In December of 2008 SEOmoz debuted their SEO methodology and search engine optimization basics, with an SEO Pyramid in one of their popular Whiteboard Friday Videos. Since then, there have been many advancements within the search engine’s algorithm. What the heck is SEO? Learn the basics of the best free marketing on the internet. In a previous blog post, “7 Reasons why your website is not crawled by Google” I discussed the basics of how Google crawls the web, indexes data, and presents search results. It uses a scoring system called PageRank to the importance of website pages. There are legitimate ways to improve your website’s PageRank score and this is where search engine optimization (SEO) comes in. SEO – or Search Engine Optimization – is the number one way that you can get a return on your investment, because your investment is $0! SEO comes by many names: natural search, organic search, earned search traffic, but no matter what you call it SEO is a critical component to any online marketing program. What are search engine algorithms? Certain algorithms, implemented by Google, Bing, and other search engines, organically find the keywords in your text, as well as relevant linking behaviors, and use them to force-rank all the sites on the web in their respective categories. Though the intricacies of these algorithms are extremely complex, the concept is relatively basic and there are certain tips and tricks that will allow you to win the SEO game. You can optimize your site for any of the many different algorithms, but the industry standard is to optimize for the Google algorithms, as they are typically leading the rest of the industry. Content is still King. Even in the year of the World Wide Web, content is still king. Google scans your content for relevant verbiage to understand which categories you should be force-ranked the highest in, and how you should rank in relationship to your competitors. The algorithms also search the code for the HTML title, not the customer-facing title, to find a relevant and understandable summary of the page. Including relevant back links and having your site featured in back links on other websites is also another critical part of the algorithms ranking system. Make sure you that your site is consistently posting fresh, relevant content so the search engines will continue to rank you in the top few links amongst your peers. Adding your site to the Google Search index It’s fairly simple to submit your site to Google to make sure they add your site into their search index. Access http://www.google.com/submityourcontent. If you are having issues with SEO or...
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Getting your company’s site up and running is the most important phase of digital marketing that you’ll experience thereafter, so getting this phase right is critical! Our Part 1 shows you how to build a strong digital foundation. 77th Floor Online wants to make sure that you are comfortable with the sink-or-swim moments in your journey, so that you can be successful in bringing your site to market. Launch your website, get your audience, and change the game! Choosing a Web Host Ensuring that you have a best-in-class web-hosting partner is a critical piece in the puzzle. Before you are ready to launch your site, you should partner with an industry leading web host to discuss the type of services you’ll require, the amount of traffic you estimate that your site will get, your plans for future growth, and the intricacies of the information you might hope to collect from your visitors. Once your vendor has this information, he or she will be able to determine whether they can host your site on the level that you need and provide you with a detailed quote. Make sure you really assess whether your vendor is able to support the bandwidth you need, as well as providing safety and security to your visitors. Beautiful Design The first thing your customers will notice when they view your site is the intricacies of your web design. Not only do you need a beautiful aesthetic design, but also ensuring that your site has a great user experience and seamless functionality across platforms is critical. Partnering with a vendor that can provide both design and guidance in understanding the vast intricacies of web design. Search Engine Optimization Now that you have a site up and running, it’s time to make sure you’re getting noticed. As you launch, there are a lot of things you can do along to way that will save you time later! Knowing what you’re doing from an SEO perspective pre-launch can ensure that you’re set up for success as you go live. Partnering with a knowledgeable vendor can save you tons of time, money, and frustration in the long run. Vendor partnership and learning is one of the most beneficial things you can do as you get your site up and running. This relationship will ensure that your site launch is a success from the start. 77th Floor employs a team of experts that can be a great resource for you in your journey. Visit...
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Want to improve organic traffic, drive leads and improve your position in search engine results? There have been significant changes in the recent past with how search engines evaluate the content on your website and decide its rankings.Google has over 200 factors that it takes into consideration for website rankings. Below is a list of on-page elements which contribute towards a perfectly optimized web page. While no single factor below is the make-or-break for getting your page ranking high, in combination, these factors will raise your overall score. SEO friendly URL’s The first 3-5 keywords of a URL are important and should be focused upon. You should always reduce the length of the URL to an abbreviated phrase, containing only 4-5 words if the title is too long to make it perfect. Optimized title tags Keep the number of characters in the title tag not more than 55 as Google only displays around 50-60 characters. And design it so that it includes the target keywords and these keywords are towards the beginning of the tag. Its a definite plus to include the keyword into the H1 and the other heading tags. Dazzle with visuals Be generous with the use of pictures and videos as this increases site time and reduces bounce rate. And there is nothing like visuals to prompt user interaction which will improve rankings. Using ALT attributes to these images will enable them to come up in Google image results. Quality Links Having out-bound links to quality authority webpages that have related information makes it easier for Google to understand what your topic and content is about. A few internal links (to other pages on your site) are also helpful, especially if they tie together similar topics. Internal links also help search engine bots navigate and categorize your site. Word count for content Having around 1500 + words for a webpage content is expected to drive more traffic to your website. However, making it too long would result in readers losing interest and bouncing off your site. So, depending on which industry your website falls into,make sure the content is highly relevant, fresh and at least 500 words. Keywords in the content When we are designing our on-page SEO we like to use one, or at most, two target keywords or phrases per page. This target search phrase and related words can be repeated three to 10 times within body copy. Overdoing it will result in the page getting downgraded as spam. Put up social sharing buttons on your website Including of social media links and / or user discussion or reviews on pages will earn quality in-bound links....
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You’ve been hearing from everyone about making your website mobile-ready. But you’ve been procrastinating. Well, your time is almost up! Google has announced that from April 21st on-wards its ranking algorithm will place more weight on how mobile-friendly a website is when users search from a mobile device. “This change will affect mobile searches in all languages worldwide and will have a significant impact in our search results. Consequently, users will find it easier to get relevant, high quality search results that are optimized for their devices.” To check if your website is mobile ready, you can test a few of your pages here For websites that are looking to make the switch, Google has a handy guide to simplify the process Your website is an essential tool for the success of your business and we want to see you succeed. If your website does not use responsive website design, that is, it does not give mobile users the best user experience, then give us a call and get this conversion done. And please reach out to us before the April 21st...
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