SEO Archives | Yoshiro Digital https://yoshirodigital.com Digital Marketing Agency in Cyprus Mon, 24 May 2021 06:01:21 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=5.6.13 https://yoshirodigital.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/YoshiroFavicon.jpg SEO Archives | Yoshiro Digital https://yoshirodigital.com 32 32 How to write SEO friendly content https://yoshirodigital.com/how-to-write-seo-friendly-content/ https://yoshirodigital.com/how-to-write-seo-friendly-content/#respond Tue, 27 Apr 2021 11:04:12 +0000 https://yoshirodigital.com/?p=6738 Wondering how to write SEO content? Want to know what is SEO friendly? Don’t understand what does SEO friendly mean? You’re in the right place! Writing good content is challenging enough – mastering SEO is worse! However, the present article discusses a full guide to teach you how to develop the previously mentioned skill. When […]

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Wondering how to write SEO content? Want to know what is SEO friendly? Don’t understand what does SEO friendly mean? You’re in the right place!

Writing good content is challenging enough – mastering SEO is worse! However, the present article discusses a full guide to teach you how to develop the previously mentioned skill. When you finish reading, you can start writing like an SEO pro which will help you in your business or as a member of a reputable SEO agency!

Start with Your Keyword Research

One of the most important things when it comes to creating SEO content is targeting the right keywords. If you do that, you can create incredible posts that also have the possibility of ranking high in Google.

To achieve the best keyword research, you should find a tool (there are tons of free and paid ones!) that allows you to have a list of good short and long-tail keywords. After that, you have to decide how many times you need to repeat them in your content so it looks natural, compelling, but also helps with SEO.

Outline Your Posts

Many young entrepreneurs make the mistake of writing without having a clear idea of what they want to say. Avoid that! Start your post by outlining the main ideas you wish to discuss, and the process can be much easier, effective, and help with SEO friendliness.

Create Killer Headlines

Headlines can compel your audience so they click on your post. However, they can also drive them away from your website.

Therefore, you need to have the ability to create incredible and catchy headlines. A good one comprises the following aspects:

–         It tells the reader exactly what they’re going to find

–         It’s clear

–         It’s attractive

–         It solves a specific problem that the reader might be looking for

Some tools can help you create headlines easily. Thus, you can incorporate them to make sure you have SEO friendly content.

Format Your Content for the Google Answer Box

Have you ever searched for “How to…, What Are…, Why Does…, etc.?” said posts are often featured in the Google Answer Box.

If you format your content following that type of outline, you have better chances at ranking higher in Google and appearing on said page. Therefore, each time someone searches for what you’re offering, they can find you.

That doesn’t mean your content can’t work if it doesn’t have the said format. However, it’s a great trick to aid your SEO friendliness.

Write for Your Audience, Not Yourself

If you’re wondering how to write SEO content, the following tip is your best friend from now on. The basis of SEO friendliness is learning that your readers only care about themselves.

Think about it: each time you go online and search for something, you want to find the answer to your problem, right? Everyone in your audience feels the same way.

You might be asking yourself what that has to do with SEO friendliness. It’s very simple: your content needs to solve your readers’ problems. Thus, each time you write, you should think about them.

Imagine your target audience. What kinds of things do they go through? What are their dreams and aspirations? What are their biggest obstacles?

After you think of that, you should also have some answers to it. If you write with that in mind, your posts can have much more SEO friendly content.

Include Relevant Keywords

When you do your keyword research, you might feel overwhelmed by the number of things that pop up. However, don’t despair: you have all the time in the world.

In other words, you shouldn’t just include 500 keywords in a 1000-word article. You should only add the ones that are relevant to your content. Otherwise, your readers can perceive it as unnatural. Eventually, they might even stop reading.

Have a Structure

To learn what does SEO friendly mean, you need to understand that your blog posts have to be structured. You can’t just post a chunk of nonsense content without any substance. If you choose to structure it instead, you can have much more SEO friendliness.

When you outline your post and decide your keywords, you should choose your subheadings accordingly. That means that you need to decide which are the specific points of the subject you want to develop in the article.

After you write some posts following the said tip, you are going to notice that it’s much easier. Since you have a structure, all you need to do is follow it.

Edit Away!

One of the worst things you could do to your SEO content is to publish without editing. Even the best writers can have some mistakes, which is why you should edit away before your content goes out there.

To edit, use handy tools like Grammarly, CopyScape, Yoast SEO, and more. They can help you fix your grammar, find out if there are some copies of your content, and tell you about the state of your SEO within the article you wrote.

After a while, you can develop the skill to edit faster. Thus, you don’t need to spend that much time in it.

Improve Readability

The readability score is what tells you what level your readers need to have to understand your content. That means that it’s a very important aspect if you want to know what is SEO friendly.

If you use tools like Yoast SEO or Grammarly, you can quickly find out about your readability score. To improve it, try to explain everything with an active voice, make concrete statements, use punctuation correctly, and make your content as easy to understand as possible.

Incorporate Visuals

Visuals are a very important part of SEO friendliness. Your reader needs more than text to feel compelled by your writing, and so does Google. As a consequence, you need to find the best sources to add some images, infographics, and videos to your articles.

There are lots of websites where you can download stock images for free, such as PixaBay or UnSplash. Besides, you can create your infographics using tools like Canva.

When you’re writing to achieve SEO content, you might wonder how many images you should add. The quick answer is that there’s no specific number. However, a general rule is that you should include at least one every 250 to 300 words.

Add Your Social Media

Social media wasn’t very important a few years ago, but it has become so popular that it’s now relevant for SEO content. Pinterest, Instagram, and Facebook are, by far, the most essential platforms; however, others like Twitter are not so far behind.

Every time you can, add natural links to your social media accounts. You can also include images from them in your blog posts. Likewise, make sure you have handles on your website so your readers can quickly access your pages and start following you if they want to.

Promote Healthy Link Building

A very important aspect of SEO friendliness is inducing healthy link building. If you’re new to content writing and SEO, you might not know what that means. Don’t worry. Read the following simple explanation: it consists of adding links to your articles, which can help your readers stay on your page.

In other words, you can add links from other posts you’ve written before to your new ones. That way, if your readers find something interesting, they can click on it and stay on your website.

The previously mentioned tip works with social media, too! As it was formerly addressed, if you add links to it, your readers can follow you there.

Hook Your Readers

With so many things on the internet, it can be hard to identify what is SEO friendly content. However, a good way to view it is to understand that your posts can rank higher on Google if they are attractive to your audience.

How can you attract your audience, though? Well, with so much content already, it can be hard to stand out. Thus, you should hook your readers with something unique, things that they’ve never seen before. Write about personal experiences that might help them, case studies, or unexpected comparisons! That can help your audience stay tuned for more.

Evaluate Your Progress

Lastly, something lots of writers forget is to constantly evaluate what they’re doing right and wrong. To master the art of how to write SEO content, you need to be aware of the effect your current posts have on Google.

To do the previously mentioned thing, go through old posts from time to time and check how you’ve improved. Likewise, check your article’s stats, analyze them, and try to see what went wrong and what didn’t. That way, you can have a clear idea of the things that are working and the ones that need improvement.

To Wrap Up…

Understanding what is SEO friendly is not an easy job. It’s often the hardest skill to master when you’re starting to write content.

Nonetheless, if you follow the tips you learned, you can improve faster than you think!

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Does Page Speed Affect SEO Performance https://yoshirodigital.com/page-speed-seo-performance/ https://yoshirodigital.com/page-speed-seo-performance/#respond Sat, 03 Apr 2021 09:09:46 +0000 https://yoshirodigital.com/?p=6735 It’s essential to know about search engine optimization (SEO) and page speed if you’re hosting a website. If you already knew, you may wonder whether it’s necessary to balance page speed and SEO. Prioritizing page speed may seem better from an end-user perspective as it can be exasperating to deal with a slow-loading site, but […]

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It’s essential to know about search engine optimization (SEO) and page speed if you’re hosting a website. If you already knew, you may wonder whether it’s necessary to balance page speed and SEO. Prioritizing page speed may seem better from an end-user perspective as it can be exasperating to deal with a slow-loading site, but is it relevant for SEO performance?

Here, you can find out all about page speed: what it is, how it affects SEO, the metrics it affects, and how you can improve it.

What Is Page Speed?

Page speed is either the time it takes for a website to fully display an individual page or the time it takes for a browser to receive the first byte of information from the website. Every page element, such as images, scripts, videos, other multimedia, can affect page speed. It also depends on the server and website’s performance.

On the end-user side, things that can affect page speed are the pages the users visit, their connection type, internet service provider, browser, and device’s processing power. What the user is currently doing and how many apps they have open can also play a large part.

Regardless, you can only concern yourself with what you can work on if you host a website: your page and your server. Other factors are entirely out of your control.

Does Page Speed Matter?

Page speed is relevant to users as faster-loading pages provide them with a significantly enhanced user experience. Webpages that take longer than usual to load often lead their users away.

Mobile users also expect good load times. In fact, one of the best and most convenient tools for measuring page speed, Google PageSpeed Insights, now show mobile results first. The reasoning is that more than half of search engine users now use mobile devices for their searches. This tool also analyzes a website’s accessibility and user experience.

Is Page Speed a Ranking Factor? 

Ever since 2010, page speed became relevant for SEO. Google announced at that date that they would include a new signal in their search ranking algorithms, site speed. Regardless, at the time, it didn’t carry as much weight as the page’s relevance did, with fewer than 1 percent of queries being affected by it.

However, further ahead in 2018, the page speed ranking factor became even more prominent for Google search and ads, especially for mobile searches. The “Speed Update,” as Google called it, implemented site speed as a landing page factor for mobile searches, effectively making it a direct ranking factor for search engine queries on all devices.

Although Google weights page relevancy more than page speed, it becomes more important when you consider that it also improves the user’s experience.

Which Metric Is Affected by Slow Page Speed?

Many things can affect page speed. In Google’s PageSpeed Insights product, the metrics which affect slow page speed are split into different categories, field data and lab data, to show you what exactly impacts it the most.

Field data, if available, is on the Chrome User Experience Report dataset. On the other hand, lab data comes from Lighthouse, an open-source automated tool that can analyze and collect it.

Field Data

It’s the data that Google extracts from real users, and it’s the most critical one of the two. Google gets this either through Chrome or any other data provider. It’s an average, and Google lets you know whether it has enough data to show it. If it does have a dataset available, it reports the following performance metrics:

First Contentful Paint. It measures the length of time it takes for a page to render any of its content on the screen. Content refers to images, elements, or any non-white section.

First Input Delay. This metric measures the site’s response time from when a user first interacts with it to the moment the browser can begin processing the response to that interaction. If you want your site to provide an excellent user experience, you should try to have a delay below 100 milliseconds.

Largest Contentful Paint. It measures and reports the render time of the most prominent image or text block visible from the initial viewport. It’s relative to when the page first starts loading. In simpler terms, it’s the moment in which the user can understand some of the page’s content. Sites should try to score 2.5 seconds or less.

Cumulative Layout Shift. Measures the number of individual layout shifts that occur in a page as it loads. A layout shift happens every time a visible page element changes its position from one place to the other.

The score considers two measurements, the impact fraction (how it impacts the viewport area between jumps) and the distance (how much it moved relative to the viewport.) A good score would be one of 0.1 or less.

Lab Data

The Google page speed score comes from this metric. It’s useful yet of less relevance as it comes from a controlled environment. This environment is a single connection that doesn’t combine data from multiple users.

Google uses this as an alternative when they don’t have enough field data. It does this on the spot by considering six performance metrics, some of which are also present in the field data, like First Contentful Paint, Largest Contentful Paint, and Cumulative Layout Shift. The other three are the following:

Speed Index. It’s a more complex metric that measures how quickly the page’s elements are visually displayed while it loads. The faster they appear, the better it is. Like the others, it’s measured in seconds, and you’re looking for a score of 4.3 seconds or less.

Time to Interactive. Measures how long it takes for the website’s interactive elements to become entirely interactive. Pages are fully interactive once they display applicable content, respond to user queries in under 50 milliseconds, and when most visible elements have their event handlers registered.

It’s similar to the now deprecated First CPU Idle metric, which reports the moment the user can begin interacting with the site. Some find this measurement more meaningful than Time to Interactive, but they’re too similar to keep using them both.

Total Blocking Time. It measures the length of time between First Contentful Paint and Time to Interactive in which a long task blocks the main thread and delays input response. The main thread gets blocked because a browser can’t interrupt a task in progress. Users who try and interact during this process need to wait until it finishes before the browser can respond.

Page Speed SEO – Best Practices

It may be hard to understand some of the terms previously described. Still, they aren’t completely essential to improve your page speed. However, it’s necessary to set a baseline before bettering it, which you can do with PageSpeed Insights. This tool also provides you with a list of opportunities and diagnostics which can help your page load quicker.

Besides these suggestions, you can also try some of these best practices to improve your page speed:

Compress and Optimize Images

Images are often the biggest problem with websites, as they can negatively impact page speed. Some of them are big and take too long to download. You need to ensure they aren’t larger than necessary and are in the correct file format.

You can easily compress PNG, which works better for pictures with fewer colors, and JPEG, which is suitable for photographs. Most browsers support these file extensions. Also, avoid having images larger than one megabyte.

Another way to speed up page load is by deferring images. With this method, users download them later as they scroll further down the web page. There may be a moment where images aren’t visible, but they show up sooner than later. Several plugins can help you implement this method, like Joomla or Magento, but you can also use jQuery with the help of a developer.

Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN) 

With them, you can offer high performance and availability to your end-users with the help of geographically distributed network proxy servers and data centers. It lets users access your website through a closer CDN server, improving their page load time.  These servers can also reduce your bandwidth costs because it minimizes the amount of data that the original server has to provide.

Minify HTML or CSS Structure

The HTML structure of a website dictates how it loads. A browser reads it from top to bottom and loads it the same way. If you want a specific element to load first, you have to place it higher on your page. Still, most issues aren’t with HTML but with CSS. When people write their website’s CSS poorly, it results in significantly slower load times and a bad user experience.

Optimizing and minimizing your site’s code can improve your page speed. You can do this by taking out all unnecessary information, such as spaces, commas, comments, and unused code, from it. Although most of these things can make the code more readable and easier to work on, they can pile up and reduce your page speed.

Implement an Effective Caching Policy

Web caching is the temporary file storing process in a user’s browser for later reuse. Users that visit your website for the first time need to download all of your page’s elements. With an effective cache policy, most of these files can remain in their browser, significantly reducing the page speed by eliminating the need to load the web page again in its entirety.

Limit Plugins

As you add more plugins to your website, it gets heavier and loads slower. The page’s theme may be the most extensive plugin it can have, and some come with third-party builders and libraries that can significantly slow down your site. If you’re looking for a theme, try to find one without many animations, functions, sliders, and other heavy elements.

Regarding other plugins, you only need to consider whether they are essential to your website. If you install them, test your score and loading speed to determine if it made your page run slower. Should it do so, figure out if it’s necessary to keep the plugin, look for a better alternative, or remove it entirely.

The Bottom Line

Page speed isn’t only an essential part of the user experience, it’s also a vital ranking factor in both desktop and mobile searches. Higher page speed leads to better search rankings. If you want to improve it, you can use Google’s PageSpeed Insights coupled with utilizing the services of a proven SEO agency. It’s an excellent tool that can help you analyze your site while also providing you with several possible optimizations.

You can also compress images, simplify your code, or use a content delivery network to enhance your page speed. Continue improving it and increase your page views!

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What is Technical SEO https://yoshirodigital.com/what-is-technical-seo/ https://yoshirodigital.com/what-is-technical-seo/#respond Sat, 20 Mar 2021 08:48:25 +0000 https://yoshirodigital.com/?p=6725 Technical SEO is a process for optimizing a website, so search engine spiders (crawlers) can index everything on the site efficiently. It is essential for crawlers to gain access to your website’s content because if they can’t, you miss opportunities to rank those pages. When you think of search engine optimization, you think about what […]

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Technical SEO is a process for optimizing a website, so search engine spiders (crawlers) can index everything on the site efficiently. It is essential for crawlers to gain access to your website’s content because if they can’t, you miss opportunities to rank those pages.

When you think of search engine optimization, you think about what the users see, and that’s a huge part of SEO. Technical SEO is what helps you hit those goals. You have to combine traditional SEO and technical SEO with other strategies, including on- and off-page optimizations. In fact, all of them together are what make the three pillars for SEO.

Why Is Technical SEO Important?

In a sense, technical SEO is essential because it could boost or hurt your organic performance and rankings. You could have the best content ever imagined. Ultimately, you may have backlinks from authoritative sites that are strategically placed. All of that is good, but if the search engine can’t crawl and index your website, you may not see any rankings at all. If nothing else, you might be on the fifth or sixth page. We all know that if you’re not on that first (and maybe second) page, no one is visiting your site. There are exceptions to that, but that’s pretty much what it boils down to.

The Technical SEO Checklist – Suitable for Beginners

Below, we have come up with a technical SEO checklist to cover most of the critical elements relating to technical SEO. That way, you have a website that’s technically sound and ready for action. However, this isn’t a full or comprehensive list of all technical recommendations out there. It’s up to you to make sure that you’re doing what you can to keep your website on the up and up.

In most cases, people don’t know where to begin with SEO in any form. That’s okay! You can always work with a professional SEO agency to get the help you need. Yoshiro Digital offers assistance with technical SEO, so you’re good to go.

If you want to get started on your own, we don’t blame you and commend you for such a task. By following the checklist below, you can make sure that your website has a strong technical foundation. Many of the roadblocks that prevent search engines from indexing, crawling, and ranking your site are covered here.

  1. Ensure that Google Can Index and Craw Your Site.

Crawling is the process where Googlebot discovers updated and new pages that should be added to the Google Index. When Googlebot can’t crawl those pages, it can’t rank the content or index it.

Webmasters must make sure that Googlebot can index and crawl a page, and the best way to go about it is to use a special URL tool called “Inspect a Live URL.” This can be found in Google Search Console, and it allows people to test live URLs to see if Google can index them or not. If Google can’t index that URL, the test shows an error. That way, you know you have to fix the problem to ensure that it’s indexed and crawled correctly.

Here are common ways to make sure that your website can be indexed and crawled:

  • Make sure you’re not blocking the search engine from crawling the page in the robots.txt file.
  • Check for any orphaned pages. That means there are no internal links, so it’s harder for crawlers or users to find that page.
  • Ensure that the page is in the sitemap.xml file. That way, search engines can find it efficiently.
  • If you want a page to be indexed, make sure it doesn’t feature a “no-index” tag on it.

You can also use a mobile-friendly testing tool to check the HTML code of a landing page to make sure Googlebot can see the content. This is quite useful when you’re testing JavaScript for a site that is built using the JS framework. These tools can give you a snapshot of how the page is designed and offer errors that could impact crawlability.

  1. Don’t Have Duplicate Content on Your Website.

Duplicate content means that you’ve got many pages with similar or exactly the same information on the site. If search engines see duplicate content, it confuses them, and they aren’t sure which version should be ranked and indexed. Typically, the search engine picks the one it thinks is best and then filters out the rest. This also holds true if you’ve got two similar pages that compete for the same keyword terms.

There are many ways to prevent duplicate content and solve this issue. The most common include:

  • Use canonical tags to tell Google which page version you want it to use.
  • Make sure that you’re using either a non-www or www version, but do not use both. When you do, that creates a duplicate of your entire website.
  • Use various 301 redirects to get similar content pages to the right one.
  • Ensure that you’re enforcing the lower-case URLs because mix-case URLs are usually considered to be duplicate content.

You can find many online tools to help you find duplicate content on your website. However, it’s often easier to work with a professional.

  1. Make Sure the Website Loads Fast.

Ever since 2010, site speed is a ranking factor. Ultimately, a slower site ranks worse than one that works quickly.

You can find different tools to determine your website’s speed. With PageSpeed Insights, you can plug in the URL and get a report about the page’s performance. It also comes with a list of ways to improve speed.

Google also has a tool called Think. This lets you compare mobile page speeds with the competition to see how you rank. With that, you can also evaluate how much better you’re going to rank if your site is faster. That way, you can effectively see how much money you could make if the website speed was boosted by a specific amount.

Core Web Vitals is set to become a ranking factor for Google in mid-2021. You can keep an eye on your CWV metrics with various tools, such as GTMetrix and LightHouse. Alternatively, it might be easier to work with a technical SEO agency.

  1. Focus on Website Security.

Google is now trying to create secure web experiences for its users, so it recommends that all websites use the HTTPS encryption. It has offered incentives for that by providing ranking boosts if the sites use HTTPS. On top of that, Google is marking regular HTTP sites as “not secure” as a way to protect and warn people.

It’s easy to ensure that your site is secure with a valid SSL certificate. However, we understand that some people don’t know how to go about it, and we can help.

  1. Mobile-friendly Sites Are Important.

In March of 2018, Google started mobile-first indexing. Now, it’s the default. With that, if you don’t have a mobile-friendly website, you’re not ranking well.

Conclusion

Most people (unless they’re webmasters) aren’t sure how to implement technical SEO practices. Instead of muddling through it and hoping for the best, work with a professional. That way, you know things are done correctly, and it’s not going to hurt your ranking. In fact, it could help you rank better!

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7 Major SEO Mistakes that you may be making without knowing it https://yoshirodigital.com/7-major-seo-mistakes-that-you-may-be-making-without-knowing-it/ https://yoshirodigital.com/7-major-seo-mistakes-that-you-may-be-making-without-knowing-it/#respond Sat, 06 Mar 2021 08:44:31 +0000 https://yoshirodigital.com/?p=6722 Your SEO strategy can be an essential part of marketing and growing your business online. SEO is not something you learn once and master immediately. It takes continual learning, trying, and getting it wrong as well. If you’ve ever made any SEO mistakes, you might know how this can be an important learning opportunity. In […]

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Your SEO strategy can be an essential part of marketing and growing your business online. SEO is not something you learn once and master immediately. It takes continual learning, trying, and getting it wrong as well. If you’ve ever made any SEO mistakes, you might know how this can be an important learning opportunity. In this article, you can learn about seven common SEO mistakes and how you can fix them. Perhaps these are SEO problems you already have or might face in the future. Armed with this information and insight, you can make high-impact changes to how you grow your business online.

  1. Thinking About SEO Late in the Game

While it’s true to say that it’s never too late to start search engine optimization, the sooner you start, the better the results you can expect. SEO shouldn’t come as an afterthought after you have put everything else in order like your website, your social media pages, or your blog. SEO specialists everywhere recommend that you start thinking about your SEO as soon as you start developing your website. It’s much easier to build your strategy into your website content than to backtrack and redesign it later on. That being said, now is always the best time to look at common website problems that could have been caused by any of the SEO mistakes in this article.

  1. Creating a Disconnect Between Your Content and User Search Intent

Every successful marketing campaign is built around knowing and understanding who the customer is. Your website design, SEO strategy, and content should all be customer-centric. When you create content for your website and your blog, the most important box it should check is that of being relevant to the intended readers. It could be the most interesting and well-written content, but if it’s not what your potential customers are after when they search for a particular term, then you are not providing the right value.

Fixing these types of SEO mistakes isn’t difficult. Begin by creating a customer persona and thinking about what questions they have and what solutions they need that your company can provide. Tailored content that adds value to the right segment of the market is the key.

  1. Broken Pages and Their Backlinks

One of the most common website problems is that of broken pages. It could be that you deleted a page from your website. When someone now tries to go to that page, they could encounter the all too familiar 404 error. Another related issue is when you have internal and external backlinks pointing to the broken page.

There’s nothing wrong with making changes to your website and deleting certain pages that you feel may no longer be relevant. This issue only becomes one of the top SEO mistakes when you do nothing to fix the broken pages and backlinks. Just think about all the lost organic traffic when potential website visitors are directed to an error page. You can fix this issue by ensuring that backlinks are spelled correctly and directing to existing pages that you actually want your market to visit. The sooner you take action, the better.

  1. Using Faulty SEO Approaches

There’s a lot of information out there about how to succeed with SEO and tips and tricks about how to boost your content online. At times, it can seem like a hard-to-grasp art form where trial and error is the name of the game. While there is a place for trying out various approaches to see which one is going to work, your SEO strategy must be backed by information and facts.

As elusive as SEO can seem at times, it is a data-based science that has rules. The algorithms behind how search engines work are programmed and use the data made available to them. Once you understand how SEO works, you are more likely to start using tried and tested approaches to improve your website rankings on search engines and scale up your internet reach. Knowledge is power, and it could be time to wave goodbye to SEO advice you may have followed before that is based on nothing but a hunch.

  1. Publishing Poor Quality Pages

All your online content should offer some level of value to the readers and something distinct from competitors’ sites out there. If you publish too many poor-quality pages with no ‘wow’ factor, it’s highly unlikely that your content is going to rank highly in Google. If you are one of many other similar services in your time with the same kind of content, there really is nothing to differentiate your website from what already exists in the market.

The way to get around this common SEO mistake is to rethink how you structure and present your content. You may have to rewrite some pages, switch up some of the layouts to make it more user-friendly, or take some time to create an accompanying blog with more high-value content for your website visitors.

  1. Not Targeting and Optimizing the Right Keywords

Keywords are so important when it comes to getting more people to your website. Some of the most prevalent SEO problems center around targeting out-of-reach keywords to rank for or not optimizing the right ones. If your website is relatively new, it’s a tall order to try to rank for the same keywords that authority websites are already ranking highly for. Instead, you can target some longer keyword phrases. As a general rule of thumb, you can start off with five-word keyword phrases and reduce the phrase length as your page authority grows with time.

As far as knowing which keywords to optimize, it goes without saying the not all keywords are equal. You want to direct more of your focus to keywords that bring in the right kind of customers—customers who actually want to find products, services, and information to solve their current challenges. You should also take some time to optimize other parts of your website as well, including your meta descriptions and the images you use on your pages.

  1. Expecting Instant Results

One of the most common SEO mistakes that come up, especially with small and new businesses and websites, is to expect fast results. SEO is an organic method, and it takes time to bring in high volume and high-quality leads and to see the results of your efforts. Even if you come up with a killer SEO strategy today, you are not going to start seeing the results tomorrow or next week. Patience is a vital virtue as you navigate the space of SEO and try to market your website to the online world.

There may seem to be too many moving pieces and new updates of approaches and algorithms in the world of SEO, it’s not nearly as complicated as many people make it out to be. The best starting point is to understand the basics of SEO, come up with a strategy, then give it some time to work. Being highly adaptive and flexible is critical because there are going to be many opportunities for you to revisit your SEO strategy and make adjustments to methods that are not working as well as you might have hoped they might.

When building a website for your business, the goal is to bring in traffic from various places online and channel that traffic to buying into the services and products that you offer. If you have faced any of the common website problems that are impacting how much traffic you get, there could very well be a problem with your SEO methodology. The most common SEO mistakes include picking the wrong keywords and putting out irrelevant content. Most of the SEO problems are easy to fix, and with a bit of work and patience, you can start seeing more high-value traffic coming to your website.

But where problems just seem beyond your expertise, it may be time to recruit the services of a proven SEO agency to take your business to the next level.

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Updated SEO Best Practices of 2021 https://yoshirodigital.com/updated-seo-best-practices-of-2021/ https://yoshirodigital.com/updated-seo-best-practices-of-2021/#respond Sat, 27 Feb 2021 06:11:53 +0000 https://yoshirodigital.com/?p=6718 The best SEO practices allow your company to gain attention in local areas. One of the primary sources of online traffic is organic searches. These require carefully selected keywords, depending on the business you run. It makes all the difference in the world. However, you need a good place to start. What should you do? […]

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The best SEO practices allow your company to gain attention in local areas. One of the primary sources of online traffic is organic searches. These require carefully selected keywords, depending on the business you run. It makes all the difference in the world. However, you need a good place to start. What should you do?

You should run a digital marketing strategy to bring consumer eyes to your products and services. To do so, you should definitely learn about SEO practices. Your business only stands to benefit as a result. Here is what you need to know about SEO.

What is SEO?

SEO refers to Search Engine Optimization. The most popular websites have user-friendly content with appropriate keywords. When someone looks up something on the search engine, they either get paid advertisements or SEO-reliable websites.

The very reason you can read this article is because of SEO. You likely found the website on the first page, since SEO relies on relevance and high-quality results. Search engines like Google use complex algorithms based on keywords, bound links, and specific locations.

SEO Best Practices 2021 – Why It Remains Very Relevant

When you start up a brand-new company, you need to get your name out there. Most business owners make the mistake of paying upfront for advertisements. While it does bring their business to the main page, it costs a lot of money. This is why a more popular starting point is to recruit the services of a Search Engine Optimization team.

SEO always remains a viable alternative for digital marketing, especially in 2021. With SEO best practices, you can drive traffic to your website. It’s a cost-effective investment with long-term returns. Everybody uses Google to look up something, but only a select few pages stand out immediately. How do you differentiate yourself from local competitors? Here is a list of effective SEO methods you can use.

Understand Your Keywords

Your keywords are important since they play a major role in your marketing strategy. When people look up a website, they look for specific phrases relevant to their situation. For example, someone in Arizona might look up “concrete block walls.” SEO allows websites to connect with potential visitors when they speak a similar language.

Try to look up common search results within your area. Going back to the previous example, if your business operates in construction, you can use the keywords “concrete block walls near me.” By doing so, visitors within your area can find your website easier.

Be Specific With Keywords

When you use a keyword, it’s important to make obvious distinctions. Everybody has specific wants and needs, but you should be more informational in your approach. You want Google to display the correct results that relate to your business.

A person can type “buy office chair”, but the phrase is too vague and general. Instead, make sure you use specific keywords. If you sell a product with certain features, highlight them. A keyword phrase like “ergonomic chairs with lumbar technology” generates more organic results.

Use a Meta Element

A meta element is a tag within an HTML document. In layman’s terms, it provides the main web page data. Search engines like Google and Bing can use the meta elements to categorize your website pages correctly. The internet uses web crawlers, which are robotic programs that browse the web methodically. SEO uses meta elements to attract their attention and bring your website to the forefront.

Make sure all your keywords are catchy and memorable. Every meta element, such as titles and descriptions, should be bold to make them more noticeable. Most websites use this technique to bring more eyes to important headers.

Focus Your Keywords in Titles and Descriptions

SEO uses meta tags, descriptions, and titles to bring extra clicks to your website. How it works is the search engine looks for specific keywords within the titles and descriptions. Afterward, they can decide if the information pertains to a user’s search.

You need to carefully pick your keywords for these meta tags. It actively involves CTR, also known as click-through rate. It’s the ratio of visitors that link on certain links, to the total amount of visitors looking at your page. Five clicks and a hundred impressions mean the CTR is at 5%. Keywords can make a difference in how many people visit your website.

Perform Keyword Research

In-depth research goes a long way, which means you need to do your homework. You should understand what your customer base is looking for. Use content optimizers and keyword tools for further assistance; these applications are readily available online. You can look up monthly searches, content and link difficulty, and overall relevance per keyword.

Not only do you need to know what you’re doing, but also your local competitors. Once you understand user intent, you can construct your content with their information. Perform ranking analysis for your type of business venture.

Provide Relevant Hyperlinks

When you hyperlink content from other websites, it can boost their traffic as well as yours. As a business owner, you want to maintain strong connections with other websites. Think of it like a symbiotic relationship where both parties benefit. However, you should only allow a set number of links, since too many can be overcrowded.

You should make sure all your hyperlinks are relevant to your website. More importantly, they should be factual authority figures. It’s better to link to a mainstream organization than a random blog. Be mindful of how you want to present your company to potential visitors.

Regularly Update Content

Keep in mind we live in a fast-paced age of technological advancement. Everybody wants to stay up-to-date with current events. That means they are less than likely to visit articles a few years old. Make sure you update your content every six months to a year.

For example, if you have an article that lists the year 2020, it’s no longer relevant to 2021. Instead, you can make a new article with the current year. When you regularly update content, it also shows visitors you take your website seriously.

Track Your Results

You should always keep up with the current progress of your website. One useful tool at your disposal is Google Search Console. It’s a web service you can use to track the results of your website traffic. You get the perspective from Google themselves, in terms of visitors and the search result pages.

Google Search Console gives you alerts on indexes, spam, and issues within your main website. You can also monitor which websites provide links to yours. The best part is Google Search Console is entirely free to use. You don’t have to pay anything for this service.

Use Content Writers

Not everybody can write their websites. It’s advisable to seek out professional assistance, namely with content writers. Their job is to write your website content and use keywords effectively. They make it much easier for your website to hit the first few pages.

Make sure to give them specific instructions for each project. Give them the specific keywords and phrases, along with a word count and style of speaking. You want to ensure a tone that matches the personality of your product. As long as the directions are straightforward, you should avoid any confusion on what you want.

Make Sure to Follow Good SEO Practices

You can use this informational list to your benefit. How can you remember these guidelines if you follow them accordingly? Consider the use of a checklist. Once you develop a strategy that works for you, check your list and be sure to cross everything.

The best SEO practices involve careful decisions with your keywords, use of meta elements, and plenty of research. Content writers can also make your job easier by creating web pages for you. SEO is a proven methodology for a start-up business. Take the next step and use these practices to drive more traffic to your website.

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SEO Link Building Myths in 2021 https://yoshirodigital.com/seo-link-building-myths-in-2021/ https://yoshirodigital.com/seo-link-building-myths-in-2021/#respond Sun, 14 Feb 2021 11:00:05 +0000 https://yoshirodigital.com/?p=6729 Link-building takes place in a busy setting. The internet is clogged with a lot of unsubstantiated views and free advice. When it comes to link-building myths, we find an uncharted territory filled with muddled instructions and frightening concepts that can end up destroying your website. On the other hand, knowing how to effectively use search […]

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Link-building takes place in a busy setting. The internet is clogged with a lot of unsubstantiated views and free advice. When it comes to link-building myths, we find an uncharted territory filled with muddled instructions and frightening concepts that can end up destroying your website. On the other hand, knowing how to effectively use search engine optimization (SEO) can boost the traffic and clicks that you get. It is important that you are aware of exactly what you need to do, as well as the various myths out there in order to give your website the best chance at success.

There are several SEO myths, but we focus on the most harmful ones today.

A link-building strategy should concentrate on gaining links naturally when adhering to Google’s quality guidelines and white hat SEO practices.

Pro Tip: When it comes to link-building and basically everything related to your digital marketing strategy, make sure you respect the accuracy of details. It’s important to distinguish between reality and myths.

Myth One: All Links are the Same

The distributed worth of links on a website is first and foremost. Many people believe that all links from a website have the same meaning, regardless of how high or low they appear in your post. Although this can seem to be valid, consider the differences between footer and body connections. We can only see that connection location matters by contrasting these two forms of links.

This topic falls under the Google patent application – ranking documents based on user experience and/or feature data, which highlights a number of factors that affect the link’s value:

  • The size of the font of the anchor text associated with the link.
  • Where the link is positioned.
  • Should a link be in a list, the position of the link in the list matters.
  • The font color and attributes of the link.
  • The type of link.
  • Context, relating to the words before and after the link.
  • A variety of other factors.

There is a debated ranking factor related to where a link is placed in a text. Some SEO experts believe that when a link is listed higher in an article, it holds more weight than if it were to be listed lower down. These links could then determine some significant value which is then passed on to the pages they link to.

At the same time, we must keep in mind that a variety of other signals play a role in determining ranking importance. It is higher in the HTML code if a connection appears on a similar page with related anchor text that would be more useful. If we have two ties and all of the elements are identical and favorable, the position could be valuable.

Finally, we can say with certainty that different ranking values are cast by links on a list.

Myth Two: NoFollow Links are Bad 

The truth is that nofollow links are beneficial to your SEO in general. The response is the same if your proof comes from case studies, personal experience, or correlative results.

We can argue until the cows come home on whether nofollow links have any direct effect on rankings, but in the end, it doesn’t really matter. What matters is that if you win nofollow links on high-profile sites, you may gain brand recognition, referral traffic, and various off-site signals which could help your search rankings.

I’ve seen the impact far too many times to believe otherwise, and anyone who’s worked in this industry long enough knows that you shouldn’t choose whether or not to pursue a connection based on whether or not it’s nofollowed.

I’m confident in saying that nofollow ties are beneficial to your SEO, even though the majority of the benefits are likely indirect. The publicity that comes with a high-profile nofollow connection is well worth the effort, as it improves your search engine visibility while also sending direct referral traffic and expanding your brand scope. It also appears to be almost incontrovertible that nofollow links aid in the indexing of websites.

It’s more speculative to suggest that nofollow links may directly boost your rankings in certain situations, and I won’t make such a bold claim. What I can say is that search engines reserve the right to disregard the nofollow tag, which I believe they do for certain editorially positioned and trustworthy links.

Keep in mind that Google’s own response is, “In general, we don’t follow them.”  This seems to mean that, although they don’t always adopt them, they do so on occasion.

Myth Three: Links are the Most Important Ranking Factor

In order to continue with the link clarification, we had to dispel another misconception, namely that inbound links are the most significant ranking factor in Google search. No, that isn’t the case.

During a Google Q&A, Google Search Quality Senior Strategist Andrey Lipattsev mentioned that content, links, and RankBrain are the top three ranking factors, among over 200 others that should not be overlooked. They have to do with user interface, dwell time, mobile usability, content quality, on-page SEO, connection efficiency, and organic results, among other things.

Google’s ranking signals are complex, and they’re designed to provide reliable and informative results by analyzing each user’s searches, so each person may see different results.

To put it plainly, inbound links aren’t the most important ranking element, but they’re just as important as content and RankBrain.

Myth Four: PBNs Do Not Work in 2021

You’re probably wondering whether PBNs are still effective. In 2021, how far has Google progressed and how effective is it at capturing these schemes?

PBNs still work and should continue to work as long as backlinks are a ranking factor, which is unlikely to change anytime soon, despite what many people believe after 2014.

When PBNs first gained popularity, I’m sure both parties were apprehensive. The risk of being captured by webmasters, and the risk of Google users finding the ultimate BlackHat SEO technique.

Google, on the other hand, was one step ahead.

Backlinks are essential to Google, as previously stated. Link building remains a critical ranking factor. They tried eliminating the connections from the algorithm, but the search engine results seem to have gotten worse.

If done correctly, a PBN is virtually undetectable. There’s no way of knowing, or really knowing for sure. Everyone has a link to another website. People are acquainted with one another, converse, and exchange connections. Innocent people practicing White Hat SEO can be harmed if you ban solely on the basis of trends. Isn’t it better to just ban everyone?

So, how did Google respond? How did they capture those who were seriously considering creating a PBN as a BlackHat method of boosting the rankings of their money sites? They didn’t, to be sure.

Instead, Google went after a few well-known PBN providers as well as a few well-known marketing writers who were using and writing about them.

Myth Five: Guest Posting is White Hat

Guest posting is a contentious practice that is commonly used in almost any industry with a blog. Representatives from Google said that guest posting was used as a tactic, but they didn’t mean what they meant.

Basically, publishing content on a domain you don’t own for the purpose of gaining a connection, traffic, a brand mention, or any other advantage is not a blackhat technique. It’s a completely legitimate white hat tactic that’s been tainted by blackhats in the past.

It all depends on how you approach the guest posting process.

The Bottom Line

Hopefully, after reading this article, you have a much better understanding of SEO, as well as some clarity on the myths that go along with it. Understanding SEO properly, and knowing which statements are true and which are not can give you the boost in a job search with an SEO department or simply give you the info that you need to get your website more traffic and visits on a daily basis. It is important that you understand all this in order to get the best results.

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Google Penalty Removal: All You Need To Know https://yoshirodigital.com/google-penalty-removal/ https://yoshirodigital.com/google-penalty-removal/#respond Mon, 15 Mar 2021 07:43:36 +0000 https://yoshirodigital.com/google-penalty-removal/ When you need to look something up online Google is one of the world’s most popular search engines. In a way, it’s sort of like its own club, and like every club, it has a set of rules to follow if you want to be a part of it. If you violate the rules you […]

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When you need to look something up online Google is one of the world’s most popular search engines. In a way, it’s sort of like its own club, and like every club, it has a set of rules to follow if you want to be a part of it. If you violate the rules you can definitely expect a penalty.

Google has Webmaster Guidelines in place for index able content. If your website has any actions that go against these guidelines then a penalty is put in place and that will greatly affect where you stand in the search results. Sometimes people have even seen their website fully removed from the search engine results pages.

If you’re running an online business then there’s a good chance that you rely on your page showing up in search engine results. Your business counts on those organic views and any risk to where you rank in search results could affect your sales.

Once you learn Search Engine Optimization you will realize that mistakes happen. Luckily you can undo any damage you may have done. If this has happened to your website then follow this Google penalty removal guide to get your page back in the search results.

What Are Google Penalties?

When you go against Google’s rules you get hit with one of their penalties. There are two types of Google penalties that you could receive: algorithmic penalties or manual actions. Let’s take a look at the two so you know where you may have gone wrong.

Algorithmic Penalties

Google has core algorithm updates that check for things that go against code. Every time that one is released it means that there has been something detected that Google doesn’t like. For some webmasters, this is a good thing, like if their blog content has been stolen. Other webmasters get bad news from these algorithm updates.

These algorithm updates check for things such as low-quality or duplicated content and link-schemes. There is a different name for each algorithm update released because each one is searching for something specific. If you are a keyword stuffer they will catch you!

A good thing about algorithmic penalties is that they keep webmasters on their toes and makes sure they only produce original content. Whether your website is for business or just a hobby, it should be good quality and original. These penalties are making sure everyone reviews their content and marketing plans to make sure they meet Google’s standards.

Manual Actions

Google also has real people on board reviewing websites. If one of their reviewers found that your website wasn’t in line with the guidelines then you may receive a manual action penalty. There are a few things in particular that can get you a manual action penalty:

  • Structured data issues
  • User-generated spam
  • Spam links
  • Low-quality content/ no value
  • Cloaking or sneaky redirects

There’s a lot more that can be added to this list too. Basically, if your website doesn’t follow Google’s guidelines then it is at risk of a penalty.

For manual action penalties, they are mainly seeking websites that are guilty of spamming and deceptive behavior. As a webmaster, you will want to avoid these penalties at all costs. They are much harder to get revoked because they are a more serious penalty. However, it is still possible to do.

How To Tell If You Have A Google Penalty

a businessman stands in front of a blackboard with an illustration of a large drop in metrics illustrated behind him

Since manual actions are done by a person, you will receive a message from Google alerting you of the penalty. Unfortunately, algorithmic penalties aren’t as obvious and you may not know about them until you actually see the damage it has caused. These are a few of the ways you can tell if you have a Google penalty.

Rankings Drop

As a webmaster, it’s highly likely that you often search your keywords in google to see where your site ranks. If you do this and see that your site is dropping in the search engine results page then there is a good chance you may have a penalty.

If you aren’t in the habit of checking your keywords to see where you rank in the search results you should as a way to monitor in case something goes wrong. This way you can take action quickly if you get a penalty.

Traffic Drops

If you notice that your traffic is starting to drop, look specifically at the amount of traffic that organically comes from Google. This can really hurt webpages that sell their products online as they notice sales decline. When your traffic is dropping due to a Google penalty you should take action right away.

Deindexation

When it comes to websites that are heavy on the spam and deceptive behavior, Google will flat out remove it from their search engine. You might notice that only part of your website was removed if this happens.

Google Penalty Removal Guide

If you have a Google penalty, then your SEO team will likely try one of these tricks to remove it.

Disavow Tool

Did you get a link penalty through Google? If you did the easiest way to lift the penalty is by removing any toxic links from your website. You can do this by creating a disavow tool file for all of the links that got you that penalty. Submit the file of backlinks to Google’s Disavow Link Tool to have them removed.

Fix Up Your Page

Google put their rules out for a reason. The best way to get rid of your penalty and prevent your page from getting another one in the future is to clean it up so it meets Google’s Webmaster Guidlines. Take some time to study their guidelines so you know what you can and can’t do to stay high on Google’s rankings.

High-Quality Content Only

Google is strict on its content. They strive to only show their users helpful content, they have no use for junk and spam. Review the quality of your website and take down anything that could be bringing it’s value down.

Reconsideration Request

Make sure you have done the other 3 steps before this one. For a reconsideration request, you will also need to show documents of what you did to improve your website to meet the guidelines along with a brief summary of why your penalty should be revoked. The reconsideration request is found in the Google Search Console.

With these 4 steps, you should likely have your Google penalty revoked but the best approach is to learn how to avoid a Google Penalty in the first place.

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3 Questions to ask before hiring an SEO Agency https://yoshirodigital.com/3-questions-to-ask-before-hiring-an-seo-agency/ https://yoshirodigital.com/3-questions-to-ask-before-hiring-an-seo-agency/#respond Sat, 28 Nov 2020 13:56:53 +0000 https://yoshirodigital.com/?p=3352 Hiring an SEO agency is an important step in your marketing strategy. People that come to the point of implementing Search Engine Optimization for their business are likely well-educated on the effectiveness of this marketing technique and the tremendous ROI that it can yield. However, you have to be extra careful about choosing the company […]

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Hiring an SEO agency is an important step in your marketing strategy. People that come to the point of implementing Search Engine Optimization for their business are likely well-educated on the effectiveness of this marketing technique and the tremendous ROI that it can yield.

However, you have to be extra careful about choosing the company that you are going to hire for your SEO. The reason is because SEO is so complicated that if you don’t understand the industry, your local “SEO expert” might just take you for a ride without producing any meaningful results for your business. Although paying someone for 6-12 months without producing any results to your business may sound bad, that’s not the worst thing that can happen. The worst thing is that an uneducated SEO without proper experience may cause permanent damage to your website. If the SEO agency uses Black Hat (unethical) techniques that go against Google’s guidelines then you are in big trouble.

Make sure that the SEO agency that you are going to work with knows their thing.

Since SEO agencies will need time to produce the initial results (usually 6-12 months), it will be hard for you to understand what’s really going on behind the scenes. When it comes to SEO, the best approach will always be for you to educate yourself in SEO so you can do the correct screening before hiring an SEO company.

In order for you to do the right screening, we prepared some questions that you can use in order to find out if your prospective SEO agency really knows what they are doing.

3 Questions to ask before hiring an SEO Agency

Question 1: “What is your process for creating the strategy for an SEO campaign”

Why you should ask this question: You need to understand if the SEO Agency can set a clear and structured path that can be followed in order to help you achieve your goals. In other words, you should be looking to hear about deliverables per month, time frames etc.

What you should look for in an answer:

  • Are they proposing a deliverable, oriented approach? For example, Optimizing x number of pages per month and building X number of backlinks per month?
  • Do they provide an accurate time frame? For example, are they suggesting that they are going to spend 2-3 weeks auditing the website, then 4-8 weeks dealing with Technical SEO etc?

How to decide?

If the Agency’s answer is both specific and deliverable-based, then this is a yes. Although SEO cannot be guaranteed, an agency that works with a specific strategy plan in mind is more likely to provide better results than an agency that doesn’t follow a structured plan.

Question 2: “Explain how communication will work between our teams.”

Why you should ask this question: Frequent and honest communication is an essential element for an SEO campaign.

What you should look for in an answer:

  • Are you going to use a specific platform for communication?
  • How often will you have catch up calls or meetings?
  • What’s the ad hoc meeting availability?

How to decide?

In order to increase the chances of succeeding in SEO, the agency needs to be transparent with their tasks and their planning. If the communication plan makes sense to you and the Agency allows at least monthly meetings/calls then everything should be fine.

Question 3: “What’s your approach to SEO”

Why you should ask this question: You need to ask this question in order to help you understand the agency’s philosophy, and determine if there is strategic alignment with your business.

What you should look for in an answer:

  • Do they spend enough time auditing your site?
  • Do they spend enough time analyzing your industry?
  • Do they care about your users/visitors?
  • Is it a data-driven SEO agency?
  • Do they set specific goals?

How to decide?

You definitely can trust a company that spends enough time analyzing your data, your site and your industry. Furthermore, make sure that you choose an agency with a white-hat approach since black hat and grey hat techniques often lead to poor performance in the Search Engine Result Pages.

Conclusion

Choosing an SEO agency is a tough decision. However, by educating yourself in the industry of SEO it will allow you to make an educated choice that reduces the chance of being burned. 

Yoshiro Digital is a leading SEO Agency in Cyprus. Get in touch with us for a FREE SEO consultation session that can help you understand how SEO can help you achieve your business goals!

 

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Implementing SEO Solutions for Small Businesses https://yoshirodigital.com/seo-solutions-for-small-businesses/ https://yoshirodigital.com/seo-solutions-for-small-businesses/#respond Tue, 11 Aug 2020 10:01:26 +0000 https://yoshirodigital.com/?p=3905 How to implement SEO Solutions for Small Businesses It was easy to dominate Google search rankings locally even just a few years ago. Pay attention to your on page SEO, dial in your keyword research, and focus on building some NAPs and you were good to go. But after the Google Venice update local SEO […]

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How to implement SEO Solutions for Small Businesses

It was easy to dominate Google search rankings locally even just a few years ago.

Pay attention to your on page SEO, dial in your keyword research, and focus on building some NAPs and you were good to go.

But after the Google Venice update local SEO changed completely.

Like with most Google updates and their effects on SEO, almost overnight competition for the top spots went through the roof – making it a whole lot harder for small businesses to dominate the way they had previously.

Thankfully though, armed with just a little bit of inside information like the tips and tricks below, you can skyrocket back to the top of Google again while formulating strategies to avoid a Google penalty.

Implement the five strategies we in this quick guide and you’ll be able to take your SEO to the next level in a hurry.

Of course for best results you’ll always want to consider partnering up with an expert SEO agency who can focus on what they do best while leaving you to navigate what you do best.

Let’s get right into it!

Create Location Specific Landing Pages

80% of ALL local searches on mobile phones end up converting.

Think about that for second.

If you had a magic machine that converted 8 out of every 10 prospects that searched for your products or services, especially in your local area, you would run it on a 24/7 basis every single day of the year.

Well, that’s what location specific landing pages can do for your SEO efforts.

Far too many small business owners are (understandably) going with one-size-fits-all marketing approaches for all their lead generation efforts. This is a huge mistake if you’re trying to maximize local search engine results, as the more targeted you make your landing pages – and the more location specific you make your landing pages – the better your conversion rate becomes.

Not only that, but when you hyper focus your SEO efforts to a specific location you’re able to weed out a lot of extra competition. You’ll have an easier path to the top of Google and you’ll have to spend less time and money defending that top spot, too.

Get Listed in Local Directories

Listings in local directories (like YellowPages.com, Yelp, Super Pages, City Search, Yahoo Local, Facebook, etc.) can give you a huge bump when it comes to local SEO.

For obvious reasons all of these directories are considered to be very influential and very authoritative. When your listed on these directories that Google has a favorable attitude towards your own credibility and authority skyrocket, and so do your search engine results.

It is, however, important that you get citations that accurately reflect your web information on these directories.

It’s not a bad idea to look at the local directories you’ve already listed in every once in a while to make sure that your information is relevant, accurate, and up-to-date. Anything that needs to be changed should be ASAP.

You want to make a big point of linking to those directories while leveraging any of the back links and “link juice” they push your way, too.

Link Build Strategically with Partners and JVs

If you have been in business for any amount of time the odds are good that you have partnerships and relationships in your local industry and business community.

One of the smartest moves you can make (especially as far as local SEO goes) is to reach out to these business owners, partners, and relationships to see if you all can get a link sharing setup going with one another.

It doesn’t take a lot of convincing to get people on board, either.

Every successful business owner understands the power of Google these days and how important it is to be ranked highly for core search engine keywords. You might not necessarily get your closest competitors to share links with you, but even partnering with similar businesses (or just locally targeted businesses) and swapping links on one another’s platform can give you a big bump, too.

If you don’t feel like doing the heavy lifting of getting these agreements in place this is something that can be outsourced pretty easily. You don’t even have to necessarily hire top-tier SEO agencies to do the heavy lifting for you.

People on your sales staff, interns, or even just freelance SEO pros cannot these kinds of agreements out for you pretty quickly and get your links placed where they’ll give you the maximum return.

Create and Optimize Google My Business

Your My Business listing on Google is going to be a huge source of organic traffic – if you’re using it correctly.

Google properties are (no surprise here) always given a bit of priority access in search engine results. You may not be able to grab the top spot just because of your My Business listing with Google, but you’ll definitely be in the top five – and can push your own site closer to the top, too.

Be sure that you are using a keyword rich description that doesn’t feel written for robots. Carefully craft a marketing message that can attract people to your website with SEO tactics littered throughout for the best results.

Make sure that all of your images are geo-tagged (to cash in on local SEO benefits) but also make sure that they have the right title tags and alternative text with SEO keywords sprinkled in, too.

Anytime you create content for the web you need to be sure that you are first creating it with your perfect prospect or customer in mind.

After that, though, you need to back fill in effective SEO tactics like the ones we highlighted above – especially on something like My Business on Google – to push a flood of targeted traffic your way.

Blogging

Lastly, Google still loves fresh and relevant content that isn’t keyword stuffed beyond all recognition.

Content marketing from a search engine optimization standpoint is still a huge piece of the local SEO mastery puzzle.

If you are going to blog, however, you want to make sure that you stick to a regular posting schedule. You can’t take a willy-nilly approach to this. It just won’t work. You’ll actually end up taking your search engine results if you post infrequently.

Semi-daily posts are best (especially if they target different keywords you want to rank highly for), but weekly or even biweekly updates are okay – not only from a content standpoint but from a search engine optimization standpoint, too.

Build up a library of blog posts and you won’t only be able to grant the top spots for the local keywords you are after. You’ll also be able to dominate and defend those positions from competitors not willing to do the work you have to get the spots in the first place.

So the next time you wonder why isn’t my website performing effectively in the search results, consider adapting the suggestions we’ve outlined above.

Best of luck going forward!

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A Google Algorithm Update Just Hit My Website – Now What? https://yoshirodigital.com/a-google-algorithm-update-just-hit-my-website-now-what/ https://yoshirodigital.com/a-google-algorithm-update-just-hit-my-website-now-what/#respond Sun, 17 Jan 2021 07:54:10 +0000 https://yoshirodigital.com/?p=3799 Google shakeups are pretty commonplace. The search giant is interested in one thing and one thing only – providing the most relevant results possible, as quickly as possible, to every search query made on the site – and Google makes frequent adjustments to their internal algorithms to do exactly that. Some of these adjustments are […]

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Google shakeups are pretty commonplace.

The search giant is interested in one thing and one thing only – providing the most relevant results possible, as quickly as possible, to every search query made on the site – and Google makes frequent adjustments to their internal algorithms to do exactly that.

Some of these adjustments are relatively minor and fly under the radar, but others (like Penguin and Panda, for example) have the potential to turn search result rankings on their head.

If your site has been hit by a Google algorithm update and you’re wondering what to do next you want to check out the rest of this quick guide.

Assess the Impact

Right out of the gate, you’ll want to fully assess the impact that the algorithm has had on your site from top to bottom.

This means digging into your internal analytics to see which pages have been hit the most, comparing them with search results you had before the algorithm landed, and trying to really understand which areas of your site need to be triaged first.

The odds are always pretty good that you are going to have certain pages that aren’t doing as well as they used to with other pages maintain their position or even improving, especially if your search engine optimization efforts have been strategically deployed.

It’s important to get to the bottom of things before moving forward, though.

Diagnose Your Rough Edges

The next big piece of the puzzle is to look at each of the pages on your site that were hit hardest to figure out why they were specifically laid out by the algorithmic update.

This is going to require a bit of heavy lifting on your end. You’ll need to have a look at your keywords used, keyword density, whether or not your on page SEO is as well optimized as you had thought it was, whether you’re meta-tags and alternative tags are dialed in, etc.

You really need to quickly identify the patterns that each of these pages share to understand why you’ve been hit hard by the algorithmic changes.

Analyze Your Competitors

You aren’t going to be the only person hit hard by changes to the Google algorithm.

These algorithmic updates hit everyone across the board and you’ll want to have a look at how your competitors are faring against the new changes.

Some of them may be doing very well, and you’ll want to dig deeper into what they are doing on page (as well as off page) to get a better feel for what you can do better moving forward. Some of them may be doing very poorly, though, and it’s a great opportunity for you to leapfrog ahead and grab some higher rankings before they are able to scramble and fix their mistakes.

Run a Backlink Audit

Any time (and we mean ANY time) Google releases a new algorithm update you’re going to want to conduct a quick backlink audit to make sure that the links you’ve created are still working for you, that they are still out there, and that you are still getting “link juice” from them.

Backlinks remain a huge piece of the puzzle when it comes to success in the world of search engine optimization.

No matter what else changes, backlink generation is critically important and you want to make sure that your links remain on high authority pages, credible pages, and sites that are going to give you a bump even in the wake of these changes to the algorithm.

There are a lot of platforms out there that can help you automate a backlink audit in a hurry and you want to leverage them on a regular basis.

Call in the Experts

Lastly, if your site was particularly hit hard by an algorithm update you’re going to want to consider calling in the experts – legitimate SEO freelancers, consultants, or even a full-blown SEO agency – to get you back on track.

The world of search engine optimization is constantly and ever-changing.

What works today to rank a website highly may not work at all tomorrow, or worse – because of algorithmic updates – it may cause your rank to tank.

Unless you are knee-deep in the world of search engine optimization on a day-to-day, minute to minute basis like these professionals are you might always feel a step or two behind your competitors.

By leveraging the help of real experts you’re able to immediately boost your results while freeing up your time and energy to focus on other areas of your business that you have expertise in.

Don’t be shy about calling in the pros when necessary.

References

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