Cup Series driver Kyle Larson told the AP he has spoken to Hendrick Motorsports about driving in both the Indy 500 and NASCAR’s Coca-Cola 600 on the same day.
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Location: Hawaii Standard Time
Remote: Yes, only
Willing to relocate: No
Technologies: Go, Python, Java, SQL, JavaScript, TypeScript, Familiar with: Ruby/Rails, PHP, C, C++
Tools: Docker, Postgres, Git, Bash, AWS, GCP, Node, CI/CD, Maven, Vue, Angular, Jira, CI/CD
Résumé/CV: Upon request
Email: hisoftwareengineer@protonmail.com
I’m a software engineer with a finance background. My primary focus is on the backend but I’ve worked with everything from infrastructure to the frontend. I have 6+ years of experience working remotely and feel very comfortable collaborating on asynchronous teams. I’m interested in a senior engineering role at a company that is solving interesting problems.
Article URL: https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/kable/jobs/7YUZkyG-founding-full-stack-software-engineer
Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31303271
Points: 1
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“The Big Saturday Show” co-hosts uncovered left-wing elitism and unaccountability on Saturday.
Top Google rankings are a pinnacle of online business success.
According to Backlinko, the first result on Google gets 31.7 percent of all clicks — while results on the second page receive just .78 percent of clicks.
I’ve talked to a lot of business owners and managers – newbies and veterans alike – who have struggled to unlock the secrets of how to improve their Google ranking without getting penalized.
I wish I could tell you there’s a magic button that ranks your site #1 without fail.
The truth is, it takes resourcefulness, dedication, persistence, and creativity. This is especially true because of the constantly changing nature of Google’s algorithm.
While there’s no magic bullet, there are steps you can take to soar to the top of a search engine results page (SERP).
I learned this the hard way; but luckily, you don’t have to.
I’m going back to basics with on-page SEO to help you understand the new SEO rules, learn how to optimize for both humans and search algorithm crawlers, and to master on-page and off-page SEO.
Here are the steps I will cover in this guide:
Google executives like Gary Illyes and John Mueller confirm Google constantly changes its algorithm, even though most of these changes aren’t publicly announced.
Moz estimates there are 500 to 600 Google algorithm changes per year!
While Google used to share major update announcements, the exact inner workings of the algorithm are still unknown. The majority of information is just speculation from industry professionals.
After all, if everyone knew exactly how to rank in the first position without penalties for shortcuts or black hat SEO strategies, Google wouldn’t succeed in ranking only the best results. Anyone could hack their way to the top without putting in the work.
Not only would this make it hard for honest people like you and me to succeed, but it would also seriously compromise Google’s mission statement:
Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.
The best knowledge we have of Google’s algorithm comes in the form of major algorithm updates like:
Not to mention Panda, Google EMDs (exact match domain names), and the Private Blog Network (PBN) deindexing updates. Then there’s Phantom, which first appeared in May 2013 and is believed to have been updated four times – but has never actually been confirmed by Google.
How are you supposed to keep track of all these Google updates?
There are some great resources to help. Moz’s Google Algorithm Change History is an awesome database that organizes updates chronologically. Check out Google Webmaster Central, too.
Check out the video below to learn more about my strategies for link building, on-page SEO, and user metrics when trying to rank on Google.
Now that we’ve covered the basics of the algorithm, let’s get down to those actionable strategies I mentioned earlier.
To improve your Google ranking, you need to know where you stand. This is true even for new sites. Thankfully, there are several tools to help.
If you’ve been targeting specific keywords in page content, use my tool Ubersuggest to assess your rank.
Login, then use the “Traffic Overview” under the competitor report. Type in your domain, and you’ll see a list of SEO keywords your rank for, top pages, and an overview of your SEO keywords ranking.
Scroll down to view the “SEO Keywords” chart, which tells you where you rank for main keywords.
Next, it’s important to check site speed, as this is still an important Google ranking factor.
If your site is slow, you have little chance of a high search position. It will affect your ability to convert and sell new customers, too.
Walmart experienced a sharp decline in conversions when its page load times increased from one to four seconds.
If this happens, it doesn’t matter what your on-page SEO, meta description, or title tags are. The search algorithm will punish you, even if you’re a giant like Walmart.
That’s why it’s important to run your own site speed test to figure out how to improve Google rankings. There are dozens of tools that can help you do this. Some of my favorites are:
Here’s how to test your page content speed with Pingdom.
Go to tools.pingdom.com and type in your URL. Choose the location you’d like to test from and click “Start Test.”
Quick Sprout registers a performance grade of 81. As long as your site registers over 50, that’s a good start.
If you get a performance grade of less than 50, your page content is really slow and you need to work on improving it.
Check the page load time, too.
Quick Sprout is doing pretty well at 1.89 seconds. Aim for under 2 seconds for a really fast site and under one second for mobile devices.
Remember, a load time of more than a few seconds could cause you to lose a significant amount of site traffic.
After looking at keyword search engine rank and site speed, assess the overall health of your site before you start to optimize.
Have you experienced a sudden drop in organic traffic after months or years of consistency?
Are you wondering whether Google has deindexed (or banned) your site?
There are a lot of great tools to help piece together this puzzle. Try the MxToolBox Domain Health Report tool to check for major issues in five different categories: general site problems, blacklist, mail server, web server, and DNS.
Just click the box for each category to see specific errors and warnings. From there, you can work one-by-one to fix them.
If you want to check if you’ve been penalized by one of the major algorithm updates, check out FE International’s Website Penalty Indicator tool.
You’ll see a graph that shows your site’s traffic in relation to rollouts of major updates. This comparison takes you one step closer to knowing if an update directly affected your site.
To check for a Google penalty, login into Google Search Console and look for the “Security & Manual Actions” report. This will tell you if Google has taken a manual action against your site.
Note that this report will only show if a human reviewer has determined your site breaks Google’s quality guidelines — it won’t tell you if a Google Algorithm update penalized your site.
If you do have a manual penalty, fix the issue (this guide on how to recover from a Google penalty can help), then submit a reconsideration request with Google.
Next, it’s time to track some vital metrics of your site to find out what other factors you need to improve. Here are the most important metrics to assess.
It’s important to know how visitors find your site via Google. In the past, organic search drove most website visitors, crushing non-organic channels like paid search and social media.
Today, social media, email, and paid ads often lead the pack in driving organic traffic — but that can vary drastically by industry.
To find out how many visitors reach your site, log in to your Google Analytics account and check out the acquisition channels report. This helpful Google Analytics guide will guide you.
In addition to analyzing search traffic, it’s worth paying attention to the keywords that generate traffic for your site. This is harder to see than it used to be, but is still possible.
You can do this with Google Search Console (formerly Google Webmaster Tools). It can tell you how many clicks you get for certain keywords in organic search results.
The number one keyword research mistake is not spending enough time focusing on transactional keywords.
That’s because commercial keywords are the ones that drive revenue. To improve your search engine rankings and make money, you need to understand the difference between commercial and informational keywords to improve Google rankings.
If all of your keywords are informational, you will still generate organic traffic, but it may be difficult to convert those visitors to buyers or people who share on social media.
The reason is because of visitors who search for informational keywords like:
If they’re not in the buying mood, they want you to speak their language; the search engine language of free. Now, these terms can drive traffic and a solid sales funnel will convert some of those people — but not many.
In contrast, there are people who use transactional keywords that show user intent, like:
These folks are probably searching for a solution that they can buy.
If you’re in the e-commerce industry, you’ll hopefully already know that transactional keywords tend to convert well.
Keywords that have the words below as a prefix (before) or suffix (after) to the rest of the keyword phrase tend to do well:
Earlier, I talked about the keywords that are sending you organic traffic. They should also be used in the meta description as well as on-page SEO (more on this later).
Here’s another example. Can you spot the difference between informational and transactional keywords?
I recommend that you set up an SEO dashboard so that you can track all of the important metrics at any time.
Here’s how to set one up in Google Analytics.
If you have the cash to drop on SEO tools, go for it. If you are on a small budget, however, Google Analytics should serve you just fine.
In addition to setting up dashboards in Google Analytics, you can get even richer keyword data by connecting Google Search Console to Google Analytics. Here’s a complete guide on how to do that.
More than half of all website traffic comes from a mobile device. That means if you want to rank well, your site needs to perform well on mobile.
While some algorithm changes remain unclear, Google left nothing to the imagination when it comes to mobile. On January 10, 2017, the Google Webmaster Blog said:
Starting today, pages where content is not easily accessible to a user on the transition from the mobile search results may not rank as high.
Then in 2020, Google moved to “mobile-first indexing” which means Google looks at websites as a mobile device. If your site is hard to navigate, your ranking will be impacted.
Luckily, it’s pretty easy to see where you stand. Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test offers a quick way to determine if your site is mobile-friendly or on its way to Penaltyville.
Just type in your URL and click “RUN TEST.”
The results will give you a clear “yes or no” answer along with a list of the page loading issues it encountered. This way you can fix and optimize to ensure your mobile site running smoothly.
You’ll be able to look at page loading issues like redirection errors and pages where robots.txt blocked the Googlebot from crawling the page.
Google’s Search Console also has a Mobile Usability Report that will give you a list of your site’s mobile usability issues.
If your site isn’t mobile-friendly, add this to the top of your to-do list.
For additional SEO insight, check out Google’s tips for how to improve website ranking on mobile.
There’s a strong connection between mobile and local search. Google caters to hyper-local search, connecting consumers and brands as smoothly and quickly as possible.
That’s why you should make sure your Google My Business profile is up-to-date and comprehensive.
These profiles can be a deciding factor for someone who’s searching in your area, so claim and update your business listing ASAP if you haven’t. This also goes for other local listing sites, like Yelp, Facebook, Better Business Bureau, and more.
See HubSpot’s local business listings and directories list for a comprehensive look.
Now that you understand your search ranking and have set up tracking for the most important metrics, it’s time to examine your site in detail and fix any current penalties.
This is fundamental; there is no point in promoting or building links to an unhealthy site. Before we dig in, I want to cover a few things that could get you a Google penalty.
Bad links hurt your site. Use them and you can expect a Google penalty sooner rather than later.
That’s why it’s essential to think about how you generate links to your site.
The sentiment remains true today.
Here’s how. Start by identifying and eliminating unhealthy links.
First, analyze inbound links to your site. There are several link analysis tools you can use to do this:
Let me walk you through a link analysis using SEOprofiler.
Sign up for a free account and go to Link Profiler → Backlinks. Let’s use problogger.net:
The results show the most important elements to look for when analyzing your backlinks:
It’s also important to know which links are harmful to your site so that you can remove them. Harmful links include those that:
There are many free tools to help you identify unhealthy links. Two that I’ve tried include Monitor Backlinks and Linkquidator.
Moz has a detailed tutorial on which links can harm your site and what to do about it.
Remember to export the list of unhealthy links once you find them. That way, you can refer to them later.
That’s the next step in cleaning up your link profile, and there are two ways to do it.
1. Request a Manual Link Removal: Visit the website where the unhealthy/unnatural links are coming from and contact the site owner. Ask the site owner to either remove your link (the better option) or add a nofollow tag to it.
If you have outsourced link building in the past, you can also contact the person who placed the links for you and ask that person to have the links removed. Here’s an excerpt from a post at Search Engine World to show how this works:
In this case, don’t ask the site owner to remove your links because they might assume you’re a spammer and ignore you. Instead, follow this tutorial from Search Engine Journal to learn the best way to contact webmasters about link removal.
2. Use Google’s Disavow Links Tool: If you’re unsuccessful in getting unhealthy links removed, your only option is to use Google’s own disavow links tool.
While manual link removal is best, this is a good second choice.
The disavow tool is part of Google Search Console. Once you open Search Console, you’ll see a list of all of your sites.
Go to the site for which you want to disavow links. This is what you’ll see:
When you check for unnatural links, you have the option to export the links that you find. If you have done this, upload the file and click “done.”
Like you, Google can’t actually remove the links as they don’t have access to the referring sites.
However, doing this authorizes Google to stop passing link juice (value) from those links to your page content.
3. Diversify Anchor Text Distribution: Anchor text can play a key role in improving or utterly destroying your search ranking. As I mentioned earlier, if you want a natural link profile, you have to diversify anchor text.
When distributing your anchor text, think about including these types:
Let’s assume your page content sells blue denim jeans. If your domain name is bluedenimjeans.com, how do you distribute your anchor text?
If you want to link three times from a particular site, it’s ideal to use this link profile:
4. Avoid Over-Optimization: When you overuse anchor texts, it can result in over-optimization and can get you penalized. Geoff Kenyon suggests the percentage below:
To avoid anchor text over-optimization, follow these two guidelines:
If you need a detailed guide on over-optimization, see How to Avoid Over Optimization For your Site.
Once you are rid of unnatural links, it’s time to improve on-page SEO the right way.
One essential element of an effective inbound marketing strategy is keyword research. You won’t get far without understanding how it works.
To be effective, you need to pinpoint the keywords that your target audience is using to find your site. Here’s how that works.
Step #1: Visit Ubersuggest, Enter your Keyword and click Search.
Step #2: Click on Keyword Ideas
Step #3: Review Keywords and Search Volume for the Month
Here’s how that helps you.
When you research keywords, you’re getting firsthand information about your target audience, the information that they want to know, and how they want it.
For example, when someone searches for “html5 tutorials for beginners,” you know the searcher is a newbie who is searching for solutions and wants content that helps with this topic.
That can guide you to write headlines and content that ranks well in the Google search results.
It’s helpful to figure out the buyer personas and customer lifecycle of your target audience, so you understand what motivates them. Then, provide relevant page content that will help you increase your Google ranking.
Alexa can help you work out audience demographics, as in the example below for Upworthy.
Remember when I mentioned transactional and informational keywords?
When you do keyword research, you can easily see whether users are simply looking for information or ready to buy.
That’s called user intent, and here’s how it looks for the keyword research example used earlier.
In this example, free web design is an example of an informational keyword. Free web design courses is an example of a transactional keyword.
You need both informational and transactional keywords in your page content to improve the Google rankings of your website.
It’s your job to educate, inform, inspire, and build interest before recommending a product.
Informational keywords can be used to build email lists and nurture prospects before offering a product for sale.
Also, don’t ignore long-tail keywords and questions.
The rise of voice search and BERT means long-tail keywords are more important than ever before.
This guide to intergrating long tail keyterms is a good place to start.
If your competitors are ranking ahead of you in Google search results, it’s time to spy on them.
If the search algorithm likes them, you can learn and copy their strategies.
I like to use Google Keyword Planner for this because it gives me an accurate estimate of competitors’ keyword targets.
Let’s assume you’re in the “survival knife” sub-niche. One of the authority blogs you might spy on is survivallife.com.
On the Ubersuggest homepage, instead of inputting a seed keyword, simply type your competitor’s URL into the landing page box and click search.
Then scroll down the page until you see “SEO Keywords.” You will see the keywords that your competitor is targeting.
In addition to the keywords, other data includes:
For example, your competitor ranks number 1 for the term “survival life.” With the top spot, they receive roughly 395 visitors per month for the term. So, if you’re successful in overtaking them, you know what type of traffic to expect.
This works for any niche and can help you uncover hidden keywords that will help improve your ranking.
If you find your web page on page two, how can you boost its ranking to the first page of Google?
You can use the skyscraper method, popularized by Brian Dean from Backlinko.
Find a post or article that’s ranking already, improve it, and promote it everywhere. This led to a 457% organic traffic increase for him.
If you want to do this for your topic (for example, “outsourcing guide for small business”), follow this simple guide:
Make sure you write a powerful and clickable headline.
For example, if your first headline is:
Outsourcing Guide For Small Businesses
You can improve it like this:
The Complete Guide to Outsourcing for Small Businesses
An In-Depth Guide on How to Outsource for Small Businesses
X Ways Outsourcing Can Revolutionize Your Small Business
Contact the blog owners that you mentioned in your post and ask them to check it out. Hopefully, you’ll get a handful of authority sites to link back to you.
Let’s get one thing straight.
There is no optimal ratio for placing keywords in an article.
However, knowing the right keywords to target is of the utmost importance. That’s the basis of keyword analysis.
Wordstream defines keyword analysis as:
The starting point and cornerstone of search marketing campaigns. By understanding what queries qualified visitors to your website type into search engines, search marketers can better customize their landing pages to increase conversion rates.
Unless you know the queries that qualified visitors type into Google, you’ll find it difficult to improve your ranking and conversion rates.
By now, you know how to do keyword research. That’s the easy part. The difficult part is knowing which keywords are bringing in organic traffic.
Ever since Google’s “Not Provided” update, this info has been hard to come by. This guide to unlocking Not Provided Keywords will help you recover some of the data. However, these days, it’s impossible to get a full view of what terms drive organic traffic.
You do want to pay attention to popular keywords, terms your competitors rank for, and Google’s “People also ask” questions.
Use this information to write on-page SEO content that matches user intent (remember that?). This will improve the Google ranking of your web pages.
How should you place your target keywords in the content?
Let’s assume you want to write an in-depth review on “best senior irons for seniors.” Here are some titles that you could use:
To start your introduction, you could begin like this:
There are several senior irons in the marketplace. But knowing the right one for you is the most difficult decision. If you read this guide from start to finish, you’ll know the best senior irons for seniors that are affordable and reliable.
Or, you could start your introduction by asking a question:
Do you want to find the best senior irons for seniors? This page will not just tell you about the irons but will show how to use them to improve your golf game and provide practical tips on getting a huge discount for your purchase.
Do you see how I placed the target keyword in the first paragraph, without making it seem like spam?
As I’ve said before, target a specific keyword in a natural manner – don’t just try to make it look natural.
Now that you know which keywords you want to target – and should be targeting – to maximize your performance, you’re equipped to make meaningful on-page SEO changes.
Backlinko has an excellent guide that breaks down on-page SEO factors that will earn you big points with Google and your visitors.
Let’s break down a few key considerations.
Title tags are still a big part of determining how your site will perform.
Make sure every title tag is descriptive, unique, and catered to your targeted keywords.
Avoid using the same keywords and title tags over and over. This way, you’ll diversify your opportunities while avoiding cannibalizing your own efforts.
Say that you’re an ecommerce company. A good formula for your product pages could be:
[Product’s Name] – [Product’s Category] | [Brand Name]
Like this:
Curly Hair Leave-in Conditioner – Hair Care | Diana’s DIY
Here are a few more title tag optimization tips:
Keep in mind Google shows roughly 60 characters on a SERP, but don’t cut off if a longer title suits the page content. The search snippet title Google displays can be dynamic based on the search query.
So ultimately, you might be doing yourself a favor by getting more descriptive.
Plus, desktop snippet titles are limited by pixel width, while mobile display titles are typically longer.
Here’s an example from Hobo Web:
In the image above, Google displays as many characters as possible from the beginning. But in the image below, Google truncates the middle of the title to show the term “Hobo” at the end to show relevance to the user’s query.
While meta descriptions have negligible (if any) impact on your rankings, they still serve the important purpose of helping to determine your search snippet and adding an extra factor of uniqueness. This in turn can influence your click-through rate (CTR) from SERPs.
Check out this Kissmetrics article on making the most of meta descriptions for your CTRs.
Schema markup can be thought of as extra “labels” on information that tells Google what your content means. For example, let’s say my name appears on an article, so Google displays my name in a SERP entry.
But if I use the right schema around my name in the article’s HTML, I can indicate to Google that I’m the author of the article, not just another term in a sea of indistinguishable words.
Not only does schema markup help Google understand your website, it also makes a massive difference in attracting traffic to your website.
Schema helps give users more relevant information in a visually organized and aesthetic way.
You can use schema tags to identify various types of SERP information, including:
Google’s Structured Data Markup Helper is a great tool for implementing schema markup on your site to help you get featured snippets.
Featured snippets are featured more on mobile SERPs, which we discussed are more common in the U.S. than desktop searches.
The best part about them is that they push you to the number one result (also known as the coveted “position zero”) even if you’re not winning in the rankings otherwise.
It’s an easy way to push your result to the top of the page.
Here’s the best way to target them.
Think of a question in your industry that people are regularly typing into Google. Try something basic like, “What is digital marketing?” or “How to rank on Google?”
This article offers a step-by-step schema markup tutorial to get you started.
A sitemap tells search engines about the organization of your site’s content.
That way, when Googlebot reads the file, it can more intelligently crawl your content. This helps make it more readily available for ranking on SERPs.
Sitemaps also provide valuable metadata about pages on your site like when they were last updated, how often you make changes, and how the page relates to other pages on your site.
You can use XML-sitemaps.com, a simple sitemap generator. If you use WordPress, there are several site map generator plugins as well.
Once you have your sitemap, check out my article on XML Sitemap to download your sitemap file, put it into the domain root folder of your website, and add the sitemap URL to your Google Webmaster account.
Now that we’ve covered some key on-page SEO factors, it’s time to discuss how to differentiate your brand from good to great with unique, strategic, and purposeful content.
Although I’ve touched a bit on keyword research and placement already, in this section, we’ll look more at going leveraging those keywords that you’ve researched.
Sadly, a lot of people misunderstand the purpose keyword research and placement.
Even before Google rolled out their first Google Panda update, the best search marketers knew that quality, valuable, and useful content should target a particular group of people.
Optimize for informational keywords and improve your search ranking by writing resourceful and detailed content while supplementing it with descriptive meta description and title tags.
This process attracts raving fans, gets your content shared on social media platforms, and garners relevant and high-authority links naturally.
If you want to write resourceful and detailed content, follow the guide below:
According to ConversionXL, data-driven approach can increase your traffic.
Back up facts with accurate data so that people will see your content as authoritative and share it on social media, expanding your organic reach. This post on how to create and promote an infographic is an example of data-driven content.
Other examples of data-driven content include:
The Science of Productivity
5 Things You’re Measuring Incorrectly with Digital Analytics and What To Do About It
7 Proven Strategies To Increase Your Blog’s Traffic By 206%
The resources below will help you to backup your content with accurate data:
Aim to include newer stats — less than three years old is ideal.
You can even micro-target content. For example, if a blogger experiments with niche marketing, take it a step further and try niche marketing with an aged domain name, then write it up.
Stories can captivate your audience, evoke emotions, and improve your conversion rate.
Here’s how to tell a story that captivates your audience:
Begin with something unique: Start your story with a unique message that resonates with your audience. Ideally, this should connect with your audience’s questions or pain points.
Infuse Your Own Experiences: It’s called a story for a good reason. Use your own experiences (whether good or bad) as part of the message. No fakery allowed!
Jon Morrow used this on-page SEO content technique to grow his blog to 1,740 loyal subscribers in just seven days. Here’s the post that helped him connect with his audience: How To Quit Your Job, Move To Paradise, and Get Paid To Change The World.
Add a Call-to-Action (CTA): Every story must have an ending. Once you capture your readers’ attention, they expect you to share the solution. After all, your story is supposed to solve a problem, not nurture it.
Use a call-to-action link or button to lead people to your funnel and convert them. MatchOffice increased its conversion rate by 14.79% by changing its CTA copy.
Unbounce provides some more examples of actionable CTA buttons to replace your generic ones:
Google has made a lot of changes to search rankings, but one element remains crucial: the headline.
If you write a shareable headline for your post, nothing can stop it from getting clicked, read, and shared by true fans.
Peep Laja of ConversionXL increased his conversion rate by changing the word “today” to “now” in a headline. It also helped him increase sales by 332%.
Headlines truly win the clicks.
Even if your web page is ranked at #1 in Google for page content, that doesn’t mean you’ll get the most clicks.
On-page SEO gets you in the running but the title can convert impressions to clicks.
Let’s search for the term how to outsource. Note that the most clickable headline is in position #2.
The perfect example of a website that uses shareable headlines to boost conversion rate is Upworthy.
I’ve used Buzzsumo to analyze Upworthy’s headlines. Check out the amazing number of shares the first article has racked up.
If I wanted to craft a better headline for my own content, here’s what I’d do:
Add numbers: Upworthy’s post was shared over 1.6 million times on Facebook because it has a definite number. If the headline was “Americans are Completely Wrong About This Mind-Blowing Fact,” I’m sure the total number of social media shares would be lower.
Here are some more examples. When I wrote this post, these headlines were ranked in the Google top 10 for their respective keywords. But, a simple tweak would result in a higher click-through rate.
Original headline:
SEO Basics For Optimizing Your Site
Let’s add some numbers:
Original headline:
Let’s add some numbers
Invoke Curiosity: Curiosity will cause people to click your headline, but do it with caution and make sure that you deliver on the promise of your headline with quality content.
For example, if your title is:
Top 7 Body Building Secrets You Didn’t Know
Then make sure that you reveal the ‘7’ secrets, and ideally, what you reveal needs to be new or unique.
While regular blogging is important, don’t settle there.
Hone in on your keywords to learn the questions that brought your visitors to your site. Then use diverse types of content to answer those questions, like:
For a comprehensive list, see HubSpot’s 20 types of lead generation content, as well as 14 types of experimental content that you should try out.
Use tools like Copyscape, SiteLiner, and Screaming Frog to make sure you’re not repeating yourself.
While the occasional duplicate content won’t destroy your rankings, you’ll be doing yourself a favor by showing Google each piece of content is original, relevant, and useful.
Once you have great on-page SEO content that includes informational and transactional keywords and tells a story that appeals to your audience, it’s time to build links the right way to improve Google rankings.
Earlier, I showed you how to analyze links to your site using SEOprofiler.
Here’s another analysis I did for Business Insider’s site.
Note that it shows a range of different types of anchor text for inbound links.
That’s exactly what you need to build links the right way and improve Google rankings.
Here are some of the ways to do that and the types of links that you need.
Anchor text linking (in-text links): Anchor text links are simple links that appear within the content. See an example below…
I’ve found placing anchor text links “above-the-fold,” can increase conversion rates.
The anchor text linking strategy is mostly used when you’re looking to rank for a particular keyword.
You can use your target keyword as anchor text, but to be on the safe side and avoid penalties with the search algorithm, mix it up with generic keywords.
For example, if your primary keyword is digital camera reviews, when building your links from another site, link naturally like this: find the best digital camera reviews, top digital camera brands, etc.
A good mix is smart on-page SEO.
Internal Links: External links (that is links from other sites to yours) are important, but internal links are also important. Make sure to link to important internal pages using optimized anchor text when it makes sense.
Editorial Links: Creating useful content and sharing it through social media naturally results in valuable inbound links.
A good example is a post on 200 ranking factors that Brian Dean wrote. It’s been cited multiple times.
For Google, what other people say about you is much more important and relevant than what you say about yourself to improve Google rankings.
Over the years, I have created thousands of rich, data-driven, and useful blog content.
If you search for anything related to content marketing, Quick Sprout and neilpatel.com pop up, which means that I get a lot of editorial links.
Copyblogger links out to useful and relevant resource posts that contribute to the engagement that they already have with their audience.
I strongly believe that the site owners didn’t do anything to get those editorial links.
They simply earned the links because of the usefulness of their content. Focus on exceptional content if you want to earn links that will improve the rank of your web pages.
Scale link building: Link diversity is the ultimate way to generate Google-friendly links and improve Google rankings while staying off the penalty radar.
This tutorial from SEMrush will show you how to ethically build links to improve Google ranking.
Old techniques, like directory submission, forum marketing, wiki sites, and even guest blogging and press releases don’t work and they also put you at risk for a Google penalty.
To get a diverse inbound link profile, write page content that will gain links from local, regional, and international sites relevant to your own.
Then, you’ll build a natural link profile with natural, targeted on-page SEO that will withstand anything Google throws at it.
What does social media have to do with search rankings?
That’s a great question.
Search engines like Google try to take into account as much information as possible about your website.
They use it to determine the quality of your website and thus where they should place you when someone searches regarding a topic within your niche.
One of the factors that search engines consider is social media. In particular, they consider the following questions:
On top of all that, keep in mind that social media also offers 4.8 billion social media users worldwide. That’s a lot of traffic potential.
It’s not just worth it for the sake of reaching a larger audience on the social media platform itself; social media can drive traffic to your site, which improves your search ranking.
How do you share content on social media that users are likely to share?
Here’s one great tactic: when you share stuff on social media, you want to increase your audience size and encourage people to engage with your content.
To do that, you can tag some of your friends who you think might be interested in the content.
This doesn’t just show the post to people you tagged. It also ensures that Facebook will show your post to all of the friends of those you’ve tagged.
You can easily increase your audience size by several thousand with a few relevant tags.
However you do it, use social media to build your SEO. The search engines are watching. Start performing.
The most effective way to improve your ranking is to do keyword research and write content that is highly relevant for user intent associated with those keywords.
It can take up to six months to have your content appear in the search results.
If you can optimize your website for organic traffic and do some free content marketing, it’s possible to rank high on Google without paying.
You can be penalized for things like duplicate content, over-optimization, and bad linking practices.
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The key to higher Google rankings without getting slapped with a penalty boils down to providing useful content, presented in a helpful way.
A few basic include:
Lather, rinse, repeat, and you’ll dominate search engines while avoiding Google penalties from algorithm updates.
How did your site do in the most recent Google update? Did you see any change in rankings, traffic, and conversions?
SEO is all about ranking high on Google.
The higher your rank the more clicks you get to your website.
But what if Google starts sending fewer clicks to websites over time, what should you do?
Well, just look at the graph below. It breaks down the last 4 years of click on Google.
According to data that we pulled from Ubersuggest, 62.41% of all searches globally get 0 clicks.
Literally 0 clicks.
But here’s where it gets interesting…
Over time the number of people that clicked on no result has increased. It went from 54.11% in 2017 to 62.41% in 2020.
Now keep in mind we don’t have data on every single Google search, as only Google would have that.
But we buy data from a few different providers and we have data on hundreds of millions of searches each year. So directionally the data is accurate.
Here’s where it gets interesting. According to Comscore 50% of the searches are voice search.
The data providers we get our Ubersuggest data from don’t have access to voice search data yet. So, you can assume the number of “no clicks” is actually greater than what’s presented above.
None-the-less you should expect it to get worse over time as the graph is showing.
Now, why is this? Well, it’s because Google is answering your questions for you when you search.
For example, if you type in, “Las Vegas weather”, you’ll see a listing like this:
Google’s pulling the data from weather.com, but there really isn’t a need for you to click on over to weather.com.
And as a user, this provides me with a better user experience, so I like it. But if I was a website like weather.com I probably wouldn’t as it decreases my traffic, which decreases my ad revenue.
Expect Google to continually do this more over time as it tends to create a better user experience.
Before I dive more into the data and give you ways to increase your SEO traffic, even though Google is taking away some of your clicks… I want you to keep this in mind.
A lot of marketers and business owners don’t like this, and they complain that what Google is doing isn’t fair.
But hey, it’s up to you if you want Google to even crawl your site. If you don’t like it, you can always block Google from your site.
I personally don’t have an issue. Just imagine life with Google, it would suck.
And as a searcher, I don’t want to search for the weather and have to click on a few links to get my answer, I just want to know the weather right now in the least number of clicks.
I recommend that you focus on what you can control versus worrying about what you can’t, such as Google’s future plans or random algorithm updates.
I want you to look at this as two separate problems.
The first is how can you get more clicks when people are clicking less.
And the second is how can you get more conversions from the clicks you are getting to make up for the loss in traffic.
Typically, with clicks, the main thing that impacts it is your meta tags. You know your title and meta description. Here’s what I am talking about… when you perform a search on Google, this is what it looks like:
Here are 10 ways to adjust them to help you get more clicks (some of the data came from Clickflow, others from Ubersuggest):
As I mentioned above, the second thing you need to optimize for is conversions.
When you do get clicks, you’ll want to drive as many sales as possible.
Here are some articles I wrote that you should read. They will teach you how to boost your conversions.
When optimizing your site, don’t just think about the desktop version of your site either.
It’s even more important to go through this process for your mobile traffic.
According to our Ubersuggest data, 61% of all searches are mobile.
And based on our data providers, the no click data for mobile is even worse.
Typically, when it comes to optimizing your meta tags, you don’t have to worry as much as you are going to use the same meta tags for both the mobile and desktop versions of your site as most sites are responsive.
But when it comes to conversion optimization, you’ll want to create a different mobile experience, which you can easily do through a responsive design.
Don’t focus on the fact that Google is driving fewer clicks to websites. Focus on what you can control and make the best out of the situation.
If I were you, I would do 3 things.
So what do you think of the data I shared above?
Web Developers / Full Stack Developers / News Algorithm Developers / Back End Software Engineers | NewsNow.co.uk | 100% remote (UK residents only) | Full-time, permanent
We are a top ten UK media publisher, with a website loved by millions: a technology company at heart with industry-leading success metrics propelled by a highly experienced multi-disciplinary engineering team that can afford to run lean. Which means today, we offer all the excitement and agility of a start-up, but with the stability and benefits of an established business — we’re still a company where everyone gets to make a massive impact!
Our mission: to democratise and disrupt the market for news. Today, we have major plans for growth, both here in the UK and abroad, and to create even more social capital out of what has been an extremely successful platform: through increased editorial direction, curating credible but independent journalism, as well as through computational approaches to identifying the best news to show our users.
We currently have these opportunities:
– As a /Fully Remote Web Developer/, you’ll write the logic that drives the UI, and integrate new UI with back-end data. You’ll also work on a wide array of other UI/UX, SEO, and content integration challenges.
– As a /Fully Remote Full Stack Developer/, you’ll be expected to contribute authoritatively towards product development projects throughout the entire software stack: from database and infrastructure installation and configuration, through writing business logic and prototyping website presentation, to developing our bespoke programmatic advertising technologies.
– As a /Fully Remote News Algorithm Developer/, you’ll develop automated curation algorithms that will produce the content for a new homepage format.
– As a /Fully Remote Back End Software Engineer/, your projects will largely be server-side. You will bring a sophisticated approach to problem solving, finding ways to achieve objectives while addressing scalability challenges and security concerns.
All London positions are based at our centrally-located head office.
All fully remote roles are open to UK residents only.
If you think you’re a fit for any of these roles, please apply online. http://www.NewsNow.co.uk/careers/
PAYDEX is important to your business credit. In fact, the D&B PAYDEX is one of the most common tools used by lenders to determine credit risk. There are a couple of reasons for this. First, Dun & Bradstreet is one of the largest and most commonly used business credit reporting agencies. Next, the PAYDEX score is the most like the personal FICO score, so it is easy for lenders to understand.
Though the PAYDEX is the most commonly used, there are other reports that Dun & Bradstreet issue that can be helpful to lenders. You need to know about all of them, because you never know what all a lender will look at.
Learn more here and start building business credit with your company’s EIN, not your SSN.
The PAYDEX Score is Dun & Bradstreet’s score that tells the lender how well your business has paid the bills over the past year. D & B bases this score on trade experiences documented by vendors. It ranges from 1 to 100. The higher the score, the lower the perceived risk. In business credit terms, it is the most similar to the personal FICO score. This is why it is the most popular business credit option among lenders.
In addition to the PAYDEX, D&B issues the following options for lenders.
To estimate how likely a company is to be late in paying debts, Dun & Bradstreet uses predictive models. They use predictive scoring, which takes past data to try to predict what will happen in the future. They do this by figuring out the potential risk of a future decision. Then they compare the historical information to a future event. Thus, predictive scoring only represents a statistical probability. It is not a guarantee.
The Financial Stress Percentile compares companies in categories such as region, industry, number of employees, or number of years in the business. Financial Stress Score Norms determine an average score and percentile for like firms.
Dun & Bradstreet generates Financial Stress Scores to predict how likely it is a business will fail over the next twelve months. These scores range between from 1,001 to 1,875. A score of 1,001 represents the highest probability while a figure of 1,875 shows the lowest probability of business failure.
This is a rating from D&B that places business in classes from 1 to 5. Class 1 includes businesses least likely to fail, while class 5 includes those firms most likely to fail. Therefore, a D & B customer can rapidly divvy their new and existing accounts by risk and then determine how to proceed. If your business is shown as being Discontinued at This Location; Higher Risk; or Open Bankruptcy, you are going to automatically get a 0 score.
This score has a 1-100 ranking where a 1 percentile is most likely to fail and a 100 percentile is least likely to fail. If D&B identifies a company as financially stressed, that indicates it has stopped operations following assignment of bankruptcy, voluntarily withdrawn from business operation with unpaid obligations, or closed up shop with a loss to creditors. It could also mean a company is in receivership, reorganization, or has made some sort of an arrangement for the benefit of creditors.
The Supplier Evaluation Risk Rating (also called a SER Rating) predicts how likely it is a company will get legal relief from creditors or end operations without paying creditors in full over the next twelve months. Once Dun & Bradstreet calculates the Financial Stress Score percentile for your company, they apply a second set of rules to calculate the SER Rating, on a scale of 1 – 9. A 1 means your company is least likely to fail to pay suppliers. A 9 is the opposite, showing the highest likelihood.
A D&B Credit Limit Recommendation includes two recommended guidelines:
D & B bases these dollar guideline levels on a historical evaluation of the credit demand for similar businesses, with respect to employee size and industry. They assess how likely a business is to continue to pay obligations according to the agreed-upon terms, and how likely it is to experience financial stress in the next twelve months.
Learn more here and start building business credit with your company’s EIN, not your SSN.
A D&B Rating helps lenders assess a business’s size and credit potential. Dun & Bradstreet bases this rating on details in your company’s balance sheet and an overall evaluation of the firm’s creditworthiness. The scale goes from 5A to HH.
This number, between 1 through 4, makes up the second half of your firm’s rating. It reflects Dun & Bradstreet’s overall rating of your business’s creditworthiness. They analyze company payments, financial information, public records, business age, and other factors.
If your company does not supply current financial information, you cannot get a Composite Credit Appraisal rating of better than a 2. The 1R and 2R ratings show company size only based on the total number of employees. Consequently, these ratings are assigned if your company’s file does not contain a current financial statement. Employee Range (ER) Ratings apply to specific lines of business that are hard to put into categories under the D & B Rating system. These kinds of businesses receive an Employee Range symbol based upon the number of employees and that is all.
In general, when Dun & Bradstreet does not have all of the information they need, they will show that in their reports. However, omitted information does not necessarily mean your firm is a poor credit risk.
The first step is to ensure your business is set up properly to separate it from yourself. You don’t want business credit accounts reporting to your personal credit. They need to report to your business credit only. How do you make this happen? Glad you asked.
The first step in setting up a foundation of fundability is to ensure your business has its own phone number, fax number, and address. Then, when you apply for credit accounts, use that information and not your personal information.
That doesn’t mean you have to get a separate phone line, or even a separate location. You can still run your business from your home or on your computer if that is what you want. You do not even have to have a fax machine.
In fact, you can get a business phone number and fax number that will work over the internet instead of phone lines. In addition, the phone number will forward to any phone you want it to so you can still use your personal cell phone or landline. Whenever someone calls your business number it will ring straight to you.
Faxes can be sent to an online fax service, if anyone ever happens to actually fax you. This part may seem outdated, but it does help your business appear legitimate to lenders.
You can use a virtual office for a business address. How do you get a virtual office? What is that? It’s not what you may think. This is a business that offers a physical address for a fee, and sometimes they even offer mail service and live receptionist services. In addition, there are some that offer meeting spaces for those times you may need to meet a client or customer in person.
The next thing you need to do is get an EIN for your business. This is an identifying number for your business that works similar to how your SSN works for you personally. Some business owners use their SSN to apply for business accounts. This is what a lot of sole proprietorships and partnerships do. However, it really doesn’t look professional to lenders. It can cause your personal and business credit to get mixed up. When you are looking to increase fundability, you need to apply for and use an EIN. You can get one for free from the IRS.
This is the most important step separating your business from yourself. Incorporating your business as an LLC, S-corp, or corporation is necessary to fundability as well. It lends credence to your business as one that is legitimate and it offers some protection from liability.
Which option you choose does not matter as much for business credit and fundability as it does for your budget and needs for liability protection. The best thing to do is talk to your attorney or a tax professional. What is going to happen is that you are going to lose the time in business that you have. When you incorporate, you become a new entity. You basically have to start over. You’ll also lose any positive payment history you may have accumulated.
This is why you have to incorporate as soon as possible. Not only is it necessary for fundability and for building business credit, but so is time in business. The longer you have been in business the more fundable you appear to be. That starts on the date of incorporation, regardless of when you actually started doing business.
You have to open a separate, dedicated business bank account. There are a few reasons for this. First, it will help you keep track of business finances. It will also help you keep them separate from personal finances for tax purposes.
Learn more here and start building business credit with your company’s EIN, not your SSN.
There’s more to it however. There are several types of funding you cannot get without a business bank account. Many lenders and credit cards want to see one with a minimum average balance. In addition, you cannot get a merchant account without a business account at a bank. That means, you cannot take credit card payments. Studies show consumers tend to spend more when they can pay by credit card.
Once you are certain your business is established as an entity separate from you as the owner, you need a DUNS Number. This 9-digit number is a unique identifying number that works to establish a business credit file with D & B. A DUNS (Data Universal Number System) works to keep accurate and timely data on over 250 million businesses around the globe. You want your business to be one of them.
From an identification standpoint, it makes a lot of sense. With the use of this identifier, errors can be kept to a minimum. As a result, Dun & Bradstreet will never confuse your business with someone else’s.
Dun & Bradstreet requires that you register your company for free on their site to get a number. There are a few other ways to get a DUNS if your business belongs to a special class. These include if it is a US government contractor or grantee, your company is Canadian, or you are working as an Apple developer.
Registration is fast and simple. Once you have said yes to their Terms and Conditions, you are taken straight to a dashboard where you either ask for a DUNS number or you look up to see if your business is already listed. If it is already on the big list, then you click on your company’s name to make any needed changes.
By understanding what the D&B PAYDEX is, how it works, and how lenders use it, you can have a better feel for how fundable your business is. The PAYDEX is one measure of business credit, and business credit is just one piece of a business’s overall fundability.
While other aspects of fundability are important, business credit is the one that is easiest to control. All you have to do is make your payments consistently on-time. If you do that, you PAYDEX will be fabulous and you will be able to get whatever funding you need to run and grow your business.
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Monday through Friday, host Mina Kimes brings you an inside look at the most interesting stories at ESPN.
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Elena Delle Donne is getting treatment for a herniated disk. The Mystics say they’ll update her status Saturday, ahead of Sunday’s Game 3.
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