7 Tips For Choosing a Domain That Will Help Your SEO

By Peter Brittain on August 29, 2018 in Domain Names, SEO

The number of factors that affect the SEO of websites not only increases on a regular basis, they also change frequently. Some are complicated, and others are straightforward. One factor that you might think has little or no impact is the domain name of your website, however, it does play an important part. Here are 7 tips which can help to improve your SEO efforts and your Google ranking when choosing your domain name correctly.

Keep Your Domain Name Length To 15 Characters Or Less.

If you were to analyse the domain names of the top 100,000 ranked websites on Google, you will find that their average length is 9 characters or less. Shorter domains names are much easier to remember and share in terms of people passing on or recommending your website. For example, compare www thebusinessandinvestmenttoptipswebsite.com to www.biztips.com. and it is clear the latter is far more desirable.

Check To See If Your Domain Is Available On All Your Social Media Channels.

With the huge and ever-increasing importance of social media, it is no surprise that it plays a role in Google rankings. The authority of sites such as Pinterest, Facebook, and Instagram, means that having a presence on them and other social media sites can boost your SEO efforts.

For this reason, you should first check to see if any of the domain names you are considering are also available on social media platforms. A great tool for this is ‘knowem.com’ where you can enter a name and it will check hundreds of social media sites to see if it is still available or not.

Don’t Pack Your Domain Name With Keywords

The days of having ridiculously long domain names which read more like a list of keywords, with or without hyphens, are long gone. Google frowns upon this activity, and it also looks very spammy when potential customers see it. It’s ok to have one or two keywords, so a domain for a will writing service such as ‘premierwillwriting.com should be ok. However, using something like ‘the-best-and-cheapest-will-writing-and legal-services-company.com, will be penalized, and it looks ridiculous too.

Choosing a Domain Top-Level Domain

Simple Keyword Strategies To Outrank Your Competition

By Peter Brittain on July 22, 2018 in SEO, SEO Keywords

The internet has billions of web pages, and many of them are competing to be noticed by Google in order to move up the search rankings for that coveted page one of results. There are lots of SEO tactics and strategies that will help achieve this, and one of the most important is optimizing the page for the keywords you want to rank for. Here are some very simple ways to ensure that any, and all web pages on your website have the best chance of improving their ranking with the use of keywords.

Researching Keywords

The mystique surrounding keywords, and how best to optimize for them has led to countless theories and complicated strategies about how it should be done. In reality, optimizing a page for keywords is not that difficult, and only requires some very straightforward actions.

The first of these is to do proper keyword research to establish which keywords and keyword phrases you need to target to be able to challenge those sites which currently occupy the first page of results within your niche. There are numerous keyword research tools available, with the most obvious one being the free AdWords keyword tool that Google offers.

If you really want to dig deep, to the extent that you know what keywords your competitors are targeting, how highly they rank for those keywords, and where they are getting backlinks from, paid tools such as ‘Ahrefs’ can give you all that information. It cannot be stressed enough how important this sort of keyword research is. It can mean the difference between knowing exactly what keywords to target and then creating the content to match versus aimlessly creating content that achieves nothing.

Keyword Strategies Researching Keywords

3 Things Designers Need to Know About SEO

By Peter Brittain on June 13, 2018 in SEO, Web Design

When it comes to relevance and visibility of content, every person who is looking to build a good online presence for their company knows the importance of good SEO practices. That being said, a lot of them fail to realize the importance of SEO practices when it comes to the design aspect.

There are some key concepts of SEO which experts are not exactly able to communicate with their designers well enough. That can leave a lot of problems because even if a website looks visually appealing, it might lack the crucial oversight of good SEO practices. That can affect the rankings significantly.

Here is a list of things that designers need to know about SEO in 2018 so that they can bridge the gap between excellent design and good SEO practices.

Mobile First

First things first, Google has made it quite clear for everyone out there that there is a need for optimizing websites for mobile phone usage with responsive design. The number of people using the internet through their mobile devices is more than those using it through their computers and that change in demographic needs to be catered to. Website designers need to make sure that the design of a website should not just be visually good for desktop computers, it can be equally well done but it will be more effective if it is optimized for mobile phone usage as a priority.

Organic Visibility

SEO experts are of the opinion that the website pages should be designed in a way that they are more accessible to search engines. This means the content organization for the website layout has to be on point.

A sense of organization on a website will make it easier for search bots to go through the webpage and find relevance in the content for the users. One of the most important aspects of content organization in a website’s layout is the use of H tags or the headings.

If the web designer creates a layout that follows a hierarchy of headings from H1 to H2 to H3 and so on, it will be deemed as something more relevant in comparison to a more haphazard layout.

Mobile First Organic Visibility

4 SEO Trends in 2018

By Peter Brittain on April 9, 2018 in SEO, SEO Trends

Every successful business in the world right now is taking full advantage of good SEO strategies for their websites, blogs, and their social media profiles. If your business is not doing the same, you might as well be digging your own grave because without good SEO rankings, your business will not be able to keep up with the rest of the competition. High ranking on SEO is going to make sure that your business stays relevant by helping your customers find your products and services online with ease.

SEO might seem very simple when you think about the fact that a lot of businesses are using it but it is actually quite challenging. The most difficult aspect of SEO is the fact that it is in a constant state of evolution. The “best practices” that worked last year might not even be relevant right now. This means, there is a need to keep up with the latest SEO trends if you want to stay ahead of the curve.

Here is a look at the 4 SEO trends that are tearing things up in 2018.

Secure Links

2016 saw Google make the announcement about the fact that secure links (SSL) are going to make a significant impact on the SEO ranking of websites. From being a simple announcement to becoming something that is more of a necessity, browsers like Google Chrome are now marking the websites that do not start with “https” as potentially unsafe for internet users. It’s one of the easiest ways to boost your SEO rankings and a trend that is here to stay.

Artificial Intelligence

Google has been intent on providing the best user experience to people using their platform and that is why SEO is constantly evolving. With the prospect of advancing technology making Artificial Intelligence and machine learning more and more sophisticated, one of the SEO trends that is blazing its way through 2018 ever since its introduction is RankBrain. It is an AI algorithm which has been designed to provide search results based more on the intent of the user rather than the literal words in the search query. This is making search engine results based more on relevance to the user’s requirements rather than the fixed formulas involving keyword stuffing. Quality is a must now.

Artificial Intelligence SEO Trends Voice Search

SEO Checklist for Success in 2018

By Peter Brittain on January 21, 2018 in SEO

SEO is a crucial part of the online marketing realm for businesses across all industries looking to make it big. The world has gone digital and relevance to the masses can only be achieved through maintaining good visibility online. If you are someone who is new to the concept of SEO, and are not exactly sure where to begin from, you should consider yourself lucky. We have put together this article in order to help you see how you can make better SEO efforts for your business. Here is the checklist for SEO success in 2018 that you need to follow for SEO success. Audit your website in order to find out how much of it your business follows.

Objectives

Before you start the SEO without any sense of direction, you need to be clear on the objectives you have. What is it that you want to achieve with the relevance that you can gain from it? Who is your target audience? What are you offering that people will need? Everything needs to be written down and not stay in your head so that you have a clear objective when it comes to your online marketing efforts with SEO.

Analyze What You Have Right Now

Take a thorough look at your website. How does it fare with the competition in the same industry? How well does it function? You see, there isn’t a need to update everything on your website. It might just be that there are some things you’re already doing right but there are some things which need improvement.

You need to make sure that your website can load fast. Check to see how long it takes to load with a decent internet connection. If it takes longer than a couple of seconds, you might need to work on that. The other thing you need to do is make sure that your website’s design is responsive i.e. the layout should be the same across all major devices. If it isn’t looking good on mobile devices, you need to optimize it. Both of these are excellent SEO practices.

Navigation

Now you need to look at how easy it is to navigate through the website. Is it easy to find all the important pages? Are the pages too long or too short? Are there any crashes on the web pages? Are there too many ads? Is the web page too crowded to make any sense?

Our suggestion for better SEO practice is to keep the website with a cleaner aesthetic. It should be easy to navigate through and everything has to be clear and concise. If you do have ads on your website, make sure they are not annoying and scattered everywhere. Make space for them in the layout in a way that they don’t interrupt the user experience.

SEO Checklist Website Navigation

Two Crucial Metrics That Impact On Your Google Ranking

By Peter Brittain on October 5, 2017 in SEO, SEO Metrics

One of the biggest mistakes many website owners make is failing to measure the impact that their SEO activities have made. This is akin to following a diet and exercise program, and then not bothering to check your weight.

There are two specific SEO metrics which Google looks at very closely to see if the visitors they send to a website via their search results are having a good experience. These are ‘Page Views‘, and ‘Session Time’

If you have a business with an online presence, it is not enough to have people visit your website; you want them to engage with the website and the content therein. The more that they read articles, watch videos and click through multiple sections of your website the better.

The level of engagement that a visitor has with your site, is measured by a metric called ‘page views’. A high number of page views tells you that visitors are taking an active interest in your website, whereas a low number suggests they are disinterested in looking through it.

This data is measured by Google, and if they see that visitors are clicking through to lots of pages on a website they will increase the ranking of that site. The reason for this is that they want their search engine results to show sites that encourage activity. One way this is achieved is with great content that users find interesting.

Compare this scenario to a site which has little or poor content and as a result, visitors very rarely click through to other pages. The page views metric will be low, therefore, Google reduces the ranking of that site.

Google Ranking Page Views Session Time