Posts

SEO

SEO & maximising the potential of your content

/in /by

Why good content needs the backing of technical SEO for your website

It is well known that Google places a high value on regularly uploaded, good quality, new content, such as blogs, on websites.

It has algorithms to assess quality no longer simply by focusing on the frequency of key words or phrases, but also on the information your blog contains.

However, it is also important that the technical content behind the blogs is done correctly.  They won’t be found or listed unless they are correctly indexed by the search engine.

You can find out whether a blog has been indexed with the help of a Google tool currently being updated and at beta stage. It is called the Index Coverage Report and will provide an analysis of pages that have been successfully indexed, not indexed because of an error or have been blocked.

There is a detailed help page that explains each status found in the report.

Combined with Google Analytics it makes it possible to analyse any patterns in the indexing – or not- of pages on your website.

The sorts of issues that may affect correct indexation are the numbers of internal links in blogs, the length of pages and meta tags.

If there are several blogs with similar content on the same topic you need to assign priority to one of these using what are called canonical tags so that Google knows which URL is the main page to consider.

It is also important to consider the speed at which a page loads.  Slow speeds can significantly affect bounce rates, since site visitors are impatient and will leave if a page takes too long to load.

If all this sounds too much for you as a website owner, that’s what we’re here for.

Dominating web space

Big companies dominating web space

/in /by

The “Big Three” dominating web space

Think of website searching and what name springs to mind? – Google

What about social media? – Facebook

Online selling? – Amazon

Despite the best efforts of IT innovators, these three effectively now dominate their niches, far outstripping the likes of Bing, Snapchat, Instagram and WhatsApp. In fact, Facebook now owns both Instagram and WhatsApp.

There is also speculation among tech experts that Google may be preparing to buy Snap, the company behind Snapchat.

According to BBC Tech correspondent Rory Cellan-Jones, the dominance of the big three means that while LinkedIn, Twitter and Snapchat will have substantial audiences they will struggle to make much money.

What does this mean for businesses and marketing?

Leaving aside LinkedIn, which is owned by Microsoft and is a specialist niche for businesses and organisations for both conversational groups and for recruitment, business marketing will need more than ever to have a presence on both Facebook and Google.

This means paying attention to SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) so that the business’ website is easy to find when its service or product is being searched for.

It means regularly updating website content, something Google particularly now monitors and for those businesses selling services that may not change dramatically or often, unlike products, one of the best ways to do this is to add regular blogs on topics of interest to potential clients and customers.

It means that businesses should understand who their target customers are, what motivates and interests them, and cater to their requirements.

It also means defining clear goals for any marketing on social media, which is often about creating an identity so that potential clients and customers remember the company’s name and see it as having a solid reputation for the quality of its customer service and reliability.

It also means developing a trustworthy reputation, so that there are secure means of making payment online, if appropriate, and a very clearly-stated policy of conforming to the new rules due to come into force on 25 May 2018 (GDPR – General Data Protection Regulations) on protecting people’s personal information.