As time goes by, the academic level of SEO is growing and there are already interesting courses. But I still believe more in the self-taught foundation to better fix the knowledge. For this reason, and mainly for a question of cost, I suggest listening to recognized professionals, rather than paying for courses.

A good tool to listen to recognized professionals is Twitter. From there you can get valuable information, tested and validated, in most cases.

For this reason, I decided to select the 50 Twitter accounts that I suggest you follow if you are interested in SEO:

Cyrus Shepard @CyrusShepard

Kevin Raposo @Kevin_Raposo 

Brian Dean @Backlinko 

Danny Sullivan @dannysullivan 

Jaime Novoa @jaimenovoa

Jesús Martinez @jesusmargon

Chris Dyson @ChrisLDyson 

Matt Cutts @mattcutts 

Bloomberg Gadfly @Bfly

Danny Groner @DannyGroner

Jordiob @jordiobdotcom

Ross Hudgens @RossHudgens 

Stacey Cavanagh @staceycav 

Dr. Pete Meyers @dr_pete

Simo Ahava @SimoAhava

Geoff Kenyon @geoffkenyon 

Phil Nottingham @philnottingham 

Eric Enge @stonetemple 

Annie Cushing @AnnieCushing 

Tad Chef @onreact_com 

Jaime Novoa @jaimenovoa

Jesús Martinez @jesusmargon

Danny Ashton @dannyashton 

Avinash Kaushik @avinash

Wil Reynolds @wilreynolds 

Kate Morris @katemorris 

Sean McGinnis @seanmcginnis 

Hannah Smith @hannah_bo_banna 

Ian Lurie @portentint 

Lyndon Antcliff @lyndoman 

Jordiob @jordiobdotcom

Ryan Hoover @rrhoover

Will Critchlow @willcritchlow 

Barry Schwartz @rustybrick 

Larry Kim @larrykim 

Kane Jamison @KaneJamison 

Bill Slawski @bill_slawski

Aleyda Solís @aleyda

James Agate @jamesagate 

Roger Montti @martinibuster 

Rand Fishkin @randfish

Jason Acidre @jasonacidre 

Emilio García @CampamentoWeb

Michael King @iPullRank

Paul Shapiro @fighto 

Adam Connell @adamjayc 

Jon Cooper @pointblankseo 

Fernando Maciá @fernandomacia

Natzir Turrado @natzir9 

Mjcachón @mjcachon

I also suggest you subscribe to Seopatía, Esteve Castells’ newsletter. Not only because it is so updated, but also because of its didactic and easy-to-interpret methodology for all SEO levels.

https://www.getrevue.co/profile/estevecastells

Finally, and doing a bit of self-publicity, I recommend attending SEOday. An international SEO conference where the industry’s main referents expose their SEO strategies and future trends.

https://puntorojo.com/seoday

I hope this information will be helpful for your SEO knowledge to grow. But the most important thing is that we all keep contributing to the list so we can help each other, that’s why I ask you to please comment with more Twitter accounts to follow, more newsletters, more courses, events, and other tools :-D

Why are we sharing this information? 1 week ago we got an offer from an ”SEO specialist”, who offered to write a post on our blog with ”introductory information about SEO”. After reading it, we realized that many people are at risk of consuming the wrong information, and it is one of the causes of the delay in the growth of the SEO industry.

I copy below the text so you can identify when you are consuming valuable information, such as that of the professionals mentioned above, and when you are not…

SEO for beginners

SEO is an extremely important word that is part of the vocabulary used daily by all those who work daily in the field of digital marketing.

Its acronym means Search Engine Optimization.

But why is Search Engine Optimization important? How does SEO work? Is SEO necessary? What happens if my website does not have SEO?

These are some of the questions that many people ask about SEO, so we have decided to dedicate this post to answering these and other questions in the simplest way possible.

At the end of this post, you will no longer be the uninterested party in the conversation, and you will start a new goal in your website (in case you don’t handle the term): “Providing SEO”.

If you already know the topic, we invite you to read it, you will surely find some interesting clues, or maybe it will simply help you to refresh the topic.

Something we have learned is that information is never enough, it should not be discriminated or underestimated.

Why is SEO important?

If I, as a user, customer, or buyer, am interested in a particular item, I will go in search of it.

Let’s imagine that I want to buy some shoes, but I have no idea how to use the Internet; the first thing I do is to go to a shopping mall because I know that there are shoe stores there, when I get to the site, I start to locate the shoe stores to evaluate the models and prices, and thus make the selection of the one I like the most.

I probably won’t visit all the shoe stores, maybe I won’t have enough time, or maybe I’ll get tired.

So if there are stores that would improve the offer and the models I probably won’t know about it.

The same thing happens with online shopping or searching, but with convenience, security and variety.

If a person enters the online platform with an objective in mind, it is like who goes to the mall, the Internet is your mall.  Look closely, the SEARCH is a guide, it takes you directly to where you want to go.

Continuing with the example of shoes, if a person enters online, women’s shoes, immediately the search engine will sort the websites, classify them, and display them by groups of pages.

As a buyer, I will start to evaluate the models and prices, and most likely I will do it in the first pages. Can you imagine that the search engine will show me 400 sites? I don’t think I would visit that many websites, it would become a stressful shopping experience.

What would happen if your website is ranked 400? or 300? or 100? or 50?

It will be like the stores in the Mall that for X reason I will not visit, no matter if you have better offers, if your models are unique, if there is no website with more security than yours, if the design is impeccable, IF THE SEARCH ENGINE DOES NOT GIVE YOU A GOOD POSITIONING THE CUSTOMERS OR USERS DO NOT SEE YOU.

And if they don’t see you, they don’t visit you, and if they don’t visit you, you don’t sell.

SEO helps you to position yourself, it helps you to be among the first, SEO is a key factor of websites, that’s why it is so important!

Statistics show that the behavior of a person interested in a product, service, or information, is to locate the target in the first pages, it is not very common to visit all the pages shown by search engines.

Do you understand now why SEO is important for your website?

I WANT A LOT OF SEO ON MY WEBSITE

Now that you know what SEO is, you’re probably thinking of calling your website administrator or developer and asking him to put a lot of SEO on your page, and that you want to appear among the first ones.

That’s great! If you’re doing that, you’ve understood what SEO is.

But I must give you a dose of reality:

“SEO is an organic work that takes a long time to obtain, so much that the first results you’ll see will be in 6 months, and with a good digital marketing campaign.”

Yes, I’m sure it fell like a bucket of cold water, but that’s the truth, SEO does not work like a button that is programmed, SEO must be worked, it must be planned, and it must be executed under a digital marketing campaign model preferably, and for best results, you should do it guided by people with experience in the area.

HOW DOES SEO WORK AND HOW DO I WORK MY WEBSITE TO HAVE SEO?

To know how SEO works, it is a primary requirement to know what elements or factors are involved in SEO?

1. Search engines are websites developed to locate on the web everything that users want to find on the Internet. The main search engines are the following:

• Google.
• Yahoo.
• Bing.
• Dogpile.
• DuckDuckgo.
• Ecosia.
• Exalead.
• Gibiru.
• Among others.

And although there are many more, who dominate the search market, Google, with all the applications it has created for PC, mobile, and Tablet, has become our necessary search participation.

1. The algorithm is a kind of programming code used by search engines to rank web pages. We are not going to dig too much into its structure, it is enough to know that we must make our publications to be well qualified by the algorithm. Google constantly updates the algorithm, so it is good to keep updated so that your SEO is optimized.
2. The design of your website, its design structure, and the speed of the site are very important for the Google algorithm to position you among the first. Avoid very heavy images, in this sense, less is more, it comes very well to what you want to achieve.
3. Publications: what you publish on the Internet, is the key to your entire site, it is your branding, it is the anchor to attract or repel your visitors. Publications are the day-to-day, previously people did not pay much attention to them and published according to their criteria and ideas.

With all the advancements in the online market, websites have adapted their publications to a persuasive market trend, with articles of real interest to users.

And users have become much more demanding; so, if you want to get your users’ attention, you must give them useful material to read.

Keys to SEO in publications

If your publications are optimized for SEO, then you have a good chance that Google will find you and give you a good positioning.

We remind you that you must be very patient with this positioning of your website because the competition is quite tough, you are not the only one in your area, nor the only one who wants to get good positioning.

However, some important keys can help you in positioning, in what is popularly called giving SEO to the publications.

1. Keywords: Keywords play an important role, but you have to be careful when writing and we will explain why:

In the beginning, there were several keywords that you had to fulfill, but people abused this, writing texts like to eat tastily, you must first say what is to eat tastily and what is not, we will show you what is to eat tasty because eating tasty is the best of all life.

The texts became sentences and even tongue twisters, so Google changed the algorithm. On the contrary,

• Try to have the keyword in the first paragraph in the first 20 words and if you can, start the text.
• Distribute the keyword in the paragraphs evenly.
• If you repeat keywords too much, you may be penalized.
• Use synonyms of your keywords.

1. Keyword selection: to select which keywords to use you can use the search engines and see the trends, when you enter a word Google gives you search references.

There are also Google pages and tools that help you to see search statistics such as Google Adwords Keyword Planners.

1. Use several keywords: You can optimize your article for several keywords, this way you have more chances to compete.
2. Title: Select a title that is attractive and place the keyword in it.
3. Many words: Many social networks have adopted the modality of few words and many images, so many users have become accustomed to punctual and not very long texts.

But as extremes are bad, do not write texts of less than 300 words, do not write very long paragraphs, and try to be persuasive.

1. Use of bullets: texts, where you use enumerations and bullets, are also prioritized by Google’s algorithm.
2. Use titles and subtitles: and include keywords in them.
3. Use of bold keyword highlighting: this practice is good but should not be abused, highlighting a couple of times some words is fine.
4. Content: this is the main thing, pay a lot of attention, Google gives priority to original content, your own, so do not try to copy anyone.

Original texts for SEO

The best thing you can do to work on the positioning of your page is to be original, and this is very serious, the horses when they compete only look ahead, you should do the same.

This is the only thing we invite you to imitate, if you have an idea of how to run your business, blog, or store, do not imitate, do not look at your competition and do the same, be original.

The best you can do is write what you know and think, distribute your words in a balanced way, and use many synonyms.

This way Google will take you into account.

In addition, bad practices are penalized, what many used to do is no longer valid, that of writing the same thing with other words, Google’s algorithm detects it now.

Recommendations

First of all, we recommend you to be patient, SEO takes time to give results but it gives them.

One of the secrets of SEO is in the research, determine who your audience is, what they would like to read, what would be useful, and give new information and your followers will remain loyal.  The research will make keyword selection easy.

Position your website and expand your ideas.

La entrada Where to learn SEO? aparece primero en SEO Blog Punto Rojo.

To do this, the most important thing is that you are already getting impressions in the SERPs and, of course, some traffic on those URLs to be optimized. However, regardless of the position you are occupying in the search results, if you manage to attract the user’s attention, the CTR percentage will probably increase and with it the visits. 

I don’t mean by this that if you improve your CTR you will also improve your ranking. In fact, John Mueller (Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google) assures that it is not a determining factor for positioning in the SERP rankings, since these are always in motion: 

What we do know is that if you improve your CTR % it is very likely that your traffic will also grow.

In fact, on one of my sites, I started implementing these 5 tips in the first week of March. 

It is a website that: 

• Is 2 years old. 
• Has not been worked from the external links profile. 
• It has no brand searches. 
• It has only been worked onsite with interlinking and content optimization. 

The results? From the last week of March I started to notice the growth and, today, comparing the last 3 months vs. the previous period there is a growth of 5.8%:

What is CTR and why is it so important in SEO? 

The CTR (Click Through Rate) is a metric that determines the percentage of clicks you receive in search results. 

To calculate it, the number of clicks you receive is divided by the number of impressions and the result is multiplied by 100. 

For example, if you receive 60 clicks on a URL that had 1500 impressions, the calculation would be as follows: 

60 / 1500= 0.04 x 100 = 4%

Although you could do it manually, it is quite easy to obtain this calculation thanks to the Google Search Console tool. 

Entering the “Performance” tab you will see that on the right side, at the top, you will have the following data: 

• Impressions
• Clicks
• CTR
• Average position. 

By default the clicks and impressions will be activated, so you will only have to click on “CTR” to see your history. 

But why is it so important in SEO? Users have several options to choose which website to enter when they search on Google or other search engines. You don’t need to be in the first place to get their attention: if you manage to match their search intent and catch their attention, the user will be yours. 

5 tips to improve the %CTR of your website in the SERPs 

1. Identify opportunities to improve %CTR using Search Console

You can detect opportunities using Google Search Console as your main tool.

To do this, activate Impressions, Clicks, and CTR in the top panel. 

Then, follow the next steps: 

• Go to the “Pages” tab in the bottom section.
• Filter the URLs with the highest number of impressions. 
• See which URL’s have a %CTR below your average. In my case, below 11%.
• Export this data and keep only the URLs with a low %CTR. 
• Examine how these URLs appear in the search results for the queries in which they are positioned. 

Having all this you will have already detected the URLs with more possibility of improvement.

All the CTRs highlighted in yellow have a good amount of impressions, but few clicks. This is where we can implement other recommendations such as the ones I will mention below. 

2. Implements structured data (Schema.org)

Structured data, also called Rich Snippets, is a standard format in which we indicate to the search engine, in a more “digested” way, all the necessary information that we show on our pages. 

Depending on the type of content we show, and depending on the web format we have (News, Ecommerce, Recipes, informative Blogs…) there are different types of structured data to implement. 

Thanks to this there are more possibilities to position in “The zero result”. 

When searching for a recipe, before reaching the classic organic results, we come across a module in the “0” result. Not only the image is displayed, but also the overall user rating for a recipe. 

The same happens if we search for very specific products. In the search results we will see that for some queries it shows us: 

• Price
• Stock (available or out of stock). 
• Reviews.
• Number of reviews

Appearing in these modules is possible thanks to the structured data. Here are some resources according to the type of content/services/products you have on your website:

• News: https://schema.org/NewsArticle
• Products (eCommerce): https://schema.org/Product
• Recipes: https://schema.org/Recipe
• Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs): https://schema.org/FAQPage
• Blog articles (informative): https://schema.org/BlogPosting
• Lists: https://schema.org/ItemList

 If you want to implement them manually I recommend using TechnicalSEO’s JSON-LD generator.

To understand how to automate the generation of this structured data click here.  

3. Inform about the advantages and benefits you offer to users

While this is a recommendation that usually goes very well in the world of eCommerce if you apply it creatively on websites with other types of content it can go quite well. 

A technique that is often seen in some online stores is to include the discount percentage, payment methods/facilities, and some words like “offers” or “promotions”. 

Let’s see the following example:

The URL in the first place of the ranking uses words like “Cheaper” in the title, or “Discounts”. The use of this language is aligned to the intention of the user, who already from the search is using the term “offer flights”.

Now, we have already tested with a 100% transactional keyword. But what about other more informative keywords? A good example to show this is the term “dollar blue” in Argentina. Although it is a stable search at trend level, being a value that varies from day to day, some media use methods such as: 

• Include the date in the title and meta description. 
• Mentioning the updated value. 
• Use words like “today” or “updated”. 

It is up to you to use your creativity to implement these changes in your titles and meta description to improve the %CTR on your site. 

4. Emojis and symbols in your Title and Meta description?

A method that has been applied in different sectors is the use of symbols and emojis to attract clicks from users. 

From my point of view, this method does not apply to any type of business. Therefore, before implementing it, think if it fits your brand language and target audience. 

To do this, you can segment and look at your audience’s age, gender and interests. Based on this, and the product/service you offer, decide whether it is worth implementing it or not. 

In case your answer is a resounding “yes”, let’s see what some SERPs look like with emojis and symbols:

Some of the webs that I usually use to obtain these emojis and symbols are: 

• https://es.piliapp.com/symbol/
• https://emojipedia.org/ 

5. Improve your site’s URL architecture

This tip is applicable not only to improve CTR but also so that search engines can semantically interpret your content. 

A clean URL that corresponds to your internal architecture gives better signals to the user that what they will find in the content is really what they are looking for. 

To do this: 

• Avoid using numbers and special characters in your URL. 
• Segment with “/” each section of the web according to depth. Example: /sneakers/nike/women/. 
• Avoid dates in your URL. 

Final Recommendations 

Monitoring before and after the implementations will be essential to see the progress you can have. Therefore, I recommend you to export month by month the CTR % of the URLs to which you have applied the changes and, from there, compare them to see their evolution.

If you have any doubt or want to add any advice, leave it here below in the comments.

La entrada 5 tips to improve your website’s CTR in SERPs aparece primero en SEO Blog Punto Rojo.

What is link building?

Before we begin, it is important to understand what this strategy is all about. Link Building is an important marketing practice and one of the main pillars of SEO, which aims to increase the authority of your site through the generation of links to it.

Considering this and that in Latin America there are more and more blogs and influencers that set trends and constantly talk about brands on their websites, we must know the details to take into account to choose the right person to talk about our product or service.

We must not forget that the objective of link building is not to provide us with referred traffic. Thanks to quality sites linking to us, we can achieve greater authority in the eyes of Google.

For this we must take into account the following points:

1- Knowing our keywords

Keywords are the words that people use to search in Google. The search for keywords should be the basis to start our content strategy since, in order to generate the content, we must know the words that users use to reach our website.

2- Study the competition

On the other hand, once we have determined what our keywords are, we need to know what our direct competitors’ keywords are. We need to know what they are working on, what keywords are working for them, and what we can contribute that they are not offering.

3- Make partnerships with websites that suit your business

Bloggers or influencers will be the main link to achieve our goal. But before contacting them, we must know what we want to position to fit perfectly with the theme of the site. In this way, we will be working towards the naturalness of the link, since we must not forget that link building is a tactic that can be penalized if we do not do it in the right way.

Therefore, when we contact the influencer in question, we must emphasize that the post must be as natural as possible, giving the impression that we have not contacted him, and that it seems that he recommends us without prior agreement.

What should the generated content look like?

The keys to useful and attractive content for Google (and users) are two: quality and original content.

Mainly, the content must be of quality for a very basic reason. There are thousands of content on the Internet on the same subject, so Google will show before those that have a higher quality than the rest, with the objective that the user who searches receives the answer to his query.

But, what is quality? Quality content is well-written content, without spelling mistakes, structured by paragraphs related to each other, with coherent sentences, optimized with internal and external links, H2 subtitles, and keywords in bold, as the most important aspects.

As for originality, what happens is that there are many quality contents on the same topic. Then, as a differentiating point from the rest, it is important that the content is original and provides something new that the rest does not provide, so that, along with quality, its originality is highlighted by search engines.

These two variables will make that after publishing original and quality content, it will be positioned in search engines and will be shown as an outstanding result.

How do we choose the ideal influencer or blogger for our link-building strategy?

We have already discussed the quality parameters in terms of the content to be generated by the blog in question, but now we need to talk about the quality of the website. The more authority the linking site has, the better our strategy will work. For this reason, we need to use programs like MOZ or Majestic SEO to measure the quality of a website and check whether or not it is worth collaborating with them.

MOZ metrics

The Domain Authority (DA) is a value that determines the authority of a web page or an entire domain. When we talk about authority, we refer to the weight that a site has in the field of organic ranking. Its values range from 0-100 and represent the authority of a complete website. Moz calculates this metric in combination with the other link metrics like MozRank, MozTrust, the total number of links, etc.

Majestic metrics

Majestic SEO offers several metrics, the best known of which are Citation Flow and Trust Flow.

Citation Flow is a metric designed to inform us how “influential” a site is over another, according to the number of backlinks linking them. That is, if different domains link to each other, their CF will increase. It is not the quality of the links that matter, but rather the quantity.

And what’s the difference with Trust Flow?

A site can have a lot of links, but only some of them will be quality and “trusted”.

By quality links we mean if they come from a related topic, with original content and, above all, real traffic. The Trust Flow gives us the parameter of quality of the incoming backlinks to a domain because they count the number of clicks that a user must make from a trusted site to reach ours. Generally, it is of lower value than the CF, since you can have many links but not all of them will be of good performance. Even if we make sure we have very few high authority links, there will always be low authority links randomly created in blogs, forums, etc.

Here is a selection of fashion, beauty & travel bloggers for you to consider in your next link-building strategy:

Fashion Diaries

Pamela Stupia, is a journalist, blogger, YouTuber, and author of two sagas of juvenile books. She has been working for more than 10 years in technology digital media and a few years ago she started writing about other topics and that’s how the blog was born. Her main topics are fashion and beauty for young people.

In her blog, you can promote keywords related to fashion and makeup, related to How to searches, such as: how to combine [garment], how to do my makeup for [conference], etc.

Get glam

Verónica Frágola, better known as Fruticienta. She has a degree in advertising and worked for some years in the marketing area of a cosmetics company, which allowed her to obtain the necessary knowledge about components, ways of use, skincare, and so on. Today she shares this learning and mainly the experience of using products through her blog.

In her blog, you can boost keywords related to informative searches of beauty products, such as: which is the best [product], how to use [product], etc.

Argentina and the World

Federico and Sol, an Argentinean couple who share their experiences traveling around the world. There you can find posts for each of the places they have visited, telling about their experiences.

In their blog, you can boost keywords related to informative searches concerning tour packages, airlines, lodging, etc. such as: what to do in [place], the best hotel in [place], cruises to [place], etc.

I already have the links generated, now what?

As we have seen, link building for SEO takes an important effort on our side, so once we have generated the links on the websites we must check them to make sure that the work has not been done in vain. Here are some of the most common problems that can ruin your strategy.

1- The generated link is nofollow

Links are intended to be used by both humans and robots. The details behind how they do this are different, which makes it possible to control where search engines can and cannot go. All we need to do is verify that our link does not contain the rel = “nofollow” attribute as this would be telling search engines not to follow this link.

2- Too many new links overnight

If you get a lot of new backlinks in a short period, Google will suspect foul play. They know that you can get thousands of links by paying or using link spamming software.

We must keep in mind that the “short period” is key in these cases. If it took us a long time or if we constantly keep getting new links day after day, it won’t look suspicious. Some of the larger sites like Wikipedia gain thousands of links daily and don’t have to worry about their rankings.

3- Anchor texts are poorly optimized

When creating a link, it is recommended to be specific with the anchor keyword or anchor text (that is why it is very important to do keyword research to know which one is the right one). In these cases, the ideal is to specify to the blogger in question what will be our main keyword to use.

Conclusion

Influencer marketing is a rapidly growing business strategy. Both companies and bloggers or influencers work to benefit from these relationships, so the trend will not change in the future.

It is important to remember that before our main marketing strategies, influencers are in a position to help and not only from social networks. If we want to expand the reach of the brand, find new customers, and improve our SEO at the same time, we recommend implementing this strategy, and if you need help, you can always contact puntorojo.

La entrada Link Building: How to capitalize on collaborations with bloggers to improve your site’s ranking on Google? aparece primero en SEO Blog Punto Rojo.

There are many SEO courses and training out there and if you are starting your SEO career, you probably have more doubts than certainties about how to do it. During my 4 years leading the HR area for an SEO agency, interviewing SEO managers, and helping many of my colleagues to grow professionally, I have detected some learning patterns.

Here are 4 tips to jumpstart your SEO career.

1) Your attitude is what will define you.

Something that caught my attention is that all the SEO Managers I know belong to different areas of study. Some of them are Programmers, Social Communicators, Lawyers (yes, really), Web Developers, Graphic Designers, Publicists, Psychologists, etc.

Each one approached the world of SEO for different reasons, but among them, the most popular is that they had a website or a project and wanted to generate profits with it.

They began to see that a source of income came from the organic channel, and so they started to get into it, analyzing and testing how it worked to rank sites in Google. Others, on the contrary, came to SEO by chance, but the experimental attitude and the commitment to the results ended up bringing them to this profession.

So the first point that will define that you can do SEO, is to maintain a proactive, experimental, and committed to results attitude. I assure you that every successful SEO professional has this.

2) SEO Training

There are many SEO courses and training that can be good for this profession. But there is also much complementary (and essential) knowledge that can serve as an introductory to topics that you will see as SEO & in a job interview environment can be a great differential.

Here I share some resources, tools & conferences to start your SEO career.

HTML courses:

It is essential to know how HTML, the most basic language of modern programming, works. The good news is that there are many good, accessible and comprehensive courses about it. One example is Code Academy, whereas you take the course, you will do online exercises and accentuate your knowledge.

This knowledge is essential for everything related to Technical SEO or SEO On-Site. While you don’t need to know how to program to optimize a site for SEO, you do need to understand how a website works to make recommendations and implementations according to its architecture & structure.

Google Ads:

The basis of any SEO project is the identification & correct use of keywords. A keyword is a word that users use to search.

Although the Google Ads platform is designed for paid campaigns, it is one of the best tools to select keywords for an SEO strategy. To learn how to use it, Google offers excellent free courses.

In the future, this tool will also give you guidelines to better work the combination of SEO & SEM and make decisions that favor the ROI of the project.

Google Analytics:

An SEO who cannot measure his work is not an SEO.

Google Analytics is the tool that every SEO should use. Knowing how to use the tool & being able to interpret its data will give you the ability to analyze and measure the impact that your work as an SEO is generating.

Just like the Google Ads Keyword Planner tool, there is an analytics course that Google provides for those who want to learn and professionalize its use. While it’s not as simple as the previous one I mentioned, everything you need to know is available on their site for free. You just need to dedicate a little time to it.

It is also important to participate in SEO conferences, either in person or virtually. This will allow you to keep up to date with what others are sharing and what is being talked about in the industry. In addition, it is also valuable to participate in digital conferences (not only SEO), because these conferences provide broader knowledge and often from this knowledge derive more enriching strategies.

SEOday:

This conference is aimed not only at SEOs but at all those who are part of the digital environment around the world.

At SEOday you will be able to listen to talks given by international leading SEO companies such as The New York Times & Google, while international speakers will be presenting their expertise from other markets.

eCommerce day:

The eCommerce Day or eDay is the most important e-commerce conference in Argentina and belongs to a series of conferences at the LATAM level.

Participating in this type of conference not only enriches your knowledge about other dynamics, digital strategies, or platforms but also allows you to interact with leading digital professionals.

3) Constant critical reading

In SEO there are no absolute truths. Many times Google announces a change as important and then it is not reflected in results in an effective way. For that reason, SEO managers read blogs of references, and experimental cases and analyze SEO success stories to be able to formulate a critical view on it.

Because they read a lot of things and not all of them are true or at least they allow themselves to be suspicious until they prove that they are real.

For this reason, I recommend you some blogs that you can not stop following:

MOZ SEO guide:

To start your SEO career, MOZ’s beginner’s guide will be a great help. MOZ is a leader in SEO metrics, tools & services. Their guide gives you access to small free classes divided into modules and you don’t need previous knowledge.

In addition, I recommend these three blogs as sources of knowledge and innovation:

• Search Engine Land
• Search Engine Journal
• ahrefs

Of course, developing a critical vision requires experience, and this brings us to the last but not least point: practice.

4) Practice, practice, and more practice…

No matter what your field of study is, nothing can be learned from theory alone, and SEO is no exception to this rule.

Practice is a big part of learning and is what will give you experience in the field.

Therefore, the best way to put into practice what you have learned is to have your site or project where you can test what you are learning. Even if it is something small or micro-niche, having been able to apply some of your knowledge will make your start in the SEO industry faster, more successful & fun.  

I hope these 4 tips will help you start a successful SEO career!

La entrada SEO: 4 recommendations to train yourself in organic rankings aparece primero en SEO Blog Punto Rojo.

OOP Over Optimization Penalty: Having a new site over-optimized. Your optimizations should be gradual, not sudden.

Bad links: Having links to penalized sites.

Poison Keywords: Make sure you don’t have words related to pornography, viagra, etc.

Excessive crosslinking: Do not link excessively to your own sites hosted on the same hosting.

Copyright: Don’t copy the content, generate it! Google only accepts on average 25% of the content as duplicate.

Keyword Stuffing: Do not overuse your main keywords. A Keyword Density higher than 10% can be penalized.

Re-editing your content: You can be penalized if you modify your content permanently, remember to add content, not replace it.

Dynamic pages: Do not use excessively long URLs with ID.

Flash: The more flash we use, the less content we offer Google to position us.

iFrames: Do not use! They are not read, not linked, not indexed… no anything!

Invisible text: It is a Black Hat technique that some years ago gave results. Today Google easily realizes it and penalizes it.

Traffic metrics: Try not to have very high bounce rates, it is a highly valued metric today, as Google relies heavily on it to value your content.

Buy Links: Google identifies which are the sites that sell links. If you buy one of those “great offers” that arrive in your email inbox, be aware that Google will not value it.

Accelerated growth of links: if the number of links to your site grows in an accelerated way, Google takes it as something abnormal and you will be penalized. Try to grow the number of links in a natural way.

Server: Even if it costs a few bucks more, it is important to have a server that does not crash regularly.

Massive 302 redirects: If you have 2 or 3 302 redirects it is something natural if you have a few more it is doubtful, but if you have many more Google takes it as something unnatural and you will be penalized without a doubt.

La entrada Techniques that harm your site’s ranking aparece primero en SEO Blog Punto Rojo.

Disclaimer: We are not going to be covering how you can go about installing Python or its modules as that is a separate topic and there are several tutorials about this on the web.

What you need:

• Access to your Google Search Console
• Google Data Studio
• Python 3
• The pandas and matplotlib modules

First, we are going to get the information. Let’s go to the Performance report inside the Google Search Console account that contains the data you want to work with. Simply exporting the data is not enough because Search Console averages the rankings for each keyword within the selected period. This means that if you want to see the positioning for the last year for a specific keyword, GSC will give you a single number, the result of the average positioning of each day for that keyword. As we need the detailed data day by day, let’s move on to the second tool…

If you have not already added the Google Search Console data source to the Data Studio, you can read this post that details how to do it.

In Google Data Studio we are going to insert a table and add the information we need. We need the date of the last year segmented day by day, the keywords, the clicks, and if you want also the impressions and the CTR.

How to set up the table

Select the following dimensions

Date and Query. You will need to click on the calendar icon and select the Date and Time – Day of the month (DD) option. This causes all the keyword information (or queries) not to be grouped together but to show averages day by day of the year.

Once that is done, select the following metrics:

Now let’s specify the date we want to contemplate. You can choose the period you want, although it is advisable to export as much information as possible (Big Data!) and then filter specific periods with Python. We filtered to see all the data from last year.

It is not necessary to sort the information by any particular variable because we are going to modify it later, but some may get an error if they do not. In our case, we sort by clicks as shown in the image.

After setting up the table as instructed, you should be seeing something similar to this (but with your data).

Note that we have over 175,000 rows of information. Depending on the amount of traffic to your site, this number could vary considerably.

Next step, we export the data. We will save the file with the name data.csv. Depending on the number of rows in your table, the download may take up to a few minutes. Patience… it is worth it!

Now the fun begins! Open your favorite code editor. In our case, for this kind of thing we are going to use Jupyter Notebook but you can easily copy and paste the code in a notepad and save it with .py extension that will work the same way.

The code for plotting, loading the data, modifying it, and plotting it is the following:

import pandas as pd
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

keywords = ['keyword 1', 'keyword 2', 'keyword 3'] #your keywords here
rank_limit = 30 #Number of items to analyze

#The following lines do not need to be modified
df = pd.read_csv('data.csv')
df['Date'] = pd.to_datetime(df['Date'], format='%Y%m%d')
df = df[df['Query'].isin(keywords)].sort_values(by=['Date'])
df.set_index('Date', inplace=True)
df.groupby('Query')['Average Position'].plot(legend=True, figsize=(19.20,10.80))
plt.gca().invert_yaxis()
plt.title('Keyword rankings\n')
plt.ylim(top=0.75, bottom=rank_limit)
plt.show()

#Uncomment the following line to save the graphic to a file
#plt.savefig('keywords_rankings.png')

The result is going to be something like this:

But let’s not fall into the copy/paste trap… let’s analyze these lines of code to see how we can modify them to display the keywords we are interested in. Let’s analyze the script line by line.

1. It loads the pandas module. To explain it in an oversimplified way, pandas is something like Python’s “Excel”.
2. Loads the matplotlib.pyplot module that allows plotting the data
3. –
4. A list containing all the keywords that we are interested in plotting
5. Shows the number of positions seen on the y-axis of the graph. For example, if you only want to see the behavior on the first page of Google, set this value by 10
6. –
7. Everything below doesn’t need to be modified, but let’s look at it anyway
8. Load the data from the ‘data.csv’ file to a pandas data frame (it would be something like the equivalent of an Excel or Google Sheets spreadsheet)
9. Change the ‘Date’ column from number to date format, in order to plot the x-axis correctly.
10. Filter the data frame to use only the rows that contain the keywords declared in line 4
11. Set the date column as index of the data frame since we are going to plot date by date
12. Group the position values by keyword. This step is fundamental since it orders the data to be able to plot it. Think of it as preparing each line of the chart.
    1. The .plot() makes it show it as a graph instead of a table.
    2. You tell the chart to display a legend with information about what keyword each line represents.
    3. Determines the size of the chart
13. Invert the y-axis of the chart since a low number position is a good thing and when “positioning drops”, its rank increases in number
14. Set the title of the chart
15. Set the upper limit of the chart to 0.75 so that we can correctly see the lines that have rank 1. Otherwise the line of a first position would be lost at the edge of the chart.
16. The chart that has been set up so far is displayed.
17. –
18. –
19. If you uncomment this line by removing the ‘#’ character at the beginning of the line, the chart will be saved in the folder where the script is saved with the name ‘keyword_rankings.png’.

This simple script with less than 20 lines is a clear example of the potential that Python has to analyze your SEO data and be able to take clear actions accordingly. The learning curve for this sort of thing may be a bit steep at first but the reality is that there is a huge community of people documenting tutorials, strategies, useful tools, etc.

The future of business decision-making in recent years has been moving towards big data analysis and SEO is no exception. From PuntoRojo we always encourage you to do your best to grow your knowledge to take your SEO strategies to the next level.

Needless to say, any questions, comments, or suggestions are welcome in the comments of this post. As always, good rankings!

La entrada How to see the historical ranking of your keywords… for FREE! aparece primero en SEO Blog Punto Rojo.

We have created inbound and outbound links, we have optimized the images and all the semantics of the site, and we have generated high-quality content. And now, we’re wondering what else we can do.

Well, here’s the answer. We are going to analyze the strategy that very few websites are using: second-level link building.

What is second-level Linkbuilding?

A top-level link is a basic backlink: it links directly to website B from another website, A.

And there’s no doubting its power. When a high authority website (A) links to another site (B), it essentially serves as an advocate for the content it links to in Google’s eyes: site A signals that site B is important.

Simple…

But a second-level link is a bit more complicated.

Instead of generating a link directly from external content to a website B, a second-level link goes from any website (X) to the content linking to the website of interest (B).

Yes, it’s a bit confusing. Let’s take it one step at a time.

In general, second-level links revolve around a singular strategy: guest blogging (a common practice among bloggers, in which one participates as a guest on someone else’s blog).

In a few words, we write a blog post on a topic that is relevant to our website’s niche. While we are writing it, we include a backlink to our site, either within the content or in the author’s bio.

Then, we share the link and activate it on all our social networks.

This is how we get to generate second-level links.

(Remember that not only social networks are useful, but any online platform).

Why should we use second-level links?

Yes, second-level links help improve our rankings, but how exactly?

Perhaps the most important thing second-level links do is generate traffic.

When we guest blog and include a backlink to our site, all the traffic that goes to that post can also go to our website.

How? When readers click on the link we include in the post.

In other words, the traffic from our guest blogging is a gain for the publication and a gain for our website.

And precisely the main challenge for marketers is to generate traffic and leads.

And luckily, second-level link building is perfect to do just that: gain traffic.

Most guest blogging posts will promote our site. But we will also be able to help in generating traffic by disseminating additional links across the Internet (on our website, on other websites, or social networks).

With this in mind, even a guest blogging post with a no-follow link is worth it.

La entrada Second-level link building: an SEO strategy used by very few sites aparece primero en SEO Blog Punto Rojo.

Keyword Density is a parameter that will identify the number of times that keywords are repeated within the entire textual content of each page.

The parameter is determined by a simple count, the number of times the word is repeated divided by the number of words in the entire HTML.

Example: If a keyword is repeated 4 times within a content of 100 words, the density of that keyword will be 4%.

Nobody can confirm what is the ideal percentage that keywords should have to rank better, but based on my experience I can determine that what worked best for me is to achieve a keyword density between 4% and 6%.

It is very important not to abuse this technique since search engines penalize the website when any of its pages have a very high keyword density.

I have experimented many times to determine how agile Google is when it comes to identifying a high keyword density, and I can assure you that its effectiveness is 100%, so I recommend you not to exceed 6% of your keyword density.

The best suggestion I can give you is “Write for users with search engines in mind, never write for search engines with users in mind”.

Some free tools to check your keyword density:

http://www.keywordanalyzer.org/

http://www.web-inspect.com/keyword-density.php

http://www.icrossing.com/tools/calculator.htm

http://www.submitexpress.com/analyzer/

http://keydensity.com/keyword-density-checker-calculator

http://www.webjectives.com/keyword.htm

http://tool.motoricerca.info/keyword-density.phtml

La entrada Keyword Density aparece primero en SEO Blog Punto Rojo.

Google Search Console allows us to easily download the list of URLs that bring the most clicks to our page. Now, what do we do with this data? As we have been seeing for a few months now, at puntorojo we like to extract as many insights as possible from our data. An insight is any information that allows us to make a decision.

Let’s start!

1. Map the site to be analyzed: This time we are going to use a mix of tools to be able to see which theme is central to the blogs from Ahrefs, Semrush, and Moz. To achieve this, we have to start mapping the blogs with some crawler (in this example we are going to use ScreamingFrog).
2. Filter by URL type: Once we have the list of URLs, we are going to filter everything that is a page to make sure that no other type of content is lifted (e.g. image URLs).
3. Filter by subdirectory: The next step is to filter the URLs to show only those that are from the blog. A simple way to do this is with the top right filter.                                Advanced tip: you can filter by regular expressions and not only text strings.
4. Pull up URLs that return 200: Now we are going to sort the results by response code. Since we are going to work with URL slugs, we don’t want to pollute our analysis with old URLs.
   For example, there is a slug that changed from “how-to-build-links-with-guest-articles” to “guest-blogging”. This indicates an optimization due to a strategy (or change of strategy) since they went from focusing on the keyword guest articles to the keyword guest blogging. As we are interested in the current strategy, we are not going to look at the discarded URL but at the final URL after the redirect.
5. Save the URLs: In Google Sheets we are going to dump all URLs that return 200.
6. Filter by URLs that redirect: Since we also want to know the URLs that were modified, inside the Response Codes tab, we filter by the blog pages that redirect.
7. Save the redirection URLs: As in step 5, we are going to save the URLs that interest us in the same Google Sheets, but now we are going to look at the Redirect URL column since this is the one that indicates the page that is displayed after the redirection is executed.
8. Remove repeated URLs: Once in Google Sheets, we will remove the URLs that are repeated using the late functionality of Remove duplicates in the Data menu.

9. Remove irrelevant URLs: There are likely to be URLs that we don’t want in the listing such as blog home, paginations, author URLs, posts in other languages, and URLs that redirect and now point to external sites, etc. Clean these URLs manually or via a Sheets function if you find a repeating pattern.

Note: In this case, we are going to remove category URLs since we are interested in building our categorization and not necessarily sticking to the one selected by the blog creators. For example, the category “technical SEO” is too broad and we will want to segment it as “page speed, machine learning, IT, etc.).

10. Repeat with other benchmarks: Once our list is ready, we are going to do the same with all our competitors. In the Sheets spreadsheet, we are going to add a column that shows the name of the site we are benchmarking so we can then plot it in different series.

11. Write categorization UDF: To automatically categorize the information we extracted, we are going to use the Google Sheets script editor to create a UDF (user-defined function).

12. Select categorization keywords: To get the most out of each slug, we have to put together different lists (technically arrays) with keywords that determine without grayscale the content of a slug. Once the arrays are completed, run a loop through each of them checking if each word appears in the URLs being analyzed. If it appears, the name of the category is written in a cell.

Example script here:

categorize function (slug) {
  //Write an array for each category and fill it with keywords 
var keywords_tutorials = [
    "tutorial", "how-to", "guide", "step-by-step",
  ];
  
  var keywords_links = [
    "link", "anchor",
  ];
  
  var keywords_content = [
    "content", "text", "copywriting", "post", "blog",
  ];
  
  var keywords_technical = [
    "core", "rankbrain", "penguin", "panda", "hummingbird", "diversity", "unnamed", "medic",
    "maccabees", "fred", "possum", "mobilegeddon", "pigeon", "everflux", "pagerank", "page-rank",
    "sandbox", "penalty", "penalties", "google-bot", "googlebot", "mobile", "phone", "301", "200",
    "404", "403", "503", "302", "tag", "robots", "html", "javascript", "php", "keyword", "key-phrase",
    "domain", "directory", "htaccess", "redirect", "tool",
  ];
 
 
  var output = ""; 
  
  //Each array must have a loop that returns the category name
  for (i=0; i <= keywords_tutoriales.length-1; i++)
  {if (slug.toLowerCase().indexOf(keywords_tutorials[i]) >= 0){output += "tutorials" + ", ";}}
  
  for (i=0; i <= keywords_links.length-1; i++)
  {if (slug.toLowerCase().indexOf(keywords_links[i]) >= 0){output += "links" + ", ";}}
  
  for (i=0; i<= keywords_content.length-1;i++)
  {if (slug.toLowerCase().indexOf(keywords_content[i]) >= 0){output += "content" +", ";}}
  
  for (i=0; i<= keywords_tecnicas.length-1;i++)
  {if (slug.toLowerCase().indexOf(keywords_technical[i]) >= 0){output += "technical" + ", ";}}
  
  //If it does not find a category, it categorizes it as 'other'.
  if (!output){
    output = "other";
    } else {
      //remove final ', '  
      output = output.substring(0,output.length - 2);
      output = output.split(", ");
      
      //eliminate duplicates
      var output_unique = [];
      for (o=0; o <= output.length-1;o++){
        if(output_unique.indexOf(output[o]) == -1) {
          output_unique.push(output[o]);
        }
      }
      //sort the array alphabetically
      output = output_unique.sort();
      output = output.toString();
    }
  return output;
}

13. Writing the function: Now that we have everything categorized we have to write the function in the spreadsheet and see the output.

Pro Tips:

– Don’t copy/paste for your entire list of slugs because if you do a lot the Google server running our script may block your requests for a couple of minutes since running this function has a cost for Google.

– You should copy and paste about 500 rows, wait a few seconds and run 500 more rows… until you finish all your URLs.

– Be sure to copy and paste the result of the script as a value so that the function does not run again each time you load the spreadsheet.

– Do not copy and paste as a value until you have finished running the function on all the rows.

14. Sort outputs: Next step, we will separate the data into columns since it is likely that some entries have more than one category.

Note: In this example, we hide the column with the slugs to make it easier to work with the data.

15. List the benchmarked sites: Using the UNIQUE function, we list all the competing sites we are considering for the report.

16. Count total values per site: In order to automate the spreadsheet a bit, let’s count how many entries were contemplated for each site using the following formula:

=COUNTIF(A:A,G2)

17. Count unique values: Making use of the total number (and considering that the first row is the header), we put together the following formula to count how many times each term appears for each competing site:

=COUNTIF($C2:$F211,”=”&I$1)

Note: Don’t forget to adjust the range contemplated in the count for each client’s rows since rows 2 to 211 correspond only to Ahrefs.

18. Drawing percentages: We are almost there! But if we take into account that Ahrefs has 210 blog posts, we can’t really compare it with SEMrush which has 7 times more (and Moz even more). So let’s update our formula to show the percentage of the total instead of the total amount of each category. The formula would now look like this:

=COUNTIF($C2:$F211,”=”&I$1)/$H2

Note: Be sure to update only column I and then drag I2, I3 and I4 to M2, M3 and M4, respectively.

19. Format as a percentage: To do things neatly, let’s convert all the values in I2:M4 to percentages by selecting the range of cells and then clicking the percentage format button.

Note: Keep in mind that the percentages can add up to more than 100% since a note can have more than one subject (for example, contents and tutorials).

20. Set the data: To simplify things, we copy all the percentages and paste them as a value. Next, we delete the totals column (column H, in our case).

21. Graphing: The moment of truth has arrived! We select our entire dashboard and then generate the graph.

Final result

In conclusion, we draw the following insights…

• SEMrush has the most number of tutorials
• Ahrefs is the one that talks the most about links (obviously)
• SEMrush is the blog most oriented to content generation
• SEMrush is the blog with the most technical content
• Moz is the blog with the most varied topics among the three.

Note: If we want more insights, we should add more categories and filters inside our script to reduce the number of blog posts that fall into others.

Well, this was a bit longer tutorial, but we didn’t want to stop sharing it with you. We hope you can find SEO value in categorizing URLs (either your own or those of your competitors). As always, if you have any questions, leave us a comment below.

Until next time and good rankings!

La entrada How to categorize your URLs, and your competitors’ aparece primero en SEO Blog Punto Rojo.

All the metrics that are presented as results of a campaign are interesting, but at the end of the day what matters is how much was earned.

ROI allows you to evaluate a campaign by its effectiveness, not by its costs or requirements.

Why should I do SEO?

Undoubtedly, SEO provides the best ROI within digital advertising campaigns. The long-term benefits, even after the campaign is over, make it the most effective medium.

This time we decided to show a specific case. SEO is often talked about without giving numbers and we thought it was important for you to see the results of a campaign.

The data presented below belong to an important clothing company in Argentina. During the same period, SEO and SEM campaigns were carried out in parallel.

SEM

SEO

The SEO campaign had to be stopped after 3 months because the company reached its production limit. They are currently expanding their factory.

In the SEM campaign, you can see that once it ended, so did the revenue.

The SEO campaign, on the other hand, continues to bring in revenue over time!

It is very important to pay attention to the scale of the graphs. When comparing the revenues, the revenues generated by the SEO campaign comprise more than half.

What was the investment in each campaign?

During this time, the investment in SEM was $14,899.79 and the income that came from this means was $82,841.13, which means that for every peso invested, 5.6 were earned.

What about SEO ROI?

The monthly investment of the campaign was $26,000 (a total of $78,000 in the 3 months of the campaign), and the amount earned so far was $1,178,994.11 (the cost of each campaign varies depending on the degree of competitiveness of the positioning of the selected keywords).

This means that for every peso invested, 15.1 pesos were earned.

3 times more than Adwords, and the revenue keeps coming in!

Surprised?

As always, you can use the comments for questions on the subject, and if you are interested in running an SEO campaign feel free to contact us!

La entrada SEO VS SEM, Which One Has the Best ROI? aparece primero en SEO Blog Punto Rojo.