Why Guest Blogging Is the Worst Link Building Strategy
-When Done Right, Guest Blogging Is Expensive: a well-delivered column in the B2B niche costs around $400-$500 on Upwork…guest blogging is done by the contributors who really know their stuff and can write something truly unique. But as much as this copy is useful and insightful, it’s also incredibly expensive to produce.
-The Best Industry Blogs Won’t Link Back to Your Strategic Pages
-Guest Blogging at Scale Leads to Low-Quality Links
-Google Recommends Adding “Nofollow” to All Links in Guest Posts
-Guest Blogging Is More About Social Proof Than Building Links
Google: Fine if 30-40% of URLs in Search Console Are 404s
Google’s John Mueller says it’s normal if 30-40% of URLs in a site’s Search Console report are returning 404 errors. Google may continue trying to crawl URLs years after they’ve been deleted from a website, and there’s nothing site owners can do to prevent that from happening. There’s no need to stress when you see 404 errors in Search Console for URLs that aren’t supposed to be there anyway.
Google Says Word Count Not a Quality Factor
John Mueller affirmed that the number of words in an article is not a quality factor that Google considers:
“From our point of view the number of words on a page is not a quality factor, not a ranking factor. So just blindly adding more and more text to a page doesn’t make it better.”
Google: Internal Linking Gives Google A Sense Of Page Level Importance
Google’s John Mueller was asked how someone can help Google understand which pages of a site it really wants Google to index. John said it is true that Google doesn’t really look at the XML sitemap priority field. So instead, you really need to communicate which pages are more important to you through your internal linking. The more you link from your more important pages to other pages, the more Google will understand that the pages you are linking to on your website are important.
Update or delete? Cleaning up old content on your site
Update old content that is still valid: You can easily create new, valuable content from your old posts if you update it and make it current again.
Delete irrelevant posts or pages: It’s likely that you have old posts or pages on your site that you don’t need anymore. You can either tell Google to forget about these old posts or pages or give the URL another purpose.
301 Redirect the old post to a related one
OR
Tell search engines the content is intentionally gone
Go through your old posts, and decide what to do: update, merge or delete.
8 SEO Trends That Will Continue in 2021
- Zero-click searches will continue to rise
- Voice search will continue to increase in popularity
- Providing a good user experience will get even more critical
- Mobile-friendliness will be crucial for everyone
- Google will get better at identifying E‑A-T (expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness)
- Google Discover will drive more traffic: Google Discover is a personalized mobile feed showcasing content about the things that interest you. It does this using activity data from Google’s products (search, YouTube, etc.), location data, and topics you follow.
- Image search will gain even more potential
- Search intent will remain king
Rich Results Disappear? Google Says It Might Be A Site Wide Quality Issue.
Google’s John Mueller listed a few reasons why your site may not show rich results in the Google Search Results. One of the three reasons is that sometimes Google does not trust the site enough, on the site level, for Google to warrant that the site shows rich results. He said one of the reasons rich results won’t show is “usually sitewide signal that is about the quality of the site overall.”
What Is Latent Semantic Indexing and Why It Doesn’t Matter for SEO
Latent semantic indexing (also referred to as Latent Semantic Analysis) is a method of analyzing a set of documents in order to discover statistical co-occurrences of words that appear together which then give insights into the topics of those words and documents. A major shortcoming of using Latent Semantic Indexing for the entire web is that the calculations done to create the statistical analysis have to be recalculated every time a new webpage is published and indexed.
Despite there not being any proof in terms of patents and research papers that LSI/LSA are important ranking-related factors, Google is still associated with Latent Semantic Indexing. The SEO myth that Google uses LSI Keywords possibly originated from the popularity of phrases like “Semantic Analysis,” “Semantic Indexing” and “Semantic Search.” But There is no such thing as LSI Keywords. LSI is not an important part of Google’s ranking algorithms.
Data-backed insights on featured snippet optimization
-Around one-fifth of all keywords trigger a featured snippet
-99 percent of all featured snippets tend to appear within the first organic position and take over 50% of the screen on mobile devices, driving higher-than-average click-through rates (CTR)
-The key to featured snippet optimization lies in a few specific areas: long-tail- and question-like keyword strategy, date marked content that comes at the right length and format, and a succinct URL structure
- Optimize for long-tail keywords and questions
- Use the right content length and format
- Don’t overcomplicate your URL structure
- Make frequent content updates
Blog post images: Why use them and where to get them
Images can help readers better understand your content. Google’s visual search is getting increasingly important and can no longer be ignored if you want to stay visible in the search results. When you have high-quality and optimized images, your images could rank first when people perform a Google (image) search.
Option 1: Shoot your own photos
Option 2: Hire an illustrator
Option 3: Use stock photos