Harrogate SEO

We provide expert SEO services to Harrogate and the Yorkshire area, getting organisations of all sizes found online. 

[wrldcon-blog]

Is Guest Blogging an Effective Strategy for SEO?

Guest blogging is a way of sharing information among bloggers. Guests or other bloggers can post information on other blogs other than theirs. It is also considered a marketing strategy that improves a website search engine ranking and increases the credibility of guest bloggers within their particular area of expertise. Most bloggers allow visitors who have relevant information to post on their websites in order for their readers to access the information. In return, the website owner will back link to your site allowing you to get more incoming links from top quality and famous websites that will increase your website ranking. Guest blogging is still considered the most effective strategy for search engine optimization because it increases traffic to other websites, brand, and service awareness, and as a powerful SEO strategy to promote oneself. The following are reasons why guest blogging is still an effective strategy for SEO:

Use of relevant content

SEO marketing is all about creating relevant content that audience find useful during their search. Guest bloggers therefore provide relevant content for other websites and blogs so that the website owners can share the information with their audience. Well written content will attract visitors to your website hence promoting your site.

Increases audience

In the beginning you might still be anonymous because you just started guest posting, but with time as you provide relevant information that host bloggers want to share with their audience, you will get more back links to your website. With people interested in your topic, visitors will eventually turn into potential or long-term audience hence promoting your brand. This is also one of SEO marketing strategy.

Get natural links

One of the SEO services is to build high quality links to a client’s website. Being a guest blogger enables you to have relevant and natural link as long as you are using a site that has been approved by search engines. You can achieve this by providing relevant content and ensure that you topic is what the audience is looking for.

Helps you gain control  

Just like SEO marketing strategy, guest blogging also helps one gain authority over their website. This is because of the high quality information you posts on other blogs and back links that are driven to your website. Audience always likes quality information provided it is relevant and is most search by people online. With this relevant information you provide to your host blog, the same control that the blog host has will be transferred to you and your audience will associate your name with top quality content.

For more SEO tips and news visit http://www.wrldcon.com .

[springwiseintelligence]

Alternative search engine removes the most popular sites

Google has had the monopoly on search engines for the past decade. The service works in such a way that already popular sites always come up on top, while small companies remain undiscovered on page 10 or even 100, unless they can afford to hire SEO specialists and pander to Google’s algorithms. Now, Million Short is an alternative search engine, which enables users to remove up to the first 1,000,000 Google results, in order to make browsing the web more surprising and give the underdog a fighting chance. READ MORE…

[harrogateseo]

The four pillars of the future of SEO

What does the future of search engine optimization have in store for us? Columnist Pratik Dholakiya looks at recent trends to explain the direction our industry is headed in.

Where will all of us SEO experts end up in a few weeks/months/years time?

[harrogateseo]

When you are in the early stages of your website design is when you should be thinking about seeking the help of an SEO.

Why it is so important to get the right SEO for the job! 

[briannori]

3 Surprising Lessons From Building 26,000 Links

Posted by KelseyLibert

The Fractl team has worked on hundreds of content marketing projects. Along the way, we’ve kept track of a lot of data, including everywhere our client campaigns have been featured, what types of links each campaign attracted, and how many times each placement was shared.

While we regularly look back on our data to evaluate performance per campaign and client, until now we’d never analyzed all of these data in aggregate. After combing through 31,000 media mentions and 26,000 links, here’s what we found.

Most high-authority links don’t receive a lot of social shares.

Most marketers assume that if they build links on high-authority sites, the shares will come. In a Whiteboard Friday from last year, Rand talks about this trend. BuzzSumo and Moz analyzed 1 million articles and found that over 75 percent received no social shares at all. When they looked at all links – not just articles – this number rose to around 90 percent.

We (wrongfully) assumed this wouldn’t be the case with high-quality links we’ve earned. It turns out, even the majority of our links on sites with a high Domain Authority (DA) didn’t get any social shares:

52 percent of links with a DA over 89 received zero shares.

50 percent of links with a DA over 79 received zero shares.

54 percent of links with a DA over 59 received zero shares.

On average, our campaigns get 110 placements and 11,000 social shares, yet a single link accounts for about 63 percent of total shares. This means that if you exclude the top-performing link from every campaign, our average project would only get 4,100 social shares.

Since most links don’t yield social shares, marketers with goals of both link building and social engagement should consider a strategy for gaining social traction in addition to a strategy for building a diverse link portfolio.

The social strategy can be as simple as targeting a few key websites that routinely yield high social shares. It’s also helpful to look at target sites’ social media accounts. When they post their own articles, what kind of engagement do they get?

Of all the sites that covered our campaigns, the following five sites had the highest average social shares for our content. We know we could depend on these sites in the future for high social engagement.

Exceptions to the rule

Some content can definitely accomplish both high engagement and social shares. The BuzzSumo and Moz study found that the best types of content for attracting links and social shares are research-backed content or opinion pieces. Long-form content (more than 1,000 words) also tends to attract more links and shares than shorter content. At Fractl, we’ve found the same factors – an emotional hook, a ranking or comparison, and a pop culture reference – tend to encourage both social sharing and linking.

Few sites will always link to you the same way.

To ensure you’re building a natural link portfolio, it’s important to keep track of how sites link to your content. You’ll learn if you’re earning a mix of dofollow links, nofollow links, cocitation links, and brand mentions for each campaign. We pay close attention to which types of links our campaigns earn. Looking back at these data, we noticed that publishers don’t consistently link the same way.

The chart below shows a sample of how 15 high-authority news sites have linked to our campaigns. As you can see, few sites have given dofollow links 100 percent of the time. Based on this, we can assume that a lot of top sites don’t have a set editorial standard for link types (although plenty of sites will only give nofollow links).

While getting a site to cover your content is something to be celebrated, not every placement will result in a dofollow link. And just because you get a dofollow link from a site once doesn’t mean you should always expect that type of link from that publisher.

Creating a lot of visual assets is a waste of time in certain verticals.

There’s an ongoing debate within Fractl’s walls over whether or not creating a lot of visual assets positively impacts a campaign’s reach enough to justify the additional production time. To settle this debate, we looked at our 1,300 top placements to better understand how publishers covered our campaigns’ visual assets (including both static image and video). This sample was limited to articles on websites with a DA of 70 or higher that covered our work at least four times.

We found that publishers in different verticals had divergent tendencies regarding visual asset coverage. The most image-heavy vertical was entertainment, and the least was education.

Some of the variation in asset counts is based on how many assets were included in the campaign. Although this does skew our data, we do receive useful information from this analysis. The fact that top entertainment publishers used an average of nine assets when they cover our campaigns indicates a high tolerance for visual content from outside sources. Verticals with lower asset averages may be wary of external content or simply prefer to use a few key visuals to flesh out an article.

Keeping these publisher vertical preferences in mind when developing content can help your team better allocate resources. Rather than spending a lot of effort designing a large set of visual assets for a campaign you want to be placed on a finance site, your time may be better spent creating one or two awesome visualizations. Similarly, it’s worthwhile to invest in creating a variety of visual assets if you’re pitching entertainment and health sites.

Analyzing our entire link portfolio taught us a few new things that challenged our previous assumptions:

High DA sites don’t necessarily attract a lot of social engagement. Just because a site that linked to you has a huge audience doesn’t mean that audience will share your content.

Most sites don’t consistently use the same types of links. Got a dofollow link from a site one time? Don’t expect it to be the norm.

Certain publisher verticals are more likely to feature a lot of visual assets. Depending on which verticals you’re targeting, you might be wasting time on designing lots of visuals.

While I hope you’ve learned something from Fractl’s internal study, I want you to see the broader lesson: the value of measuring and analyzing your own content campaign data as a means to improve your process. If you’ve done a similar analysis of links earned from content marketing, I’d love to hear from you in the comments.

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don’t have time to hunt down but want to read!

Web Design 1 | Toronto Web Development

[belocallyagency]

Is a Blog Right for my Business?

Do businesses actually generate leads from a blog? Are blog posts read by customers and potential customers? Is there a formula for a successful blog?

[harrogateseo]

We believe that a blog can be a valuable asset when used properly!

[harrogateseo]

Search engine’s algorithms are incredibly important but are also incredibly secretive at the same time. Some facts are well-known regarding these search engines, such as ensuring that your website is mobile-responsive and full of keywords, but other than a search engine’s employees, no-one knows exactly how the algorithms work.

An interesting article about search engine tools and tracking to help with the measuring and implementing of top-notch SEO.

[harrogateseo]

We're an expert SEO agency based in Harrogate and the wider Yorkshire area.

Fancy following us on Github? We love meeting new people on social media!

[harrogateseo]

7 Ways To Break Out Of Your SEO Plateau

You aren't losing ground, but you aren't moving forward. How can you move past this SEO plateau? Here are seven ways.

An article by Jayson DeMers of @forbes​ on the 7 ways of breaking out of an SEO rut.

[harrogateseo]

Should SEO play a part in your digital marketing strategy?

As we are continuously driving further and further into the digital age, your marketing strategy and marketing team should be evolving with the times to ensure you aren’t falling behind your competitors or getting stuck in a marketing rut.

We believe that it is vital to any marketing campaign, what about you?

[briannori]

Google Is Grouping Keyword Volumes - What Does This Mean for SEO?

Posted by sam.nemzer

As of June this year, Google is now grouping keyword volumes for similar keywords in Keyword Planner. I wanted to investigate whether or not this is having an impact on the pages that rank for these similar, grouped keywords. My hypothesis is that, given that Google is associating keywords closely enough to group their volumes, we should expect that the search results would be very similar too.

What has Google changed and why does it matter?

The grouping of keyword volumes is a problem for anyone working in search because Keyword Planner is the primary source for volume data that we use in keyword research, whether that be from Keyword Planner directly, or through a third party tool that takes Keyword Planner data as its input—such as SEMRush, BrightEdge or SearchMetrics.

By “grouping keyword volumes,” we mean that different keywords that are slightly different (but generally convey the same meaning) are given the same volume, which represents the combined volume of every variation. For example, if (hypothetically) [SEO] is searched 21,000 times per month in the UK, and [Search Engine Optimisation] is searched 12,100 times per month, once these keywords are combined, each will be reported as receiving the total of the two—33,100 searches per month.\

On top of this, in the last few weeks Google have also been reducing access to keyword planner data for some accounts. Earlier this month, it was announced that Keyword Planner data will be given only in very broad buckets for advertisers with “lower monthly spend” (although some ways around this have been found). This is a separate change from the volume grouping, which is the main focus of this article.

The fact that Google is grouping keyword volumes in this way implies that they see these keywords as equivalent, at least to some extent. The questions that this raised for me were:

Does this mean that we should see keywords with grouped volumes as identical?

From an SEO point of view, should we focus our targeting efforts on any one of the grouped keywords, given that Google is seeing them as the same?

There is further reason to think this way given the simple fact that Google is always getting smarter. As well as Parsey McParseface, the English language parser that Google released to the public, much of the research output that we see in patents and journal articles from Google relates to natural language processing, so it is clear that this is an area that Google see as a priority for their research.

One way to test whether or not Google does indeed consider grouped keywords to be identical is to look at search results. The theory is that if keywords are viewed identically, we should see exactly the same pages ranking for the keywords.

What’s going on in the SERPs?

I did a similar analysis a few months ago, which was focused more on general distinctions between keywords within a topic. This analysis is much more focused on the types of variations of keywords that we are seeing being grouped. These types of variations were categorised by, among others, Jennifer Slegg at The SEM Post.

The five types of variations that I’ve looked into for this analysis are the following:

Initialisms/Abbreviations. For example, comparing SERPs for [BBC] and [British Broadcasting Corporation]

Plurals. For example, [waffle maker] and [waffle makers].

Verb stems with and without suffixes. For example, [calculate], [calculated] and [calculating].

Keywords with and without punctuation. For example, [midnight’s children] and [midnights children]

Keywords with and without typos. For example, [heart rate monitor] and [heart rat monitor].

For each of these five categories, I put together a list of 50-100 keywords, along with a variation for each. Within these keyword pairs I investigated whether or not Keyword Planner reported the same volume, and also used the rank tracking tool STAT to see what pages are ranking for each keyword.

From that analysis, I was able to measure the prevalence of grouping keyword volumes within each category (i.e. the percentage of keyword pairs that have grouped volumes), and the similarity of the SERPs (the number of top ten results that were shared between the two keywords) for grouped and ungrouped keyword pairs.

Results

The results for those metrics are the following:

I also looked at how common it is that SERPs are exactly identical, that is that the top ten results are the same pages, in the same order. This showed an interesting pattern. There are only two categories with significant numbers of identical SERPs—Punctuation and Typos. In the case of keywords with and without punctuation, you are more likely to see identical SERPs (implying that Google sees the pair of keywords as identical) if keyword volumes are grouped than if they are not. This is not a hard-and-fast rule though – there are still some ungrouped keywords which have identical SERPs.

In the case of Typos, there are no grouped keyword pairs at all that have identical SERPs. Given also the low prevalence of grouped keywords in this category, it appears that the identical SERPs are coming from “showing results for” SERPs, where Google replaces results for the mistyped keywords with the correct one.

What conclusions can we draw?

The prevalence of keyword grouping is highest for plurals, and very low for typos This may be a result of the sample of keywords used in this study, but overall, around 50% of keywords in the sample are grouped. This indicates that, although this volume grouping is a growing phenomenon in Keyword Planner data, it is not yet consistent across all SERPs.

There is not a lot of difference between keywords that are grouped by Keyword Planner, and those that aren’t. This is a surprising result. The motivation for conducting this study was to confirm the suspicion that Google associating keyword volumes means that it also associates the search intent. This is comprehensively disproven by this data. There is no significant difference between grouped and ungrouped keyword pairs when it comes to SERP similarity. The one group where there is a larger difference is the verb stems category. This is likely because there are many verbs where the present and past tense mean very different things, indicating different search intent. For example, the keywords [march] and [marched] have completely different intents due to the multiple meanings of the word ‘march.’ This means that there’s no chance that these SERPs will be similar. On the other hand, some verbs have little intent difference between past and present forms (for example [admire] and [admired]). These types of keyword pairs generally have grouped volume, and also have more similar SERPs.

Overall, there is not a very high rate of similarity of SERPs for similar keywords When starting this analysis, I expected to see much higher rates of similarity between very similar keywords. This is not the case, and to me that is surprising for two reasons. The first is that, as mentioned above, I saw the grouping of keyword volumes to be a clear signal that the keywords were seen as identical intents. This appears not to be the case. The other reason is that I have a lot of faith in how smart Google is. Its developments in natural language processing and intent assessment give me the impression that it is able to associate similar keywords in the results it shows. It may be that things are heading in this direction, but it’s too early for it to have been fully implemented. The alternative explanation would be Google is that smart, and can interpret the subtle difference between keywords with incredibly similar content.

What should we take away from this?

What does this mean for SEOs doing keyword research? Rank tracking companies such as STAT are looking into ways of splitting keyword volumes between the constituent keywords, so there is hope for at least semi-accurate volume data. What it does mean is that we should ignore the grouped volumes when targeting keywords—just because keywords are given the same volume, it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t target them individually on your site.

On a wider scale, this tells us something about how the anthropomorphised “Google” thinks and works. There are two very separate factors at work here—what Google tells us, and what we actually see. This is something Rand picked up on in his recent Whiteboard Friday, and it applies across all of search—Google tells us one thing, but search rankings don’t necessarily behave the same way. This backs up my belief to never take anything at face value, and always do your own research.

Do these results surprise you as much as they do me? Let me know in the comments.

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don’t have time to hunt down but want to read!

Web Design 1 | Toronto Web Development

[harrogateseo]

A real insight into Google grouping and SEO!

[harrogateseo]

7 quick SEO hacks for the SEO newbie

Want some simple SEO tips that will help move the needle without breaking the bank? Columnist Stephan Spencer has seven for you.

We love features that simplify certain tasks into bullet points and this post does not disappoint!

[harrogateseo]

Our aims as a Harrogate search engine optimisation agency: - To help businesses get found online - To help build trusted links - To help patch up broken and negative links - To help produce content th...

We love Evernote as a means of reminding ourselves about certain dates and goals that we’re aiming to meet. 

Do you use Evernote and, if so, how do you use it?

[harrogateseo]

Differences Between Desktop and Mobile SEO

While your company needs to reach out to customers on desktop devices, you need to do some mobile SEO work, too. Here are some tips to get you started.

Ever wondered if search engine optimisation on desktop is different to SEO on mobile devices? 

What do you search for on your laptop/computer compared to your mobile searches?

[harrogateseo]

We’re hoping that the weather picks up later today, what about you?

[harrogateseo]

10 posts!

[harrogateseo]

A social media channel for the SEO agency - SEO Harrogate.

Check out our Yookos account!