Web's Take On...

Content is king in the SEO world and if you have poorly written content, then this is going to directly affect your success online. Here are the types of content that you should avoid at all costs or improve if you currently are making these content mistakes:

 1.     Stale website content

Not updating your content on our website or blog is a mega SEO mistake. You want to have fresh content that is updated frequently for the benefit of your SEO strategy as well as your site readers and potential customers! When they see you have new content they will be drawn to your website and will enjoy seeing you have expertise in your industry and are staying up to date. Also, search engine bots will be sent to your website each time you update your content which can greatly improve your website’s ranking.

 2.     Content that not user-friendly

If your content is hard to read (example: one endless block of text) or so filled with SEO keywords and links that it becomes un-readable to viewers, you need to adjust this immediately. While you want to appeal to search engines, you need to remember to appeal to readers first. Make sure your keyword density is not too heavy and that your sentence structures make sense. Also use paragraphs and images to appeal to users and make your content more desirable to read.

 3.     Content that is not relevant to your business

Your website and content should always be able to relate back to your business or industry. Having content that is not relevant to these factors will confuse your readers and put up a red flag for search engine robots. Feel free to be creative with your blog posts or website content, but make sure it in some way makes sense with what you do as a business.

Once you begin an AdWords campaign, you will want to start tracking your data to see how your campaign is performing. Different tabs on Adwords will display various data results, so it is important to have knowledge of what tab can show you about your data. Here is our overview on how to track your performance on Adwords broken down into the tabs where the data is displayed for your review:

1.     Campaigns Tab

The first place you should look to analyze your AdWords performance is the Campaigns tab. On your campaigns tab you can view information on your ad clicks, impressions, and click through ratio. Add these columns that you are interested in viewing the data for to your statistics table so this data will always be displayed.

2.     Ad Groups tab

The ad groups tab will give you insight on how individual ad groups are doing. Analyze this information to gage how you can improve your ad groups for each ad, or for campaigns in the future.

3.     Ads tab

The Ads tab allows you to view individual data about each specific ad in your ad groups. Within this tab you can also compare your ads to see which ones are performing the best. If you have any ads that you need to edit you can do so within this ad, as well as pause or delete them if you feel they aren’t currently performing the way you would like them to

Bing has rolled out a new tool on their Webmaster Tools platform. This tools allows users to inform Bing that you have moved your website which allows for easier transition. The tools enables you to let Bing know if your entire domain has changed, or even if only individual URLs within your website have changed.

Here is a breakdown of the improvements and how you can communicate with Bing on your site move:

Scenario #1: Moving URLs within Your Domain:

If you are redirecting some of your pages within your website this new tool allows you to notify Bing of any big changes. This can be very useful if you have restructured or redesigned your website and are sending URLs to new locations. By being able to easily notify Bing, they will be able to process these changes as soon as possible which is beneficial to your search engine optimization.

Scenario #2: Moving Your Website to a New Domain

If you have changed your domain and are moving your website over this tool is a simple way to notify Bing of these changes right away. Make sure the domain you are moving to is also verified with Bing Webmaster Tools to allow for seamless transitioning. The three levels that are allowed within Bing Webmaster tools are a move from domain, subdomain, and directory. This is an improvement compared to Google Webmaster tools which only allows for a change from one domain to another. The Bing upgrade gives web publishers additional flexibility and these tools can aid in your search engine optimization efforts.

As a follow up from our previous posts on high priority and medium priority SEO tasks, the final thing to add to your SEO checklist is your low priority tasks. Once you have completed everything else on your SEO checklist, review this list of SEO tasks that are of lower importance, but still can help you achieve higher search engine rankings.

Here is our SEO Company list of low priority tasks for your SEO campaign:

-    Optimize your website for a limited number of secondary keywords that you would like to achieve rankings for, but they aren’t as pivotal as your primary keywords.
-    Try using a few different forms of your keyword in keyword phrases.
-    Ensure you are not linking too much to external websites, if at all. You want to keep your links internal to your own site and not driving traffic to other WebPages. If you do have to link to another site, try to ensure that the link is a “nofollow” link.
-    Separate your words and keywords in your URL by using the hyphen symbol.
-    On your pages make sure the content is short and precise. You don’t want pages with never ending content that readers are less likely to read. Keep it to the point or with each page focused on one subject that targets a certain keyword phrase.
-    If you have any sound files on your website, always include a text transcript of the file in case it is broken.
-    Use your keyword phrase in your meta description and meta keywords tag on all pages.
-    Consider using a few synonyms for you keyword phrase in the content so the keyword appears less obvious with repetition but you still stay on target of the subject you would like to rank for.
-    If you need to use Java, carefully consider this and ensure you are using it correctly and with care.

As we discussed in our last post, “Using a SEO Checklist: High Priority Items”, having a SEO checklist is a great way to keep your SEO tasks organized and ensure that they get done according to their importance. After you have completed all of your high priority tasks, use a medium priority task list to know what should be done next. While medium priority tasks aren’t as urgent as your high priority tasks, they are still extremely beneficial to your search engine rankings and will help your business achieve higher visibility online.

Here is our SEO Company list of search engine optimization tasks that are of medium importance:

- Create an XML Sitemap for your website. This helps search engine bots follow the links on your website as well as site visitors see pages they might not have found otherwise.

- Add your keywords or keyword phrases in your alternative text or “alt tags”. These are what shows when the mouse hovers over an image.

- Create lots of ongoing content on your website. This may include a Company blog, company news, or always being sure to update your Company information and services.

- Gain inbound links from other websites. If possible, these should be quality links from highly visited websites, forums, blogs or other industry leaders. Making sure the inbound links are of high quality will keep you from getting in trouble with the search engines.

- Make your keyword phrases stand out by bolding them. This tasctic should be used in moderation but is ok as long as it looks natural and isn’t too obvious to the site visitor because you are bolding words in every sentence.

- Use inner-site linking tactics. This means linking to other pages on your website through your content. For example, if in a blog post our Company is speaking about website design, it would make sense for us to link to the page on our website that has our website design services so the visitor can have easy access to that information.

- Use 301 Redirects to re-route site visitors away from pages that are broken or no longer exist. Search engines like to see this and it also makes for a friendlier user experience for the site visitor.