Most useful things to do without developer resources on SEO
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Hi fellow Moz users!
I am managing SEO at our company. Perhaps some of you out there also have the problem of wanting to make SEO changes on your website but lack the developer resources to make significant changes?
What are some of the things I can do in my power (can't do any backend work) to make SEO better?
Currently, I have:
- Social media (including Moz local tips of business listings)
- Blog site
- Refining pictures
- Google analytics to see where we can improve
- Internal and external links
Please feel free to expand on the above but ideally it will be new things that I could get on with!
Many thanks,
Eric -
It you are able to edit Meta titles and meta descriptions on the website I would start there. If you are unable to even access this info on the website, I would focus on social signals and link building. So have a strong social media strategy and then work on gaining backlinks from authoritative websites. If this is a local company that wants to rank for "(your service) + (your city)" you can also focus on building quality business directory citations (Moz Local is great for this!). Best of success.
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Create unique content for the blog/social media to achieve links... Use websites like rawshorts.com (video animation website) and canva.com (infographics), both are free and require no downloads but will help you to create unique content that may be shared/gain links if helpful to your audience.
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Try downloading SEO quake as a browser extension and focus on diagnosis and keyword density for every page.
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Use all free apps for SEO, or their free versions
- Google Analitycs
- Google Search Concole
- Semrush (Free version)
- Screaming frog (Fre version)
And do some linkbuilding
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Technical onsite is pretty important for a successful SEO but you still have several opportunities out there:
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onsite content creation: you can create new content to implement on the site and target your core keywords with LSI data
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title and meta optimization: I don't consider this technical but it's pretty key to get better rank and most importantly better CTR
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sitemaps: create sitemaps to better diagnose the site. I imagine the dev team may have other priorities but bugs should be handled anyway, especially important ones
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find 404 with traffic/links and redirect them
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lnikbuilding. This one is always tricky depending on resources.
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If you can create new pages do some broken linkbuilding and some ego baits (mention other in order to get them to link back to that content)
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influencers marketing in social media. Build up your community and get ready to share stuff, they will return the favor when you need it
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guest posting. There are a lot of sites that accept free guest posts, depending on the niche.
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cocitation. Get links where your competitors did (exception made for PR stuff)
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skyscraper technique. Find the best content in your niche and make it better, then get the links that content had.
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Keyword density... really?
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you dont believe in keyword density?
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No, because if you're thinking about it you're clearly not writing content that is intended for a user. I've worked with dozens of editors for publishers that really never think about keywords or the density of it. They're the best ranking sites in the world

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Agree to disagree. Every page has a keyword density to it. Just because your focus may be conversational and written to engage the user (which, i agree and also Implement), Google still views the keyword density as part of its algorithm to index what the page content is all about.
Im not suggesting to stuff each page with monotonous keywords. What I am saying is Google needs to know what each page implies. And they use keyword density as part of its algorithm to judge each page and correctly rank it in the index.
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_"And they use keyword density as part of its algorithm to judge each page and correctly rank it in the index." -Â _This part still doesn't make any sense. Because you're basically trying to maintain a 'healthy' balance that is a percentage in your tool. But nobody knows what the actual percentage is anyway and for sure that their interpretation is not a certain % but totally variable based on many more factors.
So summed up, you're looking at a metric that doesn't tell you anything. At best keyword density is a metric that will count how many times a word is being mentioned against all of them, which is a percentage. Not a density number that is useful.
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Again, agree to disagree. Which is the beauty of SEO.
If I create a page about snocones in phoenix but didnt mention snocones in phoenix on the text of the page, would my website rank highly on the search term, "snocones in phoenix"?
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Yes, it's called: Links. Even if you would mention the keyword, you're not creating any argument for why keyword density is a good metric at all or any relation on why you should be checking it. Keyword density is a flawed metric, it doesn't provide you with any context or guideline why a certain range is good or bad.
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Yes, I would agree links help as well, greatly. But link building is roughly 25-30% of the total SEO pie. My argument is about on page content, and utilizing a keyword density tool to communicate to Google how relevant the on page content is. The higher the density, but not so high to warrant a black hat technique, the more opportunity to rank on a certain keyword. If you cannot agree to this statement, I'm sure you're just focused on gathering MOZ points.
Nothing is an exact science in the SEO world. And if it is, you apparently work for Google...or Google works for you.
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Social signals are not a ranking factor.
Moreover, it has been demonstrated by Buzzsumo that the theory of social media amplification = more backlinks is false, because, as that study says:
- only a small percentage of all the blog posts published daily are able to obtain a minimum number of social share and
- in order to obtain at least one backlink, thousands of social shares are needed.
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This answer is good, because of the tools that are shared.
However... creating unique content doesn't mean your site will start earning links like crazy.
Umberto Eco once said that there are thousands of exceptional books that nobody ever read. The same can be told about all the "great content" published on the Internet. If you don't
If you don't put the same effort you put in creating your "quality content" into promoting it, then you're not going to obtain any backlink at all.
Therefore, more than thinking about what tool to use for creating content (please, don't confuse content with formats), I think it's better to suggest checking out the posts here on Moz under the Link Building category.
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Keyword Density is a myth as it has been demonstrated for several years !!! Please, don't spread myth in the Moz Q&A.
Some sources:
- https://moz.com/ugc/seo-myths-that-persist-keyword-density;
- https://moz.com/blog/keyword-targeting-density-and-cannibalization-whiteboard-friday
- http://www.alessiomadeyski.com/seo-myth-keyword-density/
- https://plus.google.com/+BillSlawski/posts/F9h4pVSXapT
- https://www.searchenginepeople.com/blog/how-search-really-works-the-keyword-density-myth.html
- http://resources.spyfu.com/4-seo-keyword-myths-you-shouldnt-buy-into/
- https://www.blackhatworld.com/seo/seo-myth-busting-01-keyword-density.961827/ (I mean, even black hats say it's a myth!)
- ....
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Beware with LSI, which is mostly a myth.
As Bill Slawski wrote in Inbound.org back in 2014:
_Latent Semantic indexing was invented and patented in 1990 before there was the web. _
_It was developed to help index small (less than 10,000 documents) databases of documents that didn't change much (like the Web does). _
_There have been a number of companies that started selling LSI Keyword generation tools that promised that they could help identify synonyms and words with the same or similar meaning. _
Where those fail is that the LSI process requires access to the database (of documents) in question to calculate which words are synonyms - and the only people with access to Google's database to do that kind of analysis (which isn't possible anyway since Google's index is much too big and changes much too frequently) is Google.
A much better metric is TF-IDF, albeit always being conscient that it is still a metric... not the bibie.
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The wonderful thing about SEO, is that every SEO expert can have a difference of opinion, and both can be correct.
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