SEO expert Langley

SEO expert Langley

Website Optimization

They forge strategic partnerships to expand their clients' digital footprint, while prioritizing the creation of high-quality content that attracts valuable backlinks.

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  • SEO and PPC
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As these trends evolve, Small World Marketing remains at the forefront, helping businesses in SEO expert Langley and beyond navigate the future of SEO with confidence and success. Their journey begins with a deep dive into the client's current online presence, identifying strengths and pinpointing areas that need improvement. Learn more about SEO expert Langley here Their method involves building quality backlinks, integrating social media, and providing ongoing maintenance, which together pave the path for significant visibility and success in the digital realm. Small World Marketing emphasizes the need for selecting effective strategies and analyzing competitor links to stay ahead.
But what exactly sets their SEO services apart, and how do they ensure sustained growth for SEO expert Langley businesses? By embracing this technology, they're not just optimizing for search engines; they're creating a more dynamic, engaging, and personalized online experience for every user. Learn more about Affordable Langley SEO Solutions for Growth here. This approach not only enhances user engagement but also significantly boosts a website's SEO ranking, as search engines favor mobile-friendly sites. SEO Optimization Tips These success stories have quickly become a testament to the power of targeted SEO strategies in driving digital success.

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The SEO expert Langley SEO specialists at Small World Marketing recognize this trend and emphasize the importance of optimizing for mobile users to drive predictable customer growth. This commitment to excellence means that businesses don't just invest in SEO; they invest in a partnership that grows their brand for the long haul. Small World Marketing understands this and employs a strategic approach to build these valuable connections. The impact extends beyond mere visibility. This ensures that websites remain visible to their target audience, capturing traffic from emerging search trends.

They maintain an ongoing dialogue with their clients, ensuring that the SEO plan evolves in tandem with the client's growing and shifting business objectives. SEO Workshops They're not just chasing any links, though.

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Their team crafts customized content that resonates with followers, encouraging likes, shares, and comments. They ensure their clients' details are accurately listed on Google My Business, making them easily discoverable to potential customers searching nearby.

This adaptability not only boosts user satisfaction but also significantly improves a site's search engine rankings. By tailoring content, keywords, and marketing strategies to reflect local culture, language, and consumer behavior, they're not just shooting arrows in the dark.

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As a result, businesses see a significant uptick in local traffic both online and in-store. Small World Marketing's approach to SEO isn't just about inserting keywords or phrases into web content.

Boosting online visibility, especially through local SEO, is crucial for businesses aiming to attract more customers from their immediate geographic area. SEO Competitor Analysis The team at Small World Marketing knows that content must answer the audience's questions and solve their problems. They also employ AI tools to predict emerging trends and uncover long-tail keywords, which, although less competitive, can significantly attract a more engaged audience. By analyzing search trends, competitor keywords, and industry-specific language, they ensure that the content they produce isn't just seen-it's seen by the right eyes.

Organic SEO services Langley

The City of Langley, commonly referred to as Langley City, or just Langley, is a municipality in the Metro Vancouver Regional District in British Columbia, Canada. It lies directly east of Surrey, adjacent to the Cloverdale area, and is surrounded elsewhere by the Township of Langley, bordered by its neighbourhoods of Willowbrook to the north, Murrayville to the east, and Brookswood and Fern Ridge to the south.

Langley SEO strategies


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These fundamentals are key to improving a website's visibility and ranking, helping businesses reach their target audience more effectively.

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In essence, Small World Marketing is transforming the digital landscape for SEO expert Langley companies, one piece of customized content at a time. They're experts at identifying topics that resonate with their client's target market, ensuring that each piece of content isn't only relevant but also engaging and informative. Boosting search rankings is pivotal for SEO expert Langley companies aiming to stand out online. This targeted strategy doesn't just attract traffic; it builds a loyal customer base rooted in the local area.

This dynamic approach guarantees that their client's online visibility grows sustainably over time. Additionally, Small World Marketing's focus on short, concise paragraphs and the strategic use of headings and bullet points further breaks down information, making it digestible for readers. What kind of digital excellence could your business achieve by harnessing their customized SEO strategies?

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It leads to increased website traffic, higher engagement rates, and, ultimately, more conversions.

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  11. SEO for Small Businesses
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This proactive engagement strategy not only enhances the customer experience but also boosts the clients' SEO rankings by increasing social signals, a key factor search engines consider when determining a site's importance. They prioritize local SEO strategies, ensuring that businesses are visible to potential customers right in their vicinity. By harnessing the power of AI to analyze vast datasets and optimize content, they've helped clients achieve remarkable growth in organic search results. This process involves examining your market position, target audience, and competitive landscape.

It's not just about reacting to changes; it's about anticipating them, ensuring Small World Marketing's clients maintain prime visibility online. These success stories in SEO expert Langley highlight Small World Marketing's ability to tailor SEO solutions that meet the unique needs of local businesses, proving that with the right strategy, even small businesses can achieve significant digital success. They're in the trenches, analyzing data, and testing strategies to see what resonates best with the new parameters set by search engines. They've leveraged the power of SEO, content marketing, and social media to craft a digital presence that's both wide-reaching and impactful.

Leading SEO firms in SEO expert Langley
SEO expert Langley website optimization

SEO expert Langley website optimization

This approach allows for real-time adjustments, keeping pace with the rapid changes in search algorithms. Initially, their innovative product was lost in the digital noise. They're adept at balancing broad, competitive keywords with niche, long-tail phrases to capture a wide range of search intents. This foresight places their clients' content at the forefront of search results, whether a user is typing or speaking their queries. It's a proactive, rather than reactive, approach to SEO that keeps SEO expert Langley companies ahead of the curve.

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Lastly, they focus on internal linking strategies to guide visitors seamlessly through the website, increasing dwell time and reducing bounce rates. Small World Marketing leverages AI-driven strategies to streamline site menus and categorize content intuitively. Reporting is equally important. Investing in SEO with Small World Marketing offers SEO expert Langley businesses a significant return on investment by enhancing their online visibility and driving targeted traffic to their websites.

They're about building a sustainable online presence that continues to thrive in the ever-evolving digital landscape. They focus on creating valuable connections with local businesses, websites, and organizations. The impact of such technology is transformative. In essence, the fusion of AI and SEO is setting a new standard for digital marketing in SEO expert Langley.

They streamline menus and limit the use of pop-ups, which can be particularly intrusive on mobile devices. Another success story comes from a boutique clothing retailer. Through their comprehensive approach, they ensure that the technical foundation of a website contributes positively to its overall SEO strategy, driving more organic traffic and fostering business growth. Digital Advertising Finding the right balance is key to enhancing readability while optimizing for search engines.

SEO Performance Analysis SEO expert Langley

This means optimizing not just for search engines, but for human engagement as well. Moreover, AI-driven chatbots have revolutionized customer service in digital marketing, providing instant responses to customer inquiries and improving the overall customer experience. Turning now to local businesses, AI-powered SEO strategies offer unparalleled opportunities for growth and visibility in their communities. Moreover, AI insights allow for a more personalized user experience.
Such meticulous attention to navigation details reflects Small World Marketing's commitment to delivering superior user experiences, setting their clients' websites apart in the competitive digital landscape. Internal linking is another area of focus. Website Optimization Moreover, they emphasize the importance of scalable solutions.
First off, they ensure that each webpage boasts a unique, descriptive title tag and meta description. Link building stands at the forefront of their off-page strategy. Small World Marketing's approach ensures that each campaign isn't just a shot in the dark but a calculated move towards success, demonstrating how AI-driven strategy design is revolutionizing the way companies approach their market presence. Read more about SEO expert Langley here
By leveraging cutting-edge AI technologies with proven SEO practices, Small World Marketing is not just keeping pace with industry trends; they're setting them.

SEO expert Langley - SEO Outreach

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Additionally, Small World Marketing utilizes caching strategies, allowing frequently accessed data to be stored locally in a user's device, further improving load times during subsequent visits. But what exactly makes their strategy a beacon for businesses navigating the competitive waters of online visibility?

SEO Performance Analysis SEO expert Langley
Best SEO services SEO expert Langley
Best SEO services SEO expert Langley

Small World Marketing has mastered this modern SEO, focusing on comprehensive strategies that align with these evolving standards. With the vast majority of consumers turning to search engines to guide their purchasing decisions, a company's presence on the first page of Google isn't just desirable-it's essential. In the SEO world, backlinks from reputable sites signal to search engines that a website is a credible source of information, thus boosting its rankings. As these trends continue to evolve, Small World Marketing remains at the forefront, helping businesses in SEO expert Langley and beyond navigate the ever-changing SEO landscape. The team at Small World Marketing starts by identifying target keywords essential for their clients' online visibility.

Another success story comes from GreenLeaf Auto Parts, a family-owned auto parts store facing stiff competition from larger chains. Professional SEO Services They argue that knowing how you appear online not only helps in managing reputation but also in refining marketing strategies. Their strategy isn't static; it evolves with search engine algorithms, ensuring that SEO expert Langley businesses stay ahead in a competitive digital landscape. This involves understanding the audience's needs, interests, and pain points, and then tailoring the content to address these aspects directly.

This innovative approach leverages AI tools to analyze vast amounts of data, identify trends, and understand consumer behavior.

SEO expert Langley - Conversion Rate Optimization

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They understand that the crux of driving digital success lies not in casting the widest net, but in weaving one that's intricately designed to catch your ideal customer. These metrics offer a comprehensive view of an SEO campaign's success, allowing them to make informed decisions about where to adjust their strategies. Yet, the question remains: how does Small World Marketing leverage AI to not only predict the curve but stay ahead of it?

SEO expert Langley - Digital Advertising

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Their efforts have led to a significant uptick in client revenue, with some businesses seeing a return on investment (ROI) that far exceeds industry averages. As we peel back the layers on Small World Marketing's approach to SEO in SEO expert Langley, one can't help but wonder how these advanced techniques are setting a new standard for digital excellence and what this means for the future of local businesses looking to thrive in an increasingly digital world. The trend suggests a shift towards more personalized, relevant content that meets users' precise needs at the moment they search. This streamlines the content creation process, saving businesses time and resources while maintaining a high standard of quality.

Affordable SEO services SEO expert Langley

Another trend gaining momentum is the importance of user experience (UX). This predictive capability allows Small World Marketing to create content that addresses these needs, ensuring higher engagement and improved user satisfaction. Think of them as a mini-advertisement for what's contained on the webpage. This approach helps in improving the website's ranking, making it more visible to potential customers. Small World Marketing's approach means SEO expert Langley companies aren't just keeping up; they're setting the pace, using AI to fuel a growth strategy that's as dynamic as the market itself.
Understanding the power of social signals is crucial for maximizing online visibility and engagement. These methods collectively ensure that mobile users enjoy a seamless, efficient browsing experience. Small World Marketing's team stays ahead of these changes, ensuring their strategies aren't only effective but also sustainable. Small World Marketing's process, from initial analysis to final optimization, is meticulously designed to maximize SEO expert Langley companies' online visibility and growth.
By staying informed and adaptable, they ensure that their content remains relevant and effective, securing their position as SEO expert Langley's top SEO specialists. They know that mobile users expect quick access to information.

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AI's role in SEO's future is multifaceted. It's essential to assess your business's current online presence and identify the gaps.

SEO expert Langley - Keyword Research

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This approach not only aids in quicker navigation but also boosts the site's SEO, as search engines favor websites that are easy to crawl and understand. They're not just keeping pace; they're staying ahead, making informed decisions that drive growth and competitiveness in the digital landscape. Regular reports track progress, making sure you're always in the loop. AI's impact on digital marketing also extends to social media platforms, where it helps in monitoring trends, understanding consumer sentiment, and automating social media posts.

Explore SEO expert Langley here
Affordable SEO services SEO expert Langley

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the quality and quantity of website traffic to a website or a web page from search engines.[1][2] SEO targets unpaid traffic (known as "natural" or "organic" results) rather than direct traffic or paid traffic. Unpaid traffic may originate from different kinds of searches, including image search, video search, academic search,[3] news search, and industry-specific vertical search engines.

As an Internet marketing strategy, SEO considers how search engines work, the computer-programmed algorithms that dictate search engine behavior, what people search for, the actual search terms or keywords typed into search engines, and which search engines are preferred by their targeted audience. SEO is performed because a website will receive more visitors from a search engine when websites rank higher on the search engine results page (SERP). These visitors can then potentially be converted into customers.[4]

History

[edit]

Webmasters and content providers began optimizing websites for search engines in the mid-1990s, as the first search engines were cataloging the early Web. Initially, all webmasters only needed to submit the address of a page, or URL, to the various engines, which would send a web crawler to crawl that page, extract links to other pages from it, and return information found on the page to be indexed.[5] The process involves a search engine spider/crawler crawls a page and storing it on the search engine's own server. A second program, known as an indexer, extracts information about the page, such as the words it contains, where they are located, and any weight for specific words, as well as all links the page contains. All of this information is then placed into a scheduler for crawling at a later date.

Website owners recognized the value of a high ranking and visibility in search engine results,[6] creating an opportunity for both white hat and black hat SEO practitioners. According to industry analyst Danny Sullivan, the phrase "search engine optimization" probably came into use in 1997. Sullivan credits Bruce Clay as one of the first people to popularize the term.[7]

Early versions of search algorithms relied on webmaster-provided information such as the keyword meta tag or index files in engines like ALIWEB. Meta tags provide a guide to each page's content. Using metadata to index pages was found to be less than reliable, however, because the webmaster's choice of keywords in the meta tag could potentially be an inaccurate representation of the site's actual content. Flawed data in meta tags, such as those that were inaccurate or incomplete, created the potential for pages to be mischaracterized in irrelevant searches.[8][dubiousdiscuss] Web content providers also manipulated some attributes within the HTML source of a page in an attempt to rank well in search engines.[9] By 1997, search engine designers recognized that webmasters were making efforts to rank well in their search engine and that some webmasters were even manipulating their rankings in search results by stuffing pages with excessive or irrelevant keywords. Early search engines, such as Altavista and Infoseek, adjusted their algorithms to prevent webmasters from manipulating rankings.[10]

By heavily relying on factors such as keyword density, which were exclusively within a webmaster's control, early search engines suffered from abuse and ranking manipulation. To provide better results to their users, search engines had to adapt to ensure their results pages showed the most relevant search results, rather than unrelated pages stuffed with numerous keywords by unscrupulous webmasters. This meant moving away from heavy reliance on term density to a more holistic process for scoring semantic signals.[11] Since the success and popularity of a search engine are determined by its ability to produce the most relevant results to any given search, poor quality or irrelevant search results could lead users to find other search sources. Search engines responded by developing more complex ranking algorithms, taking into account additional factors that were more difficult for webmasters to manipulate.

Companies that employ overly aggressive techniques can get their client websites banned from the search results. In 2005, the Wall Street Journal reported on a company, Traffic Power, which allegedly used high-risk techniques and failed to disclose those risks to its clients.[12] Wired magazine reported that the same company sued blogger and SEO Aaron Wall for writing about the ban.[13] Google's Matt Cutts later confirmed that Google did in fact ban Traffic Power and some of its clients.[14]

Some search engines have also reached out to the SEO industry and are frequent sponsors and guests at SEO conferences, webchats, and seminars. Major search engines provide information and guidelines to help with website optimization.[15][16] Google has a Sitemaps program to help webmasters learn if Google is having any problems indexing their website and also provides data on Google traffic to the website.[17] Bing Webmaster Tools provides a way for webmasters to submit a sitemap and web feeds, allows users to determine the "crawl rate", and track the web pages index status.

In 2015, it was reported that Google was developing and promoting mobile search as a key feature within future products. In response, many brands began to take a different approach to their Internet marketing strategies.[18]

Relationship with Google

[edit]

In 1998, two graduate students at Stanford University, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, developed "Backrub", a search engine that relied on a mathematical algorithm to rate the prominence of web pages. The number calculated by the algorithm, PageRank, is a function of the quantity and strength of inbound links.[19] PageRank estimates the likelihood that a given page will be reached by a web user who randomly surfs the web and follows links from one page to another. In effect, this means that some links are stronger than others, as a higher PageRank page is more likely to be reached by the random web surfer.

Page and Brin founded Google in 1998.[20] Google attracted a loyal following among the growing number of Internet users, who liked its simple design.[21] Off-page factors (such as PageRank and hyperlink analysis) were considered as well as on-page factors (such as keyword frequency, meta tags, headings, links and site structure) to enable Google to avoid the kind of manipulation seen in search engines that only considered on-page factors for their rankings. Although PageRank was more difficult to game, webmasters had already developed link-building tools and schemes to influence the Inktomi search engine, and these methods proved similarly applicable to gaming PageRank. Many sites focus on exchanging, buying, and selling links, often on a massive scale. Some of these schemes, or link farms, involved the creation of thousands of sites for the sole purpose of link spamming.[22]

By 2004, search engines had incorporated a wide range of undisclosed factors in their ranking algorithms to reduce the impact of link manipulation.[23] The leading search engines, Google, Bing, and Yahoo, do not disclose the algorithms they use to rank pages. Some SEO practitioners have studied different approaches to search engine optimization and have shared their personal opinions.[24] Patents related to search engines can provide information to better understand search engines.[25] In 2005, Google began personalizing search results for each user. Depending on their history of previous searches, Google crafted results for logged in users.[26]

In 2007, Google announced a campaign against paid links that transfer PageRank.[27] On June 15, 2009, Google disclosed that they had taken measures to mitigate the effects of PageRank sculpting by use of the nofollow attribute on links. Matt Cutts, a well-known software engineer at Google, announced that Google Bot would no longer treat any no follow links, in the same way, to prevent SEO service providers from using nofollow for PageRank sculpting.[28] As a result of this change, the usage of nofollow led to evaporation of PageRank. In order to avoid the above, SEO engineers developed alternative techniques that replace nofollowed tags with obfuscated JavaScript and thus permit PageRank sculpting. Additionally, several solutions have been suggested that include the usage of iframes, Flash, and JavaScript.[29]

In December 2009, Google announced it would be using the web search history of all its users in order to populate search results.[30] On June 8, 2010 a new web indexing system called Google Caffeine was announced. Designed to allow users to find news results, forum posts, and other content much sooner after publishing than before, Google Caffeine was a change to the way Google updated its index in order to make things show up quicker on Google than before. According to Carrie Grimes, the software engineer who announced Caffeine for Google, "Caffeine provides 50 percent fresher results for web searches than our last index..."[31] Google Instant, real-time-search, was introduced in late 2010 in an attempt to make search results more timely and relevant. Historically site administrators have spent months or even years optimizing a website to increase search rankings. With the growth in popularity of social media sites and blogs, the leading engines made changes to their algorithms to allow fresh content to rank quickly within the search results.[32]

In February 2011, Google announced the Panda update, which penalizes websites containing content duplicated from other websites and sources. Historically websites have copied content from one another and benefited in search engine rankings by engaging in this practice. However, Google implemented a new system that punishes sites whose content is not unique.[33] The 2012 Google Penguin attempted to penalize websites that used manipulative techniques to improve their rankings on the search engine.[34] Although Google Penguin has been presented as an algorithm aimed at fighting web spam, it really focuses on spammy links[35] by gauging the quality of the sites the links are coming from. The 2013 Google Hummingbird update featured an algorithm change designed to improve Google's natural language processing and semantic understanding of web pages. Hummingbird's language processing system falls under the newly recognized term of "conversational search", where the system pays more attention to each word in the query in order to better match the pages to the meaning of the query rather than a few words.[36] With regards to the changes made to search engine optimization, for content publishers and writers, Hummingbird is intended to resolve issues by getting rid of irrelevant content and spam, allowing Google to produce high-quality content and rely on them to be 'trusted' authors.

In October 2019, Google announced they would start applying BERT models for English language search queries in the US. Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) was another attempt by Google to improve their natural language processing, but this time in order to better understand the search queries of their users.[37] In terms of search engine optimization, BERT intended to connect users more easily to relevant content and increase the quality of traffic coming to websites that are ranking in the Search Engine Results Page.

Methods

[edit]

Getting indexed

[edit]
A simple illustration of the Pagerank algorithm. Percentage shows the perceived importance.

The leading search engines, such as Google, Bing, and Yahoo!, use crawlers to find pages for their algorithmic search results. Pages that are linked from other search engine-indexed pages do not need to be submitted because they are found automatically. The Yahoo! Directory and DMOZ, two major directories which closed in 2014 and 2017 respectively, both required manual submission and human editorial review.[38] Google offers Google Search Console, for which an XML Sitemap feed can be created and submitted for free to ensure that all pages are found, especially pages that are not discoverable by automatically following links[39] in addition to their URL submission console.[40] Yahoo! formerly operated a paid submission service that guaranteed to crawl for a cost per click;[41] however, this practice was discontinued in 2009.

Search engine crawlers may look at a number of different factors when crawling a site. Not every page is indexed by search engines. The distance of pages from the root directory of a site may also be a factor in whether or not pages get crawled.[42]

Mobile devices are used for the majority of Google searches.[43] In November 2016, Google announced a major change to the way they are crawling websites and started to make their index mobile-first, which means the mobile version of a given website becomes the starting point for what Google includes in their index.[44] In May 2019, Google updated the rendering engine of their crawler to be the latest version of Chromium (74 at the time of the announcement). Google indicated that they would regularly update the Chromium rendering engine to the latest version.[45] In December 2019, Google began updating the User-Agent string of their crawler to reflect the latest Chrome version used by their rendering service. The delay was to allow webmasters time to update their code that responded to particular bot User-Agent strings. Google ran evaluations and felt confident the impact would be minor.[46]

Preventing crawling

[edit]

To avoid undesirable content in the search indexes, webmasters can instruct spiders not to crawl certain files or directories through the standard robots.txt file in the root directory of the domain. Additionally, a page can be explicitly excluded from a search engine's database by using a meta tag specific to robots (usually <meta name="robots" content="noindex"> ). When a search engine visits a site, the robots.txt located in the root directory is the first file crawled. The robots.txt file is then parsed and will instruct the robot as to which pages are not to be crawled. As a search engine crawler may keep a cached copy of this file, it may on occasion crawl pages a webmaster does not wish to crawl. Pages typically prevented from being crawled include login-specific pages such as shopping carts and user-specific content such as search results from internal searches. In March 2007, Google warned webmasters that they should prevent indexing of internal search results because those pages are considered search spam.[47] In 2020, Google sunsetted the standard (and open-sourced their code) and now treats it as a hint not a directive. To adequately ensure that pages are not indexed, a page-level robot's meta tag should be included.[48]

Increasing prominence

[edit]

A variety of methods can increase the prominence of a webpage within the search results. Cross linking between pages of the same website to provide more links to important pages may improve its visibility. Page design makes users trust a site and want to stay once they find it. When people bounce off a site, it counts against the site and affects its credibility.[49] Writing content that includes frequently searched keyword phrases so as to be relevant to a wide variety of search queries will tend to increase traffic. Updating content so as to keep search engines crawling back frequently can give additional weight to a site. Adding relevant keywords to a web page's metadata, including the title tag and meta description, will tend to improve the relevancy of a site's search listings, thus increasing traffic. URL canonicalization of web pages accessible via multiple URLs, using the canonical link element[50] or via 301 redirects can help make sure links to different versions of the URL all count towards the page's link popularity score. These are known as incoming links, which point to the URL and can count towards the page link's popularity score, impacting the credibility of a website.[49]

White hat versus black hat techniques

[edit]
Common white-hat methods of search engine optimization

SEO techniques can be classified into two broad categories: techniques that search engine companies recommend as part of good design ("white hat"), and those techniques of which search engines do not approve ("black hat"). Search engines attempt to minimize the effect of the latter, among them spamdexing. Industry commentators have classified these methods and the practitioners who employ them as either white hat SEO or black hat SEO.[51] White hats tend to produce results that last a long time, whereas black hats anticipate that their sites may eventually be banned either temporarily or permanently once the search engines discover what they are doing.[52]

An SEO technique is considered a white hat if it conforms to the search engines' guidelines and involves no deception. As the search engine guidelines[15][16][53] are not written as a series of rules or commandments, this is an important distinction to note. White hat SEO is not just about following guidelines but is about ensuring that the content a search engine indexes and subsequently ranks is the same content a user will see. White hat advice is generally summed up as creating content for users, not for search engines, and then making that content easily accessible to the online "spider" algorithms, rather than attempting to trick the algorithm from its intended purpose. White hat SEO is in many ways similar to web development that promotes accessibility,[54] although the two are not identical.

Black hat SEO attempts to improve rankings in ways that are disapproved of by the search engines or involve deception. One black hat technique uses hidden text, either as text colored similar to the background, in an invisible div, or positioned off-screen. Another method gives a different page depending on whether the page is being requested by a human visitor or a search engine, a technique known as cloaking. Another category sometimes used is grey hat SEO. This is in between the black hat and white hat approaches, where the methods employed avoid the site being penalized but do not act in producing the best content for users. Grey hat SEO is entirely focused on improving search engine rankings.

Search engines may penalize sites they discover using black or grey hat methods, either by reducing their rankings or eliminating their listings from their databases altogether. Such penalties can be applied either automatically by the search engines' algorithms or by a manual site review. One example was the February 2006 Google removal of both BMW Germany and Ricoh Germany for the use of deceptive practices.[55] Both companies, however, quickly apologized, fixed the offending pages, and were restored to Google's search engine results page.[56]

As marketing strategy

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SEO is not an appropriate strategy for every website, and other Internet marketing strategies can be more effective, such as paid advertising through pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns, depending on the site operator's goals. Search engine marketing (SEM) is the practice of designing, running, and optimizing search engine ad campaigns. Its difference from SEO is most simply depicted as the difference between paid and unpaid priority ranking in search results. SEM focuses on prominence more so than relevance; website developers should regard SEM with the utmost importance with consideration to visibility as most navigate to the primary listings of their search.[57] A successful Internet marketing campaign may also depend upon building high-quality web pages to engage and persuade internet users, setting up analytics programs to enable site owners to measure results, and improving a site's conversion rate.[58][59] In November 2015, Google released a full 160-page version of its Search Quality Rating Guidelines to the public,[60] which revealed a shift in their focus towards "usefulness" and mobile local search. In recent years the mobile market has exploded, overtaking the use of desktops, as shown in by StatCounter in October 2016, where they analyzed 2.5 million websites and found that 51.3% of the pages were loaded by a mobile device.[61] Google has been one of the companies that are utilizing the popularity of mobile usage by encouraging websites to use their Google Search Console, the Mobile-Friendly Test, which allows companies to measure up their website to the search engine results and determine how user-friendly their websites are. The closer the keywords are together their ranking will improve based on key terms.[49]

SEO may generate an adequate return on investment. However, search engines are not paid for organic search traffic, their algorithms change, and there are no guarantees of continued referrals. Due to this lack of guarantee and uncertainty, a business that relies heavily on search engine traffic can suffer major losses if the search engines stop sending visitors.[62] Search engines can change their algorithms, impacting a website's search engine ranking, possibly resulting in a serious loss of traffic. According to Google's CEO, Eric Schmidt, in 2010, Google made over 500 algorithm changes – almost 1.5 per day.[63] It is considered a wise business practice for website operators to liberate themselves from dependence on search engine traffic.[64] In addition to accessibility in terms of web crawlers (addressed above), user web accessibility has become increasingly important for SEO.

International markets

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Optimization techniques are highly tuned to the dominant search engines in the target market. The search engines' market shares vary from market to market, as does competition. In 2003, Danny Sullivan stated that Google represented about 75% of all searches.[65] In markets outside the United States, Google's share is often larger, and Google remains the dominant search engine worldwide as of 2007.[66] As of 2006, Google had an 85–90% market share in Germany.[67] While there were hundreds of SEO firms in the US at that time, there were only about five in Germany.[67] As of June 2008, the market share of Google in the UK was close to 90% according to Hitwise.[68] That market share is achieved in a number of countries.

As of 2009, there are only a few large markets where Google is not the leading search engine. In most cases, when Google is not leading in a given market, it is lagging behind a local player. The most notable example markets are China, Japan, South Korea, Russia, and the Czech Republic, where respectively Baidu, Yahoo! Japan, Naver, Yandex and Seznam are market leaders.

Successful search optimization for international markets may require professional translation of web pages, registration of a domain name with a top level domain in the target market, and web hosting that provides a local IP address. Otherwise, the fundamental elements of search optimization are essentially the same, regardless of language.[67]

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On October 17, 2002, SearchKing filed suit in the United States District Court, Western District of Oklahoma, against the search engine Google. SearchKing's claim was that Google's tactics to prevent spamdexing constituted a tortious interference with contractual relations. On May 27, 2003, the court granted Google's motion to dismiss the complaint because SearchKing "failed to state a claim upon which relief may be granted."[69][70]

In March 2006, KinderStart filed a lawsuit against Google over search engine rankings. KinderStart's website was removed from Google's index prior to the lawsuit, and the amount of traffic to the site dropped by 70%. On March 16, 2007, the United States District Court for the Northern District of California (San Jose Division) dismissed KinderStart's complaint without leave to amend and partially granted Google's motion for Rule 11 sanctions against KinderStart's attorney, requiring him to pay part of Google's legal expenses.[71][72]

See also

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References

[edit]
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[edit]
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In the field of search engine optimization (SEO), link building describes actions aimed at increasing the number and quality of inbound links to a webpage with the goal of increasing the search engine rankings of that page or website.[1] Briefly, link building is the process of establishing relevant hyperlinks (usually called links) to a website from external sites. Link building can increase the number of high-quality links pointing to a website, in turn increasing the likelihood of the website ranking highly in search engine results. Link building is also a proven marketing tactic for increasing brand awareness.[2]

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Editorial links are the links not acquired from paying money, asking, trading or exchanging. These links are attracted because of the good content and marketing strategies of a website. These are the links that the website owner does not need to ask for as they are naturally given by other website owners.[3]

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Resource links are a category of links, which can be either one-way or two-way, usually referenced as "Resources" or "Information" in navbars, but sometimes, especially in the early, less compartmentalized years of the Web, simply called "links". Basically, they are hyperlinks to a website or a specific web page containing content believed to be beneficial, useful and relevant to visitors of the site establishing the link.

In recent years, resource links have grown in importance because most major search engines have made it plain that—in Google's words—"quantity, quality, and relevance of links count towards your rating".[4]

Search engines measure a website's value and relevance by analyzing the links to the site from other websites. The resulting “link popularity” is a measure of the number and quality of links to a website. It is an integral part of a website's ranking in search engines. Search engines examine each of the links to a particular website to determine its value. Although every link to a website is a vote in its favor, not all votes are counted equally. A website with similar subject matter to the website receiving the inbound link carries more weight than an unrelated site, and a well-regarded website (such as a university) has higher link quality than an unknown or disreputable website.[5][self-published source?]

The text of links helps search engines categorize a website. The engines' insistence on resource links being relevant and beneficial developed because many artificial link building methods were employed solely to spam search engines, i.e. to "fool" the engines' algorithms into awarding the sites employing these unethical devices undeservedly high page ranks and/or return positions.

Google has cautioned site developers to avoid "free-for-all" links, link-popularity schemes, and the submission of a site to thousands of search engines, given that these tactics are typically useless exercises that do not affect the ranking of a site in the results of the major search engines.[6] For many years now, the major [which?] search engines have deployed technology designed to "red flag" and potentially penalize sites employing such practices.[7]

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These are the links acquired by the website owner through payment or distribution. They are also known as organically obtained links. Such links include link advertisements, paid linking, article distribution, directory links and comments on forums, blogs, articles and other interactive forms of social media.[8]

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A reciprocal link is a mutual link between two objects, commonly between two websites, to ensure mutual traffic. For example, Alice and Bob have websites. If Bob's website links to Alice's website and Alice's website links to Bob's website, the websites are reciprocally linked. Website owners often submit their sites to reciprocal link exchange directories in order to achieve higher rankings in the search engines. Reciprocal linking between websites is no longer an important part of the search engine optimization process. In 2005, with their Jagger 2 update, Google stopped giving credit to reciprocal links as it does not indicate genuine link popularity.[9]

Blog and forum comments

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User-generated content such as blog and forum comments with links can drive valuable referral traffic if it's well-thought-out and pertains to the discussion of the post on the blog.[10] However, these links almost always contain the Nofollow or the newer ugc attribute which signal that Google shouldn't take these into its ranking considerations.[11]

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Website directories are lists of links to websites which are sorted into categories. Website owners can submit their site to many of these directories. Some directories accept payment for listing in their directory while others are free.

Social bookmarking

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Social bookmarking is a way of saving and categorizing web pages in a public location on the web. Because bookmarks have anchor text and are shared and stored publicly, they are scanned by search engine crawlers and have search engine optimization value.

Image linking

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Image linking is a way of submitting images, such as infographics, to image directories and linking them back to a specific URL.

Guest blogging

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Also known as guest posting, is a popular SEO technique that consists of writing a piece of content for another website with the goal of getting more visibility and possibly link back to the author's website. According to Google, such links are considered unnatural and should be generally containing the Nofollow attribute.[12]

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In early incarnations, when Google's algorithm relied on incoming links as an indicator of website success, Black Hat SEOs manipulated website rankings by creating link-building schemes, such as building subsidiary websites to send links to a primary website. With an abundance of incoming links, the prime website outranked many reputable sites. However, the conflicts of being devalued by major search engines while building links could be caused by web owners using other black hat strategies. Black hat link building refers explicitly to the process of acquiring as many links as possible with minimal effort.

The Penguin algorithm was created to eliminate this type of abuse. At the time, Google clarified its definition of a "bad" link: “Any links intended to manipulate a site’s ranking in Google search results may be considered part of a link scheme.”

With Penguin, it wasn't the quantity of links that improved a site's rankings but the quality. Since then, Google's web spam team has attempted to prevent the manipulation of their search results through link building. Major brands including J.C. Penney, BMW, Forbes, Overstock.com, and many others have received severe penalties to their search rankings for employing spammy and non-user friendly link building tactics.[13]

On October 5, 2014, Google launched a new algorithm update Penguin 3.0 to penalize those sites who use black hat link building tactics to build unnatural links to manipulate search engines. The update affected 0.3% English Language queries all over the world.[14]

Black hat SEO could also be referred to as Spamdexing, which utilizes other black SEO strategies and link building tactics.[15] Some black hat link building strategies include getting unqualified links from and participating in Link farm, link schemes and Doorway page.[6] Black Hat SEO could also refer to "negative SEO," the practice of deliberately harming another website's performance.

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White hat link building strategies are those strategies that add value to end users, abide by Google's term of service and produce good results that could be sustained for a long time. White hat link building strategies focus on producing high-quality as well as relevant links to the website. Although more difficult to acquire, white hat link building tactics are widely implemented by website owners because such kind of strategies are not only beneficial to their websites' long-term developments but also good to the overall online environment.

See also

[edit]
  • Deep linking: linking directly to a page within another website.
  • Inline linking: linking directly to content within another website.
  • Internal link: linking directly to content within your own website.
  • Overlinking
  • PageRank: an algorithm used by Google Search to rank websites in their search engine results.

References

[edit]
  1. ^ "Link Building Strategies You Need to Know | SEJ". searchenginejournal. Retrieved 10 February 2017.
  2. ^ Bailey, Matt (2011). Internet marketing : an hour a day (1st ed.). Indianapolis, Ind.: Wiley Technology Publishing. pp. 83–84. ISBN 978-0470633748. Retrieved 2 December 2014.
  3. ^ Rognerud, Jon (2011). Ultimate Guide to Search Engine Optimization Drive Traffic, Boost Conversion Rates, and Make Lots of Money (2nd ed.). New York: Entrepreneur Press. p. 213. ISBN 978-1613080207. Retrieved 2 December 2014.
  4. ^ "Link schemes" Google webmaster central
  5. ^ Oxer, Jonathan (2007). How to build a website and stay sane (2nd ed.). Lulu.com. p. 134. ISBN 978-1847997340. Retrieved 2 December 2014.[self-published source]
  6. ^ a b "Search Engine Optimization (SEO)" Google webmaster central
  7. ^ "Is That Directory Link Unnatural? | Search Engine Watch". searchenginewatch.com. Retrieved 14 March 2016.
  8. ^ Jerkovic, John I. (2010). SEO Warrior. Sebastopol: O'Reilly Media, Inc. p. 17. ISBN 978-1449383077. Retrieved 2 December 2014.
  9. ^ Webster, Ken. "Google's Jagger Update – Dust Begins to Settle?". WebProNews. iEntry Network. Archived from the original on 22 February 2014. Retrieved 24 February 2014.
  10. ^ Hines, Kristi. "How to Use Blog Commenting to Get Valuable Backlinks". Search Engine Watch. Retrieved 20 July 2016.
  11. ^ "Evolving "nofollow" – new ways to identify the nature of links". Official Google Webmaster Central Blog. Retrieved 15 June 2020.
  12. ^ Southern, Matt (10 April 2020). "Google Answers: Is It OK to Link to My Own Guest Post?". Search Engine Journal. Retrieved 15 June 2020.
  13. ^ "10 Big Brands That Were Penalized By Google, From Rap Genius To The BBC". Marketing Land. Retrieved 21 April 2014.
  14. ^ Matt McGee. "Google Penguin Update 3 Released, Impacts 0.3% Of English-Language Queries", Retrieved on 17 February 2016.
  15. ^ Frick, Tim (2013). Return on Engagement: Content, Strategy and Design Techniques for Digital Marketing. Taylor & Francis. pp. 30–31. ISBN 978-1136030260. Retrieved 3 December 2014.
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