Understanding SEO The Basics

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. At its core, it’s a set of strategies and methodologies aimed at enhancing a website’s visibility on search engines like Google, Bing, or Yahoo. Imagine the internet as an enormous library. When you want to find a specific book, the library’s indicator guides you to the right section. SEO acts as this indicator for the internet, helping users find applicable websites amidst the digital chaos.

How Does SEO Work?

Search engines use complex algorithms to audit and rank websites based on various factors. SEO involves optimizing your website to align with these algorithms. It’s affiliated with preparing a delicious recipe – the right ingredients( keywords, content, links) combined in the right way( optimization) make the dish( website) more appealing to the taste buds( search engines).

Why is SEO Essential?

Visibility and Traffic:  Websites on the first page of search results are more likely to be visited. SEO helps your website climb these species, increasing visibility and attracting further visitors.

Credibility: Users tend to trust websites that appear at the top of search results. SEO enhances your site’s credibility, fostering trust among users.

User Experience:  SEO isn’t just about search engines; it’s also about furnishing a flawless experience for users. Optimized websites load faster, are mobile-friendly, and offer applicable, high-quality content.

Cost- Effectiveness:  Compared to paid advertising, SEO is a cost-effective way to drive organic(non-paid) traffic to your website.

Key Elements of SEO

Keywords: These are the words or phrases users type into search engines. Effective SEO involves exploration to identify applicable keywords and strategically placing them in your content.

Content:  Quality content is the heart of SEO. It should be informative, engaging, and accommodated to meet the requirements of your audience. Regularly streamlining your content also keeps your website applicable.

Links: Both internal links( links within your website) and external links( links from other websites to yours) are vital. They enhance navigation and indicate your site’s credibility.

Mobile-Friendliness:  With the rise of smartphones, mobile-friendly websites are prioritized by search engines. Ensuring your point is responsive on various devices is vital for SEO.

Page Speed: Slow-loading websites frustrate users and are penalized by search engines. Optimizing your site’s speed improves user experience and SEO ranking.

Meta Tags: These are snippets of textbooks that describe a page’s content. Optimized meta tags enhance click-through rates from search results.

How does SEO work?

Search Engine Optimization works through a series of strategies and ways designed to enhance a website’s visibility and ranking on search engine result pages( SERPs). Then is a breakdown of how SEO works

Search Engines Crawling and Indexing

Crawling: Search engines like Google use automated programs called crawlers or spiders to browse the internet and discover web runners.

Indexing: Once a page is crawled, the search engine indicators the content, organizing it based on keywords and other factors. Indexing is akin to creating a huge digital library catalog.

Keywords

SEO begins with keyword research. Website owners identify the words and expressions( keywords) users might use when searching for content related to their site.
These keywords are strategically integrated into the website’s content, including titles, headlines, and body textbooks. This helps search engines understand what the site is about.

Content Quality

High-quality, relevant, and informative content is crucial. Search engines prioritize content that answers users ’ questions and provides value.
Regularly streamlined and fresh content keeps the website applicable, encouraging search engines to crawl the site more frequently.

On-Page Optimization

Title Tags and Meta Descriptions: These are HTML elements that give concise descriptions of a web page’s content. They appear in search results and influence click-through rates.
Header Tags:  Proper use of heading tags( H1, H2, etc.) helps search engines understand the structure and scale of content on a page.
URL Structure:  Clean, descriptive URLs make it easier for both users and search engines to understand the page’s content.

Off-Page Optimization

Backlinks: Links from other websites to yours( backlinks) are like votes of confidence. Quality backlinks from authoritative sites enhance your site’s credibility and ranking.
Social Signals: Social media activity and engagement laterally impact SEO. Content that gets shared on social platforms frequently attracts more backlinks and traffic.

Technical SEO

Site Speed: Faster-loading websites provide a better user experience and are favored by search engines.
Mobile-Friendliness: With the rise of mobile devices, search engines prioritize mobile-friendly websites.
Site Structure: Well-organized sites with clear navigation are user-friendly and admit better search engine rankings.

User Experience

Websites that offer a positive user experience, such as easy navigation, applicable content, and fast loading times, are likely to have lower bounce rates and higher rankings.

Regular Monitoring and Adaptation

SEO isn’t a one-time task; it requires continuous monitoring and adaptation. Regular analysis of website traffic and keyword performance helps in identifying areas for enhancement. Keeping up-to-date with search engine algorithms and industry trends is crucial for staying ahead in the SEO game.

SEO in a Nutshell

In substance, SEO is the digital compass guiding users to your website amidst the vast internet geography. By understanding the basics – keywords, content, links, user experience, and specialized aspects – you can optimize your website effectively.

Remember, SEO isn’t a one-time task but an ongoing process. Regularly streamlining your content, adapting to changing algorithms, and staying informed about industry trends are essential for long-term success.

In the digital age, mastering SEO is affiliated with learning the art of being found. So, invest your time and effort wisely, and let SEO pave the way for your online success.

I hope you enjoyed reading this article!

Please check out our recent article:

• WPForms vs Gravity Form: Which one’s better?

The post What is SEO? ( Everything You Must Know) appeared first on Acme Themes Blog.

Things to consider when getting a backlink from a high domain authority site

Below we have mentioned some of the facts to consider when getting a backlink:
⦁ The site should be relevant to your niche
⦁ The post in which you are getting the backlink should be written unique and of high-quality
⦁ The site should have high domain authority to get high-quality link. You can check DA through the online tools without any spending.
⦁ You shouldn’t pay for the backlinks to the site from which you are getting the backlink. This is because Google never allows the paid or artificial backlink.

1. Extract the Backlinks of Your Rivals

Every of your competitors is making efforts for getting the backlinks. You can easily get an overview of your rival’s backlinks and then try to restore your best backlinks.
Rebuilding the website’s backlinks is probably the sharpest approach to discovering new references and improving SEO.
Start by selecting your main competitors, the sites that position themselves in the top 5 situations for your primary keywords.
If they are appearing above than your position then there are chances that they have better relationship with other websites through backlinks while they are also making high-quality backlinks than you.
If you have chosen which candidates to keep an eye on, you need to break down their backlinks.
There are different tools like Ahrefs, UberSuggest that can help to analyze the backlinks of your competitors and this way, you can easily contact the sites to get backlink.

After you have added your basic competitors to monitor backlinks, use the analysis tools you have been given to find out which links deserve to be repeated.
Do not fall into the trap of trying to recreate each and every one of them. All sites have terrible connections, even Wikipedia.
You should only reproduce those links that have a high ranking in the search engine.

2. Guest Posting for High-quality Backlinks

Guest posting is the free posting to another website or blog in return for a link back to your own personal website.
These links can either be inserted into the author biography or used to refer to data within the content body.
This has been an established third-party link strategy for some time, as it has been a success for both destinations: one gets free content to convey its audience, while the other gets an excellent backlink.

Unfortunately, there are many cases where web masters usually publish low-quality content to just obtain a backlink which become low-quality.
They employ article writer who hardly ever deal with the topics they present, and then contrast these inferior articles with a selection of topics when the content is applicable to their audience.
This is why Google has warned against guest post.
This has discouraged a lot of site owners from using this third-party reference system – and of course.
But high-profile, significant guest posts are unique compared to the user-produced, low-quality post that were a staple of many SEO techniques a few years ago.
If done properly and with an emphasis on accommodating, excellent content, visitor posts can even now be a powerful reference tool for third parties.
If things are as they are, how can you use this strategy properly?
The first thing is that you should find the best website where you can contribute.

3. Construct Backlinks with Infographics

Infographics are not only known through social media sites such as Pinterest and Reddit, they can also significantly improve your SEO and increase web traffic.
A valid example: websites that distribute infographics have normal traffic growth of 12% more than destinations that do not.
The vast majority, however, disregard infographics on the grounds that they mistakenly assume that it takes a lot of time and effort to plan one, or to think that it would be an expensive procurement to repopulate it.

Nor should you be an expert in fashion: extravagant infographics can be created amazingly quickly with free online planning tools such as Canva, Venngage and Pictochart.
Another approach to creating attractive infographics is to redistribute them by using competent fashion designers for destinations such as Fiverr, Upwork, or Design Pickle for the chance that you have a bigger spending plan.

4. Generate the Backlink from Broken Link

Even legitimate, all-round maintained websites suffer from the negative effects of broken links.
Each link is referring the reader to another website or web page. However, since websites often move their content, some of these links will end up “breaking” or highlighting pages that do not currently exist.
At the point a customer taps a broken link, they appear on a page with 404 errors, where they learn that the content, they are looking for no longer exists.

This gives a helpless customer experience and makes it harder for web search tools to slide productively and record websites.
Broken backlinks are an incredible way to build external links to your site.
This technique involves locating broken links at different sites, identifying the content they originally alluded to, and at this point offering the site the opportunity to replace its tangled interface with a legitimate connection to relevant contents.
This content will of course be on your website.
With this approach, everyone wins. The owner of the site has fewer broken connections. His guests will see more state-of-the-art, valuable content and fewer 404s. You will also get an excellent backlink.
You can easily approach the web owner of the broken link and ask to change the broken link into referring your site.

The post Tips for Creating Quality Backlinks for SEO of a Website appeared first on Acme Themes Blog.

Ultimately, link building is great for generating leads, driving traffic to your site, and improving revenue. The
advantages that come with link building make it necessary for you to work as hard and as smart as you can.

With numerous options to choose from, it can be challenging to assess which ones to put more effort into.
You can start by thinking about the sites that you want to link to you. The goal is to gain backlinks from
reputable, authoritative sites that are equally committed as you are in sharing quality content that’s relevant for the audience.

These sites have probably received hundreds to thousands of email outreach campaigns from content creators
like yourself, requesting for a link to their website. To cut through the noise, your link building strategies should
include those that marketers may be taking for granted, including interviews with influencers, comprehensive
resource articles, and ego-bait content, among other examples.

Unlike most other traditional approaches, these lesser-known techniques in link building can make your brand
stand out simply because there’s not as much competition for you. When most marketers would refuse to
explore and innovate, you could level up your link building efforts and gain more high-quality backlinks or
inbound links.

Our featured infographic identifies and describes several other underutilized link building tactics —including
partner links, image reclamation, the Help a Reporter Out (HARO) platform, and media event promotions—that
can help you improve your SEO performance.

The post Underrated Link Building Tactics for SEO that Work Surprisingly Well appeared first on Acme Themes Blog.

E-A-T is an important element in Google’s search algorithm. It has become a major ingredient in determining where your brand or website should rank in Google search ranks. Although it is not a direct ranking factor, it is a crucial ranking signal for Google.

Google is constantly improving and it is trying its best to give the best possible experience to its customers. In doing so, it prefers to promote websites that it trusts.

A study revealed there are currently over 4.4 billion websites in the world. A huge portion of such websites are not active; have poor quality, and are not trustable as well. To provide quality search results, Google has to identify trustworthy websites from outdated ones, cause misinform users, or deceive people.

To give Google users a better experience, Google constantly brings new updates and changes to its search algorithm.

Google rolls out thousands of minor updates every year with a few major ones occasionally. An example of a major update is the Core Update that Google rolled out in January 2020. The major updates can make or break your website and business on the search engine.

With updates in the algorithm, Google has become better and better in distinguishing quality websites from the poor ones. So, it moves the websites it can trust upward and drags down the poor quality websites in the search engine ranking.

In Google Search Quality Guidelines, Google mentions it pays special attention to E-A-T of domains and businesses while ranking them.

E-A-T is important in all kinds of content. But, it can be the most influential signal in ranking content that can impact on people’s health, finance, safety, and future. Such content is categorized as YMYL “Your Money or Your Life”.

Let’s discuss a little about each element of E-A-T.

Expertise

Google wants the expertise of both – the website and the author in the topic the content or website is about.

Expertise refers to expert skill or knowledge in a particular field.

Google looks after the credentials that a website or the business has before giving it a rating. If it finds relevant credentials, it gives the website a good rating and moves it upward in the Google ranking. For example, in a search query related to home remodeling, Google prefers to rank the content produced by a certified professional contractor or business rather than a content produced by a new blogger.

If your website has gained external recognition in the particular field, it will help your business rank better in the search engine.

Likewise, Google equally pays attention to the author of the content. For example, Google values content in the medical field written by a doctor rather than the one written by some unknown author. It’s the same case in other fields.

So, if you are a certified professional of a certain field, you have a huge advantage over others when it comes to ranking your website or content in Google. As you will be cited by other authoritative businesses and third-parties which happens to be a big advantage over your competitors.

Authoritativeness

Having the weight of authority, or able to be trusted as being accurate comes under authoritativeness.

Google artificial intelligence and algorithm do their best to measure the authoritativeness of the website and author. It somehow relies on the mentions, referrals, or backlinks on other websites. If big and trusted websites have mentioned you and your website, Google certainly takes that as a positive sign.

Popular metrics like high Domain Authority and high Domain rating indicate a website has authoritativeness. Forbes can be taken as not just an expert, but as an authority in news niche.

Users don’t just want to find the content of an expert; they want to see from the best one – the authority.

If you are an author, Google considers the citations you have, the websites you are mentioned at, and the type and quality of content you have produced before. If you have produced the quality content, are cited from authoritative and big businesses and websites, and helped people find what they were looking for, you will certainly cut above the rest when it comes to ranking your content.

Trustworthiness

Trustworthiness – the ability to be trusted as honest and reliable! To get a better ranking in Google, you have to make Google trust you.

If you own a business website, the website should reveal information like the business location, contact information, team members, terms and conditions, and other such information. It may hurt your ranking in Google if you don’t reveal the information about your author and website.

Google also considers organic positive reviews, the security of your website, and the performance of your website to measure the trustworthiness of your website or business.

If your website has been a go-to resource for getting reliable information, Google certainly keeps track of that and it will rank your new content quicker and higher in the search results.

How to Make your E-A-T score better?

So now you know what EAT in SEO is and how it can hurt your website and business if you have a low EAT score. If you want to perform well in the Google search ranking, you should start improving your E-A-T rating. And how do you do that? Read on.

Include Author name and Details in Editorial Contents

If you have not done started crediting the author of your post, it’s time to do so. Your readers should know who has written the content and is s/he the expert one in the topic. Readers should know whether the content and the content creator is trustworthy or not.

If someone is searching for a symptom of a certain disease, s/he would prefer to see the content created by a certified medical professional or medical agency. So, you should provide the name, details, and credentials of the author which will let Google and the readers evaluate the trustworthiness of you and the information you provide.

However, this may not be the case with product pages and landing pages. For such pages, you should provide easy access to contact information or the customer support page.

Invest in Reputation and Personal Branding

You should start building your personal branding in your business field to increase the reputation of you and your business. Big businesses and organizations’ websites tend to perform better as they are well-known and have a reputation in the field.

If your content lacks the quality or spreads misinformation, it will hurt your SEO more than ever before. So, regardless of the size of your website or business, make sure you provide the quality and useful information to your visitors.

If you lack a reputation in your industry, you will most likely be outperformed by an influencer with a positive reputation.

So, how can you invest in personal branding and increase your reputation?

• Reveal your social media profiles and interact with influencers, your audiences, and customers
• Reach out to trusted platforms and build the relationship
• Win the trust of your customers with helpful interaction

Edit or Get Rid of Low-Quality Content

Every page of your website must serve a purpose. If it does not, it’s not worth staying there. Make sure all your editorial content and commercial content pages are user-centric and benefit the user.

You should also avoid using any clickbait headlines or copy. If your content intends to deceive users, Google will catch you sooner or later and take an action against your website.

If you have created content just for the sake of creating more content, it’s time to stop doing it and focus more on creating strong, comprehensive, correct, and well-crafted content. If you have thin or duplicate content, you can either eliminate them or merge them to build a comprehensive and detail-oriented content page with high EAT.

In addition, make sure your headlines and metadata are intended to help users rather than raising urgency. Stop using phrases like “Offer Ends Soon” and “Limited Time Offer”.

In short, 

• Delete poor or thin content that offers little to no value
• Don’t try deceiving your customers with click-bait topics
• Create comprehensive, factually-correct, and detail-oriented content

Don’t Hide the Identity of Your Website

Your website visitors and customers should have access to information about your business. They should have access to easily discover who are the people behind it and from where the business or website is run.

Therefore, build strong and well-optimized About Us and Contact Pages on your website. And remember, they should be easily accessible. It’s better if you include reviews, testimonials, and ratings that third-parties have provided to your website.

Moreover, detailed information about your company’s history (and certification if any) enhances the EAT of your website further.

Likewise, your Contact Page should offer clear contact information about your business. Put contact email, phone numbers, or any other contact details through which your users can easily connect with you. Also, provide the physical location of your business too.

In short, 

• Build detailed-oriented About Us and Contact pages with correct information
• Place pages like About Us, Contact, Customer Support, and Privacy Policy pages in visible and easily accessible areas
• Provide as much information as you can about your business

Improve Technical Security of Your Website

To improve your EAT rating, you should also make sure that your website is secured. If your website is on (HTTP), your web browser will show a tag ‘Not Secure’ and the majority of your web visitors move away. So, you should install an SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) certificate which encrypts the connection between a web browser and the server. It gives users a secure connection and protects the personal data they share with your website.

Google acts strongly against insecure connections when it comes to transactions. If a shopping checkout page of an e-commerce website shows an insecure connection, that e-commerce website will certainly get a low EAT rating. So, make sure your website is secured and is hosted in a secured hosting to improve your EAT rating.

If you use WordPress to build your website, make sure you update the WordPress version and also the plugins you have installed on your website. As this helps in the protection of your website, Google notices that and gives you a positive rating to increase your EAT.

In short, 

• Install an SSL certificate on your website to secure your website
• Update your website

To Sum Up,

Google has been improving and so should business and website owners like you.

Although improving your website’s EAT score seems intimidating sometimes, it’s all about being more trustworthy, reliable, and honest towards your visitors and customers. It’s about creating more value for your customers.

Google’s Quality Rater Guidelines say the EAT (Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness) plays an important role in the search rankings and its algorithm updates have been proving it time and again.

So, have a goal to build a brand, not just a website. Build a brand with a high level of expertise in your industry, gain the trust of your customers, and become a go-to resource for people about the topic. And see how Google brings your brand on the top of every search results you want.

The post What is EAT in SEO? How To make your E-A-T Score Better? appeared first on Acme Themes Blog.

In our previous article, we have covered On-page SEO, Off-page SEO, Technical SEO, and Local SEO. You as a content producer need to focus on developing quality content for both Search Engines and Users. This is something that sounds like a white hat SEO. But there is another term called On-SERP SEO.

Now in this article, we are going to cover the On-SERP SEO in detail.

What is On-SERP SEO?

On-SERP SEO is the technique of optimizing the website to increase visibility in the SERP. With the On-SERP SEO, you can optimize your content for zero-click results.

“Zero-click searches refer to a search engine results page (SERP) which answers the query right at the top such that the user doesn’t need any further clicks to complete the search. A zero-click search is one that satisfies the search intent at the top of the SERP.”

The concept of On-SERP SEO is to bring the brand to the front page of Google as much as possible. The ultimate goal of On-SERP SEO is to increase your click-through rate (CTR) and generate more organic traffic.

In the past days, meta titles and descriptions were the only SERP content that you could control. But now, there are more methods available for optimizing your on-SERP presence.

For that, you need to take care of the following elements –

• A featured snippet
• Meta Title and Description
• Schema Markup
• Ask boxes
• Image and Video search
• Map Pack
• Google My Business
• Google Sitelinks
• Connect All Social Media Channels
• Run paid ads

Importance of On-SERP SEO

Let’s look at the data published by SparkToro about the click behavior of users.

The statistic shows that, among 40 M+ browser-based searches on millions of desktop and mobile devices in the United States, more than half of the Google searches resulted in zero clicks. See the figure below-

On-SERP SEO helps in enhancing the visibility of your brand in the search results. It does not only increase the traffic to your website but also build trust in the search engine.

10 Best Tips to Optimize For On-SERP SEO

Optimizing for the On-SERP SEO involves various techniques. Some of these techniques are a part of on-page SEO techniques. But how is an On-SERP SEO is different from an On-Page SEO?

Let’s describe the best On-SERP SEO techniques one by one.

1) Aim For Featured Snippet

Featured Snippet is a rich result that shows in the zero position on Google. The zero position is the top page in the search listing. Following is an example of featured snippets on the keyword “Pinterest SEO tips 2020”.

.

Because of the trend towards zero-click searches, winning a featured snippet is a great way to increase awareness and defeat your competition for impressions. In general, the best way to win a featured snippet is to organize your content in a way that is logical and indicates to Google that you have a useful, succinct answer to the question being asked.

Note: The latest announcement (January 2020) from Google has stated that webpages in a featured snippet position will no longer be repeated in regular Page 1 organic listing.

2) Optimize Meta Title and Description

Optimizing Page Titles is another important factor for SEO. Although meta title and description are not only the SERP content that affects SERP results, meta title and description are still an important part to take care of.

So, you need to put a catchy and powerful title so that the user can click it.

Tips:

• You can include modifiers like, “Best”, “Free”, “Tips”, “How to”, “Guide”, “Latest Date” etc.
• Write a title of not more than 65 characters that perfectly fit on the screen.
• The page title should always be in the <H1> tag.

3) Add Schema Markup in Appropriate Sites

Schema markup helps search engines understand the topics of your content better via structured data. A rich snippet is a result shown on the Google page along with some other additional information so as to add value to the result. It stands out from the other snippets when it comes to the priority.

From the user’s perspective, just by looking at the result of the rich snippet, they get to know more about the content.  Because it is more appealing to the users, posts with rich snippets are likely to get more clicks. If the click-through rate (CTR) of your blog post increases, you will get more traffic. Ultimately, rich snippets will affect your ranking as well.

The following image shows the difference between rich snipped and normal snippets.

Rich snippets can not be used in all types of content. The following are some of the content types where rich snippets can be used.

• Recipe
• Event
• Apps
• People
• Products
• Business and Organizations

How can you get rich snippets? 

You have to add structured data to your site so that Google can show a rich snippet. A piece of code in structured data tells Google to extract the maximum relevant data for rich snippet results. You can test the structure of your article using this Structure Data Testing Tool.

4) Optimize For Ask Boxes

Ask Box is the box area on the Google page shown in the tabbed form. The number of questions is shown in this box based on the user’s query. Users generally click on these boxes when they are looking for a particular answer.

Optimize for ask boxes by answering the question in a structured way in your content. Get the idea of the related questions by analyzing the LSI keywords, and Google Keyword Planner tool. You can insert the FAQs box (Gutenberg) within your content that lets your content result for ask boxes. I recommend installing Gutentor for amazingly designed FAQ boxes.

Following is an example of how an ask box looks on Google’s page.

5) Focus on Image and Video Search

Optimizing image and video content is one of the best practices in SEO. In fact, this practice also falls under the On-Page SEO. Based on the user’s query, video or image of your website has a better chance to appear on the front page via the image or video carousel.

However, the result might appear in different positions on the result page, so they’re not as fixed as featured snippets.

Just look at the example of video results in the following example.

Schema markup and optimization are important with video and image SEO, especially because there are brands that won’t take the extra step to work on it. For videos, make sure you have video schema markup (more on schema markup next).

6) Add Map Pack

Google’s Map Pack can be a great way to get in front of potential customers and clients locally. The local map pack is a listing available on some searches that includes a scrolling list of businesses within a category. A map pack contains the Google map location, star ratings, contact number, and website. You need to optimize for Local SEO in order to optimize the map pack.

Read details about Local SEO techniques here.

7) List in Google My Business

Getting listed in Google My Business is another best approach for On-SERP SEO. A Google My Business listing is important for appearing in both places on the SERP. Google will show the rich result on the right side of its page along with the related information.

Check out an example of Google My Business results below.

8) Google Sitelinks

Google Sitelinks are sub-listings that appear under the first result in the search result. Sitelinks increase the visual space of your search results by displaying the most important pages of your website directly within your search results. This results in direct navigation on your website.

Although you can’t force Google to display site links, you can create a clear navigational structure – with strong internal links to the core pages, as well as anchors and alt tags that are descriptive – to increase your chances of Google displaying your site links.

Google says –

“Our systems analyze the link structure of your site to find shortcuts that will save users time and allow them to quickly find the information they’re searching for . . . We only show sitelinks for results when we think they’ll be useful to the user.”

9) Connect All Social Media Channels

Social media channels play a great role in traffic to any website.

Google uses its knowledge panel to display all the information about your business in one condensed spot.

Connecting social media will provides more opportunities for the user to click on a search element that you own and control. Your social media profile may help in building brand awareness among customers.

10) Run Paid Ads

Although running ads cost you, it helps you to get an extra spot at the top that Google can’t take away from you. People are searching for keywords that your brand belongs to. In this case, you have to find out the cheapest keywords that you can run ads on so get more clicks on your website.

Lastly, in today’s world, digital marketers and companies need to be well-versed in adopting the changing technology. In order to compete with the rapidly changing world in the competitive market, you need to care about lots of things at once.

Just follow the above techniques to win traffic to your website.

Related Article 

• 7 Techniques to Bulletproof Your WordPress Website
• 10 Free Techniques To Speed Up WordPress Website

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The post What is On-SERP SEO? 10 Best Tips to Optimize For On-SERP SEO appeared first on Acme Themes Blog.

Why WordPress Speed Matters?

Google does take website speed as one of the ranking factors. This means your SEO performance is affected by the loading time of your website. So, if your website loads slow then Google downranks your website. Fast loading websites are not only a good experience for users but also it will be easier for a search engine to crawl. This directly impacts the conversion rate but also reduces the bounce rate of the website.  So, it is super important to make the website as fast as possible in order to rank well on the search engines.

You can check the loading speed of your website in Google’s PageSpeed Insights.

Related Article – First Contentful Paint (FCP) and First Meaningful Paint (FMP) Explained

10 Free Techniques To Speed Up WordPress Website

1. Choose Good Hosting

Investing in a reliable hosting service is an important part of your business. If you do not have reliable hosting, your website will not be available to the users at the time of the query (or maybe load slow). If your website is not available, Google can not find you, and once Google notices it, your website will not be indexed.

So, investing in reliable hosting is a key decision you need to take. We have been using the Siteground for such a long time and their service is just great. In fact, it is the top three hosting companies recommended by WordPress itself.

It has tools that make managing WordPress sites easy: one-click install, managed updates, WP-Cli, WordPress staging, and git integration. They have a very fast support team with advanced WordPress expertise available 24/7.

2. Use CDN

CDN stands for Content Delivery Network and as the name suggests, it is the delivery of the content based on the geographical location. The core concept of CDN is serving content from the nearest possible physical location in order to increase the speed of the website. When you use CDN, copies of your site are stored at multiple, geographically diverse data centers so that users have faster and more reliable access to your site.

The CDN server closest to a user is known as the “edge server”. When a user requests content from a website served through a CDN, they’re connected to the closest edge server, ensuring the best online experience possible.

3. Optimize Image

Image optimization is another important task of Search Engine Optimization. For WordPress, there are many image optimizer plugins available, among all, Smush and ShortPixel Image Optimizer is widely used plugins. These plugins do a great job after you upload images, but you have to do lots of things before you even upload the images. This helps in even better image optimization. Such as –

• Image Size – You have to optimize your image size so as to make it light. This affects the loading speed of your website. But one thing you should be careful of is while reducing the size of your image, you should also take care of its resolution. You can use different tools to reduce the image size such as  tinypng.com, tinyjpg.com. These online FREE TOOLs help you to reduce the size of your image keeping its quality optimum.
• Proper Alt text –  Alt text (also called “alt description”, “alt-tag”) is the written copy that appears in place of an image on a webpage if that particular image fails to load on the screen. So, putting proper alt text is important for accessibility and Image SEO. Try to put the proper image alt tag that better describes the image.
• Description of the Image – Description of your text describes the image. This is different from “alt text” because alt text is an “alternative text to the image” that will be shown on the screen when the image fails to load. But image description is the description of that particular image that is shown below the image to further describe the image.
• Choosing the Proper format – There are mainly three image formats that are in use, JPEG, PNG, and GIF. I personally do not recommend GIF unless there is a “Must Use” situation. Although PNG produces better quality images, it comes in a larger size than JPEG format. So, you have to use the JPEG image in most of the cases in order to save size and quality. However, there might be some cases where PNG produces better results than JPEG. Just balance it.
• Use Unique and High-Quality Image – Unique and High-quality images are crucial for any website. But, one important fact to understand is a high-quality image is not necessarily be of large size. We can maintain high resolution with the optimum size as well. So, optimize images before uploading them to the website.

4. Use Cache Plugin

Installing a cache plugin is another important SEO setting for the WordPress website. A cache plugin generates static HTML pages of your website and saves it on your server. Each time a user tries to access your website, your caching plugin serves up the lighter HTML page instead of processing the heavy WordPress PHP scripts. This allows the caching plugin to tremendously improve your page loading time.

Tips

• Top 3 cache plugins are WP Rocket, WP Super Cache, W3 Total Cache
• Follow full documentation of the cache setup

Cache plugins like W3 Total Cache improve the SEO and user experience of your site by increasing website performance, reducing load times via features like content delivery network (CDN) integration and the latest best practices.

5. Lightweight Theme

WordPress theme quality is another important factor for the speed of the website. So, while choosing the WordPress themes, you should make sure that you pick up a lightweight theme. Some themes are so heavy that takes time to load the content.

There are thousands of WordPress themes available but the one with high speed, well-coded responsive theme is what we need to install. Fast loading and responsive theme are best for both search engines and users.

Tips

• Choose a theme that is not only appealing visually but also fast and responsive
• Keep checking Google Search Console if anything is wrong with the theme code and get the support from developers

A badly coded theme definitely going to harm your whole website.  Because the theme is the backbone of your website, you need to pick up the trusted theme from the trusted developer. There are lots of free themes available in the market, but the thing is they have designed and developed for different niches. Its speed, structure, responsiveness affect the SEO of your website. So, the theme is the first thing you should consider for better SEO. Acme Themes offers a wide range of Free and Premium Themes loved by thousands of users.

Explore the themes

What do you need to know about the theme?

• Chose the theme from the trusted developers
• The theme should be lightweight
• The theme should be SEO friendly
• Support from developer
• Use the premium theme as must as possible for better support and features

6. Remove Unnecessary Plugins

As well know, WordPress is a plugin rich platform. There are thousands of plugin developers who developed various plugins for different purposes.  But installing random and unnecessary plugins adds an extra burden to the website. Broken and unauthorized plugins degrade the speed of the website and ultimately it creates a negative impact on ranking. So, use only needed and trusted plugin on your WordPress website.

Tips

• Carefully look rating and last update date of the plugin
• Do not forget to check the compatibility
• Install only essential plugins and delete rest of the plugins

7. Use GZIP Compression

You can use GZIP compression that dramatically reduces the bandwidth usage and the time access time. GZIP compression compresses the files so, when a user makes a request, their browser will first have to unzip the website. A plugin like PageSpeed Ninja, helps you to enable GZIP compression. You can make your site load faster on desktop and mobile, fixing Google PageSpeed Insights issues with one click.

8. Don’t Upload Audio/Video Files Directly to WordPress

WordPress allows you to directly upload video or an audio file. These files take lots of bandwidth when users ask for the request. So, instead of directly upload the video to your website, you can use different audio and video hosting platforms. For audio, you can use SoundCloud.com and for the video, you can use Youtube.com and Vimeo.com.

WordPress comes with a great feature called auto-embeds that allows your website to automatically get the embed code from YouTube or Vimeo. You just need to copy the link of the video and paste it into the relevant place. This way you can save your bandwidth and speed up the loading time of your website.

9. Minify CSS &JS

When you check your website loading speed from tools like Pingdom or Google PageSpeed Insights, you get the report that says minify Javascript and CSS file. That means you need to reduce the JS and CSS calls to reduce the server response time.

By optimizing your code (including removing spaces, commas, and other unnecessary characters), you can dramatically increase your page speed. Also remove code comments, formatting, and unused code. This will eventually help you to save bandwidth usage.

10. Cleanup WordPress Database

Cleaning up the WordPress database is the process of deleting unwanted data from your database will keep its size to a minimum and also helps in reducing the size of your backups. It is also necessary to delete spam comments, fake users, old drafts of your content and maybe even unwanted plugins as well as themes. All of this will reduce the size of your databases and web files, and thus speed up WordPress – your WordPress.

Other SEO Articles:

✅7 Techniques to Bulletproof Your WordPress Website

✅What is Duplicate Content? How to Avoid it?

If you liked this article, then consider following us on Twitter and Facebook and LinkedIn.

The post 10 Free Techniques To Speed Up WordPress Website appeared first on Acme Themes Blog.

Although it was primarily famous for the blogging platform, now we can build any type of website using WordPress. Popular companies like CNN, TechCrunch, SONY, New York Times, TED are also used WordPress software to build their website.

I personally in love with WordPress from the day I come to know about it. Statistics show that the popularity of WordPress is growing rapidly.

With its popularity and growth, security equally comes as a vital challenge for website owners. Keeping safe from unauthorized access, manipulation, malicious attacks, and hacking become a crucial job for you. Especially if you perform an online transaction through your website, it is compulsory that you need to keep your website safe.

Or even you do not have a financial transaction, you still need to keep your website safe from any type of security breaches.

In this article, I am going to share 7 actionable techniques for securing your WordPress website.

7 Techniques to Bulletproof Your WordPress Website

1. Install SSL

Installing SSL (Secure Socket Layer) is a very first step to keeping your website secure. Today, most of the hosting providers offer free SSL along with the hosting service. Depending on your hosting provider, you may need to obtain an SSL certificate and then install it. Just ask your hosting provider to enable SSL for your domain.

In the secured website, a browser, and a server attempt to connect to a website securely by encrypting data. SSL helps to keep an internet connection secure and safeguarding any sensitive data that is being sent between two systems (server and client). SSL uses encryption algorithms to scramble data in transit, preventing hackers from reading it as it is sent over the connection. So, only encrypted data are transferred over the internet on the SSL website.

Here are a few plugins that can help you install SSL in your WordPress websites.

1. Really Simple SSL
2. SSL Insecure Content Fixer 
3. WP Force SSL

2. Keep Strong Admin Password and Keep it Secret

Admin passwords are the primary key to get access to your website dashboard. You need to set a strong password so that someone can not easily guess it. Some people keep easy to guess password which is a blunder mistake. An advanced user or can easily crack your password and get into your system easily.

Generally, a combination of characters, capital letter, numbers are considered to be the strong password. A plain password like 123453 or password as an example of an insecure password.

A strong password can be something like –  P@s5w0rD#453. You also need to change the admin username to something different.

As we all know a password is everything for a business. Your password should be secret that no one knows except your business partner or trusted friends.

3. Keep Updated WordPress Version

Keeping up do date WordPress version also helps to secure your WordPress website. It is good practice to keep your website up to date with the latest security features. Developers keep in mind that with every new update, they put extra effort into security. You can be safe from pre-identified loopholes and exploited hackers, which, a hacker uses to gain access to your site.

Also, you need to regularly update your plugins and themes as they are coming up with extra security features in each update.

You can check the update option from the Dashboard>Update

WordPress automatically suggests you update a newer version of the software. But it is important to know that before proceeding for big updates, you need to keep a safe backup of your data. It is because in some cases, you may lose your data.

4. Setup Double Authentication Login

Two-factor authentication allows you to set up a two-step login attempt. After setting up, you have to provide two logins credentials to be able to login to the dashboard.

WordPress plugins like Google Authenticator by miniOrange let you set up double authentication for WordPress website. It provides two-factor authentication (2FA, MFA) whenever login to your WordPress website ensuring no unauthorized access to your website.

This is one of the best ways to protect your website from unauthorized access. Only those who know the password and extra secret question will have access to the admin login.

5. Change Admin Path

Changing the Admin URL is another best practice to keep your WordPress website secure. This practice protects your website by changing the login URL and preventing access to the wp-login.php page and wp-admin directory while not logged-in.

Normal URL – www.website.com/admin . or www.website.com/wp-admin 

Changed URL – www.website.com/miksi3221

In WordPress, the default admin URL can be accessed by /admin or /wp-admin. But once you customize it, you can put any words in the admin URL section. This helps in preventing the third person to get accessed on the admin login panel.

WordPress plugin like WPS Hide Login by WPServeur help to set up a login URL. It doesn’t literally rename or change files in core, nor does it add rewrite rules. It simply intercepts page requests and works on any WordPress website. The wp-admin directory and wp-login.php page become inaccessible, so you should bookmark or remember the URL. This plugin is super easy to set up and use.

6. Install Security Plugin

There are plenty of trusted plugins that guards your website against unauthorized access. A security plugin takes care of your website’s overall security from scanning malware, to blocking malicious attacks. You do not need to manually check the status of your website, instead, these plugins keep monitoring everything things you should do.

Wordfense includes an endpoint firewall and malware scanner that was built from the ground up to protect WordPress. This plugin arms with newest firewall rules, malware signatures and malicious IP addresses it needs to keep your website safe. Rounded out by 2FA and a suite of additional features, Wordfence is the most comprehensive WordPress security solution available.

Sucuri Security, on the other hand, is a WordPress security plugin that offers security activity auditing, file integrity monitoring, remote malware scanning, blacklist monitoring, effective security hardening, post-hack security actions, security notifications, and even website firewall.

7. Monitor Your Website Performance

No matter how secure your WordPress website is, there is always room for improvement. Relying only on the plugins and tools does not guarantee that your website is 100% risk-free. You need continuous monitoring of the website with a periodic report. Besides the above-listed tasks, some important task includes the regular backup of the website, perform a security audit, keep track of website performance and many more.

Lastly,

It is always crucial to keep track of your website security and monitor it as it goes. website security is one of the crucial parts of a website. Above mentioned techniques are free that you should not pay a single penny.

So, why shouldn’t you give a little time to make your website secure?

Other SEO Articles:

✅WordPress 301 Redirect – Step By Step Guide 
✅Outbound Link | No Follow vs Do-Dollow Links
✅15 White Hat SEO Techniques To Drive Organic Traffic

If you liked this article, then consider following us on Twitter and Facebook and LinkedIn.

The post 7 Techniques to Bulletproof Your WordPress Website appeared first on Acme Themes Blog.

For long term business, you have to build a legit strategy to outrank your competitors and drive the organic traffic. It involve research, developing strategies, execution, and continuity. Besides this lengthy process, there are quick and risky techniques to get ranking by implementing different SEO strategies. So, in general, SEO techniques based on these criteria are divided into three different types.

1. White Hat Technique
2. Gray Hat Technique
3. and Black Hat Technique

What is White Hat SEO?

White Hat SEO is a technique of optimizing the website by follows all the rules and regulations of search engines. White hat SEO is the practice of improving search rankings on Search Engine Results Pages by maintaining the integrity of your website and staying within the search engines’ terms of service. White Hat SEO gives priority to human audiences by creating helpful and quality content.

The White Hat SEO uses organic and legit techniques in order to ensure it performs well for search. Examples and techniques of the White Hat SEO are described below.

What is Black Hat SEO?

Black Hat SEO opposes White Hat techniques and breaks the search engine rules to get higher search rankings. It focuses only on search engines rather than on human audiences.

Black hat SEO is used by those who are looking for a quick return on their site, rather than a long-term business. Various Black Hat SEO techniques include keyword stuffing, Cloaking, link farming, blog content spamming, etc. Although you get the quick result by implementing Black Hat techniques on your site,  your site might be penalized by search engines as this is not recommended methods.

What is Gray Hat SEO?

Gray hat SEO technique stands between White Hat SEO and Black Hat SEO. Grey Hat SEO is the practice of using technically legal methods to improve your site rankings, but which are ethically dubious, and could one day become a black hat.

Gray Hat SEO is an SEO practice that is riskier than White Hat but less risky than Black Hat. You may or may not result in your site being banned from search engines as it is a technically legit method.

Benefits of White Hat SEO?

The following are the benefits of White Hat SEO.

• White Hat SEO results in slow but it is a long-lasting strategy
• The traffic or business generated by White Hat SEO is long-lasting
• No risk of being penalized or banned by search engines
• The business growth is much more stable
• Increase your business reputation as it slowly grows
• Builds a stronger relationship
• Provide greate value to the customers

White Hat SEO & Black Hat SEO Difference

10 White Hat SEO Techniques To Drive Organic Traffic

1. Make Your Site Mobile First

Google has made major changes in its algorithm, officially calledMobile-First Indexing. So, if your website is not responsive-meaning not optimized for mobile devices then your site automatically pushed down in the ranking.

You can test your site on the Mobile-Friendly Test tool by Google.

2. Give a Time in Keyword Research

Before publishing any article you have to do proper keyword research. An article developed without proper keyword research is like pouring water in the sand. So, before start writing a post on a particular topic, you should conduct proper keyword research. Keyword research involves, finding out the primary keyword, analyzation of search volume & competition, keyword difficulty, pages that are already ranked for and finding out the LSI keywords. So, perper keyword research is very crucial for every blog post.

There are lots of Keyword Search Tools in the market. Some of them available for free with limited features. Google Keyword Planner is the best free keyword search tool. This tool lets you analyze, keyword search volume, competition, keyword difficulty, Cost Per Click (CPC), etc.

3. Focus on Content Formatting

When it comes to the user experience, content formatting plays a significant role. Content with a long sentence and long text is boring for readers. So, you need to perfectly format your content in such a way that readers could enjoy reading it.

You can follow the following content formatting techniques to make it interesting to read!

• Use bullets or numbering in the relevant context
• Use sentence so as to make it easy to read and understand
• Write in speaking tone
• Maintaining the heading hierarchy

4. Build Link From High-Quality Sites

To add value to your website, you have to focus on building a high-quality link rather than having lots of low and spammy links. When search engines like Google analyze the content, it checks for high authority backlinks. Because it shows the relevancy and trust of the content, the search engine pushes your page to the top position on SERP.

5. Use Schema

A rich snippet is a result shown on the Google page along with some other additional information so as to add value to the result. It stands out from the other snippets when it comes to the priority.

From the user’s perspective, just by looking at the result of the rich snippet, they get to know more about the content.  Because it is more appealing to the users, posts with rich snippets are likely to get more clicks. If the click-through rate (CTR) of your blog post increases, you will get more traffic. Ultimately, rich snippets will affect your ranking as well.

The following image shows the difference between rich snipped and normal snippets.

Rich snippets can not be used in all types of content. The following are some of the content types where rich snippets can be used.

• Recipe
• Event
• Apps
• People
• Products
• Business and Organizations

How can you get rich snippets? 

You have to add structured data to your site so that Google can show a rich snippet. A piece of code in structured data tells Google to extract the maximum relevant data for rich snippet results. You can test the structure of your article using this Structure Data Testing Tool.

6. Improve Website Page Speed

Website loading speed is one of the key things to consider for a website. In fact, search engines like Google have made loading speed an actual ranking factor. So, it is super important to improve your website speed. Google has also provided a speed testing tool called “Google PageSpeed Insight” to analyze your website speed.  There are other page speed testing tools such and Pingdom, and GTMetrix that give you insights into your website speed.

With these tools, you can analyze your site’s speed and also find out the causes and possible improvements to make your website faster.

Check out the – First Contentful Paint and First Meaningful Paint in Page Speed Tools

7. Use Image and Other Relevant Media File

The use of relevant images and other media files increases the chance of retaining your audiences on your website. According to the study, people remember 80% of what they see and 20% of what they read. The study also shows that 65% of people are visual learners meaning that people just don’t want to read a big chunk of text. Adding images in the content retains users by providing visual information.

Besides images, you can also add related videos, GIFs in the relevant context to provide extra value to your content.

Check out the – How to Optimize Images For WordPress? – Image Optimization Guide

8. Choose Better Fonts and Colors

This is all about making your website better for users of all types. In fact, a website with bad colors and an ugly font is not something that users could read.

You have to make your website easy to read with attractive fonts and colors. You can also use third-party tools like Accessible to make your website accessible to all types of users. This AI-powered tool allows you to customize every element of the website. Since this is a paid tool, it is up to you. But at least you can choose better colors and fonts for your website.

9. Focus on User Experience

White Hat SEO is all about user experience. Search engines like Google do consider how the reader is satisfied with the content. Find out about the expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness factors (EAT score) that Google cares about for ranking your content. User retention will be a key factor for your website to climb the ranking in the SERPs.

10. Write a Thorough Article

According to the research, long and detailed content tend to get a higher ranking in search engines. It is because long content covers a particular topic in detail. From the user’s perspective, they will get every piece of information they are looking for.

In September of 2016, Backlinko published an article and found that the average word count of a Google first page result was 1,890 words. SEO plugins like RankMath and Yoast also suggest that content should be at least 800 words and more.

11. Update Your Content Regularly

As a content publisher, you always focus on making your content valuable. Outdated content that does not provide extra value to the readers is not something Google promotes. So, regular updates, edit, and optimization are super important to make your content fresh and up-to-date.

12. Populate Proper Tags

Tags are predefined taxonomy in WordPress. It provides a useful way to group related posts together and to quickly tell readers what a post is about. Tags also make it easier for people to find your content.

Tag is one of the default tools you can use to categorize your WordPress posts. Each post may contain multiple tags. The readers can click on a tag to find similar posts that have that same tag.

Although the use of tags is completely optional, they provide a useful way to group related posts together and to quickly tell readers what a post is about.

13. Write Attractive Titles, Meta Descriptions, and Descriptive URLs

Title:

Writing compelling titles increase the Click Through Rate (CTR) of your website. For content, the title is a major factor in helping search engines understand what your page is about, and they are the first impression many people have of your page. Title tags are used in three key places: (1) Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs), (2) web browsers, and (3) social networks.

Meta Description:

The meta description provides a brief summary of a web page. Search engines display the meta description in search results, which can influence people’s click-through rates. Since CTR impact the ranking position, it is very important to write a compelling meta description.

URL:

A perfect URL provides both humans and search engines an easy-to-understand indication of what the destination page will be about. A descriptive URL is also equally important for a website. Google uses your URL to understand what is your page all about. You have to choose a short and keyword-rich URL.

In WordPress you find permalink setting to set your descriptive URL. Set your permalink setting as “post name” as shown in the figure below.

14. Maintain Proper Internal Links

Internal linking is one of the important factors from an SEO perspective as well as the user’s perspective. Internal linking helps in navigating the different contextual pages within the website. It does not only retain the people but also gives search engines a relevant context.

15. Make Your Site Easy to Navigate

In order to provide easy navigation to your site, you vane to make your website clean and minimalist. Unless you have a news portal website, categories and pages should properly be placed so that the reader could easily navigate through different sections os the website.

Other SEO Articles:

✅WordPress 301 Redirect – Step By Step Guide 
✅What is Duplicate Content? How to Avoid it?

If you liked this article, then consider following us on Twitter and Facebook and LinkedIn.

The post 15 White Hat SEO Techniques To Drive Organic Traffic in 2024 appeared first on Acme Themes Blog.

Yoast SEO is in the market for a long time and it has already established a user base with over 5 million active installations. There is a strong foundation for the Yoast SEO plugin trusted by millions of creators around the world. This proves that Yoast SEO is undoubtedly the best plugin in the market.

On the other side of the game, there is a Rank Math, which is kind of new in the market but this plugin is gaining positive reviews from the users. With its handful of features, its popularity is rapidly growing in the SEO industry.

This brings us confusion that to which one is the best SEO plugin for a WordPress website? Why should you use Yoast or Rank Math?

In the previous post, we have compared the two plugins Yoast SEO vs All in One SEO Plugins in detail. In this article, we are going to compare two of the top SEO plugins, Yoast and Rank Math. 

How Does Plugin Help a WordPress Website?

SEO plugins themselves are not enough to maintain the overall SEO strategy. These plugins just guide a content creator while creating content. The basic guidelines like title text, meta description, keyword density, content readability, image alt text, length of the content, and many more. Basically, SEO plugins help you optimizing content for search engines like Google, Bing, Yandex to outrank your competitors, better known as On-Page SEO.

These plugins also help to create an essential file like robots.txt,  sitemap.xml. The plugin automates your WordPress SEO, helps you optimize your posts, and gets you ranked higher.

Yoast SEO Introduction

Yoast SEO plugin is one of the best and most downloaded WordPress plugins as of now. This WordPress SEO plugin helps you with your search engine optimization. Since its launch time back in 2008, Yoast has helped millions of people all across the world.

Yoast SEO does everything in its power to please both visitors and search engine spiders. A dedicated team of developers, testers, architects, and SEO experts works daily to improve the plugin with every release.

So, basically, Yoast SEO is for a business owner, professional blogger, a content creator, a developer, or an SEO expert. It helps you keep your website in perfect shape.

Core Features of Yoast SEO Plugin

• The SEO analysis
• Readability Analysis
• Snippet preview for Desktop and Mobile
• The most advanced XML Sitemaps functionality at the push of a button.
• Full control over site’s breadcrumbs
• Canonical URL to avoid duplicate content
• Indexables feature introduced from 14.0 version

Premium [paid] Features

• Social previews
• Insights tool for focused keyword/keyphrase
• Article optimization for synonyms and related keyphrases
• Automatic internal linking suggestions and many more

Pros and Cons of Yoast SEO Plugin

Yoast SEO plugin is as popular as it offers a lot of flexibility with your content. You can set up titles, meta descriptions and Social Media sharing information for each post and page. One of the best things about Yoast SEO is its beginner-friendly features. However, in their quest to facilitate newcomers in using Yoast, the creators have basically hidden all the advanced options – making you manually turn custom fields on. On top of that, Yoast SEO and readability recommendations force you keyword stuffing or disregard the importance of LSI. Sometimes, this may lead your post out of the subject. So, If you use Yoast SEO, especially as a WP beginner, you should take these suggestions as exactly that – only suggestions.

Yoast SEO

Rank Math Introduction

RankMath is another plugin for Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for WordPress. Plugin developer claims that Rank Math is the swiss army knife of SEO tools for WordPress.

Rank Math Features 

• Easy to follow the setup wizard
• Clean and Simple User Interface
• Modular Framework
• Code optimized for speed (Lightweight)
• Great support
• Bulk Edit Titles & Descriptions of All Your Content

Rank Math SEO with AI Best SEO Tools

Yoast Vs. Rank Math – Set Up Configuration

Setting up is the first feel of any software and this makes a huge difference in the first impression of people. So, let’s compare the setting up of each of the plugins.

RankMath

RankMath setup is quite easy and clean in design. After the installation of Rank Math will bring a 5 steps installation wizard. You can create an account via Google, Facebook, or email. But this is skippable.  After that, you are required to site name, search console details, sitemap configuration, advanced optimization, and confirmation of the setting. Once you finish the setting, you will be able to go for more advanced settings.

Yoast SEO

Yoast, on the other hand, provides 8 Steps setup wizard where you have to set up basic settings like site type, organization type, search engine visibility, authors option, title setting, etc. One difference you notice in Yoast is there is a video guide embedded during the setup process. Which might be helpful for beginners.

So,

I think setup wise both plugins provide a great user experience. Rank Math offers more options like search console, sitemap and SEO optimization option which helps automate some of your SEO tasks like making external links no-follow, redirecting attachment pages.

Yoast SEO vs. Rank Math – User Interface

The user interface is a crucial part of any software tool. A clean and minimalist user interface attracts more people and creates value for the users. Let’s discuss about the user interface of each plugin.

Yoast SEO

As far as UI is concerned, Yoast SEO focuses more on functionality than aesthetics. Sure, you can get everything done with all the options neatly organized under well-defined categories. But there is no helping the fact that the Yoast SEO UI seems a bit bland and uninspired.

Rank Math

Rank Math offers a clean dashboard. You can easily turn on and of different features one by one. Each feature is clearly described inside the box along with its status. Rank Math implements a visually attractive interface that not only looks and feels modern but also enhances the user experience.

I personally found that the rank math interface is slightly easy to use. having said that, Yoast has not had that difficulty setting either.

Yoast vs. Rank Math — Keyword Assigning

This feature allows you to populate keywords, write title and meta description, set the permalink, and set the focus keyword of the content. This is an essential part of an SEO tool and without properly maintain these settings, you can’t just optimize your page or post. Both plugins allow you to assign keywords, titles, and meta, permalink and apply different methods to show you how your content looks on the Google page. The following picture shows the keyword assigning interface of both of the plugins.

Yoast SEO

The free version of Yoast allows you to assign a maximum of one keyword to your content. If you want to optimize for multiple keywords, you need to purchase the premium version.

Yoast represents the optimization level of content as green, orange, and red signals. You can analyze the SEO score, readability score,  and Google page preview (both desktop and mobile). Keyword assigning tools is quite easy to use.

Note: Premium Yoast SEO also analyzes the different word forms of your keyphrase, like plurals and past tenses. And not just that, it can analyze different languages – English, Dutch, Spanish, German, and French.

Rank Math

Likewise, Rank Math lets you assign a maximum of 5 keywords for optimization, but you will need to create an account for that which is free. The title, meta, and permalink setup works exactly the same as Yoast and also shows the preview (both mobile and desktop) of the Google page. Rank Math shows the score in the number from 0-100. Generally, if your score is above 80, it turns into green colors. So, you need to optimize your content until your score turns green color.

Moreover, Rank Math can give you keyword suggestions immediately once you start typing the keyword in the “focus keyword” textbox.

The keyword assigning option for both plugins does an excellent job.  The Rank Math gives you a scoring system and Yoast gives you a color signal. It is entirely your decision which one is more appealing for you.

One good thing about Rank Math is, it will automatically start suggesting different keywords as well as longtail keywords based on Google keyword suggestions as shown in the image above. Whereas Yoast lacks this feature.

Yoast Vs. Rank Math – Performance Comparison 

Talking about the performance, we are not quite sure because it is a technical term. But RankMath claims itself a very lightweight, fast, efficient, and well-coded. On the other hand, the release of version 14.0 of Yoast SEO introduces a new feature called ‘Indexables’ which improves the performance of your site and makes it faster. With this feature, Yoast SEO indexes your pages and put the date in a single table in your database

As a user, you do not feel that difference in this case.

Yoast Vs. Rank Math  – Pricing 

Talking about the pricing of these two plugins, RankMath is completely free as of now. Whereas Yoast SEO is freemium, meaning you have to pay to get access to some of its features. Rank Math may go in the premium version after a while but as of now, you can enjoy full fledge features for free.

Yoast Vs. Rank Math – Google Search Console Integration

When it comes to Seach Console integration, Rank Math makes it much easier. You can integrate the Seach Console during the setup process, all you have to do is input and verify your Gmail account, and it will fetch the associated Search Console data in your WordPress dashboard.

Yoast SEO also allows you to integrate the search console. But it does not provide an interface where you can see your search console records directly.

Yoast Vs. Rank Math – XML Sitemap Integration

A Sitemap file is an important part of any website when it comes to indexing. Without a sitemap, your site can not be fetched by Google’s crawler.  Both Yoast and Rank Math SEO plugins generate the sitemap of your website automatically. The URL of the sitemap will be different for both plugins, however, that does not impact on the site.  In both plugins, you can generate custom sitemaps once respective post types are available on your site, such as news sitemap, image sitemap, etc.

Yoast Vs. Rank Math – Updates

Rank Math brings updates more frequently as compared to Yoast SEO. And you can deem these frequent updates in two ways – either Rank Math is too uncompetitive and gets so many bugs and problem reporting, or it is trying to grow too fast. Rank Math defends their regular updates by saying that they are trying to keep with Google’s updates and algorithms change. For example, they immediately added new Schema Markups after Google’s update and they removed the readability options after the BERT update came up.

Choice is Yours

There is no significant difference between these plugins so that we could directly suggest a particular plugin. You can pick up any plugin. I personally found Rank Math is easy to use but that might not be the same for you.

Yoast is in the market for a long but Rank Math is new compared to Yoast. So, there is more trust in Yoast from millions of users. My suggestion is if you are using the premium version of Yoast then you better not switch. But if you are using free Yoast then you can try both and make a decision later.

Other SEO Articles:

• Do-Follow vs No-Follow Outbound Link – Which one is better?
• Yoast SEO vs All in One SEO Plugin – Which one is better?

If you liked this article, then consider following us on Twitter and Facebook and LinkedIn.

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After Penguin Update (April 2012), Google strictly looks for the manipulative links. Unusual black hat techniques are something Google does not like. So, your competitors may apply some of the black hat tactics to downrank your website. However, this happens in a very rare case.

Is “Negative SEO” is still a good topic to talk about in 2020?

What actually is this term, what are its main type and how to avoid negative SEO attacks? In this article, we will discuss Negative SEO and related terms in detail.

What is Negative SEO?

When someone performs an irrelevant activity on the website by using a black hat technique that is called negative SEO. It is the act of showing search engines that a website is not relevant by following various off-page and on-page techniques. On the best way to perform negative SEO is by linking from the various low-quality websites with irrelevant anchor texts. Website owners can combat it by disavowing all low-quality backlinks.

Negative SEO can be done in many ways, but the most common type of negative SEO is a link based on negative SEO. However, there are many other techniques that unscrupulous people can use to try to reduce your rankings.

Some negative SEO examples:

1. Hacking your website
2. Linking your website from hundreds (even thousands) of low-quality sites
3. Sending thousands of unnatural traffic bots to website
4. Pointing the website using keywords like porn, viagra, online betting, gambling, etc
5. Creating fake reviews
6. Creating multiple replications of website

Why Would Someone Commit Negative SEO?

There is no exact answer to this question. In some cases, negative SEO happens from yourself too when you trying to apply black hat SEO with the intention of improving your website. But most people do this with the intention of making your website bad in the search engine’s eye.

What Does Google Say About Negative SEO?

From the date of the Penguin update, a site with excessive spammy links is downranked from the index. This algorithm gave birth to “Negative SEO”. Google itself is not quite sure about negative SEO as it is hard to figure out.

John Mueller – A Webmaster Analyst says –

Types of Negative SEO

Negative SEO attacks can take place in a number of different forms, both off-page, and on-page. The below list will give you an overview of the most common forms of negative SEO.

Negative On-Page SEO

Negative On-Page SEO concept is the same as on-page SEO. Negative on-page SEO is a negative SEO activity done within the website. The following are some of the examples of negative on-page SEO.

• Excessive Crawling
• Content Scraping
• Hacking

Excessive Crawling

Google has specific crawling timing. This is the Black Hat SEO trick is achieved by forcefully crawling the site and thus causing heavy server load. When your site encounters heavy server load, search engine crawlers will not be able to find your site. This affects your ranking index.

If you notice that your website is loading slower, or even can not access, contact your web hosting provers or webmasters. They should be able to figure out where the traffic is coming from. This way, you can monitor your website traffic and keep it balanced.

Content Scraping

Content scraping is the process of copying a block of content and publish on other websites. Scraped content results in Duplicate Content.

This is the scenario when someone copies you all website content and publishes on other websites then Google sees it as duplicate content and downranks all similar sites.

Hacking

Hacking the direct attachment to your website. This happens even if the attacker has no negative SEO in mind, a hacker attack per se can hurt your SEO. Usually hacking is done by highly professional tech nerds.

 Negative Off-Page SEO

Off-page negative SEO is essentially trying to wreck a website’s backlink profile. There are a few techniques used to do this, such as:

• Link Farming
• Bad Reviews
• Irrelevant Link Building

Link Farming 

This typically involves the use of link farms such as a PBN (private blog network) which is a network of sites created solely for link building. Attackers try to carry out negative SEO by linking to their target website from the link farm. Google then flags the target site for potentially being involved in spam activity. The attacker might also make things worse by using exact match anchor text for your target keywords to make your link profile look even more spammy.

Bad Reviews

Reviews are one of the good signals for the website to add value to the search engines. This is also one of the easiest ways to conduct for those who are jealous of you.

Irrelevant Link Building

Google does care about the quality of the link. In fact, backlinks are one of the major factors for ranking. A website having excessive Irrelevant and low-quality links can be penalized by Google. So, this is one of the common ways that someone follows for negative SEO.

How to Prevent Yourself from Negative SEO

Although negative SEO impact is something not controllable,  you can prevent yourself from negative SEO by implementing various techniques. There are many ways you can keep track of your website if it is affected by the unusual activities.

Here are some of the methods that you can use to prevent yourself from negative SEO.

1. Keep Track of Your Backlinks

Since backlink is one of the major factors for Google ranking, you have to keep tracking the backlink profile.

You can use the premium tool like Monitorbacklink. This tool lets you know about each and every link you get to your website through email. You can check the good and bad backlinks for you and the competition.

If you don’t want to use a paid version of features then you can still check your backlink stats with its Free Tool. Besides this, you can also check the backlink profile from tools like Backlink Checker by Ahref and Backlink Analytics by Semrush.

You can remove the unnecessary backlink from your website by the Disavow backlinks process.

Note: You should disavow backlinks only if:

1. You are sure that spammy, artificial, or low-quality links pointing to your site.
2. The links have caused a manual action, or likely will cause a manual action, on your site.

Follow these steps for the disavow process

2. Keep Checking Duplicate Content

Existence in Duplicate Content results in a negative impact on your website.

You have to regularly check if there is duplicate content exists on your website. This is because if somebody is copying and pasting your website content on another website, all the websites with similar content will be penalized by Google.  You can use tool like Copyscape.com to check if someone published you exact content somewhere else.

3. Monitor Your Own SEO Strategy

As we have talked earlier, negative SEO sometimes occurs from your side too. This is completely an unintentional negative SEO attack. This is the case when you conduct absolute black hat practices deliberately with the intention of improving the site’s performance. So, you need to keep yourself free from these activities.

4. Secure Your Website From Malware

Security is a pillar of your business website. You have to keep a strong password for your administrator logins. There are multiple ways you can keep your website secure. Some of these techniques include –

• Setting up multiple authentications (Google Authenticator)
• Keeping your password secret
• Protecting your website by changing the login URL and preventing access to the wp-login.php page and wp-admin directory while not logged-in
• Setting up a backup on a regular basis

5. Check Your SERP Ranking

You have to keep checking your websites crawl stat to make sure that robots.txt file is set up properly. This is because sometimes a change in robots.txt or one simple alteration could wreak havoc on your entire SEO strategy. A disallow rule is all it takes to tell Google to completely ignore your important pages or even the entire website.

Check Out This infographic by YourSEOPick.com

Other SEO Articles:

• Do-Follow vs No-Follow Outbound Link – Which one is better?
• 10 Common Off-Page SEO Techniques
• What is EAT Score in SEO & Ways to Improve It

If you liked this article, then consider following us on Twitter and Facebook and LinkedIn.

The post What is Negative SEO? How To Be Safe From Negative SEO? appeared first on Acme Themes Blog.