Search Engine Optimization

How To Get Top Ranking In Google – Google Ranking Factors

Little is known about the index Google uses to rank their sites according and the sheer magnitude of the ranking factors is very intimidating especially for beginners. Some factors are a must have while others might not make much of a difference. Many that you don’t have influence directly and may be the reason behind your ever slugging site. For SEO Company high ranking should be first priority when it comes to online venture – you need to be ahead of others. Google mission is to organize information across the world and make it universally accessible and useful. This means that for your site to succeed in this ever-growing industry you have to keep up with their updates.

The list below is a combination of my own personal experience, experimentation, reliable sources and case studies from sites that are ranking best with a 4 star rating. The main factors include links, back brain and content.

Keywords – include keywords in your title tag to increase your SEO ranking; it makes your SEO signal stronger. Remember that keywords on the beginning of a title tag perform better than those keywords at the end. Although it doesn’t make any difference, keywords on the Meta description tag are equally important. Including your keywords on the H1 tag is a good practice and a relevance factor that acts as a description of the pages content. Do not stuff your page with keywords as it may affect your search ranking. Keyword density is used by Google to determine the topic of a webpage. Also, including LSI keywords in title pages and content will help Google discern synonyms and rank your site better- you don’t want to miss on that. Make sure you place your keywords on the first 100 words of your content and keep them in the same order.

Content – your content needs to align with the Google’s mission to rank well. How accessible and useful it is should be your main objective. To achieve this knowledge about page optimization, SEO rules and basics are highly important. Some SEO rules are proven; some are speculations while others are controversial. Google algorithm prefers freshly updated content, so update at least once in every 12 months. Avoid duplicating content and write original copies for each page as having similar content across your site can hurt your rankings. Use a canonical tag to differentiate URLs with similar content to tell Google that one URL is equal to the other. Lastly, make sure that the length of your content is long enough, authoritative and informative to ensure that you cover all aspects of your topic. If you don’t have a content manager hire one- your site’s content is your site’s life.

Links – linking to authoritative pages sends trust signals to the search engines as it will enable the user to go to the other site and learn more. However, too many outbound links can diminish the page ranking which will alternatively hurt its search visibility. Interlinking your pages to pass strength between them. Focus on increasing your contextual links as links on the content matter more than links on the side bar. Highlight your links with a different color and font. Do not have diverse links as too many links maybe a spam indicator and affect your ranking negatively. If your site has a low authority, link to high authority pages to promote your domain.

Competitive Analysis – Always remember that; ranking is a competition, you only climb to the top by outdoing others. Doing SEO competitive analysis will give you an insight and ability to create a baseline that will enable you to track the progress of your rankings and background information to analyze your competitors. Competitive analysis will give you a clear picture of where you stand in relation to others and generate ideas on how to lead the pack. Keep track of your competitors smallest moves that can mean a big difference to make sure that you remain competitive and win. It’s of critical importance to analyze why your competition may be gaining on you and what you can do to pull ahead. Some of the most important and effective analysis include; Back link analysis, Traffic analysis, Keyword ranking analysis, Online brand presence analysis, Website domain history analysis, Content analysis, Website architecture analysis, Visitor demographic break down analysis, Social links analysis, Conversion tracking analysis, Social signals analysis and Structured data analysis.

Web Loading Speed – This year Google will be updating the page speed ranking factor to specifically look at the page speed of your mobile pages when it comes to the mobile-friendly algorithm. This means that Google’s main goal is to make page loading speed to be not only desktop dependent but also mobile dependent. Optimize your loading speed, you don’t what your visitors to get impatient and leave before you have a chance to tell them how great you are.  A site with web pages that load fast leads to good UX (also known as user experience) and a substantial UX results to higher conversion rates. on the contrary, a website page that loads too slow is penalized by search engines and can affect your ranking, may it be on a desktop or mobile devices. Google compares your website against your opponents on a particular segment and rewards yours if it’s the fastest. However, be cautious that marks aren’t given separately: it considers the country, network, or device.

Other relevant factors include ;user experience, speed, site map and location and domain factors that include- ensuring exact domain match, keywords in domain, keyword in sub domain, domain age, domain registration date, domain renewal date and domain history.

Top 7 SEO Trends to Implement in the Year 2017

SEO Trends

Google, the giant in the world of search engines and other major search engines have always emphasized the essentials of user-experience as well as mobile-based search results. In the year of 2017, we, most of the people, especially who are in digital marketing and Search Engine Optimization set to watch more effective SEO trends. With Google and other major search engines focusing its effort on the advancement in AI i.e. Artificial Intelligence and the enhancement in contextual search, we are hoping to see more outcomes served based on the user-intent.

Latest SEO Trends for better ranking 

The below discussed trends in SEO would surely help you better to make decision as well a changes to adopt to your existing strategy in SEO in the year 2017. Let us have a look the top seven search engine optimization trends to implement in this year, which you should never miss.

1. Better Optimization from Searchers’ Perspective – If you are an SEO specialist, then you must know the benefits of optimization on user or searcher perspective. As per the Humming bird updates, Google generally likes those content and relevant data that uses or searchers like to search. It is true that the content you post on your website or blog should be good in terms of quality and standard, but at the end of the day, your searchers and their queries are the concern.

2. Optimization for Image and Video Content – When you are optimizing the entire website, you certainly not miss optimizing the video as well as image content. As an SEO, you must know that images and videos are some of the major parts in your entire SEO strategy and you need to look after them as you look after other things while doing a strong SEO plan for your website or blog.

3. Google’s Accelerate Mobile Page – Google’s accelerated mobile page often called Google’s AMP, one of the most important things that most of the digital marketing specialists believe. Google’s is giving additional priority to this only. If your website or blog not connected or verified with AMP, then you should do it immediately. If you do not know where to do it, you can visit Google’s Webmaster tool and you will get to see there.

4. Google’s Markup of Structured Data – If you do follow the Humming bird or Penguin update, then you must know that Google has given extra priority on markup and structured data, which is one of the most important things as well.

5. Speedy Mobile Index – Test your website or blog seep or loading time. There are many software or online applications available by which you can get the speed time or loading time of your website or blog. If your website or blog takes more than 4 seconds to load on the browsers then talk to your developer team to do the necessary things.

6. Speedy Voice Search – With the rapid development of AI (Artificial Intelligence) and rank brain more emphasis will be provided to voice search by Google, so keep updating it for better search rankings.

7. Google’s Featured Snippets & Answer Box – Search engines’ main concern is to provide best of the best user-experience and Google is not an exception. The question and answer type sentences or content would get more priority by Google’s snippets search, for instance “Most of the people believe” etc.

The above described some important, yet effective SEO trends or tips for 2017 can give you a smart boost in search engines, especially on Google. With the help of the trends or tips mentioned above, you can design your own SEO plan that will surely help you gain the upper-hand over your organization’s business and make more competitive in 2017.

How to use voice in SEO as web designing company do!

Voice search is looking like the next big thing. Google states 55% of teens and 41% of adults use voice search daily. It is growing, faster, hands-free, allows multi-tasking. Chat has become reliable. Google says the future is to have mobile assistants that understand speech. With voice context and conversational search has become more important. How does it affect SEO?

Since context and conversational search has become more important There is a need to incorporate voice search strategy in websites. Means using excellent content that is written in a conversational tone. Understanding people will type a query and people will ask a question needs to be kept in mind. Voice search has different things doing research or quick answers with instant results. Both need to be kept in the SEO mind frame of the voice enabled website.

Short tail keywords will become less relevant and focus on more conversational long tail keywords will emerge. Use of add-on that helps search engines understands the context of content meaning better ranking in normal search, making it more relevant invoice search queries. Sitemaps need to be made readable so visitors can search websites in the voice it needs to be highly organized allowing a good efficient search. Voice search asks questions like “Who,” “What,” “Where,” “When,” “Why,” and “How,” and want answers. FAQs page will help give good searchable content on these. Keyword research tools like Rank Tracker can be used to autocomplete queries.

We grew up in an age where technology was not able to talk back and some may still have a stigma associated with talking your phone rather than another human on the other side. Hesitation among younger groups is less they are more ”tech savvy” and asking questions into voice search is easy for them. Some may ask for directions, helps them with homework, even use it in the company of others.

You need to be in expert web design company in Mumbai with hands to make your website SEO friendly in terms of voice. I would suggest an expert player in the business like Apex Infotech India to help you with your SEO needs in this regard. Voice search is rising – it would be foolish to ignore the trend in terms of SEO. It is time to start thinking about this frame of mind not linearly of only text-based queries. We need to start using and optimizing for voice search – the future is conversational!

Four-Point Success Plan for SEO Strategists in 2017

SSL Certificates Explained – Everything You Need to Know for Your Website

What Is an SSL Certificate?

An SSL (Secure Socket Layer) certificate provides a method of encrypting data as it travels across the Internet to ensure the information cannot be intercepted for malicious purposes.

You can tell if a website has an SSL certificate by looking at the address bar of your browser. If the website has an SSL certificate, the URL in your address bar will begin with HTTPS, not HTTP. That extra “s” stands for “secure.” Most browsers will also show a “Lock” icon indicating that the connection is encrypted.

Do I Need an SSL Certificate?

You definitely need an SSL certificate if you have an e-commerce website or transmit any kind of sensitive information. More specifically, you should get an SSL certificate installed and connection encrypted if your website:

• Has user authentication (passwords and logins) to allow access to restricted information.

• Processes financial information (online orders, credit card numbers, bank accounts, etc.).

• Transfers or stores sensitive data: social security numbers, IDs, birth dates, license numbers, etc.

• Works with any kind of medical or legal information.

• Contains any kind of restricted proprietary or confidential information, legal documents, contracts, client lists, etc.

Where Can I Get an SSL Certificate?

Your hosting provider should be able to assist you in obtaining an SSL certificate. First, you need to purchase the certificate from a trusted vendor. Your web developer or hosting provider can order it for you, or they can refer you to a source. Typically, there is an annual fee to obtain a certificate, and the SSL-issuing authority may have to verify your identity (or the identity of your business) before issuing the certificate.

The new Google reCAPTCHA

Do you hate CAPTCHAs? Me too! As someone who uses technology on a daily basis, I can’t tell you how irritating it can be to not only not be able to enter the CAPTCHA correctly. The truth is that using CAPTCHAs has been studied, and it does have an adverse affect on your conversion rate. People will try a couple times and then leave your site if they can’t get through the CAPTCHA. But how do you control the influx of spam on your site if you don’t use one? The struggle is real.

I use Gravity Forms that integrate with Akismet, and I haven’t had a problem with spam on my forms for a long time. However, if you are looking for alternatives, Google has introduced an invisible reCAPTCHA.

How does it work?

If you aren’t using the Google reCAPTCHA yet, you’ll need to sign up.  It’s really simple, and you can do it using your existing Google account. Then, you can add the Invisible reCaptcha for WordPress plugin to your site. You’ll have to configure it with your Google keys you get when you register with Google. The plugin gives you options about where you want to incorporate the invisible reCAPTCHA.

The power of hashtags

2017 is here and as expected, #hashtags continue to be incredibly popular, we couldn’t be more excited! Today you don’t have to be a dedicated social media user to be exposed to hashtags. More often than not, hashtags can now be found in restaurants on menus, on TV and radio talk shows and even regional and national news now promote the use of hashtags – They’re literally everywhere!

With a #throwback to the early days of Twitter in 2006, hashtags have quickly dominated advertising and contemporary culture – but what does this mean for your business?

CONNECTIVITY, AWARENESS & PLAIN OLD QUIRKINESS

Hashtags act like a “doorway”, allowing businesses to communicate with target audiences in an exciting and fresh manner. With hashtags you can tap into lifestyles, cultures, and the latest consumer trends. You can also become a member of virtual communities, taking part in conversations to further understand your audience, something which also undoubtedly helps your business to stay relevant! When combined with an inbound link, hashtags can even increase your referral traffic – In fact, hashtags are a fantastic tool for getting your content seen!

The benefits don’t just end there either. The simple yet quirky symbol provides you with the potential to address new demographics and cultural groups. What’s more, over time, you can even create your own unique hashtags to really establish your online presence!

Being Hashtag Savvy

Clearly hashtags are a nifty little tool but knowing how to use them effectively is crucial. So, to help you get the most out of your campaigns, we’ve put together three top tips!

1. Relevancy: Choose hashtags relevant to your business and audience. Whilst broad hashtags bring in engagements, keyword specific hashtags will gain you meaningful interactions.
2. Understand the Platform: Whilst it’s commonplace to use 20+ hashtags on Instagram, on Twitter less is more. In fact, excessive hashtags can be damaging, attracting accounts which focus purely on #FollowBacks. Twitter recommends no more than 2 hashtags per Tweet as best practice.
3. Short & Sweet: Finally, no-one wants to type out long phrases, we’re all busy bees y’know? So keep your hashtags short and specific! After all, they’re supposed to make engagement easier!

Your Website Security

Keeping up with SEO

Having a successful business website can make or break a company. Whether it is a new startup or an established business turning to the internet to expand their markets, your website will be the first thing that many of your future customers will see. It stands to reason that your website needs to be modern, clean and informative to make it convenient to use. If a potential customer can’t find the information he or she needs quickly, they will move on.

Once you have your website, however, getting those potential customers to visit is the first big challenge your company will face. As many equipped SEO Sydney experts would know, search engines, such as Google and Bing, use a constantly evolving algorithm to determine how valuable a page is within the parameters of an online search. These algorithms judge websites based on variables as diverse as content, links and traffic – among others – to determine the ranking of websites for different search criteria.

Additionally, the algorithms are different depending on what kind of device the search is being conducted from. Searches done from mobile devices, like phones and tablets, use a modified version of the standard algorithm to give better local results. This can be a factor for businesses that are trying to appeal in a more general fashion than companies that are targeting mobile users.

The mobile conundrum

The weight that the current algorithms give mobile websites is having an effect on business websites. If your current website is not mobile-friendly, you are losing customers. Mobile websites, on the other hand, do not usually have the depth and options that can be found on traditional websites. Mobile users like there information in digestible, screen-size chunks which are not ideal for computer users.

Finding the correct balance is challenging, especially since there is little hard information available on how much mobile websites are weighted in the algorithms. This lack of information can be frustrating for business owners, but there is a very good reason the parameters of the algorithm are kept hidden.

Keeping the ‘Black Hats’ at bay

If everyone knows the parameters of the specific algorithm they could create websites that are perfect examples of what the search engine is looking for. Although this sounds like a good idea, the truth of the matter is that it would make it very easy for immoral users to tweak their websites to get hits on search queries that have nothing to do with their websites.

Back in the good old days – about a decade ago – this was common practice among spam websites to get disproportionate page hits. At the time, search engines were cruder and searches revolved around keywords. The more keywords a page had – valuable or not – the more likely it was to appear in search results. To cut down on these websites, search engines became more sophisticated.

Working the system

As the search engines became more sophisticated and secretive, an entire industry has sprung up to support businesses that need to have a strong internet presence to sell their products. Search engine optimization has come a long way since the days of keyword stuffing, but in many ways practitioners are making more guesses – albeit educated ones – than they ever have.

Google, for example, updated there algorithm over 500 times in 2016. The vast majority of these updates were minor, but there were over a dozen major updates. Each update changed the algorithm. Even minor changes can have a large impact on how search engines “see” your website. SEO experts test and tweak websites and determine how and why the search engine was changed and make the adjustments on their websites to keep or improve their ranking.

That leaves business owners in the unenviable position of being forced to either outsource their websites, create an internal department to maintain their internet ranking or just give up. The first two options have advantages and disadvantages, but giving up on SEO efforts will result in your business losing customers and money to other, more tech-savvy companies.

What is a tag?

Since you landed on this post, you probably have heard the term – “tag.” But, you don’t have a complete grasp of its use case and importance. The tag is simply a type of Metadata assigned periodically to a piece of information that makes it easy for the users to scan through a particular content by searching through it. The concept of tagging can also be grabbed from the lights of social media giant – Facebook where you can simply tag people according to the photos and events. Simply take; it’s a process of classifying or levying ownership on any form of information like images, words, and digital products.

Historical Background of Tag:

The early deployment of tags was made through internet databases where it was used by users to find content. However, the word tag came to popularity with the amendment of web 2.0 on the internet and is still a vital part of many web 2.0 services. In 2003, the social bookmarking site Delicious used the tag functions on their bookmarks to help users find their bookmarks later. At this point of time, SEO was a mysterious and big thing. So, this system got skyrocketed by this easy function. Similarly, Flickr – A photography community also used this feature that let users add their own text tags which made the photos highly searchable. Tags may not be the real classic way of organisation but it does offer number of ways to classify an item. This is what made it widely popular in no time.

Types of Tags

• Triple Tags: A tag that uses a special syntax for meaningful interpretation. Used mainly on social bookmarking sites & photography sites.
• Hash Tags: Mostly popular on social media like Facebook and Twitter. It makes the news viral and easily accessible.
• Knowledge tags: It captures knowledge from the digital resource in the form of tags.

Why are tags the fundamental approach for classifying your items?

Flexibility:

When it comes to organisation, maintaining a hierarchical structure based upon the location is the opted idea. However, having a single location system hinders the classification methodology. This is where tags play an important role. It offers great flexibility in terms of classification without having to worry about the structure. You can create as many tags as possible without any limitation making it one of the vital options for item organisation.

Makes content highly accessible:

Tags along with categories make the search program relatively easy for users if they are working on a huge system. Although category and tags are different in many ways but it both functions on making content highly searchable. If you have given 4-5 tags for a particular content that describes it well. You can easily search through it by tags making it easily accessible. Readers can simply browse through their favourite topic of interest with the help of tags.

Builds authority on social bookmarking sites:

If you look beside classification, the other thing that tags help to do is build authority on social bookmarking sites. Although these type of sites have a reduced value these days, but it does have the power to get a small business website rank. If you have a powerful social bookmarking account, the juice passed through it does help in SEO. And, adding tags is one way to build authority to social bookmarking sites. There are a ton of users using these sites. So, you can also steal decent traffic to your website through these websites.

When and how to use tags:

Tags are mostly used on digital products like digital photographs, address books, web pages, taxonomies, and social media. The easiest way to use tags is by opting for software that supports the website configuration. If you are using CMS like WordPress, writing tags become a breeze.