Adding Authoritative Links Can Boost Site Rankings

business 1

Rankings Popular search engines like Google, Microsoft Edge, and Bing! gain popularity by providing users with high-quality results. When you search for information about any topic, you expect it to be accurate, timely, and on topic.

 

As a business owner in the digital age, it’s critically important that your website ranks high on the search engine results pages (SERPs) for the keywords that best describe your business, products, or services.

 

So one of the best ways to instantly boost your rankings is by improving the credibility of your postings by including links to authoritative sources.

 

Improving Your Online Credibility

 

Search engines love authoritative sources. These include things like academic websites, scientific studies, and well-respected resources like encyclopedias and dictionaries.

 

When you post content related to your business, you can increase your site rankings by giving search engines what they want: Links to authoritative sources. Some of the best are:

  • Websites with the suffix “.edu” which means it is associated with an academic institution.
  • Websites with the suffix “.gov” which means it is associated with a government agency.
  • Research papers, scientific studies, and other expert resource materials.
  • Wikipedia, which has entries on practically every imaginable subject

 

You can easily find these by conducting a simple Google search. For example, if you are writing a blog and want to include statistics, research the information you need then include a link to the source material when posting it in your content.

 

Rankings – Creating a Link

 

Building a link is simple. Simply go to the page you want to cite then copy the web address. Then go to the place in your content that you want to link it to, move the cursor over the text, then use the link tool on your toolbar and paste the address into the box when it appears.

 

The text will then be underlined in your content. When people click on it they will automatically be taken to the source material you are citing, increasing the credibility of your content.

 

Plus, web browsers will see that your content is more reliable because it includes links to authoritative sites so it likely will increase your rankings, putting your website in front of more prospective customers or clients.

The Fast, Easy Way to Retool Your Online Business

Business

It’s important that customers believe your business is fresh, cutting edge, and always evolving into something more appealing. The easiest way to achieve this is often simply to update your company’s logo.

Some long-established businesses have used the same logo for years — or even decades. The logos for companies like IBM, Ford, and McDonald’s are instantly identifiable and familiar. So it’s highly unlikely these will ever be changed.

Long-Term vs Short-Term

But smaller web-based companies have more freedom when it comes to updating their logo. A new, streamlined design for your business’s logo can communicate visually to your customers that you are making positive changes and improving for the future.

Keep in mind that your logo is not your company name. Changing the name of your business can confuse customers, disconnecting your brand from existing customers, and driving away new customers actively searching for you under your old name.

Your logo, however, is simply the visual, stylized representation of your business. By updating or redesigning it, you can reconnect with existing customers and compel new ones to check out your website, products, or services.

Expressing Your Values

Small business owners aren’t married to the logo they adopted when they first launched their operations. In many cases, a company’s first logo is more like a first draft of what they wanted to be. As time goes on and companies evolve, their logos should as well.

A redesigned log is a great way to express to old and new customers alike that you are making positive changes to your image, your business, and your products or services. It instantly expresses fresh ideas and innovative thinking even if you do nothing else to your business.

An updated and stylized logo redesign is a fast, affordable, and effective way to positively change your business’s public image.

Long-Tail Keywords Bring Localized Results

search searching online network website concept

KeywordsThe more specific you get with the keywords you put in your online content, the more focused your customers.

 

Google and other popular search engines use keywords placed in certain places of your content to identify and understand what you have posted. These places include the headline/title, the subtitles/paragraph headlines, the first 100 words of your content, and the last 100 words.

 

Your post also will be rewarded its length, whether or not it includes relevant photos or graphics, and the number of times your keywords appear. Too many is bad. Not enough is also bad. But just the right amount can give you a higher ranking on the  Search Engine Results Page for your specific keywords.

 

Long-Tail vs Short-Tail

 

One key concept in Search Engine Optimization has to do with how specific your keywords are. As the name implies, short-tail keywords are short, to the point, and don’t include a lot of description. For example, “car repair shops” is a short-tail keyword the owner of an auto garage might use to attract online customers.

 

Long-tail keywords are longer, more descriptive, and specific. They can include specific details such as location, specialties, and other pertinent information that can narrow down the search for customers. For example, that same garage owner might post “foreign car repair in St. Louis” if he wanted to attract a certain type of customer (“foreign car” owners in need of repair) in a specific geographic area (“St. Louis”).

 

Target Specific Customers

 

Long-tail keywords are helpful in attracting a narrower field of customers. Web users who type in car repair shops are likely to get millions, if not billions, or responses from garages all over the world servicing every type of vehicle. But “foreign car repair in St. Louis” will narrow down the results to a specific type of garage within a limited geographic area.

 

Identify the long-tail keywords that best describe your business and place in the appropriate places within your content and you can instantly get more results from prospective customers looking for exactly what your business offers.

Breakthrough Web Design Trends for Fall

Lytron 7 Easy Resize.com

Web DesignSummer is already in full swing but many businesses already are getting ready for fall — especially when it comes to their web design. This year, as more consumers make online searches their primary way of seeking out the products and services they want, having a cutting edge website is more important than ever.

 

Web design is constantly changing. But here are some trends that could help your website stand out from your competitors.

 

3D Illustrations

 

Remember 3D movies? The kind where you had to wear special glasses in the theater to see the picture properly? Today, revolutionary changes in web design allow some illustrations on websites to appear in three dimensions with the naked eye.

 

These vibrant, artistic illustrations practically jump off the screen to capture the viewer’s attention. They promote a more interactive experience that delight and compel visitors to return to your page again and again.

 

Screen-Dominating Text

 

Web page designers have discovered that really big words are effective at capturing the attention of web viewers. No, not words with lots of letters that are hard to pronounce and difficult to understand, but physically big words that dominate the screen.

 

Huge fragmented messages on web pages instantly grab the eye’s attention and force viewers to focus on the message being displayed. The communicate urgency and immediacy while engaging the viewer’s imagination.

 

Non-Traditional Cursors

 

The popularity of video games has led web page designers to replace the traditional on-screen cursor with innovative alternatives. Now the cursor on your web page can be your company’s logo, a mascot, or anything else the delights and entertains visitors while encouraging them to spend more time there.

 

Designers can also play around with the function of the cursor. Instead of just pointing and clicking, now cursors can click and hold to add new elements, such as to get a .gif file to load or to play a brief video or animation.

 

The more interactive and entertaining your website is for visitors, the more likely they are to find it, spend time on it, and interact with your business.

Optimize Your Website for Mobile Viewing

Results

Website When you go online to look for products or services do you sit down in front of a computer? Or do you simply whip out your smartphone? Odds are you do both — but are more likely to use your phone 66% of the time, according to a report from the Pew Research Center.

 

Consumers prefer phones over computers because of convenience, location, and speed. Most people don’t have access to their home computer when they are at work, in their cars, or walking around the streets. But when they want to look for that new book they heard about or find a plumber online, they usually aren’t willing to wait until they get home to do it.

 

Smartphones provide instant access to the Internet from practically anywhere — which is why your website needs to be mobile optimized.

 

Faster, Better, Stronger

 

Mobile websites are different than your primary website. If you spent a lot of time and money developing your website for your business so that customers can find your business online, that’s great. But if they click on that website on their phones and it isn’t optimized for mobile phones and tablets, it’s probably going to be slow to load, too crowded to easily read, and not responsive enough for visitors.

 

That means a lot of visitors — if not most prospective customers — are going to click off and visit the mobile-optimized website of your competitors rather than stick around and try to navigate your old-fashioned, slow, and cumbersome website.

 

Website – Built for Speed

 

With 66% of consumers using their smartphones to shop for products and services, you can’t afford to ignore mobile optimization for your website. That’s like shutting the door to 2 out of every 3 customers looking for your business.

 

Mobile optimization improves the way the majority of customers interact with your business online. So if you don’t yet have it, what’s stopping you?

Factors that Influence Your Google Ranking

Factors that Influence Your Google Ranking

By now, just about every business owner knows the importance of having a high Google ranking. It’s actually quite simple: If your website appears on the front page of Google for the keywords that best describe your business, you can expect a ton of traffic from customers looking online.

 

And if it’s at the Number One spot, you have a good chance of capturing the market completely.

 

People now use the Internet — especially via their mobile devices — as the primary method of looking for the products and services they want. Need proof? When was the last time you saw a Yellow Pages, let alone used one?

 

Google Algorithm

 

So getting at the top of Google rankings is critical for your business. Unfortunately, it’s easier said than done because every other business owner wants the same thing.

 

One way is to simply buy your way in. If you have the budget for it, Google will be happy to sell you an ad that will appear above all the other listings when people type in your best keywords. But these can be costly. Plus, many users scroll past these paid results to find the best organic results — the ones the actual Google algorithm determined the best match for what they are seeking.

 

Search engine optimization – Number One Spot

 

So how can you achieve that top spot? There lots of traditional search engine optimization: Placing your keywords in most strategic places, keeping your content brief and to the point, including appealing photos and graphics, and others.

 

But the downside is that Google is continually changing the formula it uses to rank results. That’s because when the online search business first started getting popular, savvy business owners successfully figured out how to “hack” the algorithm. So now Google’s engineers have developed a highly complex, top-secret, and continually changing formula for giving users high-quality results.

 

These days, it’s practically impossible to hack Google. But a professional online marketing business like Lytron Design can significantly improve your rankings and boost your profile on Google so that it’s easier for customers to find you.

The Importance Of Building Quality Backlinks

seo importance building backlinks

If you’ve studied SEO for any length of time, you know that there are things you must do to your webpages themselves, called “on page optimization,” and things external to your website, called “off page optimization.”

 

While there are a number of tactics that fall into the off page optimization category, the most important is the building of quality backlinks. A backlink occurs whenever an image, a piece of text, or your full website url is linked “back” to your site from some other.

 

The best links are those that are “one-way,” meaning that a site links to you but you do not link back to them. It can be beneficial to “trade links” (called reciprocal linking) with another webmaster for the purpose of gaining website traffic but it’s not a strategy that will improve your search engine rankings or SEO.

 

As each page of your website should be optimized for 1-3 keyword phrases, it’s best to build “anchor text links” (aka text links, hypertext links, hyper links, contextual links) that include the keyword phrases you are targeting. The more links you build, the better your ranking will be for the terms contained in the links.

 

The Importance Of Building Quality Backlinks – Here’s a perfect example of this in real life:

 

If you search Google.com for the term, “click here,” you will find a page that gives access to the free Adobe Reader (a page off of Adobe.com) ranked in the first position.

 

This is an interesting/valuable observation as their page is not optimized for this keyword phrase at all. You won’t find it in their Page Title, their Meta Page Description, or anywhere on the actual page itself.

 

The Importance Of Building Quality Backlinks – Then how is this page ranked in the top spot for this term?

 

It’s happening for one reason, and one reason only… a huge amount of backlinks have been built by webmasters from around the world, that link to this page. Want to guess what keyword phrase they’ve used when creating their links? That’s right… they’re linking the term, “Click Here,” to the specific page that is ranking in the first position!

 

As I write this, Yahoo reports that 2,927,761 links are pointing to this page.

 

This shouldn’t be taken to mean that you should abandon your on page optimization efforts, but it does reveal the power of anchor text backlinks. 

The more links you build to your pages that include your targeted keyword phrases, the more likely your pages are to rank well for the terms… it’s just that simple.

SEO Tips For Small Business Owners

seo tips small business owner

While there are a variety of ways to increase targeted website traffic, every business owner should consider optimizing their website for the search engines.

 

Instead of putting all of your eggs in one basket, it’s best to drive website traffic through several sources. This way, you can cast a wider net, resulting in more traffic, and track the efficacy of each source.

 

Before you begin, you should understand the core concepts of Search Engine Optimization (and Search Engine Marketing). In order to increase your website traffic and attract qualified prospects, you need to understand three things:

 

  1. Everything related to SEO starts with an understanding of what a “keyword phrase” is.

 

Anytime someone conducts a search on Google, or another search engine, they enter some text to start their search. In SEO terms, the entered text is called a “keyword” or “keyword phrase.”

 

If you know what keyword phrases your prospects are entering when looking for the type of information, products or services you offer, you will know what phrases to optimize your web pages for.

 

  1. Websites are not indexed or ranked by the search engines… each web page is indexed and ranked independent of any other.

 

This is commonly misunderstood but so vital to understand! Just because you have one web page that ranks really well in the search engines, that doesn’t mean that your others will also rank well.

 

Each page of your website must be uniquely optimized for a handful of keyword phrases… keyword phrases that are searched upon and those likely to attract your targeted audience.

 

If you pay close attention to the optimization of each page, you should see a dramatic improvement in terms of search engine placement.

 

  1. Like it or not, you’re competing against others!

 

Some have a harder time with this concept than others but the truth remains the truth… in order to get your web page listed on page one of Google, you have to kick one of the currently listed web page’s off!

 

This is valuable information because it will help you understand what you must do to achieve the ranking you’re after. 

 

SEO Tips For Small Business Owners – Thorough analysis of the web pages currently listed for a particular keyword phrase will tell you how hard it will be to overtake one of them. You need to pay close attention to a number of elements including: 

 

  • How well is their page optimized for the keyword phrase?

 

  • How old is their domain (the older the better)?

 

  • How many links can be found that point to the page (the more the better)?

 

While there are other elements involved, these three are of primary concern. If you find you can outdo your competitor’s web page in at least two of the three areas mentioned, you can probably kick them off the page and take their place.

 

After ensuring you are optimizing for a keyword phrase (or phrases) that are likely to bring you the kind of traffic you want, you’ll often find it is the quantity of backlinks that make the real difference.

 

SEO Tips For Small Business Owners – Of course, the quality of the backlinks is important too but if you are going to concentrate on one objective, it should be the building of links. Ensure your text links use the keyword phrases you are optimizing for and you’ll find you quickly climb the ranks of the search engines.

Website Factors That Affect SEO

Website Factors That Affect SEO

Search Engine Optimization is generally comprised of two distinctly different
activities… optimizing the website itself , referred to as “on page”
optimization, and increasing the authority of the website  in the eyes of the
search engines, referred to as “off page” optimization.

 

While both strategies must be employed for best effect, most SEO Consultants
begin with the on page optimization work before beginning their off page
optimization efforts.

 

In this article, I’ll cover some of the things that can be performed to your
website in order to increase its ability to achieve better rankings. First,
However, you must understand that each and every page of your website needs to be SEO’d. This will not pose too much difficulty if your website is rather small but if you have dozens (or hundreds) of pages, the work to be done will be substantial.

 

Here are eleven website factors that may affect your SEO:

 

Meta Title

 

Your “meta title” information is added to the page source (i.e. your website
coding). This may be done manually by your web designer or added through a
WYSIWYG editor if your site uses some form of Content Management System (aka CMS). On some dynamic platforms, the meta title is created automatically as soon as the page is published.

 

Generally speaking, your meta title should be kept relatively short (no more
than 60-80 characters) and should include the two-to-three keyword phrases you are specifically trying to optimize the page for.

 

Meta Page Description

 

Some may argue how much this affects SEO but there are other benefits to
writing a good meta page description as well. Google will only display the
first 156 characters (including spaces) of your page description so it’s best
to use that as your maximum length.

 

Your page description text should read well, include your primary keyword
phrase at minimum and be somewhat exciting. The page description will generally be shown to searchers just beneath the clickable title. If your description tells of a benefit or evokes curiosity in the reader, you will enhance your ability to get visitors.

 

Meta Keywords

 

Most will tell you that meta keywords are worthless when it comes to SEO and I would tend to agree.  However, if you are going to add meta keyword information I would recommend that you keep the amount to no more than about five terms in total.

 

It’s bad practice to add dozens of meta keywords to each page and you may
actually get penalized for doing so.

 

On Page Content

 

Your on page content should be unique to your website if at all possible and
should also include the keyword phrases you are targeting. You don’t need to
worry about the specific “keyword density” anymore as that is mostly a thing of the past but it does help to include the terms you are specifically targeting
at least once.

 

Your Web Page URL

 

If your website architecture allows you to control the name of each page, it’s
best to see that it includes your primary keyword phrase.

 

If you were targeting the term, “search engine optimization,” for example, you
might cause the url to be: domain.com/search-engine-optimization or even
domain.com/search-engine-optimization.html

 

Both examples work quite well so use whatever version is easiest for you to
achieve.

 

Your Web Design

 

You may be surprised to see “web design” included in this list but it can
affect your SEO in a variety of ways:

 

  • Your design should be attractive and professional so as to keep your
    visitors on your site as long as possible .
  • Your coding should be as “clean” as possible and should validate with
    the “W3C validation tool” whenever possible.
  • Your images and coding should be optimized so as to maximize the speed of your site. This is good for both SEO and human visitors… no one likes to needlessly wait.

 

On Page Link Text

 

As you can control your on page link text, you can increase your optimization
for a term by using the term in the text link that points to your other page. 

The gain is generally considered minimal so this should only be done sparingly and only when the keyword phrase is relatively short.

 

Links Pointing To Other Sites

 

This topic may surprise you but most SEO Consultants agree… the search
engines’ believe that no one website is the “be all, end all” authority on a
topic and therefore expect a website to link to others on the same topic.

 

Of course, there is a downside to this practice… you may find that the visitor 

leaves and never comes back. An intelligent strategy is to link to
informational only sites, like Wikipedia, that do not provide competitive
products or services.

 

Visit Duration

 

Many search engines now track how long your visitors remain on your site. The longer the average is, the more apt the search engines are to believe your site is relevant to the keyword phrase that brought them to your web page in the first place.

 

Visit Depth

 

In addition to visit duration, they can also track how many pages of your site
the visitor looked at before leaving and which specific page they exited from.

 

You can see this data for yourself when viewing your web stats and can use the data to help you improve your visitor’s experience.

 

Page Load Speed

 

I touched on this when I spoke about web design but your page load speed is
also affected by the speed of your web hosting. It may not be a major factor,
but the search engines are paying attention to how long your pages take to
load.

 

It makes sense, really. The search engines do their best to deliver the best
possible visitor experience and if your pages take forever to load, it’s easy
to conclude that many are probably irritated as a direct result.

If you address the majority of the topics contained in this article, you’ll be
on your way to well-optimized pages. With a strong SEO framework, you’ll find that your off page optimization efforts yield better, and quicker results.

Keyword Selection For Search Engine Optimization

Keyword Selection For Search Engine Optimization

Search Engine Optimization really isn’t rocket science but there is a lot to know and consider when optimizing one’s website.

 

At the forefront is the understanding of keywords/keyword phrases and what affect they have on your ability to get targeted website traffic. 

 

What is a keyword/keyword phrase anyway?

 

It’s the word, or words, that internet users are typing in when they conduct an internet search. Fortunately for us, there are a variety of tools that keep track of this incredibly valuable data.

 

With that understood, here are some tips to help you choose the right keywords for your website… keywords that will draw the specific type of visitors you are looking for.

 

Keyword tools

 

There are a variety of keyword tools, both free and paid. Unless you are an SEO professional, you’ll probably want to use the free tool provided by Google.

 

To find it, simply conduct a search on Google for the term (aka keyword phrase), “Google Keyword Tool.” As Google has done its job to optimize for this keyword phrase, you’ll find it to be the first “organic” listing on page one of the results.

 

Search Volume

 

Search volume is an indicator that tells you how many times a particular keyword phrase is searched upon. The data is “search engine specific” so you will find that the numbers differ depending on which search engine’s data you are looking at.

 

It’s important to note that Google now tracks “local” and “global” search volume separately and can even tell you how frequently someone is searching the term with a mobile device.

 

Most SEO Consultants disagree as to the accuracy of the data so you should consider the data to be more “comparative” than accurate. For example, if “keyword phrase #1” is said to get 3,000 searches per month and “keyword phrase #2” is said to get 500, it’s safe to say that keyword phrase #1 is more searched upon.

 

Competition

 

It’s vital to remember that most search engines only show ten “organic” listings on any page of the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages). Because of this, you are competing with the websites/web pages that are already ranked for the keyword phrase(s) you have chosen.

 

In order to get your web page listed on “page one” for a particular keyword phrase, you are going to have to outperform one of your competitors.

 

There are many factors to consider when gauging competition but the main ones include:

 

  • On-page Optimization – In other words, how well have they optimized their page around the keyword phrase(s) they are ranking for.
  • Age of the domain – Generally speaking, the older the domain, the better.
  • Domain extension – Although you can improve the SEO of any website, those with a .com, .org, .net, .edu, .gov or a country specific domain tend to rank better than those with other extensions.
  • Inbound links – The amount of links the page has from other websites as well as those coming from other pages of the site itself.

 

Keyword Selection For Search Engine Optimization – Intent

 

Before finalizing your keyword list, it’s best to see if you can get into the mind of the person conducting the search. While your keyword research will tell you what keyword phrases are being searched upon, do you really know what they are looking for?

 

Keyword Selection For Search Engine Optimization – Here’s a real-world example:

 

Let’s say I wrote a book on emergency first aid and CPR and am looking for keyword phrases to promote my book. During my keyword research I find that the keyword phrase, “how to save a life,” is searched more than 40,000 times per month. I get excited because this phrase seems perfect for promoting my new book. But is it?

 

I dig a little deeper and find that this phrase will be meaningless for me. Why? It’s because the average searcher isn’t looking to actually save a life, they’re looking for information (lyrics, the music itself) for the song, “How To Save A Life” by The Fray!

 

The search volume is great, but the intentionality of the search is different than what it appears on the surface.

 

Keyword research is paramount to Search Engine Optimization and the ability to increase targeted website traffic. It’s best to avoid rushing in as this is the foundation for which all other SEO tactics will be built upon.