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Off site SEO advice please

by rms1
15 replies
  • SEO
    • |
My Wordpress E Commerce website has been up and running for about 3 months. I seem to have mastered on site SEO. I have had a couple of site scans done and the site scores quite highly.

However, I feel I need some help with off site SEO. I am getting on in years and can't seem to get to grips with it. I have a limited budget so what would be the most beneficial thing I could spend my money on
#advice #seo #site
  • Profile picture of the author nik0
    Banned
    Write or let someone write great content that people would like to share, (costs some money)

    Follow up with a massive link outreach campaign (only costs time).

    I suppose that's the cheapest most solid way to achieve links.

    You can also check for broken links to sites and write a better resource and make webmasters aware of the broken link and ask them to link to your page instead.

    Another way of achieving links is by interviewing experts in your niche, link out to them, and reach out to them when it's published, good chance that results in some solid links as people like to be featured on other people's sites.

    But before you do all that make sure you have a great looking site, perhaps buy some fake social signals to make it look like you already receive a lot of traffic, in case some of the people you reach out to visit your site. Makes it look a bit better.

    I have no idea how much you have to spend, for some $50 is little for others $500,- is limited. If you're on the higher range you should check out the case study in my sig link, to see how I rank sites. The case study just started so it's best to keep checking it once in a while, right now it's in the phase of setting it up and getting the content ready, though it reveals a bit about how I plan to rank it (dropped domains).
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    • Profile picture of the author rms1
      Thanks Nik

      We are pretty expert in our niche and do have some good quality content, we are just unsure what to do with it but I will check our your link and thanks for taking the time in answering my question.
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    • Profile picture of the author MichaelMcKinney
      Originally Posted by nik0 View Post

      Write or let someone write great content that people would like to share, (costs some money)

      Follow up with a massive link outreach campaign (only costs time).

      I suppose that's the cheapest most solid way to achieve links.

      You can also check for broken links to sites and write a better resource and make webmasters aware of the broken link and ask them to link to your page instead.

      Another way of achieving links is by interviewing experts in your niche, link out to them, and reach out to them when it's published, good chance that results in some solid links as people like to be featured on other people's sites.

      But before you do all that make sure you have a great looking site, perhaps buy some fake social signals to make it look like you already receive a lot of traffic, in case some of the people you reach out to visit your site. Makes it look a bit better.

      I have no idea how much you have to spend, for some $50 is little for others $500,- is limited. If you're on the higher range you should check out the case study in my sig link, to see how I rank sites. The case study just started so it's best to keep checking it once in a while, right now it's in the phase of setting it up and getting the content ready, though it reveals a bit about how I plan to rank it (dropped domains).
      Thanks for sharing this informative tip here, you had described very well.
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  • Profile picture of the author SEO-Dave
    Originally Posted by rms1 View Post

    My Wordpress E Commerce website has been up and running for about 3 months. I seem to have mastered on site SEO. I have had a couple of site scans done and the site scores quite highly.

    However, I feel I need some help with off site SEO. I am getting on in years and can't seem to get to grips with it. I have a limited budget so what would be the most beneficial thing I could spend my money on
    I do like how you say "I seem to have mastered on site SEO", that's quite a claim. You shouldn't assume you have anything mastered.

    How's your Google PageSpeed Insights Results?
    Are you running a caching plugin (W3 Total Cache is the best) for improved speed (speed is a ranking factor)?
    Are your images optimized both for speed and direct SEO benefit?
    Is your site mobile responsive?
    Do you vary internal anchor text to make off-site link building easier?
    Have you removed all internal nofollow links WordPress adds to a site?
    Do you avoid linking with anchor text Click Here, Continue Reading, Home and other worthless words?
    Have you siloed your content via the internal linking structure into at least weak niches?

    All the above are Google ranking factors many WordPress users miss.

    I'd put good money on you've far from masters on site SEO.

    With a limited budget look to creating link bait, that's content webmasters will naturally link to because they like something about it.

    David
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    Freelance SEO Consultant
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    • Profile picture of the author nik0
      Banned
      Originally Posted by SEO-Dave View Post

      Do you avoid linking with anchor text Click Here, Continue Reading, Home and other worthless words?
      Waiting for an onpage over optimization thing to hit you in the next Panda 4.2 or 5.0 (or perhaps in the current one already) with all your heavy anchor focus on internal links.

      Did you know that I rename my categories to something more broad instead of the keyphrase I like to rank for? For example when I want to rank my category for "best hair dryers" I just name my category: hair dryers. Same like there is offpage over optimization with anchors, onpage can happen as well. Especially when you're link profile is already keyword heavy as everything works in combination with each other.

      I know you won't agree but that doesn't matter.
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      • Profile picture of the author SEO-Dave
        Originally Posted by nik0 View Post

        Waiting for an onpage over optimization thing to hit you in the next Panda 4.2 or 5.0 (or perhaps in the current one already) with all your heavy anchor focus on internal links.

        Did you know that I rename my categories to something more broad instead of the keyphrase I like to rank for? For example when I want to rank my category for "best hair dryers" I just name my category: hair dryers. Same like there is offpage over optimization with anchors, onpage can happen as well. Especially when you're link profile is already keyword heavy as everything works in combination with each other.

        I know you won't agree but that doesn't matter.
        Who said use heavy anchor text focused internal links?

        I said don't use irrelevant anchor text like Click Here, Continue Reading etc...

        There's an SEO technique to avoid the anchor text damage of using Click Here etc... (so you can still use Click Here without it being counted as anchor text) do you know what it is?

        I go much further at on-site anchor text variation than you do via the theme I use, I vary the internal anchor text so for an article targeting "Keyword Phrase" the internal links will be up to 6 phrases related to "Keyword Phrase": one might be "Best Keyword Phrase" another a semantic derivative, so if targeting "SEO Tips" might use "Search Engine Optimization Tips" as one of the anchor text variants. That's automated (after adding 6 phrases). Also manually add internal links with even more varied anchor text, won't to avoid lots of internal links using the same anchor text.

        The result is similar to what you are aiming for, but more varied anchor text usage and avoid using phrases like Click Here, Continue Reading... So I do agree with the SEO concept.

        David
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        Freelance SEO Consultant
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        • Profile picture of the author rms1
          I pm'd the url
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          • Profile picture of the author SEO-Dave
            Originally Posted by rms1 View Post

            I pm'd the url
            I won't post your URL here, though you should as others could also give advice.

            As I suspected terrible on-site SEO, if you post your URL here others will confirm or disagree with me. If you aren't doing anything backhat there's no reason to hide the URL.

            Here's a short list of some of the issues, didn't do an extensive SEO review (takes about 5 mins to check these issues: took longer to write this comment).

            1. Used "Home - " in the title tag of home page!

            2. Home page title you've gone for "Home - Brand - Keyphrase". Unless you have a big traffic brand (you don't), better is "Keyphrase - Brand" or even better just "Keyphrase".

            3. Used Home, Read More, Continue Reading awful anchor text.

            4. Lots of internal rel="nofollow" links yet dofollow social media links. So you aren't sending full SEO benefit to your articles, but are to Twitter, Facebook etc... That's weird.

            5. Your PageSpeed Insights results aren't too bad (looks like you've used W3 Total Cache, good choice), but there's still a fair amount of low hanging fruit you could improve like optimize image sizes (69% reduction possible: try the EWWW Image Optimizer Plugin) and you could minify and possibly combine your js files and css files using W3 total cache (trial and error on that one, sometimes it works, sometimes not).

            6. Inconsistent alt text, some missing, some not bad SEO wise, others awful.

            7. Image filenames generally awful.

            8. BIG NO NO, you are linking sitewide to your web designer! See the footer link with anchor text "Ecommerce Websites", that benefits your web designer, but damages your sites SERPs. You don't target the Ecommerce Websites SERPs and I guess the designer isn't paying your for the damaging sitewide backlink. By linking out to an irrelevant site it damaged the theming of your internal links (the concept is minimize non-theme relevant links).

            If your web designer does this a lot and Google picks up on it he'll be slapped with an unnatural links penalty and who knows how that will impact your site. Remove the link and his name from the footer (probably in footer.php).

            Assuming you believe me, you can see your on-site SEO is far from great, those nofollow links for starters are wasting a lot of internal link benefit. Whoever told you to add internal nofollow links to your articles is an idiot.

            Don't worry, this is typical of over 90% of sites I look at, fix the issues and you are better than 90% of sites online.

            David
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            Freelance SEO Consultant
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            • Profile picture of the author rms1
              Hi John,
              I appreciate your advice and will try and work through the list.

              Can you or anyone please clarify that internal links should be dofollow as I was told the opposite

              I have the html code to make the internal links nofollow

              If I remove the code, will they automatically be dofollow links?
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              • Profile picture of the author SEO-Dave
                Originally Posted by rms1 View Post

                Hi John,
                I appreciate your advice and will try and work through the list.

                Can you or anyone please clarify that internal links should be dofollow as I was told the opposite

                I have the html code to make the internal links nofollow

                If I remove the code, will they automatically be dofollow links?
                Internal links should be dofollow, even if there's an internal webpage you don't want Google to index do not add nofollow: the way to block a page from being indexed is a noindex meta tag, not nofollow links.

                Nofollow doesn't prevent Google indexing a page, the links in our sigs on this forum are all nofollow, our websites are still indexed by Google, just means there's no SEO benefit passed from this forum to our websites.

                Every link that includes nofollow deletes a percentage of the link benefit which could be used for helping to rank your important webpages.

                If half your links are nofollow, half your link benefit which should be used for ranking your important content is deleted, so some of your hard work generating backlinks is wasted!

                Anyone who tells you otherwise does not understand basic SEO, Google changed how it treats nofollow in 2008 (didn't used to delete link benefit, nofollow was abused to sculpt PR, so they changed).

                A dofollow link is a link which lacks nofollow. so remove rel="nofollow" or rel='nofollow' (same code, different format) and your links are dofollow.

                There are Firefox and Chrome addons for highlighting nofollow links, if you use one of the addons the nofollow links will be highlighted. For Firefox I'm currently trying out RDS Bar which puts a link through nofollow links, you can quickly see how many there are.

                In a perfect SEO world don't nofollow outgoing links as well, difficulty here is if you allow comments and allow comment author URLs or your commenters to add links within the body of a comment if you don't add nofollow to those links and they link to bad sites, you could be damaged by linking to bad sites (nofollow protect your site from the damage of comment spammers).

                Same argument if you are linking to bad site deliberately (some affiliate links are iffy for example), although the nofollow deletes the link benefit, it's better than running the risk of adding dofollow links to bad sites. If you are linking out to good quality sites, there's no good reason to nofollow them (nofollow or dofollow, costs the same in link benefit), only use nofollow on links you don't vouch for the quality of the site.

                My sites don't use nofollow at all, BUT I strictly moderate any links added by commeners. I turn off the ability for commenters to add an author URL (theme feature) and the WordPress core function which turns plain URLs into clickable links (theme feature), any full HTML links added manually I manually delete (99 out of 100 times it's a link spammer, so delete the comment). My setup means I can link to other pages/sites from comments, but no one else can unless I let them (which I don't, why would I).

                David
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                Freelance SEO Consultant
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    • Profile picture of the author rms1
      Originally Posted by SEO-Dave View Post

      I do like how you say "I seem to have mastered on site SEO", that's quite a claim. You shouldn't assume you have anything mastered.

      How's your Google PageSpeed Insights Results?
      Are you running a caching plugin (W3 Total Cache is the best) for improved speed (speed is a ranking factor)?
      Are your images optimized both for speed and direct SEO benefit?
      Is your site mobile responsive?
      Do you vary internal anchor text to make off-site link building easier?
      Have you removed all internal nofollow links WordPress adds to a site?
      Do you avoid linking with anchor text Click Here, Continue Reading, Home and other worthless words?
      Have you siloed your content via the internal linking structure into at least weak niches?

      All the above are Google ranking factors many WordPress users miss.

      I'd put good money on you've far from masters on site SEO.

      With a limited budget look to creating link bait, that's content webmasters will naturally link to because they like something about it.

      David
      Dave,

      Thanks for your input but you have made many assumptions there. You are quite right, I haven't done many of those things because I wouldn't know how and that is why I hired a professional to do it for me and that person has given me training to maintain things for myself.

      I now have a limited budget to spend on off site SEO which is why as I originally asked,
      what would be the best way for me to spend it.
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      • Profile picture of the author SEO-Dave
        Originally Posted by rms1 View Post

        Dave,

        Thanks for your input but you have made many assumptions there. You are quite right, I haven't done many of those things because I wouldn't know how and that is why I hired a professional to do it for me and that person has given me training to maintain things for myself.

        I now have a limited budget to spend on off site SEO which is why as I originally asked,
        what would be the best way for me to spend it.
        You just made my point, you don't know enough about SEO to know if you have the on page SEO right.

        If you read any forum you'll find people offering SEO services asking very basic SEO questions, are you sure you haven't hired one of the SEO clueless, with a limited budget wouldn't be a surprise?

        What's the URL, always interested to see a site we are discussing?

        David
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        Freelance SEO Consultant
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  • Profile picture of the author joeho
    Off site seo = build links no other things.
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    10 SNEAKY SEO TRICKS TO INCREASE YOUR RANKING
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  • Profile picture of the author Jeffery Moss
    Linking from thousands of unrelated or low quality/new websites is pointless and does little to help your search engine ranking. You will need the best backlinks from other bloggers and site owners in your niche and these can be obtained by simply asking the other site owner to republish your content on their site. You can most easily do this by emailing the site owner.
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    Transform your old PLR books to an automated cash machine that keeps paying you day in and day out!
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    • Profile picture of the author JohnnyPlan
      Originally Posted by Jeffery Moss View Post

      Linking from thousands of unrelated or low quality/new websites is pointless and does little to help your search engine ranking. You will need the best backlinks from other bloggers and site owners in your niche and these can be obtained by simply asking the other site owner to republish your content on their site. You can most easily do this by emailing the site owner.
      Just don't make the mistake of thinking that article directories give you any traffic generation or SEO benefit as they won't. Getting your articles onto other websites is very easy if you have something of value to offer. Lots of really great posts here on Warrior to explain how to use article marketing for traffic generation and how to find blogs to get your article published on.
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