Tag seo

SEO Myths Demystified

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!

 

SEO Trends for 2015

seoimage

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!

 

What The Heck Is Bounce Rate, Anyway?

1417819234964Let’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!

Well, You’ve Got To Start Somewhere…

…so this is where I’ll begin:  Eight (8!) years ago this month, the metaphorical doors of Diamond Mind Web Design opened, and since we are still alive and kicking, I thought that maybe it was time to start my own blog.  Not my first, actually, as I’ve been blogging for about three and a half years over at Business Power Network, but for the first time I’ll be able to focus on topics specific to the web world.

What you will find here: Posts about the dos and don’ts of web design, posts about social media in general, Facebook and LinkedIn in particular, posts about SEO and profile management, and more.  Some will be more technical in nature, some will not; hopefully all will be useful, or at least interesting.  You’ll also find some humor, I hope, though the odds are it will be of a more Pythonesque nature than anything else.

What you won’t find here: Posts about finance, religion, or politics.  Not only did my momma tell me to avoid those subjects in polite conversation, as I have no expertise in any of those fields, I choose not to blather on about any of them.  You can find plenty of that elsewhere; you’ll find none of it here.

Wait, did I say “none”?  Oh, yes, well, one, anyway.  The candidate I endorse in this fall’s election is…

Craig For Prez!

Yes, that’s right — Craig Ferguson for President!  I don’t care if he wasn’t born in this country.  He speaks with a Scottish accent, and that alone makes him trustworthy! 🙂  Okay, I’ll quit now while I’m still ahead.  Encourage your friends to sign up for the blog; we’ll have a kick-off contest soon.  Until next time!