Bikash Rai, Author at Acme Themes Blog https://www.acmethemes.com/blog/author/bikash/ WordPress Themes and Plugins, WordPress Tips and Tricks, News and Events Wed, 07 Jun 2023 10:21:51 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.4.2 https://www.acmethemes.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/cropped-acmethemes-32x32.png Bikash Rai, Author at Acme Themes Blog https://www.acmethemes.com/blog/author/bikash/ 32 32 109068206 15 Free SEO Tools For Website in 2023 https://www.acmethemes.com/blog/15-free-seo-tools-for-website/ https://www.acmethemes.com/blog/15-free-seo-tools-for-website/#comments Thu, 26 Nov 2020 11:46:32 +0000 https://www.acmethemes.com/blog/?p=5741 Are you aware of these awesome and Free SEO Tools? If you are working in the SEO industry for a long time, you must know all of these. But if you are not, we will be listing 15 of the best free SEO tools in this article. There are lots of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) tools available in the market developed for different purposes. Some of them are free to use whereas some of them are paid. You need an SEO tool to closely monitor your website stats and performance. SEO task is not as easy as we think as there are too many competitors in the market. On top of that, with the continuous update and improvement in the […]

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Are you aware of these awesome and Free SEO Tools?

If you are working in the SEO industry for a long time, you must know all of these. But if you are not, we will be listing 15 of the best free SEO tools in this article.

There are lots of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) tools available in the market developed for different purposes. Some of them are free to use whereas some of them are paid. You need an SEO tool to closely monitor your website stats and performance.

SEO task is not as easy as we think as there are too many competitors in the market. On top of that, with the continuous update and improvement in the search engine algorithm, there are lots of things to take care of in order to rank higher in the SERPs.

Why use free SEO tools?

The very first benefit of using a Free SEO tool is you don’t have to pay a single penny. Moreover, these free SEO tools are super helpful for your websites to check, improve, measure, track/monitor the SEO performance and website traffic.

Some of the mentioned free SEO tools are offered by Google itself such as Google Analytics, Google Search Console, Google Page Insights, and Google Mobile-Friendly Test. So, these tools are something that you should not miss out on as an SEO professional. These tools do not give just the result of the website, but also guide you to improve your website for better ranking.


List of 15 Free SEO Tools

1. Google Analytics

Google Analytics Screen Shot

Google Analytics is one of the best tool provided by Google. It gives you in-depth insights of users, their demography, geography, intention. You can track vital information of visitors, how they came to site, where are they from, which demographics, most popular content and lots of other results. This is one of my favorite tools that I use every day of my life.

2. Google Search Console

Google search console Screen shot

Google Search Console is another essential tool by Google that helps you to monitor, maintain, and troubleshoot your site’s presence in Google Search results. The difference between Google Analytics and Google Search Console is, Analytics is user-oriented, providing data related to those who visit and interact with your website. Likewise, Google Search Console is search-engine focused, providing tools and insights that can help site owners improve visibility and presence in the SERPs. As an SEO professional, you must use Google Search Console to track the performance of the website in every aspect.

3. Google Keyword Planner

Google Keyword Planner

Google Keyword Planner is a free Google Ads tool for new or experienced advertisers that’s like a workshop for building new Search Network campaigns. You can use Keyword Planner to search for keywords and see how a list of keywords might perform. Keyword Planner can also help you choose competitive bids and budgets to use with your campaigns. This article goes over the ways you can use Keyword Planner to lay the groundwork for a successful campaign.

4. Ubbersuggest

ubbersuggest

Ubersuggest is a free keyword research tool that was previously known as ubersuggest.io. Ubersuggest is one of the best keyword research tools because it has a friendly user interface, main and related keyword suggestions, and also displays the top 100 SERPs for each clicked keyword/keyphrase. You can also get competition scores.

Using Ubersuggest, you can do competitor keyword research. All you need to do is to enter the website’s URL and check which posts receive the most traffic and what are the top keywords for the website. However, the stats are slightly off, so use it for guidance, but don’t trust it blindly.

5. Answer the Public

answer the public

Answer the public is another free SEO tool that visualizes the search query that users are asking on Google. Answer the public is a clever consumer insight tool that combines the suggested searches from Google and Bing. It fetches and maps keyword suggestions that you see when you perform a Google search.

You can use this tool to develop a keyword idea so that you create content that users are searching for.

6. Google Mobile-Friendly Test

mobile friendly test

Google Mobile-Friendly tool helps you to test whether or not your website is mobile-friendly. Google strictly tests each and every site to be fitted on the mobile screen. This free tool not only gives you the mobile-friendly result but also provides you additional resources along with JS script messages.

7. Speed Test Tools – Google Page Speed/GTMetrix/Pingdom Tools

Google Page Speed

Google Page Speed or GTMetrix or Pingdom Tool is used for measuring the website speed. These tools tell exactly how fast the website is loading and also tell what caused the website to load slowly. Since the site’s loading speed plays a significant role in ranking factors, you need to closely monitor the site’s speed.

Google has indicated site speed is one of the signals used by its algorithm to rank pages. And research has shown that Google might be specifically measuring time to the first byte when it considers page speed. In addition, a slow page speed means that search engines can crawl fewer pages using their allocated crawl budget, and this could negatively affect your indexation.

These tools are free to use and a great way to test your site’s performance.

8. SEMrush

semrush result

Semrush is a freemium SEO Tool that helps you to analyze the keywords, track the keyword strategy used by your competitors.  SEMrush is trusted by internet marketers all over the world. It is also used by a number of businesses, big and small.

SEMrush is specific to finding profitable keywords. It is the best SEO tool which is highly recommended by most SEO professionals. You can get 30 months for free and later you can upgrade for more features.

9. Seobility

seobility

In the list of Free SEO Tools, we have Seobility. It is an online SEO software for better website optimization and SEO monitoring. Optimize your website for better search engine rankings. Sustainably.” Seobility is an online SEO software for better website optimization. Seobility checks your complete website, by crawling all linked pages.

10. SEO Plugins

WordPress SEO plugins are another best free tool to use for ranking better. There are many SEO plugins but among them, Yoast is a widely used plugin followed by All in One SEO Pack and RankMath. Read full comparison between Yoast SEO vs All in One SEO Pack. RankMath is also getting positive feedback from the users.

11. Siteliner

siteliner

Siteliner is another free SEO tool that lets you explore your website, revealing key issues that affect your site’s quality and search engine rankings. Siteliner also gives you in-depth insight about the following issues:

  • Duplicate Content – Duplicate content can lower your site’s search engine rankings, reducing the traffic to your site. Siteliner systematically checks your site for internal duplicate content, highlighting it on each page, intelligently excluding common content such as menus and navigation./
  • Broken Links – Broken links can damage your site’s user experience and lower your site’s search engine rankings. Siteliner checks all internal links on your site to ensure they are working and highlight the broken links so you can fix them easily.
  • Page Power – Siteliner identifies the pages that are most prominent to search engines as they crawl through your site based on the link patterns between your pages.
  • Reports – Siteliner crawls and analyzes the pages on your site, revealing key information about each page. Siteliner provides a standard XML Sitemap for your site, as well as a more detailed Siteliner Report.

You can use the Siteliner tool for free up to 250 pages/month.

12. SEOSiteCheckup

seositecheckup

SEO Site Checkup aims to make search engine optimization (SEO) easy. This free tool provides simple, professional-quality SEO analysis and critical SEO monitoring for websites. It shows you all the necessary reports needed for SEO and you can fix it for better ranking. This tool is developed by the SEO professionals by considering how algorithms, penalties and SEO factors have evolved since the early days of search.

13. Google Trends

google trends

Google Trends is a free tool by Google that is used for comparative keyword research and to discover event-triggered spikes in keyword search volume. Google Trends provides keyword-related data including search volume index and geographical information about search engine users.

Google Trends algorithm analyzes the popularity of top search queries in Google Search across various regions and languages. The website uses graphs to compare the search volume of different queries over time. You can use this data to extract the particular keyword that is searching by users.

14. Google My Business

Google My Business

Setting up Google My Business (GMB) previously known as Google Local is very important for any local business. It is a free and easy-to-use tool for businesses and organizations to manage your online presence across Google, including Search and Maps. By verifying and editing your business information, you can both help customers find you and tell them the story of your business.

It feeds information to a variety of places, including the local pack and Google Maps search results, but the most familiar appearance will likely be when it’s in the top right (or top on mobile) of a branded search for your business.

15.  Rich Results Test

Rich Result Test

This tool lets you check if your website if valid for Google’s Rich Results. But, getting a passing grade doesn’t mean your page will automatically display rich results in the SERPs, but think of it as the cost of admission. This tool is an updated version of Google’s previous structured data testing tool and is designed to make testing and diagnosing your page’s structured data easier.

Final Words,

Whether you are a website owner or SEO professional, you should keep tracking your website performance frequently in order to beat the ranking. Even if you are already well-ranked, it is a challenging task for you to hold the position.  For that, you should keep your website up-to-date, error-free and technically sound. So, the above-mentioned tools can help you to come in front of your competitors.

So, what di you think about this tool? How many of these tools are you familiar with? Write down your experience and suggestion in the comment section below. Also, check out our other articles on Search Engine Optimization, Website Traffic, and WordPress Themes.

Other Posts:

If you liked this article, then consider following us on Twitter and Facebook and LinkedIn.

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How to Create a WordPress Website in 5 Easy Steps in 2023 https://www.acmethemes.com/blog/how-create-a-wordpress-website/ https://www.acmethemes.com/blog/how-create-a-wordpress-website/#comments Thu, 06 Feb 2020 12:53:38 +0000 https://www.acmethemes.com/blog/?p=6614 Today, everyone is going online. From small stores to big supermarkets, they are already expanding their online-based customer. As there are a growing number of people on the internet, you have to be found on the internet. The popularity of the Internet has prompted businesses of all sizes to have an online presence in the form of a Website. You now are no more a local vendor. You can reach millions of customers across the globe with the help of the internet. To reach to global audiences, the best way is to build a website that can be accessed from every corner of the globe. Building a website is not a big deal in today’s time! Back in the old […]

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Today, everyone is going online.

From small stores to big supermarkets, they are already expanding their online-based customer. As there are a growing number of people on the internet, you have to be found on the internet. The popularity of the Internet has prompted businesses of all sizes to have an online presence in the form of a Website.

You now are no more a local vendor. You can reach millions of customers across the globe with the help of the internet. To reach to global audiences, the best way is to build a website that can be accessed from every corner of the globe.

Building a website is not a big deal in today’s time! Back in the old days, only tech-savvy or technically expert people could build websites. But today, launching a website became quite easy. Especially, with the rise of the Content Management System (CMS) like WordPress, anyone can build and launch a website.

In this article, we are going to discuss the Website Building process in 5 easy steps.

Let’s get started!


Why Do You Need a Website in 2023?

There are lots of channels you could reach people. Such as social media channels, email, and forums.  But the best option among these is having a website.

If you do not have a website for your business then your business is not performing to its fullest capabilities. At least in today’s time.

Having a website have multiple benefits. They can be listed below –

  • You can reach global customers by widening your demography and geography
  • You will have full control over your website design, content
  • You can increase sales by giving your customers an opportunity to buy online
  • Having a website helps customer’s convenience
  • A website increases business credibility
  • You can serve your customers 24×7
  • Build your customers base
  • A website helps in gathering the information of your customers and building a strategy to serve better marketing
  • and many more …

Here are 5 easy steps to create a website in 2021!

1) Buy Domain and Get Hosting


What is a Domain Name?

Domain name is the phrase that is used to identify the IP address of your website. Domain names are used to identify specific web pages. For example, acmethemes.com is a domain name. The purpose of the domain name is to minimize the complexity of every webpage’s accessibility. Without a domain name system, you would have to memorize the complex IP address for every website.

Tips to choose domain names

  • Try to pick up a short name
  • You can use numbers but avoid using numbers and hyphens
  • Pick up a name that reflects your business

Get Hosting


Investing in a reliable hosting service is an important part of your business. If you do not have reliable hosting, your website will not be available to the users at the time of the query (or maybe load slowly). If your website is not available, Google can not find you, and once Google notices it, your website will not be indexed.

SiteGround – [ Reliable Hosting ]

siteground

SiteGround is one of the most popular hosting providers recommended by WordPress.org. They have a quick support team that provides 24/7 support. SiteGround has various features for managing WordPress sites: one-click install, one-click staging, built-in WP caching, automatic upgrades, WP-CLI, git integration, and more.

 

Start With Siteground


Kinsta [Best WordPress Hosting ]

kinstaKinsta is another best WordPress hosting platforms. Unlike the regular cPanel admin, they have a distinct and their own custom panel which is much easier and more flexible. It offers Business, Enterprise, and Custom hosting solutions based on the user’s needs. It provides excellent performance along with high security. Some of its important features include optimized backups, free migration, supports of SSL, high speed, and many others.

Start With Kinsta


Bluehost [No. 1 Hosting Recommended For WordPress Website ]

bluehostBluehost is another best hosting company recommended by WordPress.org. Bluehost powers over 2 million websites, and Bluehost offers the ultimate WordPress platform. Tuned for WordPress, Bluehost offers WordPress-centric dashboards and tools along with 1-click installation, a FREE domain name, email, FTP, and more. Easily scalable and backed by legendary 24/7 support by in-house WordPress experts.

Start With Bluehost


2) Install WordPress

WordPress

What is WordPress?

WordPress is open-source software to create a beautiful website, blog, or app. WordPress is a top Content Management System (CMS) in the world today. WordPress powers more than a quarter of all websites in the world. Millions of people use WordPress to build a website including some big companies like CNN, TechCrunch, SONY, New York Times, TED, etc.

Let’s look at WordPress Statistics as of February 2020

  • WordPress is used by 62.4% of all the websites whose content management system we know. This is 35.7% of all websites.
  • WordPress blogs are written in over 120 languages, including Spanish and Dutch
  • WordPress users include CNN, TED, UPS, CBS Radio, TIMES, Tech Crunch, etc
  • Over 409 million people view more than 20 billion pages each month.
  • Users produce about 70 million new posts and 77 million new comments each month.

CMS market share

Why WordPress?

Here are the 10 reasons to use WordPress to build a website.

 

  1. It is Free and open source
  2. It is flexible
  3. There are more than 54000+ WordPress plugins
  4. WordPress theme rich
  5. Expert community
  6. Easy backup
  7. It is secure
  8. WordPress is SEO friendly
  9. WordPress is responsive

Being said that, WordPress is truly a great platform that allows us to customize and build a website that we want. Here are the 10 Reasons to Build a Website on WordPress platforms.


Essential WordPress Setting For New Website

1) Create Essential Pages

The second most important thing to do before publishing the first blog is to create essential pages like About, Privacy Policy, Terms and Conditions, Contact Page, Affiliate Disclaimer (If you running some kind of Affiliate Programs), GDPR compliance, etc.

Creating these pages with detailed content helps your website proves to be authentic. Also when you apply for some affiliate programs, or partnerships, and monetize your blog, the second party clearly checks for these pages. Having these pages also let your potential and existing customer know more about you.

2) Set Up Permalink in Right Way

Permalink setting of WordPress lets you set how the permanent URL structure of your individual posts, pages, categories, and tag archives will be. Permalink structure plays a great role in SEO and site ranking as the URL is the gateway for the web crawler.

“Permalink” – the name itself suggests that this is the permanent link of each post (Uniform Resource Locator-URL). It is also called the web address of the post that should not be changed once it is set. The following figure shows an example of a URL.

permalink setting

3) Setup Google Analytics and Google Search Console

Another important thing to do right after the installation of WordPress (new website) is to configure Google Analytics and Google Search ConsoleGoogle Analytics is the most popular tool by Google used to measure the visitors to your website. By using Google Analytics you can track visitors, how they came to the site, where are they from, which demographics, the most popular content, and lots of other results.

Google Search Console, on the other hand, is a tool by Google that helps you to monitor, maintain, and troubleshoot your site’s presence in Google Search results. The difference between Google Analytics and Google Search Console is, that Analytics is user-oriented, providing data related to those who visit and interact with your website. Likewise, Google Search Console is search-engine focused, providing tools and insights that can help site owners improve visibility and presence in the SERPs.

4) Install Robot.txt and Sitemap.xml

Installing robot.txt will help your site to establish communication with web crawlers and other web robots. Robot.txt is a small file that allows the website owner to specify the specific pages or areas of the website to be blocked from scanning or processing. It also tells web robots which pages to crawl. The slash after “Disallow” tells the robot to not visit any pages on the site.

Also, install sitemap.xml or sitemap.html. SEO plugins like Yoast automatically create a sitemap.xml file for your website. Basically, A Sitemap is an XML file that lists the URLs for a site. It allows webmasters to include additional information about each URL: when it was last updated, how often it changes, and how important it is in relation to other URLs in the site.

5) Configure the Discussion Section

Another important setting in WordPress before publishing is configuring the discussion section. In the WordPress site, you get lots of spam comments so you should configure in a way that you stop getting spam comments. There are lots of plugins that stop spam comments however, you can also control these types of comments. You can even block the users from commenting on specific posts.

WordPress Discussion


3) Install Plugins

After setting basic settings, you need to install essential plugins.

Plugins extend extra functionality to your website. But while choosing plugins, you need to install only those plugins which are essential for the website. Unnecessary and broken plugins harm your website.

Here we have listed 10 essential plugins that a new website must have.  These plugins are –

S.N Plugins
1 Gutentor – Gutenberg block-based page builder Free
2 JetPack by WordPress.com Free/Paid
3 RankMath  Free/Paid
4 Social Sharing Free/Paid
5 Table Designer Plugin  Free
6 OneSignal Push Notification Free/Paid
7 Form Builder Free
8 Broken Link Checker Free
9 UpdraftPlus – Backup/Restore Free/Paid
10 Cache Plugin Free

Among many WordPress plugins, these are must-have plugins that help you extend your website’s functionality. Let’s look at these plugins one by one –

1. Gutentor 

Gutentor is a Gutenberg-based page building block that helps you to build all types of professional websites without having programming knowledge. Its ready-made blocks and templates allow you to build the website’s components with simple drag-and-drop features. The blocks and templates come with highly customizable features.

2. Jetpack by WordPress

Jetpack plugin is a multipurpose plugin that gives you everything you need to design, secure, and grow your site in one bundle. With Jetpack, you can: Fully customize your site with free themes, image tools, and rich content.

It also helps you guarding you against brute-force attacks and unauthorized logins. The basic protection is always free, while premium plans add expanded backup and automated fixes.

3. RankMath

RankMath is easy to use simple and secure WordPress SEO plugin. It helps you to better optimize your content for better ranking and driving traffic to your website. Although this plugin is new in the SEO market, RankMath has received positive responses from its users.

Check OutYoast vs RankMath SEO comparison 

4. Social Sharing

For a website, a social sharing option is a must. With the help of this plugin, readers can easily share the content through their different social media channels. This helps in reaching out to different customers.

There are lots of social media sharing plugins, but my personal favorite plugins are Social Sharing Buttons – by Mediavine. But there are tons of plugins you can choose from.

5. Table Designer Plugin 

On every website, you need a table to present some of your data in tabular form. In this case, you need the right table plugin for WordPress.  There are mainly two popular table designer plugins, TablePress and Ninja Table. You can use these plugins to design tables for your posts and pages with their easy-to-use features.

6. OneSignal Push Notification 

OneSignale helps you to increase user engagement on your website by sending visitors targeted push notifications. This plugin makes sure that users just keep coming back. It is a very easy-to-use plugin and takes a few minutes to install.

You can configure notification delivery at preset intervals, create user segments, and customize the opt-in process for visitors.OneSignal’s free plan allows targeting up to 30,000 subscribers with push notifications.

7. Form Builder

Form builder plugin allows you to create forms in your WordPress. There are many form builder plugins in the market, but among them, the popular form builder plugins are Contact Form 7 and Ninja Forms. These plugins help you to create beautiful, professional contact forms with drag & drop feature in minutes.

8. Broken Link Checker

Broken links on websites harm your website’s health. You need to take care of the link you have maintained on your website. If your links take users to 404 pages or broken pages, the search engine considers it a negative aspect of SEO.

Broken Link Checker plugin allows you to check the broken links of your website so that you can manually take action to fix the links. This plugin gives you notifications of each and every broken link.

9. Updraft Plus

You need to have a regular backup of your website data in order to keep you safe from unexpected data losses.

UpdraftPlus is a WordPress plugin for the backup and restoration of website data. It is the world’s highest-ranking and most popular scheduled backup plugin, with over two million currently active installs.  You can back up your files and database backups into the cloud and restore them with a single click.

10. Cache Plugin 

Website speed is an important aspect when it comes to ranking. Google takes care of how fast a particular website is loaded and decides which website to rank higher on its page. So, in this case, a caching plugin comes into action. A caching plugin generates static HTML pages of your website and saves them on your server. Whenever a user tries to access your website, your caching plugin serves up the lighter HTML page instead of processing the comparatively heavier WordPress PHP scripts. This helps in reducing the overall load time of your page.

Check Out10 free techniques to speed up your WordPress website


4) Design Website

WordPress Dashboard

Designing a WordPress website is one of the most challenging jobs I have ever experienced.

You have to play with lots of customization, header, footer, navigation, menus, and all. But now you don’t need to worry about the designing aspect of your website.

You can simply use Gutentor to create any type of website within very little time. Let’s know more about Gutenetor.

What is Gutentor?

Gutentor is a complete page builder based on the Gutenberg blocks. It is a new innovative way to create blocks and follow best practices and guidance on how to design, build and manage web page content and pages.

gutentor

Features of Gutentor

  • Gutentor Element
  • Gutentor Module
  • Gutentor Widget
  • One-click Demo Templates Library for ready-made templates and blocks
  • Faster Designing Experience
  • Complete Webpage building blocks with all necessary features
  • Extremely simple, without adding row/columns, just adding block is sufficient to make a beautiful website
  • Repeater field to create items inside blocks with drag and drop reorder, edit, delete options
  • Highly customizable row/columns options available for creative designers
  • Advanced options on each block including HTML Tag, Background, Border, Box-shadow, Margin-Padding, Svg shape divider, and built-in animations.
  • Block Template module on each block, Single block multiple design Template,
  • Individual elements full styling options
  • Device-specific responsive controls
  • Advanced Typography Options which includes all available google fonts and systems fonts
  • Video background Options
  • Inline, Internal or External CSS files for dynamic CSS

Find the video tutorial about Gutentor here.


5) Publish Your First Blog

Publishing quality is one of the important approaches to winning the Google ranking. Let’s look at the basic

blog layout wordpress

You can add new blog from the Dashboad>Posts>New Post 

Things to consider while publishing a blog post

  1. Do Keywords research
  2. Develop original content
  3. Focus on content formatting
  4. Find relevant images
  5. Maintain internal linking
  6. Check the mistakes before publish

1. Keyword Research

Keyword research is the first phase of your content development strategy. An article developed without proper keyword research is like pouring water in the sand. So, before start writing a post on a particular topic, you should conduct proper keyword research. Keyword research involves, finding out the primary keyword, analysis of search volume & competition, keyword difficulty, pages that are already ranked for, and finding out the LSI keywords. So, perper keyword research is very crucial for every blog post.

There are lots of Keyword Search Tools in the market. Some of them are available for free with limited features. Google Keyword Planner is the best free keyword search tool. This tool lets you analyze, keyword search volume, competition, keyword difficulty, Cost Per Click (CPC), etc.

2. Develop Original Content

After the keyword research, write quality content so that you provide value to your readers. You have to develop quality content to be safe from duplicate content.

3. Content Formatting

For better ranking, your content should be well formatted. Well-structured content helps your reader to read content more easily and also it is good for search engines.

These are the 5 key content formatting steps.

  • Use headings
  • Use bulleted and numbered lists
  • Use bold text for memorable phrases
  • Use relevant graphics and images
  • Give photos helpful captions

4. Find Relevant Images

According to the Http Archive report, images make up on average 21% of a total webpage’s weight. Along with the texts, images are the most important elements on a website. Search engines like Google also rate text content with images better than content without images.

Check OutImage Optimization Guide for WordPress

5. Link Internally

Internal linking is the process of linking one content to another according to the context within the same website. It helps your readers to find more relevant posts on the website. Internal linking is one of the important factors from an SEO perspective as well as the user’s perspective. Internal linking helps in navigating the different contextual pages within the website.

6. Check The Mistakes Before Publish

Before publishing your content, you have to check properly whether there are grammatical mistakes, broken links, or some other mistakes in sentences.

It is a good practice to conduct a content examination before publishing it.


Related Article 

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6 Tactics to Integrate Email Marketing and Social Media https://www.acmethemes.com/blog/integrate-email-marketing-and-social-media/ https://www.acmethemes.com/blog/integrate-email-marketing-and-social-media/#comments Tue, 04 Feb 2020 05:48:16 +0000 https://www.acmethemes.com/blog/?p=6600 Many have wondered whether you can combine email marketing and social media.  The answer is a definite yes! As consumer behavior is becoming more omnichannel, businesses need to adopt a more holistic approach to digital marketing that incorporates multiple channels. In this case, using two of the most popular channels will help you create the ultimate formula to boost your conversions and promote your growth. To do that, I’ll show you 6 simple yet effective tactics to integrate email marketing and social media for better results. But first, let’s take a look at the differences between these two channels. Email Marketing vs Social Media While email marketing and social media focus on delivering exceptional messages to people who are interested […]

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Many have wondered whether you can combine email marketing and social media. 

The answer is a definite yes!

As consumer behavior is becoming more omnichannel, businesses need to adopt a more holistic approach to digital marketing that incorporates multiple channels. In this case, using two of the most popular channels will help you create the ultimate formula to boost your conversions and promote your growth.

To do that, I’ll show you 6 simple yet effective tactics to integrate email marketing and social media for better results. But first, let’s take a look at the differences between these two channels.

Email Marketing vs Social Media

While email marketing and social media focus on delivering exceptional messages to people who are interested in your business, they both have a couple of main differences.

Interaction

When it comes to the interaction between your audience and your channel, emails offer a more limited response. This means that when a subscriber receives your email, they will open it and decide whether to click on your CTA or not.  If they do, then you can send them either a thank you email, a cross-sell campaign or any other post-purchase message.  Social media, on the other hand, will allow you to open a discussion with your followers and give solutions to their pain-points through comments and direct messages. Social media, in that respect, is a more personal channel to communicate with your audience and show them that you are a real person who cares about them.

Personalization

One of the advantages of email marketing is that you can personalize your subscribers’ experience based on their interests. This personalization is possible through segmentation, a process that allows you to group your subscribers according to specific demographics like age, gender, location, and interests. Apart from that, this information will let you come up with different email campaigns for your segments, maximizing your email open, click-through and conversion rates.

According to email marketing statistics, personalization can help you increase your open rates by an amazing 29%. For social media, though, segmenting your messages is not possible. Once you make a post, your social media followers will see the same message regardless of their age, gender and interests.

6 Amazing Ways to Integrate Email Marketing and Social Media

1. Create a Signup Call-to-Action on Facebook

As of the third quarter of 2019, Facebook had 2.45 billion active users per month, making it the biggest social media network worldwide. Due to its massive audience, businesses usually include Facebook in their social media marketing strategy.

Through sharing and commenting on your Facebook posts, your followers help you increase your brand awareness and expand your reach. Now, what if I told you that you can use your Facebook page to expand your mailing list as well?  What you need to do is to turn your main Facebook CTA into your newsletter signup button and voila! By doing this, you will show your target audience that you want them to join your mailing list, offering them an easy way to do it through their favorite platform.

Here’s an example from Airtable:

Airtable Facebook Page

To turn your CTA into a signup button you need to click on the “Create Call-to-Action” button found on your Facebook page and select the “Sign Up” button from the dropdown menu.

The next step, which requires a bit more of your time, is to link your online signup form. To do that, you first need to create your amazing online form. If you want to save time, then you should choose one of the best online form builders out there to help you create your newsletter signup form fast and easy.

Now, it’s time to link your form and start expanding your mailing list!

2. Add a newsletter signup tab 

Another way to add a newsletter signup form on your page without sacrificing your precious CTA is through your Facebook page tabs.

Especially for eCommerce businesses that want to use their Facebook CTA to promote their products, adding a separate tab on the left side of your page will help you boost your sales and your signups at the same time.

Here’s an example from Moonpie’s Facebook page:

moonpie facebook page

As you can see, the brand has both an email signup tab and a “Shop Now” CTA.

This tactic is great for businesses that want to give emphasis to different CTAs but also give their social media followers a simple way to join their list and enjoy its benefits.

3. Insert social media buttons in your email campaigns

A large social media audience will, undoubtedly, help boost your signups and grow your list. 

However, what about expanding your social media reach through email? Is this even possible? Well, if you’ve seen as many email campaigns as I have, then you might have noticed that the majority of them include various social media buttons.

Here’s what I’m talking about:

social media button example

Adding social buttons is the most common email and social media integration practice that every business out there does.

So, when you add them to your emails, your subscribers will automatically know that there are multiple channels they can communicate with you.

Sending them directly to your social media accounts will incentivize them to follow you and engage with your posts.

However, the most important thing is that you’ll lead them to a place where they’ll be able to create valuable user-generated content and share their experiences with their peers.

What this means for you is free content to increase your brand visibility, credibility, and social media follower count.

4. Turn your emails into social campaigns

Social buttons are great, but their power is limited to a simple icon at the end of your email campaign.

If you want to skyrocket your social reach, then you need a powerful social campaign to make a statement. These campaigns don’t need to be complex or too fancy, but rather focus on why your subscriber needs to turn into your social media follower.

Here’s a great example from Handy:

Social Campaign

Handy’s campaign promotes its three social media accounts through six images that draw attention to the account and the reason why subscribers need to follow them.

While the copy is limited, the visuals and the captions “follow to win prices” and “Handy saves time” give their subscribers all the right reasons to follow the company’s accounts.

5. Create a Tailored Audience with your mailing list

The best way to leverage the power of your mailing list is to convert it into a file, upload and create a tailored audience.

To create a Tailored Audience you need to go to your Twitter Audience Manager and find the “Create new audience.” option

When you click on it, you’ll get the option to upload your own list.

create a Tailored Audience

Uploading your subscriber list will give you the opportunity to personalize your contacts and add a face and a name to them.

As your subscribers like to share their favorite things throughout social media, you’ll manage to gather valuable information about their interests and preferences.

Then, you can use the data to create personalized campaigns that will engage them better.

Having a tailored audience will also give you the opportunity to retarget your disengaged subscribers through social media ads and discover which social media influencers are best your tailored audience.

6. Enable social sharing for your emails

Depending on your industry, email marketing will allow you to create campaigns that will incentivize your subscribers to click on your CTA. While your email audience might be enough to land the conversions you desire, expanding the reach of your message through social media will let you achieve more. That’s where social sharing comes in. This practice will give you the opportunity to make your messages shareable and give you extra visibility and conversions in return.

Here’s what social sharing looks like:

social share example

When your subscribers share your email content, you’ll get access to their industry-related peers and increase your email CTR in the most cost-effective way. So, when you start integrating your email marketing and social media, don’t forget to make your emails shareable on social media.

Takeaway

Adopting a more holistic approach to digital marketing will give you access to some of the most powerful marketing channel combinations. Email marketing and social media might be different by nature, but when you make them work in tandem you’ll get an incredible tool to boost your customer lifecycle marketing endeavors.

So, what are you waiting for? Start integrating your email marketing and social media and enjoy the benefits of their collaboration!


Author bio 

Marilia Dimitriou

Marilia Dimitriou is a Creative Writer working for email marketing software Moosend. Her passion for writing has made her find new ways to combine the art of Creative Writing with SEO Copywriting. When she’s not writing articles, you’ll find her enthusing over marketing tech and automation.


 

Other SEO Articles:

✅7 Techniques to Bulletproof  Your WordPress Website
Outbound Link | No Follow vs Do-Dollow Links

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What is On-SERP SEO? 10 Best Tips to Optimize For On-SERP SEO https://www.acmethemes.com/blog/on-serp-seo/ https://www.acmethemes.com/blog/on-serp-seo/#respond Mon, 03 Feb 2020 12:32:36 +0000 https://www.acmethemes.com/blog/?p=6558 Google always tries to give the best possible result to its users.  So, there are lots of things to consider for better results in the Search Engine Ranking Pages (SERPs). In our previous article, we have covered On-page SEO, Off-page SEO, Technical SEO, and Local SEO. You as a content producer need to focus on developing quality content for both Search Engines and Users. This is something that sounds like a white hat SEO. But there is another term called On-SERP SEO. Now in this article, we are going to cover the On-SERP SEO in detail. What is On-SERP SEO? On-SERP SEO is the technique of optimizing the website to increase visibility in the SERP. With the On-SERP SEO, you […]

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Google always tries to give the best possible result to its users.  So, there are lots of things to consider for better results in the Search Engine Ranking Pages (SERPs).

In our previous article, we have covered On-page SEO, Off-page SEO, Technical SEO, and Local SEO. You as a content producer need to focus on developing quality content for both Search Engines and Users. This is something that sounds like a white hat SEO. But there is another term called On-SERP SEO.

Now in this article, we are going to cover the On-SERP SEO in detail.

What is On-SERP SEO?

On-SERP SEO is the technique of optimizing the website to increase visibility in the SERP. With the On-SERP SEO, you can optimize your content for the zero-click results.

“Zero-click searches refer to a search engine results page (SERP) which answers the query right at the top such that the user doesn’t need any further clicks to complete the search. A zero-click search is one that satisfies the search intent at the top of the SERP.”

The concept of On-SERP SEO is to bring the brand on the front page of Google as much as possible. The ultimate goal of On-SERP SEO is to increase your click-through rate (CTR) and generate more organic traffic.

In the past days, meta title and description were the only SERP content that you could control. But now, there are more methods available for optimizing your on-SERP presence.

For that, you need ta take care of following elements –

  • A featured snippet
  • Meta Title and Description
  • Schema Markup
  • Ask boxes
  • Image and Video search
  • Map Pack
  • Google My Business
  • Google Sitelinks
  • Connect All Social Media Channels
  • Run paid ads

Importance of On-SERP SEO

Let’s look at the data published by SparkToro about the click behavior of users.

The statistic shows that, among 40 M+ browser-based searches on millions of desktop and mobile devices in the United States, more than half of the Google searches resulted in zero-clicks. See the figure below-

zero-click-result

On-SERP SEO helps in enhancing the visibility of your brand in the search results. It does not only increase the traffic to your website but also build trust in the search engine.


10 Best Tips to Optimize For On-SERP SEO

Optimizing for the On-SERP SEO involves various techniques. Some of these techniques are a part of on-page SEO techniques. But how is an On-SERP SEO is different from On-Page SEO?

Let’s describe the best On-SERP SEO techniques one by one.

1) Aim For Featured Snippet

Featured Snippet is a rich result that shows in the zero position on Google. The zero position is the top page in the search listing. Following is an example of featured snippets on the keyword “Pinterest SEO tips 2020”.

Google featured snippet.

Because of the trend towards zero-click searches, winning a featured snippet is a great way to increase awareness and defeat your competition for impressions. In general, the best way to win a featured snippet is to organize your content in a way that is logical and indicates to Google that you have a useful, succinct answer to the question being asked.

Note: The latest announcement (January 2020) from Google has stated that webpages in a featured snippet position will no longer be repeated in regular Page 1 organic listing.

2) Optimize Meta Title and Description

Optimizing Page Title is another most important factor for SEO. Although meta title and description are not only the SERP content that affects SERP results, meta title and description are still an important part to take care of.

So, you need to put a catchy and powerful title s0 that the user could click it.

title and description

Tips:

  • You can include modifiers like, “Best”, “Free”, “Tips”, “How to”, “Guide”, “Latest Date” etc.
  • Write title not more than 65 characters that perfectly fit on the screen.
  • The page title should always be in <H1> tag.

3) Add Schema Markup in Appropriate Sites

Schema markup helps search engines understand the topics of your content better via structured data. A rich snippet is a result shown on the Google page along with some other additional information so as to add value to the result. It stands out from the other snippets when it comes to the priority.

From the user’s perspective, just by looking at the result of the rich snippet, they get to know more about the content.  Because it is more appealing to the users, posts with rich snippets are likely to get more clicks. If the click-through rate (CTR) of your blog post increases, you will get more traffic. Ultimately, rich snippets will affect your ranking as well.

The following image shows the difference between rich snipped and normal snippets.

schema markup

Rich snippets can not be used in all types of content. The following are some of the content types where rich snippets can be used.

  • Recipe
  • Event
  • Apps
  • People
  • Products
  • Business and Organizations

How can you get rich snippets? 

You have to add structured data to your site so that Google can show a rich snippet. A piece of code in structured data tells Google to extract the maximum relevant data for rich snippet result. You can test the structure of your article using this Structure Data Testing Tool.

4) Optimize For Ask Boxes

Ask Box is the box area on the Google page shown in the tabbed form. The number of questions are shown up in this box based on the user’s query. Users generally click in these boxes when they are looking for a particular answer.

Optimize for ask boxes by answering the question in a structured way in your content. Get the idea of the related questions by analyzing the LSI keywords, Google Keyword Planner tool. You can insert the FAQs box (Gutenberg) within your content that lets your content to result for ask boxes. I recommend installing Gutentor for amazingly designed FAQ boxes.

Following is the example of how an ask box looks like in Google’s page.

Ask Boxes

5) Focus on Image and Video Search

Optimizing image and video content is one of the best practices in SEO. In fact, this practice also falls under the On-Page SEO. Based on the user’s query, video or image of your website have a better chance to appear on the front page via the image or video carousel.

However, the result might appear in different positions in the result page, so they’re not as fixed as featured snippets.

Just look at the example of video results in the following example.

video result of Google

Schema markup and optimization are important with video and image SEO, especially because there are brands that won’t take the extra step to work on it. For videos, make sure you have video schema markup (more on schema markup next).

6) Add Map Pack

Google’s Map Pack can be a great way to get in front of potential customers and clients locally. The local map pack is a listing available on some searches that includes a scrolling list of businesses within a category. A map pack contains the Google map location, star ratings, contact number, and website. You need to optimize for Local SEO in order to optimize the map pack.

Read detail about Local SEO techniques here.

google map pack

7) List in Google My Business

Getting listed in Google My Business is another best approach for On-SERP SEO. A Google My Business listing is important for appearing in both places on the SERP. Google will show the rich result on the right side of its page along with the related information.

Check out an example of Google My Business result below.

google my business listing

8) Google Sitelinks

Google Sitelinks are sub-listings that appear under the first result in the search result. Sitelinks increase the visual space of your search results by displaying the most important pages of your website directly within your search result. This results in direct navigation on your website.

Although you can’t force Google to display sitelinks, you can create a clear navigational structure – with strong internal links to the core pages, as well as anchors and alts tags that are descriptive – to increase your chances of Google displaying your sitelinks.

Google says –

“Our systems analyze the link structure of your site to find shortcuts that will save users time and allow them to quickly find the information they’re searching for . . . We only show sitelinks for results when we think they’ll be useful to the user.”

Google sitelinks

9) Connect All Social Media Channels

Social media channels play a great role in traffic to any website.

Google uses its knowledge panel to display all the information about your business in one condensed spot.

Connecting social media will provides more opportunities for the user to click on a search element that you own and control. Your social media profile may help in building brand awareness among customers.

10) Run Paid Ads

Although running ads cost you, it helps you to get an extra spot at the top that Google can’t take away from you. People are searching for keywords that your brand belongs to. In this case, you have to find out the cheapest keywords that you can run ads on so get more clicks on your website.

Google Ads

Lastly, in today’s world, digital marketers and companies need to be well versed in adopting the changing technology. In order to compete with the rapidly changing world in the competitive market, you need to care about lots of things at once.

Just follow the above techniques to win the traffic to your website.


Related Article 

If you liked this article, then consider following us on Twitter and Facebook and LinkedIn.

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10 Free Techniques To Speed Up WordPress Website https://www.acmethemes.com/blog/tips-to-speed-up-wordpress-website/ https://www.acmethemes.com/blog/tips-to-speed-up-wordpress-website/#comments Wed, 29 Jan 2020 12:54:00 +0000 https://www.acmethemes.com/blog/?p=6535 In the previous article, we have discussed Image Optimization in WordPress. In this article, we are going to discuss 10 free techniques to speed up WordPress website. Why WordPress Speed Matters? Google does take website speed as one of the ranking factors. This means your SEO performance is affected by the loading time of your website. So, if your website loads slow then Google downranks your website. Fast loading websites are not only a good experience for users but also it will be easier for a search engine to crawl. This directly impacts the conversion rate but also reduces the bounce rate of the website.  So, it is super important to make the website as fast as possible in order […]

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In the previous article, we have discussed Image Optimization in WordPress. In this article, we are going to discuss 10 free techniques to speed up WordPress website.

Why WordPress Speed Matters?

Google does take website speed as one of the ranking factors. This means your SEO performance is affected by the loading time of your website. So, if your website loads slow then Google downranks your website. Fast loading websites are not only a good experience for users but also it will be easier for a search engine to crawl. This directly impacts the conversion rate but also reduces the bounce rate of the website.  So, it is super important to make the website as fast as possible in order to rank well on the search engines.

You can check the loading speed of your website in Google’s PageSpeed Insights.

Related ArticleFirst Contentful Paint (FCP) and First Meaningful Paint (FMP) Explained

10 Free Techniques To Speed Up WordPress Website


1. Choose Good Hosting

Investing in a reliable hosting service is an important part of your business. If you do not have reliable hosting, your website will not be available to the users at the time of the query (or maybe load slow). If your website is not available, Google can not find you, and once Google notices it, your website will not be indexed.

So, investing in reliable hosting is a key decision you need to take. We have been using the Siteground for such a long time and their service is just great. In fact, it is the top three hosting companies recommended by WordPress itself.

It has tools that make managing WordPress sites easy: one-click install, managed updates, WP-Cli, WordPress staging, and git integration. They have a very fast support team with advanced WordPress expertise available 24/7.


2. Use CDN

Content delivery network

CDN stands for Content Delivery Network and as the name suggests, it is the delivery of the content based on the geographical location. The core concept of CDN is serving content from the nearest possible physical location in order to increase the speed of the website. When you use CDN, copies of your site are stored at multiple, geographically diverse data centers so that users have faster and more reliable access to your site.

The CDN server closest to a user is known as the “edge server”. When a user requests content from a website served through a CDN, they’re connected to the closest edge server, ensuring the best online experience possible.


3. Optimize Image

Image optimization is another important task of Search Engine Optimization. For WordPress, there are many image optimizer plugins available, among all, Smush and ShortPixel Image Optimizer is widely used plugins. These plugins do a great job after you upload images, but you have to do lots of things before you even upload the images. This helps in even better image optimization. Such as –

  • Image Size – You have to optimize your image size so as to make it light. This affects the loading speed of your website. But one thing you should be careful of is while reducing the size of your image, you should also take care of its resolution. You can use different tools to reduce the image size such as  tinypng.comtinyjpg.com. These online FREE TOOLs help you to reduce the size of your image keeping its quality optimum.
  • Proper Alt text –  Alt text (also called “alt description”, “alt-tag”) is the written copy that appears in place of an image on a webpage if that particular image fails to load on the screen. So, putting proper alt text is important for accessibility and Image SEO. Try to put the proper image alt tag that better describes the image.
  • Description of the Image – Description of your text describes the image. This is different from “alt text” because alt text is an “alternative text to the image” that will be shown on the screen when the image fails to load. But image description is the description of that particular image that is shown below the image to further describe the image.
  • Choosing the Proper format – There are mainly three image formats that are in use, JPEG, PNG, and GIF. I personally do not recommend GIF unless there is a “Must Use” situation. Although PNG produces better quality images, it comes in a larger size than JPEG format. So, you have to use the JPEG image in most of the cases in order to save size and quality. However, there might be some cases where PNG produces better results than JPEG. Just balance it.
  • Use Unique and High-Quality Image – Unique and High-quality images are crucial for any website. But, one important fact to understand is a high-quality image is not necessarily be of large size. We can maintain high resolution with the optimum size as well. So, optimize images before uploading them to the website.

4. Use Cache Plugin

Cache plugins

Installing a cache plugin is another important SEO setting for the WordPress website. A cache plugin generates static HTML pages of your website and saves it on your server. Each time a user tries to access your website, your caching plugin serves up the lighter HTML page instead of processing the heavy WordPress PHP scripts. This allows the caching plugin to tremendously improve your page loading time.

Tips

  • Top 3 cache plugins are WP Rocket, WP Super Cache, W3 Total Cache
  • Follow full documentation of the cache setup

Cache plugins like W3 Total Cache improve the SEO and user experience of your site by increasing website performance, reducing load times via features like content delivery network (CDN) integration and the latest best practices.


5. Lightweight Theme

WordPress theme quality is another important factor for the speed of the website. So, while choosing the WordPress themes, you should make sure that you pick up a lightweight theme. Some themes are so heavy that takes time to load the content.

There are thousands of WordPress themes available but the one with high speed, well-coded responsive theme is what we need to install. Fast loading and responsive theme are best for both search engines and users.

Tips

  • Choose a theme that is not only appealing visually but also fast and responsive
  • Keep checking Google Search Console if anything is wrong with the theme code and get the support from developers

A badly coded theme definitely going to harm your whole website.  Because the theme is the backbone of your website, you need to pick up the trusted theme from the trusted developer. There are lots of free themes available in the market, but the thing is they have designed and developed for different niches. Its speed, structure, responsiveness affect the SEO of your website. So, the theme is the first thing you should consider for better SEO. Acme Themes offers a wide range of Free and Premium Themes loved by thousands of users.

Explore the themes

What do you need to know about the theme?

  • Chose the theme from the trusted developers
  • The theme should be lightweight
  • The theme should be SEO friendly
  • Support from developer
  • Use the premium theme as must as possible for better support and features

6. Remove Unnecessary Plugins

As well know, WordPress is a plugin rich platform. There are thousands of plugin developers who developed various plugins for different purposes.  But installing random and unnecessary plugins adds an extra burden to the website. Broken and unauthorized plugins degrade the speed of the website and ultimately it creates a negative impact on ranking. So, use only needed and trusted plugin on your WordPress website.

Tips

  • Carefully look rating and last update date of the plugin
  • Do not forget to check the compatibility
  • Install only essential plugins and delete rest of the plugins

7. Use GZIP Compression

Use GZIP Compression

You can use GZIP compression that dramatically reduces the bandwidth usage and the time access time. GZIP compression compresses the files so, when a user makes a request, their browser will first have to unzip the website. A plugin like PageSpeed Ninja, helps you to enable GZIP compression. You can make your site load faster on desktop and mobile, fixing Google PageSpeed Insights issues with one click.


8. Don’t Upload Audio/Video Files Directly to WordPress

WordPress allows you to directly upload video or an audio file. These files take lots of bandwidth when users ask for the request. So, instead of directly upload the video to your website, you can use different audio and video hosting platforms. For audio, you can use SoundCloud.com and for the video, you can use Youtube.com and Vimeo.com.

WordPress comes with a great feature called auto-embeds that allows your website to automatically get the embed code from YouTube or Vimeo. You just need to copy the link of the video and paste it into the relevant place. This way you can save your bandwidth and speed up the loading time of your website.


9. Minify CSS &JS

When you check your website loading speed from tools like Pingdom or Google PageSpeed Insights, you get the report that says minify Javascript and CSS file. That means you need to reduce the JS and CSS calls to reduce the server response time.

By optimizing your code (including removing spaces, commas, and other unnecessary characters), you can dramatically increase your page speed. Also remove code comments, formatting, and unused code. This will eventually help you to save bandwidth usage.


10. Cleanup WordPress Database

Cleaning up the WordPress database is the process of deleting unwanted data from your database will keep its size to a minimum and also helps in reducing the size of your backups. It is also necessary to delete spam comments, fake users, old drafts of your content and maybe even unwanted plugins as well as themes. All of this will reduce the size of your databases and web files, and thus speed up WordPress – your WordPress.


Other SEO Articles:

7 Techniques to Bulletproof Your WordPress Website

✅What is Duplicate Content? How to Avoid it?

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7 Techniques to Bulletproof Your WordPress Website https://www.acmethemes.com/blog/how-to-secure-wordpress-website/ https://www.acmethemes.com/blog/how-to-secure-wordpress-website/#comments Tue, 28 Jan 2020 12:35:37 +0000 https://www.acmethemes.com/blog/?p=6499 WordPress’s popularity is growing massively. More than a Quarter of all websites in the world run on the WordPress platform. Although it was primarily famous for the blogging platform, now we can build any type of website using WordPress. Popular companies like CNN, TechCrunch, SONY, New York Times, TED are also used WordPress software to build their website. I personally in love with WordPress from the day I come to know about it. Statistics show that the popularity of WordPress is growing rapidly. With its popularity and growth, security equally comes as a vital challenge for website owners. Keeping safe from unauthorized access, manipulation, malicious attacks, and hacking become a crucial job for you. Especially if you perform an online […]

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WordPress’s popularity is growing massively. More than a Quarter of all websites in the world run on the WordPress platform.

Although it was primarily famous for the blogging platform, now we can build any type of website using WordPress. Popular companies like CNN, TechCrunch, SONY, New York Times, TED are also used WordPress software to build their website.

I personally in love with WordPress from the day I come to know about it. Statistics show that the popularity of WordPress is growing rapidly.

With its popularity and growth, security equally comes as a vital challenge for website owners. Keeping safe from unauthorized access, manipulation, malicious attacks, and hacking become a crucial job for you. Especially if you perform an online transaction through your website, it is compulsory that you need to keep your website safe.

Or even you do not have a financial transaction, you still need to keep your website safe from any type of security breaches.

In this article, I am going to share 7 actionable techniques for securing your WordPress website.

7 Techniques to Bulletproof Your WordPress Website


1. Install SSL

SSL Certificate

Installing SSL (Secure Socket Layer) is a very first step to keeping your website secure. Today, most of the hosting providers offer free SSL along with the hosting service. Depending on your hosting provider, you may need to obtain an SSL certificate and then install it. Just ask your hosting provider to enable SSL for your domain.

In the secured website, a browser, and a server attempt to connect to a website securely by encrypting data. SSL helps to keep an internet connection secure and safeguarding any sensitive data that is being sent between two systems (server and client). SSL uses encryption algorithms to scramble data in transit, preventing hackers from reading it as it is sent over the connection. So, only encrypted data are transferred over the internet on the SSL website.

Here are a few plugins that can help you install SSL in your WordPress websites.

  1. Really Simple SSL
  2. SSL Insecure Content Fixer 
  3. WP Force SSL

2. Keep Strong Admin Password and Keep it Secret

WordPress admin password security

Admin passwords are the primary key to get access to your website dashboard. You need to set a strong password so that someone can not easily guess it. Some people keep easy to guess password which is a blunder mistake. An advanced user or can easily crack your password and get into your system easily.

Generally, a combination of characters, capital letter, numbers are considered to be the strong password. A plain password like 123453 or password as an example of an insecure password.

A strong password can be something like –  P@s5w0rD#453. You also need to change the admin username to something different.

As we all know a password is everything for a business. Your password should be secret that no one knows except your business partner or trusted friends.


3. Keep Updated WordPress Version

 

wordpress

Keeping up do date WordPress version also helps to secure your WordPress website. It is good practice to keep your website up to date with the latest security features. Developers keep in mind that with every new update, they put extra effort into security. You can be safe from pre-identified loopholes and exploited hackers, which, a hacker uses to gain access to your site.

Also, you need to regularly update your plugins and themes as they are coming up with extra security features in each update.

You can check the update option from the Dashboard>Update

wordpress update

WordPress automatically suggests you update a newer version of the software. But it is important to know that before proceeding for big updates, you need to keep a safe backup of your data. It is because in some cases, you may lose your data.


4. Setup Double Authentication Login

Two factor authentication

Two-factor authentication allows you to set up a two-step login attempt. After setting up, you have to provide two logins credentials to be able to login to the dashboard.

WordPress plugins like Google Authenticator by miniOrange let you set up double authentication for WordPress website. It provides two-factor authentication (2FA, MFA) whenever login to your WordPress website ensuring no unauthorized access to your website.

This is one of the best ways to protect your website from unauthorized access. Only those who know the password and extra secret question will have access to the admin login.


5. Change Admin Path

hide admin login url

Changing the Admin URL is another best practice to keep your WordPress website secure. This practice protects your website by changing the login URL and preventing access to the wp-login.php page and wp-admin directory while not logged-in.

Normal URL – www.website.com/admin . or www.website.com/wp-admin 

Changed URL – www.website.com/miksi3221

In WordPress, the default admin URL can be accessed by /admin or /wp-admin. But once you customize it, you can put any words in the admin URL section. This helps in preventing the third person to get accessed on the admin login panel.

WordPress plugin like WPS Hide Login by WPServeur help to set up a login URL. It doesn’t literally rename or change files in core, nor does it add rewrite rules. It simply intercepts page requests and works on any WordPress website. The wp-admin directory and wp-login.php page become inaccessible, so you should bookmark or remember the URL. This plugin is super easy to set up and use.


6. Install Security Plugin

Wordpress security plugin

There are plenty of trusted plugins that guards your website against unauthorized access. A security plugin takes care of your website’s overall security from scanning malware, to blocking malicious attacks. You do not need to manually check the status of your website, instead, these plugins keep monitoring everything things you should do.

Wordfense includes an endpoint firewall and malware scanner that was built from the ground up to protect WordPress. This plugin arms with newest firewall rules, malware signatures and malicious IP addresses it needs to keep your website safe. Rounded out by 2FA and a suite of additional features, Wordfence is the most comprehensive WordPress security solution available.

Sucuri Security, on the other hand, is a WordPress security plugin that offers security activity auditing, file integrity monitoring, remote malware scanning, blacklist monitoring, effective security hardening, post-hack security actions, security notifications, and even website firewall.


7. Monitor Your Website Performance

Monitor Website securityNo matter how secure your WordPress website is, there is always room for improvement. Relying only on the plugins and tools does not guarantee that your website is 100% risk-free. You need continuous monitoring of the website with a periodic report. Besides the above-listed tasks, some important task includes the regular backup of the website, perform a security audit, keep track of website performance and many more.

Lastly,

It is always crucial to keep track of your website security and monitor it as it goes. website security is one of the crucial parts of a website. Above mentioned techniques are free that you should not pay a single penny.

So, why shouldn’t you give a little time to make your website secure?


Other SEO Articles:

WordPress 301 Redirect – Step By Step Guide 
Outbound Link | No Follow vs Do-Dollow Links
15 White Hat SEO Techniques To Drive Organic Traffic

If you liked this article, then consider following us on Twitter and Facebook and LinkedIn.

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15 White Hat SEO Techniques To Drive Organic Traffic in 2023 https://www.acmethemes.com/blog/white-hat-seo-techniques/ https://www.acmethemes.com/blog/white-hat-seo-techniques/#comments Fri, 24 Jan 2020 12:17:12 +0000 https://www.acmethemes.com/blog/?p=6463 When it comes to making an SEO strategy, there are many methods you can follow. It all depends on whether you want to do it for the long term or just for quick wins. For long term business, you have to build a legit strategy to outrank your competitors and drive the organic traffic. It involve research, developing strategies, execution, and continuity. Besides this lengthy process, there are quick and risky techniques to get ranking by implementing different SEO strategies. So, in general, SEO techniques based on these criteria are divided into three different types. White Hat Technique Gray Hat Technique and Black Hat Technique What is White Hat SEO? White Hat SEO is a technique of optimizing the website […]

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When it comes to making an SEO strategy, there are many methods you can follow. It all depends on whether you want to do it for the long term or just for quick wins.

For long term business, you have to build a legit strategy to outrank your competitors and drive the organic traffic. It involve research, developing strategies, execution, and continuity. Besides this lengthy process, there are quick and risky techniques to get ranking by implementing different SEO strategies. So, in general, SEO techniques based on these criteria are divided into three different types.

  1. White Hat Technique
  2. Gray Hat Technique
  3. and Black Hat Technique

What is White Hat SEO?

White Hat SEO is a technique of optimizing the website by follows all the rules and regulations of search engines. White hat SEO is the practice of improving search rankings on Search Engine Results Pages by maintaining the integrity of your website and staying within the search engines’ terms of service. White Hat SEO gives priority to human audiences by creating helpful and quality content.

The White Hat SEO uses organic and legit techniques in order to ensure it performs well for search. Examples and techniques of the White Hat SEO are described below.

What is Black Hat SEO?

Black Hat SEO opposes White Hat techniques and breaks the search engine rules to get higher search rankings. It focuses only on search engines rather than on human audiences.

Black hat SEO is used by those who are looking for a quick return on their site, rather than a long-term business. Various Black Hat SEO techniques include keyword stuffing, Cloaking, link farming, blog content spamming, etc. Although you get the quick result by implementing Black Hat techniques on your site,  your site might be penalized by search engines as this is not recommended methods.

What is Gray Hat SEO?

Gray hat SEO technique stands between White Hat SEO and Black Hat SEO. Grey Hat SEO is the practice of using technically legal methods to improve your site rankings, but which are ethically dubious, and could one day become a black hat.

Gray Hat SEO is an SEO practice that is riskier than White Hat but less risky than Black Hat. You may or may not result in your site being banned from search engines as it is a technically legit method.

Benefits of White Hat SEO?

The following are the benefits of White Hat SEO.

  • White Hat SEO results in slow but it is a long-lasting strategy
  • The traffic or business generated by White Hat SEO is long-lasting
  • No risk of being penalized or banned by search engines
  • The business growth is much more stable
  • Increase your business reputation as it slowly grows
  • Builds a stronger relationship
  • Provide greate value to the customers

White Hat SEO & Black Hat SEO Difference

White HatBlack Hat
Content is optimized for
both Search Engine and Users
Content is optimized only for Search Engine
Follow search engine rulesDo not follow search engine rules
It follows correct methodsIt follows manipulative methods
It is long term strategyIt is for quick wins
Recommended by search enginesNot recommended by search engines
There is not risk of being penalized Search Engine Penalized the site at any time
It it long lasting process and takes time to get the resultIt is quick process and get the result quicker
Focused on giving value to the audienceFocused on Ranking of Search Engine by ignoring the user experience
Eg. Keyword Research, Link Building, Content Formatting, Maintaining Heading Hierarchy, Writing Quality Content, Link BuildingEg. Link Farming, Keyword Stuffing, Blog Content Spamming, Cloaking

10 White Hat SEO Techniques To Drive Organic Traffic


1. Make Your Site Mobile First

Google has made major changes in its algorithm, officially calledMobile-First Indexing. So, if your website is not responsive-meaning not optimized for mobile devices then your site automatically pushed down in the ranking.

You can test your site on the Mobile-Friendly Test tool by Google.

Mobile Friendly Test


2. Give a Time in Keyword Research

Before publishing any article you have to do proper keyword research. An article developed without proper keyword research is like pouring water in the sand. So, before start writing a post on a particular topic, you should conduct proper keyword research. Keyword research involves, finding out the primary keyword, analyzation of search volume & competition, keyword difficulty, pages that are already ranked for and finding out the LSI keywords. So, perper keyword research is very crucial for every blog post.

There are lots of Keyword Search Tools in the market. Some of them available for free with limited features. Google Keyword Planner is the best free keyword search tool. This tool lets you analyze, keyword search volume, competition, keyword difficulty, Cost Per Click (CPC), etc.

Keyword for SEO

 


3. Focus on Content Formatting

When it comes to the user experience, content formatting plays a significant role. Content with a long sentence and long text is boring for readers. So, you need to perfectly format your content in such a way that readers could enjoy reading it.

You can follow the following content formatting techniques to make it interesting to read!

  • Use bullets or numbering in the relevant context
  • Use sentence so as to make it easy to read and understand
  • Write in speaking tone
  • Maintaining the heading hierarchy
Heading hierarchy
Heading hierarchy

4. Build Link From High-Quality Sites

To add value to your website, you have to focus on building a high-quality link rather than having lots of low and spammy links. When search engines like Google analyze the content, it checks for high authority backlinks. Because it shows the relevancy and trust of the content, the search engine pushes your page to the top position on SERP.


5. Use Schema

A rich snippet is a result shown on the Google page along with some other additional information so as to add value to the result. It stands out from the other snippets when it comes to the priority.

From the user’s perspective, just by looking at the result of the rich snippet, they get to know more about the content.  Because it is more appealing to the users, posts with rich snippets are likely to get more clicks. If the click-through rate (CTR) of your blog post increases, you will get more traffic. Ultimately, rich snippets will affect your ranking as well.

The following image shows the difference between rich snipped and normal snippets.

schema markup

Rich snippets can not be used in all types of content. The following are some of the content types where rich snippets can be used.

  • Recipe
  • Event
  • Apps
  • People
  • Products
  • Business and Organizations

How can you get rich snippets? 

You have to add structured data to your site so that Google can show a rich snippet. A piece of code in structured data tells Google to extract the maximum relevant data for rich snippet results. You can test the structure of your article using this Structure Data Testing Tool.


6. Improve Website Page Speed

Website loading speed is one of the key things to consider for a website. In fact, search engines like Google have made loading speed an actual ranking factor. So, it is super important to improve your website speed. Google has also provided a speed testing tool called “Google PageSpeed Insight” to analyze your website speed.  There are other page speed testing tools such and Pingdom, and GTMetrix that give you insights into your website speed.

With these tools, you can analyze your site’s speed and also find out the causes and possible improvements to make your website faster.

Check out theFirst Contentful Paint and First Meaningful Paint in Page Speed Tools


7. Use Image and Other Relevant Media File

The use of relevant images and other media files increases the chance of retaining your audiences on your website. According to the study, people remember 80% of what they see and 20% of what they read. The study also shows that 65% of people are visual learners meaning that people just don’t want to read a big chunk of text. Adding images in the content retains users by providing visual information.

Besides images, you can also add related videos, GIFs in the relevant context to provide extra value to your content.

Check out theHow to Optimize Images For WordPress? – Image Optimization Guide


8. Choose Better Fonts and Colors

This is all about making your website better for users of all types. In fact, a website with bad colors and an ugly font is not something that users could read.

You have to make your website easy to read with attractive fonts and colors. You can also use third-party tools like Accessible to make your website accessible to all types of users. This AI-powered tool allows you to customize every element of the website. Since this is a paid tool, it is up to you. But at least you can choose better colors and fonts for your website.


9. Focus on User Experience

White Hat SEO is all about user experience. Search engines like Google do consider how the reader is satisfied with the content. Find out about the expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness factors (EAT score) that Google cares about for ranking your content. User retention will be a key factor for your website to climb the ranking in the SERPs.


10. Write a Thorough Article

According to the research, long and detailed content tend to get a higher ranking in search engines. It is because long content covers a particular topic in detail. From the user’s perspective, they will get every piece of information they are looking for.

word count research

In September of 2016, Backlinko published an article and found that the average word count of a Google first page result was 1,890 words. SEO plugins like RankMath and Yoast also suggest that content should be at least 800 words and more.


11. Update Your Content Regularly

As a content publisher, you always focus on making your content valuable. Outdated content that does not provide extra value to the readers is not something Google promotes. So, regular updates, edit, and optimization are super important to make your content fresh and up-to-date.


12. Populate Proper Tags

Tags are predefined taxonomy in WordPress. It provides a useful way to group related posts together and to quickly tell readers what a post is about. Tags also make it easier for people to find your content.

Tag is one of the default tools you can use to categorize your WordPress posts. Each post may contain multiple tags. The readers can click on a tag to find similar posts that have that same tag.

Although the use of tags is completely optional, they provide a useful way to group related posts together and to quickly tell readers what a post is about.


13. Write Attractive Titles, Meta Descriptions, and Descriptive URLs

Title:

Writing compelling titles increase the Click Through Rate (CTR) of your website. For content, the title is a major factor in helping search engines understand what your page is about, and they are the first impression many people have of your page. Title tags are used in three key places: (1) Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs), (2) web browsers, and (3) social networks.

Meta Description:

The meta description provides a brief summary of a web page. Search engines display the meta description in search results, which can influence people’s click-through rates. Since CTR impact the ranking position, it is very important to write a compelling meta description.

URL:

A perfect URL provides both humans and search engines an easy-to-understand indication of what the destination page will be about. A descriptive URL is also equally important for a website. Google uses your URL to understand what is your page all about. You have to choose a short and keyword-rich URL.descriptive url

In WordPress you find permalink setting to set your descriptive URL. Set your permalink setting as “post name” as shown in the figure below.

permalink setting


14. Maintain Proper Internal Links

Post Linking

Internal linking is one of the important factors from an SEO perspective as well as the user’s perspective. Internal linking helps in navigating the different contextual pages within the website. It does not only retain the people but also gives search engines a relevant context.


15. Make Your Site Easy to Navigate

In order to provide easy navigation to your site, you vane to make your website clean and minimalist. Unless you have a news portal website, categories and pages should properly be placed so that the reader could easily navigate through different sections os the website.

White Hat SEO Techniques


Other SEO Articles:

WordPress 301 Redirect – Step By Step Guide 
✅What is Duplicate Content? How to Avoid it?

If you liked this article, then consider following us on Twitter and Facebook and LinkedIn.

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Yoast vs Rank Math SEO Plugin – Which One Is Better? https://www.acmethemes.com/blog/yoast-vs-rank-math-seo-plugin/ https://www.acmethemes.com/blog/yoast-vs-rank-math-seo-plugin/#comments Wed, 22 Jan 2020 12:45:22 +0000 https://www.acmethemes.com/blog/?p=6434 When it comes to WordPress SEO plugins, there are three main plugins that come into mind. They are, Yoast, All in One SEO Pack and Rank Math. For beginners, it is quite difficult to make a decision about which plugin to use as they work pretty much the same. Yoast SEO is in the market for a long time and it has already established a user base with over 5 million active installations. There is a strong foundation for the Yoast SEO plugin trusted by millions of creators around the world. This proves that Yoast SEO is undoubtedly the best plugin in the market. On the other side of the game, there is a Rank Math, which is kind of […]

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When it comes to WordPress SEO plugins, there are three main plugins that come into mind. They are, Yoast, All in One SEO Pack and Rank Math. For beginners, it is quite difficult to make a decision about which plugin to use as they work pretty much the same.

Yoast SEO is in the market for a long time and it has already established a user base with over 5 million active installations. There is a strong foundation for the Yoast SEO plugin trusted by millions of creators around the world. This proves that Yoast SEO is undoubtedly the best plugin in the market.

On the other side of the game, there is a Rank Math, which is kind of new in the market but this plugin is gaining positive reviews from the users. With its handful of features, its popularity is rapidly growing in the SEO industry.

This brings us confusion that to which one is the best SEO plugin for a WordPress website? Why should you use Yoast or Rank Math?

In the previous post, we have compared the two plugins Yoast SEO vs All in One SEO Plugins in detail. In this article, we are going to compare two of the top SEO plugins, Yoast and Rank Math. 

How Does Plugin Help a WordPress Website?

SEO plugins themselves are not enough to maintain the overall SEO strategy. These plugins just guide a content creator while creating content. The basic guidelines like title text, meta description, keyword density, content readability, image alt text, length of the content, and many more. Basically, SEO plugins help you optimizing content for search engines like Google, Bing, Yandex to outrank your competitors, better known as On-Page SEO.

These plugins also help to create an essential file like robots.txt,  sitemap.xml. The plugin automates your WordPress SEO, helps you optimize your posts, and gets you ranked higher.

Yoast SEO Introduction

Yoast SEO plugin is one of the best and most downloaded WordPress plugins as of now. This WordPress SEO plugin helps you with your search engine optimization. Since its launch time back in 2008, Yoast has helped millions of people all across the world.

Yoast SEO does everything in its power to please both visitors and search engine spiders. A dedicated team of developers, testers, architects, and SEO experts works daily to improve the plugin with every release.

So, basically, Yoast SEO is for a business owner, professional blogger, a content creator, a developer, or an SEO expert. It helps you keep your website in perfect shape.

Core Features of Yoast SEO Plugin

  • The SEO analysis
  • Readability Analysis
  • Snippet preview for Desktop and Mobile
  • The most advanced XML Sitemaps functionality at the push of a button.
  • Full control over site’s breadcrumbs
  • Canonical URL to avoid duplicate content
  • Indexables feature introduced from 14.0 version

Premium [paid] Features

  • Social previews
  • Insights tool for focused keyword/keyphrase
  • Article optimization for synonyms and related keyphrases
  • Automatic internal linking suggestions and many more

Pros and Cons of Yoast SEO Plugin

Yoast SEO plugin is as popular as it offers a lot of flexibility with your content. You can set up titles, meta descriptions and Social Media sharing information for each post and page. One of the best things about Yoast SEO is its beginner-friendly features. However, in their quest to facilitate newcomers in using Yoast, the creators have basically hidden all the advanced options – making you manually turn custom fields on. On top of that, Yoast SEO and readability recommendations force you keyword stuffing or disregard the importance of LSI. Sometimes, this may lead your post out of the subject. So, If you use Yoast SEO, especially as a WP beginner, you should take these suggestions as exactly that – only suggestions.

Yoast SEO

Rank Math Introduction

Rankmath plugins

RankMath is another plugin for Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for WordPress. Plugin developer claims that Rank Math is the swiss army knife of SEO tools for WordPress.

Rank Math Features 

  • Easy to follow the setup wizard
  • Clean and Simple User Interface
  • Modular Framework
  • Code optimized for speed (Lightweight)
  • Great support
  • Bulk Edit Titles & Descriptions of All Your Content

Rank Math SEO – Best SEO Plugin For WordPress To Increase Your SEO Traffic

Yoast Vs. Rank Math – Set Up Configuration

Setting up is the first feel of any software and this makes a huge difference in the first impression of people. So, let’s compare the setting up of each of the plugins.

RankMath

RankMath Setup

RankMath setup is quite easy and clean in design. After the installation of Rank Math will bring a 5 steps installation wizard. You can create an account via Google, Facebook, or email. But this is skippable.  After that, you are required to site name, search console details, sitemap configuration, advanced optimization, and confirmation of the setting. Once you finish the setting, you will be able to go for more advanced settings.

Yoast SEO

Yoast Setup Configuration

Yoast, on the other hand, provides 8 Steps setup wizard where you have to set up basic settings like site type, organization type, search engine visibility, authors option, title setting, etc. One difference you notice in Yoast is there is a video guide embedded during the setup process. Which might be helpful for beginners.

So,

I think setup wise both plugins provide a great user experience. Rank Math offers more options like search console, sitemap and SEO optimization option which helps automate some of your SEO tasks like making external links no-follow, redirecting attachment pages.

Yoast SEO vs. Rank Math – User Interface

The user interface is a crucial part of any software tool. A clean and minimalist user interface attracts more people and creates value for the users. Let’s discuss about the user interface of each plugin.

Yoast SEO

yoast seo plugin interface

 

As far as UI is concerned, Yoast SEO focuses more on functionality than aesthetics. Sure, you can get everything done with all the options neatly organized under well-defined categories. But there is no helping the fact that the Yoast SEO UI seems a bit bland and uninspired.

Rank Math

rankmath interface

Rank Math offers a clean dashboard. You can easily turn on and of different features one by one. Each feature is clearly described inside the box along with its status. Rank Math implements a visually attractive interface that not only looks and feels modern but also enhances the user experience.

I personally found that the rank math interface is slightly easy to use. having said that, Yoast has not had that difficulty setting either.

Yoast vs. Rank Math — Keyword Assigning

This feature allows you to populate keywords, write title and meta description, set the permalink, and set the focus keyword of the content. This is an essential part of an SEO tool and without properly maintain these settings, you can’t just optimize your page or post. Both plugins allow you to assign keywords, titles, and meta, permalink and apply different methods to show you how your content looks on the Google page. The following picture shows the keyword assigning interface of both of the plugins.

Yoast SEO

Yoast Interface

The free version of Yoast allows you to assign a maximum of one keyword to your content. If you want to optimize for multiple keywords, you need to purchase the premium version.

Yoast represents the optimization level of content as green, orange, and red signals. You can analyze the SEO score, readability score,  and Google page preview (both desktop and mobile). Keyword assigning tools is quite easy to use.

Note: Premium Yoast SEO also analyzes the different word forms of your keyphrase, like plurals and past tenses. And not just that, it can analyze different languages – English, Dutch, Spanish, German, and French.

Rank Math

rankmath interface

Likewise, Rank Math lets you assign a maximum of 5 keywords for optimization, but you will need to create an account for that which is free. The title, meta, and permalink setup works exactly the same as Yoast and also shows the preview (both mobile and desktop) of the Google page. Rank Math shows the score in the number from 0-100. Generally, if your score is above 80, it turns into green colors. So, you need to optimize your content until your score turns green color.

Moreover, Rank Math can give you keyword suggestions immediately once you start typing the keyword in the “focus keyword” textbox.

The keyword assigning option for both plugins does an excellent job.  The Rank Math gives you a scoring system and Yoast gives you a color signal. It is entirely your decision which one is more appealing for you.

keyword sugesstion

One good thing about Rank Math is, it will automatically start suggesting different keywords as well as longtail keywords based on Google keyword suggestions as shown in the image above. Whereas Yoast lacks this feature.

Yoast Vs. Rank Math – Performance Comparison 

Talking about the performance, we are not quite sure because it is a technical term. But RankMath claims itself a very lightweight, fast, efficient, and well-coded. On the other hand, the release of version 14.0 of Yoast SEO introduces a new feature called ‘Indexables’ which improves the performance of your site and makes it faster. With this feature, Yoast SEO indexes your pages and put the date in a single table in your database

As a user, you do not feel that difference in this case.

yoast vs rankmath

 

Yoast Vs. Rank Math  – Pricing 

Talking about the pricing of these two plugins, RankMath is completely free as of now. Whereas Yoast SEO is freemium, meaning you have to pay to get access to some of its features. Rank Math may go in the premium version after a while but as of now, you can enjoy full fledge features for free.

Yoast Vs. Rank Math – Google Search Console Integration

When it comes to Seach Console integration, Rank Math makes it much easier. You can integrate the Seach Console during the setup process, all you have to do is input and verify your Gmail account, and it will fetch the associated Search Console data in your WordPress dashboard.

Yoast SEO also allows you to integrate the search console. But it does not provide an interface where you can see your search console records directly.

Yoast Vs. Rank Math – XML Sitemap Integration

A Sitemap file is an important part of any website when it comes to indexing. Without a sitemap, your site can not be fetched by Google’s crawler.  Both Yoast and Rank Math SEO plugins generate the sitemap of your website automatically. The URL of the sitemap will be different for both plugins, however, that does not impact on the site.  In both plugins, you can generate custom sitemaps once respective post types are available on your site, such as news sitemap, image sitemap, etc.

Yoast Vs. Rank Math – Updates

Rank Math brings updates more frequently as compared to Yoast SEO. And you can deem these frequent updates in two ways – either Rank Math is too uncompetitive and gets so many bugs and problem reporting, or it is trying to grow too fast. Rank Math defends their regular updates by saying that they are trying to keep with Google’s updates and algorithms change. For example, they immediately added new Schema Markups after Google’s update and they removed the readability options after the BERT update came up.

Choice is Yours

There is no significant difference between these plugins so that we could directly suggest a particular plugin. You can pick up any plugin. I personally found Rank Math is easy to use but that might not be the same for you.

Yoast is in the market for a long but Rank Math is new compared to Yoast. So, there is more trust in Yoast from millions of users. My suggestion is if you are using the premium version of Yoast then you better not switch. But if you are using free Yoast then you can try both and make a decision later.


Other SEO Articles:

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What is Negative SEO? How To Be Safe From Negative SEO? https://www.acmethemes.com/blog/what-is-negative-seo/ https://www.acmethemes.com/blog/what-is-negative-seo/#respond Fri, 17 Jan 2020 05:57:13 +0000 https://www.acmethemes.com/blog/?p=6413 When it comes to the term “Negative SEO”, it is something that most of the people don’t want to talk about. There are also lots of misconceptions about this term. But, it is a good practice to always keep your eyes on your site from each and every perspective. After Penguin Update (April 2012), Google strictly looks for the manipulative links. Unusual black hat techniques are something Google does not like. So, your competitors may apply some of the black hat tactics to downrank your website. However, this happens in a very rare case. Is “Negative SEO” is still a good topic to talk about in 2020? What actually is this term, what are its main type and how to […]

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When it comes to the term “Negative SEO”, it is something that most of the people don’t want to talk about. There are also lots of misconceptions about this term. But, it is a good practice to always keep your eyes on your site from each and every perspective.

After Penguin Update (April 2012), Google strictly looks for the manipulative links. Unusual black hat techniques are something Google does not like. So, your competitors may apply some of the black hat tactics to downrank your website. However, this happens in a very rare case.

Is “Negative SEO” is still a good topic to talk about in 2020?

What actually is this term, what are its main type and how to avoid negative SEO attacks? In this article, we will discuss Negative SEO and related terms in detail.

What is Negative SEO?

When someone performs an irrelevant activity on the website by using a black hat technique that is called negative SEO. It is the act of showing search engines that a website is not relevant by following various off-page and on-page techniques. On the best way to perform negative SEO is by linking from the various low-quality websites with irrelevant anchor texts. Website owners can combat it by disavowing all low-quality backlinks.

Negative SEO can be done in many ways, but the most common type of negative SEO is a link based on negative SEO. However, there are many other techniques that unscrupulous people can use to try to reduce your rankings.

black hat SEO

Some negative SEO examples:

  1. Hacking your website
  2. Linking your website from hundreds (even thousands) of low-quality sites
  3. Sending thousands of unnatural traffic bots to website
  4. Pointing the website using keywords like porn, viagra, online betting, gambling, etc
  5. Creating fake reviews
  6. Creating multiple replications of website

Why Would Someone Commit Negative SEO?

There is no exact answer to this question. In some cases, negative SEO happens from yourself too when you trying to apply black hat SEO with the intention of improving your website. But most people do this with the intention of making your website bad in the search engine’s eye.

What Does Google Say About Negative SEO?

From the date of the Penguin update, a site with excessive spammy links is downranked from the index. This algorithm gave birth to “Negative SEO”. Google itself is not quite sure about negative SEO as it is hard to figure out.

John Mueller – A Webmaster Analyst says –

John Muller quote about negative SEO

Types of Negative SEO

Negative SEO attacks can take place in a number of different forms, both off-page, and on-page. The below list will give you an overview of the most common forms of negative SEO.

Negative On-Page SEO

Negative On-Page SEO concept is the same as on-page SEO. Negative on-page SEO is a negative SEO activity done within the website. The following are some of the examples of negative on-page SEO.

  • Excessive Crawling
  • Content Scraping
  • Hacking

Excessive Crawling

Google has specific crawling timing. This is the Black Hat SEO trick is achieved by forcefully crawling the site and thus causing heavy server load. When your site encounters heavy server load, search engine crawlers will not be able to find your site. This affects your ranking index.

If you notice that your website is loading slower, or even can not access, contact your web hosting provers or webmasters. They should be able to figure out where the traffic is coming from. This way, you can monitor your website traffic and keep it balanced.

Content Scraping

Content scraping is the process of copying a block of content and publish on other websites. Scraped content results in Duplicate Content.

This is the scenario when someone copies you all website content and publishes on other websites then Google sees it as duplicate content and downranks all similar sites.

Hacking

Hacking the direct attachment to your website. This happens even if the attacker has no negative SEO in mind, a hacker attack per se can hurt your SEO. Usually hacking is done by highly professional tech nerds.


 Negative Off-Page SEO

Off-page negative SEO is essentially trying to wreck a website’s backlink profile. There are a few techniques used to do this, such as:

  • Link Farming
  • Bad Reviews
  • Irrelevant Link Building

Link Farming 

This typically involves the use of link farms such as a PBN (private blog network) which is a network of sites created solely for link building. Attackers try to carry out negative SEO by linking to their target website from the link farm. Google then flags the target site for potentially being involved in spam activity. The attacker might also make things worse by using exact match anchor text for your target keywords to make your link profile look even more spammy.

Bad Reviews

Reviews are one of the good signals for the website to add value to the search engines. This is also one of the easiest ways to conduct for those who are jealous of you.

Irrelevant Link Building

Google does care about the quality of the link. In fact, backlinks are one of the major factors for ranking. A website having excessive Irrelevant and low-quality links can be penalized by Google. So, this is one of the common ways that someone follows for negative SEO.

How to Prevent Yourself from Negative SEO


Although negative SEO impact is something not controllable,  you can prevent yourself from negative SEO by implementing various techniques. There are many ways you can keep track of your website if it is affected by the unusual activities.

Here are some of the methods that you can use to prevent yourself from negative SEO.

1. Keep Track of Your Backlinks

Since backlink is one of the major factors for Google ranking, you have to keep tracking the backlink profile.

You can use the premium tool like Monitorbacklink. This tool lets you know about each and every link you get to your website through email. You can check the good and bad backlinks for you and the competition.

monitor backlink dashboard
Monitorbacklink Dashboard

If you don’t want to use a paid version of features then you can still check your backlink stats with its Free Tool. Besides this, you can also check the backlink profile from tools like Backlink Checker by Ahref and Backlink Analytics by Semrush.

You can remove the unnecessary backlink from your website by the Disavow backlinks process.

Note: You should disavow backlinks only if:

  1. You are sure that spammy, artificial, or low-quality links pointing to your site.
  2. The links have caused a manual action, or likely will cause a manual action, on your site.

Follow these steps for the disavow process

2. Keep Checking Duplicate Content

 

Existence in Duplicate Content results in a negative impact on your website.

You have to regularly check if there is duplicate content exists on your website. This is because if somebody is copying and pasting your website content on another website, all the websites with similar content will be penalized by Google.  You can use tool like Copyscape.com to check if someone published you exact content somewhere else.

3. Monitor Your Own SEO Strategy

As we have talked earlier, negative SEO sometimes occurs from your side too. This is completely an unintentional negative SEO attack. This is the case when you conduct absolute black hat practices deliberately with the intention of improving the site’s performance. So, you need to keep yourself free from these activities.

4. Secure Your Website From Malware

Security is a pillar of your business website. You have to keep a strong password for your administrator logins. There are multiple ways you can keep your website secure. Some of these techniques include –

  • Setting up multiple authentications (Google Authenticator)
  • Keeping your password secret
  • Protecting your website by changing the login URL and preventing access to the wp-login.php page and wp-admin directory while not logged-in
  • Setting up a backup on a regular basis

5. Check Your SERP Ranking

You have to keep checking your websites crawl stat to make sure that robots.txt file is set up properly. This is because sometimes a change in robots.txt or one simple alteration could wreak havoc on your entire SEO strategy. A disallow rule is all it takes to tell Google to completely ignore your important pages or even the entire website.

Check Out This infographic by YourSEOPick.com

negative SEO


Other SEO Articles:

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How to Optimize Images For WordPress? – Image Optimization Guide https://www.acmethemes.com/blog/how-to-optimize-images-for-wordpress/ https://www.acmethemes.com/blog/how-to-optimize-images-for-wordpress/#comments Wed, 15 Jan 2020 12:16:58 +0000 https://www.acmethemes.com/blog/?p=6361 According to the Http Archive report, images make up on average 21% of a total webpage’s weight. Along with the texts, images are the most important elements on a website. Search engines like Google also rate text content with images better than content without images. But, you should definitely deal with the optimization of images on your website as part of the optimization of your website as a whole. But are you using an image on your website in the right way? or just randomly upload it on your site? You might be missing an important image optimization task.  In this article, we are going to explain the “Image Optimization for WordPress Website” in detail. 6 Image Optimization Techniques You […]

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According to the Http Archive report, images make up on average 21% of a total webpage’s weight. Along with the texts, images are the most important elements on a website. Search engines like Google also rate text content with images better than content without images. But, you should definitely deal with the optimization of images on your website as part of the optimization of your website as a whole.

But are you using an image on your website in the right way? or just randomly upload it on your site? You might be missing an important image optimization task.  In this article, we are going to explain the “Image Optimization for WordPress Website” in detail.

6 Image Optimization Techniques You Must Follow


1. Rename Your Image Before Upload

It is always crucial to rename your image before uploading it to the website. Renaming your image file let search engines to recognize the image and place them in the respective category. If you upload your image without a proper name then search engines like Google will not be able to notice it. In the end, your image will be ignored by Google. That is not good for you.

One important thing to notice is when you upload an image without renaming it, it will be stored in the database with the same name as it was. Meaning even though you make changes in the title from “Attachment Details” it will not change. So, from the SEO perspective, it is important to rename your image file with proper keyword.

For example –

Your image name sometimes be like

  • IMG_8sd743.jpg
  • Screenshot-873403.jpeg

These above image name does not make any sense in the website.

Also, you should be careful about how to properly rename the image so that both users and search engines can understand the image.

Let’s understand the following scenario:

Canon 400D Camera

 

Suppose you have many cameras of different brands and models. And if you rename each of your images as “camera.jpg“, then camera photos will be renamed as “camera-1.jpg“, “camera-2.jpg” and so on.

So, it is better to rename it as a “Canon 400D camera“, this way users and the search engines can easily understand what is an image all about.

image url structure


2. Keep Proper Alt Text

Alt text (also called “alt description”, “alt-tag”) is the written copy that appears in place of an image on a webpage if that particular image fails to load on the screen. So, putting proper alt text is important for accessibility and Image SEO. Try to put the proper image alt tag that better describes the image.

In plain HTML text, Alt Text will look something like this

<img src=”/bear.jpeg” alt=”A polar bear walking on frozen winter” />

Alt text ensures that images can be used by visually impaired people as well. The following image shows how to properly put the alt text for an image.

 

alt image guide

image alt guide

What About the Caption and Description? 

When we talk about Image SEO, caption and Description does not impact on SEO. A caption is an extra information about an image that shows under the image. If you want to describe your image a little more, then you can write in the caption section. A caption and description are different from an “Alt text”, let loot at the following table.

Attachment details

Alt TextCaptionDescription
Important for SEONot Important for SEONot Important for SEO
To explain imageAdds extra information to the image (eg. Sources of image, Image's short description)Describe image in detail
Not visible to usersVisible to usersVisible to users if someone lands on the attachment post page
Will be inserted into the codeNot inserted into the codeDescription will be stored as post content for the attachment post
Compulsory for SEOOptionalOptional

3. Keep Your Images Copyright Free

Although you can use images with proper attribution (credit), it is recommended that you have to use copyright-free images in your content. There are many online sources where you can get license-free images. Some of the websites are listed below:

Google Copyright Free Image

Google is the largest website on the planet with billions of images. Google holds billions of images from all the web pages. But all of them are not free to use. You have to filter the images so that you can use those images without attribution.

Just go to Google.com and search for an image. Go to Tools>Usage Rights and here you see the five options. Filter “Labelled for reuse with modification” or “Labelled for reuser” and all the images that show up after this filter can be used in your blog.

Take a look at the following image for reference.

Google Image Filter

You can use other free stock images from the site like Unsplash.com, Freepik.com, Pixabay.com, Pexels.com. These are the sites with millions of free stock photos used by millions of people. Some of the photos are premium – meaning you have to pay but most of the images from these sites are free to use.

Check out – 41 Sites to Find Free Images Online


4. Keep Size of the Image as Small as Possible

You have to optimize your image size so as to make it light. The size of your image has a direct impact on the loading speed of your website. But one thing you should be careful of is while reducing the size of your image, you should also take care of its resolution. If you are not a Photoshop nerd, you can use different tools tinypng.comtinyjpg.com to reduce the image size. These online FREE TOOLs help you to reduce the size of your image preserving its optimum quality.

Note: It is recommended to keep your image size below 200KB.


5. Chose Proper Image Format

There are mainly three image formats that are in use, JPEG, PNG, and GIF.  Let’s look at each of the image formats in detail.

  • JPEG (JPG) –  JPEG stands for Joint Photographic Experts Group. It is a lossy compressed file format. It is useful for storing photographs at a smaller size. JPG is a common choice for use on the Web because it is compressed. For storing line drawings, text, and iconic graphics at smaller file sizes.
  • PNG –  PNG stands for Portable Network Graphics. It is a lossless compression file format, this is why it a common choice for use on the Web. PNG produces better image quality but it occupies a bigger space. PNG is a good choice for storing line drawings, text, and iconic graphics at small file sizes.
  • GIF – GIF file is limited to 256 colors and is a lossless compression file format. It is a good choice for presenting an image in an animated form. Use GIF when your graphic uses a relatively low number of colors. GIF or PNG are better choices because they are lossless.

JPEGs are for photographs and realistic images. PNGs are for line art, text-heavy images, and images with few colors. GIFs are just failed.

image format table

I personally do not recommend GIF unless there is a “Must Use” situation. Although PNG produces better quality images, it comes in a larger size than JPEG format. So, you have to use the JPEG image in most of the cases in order to save size and quality. However, there might be some cases where PNG produces better results than JPEG.


6. Setup Image Sitemap

A sitemap is important for all website but sitemap is also equally important for the image. It improves your images to be found on the search engines easily.

image seo

Image Optimization Plugins For WordPress

For WordPress, there are many image optimizer plugins available, among all, Smush and ShortPixel Image Optimizer is widely used plugins. These plugins do a great job after you upload images, but you have to do lots of things before you even upload the images. This helps in even better image optimization.

Conclusion!

The above 7 tips for optimizing images are manual techniques before uploading them to the website. Whether you use WordPress plugins or not these 7 techniques are must-do actions for you.

So, next time, before you upload the image to your website make sure you follow these steps –

  1. Rename Your Image Before Upload
  2. Keep Proper Alt Text
  3. Keep Your Images Copyright Free
  4. Keep Size of the Image as Small as Possible
  5. Chose Proper Image Format
  6. Setup Image Sitemap

Other SEO Articles:

WordPress 301 Redirect – Step By Step Guide 
✅What is Duplicate Content? How to Avoid it?

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