EBOOK Off-Site SEO Made MSPeasy Everything you need to know about Off-Site SEO & Google Algorithms
K SEO easy ut Onsite SEO What is SEO and How is it used? SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation. The idea of SEO is to improve your website visibility on organic (non-paid) search engine results. There are two main forms of SEO, On-Site and Off-Site. Onsite is any practice that you do on your own website. Whereas Off-Site is anything that features on third party websites. This ebook will primarly focus on Off-Site SEO. You can find everything you need to know about On-Site practices in our last ebook. Before we start explaining the world of SEO there are a few things that you need to know... 1. No one can guarantee you a position on Google (if they do RUN AWAY) 2. There are no shortcuts to good SEO asy bout Offsite SEO & Google Algorithms 3. It takes time, both to do SEO and for it to take effect. 4. Doing a little often is better than doing all your SEO in one hit. 5. You can t do SEO in only one hit! It s an ongoing project.
Why is it necessary? In short, SEO is vital to a websites success. The best way of thinking about SEO and your website is to think of your website as a physical shop. The art of SEO is in a sense, a way of moving your website from the side ally shops to appearing on the high street. It s great having a fantastic website, but if no one knows you exist then it s not worth anything! In 2016 it was reported that Google yielded 2 trillion searches per year. How many people are searching for you? By taking interest and control of how your content is found and consumed, you can increase the number of new prospects who come across your website. Here s how to get started with SEO!
Off-Site SEO Social media is rapidly becoming one of the biggest tools in marketing. Not only it is a great tool in increasing brand awareness, it s a fantastic way of creating increased web presence. Every time you create a post, tweet or upload a piece of content with a link back to your website, you are creating a backlink. You might be wondering how else can you build backlinks? Well getting your content, news and name across the internet all helps. So, how can you do this? In short spread the word! Start talking to other web owners, suppliers and resellers to get your website listed on their websites, or to any other sites that cover similar topics as your own website. Links from random sites about phishing will not help you if you are talking about Business Continuity. If you have news about a big product / service launch or an event then spread the word with press releases, networking websites and again social media. It all helps!
Protect your domain One of the key parts of business is ensuring that you have control of your brand. There are fantastic tools such as https://www.namecheckr.com/ that will allow you to check key domains names and social media accounts to ensure that you can get the accounts in your name before someone else does. Other Usefull Tools There are a whole host of SEO tools and websites that experts use to improve website rankings however, the core tools sit with Google. These are the starting blocks of any SEO campaign and are a direct source to Google these core tools are. Google Webmasters / Search Console Google Analytics Google My Business
Google Webmasters Tools (GWT) Google provide a whole host of tools to help your website grow and succeed. At the heart of these tools is Google webmasters. GWT will not only help you get your website ranking on Google and get your company there but it will also flag up any major issues with your website. Overtime will give you key metrics about how people find your website. How do you get GWT? To get started you simply need a Google account, Go to: https://www.google.com/ webmasters/ in the top right you will see the login / sign in button. Upon completing you will see a screen like the below.
Once you have entered your full website e.g. https://www.datto.com/ you will be asked to upload a verification file to your own files to prove that you own that website. Once you have downloaded the file which Google has provided, re uploaded it to where your website is hosted. Check the I m not a robot captcha and verify your website. Its vital that you do this step otherwise you will recive no metrics on your website. Once you have completed this step you will be taken back to the webmasters homepage where you can start tracking, improving and reporting on your website. Yahoo and Bing both have their own versions of this tool, however Google is by far the most powerful and the most essential to success.
Submiting a Sitemap After you have created your webmasters account you need to go to sitemaps: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/sitemap There are so many tools on the internet that will generate a sitemap for you and then you can download and upload your sitemap to your server. Normally you will host your sitemap somewhere like https://www.datto.com/sitemap.xml Then, when you go back to the webmaster sitemap submission page, you will need to press the large button that reads submit sitemap. Once you have submitted your sitemap you need to keep an eye on this over the coming weeks, as Google will start to crawl your website and index your page. If there are any errors it will flag these up. However, it s important to remember to keep your sitemap up-to-date when you add new pages and remember that it can take upto two weeks for Google to crawl your website.
Data Highlighting This tool is a great way of helping Google to understand your website. If you go to https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/ data-highlighter there is actually a video by Google which will help you navigate your way around this tool very easily. In short, with Google Data Highlighter you can teach Google what parts of your website are key focus areas. For example, if you have a blog section on your site, you can identify your core company details, logo, phone number, etc. and then the heading of the blog, the main articles etc. It s a quick and easy way for Google to understand what is what on your website and help you display your website clearer in search results. A fantastic quick win for your team!
Google My Business In previous years Google My Business was only used as a priorty for companies that wished to appear on Google Maps. However, in recent months Google have started to introduce new features such as posts to allow you to create news, events and resource updates for your customers attention. Once you go to https://www.google.co.uk/business/ you will need to Claim your business. Normally this requires Google to post out some verification details which can take around two weeks to get approved, so it s going to take time. Once you have got your account approved you can take full control of this side bar and it will open up a new world of possibilities for your marketing efforts!
Google Analytics Analytics is not necessarily aligned to SEO however its a great way of tracking progress. There is a whole world of analytics which will transform your business but we wont dive into that today. Once you have your website added and verified in a very similar manner to the Webmasters tools you will be able to start tracking your websites progress, set goals and see proof of the effort you are putting in!
Google Algorithms So here is the fun stuff - the magic behind google Well sort of. Google algorithms are kept super secret and are compiled of hundreds, if not thousands of factors that determine the position of where your website ranks. However, below are a few of the main algorithm updates over the past few years to give you an overall insight into how Google search works. It s important to note that Google update their algorithm daily, most are tiny tweaks, others are major updates. So let s take a look as some of the major releases over the past few years. Staying up-to-date https://moz.com/google-algorithm-change
Google Panda Google s Panda Update is a search filter introduced in February 2011 meant to stop sites with poor quality content from working their way into Google s top search results. Panda is updated from time-to-time. Back in 2011 CNET reported a surge in the rankings of news websites and social networking sites, and a drop in rankings for sites containing large amounts of advertising. This is a perfect example of Panda s impact. Google Penguin Google launched the Penguin update in April 2012 to better catch sites deemed to be spamming its search results. In particular those doing so by buying links or obtaining them through link networks designed primarily to boost Google rankings. The update is aimed at decreasing search engine rankings of websites that violate Google s Webmaster Guidelines. These are worth reading over so you ensure that you don t violate these. The violations are commonly known as black-hat SEO techniques which involve increasing artificially the ranking of a webpage by manipulating the number of links pointing to the page. Such tactics are commonly described as link schemes.
Google Hummingbird Hummingbird is the name of the new search platform that Google is using as of September 2013. The name comes from being precise and fast and is designed to focus on the meaning behind the words. Hummingbird is paying more attention to each word in a query, ensuring that the whole query the whole sentence, conversation or meaning is taken into account, rather than particular words. The goal is that pages matching the meaning do better, rather than pages matching just a few words. Google s Hummingbird is designed to apply the meaning technology to billions of pages from across the web, to bring back better results. Google Pigeon The Pigeon update came into effect back in July 2014 in the US and December 2014 for the rest of the world. The key things that Pigeon looks at is the user s location and importantly both on and off site SEO. So, in short, Pigeon is rewarding companies that are being proactive and have a solid local presence, it s really aimed at helping the SMB market.
Mobilegeddon & Mobile-friendly 2 On April 21, 2015, Google released a significant new mobile-friendly ranking algorithm that s designed to give a boost to mobile-friendly pages in Google s mobile search results. If you are not mobile-friendly, or if you want to ensure that you are, check the Google mobile-friendly tool, and check Google s mobile guidelines. It is never too late to benefit from this mobilefriendly algorithm; it is real-time based on how fast Google crawls your pages. Google Possum Possum, unlike most other updates, affects only local search results. That means if you re trying to rank #1 for a keyword and you aren t concerned about location, Possum probably won t affect you one bit. The new Possum update makes local search results dependent on the searcher s location. Previously, businesses that were physically based outside of a city centre (or city limits) were having a hard time in ranking for search phrases that contained location modifiers. With the Possum update we ve seen this become much more relaxed.
HTTPS/SSL Update. Google has announced that going HTTPS adding a SSL 2048-bit key certificate on your site will give you a minor ranking boost. Google says this gives websites a small ranking benefit, only counting as a very lightweight signal within the overall ranking algorithm. Google said this carries less weight than other signals such as highquality content. Based on their tests, Google says it has an impact on fewer than 1% of global queries but said they may decide to strengthen the signal because they want to encourage all website owners to switch from HTTP to HTTPS to keep everyone safe on the web. Google also said based on their tests for the past few months, the HTTPS signal showed positive results in terms of relevancy and ranking in Google s search results. In fact according to MOZ in April 2017, over 50% of page 1 results are https and thats up from 30% in just 9 months. They also go on to say that by the end of 2017 it will be around 70%. This is a great quick win and something every company should be doing!
Conclusion So now that you have read through this SEO guide for Off-site optimisation you should have a good idea of where to start, but to summarise... 1. Setup your Google Webmasters Account 2. Claim your Google My Business Page 3. Install Google Analytics 4. Upgrade your website to a HTTPS certificate Want to know more? Download Now: OnSite SEO Made MSP Easy: www.datto.com/uk/resources/
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