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Search Engine Optimization

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What is Search Engine Optimization, also known as SEO?

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the work performed by a Search Engine Optimization Specialist, in order to improve the visibility of a website in the search engines' unpaid results. You may have heard those results as organic, natural, or even earned results. That is because it takes a lot of effort to produce them and the effect is permanent. It is very unusual for those websites, that earned a high natural search engine results' position to drop, if the SEO Specialist has done a good job.

Inside the Website Vs Outside the Website Search Engine Optimization. What is the difference?

There are basically two ways to perform SEO: inside the website and outside the website. It is essential to perform both tasks, although sometimes it is not feasible, as they are not assigned to the same specialist. You cannot actually have great results with SEO, if you do not first improve the website itself and resolve any issues and problems. But what is the difference between them? With the inside the website SEO you actually improve your website - performance, device compatibility, and technology wise - and resolve any problems; while with the outside the website SEO, you improve its inbound traffic by creating or improving inbound links, socializing, networking, participating, volunteering, etc. We elaborate on all these topics below.

Inside the website SEO

It consists mainly of two website optimizations: the performance optimization, that has to do with the performance and correctness of the website, and the content optimization, that has to do with the optimization of the content.

Website performance optimization

A website that loads slowly and performs poorly is one of the main reasons why visitors leave before it is even loaded. Therefore, it is very important to make sure you have performed all the necessary tuning, to ensure it performs in maximum optimization. Contact us now for a free analysis of your website's performance and have an optimization proposal free of charge. Website performance optimization consists of the following tasks:

Resolve all problems and errors

You will be surprised how many errors websites have, that go unnoticed, such as coding or spelling errors. However, these type of errors create problems to our visitors and hurt the search engine ranking.

Resolve all design issues

In many cases there are design errors, that prevent the visitor from normally viewing and understanding the content of a website, and in some cases, prevent them from performing certain tasks. For example, the color of the background in some menus does not contrast enough with the color of the text, and in some screens it would make the text difficult or impossible to read. In many cases, the cart or the order button are not accessible in some screen resolutions, due to a design error. All the of above issues and many more can discourage the visitor from continuing on your website, or with the order and will increase the bounce rate and decrease the conversion rate, thus dropping sales and success ratio. It will also hurt the search engine ranking.

Resolve blocking scripts and CSS problems

Besides creating problems with the operation of a website, blocking scripts and CSS problems significantly increase the loading time of a website. A slow loading website will be dismissed by the majority of visitors, as they would think that it is not working and go to another website.

Optimize images

Most of the people just take an image and use it on a page, but there is much more to that. We resize all images to the right size. I picture that is bigger and is scaled by code, hurts the website's loading time and the search engine rating. We lossless compress them to the optimum, according to Google's image optimization guidelines. Finally we make sure that they all have ALT text so that it is easier for search engines to index them.

Minify and compress

the CSS, JavaScript and HTML and we make use of the Gzip compression. We do everything necessary to shave even a few bytes of, because it makes a difference when you add all up.

Make use of the browser's cache

A page that is loaded before, doesn't have to take much time to be loaded again. Utilizing the browser's cache, not only speeds up your website's loading, it also saves your visitors' valuable bandwidth, especially for the ones who use the mobile network.

Make use of a Content Delivery network (CDN)

Using a good CDN, significantly improves your website's content delivery and loading speed, because there are more networks that are delivering at the same time and so the pages are loading faster. However, most CDNs, provide also other useful features, like DDoS protecting, script optimization, etc. It surely worth having a look what they offer and how they could help the performance and up time of your website.

Make sure it works fine with all devices and correct problems

A website that does not load correctly on some devices, i.e.: Mac, iPhones, Android cell phones, would make its use impossible for those visitors and therefore you will lose traffic, Search Engine ranking and possibly sales.

Mobile devices optimization

Make sure the website works fine with phones and tablets and Make use of Google's Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP). In i-seo.us we support and make use of Google's initiative for faster mobile internet and so we make sure all our websites make use of that technology. Add Google AMP technology to your website now.

Website content optimization

Improving and enriching a website's content is a job that never ends. You need to spend time to optimize and update the existing content, as well as write new. Attention is required in the information that is provided to the bots and spiders, so they will understand the type of the content. Here are some of the tasks this optimization consists of:

Improve your content and write new and useful content

Content is probably the most important thing on a website. It is the reason for its existence. The internet is always in need of original, relevant and useful content. The main focus of a successful website is to provide that kind of content. Our work starts by researching what is available on the internet and we build and improve on that, to the point that we produce original content that is in demand. We have to emphasize the fact that we do not write content indented for search engines. The content we write is mean to be read by humans. However, we optimize and follow guidelines in order to make it search engine friendly. As a result, receiving high ratings by the search engines, is the welcoming side effect. We also give special attention to the existing content and we improve and optimize it as well, because the content in a website is the most important thing. It is the purpose of its existence, so we make sure that there are no pages without the right content, because they will hurt our targeted results.

Help search engines categorize and identify your content

by providing information about the type of your content, i.e. microformats.

Fill up all the meta tags on every page

Meta tags describe a page's content and thus, help search engine bots identify the information included. Helping search engines understand the content of your website, helps with SEO Ranking.

Add headers to your paragraphs

Header tags h1 through h6 help structure the content of a page and help Search Engines classify the information it contains. h1 is the primary keyword that the page is talking about. For example, the article you are currently reading is talking about Search Engine Optimization, so it is only logical that h1 is exactly this keyword. You can use all the rest header tags h2 to h6 to include everything else the page is talking about by using an indent structure. In this article, we use h2 for the header "Inside the Website SEO", h3 for its sub categories "Website performance optimization" and "Website content optimization" and h4 for the rest of the paragraphs, like the one you are currently reading.

Use Canonical URLs

Using canonical URLs will prevent duplicate content issues on your website. Add canonical URLs to your website now.

Internal linking between the pages of a website

Linking relevant pages of your website will not only help with repeating the same content, but will also help with SEO. So it is always a good idea when you are talking about something that is elaborated in another website to add a link to it.

Add correct geolocation

Providing the correct location of your business, can help a lot with localized SEO. So if for example your business is a local Chicago business, like a coffee shop, it is a good idea to help search engines, map and navigation apps, by adding the correct geolocation tags. That way, when customers are searching for this specific business type that is close to them, your business will appear before the ones that are further.

Make use of the latest technology

Always keep your website up to date and make use of the latest technology, i.e. Google AMP, microformats, etc. Remember, your website is only good if it stays up to date. An outdated website is not good for your business, is obsolete and could even potentially harm your business.

Outside the website SEO

Search Engines submission

Submitting a website under the correct category and to all possible search engines is an important step to improve its visibility.

Sitemaps submission

Submitting a website's sitemap is a necessary step to ensure that it would be fully and quickly index by the major search engines. However this is not what they do, by submitting a site map you have the option to first verify it and this way you can discover potential problems and fix them, before they are indexed by the search engines. There are different types of sitemaps and each one serves a different purpose, so it would be best to submit them all.

There are basically two types of sitemaps:

HTML sitemap (written in Hypertext Markup Language)

XML sitemap (written in Extensible Markup Language)

XML Sitemaps consist of two types.

Index Sitemap (how many URL sitemaps a website have)

URL Sitemap (contain final information of URLs on web page)

XML sitemaps are further divided into 6 different categories:

Sitemaps for web pages (commonly known as XML sitemap in community)

Sitemaps for mobile devices (XML mobile sitemap)

Google News sitemaps (they provide Google with metadata regarding the specific news content on a website)

Image sitemaps (details of images and their URLs on website)

Video sitemaps (what web pages have videos embedded in them and their details)

Geo sitemaps (an extension of the sitemap protocol geospatial content, in order to make it searchable in mapping applications)

So, depending on the content of a website we need to submit some or all of them. Since the contents of a website are always in motion, it is best to have sitemaps extension installed and configured, so it will be responsible to update the sitemaps, so the search engines will always get them updated to the latest changes. Let us to help you easily install and submit a sitemap to your website.

Maps / GPS submission

Submitting your business and website to Maps, such as Google Maps, can help your potential customers find it easy when they are looking for a business or product within the local area. This can help you get business activity and increase your sales, so it is a very important step to take. Also it allows your customers to rate and review your business, products and services, so new customers who are looking for them would be easier to trust you. Besides Google Maps, there are quite a few alternatives and it would be best to submit your business and website to as many as you can. Some of them are, Wikimapia, Mapquest, National Geographic Maps, Atlapedia, Sites Atlas, Maptech, Yahoo Maps, Multimap, World Time Interactive services, Maps.com, Mission Atlas Project, World Mapper. Also, some alternative apps to Google Maps are, Here, Waze, Navmii, MapQuest. Submitting your business and your website to Google Maps is not enough, however. In order to build trust and improve your visibility to Google Maps and search engines you need to verify your business with Google. Let us help you submit your business and website and verify it to Google Maps.

Creating relevant Inbound Links

Inbound links are links on other web sites that send visitors and search engines to your web site. The term relevant means that it is a link from a relevant website. For example, if your business is a school, a link by a schools directory is relevant, while a link by a sports website is not. Relevant inbound links count as positive from the search engines, while irrelevant count as negative. So it is very important to build relevant inbound links if your SEO is going to be successful, because the other way around could penalize your website and the result would be the opposite to the expected one. Inbound links are also known as 'backlinks'. The quality of the backlink, depends on the ranking of the website that links to yours, with the search engines. The higher the rank, the higher the quality of the inbound link and the higher the SEO benefit to your website. Building high quality and relevant backlinks is a difficult and time consuming process and it is highly recommended to leave it to the professionals, because building low quality and irrelevant backlinks could hurt your Search Engine ranking score. Contact us now for a free analysis of your website's backlinks and have an backlink building proposal free of charge.

Blogging

In other words posting useful information to blogs is a good way to promote a website, get good quality backlinks and improve the website's ranking with Search Engines.

Socializing

in other words posting to Social Networks is an other good way to keep in touch with your customers, improve your business visibility, build trust and improve your brand's image.

Networking, participating and volunteering

By participating to local or national events, could help boost your business brand and get exposure to the public. Become a member of organizations within your industry. Participate to their meetups dealing with a variety of web design/creative entrepreneur topics. Volunteer to be one of the speakers, or for a specific task. All the above could help with your business and website's SEO, because the exposure to the public will bring more people to your website.

Newsletters

This is a great way to keep your audience on their toes. Using it wisely by sharing useful information and don't become a constant annoyance, builds a trust between your audience and business and keeps reminding your subscribers about what your business and website do, so when they are in need of such a service and / or product, you company would be the first they contact. Make your website Newsletter enable with one click.

Online directories submission

Submitting your website to relevant online directories is another great way to get high quality and relevant backlinks and improve your ranking with the search engines. Submit your websites to multiple online directories now. Get a free instant quote.

Conclusion

Search Engine Optimization is a science by itself. It requires a lot of knowledge, experience, dedication and continuing study, because it is changing every day. The good news are that if you hire a good SEO professional, your business could enjoy the SEO results for a long time and it can help your business grow. Let us help your business boost its visibility with the search engines. Get a free instant SEO quote.

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