Contents€¦ · that are for the manipulation of the algorithm. (ADD definition: According to...
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Transcript of Contents€¦ · that are for the manipulation of the algorithm. (ADD definition: According to...
Contents
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Summary
Since Google was founded in 1998, the marketing world has been disrupted
more than ever. Google has had such a large impact that “Google” was
named “The Most Important Word of the Year” by the American Dialect
Society in 2002. Consumers have realized that they can research nearly
anything before making a purchase, and they do not hesitate to do so. For
this reason, it is very important for organizations to make sure that their
content can be found by search engines. The guide will cover a few tools
that can help marketers stay ahead of the search technology curve.
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A Good Way toThink About SEO
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Onsite SEO Offsite SEO
• Website Architecture
• Content Quality
• Information Analysis
• User Interaction
• Keyword Research
& Selection
• Domain and Page Authority
• Social Signals & Brand
Signals
• Link Building
SEO Tools Chart
Google ranking success often depends on a
company’s awareness and measurement of
each of the above categories and the resulting
strategy of what action steps should be taken.
This must be done while also avoiding costly
penalties imposed by Google for the use of black
hat tactics such as buying links or other tactics
that are for the manipulation of the algorithm.
(ADD definition: According to Webopedia In
search engine optimization (SEO) terminology,
black hat SEO refers to the use of aggressive
SEO strategies, techniques and tactics that
focus only on search engines and not a human
audience, and usually does not obey search
engines guidelines.)
This toolkit will briefly explain some of the key
tools that can help marketers make sense of
all of the information available to them as they
strive to maximize SEO success.
Here are the top 10 tools that should be in every
marketing team’s toolkit to help ensure success for
both onsite and offsite SEO as well as Information
Analysis and Reporting.
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Top 10 Tools
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Goal Tool Starting Cost Description
Link Building Ahrefs $79/Mo This is the largest database of crawled links that displays the entire backlink profile of a website. It allows a company to see its own incoming links as well as its competitors. The tool uses a unique algorithm to score each backlinks quality.
Link Building Raven Tools $99/mo This tool can be used for link management among many other things. One of the key features is the ability to alert the link builder when a link is set to active or inactive. This helps determine the ROI on link building efforts by seeing when links comes to fruition and determine who helped purpose the link.
Social/Brand Signals
Sprout $39/mo per user
This tool creates trackable links that monitor social media interaction, and brand signals. It is also a dashboard and all in one posting platform for social media outlets.
Social/Brand Signals
Post Beyond varies PostBeyond is a tool that engages a company’s employees to share blog posts, trending articles, and other information to their social network.
Content Quality
Yoast SEO Plugin (WordPress)
Free A plugin for wordpress that analyzes content in relation to a selected primary keyword. The algorithm is constantly updated to match Google’s ever changing best practices.
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User Interaction
Kissmetrics $179/mo Kissmetrics reports on who is doing what on the website. Once a user is identified, the entire path of the visitor is revealed. This helps identify keywords and trends that are attracting visitors and allows the organization to concentrate SEO efforts where needed. Kissmetrics is also known for it’s superb reporting feature.
Web Architecture
WordPress Free WordPress is used more than any other CMS for websites and blogs. It offers an architecture that is continually optimized for and easily navigated by Google.
Keyword Research & Selection
Mysetool $49/mo Myseotool shows performance and ranking improvements of selected keywords. This tool allows page by page keyword analysis and will provide with suggestions for how to improve keyword rankings through onsite content modifications.
Domain & Page Authority
Moz Pro $99/mo Moz allows condensed reporting from a variety of tools, that show progress of Domain authority with the ability to compare directly to competitors.
Information Analysis
Google Analytics
Free This tells what is happening on a website, and allows goals creation, visitor tracking (anonymously), and reporting of website KPIs.
Goal Tool Starting Cost Description
Link Building
Link building and link management are crucial to SEO. Think of the
website as a node within a massive web. The more connections
the website has, the more trusted it is by the search engine. Trust
is the fastest way to improve domain authority, which leads to
keyword ranking improvement.
Moz believes that 50% of SEO effectiveness is measured by the
quality and quantity of inbound links to a website. The quality of
the link depends on the following characteristics of the external
site that links to the organizations website:
• How much the search engine trusts the website
• How many other backlinks are on the page (fewer is better)
• The quality of the content on the page
• How well the content on the page relates to the domain
that is linked to
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Raven ToolsRaven tools is another great resource link
management. It is used for monitoring specific
link statuses as active or inactive for each
URL tracked. For example, if an organization
has requested a link be added to a particular
external blog post where the organization was
mentioned, the web page, contact information
date requested, and origin of the request can be
added to Raven Tools. This information will be
saved and the status will be inactive until the link
is posted on the blog. If the links gets posted it
will automatically be updated and an alert will be
sent. This makes it easy to see which categories
of link building are effective, total amount of new
active links per month, and how much juice an
active link passes
Ahrefs.comAhrefs.com is arguably the strongest resource
monitoring all inbound links to both the
competitor and the company’s domain. This tool
can reveal opportunities where one or more
competitors are mentioned and where their
efforts are focused. For instance, a compare
and contrast article is written about companies
in a specific niche where the organization is not
mentioned. It would be possible to email the
author, request to be added, and then estimate
how important the link will be if obtained all
inside of Ahrefs.com. This information can then
be saved in a link management tool.
Highlighted Tools for Link Building
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Social / Brand Signals
Social signals are picked up by feelers that Google uses to determine how
important a brand is, how many people are engaging with the brand, and
how trusted the brand is. This feeds into keyword rankings often times
much faster than link building. Increasing the amount of positive social and
brand signals is crucial to growing a company’s online presence.
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Highlighted Tools for Social / Brand SignalsPostBeyondThis is a great tool for increasing social media
growth through utilizing employees and their
personal social networks. Generally individual
(versus business) posts are more likely to be
clicked due to perceived motives and greater
trust of individual share. Depending on the
size of the company and the level of employee
interaction, PostBeyond can be quite a powerful
tool for content dissemination. This tool tracks
each users potential and creates a level a
competition among employees through a point
based system to encourage consistent use.
SproutThis tool is great for linking a company’s social
profiles together in an easy to use dashboard.
The links are shortened automatically and made
trackable to measure the performance of the
content across each social media channel. The
dashboard displays a social metrics summary
and total number of social followers in one place
in order to easily see social network growth.
Since Google values high traffic volume and
social signals, the traffic that Sprout can help
generate socially is great for SEO.
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Content QualityQuality content is the counterpart to link building. Without quality content, it is nearly impossible to
obtain high quality links. Quality content is unique, current, and appeals to the target market. There
is no single tool that magically creates quality content, however, there are tools that will help optimize
the current content and ensure that it receives the highest possible grade by search engines.
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Highlighted Tools for Content Quality
Yoast SEO Plugin for WordpressYoast is a one click install within WordPress to analyze a website’s content in relation to a specified
keyword on a particular page. Webpage content should be designed with a keyword strategy in
mind. Essentially the marketer should ask themselves, “What keyword or phrase would l most like to
ensure this content ranks highly for?” A tool like Yoast can then help the marketer understand how
this page will perform when that keyword is searched.
After the keyword is set, the plugin runs the keyword through an algorithm based on Google’s
best practices and past success. A “green light” is assigned to SEO optimized pages, a “yellow light”
is assigned to partially SEO optimized pages, and a “red light” is assigned to pages that are not
optimized or do not have a specified keyword assigned. This plugin also allows mass editing of
page meta titles and meta descriptions as well as an auto generating an XML sitemap that can be
uploaded to Google Webmaster Tools to tell Google how to crawl the website hierarchy.
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User Interaction
User interaction and engagement is crucial to a company’s success.
Simply driving a high volume of traffic to a website does not improve
SEO. Now Google can determine how engaged a user is with a site by
how many pages a visitor interacts with, how long the visitor spends on
the website as a whole, and how long the visitor spends on each page.
Understanding and optimizing the paths users follow through a site is
essential for keeping those users engaged.
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Highlighted Tools for User InteractionKissmetricsThis tool is similar to Google Analytics, except instead of telling only what is happening on the
website, it tells who is doing it. Kissmetrics identifies a user by any means possible. It will attach a
phone number, email address, or even caller ID number to a specific visitor’s profile which is tracked
the second they land on the website. This is incredibly useful for tracking converted traffic patterns
to see what works and what doesn’t. It also tracks what pages these customers visit, how long they
were on each page, and even how many times they visit the website and where they came from
each time they visit.
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Keyword Research & SelectionPicking the right website keywords is critical to SEO success. Without
this, it can be very hard to generate content that will attract the target
audience no matter how high quality the content is. It is very important
to know if and when it will be possible to rank for a keyword. The SEO
strategy will vary depending on the competition of the keywords that are
being targeted. If an organization wants to target low hanging fruit and see
results within three to six months, a very different strategy will be used
when compared to selecting a very broad keyword that is the target of
many other organizations in the same ecosystem. These keywords can take
years to rank highly for depending on how much ground the organization
needs to make up and how much momentum the top competitors have.
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Highlighted Tools for Keyword Research &
SelectionMyseotool.comThis tool tracks an organization’s targeted keywords and performs daily searches for each word
to monitor increase or decrease for both Google and Bing. This makes it very easy to track many
keywords and report on the results easily. This tool also shows how competitive each word that has
been selected is, how much traffic the word receives, and how many total competitors are listed for
the word or phrase. One of the best features of this tool is ability to select a website page, pick a
keyword, and then have an audit of that page performed
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Website ArchitectureWith the rise of content management systems (CMSs such as WordPress,
Magento, etc), website architecture has become more accessible and easier
to master. Many people are familiar with the advantages of using a CMS
from an ease of use standpoint; however they are not familiar with the
SEO benefits from using an SEO friendly platform such as WordPress. SEO
friendly CMSs will automatically structure the Header Tags (H1,H2,H3) for
posts and pages, include input fields for meta titles and descriptions, and
help structure the content in a logical hierarchy fully crawlable by Google.
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Highlighted Tools for Website Architecture
WordpressWordPress has become the leading CMS
among SEO experts due to the customizability,
the easy to use plugins, and search engine
recognition of the infrastructure of the platform.
Almost a quarter of new domains registered
use WordPress. WordPress.com gets more
unique hits per day than Amazon.com according
to Managewp.com in 2013 . Many hosting
providers offer one click installs for WordPress
making it easier than ever to install. With so
many websites using WordPress, extra security
precautions must be taken such as: changing
the WordPress admin URL, deleting the “admin”
user, and installing a captcha plugin to lock out
unauthorized access attempts. Search engines
will blacklist hacked websites very quickly, so this
is a very important step.
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Domain & Page AuthorityDomain and page authority is determined by mainly inbound links and social
signals, however, there are other factors that make an impact. The domain
authority transcends to each page diminishing in value the further it is away
from the homepage in relation to the taxonomy. The individual page score
that is related to the domain authority is called the page authority.
Tools such as Moz or Ahrefs, use different algorithms to calculate these
figures; however generally they are very similar. Google does not update
their page rank score as often as they have in the past, but they still use
the system to determine how important links are that come from websites
which can determine how high the website ranks within Google.
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Highlighted Tools for Domain & Page AuthorityMoz ProMoz Professional uses their own algorithm to calculate domain authority. Moz is a massive tool that
has many overlapping features included in the other tools described above as well as APIs to several of
the tools. Moz has great reporting features and allows an organization the ability to compare domain
authority to that of competitors and monitor that domain authority on a monthly basis. Automated
reports can be set up and delivered on a recurring basis to include fields that are relevant to the
success of SEO campaigns.
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Information AnalysisThere are many metrics used by marketers in many different tools.
Ultimately all these tools are being used to gain insights in order generate
more traffic by increasing search engine rankings. Trial and error is an
essential skill set to being successful at SEO. A lot of effort is put into trying
new things, monitoring these new things, and then noting the success or
failure over several months. Reports make this much easier to make sense
of key factors.
Highlighted Tools for Information Analysis
Google AnalyticsGoogle Analytics is arguably the most powerful SEO tool there is, however it comes at the cost of
sometimes being challenging to use and master. Many prefer to use other simplified tools that
specialize in a particular area of SEO. Google Analytics tracks visitors to the website and supports
goal tracking based on anything from phone calls to thank-you page visits. It also integrates with many
different software tools, so there is a good chance someone at the organization has seen or used
data from this tool before. Google Analytics integrates into Moz, allowing top notch reporting.
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Salesfusion is a leading provider of marketing automation software that is designed for B2B
companies who are committed to driving more revenue by aligning marketing and sales.
Salesfusion anchors around the belief that a well integrated CRM and Marketing
Automation pair is the foundation of all B2B marketing.
© 2014 Salesfusion Inc.
Sources for the data in this ebook: internetlivestats.com/google-search-statistics/ Searchenginewatch.com, Searchenginejournal.comHubspot.com/marketing-statistics
Contact Information:[email protected]
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