Tag: search engine optimization

Why Building a Brand is Important to SEO

Facebook Image on Phone

Why a Brand name is Important for Good SEO

Many marketing experts will certainly make the mistake of seeing their SEO and their wider advertising as being separate. The presumption is that advertising requires things like social media advertising and marketing, whereas Search Engine Optimization involves adding great deals of web content to your site and utilizing search phrases. The two are totally separate and there is no crossover ... right?


Some website owners will also reach to shun advertising and marketing completely and rather concentrate on just SEO as a device to enhance the condition of their website.

If you're going to come up with a reliable Search Engine Optimization technique, it requires you to take into account an efficient advertising project. This consists of things like social media advertising, internet layout as well as branding,

Why Branding Matters


How does creating a great logo design, web style as well as website name aid you with SEO specifically?
Firstly, developing a brand name for your website is something that Google extremely advises.

Real companies are not called 'How-To-Get-Big-Biceps.com', they are called 'CrushingMuscle.com'.

Brands assist in giving an organisation, and also a web site by expansion, an identity and a personality.

Think about the websites that are most successful on Google and you'll likely locate that they all make use of a brand name instead of simply a key phrase as their site name!

One more reason that brands matter to Google is that brand names matter to individuals. If your website has an excellent logo, a wise web design that matches the logo as well as a clear 'objective statement', then you'll find that your visitors find it a lot easier to get behind your message and also to become fans of your material.


That subsequently suggests that they're most likely to invest long on your site, lowering your bounce rates. It means they will be most likely to share your web links also. These are both things that Google will certainly take a look at and also consider as an indication of a top quality website.


Another crucial reason to invest and construct a solid brand name using the time spent producing a site with high production value, is that it will send out the right message to other website owners. Do you understand, the sites that you want to deal with when constructing web links? It is difficult to obtain a visitor post from a top blog site if your website resembles spam.

mockup images

The best ways to Layout a Great Brand


How do you create a wonderful brand name?


A great brand does not start with a logo yet rather with an objective. It starts by recognizing specifically what it is that you intend to provide to your users and precisely what sets you apart from the rest.

Your logo design is then an expression of that, as well as a label that will certainly inform individuals what to anticipate when they discover your site. It should additionally be well made,  and that it needs to be special, identifiable and not overly complicated.

Creating a brand name for your site is something that Google highly suggests.  We believe the things that sites that are most effective on Google and the sites that you'll likely find in searches are that they all make use of a brand rather than simply a key phrase as their website name!


An additional crucial reason to construct a solid brand name and invest time producing a site with high net worth, is that it will send out the appropriate message to other website owners.

How to Know if a SEO Company is Bad

SEO report image

How to Tell if You’re Working With a Poor SEO Company

If you want to get to the top of the Google search engine results so that you can attract more visitors to your site, then there are countless SEO companies out there claiming to be able to help you do it.

Just check out a freelancing site like UpWork, or a marketing forum like Warrior Forum and you’ll be inundated with options. But how do you know if the company you’re working with is worth your investment? How can you separate the wheat from the chaff?

Signs of a Poor SEO Company

There are several types of low quality SEO companies. On the one hand, there are those companies that mean well, but are simply outdated still using old-fashioned tactics. They are the companies that will offer link trades with other sites, or will submit your website to link directories or will write you lots of content for your website using a very generic formula and an over-abundance of unnatural looking search terms.


In other words, these are the companies trying to help you ‘trick’ Google and trying to manipulate the way that its search algorithms work in order to try to the top of the rankings. They probably mean well, but Google has long since become smarter than that and much more complex. Today, this method is most likely to get you de-indexed or at least penalized. 

At least these companies mean well. Because the other type of poor SEO company is the one that knows full well that these kinds of methods don’t work… and tries to use them anyway. They are the companies that will submit your links using automated tools and will sell you poorly-written content and will make bombastic promises that they can’t possibly deliver on.


Another type of poor SEO company is the company that attempts to trick Google knowing that they aren’t supposed to use those strategies but believing it will still work. These are the ‘black hat’ SEO companies that will use ‘private blog networks’ and other methods to try and manipulate Google. None of these companies are worth your time or your money.

image of man at computer

What Good SEO Looks Like

Good SEO should really be a part of a larger marketing package which should also include social media marketing, content marketing, brand design, traditional advertising and more. By using all of these different techniques together, these companies can provide a comprehensive strategy that builds trust, builds visibility and generally helps you to climb the ranks and get to the top.


You can tell a good SEO company because it will be concerned with helping you to deliver quality experiences to your visitors and building a brand that will survive in the long-term. This is what Google wants you to be doing and thus it is what the best SEO companies will do for you.

Even if you can get a quick jump in your performance by paying for links, or by using a private blog network, eventually that is going to come back and bite you. Focus on quality and play the long game!


Another sign of a good SEO company is that they will give you reports and a dashboard that allows you to see that your hard spent money is working for you.  Ranking and analytics reports will allow you to see where you measure up in traffic and and other important ranking factors.  Your SEO company should provide to you these report on a monthly or even weekly basis.


Here at Allied Pixels we will provide to you a dashboard that you can check your analytics as well as perform an audit of your website.  You can also manage your social media and even track leads and calls with it.  

Contact us to ask for a free website audit to see what can be done to get you to the first page of Google.  

How to Create an Organic-Looking Links

computer and mouse image

Natural links are the best

The best type of links to build for any website, is one that looks natural and organic and doesn’t appear to have been bought or bargained for. Natural looking links are the ones that are designed to look as though they developed by the referring site naturally and without the intervention of an SEO company, or even your own SEO efforts.


The thing to keep in mind is that Google doesn’t want to see companies or site owners cheating the variables to get to the top of the search engine results page. Rather, it wants to see websites that are genuinely so authoritative and well written that they will attract links from other big sites and that they’ll be shown across social media.


So how do you ensure that your links profile looks natural in this way?

Vary Your Link Text

The anchor text that is the words that are underlined when you create a link. Using a SEO relevant anchor is absolutely crucial. Back in the day, the easiest way to make this work was by generating as many links as possible, all using the same search term, in other words spamming the anchor text. This helped Google to identify that your site was relevant specifically to that search keyword and thus it used to help you climb the ​rankings.


But that was much too easy to cheat and the smarter, Penguin-powered Google now looks at this as a sign of a company or site owner trying to game the system. This is very easy to identify also – if all of the links to a website are consistently using the exact same text in their anchors, then this is very likely to have been the work of a marketer or SEO practitioner rather than happen by natural occurrence.

To solve this problem, make sure that the links you create use a variety of different words and terms. Sometimes you should use your keyword. Sometimes you should use a synonym or version of your keyword. And sometimes you should use your URL, or just the word ‘here’ or 'click here'. 

computer image

Vary Your Link Locations

Google has made it clear that site owners should build high quality links rather than a large quantity of links. Quality beats quantity especially when Google is concerned. Thus, a lot of marketers and site owners have been focusing all their efforts on targeting top blogs and other high quality websites. Meanwhile, they disavow any smaller links.

But now consider how this actually looks. Imagine a site like the BBC or Bodybuilding.com. Do you think these sites only have links from the most reputed sources? Or do you think they have a few low quality ones thrown in there too?


As you can see, variety is actually a key indicator of a genuine, organic link profile.

Link Bait

What is the best way to get all these natural looking links? Educate your users to post them! The best way to do that is with ‘link bait’ – content that is so high quality, so shareable, that people will want to link to it of their own.

And there are also some strategies you can use to create link bait too – for instance, making your content a comprehensive resource that other posts can point too.

How to Build Trust for Your Website

Laptop Image

Building Trust for Your Website

If you want your website to be as successful as possible, there are a lot of different factors that you need to take into account. Which of these is most important all depends on who you ask, but one thing that we universally know to be highly important is ‘trust’.


Google wants to provide its users with answers. This is one of its main services, and if Google can’t do it, then people will look elsewhere – such as Bing – to get what they’re looking for.
But in order for Google to provide answers, it needs to know which sites it can trust.


The results pages are not ‘curated’, meaning that Google doesn’t have a team to actually check the content. That means that it needs to start recognizing sites that deliver popular answers in a programmatic, algorithmic manner.


How can you make sure that this all works so that your site is considered one of the ‘trusted’?

laptop and tablet image

The Right Links

The first and most important way to accomplish this is with the right links profile. You need to attract links from sites that Google already trusts – but how do you know what sites those are?


One strategy is to look at Google’s ‘In the News’ section. Here, Google highlights breaking stories by sharing posts from popular news sites and sites in that niche. This is a very important tip because in order for Google to share that content as news, it must already have a high amount of trust for those sites – and this will rub off on you to a great deal.


Another tip is when possible, to try and get a link from a .edu or .gov domain. Google likes these sites because they have obviously got a certain amount of credibility and by aligning yourself with them, some of that credibility is likely to rub off on you as well!

Branding

Another useful tip is branding. Google loves brands and has shared this information openly in the past. If your site name is currently the same as your keyword – rather than a catchy company name – then you’re doing yourself a disservice. Yet building a brand can be a daunting challenge. One way is to align your site with other brands by partnerships, certifications and joint ventures.


Likewise, you should also try to get links from other big brands. Google knows brands like Coca-Cola, like the BBC and like The Verge and that means they can pass on a lot of credibility.

Degrees of Separation

Of course it’s not exactly easy to get links from the BBC, or from the biggest sites in your niche that Google is featuring. So what can you do if you’re still ‘small fry’?


One answer is to think of this as a game of ‘degrees of separation’. If you can’t get a link from the BBC, then getting a link from a site that has a link from the BBC can work a great deal!

servers image

Researching Backlinks

How would you know what links a site has pointing to it? Easy, utilize a backlinks tool. What's more, this  has the benefit of enabling you to inquire about absolutely which links worked for the greatest companies in your specialty… with the goal that you can create similar ones!

How Good SEO Brings You High Quality Traffic

Tablet Image

You Want High Quality Traffic

Search Engine Optimization is a complicated business that can help most companies to thrive.  However, over time the whole process has been somewhat misrepresented as a simple system of getting as many links as possible pointing to your site. This dying breed of so called ‘SEO gurus’, are so desperate to get links to their site that they will use any trick in the book to spread their site around the net with little regard for quality, suitability or value for the readers.
This is bad SEO and will actually prove to be destructive for the website in the long run. While flooding the internet with links will certainly bring you short term dividends, in the long run. it will only upset visitors and get your site avoided like the plague.

Think about it, if you click on a link to a website on another site that you normally trust and find out that it’s nothing like it claims to be, complicated to navigate, or full of content from article spinners, would you really spend more than ten minutes there?

Likewise, if you click on a search result and find the website you’ve discovered to be poorly designed and unhelpful you’d be most likely to just click ‘back’ and try another link.

We’re increasingly aware of the importance of high quality links these days. But are you also thinking about the quality of the traffic coming from those links? 

Web Image

High Quality Traffic is More Important Than High Quantity

You’re not just looking at getting a high quantity of traffic, but also a high quality. Once you’ve got visitors onto your website then you need to get them to want to stay there if you’re going to get them to click on ads or buy products.

The real way to optimise your website for search engines is to make your site genuinely offer the answers that the visitor is looking for. This will more than pay for itself in terms of links also as your visitors start to talk about your site on message boards, dig it on a social bookmarking site, put links on their own sites, or reference it on Wikipedia and Yahoo Answers.

This is called ‘link baiting’, and if done properly it will mean that all the work is done for you and you can concentrate on making worth while content. One link from a respected user on ‘Reddit’ can multiply your revenue from AdSense alone by ten times for that day and it’s more than a little rewarding to see this happen. That is quality traffic.

Image of computer screen

Staying Relevant for Your Audience

Posting your links everywhere can also actually damage your site. For example, if you have links to your site on lots of websites that seem unrelated then Google will penalize you for spamming and your page rank will suffer as a result.

Similarly, if you keep filling your site with worthwhile and regular content then Google and other websites will recognize this and your search rankings will reflect that.

You can help Google by designing appropriate headings and meta tags which will tell search engines precisely what is on each page. If your pages of content seem relevant and exhaustive, then Google will start to like the site as much as your visitors will.

So in short, there’s a lot more to SEO than just posting links. Designing worthwhile content, adding regular updates, designing good navigation and using meta tags are all just as important if not more so. And just as important is to make sure that you are then attracting the kinds of visitors to your content – the kind that will specifically enjoy the content you’ve created.

Google has been very cleverly designed with the customer in mind and there’s a big difference between working the system and abusing it.

What is SEO?

Allied Pixels Background Image

In this video we discuss what Search Engine Optimization is and some of the factors that affect search engine ranking.

Transcript

What is Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?

When you type something into Google, Bing or some other search engine, to begin a search, you are looking for something.

We will talk about Google because Google is the 800 pound gorilla of the search engine field, they handle over 80% of the searches.

Google wants to provide the best possible result to that search so that you like the result and will use them again. They make money when people like you use their product, and especially when you click on the ads (the top and bottom listing that are labeled as an Ad). They present sites in order of their special program or algorithm based on how relevant they think the site is to the search you conducted. They base this on a variety of information, such as:

  • Contents of your site
  • Who links to your site
  • How long people stay on your site
  • The number of clicks going through to your site
  • and a whole bunch of other factors.

What does that mean to you the website owner?

Looking at it from the website owners perspective, SEO is the process of getting the search engines to rank your site higher on the list by giving them the things that their algorithm sees as important.

We do this by making changes to your site such as:

  • Creating keyword focused pages
  • Creating keyword specific content
  • Obtaining links to your site from sites that Google sees as authoritative
  • Restructuring pages on the website for SEO
  • Optimizing website code for SEO
  • Optimizing existing content for SEO
  • Listing of the site across main search engines, social networks and directories
  • Creating and distributing relevant content to link back to the site
  • Mobile optimizing
  • And many more things.

SEO works to make your site rank higher based on what Google is looking for in an authoritative site for your specific topic or keywords.