FIA sporting director Steve Nielsen has quit his role with racing’s governing body after less than a year in the position.
The post FIA's Nielsen quits after less than a year appeared first on Buy It At A Bargain – Deals And Reviews.
Fox News’ Joey Jones comments on a Fox News poll showing Americans feel less patriotic and urges both sides to remember ‘there’s so much more’ to America.
When it comes to SEO and marketing, I like quick and easy wins.
Even though I’m committed to the long journey of blogging (10+ years and counting), I’d much rather push a few buttons and pull a few levers to get more traffic.
Low effort. Big wins. That’s where I like to be.
And, thankfully, there are some SEO techniques that deliver high value for low effort.
I want to share with you one of those techniques — creating an XML sitemap.
Now before you run away after reading the term “XML sitemap,” let me give you some good news.
Even though an XML sitemap is on the “technical” side of SEO, it’s not hard to make one. And, really, it’s not that “technical” either.
In fact, in just a few minutes you could create a really good XML sitemap. You don’t have to know how to code. You just have to know how to click.
It’s free. It’s easy. It’s relatively simple, and it can improve your SEO.
Ready to give it a try?
What is an XML sitemap?
In simple terms, it’s a list of a website’s URLs.
That’s why it’s called a sitemap. It maps out how the website is structured and what pages the website includes.
(“XML” stands for “Extensible Markup Language,” a way of displaying information on websites.)
That’s what an XML sitemap is, but why should you even have one? What’s the purpose?
Search engines use crawlers to organize and index information on the web.
These crawlers can read all kinds of information. But an XML sitemap makes it easy for the crawler to see what’s on your website and index it.
Once it does this, your website has a stronger likelihood of improving its rank quickly.
Essentially, an XML sitemap serves as a table of contents for your website, allowing the crawler to get the essentials and index your site accordingly.
A well-structured sitemap can do even more, however.
Sitemaps tell search engines when a page was updated, the frequency of updates to the page, the relative importance of pages within a website, and how to find and index content that may be found deep within the site’s structure.
Here’s what the information looks like in a sitemap:
These features are important, especially considering the amount of unauthorized syndication that takes place with content today.
If you aren’t using a sitemap, your website could be seen as containing duplicate content, which isn’t good for SEO.
More importantly, however, a sitemap is a fast way to get indexed by Google.
With a sitemap, you can tell Google, “Look, this is my site, and here are the pages I want you to index.”
Within minutes (usually), Google will crawl your site and index your content.
If you’re wondering, “Hmm. Do I really need a sitemap? Should I go to all that trouble?” I want to persuade you to, yes, do it. It only takes a few minutes, and the benefits are enormous.
Consider these benefits of an XML sitemap:
If you’re ready to get started on creating your own XML sitemap, we’ll follow a three-step process:
(I’ll also show you how to submit your Sitemap to Bing and Yandex as well)
The remainder of this article will address each of those points, along with one final step, using Ubersuggest to find potential sitemap errors.
You can use Screaming Frog to create an XML sitemap for any website. It doesn’t matter what CMS you’re using, what size the website is, or your website’s age.
In fact, you don’t even need to own the website or have login access to it to create the sitemap.
Is there a cost associated with this? Screaming Frog, the tool we’ll use, provides free crawling for up to 500 pages. To crawl websites larger than 500 pages, you will need to purchase a Screaming Frog license.
If you do not have Screaming Frog yet, you need to install it first. You can do so here.
Screaming Frog is a powerful desktop software program that helps with a whole range of SEO activities.
The basic version is free. The full version (with license purchase) costs £149.00 per year (around $180 USD or €170 euro).
In this section, I’ll walk you through how to create an XML sitemap for any website using the free version of Screaming Frog.
First, open Screaming Frog.
Then, type your URL into the field at the top.
Click “Start.”
Depending on your website’s size, it will take from a few minutes to a few hours to crawl the site.
For a site like NeilPatel.com (6,600+ pages), it takes a while to crawl, but not too long. I’ve worked on some large e-commerce websites with millions of URLs. These take hours to crawl.
When the site has finished crawling, it will display “100” in the status bar.
Now, click “Sitemaps” in the menu bar.
Click “Create XML Sitemap.”
Next, you’ll need to choose which sections of your website you want to include in the XML sitemap.
At first glance, this may seem confusing, especially if you’re not sure what “Noindex” or “canonicalised” means.
Here is a brief explanation of each one:
Remember this basic idea. A sitemap is for SEO. If you want someone to find the page on your website, you want to include it in the sitemap.
For my purposes, I’m going to include PDFs.
The tabs “Last Modified,” “Priority,” and “Change Frequency” deal with the date and time that website pages were modified and the <priority> settings.
Unless you have a knowledge of these settings, please leave them as they are by default.
I think it’s a good idea to include images in a sitemap, so I’m going to add those to my sitemap.
Click the “Images” tab.
Then, click “Include Images.” The third box (“Include only relevant Images with up to 10 inlinks”) will automatically be checked.
Then, click “Next.”
You’ll be prompted to save your XML sitemap on your computer. Find a good place to save it, and click “Save.”
Congratulations! You’ve created an XML sitemap!
You’ll now need to upload this file to your website via FTP. You may already know how to do this.
If you don’t know how to upload the XML sitemap to your website, check with a developer to determine what process you should follow for your specific server and/or CMS.
But creating a sitemap is only the first step. A sitemap means nothing unless you submit it to the search engines.
Skip down to the section “Submit your XML sitemap to Google” to learn how to do it.
Yoast is one of the most popular SEO plugins for WordPress. Yoast makes it easy to create and submit an XML sitemap.
I’ll explain how to do it step-by-step, but first, here’s what you need:
Most websites already have those three things in place. If you’re ready, let’s jump in.
Note: In the screenshots below, my WordPress admin might look a little bit different from yours. That shouldn’t keep you from being able to follow each step.
What we’re going to do first is make sure that the Yoast plugin is all ready to create a sitemap for you. To do so, we’ll need to turn on Yoast’s advanced settings.
It has a “Y” icon, and says “SEO.” It should be located in the left sidebar.
Click the “Dashboard” option.
From the Dashboard, click “Features.”
From the Features tab, look for “XML sitemaps” and make sure it is toggled to “On.”
Now, scroll to the bottom and click “Save Changes.”\
If you want to customize your sitemap, learn how here. For example, you might want to exclude pages that aren’t public.
In general, however, the sitemap Yoast generates tends to be pretty solid.
Now, it’s time to submit this to Google.
Now it’s time to do something valuable with your sitemap — submit it to Google.
To do this, you’ll need to have Google Search Console connected to your website. Check out this Google guide for instructions on doing so.
First, go to Google Search Console and select your website.
From the dashboard, click “Sitemaps.”
Click “Add a new Sitemap.”
Enter the URL where you’ve saved your sitemap. It should end with “.xml” since it’s an XML file.
Click “Submit.”
Then use the Sitemaps report to make sure there are no errors. (I’ll also cover another method below.)
Once that’s completed, Google takes care of the rest. Your sitemap allows Google to quickly and seamlessly index your site, helping to boost your rankings.
Google is the largest search engine — but it isn’t the only one. To get the most mileage out of your XML sitemap, I suggest submitting it to Bing and Yandex. Here’s how:
Bing is Microsoft’s answer to Google. It has a much smaller market share (just over 6%). However, more than 900 million unique users visit Bing a month. Submitting a sitemap to Bing is a breeze, so it’s worth the few minutes to reach their audience.
To submit your sitemap to Bing, login to your Dashboard in Webmaster tools. Find the Sitemaps widget and click “Submit a Sitemap.”
Enter the URL location of your file, and click “Submit.” That’s it!
Yandex is Russia’s version of Google. In Russia, Yandex dominates more than 55% of the search market. It also provides email, streaming music, and online payment services. Like Bing, submitting a sitemap only takes a few minutes, so it’s worth the effort to reach a wider audience.
Here’s how to submit your sitemap to Yandex:
Head to to Sitemaps files page, and choose your site from the list.
Add the URL of your sitemap.
Click add.
It will take about two weeks for your sitemap to load. You’ll want to check back and make sure it is uploaded properly; if it says “OK,” then you are good to go. If you see “Redirect,” try uploading the file again.
If you see “error” or “not indexed”, you’ll need to troubleshoot. Use this guide from Yandex to figure out what is going on.
If you follow the steps above, you shouldn’t have any sitemap errors. But just because you shouldn’t, doesn’t mean you won’t.
Here’s how you can use Ubersuggest to check for sitemap errors:
Step #1: Enter your domain name and click “Search.”
Step #2: Click site audit in the left sidebar.
Step #3: Review the results.
To find issues with your sitemap, review the data associated with the health check, critical errors, warnings, and recommendations.
For example, when you click on Critical Errors, here’s what you see for my website:
There are no issues with my sitemap, but if there were, here’s where you’d find more information. In addition to the issues itself, there’s a learn more button that takes you to:
You can then follow the prompts for more guidance on how to fix the error.
Use Ubersuggest to check the health of your sitemap regularly. Doing so once or twice a month will only take a few minutes out of your schedule, but it can go a long way in improving your website’s SEO.
A lot of small business owners and web entrepreneurs get afraid when they hear the term “XML sitemap.”
It sounds jargony and code-like. If you’re not an SEO nerd or a computer geek, how do you figure out how to create and submit an XML sitemap?
As it turns out, it’s not that hard.
Creating a sitemap using a program like Screaming Frog or Yoast takes ten minutes or less.
If you know nothing about sitemaps, and need to go through the whole process for the first time, no problem. Walking through the entire process from start to finish may take, at most, twenty minutes.
The SEO benefits, however, will be enormous.
If you’ve never created an XML sitemap for your website, my advice is simple: Get one made today.
Then, perform a technical SEO audit to see what other issues might be lurking on your site.
You can do it. I’ve got your back.
What’s your experience creating an XML sitemap? How has it helped your site’s SEO?
I’ve been testing a new SEO hack and it works no matter how old or how new your site is.
Heck, you can have barely any links, and I’ve found it to work as well.
Best of all, unlike most SEO changes, it doesn’t take months or years to see results from this… you can literally see results in less than 30 minutes.
And here’s what’s crazy: I had my team crawl 10,000 sites to see how many people are leveraging this SEO technique and it was only 17.
In other words, your competition doesn’t know about this yet!
So what is this hack that I speak of?
Not only is Google changing its algorithm on a regular basis, but they also test out new design elements.
For example, if you search for “food near me”, you’ll not only see a list of restaurants but you also see their ratings.
And if you look up a person, Google may show you a picture of that person and a quick overview.
Over the years, Google has adapted its search results to give you the best experience. For example, if you search “2+2” Google will show you the answer of “4” so you don’t have to click through and head over to a webpage.
But you already know this.
Now, what’s new that no one is really using are FAQ-rich results and Answer Cards.
Here’s what I mean… if you search “digital marketing” you’ll see that I rank on Google. But my listing doesn’t look like most people’s…
As you can see from the image above, Google has pulled FAQ rich results from my site.
And best of all, I was able to pull it off in less than 30 minutes. That’s how quickly Google picked it up and adjusted their SERP listing.
Literally all within 30 minutes.
And you can do the same thing through Answer Cards anytime you have pages related to question and answers.
So how can you do this?
Before we get this going with your site, you have to pick the right schema markup.
FAQpage schema is used when you offer a Frequently Asked Question page or have a product page that contains frequently asked questions about the product itself. This will let you be eligible for a collapsible menu under your SERP with the question, that when clicked on, reveals the answer.
It can also let you be eligible for FAQ Action that is shown on Google Assistant. This can potentially help get you noticed by people using voice search to find out an answer!
Q&A schema is used when people are contributing different types of answers and can vote for which answer they think is the best. This will provide the rich result cads under your SERP and shows all the answers, with the top answer highlighted.
After making sure you understand what these are used for, Google also has additional guidelines on when you can and can’t use these schema’s for:
Google has a list of FAQpage schema guidelines.
Only use FAQPage if your page has a list of questions with answers. If your page has a single question and users can submit alternative answers, use QAPage instead. Here are some examples:
Valid use cases:
Invalid use cases:
And here are the guidelines for Q&A schema:
Only use the QAPage markup if your page has information in a question and answer format, which is one question followed by its answers.
Users must be able to submit answers to the question. Don’t use QAPage markup for content that has only one answer for a given question with no way for users to add alternative answers; instead, use FAQPage. Here are some examples:
Valid use cases:
Invalid use cases:
If your content meets these guidelines, the next step is to figure out how to implement the schema onto your website and which type to use.
There are two ways to implement it… either through JSON-LD or Microdata.
I recommend choosing one style and sticking to it throughout your webpage, and I also recommend not using both types on the same page.
JSON-LD is what Google recommends wherever possible and Google has been in the process of adding support for markup-powered features. JSON-LD can be implemented into the header of your content and can take very little time to implement.
The other option is Microdata, which involves coding elements into your website. This can be a challenging process for some odd reason, I prefer it. Below are examples of how each work.
<html>
<head>
<title>Digital Marketing Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) – Neil Patel</title>
</head>
<body>
<script type=”application/ld+json”>
{
“@context”: “https://schema.org”,
“@type”: “FAQPage”,
“mainEntity”: [
{
“@type”: “Question”,
“name”: “What is digital marketing?”,
“acceptedAnswer”: {
“@type”: “Answer”,
“text”:”Digital marketing is any form of marketing products or services that involves electronic device”}
}]
}
</script>
</body>
</html>
<html itemscope itemtype=”https://schema.org/FAQPage”>
<head>
<title>Digital Marketing Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) – Neil Patel</title>
</head>
<body>
<div itemscope itemprop=”mainEntity” itemtype=”https://schema.org/Question”>
<h3 itemprop=”name”>What is digital marketing?</h3>
<div itemscope itemprop=”acceptedAnswer” itemtype=”https://schema.org/Answer”>
<div itemprop=”text”>
<p>Digital marketing is any form of marketing products or services that involves electronic device.</p>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</body>
</html>
{
“@context”: “https://schema.org”,
“@type”: “QAPage”,
“mainEntity”: {
“@type”: “Question”,
“name”: “Can I tie my shoe with one hand?”,
“text”: “I currently have taken a hobby to do many actions with one hand and I’m currently stuck on how to tie a shoe with one hand. Is it possible to tie my shoe with one hand?”,
“answerCount”: 2,
“upvoteCount”: 20,
“dateCreated”: “2019-07-23T21:11Z”,
“author”: {
“@type”: “Person”,
“name”: “Expert at Shoes”
},
“acceptedAnswer”: {
“@type”: “Answer”,
“text”: “It is possible to tie your shoe with one hand by using your teeth to hold the other lace”,
“dateCreated”: “2019-11-02T21:11Z”,
“upvoteCount”: 9000,
“url”: “https://example.com/question1#acceptedAnswer”,
“author”: {
“@type”: “Person”,
“name”: “AnotherShoeMan”
}
},
“suggestedAnswer”: [
{
“@type”: “Answer”,
“text”: “It is not possible to tie your shoe with one hand”,
“dateCreated”: “2019-11-02T21:11Z”,
“upvoteCount”: 2,
“url”: “https://example.com/question1#suggestedAnswer1”,
“author”: {
“@type”: “Person”,
“name”: “Best Shoe Man”
}
}
]
}
}
<div itemprop=”mainEntity” itemscope itemtype=”https://schema.org/Question”>
<h2 itemprop=”name”>Can I tie my shoe with one hand?</h2>
<div itemprop=”upvoteCount”>20</div>
<div itemprop=”text”>I currently have taken a hobby to do many actions with one hand and I’m currently stuck on how to tie a shoe with one hand. Is it possible to tie my shoe with one hand?</div>
<div>asked <time itemprop=”dateCreated” datetime=”2019-07-23T21:11Z”>July 23’19 at 21:11</time></div>
<div itemprop=”author” itemscope itemtype=”https://schema.org/Person”><span
itemprop=”name”>Expert at Shoes</span></div>
<div>
<div><span itemprop=”answerCount”>2</span> answers</div>
<div><span itemprop=”upvoteCount”>20</span> votes</div>
<div itemprop=”acceptedAnswer” itemscope itemtype=”https://schema.org/Answer”>
<div itemprop=”upvoteCount”>9000</div>
<div itemprop=”text”>
It is possible to tie your shoe with one hand by using your teeth to hold the other lace.
</div>
<a itemprop=”url” href=”https://example.com/question1#acceptedAnswer”>Answer Link</a>
<div>answered <time itemprop=”dateCreated” datetime=”2019-11-02T22:01Z”>Nov 2 ’19 at 22:01</time></div>
<div itemprop=”author” itemscope itemtype=”https://schema.org/Person”><span itemprop=”name”>AnotherShoeMan</span></div>
</div>
<div itemprop=”suggestedAnswer” itemscope itemtype=”https://schema.org/Answer”>
<div itemprop=”upvoteCount”>2</div>
<div itemprop=”text”>
It is not possible to tie your shoe with one hand
</div>
<a itemprop=”url” href=”https://example.com/question1#suggestedAnswer1″>Answer Link</a>
<div>answered <time itemprop=”dateCreated”datetime=”2019-11-02T21:11Z”>Nov 2 ’19 at 21:11</time></div>
<div itemprop=”author” itemscope itemtype=”https://schema.org/Person”><span
itemprop=”name”>Best Shoe Man</span></div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
When you are implementing it on your website, feel free and just use the templates above and modify them with your content.
If you are unsure if your code is correctly implemented or not, use Google’s Structured Data Testing Tool and you can add your code snippet or the page that you implemented the schema on and it will tell you if you did it right or wrong.
Plus it will give you feedback on if there are any errors or issues with your code.
You can also try Google’s Rich Result Tester. This will give you a brief look at how your structured data will look like in the results!
Once you make the changes to any page that you think is a good fit, you’ll want to log into Google Search Console and enter the URL of the page you modified in the top search bar.
You’ll then want to have Google crawl that page so they can index the results. All you have to do is click “request indexing”.
And typically within 10 minutes, you’ll notice it kick in and when you perform a Google search you’ll see your updated listing.
Now the key to making this work is to do this with pages and terms that already rank on page 1. That’s where I’ve seen the biggest improvement.
Will this help with People Also Ask and Featured Snippets? So far, there has been no correlation between schema markup and People Also Ask or Featured Snippets and you do not need them to be featured in them.
Optimizing your content for this will not hurt you though and can potentially improve your chances to be on here.
Google has been testing out how they can show these types of Q&A, FAQ, and How-To results and looking at structured data to help understand them.
It’s better to be early to the game and help Google understand your pages, as well as possibly participating in any of Google’s experiments.
With more and more people using mobile devices to find answers to questions, this is a very relevant question!
Especially considering that over half of the searches on Google will be from voice search in the near future.
Answers from voice search get most of their answers from featured snippets.
And adding structured data on your website increases the chances of getting you into featured snippets, which increases the chance of you getting featured on voice search.
This simple hack can potentially increase the visibility of your brand and help improve the authority of your website. It’s a simple solution that can take a single day to implement across your main question, product, or FAQ page.
I’ve been using it heavily for the last week or so and as long as I pick keywords that I already rank on page 1 for, I am seeing great results.
And as I mentioned above, when my team analyzed 10,000 sites we only found 17 to be using FAQ and QA schema. In other words, less than 1% of the sites are using this, which means you if you take advantage now, you’ll have the leg up on your competition.
So what do you think about this tactic? Are you going to use it?
The post Advanced Hack: How to Improve Your SEO in Less Than 30 Minutes appeared first on Neil Patel.
During a conference call Monday to explain his decision to retire at age 34, shortstop Troy Tulowitzki said that baseball “just wasn’t as enjoyable as it once was” after he strained his calf this year.
The post Tulowitzki: Injuries made game less enjoyable appeared first on Buy It At A Bargain – Deals And Reviews.
They say there are over 200 ranking factors in Google’s algorithm.
But are you going to take the time to optimize your site for each and every single one of them?
Well, you should… but you probably won’t.
See, SEO has changed… it used to be that you could do a handful of things and rank well. Sadly, those days are gone.
Now you have to do every little thing and do it well to dominate Google.
So, I decided to make your job easier and release yet another new feature in Ubersuggest that audits your website for you in less than 3 minutes.
It’s called SEO Analyzer.
If you want to find out what’s wrong with your website, you won’t have to do it manually anymore.
All you have to do is head over to the SEO Analyzer and put in your URL.
Once you put in your URL, you’ll be taken to a report that looks something like this:
Once the report loads (it typically takes 3 minutes or less), you’ll see an overview like the image above.
The overview is broken down into 3 main sections.
The first section shows you your on-page SEO score (the higher the better), your estimated search traffic, the number of keywords the domain ranks for, and how many backlinks the site has.
You’ll also see a message from me that breaks down how many pages were crawled and any SEO errors that were found.
When you click on any of those 4 boxes, it will take you to a more in-depth report.
Clicking on the on-page score takes you to a page that lists out your SEO errors. It looks something like this:
Clicking on the organic traffic takes you to a report that shows you how well your site is performing.
Clicking on the keywords box shows you all of the keywords your website ranks for organically.
And clicking on the backlinks box shows you all of the sites linking to that domain.
This is my favorite section of the site audit report. This is where you can really dig around and boost your rankings
You can click on any of the four site health boxes and drill down into more reports.
This is important because you’ll want to first focus on clearing up any critical errors. From there, you’ll want to fix any warnings and then, finally, consider doing any of the given recommendations.
The health check box gives you an overview of the healthy pages and the ones that have issues or are broken or blocked or even redirected. By clicking on this box you’ll get taken to a report that lists all your SEO issues in detail.
From there you can click on any of those issues and you’ll be taken to the exact pages that contain any SEO errors and what they are exactly. An example of this is pages with too long of a title tag.
If you aren’t sure on how to fix any of the issues, just click on “what is this and how do I fix it?” and a box like this will appear:
And if you click on the critical errors, warnings or recommendations boxes, you’ll see reports just like the ones above. They will be broken down by how important they are.
That way you’ll know which fixes have the greatest SEO impact and how hard they are to implement.
You should first focus on the ones that have the highest SEO impact and are the easiest to implement. And I took the liberty to prioritize the table for you, so all you have to do is start at the top and work your way down to the bottom.
Speed is important. Not only do faster load times help boost conversion rates, but they also help boost your search rankings.
There are two sections to the site speed. The section on the left breaks down your desktop load time and the section on the right breaks down your mobile load time.
Site speed varies drastically by a person’s connection and computer, but the charts give you a rough range of how fast or slow your site loads.
Your goal should be to have your site load in 3 seconds or less for both mobile and desktop.
The report even breaks down which areas are slowing down your site speed.
For example, you could have an issue with “First CPU Idle”… and if you aren’t sure what that means, just hover over the question mark and the tool will tell you.
I know I said the report has 3 main sections, but the 4th section is just repeating the site health section.
You’ll see the 3 most important fixes that you should make to your site if you want higher rankings.
If you don’t have the time to fix everything, start off by fixing the 3 issues listed here. Those will give you the biggest bang for your buck.
So, what do you think about the SEO Analyzer report? Do you think it was a good addition to Ubersuggest?
I know I haven’t talked about the SEO Analyzer report much, but we’ve been working on it for 4 months now.
For now, the tool crawls the first 100 pages on your website, and eventually, our goal is to increase the limit to 500 or even 1,000. Technically we can do that fairly easily, but for the launch, I’ve capped it at 100 due to the sheer number of users I have and server load.
Give the SEO Analyzer a try and let me know what you think.
The post How to Perform a Thorough SEO Audit in Less Than 3 Minutes appeared first on Neil Patel.