As search engines continue to evolve, marketers must improve their skills to keep up. According toreports 70 percent of the links search users click are from SEO. Also, inbound leads (i.e. SEO) cost 61 percent less than outbound leads (i.e. cold calling).

SEO has a better return on investment (ROI) as well. "SEO leads have a 14.6 percent close rate, while outbound leads (such as direct mail or print advertising) have a 1.7 percent close rate," according to the same report.

Now that you know SEO is the way to go, here are 11 SEO tactics that you need to know in 2015:

1. Creating Incredible Content That Earns Links

Even after all of the changes with the search engine algorithms, inbound SEO links are still the biggest influence for search engines. This is unlikely to change. On the other hand, other methods of link acquisition have changed. Earning a link from a high-quality, relevant website will not only help with your SEO but also with referral traffic, which can lead to more sales and brand exposure. Creating incredible content that people will want to share is still the best way to earn links.

2. Co-Citation Links

Every time a search engine finds your website next to your competitors, it tells them that your company is in a related niche. To get co-citation links, do a search for "best" or "top 10" items in your niche.

Example: top 10 blue widgets

If you do this search and don’t find your business in the results, get in touch with the publisher and ask that your company be added to the list. Be prepared to justify why your company should be included and where appropriate, give them a summary to go along with a link.

3. Editorial Links

Editorial links can be some of the most powerful for SEO because they come from other publications in your niche mentioning your company. They can also come from thought leadership guest posts that you write and get published on third-party sites.

The easiest way to get editorial links is to create outstanding content that people will want to share with their readers. Another way is to guest post on a high-quality site that is in your niche. Be prepared to create incredible content that may be heavily scrutinized before publishing.

Interviews are another way to get editorial links.

As part of the interview, you should be allowed to cite your work in your responses. This can lead to even more backlinks and traffic.

4. The Broken Link-Building Method

Here’s another white-hat link-building strategy that can be quite effective. In this case, you’re actually helping publishers fix broken links, which can be helpful to their readers. However, this only works if your content is good enough to replace the lost content.

To do the broken link-building method, you must find broken links on a site that is relevant to your niche. You then contact the webmaster with the broken link and recommend your site as an alternative to the broken link. To find out more, you can read the broken link-building Bible at the Moz blog.

5. Link Reclamation

Link reclamation can help you get fresh links by finding broken links to your site and having the publisher fix them.

Examples:

Find brand mentions about your site and ask the publisher to add a link

Find places where your content has been used without attribution (places where people have used your post or infographics without giving you credit) and request a link from the person

According to Kristi Hines with kristihines.com, "A lot of people think of link reclamation as just 301'ing pages they have moved that still have a lot of great backlinks. But I like to think of reclamation as more than that. I like to think of it as not just reclaiming, but claiming links you deserve."

In order to make this automated, you can set up a Google Alert to email you whenever your company’s brand is mentioned. You can then check that page to find out if they link to your site.

6. Link Outreach

Link outreach is a bit "old school" but can still be quite powerful. To do this, find a website that is relevant to yours and get their contact information from the site. Send them an email or call and politely ask them for link. This works better if the site has a slightly different business than yours but may share a common audience.

7. Competitor Analysis

Competitor analysis is nothing new, and companies have been researching their competitor’s links for years. However, by looking at the competitor’s backlinks and manually reviewing which links are worth having, you can then perform a link outreach and try to get a link from the same referring site.

8. Focus on ROI Instead of Keyword Rankings

While we all enjoy seeing the keywords rank well in the search engines, this doesn’t necessarily mean your SEO campaign is successful. It’s possible to rank number one for many keywords that have no real ROI. Instead, you should focus on metrics that bring conversions.

9. Create an SEO Strategy That Maps to an Audience

Over the past few years, we’ve lost most of the keyword data in Google Analytics and other tools. This has required marketers to change from traditional methods of SEO to create new ways of segmenting their audiences.

In order to do this we must find new keywords to focus on, new ways to approach neighboring markets, and determine where our competition is succeeding with SEO and how you can do it better.

The days of stuffing keywords into bad content and having it rank are long gone. Now your content needs to focus on your target persona and your keywords need to flow within the content. This is why it’s so important that content and SEO be tied closely together.

10. Optimize for Yahoo, Bing, and Others

Search engines like Yahoo, Bing, and DuckDuckGo may slowly take a bigger piece of Google’s pie in 2015. Yahoo is now the default search engine for Firefox. Safari had a deal with Google, which is supposed to end in 2015, and Yahoo and Bing are both trying to become the default search engine for the browser.

As other search engines become the default Web browsers instead of Google, it makes sense to optimize for those search engines as well.

11. Mobile SEO

Mobile is becoming more popular every year. Every website should have a mobile marketing strategy for 2015 and beyond.

"May [2014] turned out to be a banner month for mobile as it delivered on some huge milestones which underscored just how impressive the medium’s ascendance has been in the past few years. Mobile platforms – smartphones and tablets – combined to account for 60 percent of total digital media time spent, up from 50 percent a year ago," says comScore.

Mobile should be a core part of any SEO plan in 2015. However, you must be cautious as configuration errors caused a 68 percent loss of traffic, according to BrightEdge.

Conclusion

Creating an SEO strategy can give your company and brand a boost in the search engines. Why not improve your ROI today?

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For those who deal with SEO and blogging, Google panda and Google penguin should not be something new to them. Ever since these updates were introduced, there has been strong buzz on how to develop the perfect search engine optimization plan, so that websites have their dues in rankings. Moving forward, here is a close take Panda and penguin, the two most discussed Google updates, and the difference between the two.

What is Google Panda

Google launched Panda in February 2011, mainly as a change in its search results ranking algorithm. The main purpose of the update was just to keep those low quality and low content sites away from the top ranking results and give the actual quality sites their due.

As an obvious result, many websites with huge amount of advertising, or those with low quality content, saw a huge decline in the rankings. Ever since Panda was launched, there have been many updates to it ranging to over 22 in total.

What is Google Penguin

Another algorithm update from Google that gave SEO experts another blow was Penguin that was launched in April 2012. The idea underlying the update was simple enough- penalize and decrease the rankings of sites that breach Google’s Webmaster Guidelines set the by the search engine.

This included lowering the search engine rankings of all those sites that practice black-hat SEO techniques like duplicate content, keyword stuffing and cloaking to name a few.

Attributes	Google Panda	Google Penguin
The Idea	Penalize websites of low quality and those with low quality content.It is first introduced in 24thFebruary, 2011 with the name of Farmer Update in USA.	Bring down websites that violate Google’s Webmaster Guidelines and use  black-hat SEO techniques
Date of First update	February 2011	April 2012
Also Known as	Farmer Update	Over Optimization Penalty.
Number of updates	Panda had over 24updates till March 2013, last being on Jan 22, 2013.	Penguin had just three updates since its launch in April last year.
Purpose	Bring the high quality and content sites on the top of search engine rankings	Bring the high quality and content sites on the top of search engine rankings
Surviving the algorithm change	There are no two ways about surviving Panda than to make an update in the website and get rid of all those low quality pages, content and keywords. Over-optimized pages need to be checked. Websites that have been hit by Panda need to work on brand awareness and social media networks in a new campaign. The webpage(s) that have been affected need to be isolated from those that weren’t harmed.	Black hat SEO techniques need to be abolished because Penguin is smart enough to deal with all websites indulging in these practices. Avoid excessive link building, doorway pages, keyword stuffing, and meaningless and irrelevant content. Creating content for other blogs and websites and socializing content. Relevant use of keywords and absolute refrain from all kinds of stuffing.
Google released any tool to recover ?	NO	Google introduced A new tool called “disavow links tool” – see the Google webmaster central blogpost
Recovery choices for websites	Panda is basically an on-page problem, so the main changes need to be on the website. Check for pages with no or little content, as well as, for plagiarism. Creating elaborative pages with FAQs and more for a website should help.	Check for the links to find if there are from the same domain name or IP address, so that links don’t look like purchased. The links should not just be direct links to the website, because websites that have followed such polices have seen dip in the rankings. Disavow tool can be helpful in getting rid of too many links that are just associated with the keywords. Penguin genuinely focuses on penalizing unnatural links that are causing changes in the search results intentionally.
How do The algorithms affect a site?	It is possible that an entire site is affected through panda. Usually single pages of a website are not targeted in the algorithm. Panda doesn’t look for think contents but the overall content, so in websites where little original content and more duplicate or thin contents are present, those are likely to be fully penalized.	Penguin generally affects one part of the website on a page and keyword level. Unless spammed for too much keyword usage on the entire, Penguin doesn’t damage the entire site.
Does a recovery request help?	No, because the changes are overall.	No, unless a manual warning is issued, and even in such warnings, recovering is next to impossible.
Does manual removal of links needed?	No, because content is more important here.	If time permits and one wants to avoid relying totally on Disavow tool, then definitely manual link removal is helpful.
By when sites can recover?	If the duplicate and thin content has been done away with, then probably by the next refresh.	Should take time in recovering as refreshing is not frequent. Google has announced an update but with no date specified.
Detailed tips and tricks to recover	Tips to recover from Google panda	Tips to recover from Google penguin
When is the next update ?	No idea	4th penguin update going to happen soon in the month of May, 2013. source : Matt Cutts Twitter

Even though the magnitude of the updates seems to be low in comparison to the results they generated, there is no denying that SEO experts and webmasters have a lot to cope with. With content getting the topmost priority, there is no possibility of any kind of trick in the current scenario!

Still if you are confused about these Google search updates and wanted some personal tips and tricks then contact us and we will try to help and guide you :)

Google's Gary Ill-yes says web-masters can expect a Panda refresh within the upcoming weeks.

Google’s Gary Ill-yes announced that the next Panda update will happen in the upcoming weeks. He said he expects it in the next two to four weeks.Ill-yes referred to it multiple times as a data refresh, not an algorithmic change. So sites that have been suffering from this algorithm may see a recovery in the near future. However, not all sites will see a recovery: Some may not recover, and new sites may also be hit by this data refresh. When the data refresh is updated, we will make sure to notify you right here.Ill-yes also explained that it is in Google’s best interest to keep this data fresh, so the they want to keep it updated as frequently as possible. But they do require manual updates and will currently not run by itself like some of their other algorithms.

History of updates:

Google Panda is a change to Google's search results ranking algorithm that was first released in February 2011. The change aimed to lower the rank of "low-quality sites" or "thin sites", and return higher-quality sites near the top of the search results. CNET reported a surge in the rankings of news websites and social networking sites, and a drop in rankings for sites containing large amounts of advertising.This change reportedly affected the rankings of almost 12 percent of all search results. Soon after the Panda rollout, many websites, including Google's webmaster forum, became filled with complaints of scrapers/copyright infringer getting better rankings than sites with original content. At one point, Google publicly asked for data points to help detect scrapers better. Google's Panda has received several updates since the original rollout in February 2011, and the effect went global in April 2011. To help affected publishers, Google provided an advisory on its blog, thus giving some direction for self-evaluation of a website's quality. Google has provided a list of 23 bullet points on its blog answering the question of "What counts as a high-quality site?" that is supposed to help webmasters "step into Google's mindset.

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Search Engine Optimization or “SEO” is the process of designing your website and marketing strategy to get high quality, un-paid traffic from Search Engines to your website.
Several years ago, the term “SEO” conjured up an image of shady characters working in dimly lit back rooms to “trick” search engines into ranking a site’s pages higher – but those days are long gone. Nowadays, paying for links to your site, hiding content, keyword stuffing or deceptive “black-hat” practices are much more likely to hurt your site than help.
In this article, we will discuss basic SEO best practices that will help you boost the authority of your site on the web, and as a result, increase the value and visibility of your business.
What Search Engines Want
A good place to start thinking about SEO is to consider the goals of Search Engines companies. In order to keep people coming back, Google and other search engines want to display the best, highest-quality results for any given search query.
So, your strategy for SEO should:

1. Make sure that the pages of your site actually do have the best, highest-quality content for keywords relevant to your site.
2. Make sure that Google and other search engines are aware that #1 is true.

That begs the question – What defines high-quality content? Over the past few years, Google and other searches engines have gotten much smarter about understanding both website content and user experience. Google has published clear quality guidelines that are a great framework to abide by.
The good news is that for the most part, what’s good for your visitors will also help your search rankings.
Quality Experience
The first part of quality is making sure that your site is reputable. Your site must be free of spam, malware and other problems. Excessive ads or pages filled with nothing but links are signs that your site is not reputable. And, as mentioned above, any deceptive practices are another sign of a bad-quality site. If you sign up for notifications in Google Webmaster tools they will tell you if they detect any issues on your site.
Another measure of high quality is a fast site. Faster is clearly a better user experience. And, studies have shown that a faster site also converts better. A study by Akamai reports that 47% of people expect a web page to load in two seconds or less. What’s more, just a one-second delay in page load time results in a 7% decline in sales (source). Several years ago Google started factoring in site speed into search result rankings, so delivering on this has never been more crucial to site visibility. A tool like the Alexa Site Audit can crawl your whole site and flag your site’s slowest pages to make sure your performance is optimized.
For people searching from a mobile device, a measure of quality content is that the site is mobile-friendly. Google began labeling mobile optimized sites in search results this fall, presumably giving ranking preference to those that are responsive. With 1/3 of search result clicks going to the top organic result, the need to perform well in organic search has never been more crucial. You should make sure your site renders well on tablets and phones to maximize web traffic from mobile searches.
Freshness is also a factor. A site that hasn’t been updated in months or years is most likely lower quality. With out of date content, this also probably means the site hasn’t earned any new inbound links. Without a good “freshness factor”, search engines will likely pass over a site for newer, more current content.
Spelling errors and broken links are signs of bad quality. The Alexa Site Audit regularly monitors your site for broken links, which are bad both for your visitors and for SEO.
Quality Content
Quality content is copy that is original, clearly written, and relevant to the user’s search query. Writing good copy is hard work, so you need to make the copy as effective as possible in making the connection between what people are searching for and the pages of your website.
The pages of your site should be, for the most part, focused on individual topics – not individual keywords. But it is important that the content include the keywords or phrases you want to rank for in search engines naturally in the text.
The process of picking the right keywords – Keyword Research – is one of the most important parts of SEO and is a big topic unto itself. But some questions to get answers to are:

• What keywords do people who are genuinely interested in my topic/product/service/organization use when searching?
• What keyword phrases are currently driving traffic to my site?
• What keyword phrases are driving traffic to my competitors’ sites?
• How often do people search for certain keyword phrases?

The Alexa keyword tool, which is part of the Alexa Advanced subscription, can help you find keywords driving traffic to your competitors’ sites. You can also search by keyword, and find the top sites receiving organic or paid traffic from that keyword. Google Trends is another useful tool to help you understand how search patterns change over time. In all, comprehensive keyword research and testing can give incredible insight into your customers needs and buying behavior, trends in demand and market constraints, and even your competitors’ strategy.
Quality content is also reflected in engagement metrics. Metrics like bounce rate and session length allow a search engine to determine how happy a visitor is with the result. Over time, usage patterns emerge and search engines can differentiate fairly accurately between what visitors find engaging, quality content and what they don’t. If you’re offering substantial, differentiated value, your engagement metrics will show it. When you consider that content marketing costs 62% less than traditional marketing but generates about 3 times as many leads, it’s more than worth the effort (source).
Helping Search Engines Understand Your Content
Although search engines are much smarter than they used to be, that doesn’t mean they don’t need some help. You should make it as easy as possible for search engines to find and understand the pages of your site.
Your site should be well organized. The directory structure for your pages helps both people and search engines understand and navigate your content. For example, if you’re selling both kitchen appliances and consulting services, it can be helpful to put the appliances stuff in an /kitchen-appliances/ directory and the consulting services in a /consulting-services/ directory.
Another way to help search engines understand your site is on-site links – the links from one part of your site to another part of your site. If you have any links where the anchor text is “Click here” you are throwing away an opportunity to let search engines know what the page is about! For example, instead of “Click here to use our kitchen planner” use “Try our kitchen planner.”
Still, there are a still lot of little things to get right. Whoever is building your site should understand Google’s technical guidelines. Some basics:

• Each page on your website should have a unique title that describes what the page is about.
• Images should have “alt” text which describe them.
• Avoid multiple pages with the same content.
• Your robots.txt file should not block search engines.

The Alexa Site Audit can help make sure that you’ve got these basics right.  On an ongoing basis it audits your site to make sure you’re following best practices.
How does Google know that your content is important?
At the end of the day, even if you’ve followed all the best practices for quality and technical guidelines, you are still competing with many other sites for search traffic. One of the early key innovations of Google was PageRank – which is built on the idea that links to a web page are like votes for the importance of that page. When other sites link to your site it indicates that the content is of high credibility. When people share your content on social networks it indicates that it was valuable or interesting to them.
Many early SEO strategies focused on planting, buying or trading links.   Although inbound links to your site are still a very important part of SEO, modern SEO is more about earning links through effective content marketing – creating content that is interesting, valuable and shareable. Easier said than done!
You can use a tool like Alexa’s “Sites Linking In” tool to monitor what sites are linking to your site and to your competitors’ sites. If you see new links to your site or your competitor’s site, learn from that success and build on it!
Bottom Line

As they get smarter and smarter, Google and other search engines are leveling the playing field. SEO is no longer about technical tricks. Once you’ve got the best practices implemented, SEO becomes more like all other marketing – understanding what your customers need, and making sure they know that you’ve got it!

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What SEO Best Practices will be HOT in 2016?

The Internet is a huge factor in how marketing is performed nowadays, and keeping up with the latest SEO trends is important to keeping your marketing edge. This is because traditional push marketing is being replaced by more cost-effective inbound marketing strategies like search engine optimization (SEO), that drives targeted audiences to you as apposed to out bound marketing where you are marketing to the masses and hoping you reach the right people. Make sure to bookmark this page as your SEO best practices checklist and don’t let up! Here are the top 8 SEO trends to watch for in 2015.

1. Content is King. Google’s latest search engine algorithms focuses more and more on content, which means there is less focus on keyword saturation and more focus on whether or not the content is actually relevant to the keywords. You should continue to generate high-quality content that uses appropriate, relevant keywords and synonyms for those keywords, but focus more on the content than the words themselves.

2. Social Signals Will Be Even More Important. Changes within the search engine algorithms have not just placed greater importance on the content, but they’ve also begun to rely more upon social signals to elevate results up the ladder in search ranking importance. Eventually, we expect to see content and social signals integrated, with content of higher quality getting more social shares and thus rising higher in the search engine results.

3. Online Security Will Become More Important in Rankings. If your website deals with online payments and sensitive customer information, you need to make sure you are using proper security measures to safeguard that information. For example, using security certificates and https instead of http will help your website grow in search engine rankings in 2015. If you want to confirm the security of your website, check out WordPress Support.

4. Mobile-Friendly SEO will grow. The mobile user experience is rumored to be another important ranking factor in Google’s search engine algorithm, since the mobile Internet has surpassed the desktop Internet and will continue to grow in 2015. Estimates say that in 2016, there will be as many as 50 billion local searches using mobile devices—wouldn’t you want to be found in those searches?

5. Increased focus on conversations instead of keywords. Semantic search became a big deal in 2013, with Google’s Hummingbird update. Search engines are now using context, meaning, and intent of the words in a search query, instead of just focusing on matching up keywords. This means long-tail, or more “conversational,” keyword phrases will grow in importance for SEO, and you should begin to tailor some of your SEO efforts towards engaging in a conversation with search engine users.

6. Link Building Will Focus on Brand Mentions. In 2016, proper link building will continue to be important. What’s changed, though, is how the search engines will interpret those backlinks coming to and from a website. The content will get more of the focus, so you need to think about relevance and social popularity. Brand mentions, relevant information the source website is discussing about your brand or website, might not require a hyperlink but will still factor into SEO.

7. There Will Be More Visual-Based SEO. High quality, original content featuring visual media elements like graphics, images, and video are becoming high performing assets for the top-ranked web pages in 2015, and this is expected to continue throughout 2016. Rich text with visual elements gets priority in SERPs over web pages with just text, and video marketing on YouTube can generate a huge amount of link and social sharing traffic for your site. 

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