Lytron, Author at Lytron Fort Lauderdale Web Design & SEO Agency

5 Things You Can Do Right Now to Boost Traffic

Getting the attention of the Google search engine is getting harder and harder. With more 10,000 new websites launching every day, there’s more reason than ever to use SEO to attract more page visitors.

Here are five on-page SEO techniques you can use starting today to drive more traffic to your web page:

Stick to a Single Keyword or Topic

Many web page creators try to do too much with their content. Pick the one keyword phrase or topic that is the most likely for people searching for pages like yours to enter into Google and stick with it.

It’s often helpful if you tie your keyword to your geographic location. For example, instead of focusing on “dry cleaners”, use “New York City dry cleaners” to promote your small dry cleaning business in Manhattan.

Don’t Be Strict about Keywords

Google recently changed its algorithm so that it looks for variations of the same keyword, rather than the exact same keyword every time.

If you are using the same verbatim keyword throughout your content to boost your SEO, it can make your content seem stiff and unnatural. Instead, don’t be afraid to use variations that help with the flow.

Page Titles Are Critical

Google will use the title tag to display your page in its search results. So you want to make sure your title tag explicitly states what your page is all about. It may be your one and only chance to get people to click on it.

5 Things You Can Do Right Now to Boost Traffic – Include Natural Links

Google prefers pages that have natural, high-quality inbound links that lead into them from authoritative sources. pay attention the inbound links leading to your page to make sure they are continually growing and that they come from reputable, high-quality websites.

Implement these five SEO techniques on your pages starting right now and you should see more traffic by the end of the day.

4 Tips to Make Your Web Pages More Popular

When it comes to web design, everything you do should contribute to the popularity of your web pages.

It’s important that your web pages look great, but they also need to have great Search Engine Optimization so that people using Google, Bing and other major search engines can easily find them.

Tips for Improving Your Page Rankings

With that in mind, here are four quick and easy things you can do to make your web pages rank higher:

Content Is King

No matter how many backlinks, keywords or other SEO techniques you include on your web pages, if the content isn’t interesting and compelling to visitors, they are going to click off right away.

Try to include great content that visitors will find useful, entertaining or enlightening. Put yourself in the shoes of your customer and ask yourself, “What would I like to see on this web page?”

Join the Online Community

The Internet is a participatory sport. And the more people you can get involved with your web pages, the higher they will be ranked by Google.

Reach out to bloggers who write about your field and ask if they would be willing to review your products. A few positive reviews can not only get the word out about your business, but also drive more visitors to your web pages.

4 Tips to Make Your Web Pages More Popular – Network, Network, Network

Similarly, you want to be involved with the online community that is devoted to your niche. Link building and getting good social signals is all about building relationships with people.

Today’s search engines look for ways to understand how people connect with one another. So the more connections you can create between your web pages and actual Internet users, the more value search engines will assign to your web pages.

4 Tips to Make Your Web Pages More Popular – Track Your Business

It’s also important to understand what people are saying about your business. Something as simple as setting a Google Alert to track mentions of your company can keep you informed.

Choosing the Perfect Pictures

Despite all the technological developments in smartphones, tablets and other mobile devices, when it comes to getting attention for your website a great picture truly is worth a thousand words.

Image really is everything. So having great-looking pictures on your web pages will make your business the ones people are more likely to choose. Visitors will see your site as being more approachable, friendly and interactive if they like the pictures you choose.

Choosing the Perfect Pictures – Look Sharp

When uploading images onto your web pages, clarity and sharpness is critical. This is especially true now that most newer mobile devices have retina displays that can show images even sharper than the human eye can process them.

Consider your website’s images to be just as important as its textual content … or even more important! You wouldn’t publish anything on your pages without running SpellCheck or a grammar program, would you? So why would you post pictures that are washed out, gray or grainy?

Choosing the Perfect Pictures – The Perfect Picture

If you are using photos you shot yourself, make sure they have at least been put through the Auto Correct function of your photo editing program. If possible, use an expert who can improve the look of your photos through cropping, color balancing, and other tools before posting them.

Another option is to use photos that already have been expertly prepared for display on web pages. There are many websites where you can find high-quality stock images you can use on your web pages for a small fee.

If you’re on a budget, consider using royalty-free images that can be found on such places as Wikimedia Commons. In these type of open source websites, you are generally free to use the photos as you want as long as you follow rules regarding attribution and other factors.

Once you include the right photo on your web pages, you will see the result in the number of visitors your page receives, how much longer they spend there, and how likely they are to convert to your call to action.

Improving Internet Security

Keeping your PC, laptop, tablet and smartphone safe is a huge part of Internet security. Without it, your devices could easily get infected with viruses or malware that can slow down or even ruin your operating system.

Another big risk are key loggers, which can be used to steal your credit card information, passwords, and even your identity.

Improving Internet Security -Need for a High-Quality Antivirus

While it’s always painful to pay for that antivirus program, given the real security threats online today, it’s a necessity. Even though there’s no guarantee you will ever actually need it, if you don’t have it and are the victim of a cyber-attack or infiltration, you will wish you spent the money.

Use your antivirus software to do a full scan — not a quick scan — a minimum of once per week. Most of the newer high-end antiviruses will automatically schedule these scans during the overnight hours, when they are least likely to interfere with your work.

Don’t Go ‘Phishing’

You can’t control all the emails you receive. But you can control the ones you open.

Many emails that seem legitimate are actually scams. Some can even contain aggressive software that launches when you open an attachment to the email.

Never open an email that comes from a source you don’t recognize. One common scam is to send an email that looks legitimate and claims to be from a pay site such as Amazon or PayPal.

Then at some point the email will ask you to click on a link that supposedly leads to PayPal or Amazon, but in reality goes somewhere else. Once you log into this fake website and give your password, it’s stolen.

To make sure an email is from a legitimate source, always check the URL by hovering your mouse over the link and checking the status bar at the bottom of your browser. This will tell you exactly where the link actually leads.

Increase the Effectiveness of Your Email Campaigns

Despite the growing popularity of text messaging, video conferencing, and other more sophisticated technologies, email continues to be an important marketing platform for practically every type of business.

Autoresponders are programs that automatically manage your email campaigns for you. Business owners can input a series of emails, schedule them according to when they should be delivered, upload their subscriber list, and the autoresponder will take care of the rest.

Sequencing Your Emails

Some autoresponders will even manage how the sequence of emails is sent out. For example, if you are sending out a series of emails that are designed to get the reader to take a particular action — such as sign up for a subscription list or download a special offer — once that customer takes that action, you don’t want to keep sending the remaining emails in that sequence.

The autoresponder can be programmed to stop sending the remaining emails in that sequence once the action is achieved. This is usually done via an “if/then” loop: If Action X occurs, then take Action Y.

Moving Customers between Lists

Another helpful task some autoresponders perform is to move customers to different subscriber lists based on the actions they take.

For example, customers that buy a certain type of high-priced product or who are among the most frequent customers of a business can be moved to a specialized class — such as a VIP or MVP group –where they can receive exclusive offers and awards.

Some autoresponders can keep track of buyer behavior and move customers to specified lists according to whatever parameters are set.

Reporting

Another important function of autoresponders is reporting data about the performance of various email campaigns. Having information about how many subscribers opened a particular set of emails, rather than deleting them without reading them, can help fine tune future campaigns to make them more effective.

WordPress Discovers and Fixes Cyberhack

If you used WordPress to set up and maintain your website and you downloaded the JetPack plugin or the TwentyFifteen theme, you could be vulnerable to a newly-identified cyberattack.

According to the web security website Sucuri, any WordPress plugin or theme that uses the popular genericons package could be at risk of a DOM-based Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) vulnerability.

Both the JetPack plugin (which has more than 1 million active users) and the TwentyFifteen theme (which is WordPress’s current default theme) use genericons. The threat has been identified in the example.html file that comes with the package.

Eliminating the Threat

The quick fix is to remove the example.html file from the genericons package, which you don’t need anyway.

This vulnerability was detected before it ever became active, so it hasn’t done any known damage so far. Due to the website’s wicked fast response time, the threat level to WordPress users isn’t considered serious. But the site warned that it would be easy for the vulnerability to be exploited.

WorPress already has reached out to the most popular web hosting services and notified them of this vulnerability and gave them the patch they needed to eliminate it. So if you use any of these services, you already have the virtual patch you need to protect yourself:

GoDaddy
HostPapa
DreamHost
ClickHost
Inmotion
WPEngine
Pagely
Pressable
Websynthesis
Site5
SiteGround

But if your site is hosted by a different company, you may need to manually fix the issue yourself. All you have to do is go to the genericons directory and delete the example.html file and you will be completely protected.

Most Sites Probably Safe

Had this hack not been discovered, it could have had a devastating impact on unsuspecting website owners and businesses alike.

In any case, if you remove the example.html from the genericons directory, you should be okay for now.

SEO News: PageSpeed Cancelled

Google recently announced that it was cancelling its PageSpeed service, effective earlier this month.

Google’s PageSpeed Service, which was first launched in 2010, uses tools to analyze and optimize websites in order to implement the best web performance practices. Fast and optimized pages lead to better visitor engagement, retention, and conversions.

But Google is pulling the plug on the service, although the free tools it offers will still be available on other open source platforms.

What to Do Now

Google recommended that webmasters using the service login to the PageSpeed console and look at the list of their domains. Any domains that are labeled “Enabled” were affected when the service shut down.

If a web page’s DNS wasn’t changed prior to the shutdown of PageSpeed, it is now completely unavailable.

PageSpeed Cancelled – Options to PageSpeed

Google offered PageSpeed several options – some free and some paid — that they can switch to as an alternative to the service.

Webmasters are advised to check with their service provider to see if they offer provider hosted PageSpeed. In some instances, switching to this version could be as simple as checking a box in the provider’s control panel.

There also are PageSpeed modules available for many of the most common web servers. So web page owners who run their sites of their own server are advised to install one of these.

Google also has developed the open-source Apache module mod_pagespeed. There are currently two pre-built binary modules available: Apache 2.2 and Apache 2.4.

Plug-In Option

There’s also a plugin for Nginx that Google has developed. But this must be compiled from the source.

Other options include:

IIS – WeAmp has a commercial port of PageSpeed to Microsoft IIS.

Apache Traffic Server – WeAmp also has ported PageSpeed to the Apache Traffic server.

OpenLite Speed – This platform supports a PageSpeed module that can be compiled and loaded into a webserver.

Cloud-Based Alternatives – If webmasters prefer to use a cloud-based product, EdgeCast EdgeOptimizer integrates Google PageSpeed with its CDN offering. Or, many CNDS offer similar functionality that don’t use PageSpeed technology.

PageSpeed Cancelled – Why PageSpeed Mattered

PageSpeed was designed to allow web pages to load faster for users. It featured a quick and easy setup and allowed users to keep up with the latest optimization technologies without having to constantly search for them online.

One of the biggest benefits was that it used Google’s existing fast and secure infrastructure, which won’t be available for webmasters who switch to open source server modules. It was widely praised for creating happier users and better conversions.

Off-Page Techniques to Increase Rankings

Most SEO techniques used to improve web page rankings are considered “on-page SEO”. These are the things you can do within the content of your web pages to make your websites more appealing to Google and other search engines.

But there also are “off-page SEO” techniques you can use that don’t involve manipulating the content of your page.

Backlinks and Their SEO Value

The first are backlinks. These are links that lead to your web pages from other sites.

Google assigns additional value to a web page if it has a lot of backlinks, particularly from web pages that it considers “authoritative”.

Authoritative web pages are places users will go when they are seeking answers to questions about a particular subject. They include such sites as Wikipedia, About.com, eHow.com and any website whose address ends in the suffix .edu or .gov.

Social Approval Signals

Up until the Panda and Penguin upgrades to the Google search engine algorithm, backlinks were the primary determiner of a site’s ranking.

But because too many unscrupulous marketers learned how to artificially create backlinks, making their pages appear more authoritative than they actually were, Google changed its algorithm so that social approval signals played the most important role in a site’s ranking.

It’s Nice to Be ‘Liked’

Social approval signals are things such as Facebook “Likes”, Google+ +1’s, or how often the link is shared on Twitter. The theory is that because everybody uses social media to share sites they enjoy with their contacts, the more frequently a site is shared, the more useful it is.

SEO success today is inextricably linked to getting the most social approval signals for your page as possible. Make it easy for visitors to give you these signs directly from your page using the free widgets and plugins offered by most web builders, and encourage visitors to share your page with their social media contacts whenever possible.

How to Use Title Tags to Improve Your On-Page SEO

The title tag of your website is what tells the search engine the topic of your page.

In HTML code, it is listed within your headline – or <head> tag at the top of your page and indicated by a <title> command:

<html>

<head>

<title>Easy Ways to Lose Weight Fast</title>

Done-for-You Coding

If you are using a web builder program, such as WordPress, to create your website, this coding should occur automatically when you write your headline.

Make sure you give a unique title for each page on your site. This helps Google distinguish each page from the others on your site.

When your page appears on a search engine results list for your keywords, the contents of the title tag is what appears on the first line of the results. If they contain the words that the user searched in their query, they will appear in bold so that users can recognize if the page is likely to be relevant to their search.

Keep your titles brief, otherwise Google will only show a portion of it in the search result.

How to Use Title Tags to Improve Your On-Page SEO – Describe Content

In addition to containing your primary keywords, the title should accurately describe the page’s content. Avoid using titles that are not relevant to the content or using vague titles such as “Untitled” or “Page 1”.

While titles should be only a few words or a single phrase that sums up your page’s purpose, a meta tag is a longer string of information the spider looks at when indexing the page. Meta tags can be a sentence or two or even a short paragraph in length. Snippets of the meta tag usually will appear below the title on the SERP.

How to Use Title Tags to Improve Your On-Page SEO – Image Titles

Search engine spiders will also look at any images you include on your site, specifically the image filename and “alt” attribute, which is the text phrase that describes the image if it cannot be displayed for some reason.

Name your images using brief, descriptive filenames that include your keywords whenever possible. Don’t use the default image filenames your computer will assign to your images if you don’t change them, such as “image1.jpg” or “pic.gif”.

3 Ways to Improve Local SEO for Your Business

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People who go online to search for the products, services and businesses they want in their local area will instantly get a listing of results based on the keywords they type in.

Every small business owner wants the links to their business to be at or near the top of that list because usually web users will click on one of the top-listed links and ignore all the rest.

Business – Straight to the Top

To get your business listed at the top of that list, you need to use local these Search Engine Optimization, or local SEO, techniques that will cause Google, Bing, Yahoo and other search engines to list the link to your business’s website first:

Get a Google My Business Page — The GMB platform allows business owners to create their own free Google+ Local pages. Simply go to the Google Brands page and click on the button that says “Create a GMB Page”. This will instantly make Google more aware of your business and help improve your website’s page rankings.

Free Google Webmaster Tools — Google also lets you optimize your web pages so that they are more appealing to its search engine. Go to Google Webmaster Tools, create an account, and add your website to the dashboard. You can then check your site’s health for potential issues that Google has already detected for you; see how most users are currently finding your site – and what you can do to make it easier; and see optimizations that will improve Google’s ranking of your website.

Use the Best Keywords — To get the most customers, your website needs to have the exact same keywords that people typing into Google to find Business like yours. Go to Google Ads Keyword Planner and search for different keywords to see how well they perform. Try out different keyword combinations until you find the ones that are going to bring you the most customers.