Hats In SEO and their ABCs

Possibly, the fun part about the “Hats” in SEO is actually how we can sort them as heroes and villains. These so called hats somewhat tell us which SEO strategy is on the dark side and which is more of a hero.

In general SEO Hats conceptualize how your optimization is going according to rules or making a smaller or bigger curves. Well, saying that they are actually heroes and villains is maybe a fun metaphoric description, but let’s keep in mind, that all strategies need individual approaches.

Now, sometimes even through Black Hat SEO is frowned upon, it might actually give us the results we need in the current time. So, let’s review what these hats actually mean.

White Hat SEO

White hat SEO basically means to optimize your search engine according to platform guidelines and completely by the rules. You don’t cheat and have longer-term goals with your SEO campaign.

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Black Hat SEO

Now, black hat SEO involves riskier practices and somewhere not along the lines of rules and guidelines. It can actually do the work assigned to it, but temporarily. In contrast with white hat, black hat cannot be counted on unless the SEO strategy is quite short-term.

What are the Rules?

To understand the concept of rules, which are actually regarded to as guidelines-we can refer to Google’s “Quality Guidelines”. Keep in mind, that algorithm changes over time and so do the guidelines in correspondence to it. Basically picking a hat means to work with the guidelines or against them.

The basic outline of an honest White Hat is to not try to cheat the system. Using keywords is cool, but imagine just throwing in the keywords on your landing page for no specific or adequate reason.

Well, it might work for a little while, but just how many hundreds and thousands of fooled viewers will you handle? It’s quite dishonest and uncomfortable for you as a company in the first place to recklessly waste the keyword treasures.

But Black Hat looks so Tempting

And still, the dark side is just too seductive to resist sometimes. Now, let’s review the point of the black hat SEO in the first place. It’s very short-term and there is no perspective to it. Yet, SEO rankings are supposed to be consistent.

You will be almost cutting off the branch you’re sitting on by trying to trick the system, because such violations do not really go unnoticed. Once the algorithm changes your rankings will only become harder to push back up. So, why would you do this to your enterprise?

Mysterious Grey Hat

Well, just like in a comic book, when you have Villains wearing black hats and Heroes wearing the white one-you also have that one neutral guy. The point of grey hat is actually mixed media.

Grey Hat SEO in somewhere close to quality guidelines, but not quite there. Yet this SEO is not as fatal as the black hat one. Results are also mediocre with Grey Hat SEO strategies.

Using Grey Hat SEO tactics is something you might not deliberately inform Google about, but even if found out about-it’s not something to get penalized for immediately. Something like a blurred line between good and bad.

Choose Your Hat

After all the discussions in previous paragraphs about how SEO Hats work, now it’s completely up to you-which one you’re willing to choose. Will you opt for radical options or navigate somewhere along the neutral zone?

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Multimodal Search Basics

Basically, multimodal search combines the aspects of keyword, concept and example searches. It can also involve the multilingual search engine development and of course-multimedia search elements like photo, video and audio. Now, to make the concept clearer, let’s discuss several possibilities of using multimodal search strategy to benefit our SEO.

Multi-Functional Content

Before you start with multimodal search, you must first have some diverse content. Now, that we’ve mentioned so many content mediums it’s important to know how they can be navigated through general search engines to pop up in more various channels.

Multi-Lingual Search

For this case, let’s take the basic example of your blog-textual content. It’s great to have customers engaged and well, if they do not know the language of your choosing, they can always refer to google translate. Yet, best option for increasing your summed up SEO results would be to actually provide the multi-lingual versions on your website already.

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Here’s how it works-you have at least two language options for your original website. When writing blogposts/cornerstone content make sure to provide copies in both languages. Provide a URL for both posts in their specific languages with the keywords relevant to that native audience.

This obviously doubles up the work you put in blogging, but also surely doubles your SEO profits as well.

Concept Search

So far, in one of our articles we have discussed the importance of external links in your content. Here’s how it helps with acquiring concept search strategy. The primary reason you use external links in your content is to help the search engine understand what’s the purpose of your post. What ideas or concepts it is about. So, make sure to use relevant external links to navigate your potential customers towards your content via the general outline of its concept.

Example Search

If you write content on regular basis, you should know that you must have at least one comparative or exemplifying sentence in your blogpost or social media textual content. Such assets in content writing help interested viewers find certain keywords in the body text of your content without concentrating on headlines alone, so make sure to present some comparisons and examples in your copy next time.

Multi-Media Search

Now, media that dominates search engines is generally photos. Even before clicking the video or possibly available audio content-we need a small glimpse of what we’re about to see right? When you create a specific type of content don’t forget to edit your featured image in coherence with SEO friendliness. This is how it works:

When you add a featured image for your content you are very likely to see graphs asking you to explain the image and add the so called Alt text. Explaining the image actually helps you use your necessary keywords in multiple mediums. Some platforms offer simple wording and some require some coding knowledge, but it’s still manageable.

As for the ALT text, here is why it’s cool. The ALT text function literally helps you command your engine on when and where to make the image pop up. Let’s say you have an image on content about your Croissant recipe. You upload an image (preferably royalty free) and command in ALT text to pop up in Google SERP when searched “French Croissant Recipe” or “Real Croissant Recipe”

The previously conducted customer research and keyword research will help you understand how to control these search strategies better, so don’t hold back on using the search engine functions to their fullest.

What We Offer

For more similar articles make sure to scroll through our Publications on Edana. And, don’t forget to check our services for Expert-Level assistance from your Swiss Digital Agency. Our expertise includes Search Engine Optimization Services and many more. Feel free to contact us anytime!

ABC Of Internal And External Linking

Before we get to discussing more specific benefits of internal and external linking for your SEO scores, let’s review the basic properties of both:

Internal links direct your users from your website to another page on that same website. So, basically it helps you with CTR and earns you a higher SEO score, thus letting you appear higher in search engine hierarchy. Also, you provide ease of navigation all through your website.

As for the external links, they direct your users out of your website to another website. Here, the pro is to get backlinks from those other websites trailing all the way back to yours, which also result in higher SEO rankings.  Also, the Google Robot views the externally linked content as credible.

External Linking Myths

Now, if you know little about SEO, you might think, that external linking might do you no good. This can also be result of fear of competition. Let’s say you are creating cornerstone content. It’s obvious, that you cannot just copy from someone and label it as yours, so you need to link the informational source.

Fist off, you’re getting rid of plagiarism and also showing the honesty to your viewer. The other thing is, that you need to make sure you’re using a reliable source of information. Doing that will only benefit you, as the users will be assured that you use professional resources and are more likely to re-visit your content out of trust.

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Internal Linking

2 or maximum of 3 internal links are an optimal option per one landing page. Over-doing will over-saturate your content and confuse the search engine. In this case, in alliance with keywords you’re focused on-use specific and strategic internal links for the engine to understand briefly what your page is all about and its content.

Also, you offer users quick access to certain pages they must be interested in and save a lot of time scrolling through your options or menu. Of course, don’t forget the benefits of building organic traffic on your website which shows in further increased website engagement.

E-A-T

The abbreviate of E-A-T deciphers as expertise, authority and trustworthiness. These are the three main principles your external linking strategies work for. This is suitable not for individuals only, but also your engine robots of Google and Bing alike.

Don’t Forget Other Engines

The engine we’ve been discussing primarily is Google search. But, keep in mind, even though google is the most used one generally, Yahoo and Bing are not the ones to be left out from.

Your target audience needs to be researched well to at least figure out which search platform they are using most frequently. Quite logically, if your customer research shows that your users mostly use Bing, it would be non-beneficial to work only on Google SEO rankings.

Use External Links Wisely

Just dropping and popping external links simply because your content mentions a website is not enough of a reason to use external links so clueless.

We might mention Instagram or Facebook in our website content, but is it really necessary to link instgram.com or facebook.com? Will it anyhow serve our search engine robot to figure out the purpose of our content? Not really.

So, for a better example, if you’re writing about fashion industry trends and emphasize on Vogue magazine-instead of simply linking Vogue.com, you can apply a more specific link from vogue website that is conceptually about the same subject as your content with similar keywords.

What We Offer

For more similar articles make sure to scroll through our Publications on Edana. And, don’t forget to check our services for Expert-Level assistance from your Swiss Digital Agency. Our expertise includes Search Engine Optimization and many more. Feel free to contact us anytime!

Keywords Are Vital

When creating a content for your brand’s campaign, posts etc. consider researching the right keywords. Also, don’t forget the importance of a key-phrase. The point it, the usage of keywords, even if researched tightly, will be downgraded if their alignment is not considered.

Now, let’s say your service focuses on creating great posters/prints. Next, you researched the keywords your target audience uses to find services like yours. The keywords turned out to be “printshop” and “posters”.

Creating content without correctly stating what’s the point of addressing your Printing Agency instead of another would be an error to your digital communication.

Inbound Marketing

Inbound marketing is a Digital Marketing Strategy, that focuses on potential customers, who want to find a company or a product Online. Inbound marketing comes into play when the brand notices that a certain product doesn’t have enough reach to the target audience through offline channels.

For great Inbound Marketing you need a productive and functional web-content. Interactive elements prove to be most useful to generate higher CTR, interest in potential customers and as a result-engagement.

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Brand Visibility Through Inbound Marketing

Generally, online communication and web-content marketing has become the source of visibility for modern brands. This is one of the key benefits of inbound marketing. Well, what this strategy does is: With SEO-Friendly content, possibly maximum amount of targeted individuals reach your web-content.

Your content is not plainly promotional, but most importantly productive or informative. That’s a way to gain customers’ trust on the market. Competition is quite tough and correct Search Engine Optimization plays a huge part to be ranking among leaders.

Keywords and SEO

As stated in the first paragraph, Keywords and Key-Phrases have a lot to do with the optimization process of your web-content. There are several online platforms offering SEO services.

No good optimization can be done with correct keywords. If you want to try researching keywords for personal experience, try to be a customer yourself. When creating content for your website-ask yourself a question; If I were a customer of my brand, would I share this content? Like, on social media for example?

Think Like A Searcher

When looking for something as regular individuals we don’t look for keywords in a robotic manner. Let’s say, we are looking for a veterinary service. What we most likely search on Google for example would be “Veterinary Clinics that work 24/7 in [blank] city”. Now, we see what a customer is looking for right? Not just a veterinary clinic, but the one that’s accessible at any time, in a specific area of residence.

So, when creating our web-content we need to make sure we positively respond all those needs. Well, of course if the veterinary clinic does work 24/7. We need to include categorized information, especially about our brand/enterprise.

Benefits Of Inbound Marketing

Except for visibility, earlier stated in this article, let’s review several other benefits of the given Marketing Strategy:

• Expert Positioning On The Market-Ranking as an expert can be achieved through quality content that is being published consistently. Inconsistent posting will negatively affect your visibility in the search engine.
• Trust Bond-Once you’ve created a base of quality and consistent content, trust is being developed between you and your customers. They become a form of community that is waiting for updates about the field through your web-content.
• Regular Reports-The product of constant and real-time research is the report. Reports are practically your mathematical equations of your online presence that show themselves through Click Through Rates for example. Earlier reports can also be very useful for further researches of customer behavior.

Automate Your Inbound Marketing Strategy

Once you’ve covered the basic stages of your inbound marketing strategy, you just might let yourself relax a bit and automate it. From customer research and reports stated previously you start having a guide to the audience you should rather target.

Without wasting time and resources you will be able to create more specific content for a more specific group of individuals. The automation process focuses on selling more effectively and in greater numbers.

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Everyone, who runs a website knows about the benefits of google analytics. It gives you an insight of what visitors do on your website and allows you to use this information as an advantage.

Google analytics has hundreds of metrics, but here we will discuss only 14 of them, which are the most essential of them all:

• Users and sessions

Taking into account the number of users in your metrics is really important, since it provides the amount of unique visitors, meaning specific individuals that visit the website in a specific time line. And sessions are the amount of time when visitors engaged with the website. This data helps you determine how the traffic flow to your website is.

• Duration of a session

This means an average time that a prospective client spends on a website.

• Pages on each session

Including this metric will give you an information about how many pages a visitor goes through on average. This will give you an information about how much of your content interests them.

• Ratio of new and repeated visitors

If you compare the amount of new visitors to repeating ones, you will see how your campaign works and what kind of influence it has on visitors.

• Bounce rate

It is a percentage of those people who only visited one page. When you have a high bounce rate, it means that there is a problem with your campaign. When this happens, we recommend to divide the visitors in several segments and find the issue underneath.

• Organic and paid sessions

Clients reach to your website through different sources, it can be an organic (natural) session or a paid one. When they come through organic way, it means that traffic came from a non-paid search engine. On the paid one they clicked on advertisement and reached the website. Natural sessions indicate that you have an effective SEO, while paid sessions mean that you have a very good ad campaigns.

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• Google ads

You may have heard a saying “work smarter not harder”. This category is the definition of it. You can connect your google ads campaigns to your google analytics and it will automatically analyze all the activities on your website and will provide a helpful data.

• Search console section

It provides you with more detailed and specified data of organic searches. Using this, you can see which pages have bigger number of click-through.

• Email tracking

Email tracking can help you analyze the success rate of your project, this way you will be able to determine what is your email lacking and improve it to get better results.

• Time visitors spend on each page

Tracking the time that visitors spend on average on each page will help you check the success rate of your project and will show the ways of how to improve it farther.

• Inspect site search information

Using google analytics to inspect site search data will allow you to see the queries by looking at the terms on search bar.

• Landing pages

Using landing pages metric is the best way to check which page is receiving more popularity. This way you will be able to evaluate user experience, content quality and effectiveness of your marketing campaign.

• AdSense revenue

Google ads is not the only thing you can link to your google analytics. AdSense shows the impressions, revenue and clicks to see how well you monetize this pages.

• Goal conversion

Goal is a target you want to reach. You may have different goals, but in google analytics a goal is the definition on higher conversion number. It allows you to track your own performance and response and make necessary changes based on that.

Conclusion

Google analytics is a very useful tool to improve your success rate and gain higher revenue. As we already mentioned before:

Are you ready to work smarter instead of harder?

Larger Business-Larger Strategies

The process of improving your website in the direction of search engine optimization is quite time-consuming and takes a full-on concentration on the process of monitoring this procedure, especially in real-time. When it comes to corporate SEO solutions, which are more fitted for larger companies, the right guess is-it doesn’t get easier. Creating a proactive SEO strategy for larger enterprises takes specific approach and this is what we shall dive into.

Improve Visibility on Google

There is a metric of Visibility, which is used to measure and compare how certain websites perform online. Corporate SEO is not simply about keywords which need to be used. It must understand the User’s search habits and how search engines rank content in a more accurate manner. Let’s say, corporate SEO is a more advanced type. Even with more need for accuracy and a few complications, the goof visibility formula stays the same: Users look for relevant and trustworthy content and search engines look at sites with higher user engagement and reliable, processed content.

Frequency of Interaction

We most certainly know, that one-time interaction is not enough for high visibility rates, the frequency of visits from our users affect the metric we were speaking of in previous paragraph. Interaction is monitored through how many landing pages one viewer decides to scroll through and get acquainted with our services/products. This is where reliable content plays a huge role.

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Keep up with the Algorithm

Naturally, the tweaks search engines make on their algorithms, can affect corporate SEO strategies. Algorithm affects your visibility, if you’re lucky-sometimes for the best, but it’s not too common, so stay updated on these tweaks to adjust your further strategies and keyword research. Fortunately, Google for example gives us warnings on algorithm tweaks, so it’s not really as much of an emergency issue, but timing is still a must.

Corporate SEO Visibility Practices:

• Update content to align with search intent
• Optimize meta descriptions and meta tags
• Include target keywords in anchor text
• Benchmark top-ranking pages
• Integrate images and videos
• Have strong UX
• Ensure mobile friendliness

Use THE Model and Progress it

In this case we will be talking more in detail about benchmark top-ranking pages. This practice involves using the existing high-ranking content as an example of why it attracts so many users and how it gets high visibility rankings. This practice is going to help you edit your website and make necessary changes for improved performance.

Mobile Readability is Essential

It must be addressed, that most of the individuals are lately relying on their smartphones more, than the computers or notebooks. The important detail is, when do people generally start searching for something and right about anything? Maybe when they are on a long ride in the bus, in a queue waiting to go in a certain room, in their couches-just chilling around scrolling to finally research something they didn’t have enough time for before.

In all these scenarios it is more likely to see these people with phones in their hands, rather than laptops on their laps. It’s clearly mandatory for a proactive corporate SEO strategy to be mobile-friendly. To have a comfortable mobile mode for your website, research the ratios which are generally appropriate for the phone screens. Something like the one size-fits all. It’s difficult, but not impossible, just takes more effort than usual.

Reports, Reports and Reports Again

Just like we discussed in previous topic, the search engine algorithm is not completely on our side, it’s like a neutral player in this visibility/invisibility tournament. Staying updated is cool, but detailed reports will navigate you through the tweaks of tweaks, if analyzed properly. Update constantly, but don’t forget to re-analyze and review the past events and algorithm changes.

What We Offer

 Scroll through our publications for more interesting articles and make sure to check out our services, which include Search Engine Optimization at Edana. Feel free to contact us anytime!