Welcome To The Raine Report

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2 Welcome To The Raine Report A successful man is one who can lay a firm foundation with the bricks others have thrown at him. - David Brinkley Welcome to Issue 6 of The Raine Report. In this month s issue I am going to be focussing on SEO, and yes I know I have said this before but SEO is not dead, in-fact it is one of the most important things you should be doing in your business whether you are primarily selling goods or services online, or running a bricks and mortar business and wanting to get a better boost in Google local. So with that being said the first article this month is on The Perfect Backlink, I actually wrote this piece a while ago and it is still very relevant today and explains how Google looks at your site and the position of content, images, and links on it. The second piece covers MicroData, and don t be turned off by the name as this is one of the simplest but most effective changes you can make immediately to your site to get a boost in the Google rankings, it is also a highly effective way of making your listing stand out from the crowd. Finally this month I am also taking a look at optimizing your title tag and directing Google using breadcrumbs (which also enhances your listing). 2

3 This month Gold members have full access to my Private Blog Network video training in their members site and we will be taking a brand new site which is selling an affiliate product and getting it ranked as quickly as possible in the top ten of Google. I also look at some key changes in Google this month and will be discussing some killer services. 3

4 The Perfect Backlink Fix your eyes on perfection and you make almost everything speed towards it. - William Ellery Channing People will tell you that backlinking and the SEO landscape has totally shifted over the past few years, and that getting backlinks isn t as important in the new and improved online world of SEO in 2015, but I m here to tell you that they couldn t be more wrong. Yes, there have been a lot of changes, and we ve had a couple of major algorithm updates from Google which have hit backlink building strategies - but as you ll see from this article, Google haven t actually changed the underpinning foundations. When it comes to SEO people tend to shout loud from the rooftops and make knee-jerk proclamations every time Google run an algorithm update - they cry like Chicken Little that The sky is falling! without actually taking the time to look at the cold hard stats and review all of the data to see what the effects are of the changes. In reality the only change that s happened over the past few years is that Google have got better at finding and weeding out spammy and scammy linking practices which go against their terms, and the basics are exactly the same as they have always been. 4

5 Make no mistake, backlinks are just as important now as they were back when Google first started, and although there are over 200 different ranking factors, backlinks still remain one of the most crucial parts of good SEO. There s a reason everyone harks on about backlinks, and it s all because Google based their initial search algorithm all around backlinks, calculating them as votes for a particular web page and giving a PageRank (PR) score to the referring page. And from that initial point onwards the world and his wife have been chasing high PR backlinks ever since... Google have come on in leaps and bounds since those early days though, and now they say there s well over 200 different indicators used in calculating the ranking of an individual page. However, backlinks are still an important part of the mix, but they can t be gamed as easily now, and the big G does a lot of stuff to make sure that they re weeding out the people who are trying to game the system. Which brings me onto something interesting that I read... Well, I say interesting - in reality it would either bore you to tears, or melt your brain with it s boring technicalities... 5

6 Anyhoo, the thing I read was a patent granted to Google, and it had some very interesting points hidden away, and the reason I m writing this article is to spill the beans on the interesting bits. For those of you who want to read the actual patent, then you can download it here: Read Google s Patent For those of you who want the important highlights translated into human speak then read on! Now, before we get into the bits I find interesting, you need to understand that although this patent was granted in 2010, the actual patent was submitted back in 2004 (yes, this is how long the patent office have taken to process and grant the application.) As a result, there will have been new things introduced into Google s workings, and some things will have been taken out. But, I firmly believe that the things I m going to talk about in this article are still highly relevant and more importantly, pretty easy to implement. So, let s get cracking and start looking at the finer details! 6

7 A Bit Of A History Lesson There s something that a lot of people don t realise when it comes to getting ranked and loved by Google, and that s how they came to value pages on the internet and assign a rank to them in the first place. It all stems from their original patent and idea which was based around the Reasonable Surfer Model, and it s crucial you understand this concept otherwise you ll fall into the trap that everyone goes down - which is to chase backlinks in all the wrong places. The Reasonable Surfer Model The Reasonable Surfer Model is a thing of genius, and it s really very simple to get your head around. Basically, what Sergey and Larry came up with was to answer this simple question: What would a normal person browsing this particular page click on to leave the page and move forward to another page on the web? This forms the simple ethos behind the Reasonable Surfer Model, and as with Google s core concept, it all revolves around what the user would do, and how simple it makes it for the user to find what they re looking for easily and quickly. 7

8 If we take a direct quote from the patent, it says this about the Reasonable Surfer Model: Systems and methods consistent with the principles of the invention may provide a reasonable surfer model that indicates that when a surfer accesses a document with a set of links, the surfer will follow some of the links with a higher probability than others. This reasonable surfer model reflects the fact that not all of the links associated with a document are equally likely to be followed. Examples of unlikely followed links may include Terms of Service links, banner advertisements, and links unrelated to the document. Do you see how simple the concept is? Basically, when a user lands on a page they will choose to follow a link and choose not to follow others, and the ones which are most likely to be followed get a higher rating in Google s eyes. It s a touch of brilliance, and over time they ve perfected the model to score different links and give them the weightings they feel are deserved - and as a result they ve put in place a system which effectively makes it difficult for people to engineer the link graph. 8

9 However, as you re going to discover as you read through this guide, you will see how to construct the perfect backlink, where to place it, and where to go to get it and make the mighty G give you some good lurvin Before we look at the perfect backlink tho, we need to have a quick chat about backlinks in general, and what the search engines look for when rating a page and deciding upon it s ranking in the search engine results pages (SERPs). The first mistake nearly everyone makes when going around scrabbling for backlinks is to only go and get high PR links in their quest for Google love, and this is quite frankly a schoolboy error. You see, Google looks at the link graph and checks stuff out on a minute-byminute basis, they are very good at spotting trends, spotting fingerprints, and they can easily see who is trying to game the system. For example, if you run a site and you only have say around 50 backlinks which are all PR5, PR6, and PR7 all pointing back to your site let me ask you this question: Does this look natural? The answer to both you, me, and more importantly the GoogleBot is: No, of course it doesn t. You can spot it a mile off, it s clearly engineered and not natural. 9

10 It is crucial that when you re getting backlinks you get a natural mix of low (and indeed PR0) links into your backlink mix alongside the heavy hitting PR6 s to show Google that you re not trying to game the system and that people are linking to you more naturally. The second mistake everyone makes is going for the easy backlinks, which although have no effect on overall rankings since the Penguin updates, having a few of them are again needed in the overall picture to show a natural spread of links spread. Purely getting backlinks from low level places like blog comments, forum posts, article directories, press releases, and other web 2.0 sites are of a low quality and are completely discounted by Google (some are even negatively scored from the Penguin updates). Don t get me wrong, having these types of backlinks can serve their purpose in giving some low level links back to your site (if they look natural and are from good neighbourhoods ), but they shouldn t be your only links. The third mistake people make is only going for the top level domains (TLDs) which have a higher weighting in Google s eyes, such as.gov or.edu domains. Again, if all you have is links back from.edu or.gov sites then it sticks out like a sore thumb. The final mistake people make (there are more, but let s just keep to the core problems!) is that people only get backlinks from say 3 sites which have good 10

11 PR and are relevant to their niche / market. This is another big flag for Mr Google on people who are just trying to game the system. Think about this from a Google point of view... In a normal world people make natural links back to sites which they like or will recommend to a friend. Sites which are recommended by a ton of different people are going to get a higher rating by Google because there s not just 3 people saying hey this site is really good, it s actually 50 different people saying check out this page, it s awesome. All this is common sense when you think about it, but in our industry people get blinded by chasing the high PR links from a relevant page, with the exact keyword anchor text to show 100% keyword density and relevance to the GoogleBot, without taking the core concept of the reasonable surfer model which is this: Is a real person likely to click the link? If the answer is No, then Google won t rank you well in the SERPs, because if a user isn t likely to follow the link then it s not relevant. So, what do we do then? Simple. Remember that patent I mentioned earlier? Well, it s full of juicy tidbits to tell us exactly what we should do :) 11

12 What Does Google Think? There is a ton of techno-babble in the patent, but when you break it down to it s bare bones then it makes clear sense, and that s what I m going to spell out for you now in my own unique and ground breaking interpretations - and all of these interpretations centre around the core question of: What would the reasonable surfer do? Font Size And Other Font Attributes Of The Link This is an interesting point which is made in the patent, it s made in several places, and it concerns what the link looks like. Specifically: Is the link in a larger font size than the surrounding text? If it is then would you say it s more likely to be clicked by the reasonable surfer? Is the link in a smaller font size than the surrounding text? If it is then would you say it s less likely to be clicked by the reasonable surfer? Is the font color of the link a different to the surrounding text? If it s not different then how does the reasonable surfer know that it s actually a link to click? 12

13 Is the font color of the link the same color as the background,? If it is then do you think that Google will slap you from here to next week? Is the link styled to look different using underline, bold or italics to make stand out? As well as the parts on the features of the link, Google also outlined this briefly in the patent: For example, model generating unit 410 may generate a rule that indicates... that links with anchor text greater than a particular font size have a higher probability of being selected than links with less than the particular font size Key takeaways from the font attributes... Make sure that the link looks like a link and doesn t blend into the background, make the link slightly larger than the surrounding text, think about making it bold or in italics to make it stand out, and for goodness sake don t try to hide links on a page. 13

14 Anchor Text Now, if you ve followed my teachings for any length of time you ll know that I ve talked previously about the importance of getting your keywords into your anchor text, but the patent has some pretty interesting points on how Google looks at the contents of the anchor text, here s a couple of excerpts. Examples of features associated with a link might include the... number of words in anchor text associated with the link; actual words in anchor text associated with the link; commerciality of the anchor text associated with the link;... a topical cluster with which the anchor text of the link is associated;... and/or a degree to which a topical cluster associated with the source document matches a topical cluster associated with the anchor text of a link. As we can see, Google are pretty clever in that they re looking not only if the words in the anchor text are related to the content of the page, but also if the anchor text has any commercial intent. 14

15 In some cases you may not get round the commercial intent aspect, especially if your target keywords are something like Buy Fishing Rods, sometimes you just have to go with the flow. Now here s an important note to make about anchor text... The links which come into your site need to have a good variety of anchor text. If all the backlinks only have your exact main keyword phrase then this doesn t look natural, and it s an easy fingerprint for Google. So vary the anchor text with different relevant keywords related to your main keyword, and also make sure you include some generic anchor text like your domain, brand name, and even Click here. Page Attributes And Immediate Surrounding Text Although we talk about getting links from a page which is related to the topic, they actually go down to a closer level than just the page. Don t get me wrong, it s crucial that the topic of the page you re getting your backlink from matches the topic of the page you re linking to, but they do go much deeper and down to a paragraph level. First of all, here s the important bit about the overall page: 15

16 For example, model generating unit 410 may generate a rule that indicates... that when a topical cluster associated with the source document is related to a topical cluster associated with the target document, the link has a higher probability of being selected than when the topical cluster associated with the source document is unrelated to the topical cluster associated with the target document. So in a nutshell, the first point of call is to make sure that the link is on a page which Google sees as being relevant to the page your linking to. You can check if the page your placing your backlink is relevant in Google s eyes for your keyword by plugging in the URL of that page into Google s Keyword Planner tool, and if the keyword you re targeting appears in it s list then you re good to go. But now for the killer part, and something which literally no one talks about, and that s the words which surround the actual link on a page. If you think about it from a users perspective then it makes perfect sense to have a link which is relevant to the conversation, and not one which has nothing to do with the paragraph they re reading. 16

17 For example, if your paragraph is all about the topic of dog training, and then the link in the middle of the paragraph is for instant credit loans then that s a massive disconnect for the user, and completely off topic for the page and the specific paragraph. They outline it briefly in the patent: Examples of features associated with a link might include the... the context of a few words before and/or after the link; So, make sure that when you re placing your link in the body text of the page that the surrounding text in the sentence is relevant to the anchor text. Again, you can use the Google s Keyword Planner tool to see what other words are relevant by putting in your anchor text and getting back what Google says is relevant, then craft the sentence / paragraph using some of those relevant words in the structure. Just make sure the sentence / paragraph reads naturally and doesn t just look like 50 keywords put back-to-back - remember that it s all about providing useful information to the reasonable surfer in an effort to get them to click on a link. 17

18 Image Links A huge portion on links on the internet are actually linked to images, and some will be classed as relevant by Google and some won t. For example, a buy it now button could be an image link, but not necessarily relevant to show up in the SERPs, whereas an image of a chihuahua puppy, properly tagged and linked to a chihuahua page is relevant, and would get indexed and ranked in Google image search. The key to image links is to: Make the image filename match your keyword (e.g. if your keyword is chihuahua training then make the file name chihuahuatraining.jpg ). Make sure that the alt and title tags of the image match your targeted keywords (e.g. chihuahua training ). Make sure that the target URL has chihuahua training in the path and the content of that page is all about chihuahua training. What Google has specified in the patent is all about the aspect ratio of the image (i.e. the image size), and I guess that this is all to do with the probability that the reasonable surfer will click on the image link. 18

19 For instance, if the image is 200 x 200 pixels and tagged as the chihuahua example above, then there is a better probability that the image might be clicked. However, if the image is a 1 x 1 pixel image then there s absolutely no chance that it will be clicked, and therefore deemed not relevant and ignored (or even negatively scored). Target URL Every link needs to have a target URL to go to, and Google go the extra mile in checking that target URL to make sure that it s relevant to the source page that the link is on, and also if the source page where the backlink is placed is related even remotely to the target URL of the link. For instance, these two points make interesting reading: Examples of features associated with a link might include... whether the link leads somewhere on the same host or domain; if the link leads to somewhere on the same domain, whether the link URL is shorter than the referring URL; and/or whether the link URL embeds another URL (e.g., for server-side redirection). 19

20 and: Examples of features associated with a target document might include the URL of the target document (or a portion of the URL of the target document); a web site associated with the target document; whether the URL of the target document is on the same host as the URL of the source document; whether the URL of the target document is associated with the same domain as the URL of the source document; and/or the length of the URL of the source document. Basically, let s break down into layman's terms what Google are actually saying: Is the backlink pointing to a page on the same site (domain)? If it is on the same site, then is it pointing to a deeper page further into the site or back towards a page higher up the site? Does the link try to mask it s true destination using a server-side redirect? Is the backlink pointing to a different site on the same host? (Therefore is the backlink engineered by someone setting up 2 sites on the same host to try and game the backlinks). 20

21 One of Google s main concerns is with people trying to create backlinks in a favourable position on the page on relevant websites which they in fact own and run, which they naturally take a very dim view of. In addition to this, Google have also outlined some pretty interesting points about the target URL, specifically these: For example, model generating unit 410 may generate a rule that indicates... that a link associated with a target URL that contains the word domainpark has a low probability of being selected.... that a link associated with a source document that contains a popup has a low probability of being selected.... that a link associated with a target domain that ends in.tv has a low probability of being selected.... that a link associated with a target URL that includes multiple hyphens has a low probability of being selected. I m sure I don t actually need to break down these four things, as they are pretty self explanatory, but basically Google are saying that they re going to 21

22 negatively mark links to parked domains, pages with popups, that the top level domain (TLD) is a factor (which is why we recommend.com,.net and.org), and loads-of-hyphens-in-your-domain-name-are-bad.com ;) Link Position On The Page This is one of the major things which is outlined, and one of the big reasons why comment links, forum links, and footer / sidebar links are so devalued by Google when it comes to ranking and passing PR to the link. Once more it comes down to the reasonable surfer s likelihood to click on the link, and again quite a lot of this boils down to common sense. Think of the reasonable surfer: he / she visits a page on kiteboarding, which is a PR 7 page, and it s got comments enabled. If you re going to leave a comment on this page you might mistakenly think that it s a good PR7 backlink, but what is the likelihood that the reasonable surfer is going to click on your backlink in your comment? Pretty low, maybe even non-existent, especially if there are other comments on the page as well with other competing links. You also need to factor in the negative ratings which Google gives, but we ll talk about that later in the article :) 22

23 Like I said earlier, having a good spread of lower-level backlinks from comments, forums, article directories can be OK to look more natural, but these won t give you any SEO juice at all (they may also give a negative scoring if the site has been Penguin or Panda slapped!), and they certainly won t separate you from anyone else who is trying to rank in the SERPs. Let s again look at what Mr Google says about link positioning, and here they have some pretty clear hints about where the best place to have your link: Examples of features associated with a link might include the... position of the link (measured, for example, in a HTML list, in running text, above or below the first screenful viewed on an 800x600 browser display, side (top, bottom, left right) of document, in a footer, in a sidebar etc.); if the link is in a list, the position of the link in the list; Although the above excerpt is more of a hint than an actual best place to put your link statement, the next bit from the patent is very clear about the situation: 23

24 For example, model generating unit 410 may generate a rule that indicates... that links positioned closer to the top of a document have a higher probability of being selected than links positioned toward the bottom of a document. However, there s also a good caveat placed in the patent about sidebar links, and it reads like this: For example, model generating unit 410 may generate a rule that... a link positioned in the More Top Stories heading on the cnn.com website has a high probability of being selected. So, when you put all those pieces of the puzzle together you can draw these assumptions: The best place to have a link is in the main body of the page, above the fold when viewed on an 800x600 screen. If the link is in a list, then the higher up the list the better (as this has a higher probability of being clicked on by the reasonable surfer ). 24

25 Sidebar and footer links have a lower probability of getting clicked, unless they have a reasonably good call to action section (like the cnn.com example above). So far we re building up a pretty good picture of what the perfect backlink should look like, not only in font / display, but also in position, relevance of the topic that the page is on, and also the linking URLs and target domain that the backlink is going to. But there s another key factor to add into the mix, and that s where Google s massive databases come into play... Analysing User Behaviour The computational power Google have is immense, they not only crawl, index and rank pages in real-time across the globe, they serve the results of a search against their databases mostly in under half a second. To get your head around the work involved in achieving this feat is quite hard, and for the vast majority of searches they are pretty much bang on the money. So, the next bit I m going to talk about will make you think a bit more about just how much the big G analyse and store all the stuff that you and I do online. 25

26 With regard to backlinks on a page, Google not only stores the information we ve talked about so far (font, anchor text, target URLs etc.), but they also store information for how the user interacts with each and every link. Basically, Google looks at a page and sees how many links are on it. They record all the information about each of those links with regard to the page they are on. Google then track how many times each of those links are clicked, and then score all the links on the page either positively or negatively depending on whether they were clicked or not clicked. If that sounds a little confusing then I m sorry, but trust me, the wording in the patent is worse! Here it is in a quick example: Let s say that there are 3 links on a page. When the page is viewed the surfer clicks on Link #1. Google records this as a positive interaction for Link #1, but it also records it as a negative interaction for Link #2 and Link #3 because they we re not clicked. 26

27 Also, if a surfer views the page and no links are clicked then all 3 links are scored negatively. Google over time builds up a profile for each link based on these positive and negative interactions. This is a massive thing that people don t ever realise! So, if there s a ton of links on a page, then unless your link is front and centre and has a high probability of getting clicked, then all that s going to happen to your link is lots of negative scoring in Google s databases, and this is why so many comments links are of a low value. Nofollow OK, this isn t part of the patent, but it is bound to be something that someone asks when they read this article, so it s something I m going to cover briefly as it s important that you get a grasp of my world-view of the issue. For those that aren t aware of what the issue is, nofollow is a tag which was introduced to allow website owners to show which links they trust and which links they don t trust as much. Predominantly it was to allow a better control of comment spam. 27

28 By putting rel=nofollow into a backlink you are effectively telling Google that you re not 100% sure about this link, and please don t pass on any PageRank to that link. From this, many an SEO expert and commentator went on a warpath of nofollow links are worthless. Sorry, but this is bullshit. A nofollow link is not worthless, every link has a value (as long as it s not in some spam ridden, malware hell-hole). All that will happen is that the link will not pass PageRank. This is something you really need to get a hold of. I ve said it at the start of this article, and I m going to re-iterate it now: You need to have a healthy mix of backlinks from a wide variety of sources pointing back to your site. The diversity in the linking domains (e.g. not all links are coming from only three sites) is an important factor, as is the need to have the high PR links from higher authority domains alongside your PR0 and nofollow links. 28

29 Saying that nofollow links are worthless is just plain wrong, and it s one of those topics which has got so muddied and confusing because of the whole PR sculpting thing that it s become beyond a joke. The overriding factor you need to understand is that the person reading the backlink on a page on the internet doesn t give a rat s ass if the link is nofollow, if it s something that they want to click on then they will click on it. Google might not give you any PR juice for the nofollow link, but are Google the ones who are going to be buying your product? Does the Googlebot even have a credit card? Don t go down the blind path of just trying to create links for Mr Google. Backlinks serve a dual purpose, the first is to get your pages / site ranked, and the second is to get people to click on them and actually visit your site. At the end of the day you want real live human beings to come to your site, then you can go about the business of actually selling them something, and just trying to build backlinks to suit Mr Google isn t going to pay your bills. OK, that s about the end of my nofollow rant. 29

30 Tying It All Together I ve outlined all the important bits, and now it s time to bring it all together so that you can see where the best place is to get your backlinks. So, here it is... The perfect backlink should be: In the main page body, and not in a sidebar, footer or blog comments. It needs to be in the top section of the page, above the fold when viewed on an 800x600 screen. The link needs to look like a link. The link needs to be slightly larger than the surrounding text, and either underlined, bold or italicized (or something different enough to make it stand out). The anchor text of the link needs to contain the keywords you re targeting, and not have an overly commercial intent. The anchor text needs to be related to the topic / theme of the page the link is on. 30

31 The words surrounding the link need to be related to the anchor text. The target URL needs to be related to the same topic / theme as the page the link is on. The target URL needs to be on a separate host to the page the link is on. The page the link is on needs to have as little other outbound links on as possible to reduce negative scoring. So those are the headlines on the perfect backlink, but there are some important things you need to understand when planning out your backlinks, and your overall backlink strategy: You need to have a good spread of lower level links (PR0, nofollow, all from sites which are playing by the Penguin & Panda rulebook etc.) to make you look natural. You need to have a good diversity in the linking structure, so 50 links from 50 different sites related to your niche is a wider variety of people giving you a vote than getting 5 links from 1 high PR site in your niche, which is only 1 vote. The higher PR backlinks are what ultimately separates you from your competitors, but keep in mind the need for the lower-level links as well. 31

32 Backlinking is an ongoing task and needs to be done regularly. Google likes freshness and if you go away and do 200 backlinks in one week then you ll see an initial bump, but after that your page will drop down the SERPs because it doesn t have any continuation. It s better to do a slower approach over a longer time to get the longer term benefit. Always remember that there s two purposes for the backlink, one is to get the search engines interested, and the other (and ultimately more important purpose), is to get the people who are going to read the content to click the link. Where Can I Get My Perfect Backlink? Let s start off straight away by saying that any automated tool isn t going to get you the perfect backlink, and this is simply because of where these tools go to place your links. So, to get the real good stuff you can get Google to help you out by telling you which pages it thinks are related to your actual page, and we ll talk more about that in a moment. Basically, you want to get your backlink onto a page which is very related to yours, and you want that link to be in the main body near the top. 32

33 So, the best way to do this is by taking the time to communicate and network with other authorities in your niche / market. Unfortunately this isn t a quick or easy process, but once you ve got your foot in the door and you get more well known, then it becomes much easier further down the line. What we re looking to do here is build the relationships so that we can then get some really good unique quality content posted on a good site in your niche, and this is where we ll be putting the backlink to your site. Now, you might be reading this and automatically think: Wait, this is guest blogging, and haven t Google said that they re cracking down on guest blogging?, and the answer here is kind of... Google are indeed going after guest blogging, but what Google are going after are thin content sites whose prime purpose is to offer paid links in the content. This isn t what I m talking about. I m talking about making connections with decent quality sites in your niche, ones which are of a super high quality and don t offer any paid links at all, and then getting your content (with backlink) on to that site. 33

34 If the sites you re looking at offer paid links, then quite frankly you re looking at the wrong sites. What we re doing here is looking to add quality content on a relevant site, nothing more. As I said right at the start of this article, Google haven t changed their focus on backlinks, they ve just got better at identifying those who try and game the system. They ve always tried to discount links from massive blog farms which have thin or poor quality content, spun article syndication, and other schemes which are solely designed to artificially raise the link profile. With this in mind you don t want to just go running off to some random site which you think is right to get your content posted, because there s a very simple way to get Google to tell you what it sees as the right site which I m going to share in a moment. However, first of all there s something more important to discuss. You have to approach this in the right way, and a lot of the time it s just a matter of trying to get on a one-to-one basis with the site owner and letting them know how much you like their stuff. If you just burst through with an to the site owner saying Hi, love your stuff and can I I give you one of my awesome articles to grab a backlink then expect to get ignored, or rejected, and possibly get some verbal abuse for good measure. 34

35 In fact, even after you ve built up a relationship with the site owner they might still say no, my advice is to take it on the chin and move on. The best way to get your foot in the door is to try to speak to them personally after you ve already made sure they have some trust in you, and you can build that trust using simple things like communicating with them using Twitter or Facebook, or leaving great blog comments on their site (with no links in the comment), and actually being part of a conversation with them so they get to know you. Think about it, if some complete stranger came knocking on your door saying Hi, wanna buy my new widget?, then your response is most likely going to be no, but if one of your friends says Oh, I ve got a new widget and it s great, fancy having a look and maybe buy one?, then you re naturally going to be more receptive because your friend has built up that trust element in advance. I ve been preaching becoming the brand and stand out in your niche and become the leader for so long now that it should be second nature to you, and it s part of this friendly approach in order to position yourself as the go-to person for your niche / market that will help seal the deal. The more you build your credibility in your niche / market, and the more you show yourself as a nice person who s genuinely interested in the topic, the more easily you ll find it is to actually talk to people about providing content, or even selling whatever it is you re trying to sell. 35

36 I also heartily recommend you read Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion by Dr Robert Cialdini - I guarantee that it will change your perspective on a whole range of things, both online and offline. OK, now that you know how you should go about approaching people, you need to know who the right people are which you should approach, and this is where Google comes in, because you want to get your perfect backlink on a related site and only Google can tell you who they think is related. Fortunately, Google make this process stupid simple. And I really do mean simple! If you want to know which pages Google thinks are relevant to your page then you simply go to Google s search page, then type in related: followed by the URL of your page. Google will then very kindly give you all the pages that it has indexed which it thinks are relevant to your page, and crucially, they rank those pages in order of importance. See, I told you it was simple. For example, if we put in the URL of a popular dog training page we get back all the pages which Google has in it s index which it deems relevant to that 36

37 page, and it lists those results with the ones it sees as most important and relevant. Take a look at the following screenshot to see what I mean: So, which sites do you think you should approach first?! Simply start with the number one site and move down the list. You might find that some of the sites simply aren t relevant to approach, they might be a store like Amazon, or it might simply be a sales page for a product. If that s the case, move down the list until you find one which is relevant. 37

38 Remember, the key to this process is to engage with the other people at these sites on a friendly basis to build up trust, then once you ve done all that you can make the approach around sharing some quality content. If you ve done the legwork and have made the effort then it can be as simple as asking the question in a friendly manner: Hey Bob, I loved that piece you put out the other day on training your Shitzu, I ve actually got a great related piece of content on training a Chihuahua, would you mind me putting it up on your site as I think it s something your readers might be into. There s a ton of different options for you to try and test, and remember, don t get hung up if someone says no, there s no shortage of places you can go to get the links, just keep in mind all that you ve read in this article and make sure you apply the principles when creating the backlink. So there you go, the Perfect Backlink in 2015 is pretty much the same as it always has been. The only major difference is that so many people spend so much time (and money) on chasing the wrong links, that they end up causing themselves bother when Google do the next algorithm update. I ve been building my links with these fundamentals in mind for over 5 years, and the sites in my networks where I ve followed the basics have continued to thrive through all the updates. 38

39 Oh, don t get me wrong, I ve got a whole bunch of sites where I ve tested pretty much every link scheme under the sun, some of which are grey hat and some of which are decidedly black hat. On nearly every occasion I ve had some good success with these sites, but with some of them I have indeed been caught and slapped to one degree or another. I m not saying you can t get rankings or make money with the more dubious approaches to link building - you totally can! But, it s not for your main money sites simply due to the fact that you can find your sites getting killed overnight if you do get caught. If you follow the fundamentals then the links you build will be solid. If you chase any quick link schemes which don t meet Google s requirements, then you can expect to eventually get caught out when they finally tweak their algorithms at some point in the future, which could have a very real impact on your income if your main money sites get slapped from here to next week. 39

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43 The One Crucial Thing To Stand Out From The Crowd And Get More Visitors To Your Website Today we're living in an anti-waldo world, where you don't want to blend in. You want to stand out like you're wearing a red and white sweater, and everyone else has on black. - Jarod Kintz Getting ranked is one thing, but once you re appearing in the search results you re still competing with other sites and ad units to get the click from the reader to get that all important visit to your site. A couple of years back Google introduced the Authorship tag which was a great boost for making your results stand out from the crowd, because you could have an image next to your search result which automatically drew the eye of the reader and grabbed their attention, and it looked like this: 43

44 However, as Google so often do, they ditched this experiment of displaying the author image, and as a result the search entry doesn t automatically grab attention, in fact it now looks like this: That s not to say having the Authorship tag isn t going to be important for you, because the tag was never just about getting your headshot into the SERPs. Google are moving more and more towards trying to link content to real people, so if you re enabling Authorship and linking your real Google account to your web properties, then over time your content is going to get treated as more reliable and maybe have an effect on rankings. In this article I want to cover a tactic that less than 1% of other websites out there are currently using that will help your website jump out from the page in the search results and stand out from the crowd. In fact, Bing have actually come right out and said that what I'm about to show you has increased click thru rates. I'm talking about rich snippets, and over the next few pages I'm going to be looking at what it all means and how you can get it implemented. 44

45 What Is Microdata, RDF's, and Schema.org? There is a lot of information out there, and Google and the other search engines are certainly doing their best to index it all. But indexing doesn't necessarily mean understanding. If a search engine could 'understand' what your content was about then it would be able to offer up much more informed search engine results for a users query. It would be able to answer complex questions and provide resources that are directly associated with the query not just by semantical reference but by direct knowledge. Ok, I am starting to over complicate things here... What I really want to say here is that: there is another language that Google and the other search engines understand that describes your content and that can be added to any page so that they know exactly what it is about. This 'language' is the microdata and schema.org markup. Now this may sound groundbreaking but this has actually been around for years, it's just that very few people use it and support was sketchy... but over the last 18 months all three top search engines got together and officially gave support to this, and introduced schema.org which is now a standard for describing your content to the machines. 45

46 Now let's get some terminology out of the way: RDF: This is the Resource Definition Format, it is a standard way of sharing information across the internet, think of it as a machine readable language for information. Microformats: These are special tags that you can add to pages to share RDF information. Schema.org: This is the new standard for Microformats (i.e. HTML tags). It is a shared vocabulary that makes it easier for webmasters to understand how they can markup their pages so that the search engines understand them. This is supported by all the main search engines to one degree or another. Microdata: The new way of supporting the schema.org vocabulary. 46

47 A Real World Example Let me give you a real world example of Microdata in action from the live schema.org site. This example may look a little scary and complicated at first, but don't worry I am going to make it much easier later on. Imagine you have a page about the movie Avatar - a page with a link to a movie trailer, information about the director, and so on. Your HTML code behind the scenes might look something like this: <div> <h1>avatar</h1> <span>director: James Cameron (born August 16, 1954)</span> <span>science fiction</span> <a href="../movies/avatar-theatrical-trailer.html">trailer</a> </div> To begin, identify the section of the page that is 'about' the movie Avatar. To do this, add the itemscope element to the HTML tag that encloses information about the item, like this: <div itemscope> <h1>avatar</h1> <span>director: James Cameron (born August 16, 1954) </span> <span>science fiction</span> <a href="../movies/avatar-theatrical-trailer.html">trailer</a> </div> 47

48 By adding itemscope you are specifying that the HTML contained in the <div>...</div> block is about a particular item. But it's not all that helpful to specify that there is an item being discussed without specifying what kind of an item it is. You can specify the type of item using the itemtype attribute immediately after the itemscope. <div itemscope itemtype=" <h1>avatar</h1> <span>director: James Cameron (born August 16, 1954)</span> <span>science fiction</span> <a href="../movies/avatar-theatrical-trailer.html">trailer</a> </div> This specifies that the item contained in the div is in fact a Movie, as defined in the schema.org type hierarchy. Item types are provided as URLs, which in this case is a 'movie' ( itemprop What additional information can we give search engines about the movie Avatar? Movies have interesting properties such as actors, director, ratings. To label the properties of an item we use the itemprop attribute. 48

49 For example, to identify the director of a movie you can add itemprop="director" to the element enclosing the director's name (there's a full list of all the properties you can associate with a movie at Movie). <div itemscope itemtype =" <h1 itemprop="name">avatar</h1> <span>director: <span itemprop="director">james Cameron</span> (born August 16, 1954)</span> <span itemprop="genre">science fiction</span> <a href="../movies/avatar-theatrical-trailer.html" itemprop="trailer">trailer</a> </div> Note that we have added additional <span>...</span> tags to attach the itemprop attributes to the appropriate text on the page. <span> tags don't change the way pages are rendered by a web browser, so they are a convenient HTML element to use with itemprop. Search engines can now understand not just that is a URL, but also that it's the URL for the trailer for the science-fiction movie Avatar, which was directed by James Cameron. Embedded Items Sometimes the value of an item property can itself be another item with its 49

50 own set of properties. For example, we can specify that the director of the movie is an item of type Person, and the person has the properties name and birthdate. To specify that the value of a property is another item, you begin a new itemscope immediately after the corresponding itemprop: <div itemscope itemtype =" <h1 itemprop="name">avatar</h1> <div itemprop="director" itemscope itemtype=" Director: <span itemprop="name">james Cameron</span> (born <span itemprop="birthdate">august 16, 1954)</span> </div> <span itemprop="genre">science fiction</span> <a href="../movies/avatar-theatrical-trailer.html" itemprop="trailer">trailer</a> </div> So that was a pretty in-depth example of Microdata in action but let me tell you why this is extremely important. First off we get to tell Google what this page is about. But the kicker here is, we also get to tell Google what a link is about. And boy, have we had some results with this. 50

51 Now the above example was just for movies but there is Microdata markup for: Events Places People Organizations Reviews Products Offers Books Recipes Ratings Restaurants Music TV Series Articles News Maps Photographs Web Pages (about us, checkout) and there's a hole heap more. You can find a full list here: 51

52 Real World Examples And Results Now all of this is very exciting but I want to start by showing you some real world examples of companies who have implemented Microdata, and the results some companies have had using them. Let's start with the effect that schema.org markup can have on Google organic listings, and here is one which uses the Reviews and Ratings markup. This organic listing gets the addition of the stars, and if you actually go through to the page you will see from the screenshot below that there are four reviews and the average rating is four out of five: 52

53 Now most people think that this is something only large companies like Yelp can do, but if you implement reviews and ratings on your site then over time Google will begin to show these for your listings too. So that is one example of Microdata in organic listings but I want to show you how they also appear in enhanced AdWords listings: 53

54 This is a pretty loaded example as it has the star rating, the reviews listed, links to sections of the site etc. Think how much more CTR this ad gets in comparison to the other two listings above it. Now again, you may think that John Lewis has paid extra for the star ratings but they haven't, the page which this ad links to has all the Microdata in and Google is just using this, you can see other companies making use of the same markup and getting an enhanced listing. 54

55 At a recent conference I spoke to a couple of marketers who are in a particular cooking supply niche, and they shared some pretty amazing data with me and gave me access to their analytics account to verify their information. Now before I tell you the story let me show you what a typical recipe listing in Google looks like: As you can see it shows the cooking time and the calorie count. Nice. Anyhoo, on with the story. This couple sell ingredients to a particular speciality segment of the market, so to support that and to get more content on to their site they have been writing a recipe / cooking blog and roughly put out one post a week linking to the ingredients in their store etc. 55

56 On average they were getting 600 hits a day on their site except for holiday times where the site obviously had a huge spike in visits. This was before implementing Microdata on their site. They initially started by implementing the markup for recipes and included the following extra information on each page: cooktime cookingmethod ingredients preptime recipecategory recipecuisine recipeinstructions recipeyield totaltime There are few extra things they could have added to the page but wanted to keep it simple, and as they already had this information on the page most of it was a simple cut and paste job. Over a long weekend they updated all of their pages (around 110 at the time) with the new data. 56

57 Previous to doing this their recipes were showing up on the second to third page of Google when you typed in a particular dish with the occasional one hitting page one. A week after implementing this they came into the shop and saw that they had nearly 90 more orders to fill from their store than normal, they checked their analytics account and it was just showing up Saturday's data and they had over 5,000 visitors to their site, and to pages that don't normally get a lot of hits. Obviously they quickly checked the SERPs and most of their recipes were now showing up around the top spots of Google, all they had done is add Microdata to the pages and Google had picked that up. Because they had put their ingredients in the list, Google was pulling that information out and showing up their recipes on it's site. A total success and a huge change in their business, they have now closed down their physical shop and just have a warehouse for the raw ingredients and delivery, they currently ship $200,000 of ingredients a week... all thanks to Microdata markup and the semantic web. When I spoke to them at the conference I suggested making one change, and that was to add nutritional information to the recipe Microdata which would give them an even more enhanced organic listing. 57

58 They went away and did that a couple of days later and then a couple of weeks later once Google had re-crawled their website they noticed a 12% increase in traffic and all their listings now contain the calorie count information and they appear higher than any of the competition. Now that is an extreme example and your milage may vary, but by giving Google more information so that it can make an informed decision about your content can only do you good, and later I am going to show you how you can get started with all of this, but for now I want to tell you about another way Microdata can help you. 58

59 Microdata And Enhanced Local Listings This example for us really showed how powerful Microdata can be. Up until this point we had been running tests on Google using Microdata to boost review sites and to get enhanced link juice but a friend of ours came to us with a problem. His business focusses mostly on local SEO and one of his clients was being seriously outranked in Google by a competitor which was located nowhere near to his business. He had tried everything from getting customers to write reviews, getting entries in all the major directories - everything - but the other guy was still out ranking him despite being nearly 40 miles away from the location. So we decided to add the following to his About Us page: <div itemscope itemtype=" <span itemprop="name">his Business Name</span> <div itemprop="address" itemscope itemtype=" PostalAddress"> <span itemprop="streetaddress">address 1</span> <br /> <span itemprop="streetaddress">address 2</span> <br /> <span itemprop="addresslocality">address Town</span> <br /> <span itemprop="addressregion">address County</span> <br /> <span itemprop="postalcode">address Post Code</span> <br /> </div> </div> 59

60 This added his business name and full postal address to the page in both human readable and machine readable format. Bingo! It took about a week but he is now top spot in the Google Places listings - a simple and effective fix which only took a couple of minutes to implement. So if you are in the local space, have a local physical business, and want to make sure that Google lists you properly then make sure you put your machine readable information on your 'About Us' page etc. 60

61 Putting This To Work So by now I am sure you are itching to get started with this, and the easiest way is to use a WordPress plugin. There are a few different plugins available, and the two which jump out for me are called Schema Creator ( or Seamless Schema ( Both are free and easy to install, and both do pretty much the same thing. When you ve installed one of the plugins and you re putting together your blog post or page you will now have an extra section where you can select your schema tags and enter details below the in the post edit screen. The Schema Creator box looks something like this: 61

62 And Seamless Schema looks like something like this: When you enter the details and save your post / page then the plugin automatically inserts the correct schema tags into the page when it loads. 62

63 Testing Your Snippets One of things you are going to want to do once you have implemented some of the Microdata code on your site is to test whether it is marked up correctly and that Google can read it. They have provided a tool for this here: To use the tool just paste in the URL of the page you want to check and then click on the Fetch & Validate button: Google then validate the page and report back all of the tags they ve found and highlight any errors: 63

64 There are a lot of options for adding this markup to your websites, and depending on what you are currently working on adding schema.org data anywhere on your site is only going to help your search listings. The absolute kicker is that at the moment there are less than 1% of websites who are integrating this type of data, so if you add it then you can steal a march on your competition and it will help you stand out from the crowd. 64

65 The Missing Link To SEO That You Should Ignore At Your Peril! An expert is someone who has succeeded in making decisions and judgements simpler through knowing what to pay attention to and what to ignore. - Edward de Bono When people hear the words Search Engine Optimisation, the vast majority automatically think that it s about how to leverage backlinks and some other ninja methods to get ranked on the first page of Google, but there s one thing that quite a lot of people completely miss out... You see, there is more to SEO than just getting ranked on Google. The O of SEO stands for optimisation, and optimising isn t just about getting a good ranking, it s about getting the best bang for your buck when your site actually does show up in the search results. What I m going to outline in this article is optimising the Title Tag on your pages, and I m going to explain why this is a crucially important factor in your SEO strategy. The Title Tag is one of those elements that many people overlook, and if you take a look at the search results you can see straight away the ones who are doing it all wrong. 65

66 There are quite a few people out there who will tell you that optimising the title tag won t give you a significant boost in the rankings, and this is partly true. It's not as powerful as it used to be for ranking, especially if you're keyword stuffing which Google will penalise you for, but trust me when I say that if you ignore this then it s at your own peril. The real reason we want to optimise the Title Tag is that we want to not just be optimising the tag to appeal to the search engine bots who are indexing and ranking our sites, but more importantly, we want to appeal to the real live humans who will be viewing the search results. This really shouldn t need saying, but the primary goal of your title tag is to get the user to click and come to your website. Shocking, I know. Such a simple thing, but one which is completely ignored by 99% of the websites out there. Everyone is so entrenched with doing all the SEO gimmicks and tricks to get Google to index and rank their sites that they totally forget the number one objective - getting users to actually click and visit your page. This is why we see so many links on the search results pages which are just a series of keywords separated by commas, dashes, or pipes. 66

67 That s not to say you don t want to be including your keywords in your title tag, you absolutely need to be including them, but you need to do it in a way which speaks to the reader and encourages them to take action. So the key thing you need to be doing is crafting your title tags so that they are focussed towards getting the user to click. You should think about crafting the title tag in exactly the same way as you would craft the headline for an advert. You want to hit all the key triggers, speak to your customer in their language, appeal to a problem they have, hint at a solution you can give, and above all provide a call to action which encourages the click. Your title tag needs to be easily read and understood by a real live human being, because they are the ones who will be compelled to click and then ultimately hand you some money (to date I ve never been paid any money by a Google bot indexing and ranking my site, only by the humans with credit cards who do click on the links ;) Your title tag does of course need to include the main keyphrase or keywords you are targeting, but this needs to be in a natural way and in context with the message you re trying to get across to the person who s reading it. Take these two examples for the search half marathon training tips. 67

68 The first one really isn t very good. It does contain the keywords, but it s quite short and doesn t give me a real reason to click apart from obviously meeting the basic requirements of matching the keywords: NB: I should also mention here that the small section directly below the link is the Meta Description tag. Again, this is another area you should be investing some time into. Others will tell you that the meta description tag is worthless for indexing and ranking because Google completely ignore it. But as we ve just discussed, this is prime real-estate to convert your browsers into clicking and becoming visitors to your page. Here s the second one: This one is much better. Yes, it contains the same keywords, but this one is written to give the reader a better understanding of what the content contains, and having something as focussed as 7 training tips already gives the reader the impression that the solution is quick and easy to implement. 68

69 Also note the meta description. There is a question in there which speaks directly to the reader Training for your first half marathon? - the odds are quite good that people searching for half marathon training tips are indeed just starting out, so this is totally on target for the audience. To craft a decent title tag you need to keep in mind effective techniques of writing good headlines, so you need to speak to the reader in their language, maybe ask a question which you know they want answering, including specific numbers (like the 7 tips... ) can work well etc., and above all make it a compelling call to action to get the click. Here's another one which is sort OK, but not quite ticking all the right boxes. They ve done a clever play on the half marathon distance (13.1 miles = 13.1 tips), but the title tag here is too long and gets cut off with the 3 dots... and the description isn t focussed at all: This is another important point. Google will cut off the end of title tags which are too long and add the 3 dots to the end. 69

70 It used to be that Google would give you about 70 characters for your title tag, and anything over would get cut off. However, Google actually give you a set width in pixels for the title tag area, and because certain letters are wider than others (i.e. the letter I is narrower than the letter M ) the number of characters you get can vary. For best results I recommend between characters, and you can easily check what this looks like by using a free tool over at this link: That tool is really straight forward to use, you just type in your title, description and link, then click on the option for Google SERP Simulator and you ll get a nice preview. If you re on WordPress then you ll most likely have this built in automatically if you re using one of the many SEO plugins out there. There is a final point to note... Google can (and do!) rewrite title tags. There s nothing you can do to stop this, but in the main Google only tend to rewrite titles which are too long, so if you're sticking to the guidelines I mentioned above you stand a better chance of having your carefully crafted title displayed in the results exactly the way you want it to. 70

71 So, let s have a brief recap on the main points... The title tag is your opportunity to get the readers attention. The title tag needs to include your keywords, but in a way that makes sense to the reader. Craft your title tag with the same focus as you would with your advert headlines. Keep your title tag to between characters including spaces, test before you publish using the free tools, rewrite if it s too long and gets cut off with the 3 dots. The meta description tag might be no good for the Google bot, but it s prime real-estate to talk directly to your target and encourage the click. Remember, the number one job of your site appearing in the search results is to get the reader to click and visit your site - treat it as a call to action that appeals to get the click. 71

72 Getting More Pages Indexed And Ranked In The Search Results We shall see the crumbs of bread... and they will show us our way home again. - Hänsel and Gretel There are so many things to think about when it comes to SEO that people can easily get overwhelmed, but the basics of good SEO are relatively simple. Everything should always start with theming your site around a specific topic, then categorising your content into semantically relevant keyword groups. In a nutshell this simply means keeping your site tightly focussed to the core theme. For example, if your site is based on the topic of Golf you might have your content categorised into specific keyword groups like Golf Equipment, Golf Tips, Golf Courses, and so on. When it comes to getting your pages indexed and ranked by the search engines we do of course need backlinks pointing to it from other places around the web, that way the search engine crawlers can follow a link and find our site. However, there are a couple of other things we can do to help the search engines crawl and index all of our pages. 72

73 The first is to add a sitemap, and depending on what CMS you re using on your website (like WordPress) this might have already been created by a plugin (all of the main SEO plugins contain the sitemap functionality). Once the sitemap is created it should be automatically picked up by the search engines, but you can help yourself out by registering your site with both Google Webmaster Tools and Bing Webmaster Tools, and then you can manually add the location of the sitemap if it hasn t already been fetched. The second way to help with crawling and indexing is using some tags which have been around for a long time, but they re not always used and are often overlooked. These tags are called Breadcrumbs, and I ll expect why they re important for a few different reasons in a moment. You will have seen breadcrumbs on your internet travels, they are especially prevalent on e-commerce sites, and on a website they look something along the lines of this: What you might have also seen is that Google have been automatically generating breadcrumbs in their search results to enhance the listings, which is great because it makes the entry stand out on the page and gives a good classification of the content. 73

74 Here s a couple of search entries, this first one is with the breadcrumbs: And this one is without: As you can see, these enhance the search listing and give the browser a clear idea of what your site is about, which can be very helpful in getting that all important click. These are picked up automatically by Google, and we ll talk later on how you can quickly implement them on your site and improve your chances of getting these shown on your search results to enhance your listings and make them stand out from the crowd. I m also going to talk about why breadcrumbs are good for indexing and getting more pages in the search results shortly, but first I want to talk about why they can be good for your users and how they can boost your website stats. 74

75 Giving A Good User Experience Getting index and ranked is important, but what is equally important is keeping your visitor on your site once they ve clicked on the link in the search results, and to do this you want to give a good user experience (UX for short ;) Giving good UX comes down to a number of factors, including first and foremost decent quality content, information, or a product that the visitor is looking for. As a secondary element you want to make your site easy to navigate and helpful to the visitor, and this is where the breadcrumbs come in to play. Breadcrumbs instantly show the visitor where they are in the hierarchy of your site, and this is especially helpful for larger sites which lots of pages of content (or lots of different product pages for e-commerce sites). If you think about it from a basic point of view, the breadcrumbs can actually help keep the visitor on your site for longer and can instantly point the visitor in a specific direction to other content, products, and pages. It might be that the visitor has landed on a page which doesn t offer them what they re initially looking for, but they may just click on the breadcrumb to browse some more pages on your site to find what they actually do want. 75

76 This in turn increases the time on site and reduces the bounce rate, which is good in Google's eyes and can help build up your site's reputation and authority, and it shows Google that the content you are producing is what people want (because they're sticking around and not leaving your site). For best user experience the breadcrumb should be at the top of the page where the visitor can easily see it. Crawling, Indexing, And Ranking Breadcrumbs allow search engines to better determine the structure of your site, which helps massively with crawling, indexing, and ranking. Search engine bots can come into your site at any page, they don't just come in at the home page and then drill down, so it s important to give the search crawlers clear directions for all of your other pages. If the search bot lands on a page deep in your site, and then if they see a breadcrumb they now have a path to take to further index and crawl your other linked pages. Don t underestimate how important this can be. By also seeing which category the content is in they can also better classify your page for indexing and ranking in the search results, because your 76

77 categories will all be keyword relevant and semantically related (assuming you're following the SEO basics ;) Having a page or post in multiple categories might result in more than one breadcrumb showing on the page, but keep in mind that Google will pick the first breadcrumb it sees and completely ignore the others, so ideally you want to tightly theme your posts and pages into a category that matches. This of course might not be possible for some sites, especially e-commerce where a product might fit into more than one category, but in an ideal world you ll be trying to tightly theme your content into individual keyword categories for best results. Google doesn't like to see sites with minimal content that aren't helpful to the user, they like to see rich sites with quality content all themed around a specific topic, so getting more of your pages crawled and indexed is going to give you a much better boost. For best results the breadcrumb should be nearer the top of the page because the search engine bots don't always initially crawl entire pages (especially when they are long content pages), so you want to make sure that the breadcrumb gets included in the crawl. Let s now take a look at implementing these bad boys :) 77

78 Implementing The Breadcrumbs Google supports breadcrumbs tagged in the Microdata, RDFa, or JSON-LD formats, and if you re on a plain old HTML site then you can find the quick tags to markup your pages here: If you're using WordPress then there are plenty of free plugins on the WordPress Plugins Repository which you can use, including these three which are in no particular order of preference: Yoast SEO Plugin ( Breadcrumb NavXT ( Breadcrumb Trail ( Each of those plugins listed above will automatically generate the breadcrumb tags and display them on your site, but if you re currently running an SEO plugin you might find that it already has breadcrumb support, so have a look in your plugin settings to see if it s already there for you to enable. Don t underestimate how helpful breadcrumbs can be, they can enhance your listing in the search results to get more clicks, they can help your site visitors and keep them around for longer, and they can help you get more of your pages crawled, indexed, and ranked in the search engines. 78

79 Q&A Call The art and science of asking questions is the source of all knowledge. - Thomas Berger I put up a post inside the Raine Report Facebook Group this month asking for your questions on any topic, and to be honest I didn t expect such a fevered response! I ve now recorded the Q&A call, and I recommend you grab the beverage of your choice, kick back, and take a listen: Listen To The Q&A Call If you re not yet a member of the Raine Report Facebook Group then you are seriously missing out. There are currently just over 1,150 people just like you networking, asking questions on the training and report content, and it s becoming a really positive community. There s no cost, it s a completely free group, and I m in there every single day taking part and answering your questions. Head on to the group and ask me any question you want: Join The Raine Report Facebook Group 79

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