5 AWESOME KEYWORD RESEARCH TOOLS

5 AWESOME KEYWORD RESEARCH TOOLS

In the sea of SEO experts and bloggers trying to get recognized with this tiny effort of writing not so awesome blogs......

I know you might be thinking why I have stated this above?

Because every time I write a blog on SEO or some of its related topics. I see that there is a lot of room for improvement and I need to walk a great distance of miles in order to reach that state of presenting 100% perfect SEO Blogs.

But we know that some of the great persons of their time have stated that .......

“Success is a journey, not a destination. The doing is often more important than the outcome.” – Arthur Ashe.

I am again making a little extra effort to write this not so awesome blog on Keyword research tools... But we never know it might add some value to the fishes in the sea of SEO Experts.

Ready, So, let's get started ......

As everyone starts..... let me also start with the basic keywords Introduction that I think all most everyone is aware of. Right?

What are Keywords?

Keywords are ideas and topics that define what your content is about. In terms of SEO, they're the words and phrases that searchers enter into search engines, also called "search queries."

Why are keywords important?

Keywords are important because they are the key between what people are searching for and the content you are providing to fill that need. 

Your main goal in ranking on search engines is to drive organic traffic to your site from the search engine result pages (SERPs), and the keywords you choose to target will determine what kind of traffic you get. If you own a Boutique shop, for example, you might want to rank for the keyword "new designer Boutique in Amritsar" — but if you're not careful, you might end up attracting traffic that's interested in finding a new place for ready-made garments instead of your customized designer clothing.

Keywords are as much about your audience as they are about your content because you might describe what you offer in a slightly different way than some people ask for it. To create content that ranks well organically and drives visitors to your site, you need to understand the needs of those visitors — the language they use and the type of content they seek. You can do this by talking to your customers, frequenting forums and community groups, and doing your own keyword research with different keyword tools available in the world of SEO i.e Search Engine Optimization

Some of Keyword Research Tools that I use are:

1. Keyword Planner: Yes, how can we miss keyword planner if we are talking about the world of Keywords. Even a starter to SEO knows about this tool. But still, we will go through this tool here in this blog.

Yes, this is a free tool by Google 

What is Keyword planner?

Keyword Planner is a tool that provides keyword ideas and traffic estimates to help you build a Search Network campaign. Search for keyword and ad groups ideas based on terms that describe your product or service, your website, or a product category related to what you're advertising.

How to use Keyword planner?

1. Log in to your Google Adwords account. 

2. Click on the wrench icon in the toolbar at the top of the page. 

3. Then, choose “Keyword Planner”: 

4. You'll see with two different tools within the Keyword    Planner: “Find New Keywords” and “Get metrics and forecasts for your keywords”.

5. There choose " Find new keywords" and enter your list there

After you have entered all the required keywords it will generate the list of all the keywords that you have used in the search box as well as it will provide you with its own suggestions also.

The keyword report prepared by the keyword planner has all the details like competition, minimum and maximum search volume and bid amount if you want to run Google Adwords for those keywords.

2. KWfinder: KW finder is fairly new research tool to the market, providing traffic data for keywords, estimated SEO difficulty, competitive data on sites ranking in top 10, and much more.

It's well known featured sets means that you can use this tool alone for keyword research without having to use multiple tools. plans start at $29.

3. Google Trends: Google Trends is a website by Google that analyzes the popularity of top search queries in Google Search across various regions and languages. The website uses graphs to compare the search volume of different queries over time.

This tool provides powerful stat of search trends over time. this is great for seeing how your market performs overall, and how demand changes over time for your keywords.

4. MOZ (Free and Paid both are available): It is generally said that no blog would ever be complete without mention of MOZ. Moz is a leading SEO tool provider that uses both basic and advanced research tools to improve your search engine optimization. 

In short, Moz offers keyword research tools, an SEO keyword generator that gives detailed data on your Keyword research. 

5. SEOBOOK Keyword Analyzer: This is basically a free tool. By simply entering the URL to any page on your website, you can see a chart of the most optimized keywords on the page. This is great for getting a visual indication of keywords search engines is likely to pick on the page.

ALL THAT I CAN SAY

Don’t get me wrong, you can find n number of keyword research tools... 

But doing so can be very time-consuming. And time = money in Today's world

Therefore, this was my little effort to help you guys and share some of my SEO knowledge on the tools that I have worked on.....

Let me know in the email if you know of any other cool free keyword tools—I will consider adding them to the list. 🙂

What is Duplicate Content and How Does it matters in SEO ?

What is Duplicate content?

Duplicate content generally means that the same content is appearing at multiple URL's Location across the web and thus search engine does not knows which content to show in the search results.

Or, I must say that Search engine Like Google has a problem known as a duplicate content.

Let us study some History about Duplicate Content

Let's go back to 2011 when google launched the first phase of the "Panda" update which would prove to be a wake-up call for SEO issues webmasters had been ignoring for too long. One of those issues was duplicate content. While duplicate content as an SEO has been around for years, the way Google handles it has evolved dramatically and seems to only get more complicated with every update. 

Why Do duplicate content matters?

Duplicate content can cause these main issues for search engines:

1. They don't know which version(s) to include/exclude from their indices.
2. They don't know whether to direct the link metrics (trust, authority, anchor text, link equity, etc.) to one page, or keep it separated between multiple versions.
3. They don't know which version(s) to rank for the query results.

Three Kinds Of Duplicate

True Duplicates: In this, any page is 100% identical in content to another page but just different in their URL address.

Cross-Domain Duplicates: When two or more websites share the same piece of content then there the cross-domain duplicate issue occurs.

Near Duplicates: A page differs from another page with a very small amount of given text that can be a block, image or the order of the content.

How do duplication issues arise?

www or non-www pages: When your site has two different versions of the web pages i.e one with and the other without the "www" prefix and each version have the same content. They both compete with each other for search engine rankings.

URL variations: At times, the same page of your website is located at multiple places. For example, In an e-commerce website the page featuring. An item of men's shoes on sale found. Both in the “Men shoes” section as well as the “Sale” section.

Session IDs: These are another reason for duplicate content. Various e-commerce websites nowadays involve the use of session IDs to track user behaviour. However, when each user is assigned a different session ID. It creates a duplicate of the core URL of the page where session ID was applied.

Copied Content: When someone copies the website content or the blog content from others website or blog and republish them on their website. Then, also this issue of duplicate arises.

How to Check Duplicate Content?

There are many tools available to check duplicate content For example we have

Siteliner: This basically checks the duplicate content present in one or two pages of your website

How to fix the Duplicacy Issues?

In most cases, duplicate content is not created deliberately by website owners but it happens..... 

• Apply 301 permanent redirects where necessary and possible.
• Solve the canonical tag issues problem i.e Implement the rel=”canonical” link element on your pages where you can.
• www and non-www pages issue should be taken care of. For example www.xyz.com and xyz.com issue

• Try to create unique content for your website and blog posts.
• The Uppercase and Lowercase URLs Counted as TWO different pages to Google so try to follow one practice in order to avoid the duplicate content issue.

2019 The Definitive Guide To LINK BUILDING

Yes, link building is still the most important skill in SEO (Search Engine Optimization). 

It is generally said that If you want more search Engine Traffic then link building is a must.

What is Link Building?

Link building, simply put, is the process of getting other websites to link back to your website. Building links is one of the many tactics used in search engine optimization (SEO) because links are a signal to Google that your site is a quality resource worthy of citation. 

Note : In fact, it’s a culmination of several different skills: you need to master content, sales, programming, psychology, and good old-fashioned marketing if you want other people to link to your site.

Google has recently stated that backlinks are one of their top 3 ranking signals.....

Why Link Building is so important?

To understand that, we have to go back to the pre-Google days of the internet when search engines like Yahoo! and Alta Vista (remember them?) were the dominant players. And they ranked their search results 100% based on the content on a webpage.

Then, came the Google that totally changed the game...Instead of simply analyzing the content of a page, Google looked at how many people linked to that page.

Still, to date, Links are the best way to determine the quality of a webpage. That’s why backlinks remain Google’s go-to ranking signal.

And Updates like Google Penguin, Google now focuses on link quality (not just link quantity).

So, now you have realized the importance of link building. Let's dive into more detail

Types of links

No-Follow Links Vs Do-Follow Links

No-Follow tag is a way that allows webmasters to tell search engines “Don't follow links on this page or Don't follow this specific link. A link can have one or more rel attributes, where “rel” is short for “relationship”. These attributes help define the relationship a link has with a page that it points to.

rel=”nofollow” is a tag added to a link that tells search engines: “Don’t count this link as an endorsement.”.

Dofollow is a descriptor of links describing that search engines crawl them and count them as votes of quality. By default, all links are do-follow links unless they are modified to be nofollow links manually or are automatically changed by a website setting. Search engines crawlers follow do-follow links.

Note: So, in Link building, Do-follow links have more importance. When it comes to SEO, you want to get normal, “do follow” links whenever possible.

Here, is the Complete detail to Link Building Techniques:

Guest Blogging: Guest Blogging is the most frequently used strategy for earning backlinks. The approach is preferred by several digital marketers and guest bloggers as its a sure-shot way to reach a broad audience who have an interest in your niche.

Here, are some simple steps to Guest Blogging 

Choose any topic from any particular domain

- Now contact several editors who might be interested in your topic and might give you a backlink

- As per the discussions submit the guest post including the backlink.

- Once your article with the link and the credit is live, its time to promote the article to as many channels as you can.

Guest posting, when done in the right way, will help in establishing long-term relationships with the editor.

Discover Competitors Backlinks

If you research your competitors, you will probably notice that they have some backlinks in common which you don’t have yet. All you have to do is analyze these backlinks and try to get them as well. There are some tools that help you in checking the Competitors Backlinks and those are:

• AHREFS: https://ahrefs.com/
• NEIL PATEL: https://neilpatel.com/ 
• SEMRUSH

Profile creation is one link building technique in which we create a profile on different platform's website such as forum sites, social networking etc… 

We give all our business details and our website link in that profile page. And From there we can get a backlink to our website.

Blog-commenting: Blog commenting is still the effective strategy of getting more page visits, backlinks etc. But, I believe that you should only post GENUINE, meaningful posts if you are thinking to get some traffic to your site. Blog commenting only works great if you put down efforts in writing an authentic comment on other blogs.

Forum Submission: A Web forum is a website or section of a website that allows visitors to communicate with each other by posting messages. Most forums allow anonymous visitors to view forum postings but require you to create an account in order to post messages in the forum. This is one the white hat SEO technique to earn quality backlinks to your website.

Infographic Submission: An infographic is a collection of imagery, charts, and minimal text that gives an easy-to-understand overview of a topic. Infographics use striking, engaging visuals to communicate information quickly and clearly.

Conclusion
These are some of the link building techniques that I have explained above. But For building quality links there is n number of techniques like:

• Skyscraper technique
• Broken Link Building Technique
• Local Listing
• Social Bookmarking
• Question and Answers.......

VISUAL GPS OR GOOGLE VISUAL POSITIONING SYSTEM

Ready for something new from Google? Here, is the latest announcement by Aparna Chennapragada.....

"Visual guidance and Visual Positioning System in Google Maps Navigation."

It is basically the revamped version of Maps that utilizes a complex visual positioning system to offer improved navigation. 

Introduction

We all have experienced the incorrect directions while using GPS that could be because of some satellite signals issues; As satellites are not a hundred per cent accurate always because of which they may not be able to determine your exact location.

To overcome this issue, Google VPS Comes into play.

What exactly it does?

Google VPS is an advanced version of Google Maps technically termed as Google Maps AR navigation mode in this...

Google Maps can now use your camera to identify your surroundings, visually communicate your route right in front of your eyes!

For example, you want to go to 6th street then Google Maps will instead display blown-up 3D directions such as lit-up arrows and precise steps like “6th street is 100 feet away.”

With Google VPS, all you have to do is tap a button to activate the visual view and point your camera where you want to see relevant information. 

VPS is a great addition to Google Maps and Street View and uses your phone’s camera and Google’s extensive back-end data to analyze your surroundings to get you navigated on your way. It identifies the surroundings with an overlay of information for businesses close by, with superimposed arrows appearing at each turn to point you in the direction you need to go, without misinterpreting directions and a map at the bottom to remind you where you are going with greater accuracy. 

Note: Google, in its demo, is playing with the idea of inserting digitally animated avatars as an augmented reality tour guide to make your app more entertaining.

Benefits of VPS (Google Visual Positioning System )

• The new visual system is beneficial for people who live in densely populated areas with tall buildings and face problems with GPS drift while navigating.

• It is also for the people who usually get delayed while figuring out Google Maps navigation

VPS will give a better sense of position than with just the GPS. This new version of Google Maps will merge its traditional interface with a live camera view and enable you to figure out your surroundings and find your route through its visual positioning service.

Sadly, Google did not mention when these new Maps features would become available. We will be sure to update when we learn more.

IS SEO NEED FOR GOOGLE MAP LISTING?

SEO is not really needed for the Google Map Listing ......

Then, what is exactly needed? 

Google keeps in mind some following set of instructions and helps you to rank higher on GOOGLE

and they are.....

• Enter complete data: Nearly, 82% of consumers use search engines to find information about local businesses. Make sure that you have entered all of your business information in Google My Business and keep it up to date. For example, Keep on adding new posts weekly like if your business is related to photography keep your profile updated with the latest photography, You new offers, etc.

• Manage and respond to reviews: Reviews play a very important role so, Responding to reviews shows that you value your customers and the feedback they leave about your business. High quality, positive reviews from your customers will also help improve your ranking.

• Add photos: Accurate and appealing pictures can show potential customers that your business offers what they’re searching for. Businesses with recent photos typically receive more clicks to their website.

• Give your listing time: If your listing has been verified fairly recently. Then the local results ranking on Google takes into account the prominence of the business on the web. Allow your listing more time to accrue impressions.

LAST BUT NOT LEAST 

Make your business listing awesome! : Whether you already have a website or are just starting to build your online presence, you can make a business listing that impresses customers and helps you to stand out from the competition.

What is SEO? A Basic Introduction

Are you one of me?....

Always wanted to learn something deep about SEO (Search Engine Optimization) 

But end up just with the basic definition and confused SEO terms like SEO operators, SEO Algorithms like Panda, Core, Rank Brain and so on.

Then don't worry you have clicked exactly right topic which will answer all your questions and will help you make a proper SEO map in your mind that will lead you to improve website ranking on the GOOGLE

Excited to read more?

Here, we go

What is SEO (Search Engine Optimization)?

In simple words, I will frame SEO as a method of increasing the quality and quantity of website traffic by increasing the visibility of a website or a web page to users of a web search engine.

Why is SEO Important? 

‘Search is the biggest source of traffic and SEO is vital for that’

As you can see, nearly 60% to 70% of all traffic on the web starts with a Google search. And if you add together traffic from other popular search engines (like Bing, Yahoo, and YouTube, Duckduckgo), 76.6% approx. of all traffic originates from a search engine.

Types of SEO:

1. Black Hat 
2. White hat
3. Grey hat

White Hat SEO: White hat SEO also called Ethical SEO. It refers to the usage of optimization strategies, techniques and tactics that focus on a human audience opposed to search engines and completely follows search engine rules and policies.

Black Hat SEO: Black hat SEO processes of using unethical, unapproved, or even illegal tactics to grow a site's traffic and rankings through search engine optimization against the law. Black hat SEO practices can seriously hurt a site's traffic and credibility, and even get you banned from search engines.

Grey Hat SEO: Grey Hat SEO is the practice of using technically legal methods to improve your site rankings, but which are ethically dubious, and could one day become blackhat. 

Got the Basic Idea about What SEO is and What are its Types?

Let’s Dive into more deep details. While reading about SEO one generally comes across the two popular terms or optimization techniques related to SEO

ON-PAGE OPTIMIZATION and OFF-PAGE OPTIMIZATION

What is On-Page Optimization?

When we talk about Keyword optimization, Content optimization, Meta description, URL’s, Title tags, Speed Optimization, SSL/HTTPS, AMP, Schemas, and so on. Then, we are directly talking about On-Page SEO. So basically, On-page refers to both the content and HTML source code of a page that can be optimized.

On-page SEO factors:

• Keywords:  Keyword optimization is still a cornerstone of SEO today. The focus has shifted more towards long-tail keywords, which fits accurately in the search patterns of today’s internet world. Think of your audience and the keywords they’re searching for, and try to create and optimize your website content around those keywords according to keyword Proximity, Keyword density and keyword prominence.

• Meta Tags and Body Tags: Meta tags are snippets of text that describe a page's content; the meta tags don't appear on the page itself, but only in the page's code. We all know tags from blog culture, and meta tags are more or less the same thing, little content descriptors that help tell search engines what a web page is about. 

• Alt-Text: An alt tag, also known as "alt attribute" and "alt description," is an HTML attribute applied to image tags to provide a text alternative for search engines. Applying images to alt tags such as product photos can positively impact an e-commerce store's search engine rankings.

• Canonical Issue: A canonical issue arises when 301 redirects are not properly in place. This means that your website can be accessed by search engines from several different URLs. This means that the search engines can then potentially index your site under different URLs, meaning that it will look like a site of duplicated content.

• Presence of SiteMap and Robots.txt file: A sitemap is an XML file that contains a list of all webpages on your site. It may also contain additional information about each URL in the form of metadata. And just likerobots.txt, a sitemap is a must-have. It helps search engine bots explore, crawl and index all the webpages on a site through the sitemap.

• Website Architecture and Navigation: One should be properly able to find out the required web page in one or two clicks.

• SSL/HTTPS: In 2015, Google stated that their HTTPS ranking boost may serve as a tie-breaker if the quality signals for two different search results are equal in everything else. Meaning, if your website is equal to your competitor’s website in terms of speed, title tags, content freshness, etc. but your competitor’s website is HTTPS and yours isn’t, Google will most likely rank theirs ahead of yours i.e Google will improve their ranking.

• Internal Linking: Placing links to your other website pages, is a great way of improving your website architecture, internal links can prove as one of the most useful weapons in your SEO arsenal. Not only does it make it much easier for your visitors to navigate around your site and find all of your content, but it also ensures that your site gets properly crawled allowing the search engines to find all of your pages. It also helps to build the relevancy of a page to relevant keywords and phrases, whilst it is also one of the factors that help you in telling how to improve google ranking.

Some SEO tools that help you in analyzing your website performance

• GT METRIX- GTmetrix was developed by GT.net as a tool for our managed hosting customers to easily determine the performance of their sites.
• SEO Site Checkup - To Check if our website is optimized or not
• Broken Link Checker: To check if there is any broken link
• Siteliner: To check if there is any kind of duplicate content on the website

What is OFF-Page Optimization?

The measures that can be taken outside of the actual website in order to improve its position in Search Engine Rankings is known as Off-page optimization. These are measures that help create as many high-quality backlinks (incoming links) as possible.

Know more about OFF Page Techniques in our next upcoming Blog.