15 Ways Clients Can Build a Better Relationship With Their SEO Provider

After running a link agency for the past few years, I can safely say that some clients are easy to work with and some are nightmares. I can also say that the ones who are easy and fun to work with are the ones that truly bring out my passion for the work that we do, and as I see with my own employees, being receptive to listening to someone else's perspective is something that I highly value.

It doesn't matter if a client's niche is exciting or if their site is so amazing that I want to spend hours on it every week. A client who is willing to view our arrangement as a give and take relationship is the client for me.

Here are 15 pieces of advice that will help you build a better relationship with your SEO provider.

1. Be Honest About What You've Done in the Past

This is probably the most critical piece of advice. Lots of clients have done some shady things that they might not have fully understood were being done, and many have known exactly what was being done and just chose to ignore the repercussions.

Be honest about what was done. It's rare to find someone who hasn't done some sketchy marketing at some point. We're not judging.

If you bought networked links and spammed the heck out of forums for three years, just admit it. Don't swear that those links were the result of a competitor trying to harm you. Lying just wastes everyone's time and energy.

Good clients will explain what they have done so their provider can find out how to fix it or counteract it faster, if needed.

2. Don't Immediately Blame Links When Something Goes Wrong

Don't immediately blame links if your SEO service provider has built one for you and you've just messed up your robots.txt file. Also, if your SEO provider has built some great links and your site skyrockets to the top of the rankings, generating lots of new traffic and conversions, don't try and insist that it had nothing to do with their work.

3. No Surprise URL Changes

Don't change URLs without 301ing them or telling your SEO provider about it. If you've provided some targets to work with and they are suddenly 404ing, that's embarrassing. Webmasters start to get cranky when you have to go back and request a change.

4. Share Access to Webmaster Tools and Analytics

If your SEO provider can't see what's happening, it's much harder to do a good job. Sure, we can bug you for this info, but it's much easier if we can dig in and not have to wait for you to come back from your weeklong vacation so we can get the data we need.

5. Answer Questions

I can promise you that I have never once asked a client a question simply because I was being nosey. If I ask whether you've just changed 100 URLs, to go back to harping on that one, it's because it affects my work.

If I do have access to your analytics and ask if you've done anything on-site that could account for the sudden drop in traffic to a specific page, again, it's not just because I have nothing better to do than ask irrelevant questions.

6. Listen to Our Advice on Risk

Not to be funny here, but if someone who doesn't mind buying links tells you that your link buying plan is just too risky, you really, really should listen. If we stand to make more money off building more links for you but we say we shouldn't do it, it's because we really believe that you're playing with fire.

7. Don't Employ Multiple Teams or People to do the Exact Same Thing

If you do this and both (or all 10) of us wind up getting links on the same site, don't complain about it and try and make some of us go back to the webmaster and get them removed.

8. Don't Share Someone Else's Confidential Information-

If you send your provider something that is clearly marked as being "for your eyes only", all your provider will think is that one day you'll be sending their confidential information to someone else.

9. Be Clear About What You Want

Don't start out asking for one service and then run your provider all around until you finally admit that what you actually want is something totally different.

I've written up loads of consulting proposals for clients who asked for one specific service. Then, after spending loads of time on it, the clients admitted that they really just wanted me to go buy a bunch of links for them. If you want paid links, then say so.

10. Ask Why a Service Costs What it Does

We'd rather explain pricing to you now than receive a complaint about it later. The more you know about what we do, the better.

11. Don’t Ask About Price Matching

Don't give us pricing information that you've pulled off the site of some offshore SEO firm that no one's ever heard of and expect a provider to meet that price. If you do and your SEO provider says OK, be very nervous.

12. Be Fair About Client Examples

Don't freak out if your provider can't give you the example you want when you're trying to decide if they are the right fit. Sometimes there are iron-clad nondisclosure agreements in place.

However, please be receptive to ways that your provider can prove its worth without violating client confidentiality.

If that's a deal breaker, that's fine – and honestly it might be one for me if I were in your shoes. But if your provider can't give you client examples but can work for you and refund the cost if you're not satisfied, either accept that offer or move on and try to refrain from sending rude emails about a lack of professionalism.

13. Any Good Link Builder Knows About More Than Just Building Links

If you're asked to promote your new content socially to give it more attention, take that advice. Don't just think that because you can't immediately tie social to links, it means the advice is worthless.

If you're told to do a few things to speed up your homepage load time since it keeps timing out, listen. Link building is much easier when a site's worth linking to, you know.

14. Don't Focus on What Your Competitors Are Doing

Don't continually point out what your competitor is doing that violates Google's guidelines and ask why we don't just mimic them.

For one thing, your site is not the same as their site. For another thing, if you build a profile based on someone else, you're contributing to a footprint, and that's not a good thing.

Would you want them copying you? No.

15. Don't Try to Get Something for Free

I doubt you'd be able to find a decent SEO who doesn't end up giving away way too much for free. Many of us are actually nice people who are willing to share what we know and help people.

But there is a limit.

If you want to pay for an audit, then get a quote and pay for one. Don't try and weasel out pieces of an audit for free each month.

If you're paying for a service, stick to the scope of your contract. Asking a question here and there is OK, but if you want someone to spend 2 hours on the phone walking you through how to do something, expect to pay for that time.

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Google Images Makes it Easier to Search by Usage Rights

Seo Services

Google Images has made a great change to its search results. Users can now search for images with specific usage rates more easily. This will be extremely helpful for webmasters and others to find images that they can use for publishing on their own sites.

While Google has actually offered filtering based on photo licenses since 2009, it was a little-known search feature buried in the advanced search options. With the change, users can easily see it and filter the results accordingly.

To access it, simply click "Search Tools" on the image results page, and along with the usual search settings such as size and date, there is now a new drop-down for usage rights. The default is set to "not filtered by license" but users can change it to "labeled for reuse", "labeled for commercial reuse", "labeled for reuse with modification", and "labeled for commercial reuse of modification".

Sites such as Flickr, as well as stock photography sites that offer a variety of photo rights, have long had this type of filtering in their own search results. Bing began offering its own license search filter last summer, so it's surprising that Google took so long to make the change obvious to the average searcher.

As a word of caution, as with any image search, do be aware there are sites that republish photos allowing for reuse, but are actually not the original owner. However, using Google’s reverse image search can help determine the originating owner of an image and to determine what the correct licensing on the photo is.

More info:-ppc tips and tutorials ,Create backlink

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Google Improves URL Removal Tool

SEO Services

Google has launched an improved version of its URL removal tool in Webmaster Tools, aimed at making it easier to request updates based on changes to other people’s sites.

Google suggests that you could use the tool if a page has been removed completely or if it has changed, and you need the snippet and cached page removed.

“If the page itself was removed completely, you can request that it’s removed from Google’s search results,” says Google Webmaster Trends analyst John Mueller. “For this, it’s important that the page returns the proper HTTP result code (403, 404, or 410), has a noindex robots meta tag, or is blocked by the robots.txt (blocking via robots.txt may not prevent indexing of the URL permanently). You can check the HTTP result code with a HTTP header checker. While we attempt to recognize ‘soft-404′ errors, having the website use a clear response code is always preferred.”

For submitting a page for removal, just enter the URL and confirm the request.

“If the page wasn’t removed, you can also use this tool to let us know that a text on a page (such as a name) has been removed or changed,” says Mueller. “It’ll remove the snippet & cached page in Google’s search results until our systems have been able to reprocess the page completely (it won’t affect title or ranking). In addition to the page’s URL, you’ll need at least one word that used to be on the page but is now removed.”

Webmasters are instructed to enter the URL, confirm that the page has been updated or removed and that the cache and snippet are outdated, and enter a word that no longer appears on the live page, but still appears in the cache or snippet.

more information:- SEO interview Questions, Seo Services in india, Seo services in indore, 

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6 Major Google Changes

SEO Services

The last few weeks have been amazing. Google has made some big changes and they are all part of a longer term strategy that has many components.

In short, Google is doing a brilliant job of pushing people away from tactical SEO behavior and toward a more strategic approach.

You could argue that "tactical SEO is dead", but that's not quite right. And don't run around saying "SEO is dead" because that is far from the truth, and I might just scream at you.

Instead, let's take a few steps back and understa

nd the big picture. Here's a look at the major developments, some of Google's initiatives driving this change, and the overall impact these changes will have on SEO.

 No PageRank Update Since February

Historically, Google has updated the PageRank numbers shown in the Google Toolbar every 3 months ago or so, but those numbers haven't been updated since February. This means 8 months have gone by, or two updates have been skipped.

In addition, Google's Distinguished Engineer Matt Cutts has said Toolbar PageRank won't be updated again this year, leading many to speculate that PageRank is going away. I won't miss it because I don't look at PageRank often and I normally don't have a Google toolbar in my browser.

However, a lot of people still use it as a crude measurement of a site's prominence.

For sites with a home page that has PageRank 7 or higher, it may in fact be reasonable to assume that the site has some chops. Correspondingly, sites with a home page that has a PageRank of 3 or lower, it is either new, or probably a low quality experience. Stuff in the middle, you just don't know.

If Google shuts off this data flow entirely, which wouldn't be surprising, then they will have to rely on other real world (and better) measurements instead. This would actually be better than using PageRank anyway, because Google says they don't use it that way themselves, so why should we?

Hummingbird

There are a few elements to Google's Hummingbird algorithm, announced in time for Google's official birthday, but like Caffeine before it, this is really a major platform change. Google has built a capability to understand conversational search queries much better than before.

Hummingbird really changes the keyword game quite a bit. Over time, exact keyword matches will no longer be such a big deal.

The impact of this algorithm is likely to be quite substantial over the next 2 or so years. Net-net, they have drastically reduced access to the raw data, and are rolling out technology that changes the way it all works at the same time!

Google+

OK, this one isn't new. Google launched Google+ June 28, 2011.

While it seemed to get off to a slow start initially, many argue that it has developed a lot of momentum, and is growing rapidly. The data on Google+'s market share is pretty hard to parse, but there are some clear impacts on search, such as the display of personalized results.In addition, you can also see posts from people on Google+ show up in the results too. This is true even if you perform your search in "incognito" mode:And, while I firmly believe that a link in a Google+ share isn't treated like a regular web link, it seems likely to me that it does have some SEO value when combined with other factors.

How Google+ fits into this picture is that it was built from the ground up to be a content sharing network that helps with establishing "identities" and "semantic relevance". It does this quite well, and in spite of what you might read in some places, there is a ton of activity in all kinds of different verticals on Google+.

 Authorship

OK, authorship also isn't new (launched on June 7, 2011), but it is a part of a bigger picture. Google can use this to associate new pieces of content with the person who wrote it.

Over time, this data can be potentially used to measure which authors write stuff that draw a very strong response (links, social shares, +1s, comments) and give them a higher "Author Rank" (note that Google doesn't use this term, but those of us in the industry do).

We won't delve into the specifics of how Author Rank might work now, but you can read "Want to Rank in Google? Build Your Author Rank Now" for my thoughts on ways they could look at that.

That said, in the future you can imagine that Google could use this as a ranking signal for queries where more comprehensive articles are likely to be a good response. Bottom line: your personal authority matters.

I also should mention Publisher Rank, the concept of building a site's authority, which is arguably more important. Getting this payoff depends on a holistic approach to building your authority.

In-Depth Articles

Google announced a new feature, in-depth articles August 6.

The Google announcement included a statement that "up to 10% of users' daily information needs involve learning about a broad topic." That is a pretty big number, and I think over time that this feature will become a pretty big deal. Effectively, this is an entirely new type of way to rank in the SERPs.

This increases the payoff from Author Rank and Publisher Rank – there is a lot to be gained by developing both of these, assuming that Google actually does make it a ranking factor at some point. Note that I wrote some thoughts on how the role of in-depth articles could evolve.

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Link Building the Right Way in 2014

SEO Services

Some have concluded that the best and safest response to Penguin is to stop link building altogether. That's a bad idea.

Here's a reality check: the best way to improve visibility in the SERPs, in 2014, is still link building. Links are still believed to be the most important part of the algorithm, according to the most recentMoz search engine ranking factors survey.

Google's own Matt Cutts confirmed the same in an interview with Eric Enge, stating:

"Links are still the best way that we've found to discover (how relevant or important somebody is) and maybe, over time, social or authorship or other types of markup will give us a lot more information about that."

That statement has some pretty important implications, when it comes to planning and budgeting for a digital marketing campaign.

The main takeaway is this: Link building is still the key to more visibility in organic search. If your objective is to improve visibility in organic search, then invest in resources accordingly. Social media and authorship may (and probably will) impact the SERPs at some point in the future, but not today and probably not significantly in 2014.

Relevance is the New PageRank

The evolution of the original 1 link = 1 vote algorithm took a quantum leap forward in May 2012 with the introduction of the Knowledge Graph, which is used by Google to deliver search results with semantic-search information. This information is gathered from a wide variety of sources, using more than 500 million objects and 3.5 billion facts. In Googlespeak, the Knowledge Graph is about "things, not strings."

It's quite probable that Knowledge Graph is baked into Hummingbird, the latest Google algorithm. Assuming that's the case, then a correlation between "context, not anchor text" and "things not strings" is applicable. Relevance is the new PageRank when searching for linking opportunities.

A real life example could look something like this: Pre-Hummingbird, a search for car covers might yield results split among auto accessories to protect your car, tribute bands that cover the classic rock group "The Cars" and songs covered by Ric Ocasek and the cars. The "old" algo couldn't distinguish one car cover from another. Hummingbird, on the other hand knows the difference. Now, all of those auto parts links coming from high PR band sites, are now exposed for what they really are: unnatural. At best the link is devalued. At worst it triggers a manual review.

Link Schemes vs. Link Building

Understanding the difference between link scheming and link building is critically important in 2014. For webmasters who were doing SEO before Panda, this can be particularly difficult to navigate.

Many have been directly impacted by the Google paradox. Unlike the Einstein theory of insanity, in the Google Paradox, SERPs actually do yield different results after doing the same thing (spammy link building) over and over again.

A link scheme that scored number one rankings in 2010 can and will draw a manual or algorithmic penalty, today. That paradox has driven many a webmaster nuts!

According to Google, the following activities are link scheming – not link building:

• Buying or selling links that pass PageRank
• Using automated programs or services to create links to your site
• Linking to a site for the sole purpose of getting a link back
• Building a link networking for the purpose of linking
• Large-scale article marketing or guest posting using keyword-rich anchor text
• Buying advertorials or articles that include links that pass PageRank
• Creating & Distributing Press releases with optimized anchor text

Recently removed from the guidelines, but still likely to trigger a penalty:

• Linking to web spammers or unrelated sites with the intent to manipulate PageRank
• Links that are inserted into articles with little coherence

3 Safe Ways to Build Links in 2014

So what's left?

• Focus external link building efforts on the acquisition of editorially given links. These are links requiring human intervention and approval.
• Build links that are relevant – on pages where the readers would have a genuine interest in your website.
• Quality trumps quantity. A few links from high trust/authority websites will have more impact than hundreds of links from "Made for Guest Posting" 
• more information :- Seo Services, Seo services in indore, 

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Tips Of Using Webmaster Tool

SEO Services

Web Master Tool is a free toolset that’s absolutely invaluable for SEO trouble shooting.

It’s pretty simple to set up, you just need to verify that you’re the site owner (there are a number of ways to do this, so just use the one that is best for you) and you’ll have instant access to an abundance of useful information that will help you to improve your website and your search engine optimisation (SEO).

Here are five tips that will get you started:

1. Crawl Stats

Crawl Stats give you information in Google’s crawling activity for the last 90 day period. When you click into this report which is located in Diagnostics, you’ll see three reports:

Pages crawled per day: Overall, it’s a good sign to see this graph going up. Whilst there are peaks and troughs, you’ll be able to see if there is a steady incline, decline or no change at all. Spikes in this report are often due to the introduction of new pages or an increase in inbound links.

Kilobytes crawled per day: This graph should bear some resemblance to the Pages crawled per day graph in terms of the peaks and troughs in the graph.

Time spent downloading a page: This graph will be different from the above two and is likely (hopefully) to not show as many peaks. Peaks on this graph could be a server problem as in the norm, Google should not take very long downloading your pages.

These stats are useful for diagnosing problems and gauging performance issues.

2. Not Found Errors

Not found crawl errors are very useful for usability & SEO. If customers are browsing around your site and finding that links are not taking them anywhere, they’re likely to get annoyed and go elsewhere. This tool (which is accessed on the top right of the dashboard) will identify all not found URLs in your site. Be aware, that this can sometimes be slightly outdated, and Google state:

If you don’t recognize these URLs and/or don’t think they should be accessible, you can safely ignore these errors. If, however, you see URLs listed in the ‘Not found’ section that you recognize and would like crawled, we hope you find the ‘Details’ column helpful in identifying and fixing the errors.

So don’t dwell too much on getting this down to 0 errors in GWT, just use the information to improve site usability.

As well as links from within your site that are leading to a 404, this will also show you links from outside sites that are leading to a 404. This aspect is particularly valuable for SEO. Use this feature in GWT to do is identify the linked to pages within your site that no longer exist and redirect those pages to a real page within your site. This tactic will lead to increased link juice and increased visitors.

3. Meta Descriptions and Title Tags

Google Webmaster Tools will provide you with a list of URLs that have problems in their title tags or Meta descriptions, this list will include duplicates as well as incidences of titles or Meta descriptions that are too long or too short. Go into Diagnostics and HTML suggestions to find this information. Duplicate meta titles, especially can affect your rankings within Google and meta descriptions should be snappy and targeted to each specific page to help CTR of each page on your site.

4. Top Search Queries

Whilst you can get your top search queries out of Google Analytics or whatever analytics tool you use, I particularly like the Webmaster Tools version for the simple reason that it shows your average position within Google as part of the data. This enables you to look at your top search terms by position. The reason this is helpful is that when deciding which keywords to push, I particularly like to focus on the keywords that are currently in positions 2-4 as increases in positions at this level will have the most increased in traffic.

5. Site Links

If your site had a list of links below its Google listing, you can use the sitelink section within Site Configuration to control the links that are shown. You can’t actually tell Google which links to show, but you can block links that you don’t want shown.

These are just a few of the many tools available in Google Webmaster Tools and Google often add new features to this great tool. If you’re not a regular user of GWT, try these features out for size and look around to get used to other features on offer. If you are a regular user of GWT, let us know your favourite features and why.

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4 Steps to Increase Your Blog Traffic

SEO SERVICES

One of the most common complaints that I hear from bloggers is the fact that no matter how hard they try, they can’t grow their blogs past 100 or so daily page vies. Those early days are indeed the hardest, because you need to put hard work in without the certainty of achieving results.

If you are in that same situation, here is a simple strategy that will certainly increase your blog traffic and make you break the 1,000 daily page views mark. In fact, the strategy could be used even if your are already over that number but have reached a traffic plateau lately.

Just make sure to execute the 4 steps as planned and to spend the two hours and a half every day (obviously if you have more time available you can expand the time spent on each of the four steps 

First Step: Killer Articles (1 hour per day)

Spend one hour brainstorming, researching and writing killer articles (also called linkbaits, pillar articles and so on).

Notice that your goal is to release one killer article every week. If that is not possible aim for one every 15 days. So the one hour that you will spend every day will be dedicated to the same piece. In other words, expect killers articles to take from 5 up to 10 hours of work.

If you are not familiar with the term, a killer article is nothing more than a long and structured article that has the goal of delivering a huge amount of value to potential visitors. If you have a web design blog, for example, you could write an article with “100 Free Resources for Designers”. Here are some ideas for killer articles:

• create a giant list of resources,
• write a detailed tutorial teaching people how to do something,
• find a solution for a common problem in your niche and write about it, or
• write a deep analysis on a topic where people have only talked superficially

When visitors come across your killer article, you want them to have the following reaction: “Holy crap! This is awesome. I better bookmark it. Heck, I better even mention this on my site and on my Twitter account, to let my readers and friends know about it.”

Second Step: Networking (30 minutes per day)

Networking is essential, especially when you are just getting started. The 30 minutes that you will dedicate to it every day could be split among:

• commenting on other blogs in your niche,
• linking to the posts of bloggers in your niche, and
• interacting with the bloggers in your niche via email, IM or Twitter.

Remember that your goal is to build genuine relationships, so don’t approach people just because you think they can help to promote your blog. Approach them because you respect their work and because you think the two of you could grow together.

Third Step: Promotion (30 minutes per day)

The first activity here is the promotion of your killer articles. Whenever you publish one of them, you should push it in any way you can. Examples include:

• letting the people in your network know about it (don’t beg for a link though),
• letting bloggers and webmasters in relevant niches know about it,
• getting some friends to submit the article to social bookmarking sites,
• getting some friends to Twitter the article, and
• posting about the article in online forums and/or newsgroups.

If there is time left, spend it with search engine optimization, social media marketing and activities to promote your blog as whole. Those can range from keyword research to promoting your blog on Facebook and guest blogging.

Fourth Step: Normal Posts (30 minutes per day)

Just like a man does not live by bread alone, a blog does not live by killer articles alone. Normal posts are the ones that you will publish routinely in your blog, between the killer articles. For example, you could publish a killer article every Monday and normal posts from Tuesday through Friday. Here are some ideas for normal posts:

• a post linking to an article on another blog and containing your opinion about it
• a post informing your readers about a news in your niche
• a post asking a question to your readers and aiming to initiate a discussion
• a post highlighting a new resource or trick that you discovered and that would be useful to your readers

While killers articles are essential to promote your blog and bring new readers aboard, normal posts are the ones that will create diversity in your content and keep your readers engaged.

more Details :- Blogging tips , Seo Services 

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How To Redirect Blogspot .in URL To .com URL

SEO SERVICES

1- Go to Blogger Dashboard > Design > Edit HTML.
2- Take a backup/download your template.
3- Find for </head> tag.
4- Add below piece of JavaScript code just above </head> tag.

<script type="text/javascript">
var blog = document.location.hostname;
var slug = document.location.pathname;
var ctld = blog.substr(blog.lastIndexOf("."));
if (ctld != ".com") {
var ncr = "http://" + blog.substr(0, blog.indexOf("."));
ncr += ".blogspot.com/ncr" + slug;
window.location.replace(ncr);
}
</script>
If you are big fan of blogspot, then this gonna be very helpful for you.

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New Facebook Like-Share Buttons Now Available to All

SEO Services

Facebook announced a redesign to its Like and Share buttons to unveil the new Like-Share combo button to select brands. This week, Facebook announced the new buttonswould be available to all, saying tests of the functionality have boosted sharing.

From Facebook:

In early tests over the past month after launching the new Like and Share buttons, we've seen more than a 5% lift in Likes and Share across the web. This is significant, given that both buttons are viewed over 22 billion times daily. Based on these results, we've rolled out the new design to everyone and extended it to the Follow and Like Box plugins as well.

          Sharaholic released its data for Facebook referrals over the past month, and showed referring                traffic from Facebook was up 47 percent.

Although Shareaholic does not offer the new FB buttons among our own share buttons, we still track inbound traffic on sites that use any of our other offerings (analytics and related content). Some of our publishers have adopted the new Like and Share buttons from Facebook and are obviously reaping the benefits. Others that use our share buttons still see gains in Facebook referral traffic.

"I think this is a very positive change for users and brands," said Danny Wong, who oversees growth and marketing at Shareaholic. "The buttons perform well, increasing engagement, which means more sharing across the web. Users now have an easier time acknowledging they 'like' a story and can easily 'share' things they think their friends would love, too. Brands benefit because their earned, owned and paid media will continue to attract more eyeballs." 

More Updates :- Latest google updates , Seo services in indore

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Page Rank factor For SEO

SEO SERVICES

There are more than 100 factors which are used to consider for Page Rank. mentioning some of the few here which you should consider  while optimizing your website

Keyword phrases

Secondary keywords

Keyword stemming

Use of Synonyms

Keyword Mistypes

Keyword dilution

Keyword stuffing

Anchor text of inbound links

Origin of inbound links

Links from similar sites

Keyword density in document text

Keywords in anchor text

Keywords in headings (H1, H2, etc. tags)

Keywords in the beginning of a document

Keywords in alt tags

Keywords in metatags

Keyword proximity

Links from .edu and .gov sites

Number of Quality backlinks

Sitemap

Hosting downtime

Redirects (301 and 302)

Keywords metatag

Unique content

Frequency of content change

Keywords font size

Age of document

File size

Poor coding and design

Illegal Content

Invisible text

Many outgoing links

Excessive linking, link spamming

Outbound links to link farms and other suspicious sites

Cross-linking (resiprocal link building)

Description metatag

Cloaking

Doorway pages

Duplicate content

Use of tables,Frames

A Flash home page

Site Accessibility

SEO Services in india, Seo tools

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5 Ways to Improve Owned Digital Assets

I come bearing gifts. It is difficult, from time to time, to get the creative juices flowing -- especially when it comes to finding strategic next steps for a client. For a longstanding initiative, you have likely tested and performeView blogd a lot of tactics in reaching digital marketing success.

This time of year doesn't help at all either, as our brains are mostly fried from a busy year of keeping up with the many changes and needs born from the digital marketing industry. With this, I thought it would be fitting to discuss of a few tasks you can undertake with little innovative or creative thought.

Links, in Relation to Robots/404/302

I see this all the time and love when I have the chance to do some link harvesting with a tool like Open Site Explorer. Review the top linked pages on your site. You may find that from this report that you have links pointing to pages on your site that are excluded from search engine view via robots.txt or the Meta Robots tag. This is link value that is not getting through the door.

Also, take a look at those pages heavily linked to that are 302 temporarily linking to another page on your site. Turning this into a 301 permanent redirect will help search engines start giving credit to those links. Last, how many links are pointing to pages that are now 404 error pages where you may have accidently deleted the page or someone has got the domain linked correctly but the page name is incorrect?

Bad Redirections and Old Domains

This may sound a little similar to the above topic, but with a different twist. Do you own any other domains that have link value/domain age and are not permanently redirecting to the current site? I see this issue often, where a new site is created and the old site/site pages are 302 redirected to the new site.

Additionally, do you have any other old owned domains that are simple sitting aside and not being redirected to the current business or organization site? There could be additional link/age value to pass on to the current domain.

Referring Site Links

We all know it can be hard to get a good link, but what happens after we get the link? Many of us may cheer as we have accrued additional SEO value, but what you should be thinking about is the traffic potential of links.

Review Google Analytics Referring Sites and find those referring sources that are not from social media, email, etc., and visit the referring page. You may have a link from the source, but could the link be presented above the fold on the page? Should the anchor text be more enticing? Should the messaging around the link be more relevant? It is great that this referring source is bringing traffic, let’s have it bring some more!

Images/Video Driving Traffic

You did it! You have images driving traffic to your site via image search or universal image results… and you probably didn't know it. Review Google Analytic Referring Sites and then view specifically /imgres as a source, in relation to a secondary dimension of Landing Pages. See what pages image traffic is likely landing on and then you may get a better idea of successful imagery.

Next, look in Google Webmaster Tools or Google Analytics at Search Queries data by Landing Page and filter, to only look at Images driving impressions in search results. This will help you get a better handle on which pages are hosting referring image traffic, but also the likely keywords that are ranking your images.

Those Damn PDFs

Sorry, I hate PDFs. Who likes a search result that traverses to your site organically, yet you cannot track it with an analytics snippet? Anyway, beyond losing this traffic from organic data, you still want this traffic to get to your main site. Remember, PDFs often don’t carry the navigational theme of the site and often times carry no link back to the main site. This forces the user to remember your brand and then search or directly visit the site. Add a link from the top of PDF back to the site to help funnel traffic back to the site. I would do this to all PDFs, but if you are short on time, I recommend running a report on all ranking site pages in SEMrush and then identifying any pages that are ranking which are PDFs.

Big Traffic/ Big Bounce

Take a quick look at highest referring organic landing pages, but also those with ugly bounce rates. If you are a seasoned search marketer, you may be able to simply look at the page and assess bad calls to actions, crappy messaging, display issues and such that can be quick indicators prime for bounce rate turnaround. If the page doesn’t have elements that seem responsible, do a few days testing using CrazyEgg or LuckyOrange to get a good example to typical page visitor behavior.

Still nothing? Once again, look at SEMrush and see what terms these pages are ranking well for. Then review the pages again and assess for relevancy between those terms and the messaging/keyword theme of the respective pages.

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