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What is SSL Certificates and Why Are They Important?

Secure Socket Layer, or simply SSL, is a security protocol that encrypts the communication between a web server and a web browser. In this age of web vulnerability, WordPress SSL certificates provide an additional security layer by ensuring that the communication between a web server and a web browser is private.

When you visit a website, you will notice that the URL is either HTTP or HTTPS. The S in the HTTPS refers to the SSL certificate. Good crawlers also take this into consideration when they are compiling SERPs. A website with WordPress SSL certificate is given preference.

Google Chrome started marking websites without WordPress SSL as “Not Secure”. This resulted in visitors avoiding engagement on such websites. Site owners experienced a decline in conversions like sales, subscription, and more.

What is an SSL Certificate?

Secure Socket Layer (SSL) encrypts the transferred data between a web server and a web browser. When you install a WordPress SSL certificate on your website, you will notice your HTTP protocol changing to HTTPS.

Here are the four key benefits of using an SSL Certificate:

• SSL Protects Data

The core function of an SSL certificate is to protect server-client communication. On installing SSL, every bit of information is encrypted. In layman’s terms, the data is locked and can only be unlocked by the intended recipient (browser or server) as no one else can have the key to open it. While dealing with sensitive data such as IDs, passwords, credit card numbers, etc., SSL helps you protect against the mischievous army of hackers and skimmers. As the data is turned into the undecipherable format by SSL, hacker’s skills prove to be an edgeless sword against the unsurpassable encryption technology of SSL certificates.

• SSL Affirms Your Identity

The second primary task of an SSL certificate is to provide authentication to a website. Identity verification is one of the most important aspects as far as web security is concerned. There is no doubt about the fact that the internet is increasingly deceptive.

When you want to install an SSL certificate, you must go through a validation process set by an independent third party called a Certificate Authority (CA). Depending on the type of certificate, the CA verifies the identity of you and your organization. Once you have proved your identity, your website gets trust indicators vouching for your integrity. When users see them, they know who they’re talking to.

Such verification makes sure that no impostor creates a fake website pretending to be yours. In technical terms, this is called Phishing. Thus, SSL helps users drive to your real website, saves users from fraud, and enhances your reputation.

• Better Search Engine Ranking

In 2014, Google made changes to its algorithm in order to give the upper hand to HTTPS-enabled websites. This has been evident in various studies conducted by SEO experts around the world. One such study conducted by Brian Dean, founder of Backlinko.com shows a strong correlation between HTTPS and higher search engine rankings.

• SSL is required for PCI Compliance

To accept credit card information on your website, you must pass certain audits that show that you are complying with the Payment Card Industry (PCI) standards. One of the requirements is properly using an SSL Certificate.

How Does a WordPress SSL Certificate Work?

An SSL certificate converts your HTTP protocol into an HTTPS protocol by encrypting the data that is transferred from a web server to a web browser. This process of data encryption involves a user submitting information, which can include name, credit card number, and home address.

This data is then encrypted and transported from HTTPS to your web server. Any attempt of a data breach will not leak out the information because it is encrypted.

Types of WordPress SSL Certificates:

• Single Domain

Single-domain SSL certificates can only be used on a single domain or a single IP address at a time.

• Multi-domain

Multi-domain SSL certificates can be used on more than one domain.

• Wildcard

A Wildcard SSL certificate is used on a single domain but can be extended to multiple subdomains.

• Multi-domain Wildcard

As the name suggests, the multi-domain wildcard is a hybrid of both, multi-domain and a wildcard SSL certificate. This means that the SSL certificate can be used on multiple domains and also multiple subdomains.

Top WordPress SSL Certificate Providers:

An SSL certificate is a third-party tool that you can get from several SSL providers. In this article, we will mention both paid and free SSL certificates for WordPress.

1. RapidSSL
2. Thawte
3. GeoTrust
4. Cheap SSL Shop.
5. Comodo
6. Let’s Encrypt
7. Cloudflare
8. WoSign
9. SSL For Free

Final Words: How safe would you feel if your browser warned you about a website being “not secure”? Because that’s what will be shown in the upcoming version of Chrome if you don’t have an SSL certificate. Do you want that? Of course, you don’t.

So, what are you waiting for? Add an unconquerable layer of protection to your website.

How To Choose A Website Design Company

You have less than eight seconds to create a positive impression on a visitor to your website when they first land on your website. Be very selective when it comes time to choose the website design firm for your website project.

Here are some suggestions/tips to consider when selecting a Website Design Firm:

1. Do they have a Portfolio? Make sure your chosen website designer has some experience under their belt. Website development has come a long, long way in the last ten years. One person can’t know everything necessary to design, program, and promote a successful website. Think hard about hiring that independent programmer who works out of his house. The price might be enticing, but what will you end up with?
2. Can the Website Designer you are considering cater to any type of Business? Look through their website portfolio for variety across industries. Also, do their client websites all look similar in format and structure? A custom-designed website establishes a much more professional image for your company. Templates can be a substitute, but are resold many times over. Your website may look like many others. Also, website templates require your content to be presented in a certain way – a presentation that may not be appropriate for your business.
3. How is that Potential Website Designer’s Response Time? This is vital to the success of your website. Take note of their choice of response on their website. Is it by e-mail, phone, fax, or instant messenger? How quickly did they respond to your inquiries? If you prefer to do business over the phone, your website developer should accommodate your preference.
4. Does the selected Design Firm have a Contract? Everything must be understood up front when beginning a website project. When it is written, it can be referred to. Also, before signing, make sure you read the entire contract, including all the fine print. Don’t hesitate to ask any questions. This will be best for you AND the designer. Answering questions and ensuring there is an understanding between the web design company and your company will help prevent bad feelings, a poor job, and/or missed deadlines.
5. How Reasonable are these Web Developers’ Prices?
You do get what you pay for. There are many “web designers” who work out of their homes. They have created a couple of websites, are hungry, and will price low to get more experience. Do you want them to gain experience on your dime? Most web designers work on an hourly basis – this is ok if they have a comprehensive budget they plan from. There is a good chance you will want extras once the website development process starts. You should check to see if your chosen website developer has planned for contingencies in their website proposal budget. Your website is going to the link between you and your customers, so make sure it is the best it can be given your budget constraints. Nowadays, you can find websites for $500 or website builder applications for a monthly flat rate. Be careful! Consider if you will get what you need in these “value” packages. How will your customers view you? You can always consider building your website in phases. This will help keep the cost down and the quality up.
6. Can your chosen Website Designer help you market your Website?
You may have a gorgeous, functional website, but if no one knows it is there, it is useless. Online promotion of websites has become a whole new industry – search engine optimization, search engine marketing, social media, linkbacks – all very important, and experience in these areas is essential to making your website a success. Ask your web design firm what they feel is best for your company. You should feel comfortable with their explanation and reasoning; otherwise, move on.
7. Does the Website Designer have happy Clients? Can you find client testimonials on the site? Ask for referrals and then CONTACT them. Ask probing questions like What was your overall satisfaction? Did the website designer go over budget? Is your website performing for you now? It’s better to spend 15 minutes on the phone than months of hassle and pain with the wrong web developer.
8. Can your chosen Website Design Firm meet all your needs? Do you want an e-commerce store, can they program Flash elements, or a custom web application? Can they perform search engine optimization and/or search engine marketing? Discuss their goals and confirm they can do what is best for your company and meet the expectations of your website goals. Choose a firm that has the full corporate solution for your needs – that usually means more than a guy in his bedroom or garage.
9. Can they Deliver on Time?
Discuss your goals as they relate to timelines. Be comfortable with their explanations of delivery. If you need your website done by a certain date, tell the designer/developer. Can the web designer you choose confidently state that they can complete it by that date?
10. Does the Web Designer you are considering take a Personal and Friendly Approach?
Is the website designer willing to help and suggest their ideas, or do they robotically go along, hoping they got everything you want? It’s always best to find a website designer who has some ideas of their own, with fresh ideas.

Although this blog entry can seem like a no-brainer to some, many companies will often run into difficulties and conflicts within their website development project. These are simple steps that are often overlooked. Keep this list in mind when looking for a website designer, and you should find the right one to create a successful website!

Have you had a bad experience with a website developer? Do you have something to add to the list above? Please let us know in the comments section below.

5 Excellent Tools for Checking Google Keyword Rankings

Are you looking for ways to check Google keyword rankings? Do you want to know how your keywords are performing on Google?

Well, you have come to the right place where you are going to discover a few of the top tools to check Google keyword rankings. Not only that, but you will also learn why keyword tracking is essential and a few other important details in this guide.

What is Keyword Tracking?

We all know keywords are used by people on Google to find information online, so they can educate themselves and purchase later. That’s how online eCommerce sites are boosting their search traffic and sales.

Keyword tracking is the ability to track and analyze all the keywords that you are targeting. Keyword tracking helps you easily find out which keywords are performing well on Google so you can analyze those details to improve your keyword rankings.

Why is Keyword Tracking Important?

One of the essential elements of SEO is picking the right keyword, making it rank & track the keyword position in search.

It is necessary for a blogger or SEO professional to check their Google keyword ranking for target keywords. One of the most common mistakes bloggers and website administrators make is that they write and publish articles without targeting any keywords at all.

Every blogger must aim to use the keywords that users search for the most, especially those keywords that will help your website show up on one of the first few pages of search results.

If you accomplish proper on-page SEO, chances are good that you will appear in the first 50 search results.

In order to accomplish this goal, you need a tool that can tell you where a specific keyword ranks in Google’s search results without manually going through 100’s of search results and pages.

To help you do this, we have compiled a list of some excellent online tools to use to check your target keyword position in Google.

5 Best SEO Tools for Checking Google Keyword Rankings:

• SEMrush

SEMRUSH is a well-known, comprehensive tool. Instead of simply allowing you to check the rankings of a single keyword phrase, you get access to a wide range of statistics.

You can enter your website URL and determine which keywords you rank for.

You will be able to see your ranking for top organic keywords, along with monthly search volume and the average cost per click for PPC advertising for that keyword. Check keyword competition and discover other details.

It supports Google (you can select Google Search based on your target geographical region) and Bing search as well.

If you ever wonder, “What keywords do I rank for?”, SEMrush has got you covered. Simply add your domain name in the URL field, and it will show you all the keywords that you are currently ranking for.

SEMrush is professional software that is easy to use, and you can try it for a couple of weeks for free before deciding whether you want to subscribe.

The only downside is that SEMRUSH is one of the most expensive tools on the market. Unless you have a pressing need for its other features, you might be best off with another of the rank checkers.

• SERPWatcher

Mangools is famous for giving some really good SEO tools. A new addition to this is SERPWatcher. This is one of the best rank checker tools with which you can determine the keyword position for any domain. They have features with the help of which you can track keywords based on location. Their paid packages have competitive pricing, and they provide value for the money that you pay. You can track keyword position based on Geolocation  & devices (Desktop and mobile).

• Ahrefs

This website has several good features. This makes it very easy to monitor keyword rankings. The keyword for which your website is being ranked is detected automatically. If you want a ranking based on the country, then that feature is available on this website.

With Ahrefs, you can start tracking the rank of your website as well as your competitors’ websites.

• Google rank checker

Google Rank Checker is a free online tool for tracking keyword positioning. Though it does not check Bing, just Google.

It is a very basic utility that gets a basic job done. All you need to do is enter your target keyword phrase and the domain name of your website. You then select the region and press submit. Within seconds, you will know the search engine rankings for the keyword you entered.

• SERP’s keyword rank checker tool

SERP also has an amazing keyword rank checker tool to easily check all your Google keyword rankings. Simply enter your keyword along with your domain name and choose the search engine (including the location) to know your keyword rankings.

This tool is the fastest way to check your keyword rankings, and it’s completely free.

It shows you the top 250 search results. It also gives you information about search volume, CPC, etc, to know how your keywords are performing on Google.

Improve Your Google Keyword Rankings:

The bottom line is that you need to check your keyword rankings to monitor your performance. Whether you choose one of the web-based free checkers or purchase a membership from one of the advanced options, knowing where you rank for your keywords is the first step in improving your Google rankings

Once you know where your website ranks in Google, it’s time to improve it. While many people will offer you their services, we urge website owners to consider the long-term impact of such services on their websites and businesses.

Without a proper, longer-term ranking plan, any ranking gains are unlikely to be sustained over the medium to long term. Go through our recommended service to improve your website rankings.

SEO Vs. PPC Uncovered

After all the hard work you put into designing and launching your website, now you get to the even harder part: getting people to visit.

A website can be a powerful tool for driving more awareness of your business and convincing people to buy, but it can’t do any of that unless people find it. And in an overcrowded online marketplace, getting noticed by the people you want to reach is a serious challenge.

Once you start looking into online marketing tactics to promote your website, you’ll notice two marketing options get a lot of attention: search engine optimization (SEO) and pay-per-click advertising (PPC).

Often, new website owners with a limited budget try to figure out: “In the argument of SEO vs PPC, which should take dominance?”

Before you can determine which tactic makes the most sense for your business, you need to understand what they are.

SEO and PPC are the two sides of search engine marketing (SEM). They have one main thing in common: they help you get found by people searching for what you do on the search engines, especially Google.

But they also have some notable differences.

What is the Difference Between SEO and PPC?

The difference between SEO and PPC is all about where on the search engine results page (SERP) you show up and how you get there.

What is PPC Marketing? With PPC, you buy spots on the SERP that show up at the top of the page (if you pay enough), at the bottom, or to the side. PPC results often have the word “Ad” next to them or show up in an image carousel with shopping details at the top of the page.

Brands get those spots by paying for them. Search engine ad platforms use a pay-per-click bidding model to sell ad results. The businesses willing to spend the most get the best placements for the keywords they bid on, but they only pay when someone clicks on the ad, hence the name “pay-per-click.”

An SEO strategy operates differently.

What is SEO Marketing? With SEO, you work to earn spots in the organic results—that’s the term for all the results on the page that haven’t been paid for. For many search terms, that means they show up below PPC results, but not always. Sometimes, organic results can claim a rich snippet, like the answer box that shows up at the top of some SERPs.

SEO results can’t be bought, they have to be earned. You claim organic spots by practicing several SEO tactics, including:

• Working to optimize your website for the relevant keywords you want to target.
• Making sure your website provides a good user experience, especially when it comes to things like site speed and mobile-friendliness.
• Working to build authority for your website by earning backlinks from other sites.

Those are the basic differences between SEO and PPC to be aware of, but what does that mean for website owners?

SEO vs PPC in 7 Categories:

Small business owners don’t have a lot of money to spend on an online marketing strategy, so what you want to know about SEO vs PPC is how they shake out in comparison to each other in terms of things like cost and performance.

Here’s how the two SEM tactics compare in seven main categories.

• Cost:

This is a tricky category for comparison. While it may seem like there’s an obvious answer, since PPC is paid advertising and SEO must be earned with work, you may assume PPC is more expensive. In reality, measuring SEO vs PPC in cost is complicated, as which costs more will depend on how you approach each.

To truly see results with SEO, most website owners will need to hire an SEO expert to help. A recent survey found that SEO consultants charge an average of around $500-$1,000 a month. While technically, you can spend nothing on SEO but time, more realistically, you should expect to spend around this amount.

One benefit of PPC is that costs are within your control. You can set a maximum daily spend within Google Ads, and the network will stop running your ads once you’ve gotten enough clicks to reach that amount. That means you can name your budget and never go over it. But if your budget is too low, you’ll run through your maximum spend too early in the day to get the results you want, and it will take longer to accumulate the data you need to build better campaigns.

According to one survey, small businesses that do PPC spend an average of $9,000-$10,000 a month. That doesn’t mean you’d have to spend that much, but it probably means that’s the amount others have found that gets the best results.

• Control:

SEO is all about doing your best to signal to Google the keywords you think you should rank for, and proving you’re authoritative enough to gain those rankings. While you can target specific keywords, you ultimately have very little control over what terms you’ll show up for, where you’ll show up in the rankings, and how your website will show up on the SERP.

For that last point, you can provide your meta descriptions and use schema markup in the hopes that Google will display the information you’ve provided on the SERP. But it’s still up to the search engine how your website shows up -if it shows up at all.

With PPC, on the other hand, you have much more control. Paying for ads means you can decide:

A. Which relevant keywords do your ads show up for?
B. Who sees your ads, in terms of categories like demographics, geography, and consumer behavior?
C. What your ads look like, since you decide on what the ads say, and can include elements that increase clicks, like images, or ad extensions that provide useful information such as special deals and delivery information?

• Speed of Results:

SEO is a long game. Expect to spend months, or even years, practicing SEO tactics before you start to see results. And even then, your first results won’t be for high-competition keywords.

For example, a small business that sells hot sauce will see results for long-tail keywords—the SEO term for keywords that are less competitive—like “hot sauce shop San Antonio” or “ghost pepper hot sauce” long before it has the chance to claim a broad term like “hot sauce”.

That doesn’t mean SEO isn’t worth doing. It is! There are plenty of Benefits to SEO. It just requires patience.

With PPC, by contrast, you can start showing up on page one and getting new traffic the first day you launch a campaign. PPC is often a smart choice for businesses that are doing SEO but want to start driving traffic faster while they’re waiting for SEO results to pay off.

• Amount of work:

Both SEO and PPC require ongoing work. With PPC, you need to complete keyword and audience research to figure out the best targeting for your campaigns. Then you need to set up your campaigns, monitor them to learn what’s working, and make updates to improve your results and make sure your budget goes further.

As with PPC, SEO should start with keyword and audience research, then you have a list of tactics to stay on top of:

1. Optimize each page of the website for your chosen keyword by including it naturally in the title, headings, page copy, and meta tags of the page.
2. Consistently create high-quality content to keep your website fresh and target more of the keywords on your list.
3. Undertake link-building strategies to get other websites to link back to yours.
4. Maintain an SEO-friendly web design
5. On the whole, doing SEO well usually requires more work than PPC

• Trust:

As you’d expect, people generally trust the results that have earned top spots more than those that are paid for them. 46% of people said they consider organic results more trustworthy than PPC ones, and 65% said they were more likely to click on an organic result for product-related searches. SEO is, therefore, a better way to earn the trust of people searching for the kind of products you sell.

That said, a sizeable portion of the population—around 57%— don’t even register the difference between the paid and organic results on the SERP.

Google’s always changing how the SERP looks, so that number is subject to change, but there’s a certain type of consumer that won’t think any less of your PPC ad than if you earned that top organic spot.

• Click-through Rate:

Recent data shows a clear winner in this category, but also shows that a lot depends on the type of device people are using. The click-through rate (CTR) for organic results on desktop computers is at over 65%, as compared to a little under 4% for PPC ads. On mobile devices, organic results get around a 40% CTR, with mobile earning a little over 3% (many searches on mobile don’t result in a click at all).

Either way, organic results get more clicks, making SEO rankings more valuable for traffic once you get them.

• Analytics:

Analytics gives you the power to consistently learn from everything you try, improve your campaigns based on that knowledge, and get better results over time. With both SEO and PPC, you can tap into valuable analytics.

Google Analytics, which is entirely free, provides a lot of data on how much of your traffic comes from organic search, where you rank for target keywords, and which pages people are finding through SEO.

And you can supplement all that free information with the additional data included in paid SEO tools that help you identify how your website compares to your competitors in rankings and what they’re doing differently to achieve the rankings they have, such as their backlink profile and the keywords they’re targeting.

While SEO tools can provide a lot of useful information, ultimately, there’s still a lot of guesswork behind why certain pages rank higher than others.

By contrast, the analytics provided in PPC campaigns can tell you exactly which ads perform well. And because you control every part of the ad, you can do A/B testing to gain insights into what your audience responds to, providing information you can apply not only to your future PPC ads but also to every other part of your online marketing campaigns.

SEO vs PPC Frequently Asked Questions:

Even with that extensive rundown, you may still have some questions. Here are answers to some of the common questions website owners have about the difference between SEO and PPC.

• Which Is Better: SEO or PPC?

It depends on your priorities.

PPC drives faster results. You can start getting visibility and traffic on day one, but you have to continually pay for every person it sends to your website.

SEO is slower, but once you gain relevant rankings, the results last longer. A good ranking will continue driving traffic for as long as you stay near the top, and you can count on getting more traffic from a good SEO ranking than a PPC one. And while there’s a cost to the work involved in getting on page one, once they’re all the traffic it sends your way is free.

• Does PPC Traffic Help SEO?

Not directly, but some of the metrics SEO experts commonly believe to be ranking factors require getting more relevant traffic, which PPC sends your way.

For example, when people click on your ad and like what they see long enough to stick around, it results in a lower bounce rate and longer time spent on site, both metrics that signal to Google that people are happy with the page they land on.

You can’t buy SEO results with PPC ads, but getting traffic from relevant visitors is one of the first steps to doing a lot of things that do pay off in SEO.

• How do PPC and SEO Work Together?

Good question! While the framing of this piece has pitted SEO and PPC against each other, for most businesses the goal should be SEO and PPC working together.

PPC helps you get the initial boost you need in visibility and traffic when your website’s new, or when it’s underperforming based on your goals. It’s a good strategy for short-term wins while you’re waiting for your SEO work to start coming through.

SEO is a long-term strategy that delivers bigger and more reliable results once it starts working. But it’s hard when you’re starting from scratch, and PPC can bring some of the initial traffic and attention you need to get your SEO efforts off the ground.

A good online marketing strategy combines the two tactics. If that sounds like a lot of work, well, it is. But you don’t have to learn both SEO and PPC from scratch to start getting more traffic for your website.

You’ll get better results, faster if you outsource the job to someone who already knows what they’re doing. HostGator offers both SEO and PPC services. Our team includes skilled professionals with years of experience in both types of SEM. If you’re ready for your website to start delivering bigger results, let us help.

Drupal Dashboards

Dashboards!

Dashboards are user control panels installed on a site to help the user easily edit and maintain their site with little to no knowledge of web programming. We can create these dashboards for our clients using the content management system known as “Drupal”. With the combination of our programming expertise and Drupal, we can deliver an easy-to-use user control panel or “Dashboard” to our clients so that they can modify the content of their site without needing eMUNICATIONS to make the changes for them, thus saving our clients money and time.

With this dashboard, you can manage everything pertaining to your website: online calendars, email blasts, email newsletters, all done with the ease of submission forms and in real time.

Contact your Houston area Drupal experts today for an introduction to the world of dashboards.

Tips to Image SEO – Optimize Images for Search Engines

Image Optimization is the basic step for your SEO campaign. As the Search Engines are getting smarter and more intelligent, the process of achieving a good search ranking is getting more complex.

Now it takes much more than just quality content to get to the top.

Many factors contribute to showing up well in search engine rankings, one of the most important of them is on-page optimization. On-page optimization is the pillar of your SEO, and one of the important on-page optimization factors is image optimization.

Images make your webpages more appealing.

More likely than not, there’s an image on every page of your website. Without the proper optimization, however, you’re wasting a valuable SEO asset. Plus, the larger the file size, the longer it takes your page to load, and the higher your bounce rate will be.

Image optimization creates many advantages for your image assets, including better user experience, faster page load times, and additional ranking opportunities, both within the traditional and image search results.

Although visual search technology has made great strides of late, search engine bots are unable to identify the content of an image; they rely on the text associated with the images to fully understand what the image is and how it relates to your content or the topic of your page.

But which factors are most important to ensure your images are findable and don’t slow down your site?

To help you ensure you’re optimizing your images properly, here are six basic tips to get you off to a great start

Optimizing Your Images for SEO and Speed:

Speed plays an important role in SEO and user experience. Search engines consistently rank fast websites higher. This is also true for the image search.

Images increase your overall page load time. They take longer to download than text, which means your page loads more slowly if there are several large image files to download.

You need to make sure that images on your site are optimized for the web. This can be a little tricky to get used to since many beginners are not experts in graphics and image editing.

The best way to optimize images is by editing them on your computer using photo editing software like Adobe Photoshop. This allows you to choose the right file format to create a small file size.

Alt Tag:

The Alt tag is probably the most important image optimization factor. Alt stands for alternate. The text in the alt tag is displayed in place of the image if the image can not be shown or is taking too long to load.

Most of the major search engines are text-based, i.e they can not read images and videos. The location of your images appears as an empty space to the search engines. These empty spaces are not in any way good for your overall SEO. The alt tag not only tells the search engines that there is an image placed here but also informs it about the topic of your image.

Use Original, High-Quality Images:

The more original pictures you have, the better the experience for the user and the better your odds are of ranking on relevant searches.

Original images can be made by a designer at your company (e.g., data visualizations, infographics) or taken in-house using a quality camera.

Give your customers a glimpse of your company, or provide a high-quality product image that your visitors will respond to.

Many users ignore stock photos. High-quality original images allow you to stand out in the search results, so show your brand’s personality and attract more people to your website.

JPEG Best Practices:

A JPEG image provides the best options for maintaining a quality image when compressed or resized. They work with many colors, shadows, and patterns to display a high-resolution image, and is the most popular photo type in the digital space.

Due to its ability to be compressed considerably, the JPEG forms quality images in small file sizes.

One downside of JPEGs: it uses lossy data compression. This means that the image quality can suffer depending on your settings. There is also no support for transparent backgrounds like there is with GIF and PNG formats.

PNG Best Practices:

A PNG image is typically used when editing or downloading files from Adobe Photoshop. PNG is known to handle transparency, and is often used for logo image assets as the image appears small, yet the resolution is high quality.

PNGs can be saved as a PNG-8 or a PNG-24. The PNG-8 file type is limited to a palette of 256 colors, whereas the PNG-24 will deliver a much higher quality display, but result in a larger file size, which could disrupt the page’s performance.

Use a meaningful Image Filename:

Just as keywords are important in the URL, the same goes for images. Keyword-rich file names can help an SE determine relevancy. Avoid using default image file names like “DSC0019.jpg” as it does not give much information about the image. Use descriptive filenames with keywords separated by “-” (hyphen).

Create an Image Sitemap:

Create and publish an image sitemap to house all of your images in one place. This gives Google and other search engines more ability to discover the images on your site, increasing the likelihood that your images will be displayed in Image Search results.

OpenGraph and Twitter Cards:

If you’re providing valuable content and information to your audience, they will share the content on social media. From Facebook to Twitter, content is shared and links are distributed.

If you add the following image tag to the section in your page HTML, like this:

<meta property=”og:image” content=””

For OG tags, you can set the image you want within WordPress, but also create your meta property in HTML. Add the tag to the section of your page, so it looks like above

Conclusion:

Following these tips should increase interaction and engagement with your images, reduce page load speed, improve findability in image search results, and strengthen your keyword performance.

The most important thing is to make sure the image and alternative text are relevant to the page. Other key takeaways:

1. Reduce file size for faster page load speed.
2. JPEGs are generally the best option for website photos.
3. Never use GIFs for large product images.
4. Improve stock images with tools like Canva.
5. Do not overstuff keywords in the alt text; make sure it describes the photo.
6. Make sure the image is relative to the page.
7. For crawlability, create an image sitemap.
8. Create OG and Twitter Cards for social shares.

The Ultimate Guide to Important Pages In Website

This post will answer a very common question that most small business owners have:

What are the most important pages on a website?

We are a website design and Development company in Houston, We often get questions from our small business owners: What are the most important pages on a website? what pages should my website have necessarily? And mostly, this question comes from small business website owners. This is because they have recently joined the digital world. And they are making themselves acquainted with it slowly.

What pages should my website have? This is a very common question online entrepreneurs and small business owners ask when they are looking to develop a website.

When it comes to creating pages for your website, there is a set of web pages that are standard or general, which all small business websites should have. Below is a list of the most common pages that every website should have, and the type of information these pages should feature and include. If you need to create a website, we guide you step-by-step through the process of creating a small business website using WordPress.

Why Do You Need A Small Business Website In The First Place?

Your website is the best chance you have at making a great impression on potential new customers online, and your website is the face of your company in the digital world. Though your outbound content, social media channels, and ads might capture their initial interest, your site is where they’ll end up making a final purchasing decision.

Having a website creates a trust factor for customers. They know what other fellow customers say about you, your history, your location, and other important information.

Don’t have a website yet?

No worries, our special plan for a small business website can give you a kick-start.

Most Important Pages For Your Small Business Website

The number and type of website pages will depend on the nature of the business. But some pages are common that every small business website should have on their website.

A typical way to pinpoint the important pages in a website is to ask:

1. Have the highest likelihood of attracting new traffic.
2. Form the strongest impressions with new users.
3. Have the highest chance of achieving conversion.
4. Give you the best chance to sell your brand.
5. Are weighted more significantly than other pages by search engines.

With those qualifying factors in mind, Let us discuss what to put on a website for business.

• Home Page:

The home page is the first page most users will see, it should tell everyone who you are and what your company does. Your homepage needs to be well-designed, load fast and look professional. so if you make a bad impression, your engagement with a new user can easily end prematurely. It’s also the first and most important page Google considers when understanding the purpose and function of your site.

A homepage design should have:

1. Clear headline
2. Interesting and related text/colors/images/animation/video
3. Easy navigation
4. Upfront contact information
5. Brief info about your company, services, and/or products.
6. The home page is the most important landing page of your website. Because mostly users land on your website’s homepage and then find their way on your website.

Therefore, if the homepage is not intriguing to them, they will bounce back and decrease your chances of sales.

Moreover, even the search engines crawl through your website’s homepage to gain knowledge about your company’s services and products. And understand the purpose of your website.

It is always a nice practice to include a strong headline above the fold of your home page. This way, you will make the purpose of your website very clear to your visiting users.

• About Us Page:

People do business with other people, and visitors want to learn a bit more about who the people are behind the company. The about page is often one of the most visited pages on any website. This page should give a brief summary of who you are, your company history and what isolates you from the competition.

About Us, page needs to include:

1. A brief summary of your company,
2. History of your company,
3. How you are different from your competition,
4. Goals and objectives of your brand, and
5. Any other special mentions and accomplishments.

About Us, page gives you the liberty to soft sell your products/services. Give your best shot to convince your visitors about why they should choose you above others.

• Contact Page:

Putting the information about your company and its services is great. But it is of no use if users cannot contact you for their requirement.

Therefore, ask your website design company to create a contact page that communicates well with the users and increase your sales and conversions.

If a user has landed on your contact page it means he/she is very much interested in your services. Therefore, make sure the contact info is out there in all forms:

1. By phone
2. By email
3. Physical address
4. Contact form

If for some reason you cannot give a phone number or address then at least mention an email address and a contact form.

The contact form should be small and easy to fill. Nobody likes long essay kind forms to just send a requirement email.

You can also include a few reviews and testimonials on the contact page to build that extra level of trust and confidence for your company.

• Services/Products Page:

When a user lands on your website he/she will try to access the information he’s seeking without wasting any time. As it is there are only 5 seconds for any business website to impress its customers.

Therefore, the dedicated services/products page is mandatory for small business website owners. Mention all the services or products you offer in your services/products page.

This way your potential clients will immediately come to know whether or not your business can help them in their seeking.

If your services/products are too many, then you can add a brief summary of them on the main page. And add links to the respective service/product page for detail information.

This page should also include the benefits of using your services/products and how they are better from your competitors.

• Privacy Policy And Terms & Conditions Page:

Both of these pages are extremely important for your small business website.

A privacy policy page informs a user about how your company will use their personal information.

A basic privacy policy page should include:

1. Information about data collected,
2. Source of data collection,
3. Accessibility of collected information to users,
4. Sharing or usage of the collected data.

A company should strictly abide by the information provided in their privacy policy page. If there are any changes to your company’s policies then the update should be made on the page also.

Either ask your local website designing company to make the updates. Or if you have a WordPress website then you can make the edits in the content by yourself.

Similarly, a terms and conditions page is also necessary for your business website. It basically highlights the terms and conditions a user must agree with so as to use your website.

This page should include the terms like:

1. Cookies Policy
2. Legal Regulations
3. Intellectual Property rights
4. Copyright Laws
5. Third party links etc.
6. Moreover, include all the information here which a user has to agree to for accessing the information on your website.

Other Important Pages For SEO Purpose:

• Blog:

It is very important for any small business website to regularly update content on their website to increase their Search Engine Rankings.

And, the most simple way to do this is to add blog posts on your website regularly. A blog page is a snapshot or collection of all the posts on your website.

Therefore, utmost care should be taken to design a blog page to interestingly showcase your posts with a summary beside each post.

• Sitemap:

Sitemaps are extremely important for users and for search engines. They come in two formats:

.xml – for search engines, and
.html – for website users
Ideally, every website should have a sitemap which links to all the important pages on your website. Mostly the favorable position to place a sitemap link is in the footer of a website.

• 404 Error Page:

A page not found or 404 error page appears when a user tries to access a page which has either expired or moved to a new location.

Therefore, website designers should create a 404 page to inform the user about the fact that the page he/she was looking for no longer exists.

Also, give a user options to go back to the homepage or other important pages on your website. You can also include a search form for the user to type the query he/she interested in.

• Other Pages:

There are some other pages that are not mandatory but recommended so as to improve the user experience and SEO rankings.

1. Career Page
2. Testimonial/Review Page
3. Portfolio Page
4. FAQ Page

Summary

When you decide to get your website then make sure you have the most important pages included. These important pages are Homepage, About Us, Services/Products Page, Contact Us and Policies Page.

If you are looking for a website design company to create your website, then contact us now.

Simple And Most Common SEO Mistakes To Avoid

SEO is one of those strategies that you can implement in a few weeks, but it takes time to master it, so you can compete for high-traffic words and phrases. You’re still learning, and with a few adjustments, you can probably get that first-page ranking.  It is also a fact that SEO is a fast-changing industry, and what worked a few months ago may not work today, so you need to stay educated and informed about the latest SEO developments. The same basic SEO errors are repeated over and over. Most of these are easy to find and fix, the kinds of things that any decent SEO consultant should be aware of.

If you have a site and don’t have an SEO consultant, these are a few of the things you can quickly go and check yourself. If you do have an SEO consultant, they should have brought these issues to your attention. Some common SEO mistakes are tough to avoid. Testing optimization approaches is also difficult because you can’t verify your methods in real-time, since search engines’ rules are becoming hard to predict.

To keep you and your site on track, here are some of the most common SEO mistakes we’re seeing in 2018:

Content With The Wrong Keyword:

Many people publish useful content regularly to boost their brand exposure and credibility. It also demonstrates to search engine spiders that they are active. But, many SEO professionals mistakenly put the wrong keywords, which further affects their website ranking. So, before writing any content, make sure that you have done detailed research as to what keywords should be included. Then, make sure to include the right keywords or related keywords throughout the content and especially in the headings.

Optimizing Content around one keyword:

For a long time, keywords were the focal point of SEO. If your blog post or content had a lot of keywords, it would be on Page 1. If I decided to write the word “SEO” 100 times in all of my blog posts about SEO, those articles would have been #1 on Google. But Today, that practice not only provides a poor user experience for your audience, but it’s simply ineffective since search engines are becoming increasingly better at determining search intent.

Do not optimize any pages for just one keyword. Instead, think bigger about the need your content can fill and hone in on keyword topics that include a variety of relevant and related search terms.

Not having Unique Content:

The next typical mistake is related to the quality of your content. While duplicating texts was a common practice back in the day, today, search engines penalize this approach. Copying and plagiarizing content is seen as a spammy practice and is highly discouraged.

Duplicate and thin content simply don’t work. Instead of ripping off a copy from other places or using software that ‘spins’ the content into a new shape, it’s worth investing in creating original and meaningful texts. This is the only way to make sure your website doesn’t get downgraded and pushed to the back of search results.

Not Having Unique Title Tags and Meta Descriptions:

This is probably the biggest SEO mistake, and despite the emphasis given by both Google and Bing, still, some websites do not provide unique titles for each page.

The most common mistakes are:

1. Having all pages under the same title.
2. Including the website name in the page title (it’s ok to do that for the homepage, but it’s not needed for the rest of the pages).
3. Making the page titles more than 65 characters in length.
4. Descriptions should be unique (between 150-160 characters), non-keyword-stuffed, and attractive to the user.

A good description can increase your click-through rate (CTR), and if your content delivers what is promised in the description, it is more likely to have high conversions as well.

Slow Loading Website:

Nowadays, technology allows folks to acquire what they desire at the drop of a hat. When someone visits your website, they are supposed to see everything in the blink of an eye. Google has also stated that 53 percent of mobile website visitors leave the site if the site takes more than 3 seconds to load. If your videos, images, pages, call-to-actions, or other elements load bit by bit, you may risk losing their attention and can lose your business as well. Make sure your site has the fastest loading time.

Not Using Anchor Text for Internal Links:

Have you ever seen links in the body of a web page for “click here,” this post,” and other generic text?

From an SEO perspective, it’s a waste. Sure, using a call to action as your link may increase clicks, but it also costs you the opportunity of tailoring your anchor text, one of the most important components of SEO.

For example, if you write a blog post and you want to link to your e-commerce services page, make the anchor text “e-commerce website design services” or something similar. Also, if you absolutely must have a call to action, try to at least include some relevant keywords in the link. For example, “click here to learn more about our eCommerce services”.

Not focusing on getting quality backlinks:

I am not a big fan of the term “link building”. In fact, I don’t even like to hear it, I like to use the term promotion instead.

Nevertheless, the reality is the same. Whether you call it link building, off-page SEO or promotion, it is one of the most important processes if you want to achieve high rankings, especially in Google.

When building links, don’t make the following SEO mistakes:

1. Don’t build too many links too fast. The whole process needs to be natural, and it is not natural for a 3-month-old website to have tons of links pointing to it. Go slow and steady.
2. Don’t use keyword anchor text links. In the near past, keyword anchor text links were very important for rankings, but now, if you have many of those, you can get a penalty instead.
3. Don’t direct all your links to your home page. Diversification is a better practice.
4. Don’t buy or exchange links with other bloggers and don’t participate in any link scheme (either free or paid).

Not Optimizing URLs or Site Structure:

Often, when building a new website, your web developer doesn’t integrate the best SEO practices into the website structure. This is totally understandable because the web developer is not an SEO specialist. Therefore, an overlooked facet of site architecture (in other words, the way the website is laid out and how the pages connect) is fairly common.

I would argue it’s the single most underrated area of SEO.

In general, the home page of your site is going to have the most authority because it’s going to have the most incoming links and the best quality of inbound links. Authority (or link juice) flows throughout a website from high authority pages to low authority pages through links. For every step away a web page is from the home page, the less and less of that total authority is going to be passed to it. All other factors being equal, the further away the page is from the home page, the worse it will rank.

I’ve seen cases of high authority web pages being buried deep in site architecture and losing rankings dramatically. I’ve also seen the reverse, where web pages are moved closer to the home page and suddenly jump several spots in Google. Ultimately, you want to create your website structure so it is easy and intuitive to navigate for users.

A flat structure often satisfies that requirement and will help you get more of those users to your site through search engines.

Forgetting Mobile Users:

Whether you’re a B2C or B2B brand, much of your audience is likely using a mobile device to find good content. If your content isn’t mobile-friendly, the user experience will be negatively impacted.

Take steps to ensure that your website and its content are mobile-friendly and responsive. Also, focus on creating content for users who would typically use a mobile device.

You are not active on Social Media:

Social media is one of the best and most effective ways to promote your website or new content.

It is a huge mistake if you are not active on at least one social media platform.

Most SEO experts agree that social signals are gaining more ground as a ranking factor, and besides the hidden SEO benefits, social media is also a good source of traffic.

You don’t have to be active in all networks or spend a lot of time socializing without a purpose.

You need to find which platform is best suited to your audience and try to build authority and trust by following the leaders in your niche and sharing informative and useful content.

Expecting Instant Results:

An SEO strategy is always a long-term strategy; it means that it will take some time to settle into search engines and to see the outcome. Many SEO professionals make this mistake and expect instant results as soon as they execute something new, but that’s rarely seen in the case of SEO. Once you make any amendment, give some time to your effort to create an impact.

Forgetting About Analytics:

Last but not least, the only way to know if your SEO optimization and content efforts work is to track their progress. Many marketers would disregard the numbers, but this is a serious mistake. Setting up and regularly reviewing your analytics is essential for your optimization results.

Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools are just two of the main tools you can use to measure and get an overview of your website’s performance. With their help, you can see how your optimization is working for the different kinds of content and using various strategies you are trying out.

Conclusion:

For sure, the above list is not 100% correct. There are many more SEO mistakes that even experienced webmasters miss. Nevertheless, the above mistakes are the most important.

In addition, it is almost certain that when these mistakes are corrected, the benefits to your website will be immediate.

Google Analytics Reports You Should Be Analysing To Improve Your Marketing

You may be using Google Analytics, but are you sure that you are using it to its full potential?

Google Analytics provides users with the ability to measure every aspect of a website, from unique visitors to referral sources, to bounce rates, device types, time on page, click through rates, and so much more. Knowing which reports analyzing can be difficult when you’re wading through so much data.

To help you out, we have put together a list of custom and standard reports. With this, you’ll be able to quickly draw actionable marketing ideas to improve your results. And get better insight into your marketing performance.

• Mobile Overview Report:

Considering that mobile internet users now outpace desktop, it’s fairly safe to assume that your mobile and tablet experiences need to be as good (if not better) than the one for desktop users.

If your mobile visitor numbers are growing, it’s a good sign that your website is healthy and will likely rank well in Google Search.

Accessing this report is easy to follow these steps.

1. Step 1: After clicking on the Audience section, go all the way towards the bottom to find the Mobile > Overview.
2. Step 2: Now select your primary conversion goal under the appropriately named Conversions section.
3. Step 3: The first place to look for discrepancies between devices is in the engagement or Behavior section.

Significantly lower numbers on mobile and tablet (vs. Desktop) is your first clue to a poor mobile experience.

• Traffic Acquisition Report:

It’s important to know what channels are producing traffic to your website. When looking at a specific date range for this report, be sure to compare to the previous year to see how your traffic compares to the same dates last year. This way you can see website improvements over a particular time.

This report is especially important if traffic is down since it will help you see what channels have changed.

“Referrals” tab (Acquisition -> Overview -> All Traffic -> Referrals). This will tell you which external sites are driving traffic to your site.

• Audience Behaviour Report – NEW VS. RETURNING:

Getting a user to come to your site for the first time is great. Getting them to visit again is even better. After all, it is the returning visitors who usually end up becoming readers, followers, and customers.

This standard report in Google Analytics will tell you what percentage of your users are coming back to your site.

You can find it by going to the Audience -> Behavior -> New vs. Returning in your Analytics account.

Why is this significant? Returning visitors are more engaged in your content, and they’re more likely to take an action such as filling out a form or making a purchase, than a new visitor.

• Landing Pages – Bounce Rate:

It’s important to know which pages people are visiting and spending time on versus pages where they land and immediately leave. It’s best to view your top landing pages and analyze which ones are contributing to your website’s high bounce rate. Once you identify the pages that are causing users to leave, focus on fixing those pages to keep users more engaged on that page such as adding more targeted content, images and a call to action.

Find the report – Behavior -> Site Content -> Landing Pages.

If the report shows that some pages have a substantially higher bounce rate than others, you can take steps to make high-bounce-rate pages more engaging.

• Top Search Pages Leaking Visitors:

As we’ve seen so far, visitors don’t always do what we expect them to. And they don’t always find what they’re looking for.

That’s evidenced by high bounce rates, especially on important pages that are bringing in a ton of traffic to your site.

Finding those pages that (a) rank highly, (b) bring tons of traffic, but (c) fail to convert them could give you another quick boost of new leads or customers.

1. Step 1: Start by locating your most popular content under Behavior > Site Content > All Pages.
2. Step 2: Now we’re going to use another filtering or sorting tool to make this information more relevant. “Bounce Rate” and “% Exit” in the Explorer tab.
3. Step 3: This will give you a visual comparison between the bounce and exit rate for all your pages. You can drill down further to get this data for each page.

Use this report to find pages with low engagement and detect UX problems on your site. For example, if visitors are exiting a three-page article after reading only the first two pages, there’s probably something that is causing them to leave on the second page (too many ads, bad copy, a distracting link in the sidebar and so on).

Conclusion:

Don’t worry about running A/B tests. And don’t waste time with a new page or content creation.

First, go back and fix all the stuff that’s not working. The poor device experiences. The high potential pages or posts are hidden from the world on Google’s page. And the popular pages that people are leaving immediately in droves.

Next, connect the dots by getting people from the most popular pages and paths to your pages that convert (or assist conversions) the highest.

Raw data, by itself, is meaningless. But using these five simple reports can help you layer in context and gain actionable insight that has the power to increase leads and sales literally overnight.

How High-Quality Content Impacts your Website SEO

Nowadays, in times of digital marketing, companies definitely prefer to use SEO. But, for best results, it is essential that the content available on the site is not only relevant but also something that will attract the clients. The site content should be such that it will allow the SEO to promote the site and allow the clients to understand the company and its services, encouraging interactions.

When it comes to SEO, We hear Content is the king for engaging the users and thus good quality content in SEO holds a prominent place. All the SEO tips advocate about posting high-quality, relevant and unique content, which should engage the users instantly.

When it comes to most of people content strategy they always think the more content they have the better their search rankings will be. However, search engines know better than that and you should always choose quality over quantity.

What is high-quality content?

To answer this question, Google’s Hummingbird update, along with the removal of the keyword tool. had emphasized quality content as a deciding factor for ranking well. And Google’s quality guidelines clearly mentioned out what they’re looking for.

Here are their exact words:

1. Make pages primarily for users, not for search engines.
2. Don’t deceive your users.
3. Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings.
4. Think about what makes your website unique, valuable, or engaging. Make your website stand out from others in your field.

Content isn’t just frequently updating your website with blogs, videos or images. While that can be good for your website, search engines decide what makes your content worthy. Are you creating the same content that can be found on other sites? Is your content providing value to its visitors? Is your content relatable and unique? Is it answering the questions that someone is searching for? Fresh, interesting, easy to read, and credible content with the right number of keywords impacts the quality of content. Remember, high-quality content provides a valuable experience to its’ visitors.

So the message is clear: Focus on content, not keywords.

What is low-quality content in SEO?

Low-quality content, on the other hand, is only concerned about stuffing the keywords in such a way that it is spotted by the search engines, thus helping in boosting the rankings. It has nothing to do with the user experience and this is the reason why most of the times low-quality content ends up in achieving nothing. It has duplication issues, poor grammar, meaningless sentences, etc.

Any content does not meet these criteria is most likely low quality for SEO:

1. There is not enough main content on the page to satisfy the searcher.
2. The main content is not very good. Someone searching for something is unsatisfied by the content.
3. Perhaps the main content is good, but there are too many ads and pop-ups for the user to have a satisfying experience. The page is slow to load, or hard to read.
4. It is difficult to find out who is responsible for the website or the page content, and there is no good reason for anonymity.
5. The website has a negative reputation.

How does this affect SEO?

when quality content is created, it drastically improves your visibility. And without visibility and exposure, your content is just another one of the millions of articles that are posted every day on the web. Nobody sees it, Nobody shares it, Nobody does anything with it. Search engines care about the user experience. Their goal is to get you to the answer you’re looking for faster, creating a nearly seamless connection between you and the knowledge you seek. Google looks at the overall expertise, authority, and trust of a site. They call this E-A-T for short.

When evaluating the main content of a page, they look at:

1. The quality of information on a website.
2. The quantity of information on a site.
3. The external reputation of a website.
4. The internal information on a website.

If you want visibility and exposure, you have to commit yourself to the grind of consistently creating quality content.

How do you develop high-quality content?

With good content dominating search engines, you’ll need to invest time and money into developing high-quality content. Think outside the box, use other creative tactics, and try to become an industry expert to be considered a trustworthy resource, which will then lead to higher search rankings.

So, focus on this point:

1. Get to know your readers.
2. Keep the focus on customers, not selling.
3. Create content regularly.
4. Create content for every stage of the sales funnel.
5. Talk in their language.

How Do You Know If You Have a Piece of Quality Content?

Here’s a great benchmark for judging whether you have a piece of quality content or not. If someone reads that page, are they going to change the way that they approach their business or problem? A piece of content that compels someone to change their business strategy or influence their decision-making can be considered high-quality.

Conclusion:

In the end, quality content isn’t about a sales pitch. It’s about establishing trust and authority. Quality content should be all about solving a problem, addressing an issue, or offering up original research.

On Page SEO Checklist Needs to be Checked Periodically on Any Website

Search Engine Optimization is an ongoing process, you have to keep making effective changes in your optimization strategy to keep your site working well and appearing at the desired position on the web. We make a lot of changes to our site, from changing the theme to adding new plugins, from updating plugins to refreshing the old content. All such things ultimately affect your On-Page SEO Health, which reflects in your site’s performance and ranking.

To make sure that your site will always perform at it’s the best level, you should perform ON Page Optimization on regular time slices. This is because, only link building is an ongoing process and all things other than link building, changes frequently. That’s why you should take care of the optimization process more often and more carefully to maintain the site’s performance at its peak.

Site updates, theme updates/changes, plugin updates, adding a new plugin/functionality, and other changes can cause some accidental errors that could lead to on-page SEO issues. Unless you proactively look for these errors, they will go unnoticed and will negatively influence your rankings.

Keeping the importance of SEO in mind, here are important checks that you need to conduct weekly to ensure that your on-page SEO is on point.

Check Robots.txt to see if you are blocking important resources:

It is very important to check the Robots.txt files regularly. Many times we block some important stuff unknowingly, which is not crawled by the search engines. In CMS like WordPress, Drupal, it’s very easy to block something important because initially, WordPress, Drupal comes with many default settings.

For example, blocking out the wp-content folder in your Robots.txt would mean blocking out images from getting crawled. If the Google bots cannot access the images on your site, your potential to rank higher because of these images is reduced. Similarly, your images will not be accessible through Google Image Search, further reducing your organic traffic.

In the same way, if Google bots cannot access the JavaScript or CSS on your site, they cannot determine if your site is responsive or not. So even if your site is responsive, Google will think it is not, and as a result, your site will not rank well in mobile search results.

check your Robots.txt file, go to Google Search Console -> Google Index -> Blocked Resources.
If these resources are blocked, you can simply enable them by adding

For example, let’s say you are blocking the following two resources:

/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/image.jpg
/wp-includes/js/wp-embed.min.js

You can unblock these resources by adding the following to your Robots.txt file:

Allow: /wp-includes/js/
Allow: /wp-content/uploads/

By adding these files, crawlers will be able to crawl your site’s important content. To ensure that if these resources are now crawlable or not, go to Crawl -> Robots.txt Tester in Google Search Console, then enter the URL and hit the Test button.

Check your site for broken links:

Links are the most important factor in SEO. As links are the concern, they got affected very frequently. You should do a link check on a periodic basis. Broken links damage site performance very badly, you can easily fix your internal broken links with the help of a broken links checker. But if the external links are broken than it is very difficult to manage.

It is so because you have no control over the external broken links. There may be a possibility that the page you linked with is no longer exist. Such links show the error of 404 (Page Not Found) which negatively affects your site ranking.

If you are using WordPress, you can also use a plugin like the Broken Link Checker. This plugin will find and fix all broken links.

Another way to check for broken links is through the Google Search Console. Log in and go to Crawl > Crawl Errors and check for “404” and “not found” errors under the URL Errors section.

If you do find 404 URLs, click on the URL and then go to the Linked From tab to see which page(s) contain this broken URL.

Regularly check your indexed pages:

It is very important to check that all your pages are properly indexed by a search engine. To check this, simply type “site:sitename.com” into the search panel and hit Enter. By doing this, you can easily figure out that all your quality pages are properly indexed. You can also check if there are any low-quality pages.

By roughly scanning through these results, you should be able to check if all pages indexed are of good quality or if there are some low-value pages present.

Quick Tip:

If your site has a lot of pages, change the Google Search settings to display 100 results at a time. This way, you can easily scan through all the results quickly.

An example of a low-value page would be the “search result” page. You might have a search box on your site, and there is a possibility that all search result pages are being crawled and indexed. All these pages contain nothing but links and hence are of little to no value. It is best to keep these pages from getting indexed.

You can easily exclude such pages from being indexed by disallowing them in Robots.txt or by using the Robots meta tag. You can also block certain URL parameters from getting crawled using the Google Search Console by going to Crawl > URL Parameters.

Check the HTML Source Code to ensure everything is right:

It’s one thing to use SEO plugins to optimize your site, and it’s another thing to ensure they are working properly. The HTML source is the best way to ensure that all of your SEO-based meta tags are being added to the right pages. It’s also the best way to check for errors that need to be fixed.

You can check the following things to make sure that everything is working fine.

1. Check to see if the page has a meta robots tag, and ensure that it is set up properly and working well.
2. Check for the page has a rel=”canonical” tag and make sure it is showing the proper canonical URL.
3. For mobile responsiveness check if the pages have a viewport meta tag.
4. Check for the OG Tag in the pages.
5. Check to see if pages have proper OG tags (especially the “OG Image” tag), Twitter cards, other social media meta tags, and other tags like Schema.org tags.

To check the source, do the following: Open the page that needs to be checked in your browser window.  next Press CTRL + U on your keyboard to bring up the page source, or right-click on the page and select View Source. Now check the content within the ‘head’ tags ( <head> </head> ) to ensure everything is right.

Mind Your Down Time:

It’s necessary to notice your site’s downtime patterns. Down Time ruins your visitor’s experience which will hurt the site on page SEO health in a long term. Too often, downtime negatively affects a site’s ranking factor and the Search Engine Optimization strategy. You should regularly audit your site performance.

Request your hosting provider to regularly send the performance report so that you can easily check site performance. If you are having too many downtimes, than you should switch the hosting service and get a hosting service.

This is because numerous hosting services are available that offer hosting services at a very low cost. But their performance is not good all the time and they are not even reliable. Switching to a better hosting gives better performance and fewer downtimes, which means less bounce rate.

Check for render-blocking scripts:

You might have added a new plugin or functionality to your blog, which could have added calls to many JavaScript and CSS files on all pages of your site. The plugin’s functionality might be for a single page, yet calls to its JavaScript and CSS are on all pages.

For example, you might have added a contact form plugin that only works on one page – your contact page. But the plugin might have added its JavaScript files to every page.

The more JavaScript and CSS references a page has, the longer it takes to load. This reduces your page speed, which can negatively impact your search engine rankings.

The best way to ensure this does not happen is to check your site’s article pages using Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool on a regular basis. Check to see if there are render-blocking JavaScript files and figure out if these scripts are needed for the page to function properly.

If you find unwanted scripts, restrict these scripts only to pages that require them, so they don’t load where they are not wanted. You can also consider adding a defer or async attribute to JavaScript files.

Check Site Loading Speed:

The site’s loading time matters the most for keeping the bounce rate low. For maintaining a good on-page score, the site must load fast, i.e, within 3 seconds. According to research, 75% of users will not revisit the site if it takes more than 4 seconds to load. You can easily conduct a site speed audit by Google’s free tool.

Check for Mobile Usability Errors:

Sites that are not responsive do not rank well in Google’s mobile search results. Even though your site is responsive, there is no saying what Google bots will think. Even a small change like blocking a resource can make your responsive site look unresponsive in Google’s view.
So even if you think your site is responsive, make it a practice to check if your pages are mobile-friendly or if they have mobile usability errors.

To do this, log in to your Google Search Console and go to Search Traffic > Mobile Usability to check if any of these pages show mobile usability errors.

Conclusion:

From the above On Page Optimization definition, we can conclude that it is an endless, time-consuming process and has many aspects. But if you properly audit perspectives carefully, you will have better optimization for your site without doing anything related to Black Hat SEO. Don’t wait for a perfect time to edit. Make a checklist and perform your On-Page Optimization now to ensure smooth and swift working. If you have a Drupal site, Please follow “13 Things that Will Help to Improve Your Site’s Ranking“.

Apart from On Page Optimization, another most important thing is the Off Page Optimization. We can say that Off-Page optimization is the fuel to keep running the blog posts effectively. From social sharing to link building, all these aspects matter the most for keeping the traffic coming to your site. Check out our blog on Off–Page SEO Techniques to Improve Online Reputation.

Why Mobile First Design Principle is so Important on Website Development

Mobile First Design: Historically, most web designers and their clients have approached the desktop side of any project first, while leaving the mobile part as a secondary goal that gets accomplished later. Even with the rise of responsive design, many of us begin with the “full size” site and work our way down.

One downside to doing this is that priority is essentially given to desktop/laptop users. Unfortunately, many design elements and functionality that are optimized for desktop computers and laptops do not transfer well to the mobile version of the design.

The growing importance of mobile designs has contributed to many designers following a “Mobile-First” strategy with their designs.

In this article, we would like to talk about why it is now so important to do this.

What is a mobile-first Design?

Mobile first design is a design strategy that says when you create a website or app, you should start sketching and prototyping the smallest screen first and work your way up to larger screens. Essentially, it’s about delivering the right user experience to the right device.

The reason that this makes sense is that with such limited real estate on small screens, UX designers must prioritize the most important aspects of their website and apps, namely content.

For many years, mobile websites were an afterthought to the design process. An addition, not a necessity. The slow decline of desktops, coupled with the rise of mobile phones over the last 5 years, has shown that mobile-first design has to take priority.

Mobile-Friendly vs Mobile-First Design:

We’ve got used to the terms responsive and mobile-friendly design. Isn’t this just the same as mobile-first web pages? Although the two terms sound somewhat similar, they bear different meanings.

Responsive design is built around the concept of media queries that target specific devices and viewport sizes. With this in mind, you can code up your initial CSS given a mobile perspective and then use media queries to selectively serve up additional styling as the viewport size increases.

This is likely the opposite of the method that you typically take with responsive design: start big and then reduce. Given the arguments above, though, there’s obviously a lot of logic behind structuring your media queries from small to large.

Mobile-first web design is an independent technical approach to building websites. Instead of building a site for the screens of larger devices primarily, the technique suggests that you put a smaller smartphone screen at the heart of your web development strategy. This allows you to focus on the essentials, mainly, bringing the primary focus on the design elements and pieces of content that bear the major importance for your brand and your audience.

When a user accesses mobile-first web pages, additional layers of content are added. This makes your site well thought-out and content-centric.

Why the “Mobile First” Principle Is So Important?

Mobile conversion rates are up 64% when compared with the average desktop conversion rates. So, designing mobile first can lead to more profit for your business. And since Google ranks for mobile-friendliness, it makes sense to bear this in mind when starting a new project.

This way of designing is also beneficial when it comes to download times and users accessing your content as quickly as possible. With fewer elements, the page will load faster. When you consider a 1-second delay causing a 7% loss in conversions, it pays to design mobile first.

When you design from the smallest screen to the largest screen, this is known as progressive enhancement. It’s about designing with a strong foundation and adding enhancements as you go.

With mobile first, you create your strong foundation. This foundation will help strengthen other designs for tablets and desktops. The foundation should always be content and mobile first design emphasizes content over navigation – users get the information they need quicker.

This will also make your life easier since the mobile-first design starts off by tackling the hardest screen size to design for. The rest inevitably falls into place.

Mobile-first design forces you to really focus and maintain clarity by removing any unnecessary user interface decoration. By removing any distractions, you’ll invariably improve the user experience, and that makes good business sense.

How to create a Mobile-First Design?

One of the best and quickest ways to build mobile-first pages is to use a responsive website creator that allows you to build unique designs code-free. The popularity of drag-and-drop page builders grows at a fast rate. There is no need to spend time on the learning curve in order to be able to create versatile web pages without tweaking the code.

Moreover, you can use ready-made web themes that include all the essentials that are needed for a quick start to your web project. All you need to do is select a web theme that suits your topic, adjust it with the help of the drag-and-drop admin panel, upload the pages with your content, and bring it online.

Conclusion:

Neglecting mobile design in this day and age is a UX design sin. Delivering a pleasurable user experience should be at the heart of what we do. Using this mobile-first approach will not only make your life easier as a designer, but it’ll make the life of the user easier too. And isn’t that why we do this?

How Much Does A Website Cost?

How much does a Website Cost?

We are asked all the time. The problem is that there is no simple answer. There are many variables to price, and it is important to know these variables to make the right decision for your company’s website project.

First, a web designer or a web design firm. Many individuals are capable of producing the files needed to create a website. The problem is how capable they are. Today’s Internet technologies are very complex, and there are many issues to know, design standards, usability, technical choices, programming languages, database design, web services, social networking, search engine optimization, search engine marketing, server administration, maintenance, and much, much more. It is difficult for one person to have expertise in all of these areas. Additionally, an individual can easily get bogged down if they take on too many website projects at one time. A professional firm has the resources to move around to keep your project on a timeline. This all said an individual working from their home could be less expensive than a professional firm with a team of specialists. It is important to consider these issues together.

Second, what is the business model of the web designer or web design firm you are considering? Generally, there are three business models: a website builder application, such as you will find on GoDaddy.com, a flat rate price for a template website, or an hourly rate for a customized website. A website builder is simply an application that resides on a website server, whereby you choose a rudimentary, generic template and access the content area on the page with a text editor. Typically, these website builder applications charge a fixed monthly rate. You can add additional features for an increase in the fixed monthly rate. This is a very inexpensive way to “just get a website online”. Their shortcomings are that they look very generic, are not very flexible, are not specific to your industry, very poor performing in search engines, you do not have assistance in how to write or present your concepts on the website, it is not transferrable, you are limited to the functionality offered by the website builder application.

Many web designers or website design firms will offer a flat rate to develop a website for you. This rate is usually derived from the website designer’s experience, and it is quoted broadly to fit the designer’s experience or expertise. For instance, you want a blog on your website. there are many ways to design a blog, and there are even more ways to present the blog to your website visitors. To control costs or the time involved in delivering this website functionality to you a web designer who is using a flat rate price will provide a set of pages and programming code that the web designer is familiar with or may have already produced. If the blog does not perform the way you want or is displayed as you wish, too bad. A “blog” was delivered, and you get “that” blog for the price that was quoted. This is true with other features, calendars, membership lists, newsletters, email blasts, etc. Many inexperienced web designers do not have programming skills and will provide a flat rate price because they utilize “off-the-shelf” solutions to your feature/functionality requests. Most of the time, they lack the programming skills to write a customized solution or to even make code changes necessary to effect the exact changes you want. Or, the “off-the-shelf” solution does not allow for code changes.

Most reputable, experienced, and professional web design firms provide website design and website programming, and consulting services at an hourly rate. These rates can vary widely, but it is usually the fairest way to provide web design services. Two things are critical when hiring a web design firm under this business model: be as specific as you can about the features and functionality you want on your website, and get an estimate of time/cost up front on that specific features/functionality list before beginning your website project. It is also very telling if your web design firm does not provide some room in the budget for contingencies. There will always need to be some changes or some additions. The web designer must put some padding on the estimate.

It is impossible to provide a price with any confidence when you tell the designer, “I just want a simple website. Nothing fancy.”, etc. Do you want a calendar? Blog? Newsletter? eCommerce? Membership directory? All of this functionality takes additional time to program into your web design. The design, the look, and feel, of your website, is contingent on these features – how to display them, where to display, etc. It is easy for costs to get out of hand once the project starts if you do not focus on completing your project quickly. If you run hot and cold on the process of designing and programming your website it will cause the firm hired to have to start and stop. This is a very inefficient use of their time, as they have to re-educate themselves on the project each time. It is also important that you communicate well with the web design team so they are not guessing at layout positions, minor features, and styling issues. It just costs them time and your money if they have to redo things.

Finally, there are some additional costs after the website design and programming phase – hosting of the website, hosting of email services, domain registration, search engine marketing. There can be additional costs depending on the details of your website (i.e. electronic gateway fees in the case of processing credit cards online, etc.) but, these are the primary charges you can expect on a monthly, quarterly, annual basis for just about any website. Web hosting/email hosting fees typically run about $10/month to $100/month, $200/month or more. Domain registration typically runs $9 or $10 per year to as high as $35/year. Search engine marketing such as Google Adwords can be budgeted but is difficult to predict because some industries are more competitive than others. The reason for this is because you bid for the position of your ads. Your budget could do the job as low as $100/month or may be as high as $1,000/month, $1,500/month or, more per month.

By the way, if you are getting bids from several web designers/web design firms, be sure you are comparing apples and apples before making your selection. It can be difficult to be sure what one designer is proposing matches up to the other designer’s deliverables. If you have any question or are unsure about a comparison, call the designers and ask for clarification. They will be happy to discuss it with you. We recently had a client who thought they were making a fair comparison. They didn’t. After awarding the website design project to a web designer working out of his house, they learned not everything was covered in the chosen estimate. The project finished over budget and it was completed late causing difficulties with sponsors and advertisers. The lowest price/cost estimate is not always the best value.

So, by now you are saying, “Great Kevin, HOW MUCH DOES A WEBSITE COST!” eMUNICATIONS charges an hourly rate. We will sit down with you at no charge to learn what your goals are, what your feature/function desires are, make suggestions, and we will come to a pretty good understanding of where we are headed. eMUNICATIONS will then provide you with a written estimate of the time and costs to build a customized website that will deliver the professional appearance, features, functionality, and results you expect from your website.

eMUNICATIONS uses a programming environment called Drupal. We are experts in Drupal and have done many websites utilizing this terrific programming environment. A well-respected (and big) Drupal training firm named Lullabot did a pricing survey among Drupal website design firms. You will be happy to know, eMUNICATIONS is on the low end of these scales. Not because we are less capable but because we are extremely efficient and specialized.

So sorry, as any reputable website design firm will tell you, to find out “HOW MUCH DOES A WEBSITE COST”, you’ll have to contact us and tell us what the goals of your website are.

Off-Page SEO Techniques to Improve Online Reputation

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is one of the techniques used to improve traffic to a website. This is where you construct your web pages and implement certain techniques to help you rank as high as possible on search engine result pages (SERPs). The higher your pages can rank on Google/Bing/Yahoo/etc. results pages, the more traffic your site is likely to get.

SEO can be split up into two separate categories: On-Page SEO & Off-Page SEO.

On-page SEO refers to settings you can apply on your website so that it is optimized for search engines. and it includes optimized titles and snippets, search-friendly URL structures, friendly navigation, user sitemaps, internal links, text formatting, user-friendly 404 pages, accelerated pages in terms of loading, mobile-optimized pages, high-quality fresh content, image optimization, external links to relevant sites (not broken) etc.

Off-page SEO refers to optimization activities you can do outside the boundaries of your website. Anything taking place outside of your website and contributing to your ranking is considered off-site SEO: social media marketing, influencer marketing, mentions (direct or indirect), guest blogging, and so on, so forth.

By deploying better off-page SEO techniques means you are trying to prove to your readers and search engines that your site is trustworthy, authentic, relevant, and could very well be popular in your industry, other benefits like the increase in rankings, increase in PageRank, more exposure.

Let’s get to the ultimate off-page SEO techniques checklist and learn some lessons.

Link Building:

Link building is another popular way of promoting your site. If you produce a popular, unique post for your site, then other people may want to link to it. Perhaps you have copied/published another website’s content on your site; don’t forget to place their website link as a reference. Do it for others and, if your content is trustworthy, let others do it for you. This is another way to increase your link popularity. Link building should be about quality, not quantity. If you try to ‘trick’ search engines by building artificial links, you are more likely to get a penalty rather than an increase in rankings.

Blogging:

Blogging is one of the best ways to promote your website online! By writing a blog for your website, you give a reason for visitors to keep returning to your site and keep up to date with your latest posts. It also helps search engines to crawl your site more frequently, as they have to update your latest blog post entries, which ultimately helps you rank higher in search engine results pages.

If you’re not very good at writing content for your blog, then you could always hire a guest blogger for your blog and ask him/her to write precise and unique content so that your blog can gain more credit from a search engine point of view.

Blog Marketing:

If you have created any kind of content which is share-worthy, then don’t hesitate to reach out influencers in your industry. Tell them to check your blog and ask for link backs from their blog. Make sure you get the links from completely relevant domains.

Engage in Social Media:

Social Networking is bigger than ever these days, If you want to make your business, website or blog popular, engage with people on multiple social media platforms. Social media presence will help grow your business and also help you get more backlinks.

Forum Submission:

Find forums online that are related to your sites and get involved within that community. Reply to threads, answer peoples questions, offer advice, etc. This all helps to build up your reputation as someone who is an expert within that position. Try to use “Do-Follow” Forums so that you can include a link to your site within your signature, which helps search engines crawl your site.

Directory Submission:

Many people may say that directory submission is dead! I believe that it isn’t as you are increasing the likely hood of people seeing your website. It is purely based on how effectively we are selecting those directories and how efficiently we are choosing the category for submission. You could submit to general directories, but for maximum effect, you are better off submitting to suitable directories. Of course, I agree that it gives quite delayed results, but it is worth doing it.

Social Bookmarking:

Social bookmarking sites are one of the best platforms to promote your website. When you bookmark your webpage or blog post on popular social bookmarking websites, you gain high traffic to your webpage or blog.

Photo Sharing:

Share your photos on popular image submission websites. Before submitting your images please optimize them with the correct URL and title tag. Before submitting your images, check if they have a proper title, description, and tags.

Video Marketing:

Just like photo sharing, if you have any videos that you have used on your site, then you can submit them to sites like; YouTube, Vimeo, etc. allowing people to find your content in other ways.

Answer the Questions:

One of the best ways you can get high traffic is from question and answer websites. Join high question and answer sites and search for questions related to your business, blog or website and give clear answers to these questions. Give a link to your website which will help in bringing you more visibility.

Infographics Submission:

Make creative infographics. These days, infographics are getting popular on the internet. Submit your infographics on infographics submission websites and give reference links to your webpage or blog. The image sizes differ with different websites

Conclusion:

Off-page, SEO is NOT just about backlinks as most people think. It involves your overall website trust, authority, social signals, and many other things. This off page SEO techniques guide is written to discuss some of the crucial factors that can improve your overall website authority on Google search. Don’t just rely upon on page SEO if you want higher rankings. Whenever you publish a new post, make sure to follow the off page SEO techniques mentioned here. Please always check your Google analytics report to improve your website.

Last but not least, avoid playing with fire and practice black hat off-page SEO techniques. You can turn both search engines, visitors, and subscribers to enemies. You can get penalties from Google, get blocked by visitors, or blacklisted by subscribers. And nobody wants that.

Improve your Website Design to Attract New Customers

Your website is the prime component of your online marketing. Therefore, the ultimate goal of web design is to attract new customers, keep their attention, and move them to act. This to true if you have a Business-to-Consumer (B2C) model or a Business-to-Business (B2B) model. How is your website performing?

There are many online articles discussing online marketing techniques and attracting prospects to your website. But what happens when your website visitors get there? Poor website design can diminish or negate all your hard work. If you have a high bounce rate, poor engagement, or a low conversion rate, consider these web design tips to attract new customers.

Pick a Consistent Color Scheme:

Your business communicates a lot at first glance, and it all hangs on the color scheme. Since colors evoke a message and emotion, it’s no surprise that banks typically favor blue (which emotes a feeling of security and trustworthiness), and companies that prioritize organic living and the environment opt for green logos (signifying growth, freshness, and health).

Specific statement colors not only speak to your business’ intended message, but also to the demographic you’re trying to attract. And when you’ve decided on a color scheme, make sure to use it consistently across all manner of branding, while scaling back on your general color palette.

Keep Upgrading Your Logo:

It has never been more important for your company to have a recognizable logo – after all, it’s not just an emblem on a card anymore. A logo appears on your website (both desktop and mobile), across your social media entities, as a favicon on a web browser, a mobile app tile on a smartphone, and more. When looking for a logo, try to make it as simple as possible and as unique as your brand.

Use Custom Photos And Visuals:

Innovative use of custom photos is the only way you can stand out in this competitive market. It is never a good idea to follow through with mediocrity, especially when it comes to aesthetic appeal, which decides the outset of your web page to your target audience

It may be easier to just skim through online stock photos and pick a relevant few to use for your website, but it will also make your site less innovative and less interesting. Creating your own concept of the kind of images you want and getting proper pictures taken for your site will make it more exclusive and make the idea you are trying to get across of your site more appealing and special.

Stay On Point:

The first thing a person visiting your site will notice is the top 1/3rd of your page, and hence that area must contain the most basic and essential information regarding your site. This includes what the site is about, how the customer can use the site to find or do what they came for. A smart layout will enable the users to find the options or information they are looking for more easily and will surely make the site more user-friendly. Avoid descriptions that are too long or convoluted. Everyone is looking for a fast and simple way of finding information, so unnecessarily long instructions or definitions will not be appreciated by anyone.

Designing That’s Responsive:

It is not wise to assume that your customers will only visit your site via a computer. With a single person surfing the internet through several devices, it is safe to assume your site may be visited by a phone or tablet. But for many websites, it is difficult to load the site when the user shifts to an Android/ iOS device, as the layout is solely made for entering the site through a computer browser. Making your site sensitive to changes in devices will ensure easier access for your customers, and so they will be less prone to not entering your site, even if they change devices.

Showcase indicators of Trust Prominently:

No company wants to give the impression that their services have never been used before, yet we’ve all seen websites that look hastily thrown together, untested, or sketchy. One way of strengthening your reputation is by showcasing appropriate accolades and other indicators of trust prominently on the homepage.

Has your startup been mentioned in the New York Times or reviewed on popular tech publications? Does your company have any well-known VC backers, or have they formed professional relationships with already established brands? This information, with appropriate links and graphics, should be incorporated.

Consider how Viewers read your Site:

Research from an eye-tracking study from the Nielsen Norman Group has shown that internet users are more likely to read content in an F pattern: first in a horizontal bar across the top of the page, and then horizontally again a little further down. Then they scan the document vertically from top to bottom. The implications are that visitors don’t necessarily read the whole document – they scan, and even then, mostly just the first two paragraphs on a page.

Applied to a business website, it may be more effective to communicate the most important information on the top third of a page, with generous use of keywords. Try to break up large chunks of text with appropriate graphics. I try to do the same thing in various columns I do here on Inc. Regardless of whether or not this model works for your company, it’s increasingly important to consider how viewers read your site.

Keep it Simple!

It’s easy to get carried away by all of the elements that everyone says you need. However, even with today’s surplus of SEO features and custom design elements, it’s never been more important to scale back, get rid of all non-essential details, and keep it simple.

On a practical level, people aren’t just finding your company on a computer anymore. Screens are getting smaller, which means all-important information needs to be featured more prominently. They also have shorter attention spans. People are scrolling faster, so if they don’t find what they need at first glance, they’ll look elsewhere. As we’ve learned from Apple, simple is beautiful. So if you’re building a new website, or simply updating an old one, just remember: keep it simple.

Conclusion:

These are a few simple tips you can cater to your use when designing a website. Of course, if you find implementing these tips a bit too intimidating to do it yourself, we are providing web design services. At the end of the day, all you will need is some creative thinking and a knack for perfection.

Social Media Marketing Tips to Improve Your Small Businesses

Social media isn’t just for personal use anymore. Businesses small and large have been using platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn for years – to the benefit of their bottom lines. And, if your business is struggling to make an impact, it’s time to make a change.

With 70 percent of the US population claiming at least one social media account, lagging behind on social media is no longer an option if you want to grow as a business. However,  constantly changing algorithms and increasingly savvy competitors admittedly make it hard to find your audience, particularly without a little advice.

Here are some stats to help you understand the importance of social media marketing for small business and why you need to take it seriously.

1. According to a survey conducted by eMarketer, 88% of businesses use social media.
2. 96% of the people who talk about your brand online aren’t following you on social media.
3. Customers spend 20% to 40% more on products/services by companies who engage with them on social media.

Being a small business owner, you should see social media as a robust tool that can help build strong awareness, increase the number of sales and build a real customer base. When you truly understand the potential of social media marketing for small business, you will see that the results that you achieve are far better.

That’s why getting a few tips from experts can do wonders for your next campaign. Take a look at what we found to be the most helpful social media tips out there today and reach your audience.

Get Started:

If your business doesn’t have a social media presence by now, you’re possibly feeling apprehensive about jumping in this late in the game. With more 60 million business pages on alone, making an account now might seem like a pretty daunting task. However, in 2018, it’s more about “now” than it is about “perfect.”

“Don’t be afraid to just get started — walks you through the steps and provides additional help resources so you don’t have to have every little detail set up perfectly. Just get going and learn as you go,” said Sandi Krakowski, serial entrepreneur and active social media user, to Business.

Social Media platforms like are designed to be updated as you go. There’s no reason to be worried about creating a “public relations disaster” because you poorly punctuated your “About” section. Get your company on now, and figure it out along the way. You’ll get the hang of it.

Commit to a Plan:

When it comes to social media marketing for small business, having a strong and clear strategy is the first step towards finding success. There are many reasons why a business may fail to get results with social media marketing, but sometimes it is only because they did not know what they were doing.

“It all starts with planning,” wrote Brian Peters of Buffer. “Create a social media strategy and write it down in order to hold your business accounts. Your strategy should include a basic company mission statement, content plan and goals. And most importantly, a powerful statement on ‘why’ people would follow you on social media, what kind of content you plan on creating and posting, and what you hope to achieve.”

For instance, if you are marketing on Facebook, you should not only focus on getting more likes to your posts and your page but also try to boost the number of leads and sales you’re getting. Try to align your social media goals to your business goals.

Audit Your Social Media Online Presence:

If you’re looking to improve an existing social media presence, it’s essential to first take stock of what you’re working. And that means, it’s time for an audit. By inspecting your current audience, content, and overall social media strategy, you can learn a lot about what customers want from your business.

So how do you conduct a social media audit? Taking simple steps, Gather Data, Ask some key questions, Look at your audience, Determine top performing post, Do brand check, compare to competitors, reviewing your content, and Compare to revenue, leads & conversion target, will make a huge difference when it comes to your future social media success.

Create a Social Media Calendar:

Creating quality social media content is not enough. You also need to make sure that it reaches your followers on a consistent basis. An effective way to share the right kind of content is to use a social media calendar. Without complicating things, a social media calendar is nothing but a detailed schedule of the type of content you will be posting to each of your social media accounts. It gives you the much-needed clarity to post social media updates that matter.

There are multiple ways to create your social media calendar. You can either choose to go the simple way by using a spreadsheet or calendar in your Google Drive or use a more robust approach by using a paid tool.

It doesn’t matter what tool you use to create your calendar, what actually matters is how detailed it is and how you will be executing it. Because ultimately your precise execution plays a major role in making your efforts successful.

Having a clear social media calendar allows you to stay accountable, be consistent, save a ton of time, get more productive, and achieve peace of mind – all of which contributes to building a result oriented social media marketing approach.

Get Inspired by Other Brands:

When you are doing social media marketing for small business, it is easy to get confused and misunderstand what your audience is looking for. This can lead you to create content that does not go well with your overall business goals. Which is why you need to spend time looking and analyzing the type of content other businesses are posting to their social media accounts.

These companies can be your direct competitors or may even compliment your business. The idea is to get a clear understanding of the type of content that is working for them. Look for patterns and see what’s fetching them the most social response.

You can also leverage social listening to find insights about your prospects and what they want to see from you. This not only ensures that you create appropriate content on a regular basis, but it also helps you stand out from the crowd.

When seeking inspiration, it is not necessary that you only stick to analyzing other small businesses using social media marketing. You can also go beyond and actually learn from industry leaders and bigger brands such as Starbucks, Oreo, Netflix, Apple, etc. It allows you to grab some real social media social lessons firsthand.

Don’t Forget Video:

As technology has improved, the video has become incredibly popular on social media. From live feeds to GIFs, the medium has become the go-to method for marketers to get the attention of potential customers. And, suffice it to say, it’s working.

“The domination of video has been a long time coming,” wrote Brent Barnhart of Sprout Social. “Eye-catching, entertaining and capable of stopping scrolling users in their tracks, video represents the ideal way to encourage fans to spend more time engaging with your brand.”

The stats back this up, too:

If you haven’t been convinced that video needs to be part of your social media strategy to date, it’s time to rethink your approach.

Choose the Right Platform:

One of the things that can impact your social media marketing for small business results is the choice of your platform. In order to get the most out of social media marketing for small business and make your brand stand out from the rest, it is crucial that you choose a platform that is suitable to your business goals. If not, you may end up spending your time and money on a social network that will most likely not give you a favorable return on investment.

Do not make the mistake of selecting a social media platform based on a wild estimate or on what others are doing. It is important that you take into consideration your target audience, their preferences, and other demographics before starting to work with a platform.

Develop Separate Personas:

Once you have the minute details that you find common between the best customers, it’s time to organize them into different personas, which helps you target with more precision when using social media marketing for small business.

You can easily do this by creating a list of customers within your audience that share the same kind of goals and face similar challenges. Create separate groups out of these customers and categorize them. Each category you add is nothing but a unique persona that you will be leveraging later on.

For instance, if you are a yoga teacher, some of your students may want to do yoga to perfect their posture while others may aim to do it for building muscle strength. While both of these customers want to do yoga, but for different reasons or goals. Which is why it makes sense to create two different personas for them.

Conclusion:

The reality is that, even with all the social media tips in the world, it still takes a lot of time, energy, and resources to get right. Even then, there is no guarantee you’ll be able to foster success through social media, particularly without help from an Expert. That’s where a We can do wonders.

You won’t need social media tips, because these services are set up by experts who can do the hard work for you. We improve your social strategy with the knowledge necessary to make an informed decision, so you can reach new customers while keeping your current customers happier than ever.

What Makes a Good Website Good?

What makes a good website “good”? Many factors go into making a website good, but I can sum it up simply in a single sentence:

A good website gives users the information they need as quickly and easily as possible.

That being said, we can get more specific. Here’s a short list of what makes a good website “good” — we’ll dig into each of these items in this post and explain what we mean.

A Good Website is:

1. Mobile responsive
2. Fast to load
3. Filled with useful, valuable content that’s easy to scan and read
4. Filled with calls to action that tell the user what to do next
5. Designed beautifully while avoiding excessive visual distractions
6. Designed simply (no fancy videos or effects that distract a user)
7. Easy to navigate
8. Filled with internal links that allow users to easily move from one piece of content to the next
9. Built on a content management system that’s regularly updated and maintained (like WordPress or Drupal)
10. Hosted on a quality host that prioritizes loading speed

This list flows entirely from the principle I listed earlier — that what makes a good website good is its ability to give your users the information they want without throwing up roadblocks, and to do so quickly. Let’s talk about that a little bit before we dig into each item listed above.

What Makes a Good Website Good? Its Ability to Fulfill User Intent

Your website has one job — serve information to a user. If your user is coming from a search engine, they usually have a specific question they want an answer to. If they’re coming through some other method, they may have a different intention — to make a purchase, for example.

In all cases, a good website serves them the information they need when they ask for it. That’s the only real job of your website.

Now take this with a grain of salt — from your point of view, your website may have many different jobs.

For instance, you might want your Website to:

1. Sell products/services directly
2. Attract large amounts of traffic and then send it to affiliates or advertisements
3. Generate leads for products/services
4. Inform the public and collect donations (common for non-profits)

Your users could give two figs about all that. They’re coming to your website for one thing, and one thing only — information.

Now that information could come in the form of a product or a service, and the only information they’re seeking is how to actually make a purchase. But that’s rare. In most cases, for most visitors to your website, people are there to get some sort of info.

A good website gives users the information they need as quickly and easily as possible

Maybe they want to learn more about your products or services.

Maybe they want to figure out how to contact you or how to apply for a position.

Maybe they want to learn more about a subject that you’ve written a blog post or an email about.

Maybe they just want to find out more about you and your company to see if you’re someone they want to do business with.

Whatever the case, anything that impedes their goals is going to make a website bad.

That list above? If you want to make a good website, you need to follow that list — if you want to make a crappy website that no one wants to visit, then do the opposite.

Let’s talk about the importance of each item on that list and dig into the factors that make a good website good

A Good Website Is Mobile Responsive:

Google loves mobile, and if Google loves it, it’s generally because they think users love it.

And guess what? Users love to access websites on mobile devices.

Mobile traffic recently overtook desktop traffic for websites worldwide. And Google (and all the other search engines) have begun mobile-first indexing, which essentially means the mobile version of your website is now more important than the desktop version.

If you have two versions of your website, the mobile version better is fully functional — if not, you’ll pay for it with lower rankings for your content.

But beyond that, if your website isn’t easy to use on mobile, if mobile is an afterthought, then your users (most of whom are likely accessing your website through their mobile devices) are going to struggle, and if they struggle, then your website isn’t going to perform well, because they’re not going to come back to your website (or even bother to navigate through it).

You’ll lose traffic and fail to build an audience if you annoy your users, and that’s no good.

A Good Website Loads Quickly:

If your website takes 87 years to load, users are going to click away. Modern users have no tolerance for slow websites. If your website takes more than even a few seconds to load, they might simply click the back button and try another.

Get this as deep into your head as possible: Most people don’t give two figs about your website, no matter what it is you sell or what information you have — they will find another website if yours won’t load.

Consider this: After about 2 seconds, page abandonment starts to creep up.

Websites that load slowly are no good at all.

A Good Website Has Awesome Content:

Remember, people are coming to your website primarily for information — they generally don’t make a purchase until they get a lot of information about the product or service, and they often don’t even get to the point where they want to make a purchase before getting to know your business and what you offer.

People come to your website because you have something of value. Even if you already have an awesome product, people want to learn about it. Your website needs to have good, informative content that’s chock-full of value.

If someone comes to your website, will they find what they seek? Will they read or watch your content and be impressed, feel like their question that led them to your website was answered, and come back for more?

They will if the information on your website is high quality. That means it’s carefully researched, contains links to relevant sources, answers several questions thoroughly, covers the topic completely, and helps them figure out where to go next to learn more or take action based on the information they just consumed.

A Good Website Is Easy to Read and Scan:

Content is great and all, but if you don’t have headings or subheadings, if there are no bullet points, if all someone sees is a huge wall of text, they’re probably not going to enjoy the experience of reading much.

Sometimes this can work (people expect a wall of text if they’re reading a short story, for example), but in the vast majority of cases, people are looking to find a single answer, or perhaps a few, and don’t want to read every word on every page.

“People want instant gratification and quick fixes.” This is the perennial truth of writing for the web: People are only going to read a portion of what you write. Modern users look at most pieces of content the same way they look at an instruction manual — they’re scanning to find a particular answer, and for many, that’s all they need.

Even those who dig deep are going to scan the bottom part of the article. People just don’t have time these days to read everything, but even when they do, bullet points and headings make the experience more palatable.

A Good Website Has Calls to Action:

This is a simple one, but it can’t be ignored. If your website doesn’t specifically call users to action, which is to say, if each piece of content doesn’t specifically tell people what to do next, then users are going to:

1. Leave your site because there’s no clear instruction on what to do next
2. Leave your site because they’re unaware you have more awesome content for them
3. Leave your site because they have other things to do, and you didn’t give them a reason to stay

A call to action (CTA) should be on every page, on every piece of content. It should tell users what to do next.

check out our blog on How Quality Content impacts your SEO and Website Design to Attract New users to make your website good.

Why do I need to consider a Redesign?

Times change, industries change, and most importantly, technology changes. Staying on top of current trends and utilizing current technology will ensure you stay ahead of your competition. With the large adoption of mobile technology in recent years, it is now more important than ever to keep track of the constant technology changes and ensure that your website looks good from any device. Google now shows mobile-friendly websites higher up in the search results. If your website isn’t made to be viewed on mobile devices yet, you’re missing out on opportunities.

When we are talking about a website redesign, we are talking about more than just applying a new look and feel. A successful redesign will evaluate not only the overall appearance but also the navigation and flow of content. Keeping the content fresh will be a huge benefit to your search engine rankings, but we’ll talk more about this later.

How often should I redesign my Website?

You’ve probably noticed some companies seem to do a full redesign every year, while others will push out a new website every two to three years. To put an actual value on how often you should do a redesign is very difficult because a number of factors are involved, such as the industry, the products and/or services you are offering, and your target audience.

Instead of reviewing your website once every few years, the best practice for maintaining a healthy site is to constantly re-evaluate it. These continuous evaluations might reveal the opportunity to make minor changes to small portions of the site at a time instead of one large redesign every few years.

Some questions to ask yourself while evaluating the design of your website include:

Search Engine Benefits:

Search engines thrive on finding new content. The goal of most search engines is to showcase the most current and most relevant sites available to a search query. Therefore, an article posted online a week ago will show up higher on the search engines than an article posted three years ago on the same topic.

SEO is a double-edged sword when it comes to your website redesign, though. There are several steps to consider when redesigning your website that will allow you to keep your current rankings. The URL is key to your SEO. If the redesign is drastic enough, then the unique page address could change. To not lose your place in the rankings, you should do one of two things: keep the same URL, or make sure the proper redirects are in place with the new URL.

Ultimately, the “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” mentality does not apply to websites. The internet is constantly evolving, and to be a leader in your industry, you must embrace constant change.

Check out our blog on why mobile mobile-first design principle is so Important in Website Development

What’s The Difference Between On-Page And Off-Page SEO?

Did you know that small businesses should allocate about 8% of their Revenues to Marketing?

That’s right, according to the SBA, a small business with under $5 million in yearly revenue should have a marketing budget consisting of around 7-8% of their yearly revenue. The SBA points out that in certain industries, a small business may even need to earmark up to 20% of revenue during its early branding years.

But wait, we’re not done with the small business math lesson yet. Research shows that in 2017, an average of 51% of all web traffic came from organic search.

If your small business marketing strategy is predominantly digital, you should be spending at least 3-4% on search engine optimization (SEO). The challenge is that most small business owners don’t know much about search engine optimization. You’re an expert in your industry, not SEO.

Although it probably won’t benefit you to learn how to SEO your site from top to bottom, you should know enough to talk the talk while shopping around for the right marketing services.

At the most basic level, you should understand the basics of on-page vs. off-page seo, and what each of these SEO segments encompasses.

At the highest level, search engine optimization can be broken down into off-page and on-page SEO. On-page SEO consists of factors that a website owner can directly manipulate on their site. Off-page search engine optimization refers to the digital signals outside of one’s website that marketers can influence indirectly.

There are notable differences between on-page and off-page optimization in SEO, which we will go over in the following sections. On a strategic level, off-page SEO is the more difficult and tedious of the two, so we’ll cover that first.

What is Off-Page Optimization in SEO?

Off-page optimization consists of the actions that can be performed outside of your actual website to improve your organic search rankings. These measures are meant to reflect your website’s social credibility and industry authority. Because these search engine ranking signals come from other websites, they cannot be easily manipulated.

Off-Page SEO Factors:

There are several off-site SEO factors, including:

1. Backlinks to your website
2. Brand mentions
3. Social signals around your website
4. Backlinks
5. Think of rankings as elections of web pages in the search engine results. Your page has to get the vote if it wants to be on page one. In the world of off-page SEO, those votes come in the form of backlinks. Backlinks are hyperlinks from external websites that send users and search engine crawlers to your website.

Depending on their relevance and authority, backlinks can affect your organic rankings to different degrees. Think of the importance of each of your backlinks as being located on a Cartesian plane, where the X-axis is authority, and the Y-axis is relevance.

[image] You can have the most authoritative backlink in the world, but if it’s not relevant to your niche or industry, your pages will have difficulty ranking well. On the other end of the spectrum, if you have a highly relevant backlink from a site that doesn’t have any authority in your industry, you’re still going to find it difficult to rank.

Your page rankings will not see much benefit if your links are one-dimensional on the relevance-authority spectrum.

Brand Mentions:

To many startups and small businesses, branding is a buzzword that only holds merit if you have venture capital money backing your organization. Bootstrap entrepreneurs tend to avoid paying for branding because it can result in exorbitant costs with very little ROI.

In this particular case, we have concrete evidence to verify that a brand mention may very well be one of the most critical off-page SEO factors for your site. According to Google’s Panda Patent filed in September 2012,

“An implied link is a reference to a target resource, e.g., a citation to the target resource, which is included in a source resource but is not an express link to the target resource. Thus, a resource in the group can be the target of an implied link without a user being able to navigate to the resource by following the implied link.”

When it comes to off-page SEO, brand mentions seem to be just as important as backlinks to your website.

Social Signals:

Since off-site search engine optimization is meant to reflect the authority of an entity in the real world, it makes sense that having social credibility in the digital world is a ranking signal.

To show that the use of social signals for organic rankings isn’t entirely theoretical, take a look at the US 2016/0246789 A1 Searching Content Of Prominent Users In Social Networks Patent. Without reading through everything, this patent indicates Google’s ability to augment rankings based on what your social media connections find valuable.

What does this off-page SEO signal mean for you? The more shares your content gets, the higher it will likely rank. Social shares also create nofollow links and generate real traffic, so even if you’re not concerned with improving your SEO, a social share will bring relevant traffic to your site.

How to Do Off-Page SEO:

Now that you know about the different types of off-page SEO, consider how they can be used in your digital marketing strategy.

Unfortunately, getting another website to link to your site or mention your brand is no easy feat. In today’s digital landscape, the most scalable off-page search engine optimization techniques are the least effective.

Most off-page SEO experts will leverage local or niche directories and guest blogging to build backlinks.

Local and Niche Directories:

Yext and BrightLocal are commonly used tools for local directory listing. You simply enter your business’s information, and the tools manage the footwork so that you don’t have to.

Recommended for You:

Webcast, April 25th: How to Use Tools to Maximize Your Influencer Marketing ROI

When it comes to niche business listing sites, the process is typically more involved. For example, imagine that you’re doing SEO for law firms and you’d like to get listed on several lawyer directories. You’ll most likely have to enter your profile information manually on each site.

Building Backlinks with Guest Blogging:

When done correctly guest blogging is one of the most effective methods for building links to a website. The trick is finding websites in your industry that aren’t in direct competition with your own, and asking the site owners/managers if you can contribute a blog article for their readers.

They get free content to publish for their audience, and you get to cite any of your resources that you mention and link to within the article you contribute.

Here are some additional tips to keep in mind while guest blogging:

1. Your article must be high quality – it is a reflection of your brand, and the publisher is more likely to keep backlinks for off-page SEO intact if your content is valuable
2. Don’t be self-promotional – your article might be denied
3. Don’t stuff your article with links
4. Target sites that don’t compete with you – trying to get competitors to promote your ideas is usually a waste of time
5. Use advanced search operators to search for sites that use “write for us,” “contributor guidelines,” or “guest blog” to promote their acceptance of guest authors

What is On-Page SEO?

On-page optimization in SEO refers to direct measures that can be taken on your website to improve its rankings in search results for related queries. Examples include using related keywords in the visible content and in meta tags like your page title, image alt, and meta description.

6 On-Page SEO Factors:

On-page SEO boils down to six main factors. There are more than six factors, but the six below will get you 95% of the way.

Page Titles:

Page titles are by far the most important on-page search engine optimization factor. If your site framework doesn’t have special functionality to create a unique page title, it will usually use whatever you set as the page name in the backend of your page.

If you’re using WordPress as your CMS (which I highly recommend), then you can easily use the Yoast SEO plugin to create a unique page title.

The HTML for your page title will be within the <head> tags, and will look like this:

<title>Your Page Title Here</title>

The page title is what shows up in the search engine results pages (SERPs) and in the browser tab at the very top of your screen. For this reason, it’s important to optimize page titles for SEO and for user click-through.

Keep the page title length under 70 characters, and closer to 50 characters if you can. This will prevent your title from being cut short in the SERPs, while keeping it concise and appealing. It has been best practice to include your keyword near the beginning of the page title if possible. However, you’ll probably see better results if you create a title that is appealing to users and include your target keyword where it seems most natural.

Heading Tags:

After the page title, heading tags (<h1>, <h2>, <h3>, etc.) are the next most important on-page optimization factors. Use the page headings like you would an outline for a paper. Headings should follow a logical hierarchy without skipping steps.

It’s best to only use one H1 on a page. That being said, it’s also important that your web page is about one organized topic to begin with. This helps Google and other search engines identify and better understand what your page is about, and if your page deserves to rank highly for related user queries.

Some marketers without an understanding of technical SEO use headings for their styling characteristics. For example, content marketers sometimes use H2s when they want to emphasize text by making it large, despite that text not being important to the main content on the page. Avoid this practice, and instead use the cascading stylesheet (CSS) to style your text. This will help you avoid emphasizing text to search engines that should be taking a backseat.

Keyword Usage:

Keyword usage within the body of your page is important. I am not a proponent of focusing on using a certain keyword density, as was common practice in the early days of SEO. However, if your page is about a certain keyword topic, it’s only logical that you would use your target keyword and closely related terms within the body of the page.

Similar to the primacy and recency psychological principles, it is typically best practice to include your target keyword near the top of your page and the bottom of your page. You can use related keywords throughout your page to avoid keyword stuffing while still following on-page SEO best practices.

As an interesting aside, in 2016, one of my clients’ web pages was competing with another site’s page for a high-competition keyword. The keyword was not visible anywhere on the competitor’s page, and still they were ranked on page one, position two for this 1600 per month national keyword. The takeaway: though it’s best practice to use your target keywords in the body of your page, Google’s algorithm is becoming more and more advanced each day, and exact match keyword usage isn’t do-or-die.

URLs:

Including the target keyword in your page URL is a best practice. This used to be an important on-page ranking factor, but it’s speculated to account for less than 1% of your page’s SEO value today.

The biggest benefit of this practice is that when someone links to your page with a naked URL (the actual URL is used as the anchor text), the link anchor text will still include your page’s target keyword.

Image SEO:

There are three main pieces to image SEO:

1. Optimized image alt Tag
2. Image filename includes the target keyword
3. File size is kept to a minimum without hurting user experience

An optimized image alt tag should include the keyword and be under 15 words. The true best practice here is to craft an honest description of the image while including your target keyword. With their image recognition technology, it is likely easy for Google to determine when someone is keyword stuffing in an image alt tag, and when someone is accurately describing an image for a good user experience.

Since there are limited ways to optimize an image, including your target keyword in the filename is also a good practice. This can be difficult to do when you’re optimizing images on a website that already has images without filenames that have been optimized for on-page SEO. You’ll have to save the images to your local machine, then upload them again with the keyword-focused name.

As a last step, you’ll want to compress images before uploading them to your web page. You can use a free online image compression tool for most .jpg and .png files. A tool like Tiny PNG is usually a safe bet, and Google also released an open-source file compression program called Guetzli in 2017. Guetzli is not as easy for marketers to implement since you cannot simply run the program with an online tool.

Meta Descriptions:

Meta descriptions are not visible on your web page, but will show up under your page title in the organic search results. Your meta description should be around 300 characters, with an absolute maximum of 320.

Many times, Google will choose its meta description from the visible content on your page that best aligns with searcher’s intent. This probably has the biggest effect on an eCommerce SEO strategy, as meta descriptions and on-page product descriptions play an integral role in the overall page’s SEO value.

How to Do On-Page SEO:

Many of the on-page search engine optimization factors above come with insight about implementing these components. When it comes to on-page seo and off-page seo, on-page is easier because of a site owner’s ability to make direct changes.

You can implement best practices on your target pages, and while blogging for SEO. You’ll just have to adjust your approach for the different searcher intent behind your keyword topics.

How SEO is Crucial to Your Digital Marketing Plan in 2019

Search Engine Optimization, as always, should play a key role in your Digital Marketing plan for 2019. SEO is in and not going out of style.

In the early days of digital marketing, your business lived and died by SEO. Search engine optimization, whether keyword stuffing or grinding away with a blog, allows you to siphon traffic from Google and other search engines. And, in those early days, Google was the internet. As the years went on, though, the landscape of the internet changed drastically. Social media came along and quickly replaced Google as the internet’s front page, and Google wisened up to black hat tactics. Last year, many outlets declared SEO dead. In July of 2018, a survey found that only 44% of businesses were spending money on SEO, ranking it below email and banner ad spend.

I don’t believe this is the case, though. Done correctly, SEO can be crucial to your digital marketing plan in 2019. Google still earns a ridiculous amount of traffic, and any website that has pulled traffic away has its search engine. SEO is just as important as ever, even if it has had to change with the times.

Misconceptions About SEO in 2019

These are some of the major reasons people avoid SEO:

1. You might… believe that it’s not effective anymore, not worth your time or marketing budget.
2. You may have tried it and it didn’t work it’ll work for your business.
3. Believe that it’s a shady tactic.

We’ll get to that later. SEO does one thing well, better than anything else, and that thing is long-tail organic traffic. SEO can get you from 0 to 100 visitors with little to no cost. Social media can’t do that. Email can do that, but not at scale. SEO brings in new, innately interested people. Your business deserves to appear when people are looking for things that are related to it — they’re looking for it! And, if your business solves a problem, there will be people searching for it. One business I work for generated several million visitors a month from SEO alone, with almost no spend focused on it.

The downside is that SEO isn’t immediate. It’ll take about a month from the time your site goes live for Google to begin logging your content, and even then you won’t jump directly to the front page. SEO can take a year to pay off, and you have to be willing to put the effort in for that long. If you’ve tried SEO in the past, I’d be willing to bet that this is why you had a bad experience. Your execution was either poor or focused on the short term.

Finally, if you don’t think SEO will work for your business, remember this: SEO is marketing on Google. And people are Googling your business, and everything related to it. They’re Googling everything that isn’t related to it, too. Google is everywhere. That makes Google the best way to be anywhere.

What People Get Wrong with SEO in 2019

People in 2019 are internet smart. Not all of them, but an overwhelming majority. And the internet itself is getting smarter and smarter every year. Smart internet users and a smart internet have at least one thing in common: they can smell SEO. And it smells putrid to them.

Why? Because SEO was so black hat for so long. Many people still remember the days of ridiculously over the top keyword stuffing. They remember scams being the number one result. Even those who are too young for it are likely to bounce off of an SEO heavy website. Because no one is looking for landing pages anymore – they’re looking for content.

Trust is the key to creating sales on your website. Obvious, overbearing SEO develops distrust. It drives people away. Keywords need to be natural, and so do backlinks. There are no easy hacks anymore. To make SEO work, you’re going to need to produce great content.

How to Effectively Use SEO in 2019

In 2019, SEO can be a very important part of your marketing strategy – and it can be almost invisible. If you are using marketing strategies that involve a website that isn’t Gmail, SEO will be there. Doing it right means looking through everything you do through an SEO lens. Ask yourself: is this discoverable? How can people find it?

A fair amount of that will come from simply making sure relevant keywords are included somewhere, in some way, on your website. If your business sells candles, you should be using the word “candle” in your content. Content is key here. When people are testing a website to see if they can trust it, they will go to a blog before continuing with the product page. You needn’t overload your copy with keywords, as it’s not likely to be how you get discovered.

Even if you aren’t producing written content, SEO is necessary. Podcasts need to be optimized to be found within iTunes. YouTube videos need work to be easily discoverable, as YouTube logs videos based on their closed captioning for their search engine. Even local businesses that do 0 online business need SEO. Not much, but still. Google will check your businesses website and what your customers are saying to find.

In 2019, the best SEO is almost incidental. That’s why it’s so crucial, though. SEO can be easily ignored, but – if you accept that the devil is in the details – you can generate enormous amounts of traffic. Google is absolutely everywhere, and it’ll take your business with you if you’ll go. SEO can’t singlehandedly power your digital marketing, but no channel really can. Whatever your digital marketing plan for this year is, you can almost certainly increase its effectiveness by working on how and how much SEO you’re doing.