But achieving this feat is increasingly difficult, considering everyone wants the same spot. While everyone cannot be at the top, getting the basics right will improve your chances of landing the prize.

So, in this piece, we will be discussing the pitfalls you should avoid in your quest to rise through the ranks.

Having no sitemap.

Let’s describe what a sitemap is – it is an XML file that feeds data to search engines. What type of data? The sitemap provides data about the most important pages of the website. These may include the date of the last update and what a page has over the others.

With this information, the spider is better positioned to crawl the site more efficiently and accurately. Note that having a sitemap does not automatically translate to search engine success; it is one of those little moves that can better your chances.

Unsuccessful canonical domain check.

Your domain may fail a canonical check if your homepage can be accessed via multiple URLs. As harmless as it may appear, different URLs loading the same content is an issue. This leads to the division of inbound like equity, which depletes the SEO value of the website.

When this happens, configure the 301 redirects to redirect the duplicate pages to a single location or fix the canonical tags.

Slow load times.

When Google announced its decision to consider the loading times of a website as part of its algorithm in 2010, it forces websites to work on reducing their loading times both on desktop and mobile.

Not sure what your site’s load time is? Use the PageSpeed Insights tool from Google or any other page analysis tool to estimate your site’s load time. If the analysis confirms that your website has a slow process speed, you should make some changes.

First, remove render-blocking JavaScript and CSS above-the-fold. You should also implement browser caching and optimize images. You should also enable compression and minifying HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

Not having header tags.

The importance of header tags cannot be overemphasized. The structure it brings into the mix makes it easier for search engines to understand the important parts. The header tags also help in prioritizing the content on a page for correct and effective uses.

When using header tags, adopt a unique main tag that clearly states the page’s purpose using the main keywords. Consider using tags where applicable in your subheadings.

Having no image description.

Using the right image is half the job; the other half is adding the proper image description. Your image description should be a descriptive and relevant text. You can have it as an Alt attribute.

Image descriptions help search engines to understand your images. When adding descriptions to your images, make them clear, concise, relevant, and keyword-rich.

Having inadequate metadata.

Your SEO success still largely depends on your metadata, especially title tags. Your title tag is the first line of text a user sees about your website on the search result page.

For best results, keep your title tags brief – not more than 70 characters – and use the relevant keywords. Alongside title tags, you should also focus on meta descriptions. It is your best chance of convincing the user to click through to your page.

Your meta descriptions should appear like a copy. You can easily add and edit your meta descriptions if you are using a CMS system.

Keyword spamming.

It is not enough to research and identify the right keywords. You must also use them correctly. Copywriters must understand the need to balance the use of target keywords naturally in a page’s body.

Using the keywords excessively and unnaturally will put your SEO score at risk. The search engine will struggle to identify what to rank for. Instead, use selected variations of the keywords of the page. While using keywords to impress Google, do not confuse your readers.

You must satisfy your readers and Google spiders.

Duplicating content.

It is common to see duplicate pages within the same website, especially on larger eCommerce websites. This can be counterproductive. For instance, applying filters to product listings on eCommerce websites may lead to duplication. Likewise, having several slight variations on a product on the same website can lead to duplication.

To fix this, use a canonical tag. Canonical tags help to identify duplicate pages by linking them with the corresponding main pages so that a single page gets all the SEO values.

Not naming links correctly.

When you add links to your page, you do so via anchor texts – the text’s clickable part. Now, when the search engine spider crawls your website, one of the reasons is to assess the relevance of any associated page.

It is easier to use random anchor texts like ‘follow this link’ when linking external pages. But this will not do any good for your SEO efforts. Instead, use anchor texts containing relevant keywords that you want your page to rank for.

More importantly, avoid over-optimizing your anchor texts – it can be counterproductive.

In Conclusion

The mistakes we have discussed above, if fixed, will definitely help your online marketing efforts and improve your overall results. But more importantly, it will contribute more to your revenue.

Understandably, it may seem like a lot of work. However, start with one or two and add more gradually until you have ticked the boxes. If you ever encounter a hitch while at it, feel free to contact professionals for help.

You can reach us via (insert email), we will be delighted to help you get the best out of your digital marketing efforts.

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Article by EDOT3 SEO Agency Newcastle

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Your entire SEO campaign, including both on- and off-site optimization, will revolve around your chosen keywords. Therefore, you must ensure that you do effective keyword research before you do anything else.

Build a List

After you have chosen a niche, you need to research keywords which are connected to that niche. Your first stop should be the Google Adwords Keyword Planner tool. Enter your niche and the tool will return hundreds of related keywords for you.

Copy and paste all information into a spreadsheet. Then go through the list and search the tool for these keywords. It will then show even more ideas. Using this method, you should be easily able to build a list which contains thousands of entries.

To get even more keywords, you can use Google Trends to see what is popular at the moment. Research current trends and extract the keywords, then put these keywords into the Adwords tool, and it will return their number of monthly searches. Finally copy and paste this information into your spreadsheet.

You can get more ideas from Google’s auto-complete. When you type a keyword into the search bar, it will try to predict what you want to search for. You can use this information in the same way as Google Trends to add to your list. Similarly, you can do the same with “related searches,” which are located at the bottom of the search page.

Finally, there are other free tools you can use which will return a list of keywords such as ubersuggest.io . Enter in your keywords and it will return a list of related keywords for you. Again, put this into Google’s keyword planner, get the number of monthly searches, and add it to your list.

Cleaning the List

If you have thoroughly gone through this process, you should have collected a list which contains many thousands of entries. You’ll find that a number of them will be duplicates, which you want cleared from the list. Fortunately, Excel has an option to do this automatically for you.

Now you can sort your data according to the number of monthly searches. Your overall aim is to find keywords with a high number of monthly searches which are also fairly easy to rank.

Filtering the List

Depending on your niche, you will want to look for different types of keywords. For example, if your website sells shampoo, you’ll want keywords that contain the word buy or a synonym such as purchase, such as buy shampoo online or purchase shampoo. This will help to increase your conversion rates because people typing in these keywords are looking to buy something.

One the other hand, if your website is an informative blog, you may want to consider filtering questions, lists, and how-to guides, as they are all popular types of blog posts.

Keyword Difficulty

Now that you have started to reduce the number of keywords you have, you’ll need to assess their ranking difficulty. Try to find keywords which have a high number of searches and don’t have a lot of competition.

Here, you just need to type the keyword into Google and look at the competition on the first page. The websites listed on the first page of a search containing your chosen keyword will be your direct competition.

Check their domain authority and backlinks. The more authority and high-quality backlinks they have, the harder they are to outrank. Also look for exact title matches. If most of the first page contain exact title matches, it will also be more difficult to rank highly.

Automated Software

To save time, you can use tools such as Long Tail Pro and Ultimate Niche Finder to speed up the process. They can both automatically scrape huge lists of keywords and analyze the competition, meaning that a lot of the hard work has been done for you. They are premium tools with a paid subscription, but if you’re doing a lot of keyword research, they can both save you a lot of time.

Choosing the Best Keywords

After analyzing all the keywords in your long list, you should now have a list of your targeted keywords for each page on your website or article published on your blog. You should also use related keywords on the same page as your targeted keywords so that your keyword density for one keyword doesn’t get too high.

After effectively researching a list of keywords, you are now ready to start your SEO campaign and start tracking your SERPs. SEO is an ongoing process and you need to keep working hard not only get high rankings in the first place, but to also maintain them over time.

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Looking for an SEO agency to take your business to the next level? SEO agency Newcastle will transform your business by finding, convincing and converting your audience.

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Internet Marketing Graphics by SEOBook

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A properly implemented search engine optimization (SEO) marketing strategy can enable an SMB to reach the approximately 2.4 billion people across the globe who use the Internet to purchase goods and services. In North America alone, 78.6 percent of the population regularly goes online.

You Want Your Business to Grow

Basically, an Internet presence (also called online visibility) refers to the ease and speed with which consumers find a business and its products or services after an Internet search. It also considers the level of your business’s brand recognition created online.

SMBs often struggle with the issue of satisfactory visibility on the Internet. Some SMB owners delude themselves that they can’t afford to hire search engine optimization marketers or writers. They don’t realize that when they invest in quality SEO they’re investing in the long-term success of their business.

What About Social Media and SMB Online Visibility?

SMB owners and experts agree that any successful SMB starts by bolstering their Internet presence via social media along with SEO marketing. An SMB determined to succeed depends on both marketing platforms to gain a competitive edge.

An effective SEO marketing strategy may be somewhat costly. A well-managed search engine optimization marketing strategy can boost an SMB’s online visibility, which promotes initial success, growth and stability.

If you are looking for an SEO agency, seoagencynewcastle.com will transform your business by finding, convincing and converting your audience.

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We are moved to speculate what’s coming up for the rest of 2015, especially with the growing number of devices used to access the web on a daily basis, most web designers need to keep modifying their workflow in order to meet up with the vibrant changes that keep occurring in web design. To determine what trends will flourish in the year 2015, we have put together some of the most notable changes and improvements to be made this year.

Images and Videos

In the past, web masters avoided making use of large images on their webpages, they forget the fact that pictures are a wonderful tool that most web users find very appealing, and they convey a sense of cleanliness on the web page as well as quality services. They are also a lot more entertaining and captivating than just plain words on a page, thus the saying “a single picture is better than a thousand words”

Pictures are now being used by web designers to direct people to selected sections that contain more information on web pages. When web users see images that points to a particular direction, they are definitely inclined to check the information’s that such pictures where referring to, whether it is a section of important information, or a call to action. Videos has also become very important, because they are quick to provide web users with lots of information, the moving pictures and audio provides all that your business has to offer. Web users are definitely going to enjoy looking at pictures and watching videos than just reading plain texts.

Responsiveness.

With the technological explosions and a lot of devices (smart phones, phablets, tablets, monitors and large screen TVs) which are being used to access the web, since they all have varying screen sizes, web masters now have to make sure that they tailor their webpages to ensure that all web users can surf the web comfortably, regardless of the screen size or type of device.

A website lacking a responsive layout or structure demands that the user puts in extra effort to pull and drag when trying to view the contents of the site. This puts you at a serious risk of not getting potential leads since viewers wouldn’t want to hassle themselves just to see what it contains. While a responsive webpage ensures that the contents of your webpages shrinks, expands, shifts and moves to fit the screen of whatever device is being used to access the website. This allows users to easily navigate your web pages and go through the contents without any stress and from any device. Thus increasing the chances of the webmaster of getting leads and conversions.

Parallax Scrolling

This became common early in 2014, and was embraced by most web masters, and it is now being used in more web pages than the previous year. This unique feature gives flexibility to web pages that are not just pleasant to users; they are also convenient and very effective. Parallax Scrolling are great for handling single paged websites and storytelling sites, and we’ll definitely be seeing more of this in the year 2015.

Card Designs

Web designers now make use of a method in displaying information in such a way that users find very appealing. The webpage is segmented into card-like structures, with each card containing a different and attractive image or text. That describes what the card links to. And when a desired card is selected, it takes the user away from the homepage and into a page containing the desired information.

When creating such card structures, a simple layout that has large and very attractive pictures that catches the eye, and pulls the user to your page. Webmasters need to create suitable cards that provide the exact information needed to successfully provide the much needed results.

Flat Backgrounds

In the past, web designers made use of complex intricate designs on their webpages, but they had very poor returns in investments. This is because users find such sites to be messy and unkempt, and feel that it would take extra time and a lot more effort to find exactly what they are looking for. So they tend to look elsewhere at simpler sites that make use of one dimensional design. A flat design with attractive colors and prominent information are usually more attractive to web users and provide potential leads and conversions to web users. And as a result of its effectiveness, it is definitely going to be used a whole lot more in 2015.

Web graphics

Humans are always attracted to what they can see, and tend to grasp information a lot faster when it is presented in graphics. The use of info graphics has been used to portray large amounts of information that could easily be remembered. Thus the new trend called the web graphics, which is basically the same with info graphics, but has some added features that allows web users to interact with the web information. Unlike the info graphics, web graphics are far more appealing and increases the retention of users at a significantly higher level.

Webgraphics is definitely going to be part of the 2015 trends, with more web users demanding for it. This is sure to make web graphics become a lot more popular than it was in 2014.

Less Clicking, More Scrolling…

Since more and more web users access the web through smartphones, the need to create a site that can easily be navigated from such phones definitely creates a good impression. Rather than make users push buttons on small screens, web designers have found a more effective way of structuring their web pages to just scroll through the information, without having to click on any button. So instead of tapping delicately on buttons, viewers can comfortably scroll through the desired information, putting up desired information at the top of your homepage, while making the rest of the information very easy to access will definitely bring in more viewers and more conversions.

SEO in 2015

If 2014 is any indication, then web design and SEO techniques are going to only become more important in 2015, as more people look to the virtual world for their various needs and wants.
Same old, same old The core concepts of website design and SEO strategy are unlikely to change much in the coming year; as with most products and services, quality is a standard that never goes out of style. For the website owner, this means:

Top-notch, frequently updated, and relevant content remains one of the best ways to keep old visitors coming back and attract new ones. Obviously, running a website can be quite a chore, so if you find that content creation is too much for you, consider hiring a writer or teams of writers to do so for you. There are plenty of freelancers who specialize in doing just that and for very reasonable prices.

• User-centric website design is a necessity. A site that makes the user experience (or UX, for short) its number one priority will ultimately see much more success than a similar site with a less user-friendly design. Creating such a site encompasses a wide varieties of factors, including, but definitely not limited to, choosing a colour scheme that is visually appealing and easy-to-read and that does not assault the eye (like a retina-scarring neon orange background with lemon-yellow lettering), setting up multiple pages for specific subjects, all easily accessible with clear navigational controls, using the F-pattern for your design (for more on this, check out the information in this tutorial), and laying out your content in such a way that is easy on the eyes (such as breaking up large blocks of content and using contrasting colours, like black and white, for text). For more information on how to make your website design user-friendly, there are a number of tutorials available, all of which can be found using Google.
• The quality of your link profile remains an important factor in determining your search engine results ranking. Kick off the new year by evaluating its present state and then design a plan to improve it through link-earning (as opposed to link-buying and other “unnatural” link-building practices that will only eventually land you in trouble.)
• White hat SEO practices remain supreme. Yes, they may take a little longer to show results than their black hat counterparts, the latter will get you penalized by that Almighty Overlord of Search Engines, Google, while the former will help your website succeed.
• Site speed is still important. Always remember that most internet users have the attention span of a hyperactive 5-year old and the “give it to me now” mentality of a 2-year old. Sites that take more than a few seconds to load will have most users hitting the “back” button

Factors of Growing Importance
SEO and website design in 2015 will still see some important changes, though much of the fundamentals will remain the same.

Mobile-friendly pages are more important than ever. If you do not have a website that is optimized for use on mobile devices, creating one that is geared for mobile users should probably be your first priority. The amount of mobile traffic is only growing and the best way to lose out on the business of mobile users is to have a site that is inconvenient or even impossible to use on their devices. In fact, Google has recently added a “mobile-friendly” label to their search engine results list so that mobile users can skip right to the sites that are easily viewed on their devices, rather than slogging through sites that are poorly-designed for mobile technology. Are you wondering what makes a site a mobile-friendly? Google uses the following as criteria:

• Text can be easily read without zooming in and out.
• Links and interactive objects are large enough and spaced far enough apart so that they can be tapped accurately. This is in contrast to those sites that, on mobile, make their tap-able content so small and scrunched together that anyone with fingers larger than that of a toddler will find themselves repeatedly hitting the wrong link on accident.
• Content automatically sizes itself to the dimensions of the screen on which it is viewed, eliminating the need for horizontal scrolling
• The site does not use software that cannot be used on most mobile devices—Flash is an example of an incompatible piece of software.
• There is likely to be a decrease in the importance of keywords. In the past, SEO tactics have emphasized the use of keywords to increase one’s visibility on search results. In 2015, SEO techniques will have to adapt to semantic search-based algorithms, which means that no longer will Google be looking for individual keywords within a query, but taking into account each word and the overall meaning of the phrase searched. Additionally, Google will take into account plurals and synonyms of words when looking for pages relevant to the search query. Conversational keywords, longtail keywords, and LSI keywords should all be explored as means of increasing your online visibility.
• Because social media sites, such as Facebook, are high-authority sites, your business’s Facebook, Twitter, or Google+ page may actually rank higher than your business’s actual site. The continued, even growing, popularity of these sites means that creating an impressive social media profile is more important than ever.

Brand visibility across a multitude of platforms and on a variety of different outlets will become increasingly important to SEO strategy as the virtual world is accessed through a myriad of ways and information is gathered from a plethora of sources. It is important to have a representation of your company in every corner of digital space if you truly wish to  grow your customer base.

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You are studying competitor websites to see how they get organic page one search results, so that you can apply some of the same techniques to the search engine optimisation (SEO) or design of your own site.

You want to visit the sites that come up on page one of search results for each search word or phrase that you typed into the search bar.

You’re looking at the page one organic search results, and not at the PPC ads that appear at the top or the sides of the organic results.

Make sure you have your different search words or phrases noted down, and then do your searches.  Do not start visiting the sites that come up on page one of the results (unless you’re really only doing one keyword search) until you’ve gone through your entire list of search words and phrases.

Take note of the websites that appear more than once in the results on page one for different search terms.  If a website is coming up on page one of the results for a search term, that’s good, but if some sites are coming up on page one for a variety of different search words and search phrases, they’re obviously doing a lot better – a person looking for information on the Internet can find those sites by using more than just one search term.  One never knows what a person might type into a search bar, and if your site can appear on page one of results for more than one search term, that’s excellent.

Once you’re heading to any particular site, be ready to just sit back and get a “first impression” when the site opens.

1. How long does it take to open?
2. Does any image near the top immediately tell you what the site is about?
3. Does the website have a minimal but effective look?
4. Are the navigation tabs easily visible?
5. What is the font size – is it easy to read?
6. Is the text nicely spaced, or all squashed up?
7. Are there calls to action?
8. What are the main colours?
9. Are there any videos visible above the fold?
10. Are there any small forms visible above the fold?
11. How does looking at the page make you feel – interested to learn more, bored, excited, calm, or irritated?
12. Is it obvious that one needs to scroll down to read or view more?
13. Is it obvious how long the site has been live on the Internet – if so, how long is that?
14. Is the site mostly a static website or is it a blog?
15. Do the site owners have a blog – is it attached to the website, or separate?

Now look at just the text:

1. How much text content is there?
2. Does the text have links in it that go to other pages of the site?
3. How much text is near the very top of the page?
4. Is there a lot of text in any sidebars?
5. Is the text really text or is it an image?
6. If the text is an image, does an alt tag pop up when you hover your mouse over it?
7. What are the words in the alt tags of images?
8. Are the navigation tabs text or images?
9. Do image navigation tabs have alt tags?
10. What is the domain name and which keywords appear in it?
11. Are the main keywords in the main body of text related to the keywords in the title, description, image alt tags and text links on the web page?
12. Is the grammar good and is the spelling correct?

Now look at navigation:

1. Do the navigation tabs really take you to where they should?
2. If the navigation tabs take you to where they should, is it easy to again navigate from that second page to wherever else you want to be on the site?
3. Do the navigation tabs have drop downs?
4. Is there a sitemap?
5. How many pages does the site have?
6. Is there a resources page or a link partner page?
7. What are the resources and who are the link partners?
8. How many text links are visible on the page?
9. Are there any RSS feeds and what is the content being fed?

Now look at the coding (click view source):

1. Is there a doc type declaration in the first line of coding?
2. Is the Meta tag coding good – does the title, description and keywords match those of the web page?
3. Does the Meta tag coding also match the title and description of the search result when you did your search?
4. Are there robot crawl instructions?
5. Is the content that’s on the web page also in the coding, or is a script calling the content in?

Use free online tools to check other aspects of SEO:

1. What are the Meta tag relevancy percentages?
2. What is the page rank of the homepage?
3. How many backlinks does the site have?
4. Where are the backlinks coming from?
5. Which main keywords are repeated the most and exactly how many times are they repeated?
6. Which main keywords appear in the text links and how many are there of each?
7. Which main keywords appear in the alt tags of images?
8. How many people use those keywords to search for information every month?
9. Does the website owner use PPC advertising?
10. What is the wording of the PPC adverts?
11. How much is the website owner paying per click?

Conclusion:

Once you’ve noted and compared the contents of the top sites, it is likely that you will notice many similar SEO techniques being used.  Use the same techniques to improve the SEO of your own site (or the site of a client.)

During the competitor website analysis process you may also become more aware of which design and navigation techniques work best to keep a visitor on a site for longer.

The post Improve SEO by doing Competitor Website Analysis appeared first on Web Design Newcastle, Digital Design Agency Newcastle upon Tyne. NE1 1SG. UK.

However, not all backlinks are built the same. It is important to obtain quality backlinks if you wish for search engines to take your website seriously.

Comments and Forums Posts – Easy, but Low Quality
The first step taken by those new to SEO is often a campaign of comments and forum posts. This is an easy, and often recommended, step which requires minimal effort. Unfortunately, this strategy has two problems which also result in minimal quality.

The first is that comments and forums generally frown on blatant plugs. You will therefor be reduced to general promotion, usually using links to your website’s main page. However, search engines don’t rank sites, they rank pages. While having many backlinks to your main page might have some minor effect, it doesn’t help your many pieces of content targeted towards specific keywords.

The second problem is that everyone is doing it. In order to obtain consistently high rankings in search engines you will need to stand out from the crowd. Comments and forum posts, even at their best, won’t put you ahead of your competitors.

Guest Posting – Gaining Authority
A much more effective way to build backlinks is by guest posting on websites related to your topic. While you may at first be intimidated – after all these websites are possible competitors – remember that it is a mutually beneficial deal. You will receive a backlink and the website you write for will receive free content.

Guest posting provides you with a backlink from a website with related topic to a page of your choosing. This is great for SEO. It tells search engines that your website is relevant and it allows you to target specific pages on your website for attention. Here at EDOT3 SEO Agency Newcastle we create content and get it published as guest posts which helps increase rank whilst delivering highly targeted traffic.

Guest posting can also improve SEO by sending interested visitors to your website. These visitors have already looked at your guest post and decided it was good enough to visit your website. There is a good chance that they will spend time on your website and click on various links, which positively effects your time on site and bounce rate metrics.

Breaking News and Information – The Best Backlinks
The best possible backlink situation occurs when content on your website becomes news. Once one major website decides to report on your content, chances are good that more websites will also report on it. Better yet, you will usually receive a backlink directly to the relevant page. This tells search engines that the page is important and maked that page more likely to show up as a front page result.

This will sometimes happen at random if you frequently post unique content. However, you can assist the process by being your own advocate. If you have a unique piece of content which you are proud of, send that information to other websites and blogs as a news tips.

Don’t Fall in the Downward Spiral
These are just some examples of what are and aren’t quality backlinks. Generally, the easier a backlink is to obtain, the less likely it is to be important. While it is easy to decide to take the volume route, higher quality backlinks are always better. They make your website stand out from the crowd as an important, reliable and relevant source.

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