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

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.

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.

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

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.

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 the – First 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 the – How 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.

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.

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

14. Maintain Proper Internal Links

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.

Other SEO Articles:

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

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The post 15 White Hat SEO Techniques To Drive Organic Traffic in 2023 appeared first on Acme Themes Blog.

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.

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 –

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.

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

Other SEO Articles:

• Do-Follow vs No-Follow Outbound Link – Which one is better?
• 10 Common Off-Page SEO Techniques
• What is EAT Score in SEO & Ways to Improve It

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

The post What is Negative SEO? How To Be Safe From Negative SEO? appeared first on Acme Themes Blog.

When it comes to driving traffic to the website, there are two options, organic traffic and paid traffic. Organic traffic comes from proper Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and paid traffic comes from Pay Per Click (PPC) campaign. To simply understand, organic traffic is FREE and paid traffic, of course, costs you.

People often get confused about which method to use for traffic. But it is important that before making a decision, you must know what are the differences, pros, and cons of implementing SEO and PPC. In this article, I am going to cover in-depth information about SEO and PPC. 

First off, let’s look at the image that shows Google’s organic and paid results. The paid result generally shows on the top depending upon the Ad Rank – a combination of your bid, auction-time ad quality (including expected clickthrough rate, ad relevance, and landing page experience), the Ad Rank thresholds, the context of the person’s search (location, device, time of search, search terms, the other ads and search results on the page, and other user signals and attributes), and the expected impact of extensions and other ad formatting. 

When people search on Google, text ads can appear above or below the search results. Only up to four ads are eligible to show above the search results.  

What is Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the website’s visibility in order to drive organic traffic from search engines. SEO involves lots of different tasks from the technical improvement of the website to content creation. Search Engine Optimization is a slow and step by step process that you have to do continuous work to get a result. It may take months to start getting traffic depending upon the keyword difficulty. 

• Keyword Difficulty – In SEO terms, Keyword Difficulty is a metric that tells how hard is a particular keyword to rank on the search engines. The higher the value, the harder it is to compete with others using that keyword. So, one needs to focus on low competition keywords in order to win the game. 
• Search Volume – Search Volume is the amount of query and search of a particular key-phrase made in the search engine in a certain period of time.  As an SEO person, unless you are working for your own keywords, you need to focus on those keywords which have higher search volume. 

On-Page SEO

On-page SEO is the practice of optimizing individual web pages in order to rank higher and earn more relevant traffic in search engines. On-page refers to both the content and HTML source code of a page that can be optimized. On-page SEO is something that you do within the website like a technical improvement, content creation, content format, etc.

15 On-Page SEO Techniques:

1. 1. Proper Keyword Research
   2. Optimize Page Titles
   3. SEO Friendly URL Structure
   4. Optimize Meta Description
   5. Optimizing Media Files
   6. Proper Content Formatting
   7. Take Care of Website Speed
   8. Mobile-First Design (Responsive)
   9. Content SEO
   10. Maintain Keyword Density
   11. Work in LSI Keyword
   12. Maintaining Headline Hierarchy
   13. Proper Internal Linking
   14. Use Outbound Link
   15. Developing High-Quality Content

Read About Full Guide To On-Page SEO

 Off-Page SEO 

Off-page SEO, on the other hand, is also an important tactic to bring traffic, build the trust and relevancy of the website. Off-page SEO is performed outside the website. 

Off-Page SEO technique sometimes called off-site SEO techniques – is a technique of improving the ranking of the website in the Search Engine Ranking Pages (SERPs). Basically, it is a type of promoting a website across all the internet channels. 

10 Off-Page SEO Techniques:

• Social Media Promotion
• Email Marketing
• Question and Answer Submission
• Influencer Marketing
• Link Building and Link Exchange
• Image, Video, Document Submission
•  Social Bookmarking
• Blog Commenting
• Local Business Listing

Read About Full Guide To Off-Page SEO

There is another term in SEO called Technical SEO. Technical SEO refers to the optimization techniques related to the technical part of the website like the structure of the website, technology used to build the website and so on.

Technical SEO doesn’t have any standard definition, but there are some SEO experts who think technical SEO is something that provides a beneficial platform for making your content rank and brings in success. It ensures that your website is complying with all the guidelines set by the search engines.  Technical SEO falls under the domain of the On-Page SEO services framework, but it has been majorly complicated by implying that it belongs to some other domain.

SEO Pros

• SEO traffic is FREE
• SEO traffic is considered to be more stable
• SEO leads to better user experience
• SEO is a primary source of leads
• SEO brings higher close rates
• SEO promotes better cost management
• SEO builds a better brand credibility
• SEO takes you ahead of the competition in the long term

SEO Cons

• SEO takes a long time
• SEO results in low conversion compared to PPC
• SEO has no guarantee for #1-page results
• You can not have full control over users
• You may get a slap from the Algorithms

What is Pay Per Click (PPC)

Pay Per Click is the paid marketing model where advertisers pay certain money on the basis of ads click. PPC is the process of buying visitors through different platforms. One of the best examples of PPC is search engine advertising using Google AdWords. As the name suggests, advertisers have to pay according to the click they get.

Pay-per-Click marketing is seen by many as one of the best ways of promoting a business online. It is considered as the 1st logical step to be taken by marketers and business owners in testing keywords profitability and ROI before they tried their hands-on Search Engine Optimization or SEO. But just like SEO, PPC has its share of advantages and disadvantages. Before you take the plunge into PPC, it is a good idea to know its pros and cons first so you can make the most of it.

PPC Pros

• PPC gives you instant result
• PPC results in a high conversion rate
• PPC does not involve technical tasks related to website
• You can control over your ads
• You can target specific (Geographical, Demographical) audience
• Free from search engine algorithms updates
• PPC Gives You Measurable Results

PPC Cons

• It is NOT FREE
• PPC Costs high – more you pay more you get the results
• You get traffic as long as your campaign runs
• PPC can be quite complicated

SEO vs PPC Comparison

My Suggestion!

Well, we have come to the conclusion now. We know how PPC and SEO work in the business. But when it comes to picking up the option, both are great options. Just you need to do is figuring out what are your objectives. For long term business, it is quite a good option to invest in SEO, but for instant sales and time-specific business, you better go for PPC option. What did you think about this article? Comment down below and follows our other WordPress, SEO, Traffic, Tips and Tricks articles visit out Acme Themes Blog. Other Posts:

• 15+ On-Page SEO Techniques You Must Implement to Rank Higher
• 13 Essential SEO Tips For WordPress Website
• 10 Reasons Why You Should Build Your Site in WordPress

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The post SEO vs PPC – Search Engine Optimization & Pay Per Click Comparison appeared first on Acme Themes Blog.

The concept of Technical SEO and On-Page SEO is pretty much the same. Because both concepts are done within the website. But technical SEO is focused more on website structure whereas On-Page covers content aspects as well.

What is Technical SEO?

Technical SEO refers to the optimization techniques related to the technical part of the website like the structure of the website, technology used to build the website and so on.

Technical SEO doesn’t have any standard definition, but there are some SEO experts who think technical SEO is something that provides a beneficial platform for making your content rank and brings in success. It ensures that your website is complying with all the guidelines set by the search engines.  Technical SEO falls under the domain of the On-Page SEO services framework, but it has been majorly complicated by implying that it belongs to some other domain.

The main objectives of technical SEO are making website technically sound without having any structure and code error.

How Important is Technical SEO?

Technical SEO is conducted by website owners or developers for improving their website’s structure. It will eventually help the search engine crawler/indexer bots in finding your website easily and crawl for indexing and ranking its various web pages rapidly.

Interestingly, Technical SEO is not related to the optimization of content on a website like other on-page SEO activities. Its focus lies on having a structural sound,well-planned and cleverly laid out website.

So, in my perspective, technical SEO is the very first action to conduct before starting on-page SEO and Off-page SEO. Because the website should be technically healthy before you start optimizing it.

Technical SEO Checklist in 2020

1) Responsiveness

The very important and essential aspect of every website is its responsiveness. Today, the majority of visitors come from mobile phones and tablets combined. Responsiveness fits the website’s content in the best way possible in any type and size of devices. So, make sure your website is 100% responsive.

2) Website Speed

The loading speed of a website is directly related to the users’ experience. So, it is super important to optimize the speed of the website. There are many free tools like GTMetrics, Pingdom Tool, Google Speed Test, etc that you can use to test the loading speed of your website. These tools just do not show the speech result but also tells the area of improvement you can do to make it faster. Taking care of website speed (Loading time) keeping the size minimize is one of the important technical SEO.

3) Setting up Robots.txt

Robots.txt is also called the robots exclusion protocol, which is a standard used by websites to communicate with web crawlers and other web robots. It defines which areas of a website crawlers are allowed to search and also defines certain areas not to crawl.

5) Setting up Sitemap.xml

Sitemap.xml file makes it easy for Bing, Google, Yahoo, and other search engines to crawl your website. This is a file through which search engines find different pages and posts of your website. A Sitemap is an XML file that lists the URLs for a site. If you have installed SEO plugins like Yoast SEO then it automatically generated an XML file for your website. Otherwise, you have to install a Google XML sitemap plugin.

6) Handling 404 Error

A 404 error occurs when there is no content available in the certain URL of the website. This can be due to mistyping of the URL or content is deleted or URL is changed. This page not found error can be easily handled in WordPress or other custom CMSs.

You can create a custom 404 page that will be shown up whenever users encounter a 404 error. Read about 301 redirects in detail here.

7) Broken Link Fixes

Having broken links on the website is a bad experience for users and so does for search engines. So, time and again you have to keep checking if there exist any broken or dead links on the website. A broken link can be fixed manually by analyzing the Broken Link Checker plugin or using the different broken link checker tools.

8) Data Structure

Data Structure is all about the structure of the content on a website. Structure data plays a great role when it comes to showing the result, especially after the latest Google update. Structured data tells search engines about your data.

Although structured data is part of technical SEO because you need to add code to your website to get it right. It can help you enhance the presentation of your listings in the SERPS either through featured snippets, knowledge graph entries, etc and increase your CTR.

9) AMP – Accelerated Mobile Pages

AMP stands for Accelerated Mobile Pages. AMP concept is developed with the intention of making websites faster by loading only HTML files rather than loading the whole bunch of heavy scripts, CSS files. AMP is not compulsory for a website however, it helps the loading site faster thus making the user experience better. Installing and setting up AMP is very easy in WordPress You just need to install AMP Plugin, and setup some designs what it looks like in the mobile and desktop.

With the official AMP plugin for WordPress, the WordPress ecosystem is provided with the capabilities and tools it needs to build world-class AMP experiences.

10) SSL HTTPs

Https adds up value to a website when it comes to ranking factors. Once you install SSL to your website, it is accessed by https:www.domain.com. This indicates that any information transferred between your website and server (such as usernames, passwords, personal data, etc) is encrypted. Installing and activating SSL is very simple. You can even get free SSL along with the hosting service. So, SSL is a must for every website.

11) Breadcrumb

Breadcrumb is a set of links shown on the top or bottom of a page that allows users to navigate from one page or category to another page or category. Breadcrumb is useful for mainly two purposes:

1. To help users to navigate
2. To let search engines know about the structure of the website

If you don’t already have breadcrumbs enabled, make sure that they are enabled on your website and that they have the proper schema. Google search console also added the breadcrumb feature in the 2019 update so that breadcrumb errors can easily be identified and fixed.

12) Maintaining Canonical URL

Duplicate content is the content that appears in more than one place with different URLs. Appearing the same content in more than one place is not good for search engines. Because search each post must have a unique URL. Content in more than one location can be difficult for search engines to decide which version is more relevant to a given search query.

So, canonical ULS tells Google which one is the original post. It is the technical solution for duplicate content. Using canonical URLs can help to better inform search engines which URLs have identical or highly similar content.

13) URL Structure

When it comes to SEO, permalink plays a great role in ranking. Permalink is the website permanent URL seen in the search bar of any browser. For the WordPress website, you have different choices of how your permalink will look like. But, among them recommended setting for best SEO practice is setting www.yourdomain.com/%postname%/.

One good reason for setting permalink as “postname” is easy to guess what is post is all about and the keyword can also be seen in URL.

14) Meta Title and Meta Description

Meta description is a short description that appears just below the URL link in Search Engine Ranking Pages (SERPs). Meta description also appears in the homepage as well.

Meta description is also an important factor for SEO as it increases the Click Through Rate (CTR) of the page. People are likely to click more those pages having proper meta descriptions. It is highly recommended to include the primary keyword along with the modifiers like, “best”, “Tips”, “Guide”, “Lates date year” etc.

15) Google Search Console Setup

Google Search Console (GSC) helps you to monitor, maintain and troubleshoot the website’s visibility in Google Search Result Pages. If you have a particular issue with a website then you can identify through Google Search Console.

18) Google Analytics Setup

Google Analytics provides in-depth knowledge of visitors, source of traffic, the platform that visitors using, geography for visitors, session and other valuable insights that can help you to build the success strategy for your business.

16) Image Optimization

Media in any website represents different formats of images and videos. Media adds extra beauty to the overall content of the website. But in terms of On-page SEO, optimizing media is one of the vital tasks.

Majorly, optimizing media on any website includes, optimizing image files. Such as Image alternative texts, Image description, reducing size. Read a full guide about Image Optimization.

17) Integrate Social Sharing Plugins

In today’s time, social sharing is an integral part of our internet experience. Furthermore, it’s constantly on the rise and becoming popular with older folk as well. Social media became the best way to share any information because many people engage in social media than any other platform. Social media also plays a significant role in helping you find your favorite websites.

So, we highly recommend installing the best social media sharing plugin. We don’t say exactly which one you use because there are lots of best social media sharing plugins. But, what we can say is having a social media plugin is a must for any website.

Other Posts:

• 15+ On-Page SEO Techniques You Must Implement to Rank Higher
• 13 Essential SEO Tips For WordPress Website
• 10 Off-Page SEO Techniques 

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

The post How to Do a Technical SEO For a Website? appeared first on Acme Themes Blog.

What is Off-Page SEO?

Off-Page SEO technique sometimes called off-site SEO techniques – is a technique of improving the ranking of the website in the Search Engine Ranking Pages (SERPs). 

Off-page SEO has nothing to do with website design and the technical part of the website. Basically, it is a type of promoting a website across all the internet channels. Optimizing for off-site ranking involves a number of techniques that we will discuss below.

On-Page SEO vs Off-Page SEO

Let’s talk about the importance of the Off-Page SEO in compared to the On-Page SEO.

Off-page SEO is a lot harder to get good results than on-page SEO. Because it does not have an instant impact on a website. The result is gradually seen in the longterm process.

On-page SEO is much more important than off-page SEO when it comes to priority. But, off-page plays a vital role in authority, trustworthiness, and relevance.

On-Page Techniques	Off-Page Techniques
Proper Keyword Research	Guest Posting
Page Title	Social Media Promotion
URL Structure	Email Marketing
Meta Description	Q/A Submission
Optimizing Media	Influencer Marketing
Content Formatting	Link Building/Exchanging
Optimizing Speed	Image/Video/Docs Submission
Mobile Friendliness	Social Bookmarking
Content SEO	Blog Commenting
Keyword Density	Local Business Listing
Work in LSI Keyword
Maintaining Headline Hierarchy
Proper Internal Linking
Use Outbound Link
Developing High-Quality Content
Make Content Easily Sharable

How Important is Off-Page SEO?

Talking about overall ranking factors, On-page SEO only is not enough. Google changed its algorithm frequently and analyze each page considering multiple factors. According to the research, off-site SEO carries more than 50% of the ranking factors.

Let’s look at the following diagram by MOZ to capture the view of different ranking factors and their percentage consider by Google.

Best Off-Page SEO Techniques

1) Guest Posting

Guest Posting is publishing content on other’s websites in a relevant topic. This is the best way to attract a targeted audience to the website. All you need to do is find a perfect blog or website that allows you to post as a guest.

Some of the blogs offer guest posting, write for us option on the homepage of the website. If not, you can make your own business circle to guest posts regularly. Guest posting helps in building community within your industry. Having said that, guest posting is one of the best off-page SEO techniques.

2) Social Media Promotion

Social Media Sharing helps content to reach more audiences and it became the best way to share any information because many people engage in social media than any other platform. It also plays a significant role in helping you find your favorite websites. So, social media promotion is one of the best ways of driving traffic to the website. Thus it is effective off-page SEO Techniques.

3) Email Marketing

Email marketing is another off-page SEO technique. It is one of the legit ways of offering specific products or services to targeted customers. In order to carry out email marketing, you first need to collect the email of targeted customers through email campaigns, newsletter signups, contact forms. You can also offer seasonal deals and offers through email marketing.

Email is also a great way to drive traffic to the website. Marketing your products or services by email can be a fast, flexible and cost-effective way of reaching new customers and retaining existing customers by encouraging repeat website visits. Email marketing can allow you to create targeted and personalized messages.

4) Q/A Submission

Answering the questions is a great way of driving traffic to the website. You can use sites like Quora.com, Answer.com, yahoo.com, answerbag.com, etc. The best tip is you have to find the audience of your niche and solve the problem of your niche. The traffic from Q&A sites are quality and stable because the targeted audience comes to your site.

5) Influencer Marketing

Reach out to the influencer in your industry. For list out the people who are doing great in your niche and let them know about your contents, services, products. And encourage them to share your content with their audiences. Influencer marketing can be paid, in some cases depending upon how many followers he or she has got.

So, strategic partnerships and form mutually beneficial relationships with other influencers who can help you get more exposure from the right audiences.

6) Link Building/Exchanging

Link building is another very important off-page SEO techniques in today’s practice. It helps increasing trust, brand in the internet world. Google prioritizes the content with a higher number of links.

Link exchanging in the process of giving a link to each other in the relevant contexts.

There are mainly three types of links

• Natural Links: User or Customers or Second person automatically (by themselves) links to your site as a sign of trust, endorsement, and appreciation.
• Manually Built Links: You get the link back manually by asking them to link back to your website.
• Self-Created Links: These are the links created intentionally by commenting in blogs, directories, blog comment signature with the optimized anchor texts.

7) Image/Document/Video Submission

Share images, documents, and videos, and other relevant infographics in the respective directories. This way, you can drive traffic to your site. Images and Videos can go viral nowadays, so you should bet in them. For example, you can use the following platforms –

Image – Instagram, Pinterest, Flickr, Photobucket

Video –  YouTube, Vimeo

Document – SlideShare, Issuu, Scribd

8) Social Bookmarking

Social Bookmarking is another great way of promoting your website. Submit your latest blog posts and pages to the most popular bookmarking sites, like StumbleUpon, Delicious, Reddit, Digg, etc.

The content on these sites is updated very frequently, so, search engines really like these types of sites  You should be very careful while doing this and you must properly handle the tags which are very essential to broadcast your news on a wide area network.

9) Blog Commenting

Do not hesitate to comment on authority blogs. Blog comments on other blogs within the same niche as yours allows you to add a link in the comments section. These links can then be crawled by search engines, helping to point them towards your site.

Blog Commenting is also the best off-page SEO techniques.

Note: Do not comment everywhere, instead chose the blog which is relevant, authentic, trustworthy and also has higher numbers of audiences.

10) Get Listed in Local Business

Getting listed in the local business is essential in today’s online business.  Depending on your niche and business fields, you might find that listing in local directories may be useful. You have to optimize your content and links and from that, you can generate a decent number of social traffic and brand awareness.

Local listing is very important in two factors, if you are doing business locally then you have a high chance of getting business also you should not fight with global competitors. Instead of going global and facing huge competition, listing your website locally, so that search engines can easily view your website. So, Local listing is another best off-page SEO techniques.

Submit your website to sites like; Google My Business, Google Maps, Yellow Pages, Local Business Directories, etc.

So, these are the widely followed Off-Page SEO Techniques by the professional.

Comparatively, off-page SEO is a lot harder to get good results than on-page SEO. These 10 tips should boost your SEO strategies and improve your website traffic numbers. You have to work at it over time and perhaps get out of your comfort zone and network with other bloggers.

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Other Posts:

• Yoast SEO Plugin VS All in One SEO Pack – Which one is better?
• 13 Essential SEO Tips For WordPress Website
• Essential Basic Setup for Brand New WordPress Website

If you liked this article, share it with your group on social networks. Also, follow us on Twitter and Facebook and LinkedIn for more tips.

The post 10 Common Off-Page SEO Techniques appeared first on Acme Themes Blog.

Wait,

driving tons of traffic sounds great right? But it is not as easy as we think. There are many competitors working in the same idea and niche. The only two ways to drive traffic on the website are either by Running Ads or by Ranking the Site Organically.

Running ads and spending a huge amount of money – is kind of not our interest.  So, another best way to drive traffic in by ranking the website organically on the search engines. It may take a few months to get ranked on the search engines, but the traffic duration and quality of traffic is must stable than paid traffic.

So in order to rank the website in a specific keyword. The very first thing you need to perform in On-Page Search Engine Optimization. 

What is On Page SEO?

In the SEO industry, there are two terms On Page SEO and Off Page SEO. On-page optimization is the technique of optimizing the content, media, links within the website.

According to Moz – On page SEO is the practice of optimizing individual web pages in order to rank higher and earn more relevant traffic in search engines. On page refers to both the content and HTML source code of a page that can be optimized.

Off-page, on the other hand, is a technique that you do outside websites like building quality backlinks. On-page SEO  is the most important factor for better ranking.

15 On Page Optimization Techniques

Here are the 15+ Actionable On-Page SEO Techniques for WordPress Website.

1. Proper 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.

Tips:

• Mention the primary keyword in the first 100 words of the post
• Try to populate Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) keywords within the blog post
• If you are in a highly competitive niche, then focus on Long Tail Keyword.

2. Page Title

Optimizing Page Title is another most important factor for SEO. Title-page, as shown in the figure below, is the first impression to the users. So, you need to put a catchy and attractive title s0 that the user could click it.

Study shows that Title tag affects the overall Click Through Rate percentage of the website.

Check out the how to Optimize Title Tag for better Click Through Rate.

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. URL Structure

The URL Structure of the site plays a great role in SEO and site ranking as the URL is the gateway for the web crawler.  Google Gives More Priority to the URL that contains 3-5 words. Your URL should be short and sweet.

The WordPress permalink setting allows you to choose your default permalink structure. You can choose from common settings or create custom URL structures. Once you chose the setting, WordPress automatically chose the permalink structure that you configured.

I WordPress, you will find the permalink setting in Settings>Permalink

We recommend setting the Post name as default.  Permalink according to the post name is considered to be better for SEO purposes.

Tips:

• Try to include Primary Keyword in the URL.
• Make your URL as short as possible.

4. Meta Description

Meta description is a short description that appears just below the URL link in Search Engine Ranking Pages (SERPs). Meta description also appears in the homepage as well.

Meta description is also an important factor for SEO as it increases the Click Through Rate (CTR) of the page. People are likely to click more those pages having proper meta descriptions. It is highly recommended to include the primary keyword along with the modifiers like, “best”, “Tips”, “Guide”, “Lates date year” etc.

Tips:

• Try to wrap up Meta Description between 50–160 characters.
• Try including a primary keyword in Meta Description.

5. Optimizing Media

Media in any website represents different formats of images and videos. Media adds extra beauty to the overall content of the website. But in terms of On-page SEO, optimizing media is one of the vital tasks.

Majorly, optimizing media on any website includes, optimizing image files. Such as Image alternative texts, Image description, reducing size. Read a detailed guide about image optimization.

Tips:

• Try uploading images below 200 kb in size.
• Use TinyPNG.com or TinyJpg.com to reduce the size of the image without losing the image quality.
• Do not forget to rename the image with a targeted keyword before upload.
• Have image cache plugin

6. Content Formatting

Content is King!

For better ranking, content should be well formatted.

According to the 11web.com, 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

Besides these, steps. you need to improve things like internal and external linking to the related posts. This way, you can add more value to your post by providing interrelated content.

7. Optimizing Speed

Website speed has a big impact on SEO. Page speed is important to user experience. Pages with a longer load time tend to have higher bounce rates and lower average time on page.

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 as 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.

There are a few things you need to consider to make a website faster.

• Choose good hosting
• Choose well coded and light WordPress theme
• Use Content Delivery Network (CDN)
• Minify JavaScript and CSS

Read More about First Content  Paint (FCP) and First Meaningful Paint (FMP).

8. Mobile Friendliness

Google has made major changes in its algorithm, officially called Mobile-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.

9. Content SEO

Content SEO is a key part of any SEO strategy. Without content, it’s impossible for your site to rank in search engines. It’s, therefore, crucial to write and structure quality content.

According to Yoast – “Content SEO refers to creating content that helps your web pages to rank high in the search engines. It includes everything to do with the writing and structuring of content on your website. There are three major elements you need to consider to produce content that will make your website rank well: keyword strategy, site structure and copywriting”. 

So, focus on three of the key elements while doing content SEO to rank higher in the SERPs.

10. Keyword Density

Maintaining the right keyword density is another important On-Page SEO technique.

Keyword refers to the repetition of the number of targeted keywords in a specific blog post. You have to maintain the optimum percentage of the keyword in the overall content.

“KEYWORD DENSITY’ is simply a PERCENTAGE value of the NUMBER OF TIMES a KEYWORD or KEY PHRASE appears on a WEB PAGE compared to the TOTAL AMOUNT OF WORDS on the page.” WIKI

The consideration is that Google will order SERPs and reward with higher ranking a page that has a ‘specific’ target keyword density percentage value.

Tips:

• Try to populate 2-3% of keyword density

11. Work in LSI Keyword

Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) keywords are another important thing to work in. In order to rank better for the main keyword, these are the essential keywords that are semantically related to your main keyword. These  keywords supplement the Primary Keyword and act as helpers to give stronger contextual information to the search engines and users

These accompanying words that provide context to the main keywords are what Google understands as LSI keywords to decide which is the correct meaning. Read more about LSI Keyword Guide in this article by LSIGraph.

Tips:

• Try in include related LSI keywords in the content

12. Maintaining Headline Hierarchy

There are altogether 6 header tags used in the website from <H1> to <H6>.

Header tags used on the website make it easier for web crawlers to gauge the relevance of your web content. The proper header categorizes the content in the heading, subheading, and body.

In the hierarchy of headings, H1 text is the most important to SEO. This is the title of the web page, so search engines look to the keywords in the H1 header to categorize and surface content to users.

Maintaining proper header hierarchy is essential from both the search engine aspect as well as the user experience point of view.

Tips:

• The main keyword must be included in the <h1> tag in the header

13. Proper Internal Linking

Internal linking is the process of linking one content to another according to the context within the same website. Internal linking is one of the important factors for SEO perspective as well as the user’s perspective. Internal linking helps in navigating the different contextual pages within the website.

Tips

• Link to only relevant pages

14. Use Outbound Link

Outbound link the link that goes to different website from your website. An outbound link does help in search engine optimization. There are two types of outbound links.

They are do-follow and no-follow. Nofollow tells search engines not to follow links and do-follow passes ranking power from your website to the targeted pages. Deciding whether to have a do-follow link of no-follow link entirely depends on the site authority. The benefit of having outbound links is to increase relevancy, to increase trust, to boost value and backlinking purpose.

So, Increase Your Authority, Audience, and Ranking With Outbound Links.

Tips:

• Outbound links will be useless if they are not wrapped up in high-quality original content

Read More – about the do-follow link and no follow link

15. Developing High-Quality Content

After setting up all the necessary settings, you now focus on producing Quality, Engaging, Original and Helpful content for users. While publishing the first blog, you should consider the essential SEO guidelines so that you start pushing even better content right after.

Here, the meaning of quality content is content that creates value for the targeted customers. Engaging content means somehow, that content should engage the reader by providing relevant images/infographics, GIFs, videos.

Visually rich infographics can instantly make your content look more appealing and entertaining. But that’s not the only reason why you should learn how to make infographics that shine. Read more about How to Make an Infographic: The Ultimate Guide

Likewise, original content refers to that the content is not copied from the other sources. Instead, it is written from scratch with own experience and in-depth research. Lastly, helpful content means, that it should solve the user’s problem that they are looking for.

And the more you produce quality content, the more Google notices you and rank your content better. Find out how to get noticed by Google by improving your EAT score.

16. Make Content Easily Sharable

In today’s time, social sharing is an integral part of our internet experience. Furthermore, it’s constantly on the rise and becoming popular with older folk as well. Social media became the best way to share any information because many people engage in social media than any other platform. Social media also plays a significant role in helping you find your favorite websites.

So, we highly recommend installing the best social media sharing plugin. We don’t say exactly which one you use because there are lots of best social media sharing plugins. But, what we can say is having a social media plugin is a must for any website.

Tips:

• Use visually appealing and best Social Sharing plugins

Glossary

LSI Keyword – LSI stands for Latent Semantic Indexing. It is the list of keywords that are closely related to the primary keyword.

Long Tail Keyword – Long tail keyword is the group of keywords or phrases that make a sentence.

SERPs – Search Engine Ranking Pages are the pages that show up when user type specific keywords in the Google search bar.

CTR – Click Through Rate is the rate of the click on your page. CTR = Click/Impression.

Other Posts:

• Yoast SEO Plugin VS All in One SEO Pack – Which one is better?
• 13 Essential SEO Tips For WordPress Website
• Essential Basic Setup for Brand New WordPress Website

If you liked this article, share it with your group on social networks. Also, follow us on Twitter and Facebook and LinkedIn for more tips.

The post 15 Actionable On Page SEO Techniques for WordPress Website appeared first on Acme Themes Blog.