Welcome to Anthony Leaton’s SEO blog. Here you will find guides, news and updates affecting SEO professionals. Any personal updates include my certifications, training or case studies. Please do leave a comment.
How To Rekindle Your Passion for Your SEO Content Strategy
How To Rekindle Your Passion for an SEO Content Strategy Maintaining motivation and passion for an SEO content strategy can be a challenge, even for the most experienced professionals in the field. As a crucial component of digital marketing and branding, content strategy requires constant ideation, creation, and analysis to achieve specific business objectives. However, the demands of the work can sometimes lead to burnout, boredom, or a lack of clear direction, causing content strategists to lose their enthusiasm. If you find yourself in this situation, it's important to take proactive steps to reignite your passion and rediscover your purpose....
Read More
What To Do If Your SEO Analytics Strategy Fails & There is a Trust Issue
What To Do If Your SEO Analytics Strategy Fails & There is an Issue of Trust There is no doubt that a failing marketing analytics strategy can erode trust in your department, with superiors - everyone. In the absence of trust in their own data or analytics, marketers are unable to make informed decisions, which undermines marketing credibility. This leads to poor campaign performance, wasted marketing spend, and a disconnect between the marketing team and the rest of the organization, which all lead to poor campaign performance. This problem needs to be addressed by the SEO professional taking the following steps: Conduct an analysis of...
Read More
How To Measure SEO Success
Measuring SEO Success: Depends On The Goal and Task Right? While keyword rankings remain a valuable indicator in SMEs, start-ups and even large agencies, I am of the view of now getting fixated on this single metric. Focusing solely on rankings can lead to a myopic view of SEO, neglecting crucial aspects that contribute to a website's overall success. Instead, a successful SEO strategy prioritises metrics that reflect user intent and ultimately drive business value. Here's where a data-driven approach shines. By meticulously analysing website traffic, conversions, and user behaviour, we gain valuable insights into how users interact with the...
Read More
What are LSI Keywords?
What are LSI Keywords? Let me explain their myth and 'on-going legend'. The concept of "LSI keywords" has been a popular topic in SEO circles for decades, but it's a myth. When I hear SEO professionals or business owners say this phrase it makes my skin crawl. It's important to understand that the term itself is misleading. Here's a breakdown of the misconception: LSI and Modern Search Engines: Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) was a technology developed in the 1980s by researchers at Bell Labs - not a writing methodology. It is not something Google currently uses in its search engine...
Read More
The Robots Text and its Importance in SEO
All about robots.txt and its importance in SEO A crucial element for SEO is the robots.txt file, a text document acting as a set of instructions for web robots, primarily search engine crawlers. My guide delves into the world of robots.txt, explaining its purpose, commands, and best practices to optimise your website's interaction with search engines. What is Robots.txt and Why is it Important? Imagine your website as a library. Librarians (search engine crawlers) need a system to navigate efficiently and avoid restricted areas. Robots.txt serves as that system, informing crawlers which sections of your website they can access and...
Read More
How to Check a Website’s Organic Traffic Beyond Google Analytics
The SEO's Guide To Not Trusting All Organic Traffic is Right in Google Website owners crave understanding their organic traffic. Google Analytics (GA) and Search Console (GSC) are the go-to tools, but they often leave gaps. Enter the world of "dark traffic" and misattributed sources. This article dives into uncovering the full picture of your website's organic reach, venturing beyond the limitations of traditional analytics. For SEOs, the mantra is carved into our very being: organic traffic is king. We spend countless hours meticulously crafting content, building backlinks, and optimizing websites, all in fervent pursuit of that holy grail –...
Read More
7 Step Guide For Easy Competitor Backlink Analysis
Easy SEO Competitor Backlink Analysis in 7 Easy Steps As we all know, backlinks, also known as inbound links, are a crucial factor that search engines consider when determining a website's authority and relevance. Simply put, the more high-quality backlinks a website has, the higher it's likely to rank. This is where competitor backlink analysis and choosing the right competitor backlink analysis tool comes in. By scrutinizing the backlink profiles of your top competitors, you can glean valuable insights into their SEO strategies and identify opportunities to build even stronger backlinks for your own website. By understanding what kind of...
Read More
Alt Text SEO is it still a ranking factor?
Alt Text SEO: A Powerful Tool for SEO? and/or Just For Accessibility? Alt text remains important for SEO, but its role has evolved. Google's John Muller clarifies alt text is a factor for image search ranking, not general web search ranking. It helps search engines understand image content for relevant searches. But let's be clear alt text is not the Biggest SEO Booster: Compared to high-quality content and backlinks, alt text carries less weight in overall SEO. The core function of alt text is to provide an audio description for visually impaired users relying on screen readers s0 mainly for accessibility....
Read More
Using Canonical URLS In Your SEO Best Practices
Using Canonical URLS in your SEO best practices Canonical URLs should be in your arsenal of SEO best practices. When your website has duplicate content – search engines get confused and might not show content to the world. Yep, those are the articles stuck in crawled, not indexed or Google found another canonical and used that content. It's even worse for new and upcoming websites which are sandboxed. One of the key elements in getting your pages in the search index this is tackling the issue of duplicate or, very similar content. This is where canonical URLs come in. They...
Read More
Working Long Tail Keywords into your SEO Strategy
What are Long Tail Keywords? Long Tail keywords for search engine optimisation (SEO), are the golden ticket to success. But not all keywords are created equal. While high-volume, single-word keywords like "shoes" or "fitness" might seem like the ideal targets, the reality is that they are often fiercely contested by large, established websites with extensive resources and authority. This intense competition makes it extremely difficult for smaller businesses or new websites to rank well for these broad, popular terms. This is where long-tail keywords come in, offering a strategic approach to attracting highly relevant traffic and boosting conversions. Demystifying Long-Tail...
Read More
Keyword Research Process Using SemRush, Ahrefs and Moz
Can a keyword research tool define & limit your SEO strategy In a word, yes. What I have found out over the years about keyword research is that often in house, and in agency, you have to use and be limited by the tools. By these choices, often a SEO professional is unknowingly lead down a path of following the value system of the SEO keyword and strategy planner, not devising their own. In addition, if you are being interviewed for a job, or networking or speaking at an event, be aware that avid tool followers are often 'locked into'...
Read More
What is Crawling and Indexing? What’s The Difference Between Them?
What's The Similarity and Difference Between Website Crawling and Indexing? Crawling and indexing are two essential processes in the functioning of search engines. What is website crawling? Crawling is the process by which search engine bots, also known as crawlers or spiders, visit and gather information from websites, including web pages, links, and content. Crawling is typically initiated by a search engine's crawler, which starts at a list of known good pages and then visits each page. As the crawler visits each page, it reads the content and follows any links it finds. The crawler then adds these new pages...
Read More
Apart from Google what other search engines can you name?
Typical Question Asked At Interview is naming other search engines apart from Google. Some of the popular search engines other than Google are: Bing, Yahoo, Baidu, Esocia, Ask.com, MSN, Hutsy, Vimeo, DuckDuckGo. YouTube and TikTok are Gen's place to go alongside CHATgpt and Perplexity AI. For extra points you have long going Lycos, Shodan, Naver, Sogou too. If you read my article on getting better search results, now search engines are being created akin to metasearch engines of the early 2000's. SEARX and it's developmental search engines per language offer a 100% pure alternative. The question is - why is...
Read More
Google Testing Various Product Image Formats in Search Result Pages
Google Continues Testing of Product Image Formats in SERPS from March 2024 onwards Google has been testing various formats for search result snippets that include product images. According to the search results: In March 2024, Google started testing an updated format for multi-image thumbnails in search results that provide direct links to product pages. Product PPC Results & Organic Results Are Now More Convoluted From a simple point of view, it appears the line between 'PPC' and 'organic' results is being pushed a bit with the results being 'image heavy'. For the user, and for SEO specialists, this line has got more blurry with this update....
Read More
How to refine search queries to improve search results on Google & Other Search Engines
Google, Bing and Other Search Engines, Their Accuracy, and How to Find Accurate Search Results By refining your search queries, you will be able to improve the results that you receive from Google and other search engines. However, Google has some clever ways to chop down and remove content that other search engines ignore or leave out. My last point might surprise many being a lover of many things Google as I still feel the search engine has been over-optimised for. Given March 2024 Helpful Content Update, I remain unconvinced with impartial search results from the Alphabet corporation and Microsoft. Here are a few tricks and I...
Read More
Interaction to Next Paint (INP) Core Web Vital replacing First Input Delay (FID) on March 12, 2024
Core Web Vitals welcomes Interaction to Next Paint (INP) and First Input Delay (FID) is getting the boot today, on March 12, 2024 Interaction to Next Paint (INP) has been introduced as the newest addition to Google's Core Web Vitals today. No longer is the FID, which many SEOers, including myself didn't care about. The FID metric to me was a vanity statistic and I guess you must have had a really terrible site not to score on this. Having run competitor analyses, I've never come across a really bad one. All in all, INP is a valuable tool to measure user experience and should be given more attention by SEOers. Now it has to! In other words, it marks a...
Read More
SEO Round Up Week 10, 2024 – 4/03/2024 to 10/03/2024
SEO Round Up Week 4/03/2024 to 10/03/2024 Google made changes to Rich results, impacting Events, FAQs, and How-To's, potentially linked to a 'Helpful Content' March Core Update - or is it just a coincidence? Additionally, Google's March Helpful Content Update aims to reduce unhelpful content by 40% in search results, emphasising the importance of quality and informative content over spammy practices. We've heard that one before right? Apparently there has been a lot of manual actions called this week. Moreover, Google's updates targeted spam practices like scaled content abuse and site reputation abuse. The focus is on eliminating low-quality content...
Read More
SEO Round Up Week 9, 2024
Welcome to the "SEO Week 9 Roundup of 2024: Where the SEO news is as unpredictable as the weather, unless you like in the UK. This week the SEO community was going on about "is SGE dead", "what makes a holistic SEO strategy", if "Semantic SEO is dead", "YouTube's SEO possibilities with 'Collab'", and of course, everyone's favourite SEO person at the table - "the link builder and the strategies they'll be using in 2024". So buckle up, walk the dog, and sit down again again and have a cuppa. Here I present my pick of the best articles in...
Read More
SEO Round Up Week 8, 2024
What's been going on in the Western World with SEO and Search Engines? With Google's recent actions, the SEO world this week in February has been gripped by excitement and concern, akin to a rollercoaster ride through the digital landscape. Join my SEO updates show, showing that SEO is not just about looking at Excel and keywords or getting an email with a backlink rejection starting with the letter F. I’m hoping to keep myself informed by keeping it humorous for all. Here's some of the top stories this week. Updated rel=canonical Documentation finally: Google is dusting off its rulebook and giving webmasters a clearer path to SEO success like making the documentation clearer. I remember...
Read More
Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) for SEO Professionals
For SEO professionals, cumulative layout shift (CLS) is an important metric to understand and optimize for, as it has a direct impact on user experience and search engine results. CLS is discussed in detail in this article, along with its causes and practical solutions, ensuring that users have a better user experience and search engine results that are more accurate. What is Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)? As a measure of webpage stability, CLS quantifies how much content shifts during loading. A high CLS score indicates a poor user experience, as content moving unexpectedly can lead to users clicking on the wrong elements...
Read More