Backlinks have been a key ranking signal for many years, but Google has been cracking down on dodgy or spammy backlinks for a long time now. 

Previously, it was exceptionally easy to hop from forum to forum, building up a bit of posting history and then posting some content with links for instant SEO juice.  

Prior to 2005, Google followed pretty much every link which meant it was a case of quantity over quality. 

Fast forward to now and we now realize that Google wants quality over quantity. They’ve understandably made it harder to jump between forums posting backlinks embedded in thin or low-quality content. 

So, are forum backlinking tactics dead? Not quite!

The Chronology of Backlinking

Backlinks have a turbulent history. Google has long considered them an important ranking signal since they provide a means for one site to vouch for another by means of a referral. 

However, the tricky element is, Google needs to discern when a site is referring to itself. Prior to recent updates, it was quite easy to self-submit stacks of links to various indexes, databases, spammy forums, and directories. These tactics could provide instant SEO juice to any site, regardless of the value it offers internet users. 

In 2005, Google added the nofollow attribute so webmasters flag poor quality or user-generated links to prevent Google from crawling them. This gave power to credible website forums that could be abused by link spammers looking for quick-win backlinks. However, according to Moz, data shows that even nofollow links are considered a ranking signal when other factors are also favorable (e.g. the authority of the site). 

The 2011 Panda update further clamped down on so-called ‘article marketing’ where SEOs published low-quality, often templated content to article databases to embed some quick-win backlinks. This terminated the rankings of article submission sites that had been taking a handsome sum in return for hosting poor-quality articles solely for the purpose of backlinking. 

The war on spammy backlinks has continued, with Google announcing a series of algorithm changes that gave webmasters the ability to add two new attributes to links on their site in addition to nofollow. Webmasters can now mark up sponsored or paid links as well as links embedded in user-generated content. This gives webmasters another way to provide Google with clues as to what a link means and how they should rank it. 

Google has even taken a dim view of backlink exchanges which are a genuine white hat link building technique for the most part. 

Generally speaking, the quality of a backlink still depends on:

It’s clear that most backlinks likely yield some benefit for SEO, even those earned via backlink exchanges or legitimate quick-win methods. 

For forum posting, what does matter is developing a strategy that both Google and the forum owner respect. 

That means sticking to relevant, higher authority forums, and not skimping out on content quality and posting authenticity. 

These principles are fundamental to building backlinks. 

Why Bother With Forum Posting?

So why bother with forum posting for SEO; what are some of the benefits of forum backlinking tactics?

1. There are thousands of forums

There are thousands of still-active forums on the internet, many of which receive thousands of posts and comments every single day. 

Forums cover pretty much every single niche, subject, industry, or topic you can think of which provides you with an opportunity to find forums that are directly relevant to your site(s). 

2. It’s quick and easy

So many sites don’t have any backlinks – some 66.31% in fact, according to Ahrefs. 

Building backlinks undoubtedly takes time and effort, which is why quick-win tactics like forum posting, directories, and link exchanges have always been popular. 

Whilst it’s true that Google has broadly devalued synthetically-earnt backlinks in recent years, they still matter, especially for smaller sites. 

3. Many forums are high-authority sites

Many forums are part of high-authority sites. That’s not to say that Google will treat your backlink like any other link embedded in content created by the site itself, but still, there’s some genuine value to be extracted from forum posting. 

You can check the domain authority (DA) using various SEO tools – Moz has a free one here. 

4. Network and drive traffic to your site

Engaging in forums is a solid way to drive traffic to your site and build community engagement and awareness. 

Many forums are targeted at startups, DIY entrepreneurs, and SEO beginners or novices. Being active in forums relevant to your niche is valuable beyond backlinks. 

Finding Dofollow Forums

Whilst there probably is some (limited) value to nofollow links, there are plenty of forums out there that don’t mark links as nofollow. These are the forums you want to hunt down. 

It’s worth mentioning that the vast majority of social media sites, Q&A sites, and major messaging boards like Reddit mark all links as nofollow by default. On rare occasions, sites like Reddit do allow Google to crawl links. BacklinkSEO provides a good explanation of this here. 

Aside from searching manually, there are many sites that post lists of dofollow forums:

• This dofollow forum database by Shoutmeloud contains plenty of dofollow forums. 
• Woblogger provides a similar list here. Note how there’s plenty of high-authority sites here like Overclockers and TechRepublic. 
• Here’s another option by WebSetNet. 

Search for ‘dofollow forums,’ ‘link follow forums,’ ‘backlink forums,’ etc, yourself and you’ll find tons of similar databases and lists of dofollow forums. 

Another option is to manually search Google for forums specific to your niche. 

Use the inurl:/ search string. 

For example, if your industry or niche is photography then search for:

“Photography inurl:/ forum” 

This particular search string returned tons of photography forums. It’s worth mentioning that many of these will be ridden with spam whereas others are filled with a decent level of quality content. 

Hunt down the more authoritative, relevant forums and target those first. The more authoritative and the more relevant, the better. 

Next, you’ll need to check the forum to make sure their links are follow and not nofollow. 

One solid strategy is to use the forum’s search box to search for ‘www.’ This will locate links in forum posts. You can see the result for searching ‘www.’ on PhotoForum here.

We can see a couple of links here – probably people posting for backlinks.

Now we need to check if the links are follow or whether they’re marked with nofollow. 

1. (on Chrome) Right click > View page source.
2. Hit Ctrl+F and search ‘www.’, or search some text from the link (in this case, I typed in ‘417’ to find the link pictured in the screenshot.
3. Find the link and look for a nofollow tag. If there’s no tag then you’re good to go – the link should be crawled by Google, unless there’s something else going on with the site. 
4. Backlinko has a good guide to finding follow/nofollow links here. There are a few methods you can use. 
5. You can also use a Chrome browser add-on like this one which automatically scans backlinks as you browse.
6. You can also analyze your competitor’s backlinks using a competitor analysis SEO tool. You’ll be able to quickly find forum backlinks and other quick-win backlinks that you can then go and claim yourself. 

Finding whether or not links are marked with nofollow should be quite straightforward. 

Once you’re certain that the forum is good for linking then it’s time to make a profile and get posting. 

Posting Strategy For Forum Backlinks

Once you’ve located a solid forum, it’s time to make a profile. You should be able to insert your site(s) into your profile signature and possibly even a bio/about section. This is well worth doing. 

Next, it’s time to engage with some posts. 

If you’ve found a genuinely good, active forum, then genuine engagement shouldn’t be too difficult. Some very general forums (like SiteOwnersForums) contain all sorts of posts on almost any topic imaginable – you’re bound to find a few topics to get stuck into immediately. 

It’s good practice to build up some posting history before you embed any links whatsoever. It can’t do any harm – making one to three short comments a day across say, 10 to 15 forums, should take just 15 minutes or so.

Bear in mind that many forums (especially the better ones) will have robust anti-spam bots and moderators in place to clamp down on spammy backlinks. 

After all, allowing spammy backlinks will damage the authority of the host site. 

Embedding Links

One common tactic is asking for others to ‘critique their site’. It’s a fair tactic and it’s hardly unreasonable to want to collect some feedback on your site. Make sure your site is absolutely secure before you place your first link, as you can’t be sure as to who is lurking in the forum. 

It’s probably best to avoid being too direct with your links if possible. This might seem tricky but you’re not looking to place your link loads of times – placing it in a couple of active, high-volume conversations should do the trick. 

All forums have different tolerance to linking, and many users will be none-the-wiser that you’re inserting your links for backlink purposes anyway, so long as you’re being authentic. 

Analyzing your Backlinks

Once you’ve placed some links, you can use an SEO tool to check your site’s backlink profile. 

Your backlink profile should reveal whether or not any links pointing to your site are indeed ‘follow’ and not ‘nofollow’. You’ll also receive a breakdown of the quality of the backlink and whether or not Google trusts it. 

Any spammy/dodgy backlinks that might harm your SEO are also highlighted by most SEO tools’ backlink analyzers. If you’ve accidentally placed your link on a dodgy site then you should remove it. 

Summary: Guide to Forum Posting sites for SEO

Posting links to forums remains a solid quick-win backlink strategy today. 

Quite how far these links will go to rank your site is up for debate, but the general consensus amongst SEOs is that forum posting is a solid strategy for smaller or medium-sized sites at least. 

Once you’ve identified some forum candidates, setting up your profile and posting some content doesn’t take long. 

Always pay attention to the relevance and authority of the site, and make sure that any links posted by users are marked to follow and not nofollow. 

That’s about it – it’s time to win some quick backlinks!” 

The post A Guide to Forum Link Building appeared first on SEO Administrator.

Everybody from marketers to advertisers, writers, CRMs, eCommerce professionals, and startups of every shape and size use SEO in their daily digital strategy.

But what are the real advantages and disadvantages of SEO?

Does SEO have any disadvantages? Or is it just a mantra that we drone on about through mere habit and repetition?

What is SEO?

It’s easy to get lost in the many varying definitions of SEO.

In a nutshell, SEO is the process and method of optimizing websites and other online entities (like social media accounts), to enhance their visibility in search engines. 

SEO endeavors to shuffle sites and their content to the top of the pile where users are most likely to find them.

SEO is a simple concept, but it has numerous sub-disciplines.

The core components of SEO are:

What Is The Point of SEO?

But why does SEO exist, and why is it even important?

Because search engines are the main gateway to the internet. SEO has a strange relationship with Google and other search engines.

Whilst it might be tempting to think that Google and SEO have a closely related or even symbiotic relationship, this doesn’t paint the whole picture.

Consider Google’s main aims; to make Google products and services the best in the world, to sell adverts, and to bolster their online influence. Google wants to be in control, and for the most part, they are.

The aim of SEO, in some sense, is to take back control from Google and engineer effective strategies that benefit businesses, organizations, and any other entity that requires an online presence.

In the beginning, this used to be about gaming Google’s algorithms to ‘cheat’ the system, but now it’s much more about serving the user – this is what search engines want you to do. 

Google’s focus on entirely honest and transparent organic SEO was enhanced in 2021 when Google decided to crack down on some forms of backlink exchange.

In the early days of SEO, gaming Google was pretty easy. By purchasing a few pricey backlinks and creating a quality site, your position at the top of the SERPs was all but guaranteed, especially given the relatively low competition at the time.

Google fought back, engineering new algorithms that placed increasing focus on the genuine credibility of sites. Google wants their search to work for the user, if they gained a reputation of pushing dodgy, scammy, or spammy sites to the top of the SERPs then Google would not be the massive business it is today.

SEO is now far-evolved and more complex.

The upshot is, it’s now easier for any and all businesses, organizations and individuals to harness the power of SEO.

The Advantages and Disadvantages of SEO

Without further ado, let’s look at the advantages and disadvantages of SEO.

Advantages of SEO

1)    Organic Search Reigns Supreme

Organic search is fuel for businesses. The more that people find your content via organic search, the more traffic you’ll get. You need the traffic to make conversions. SEO is top-of-the-funnel, it’s your opportunity to capture people from the SERPs.

According to BrightEdge, 68% of online experiences start with a search whereas 53.3% of all website traffic comes from organic search. Moreover, 1000% more traffic comes from organic search than social media.

SEO is a surefire way to improve digital visibility. SEO is the only tool you have to work your way up the SERPs. Paid traffic is another game entirely and whilst it can be effective, it doesn’t have the same longevity as SEO.

2)    SEO Has High ROI

But is all the money and time spent on SEO worth it in terms of ROI? Data suggest that it is – 60% of marketers told HubSpot that SEO is their main source of leads. These SEO leads had a close rate of 14.6%.

SEO converts traffic into leads efficiently, especially if the search terms have strong conversion or buying intent. For example, ranking highly for a phrase like “buy chamomile tea” gives you a strong chance of capturing leads who have their wallets in their hands already.

In comparison, running PPC campaigns can be very expensive, especially for competitive keywords.

SEO can be done DIY or with the service of an SEO professional – there’s a lot of choices out there and getting started doesn’t need to cost you anything at all. Some 70% of marketers view SEO as having a superior ROI to PPC.

3)    Long-Term Results

A solid SEO strategy will set your site up for long-term results. SEO does change as Google’s algorithms shift and add new features and improvements, but the core tenets of SEO such as content, UI/UX, backlinks, and technical SEO are not subject to a great deal of variation.

By building SEO steadily, your site will ascend the SERPs slowly but surely. Once you’ve obtained a decent position, it’s just about sustaining it. In a sense, SEO becomes easier with every rung you ascend in the SERPs. Once you’ve built authority and presence, it’s hard to lose it.

By comparison, PPC is quite unstable and volatile. SEO is much more stable and has greater longevity, especially if you create excellent evergreen content.

Disadvantages of SEO

1)    SEO is Long-Term Strategy

The advantage of SEO’s longevity doubles up as a disadvantage because of how time-consuming it is.

SEO strategies take some time to implement and though some gains can occur as quickly as it takes Google to index the page, it can take several months for multiple efforts to accumulate their benefits.

SEMRush says it can take 6 to 12 months for SEO strategies to reap rewards. It depends on your work rate, expenditure, and the competitors you need to beat to ascend the SERPs.

2)    No Real Guarantees

Your SEO efforts are not guaranteed to work, at least not as quickly as you’d like them to.

Google expressly warns against SEO companies that guarantee first-page results. SEO is not a get-rich-quick scheme, even though there are a vast number of success stories and rags-to-riches tails of startups and SMEs blossoming into much bigger companies via the power of SEO.

So long as you moderate your expectations, this is not a real issue.

3)    You’ll Have Competitors

Even if you think you have a very strong niche with low competition, it’s only a matter of time before new competitors enter your space. The internet is the most competitive space in the world. Some keywords like ‘car insurance’ or ‘mobile phone brands’ are likely to be absolutely dominated by huge sites with enormous SEO clout.

This doesn’t mean there are no opportunities, even in competitive areas. But, the more competitive the niche or subject, the more shrewd you’ll have to be, and you’ll have to invest more time into your content, link building, social media, and other SEO juice.

SEO is an ongoing competition and you’ll need to stay on the ball to prevent competitors from leapfrogging you.

Once you’ve found some decent rankings, maintaining them is crucial. Sometimes, there’s very little you can do to remain competitive for a specific keyword or phrase, but you’ll still be able to work around that keyword or phrase to out-maneuver competitors and stay on-trend.

Summary: The Advantages and Disadvantages of SEO

SEO is a unique discipline in many ways. It works both with and against Google and other search engines.

The advantages are clear – search engines are the machines between global web traffic and SEO is your opportunity to feed them what they need to rank you higher in the SERPs.

SEO does take time, dedication, and skill, but it’s not rocket science either, even if it might seem like it is at times.

When in doubt, keep it simple and focus on your bottom line; content, on-page, and off-site SEO.

Usually, it’s only a matter of time before you start to see the rewards.

Good luck!

The post The Advantages and Disadvantages of SEO appeared first on SEO Administrator.

The passive and active voice are both ways of phrasing a sentence that includes a subject, object, and verb.

Both active and passive voice have their place in writing, but the active voice is more direct, impactful, and rhythmic with a stronger narrative flow.

The vast majority of advertising and marketing copy exclusively targets the active voice for these reasons.

Take these marketing slogans:

Clearly, the active form of these short phrases is more impactful. The passive formation has identical meaning but throws in unnecessary words that clouds the phrase’s impact.

But how does this fit in with SEO?

Language and Google

Google’s algorithm has understood natural language to some extent for nearly a decade, but natural language processing – or NLP – has become much more advanced in recent years.

With BERT, SEOs can assume that Google is very competent at analyzing most elements of natural language.

So, granted the knowledge that Google understands the language very well, could this be an SEO ranking factor?

Language and SEO: A Complex Relationship

Language is something we often take for granted, but it’s hugely complex and thus, SEO and language have a complicated relationship.

There are numerous ways to construct sentences with near-identical meaning. This is why building NLP algorithms is so difficult.

Consider the following sentence:

“I saw a man on a hill with a telescope.”

It’s a seemingly simple sentence, but there are many different potential meanings here:

1. I was on a hill when I saw a man with a telescope
2. I’m watching a man on a hill with my telescope
3. The man on the hill has the telescope
4. There’s both a man and a telescope on the hill

For SEO purposes, Google has to try and unpack the meaning of these sentences to properly rank the phrase.

Since the phrase is so ambiguous, it will have to use the surrounding context of the phrase to understand what the passage is really about. This is consequential for SEO purposes.

SEO, as we may know, is about making Google’s life easier – writing is a big part of that.

Writing unambiguous text is potentially important for SEO as it helps algorithms understand the meaning of the text, e.g. that this blog post is about my sighting of a man on a hill using my telescope and not my sighting of a hill with a man and telescope on it.

Writing content that is clear, articulate, and error-free may directly or indirectly impact SEO performance.

What Google Has to Say

Google Webmaster guidelines reference the quality of written content in several places:

Google states: “Create a useful, information-rich site, and write pages that clearly and accurately describe your content.”

Google states: “Avoid writing sloppy text with many spelling and grammatical mistakes.”

Google states: “Creating high-quality content takes a significant amount of at least one of the following: time, effort, expertise, and talent/skill. Content should be factually accurate, clearly written, and comprehensive.”

Even back in 2011, SearchEngineLand found that content littered with spelling and grammar issues often ranked lower than accurately written pieces.

If there are two similar pieces competing for a hotly contested space in the SERPs, the better-written piece might just edge it.

However, Google has also said that they do not actively penalize sites with poorly written content so long as it doesn’t impact user experience.

As ever in SEO, the waters here are pretty murky. But, it’s still safest to assume that you need to produce excellent, clear, and error-free copy

1. For your users
2. For Google

And that’s why you need to think about passive vs active voice.

Passive vs Active Voice

If you’ve produced web copy with writing tools such as Yoast SEO, you’ll likely have come across the passive and active voice already. You can use the Hemingway editor to quickly check content for passive voice.

Simply defined, in an active voice sentence, the subject acts on the verb.

The subject in a passive voice sentence is a recipient of the verb’s action.

Here are a few examples:

Active: The team laid the road quickly.

Passive: The road was quickly laid by the team.

—

Active: I will clean the house on Monday.

Passive: The house will be cleaned by me on Monday.

—

Active: The writer created the article.

Passive: The article was created by the writer.

—

In some of these examples, you could strip away the ‘by me’:

Active: I will always remember my first trip to London

Passive: My first trip to London will always be remembered by me

Passive 2: My first trip to London will always be remembered

The last example here is ambiguous – it doesn’t specify that you are remembering that trip and not someone else.

When Passive Voice is Preferable

Overuse of passive voice does impact the readability of a passage, but it can sometimes be unavoidable.

If you’re reflecting on a process or events that occurred in the past tense then you’ll probably rack up more uses of the passive voice than if you’re writing about something that is happening right now.

Active voice is also easier to use when describing something that happens on an ongoing basis, e.g:

Active: Global warming caused a 3% rise in sea level in 2015.

Passive: A 3% rise in sea level was caused by global warming in 2015.

Here, the passive version of the sentence is clearly inferior. It doesn’t change the meaning of the sentence, it just throws in an extra couple of words that affect its readability.

However, sometimes, you’ll need to use passive voice to emphasize the correct part of a sentence:

Here’s an example of when passive voice best communicates the meaning of a sentence:

Active: An elephant injured grandad

Passive: Grandad got injured by an elephant

The second sentence, phrased using passive voice, describes the incident more clearly than the first.

The first focuses more on the elephant, whereas the second focuses more on the grandad.

Here’s another example:

Active: The burglar attacked an elderly couple at 8 pm

Passive: The elderly couple was attacked by a burglar at 8 pm

The passive version of the phrase emphasizes the elderly couple. If you’re reporting on this incident, e.g. in a newspaper, then it’d be more sensical to use the passive voice.

Passive vs Active Voice: The Verdict

Overuse of the passive voice is likely inconsequential for SEO unless it clouds the meaning of a passage or otherwise affects its readability.

But, there’s a thin line here, because losing readers due to ambiguous writing will affect SEO.

Away from optimization, the active voice can encourage action which may yield higher conversion rates, engagement, and enhanced shareability of content.

For marketing, promotional content, and advertising, a strong command of the active voice is essential. 

The active voice is also encouraged in scientific writing, medical writing, healthcare, therapy, and self-help.

It’s also worth mentioning that passive voice is by no means the only factor that can affect the readability of written text. Proper spelling, grammar, and formatting are all UX factors that Google understands.

The subject, message, and tone of a passage should also be well-aligned with the subject.

Whilst a post encouraging users to try or buy a product should be packed full of short, snappy, and motivational content, a reflective post on sensitive emotional themes ought to evoke a slower overall pace.

There are all potential ranking factors if they affect UX, so think carefully about written content and the role of passive and active voice.

The post Does the Use of Active vs Passive Voice Affect SEO? appeared first on SEO Administrator.

Not only did Google require engineering prowess and a unique penchant for digital innovation, but it also required long-term strategy, agility, and foresight.

To remain ahead of the curve, Google has had to undergo huge development.

Now, Google serves some 90,000 searches each second – since you’ve been reading this, Google has served millions of searches for millions of people worldwide!

Of course, many of these stats are indicative of how technological capacity has grown exponentially on the whole, but it also begs the question of how Google manages to do it.

What Are Data Centers?

Data centers are buildings that house data infrastructure and other technology, including the various software stacks required to run the technology.

Data centers are comprised of servers, data storage devices, and processor systems, plus a vast plethora of supportive technologies, power grids, and security systems.

Google’s data centers are unique in that they house the hardware and software required to maintain Google’s services, including Google Search and the Google search index which is over 100,000,000 gigabytes in size.

The data center has to store this data, but also has to serve it to the user.

Data Center Technologies

Data center technologies include:

• Routers
• Servers
• Application-delivery controllers
• Software security (e.g. firewalls)
• Hardware security (e.g. biometric or passcode entrances and exits, blast-proof walls)
• Storage systems
• Switches
• Environmental control (e.g. temperature, dehumidification)
• Cooling
• Load balance and fault tolerance software for managing issues and errors
• Predictive maintenance tools to measure system decline and forecast/schedule engineering/maintenance works

How Many Google Data Centers Are There?

Google currently has 21 data center locations.

Between these 21 data centers, in 2016, it was predicted Google had some 2.5 million servers.

The current figure is likely much higher, especially as Google has invested considerably in providing cloud computing services to rival AWS and Microsoft Azure.

There has been considerable speculation that Google owns backup or other secret data centers, but these have not been verified to date.

It’s worth mentioning that Google’s cloud data centers are not the same as the data centers they use to serve Google services, though there is likely some cross-over.

Google Cloud data centers are available in 24 regions right now in 2021.

Google Data Center Technology

Google’s Data Center technology can be broken down into two broad categories:

Indexation

Google says they know about some 130 trillion pages or more, but this doesn’t represent how many pages are actually in their index.

The index is different from the internet. Imagine the index as the collections of books that the librarian has read, or analyzed, for placing in the library database. Aside from these books, there are stacks of other books the librarian hasn’t looked indexed – they may have had a look and decided the content is not worthy of the index.

This information resides in what has come to be known as the “deep web”. Whilst the connotations of the deep web is often dark or even criminal, this really isn’t the case.

The deep web is mostly full of unpublished or half-finished or half-dead material, any content that resides between paywalls or sign-in credentials, content that the owners have blocked from indexing, and much more.

Google’s index works via an inverted index system where the index obtains documents listed by query. When you use a query on Google, it will retrieve the relevant material from where it’s stored in the index and serve it to you.

Documents IDs are divided into what are known as database shards, divided and replicated between many servers.

In 2010, Google designed a new index called “Caffeine” that continuously crawled the search index to update it at rapid periodical intervals. These days, the entire search index is created by crawlers that work in tandem with indexation algorithms to locate, parse, save and rank internet data.

Google Data Center Server Types

Google uses many hardware and software technologies, some are publicly known, others are secret.

There are several server types:

• Web servers form the backbone of the data center’s networking tech. These execute the queries of internet users. Queries are sent from Google Search to index servers. These are coordinated with the ranking algorithms and also receive information on auto-suggest and other search features. The servers will deliver search results and all other relevant information.

• Google stores internet documents and files in document servers. These return documents relevant to queries.

• Google employs spiders and crawlers that live inside the web. Google’s crawler is known as GoogleBot. This robot network crawls the web to locate new and existing web pages for potential ranking in the index.

• Other servers manage other Google services ranging from Maps to Shopping and Ads.

Environment and Security

Google Data Center security was hush-hush until Google published some posts on the interior of their data centers. Indeed, they’re not as secretive as they once were.

Security is provided by a multitude of entry protocols and security tiers controlled using badges. Retinal scanning and multi-stage doors are also used at some data centers.

Hardware and software security is obviously a huge priority and there are numerous in-house-developed and third-party technologies used here to safeguard both data and hardware from all forms of vulnerability and attack.

Some of the most common criticisms of data centers revolve around energy usage and environmental impact. Some data centers are thought to use billions of gallons of water daily to cool servers and other hardware.

Back in 2016, Google pledged to use 100% renewable energy and is one of the world’s biggest corporate investors in renewables technologies today. It’s unclear what progression has been made on that earlier claim, but progress has certainly been made.

How Google Serves Your Query

The data center is the brain and lifeblood of Google Search and other Google services.

Google has become phenomenally intelligent over the years and is now able to serve queries with extreme accuracy.

This involves a few steps:

• Google uses natural language processing (NLP), a branch of machine learning (ML), to understand your query. Different operative words you use will alter the results.
  
  For example, ‘change’ can be an entirely different operative word to ‘replace’, despite them being interchangeable in some contexts. Google will understand when ‘replace’ is being used differently to ‘change’ to modify the query.
  
• Once Google understands your query, it will calculate the most relevant responses. This is where SEO comes into play as Google will have already ranked responses for that query.
  
  Google uses a priority system to allow it to serve users with the best results. Optimized pages that Google thinks will help the user will be at the top of the pecking order in the search engine results page (SERPs).

• Google will also take the context of the search into account, including your location and other personalized variables.
  
  For example, if you’re currently in Barcelona and Barcelona vs Real Madrid is on that night, the query “football” will bring up results about this match.

All of these actions are processed at Google’s data centers. They can be thought of as super-computers that are networked to the web via colossal numbers of servers.

Of course, Google’s data centers will also process other information and data related to their business, whether that’s data related to the Android mobile operating system or data related to their DeepMind AI platform.

The post Google Data Centers Explained appeared first on SEO Administrator.

Clickable tables of contents are one such ‘SEO gadget’.

There are so many indirect and direct SEO ranking factors ranging from off-page SEO such as backlinks to on-page SEO, e.g. content, and technical SEO.

But the way you design your pages and content is also important, and Google has placed great emphasis on user interaction and UX in recent years.

Adding a table of contents to your posts is a quick and easy way of adding a great-looking UX feature for users, as well as placing some keywords at the top of your text.

The Benefits of Using Tables of Contents for SEO

Building a table of contents is an easy way to augment your content for both SEO, UX, and the middle ground that exists between the two.

Here are some benefits of building tables of contents for your blog posts and articles:

How Do You Create Tables of Contents?

Your theme might have a table of contents plugin or content block already – it’s worth checking. 

If not, creating great-looking, user-friendly tables of contents on WordPress is pretty easy with the use of the following 4 plugins:

These should provide a breakdown of your headings along with clickable links that take users to that heading in your content.

On-Page SEO and UX

On-page SEO and UX work together. They refer to the characteristics and components of your pages and content.

UX probably didn’t matter much in SEO until the early 2000s or later. Prior to that, webpages were generally so basic anyway that ‘anything that worked’ probably provided a good UX.

When web page design became more diverse and the options grew, webpages started to look different and displayed more features to make themselves unique, add functionality and provide a stronger user experience.

UX then became a central focus of web design, and Google followed suit with a sequence of algorithm changes to reflect this.

Since the early days of SEO, as SearchEngineLand states, Google’s Panda, Penguin, and Hummingbird algorithm updates have reflected the metamorphosis of the web from raw textual data into a much richer, multimedia environment.

But with great media comes great responsibility, and it’s been a challenge to deliver the functionality of complex web pages through quality UX.

What is UX?

Consider social media giants like Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. Twitter’s UX is more oriented around the tweets themselves – it’s a reel of continuous textual and photographic data, organized via hashtags and trends.

Instagram, on the other hand, is a more visual platform, and thus it has a more visually-oriented UX. Text is mostly replaced by images.

Facebook is somewhat of a mixture but it’s also oriented around networking. As a result, Facebook’s UX is optimized for navigating and interacting with people and brands.

UX For Your Site

But what does UX mean for your site?

It depends on the site, but in general, content needs to be attractive and easy to navigate. Users want to get to what they want almost immediately. That means fast, accurate, and well-signposted pages.

UX involves some technical SEO, but mostly on-page SEO.

In terms of technical SEO, load time is one of the greatest UX factors. A great user experience is a fast user experience, and tests by Pingdom found that bounce rates could jump by some 20% if a site loads for longer than 3 seconds or so.

Page speed is always worth tackling, and most fixes are straightforward. You can use SEO audit tools to get to the bottom of why your pages are loading slowly, if they are at all.

UX and Content Design

Regardless of how complex and flashy your website is, every site has one thing in common when it comes to UX:

Content has to be easy to read.

All the beautiful graphics and menus in the world can’t help you if your content is hard to read!

Content design is the process of making sure your content is well-optimized for the reader.

Google Wants People to Read Your Content

Written content is the main-stay of the internet, and Google wants to know that people are actually reading it on your site.

There are two signals here:

1. Bounce rate – the rate at which users click off your page/site soon after visiting it
2. Dwell time – the time users spend ‘dwelling’ or interacting/read with your page

It’s very difficult to quantify how Google looks into these signals and how they may/may not affect SEO.

Ahrefs concluded that dwell time is a valuable indicator of how engaging your pages are, but that it was unclear whether or not this would be a direct ranking factor.

CXL and Moz, however, argue that Google discerns between ‘short clicks’ i.e. bouncing clicks where someone spends little to no time on your site, and ‘long clicks’, when users spend more time on your site.

Regardless of whether content engagement, dwell time or long clicks are actual ranking factors, designing your content to fulfill the user’s query is very likely to yield SEO benefits.

Content your users actually read ought to be an indicator of ‘search success’ – a validating signal that lets Google know your page is earning its spot in the SERPs.

That’s why you should add a table of contents to your pages!

Tables of Contents for SEO

The concept of a table of contents is simple.

Placed at the top of a page, they let users view a quick breakdown of your article or content for easy navigation purposes.

If they click on a heading link, (also known as a jumplink), then they’ll be taken to that relevant heading – no need to scroll manually.

For UX this is very important. When someone lands on a post with a table of contents, they can easily find their answer quickly.

This at least reduces bounce rate and could increase dwell time or the chance of a ‘long click’ compared to if the user tried to scroll through the post for info and gave up before finding their answer.

When to Use a Table of Contents?

Tables of contents are most useful for longer content with plenty of headings.

You can add them to any content, though, and they do yield some technical and on-page benefits UX, as mentioned.

There’s no reason why you shouldn’t add a table of contents to all content with say, 3 or more headings, and over 500 or so words.

A quick win SEO gadget with potentially measurable results – tables of contents are a simple but effective tool to add to your SEO arsenal!

Summary

Adding a table of contents to your pages is simple but effective for both UX and SEO. UX and SEO are related in many ways, so it’s pretty much a win-win all round!

Tables of contents enhance the usability and navigation of your site, and that counts for a lot.

It’s pretty much as simple as that, so the answer is yes, click tables of contents are indeed good for SEO.

The post Is a Clickable Table of Contents Good for SEO? appeared first on SEO Administrator.

XML sitemaps are files that provide Google and other search engines a map to your site and its various URLs and pages.

Consider when a crawler arrives on your site. Without an XML sitemap, it has to follow links around your site to locate new content for crawling and eventually, indexing.

With an XML sitemap, the crawler is signposted to the parts of your site that you want it to crawl and index.

XML sitemaps are signposts that urge crawlers on the right path round your site.

Without a sitemap, your site will still get indexed so long as you have proper internal linking, so don’t panic if you’ve never used an XML sitemap before.

As far as SEO goes? XML sitemaps are supportive of good SEO but will only directly influence it under specific circumstances.

You’ll need to set your site up with Google Search Console and other search engine webmaster tools to point them to your sitemap.

Crawlers can also find the XML sitemap in your robots.txt file if you specify the path to the sitemap there.

Do You Need an XML Sitemap?

XML sitemaps aren’t strictly essential – your site will still get indexed without one, so long as pages are properly linked by internal and/or external URLs.

But that doesn’t provide the whole picture as XML sitemaps certainly improve the efficiency and quality of indexing and this does impact SEO.

Google themselves state that XML sitemaps are only 100% essential if your site is reasonably large (over 500 pages) or features a lot of rich media.

The problem is, by modern standards, sites with 500+ pages can still seem small, and many ‘small’ sites will exceed this if they have a store with quite a few products, a blog, etc.

Other situations when you definitely need an XML sitemap is when your site has a complex structure with a lot of disparate or isolated content that might get overlooked by crawlers if you don’t provide a sitemap.

In these situations, crawlers may never reach your newly created content if you don’t have a sitemap to direct them there. Obviously, this is a problem; they’ll arrive on your homepage, explore a little and pretty much get lost crawling the same pages until your crawl budget depletes.

This could leave parts of your website uncrawled and therefore, unindexed!

Why You Should Create an XML Sitemap

Even if Google states that you don’t need an XML sitemap, particularly if your site is small (though you might be surprised as to how large your site really is), it’s definitely good practice to create one for any site. 

Creating an XML sitemap is pretty easy, and once you upload your sitemap into Google Search Console, you’ll be able to check when Google visits it and crawls your URLs, which is very useful in itself.

Providing a sitemap to Google will also help get your site indexed quickly and you’ll be able to check and track the crawl status of your URLs from the Sitemaps section of Google Search Console.

For this alone, creating a sitemap is well worth it.

When You Should Create a Sitemap

It depends on how you’re constructing your website or what platform or theme you’re using.

If you go down the WordPress route, your theme will already have some sort of built-in URL structure, e.g. you might have a homepage, blog, about, shop, portfolio and other related pages.

Shopify and other platforms will auto-generate XML sitemaps, but you still might need to modify them at some point.

Generally speaking, once you build your site out with some content and get your site set up with Google Search Console, you should create and add a sitemap.

When you make small changes to your site, there’s no need to update the sitemap unless it’s very large and you’re concerned about your crawl budget.

Dynamic Sitemaps

Some sitemaps generated using plugins like Yoast SEO are known as ‘dynamic sitemaps’ and will auto-update when you add and remove content from your site.

These plugins ‘ping’ search engines to alert them of updates (which may get new content indexed quicker, but it’s hard to tell and you can’t count on it.

Where Do You Put the XML Sitemap?

The XML sitemap should be placed at your site route, so www.example.com/sitemap_index.xml.

You place your sitemap manually with the file manager of your web hosting software (such cPanel), but you can also use a plugin to do this for you (and many will also generate the sitemap also).

Once you’ve placed your sitemap file at the root, you can head into Google Search Console and head to Sitemaps > Add a New Sitemap.

For other search engines, e.g. Bing, Yandex or Baidu, you’ll have to use their equivalent webmaster tools to upload your sitemap. You can also add the sitemap to your robots.txt so they can find the sitemap automatically when they crawl your site.

Step-by-step:

1. Create a sitemap using a sitemap generator tool or plugin
2. Add the sitemap to your site’s root (manually or with a plugin)
3. Add that sitemap to Google Search Console
4. Wait for confirmation that Google can see your sitemap, your URLs should be mapped and crawled soon after
5. You can also add your sitemap to any robots.txt files you create for your site

Advanced Sitemap Attributes and Controls

XML sitemaps can contain complex attributes that provide in-depth signposts for crawlers visiting your site.

XML sitemap attributes include priority, last modified and change frequency, all of which are designed to instruct crawlers on what your important URLs are and how often they change.

You can alter these if you like (using in-depth XML sitemap generators like Screaming Frog), but many search engines pay little or no attention to them.

For example, Google stated that they do not consume priority attributes in sitemaps.

XML Sitemap Tools

Screaming Frog XML Sitemap Generator

The Screaming Frog XML sitemap generator is part of their SEO Spider tool that crawls your site, locates its URLs and analyzes various on-page and technical SEO characteristics.

In the process, it will crawl your URLs for XML sitemap generation.

Screaming Frog provides a full breakdown of your site’s URL structure, allowing you to create an XML sitemap that is modifiable with attributes such as priority and change frequency.

You’ll also be able to select any URLs you don’t want to include in the sitemap (though they’ll still be crawled if there are internal or external links pointing to them).

The free version of the SEO Spider will crawl up to 500 URLs which you can use to create your XML sitemap.

Features

• Crawls your site for URLs
• Allows you to add many types of sitemap attributes (e.g. priority, change frequency)
• Up to 500 URLs for the free version of the SEO Spider (which does a lot more than create sitemaps)

XML Sitemaps

This longstanding XML sitemap generator tool has been around since 2005 and is a quick and easy way to build a standard XML sitemap for any site.

Simply insert your site into the field and the tool will crawl its various URLs to generate a downloadable XML sitemap to place in your website root and Google Search Console.

The free version of the tool will map up to 500 pages. There is a premium version of the tool that creates dynamic sitemaps for larger websites, and it will ping them to search engines so you don’t have to upload them yourself (but you should anyway).

An excellent, simple free tool for creating XML sitemaps for upload to your site’s root and Google Search Console.

Features

• Free tool crawls up to 500 pages
• Downloadable XML sitemaps
• Premium version ideal for super-sized sites

XML Sitemap Generator

Another super-simple, free XML sitemap generator, this free tool will crawl up to 2,000 URLs, more than broadly equivalent free tools.

There are also several options for creating advanced XML sitemaps with change frequency, priority and exclusion or filtering settings. It’s only worth fiddling with these settings if you’re an advanced SEO user or want to manage a crawl budget problem.

The company also offers a WordPress XML sitemap plugin that lets you choose whether or not to add new content you create for your site.

Features

• Generate XML sitemaps for up to 2,000 pages
• Advanced attribute settings
• WordPress plugin also available

My Sitemap Generator

This is another super-simple sitemap generator suitable for the vast majority of standard websites. Simply enter your root URL to create your sitemap.

You’ll be able to set priority and change frequency for specific URLs if you like and can add attributes to instruct crawlers whether or not to crawl certain content (e.g. javascript).

The free tool accommodates sites with up to 500 pages. There’s plenty of advanced settings here if you’re looking to manage a crawl budget problem (unlikely for small sites).

Features

• Free for up to 500 pages
• Set advanced sitemap instructions and attributes
• Set URL change frequency and priority

Yoast SEO

The fantastic and widely known Yoast SEO plugin includes an XML sitemap feature that is free to use.

The plugin will automatically update your sitemap as you add/remove/change content on your site, which is obviously great.

The XML sitemap feature is very easy to activate, and once you’ve done it from within the plugin menu in WordPress, you’ll be able to view your sitemap and submit it to Google Search Console and other webmaster tools.

You’ll probably notice that there are no additional settings to adjust priority or change frequency, but as stated, you really don’t need to worry about these too much.

Features

• Auto-generate dynamic XML sitemaps for any WordPress site
• Sitemaps are auto-updated
• Simply point Google Search Console to the sitemap that you can open from within the plugin

Google Sitemap Generator

Though named Google Sitemap Generator, this sitemap generator plugin is compliant with most search engines and allows you to auto-generate sitemaps for WordPress sites.

When you update your site or create new content, the plugin ‘pings’ Google and other search engines with an alert that your sitemap has been updated.

This plugin does allow you to edit priorities, change frequency and other parameters if you want to. It’s extremely well-rated, reliable and easy-to-use for anyone.

Features

• Auto-generate dynamic XML sitemaps for any WordPress site
• Auto-update sitemap and alerts Google and other search engines to changes
• Allows for changes to advanced sitemap parameters and attributes

Rank Math

Rank Math is an extremely sophisticated WordPress SEO plugin that provides unparalleled control over numerous on-page and technical SEO settings ranging from schema to sitemaps.

It doesn’t just cover XML sitemaps but also news and video sitemaps that can help Google index your content and media to Google Videos and Google News.

The XML sitemap generator is exceptionally easy to use and modify, and you’ll be able to allocate URLs that you don’t want to include in the sitemap.

In general, though, Rank Math is a gem of a WordPress SEO tool that has been featured by many top SEO brands. The XML sitemap feature is available in the Standard version at $59 a year (and is also obviously available in the more advanced, expensive tiers).

Features

• WordPress SEO plugin
• Powerful sitemap features
• Tons of other tools available in the plugin

Site Robot for Shopify

This is an XML and HTML sitemap generator plugin for Shopify.

It essentially creates an XML sitemap for any Shopify site for upload to Google Search Console.

The only real advantage it lends over auto-generated Shopify sitemaps is that you can choose URLs to exclude (and that it lets you create HTML sitemaps too, which are a different type of sitemap that pull all your site URLs onto one page of your site).

Features

• Auto-generate XML sitemaps for Shopify
• Exclude URLs
• Also generates HTML sitemaps

Magento XML Google Sitemap Generator

For the Magento CMS, this sitemap generator is designed to quickly and efficiently create very large sitemaps for super-sized sites (typically enterprise-level or larger business sites with thousands of pages).

It’s a powerful tool that allows total control over sitemaps and it’s capable of mapping the maximum number of URLs Google permits for a sitemap (50,000 URLs or 50MB).

This is very useful for large Magento stores with potentially thousands of products and many dynamic pages. Essential for enterprise-level crawler budget management for Magento.

Features

• Sitemap generator for Magento
• Works with XL websites
• Plenty of control over attributes

Summary

Creating and implementing XML sitemaps for Google Search Console and other webmaster tools is straightforward and whilst the jury is out on whether or not they confer direct SEO advantages, XML sitemaps definitely qualify as SEO ‘good practice’.

For some sites, there’s no doubt of the necessity of XML sitemaps and properly implementing them can get your site indexed properly, also helping you manage crawl budget problems.

It’s also very useful to be able to view and navigate your site in the Search Console under the Sitemaps tab.

This provides you with an easy way to monitor the URL structure and indexing status of your site and its pages.

The post XML Sitemap Generators appeared first on SEO Administrator.

The options are bewildering and finding the best software for your project is a tricky process, especially given that not all SEO software is built to the same specification, and prices do vary considerably.

SheerSEO has been around since 2006 which actually makes it one of the first SEO tools available for the mass market.

It can be considered an ‘SEO suite’, meaning it has a wide focus and provides you with virtually everything you need for SEO as an individual site owner or small agency.

This differs from other SEO software that might focus on just one or two aspects of SEO in detail, e.g. competitive analysis, technical or on-page SEO, or keyword analysis.

SheerSEO covers pretty much all the SEO bases – it’s a comprehensive set of SEO multi-purpose tools.

SheerSEO is a cost-effective, trustworthy, comprehensive but altogether lesser-known SEO suite that is certainly well worth a look, so here’s a review on SheerSEO!

SheerSEO Background

SheerSEO was created by Israeli software engineer Eyal Aldema. He’s a successful software designer that always had a penchant for SEO, and whilst aggrieved by the lack of SEO options back in 2006, he set out to build SheerSEO.

There’s no doubt that SheerSEO is a budget, utilitarian SEO software suite.

You can tell the site and tools themselves have been built pretty DIY by the guy himself. Some people will really enjoy the no-frills design and approach to SEO.

It’s important to bear in mind that you’re not dealing with million-dollar aesthetics here, but you are dealing with a very strong set of highly usable SEO tools that work effectively and at probably a quarter of the cost of main-brand SEO suites.

SheerSEO Prices

• Free: SheerSEO begins with a free-forever version that is expectedly limited. It lets you track 20 keywords and crawl 100 pages each month with a once-a-month site audit. Most other features are disallowed or greatly limited.

• Standard, $10/mo: The standard package is basically more of everything you get in the Free package. You’ll also get access to reports. You’re still lacking most features.

• Advanced, $15/mo: For just $5 more than Standard, the Advanced package comes with all features except the Competitor Analysis tool. That means you’ll get plenty of keyword tracking, site audits with decent page crawl limits, guarded backlink tools, a blog review, and outreach tool, the ability to re-poll rankings immediately, and integration with Google Search Console and Google Analytics.

• Professional Thin, $25/mo: For just $25/mo, you get the Professional Thin package. $25/mo is still extremely cheap compared to many equivalent SEO suites. You’ll get access to everything with generous budgets + the Competitor Analysis tool.

• Advanced, $40/mo: For agencies and teams, the Advanced package gives you everything, and you get very generous crawl budgets, keyword limits, etc.

Overall, the pricing here is more-than-fair. In fact, it’s actually pretty outstanding. SheerSEO wins over many users on pricing alone. You are limited until you reach the Advanced package, but at $15 it’s a steal.

SheerSEO is cheap but powerful, a winning combination!

Sign Up Process

Signing up to SheerSEO is easy.

All you’ll need is your domain name and email. By signing up you’ll automatically be put onto the Free version of the software, with limited functionality. It’s still decent though and is free forever – not a free trial, which is excellent.

During the sign-up process, the software will analyze your site and suggest keywords to track from your content.

This gets you started nice and quickly, but of course, you’ll probably want to add more keywords you’re targeting into SheerSEO.

Dashboard and Interface

SheerSEO has a pretty utilitarian interface. It certainly works, is easy to navigate, and seems robust, though perhaps a little lacking in the design department.

One of the first pages you’ll land on is the Dashboard.

The Dashboard area displays critical data and graphs.

You’ll find:

Once you land on the dashboard, you should take note of the ‘Onboarding Tasks’ positioned at the bottom of the page. This provides you with a few tasks to complete so you can start to properly use the various tools on offer.

You can set up your local SEO here with ‘Localization’. This will allow you to track local rankings in the Rankings tab. You can also add your precious backlinks to the Guard Precious Backlinks tool. This is an alert system that will update you with any changes to your existing backlinks.

You can also Define Optimization Targets, which essentially allows you to single out a handful of keywords you really want to work on. You can then track these in greater detail, and the tool will also show methods to improve your ranking using SheerSEO features.

It could also be a good idea to head straight into an SEO Audit (also suggested by the onboarding). Checking your site’s existing pages for errors and actionable insights is always a good place to start when it comes to SEO.

Features

Now, let’s move onto the features SheerSEO has to offer.

There are 16 tabs in total.

Rank Tracking

The first tool available for you down the left-hand side is the rank tracking tool, or ‘Rankings’. This is a rank tracker tool for analyzing and tracking movement in the SERPs.

Here, you’ll be able to track ranks for given keywords alongside various numerical and graphical data. Some of these keywords will be analyzed when you sign up – these are the only ones you’ll be able to track using the free version of SheerSEO.

For the paid versions, you’ll be able to add keywords from the Keyword Explorer tool, and will then be able to track their ranks from Rankings. Data can be imported from Google Search Console to display “visits” and “impressions”.

The Rankings tool has all your typical features including historical ranking graphs, search volume, estimated clicks per SERPs listing, and the numerical rank itself.

Current data can be compared to past data to track ranking changes over time.

Ranks can also be tracked locally or by country or region if you set this up in the localization settings. Filters can be set up to sort ranks if you have a lot of data there.

You can track rankings for Google, Google Local, Bing, and YouTube.

Competitor Analysis

The next tab down is Competitors. This is only available for paid versions of the tool.

Competitors will be automatically generated from sites that relate to your keywords, but you can add others manually.

Competitors allow you to insert and track your competitor’s rankings by keyword. You’ll be able to track their local SEO performance, including how this changes throughout time

You’ll be able to directly compare rankings side-by-side.

It’s worth mentioning that there are other ways to track competitors in SheerSEO, namely the Keyword Gap and Site Backlink tabs.

Overall, a decent set of tools for tracking the movement of competitors in the SERPs alongside the keywords they’re ranking for.

Optimization Targets

As touched on earlier, the Optimization Targets feature helps you ascertain your highest priority keywords. These can be imported from Google Search Console.

This is pretty much just a more detailed version of the keyword tracker combined with ranking analysis. It provides suggestions of actions you can take to improve the ranking (e.g. securing backlinks or on-page SEO).

Backlinks Explorer

The Backlinks Explorer tool provides you with a detailed rundown of your backlink profile including:

This tool is somewhat linked to the Backlink Checker tool where you can add your precious backlinks and set up alerts on any changes that occur to them.

The Backlink Explorer also lets you analyze competitor’s backlinks including the anchor text and source URL.

Moreover, you’ll be able to locate toxic links to your site, assess how bad they are/could be, and then generate disavow files for the Google Disavow Links tool.

Site Audit

The site audit will crawl your site and its pages to discover page errors such as redirects. It will also let you analyze how/if your pages are being crawled.

The Audit Issues tab here is probably more in-depth and will provide you with a breakdown of issues page-by-page alongside tips on how to fix any issues you encounter.

Site Audit is more of a technical SEO audit tool – On-Page SEO is more of a content audit. 

Organic Research

The Organic Research tab identifies and analyzes competitors based on your keywords.

It’s designed to help point you towards sites you should investigate manually and with SheerSEO’s competitor analysis tools.

You’ll be able to find keyword information for each site and their ranked keywords as well as their CPC value (where applicable).

This is great for quickly building a snapshot of how your niche is featured on Google.

Keyword Gaps

Keyword Gap is another competitor analysis tool. It would have been easier to group the tools together based on what they’re used for rather than scattering them out throughout the menu.

Keyword Gap analyzes competitors’ keywords to find out what they’re ranking for and what you don’t rank for. It’s simple to use – hunt down keywords from competitors and seek to build content around those gaps.

Social Media

SheerSEO lets you track Twitter and Facebook and will discover shares, likes, and comments relating to your brand. Any mention of your site on Twitter or Facebook should appear here.

This is excellent and though simple in interface and design, this is a non-convoluted way to track branded social media mentions.

On-Page SEO

For many, this is one of the most important tools of any SEO suite. The On-Page SEO tool lets you analyze your pages for many types of optimization factors ranging from meta tags to keywords in heading, alt tags, and keyword density.

The optimization issues are all easily laid out and displayed alongside tips on how to fix them.

The Keyword Density tab provides a more complete breakdown of your page-by-page keywords so you can find out the kind of terms you’re including in your content already.

Index Pages

This is a simple tool for checking if/how many of your pages are indexed.

You can use it to track whether or not new content you’re adding to your site is being indexed.

Backlink Checker

We’ve covered this already – it allows you to allocate guarded backlinks that can be set up using alerts. 

Directory Submissions

Now, this is an interesting one!

The Directory Submissions tab provides a semi-automated method of getting your site backlinked in directories.

Directories are sites that will take your link, often with a small bio or snippet of content, and place it on their site. They’re a quick-win backlink method that gets your site up and running with some backlinks.

In the long run, directories do not provide a great deal of ‘link juice’, but they’re generally inexpensive when you’re starting out.

To use this tool, you’ll have to create a directory profile. You choose directories and pay via the tool itself, and SheerSEO will take up the request with the directory.

If the request fails or the directory doesn’t respond, you’ll receive your money back.

Blog Reviews

Another nifty and quite original tool, the Blog Reviews tool lets you create blog profiles that you can then use to prospect blogs related to your niche for outreach purposes.

You simply add an Offer profile and then ask SheerSEO to display blogs related to your input keyword.

Like the Directory Submissions tool, this semi-automates the process of finding suitable blogs to contact for backlink purposes.

It’s pretty clever and works well, saving time on procuring blog submissions and other blog backlinks/guest posts manually.

Reports Generator

The Reports tab lets you create reports and breakdowns of your SEO metrics and performance.

There’s plenty of options here and you can automate reports to send periodically.

SheerSEO Pros and Cons

Now we’ve overviewed the main features and tools, what’re the key pros and cons of SheerSEO?

Pro: Cost-Effective

SheerSEO is one of the cheapest SEO tools of its class. Whilst it might not be so flashy and high-end in appearance, it has the tools you need to succeed in SEO at almost any level.

Pro: Comprehensive

SheerSEO is comprehensive with deep functionality and some clever tools. The Blog Review tool lets you send blog requests en-masse – a real time-saver.

The Directory Submissions tool is also effective and intelligently implemented. It takes the legwork out of directory submissions and makes them much easier to manage than if you were going through them manually by email.

Pro: Generally Easy-to-Use

While the interface might feel clumsy at first, it is easy to use. Once you’ve set the groundwork for your site, e.g. choosing keywords, setting competitors and setting up localization and blog profiles, etc, the whole experience runs pretty smoothly.

Con: Clunky

There’s no hiding SheerSEO’s clunky and slightly outdated interface. Whilst it works fine, it would be straightforward to group tools based on their general uses. For example, all the backlink tools should be placed side-by-side, the competitor analysis tools, outreach tools, etc.

Con: Lacks Graphical Detail

The interface lacks a splash of color and other graphical features to animate data and bring everything to life. Again, whilst the utilitarian vibe is broadly effective, it could benefit from some refining.

Who Should Use SheerSEO?

SheerSEO’s pricing angles it towards entry and novice-level SEOs, or small teams.

For single sites, it’s a superb tool that combines a wide range of quality tools with some nice innovative touches in the form of the Blog Review and Directory Submissions outreach tools.

DIY SEOs will enjoy the pricing and the scalability of the product. It just goes to show that if you’re a small business with a developing site that you run either part-time or even for hobby or non-profit purposes, there is an affordable SEO suite out there for you.

SheerSEO is welcomed in a market where SEO suites are still generally quite expensive.

Summary

SheerSEO is cheap and effective with plenty of tools. Many of the tools have enough depth for serious SEO – this is not a basic SEO suite by any stretch of the imagination.

Standout tools here include the Directory Submissions and Blog Review tools, both of which provide an innovative path to conducting outreach en-masse.

All of your standard SEO tools are well-represented, including content and technical SEO audits, ranking tracking and competitor analysis, etc.

Overall, whilst SheerSEO lacks some refinement or design prowess, it represents one of the most cost-effective SEO suites in the entire industry.

The post Shear SEO Review appeared first on SEO Administrator.

Whilst you can control many things associated with your brand, business, organization, or individual reputation, poor reviews, bad press, and other damaging stories can come out of the woodwork to haunt you in the SERPs.

According to The Harris Poll, 4 out of 5 consumers search a business on Google before purchasing from them. Meanwhile, 86% of people rate local business reviews as important, and over half look for businesses with 4-star reviews or over.

Clearly, trust is a massive priority and sharp-eyed internet users will always pick up on negative press, stories, and reviews in the SERPs.

In short, when bad press strikes your brand, you need a strategy to fight it.

Reverse SEO is one tactic you can use.

What is Reverse SEO?

Reverse SEO is a strategy whereby you identify problematic web pages associated with your brand and attempt to push them down the SERPs.

This could involve a combination of pulling up positive or neutral results that appear below the bad results in the SERPs to push the bad results down, creating new content to rank for the keywords of the negative content, or even creating new sites to take the space of the bad in the SERPs.

The negative content you’re targeting will usually return for queries involving your brand/business/personal name.

Pages that might impact your brand could include:

Locating this content is simple when your brand, organization, or personal name is used. But otherwise, it might rank for your products, services, employees, or other aspects of your business.

It’s worth bearing in mind that if the negative content itself is very poorly optimized then it’s not likely that many people will see it – that’s why it’s best to focus on content that ranks for branded or personal mentions.

Is Reverse SEO Black-Hat/Allowed by Google?

Reverse SEO is not a black-hat SEO tactic, but negative SEO is.

There is some crossover between the two and it’s important to bear in mind that a poorly executed reverse SEO campaign can easily become black-hat and serious repercussions are possible.

Fortunately, so long as you stay within the lines with reverse SEO, you’ll be fine.

Negative Vs Reverse SEO

Negative SEO is a black-hat technique, unpermitted by Google and other search engines.

Negative SEO ranges from producing fake reviews on a competitor’s products to flooding their pages with spammy links or holding sensitive information for ransom. Brand mentions could also be ranked alongside NSFW content.

Not only is negative SEO expressly disallowed by Google, but it can also be situationally illegal. 

Before You Consider Reverse SEO

Before you consider reverse SEO, you may be able to request that Google removes the harmful content from the SERPs for you.

Google’s removal policies revolve around legal issues, privacy breaches, security, and the potential for personal harm.

They keep free speech in-tact, meaning that they won’t apply to general negative press or other bad coverage that affects your brand.

Google has 6 main content removal policies:

In any of these situations, Google should help you remove the content in question from the SERPs.

Google can also remove fake Google My Business reviews, providing you have a strong case.

You can also have a look through the site and find out whether they’re breaking other Google guidelines, e.g. they’re engaging in negative SEO or are publishing illegal or spam content.

Contact the Site Owner/Manager

Secondly, it’s always worth contacting the site to ask what’s going on and get them to explain their side of the story. Tread carefully and kindly request they reconsider their views or otherwise take down the content.

This is a good shout if the negative press/review results from a rare defect product, a misunderstanding, or a complaint that is no longer relevant/has been dealt with internally by your company or similar.

So long as you’re professional, courteous, and have a strong, genuine case, then there’s a good chance this will permanently solve the issue!

Reverse SEO: Research Stage

The first stage of an SEO campaign is locating the target pages and analyzing them for competitive intel.

You’ll need an SEO audit tool or competitive research tool as provided in SEO suites such as Moz, Ahrefs, UberSuggest, and Semrush.

Trust Score and Domain Authority

You’ll first need to look at the site’s trust score and authority.

Needless to say, if you’re a small business and you’ve been unlucky enough to get slapped by a bad review or negative press from a major publication then there’s likely no easy way out.

If the domain has a low trust and authority score and the content itself is thin then you’ve got a strong chance of pushing them down the SERPs.

Keyword Analysis

The next step is to analyze the keywords used by the page in question.

These are the keywords you’ll have to target in your reverse SEO campaign. If you create on-site and off-site content around these keywords, you can rank for those keywords and resecure the SERPs.

Backlink Analysis

You’ll also want to analyze the backlinks of your target page.

This will enable you to contact those sites and request they backlink your own properties.

Reverse SEO: Organic SEO Comes First

The best way to perform reverse SEO is by bolstering your own domain’s SEO.

This technique has longevity – if you can rank in a few places across the SERPs then you’ll leave less room for negative press and reviews.

For example, if a poor review hits one of your new products hard then you can create new pages on your site dedicated to that product. These should rank themselves, thus pushing the negative reviews out of the picture.

Of course, this technique can generate traffic of its own, which is a bonus.

Always focus on building and consolidating your own quality content around your brand name and products first.

Brand Name Optimization

Negative content typically hits the hardest when someone searches your exact brand, business, or organization name (or you as an individual).

In this case, you might realize that you haven’t actually published enough optimized content for your brand name – publish more to fill the SERPs with your own positive branded content.

Press Releases and Building Positive Reviews or Feedback

If bad press or negative reviews hit you hard in the SERPs then you can build additional positive reviews and press to reoccupy the space.

Create new press releases for your target keywords and write more guest posts for other sites. The more the better! The long-term goal is to really monopolize the SERPs with your own positive content.

Build Links to New Sites

You can also build links to other positive content that appears around or below the negative page you’re targeting in the SERPs.

Look beyond page 1 of the SERPs and discover content you can link both on-site or off-site with the aim of boosting that up the SERPs.

Reverse SEO: When One Site Isn’t Enough

If you find that guest posting and publishing more keyword-optimized content on your own site isn’t doing the trick, then you can consider creating additional websites specifically for the purpose of reverse SEO.

Make sure these new sites don’t seem or look like competitors to your own site, though. They should be complementary where possible.

Summary

Reverse SEO can be very effective and eliminating thin, low-trust, or authority content from the SERPs is usually straightforward.

But if you’re dealing with a lot of negative content or content published by authoritative domains then reverse SEO can be very tricky indeed!

There are SEO reputation managers out there who can assist with high-profile reverse SEO, these could be worth looking into if the negative content is particularly damaging or malicious.

Remember to always focus on bolstering your own organic SEO around problematic keywords before resorting to other more complex tactics!

The post Reverse SEO appeared first on SEO Administrator.

Analyzing log files is an often-overlooked but important aspect of technical SEO, and it really comes into its own when dealing with huge websites with thousands, or hundreds of thousands of pages.

Here, we’ll be explaining what a log file is, where to find it, what it means for your site, and how you can squeeze SEO juice out of it.

What is a Log File?

Every request made to a web server is logged and saved.

The file is output and saved to your hosting web server – and you’ll be able to find it and analyze it.

When you look at a raw log file, it’ll be densely packed with written info and data – but don’t panic!

Some logged request information you’ll see may include:

• IP Address
• Type of HTTP request (GET/POST, etc)
• User Agent
• Requested URL
• Timestamp
• HTTP Status Code
• Referrer

Other attributes might include:

• Host name
• Bytes downloaded
• Request/Client IP
• Duration

This information can be useful for troubleshooting issues, but for SEO, we’re primarily interested in HTTP requests – this recorded information tells us about how GoogleBot and other crawlers crawl a site.

The log is a 100% accurate representation of how GoogleBot and other search engine bots crawl a site and its pages.

Log files essentially log the activity of crawlers, providing SEOs clues as to how a site and its pages are being crawled and indexed, and by who.

How Do I Find a Log File?

It depends on your server setup and configuration.

For those who have access to/have configured their own server, the following guides can be followed to download a log file. This is often a convoluted process – you can ask your web developer or tech team for log files if you are not responsible for the server.

Using cPanel to Download a Log File

cPanel is a web hosting control panel software that simplifies web and server management.

If you have access to your site’s cPanel then downloading log files is much simpler (thankfully!).

Log into cPanel and you’ll typically need to head to Metrics and Raw Access Logs. You’ll need to tick the Archive box to ensure that logs will be saved from then on.

After a new log is created, you’ll then be able to download the log for analysis.

This is by far the easiest DIY method to retrieve logs and anyone can do it, provided you can access your site’s cPanel.

Once you have the log file, you’ll need to look into log analyzer tools to analyze the data.

You can manually convert and filter the file, but there’ll be tons of info in there which is totally irrelevant to SEO. In fact, some log files can reach hundreds of megabytes, and parsing and sorting the info DIY is painstaking.

It’s worth noting that you may need multiple log files to cover longer periods of time – one day’s worth of data is not likely to be enough to analyze how GoogleBot crawls your site.

Why Analyze Log Files?

It’s a lot of hassle right?!

Well, if you use cPanel then it’s not too bad!

But still, what do you do with all that data?!

Identify Crawl Bots

SEO is usually all Google, Google, and Google, but other crawl bots matter too, especially if you’re looking to tap into emerging markets or audiences in China for example, via Baidu.

Your server log will tell you if requests have been made by GoogleBot as well as BingBot, Baidu, Yahoo, and Yandex, and any other user agents.

So, for example, you may find that you’re not getting crawled by Baidu, but you want to appear in China. The log file contains this sort of information.

You’ll also be able to see if your robots.txt file is doing its job in disallowing certain crawlers.

Crawl Budget

Search engines don’t crawl your site indefinitely, and they don’t have unlimited resources either.

Crawls are periodical and only a dedicated quantity of crawling resources will be dedicated to your site. Log files let you find and assess how many pages are being crawled across your site over a given period of time – usually daily.

More authoritative, healthy, and optimized sites will be dedicated greater crawling resources.

Consider a site like Wikipedia which has some 6 million pages, with over 600 newly added articles each day. That’s going to need a lot of crawling and as such, GoogleBot probably crawls many thousands or even millions of Wiki pages every day to check for updates and changes.

Wikipedia is one of the most authoritative domains in the world and thus, it has a huge crawl budget to suit its vast quantity of pages and ultra-high authority.

But your site might be different, you still might have thousands of pages and if your site isn’t being allocated the appropriate crawl budget, then your newly created or updated pages might sit there uncrawled for days, weeks, months, or even years in exceptional circumstances!

You could also find that crawler bots are indexing old pages, redirects, orphaned pages, and other useless URLs when you want them to crawl your new or updated content.

Log analysis lets you calculate how many pages of your site are being crawled – and which ones – so you can make necessary changes to your site, robots.txt and sitemap to make sure your top pages are prioritized.

Once you’ve assessed crawl budget and timing, you can modify your XML sitemap to prioritize which pages Google crawls regularly.

This might be your blog or similar, whereas other parts of your site that remain the same for long periods of time will not need to be crawled so often.

Temporary 302 Redirects and Duplicate URLs

Temporary 302 redirects direct users and crawlers to a temporary page. They’re not harmful to SEO but do eat into crawl budget as the search engine will be continually crawling to see if the redirect is still there.

You can also narrow down the content that you can instruct Google not to crawl at all, i.e. duplicate content. This can also help reduce analytics errors.

Check Page Crawl Times

You can analyze log files to discover the time to first byte (TTFB) and time to last byte (TTLB) associated with each page, helping you quickly find your fastest and slow loading pages.

This is a quick and easy way to check page load stats for big sites, and you’ll be able to sort your largest web pages so you can check those for particularly slow content (e.g. high-res images).

Discover Orphaned Pages

Orphaned pages are pages still linked to your site and crawled, but aren’t internally linked. They exist to Google (if they’re being instructed to crawl the page from the sitemap, or external links point to it) but not to you or the user (unless external links still point to them).

These can be created by site structure changes, internal linking errors, and old redirects.

Either way, they won’t rank as they’ll have no internal links. Log analysis finds orphaned pages so you can inspect them and deal with them.

Best Log File Analysers

Here is a compilation of log file analyzer tools that take the graft out of analyzing complex log files for SEO purposes.

Semrush Log File Analyser

In Semrush’s mighty set of SEO tools, you’ll find the Semrush Log File Analyser which was actually only released in 2018. This tool is available with Semrush’s main set of tools, costing $119/mo for the Pro package.

You’ll be able to upload your log files for analysis where the tool will break down all of the important SEO-related metrics and display them in graphs.

The tool will breakdown:

• Requests from various search engine bots (e.g. GoogleBot)
• HTTP status codes found each day
• The different file types crawled each day

This easily lets you assess your crawl budget, and shows how often pages and/or files are crawled. This enables you achieve the main goal; to analyze the crawlability of your site and point GoogleBot towards the pages that require crawl priority (e.g. a regularly updated blog).

Features

• Analyze bot activity
• Discover most crawled and least crawled pages
• Filter by file type, e.g. HTML, PHP, amp, CSS, Javascript, and JSON

Screaming Frog SEO Log File Analyser

The Screaming Frog Log File Analyzer is probably one of the most complete log analyzers around and doubles up as an excellent technical SEO tool.

Costing just £99.00 per year, it’s one of the cheaper tools around and the free version still lets you analyze 1000 lines of log, plenty for single-site owners and SEO novices.

This tool will breakdown crawler activity in full, filterable by the bot, e.g. GoogleBot, Baidu, Yandex, etc. It’ll point you towards broken links, redirects, and orphaned pages. Sorting by page size is simple too, so you can quickly ascertain page load speed and size.

For SEO purposes, the tool breaks down crawl budget and reveals the most crawled pages and content, enabling you to discover how efficiently your site makes use of its crawl budget.

Features

• Discover and verify bots
• Analyze crawl frequency
• Find your most crawled pages to analyze crawl budget
• Find orphaned pages

Paper Trail by Solar Winds

This is more of a log management tool for DevOps and tech teams. It aggregates many types of logs, including server log files, for centralized accessibility across an organization.

Log alerts can be sent via Slack or other team management platforms and data can be imported into software utilities such as Hadoop.

Features

• Aggregates logs for engineers and dev teams
• Email alert system for anomalies
• Access and download log files for further analysis
• Wide technical remit (not really an SEO tool)

Graylog

Graylog is a sophisticated log and data analysis platform that enables aggregation of logs of virtually any type, from any source. It’s designed for enterprise and organization-level businesses that require rigorous analysis of many data log outputs.

Graylog is an advanced tool for engineers and dev teams, it’s designed for analyzing data from many inputs or outputs – not just servers. 

Features

• Can store huge quantities of data
• Designed for enterprise-wide data analysis
• Real-time analysis
• Unprecedented scalability

Loggly

Loggly aggregates log data across large enterprise-level or organization-wide networks. It’s an enterprise-level platform that allows for real-time analysis of server logs as well as log data from near-limitless sources.

Loggly enables the analysis of all server data, but it’s also an interdisciplinary tool for log aggregation and analysis.

Features

• Store and analyze server logs across large distributed systems
• Secure, cloud-enabled analytics platform
• Near-limitless scalability
• Enables cross-department collaboration

Log Entries by Rapid1

Another enterprise-level server log file and aggregator. Designed to pool and centralize server info from distributed networks, Log Entries enables advanced analysis of server resources and system health.

A professional engineering/dev tool that breaks down server metrics in minuscule detail to audit the health of colossal networks.

Features

• Collect server logs across large networks
• Real-time alert system
• Server anomaly detection
• Enables cross-department collaboration

GoAccess

A fast, terminal-based log analyzer, GoAccess breaks down key server requests in detail for real-time analysis. It shows visitor numbers as well as crawlers and spiders so you can analyze how often your site is crawled. It’s also great for assessing page response time and server load.

Features

• Terminal-based dashboard
• Analyze web traffic and crawlers in real-time
• Analyze server resources and bandwidth
• Free

SEOLyzer

Optimized for SEO log analysis, SEOLyzer provides seamless live log tracking tools to detect crawling errors rapidly. It has an easy-to-use interface and the focus here is on speed; it enables you to locate and home in on errors before your other systems (e.g. Search Console) pick up the error.

SEOLyzer has built an impressive repertoire of clients and has proven a superb technical SEO tool for auditing useful server logs for key information. The aim of SEOLyzer is to detect logged errors and work to fix them before site coverage declines.

The software also allows you to aggregate information into graphs and KPIs.

Features

• Log analysis for SEO specifically
• Aggregate log data for analysis
• Find errors before they hit your site coverage
• Free version for single-site users (limited analysis capacity.

Summary

SEO log analysis may seem fairly niche and complex, but it’s a powerful weapon for your technical SEO armory.

SEO log analysis’s main strengths lie in debugging and troubleshooting, but it’s also an excellent tool for analyzing crawl budget in the natural habitat of the crawlers themselves.

The log is 100% accurate, data-rich, and hard-linked to the requests made by crawlers – that is its main advantage.

The post Log File Analyzers appeared first on SEO Administrator.

Without accurate and proper HTML, web pages would just be chaotic blocks of unformatted text. HTML guides the web browser to display the document as the designer or creator intends it to be displayed.

HTML is fairly simple and is one of the first languages web developers learn – though you cannot technically call it a ‘programming language’, as its sole intent is to markup documents.

Here, we’ll be providing a brief example of what HTML and validation is, overviewing some HTML validation tools, and explaining how HTML errors can affect your site’s SEO performance.

HTML Example

An HTML copy of the first portion of this document would be:

<h1>HTML Analyzers & Validators</h1>

<p>HTML is the number one foundational document markup language.</p>

Here, <h1> marks up the first line as a title and <p> marks up the first paragraph. Notice how the opening tags are different to the closed tags, which are closed with </.

There are around 100 total HTML markup tags – not too many in the grand scheme of things.

HTML and W3C

The W3C, World Wide Web Consortium, is a quasi-regulatory organization for the internet. They set out codes of best practices for web designers and developers to follow.

Over time, HTML has needed to adapt to different devices, browsers, and assistive technologies. HTML errors can cause readability issues, particularly on certain devices such as screen readers (which render text documents as speech for the blind or visually impaired).

Poorly constructed HTML can cause a number of issues that sabotage the readability and compatibility of your web pages.

This could even render the entire webpage unreadable or uncrawlable in exceptional circumstances.

The W3C has laid out best practices for HTML – if you follow those then, in theory, your site is more likely to be compatible cross-browser, device and technology – both now and in the future.

This is why we have HTML validators – they check the quality and ‘cleanliness’ of your HTML.

Why Do HTML Errors Occur?

HTML errors and bugs can result when you’re editing pages in HTML format and make a mistake, or when you use a buggy plugin or other tool to create and markup web pages.

Codeless web development apps and WYSIWYG editors mean that we generally don’t need HTML knowledge to create documents – the software does that for us.

But it’s not always perfect, and errors can occur, harming the technical quality of your webpages, in turn damaging SEO.

HTML Validation

To analyze HTML documents for errors and bugs, you can use an HTML validator.

HTML validators check and validate your HTML against W3C best practice guidelines. They’re simple online tools that load an HTML file or URL before parsing the HTML markup and analyzing it for errors and bugs versus W3C guidelines.

Some HTML guidelines are pretty trivial, e.g. W3C says you should use <strong> and not <b> to embolden text.

Both markup a document in a near-identical fashion, but it just so happens that some plugins or editors might use <b> instead of <strong> for whatever reason.

That said, HTML validation will route out genuine errors and bugs.

Some key examples include unclosed tags, incorrectly written tags, and formatting errors which cause compatibility issues, particularly with regards to tables.

In fact, you might have experienced dodgy HTML in the past when surfing a webpage that clearly doesn’t render properly, particularly old web pages that haven’t been optimized for mobile.

Yoast SEO draws attention to an example of a Dutch news site whose homepage failed to crawl properly, and couldn’t be rendered in Google’s cache.

They were using an XMP tag, similar to the PRE tag, but instead of rendering tags internally, it outputs them instead. The XMP tag wasn’t closed correctly, so GoogleBot failed to render and crawl the page.

This is a pretty unique example, though, and you’re very unlikely to experience page-breaking HTML errors.

What Does Google Think About HTML Validation?

It’s worth remembering that W3C is not really affiliated with Google, and that you’re under no obligation to conform every component of your documents to their standard.

So what does Google say on the issue?

Google Search Central states:

“The best way to make sure that your page looks the same in all browsers is to write your page using valid HTML and CSS, and then test it in as many browsers as possible. Clean, valid HTML is a good insurance policy,”

– Google.

Meanwhile, Google’s Matt Cutts admits that HTML validation is not an organic ranking factor, also stating that a minuscule percentage of sites have perfect HTML – and a large portion of global giant websites actually have pretty poor HTML on balance.

“Google does not penalize you if you have invalid HTML because there would be a huge number of webpages like that”

– Matt Cutts, Former Google Head of Webspam.

HTML, like many areas of SEO, is a grey area. You can leave messy code alone and hope it never matters – and it probably won’t unless there are serious errors – or you can strive long and hard to build the perfect HTML markup for every page on your site.

Largely, this comes down to time and resources. HTML gurus will whizz through validation, but it could still be time-consuming.

So What’s the Point in Validation?

Validation is non-essential but it’s still good practice, but the truth is, few SEOs take it particularly seriously unless they encounter errors.

W3C themselves do put forward a strong case for checking HTML, particularly as it will future proof your pages to new browser software and accessibility tools.

Debugging HTML errors and bugs are made simpler by HTML validation tools, and they can direct you towards serious issues. If you have knowledge of HTML then it should be fairly simple to use an HTML validator to check your code, but if not, then it can be pretty bewildering, especially if it throws up a lot of errors.

It’s also worth highlighting that HTML validation is not the only way to check page errors. SEO tools such as Semrush Site Audit and Surfer SEO offer a multitude of other on-page and technical SEO checkers that can crawl your site and will highlight errors that Google will see – and which could then affect your SEO.

You can also check for browser compatibility, Google highlights this themselves:

“Once you’ve created your web design, you should review your site’s appearance and functionality on multiple browsers to make sure that all your visitors are getting the experience you worked so hard to design.”

HTML Validator Tools

Without further ado, let’s suggest some HTML validator tools to plug your HTML in for markup analysis and validation.

W3 Validator

By W3C themselves, this validator is very easy to use via URL input, HTML file upload, or direct input. It handles all HTML, XHTML, and other web document formats.

Once you’ve input your URL and clicked validate, the tool will parse your HTML and display both errors and warnings. Errors are what you should focus on first, warnings usually related to unnecessary attributes or other markups that could be removed – but that’s usually unnecessary, or at least very low priority.

It is almost guaranteed that you’ll find some errors and likely many warnings. Try some competitor sites, friend’s sites, or other major sites and see how they compare – you’ll likely find many errors there also.

If you do find reams and reams of errors then don’t panic, and don’t rush into making any changes. Check your site on multiple browsers and use an SEO audit tool like Semrush SEO Audit to check the crawlability and technical SEO of your site.

If Google can crawl it and people can read it without issues, then you’re probably fine!

You can do your own research into errors – there are too many possibilities to describe but the likelihood is, if it’s a genuine issue then people will have discussed it many times already.

JSON Formatter HTML Validator

A powerful set of tools for formatting, converting, and validating HTML as well as JSON and CSS, the JSON Formatter HTML Validator works like any tool – you simply plugin your URL or upload a URL file.

You can hit ‘Run’ to render the HTML and Validate to check the HTML for errors. Again, the same caveats apply, and you’ll likely find errors – possibly many

The interface here isn’t as good as other HTML validator tools and doesn’t give you a detailed breakdown of errors and warnings, though it’s still fine if you have HTML knowledge and know what you’re looking at.

Freeformatter HTML Validator

Another simple HTML validator tool. The Freeformatter HTML Validator only lets you copy and paste HTML or upload an HTML file. You can choose from all ISO language codes for parsing HTML in different languages.

You’ll find that errors and warnings are clearly differentiated here, allowing you to look at common errors that appear on your pages and delve into further explanations online.

Infohound Tidy

This tool lets you check and validate HTML and then create and download a tidied copy. There are many options

Like other tools, it will display both warnings and errors. You can then tidy errors using the controls provided before downloading the tidied HTML.

DO NOT just copy HTML from your site into here and replace it with the tidied HTML, at least not without creating a duplicate to test it first, or using a backup.

Like with other HTML validators, it’s likely that many errors are negligible or pretty much meaningless – always research them before taking action.

Code Beautifier for HTML

Code beautification is slightly different from validation. With this tool, you can beautify your code, meaning deleting unnecessary components and minimizing down to what is needed.

This makes it easier to work with the code.

Again, this has a pretty niche use but will be useful for some

SonarSource

SonarSource is a professional suite of paid code analysis tools. They’re oriented towards creating highly robust, secure codes. The software helps tidy code but also identifies secure blackspots and other backdoors or other security issues.

For sure this is the most advanced HTML validator and analyzer around and each and every code or warning is broken down with an explanation of what’s going on.

For clients that demand perfectly validated error-free code, SonarSource is tough to beat.

What Do I Do If I Find HTML Errors?

It’s likely that you’ll find HTML errors when using a validation too.

Feature-rich pages that run lots of plugins will likely be the worst, whereas simple pages with little content, or just plenty of simple block text, will usually be fine or totally error-free.

The first thing to do is to check and see if any errors appear multiple times. Look them up to gain more info on what they mean and whether they matter – it might be jargon but you might find some simple-worded insight!

You can also consider hiring an HTML specialist on a freelance website. Checking your HTML should be easy for someone who knows HTML inside out and it’s likely that any serious errors can be fixed in seconds.

If all else fails, then you’ll need to check your pages using SEO audit tools and browser compatibility apps. If your pages load fine on every browser and device, and you sort technical SEO issues highlighted by an SEO audit, then you’ll probably be fine!

Make sure you monitor your site in Search Console, Google Analytics, or whatever other tools you use, and keep an eye for changes in traffic or other anomalies that could indicate more serious site bugs or UX problems.

The only other thing to do is to keep up-to-date with Google’s algorithm changes to make sure they never add HTML validation signals or other new rules that could lead to negative SEO results for sites with messy HTML – but this seems unlikely.

Summary

Clean HTML is a hot topic, with the purists arguing that fully clean, precise and valid HTML as validated by validation services is totally necessary for now and the future.

But, checking the HTML of many sites reveals a different story and Google themselves admit that ranking sites on their HTML would be likely destructive and antithetical to what they’re trying to do – i.e. serve the user.

But, therein lies the crux of the issue.

If HTML does affect user experience on your site, then it will affect SEO.

This is why HTML validation is a good way of tracking down HTML issues, and together with technical SEO audit tools, you can build a clean, fast and robust site.

The post 7 Free HTML Code Analyzers & Validators appeared first on SEO Administrator.