Tag Archive for: SEO

Increase Search Traffic. Translate Your Blog Into Chinese.

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Chances are high that when you write your blog posts you are writing them in English. What if I told you that you could increase your search traffic by translating your blog into Mandarin and Spanish as they are the two most popular languages in the world?

There are a variety of translation plugins that can help you do this. There is no perfect plugin, however. The best plugin is called Transposh.

If you decide to do this to increase your search traffic, here are some tips.

  1. Download the plugin directly from the website – http://transposh.org/download/ and install it yourself. This works better than the plugin you will get if you search for it in the plugin repository.
  2. Transposh offers 92 possible languages for translating your content. If you select them all at once, however, the plugin crashes, freezes your browser, and will not translate all of your blog’s posts and pages. For this reason, you should select a few languages (usually fewer than 5) at first and see how it goes.Languages Transposh ‹ Connect4 Consulting — WordPress
  3. Once you select a few languages, find the Settings tab and uncheck the option that says “This enables auto detection of language used by the user as defined in the ACCEPT_LANGUAGES they send. This will redirect the first page accessed in the session to the same page with the detected language.” The reason you have to uncheck that option is because the plugin automatically sends people to a translated version when it shouldn’t.
  4. Once you hit the Save Changes button, head over to Utilities tab, and click “translate all now.” If you have a big blog, it’s going to take hours. The plugin is a little buggy so if nothing happens the first time, select fewer languages and then repeat the steps.
  5. When you publish new posts and pages, you won’t have to repeat these steps as the plugin will do it automatically, but you will need to repeat the process for older posts.

Troubleshooting Transposh

Not everything works perfectly. Although all content, text links, sliders, and button text gets translated, the title tag and meta descriptions are not. For that reason Google Webmaster Tools will show duplicate tags and meta descriptions. The plugin also messes with the design a bit as you can see below.

transposh-design-conflict

Finally, the plugin doesn’t translate everything perfectly on the first go-around. Sometimes you have to run it a few times to get it to work correctly and even then, sometimes the translations are horrible. The upside here is that you will undoubtedly increase your search traffic. The downside is the quality of the translation.

 

How Google Indexes Web Pages

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Have you ever wondered how Google crawls and indexes web pages? If you haven’t and don’t know, you should. Why? Because knowing how Google indexes web pages will help you understand how to rank better on Google.

First you’ll need some facts.

Google has had a search engine since 1998 and it has the largest database of indexed websites. Google’s database is twice as large as Yahoo or Bing. When you search for something on Google, you’re not actually searching the entire Internet, you’re just accessing Google’s database of indexed websites.

What is Google’s Index?

The Google Index is the list of all the pages and sites that Google has crawled and cached or stored on its servers. When someone performs a search, Google pulls out pages from this data. More than 40 billion web pages are indexed by Google.

Less than 10% of the entire Internet is indexed. That means there are more than 450 billion web pages that are not indexed by Google.

Google uses programs called “Spiders” to index your site.

Spiders have the following characteristics:

  • they browse the web just like people browse the web
  • they move from page to page and link to link
  • they try to find and index every page on the web

This process is called crawling.

Crawls can happen several times a day or once every few months.

Update or change your content regularly and Google will crawl your site more often.

Fun Fact: Google needs more than 1 million servers to crawl the web and deliver search results.

  • Facebook only has 181,000
  • Intel has only 75,000
  • eBay has only 54,000

7 most common reasons Google can’t crawl your pages:

  1. No or incorrectly configured robots.txt file
  2. A badly configured .htaccess file
  3. Badly written title, meta, and author tags
  4. Incorrectly configuring url parameters
  5. Low pagerank
  6. Connectivity or DNS issues
  7. Domains with bad history

How to help Google crawl more pages:

  1. Check out crawl errors and address them
  2. Be careful with Ajax applications
  3. Add a robots.txt file and make sure it’s working
  4. Add a sitemap to your site

We can help you address these four critical steps to make sure you are doing everything you can do to help Google crawl your pages.

Contact us today by emailing gabe@connect4consulting.com or calling 202-236-2968 for more information.

Seven Obsolete SEO Tactics

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Search Engine Optimization has changed dramatically over the years and what worked before doesn’t necessarily work anymore. Some of the old tactics you are using may now be a waste of time or money and it’s also possible that some obsolete SEO tactics may actually now harm your search engine ranking.

Obsolete Tactic #1: More Backlinks Means Higher Ranking

Although more backlinks used to mean a higher search engine ranking, this is no longer completely true. These days you’ll notice new sites with few backlinks that rank better than old sites with hundreds of backlinks. What’s going on? Google is prioritizing backlinks – rewarding backlinks that are more relevant. This just shows that you don’t have to focus on backlink quantity. Focus on building highly relevant links that are topical to the content of your website.

Obsolete Tactic #2: SEO is About Writing Keyword-rich Content

If you want to rank for a term like “business loans,” you would need that phrase on your web page, right? That used to be the case, but Google’s algorithm uses latent semantic indexing.

Latent Semantic Indexing is an indexing and retrieval method that uses a mathematical technique called singular value decomposition (SVD) to identify patterns in the relationships between the terms and concepts contained in an unstructured collection of text. LSI is based on the principle that words that are used in the same contexts tend to have similar meanings.

In other words, Google sees the words “corporate loans” as being similar to “business loans”. That means that if you used the word “business” instead of “corporate” you would still rank for both words.

Instead of trying to write keyword-rich content, write content that is user-friendly. If you put your users first and you write what’s best for them, Google will naturally figure out what terms you should rank for and will place you there.

Obsolete Tactic #3: SEO is Just Links, Code, and Content

This is what SEO used to be five years ago. Sites with tons of links, good on-page optimization, and mediocre content ranked really well. That’s not the case anymore.

Sites that rank well are sites that have a large social following. The more popular your site is on the social web, the more eyeballs you will draw to it. And the more people see it, the more backlinks it’ll get.

Check out this great Social Media Tutorial if you want to build your social following yourself.

Obsolete Tactic #4: You Need to Track Your Rankings

Rankings are irrelevant. Sure you want better rankings, but search has changed into a long tail game. Just look at the data: search volume for head terms is down by 8%, and sites are starting to see the majority of their traffic coming from long tail phrases.

The beautiful part about this is that you no longer have to track your rankings. Instead, you need to focus on creating a long tail strategy by using content marketing.

Obsolete Tactic #5: More Pages Means More Traffic

If the pages aren’t high in quality, you won’t rank well. Instead of actually helping you, adding too much content, especially mediocre content, can hurt you.

Google released an update called Panda, which targeted sites with low quality content. Such sites got penalized, and their search traffic dropped.

Don’t create sites with thousands of pages. Focus on creating high quality content.

Obsolete Tactic #6: Higher Rankings Means More Traffic

There is a big misconception in the SEO industry that higher rankings mean more search traffic.

It’s true that more people will see your listing, but it doesn’t necessarily mean you will get more clicks because the keywords you are targeting may not get much search volume. Or your meta tags may not be appealing, which will cause people to not click on your listings.

You can solve this by doing two things:

  1. You need to start using the Keyword Planner tool by Google to find the right keywords to go after.
  2. You need to optimize your click-through rates.

 

Obsolete Tactic #7: You Need A Lot of Text to Rank Well

Until recently, you needed as much as 2,000 words on a page to rank well, but this is changing dramatically. Sites like upworthy.com have very little text but rank well.

This shows that text isn’t the only form of valuable content. Videos and images also do well in the rankings, which is what Upworthy typically uses within its posts.

If you want high rankings, use different types of content to reach this goal. From podcasts to videos and quizzes, there are many possibilities.

Conclusion

Stop wasting your time on obsolete SEO tactics, and start focusing your energy on strategies that will boost your traffic.

SEO – Basic Strategies for Top Ranking Search Results

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Everyone wants to know how to rank as high as possible on Google. That’s the definition of SEO for most people. What it comes down to is fairly straightforward – content, links to your content, and an organized structure of your content. All Google is doing is trying to connect questions with answers. If your site provides answers to questions (all sites do), then it’s important to know what those questions are, and how Google wants you to answer those questions.

SEO – What Is the Ultimate Goal?

Websites that are rewarded with top ranking search results, are those that deliver a consistent and customer-centric user experience. Everything about the site must be for the benefit of the customer, and that goal must be obvious to Google.

How Can This Be Achieved?

The following are some key strategies that will improve seo and help websites receive top ranks in search results:

  • Post Natural Content

Content should read almost conversationally; it shouldn’t sound awkward or forced in order to squeeze in specific keywords.

  • Use Page URLs Like Website Signage

Page urls should read normally and give visitors a clear indication of what the page is about. Get rid of special characters and gobblety-gook.

  • Use Accurate Title Tags to Keep Visitors On Your Website

Title tags and meta descriptions should accurately reflect the page content. For locally-focused companies, heavy emphasis on geographical reference will aid in the search results.

  • Create Intuitive Site Architecture

Site architecture should be clear and intuitive for visitors. Users should never have to wonder how to find information or get somewhere on your website.

  • Full Support for Mobile Devices is a Must

Full support for mobile devices is mandatory. With the expected number of mobile online users surpassing desktop users this year, this market will only continue to grow. If your site doesn’t capture this audience, you’re likely to see a big dip in traffic if you haven’t yet already.

Conclusion

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a cat and mouse game. As Google makes changes to and refines its search algorithm, the websites and businesses that adapt to those changes are the ones that will be rewarded with higher search results.

Google Analytics Features for Business Owners

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I think it’s safe to say that small and mid-sized business owners have to have a website. It lends credibility, establishes trust and professionalism, and often is a much less expensive way to market your service or product than old fashioned paper advertising. Usually small business owners are running around trying to do their business and can’t get caught up marketing their business, and they therefore know very little about what’s going on behind the scenes on their website.

There are some basic Google Analytics features that all business owners should take a look at from time to time.

1. Business Conversions

The Conversion tab is one of the most important areas for business owners because it shows how many people are reaching your contact form or other specific page where an action is required, and the exact number of leads and conversions. If the site is an ecommerce site, the conversion tab also indicates the $ amount of sales generated in the current month and allows you to compare this month’s sales figures with previous months.

2. Traffic Sources

This is the second most important area for business owners because it shows where their website traffic is coming from and gives a strong indication of where to invest marketing dollars. This feature also tells exactly how the visitors arrived on the site – through search engines, other site links, etc.

3. Traffic Location

This is similar to Traffic Sources and tells about where the traffic is coming from and which area is bringing in some solid leads and sales. On the other end it indicates potential locations that you can invest in future.

4. Browsers and Mobile Technology

This tells you what browsers your visitors are using and what mobile phones they are using. It’s important to test your website on a variety of browsers and phones. If the site is optimized for Internet Explorer and iPhones and most of your visitors are on Chrome and a Windows Phone, you can make an adjustment to make sure that the site is optimized for the bulk of your traffic.

5. Top Exit Pages

This tells you which website pages visitors usually leave from. It would make sense that the home page and the contact page would be a top exit page. But if a product or service page is a top exit page, it might indicate that you should make some changes to the content to get people to either stay longer or move to another section of the site.