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Welcome To The Raine Report

“A successful man is one who can lay a firm foundation with

the bricks others have thrown at him.” - David Brinkley

Welcome to Issue 6 of The Raine Report. In this month’s issue I am going to be

focussing on SEO, and yes I know I have said this before but SEO is not dead,

in-fact it is one of the most important things you should be doing in your

business whether you are primarily selling goods or services online, or

running a bricks and mortar business and wanting to get a better boost in

Google local.

So with that being said the first article this month is on The Perfect Backlink, I

actually wrote this piece a while ago and it is still very relevant today and

explains how Google looks at your site and the position of content, images,

and links on it.

The second piece covers MicroData, and don’t be turned off by the name as

this is one of the simplest but most effective changes you can make

immediately to your site to get a boost in the Google rankings, it is also a

highly effective way of making your listing stand out from the crowd.

Finally this month I am also taking a look at optimizing your title tag and

directing Google using breadcrumbs (which also enhances your listing).

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This month Gold members have full access to my Private Blog Network video

training in their members site and we will be taking a brand new site which is

selling an affiliate product and getting it ranked as quickly as possible in the

top ten of Google. I also look at some key changes in Google this month and

will be discussing some killer services.

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The Perfect Backlink

“Fix your eyes on perfection and you make almost everything

speed towards it.” - William Ellery Channing

People will tell you that backlinking and the SEO landscape has totally shifted

over the past few years, and that getting backlinks isn’t as important in the

new and improved online world of SEO in 2015, but I’m here to tell you that

they couldn’t be more wrong.

Yes, there have been a lot of changes, and we’ve had a couple of major

algorithm updates from Google which have hit backlink building strategies -

but as you’ll see from this article, Google haven’t actually changed the

underpinning foundations.

When it comes to SEO people tend to shout loud from the rooftops and make

knee-jerk proclamations every time Google run an algorithm update - they cry

like Chicken Little that “The sky is falling!” without actually taking the time to

look at the cold hard stats and review all of the data to see what the effects are

of the changes.

In reality the only change that’s happened over the past few years is that

Google have got better at finding and weeding out spammy and scammy

linking practices which go against their terms, and the basics are exactly the

same as they have always been.

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Make no mistake, backlinks are just as important now as they were back when

Google first started, and although there are over 200 different ranking factors,

backlinks still remain one of the most crucial parts of good SEO.

There’s a reason everyone harks on about backlinks, and it’s all because

Google based their initial search algorithm all around backlinks, calculating

them as ‘votes’ for a particular web page and giving a PageRank (PR) score to

the referring page.

And from that initial point onwards the world and his wife have been chasing

high PR backlinks ever since...

Google have come on in leaps and bounds since those early days though, and

now they say there’s well over 200 different indicators used in calculating the

ranking of an individual page.

However, backlinks are still an important part of the mix, but they can’t be

gamed as easily now, and the big ‘G’ does a lot of stuff to make sure that

they’re weeding out the people who are trying to game the system.

Which brings me onto something interesting that I read...

Well, I say interesting - in reality it would either bore you to tears, or melt your

brain with it’s boring technicalities...

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Anyhoo, the thing I read was a patent granted to Google, and it had some very

interesting points hidden away, and the reason I’m writing this article is to

spill the beans on the interesting bits.

For those of you who want to read the actual patent, then you can download it

here:

Read Google’s Patent

For those of you who want the important highlights translated into human

speak then read on!

Now, before we get into the bits I find interesting, you need to understand that

although this patent was granted in 2010, the actual patent was submitted

back in 2004 (yes, this is how long the patent office have taken to process and

grant the application.) As a result, there will have been new things introduced

into Google’s workings, and some things will have been taken out.

But, I firmly believe that the things I’m going to talk about in this article are

still highly relevant and more importantly, pretty easy to implement.

So, let’s get cracking and start looking at the finer details!

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A Bit Of A History Lesson

There’s something that a lot of people don’t realise when it comes to getting

ranked and loved by Google, and that’s how they came to value pages on the

internet and assign a rank to them in the first place.

It all stems from their original patent and idea which was based around the

‘Reasonable Surfer Model’, and it’s crucial you understand this concept

otherwise you’ll fall into the trap that everyone goes down - which is to chase

backlinks in all the wrong places.

The Reasonable Surfer Model

The Reasonable Surfer Model is a thing of genius, and it’s really very simple to

get your head around. Basically, what Sergey and Larry came up with was to

answer this simple question:

“What would a ‘normal’ person browsing this particular page click on to

leave the page and move forward to another page on the web?”

This forms the simple ethos behind the Reasonable Surfer Model, and as with

Google’s core concept, it all revolves around what the user would do, and

how simple it makes it for the user to find what they’re looking for easily

and quickly.

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If we take a direct quote from the patent, it says this about the Reasonable

Surfer Model:

Do you see how simple the concept is?

Basically, when a user lands on a page they will choose to follow a link and

choose not to follow others, and the ones which are most likely to be followed

get a higher rating in Google’s eyes.

It’s a touch of brilliance, and over time they’ve perfected the model to score

different links and give them the weightings they feel are deserved - and as a

result they’ve put in place a system which effectively makes it difficult for

people to engineer the link graph.

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Systems and methods consistent with the principles of the invention

may provide a reasonable surfer model that indicates that when a

surfer accesses a document with a set of links, the surfer will follow

some of the links with a higher probability than others. This

reasonable surfer model reflects the fact that not all of the links

associated with a document are equally likely to be followed.

Examples of unlikely followed links may include “Terms of Service”

links, banner advertisements, and links unrelated to the document.

However, as you’re going to discover as you read through this guide, you will

see how to construct the perfect backlink, where to place it, and where to go to

get it and make the mighty ‘G’ give you some good lurvin’

Before we look at the perfect backlink tho, we need to have a quick chat about

backlinks in general, and what the search engines look for when rating a page

and deciding upon it’s ranking in the search engine results pages (SERPs).

The first mistake nearly everyone makes when going around scrabbling for

backlinks is to only go and get high PR links in their quest for Google love, and

this is quite frankly a schoolboy error.

You see, Google looks at the link graph and checks stuff out on a minute-by-

minute basis, they are very good at spotting trends, spotting fingerprints, and

they can easily see who is trying to game the system.

For example, if you run a site and you only have say around 50 backlinks

which are all PR5, PR6, and PR7 all pointing back to your site let me ask you

this question:

Does this look natural?

The answer to both you, me, and more importantly the GoogleBot is: No, of

course it doesn’t. You can spot it a mile off, it’s clearly engineered and not

natural.

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It is crucial that when you’re getting backlinks you get a natural mix of low

(and indeed PR0) links into your backlink mix alongside the heavy hitting

PR6’s to show Google that you’re not trying to game the system and that

people are linking to you more naturally.

The second mistake everyone makes is going for the ‘easy’ backlinks, which

although have no effect on overall rankings since the Penguin updates, having

a few of them are again needed in the overall picture to show a ‘natural’ spread

of links spread.

Purely getting backlinks from low level places like blog comments, forum

posts, article directories, press releases, and other web 2.0 sites are of a low

quality and are completely discounted by Google (some are even negatively

scored from the Penguin updates).

Don’t get me wrong, having these types of backlinks can serve their purpose in

giving some low level links back to your site (if they look natural and are from

‘good neighbourhoods’), but they shouldn’t be your only links.

The third mistake people make is only going for the top level domains (TLDs)

which have a higher weighting in Google’s eyes, such as .gov or .edu domains.

Again, if all you have is links back from .edu or .gov sites then it sticks out like a

sore thumb.

The final mistake people make (there are more, but let’s just keep to the core

problems!) is that people only get backlinks from say 3 sites which have good

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PR and are relevant to their niche / market. This is another big flag for Mr

Google on people who are just trying to game the system.

Think about this from a Google point of view...

In a ‘normal’ world people make natural links back to sites which they like or

will recommend to a friend. Sites which are recommended by a ton of

different people are going to get a higher rating by Google because there’s not

just 3 people saying ‘hey this site is really good’, it’s actually 50 different people

saying ‘check out this page, it’s awesome’.

All this is common sense when you think about it, but in our industry people

get blinded by chasing the high PR links from a relevant page, with the exact

keyword anchor text to show 100% keyword density and relevance to the

GoogleBot, without taking the core concept of the reasonable surfer model

which is this:

Is a real person likely to click the link?

If the answer is ‘No’, then Google won’t rank you well in the SERPs, because if

a user isn’t likely to follow the link then it’s not relevant.

So, what do we do then?

Simple. Remember that patent I mentioned earlier? Well, it’s full of juicy tid-

bits to tell us exactly what we should do :)

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What Does Google Think?

There is a ton of techno-babble in the patent, but when you break it down to

it’s bare bones then it makes clear sense, and that’s what I’m going to spell out

for you now in my own unique and ground breaking interpretations - and all

of these interpretations centre around the core question of: “What would the

reasonable surfer do?”

Font Size And Other Font Attributes Of The Link

This is an interesting point which is made in the patent, it’s made in several

places, and it concerns what the link looks like. Specifically:

• Is the link in a larger font size than the surrounding text? If it is then

would you say it’s more likely to be clicked by the reasonable surfer?

• Is the link in a smaller font size than the surrounding text? If it is then would

you say it’s less likely to be clicked by the reasonable surfer?

• Is the font color of the link a different to the surrounding text? If it’s not

different then how does the reasonable surfer know that it’s actually a link

to click?

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• Is the font color of the link the same color as the background,? If it is then

do you think that Google will slap you from here to next week?

• Is the link styled to look different using underline, bold or italics to make

stand out?

As well as the parts on the features of the link, Google also outlined this briefly

in the patent:

Key takeaways from the font attributes...

Make sure that the link looks like a link and doesn’t blend into the

background, make the link slightly larger than the surrounding text, think

about making it bold or in italics to make it stand out, and for goodness sake

don’t try to hide links on a page.

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For example, model generating unit 410 may generate a rule that

indicates

...

that links with anchor text greater than a particular font size have

a higher probability of being selected than links with less than the

particular font size

Anchor Text

Now, if you’ve followed my teachings for any length of time you’ll know that

I’ve talked previously about the importance of getting your keywords into your

anchor text, but the patent has some pretty interesting points on how Google

looks at the contents of the anchor text, here’s a couple of excerpts.

As we can see, Google are pretty clever in that they’re looking not only if the

words in the anchor text are related to the content of the page, but also if the

anchor text has any commercial intent.

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Examples of features associated with a link might include the

...

number of words in anchor text associated with the link; actual

words in anchor text associated with the link; commerciality of the

anchor text associated with the link;

...

a topical cluster with which the anchor text of the link is associated;

...

and/or a degree to which a topical cluster associated with the

source document matches a topical cluster associated with the

anchor text of a link.

In some cases you may not get round the commercial intent aspect, especially

if your target keywords are something like “Buy Fishing Rods”, sometimes you

just have to go with the flow.

Now here’s an important note to make about anchor text...

The links which come into your site need to have a good variety of anchor text.

If all the backlinks only have your exact main keyword phrase then this

doesn’t look natural, and it’s an easy fingerprint for Google.

So vary the anchor text with different relevant keywords related to your main

keyword, and also make sure you include some generic anchor text like your

domain, brand name, and even ‘Click here’.

Page Attributes And Immediate Surrounding Text

Although we talk about getting links from a page which is related to the topic,

they actually go down to a closer level than just the page.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s crucial that the topic of the page you’re getting your

backlink from matches the topic of the page you’re linking to, but they do go

much deeper and down to a paragraph level.

First of all, here’s the important bit about the overall page:

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So in a nutshell, the first point of call is to make sure that the link is on a page

which Google sees as being relevant to the page your linking to.

You can check if the page your placing your backlink is ‘relevant’ in Google’s

eyes for your keyword by plugging in the URL of that page into Google’s

Keyword Planner tool, and if the keyword you’re targeting appears in it’s list

then you’re good to go.

But now for the killer part, and something which literally no one talks about,

and that’s the words which surround the actual link on a page.

If you think about it from a users perspective then it makes perfect sense to

have a link which is relevant to the conversation, and not one which has

nothing to do with the paragraph they’re reading.

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For example, model generating unit 410 may generate a rule that

indicates

...

that when a topical cluster associated with the source document is

related to a topical cluster associated with the target document, the

link has a higher probability of being selected than when the topical

cluster associated with the source document is unrelated to the

topical cluster associated with the target document.

For example, if your paragraph is all about the topic of dog training, and then

the link in the middle of the paragraph is for ‘instant credit loans’ then that’s a

massive disconnect for the user, and completely off topic for the page and the

specific paragraph.

They outline it briefly in the patent:

So, make sure that when you’re placing your link in the body text of the page

that the surrounding text in the sentence is relevant to the anchor text.

Again, you can use the Google’s Keyword Planner tool to see what other words

are relevant by putting in your anchor text and getting back what Google says

is relevant, then craft the sentence / paragraph using some of those relevant

words in the structure.

Just make sure the sentence / paragraph reads naturally and doesn’t just look

like 50 keywords put back-to-back - remember that it’s all about providing

useful information to the ‘reasonable surfer’ in an effort to get them to click on

a link.

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Examples of features associated with a link might include the

...

the context of a few words before and/or after the link;

Image Links

A huge portion on links on the internet are actually linked to images, and

some will be classed as relevant by Google and some won’t.

For example, a ‘buy it now’ button could be an image link, but not necessarily

relevant to show up in the SERPs, whereas an image of a chihuahua puppy,

properly tagged and linked to a chihuahua page is relevant, and would get

indexed and ranked in Google image search.

The key to image links is to:

• Make the image filename match your keyword (e.g. if your keyword is

‘chihuahua training’ then make the file name ‘chihuahuatraining.jpg’).

• Make sure that the ‘alt’ and ‘title’ tags of the image match your targeted

keywords (e.g. ‘chihuahua training’).

• Make sure that the target URL has ‘chihuahua training’ in the path and

the content of that page is all about ‘chihuahua training’.

What Google has specified in the patent is all about the aspect ratio of the

image (i.e. the image size), and I guess that this is all to do with the probability

that the reasonable surfer will click on the image link.

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For instance, if the image is 200 x 200 pixels and tagged as the chihuahua

example above, then there is a better probability that the image might be

clicked.

However, if the image is a 1 x 1 pixel image then there’s absolutely no chance

that it will be clicked, and therefore deemed not relevant and ignored (or even

negatively scored).

Target URL

Every link needs to have a target URL to go to, and Google go the extra mile in

checking that target URL to make sure that it’s relevant to the source page that

the link is on, and also if the source page where the backlink is placed is

related even remotely to the target URL of the link.

For instance, these two points make interesting reading:

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Examples of features associated with a link might include

...

whether the link leads somewhere on the same host or domain; if

the link leads to somewhere on the same domain, whether the link

URL is shorter than the referring URL; and/or whether the link

URL embeds another URL (e.g., for server-side redirection).

and:

Basically, let’s break down into layman's terms what Google are actually

saying:

• Is the backlink pointing to a page on the same site (domain)?

• If it is on the same site, then is it pointing to a deeper page further into the

site or back towards a page higher up the site?

• Does the link try to mask it’s true destination using a server-side redirect?

• Is the backlink pointing to a different site on the same host? (Therefore is

the backlink engineered by someone setting up 2 sites on the same host to

try and game the backlinks).

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Examples of features associated with a target document might

include the URL of the target document (or a portion of the URL of

the target document); a web site associated with the target

document; whether the URL of the target document is on the same

host as the URL of the source document; whether the URL of the

target document is associated with the same domain as the URL of

the source document; and/or the length of the URL of the source

document.

One of Google’s main concerns is with people trying to create backlinks in a

favourable position on the page on relevant websites which they in fact own

and run, which they naturally take a very dim view of.

In addition to this, Google have also outlined some pretty interesting points

about the target URL, specifically these:

I’m sure I don’t actually need to break down these four things, as they are

pretty self explanatory, but basically Google are saying that they’re going to

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For example, model generating unit 410 may generate a rule that

indicates

...

that a link associated with a target URL that contains the word

“domainpark” has a low probability of being selected.

...

that a link associated with a source document that contains a

popup has a low probability of being selected.

...

that a link associated with a target domain that ends in “.tv” has a

low probability of being selected.

...

that a link associated with a target URL that includes multiple

hyphens has a low probability of being selected.

negatively mark links to parked domains, pages with popups, that the top level

domain (TLD) is a factor (which is why we recommend .com, .net and .org),

and loads-of-hyphens-in-your-domain-name-are-bad.com ;)

Link Position On The Page

This is one of the major things which is outlined, and one of the big reasons

why comment links, forum links, and footer / sidebar links are so devalued by

Google when it comes to ranking and passing PR to the link.

Once more it comes down to the reasonable surfer’s likelihood to click on the

link, and again quite a lot of this boils down to common sense.

Think of the reasonable surfer: he / she visits a page on ‘kiteboarding’, which

is a PR 7 page, and it’s got comments enabled. If you’re going to leave a

comment on this page you might mistakenly think that it’s a good PR7

backlink, but what is the likelihood that the reasonable surfer is going to

click on your backlink in your comment?

Pretty low, maybe even non-existent, especially if there are other comments

on the page as well with other competing links. You also need to factor in the

negative ratings which Google gives, but we’ll talk about that later in the

article :)

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Like I said earlier, having a good spread of lower-level backlinks from

comments, forums, article directories can be OK to look more natural, but

these won’t give you any SEO juice at all (they may also give a negative scoring

if the site has been Penguin or Panda slapped!), and they certainly won’t

separate you from anyone else who is trying to rank in the SERPs.

Let’s again look at what Mr Google says about link positioning, and here they

have some pretty clear hints about where the best place to have your link:

Although the above excerpt is more of a hint than an actual ‘best place to put

your link’ statement, the next bit from the patent is very clear about the

situation:

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Examples of features associated with a link might include the

...

position of the link (measured, for example, in a HTML list, in

running text, above or below the first screenful viewed on an

800x600 browser display, side (top, bottom, left right) of document,

in a footer, in a sidebar etc.); if the link is in a list, the position of

the link in the list;

However, there’s also a good caveat placed in the patent about sidebar links,

and it reads like this:

So, when you put all those pieces of the puzzle together you can draw these

assumptions:

• The best place to have a link is in the main body of the page, above the

fold when viewed on an 800x600 screen.

• If the link is in a list, then the higher up the list the better (as this has a

higher probability of being clicked on by the ‘reasonable surfer’).

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For example, model generating unit 410 may generate a rule that

indicates

...

that links positioned closer to the top of a document have a higher

probability of being selected than links positioned toward the

bottom of a document.

For example, model generating unit 410 may generate a rule that

...

a link positioned in the “More Top Stories” heading on the cnn.com

website has a high probability of being selected.

• Sidebar and footer links have a lower probability of getting clicked, unless

they have a reasonably good call to action section (like the cnn.com

example above).

So far we’re building up a pretty good picture of what the perfect backlink

should look like, not only in font / display, but also in position, relevance of

the topic that the page is on, and also the linking URLs and target domain that

the backlink is going to.

But there’s another key factor to add into the mix, and that’s where Google’s

massive databases come into play...

Analysing User Behaviour

The computational power Google have is immense, they not only crawl, index

and rank pages in real-time across the globe, they serve the results of a search

against their databases mostly in under half a second.

To get your head around the work involved in achieving this feat is quite hard,

and for the vast majority of searches they are pretty much bang on the money.

So, the next bit I’m going to talk about will make you think a bit more about

just how much the big G analyse and store all the stuff that you and I do

online.

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With regard to backlinks on a page, Google not only stores the information

we’ve talked about so far (font, anchor text, target URLs etc.), but they also

store information for how the user interacts with each and every link.

Basically, Google looks at a page and sees how many links are on it. They

record all the information about each of those links with regard to the page

they are on.

Google then track how many times each of those links are clicked, and then

score all the links on the page either positively or negatively depending on

whether they were clicked or not clicked.

If that sounds a little confusing then I’m sorry, but trust me, the wording in the

patent is worse!

Here it is in a quick example:

• Let’s say that there are 3 links on a page.

• When the page is viewed the surfer clicks on Link #1.

• Google records this as a positive interaction for Link #1, but it also records

it as a negative interaction for Link #2 and Link #3 because they we’re

not clicked.

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• Also, if a surfer views the page and no links are clicked then all 3 links are

scored negatively.

• Google over time builds up a profile for each link based on these positive

and negative interactions.

This is a massive thing that people don’t ever realise!

So, if there’s a ton of links on a page, then unless your link is front and centre

and has a high probability of getting clicked, then all that’s going to happen to

your link is lots of negative scoring in Google’s databases, and this is why so

many ‘comments’ links are of a low value.

Nofollow

OK, this isn’t part of the patent, but it is bound to be something that someone

asks when they read this article, so it’s something I’m going to cover briefly as

it’s important that you get a grasp of my world-view of the issue.

For those that aren’t aware of what the issue is, ‘nofollow’ is a tag which was

introduced to allow website owners to show which links they trust and which

links they don’t trust as much. Predominantly it was to allow a better control

of comment spam.

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By putting ‘rel=nofollow’ into a backlink you are effectively telling Google that

you’re not 100% sure about this link, and please don’t pass on any PageRank

to that link.

From this, many an SEO expert and commentator went on a warpath of

‘nofollow’ links are worthless.

Sorry, but this is bullshit.

A ‘nofollow’ link is not worthless, every link has a value (as long as it’s not in

some spam ridden, malware hell-hole). All that will happen is that the link

will not pass PageRank.

This is something you really need to get a hold of.

I’ve said it at the start of this article, and I’m going to re-iterate it now:

You need to have a healthy mix of backlinks from a wide variety of sources

pointing back to your site.

The diversity in the linking domains (e.g. not all links are coming from only

three sites) is an important factor, as is the need to have the high PR links from

higher ‘authority’ domains alongside your PR0 and ‘nofollow’ links.

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Saying that ‘nofollow’ links are worthless is just plain wrong, and it’s one of

those topics which has got so muddied and confusing because of the whole PR

sculpting thing that it’s become beyond a joke.

The overriding factor you need to understand is that the person reading the

backlink on a page on the internet doesn’t give a rat’s ass if the link is

‘nofollow’, if it’s something that they want to click on then they will click on it.

Google might not give you any PR juice for the ‘nofollow’ link, but are Google

the ones who are going to be buying your product? Does the Googlebot even

have a credit card?

Don’t go down the blind path of just trying to create links for Mr Google.

Backlinks serve a dual purpose, the first is to get your pages / site ranked,

and the second is to get people to click on them and actually visit your site.

At the end of the day you want real live human beings to come to your site,

then you can go about the business of actually selling them something, and just

trying to build backlinks to suit Mr Google isn’t going to pay your bills.

OK, that’s about the end of my ‘nofollow’ rant.

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Tying It All Together

I’ve outlined all the important bits, and now it’s time to bring it all together so

that you can see where the best place is to get your backlinks.

So, here it is...

The perfect backlink should be:

• In the main page body, and not in a sidebar, footer or blog comments.

• It needs to be in the top section of the page, above the fold when viewed

on an 800x600 screen.

• The link needs to look like a link.

• The link needs to be slightly larger than the surrounding text, and either

underlined, bold or italicized (or something different enough to make it

stand out).

• The anchor text of the link needs to contain the keywords you’re targeting,

and not have an overly commercial intent.

• The anchor text needs to be related to the topic / theme of the page the

link is on.

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• The words surrounding the link need to be related to the anchor text.

• The target URL needs to be related to the same topic / theme as the page

the link is on.

• The target URL needs to be on a separate host to the page the link is on.

• The page the link is on needs to have as little other outbound links on as

possible to reduce negative scoring.

So those are the headlines on the perfect backlink, but there are some

important things you need to understand when planning out your backlinks,

and your overall backlink strategy:

• You need to have a good spread of lower level links (PR0, nofollow, all

from sites which are playing by the Penguin & Panda rulebook etc.) to

make you look natural.

• You need to have a good diversity in the linking structure, so 50 links from

50 different sites related to your niche is a wider variety of people giving

you a ‘vote’ than getting 5 links from 1 high PR site in your niche, which is

only 1 ‘vote’.

• The higher PR backlinks are what ultimately separates you from your

competitors, but keep in mind the need for the lower-level links as well.

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• Backlinking is an ongoing task and needs to be done regularly. Google

likes ‘freshness’ and if you go away and do 200 backlinks in one week then

you’ll see an initial bump, but after that your page will drop down the

SERPs because it doesn’t have any continuation. It’s better to do a slower

approach over a longer time to get the longer term benefit.

• Always remember that there’s two purposes for the backlink, one is to get

the search engines interested, and the other (and ultimately more

important purpose), is to get the people who are going to read the content

to click the link.

Where Can I Get My Perfect Backlink?

Let’s start off straight away by saying that any automated tool isn’t going to get

you the perfect backlink, and this is simply because of where these tools go to

place your links.

So, to get the real good stuff you can get Google to help you out by telling you

which pages it thinks are related to your actual page, and we’ll talk more

about that in a moment.

Basically, you want to get your backlink onto a page which is very related to

yours, and you want that link to be in the main body near the top.

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So, the best way to do this is by taking the time to communicate and network

with other authorities in your niche / market.

Unfortunately this isn’t a quick or easy process, but once you’ve got your foot

in the door and you get more well known, then it becomes much easier further

down the line.

What we’re looking to do here is build the relationships so that we can then

get some really good unique quality content posted on a good site in your

niche, and this is where we’ll be putting the backlink to your site.

Now, you might be reading this and automatically think: “Wait, this is guest

blogging, and haven’t Google said that they’re cracking down on guest

blogging?”, and the answer here is kind of...

Google are indeed going after ‘guest blogging’, but what Google are going after

are thin content sites whose prime purpose is to offer paid links in the content.

This isn’t what I’m talking about.

I’m talking about making connections with decent quality sites in your niche,

ones which are of a super high quality and don’t offer any paid links at all, and

then getting your content (with backlink) on to that site.

� 33

If the sites you’re looking at offer paid links, then quite frankly you’re looking

at the wrong sites. What we’re doing here is looking to add quality content on

a relevant site, nothing more.

As I said right at the start of this article, Google haven’t changed their focus on

backlinks, they’ve just got better at identifying those who try and game the

system.

They’ve always tried to discount links from massive blog farms which have

thin or poor quality content, spun article syndication, and other schemes

which are solely designed to artificially raise the link profile.

With this in mind you don’t want to just go running off to some random site

which you think is ‘right’ to get your content posted, because there’s a very

simple way to get Google to tell you what it sees as the right site which I’m

going to share in a moment. However, first of all there’s something more

important to discuss.

You have to approach this in the right way, and a lot of the time it’s just a

matter of trying to get on a one-to-one basis with the site owner and letting

them know how much you like their stuff.

If you just burst through with an email to the site owner saying “Hi, love your

stuff and can I I give you one of my awesome articles to grab a backlink” then

expect to get ignored, or rejected, and possibly get some verbal abuse for good

measure.

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In fact, even after you’ve built up a relationship with the site owner they might

still say no, my advice is to take it on the chin and move on.

The best way to get your foot in the door is to try to speak to them personally

after you’ve already made sure they have some trust in you, and you can

build that trust using simple things like communicating with them using

Twitter or Facebook, or leaving great blog comments on their site (with no

links in the comment), and actually being part of a conversation with them so

they get to know you.

Think about it, if some complete stranger came knocking on your door saying

“Hi, wanna buy my new widget?”, then your response is most likely going to be

no, but if one of your friends says “Oh, I’ve got a new widget and it’s great,

fancy having a look and maybe buy one?”, then you’re naturally going to be

more receptive because your friend has built up that trust element in advance.

I’ve been preaching ‘becoming the brand’ and ‘stand out in your niche and

become the leader’ for so long now that it should be second nature to you, and

it’s part of this friendly approach in order to position yourself as the ‘go-to’

person for your niche / market that will help seal the deal.

The more you build your credibility in your niche / market, and the more you

show yourself as a nice person who’s genuinely interested in the topic, the

more easily you’ll find it is to actually talk to people about providing content,

or even selling whatever it is you’re trying to sell.

� 35

I also heartily recommend you read “Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion”

by Dr Robert Cialdini - I guarantee that it will change your perspective on a

whole range of things, both online and offline.

OK, now that you know how you should go about approaching people, you

need to know who the right people are which you should approach, and this

is where Google comes in, because you want to get your perfect backlink on a

related site and only Google can tell you who they think is related.

Fortunately, Google make this process stupid simple.

And I really do mean simple!

If you want to know which pages Google thinks are relevant to your page then

you simply go to Google’s search page, then type in ‘related:’ followed by the

URL of your page.

Google will then very kindly give you all the pages that it has indexed which it

thinks are relevant to your page, and crucially, they rank those pages in

order of importance.

See, I told you it was simple.

For example, if we put in the URL of a popular dog training page we get back

all the pages which Google has in it’s index which it deems relevant to that

� 36

page, and it lists those results with the ones it sees as most important and

relevant.

Take a look at the following screenshot to see what I mean:

So, which sites do you think you should approach first?!

Simply start with the number one site and move down the list.

You might find that some of the sites simply aren’t relevant to approach, they

might be a store like Amazon, or it might simply be a sales page for a product.

If that’s the case, move down the list until you find one which is relevant.

� 37

Remember, the key to this process is to engage with the other people at these

sites on a friendly basis to build up trust, then once you’ve done all that you

can make the approach around sharing some quality content.

If you’ve done the legwork and have made the effort then it can be as simple as

asking the question in a friendly manner:

“Hey Bob, I loved that piece you put out the other day on training your

Shitzu, I’ve actually got a great related piece of content on training a

Chihuahua, would you mind me putting it up on your site as I think

it’s something your readers might be into.”

There’s a ton of different options for you to try and test, and remember, don’t

get hung up if someone says no, there’s no shortage of places you can go to get

the links, just keep in mind all that you’ve read in this article and make sure

you apply the principles when creating the backlink.

So there you go, the Perfect Backlink in 2015 is pretty much the same as it

always has been. The only major difference is that so many people spend so

much time (and money) on chasing the wrong links, that they end up causing

themselves bother when Google do the next algorithm update.

I’ve been building my links with these fundamentals in mind for over 5 years,

and the sites in my networks where I’ve followed the basics have continued to

thrive through all the updates.

� 38

Oh, don’t get me wrong, I’ve got a whole bunch of sites where I’ve tested pretty

much every link scheme under the sun, some of which are ‘grey hat’ and some

of which are decidedly ‘black hat’. On nearly every occasion I’ve had some

good success with these sites, but with some of them I have indeed been

caught and slapped to one degree or another.

I’m not saying you can’t get rankings or make money with the more dubious

approaches to link building - you totally can! But, it’s not for your main money

sites simply due to the fact that you can find your sites getting killed overnight

if you do get caught.

If you follow the fundamentals then the links you build will be solid.

If you chase any quick link schemes which don’t meet Google’s requirements,

then you can expect to eventually get caught out when they finally tweak their

algorithms at some point in the future, which could have a very real impact on

your income if your main money sites get slapped from here to next week.

� 39

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� 42

The One Crucial Thing To Stand Out From The Crowd And Get More

Visitors To Your Website

“Today we're living in an anti-Waldo world, where you don't want to

blend in. You want to stand out like you're wearing a red and white

sweater, and everyone else has on black.” - Jarod Kintz

Getting ranked is one thing, but once you’re appearing in the search results

you’re still competing with other sites and ad units to get the click from the

reader to get that all important visit to your site.

A couple of years back Google introduced the Authorship tag which was a

great boost for making your results stand out from the crowd, because you

could have an image next to your search result which automatically drew the

eye of the reader and grabbed their attention, and it looked like this:

� 43

However, as Google so often do, they ditched this experiment of displaying the

author image, and as a result the search entry doesn’t automatically grab

attention, in fact it now looks like this:

That’s not to say having the Authorship tag isn’t going to be important for you,

because the tag was never just about getting your headshot into the SERPs.

Google are moving more and more towards trying to link content to real

people, so if you’re enabling Authorship and linking your real Google account

to your web properties, then over time your content is going to get treated as

more reliable and maybe have an effect on rankings.

In this article I want to cover a tactic that less than 1% of other websites out

there are currently using that will help your website jump out from the page in

the search results and stand out from the crowd.

In fact, Bing have actually come right out and said that what I'm about to show

you has increased click thru rates.

I'm talking about rich snippets, and over the next few pages I'm going to be

looking at what it all means and how you can get it implemented.

� 44

What Is Microdata, RDF's, and Schema.org?

There is a lot of information out there, and Google and the other search

engines are certainly doing their best to index it all.

But indexing doesn't necessarily mean understanding.

If a search engine could 'understand' what your content was about then it

would be able to offer up much more informed search engine results for a

users query. It would be able to answer complex questions and provide

resources that are directly associated with the query not just by semantical

reference but by direct knowledge.

Ok, I am starting to over complicate things here...

What I really want to say here is that: there is another language that Google

and the other search engines understand that describes your content and that

can be added to any page so that they know exactly what it is about. This

'language' is the microdata and schema.org markup.

Now this may sound groundbreaking but this has actually been around for

years, it's just that very few people use it and support was sketchy... but over

the last 18 months all three top search engines got together and officially gave

support to this, and introduced schema.org which is now a standard for

describing your content to the machines.

� 45

Now let's get some terminology out of the way:

• RDF: This is the Resource Definition Format, it is a standard way of

sharing information across the internet, think of it as a machine readable

language for information.

• Microformats: These are special tags that you can add to pages to share

RDF information.

• Schema.org: This is the new standard for Microformats (i.e. HTML tags).

It is a shared vocabulary that makes it easier for webmasters to

understand how they can markup their pages so that the search engines

understand them. This is supported by all the main search engines to one

degree or another.

• Microdata: The new way of supporting the schema.org vocabulary.

� 46

A Real World Example

Let me give you a real world example of Microdata in action from the live

schema.org site. This example may look a little scary and complicated at first,

but don't worry I am going to make it much easier later on.

Imagine you have a page about the movie Avatar - a page with a link to a

movie trailer, information about the director, and so on. Your HTML code

behind the scenes might look something like this:

<div> <h1>Avatar</h1> <span>Director: James Cameron (born August 16, 1954)</span> <span>Science fiction</span> <a href="../movies/avatar-theatrical-trailer.html">Trailer</a> </div>

To begin, identify the section of the page that is 'about' the movie Avatar. To

do this, add the itemscope element to the HTML tag that encloses

information about the item, like this:

<div itemscope> <h1>Avatar</h1> <span>Director: James Cameron (born August 16, 1954) </span> <span>Science fiction</span> <a href="../movies/avatar-theatrical-trailer.html">Trailer</a> </div>

� 47

By adding itemscope you are specifying that the HTML contained in the

<div>...</div> block is about a particular item.

But it's not all that helpful to specify that there is an item being discussed

without specifying what kind of an item it is. You can specify the type of item

using the itemtype attribute immediately after the itemscope.

<div itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Movie"> <h1>Avatar</h1> <span>Director: James Cameron (born August 16, 1954)</span> <span>Science fiction</span> <a href="../movies/avatar-theatrical-trailer.html">Trailer</a> </div>

This specifies that the item contained in the div is in fact a Movie, as defined in

the schema.org type hierarchy. Item types are provided as URLs, which in this

case is a 'movie' (http://schema.org/Movie).

itemprop What additional information can we give search engines about the movie

Avatar?

Movies have interesting properties such as actors, director, ratings. To label

the properties of an item we use the itemprop attribute.

� 48

For example, to identify the director of a movie you can add

itemprop="director" to the element enclosing the director's name (there's a full

list of all the properties you can associate with a movie at http://schema.org/

Movie).

<div itemscope itemtype ="http://schema.org/Movie"> <h1 itemprop="name">Avatar</h1> <span>Director: <span itemprop="director">James Cameron</span> (born August 16, 1954)</span> <span itemprop="genre">Science fiction</span> <a href="../movies/avatar-theatrical-trailer.html" itemprop="trailer">Trailer</a> </div>

Note that we have added additional <span>...</span> tags to attach the

itemprop attributes to the appropriate text on the page. <span> tags don't

change the way pages are rendered by a web browser, so they are a convenient

HTML element to use with itemprop.

Search engines can now understand not just that http://

www.avatarmovie.com is a URL, but also that it's the URL for the trailer for the

science-fiction movie Avatar, which was directed by James Cameron.

Embedded Items Sometimes the value of an item property can itself be another item with its

� 49

own set of properties. For example, we can specify that the director of the

movie is an item of type Person, and the person has the properties name and

birthDate. To specify that the value of a property is another item, you begin a

new itemscope immediately after the corresponding itemprop:

<div itemscope itemtype ="http://schema.org/Movie"> <h1 itemprop="name">Avatar</h1> <div itemprop="director" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Person"> Director: <span itemprop="name">James Cameron</span> (born <span itemprop="birthDate">August 16, 1954)</span> </div> <span itemprop="genre">Science fiction</span> <a href="../movies/avatar-theatrical-trailer.html" itemprop="trailer">Trailer</a> </div>

So that was a pretty in-depth example of Microdata in action but let me tell

you why this is extremely important.

First off we get to tell Google what this page is about.

But the kicker here is, we also get to tell Google what a link is about.

And boy, have we had some results with this.

� 50

Now the above example was just for movies but there is Microdata markup for:

• Events

• Places

• People

• Organizations

• Reviews

• Products

• Offers

• Books

• Recipes

• Ratings

• Restaurants

• Music

• TV Series

• Articles

• News

• Maps

• Photographs

• Web Pages (about us, checkout)

…and there's a hole heap more.

You can find a full list here: http://schema.org/docs/full.html

� 51

Real World Examples And Results

Now all of this is very exciting but I want to start by showing you some real

world examples of companies who have implemented Microdata, and the

results some companies have had using them.

Let's start with the effect that schema.org markup can have on Google organic

listings, and here is one which uses the Reviews and Ratings markup.

This organic listing gets the addition of the stars, and if you actually go through

to the page you will see from the screenshot below that there are four reviews

and the average rating is four out of five:

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Now most people think that this is something only large companies like Yelp

can do, but if you implement reviews and ratings on your site then over time

Google will begin to show these for your listings too.

So that is one example of Microdata in organic listings but I want to show you

how they also appear in enhanced AdWords listings:

� 53

This is a pretty loaded example as it has the star rating, the reviews listed, links

to sections of the site etc.

Think how much more CTR this ad gets in comparison to the other two listings

above it.

Now again, you may think that John Lewis has paid extra for the star ratings

but they haven't, the page which this ad links to has all the Microdata in and

Google is just using this, you can see other companies making use of the same

markup and getting an enhanced listing.

� 54

At a recent conference I spoke to a couple of marketers who are in a particular

cooking supply niche, and they shared some pretty amazing data with me and

gave me access to their analytics account to verify their information.

Now before I tell you the story let me show you what a typical recipe listing in

Google looks like:

As you can see it shows the cooking time and the calorie count. Nice. Anyhoo,

on with the story.

This couple sell ingredients to a particular speciality segment of the market, so

to support that and to get more content on to their site they have been writing

a recipe / cooking blog and roughly put out one post a week linking to the

ingredients in their store etc.

� 55

On average they were getting 600 hits a day on their site except for holiday

times where the site obviously had a huge spike in visits. This was before

implementing Microdata on their site.

They initially started by implementing the markup for recipes and included

the following extra information on each page:

• cookTime

• cookingMethod

• ingredients

• prepTime

• recipeCategory

• recipeCuisine

• recipeInstructions

• recipeYield

• totalTime

There are few extra things they could have added to the page but wanted to

keep it simple, and as they already had this information on the page most of it

was a simple cut and paste job.

Over a long weekend they updated all of their pages (around 110 at the time)

with the new data.

� 56

Previous to doing this their recipes were showing up on the second to third

page of Google when you typed in a particular dish with the occasional one

hitting page one.

A week after implementing this they came into the shop and saw that they had

nearly 90 more orders to fill from their store than normal, they checked their

analytics account and it was just showing up Saturday's data and they had

over 5,000 visitors to their site, and to pages that don't normally get a lot of

hits.

Obviously they quickly checked the SERPs and most of their recipes were now

showing up around the top spots of Google, all they had done is add

Microdata to the pages and Google had picked that up.

Because they had put their ingredients in the list, Google was pulling that

information out and showing up their recipes on it's site.

A total success and a huge change in their business, they have now closed

down their physical shop and just have a warehouse for the raw ingredients

and delivery, they currently ship $200,000 of ingredients a week... all thanks to

Microdata markup and the semantic web.

When I spoke to them at the conference I suggested making one change, and

that was to add nutritional information to the recipe Microdata which would

give them an even more enhanced organic listing.

� 57

They went away and did that a couple of days later and then a couple of weeks

later once Google had re-crawled their website they noticed a 12% increase in

traffic and all their listings now contain the calorie count information and

they appear higher than any of the competition.

Now that is an extreme example and your milage may vary, but by giving

Google more information so that it can make an informed decision about your

content can only do you good, and later I am going to show you how you can

get started with all of this, but for now I want to tell you about another way

Microdata can help you.

� 58

Microdata And Enhanced Local Listings

This example for us really showed how powerful Microdata can be. Up until

this point we had been running tests on Google using Microdata to boost

review sites and to get enhanced link juice but a friend of ours came to us with

a problem.

His business focusses mostly on local SEO and one of his clients was being

seriously outranked in Google by a competitor which was located nowhere

near to his business.

He had tried everything from getting customers to write reviews, getting

entries in all the major directories - everything - but the other guy was still out

ranking him despite being nearly 40 miles away from the location.

So we decided to add the following to his ‘About Us’ page:

<div itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/LocalBusiness"> <span itemprop="name">His Business Name</span>

<div itemprop="address" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/ PostalAddress"> <span itemprop="streetAddress">Address 1</span> <br /> <span itemprop="streetAddress">Address 2</span> <br /> <span itemprop="addressLocality">Address Town</span> <br /> <span itemprop="addressRegion">Address County</span> <br /> <span itemprop="postalCode">Address Post Code</span> <br /> </div>

</div>

� 59

This added his business name and full postal address to the page in both

human readable and machine readable format.

Bingo!

It took about a week but he is now top spot in the Google Places listings - a

simple and effective fix which only took a couple of minutes to implement.

So if you are in the local space, have a local physical business, and want to

make sure that Google lists you properly then make sure you put your

machine readable information on your 'About Us' page etc.

� 60

Putting This To Work

So by now I am sure you are itching to get started with this, and the easiest way

is to use a WordPress plugin.

There are a few different plugins available, and the two which jump out for me

are called Schema Creator (https://wordpress.org/plugins/schema-creator/)

or Seamless Schema (https://wordpress.org/plugins/seamless-schema/).

Both are free and easy to install, and both do pretty much the same thing.

When you’ve installed one of the plugins and you’re putting together your

blog post or page you will now have an extra section where you can select your

schema tags and enter details below the in the post edit screen.

The Schema Creator box looks something like this:

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And Seamless Schema looks like something like this:

When you enter the details and save your post / page then the plugin

automatically inserts the correct schema tags into the page when it loads.

� 62

Testing Your Snippets

One of things you are going to want to do once you have implemented some of

the Microdata code on your site is to test whether it is marked up correctly and

that Google can read it. They have provided a tool for this here:

https://developers.google.com/structured-data/testing-tool/

To use the tool just paste in the URL of the page you want to check and then

click on the ‘Fetch & Validate’ button:

Google then validate the page and report back all of the tags they’ve found and

highlight any errors:

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There are a lot of options for adding this markup to your websites, and

depending on what you are currently working on adding schema.org data

anywhere on your site is only going to help your search listings.

The absolute kicker is that at the moment there are less than 1% of websites

who are integrating this type of data, so if you add it then you can steal a

march on your competition and it will help you stand out from the crowd.

� 64

The Missing Link To SEO That You Should Ignore At Your Peril!

“An expert is someone who has succeeded in making decisions and

judgements simpler through knowing what to pay attention

to and what to ignore.” - Edward de Bono

When people hear the words ‘Search Engine Optimisation’, the vast majority

automatically think that it’s about how to leverage backlinks and some other

ninja methods to get ranked on the first page of Google, but there’s one thing

that quite a lot of people completely miss out...

You see, there is more to SEO than just getting ranked on Google.

The ‘O’ of ‘SEO’ stands for optimisation, and optimising isn’t just about getting

a good ranking, it’s about getting the best bang for your buck when your site

actually does show up in the search results.

What I’m going to outline in this article is optimising the Title Tag on your

pages, and I’m going to explain why this is a crucially important factor in your

SEO strategy.

The Title Tag is one of those elements that many people overlook, and if you

take a look at the search results you can see straight away the ones who are

doing it all wrong.

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There are quite a few people out there who will tell you that optimising the title

tag won’t give you a significant boost in the rankings, and this is partly true.

It's not as powerful as it used to be for ranking, especially if you're keyword

stuffing which Google will penalise you for, but trust me when I say that if you

ignore this then it’s at your own peril.

The real reason we want to optimise the Title Tag is that we want to not just be

optimising the tag to appeal to the search engine bots who are indexing and

ranking our sites, but more importantly, we want to appeal to the real live

humans who will be viewing the search results.

This really shouldn’t need saying, but the primary goal of your title tag is to

get the user to click and come to your website.

Shocking, I know. Such a simple thing, but one which is completely ignored

by 99% of the websites out there.

Everyone is so entrenched with doing all the SEO gimmicks and tricks to get

Google to index and rank their sites that they totally forget the number one

objective - getting users to actually click and visit your page.

This is why we see so many links on the search results pages which are just a

series of keywords separated by commas, dashes, or pipes.

� 66

That’s not to say you don’t want to be including your keywords in your title tag,

you absolutely need to be including them, but you need to do it in a way which

speaks to the reader and encourages them to take action.

So the key thing you need to be doing is crafting your title tags so that they

are focussed towards getting the user to click.

You should think about crafting the title tag in exactly the same way as you

would craft the headline for an advert.

You want to hit all the key triggers, speak to your customer in their language,

appeal to a problem they have, hint at a solution you can give, and above all

provide a call to action which encourages the click.

Your title tag needs to be easily read and understood by a real live human

being, because they are the ones who will be compelled to click and then

ultimately hand you some money (to date I’ve never been paid any money by

a Google bot indexing and ranking my site, only by the humans with credit

cards who do click on the links ;)

Your title tag does of course need to include the main keyphrase or keywords

you are targeting, but this needs to be in a natural way and in context with the

message you’re trying to get across to the person who’s reading it.

Take these two examples for the search ‘half marathon training tips’.

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The first one really isn’t very good. It does contain the keywords, but it’s quite

short and doesn’t give me a real reason to click apart from obviously meeting

the basic requirements of matching the keywords:

NB: I should also mention here that the small section directly below the link is

the Meta Description tag. Again, this is another area you should be investing

some time into. Others will tell you that the meta description tag is worthless

for indexing and ranking because Google completely ignore it. But as we’ve

just discussed, this is prime real-estate to convert your browsers into clicking

and becoming visitors to your page.

Here’s the second one:

This one is much better. Yes, it contains the same keywords, but this one is

written to give the reader a better understanding of what the content contains,

and having something as focussed as ‘7 training tips’ already gives the reader

the impression that the solution is quick and easy to implement.

� 68

Also note the meta description. There is a question in there which speaks

directly to the reader ‘Training for your first half marathon?’ - the odds are

quite good that people searching for ‘half marathon training tips’ are indeed

just starting out, so this is totally on target for the audience.

To craft a decent title tag you need to keep in mind effective techniques of

writing good headlines, so you need to speak to the reader in their language,

maybe ask a question which you know they want answering, including

specific numbers (like the ‘7 tips...’) can work well etc., and above all make it a

compelling call to action to get the click.

Here's another one which is sort OK, but not quite ticking all the right boxes.

They’ve done a clever play on the half marathon distance (13.1 miles = 13.1

tips), but the title tag here is too long and gets cut off with the 3 dots ... and the

description isn’t focussed at all:

This is another important point. Google will cut off the end of title tags which

are too long and add the 3 dots to the end.

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It used to be that Google would give you about 70 characters for your title tag,

and anything over would get cut off. However, Google actually give you a set

width in pixels for the title tag area, and because certain letters are wider than

others (i.e. the letter ‘I’ is narrower than the letter ‘M’) the number of

characters you get can vary.

For best results I recommend between 55-67 characters, and you can easily

check what this looks like by using a free tool over at this link:

http://snippetoptimizer.net/google-serp/

That tool is really straight forward to use, you just type in your title, description

and link, then click on the option for Google SERP Simulator and you’ll get a

nice preview.

If you’re on WordPress then you’ll most likely have this built in automatically if

you’re using one of the many SEO plugins out there.

There is a final point to note...

Google can (and do!) rewrite title tags. There’s nothing you can do to stop this,

but in the main Google only tend to rewrite titles which are too long, so if

you're sticking to the guidelines I mentioned above you stand a better chance

of having your carefully crafted title displayed in the results exactly the way

you want it to.

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So, let’s have a brief recap on the main points...

• The title tag is your opportunity to get the readers attention.

• The title tag needs to include your keywords, but in a way that makes

sense to the reader.

• Craft your title tag with the same focus as you would with your advert

headlines.

• Keep your title tag to between 55-67 characters including spaces, test

before you publish using the free tools, rewrite if it’s too long and gets cut

off with the 3 dots.

• The meta description tag might be no good for the Google bot, but it’s

prime real-estate to talk directly to your target and encourage the click.

• Remember, the number one job of your site appearing in the search

results is to get the reader to click and visit your site - treat it as a call to

action that appeals to get the click.

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Getting More Pages Indexed And Ranked In The Search Results

“We shall see the crumbs of bread... and they will show us

our way home again.” - Hänsel and Gretel

There are so many things to think about when it comes to SEO that people can

easily get overwhelmed, but the basics of good SEO are relatively simple.

Everything should always start with theming your site around a specific topic,

then categorising your content into semantically relevant keyword groups. In

a nutshell this simply means keeping your site tightly focussed to the core

theme.

For example, if your site is based on the topic of ‘Golf’ you might have your

content categorised into specific keyword groups like ‘Golf Equipment’, ‘Golf

Tips’, ‘Golf Courses’, and so on.

When it comes to getting your pages indexed and ranked by the search

engines we do of course need backlinks pointing to it from other places

around the web, that way the search engine crawlers can follow a link and find

our site.

However, there are a couple of other things we can do to help the search

engines crawl and index all of our pages.

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The first is to add a sitemap, and depending on what CMS you’re using on your

website (like WordPress) this might have already been created by a plugin (all

of the main SEO plugins contain the sitemap functionality).

Once the sitemap is created it should be automatically picked up by the search

engines, but you can help yourself out by registering your site with both

Google Webmaster Tools and Bing Webmaster Tools, and then you can

manually add the location of the sitemap if it hasn’t already been fetched.

The second way to help with crawling and indexing is using some tags which

have been around for a long time, but they’re not always used and are often

overlooked. These tags are called Breadcrumbs, and I’ll expect why they’re

important for a few different reasons in a moment.

You will have seen breadcrumbs on your internet travels, they are especially

prevalent on e-commerce sites, and on a website they look something along

the lines of this:

What you might have also seen is that Google have been automatically

generating breadcrumbs in their search results to enhance the listings, which

is great because it makes the entry stand out on the page and gives a good

classification of the content.

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Here’s a couple of search entries, this first one is with the breadcrumbs:

And this one is without:

As you can see, these enhance the search listing and give the browser a clear

idea of what your site is about, which can be very helpful in getting that all

important click.

These are picked up automatically by Google, and we’ll talk later on how you

can quickly implement them on your site and improve your chances of getting

these shown on your search results to enhance your listings and make them

stand out from the crowd.

I’m also going to talk about why breadcrumbs are good for indexing and

getting more pages in the search results shortly, but first I want to talk about

why they can be good for your users and how they can boost your website

stats.

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Giving A Good User Experience

Getting index and ranked is important, but what is equally important is

keeping your visitor on your site once they’ve clicked on the link in the

search results, and to do this you want to give a good user experience (UX for

short ;)

Giving good UX comes down to a number of factors, including first and

foremost decent quality content, information, or a product that the visitor is

looking for.

As a secondary element you want to make your site easy to navigate and

helpful to the visitor, and this is where the breadcrumbs come in to play.

Breadcrumbs instantly show the visitor where they are in the hierarchy of your

site, and this is especially helpful for larger sites which lots of pages of content

(or lots of different product pages for e-commerce sites).

If you think about it from a basic point of view, the breadcrumbs can actually

help keep the visitor on your site for longer and can instantly point the visitor

in a specific direction to other content, products, and pages.

It might be that the visitor has landed on a page which doesn’t offer them what

they’re initially looking for, but they may just click on the breadcrumb to

browse some more pages on your site to find what they actually do want.

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This in turn increases the time on site and reduces the bounce rate, which is

good in Google's eyes and can help build up your site's reputation and

authority, and it shows Google that the content you are producing is what

people want (because they're sticking around and not leaving your site).

For best user experience the breadcrumb should be at the top of the page

where the visitor can easily see it.

Crawling, Indexing, And Ranking

Breadcrumbs allow search engines to better determine the structure of your

site, which helps massively with crawling, indexing, and ranking.

Search engine bots can come into your site at any page, they don't just come

in at the home page and then drill down, so it’s important to give the search

crawlers clear directions for all of your other pages.

If the search bot lands on a page deep in your site, and then if they see a

breadcrumb they now have a path to take to further index and crawl your

other linked pages.

Don’t underestimate how important this can be.

By also seeing which category the content is in they can also better classify

your page for indexing and ranking in the search results, because your

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categories will all be keyword relevant and semantically related (assuming

you're following the SEO basics ;)

Having a page or post in multiple categories might result in more than one

breadcrumb showing on the page, but keep in mind that Google will pick the

first breadcrumb it sees and completely ignore the others, so ideally you

want to tightly theme your posts and pages into a category that matches.

This of course might not be possible for some sites, especially e-commerce

where a product might fit into more than one category, but in an ideal world

you’ll be trying to tightly theme your content into individual keyword

categories for best results.

Google doesn't like to see sites with minimal content that aren't helpful to the

user, they like to see rich sites with quality content all themed around a

specific topic, so getting more of your pages crawled and indexed is going to

give you a much better boost.

For best results the breadcrumb should be nearer the top of the page because

the search engine bots don't always initially crawl entire pages (especially

when they are long content pages), so you want to make sure that the

breadcrumb gets included in the crawl.

Let’s now take a look at implementing these bad boys :)

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Implementing The Breadcrumbs

Google supports breadcrumbs tagged in the Microdata, RDFa, or JSON-LD

formats, and if you’re on a plain old HTML site then you can find the quick

tags to markup your pages here:

https://developers.google.com/structured-data/breadcrumbs

If you're using WordPress then there are plenty of free plugins on the

WordPress Plugins Repository which you can use, including these three which

are in no particular order of preference:

• Yoast SEO Plugin (https://wordpress.org/plugins/wordpress-seo/)

• Breadcrumb NavXT (https://wordpress.org/plugins/breadcrumb-navxt/)

• Breadcrumb Trail (https://wordpress.org/plugins/breadcrumb-trail/)

Each of those plugins listed above will automatically generate the breadcrumb

tags and display them on your site, but if you’re currently running an SEO

plugin you might find that it already has breadcrumb support, so have a look

in your plugin settings to see if it’s already there for you to enable.

Don’t underestimate how helpful breadcrumbs can be, they can enhance your

listing in the search results to get more clicks, they can help your site visitors

and keep them around for longer, and they can help you get more of your

pages crawled, indexed, and ranked in the search engines.

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Q&A Call

“The art and science of asking questions is the

source of all knowledge.” - Thomas Berger

I put up a post inside the Raine Report Facebook Group this month asking for

your questions on any topic, and to be honest I didn’t expect such a fevered

response!

I’ve now recorded the Q&A call, and I recommend you grab the beverage of

your choice, kick back, and take a listen:

Listen To The Q&A Call

If you’re not yet a member of the Raine Report Facebook Group then you are

seriously missing out. There are currently just over 1,150 people just like you

networking, asking questions on the training and report content, and it’s

becoming a really positive community.

There’s no cost, it’s a completely free group, and I’m in there every single day

taking part and answering your questions.

Head on to the group and ask me any question you want:

Join The Raine Report Facebook Group

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