Author Archives: Seo Tuners

About Seo Tuners

SeoTuners is a Los Angeles and Ventura based Creative Design and Internet Marketing Company that offers high quality services to both small and medium sized businesses. SeoTuners lives up to the hype with customized services sure to boost online presence in no time. With stunning creative and thought provoking designs, SeoTuners design team stands-out above all the rest in the industry. Utilizing the latest methods in conversion optimization, along with proper site structure, your brand is sure to attract.

What is Google Penguin? Understanding Google’s Engine

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

In the world of SEO, content may be king, but Google keeps the keys to the kingdom. Among the larger search engines out there, Google is the undisputed king. As per Statista, for the past five years, Google has held well over 80 percent of the global market share in all things related to search engines. When you want to look something up, you “Google it.”

That doesn’t mean capturing other search engine demographics isn’t important, but even then, there are similarities across all search engines in the way that they work. In fact, as per SEO Book, Yahoo! Search is powered by Bing.

Still, following and understanding Google updates is the biggest obstacle and basis of research for SEO professionals. Knowing how Google works is key to a good SEO service, and it’s no easy job.

Google’s search algorithm has existed for years, but it’s only recently been named. As of 2013, the company’s 15^th anniversary, Google’s algorithm according to Search Engine Land, is called Hummingbird. Within Hummingbird, however, the company has employed several different programs to optimize the way it works and categorizes websites.

These are programs like Google Panda, Pigeon, PageRank, and Penguin. These programs or ingredients number in the hundreds. No one in the SEO world really knows how Google works a hundred percent of the time, but we do know enough to optimize websites. So the question is this: what are these programs, and how do they affect your company’s SEO?

Tackling Google Penguin

Google Penguin was first announced in 2012, and since then, it’s been assigned the job of crawling through websites and penalizing those that were buying links or utilizing other black hat methods to generate inbound links.

To understand what Google Penguin does, you have to understand link building. Link building is the activity of building your website’s reputation and search engine rank through inbound links. Inbound links are links on other websites leading to your own website.

How Link Building Works

In the past, just having inbound links was enough to generate a great rank on your website. Inbound links are used as a factor for search engine ranking for a simple reason: if people link to your website, it’s a sign that there’s something there that’s worthy of a read or visit. Basically, your inbound links are a sign of popularity, and quality.

The problem, in this situation, is the way marketers and SEO specialists abused inbound links to artificially inflate their SEO rankings. Through private blog networks and rewritten content, websites could get quick, cheap, and often self-generated inbound links that helped boost their ranking for little legwork.

Getting Help

Today, link building is a little more complex. You can’t buy inbound links, and inbound links from less reputable or unknown websites doesn’t account for much. In fact, these can even get you penalized. The holy grail these days is being mentioned in mainstream news media. Second to that, you have educational websites, like university blogs and article entries, which are also highly reputable. If you’re looking for affordable SEO solutions in Los Angeles and Ventura, you’ll need the services of a qualified local provider, like SeoTuners.

While search engine specialists argue that website reputation doesn’t matter much, there is a little controversy in the issue. The point, however, is this: spamming links no longer works, and probably never will. Google’s algorithms are updated on a regular basis to weed out quick and easy ways to raise your company’s ranking, placing value on good content and organic ranking techniques.

Small Business SEO Made Easy: What You Need to Know

This entry was posted in Advertising, Marketing, SEO on by Seo Tuners.

When people think about SEO, they often picture it to be a bit of a momentous task. Setting up a whole system of content creation and optimization can be exhausting, and requires the manpower of an entire department. However, what some small business owners fail to realize is that SEO for small businesses is far from the rocket science it has to be for large businesses.

In a competitive Fortune 500 corporation in the financial or real estate sector, SEO and PR are fields that require the expertise and hard work of several talented experts to do right. When you’re that big, keeping a good name online and making sure you come out on top in search results is a tough thing to do, especially with a customer demographic that spans several continents.

It’s different when you’re an openly local business. Small businesses are meant to target their local demographic, all while having a much smaller competition to deal with. That means that ultimately, your SEO tactics don’t have to span across huge multinational campaigns. Instead, a simple, straightforward, and targeted campaign can be enough to rocket you to first place among all relevant search results in your niche and area.

You don’t need a huge firm to help you. Getting quality SEO services in Los Angeles and Ventura through a company like SeoTuners is more ideal, as you’ll get to cut costs and still benefit from a lean operation.

Let’s tackle some of these tips and tricks, and help you figure out exactly what you need to do to help your business out in the field of search engine optimization.

Optimize Your Website

Minimalist designs both help decrease your website’s load times and makes your website easier to navigate. You don’t want a cluttered design. As per Kissmetrics, load times matter for sales just as much as SEO does.

Optimizing your website’s on-site SEO is also a task. If you have an on-page blog, make sure every blog entry is tagged and categorized with business-relevant categories. Utilizing Google Trends, you can also find out what keywords are most regularly used in your given niche, and you can specifically target them by including them in your content.

Understanding Google Pigeon

When it comes to local SEO, the most influential component of Google’s Hummingbird algorithm is Pigeon. Launched in 2014 according to Search Engine Land, Pigeon is Google’s component dedicated to making local SEO a bigger factor in search results, so even if you don’t look up a business specifically in your area, Google will use location technology to refer you to relevant and quality businesses close to you.

However, Pigeon isn’t about city-wide local searches. Cities are huge, after all, with some nearly 10 million residents. Instead, it allows you to target customers specifically in your neighborhood.

Stay Consistent

If you want your business to show up in people’s neighborhood searches, you’ll want to make sure that your company’s name, address, and phone number remains consistent every time it’s mentioned.

The final consideration to make in local SEO is to make sure your customers leave reviews if they loved your service. You could offer incentives, or help refer customers to review websites through your own site. As per Shopify, reviews help you rank better in searches, they’re integral to your SEO, and they help customers decide whether or not to buy your product.

7 Ways to Optimize Your Pages

This entry was posted in Content, SEO on by Seo Tuners.

In a market where big names dominate, a lesser brand usually has no chance at all… not unless you’ve got stellar SEO skills to back yourself up. Search Engine Optimization helps you grab a share of the market, even against bigger players in the industry. It’s a tool that levels the playing field, allowing small to medium-sized companies share the sandbox with the big ones.

Interested but not sure where to start? Here are some simple ways to help you begin optimizing your pages for search:

Find Better Keywords

If you’re trying to rank for the same keywords over and over, but results stay the same, it can be a simple matter of adjusting your keywords. Get ones that are much closer to your speciality, that is to say, find something more specific to your niche. You’ll have much less competition that way.

Organize Your Page Better

Consider improving your on-page content by using primary and secondary keywords to support your focus keyword. You can use each phrase to designate a subsection. Be sure to factor in position, frequency and distance when you use keywords throughout your pages, says the Moz blog. That means they shouldn’t be too close together. Don’t overload the page with your keywords, and make every word you use in your page titles or headings count.

Get Pros

Not every company starts off with a great SEO team, but you can hire one to help you out. Plenty of firms offer SEO services in LA so it won’t be a problem to get the assistance you need to lower your bounce rate, get your pages to rank and boost traffic to your site.

Eliminate Duplicate Content

This has been a long-used tactic since Google Penguin wiped out most sites all over the world. Content farms and spam sites took the brunt of it, their page ranks dropping nearly 80 percent over night. It was enough to cause any self-respecting marketer to break out in a cold sweat. So if you’re still using spam-based tactics, end those now. Get rid of the duplicate content to get your Google standing to improve.

Fix Those 404 Errors

Nobody likes dead ends and that’s what these errors are. Set up redirects wherever applicable so that you can provide your readers with a way out of those dead ends, says the Entrepreneur.

Optimize for Mobile

The surge in mobile internet usage within the last few years has opened up a new and exciting channel for marketers. With many people using their mobiles to go online to surf pages or check reviews, there’s a need to make sure your site is as mobile-friendly as can be. If it isn’t, you’re going to lose customers before you can even start telling them about the good stuff. So embrace mobile now, says the CIO.

Clean Your URLs

You can use readable content in your URLs instead of numbers or random strings. You can use that page’s main keyword to leave a breadcrumb trail in your URL.

There are plenty of ways you can improve your SEO strategy. Get an excellent head-start with these tips and you’ll be making your way up Google’s search results in no time.

Optimizing Your Page in 5 Ways

This entry was posted in Content, SEO on by Seo Tuners.

If your sites aren’t performing as they should, it might be time to reconsider your online marketing strategy. You can significantly improve page optimization when you:

Pay Attention To Your Competition

Your business doesn’t exist in a bubble. You need to be current on what the rest of your competition is doing. If you aren’t, you might miss out on a breakthrough innovation. What if they come up with a better way to service customers? If you aren’t looking, you would miss the chance to outdo your competition and improve your own business, says Business2community.

But Not Too Much Attention…

If you pay too much attention to your competition, you might not be devoting enough time to your own optimization efforts. There’s always a better way to do things. Remember that fact when you think your search campaigns fail or if you feel like you don’t get the kind of results you want. Focus more on improving your strategies instead of wringing your hands and worrying about what your competition is doing, says the Search Engine Journal.

Hire a Team

If you don’t have a strong enough search engine optimization team, then it’s simple enough to hire one. If you’re looking for affordable SEO services in LA, get in touch with us. We’ll be happy to provide you with the quality and help you need to make your online marketing campaigns improve your bottom line.

Organize Your Content

It’s all about organization. The more organized your pages are, the more readers you’ll attract. You might have too many images cluttering your page or your content may not be positioned in the right spot. What you can do to improve things is to start with a strong title. Make sure it leaves readers wanting to know more. First, though, make it enticing enough for them to click on the title so that they will read the rest of the article. Then, use subsections to divvy up the content. Blocks of content aren’t the easiest thing in the world to read and could make your customers skedaddle instead of staying put for the next word, much less the next paragraph.

Fix Your Keywords Issues

It might be as simple as choosing another set of keywords. Try changing your keywords and give the change enough time to yield results. Going for different keywords, ones that are closer to your niche but have a lot less competition, can be the key to improving your traffic. Also, make sure never to overload your pages with too many keywords. Space them apart in an article. Don’t lump them together all in one place.

So go ahead and get your optimization game back on. We’ll help you find a better way to do it.

4 Reasons You Need to Hire SEO Professionals

This entry was posted in Advertising, Content, Marketing, SEO on by Seo Tuners.

Your website makes it easy for your consumers to find you. It can also be an indication of how competent you are. If your content is of high quality, accurate, and captures the interest of your target market flawlessly, then it improves the odds in your favour. You’re likely to end up with more clients or customers as a result. However, if your content is bad, riddled with grammar errors and has managed to hopelessly mangle the English sentence in every way possible, then you’ll probably end up with zero clients.

That’s why getting your site right matters. You need help, though. Here are four reasons why you should hire search engine optimization experts as soon as possible:

Your Content Needs To Be Seen.

Well-written content isn’t going to do you much good if it can’t be seen. You see, the more a site is relevant to its target market, the higher it ranks on the search engine results page. So when you search for a keyword, that site automatically pops up on your results list. However, if you’re only starting out, your page isn’t going to end up anywhere on the first or second page of the results any time soon. An SEO expert, though, will know just what to do to optimize your pages and improve their ranking, allowing more people to read your content, says the Moz blog.

Your Competition Is Online.

Your competition is doing it and that’s a good enough reason to follow suit. After all, you really wouldn’t want to be left behind in the dust by the companies you’re trying to outwit, outdo and outperform. With a lot of new businesses springing up every year, says the Entrepreneur, your competition grows every year. Having an excellent site gives your business an edge over those newcomers.

You Save on Costs.

SEO is much more cost-effective than other types of online marketing, especially when compared to PPC or even social media marketing. It takes a long time to build but once it’s up and running, your online reputation is established and you’ll have a constant stream of traffic to your marketing channels, all without having to pay for a single cent. With affordable SEO servicer rates, you won’t even have to spend millions on marketing your products or services.

Your Customers Are Online.

You need to be where your customers are. So if a lot of them are online, then you should be too. You should do your best to meet consumer demand wherever happens to be, including online venues. However, it’s not enough to have a website or Facebook page. If you want to reach out to your audience, you need to make sure your pages stand out from the rest. SEO pros can upgrade your site or put features and content that’s sure to capture and hold your target market’s interest. For as long as you continue to commit to building a consumer-centric experience, then this system will work, says Forbes.

So what are you waiting for? Hire an expert and get your marketing plans started.

Startup Talk: 5 Suggestions for Search and Social Newbies

This entry was posted in Advertising, Content, Local, Marketing, SEO, Social on by Seo Tuners.

Getting your marketing campaigns off the ground isn’t going to happen overnight. This is already a tough job for most big companies to pull off. If you run a startup, it can be a monumentally resource-draining task, especially if you aren’t doing the campaigns right. Take a look at some of the tips we put together for beginners about the ins and outs of search:

Know Your Core Business Model

The first step to a successful online marketing campaign is to know your core business model, says Entrepreneur. You should have full knowledge of your business: when are the busiest and slowest seasons, for one? What growth goals have you set for yourself, the team or the company? How much profit do you get out of every customer? How long do customers stay with your business? Four years is a great average, by the way. Most of all, you should know your marketing channels. Some businesses are better off with a Twitter page. Others benefit most from a blog. Depending on the nature of your business and the target audience you want to reach, you could end up choosing one marketing channel over another.

Be Realistic

Keeping a positive attitude towards your business goals is all well and good but being realistic is even better. Realistic expectations mean you won’t get taken in by promises of overnight success. While some do get lucky and only slave away at the business for a mere month or two before being valued at a hundred million, that’s not really common in the world of start-ups. Inc says about 96 percent of businesses fail within the first 10 years, so set your expectations straight.

Have the Right Audience

Don’t put up a site unless you know who your target audience is. That’s because your target market would determine a lot of your online marketing and SEO efforts. So which consumer pie have you got your sights set on? When you know that, it’ll be easy enough for you to polish up your marketing plans.

Do the Work

Don’t just assume that sales will start rolling in as soon as you put up a site. You’re competing with a ton of other businesses out there. Maybe their sites are better than yours. You need to put in the time, effort, and even the cost necessary. That means you need to get help. Look into some SEO services in Los Angeles and Ventura to get you the assistance you need to take on your competition.

Earn Your Followers

Some companies think success is all about having the highest numbers of followers and fans, says CIO. However, buying followers just to help your business reach the top sends a bad message, one that says you can’t be trusted. If any of your customers find out, you might end up fighting a backlash big enough to be a public relations nightmare.

Putting up a business is tough. But sidestepping mistakes and following great tips can lead you closer to success with one confident step at a time.

For Mobile Unfriendly Sites: Google Warns Site Owners in Mobile Search Results

This entry was posted in Mobile, SEO on by Seo Tuners.

For Mobile Unfriendly Sites: Google Warns Site Owners in Mobile Search Results Back in April 2015, the search engine giant, Google, announced through their Official Webmaster Blog that they would be putting out updates and launching an algorithm that was specific to the mobile search results that users would be getting. Specifically, the company noted that they would be giving preference to those sites that were already optimized so that they were easy to browse on various types of devices. This meant that those that had a mobile-friendly layout and design would rank on top of the list versus those that were difficult to navigate due to their desktop-centric coding. The Recent Update to the Algorithm If you were lucky enough to already have one that was good to go for smartphones and tablets, then you were probably unaffected by the specific change. But now, starting around April of 2016, the company is sending out warnings to several owners who still have not gotten the memo about tweaking their pages to be viewable beyond just desktop and laptop computers. For those who own pages with outdated designs, you would see a snippet above your meta description when you try to view your domain in the search results. It is a simple warning, as all it says is this: “Your page is not mobile-friendly.” According to an article by Jennifer Slegg on The SEM Post, Google’s very own John Mueller confirmed that these alerts are only visible to those who own websites that have been found not to comply with the new regulations. What This Means for Your Online Presence This all seems simple, or so it may seem. Surely it is just a reminder and not a threat to your online presence’s rankings, as many people would like to think. However, this is actually a polite warning from the corporate giant to start giving your page a face-lift before the next update to the algorithm rolls around. The company has even provided the public with several tools for developers meant to assist you in editing your coding so that it becomes much more suited to the latest lightweight and wireless technology. Some of the great tips that the company outlined in their very own guidelines include the following:

Make it easy for your target audience to use your website for whatever purpose it is meant to serve.
Analyze how effective it is based on how easily your users can carry out certain tasks that they have to do often.
Choose a template or layout that will work on all sorts of devices, regardless of model, maker, or operating system.

When in Doubt, Hire An Expert Still finding it difficult to adjust your code so that it complies with Google’s new requirements? You can get in touch with companies that provide a plethora of affordable seo services in order to help you tune up your website and get it up to date with all of Google’s new requirements, especially when it comes to the mobile side of things.

5 Best Tools to Check Broken Links on Your Site

This entry was posted in SEO on by Seo Tuners.

They may seem like hindsight, or a little problem you can brush aside, yet don’t be fooled by the potency of broken links. A single dead link can mislead and frustrate customers, show that you’ve been out-of-touch and sloppy with your website maintenance, and it can even potentially push you down in search engine ranks. This isn’t just a small issue – according to Entrepreneur.com, “link rot” has been described as an actual web epidemic.

Remember – no matter how hard it is to get a website running perfectly, that sort of smooth experience is what web users expect as normal. Anything hindering that sort of experience – even a sensible issue like a broken link – can carry dire consequence for you and your company.

Utilizing the Best Tools

Combat your broken links today in the most sensible way – by utilizing a fast and reliable tool, rather than manually combing through your website and the Internet in search of years-old dead and broken links. We’re here to offer you a few alternatives you can use to get started in picking up the pieces:

Xenu’s Link Sleuth – A Windows-only tool, Xenu’s Link Sleuth provides a wide array of uses from finding duplicate content to checking page depth, but our main interest in it is its comprehensive ability to scan for and find all broken links.
Google Webmaster Tools–A straight-from-the-source kind of tool, Google Webmasters Tools gives you an overview of what Google thinks of your website, and where you should improve it – specifically in crawl errors, which are broken links that force crawlers to move onto another domain.
Screaming Frog–For Windows and Mac, Screaming Frog crawls websites and finds out more than Xenu’s Link Sleuth, at a premium price.
Link Checker–A little less user-friendly than the other options, but more powerful under-the-hood – perfect for users who want a more comprehensive look at their links while running a command line interface.
W3C Link Checker–A simple link-checking tool, W3C’s Link Checker can be downloaded or run from a browser.

Broken Links are a Result of Negligence

As per Computer Hope, a broken link is a link that points to a page that no longer exists. In most cases, websites present viewers of a broken link with a 404 error code, presented within a custom page of some kind.

Usually, the most common reason is moving a webpage without modifying all the links leading to it, thus having older links within your web content that prompts users to find your error 404 message instead of your updated page.

Why Broken Links are Important

Aside from user frustration or complaints, a broken link can actually damage your SEO. Although search engines like Google have explicitly stated that a few broken links won’t hurt you, according to SiteImprove.com, what they can do is force search engine algorithms to stop short and move onto the next site.

That’s right. Search engine optimization is all about creating a website that makes it easy for search engine crawlers to index and rank it. If a crawler encounters a broken link, it ignores the rest of the page – which is detrimental to you and your ranking. You’ll need the help of an affordable website SEO company like SeoTuners to take control of the situation if your site’s broken links are particularly troublesome.

How To View AdWords Data In Google Analytics?

This entry was posted in Advertising, Marketing, PPC on by Seo Tuners.

Google is incredibly powerful. Its search engine is used about 40,000 times a second nowadays according to Internet Live Stats, and Google hit 1.2 trillion searches a year in 2012. However, of those 40,000 searches made in the course of you reading that number in your head, 85 percent are searches people have already made, says CNet. And many of them are searches you can make a profit from.

That’s the key point behind Google AdWords – you choose a business-relevant keyword, incorporate it into your content, and pay Google to be listed as a seller or service provider in your specific niche.

Having an understanding of all the key metrics in what makes up your website – and more importantly, what makes up your web traffic and the people who are most likely viewing your content – is the key to creating a profitable website and maintaining a strong web presence. It’s not enough to simply create a great website – if you want to make money, you need to fine tune your ads and content to your audience. And that requires the right data.

For both the sake of convenience and efficiency, Google has officially made it possible to link your AdWords account to a Google Analytics property, so you can “analyze customer activity on your website after an ad click or impression.”

According to the search engine company, this is meant to help you separate your organic traffic from the traffic you’ve been getting through AdWords, so you can boost the effectiveness of your PPC campaign and identify how effective your organic SEO has been, while receiving other AdWords data in your Analytics reports.

Why Join AdWords and Google Analytics?

It’s also useful for helping you identify how to better structure your website to make your AdWords campaign much more effective. For example, Google Analytics can show you when a customer is confused or stuck on a specific part of your page, and combining the two can help you address and solve problems that you might not have known about.

Remember, the most dangerous customer isn’t the one that comes to you with complaints – because that’s the customer you can address and help win over. The most dangerous customer is the kind that leaves without a word after encountering a problem – and it’s likely that many more are simply leaving rather than asking you for help. Pre-empt the problem by finding it quickly.

How to Quickly Link AdWords and Analytics

To begin, you’ll need both an AdWords account, and an Analytics account for the website you’re advertising. Then, you need the right permissions. As a Google Analytics user, make sure you have Edit permissions for your website. As an AdWords user, make sure you have administrative access over your account.

Next, sign into Analytics and select AdWords Linking under your Admin options, under Property.View the Google AdWords tab, and check the box next to the account you would like to link. Click Select All and Link Accounts to make sure you’re linking the right view.

With AdWords access in your Google Analytics, you’ll be able to tell what’s what when it comes to whether traffic is paid or organic. This way, you can tell how an SEO provider like SeoTuners is helping your traffic through affordable SEO services, and what kind of impact your PPC campaign is having.

Content Marketing: The Right Way To Do It

This entry was posted in Content, Marketing on by Seo Tuners.

Content marketing is many, many things. It’s thousands and thousands of words – millions, even, piled onto hundreds of blogs and websites all vying for the Internet’s most precious commodity: the attention of actionable customers.

If that’s what you’re after – and it’s what you should be after – then content marketing is something you’ve probably invested a lot of time, effort and money into. But the question is, is it working for you? And if not, then why?

Getting content marketing right is hard to do. While the data and metrics are there for you to see when you’re being successful, it’s harder to tell what the actual difference is between being successful and mediocre with content marketing. Is it the quality of the content? The frequency? The design? The timing? The subjects at hand? Is it the momentary psychology of the public? As Mark Schaefer argues, there’s too much content – he says, there’s so much that content marketing itself isn’t a sustainable model for marketing. But that isn’t necessarily true. Content just needs to be looked at in a new light.

Content is Not a Metric

This is the hard part to grasp. Content is, for the most part, difficult to mathematically pin-point. That’s because unlike a commodity or a metric, content is art. Whether it’s video, audio or written, content is what directs and informs people, and it’s the very same thing that’s been keeping artists awake and alive and questioning and dreaming. Respecting content is the first step to getting it done right; respecting content and the people who will read it is the first step to getting away from the average marketer’s mentality. Onto the next part:

Content Needs to Attract Readership

When it comes to content marketing, what you want is continuity, not interest. You want a voice, not sound bites. You want subscribers and a readership, not potential customers who fall into the model of the sales funnel. After all, according to Digital Tonto, the sales funnel has been made largely irrelevant. Instead, there’s an interest in creating a sales continuum – that is, building content that doesn’t just market a product, but that promotes loyalty in a certain brand and idea.

So, to further iterate:

Content Needs To Define Your Business

You need a business identity, and a business mission. Whatever you’re selling, it needs to help people somehow – and your content needs to be a constant informative voice that dedicates itself to propagating that mission and promoting consumer advocacy – getting people involved with what you’re trying to accomplish, and proving that your brand does make a difference. As Forbes states: brands need to think like publishers.

If you’re a marketing company, then perhaps your mission is to inform small businesses of the new paradigm shift in marketing, getting them on-board to building a loyal customer base, and advocating customer care-centered marketing campaigns.

The key behind content today is that it shouldn’t just create awareness and build leads. To lead to sales, you want content that entertains people and attaches them to your brand. As a good SEO company in Los Angeles and Ventura like SeoTuners would tell you, content and engagement aren’t linear anymore – it’s about keeping the conversation going.