But there are better and cheaper SEO alternatives to these expensive programs. I spent a large portion of my career looking for them and testing them. I wasn’t a cheapskate, I just wanted to make sure I was getting a good deal.

Google Analytics = Free

This is the standard program for a reason: it’s better than anything else out there. It isn’t always as complete as I would like and I have experimented with others because of this, but I keep coming back to GA because it’s the only one that works consistently for what I need.

However, it’s important to know its strengths and weaknesses. If you want to track the keywords coming into your site, GA is not the best tool. 99% of the traffic is listed as “Unknown Keyword” and there is no way of narrowing down that field. The best thing about GA is that it tells you who is using your site, where they are coming from, and how long they are staying.

For that essential information, you can’t get much better.

StoryBase = $50

StoryBase is a keyword finder that works in a very unique way, emphasizing long-tail keywords as opposed to single keywords. This means that it focuses on phrases and questions, which Google is placing more emphasis on in its latest changes.

I was skeptical when I first used it as there is no way to determine how “easy” the keywords are. Unlike SEMRush and other keyword finders, it won’t give you an estimation of how difficult or easy a certain keyword is and it won’t tell you how many searchers there is that use it. But that information is just an estimate anyway and if you dismiss it and focus on the keywords themselves you can get some very good data.

I used a few basic questions for a project I was working on about the prevalence of car accidents in the US, helping legal sites and stat sites. I took a few basic keyword questions, implemented them into both, and was pleasantly surprised when I saw those articles shoot to the top of Google for several keyword variants.

Ever since I have used it for many more sites with similar results.

Majestic = $50

This can be expensive, with options for a $100 a month subscription and a $400 per month one. But the “Lite” option is more than enough and it’ll cost you less than $50 a month. It’s still expensive when compared to some of the other options on this list, but it’s so useful.

The important thing to understand with backlinks and how good or bad they are is that no one really knows. Domain Authority and Majestic’s own Trust Flow are just educated guesses. However, because it focuses more on quality links and on relevant links, Majestic seems a much more accurate system than any of the others.

One of the best ways to use Majestic to gather links is to see what similar sites to yours are doing. Punch their URL in, see who is linking to them, and then visit those sites. There’s a good chance they will link to you as well.

The Best Software Overall

I’ve used Moz and I’ve used SEMRush. I’ve also used many other programs in my time. Truth be told, I would never go back to most of these. I was lucky enough to work with a very talented SEO alternatives expert who gave me free access to many expensive programs, including SEMRush. From there, I fell in love with it from the outset and eventually bought my own subscription to stop hogging his.

I had similar luck with Moz, but I would not go back. It is not as intuitive, expansive, and helpful. I love the support staff, don’t get me wrong. Those guys are great and are nothing but helpful and professional. But the software itself pales in comparison to SEMRush. If you have the money, that’s where it needs to be spent, but make sure you get Majestic as well.

The post Cheap and Free Alternatives to Expensive SEO Software appeared first on RELEVANCE.

The Exact Match Domain Algorithm

Google changed the algorithm in order to remove what was known as the “Exact Match Domain” issue. In simple terms, this meant that if you were searching for “Cheap DVDs and CDs”, then you would see a rather long-winded site that had that keyword as the domain name. A friend of mine once bought over 30 stupidly long domains to advertise products. They contained all kinds of stop words and were ridiculously long, akin to something like PanasonicTVForLessThan500Dollars,com. It probably would have worked because this algorithm was so flawed, but in his case the Exact Match Domain change was implemented just 2 weeks after he bought them all.

So Keyword Domains Are Useless?

Not entirely, but they are fairly useless for big companies. These days the big budget companies can do much more with good branding and social media advertising than they ever could with a strong domain. That’s why they focus on creating a brand and don’t really care about keywords. If you have less money then you’re more apt to clutch at straws and take what you can get, and that’s okay because keyword domains do still help in someway (more on that soon) but the big boys no longer care. And that’s good for the rest of us, because it means all quality domains are not being snapped up so they can be sold on for thousands of dollars, leaving us with obscure domains.

What About Domain Extensions?

I have been asked whether country extensions such as .Wales or .London could be used in place of keywords, so that domains like BestPlacesIn,London would essentially take you to the top of Google for a key search term. But, unfortunately, that’s just not the case. In fact, these names likely have considerably less pulling power than .Co.Uk and are really only for very localized brands that want some local identity. As far as Google is concerned, top-level domains are always the way to go.

I also recommend going for .Com, but if you have a local business or are writing about national content, your country’s domain is better. And it doesn’t exclude you from the international marketplace. One of my biggest sites right now is a .Co.Uk site that gets 90% of its hits from the United States. I also have .Com sites that get more hits from the UK and one that gets most of its hits from Canada.

.EDU and .GOV are incredibly valuable as well, but only because they are exclusive, limited to government agencies and to educational centers respectably. They rarely top the Google search engines and are usually muscled out of major keywords by .Com sites, but Google places a lot of value on domains like this so they are great for backlinks. If you ask me, I don’t think that will last because it’s something that is currently being exploited and has been exploited for a few years now. It’s a matter of time before Google realizes this and does something about it, but until then, they are very valuable domains.

What it Means for Small Companies

If you have your company name in the domain and it is a relatively obscure company, then the Exact Match Domain changes will likely seem like a negative. But Google still seems to favor such companies because company keywords are not as strongly contested and because there are other factors at play.

Let’s take a popular legal site as an example: MichaelHendersonLaw.com. This is something that you’ll only see mentioned on review pages, directories, forums and on the site owned by the company. If you search for those terms in Google then you’ll still find this site at the top, but that’s a result of on-page strength. Simply put, if it’s a brand name and not a keyword grab, then it’s going to be mentioned many times throughout the site, it’s going to be on most pages, and it’s also going to dominate the anchor texts. Google recognizes this and pushes the site to the top. In other words, it’s not the domain, it’s the site itself.

Site structure is also very important and one of the main things I actually focus on when I think about SEO. Take a look at a recent example: http://www.chaincutting.com/. This is a chainsaw site that reviews chainsaws, simple as that. It’s a keyword relating to chainsaws, but most importantly it allows me to create short URLs when I add new articles. Let’s say that I want to review a chainsaw named PowerBlaster. I could store the article under http://www.chaincutting,com/powerblaster, which means that if anyone searches for “cutting with PowerBlaster” or “the chain saw PowerBlaster”, I have all of those words in the domain, even though the domain is still nice and short.

One of the better examples out there BuySharesIn.com. If you want to tell people how to buy shares in Aldi, then they just need the URL BuySharesIn.com/Aldi and they have managed to nail several long-form keywords, from “buy shares in Aldi” to “Aldi shares” and many more. It’s great for structure and order, it’s great for branding and it’s great for keeping everything short and relevant.

So premium domains are still expensive because they do still play some role when the URL is extended and because short domains are always better.

The post Does the Domain Name Really Matter Anymore? appeared first on RELEVANCE.

Here are my top tips for outreach:

7. Personalize your Outreach (Without Being Obvious)

I receive 5 to 15 requests a day for backlinks across all of my websites. You’d think there would be a lot of variety there, but 99.9% of them are the same and they make the same mistakes. The main issue is that they all use copied and pasted spam letters that lie about the site, ignore guidelines and spam me with nonsense requests.

Make sure you tailor each request to the website your contacting. Don’t just send a form letter with their domain copied in. I see this in nearly every message I get and it drives me insane because it’s so obvious what they are doing.

6. Be Honest

Be honest—seriously, you’ll get more replies if you are. I have never had a request that was honest and i’ve had thousands. It defies belief, but if they came, they’d get what they wanted.

The most common lie I hear is “I have been a fan of your site for X months”. Sometimes it’s years, sometimes it’s 6 to 12 months, it’s never less than 6 months. This might make sense if most of my sites were not 3 to 5 months old. I also get “I love your content, especially [copy and pasted URL or title]”. It’s not natural and it reeks of spam, which every webmaster will ignore.

5. Don’t Hire Other People to do it

If you’re going to hire someone else to make these requests for you, make sure it’s one person and that their only job is to outreach for one site, otherwise they’ll make mistakes and end up spamming websites. You should also hire a professional and not a cheap VA.

There is one particular website out there that has emailed me over 300 times across all 20+ of my websites. They always use the contact forms on my sites, they always send exactly the same request (telling me they love my site and are avid readers each time) and they come from about 6 different email addresses/names. The site in question is quite reputable and if they hadn’t hired a group of spammers to mail bomb me, I might have agreed to their requests. As it happens, I have since had to report them to their ISP, because despite replying to tell them I can’t help them, and despite emailing the company direct, those spam requests still flood in.

These “marketing” companies don’t care about your reputation. They will mass mail every site they can find and they will spam the hell out of them. You will suffer, not them, so do it yourself. What happens if they end up spamming someone less patient than I am and that site gets their legal team on the case? You could lose your site, your server and your ISP.

4. Send Full Articles

I know it’s tricky, but I find that the best way to get hits with outreach is to write and submit a few full length articles. There are several reasons for this. Firstly, I can say for a fact that 99% of other submitters will not do it, even if the guidelines specify it. As a result, anyone who sends a full article will stand out.

Secondly, webmasters like me will prioritize these requests because we know that someone has really spent their time on it. If we are going to reject we will do it quickly so they can submit elsewhere and avoid wasting their time; if we’re prepared to accept then the fact that we have a tangible article already will make us more inclined to do so.

Of course, the article has to be unique. The first thing most webmasters will do is run it through Copyscape, and if they did out it’s not unique then they’ll ignore you.

3. Don’t Beg

I use to reply to requests to politely say that I didn’t offer guest posts. You know what happened then? They thanked me for replying and wished me well.

By which I mean they pestered me and practically begged me to link to them. They saw my reply as a weakness, a sign that I was available, and they went on a mission to try and get what they wanted. They promised insane things, they made excuses, they lied, one of them even told me that their friend had recently died and that this backlink was what he always wanted. It’s insane and it drives webmasters up the wall.

If you receive a rejection, thank the webmaster for taking the time to reply, ask them to keep your site on file if they change their mind, and don’t contact them again. If you pester them and beg like this, they’ll block you and report you for spamming.

2. Keep it Short and Write Well

You don’t need to write out a long email. It’s often a sign that the message is copy and pasted. Keep it short, but make sure it’s also professional and well written. Use proper English, be polite and don’t make demands. You’re asking for a favor, so there should be a pleading, thankful tone, not a demanding one.

1. Do Your Research

90% of the requests I get are for the wrong genres and 100% of them have not checked my guidelines, because if they did, they would see that I don’t accept guest posts. This can and will drive webmasters insane. Most of the requests I get are for casino links, with writers asking me if they can write and publish gambling articles on my site, even though those sites are about health, pets and food.

Doing your research will take up more of your time in the short run, but it’ll get you more hits long term and you’ll annoy far fewer webmasters. You can take a few liberties, but only if you are upfront with your reasons.

For instance, if you’re doing off-page work for a legal site then don’t contact a car review site and make a generic request. However, you can contact them with a specific request that you write an article about legal claims involving car accidents, with a link to your legal page on the same subject. I recently did something similar for a pet site, talking about restraining lets in cars and getting links on car sites.

The post 7 Tips for Successful Outreach (Backlinks) appeared first on RELEVANCE.

It is standard practice and countless novice webmasters will allow this to happen without a second thought. But when your details are registered like this it means they will show up on a Who-Is Search, which can be performed by anyone.

Not only can someone find out exactly who you are by searching for your domain, but these searches are conducted automatically by spammers and scammers every single day. They trawl for new domain registrations, gather all of the email addresses, and then hit them one by one with spam that is often ridiculous, even though they are apparently trying to sell a legitimate product.

Fortunately, you can stop this from happening simply by making sure you tick the “Privacy” feature. Some private domain providers will charge for this, but the better ones let you do it for free.

As I was writing this, I checked my spam folder and had just received an email. So, to show you how absurd these are, here it is.

Dear web owner

Hope you are well. 

Work with a reputed leading Search Engine Optimization Company having the experience of getting our customer's websites top in Google and producing high revenue with big page rank. 

I was looking related to your business and saw your website not on the first page for relevant and user-oriented keywords pertaining to your domain so

 I was wondering. 

If you want to get Search engine optimization done for your website. 

You Can contact me with:- 

I'd be happy to send you our package, pricing, and past work details if you'd like to assess our work. 

Feel free to discuss any other queries at any time. 

Thanks & Wishes

Manager-Business

I didn’t change anything. The “you can contact me” mistake is all them. As is the company name at the bottom. This is proof that these guys use the same templates to spam the same nonsense, merely filling in relevant sections with their company name and contact details. Only in this case, did this guy forgets to do that.

The Spammers Descend

I used to let this happen simply because the place I was registering private domains at was charging me extra for the privacy option. I was launching a number of websites at the time so I needed quite a few private domains and ended up ordering 4 or 5 without this feature checked.

In the 3 days that followed those registrations, I received over 150 emails. The bulk of these was from companies offering SEO and web design services, insisting they were the best, the cheapest, and that I should hire them because apparently, they thought I based all my buying decisions on which random person was the first to spam me.

It was an annoyance, to say the least, but it crossed a line when the phone calls started. My number had been registered automatically by the domain registrar. I had simply clicked “next” and because they had my details, they did the honor of adding them to the form. To be fair to them, I agreed to it (albeit unknowingly) and the registration details did require a phone number.

After ignoring all of the emails, I received over 10 phone calls on the 4th day (reminiscent of the annoying IRS phone scam) and in the 2 weeks after registrations, I ended up with about 20 in total. Obviously, I lost my cool with them several times, but they kept calling. These days I try to do everything I can to stop them and have learned a few tricks to make my life easier.

How to Stop the Chaos

The first thing you should do is to pay more attention when you are buying a private domain and to make sure you get one from a host that will give you this option for free. 123-Reg charges £4.99 a month for it, GoDaddy charges roughly the same I believe, while the likes of 1and1 offer it for free.

Secondly, if they persist with emails, you can report them through this link. If they keep calling, you can request that your line provider block them. Don’t think for a minute that you can ask the spammers to remove you from their list because there is no list. They just keep pelting random requests at anyone who was careless enough to leave their Who-Is data.

Finally, if you register do the private option and the spam is still coming through (it happens) then you need to take it up with the registrar. Tell them that you take your privacy very seriously. Threaten a class action lawsuit if you must. Whatever. Just let them know that it is unacceptable, that they are to blame, you are angry, and it needs to stop.

At the very least it should give them a kick up the backside and ensure they offer you some kind of compensation.

The post Why it is Important to Register Private Domains appeared first on RELEVANCE.

1. You are Targeting Low Cost Keywords

The way that Adsense works is that it will look to show ads relating to the content on the page it is on, as well as the things the reader is interested in. So, let’s suppose that fast food is the lowest paying keyword of all, but that health food is the highest paying and you run a food site.

If you discuss food hacks, KFC menus and other fast food related content, then you’re going to attract people who have previously searched for it and you’re also going to tell Google to trigger those ads. This means that high-priced ads won’t show and when they are clicked on, you won’t earn anything. If you only write about powdered greens and other super healthy food, then you’ll only attract ads for the upmarket stuff, which will ensure you get a high priced click.

There are ways to maximize your content regardless of your niche. Start writing more about costly products, start thinking about what advertisers are happy to pay a lot of money for and then start building content around it. If you have a financial site that usually discusses share trading, start branching out into forex, precious metals and insurance/loans; if you have a site about gardening, stop writing about seeds and start writing about tools, sheds and other big ticket items.

2. Poorly Placed Ads

There’s a misconception that a lot of Adsense money comes from impressions. That’s not true and if it’s true for you, then you’re doing something wrong. 95% or more should come from clicks and if you’re getting impressions but not clicks, then your ads are not prominent enough.

I have worked on a lot of sites in my time and I own quite a few, so I have a good idea of what works and what does not. Take FreelanceWithUs.com as an example. You see that ad at the top? The banner that almost seems mandatory on all websites these days? Well, it doesn’t work, and in my experience, it never does. These days readers are almost blind to banners like that. It’s as if we’ve all developed selective vision in order to avoid seeing these because the early days of the internet made us despise them so much.

What does work, however, is a sidebar ad, but you need to make sure this stays as the reader scrolls. I have learned that the readers who click the most are the ones who stay the longest. The longer they stay, the more chance you have of getting a click. So, if your banners are all at the top of the page then they will disappear when the reader scrolls down which means that by the time they are ready to click, there is nothing for them to click.

You want big, bulky sidebar ads that stay on the screen at all times but don’t get in the way. Forget about horizontal banners, forget about the little banners. Go big and you can keep your site clean while maximizing clicks. Take a look at Can-Pets-Eat.com for an example of this, an ad that gets much less impressions than the horizontal banner above, but gets 1,000% more clicks.

3. Your Visitors Are Coming from a Low-Paying Country

One of the biggest factors that determine how valuable your visitors are to Google is where they are from. If you are attracting a lot of visitors from the US and UK, then you are hitting a premium demographic that should earn you good money. If you are getting a lot of hits from certain countries in Eastern Europe, as well as the likes of Bangladesh, then you will struggle to earn.

As an example, I own a directory that has ads all over that site and it gets about 1,000 hits a day. On other sites I own, that could equate to between $5 and $20. But because those directory hits are mainly from India, it works out at about $0.10.

The more regional and specific, the better.The more US visitors, the better. Take a legal site like https://injurylawservice.com/ as an example. It’s at the top for many of its categories and while I don’t have any role in the site, they probably get the same number of hits as my web directory. However, those hits are targeted, they are in a major niche and they are all in the US (because no one else would be interested in a US-Based attorney). As a result, they would potentially earn upwards of $50 CPM if they setup ads.

It’s similar to comparing a site like forbes.com, which has a global appeal but is huge in the US and the UK, to a site like the Indian Times, which is mainly for the Indian market. It goes to prove that big numbers don’t always earn big money.

The country you target plays a massive role and needs to play a big role in helping you to decide what site to create.

The post Quick Fixes for Low Adsense Earnings appeared first on RELEVANCE.

To show you what I mean, here are a few of my most troublesome projects, along with the things that I did in order to make them work.

ParvinLaw.com:

This was one of my trickiest projects and it serves as a great reminder to all that while some SEO can be straightforward, others can be incredibly difficult. This one combined local, regional and national SEO. It needed high turnovers and big leads, yet the market was tiny.

It began by advising on the creation of a simple FAQ. As you can see in the link, it includes questions that everyone needs the answer to at some time. This helped to take a niche site and market into the mainstream. But increasing traffic is one thing, how do you make sure that the traffic is high quality? And how do you do this for a site that should have minimal content?

For this, we created a legal blog, that discusses very specific content that would only be relevant to potential customers and we also launched an eBook to attract the general populace and to catch their eye with key legal services. From there, it was a simply a case of making sure that each blog post had relevant backlinks.

So, for the bankruptcy services, we made sure they got links on major financial sites. For the estate planning we focused on real estate websites. To cap it off we made sure that the blog was mentioned on key blogging websites such as Shout Me Loud and HowtoStartaBlog.com.  After that, ParvinLaw.com became one of he biggest in its niches and that remains to be the case.

HumanParagon.com:

This was a very tough site to write for but one of the ones I am most proud of. The problems with this site is that it covered all kinds of subjects that were really difficult to write about (see this article to see what I mean). However, it proved a good point, which is that good SEO is as much about well written content and LSI as it is about big keywords.

For this, we ignored all major keywords. We stripped everything back and we focused entirely on research and entertainment. We paid an expert in robotics to take a look and to provide us with some key information, quotes and stats, and I then personally went over this and turned it into content that was easy to digest.

Every SEO “Expert” has that moment when they create a project and are not sure it will work and this was mine. I had no choice but to cross my fingers and hope for the best, but it worked. Before long, we were ranking at the top of Google for long-tail keywords, sometimes as long as 10 to 15 words.

The site didn’t do much with off-page SEO in the beginning, but once we began to add that and strengthen the site, it made those pages rank for the single word keywords as well.

You-Reviews.com:

This site was based on a simple premise and the goal was to find a way to make that premise work. This was basically backwards SEO because I began with the keyword and then worked everything around it. The fact that I was afforded the chance to do this from a clean slate helped, but it wasn’t easy.

Simply put, I discovered that the majority of searches on Google use the plural “Reviews” instead of “Review”. However, the average blogger offering their opinion is providing a “review” not “reviews”. As a result, there was, and still is, a gap in the market for anyone who can cover the plural.

The easiest way to do this is to be cheap and just use “Reviews” in place of “Review”. But it sounds wrong and Google will not look fondly on you. Instead, I made sure that the site was run by a team of reviewers and that the information used to create a review came from the users as well. As a result, these were “Reviews” and not a “Review” and Google looked far more fondly on it.

After that, it was a simple case of getting off-page SEO to sync up with the products and services we were discussing. But after going through all of that, that was the easy part!

The post Case Studies in Content Marketing and SEO appeared first on RELEVANCE.

It is a perpetual paranoia of mine that I will somehow, inadvertently, step on someone else’s shoes and that my work will then suffer the consequences. So, before I publish any websites or any content online I make sure I complete a few simple checks to ensure I won’t face any legal issues down the line.

Check for Plagiarism

I am a writer by trade, so I write a lot of my own website content. However, sometimes it’s more economical for me to write for a client and then to hire someone else to write for my site. I have been doing this since the beginning, using sites like Upwork, and in that time I have worked with over 50 writers, around 40 of which were either incompetent or were out to scam me.

The amount of excuses, missed deadlines, plagiarized work and downright scams I have encountered has been unbelievable. So, don’t take content you pay for on face value and make sure you run it through Copyscape to check it is original.

You should also read it and look for strange word usage. These days a lot of scammers will simply steal an article and run it through spinning software. This will use synonyms to change random words, therefore maintaining meaning (at least in theory) and passing plagiarism checkers. However, the words they change are often bizarre. So, look out for them, change them back to the words they obviously should be, and then run through a plagiarism checker.

I did this a few months ago with an article for a horror site that I had received from a very suspicious freelancer. They passed Copyscape, but I then decided to edit the article to remove their awkward choice of words. Afterwards I decided to retest it on Copyscape, at which point I realized that the article had been stolen from this article on serial killers which, by a twist of fate, was actually owned by a former client of mine.

Be Careful Which Pictures you Use

There are some strange laws with regards to images and whether or not you can use these on your site. To avoid any complications, I often just use generic images from Pixabay. But I know of many sites that will just take what they want and then attribute the image to the site/creator they took it from.

This is a legal grey area and I wouldn’t recommend it. But what if you are writing about a very specific case and you need images from that case? Well, this has actually happened to me before. I was writing about a famousmedical malpractice lawsuit that was all over the news at the time. Tabloids, news sites and everyone else was publishing official images from the case (doctors, x-rays, etc.,) but I couldn’t find a guarantee that those images were copyright free.

On the one hand I didn’t want to take a risk, on the other hand I didn’t want to use generic images. So, I simply contacted the tabloid that first posted the pictures and asked if I could use them. I promised to give them credit and link back to them, and they responded with 2 hours to confirm this was okay.

It saved me a lot of time and hassle and I made sure I saved that email just incase they changed their mind at a later point and decided to take some kind of action. 

Do you Own the Theme?

I work in WordPress, as many content creators do. I also work with premium themes, because they are much easier. These themes charge you an average of $50 to use them and that gives you the rights to use them on a single site. If you want to install them on another site, you need to pay another $50.

The problem is, you already have the download at that point and many webmasters don’t feel obligated to pay that additional money. They don’t believe they will ever get caught and therefore don’t deem it necessary.

In a way they are right, because unless you make a point of connecting your websites to one another then your chances of getting caught are slim. But at the same time, it’s $50. It’s not going to bankrupt you and if you are paying for good content then it’s probably the equivalent of a short article. It’s just not worth the risk and it’s also a great way to show respect to the people who make these themes.

If you spent a lot of time and money creating a quality theme that was being used by webmasters big and small, you would be pretty annoyed if a network earning tens of thousands went to great lengths to rip you off for just $50. So, consider it a donation—a way of doing the right thing and helping those them creators to continue doing what they do. 

Keep Checks on Writers

If you have writers who can freely write, submit and post to your site, then you should make regular checks on the work that they submit. It’s obviously very important to hire people you trust for these roles. I personally have a very capable team that have done great work and that I trust. But if you own a website that constantly lets writers gain access (for your convenience and theirs) this isn’t easy.

In the past I have had writers who have taken liberties and used plagiarized content when they thought I was no longer monitoring the site. I have also had writers and artists who have unknowingly used copyrighted and trademarked content, getting me in to trouble. So, make sure they know the rules and make sure you check on their work.

The post Content Marketing and Legal Issues: Avoiding Copyright Problems appeared first on RELEVANCE.