Search Engine Optimization Archives

Benefits of SEO for Small Businesses

September 9, 2019 Rozanne Wilds Search Engine Optimization, Small Business, Web Design No comments

SEO stands for search engine optimization. When optimizing a website for search engines, there’s a focus on attracting relevant traffic. But what does SEO entail and what are the benefits of SEO for small businesses? A lot of business owners mistakenly believe that SEO is irrelevant to their marketing. However, a well-optimized website can deliver excellent results for businesses.

Can SEO Help Your Business?

The short answer is yes, definitely.

SEO is all about helping your website rank on search engines like Google. So, if your website is optimized for search, it will show up on the first pages of search engines whenever people search for your product or service.

There are various SEO tactics that digital marketing companies use to help improve website SEO, these include:

The use of relevant keywords throughout your website copy
Relevant link building tactics to improve your website’s domain authority
Skilled SEO web development
Regularly updating your website with new content

If your website is properly optimized for SEO, you’ll be able to attract traffic from relevant internet searches.

For instance, if your business is in the construction industry, your website SEO will be focused on attracting traffic from search queries related to building and construction. Better yet, your SEO can focus on attracting traffic from search queries from people looking for construction in your area.

This is the basic principle of how SEO can help your business. But there’s more to SEO than meets the eye. Aside from increased search engine traffic, an SEO website can offer more advantages.

Benefits of SEO for Small Business

Many small business owners view SEO as an advanced marketing technique that requires a big budget. But SEO isn’t a marketing strategy that’s reserved for fortune 500 companies. Small businesses can also benefit from relevant SEO marketing. These some of the benefits of SEO for small businesses.

Increase Organic Website Traffic

If someone visits your website by clicking a non-sponsored listing directly from their search engine, this person is supplying organic traffic to your website. In other words, your website can get organic traffic for free if it’s optimized for search.

Other forms of traffic to your website can include:

Paid traffic: This is when someone visits your website by clicking a sponsored listing on Google, or an ad on social media. Basically, any traffic you get through paid online advertising is paid traffic.
Social traffic: If you promote your website on social media (i.e. your Facebook page, business Twitter account or Pinterest) and people click your social links to arrive at your website, this is called social traffic.
Referral traffic: This is traffic from sources that aren’t search engines or social media sites. If your business is on local business directory and people click a link to your website from the directory, that’s a source of referral traffic.
Email traffic: If your business has an email marketing newsletter with links that refer people to your website, that’s a source of email traffic.

Some other traffic sources to your site can also be direct (where people paste your website URL directly into their browsers) or unknown.

Of all the different kinds of web traffic you can get, organic traffic is the best. That’s because organic traffic is free and you won’t need to constantly promote your website on social media or in email newsletters to keep a consistent amount of traffic coming in.

SEO is the only way to improve your website’s indexability in search engines.

User-friendly Websites

An important aspect of a website that’s optimized for search is that it must be user friendly. Search engine crawlers look at critical data such as website loading times when selecting what websites to display in top search results.

A website that’s too slow to load will turn many people off, so it’s important that your business website is optimized for quick loading times.

Another thing to consider is how responsive your website is. Nowadays, so many people are using mobile devices like phones and tablets to browse the internet. Search engines try to give users the best possible experience by only listing websites that display well across all different devices.

Getting a user-friendly website that’s developed specially for search engines is one area where getting professional SEO help is most necessary. Your website’s functionality is at the core of all your other SEO efforts.

SEO Can Be Local or Global

Your website SEO can be focused around attracting traffic from your local area. So if your business operates locally, your SEO can focus on attracting local people who are potential customers to your website.

There are some great options available, like Google My Business and Bing Local to help local businesses even more in attracting customers that are situated in the area.

On the other hand, many businesses can benefit from attracting traffic from all over the world. Hotels, travel companies and software providers don’t need to stick to local SEO because their customers could be anywhere in the world. In such an instance, these businesses can benefit from an SEO strategy that’s will attract relevant traffic from all over the world.

SEO Builds Trust

Any business can have a website or Facebook page, but not any business can rank on the first pages of search engines for industry-specific searches.

This is one of the major benefits of SEO for small businesses. Even small businesses can rank high for popular search terms. Once your website becomes a known source of information for your industry, customers will trust your brand.

SEO Only Gets Better

As mentioned, a lot of marketing tactics to attract website traffic are temporary. You might see a spike in web traffic after sending out a marketing email, or publishing a Facebook post, but the results won’t last.

Long-term SEO strategies such as content marketing, deliver results for longer. In many cases, the traffic you get to your best blog posts will only grow over time, not diminish. The great thing about this is that you still only pay once, but can reap the benefits of a good content piece for years to come.

Similarly, a website that’s designed with SEO and user-friendliness in mind, won’t stop delivering results right after it goes live. On the contrary, your business website should grow over time as a marketing asset for your company.

SEO Is Affordable

Of all the benefits of SEO for small business, this is one you might not have expected. But SEO is a cheaper form of marketing compared to many alternatives.

When you take into consideration that your business can keep enjoying the benefits of SEO long after your first investment, your initial input costs become so much less.

If you compare SEO to placing advertisements in local newspapers, or running ad campaigns on radio or television, SEO delivers a much better ROI.

Another benefit is that an SEO website opens up more marketing opportunities. You can use your website as a hub to direct your social media followers to your sales pages, or to get email subscribers and grow your marketing reach.

How to Do SEO for Your Business

When starting out with SEO for your business, having a website that’s well-optimized should be your first priority. There are various ways to go about getting a website. Some businesses opt for a website builder such as Squarespace. However, building your own website on this kind of platform usually isn’t a good long-term choice.

The best, most reliable platform to build a website is a self-hosted WordPress site. The good thing about WordPress is that it’s reasonably easy to use, even for beginners. There are some premium themes available that allow business owners to build their own websites quite easily at a low cost.

The problem is that even on an easy-to-use website builder, it takes skill to craft a great SEO website. You want your website to look good and be highly functional. Doing everything yourself will require a lot of skills such as graphics design, web design and more.

The easiest way to get a great SEO website is to hire an experienced web design company to handle the project for you.

The great thing about WordPress is that you can start off with a budget website you built yourself, and save for a more sophisticated SEO site while you already have your website up. You won’t need to migrate your website from one platform to another once you’re ready to invest in web development services.

Local SEO vs Organic SEO: How to Choose?

July 24, 2019 Rozanne Wilds Search Engine Optimization No comments

It’s no secret that the internet has drastically transformed society. From social media changing the way we stay in touch with friends, to email reforming our business communication. Local marketing is no exception. In the past, phonebook listings and local adverts were some of the best ways to market businesses locally. These days, people are far more likely to search for local businesses online. This means the best way to advertise a local business is to make sure people can find it in online searches.

Search engine optimization (or SEO for short) has helped countless businesses attract clients. However, not all practices are the same. When looking at SEO, there’s a distinct difference between local SEO vs organic SEO. What your business needs most will depend on several factors, but a lot of businesses can benefit most from a combination local and organic SEO techniques.

What Is SEO for Businesses?

Before distinguishing between local and organic SEO, it’s important to have a basic understanding of what SEO entails. As the term “search engine optimization” suggests, SEO is the practice of improving a website with the goal of helping search engines list it.

Some common strategies to help a business website list in relevant searches include:

Adding enough relevant keywords in the website content
Establishing and managing a business social media presence
Optimizing the company website to offer a user-friendly experience
Listing a company in relevant business directories

This is only a short summary of what SEO entails. Entire books can be written on each one of the above-mentioned points. Search engine algorithms are always changing, and so SEO practices must also adapt to accommodate new criteria set by search engines for indexability.

Regardless, there are certain facets of SEO that remain stable. For instance, the inclusion of keywords in website content is always advantageous. Search engines scan website texts in order to find phrases and words relevant to searches. Although the use of relevant keywords isn’t the only thing search engines look at when choosing the most relevant search results, it will always remain an important part of SEO.

Local SEO vs Organic SEO: What’s the Difference?

Understanding the concept of SEO helps to distinguish between local and organic SEO techniques. Although both forms of SEO focus on helping a website list in searches, the main difference is the audience local SEO will attract vs organic SEO.

What is Local SEO?

Quite simply, local SEO is focused around helping a business attract website traffic from local searches. Local searches in this context simply means that the searches are specific to a location. The exact location of the search could be as broad as a whole country, or as narrow as a specific town.

Examples of local searches could include the following:

Tourist attractions in the United States
Car insurance in South Carolina
Web design services in Miami, FL

The first example is a local search, but not a very specific one. Results will be relevant to the specific place mentioned in the search, but in this case the “place” in question is the whole US. As a result, listings could include geographic locations from any state or city. That’s not very helpful for someone looking to tour only a specific part of the country.

In the second example, the place mentioned in the search is the state of South Carolina. Getting listed for searches specific to a state is much more useful for most businesses. A lot of companies only operate in one state and are looking to attract customers from that region.

The third example focuses on both the state and the city in which the business operates. A lot of small to medium sized businesses only operate in one town or city. A local bakery, for instance, will target customers from the city where it operates. In such a case, there’s no use attracting potential customers that are too far out of the town where the business is located.

In practice, this means that local SEO aims to help local businesses attract clientele. Just how local the SEO will be, depends on the needs of a specific business.

What is Organic SEO?

Organic SEO is all about listing a website for specific keywords or phrases. Unlike with local SEO, the keywords you’re trying to list the website for might not be specific to a region.

Here are some examples of organic SEO keywords people might search for:

How to get more sleep
Best apple pie recipes
Happy songs to listen to

The important thing here is that none of these search phrases target a specific place. They’re all general searches. People from all over the world could search for these things. The content a search engine lists in the results can also originate from any country.

Theoretically, organic SEO searches have the potential to bring in far more website traffic, but website visitors can be from any place in the world – not just locally.

For businesses, listing in organic searches often means to list in industry-specific searches rather than location-specific ones. A plumber might have website content that shows up in a search for “how to fix a leaky tap?”, for instance.

The benefit of listing for general search terms isn’t necessarily attracting more customers directly. Instead, having content that lists for industry-related search queries can help you establish yourself as an expert in your industry. In turn, this will cause potential customers to see your company as a trustworthy business in your industry.

The Difference Between Local SEO and Organic SEO Listings

Till now, the main focus was to explain the difference between local and organic SEO in terms of local vs general enquiries. However, there’s another difference between local and organic search – Google’s listing format.

When searching for a term such as “car insurance in South Carolina” Google has a special section to list local businesses that suit the criteria of the search. After these local results, there are also some normal Google listings, which you can find underneath the first three results.

Google has a local listing format which is integrated with Maps and other Google services.

The first three listings are local businesses and they have a physical address linking to Google Maps – these are local listings. All the subsequent listings are location-specific organic listings. This can seem confusing at first. After all, can’t all listings for location-specific searches just be local listings?

Google also has organic listings for location-specific searches. These listings will usually be relevant to a local search query, but they aren’t integrated with Maps.

To clear up the confusion, it’s important to understand that only Google has separate listing formats for local vs organic listings. Other search engines, such as DuckDuckGo and Bing only have the organic listings in their results.

Google’s “local listings” section is actually filled with results from a Google service called “Google My Business”. So actually “local listings” can also be called “Google My Business listings”. Essentially, the difference between local and organic listings is simply where Google gets them from.

Local listings are from Google My Business, specifically. When opened, a local listing will display a company’s Google My Business profile and its location on Google Maps.

Organic listings can be from all over the internet. Quite often, organic listings link directly to the websites of relevant local businesses. Organic listings can also link to social media profiles or online business directories.

More About Google My Business Listings

The Google My Business service is almost like Google’s own version of a business directory. It’s a service Google offers to help local businesses get found online. Google My Business is integrated with other Google services like Google Maps and Google Reviews. This allows customers to easily get a good overview of a local business. As an added benefit, a business can also link to their business website directly from the GMB listing.

The fact that Google My Business is integrated with Google Maps allows users to quickly search for local businesses. Google will then list results based on the location of the user in proximity to relevant local business. Users can then use their GPS on Maps to travel to the location of the address listed on Google for a specific business

Local SEO vs Organic SEO: What Does Your Business Need?

Understanding the difference between local and organic SEO can help you decide what’s best for your business. Generally though, a combination of both local and organic SEO is best.

Seeing as most search engines only have the organic listing section, showing up in location-specific organic results can boost your business substantially. Getting your business website listed for searches that are specific to both your industry and location is still considered local SEO. You’re targeting a local audience with local searches. It’s simply a form of local SEO which aims at improving where your website lists in organic results.

On the other hand, listing for search terms that are related to your industry rather than location is also helpful. Listing in results for common queries customers might have establishes your business website as a trustworthy source of information for both search engines and potential customers.

If more of your business website content appears in searches, your website will become more indexable for future searches as well. As a result, your website can also be more likely to appear in location-specific searches. So, to conclude, local and organic SEO practices and techniques can and ideally should compliment each other to help your business attract customers online.

How to Do Online Marketing for Your Business

July 5, 2019 Rozanne Wilds Business Growth, Online Marketing, Search Engine Optimization No comments

Online marketing is fast becoming one of the most essential marketing channels. Every business of every size – whether it be a large corporate company or a family owned shop – can benefit from online marketing. But the world of online marketing is competitive and ever-changing. Search engines are always updating their algorithms and social sites are constantly add and remove features.

With so much change, it’s difficult to know how to do online marketing for your business. Perhaps you already have an online presence that you want to boost, or perhaps your business isn’t even online yet. Whichever way it goes, it’s never too late to establish an online presence for your company and reap the rewards of your marketing efforts.

The Basics of Online Marketing

Before diving into just how to do online marketing for your business, there are a few basics terms you must know. Knowing the terms below could help you gain a better understanding of online marketing concepts while doing research to improve your strategy.

Inbound Marketing

Inbound marketing is a widely used term for a marketing strategy that involves attracting customers to your business via techniques that will help customers who already want your product or service find you. This is opposed to driving customers away with unwanted marketing material. Offering value to potential customers via your marketing materials is an important part of inbound marketing.

The opposite of inbound marketing is called interruption marketing. As the term suggests, interruption marketing techniques are unsolicited and completely unwelcomed by your audience. An example of interruption marketing a TV advert that shows during your favorite show, or a marketing phone call.

Online, interruption marketing could include ads that play while you’re trying to watch online videos, or the promotional content in your social media news feeds.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

As the name implies, search engine optimization is all about improving your website to help it rank in search results.

SERPs

This is a common abbreviation for search engine results pages. Ideally, you want your website to rank in the top SERPs, as most users never go further than the first results page.

Search Engine Marketing

Search engine marketing is a broader term than SEO. It’s used to describe any marketing that’s intended to help your website show on Google – regardless if you’re paying for ads, or showing up in organic search results.

Pay per click (PPC)

Also called cost per click advertising, this is a form of paid online advertising where your advert is displayed in search engine results or on social media sites. As the name suggests, you pay every time an individual clicks your advert. PPC is the most widely used form of paid online advertising. The benefit of PPC is that you only pay for results, so you can get a much better return on your investment. Alternatively, you could pay for impressions, which means you pay for every person who sees your ad. This form on paid online advertising is called cost per impression, and it’s abbreviated as CPM (You might be wondering why it isn’t abbreviated as CP.

There’s still a lot of other online marketing terms that aren’t listed above, but the terms listed here should give you a good overall understanding of online marketing concepts going forward.

Why Inbound is the Best Form of Online Marketing

If you’re a small to medium sized business trying to get real leads from your online marketing, you’ll get a much better return on investment if you opt for inbound. That’s because inbound marketing is aimed at attracting people who already show interest in your product or service. Instead of annoying your audience with disruptive ads, your customers will discover you online by searching for you.

SEO is a good example of inbound marketing. By optimizing your website for search, you can help potential customers find your business on Google. However, even paid PPC listings in SERPs can be a form of inbound marketing if done properly.

Because inbound marketing is the best place to start when establishing an online presence for your business, this post will focus of different inbound marketing techniques.

How to Do Online Marketing: What You’ll Need

Before you can start doing online marketing for your business, there are some things you’ll need. Firstly, you’ll need your own company website. A website is one of the most essential parts of your online marketing strategy.

Secondly, you’ll need to create social media accounts for your business. Even if you aren’t planning to use social media yet, it’s wise to setup your profiles to reserve your username on each platform.

Lastly, you’ll need to have enough time to invest in online marketing. While the prospect of growing your company through online marketing seems exciting, it’s not always easy. After a while, you’ll likely find you aren’t getting response you hoped for from your marketing efforts.

Don’t let this discourage you, there are literally billions of websites competing for search engine rankings. It’s unlikely that yours will shoot to the top straight away. Over time, your collective efforts should start to pay off and you’ll start reaping rewards – it just takes more time and hard work than most people anticipate.

How to Improve Your SEO

One of the best ways to get results from online marketing is through SEO. If you’re website is listed at the top of Google’s search pages, a lot of people will be able to find your business online.

What Are Keywords?

The first SEO concept you must understand is keywords. Keywords are words or phrases that people often search for. For instance, the word “love” is searched for approximately 3 350 000 times a month, making it one of the most popular Google searches. Seeing as “love” is such a popular search term, you could get a lot of traffic if you ranked high when people search the internet for this word.

However, to attract leads, you must rank for keywords that your potential customers are looking for. A dental practice must rank for searches related to dentistry, whereas a florist needs to rank for searches related to flowers. Ideally, you also want your website to show up in local searches, such as “dentist near me” or “florist in Miami”.

The phrases that you’re trying to rank for are your keywords. Try to rank think of different ideas for what people might search to find a website like yours. Think of as many different keywords as you can. You don’t have to tailor all your website content to rank only for one popular search phrase.

To get your website to rank in SERPs, you must include your target keywords in your website content. A great way to start is by including keywords in the content of your main website pages, such as your Home, About and FAQ pages, for instance.

When writing content with keywords in mind, it’s important to have a balance. You want search engines to find your content, but you don’t want to include the keyword so much that your writing becomes repetitive. Repeatedly stuffing keywords into your writing can cause search engines to penalize your website and mark your content as spam.

Starting a Business Blog

The more keywords your website can rank for, the more traffic you’ll get. If your website consists only of your main website pages, you’ll be limited as to how many different search phrases you can rank for.

Blogging is an excellent way to broaden the range of search phrases your website can rank for. Every blog post can target a different set of key phrases. This will help more people find your business online through your blog.

When blogging, it’s important to write posts that are informative. Look for common questions people ask about your industry and try to write posts to answer them.

Social Media Marketing

Social media is a great platform to help people find your business online. People use social sites to interact with their favorite brands and connect with businesses. Networking is also a major part of social media, which means a social media presence could open up business opportunities you would otherwise miss out on.

A lot of people skip Google and head straight to social sites like Facebook when searching for products and services. In this case, a proper Facebook page is what would help you get found online. Another benefit of having a business Facebook page is that it’s like your own mini website and it’s easy to setup.

Of course, you can use your social media profiles to attract attention to your business. By posting about special offers at your company and other news, you can attract traffic to your business website and make more sales.

Pay Per Click Advertising

PPC can help your website show up in relevant Google searches under the “ads” section in the results. To run a PPC campaign, you need to choose keywords you want to rank for, as well as what products or services you want to advertise. You can set your campaigns with relevant keywords in Google Adwords.

You can also set negative keywords in Adwords to avoid showing your ad in certain results. So, if you have a business that sells jerseys, but you find that people who arrive at your website search for “jersey country”, you can set a negative keyword such as “country” to avoid getting traffic from searches that aren’t related to the clothing item you sell.

The information in this post barely scratches the surface of online marketing. Learning to do online marketing will take a lot of time. Whether it be keyword research, blogging, social media marketing or PPC campaigns, there’s so much more you can learn than is mentioned in this post.

To get good online marketing results from the start, you can hire a professional online marketing company to do your marketing. Find out more about what an online marketing company can do for your business.

Google Working to put Mobile First with New Index

October 17, 2016 Victor Gonzalez Search Engine Optimization No comments

Within the next couple of months, Google is planning to create a new mobile index that will become the primary index for responding to queries. While Google will maintain a separate index it will not be as up-to-date as this new mobile index.

This bit of news was released on October 13th during a Pubcon keynote address given by the Google webmaster trends analyst, Gary Illyes. Illyes did not release a timeline for the creation and release of this new index during his keynote speech; however, in a follow-up that he did with Search Engine Land, he did state that this would happen within the next few months. He did not clarify if it would occur before the end of 2016.

This is not the first that the public has heard of Google releasing a mobile index. In 2015, Google announced that it was putting time and energy into the concept of a mobile index during SMX East. Since that announcement, Google has clearly made the decision that such an index makes sense and has made movement forward in the creation of this product.

Throughout 2015/2016, Google has been prioritizing and streamlining their mobile abilities. In 2015, they tweaked their algorithm so that websites that have been optimized for mobile were receiving a higher priority. This year, they added Accelerated Mobile Pages to their search results so that users were able to select websites that have a quicker loading capacity while they were on their phones.

This new search index should enhance mobile user’s experiences with the Internet, but we aren’t sure how it will affect those who are still doing most of their work on their desktops. While desktop searches have become sparser as more of the population goes mobile, there are still many users who primarily access the Internet this way. We haven’t yet received more information regarding how this mobile index will work for the public, which has left us with plenty of questions.

For instance, seeing as the mobile index will take over as the primary search index for Google, will the public still be able to use it for any desktop queries that they may have? If so, will the mobile index only contain information that has mobile friendly context and will that information be out of date? Additionally, how out of date will the desktop search engine be once this new index is released and how will that affect desktop users?

The largest chance will most likely be that by creating a mobile index Google can begin to change the way that its algorithm is run. Currently, data is extracted from desktop content to help Google determine how pages should be ranked for mobile users. That means that the signals that mobile users are currently seeing, such as links and page speed, are being generated from a desktop algorithm. In short, you may not actually see these items on a smartphone when they are generated from a desktop algorithm.

How to Build a Sustainable Long-Term SEO Strategy: 5 Keys to Remember

September 14, 2015 Victor Gonzalez Search Engine Optimization No comments

Whether it’s Panda, Hummingbird, or even Mobilegeddon, keeping track of Google’s algorithm changes can easily be considered a full-time job. In fact, it’s common for Google to change their algorithm at least once a day. This is ultimately why having a long-term search engine optimization (SEO) strategy is vitally important to improving your website’s PageRank. So, what does it take to put together a sustainable long-term SEO strategy?

1. Consistent Content Production

A number of companies assume that online marketing merely involves having a website, being present on social media and then leaving everything on autopilot. If only it were that easy. Online/inbound marketing takes a lot of time and must be geared towards continually raising the bar on content creation. This requires a commitment to constantly produce engaging content and a willingness to spend the time researching the type of content your customers want.

2. Keyword-Focused Research

It’s not just a question of disseminating your website’s analytics. It’s ultimately about having the ability to research those keywords and keyword-phrases your customers use to find your company and its products in online searches. Those keywords must then be used properly within your content. You need just enough keywords for the content to be seen as value-added, but not so much that it is seen as keyword-stuffing. It’s a balancing act, one where you must remain up-to-date with the most recent Google algorithm change.

3. A Focus on Local SEO

Ultimately, you want to dominate your local market. You want to be seen as a valued source of relevant and timely information. This means having a local SEO strategy that continually positions your company at the top of local online searches. Success means you’re following the changes pushed forward by Google’s Hummingbird algorithm change in August of 2013.

This aforementioned change was meant to simplify how users find relevant local sources. As such, a solid local SEO strategy involves producing content geared towards information-based queries, navigational-based queries and transactional-based queries. This is by no means a simple task. Again, it’s about finding that happy medium between value-added content and keyword stuffing.

4. Using Video to Engage an Audience

The reality is that people would much rather watch a two minute video that is full of pertinent information than they would reading a non-descript webpage. It’s human nature to be drawn to vivid images and video. An engaging video that speaks directly to your customer base is a surefire way to position your company as the proverbial market leader. In fact, in today’s marketplace, it’s far more likely that someone will view and share a video on social media than they would a webpage with no videos, no images and nothing other than the written word.

5. Focusing on the Right Social Media Strategy

A long-term SEO strategy must encompass the right social media strategy. After all, if viewers aren’t willing to share your content, then how are you going to build your online brand? Ultimately, it’s not just a question of putting up a bunch of social media share buttons on your landing pages. Instead, it’s about tapping into the right social media strategy for the right customer segment, the right market and the right industry.

A Miami website design firm must take the time to sit down and iron out a proactive SEO strategy, one that leverages a strong social media presence with engaging video and bright imagery. Make sure you work with a firm that matches your business to a content strategy that reaches your target audience.

5 Things You Need to Know About Google’s Mobile-Friendly Algorithm Update

April 6, 2015 Victor Gonzalez Search Engine Optimization No comments

The number of mobile devices capable of surfing the Internet is rapidly increasing. There may soon come a day when the number of mobile devices that can browse video, post to Facebook, and check email may outnumber the number of laptop and desktop computers that consumers use.

In an attempt to prepare for this change, Google is taking one big step towards incentivizing websites to become more mobile friendly with this latest update to the Google search algorithm.

Let’s examine the things you need to know about this mobile-friendly update to Google’s search algorithms.

Google Will Add a New Bot

In response to the popularity that mobile devices have enjoyed and their future prospects, Google’s update will likely bring about the addition of a new spider.

While there are no details about it yet, it’s likely that this spider will utilize an Android user-agent. This will allow it to crawl links that not only exist on standard websites, but also those found within mobile apps and single-page websites.

This new spider will likely give bonuses to websites that are mobile friendly.

Mobile-Friendly Won’t Affect Desktop Rankings, Yet

Google stated that mobile and desktop rankings will remain mostly separate. While this means you won’t see a drop in your desktop rankings, you can expect that your mobile traffic might drop completely if you don’t optimize your website for mobile viewers.

Another point to acknowledge is that this separation between desktop and mobile rankings may not last forever.

This Change is Big

With regards to mobile rankings, it has been stated that this update will change rankings significantly more than Panda or Penguin ever did. Considering that these updates were the reasons countless websites dropped in ranking while others rose to the top, it’s a sure thing that this update will bring dramatic changes.

As history tends to repeat itself, this may be your opportunity to take advantage of mobile traffic to get ahead of the competition or to fall behind it.

Responsive Designs Surpass Other Mobile Alternatives

Alternatives for mobile-friendly designs do exist. The most prominent of these alternatives, and likely the least involved for businesses, is to utilize a mobile subdomain.

The problem is that these alternatives will bring numerous difficulties. They may produce duplicate content penalties while requiring another webmaster to oversee that these mobile subdomains stay updated.

Responsive web design offers an amazingly simple answer. By altering the way a website appears based on the device that is used to view it and the resolution of that device, the same content can be delivered in a form optimized for the device being used.

In other words, imagine having a website that changes in response to the needs of your visitors. You can ensure that the same information gets displayed in a format that doesn’t detract and one that search engines like Google will value.

You’re Going to Need a New Layout

The bottom line concerning this mobile-friendly change to Google’s search engine is that you’re going to need to retool your current web design. Your website needs to adapt to the present needs of your consumers and the future demands that they may have.

Responsive web design offers the best solution for the many challenges that your company will face with regards to the Internet. It provides a sleek, elegant solution that doesn’t require any extra work than your current website does.

By investing in a response design, you’re preparing for the future and ensuring that your business caters to your customers. This will enable your website to pull ahead of the competition both in terms of search engine rankings and customers.

Contact us to learn more about what responsive is and how it will benefit your business as more mobile devices become accessible to consumers.

How To Do WordPress SEO Like a Boss

January 27, 2015 Victor Gonzalez Search Engine Optimization No comments

If you make SEO mistakes on your WordPress site, you could be seriously limiting your search engine ranking. Search engines don’t care about how pretty your website is or the cleverness of your blog design. Learn how to properly optimize your WordPress website or blog with the following tips.

Install SEO WordPress Plugin

Install a WordPress plugin, even if you’ve optimized your site as much as possible without the plugin. Adding a plugin that’s specifically for WordPress SEO will help optimization even more. There are a lot to choose from (Yoast, All-in-One, and SEO Ultimate, to name a few) so weigh the pros and cons of each and make sure to read user reviews.

Optimize Permalink Structure

The URL for each page should contain keywords, not numbers. For example, if you have a page about SEO tips, the page name should be mywebsite.com/seo-tips, not mywebsite.com/?878787. Using understandable permalinks will also help you build trust with your social media audience – nobody wants to click a link that they don’t understand.

Add XML Sitemap

There are a ton of WordPress SEO plugins available. When deciding which one is right for you, make sure it has a function that auto-generates XML sitemaps. Since organization is so important when it comes to SEO, an XML sitemap is a necessity. Also, the plugin should update the sitemap every time you update the website and auto-submit the updated sitemaps to search engines.

Include Meta Titles & Descriptions

Add a custom meta header and description, which is different from the header that your visitors will see. Meta titles and descriptions are just for SEO purposes and search engines. Make sure to use the right keywords; cleverness should take a backseat to search effectiveness when it comes to the meta sections.

Link Internally

Link to other posts within a post. Let’s say you’re writing about SEO tips on your blog. If you’ve already written other related blog posts, link to those posts within the current post. Getting links to your content is a big part of SEO and ranking – one of the easiest ways to increase inbound linking is to do it from your own posts. Just make sure that you’re linking to relevant content. If you have a blog post about traveling to San Francisco, you don’t want to link to a blog post about training a new puppy just for the sake of getting more backlinks.

Noindex the Right Pages

While you should index relevant pages, avoid indexing every single page on your website. Certain pages shouldn’t be indexed – anything that doesn’t provide value to a regular reader or that might be considered duplicate content (e.g., landing pages for pay-per-click campaigns) should be left out. An other example, you probably have a “Thank You” page for new e-mail subscribers – this is the type of page that doesn’t need to be indexed.

Write Great Content

If you run a business writing company and your main priority is finding new clients who need press releases, you may want a blog post or a page about “Why You Need a Professional to Write Your Press Release.” You’ll add important keywords and try to drive traffic to this page. However, if the writing and the content is low quality, you won’t get much attention, which means you’ve wasted a lot of effort. Search engines favor high quality content that a lot of people want to visit – make sure your content is great from the beginning.

Natural Keywords

When it comes to writing that great content, using keywords is important, but having high quality content is even more important. The secret is that if you’re sticking to the topic at hand, most of the necessary keywords will get in there naturally. If necessary, hire a professional writer. You can have the best SEO plugins in the world and master all of the tricks, but you’ll get nowhere if you don’t have excellent copy.

SEO for Images

Whenever you use an image on your website, come up with a good, keyword rich file name. Google uses images when calculating ranking. Instead of File879.jpg, rename your image something like SEO-Tips-2015.jpg.

Choose the Right Theme

Pick a WordPress theme that’s SEO optimized. Certain themes use a ton of code for the design and layout. When Google has to get through all of that code to find the actual content, it’s more difficult to rank your website. More code means less keyword density and content. Pick a theme that performs quickly and that’s highly compatible with SEO.

When it comes to implementing SEO on your WordPress site, you can read all of the up-to-date articles on the topic and learn the ropes yourself. If you don’t have time to do it right, though, consider hiring a professional to handle it for you or using plugins that walk you through every important step.

Don’t Waste Your Money On These 3 SEO Services

January 14, 2015 Victor Gonzalez Search Engine Optimization No comments

Most business owners who are attempting to expand their brand online have a vague idea of what SEO is, but don’t necessarily know how to go about utilizing SEO to help their own business grow. Unfortunately, a lot of major corporations have preyed on business owners’ ignorance about online marketing and have created paid SEO services that are wholly ineffective. Don’t waste your money on these pointless services that won’t give your company the personalized attention that it deserves. Here are three SEO services that you shouldn’t waste your money on, in addition to what you should do instead if you want your business to thrive.

GoDaddy

GoDaddy offers its customers an SEO service for only $2.69 a month. For those who don’t understand SEO or are new to the world of online marketing, this deal sounds like an absolute dream. Who wouldn’t want to get their website on Google and receive a list of these “keywords” we’ve been hearing so much about?

Unfortunately, GoDaddy is pretty much counting on the fact that most website owners are uninformed about SEO. To put it in very basic terms, GoDaddy will submit your website to search engines and give you a list of keywords, i.e., phrases that are popularly searched on Google and Yahoo that pertain to your business that you should include on your website to generate traffic.

Even the most technological greenhorn could master what GoDaddy does for its SEO customers in an afternoon. Furthermore, GoDaddy is offering SEO services the same way that McDonalds is providing nutrition. What GoDaddy is offering isn’t really SEO, it’s an incredibly basic plan that is unlikely to do anything significant for your business. Despite its low cost, this is an extremely pointless SEO option and highly inadvisable for business owners.

Yelp

Yelp is a company that has gained popularity for all the wrong reasons. The concept of Yelp is noble enough: give customers a platform through which to honestly review their experiences with different businesses.

Unfortunately, Yelp saw an opportunity to make an unscrupulous buck and jumped on it. Yelp offers monthly services that purport to offer SEO and increased visibility to businesses that sign up. However, Yelp’s program will do very little to increase your business’ search engine ranking. It won’t even improve your visibility amongst Yelp search results. All Yelp’s program really does is to raise the good reviews of your business and conceal the bad ones. Essentially, this company is blackmailing small businesses into paying to only display the good reviews and censor the bad. Even if your company has received negative attention on Yelp, don’t give in. Instead, work with a reputable SEO agency to improve your company’s presence online.

Yellow Pages

Unfortunately, the familiarity of the Yellow Pages brand causes a lot of customers to erroneously sign up for their SEO service, which costs a whopping near $300 a month. While Yellow Pages offers slightly more than GoDaddy, it ultimately falls incredibly short. It mostly promotes your business on its own website. While Yellow Pages does have widespread recognition as a brand, it is not nearly as popular as Google or Yahoo. Thus, this investment is not even a bit worth the cost.

Conclusion

Ultimately, there is one big thing to remember. Massive corporations like GoDaddy, Yelp and Yellow Pages couldn’t possibly give all of their SEO clients one-on-one attention. Don’t pay for a generic SEO service from one of these giant corporations. Instead, work with an SEO agency that will assign actual people to work with you and help your business to grow and thrive.

Why a Blog is Important For Your Website

April 8, 2013 popadmin Blogging, Online Marketing, Search Engine Marketing, Search Engine Optimization No comments

When you are managing a website for your company or to share content with others, having a blog is a key factor in achieving and maintaining success online. Launching a blog within your website is a way to share your voice and gain genuinely interested fans and followers. When you use a blog properly, it is another platform to help with promoting your products, services or the entire brand you represent. Working together with professional website design Miami services can help you to achieve any goals you have in mind when launching your blog.

Blogs help to create a voice behind any website, regardless of whether your are selling products and services or trying to share a message. An Internet marketing Miami company such as Pop Creative can provide you with valuable insight and tips on how to reach your specific audience or target demographic for the industry you represent. When you work with an Internet marketing Miami company that also provides web design, you can feel confident that you are presenting your website properly to those who are interested in what you have to offer.

Getting the help you need from a website design Miami firm is ideal whether you are launching a website for a start up business or looking to expand your corporate image online. When you work with a website design Miami firm that also specializes in Internet marketing and formatting blogs, you are able to reach a much greater audience than with traditional local marketing and advertising campaigns.

Finding the right Internet marketing Miami company highly depends on the type of blog you want to launch and whether you want to work with a website design Miami firm and an Internet marketing firm together. When you begin looking for an Internet marketing Miami firm, you can do so by searching online to compare all of the options you have available.

Working together with professionals who specialize in Internet marketing and website design allows you to continue to focus on the products and services you have to offer while ensuring your website is up to today’s standards of design and integrated properly with social media. Internet marketers are capable of promoting your website properly so you can instantly connect with your users on your blog each day. Updating your blog consistently on a daily basis is a way to gain followers while generating buzz and interest in the content you produce.

Basic SEO Practices Every Website Should Employ

October 8, 2012 popadmin Search Engine Optimization No comments

Internet marketing is truly one of the most effective and affordable ways to reach a large, yet targeted audience. A high functioning SEO campaign will require