Remember when writing was somewhat pedestrian and simple? When presenting compelling and provocative prose to draw audience attention was solely a factor of how you string sentences together? You can suspend that, at least partly. Key in a migration of communications from print to digital is the necessary intrusion of technology, which means wording sentences and ideas in a way that they are captured and rechurned through algorithms on search engines.
But it’s possible that the race to tap into somewhat robotic Search Engine Optimization (SEO) may be a bit premature. There are still arguments to be made for focusing on the human target as opposed to a reliance on converting your input to a system that delivers ordered results. By now you’re envisioning your 9th grade composition teacher’s pleas to embrace a conversational voice. Turns out there’s still a solid argument for that, because the predominant search entity, Google, still evaluates text for its readability and adherence to rules of approachable writing. Here’s a rather protracted guide of how Google attempts to legitimize and rank search criteria. High on Google’s list is a reputation-based evaluation. How trustworthy is the source? How much expertise does the writer have? Low-quality submissions that are not verifiable will be ranked lower. And make no mistake about it: Google employs human beings to assess these things.
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Whether you’ve been doing business online for 5 years or 5 minutes, you’ve probably utilized some form of content marketing to reach potential customers. It’s all the rage these days, and it’s easy to see why.
After all, a consistent output of quality content has immense potential. It has the power to grab prospects’ attention, gain their trust, and elevate you as an authority in your niche - which, if you’re doing it right, leads to increased sales, a loyal customer base, and more money in your pocket. (Cha-ching!) Perhaps you’ve focused on social media; on likes and shares and building a community to promote your brand. Or perhaps you’ve found your efforts better spent on growing your list and creating killer email sequences to get people clicking and buying. Maybe you’ve found success in blogging, in reaching people through original, thought-provoking written content. Or, if you’re like most business owners, it’s likely a combination of all of the above. Last year, many SEO experts looked at the upcoming changes to Google’s method of ranking websites.
The most notable trends were:
Let’s explore what each trend means as well as 10 ways to boost your SEO strategy. Responsive Sites Aren’t Mobile-First Mobile-First Indexing is Google’s answer to one of the biggest substantial swings in recent consumer behavior. In 2018, 57% of all traffic is from mobile devices. Ranking will now focus on mobile sites not desktop sites. It’s not enough to have a smartphone and tablet friendly responsive site. It’s now essential to be mobile-first for better ranking. Maintaining SEO, or search engine optimization, during a website redesign is tricky to handle. Search engines are constantly scouring the web for updates to content, making it important to manage changes and stay relevant.
Usually during a website redesign, code and pages are altered. This makes it vital to properly handle the updates to your website so SEO and growth are not affected negatively. Let’s take a look at 6 quick tips you can use to stay on top of your SEO while undergoing a redesign. 1.Create a URL Backup A lot of the changes that are made during a redesign affect your website’s URL re-structure. With all of the work you’ve already put into SEO, don’t risk losing your standing: The URL structure of your website can be easily downloaded through plugins, such as the updated sitemap on the Yoast SEO plugin. This creates a backup, just in case there is an issue with the new changes. 2.Use a Temporary URL Under the same premise as the first tip, completing your redesign on your existing website can cause problems. The best way to avoid visitor and other potential issues is to set up a copy of your site under a temporary URL. Doing this also allows you to check the status of your current website and make sure that it is fully optimized – you can review broken links, features, and update your CSS. Once the redesign changes are complete, you can switch the domain or update your website with your new changes. Considering the grueling hours you poured into building a website that works for you and represents your business in its best possible light (or the dollars you spent paying someone else to do it), the last thing you want to envision is a lack of interest among actual visitors. But it’s a thing, and it happens more often than not. If you’re honest with yourself, you’ll admit that you have done it many times in the past—followed a link to a site and then simply moved on.
In the vernacular of web commerce, that’s called a “bounce.” Cute word, but it’s something we hope to avoid. And stat collectors measure the frequency of these in the form of bounce rates. The higher your bounce rate, the more you may want to take note, and figure out what you can do to retain first-time or regular visitors. It goes without saying that ecommerce merchants are far more affected by bounce rates than conventional businesses who happen to have a web presence. Your business lives or dies by engagement and ordering. Here are ways to measure your bounce rates, and tips on how to reduce them. If you host your website on a WordPress CMS, you may or may not be aware of the enormous supply of valuable plugins that you have access to. With more than 55,000 plugins available for seemingly everything about your website, it can be very tricky to identify the most ideal options for improvement. Here, we’ll highlight the five plugins most valuable for satisfying and managing SEO needs.
First, let’s start with big-picture, all-in-one plugins. It’s hard to talk about WordPress SEO plugins without looking at Yoast SEO. Since 2008, it’s been available as an all-in-one solution for improving SEO, with a variety of tools and features geared toward pushing sites toward the top of the search results. It includes templates to ensure you’re correctly handling titles and meta descriptions, while also helping to focus in on writing SEO-friendly content. A favorite feature is its snippet preview, which allows you to see how your pages appear in search results, before publishing them. Additional content is available through Yoast SEO Premium. If you follow writings on how to improve marketing strategies for your online business, you’ve probably seen the word “optimize” a thousand times. The application is diverse, but typically it refers to making your content accessible and readable.
Whether or not you’re prepared, the internet commerce trend is swinging toward mobile. Tablets, cell phones, and even watches are now the go-to media for shoppers hoping to pick up a bargain or hunt down something they’ve dreamed of owning. In fact, more than half of all web commerce takes place on mobile devices. And that ratio will skyrocket in the coming decade. That means the equipment you (or your web designer) use to create an attractive, user-friendly site on which to peddle your wares may not be even remotely close to what your customers use to purchase them. Code-driven page layout has become unwieldy and complex over the last decade, and even though its goal is to improve readability, it can also wreak havoc if not used properly. In the intervening decades since visiting a website meant typing in an entire internet address and navigating blindly, online usage has evolved largely into specific hits based on hyperlinks or search engine returns, and coming to rest on what marketers call a “landing page.” That’s a fancy term for one page within a complete website that delivers content a user has specifically sought. Simple enough.
The content on that page will ideally reflect the intent a user holds when he or she decides to visit it. If you’re an ecommerce vendor, it may return a product you’ve advertised somewhere in cyberspace. Still simple enough. What’s not so simple is digging into the wealth of opportunities that open up when the landing page – or any of your pages – becomes a potential customer’s focus. Advertising strategy is more complex than merely linking a consumer demand with a consumer supply. Though it may be a proximate goal, ideally you will lure a user into your brand as opposed to a single product. Gauging the effectiveness of either your advertising or your web pages’ ability to gain an interested party is something that marketers quantify through “conversation rates,” or the percentage of site visitors who respond to externally located links and either make a purchase, subscribe to the site, or in some other way participate beyond a mere glance. SEO rankings can make or break your website. Showing up one spot higher on a results list than a competitor can be the difference in a sale. It’s important to be aggressive in finding ways to increase traffic through optimizing a website. Revamping your website for an improved user-experience could require changing your URL structure, which could potentially harm your website’s rankings. It’s important to consider risks like this, which could appear harmful at first, with its eventual long-term payoffs.
The first step in improving optimization requires a cost-benefit analysis. By looking at where your web pages rank with different keyword phrases, you can determine how much room for improvement there is, versus how much momentum you could lose with major changes. SEMrush and Google Analytics provide insight into key metrics, and whether your traffic and rankings are trending up or down. Through careful evaluation, you will be able to determine the risks and rewards that are appropriate for your website. Below are two risks worth taking, followed by two that should be avoided. Title Tag Optimization
Let’s get right to the point with a bit of friendly advice for creating effective title tags that drive traffic to your site. It may seem onerous, just like following good grammar principles when writing sales materials. But while prospective customers can overlook a typo or run-on sentence, a title tag with errors or poorly chosen terms can keep them from seeing your page entirely. Your first priority will be SEO, or search engine optimization. Title tags are the words that fall within a hyperlink navigating to your page. They are the bait that captures search criteria and brings lookers to your site. Essential elements of any HTML page, they are essentially code requiring specificity. The order of keywords is surprisingly important, as even though searches may yield results if some of a searcher’s keyword string is entered, it’s becoming increasingly likely that they will get swallowed up in the vast Sea of Google. But if your title tags are on the mark, you’ll attract a lot more attention through simple or even complex searches. Understand that the foundation of all keyword search optimization will center on Google. Resolve to accept the inevitability of Google’s unrelenting power over your internet presence. It won a protracted slug-fest to determine which search engine would be King of the Hill. Sounds like a monopoly—and it is, essentially—but the upside to that is a solitary platform with known variables. Consistency. No need to learn various sites’ tricks and hacks. Google selects which text it will display in your tags. For an example of this, conduct a Google search of your choice and observe the format and syntax of the results. Considering that half of all visitors to your site arrive there through a Google search, it’s critical to get it done right. |
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