SEO Training 12: Traffic and Content Engagement

Three Types of Website Traffic

Organic Traffic - from search engines

Referral Traffic - from affiliated websites, forums, news or from social media

Direct Traffic - might came from people who have seen your url and typed it directly on the url bar

Note: Organic and Referral both produced traffic, simply:

1. When you're doing SEO onpage optimization, you can get few traffic from search engine. That's why we need offpage optimization to boost up the keyword ranks and be seen on the first fold of the first page of the page of the SERP.

2. When you're doing offpage optimization, you're leaving links on any types of websites and if there are links with lots of audience, you get the audience click your link.

When we are doing SEO you get the traffic from search engines and the traffic from the website where you left the link. However, if you leave a link with an anchor text "click here" then that will not boost your search engine rank, but will only get referral traffic juice.

How to Boost Direct Traffic

Organic Traffic - ensuring that we are doing on page and off page optimization (on page and off page are incorporated)

Referral Traffic - make sure we are doing community building, by posting interesting stuff and engaing with them

Direct Traffic -  branding

2 Ways to Lose Direct Traffic

1. If they visit your website and they did not find what they are looking for, next hour, days, weeks, months, and years -- you'll not find that direct traffic anymore. WORST CASE, if they have a strong influence then most likely they will tell the community to not visit you site.

2. If the country is blocked in accessing the website. if the ip address is blocked in accessing the website. if the email address is blocked by the website. if government asked the ISP (internet service provider) to block the website be loaded in their country.

Content Optimization

Are not applied in our website simply there are no content to optimize (let say that my job are into seasonal I'm into some sort of sports gaming so there is no content to be optimized and a seasonal cannot be optimized).

Therefore Content Optimization is good but t depends on the product/service of the website, in our case content engagement is better than content optimization.

Content Engagement

It's a type of content that makes your audience stick to your website or webpage. Content Engagement avoids bounce rate and the more your audience stays in your webpage the more time your webpage can engage with your audience in making them reach your goal.

This happens when if your webpage made your audience stay for a minute or more reading your content, then that's content engagement.Also if your webpage made your audience click on a link within your website, then that's content engagement.

Why is it that most bloggers say that content is king that they market blogging is the best way to market a product or service?

It is easy to build relationship using a blog, blog content has emotional hooks, it's easier than social media. Social Media has limits, at the same time, if you use social media, and time passes, it will be hard to located your past post. unlike blogs where it is categorized by sections, categories, and tags.

That's one way to do content engagement, build relationships by small talk, it's the highest engagement level that you could do.

There are several ways on how you are going to do it, here's how:

1. Create a video or anything how your audience might understand how your product and services work. Think of the possibility what would be the common question they will ask you.

e..g. most people know how to feed dogs, but what they need is the proper way to feed a dog.

2. Informative Content can provide Negative Impact on Engagement

- In this case you are going to provide two or three options for them but always give them bettr options

3. Holiday is Good for Marketing. But Mentioning Holidays is Worth Nothing.

- Everyone is familiar with this one giving better deals during holidays, but what will makes you stand out? and how can your audience used holidays as a better opportunity for them.

4. Less is More

- Show them data

- Pick what is best part

5. Interactive Post

- Care about you audience

6. To ask People

-  Taking action means answering a question you've provided or making them share what you have provided. telling your followers what you want them to do

7. Images

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SEO Training 11: Keyword Researching on ON PAGE Optimization

Keyword Researching I must say is somewhat complicated to do, simply you have to analyze what is your webpage all about and how your potential customer will find you. So it took three days just to finished this complex topic.

Here's how to do keyword researching:

1. you need to analyze (NOT THE WEBSITE) the web PAGE

2. find the keywords that the webpage are going to be found

3. search your webpage by using the analyzed keywords on your target search engine.

Once you find your keywords you have to incorporate it with your on page optimization.

For this topic Joy gave us an activity where we have to derive with the following (of course he also provide us what website we should optimize):

1. provide me the new title

2. provide me the new meta description

3. provide me the new content

To do this your keyword must be found in title, description and content (just make sure it doesn't sounds redundant. BE NATURAL!)

Note: One of the best practices in doing this check the URL of your your webpage incorporate the URL keyword to your title and description.

After this certain questions pop up into my head:

1. What if your website is very new and it will be your first time to put something on it?

Answer: you need to AGE the website for months 6-months is the average. After that  go back to your webpage, and collect all the keywords that you have used for that page. then, 1-by-1 search the webpage using each keyword on your target search engine e.g. google.com

2. There are certain websites who puts keywords such as "competitions, blogs, transfers, preview, review, newsletter" etc. (sounds like a broad one)

Answer: For their personal use (if they are using it for their INTERNAL search engine). But if they are going to use it for SEO, all of those keyword set are stupid stuff.

What parts of the webpage are all major search engine spiders crawling?

1. spiders look for your robots.txt first

When the search engine spider found the robots.txt, it will give you +3 in your SEO Rank Value BUT, if the spider did not find robots.txt, it will give you -3 SEO Rank Value. The spider wants to know which of your folders are allowed to be crawled and which are not. If spiders did not see any robots.txt then it's like you're telling the spiders to crawl everything and i don't care if the data is relevant or not to be indexed.

2. Once the spider know which folders to crawl, it will then collect all the URLs of your website. these URLs are the pages of your website to be analyzed.

3. The search engine system are the ones collecting the keyword data that is typed in the search engine text box.

After search engines collected all the keywords that was typed in the search box, the search engine system creates a "SANDBOX" per keyword. e.g. SANDBOX1:sports, SANDBOX2:sports betting, SANDBOX3:sports betting strategy, SANDBOX4:sports betting strategies

What are the use of these sandboxes? it is used by the search engine spiders to store the URL that they have collected from your website.

so from robots.txt, search engine spiders sort all of your URLs containing they keywords on their respective sandboxes.***containing the keywords.

4. Once the sorting is done, search engine spiders will now then collect the TITLE and DESCRIPTION of each URL or page.

a - search engine spider will go back to the URL sandboxes

b - search engine spider will compare the keyword from the URL and the keyword from your TITLE. if the keyword URL and keyword title is relevant, then search engine spiders will give you +1 for URL and +3 for title relevancy. So, you've got a total of +4 SEO Rank Value.

c - search engine spider will then compare the keyword from the URL vs TITLE vs DESCRIPTION. if the keyword URL, keyword TITLE, and keyword DESCRIPTION, are all relevant, search engine spiders will then give you an ADDITIONAL +2. Now, you've got +8 SEO Rank Value.

d - what if title or description are not relevant to the keyword URL? what the spider will do is to give you a -3 for title and -2 for description.

5. After search engine spiders collected your URL, Title, and Description, it will then collect your CONTENT to compare for relevancy. search engine spiders will give you +3 for quality content, +3 if the keyword you are using are in the list of the sandboxes, and +2 if you are using the exact keywords on URL, TITLE, DESCRIPTION, and CONTENT.

What if title or description are not relevant to the keyword URL? what the spider will do is to give you a -3 for title and -2 for description.

The following are what spiders are looking for in your page:

1. URL

2. <title></title>

3. meta name="description"

4. your content removing the following HTML strips -- <p></p>, <em></em>, <strong></strong>, and more except for <h1></h1>, <h2></h2>, <h3></h3>...to <h6></h6>

For multiple keywords it is not recommended to apply all those keyword. But you have two options:
1 - focus with your current 2 keywords
2 - compare keywords for similarities and try to outline they title, description, and content. if it can do, then do this 2nd option.


Let's move to the next part keyword researching on Title, in this part I know it is everyones dilemma to create a title.

For example you are given 5 keywords and you have to incorporate it for the webpages, here's your option:

1. describe the content of the page in 70-characters (unfortunately, we have limits so we need to follow that rule)
2. emphasize your target product (e.g. ODDS)
3. don't forget the CTA (call to action) so you'll get most of the clicks
4. target keyword should be FOCUSED (in my example, what is my target keyword)

Descriptive title is okay but remember that it is much okay if we make it for both search engine and searcher. Also don't force yourself if you can't make five keywords on title and description fit. Also searcher/people are using search engine is because, they are asking questions.

Here are the good practices when it comes to title setup:

1.  Try to maximize 60 characters with spaces so that you can make use the additional 10 characters for CTA

2. Use 1 target keyword and 1 related keyword --- total of 2 keywords in 1 page. e.g. Asian Handicap Betting + Asian Sportsbook

3. Make sure that URL and the target keyword you use on the title are the same (it's 100% better than title+description setup)

If you don't have tools on how to do keyword researching here is the the other alternative you can do you can use related searches

1. Go to your target search engine
2. Type the keyword and hit search button
3. Go down to the bottom of the page, and find the related keywords
4. Get the top 10 results and list down all the keywords used by these 10 pages
5. Get the best keywords
6. Analyze how you can use those keywords then try to build a strategic optimization

Content Keywords

Content keyword is the most easiest-est (super redundancy) part of onpage optimization, but the problem is that how can you put  quality contents if you can't put  quality contents?

First let us define the three important parts of Web Page:
1. Header
2. Body or the content
3. Footer

The three important parts can contain the quality content normally the body has the larger percentage but if you can't add content on the body you can try to add it on header and footer (let say: body 50%, header 25 %  and footer 25 %)

In adding targeted keywords on header and footer depends on the keyword density, we should be wary on the keywords stuffing on content, simply the more the keywords in your content then the thinner your content goes.

Keyword Stuffing + Thinner Content = -3
Keyword Stuffing  -1
Thinner Content -2

Keyword Density

Keyword Density can be computed using your MS Word, here's how:

1. Open your ms word
2. Do your writing in ms word (don't mind the keyword density yet here)
3. Highlight all paragraph you've made (exclude the title)
4. Check the bottom left corner of the ms office, you'll see this

Total Number of Keyword Density = ((Total Number of Article Words) / (Number of Words of Keyword)) * 0.04

so if you have 100 words article with 2-word keyword (100/2)*0.04 = 2


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SEO Training 10: Introduction to On Page Optimization

Search Algorithm most important part is the title and description what makes them important:

Title - contains the keywords related to page topics

Description -  contains keywords that describes what pages are about

Even though the Title and Description does not contain keywords they will still appears on the SERP as long as the website is crawled but  it can't help you to get better rankings. 

SEO is composed of two ways:

ON Page Optimization - more on website/page optimization

OFF Page Optimization - Link building

Both of them can stand without each other but if they want to get better rankings they should stick together.

ON Page Optimization is composed of three parts:

1 Content

2 HTML

3 Site Architecture

Content Building

There should be a balance between the target market needs and to write content that will suite those needs for you to sell your product/service/idea at the same time, you should also write in a way that search engines can easily track/index you so that you can rank up the results. In other words both of them should mix together to maximize the target market.

In Optimizing the Content 

1 - quality of content

2 - related keywords

3 - target keywords

4 - engagement

5 - fresh content

6 - title

7 - description

8 - headers

9 - header outline or structure

10 - crawl-ability

11 - duplicated content

12 - page load speed

13 - url structure

14 - responsive design (mobile friendly)

Quality of Content

This is how a content is being measured on it's relevance, usability, down to use of words, tone.

In conclusion this was our introduction to search engine optimization, the first part was all about  the On Page optimization.

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SEO Training 9: Meta Tags

In this training it was my off day, so I just need to catch-up with the previous thread by reading Corn and Joy discussion.

To start the topic was all about  Search Algorithm, No Follow and Do Follow and keywords

Search Algorithm most important part is the meta tag (title and description), this is the only that search engine can identify your website or webpage contains the documents the searcher is looking for.

Remember: before Meta description were known as the snippet but because the rich snippet is always used. Most SEOs call the title and description as meta tags to separate it from the rich snippet (reviews, people, business, events, breadcrumbs, and more.) Rich Snippet  is used for products/services, information websites/webpages doesn't have rich snippets. However, rich snippets can also be used as part of the information page if it contains pages and/or data that can relate to rich snippets.

Meta Tags are important simply it will help the user identify if a certain result match in their own needs, so when you fill-up your title and description with lots of your targeted keywords it will help your website get ranked. But unfortunately it's not working for due to Google Updates (Panda, Penguin and Humming Bird). When Panda and Penguin release all the article submission sites were tagged as SPAM. For Social Bookmarking sites, they are still working but we have to know that if there are conversation/engagement then it's worth nothing.

Meta Tags Limits:

Meta Title: 70
Meta Description: 170

Note: When using keyword phrase link (or what we call as Anchor Text), make sure to maximize the anchor text's 70 characters with spaces and should contain your target keyword; not all target keywords.

Keywords

One of the best practices when it comes to using keywords, is that they used one targeted keyword per pages:

1 - if you want to target both keyword, on 1 link page, then change the content that contains both best football odds and a list of football betting odds.

2 - if you want to be safe, then go for 1 keyword and separate the keywords

There are violations that can affect your SEO ranking factors and these violations are the stuff that you "need" to avoid. These 2 have the most number of violation weight Paid Violation and Cloaking Violation.

Remember: that for every link that you share, your target page receives +1 rank value, once you received a paid or cloaking violation. you rank value is decreased by -3

Violations:

-2    keyword spam and thin content violation

-1   a page full of advertisements, a page with hidden contents, hosting pirated contents, and keyword stuffing violation

Overall paid links, cloaking, keyword spam, thin content, advertisements, hidden contents, pirated contents, and keyword stuffing,  all of these violations can make your website or webpage suffer from ranking by avoid these stuff and you'll get a lot of link juice.

DoFollow and NoFollow

NoFollow - means you only get traffic juice but not link juice.

To know if the websites are NoFollow or DoFollow you can simply do this:

1. Post or check for user links from the page.

2. Right click the page where you found the user posted link and choose view page source.

3. find the link in the source code.

4. Check if there is rel="nofollow"

if it has, it's nofollow  if it doesn't contain rel="nofollow" in the <a href> tag, then it's a dofollow.

1 - if you can post a link and it's a nofollow, you can get traffic juice but not link juice.
2 - if you can post a link and it's a dofollow, then you can get traffic and link juice

However

1 - if the link is URL only, and can't produce a keyword in the link. then you'll get traffic juice. no link juice.
2 - if the URL link can use keyword phrase, make sure it's a dofollow so it can produce link juice.
3 - if the page, doesn't contain traffic and it's a dofollow, then you'll only get link juice. no traffic juice.

Remember: Link juice is important to increase your keyword rank.

SEO Training 8: Strategic Marketing Plan

Before we start our daily dose of SEO, let's make a recap on our previous lesson, remember our Marketing Plan? To give you an insight regarding with our company or every one goal is to get traffic and convert these traffic and in that moment Strategic Marketing Plan follows. Both strategic marketing plans are of different steps, you need to produce a traffic first before you could do a conversion.

How are we going deal with this one?

One effective marketing strategy is for you to become a resource.

Resource - whenever you provide something that can help someone, it's a resource and when it is shared, you get followers.

How can you be a resource?

The answer is, by selling ideas and not selling your product/service.

In dealing by selling your product or service you must take a note on Useful and Commercial Ideas.

Difference between Useful and Commercial Ideas?

Useful Ideas - useful, interesting and unique ideas
Commercial Ideas - no useful, interesting and unique ideas

Commercial Idea - is a plain marketing spiel of a product or service, customers will be attracted if they need or want it. but if they don't, your product/service is nothing but a piece of trash waiting to be picked up, it's the same with twitter or other marketing platforms. whatever you say about your product or service, it will be nothing to anyone who sees it,  unless you have a useful, interesting, and unique ideas, which makes a commercial idea become interesting to people who needs it, who wants it, and even people who don't need or want it.

In conclusion Strategic Marketing Plan needs you to be a resource and selling your ideas.

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SEO Training 7: Search Engine

Another daily dose of SEO lecture today with Joy, so for now we are going to tackled about Search Engine.

Let's get started!

1. What's the Goal of a Search Engine?

Me- To provide the users the relevant searches or info that they need

Corn - Index Stuff

2. Define relevant searches?

Me- literally relevant connected to what you are looking for

In this question Joy gave us an example so both Corn and I will determine if our answer were correct. 

Example 1: keyword "SANTORUM" (NOTE: I don't know what Santorum is all about).

According to Joy if we checked the 6th result in Google SERP, we'll find the definition of Santorum, then his follow-up question "is that relevant?"

Me - For search engine relevance means simply finding the a page with the right words - the more the popular a website/page/document - so basically it is more on popularity.

Example 2:

If Google improved what yahoo did, then why is it that when i search for the keyword "CLICK HERE" on both yahoo, bing, and google (3 major search engines in the world), I see these results

In this part Joy showed us a screen shot of CLICK HERE (keyword) using three major search engines Google, Yahoo and Bing. Which is better among the three?

Google - http://puu.sh/5Sq82.png

Yahoo - http://puu.sh/5Sq72.jpg

Bing - http://puu.sh/5Sq6h.png

These 3 major search engines contains different result, why this happen? simply due to optimization. If your going to ask who among this three is better, it's YAHOO, why? 

YAHOO is BING and BING and BING is GOOGLE

Let's make a recap back again with question number 1. So basically our answer were correct it's just that the search engines wasn't able to get their goal, this is the reason behind search engine updates (penguin, panda, humming bird)

PARTS of SEARCH ENGINE

Search Engine use spiders to crawl in the website to get the data search engine needed. after collecting the data, spiders then stores it in a search engine database. once it is stored, all of the data collected are sorted to their respective sections and categories which is then called index or catalog. This index are waiting to be fetched by the search engine interface. Once the searcher types the keyword in the search box, the search engine will go in the database and looks for the most relevant website or webpages. now, to be able for search engines achieve its goal (to provide high quality content), spiders will then crawl again to the website the searcher clicks using a keyword phrase. These spiders will collect the data again and store it in the database. the final task of the search is ticking the counter. so if i search for a certain keyword the spider will count the website I clicked, as quality content. Now, search engine knows which website has quality content. once a new searcher clicks again on the website with the same keyword term. That's when the search engine will tag the website as the highest quality content.

In short:

crawlers/spiders -- is a system that collects data

index -- is the data collected stored in search engine database

search interface -- is the website where information are displayed

3. What is the most effective strategy to get high value in search engine algorithm?

Through Content and Community Building

4.  Why do businesses chose to market on the web?

 It's Cheaper

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SEO Training 6: Evergreen Content & Guest Blogging

For today SEO Training Diary we will focus on Evergreen Content and Guest Blogging, this would be used as one of the SEO strategy. To start our daily routine before we face Joy we have to do this assignment. Searching Advance our homework to start our discussion.

Difference Between Evergreen Content & Ordinary Content

Evergreen Content

- Content that is simply an informational or reference material that somehow never goes out of date. However the content can still relies on current trends but mostly full informational contents like e-book.

- Based from a tree that grows as time passes

Ordinary Content

- Is the same like the Evergreen Content, the only difference is that they have limited time.

Difference Between Evergreen Content & Content Re-purposing

Evergreen Content is the first unique content while repurpose are ideas based from Evergreen, once you update your old content it's repurposing.

To enlighten you up guys Content Repurposing is not included on the strategy that we are going to use. Simply to avoid redundancy or duplicate of content and also Humming Bird Update.

Guest Blogging

So based on my understanding about Guest Blogging, is that you will contact a certain blog owner/webmaster and asked them if you can write articles for them in return the owner/webmaster will allow you to get backlinks; it can also be someone will contact you if they can write for you and in return you will also give them backlinks.

For now Guest Blogging is one of the most used Link Building of any SEO, simply Google Algorithm doesn't have any role in Guest Blogging, Google will see your content as an ordinary blog that needs ranking. But the problem with Guest Blogging is the community even though you've done this Guest Blogging, blog is not socially active and it will not provide your objectives.

To end this session about Guest Blogging I will leave you with Matt Cutts quotable quotes:

According to Matt Cutts, Guest posts can be problematic:

"The problem is that if we look at the overall volume of guest posting we see a large number of people who are offering guest blogs or guest blog articles where they are writing the same article and producing multiple copies of it and emailing out of the blue and they will create the same low quality types of articles that people used to put on article directory or article bank sites.”


“If people just move away from doing article banks or article directories or article marketing to guest blogging and they don’t raise their quality thresholds for the content, then that can cause problems.”

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