Website Development Archives

The Ultimate Search Engine Optimization Checklist for Avoiding Google Penalties

August 29, 2019Posted by Anne Roosin Content Marketing, SEO: Search Engine Optimization, Website Development

Did you know that Google changes its search system several times per day?

That’s 3,200 changes in the past year! How can you keep up with this pace, and do you really need to be aware of all these changes to stay on top of your search engine optimization (SEO) efforts?

According to Google, some are brand new changes while others were updates to keep in step with the fluctuating landscape of the worldwide web. To improve the ability to search and find exactly what we are looking for, Google releases regular algorithmic updates. As new websites, blog articles, comments, reviews, and data are uploaded to the internet, search engine rankings need to adjust to present the freshest, most relevant content to internet users. Therefore, your company’s Google rankings today are not what they will be tomorrow. Nor will your keyword phrases forever remain the top words your potential customers use to find your products and services.

To be an SEO ninja, you need to keep up on the recent algorithmic updates. Here’s a quick rundown of the last major Google algorithm changes, the penalties when they are not followed, and the fixes to avoid penalties. Use these items as your ultimate checklist to maintain your website’s rank position in search engine results:

• The 2011 Panda Update and subsequent Panda Core Updates since 2016

Duplicate, thin, or plagiarized content is penalized. Avoid keyword stuffing and spammy posts. Panda wants you to earn your Google rank and assigns your website’s ranking according to a “quality score” for your web pages. The fix: Regularly check your site and blog for keyword stuffing and thin content (doorway pages, irrelevant affiliate pages, and low quality content pages) . Check for duplicate content within your website and against other web pages on the internet. If you must use exact language for product descriptions and reviews, place product descriptions within graphics that are not crawled by Google.

• The 2012 Top Heavy Update

Websites that are “top-heavy” with ads are penalized. The fix: Remove the proliferation of advertisements and replace them with interesting, relevant content.

• The 2012 Penguin Update and subsequent Penguin Core Algorithm that works in real time since 2016

Irrelevant or spammy links are penalized, along with links with anchor text that is over-optimized. Penguin drops the rank of sites that employ manipulative links. The fix: Regularly audit your website with a backlink checker.

• The 2012 Pirate Update

Sharing pirated content—content from sites containing copyrighted material—is penalized. Pirate specifically demotes websites that violate the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. The fix: Run a duplicate content report and eliminate any material copied from other websites. Avoid posting content under copyright protection (including graphics and video media).

• The 2012 Exact Match Domain (EMD) Update

Low-quality websites are penalized when keywords within their domain names that are an exact matches in searches. The fix: Create meaningful, enhanced on-page content to retain and gain rankings without altering your domain name.

• The 2013 Payday Loan Update

Keywords often used by spammers (such as casinos, loans, money, and sexual terms) are penalized. The fix: Avoid keywords that can confuse readers to believe you run a spammy website. Instead, concentrate on longtail phrases that specify legitimate business.

• The 2013 Hummingbird Update

Poor quality content and keyword stuffing are penalized. Hummingbird likes to look for intuitive content over blatant keywords and makes use of processing synonyms, co-occurring terms, and semantic indexing instead. In other words, the intent of the searcher takes precedence over keywords. The fix: In addition to focusing on keyword research, focus on phrases and concepts. Diversify your content to increase engagement.

• The 2014 Pigeon Update

Poor local SEO practices are penalized. Traditional SEO factors now play a part in the calculation for local result rankings. The fix: Ensure your company is easy to find on a map by avoiding address info inconsistencies online. Invest in search engine optimization efforts for both on and off-page SEO. Start with a content analysis to discover what aspects to focus on for on-page optimization. Get listed in directories of relevance to your business to bolster off-page SEO, deliver backlinks to your site, and increase your Google rankings.

• The 2015 Mobile Update (also known as “Mobilegeddon”)

Lack of mobile websites or poorly loading and error-prone mobile websites are penalized. Mobilegeddon ensures that mobile-friendly pages rise to the top of the rankings in a mobile search, and pages that are not mobile-optimized are dropped in rank or removed entirely from the SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages). The fix: Check how your website pages load in a mobile device. Focus on usability and speed.

• The 2015 RankBrain Update (added to the Hummingbird Algorithm)

Shallow, generalized content is penalized. Based on artificial intelligence, it focuses on specific ranking factors within a query (not much is known about how RankBrain actually functions). The fix: Run a competitive analysis to discover terms used by your top-ranking competitors, then optimize your content accordingly.

• The 2016 Possum Update

Head-to-head competition in your specific location is penalized. Possum ensures that the closer a searcher is located to a business address, the more likely they are to see it in their results. Possum also boosts businesses located outside of a particular city area to offer a greater variety of SERPs. The fix: Expand your keyword phrases to include location-specific information, and ensure that your address and contact info is consistent across the Internet.

• The 2017 Fred Update

Thin ad-centered or affiliate-heavy content that breaks Google Webmaster Guidelines is penalized. Fred focuses on blogs and web pages that are created with the main purpose of generating advertising revenue. The fix: Adjust your on-site ads to offer high quality, relevant, educational information instead of tricking a reader into clicking on an affiliate link.

• The 2018 and 2019 Core Updates

These updates do not specifically focus on particular website characteristic or search queries. Instead, they are “behind-the-scenes” changes that have a broader impact across a large range of areas.

• The 2018 Broad Core Algorithm Update

This update includes the E-A-T update, which penalizes overall quality. It mainly affects medical websites and big news portals. E-A-T stands for Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness—Google’s three major considerations for page quality. Your web pages are penalized when they don’t indicate why your content is of value. The fix: Post content that leaves no doubt that you are an expert, an authority, and trustworthy in your field.

• The March 2019 Core Update

All forms of irrelevant content can be penalized, including blog articles, social media posts, posts to forums, press releases, reviews, and email. The fix: Distribute engaging, relevant information that generates social interactions such as comments, responses, and shares. Post high-quality content on a consistent schedule, and refresh older content.

• The June 2019 Core Update

Sites containing low-value news content are penalized, while larger, well-known sites with reputable news content surge in the SERP rankings. Sites containing video carousels also rose in search engine rank visibility. The fix: Refresh your website with reliable content and include videos in the mix.

• The Unofficial July 2019 Maverick Core Update

This update came on the heels of the new Top Gun movie trailer (Google may have ceased using animal names for their updates, but they haven’t lost their sense of humor.) It is too early to discern why your site lost traffic and ranking within the last month or so, as the Maverick update currently doesn’t seem to target any single spammy SEO tactic, but early indications lean towards targeting traffic on retail websites. The fix: Continue to be vigilant and monitor your content for poor links, duplication, and relevance.

Trying to digest all the Google algorithm updates over the past eight years can give anyone a search engine optimization stomachache. Avoid the pain and hassle of dodging Google penalties: Learn about organic SEO and the essentials of content development. Then let the SEO experts steer you clear of penalties and make stellar improvements in your search engine rankings. Contact Moore Than SEO at 559-978-4096 to get started.

Top Local Agency Tips for The Best Results in Today’s World of SEO

May 21, 2019Posted by Anne Roosin Industrial Marketing, SEO: Search Engine Optimization, Website Development

Fascinating content is the solution for stellar search engine ranking results, whether you are jumping into the world of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for the first time with a new website or you’re seeking to regain your website’s rank. Populate your web pages with text and media to answer your target customer’s questions, and you’ve nailed it.

Sounds simple? The trick is that SEO is dynamic—Your rank may be on the first page of Google search results today, but maybe not tomorrow. Your success depends upon whether you regularly refresh your website with interesting new information that’s relevant to your visitors, or whether your competition does a better job of this.

How do you keep up with the demands of posting new and relevant information? Turn to the top local agency for SEO (that’s us) to create the perfect content.

We’ll give you a few tips to get started, in the meantime.

To celebrate 20 years of the Internet, here’s a primer, designed for successful results today’s world of SEO:

1. Your content must be goal-driven.

Have a purpose for creating meaningful information. Why are you publishing your website home page, online product catalog, blog article, infographic, or video? If your answer is, “to get a high Google ranking,” go back to the drawing board.

Design everything you publish online for human consumption, for your reader’s education and enjoyment. Mold your content to fit your target customer, just the clients who want and need your products and services.

Google will take notice. Specify goals for your content, producing web pages filled with relevant,“ sticky” content where your website visitors stick to your website and delve deep into your message.

How does your content deserve that top rank in the Google results? Lay the groundwork for good SEO practices by following a measurable goal, such as:

• To increase product sales by highlighting how our products are the one and only answer our customer’s needs

• To increase inquiries and consultation appointments with proof of our experience and trustworthy reputation

• To increase the numbers of email sign-ups through offers of educational download information to help customers make the best product purchase from our catalog

When your content is meaningful to website visitors, your content will be meaningful to Google and all search engines, too.

2. Target your perfect customers with the best keyword phrases.

Create a competitive strategy around the keywords that you choose. Need help with choosing keywords? Discover “How to Research SEO Keywords Like a Pro”.

Armed with your keyword phrases, select the best user-friendly internal URLs (web page addresses). For instance, which would you prefer to click on?

https://YourCompanyName/pfc-37

https://YourCompanyName/groovy-guide

For more clickability, Google’s Matt Cutts recommends confining the URL extension to between 3 and 5 words. (Not https://YourCompanyName.com/groovy-guide-that-even-your-grandmother-will-love)

Use your main keyword phrase in the first paragraph of your text, within the first 100 words or so, while ensuring that the text is natural for any website visitor to read. Don’t try to force or stuff a keyword phrase into the content. Good grammar and punctuation trump keyword placement.

Sprinkle your content with semantically related keyword phrases—text that includes words associated with your industry, business sector, products, and services.

3. Include optimized tags.

This is the information provided for the search engine bots that crawl the web to locate new information to include in the search engine results. Your human readers don’t see these optimized tags unless they know how to look for it. Without this information, automated web crawlers don’t know that you’ve posted brilliant content.

Supply the following information to your IT guru to insert on your web pages, or do it yourself:

• Optimized Title Tag—Include your target keyword phrase and limit it to 60 characters

•Optimized Meta Description—Include keywords that encourage completing a call-to-action, and limit the description to less than 160 characters

• Optimized H1 Tag—This is the actual title of your page or article that your human visitors read, and it includes your target keyword phrase. It can be identical to the Optimized Title Tag.

4. Add internal and external links.

Hyperlinks provide resources for website visitors to learn more about your company and offerings.

Internal links posted on your website take the visitor to another page within your site. Use internal links to offer visitors reasons to take advantage of your calls to action.

Outbound, or external links were once feared, due to the concern that visitors are guided away from your website and brand. Linking to informative sources and business partner websites strengthens your reputation—Visitors believe you are the ultimate authority for your subject and your industry. Choose links that guide your potential customers, helping to answer their questions while preventing them from landing on your competitors’ websites.

Add links to your social networks, too, and insert widgets on your website that display your most recent posts. Post social share buttons to encourage website visitors to create a buzz about your useful information, products, and deals to their own networks of followers. Think of this as free advertising and great SEO!

5. Ensure that your page loads quickly and is viewable on multiple devices.

A major ingredient to gaining a successful mobile search rank position is how fast the pages on your website load. Check that your website design template is running on the most recent update and optimize images on your site. Learn more about enhancing your search appeal with a mobile-friendly website.

6. Don’t skimp on the content.

How many words should a web page or blog article contain? Our rule of thumb: Use enough words to go into depth to answer your website visitor’s questions clearly and solve their problems. Your content must steal the spotlight away from your competitors and put you on center stage.

Search engines reward websites with great content by placing them at the top of the results page for your keyword phrases. Google penalizes sites that resort to:

• Redirects and Cloaking—Giving Google a different view of your website than your offering for human website visitors

• Keyword Stuffing—Repeating the same keyword phrases throughout the text

• Hidden Text—Text that only Google bots can see and is invisible to human readers (white font against a white background, for instance)

• Unnatural links—Sending your web page visitors to websites that are unrelated to your subject at hand smells of taking money as bribes to benefit other website owner’s SEO agendas.

• Broken links and evidence of hacking—Avoiding the regular website housekeeping chores of ensuring links are still good, backing up your site, and updating the security marks your site as old and ignored.

• Spammy user comments, spammy hosting companies, and spammy hard-sell content—“Spam, spam, spam, lovely spam,” as the Monty Python troupe sang

• Copied material—Duplicating information found elsewhere on the ‘net sends Google rankings into a free fall

Why would Google want to include a site anywhere in their search engine results that resorted to these tactics?

Follow the rules and avoid any reason for Google to drop your site from their search engine results. But your triumph will only be temporary if you post content on your website only to forget about it. Web pages that retain stale content plummet as competitors post innovative, new material on their sites. The internet is dynamic and ever changing, and so are the search engine results.

Here at Moore Than SEO, we recognize you have more important things to attend to than constantly come up with new content to keep up with your competitors at bay. You could do your homework, or you could make the easy choice and partner with us.

Learn why Moore Than SEO is the top local agency in the greater Fresno and Clovis areas, and then give us a call at 559-978-4096. We work with you to build a campaign strategy that delivers quantifiable results-driven social media content that engages. We don’t stop there—We continue to adjust content for maximum effect. Contact us today to get started.

How to Ensure Your Business Gets Found: Adapting to the Changing Horizon of SEO

March 20, 2019Posted by Anne Roosin Digital Marketing, SEO: Search Engine Optimization, Website Development

New methods to searching the internet demand new search engine optimization tactics. Google isn’t the only game in town. What other “search engines” are your customers using to find you? Do they discover you on Amazon, Apple or Google Play stores, or do they use their voice to search instead of typing in a phrase?

These emerging methods of finding content on the internet demand that we re-examine how to ensure our companies get found.

Follow our 7-step recipe for success in the new world of SEO for voice search, Amazon, and App Store:

1. Before you get started, understand your target customers’ searching behaviors. Do they prefer videos, audio, graphics, or old-fashioned text? Begin with our Developing Buyer Personas worksheet and learn how your audience is segmented to provide useful solutions to your target customer’s problems.

2. Go above and beyond matching keywords. Check that your website content answers questions that you anticipate from your customers. Start by understanding how your audience looks up new information on the ‘net. Think beyond the first questions they ask and consider forming keyword phrases based on follow-up questions that dig deeper into your brand. Download our free guide: “How to Research SEO Keyword Phrases Like A Pro!”

3. Employ on-page optimization, or measures that you control directly within your website, to improve your search ranking position. Re-examine your website and update it to put it on the map. Besides revisiting META descriptions and title tags, include:

• Content that digs deeply to answer common user questions

• Short pathways to conversions to make quick work of click-throughs to contacting, buying, downloading, and signing up

• Clear, visual forms that lead website visitors down your sales funnel easily

4. Optimize to land a coveted spot in Google’s featured snippets, where your website link is displayed along with answers you provide to search queries. These snippets appear just below Google’s paid ads but above of the remainder of Google’s organic search results. Follow the basic tenet of providing clear answers to a simple question to land you above your competitors without paying for advertising. The key is to include the question and answer on your website, then add more info beyond the direct answer, and make it easy for Google (and your website visitors), to find it on your page.

5. Display outstanding content on your website to rise above your competition in this world of newfangled search engines. “Good enough” is not enough. Dig deep into your topic to create relevancy. Google’s trend is towards rewarding sites that provide extraordinary depth of content. Motivate your website visitors to continue reading and remain on your site to follow the path down your sales funnel. Make internal links an integral part of your digital marketing plan.

6. Create content that establishes and grows your expertise, authority, and trustworthiness. In other words, satisfy Google’s voracious E-A-T Guidelines. To rank in searches on Google, Amazon, and audio only devices, your content must deliver detailed quality that sets you apart as the only true expert in your field. Not a writer? These tips will get you started.

7. Ask: “What other ‘search engines’ do my customers use?” They might discover you through your app, so you’ll need to rank in app stores. They may be searching for your products on Amazon, so you’ll need to be found there. And then consider how audio-only devices, such as Amazon’s Alexa, rank you above your competition’s brand. SEO for voice search, app store search, and Amazon search are the hottest new methods for getting found on the internet.

When you know who your customer is, and you know how they are likely to find you, you are ready to tailor your SEO strategies to specifically target:

• SEO for Voice Search—Implement structured data, the organized data code that conforms to the syntax that search engines understand. Without it, search engines are less likely to find you, and this is particularly true with voice search SEO. Claim your Google Business Listing, spelling out your business information precisely to reinforce your local SEO prowess. And of course, because voice search occurs on mobile devices, check that your site is mobile friendly on a wide variety of devices.

• SEO for App Store Search—The name of your app is more than just branding—Claim a name that includes relevant keyword phrases in the title, and avoid truncation (which happens if your title is longer than 23 characters, including spaces). Beyond a compelling description, a unique visual icon breaks through the clutter and makes your app a standout. Add screenshots and videos to pique your customer’s interest. Localize SEO to increase downloading by your target audience. Drive traffic to your app by promoting it through social media and on your website, encouraging feedback through ratings, and updating your app frequently. Make consistent improvements that go beyond “bug fixes”.

• SEO for Amazon Search—Amazon’s search algorithm favors the use of relevant keyword phrases in your product’s title, your brand name, your brand field, your product description bullet points, and even “hidden” keywords that are only displayed in the backend section of your Amazon Seller Account. Pricing also enters into Amazon search factors and conversion rates: Reveal reasons to price your product above your competitors, or stick with competitive pricing.

We’ve only scratched the surface—Rely on the SEO experts from Moore Than SEO to guarantee all the many working pieces to new-generation SEO will keep you on the radar of search engines well into the future. Find out how your brand can continue to be a competitive force. Reach us at 559-978-4096.

Enhance Your SEO and Digital Identity with a Mobile-Friendly Website

May 12, 2017Posted by Shel Moorein Digital Marketing, SEO: Search Engine Optimization, Website Development

By Anne Roos, Content Development

Make the most of your digital identity for improved SEO appeal and connection with target audiences!

The Scenario:

You’ve spent countless of dollars and hours getting your gorgeous website up-and-running just the way you like it. It looks great on your office desktop and your business laptop. Then, something fishy happens: You’re on the road and you receive an email, “I can’t see anything on your website beyond your homepage.” Or, “I click to subscribe to your newsletter, and nothing happens.” Or, even worse, you check your web stats and discover that you have few online sales because customers are abandoning their shopping carts.

Hmmm. Your website looks fine on Google Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and other browsers. But when you pick up your smartphone or tablet, your website doesn’t appear, it looks terrible, or it doesn’t work.

The Hard Facts:

Google’s research found that 61% of mobile device users are unlikely to return to a mobile site that they have trouble accessing, and 40% will go to a competitor’s site instead.
Conversation rates for smartphones are up by 64% compared to conversion rates for desktops. (“Conversions” are when website visitors complete an action, such as subscribing to a newsletter.) (Source: CMS Report)
57% of mobile users respond that they do not recommend businesses with poorly designed mobile websites. (Source: CMS Report)

In the end, when you aren’t visible, barely visible, or give a poor impression of your business on digital devices, you’re missing out on business. New customers can’t find you, and your existing customers quietly jump ship and go to your competition.

These hard facts are reflected in Google’s mobile algorithms. Mobile friendliness figures significantly in Google determines website rankings. Therefore, even if a customer is surfing on a desktop or laptop, your site may not be visible in search engine results if it isn’t mobile friendly.

The Solution:

Enhance your SEO (search engine optimization) and your digital identity (online brand awareness) by going mobile. This does not mean that you need to trash your current website and start all over again!

Research your website’s mobile friendliness.

Check how each page is viewed on a mobile device, looking at it on both tablets and smartphones. Verify that META information is entered on each page to enable the Google bots to find your site. View each individual page of your site, confirming that navigation is working. Click on all actionable buttons to confirm they are in working order.

Use the fast and easy Google Mobile-Friendly Test Page for a free analysis. Just plug in a URL and go. Better yet, receive a free website health assessment to delve into mobile-ready issues and other website hiccups that may be stunting your online competitive edge.

Hold off on making tweaks to your website until you have the whole story about your website’s performance.

Think about how your customers use mobile.

How does it fit into their lives? Which devices are they using? Think of how your website information can be adapted to the small screen. Take advantage of geolocation technologies, such as GPS-enabled apps, to increase engagement with local customers and discover where your customers roam. Mobile-ready websites are about design as much as they are about creating content that is viewable and actionable across all devices.

Reconsider your website content.

On small, mobile screens, your website copy needs to be clear and actionable. Simplify navigation. Avoid Flash and JavaScript to ensure graphics appear as clear on smartphones as they do on desktops. Ensure font size and style are easily readable on both the big and small screens. Post contact info prominently on every page—Make it easy for mobile customers to get in touch with you. When

Satisfy the Google mobile requirements first, and continue to reshape content.

Get a WordPress or an HTML-5 mobile plugin if you aren’t ready to update your existing website.

Many website themes are viewable on all devices. This doesn’t necessarily mean that they look good, though. Before your new or refurbished website goes live, view it on as many devices as possible, and then make final adjustments. Once your site is launched, review your online listings.

Update your SEO strategy

Websites are not “set it and forget it”. They are dynamic because customers’ tastes change and your competition changes. Create a game plan for the use of social media marketing with the hottest keyword phrases that turn on your customers. Regular monitoring of your website’s performance puts you apart from your competitors, and together with social media marketing, develops your digital identity niche. Best of all, it increases your profits, because your audience can find your business wherever they roam.

Here at Moore than SEO, we specialize in website and content development that satisfies Google’s best practices and increases brand identification and reputation. Not mobile-friendly? Get started by contacting us at 559-978-4096 for your complimentary website health assessment.