5 Ways to Increase Traffic to Your Business Website
Author: Maggie Bloom
Business website owners and bloggers will often be told to build their sites with a focus on increasing the traffic coming to their sites. This is a practice that Google has been using for years, and while it can be difficult to keep up with, it is also an effective way to drive traffic to your site and generate leads.
1. Optimize Your Content With Keywords
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is making your site more visible to the search engines, which are programs that read sites and help determine how your page will rank. One of the most important parts of SEO is creating optimized content for keywords that attract traffic to your site.
The key to a successful business website is ensuring it is optimized to receive all the relevant traffic possible. This means that when you post your content, it should include keywords, titles, and descriptions that are relevant to the content itself. The more relevant your keywords are, the more traffic you will receive from searches.
2. Create Targeted Landing Pages
Visitors who search for keywords can be divided into different categories. Targeted landing pages are a way to ensure that visitors to your site remain in your domain and don’t bounce back or end up in spam folders. A great way to keep readers on your site is to create landing pages geared specifically toward your ideal customer. Landing pages should include information about your products and services and even testimonials from satisfied customers or partners. This will help direct traffic, not only from search engines but also from referrals, links, and social media sources.
3. Use Digital Ads to Promote Your Site
The best way to achieve maximum traffic is by increasing your exposure with both quality and quantity. Quality exposure will come through Google searches and landing pages, but increasing the traffic you receive is also necessary. The best way to do this is through online advertising.
Digital ads are a great way to get more customers to your site without spending large sums of money on print or radio advertisements. This can also be a very effective way to get leads and new customers, and the best part is that you can do it all in one place. You can place ads on search engines, including Google AdWords. These ads include links that send people directly to your site, but they also have links to affiliate programs and other companies that offer similar products or services.
4. Boost Your Local Search Reputation
Local SEO is the process of optimizing your site and gaining higher rankings in results when people search for local businesses. Local search engine rankings are important because they help to determine where visitors to your site will end up after searching for a keyword. To boost your local search ranking, you must post captivating and informative content that truly makes a difference in your local area. This can include information about events, trends in your community, and information that has yet to be mentioned. Make sure that when you post content, it is interesting and relevant to the keywords used by the local engines. This is an important part of driving traffic and leads to new customers, especially when people are looking for local businesses close to their homes or office.
5. Send Emails That Link to Your Website
While you can do a lot to increase your traffic and the number of people who visit your website, they will only be able to find it if they know where it is. To drive more traffic, you need to ensure that you have a more prominent link to your site on every piece of content you post to keep visitors. You can post links on your social media profiles, blog, and emails. MMS API enables you to send and receive Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS) messages in the most efficient manner, without having to write any code. These are all great places to place links to your site so people can easily find it.
An effective strategy is always to look for new and better ways to drive traffic to your site. The best thing you can do is continue doing what you already do while expanding into new areas. Depending on your company’s goals and needs, there are other ways that you can increase your traffic.
What are the five important areas of SEO optimization?
Author: Joe Barry
SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is a methodology that can be used to help your
website to reach as many people as possible. It’s important to be aware of the different aspects of SEO and how they influence one another in order to make sure your website ranks highly when it comes time for search engines like Google to hand out traffic.
What are the five important areas of SEO optimization?
There are many aspects to SEO optimization, and each one is important if you want your website to rank highly in search engine results pages. Here are the five most important areas:
1. Title tags and meta data:
The title tag and meta data are the first lines of your website’s HTML code. They’re used to determine the layout of your page and help search engines identify your webpage. Make sure your title tags and meta data are correct, accurate, and descriptive. For more information on how to title and meta your page, check out this guide from Moz.
2. In-page SEO:
This refers to the ways that you can improve the appearance of your content on a webpage. You can use keywords throughout your content to boost its ranking potential, as well as create unique layouts and design elements that will draw attention to your content. For more information on in-page SEO, be sure to check out this guide from Google.
3. Link building:
Building links is one of the most important aspects of SEO optimization. When someone clicks through a link from another website and lands on your page, it’s considered “inbound link building.” It’s important to make sure that all of your content is accessible via inbound links. That means that it’s important to make your content easy to read, structured properly, and easy to find.
4. Draw in visitors with social media:
Social media marketing can benefit your SEO efforts as well. When you’re creating content for a blog post or page on a site like Facebook or Twitter, be sure to include keywords throughout the text so that it can rank for particular search terms and phrases.
Additionally, you should be using external sites like Google+, Instagram, Pinterest, and YouTube to gain visibility for your content. This will help boost the visibility of your site on the web as well as on social networks, which will increase readership and traffic overall.
5. Optimize a site for mobile users:
With the wave of mobile users sweeping the internet, you need to make sure that your site is easily navigable for visitors on all types of devices. You should use clear navigation and include mobile-friendly pages, as Google’s Mobilegeddon update made it all too easy to be penalized by search engines if your sites aren’t mobile-friendly.
6. Check over your site regularly:
To stay on top of your SEO efforts and make sure they’re working properly, you’ll have to take time out of your day to check things like links, backlinks, external links, and anchor texts (the text surrounding the link). The best way to do this is by hiring someone who can check these things in your absence, and Incrementors provide the best on-page seo techniques.
The importance of search engine marketing
There is no doubt that search engine marketing (SEO) is one of the most important ways to improve your website’s ranking on search results pages (SERPs). SEO can help you attract more visitors from search engines, which in turn can lead to increased traffic and revenue.
Here are five important areas that you should focus on when building your SEO strategy:
Title tags and meta descriptions
Web page content
Link building
On-page optimization (also known as “hits” or “traffic”)
Offpage optimization
How to set up a website in today’s market
According to the Pew Research Center, in 2017, there were 1.4 billion active internet users, which is more than double the number of users in 2013. This massive increase in internet usage has led to an increase in website traffic. In order to keep up with this increase and ensure that people find your website, you need to optimize it for search engines.
There are five main areas of SEO optimization: title tags, meta descriptions, H1 tags, images, and page content.
1. Title tags are the first thing that a search engine sees when it indexes a page. They should be short and to the point, and use keywords that are relevant to your website’s topic.
2. Meta descriptions are a short paragraph that describes your page’s content. They must be between 75 and 150 characters long and use keywords as well.
3. H1 tags are used to identify the main heading on a webpage. They should be keyword rich and make it clear what the page is about.
4. Images play an important role in SEO, as they can help boost click-through rates (CTRs) and improve user experience. Make sure you ’re using a high-quality image that contains most of your keywords.
5. Use HTML sitemap to make sure every page on your website is well organized and easy for search engines to crawl through.
6. Place the following elements in your footer: a copyright notice, contact info, social media links, and webmaster information.
Best ways to optimize your website
1.Meta data:
Make sure all your meta data is up-to-date and accurate. This includes things like your website title, description, and keywords.
2.On-page optimization:
Make sure your titles, meta descriptions, keyword density, and images are all optimized for search engine visibility.
3.Off-page optimization:
Link building is one of the most important aspects of SEO and can help you rank higher in search engines.
4.Crawling and indexing:
Googlebot will index your site if it’s relevant to a search query, so make sure it’s properly crawled and indexed.
5.Design considerations:
Keep in mind that design affects how users interact with your site and may affect how well it ranks in search engines.
Best practices for SEO
1. Proper title tags:
A well-optimized blog should have informative and keyword rich titles that are catchy and search engine friendly. The title tag should be between 20 and 30 characters long and include the keyword(s) you are targeting.
2. Meta data:
Every blog post should include a title, description, tags, author, and date of publication information. This will help Google index your content and determine which pages to show in its search results.
3. Inclusion on social media:
Make sure your blog posts are shared on relevant social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Pinterest, and LinkedIn. SEO social media marketing services help amplify your reach and increase engagement with potential readers.
4. Optimized images:
Use high-quality images that are optimized for SEO (Alt Text, Title Tag, H1 Tag). These will help improve click through rates (CTRs) and make your content more visible to potential browsers.
5. Use anchor text:
Add keywords to all your links within your blog post so that they rank higher in SERPS. This will help increase traffic flow to your site and increase conversion rates.
Best tools for SEO
1. SEMrush –
SEMrush is a great tool for optimizing your website for search engines. This tool helps you see what keywords are being targeted by your competitors, find optimization opportunities, and generate more leads from organic search.
2. Google AdWords Keyword Planner –
This tool allows you to research keywords that are likely to drive traffic to your website. You can then allocate a budget and time to target these keywords.
3. Ahrefs –
Another great tool for researching and optimizing your website for search engines is Ahrefs. This platform provides detailed data on SERP trends, competitor activity, and keyword performance.
4. BuzzSumo –
One of the best ways to get exposure for your new content is to analyze how other brands are performing with similar content. BuzzSumo allows you to quickly find popular articles and measure their popularity based on shares and likes.
5. Google Analytics –
Google Analytics is a powerful tool that allows you to track the performance of your website traffic and conversion rates over time. By understanding where visitors are coming from and what motivates them, you can create better content that will keep them coming back.
Conclusion
There are a number of different aspects to SEO optimization, and it can be hard to know where to start. If you’re looking for some tips on how to optimize your website for better search engine visibility, read on!
Author BIO -Joe Barry is the manager and Head of Growth of Incrementors, a company that assists clients in expanding their online businesses by bringing in more customers, Incrementors is an Award-Winning Digital Marketing Agency leads, and sales. Online marketing solutions that are specifically adapted to the demands of the clients are the Incrementors’ area of expertise.
How to Optimize Your Business and Your Website
Author: Sophia Young
There are a million things to think about running your business, from acquiring funding to marketing your product or service. And though all businesses want to attract more visitors, convert more leads, and boost sales, the specific techniques for achieving these goals can be somewhat elusive.
That’s where optimization comes in. By definition, optimization is the process of making something the most effective version it can be. Optimizing your business means making it as effective as possible at achieving its goals. Likewise, optimizing your website means making it as effective as possible at attracting visitors and converting leads.
Don’t know where to begin?
Fortunately, the process sounds harder than it is. Optimizing your business today necessitates optimizing your website. That means that you’ll be hitting two birds with one stone by following our tips below.
1. Automate Business Processes
Automating your business processes can help you resolve many common issues, including:
Inefficiency -Manually completing tasks can often be time-consuming and error-prone. Automating these processes can help you speed up completion times and reduce errors.
Repetition – If your employees are spending a significant portion of their day completing the same task over and over, there’s a good chance that the task could be automated. This would free up their time to focus on more value-adding activities.
Dependency – If your business is reliant on a single individual to complete a task, automating that process can help to mitigate the risk of disruptions should that employee be unavailable
Lack of visibility – It can be difficult to get a clear picture of how your business is performing when business processes are manual. Automating key processes can help you capture data and generate reports that give you valuable insights into your operation.
Thanks to recent advances in technology, particularly with Artificial Intelligence (AI), even smaller businesses can now automate several processes, including:
Customer support – AI-powered chatbots can handle customer queries 24/7, freeing up your customer service team to focus on more complex issues.
Appointment scheduling – Automating the appointment scheduling process can help you reduce no-shows and scheduling conflicts.
Automating your business processes also makes it easier to collect data and generate reports. This data can be used to identify areas of improvement, track progress over time, benchmark your performance against competitors, and optimize your website.
2. Improve Website Performance
Most of your customers’ first interactions with your business will be through your website. That means that its performance is critical to the success of your business. Unfortunately, many businesses don’t put much thought into their website’s performance—until it’s too late.
The average user expects a website to load in less than four seconds. If your site takes longer than this to load, you’re likely to lose visitors and potential customers. You can improve your site’s speed by optimizing your images, using a content delivery network (CDN), and minifying your CSS and JavaScript.
And because more than half of all retail web traffic now comes frommobile devices, you must also ensure that your website is optimized for them. That means creating a responsive design that can adapt to any screen size, as well as ensuring that your site’s content is easy to read and navigate on a smaller screen.
3. Invest in SEO
Ever wonder how your competitors crowd the first page of Google results? They’re using Search Engine Optimization (SEO), which optimizes their website for Google’s algorithms so that your site appears higher in search results.
Don’t waste your website design cost by building a beautiful site that no one can find. Hiring an SEO expert can help you ensure that your site is visible to your target audience. They can also help you improve your click-through rate (CTR) and organic search traffic.
Remember that SEO is more of an ongoing process than a one-time optimization effort. That means you’ll need to regularly update your website’s content, Meta tags, and other elements to ensure that it continues to rank high in search results.
4. Don’t Stray from Quality Content
All business owners know that their content is important. But in the rush to produce more and more content, it’s easy to lose sight of what actually matters: quality.
You may think that interspersing a few low-effort posts among your high-quality articles will help you save money and time. But in reality, this will only hurt your business in the long run.
Your audience can tell the difference between well-written, informative articles and hastily put-together posts full of fluff and filler. The former will help you build trust and credibility with your readers; the latter will damage your reputation and turn potential customers away.
And because Google’s algorithms are designed to penalize sites that engage in what’s known as “content farming” — the practice of producing large quantities of low-quality content in an attempt to game the system— it’s more important than ever to focus on quality over quantity.
5. Keep Your Site Secure
If your website isn’t secure, you’re putting your business at risk of a data breach. You don’t want to land on the news because your customer’s personal information was compromised.
To protect your site, make sure that you’re using a secure hosting service, as well as a strong password for your admin panel. You should also consider investing in an SSL certificate, which encrypts your website’s data. We covered what small businesses need to know about cybersecurity in aprevious post here.
Optimizing your business as well as your website in one fell swoop isn’t as hard as it seems. Automating your business processes opens the door to a host of benefits, including easier data collection and analysis, improved customer communication, and increased efficiency.
With that data in hand, optimizing your website with SEO, quality content, and a robust cybersecurity strategy becomes a much simpler task!
How to Best Optimize What Factors to Increase Search Engine Rankings
Author: Hannah Boothe
Get your business ready for the search engines by optimizing your website for various factors. It’s not enough to pay lip service to SEO. You need to take action from day one and start making improvements as soon as possible.
If you’re looking to make a big impact on search engine rankings, you should know what each factor does and how it can be improved. The Internet has changed the way consumers search for almost everything. Traditional search engines that once only indexed websites have been incorporated into more advanced search engines to find content relevant to a user’s query. With the rise of AI and Machine Learning, Google is able to give users more relevant results than ever before. However, not all optimization is created equally. When it comes to improving rankings on search engine result pages (SERPs), there are various factors one needs to take into consideration. Let’s take a look at some of the most important ways you can optimize your website for SEO success.
1. Publish High-Quality Content
While many people believe that quality content is what gets them rankings, it’s not enough to just publish a bunch of articles. Your content needs to be high-quality, but it should also be optimized for search engines. You need to use the right keywords in your title, description, and on your pages. If you don’t have any content yet, you should create it as quickly as possible so you can start optimizing it.
2. Optimize Your Meta Data
Metadata is data that can be found in different places on your site. This information is used by search engine algorithms to determine the relevance of a page and its contents. It’s important that you choose the right keywords to include in meta tags if they are going to be used by search engines. You want to include at least one keyword on every page so that search engines can find relevant pages when they crawl your website.
3. Make Your Site Mobile-First
Mobile-first means that your website should be designed to work on mobile devices first. Search engines use mobile data to determine the relevance of a page. If your site isn’t optimized for a mobile device, it will not rank well on the search engine results pages. You should prioritize making your site mobile-friendly from the start. This means that you need to ensure that users can easily access content on your site, regardless of the device they are using. If your pages aren’t optimized for mobile devices, search engines will not think highly of them. Instead, they will be ranked lower than other pages that are optimized for mobile use.
4. Enhance Page Experience
Many partnership marketing platform companies believe that the best way to get a website to rank well is by creating content that appeals to people who are looking for specific content. The problem with this kind of strategy is that it’s not very effective. Instead, you need to focus on making your pages easy for users to navigate and read. You want to make sure it’s easy for people to find what they are looking for on your website so they can have a positive experience when they visit it.
5. Master Your On-Page Optimization
On-page optimization is the process of making sure that every page on your website contains the right keywords and other relevant information. If a page doesn’t contain the information that search engines are looking for, it will not rank well in SEO rankings. You need to make sure that every page on your website contains the correct keywords and other relevant information. This is where you want to use content creation software like Hubspot’s Content Creation Toolkit.
6. Internal Link Structure
Internal links are important because they help search engines determine the relevancy of a page. If relevant pages aren’t linked to one another, it will be hard for search engines to determine the relevance of a page. You need to link your pages together so that search engines can understand the relationships between them. You can use internal links to improve the ranking of your pages in search engine results pages.
Conclusion
In order for your website to rank well on search engine results pages, you need to focus on a few key areas. You want to make sure that your site is mobile-friendly and that you have an internal link structure that includes internal links between all of your pages. You also want to make sure that all of your content is relevant and contains the correct keywords.
6 SEO Trends That are Bound to Rule the Coming Decade
Author: Hazel Raoult
Optimizing and ranking your website pre-2010 era was pretty easy. You’d just have to follow simple steps like getting your website up, throwing in a bunch of keywords, writing a bit about the topic, and Voila! Google would start ranking your website on top.
However, that’s not the case anymore. Also, due to the internet revolution, the number of websites that compete with each other to rank higher exploded. Due to these reasons, it started getting difficult for search engines to crawl and index the massive database of the internet.
Today, the Google search index contains hundreds of billions of web pages and is well over 100,000,000 gigabytes. Thus, it needs a formidable way to evaluate and rank each page.
The evolution of Search Engine Optimization as seen in the last decade that ended with 2020 was, if described in one word, stellar.
Search Engines, especially Google have improved their quality and user experience by shifting their focus from keyword-oriented to quality-oriented results. And as the days pass by, SEO will keep getting evolved as and when new trends emerge.
Meanwhile, let’s see some of the SEO trends that are bound to rule the coming decade.
6 SEO Trends That Will Dominate the SERP Ranking for Coming Decade
1. Content Quality & User Intent
Yes, content quality has long been here and affects significantly on the SERP rankings. However, many websites haven’t adopted this as their SEO mantra. They are still focused on short-term SEO gains through building backlinks, optimizing technical SEO, or doing digital PR.
However, these are not suitable for long-term SEO gains. Also, due to the massive size of the database, the Google algorithm will only rank pages that offer remarkable quality on a consistent basis.
Websites creating generic content will have lower chances of ranking than the ones that publish unique, quality content on topics not covered by others previously.
One way to adopt this in your competitive content marketing strategy is by researching well for the user intent of your target audiences to scour unique topics. Now, organize and prioritize these notions by relevance and cover them one by one.
The quality content doesn’t necessarily have to be SEO-friendly but it must fulfill the users’ intent and their expectations. And if the industry leaders are to be believed, Google has long been working to detect the intent behind every search users make.
Thus, considering the value of content quality and user intent it encapsulates, this trend is bound to rule the coming years as a SERP ranking signal.
2. SEO Automation
From admin workflows to IT services and marketing, automation has proven its effectiveness. SEO practices such as website audits, competitor analysis, search intent detection, and many others have already been automated. And from 2022 onwards, it’ll become more widespread as more SEO professionals around the world increasingly adopt automation with open arms.
Driven by AI and machine learning, SEO automation can intelligently do technical audits to scour issues by content type. Also, many SEO experts utilize SEO automation as quality assurance for their SEO services.
Moreover, AI-powered automation tools monitor potential SEO issues in real-time and warn as soon as possible to eliminate and resolve them beforehand. The SEO automation trend is continually picking up the pace. And it has gone from ‘nice to have’ to necessary when dealing with larger and more complex sites.
3. Mobile & Page Experience
Not so recently, Google had announced the mobile-first indexing for the whole web. And recently, it has started implementing a page experience update that aims to rank sites with better user experience scores for both mobile and web.
Thanks to this update, the entirety of the mobile and web, from the discovery phase to engagement, everything will correlate and be in sync to offer the best possible page experience.
The ripple effects of mobile-first indexing and page experience updates will cause a massive re-organization in the SERP ranking that we all can witness in the coming years. Thus, brands should start preparing their website from the onwards to not lose any significant SERP rankings.
4. SERP Localization
As per Brightlocal’s Consumer Survey, consumers that use Google for local business evaluation increased from 63% in 2020 to 81% in 2021. Also, the following graph shows that 21% of consumers use the internet every day to find information about local businesses and 99% have done so in the last year.
From these statistics, we can idealize that Google will focus more on presenting localized content in the SERP results over the next few years. Already, the location-specific pages or content is outranking those who ranked at the top and focused more on global reach.
This will keep on picking up and become more obvious in the coming decade. Thus, websites with global target audiences will have to necessarily form a local presence to rank higher on localized SERP.
5. Metaverse Marketing
Metaverse marketing may seem like a new trend in the marketing sphere that’s thought to fade away with time. However, it has come a long way from being just another buzzword to a revolutionary strategy for marketers.
Metaverse can be conceptualized as the successor of the internet that we enjoy today. It brings the capabilities of the internet, virtual reality, and augmented reality together. As per Statista, there will be around a billion AR active users in 2022, which is supposed to cross the 1.7 billion mark in 2024.
Just like how brands optimize their web presence to get found on the current internet, they’ll have to find different ways to optimize their presence on the next generation of the internet i.e. Metaverse. A visual content strategy will play an important role in getting found on the Metaverse.
Audit your content strategy to find and optimize it with new content types and can implement AR, VR, and 3D experiences to leverage Metaverse marketing.
6. Voice & Visual Search
As mentioned in the previous point, visual as well as voice search will take precedence over the normal search approach.
As per one report, more than one-third of Americans use a voice search feature while 71% of consumers prefer making a voice search over typing. Another report projects that Google Smart Speaker Sales will hit 140 million in 2025.
This foreshadows that Google will prioritize the sites optimized for voice search and will feature them in the snippet results or show/speak when searched using smart assistants.
The same will apply for the visual search. After the introduction of Google Lens, the search engine giant is becoming better at interpreting SEO-optimized images day by day. The image recognition software will enable users to search for products and other things on the web.
Also, Google Discover uses images for tailored results. Thus, it’s predicted that normal search may start to resemble a lot more like Discover results filled with visuals.
Conclusion
Trends are known for their quick appeal when they appear first in the market. Many of those trends become obsolete after a certain period or when they are no longer relevant to the market. However, the above-mentioned SEO trends have been here for a few years now and we believe they’ll continue to be relevant in the coming years.
As more research and development are being conducted in the same direction, many of the trends listed in this article will go mainstream and rule the coming decade. Thus, brands need to sharpen their knowledge horns to drive sustainable and meaningful growth in the near future.
Author Bio
Hazel Raoult is a freelance marketing writer and works with PRmention. She has 6+ years of experience in writing about business, entrepreneurship, marketing, and all things SaaS. Hazel loves to split her time between writing, editing, and hanging out with her family.
How to Optimize Images for SEO
Author: Ivy Attie
Search Engine Optimization is a critical part of designing a website. With a great SEO strategy, your website will attract organic traffic and position well on the search engine rankings.
But do you know that there is more to a stellar SEO strategy than just working on the content? While they are often ignored, images also play an essential role in creating a sound SEO strategy. And leveraging the power of images and other visual content while designing your website’s SEO strategy will help you stay ahead of the competition.
This article talks about some excellent image optimization suggestions that you can use to increase your website’s speed and searchability.
Let’s get started!
Resize Your Images
Image size refers to the resolution and dimensions of the images. The greater the resolution and the bigger the dimensions, the slower your page’s loading speed will be. And we already know that Google considers page speed while deciding SEO rankings.
Here are some ways to ensure your images are the right size and don’t weigh your website down:
Choose The Correct Format!
Images are presumably the heaviest content on a page and add the most load to a website. Ultimately, this can lead to an increase in bounce rates and lower SEO rankings. By choosing the right format of images for different purposes on your website, you can achieve optimal loading speed.
There are three primary formats for digital pictures: JPEG, PNG, and GIF. Each type uses a distinct compression method, which means the file size for these three types can differ astronomically.
So, which type to use? Well, there is no one answer for this.
For example, JPEGs take the least space and are great for photographic images. In contrast, PNGs are a good option for illustrations, screenshots, images with textual information, etc. One downside to PNGs is they are heavier in size, compared to JPEG. As for GIFs, they are suitable for animated images.
Decide Your Compression Rate
Compressing too much can lower the file size, but it will also impact your image quality. Whereas not compressing enough, your image file size will remain big.
One of the best ways to compress a picture is through Photoshop. Select the ‘Save for Web’ option for a copy that is the ideal size and color for web use. TinyPnG, JPEG Optimizer, and many WordPress plugins are also helpful for this purpose.
Never Use Sloppy Filenames For Your Images!
When it comes to image optimization, filenames are not to be taken lightly.
Google has integrated a machine-learning image identification tool into its platform that can identify the content of the media file. But understanding an image is not always so easy.
For example, if you have uploaded an image of a basketball-inspired birthday cake and simply named it “Image_101.jpeg“, chances are Google may identify it as a basketball only.
This is because Google is still a machine, and you have to help it as much as you can to comprehend what your image is all about.
How?
For starters, use a more descriptive filename. In this case, a better and more helpful name would be “basketball-birthday-cake.jpeg.” This name will help Google identify your image and rank it among birthday cakes and not basketballs.
Don’t Underestimate The Power of a Good Alt Tag
Alt tags appear when the picture is unable to load on the browser for some reason. Search engine algorithms look for alternative tags to comprehend the image’s content and show them in place of the photo.
The alt tags also allow people with visual difficulty better understand the picture when they are reading through a screen reader.
Add precise alt tags along with your pictures. Aim to be as descriptive as possible by integrating relevant keywords in the alt tags. However, avoid keyword stuffing as Google can figure ‘over optimization’ and penalize your page for trying to trick their algorithms.
Again, take the example of a basketball-inspired birthday cake and see what a lousy alt tag looks like and how you can make it better.
Whether you choose to acquire images from an online source or click original ones, they mustn’t appear to be cliche. Just as textual content is supposed to be unique and not plagiarized for good SEO rankings, your visual content must also be novel.
However, uniqueness can be an issue when using stock photos because they are readily available to almost everyone. What you can do to minimize the problem is add a hint of your own creativeness to them before you put them up on your website.
Stock pictures are open for modification, so you are free to edit, crop, and even change the background to incorporate that tinge of uniqueness into the images.
Come up With Great Image Captions
Image captions don’t directly contribute to great SEO rankings, but they definitely improve the user experience on your website. Image captions are the writings that appear underneath your visual content. Unlike alt tags or image names, they are visible to the readers on your website.
Putting a creative caption under your images gives users a complete feeling about the visual content. It tells them the purpose of the image, which they might not comprehend without the caption. Good image captions decrease your website’s bounce rate and boost your online reputation.
Make an Image Site Map
According to Google, a sitemap is “a database where you give information about the pages, videos, and other files on your site and their relationships.”
While most webmasters add every textual information of their website on the site map, it is important to mention every visual asset on your website too. From the smallest thumbnail to the largest video – every element of your website should be part of the sitemap.
It will help SEO spiders consider all the content on your website while deciding the rankings.
Conclusion
Search Engine Optimization is the present and the future of online marketing. And as said before, your SEO strategy will be incomplete without an excellent image optimization plan.
Give these tips a try. We are sure they will increase your online credibility and rate you high in the SEO rankings. Good Luck!
Author Bio:
Ivy Attie is a content manager, researcher, and author in various media-oriented publications. She is a passionate communicator with a love for visual imagery and an inexhaustible thirst for knowledge. Her background is in communication and journalism, and she also loves literature and performing arts.
7 Ways Coding Can Help Your SEO
Author: Jasmine Gordon
Nowadays, the world of digital marketing is a competitive battlefield. Like any battlefield, it’s crucial to be fully equipped, which means having a strategic content plan and effective marketing tools.
Indeed, content is king. However, some strategies must not be missed to ensure optimized search engine rankings. Coding is one of them.
For many webmasters, search engine optimization (SEO) is about boosting specific on-page variables to maximize the chances of being ranked for keywords or soliciting backlinks from qualified sources to strengthen off-page SEO. However, coding also plays a critical role in your site’s optimization. By harnessing coding for SEO, you are like building something on a robust foundation.
To help you understand why coding is essential when doing SEO, we’ll walk you through their relationship and how the former can boost your SEO. Let’s dive right in!
Does one need coding skills for SEO?
SEO doesn’t essentially require hands-on coding. But learning to code is a huge plus.
With coding skills and knowledge of technical SEO, one has a significant advantage in better optimizing a website and understanding technical issues that need addressing. A good understanding of SEO source code can also help a professional determine how to display a webpage content and peek at your competitors’ website source code.
To make the most of SEO practices, it’s crucial to have a good technical infrastructure, which includes programming. This programming is essential to optimize a site, especially for Google and cross-platform compatibility.
How coding helps SEO
SEO and coding are profoundly linked, thus providing benefits to each other. To know more about these benefits, let’s discuss how coding helps SEO.
1. Coding facilitates a seamless page experience for users
Page Experience involves a set of factors that measures how satisfactory it is for users to interact with a page beyond its pure information value.
Search engines like Google favor what works for the users better. So, with proper and well-written code, you ensure hassle-free webpage interaction. This means having a technical front that complements your user interface. With this, your website becomes more favorable for Google, thus resulting in improved search rankings.
2. Coding makes indexing easier for the web crawlers
Many say that SEO professionals must have even a little knowledge of HTML and CSS. This may be primarily because making changes to or improving the HTML tags, microdata, and website architecture, allow search engine algorithms to locate, understand, and rank the website faster.
3. Code validation allows for search engine spider accessibility
Search engine spider programs usually have serious limitations in terms of crawling and indexing your website. Given that they only effectively read text, other elements on your site—image, video, audio, and script files—can avert important site text from being crawled and indexed properly.
Should you notice that many parts of your text are missing from your web pages, if you have code validation skills, you can better cross-check if search engines can find your data.
4. Create SEF URL rewrites with coding
Making search-engine-friendly (SEF) URLs, which you can rewrite with coding, is advantageous for both SEO and user experience. To reduce the number of inapposite characters and codes in your URL, you’ll have to modify your website’s codes. But this depends on the specific platform your site runs on. If your site uses WordPress or another content management system (CMS), you will have access to internal dashboards or plugins that will permit you to make important changes. When it comes to open source e-commerce platforms though, you may need to address your permalink structure within your hypertext access file.
5. Coding allows you to establish 301 redirects for proper PageRank flow
When it comes to setting up proper 301 redirects, From an SEO perspective, there are two coding situations to consider in terms of setting up effective 301 redirects. First, you utilize this code to notify search engines that both world wide web (www) and non-www URL versions should be treated equally. Second, should you ever move content within your website, you establish a 301 redirect to inform search engine spiders of the action. By doing so, you reduce the potential loss of PageRank that may occur when backlinks can no longer resolve to your previous URLs.
6. Accelerate loading times with combined code files
In recent times, site loading speed has been considered as a huge search engine ranking factor per Google’s stated desire to reward swift sites in the search results. Unfortunately, if your site is built using many different scripts for additional functionality purposes, loading all the various code files will significantly bring down your site’s performance. To minimize long loading times due to excess script demands, it’s best to combine these individual code sheets into a smaller number of files. This way, you also improve your site’s overall SEO.
7. Utilize “rel=canonical” to deal with duplicate content issues
You may have duplicate content issues if you use a CMS program like Magento, Joomla, or WordPress to build your site. Every time you generate a new post for your website, these systems may automatically create any or all of the following options:
Yoursite.com/post-name.html
Yoursite.com/category1/post-name.html
Yoursite.com/archive/date/post-name.html
Since these different URLs redirect to the same page, search engines may subject you to duplicate content filters within their platforms, especially if you don’t specify exactly how each URL should be regarded or treated. To instruct search engines to better handle your URLs, you can use the “rel=canonical” tag. You can add this feature to your website’s <head> section and tell the search engines to disregard, redirect, or index a specific page for the URL.
In a Nutshell
SEO and coding altogether may be a complex concept, but by considering the best practices and benefits above, you can effectively optimize your search engine rankings and achieve your marketing goals.
How To Make Your Images SEO-Friendly
Author: Frank Hamilton
Every business owner should define what strategy they’ll follow to promote their products among the users, engage more customers, and promote the website’s ranking on search engine rates. However, sometimes it can be challenging to choose an exact approach that will be effective for your venue.
Before finding a proper strategy, business owners go through trial and error in increasing their services’ brand awareness by trying various experiments and marketing techniques. Only after many attempts will they succeed in finding out what strategy fits your local business prosperity.
Link building as a key approach for personal brand enhancement
Link building and backlinks implementation are the most useful approaches to creating a great local network and boosting your SERP position. You shouldn’t underestimate the significance of link building and backlink profile creation; indeed, it can bring a high ranking on Google and increase your clients. So, if you want to get a spot among the top tens, consider link-building efficiency.
If you don’t know how to launch a campaign for local link building, entrust this process to SEO geeks who will promote your website authority and engage more potential clients. Using an efficient tool for link building for a local business called linksmanagement.com, a website owner will receive a strong backlink profile with relevant links from credible sources that will bring even more users locally and worldwide. So, it’ll result in leads and sales increase.
LinksManagement is a good platform for effective link building for local businesses. Getting high SERP for your website means receiving more organic traffic and clients. Also, don’t forget that when dealing with local link building, consider your geolocation for more details and enable Google to define it correctly. Such a technique aims to engage more users and profit.
Creating a competitive and client-oriented brand is an effective way to outshine opponents in the niche. But, to do it smoothly, an entrepreneur should know well what steps to follow to be a leader in their area. The key point is to know your target audience, its needs, interests, and what information people expect to get from your source.
To succeed in personal brand creation, you need to carefully study your audience, your niche’s peculiarities, and nuances. You need to clarify what you can offer your client and surpass competitors. To promote your brand recognition, it’s crucial to work on your product appearance. You also need edited photos to make your brand memorable and outstanding.
Search Engine Optimization for Images: What Methods to Use to Increase Your Visibility
To climb up Google ranking, you need to arrange a solid SEO strategy. To catch the audience’s trust is also crucial to optimize images for SEO that will inevitably get more views for your source. So, each brand owner and marketer should know which tips to adhere to to make SEO-friendly images:
Name images properly to separate their naming via keywords with hyphens.
Apply consistent alt text that will provide a description for images.
Use captions to provide relevant information to the image.
Lower the used images’ size to make loading time fast.
Index your images by adding them to XML sitemaps.
Apply standard image resolution that is 72dpi.
Add images relevant to an article.
So, don’t neglect each aspect of image SE optimization to make your content more catchy, informative, and accessible to a broader audience. Learn how to improve images to speed up page loading and ranking. Image SEO optimization brings considerable benefits to your website promotion, such as enhancing users’ activity and rapid page loading time, resulting in superb ranking.
To make your SEO image strategy work, it’ll never be over to apply clear SEO best strategies in 2022. They’ll prove your professionalism in generating high-quality content making it user-centered and attractive to social media algorithms. This standard, but highly efficient practices will bring you profit and the audience’s interest:
Stellar content with trusted backlinks.
Choosing proper keywords and phrases.
Avoid click-baiting to boost your ranking.
Getting backlinks using white hat SEO principles.
Creating unique articles referring to credible sources.
By sticking to the above-mentioned careful SEO techniques, you’ll gain a positive reputation without using blackhat SEO and images copying without modifying them at all. Instead, implement proper keywords, include them smoothly in articles metadata, and place captivating images to increase a complete, useful, and well-optimized website.
Which Links Are Best Not to Use for SEO
Author: Rebecca Shinn
SEO Links Every Website Owner Should Avoid
The success of your marketing campaigns depends on the quality of your SEO site links. From internal tags to inbound and SEO outbound links, link-building benefits your business in many ways. For starters, it increases your credibility to boost traffic and SEO scores. Italso increases the value to readers, grows revenue from SEO affiliate links, and reduces bounce rates. However, not all SEO linksare good for your website. Some attract search engine penalties and affect your rankings. Here are some SEO links that the best dating sites avoid.
Press Release SEO Links
Press release SEO links were once popular because they were easy to get. After publishing a press release, all you needed to do was syndicate it to distribution websites and get numerous SEO links.
However, website owners abused press release links, pushing Google to consider a link scheme method. This is especially true for SEO links that target the main keyword with over-optimized text. To be safe from Google penalties, ensure your press release SEO links don’t pass PageRank. The best alternative is adding nofollow to press release tags.
Blog Comments
As long as you use them cautiously, blog comment links aren’t entirely discouraged. You can get natural traffic when you offer helpful advice redirecting readers to a blog. However, search engines will detect keyword-stuffed SEO tags going to one site.
The same applies to chat forum spam. It’s not uncommon for users to stuff their discussion forum signatures with links. These schemes are common across different platforms, from social boards to niche websites. Remember, you can still earn readers’ trust by having constructive discussions on the comment section without manipulation moves.
Substandard Guest Posts
Some website owners write low-quality guest posts to boost their ratings with backlinks. Google can disregard guest posts if they don’t provide value to readers or your marketing campaign. Search engines are also against too many guest post backlinks since they manipulate algorithms.
The key to escaping Google’s wrath is avoiding rich anchor texts in your guest posts. Remember to use anchor text variations. Using only one keyword format puts you under the radar of search engines.
Unrelated Niches
The best SEO backlinks come from sites in your industry. For example, you can link to travel blogs if you write restaurant reviews. Think of backlinks as academic citations; you need an expert to verify the information on your website. Moreover, aim for high-authority backlinks. Readers may lose trust in your brand if the linked site:
Is new;
Has low traffic;
Promotes clickbait;
Is biased.
One irrelevant backlink may go unnoticed by search engines, but using too many of them increases the risk of penalties. When most of your keywords come from other niches, search engines will use unrelated keywords instead of those that matter.
Don’t Force It
Your SEO anchor links should occur naturally. If you have a bad feeling about them, chances are search engines won’t understand them either. How do you improve your site with SEO backlinks? Share some strategies in the comments.
Authors bio
Rebecca Shinn is a freelance writer and dating and relationship expert with a psychology degree. Her field of expertise is relationship, dating, and marriage. The important part of Rebecca’s practice is to help couples with communication skills, problem-solving skills, stress management, and financial skills.
Rebecca started writing 2 years ago to inspire and help people to have a better dating life, healthy relationships, or find a way to keep a marriage strong for long years.
With all said above, Rebecca is proud to be a mother and a wife so she doesn’t only use her knowledge for helping others but keeping her family strong and happy.
The Benefits of Technical SEO
Author: Christopher Oldman
Nowadays, having a fully functional website is of the utmost importance.
Modern consumers have high expectations, needs and demands. If the website they’re currently browsing cannot meet those expectations or needs, consumers will simply bounce right off.
Fortunately for web owners, there are ways to provide their potential customers with whatever they want.
This is where SEO (Search Engine Optimization) comes in. SEO is a marketing strategy that allows companies to meet consumer needs when it comes to a seamless browsing experience while promoting their businesses online.
You’re basically hitting two birds with one stone. The process in charge of meeting consumer demands is called technical SEO. As its name suggests, technical SEO covers every aspect of a website’s functionality, such as page speed, security and so on.
That being said, most consumer pain points are related to website performance and functionality. For example, pages that take too long to load irritate consumers and force them to bounce.
Technical SEO takes care of such issues and ensures that search engines, such as Google, look favorably upon websites that have consumers’ best interests in mind.
With that in mind, here are a few benefits of technical SEO.
As mentioned above, page loading time is one of the major pain points for consumers. If your pages aren’t loading fast enough, you will lose a lot of traffic and potential customers. The main reason is that modern consumers simply don’t tolerate sluggish websites.
That said, even if it takes one second longer for your pages to load than what consumers expect it will result in a 16% decrease in customer satisfaction, 11% decrease in page views and 7% decrease in conversion rates.
This can have a huge negative impact on your bottom line. Page loading time and overall website speed are part of the technical SEO domain.
There are plenty of things you can do to improve your website speed using technical SEO techniques alone. Here are a few examples.
Server file compression.
Code minification.
Browser caching.
Image optimization.
Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) for mobile optimization.
With technical SEO, you can eliminate all the issues that can slow down your website and page loading time. This will improve customer experience and give your rankings a much-needed boost.
After all, website speed is, in fact, one of the major ranking signals. The fact of the matter is that page loading time affects user experience the most.
Search engines, such as Google, want to provide consumers with the best results possible. That means that they’ll check not just the accuracy and value of information but also factors that will affect browsing experience like website speed does.
2. Mobile optimization
As you already know, the number of mobile users has grown significantly over the past few years. As of 2021, the number of mobile users worldwide reached 7.1 billion. That number is expected to reach 7.49 billion by 2025.
It’s safe to say that most online consumers are browsing the web using a mobile device. Search engines, such as Google have been aware of this trend for some time now. This is why Google released their mobile-first indexing update which will give favorable rankings to mobile-friendly websites.
Once again, technical SEO can help you optimize your website for mobile devices. One of the ways it can help you is by ensuring that your responsive design is properly implemented and fully functional.
Some of thebest marketing companies advise that all companies should focus on optimizing for mobile, especially if they are leveraging SEO. The main reason is mobile-friendliness will not only benefit your SEO efforts but also help your company acquire more leads and more organic web traffic.
Technical SEO makes sure that your website features and content are performing well on mobile devices. That way you guarantee an exceptional browsing experience to all customers, regardless of which devices they might be using to browse your website.
Technical SEO will also help you test various other features on your website to help you determine if they are mobile-friendly or not. It can even also help you implement the best practices that will ensure that your entire website is, in fact, mobile-friendly.
One of the main benefits of SEO is improved online visibility. However, search engines must be able to crawl and index your pages so that they can rank them properly.
Moreover, search engines must be able to understand the context of your pages so that they can match them with user intent. That’s why you must ensure that search engine crawlers can do their job so that you actually benefit from SEO. Technical SEO is also responsible for this part.
Every time you add a new page or an individual piece of content, you have to ensure that those pages and content are properly indexed.
In addition, you want to avoid redirects, errors, broken links and other inconveniences that will prevent search engine crawlers from doing what they do best. That’s why technical SEO is mandatory.
Here are a few ways technical SEO can help you with page indexing and other factors.
Help you track and fix server errors.
Help you prevent loop redirects.
Helps you identify URL blocking by robots.txt files.
Helps you identify “noindex” tags.
Helps you fix 404 errors.
Helps you locate and fix duplicate content.
When you eliminate or fix the most common problems that hinder search engine crawling, you can boost your rankings and allow search engines to properly index your pages.
4. Website architecture
Website or simply site architecture is very important to both your users and search engines.
From the user’s point of view, site architecture represents website navigation and content hierarchy that allows them to seamlessly browse your website and find what they’re looking for with ease.
On the other hand, search engines use your site architecture to navigate the pages and determine should the page be indexed or not. It also helps search engine crawlers understand the connection between your internal links.
The more pages your website has, the more important site architecture becomes.
Technical SEO can help you create an ideal architecture that will meet the needs of both users and search engines. Here are a few examples.
Categorizes and organizes the pages on your website.
Helps create SEO-friendly URLs for seamless navigation.
Focuses on creating sitemaps to help crawlers with page indexing.
Creates internal link hierarchy to point search engine crawlers towards pages with more authority.
This allows you to retain your audience’s interest by providing them with additional content that’s easy to find. It also creates breadcrumbs that enable seamless navigation for both users and search engines. That way your pages get properly crawled and indexed while your audience enjoys high-quality content.
Website security is an important ranking factor and it’s also vital to customer experience. This is especially true if you process consumer-sensitive information, such as names, addresses, emails, credit or debit card information etc.
To ensure that websites will take security seriously, Google made having HTTPS (Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure) a major ranking factor.
Websites that don’t have HTTPS would get penalized by Google. To transfer from HTTP to HTTPS, a web owner would have to purchase a TLS/SSL (Transport Layer Security/Secure Socket Layer) certificate from their hosting provider.
However, this migration can and does cause a lot of issues with your website. Fortunately, technical SEO is there to ensure everything is working as properly as it should. Here are a few things technical SEO can help you with.
Ensure that the same functionalities remain after the migration.
Monitors the changes in URLs and uses canonical tags to remove duplicate content.
Helps you test everything after the changes have been made.
Having proper security measures is vital. It prevents your website from being blacklisted and it shows your customers that your website is, indeed, trustworthy.
Technical SEO is there to ensure that your security measures are in place and that everything is working as it should.
Closing words
Technical SEO is a big part of on-page optimization. It ensures that your website functionality and performance are up to the task. Many of the factors that technical SEO deals with are also ranking signals.
These factors affect user experience in more ways than one. That’s why Google considers technical SEO to be an essential aspect of your overall SEO strategy, alongside on-page and off-page SEO.
After all, Google wants to ensure that they’re matching search queries with the best results possible.
By optimizing your technical SEO regularly, you’ll be able to ensure that your website is highly functional and that it performs exceptionally well. This will meet the needs of both search engines and your customers.
In other words, your website will not only end up on the first page of search results due to favorable rankings but it will also be able to provide your users with everything they want or need.
Author’s Bio
Christopher is a Digital Marketing specialist, Project Manager and Editor at Find Digital Agency and a passionate blogger. He is a dedicated and experienced author who pays particular attention to quality research and details. Focused on new web tech trends, he starts the day scrolling his digest on new digital trends while sipping a cup of coffee. In his free time Christopher plays drums and Magic: the Gathering.
