SEO Links That Get Users to Visit a Website. Do They Really Exist?

Links do work only on they improve website rankings and ensure real and interested users visit a certain website. Click-through is the key to referral promotion. You already know that in order to get more ad clicks it is easier to work with articles.

Last week Webartex, an article exchange service, launched a new type of articles, notably articles that both drive traffic and ensure ad clicks. The developers guarantee no less than 5 ad clicks per month. In addition when choosing any platform to publish an article on, the system always offers a rough forecast of ad clicks, from 5 to even 100. Such indices can be also compared to PR publications.

The developers claim that these clicks are made by real users who are interested in a certain topic, and they decided to click on a link. How does that work?

Firstly, those traffic-driving articles are advertised on main pages 24 hours, so that they have enough time to be noticed by the website users. Moreover being advertised on the main page boosts article indexation.

Secondly, for publishing traffic-driving articles on the exchange, there is a selection of websites with a CTR rate of over 500 people per day, with one-year of service, not marked as spam, and having perfect behavioral and social profiles. In other words, websites that have a real, active audience rather than websites created for advertising only.

According to developers, nearly 50 traffic-driving articles bring the desired result on a monthly basis. On one hand, you get traffic from non-search resources during the first week of publication; on the other hand, you will see a considerable increase in ranking during 1-3 months. 

Link-Building Does Have a Future

Today it is much harder to build links that help improve your online business and drive organic traffic. It has been simple before Google developed methods to treat links with different levels of quality and trust. And the fact that it comes more difficult to build links doesn’t mean link-building is dead.

Links will always be important when it comes to ranking. Google has always been looking for more information, more indicators, more signals to figure out if a certain page is relevant for a user at a given time. They will find them. What can naturally happen is that other signals may be replaced or modified since Google becomes smarter and has a better understanding of web and users.

All this means that in the future the links accepted by Google will be the ones got as a result of quality product and quality marketing.

What we had in the past

Google wasn’t able to understand links. They didn’t get the following things:

·         Was the link paid or not;

·         How much trust to give to a link;

·         Was the link editorially given or not;

·         Was the link high quality or not;

·         Was a link relevant or not.

What we have now

Google understands much more. Hummingbird represented just the beginning of what Google expects to achieve and the reason the same technology that helped the query bellow will also help Google get a better understanding of links.

Google now understands people better. They are learning about us all the time in order to be able to provide more relevant search results. Today they understand more that the keywords we use may not be exactly what we need, nor are they enough to find what we need.

If speaking about link-building it is important to understand that now there are much more signals that could mean that the dial on links is getting turned down a little bit more. 

The future of link-building

To predict the future is not easy and knowing what to do about it is difficult too. But there are several things we all should be doing:

1. Don’t look for scalable link-building methods;

2. Focus on a type of marketing users love;

3. Don’t be ignorant! Pay attention to what is changing.

Links don’t disappear, it is the world that changes and we have to do our best to do what really matters.

Nearly Half of UK Consumers Leverage Organic Search When Searching for Online Retailers

49% of UK consumers use organic search to find e-commerce shipping sites, and only 35% of online retailers believe consumers find them via organic search.

According to BloomReach, a company that offers customized discovery platform for online retailers, organic search has been always an effective source of discovery. But the main question here is what channels brings the most sales? Since we cannot count it, we rely on the last click.

When a shopper lands on a site from organic search, it is the shopping experience that keeps them there for some time. Actually, 60% of UK consumers say that they feel more comfortable with online shopping than with shopping in the store.

But, only 13% of retailers believe that online shopping is more personalized than in-store shopping. 

However, there is one thing retailers don’t understand. Much of the personalization that occurs today in stores is facilitated by the fact that shoppers use their mobiles in addition to online search in order to make a better decision when at the store.

According to a BloomReach research, if speaking about the retail giant Amazon, four out of five UK consumers think it is the most personalized customer service. Amazon has a great amount of information on consumer demand. This helps Amazon determine what consumers are looking for on their website and after that, conform their recommendations to that.

Specialists say that in order to compete with Amazon it is important that retailers are able to use Web-wide data, because when it comes to the thing shoppers want at this very moment on that retail website, most websites are negligent.

The findings of BloomReach recent survey show a demand by consumers to have a more customized shopping experience online. But, perhaps technology is the missing piece here.

Shopping experience is not about knowing what I was doing in the past, but what I want right now. 

3 Important Steps to Avoid Future Panda Hits

When dealing with a substantial drop in traffic due to an algorithm update, nothing can be better than seeing recovery. Typically, it takes months of recovery with hope that your hard work will pay off. But, unfortunately for some recovery never happens.

When you see something like the screenshot below, it’s hard not to start dancing. The screenshot is from a person who recovered from a Panda hit. It took over four months to recover.

To make sure the recovery work is going to pay off, consider the following three steps.

1. Carry out an Analysis of Top Landing Pages from Google Organic

When you are hit by an algorithm update, it is very important to analyze the top landing pages before the Panda hit. Since that is the place where Google gets user engagement data from, you can find some glaring issues when analyzing those pages.

Now, when Google traffic is back due to recovery, it is recommended to analyze the top pages that receive traffic to make sure everything is alright from the point of view of content quality.

Compare the screenshot below with the previous one to determine the change in traffic level.

2. Check Mobile vs. Desktop Traffic

If 50% of your Google traffic comes from smartphones users, than that is 50% of information Google is going to measure when it comes to Panda.

It is important to understand how much mobile traffic hits your website from Google, and where that traffic is going. Thus, use several mobile devices to analyze top landing pages for smartphone users. 

3. Carry out a Crawl Analysis

If you have recently recovered from Panda, it is useful to crawl the top pages receiving traffic from Google. This will help you gather data about those pages at scale. For example, finding poor content, soft 404s, duplicate content, etc. Some findings will be favorable, while others can lead to serious bamboo. 

There are several powerful tools for crawling. For small and medium-sized websites you can use Screaming Frog, and DeepCrawl for larger-scale websites.

When you recover after an algorithm hit you feel just amazing. Performing a post-recovery analysis enables you to identify technical problems, content issues, ad issues, user engagement problems, etc. 

5 Essential Link Building Strategies to Get Quality Traffic

Driving quality traffic to a website is perhaps the major goal of any SEO practitioner. Beginning with the very first days of Web 1.0, there have been a lot of strategies that brought a 15-second fame after which you had to recover after search algorithms hits.

However, one tactic remained unchanged and still gets a huge number of quality links to your website.

Although the Panda and Penguin updates produced many changes as to the way we look at off-page and on-page SEO, Hummingbird makes it compulsory that we get Google-proof link-building strategies if we don’t want to get into the dark cage of the second page and beyond a SERP.

Before launching your link-building campaign, it is essential to get your link-building strategy right. Here are the most important steps that will help you select the perfect tactics to implement.

How to Understand Google’s Quality Rules

There are several distinct guidelines to show what you should do:

·         Don’t use content that is scraped from well-ranked websites.
·         Avoid poor guest posting;
·         Don’t syndicate your own content for popular blogs;
·         Forget about doorway websites;
·         Don’t run affiliate programs.

Relevance Matters

While the quality of the websites that link to your website is of crucial importance, it is equally essential that these websites are relevant to your business. You page rank strongly depends upon how useful users find a search result.

Here is a four-step test to figure out if a link is relevant:

·       Ensure the link you’ve earned come from sites in the same field as yours;

·       If the website is not related to yours, find a section that has to do with your business;

·       Links from website that don’t relate to yours will work only if the content on the page that gives the link is related to the content on your webpage directly;

·       Your earned link should be relevant to the overall context of the page that gave you the link.

Diversify Your Link Building Strategy

Don’t pick and stick to one single link-building approach. By narrowing your tactics, you are more likely to lose importance in the eyes of Google.

Here are the link-building strategies that still matter in 2014:

• Producing high quality content;
• Getting recommendations and citations from trusted websites;
• Syndicating your content;
• Becoming a popular guest blogger;
• Etc. 

Rand Fishkin of Moz said that a clear shift in link-building tactics has been noticed in 2014. See the illustration below.

Don’t Use the Strategy Your Competitors Do

Many SEO practitioners today forget about on extremely important thing: brand building. The greater brand awareness, the stronger your brand image. Thus, it won’t take much effort to get quality links.

The only way you can get a unique identity is using your own tactics and not copying the ones your competitors use. Analyze the two brands illustrated below. They both target the same audience, but use two different approaches. 

Make the Anchor Texts Natural

The idea here is simple. Stop using keywords as anchors for each link you create. Your readers are smart enough. Make your links natural and don’t worry if your anchor text doesn’t match your keywords. As long as the link is relevant, you work is done. 

Link Building’s Evolution

There is a great difference between link earning and link building. Link building requires a lot of work on your part, while link earning happens without any efforts especially as to getting links.

Let us take content as an example. You have invested a great deal of time and hard work in your content in order to introduce it to the targeted audience. What would be your next step?

As a rule, publication of any content is always followed by the natural promotion through various channels:

1. Firstly, promote your content through various social media channels

2. Inform those loyal customers who could be interested in your new offer/article

3. Develop relationships

4. Take advantage of paid promotion (Depending on the type of content and budget available, it can include such things as Facebook ads, paid tweets and so on)

The above-mentioned steps are absolutely natural for any content creation process. In contrast, link earning doesn’t require any additional steps beyond that. Link earning allows you to just wait for the links to come in after promotion or publication.

Unfortunately, our world is too fast-paced today and all the people are self-centric. So don't even expect others to notice and reward your hard work! Don't hold your breath! If you really want someone to recognize your value, promote that value. Promote it intelligently and widely.

For those who choose building links, there are several useful steps after your content is published:

• Identify your specific targeted audience who can really like your content

• Identify possible websites where your targeted audience could spend time

• Identify active pages on those websites where a link would be useful 

• Contact the webmasters of those websites, telling them about:

     1. The authorship and that your content really exists
     2. The high value of your content to their website audience
     3. The pages where a link can be placed would be useful
     4. A request for feedback with reference to the content

Google's Evolution and Algorithms

There is no secret in the fact that Google has strong reliance on links. In the days of Google’s foundation, a search engine recognized a link as a really trusted source. A link was a signal of relevance and authority. Over time, Google has developed and adapted to the web. However, one thing stayed the same: links remained to be a considerable signal in its algorithm. Links were shortcuts to getting quick and easy rankings. The next Google’s step was quite powerful. It was Penguin. Nonetheless, Penguin hasn’t reduced the importance of links. Vise versa, Penguin effectively detects poor-quality links and works to punish those links.

Therefore, building or earning links is a quite complicated and confusing subject, particularly to those who don’t have a considerable experience in SEO industry.

 Info presented by Rankwinz

How to Get Your Customers to Come Back

One of the greatest mistakes of small-business owners is focusing only on attracting new clients forgetting about the importance of keeping them and turning them into loyal customers. In order to improve your customer relationship management, you should communicate with your customers regularly and keep providing them with top-quality service.

Here you can see three easy ways of how small businesses can keep their customers they worked so hard to earn:

1. Make a personal connection.
Firstly, focus on keeping your company in the customers' minds in a positive way.

Actually, every customer wants to feel special. This could be explained by the fact that people have a basic human need to be acknowledged and recognized. Sending e-mails to customers, whether it is wishing them a happy birthday, or congratulating on an anniversary, or just thanking them for their latest order, show them you care. Make it regularly even when you are not trying to sell them something.

2. Be clear and transparent.
What could be better for earning customer’s loyalty then watching the developers build their product or develop their service in real time? Make it possible for customers to monitor your work in real time: show which project tasks are already completed and which are in the pipeline. 
This can help you to create trust and transparency that are 2 main elements for retaining customers. 

3. Customize mobile deals.

You can take advantage of such mobile loyalty and customer retention programs as Cardagin in order to send special offers to customers on their smartphones and reward them with loyalty points. Sending your clients a personalized deal also shows that you are invested in the customer and that you know what he/she wants. As for today, smartphones are a really powerful instrument, so don’t miss the advantage! 


Make your customers сome back for ever and a day! Good luck!

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