Is SEO Dead?

Mark Komula September 22, 2018

Don't Write the Obituary yet

Over the previous years,SEO has been declared dead countless times.
SEO was declared useless first when Panda hit the scene and alternatively when the Penguin update was unveiled. Those had been algorithm modifications that altered the manner that Google ranked and organized the content it discovered. Those updates penalized and de-listed a massive variety of web sites and in reality cost many businesses thousands of dollars – even destroying their businesses in lots of cases.

All of the techniques that had once reliably worked to help a internet site climb the ranks – posting hyperlinks on link directories and writing content with lots of keywords – turned into unexpectedly getting sites banned.

Search engine optimization was declared dead by many a naysayer, stating that it was no longer the most effective method for traffic due to the fact the antique techniques no longer worked. This was due to the fact Google made it clear that it didn’t want to see human beings trying to manipulate the variables and cheat the system. Each time someone finds a way to ‘beat’ Google and get to the top, the probabilities are that Google is going to adapt and punish them.
Really, that’s entirely what search engine optimization is about?

How Have things changed?

Of course human beings adapted and created new techniques to deal with this. For a long time, this meant depending almost purely on ‘visitor posts’, which are posts that a author creates on some other internet site with links embedded to their website. The web site owners get free content material and the post creators get a link back to their site – everyone wins. This manner, showed that creators had been partnering with the best manufacturers on the web and they could be taken seriously as a end result.

However even visitor posting can get you into trouble. Matt Cutts, who works at Google, came right out and stated that over-reliance on visitor posting could get your web site penalized too. Why? because it’s obvious that you’ve once again been trying manipulating the machine.

If every single one of your posts takes the same format and layout and they’re all on similar blogs… well then it's going to look as though you’ve ‘performed a deal’ with the weblog creator.
Which you have…

And now Google is getting extra complex and strategic in its technique. Google is considering such things as bounce rates, personalized searches and a variety of other criteria. Those are all factors that we haven't been able to manipulate in many instances. Or at a minimum have no direct to way to manipulate.

Is SEO still worth it?

So, is SEO in reality useless? Is it better to depend upon social media advertising, which appears to be growing all of the time?
The answer is yes and no.

SEO isn’t useless and in reality, it hasn’t even changed. The trouble is our interpretation of search engine optimization and what it suggests to us.

Search engine optimization isn’t trying to trick Google. Search engine optimization is operating in conjunction with Google. SEO means doing the things it takes to increase your probabilities of rating highly in the search engines like Google, without getting into trouble.
If that means changing your web site to a blue color scheme to decrease bounces, then this is search engine optimization.

And if the method method you are counting on for traffic is social media marketing, then that is great because SEO uses social media as one of its ranking factors.

A great SEO provider knows this and ought to be able to offer a cohesive and comprehensive advertising and marketing strategy that takes numerous factors into consideration.

Your SEO campaign should be part of of a bigger marketing plan that is fitted to your specific needs and desires.

SEO SEO, seo tampa

How to Know if a SEO Company is Bad

Mark Komula September 22, 2018

How to Tell if You’re Working With a Poor SEO Company

If you want to get to the top of the Google search engine results so that you can attract more visitors to your site, then there are countless SEO companies out there claiming to be able to help you do it.

Just check out a freelancing site like UpWork, or a marketing forum like Warrior Forum and you’ll be inundated with options. But how do you know if the company you’re working with is worth your investment? How can you separate the wheat from the chaff?

Signs of a Poor SEO Company

There are several types of low quality SEO companies. On the one hand, there are those companies that mean well, but are simply outdated still using old-fashioned tactics. They are the companies that will offer link trades with other sites, or will submit your website to link directories or will write you lots of content for your website using a very generic formula and an over-abundance of unnatural looking search terms.

In other words, these are the companies trying to help you ‘trick’ Google and trying to manipulate the way that its search algorithms work in order to try to the top of the rankings. They probably mean well, but Google has long since become smarter than that and much more complex. Today, this method is most likely to get you de-indexed or at least penalized.

At least these companies mean well. Because the other type of poor SEO company is the one that knows full well that these kinds of methods don’t work… and tries to use them anyway. They are the companies that will submit your links using automated tools and will sell you poorly-written content and will make bombastic promises that they can’t possibly deliver on.

Another type of poor SEO company is the company that attempts to trick Google knowing that they aren’t supposed to use those strategies but believing it will still work. These are the ‘black hat’ SEO companies that will use ‘private blog networks’ and other methods to try and manipulate Google. None of these companies are worth your time or your money.

What Good SEO Looks Like

Good SEO should really be a part of a larger marketing package which should also include social media marketing, content marketing, brand design, traditional advertising and more. By using all of these different techniques together, these companies can provide a comprehensive strategy that builds trust, builds visibility and generally helps you to climb the ranks and get to the top.

You can tell a good SEO company because it will be concerned with helping you to deliver quality experiences to your visitors and building a brand that will survive in the long-term. This is what Google wants you to be doing and thus it is what the best SEO companies will do for you.

Even if you can get a quick jump in your performance by paying for links, or by using a private blog network, eventually that is going to come back and bite you. Focus on quality and play the long game!

Another sign of a good SEO company is that they will give you reports and a dashboard that allows you to see that your hard spent money is working for you. Ranking and analytics reports will allow you to see where you measure up in traffic and and other important ranking factors. Your SEO company should provide to you these report on a monthly or even weekly basis.

Here at Allied Pixels we will provide to you a dashboard that you can check your analytics as well as perform an audit of your website. You can also manage your social media and even track leads and calls with it.

SEO search engine optimization, SEO

How to Create an Organic-Looking Links

Mark Komula September 21, 2018

Natural links are the best

The best type of links to build for any website, is one that looks natural and organic and doesn’t appear to have been bought or bargained for. Natural looking links are the ones that are designed to look as though they developed by the referring site naturally and without the intervention of an SEO company, or even your own SEO efforts.

The thing to keep in mind is that Google doesn’t want to see companies or site owners cheating the variables to get to the top of the search engine results page. Rather, it wants to see websites that are genuinely so authoritative and well written that they will attract links from other big sites and that they’ll be shown across social media.

So how do you ensure that your links profile looks natural in this way?

Vary Your Link Text

The anchor text that is the words that are underlined when you create a link. Using a SEO relevant anchor is absolutely crucial. Back in the day, the easiest way to make this work was by generating as many links as possible, all using the same search term, in other words spamming the anchor text. This helped Google to identify that your site was relevant specifically to that search keyword and thus it used to help you climb the rankings.

But that was much too easy to cheat and the smarter, Penguin-powered Google now looks at this as a sign of a company or site owner trying to game the system. This is very easy to identify also – if all of the links to a website are consistently using the exact same text in their anchors, then this is very likely to have been the work of a marketer or SEO practitioner rather than happen by natural occurrence.

To solve this problem, make sure that the links you create use a variety of different words and terms. Sometimes you should use your keyword. Sometimes you should use a synonym or version of your keyword. And sometimes you should use your URL, or just the word ‘here’ or 'click here'.

Vary Your Link Locations

Google has made it clear that site owners should build high quality links rather than a large quantity of links. Quality beats quantity especially when Google is concerned. Thus, a lot of marketers and site owners have been focusing all their efforts on targeting top blogs and other high quality websites. Meanwhile, they disavow any smaller links.

But now consider how this actually looks. Imagine a site like the BBC or Bodybuilding.com. Do you think these sites only have links from the most reputed sources? Or do you think they have a few low quality ones thrown in there too?

As you can see, variety is actually a key indicator of a genuine, organic link profile.

Link Bait

What is the best way to get all these natural looking links? Educate your users to post them! The best way to do that is with ‘link bait’ – content that is so high quality, so shareable, that people will want to link to it of their own.

And there are also some strategies you can use to create link bait too – for instance, making your content a comprehensive resource that other posts can point too.

SEO backlinks, links, search engine optimization, SEO

How to Create Link Worthy Content

Mark Komula September 20, 2018

Creating Link Worthy Content

Building links stays as one of the most critical techniques with regards to SEO. Link connections gives Google an in-road to finding your content authority and links recommend to Google that your content is high caliber.

Google takes links as referrals or recommendations and if you have lots of connections pointing at your website, from authoritative websites and blogs, Google will realize that those websites see your content as beneficial to their readers.

Be that as it may, making links isn't so natural. Google will boycott any sites that are discovered with 'purchasing' links, paid link swapping never really works and Matt Cutts has even cautioned against over-dependence on visitor posting.

Also, your little webpage, is probably going to find out that a ton of different sites won't have any desire to connection to you at all!

So how might you approach getting those connections?

Simple: you post something on your site something that is incredible, to the point that it moves a countless number of your guests to share it for you. This is called 'link bait' and it is the most ideal approach to assemble a truly natural links profile.

So how do you create link bait?

The primary tip, is to ensure that your substance is one of a kind. That it is fascinating and elegantly composed. Consider the sort of content that you might share.

Would you share something that was seriously miss-spelled? Or something that was just 300 words in length?

If you don't have the necessary writing skills to create top-level content, hire somebody to do it. If you do hire somebody, pay them enough to guarantee it will really be up to high quality standards.

Making incredible content isn't enough. There's a decent chance you have just been filling your website with superb content, yet despite everything you haven't seen numerous links show up on blogs or different online journals. So what is the missing part?

Once more, it boils down to deciding what makes your post shareable? Typically, this comes down to communication. Typically, we share different content that moves us to others and we need to educate our followers to do the same.

In your content, you need it to be exhaustive. Sharing a couple a hundred words is not enough. Google wants authoritative answers to whatever question their user is asking. Creating content that is complete and provides a full and expansive answer is the type of content Google wants and will rank higher.

In like manner, if you compose a post that is controversial and utilizes studies and rationale to disprove a famous perspective, your article may be utilized to back up theories by the individuals who concur with you.

Sharing as a Form of Self Expression

Recognize that many individuals will share your content as a way of expressing themselves. We are a whole nation of narcissists and we cherish utilizing the web to tell our loved ones, or hated ones, what we think about everything.

Compose blog entries that are designed to attract, or even repel, certain individuals. You'll see agree with your point of view desire to connect themselves with you! There are always at least two sides to an issue. By taking a side and even throwing rocks sometimes it may bring others to your side of the issue.

Don't attempt to please everybody, or nobody will care enough to share!

SEO backlinks, link worthy content, SEO

How to Build Trust for Your Website

Mark Komula September 20, 2018

Building Trust for Your Website

If you want your website to be as successful as possible, there are a lot of different factors that you need to take into account. Which of these is most important all depends on who you ask, but one thing that we universally know to be highly important is ‘trust’.

Google wants to provide its users with answers. This is one of its main services, and if Google can’t do it, then people will look elsewhere – such as Bing – to get what they’re looking for.
But in order for Google to provide answers, it needs to know which sites it can trust.

The results pages are not ‘curated’, meaning that Google doesn’t have a team to actually check the content. That means that it needs to start recognizing sites that deliver popular answers in a programmatic, algorithmic manner.

How can you make sure that this all works so that your site is considered one of the ‘trusted’?

The Right Links

The first and most important way to accomplish this is with the right links profile. You need to attract links from sites that Google already trusts – but how do you know what sites those are?

One strategy is to look at Google’s ‘In the News’ section. Here, Google highlights breaking stories by sharing posts from popular news sites and sites in that niche. This is a very important tip because in order for Google to share that content as news, it must already have a high amount of trust for those sites – and this will rub off on you to a great deal.

Another tip is when possible, to try and get a link from a .edu or .gov domain. Google likes these sites because they have obviously got a certain amount of credibility and by aligning yourself with them, some of that credibility is likely to rub off on you as well!

Branding

Another useful tip is branding. Google loves brands and has shared this information openly in the past. If your site name is currently the same as your keyword – rather than a catchy company name – then you’re doing yourself a disservice. Yet building a brand can be a daunting challenge. One way is to align your site with other brands by partnerships, certifications and joint ventures.

Likewise, you should also try to get links from other big brands. Google knows brands like Coca-Cola, like the BBC and like The Verge and that means they can pass on a lot of credibility.

Degrees of Separation

Of course it’s not exactly easy to get links from the BBC, or from the biggest sites in your niche that Google is featuring. So what can you do if you’re still ‘small fry’?

One answer is to think of this as a game of ‘degrees of separation’. If you can’t get a link from the BBC, then getting a link from a site that has a link from the BBC can work a great deal!

Researching Backlinks

How would you know what links a site has pointing to it? Easy, utilize a backlinks tool. What's more, this has the benefit of enabling you to inquire about absolutely which links worked for the greatest companies in your specialty… with the goal that you can create similar ones!

SEO search engine optimization, SEO, website design, website trust

How Good SEO Brings You High Quality Traffic

Mark Komula September 18, 2018

You Want High Quality Traffic

Search Engine Optimization is a complicated business that can help most companies to thrive. However, over time the whole process has been somewhat misrepresented as a simple system of getting as many links as possible pointing to your site. This dying breed of so called ‘SEO gurus’, are so desperate to get links to their site that they will use any trick in the book to spread their site around the net with little regard for quality, suitability or value for the readers.
This is bad SEO and will actually prove to be destructive for the website in the long run. While flooding the internet with links will certainly bring you short term dividends, in the long run. it will only upset visitors and get your site avoided like the plague.

Think about it, if you click on a link to a website on another site that you normally trust and find out that it’s nothing like it claims to be, complicated to navigate, or full of content from article spinners, would you really spend more than ten minutes there?

Likewise, if you click on a search result and find the website you’ve discovered to be poorly designed and unhelpful you’d be most likely to just click ‘back’ and try another link.

We’re increasingly aware of the importance of high quality links these days. But are you also thinking about the quality of the traffic coming from those links?

High Quality Traffic is More Important Than High Quantity

You’re not just looking at getting a high quantity of traffic, but also a high quality. Once you’ve got visitors onto your website then you need to get them to want to stay there if you’re going to get them to click on ads or buy products.

The real way to optimise your website for search engines is to make your site genuinely offer the answers that the visitor is looking for. This will more than pay for itself in terms of links also as your visitors start to talk about your site on message boards, dig it on a social bookmarking site, put links on their own sites, or reference it on Wikipedia and Yahoo Answers.

This is called ‘link baiting’, and if done properly it will mean that all the work is done for you and you can concentrate on making worth while content. One link from a respected user on ‘Reddit’ can multiply your revenue from AdSense alone by ten times for that day and it’s more than a little rewarding to see this happen. That is quality traffic.

Staying Relevant for Your Audience

Posting your links everywhere can also actually damage your site. For example, if you have links to your site on lots of websites that seem unrelated then Google will penalize you for spamming and your page rank will suffer as a result.

Similarly, if you keep filling your site with worthwhile and regular content then Google and other websites will recognize this and your search rankings will reflect that.

You can help Google by designing appropriate headings and meta tags which will tell search engines precisely what is on each page. If your pages of content seem relevant and exhaustive, then Google will start to like the site as much as your visitors will.

So in short, there’s a lot more to SEO than just posting links. Designing worthwhile content, adding regular updates, designing good navigation and using meta tags are all just as important if not more so. And just as important is to make sure that you are then attracting the kinds of visitors to your content – the kind that will specifically enjoy the content you’ve created.

Google has been very cleverly designed with the customer in mind and there’s a big difference between working the system and abusing it.

Digital Marketing, SEO high quality traffic, search engine optimization, SEO, traffic

Guest Posting Done Right

Mark Komula September 18, 2018

Guest Posting for SEO

While no SEO technique is ideal, guest posting is perhaps the most reliable and useful tool for building links that is available to marketers today.
For those who aren’t familiar with it, guest posting simply involves creating links to your website from external blogs and sites by providing them with free content. You write a post or article for a blog or a website and then send it to them and let them publish it on the agreement that you can include a link to your own website in it.
As a result, they get free content and you get a link back to your site. Everyone wins…
But as with any tool, it’s all about how you use it…

Tip 1: Not Too Much

The first vital tip to keep in mind is that you just mustn’t overdo guest posting – like any other SEO strategy, a good links profile is one that appears ‘natural’ and therefore you don’t need an excessive amount of any similar ‘type’ of links. Use guest posts and additional alternative methods to create your link profile in a broader strategy.

Tip 2: Choose Authority Blogs

Probably the most important factor to consider when getting guest posts is the type of blog that your link is going to end up on. The best option is to get your links on authority blogs and sites.
Authority blogs and sites are those that Google trusts as an authority already and these will thus be able to act much more effectively as useful ‘testimonies’ as to the quality of your site.

One excellent way to find high authority blogs is to look at Google’s ‘In the News’ section. This will show you sites that Google trusts enough to feature reporting on breaking news. If you can get a link from one of these, it can help you a great deal.
Another tip is to look at the links profile of the blog you’re planning on submitting content to. Trust for Google works a little like ‘degrees of separation’ and if the blog linking to you has a link from a .edu site, or high authority site, for example, then this can result in more trust for you too!

Tip 3: Excellent Content

The post you write is highly important. It needs to be high quality, not only so that it sends more of the right message to Google, but also to encourage other high authority blogs to want to link to you (it’s also important to ensure your branding is strong for the same reason).
At the same time, you need to write high quality content that is directly related to the topic of your website. This is important because you want to communicate the topic of your blog to Google and make the links more relevant. Google insists that all in-bound links be highly relevant. What’s better than having a your link embedded into a post that you wrote?

SEO backlinks, guest posting, links, SEO

What is SEO?

Mark Komula September 5, 2018

In this video we discuss what Search Engine Optimization is and some of the factors that affect search engine ranking.

Transcript

What is Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?

When you type something into Google, Bing or some other search engine, to begin a search, you are looking for something.

We will talk about Google because Google is the 800 pound gorilla of the search engine field, they handle over 80% of the searches.

Google wants to provide the best possible result to that search so that you like the result and will use them again. They make money when people like you use their product, and especially when you click on the ads (the top and bottom listing that are labeled as an Ad). They present sites in order of their special program or algorithm based on how relevant they think the site is to the search you conducted. They base this on a variety of information, such as:

Contents of your site
Who links to your site
How long people stay on your site
The number of clicks going through to your site
and a whole bunch of other factors.

What does that mean to you the website owner?

Looking at it from the website owners perspective, SEO is the process of getting the search engines to rank your site higher on the list by giving them the things that their algorithm sees as important.

We do this by making changes to your site such as:

Creating keyword focused pages
Creating keyword specific content
Obtaining links to your site from sites that Google sees as authoritative
Restructuring pages on the website for SEO
Optimizing website code for SEO
Optimizing existing content for SEO
Listing of the site across main search engines, social networks and directories
Creating and distributing relevant content to link back to the site
Mobile optimizing
And many more things.

SEO works to make your site rank higher based on what Google is looking for in an authoritative site for your specific topic or keywords.

SEO google ranking, how to get on the first page of google, search engine optimization, SEO, seo clearwater, seo tampa