- Digital Surfer
- Posts
- ISSUE 51
ISSUE 51
URL Structures; Topic Clusters; Free Images; Backlink Audit; SEO Flowcharts; Increase EPMV/RPM; Google Advice on Titles and Meta; and Much More!
Yoyao
October 16, 2021 • Est. Learning Time: 14 minutes
FIRST…
Keep the intro short this week. Lots of great info in the links this week, so check them out.
The SEO Flowcharts is an especially good one to make content and niche site decisions.
Hope that everyone has a great week ahead!
SEO
Aleyda Solis provides some easy to read SEO Flowcharts to help you with SEO decision making across many common scenarios. Here are some examples:
Should you prioritize an SEO Opportunity/Issue Execution?
What to do when hit by a Google Core Update?
Should you prune or optimize a page from your site?
Should you migrate a Page to the New Web Version?
Should I index a Sub-Category/Faceted Page?
How can you tell the difference to avoid prioritizing a fix that doesn’t need to be done? Olga Zarzeczna discusses 7 errors and warnings that can be ignored after using an SEO crawling tool.
Indexability Issues (Noindex Pages on the Site)
Meta Description Too Short or Empty
Meta Keywords Missing
Images Over 100 KB
Low Content or Low Word Count Pages
Low HTML-Text Ratio
XML Sitemap Not Indicated in robots.txt
In this episode of AskGooglebot, John Mueller explains the differences between absolute and relative URLs and if there is a preference in how a search engine crawls and indexes them.
Absolute URL - https://yoyao.com/keyword-research/
Relative URLs - /keyword-research/
Spoiler alert: Google doesn't treat them differently.
TOOLS AND RESOURCES
TopicMojo - Do topic and keyword research across all sorts of social media and websites. If you want search volume and other data, they also have a SEO Data Add-On that's currently $9/month, but will increase to $15 in 9 days. It's also on AppSumo for the same price, but TopicMojo gets a smaller cut from them, so supporting the little guys here. Here's a tutorial walkthrough video by Alston Antony, so you can get a idea of its usefulness.
Hide My WP Ghost - Looks like a combo alternative for Wordfence and WPS Login. For extra protection and enhanced security against attacks like SQL injection, brute-force, and more. The UI/UX looks user-friendly. From the Squirrly SEO team.
Visual Sitemaps - Ends in 3 days. Generate visual sitemaps with screenshots of any website. This is helpful when you're checking out your competition. Good tool to view their design, content and site structure, as well as to keep up to date with their page updates.
Nozzle - Ends in 10 days. Rank tracker that provides an incredible amount of data. I've been using it and there's a bit of a learning curve navigating through the data, but it's manageable if you like data.
Simplified - A combo Canva and AI Writer. If you're using an AI content generator for the copy in your graphic designs, this is an all-in-one solution. You won't need multiple solution
VectorGrove - Ends in 3 days. Over 2.1m vectors and graphics for only $29. Great deal if you like to create infographics and other graphic designs for your niche site. Also good to use for print-on-demand designs and selling those printed products.
CONTENT
Samuel Schmitt wrote one of the better articles on creating a topic cluster about a year ago. Now he answers 14 common questions about Topic Clusters. Learn all about the who, what, when, where and why of topic clusters and how to create them. Some of the sections include:
How to choose the right keywords for your Topic Cluster?
How to publish and promote your Topic Cluster?
What tools can help me to cluster keywords?
How to link pages within a Topic Cluster?
What mistake to avoid when creating a Topic Cluster?
When do Topic Clusters NOT work?
Great Examples of Topic Clusters
How to create a Topic Cluster with WordPress?
Where can you find the best free photos for blogs? Here are the best 20 free image sites online. Commercial use without attribution too!
Keep in mind that since these are free, many people have access to them and they might be used in lots of places. Doing a Google image search will help there. I prefer the paid images like when Deposit Photos has a deal, because they're used less. Wait a month or so for Black Friday deals.
LINK BUILDING
Matt Diggity shows how to do a backlink analysis. A backlink audit tool (Ahrefs) provides a backlinks report comprising important metrics and information about all the links pointing to your website.
Since Ahrefs offers a free plan where you can analyze your own websites, you'll be able to do this for free. You won't be able to analyze competitors though on a free plan.
I'm going to show 8 ways to build powerful edu backlinks to help you boost your rankings and increase your organic search traffic. Here are half of the 8 tactics he gives:
Get Listed On Resource Pages
Offer Discounts To Staff & Students
Create A Scholarship For Students
Interview Prominent Faculty Members
Amanda Natividad discusses how she gets at least 80% response rate from her cold outreach, even 100% from one batch of emails. She sums up her approach with:
I invest serious time qualifying my lead list and researching my audience before I send messages. This requires extra energy and effort, but if you’re seeking results, the payoff is worth it.
There's a video of how she does it, as well as a summary in the blog post. Worth a read if you're doing outreach for backlinks.
EDUCATION
Summary of Google Search Central's Office Hours with John Mueller. Some good topics covered, including:
The number of indexed pages vs. site authority
Evaluating a website’s primary purpose
Redirection of links
Recovery from core updates
Links in guest posts
Product price as a ranking factor
Moving URLs between sitemaps
Learn what causes EPMV to change on your site and how to improve it using this interactive article that will help you generate the reports you need.
If you're with Ezoic, this is some useful information. If you're not with Ezoic, this can also be useful to help you understand why RPMs are different.
Google's 'knowledge' is garnered from multiple sources. Confirmation is drawn for multiple sources. Wikipedia is important, but is not the be-all-and-end-all.
From Kalicube, here is a list of sources Google cites in knowledge panels. Jason Barnard from Kalicube discusses their list in this short video snippet that's part of a longer interview. This can help give you an idea of sites that Google considers trustworthy. Top 5 sites:
The Google Search Central team updated a couple of their best practices posts in the Advanced SEO section.
You can help improve the quality of the title link displayed for your page in Google Search by following these general guidelines.
NEWS
Mushfiq at The Website Flip announced the acquisition of DNGeek.com, a nice blog on buying and selling domains from Sean Markey.
Check out his Twitter thread on how he did his analysis of DNGeek and what made him acquire it.
LIKE NICHE SURFER?
Let me know! Reply or email me at [email protected]. I’d love to know what you think and if you have any ideas.
I’d also appreciate it if you shared it with fellow niche surfers.
Also, be sure to Whitelist [email protected] and/or drag the email to the Primary Inbox to make sure you don't miss the emails!
Have a great week with taking your niche sites to another level!
Reply