You can make all the substance you need; however, you shouldn’t post it if it’s not offering some incentive. It’s significant that each page on your site has fair substance, that is, something like three hundred words in length. Making content conflictingly can likewise hurt you. At the point when guests arrive at your site, they hope to find applicable data and related pieces that offer some incentive. On the off chance that they don’t track that down, they’ll likely look somewhere else.
It is also critical that you only discuss topics that are relevant to what you do. You could expand on a word that is completely irrelevant to your sector in an attempt to build traffic to your site, but you risk alienating your present audience as well as any additional individuals you wind up attracting in.
Some SEO pioneers examine the significance of creating good material over huge amounts of material. Google needs sufficient subtleties to discover what’s going on with your page and regardless of whether you can give the appropriate response individuals are searching for. If you present an incentive for individuals devouring your posts and exhibit authority, you can gather trust. When you have it, you should keep creating fresh material.
Individuals are probably not going to get back to your site in the event that you don’t routinely produce content. However, they are additionally far-fetched to return, assuming you just post around one theme. Groundbreaking thoughts are continually emerging, so regardless of the industry you’re in, you ought to have various things to expound on. Having new content being introduced through your channels can truly draw individuals into getting back to your website.
Each topic you expand on can assist you with growing your possible reach. In the event that you upgrade your substance for search, expanding on various points permits you to target various arrangements of keywords. With each keyword, you add that word’s search volume to your likely reach.
It is important to keep in mind that new firms should maintain a little more involved content process. Because they haven’t developed a substance library, they must guarantee that they handle their primary topics before moving on to related topics.
Streamlining your substance doesn’t end once you remember an objective keyword for your articles. Title tags and meta descriptions are fundamental components of search engine optimization that ought not to be neglected. Overlooking them implies a colossal missed potential for your content. The page title is as yet a significant positioning element for Google, so you need to ensure it’s advanced accurately for each page. It is recommended to add your keyword to the title if that is conceivable and ensure that your page title isn’t excessively long. If your page title is excessively long, chopping it down is inevitable.
Making content is extraordinary; however, search engines battle to comprehend the setting of your substance. You don’t need potential guests to see only 50% of your page title in the search results. These streamlining factors are considered via search engines when slithering your site; thus, they can further develop your content execution whenever done effectively.
Click-Through Rate gives some knowledge of how potential guests can tap on your site in the SERPs. On the off chance that you enhance your meta portrayals with a reasonable and appealing message on what individuals can find on your site, it becomes simpler so that they can check whether the data they’re searching for is on that page. The more probable individuals are to figure your site will give a solution to their search inquiry, the more traffic a page will acquire.
Once guests land on your site, the following objective is to keep them on your site. You don’t need your guests promptly ricocheting back to Google whenever they have perused something on your page. This is the reason you really want to urge guests to navigate your site. The ideal way of doing this is to make a call to action or CTA, which typically is a button that offers an activity to your guest. This can be, for example, a purchase button on an item page or a signup button for the bulletins. Don’t get carried away and attempt to have one fundamental call to action that stands apart from the remainder of your page.
Over the long haul, in the event that you produce top-caliber, important material, others will probably begin linking to it. At the point when that happens, Google noticed that different areas are remembering you as an expert in your space, which supports your search rankings. That is the reason outer links are fundamental to your SEO methodology. One more way of keeping individuals on your site is by adding significant inward links to different pages on your site.
By working out your content procedure, you will ideally acquire authority, and individuals will remember you are talented and reliable in your subject matter. This offers you the ideal chance to reference your own content through internal linking.
This is quite a significant piece of SEO and ought to be essential for your promoting endeavors. By adding internal links, your site guests and Google will realize what pages are identified with one another and can be intriguing when they’re searching for data on a specific subject. On the off chance that you have a library of related content, not referring to yourself is a mistake. Preferably, when guests go to your site, you will give an all-in-one resource to them. Fundamentally, they ought to have the option to visit your space and realize whatever they need to about your topic. So try to invest energy in your inner linking to make an extraordinary web page structure that keeps individuals on your site!
If your site isn’t dynamic enough with loading speeds or versatile while being searched, it is important for you to change your SEO technique, as you risk losing serious money! It is imperative that websites these days are mobile-friendly.
Around 4 years ago, Google changed to a system of mobile rankings. This implies that Google currently checks out the mobile rendition of your site to conclude how high your ranking should actually be. So if the desktop adaptation of your site is set up splendidly, yet your mobile site isn’t responsive by any means, this will be reflected in your rankings. Adversely, if that is the situation, make a point to deal with mobile search engine optimization. Today, over half of all traffic comes from cell phones. Also, that is the reason Google will, in general, lean toward versatile websites.
To set up your site for natural traffic from cell phones, you’ll need to guarantee that your site is responsive and that it loads in less than a couple of seconds. Versatility and page speed are significant positioning variables.
An extraordinary way of testing if your site is adapting well to mobile devices is to utilize Google’s test. This provides you with a sign of how effectively guests can use your page on cell phones.
In any case, don’t stop in the wake of really taking a look at this. The best exhortation is to visit your site on your own cell phone. Peruse your own site for some time and attempt to tap on each link, tab, and picture to perceive what occurs. Make sure that you do not stop testing the website until you are delighted. The Where, Why, What, When, and How, all should be satisfactorily answered! The bottom line is straightforward. Do not disregard mobile optimization in the event that you really need to expand your natural site traffic.
Conclusion
Generally speaking, it’s simple to foster these unfortunate SEO quirks and not put any time or consideration into further developing them. Notwithstanding, if you are growing positive routines and, as of now, setting a portion of the strategies discussed above in motion, it ought to be simpler and more viable to embrace the SEO flaws.
You don’t need one of the mistakes to cost you your rankings. Accordingly, by following SEO best practices, you can fuel results all the more effectively. On the off chance that you join these components into an undeniable SEO procedure, it can have a fantastic effect.
Indeed, even well-versed individuals can commit numerous normal SEO errors. It’s better to get familiar with the difficulties others have encountered and stay away from them in your promoting endeavors. You need an essential comprehension of SEO and to pose inquiries about specific strategies to guarantee your SEO techniques aren’t about attempting to deceive Google.
FTx 360 offers a full suite of marketing solutions, including affordable SEO services and online reputation management, at competitive prices. Whether you’re interested in our consulting services or would like to hire us to manage all of your SEO marketing needs, our team of experts can help your online presence grow. Contact us to learn more about our content marketing, social media marketing, and SEO marketing services.
Increasing the search engine ranking of your website is probably one of your top priorities if you’ve landed on this blog post.
Did you type “increase organic ranking” into Google’s search bar, discover our blog title, and click its blue-hyperlink title to learn more? If so, then you are a part of our website’s “organic traffic,” and the fact that you’re here will help to naturally increase our website’s “organic ranking” on Google.
So, thanks for that!
Your website’s daily visitor count is impacted by two factors, which are organic web traffic and traffic from paid advertisements and other lead generation strategies. Interestingly, Google values and rewards organic traffic more than any other form of traffic. This means that your website’s Google search engine ranking is actually based solely on organic traffic.
But we don’t need to convince you of the importance of increasing your organic ranking on Google and other search engines. We know why you’re here, so we’ll cut to the chase right after we try to convince you that if you really want to increase your organic ranking, you should contact our digital marketing specialists and we’ll tailor a customized SEO and SERP strategy for you that works. FTx 360 is a transparent digital marketing agency that serves both B2C and B2B businesses of all industries at affordable prices. Don’t believe us? Use this Build Your Own Quote form and see for yourself! Chances are, we’ll get back to you with a personalized quote before you even finish reading this article!
Now, let’s get down to SEO business… Here are 8 tips to increase organic ranking…
Google uses mobile-first website indexing algorithms, which means that if your website is not mobile-friendly, we have some very bad news for you. Your site isn’t getting ranked. Yikes! Drop everything right now and take the time to turn your desktop-configured website into a responsive, mobile-friendly one. Google has published an extremely helpful Mobile-first Indexing Best Practices Guide you can use. The same guide will help you confirm that Google bots will be able to crawl and index your website without issue.
You’re probably aware of the importance of using outbound links, also known as external links, in your web content. But what are you doing to increase the number of backlinks to your website? Backlinks are when other websites use your web page URLs as their own outbound links. When other websites link to your site, it elevates your standing with Google, and if those other websites hold a high Google ranking, then it can benefit your site’s ranking even more. Think of it as popularity by association, which is another form of “social proof.”
Let’s get down to brass tacks. The more backlinks you have to your website, the greater the chance that Google bots will presume you’re an authority in your field and should therefore be elevated in the SERP ranking. In the spirit of popularity, you’ll need to get social if you want to increase your backlinks. Meaning, you might need to send a few emails or—gulp—pick up the phone and ask reputable, non-competing websites, bloggers, and other influencers if they would like to exchange links with you wherein they hyperlink to your URLs on their sites and you do the same for them.
One of the biggest impactors of your Google ranking is the frequency with which you publish new content. New content, whether it be a new product description page, new landing page, or entirely revised website, provides Google with additional SEO keywords that it can use to recommend your website to search engine users. As users discover your website via Google, Google will assess the inbound traffic and reward your website accordingly by elevating its ranking. If you’re only publishing new web content on your site once a year, your organic ranking is probably going to fall lower and lower down in the search results.
The easiest “fix” to frequently generating new SEO might seem easier said than done, but we believe in you and know you can do it! By simply adding a blog to your website and committing to regularly publishing an article, you will naturally add SEO keywords to your website and the long-term accumulation will positively impact your Google ranking. Ideally, if you published two articles per week that each totaled 2,000 words, your SERP ranking would rise faster than a bun in an oven, but no one expects you to set the bar that high. In fact, regularity is more important than article length. If you can only publish one micro-blog every other week, then do it, stick to it, and the results will speak for themselves.
Elevating your search engine ranking is only helpful if you’re generating the right kind of web traffic. What is the right kind of web traffic? Web traffic that contains interested consumers who quickly convert into paying customers. It’s really not going to matter if you’re #1 on Google SERP if 100% of your web traffic contains twelve-year old French girls who are in no position to buy the used cars you’re selling in Boise, ID. Make sure your keywords and longtail keyword phrases will successfully target your ideal customer by using Google’s Keyword Planner.
A meta description is the readable description about your website that Google users see beneath your website title in the search results. Meta descriptions are elements of the HTML of your website, and typically range from 100 – 160 characters in length, or 22 words. Relevant meta descriptions that include a few targeted keywords tend to perform the best. Because the meta description of your web page is the main deciding factor of whether or not a user clicks or scrolls, you’ll want to make sure that the content is compelling, clear, and also attractive. With that in mind, be sure that your web domain page titles, otherwise called <title> HTML tags, are concise yet descriptive; and make sure that your ALT tags, which are additional HTML elements, include essential keywords.
Finally, after all the work you put into increasing your organic ranking on Google and other search engines, it’s important that you’re able to track your web visitors and tally all the leads your website generates on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis. This is because elevating your SERP ranking is really only half the battle. The other half involves making sure the results really are benefiting your business in the form of expanding your customer base and increasing your revenue. The Google Search Console and Google Analytics can provide SEO insights that you can leverage to adjust and improve your SEO and SERP strategies.
That concludes our tips to increase your website’s organic ranking, which means it’s time to either roll up your sleeves… or give us a call. The marketing specialists at FTx 360 would love to work with you to drive web traffic and boost engagement!
There has been a fair amount of controversy in the last five years regarding how marketers should write web content so that Google elevates the search engine ranking of the site in question.
One camp of marketers insists that website content, such as web pages, product descriptions, professional services, and blog articles should be written so simplistically, straightforwardly, and concisely that anyone with a 6th grade reading comprehension level will be able to understand it. This camp believes that content should be written for people, albeit people who aren’t necessarily the sharpest tools in the toolbox.
Another camp of marketers operates as though the sole purpose of publishing written content online is to elevate website search engine ranking, and therefore all content should be composed to maximize the chances that Google bots will determine the website’s content is “valuable.” This camp believes that content should be written with as many popular SEO keywords as possible so that the content pleases Google bots and Google’s ever-changing algorithms even if doing so causes the actual verbiage to sound awkward, stilted, or downright grammatically incorrect.
I don’t know about you, but when I think of my ideal customer, neither a 6th grader nor a Google bot comes to mind… But I digress.
Does content that consumers love tend to rank poorly on Google?
Will content that’s written for the specific purpose of maximizing search engine ranking automatically repulse living, breathing web visitors?
Why do Google bots exist if they’ve been programmed to value what consumers despise and penalize what consumers value?
The answers to these questions can be summed up in a single statement: Google bots have been programmed to mimic consumer behavior and value what consumers value.
In other words, the entire “content controversy” is based on a faulty assumption.
You see, professional writers tend to insist that excellent writing has the power to render the need for SEO techniques obsolete. On the other hand, professional webmasters and SEO strategists tend to presume that strategic SEO is so effective that it can elevate the search engine ranking of even the most poorly written drivel. These two diametrically opposed mentalities have caused marketers to split into those two camps I mentioned.
If you ask me, massive egos are to blame…
The fact of the matter is that content must be well-written and also utilize effective SEO techniques. You can’t favor one over the other and expect your website to positively impact your business revenue.
Let’s cut to the chase. You want to learn the characteristics of “well written” content, and you want to understand how you, as a marketer, can ensure that the content you write satisfies the quality criteria for both consumers and Google bots.
Step one is to free yourself from the mindset of those “camps” I’ve been referencing. The rest of the steps are laid out in this article, so keep reading.
Your business is unique, which means your customers are unique individuals with unique needs. This means that the content you write should speak to your audience. You can identify your audience and understand who your ideal customer is by analyzing your Customer Relationship Management data as well as your web traffic reporting and analytics data.
Do not become seduced by the prospect of writing content for a broad audience as if doing so will result in acquiring new customers. It will backfire. Meaning, if you write your content in such a way that caters to people with a low reading comprehension level even though your ideal client holds a graduate degree, earns a seven-figure salary, and places a high premium on credentials and expertise, you will only end up turning off the people you want to do business with.
Instead, be polarizing.
There’s no real risk of excluding consumers who were never going to become your customers anyway. However, there’s a real benefit to composing your content in such a way that it exclusively addresses a niche audience. In fact, intentionally writing for a niche audience will organically boost your search engine ranking when it comes to consumers who use longtail keyword phrases to find business websites that offer very specific products, services, and solutions.
This type of consumer will be more likely to quickly convert into a customer once they land on your website, which is far more beneficial than having one hundred consumers land on your website who never buy.
Write your content as though you are speaking to your ideal customer, one-on-one. If your customer base is largely comprised of ten-year olds, then speak to them in their language with their vocabulary, remaining mindful of their limited attention span.
Use the following checklist as you write:
● Identify and use the best word choices
● Find and use high-ranking keywords
● Understand your niche audience
● Speak to your audience in their language
● Study your competition
● Write with confidence, challenge existing opinions, be polarizing
● Create a content template based on your high-ranking content for future use
If you’ve been keeping up with the FTx 360 blog, then you’ve already read several articles about SEO, including What Is SEO?, How to Spot Negative SEO, and Ways to Increase Web Traffic. For tips on how to determine which keywords and longtail keyword phrases to use, be sure to check out those articles.
Then, in order to compose effective content that Google bots will love just as much as consumers, keep the following pointers in mind as you write:
● Understand SEO copywriting
● Incorporate keywords in your headline
● Optimize for clarity
● Understand on-page SEO
● Build sentences and paragraphs that naturally utilize longtail keyword phrases
● Google boosts articles that are at least 2,400 words
● Google elevates the ranking of websites that have longer visitor engagement sessions
Ready to analyze the real technical side of your website to ensure that Google bots will love, love, love your website? It’s time to talk about Robots.txt.
The term “robots.txt” is shorthand for “robots exclusion protocol.” A robots.txt file is a website text file that’s sole purpose is to inform search engine robots, including Google bots, whether or not robots have permission to “crawl” the web page that the robots.txt file belongs to.
What this means is that Google won’t automatically crawl your website by virtue of the fact that your site exists, in the same way that your neighbor won’t automatically enter your house just because it’s right across the street. Before Google crawls a given web page, its robots will first read the robots.txt file for permission and instructions.
Do you want to permit Google to crawl every page on your website? Maybe. Or maybe not. That’s up to you. If, for instance, you have indexed your website with archived content, you wouldn’t want Google to crawl both the featured content and its archived duplicate, because Google will penalize the duplication and demote your ranking.
You can “disallow” Google bots from crawling web pages by setting the appropriate allowances and disallowances within your robots.txt files.
Where can you find your robots.txt files in order to review and modify the permissions?
Simply type your website’s URL into the search bar, followed by “/robots.txt.” Let’s use FTx 360 as an example. Type the following URL into your search bar:
https://ftxdigital360.com/robots.txt
You will notice:
User – agent: *
Disallow: /wp-admin/
Allow: /wp-admin/admin-ajax.php
That exact information is what Google will adhere to prior to crawling our website pages.
What does yours include? Be sure to review your robots.txt files for each of your web pages and make sure that the files reflect what you want to allow and disallow.
In the rare event that there aren’t any robots.txt files associated with your website, Google will proceed as though they have full permission to crawl and index your entire site. If that’s okay with you, then there’s nothing you need to do. Robots.txt will be your friend across the board.
But if you prefer certain pages of your website not to be crawled and indexed by Google and other search engines, then you’ll need to create robots.txt files and meticulously list the permissions you want in place, blocking Google from any pages you don’t want their bots to crawl.
Cleaning up your robots.txt files is an integral aspect of ensuring that the web page content crawled and indexed by bots are elevated on Google’s search engine ranking so that visitors discover and read them.
Are you familiar with the digital marketing term, “cloaking”? If not, you aren’t alone. I’ve been writing digital content for over eight years and only recently have I been introduced to the concept of “cloaking.”
Anyone who has ever dared venture into the online dating world has likely been the victim of some degree of cloaking. You chat with what you believe to be an attractive individual on the dating platform, only to discover when you finally meet them in person that they are 20 years older and 80 lbs heavier than their profile pictures indicated…
Yikes!
In a nutshell, “cloaking” can be defined as falsely representing your URL content to Google’s search engine spiders for the purposes of luring online users to your website. Similar to a washed-up 45 year-old who uses his nephew’s handsome bodybuilding photos in order to score dates on OKCupid, “cloaking” involves providing Google with an inaccurate portrayal of your website in order to elevate search engine ranking and drive web traffic.
There are many reasons why “cloaking” is a big no-no in the digital marketing world, but the biggest of all is that businesses that use cloaking as an SEO tactic ultimately end up turning potential customers into infuriated website visitors.
When a potential customer uses Google to search for the best mechanic in town and your website appears in the first page of the search results, you better be a mechanic. If you’re selling used cars instead, you’re going to have one very irritated website visitor.
Now, chances are, you would have never heard of cloaking if not for reading this article. You might be thinking right now that you’re in no danger of “cloaking” your website in order to “game the Google system,” so why am I bothering to tell you about cloaking in the first place?
Because there are unethical digital marketing agencies out there who attempt to use cloaking without their clients’ knowledge in order to “deliver outstanding SEO results.” These agencies like to boast that they’ll get your website on the first page of Google’s search results, only to end up using unethical tactics to succeed. Worst of all, despite elevating their clients’ websites on Google, they provide virtually no ROI, because deceived website visitors obviously do not become online customers.
What are the “cloaking” red flags to look out for when you’re considering partnering with a digital marketing agency? Are there warning signs that can help you avoid these disreputable “cloaking” agencies? And if you’ve recently discovered that the digital marketing agency you’ve hired has “cloaked” your website, what can you do about it now?
Let’s take a look…
Cloaking is not only unethical, but unlawful in 2021. Ethical webmasters employ search engine optimization techniques as they index the websites they build. This is fine. But how can you tell whether a webmaster has used ethical SEO techniques or illegal ones? You can find out for yourself what a digital agency has been up to by investigating their clients’ websites. Here’s what to look for:
● Check for AdWords cloaking scripts, PHP URL cloaking scripts, and URL cloaking scripts
● Review the SERP directly by turning on “Preserve Log” in “Chrome DevTools,” switching your user type to “Googlebot,” and going to the website directly from Google to compare the “Googlebot” content to the “online user” content
● Use a “cloaking checker” tool, like the one offered at Dupli Checker
Needless to say, if you discover any prospective marketing agency has used cloaking for their clients’ websites, run.
When Google discovers that a website has used “cloaking” to elevate SEO ranking, then Google will blacklist the website, period. It is very hard to bounce back once you’ve been blacklisted. Protect your business so that you don’t hire an agency that resorts to these unethical SEO tactics. Here are the questions to ask potential webmasters and digital marketers before you sign a contract:
● Will you use PBNs to increase my website’s rank on Google?
● Will you republish high-ranking web content for me in order to maintain a favorable SEO ranking?
● Will you maximize SEO and backlinks by assigning a team to leave comments under all my website’s blog articles?
If a marketing agency answers “yes” to any of the above questions, run. It’s a very good idea to familiarize yourself with Google’s Webmaster Guidelines prior to interviewing your agency candidates.
What if you recently discovered that the digital marketing agency you’ve been working with has used cloaking and other “black hat SEO” techniques, which have now backfired, resulting in your website being blacklisted by Google? Can you recover? It’s possible, but recovering won’t happen overnight. That being said, here are the steps you can take today to submit a “reconsideration request” to Google:
● First navigate to Google Search Console > Crawl > Fetch, and fetch the web pages from the affected portions of your website
● Compare your web content that is fetched by Google to the web content your online users see and resolve all variations between the two so that the content is the same
● Finally, check all redirects on your site and remove the faulty ones that send users to an unexpected destination and / or ones that utilize “conditional redirects”
● Once you’ve completed the above steps, submit your reconsideration request to Google
If you do not want to attempt resolving the Google violations yourself, preferring instead to hire a reputable marketing agency, then just be sure to relay to the new digital marketing agency the specific Google penalties you’ve received. Did you receive a “partial match” penalty or a “site-wide match” penalty? Let the new agency know so that they can focus on fixing the specific violations.
Cloaking, or “black hat SEO,” is the result of plugging misleading content into Google for the specific purpose of optimizing SEO. In technical terms, this is accomplished when the marketer provides Google’s bots with a “server-side script,” i.e. a Google-friendly variation of the website. How would a website know that a “visitor” is a “search engine robot” and not a real user? Rather than digress into a detailed and highly technical explanation of how that’s done, let’s put it this way: Artificial Intelligence has come a long way.
Originally, A.I. was not developed for the purposes of helping unethical marketers to lie, cheat, and steal. But very unfortunately, mastering the best A.I. strategies in order to inform Google’s bots of URL content is what led fraudsters to invent “cloaking” in the first place.
You see, web developers, SEO strategists, and digital marketers are supposed to provide Google bots with URL information. This information must be truncated. For example, if a website sells over 500 products, the URL description that is written specifically for Google is obviously not going to include mention of all 500 products. Savvy SEO strategists will therefore choose to highlight only the most SEO-friendly products to mention within the Google-specific “scripts.” If organic coffee is the most popular product a website sells, for instance, then the “scripts” used for Google will focus on organic coffee and won’t mention the other 499 organic produce, meat, and tea products that are also for sale on the site.
Hopefully, by this point you see the distinction between acceptable SEO strategies and unethical “black hat SEO” cloaking.
The big takeaway to remember is that if real, living, breathing users love your web content, then Google bots will, too. Always write for people. Never write for the sake of pleasing algorithms if doing so comes at the expense of providing quality content to actual people. After all, Google bots are not your potential customers, people are, so be sure to keep the horse in front of the cart if you want to elevate your search engine ranking on Google.
Are you looking for a reputable digital marketing agency to develop your website, write your content, and handle your SEO? FTx 360 offers web design and development, content writing, and SEO marketing and optimization services for businesses of all industries. If you’ve been the victim of black hat SEO, we can fix it, repair your reputation, and put you on the fast track to building trust with consumers. Contact us to speak with our webmasters, content writers, and experienced marketing strategists today.
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Have you ever walked into a house and fallen in love with the atmosphere? Everything from the home furnishings to the stylized decor to the archways that connect each beautifully laid out room contributed to the wonderful experience you had while there. At the time, you might not have been aware that an architect had to draw up blueprints and contractors had to construct the home, first and foremost, in order for the interior design team who came in next to paint, furnish, and decorate. You see, your experience at the house, which left a lasting impression on you, would not have been possible without the architect and the contractors who built according to the blueprints.
In the same way, the specific experience you have on any given website would not be possible without the architect of the website, otherwise known as the lead web developer, and his or her team of builders who are the web developers that actually construct the website by writing coded language.
Producing a final website is not possible without a web designer, or website design team, just as a house would never go on the market until the walls had been painted, the floors tiled, and the overall decor arranged to give the best impression to prospective buyers. Today, we are going to focus on web developers, but if you would like to learn more about web designers, check out Web Design Trends, which goes into detail on the subject.
In this article, you will learn about website developers, what they’re responsible for, and what they can do for your business. Frontend, backend, and full-stack web development skills are just the beginning of what professional website developers bring to the table. They also create the basic structure and presentation of a website using website scripting languages. All-in-all, their work greatly impacts SEO, inbound marketing, and even revenue increases. Keep reading to discover everything there is to know about web development and what hiring a web developer can do for your company.
A website developer is a skilled programmer who specializes in building “World Wide Web” applications, i.e. websites.
The anchor of a website, which is the bedrock that web developers build upon, is a URL. In today’s competitive market, all websites use “custom domains.” A custom domain, also referred to as a vanity URL, is the branded website name that appears in the address bar of every web browser. Custom domains are not free and must be purchased by a qualifying provider and registered.
There are three primary types of web developers who build out custom domain URL websites. These are frontend developers, backend developers, and full-stack developers. Let’s take a look at what each of these three types of developers do.
The term “frontend” refers to the “visitor-side” of a website. When you visit a website, everything you see from the layout to the color scheme to the CTA opt-in forms appear thanks to the work of the frontend web developer. Because frontend developers are responsible for the UI, or user interface, they tend to work closely with the site’s web designer. Frontend developers use HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to craft the best UI possible, which we will take a closer look at further in this article.
As you might have guessed, just as the “frontend” developer is responsible for everything website visitors will see, the backend web developer is responsible for everything that happens behind the scenes in order to make a website function. Their territory is often referred to as the “server-side,” because backend developers work on the “guts” of the website within the server, application, and database. In order to ensure excellent UX, or user experience, backend developers collaborate with frontend developers as they develop code.
Highly experienced web developers generally go beyond offering either frontend or backend development services. Instead, these developers learn both sides of the development equation. Any website developer who offers frontend as well as backend web development is called a “full-stack web developer.” Known in the industry as development geniuses, full-stack web developers do it all because they know it all.
Whether you hire front-end and back-end developers or hire a single full-stack developer, your web developers should be mindful to build MarTech into your site for you. Shorthand for “marketing technology,” the term MarTech refers to any marketing software solution that helps marketers research, strategize, execute, analyze, and optimize their campaigns across all digital platforms. MarTech combines marketing with technology, and oftentimes marketers will consolidate multiple MarTech solutions into a stack, known as a MarTech Stack. The purpose of utilizing MarTech is to improve engagement with customers and drive sales, and yes, really smart web developers will build your website with your future marketing strategies in mind.
Every website presents an interface to the visitors who navigate from one web page to the next. The presentation of a website’s basic structure is the result of web developers using programming language to write code. The most common programming languages in use today are HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Let’s take a look at each one so that you become familiar with web development jargon.
“HTML” stands for “hypertext markup language.” This programming language has been considered the standard markup language for websites since the 90s. You can think of HTML as the foundation that must be laid prior to building a beautiful house. Providing the basic structure of a website, HTML is the bedrock that other technologies, such as CSS and JavaScript are fixed upon.
Short for “cascading style sheets,” CSS directly impacts the experiences visitors have when they interact with a website. CSS programming language modifies and enhances HTML to define the website’s layout, formatting, and overall presentation. This programming language is considered a cornerstone technology for the World Wide Web. Like HTML, web developers are experts in CSS due to the fact that reliable, functional, well-performing websites cannot be built without this essential language.
Another crucial layer to constructing a website that performs excellently is JavaScript, a complex programming language that is used to control the behavior of different web page elements. What do we mean by that? JavaScript’s logic-based programming language is how web developers include opt-in boxes, newsletter signups, and other CTAs on websites. Without JavaScript, websites would not be “interactive.”
No matter which programming language your web developer uses—HTML, CSS, JavaScript, or a combination of all three—they should be mindful to include coding that offers a “responsive web design.” This term refers to technology that automatically resizes, rearranges, and adjusts website content so that it displays correctly on all mobile devices such as smartphones, tablets, iPads, and other handheld devices. Also known as “mobile optimization,” responsive design is a necessary aspect of web design and development.
Website developers have a massive responsibility—to provide the best user experience, or UX, possible. Since web developers construct the layout of a website, which involves working closely with website designers, they are responsible for creating visually interesting and experientially engaging web pages that load fast and perform excellently. This means that web developers take extreme care when developing landing pages and optimizing websites for their inbound marketing potential, which includes coding opt-in forms and other marketing CTAs right into the web pages
themselves. Let’s take a look.
Landing pages have many synonyms, such as a lead capture page, squeeze page, and destination page, to name a few. Whichever term is used, this type of page refers to a single web page that’s
used as part of a digital marketing CTA for lead generation. For example, when an internet user clicks on a SEO search result, marketing email, or online advertisement, they are directed to the landing page that the web developer has set up. Landing pages typically display content that’s relevant to the user’s search or the ad the user clicked. And yes, a savvy web developer will be your best bet for including lead generation capabilities like this on your website.
A savvy web developer is also your best bet for connecting effective inbound marketing channels to your website. Inbound marketing strategies include content marketing, SEO, social media, blogs, and other digital marketing methods that draw consumers into a business’ marketing funnel. Inbound marketing campaign content places an emphasis on personally connecting with consumers and solving consumer pain points, which indirectly promotes the business’ products and solutions. Put simply, inbound marketing is any strategy that helps potential customers discover a business or
brand.
As we mentioned, opt-in forms and other CTAs are coded right into your web pages by your web developer. These forms and CTAs appear on websites and function as data collection tools. When a lead fills out an opt-in form on your website, information about the lead is automatically gathered and stored for you to leverage in the future during your marketing campaigns.
Web developers, as you can see, are truly responsible for the fate of the websites they develop.
SEO, or search engine optimization, refers to the objective of driving online user traffic to a website by elevating the website’s standing with search engines such as Google. Ideally, businesses want their websites to appear on the first page of Google’s search results whenever a user is looking for a company like theirs. Using relevant keywords within web content optimizes search engine ranking. Keywords are words, phrases, or questions that a Google user might type into the search bar in order to generate a list of possible websites relevant to their search topic. The term SEO only applies to non-paid, organic search results. Web developers contribute to the SEO of the websites they develop.
As a business owner, you want to maximize your daily site visitors. A “site visitor” is any internet user who lands on or navigates through your website. Websites collect valuable visitor data, including IP addresses and cookies, to determine how many unique site visitors have visited each web page, where those site visitors came from, and what actions they took while visiting the website. This is data you want, which means optimizing your website for SEO is a must. What can you do with visitor data? A lot. By analyzing the number of visitors that land on your website, you will learn important metrics such as the overall visitor frequency along with crucial demographic information. This information can then be leveraged during the creation and publication of additional website content to improve website traffic and increase sales revenue.
Launching a blog is easily the most worthwhile strategy in terms of integrating new SEO into your business website, so be sure to ask your web developer to include a blog on the site they develop for you. By featuring a blog on your website, you will organically begin to build brand awareness, improve SEO, drive website traffic, and increase revenue. Short for “web-logs,” blogs are actually considered an original social media platform for two reasons. Posts can be published frequently to immediately engage an audience, and discussions are often triggered based on the articles’ content. These discussions unfold in the comments section beneath each post. By including opt-in forms within your blog posts and automating the publication of each article, you can effectively convert website visitors into loyal customers.
Another effective SEO strategy involves using “dynamic content” on your website, and any web developer worth his or her salt will program your site using dynamic content. Also called adaptive content, dynamic content refers to the component on web pages that changes the page’s content based on visitor data, behavior, and preferences. Because these content changes can be automated, dynamic content keeps site visitors engaged while freeing up marketers to focus on other tasks. Changing the content naturally updates the web page’s SEO, which can improve search engine ranking.
Business owners who want to avoid hiring a web developer and who are not prepared to learn how to use HTML editors and in-line coding themselves might opt to use a WYSIWYG website building platform instead.
Instead of writing web page code and building your website from scratch all on your own, you could opt for a What You See Is What You Get, or WYSIWYG, website building platform. These user-friendly platforms come with rich text editors, drag-and-drop editors, and point-and-click editors. In other words, a WYSIWYG platform will enable you to quickly build and edit your website once you have chosen a template from their CMS. Let’s take a look.
CMS, or content management systems, provide users with technologically simplistic templates. These templates can be edited with drag-and-drop features, as we mentioned. The user-friendly nature of website builders with CMS allows the user to construct a fully functional website or eCommerce store without the help of a professional web developer. This is due to the fact that the CMS platform itself handles all of the basic backend infrastructure. Once your WYSIWYG website is established, the CMS software platform will help you create, manage, modify, and schedule all of your content in an organized, easy-to-execute manner.
Let’s take an in-depth look at “point-and-click” editors, “drag-and-drop” editors, and mobile-optimized responsive website design so that you’re fully informed in case you choose to go the WYSIWYG route.
Point-and-click editing is a design feature that empowers the user to add elements of code into web pages without having to formally program that code into the backend. Point-and-click editor allows the user to easily add plugins, source buttons, and code snippets among other widgets to the pages of their website or eCommerce store without having to rely on a web designer. Businesses can also invest in free-standing point-and-click editors to create, write, and revise their Wikipedia pages and other online business encyclopedias.
A drag-and-drop website builder enables users to create a website without having to learn CSS commands or write code. The user simply selects a basic layout theme from a library of professionally designed templates and proceeds to drag-and-drop widgets, fill in text, and make other alterations to personalize the site for their business. Drag-and-drop website builders give business owners the freedom to build their websites exactly as they want and easily update their web content without having to rely on a web designer or agency.
A mobile-optimized responsive website design template is a build-your-own-website template that has been designed to display correctly on all devices for optimal viewing. The templates themselves are coded to automatically adapt to any screen size and orientation so that the website looks great, functions well, and is easy to read on computers, smartphones, and tablets. If you opt to build your own website instead of hiring a professional web developer, then be sure to choose a web building platform that offers mobile-optimized responsive web design templates.
At the end of the day, your business website has the potential to be your most powerful digital marketing tool. When visitors land on your website, they read the home page, navigate through the entire site, and decide whether or not to purchase your products and services based on their experience interacting with your website. For this reason, making sure that your website performs excellently is the most important thing you can do for your business.
Is your website performing as well as it should? Our article, What Do Customers Look For in a Website? can help you determine where your site stands in the eyes of consumers, so be sure to give it a read.
If your website or eCommerce store isn’t performing as well as it should, you could try your hand at constructing a new site using a WYSIWYG web building platform like Squarespace, Wix, or Weebly… Or you could have the website development team at FTx 360 handle your site for you. Our web developers work hand-in-hand with artistic website designers to produce stunning websites that strike a perfect balance between beautiful and functional, and our websites always load properly on mobile devices. Contact us to check out our portfolio or get your project started with our web development services today.
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On a global scale, approximately 547,200 new websites are created every single day. As of the publication of this article, 24 million eCommerce sites across the world are actively selling products. According to data compiled from IBISWorld, U.S. eCommerce sales reached $211.5 billion in the second quarter of 2020, which represents a 44.5% increase compared to the second quarter of 2019.
The eCommerce sector, regardless of industry, is extremely competitive. The market is growing exponentially. But don’t worry. Your eCommerce business isn’t automatically doomed to get lost in the fray. There are plenty of marketing strategies you can implement today that will increase sales tomorrow, next week, next month, and next year.
In this article, we’ll show you how to promote your eCommerce website using 5 marketing ideas that work.
Search engine optimization is a marketing method that uses targeted keywords and longtail keyword phrases to elevate a website’s ranking on search engines such as Google. SEO typically refers to organic, non-paid keyword strategies. The desired result of any SEO effort is to increase a website’s online visibility and traffic. Check out What Is SEO? to learn specific SEO strategies, including how to generate relevant keywords.
49% of marketers report that organic search engine optimization has the best ROI of any marketing channel, according to Search Engine Journal.
Devising an SEO strategy for your eCommerce site includes three areas, each with its own steps:
● First, you’ll have to do a little research to figure out the frequently searched words, terms, and phrases that search engine users typically type into the search bar. You can identify these SEO keywords by using Ahrefs, Amazon, Google, or any SEM tool.
● Next, you’ll need to create new content with the keywords you’ve selected. You could revise your eCommerce Home Page using keywords, or spruce up your product descriptions with them. This second step of plugging fresh keywords into your site should become a periodic practice.
● Finally, you’ll need to analyze the impact of those SEO keywords, using Google Analytics or another tool that measures the success of your SEO strategy.
Multichannel marketing for an eCommerce company refers to diversifying your sales platform. Yes, your eCommerce site is obviously your primary sales platform. But in today’s competitive market, businesses succeed online when they meet their customers’ wants and needs, including their preferences for where they want to shop. Facebook has made buying online extremely convenient, and the same can be said about Amazon. By opening a Facebook Store, you can cater to consumers who want to shop there, and others that prefer to visit your website can access it through Facebook via the URL you provide.
By the year 2040, an estimated 95% of all purchases will occur online through eCommerce, according to Nasdaq.
Spread your brand across multiple channels to diversify your sales and income streams. Follow these steps to get started:
● Research where your potential customers are congregating online. Are they on Instagram the most, or do they fill up the comments sections of YouTube? Find out so you’ll know where to focus your efforts.
● Focus on the top 3 channels where your potential customers spend their online time, then develop posting strategies on those platforms. By engaging users, they will begin to view and interact with your brand, which will lead to sales through those platforms if not your eCommerce site.
● Since multichannel marketing is all about creating different paths for consumers to travel in order to get to the purchasing stage of their shopping experience, it’s okay to start small, as long as the customer journey is easy and rewarding.
If you have an advertising expense budget, the best way to allocate your funds in 2021 is into podcast advertisements. Yes, it’s true. Regardless of the overall popularity of a podcast, the fact of the matter is that podcasts garner very loyal audiences, and those audiences tend to be comprised of specific demographics. This means that the podcast itself has already corralled your ideal customers, and by buying ad space, you can speak to all of them at once.
54% of podcast listeners will lean towards buying products that were recommended on podcasts, according to Edison Research.
Narrowing down the best podcast to invest in requires a little research. Start with these initial steps:
● Contact podcasts that are relevant to your industry to find out the size of their listenership and the costs for different ad spots. The ad sales department should be able to send you a demographic report that organizes their audience by categories such as age, gender, location, and interests, among other variables.
● Choose the most affordable ad spot. This could be a shorter pre-roll or post-roll spot, which will play at the beginning or end of the podcast episode. Pricier spots typically play in the middle of the podcast when listenership is the highest.
● Lastly, you’ll need to record a high-quality audio ad that meets the technical requirements and standards of the podcast.
In terms of regularly generating fresh, targeted, relevant keywords that harness the power of SEO and directly impact your eCommerce site’s Google ranking, nothing beats a blog. Launching and maintaining a blog is a highly effective promotional strategy. Blogs expand brand reach and online presence, as well as help to validate the business as a credible authority. All of which will lead to consumer trust. For detailed tips on blogging, be sure to read Creating a Remarkable Business Blog.
63% of online consumers in the U.S. have made a purchase based on recommendations from a blog, according to the Content Marketing Institute.
Summarizing the article on blogging referenced above, here’s how you can promote your eCommerce site by adding a Blog tab and posting on a regular schedule:
● When creating the content of each blog post, aim to follow the “information, inspiration, call-to-action” format. This means that the content should inform the reader by first addressing a “pain point” they’re experiencing and then suggesting solutions to fix that particular pain point problem. The suggestions should “inspire” the reader. And finally, the article should wrap up with a call-to-action that encourages the reader to purchase the product that will “solve” their problem from your eCommerce site.
● Be sure to work your keywords into the written content. Keep the paragraphs short so that the article is easy to read. Use headings, subheadings, and bullet points to list information, all of which ensures easy reading.
● Break up the text even more with images, photos, and graphics. Include a “subscribe” button at the bottom of each post, and as you collect email addresses, be sure to use them wisely when you promote your recently published blog posts.
Over the course of 2020 and into 2021, the use of “chatbots” has risen as a prefered method of customer relationship management and customer service. Meaning, your eCommerce site visitors would probably appreciate being able to ask straightforward questions and get fast answers via a chatbot box. There are two kinds of chatbots—purely robotic or a live person. Depending on the size of your eCommerce business, you may opt to use one or both types of chatbots. A live person might not be able to accommodate a great volume of inquiries. Remember, consumers expect fast responses, so if there’s any chance your employee will take longer than 5 minutes to reply, then the safer route would be to integrate a machine-learning A.I. “robotic” chatbot.
Roughly 50% of consumers have ended up making an eCommerce purchase after interacting with the site’s chatbot, according to Drift.com.
The success or failure of an A.I. chatbot completely depends on whether or not your eCommerce site visitor can tell they’re talking to a machine-learning robot. The point being, even if you use an A.I. chatbot, you want your website visitors to believe it’s a real, live person. Here are some tips to keep you—or your hired chatbot developer—on track:
● The chatbot should exhibit a discernable degree of empathy when appropriate. Firstly, the bot must be programmed to use language properly so that it can smoothly speak with the customer typing on the other end of the box.
● In order for the chatbot to function properly, i.e. provide appropriate, relevant, and accurate answers to customer questions, the chatbot first must be programmed with all the necessary information. Also, it should be “trained” to ask the customer to provide more details when required. Remember, better answers equal better service.
● Train the chatbot to answer frequently asked questions. Depending on the nature of your business and the products you sell on your eCommerce site, you’ve probably noticed that customers tend to have a range of specific questions. Chatbots can, in fact, be trained to answer those specific questions.
Additional marketing methods that can greatly enhance your efforts to promote your eCommerce website include:
Are you ready to get your eCommerce marketing strategy started? FTx 360 offers SEO marketing and optimization plans for eCommerce businesses. Contact us to speak with a professional marketing strategist today.
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The entire marketing industry was forced to make a huge shift when the coronavirus pandemic changed how consumers shop. Companies, both B2C and B2B, needed to quickly implement innovative marketing initiatives in order to retain their customers while accommodating sudden governmental mandates.
Consumers had new habits, and businesses that didn’t develop new marketing strategies took a big financial hit throughout 2020.
The timeless adage holds true–necessity is the mother of all invention–and the digital marketing sector certainly birthed a wealth of inventions that companies could use to survive. These innovations evolved swiftly and not all of them worked. But those that did, thanks to advances in marketing technologies, were tested and thoroughly vetted during 2020.
Marketers now have a fresh arsenal of digital marketing tools to use in 2021. Here is a list of all of the tried-and-true marketing strategies that resulted from the most tumultuous year in modern history. These marketing trends are here to stay, which is why you should implement them at your company as part of your digital marketing strategy.
Considered the best location-based marketing strategy for online marketers, Google My Business, or GMB, has been around for a few years now, but it has dramatically evolved over the course of 2020. If you’re unfamiliar, GMB is an online directory that provides Google users with a map of relevant businesses whenever they search locally. Since 46% of all Google searches are for the purposes of finding local businesses there is no downside to creating a GMB profile, especially because having one is completely free. For more on GMB, check out Making The Most Out Of Google My Business.
The number one reason that consumers abandoned certain brands, retailers, and businesses throughout 2020 was because of product availability, or rather, the lack of available products at a particular store. In other words, retaining customers boiled down to keeping shelves stocked, and more importantly, keeping customers informed about product availability, online order turn-around times, and how long it would take a retailer to replenish popular items. Communication goes a long way with today’s consumers, and retailers will have a better shot maintaining customer loyalty if they inform their customers of fluctuations in product availability.
Google Ad’s automatic bidding feature has been around since 2016. However, this automated advertising method gained real traction in 2020 when businesses had to downsize and modify their operations due to COVID-19 shutdowns in certain industries, especially the retail and service industries. Google’s auto bidding allows Google, rather than the marketer, to assess your ad campaigns for you and adjust your bids accordingly in real-time. By permitting Google’s A.I. to handle these adjustments, the marketer is freed up to optimize other aspects of their PPC campaigns’ performances. The ultimate outcome is that companies will end up spending less for their targeted advertising campaigns.
Shocking as it may seem, Google’s algorithms cannot yet pick up voice search SEO. But that doesn’t mean that marketers and business owners should hold off on implementing voice search as part of their overall digital marketing strategy. There has been a steady rise in Google users opting to speak, rather than type, their searches into Google. A whopping 45% of consumers have used a voice assistant on a smart speaker, whether using Alexa at home or their smartphone while out-and-about. Simply put, if there is an increasing number of consumers using this feature, then marketers should cater to that demographic.
When interactive content is offered on business websites and ECommerce stores, visitor engagement dramatically increases, which leads to rises in brand awareness and sales. Interactive website content includes dynamic product images, short videos, active blogs with an open comments section below each article, and the list goes on. What 2020 showed marketers was that static, text-heavy online content no longer holds web visitors’ attention. But when that same text content is broken up with graphics, GIFs, memes, info-tisements, and graphs, visitor engagement shoots through the roof. One of the heaviest hitters among all interactive content is the blog. By adding a blog to your website or ECommerce store, you will easily drive traffic to your website. For specific pointers, take a moment to read Creating A Remarkable Business Blog.
In recent years, “chatbots” have become a buzzword in the digital marketing community. Despite the fact that chatbots have technically been around longer than P.C.s, their current level of artificial intelligence far outshines what it used to be, and their modern-day capabilities put their former ones to shame. If your website or ECommerce store does not have a chatbot, you should seriously consider adding one. The A.I. that the average chatbot possesses in 2021 has been optimized for functionality, and can handle evolved levels of responsibility, from engaging in simple conversations to recommending products to completing complex transactions.
Does that conclude all of the marketing trends you can expect in 2021? Not at all! We’ve only scratched the surface, which is why we invite you to subscribe to our blog. We publish weekly articles on helpful topics such as Marketing Tricks That Can Help You Go Viral and Social Media Marketing Strategies.
All business brands, whether B2C or B2B, must implement a solid digital marketing strategy in 2021, and you can’t go wrong if your company’s strategy includes the forward-thinking trends we laid out in this article. But that doesn’t mean you should stop researching newly emerging trends.
Businesses that remain on the lookout for the next big marketing tools keep themselves ahead of the technology curve and a cut above their competition. Digital marketing is a constantly developing industry, which means that business owners should stay in the know, research new technologies, watch trends, and launch marketing initiatives that have been proven to work.
But don’t get intimidated if you aren’t tech savvy. You can always hire FTx 360 to manage your digital marketing. Our full suite of marketing solutions includes all of the creative services you will need to launch effective digital marketing campaigns that drive website traffic, increase revenue, and expand your brand’s digital footprint online.
The marketing strategists at FTx 360 have experience working with businesses of every industry. To discover all that our agency can do for you, check out our digital portfolio or contact us today.
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You know something’s wrong, but you can’t put your finger on what. Your Ecommerce site has been getting less and less traffic. Your business website takes longer and longer to load. Even the engagement on your blog has slowed down, but you have no idea why any of this is happening. It seemed like only moments ago your business was booming…
If your online brand is experiencing any of these symptoms, it’s quite possible your business has become a victim of negative SEO.
Negative SEO is serious and can be detrimental to a company, but we’ll show you how to spot the effects and what you can do to recover.
With each passing year, it’s harder and harder to establish and maintain a high ranking on Google and other search engines. Google regularly changes its algorithm rules in an effort to identify websites that try to “game the system” with cheap tricks in order to elevate their ranking. One cheap trick is cramming so many SEO keywords and longtail keyword phrases onto a web page that it overwhelms the content. Another cheap trick is creating a website with dozens upon dozens of web pages. When Google’s A.I. “spiders” recognize this kind of spammy behavior, it penalizes the guilty websites.
What this means is that unethical businesses have developed yet another cheap trick in their quest to dominate Google–attack the higher-ranking websites of their competitors. That’s right. If your business website has been rising in SEO ranking, you could have a target on your back.
Devious competitors could attack your website with negative SEO in order to take you down a notch… as if doing such a thing will automatically elevate their own SEO ranking.
Negative SEO can take on a number of different forms, which makes spotting this kind of attack difficult to pinpoint. Read on to learn about the telltale signs a competitor is trying to sabotage your success with negative SEO and what you can do about it.
If you don’t know what negative SEO looks like when it strikes, you won’t be able to reverse it. Here are the biggest indications your website is under a negative SEO attack.
Have you noticed that when you pull up the homepage of your website, it takes an unusually long time to load? Initially, you might optimistically assume this is good news–maybe a ton of visitors have discovered your site all at once? When you check your website hits, you discover that you’ve actually been getting less traffic than usual… hmm.
Your website could be the victim of forceful crawling, which results in a heavy server load, causing your site to slow down and potentially crash. Forceful crawling makes a website inaccessible. When Google can’t access the website as usual, its A.I. determines something is wrong and will automatically push that website down in ranking. If this problem persists, Google could conclude that the site is defunct and completely de-rank it altogether.
You completely understand and respect that “content is king”, which is why you’ve taken particular care to build a well-written website. You might even have an active blog on your site and publish popular content regularly to drive website traffic, validate your company, and establish your brand within your industry.
If you’ve invested in hiring content writers, the last thing you want is for your competitors to plagiarize your website. Having your content stolen not only makes your company look bad–the average visitor will not be able to tell if you were the plagiarist or the other guy–but it also triggers Google to penalize both sites containing the copied content, which will massively impact your ranking. In order to keep an eye on your content, use Copyscape, a free website that will locate duplications of your content for you.
Have you heard of “spammy link farms”? It’s a dirty trick some unethical companies implement to sabotage high-ranking, successful online businesses. A link farm is a website that contains an overwhelming number of hyperlinks to other sites. Link farm websites don’t contain original, traffic driving content–these people aren’t even pretending to be ethical! Instead, link farms use repeated “anchor text” for these hyperlinks… and you do not want these people hyperlinking to your legitimate business website, because it will negatively affect your Google ranking…
Even though Google uses a webspam net to catch these spam farms, their mechanisms don’t catch everything. If you regularly monitor your backlinks, you’ll be able to spot if your website has become the victim of a spammy link farm. Bring a list of any suspicious links to the attention of your website’s webmaster and formally request a removal. Tools like Ahrefs, Moz, and SEMRush are useful for monitoring your backlinks.
Oh no, you’ve spotted negative SEO associated with your website. You want to get rid of it as quickly as possible to mitigate damages and recover ASAP. Here’s what you can do immediately:
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If you have a website, e-commerce site, or blog, chances are you understand the importance of SEO.
Inbound internet traffic that results from effective SEO efforts remains the #1 content marketing strategy for lead generation. If you want to increase inbound traffic to your website, e-commerce site, or blog, you’ll need to integrate strong, relevant, and accurate SEO into your content marketing materials.
We’re talking about keywords.
Keywords are the foundation of SEO, but what are they really? You can think of keywords as the words, phrases, or questions that a Google user would type into a search field in order to generate a list of possible websites relevant to that search topic.
Because search engines like Google are the matchmakers that suggest relevant websites to searching users, in order to get these search engines to work for you, you’ll need to use keywords smartly. Hence, keywords are the foundation of SEO.
Keywords won’t help you optimize your website’s ranking within search engine results unless you’re using the right words and phrases. There’s no getting around doing your research in order to determine what particular keywords will yield the best results in raising your search engine ranking and increasing your website traffic.
If you haven’t done so already, it’s imperative for the success of your business that you identify who your ideal customer is and what their primary “pain points” are, in other words, what problems can your business solve for them? Once you identify and really “know” your audience, you can optimize your website using keywords that will attract them. Ask yourself, what does my audience care most about? What topics would they be interested in? How can I convince them my products, services, and informative content will check all of the boxes that these ideal customers have in mind?
Google users are more likely to type a phrase or question into Google’s search bar than they are a single keyword. These phrases are called “longtail keyword phrases”. When developing your online content, it’s important to plug in popular longtail keyword phrases in addition to singular keywords if you want to effectively market your business to consumers. In other words, using longtail keyword phrases will reduce your competition and help you stand out from the crowd. In order to understand this concept, you’ll need to reverse-engineer the idea. For example, if you own a pet supply store and want to promote your customer loyalty rewards program, try using the longtail keyword phrases that your ideal customers would likely type into Google’s search bar, such as “best pet store with loyalty program near me” or “where can I find discount organic dog food in my city?”.
This tip elaborates on our suggestion above to target longtail keywords. Put simply, using one keyword or one longtail keyword phrase won’t be enough. Try brainstorming at least three variations on the most likely longtail keyword phrase that a consumer could type into Google. This way, you’ll cover your bases and make sure that no matter what a potential customer types in, they will see your website listed. Don’t go too crazy, though. The written content will run the risk of sounding awkward if you plug in back-to-back keyword phrases.
We can’t emphasize this SEO tip enough. Keywords should inform content and not the other way around. This means that before you start writing your content, you should already know the keywords and longtail keyword phrases you’re going to integrate into the webpage, product description, blog article, or whatever online content you’re about to write.
This might sound repetitive, but it’s worth emphasizing twice. As we detailed above, using different variations in your keywords and longtail keyword phrasing is critical when you’re selecting the keywords you plan to integrate into your content. Try striking a healthy balance between weaving your keywords into a particular webpage and then using variations of those keywords on additional pages and within the backend of the site’s meta data. For example, if you’ve worked the longtail keyword phrase “all-natural puppy flea control” into your latest blog article, you can use different keywords that mean the same thing, such as “organic flea control for puppies” and “non-toxic fur treatment for pets” on other webpages.
Once you’ve integrated a variety of keywords into your online content, it’s vital to track and monitor how each keyword is doing. Trending keywords can change on a week-to-week basis, even when the subject itself remains the same. For example, last week the keyword “all-natural” might have been ranking high in search results in reference to vitamin-rich kitten food, but this week the buzzword happens to be “organic, non-GMO”. We wouldn’t recommend that you go into your already-published content and swap the keyword out. But it is important to stay informed of trends so that you can use them to your advantage.
The entire marketing team here at FTx 360 is passionate about SEO strategies, as well as all facets of digital marketing. We love sharing the best marketing tool for the job with our readership no matter what the “job” happens to be, so be sure to hit the subscribe button.
Need SEO advice? Contact us anytime! Prefer to have our experienced agency handle your SEO strategy and implementation? We can do that, too! FTx 360 offers affordable SEO services and can work within any budget.
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