Five things you should know when you want to buy backlinks

Five things you should know when you want to buy backlinks

For a long time, link generation has been a very important concept based on which Google search algorithms are built. It has become one of the important key factors in Google’s Search Engine Page Rankings. Link generation has a direct impact on domain authority, website traffic, and ultimately SERP results. Hence it is always one of the key areas of focus for an SEO expert.

The link-building activities involve building internal page links on a website and external page links. Internal links allow the website visitor to stay on the page for a long time consuming, value-added content on the website. External links drive visitors to the website from various channels.

Though interlinks can be generated and linked, generating external links is the key to driving more traffic. Driving traffic, keeping the visitors engaged are two significant factors that improve search rankings.

Here are the top five things you should know when you are considering buying backlinks. Beware! None of the people selling backlinks will tell you this.

  1. Buying backlinks is considered Illegal. John Mueller has clarified it time and again and reiterated the same in his recent Google SEO Office hours. Google keeps updating its algorithms to purge invalid links. Buying backlinks is one of the black hat SEO technique which is forbidden by Google. However, some people who try to find shortcuts do look for sellers who can assure backlinks. But practically, there is no shortcut to increasing backlinks, except for following White Hat SEO techniques.
  1. It is not a good practice to buy backlinks. Google’s algorithms are refined frequently to catch any unauthenticated activities in Google search rankings. These algorithms keep refining and are fine-tuned to flag any suspicious links.
  1. Google takes punitive action on the websites that have been flagged by Google. This may include removing all those suspicious backlinks or may sometimes lead to serious repercussions like pulling down the websites as a whole.
  1. Getting a website up online after it is pulled down takes a lot of time, and you may be asked to give several reasons. Hence be careful when you think of buying backlinks from sellers.
  1. Backlinks are the foundation of Google’s search algorithms. Google’s search, traffic, conversion tracking, discovery all are based on these backlinks and are as much relevant today as they were in 1997. Hence it is worth investing in building your website’s backlinks authentically.

Hence, buying backlinks could prove lethal to your business website. It is always recommended to build links by following White Hat SEO techniques. These techniques have proven to increase search rankings and boost a website’s traffic. Relying on the best practices to implement SEO techniques is always safe and worth investing in.To watch the latest Google SEO Office Hours, please check out the video below:

Top 20+ Chrome Extensions For Every Digital Marketer

Top 20+ Chrome Extensions For Every Digital Marketer

Digital Marketing is not an art, it is a science. Science of understanding your target market, their interests, preferences, psychographics, and demographics. Ideally, as a digital marketer, we want every campaign to be a success. And we strive to achieve that by learning, applying, and correcting ourselves to ensure we are meeting the success targets. To become a successful digital marketer, we need tools, techniques, and focus to execute the marketing objectives. Here we bring you 20+ essential tools that you, as a digital marketer should have as part of your chrome extensions. 1.Nimbus screenshot Helps you to take screenshots, screenshots with scroll, edit the screenshot, and save it. Typically we face a lot of issues with taking long-form screenshots. And Nimbus Screenshot tool has been a helpful tool to us. Click Here to Add Extension  
Nimbus Chrome Extension | KloudPortal
  2. Uber suggest This has been an amazing tool when it comes to keyword volume search and understanding the SEO difficulty of a Keyword. Click Here to Add Extension 3.Loom Be it creating demos or recording a screen and saving it, Loom has made the file of marketers so easy. Creating short demos of SaaS products and saving them helps us run effective marketing product campaigns. Click Here to Add Extension 4.Grammarly Grammarly has been a blessing in disguise, for many marketers who have trouble with writing engaging content or professional content. Apart from giving us grammatical suggestions, Grammarly also helps in giving the right context around the content. Click Here to Add Extension 5. Hunter This is a professional e-mail address finder tool that helps you to collect the email addresses of people, through various online sources. Click Here to Add Extension 6.Buzz Sumo Content research, content ideation, social media performance analysis at a shot, Buzz Sumo has it all. Must have an assistant to every digital marketer to catalyze your inner creativity. Click Here to Add Extension 7.Check my links An amazing tool that can help us identify the broken links on a website and give digital marketers a clear picture of the website’s SEO parameters. Now you know where you can look to fix things. Click Here to Add Extension 8.Eyedropper If you want to design your presentation templates and don’t have a branding document for the website, eyedropper is an excellent tool. It helps you to pick the colors from the client’s website and meet their brand expectations even during marketing. 9.Bitly Long ‘Click Here’ URLs always take a long time to build traffic. Your target audience already gets scared to even click on a link when it looks so long. Bitly is the best tool to shorten URL length. It allows you to copy and even customize your URLs to suit your marketing context. Click Here to Add Extension 10.Tag Assistant Did you ever try to check if a particular website has the google tags on the website and whether they are working? Yes, most of us try to check with page sources to verify the same. And sometimes, these elements are hidden by the website owners and are generally not visible on-page source. Tag Assistant plugin is a ‘go-to’ tool to check if google tags are working fine. Click Here to Add Extension  
Google Tag Assistant Chrome Extension | KloudPortal
  11. Similar web A fantastic tool to analyze traffic rank and website analytics. This tool has given us an opportunity to help our clients understand their traffic and what is the potential their website can generate when the right SEO strategies are implemented. Click Here to Add Extension
12.Social Blade Want to know how a video post is performing on Youtube or Twitch or Twitter or Instagram, Social Blade is the answer. Check out the social media analytics of your video and understand if your marketing strategy is working. Click Here to Add Extension 13. One Tab As digital marketers, we tend to work on multiple items at once, It is very essential to keep our browser window free saving memory space and preventing it from freezing when you are trying to save an important document. One tab is an amazing tool that stores all your tabs in one file when you are researching. Click Here to Add Extension 14.Similar sites Finding an alternative website is always a laborious task. Understanding your client’s business, then doing an analysis has been now made easy with Similar Sites. This extension developed by a similar web gives the nearest alternatives to a website you search for. Click Here to Add Extension 15. Whatfont If browsing is your hobby, you may navigate through different websites to understand how they design and how they market themselves. And if you have been browsing for quite some time now, then you must have come across some amazing websites with a variety of fonts. Did you ever try to find those beautiful fonts? What font extension is an amazing tool to identify the font on any given webpage. Now you know how to find a font on any website. Click Here to Add Extension 16.SEOQuake As a digital marketer, understanding a website’s SEO health is essential. SEO Quake gives a comprehensive picture of the entire website including header tags, Alt tags, missing elements like schema.org, robots.txt, Google Analytics Integration, Backlinks, etc., Click Here to Add Extension
SEO Quake Chrome Extension | KloudPortal

17.Light House Google Lighthouse is an open-source Chrome extension exclusively developed to help web developers identify the issues in a website. It gives a comprehensive picture of all the quality links on the website and its’ performance. It measures the accessibility, SEO, website performance, beast practices, progressive web app features. After effectively running the tests, it gives subsequent recommendations on how to improve the website’s performance. A ‘must-have’ tool for every web developer. Click Here to Add Extension 18.Evernote Web Clipper When browsing thousands of websites every year, it becomes difficult to filter the best you have found. If you found interesting articles online, the best way is it clip them immediately. And Evernote Web Clipper works seamlessly by clipping your favorite articles, pages, designs and you can re-visit them whenever you want to. A seamless tool recommended for every marketer, who is an avid online reader/surferer. Click Here to Add Extension 19.Facebook Pixel Helper Using Facebook pixels to track events on your website? Not sure if it is working? Facebook Pixel Helper Chrome Extension helps you to understand if your pixel tracker is properly. When you click on the Pixel helper panel, it displays the list of successes, errors, warnings, and pixel tracking information for a particular web page. Click Here to Add Extension 20.MozBar Mozbar is an essential tool that every digital marketer must install on his chrome browser. This tool gives a big picture about the entire website including domain authority, page authority, linking reports, etc., Click Here to Add Extension 21. SERPTrends Is an amazing chrome extension that gives you a website’s ranking dynamics on the search engine results page. While you may find similar chrome extensions for Google SERPs, SERPTrends does not limit itself to only Google’s search results ranking but also shows the ranking trends in Bing and Yahoo searches. Click Here to Add Extension 22. One click extensions manager While we gave your 20+ extensions above, pinning them active at all times could be a little annoying. With One Click Extensions Manager, you can manage all your extensions at a time. This extension saves all your chrome extensions in one place. You can easily manage them with simple enable and disable buttons. Click Here to Add Extension

Use these extensions every day to drive your marketing results.

Now that you have noted the top chrome extensions to be aware of, you may also want to check our recent blogs on SEO and Instagram hacks. Please subscribe to receive our latest blog updates. If you want to write for us, drop us an email to contactus@kloudportal.com

Keyword Clustering: Dominate SEO with a Content Strategy Upgrade

Keyword Clustering: Dominate SEO with a Content Strategy Upgrade

Keyword clustering is one of the best white hat SEO techniques you can add to your SEO or content marketing strategy. It’s an advanced method used in search engine optimization to segment target terms into groups that are relevant to each page of the website.

Normally, a keyword strategy involves one or two keywords to optimize a given content. However, with the development and updates in search engine algorithms, such simple tactics don’t work like they used to. Google has become far more advanced today, with an ability to understand user intent, detect multiple topics and index content accordingly.

What is Keyword Grouping?

Keyword clustering groups keywords that are similar to each other and fall under the same search intent. It’s an effective tactic that will allow your content marketing strategy to be more targeted. There are three common types of search intent namely: navigation, information, and transactional or commercial.

For example, “women shoes,” “women’s black shoes,” and “black running shoes for women” are all different keywords. But they all represent users who want to buy women’s shoes. Therefore, they all fall under the transactional category.

The process is similar to traditional keyword research — but on a bigger scale. Through keyword clusters or grouping, you’ll get insight into how keywords are related to each other, and what terms are used by audiences in the different stages of the buyer’s journey.

You can better assess which keywords to use whether a buyer is merely doing initial research, informational research, or they’re already looking to buy a product.

What is keyword grouping?

How to Map Out Keyword Clusters

Here’s how you can begin doing your keyword clustering.

1. List all keyword data

Keyword clustering will start with a lot of keyword research. Determine the root keyword that you want your website to rank for and then list all the related keywords, or similar keywords including long-tail keywords, and common topics that searchers are using with the keyword.

Use as many sources as possible. You can use the following for research:

  • Ahrefs, Semrush, and Google Analytics
  • Existing target keywords
  • Competitors’ keywords
  • Google Trends

Compile all keywords until you have hundreds you can use, then remove any duplicates or repetitive phrases.

2. Have a workable list of keywords

Study your list, and you’ll notice that there’s a pattern on the search terms. You’ll see that though many will have the same root keyword, they will fall into different categories or serve different search intent.

Example:

  • Content marketing strategy
  • Content marketing services
  • Examples of content marketing
  • How to do content marketing
  • Cost of content marketing

Here, “content marketing” is the root keyword, but the phrases all fall under different categories. If you look closely, “content marketing strategy” is an informational keyword, whereas you can list “content marketing services” as a transactional or commercial keyword. You need to determine the keyword variation to properly group them later on.

Analyze your list, keeping these points in mind:

  • Choose phrases that are relevant to your business
  • Choose phrases with a good search volume (You can target keywords that have a high search volume, but keep in mind that you must be capable of ranking for that keyword. It’s best to also include keywords with search volumes of 200-2,000 with low keyword difficulty.)
  • Choose the ones that make strategic sense when it comes to content creation

3. Group and segment keywords

Now, it’s time to group and categorize the keywords. Earlier, we mentioned the different stages of the buyer’s journey. We’ll use this process to divide and group our keywords.

Here are the three stages of the buyer’s journey:

  1. Awareness. Informational keywords will fall under this category since users at this stage are not yet aware of the products or services that you offer. They may not even be aware that they need them. Choose informational keywords that also address their pain points.
  2. Consideration. Keywords that nurture or will further educate your audience about your products and services should fall under this category. In this stage, users are already aware of what they want, and are looking for information that will assure them that they’re making the right choice.
  3. Purchase. These are your conversion keywords. Commercial and transactional keywords fall in this category.

You will have to analyze this carefully and decide which keywords you want to use for which purpose. You can also develop multiple groups. But be mindful of the keyword difficulty, search volume and how competitive the keyword is. The goal here is to reach more users, which you can only do once you’re able to successfully target the right keyword and rank for it.

4. Incorporate your keyword clusters into your content

First, organize your pillar pages or the main pages in your site. This way, they’ll contain the most important keywords or the root keywords that your website should be ranking for.

Next, optimize your blog according to category. You can update existing blogs or create new ones, it all depends on the keyword cluster you’re working on.

Your blog posts should link back to the appropriate pillar page. This method of internal linking will strengthen your chances of ranking for those keywords as well.

Basing your content production on existing keyword clusters is a more strategic approach that’s driven by data, rather than gut-feel or instinct. The process is easier to monitor, track and adjust, providing your business with a more effective SEO and content marketing strategy.

Incorporate your keyword clusters into your content

Better Keywords for Greater Visibility

It doesn’t matter if you’re marketing on your own or have professional help from a digital marketing agency. Well-written and thoroughly researched articles are essential to your content marketing arsenal. And the best way to optimize those high-quality articles is to apply keyword clustering.

The methodical approach does take time, requiring more keyword research and more content production. But in the end, it’ll allow you to provide the right type of content to the right type of users. And this will help you improve search visibility, giving you that competitive edge your business needs.

Itamar Gero

Itamar Gero

About The Author…

Itamar Gero is the founder of SEOReseller.com, a digital marketing solutions provider that empowers agencies and their local clients all over the world. When he isn’t working, he’s traveling the world, meditating, or dreaming (in code).

Google’s John Muller Clarifies on Average Position Metric on Google Search Console.

Google’s John Muller Clarifies on Average Position Metric on Google Search Console.

We recently conducted a short research on Search Engine Ranking positions. We did a manual search and found that few of our pages were ranking in the first 10 positions in Google Search Rankings. We were really happy that our website was coming up in the top ten positions on Google’s SERP. But that happiness was short lived, as we did find that our Google Search Console was speaking something else.

Google Search Console and Active Position Metrics
Our Google Search Console showed our average position to be somewhere around 65.6 one day, 56.9 on another day and 40 on another day. We were wondering if the Active Positions Metric on GSC was true and believable.

In a recent video posted by Google’s #AskGoogleBot series, luckily John Muller answered this question for us.

As per Google, the active position could vary based on several parameters which include Geo targeting, personalization or because of a short and sharp visibility which was brief. Also, John Muller clarified that the results on active position are for real and are based on real-time statistics and not just theoretical results.

If a website has multiple URLs indexed on Google and ranked at different positions, then Google considered the least ranked position when calculating the Average position. So when we manually check, we don’t see the URL appearing in the same poistion everytime. Hence the average position metric changes as well.

Sometimes we also observe that certain keywords display significantly less impressions, which we do not expect. Since it could be a high ranking keyword, your URLs visibility could have short lived among other URLs, and could be the reason for low visibility statistics.

The Average position metric also considers the search results in images as well.
Hence the role of alt tags on a website should never be ignored.

In conclusion, we can say that the Active position on the Google Search Console is actually based on the actual search results, when people search for something and find your website. Hence keywords, alt tags, meta descriptions and several on-page and off page parameters play a significant role in your active position metric.

Here is what John Muller said in his recent video addressing the GSC’s active position metric

Link Building – The Core Technique In Search Engine Optimization

Link Building – The Core Technique In Search Engine Optimization

Searching Engine Optimization has been fascinating us for a long time. There are an estimated 1.78 billion websites on the internet. Helping the google bots crawl and index these websites and the trillions and trillions of web pages on these websites is so fun and enticing.
There are more than thirty SEO techniques that are followed when it comes to search engine optimization. These techniques when followed can achieve ranking results. However, the duration in which a website can be ranked on Google certainly depends on several factors like keyword search volume, keyword ranking, competitor keyword analysis, link building, domain authority, page authority, blogs, articles, etc.,
Many SEO agencies follow a few techniques and finally get lesser results. In fact, some end up getting no results at all. We have worked with many clients thus far, and we have strategically followed our techniques to achieve the results. And we proudly boast about achieving the results which addressed our customer’s pain points like ranking on google search results, digital branding, and digital visibility. Few of our clients are happy with the indirect benefits that they received, which include more walk-ins, more orders, and substantial enquiries they receive on a daily basis.
When it comes to SEO link building there are three major types of links that we come across – Inbound Links (Backlinks – Link Building), Outbound Links, and Internal Links.
Link building has been one of the common techniques we follow for many of our clients. Link building includes – backlink submissions, guest blogging, bookmarking submissions, etc.,
Is there a strategy behind link building? How to achieve better results with link building? How can your link building be more effective?
There are many link building websites that offer you the ability to submit links. But are all these websites correct for you/your business? What are the parameters you should look for when executing link building strategies?

Here are the top SIX tips for you to achieve SEO results through Link Building:

  1. Domain Authority
  2. Business Relevance
  3. Appropriate Anchor Text
  4. Do Follow Vs No Follow
  5. Link Placement
  6. Destination URL

Tips to achieve SEO results through Link Building

Domain Authority

If you are following link building techniques as part of SEO, searching for social bookmarking websites on google is a good way to start with. But choosing the right submission sites is very crucial for the quality of submissions. We suggest you choose a website that has a higher domain authority than your current website.

Business Relevance

As a digital marketer, it is very important to understand our client’s business first. We then go about identifying their needs and expectations, before we start with the strategy of link building. Identifying the websites with higher domain authority and having a business relevance is the key to successful results.

Appropriate Anchor Text

While identifying the right domain and business relevant, putting in the business specific anchor text decides whether the link will get approved or not. Hence, having a good, descriptive content as an anchor text, makes the job of a link approver easy and there are high chances of getting an approved back link.

Do Follow Vs No Follow

Even after submitting in hundreds of websites, we fail to increase the number of backlinks in the Google Search console. And when the numbers don’t go up, then it becomes a worrying part. When the backlinks that were submitted are not approved, there will be an impact on the number of active visits to the website, enquiries, improvement in domain authority, etc., Hence submitting the links in websites that provide a do-follow link, add value to your submissions.

Link Placement

Many off-page specialists work hours and hours submitting their website links during the link building tasks. While they follow all the guidelines, they still don’t see enough referral-generated traffic on Google Analytics. The reason: Link Placement. Link placement is again a strategic placement of the link during submission. Including the link at the end of the anchor text yields minimum results. Placing the link at the beginning of the text doesn’t add value either. However, including a link in the first 2-3 lines of your anchor text does do justice and derives your expectations. Hence, the right link placements play a crucial role in bringing in traffic to your website.

Destination URL:

Destination URL plays a significant role when the traffic is routed through it. Sometimes a link building executive, could simply follow all the above guidelines and finally insert a link that returns a 404 page. This leads to loss of trust and low credibility in the market, Hence, when we submit our content as part of link building activity, we first list down all the active URLs that are relevant to the business. We then submit the relevant content on the website with the appropriate destination URL. Leading to an engaging content on the destination URL reduces the bounce rates and improves the quality of visits.
Benefits of following the above small tips lead to quality lead generation, enquiries from the right prospects, and lead to right engagement models.
If you are looking for more tips and hacks in marketing, please check out our latest blog on “10 Interesting Hacks That Will Boost Your Engagement On Instagram” or “Importance of Core Web Vitals in Search Rankings Boost”.

How Search Engine Optimization works for businesses?

How Search Engine Optimization works for businesses?

Search Engine Optimization has gained considerable attention in the last decade.

Many business owners were perceiving SEO as an optional channel for marketing their products and services. But is that still an option in the post COVID era?

There are close to 1.8 billion websites across the internet. Many businesses have turned towards online presence during the COVID time. Is it just enough to have a website and just leave it there? Do all those businesses generate leads? Definitely not.

Search Engine Optimization is a process of educating the search engines about your website’s presence amongst the billions of websites and web pages.

By being indexed by Search Engine Bots, your business is highly likely to be found by many people online from across the globe.

When people find your website amongst the search engine results, they are highly likely to click and visit your website.

Search Engine is just not limited to Google. It extends to Bing, Yahoo, etc., Hence these processes educate the respective search engine bots about the presence of your business.

SEO is one of the several digital marketing techniques that are used to build a brand presence in the digital space.

There is a misconception in the market that the process of SEO will lead to generating leads for your business. Business owners assume that as soon as the website is ranked on the first page of Google, people will just visit and sign up or fill a form. Yes, that was a case some two decades ago. There were fewer websites and accessing the internet was a privilege. But things have changed now.

We take up digital marketing activities for many clients and here is the trend that we have seen in the last few years:

  • Your Website visitors are looking for more engaging content.
  • Visitors are likely to navigate to your other blogs or pages, only after they see you are presenting valuable content to them.
  • Visitors are likely to subscribe to your website only when they find that you answer their search query every time they reach your website.

Misconceptions:

  • More website visits, more conversions
  • ViFirst-time website visitors Signup/Subscribe for your websites newsletters
  • All the visitors are going to register/signup.
  • One time SEO is enough to rank your website and it stays on Google’s first page forever.

Top 5 KPIs when you are measuring your website metrics

KPIs In Google Analytics that you cannot ignore

Returning Visitors

  • Not only visitors focus on having more returning visitors. Returning visitors are 40% more likely to convert as your subscribers in his/her 5th or 6th visit (on average).
Returning Users vs New Users Metrics in Google Analytics

Bounce Rate:

  • Check your website bounce rate. Bounce rate indicates your visitors are not finding relevant content.

Session Duration:

  • Session duration indicates how much time your visitors spend on your pages on an average.

Active Users:

  • Number of active users should be high. Active users are defined a those visitors on your website who have navigated through the pages or have done some action on your website.

Audience Overview:

  • Know your Audience. Where they are coming from – Location, What is their Gender, and what is their age group.

How much time does it take to see the SEO results?

Many business owners think that SEO yields immediate results. Hence they hire an agency to get their website SEO done for 3-4 months. They don’t see significant results and hence they stop with SEO services.

Benefits of SEO for businesses

  • Search Engine Optimization when done reguarly, can help you build domain authority for your website.
  • This leads to increased number of visits.
  • SEO will start showing results only when it is supported by good content.
  • SEO builds your brand presence online.
  • Lead generation happens upon consistently delivering value added content.

If you are looking for more Digital Marketing related articles, you may want to check our latest blogs on ‘Why and How To Get SEO Done Along With Website Redesign?’ and ‘What do you need to know about Digital Marketing for your business?

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