This year I had a great time speaking about on-page and off-page SEO at the Rocks Digital Marketing Conference here in Dallas. I’ve spoken before at this conference, and it’s always a great to be able to present to a hometown crowd.
The slides from my presentation on on-page and off-page SEO have been uploaded to Slideshare, and you can go through the presentation below. If you have any questions or comments, feel free to get in touch.
1. On-Page & Off-Page SEO Rocks Digital June 2017
2. 2017 Rocks Digital Marketing – About Me
About Me
• Senior SEO Consultant, BillHartzer.com
• Founder, DFWSEM Association (2004)
• US Brand Ambassador, Majestic.com
• Brand Ambassador, OnCrawl.com
• Practicing Organic/Natural SEO since 1996
• Formerly Senior VP, Advice Interactive (Advice Local)
• Senior SEO Strategist, Globe Runner
• Director of SEO, Standing Dog
3. 2017 Rocks Digital Marketing – Overview Overview
• Off – site SEO – Linking Basics
• Using Majestic for Link Analysis
• Analyzing and Fixing Your Links
• Using OnCrawl for SEO Analysis
• SEO Testing Results
4. 2017 Rocks Digital Marketing – Linking Basics Why Use Links as a Ranking Factor?
• Google has run experiments that excluded links as a factor.
• Google doesn’t have a way (yet) to exclude links
5. 2017 Rocks Digital Marketing – Linking Basics Anchor Text
• Anchor text describes what a user will find when they click
• Keyword rich anchor text still helps rankings
• Too much? Algorithmic or manual penalty possible
6. 2017 Rocks Digital Marketing – Linking Basics Link Placement – Maximum SEO Value • Header & content areas most valuable • 1st link counted if multiple links to same URL on page
7. 2017 Rocks Digital Marketing – Linking Basics Paid Vs. Natural Links
• Buying or Selling Links that Pass PageRank is bad
• Google can identify Guest Blog Posts, Sponsored Posts, Advertorials • Sponsored Posts must be “nofollow” • Sponsored posts must disclosure it’s paid or sponsored (FTC guidelines) • Google knows which sections are ads
8. 2017 Rocks Digital Marketing – Linking Basics Link Schemes Are Bad Google’s Guidelines: http://bit.ly/google-link-schemes
• No Paid links that pass PageRank
• No Excessive link exchanges (define excessive?)
• No Large-scale article marketing or guest posting
• No Using auto programs or services to create links
• No Optimized anchor text in articles or press releases
• No Low-quality directory or bookmark links (Web 2.0) • No Forum comments with optimized links • No Keyword-rich, hidden or low-quality links in widgets • No Widely distributed links in the footers or templates
9. 2017 Rocks Digital Marketing – Linking Basics Google Ignores Certain Types of Links
• “Most” links with “nofollow” link attributes on them
• Most Web 2.0 links (and other low quality web spam)
• Google ignores 2nd, 3rd, 4th, etc. link to same URL on a page
• “1 | 2 | 3” links • “Previous and Next” links
• Google might ”nofollow” certain links internally even though they are not tagged as “nofollow”.
10. 2017 Rocks Digital Marketing – Majestic What is Majestic? www.Majestic.com
• Formerly known as Majestic SEO (majesticseo.com)
• Marketing Search Engine • SEO Backlink Checker • Provides Link Intelligence Tools
• Site Explorer shows inbound link & website summary data.
• One of the world’s largest link crawlers
• Link data provided back as far as 2004.
11. 2017 Rocks Digital Marketing – Majestic
12. 2017 Rocks Digital Marketing – Majestic Search Explorer
13. 2017 Rocks Digital Marketing – Majestic Trust Flow & Citation Flow Majestic Trust Flow and Citation Flow
• Trust Flow = Number of clicks from seed set of trusted sites to a given URL, or Domain
• Citation Flow = Number of citations to a given URL, or Domain
14. 2017 Rocks Digital Marketing – Majestic – Finding Bad Links Identifying Low Quality and Bad Links
15. 2017 Rocks Digital Marketing – Disavow What To Do With Low Quality and Bad Links? Download and Disavow Download ALL your links:
• Google Search Console, Majestic, Ahrefs, OSE • Add to spreadsheet, remove duplicates
• Manually review all your links
• Identify low quality, bad links, unnatural links
• Prepare and upload Disavow File to Google, Bing
16. 2017 Rocks Digital Marketing – Disavow Disavow File – Text File You Can Disavow URLs or Entire Domains Format of text file: http://www.bad-domain-name.com/page1.html http://www2.bad-domain-name2.com/page2.html https://www.bad-domain-name3.com/page3.html OR domain:bad-domain-name.com domain:bad-domain-name2.com domain:bad-domain-name3.com
17. 2017 Rocks Digital Marketing – Disavow Notes and Warnings: Disavowing Links Keep in mind: Verify all versions of site in GSC. Upload file to all versions of site: https://yourdomain.com https://www.yourdomain.com http://yourdomain.com http://www.yourdomain.com
• Upload text file with list of URLs to Google.
18. 2017 Rocks Digital Marketing – Disavow Notes and Warnings: Disavowing Links Keep in mind:
• Manually upload each URL to Bing, one at a time.
• Use automation to upload (“manually”) to Bing https://www.billhartzer.com/disavow-bing/
• Google won’t disavow URLs until page linking TO you is cached. Check Google cache date.
19. 2017 Rocks Digital Marketing – Disavow Disavowing Links Didn’t Work? Here’s Why
• It hasn’t been long enough.
• You disavowed the wrong links.
• You disavowed URLs and not domains.
• You didn’t upload the disavow file to all versions of site.
• You disavowed links but that’s not the problem. • Your site has a manual action, a manual penalty.
Pro Tip: Use Link Research Tools’ Link Detox Boost too http://www.linkresearchtools.com/tools/boost/
20. 2017 Rocks Digital Marketing – Majestic – New and Lost Links Identifying New and Lost Links
21. 2017 Rocks Digital Marketing – Majestic – Compare Tool Compare Tool
22. 2017 Rocks Digital Marketing – Majestic Keyword Checker Keyword Checker
• Shows how often keywords appear in the Majestic Index
23. 2017 Rocks Digital Marketing – Majestic – Bulk Backlinks Bulk Backlink Checker
24. 2017 Rocks Digital Marketing – Majestic Neighborhood Checker Neighborhood Checker
25. 2017 Rocks Digital Marketing – Analyzing a Link Profile Analyzing a Site’s Link Profile
• Gather all of the links (Majestic, GSC, ahrefs, OSE)
• Review Trust Flow, Citation Flow, Topical Trust Flow • Review anchor text, compare vs. keywords ranking • Review percentage of anchor text (brand vs. keyword text) • Review SEMRush.com Data • Site penalized by Google Penguin in past?
26. 2017 Rocks Digital Marketing – Getting Trust Get Links From Trusted Links, Seed Sites • Closest you can get to having a link from trusted seed site the better
27. 2017 Rocks Digital Marketing – Getting Trust Trustworthy Domain Info Could Help
• Register your domain for 2+ Years
• Make it public (don’t hide with privacy whois)
• Put whois info on your contact page
28. 2017 Rocks Digital Marketing – Getting Links Untapped Link Sources
• Donate to Charity
• HARO Help a Reporter Out
• PodcastGuests.com
• Expired Domains
• Blog Aggregators (Alltop)
• Broken Link Building
• Perform Research, Socialize Results
• Find Content w/links, Better Content
29. 2017 Rocks Digital Marketing – Getting Trust On-Page Trust Optimization
• Link out to Authority Sites when appropriate
• Privacy Policy, Terms of Service, Disclosure pages on site
• Bounce Rate, prevent pogosticking
• Blocked Sites (users can block sites via Chrome browser)
• References and Sources (at end of articles)
• Schema Markup (local sites’ contact matches citations)
30. 2017 Rocks Digital Marketing – OnCrawl OnCrawl
• Site analysis combining Google Analytics, Crawl, Log Files
31. 2017 Rocks Digital Marketing – OnCrawl Crawl Analysis – On-site issues
• Pages crawled
• Indexable pages
• No-Index pages
• 4xx errors
• Pages with tag duplication issues
• Pages with content duplication issues
• Page depth distribution
• Load time
• Links internal/external, follow/no-follow distribution
• HTML quality: Title, Meta description, H1
• Status codes
32. 2017 Rocks Digital Marketing – OnCrawl Log Analysis
• Unique pages crawled
• Crawler hits
• Pages newly crawled
• Pages not crawled
• Crawl frequency
• Hits distribution by bot
• Newly crawled vs pages not crawled
• Crawl behavior over time
• Crawl frequency & crawl frequency of newly fetched over time
• Crawl behavior by page group
• Crawl frequency & crawl frequency of newly crawled pages by page group over time
33. 2017 Rocks Digital Marketing – OnCrawl More Analysis – OnCrawl Cross Analysis
• Pages in the structure
• Unique pages crawled by Google
• SEO visits Crawl Behavior
• Pages in structure vs unique pages crawled
• Crawl ratio by group
• Crawl frequency by group SEO impact Orphan pages Traffic Analysis
34. 2017 Rocks Digital Marketing – OnCrawl Actionable Data
35. 2017 Rocks Digital Marketing – OnCrawl On-Page Keyword Placement Locations
36. 2017 Rocks Digital Marketing – OnCrawl On-Page Keyword Placement Testing Results
37. 2017 Rocks Digital Marketing – SEO Testing SEO Testing
• SEO Intelligence Agency – SEO testing, real world tests
https://www.billhartzer.com/seotesting/
38. 2017 Rocks Digital Marketing – SEO Testing Does Incorrectly Marked-up Structured Data Harm Rankings?
• Most penalties from Google in Search Console for marked up content where a rating or review doesn’t exist
• Schema code – easy to make mistakes
• SIA Tested to see if errors in markup harm rankings.
• Tested 3 pages, one with incorrect markup (lots of text in phone number field)
https://www.billhartzer.com/seotesting/
39. 2017 Rocks Digital Marketing – SEO Testing Does Incorrectly Marked-up Structured Data Harm Rankings? Results
• After several weeks, no movement in rankings.
• Incorrect schema markup didn’t harm rankings.
• No rankings changes.
https://www.billhartzer.com/seotesting/
40. 2017 Rocks Digital Marketing – SEO Testing Does Page Freshness Affect Ranking?
• Updated Date of a Post
• Changed the date of the publication from what it originally was to a more recent date
https://www.billhartzer.com/seotesting/
41. 2017 Rocks Digital Marketing – SEO Testing Does Page Freshness Affect Ranking? Results
• Initially, the post jumped up in rankings
• Page held rankings for less than 12 hours
• Jumped back in rankings This is where user engagement metrics kick in.
• More click-thrus, time on page, etc. could keep rankings around longer.
• Same results with images – updating images on a post.
https://www.billhartzer.com/seotesting/
42. 2017 Rocks Digital Marketing – SEO Testing Can You Boost Link Strength Through Traffic?
• Sent traffic to a page that contains a backlink.
• Traffic did not click on the link on that page, just visited page.
• Google patent: what makes one link stronger than another link and what makes one link stronger than another is the propensity for that link to be clicked.
https://www.billhartzer.com/seotesting/
43. 2017 Rocks Digital Marketing – SEO Testing Can You Boost Link Strength Through Traffic? Results
• Sent traffic to one of 3 pages – page with traffic went to #1 position.
• You can increase value of a link with user metrics, traffic, clicks
• Send traffic to your PBNs (I didn’t just say that!)
https://www.billhartzer.com/seotesting/
44. 2017 Rocks Digital Marketing – SEO Testing More Tests and Results
• Page only needs to be 51% unique to get passed Google’s duplicate content filter
• 2-3 internal links = 1 external link of the same value
https://www.billhartzer.com/seotesting/
45. 2017 Rocks Digital Marketing – SEO Testing More Test Results
• DA – Domain Authority Doesn’t Exist. What people see as Domain Authority is probably the cumulative sum of individual Page Authority with good internal linking.
• You can’t index a page just with links and anchor text
https://www.billhartzer.com/seotesting/
46. 2017 Rocks Digital Marketing – SEO Testing Some Final SEO Testing Results
• To index a page, you need your target term or an appropriate match on the page. Backlinks with exact anchor text alone won’t get it done.
• Does Compressing Images Boost Your Rankings? No. Testing shows that just compressing an image won’t boost rankings–a page with a larger image stayed in the #1 position.
https://www.billhartzer.com/seotesting/
47. 2017 Rocks Digital Marketing- Contact
THANK YOU
Contact Bill Hartzer SEO Consultant
Email: [email protected]
Phone: (214) 236-4378
Web: https://www.billhartzer.com
Twitter: @bhartzer
Facebook: facebook.com/bhartzer
