Tag: Holistic SEO

6 steps to a successful link building strategy

Marieke van de Rakt

Links are important for SEO. And link building should therefore definitely be part of your holistic SEO strategy. But more importantly, link building should be part of your growth strategy. Links should help generate traffic to your site directly. In this post, I’ll describe 6 important steps for a successful link building strategy, the holistic SEO way.Link building is part of your growth strategy

Link building as part of your growth strategy

Links will help your pages to rank higher in Google search results, this post explains why. That’s perfectly true. That, however, is not the only thing links do. Backlinks will also help in getting more (referral) traffic to your site via those links. When you determine your link building strategy you should keep in mind: the reason links were invented was to send you off to pages you might enjoy as well. Use link building as a strategy for the growth of your website audience and place links on sites that will actually generate traffic to your own site.

A good link, first and foremost, drives traffic to your site.

Step 1: get to know your audience

If you want your audience to grow, you need to find out how to expand your audience or how to find a new audience. You should therefore know two things: who is my audience right now and what does my ideal audience look like. At Yoast.com for example, we started out with an audience mainly consisting of (web) developers, but we aspired to reach an audience consisting of a more general group of WordPress users (whilst keeping our initial developers audience). We adapted our content to this new group of people, but in order to reach these ‘new’ audiences, links from other websites to our new (less nerdy) content were also important. You should do some research in order to get to know your audience.

Step 2: make a list of websites that appeal to your desired audience

If you have a clear picture of your present and desired audience in mind, you can make a list of websites that could possibly help you in reaching your new audience. Find those websites that already appeal to your desired audience. Links from these websites could help you to reach your new audience.

Step 3: write amazing content

In order to get other websites to link to your content, your content simply has to be amazing. And more importantly, it should appeal to the audience you’re aspiring to make your readers or buyers. Make sure your pieces and articles are well structured and nicely written.

Step 4: match content to websites

If you have written an awesome blog post, you should dive into the list you made as part of your growth strategy (step 2). Choose sites from that list that could possibly link to the article you have written. If you have a long tail keyword approach (writing about small and niche subjects) the number of websites which will be fit to link to your blog post will be small. Make an effort to find those websites that really fit the specific topic of your blog post or article. These websites will probably be very willing to link, as your blog post really fits their content. More importantly, visitors that will come to your website following that link will really be interested in the topic of your article (making chances of conversion and recurring visits much higher).

Step 5: reach out

If you’ve really put an effort in both writing content as well as finding websites that fit the content of your article, you should contact the website you would like to link to your site. Tell them about the content or product and ask them to write about it and link to it. Most people will be happy to write about your product if this means they’ll receive it for free! You can use email, but in many cases Twitter or even a phone call is a great way to contact people as well. Make sure to reach out in a personal way, never send out automated emails.

Step 6: use social media!

If your content is original and well structured, you’ll be able to reach new audiences (and get links) by using social media as well. Make sure you tweet about your blog, perhaps send some tweets to specific persons of whom you think they may like your article. Facebook is also a great way to get exposure for your articles (maybe… even promote it a bit?). And as many people like, tweet and share your articles, you’re bound to receive some more links as well.

Conclusion: link building is a growth strategy

A successful link building strategy should always be aimed to bring a new, aspired audience to your website. A (welcome) side effect will then be a higher ranking in Google. As long as you consider link building as a way to reach out to other sites in order to get more visitors from that site, you’re doing it the ‘right’ way.

Link building from a holistic SEO perspective

Marieke van de Rakt

Link building isn’t easy. That doesn’t mean it’s rocket science, it means it takes a lot of work if you do it right. Link building done the wrong way can backfire, resulting in a ban from Google altogether. In this post, I’ll discuss our ideas about getting more backlinks: link building from a holistic SEO perspective.

Before we dive in, if you want to learn more about link building strategies and other essential SEO skills, you should check out our All-around SEO training! It doesn’t just tell you about SEO: it makes sure you know how to put these skills into actual practice!

How does a link help your page to rank well?

Let’s first discuss why link building is important for SEO. A link to your site helps in its ranking in four ways:

  • It adds value to the receiving page, allowing it to improve its visibility in the search engines.
  • It adds value to the entire receiving domain, allowing each page on that domain to improve its rank ever so slightly.
  • The anchor text of the link and the surrounding copy is an indication to the search engine of the topic of the website and more specifically the receiving page.
  • And obviously, people click on links, resulting in so-called direct traffic.

The value of a link for the receiving page is determined in part by the topic of the page the link is on. A link from a page with the same topic as the receiving page is of more value than a link from a page about an entirely different topic. Also, a link from within an article is worth way more than a link from a sidebar or a footer. And, in general, the more links there are on a page, the less each individual link is worth.

Bad reputation

Link building has got a somewhat nasty reputation. Once people noticed that backlinks from other sites resulted in higher rankings, they began to abuse this. They got links from sites that didn’t have any topical relation with their own site. In other cases, people bought links from other sites.

These shady links polluted the search engines. That is why Google started giving penalties to companies that bought links or used links from non-related websites (Google Penguin was all about this). If you got a penalty from Google, it’d be serious: your site would disappear from the search results.

The bad reputation of link building comes from companies who were a bit too enthusiastic about shady link building techniques and got penalties from Google. Does this mean that you shouldn’t do any link building at all? Of course not!

Read more: Link building: what not to do? »

Outreaching activity

Link building is – or should be – an outreaching activity. That means that you have to contact people and ask them to write about and link to your website. Usually, you will get better results if you contact people personally. That means writing emails and press releases, making phone calls, talking about your product. If your product and content are good, there will be people who would like to write about it. Most bloggers and journalists need content, so presenting your products to them could very well make them happy too!

Link building as part of a holistic SEO strategy

Holistic SEO means that you’ll do everything to make your website the best: you should show high-quality information, provide an excellent user experience, have the fastest website and so on. Link building will get easier if your website offers a great experience, just like your products and/or services. It’s far more likely that people are willing to write about and link to such a site.

Link building should feel like a normal marketing activity and not like a trick. Do remember that link building should generate links that get your target audience to your site. Those are the people that will read your posts, subscribe to your newsletter or buy your products. Those people will make your business thrive.

Keep reading: 6 steps to a successful link building strategy »

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New Yoast eBook: UX & Conversion from a holistic SEO perspective

Marieke van de Rakt

As of today, we offer a brand new eBook ‘UX & Conversion from a holistic SEO perspective‘. This eBook focuses on many different aspects of UX and Usability and gives great insights in Conversion Rate Optimization and A/B-testing. The eBook is offered for only $14 the entire month of October (after that the price will be $19).

About ‘UX & Conversion from a holistic SEO perspective’

We cover the basics, but also provide more in-depth information on User Experience and Conversion. The book consists of five sections: an introduction, a section about general usability issues, a section about usability of specific pages, a section about mobile UX and a final section about conversion research. The chapters are all written by Joost de Valk, Michiel Heijmans, Thijs de Valk and Marieke van de Rakt. The eBook consists of 128 pages, you will receive a PDF, a Kindle version and an ePub version.

eBook UX Conversion

Want to improve your site's user experience and conversion? Get our eBook: UX & Conversion from a Holistic SEO perspective »

eBook_UX_Preview_x2

Why buy this eBook

UX is important for both conversion as well as SEO. We consider UX as a very important part of a holistic SEO strategy. In order to keep ranking well in Google, you should continuously invest in decent UX on your website. Our eBook will give practical tips and useful insights in both UX and conversion.

 

Coming soon: new Yoast eBook on UX & Conversion

Marieke van de Rakt

We are very proud to announce Cover_UX_Conversion_600_x2 the launch of our new eBook ‘UX & Conversion from a holistic SEO perspective’. It offers a holistic SEO view on both User Experience as well as on Conversion Rate Optimization. The information mostly is non-technical and can be read and understood by anyone owning or maintaining a website. The sale of our new eBook will start coming Tuesday, October 6. Early birds will get a discount: the eBook will be available for only $14 (instead of $19) this October!

Don’t want to miss the discount? Subscribe to our newsletter here!

It's out! Get our UX & Conversion eBook here and learn how to optimize your site's user experience and conversion rate! »

Holistic SEO and UX

A holistic SEO approach requires an amazing website. An excellent user experience is a very large part of that. At Yoast, we’ve been giving SEO advice for quite some time now. And although Google has changed its algorithm quite a few times, most of the advice we give at Yoast has remained the same over the years. And this advice is very simple: you just have to make sure the experience users have on your site is really really good. Do not use any ‘SEO tricks’; while they might get you rank quickly, they usually don’t work in the long run and might even backfire. A holistic SEO approach focusses on all aspects that can make a website great: ease of use, high quality content, excellent site speed… and so on.

The importance of UX for SEO

In our holistic SEO view, the usability of and the UX on your website should be a very important part of your long-term SEO strategy. Having an awesome website with high quality content and a great user experience won’t instantly improve your ranking. In the long run though, it will definitely have a positive effect on your SEO! Attractive websites have a lower bounce rate and a much higher chance to receive social media attention. These are exactly the two things that make sure your website will keep ranking well.

Conversion and SEO

Awesome websites will also result in higher conversions. If your audience likes and understands your website, the chance of them buying your products or become a returning visitor is much higher.

You could improve your conversion even more by Conversion Rate Optimization. This actually is, next to SEO, a good supplementary strategy. SEO makes sure that more people find your website. A conversion strategy focuses on the visitors on your website, turning these visitors into customers. In our vision, you should always combine SEO and Conversion Rate Optimization. This means that you focus on attracting more people to your website and at the same time focus on increasing the chances that people will actually buy your stuff. That’s a double payoff!

Buy the UX & Conversion eBook!

Do you want to integrate better user experience elements into your website? Want to make your site more user friendly as part of your very own holistic SEO strategy? And optimize your conversion even further? Stay tuned and buy our UX & Conversion eBook as of October 6!

Everyday website optimization: 6 tasks for your daily SEO routine

Michiel Heijmans

Many of you log into your site every day, or, at the very least, once a week. But, if you’re managing a small business or one-man blog, you can’t (always) spend a lot of time on your SEO, you have other things to do! Here, we discuss several small yet impactful things you should try to work on on a daily to weekly basis to keep your SEO on track.

Does this all sound a bit daunting to tackle on your own? Check out our All-around SEO training! It doesn’t just tell you about every aspect of SEO: it makes sure you know how to put these skills into actual practice!!

Long-term SEO Strategy

Before we dive into daily and weekly SEO tasks to work on, we should stress the importance of having a long-term SEO strategy. While it’s good to have a list of quick SEO tasks, make sure you keep an eye on the bigger picture. You should base your strategy on extensive keyword research, look at search intent, set goals and analyze how your site is doing. Holistic SEO is a lot of work, but it’ll pay off in the end!

On days you only have about an hour to spend on your site, consider tackling one of the following tasks.

1. Make sure your content stays fresh

Content is important to rank, which is why you should aim to regularly add new content and keep existing content up to date. Either writing and publishing new content or updating existing content is something that should be part of everyday website optimization. You don’t have to publish a new post everyday, just try to stick to a schedule of publishing that’s realistic for you. If you publish a (new) post every wednesday, for example, your audience will, in time, know to look forward to that! 

Odds are, you also have lots of valuable articles laying around that only need a small update before they can be published again. If you don’t have time to write a new article, it’s useful to have a list of posts like this and work on one of those as your daily SEO task.

A task that’s also related to keeping your content fresh and alive: if you get a lot of comments on your blog posts, try to regularly interact with commenters. If you don’t reply to their comments, people can feel ignored, and it doesn’t look good to have a load of unanswered comments on your content pages either. 

2. Work on your internal linking structure

Working on a good internal linking structure is like rolling out the red carpet for Google. But as your site keeps growing, you should also continue improving that internal linking structure.  

One of the things to keep an eye out for every time you look at your post overview, is orphaned content. It’s such a waste having content that doesn’t get any text links from your other posts or pages, as those contextual links add much value. Have a hard time finding orphaned content? The Yoast plugin is here to help! After installing it, there’s no need to open every post to see which internal links you’ve added already: simply use the filter in the post overview to locate orphaned content and add relevant links!

Another thing to incorporate into your daily SEO efforts: linking to your cornerstone content. Ideally, you should add links to relevant cornerstone content when you’re updating or publishing articles. But, just to make sure you haven’t forgotten any cornerstones, check your most recent posts and make sure they include links to relevant cornerstones. 

Haven’t thought about a cornerstone content strategy yet? Now is the time to start working on that! Yoast SEO can help you set up a kickass cornerstone strategy.

3. Keep your site maintenance on track

Most of you will agree that it’s better to do a bit of cleaning everyday, rather than waiting for the house to become a huge, dirty mess. It’s the same for your website: don’t wait until the number of pages has become unmanageable, stay on top of things!

One way to do that as part of your everyday SEO is to look out for cannibalized content. Since you’re already making sure you regularly publish or republish content, it’s only a little bit of extra effort to ensure you’re not competing with (other) existing content on your site. If you come across two articles that are on a similar topic, from a similar point of view, consider combining them into one new article. Unfortunately, too much of a good thing, such as quality content, can still cause problems. So take some time to ensure your content isn’t repeating itself!

Similarly, don’t keep unnecessary pages around. Regularly factor in some time to check for pages that have lost their relevance and can’t be updated. Delete these pages (properly) from your site and you’ll thank yourself later! Yoast SEO Premium makes deleting and redirecting pages super easy, so check it out if you want to save even more time!

4. Work on your technical SEO

Many technical SEO tasks require time and expertise, or don’t need to be part of your daily routine. Nevertheless, there are things you should pay attention to on a regular basis.

One of them is keeping the size of your images as small as possible. Having high-quality images on your site is a must, but you don’t want your handpicked picture to slow down your site! A quick task to add to your SEO routine: use tools like ImageOptim or websites like JPEGmini, jpeg.io or Kraken.io to optimize the size of your images.

Another thing to be aware of: duplicate content. You’re already on track if you regularly look for cannibalized content, but duplicate content can also be created accidentally. Now, you don’t have to do a duplicate content check everyday. But you should be aware of the possibility, for instance when you’re creating a tag that applies to the exact same group of posts as another tag, or when you add a printer-friendly version of your DIY post.

One final thing that could be easy to implement in your routine of publishing content: adding structured data. Not every type of post is suited for rich results, but for many types of content it can make a difference. Yoast SEO not only automatically adds the most important structured data to (almost) every page on your site, it also makes it super easy to add structured data blocks for howtos and FAQ pages. So if you regularly post howtos, use Yoast SEO’s structured data blocks to increase your chances of a rich result. If your site focuses on recipes, products, reviews or events, you may want to learn how to add structured data. Luckily, Yoast Academy offers a structured data training course!

5. Keep track of your analytics

Google Analytics has a ton of interesting data you can use to optimize your website. But mastering every single aspect of Google Analytics takes a lot of time. If you don’t have enough time to dive in, and only have a little understanding of the analytics tool, then you can spend some time once a week looking at two reports. 

The first is the source/medium report, which you can find in the ‘Acquisition’ section under item ‘all traffic’. This will show you where your site’s visitors are coming from. Check if you get organic traffic from search engines, like Google. And try to understand the data you’re seeing. Which sources have a high bounce rate, which sources drive the most traffic to your site? If you look at this data every week, you’ll know if your site’s doing better than the week before.

The second report that’s interesting is the Landing pages report you can find in the ‘Behavior’ section under ‘All pages’. These pages are the very first pages people visit on your site, which gives you insight into the things your visitors are interested in. It’ll (basically) tell you if the description of a page on Facebook or in a search result was interesting enough to make people click. Again, try to understand the data. How’s the bounce rate of landing pages that shouldn’t have a high bounce rate, like your homepage, for instance? And if you dare, add a secondary dimension like ‘source’ to this report so you can immediately see which pages are visited from Google.

6. Maintain your presence on social media

You’re probably active on one or more social media platforms. Regularly posting updates for your followers is a good idea, to make clear that your account is alive and kicking. You can share your blog posts, but also pictures you take, events from your daily life, other articles you find interesting, and so on… You know your audience best, you know what they’ll like. And, while you’re at it, also try to regularly interact with people leaving comments on your social media pages, so you keep them engaged.

Read more: How to use social media »

Conclusion on everyday SEO

That’s it! Work on one (or more) of these six things once a day, and you’re well on your way to keeping your site’s SEO in good shape. And don’t forget to invest some more time into your long term seo strategy whenever you can, for a truly sustainable approach to SEO!

Keep reading: What makes a good website? »

The post Everyday website optimization: 6 tasks for your daily SEO routine appeared first on Yoast.

Holistic SEO: Improve every aspect of your website

Joost de Valk

At Yoast, we try to combat the notion that SEO is just a trick. While tricks might get you ranked quickly, they usually don’t work in the long run, and they might even backfire. Permanently ranking well in Google demands an extensive SEO strategy focused on every aspect of your website; the technical stuff, the user experience, the content on your website and the security of your website all need to be in order. So, to keep ranking well in Google, you should develop a holistic SEO approach. Let me explain what that is, here.

What is holistic SEO?

Holistic SEO (search engine optimization) refers to improving all important aspects of a website to make it rank higher in the search engines. The ultimate goal is to make a website fulfill its users’ needs on all levels. Not only by providing the right information at the right time, but also by being easy and safe to use. To reach this goal, website owners should, at least, focus on the following aspects of their site:

Why a holistic SEO approach?

Google’s mission is to build the perfect search engine that helps people find what they are looking for, whether that’s the answer to “Where is Wijchen?”, a recipe for apple pie or the best toaster. Making your website and your marketing strategy fit this goal is the way to go. (Which doesn’t mean that if Google says jump, you ask, how high?).

While Google has changed its algorithm numerous times, most of our advice has remained the same ever since we started. This advice is simple (which doesn’t mean it’s easy though!): you have to make sure your site is exceptionally good. Having a website with high-quality content, offering a great user experience and up to date security will not instantly improve your ranking. In the long run, though, it will definitely have a positive effect on your SEO!

Great websites tend to get more links from other websites and will also receive more social media attention. On top of that, people behave differently on a website which they like, compared to a website they don’t understand. Google uses these kinds of user signals to find out how people experience your site.

Awesome websites will also result in higher conversions. If your audience likes and understands your website, the chance of them buying your products or returning to your website is, of course, much higher.

Learn SEO, the holistic way

Sure, you say, but where to start? We understand you might feel overwhelmed by this advice. Fortunately, there are many ways to improve your knowledge about the above-mentioned topics.

For starters, we offer a free SEO for beginners course, a great starting point to learn how SEO works. If you really want to put this knowledge to practice, consider trying our All-around SEO training, you’ll get lots of hands-on tips to start improving many aspects of your own site. Just want to read? Check out these beginners’ guides to help you get started!

Read more: Link building from a holistic SEO perspective »

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