SEO and Content Promotion

[DanielGarneau]

Here is a link towards an SEO primer article that is while worth reading, by Squirrly's Florin Muresan, One Ultimate Guide to Help You Start Your SEO Journey. Let me quote how this article was described to me in an email by the author: «If you're new to SEO and want to understand the language SEOs speak, or you just want to figure out why Google is obsessed with great SEO, then this is the one guide that you need to read.»

An introduction to the Squirrly SEO WordPress Plugin: You’ll be Shocked by What These 49,000 People Like You Taught Us About Online Visibility, also titled "Online Visibility for your WordPress." This article reports how this company turned their research about successful websites into a set of tools available from within the WordPress Dashboard through the Squirrly SEO 2018 (Briefcase) WordPress plugin. The article also provides a brief overview of some of the tools available from within the plugin. It is especially useful if you consider the possibility of using this specific plugin for your own WordPress web site.

Amongst the 10 Time-Saving blogging Tools you Need to Use, Neil Patel, refers to Squirrly SEO as "A complete content marketing suite" (Coaching Session II, from Squirrly).  This article provides very interesting information and insights. For example, it points out that "Recent statistics show that once you accumulate 51 useful posts, blog traffic will increase by 53%. And traffic will triple once you hit 100 posts." The most interesting feature of this article is indicated within its title, and it is to provide a brief description of blogging tools. Here are a few of them, that I might want to investigate further for my own presence online:

• Google Docs -- "Google’s suite of Docs, Sheets and Slides allows you to create and edit documents online, for free" (Neil Patel).
• Quora and Quora French -- "If only there was a social media network where a deeper connection could be built and people engaged with each other on a deeper level – imagine how useful that would be. Well, this network does exist.  It’s called Quora. [...] A lot of smart bloggers are using Quora to find long-tail keywords that they can’t find with Google AdWords’ Keywords Planner." (Neil Patel).
• HubSpot -- Quoting Brian Clark, Neil Panel writes: "A poor headline will render your blog content invisible." He then goes on to show how the Hubspot's blog topic generator may be of help in filling this need. A free version with limited functionality seems to exist.

Neil Patel's also mentions Quirrly amongst its time-saving blogging tools, and a few more not mentioned here.

As I began to use Squirrly, it led me to a glob called blogdei that used  a tool called  FaceBook Comments, and which I wish to investigate.

[DanielGarneau]

After a few days of registering with Squirrly SEO Plugin 2018, I received an Audit Analysis of the front page of Savoir et croire .ca. The automated report was instructive. I will now begin to use this report in order to identify the aspects that most require to be attended to.  Here is a list of items requiring to be attended to:

• No Meta Viewport. "If your web page does not have any other mobile-specific customizations, the quickest way to determine a good mobile viewport width is to open your page in your browser and then resize the browser horizontally." To which the report adds the following warning: "If your web page does not have any other mobile-specific customizations, the quickest way to determine a good mobile viewport width is to open your page in your browser and then resize the browser horizontally." Suggested reading, first, Stop using the viewport meta tag (until you know how to use it), to help understand the issues, and Configuring the Viewport to resolve it.
• Average Shares per latest posts is 2, which is apparently not good. The audit document specifies the following: "Social Shares are becoming the New SEO. If you increase your social shares you will improve your SEO and you'll get found better on search engines. Every form of social interaction between readers and your site (social signal) is important to making your site look authoritative." Recommended reading: 8 Ways to Instantly Improve the Social Shareability of Your Visual Blog Content. Recommended viewing: Social is Key to SEO.
• Social Impact not so good with a total shares of 51 (from FaceBook, 47; from StumbleUpon. 2 ; from Pinterest, 2). The report explains: "Search engines now include the strength of a link in social media as a ranking factor. The Strength is calculated by the number of times the page has been shared, tweeted, liked, and posted on social media. [...] Use images that look good, in order to increase the possibility of having your articles shared. Great design is a form of social proof and it makes people trust you and also like you enough to share your page." Recommended viewing: Does Google Use Data From  Social Sites in Ranking?

There are eight more issues requiring to be attended to according to the same report : (1) No Social "Follow me" Buttons; (2) No High Authority Backlinks for latest posts; (3) Too few Authority Backlinks for the site; (4) Too few Majestic Backlinks; (5) Too few Majestic Unique Domains; (6-8) MozRanking, Moz Page Authority, and Alexa Rank for my site are all considered to be poor. I will be working on these directly from the Audit Analysis document.

Nevertheless, the following articles or videos dealing with some of the issues identified in the last paragraph:

• Importance of Social Media icons and their position on websites. Before reading this article, I realized that although I do have social media share buttons on every page of this site and its forum, it might be interesting to add less committing like-type buttons connected at least to the most important social medias I'm interacting with.
• 11 Link Building Strategies that Won't Break the Bank. One suggestion from this article is to identify broken link on other people's sites and perhaps propose replacement links from our own site. Suggested tool: Screaming Frog. Guess blogging and asking site owner to add our links to their sites are among the other tips proposed.
• How to Grow Inbound Links With Guest Blogging Opportunities. This article and its inbedded video presentation provide practical help within reach of non technical bloggers. It suggests how to use some publicly available tools, and discusses the human to human relationship necessarily involved in reaching out to other bloggers in our own niche. 
• External Links and All Links are Not Created Equal: 10 Illustrations on Search Engines' Valuation of Links. These two articles helped me understand that even the links that go from my site or forum to other sources are SEO-significant.
• What are some effective techniques for building links? This video presentation argues that organic link building should be viewed as an integral part of writing good and valuable material for human beings that might end-up consulting your site. Controversy might not be as valuable as some have made it out to be. Humor could be a best avenue. One of the best way to bring-in organic link would be participating in the community, and answering questions. People will be happy to have an answer to their question and might realize you have more interesting content on your web site and link to it. Original research is another good way. Other means would be Newsletters, social medias, doing a conference. As poor as controversy would be lists. Blogs would be good ways of bringing links to your site. Writing tutorials would also be a good way, even if you don't get a lot of links. It's not always about links, but about having a resource nobody else in the world has. Make sure your site has a good architecture. Making a few videos might be a good way to lead people to build links to your site. 
• About Majestic from the Majestic Blog, and MozRank, along with Moz Page Authority, have also contributed by Squirrly's audit's report.

The above notes are a guide that should help me choose the priorities in improving my site's SEO and content promotion. I'm hoping it will be useful to other webmaster or site owners attempting to improve their site's visibility on the internet. Please feel free to add to this with your own posts.

[DanielGarneau]

In the two previous posts, I covered material studied from Squirrly's coaching lessons 1 and 2. I also reported on some of the articles provided withing these coaching sessions. Finally, I spent a fair amount of time examining some of the weakest areas requiring improvements as identified in the first Audit Analysis report provided by Squirrly for the main page of my Web Site: www.savoiretcroire.ca.

This post is based two articles, the first from Florin Muresan's article: How To Make Your WordPress Look Like The Huffington Post on Google. It focuses on the improvement to the structured appearance of Google search results through Squirrly's JSON-LD functionality. The article then shows some of the advantages of Squirrly's snippets (real results) over those of Yoast SEO's snippet (projected results).

The second article at the basis of this post is a Squirrly vs Yoast face-off from the perspective of the Squirrly team. Although this article brings to the table some interesting observations, I feel the need to visit it again after my free access to the paid version of Squirrly has expired. This will allow me to evaluate which of the features presented in that article are paid for and which are not. The same can be said of the Squirrly vs Classic WordPress SEO Plugins, a detailed feature-by-feature face-off between Squirrly and a broad but generic array of competitors.

As I was reading through Squirrly's material for their third coaching session, I also did a little researching on the side which I want to report right here, by way of links:

• I found interacting with the Squirrly Customer Service GooglePlus Community and visiting WordPress' Support site for SEO Squirrly to be quite useful.
• Likewise with 5 Modern Keyword Research Methods to Uncover Hidden Gems, and the KeyWord tool it helped me find.

The latter article about different methods and tools for finding them could be used along an article about Quora from my previous post. Indeed, Quora-based keyword research came up in both cases, along with the idea that it is beneficial to use more than one single approach for identifying useful long-tail keywords. 

Please feel free to add your own findings in relation to SEO and Content Promotion. What are the strengths and weaknesses of the tools are you using?

[DanielGarneau]

In an earlier post within this thread I quoted Neil Patel's article, the 10 Time-Saving blogging Tools you Need to Use, saying this about Quora: "If only there was a social media network where a deeper connection could be built and people engaged with each other on a deeper level – imagine how useful that would be. Well, this network does exist.  It’s called Quora. [...] A lot of smart bloggers are using Quora to find long-tail keywords that they can’t find with Google AdWords’ Keywords Planner." (Neil Patel). I'd like to add the following quote to the preceding ones:

If you’re not using Quora to grow your leads and sales, you should reconsider. Quora also has functions that allow you to use strategic targeting. It’s time to start using Quora to grow your bottom line. Remember also that beyond writing for your own blog post or contributing to other blogs, you should get active on this social Q&A network, because you’ve got a better chance of ranking #1 in the Google top 10 if your answer resonates with people. This can send spikes of organic traffic to your blog (Neil Patel).

I supplemented what I found in the above mentioned articles with what is said in Neil Patel's 5 Modern Keyword Research Methods to Uncover Hidden Gems, and by Susan Gilbert, in How Q and A can Drive More Traffic and Leads for your Business. I found the following worth quoting from Susan's article:

As you establish yourself as an expert in your niche,  you’ll want to attract more visitors to your website who can be converted into sales. A good plan of action is to go where other like-minded professionals are and showcase your knowledge. There are few networks that currently offer this such as LinkedIn, Google Plus, and Facebook, which offer targeted groups where you can provide helpful content and advice. Another powerful tool that has been emerging is called, Quora. Founded in 2009, this networking and question and answer platform has grown to include around 1.1 million users in the U.S. alone. What makes this website unique is that users are required to use their actual names, and provides an opportunity to display your credentials, website link, and answers in your topic of interest. Questions and answers are available in over 500,000 subjects, and can attract new leads and the media [...]  Question and answer websites are increasingly popular, and what makes this platform unique are the vetted users along with the ability to publish blog posts. The topics are also more focused and answered by industry professionals such as yourself. [...] (Susan Gilbert, Founder and CEO at Online Promotion Success).

Here are some practical advice suggested by Susan Gilbert, in How Q and A can Drive More Traffic and Leads for your Business:

• Have a clear bio with links;
• Follow your topics of interest;
• Answer questions you've already written about;
• Ask your own questions and be involved.

I intend to follow these as general guidelines in using Quora. I will now need to proceed with hands-on exercises within Quora itself in order to benefit from what I have been learning so far in this post. this because although I'm not new to Quora. I'm not sure I'll want to document here what I will be learning from this. Perhaps we'll meet there, where I'm just beginning to be active in Quora English, Quora French, and Quora Spanish. Look me up and see for yourself. The user-name I go by in the Quora environment is Daniel E. Garneau.

Feel free to join this thread and add from your own experience as a learner or as an expert.

[DanielGarneau]

Here is a link to Squirrly SEO Pricing Plans. It allows to see what is included in the free plugin version and what is not.

[DanielGarneau]

Moving ahead with the free coaching sessions from Squirrly for its SEO WordPress Plugin brings me to Session 5 titled Speedy Content. This document is focused on showing the value of adopting Squirrly's WordPress plugin for the purpose of improving SEO and Content Marketing. So reading it is a good means of understanding the plugin itself. But there is much more in this document that make it worth reading through. This training session also comes with a Webinar titled Master Squirrly SEO in 60 minutes, which I'll cover in the next post on this thread.
The Free Speedy Content online book provides information about topics and tools such as the ones listed below.

Free or Unspecified Tools:

• Google Search (Wikipedia);
• Google Trends (Wikipedia), the tool itself being available from Google Support Pages;
• What appears to be another online training program, dmsupertars.com, which I have not explored as of this writing;
• Google Alerts (Wikipedia), available from Google Alerts, which I also have not explored as of this writing.

Paying tools:

• Squirrly's ContentLook, 30 $ a month, for websites up to 300 pages and up to 2 users - yet to be explored.

More Free or Unspecified Tools, yet to be explored, at the time of this writing:

• GooglePing;
• PingGoat;
• PingoMatic.

The Speedy Content manual also provides information about using feeds, which, as  of this writing, remain to be processed. Through it I discovered that my site's main feed is available from http://www.savoiretcroire.ca/feed, but that I also have a .../comments/feed/. It is not the first time I come across information about feeds, but to this day I am steel unsure of how to make proper use of them. And I almost bypassed the fact that this information about my site's feeds was obtained through a Google Tool called FeedBurner.

Finally, there is a reference to a social media called Inbound.org, apparently on par with Quora, that no longer exists. It has been replaced by a new media called Growth Hub, which seems to be specifically focused on contents about SEO and SEO related issues and interests.

[DanielGarneau]

Working through the research accompanying the resources identified in the previous post, I discovered the following WordPress plugin:

• RB Keyword Research Plugin.

This might be an alternative way of finding keywords for the writing-up of new articles on my site, using it along some of the tools identified so far.

[DanielGarneau]

Squirrly's fifth Coaching session also includes a webinar titled Master Squirrly SEO in 60 minutes. A review and synthesis of what Squirrly brings to a site, and also a hands-on guide showing how to use some of the key functionalities which Squirrly's SEO and Content Marketing plugin.

Free tools or resources mentioned in this webinar, or found through related extended research :

• PixaBay.
• Shuttterstock, and Abstract Fractal Brown example (found through researching in PixaBay).
• Imgix.
• Unsplash, (found through Squirrly's WordPress plugin image searching and inserting tool).
• Flickr.
• Instagram.
• Pinterest and Pinterest Analytics.
• Pexels.
• StockSnap.
• SplitShire.
• Clip Art from PhilippeMartin.Info.

In fact, this webinar seems to be regrouping together some of the video portions associated to individual functionalities which are available from within the plugin. But it also seems to go beyond what is available elsewhere on a peace-meal basis as it were. I found it valuable for reviewing some of what I had already been exposed to before, but also to learn material entirely new to me at the present time of writing. Moreover, it would probably be useful to plan watching over again this recorded webinar video at a later time, when I have become more familiar with the plugin over time.

Finally, there was a point that was raised about Google blocking users on shared hosting from querying their key word performance in some circumstances. This is mentioned toward the end of the webinar, along with a way to circumvent this situation which I need to watch over again in order to fully understand the issues as well as the solution proposed by Squirrly.

If you are wondering about the possibility of adopting Squirrly to help you with your SEO and Content Promotion as I currently am, I would then highly recommend watching this video. I find some of its demonstration very enticing with regards to the added value Squirrly SEO can bring to a web site.

If you choose to do so, please then feel free to add your comments to the present thread, as this would contribute to help me or any other viewer of this thread along their technical quest to better SEO and better SEO content promotion or, as it is also called, SEO content marketing.

A huge thank to the Squirrly team for their highly educative webinar and this coaching session series it is a part of, and reflected by the present thread.

[DanielGarneau]

One other resource associated to the fifth coaching session by Squirrly SEO and Content Marketing WordPress plug-in is Squirrly's Get Growth TV. I'm not sure if I mentioned it in any of the posts above. So here it is, perhaps again, because I want to check-it out whenever I can afford the time to do so.

[DanielGarneau]

I just realized that some of what I identified as lesson 5 above was in fact from coaching lesson 6. So this brings us to coaching lessons 7 through 9 for this and the following posts:

• Lesson 7: How You Can Make the Rest of 2018 Work Out Amaxingly Well in This New Feature.
• Lesson 8: Seven Surprising Numbers that will Empower your WordPress SEO.
• Lesson 9: Education Cloud - Learn more about getting to the top ranking in Google.

I may or may not be documenting these lessons, but they can easily be consulted by anyone interested through the above set of links.

[DanielGarneau]

Neil Pattel's video, The Effective Ranking Factor That Google Doesn't Want You to Know About, shows that branding is an important factor in the ranking of a website. If thousands of people typed into Google the brand "Savoir et croire " or "Knowing and Believing" or "Saber y creer" over and over, this would tend to send a signal to Google that people like this brand, which in turn would contribute to a better ranking of a web site, at least potentially.

The above video came from Neil Pattel's article, The Step-by-Step Guide to Improving Your Google Rankings Without Getting Penalized, where the following tools were also identified:

• MX Look-Up Tailbox Tool leading to a health report for Savoir et croire .ca, ensuring for example it is not on any blacklist.
• Web Site Penalty Indicator.
• Majestic, a site that provides a list of back link to a one's site.
• Moz's Link Explorer, formerly Open Site Explorer.

All of the above links have been drawn from the same article already mentioned, The Step-by-Step Guide to Improving Your Google Rankings Without Getting Penalized, and which I believe was also referenced in at lest one of the earlier posts from this thread. But this post is itself a result of my interacting with The Admin Zone (TAZ) forum and site administrator forum, more specifically their thread titled How to Improve your Web Site SEO Ranking. I'm mentioning this at this point in time because I wish to quote one more bit of advice, regrouping together a few SEO resources already identified elsewhere within this thread. The idea is for those who need to learn about SEO, there are excellent references where one can start from:

Start with these:

• Google Webmaster Central Blog
• OnPage.org
• Search Engine Guide
• Search Engine Journal
• Search Engine Land
• Search Engine Roundtable

Advice given by djbaxter, in thread titled How to Improve your Web Site SEO Ranking, on The Admin Zone (TAZ) forum.

I make this note as a reminder to myself and for easy reference as I move ahead in trying to learn SEO and Content Promotion.