With more than a billion active websites on the internet today, this just means you are going to have a billion more websites you need to compete against. SEO stands for search engine optimization, which is the practice of not only improving your site to make sure it’s SEO friendly, but also to gain the necessary backlinks and social shares to help it rank in the search results.

For a website to rank at the top of Google for any specific term or keyword, it not only needs to provide a lot of value to an audience it also needs to have quality backlinks and references as well. This is just one of the many reasons why it’s very tough to rank in the search results for any generic keyword or terms. Nearly all of the websites that are already ranked for such terms will have thousands of backlinks to their website, while also being established in age and have several prominent articles and site partners on the internet. All of this is important, as it makes the ranking decision process much easier for Google to determine, by trusting the quality of such a site, the value they serve to an audience and how other authority sites link back to them.

With all of this in mind, there are still plenty of ways you can get your site to rank higher, even if it’s new. Today we are going to be looking at five of the most effective ways to rank a website higher in the search results.

1 – Write Longer and Better Content

No matter what type of website or online business you are have, if you want to rank in the search results you need to have high quality content that not only provides value but is also better than what is currently available from your competition. At the same time, it’s also important to understand that it’s much more valuable to have a very long article with thousands of words of content, versus coming out with a bunch of smaller articles with just a few hundreds of words of content. The best way to look at this is to think about how much more extra work you would have to do to promote each of these individual articles, versus just promoting one big article.

Before even writing any content for your website be sure to look at your competition and see who is currently ranking for keywords and searched terms you would also like to for. Look at the content they are creating and then think about how you can create it even better. Also explore new options for including visual content, images and online video.

2 – Use WordPress or WordPress SEO Plugins

In addition to the content that you create for your site, it’s also important to understand the best On-Site SEO methods. By using a free WordPress tool like Yoast SEO, you can create custom titles and descriptions for each article you go live with on your site. At the same time, WordPress can make it easy for you to create permalinks that are search engine friendly and utilize the same keywords within your article in the URL of your site.

If you don’t have any experience with building a website of your own, and still aren’t sure on how to best create content that can rank in Google, we highly recommend you use the WordPress platform. Not only does it offer amazing SEO tools like Yoast SEO, it also has thousands of custom and premium WordPress themes and plugins that can help you with this process as well. The benefit here is that you basically don’t need to have any technical or design skills to create a successful site that can rank in the search results.

3 – Create a Unique Infographic to Be Shared By Others

In order to get more social shares in back link to your site, you need to be continually thinking about new ways to create original content that others find value in. With more audience is now focused on visual content and using social media, infographics are one of the best ways to accomplish this.

If you are already creating content for your website or blog, you can easily turn this into an infographic by using online software like Canva or hiring an outside design agency. Once you have an infographic created, you can then go live with it on your site and start promoting it through social media. At the same time, you can also add an embed form on your site which will allow other sites to use your infographic and sure to their audience. This works extremely well, as you are providing it easily to other site honors, and you will also in the process.

You can also post your visual content and infographics to high traffic websites like slideshare.net or even submit them to infographic directories. While the design and creation process of an infographic is important, the infographic marketing process is even more crucial.

4 – Guest Blogging and Contributing Content to Other Sites

When it comes to SEO in ranking in the search results, it’s all about getting quality backlinks from well-known and authority sites. There are basically only a few ways to accomplish this — which are to create original content that others find value in and simply link back to it as a resource (which isn’t often), paying for advertising or text content placement (which Google doesn’t approve of), or through the use of guest blogging and providing original contents other websites for free in exchange for a credit and often times a link back to your site.

The concept of guest blogging works extremely well and it’s simply one of the best ways to not only create backlinks to your site, it’s also perfect for showing off your expertise and putting you in front of a new audience. Since many websites and blogs are always looking for more content to also help them rank within the surf results, they will often have guest blogging opportunities on their website or blog.

To find some other time guest blogging opportunities today, all you need to do is visit Google and search for whatever type of industry or market you are in and then also include the words”write for us”. This will provide you with thousands of websites that are looking for guest writers.

Whenever writing for another website, always be sure to provide the most value possible and to always use your real name, profile picture, and link back to your website. Don’t forget, this isn’t just a method for building backlinks it’s also great for growing your brand and expertise in the process.

5 – Expert Roundups are Great for Brand Building and Backlinks

Have you ever taken a look at other authority figures, businesses, and brands within your niche and wanted to get them featured on your own site? If so, this is quite possible through the use of an expert roundup. In addition to getting amazing original content created for your site, expert roundups are also great for social shares and increasing links back to your site.

The way an expert roundup works is simple. The first thing you need to do is come up with a question to ask experts within your niche. Also make sure that this question is something that your audience is interested in, while also providing them with a solution in the process. After you come up with this question it’s then time to reach out to a bunch of industry experts that you would like to feature on your site. This is often done through email outreach for completing a form on their website. You can see a live example of an expert roundup in this whiteboard video resource roundup.

Once you’ve received enough responses from different experts within your industry or niche, you should then compile all of their information into one large expert roundup. After the article goes live on your site, you should focus on heavily promoting it, while also letting each of the experts know that they’ve been featured on your site. More often than not, they will not only share the content on social media, but they might also link back to it from their website as well.

How to Rank Your Website Above the Competition

After reading through each of the actionable methods above, you should now have a much better idea on how to improve your chances to rank higher in the search results. It’s not just about using the right content and creating value for your audience, it’s also about promoting it and making sure you are building a trustworthy brand in the process.

The game of SEO is one that takes a lot of time and patience. However, even small players and new websites can compete against some of the largest brands and websites in the world when they focus on creating original content and going after long tail keywords. Even with there being over a billion active websites on the internet today, and Google listing only ten organic links on each search ranking, it’s still a level playing field for those who are willing to put in the time and effort.

If you would like to learn more about the process of SEO and how to create a website that has the potential to rank higher in the search results, be sure to contact Web Design Team. Not only have we helped thousands of individuals, organizations, and brands create original content and help grow their business, we’ve also used the same methods to grow our business to what it is today as well.

The post 5 Ways to Drastically Improve Your Website’s Search Rankings appeared first on Web Design Blog - Web Design Team.

When it comes to blogging, it pays to look at some samples of a great blog. We’ll start with our own. Not that we want to toot our own horn, but you can’t blame us for giving it a small toot once in awhile. We enjoy putting out blog articles that our readers are benefitting from and hopefully, that they will share with others. For example, in this article about 7 Entrepreneur Blogs and Why They’re Great, you’ll see other blogs by well-known business owners just like you who have tapped into the power of online blogging.

Important Things to Remember

But, with any platform, there are always some things to remember that you need to make your blog a success. You have to keep in mind that each platform will have some different requirements for content and how you can promote it.

There are usually not many restrictions within the platform but each platform works differently regarding the SEO (search engine optimization), so it pays to do your homework.

WordPress has several plugins on their platform that you can use to make things easier so that you will know that your content is being presented in the best way possible. You can find the plugins at https://wordpress.org/plugins/.

Also, you may benefit from these 7 SEO tips that you should do after starting your WordPress blog.

7 SEO Tips for WordPress Bloggers

1. Keep the bots away (for now).– One of the things that will happen automatically after you launch your WordPress blog is that the search engines will try to index your site. One simple line that you can put in your WordPress text is offered through WordPress by using the feature that says, “discourage search engines from indexing this site.” When you enable this feature (within WordPress), the search engines will refrain from crawling and indexing your site until you are ready to launch it officially.

This one action will keep your site from getting indexed before you are ready and returning a bad SEO report. You can also use the “rel=noindex” and “rel-nofollow” tags in your blog pages. This avoids 404 errors when users browse the page before you are ready to launch your site.

2. Block spam comments.– While it would be nice to be able to trust that people would leave mostly positive comments, this is not usually the case in the real world. People leave negative comments as well as spam when they want to either use your site as a place to vent their frustrations or to put out spammy comments and links. While this is against WordPress rules, it’s still a good idea to take the extra step and block spam through the option to block spam comments.

If you fail to block spam comments, you may be penalized for what others do on your blog. Some people decide to opt to disallow comments altogether because they simply don’t have the time to filter the comments manually.

3. Link to older posts through your new posts.– Another thing you can do to improve your SEO on your WordPress blog is to link to your older posts. As you write new posts, put a simple link back to one of your earlier posts to encourage people to read your other material. Also, it makes Google notice the inbound link to your main pages when creating new content and makes your site appear more relevant to the search engines.

4. Optimize the images within your blog. – Large images take a long time to load on your page, and this can slow down your traffic and bounce people off of your page. Improving the quality of your images will also improve the quality of your blog and drive more traffic.

Linking out from your images to another location on your site is also a good idea. Just make sure the outbound links are actually relevant to the topic of the photos.

5. Create creative, interesting titles.– Titles have a lot to do with your SERP (search engine results page) and the subsequent ranking. Pick a title that will catch the eye of your target audience and increase your ranking in the search engines.

If you have run out of ideas, try this blog title generator. It allows you to generate a great title based on the key words you want to rank for. Not only will this help you rank higher in the search engines, but it will help you create higher quality content for your readers that they will enjoy.

6. Utilize on-page SEO tactics.– In the old days, the only way to get your page to rank high on Google was to generate meta tags and descriptions within the HTML of your main pages or blog posts. Now, Google puts in these words automatically based on the keywords that you use. But it doesn’t hurt any to add your meta tags so go ahead and do this to increase your results.

7. Use social media sharing buttons on your posts.– Social media remains one of the most effective techniques you can use to boost your rankings. Include a social media sharing button on the bottom of your posts to get more shares. It will also improve your SEO ranking in Google and increase your relevance to the outgoing content.

Food for Thought

Well, there you have it: 7 SEO tips to use after you start your WordPress Blog. There’s one more you may want to consider that they recommend on TechAge.com: consider a different web host.

WordPress is a unique platform and there may be things you cannot do on WordPress alone. While it’s a robust platform, it may help to put your website and blog on a web server that is WordPress-friendly. Check out our services at webdesignteam.com.

We are WordPress-friendly while also offering you a comprehensive web design and hosting service that you can’t beat.

Check us out at webdesignteam.com and get ready to rank to the stars!

Remember, one small action leads to 80% of your results. Do it today!

The post 7 SEO Tips to Take Action On After Starting a WordPress Blog appeared first on Web Design Blog - Web Design Team.

If you are looking for strategies to increase your impact on the internet with your target audience, this post may help you to reach your goals. We will examine seven of the best SEO resources that Neil Patel recommends you look into to increase your impact with your niche.

7 SEO Guides that Neil Patel Recommends for Marketing Growth

Take a look at these seven guides from the guru of online marketing, Neil Patel and see which ones you might use for your own branding.

1. The Beginner’s Guide to Online Marketing– This guide was created by Neil Patel for beginning marketers and online business owners who are new to the process of marketing. This guide shows you how to analyze your brand and tell your story, creating the framework to your marketing strategy, and how to use media to create your ad campaigns.

2. The Advanced Guide to SEO– In this guide, Patel offers actionable ideas that you can act on now to increase your impact through tried and true techniques. He brings in link building techniques as well as improving your speed and responsiveness within your website so you can master the SEO game.

3. The Advanced Guide to Content Marketing– In this helpful guide on content marketing, Neil Patel offers sound suggestions and ideas that you can use to promote your brand through articles and written content that will draw your target audience. He focuses on tips from professional writers that they have used to increase niche traffic, as well as how to properly use keywords naturally in your content and know your audience to market to your target audience.

4. The Complete Guide to Building Your Blog Audience– In this powerful resource by Neil Patel, master of blogging, you’ll learn how to market your blog posts. It’s not enough just to write regular blog posts. It’s also important to market your blog posts and to find people who are willing to give you permission to market to them. You can do this through a variety of methods including creating a subscriber link, emailing blog readers and asking them to give you permission, and much more.

Patel also spends a lot of time on creating organic searches for your blog. Organic searches account for a great deal of blog traffic. Patel shows you how to tap into this fact to promote your blog posts for organic results.

5. The Definitive Guide to Marketing Automation– Patel talks about how to use marketing automation and smart AI technologies to complement your inbound marketing plan and other aspects of your advertising. He shows you how to use email marketing strategies to appeal to your best prospects, as well as effective methods of creating the true “customer journey” and increasing your conversion funnel to work the way you want it to.

6. The Complete Guide to Building Your Personal Brand– In this helpful guide on branding and building your personal brand, Patel shows you how to focus on your own brand and how to project the best image for your brand to your target audience. He gives you tips on how to build your target audience as well as how to market to the people who are most likely to respond to your ads and marketing.

He spends a special section of this guide on how to build up your digital assets and to present your media in a way that will attract more people from your target audience.

7. The Complete Guide to Consumer Psychology– If you want to improve your advertising campaigns and strategies, it’s important to know how people think. Even if you have never had a course in Psychology, this resource can give you a little bit of basic insight into the human mind and how you can use your best assets to attract your target audience.

He makes the point that rather than selling, you should focus on helping your customers learn. In other words, focus on high-quality content that lets consumers learn at their own pace so that they are lead to making their own conclusions.

Tips like these and others in this resource guide will help you to know your audience better and learn to analyze their behaviors so that you can custom-design your ad strategies to fit their needs.

About Neil Patel

Neil Patel is a powerful force in the marketing world. He is considered a guru among thousands of people who are trying to get their brand noticed online. You can learn a lot from his recommendations. If you want to see other guides he has published to help online companies learn to corner their market using tried and true techniques. To see other guides, go to the Quicksprout resource guide site.

The Importance of Excellent Design

When it comes to your website, everything is important. The design itself is not the reason people come to your page. But it is still an important part of your branding because it influences whether people will stay on your page long enough to get to know your brand.

When you start with a great web design, you’ll know that, once you do successfully market your site and your brand, customers will want to stay on your page long enough to learn more.

Reducing Your Bounce Rate

What we (and Neil) are really talking about is the fact that you need to reduce your bounce rate. What is bounce rate? Bounce rate is the rate at which people come to your site but quickly bounce off the page. Is this problem bad marketing or just bad luck? Actually, it is neither. Usually, high bounce rate is due to inadvertent landing on your page by people who thought your site was what they wanted but then they discovered it wasn’t what they were looking for.

Some of these issues are due to ineffective SEO marketing strategies and others are due to your design structure.

Make sure that your website provides inbound customers with a positive experience and customer journey, while having a site that is user-friendly and attractive, as well as practical for their needs.

Start with a great plan

If you need to revamp your website, build a new site, or just spruce up your design a bit, contact us at webdesignteam.com. We are expert web designers with engineering, creative, and artistic expertise. Let us share our skills with you and imagine what you can do.

Visit us today at webdesignteam.com and learn the difference between a good website and a superior website. Step into excellence with an excellent web design team.

Because all of that marketing should lead your customers to greatness so that they will know that you brand is just what they need and that their search is over.

The post 7 of the Best SEO Guides and Resources from NeilPatel.com appeared first on Web Design Blog - Web Design Team.

Planning Your Content

Planning where you will put your keyword-rich and SEO content is an important part of creating an effective traffic campaign that will increase your traffic and promote your content to your coveted audience. You know that you should plan your content and think about what you are going to include. Whether it’s a video, podcast, photos, or text, some careful planning, and marketing goals are essential in getting your content in the right places and in front of your critical audience.

But which is best? Off-site or on-site? We’ll look at the positive aspects of both in this post and offer some suggestions on how to maximize your impact using SEO.

SEO is not Dead

It’s important to remember first that SEO is not dead. Google has penalized some site owners for overdoing the keywords, but those sites are the ones who engaged in keyword stuffing or whose content was not relevant to their subject matter on their website. Additionally, most penalized sites had too many ads, or they did not offer any real value within their content that readers and searchers would find valuable.

By the way, if you are one of the sites that have been penalized by Google in the past, there is a way to recover from this. Kissmetrics has an article on this here.

Creating Value with your SEO

Remember this rule: SEO is for search engines; high-quality content is for people. To please people, the search engines, and Google, you have to keep both of these groups in mind. Writing for search engines only is a mistake because you may overdo the use of keywords just to get clicks and visits. This will lower your results in the search engines and get you dropped in the rankings.

But if you combine SEO with valuable content (information that helps customers), you will be rewarded by both Google and your visitors and customers.

Creating Surveys to Increase Insight

One way to create value for your target audience is to start with your current customer base. Conducting surveys or polls with your current customers is a good way to find out what people want so that you can provide this for them in your content. When you create your surveys, be sure to think carefully about the questions you ask so that it will produce results that will tell you what customers want.

By having this increased insight into the desires of your target audience, you will be able to better plan your content and the placement of that content.

Advantages of On-site Content

If you intend to focus on on-site content, remember that this will increase your rankings in Google just by having it on your main site. This is because Google crawls every page in your website, not just the main page. This gives you numerous doorways from which potential customers can originate and find your main site. Whether this happens and which page them end up on depends, in part, on how well you have created, marketed, and promoted your content.

On-Site content gives customers easy access. Once they are on your page and they see your “blog” tab on your website, they are much more likely to click on it to see your blogged content than if it were off-site on another page. Once a visitor finds your site, they tend to stay on your main page to see what else you offer. This is the value of on-site content.

Additionally, having strong on-site content associates the other content you have on your page with your blog or other on-site content. This also includes videos, podcasts, and other media that you have integrated within your site. All of this information gets crawled right on your site, thereby increasing your potential rankings in the search engines.

Advantages of Off-site Content

Just as there are benefits of on-site content, there are also some reasons to create off-site content. Google likes backlinks to your site. They believe it increases your relevance on the web and offers some level of social proof that your site is popular with other sites or customers.

The more your site receives incoming traffic from other sites, the higher your backlink rate will be and the higher you’ll be on Google. It’s not the only factor in determining your increased traffic rate, but it certainly helps. Think of off-site links like traffic signs that point to your website from various directions. Just like on a real highway, this is bound to increase traffic to the destination (your website).

Using Both On-site and Off-site SEO

While there are advantages to both on-site and off-site content, the best idea is to combine both types of content for the maximum impact. By placing your main blog on your web server for easy access but also having a separate blog or other content such as videos on YouTube and other locations, you are opening doors and entry points to your website from a variety of sources.

This will pay off in the long run because it will increase both on-site and off-site traffic and create additional routes to your websites.

There are other ways to increase your targeted traffic. If you are really serious about improving your rankings in the searches and keeping people on your site, you should have both on-site and off-site content. It’s hard to have a definitive answer on which is best since they are both of equal importance to growing your web traffic.

Start with a great site

The key to making SEO work for you is to start with a great website. If you find that your site is lacking in some way, you may want to hire a professional web design team to do the job.

The main advantage to hiring a professional web design team is that you will get the highest quality in every aspect of your site, providing the company can deliver. Check out our portfolio and see what you think of our work. We have been in the web design business for over a decade, creating dynamic and stunning websites for our customers.

We can provide the following services within our web designs:

• Graphics design
• Web design and development
• 2D and 3D animation
• Infographic design

All of these features, along with the ability to use coding languages that are compatible with multiple platforms and sites makes us the first choice for our customers.

So if you think your on-site and off-site content could use some work or if your website is lagging, contact us for a free quote. At webdesignteam.com, web design and on-site and off-site content are our business!

Visit us today at webdesignteam.com.

The post On-site vs. Off-site SEO: Which is the Most Important? appeared first on Web Design Blog - Web Design Team.

SEO (search engine optimization) is necessary to keep your site high in the search engines when people are searching for your content. We use keywords and other SEO techniques to optimize your page so that it will be ranked higher for certain keywords. Without SEO, Google and the other search engines would rarely find your page when visitors search using certain terms.

That being said, SEO must be used skillfully and in the right places. It should not be the only thing that is used to optimize your page. Your graphics, navigation, and each page are all also indexed by Google. So this gives you many different chances to improve your ranking and placement in the search engines when you are trying to increase the presence of your website.

How has web design changed?

Web design techniques have changed, but the need for SEO in the right places has not changed much. There are many more techniques and engineering tactics that can be used today to increase the likelihood of more traffic or engagement with your page. But this does not remove the need for skillfully-done SEO to cover the searches.

The key to using SEO to your advantage is to utilize all of the new tools that are available but also to be mindful of the continued need for search engine optimization on your pages.

Google Indexes Every Page

One key point to keep in mind is the fact that Google indexes every page individually within the searches. They send out their “bots” to index and rank pages according to some key factors about once per week. Below are some of the ways that Google indexes and ranks pages.

• • Keyword usage– Google ranks pages according to the way that keywords are used and how relevant they are to the searches. They use complex mathematical algorithms to do this, so it is all done with computers. But the key is that they scour the web to find the best and most relevant matches to certain keywords that users may use to access the site. Google’s ultimate goal is to provide the searcher with the best search experience so your pages need to meet this goal as well.

• • Site structure– The structure of your site is also important when it comes to creating the most user-friendly SEO pages. It should be easily understood by both search engines and viewers, and it should provide a positive experience for the user.

• • Site speed– Does your page load quickly? The rate at which it takes your page to load is also important. Pages with slower loading times will get less attention by Google when they send their web spiders to rank your pages.

• • Time spent on site– Google also checks metrics on various pages and looks into how much time users are spending on your site. If they are spending enough time to absorb the material, then they conclude that your site is a good asset to the web and they will rank it higher.

• • Number of inbound links– Inbound links are a good sign to Google. They view sites will a large number of inbound links as increasing the degree of relevance for your subject matter and content. This is why it is a good idea to ask your business partners with similar businesses to link out to you. But remember that Google only wants quality, relevant links.

• • Quality of inbound links– Consider the quality of the inbound links, as mentioned above. Make sure they are relevant to your site’s content and are not just random links to increase traffic. Google penalizes sites who offer dead links or links with little or no relevance to the site content.

When it comes to ranking with Google, it’s not an easy process to figure out. But they do have many tools to help you along the way. Google Analytics provides deep insight into how your site is doing and you can even use their optimization tools to improve your SEO if it needs help.

Creating Healthy SEO

The best thing you can do to improve your ranking with Google is to keep your SEO healthy. Healthy SEO is not done solely for the purpose of increasing clicks. Rather, it is to provide keywords that match up to the searches users are using to find content. If the content they are searching for is relevant to your site, it should show up naturally in the search results.

Start with a great website

Remember that SEO is not just about keywords. It is about the design, structure, and components of your page, as well. When you put your SEO into a well-designed webpage, you are going to see better results than if you try to utilize SEO techniques in a poorly-built page.

Having the knowledge of how to create a well-designed page is the first thing you need to create a good website that Google will reward. Remember your mobile customers, as well and think about what you are providing to potential customers that will motivate them to come to your site. You also want to do things that will increase your viewer retention of your content, especially if you include videos and podcasts within your site (highly recommended). Including media on your page also increases your SEO results.

About Web Design Team

If you are not sure where to start building a great website or improving upon your current site, call on us. We are Webdesignteam.com, and we focus on great content that includes SEO as well as all of the elements that Google rewards.

We have the technology and the know-how to optimize your site for the search engines and create a solid infrastructure for your website that is sure to draw your target audience.

Check out our online portfolio and then contact us for a free estimate. We’ll get back to you and discuss your web design project with you. We offer a variety of services including video and animation, infographics, and graphics design. Everything we do is from “scratch, ” and we customize the look and functionality of every website to match our customer’s needs.

Remember, SEO is not the only part of the strategy of creating a good website. But it is a part we understand, and we can show you how to do it. Better yet, we’ll do it for you!
See webdesignteam.com today.

The post Where Does SEO Fit in with Today’s Web Design? appeared first on Web Design Blog - Web Design Team.

In this post, we will take a look at the various components of the latest updates so that you can focus of what Google feels is the most important to keep your site high in the rankings and comply to their policies.

We have listed the different characteristics that are involved, along with the percentage of importance according to Google with their updates release.

Links: 28%

One of the most important aspects of the new updates is the issue of links. Inbound links are what Google uses to determine the level of trust of a website. This has been the case since the early beginnings of Google in 1998. Naturalness and organic and relevant search results are what are the most important here. The link should come up for searchers based on their search terms and whether your URL actually is matching with what searchers are looking for in the results.

This means that you should never use paid or traded links that are added by your company to influence the results. You should also never try to defeat or influence the search results to your benefit.

Consistent output of thought leadership content: 24%

Thought leadership is a term that refers to the ability to provide consistent excellent content on your niche area. Part of the goal of this is to connect your articles and high-quality content with your brand. High-quality content is always going to be the most important aspect of your rankings, along with valid and relevant links. You should focus on providing some of the best content possible in your niche area. This helps you market yourself as an expert in your field with your content. Google considers this one of the most important things you can do regarding your content to help your rankings.

Keyword-rich meta titles: 10%

Meta titles are still important, despite the fact that keywords have basically taken a backseat to the other components of creating content for your site. Skillfully-chosen meta titles tell the search engines what kind of traffic to send people to. Think about what words people are using to search for your products and services and use these words in your meta title. Your meta title tags should be a total of 80 characters or less.

Mobile-friendliness / responsiveness: 8%

Mobile-friendliness is extremely important, even though it only ranks 8% in terms of the changes we are seeing in the January 2017 updates. The reason this is only 8% of the total changes is because it echoes the previous reminders of Google to make sure your site is friendly to mobile users.

You should continue to optimize your site for mobile users and make sure it meets the requirements for users who come to your site with mobile devices.

Highly specific landing pages : 7%

Consider your landing pages and make sure they fit the information that searchers are wanting to find. The Google search engine is highly specific so you should follow this idea when you create your landing pages. This way, people will see the results they are wanting to see that are more highly specific to their desired search rather than a general result.

Google rewards sites that follow the idea of specificity in landing pages so keep this in mind as you work on your site.

Site speed (including the use of AMP pages): 6%

Does your site load quickly for visitors? Google gives ranking preference to websites that load more quickly than others. You should check your site’s loading speed periodically to see how fast it loads so that you can optimize it. The general rule with Google is that it should load in 3.5 seconds or less when possible. Every half second loss after that may result in loss of ranking with Google.

Google also has recently come up with the AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) technique that codes mobile pages so they will load faster.

Clear labeling of information on page: 5%

Another topic that you should know about is the clear labeling of information within your site. This includes the topics and subheadings and all other elements of your page. Your graphics, topics and any descriptive information such as names, numbers, and addresses should be apparent and obvious on your site so that people can find the information they need.

Schema markups: 4%

Scheme markups are a new way to have your site stand out and help you gain a boost in search ranking. You must identify the type of content on your page that you want to add and include the type of content that you are including. Then you fill out the descriptions of each element on the page. There is a tool that Google offers called the Structured Data Markup Helper to generate markup code to add to your pages.

Social signals: 3%

Social media is a key component to the success of your websites. Social signals were an indicator of site strength in the past and Google used it as a way to track site relevance and success. However, the past seven years, Google has backed away from using social media as a ranking factor. They have used artificial intelligence and natural speech search to improve rankings in regards to social media. YouTube is the only social media platform that Google uses now to rank sites and it is only around 3% in significance.

So, when it comes to social media as a ranking factor, you shouldn’t worry about it too much. Just keep your social media up-to-date for your own branding purposes, but not for any real standing in the rankings with Google.

Age of site: 2%

The age of the site is important in ranking but not near as important as the other factors. The importances of site age has been gradually decreasing since 2000 and continues to dwindle in significance with these latest updates.

Keywords in URLs: 2%

Having your meta words appear in your site title is not as important as your meta title itself. So, when it comes to key words, use them in your meta tags and not your site title. This makes perfect sense when you think about the fact that many search terms may be different than your brand name of URL when it comes to search terms.

All other factors: 1%

Other factors that account for rankings account for only 1% of the ranking process. So follow the above ranking insights and don’t worry about the rest.

Keep up with the latest algorithm changes at this site.(Webmaster.com)

Check your website

Now that you know which qualities Google is using to rank sites in 2019, you’re ready to go. Or are you? Are you prepared to handle these latest updates? If not, maybe your website needs an overhaul.

Webdesignteam.com specializes in offering high-quality web design that takes into account of the recent ranking factors that Google released on January 10th, as well as the ongoing updates from Penguin and other ranking engines. We can create a dynamic, beautifully-designed website that will attract the right people to your site and help you to maximize your impact on the web with real people who are searching for your products and services.

Let us know how we can help!

The post Is your Website Ready for Google’s Latest 2019 Updates? appeared first on Web Design Blog - Web Design Team.

How SEO Tools Can Help

Some SEO tools can help you to keep your site up-to-par with Google requirements and improve your SEO so that your rankings will improve in Google. Some of these tools are free while others are premium tools that you can purchase or subscribe to.

Look through these tools and see if you think you could use these to improve your SEO for your website when working on improving what you do online.

Mondovo Site Audit Tools

Mondovo Site Auditor offers a wide range of tools and tracking features for site owners to use to improve the performance, speed, and optimization on their sites. One of the most common features on the site is the ability to run full site and seo audits. What makes Mondovo stand out from the crowd is how they charge only for the reports you run, and not waste customer’s money on monthly membership fees.

Zadro Web

Zadro Web is an online free tool that allows you to increase your Google page speed, as well as create a list of your top ten keywords that are seen by SEMRush. It will track social links on your website and show you how your site is doing with your SEO.

This tool is free, and you can download a PDF report of your SEO audit to keep so that you can compare it to other audits you may do in the future.

Mysiteauditor.com

Mysiteauditor.com is another online SEO audit tool that allows you to put your URL in the search box to test it for validity and SEO strength. This not only allows you to test the SEO on your site but you can also embed the tool on your website to increase your leads.

Mysiteauditor also allows you to audit specific web pages for a key phrase rather than just testing out one page. This gives you a lot of power in testing how your site is doing with SEO, and it can improve your ranking. Use the percentage tool to watch your quality of SEO go up. As the percentage increases, so will your rankings.

Screaming Frog

Screaming Frog is a great tool to help you crawl your websites and see how they are doing with various aspects of SEO at any time. It allows you to get “big data” on your entire site all at once so that you can analyze key elements of your site to see how you are doing. It is more of a “crawl tool” than an audit tool, but it allows you to get a realistic analysis of your site status in the searches.

This is a downloadable tool rather than an online site tool. You can download it for free and analyze and evaluate it. Then, if you decide you want to buy the full version license, it’s available for $185.

SEO Report Card

SEO Report Card by UpCity is a great analytical tool for analyzing your SEO status on your site. This handy tool will take your website URL and give you a “report card” of your performance on SEO and overall site health. A great point of this tool is that it happens very fast and returns the results quickly.

WooRank

WooRank is a great SEO audit tool that gives you a lot of data that helps you improve the SEO status of your website. It works by running an automatic test of the URL that you put in the test box then showing the results. This happens quickly, and you’ll be able to do this in 30 seconds or less with any URL. It even shows a preview of your website in the results, and you’ll see what needs to be improved and what is working. It also gives you a percentage score of your site URL, so you’ll know what you need to do to improve it.

Marketing Grader

Marketing Grader is a very simple online SEO site tool that allows you to know instantly how your site is doing. It gives you a grade right after your test is run and looks at your blogs, social media sites, and other off-site content as well as your main site. This gives you a complete picture of how your site and other content is doing in the searches and helps you decide what to do to fix the problems.

SE Ranking

SERanking.com allows you to rank up to 5 websites and up to 50 keywords. You will see undiscovered SEO-related errors with the marketing plan. You can monitor up to 1,000 backlinks to improve your results in the search engines. It also gives you the capabilities to build custom reports and create sub-accounts.

Use Tools to Start Improving your SEO

We hope you will try out one or more of these tools to help you with your SEO and improve your search results for your website. Let’s face it: without having some tools in your arsenal to improve what you do with your website, some potential customers may never find you. So use the tools to your advantage and analyze what is going on so that you can improve your results.

Start with a great website and great content. When you have high-quality content and a well-designed website, you are going to get better results with your SEO as well. It is not just about making sure your SEO is working well. But you should also make sure that you have a design that is working well with your target audience and providing value to your customers.

At webdesignteam.com, we understand the importance of creating a dynamic fully functioning website that appeals to your audience. It should be easy to use and attractive in appearance while utilizing the important aspects of design that people respond to.

Go to our site and check out our work and see what we can do for you. We will talk to you about your business and create a custom website that will work for you. Then you can use your SEO tools and tell us how we did! If we don’t pass their tests for SEO, we’ll fix it!

Visit us at webdesignteam.com for more information and a free quote. We look forward to helping you create your professional website that will help you find the customers who appreciate what you have to offer.

The post Best Site Optimization Tools for Running an SEO Audit on Your Site appeared first on Web Design Blog - Web Design Team.

How to Search for a Web Design Firm Online

If you are looking for a local web designer, there are some ways to find what you are looking for. You can start with a search for web designers by typing in the search terms, “web designers in” and then list your city or geographical area. This will call on the search engine to put your geographic area with the term, “web design” to yield the best results. Using tools like Sortfolio, you can find web designers in your area more quickly.

When searching, you may want to put a “plus sign” between the term web designers and your city name. This will ask the search bots to return results only focused on web design and your town name. Putting the plus sign creates a relationship between web design and your geographical location.

Search the local paper

There are other ways to locate a web designer in your area. You could search the local paper under “classifieds” for web design firms. Sometimes web designers are not a company. Instead, they are individual web design experts who work as a freelance web designer or SEO developer.

Should you hire a freelancer?

There are some good things about hiring a freelancer but should you weigh the advantages and disadvantages and then decide. Freelance web designers and SEO specialists tend to be highly skilled in those areas, but they may have limited resources when it comes to advanced web design techniques.

Some of these freelancers are coding experts so they might be able to code a page from scratch. Using raw code means that you can tell the web designer what you want and they may be able to create it for you using coding language.

The DIY Method

Some people decide to try to create their website on their own. There is a certain thrill involved in creating your website. You can announce to customers that you designed it yourself and have “bragging rights” when you post it to your social media or email campaigns. But there are also many disadvantages to doing it yourself. Unless you have a high level of skill in web design and HTML, you may find it frustrating to design your site in the way that you need it to be.

If you try to create the website yourself, you may resort to using online editors that allow you to drag and drop your content into templates. It is possible to create a nice-looking page using this method. However, it is always limited to the type of platform you are on and the modules that they allow on the site.

Put an ad in the local paper.

Just as you can find talented web designers by looking in your local paper, sometimes you can also put an ad out asking for web designers to get some results. Independent web designers often place ads in the paper in the hopes of obtaining local business from companies. Alternately, local web design firms also advertise in your local paper as well as on your local radio or TV station and other media.

Check local Craigslist listings.

Craigslist is a site that is often used by freelancers as well as business owners to get business. So you may have some luck searching your local Craigslist listings for a web designer or SEO agency there.

It is important to check out the business that you want to deal with, though. Craigslist has some scammers who get on this site and attempt to trick people into making a trade deal that is not legitimate. While this situation is not exclusive to Craigslist, it is a bit more common on their site so proceed with caution.

Get on social media and ask around.

Another way to locate a local web design or SEO agency is just to ask. You can ask your friends first and see if they could recommend a local web design firm. They may have someone they use already that they will recommend to you.

If this doesn’t work, try making a post similar to the following post:

“Looking for a seasoned web designer or web design team. Prefer someone in my local area of (list city). Please contact if interested.”

You could even pay for a Facebook ad if you want to jazz it up a bit and increase the attention for your post.

By boosting a post for a few days, you are going to be more likely to match up your need for a web designer with a possible web designer that can help you. Facebook uses customized smart advertising to match up keywords and search terms as well as likes and demographics, much in a similar way that Google Analytics does when you are analyzing your site.

This technique may serve to help you find someone to do web design or SEO for you if you want to try this method. You can also search on Facebook for web designers in your area and see what results you get.

If you want an alternative and are open to the idea of finding a professional design team outside your area, we may be able to help. We are located in the UK area, but we have clients from all over the world. We help all sorts of businesses from every type of industry both in the UK, the United States, and other locations to design and maintain their websites.

Why hire locally?

Is there any valid reason to hire local designers? Who says you have to find a local web design agency to handle your web design job? Sure, it’s a different way of thinking to hire an outside company if you live somewhere else. Many business managers and CEOs like the idea of being able to hop in their car to visit their web designer to make changes or to brainstorm ideas on their web design with their outsourced team.

But who is to say it has to be that way? Isn’t the most important thing the fact that you get a professional design team who not only understands the importance of creating the best site for you but also who has years of experience with all types of programming languages like HTML, HTML5, CSS, and Joomla?

Isn’t it more important that you choose a web design team who puts your interests first instead of their own? At webdesignteam.com, we do just that. We have clients all over the world that we help to design and maintain their site.

We can do the same for you. Contact us and check out our online portfolio to find out more about what we can do for you and your business.

Forget trying to find a local designer. After all, do you want to stay local all your life or do you want to make history?

Show off your site to the world. We can help with our unlimited resources and team talents at webdesignteam.com.

The post How to Find a Local Web Design or SEO Agency for Your Business appeared first on Web Design Blog - Web Design Team.

Even if you have confidence in your ability to create a website, you are often at a loss as to whether and what you should do to launch and market your site properly.

In this post, we will explore some of the ways that you can launch and effectively market it using tried-and-true and proven SEO techniques as well as a variety of other ideas to get you started.

Keep in mind however that how you use the information that we give you will determine your success, not the information itself. In other words, there is no cookie-cutter solution to website success, and it is a continual process from the time you begin your website to when you launch it. The work is also not done just because you have launched it.

Technology is Always Changing

Technology is changing so rapidly, and we’re all just running to catch up. What is standard today may not be standard tomorrow. Therefore the wise website owner and online entrepreneur or business owner must always be aware of the changes that are on the horizon and know what to do to adjust to them.

These changes affect everything from the security system you used to make sure your clients’ data is secured to your payment settings, the colors and fonts and graphics you will use for your website and a wide variety of other assets.

Best Practices in Launching Your Site

The following are some of what we believe to be best practices regarding starting and launching your website. Use them as you will but make sure to tweak them to fit the demands of your customers and the changing technologies.

1. Always practice white hat techniques. Don’t be tempted to fall into the trap of black or gray hat SEO techniques as these have been punished repeatedly by Google. What is considered gray hat today may be black hat tomorrow, so even those ideas that seem on the line between good and bad are probably not the best ideas to follow. Just stick to what you know to be positive qualities of a good website that Google rewards. These include relevancy, high-level quality content, and the proper use of natural keywords.

2. Don’t just talk about your products. Many businesses have learned the hard way that you can overdo selling yourself by talking about your goods and services. In most cases, it is best to talk about topics and let them see the products visually.

You should have a wide array of goods for them to look at with of course with accompanying short descriptions that describe each one and what it will do for them. But let the products sell themselves and restrict your content such as in your blog to addressing concerns of customers or valuable topics. The key is to create value for customers no matter which part of the sales funnel they are in.

3. Use long-tail keywords more than shorter keywords. If you use longer tail keywords, you will find that your search results will match up better with your key words that you use in your web content.

In a sense, this is almost like virtually matching up your customers’ needs with what you have to offer, which is perfect. Of course, in the real world, this is hit-and-miss, and this will not happen every time since you never know who is coming to your site and from where.

While you don’t know exactly what they are looking for if you will learn to think like the searcher you will come closer to matching up your products and services with what they want to find. Not only will this increase your revenue and customer base, but it will also increase your rankings and approval ratings of Google.

5. Study your competition. One of the ways to best utilize what you were doing with your website is to research your competitors and see what they are doing and are successful with. There are tools on the web that you can use to do this such as Kissmetrics.com, SEMrush.com, and many others that allow you to look into the strategies back links and other assets of your competitors’ websites. Just make sure that everything you do is of an ethical nature and that you are not illegally spying on someone. Always check out the tool to make sure it is a valid and ethical tool to use.

6. The trial-and-error method. Many of the things that you will do as a website owner will be strictly through trial and error. You can’t just simply put up a website and then stand back and do nothing else. Although you are creating a website possibly for the hope of passive income, thinking that you will not have to do much else once you have the site up is fooling yourself. You will still have to maintain it and make sure that everything is in proper working order.

Promote! Promote! Promote!

In addition to this, just like a book, any creative media project, or your blog, you will always have to maintain the platform on which it resides, answer emails from customers and social media comments and guard your online presence and social media reputation.

Reputation Management is a Part of Branding

These are all important aspects to your branding and your website ranking as well. If you get a lot of bad reviews even if people can find your site in the Google rankings and searches, they make quickly bounce off if they find bad reviews. So consider reputation management as one of the primary aspects of proper marketing of your website.

During a recent interview with Todd William, an online reputation management expert, he recommended using a blog to protect your reputation and also to build a protective wall around your personal name and brand. Todd went on to say;

“We hear a lot about quality when it comes to blog marketing. But no one seems willing to talk about quantity. Here is how I explain the power of blogging for a small business… If you have a 12 page web site and you commit to blogging twice a month, you will grow your Web site by over 200% in a single year. 200% more pages crawled by Google. 200% more internal links. 200% more ways for customers and clients to find you and your business online.”

At the core of all reputation management strategies and plans, is a solid SEO strategy. Understand how both of these methods work to effectively rank your site, while also protecting your brand and online properties in the process.

Get a website!

Finally, don’t get the cart before the horse. To have a successful website you first have to have a website. Whether you did this yourself with a what-you-see-is-what-you-get or HTML editor, used an online editor with some other platforms such as WordPress or others, or whatever the case, just make sure it looks professional and functions in the way it should.

Look over your website and be your worst critic. Does it match up to what you think your customers are looking for? That is what it is all about when it comes to having an online business and ranking well in Google.

Remember that SEO has taken a backseat to high-quality content video and other media that draw in the reader and increase your engagement. However, Google still does want to see the natural use of certain key words that help the search engines match up your searchers with what you have to offer.

If you need help with your website contact us at webdesignteam.com. We are experts in web design, and we understand all of the aspects of building a great site, and we can help you launch your idea to the world.

The post SEO Tips for Beginners: How to Rank a New Website in Google appeared first on Web Design Blog - Web Design Team.

For example, “gardening tools for tomato gardens” would be a long-tail keyword for tomato growers and would rule out results for anyone who grew spinach, flowers, or Johnson grass. They are relevant and specific to the desired search results.

How long should a long-tail keyword be?

Long-tail keywords can be of any left as long as it is not excessively long. It should include some of the most important words that people would use when searching for an item or concept using Google or another search engine. While there is no tried-and-true length for effective long-tail keywords, generally they should be between three to five words in length.

Do your research.

It is important to do your research when looking for long-tailed keywords that will do the trick for your website. Google’s Keyword Planner (which replaced the previous Keyword Tool), allows you to plan which words will work best for your campaigns.

If you go to the link above, you will see that you can look at a variety of aspects regarding the keyword. Google does a lot to help you out regarding your keyword research. They offer you a way to look into ad group ideas, keyword ideas, and check the statistics of various keywords and their popularity within Google.

Neil Patel offers a variety of tips on his website that show you how to create searches for certain long-tailed keywords. Once you have chosen a keyword, you can also plug it in and let Google’s keyword planner find long-tailed variations for you.

Patel, an expert on keyword research and SEO marketing, recommends not being too hung up on Google’s algorithm changes. Instead, he recommends focusing on the main elements of good SEO and keyword use without being overly obsessed with the keywords themselves.

Remember: Quality First!

Where you do need to remember Google’s latest algorithm changes is when it comes to quality. On January 10, 2017, Google again reminded web owners that high quality is job one and that it supersedes any other factor when it comes to creating quality content.

When you produce high-quality content and a stellar website, you are going to outdo many of your competitors who are too busy trying to crank out more content faster than anyone else does. Quality is king and content will continue to be judged based on the amount of value that you bring to your intended audience.

Using Long-Tailed Keywords to Create Value

You can create value for your customers in some different ways. One way is to build a high level of quality and connections between your long-tailed keywords and the searches your customers are doing. You can increase your ability to do this by surveying customers to ask them what it is they are looking for when they come to your site or simply by analyzing your conversion rates and seeing what motivates them the most.

Much of web success is determined by sustainability. The more you learn to be consistent on what you do, the more you will be able to continue to increase your results and maintain some level of success.

How to Increase Your Rankings

Ranking in Google is not easy but below are some tips as to how you can do this using long-tailed keywords.

• Do keyword research.– As we mentioned before, it’s important to do your keyword research first to see which words are ranking well. Write down some words that you think will be the best to use for your website and then study the statistics.
• Find low competition words.– Remember that the ideal combination is finding low competition keywords that have lots of searches. In general, this defies logic. People are going to go with keywords that have many searches and, as a result, the competition will be high. Still, there are some variations of your long-tailed keywords that you may discover don’t have the same level of activity as the others. These are the ones you want to use, especially if you are a new business owner with a limited budget. Remember that, the higher the competition, the more you will pay per click when it comes to pay-per-click advertising and Google Adwords.
• Look for highly searched words with lower competition.– Do your best to find some popular words that have lower competition when possible.
• Make awesome headlines.– Your headline matters. It’s just like a book title when it comes to Google’s search engine spiders. So make it good and make sure that it includes at least a few of the long-tailed keywords that you chose for your search terms.

Be relevant.

Another important tip when it comes to creating a successful long-tailed keyword campaign is to stay relevant to what the searcher is looking for. Of course, you cannot know exactly what they are looking for or who will come to your site.

But you should always put yourself in the place of the searcher, just as you try to get in the mind of your customer. Empathy for your client creates a stronger sense of ability to “read their customers’ minds” and every smart entrepreneur and site owner practices this idea as much as possible.

It is no different in ranking. When you think like the customer and learn their preferences, you come closer to matching up your products and services with the needs of your client, and that’s what makes good business.

The Science of Ranking

The key to successful ranking with long-tailed keywords (or with shorter words, also) is to think like the searcher. It also helps to be aware of the sales process which usually includes four phases:

• Awareness phase
• Research phase
• Decision phase
• Purchase phase

Some people refer to this as creating your sales funnel. It is just four different phases that people must go through before making a decision. The Awareness Phase gets the attention of the searcher. The Research phase is when the searcher is researching the topic for further information. In the Decision phase, they decide whether to purchase or not before entering the Purchase phase (the actual purchasing).

As a web owner, you should consider which part of the phase your searcher is in. The keywords that you use may vary depending on this factor.

It is wise to study this process at length and better still to hire a professional web design company to help you choose effective long-tail keywords to get your site the attention it needs to flourish.

At webdesignteam.com, we know all about web design, and we understand that there is more to web design than only the artistry of the site itself. We can help you choose a strategy for maintaining and marketing your site and give you advice on how to design your site so that it will utilize Google’s standards to the fullest.

This will result in higher ranking results.

Start with a great site at webdesignteam.com.

Because you have to have a website before you can rank.

The post How to Create Long-Tail Keywords That Rank in Google appeared first on Web Design Blog - Web Design Team.