SEO Company Surrey: March 2016

Thursday, March 31, 2016

Heathrow Airport rail link could see tunnels run under Egham and Magna Carta site

The National Trust said "the best environmental mitigation measures" would be expected if plans for the £800 million to £950 million route were to go ahead

from getsurrey - News http://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/heathrow-airport-rail-link-could-11121660

Police appeal to find 'vulnerable' missing Walton man Alec Green

Alec Green, 53, has links to Walton, Hersham and Shepperton and has not been seen since the early hours of Thursday

from getsurrey - News http://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/police-appeal-find-vulnerable-missing-11122224

Meet Get Surrey's newest recruit - Belle the news hound

Our very own dog reporter Belle will have a weekly column and assist in the reporting of all things dog related

from getsurrey - News http://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/meet-surreys-newest-recruit-belle-11117288

Woking vehicle handed whopping 242 parking tickets and subject of £17.8K in unpaid fines

Exclusive figures have revealed which council areas in Surrey have the worst parked vehicles

from getsurrey - News http://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/woking-vehicle-handed-whopping-242-11121907

Marks & Spencer opens stylish new foodhall in Haslemere

The opening of the Lion Green store has brought nearly 50 new jobs to the area

from getsurrey - News http://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/marks--spencer-opens-stylish-11120287

Top Gear's first trailer for new series shows Chris Evans throwing up

The very first clip has been released, and it features incredible cars, Chris Evans' vomit and of course, The Stig

from getsurrey - News http://www.getsurrey.co.uk/whats-on/top-gears-first-trailer-new-11120561

Young motorcyclist dies after collision with car in Normandy

The man, aged in his 20s from Farnborough, was airlifted to hospital but sadly died from his injuries

from getsurrey - News http://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/young-motorcyclist-dies-after-collision-11121820

River Wey search operation for missing kayaker Grant Broster runs into fourth day

Rescue workers and police officers cordoned off an area of the River Wey near the Row Barge pub on Thursday

from getsurrey - News http://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/river-wey-search-operation-missing-11121764

Transgender woman from Woking becomes 'voice of Channel Four' as guest announcer

Amy Stanning from Woking will voice the links between 5pm and 10pm tonight on Channel Four

from getsurrey - News http://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/transgender-woman-woking-becomes-voice-11120579

Man gets himself stuck in compost bin and everyone finds it absolutely hilarious

Fred Holmes was just trying to clean off the roof of his shed when this happened...

from getsurrey - News http://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/man-gets-himself-stuck-compost-11119380

Cobham High Street closed after man collapses in road

An eyewitness said a van stopped in Cobham High Street to prevent other vehicles from hitting the man after he collapsed in the road

from getsurrey - News http://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/cobham-high-street-closed-after-11120695

Berkeley Homes gets green light to build more than 400 new homes in Cranleigh

The inspector said any 'adverse impacts arising from the proposed development would be significantly and demonstrably outweighed by its benefits'

from getsurrey - News http://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/berkeley-homes-gets-green-light-11120106

Motorcyclist airlifted to hospital with serious injuries following collision with car in Normandy

The motorcyclist was taken to hospital in a 'serious condition' following the crash on Thursday afternoon

from getsurrey - News http://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/motorcyclist-airlifted-hospital-serious-injuries-11119678

Motorcyclist airlifted to hospital following collision with car on A323 in Normandy

The young male motorcyclist is in a 'serious condition' following the crash on Thursday afternoon

from getsurrey - News http://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/motorcyclist-airlifted-hospital-following-collision-11119678

'Devastated' family pay tribute to 'kind' Joe McMinn after Dorking woodland death

Joe McMinn's family said he 'would go out of his way to help people' and they were 'proud' of him

from getsurrey - News http://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/devastated-family-pay-tribute-kind-11119933

How to optimize your food blog

A very popular type of website is the ‘food blog’. Cooking and baking are hot, and the number of food blogs seems to rise. In this post, we’ll go over the things that will give your food blog just that little extra. Both for your users and in terms of SEO.

how to optimize your food blog

Focus on long tail

This might be the most important piece of advice I can give you: focus on long tail. The number of food blogs grows every day. I recently talked to an old friend of mine that just started a blog about nutrition and healthy food. 5 years ago I reviewed a blog that had a weekly bread recipe and 200,000 visitors every month. The main problem with the number of food blogs, is that you really need focus to rank. You need to find your special niche and write great content about that niche to surface on page one in Google. This is really hard. The better and more unique the niche, the easier it will be to rank. I think focusing on long tail will give you a head start.

Do you know the Yoast Google Suggest Expander? You can use that tool to find all the things Google suggests when a user types a query in Google. With that tool, you might find the niche or long tail keyword you’d like to optimize for. I searched for paleo and it gave me keywords like ‘paleo almond butter cookies’. It’s quite an extreme example, but if you check that keyphrase for suggestions, you’ll find over 30 more topics/recipes to write about. These can all be considered long tail keywords.

FOOD!

Think about this: thousands of people per day visit food websites. Thousands of people have no clue about what to eat tonight. About what to make as a healthy children’s snack. About what kind of cake would suit their occasion.

Food is the very bottom, most essential layer of Maslow’s pyramid. Food is emotion. That emotion needs to be reflected by your choice of theme. If you’re baking cupcakes, please use a more playful design than when you’re posting BBQ recipes.
Food is personal. Make sure your website has a clear picture of yourself and a description of what your personal passion for food is. What kind of food makes you happy? Make sure this is very clear from the start to bind a certain audience to your website. Add a nice tag line to your header stating just that: what kind of food is your website about.

Food blog: photography example

That very passion for that specific food can be emphasized by great photography. What I really like about food bloggers, is that they tend to photograph every step in the baking/cooking process. Usually, these are quick photos taken with a smartphone. Which is fine. Just make sure your final shot of the amazing cupcake, delicious taco or whatever is your money shot. Without reading your post, that image should make the visitor hungry. That will make him or her want to read your post. Even if your post is about nutrition and not even a recipe :)

Fully optimize your food blog? Our Blog SEO eBook will help you with lots of tips and tricks! »

Recipes

I’m not saying that a food blog is about recipes per se, but most of the food blogs I have read at least contain recipes. We have talked about schema.org before. It’s a way to markup your content so search engines recognize very quickly what your page is about. Google, Bing and Yandex have created a Recipe schema especially for websites like yours.

The elements of a Recipe

The Recipe schema contains all kind of specific information about your recipe, varying from cooking time to ingredients. See the full list here. I’d like to point you to a few of these elements that stand out:

NutritionInformation: really in-depth information on how healthy your recipe is. I understand that you sometimes just don’t know when it’s a recipe of your own. Some information might help your health-driven audience though.
Image: as mentioned earlier, a great image really helps your post. Not just in that it triggers your visitor, but it also works in Google Images and for instance Pinterest. More on social later.

One more thing about nutrition. If you’re serious about adding this to your recipes or other ramblings about food, Google Knowledge Graph helps. It provides some extra information:

That entire right side will give you more information about fat and vitamins. Just a tip!

Seasonal posts

“Holidays are coming.” If you have specific food blog posts about Christmas, Easter or Thanksgiving, please start planning early. If your website needs to start ranking for all your Easter recipes in the week before Easter, you’re too late. Now I know this might be hard, when you’re in your first year of blogging. But especially if you’ve been blogging for a couple of years, it will pay off to promote these recipes from time to time during the year. Easter and Christmas could possibly both include bunnies, right…

You’d be surprised how many people start planning Christmas early. I, for one, would appreciate all of these dishes in September as well. See if you can find seasonal dishes without linking it directly to holidays as well. Categories like ‘for a winter’s evening’ or ‘a rainy day’ might be more suitable for your audience. Last year Jamie Oliver released a book about comfort food. I like that on a stormy day in May as well. I can imagine the number of searches for that go up in September/October though. Google Trends agrees. In Google Trends, you can clearly see that during the summer months, that keyword will give you less traffic. People like BBQs and ice cream during these times.

Bottom line: let Google know you have these post in time. And feel free to repost a Christmas post/recipe around Christmas, by the way. Just make sure you check the content of the post, update if necessary and keep the same link. If you don’t have the link in your URL, simply change the publish date and you’re good to go. It might give that ‘old’ post new visitors.

Your food blog and social media

One out of ten posts on my Facebook timeline is about food or beverages. About cooking or restaurants. On Instagram, people use tags like #yummy, #foodporn, #instafood, #foodpic and multiple variations of #(om)nomnom a lot (don’t you just hate that omnomnom trend? I do). Searching Pinterest for ‘salad‘ will keep you scrolling recipes for hours. If you know me, you’ll understand I obviously searched for ‘burger‘ and just changed the link. Same story.

If you have a food blog, you need to leverage social media. Find out what social media platform your preferred audience is using and start engaging. Pinterest and Instagram seem to work really, really well. But why not leverage sites like allrecipes.com as well? We’ve written about branding before, and sites like that might help you get your name out.

Let’s not forget Youtube. Almost 600,000 subscribers for BarbecueWeb and a whopping 2,500,000+ subscribers for MyCupcakeaddiction! This can only motivate you to start recording videos. Set up your channel, promote it via your website and other social media and see if it works for you. Please note that numbers like that require hard work and a lot of effort. Give it your best shot.

I hope this article will give you some pointers for your own food blog. Feel free to share your own food blog success stories via social media or the comment section below. I’m looking forward to these!

Keep reading: ‘Social Media strategy’ »

from Yoast • The Art & Science of Website Optimization https://yoast.com/optimize-food-blog/

Call for life support training after death of George Abbot schoolboy

Concluding the inquest of Christopher Sears, the assistant coroner said she would write a Prevention of Future Death report to the government and local authorities

from getsurrey - News http://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/call-life-support-training-after-11117540

Man appears in court charged with the murder of Dorking man Joe McMinn

Richard Taylor, of no fixed address, appeared before magistrates in Guildford on Thursday

from getsurrey - News http://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/man-appears-court-charged-murder-11118300

Funfair owner blames high rents for decision to abandon 150-year tradition in Frimley

Billy Davis funfair has long held a free morning for local disabled children - but Mr Davis said 'high rents' means he has had to end the tradition

from getsurrey - News http://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/funfair-owner-blames-high-rents-11117810

Lorry gets wedged under Staines iron railway bridge... AGAIN

The lorry became wedged under the Iron Bridge in Thames Street - the second to do so this year

from getsurrey - News http://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/lorry-gets-wedged-under-staines-11117990

Ronnie Corbett: Legendary entertainer dies aged 85 surrounded by his family

Mr Corbett was best known for starring in the Two Ronnies and the hilarious Four Candles sketch

from getsurrey - News http://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/ronnie-corbett-legendary-entertainer-dies-11118093

Conservation plan set to preserve Woking Palace's future

A masterplan will now be produced for the site after councillors agreed to adopt the Conservation Management Plan for the palace in Old Woking

from getsurrey - News http://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/conservation-plan-set-preserve-woking-11116811

HRH Prince Harry visits burns unit in Nepal supported by Ewhurst charity

The prince gave children dolls knitted by Cranleigh volunteers from the charity CHANCE for Nepal

from getsurrey - News http://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/hrh-prince-harry-visits-burns-11113376

Man charged with murder following death of Dorking man Joe McMinn

Richard Taylor, of no fixed address, will appear before magistrates in Guildford on Thursday

from getsurrey - News http://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/man-charged-murder-following-death-11117089

Crazy golf and pitch and putt courses around Surrey and Hampshire

Where to find crazy golf, mini golf and pitch and putt courses around Surrey and north-east Hampshire

from getsurrey - News http://www.getsurrey.co.uk/whats-on/family-kids-news/crazy-golf-pitch-putt-courses-11039590

Archive pictures show fabulous 1977 Guildford Pageant celebrating Queen's Silver Jubilee

We take a look back at the Guildford Pageant in 1977 which saw communities come together to celebrate the Queen's Silver Jubilee in style

from getsurrey - News http://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/archive-pictures-show-fabulous-1977-11113671

Clandon Park fire: Hunt for second bunny after porcelain rabbit found buried in rubble

The 18th century model survived a collapsing floor and ceiling in the devastating blaze last year, but its partner remains missing

from getsurrey - News http://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/clandon-park-fire-hunt-second-11115854

Calls for investigation into Waverley Borough Council's conduct after fraudster jailed for conning £233k

UKIP South West Surrey has demanded that the Waverley Borough Council orders an independent investigation following the £233k fraud which occurred in 2014

from getsurrey - News http://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/calls-investigation-waverley-borough-councils-11114929

Wednesday, March 30, 2016

Here’s How to Supercharge Your Competitive Research Using a URL Profiler and Fusion Tables

Posted by Craig_Bradshaw

This post was originally in YouMoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author's views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of Moz, Inc.

[Estimated read time: 19 minutes]

As digital marketers, the amount of data that we have to collect, process, and analyze is overwhelming. This is never more true than when we're looking into what competitors are doing from a link building perspective.

Thankfully, there are a few things we can do to make this job a little bit easier. In this post, I want to share with you the processes I use to supercharge my analysis of competitor backlinks. In this post, you'll learn:

How to use URL Profiler for bulk data collection
How to use fusion graphs to create powerful data visualizations
How to build an SEO profile of the competition using URL Profiler and fusion tables

Use URL Profiler for bulk data collection

Working agency-side, one of the first things I do for every new client is build a profile of their main competitors, including those who have a shared trading profile, as well as those in their top target categories.

The reason we do this is that it provides a top-level overview of the industry and how competitive it actually is. This allows us to pick our battles and prioritize the strategies that will help move the right needles. Most importantly, it’s a scalable, repeatable process for building links.

This isn't just useful for agencies. If you work in-house, you more than likely want to watch your competitors like a hawk in order to see what they're doing over the course of months and years.

In order to do this, you’re inevitably going to need to pull together a lot of data. You’ll probably have to use a range of many different tools and data points.

As it turns out, this sort of activity is where URL Profiler becomes very handy.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with URL Profiler is, it's a bulk data tool that allows you to collect link and domain data from thousands of URLs all at once. As you can probably imagine, this makes it an extremely powerful tool for link prospecting and research.

URL Profiler is a brilliant tool built for SEOs, by SEOs. Since every SEO I know seems to love working with Excel, the output you get from URL Profiler is, inevitably, most handy in spreadsheet format.

Once you have all this amazing bulk data, you still need to be able to interpret it and drive actionable insights for yourself and your clients.

To paraphrase the great philosopher Ben Parker: with great data power comes great tedium. I’ll be the first to admit that data can be extremely boring at times. Don’t get me wrong: I love a good spreadsheet as much as I love good coffee (more on that later); but wherever possible, I’d much rather just have something give me the actionable insights I need.

This is where the power of data visualization comes into play.

Use fusion tables for powerful data visualization

Have you ever manually analyzed one million articles to see what the impact of content format and length has on shares on links? Have you ever manually checked the backlink profile of a domain that has over half a million links? Have you ever manually investigated the breakdown of clicks and impressions your site gets across devices? Didn’t think so.

Thanks to Buzzsumo & Moz, Majestic, Ahrefs, and the Google Search Console, we don’t have to; we just use the information they give us to drive our strategy and decision-making.

The reason these tools are so popular is they allow you to input your data and discern actionable insights. Unfortunately, as already mentioned, we can’t easily get any actionable insights from URL Profiler. This is where fusion tables become invaluable.

If you aren’t already familiar with fusion tables, then the time has come for you to get acquainted with them.

Back in 2012, Google rolled out an “experimental” version of their fusion tables web application. They did this to help you get more from your data and tell the story of what’s going on in your niche with less effort. It’s best to think of fusion tables as Google’s answer to big data.

There are plenty of examples of how people are using fusion tables to tell their stories with data. However, for the purpose of brevity, I only want to focus on one incredibly awesome feature of fusion tables — the network graph.

If fusion tables are Google’s answer to big data, then the network graph feature is definitely Google’s answer to Cerebro from X-Men.

I won’t go into too many details about what network graphs are (you can read more about them here), as I would much rather talk about their practical applications for competitive analysis.

Note: There is a fascinating post on The Moz Blog by Kelsey Libert about effective influencer marketing that uses network graphs to illustrate relationships. You should definitely check that post out.

I’d been using URL Profiler and fusion tables tools in isolation of each other for quite a while — and they each worked very well — before I figured out how to combine their strengths. The result is a process that combines the pure data collection power of URL Profiler with the actionable insights that fusion graphs provide.

I've outlined my process below. Hopefully, it will allow you to do something similar yourself.

Build a competitive SEO profile with URL Profiler and fusion tables

To make this process easier to follow, we'll pretend we're entering the caffeinated, yet delicious space of online coffee subscriptions. (I've chosen to use this particular niche in our example for no reason other than the fact that I love coffee.) Let’s call our hypothetical online coffee subscription company "Grindhaus."

Step 1: Assess your competition

We’ll start by looking at the single keyword "buy coffee online." A Google search (UK) gives us the top 10 that we’ll need to crack if we want to see any kind of organic progress. The first few results look like this:

Step 2: Gather your data

However, we’ve already said that we want to scale up our analysis, and we want to see a large cross-section of the key competitors in our industry. Thankfully, there’s another free tool that comes in handy for this. The folks over at URL Profiler offer a number of free tools for Internet marketers, one of which is called the SERP Scraper. No prizes for guessing what it does: add in all the main categories and keywords you want to target and hit scrape.

As you can see from the image above, you can do this for a specific keyword or set of keywords. You can also select which country-specific results you want to pull, as well as the total number of results you want for each query.

It should only take a minute or so to get the results of the scrape in a spreadsheet that looks something like this:

In theory, these are the competitors we'll need to benchmark against in order for Grindhaus to see any sort of organic progress.

From here, we'll need to gather the backlink profiles for the companies listed in the spreadsheet one at a time. I prefer to use Majestic, but you can use any backlink crawling tool you like. You'll also need to do the same for your own domain, which will make it easier to see the domains you already have links from when it's time to perform your analysis.

After this is done, you will have a file for your own domain, as well as a file for each one of the competitors you want to investigate. I recommend investigating a minimum of five competitors in order to obtain a data set large enough to obtain useful insights from.

Next, what we need to do is clean up the data so that we have all the competitor link data in one big CSV file. I organize my data using a simple two-column format, as follows:

The first column contains the competitor being linked to. I've given this column the imaginative heading "Competitor."
The second column contains the domains that are linking to your competitors. I've labeled this column "URL" because this is the column header the URL Profiler tool recognizes as the column to pull metrics from.

Once you have done this, you should have a huge list of the referring domains for your competitors that looks something like this:

This is where the fun begins.

Step 3: Gather even more data

Next, let's take each domain that is linking to one, some, or all of your competitors and run it through URL Profiler one at a time. Doing this will pull back all the metrics we want to see.

It's worth noting that you don’t need any additional paid tools or APIs to use URL Profiler, but you will have to set up a couple of API keys. I won’t go into detail here on how to do this, as there are already plenty of resources explaining this readily available, including here and here.

One of the added benefits of doing this through URL Profiler is that you can use its "Import and Merge" feature to append metrics to an existing CSV. Otherwise, you would have to do this by using some real Excel wizardry or by tediously copying and pasting extreme amounts of data to and from your clipboard.

As I’ve already mentioned, URL Profiler allows me to extract both page-level and domain-level data. However, in this case, the domain metrics are what I’m really interested in, so we'll only examine these in detail here.

Majestic, Moz, and Ahrefs metrics

Typically, SEOs will pledge allegiance to one of these three big tools of the trade: Majestic, Moz, or Ahrefs. Thankfully, with URL Profiler, you can collect data from any or all of these tools. All you need to do is tick the corresponding boxes in the Domain Level Data selection area, as shown below.

In most cases, the basic metrics for each of the tools will suffice. However, we also want to be able to assess the relevance of a potential link, so we'll also need Topical Trust Flow data from Majestic. To turn this on, go to Settings > Link Metrics using the top navigation and tick the “Include Topical Trust Flow metrics” box under the Majestic SEO option.

Doing this will allow us to see the three main topics of the links back to a particular domain. The first topic and its corresponding score will give us the clearest indication of what type of links are pointing back to the domain we're looking at.

In the case of our Grindhaus example, we'll most likely be looking for sites that scored highly in the “Recreation/Food” category. The reason we want to do this is because relevance is a key factor in link quality. If we're selling coffee, then links from health and fitness sites would be useful, relevant, and (more likely to be) natural. Links from engineering sites, on the other hand, would be pretty irrelevant, and would probably look unnatural if assessed by a Google quality rater.

Social data

Although the importance of social signals in SEO is heavily disputed, it's commonly agreed that social signals can give you a good idea of how popular a site is. Collecting this sort of information will help us to identify sites with a large social presence, which in theory will help to increase the reach of our brand and our content. In contrast, we can also use this information to filter out sites with a lack of social presence, as they're likely to be of low quality.

Social Shares

Ticking "Social Shares" will bring back social share counts for the site’s homepage. Specifically, it will give you the number of Facebook likes, Facebook shares, Facebook comments, Google plus-ones, LinkedIn shares, and Pinterest pins.

Social Accounts

Selecting "Social Accounts" will return the social profile URLs of any accounts that are linked via the domain. This will return data across the following social networks: Twitter, Google Plus, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, YouTube, and Instagram.

Traffic

In the same way that sites with strong social signals give us an indication of their relative popularity, the same can also be said for sites that have strong levels of organic traffic. Unfortunately, without having direct access to a domain’s actual traffic figures, the best we can do is use estimated traffic.

This is where the "SEMrush Rank" option comes into play, as this will give us SEMrush's estimation of organic traffic to any given domain, as well as a number of organic ranking keywords. It also gives us AdWords data, but that isn’t particularly useful for this exercise.

It's worth mentioning once more time that this is an estimate of organic traffic, not an actual figure. But it can give you a rough sense of relative traffic between the sites included in your research. Rand conducted an empirical study on traffic prediction accuracy back in June — well worth a read, in my opinion.

Indexation

One final thing we may want to look at is whether or not a domain is indexed by Google. If it hasn’t been indexed, then it's likely that Google has deindexed the site, suggesting that they don't trust that particular domain. The use of proxies for this feature is recommended, as it automatically queries Google in bulk, and Google is not particularly thrilled when you do this!

After you’ve selected all the metrics you want to collect for your list of URLs, hit "Run Profiler" and go make yourself a coffee while it runs. (I’d personally go with a nice flat white or a cortado.)

For particularly large list of URLs, it can sometimes take a while, so it would probably be best to collect the data a day or two in advance of when you plan to do the analysis. For the example in this post, it took around three hours to pull back data for over 10,000 URLs. But I could have it running in the background while working on other things.

Step 4: Clean up your data

One of the downsides of collecting all of this delicious data is that there are invariably going to be columns we won’t need. Therefore, once you have your data, it's best to clean it up, as there's a limit on the number of columns you can have in a fusion table.

You'll only need the combined results tab from your URL Profiler output. So you can delete the results tab, which will allow you to re-save your file in CSV format.

Step 5: Create your new fusion table

Head on over to Google Drive, and then click New > More > Google Fusion Tables.

If you can’t see the "Google Fusion Tables" option, you'll have to select the "Connect More Apps" option and install Fusion Tables from there:

From here, it’s pretty straightforward. Simply upload your CSV file and you'll then be given a preview of what your table will look like.

Click "Next" and all your data should be imported into a new table faster than you can say "caffeine."

Step 6: Create a network graph

Once you have your massive table of data, you can create your network graph by clicking on the small red "+" sign next to the "Cards" tab at the top of your table. Choose "Add Chart" and you'll be presented with a range of chart options. The one we’re interested is the network graph option:

Once you’ve selected this option, you'll then be asked to configure your network graph. We’re primarily interested in the link between our competition and their referring domains.

However, the relationship only goes in one direction: I, the referring website, give you, the retailer, a link. Thus the connection. Therefore, we should tick the "Link is directional" and "Color by columns" options to make it easier to distinguish between the two.

By default, the network graph is weighted by whatever is in the third column — in this case, it's Majestic CitationFlow, so our blue nodes are sized by how high the CitationFlow is for a referring domain. Almost instantly, you can spot the sites that are the most influential based on how many sites link to them.

This is where the real fun begins.

One interesting thing to do with this visualization that will save you a lot of time is to reduce the number of visible nodes. However, there's no science to this, so be careful you're not missing something.

As you increase the number of nodes shown, more and more blue links begin to appear. At around 2,000 nodes, it’ll start to become unresponsive. This is where the filter feature comes in handy, as you can filter out the sites that don’t meet your chosen quality thresholds, such as low Page Authority or a large number of outbound links.

So what does this tell us — other than there appears to be a relatively level playing field, which means there is a low barrier to entry for Grindhaus?

This visualization gives me a very clear picture of where my competition is getting their links from.

In the example above, I’ve used a filter to only show referring domains that have more than 100,000 social shares. This leaves me with 137 domains that I know have a strong social following that would definitely help me increase the reach of my content.

You can check out the complete fusion table and network graph here.

Step 7: Find your mutant characteristics

Remember how I compared network graphs to Google’s answer to Cerebro from X-Men? Well, this is where I actually explain what I meant.

For those of you that are unfamiliar with the X-Men universe, Cerebro is a device that amplifies the brainwaves of humans. Most notably, it allows telepaths to distinguish between humans and mutants by finding the presence of the X-gene in a mutant’s body.

Using network graphs, we can specify our own X-gene and use it to quickly find high-quality and relevant link opportunities. For example, we could include sites that have a Domain Authority greater than or equal to 50:

For Grindhaus, this filter finds 242 relevant nodes (from a total of 10,740 total nodes). In theory, these are domains Google would potentially see as being more trustworthy and authoritative. Therefore, they should definitely be considered as potential link-building opportunities.

You should be able to see that there are some false positives in here, including Blogspot, Feedburner, and Google. However, these are outweighed by an abundance of extremely authoritative and relevant domains, including Men’s Health, GQ Magazine, and Vogue.co.uk.

Sites that have "Recreation/Food" as their primary Topical Trust Flow Topic:

This filter finds 361 relevant nodes out of a total of 10,740 nodes, which all have "Recreation/Food" as their primary Topical Trust Flow Topic.

Looking at this example in more detail, we see that another cool feature of network graphs is that the nodes that have the most connections are always in the center of the graph. This means you can quickly identify the domains that link to more than one of your competitors, as indicated by the multiple yellow lines. This works in a similar way to Majestic’s "Click Hunter" feature and Moz’s "Link Intersect" tool.

However, you can do this on a much bigger scale, having a wider range of metrics at your fingertips.

In this case, toomuchcoffee.com, coffeegeek.com, and beanhunter.com would be three domains I would definitely investigate further in order to see how I could get a link from them for my own company.

Sites that are estimated to get over 100,000 organic visits, weighted by social shares:

For our Grindhaus, this filter finds 174 relevant nodes out of 10,740, which are all estimated to receive more than 100,000 organic visits per month. However, I have also weighted these nodes by "Homepage Total Shares." This allows me to see the sites that have strong social followings and have also been estimated to receive considerable amounts of organic traffic (i.e., "estimorganic" traffic).

By quickly looking at this network graph, we can immediately see some authoritative news sites such as The Guardian, the BBC, and the Wall Street Journal near the center, as well as quite a few university sites (as denoted by the .ac.uk TLD).

Using this data, I would potentially look into reaching out to relevant editors and journalists to see if they’re planning on covering National Coffee Week and whether they’d be interested in a quote from Grindhaus on, say, coffee consumption trends.

For the university sites, I’d look at reaching out with a discount code to undergraduate students, or perhaps take it a bit more niche by offering samples to coffee societies on campus like this one.

This is barely scratching the surface of what you can do with competitor SEO data in a fusion table. SEOs and link builders will all have their own quality and relevance thresholds, and will also place a particular emphasis on certain variables, such as Domain Authority or total referring domains. This process lets you collect, process, and analyze your data however you see fit, allowing you to quickly find your most relevant sites to target for links.

Step 8: Publish and share your amazing visualization

Now that you have an amazing network graph, you can embed it in a webpage or blog post. You can also send a link by email or IM, which is perfect for sharing with other people in your team, or even for sharing with your clients so you can communicate the story of the work you’re undertaking more easily.

Note: Typically, I recommend repeating this process every three months.

Summary and caveats

Who said that competitive backlink research can't be fun? Aside from being able to collect huge amounts of data using URL Profiler, with network graphs you can also visualize the connections between your data in a simple, interactive map.

Hopefully, I’ve inspired you to go out and replicate this process for your own company or clients. Nothing would fill me with more joy than hearing tales of how this process has added an extra level of depth and scale to your competitive analysis, as well as given you favorable results.

However, I wouldn’t be worth my salt as a strategist if I didn’t end this post with a few caveats:

Caveat 1: Fusion tables are still classed as “experimental," so things won’t always run smoothly. The feature could also disappear altogether overnight, although my fingers (and toes) are crossed that it doesn’t.

Caveat 2: Hundreds of factors go into Google’s ranking algorithm, and this type of link analysis alone does not tell the full story. However, links are still seen as an incredibly important signal, which means that this type of analysis can give you a great foundation to build on.

Caveat 3: To shoehorn one last X-Men analogy in... using Cerebro can be extremely dangerous, and telepaths without well-trained, disciplined minds put themselves at great risk when attempting to use it. The same is true for competitive researchers. However, poor-quality link building won’t result in insanity, coma, permanent brain damage, or even death. The side effects are actually much worse!

In this age of penguins and penalties, links are all too often still treated as a commodity. I’m not saying you should go out and try to get every single link your competitors have. My emphasis is on quality over quantity. This is why I like to thoroughly qualify every single site I may want to try and get a link from. The job of doing competitive backlink research using this method is to assess every possible option and filter out the websites you don’t want links from. Everything that’s left is considered a potential target.

I’m genuinely very interested to hear your ideas on how else network graphs could be used in SEO circles. Please share them in the comments below.

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

from The Moz Blog https://tracking.feedpress.it/link/9375/2965249

South West Trains 'quizmaster' who 'puts smile on passengers' faces' wins accolade

Woking station-based Bob Mayhead won the award for "outstanding" customer service after hosting impromptu quizzes on his daily commutes

from getsurrey - News http://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/south-west-trains-quizmaster-who-11112901

Who lives in your neighbourhood? Amazing gadget reveals type of people in your area

Clever new gadget reveals all – based on data showing exactly what kind of people live in each Surrey postcode

from getsurrey - News http://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/who-lives-your-neighbourhood-amazing-11113845

Toast of Surrey Business Awards 2016: Guildford Shakespeare Company founder describes nomination as 'great endorsement'

Guildford Shakespeare Company has been shortlisted in the category for businesses with turn overs of up to £1 million

from getsurrey - News http://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/toast-surrey-business-awards-2016-11078619

Surrey Scorchers rediscover the winning recipe

Giants slain to lift Guildford side off the bottom of BBL Championship

from getsurrey - News http://www.getsurrey.co.uk/sport/other-sport/basketball/surrey-scorchers-rediscover-winning-recipe-11110346

10 things to do in Surrey and Hampshire this weekend, April 2-3

A guide to what's going on, things to do, events and family attractions this weekend

from getsurrey - News http://www.getsurrey.co.uk/whats-on/family-kids-news/10-things-surrey-hampshire-weekend-10649881

Vauxhall Astra set on fire and dumped in West Molesey park

An investigation has been launched because Surrey Police and the fire service believe the blaze was started deliberately

from getsurrey - News http://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/vauxhall-astra-set-fire-dumped-11115897

VIDEO: False widow spider discovered crawling outside pensioner's Claygate home

The scary-looking arachnid was discovered in a boiler cupboard next to the 80-year-old man's property

from getsurrey - News http://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/video-false-widow-spider-discovered-11115970

'Lacklustre' Guildford town centre needs new 'iconic building' claims MP Paul Beresford

The Mole Valley MP also described the local draft plan for future developments as 'utterly unimaginative'

from getsurrey - News http://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/lacklustre-guildford-town-centre-needs-11113892

Computer scientist proposes to fiancé with Enigma code

Dr Paul Boca entered a code into a Enigma stimulator and asked his partner to decrypt it

from getsurrey - News http://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/computer-scientist-proposes-fianc-enigma-11112933

Sinkhole caused by broken sewer appears in Woking

Traffic signals have been placed at the junction of Old Woking Road and White Rose Lane

from getsurrey - News http://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/sinkhole-caused-broken-sewer-appears-11113159

Community pull together to try and save Blackheath village pub

The Villagers pub in Blackheath closed its doors in 2010 but now the actual villagers are banding together to save it

from getsurrey - News http://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/community-pull-together-try-save-11113499

Man dies after suffering 'serious burn injuries' in Redhill house fire

The man in his 60s was taken to St George's Hospital in Tooting on Saturday night but died the following day in hospital

from getsurrey - News http://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/man-dies-after-suffering-serious-11113863

Missing Staines man Eric Crook found 'safe and well'

Surrey Police confirmed the 81-year-old had been located on Wednesday afternoon

from getsurrey - News http://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/missing-staines-man-eric-crook-11113888

Fox kills endangered species at Busbridge Lakes in Storm Katie rampage

A tree fell on a fence during bad weather and the attraction is closed while the owners clear up the devastation left by the fox

from getsurrey - News http://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/fox-kills-endangered-species-busbridge-11112077

Police 'increasingly concerned' for welfare of 'vulnerable' missing Staines man Eric Cook

Police said Mr Cook was last seen in Staines town centre at around 4pm on Tuesday and may appear confused

from getsurrey - News http://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/police-increasingly-concerned-welfare-vulnerable-11112935

Man dies and passenger injured after car collides with tree in Edenbridge

The man in his 60s was pronounced dead at the scene in Starborough Road on Easter Sunday

from getsurrey - News http://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/man-dies-passenger-injured-after-11111986

Developer unveils £4.5m vision for Mall Camberley revamp

The Mall's investor said the firm was working with the borough council to upgrade the shopping centre - and a decision could be made next month

from getsurrey - News http://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/developer-unveils-45m-vision-mall-11112763

Sneak peek at two deluxe suites launched at Foxhills hotel

Foxhills Club and Resort has unveiled its two new double-storey suites located inside the four star mansion

from getsurrey - News http://www.getsurrey.co.uk/whats-on/whats-on-news/sneak-peek-two-deluxe-suites-11075614

Man needed surgery after 'large group of men' clashed outside Staines Pizza Express

Three men have been arrested and bailed following the altercation outside the Pizzeria in Clarence Street

from getsurrey - News http://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/man-needed-surgery-after-large-11108780

Today: launch of our Yoast SEO for WordPress training

As of today it’s possible to become a certified Yoast SEO for WordPress expert! The Yoast SEO for WordPress training is available! In this course, you’ll learn all the ins and outs of our Yoast SEO plugin. Through video tutorials, instructional videos and lots of challenging questions we’ll teach you everything you need to know about the Yoast SEO for WordPress plugin. If you buy our Yoast SEO for WordPress training now, it only costs $99 for the first year! After April 6 the price will be $129.

Read more about our Yoast SEO for WordPress training or watch the video in which Joost and Jaro explain all about this great course:

Basic SEO Training

If you want to know more about SEO in general, you should definitely check out our other SEO training. Basic SEO teaches you everything you need to know to optimize your website. And with the launch of our Yoast SEO for WordPress training, we decided to lower the price of our Basic SEO training. For only $199 you will learn all the basics of SEO!

from Yoast • The Art & Science of Website Optimization https://yoast.com/today-launch-yoast-seo-wordpress-training/

Go Ape swings into Chessington World of Adventures Resort

Families will be able to enjoy a tree top adventure at Chessington World of Adventures this summer

from getsurrey - News http://www.getsurrey.co.uk/whats-on/family-kids-news/go-ape-swings-chessington-world-11105963

Princess Diana: Byfleet remembers when Princess of Wales opened day centre

Princess Diana "just lit up the room, went with the flow and enjoyed the moment" recalled a councillor of her visit in March 1986

from getsurrey - News http://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/nostalgia/princess-diana-byfleet-remembers-princess-11110663

What You Should Know About Accessibility + SEO, Part I: An Intro

Posted by Laura.Lippay

[Estimated read time: 4 minutes]

Do you know anyone who is visually impaired? Maybe they have low vision or color blindness, or are fully blind. Think about how they use the Internet. Close your eyes, or at least squint really hard, and try to find today’s news or interact with your friends on Facebook. It’s a challenge many of us don't think about every day, but some of what we do in SEO can affect the experience that people with visual impairments have when visiting a page.

Accessibility and the Internet

Visually impaired Internet users are able to navigate and use the web using screen readers like VoiceOver or Jaws. Screen readers, much like search engine crawlers, rely on signals in the code to determine the structure and the context of what they’re crawling. The overlap in what search crawlers look for and interpret versus what screen readers look for and interpret is small, but the idea is the same: Where are the elements of this page and how do I understand them?

The SEO overlap

While it’s important to understand where SEO and accessibility (a11y) overlap in order to optimize correctly for both, it’s also important to note that optimizing for one is not necessarily akin to optimizing for the other. In other words, if you’ve optimized a page for search engines, it doesn’t mean you’ve necessarily made it accessible — and vice versa.

Recently, web accessibility expert Karl Groves wrote a post called The Accessibility & SEO Myth. Mr. Groves knows the world of accessibility inside and out, and knows that optimizing for accessibility, which goes far beyond optimizing for the visually-impaired, is very different overall, and much more complex (strictly from a technical standpoint) than optimizing for search engines. He’s right — that despite the ways SEO and a11y overlap, a11y is a whole different ballgame. But if you understand the overlap, you can successfully optimize for both.

Here are just some examples of where SEO and accessibility can overlap:

Video transcription
Image captioning
Image alt attributes
Title tags
Header tags (H1, H2, etc)
Link anchor text
On-site sitemaps, table of contents, and/or breadcrumbs
Content ordering
Size and color contrast of text
Semantic HTML

If you’re developing the page yourself, I would challenge you to learn more about the many things you can do for accessibility beyond where it overlaps with SEO, like getting to know ARIA attributes. Take a look at the W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines and you’ll see there are far more complex considerations for accessibility than what we typically consider for technical SEO. If you think technical SEO is fun, just wait until you get a load of this.

Optimizing for accessibility or SEO?

Chances are, if you’re optimizing for accessibility, you’re probably covering your bases for those technical optimizations where accessibility and SEO overlap. BUT, this doesn’t always work the other way around, depending on the SEO tactics you take.

Thankfully, the Converse site has a pretty descriptive alt attribute in place!

Consider a screen reader reaching an image of a pair of women’s black Chuck Taylor All-Star shoes and reading its alt attribute as "Women’s black Chuck Taylor All-Stars buy Chucks online women’s chuck taylors all-stars for sale." Annoying, isn’t it? Or compare these page titles with SEO and accessibility in mind: "Calculate Your Tax Return" versus "Online Tax Calculator | Tax Return Estimator | Tax Refund/Rebate." Imagine you just encountered this page without being able to see the content. Which one more crisply and clearly describes what you can expect of this page?

While it’s nice to know that proper technical search engine optimization will affect how someone using a screen reader can contextualize your site, it’s also important to understand (1) that these two optimization industries are, on a bigger level, quite different, and (2) that what you do for SEO where SEO and a11y overlap will affect how some visitors can (or can’t) understand your site.

Marking the 5th Global Accessibility Awareness Day https://t.co/QiJyAM8xGW 05/19? Let us know how Globala11yawarenessdayAtGmailDotCom #gaad
— GblA11yAwarenessDay (@gbla11yday) March 14, 2016

For Global Accessibility Awareness Day on May 19, I’ll be collaborating with some experts in a11y on a post that will go into more details on what aspects of SEO + a11y to be keenly aware of and how to optimize for both. I'll be sure to find as many examples as I can — if you've got any good ones, please feel free to share in the comments (and thanks in advance).

Educational resources & tools

In the meantime, to learn more about accessibility, check out a couple of great resources:

from The Moz Blog https://tracking.feedpress.it/link/9375/2957399

Tuesday, March 29, 2016

Dorking residents express shock after body found in Devil's Den

"I can't bear to think that it's right there," said a Doking resident after the body was discovered in the wooded area on Monday

from getsurrey - News http://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/dorking-residents-express-shock-after-11107929

New Heathrow to Waterloo rail link would connect airport with Surrey rail network

The Southern Rail Access proposals would connect the airport to Waterloo, Guildford and Basingstoke, possibly via Feltham and Hounslow

from getsurrey - News http://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/new-heathrow-waterloo-rail-link-11110424

Police link death of man in Caterham A22 collision with alleged 'stabbing' minutes earlier

An altercation at an address in Croydon Road saw a man suffer stab wounds - and police believe the incident may be connected to a fatal crash on Saturday

from getsurrey - News http://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/police-link-death-man-caterham-11110178

Princess Diana: Byfleet remembers when Princess of Wales opened day centre

Hampton Court Palace agrees free garden entry after thousands backed campaign

More than 8,000 people signed a petition protesting after free access to the formal gardens on the East and South fronts during the winter was stopped

from getsurrey - News http://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/hampton-court-palace-agrees-free-11110590

Epsom Derby 2016: When is it and what's it all about?

The world-famous Investec Derby flat race returns to Epsom Downs Racecourse this summer

from getsurrey - News http://www.getsurrey.co.uk/whats-on/family-kids-news/epsom-derby-2016-whats-about-9192081

Chernobyl disaster: Fascinating images of exclusion zone by Guildford photographer ahead of 30th anniversary

Guildford photographer Paul Hills-Gibbons, who has visited the exclusion zone on three occasions, said: “To me it is many things including sad, peaceful and surprisingly beautiful."

from getsurrey - News http://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/chernobyl-disaster-fascinating-images-exclusion-11078020

Sneak peak at two deluxe suites launched at Foxhills hotel

Teenager calls 999 after getting stuck in playground gazebo

Woking firefighters had to give words of warning to the 13-year-old boy

from getsurrey - News http://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/teenager-calls-999-after-getting-11109962

South West Trains disruption: LIGHTNING strike near Egham halts services

Trains are unable to run through Staines and Egham and services between London Waterloo and Weybridge are affected, along with other lines

from getsurrey - News http://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/south-west-trains-disruption-lightning-11109768

River Wey missing kayaker named as Grant Broster as search operation continues

The wife of missing kayaker Grant Broster said "our son entered the water to try and help his father but was pulled to safety"

from getsurrey - News http://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/river-wey-missing-kayaker-named-11109283

'Chemical incident' sees three workers hospitalised and sparks evacuation at Chertsey health club

River Bourne Club general manager Heidi Blackburn said "human error" by a lifeguard led to chemicals being accidentally mixed together

from getsurrey - News http://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/chemical-incident-sees-three-workers-11107455

Body of missing French bulldog Teddy found in River Thames

Teddy's body was found in the river near Shepperton Lock

from getsurrey - News http://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/body-missing-french-bulldog-teddy-11107665

A331 car fire: Four crews battle blaze on southbound A331 between Frimley and Mytchett

As many as four fire crews were seen attending the incident along the Blackwater Valley Route on Tuesday afternoon

from getsurrey - News http://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/a331-car-fire-four-crews-11107592

5 tips to write readable blog posts!

Reading from a screen can be hard. If you want your readers to read your entire blog post, you should make sure your blog post is easy to read. Posts that are nice and easy to read will result in more returning visitors and a higher conversion rate. In this blog post, I’ll give five tips on how to improve the readability of your blog post!

Writing a readable blog post

Focus on your audience!

The most important advice I would give you, is to make sure your text isn’t too difficult for the audience you’re writing for. If you write about LEGO and focus on kids, your text should be easy to read. But, if your audience consists of scientists with a Ph.D., your text could be much more difficult and still be suitable. The five tips I present below should thus be seen as general rules. For some audiences, a text should be made even more simple, while for other audiences the rules will be a bit too strict.

Tip 1: Clear paragraphs

Make sure to write clear paragraphs. For a blog post, we would advise you to always start your paragraph with the most important sentence. Then explain or elaborate on that sentence. This way a reader will be able to grasp the most relevant content from your article, just by reading the first sentences of your paragraphs. Make sure paragraphs aren’t too long (7 or 8 sentences is quite long already).

Learn all about writing a readable blog post! Get our Blog SEO eBook and fully optimize your blog! »

Tip 2: Short sentences

Try to write short sentences. We consider sentences containing more than 20 words as lengthy. Try to limit these lengthy sentences. Make sure you only have a few sentences in a blog post that count more than 20 words. Also, make sure a paragraph doesn’t contain more than one long sentence.

Tip 3: Limit difficult words

Limit the use of words that are difficult to read. Remember that reading from a screen is harder for everyone. Words that contain four or more syllables are considered difficult to read. Make sure to limit the use of such difficult words.

Of course, in some cases, your blog post just is about something that is difficult to explain or requires a more advanced vocabulary. Just a few weeks ago, I wrote a post about illustrations. Illustrations is a word containing four syllables and can therefore be seen as a difficult word. Still, I had to use that word (and quite often too). In such cases, make sure your sentences and paragraphs aren’t too long and your readers will still be fine!

Tip 4: Use signal words

A text can be made much more readable with the use of proper signal words (or transition words, same thing). Signal words are words like ‘most important’, ‘because’, ‘thus’, or ‘besides that’. They give direction to your readers. These words give a signal that something is coming up: if you’re summarizing, you’ll use first, second, third etc. If you want to contrast you’ll write same, less, rather, while or either. If you want to conclude, you’ll use hence, consequently or therefore.

Using signal words will be like putting cement between your sentences. The relation between two sentences becomes apparent by the use of signal words. Readers will understand your content much better if you make proper use of these kinds of words.

Tip 5: Mix it up!

For a text to be attractive to a reader, it should be very varied. This means that you should try to mix it up a little! Alternate longer paragraphs and sentences with short ones and attempt to use synonyms if you tend to use a word very often. Some people use the word ‘and’ or ‘too’ very often. Mixing it up with ‘also’ or ‘moreover’ could make a text more attractive and much more readable too.

Conclusion

If you want your readers to read your entire blog post, you should make sure that your text is easy to read. Don’t make a text more difficult than necessary. Avoid long sentences and write clear paragraphs. Tools like Grammarly and Hemingway can help you to write a readable text. At Yoast, we’re currently developing new checks to be added to our content analysis. We aim to include several readability checks as well. That way, you’ll be able to check whether your text is SEO friendly and readable at the same time.

Another way to make sure a text is readable is by choosing the right typography. You shouldn’t use a small font and make sure the spacing between lines is wide enough. I’ll write a post about typography in a few weeks, so stay tuned!

from Yoast • The Art & Science of Website Optimization https://yoast.com/5-tips-improve-readability-blog-post/

Bagshot football fraudsters back in court as prosecutors try to recoup scam cash

The pair were jailed for mis-selling satellite TV cards and were said to have made a yearly turnover of almost £2 million

from getsurrey - News http://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/bagshot-football-fraudsters-back-court-11105400

Fire crews battle A331 car fire between Frimley and Mytchett

Engineers of tomorrow line up for the McLaren Manufacturing Challenge

Despite the setting, it was rubber bands not motors which provided all the power needed for racing

from getsurrey - News http://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/engineers-tomorrow-line-up-mclaren-11086046

Lorry gets stuck under railway bridge in Byfleet

Surrey Police were called out to Oyster Lane on Tuesday morning after a lorry carrying a skip got stuck under a railway bridge

from getsurrey - News http://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/lorry-gets-stuck-under-railway-11106543

River Wey search continues for missing kayaker in Guildford

Emergency services continued to scour the riverbank in search of a man who went missing when his kayak capsized on Monday afternoon

from getsurrey - News http://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/river-wey-search-continues-missing-11105872

Guildford Beer Festival 2016 tickets now on sale

You can now buy tickets to the popular summer event, taking place at Guildford Cricket Club on June 10 and 11

from getsurrey - News http://www.getsurrey.co.uk/whats-on/food-drink-news/guildford-beer-festival-2016-tickets-11102466

The Guide to International Website Expansion: Hreflang, ccTLDs, & More!

Posted by katemorris

Growth. Revenue, visits, conversions. We all want to see growth. For many, focusing on a new set of potential customers in another market (international, for instance) is a source of growth. It can sometimes seem like an easy expansion. If your current target market is in the US, UK, or Australia, the other two look promising. Same language, same content — all you need is to set up a site for them and target it at them, right?

International expansion is more complicated than that. The ease of expansion depends highly on your business, your resources, and your customers. How you approach expansion and scale it over time takes consideration and planning. Once you’ve gone down a path of URL structure and a process for marketing and content, it’s difficult to change.

This guide is here to help you go down the international expansion path on the web, focused on ensuring your users see the right content for their query in the search engines. This guide isn’t about recommendations for translation tools or how to target a specific country. It is all about international expansion from a technical standpoint that will grow with your business over time.

At the end is a bonus! A flow chart to help you troubleshoot international listings showing up in the wrong place in the SERPs. Have you ever wondered why your Canadian page showed for a user in the US? This will help you figure that out!

Before we begin: Terminology

ccTLD – A country-specific top-level domain. These are assigned by ICANN and are geo-targeted automatically in Google Search Console.

gTLD – A generic top-level domain. These are not country-specific and if used for country-specific content, they must be geo-target inside of Google Search Console or Bing Webmaster Tools. Examples include .com, .net, and .tv. Examples from Google found here.

Subdomain – A major section of a domain, distinguished by a change to the characters before the root domain. The most-used standard subdomain is www. Many sites start with www.domain.com as their main subdomain. Subdomains can be used for many reasons: marketing, region targeting, branded micro sites, and more.

Subfolder – A section of a subdomain/domain. Subfolders are sections marked by a trailing slash. Examples include www.domain.com/subfolder, or in terms of this guide, www.domain.com/en or www.domain.ca/fr.

Parameter – A modifier of a URL that either tracks a path of a user to the content or changes the content on the page based on the parameters in the URL. These are often used to indicate the language of a page. An example is www.domain.com/page1?lang=fr, with lang being the parameter.

Country – A recognized country that has a ccTLD by ICANN or an ISO code. Google uses ISO 3166-1 Alpha-2 for hreflang.

Region – Collections of countries that the general public groups together based on geography. Examples include the EU or the Middle East. These are not countries and cannot be geo-targeted at this time.

Hreflang – A tag used by Google to allow website owners to indicate that a specific page has a copy in another language. The tags indicate all other translated versions of that page along with the language. The language tags can have regional dialects to distinguish between language differences like British English and American English. These tags can reside on-page or in XML sitemaps.

Meta language – The language-distinguishing tag used by Bing. This tag merely informs Bing of the language of the current page.

Geo-targeting – Both Bing Webmaster Tools and Google Search Console allow website owners to claim a specific domain, subfolder, or subdomain, and inform the search engine that the content in that domain or section is developed for and targeted at the residents of a specific country.

Translation – Changing content from one language or regional dialect to another language or regional dialect. This should never be done with a machine, but rather always performed by someone fluent in that language or regional dialect.

Understanding country and language targeting

The first step in international expansion planning is to determine your target. There is some misunderstanding between country targeting and language targeting. Most businesses start international expansion wanting to do one of two things:

Target users that speak another language.
Example – A business in Germany: “We should translate our content to French.”
Target users that live in another part of the world.
Example – A business in Australia: “We should expand into the UK.”

False associations: Country and language

The first issue people run into is associating a country and a language. Many of the world’s top languages have root countries that share the same name; specifically, France/French, Germany/German, Portugal/Portuguese, Spain/Spanish, China/Chinese, Japan/Japanese, and Russia/Russian. Many of these languages are used in a number of other countries, however. Below is a list of the top languages used by Internet users.

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Please note this is not the list of top languages in the world; that is a vastly different list. This list is based on Internet usage. And there are some languages that only have one country set as the official language, but users exist in other countries that browse the Internet with that language as their preferred language. An example might be a Japanese national working in the US setting up a new office.

Another note is that the “main” country chosen above is what country is the originator of the language (English) or what country shares a name with/is close to the language name. This is how many people associate languages and countries in most instances, but those assumptions are not correct.

Flags and languages

We must disassociate languages and countries. There are too many times when a country flag is used to note a language change on a site. Flags should only be used when the country is being targeted, not the language.

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Web technology and use impacts targeting

The second issue arises in the execution. The business in Germany from the first few examples might hire a translator from France and translate their content to French. From there, the targeting can get confused based on where that content is placed and how it is tagged.

Below are some implementations of posting the translated content we might see by the business. This table looks at a variety of combinations of ccTLDs, gTLDs, subfolders, subdomains, hreflang tagging, and geo-targeting. Each combination of URL setup and tagging results in different targeting according to search engines and how that can impact the base number of Internet users in that group.

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Given the above, you can see that the implementation is not as straightforward as it might seem. There's no single right answer in the above possible implementations. However, many of them change the focus of the original target market (speakers of the French language) and that has an impact on the base target market.

International search strategy tool

This is what many of us face when trying to do international expansion. There is conflicting data on what should be done. This is why I developed a tool to help businesses determine which route they should take in international expansion. It helps them determine what their real focus should be (language, country, or if they need to use both) and narrows down the list of choices above while understanding their business needs, resources, and user needs. It's developed over the years from a flow chart, to a poorly designed tool, to a better-structured tool found by clicking the link in the image below.

Start with those questions and then come back here when you have other questions. That’s what the rest of this guide is about. It’s broken down into three types of targeting:

Language
Country
Hybrid (multiple countries with multiple languages)

No one type is easier than another. You really need to choose the path early on and use what you know of your business, user needs, and resources.

Language targeting

Language-only targeting can seem like the easiest route to take, as it doesn’t require a major change and multiple instances of marketing plans. Country-focused targeting requires new targeted content to each targeted country. There are far fewer languages in the world than countries. In addition, if you target the major world languages, you could potentially start with a base of millions of users that speak those languages.

However, language targeting involves two very tricky components: translation and language tagging. If either of these components are not done right, it can cause major issues with user experience and indexation.

Translation

The first rule of working with languages and translation is NEVER machine translate. Machine translation is highly inaccurate. I was just at an all-inclusive resort in Mexico, and you could tell the translations were done by a machine, not a person. Using machine translations produces a very poor user experience and poor SEO targeting as well.

Translations of content should always be done by a human who is fluent both in that language and the original language of the content. If you are dealing with regional variations, it is recommended to get someone that is native to and/or living in that area to translate, as well as being fluent.

Spending the right resources on translation will ensure the best user experience and the most organic traffic.

Language tagging: Hreflang and meta language

When you hear about translation and international expansion, the first thing people think about is the hreflang tag. Relative to the Internet, the hreflang tag is new. This launched in late 2010. It is only used by Google as of when this post was written. If the bulk of your traffic comes from Google and you are translating only, this is of use to you. However, do know that Bing uses a different tag format, called the meta language tag.

Tips: Ensure that there's an hreflang tag on every page that's translated to every other translated instance of that page. I prefer the tags be put in XML sitemaps (instructions here) to keep the tagging off the page, as any removal of code increases page load time, no matter how small. Do what works for your team.

What about x-default?

One of the tagging mistakes that happens most often is using x-default. Many people misunderstand its use. X-default was added to the hreflang markup family to help Google serve un-targeted pages, like those from IKEA and FedEx, to users that don’t have language-targeted content on that site or Google doesn’t know where to place them. This tag is not meant to set the "original" page.

Checking for tagging issues

Once you have your tagging live (or on a testing server that is crawlable by Google but not indexable), you can check for issues inside of Google Search Console. This will let you know what tag issues you are having and where they're located.

URL selections

Choosing the URL structure of your language extensions is totally up to you. If you are focusing on language targeting only, don’t use a ccTLD. Those are meant for targeting a specific country, not a language. ccTLDs automatically geo-target and that selection cannot be changed. Your other choices are subfolder, subdomain, and parameter. They're listed below in order of my professional preference and why.

Subfolders provide a structure that's easier to build upon and develop as your site and business grows and changes. You might not want to target specific countries now or have the resources, but you may someday. Setting up a subfolder structure allows you to use the same structure for any future ccTLDs or subdomains for country sections in the future. Your developers will appreciate this choice because it's scalable for hreflang tags, as well.
Parameters allow a backup system in case your tagging fails in a site update in the future. Parameters can be defined in Google as being used to modify the language on the page. If your other tags are lost, that parameter setting is still telling Google that the content is being translated.
Using a parameter for language is also scalable for future plans and easy for tagging, like subfolders. The downsides are that they're ugly and might accidentally be negated by a misplaced rel canonical tag in the future.
Subdomains for language targeting is my least favorite option. Only use this if it's the only option you have, by decree of your technical team. Using subdomains for languages means that if you change plans to target countries in the future, you'll lose many options for URLs there. To follow the same structure for each country, you would need to use ccTLDs; while those are the strongest signal for geo-targeting, they are also the option that requires the most investment.

Notice that ccTLDs are not on this list. Those are only for geo-targeting. Unless you're changing your content to focus on a specific country, do not use ccTLDs. I say this multiple times for a reason: too many websites make this mistake.

Detecting languages

Many companies want to try to make the website experience as easy as possible for the user. They attempt to detect the user’s preferences without needing input from the user. This can cause problems with languages.

There are a few ways to try to determine a user’s language preferences. The most-used are browser settings and IP address. It is not recommended to ever use the IP address for language detection. An IP address can show an approximate user location, but not their preferred language. The IP address is also highly inaccurate (just the other day I was "in" North Carolina and live in Austin) and Google still only crawls from a US IP address. Any automatic redirects based on IP should be avoided.

If you choose to try to guess at the user’s language preference when they enter your site, you can use the browser’s language setting or the IP address and ask the user to confirm the choice. Using JavaScript to do this will ensure that Googlebot does not get confused. Pair this with a good XML sitemap and the user can have a great interaction. Plus, the search engines will be able to crawl and index all of your translated content.

Country targeting, AKA geo-targeting

If your business or content changes depending on the location of the user, country targeting is for you. This is the most common answer for those businesses in retail. If you offer a different set of products, if you have different shipping, pricing, grouping structure, or even different images and descriptions, this is the way to go.

Example: If a greeting card business in the US wanted to expand to Australia, not only are the prices and products different (some different holidays), the Christmas cards are VASTLY different. Think of Christmas in summer, as it is in Australia, and only being able to pick from cards with winter scenes!

Don’t go down the geo-targeting route if your content or offerings don’t change or you don’t have the resources to change the content. If you launch country-targeted content in any URL structure (ccTLD, subdomain, or subfolder) and the content is identical, you run the risk of users coming across another country’s section.

Check out the flow chart at the end to help figure out why one version of your site might be ranking over another.

Example: As a web development service in Canada, you want to expand into the US. Your domain at the moment is www.webdevexpress.ca (totally made up!). You buy www.webdevexpress.us (that’s the ccTLD for the US, by the way). Nothing really needs to change, so you just use the same content and go live. A few months down the road, US clients are still seeing www.webdevexpress.ca when they do a brand name search. The US domain is weaker (fewer links, mentions, etc.) and has the same content! Google is going to show the more relevant, stronger page when everything is the same.

Regions versus countries

Knowing what country or which countries you want to focus on in expansion is usually decided before you determine how to get there. That's what spawns the conversation.

There's one misconception that can throw off the whole process of expansion, and that is that you can target a region with geo-targeting. As of right now, you can purchase a regional top-level domain like .eu, but those are treated as general top-level domains like .com or .net.

The search engines only operate geo-targeting in terms of countries right now. The Middle East and the European Union are collections of countries. If you set up a site dedicated to a region, there are no geo-targeting options for you.

One workaround is to select a primary country in that region, perhaps one in which you have offices, and geo-target to that country. It’s possible to rank for terms in that primary language in surrounding countries. We see this all the time with Canada and the US. If the content is relevant to the searcher, it’s possible to rank no matter the searcher.

Example: If you’re anywhere other than the UK, Google "fancy dress" — you see UK sites, right? At least in the US, "fancy dress" is not a term we use, so the most relevant content is shown. I can’t think of a good Canadian/US term, but I guarantee there are some out there!

URL selections

The first thing to determine in geo-targeting beyond the target countries is URL structure. This is immensely important because once you choose a structure, every country expansion should follow that. Changing URL structure in the future is difficult and costly when it comes to short-term organic traffic.

In order of my professional preference, your choices are:

Subfolders. As with the language/translation option, this is my preferred setup, as it utilizes the same domain and subdomain across the board. This translates to utilizing some of the power you already built with other country-focused areas (or the initial site). This setup works well for adding different translations within one country (hybrid approach) down the line.
Note: If you go with subfolders on both, always lead with the country, then language down the line.
Example: www.domain.com/us/es (US-focused, in Spanish language) or www.domain.com/ca/fr (Canada-focused, in Canadian French).
ccTLDs. This is the strongest signal that you're focusing your content on a specific country. They geo-target automatically (one less step!), but that has a downside as well. If you started with a ccTLD and expanded later, you can’t geo-target a subfolder within a ccTLD at this point in time.
Example: www.domain.ca/us will not work to target the US. The target will remain Canada. It might rank in the US, depending on the term competition and relevance, but you can’t technically geo-target the /us subfolder within the Canadian ccTLD.
Subdomains. My last choice, because while you're still on the same root domain, there's that old SEO part of me that thinks a subdomain loses some equity from the main domain. BUT, if your tech team prefers this, there's nothing wrong with using a subdomain to geo-target. You'll need to claim each subdomain in Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools and set the geo-target for each, just as you would with subfolders.
Example: gb.domain.com

Content changes

The biggest question asked when someone embarks on country-targeting expansion is: “How much does my content need to change to not be duplicated?” In short — there is no magic number. No metric. There isn’t a number of sentences or a percentage. How much your content needs to change per country site or subsite is entirely up to your target market and your business.

You'll need to do research into your new target market to determine how your content should change to meet their needs. There are a number of ways you might change your content to target a new country. The most common are:

Product differentiation

If you offer a different set of products or services to different countries by removing those that are not in demand, outlawed, or otherwise not wanted, or by adding new products for that country specifically, that is changing your site content.

Example #1: Amazon sells the movie "Elf" in the US and the UK, but they are different products. DVDs in Europe are coded for Europe and might not play on US players.

Example #2: Imagine you're a drugstore in the UK and want to expand to the US. One of your products, 2.5% Selenium Sulphide, is not approved for use in the US. This is one among hundreds or thousands of products that are different.

Naming schema

The meaning of product names can change in different countries. How a specific region terms a product or service can change as well, making it necessary to change your product or service naming schema.

Keyword usage

Like the above, the words you use to describe your products or services might change in a new country. This can look like translation, but if it’s the change of just a few terms, it’s not considered full translation. There's a fine line between these two things. If you realize that the only thing you're changing is the wording between US and UK English, for example, you might not need to geo-target at all and mark the different pages as translations.

Keyword use change example: "Mum" versus "Mom" or "Mother" when it comes to Happy Mother’s Day cards. You need to offer different cards in this and other categories because of the country change. This is more than a word change, so it’s a case of geo-targeting — not just translation.

Translation change example: Etsy.com. Down at the bottom of the page, you can change your language setting. I set mine to UK English, and words like "favourite" started to show up. If this sounds like what you would need to do and your content would not change otherwise (Etsy shows all content to all users regardless of their location), consider translation only.

Pricing structure

Many times, one of the most common things that change in country-specific content is pricing. There's the issue of different currency, but more than that, different countries have different supply and demand markets that should and will change your pricing structure.

Imagery changes

When dealing with different cultures, sometimes you find the need to change your site imagery. If you’ve never explored psychology, I highly recommend checking out The Web Psychologist – Nathalie Nahai and some of her talks. Understanding your new target market’s culture is imperative to marketing effectively.

Example: Samsung changes the images on their UK versus China sites to change the focus from an individualistic to a collectivistic culture. See my presentation at SearchLove San Diego for more examples.

Laws, rules, and regulations

One of the most important ways to change your content is to satisfy the local laws and regulations. This is going to depend on each business. You might deal with tons, while others might deal with none. Check out local competitors — the biggest you can identify — to see what you might need to do.

Example: If you move into the UK and set cookies on your visitor’s machine, you have to alert them to the use of cookies. This is not a law in the US and is easily missed.

User experience and IP redirects

When people start moving into other countries, one of the things they want to ensure is that users get to the right content. This is especially important when products change and the purchase of an incorrect product would cause issues for the user, or the product isn’t available to them. Your customer service, user experience, or legal team is going to ask that you redirect users to the correct country. Everyone gets to the right place and the headaches lessen.

There isn’t anything wrong with asking a user to select the country they reside in and set a cookie, but many people don’t want to bother their users. Therefore, they detect the user’s IP address and then force a redirect from there. There are two problems with this setup.

IP addresses are inaccurate – I was in Seattle, WA once and my IP had me in Washington, DC. No kidding. Look at that distance on a map. Think about that distance in terms of Europe and how much might change there.
Google crawls from California – For the time being, using an IP-based forced redirect will ensure your international content is not indexed. Google will only ever see the US content if you do a forced redirect.

You can deal with this by detecting the country-using IP address (or if organic traffic, what version of Google they came from) and using a JavaScript popup to ask what their preferred country is, then set a cookie with that preference. Even if the user clicks on another country’s content in the future, they will be redirected to their own.

No hreflang??

If you went through that tool, you noticed that my geo-targeting plan does not include hreflang. Many other people disagree with me on this point, saying that the more signals you can send, the better.

Before I get into why I don’t recommend setting up hreflang between country targeted sub-sites, let me make one thing clear. Setting up hreflang will not hurt your site if you are really focusing on country targeting and it’s not that intricate of a setup yet (more on that later). Let’s say you're in Canada and want to open a US-targeted site. Your content changes because your products change, your prices change, your shipping info changes. You create domain.com/us and geo-target it to the US. You can add hreflang between each page that is the same between the two sub-sites — two products that exist in both locations, for example. The hreflang will not hurt.

Example: If you don’t have the resources to change your content at the moment to fully target the UK, only translate your content a bit between your US (domain.com) and UK (domain.co.uk), and have plans to change your content down the road, an hreflang tag between those two ccTLDs can help Google understand the content change and who you're targeting.

Why I don’t recommend hreflang for geo-targeting only

Hreflang was meant to help Google understand when two pages are exactly the same, but translated. It works much like a canonical tag (which is why using another canonical can be detrimental to the hreflang working) in which you have multiple versions of one page with slight changes.

Many people get confused because there's the ability to use country codes in the hreflang tags. This is for when you need to tell Google of a dialect change. An example would be if you have two sub-sites that are identical, but the American English has been changed to British English. It's not meant to inform Google that content that's targeted at a different country is targeted at that country.

When I recommend geo-targeting only, I make it very clear to clients that going down this route means you really need to change the content. International business is so much more than just translation. Translating content only might hurt your conversion rates if you miss some aspect of the new target market.

Hiring content writers in that country that understand the nuances is very important. I worked for a British company for 4 years, so I get some of the differences, but things continually surprise me still. I would never feel comfortable as an American writing content for a British audience.

I also don’t recommend hreflang in most geo-targeting cases, because the use of geo-targeting and hreflang can get really confusing. This has led to incorrect hreflang tags in the past that have wreaked havoc on Google's understanding of the site structure.

Example: A business starts off with a Canadian domain (domain.ca) and a France domain (domain.fr). They use hreflang between the English for Canada and French for France using the code below. They then add a US site and the code is modified to add a line for the US content.

<link rel="alternate" hreflang="en" href="http://domain.ca/" />
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="fr" href="http://domain.fr/" />
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="en-us" href="http://domain.com/" />

This looks odd because there is one English-language page with no regional modifications that is on a Canadian-targeted domain. There is a US regional English dialect version on a general top-level domain (as .com is general and is not US-specific, but people use it that way).

Remember, this is a bot that's trying to logic out a structure. For a user that prefers UK English, there is no logical choice. The general English is a Canadian site and the general TLD is in US English. This is where we get some of the inconsistencies with international targeting.

You might be saying things like “That would never happen!” and “They should have changed the first English to Canadian English (en-ca)!”, but if you've ever dealt with hurried developers (they really do have at least 50 requests at once sometimes) you'll know that they, like search bots, prefer consistency.

Hreflang should not be needed in geo-targeting cases because, if you're really going to target a new country-specific market, you should treat them as a whole new market and create content just for them. If you can’t, or don’t think it’s needed, then providing language translations is probably all you need to do at the moment. And hreflang in geo-targeting cases can cause confusion with code that might confuse the search engines. The less we can confuse them, the better the results are!

Hybrid targeting

Finally, there is the route I call "hybrid," or utilizing both geo-targeting and translation. This is what most major retail corporations should be doing if they're international. Due to laws, currency, market changes, and cultural changes, there is a big need for geo-targeted content. But in addition to that, there are countries that require multiple language versions. There might be anywhere from one to a few hundred used languages in a single country! Here are the top countries that use the web and how many recognized languages are used in each.

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Do you need to translate into all 31 languages used in the US? Probably not. But if 50% of your target market in Canada prefers Canadian French as their primary language, the translation investment might be a good one.

In cases where a geo-targeted site (ccTLD use) or sub-site (subdomain or subfolder) needs more than one language, then there is the need to geo-target the site or sub-site and then use hreflang within that country-specific site.

This statement can be confusing, so let me show you what I mean:

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This requires a good amount of planning and resources, so if you need to embark on this path in the future, start setting up the structure now. If you need to go the hybrid route, I recommend the following URL structures for language and country targeting. As with before, these are in order of my professional preference and are all focused on content targeted to Canada in Canadian French.

(Country structure/Language structure)

Subfolder/Subfolder
Example: domain.com/ca/fr
Subfolder/Parameter
Example: domain.com/ca/page.html?lang=fr
ccTLD/Subfolder
Example: domain.ca/fr
ccTLD/Parameter
Example: domain.ca/page.html?lang=fr
Subdomain/Subfolder
Example: ca.domain.com/fr
Subdomain/Parameter
Example: ca.domain.com/page.html?lang=fr
ccTLD/Subdomain (not recommended, nor are the other combinations I intentionally left out)
Example: fr.domain.ca

The hybrid option is where the hreflang setup can get the most messed up. Make sure you have mapped everything out before implementing, and ensure you're considering future business plans as well.

I hope this helps clear up some of the confusion around international expansion. It really is specific to each individual business, so take the time to plan and happy expansion!

Troubleshooting International SEO: A flowchart

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from The Moz Blog https://tracking.feedpress.it/link/9375/2949306