3 New SEO Audit Checks for 2017 And Beyond

07/27/201709/07/2017 mwon

Regular SEO audits are essential for every website. This relates to all of the elements that are integral to your domain’s visibility, and a thorough audit may well improve your performance.

An SEO audit will let you examine why you may be struggling to achieve the SEO results you hope for. You can identify the weakest aspects of your campaign, giving you the information you need to formulate a new direction. You should aim to perform a full SEO audit in each quarter, or whenever you feel your progress has stalled.

If the time has come to run an SEO audit on your website, here are three new checks for 2017 – and beyond!

Run an Audit on your Internal Links

Your internal links help to establish your site’s architecture: you want to have relevant pages connected to each other, to help increase your ranking and ensure users can navigate your site in a logical way.

Wikipedia is testament to the power of good internal links, and helps explain how that site manages to retain such authority: practically each page on Wikipedia is packed with relevant, organic links to other pages right across the site.

If you haven’t performed an audit on your internal links, make sure you do this from now on.

Your keywords should be scattered across your site’s content organically, rather than clustered together. Your anchor text should use high-quality keywords, and pages linked together have to be related (directing a user to an irrelevant page may chase them away).

Your most important pages should always be within three clicks of your homepage, while any broken links have to be fixed (or replaced) immediately.

Check Indexing

When search engines index your website, they collate information on its relevancy and quality. Effective internal links are vital to help search engine crawlers navigate your site properly, to avoid missing any important pages.

Part of running an SEO audit on your site is deciding which of your pages are meant to be indexed and which should be left alone. Any pages lacking valuable content, such as your terms and conditions, should be excluded from the indexing project. Duplicate content needs to be left out of the indexing process, too.

You can tell crawlers to exclude a specific page by creating a ‘no index’ meta tag to said page’s HTML code.

Make Sure Your Site’s Mobile-Friendly

Every website has to be mobile-friendly today, given that Google has started indexing mobile domains rather than desktop ones. As a result, you need to make sure your website is optimized for mobiles as a priority.

You can use Google’s Mobile Friendly Test application to evaluate your site’s compatibility, and identify any major weaknesses. You should also track your mobile rankings, and consider switching to AMP(Accelerated Mobile Pages).

These are pared-down, lightweight pages designed to load within 8 seconds. These run without certain elements found in standard HTML, such as submission forms and JavaScript.

Want to know more about how an SEO audit can boost your online visibility? Get in touch with Nett Solutions – we’re an Orange County SEO agency ready and willing to help!

Reasons Why a Remarketing Campaign Might Not Be Driving Results

07/17/201708/01/2017 mwon

What is remarketing?

Let’s keep this simple. Remarketing is basically a way to continually target your customers after they leave your site, thanks to the power of data-gathering cookies.

When visitors leave your website or app without completing a transaction, your AdWord ads will feature on domains within the Google Display Network to re-engage said users. This minimizes the danger of losing their interest altogether.

While a remarketing campaign can play a powerful part in your online advertising, you may find it fails to drive traffic back to your website as soon as you would like.

Sounds familiar? Don’t panic!

A number of factors might be to blame. Let’s look at the usual suspects. (more…)

Why We Do Link Building The Hard Way

05/03/201705/03/2017 Brandon Celotto

Link building is an essential aspect of search marketing, but it can be a daunting area for businesses unfamiliar with the process.

Once upon a time, companies looking for short-term gains would pay for links as and when they could. However, Google’s regulations and penalties are tougher today, and so the risks of lazily buying links outweigh the potential benefits.

While simply paying a website to host a link to yours seems like a time-saver, any company looking to make a lasting, fair impact in the online marketplace must practice manual link-building instead of paying for placements. Here are the reasons why.

Donning Your White Hat

You may have heard of white-hat and black-hat strategies. The former are those SEO tactics that aim to bring real value to users, engaging your audience and boosting traffic through fair means. The latter, on the other hand, are focused more on gaining higher rankings through underhand methods.

Using black-hat tactics can see you penalized, which may affect your reputation. You will also need to invest time and effort to correct your mistakes, costing you resources that could be better spent elsewhere.

Building Ethical Links

You can create ethical links through the following techniques:

Publish regular posts with internal links (as often as you can, with high-value content)
Reciprocal linking (provided these are relevant and not excessive)
Writing guest posts for blogs and sites relevant to your industry (these must be high-value and not feature excessive links)
Create testimonials for manufacturers of products or service-providers you use

These are just a few ideas, but they can all play a big part in driving traffic to your website. If you can create valuable content, such as in your own blog or guest posts, you’ll build your brand’s visibility and credibility.

On the other hand, creating badly-written content which serves as thinly-veiled link generators for your site can have a negative impact on your brand in the long-term.

Take the time to build informative, entertaining content with natural links, and you will gradually create a stronger online presence.

One Link can be Stronger than the Other

Getting a link from a website with no authority and no relevance to your business or niche is not a terrific way to build visibility. All links are not alike.

The trick is to nurture relationships with websites that are relevant to your brand and are viewed as a trusted domain. Getting links from high-authority sites is an endorsement of your own site, whereas those from questionable domains can raise eyebrows.

Seek out websites covering topics related to your business or industry, prioritizing the biggest influencers, and reach out. If you can start placing guest posts at popular domains, you can drive real traffic your way over time.

Branching Out

Other options for manual link-building include:

infographics that people will want to share
lists
case studies
white papers
reports on your own studies

At Nett Solutions, our expert Orange County digital marketing team can help you build links that really matter. Give us a call to learn more!

What Are Website Analytics Tools Good For?

09/16/2016 mwon

Website analytics tools are essential for monitoring your online performance. Without this data-tracking software in your arsenal, you stand to miss out on critical information. Every business looking to compete today has to maximize its online visibility and customer-engagement using the best tools available, and analytics data allows you to identify your strengths and weaknesses.

What benefits does analytics software offer? (more…)

Rankings Are Not A Good Marketing Goal – Here’s Why

06/24/2016 mwon

orange county search engine placement Once upon a time, not so long ago, rankings were the be-all and end-all of internet marketing. Businesses hiring a team of SEO consultants would expect their brand to appear on the top page of Google permanently, and some were willing to pay for this result regardless of the techniques employed.

This focus on visibility over credibility or ethics led to websites carrying hidden content, keyword-stuffed text (which was all but unreadable for users), and paid links from poor-quality sites. Since then, thankfully, search engines have clamped down on such behavior, rewarding domains which rely on solid content and smart techniques while penalizing those with black-hat methods.

Today, rankings and rankings alone are not a good marketing goal; there are more important things in a successful campaign. Here’s why. (more…)

5 Ways To Speed Up Your Site

05/19/201605/31/2016 mwon

Your website has many plates to spin at the same time.

First, the visuals must be attractive enough to grab visitors and keep them engaged. Your layout must be clear and well-structured enough to navigate with ease. Your content must be well-written, easy to scan, and appropriate for your target demographic.

However, one area you might not give enough consideration is speed. (more…)

Does A Page Title Matter Anymore?

04/17/201605/31/2016 mwon

are page titles still important? As search engines evolve, businesses may well struggle to keep their websites optimized for the latest algorithm.

Failing to update a site is a huge mistake, and the subsequent drop in rankings can cause setbacks for a brand – and putting it right costs time and resources. Most of the changes implemented by Google are designed to improve user-experience and help sites of the highest quality perform better, but falling behind can be hugely annoying (to say the least). Knowing how to stay in-line with the latest trends, though, is hard. (more…)