Category SEO

If not, now would probably be a good time! Use this link to find out how Google sees your site:

http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/mobile-friendly/

Simply put in your website address, and you’ll get a return page after a few moment’s analysis. If your site is good, it will look like ours. After yesterday’s “Armagoogle” deadline (okay, I stole that), if your site is NOT mobile-friendly, you may have already lost ground in your company’s page rank.  And if you haven’t yet, it’s only a matter of time — the web is a big place, and Google is determined to serve mobile search users only pages that can be accessed and used by mobile devices.

Wondering why this change is happening? It’s not exactly sudden, as Google has been marking pages as mobile friendly, or not, for a few months, but this news out of the wireless cellphone service world, coming just one day later, seems like it might be the first dot in a much larger picture.

According to the article from Business Insider, as reported by The Wall Street Journal, Google will now be offering a “pay-for-use-only” data service for cell phones.  And while it may be limited at first, if there’s one thing that has proven true over the past 20 years, it’s that Google sees the big picture better than anyone. It’s not that difficult to speculate that more dots will be coming.

In the meantime, if you need help with your website’s mobile-friendly status, call Diamond Mind Web Design at (417) 496-9905, or fill out our brief Contact Form.  We will be glad to assist you!

Image courtesy of Stuart Miles at FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Straight from the horse’s mouth — actually from Cyrus Shephard at The Moz Blog, which is even better — comes this article, titled “10 SEO Myths That Friggin’ Tick Me Off“.  Definitely worth a read, whether you are a purveyor of search engine optimization or a recipient of its decidedly NOT mythic results.

Here is the entirety of #8, “SEO is all tricks”, because of all the myths listed herein, this is the one I have to deal with most routinely. I have added some real-world translations after each:

“Tricks” is what professionals call bad, manipulative SEO that gets you penalized. The problem, I believe, is the first thing any developer or marketing manager hears about SEO is something close to “put more keywords in the title tag.”

If that’s all SEO is, it does sound like tricks.

Real SEO makes every part of content organization and the browsing experience better. This includes:

1. Creating content that reverse engineers user needs (in other words, figuring out what your users want from you and giving them more of that)
   
2. Making content more discoverable, both for humans and search engine crawlers (yes, you still need to use search terms within your content)
   
3. Improving accessibility through site architecture and user experience (making sure your users can actually find what they are looking for on your site)
   
4. Structuring data for unambiguous understanding (don’t have a page titled “Fruit” that talks about cars)
   
5. Optimizing for social sharing standards
   
6. Improving search presence by understanding how search engines generate snippets
   (putting succinct summaries where they need to go)
7. Technical standards to help search engines categorize and serve content to the right audience (making your meta tags do what they need to do)
   
8. Improving website performance through optimizations such as site speed (exactly as said)
   
9. Sharing content with the right audiences, increasing exposure and traffic through links and mentions (getting your stuff listed and linked to from other places)
   

Each of these actions is valuable by itself. By optimizing your web content from every angle, you may not even realize you’re doing SEO, but you’ll reap many times the rewards.

To sum up, search engine optimization isn’t rocket science, but it does require some technical knowledge of how the Web works, some marketing skills, and some plain old common sense.  At Diamond Mind, we have all that stuff in spades, so give us a call when you need help with your SEO!

Image courtesy of Stuart Miles at FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Interested in where SEO (search engine optimization) will be heading this year? Well, the good news is that Google (and one would assume Bing and Yahoo, as well) continues to put more and more emphasis on actual, real, and useful content. Useful  being the key word here (pun intended),

The object that web designers and business owners need to keep in mind is providing a good user experience, and apparently that now includes what content is being served to your users. Does it dovetail with your business? Does it impart some worthwhile knowledge?

Not sure what kind of content you need to be adding to improve your SEO? Why not just ask your users? Use surveys and/or social media to find out what they want, then give them more of that. (Or so said The Kinks, anyway.) For more on this subject, see this article titled “What You Need To Know About SEO Going Into 2015” by Sujan Patel. For help with your SEO, call Diamond Mind Web Design!

Let’s face it, SEO (search engine optimization) isn’t the most exciting subject, and it can be very technical in nature. Add those two together and you come up with something that isn’t easy to explain to clients! Still, most semi-savvy business owners know that Google Analytics is the best way to examine your website’s traffic, and have at least heard the term “bounce rate“. But what is it, really, and why does it matter?

This article, titled “What Is Bounce Rate, Is It Important, And How Do You Lower It?” does an outstanding job of putting the subject into layman’s terms. Fellow web designer Ariel Rule over at the Elegant Themes Blog breaks bounce rate down into those three methods of examining it, and gives readable, succinct answers to each. And in case you are wondering, the answers are: 1) “Bounce Rate is the percentage of single-page sessions (i.e. sessions in which the person left your site from the entrance page without interacting with the page).” (as defined by Google), 2) yes, and 3) you’ll have to read the article, and/or call us, to find out!