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.

Competitor Analysis is a process of identifying the strategies, strengths, and weakness of the mover and shaker of your niche. It helps to upgrade your strategy in a good manner and help you win the battle. It is one of the most important aspects of any marketing plan that every entrepreneur should adopt for the better outcomes and for understanding what points they are missing and how much they need to improve. Well, doing it is not as tough as it sounds, thanks to the number of tools available on the internet or intranet. So, if you are new to this, take a look, how to do competitor analysis for improving your strategy like a pro.

• Identify Your Competitors: The first and foremost step of competitor analysis is identifying who your competitors are? You cannot analyze their strategies until or unless you know about them. Therefore, identifying them is a must and important in all possible manner.
• Take A Tour Of Their Website And Analyze Properly: A deep dive into the website of your competitor is a must to understand what they are doing and if you are doing the same, so, at what point they are better at you. A basic inspection will help you in long-term and support you find out a lot that further improves your strategy.
• Spy On Your Competitor’s Keywords: A smart move is important to beat the tough market competition and therefore, you have to determine with which keyword your competitors are ranking high. Also, you should check the keyword density to get the better idea.
• Evaluate Their Backlinks: Backlinks are important for the ranking of your website and you have to analyze your competitor’s site properly to identify from which sources they get links for their website, so, you can get your backlinks from the same.
• Keen Eye On Their Social Media Handling: Social Media is important nowadays, therefore, you should keep a keen eye on their social activities. It helps you understand how active and engaged, they are with the audience and how frequent they share a post and what type. This may help you improve your social media strategy to drive more traffic.

After understanding all the barriers to your entry, make an effective strategy for SEO that delivers outcomes better than before. Learn new things and improve your strategy and not only copy them. Also, you can take SEO Expert help if you don’t have the time or enough knowledge to do this on your own.

SEO is an asset that increases the value of your website and helps you earn profits in the future. The reality of today’s world is that if your website is not on Google then it has no worth in the eyes of users, which zero your efforts. If you want to win the battle against the tough market competition, so, you have to tighten your belt and make yourself prepared with new and relevant strategies that meet the parameters of the algorithm. Here are some simple tips that help to accomplish your goal and make your position in the market.

• Understand Google First: Google’s main aim is to satisfy the need of its customer and it update its algorithm after a while just to polish their techniques, so, they satisfy users better than before. And if you want to make your position on it, you first have to understand it properly. Make sure you examine the entire strategy and use it well to get the outcomes.
• Choose The Right Keyword: Another thing that you need to keep in mind to hit the ball like a pro is the selection of the right keyword. Make sure you explore the market as per the taste and preference of your customer and then make any decision regarding the same.
• Generate Content That Readers Love: Make sure you create content that has the power to hold the reader on your website and welcome them back. Also, it answers the questions of the readers and targets the audience in a correct manner.
• Don’t Forget The Internal Linking: Internal Links are the true soul of your website, as they help the search engines and users as well to go to your website and increase its value. It increases the credibility of your website and helps to earn the faith of your visitors.
• Follow The Mover And Shaker Of Your Industry: If you want to succeed, you should never underestimate your competitors. Because they continually make efforts to leave you behind, you have to increase your strategy.
• Don’t Forget To Analyze: Analyzing is important to know your performance and does something better for the next time. So, you shouldn’t forget to track your record to improve your efforts than before and avoid any mistake you are making since forever.

These simple tips help to build a winning SEO Strategy that sails you through market competition. For better support, don’t feel hesitate to consult an experienced SEO Company that turns your dream to attain the very first position into the reality.

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.

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.

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.

The content of your website is crucial for ranking, thus, it has to be unique and to the point, but before it goes viral and ranks higher, it needs links that Google crawls and come to know about your content. These links give an idea of the structure of your website, so, Google will analyze it, whether it has all the factors that it needs to rank or not. Now the question is why it is important for SEO and why you need to focus on it for better ranking. If you don’t know, so, here we are to help you out. Scroll down to know its importance.

• Improve Usability Through Anchor-Texts: Internal Linking is very much helpful to improve the usability of your website through anchor texts. And for this, you need to use, user-friendly and relevant links in your Blogs, Articles, and Classifieds, PDFs or any other type of content. It redirects the readers to another article or blog that increase their stay time on your website. But make sure you prevent duplicate content to get positive outcomes.
• Boost Page View: Another benefit of internal linking is that it helps to boost up the page view of your website and helps all your visitors to navigate your website thoroughly. This may double the chances of your website conversion and generate more leads. To make it possible, you have to make sure your website has proper links and loads its page properly without taking forever.
• Improve Ranking Of Your Web Page And Overall Website: Internal Linking plays an important role in increasing the rank of any particular page if you target the right keyword and use the proper links. As the rank of your web page improves, so, it may also improve the ranking of your overall website.
• Visitors Retention: It increases the chances of visitor retention because it’s a human nature that if they like something, they will surely browse more. It give your visitor a reason to stay on your website and give it some time, which clearly indicates that they like your website, which is good for your business and help you win the customer for life.

These are some of the common benefits of internal linking of the SEO and you should focus on it to get the great and positive outcomes of your efforts. In case you think, you need professional support, don’t hesitate to consult an SEO expert near you.

Search engine optimization is arguably the most effective online organic search marketing strategy currently in existence. It is hardly surprising that now more than ever many business establishments and even individuals are increasingly embracing this technique to achieve both their short term and long term business objectives.

Indeed, according to a Comscore survey that was conducted in May 2014, 18.5 billion people made searches utilizing the top 5 search engines in the US alone. While another related study revealed organic search accrues 85% of SERPs clicks and pay per click (PPC) searches accounted for only 15% of this share.

SEO benefits

SEO can offer a multitude of advantages that most other online marketing techniques would be hard pressed to deliver. This includes enhanced visibility, brand awareness, credibility and traffic generation that when combined lead to exponential revenue generation growth. However, many website owners sadly deem SEO merely as an inevitable expense to their online marketing campaigns, much the same way they would deal with a mundane household expenditure. The truth is in fact very different; this strategy can be an extremely rewarding investment. An investment, which can bring about a substantial ROI in a very cost effective manner. This is self evident when you compare it to pay per click (PPC). When you, for one reason or the other, halt a PPC campaign, you will automatically lose visibility, and relinquish the traffic generated by this online marketing strategy. On the other hand, search engine optimization is an ongoing strategy. It is characterized by a remarkable continuity that lets business entities to solidify their web presence, and drive quality traffic to their sites.Achieving top rankings in the major search engines such as Google, Bing or Yahoo! culminates in more leads that can be easily converted. Essentially, you should think of search engine marketing as a long term client acquisition funnel that has no bounds. Taking a case study of Google SERPs, it has been proven that the top rated sites account for 36.4% of all clicks. Hence managing to be on position #1 to #3 suggests to users a solid credibility of your firm and the products or services it offers.

How to formulate an efficacious SEO campaign

Despite all this, formulating and ultimately implementing an excellent SEO strategy is not as easy as it may seem at face value. There are numerous pertinent factors that usually come to play in achieving top rankings and maintain them. To begin with, virtually and if you fail to keep abreast of these changes you can easily lose your standing on SERPs. Also, your competition can at any time formulate and implement a superior strategy and topple you from your advantageous position. So, it pays a lot to enlist the services of a professional SEO agency that can handle this critical aspect of this online marketing campaign. These experts can be invaluable in assisting you to lay a firm SEO foundation as well as offering the prerequisite guidance in implementing and managing the very best techniques that concur with you business objectives.

As would be expected, there are numerous facets of this online marketing method that are categorized as either on-page or off-page SEO. This includes impeccable keyword-optimized content creation and submission and link building. A reputable search engine optimization firm will integrate these and other factors, which will enable your site to achieve top rankings. In turn, this will drive more quality traffic to it, enhance your brand awareness, and in extension snowball your online revenue generation. Undoubtedly one of the best attributes of search engine marketing is the fact that its results can be accurately measured by web analytics. To this end virtually all companies that offer these services have devised a wide range of metrics that let them accurately analyze the effectiveness of this online marketing strategy at any time. This enables their clients to easily gauge the viability of the various techniques they implement. While, at the same time, determining better techniques to realize or even exceed the desired ROI in a stress-free manner.

SEO web analytics

Granted, each SEO company has its own web analytic s parameters. Still, most of these metrics can be broadly categorized into 2 groups. Which are reach and action metrics. The first variety are designed to determine just how much traffic a site may be receiving as well as its SERP ranking based on the same. This goes a long way in allowing clients to establish the performance baseline of any SEO strategy. Some of the most critical reach metrics include crawlability (how visible a website is to search engine crawlers) along with branded and unbranded keywords. The last metric enables these experts to identify hot keywords and pinpoint potential problems that may arise from a flawed keyword integration technique.

Action metrics on their part, are designed to ascertain just what actions visitors to a given website perform while there. Most search engines assess sociability and content interactivity to effectively rank the sites that are submitted to them. Bounce rate is an excellent instance of action metrics. Ideally, it tracks the number of visitors that leave a site after viewing just one page. The higher the bounce rate a website registers, the lower its ranking on SERPs will be. When it comes to content interactivity SEOs have the necessary tools to establish the most popular pages and even menu items. More to the point, those that possess the highest conversion rates. Yet another vital action metric is referred to as social visitor flow. This metric allows search engine marketing firms to determine just which social media platform drives the most traffic to their clients’ sites. While monitoring all the actions such visitors perform too.

Conclusion

Thanks to these and many more metrics, these experts are always in an excellent position to prove the effectiveness of the strategies they endorse to their clients. It is consequently very easy to realize the immense benefits SEO can present to all business entities for both the short term and long term basis. You can never go wrong with enlisting professional SEO services in your online marketing efforts.

The beautifully designed website with plenty of high-quality content isn’t likely to reach its intended audience if you haven’t spent time on SEO (Search Engine Optimization). A well planned approach to marketing and promoting a website is certain to help maximize your business efforts. Here are a few reasons why it benefits to use SEO:

Low-cost

The ability to rank a website organically in the search results can be relatively low-cost when compared to other ranking methods such as pay-per-click. Once a website reaches a top position, you have the option to rely on its natural high positive to attract plenty of consistent traffic without needing to allocate on ongoing advertising budget.

Even though the results of SEO aren’t likely to be immediate, the time invested can start to pay back rather quickly. Once the first signs of the increased traffic start to arrive, it should continue to grow at a steady rate. Providing the SEO work was done to a high standard, the site ranking should stay quite stable over the long-term.

Brand credibility

Any website that is ranked high in the organic search results gets to benefit from brand credibility. The reason for this is that most people believe the top listed sites in the search engines are reputable and trustworthy companies. But, the opposite can apply for lower ranked sites which users will be more skeptical about. Also, it further benefits to get a high listing in the search results because more and more people are using an ad blocker to stop the ads appearing.

Competitors

There is a very high chance that your main competitors are involved in SEO. Most small businesses that are starting out realize that SEO has wide-ranging benefits and is very important to take advantage of it. So, if your competitors are actively ranking their website and you aren’t, they will easily get more hits and sales than you. Even if you believe you’re offering the best prices or services, the website that has the top listing is more likely to get the most attention.

Next level

With a proper SEO program in place there is every possibility that you will see a significant boost in daily visitors to your website which can take your business to the next level. This can give an opportunity to expand on the services or products offered and even to upgrade you web server requirements to take account of the higher visitor numbers and sales.