Let me show you how important it is….

Why is realtor.com not higher than zumper.com in the mobile search on the left?  Consider these metrics

Realtor.com = Domain Score: 55 Trust Score 58 Alexa Rank 763 Registered 1996 Ads 3,900 Backlinks 57,000,000 Traffic Rank 108

Zumper.com = Domain Score: 37 Trust Score 44 Alexa Rank 17,000 Registered 2004 Ads 0 Backlinks 1,700,000 Traffic Rank 2830

In every metric realtor.com wins, so why is it below Zumper.com on the mobile search?

Site Speed Test on GTMetrix

Realtor.com Fails Speed

Zumper.com Passes Speed

So in this example we clearly see a more popular site beaten by a less established site and the single only factor the smaller site did better was speed.  And we cant discount this as … well its only important in mobile.  In case you missed it…

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I have to admit they are useful in my opinion.  Say you have 10 blogs that you do SEO for … you can use the RSS feed with an IFTTT Applet to auto generator your social media announcements of new content.  Rather than posting something to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Blogger, Tumblr, Instagram and so on and so on.

You can also ensure that your blog regularly gets updates which improve the likely hood of crawlers visiting your site more frequently.  It’s not the main attraction content that you would be pulling in but filler content that is still relevant.  Think of it like this … when you go to your local newspaper’s site likely all of the nation news is from the Associated Press.  That means that article is duplicate content but duplicate content isn’t as bad as folks make it out to be…it happens and in journalism it’s more the norm than the exception.

Sometimes I feel that RSS content aggregated well can create unique content.  An example is during an election I built a site that aimed to have all the local elections news in one spot.  VoteLouisville.com pulled the RSS feeds of anyone running for office which created a place where you could read two candidates updates side by side and compare what they were focusing on in the election.  The candidates want there content reposted, and the voters likely want to see both sides so in that scenario I think the content from RSS made uniquely different aggregated content.

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Political SEO is search engine optimization meant to affect a political outcome by ranking a political message for a specific intended audience before a future event.  The event is often an election.  Political SEO is commonly mixed with PPC or Pay Per Click advertising as SEO work generally requires time to build momentum while political campaigns are often short lived entities.

Political SEO may promote a candidate, party, idea, platform or agenda and intends to influence an audience’s perception of that focus.

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Negative SEO is a branch of SEO that largely came into existence with Google’s Penguin Update.  For the first time in SEO a search engine was prepared to lower your ranking based on what it perceived to be a site gaming the system.  Not only did site’s change the way they promoted themselves but this created a very real opportunity to harm competitor’s sites.

All you have to do to is mimic spammy promotion of a site to draw Google into penalizing that site.  This can include:

• Building too many unnatural backlinks from low quality sites too quickly to have been organic
• Using anchor text with adult themes or words associated with low brow tactics.
• Associate the competitor or target site with link building schemes, such as a PBN.
• Duplicate content thereby watering down the value of their original content.

Google On Negative SEO

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Likely this is the most annoying question I get but I get it…we all wanna know the future.  Anyone who tells you a set time table is lying or doesn’t realize they don’t know.  We can guestimate…and I mean guess estimate it.  Cause for us to make an accurate quote on how long it will take we have to know what other people may be doing on the same keyword in the future and often they dont even know they are going to rank for that keyword a week from now.

You have to understand with 200 factors coming together in your ranking there are like thousands with there own 200 ranking factors that are going to play into the answer.  Sometimes unrelated things like adding a huge blog post on something else with poorly optimized images can slow down the whole site and that speed decrease may be enough to move someone else a spot higher.

In broad general terms I’d say with backlink building from relevant sites using the correct anchor text, users clicking your search result more than the one above you and with some good content thats optimized you can rank at the top in less than a month for easier long tail keywords.  It its a difficult keyword that has competition surrounding it Id expect it to take longer and Id be prepared for fluctuation some days you may lose some ground don’t get upset. The thing I’d focus on is the trend…is it climbing and can you keep up that pace?  Here is a set of keywords I use to serve as a baseline for this site…I think the trend is the most important thing.

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Search Engine Optimization or SEO is a broad term that covers actions intended to improve a web site or web page’s visibility within one or more search engines.  Its ever evolving as the search engines change and the way they rank is updated.

In the earliest days of the internet Keywords and Keyword stuffing rained king.  As search engines have evolved they no longer use old tools such as the meta keywords or keyword density. Keywords are still important but its their contextual use and placement that now matters.

SEO includes “off page” topics such as anchor text, backlinks and technical SEO.   In all 200 factors go into consideration by Google when ranking sites for searches and each of these factors is arguably a subsection of SEO.

SEO can further be divided by Whitehat or Blackhat with many SEOs falling into a hybrid Greyhat area.  Blackhat SEO is considered fast and risky with Whitehat meeting the requirements of a search engine and seek long term growth that may take some investment of time and money.

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Domain Authority is a Moz.com metric meant to predict a domains ability to rank content on a search engine.  It relies heavily on backlinks and anchor text just like Google.  DA is a number between 0 to 100.  It is increasingly harder to increase your domain authority.  So a site may have 20 backlinks from 20 different sites and it earns a 10 DA but when that site has 40 domains linking to it its not going to have a 20 DA it might have a 15.

The Law Of Diminishing Returns is really easily seen in this topic.  Over a 4 month period a DA33 site increased its linking domains from 400 to 800 and its DA increased to DA40.  That was 7 points for double the domains.  This site on 2/1/2019 has a DA41.  A month ago this site had a DA40.  In the last 30 days this site added about 34 domains linking to it for a total of 854.  The other site previously mentioned had about 800 when it became a DA40 as well.

An indepth discuss is included in an article on the site.  Domain Authority, Why Should I Care?

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Great question…here is a video from them.  It is worth watching because it provides good advice for hiring an SEO and sets expectations.

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James Cameron does what James Cameron does because James Cameron is James Cameron.

That is keyword stuffing.  It’s easy to spot and pretty obvious.  Think of a shameless self promotional tactic that just forces a keyword needless into a page’s content.  It distracts visitors at best and at worst it hurts your SEO value.

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Likely this is the most annoying question I get but I get it…we all wanna know the future.  Anyone who tells you a set time table is lying or doesn’t realize they don’t know.  We can guestimate…and I mean guess estimate it.  Cause for us to make an accurate quote on how long it will take we have to know what other people may be doing on the same keyword in the future and often they dont even know they are going to rank for that keyword a week from now.

You have to understand with 200 factors coming together in your ranking there are like thousands with there own 200 ranking factors that are going to play into the answer.  Sometimes unrelated things like adding a huge blog post on something else with poorly optimized images can slow down the whole site and that speed decrease may be enough to move someone else a spot higher.

In broad general terms I’d say with backlink building from relevant sites using the correct anchor text, users clicking your search result more than the one above you and with some good content thats optimized you can rank at the top in less than a month for easier long tail keywords.  It its a difficult keyword that has competition surrounding it Id expect it to take longer and Id be prepared for fluctuation some days you may lose some ground don’t get upset. The thing I’d focus on is the trend…is it climbing and can you keep up that pace?  Here is a set of keywords I use to serve as a baseline for this site…I think the trend is the most important thing.

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This is a solid reasonable question…that unfortunately requires a sliding scale answer.  Since your Google ranking is made up of 200 factors and Domain Pop is just one of these no exact number can be used to determine your rank. First…whats the quality of the ranking domains?  100 no name domains that you just created aren’t worth one link from huffingtonpost.com

I would suggest there is a rough rule of thumb…

DA 10 = less than 50

DA 20 = 200

DA 30 = 400

DA40 = 800

DA50 = 2000

These are not exact numbers but just rules of thumb that I’ve found helpful.  Basically though for every ten more points in DA the number of domains may double. PBN sites and domains with little to no traffic are maybe only worth a fourth of a domain…so if yiu have 800 pbn sites linking to you ….Id say you may expect a DA of about 10 to 20.  If these 800 are solid real domains, youre DA should be 35 – 40.

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First off …. honestly take pretty much everything you know about duplicate content and forget it.  You will have duplicate content and thats alright…its normal.  The Associated Press is a highly syndicated news source…do you think Google penalizes every news site that includes the AP content?

Think I’m talking crazy?  Look for information from Google on Duplicate Content…ignore info from anyone else.  To save you a step…heres me duplicating content….copying from Google https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66359?hl=en

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Best plan is to hire me to do a Technical Audit and let me implement my recommendations.  Too easy right?  Okay…so then you need to establish a baseline go to gtmetrix.com and put in a targeted page you’d like to optimize.

Okay…so I’m next to perfect here but it wasnt always that way.  I used to have a slider that had 5 large images in it at the top of my homepage.  That slider required a dozen or so javascript files and css files to load.  Since it was the first thing you saw it meant you had to wait for it before the page began to function.  After that the page had images and more javascript and more css files.  Each file on a page is a request… your computer has to ask the server for it, the server may take a moment to respond with the file, then you have to put it in place on the page and multiple that process by a hundred and you see a chance to improve your site speed.

Additionally combining files cuts down on the time required.  I have 8 or so certification icons on the homepage but I merged them into 2 images instead of 8.  Here is an example…

We can also improve Technical load times by getting a server that is dedicated to this site.  You might try a micro server on AWS or Google Cloud Platform they cost hardly anything but the resources are available for your site when you need them.  Cloudflare also offers speed advantageous through a cache and its CDN network.  Theres more but these items should be enough to start you on the road to at most a 3 second load time.  Thats honestly where you have to draw the line if you want to rank a keyword against competitors who are willing to do what it takes to load within 3 seconds.

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Likely this is the most annoying question I get but I get it…we all wanna know the future.  Anyone who tells you a set time table is lying or doesn’t realize they don’t know.  We can guestimate…and I mean guess estimate it.  Cause for us to make an accurate quote on how long it will take we have to know what other people may be doing on the same keyword in the future and often they dont even know they are going to rank for that keyword a week from now.

You have to understand with 200 factors coming together in your ranking there are like thousands with there own 200 ranking factors that are going to play into the answer.  Sometimes unrelated things like adding a huge blog post on something else with poorly optimized images can slow down the whole site and that speed decrease may be enough to move someone else a spot higher.

In broad general terms I’d say with backlink building from relevant sites using the correct anchor text, users clicking your search result more than the one above you and with some good content thats optimized you can rank at the top in less than a month for easier long tail keywords.  It its a difficult keyword that has competition surrounding it Id expect it to take longer and Id be prepared for fluctuation some days you may lose some ground don’t get upset. The thing I’d focus on is the trend…is it climbing and can you keep up that pace?  Here is a set of keywords I use to serve as a baseline for this site…I think the trend is the most important thing.

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This is a solid reasonable question…that unfortunately requires a sliding scale answer.  Since your Google ranking is made up of 200 factors and Domain Pop is just one of these no exact number can be used to determine your rank. First…whats the quality of the ranking domains?  100 no name domains that you just created aren’t worth one link from huffingtonpost.com

I would suggest there is a rough rule of thumb…

DA 10 = less than 50

DA 20 = 200

DA 30 = 400

DA40 = 800

DA50 = 2000

These are not exact numbers but just rules of thumb that I’ve found helpful.  Basically though for every ten more points in DA the number of domains may double. PBN sites and domains with little to no traffic are maybe only worth a fourth of a domain…so if yiu have 800 pbn sites linking to you ….Id say you may expect a DA of about 10 to 20.  If these 800 are solid real domains, youre DA should be 35 – 40.

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I have to admit they are useful in my opinion.  Say you have 10 blogs that you do SEO for … you can use the RSS feed with an IFTTT Applet to auto generator your social media announcements of new content.  Rather than posting something to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Blogger, Tumblr, Instagram and so on and so on.

You can also ensure that your blog regularly gets updates which improve the likely hood of crawlers visiting your site more frequently.  It’s not the main attraction content that you would be pulling in but filler content that is still relevant.  Think of it like this … when you go to your local newspaper’s site likely all of the nation news is from the Associated Press.  That means that article is duplicate content but duplicate content isn’t as bad as folks make it out to be…it happens and in journalism it’s more the norm than the exception.

Sometimes I feel that RSS content aggregated well can create unique content.  An example is during an election I built a site that aimed to have all the local elections news in one spot.  VoteLouisville.com pulled the RSS feeds of anyone running for office which created a place where you could read two candidates updates side by side and compare what they were focusing on in the election.  The candidates want there content reposted, and the voters likely want to see both sides so in that scenario I think the content from RSS made uniquely different aggregated content.

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Auto Blogging is the practice of increasing content across sites usually with the same content but sometimes with subtle changes in the wording.  It’s done usually to pad content and it’s similar to syndicating news or guest postings that may appear on other sites.

Whats the issue with it?  Well it cant be the most unique, fresh content if you’re auto blogging it.  Even with the use of synonyms and word spinners the content is below grade and could carry duplicate content.  You should ensure that the content isn’t plagiarized and give credit to the author.  Canonical tags begin to play into this more where you get the use of the content but you provide the SEO value and credit back to the author.

Whats wrong with spinner content?  Its not natural … consider the sentence … Its the day after Valentine’s Day here and I’m just hanging out with my dog.  I got back “Its the after a long time after Valentine’s Day here and I’m simply spending time with my puppy.” from Free Article Spinner.com.  There is a mishap in the beginning of the sentence now and now “I’m simply spending time with my puppy.” … how would it not be simply?  Or how about another test sentence…

I prefer doing technical SEO audits to local SEO work just because Dallas, Houston and Los Angeles are all very different from Louisville or Chicago.

I incline toward doing specialized SEO reviews to nearby SEO work since Dallas, Houston and Los Angeles are for the most part altogether different from Louisville or Chicago.

Get the point on Auto Blogging?  I’d say you’re better off rewriting it yourself and now its not auto blogging.

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Yes … already, come on!  An interesting thing happened once on a blog post I did while the article was on page two the image I used in the post and included a good img-alt tag for ended up ranking #1 for that keyword in image search.  It’s just less competitive and the point is that on page one a few images are usually shown and with the right image you can pull in more clicks than your page two article.

It’s also a requirement.  You see those are needed t=for screen readers to read to a blind person.Its part of your sites accessibility to people with ADA needs.  Which in the end a web crawler is like a blind person, so use the tag to show you’ve added yet another supporting element on the page for the keyword you’re after … and often others don’t use those tags so its your secret weapon sometimes.

  I used this image to convey Citation Flow’s uselessness and the img alt tag supports that.

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Best plan is to hire me to do a Technical Audit and let me implement my recommendations.  Too easy right?  Okay…so then you need to establish a baseline go to gtmetrix.com and put in a targeted page you’d like to optimize.

Okay…so I’m next to perfect here but it wasnt always that way.  I used to have a slider that had 5 large images in it at the top of my homepage.  That slider required a dozen or so javascript files and css files to load.  Since it was the first thing you saw it meant you had to wait for it before the page began to function.  After that the page had images and more javascript and more css files.  Each file on a page is a request… your computer has to ask the server for it, the server may take a moment to respond with the file, then you have to put it in place on the page and multiple that process by a hundred and you see a chance to improve your site speed.

Additionally combining files cuts down on the time required.  I have 8 or so certification icons on the homepage but I merged them into 2 images instead of 8.  Here is an example…

We can also improve Technical load times by getting a server that is dedicated to this site.  You might try a micro server on AWS or Google Cloud Platform they cost hardly anything but the resources are available for your site when you need them.  Cloudflare also offers speed advantageous through a cache and its CDN network.  Theres more but these items should be enough to start you on the road to at most a 3 second load time.  Thats honestly where you have to draw the line if you want to rank a keyword against competitors who are willing to do what it takes to load within 3 seconds.

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All of your sites pages should load within three seconds.  After five seconds the number of people still waiting for your page to load is about half of those who started. As your page takes longer to load, Google lowers your rank so it can serve visitors results that they’ll use.

A Lot of people discard this element of Technical SEO and a lot of people aren’t going to rank for the keywords they want.   Optimize your page content and server hardware to ensure pages are visible with in three seconds.

Test the top results for the keyword you’re hoping to rank and I can pretty much guarantee it loaded in under 3 seconds.  The top result for Barack Obama was his Wikipedia page. It loads in 2.8 seconds according to GTmetrix.   The top result for Ultimate SEO is SEO Ultimate Plus and they load in 3.9 seconds.  Our site loads in 3.4 seconds.

Page speed is one of 200 factors that go into Google ranking.  Its one of the easiest to change though.

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Negative SEO is a branch of SEO that largely came into existence with Google’s Penguin Update.  For the first time in SEO a search engine was prepared to lower your ranking based on what it perceived to be a site gaming the system.  Not only did site’s change the way they promoted themselves but this created a very real opportunity to harm competitor’s sites.

All you have to do to is mimic spammy promotion of a site to draw Google into penalizing that site.  This can include:

• Building too many unnatural backlinks from low quality sites too quickly to have been organic
• Using anchor text with adult themes or words associated with low brow tactics.
• Associate the competitor or target site with link building schemes, such as a PBN.
• Duplicate content thereby watering down the value of their original content.

Google On Negative SEO

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Theres likely debate and I don’t claim to have tested everything out there but I’ve found this mix to be good for me.

WPA Auto Links – It auto adds links in your content when it recognizes a phrase you have already covered so it adds an internal link for you.

Yoast – Hands down the best most configurable SEO plugin for what you want people to see in search results. I rarely use the keyword tool where it says to add this word here or there.  I also prefer xml site maps from a different plugin.

XML Site maps And Google News plugin just makes the files I want exactly the way I want.

Schema is another plugin that Yoast also does but I prefer a plugin that does it really well.

CyberSyn – For RSS feeds to posts, it gives the most features of any plugins I know of on WordPress for RSS to post.

Ultimate FAQs – I am a fan of FAQs all the time and anytime.  I like that in this plugin they are all on one page together but a permalink exists to the specific FAQ on its own as well giving you the flexibility of serving it a la cart.

Smush – Image optimization is essential and without a plugin to ensure you’re not showing a 2000 x 2000 image in a 200 x 200 spot you’ll quickly lose control of your site’s load times.

Merge Minify Refresh – You’ll have 25 css and 20 js files on every page and this plugin helps tackle that with out breaking everything.  I am NOT a fan of Auto-Optimize I usually find myself having to recover from backup after it auto does its thing.

404 to 301 – I like to 404 redirect to a search page that is likely to help someone find what they are after rather than just drop them on a 404 error page or the homepage.

WP-Optimize – I prefer this tool … always backup first but it does a good amount of cleaning and helps keep your database tables neat.  Neat means faster page load times.

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Let me show you how important it is….

Why is realtor.com not higher than zumper.com in the mobile search on the left?  Consider these metrics

Realtor.com = Domain Score: 55 Trust Score 58 Alexa Rank 763 Registered 1996 Ads 3,900 Backlinks 57,000,000 Traffic Rank 108

Zumper.com = Domain Score: 37 Trust Score 44 Alexa Rank 17,000 Registered 2004 Ads 0 Backlinks 1,700,000 Traffic Rank 2830

In every metric realtor.com wins, so why is it below Zumper.com on the mobile search?

Site Speed Test on GTMetrix

Realtor.com Fails Speed

Zumper.com Passes Speed

So in this example we clearly see a more popular site beaten by a less established site and the single only factor the smaller site did better was speed.  And we cant discount this as … well its only important in mobile.  In case you missed it…

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