Friday, 24 November 2017

Tips For All Of Your Content

Designed to help you rank well in search engines and enjoy a wider audience, writing content for SEO is a critical part of becoming a well-known blogger in your given field.
Write your page to load quickly.

While it’s not an element of on-page SEO necessarily, page load time is a huge factor in the world of SEO, and there are certain steps you can take during the writing process to streamline load times. 40% of people abandon web page when they take more than 3 seconds to load, so it’s essential to keep load time in mind as you craft your pages.

•             Optimize your images. Images are an important part of a good blog, and they’re critical for SEO, as well. When they’re too long, though, they can easily harm a page’s load times. With this in mind, optimize your images to load more rapidly. This involves adjusting your image sizes so that they’re not excessively large, uploading speed-friendly image formats (JPEGS are the best options), and inputting image src codes to prevent the browser from surveying the page directory in an attempt to “read” the image.

•             Keep redirects at bay. Redirects can destroy your page load time, so it’s important to keep them to the bare minimum. As much as you can, avoid citing URLs in your content that redirect to other URLs. This will help enhance your load time and create a better user experience.

Make your headlines powerful and attention-grabbing.

The headline is a huge asset when writing content for SEO. In addition to the fact that the headline is the first thing people see, it’s also one of the primary things that Google evaluates when ranking your sites. To ensure that your headlines are performing well and drawing readers, be sure to do the following:

•             Include relevant keywords. For best results, input your keyword phrase at the beginning of your headline to make it as prominent as possible.
•             Keep them the correct length. Current stats say 65 characters or fewer.
•             Use action words. Action words make readers want to act. When your headline asks someone to click, share, or download, they’re more likely to do just that.
•             Address the reader directly. Addressing the reader directly makes your headlines more personal, and can grab a reader’s attention from the depths of the SERPs.

Optimize your meta description.

Meta descriptions are the small snippets of descriptive text that show up in Google’s SERPs. If you want SEO juice, you CANNOT ignore this part.

Include keywords (but not too many).

Keywords used to be all the rage in the world of SEO. Today, the buzz has quieted a bit, but they’re still an important piece of on-page SEO. With this in mind, you’ll want to include relevant keywords in all of the writing you do, but take pains to not go too far with them and “stuff” your content like a Thanksgiving turkey.

Use links to beef up your SEO strategy.

Links are a powerful tool to help improve your SEO. While internal links (links that point back to your own content) can help direct users to your other material, external links (to high DA sources with a score of 50 or above) will help communicate to Google and other search engines that your website is authoritative and relevant, and that you value quality connections to other online content.


Content That Supports Good SEO

1. Structure the content in your head before you write it.

While nobody is saying you need to sit down and create a “brain map” of your various ideas, content that supports good SEO is the opposite of an impressionist painting. Instead of being random and sudden, it is methodical and categorical. Because of this, brainstorming content is a powerful way to ensure that you’re including all of your main points and topics, and that you can use the content to input links, keywords, and other important SEO elements.

To this end, think about all of your content, with these questions, before you write it:

•             Who are you trying to reach?
•             Which keywords will you include?
•             What’s the overall point of your material?
•             What do you want the content to communicate?
•             By thinking through the course and structure of your content clearly, it’s easier to publish great content that lends itself nicely to SEO.

2. Structure your content for easy readability & long-tail keywords.

Great blog posts rely on great structure, and good SEO does, too. With this in mind, consider mapping or outlining your blog posts before you write them. In addition to giving you a structure to abide by, this simple task will also help you lay out your introduction, body, and conclusion, and ensure that your content is easy to read, which, in turn, makes it more reader- and search engine-friendly.

Long-tail keywords are your best friends in terms of optimizing for keywords that won’t break the bank (take too long or too much $).

3. Format all of your content into short chunks.

A large brick of text is intimidating to readers, and it will push people away. With this in mind, be sure to divide all of your content into readable chunks of text, with a beginning, middle, and end.
As a general rule, paragraphs should be only 3-4 sentences in length, and you should do your best to insert subheaders at intervals of every 300 or so words. This makes your content easier for readers to approach and helps keep it from feeling intimidating on the page. It also has the potential to improve your click-through rate, which can boost your overall SEO scores.

4. Make your headings descriptive.

Beyond just using headings, you need to know how to make them descriptive and useful. Headlines are meant to guide readers through your blog post, and headlines that are highly descriptive and include target keywords will do the best job of this. They’ll also work as a sort of advertisement on Google’s search engine results page and, if they’re written well enough, will draw more people to your content.

5. Nail the transition.

Transition words are important to your writing, and they can go a long way toward making it smoother and easier to understand for readers. While this sounds simple, it’s important to remember that good content is the foundation of good SEO, and content your customers can’t read doesn’t stand a snowball’s chance of ranking well.

With this in mind, don’t hesitate to use transition words and phrases like “However,” “Secondly,” etc. These help your readers keep pace and will work wonders to streamline your writing.

6. Have other people proofread your posts.

While you may be an effective writer and editor, having other people read your posts will cut down on errors and improve your writing. With this in mind, hire an editor or another writer to help you look over your post before you publish them, and don’t ever make a habit out of publishing something you’ve not adequately proofread, since this is a recipe for mistakes and sloppiness, both of which can damage your rankings.

7. Make sure your articles are long enough to provide ample main content.

According to Yoast, every article you post should have at least 300 words. The reason for that is that content shorter than that doesn’t provide enough of what Google, in its updated Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines, calls “main content.”

While it’s true that longer articles tend to perform better in the world of SEO, the main priority you have as a writer is simply to ensure that your articles provide enough main content to be useful to search engines and people.


The Importance of Color in Website Design

Color deeply influences the overall look and feel of a website and can form the first impression about a company for visitors. Color is one of the top three most important factors in a purchasing decision, according to an article by the Touro College Journal.

What do consider when developing a color palette

Companies and clients will often have a set of colors used in the corporate logo that they want implemented in the site design. It’s the web designer’s job to educate the client about how those colors will fit into the site’s style and gently encourage changes if necessary.
Colors have different meanings in different cultures and countries, so understanding the meaning of color in your target market is important. Here are some general guidelines for color codes:

•             Blue is associated with stability, trust, and confidence. It is an excellent color for credit card website or other sites needing to inspire confidence.
•             Black represents elegance, wealth, sophistication, and mystery.
•             White symbolizes peace, purity, and simplicity.
•             Orange represents warmth, enthusiasm, or warning.
•             Red is associated with strength, power, love, and desire.
•             Green can represent nature, health, vigor, and community.
•             Yellow is often associated with brightness, happiness, idealism, and hope.

Text colors

Text is harder to read on a monitor than on paper so the choice of background and font colors is supremely important. Readability of text is the primary concern. If the text is light colored, then the background must be dark and vice versa. White and black are the most common combination and red and blue are useful for link and highlighted text. Contrast is important for making text readable, so avoid dark backgrounds with text of too similar a tone.

Browser-safe colors

A common problem when attempting to build a web design around an established set of logo colors is that Pantone colors do not always reproduce accurately in browsers. When a non-browser safe color appears in a website, browsers will adapt by shifting the color. Some computers with aging graphics hardware may also fail to display colors correctly.

The best way to avoid this issue is to stick to the “browser-safe palette” of 256 or 216 colors (for really conservative designers). These colors are designed to be accurately displayed in all browser and hardware environments. While some designers (and clients) may find this limiting, it is the only way to ensure that a site is always viewed at its best. By limiting colors this way, designers can ensure that file sizes are smaller and that the site will load quickly.

Color psychology

Designers of all stripes know that colors can be organized into groups based on the feel they give a viewer. They fall into three basic categories, and sites incorporating colors from each group can have a more balanced feel.


Thursday, 16 November 2017

Everything You Need to Know on Social Media for Small Business

You’ve launched your website, opened your doors and created a Facebook Page for your new small business, but what’s next? It’s time to get people aware of your brand and what better way than social media?
There’s a reason why roughly 94% of small businesses use social media as a marketing tool, but doing it effectively is a whole other subject. Paid ads, organic reach and posting relevant content across your social media channels is not the easiest thing do while running a small business. However, there are ways to rule the digital space, even as a mom and pop.
Find Your Core Social Networks
A big mistake small businesses encounter is trying to tackle every social channel at once. We love your eagerness, but let’s face it–you have to take your time and invest in a few of the essentials first. Unsure what networks are right for you? We’ve got you covered with our small business guides for each main network.
Facebook for Small Business
The first channel nearly every small business jumps to is Facebook. And that’s OK. With over a billion daily active users, you have one of the largest pools to generate an audience. However, you want to be strategic with Facebook especially when it comes to paid and organic content, targeting your audience and engaging your followers. Read more on how to get started with Facebook.
Instagram for Small Business
While other social channels are staples to marketing, the fastest growing network is Instagram. Brands are rushing to Instagram to visually showcase their product or service to younger audiences. But do you fully know your Instagram demographics, what features users prefer or how to monitor hashtags? This guide outlines everything you need to know as a small business using Instagram.
Twitter for Small Business
Many smaller brands are still unsure of their need for Twitter or fear it will take too much time to manage. Let us break the common myths of Twitter for small business and show you how to scale the unscalable in this guide. Learn how to use Twitter to promote, communicate and engage on a small scale that’s perfect for your business.
Understanding the Value & Cost of Social Media
Figuring out the value of social is no easy task, which makes it hard for brands with little to spend know how much it costs to market or advertise. Your marketing and advertising department might just be you, so catch up on the best practices to learning the value and cost of social media.
How to Make the Most of Your Social Media Budget
If you’re trying to plan your social media spend, you’re heading in the right direction. But sometimes, smaller businesses are unsure how to make the most of their budget. While it’s good to be cautious with your budget, it’s just as helpful to know where you can spend. Read this guide to get the most out of your social media budget.
How to Measure the Value of Social Media
What is the value of a like or comment to your business? How much return do you earn from Retweets or mentions on Instagram? These are tricky questions to ask, but there is value to your business when you focus on traffic, awareness and leads within your social marketing strategy.
Ultimate Guide to Measuring Social Media ROI
One of the biggest struggles for businesses of all sizes is to measure social media ROI. But it’s not as impossible as you think. You simply need to look in the right places and understand what you’re tracking the value it brings specifically to your company. Learn more about social media ROI in this helpful guide.

Tactics To Improve Search Engine Rankings

SEO is a big topic and many web site owners are overwhelmed, feeling like it’s simply too much to handle, getting “fire hosed” with information from consultants. As a result, they look for bite sized chunks of information – tactics. Sometimes these individual tactics can make a dent in the problem, but not considering the overall picture including current site, competition, online marketplace, resources, ongoing marketing and analytics can result in lost opportunity and bottom line lost revenue.
The smart answer to the question about “top three SEO tactics” to focus on starts with an evaluation of the site in question to see if there are any immediate, high impact opportunities such as unblocking search engine spiders from crawling the site or assessing the content management system and any other major possible barriers to getting crawled and included.
Assuming those questions are solved and the market for the web site is well understood, the next thing is to make sure the site content is targeting the right keywords. Understanding what potential customers are looking for and applying that insight with a content creation and promotion strategy is instrumental for optimal search engine visibility.
The second thing to do is to apply the keyword research you’ve done to the web site and content being published to the web.  Make sure each web page contains unique, descriptive text using relevant and popular keywords. The key on-page influences of keywords on search engine rankings include:
* Keywords in the title tag
* Keywords in text links to your web pages from other relevant web sites
* Keywords in the copy of your web pages
* Keywords used in links between pages of your site

The last thing I’d recommend (I guess this is 4, not 3 tips) is to tell other sites related to your topic about your site and attract links. The bottom line recommendation with link building is to create content worth linking to. But then you need to tell other web sites about it or they won’t know to link to you. This is especially true with new web sites.
Be a resource for your industry and create content of value to potential customers to make the job of finding, evaluating and buying your products/services easier.  It’s also important to create the kind of content that other influential web sites and blogs will want to link to.
The top 3 or 4 things to focus on for improved search visibility (in my opinion) are:
1.            Make sure search engines have no difficulty in finding and understanding your web site
2.            Research the keywords that are most meaningful for your customers
3.            Use those keywords in your content
4.            Create content and promote content that makes it easy for customers to buy and easy for influential to link to your resources


White Hat SEO And Black Hat SEO

Black hat SEO refers to techniques and strategies used to get higher search rankings, and breaking search engine rules. Black hat SEO focuses on only search engines and not so much a human audience. Black hat SEO is typically used by those who are looking for a quick return on their site, rather than a long-term investment on their site. Some techniques used in black hat SEO include: keyword stuffing, link farming, hidden texts and links, and blog content spamming. Consequences of black hat SEO can possibly result in your site being banned from a search engine and de-indexed as a penalization for using unethical techniques.
White hat SEO refers to the use of techniques and strategies that target a human audience opposed to a search engine. Techniques that are typically used in white hat SEO include using keywords, and keyword analysis, doing research, rewriting meta tags in order for them to be more relevant, backlinking, link building as well as writing content for human readers. Those who use white hat SEO expect to make a long-term investment on their website, as the results last a long time.
Effectiveness of white hat vs black hat SEO
SEO is part science, part art. There is a wide range of opinion[1][2] in the SEO practitioner community regarding the effectiveness of white hat vs black hat techniques. Most agree that white hat techniques take longer to improve search rankings.
Consequences of Black hat vs White hat SEO
Even though quick results make black hat SEO tempting, it can get your site banned (de-indexed) or heavily penalized for use of unethical practices. It is widely believed that the risk is not worthwhile for websites that plan to be operational over the long haul. Moreover black hat SEO methods give only short term results. White hat SEO can get your site ranked higher by use of ethical techniques, good content, appropriate keywords and a combination of smart marketing angles providing long lasting results.
Panda
Google's Panda update rewards websites that have high-quality content. After this algorithm update, low-quality pages on the site affected not just the ranking for those pages but for the entire website.
Penguin
Google's Penguin update was targeted specifically at black hat SEO techniques using which some website owners had accumulated thousands of links from "link farms". Thousands of such websites were penalized due to the Penguin update. Webmasters were encouraged to remove bad links pointing to their site. In some cases, they were able to do so successfully but often webmasters cannot control who links to them.
Negative SEO
Because you cannot control who links to your site, it's possible for a competitor to pay link farms to point "bad links" to your website from poor-quality sites. Google's algorithms could penalize you for these links, which would hurt your search engine rankings. Bing has a tool that lets webmasters disavow bad links pointing to their website but Google does not. Some analysts have criticized Google for letting their algorithm be gamed with negative SEO.


Thursday, 9 November 2017

Adwords Tips & Tricks

There have been big changes to organic and paid search over the last couple years. Google removed the siderail advertisements from their search results and added a 4th paid advertisement spot to the top of the search results. This extra ad spot, more use of search features like local packs and featured snippets has lead to a massive decline in the amount of traffic going to organic results. As a result, paid search is more important than ever. We manage millions of dollars in ad spend, and we know all the secrets to get the most out of Adwords. Here are 5 tips that will save you money and reach your target customer.
1. Never Use Broad Match
The default match type in Adwords is broad match, and it is the only match type that you should NEVER use. It’s bold, italic, and caps for a reason. Don’t do it. With a limited budget, it is important to have your targeting tight to reach people who are your core customers, and broad match will not do that. You should start with broad match modified which means adding + after the words in your keyword phrases. This will make your targeting tighter.
2. Use Negative Keywords
Negative keywords are an important way to further avoid bad clicks and wasted budget. Negative keywords tell Google that if a specific word shows up in someone’s search query that matches your keywords, you don’t want it to show.
Let’s say you’re a New York City locksmith, and you are bidding on the keyword NYC+ Locksmith+. (see that broad match modified?) If someone types in “NYC locksmith school” or “NYC locksmith training”, your ad will show. And they aren’t potential customers, so when they click on your ad, you’re wasting money. By adding “school” and “training” to your negative keywords, your ad will not show for searches that contain those terms. You should come up with a long list of negative keywords, so you’re only paying for ads that could generate business, and you should check your search terms report regularly to find new negative keywords.
3. Use Your Search Terms Report
This is one of your most important tools when it comes to refining your Adwords campaigns. It shows you exactly what people searched for when they clicked on your ad. Your keyword may be NYC+ Locksmith+ but the person could have searched for “the best NYC locksmith there ever was” and then clicked on your ad. It is important to go through your search terms report regularly to find new negative terms as well as specific search terms you might want to target directly.
4. Use Geo-Targeting
This whole post is all about saving you money and reaching the right customers. And if you’re a locksmith in New York City, you don’t want people in California seeing your ads. Google offers very advanced geo-targeting options, so you can limit who sees your advertisements to people who are located near where you are. You can target by city, state, zip code, and distance away from your location among others. Because you want to target only your most likely customers, You should keep your geo-targeting tight. If you’re not getting enough traffic, you can always expand your targeting later.
5. Small Ad Groups with High Lexical Similarity
Google wants your ads to be as relevant as possible to what people are searching for. To continue with our Locksmith example, let’s say you work in Brooklyn as well as Manhattan. You should create an ad group with your Brooklyn locksmith keywords and then another ad group with your Manhattan locksmith keywords. This way, you can create ads that are targeted to people who are looking for a locksmith in Brooklyn and then create ads that are targeted to people who are looking for a locksmith in Manhattan. This will improve your Quality Score which means you’ll pay less for your clicks and have a higher click through rate.