Have you heard about that Google will be switching to a mobile-first index in the upcoming future, but if you’re not certain what this means or how it will work on your site, don’t get worried? With a modest research, you won’t have to be panic about Google turning your rankings upside down. Here in this write up you will get the complete explanation about the basics of the update and can take steps to get ready.

Right now, as you know Google crawls as a desktop user’s point of view and thus catalogs websites according to the desktop version. But with this latest update now the genuine content of a mobile site doesn’t have an effect on the desktop site’s ranking in SERPs presently.

This update from Google was introduced back in November of 2016, more than ten months ago. Some people are calling this update an ‘experiment,’ but in reality, it’s really the primary move in Google’s intended move to looking mainly at mobile content, somewhat than desktop, when deciding how to grade results.

Now to your concern its good to mention that, if you’re using a responsive design, you should be well with this latest update. Technically, mobile and desktop version has similar content being easily reached on mobile and desktop. But if you’re using different mobile URLs, or using different content on your mobile URLs by means of dynamic serving, then you have to be very cautious. This update somehow can potentially cause colossal problems including a fall in rankings across URLs on both mobile and desktop versions. To make sure whether you require taking any action for with this issue, website owners can test their site in Google’s Page Speed Insights Tool. This tool will help you in checking all the important aspects of your website.

Mobile-first indexing is the new search norms, where users are using mobiles for search on mobile devices. Because the greater part of web users now use mobile devices, so Google is shifting the technique it indexes content. Historically, even after the mobile-first update, Google will uphold its reliance on a solitary index of apps and pages.

Google has in fact been experimenting with this update for at least 10 months now, but the question here arises why haven’t we seen this change yet now? Back in March, an expert from Google claimed that Google wants to start on mobile-first indexing this year, there’s no official timeline for this process to start, and it may take quite a few more months to get started. In the meantime, I extremely suggest all sites review their current mobile system for Smartphone’s and use understand how Google is seeing your mobile content. Don’t wait for search engines to act… the time to take action is now.

Local SEO has been proven to be effective for boosting businesses as it targets customers within your area. However, such a powerful tool does not come easy and might not be something your business can handle on its own. So how can your business get the best SEO result? The answer is outsourcing! Here are some reasons why you should be outsourcing to a SEO company for your campaign.

Your Costs Will Be Lessened

Local SEO is a complex process that includes web design, content writing, link building, PPC, and much more. It is an integrated marketing approach which requires every element to work to make the campaign a success.

Now, if you are going to hire employees to write content, design your website, and manage your SEO; you will be draining a lot of your financial resources. Not to mention, you will also be exerting time and investment you have to put on in training them.

By outsourcing to a local SEO company, you will already have a complete staff who can work on every aspect of your campaign. With this, you only have to pay for outsourcing instead of the additional employees you have to hire. It is definitely a more cost-effective move.

They Have the Expertise

Aside from cutting costs, outsourcing to local SEO companies will ensure that you will be receiving quality service from experts. Since you aren’t an SEO specialist, you do not have an understanding of the roundabouts of localized SEO.

Their experts know the ins-and-outs of this field, from its technicalities to its nontechnical aspects. They know what your business needs to grow in terms of SEO efforts, and they know what the pitfalls that you should be avoiding.

Doing SEO on your own will not only take away much of your time, but can also lead to failure or suboptimal results because of your lack of knowledge and experience. That’s why the assistance they can provide for your company is invaluable.

They Have Better Resources

If you are not a local SEO company yourself, then most likely, the technology that your outsourcing company has is definitely more fitting for the job. They know and have access to tools and resources to use to make it easier and better. They are also more updated with the trends that work best with attracting your target audience.

You Can Focus on Your Core Competencies

Another benefit you can gain from outsourcing to local SEO companies is the huge load of work that will be lifted from you. With that amount of time available, you can focus the efforts of your business on what it truly does best.

Use this time to focus on training your employees to be more efficient and strengthen relationships within the company. This will allow them to provide better service and finish projects faster. Outsourcing SEO also gives more room for you to concentrate in bringing in new customers for your business.

Working with an outsource local SEO company can do feats for your business’ growth all the while saving you time, money, and effort. You get more by giving less!

New Year is coming your way and like every year, for sure, you are ready with the list of resolutions. Resolutions are important not only in personal but in professional life as well, as they guide you the right way and give you the urge to make some efforts to achieve something big in your life. There are so many trends change after every year as per the update in the Google algorithm, so, it’s time you need to watch for trends in 2018. So, what are you waiting for? Look below and see where you actually are and what changes you need to make in your strategy for better outcomes.

• Site Quality Matters: No doubt, Google work to satisfy its users and, therefore, if you want to come in its good book or improve the ranking, so you have to improve your site quality. This may increase web traffic and website visits, pages per session and bounce rate, etc.
• Double The Quality Of Your Content: Content adds value to your website and increases customer time on your website as well. Therefore, if you want to hit the goal in the coming year, you should come up with more relevant content that encourages revisit of your visitors.
• Smartphones Become Primary Search Device: No doubt, mobile is important than ever before and in the coming years, it is used as a primary search device that improves your site visit than the desktop one. You should pay attention to it for better results.
• Improve User Experience: Another SEO trend you need to watch in 2018 is the improvement in user experience. It is your duty to make sure that your customer will get the best experience on your website, which automatically increases their chances of conversion.
• Featured Snippet Is Talk Of The Town: Make sure you take some steps and necessary actions to optimize your website to come in the featured snippet that drives in more customer and good for the rank of your website.
• Rise In Visual Search: In the past few months, visual search rise and this is a new trend you need to watch in 2018 to get great outcomes. This may improve your searches and grab the attention of your visitors.

These trends are very much important for the growth of your business and you shouldn’t take it for granted. For any help, make sure you consult a professional SEO expert that handle your website rank and take it to the next higher level in your niche.

Basically, a domain name is any name registered in the DNS or in simple words; it is your web address. Sub-domains are part of the larger domain and part of the main website, but considered as the separate entity by the search engines. They play a vital role in boosting the overall ranking of your website and help you make your brand image among the customers. These are very important from the SEO point of view and if you have no idea about them, so, take a look down on the points that help you understand the purpose and main benefits of using them for higher ranking of your website.

• Insert Keyword Into URLs: Sub-domains give you the opportunity to add hard-to-rank or any of your important keyword into your URL, so, the search engine can crawl it separately that further boost up its ranking. This is the best thing for your search engine ranking and you should opt for this option.
• Improve User-Experience: Poor user experience means high chances to lose customers and therefore, it is important to take as much step as possible to improve it before it’s too late. Sub-domains help a lot in improving the user experience by making it easier for visitors to reach a particular page with no hassle.
• Gear Up Your Search Ranking: Search Engines crawl sub-domains individually and this may help to increase the ranking of the particular page and keyword better than before. Therefore, investing your time in creating them is not a bad deal at all.
• Grow Niche Authority: Sub-domains also help you create a particular niche authority that brings in a lot of traffic and benefits to your doorway. Also, it helps to beat the competition in a smart way and win the faith of the customers.
• Local Optimization Of Each Page: Sub-domains play the main role in local optimization of each and every page, as it helps you target particular city and the local area and improve ranking better than before.

All the above benefits make it clear that sub-domains are very much helpful and you should use them for the better ranking of your website. You shouldn’t hesitate to invest your time and money in it as it gives you so many benefits and helps you hit the high-rank goal like never before. Any company that handles your web designing work may help you understand it in a better way.

Search Engine Optimization has become a vital part of any online marketing campaign. A company will not have any successful campaign without targeted, high-quality content. There are many different approaches for maximizing online visibility. Some of them have proven to be more effective than others and we will discuss them here.

The so-called “white-hat” SEO refers to techniques used to increase page rankings through means that do not violate the search engines’ terms of service. Basically it refers to building and keeping an active audience through quality content and backlinks. So, the first SEO factor that must be taken into consideration is engagement. That is the ability to hold a user’s attention and measures the amount of time spent on a page.

There are difference metrics related to engagement: number of visits, bounce rate, time of site, page views. And there are many SEO tools that provide the exact numbers. Improving the quality of the content will improve these numbers and will make the website rank higher.

A good website must also have good formatting. This will improve readability and overall engagement. Studies have shown that several formatting rules always make content more readable and eye-appealing:

• Shorter paragraphs. Each paragraph should have 2-3 sentences. This will boost readability considerably.
• Shorter sentences. Having to read a very long sentence is eye-fatiguing and can be an instant turn off for many users. You should try to break longer sentences into smaller ones when possible.
• Sub-headers. Many of us are used to quickly scan a page and look for exactly what we need. Providing relevant sub-headers for the content will make users reach where they wanted to and keep their attention.
• Bullet points. It is recommended to use bullet points when listing data. Besides being aesthetically appealing, it will also keep a user engaged and provide a fast reading mechanism.

Performing regular keyword researches is the base of SEO. You cannot have a competitive website if you do not provide what users want. Numerous applications were developed in order to provide statistical data. Search engines also provide applications that reflect what people searched the most.

Building backlinks is essential for any website wanting to rank high on search pages. Having good backlinks means linking relevant content in and out of a website. Links that are received due to high-quality content, outreach and influence marketing, are safe and extremely effective.

Website URLs are one of the most common elements of a successful website that have to be SEO-friendly to deliver the desired results. URLs are basically your web address, which helps the visitors to find you over the internet or intranet. Structuring them seems easy, but it is not actually because you have to act smartly to make it simple yet pronounceable, so, your visitors can easily remember them for their next visit. There are a number of things you need to keep in mind while doing so, and if you are new to it and confuse what exactly to take into consideration, the tips mentioned below are for you. Take a look for more details.

• Use Simple Words: While constructing your website structure makes sure you use simple words that are very easy to remember. It helps the search engines as well as users to reach your website in an easy manner. Simplicity has its own beauty; so, try to make it as simple as possible to keep it in the mind of the visitors for a longer period.
• Clean Away The Codes: Another important thing to keep in mind while creating URLs for your website is that if there is any inner page or any other page, so, make sure, it also contains simple words and not the codes, which are hard to remember and make it look like a mess. Cleaning such codes away from your web address makes it look attractive and well-structured, which easily capture the visitor’s attention.
• Add The Keyword Smartly: Keyword is crucial to optimize your website for search engines and you can use one of your important keywords while structuring your URLs. This may help the search engines to easily crawl your website and make them look more attractive.
• Keep It Simple, Short And Sweet: Keeping the URLs simple, short and sweet helps the reader to save it in their memory for next time, which automatically increase your credibility and helps you earn more in all good ways.
• Use Hyphens To Separate Words: The use of hyphens is important not only for the readers, but for the search engines as well. These are treated as space to separate words. On the other hand, the use of underscore is restricted in URLs as per the Google because they are considered as one word.

These simple tips make it easier for you to structure SEO-friendly URLs for your website that ensure better ranking and results.

It is proven that customers are more likely to visit the websites that show up first when doing an online search. Having your company’s website at the top of result pages can lead to more customers and potential sells. However, having a company with good search engine optimization can be difficult, especially for those who are not as technologically advanced. There are some things that you can do to help increase your website’s visibility.

One of the most important things you should do is make sure that you are always publishing relevant content. Having quality, relevant content is one of the number one drivers of giving your company higher search engine rankings. You will want to identify a keyword that pertains to each page of your site. This will be something that customers may search for to yield results to things that pertain to your company and what you do.

Once you have identified these key words or phrases, you will want to use that phrase several times on each page. Of course, you still want the page to be written extremely well and do not want to sacrifice good writing to throw in the key words more times. Having poorly written content can actually turn away customers instead of improving your SEO. Of course, you will want to update your content regularly to keep it fresh and have it appear relevant.

A big part of improving your SEO is to have proper metadata on each page. Each page has a space between the tags to insert metadata or information about the pages. This can be a confusing part of designing your website and can start to be difficult to individuals who have not been trained to improving search engine optimization. This is when hiring a professional to help you can be beneficial.

There are several aspects to improving SEO that can be difficult, with the metadata being one of the most confusing aspects. You will need title metadata for each page of your website. Then you will need a description metadata that is a textual description that a browser will use in your page search return. Finally, you will need a keyword metadata that is search phrases that are commonly used when someone wants to find a similar website to your own.

If you already own a company, there is a good chance you do not have time to go through your website and improve these metadata titles. Also, if you are not extremely knowledgeable about creating the perfect metadata, the keywords and phrases you are using may not be accurate for your website. There are many professional SEO firms that can handle writing this data for you and optimizing your website as a whole. Though these companies obviously cost you money, they can give you more customers in return which can help pay back the money spent.

Another feature that SEO friendly companies have is that they have several quality links. You want to avoid using terms like “click here” because they are not very search engine friendly. You want these keywords to be rich and improve the overall rankings of your page. This is another area that a firm can help you with as they will be more knowledgeable on creating valuable links that are optimize your page.

Overall, there are many technical aspects that come with optimizing the search results for your website. These aspects can become very time consuming and difficult to understand the average individual, especially when you are trying to run a business as well. Often, you can do some of these website enhancements on your own, but hiring a firm can be a better option. Though you will have to budget in getting a firm’s help, it will lead to better SEO and give you more customers.

Google First Page Rankings and Drupal

Drupal SEO-Friendly URLs to Get Your Drupal Site Listed in Google

Drupal manages the URL aliases for your Drupal site.

The URL aliases are the addresses for your website. A node is a content item for your Drupal site and the following address represents the first content item for a node within your Drupal website:

• Default URLs for new content on a Drupal website: /node/1
• URL Alias module allows new content added to become more human readable and most important, SEO-friendly: /articles/title-of-the-article

This format is not exactly human-friendly, nor is it SEO-friendly. Let’s fix it…

Drupal Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Building a professional business plan includes SEO for your Drupal website. It’s that important!

When you first install Drupal, by default, you will most likely have “Path Auto” enabled. This is the reason your URLs are not by default, user-friendly. The good news is that this is an easy fix.

Drupal Modules

Drupal out-of-the-box is pretty lean. It doesn’t do a whole lot. But there are over two-thousand Drupal modules that can be easily installed and enabled to enrich your Drupal website. Contributed modules provide new features for your Drupal website. Just like the App Store, if you need something, there is probably a module for that. When you’re looking for a new “feature”, you are looking for a Drupal module. Modules can also change how existing features work.

Modules for Clean URLs

There are a couple of modules that allow us to automatically change URLs to something more memorable. It gives us more human-readable, search engine optimized “friendly” URLs. This is very important for the long-term success of your Drupal site.

SEO-friendly URLs can help you achieve the business success you are looking for. Install the Drupal PathAuto and Token modules. Once you have these two two modules installed and enabled, it will remedy your ugly URLs problem.

• PathAuto (requires Token) – this module automatically generates URL/path aliases for various kinds of content (nodes, taxonomy, terms, users) without requiring you to have URL aliases like “category/my-node-title” instead of “node/123”.
• Token (provides a user interface for the Token API).

You can enable both of these modules at the same time (after you have them installed). If you do not have these modules installed and enabled already, you will want to download and enable them in your Drupal back end. You can download these modules at the Drupal website:

• /project/pathauto
• /project/token

Install both of these modules and enable them to benefit from search engine-friendly URLs on your Drupal site.

SEO-Friendly URLs Better Than Just Human-Friendly URLs

Now, you will notice that your Drupal URLs will take on a completely different pattern. The URLs will represent something such as /content/article-name

This is an improvement, but still not best practice because as your Drupal content increases, everything will be “content” plus the article name. So, let’s take your Drupal SEO a step further.

• Hover on “Configuration”
• Hover on “Search and Meta Data”
• Hover on “URL aliases”

If your not seeing URL aliases, it’s OK since you just recently enabled these modules.

Enable Clean URLs

Enable this search and metadata option to make clean URLs possible for your site. This will allow user friendly URLs like example.com/user instead of example.com/?q=user

To accomplish this, it’s pretty simple.

• Hover on “Configuration”
• Hover on “Search and Meta Data”
• Hover on “Clean URLs”
• Put a check mark in the “Enable Clean URLs” box and click the “Save Configuration” button.

Once this is done, you will notice that your new content will have human-friendly URLs.

Setup Patterns For Your URLs

1. Setup patterns by clicking on the “Patterns” tab on the top of your Drupal dashboard.
2. Highlight /[node:title] with your mouse and copy.
3. Advance to the next “pattern” field that is empty.
4. Type the name for each path and paste. For example, for your “book” content type, you will have the pattern book/[node:title]
5. Complete this step until every pattern is defined.
6. Click “Save Configuration”

Now click on the “List” tab and you will see that the URLs have not yet changed. This is because the content in the “List” tab was already created prior to you enabling your new URL patterns. All future content on your site will now reflect these new patterns.

NOTE: Don’t change the URLs of existing content articles on a live site! If you already have content indexed in Google, you will not want to make any changes to your URLs. Rather, you can set this up BEFORE your site goes live.

• Click on the “Delete Aliases” tab at the top.
• Check the “All Aliases” box.
• Click on the “Delete aliases now!” button.
• Click “Bulk Update” tab at the top.
• Choose all the boxes.
• Click “Update”

Now all your URLs have been re-generated. You now have a pattern of your URLs that actually makes sense. You can test this by adding a new content item. Any testing data will do. Leave the default day and time enabled, then save it. You will notice in the URL that the address is not only human friendly, but it’s also SEO-friendly. The importance of this cannot be understated. Without SEO, your Drupal site will have few visitors. This solution is not difficult nor is it time consuming, yet the benefits are vast.

Drupal is an amazing tool for creating advanced websites and applications.

It’s undeniable how far technological assistance in business success has come. More and more search engine optimization companies are working with smaller businesses and helping them gain ground when it comes to competing with larger enterprises.

A reported 82% of marketers find SEO effective according to a 2016 Market Dive research, reflecting the business world’s rising trust in it as a marketing method. With this, it’s important that these companies employing or who are interested in employing SEO services understand some the concepts effective in SEO and marketing in general today.

This isn’t only for the company to be able to work more smoothly with the company, but to help the company make sure that the company doesn’t end up unnecessarily spending too much.

Go Back To Basics

While numerous advances are made in SEO day by day, it’s still vital to place importance on the basic things.

The frame of any plan for success should include optimization of the title tags, meta description, URL, and page headers. These aspects are considered basic for the very reason that a good plan wouldn’t be able to stand without them.

It’s also important to ensure a website’s loading speed on both its desktop and mobile versions, because if the site isn’t opened and checked out anyway, then everything will be for naught.

Content

It’s been stressed time and again that getting customers to visit your site isn’t enough. It’s important that it contains content compelling and interesting enough to get them to stay, or better yet, keep coming back.

With endless streams of websites out there, several offering similar products/services and containing more or less similar copy, a company should take extra effort in making sure their brand stands out.

It’s important that a company’s copy team and development experts work together in creating content that not only addresses the target readers but addresses weak points as well.

Social Media

The rise in social media has expanded the possibility of brand exposure. It’s important that SEO teams see social media as competition but as an effective ally.

With the right social media strategies, like tapping popular users and going for “viral-worthy” tactics, for example, a significant amount of traffic can be gained.

Popular blogs are also a good idea, with a lot of these bloggers being trusted figures and most likely have large followings.

An important thing to gain from here is that as important as it is to get a good search engine optimization company, it’s also important that businesses acknowledge the importance of other areas and work on them as well in coordination with their SEO teams.

It’s clear how successful optimization for any site isn’t all about just getting your ad out there; SEO is just one of the factors that contribute to success. Providing good content and strategically partnering with popular platforms are just as vital in encouraging customers to visit your site.

Fortunately, most digital marketing agencies offer along with SEO services marketing assistance and content creation, making the path to a successful website a lot easier to travel on.