A well designed and resourceful website and website strategy are only useful if people can find it online, otherwise, there is little possibility of making any sales by way of natural organic traffic. For visitors to successfully reach your website, you have to direct them to it with specific and effective signs understood by search engines. Out of sight, out of mind has never been truer than in the case of search engine positioning. Where your site ranks on search engines defines your company and sets it apart from other competitors. Sites that rank at the top for a popular keyword or key phrase have better chances of attracting a higher click-through rate from search engine queries. This is precisely why your search engine optimization (SEO) and website strategy must go hand-in-hand otherwise you would be flying solo.

What Is SEO?

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is a framework of website optimization guidelines with a number of stages, rules, and controls that can be implemented to get you more traffic, which will inevitably lead to higher conversion rates.  Setting up an SEO friendly structure should be a part of your website’s foundation and the success or failure of your site in search engines depends greatly on how well you have defined your website goals.

How Can Search Engines Find Your Website

Today search engine spiders are as smart as they can get when it comes to gathering and processing all the data from your site or page to improve your search results. It is important to learn how pages are indexed and the process used by search engines to determine which websites are most relevant for targeted keywords. But search engines continue to look beyond keywords to better understand the people, places and things visitors care about so that it can throw up better matches. Search engines crawl your website looking for relevant content and links, besides checking on your website speed, the number of visitors and usability to determine how you rank in search engine results. The search engines store all this information in a really big database.

Using this information, you can take measures as part of the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) process to make your site search engine friendly and enhance its visibility and effectiveness.

Smart SEO Strategies

A website strategy that includes SEO techniques can help create and develop your online presence. Here are some of the most important SEO strategies to keep you at the top of the search engines.

• Develop a clear content marketing strategy for your website. Update your site regularly with blogs, whitepapers and other forms of content.
• Research and prioritize high-value keywords in order to ideate new content.
• Generate powerful backlinks to your site and pages
• Make your website mobile-friendly with responsive design, dynamic serving or by setting it up on a mobile subdomain
• Organize and structure your website for easy on-site navigation. Make your site and its content crawlable
• Fix all the broken links and codes that cause errors in your site
• Implement JS and CSS minification to speed up your site
• Use Rich Snippet Optimization to improve your online listing
• Strengthen your website’s security with SSL encryption, keeping your CMS and plugins updated.

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4 Key Takeaways On The Importance Of SEO

If you are interested in growing your business, keep reading to learn about the most compelling reasons why SEO is essential for any website.

1. Improve Site Visibility

This is a no-brainer. The better your SEO efforts, the more frequently your website name will show up first in searches for relevant keywords. The easier your site is for users to find, the more likely you are to sell your stuff!

2. SEO Increases Traffic

SEO can boost targeted traffic on your website. You are likely to get more free clicks to your site from customers who are looking for your product or service. A steady stream of incoming visitors adds up to more conversions.

3. Earn Credibility

SEO can help you gain a more credible name in your industry and establish you as a thought-leader in your field by making your online presence stand out through your site, blog, social media pages, podcasts, YouTube videos and more.

4. Beat Your Competition

By properly managing your SEO strategy and constantly working towards maintaining your rankings, you are more likely to outshine your competition in online searches. If your website is positioned well, it can guarantee conversion too.

Good SEO practices will keep your business or website moving in the right direction and help attract the right kinds of customers. But it would be wise to remember that Search Engine Optimization is not a one time or part-time effort. Rather white hat SEO needs to be done consistently to deliver sustained long-term results.

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Link Building Strategy: What is it and why is it important?

Before we get into why link building is important, let’s make sure that we all know what it is.  Link building is when you acquire links from other websites into your website.  It’s single direction of directing people to your site. There is no one way to build links.  It’s a difficult and complex process and one that SEO professionals agree is the hardest part of their jobs.  You could spend hours trying to master the art of link building and if you’re successful at generating high-quality links, it can truly put you ahead of your competition.

Link building continues to be one of the many factors that Google and other search engines consider when ranking search results.  We don’t know how many you need to rank above the competition; we just know that you need them.  Google isn’t denying that links are a major factor in ranking.  They recently revealed that content, links pointing to your site and RankBrain (their artificial intelligence system) are the three most important signals contributing to the result of a search query.  These are not the only things that determine your ranking but they are what Google considers to be the top 3.  If that’s not reason enough to learn more about link building and to make sure you’re doing it right, I don’t know what is.
Link building doesn’t just make Google and the search engines happy.  It’s also good for business. This includes reaching out to other relevant websites and blogs in your industry. This communication can help you build long-term relationships with key influences in your industry, and these relationships can mean a lot of respect and trust in your brand.

Building a Link Building Campaign

There are white hat, grey hat, and black hat tactics that companies can use to help drive links back to their website.  White hat techniques are considered ethical SEO.  Black hat SEO refers to aggressive tactics that are implemented only to impress or trick search engines—not humans.  Grey hat tactics are those that fall somewhere in between.  So how can you gain/earn links to start a link building campaign?  First, let’s look at some things not to do:

• Ask for links.  You can’t just call up a website and ask them to link to your website.  You need to offer something of value to their visitors.
• Buying links.  If nothing else stay as far away from this temptation as possible.  If you’re caught using this black hat tactic you could be penalized by Google.
• Cloaking.  This is when you show search engines different content than what you serve up to your users.
• Link farms. This is when a group of websites get together and decide that they are all going to link to each other.
• Buying expired domains. While this is considered more of a grey hat tactic, we still wouldn’t recommend it.  Companies who employ this tactic have a watch list of domains that are about to expire.  When the domain does expire they immediately buy the domain and replace the pages with links to their website.

While these are just a few of the link building tactics to stay away from they are some of the more popular ones that companies fall victim to.  Moving on.  Let’s review a few of the white hat approaches to building credible, authoritative links to your website.

• Reviews and testimonials: Acquiring reviews and testimonials about your business has tremendous business impact in building good online sentiment and serves as a referral source for future business.  It likewise assists with your third party referencing system.  Testimonials and reviews offer a great opportunity for you to get a backlink and potential traffic from the review sites that your customers leave reviews on.
• Blogs: Consistent, frequent and industry specific blogs that focus on satisfying your customer’s needs will, over time, gain authority.  Once you have done this, other bloggers, websites and businesses will want to link to your blog.  Don’t just blog on your site.  Reach out to other industry influencers to see if you can establish a content partnership where you each guest blog on their others site.  Guest blogging is a great way to get backlinks and increase search ranking.
• Link baiting: When you create content that that encourages people to link to your page from another website you have participated in link baiting.
• Web directory linking: The best directories to participate in are the ones that also provide useful information for your potential customers.

Getting Started

Remember, just because you built it, doesn’t mean they will come.  As with most SEO strategies, link building takes time—and a lot of knowledge.

The benefits of a successful link building program include not just increased SEO but also greater visibility online, more traffic being driven to your website, and an increase in brand awareness.  Thanks to Google algorithms and other search engine changes, the link building world is changing rapidly.  Now is the time to get on board with this growing form of marketing.

The post Link Building Strategy 101: What You Need to Know to Get Started appeared first on Greenhouse Design Group.

This is a common question, because a title on a web page is the first thing both people and search engine spiders will see about your website. In HTML, a title is usually done like this:

How can you make that title better?

With a few well placed tips you can raise your ranks in the search engines.

Tip #1 – Use Keywords
You want to use eye-catching keywords with your title tags that are relative to your web page or website. For example, if you were setting up a website for a shoe store, you would not just put “My Shoe Store”. You would want to use something like, “Adidas, Nike and Puma Shoes for Sale at YourDomain.com” or something to that effect.

Tip #2 – Make Your Title Pleasing to the Eye
Sure, “My WeBSiTe!” might look cool, but for the general public, it is not that easy to read. The same thing goes for title in all CAPS. It does not work. Phrase your titles as you would regular sentences, so they are pleasing to the eye rather than an eye sore.

Tip #3 – Pay Attention to Title Order
Always tell me what the page is about, then get into details like your domain name. Including your domain name is good, but it should be saved for last. General rule for web page titles should be description, followed with name.

Keep those three title writing rules in your head, and you will be on the right track to getting ahead in the search engines.

If you are looking for SEO services for your website look no further as The Greenhouse Design Group does provide that service.

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Google and other search engines deal with billions of websites daily. For example, the Google index is well over 100,000,000 gigabytes, with well over a million computing hours required to build it. Let’s look at how major search engines index, analyze, and then rank a site.

What Is Web Indexing?

Just like books are registered in libraries under main categories, sub-categories and further alphabetized by authors titles and more, the web too is a continuously growing virtual library with billions of webpage’s and blogs but without a central filing system. The search engines are the index to this library and registering of a webpage or blog is known as indexing. A web index is a database of all the stuff on the Internet, so that search engines know where this information is, and can help searchers find it. Search engines gathers information about the pages during the crawl process and then create a large index of all the pages on all the websites that they are aware of. If your site is on that database, only then can it show up in search results.

The search process is really complex. But putting it simply, during a search on the Google search engine, the algorithms look up the search terms in the index, which includes information about words and their location, to find the appropriate pages. Essentially search engines do two major things to your site: crawling and indexing. Crawling is when a bot fetches a webpage to analyze its contents in order to inform search result details, rank pages, and follow links to discover new pages. Indexing refers to the process when a search engine stores a website’s URL and any relevant information in its database to serve as a search result.

How Do Search Engines Index The Internet?

Search engines such as Google use  spiders that are bits of computer code to crawl from site to site in order to gather a web of information that is stored in the index and this process is known as fetching. The web spider follows the chain of links to crawl from a website to the next, constantly indexing its information. Spiders index the most important information first including- URLs, title tags and metadata containing keywords. Spiders are always on the lookout for new page on an existing site, modifications to an existing webpage or an entirely new site or blog.

The spider processes the text on the page along with the location on page including the search terms. When anyone looks for information related to the same keywords in the search engine, the search engines algorithm goes to work deciding where to rank that page among all the other pages related to those keywords. For Google, besides keywords, there are 200 other factors that are also important in deciding the fate of your page rankings, including quality inbound links, social signals and valid code on all your pages.

Benefits Of Search Engine Indexing

So why do you need to get your site optimized to be crawled by spiders and how can it benefit your site?

Attracts Traffic

Having your site indexed by spiders from search engines can increase traffic to your website. When the pages on your site are listed with search engines, it increases the chance of your webpages being displayed in the search results every time a potential customer looks up for some related information in the search engine. With proper search engine indexing, you can expect not just your site but also your webpages to be listed within a stipulated period, which can lead to more people finding their way to your site.

Improves Search Rankings

If your site is well optimized and has informative content related to your industry, with relevant keywords, proper title and descriptions detailing your business then you will definitely see your site rank higher in the SERPs.

Higher Return-On-Investment

Indexing allows you to list webpages and subpages with search engines and directories to improve your chance of attracting the right type of customers to your site. It is possible to target a specific category of customers for the product/services related to your business. Rearranging the site structure and linking the pages properly for indexing helps spiders locate your site easily. When the end user can find the information they are looking for more easily, it improves your site usability. You can track everything from the source of the traffic, leads flowing through the site and even detect demographic information and metrics of engagement to reach the target audience that are looking for your service or products. This in turn boosts your business ROI.

Conclusion

Besides getting their website indexed by Google, businesses should also look at implementing SEO techniques in order to increase their presence on the internet. Indexation is just the beginning. A site optimized for the search engines is more likely to drive more traffic to its website and in turn improve brand awareness.

The post Search Indexing: Get Spiders To Notice Your Website appeared first on Greenhouse Design Group.

SEO is a complex technical field laden with hard to understand industry jargon. To add to the confusion there are significant changes every few years, thanks to search engine algorithm updates. So, it is critical to remain informed because it affects any business with a web presence. Google’s Penguin algorithm, which was first introduced in 2012, changed the entire game of backlinking. And one of the most important aspects of SEO is anchor text that is used in backlinks.

Anchor Text Explained

Let’s tackle the big question, what exactly is anchor text? It is the visible, clickable words that appear highlighted in a hypertext link and is used to link one page to another. So, if you created a link to a target web page with the text “family dentistry” search engines will take it as an indicator that the page being linked to will match a search query on family dentists. The World Wide Web is structured around such external links that lead from one site to another site or internal links that connect one page to another page on the same site.

Earlier a site’s rankings in search results were determined not just by the number of links pointing to that site, but also by the anchor text of these links. This led many black hat marketing practitioners to game the system through link exchange and artificial inflation of link popularity. Penguin algorithm devalued and penalized these spammy links to discourage websites from building links with over-optimization. But this still remains a critical off-page factor in determining rankings for the search engine results pages (SERPs), in Google’s algorithms.

Benefits of Anchor Text

• Boost Your Brand

When used correctly, they can improve the online visibility of your website but taking a scattergun approach may prove costly, as search engines may view your site as spammy and hit you with a penalty. The words used within the text ensures that your page is ranked for the keywords you desire it to be ranked for, instead of what Google thinks you should be ranked for. For instance, if you want your homepage ranked for the term “Inbound Marketing“, you have to find ways to create links from other websites that contain your home page URL and the keyword “Inbound Marketing.“ You can create links on other sites through blog commenting, guest posting, etc.

• Better Search Ranking

Backlinks with anchor text helps search engine bots to better understand the content of the page, which improves the search engine positioning of a page. Google counts each link as a vote for the linked “to” webpage by the linked “from” webpage and to validate the vote all constituents of a link “from” a webpage are analyzed to determine whether you qualify to cast this vote Google compares the text to your site’s content to arrive at a relevance match. Optimizing this text helps add relevance to your brand and provides value to your audience thus increasing the chances of your page and website ranking well.

Make sure you use them the correct way when building links. Only use appropriate text to point to a specific page that has been optimized for that keyword phrase. The idea is to create “natural anchor text” instead of always using exact match text. It is important to diversify the text by using variations like company name, phrase matches, naked URLs, synonyms or antonyms, etc, so that search engines don’t see it as a manipulation attempt, If the text flows naturally within the content and links you create to your site are providing value to a site’s user and also to users looking for information in search engines, then you and Google will be on the same page, and your search rankings will benefit.

With anchor text and other properly implemented SEO tactics, you can stay ahead of the competition.

Greenhouse Design Group has the expertise and experience to draw up an effective digital marketing strategy for your business, while ensuring high SEO rankings.

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