Monthly Archives: February 2020

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Avoiding and Correcting Common SEO Mistakes

This entry was posted in Content and tagged , , , , , , , on by .

Having even a basic of SEO can allow you to better optimize your website, which in turn will make it rank higher in search engines. This ultimately will allow the scope of your business to reach a broader audience and is arguably one of the most important aspects to running a business in this day in age, both online and at a physical location. With SEO being such a crucial part of a successful business website, it’s also important to be aware of the multitude of mistakes that are commonly made while trying to improve SEO.

Some SEO mistakes are easily avoidable, while others take a significant amount of effort to avoid or resolve. Although making some of these mistakes may be detrimental to your business in the short term, if correct, your business or website can begin to be prosperous in search engine rankings. Below are some common SEO pitfalls and how to either avoid or correct them.

Duplicate Content or Unoriginal Content

Duplicating content or creating unoriginal content are two of the most common mistakes that website designers or content creators make in efforts to improve SEO. Always double or triple checking your website for duplicates before posting new content. Although there is no direct negative consequence to duplicating content, it affects SEO rankings because search engines will have trouble determining which pages are landing pages. Your duplicate content may begin to compete against itself through search engine rankings, which lowers the ranking of the content itself as a whole. Unoriginal content will give you less of a chance at ranking higher with search engines and gives content less value, which in turn will negatively impact your SEO.

 Keyword Mistakes (Keyword Stuffing and Using the Wrong Keywords)

Keyword stuffing is a common mistake in which keywords are “stuffed” into content with the intent to improve SEO, when in fact it actually lessens the effectiveness of the content in search engine rankings. Stuffing multiples of the same word or phrase into content not only gives that content less value but is also now recognizable by search engines. That’s right, search engines are now capable of determining if the content is keyword-stuffed, and may ultimately rank that content lower in search engines rankings.

Using the wrong keywords may also have detrimental effects on SEO. Keywords allow search engines to identify your content and rank it. If you don’t use the correct keywords in your content, search engines won’t be able to find it. Not using trending keywords or words that rank highest is also a very common mistake that can be avoided by checking keywords on Google Trends or another similar keyword analytics tool.

Irrelevant Content (Content That is Not About Keywords)

Creating irrelevant content or content that does not align with targeted keywords is a mistake that people tend to make while working to improve the SEO of their website. Creating irrelevant content is easily avoidable by checking which keywords (preferably the most optimized) should be used while creating original content on a topic that is specific to your business or organization.

Lack of Quality Links in Content

A lack of quality links within the content may have negative effects on both the value of that content and on search engine rankings in general. Quality links not only bring more value to your content, but will also help rank you higher, as both a website that is linking to other websites and as a website that is linked within other content.

Ignoring Analytics

One of the most common mistakes that businesses or organizations can make on their websites is ignoring analytics and making no efforts to adapt their website using this important metric information. While creating or redesigning content for a website, it’s important to view and know current analytic outcomes and trends specific to that site in order to improve upon its rankings.

Not Making Website Audits

Allowing for audits of your website, especially in this fast-paced, ever-changing digital landscape, is a necessity. Taking a step back and letting someone with a fresh perspective check to see how your website could improve is always beneficial and could have great positive impacts on search engine rankings in general. Website audits are important for all websites want to keep up to date on SEO.

Not Researching SEO Trends

Knowing current trends in SEO is a critical aspect of website development and content creation. Again, the internet is always changing, so knowing what trends within the SEO world are working and are best for the optimization of your website will keep you ahead of the game.

 Not Including Meta Descriptions in Title Pages

Including Meta Descriptions for pages not only makes your website more appealing but increases your SEO as well. Giving descriptions for each page is important, and is worth the effort to create or update them.

Not Including Alt Tags For Images

Alt tags for images are another very important aspect of SEO that are commonly not included in many websites. Alt tags are especially important on website images, especially in attempts to meet ADA compliance. This mistake can be avoided by either putting in the extra effort to create alt tags for your images or hire someone else to do it.

Each of these mistakes are easily avoidable or correctable, and by no means should anyone consider their SEO to be a failure if they find these mistakes applicable. Improvements can always be made to SEO, as it is a constant work in progress.

If you’re interested in improving your website’s search traffic, get in touch with us today. SeoTuners can offer an affordable solution for your business to increase exposure and SERP rankings with organic SEO strategies. We’re confident we have a solution for all your marketing needs.

 

Top 10 Advantages of Internet Marketing for Your Business

This entry was posted in Marketing, SEO on by .

Marketing is all about connecting to your audience. That’s why Internet marketing is crucial to your business. In an age where millions of people spend their time online, leveraging the Internet and its properties is a smart way to promote your business. Here are ten advantages that you can expect when you hire a digital marketing service.

Low Costs
Research your options until you find an affordable internet advertising company. You’ll come across plenty of options. Hire the one that will work hardest for you at the price that you can afford.

Huge ROI

Digital marketing campaigns generate substantial returns and they cost little when you compare them with traditional marketing media. If you’re looking to stay on budget and still generate significant returns, hire an internet marketing team.

Wider Reach

Digital marketing is a multi-channel platform. That means you can share your content across multiple platforms, allowing you to achieve wider consumer reach. If you’re launching a new product or service, or you want to improve your brand visibility, get digital marketing experts to help you, the Houston Chronicle says.

Higher Conversions

It’s easier to reach a targeted audience through digital marketing efforts. Whether it’s through PPC, SEO, or just putting your content at every stage of the buying process, you can increase buying interest, resulting in higher conversion rates, the Business2Community says.

Saves You Money

Unlike traditional marketing that often spends millions, you can generate a lot of leads with low-cost ads and campaigns. Digital marketing allows you to save considerable portions of your capital.

Real-Time Responses

Get feedback from customers right away. Pick a platform, ask the right question or share the right content, and you’ll get immediate responses from your target market. Based on their responses, you can modify your product or campaigns to suit their needs and interests better.

Mobile Audience

Mobile marketing now makes up for about 34 percent of all organic traffic. That means that a lot of your audience is on the go. Using digital marketing helps you reach out to them, anywhere and anytime.

Optimized for Mobile

Hire pros to optimize your pages. If your site isn’t mobile-friendly, that will drive potential customers away before they even have a chance to check out your products or services. Keep them on your site by ensuring a smooth user experience, whether they’re on a desktop, laptop, tablet, or mobile phone.

Keeps You Competitive

Using digital marketing keeps your business competitive. With a team of experts to create meaningful content, update your pages, and ensure that your site is always compliant with Google’s algorithm changes, you’ll have years to stay in business.

Personalized Shopping Experience

Digital marketing allows you to offer a personalized shopping experience to your customers. Ask them to build a profile on your site so you can track down their preferences. That way, the next time they shop around, you can send them targeted offers. Not only will that increase your chances of conversions and sales; that also makes it easier for your customers to find what they want.

Google Penalty Recovery: Everything You Need to Know

This entry was posted in Penalty Updates, SEO on by .

Getting a penalty hit means devastating consequences: lost traffic, visibility, and revenue, the Search Engine Journal notes. How do you recover from that blow? Here’s what you need to know.

Know the Difference

A lot of people make the mistake of thinking the Penguin and Panda updates are a type of penalty. However, there’s a big difference between triggering a manual penalty versus an algorithm. If your site gets a penalty hit, you’ll get a manual action report. Once you’ve fixed the violation, you’ll need to send a Reconsideration Request. When you trigger an algorithmic penalty, though, you won’t need to file anything.

Find Out Why

Your penguin penalty recovery efforts will go much better if you understand why you’re being penalized. Knowing is half the battle, so you can avoid making the same mistakes. For instance, some of the most common ways that you’ll get penalized include the following:

  • Having unnatural links to and from your site
  • Your site has been hacked
  • Your content adds little to no value
  • Your content is pure spam
  • You have sneaky redirects
  • Your stuffing your text with too many keywords
  • You have a spammy free host
  • You have a spammy structured markup

Identify Which Penalty

There are two main types of penalties: the manual penalty and algorithmic penalty. However, there’s the third penalty to keep in mind: a combination of both. The first one is when someone at Google sends you a manual penalty. The second one is when your site triggers an algorithm filter, the Hackernoon says. And the third is when both happen. Again, knowing what you’re dealing with will help you devise effective recovery efforts.

Learn Common Fixes

Now that you’re aware of the common reasons for penalties, you can go over your pages and fix the problem. If you have sneaky redirects, remove them. If you have cloaked images and you didn’t put them there, check your plugins. They may be the source of the issue. If your site is hacked, deal with that problem. Even better, prevent your site from getting hacked by improving your security. Identify the vulnerabilities in your site and fix them. If you’re stuffing your text with too many keywords, resist the urge.

Hire SEO Pros

Digital marketing experts can provide you with a plan and strategy to ensure that your recovery efforts succeed. Getting pros to help you will not only ensure faster and efficient results; it will also reduce the damage to your traffic and revenue. By getting help as soon as the penalty hit happens, you have a better chance of coming out of this unscathed. Or, at the very least, your pages can recover that much sooner.

Master the Guidelines

There are plenty of ways for you or your SEO team to fix the problem. However, the best way to build a sustainable presence on the web is to know and follow the guidelines that Google sets out. Don’t cut corners and get help from pros if you want to achieve online marketing success.

 

The Step-by-Step Guide to Fixing Google Penguin Penalty

This entry was posted in Penalty Updates, SEO on by .

For an SEO professional, there’s nothing worse than receiving a message that your page has been penalized. Don’t let visions of doom overtake your mind, though. There are plenty of ways to reduce the damage that it will have on your website traffic. Here’s a step-by-step guide to help you fix the problem.

Start with the Basics

Determine the why, how, and what. What was the cause? Why were you penalized in the first place? By knowing what the problem is, you have an idea of where to start. If you’ve been penalized because of your website design, you’ll need to change that as soon as possible.

Know the Different Penalties

What kind of penalty did you get? Knowledge of the two types of Google penalties will help you narrow down the reasons for getting a penalty. Whether it’s an algorithmic or manual penalty, expect your traffic to drop.

Look for Other Causes

That’s not to say that a dive in your traffic automatically means that you’ve been penalized. There are other signs that indicate e a penalty hit: server problems, crawling issues, blocking access to your robots.txt, and improper redirects. If you see all these happening, then that means you’re dealing with a penalty. The next course of action is to plan your penguin penalty recovery efforts.

Know the Common Penalties

Common penalties that affect website pages include unnatural links and thin or duplicate content. If any of your pages contain that, then fix them. Make a list of your backlinks and analyze them for quality, the Entrepreneur suggests. An outdated website design or poor user experience will also trigger a penalty. If you want to prevent penalties in the future, fix these problems.

Hire Marketing Pros

Digital marketing pros can know what to do to get your pages optimized, whether that means giving your site a much-needed upgrade, overhauling your content to ensure that they connect to your target market, or improving the quality of your links.

Fix Your Reputation

Sometimes, the penalty can even be the result of your competitors attacking your site. That could include spreading bad comments about your services, products, and company. One way to fix that is to hire pros to manage your online reputation. Why does that matter? People believe in reviews. While some may take them with a grain of salt, they’ll still go over the comments and feedback and pay attention to any details that stand out. If you have a small team, you likely don’t have the time to deal with this problem. By getting pros to take care of it, you can focus on your core tasks while experts work to get your online reputation back on its feet.

Hire the Right Team

Look for SEO experts to help you. Given the constant updates that Google rollouts, the only way to make sure you don’t get a penalty hit is to hire an SEO team that would ensure your pages are compliant with Google’s algorithms. Let them fix and maintain your pages so you can focus on your business.

cartoon computer

Using Backlinks To Your Advantage

This entry was posted in Content and tagged , , , , , , on by .

Everyone is trying to make a website that is search engine friendly in order to rank higher. It’s a no-brainer that people get in the SEO game since it’s still the number one way for a business to be seen. However, if you want to rank higher, you have to play by the search engine’s rules.

The more links you have coming into your site, the more people refer to you for something you’re good at. Your number of links is how Google can see how valuable your site is to searchers. The truth of the matter is that even if you have a lot of amazing content if you aren’t being linked by other people, search engines won’t acknowledge your site as valuable.

A backlink is a reference from another web page to your own web page. This is very different from the “outbound” or outgoing links from your page. Do not confuse the two. A backlink is also called an inbound link (IBL) and these links are very important in determining the popularity (or importance) of your web site for search engines.

website graph

It is better to have fewer high-quality links, than thousands of links that bring no value to your backlink profile. Weak or risky backlinks won’t help your rankings at all. It can even hurt you as these links can get you a Google penalty!

Because not all links are created equal, you need to be very careful when you start a link building campaign. Build links for your business, for your customers, make them relevant and associate them with great content. Your users will be happy, and Google will keep you in the search results causing your business to grow.

Here are some guidelines to keeping your backlinks beneficial:

Make Sure The Link Comes From An Authoritative Site

Search engines want to see links that come from high-quality sites that are associated with the outbound link given. Therefore, if you have a link from a completely unrelated site, it won’t be as valuable as a link from a related site.

For example, if you are a flooring business and you are getting links from an internet forum about baked goods, something would seem off to the search engine. And rightly so! Why would a forum discussing the types of cupcakes available want to link to your flooring company? It doesn’t make sense to users and it won’t make sense to the search engines either.

Make Sure The Anchor Text Is Specific

The anchor text for your backlinks is extremely important. Hyperlinking to a page with clear, specific anchor text is a big win for both the user and search engines. Constantly throwing sites the same anchor text will not help you. Google wants to see organic links being built and any attempt to trick the search engines will be frowned upon and isn’t worth the risk.

Make Sure They Are Relevant To On-Page Content

Backlinks aren’t just there for no reason; they serve as an SEO metric and they should enhance a reader’s experience. Backlinks need to be relevant to the content they’re in and actually provide supplemental information. Think of it from the reader’s perspective—backlinks won’t add any value if they’re bringing readers to completely unrelated sites.

Google aims to provide users with helpful, relevant content that answers queries. Unrelated and distracting backlinks get in the way of that. Google considers relevant backlinks to be much more valuable than a backlink from a random, unrelated site. A dermatology clinic site that links to a used car Q&A forum would probably send a red flag to Google (and also confuse readers browsing the site).

Make Sure They Don’t Come From One Site

Having a variety of sites that link to your site is a productive goal. If a site has a lot of backlinks, but they all of them come from one site, this will look spammy to Google.

You should actively strategize to build strong backlinks from a range of relevant sites.

However, Google has no problem with websites linking to each other for legitimate reasons. It is a natural occurrence on the web if a news story on the BBC cites an article on CNN, then a few weeks later CNN cites a story from the BBC.

This is technically a reciprocal link, but should Google penalize for it? No, because there are genuine reasons for these websites to link to each other and they are doing it in a natural way that is good for users.

Make Sure You Are Selective About Hidden Or Paid Links

A hidden backlink is exactly what it sounds like; it is invisible to a user and the search engine. Sounds sketchy, right? It is. A backlink that is hidden—whether by manipulating text and background colors or hiding the link in a punctuation mark—is a “black hat” SEO strategy that clearly defies Google’s best practices.

Paid backlinks are a grey area in the SEO world because certain methods of paid links are viewed as legitimate, while some aren’t. If a link has been paid for that doesn’t automatically mean it’s bad. Since this a grey area, you should be picky with paid methods. If the site’s content is related to your industry, you won’t be penalized for paying for ad space. Paid directory business listings are also fine, as long as they’re reputable.

The best directories are the ones that also provide useful information for your customers. The directories that provide no real value to the internet user are to be avoided.

Make Sure Your Backlinks Are Not Spammy

Spammy backlink tactics can cause real harm to your domain. The longer you allow the spammy techniques to continue, the more work you will have to get those spammy links removed. If you notice that your current SEO service is building spammy backlinks, you should notify them immediately and discontinue service. These tactics will harm your rankings!

Spammy backlinks lnclude:

  • Article Marketing Spam
  • Poorly Executed Guest Blogs
  • Single-Post Blogs
  • (Paid) Site-Wide Links
  • Linkbait and Switch

If you’re interested in improving your website’s search traffic, get in touch with us today. SeoTuners can offer an affordable solution for your business to increase exposure and SERP rankings with organic SEO strategies like keywords. we’re confident we have a solution for all your marketing needs.