Wave Issue 49

First...

How was your week? Get a lot done?

Q4 has started - are you ready?

If you have an affiliate site, be sure to have your pages and call to actions optimized. Get people clicking your affiliate links.

Have those Black Friday and Cyber Monday articles ready to go. As those articles may not rank, you can still direct traffic to them through notifications on your site.

Create notifications at the top of your site, on the sidebar, or in the posts themselves right at the top of your articles.

You can create similar gift pages for Christmas and other holiday presents.

Even if you're primarily an informational content site, you can still create these pages. You might get a nice boost in affiliate sales that you haven't had before because the site is all display ads.

Affiliate sales generally make much more than display ads, so it can't hurt to try it with your visitors.

Or are there other holiday-themed articles that you can create and utilize similar tactics to drive traffic to those articles?

Food sites could have Scary Foods for Halloween, New Thanksgiving Side Dishes, or Special Christmas Dishes in Green and Red.

You get the idea. Take advantage of the usual uptick in traffic and revenues in Q4 to earn more yourself!

SEO

How Autocomplete Works: The Patent Behind Google's Query Completions

Learn about the query completion patent that helps Google predict the best autocomplete answers for a user's search query.

Bill Slawski dives into Google's patent to see how Google's Autocomplete works. It's a technical article, but broken down to be easy to read.

Tools and Resources

Great Deals Out There for Niche Site and Content Creators

Noysi - Slack alternative that also combines video conferencing, tasks, file management, and even streaming to YouTube. Pretty slick product for only $49. Only 5000 codes available.

pCloud 500gb - I've been using pCloud myself as a Dropbox alternative. It's been great for me. I also use it to store the automatic backups for my sites as there's a lot of space. This is a good deal, saving over $50 from their normal lifetime deal.

TidyCal - Created by the AppSumo team themselves (AppSumo Original), it's a great calendar booking platform. It's basic, but has the core functionalities of connecting to different calendars, accepting PayPal/Stripe payments, and embedding on websites. All for only $29.

Ezoic Leap Review: My Web Speed Experience Over the Past Few Months

This is a good look at Ezoic Leap and how it works to speed sites up. I do have to say that it has sped up my sites with the ads. It's free too if you're a member of Ezoic. If you want a free speed tool, you could always sign up for Ezoic and use their Leap tool, but not display ads.

What is Ezoic Leap? Can the technology stack at Ezoic help your site speed and improve your core web vitals scores?

Have Your Favorite Keyword Tools Been LYING To You?

We all know SEO tools and their site traffic estimates are inaccurate. Authority Hackers looks at SEMRush, Ahrefs, SimilarWeb, Surfer, SERPstat, and Ubersuggest against each other and compared them to the real-time, accurate data provided by Google Analytics of almost 50 different sites to decipher just how accurate they are.

Content

How to Increase Topical Authority (The Easy Way)

He seemed to have read my affiliate keyword research article and did part 2 of my of article because I never got around to talking about silos yet :)

This video covers Topical Authority and how to make sure you're fully capturing the topic. He discusses using Google's Image Search to find entities. He also uses Entity Explorer, a cool tool to get entities from based on a search. It creates a mind map of keywords, similar to the image above.

This should give you an idea of how Google treats entities and why using a content optimizer like Frase or SurferSEO is so helpful when planning and writing content.

How To Write A Product Review in 2021 For Niche And Authority Sites

Learn how to write a product review with this step-by-step guide. Includes tips, actionable advice, and a product review template.

Link Building

What is Digital PR? Why It Matters in Quality Link-Building

Digital PR is a term that is often used in online marketing circles. Learn what digital PR means, why it’s important, how to use it to improve SEO rankings, and much more.

I was discussing about treating your niche sites as a brand last week. If you're going to do any PR or HARO, being able to present yourself and the site as a reputable brand. Journalists and Editors will be less-inclined to link to any untrustworthy sites.

How to build backlinks. A thread for SEO newbies.

The CMO of Ahrefs, Tim Soulo, post a thread on Twitter of how to get links. He says that conceptually, there are just 4 ways to get links:

Add: Manually add links to websites.
Ask: Email website owners & ask for a link.
Buy: Exchange money for links.
Earn: Get links from people who visited your page.

The 10 Commandments of Link Building

The Upper Ranks came up with their 10 Commandments of Link Building.

Put Humans First
Treat Link Building With Respect
Build Relevant Links Only
Take a Break Once in Awhile
Respect The Experts
Don’t Burn Bridges
Don’t Mislead Anyone
Don’t Take Too Many Shortcuts
Don’t Ask For a Link if Your Page Isn’t Linkworthy
Don’t Get Jealous of Other People’s Success

Education

These 5 Website Monetization Tactics Will Make You WAY More Money

Some good tactics from Matt Diggity on ways to monetize informational pages. As more people are creating informational-only (or almost) sites, it's good to figure out other ways to monetize your sites. Don't just rely on display ads.

Email list
Rent out your Facebook Pixel
Move the visitor down the funnel
Display ads
Private banner ads

Are URLS case sensitive? #AskGooglebot

In this episode of AskGooglebot, John Mueller explains how uppercase and lowercase letters in URLs affect search engine crawling and canonicalization. Do uppercase and lowercase letters matter?

Short answer: Yes, they matter.

The Perils of an .xyz Domain

An interesting look by the CEO of Spot discussing why they switched their domain from spot.xyz to spotvirtual.com. We're all building our niche sites now and choosing a domain name is one of the key aspects of setting up a site. When choosing a domain name, you might go with the $1 .xyz domains, but this article might make you reconsider. Gordon Hempton discusses:

Email Deliverability
SMS Deliverability
User Perception
Firewalls
Social Media Networks
How to Pick a Top-Level Domain

Buying Your First Website: 9 Safety Checks to Keep You Out of Trouble

Empire Flippers provides a 9-point checklist when assessing sites to buy.

Referring Domains
Homepage Backlinks
Dofollow and Nofollow Links
CCTLD Distribution
Anchor Text
Keywords
301 Redirects
Expired Domains
Traffic

Average Position Dropping in GSC is a Good Thing! Here's Why.

This is a good reminder to dig further into data and what it's telling you. I remember the first time that I saw the average position dropping in GSC and thinking that Google hit my site. But instead, it was actually Google liking my site and ranking for more keywords.

News

Google Announces Search Redesign Using MUM Algorithm

Google announced that MUM will be integrated into some searches on Google Search. Google’s search results page is undergoing changes that will introduce new ways to discover and explore topics for certain searches.

This new way of searching expands on the old way of searching for answers and introduce a more intuitive way to explore topics.

Google will in the coming months guide users down topic paths in a redesigned search experience for some searches that will be more visual.

Diggity Marketing SEO News Roundup - September 2021

Matt Diggity's monthly roundup of links. Many of these I've already shared in the past weeks, but it's a good refresher to read them again.

Like Niche Surfer?

Let me know! Reply or email me at [email protected] I’d love to know what you think and if you have any ideas.

I’d also appreciate it if you shared it with fellow niche surfers.

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Have a great week with taking your niche sites to another level!