With so much competition out there, how do you get your item pages ranking in Google?
Our SEO team have put together a guide that’s aimed specifically at Envato Authors, containing tips on everything from keyword research to links and images.
The team will also be active in this thread over the next week, to answer any SEO questions you might have. Please make the most of this opportunity, and ask away! We’ll close this Q&A thread on August 19th.
Ok, nice and useful information. Thank you!
But what about fixing Envato search engine?
Most authors on AudioJungle now name their items like “Hip hop is hip hop” or “Corporate piano for corporate piano” and these items have the highest rank when sorted by best match (which is ridiculous and Google search engine would never give high rank for these kind of titles).
The answer to this comes in two parts; one is looking at the impact from an organic traffic point of view, which is what the SEO team focuses on, the other is from an internal search and discovery point of view, which isn’t the core focus of the SEO team but still one we look in to from time to time.
So, from a strictly SEO point of view (traffic coming from Google, Bing, Baidu, Yandex, etc) keyword stuffing is a big no-no, it is seen as an attempt to manipulate the search results in a way which may negatively impact the experience of users actually heading to that page. Google have a short explanation here.
With regards to the search and discovery on the markets themselves, this is something we are always aiming to improve. I understand your frustrations with the repetition of target terms in item titles, but have spoken with the relevant team and it is a known issue that we are aiming to fix. For now, we are reaching out to authors who are engaging in keyword stuffing. You can expect more announcements and updates to our guidelines to come shortly.
Hi @mcncl Thanks for a useful article and a quick reply here.
I just have a couple of more questions regarding the duplicate title madness that is happening at AudioJungle.
Do you really think creating awareness of the keyword duplicates will minimise this behaviour? Or could it possible just make things even worse letting even more authors know about this current trend?
And how exactly are you reaching out to authors? With this topic? Will you pin it to the dashboard since not all authors are hanging around the forum? There are now insane amounts of duplicate keyword titles and it is increasing every week.
Needless to say the duplicate titles creates an extremely unprofessional customer experience for music search, and it has already been very bad for years with the regular keyword titles/lack of creative titles/music identity.
The effect of duplicating the keyword in the title creates a big jump in the search position so it is absolutely no wonder this is happening. I see no other solution then fixing the search system to solve this problem.
As an example of why updating title policies won’t help with this issue, you can check out Ambient Music, Happy Music, Corporate Music etc which all includes the keyword “music” which is not allowed according to the current naming policy: Music Titles on AudioJungle
Recently the “10 Best Youtube Music Tracks” were promoted on the Envato YT channel and one of the tracks is called…drumroll… “Music for Youtube”.
I think we authors could work on SEO for ages, but as long as that aggressive Elements banner at the top of all our pages is stealing customers away from us there’s no point IMHO… Eventually we’re just driving extra traffic to elements. Is that banner here to stay forever?
Can some one post a tutorial on how to track the sales from external resources with Google Analitycs?
If I pay a blog to promote my item I need to know how much sales the blog is generating, I’m not referring to referral earnings only but to any sale generate by the link in the blog.
1.There isn’t a definitive yes/no answer to this I’m afraid. I would promote your other items where it makes sense; is the item you want to promote related to the one the customer is currently viewing? Would it be an item for them to naturally consider in addition to the current one?
Providing a link to another item does increase its discoverability, but one should ensure correct anchor text etc when doing so (see Q2)
2.I’m not an expert in UX and so have no input on whether you should use a banner or text; they both work in the same way from an SEO perspective, provided they are used correctly.
With text links, the anchor is taken care of for you; whatever you use as “the link” will be the anchor text, ie, the thing that Google etc consider as your target term. This should be relatively detailed. For example, using background music as your anchor text would mean you wanted the target page to be a provider of that, but that term is so broad and competitive you likely won’t see any organic results. Using something like saxophone office party music would be more descriptive and target your niche more accurately.
If you’re planning on using an image, then ensure you are using alt tags correctly.
3.There is no optimal amount, but keep in mind that any images or links are not considered part of your content; flooding a description with links to other items will see your organic performance drop as a result of spamming the user with links and keyword stuffing. Also keep in mind how many times you would be expecting the user to click on a link, then back to get to the first item, rinse and repeat.
I’m afraid I don’t have much insight in to the Elements banner on markets. I’ll reach out to someone who I think may be able to help you, but I’m happy to help with any SEO questions you may have in the meantime.
A quick moderator note on the scope of this Q&A thread: our SEO team primarily handles the visibility of Envato Market pages to external search engines like Google, and they’re here to help you get the best performance from your item pages. Please keep this thread on topic, and make sure you have asked your SEO questions while we have the specialists available - they’ll be running this Q&A until next Monday (August 19).
On the duplicate keyword front, our Author Integrity team has been reaching out directly to affected authors, and we’ll be using email, forum posts and author dashboards to communicate policy changes around keyword stuffing and item naming. The initial phase of this project has focused on ThemeForest, with AudioJungle changes following close behind. There will be more formal announcements about both of those phases soon, in a separate thread.
If Envato want to increse traffic via authors items pages with SEO — not bad to take a step towards the community and remove the banner with Elements from items pages with the condition (if user come via Google to item page or via Affiliate link).
it makes no sense to do any SEO if Elements Offer ($33 for gazilion downloads) - will always be cooler than any offer from the market.
Two responses, first the shorter one:
There really shouldn’t be more than one h1 tag per page. Even if more than one were permissible, they shouldn’t be on template boilerplate (e.g. “Featured Item” on he /user/ page).
We will look into this for both /user/ and /item/ pages.
Now the longer one:
In our view and from an SEO perspective, there are not a lot of reasons in favor of multiple h1 tags in a single page.
An h1 is your main page heading. You having multiple h1’s on the same page is equivalent to you saying your page is about more than one thing. This in turn contradicts the SEO best practice of building your page around a single topic.
Therefore, per page, there should only be a single h1, but you can use as many h2/h3/hx as you see fit (and as long as they are the heading of a page section that is worthy of having a heading in the first place).
We will also look into the possibility of h1’s on /item/ pages being injected via author provided item descriptions. Should this be the case, we will have to address this issue as well.
