What is BERT Algorithm?? and Impact of Update on SERPs Rankings

What is BERT Algorithm?? 

The backlash to the BERT update was swift and without mercy. Many SEOs warned about “how to optimize for BERT” articles before any “how to optimize for BERT” articles were published.

Ryan Jones (@RyanJones) tweeted:

“the most exciting thing about BERT is that suddenly, overnight, every SEO is now an expert on neural networks and natural language processing.”

BERT and E-A-T

I came across one article that claimed BERT and E-A-T (Expertise, Authority, and Trustworthiness) had something to do with each other.

I won’t link to the article but I did show it to search algorithm expert Dawn Anderson (@dawnieando)

BERT Algorithm Myths

There is a great deal of confusion and link baiting surrounding BERT. The situation might even be worse than many had predicted.

Here are a few examples to watch out for.

1. Myth: BERT means optimizing your site for long tail queries

It’s not that your site has to be long tail search friendly. BERT is about Google understanding what user’s mean and THEN being able to connect that to more specific information that already exists on your website.

2.Myth? BERT’s Effect is Small

There are some who are advancing the idea that this algorithm is not particularly significant. Yet Google is on record stating that this update affects one out of ten English language search queries in the United States of America. Ten percent is a significant amount of search queries.

Why would people think this update is small?
I believe the perception that this update is small might come from maybe this update not shaking up coveted two and three word phrases but rather other phrases that may have been misinterpreted.

The effect being that more traffic was being sent to the right pages but without shaking up all the keywords that matters.

Kind of a conundrum where it affects 10% of searches (that’s big!) but maybe doesn’t shake up established money phrases (that’s a yawn).

So is BERT a small update or not?  

3. MYTH: BERT Makes Stop Words Important

The Google announcement used as examples search queries that have their context influenced by the words “to” and “from.” Some SEO articles claimed that this means stop words are more important now.

People are taking that seriously. I saw one SEO bragging he always includes stop words in his article URLs.

4. Myth: BERT is the Biggest Update of All Time

It’s been reported in many articles that BERT is one of the biggest updates of all time. That statement is based on a misinterpretation of a press release issued by Google.

This is what the press release stated:

“With the latest advancements from our research team in the science of language understanding–made possible by machine learning–we’re making a significant improvement to how we understand queries, representing the biggest leap forward in the past five years, and one of the biggest leaps forward in the history of Search.”

According to the press release, BERT represents one of the biggest improvements in five years, not of all time.

BERT also represents among the biggest improvements in search of all time. That does not mean it’s the biggest. It means that BERT is among the biggest.

Other candidates in this class of updates could include statistical analysis, the Hummingbird update, Caffeine update and the Panda and Penguin updates. Those were all major updates, as is BERT.

Find best KEYWORD FOR SEO and ASO | FREE Keyword Research for SEO | AdWo...

Find best KEYWORD FOR SEO and ASO

Find best KEYWORD FOR SEO and ASO

Find best KEYWORD FOR SEO and ASO

Have you ever done keyword research for a blog post and experienced no resulting organic traffic? You may be thinking, “What happened? The terms I optimized for had search volume. Why am I not getting a piece of that?”

How To Do Keyword Research Search Results

On the results page are several posts that have my exact term in the title. As a blogger, I know my niche well enough to know that several of these sites are far bigger and more credible than mine. (A few SEO-savvy bloggers will be able to verify their hunch by looking at backlinks, PageRank, etc). So if I want my blog post to rank well for this result and get any organic traffic, I’ll have to build my own links to the post and I just don’t have that kind of time. I barely had time to write this post! Alas!

Best Keyword Research Method = Find Under-the-Radar Terms

If you’re a blogger who cares enough to do some keyword research for each post, but doesn’t want to build links, then consider trying what I’ve been testing for about the last month. It involves targeting under-the-radar keywords that are relevant and being searched, but are too low to register on most keyword tools.

Under-The-Radar Keyword Research Method

The goal in being a guerrilla keyword researcher is to find the best “ultra long tail” terms, optimize the post, rank in the top spots automatically, and reap the traffic. As you get traffic, you’ll get more engagement, more natural links, and more site credibility, allowing you to rank for even more competitive keywords later. This approach works best if you have a blog with a little bit of PageRank. A PR1 or PR2 should be able to get a high ranking for guerrilla terms.

The basic steps to my blogging keyword research strategy (which I’ll explore in detail):

Write a good, interesting post

Identify core keywords related to the post

Use Google’s Keyword Tool to find long-tail variations with search volume

Use Soovle.com to find even longer variations with implied search volume

Search these terms in Google to identify low competition results Optimize and win!

Find best KEYWORD FOR SEO and ASO

Step 1: Start With Strong Content

Whatever you write should be engaging, have a unifying theme, and a decent length. More is usually better for SEO, so try for at least 300+ words.

Step 2: Identify Core Keywords Related To The Post

In the example, we identified “keyword research” to be the core term. In your case, there may be certain terms that are used interchangeably so you may have multiple possible core terms.

Step 3: Use Google’s Keyword Tool To Find Long-Tail Variations

Working off the core term, Google’s keyword tool provides some keyword suggestions that still have measurable search volume. You can play around with different combinations of these to find relevant long-tail terms. In this case, we liked “how to do keyword research” as a long-tail keyword, even though it was still too broad to keep. There are probably other long-tail terms we could work with.

Step 4: Use Soovle.com To Identify Longer Variations With Implied Search Volume

Soovle.com is basically an aggregator of “suggest” results from search engines like Google, Bing, YouTube, Wikipedia, Yahoo, Answers.com and Amazon.com. One thing we know about “suggest” results is that they are based on searcher behavior and that results at the top have more search volumes than those below (but the important thing to know is that all “suggest” results have some search volume).

There’s nothing novel about the way Soovle works, but I like it for its simplicity and its breadth of results. And it’s free (you could also use something like ScrapeBox for a more robust, paid solution).

So we plug in the term “how to do keyword research.”

Soovle Example How To Do Keyword Research

We get several variations of this term including some relevant ones:

How to do keyword research on google
How to do keyword research for seo
How to do keyword research seo

Since there are 10 results listed, there’s a good chance that there are other combinations we’re not seeing, so starting with “how to do keyword research,” we can start going through the alphabet and adding letters as if starting a new word at the end of the phrase, e.g., “how to do keyword research a” and “how to do keyword research b,” etc. Doing this reveals a few more variations we didn’t see before:

How to do keyword research for free (this made me laugh)
How to do keyword research google adwords
How to do keyword research niche
How to do keyword research tutorial
As I mentioned before, all of these terms get search volume, even though most of them would show none using Google’s volume tool (which is exactly what you want).

Another thing you can do is start with a broader term in Soovle, like “keyword research.” By starting broad, nearly every suggested term is one that also has a good amount of traffic, so none are good candidates. What you can do, though, is start front-loading the term “keyword research” with the most common adjectives and verbs to find under-the-radar variations, phrases that people naturally use when trying to search, like “easy keyword research.” For adjectives, I find that “good” and “best” are great places to start. You can also start with verbs that are associated with the term. The only verb that really goes with keyword research is “do” so I type in “do keyword research” and see what else is generated.

When I start with the term “best keyword research” and then add letters like we did previously [“best keyword research a(b,c,d,e…)”] we end up with some more fun and relevant terms:

Best keyword research article
Best keyword research guide
Best keyword research method
Best keyword research strategy

Step 5: Audit The Terms In Google

Once you have identified some good terms through Soovle, check them for search volume in Google Keyword Tool, then search for the terms in Google. You’re looking for a search result with close to zero exact match titles for the term you selected.

Best Keyword Research Method Search Results

In this case, “best keyword research method” is nearly free of exact competition and the sites that rank look easy enough to overtake.

Step 6: Optimize and Win!

Optimization includes having the exact keyword phrase in the post title, meta description, and body content. The rest of the content should also be relevant to the keyword. If possible, you can do some internal linking from older blog posts. You can optimize images as well by giving them names that include your search term.

Once you get into a rhythm of going through this keyword research process, you get used to it, and it honestly doesn’t take very long. In some of the posts I’ve tested this out on, I’ve found it easy to rank without extra linkbuilding, and one post can pull in dozens of monthly organic visits from one term and its variations. It’s really quite nice.

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Smart Ways to Build Backlinks to Your Website (SEO) and Application (ASO)

"Backlinks," meaning sites that link to your site, are, for most search engines, the supreme ranking factor. So is getting more organic traffic.

Because that traffic is directly related to the quality of the backlinks your website has, the more authoritative websites that link to you, the better rankings and traffic you’ll get.

And of course you want to keep an eye on your Google rankings. When crawling the web, Google looks in particular for your website’s backlinks, to understand how your pages are connected to one other and in what ways. Certainly there are hundreds of ranking factors. But backlinks represent the most important metric for SEO.

Now, needless to say, quality backlinks are hard to get, but they shouldn’t be. In fact there are smart ways to build or earn backlinks, to get authoritative websites to link to your online business. Here are ten:

1. The broken-link building method

I love the broken-link building method because it works perfectly to create one-way backlinks. The technique involves contacting a webmaster to report broken links on his/her website. At the same time, you recommend other websites to replace that link. And here, of course, you mention your own website. Because you are doing the webmaster a favor by reporting the broken links, the chances of a backlink back to your website are high.

So, to use the broken-link method, first find relevant websites in your niche that have resources pages. Find them by using these search queries in Google:

• your keyword + links
• your keywords + resources
• keywords inurl:links

For example, if I have a parenting website, I'll search for parenting + links.
To easily find broken links on those pages, download and install the Google Chrome plugin called Check my Links. Using this plugin, I quickly discovered all 404 links from this page:

Now, back to that webmaster: When reaching out, be friendly and introduce yourself. Tell this individual that he or she is linking to some resources that are no longer available. Always provide the exact location of the broken links, so they can be easily found. Give some alternatives to replace those links, including your own website. Try to be helpful, not greedy to get a backlink. Often, this method will work, but there will be cases when the webmaster will refuse to link back to you.

2. Backlinks through infographics

Infographics are one of the most popular methods for bringing traffic to your website and gaining valuable backlinks. They're also great because they're easy to understand and share. Everyone loves visual data, right? That's why the demand for infographics has increased considerably. Consider that influential online publications like Mashable publish numerous infographics from all over the Internet.

Now, choose your infographics carefully: Each one should include a unique and interesting story for your audience. To make your selection, follow currently trending topics and see what people are looking for, then create your infographic using statistical data.

To get started, research and gather data for the content. Then find someone to make your content visual.

There’s a misconception that creating an infographic is expensive; that's not always the case. Figure on an average price between $150 and $300. Assuming you may earn 10 backlinks per infographic, you'll be paying $15 per link. For five backlinks, the price will be $30 per link. That’s very cheap for backlinks earned through webmaster moderation. And if your infographic goes viral. you win even more.

Try using Dribble to find designers with good portfolios. Contact them directly by upgrading your account to PRO status, for just $20 a year. Then simply use the search filter and type "infographics." After finding someone you like, click on "hire me" and send a message detailing your needs and requesting a price. Fiver is another place to find great designers willing to create inexpensive infographics.

Next, once the infographic is ready, you need to make it easy for others to share it. To do this, create your own embed code using Siege Media generator.

Once everything is in place, and your infographic shines on your website, it’s time to distribute it. There are numerous infographic directories where you can submit yours. For example, here is a list with more than than 100 places to submit your infographic.

Last but not least, do email outreach to people who have previously linked to similar infographics or have shared them on social media. Ask for feedback on your infographic, but never ask for a link directly. If they like your infographic, they'll know what to do.

3. The advantage of guest articles

Guest blogging is the most effective way to reach new audiences. By publishing articles on other popular websites, you'll get your content in front of new readers and win more exposure. Sometimes, it’s not just about the backlink, but about increasing your online reputation or your social media followers. 

Guest blogging helps you leverage your relationships and expand your audience. In case you have doubts about guest posting, consider that even Google accepts guest contributors on its Google Analytics blog. Here’s a tweet from Google showing this:

Numerous ways exist to find websites that accept guest articles. Here are three::

Use Google search queries to find blogs accepting guest contributors:

• your keyword + inurl:write-for-us
• your keyword + guest-posts
• your keyword + inurl:guest-post-guidelines
• your keyword + become a contributor
• your keyword + bloggers wanted
• your keyword + submit an article
• your keyword + want to write for
• your keyword + contribute
• your keyword + become an author
• your keyword + guest post by
• your keyword + now accepting guest posts

Find influencers publishing guest posts on a regular basis and try to contribute on the same websites they've had in the past.

Consider the example of a profile by freelance From her Google Plus profile, click on "About," then scroll to the contributor section, where you can see a list of all the websites she has contributed articles to.

Repeat the process with other influencers, and you’ll find endless opportunities to publish content on third-party websites.

Use social media to discover other options.

On Twitter, search for "guest post," "guest article" or "guest author." To automate the process, use Topsy to set alerts for the keywords you want to track.

When publishing a guest article, always make sure you are linking to your social media profiles. If someone enjoys your post, he or she can easily follow you for similar future articles.

4. Spy on your competitors.

If you are serious about getting more organic traffic, staying up to date with your main competitors' online marketing strategies is mandatory. You have to spy on your competitors on social media and look for their link-building or earning techniques, as well as their content-marketing methods. Here are some tips:

Set yourself up for alerts when competitors are publishing new content on their websites. 

Subscribe to their email newsletters or follow them on social media. Another smart way to catch up with their new content is to create a Google alert for the keyword “site:yourcompetitor.com." For example, if my competitor is TechCrunch, I can set a Google alert using the keyword: site:techcrunch.com

Know when and what backlinks your competitors are building or earning.

This will help you replicate their best backlinks and better understand what methods they are using to promote their website. If they are getting links through guest blogging, try to become a guest author on the same websites. If most of their links come from blog reviews, get in touch with those bloggers and offer them a trial to test your tool. Eventually, they might write a review about it.

My favorite tool to spy on my competitors' backlinks is called Monitor Backlinks. It allows you to add your four most important competitors. From then on, you get a weekly report containing all the new links they have earned. Inside the tool, you get more insights about these links and can sort them by their value and other SEO metrics. A useful feature is that all the links my own website already has are highlighted in green, as in the screenshot below.

Using this technique, I can easily determine new link-building opportunities. With Monitor Backlinks, I can keep track of all the backlinks my website is earning. Each time my link building campaigns are successful, I can see all the new backlinks I’m getting in my dashboard.  

5. Build internal links.

Internal links are a key factor for running a successful blog. They are passing link juice, and you can use your anchor texts. With a good internal linking structure, you can help users easily navigate through your website and increase the overall user experience.

There are tools that can automatically create internal links on your blog, especially if you are running Wordpress, but you should do this manually. Microsoft's Matt Cutts has recommended that webmasters keep their number of internal links per page below 100, for both usability and SEO.

6. Promote your content.

Great content won’t get you backlinks unless you know how to promote it right. You have to get out in the world and do email outreach to promote your best articles.

One of the best strategies to do this is to contact bloggers or websites running weekly or monthly roundups. Again, you can use Google and search for queries like “keyword + roundup.” Make sure you choose, in order to see results only from the past week or month.

Then contact the webmasters and give them a quick introduction to your website. With your message, send a link to one of your best tutorials or guides. If they find your resource useful, they may link back to you in their next weekly roundup.These bloggers are constantly looking for great content, so they definitely want to hear from you.

As with the other techniques, make sure you do not abuse your relationship with any webmaster by asking for a link directly.

7. Write testimonials.

An easy method to earn quality backlinks is to write testimonials for websites you are using. You'll spend only a few minutes, and you can earn a link from the homepage of an authoritative website. As long as you are a customer of that product, there’s a high possibility you can get a link in exchange for a testimonial.

List all the tools you are currently using and reach out to discuss the likelihood of featuring your testimonial on a desired website.

8. Contact journalists and important bloggers.

To get links to your website, you have to spread the word about your business. And what better way to do this than email outreach to journalists and influencers from your niche? Fnding someone’s email address can be challenging, but there’s no reason to be discouraged. Here’s how to find anyone's email address:

• Over 90 percent of the email addresses at publications and websites are formatted like this: john@website.com or sjohn@website.com or smith.john@website.com. So, try sending your pitch to these emails directly.
• If the above formats don't work, use tools like Voilanorbert, Thrust.io or Emailfinder.io. Just enter the name of the person you are trying to contact and the website he or she works for.
• Alternately, you can send your message using social media, with Google Plus or Linkedin. Also consider that every pitch should be short and to the point. No one has time for long and boring emails from strangers.

9. Donate.

Yes, you can earn backlinks by donating to nonprofit organizations. This method is quick and straightforward. All you have to do is find websites in your niche that accept donations and link back to sites that have donated. Simply submit the amount of the donation you want to make and write your website URL.

Finding these websites requires some searches in Google. These are some queries that usually give good results:

• contributors page + donate + your keyword
• donation + contributors + your keyword
• contributors page + your keyword

10. Get interviewed.

Online interviews are hot right now, and a great and easy way to earn backlinks to your website. Once you become the authority in your niche, you'll get lots of interview invitations, but until then, to get started, you have to make the first step. Look for websites that are running interviews and tell them you would like to participate and what knowledge you can contribute.

On Page seo activity list | On-Page SEO Techniques

There are many people who are just starting to blog and many more that have run their own site for a while, that don’t know what SEO is and how to implement it!

SEO simply stands for Search Engine Optimisation. This is where you construct your web pages and implement certain techniques to help you rank as high as possible on search engine result pages (SERPs). The higher your pages can rank on Google/Bing/Yahoo/etc. results pages, the more traffic your site is likely to get.

Now, SEO can be split up into two separate categories; On-Page SEO & Off-Page SEO.

On-Page SEO refers to all the things that you can do ON your website to help you rank higher, such as page titles, internal linking, meta tags & descriptions, etc.

Off-Page SEO refers to all the things that you can do directly OFF your website to help you rank higher, such as social networking, article submission, forum & blog marketing, etc.

In today’s post we will be looking specifically at On-Page SEO and some of the most effective ways to increase your page rankings on search engines.

1. Page Titles

Your page titles are one of the most important SEO factors on your site. Each of your pages & posts should have its own unique title, which includes the main keywords for that page.

For example, you could write a blog post about a new chocolate cake recipe that you have tried. It is therefore vitally important that you include ‘Chocolate Cake Recipe’ within your post title, perhaps “Easy Chocolate Cake Recipe” or “ Chocolate Cake Recipe for kids”, etc.

This way, whenever someone searches for Chocolate Cake Recipes in a search engine, your post has a better chance of showing up because you have included those keywords.

2. Meta Descriptions

Many people forget to include meta descriptions for their pages. These descriptions are an important place to include relevant keywords for your content, as these are used within the search results when your page is listed.

For instance, if we continue to use the ‘Chocolate Cake Recipe’ example, then a good meta description for that page would include those keywords and related ones. So, “This easy chocolate cake recipe is possibly the most delicious, mouth watering, chocolatey cake ever made.” would be a great meta description to use, as it is relatively short, whilst containing a number of specific keywords.

3. Meta Tags

For each of your pages, you can include a set of keywords in the form of meta tags. These should be all the relevant keywords of your content, which you will have researched previously.

I use a WordPress plug-in on my sites called ‘All In One SEO Pack’. This allows me to enter all of my meta tag keywords, meta description and page title at the bottom of each of my posts before publishing. This simply inserts all of the information into your page HTML format for you, making your life a little easier.

4. URL Structure

Including search engine friendly URLs for each of your pages is highly recommended, as these bring better crawling. Shorter URLs seem to perform better in search engine results, however that is not the only factor.

URLs that include targeted keywords, also perform better. The location of these keywords can also be a major influence. For example site.com/keyword would perform better than site.com/365/738/subfolder/keyword etc.

As you can see for this page, the URL is https://successtechnohub.blogspot.com/2019/10/on-page-seo-activity-list-on-page-seo.html I have included the keywords that are relevant for this post.

5. Body Tags (H1, H2, H3, H4, etc.)

When writing your articles, you should break up your content into smaller sections & paragraphs to make it easier for people to read. These sections can be given heading, which is where H1, H2, H3, H4, etc. tags are used.

Generally H1 tags are reserved for your main page title, with subsequent headings (just like the ones I have used throughout this post) being issued H2, H3, etc. Search engines use these to determine what is important within your content. This is why keyword rich headines are more useful than generic ones. Make sure you write keyword rich headings in the order of priority in H1, H2 and H3 title tags. They are used by many crawlers to differentiate important content.

6. Keyword Density

Including relevant keywords throughout your content is very important, as it helps search engines work out what your content is about. However, try not to excessively repeat and overuse keywords just for search engine robots. This can lead to your site being banned from search engines.

To avoid this, try to keep your keyword density to roughly 2-5%. If you find this hard, get out a thesaurus and broaden your writing vocabulary. This way, you are still writing about the same thing, without risk of being banned.

7. Image SEO

Using images within your content is a great way to make your site more visually appealing and break up boring chunks of text. You can utilise these images to help improve your site SEO.

All your uploaded images have titles, so treat them just the same as your page titles. Including relevant keywords can help people find your site when searching on Google Images.

You can also include Alt Text and Descriptions for your images, making them even more useful with SEO.

8. Internal Linking

People often think that the only links that count are those from other websites. While these links are important, these are not the only important links!

Placing links to your other website pages, is a great way of improving your site and used properly, internal links can be a useful weapon in your SEO arsenal. Not only does it make it much easier for your visitors to navigate around your site and find all of your content, but it also ensures that your site gets properly crawled allowing the search engines to find all of your pages. It also helps to build the relevancy of a page to relevant keywords and phrases, whilst also helping to increase the Google PageRank of your pages.

There are a number of different methods that you can use to improve your internal linking structure. The main being; content links and permanent navigation links.

For bloggers, content links are very useful when used properly. These are links that are placed within your article posts, which redirect people to other relevant pages on your site. For example, this post is focused on increasing traffic to your site, so readers may also find a post on ‘How To Drive Traffic To Your Blog‘ useful. Perhaps other people are just starting out blogging and want to learn more.

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