Increasing a Site’s Rank with On-Topic Content

alt="Increasing a Site’s Rank with On-Topic Content" src="http://whsr.webrevenueinc1.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/0404-1-500x780_c.jpg" />

Years ago, you could find a keyword that people were searching for, make sure you used it on a page of your website and use a few other tricks watch the traffic roll into your site. Unfortunately, some unsavory web owners figured out these tricks and put up pages that contained things like all keywords, a ton of ads or content that simply wasn’t on topic.

Like most things, a few people doing the wrong thing with this information ruined a simple solution to href="http://www.webhostingsecretrevealed.net/category/blog/seo/">search engine optimization for everyone. You’ve likely already heard about the algorithm changes Google has implemented with Panda and other updates. One thing the search engine also looks at these days when choosing how to rank your site is many different aspects of your content, including href="http://www.webhostingsecretrevealed.net/compare-best-five-hosting/">whether or not it is on topic.

In a video by Matt Cutts, teaching website owners how to rank better on Google, he indicates that as of 2012, there were over 200 factors that Google looks at to see if a site’s content is a good match for a user’s search term.

“You want to find reputable documents that are also about what the user typed in. And that’s kind of the secret sauce, trying to figure out a way to combine those 200 different ranking signals in order to find the most relevant document. So at any given time, hundreds of millions of times a day, someone comes to Google. We try to find the closest data center to them.”

Why Quality Counts?

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One thing that webmasters have noted since Google Panda came stomping onto the scene is that quality content gets you a gold star. However, there is quite a debate about what exactly quality content entails. Since Google isn’t realizing all 200 plus points it looks at to determine this, we have to make a best guessed based on work ranking Google pages, what webmaster’s have noticed, and some information that has been leaked here and there by former employees or during interviews with current employees.

Matt Cutts, the head of the webspam team at Google, often shares thoughts on how webmasters can improve their sites. On thehref="http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/01/google-search-and-search-engine-spam.html" target="_blank"> official Google blog in January 2011, Cutts wrote:

“As we’ve increased both our size and freshness in recent months, we’ve naturally indexed a lot of good content and some spam as well. To respond to that challenge, we recently launched a redesigned document-level classifier that makes it harder for spammy on-page content to rank highly.”

It is actually beneficial for serious webmasters that Google is dealing with the spammy sites and low-quality content. However, knowing what to do to fix the content on your own site and improve your SEO can be quite a challenge.

3 Ways To Improve Your On-Topic Content Instantly

Writing on-topic content sounds simple, doesn’t it? Choose some keywords, make sure the article is about those keywords. Easy peasy! Not so fast! Remember that Google looks at hundreds of different points to decide how your website should be ranked. Writing great on-topic content that will rank well in the search engines is about so much more than just writing on a particular topic.

1. Unique Content

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Your on-topic content also must be unique content. Gone are the days where you can publish an article across several sites for the exposure, because those sites will take a hit in rankings for what Google will tag as “canned” content.

Making sure the content on your site is completely unique can be a real challenge. While Google won’t rank you down for using a quote here and there (as long as you source it properly), they will catch it if you grab articles from content mills and those articles are on several different sites.

If others are writing for you, you need to be sure the content is unique. Unfortunately, some inexperienced writers do not understand the difference between copying entire pages and passing it off as their own work and creating writing of their own. Make sure any content published on your site is unique by running it through a quick and free online plagiarism checker, such as href="http://www.dustball.com/cs/plagiarism.checker/" target="_blank">Dustball.com or href="http://turnitin.com/" target="_blank">TurnItIn.com.

2. A Fresh Angle

If you’re writing an article about duck decoys, try to come up with an angle that hasn’t been covered before. Start by doing a Google search on the topic. What comes up first in the search engine? Are there five articles about how to buy the correct decoy for different hunting situations? Good, now consider how you can cover the topic in a different way.

Could you interview a duck decoy creator or a duck hunter and include some advice from an expert to give your article a new twist that isn’t already out there? Maybe instead of writing about how to buy the perfect duck decoy, you could write about how to restore an old decoy to like-new condition.

Come up with a fresh angle and follow other excellent SEO principles and you’ll see your rankings rise over time.

3. Indicate Duplicates Within Your Tags

There are some instances where content will be repeated across your site, such as when you have a readable version and a printable version. Google can easily recognize the difference between this and copied or nonsensical material.

One thing you can do is to create one of the pages with a noindex meta tag. However, if you do not include the tag or you forget that you need one with duplicate content, Google will still recognize that the files contain the same material, albeit for different reasons and will index only one of the pages. Unfortunately, if you forget the tag, Google will choose which page to index.

If you are running a WordPress site, then you can automate this process with plugins such as the All in One SEO plugin. Otherwise, you may want to write a simple code such as this:

<meta name=”robots” content=”noindex, follow”>
<meta name=”robots” content=”index, nofollow”>
<meta name=”robots” content=”noindex, nofollow”>

Quality Tips from Google

Even though Google doesn’t release the secrets to its algorithm, we can get a glimpse of what they are looking for in on-topic content by reading the blog, listening to the instructional videos and paying attention to what information Google does release.

On their website, Google states:

“In general, Google News aims to promote original journalism, as well as to expose users to diverse perspectives. There are no human editors selecting stories or deciding which ones deserve top placement. Ranking in Google News is determined based on a number of factor.”

The factors that Google has stated it looks at are:

• How fresh the content is
• Is the content diverse? Do you cover all aspects?
• Is the text high quality and on-topic?
• Is it original?

It’s About the Quality

Although some topics are better suited to a longer article, Google does not count words when choosing a ranking status. A shorter piece can rank just as high as a long piece, if you follow the tips above and make sure your content is unique, on-topic and has a fresh perspective. Edit for grammar errors and put the absolute best product out you can for your readers and the Google ranking gods will reward you.

* Image credit: title="Google Search Ranking Factors 2012" href="http://www.tagseoblog.com/google-search-ranking-factors-2012-infographic" target="_blank">Infographic by Martin Missfeldt.

Page 21 – Web Hosting Secret Revealed

Why Author Rank Matters More After The Death Of Google Authorship

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What does an editorial by an established author have in common with all the other content pieces by all the other authors in your niche?

Too much… there are countless authors who are musing the same ideas as authoritative writers, and in similar ways.

But how should readers identify and choose content written by an authority over another writer’s work?

Google made it easy to identify the work of certain authors on the premise that ‘some people are smarter than others on certain topics’. It introduced the ‘Google Authorship’ program with the aim of giving authors who were better informed on their subject matter greater importance in search engines.

Google Authorship permitted authors to include structured data mark-ups in their website’s code which would display an author’s image with their name next to a content price so it is visible to readers who is behind the piece and make a decision according to the person’s work.

The U-turn by Google

After a multi-year experiment with Google Authorship, the search engine company has pulled the plug, and the feature is no longer available.

Google removed all author photos at the end of June 2014 from global search, and just left bylines at that time. John Mueller, Webmaster Trends Analyst, href="https://plus.google.com/+JohnMueller/posts/PDkPdPtjL6j" target="_blank">stated in a Google+ post the images were removed because Google was taking a more unified approach towards mobile and desktop search, and author images were not working well for the limited screen space on mobile.

Later, Google removed the Authorship information from search results altogether. href="https://plus.google.com/+JohnMueller/posts/HZf3KDP1Dm8" target="_blank">Muller said in a Google+ post that the reason behind ending the project was that the feature was not as valuable to readers as the company hoped and sometimes even posed a distraction.

class="wp-image-10952 size-full aligncenter" src="http://whsr.webrevenueinc1.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/21.png" alt="2" width="521" height="129" srcset="http://whsr.webrevenueinc1.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/21.png 521w, http://whsr.webrevenueinc1.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/21-300x74.png 300w" sizes="(max-width: 521px) 100vw, 521px" />

Perhaps this was coming as neither readers nor authors every really took Authorship seriously enough. href="https://plus.google.com/+RayHiltz/posts/8DHh2a7ihsZ" target="_blank">Its adoption rate was low, and it was only working for authors who had set up a Google+ profile and markup in their site or the sites they contributed to (rel=author) linking to their Google+ profile. For something this technical there was only ever going to be a fairly limited adoption.

But whilst this experiment into giving authors added benefits based on the authority of their work may not have proved fruitful, you would not discount Google from abandoning the idea all together, especially when it provided a logical way of increasing the trustworthiness, relevancy and authority established authors provide to their users.
It appears Google still has a way of determining author value with ‘Author Rank’.

What is Author Rank?

Author Rank, independent from Google Authorship, is a search algorithm that will score authors based on factors such as the social sharing of their posts, quality of backlinks to their content, interactions with their content, PageRank and the authority of publishing sites.

Within search rankings, information tied to these factors would rank higher than content not having an association with such factors, which will result in established authors gaining a higher visibility in search engines.

Author Rank doesn’t require implementation of any new code on your website. Essentially, Google will be accessing a value of an author based on this rank, so a user who is well-informed, well-engaged, writes great content, and is recognized by a large community, will enjoy a higher author ranking.

href="https://twitter.com/mattcutts/statuses/443560265808756736" target="_blank">Matt Cutts tweeted Author Rank is not implemented on every single page, but ‘it does come into play in some ways. For example, in-depth articles use that data, I’m pretty sure.’

The reason Google Authorship came into existence in the first place was due to the difficulty in filtering out individual authors. So how does Google go about helping readers correctly identify which authors are which, and which are important, is what the topic of Author Rank will center around.

Author Rank after the death of Google Authorship

class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-11087" src="http://whsr.webrevenueinc1.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/author-rank.jpg" alt="author rank" width="750" height="254" srcset="http://whsr.webrevenueinc1.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/author-rank.jpg 750w, http://whsr.webrevenueinc1.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/author-rank-300x101.jpg 300w" sizes="(max-width: 750px) 100vw, 750px" />

Crucially, authors will be judged in more natural ways about how useful they are to search engine readers. Some ways in which Google is looking to do this has already started to appear.

In addition to the gradual move towards sematic search, Google is likely to utilize Author Rank factors to identify certain ‘entities’ that are separate from each other in an effort to filter authors akin to its Authorship program closure in a more natural way.

How can it be, when Google has completely ignored Authorship markup at the same time?

Google considers it a better approach to identify authoritative figures in search results based on the factors that make up Author Rank.

Google will likely give more consideration to bylines, which existed long before Google Authorship. So in case you’re an author who is concerned that more Author Rank use will likely be the future, start believing. This is going to be the chief technique signaling who is the most established author of a content piece.

What the pros are doing and suggesting

href="https://plus.google.com/+KevinDuncan" target="_blank">Kevin Duncan

We bloggers cannot control what Google does, but we can take the things which made Google Authorship so effective in search results, and apply them to our blogs.

Duncan advices authors to add the perception of authority to their sites/blogs. If there is social proof about your authority, use that to your advantage. For example, you can show the comments received on your blog by the comments counter stand out in your blog’s design, or flaunt the number of followers you have on social media, like Darren Rowse has done on ProBlogger: he has proudly displayed 300,000+ subscribers and 66,000+ Facebook fans in his blog’s sidebar. Likewise, Adam Connell has an image of his connections to KISSmetrics, HuffPost, and more in his sidebar.

href="https://plus.google.com/+PamAungst" target="_blank">Pam Aungst

It may not be called “Authorship” anymore, so sure – go ahead and call that *word* dead, but author influence is very much alive.

Aungst’s strategy is to continue making efforts to increase the Google+ presence of her company’s SEO clients. She reminds that search users will still see Google+ posts from pages and friends when they’re relevant to queries, so Authorship’s death doesn’t impact these social features. That means the more audience in your target market are connected to Google+, the more likely you are going to receive recognition as an author for the content posted on Google+.

href="https://plus.google.com/101669415833397825384" target="_blank">Sam DeBord

The end of Authorship might leave us thinking that the remnants of Authorship code strewn across the Web are just a reminder of Google’s fickle behavior, but there is some really important direction left in the overall trend of the project.

DeBord suggests it may be a good idea to follow the usual clichés: create quality content; promote it; connect and engage with the right people. And just make sure Google sees you making these efforts. You can’t generate a good Author Rank without generating good material, so start publishing quality pieces. If Google recognizes who you are, and you continue doing it right, you’ll be rewarded eventually.

More Readings

• href="https://plus.google.com/+EricEnge" target="_blank">Eric Enge’s post ‘href="http://searchengineland.com/goodbye-google-authorship-201975" target="_blank">It’s Over: The Rise & Fall of Google Authorship For Search Results’
• href="https://plus.google.com/+MarkTraphagen" target="_blank">Mark Traphagen’s post ‘href="http://elifennell.com/google-authorship-search-extraterrestrial-intelligence/" target="_blank">End of Google Authorship Is NOT the End of Author Authority Online’
• href="https://plus.google.com/+EliFennell" target="_blank">Eli Fennell’s post ‘href="http://elifennell.com/google-authorship-search-extraterrestrial-intelligence/" target="_blank">Google Authorship & the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence’
• href="https://www.linkedin.com/profile/view?id=30858233" target="_blank">Joey Hall’s post ‘href="http://enveritasgroup.com/2014/09/18/authorship-died-sucks-man/" target="_blank">Authorship died. And it sucks, man.’
• href="https://plus.google.com/+NateDame" target="_blank">Nate Dame’s post ‘href="http://propecta.com/google-authorship-what-we-still-dont-know" target="_blank">What We Still Don’t Know About the Death of Google Authorship’

So, given the propensity of Google to consider new elements when ranking authors, it seems the best long-term play is to ensure that your digital wingspan places a focus on factors that affect Author Rank.

you should…

• Share your content on social networks, and encourage your followers to share your posts further.
• href="http://www.webhostingsecretrevealed.net/blog/inbound-marketing/how-to-drive-massive-traffic-to-your-blog-via-guest-blogging/" target="_blank">Contribute to other blogs, websites, magazines, etc. Your contributor byline will play an important role in getting your figure recognized and the anchor link used in that byline can be used to gain backlinks to your other content pieces.
• Promote yourself as an author in online communities other than social networks, such as forums and comment sections of other websites.
• Write data-rich content, for a chance to be featured in the ‘in-depth’ section of Google Search.

More about in-depth content

Why I suggest focusing on getting yourself featured in Google’s in-depth section?

The main reason is that it contains pieces that are published by highly established authors. These pieces include detailed business reports, whitepapers and case studies; this form of content requires a lot of effort on the author’s part and Google recognizes that. The search giant’s Hummingbird algorithm even places more emphasis on rich content, so in-depth content pieces are a great way to increase your author value.

So, how do you get closer to achieving recognition in the in-depth section? Here are some actionable tips that should help:

1. Implement Schema.org markup

Google recommends adding a piece of code to your publication marking its

• Alternative Headline
• Headline
• Description
• Date Published
• Crawlable and Indexable image
• Article Body

Ready-made templates are available at Schema.org/Article.

2. Use Google Authorship

I assume most of you reading will already be doing this. href="http://www.copyblogger.com/wordpress-google-authorship/" target="_blank">Get it back if you’ve removed Authorship for the content you create.

3. Use pagination

If you create an in-depth piece that is spread across multiple pages, let Google know these pages make up a single article by using pagination. href="http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2012/03/video-about-pagination-with-relnext-and.html" target="_blank">See this video from Maile Ohye.

4. Add a logo

Specifiy your company’s logo to help your piece in getting selected for the in-depth section. This can be done either through

• href="http://schema.org/Organization" target="_blank">Using Organization markup from Schema.org, or
• href="http://www.google.com/+/business/?rd=1" target="_blank">By linking your Google+ page to the website

5. Produce rich content

This is the most important step to ensure that your in-depth articles get picked up by Google for having detailed, informative and rich content within them. All the stats, data and information needs to be updated if you’re going to achieve some recognition as an influential author, because you’ll be competing against some of the biggest names in your industry… authors from the likes of The Huffington Post, Wall Street Journal and New York Times. Also, remember to follow href="https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/3280182?hl=en" target="_blank">Google’s recommendations on marking up critical details about your in-depth content piece.

Conclusion

The good news is if you’ve already been spending time building yourself as a leading author in your niche, your work towards these factors is already likely cut short.

Author Rank and factors that affect it may currently be a minor ripple on the sea, but with the death of Google Authorship, it is the only practical thing to lean on.

Page 11 – Web Hosting Secret Revealed

LSI Keywords Can Help Your Content Rank Faster

alt="LSI Keywords Can Help Your Content Rank Faster" src="http://whsr.webrevenueinc1.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/lsi-chart-samples-500x278_c.jpg" />

An outdated myth is that if you want to rank your website content high in search engines, you should include keywords in it as many times as possible – what is known as keyword stuffing.

Here’s the kicker: If you put this way of ranking content in play, not only is your copy going to sound unnatural and awkward to the readers, search engines may flag your site for over-optimization and href="http://searchengineland.com/guide/seo/violations-search-engine-spam-penalties" target="_blank">even penalize it, which would be a dismay for your content creation efforts.

Here’s an example of keyword stuffed content:

“Our San Diego health spa services utilizes the knowledge and expertise of leading professionals to provide you with the best spa services in San Diego. With San Diego spa professionals specializing in…”

Think about it, would you enjoy reading something like this, or something that speaks to you more naturally? Google and other search engines want to reward their users with the latter, so it will always be best just to write content with a natural feel to it.

Enter LSI (Latent Semantic Index) keywords – the untapped gold nuggets that target the practical side of content that readers and search engines prefer.

What are LSI keywords?

If you search for a universal definition of LSI keywords (also referred to as long-tail keywords), you would find answers all over the place. But in simple words, latent semantic indexing involves identifying synonyms and plurals to your main keywords.

The perspective is that by finding similar words for your primary keywords, you can add a natural element to your content. The ability of search engines to find an analogy between the main keywords and LSI keywords also helps in maintaining natural relevance (that’s what semantic in LSI refers to: ‘pertaining to’ different meanings of the main words or symbols).

Search engines use LSI keywords to determine what your content is all about. For example, if your primary keywords are ‘Apple smartphone’, you wouldn’t want search engines to relate your content to terms such as ‘Samsung smartphone’ or ‘LG smartphone’.

With LSI keywords, search engines scrutinize your content and try to discover other terms associated with your primary keywords. Therefore, if you have ‘Apple smartphone’ related terms in your content such as ‘iPhone’, ‘iOS’, ‘earpods’, etc. then search engines will index your content for the term ‘Apple smartphone’.

So by being more specific with keywords related to your primary keywords, you can guide search engines while keeping your content natural. As a result, you can make them rank your content based on the main keywords without keyword stuffing or over-optimizing your website. Also, you minimize the chances of your being penalized by search engines with this approach.

id="attachment_10464" style="width: 760px" class="wp-caption aligncenter">class="border wp-image-10464 size-full" src="http://whsr.webrevenueinc1.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/lsi-chart-samples.jpg" alt="lsi chart samples" width="750" height="417" srcset="http://whsr.webrevenueinc1.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/lsi-chart-samples.jpg 750w, http://whsr.webrevenueinc1.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/lsi-chart-samples-300x166.jpg 300w" sizes="(max-width: 750px) 100vw, 750px" />class="wp-caption-text">Image credit – href="http://web.simmons.edu/~benoit/lis466/" target="_blank">Gerald Benoit, Ph.D. Associate Professor