Category: Search Engine Optimization

Chances are, if you’ve been talking about SEO, you’ve heard the term “backlinking” more than once. Backlinks can also be referred to as “inbound links,” “incoming links,” or “one-way links,” and they are links that go from one website page to a different website’s page. Search Engine sees a backlink and considers it a “vote” in favor of the web page. Pages with high backlinks tend to have higher organic search engine rankings.

Why Is Backlinking Important?

For every high-quality backlink, you have to point at your site that is essentially telling Google, “this website is trustworthy and has good content” the more of these high-quality links you have, the higher search engines will want you on their search results. 

While backlinking is not a new thing, it is still a vital part of SEO and a good way to improve your rankings. Google has confirmed that backlinks continue to be of the leading SEO components if you want to rank well!

Are All Backlinks The same?

No, they are not! 

A lot of backlinks can be detrimental to your SEO. To increase your search engine optimization, you need to focus on high-quality backlinks, but how do you dictate what high-quality websites? 

The first thing to look at is if the incoming link is from a trusted source; let’s be honest, we are sure you’d prefer to have a backlink from Yale instead of a random spam page. The concept itself of getting high-quality links is referred to as “Domain Authority” if you have a link coming from a website with high domain authority, google puts a massive emphasis on it because it is prioritized as a source of links.

What Is Anchor Text, and is it important?

An anchor text is the visible part of a text that is linked. But how do you use anchor text to your advantage? Well, a best practice for SEO is to have an anchor text that includes your target keyword. In fact, a study found a direct correlation between keyword-rich anchor text and higher search rankings. But you also have to be careful with your keyword-rich anchor text and try not to go overboard with it; Google has a filter in their algorithm that’s called “google penguin,” and what this update does is filter out a lot of backlink building strategies and has a focus on sites that build backlinks with an exact match anchor text. But a good habit of having when backlinking is ensuring that the website and page you are linking to your website and page are related to the content you have on your website. Google will heavily prioritize these websites because the links come from reliable sources and are within the same niche.

Do you want to improve your ranking on Google? Contact The AD Leaf Marketing Firm!

You are busy running your business, and backlinking your website might be too time-consuming, especially if you don’t have much experience! That’s why it’s important to have on your side a marketing firm with a team of experts ready to go and help with all your marketing needs, including website maintenance! Our SEO and Website team works together seamlessly to achieve your business goals, so give us a call today at 321-255-0900 or fill out our contact form! We are just a click or call away.

 

Mobile SEO is even more prevalent than ever. Organic searches have increased immensely on mobile devices. People literally do everything on their phones. In fact, to prove our point, you are probably reading this article on your phone! Simply making your site responsive is not optimized for mobile; it is not just about fitting on the smaller screen. 

Since Google announced they would start mobile-first indexing businesses, you should have an SEO strategy for mobile and desktop because most sites rank differently in searches depending on the search’s device. If your website isn’t mobile-friendly by now, it will hurt your search ranking. Many aspects make sites optimized for mobile, and now that you know how important it is for your site, brand, and business, we are ready to share these best practices up our sleeves.

Speed It Up

This is a very crucial aspect for both mobile and desktop SEO. People can be extremely impatient, so if your site does not load in a blink of an eye, the searcher will most likely go back and try your competitor’s site. In fact, 40% of consumers will wait no more than 3 seconds before abandoning the site. People want answers now. Site speed is important for SEO efforts because if speed is low, it will cause an increase in bounce rates. Also, Google users come first, and if they constantly get impatient with your site and leave before it loads, Google will drop you in the rankings. 

Don’t Judge a Book by its Cover Does Not Apply to Websites

We live in a society where most people have a smartphone in their pocket, and because of this, your website needs to be easily viewable on their device. Responsive web design stats show that it’s wise to appeal to desktop and mobile viewers.

However, being responsive isn’t enough these days; you need to go a bit further than this. There is more to it than just making everything fit onto a smaller screen. Mobile optimization reformats and redesigns elements so that way they more appropriately fit. For example, your website’s navigation menu plays a vital role in how users find and access pages on your website. If your navigation is too difficult to use or too difficult to find what they are looking for, users will get frustrated and leave your site. Hamburger menus are popular to use on mobile screens.

Another design aspect to consider is the amount of content you have on the mobile site. Scrolling endlessly is not appealing. Something even worse is having to zoom in to read anything on the site; that takes up more time, and more than likely, your mobile viewer is on the move.

Avoid Pop-Ups like the Plague

We live in an ad-blocker world. Even if your cute pop-up message does show, the user will probably get frustrated and not even pay attention to what you are offering. This frustration with pop-ups is the effect of other businesses needing to design them and over-using them properly. If you want to use a pop-up, ensure the “x” is easily visible and clickable because people hate zooming in to click on an icon.

Local SEO is HUGE on Mobile

People these days don’t seem to slow down. Everyone is always on the move. Not to mention, people can be very impatient when trying to run a bunch of errands around town. Therefore, local SEO becomes a huge factor because those people use “near me” like it’s going out of style. They want the quickest answer that is closest to them. People want things to cater to their needs, and location qualifiers will help your business and them at the moment.

Since mobile devices have become such a crucial factor in search rankings, creating different desktop and mobile SEO strategies is necessary. We specialize in this field and have the tools and expertise necessary to help drive your business’s success by improving your search engine ranking. Contact The AD Leaf for our mobile and desktop SEO strategy services.

How can The AD Leaf help you?

You are busy running your business as it is, so working on your website’s SEO Mobile friendly version might be too time-consuming, especially if you don’t have much experience! That’s why it’s important to have on your side a marketing firm that can improve your SEO mobile user experience targeted to your goals, audience, and industry! Our team works together seamlessly to achieve your business goals, so give us a call today at 321-255-0900 or fill out our contact form! We are just a click or call away.

Have you ever wondered why your website used to rank number 1 organically, then months later, your site tanks in its place below the top? HINT: SEO: let’s not set it and forget it! Maybe you are guilty of website neglect. Everything you do on a website is not static or set in stone. Many dynamic factors will determine how well your site will rank right now and in the future. How your search engine optimization will perform a year from now will be determined by the industry, Google, and the latest trends. If you thought you could set up your website and forget it thinking the money will continue to roll in, read below why your SEO strategy will fail.

Link Erosion for SEO – Let’s Not Set it And Forget It!

Over time websites deteriorate just like your home or car. The website you might be linking to today might not be around a few years from now. This can be due to a whole host of reasons. One of the most common causes of a dead link is that the website’s domain subscription might have expired. For example, if my website links to an article about dog teeth cleaning on www.cleandogteeth.com and the owner of that website stop paying for their domain name, my link will turn dead.

SEO maintenance is key to ensure these links stay up to date, so we are not leading our audience to dead ends and a bad user experience.

Keywords Are Not Set In Stone

The keywords you choose today might be irrelevant tomorrow. Not to mention, today’s keywords might degrade their impression share as the keyword is being searched for more often. The competition for popular keywords can be fierce. So it is important to update your content to suit a long-tailed keyword instead. A long-tail keyword for SEO is simply a keyword with a narrow search focus, such as a location or product specification.

SEO Keyword Optimization – Let’s Not Set it And Forget It!

Keywords work by an inbound methodology. We should not create content around what we want to tell people; rather, we should be creating content around what people want to search for. This means the audience is inbound seeking, so keywords used that people are not searching for are useless. Proper keyword research can provide you with insights into current marketing trends. A great way to ensure your content is what people are searching for is to use an online keyword research tool such as ahrefs. Understand that there’s no such thing as the “best” keyword, just those that have a high search volume by your audience. 

The Dynamic Nature of SEO Keywords and Why SEO It’s Not Set It and Forget It!

You could rank high with the keyword “cat groomers” today and rank worse a year later. You could use the keyword “cat groomers in Santa Monica, CA” to address this. This keyword targets a specific location making the search term less competitive with a more regionally searched term. Beware of keywords that are seasonal or involve current events. These keywords might rank well now, but once the season changes, the keywords are less often searched. The same thing applies to current news events. People perform what is known as “surge” searching during a national event. It just takes days for the search volume to diminish into the ether.

Google – That Pesky Update

Google changes its privacy policy, terms of service, and the “algorithm” as often as you clean your house. It’s time you clean house after a major Google update to ensure your SEO strategy is up to date with its search engine requirements and features. Not doing so will result in your website being unable to rank higher than your competition.

 A strategy most often overlooked and one of the easiest to implement is to go back and assess their content and add additional details, longer copy, better images, keyword density, and remove any violating content that the new update might now be flagging as red.

Industry Changes

According to Forbes, 93% of online purchasing experiences last year began with a search engine query. Covid-19 played a vital role in this change in consumer behavior. Automation and the explosion of online shopping post-covid have affected search engine optimization efforts.

Conclusion

Search engine optimization is an effective skill but needs nurturing and care to achieve a long-term results-driven goal. Make sure to re-evaluate your keywords every few months, but no earlier to give the search engines time to evaluate and index your website. Google is ever-evolving, so you must update site content and keep up with the latest search trends and competitor research.

SEO with The AD Leaf

Are you struggling with getting your page ranking on Google? You don’t have time to properly do SEO on your website? Here at The AD Leaf Marketing Firm, we have a team of experts here ready to assist you with Search Engine Optimization tailored for your business. You can call us at 321-255-0900 or fill out our contact form!

 

Sources used:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesagencycouncil/2022/05/05/powerful-seo-trends-that-are-dominating-2022/?sh=1d51d5fb338d

tags: trends in SEO, SEO, search engine optimization,

Have you been struggling to rank against your competitors? When it comes to Search Engine Optimization (SEO), one of the most important factors to pay attention to when trying to rank is Domain Authority & Page Authority. That is why we put together this information so that you know what factors we pay attention to for SEO! Let us show you how we can help you grow your brand organically!

What is Domain Authority?

Domain Authority (DA) is a ranking system developed by Moz to determine how likely a website is to rank in search engines like Google. According to Moz, “Domain Authority scores range from one to 100, with higher scores corresponding to greater likelihood of ranking.” While many people may think so, DA doesn’t actually play a role in Google ranking directly. It is rather an aggregate score of how well your website performs compared to the field of options on Google! This makes it more so a prediction tool on how likely you may be able to rank for certain keywords! As it is an aggregate score, it takes influence on a lot of different things to determine your rank, including page speed, keywords, & plenty of other factors! To reiterate, Google DOES NOT use Domain Authority as a means to determine your website rank! As such, it’s better to use DA as a means to examine how well your website’s performance as a comparison!

What is Page Authority

Page Authority (PA) is very similar to Domain Authority. Rather than taking the whole website into account it only determines a specific page in the website. Page Authority in a similar way to DA but it does differ in a certain way. It does not take into consideration specific on-page elements like keyword use or content optimizations. As such, much like DA, it is best used as a comparison to other pages that you are competing with. Page authority is scored on many similar things to Domain Authority, but some key factors include having high-quality content, & how frequently the page is updated. If the page hasn’t been updated in a couple of years then it is more likely to have poor rankings!

How Do I Improve My Domain/Page Authority?

If you’re looking to better improve your Domain/Page Authority then you are going to want to improve your SEO! Since they are both aggregate scores, you need to make your website & pages more competitive in Google Search Results to stand a chance against the ocean of competition! As your competitors increase their SEO and you aren’t doing the same, you’ll fall even further behind in DA! This is why it’s imperative that you are consistently improving your SEO in order to ensure that you can at least keep pace & with your current rankings! When it comes to Page Authority, there are a couple of factors that can help improve your overall score!

Need SEO or Content Writing Services?

If you’re in need of SEO services then getting in touch with the AD Leaf Marketing Firm will be the right move! If you have no experience in SEO it will be very difficult to rank in comparison to your competitors. Especially if they have a higher Domain Authority. This is why you should higher the AD Leaf to improve your SEO and content writing in order to have a higher chance of ranking for your website! The AD Leaf has the main goal of building strong synergistic marketing relationships with our clients. We will learn your goals, your mission, and what success looks like to you! Contact the AD Leaf today at 321-255-0900 to start your marketing services today!

When most people think of optimizing their website for Search Engines including Google, most think of updating meta titles, descriptions, & keywords in order to rank as high as possible. Yet, an often overlooked aspect would be to optimize images for web usage. There are plenty of ways to ensure that your images are optimized properly for usage online. Here are a list of things that we consider extremely important when it comes to optimizing images for web & search engines. 

Optimize Images For Web By Changing The Image Format

When it comes to picking the right format for online there are very few choices that can beat WebP. WebP is a modern image format that provides lossy compression for web-used images. According to Google developers, WebP lossless images are ~26% smaller in size compared to PNGs and lossy images are 25-34% smaller than JPEG images of the same quality. There are plenty of ways to convert your images online to WebP! If you have a WordPress website there are some plugins that can handle the conversions for you. One extremely useful plugin is WebP Converter for Media! This plugin can help convert already uploaded content like JPEGs, PNGs, & GIF formats into WebP so that you don’t have to go through the painstaking process of re-uploading each individual image on you own! 

Add Image Alt Text To Your Images

If you’re looking to improve & optimize your webpage for Google then including image alt text is extremely important for improving your rankings. Alt text is basically the written copy of the image. This will allow search engines to better crawl and rank the webpage it is on! Basically, Google uses alt text to better understand what the image is about, but the webpage it is on.  However, it is not as simple as just describing the image! You want the alt text to not only describe the image, but represent the content that is on the page. It’s also best to include semantic keywords rather than implementing the direct keyword itself! Another thing to consider is if you have multiple images on your page then don’t shove your keyword or phrase into every image’s alt tags. You’ll want to pick one image that represents the content best on the page and give that one your keyword. 

Geotag Your Images

Another thing to consider including when optimizing your images is to Geotag all your images. Geotagging is the process of appending geographic coordinates to media based on the location of a mobile device. People naturally do this all the time. If they post a picture of themselves at a location on social media platforms like Instagram, they tag their location. Geotagging can not only help increase your brand awareness, but also helps you better analyze where all your web traffic is coming from. A fantastic program to use for geotagging is GeoSetter. This freeware tool can be used in order to change the geo data & metadata of image files. 

Need To Optimize Your Images

Contact The AD Leaf Marketing Firm to handle your SEO Optimizations today! We not only optimize images, but we also optimize your websites meta titles, descriptions, & page speed to help get you ranking on search engines like Google & Bing. We will do the keyword research to find the phrases that best correlate to your business, optimize content that is already present on your website to help improve your chances of ranking higher, & improve your Local Search Engine Marketing to make sure your business is visible in map searches. The AD Leaf wants to make sure your website pops up in organic search results. This way when people are searching for a product or service you are one of the top choices that appear! Contact us today at 321-255-0900 to learn more about our services or read more about what SEO can provide to your website here. 

Featured Snippets are little snippets from a web page that relate to a user’s search result. The snippet answers whatever they were searching for, while also providing a link to the webpage relating to the snippet. This snippet is also called position 0. This is due to it appearing above the typical first search result. As such, it’s very good for your organic growth to have a featured snippet by giving it a boost.

What Can Be A Featured Snippet

There are many different types of featured snippets. These include definitions, unordered lists, ordered lists, & tables.

1. Definition Snippet: This snippet is fairly self-explanatory. It provides a definition based on the search result. For example, if someone were to search “Is Pluto a planet?” they would find a featured snippet definition explaining that it is a dwarf planet. These definitions are taken directly from paragraph code or <p> within the given webpage.
2. Unordered List Snippet: These lists show up as an unordered list. For example, if you search “list of sports” you will get a bulleted list of sports including soccer, tennis, basketball, etc. Obviously, the order of this list doesn’t matter, which is why the ranking of each item doesn’t matter. Google takes these lists directly from <ul> code or unordered lists within the page.
3. Ordered List Snippet: The ordered list is a list where the ranking of each item does matter. These lists are typically step-by-step instructions on how to complete a task. This is most prevalent with cooking recipes! Google pulls these from <ol> or ordered list codes from the website.
4. Table Snippet: Tables pull data from the page that have the <table> code within them related to the query. For example, if you search for a list of upcoming Marvel movies, you will get a featured snippet with a table featuring the movie title and when it is released in the United States & Australia!

How Can I Get Featured Snippets?

Sadly, there is no way to guarantee that your website will be a featured snippet. Google itself has a system that determines if the webpage is viable, and will elevate it if it fits the query. Generally, your best chances of being a featured snippet involve you already being within the top 10 search results. This means you will need to have solid SEO before even considering going for a featured snippet. That is where we come in.

Contact The AD Leaf Marketing Firm!

If you’re looking to have featured snippets for your website, then call the AD Leaf Marketing Firm to help improve the SEO on your website. We will help build up your organic search results to help give you the best chances at getting a featured snippet for your webpage! We will help with keyword research, on-page optimizations, and link development to help you at getting the best chances at reaching the top spots on Google! If you’re interested in our services, give us a call today at 321.255.0900! Feel free to connect with us on Facebook to keep up with our events and trends!

            Business websites can benefit from search engine optimization by receiving more organic traffic through organic search results. Business owners must pay attention to this as organic traffic is critical to ensuring they have loyal and returning customers. A wide variety of strategies can be employed in search engine optimization to reach specific audiences, increase the domain authority, and make the user experience as optimal as possible for viewers. Maintaining an updated website with fresh content is one of the most important SEO strategies. Search engines such as Google perform their site indexing by checking for relevant content to the keywords the page is targeting. As a result, the web page will not rank well because Google sees that the content is not relevant to the keyword. In addition, keywords are crucial because they allow people to find pages through search engines.

The Importance of Search Engine Optimization

            Search engine optimization is a vital part of marketing success. This is because without the use of proper SEO, your webpage will not show up on Google. Many people are unaware of SEO and what is being done behind the scenes to keep your webpages looking and performing its best. Not only does SEO help rank your website higher in search engines, but there are many other skills that go into SEO. While working on web pages, backlinking is being performed in order to give your webpage domain authority. Backlinks are important for SEO because they signal to Google that other resources find your content to be of enough value to link it to their own web page.

Meta and Title Tags

            Using title and meta tags for SEO is important because this helps search engines identify the content of the page as well as what the page is about based on its keyword phrases. As the user performs a Google search, this is the first time they will come across your website. Neither of these titles nor tags are meant to be long paragraphs. An ideal number of characters for a title tag is 60 and for a meta description is 155-160 characters. There isn’t necessarily anything wrong with having a longer meta description, but it can be seen as a lost opportunity because Google will only show a certain number of characters in the meta description.

Webpage Upkeep

            Additionally, SEO focuses on the maintenance of the website. We ensure that the website runs smoothly, the load times are under 5 seconds, and the overall user experience is seamless. An image-heavy website can be one of the factors that slow down the speed of a webpage. Our goal is to reduce the size of these images so that the webpages will load more quickly and smoothly. We also examine whether the site is mobile-friendly. Today, almost everyone has a mobile phone, so if a website is not mobile-friendly, users will click away the second they land on it. Maintaining this will make sure that traffic keeps coming to the website.

Why The AD Leaf?

            The AD Leaf’s SEO team will drive more traffic to your website. Plus, you will become part of our family. Each of us works very closely to make sure that your business is as successful as possible.  Also, we take great pride in bringing you that success! We pay attention to the little things and fix problems with your site before you even realize they exist. We recognize the importance of your business and strive to always be on top of our game. Choose The AD Leaf Marketing Firm as your SEO specialists.