Tag Archives: SEO

Is Web Page Load Speed Really Important?

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Yes! Tips and Advice to Make Your Website Screamingly Fast.

Photo by CircaSassy / Flickr

The amount of time it takes for your website to appear is very important for quite a few different reasons. We’re going to explore those below, but before we begin, it’s important for you to know the current page load speed for your homepage at least. To do this, you can use Google’s Pagespeed analysis online. Use the free tool to see how well you stack up against your three major competitors. Not liking the results? Keep reading.

Why Web Page Load Speed is Crucial

First of all, you have to think about your human visitors. Whether they’re using a mobile device or desktop computer, they expect your website to load quickly. If it doesn’t, they’ll click away and find another one. Additionally, Google and the other search engines are using page load speed as one of many factors to determine whether or not to rank a web page and where to rank it in their index.

Tips to Improve Page Load Speed

Here are some easy things you can do to decrease the amount of time it takes for your pages to load.

  • Follow the Advice – If you followed the instructions at the beginning of this article, you should know how long it takes for your web pages to load on average. You should have noticed in the tool that Google gives you quite a few suggestions on how to improve your speeds. This is the very first place you should start to look for ways to get your website loading quickly.

  • Strip it Down – If something is not absolutely necessary on your website, get rid of it. Too many websites try to do everything for everybody. This is a mistake – even for mega sites like Facebook. Instead, pick one or a handful of things and do them all really, really well. Going deep rather than wide is a wise strategy in the Information Age. When you do this, you’ll find that you don’t really need all those bells and whistles that can slow down your website.

The speed of your website is very important to people and to Google’s robots. This is why you should make it a priority for all of your web properties. The good news is that once you do the work, you can reap the benefits for a long time to come. If you have any other specific tips for decreasing the amount of time it takes to load a web page, leave a comment and share your wisdom below. (And take a moment to let us know what you think about the time it takes for this website to load. Be honest, please!)

Author Bio:-

Sheila Kurdinger is a fan of Festool brand tools. She’s even bought them as gifts for her family and friends who aren’t so mechanically inclined. When not reclining in her chair in the living room, she likes to read about infographics online.

SEO For Startups

Analytics, Organic SEO, responsive web design, SEO, SEO tools, Small Business Marketing, Webmaster Tools, , , , ,

seo-for-startupsStartups have many things to worry about, so it’s not surprising that sometimes they neglect SEO. That’s detrimental to their websites because search engine optimization can bring them online exposure, as well as help them establish a more powerful online presence more quickly. If you run a startup yourself, hiring a SEO company may prove to be one of the best investments that you ever make for your business. But that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t do some optimization on your own for your website, before the experts arrive.

What to Focus On

First you have to make sure that when someone enters your company’s name in Google, Yahoo!, and Bing, the first result that the search retrieves is your website. This is done most of the time by the search engines automatically. Once that is done, you need to focus on optimizing your web pages for search engines, so that when someone searches for keywords that define one of your offerings, your website appears as high as possible in the search results. Ranking first is tough if there is strong competition in your niche, but you must struggle to make it to the first page of the results, because few people check the second page. The SEO for startups strategies below will help you get more exposure, but to really make it on the first page you need the help of an SEO expert.  A SEO company can help you out to make your local business grow in all of the San Francisco area. There are some good companies that are offering SEO services for small fees. Make sure that you always check their portfolio before hiring one.

  • Invest in high-quality web design. A bad, cluttered design can ruin all your SEO efforts.
  • Use Google Analytics and Google Webmasters Tools to monitor your website and get more insight into how your visitors are using it.
  • Make a list of your offerings and come up with relevant keyword ideas. You can use Google Keyword Planner to check how the keywords perform. The best keywords are those that have a high volume but a relatively low cost per click.
  • Ensure that every page on your website has a friendly URL, a unique title, and adequate page tags.
  • Make all website pages accessible in less than 3 clicks from the home page.
  • Fix any broken links.
  • Put your sponsors, endorsers, and partners in a visible location – on the homepage if there’s enough space – and link to their websites.
  • Add keyword-optimized content to your website, including images and videos.
  • Set up a blog on your domain and publish on it worthwhile content weekly, including in your posts links and references to your events and offerings.
  • Optimize your website for mobile devices, making sure that it displays well on all the popular smartphones and tablets used today.

These are only a few things that startups can to do improve their SEO. Save yourself the trouble to apply all these tips yourself by hiring a reliable SEO company. You have nothing to lose.

Citations:

As a marketing expert who has experience with online advertising, our guest blogger Josh loves to share his expert advice. He regularly researches the evolving SEO trends, and provides consultation to a bay area SEO company. You can check his contribution on Google+.

SEOPressor Plugin Review

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SEO plugin for WordPressOptimisation of onsite content for better SEO is something that’s always been and most likely always will be important. In essence, all SEO tools are there to help you rank better and SEOPressor is no different to the rest in that regard. So, let’s take a more in-depth look into the WordPress plug-in.

On-Page Management

Like most other tools of this nature SEOPressor looks at the usual variables, including length, keyword placement, keyword density, font decorations, images, links, and overall SEO score. However, in addition to this it also adds fonts and inserts alt text to images automatically. It also suggests modifications and warns of over optimisation also – a very useful feature, albeit a quite common one

Another useful addition is the fact that it supplies you with a full list of LSI keywords, taken directly by the plug-in from the search engine. This allows you to make your text that little bit broader in SEO terms and is something of benefit.

Linking with SEOPressor

Another thing that was impressive about SEOPressor was the fact that it allowed you to specify the specific keyword you want to link to and then do so to an individual URL. The plug-in then automatically does so for similar operations in the future. It also allows you to use snippets from SERPs and fully customise these snippets and what they show. This is ideal for those advertising on their blogs.

Social Media

SEOPressor also utilises social media and provides support for Facebook OpenGraph and Twitter Card too. This allows you to increase a sites visibility and integrate search to bring more views and more traffic to your site – always a nice benefit.

Slow

One of the things that we didn’t notice, but was mentioned regularly was that SEOPressor causes sites to slow down slightly after installation. This perhaps is down to the font decoration of keywords. In addition, we’d also say that due to the fact that the plugin tends to decorate keyword fonts, it could potentially lead to the chance of over optimisation.

Costs

Of course, because of the market and the number of competitors offering similar products price is central here. The licence for one site is $47, while a unlimited licence is $97. So, we’d say that when looking at the competition, it’s expensive for one and good value for an unlimited site licence that’s both unlimited as regards time and also the number of sites you can place it on.

The main competitors are ClickBumpSEO, Easy WP SEO and PushButton SEO all of which vary in their quality and pricing, though provide most of the options of SEOPressor.

SEOPressor comes out well against all three of these, though due to the price of Easy WP SEO it’s possibly not the best option for everyone out there (Easy WP SEO is lower in price and offers analysis of the whole HTML document, not just the content). However, it’s a very useful addition to any WordPress site and makes onsite optimisation a lot easier.

Our guest blogger, Cormac Reynolds, writes for UK digital marketing site www.mysocialagency.com and has worked in the area of social media and SEO for a number of years now.

Internal Linking: 3 Best Practices For 2013

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Internal linking

When it comes to SEO, we’re often focused completely on the practice of building our catalog of external links for our clients’ websites. But just as important is the practice of building your repertoire of internal links. If you consider any link as a recommendation of your site in the same way you consider external links recommendations to Google that, “Hey, this site has good content,” then why wouldn’t you recommend your own content and web pages to Google? This is why Internal Linking is such an important tool of SEO specialists, especially if you have a well-ranked high authority site already. You can use your well-trafficked and highly ranked pages to direct spiders and users to more content such as a limited-time campaign “recommended” by the high authority page. Likewise, internal linking provides important navigational features to your site that help users orient themselves and find what they want on your site without having to use search boxes or find orphan pages.
In the year 2013, these are mistakes nobody should be making, but there are also some important things you can do that your competitors might not be that can help you get an edge on the competition.

1. Link to Your Most Profitable/Converting Pages

It goes without saying that at the end of the day companies hire SEO specialists and Internet marketers to help them make money. So, as someone in one of those positions, you want to drive users to the most profitable and highest converting pages on a client’s site. Therefore, the more inbound links to that page, the more you’ll show up in the search engines and (hopefully) get more traffic. Of course, don’t just post href HTML codes everywhere, but don’t neglect the fact that many very profitable businesses put “most popular items” or “recently searched” in their top navigation. You already know these are highly converting pages, so why wouldn’t you try and increase exposure of these pages?

2. Link to Relevant, Related Pages

Nobody wants to have excessive links on a web page. It looks messy, cluttered and overly aggressive on behalf of the business. That being said, most web sites actually underutilize internal links rather than abuse them. If you’ve ever been a regular browser of Wikipedia, you’ll know that providing links to related, relevant and quality content can drive traffic to other pages you wouldn’t have originally considered. That’s why in your SEO strategy you should be utilizing SEO to link to related content on a regular basis. For example, if your client’s site runs a blog and the client has a web page or another blog on a related or relevant subject, you might want to consider linking to these pages. Say your site had a page on landscaping, and you wrote a blog about landscaping. This would be a great time to internally link to that central web page or an earlier blog about a similar landscaping service. Though it may seem obvious, you’d be surprised how many webmasters, content developers and SEO specialists neglect to do this. Google also gives a boost to pages linked with relevant anchor text to the page’s content–which as you’ve just seen is something you can easily do.

3. Provide Breadcrumb Navigation

I can’t think of a web browser that doesn’t have a back button, but that doesn’t mean you should let your users rely on it. Breadcrumb navigation (i.e. linking back to a more broad page from one with a narrower scope or focus) is often forsaken in favor of users’ browser back buttons. Nevertheless, breadcrumbs are a great way of ensuring your pages aren’t dead-ends, enhancing the navigational experience for users as well as sneaking in a couple extra internal links. Retail outlets and e-commerce sites such as Wal-Mart and Amazon are common users of this strategy for their sites, and clearly they’re doing pretty well in the search engine rankings. Why shouldn’t you? As an added plus, it again also allows you to easily and thoughtlessly add relevance to web pages with anchor text that is almost undeniably related to the web page in question.

Our guest blogger is Ricardo Casas is the CEO and founder of Fahrenheit Marketing LLC, an Austin, Texas based internet marketing company. With over a decade of experience in the field, Ricardo has seen the field change dramatically and knows how to adapt quickly to the pressures of the rapidly changing world of SEO.