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.

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.

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.

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.