Effective SEO has many parts
Search your brand name by itself and along with your location using all major search engines to determine your current page rank. A high ranking is indicative of successful SEO practices. The higher your brand appears, the more likely people are to click through to your site. You should also check the information displayed when your business is searched to make sure that all contact and location listings are correct. Continue reading
What do these numbers mean?
Interpreting Google Analytics
The metrics reported by Google Analytics provide valuable information about how users interact with your website. This guide can help you interpret the data and apply it to your marketing and SEO campaigns.
Google defines a session as “the period of time a user is actively engaged” on a site. Sessions typically expire after 30 minutes, but the amount of time can be adjusted as desired. High numbers of new sessions means more new traffic. Low numbers indicate repeat visitors and a potentially higher level of engagement.
Visits specify the number of people who come to your site. Every visit is counted, but only visits from new users are listed as unique. The “pageviews” metric shows how many visits a particular page on your site has received. Taken together, viewing data helps determine the popularity of your site. Continue reading
Links make the web
You know all about on-page SEO. Your site loads quickly. Visitors are telling you how much they love your content. All of your essential tags are in order. The meta description you came up with looks great. You made sure the site is mobile-friendly. However, there is still some more work you have to do.
What is Off-Page SEO? It is activities that you do away from your site to attract visitors, and to raise the rank of pages in the search engine results. Now, the first thing people will think of is link building. Yes, link building is important for ranking pages. But we need to take a step back. There one important step you have to take to prepare your site for off-page SEO. Continue reading
It is now 4 months since Google launched it’s new algorithm nicknamed “Mobilegeddon”.
The impact of this launch is still being studied as time goes on by SEO Analysts, and Online Marketeers, and other research sources in this industry. It is my continued goal to provide research results to businesses who might otherwise lose touch with what is going on with the Internet as they might be too busy running their own businesses and day to day issues that take up all their time.
I still see complacency occurring among web site clients that it was much to do about nothing. Unfortunately nothing could be further from the truth. Here are some interesting findings as I continue my research on this subject. Continue reading
Behind your page title, image captions get read more than full page content.
There is an SEO value to pretty much everything that you do on your website. You may not realize it, but adding images, and doing the accompanying SEO legwork, can help generate loads of traffic from Google Images and other image-based search engines. It’s not enough to just drop a picture on a page. Would you create a page and not title it?? That same regard should be held when talking about images.
Image optimization is simple. It’s a simple practice that’s also simple to accomplish and the results can be through the roof. It’s so beneficial that we here at the Orion Group, ensure that every image uploaded to any website that we manage for SEO or internet marketing, is optimized.
For the noob, there are four areas of concentration that need to be addressed when concerning yourself with image optimization: file name, file size, alt text, and descriptions/captions. Continue reading
Hello!
This is Bill from the Orion Group. I am reaching out to as many people as I can to explain, in layman’s terms, what Google did on April 21st of this year. Some of you may have heard about Google’s “Mobilegeddon”. The title is most accurate because what Google did was literally pull the rug out on the entire internet affecting every website that exists today.
For those of us who do not understand, here is what Google did.
Why is this important?… because Google does not play around and make such announcements just for fun.
Want proof this is happening?
All of this is because neither site was optimized to “mobile friendly” status before the algorithm update by Google.
Does this not make one think that if such a large percentage of web sites are not responsive, and only those that are will be shown in mobile search results, then we better get going and update our web site? We need to take advantage of being part of the small percentage of sites that will show up in mobile search results and capitalize while others are still playing catch up. In essence, the entire internet is starting over and only the smartest of companies that understand all of this will take advantage of such a small pool of competition showing up in mobile search results.
This is a chance that may never come around again. In order to rank higher in mobile search results and NOT be doomed to losing that traffic all together, you have to have a website that is mobile-friendly. When will Google say that they will be doing the same thing in Desktop and Laptop searches? It’s a scary thought but Google is scary.
I believe Google is forcing the entire internet to do it their way. It purifies searches and it will cost advertisers a lot more money as the field of viewership will be so much narrower for a while.
So, while you may have been putting off redoing your web sites for years, there is now an opportunity to strike while the iron is hot. When the wagons went west in the search for gold, it was the first ones there that got richest the quickest. Now this can be said for having a responsive, mobile-friendly website. If your business values mobile traffic, why wouldn’t you want to be able to cash in on being the only ones who come up on the mobile search results with little to no competition around you for the foreseeable future?
How can you tell if your current website meets Google’s definition of mobile-friendly? There’s an online tool for that. Visit https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/mobile-friendly/, paste or type in the URL of your website, and click Analyze. Does your site pass? If not, then it’s HIGHLY likely that your site is NOT showing up in mobile search results.
This was a collaborative effort by Emma Edgar, Adam Kuhn & Kevin Barnes
If your website is not mobile-friendly, Orion Group can help.
Call 262-820-9520 for a free consultation.
Google is set to release a new mobile-friendliness algorithm update on April 21 that will impact the mobile search results of websites that aren’t responsive. Is your site responsive?! If not, it may be time for you to upgrade. Here are a few resources for you to check out from the Google Webmasters themselves and Moz who’s a leader in Google Algorithm updates. Continue reading
Because the World Wide Web and the search engines that help us make sense of what it offers are always changing, it can be difficult to develop websites that will be recognized by large or targeted audiences. According to WhaTech, a leading online technology journal, one of the top five ways to increase traffic to your website in 2015 is to research long-tail keywords and incorporate them into your content.
Search engine marketing (SEM) has become increasingly popular for businesses of all types as more and more people begin to rely on the Internet as a form of media. SEM is a subset of marketing centered on website development and promotion through search engines, such as Google, and Bing too. One of the most important aspects of SEM is increasing the visibility of websites on search engine results pages (SERPs), and enhancing sites strictly for this purpose is known as search engine optimization (SEO).
A great number of SEO techniques are available to webmasters and SEM specialists, but the most efficient of these is the use of keywords, which are single words or strings of words likely to be entered in search engine queries. Continue reading
Increasing numbers of business owners and corporate executives are beginning to realize the power of blogging. Today’s online presence is about more than a traditional website. Websites are a form of passive advertisement, and visitors are often referred to as viewers because that is basically all they are doing. However, a blog not only provides valuable information to current and potential customers but also acts as an outlet for them to interact with your business.
According to recent research, successful businesses use a four-step approach to hook customers on products or services, and business blogging can work as an essential element in the first step: the trigger. Continue reading
“Keyword research is one of the most important, valuable, and high return activities in the search marketing field.” It allows for better connection to your current customers and future prospects. Knowing the right keywords will allow you to be successful in your online efforts. It is no longer good enough for your business to just be online, these days you have to be found.
(Note: When I say the word “keywords”, it can mean both a single word, or multiple words, as in a keyword phrase.)
As you delve deeper into SEO and internet marketing, you realize that sometimes there is an overlap, sometimes there is a disconnect, in the various ways keywords are used. In my mind, the image that comes up is of overlapping connections, or circles. At other times the connections between these keywords don’t exist, and the circles don’t overlap. Keywords, and their relationships to each other, can be imagined as a complex, multi-factor Venn Diagram of circles. Read on, and you will see that the more these circles overlap, the more coherent your internet marketing will be. Continue reading
