Tag : SEO

Authority Building

most-popular-90Authority on the web is one of the building blocks of SEO.  Being popular online helps raise your search results just as having high search results helps raise your popularity. Basically you need to be popular… to be popular. Not very useful advice – I know. But how do you break into this circle of privilege? You can actively work on authority building. In fact we will do it for you!

See our authority building service for details.

Parallax Web Design Presents a Major Handicap for SEO

Generally speaking, a parallax scrolling website is a visually stimulating, one-page website presenting users with a background moving slower or faster than the foreground. To give you an idea, AWWWards have identified the top 20 parallax websites of 2013 here.

Disadvantages of SEO

What’s tricky about these engaging websites is that the design usually includes only one long page of HTML and one URL that can be linked from search engines. Every time a user searches for a specific item, they land on the main page of the parallax website and not necessarily for what they were looking for. This means that there is only one meta title and meta description to optimize. Further, when choosing the main keywords for the SEO of a website, we focus on up to a few keywords per page. In this case, the site is only one page so this provides a limited number of keywords that you can expect the site to come up for in search results.

An SEO Solution

One way to counteract this problem would be to identify what content is important by deciding what would and wouldn’t be searched for by a user. For example, if a website specializes in baked goods, we would have to identify the major keywords that should rank well for the business online. Let’s say that the website focuses on selling cupcakes, birthday cakes and wedding cakes. In addition to the main page of the website that has all of the information including contact information, photos etc., on a long parallax page, some secondary pages with details on cupcakes, birthday cakes and wedding cakes can be created that could then be optimized for its own keywords, title tags, descriptions and other customized content. What’s important to remember here is that content should not be duplicated from the main page. The baked goods will only be identified on the main page, with details such as cupcake flavours and pricing included on its respective page.

By doing this, one main page with parallax design along with additional pages for the actual products will be created. This is a great way to integrate the trendy parallax scrolling web design with a conventional multi-page website without causing an issue for SEO.

Link Building Page Update

We just updated our page content describing link building for your website. Given the changes in the Google algorithm our approach for link building now also includes an assessment and cleanup of unnatural links to your site. These include any links from spammy sites that were put up just for the benefit of SEO. The benefit of these types of links is gone and to avoid penalizing your position in search results it is recommended to do a clean up of bad links. See the details here: https://www.redcarpetweb.com/link-building.html

Linking is Still Queen

Almost 10 years ago, I wrote a piece called “Linking is Queen”.  The article discussed how linking is essential to the health of a website, but that content was still “King”.

Skip to 2013 and the only thing that has changed is the way we link.  There is no longer any need to solicit links, though it would not hurt to solicit them from appropriate sites (such as clients and suppliers).  Links today come directly from a viewpoint of popularity.  If you are popular, you get discussed and linked to in social media networks like Facebook, Twitter, Blogs, and more.  This in turn makes your site, your brand, and/or yourself a deemed authority on the subject in question.

So how do you become popular? The answer is the same as it ever was: “Content is King”.  Write original, valuable content, and people will discuss it, share it, Tweet it, and make your article or website the most popular one around. You can use tricks like link bait, but that is just another way of confirming to “write content that people want to share”.  It all comes down to: good content generates good links.

So what is good content? Good content is both unique AND adds value to a website.

  • It is not offered anywhere else
  • It is an original solution to people’s problems
  • Is either interesting, surprising, and/or has a practical use

If you want your content to spread, it should trigger one of the 3 A’s: Anxiety, Awe, or Anger.

Unique content without value may in fact harm your site’s authority.  So don’t regurgitate old ideas, be creative and initiate new concepts.  That is how you will make it to the top.

So, in a decade, everything has changed, and nothing has changed.  Content and links are still the King and Queen that dominate search engine landscape.

Don’t forget to pledge your allegiance.

by Shawn Campbell – February 8, 2013 – www.RedCarpetWeb.com

SEO For Facebook Graph Search? Facebook Has Some Tips

“How do I make sure my business gets found in Facebook search?”

Never fear: Facebook itself has already shared a few tips to help make that happen. We’ll get to that below, but first a quick bit of background that’s good to know.

What Business Owners Need To Know About Facebook Graph Search.  See full article.

Jan 15, 2013

by Matt McGee, published on http://searchengineland.com/