5 Most Crucial Technical SEO Elements

When it comes to search engine optimisation, what plays into our minds are Off-page and On-page SEO.

But What about Technical SEO?

Technical SEO has been really underrated by so many SEOs particularly beginners.

It is generally understood that once the On-page SEO has been done, Technical SEO is covered.

This isn't true. This article exposes why Technical SEO is very vital and the most crucial Technical SEO Element that needs focus.

What is Technical SEO?

Technical search engine optimization refers to all of the SEO efforts (with the exception of content optimization and link building) that is done to improve the crawling and indexing of your website on search engines.

Put it like this Technical SEO lays the foundation that provides your content and links with the high-quality feasible environment to appear on search engines without any problems.

5 Most Crucial Technical SEO Elements

1. Website speed

How long does your website loads?

Speed plays a huge role in website appearance on SERP. It is expected that within the first two seconds of clicking your website links, it should have loaded.

If this is not the case here are a few hints to make your website load time faster

Use Simple Templates

Limit the activities of your website and make your templates simple. In the case of templates and designs, there is one essential thing to remember: “less is good.”.

The more element on your page, the longer your users must wait, and you higher now not cause them to wait longer than three seconds.

Remove all unnecessary widget and plugins as well as optimise codes to help reduce your website load time. Any additional elements of your layouts — plugins, widgets, monitoring codes — that causes extra load time. This also includes codes that need to be optimized

Optimize visuals

Make your images sharp by adjusting their sizes effectively. However, limit the size to the necessary minimum due to the fact that huge photos are very heavy and can strongly affect your loading time.

Limit redirects

Multiple redirects affect your page load pace negatively, too. The more redirects mounted on one web page, the longer your audience will have to wait. This is why you ought to constantly try to reduce the number of redirects and make sure you have a single redirect on a web page.

In the case of 404 error pages, while a “page no longer found” error can't be prevented, ensure that you provide you with a custom one. Design it in a user-friendly and humorous manner to at least entertain your visitors and manual drive them to your home-page or any other popular page on your website your website.

Some of the causes of 404 error can be;    The page has been moved or removed. All these eventualities call for you to make use of 301 redirects. If the page can’t be redirected to any existing or related useful resource, create a custom 404 errors page that could mitigate the situation.

Error pages may be found in Google Search Console. Go to “crawl,” then “crawl mistakes” to discover the “URL errors” report, that is divided into the computing device, telephone, and function phone categories.

Browsers cache

The browser cache store website sources robotically on a local browser when a user visits your website. This is because your browser “recollects” the first website version cashed and then is capable of loading it very fast while the website and return back to it. This considerably improves the webpage load time for returning site visitors.

Leverage the browser cache and set it in line with your wishes.

2. Mobile friendliness

Mobile friendliness is another important aspect of technical SEO, and it holds the same importance as website speed.

In April 2015 while Google rolled out the algorithm which expert popularly called “Mobilegeddon”. Mobilegeddon, derived from Armageddon, has a huge impact on the way Google ranks websites in the search outcomes. It literally ended the computer technology and started out the new technology of mobile search.

From that day ahead, being mobile friendliness has played a key component on one’s website display in mobile search, especially for local businesses.

Use tools like Pingdom and Gtmetrix to check out your mobile friendliness.

Read also: How to rank faster with Local SEO

3. Site structure

Another critical factor of technical search engine optimization is a website structure. When it comes to this aspect we focus on,

HTTPS

The right web page architecture begins with choosing an appropriate hypertext transfer protocol. In this example, there is only one SEO pleasant preference. You have to truly use the more secure protocol – HTTPS.

On the sixth August 2014, Google announced that HTTPS is blanketed on their ranking factors list. And that’s an extraordinary occasion as many of Google’s ranking factors are commonly saved secret, and all of the sources that comprise them are based totally on assumptions and the webmaster’s personal (independent) analysis.

So having your website on HTTPS:// will give you a ranking chance. Although it’s not possible to say what effect HTTPS has completely, it’s better to comply with all search engine necessities to maximise your ranking possibilities.

Additionally, HTTPS also brings some different blessings associated with web site analytics. In Google Analytics, the referrer info can most effective be viewed if you use HTTPS. Sites with the HTTP protocol could have the referrer date protected under “Direct” visitors source – without any information designated apart from numbers. This takes place because without the security protocol it’s impossible to become aware of where the site visitors come from.

Breadcrumbs

Another critical part of an SEO website structure is breadcrumbs.

A breadcrumb is a kind of navigation that helps users move around a website. The name itself comes from the Hansel and Gretel fairy tale.

Breadcrumbs navigation reduces the number of movements a user has to take if he needs to head back to the homepage, or visit another unique page.

Breadcrumbs are generally used by big websites that have a comprehensive hierarchy and plenty of unique sections that demand a clear structure. They’re in particular encouraged for e-commerce websites that provide much extraordinary merchandise.

URL shape

The last on the least for site architecture is to introduce a user-friendly, clean and regular URL structure. The URL is a readable text that serves to replace IPs – the numbers that computers use to become aware of particular assets. URLs describe the web page both for users and search engines like google and yahoo.

If you optimize them properly for search engine marketing, they may also act as a ranking thing. So take into account to make them descriptive and as brief as feasible. Ideally, a person has to recognize what is included underneath a selected link before he clicks on it, just with the aid of checking the URL.

Add a focused keyword by using a given web page. If you put into effect the key-word into all of the important page links, you will give a boost to the relevancy of the complete page and assist search engines like google and yahoo to classify it on SERP.

Also, words on your URLs should be separated with hyphens. However, it’s better to minimize the amount of the words for your URLs – don't make it longer than 60 characters.

Make use of robot.Txt document and sitemap to clearly define your site architecture by submitting it to search console for crawling and indexing of your pages.

Internal links – Silo content

Finally, it's time for internal linking.

Internal hyperlinks are important for improving the visibility of your older articles which can be related to the newly published one's articles.

You should categorize the website content and continually link to the pages within one category. Doing so will make certain that users can dig in and glide among resources in your website and find out more aspect of the specific subject matter on specific pages.

Read Also: The Two Essential Elements Of SEO

4. Structured Data Markup

Another technical SEO technique is Structured Data also known as Rich Snippets.

Though Google can perceive the type of content on your website by crawling it and looking at your on-page optimisation, Rich Snippet, however, conveys the contents to search engines better.

What are rich snippets? Rich snippet gives you a wealthy information of the search query made on search engines. The information is given ranges from the ratings to the reviews made about the search query.

To get started with a structured markup, you need to add the markup to schema.org. Schema.Org will only ask that you supply the accurate description of your content to assist Google to categorize your web page extra speedily.

To do these is pretty easy.

For WordPress users,  All you need to do is add the schema.Org plugin to their CMS and activate it. It’ll be equipped help apply structured data properly.

 For those not using WordPress, see if your CMS as a plugin for it, if not use Google markup helper to manual add your structured data by adding missing tag it, then click on the red "create HTML" button and then copy the code and paste it on the page.

Once this is done to validate your code using the structured data testing device by Google. This is usually recommended whether you generate rich snippets using Google or schema.Org.

5. Canonical URL

Technical search engine optimization often helps us avoid website errors and one of these errors is Duplicate content.

This is a very big issue and I advise you should avoid it by all means.

Here is why; In 2011 Google updated its set of Panda rules and one of these rules focused on quality and unique content, thus the algorithm was set to fight website with low quality and duplicate content by penalizing them.

Use the search console to check your website if it has any issues pertaining to your content.

But in the case you have duplicated content on your website, let say to pages are alike, I advise you delete it entirely or you write the content to make it different from the original.

If you can't, this is where Canonical URL comes in.

Canonical links or tags as it is usually called help resolve duplicate issues by informing search engines what the source of the original content is.

Conclusion

Technical search engine marketing is unending. It covers a wide range of topics regarding the factors needed for optimizing in keeping with the necessities engines like Google impose. We are not capable of exhausting the subject nowadays, however, we are hoping this brief review of the foremost troubles will suffice for now.

White Hat Techniques for SEO Best Practice - Digitaltims

How do you get your website to rank on SERP without fear of being penalized?

The answer is simple - performing White hat techniques for SEO.

Search engines especially Google takes user friendliness very seriously and thus they regularly update their search algorithms to ensure they provide the best results to users queries.

The algorithms don’t just provide the best result for users query, they are also used to clamp down on websites that practice Unethical SEO popularly referred to as “Black Hat SEO.”

In this article, we will be looking at ethical ways to carry out SEO on our website without triggering the wrath of search engines.

What is White Hat SEO

In search engine optimization (SEO) terminology, white hat SEO refers to the usage of optimization strategies, techniques and tactics that focus on a human audience opposed to search engines and completely follows search engine rules and policies.

For example, a website that is optimized for search engines, yet focuses on relevancy and organic ranking is considered to be optimized using White techniques for SEO. Some examples of White Hat SEO techniques include using keywords and keyword analysis, backlinking, link building to improve link popularity, and writing content for human readers.

White Hat SEO is more frequently used by those who intend to make a long-term investment on their website. It is also referred to as an Ethical SEO.

Read Also:
Common SEO Mistakes Blogger do
How to Sell with Inbound Marketing

How to Do White Hat Techniques for SEO

When doing your SEO for either an e-commerce site, blog or a company's website, there are 3 areas you will need to focus.

• On-site SEO
• Technical SEO
• Off-site SEO

Let us look into them.

On-site SEO

This is a  White Hat technique for SEO that focuses on the structure of your website. Its main aim is to ensure that your site is user-friendly and search engine friendly.

It practices include;

• Title and Meta description optimisation
• Url structure
• Website Navigation
• Readability
• Image Optimisation
• Mobile Friendliness
• Website Speeds
• Quality Contents

Title and Meta Description:

Whether for an article on your website or for the website itself, your title and meta description as its own role to play in search engine rankings.

For best practices, the title of your content should carry the H1 header tag with your targeted keywords in it.

Meta- description is the few texts that appear below your content title when it appears on the search engine first page see the image below.

meta-description tells your audience what they should expect from your content.

Naturally, search engines scoop out meta descriptions from the first few sentences of your content.

However, we advise you create your own meta-description yourself. While you do this ensure;

• your target keywords are within the meta description
• it should not be more than 30 words.
• make it more compelling to attract a click

URL Structure: 

URL structure refers to the arrangement of your content address link as you can see in the image below.

When you create your content make sure you also work on it Url. Search engines start crawling a website content from the URL address and if your URL is not properly optimised you lose an opportunity to further convince search engines to increase your rankings.

To take advantage of URL structure in SEO do the following:

• include your target keywords in your URL
• use a hyphen to separate words
• make your URL memorable

Navigation: 

Your website navigation also matters. Search engine crawler thinks like humans and thus take a friendly website seriously. Visitor on your site should be able to move from one page to another and return back without any difficulty.

One navigation function that most people prefer to use is called“breadcrumbs”.

Breadcrumbs navigation which is derived from the Hansel and Gretel novel helps users easily navigate a website without any form of confusion.  From the image below, you can see how the little arrow shows the direction from which a user
has navigated on the website and how it makes it easy to locate their way back.

Readability: 

Search engines like Google read text using crawlers and because they are now not real people going through styled texts, a more satisfactory approach is to make search crawlers understand the context of your HTML textual content.

below are some recommendations;

• Make use of h1 tags on the homepage
• H2 and h3 tags should be used topically in your articles;
• Format texts with a description in italics.
• make use of bullet points when necessary.
• make use of the bold, italic attribute when necessary
• Ensure you use indents for quotations

Image Optimisation:

Optimising pictures on your web page makes search engines like google crawlers capable of reading or finding it. It's very difficult for search engines crawlers to examine an image on a website. When an image that isn't optimised is crawled, search engine sees a big space in between text and will determine that such content was not nicely arranged and therefore would possibly reduce your web page ranking or even see such content as irrelevant.

To resolve this Issue, ensure you make use of;

Title tags: this should be related to your content.

Alt tag: this attribute makes search engine crawlers read your image as text. The alt tag should be the same as the content title.

Images also contribute to slowing down your website speed and thus you need to also optimise it by reducing the size.

Mobile Friendliness: 

Most people access the internet using their mobile phone. According to Google - users spend 177 minutes on the internet using their using their mobile phones - For you to take advantage of this, your website needs to be responsive to all screen size, particularly mobile devices.

Also, mobile friendliness is now at the core front of Google search engine result when it comes to Seo. If you are going to design your website from scratch, ensure you notify the web developer to make the website mobile friendly. If you are using WordPress or blogger search for a template that is mobile friendly and responsive.

Website Speed: 

One of the major ranking factors apart from the ones mentioned above is your website speed.

Imagine you searched for something online and then the first website link that pops up from the result spent more than 1 minute to load, how will you feel?
Disappointed right? True

It the same way search engine crawlers feels when they check your website speed and it does take time to load. A slow loading website not only loses SEO benefits but also customers.

A lot of things can affect your website speed.

• Your website host - use Bluehost, GoDaddy and Hostgator for best performance.
• Javascript - minify complex javascript
• Images - optimise images
• And some HTML codes - minify complex HTML codes.

To test your website speed use Google's page speed or for better result go for Pingdom

Quality content: 

What ranks more? Quality contents or lengthy content? This has been a debate among bloggers, but the truth remains that quality content beats it.

Creating relevant and quality content is the most important factor when it comes to SEO. It is the bedrock of your website and also the determinant for search engine ranking.

Search engine crawlers dislike plagiarism and spelling errors. That is why when creating a blog post, you must be extra careful. Cross check or proofread your work before publishing as simple wrong spellings can affect your SEO negatively.

You want to read this:
Rank Faster with Local SEO
The Two Essential Element of SEO

Technical SEO

This is usually considered the foundation of your White Hat techniques for SEO. Technical SEO is the techniques you perform on your website to enables search engines to crawl and index your website to make it visible on search engines.

They are the first steps to getting found on Search engines.

This is how it is done:

Submit your website to Search Engines: The first step after building your website is to let search engines know that it is available. To do this submit your website to Google, Bing and other available search engines.

It is also of best practice to submit each page of your website to search engines individually.

Submit a Sitemap: Once you have submitted your website to the search engine webmasters. You need to give them access to all your pages and content for crawling and indexing. To do this create a sitemap and submit it to the search engine webmaster

Create a Robot.txt: There might be some pages you don't intend to crawl on your website. A robot.txt helps tell webmasters and search engine how to crawl your website and what pages need to be indexed.

Create a 404 Error page: 404 error pages are is a user-friendly page that appears when readers try to access a page that doesn't exist or has been deleted. For search crawlers, 404 error pages notify them that a particular page is not available on your website.

If you have deleted several posts on your blog or website before, note that these pages might still be indexed by search engines and will still be crawled, without a 404 error page, crawlers will see your website as lacking structure and thus not user-friendly.

The negative result will be taking you off search engines rank pages. To create a 404 error page is easy.

For bloggers, download templates that automatically comes with a well structured 404 error page. Just search for it on Google or you head over to your blogger dashboard

• Go to settings
• Select search preferences
• Under the "error and redirection," you will see "custom page not found"'
• Edit it using HTML tag and voila your 404 error page has been created.

For WordPress users, the Yoast SEO plugin comes with a 404 error inbuilt feature.

Off Page SEO

When it comes to off page SEO, we are basically talking about using social signal to help boost our SEO.

If you have ever noticed, there are sometimes you search for something on Google and the result is a link from either facebook or twitter or other social media platform that redirects to the main website...

So let us get started.....

When it comes to off page SEO, put the 3 points below in mind.

• Backlink building
• Social Media
• Social Bookmarking

Backlink Building: To be fair and square backlink building is the most difficult part of search engine optimisation, yet it is the fastest way to sky-rocket to the front page of search engines.

A research carried out by Backlinko last year revealed that link building has more impact on SEO than any other factor. In fact, Google named it has their top 3 ranking factor for search engine result page (SERP).

However, when it comes to link building several factors need to be considered;

• · Quality of the link
• · Authority of the page or site that is backlinking you
• · Site relevance
• · "no-follow" and "do-follow": "NoFollow" links are not recognized by search engines but "do-follow" is.

Now that you have these factors in mind, how do we get backlinks? follow these simple tricks

• Share your post on forums: share your post on several forums with a link back to the main article. just drop a snippet of your post and redirect readers to finish reading it by clicking the link to the main article. Places like Quora, Medium and Reddit are strong places to get backlinks

• Notify your fellow bloggers in your niche let them know you have written an interesting article, email them with your link.

• Ping: Pinging is another way to get backlinks. there are several tools to aid you to ping. For blogger users, Feedburner automatically pings out your link to notify indexing site. Another tool you can use is Pingbomb.

You can get a concrete detail of backlink building here


Social Media: Of course you don't have to be told that once you have created a nice article, the first place to share it is on social media. There was a time social media wasn't considered as a factor for SEO. But now the amount of shares, likes, retweets and the referral links it sends to your website notifies search engine crawlers that the website is relevant and engaging and thus can boost your search engine ranking in a way you can never imagine.

Ensure to share your articles on Google+, Facebook pages, Facebook groups, Twitter, Linkedin, and Pinterest.

You can also decide to run a promotion for the article you have written using Facebook ads.

Let us move to the last one

Social Bookmarking:

Social bookmarking is another off-page SEO practice that boosts search engine rankings. If you regularly create relevant, interesting and quality post, people will want to bookmark your website so as to get notified when there is an update from you.

They are online bookmarking site tools where readers can add a website the want update from regularly. Search engine bots usually crawl these tools to see how relevant a website link is. This is possible because of cookies. Through the use of cookies, crawlers are able to monitor readers behaviour online and when they notice that several people bookmarked a particular website then they notify search engines to push that link up to the first page.

An example of a bookmarking site and the most popular of them all is Mix, Digg.

Now how do you ensure your website is bookmarked? follow these guidelines...

• Create relevantly and quality content
• Make accounts on bookmarking sites. There are lots of them
• Email your subscribers to also bookmark your website.

Conclusion

SEO is a big part of being visible online especially on Google. The reason is not far fetched. When people want something or need information, the first thing that comes to their mind is "Google it".

Being visible on search engine simply means getting found on the first page of Google when people search for a keyword that is related to your business and your competitors.

In this article, I have shared the best practices of White hat techniques for SEO

How to Sell With Inbound Marketing

Over the past decade, marketing methodology has been transforming, giving marketers new and convenient ways to find customers without too much hassle and money spending.

This new convenient way is what marketers today call 'Inbound Marketing'. 

An offering of the digital age to marketers to be able attracts or appeal to consumers instinct through content creation.

Unlike the old ways of marketing, marketers had to spend money buying advert,  email listing just to generate leads they would convert to customers. 

Thing is these customers weren't paying attention to them. 

Inbound marketing helps marketers to find consumers by consistently creating and promoting content that attracts and appeals to leads who eventually turn customers.

What is Inbound Marketing?

Inbound Marketing refers to the promotion of a company or business organizations through blogs, social media, podcast, visuals, emails, search engines optimization and other forms of content marketing methods both offline and online to attract the right customers

For companies to be able to use inbound marketing methodology to turn visitors to customers, leads, and promoters, they need to follow these four stages which include;

•  Attracting the visitors 
• Getting visitors information
• Converting visitors to customers
• Monitoring your progress.

Before we look at tools that fall under each of these stages, Lets us look at some facts or Statistics that shows Inbound marketing is worth while

• 60% of companies are already practising Inbound Marketing
• Inbound marketing generates 54% more leads than paid marketing. 
• 41% of companies say inbound marketing brings in more ROI than paid marketing
• Inbound marketing key focus is on the customer.

How to Sell With Inbound Marketing

Attracting Your Audience

Attracting strangers involves developing and distributing content on the internet that will help customers to find you. in doing this you can use the following tools below; 

Creating a blog: 

The main focus of inbound marketing is the content creation and content creation start with blogging.

Creating an educative blog that answers customers questions about your product and services is the first step to inbound marketing.

According to stats, companies that blogs 11 times in a month get 4-5 times leads than those that don't

Using SEO: 

Submitting your blog and site to search engines and optimizing your content by using quality and targeted keywords related to your industry attracts customers and leads.

Stats put it that Search engine optimization leads have 14.7 close also 81% of shoppers research online before buying any product. 

Social Media: 

Publishing your content not only on your blog but also across other social media channels such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Linkedin and so on increases chances of attracting more leads. 

Statistics put it that social media as 100% higher leads to close rate as 71% of internet users are active on social media. 

Pay Per Click (PPC) ads: 

Though most of the advertisement on the internet are free particularly across search engines and social media. 

Those who have enough money to spend can opt for the pay per click option which is less expensive than traditional paid ads.

Stats put it that the PPC ads on search engine get 47% click rate and companies generate $3 for every $1.60 they spend on google search engine ads. 

Getting Audience Information

You have attracted your audience, now you have to get their information.

This information should be used to build relationships with your audience and eventually converting them into paying customers. 

Below are methods you can use to get audience information

Attractive offers

Throwing out attractive offers is one way to getting your audience.

Perhaps it is the most effective. 

This offer can come in the form of a free e-book, free consultation or discount for first timers.

Lead generating forms:

 These are normally found on a website landing page. 

A landing page is a stand-alone page that helps promote your company offer while at the same time capturing visitors contact details. Try to limit navigational elements on your landing page so as to get visitors to fill out the forms. 

Call-to-actions: 

Using CTAs button on your blog and other content helps convert visitors into leads. Such call to action can be either an invitation for a webinar, a download button, a contact button etc. Try as much to make these CTAs more attractive so as to capture the attention of the visitor. 

If your audience is able to hand out their info, it shows there are interested and have thus become leads. 

The next step is to build a relationship with them that ends up converting them to leads. 

Converting leads to paying customers 

Your audience gave you their information through one of the methods I mentioned above. 

What will you use the information for? 

Converting these leads to paying customers

These can be done by building a strong relationship with them. 

This involves constantly updating your leads with content and promotional offer. 

Below  are tools that can help you carry out this task;

Email marketing: 

 Email marketing involves sending relevant, useful and promotional content through emails. These will help build trust and nurture your relationship with customers.

It tells them that you care even when they are not actively looking. According to stats email marketing generates 50% sales with $44.24 average returns for every dollar spent.

Make use of email automation. 

These tools allow you to set up delivery sequences of email at a specified time interval that include valuable content that interest your customers. 

Social media 

You can also nurture your customers and build relationships with them through media by also automating the content you send to those that follow you through on social media platforms.

This has been discussed above already. 

Let's move on to the last stage

Monitor your progress

You have done 3 stages or steps mentioned above. The next thing is to monitor the success of your campaigns.You want to know how far your strategies are meeting up with your goals.

Analyze your data. Know where your visitors are coming from, how many are turning into leads

And what channels and strategies are driving your return investment.

Conclusion

With these, you should be able to plan future strategies and optimize the current strategy for a much greater success.

 There are many tools out that can help in measuring and analyzing your data but I would recommend SerpStat

How to rank faster with Local SEO

Do you want to get your business on the first page of search engines?

Want to know how to use local search engine optimisation to rank faster on SERPs?

99medialab share a simple road map infographics which I explained here on how to rank faster with Local SEO on google.

This step might take just a few minutes to an hour to apply. So settle down and follow the tips.

How to rank faster with Local SEO

• Web design: your website as should be well designed as this creates first impressions for your customers.

•  Mobile Responsive Website: your website should be able to accommodate all screen sizes including mobile phones as most internet users access it through their phones

• Content: your website content should be unique, original and be of high quality. It should also be lengthy too.

• Meta Description and Title Tags: have a good and unique description on each of your page and a unique title tag for them with the major focus on your business keywords.

• Images optimization: make sure you use the alt text on your images for Google to be able to rank it in their images directory.

• Internal Linking: try as much to link all your pages together especially to their specific keywords. For example when you have a point on something about SEO in one of your articles you can link it to the previous article where you talk more on the topic.

• Keyword Research:  Make research for keywords pertaining to your business. You can do so here or here.

• Fresh content:  Tell your customers that you know what you are doing by always updating your website with fresh content that gives vital information

• Customer Reviews and Testimonial Pages: Have a customer review and testimonial pages on your business website as this will increase your website trust and help you understand how your customers feel about your product.

• Business address and phone number: Endeavor to place your business address and phone number in the footer or header of your business page so that customers can reach you. It also helps increase trust.

• Blog integration: A blog isn't a website, don't mix the two. A blog is like a customer service in a bank while your website is the real business front. Blog as customer reviews helps you relate with your customers and pass necessary information.

• Contact Page: Despite having your address and phone numbers on your website header and footer, you need a separate page for your contact details. Here you write all the ways you can be contacted for a business transaction. It should contain your various emails, social media profiles, address, phone numbers e.t.c

• link your non-www, website address to the one with www. Funny enough you need to make sure that you are able to redirect your non-www website address to the one with a www. For example, goal.com should be redirected to www.goal.com so that customers won't get confused if they click on the one with www and find out it a separate site or its not responding.

• Create a Facebook page: This is a representative of your website on Facebook. Business transactions can't be done here but it helps redirect people back to your website and give them a little info about your business services and product. Have your physical business address phone nos, business hours, website address and information about your business on the page.

•  Google Places page: From Search Engine Watch "Google Places is the information that a search engine receives and uses when listing Your business. A search engine will probably have already got your business listed in results, but your Google Places page allows you to control what information Google has and presents to searchers about your business." here are ways to use google places for your business.

• Add your business to Google places page listing or claim an existing one.

• Add your business physical address on your  Google places page and make sure it is the exact address details given on your website.

• Add your website addresses on to your Google places page.

• Have an introductory or About us section on your google places page.

• Ensure to categorize your various business services on your Google places page.

• Add enough pictures and videos on your Google places page.

• Add business hours.

• Yelp business page and other local listings: claim listing from other local directories such as Yellow pages or Foursquare listing. Your business should also appear on Yelp business page listing and add all information as you did on Google places page.

• Get reviews and respond to them on Google Places and Yelp: Get reviews about your business from your customers. You can do so by emailing them to write reviews about your services. You should also respond to these reviews be it a positive or negative one, it sends the idea that you want to serve your customers better.

• Submit your site to Google Webmaster and other search engines. This is a very important step as your site might not appear on Google or other search engines like Bing if you don't let them know about it.

• Lastly, have a google analytics account: Having a google analytic account helps you know how your website is performing and what necessary changes you need to make it perform better.

Common SEO Mistakes You Need To Fix

Search engine optimization ‎is something everybody wants to get involved in so that their site can rank among top pages of search engines such as Google and Bing.

A lot of newcomers in the industry pay lots of money and yet asked themselves why they aren't there yet?.  They are not there yet because they aren't aware of some factors or they don't understand these factors correctly.

We should also put in mind that SEO changes every day and we need a concentrated follow up on these changes or else we will be lost in the process as what might work today may not work today. 

So if you have been spending money on optimizing your site or you are a beginner in search engine optimization, there are several common mistakes you need to fix,

Common SEO Mistakes You Need To Fix

Having a wrong optimization mindset: 

Lots of people in the website industry have a very wrong mindset when it comes to SEO. They believe the method used Yesterday is the same  Today and will remain Like that forever. I urge you to change this belief as this will destroy your website before you start. Some believe that it is all about:

• Link building: very wrong mindset. SEO goes beyond Link building. It involves a lot, content, website design, search engines rules and much more.

• It is done only on the Landing page: This is also a wrong mindset as every page of your website needs to be optimized for search engines. It should be done after you are sure you have address what your users want.

• SEO is all about Keywords Density: Too many Keywords on a particular page can kill such page opportunity to appear on a search engine as it might be seen as spamming. When doing Keywords use the right keywords, be it a single one but that actually carries a good meaning relating to your business.

You are not using the Google Keyword tool: 

Lots of website and blogs ignore the use of Google Keyword tool as they believe that by using the popular keywords related to their industry. Google Keyword tools give you an idea of queries that can be used to find your website and using such keyword will drive traffic to your site.

Also, try to avoid popular Keywords as these are overused and the competition on them are usually very high. Try using long tail keywords that are hardly used. For example, instead of using the keyword "SEO" which is a popular keyword for blogs about Search engines, you can go for "Search Engine Optimization" instead.

Poor Content: 

This year Google announced that content plays a major role for a website to rank on their SERP. Publishing good and informative content will help your site rank well on Search Engines. A site with good content attracts traffic. So here are things you should avoid when creating content:

• ‎Directly copying contents from another Website: This is the first bullet that will kill your effort. Try writing original content and if you are going to use someone else content. There are ways to do this and keep your originality.

• Providing wrong and irrelevant information: This is you shooting yourself on the leg. Once your site is know for providing wrong info and irrelevant info for that matter then you are done for especially if you are business website. ‎ This will make you have trust issues with search engines and Internet user. Aviod providing wrong info and irrelevant one. There are several niche you can write about that users are interested in, it only requires your commitment. 

• No citation and statistics to back up your claim: when you cite some else work in your research it increases your website trust. Also providing statistics to your claim proves that your site can be trusted and thus will increase your site rank on Search Engine Result Page.

Non Unique Title Tags and Description: 

Having a unique title tag on every page of your website can help increase SERP. Here are several things you should avoid while giving Titles to pages‎:

• Don't use the same title for all your pages

• Avoid including your website name for ‎all your pages. ( website name should be for the homepage only)

• Make the title unique, short and creative. Avoid lengthy title tags for a page‎. 65 characters maximum. 

For Description, though Google claims they don't pay attention to it, a good description attracts an audience. Your description should be persuasive, unique and must provide relevant information. It should be between 150 and 160 characters.

Slow Loading Website:

A website that loads slowly is bad for business. According to Google, website speed is among the factors that decide website ranking on SERP. A slow loading website increases bounce rates meaning that users aren't patient enough to wait a minute for a website to load when it doesn't load in few seconds, they head for an alternative one. Also, put in mind that as you consider your site speed also make sure ‎it mobile responsive as this also is a ranking factor. Most Internet user uses their mobile to access it.

No Consistency in Publishing:

There is a saying that whoever "fails to plan, plans to fail," this also affect website owners. You must be consistent in publishing articles on your website. If you plan to publish an article or more per day or week or month, endeavour to follow up on that plan.

Consistency has SEO value and drives traffic to the website. Being consistent updates your users and makes Google visit you regularly.

You are not using Internal Linking: 

Lots of website owners think internal linking is a waste of time or they are just being lazy. Internal linking has lots of benefits such as;

• Helping search engine discover more pages from your site.

• Reduces bounce rates as user remain glued to your site as they find out more about the subject through it.

• It helps increase trust and Search engine sees such links as important. 

However, as you do it, don't make it too much.

Not submitting your Website to Search Engines Webmaster: 

After designing and making your website active, you refuse to submit it  ‎to Webmaster. This is like driving while being blindfolded. You want to rank on SERP and you aren't telling the search engine that you actually exists. There are many gains that come with submitting your website on webmaster which includes ranking on SERP.

Avoiding Analytics:

Every marketer wants to see how their products are performing in the market, so also do website owners. Analytics from Google and other search engines provide data that gives insight into how your website is performing ‎so as to help you improve in any way where you are lacking. Google analytically is free and thus there is no money excuse for Internet marketers or else they are just being lazy.

Not linking your Website to Social media:

Social Media helps a lot in SERP ranking and thus ‎you need to be active at least with one of the social media platforms. Social Media is a good SEO tool according to experts and that not all it helps drive traffic to your site.

Stopped learning:

SEO, as I mentioned in the beginning changes from time to time, just because you've gotten good with Today's SEO, doesn't mean you should relax. Follow up with the latest update about new rules search engines are providing for SERP so as you won't be left behind. SEO requires you to follow up with its latest news and trends.

Conclusion

With these several mistakes highlighted above if you know you've defaulted one of them, it not too late you can go back to your website to correct such errors.

The 2 Essential Elements of SEO

Over 90% of online experience starts with a search engine, meaning that for every business to succeed their presence on the web and mostly on the first page of search engines is very vital and this brings us to the topic of today "The Basic essentials for SEO."

Lots of blogs have written about this topic and have touched very vital areas of it but then again several persons are still not understanding how SEO really affect their businesses.  ‎

So in the simplest form, I will try as much as possible to explain this term SEO and the very basic essentials that you actually need for SEO. In the blog, I have divided these essential keys into two main categories.

A. Website Optimization
B.  Content Optimization

This two categories will give you the simplest understanding of SEO. However, before we jump into them let first understand the term Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and why it is relevant for your business.‎ ‎

What is SEO?‎

In simple terms, SEO according to Neil Patel is ‎" the magic you have to work on your article, in order to make Google [or any other search engine]  very likely to include your article as one of the top results whenever someone searches for that keyword."
In other words, SEO is the science behind which that website you see on the first page of google search engine after searching for a particular something [Keywords] appear on that page.‎

So Why do you need SEO?

Customers now are days don't want to stress themselves walking through the market and at the end of the day not even getting what they want. They want an easy way to get what they want and the only way for your business to get their attention is through SEO‎.

That is optimizing your business website so as to appear on the first page not only first page but first 5 results whenever a potential customer searches for your product. As a business man who wants to boost is sales and services by meeting a wider range of customer, SEO is the answer to your marketing problems.

According to research organic traffic which is the main target of any website is gotten more from SEO than paid adverts and guess what it is free and just need only a little of your attention.
With this in mind let's look at how we can optimize our website and its content for it to appear on SERP (search engine result page).

A. Website Optimisation

To optimize your website or blog for it to appear on SERP starts from our website design, hence we are going to look first at ways we can design how the website that will give search engine the go-ahead in ranking your website on their result page.

• Website User experience: Search engine won't rank a site that has no bearing. They want a site that gives good user experience such as easily navigable website, good content and internal linking. This makes users remain glued to your website and even recommended it.

• Site Speed:  Nobody likes a website that loads very slow and so does search engines. A site that loads very slowly ranks very low on SERPs as they will have increased bounce rate as users will quickly leave that site for an alternate one. So when designing your website make it as simple as possible to reduce the loading time.

• Responsive Design: Google, for example, takes this seriously. If your site is only limited to showing on desktop screen only, then you won't appear on SERP. The majority of internet visitors make use of their mobile devices and tablet to browse, meaning that when designing your website, all types of mobile and internet accessing devices should be put into consideration. Your website must respond to the screen of the device that is accessing it.

• Meta Description and Title Tags: Meta description might not look very necessary but it is an added advantage. A Meta description is a short description of your services that appears under your Url in search engine result page. Title tag, on the other hand, is a way by which you tell visitors and search engines in the most concise way about your article or business by grabbing the Keyword that matches the query from the title of your article. Always separate main titles and subtitles with h1, h2, h3 heading style.

B. Content Optimisation

After the website design comes your content and this part is very important, something people take for granted. Because you have a website don't just mean that people will click on it. There are many things involved and we will look at them one by one.

• Content Relevancy: How relevant is the content you are posting to people? What are the chances that your content is in demand by people? If you were among the web visitors, would you read what you are posting to people? These are the question one must ask while posting a content on the web. Search engine particularly Google doesn't rank a website that does not have answers to people's query. Meaning that those websites that appear on the first page of SERPs actually provide the best answers to searchers query. ‎relevancy of a content can be based on the searcher's region, searchers search history, time of day, 12 months e.t.c

• Lengthy Content: If someone told you that the length of your content doesn't matter to search engine, then you are being deceived. If your content isn't a video, then you must be ready to post quality content that carries more than 500 words, images not included. Search engine feels that website that carries lengthy content actually write for humans and not for the search engines, thus they tend to rank a website that has lengthy content.

• Linking: Building internal links in your content can assist your website to rank better on SERPs and even increase traffic and trust for your website. Internal linking helps to improve the ranking of your keywords, improve Google crawling and indexing of your site and reduces bounce rate of your site.

• Trust: Trust is an off-page SEO optimization. When your site is trusted it means you aren't spamming and your website isn't obscure. To make your site climb the trust rank of the search engine, avoid spammy and duplicate content. You can build on other people's work. Don't just pick what other people have written and say someone must read it. It doesn't work. Your domain age, content uniqueness, traffic to website, site authority are among the considerations that increase your trust rank. You can check your website trust rank here. Also, check your website authority through this link

• Well Tagged image: Search Engines cannot read image, hence you need to tag them properly for them to appear on SERPs. This can be done through the alt text attribute. The alt text or alternate text in full is a concise description of the image you uploaded. This description can be the title of the article you are writing or just a keyword. Alt text helps search engine to crawl images and index them to appear in their search results.

• Fresh Content: Google which is the most used search engine also uses fresh content as a page ranking factor. Your regularity in posting on your website beeps a signal that you know what you are doing. Hubspot last year showed how regularly posting on website increases pages rank on search engines particularly Google. However though it important to post regularly, you should also know to post once a week or a month can still give you the great ranking result as long as your content is thorough, unique and in-depth.

• Keywords: Keyword research is the backbone of SEO. Including your targeted keywords in your title tag, meta description, Url increases your chances to appear on the search engine. However getting the right keywords is something that one needs to research on carefully as misuse of this might lead to disaster. Check out Hubspot guide to Keyword research for beginners. While adding keywords to your content, note that stuffing keywords in a single content can kill your website ranking on search engines.

• Social Media: You have written your content and you want everyone to know about it, this is where the social media comes to play. Social media according to Neil Patel in his concrete post on SEO, noted that social media helps in SEO ranking. He noted that the quality of shares which comes from influencers and the number of shares can influence the Search engine ranking result.

These are some and major keys I feel that is needed for a website or a blog to rank on SERPs. If you feel anything is missing you can check out Neil Patel's guide to SEO or Search Engine Watch 22 essentials for SEO in 2016.

If you enjoyed and learned from this article please endeavour to share it. If I missed anything you can share your thought through the comment section below

How Do Digital Marketing Expert Spend Their Budget?

Have you ever wonder how expert digital marketers spend their time and budget? Looking for ways to improve your own digital marketing strength this 2019?

Search Engine Journal shared with us several ways by which marketing expert spend their time and budget on digital marketing and how you could follow in their footsteps in 2019.

SEJ last October went on a research, interviewing 230 digital marketing experts on how they work, what they spend and how they measure their success.  Here is a summary of the result collated from the research.

On SEO (Search Engine Optimisation)

Three questions were thrown at our experts, if they performed SEO  Audit on a new client website, How often they perform SEO Audit on a client website and how much they spend on SEO.

According to result, 43% of the experts said they usually perform an SEO audit on for a new client website before doing anything, 24%t consider it unnecessary while 33% claims it depends perhaps on the client they are handling.

On how often they perform this audit, 47% claimed they do it every 6 months which is the highest frequency rate. 29% claimed they do it monthly and 15% claimed they do it yearly while 5% probably doesn't do it at all.

So how much do they spend on SEO? according to Search Engine Journal, 31% of respondents spend an average of $51 – $300 on SEO tools per month, with 23% spending less than $50 a month and the shocker is 7% spend above $1000.

 Social Media Marketing is Effective

80% of the respondents say that social media network is still an effective use of resources.
Facebook continues to be the favourite social media platforms for digital marketers with 62% saying they would pick Facebook over any other social media platform out there,

On how they measure their social media effectiveness  39% look at engagements (likes, votes, and comments), 31% prefer conversion and 13% prefer the traffic flow.

On How much they spend on social media paid ads, 46% of respondents are  of the opinion that businesses can be effective on social media without utilising paid campaigns 27% of respondents spend an average of $51 – $300 on social campaigns per month, while 19 % spend $0 – $50 and 16% spend $301 – $1,000

PPC is Vital

Has much as many digital marketers prefer free stuff, Paid advertising still plays a vital role in Digital marketing campaigns.

SEJ research reveals that 42% of digital marketers allocate most of their digital campaign budget to Pay Per Click (PPC) and display ads.

So how much do digital marketers spend on their PPC campaigns?  18% of digital marketers spend between $51 to $300 on average for their monthly PPC campaigns. 17% spend below $50 per month for PPC campaigns and 16% spend $5000 for PPC campaigns per month which is very huge...

The survey also shows that being in the top three positions on SERPs results in the highest number of clicks for ads. It brings in an average CTR of 2-3%.

And Content Marketing remains King

Though digital marketing experts, to be precise, 56% of them believes that a balanced diet of content marketing, SEO, Social media marketing, and link building is the most effective aspect of digital marketing, 53% of the mix claim that they still have a planned content marketing strategy and believes that content marketing still leads the digital marketing strategy.

The irony, however, is that despite content marketing is very vital to digital marketers, not much is allocated to it during budget planning. 24% of respondents spend under $50 a month, while 2% spends between $51 – $300 and 17% spend $301 – $1,000.

So what type of content is most effective?

According to the research, Blog posts tops the category with 41%, long-form content follows behind with  14%, videos 12%, webinars 7% and podcast, 3%

Summary

What does the research tell us?

1. SEO audit is very vital and should be done at least twice a year.
2.  That social media is still effective for business with Facebook as a key player
3.  Paid advertising is still very important even though you can run your campaign without it.
4. That content marketing is king and owning a blog is very important.

Conclusion

From the above research, Digital marketing experts gave us insights into how they effectively run their marketing campaigns, with many of them spending lesser money and still getting the result. This shows that the amount of money budgeted for a digital marketing campaign doesn't really matter but rather the strategies and their effectiveness.