Godaddy’s Search Engine Visibility Review: Is It Really Worth It?

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I’m pretty sure that GoDaddy needs no introduction. If you are reading this article on search engine optimization, I am going to hazard a guess that you are savvy enough with computers to understand exactly who GoDaddy are, and what services they offer.

With that being said, one of the more recent services that GoDaddy have introduced to the market that fewer people are aware of is a service called “GoDaddy Search Engine Visibility”, which is basically their own fancy term for search engine optimization.

Whether you have had any experience with GoDaddy’s services in the past, either positive or not-so-positive is neither here nor there. We won’t be letting our past experiences with GoDaddy influence our opinion of the service that we are reviewing today, which is “Search Engine Visibility”.

Before we dive into the specifics of the service and what sort of value they are offering, we thought we would start the review with a quick comparison of the costs between Godaddy’s new SEO services and the same services, but offered by a professional SEO or digital marketing agency.

GoDaddy Search Engine Visibility Cost

At the time of writing this review, the current cost of SEO services from the team at GoDaddy is less than five bucks per month. Amazing value, right?

However, when you consider the fact that the average cost of search engine optimization services from a professional, dedicated SEO agency will set you back anywhere from $1,000 to $10,000 a month, the sub-five dollar offerings from GoDaddy start to look a little bit suspicious.

Either GoDaddy knows something that all other SEO’s in the world don’t know, or the services that they are offering are worth nothing more than what you pay for them, which is less than five bucks. That’s the reason we have put together this Godaddy search engine visibility review, to help inform our readers of the value you will ultimately receive from a service like this, and why we think they are not worth considering as a legitimate driving force for your business.

 

Is GoDaddy Search Engine Visibility Worth It?

At first glance, the landing page for GoDaddy’s SEO services seems to tick all of the boxes. They promise an increase in targeted traffic, one-click submission to the search engines, increased search rankings and all of this without having to do a single thing yourself. Sounds like everything you need from an SEO provider, doesn’t it?

However, when you dig a little deeper, you will soon realize that the services and tools that they are offering are either free and simple to do yourself, not relevant by today’s SEO standards or downright dangerous in some cases.

What we found while we were checking the services out for ourselves was the fact that the “search engine visibility” is not technically an SEO service, but rather a set of tools that are designed to make the job of optimizing your website a little bit easier.

 

For example, what seems to be the main focus of their service is the one-click submission to all of the major search engines, a keyword generation tool, an on-site optimization auditor, and a simple-to-use sitemap generator. However, the thing that made us question the validity of their service the most was the fact that the search engines have not required manual submission for several years now, and this is pretty common knowledge within the SEO community.

This potentially tells us two things; That GoDaddy have such little knowledge of the current state of the SEO industry that they aren’t even aware that manual submission isn’t a requirement anymore, or they know full-well that the services that they are offering are pretty much worthless, but they use them to take advantage of the small business owners who don’t know a single thing about SEO.

We don’t want to jump to any conclusions and state whether that is completely true or not, but when you consider the price point of these “services”, you can really start to see that it is nothing more than an easy up-sell for them.

The only tool that could be of any use to a website owner is the on-site auditor that analyzes your meta-data, keyword density and the state of your robots.txt file. However, if you are new to the world of SEO and you have got no idea what either of those terms mean, what makes GoDaddy think that this information would be of any use to you? It still requires an SEO expert to analyze the data and put together a strategy to fix the issues and improve the site going forward, which leads us to our next point…

 

Can GoDaddy Search Engine Replace The Need For A Real SEO Agency?

Search engine optimization is not a simple “ABC, 123” kind of “system” that can be performed at the push of a button. It’s the complete opposite. SEO is a powerful marketing tool that can elevate your business to a whole new level, but only if it’s done correctly.

What services such as Godaddy’s Search Engine Visibility provide are simple tools which can shed some light on the issues that need fixing on your website in order for it to be correctly optimized. However, no tool is ever going to provide the creativity required to optimize your content or your meta-date. No tool is ever going to replace the countless hours that are required to produce amazing content that is worthy of being shared and linked back to by influencers in your industry. No tool is ever going to dive headfirst into your websites back-end to improve loading speeds, minify your CSS and javascript files, cache your pages, optimize your images and everything else that is absolutely essential to the success of your website in the search engines.

SEO is always changing and evolving. The push-button services that may have worked in the past are simply not a viable option anymore and they can actually do more harm than good. What Google and the other search engines require is quality content, real high-quality backlinks and a website that provides a positive experience for the end user. Tools cannot provide these things, unfortunately.

 

So, with all of that being said, would we recommend GoDaddy Search Engine Visibility to any of our readers today?

Absolutely not. But we hope that our review has helped to open your eyes and broaden your perspectives of what is really required to make a website successful in the search engines.

If you are looking to take your business to the next level by dominating the search engines for the keywords that are the most profitable for your business, why not reach out to one of our team members here at Search Tides, to see what we can do for you.

For more information on the services that we offer, as well as our in-depth case studies from businesses just like yours, head over to http://searchtides.com/. If you need more information, don’t hesitate to get in touch. Our team are always here to help.

The post Godaddy’s Search Engine Visibility Review: Is It Really Worth It? appeared first on Search Engine Optimization | SearchTides.

from Search Engine Optimization | SearchTides http://searchtides.com/godaddy-search-engine-visibility/

Take your Business to the Next Level with Wix SEO

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With Wix SEO giving you the advantage to stand out on Search Engines, you can now reach out to more people with your Wix Website.

If you have a business for which you need to make a website, you have probably heard of Wix. For those of you who haven’t, it’s a custom website builder. A custom website builder is a web-based platform that allows you to design websites with ease- so that even someone who has no basic knowledge of programming languages or relevant technical expertise can make and maintain a website. Wix has a beautiful and wide set of templates, you can easily drag and drop to add features to your website and move them around them create your own unique looking website. Additionally, it has all the other features that can help you maintain the website as well. With Wix, you can start building and maintaining your website within hours- for free!

Well, technically, it’s not totally free- you can build and maintain websites with very limited features for free, but if you want more features and more storage for your website, you need to subscribe to their plans. Their plans, however, are very reasonable in terms of pricing which makes it affordable for even the smallest of businesses.

Now, while there are other custom website builders out there, what makes Wix truly different is its inbuilt SEO platform. Now for those of us, who know what SEO is and how it can help grow your business. Please skip this paragraph. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a method to rank your websites higher up on Google. See, every time anyone makes a query on Google, a certain set of links show up, now while there are 100s of pages of links, people will only go to links that are ranked higher up (i.e. links which are shown first). So, for example, if you are the owner of a hotel in California and you maintain a website, and it’s ranked on the 9^th page of Google for the keywords ‘Hotels in California’, there’s a chance that no one is going to visit your website when they search with those keywords. Now, while there’s a lot of technical details about Search Engine Optimization, for the scope of this article, you need to know that it’s a way to rank your pages higher up on search engines such as Google or Bing- with higher ranking you will get more visitors and increase your business’s online traction and vice-versa.

Back to Wix SEO, the factor that makes Wix stand out from all other website builders is its in-built SEO platform which allows you to set and execute winning SEO strategies- elevating you to top ranks on search engines.  Some of you might take SEO to be too complicated and take it that you are better off with it, but beware, in the 21^st century, it is imperative for all businesses to create a strong online impression to their audiences to grow credibility, in fact, 65% of businesses nowadays make a website because it makes them look more credible to their consumers. In the globalized world that we live in, almost all B2C companies and most B2B companies need to go for a digital platform to present their businesses in- a website is a good first step, but without proper SEO, you won’t be able to reap its benefits. Now, if you are interested to get started with your Wix SEO, read on:

Getting Started with SEO for Wix:

The first thing you need to get started with your Wix SEO is obviously to set it up on your pages. Keep in mind that you need to individually set the SEO up for each page. Follow the steps below to get started:

1. Log in to your website’s Wix back-end, or the editor’s panel.
2. Click the Pages Menu from the top bar of the dashboard.
3. Click the page you want to setup wix SEO for.
4. Click Page SEO

If you follow these simple steps, you will be taken to a new window where you can set up your Wix SEO. But before we go into further details, let’s talk about keywords for a while. So, for those of you who know what keywords are and how to rank, you may skip this part. But for those of you who don’t, this is for you, so keywords are the words that you think are most relevant to your businesses, something that people will search for when they are looking for businesses like yours. For example, if you own a restaurant at Redmond, Washington- your keywords may be ‘Restaurants in Redmond Washington’ or ‘Restaurants in Redmond WA’. You can also analyze and see which keywords are the most popular using nifty tools such as Google’s Keyword Planner tool. There are, however, a lot of other factors concerning keywords which is why most companies get SEO work done by professionals, but if you are looking to do it yourself, you can always learn more from Youtube, but the description can be enough to get you started as well!

Now that we are all on the same page, let us now begin optimizing pages on Wix SEO.

5. Enter your Page Title: Sometimes called the page title Meta Tag, it is the way you want your page title to appear in search engine results.But don’t worry, the page title is meant only to be a headline for the search engine, not for the page itself. The page title itself will never be visible on your page but it appears within the source code of your page when sharing the page on Facebook, Google or other social media platforms and in your browser tab. Using one of your keywords in the title is always a good idea since page titles are indexed by Google. 6. Enter a page description: Once you are done with your page title, you need to insert a description for people to read and click on your link. This feature is also called a snippet and in technical terms, it’s called a Meta Tag. While it’s not visible to users on the page of your site, it appears below your page’s title on search engines. Make sure that you use your keywords in your page description to make it a better fit to search engines.

 7. Enter Page Keywords: If you are a developer or owner who’s using Wix SEO for their websites, please make note that the page keyword Meta Tag, which is set in the page settings tab is not something that’s indexed (Considered) by Google or any other search engines. Thereby, the usage of these tags will not affect your ranking on any Search Engine Results Page (SERP). Instead, make sure that you are using your keywords in the contents of the page, you can put up to 10 keywords per page at a time. Make sure that you are using your primary keywords frequently in your content and your secondary keywords as well.

By following all these steps for all the pages on your website, you can make your website strongly search engine optimized that can place you higher on search engines can build better traction with your online audience base. But if you have found all these steps handy and informative, you may as well stay back for a few Wix SEO tips.

Winning tips about SEO for Wix

1. Adding Alt Text to an Image: There are two purposes to adding alternative texts to your images. One, it tells your readers and users what the image is about, secondly, it tells search engines what the images are about so that they can index it and whenever searches something with the relevant keywords, the image might pop up and you might just get a visitor (And who knows? A future customer) through the image. Setting it up is very easy too, here’s how you go about it:

• Click an Image
• Click the Settings Icon
• Enter the description of the image under the section ‘What’s in the image? Tell Google’

2. Make sure that your titles are well optimized: The title should always be within 60 characters long, but don’t make sure that it’s not too short either. The ideal title is between 55-60 characters, including spaces. Adding your business’s name and location may also be a good idea.

3. Optimizing Page Descriptions: Make sure that your descriptions are at least 50 characters long and do not exceed 160 characters under any circumstances including spaces. Make sure that you write a compelling description in proper English (No extra exclamatory marks, no upper and lower case letters) with a call-to-action that entices people to click on your link.

While the steps mentioned earlier will get you started with your SEO, these tips will make sure that you rank higher, sooner! So folks, what are you waiting for? Get started now!

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from Search Engine Optimization | SearchTides http://searchtides.com/take-business-next-level-wix-seo/

Don’t buy Cheap SEO packages if you value your business

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If you’re a marketing manager or an online business owner you might have come across companies offering services like the following.

Best Value SEO Package:

• 5 keywords
• 1000 directory submissions
• On Page and Off Page optimization
• Fast indexing with Google.

Only $300/month

Looks great, right? Why not try the offer for one month at least?

You might be forgiven for thinking that the only thing you can lose with these services is the money you give them. But you could lose a lot more than that. Before signing up for tempting offers of cheap SEO packages you should understand the potential pitfalls.

 

Cheap SEO Package Pitfalls

Companies that sell SEO packages are betting that a client’s desire for instant solutions beats the desire for long-term growth. The lure of the ‘All in one cheap SEO package’ is all too tempting for busy business owners and marketing managers. For one thing, it’s a quantifiable expense. $500 per month is easy to understand. SEO packages promise wonderful results like ‘first page rankings on Google’. Sounds great. But nobody can guarantee this. Nobody.

Just today I received an email from a well-known keyword research company offering “On Demand 24-48hr Page 1 Rankings for local SEO”. Why do seemingly reputable companies also buy into the get rich quick machine? Most likely because people want fast results. And they ignore warnings of potential negative consequences.

 

Why do people still buy ‘SEO packages’ from India and other places that charge much less than US companies?

‘National SEO package’ is an easy concept to grasp. “Monthly SEO package” offers the comfort of knowing that someone is working from month to month on improving your website’s search engine ranking. In the end many people don’t care how they get to the top of Google. The bit-sized chunks of SEO wizardry for a cheap price can be tempting.

But here’s the truth of it. Affordable SEO can end up costing you dearly.

Inexperienced and factory-line type SEOs will apply the same techniques to your site as they will to another site. They might apply different systems to different niches but with cheap SEO you won’t get individual attention. Imagine the following scenario.

1. Client A buys cheap SEO packages from ACME Inc., an SEO agency that offers services at a very cheap price. (Look on Google, Fiverr, and UpWork and you’ll see what I mean).
2. ACME Inc. picks 20 keywords based on client A’s niche and begins to build backlinks using these anchor phrases. Titles and body content is changed to reflect the new keywords. Alt tags are altered and product pages are reworded. ACME Inc. informs the client that these changes will take time. Client A waits.
3. In the meantime, Client B, who is in the same niche as client A, orders search engine optimization packages from ACME Inc.
4. The same keywords and techniques are reused for client C’s business.

Rinse and repeat. That’s the only way a business selling small business SEO packages can survive.

Why SEO packages don’t work

Common techniques employed by cheap agencies are:

• Spammy-link building – Creating links back from irrelevant websites
• Private blog networks (PBN) – Buying and linking from servers that appear to Google as high-authority but are in fact, built only for SEO purposes.
• Keyword stuffing. Loading each webpage with as many instances of the target keyword as possible.

 

Some of these techniques still work today in some cases. But Google will eventually catch up. Your rankings might rise initially but they won’t stay there. Google is getting better at discovering and penalizing black-hat SEO techniques. The algorithm isn’t perfect yet and the door is still slightly open to unscrupulous marketing agencies.

If your SEO Company ignores your individual businesses needs, strengths, and weaknesses, then they cannot create a holistic SEO strategy. SEO is not just keywords and links anymore. Branding, user intent, and authority are huge factors in how Google places websites in 2017.

Cheap SEO packages work on a one size fits all basis. The internet is becoming more personalized. People want individual experiences. Business should expect the same from SEO services. A marketing plan that does not focus on your brands strengths is not a plan at all. It’s merely a best guess scenario. They sometimes work. Most of the time they make no difference. And on many occasions they negatively effect search engine rankings.

In 2017 SEO strategies that worked in 2007 are not only outdated but are dangerous. In the bad old days of SEO, agencies used templates, automation, and strategies based on simple repetition and volume to beat their way to the top of the search engines. SEO work was cheap and brute force was the tool of the day.

Professional search engine marketing companies today understand your customers’ relationship with Google. People are looking for answers. They want quality content. They want to be informed and they want Google to provide them with the definitive solution to their problem. An SEO in 2017 must understand the needs of your customers.

Content marketing is an essential part of any online marketing strategy. Blog posts and articles worthy of page one ranking demand detailed research. They also require the input of competent writers. Bad SEO agencies use generic content and article spinning. This reworked content might pass all plagiarism checks and appear legitimate but it’s essentially a copy of another website’s work. As search engines become better at understanding concepts and topics they have the ability to spot patterns. ‘Spun’ content shows up as low-quality material. Google’s job is to provide high-quality results to searchers. Cheap content written purely to target keywords will not make the grade.

 

What to avoid

Avoid agencies selling cheap SEO products with ambitious generic analytics projections. Analytics for a car dealership are not relevant to a fitness center.

Avoid cheap SEO services that guarantee high search engine rankings for multiple keywords in a short period of time (1-2 months). In the past, these wild claims could actually be substantiated. However, Google’s algorithm is much smarter now and can see when companies are using generic SEO tactics.  Your business should not be treated as a generic player in your industry.

As a checklist avoid any agency that claims the following

• Connections to the search engine team in Google
• 24 or 48- hour first page rankings guaranteed
• Multiple search engine ’submissions’

Avoid agencies that insist on

• Hosting your website on their servers
• Maintaining ownership of the content they product for your website.

Look for an SEO agency that takes the time to understand your particular business requirements. Find a company that can project results based on your industry and business.

 

What about Web Design and SEO?

Good web design firms in 2017 focus on making websites that follow Google’s recommendations and provide a great user experience. SEO should not be an ‘extra’. Optimizing a website for search engines should be a fundamental component of any website build. Stay away from any firm that separates the two components (website design and SEO) into distinct ‘packages’.

What your business needs is a custom SEO plan. If you value your business above generic copycat type companies then don’t settle for a package.

 

Conclusion

You might ask, “What’s the worst that can happen? If I get bad quality SEO work I can just pay a reputable company later, right?”

Well, imagine eating cheap, junk food for years just to see what happens. Your quality of life decreases. But as you begin to repair the damage you realize that it will be an expensive road ahead. It might also be a futile one as irreparable damage means improvements are minor. Do you want to take the chance of an inexperienced SEO causing irreparable damage to your brand? If Google decides that your website is violating their guidelines there will be a lot more work to do to repair this reputation.

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from Search Engine Optimization | SearchTides http://searchtides.com/seo-packages/

How To Skyrocket Your Rankings With SquareSpace SEO

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When it comes to improving your websites visibility on the search engines, there is an abundance of useful information available online to show you how it’s done. Unfortunately, buried within all of the useful information are a few ‘myths’ that never seem to die down, regardless of how many times they are debunked.

One of the most consistent myths that we see flying around in the SEO stratosphere is the idea that it’s impossible to perform good SEO on a SquareSpace website. Not only is this misinformation bad for SquareSpaces reputation, it’s also detrimental to the success of the individuals and small business owners who are using this platform.

If I was to search “SEO SquareSpace” or any related keyword variation in Google, and I was bombarded with reasons why SEO on SquareSpace is a waste of time, I’m sure I would be discouraged too. The problem is, most of the negative noise is coming from people who have no experience with SEO, regardless of the platform.

That is the reason we have decided to create this blog post. To first of all, destroy the myths that SEO on SquareSpace is a waste of time, and second of all, to provide you with our best tips on how to maximize your SEO efforts and potentially skyrocket the organic rankings of your SquareSpace website.

Is SquareSpace Good For SEO?

To answer this question in short…

Yes. SquareSpace is a great platform for SEO, and here is why:

By its most simple definition, SEO is the art of optimizing your website for the search engines, in order to improve your rankings for specific keywords. The result of ranking for keywords specific to your business is an increase in targeted traffic. Pretty simple, right?

 

SEO can be broken down into two sub-sections, both of which are crucial to the success of your website in the search engines. These are on-page SEO and off-page SEO. In order to rank well in Google, Bing and other search engines, you must ensure that both your on-page and off-page SEO efforts are up to scratch.

When people are dismissing the SEO capabilities of SquareSpace, they are primarily referring to on-page SEO, which is essentially the culmination of internal ‘ranking factors’ such as keyword density, optimized title tags and meta-descriptions, website loading speeds and much more.

Off-page SEO, on the other hand, is essentially the culmination of external ‘ranking factors’ such as inbound links, citations and customer reviews. These factors are somewhat “out of your control”, so the platform that you are using to build your website has absolutely no impact on your off-page SEO.

While it’s true that SquareSpace does not give its users the flexibility that self-hosted platforms like WordPress do, the development team who have built the SquareSpace platform have built it with SEO optimization in mind. Essentially, all SquareSpace websites are SEO optimized (to a certain extent) straight out of the box, in terms of the more advanced and ‘technical’ aspects of SEO.

With that in mind, let’s take a look at the most important ‘ranking factors’ that you can start implementing today, to start cashing in on the SEO goldmine.

 

How To Perform SEO On SquareSpace

 
When we are optimizing a new website for the search engines, we like to employ the “80/20 Principle”, which basically means that we are focusing on the 20 percent of actions that are producing 80 percent of the positive results.

It is suggested that the Google algorithm will use over 200 ranking signals to determine which website should rank for a specific keyword. It would be impossible to optimize your website for all 200 of these ranking factors, so what we like to do as SEO’s, is to focus our time and effort on the few factors that give you the most bang for your buck, and what have the biggest impact on your rankings.

If you focus on just the following ranking factors, you will be optimizing your website better than 90% of your competition. Combined with good off-page SEO, these few tips will help to “supercharge” your SquareSpace website, and will skyrocket your online visibility and traffic numbers.

 

1. Content

You may have already heard the term “Content is King”. It’s been circulating around the internet since the early 2000’s when digital marketing was still in it’s infancy, and it still holds true to this day. The content that you post on your website is one of the biggest influencing factors in the eyes of the search engines, so it’s crucial that you spend the majority of your efforts here.

Your content, whether it be a static web page or a blog post, allows the search engines to ‘understand’ what that specific page is about, which in turn will allow them to decide which keyword phrases it should be ranking for.

For example, if you are an online e-commerce store selling rubber ducks, but your content does not reflect that, there is no way for Google or any other search engine to know that you want to rank for terms relating to rubber ducks. However, if you consistently add the keywords that you want to target to your content, for example ‘rubber ducks for sale’, ‘buy rubber ducks’ or simply just ‘rubber ducks’, the search engines will know that the content on that specific page is related to rubber ducks, and they will rank you accordingly.

The platform that you use to build your website will have no impact on how the search engines crawl and scan your online content, regardless of whether you use SquareSpace, Weebly or WordPress.

 

2. Sitemaps

One of the best SquareSpace SEO features is the built-in sitemap that is automatically generated for every user. Sitemaps, if you are unfamiliar with the term are basically a web file that stores all of the information about the pages on your website. Think of it as a filing cabinet for your websites pages.

Instead of search engine crawlers having to scour the internet back and forth searching for each individual page of your website, the sitemap simply hands over the information in one, easy to navigate file. This makes the crawlers job considerably easier, and substantially faster.

Search engine crawlers are the ‘robots’ that assess your web pages and feed the information back to the algorithm which then determines which phrases you should rank for, and in which position. As you can imagine, having a sitemap will make the entire process more efficient, which can only be positive in regards to your SEO.

 

3. Title Tags & Meta Descriptions

Another one of the most influential ranking factors, without a shadow of a doubt, is the title tags and meta descriptions. The title tag is the name of the web page that is shown in the small tab at the top of the web browser. Not only does the title tag help the visitor understand what the page is about, it also tells the search engines the same thing.Using the same example as before, if you were to change your title tag to something along the lines of “Buy Rubber Ducks Online | Cheap Rubber Ducks”, the search engine crawlers will be able to figure out what the rest of the content on the page is about.Title tags hold a lot of weight, so it’s important that you optimize these correctly. SquareSpace settings will allow you to customize the title tag of every page on your website, so make sure it’s one of your main priorities.Meta-descriptions, on the other hand, do not have a direct impact on your SEO. With that being said, a well-written meta-description (the small excerpt that shows in the search engines beneath the name of the page) will allow you to “sell” your services and persuade the searcher to click on your website over any other. The higher your click-through rate, the more ‘relevant’ your website will look in the eyes of the search engines. It is the job of the search engines to provide relevant information to the searchers, so relevancy is always a good thing to pursue.Again, the settings on every page of your SquareSpace website will allow you to add a custom meta-description. We would highly recommend that you use this feature.

 

4. URL Slugs

Now that you have an optimized title tag, a good meta-description, excellent content and a sitemap submitted to your webmaster tools account, the final piece of the puzzle is to optimize the URL slug of the pages you want to rank for.The ‘slug’ is simply the wording that follows the forward slash at the end of your domain name. Again, using the same example, let’s take a look at an automatically generated URL slug versus a custom, SEO optimized one:http://www.yourdomain.com/blogpost04082017http://www.yourdomain.com/buy-rubber-ducks-onlineIt doesn’t take an SEO expert to notice the difference between the two URL slugs, does it?The SEO optimized slug not only lets the search engines know what the specific page is about, it also looks considerably neater and lets the visitor know that they are on the page that they want to be on. If you saw the two aforementioned URLs in the search engine results, which one would you be more tempted to click?

 

5. Relevant Tags

One of the most simple ‘quick wins’ that you can take advantage of on the SquareSpace platform is simply adding tags to all of your pages and images.As you have probably noticed from the other four tips that we have shared with you, the most important aspect of SEO is to simply provide the search engine crawlers with as much information about each specific web page as possible. Any way in which we can add a keyword to our page without it looking like obvious spam will inevitably help us improve our rankings.One of the easiest ways to do this is to add relevant tags to each post and image that you upload to your website. Again, in the SquareSpace SEO settings on each page that you upload, you will have the option to add tags to the post itself, and the images that you upload. You should use this space to your advantage by adding a few different variations of your target keyword, without going overboard and “stuffing” your page with tags. Keyword stuffing can have the opposite effect on your rankings, so be cautious of that.

Is SquareSpace The Best Online Platform For SEO? (SquareSpace Vs WordPress)

In terms of the flexibility and the tools available to optimize your website as well as you possibly can, SquareSpace is far from the best online platform for SEO. WordPress, the self-hosted alternative is the most popular platform, and it’s also an open-source platform which means that developers are constantly creating new tools and plugins which allow you to manipulate your website in any way you could ever want to.What SquareSpace does, however, is provides an excellent starting point for anybody who doesn’t have the skills to work with a self-hosted solution like WordPress. The tools and features that are already built into the SquareSpace platform are more than enough to provide your website with the SEO that it needs to rank well in the search engines. Hopefully, our post here can prove it.Don’t let the naysayers dissuade you from progressing with SquareSpace. If you implement the tips that we have shared here in this post, we guarantee that you will be well on your way to dominating the search engines for your target keywords.

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The post How To Skyrocket Your Rankings With SquareSpace SEO appeared first on Search Engine Optimization | SearchTides.

from Search Engine Optimization | SearchTides http://searchtides.com/squarespace-seo/

Eliminate render-blocking JavaScript and CSS in above-the-fold content

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If you follow the Google Webmaster Central blog and you keep up with SEO trends you’ll no doubt understand the importance of website speed. If not, I suggest you check out the former resource at least. Google’s best practices are the guidelines that website owners all over the world should follow. It’s vitally important to keep up with the ever-changing search engine algorithm. Implement Google’s recommendations and see your ranking improve!

Any SEO worth his salt can tell you about the importance of having a fast loading website. Website users in 2017 will not wait for more than a couple of seconds for a page to load. It’s a fast world and the internet is expected to deliver information quickly. A slow-loading website provides a poor user experience. Google punishes these websites by putting them lower in the search results. And this means less organic traffic.

What causes a web page to download slowly?

Many things, but the one I see most frequently has to do with the loading of JavaScript and CSS on your page. 90% of the website’s I’ve tested suffer from poor performance because of “render-blocking JavaScript and CSS in above-the-fold content”. If you can fix this problem then you’ll be one step ahead of the competition. What does this mean?

1. Render-blocking – Something is preventing the website from loading quickly.
2. Javascript – A scripting language that is commonly used on modern websites.
3. CSS – The styling code that makes plain HTML look pretty.
4. Above-the-fold content – The part of the website that appears on screen without requiring the user to scroll down.

In summary: some of the code required to show the initial screen of the website is blocking the entire site from loading quickly. The remedy? Optimize or remove that code.

How do I find out if I have a Javascript and CSS rendering problem on my website?

Go to Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool or the excellent GTMetrix. Both of these services highlight potential issues which affect the speed of your website.

I’m going to show you how to address “eliminate render-blocking javascript and css in above-the-fold content” for WordPress websites. I will give two different solutions. The first is a solution for developers and people competent in editing code. The second is for the rest of us. Both work pretty much the same way but developers will be able to tweak the code a little bit more to their own requirements.

For most websites, Javascript will be contributing more to the problem so let’s start there

Solution 1 (for developers)

Run Google’s PageSpeed Insights test. If the results determine that JavaScript is causing the site to load slowly, copy the JavaScript-related URLs to a spreadsheet or text document.

 

Open the footer.php file with your favorite code editor via FTP (or access via Appearance > Editor)

Add the following code before </body>:

<script type=”text/javascript”>
function parseJSAtOnload() {
var links = [“javascript1.js”, “javascript2.js”, “javascript3.js”],
headElement = document.getElementsByTagName(“head”)[0],
linkElement, i;
for (i = 0; i < links.length; i++) {
linkElement = document.createElement(“script”);
linkElement.src = links[i];
headElement.appendChild(linkElement);
}
}
if (window.addEventListener)
window.addEventListener(“load”, parseJSAtOnload, false);
else if (window.attachEvent)
window.attachEvent(“onload”, parseJSAtOnload);
else window.onload = parseJSAtOnload;
</script>

 

Each javascript.js file in line 3 should be replaced with the scripts that Google PageSpeed Insights points out as ‘render-blocking’. Be careful to copy the link that appears as you hover over the URL. Copying the link directly from the results page will give you an incorrectly formed URL as PageSpeed Insights inserts some ellipsis (…) into the link in order to shorten them.

The javascript.js URLs will be something like this one http://yourdomain.com/wp-includes/js/jquery/jquery.js?ver=1.12.4

To add more files simply add another comma followed by the URL surrounded by quotation marks.

Once you’ve replaced the placeholder URLs with the real ones, save the file and run the PageSpeed test again.

 

So that’s the javascript part. The CSS part is much trickier to pull off on WordPress than on say, a straight HTML website. WordPress uses PHP to ‘enqueue’ the css scripts. And because of the requirement (from a UX point of view) to have CSS in place before users see any content, it is difficult to optimize CSS files without the use of a plugin. Technically, all CSS files should be added to the header in WordPress but we’ll need to break some rules here.

The best method I’ve found to do this is the following:

• Locate the style function that loads the styles in your theme’s php file.
• Comment out the function code and save the stylesheet URLs. (Eg. http://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Roboto:400,100,300,500,700,900)
• Create a new function which loads the styles in the footer. Example:

function styles_in_wp_foot() {
echo ‘<link rel=”stylesheet” href=”http://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Roboto:400,100,300,500,700,900″ type=”text/css” media=”all” />’;
echo ‘<link rel=”stylesheet” href=”‘ . get_stylesheet_uri() .'” type=”text/css” media=”all” />’;
}
add_action( ‘wp_footer’, ‘styles_in_wp_foot’ ); */

• Test for each CSS file and rerun the Speed Test

Solution 2 (for non-developers)

Download and install the plugin W3 Total Cache.

Go to Performance > General Settings

Scroll down to the Minify section and tick the checkbox marked ‘enable’.

Where it says ‘minify mode’ make sure to select ‘manual’.

Click Save Settings & Purge Caches.

Now head to the Minify page by clicking Minify in the sidebar under Performance.

Scroll down to ‘JS’ and tick the box marked ‘enable’.

In the ‘Operations in Areas’ section we only need to change the first option “Before </Head>”

Select Non-Blocking using “async” in the Embed Type: pull-down list.

You will be presented with some new options called JS File Management. This section allows you to specify the JavaScript files that you want to load asynchronously.

Copy each of the URLs which represent JS files that Google PageSpeed has marked as render-blocking.

Paste each URL into the File URI: box and select “Embed in <head>” as the Embed Location.

Click Save Settings & Purge Cache.

 

So that’s the Javascript part. We still have to tackle the CSS that’s preventing the page from loading quickly.

The developers of W3 Total Cache made some changes recently to the plugin and unfortunately if you want to eliminate render blocking CSS in your website you will need to upgrade from the free version. If this is not an option there is another solution.

 

Install Speed Booster Pack using the Plugins area of the WordPress backend.

Leave the general options area untouched as we’ve already taken care of the JavaScript. Click on the drop down menu that says “Still need more speed?”

Select the first three options.

• Load CSS asynchronously
• Minify all CSS styles
• Insert all CSS styles inline to the footer

Click Save Changes and check your website’s performance in Google PageSpeed again.

How did it go? Your web page will officially load without render blocking javascript!

If you need more advice, check out this video:

The post Eliminate render-blocking JavaScript and CSS in above-the-fold content appeared first on Search Engine Optimization | SearchTides.

from Search Engine Optimization | SearchTides http://searchtides.com/eliminate-render-blocking-javascript-css-fold-content/

5 Things I Learned From Tripling the Income of a Bail Bonds Company

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Before helping bail bonds owners 2-4x their income, I actually used to be a poker player.

I often played in the underground poker games of New York City.

There were lots of nice games that took place in penthouse apartments, but my favorites were the backdoor room games.

The games in Brooklyn, where rooms filled with a thick layer of smoke. There would be a few people packing heat, sure, but I’m certain all of the guns were registered and everyone had concealed carry permits!

Interestingly enough, there wasn’t any cash changing hands. Everything was credit based, so the people operating the game actually had to decide whether you were good for your money, or whether you might try to stiff someone and flee.

As a bail company, you are making the exact same decisions. You need to decide whether a defendant is good for the money or if he/she might try to skip town.

There’s another thing we share though: hustle. We make informed decisions, we hope for the best case scenario, but we are prepared to deal with the worst case scenario. There aren’t a lot of people who live that reality every day, but we do.

On that note, I want to share with you 5 things I learned from tripling one of my bail client’s income. These are the actual big-picture takeaways that were responsible for significant shifts in revenue:

 

1) A lot of “accepted” marketing advice doesn’t apply to bail bonds companies

 

 

When this particular client came to me, he was advertising in 5-6 channels every month. It turns out that this strategy was massively flawed!

For example, lots of time and energy was being spent on social media. The owner was paying another company a significant amount of money each month to post frequently on Facebook and Twitter, but we analyzed that almost no traffic was coming from these channels!

The problem with social media in the bail industry is that your customers are not scrolling through Facebook when their loved one is in jail, they are searching on Google for a way to get them out.

In business, it is common advice to “have a social media presence” because your potential customers are checking you out on social media and they want to make sure your business is alive.

Instead, we created a system that automatically would post relevant articles and photos each day. The owner saved a ton each month, and another performing research on the company on social media still saw an active company

 

2) Focusing on a few charges makes a huge difference

 

Every time I speak to an owner, I would ask the question “what type of charges would you like more of?

Almost always, the bail owner would reply with a “that depends” or “that’s a complicated question.”

When I dug deeper, I learned that there are four types of charges that actually make owners a lot of money:

 

• Domestic
• Assault
• DUI
• Drug

 

These charges either have very large bail amounts, or the accused are very unlikely to skip bail.

Go Google “bail bonds [your state or city].” Look at the results — it’s heavily populated, right?

Now do a search for “bail bond dui [your state or city]”. The results look completely different, right?

That’s because very few businesses are targeting these specific charges, even though they make a lot of money!

Creating pages on your website to target these charges specifically is a great idea

3) The phone doesn’t always get picked up

 

I always track the amount of phone calls I deliver to a bail bonds company because I love showing the true value of the service we provide.

The most devastating thing I see is sending over a ton of leads to a bail owner, and the phone not being picked up!

[photo of missed calls]

Sometimes, the owner is in charge of picking up the phone.

Other times, it is an employee or small group. In this instance, often times the employees leave at the end of the work day, or aren’t there in the early AM.

Not picking up phone calls from people BEGGING for your help is a surefire way to lose money, and it happens more frequently than you think. Make sure your business has a plan in place to pick up calls 24/7/365.

 

4) Having prominent, clickable phone numbers displayed on mobile makes a HUGE difference

 

Most searches online originate from mobile, which means that most of your potential customers will be accessing your website from a phone.

Look — your website needs to be responsive and look good on mobile, but that’s old advice.

Your website needs to have prominent, clickable phone numbers that are continually present on mobile. There is a huge urgency when someone is in jail, and we need to make it as easy as possible to contact us.

 

5) Bail Bond companies live and die on search engines

 

More than most types of businesses, bail bond companies live and die on Google (and on Bing/Yahoo).

When someone winds up in jail, there is a huge urgency to get them out as quickly as possible. Most likely, the person in charge of helping the jailed individual doesn’t know exactly where to turn for help.

 

So they turn to Google for help.

 

They don’t care how many followers you have on Twitter.

They don’t care if you are listed in the Yellowpages (seriously, who uses Yellowpages anymore?). And they probably don’t even care what your name is.

They go to Google and type in “bail bonds” (go test this, you don’t even need to type in a city or state and you will still get local results) and they call up the company they see first.

 

If you aren’t there, someone else is getting that phone call, and someone else is getting that business.

 

That’s the reality of the situation. This isn’t about walkers coming in off the street and asking about a bail too small for you to even entertain them.

This is about prime-paying customers reaching out and either speaking to you or to one of your competitors.
This is the best way to double or triple your business’s revenue.

 

If you’d like to see the exact results of one such campaign, check out how I was able to increase phone calls to a bail bonds business by 291% in 4 hours.

 

Before you go, I have one special offer for you:
Normally, companies have to Apply to work with SearchTides. However, since I specialize in bail bond companies, you can exclusively pass the application process and receive a completely free analysis of the landscape of your business, including how much money your competitors are stealing from you, you can fill out this form.

 

The post 5 Things I Learned From Tripling the Income of a Bail Bonds Company appeared first on Search Engine Optimization | SearchTides.

from Search Engine Optimization | SearchTides http://searchtides.com/5-things-learned-tripling-bail-bonds-companys-income/