Thursday, November 27, 2014

Why You Need a "Link to Us" Page on Your Website

In today’s ever-changing online environment, having a strong internet presence is critical to successfully generating traffic, increasing brand awareness, and earning more revenue. While implementing specific inbound marketing campaigns might prove effective at spreading word of mouth, tailoring a good link-building strategy is important for businesses that want to establish themselves as respectable and reliable service and product providers. When several other websites link back to you, your online presence becomes more authoritative, consequently resulting in improved visibility within SERPs. Read on to learn more about the benefits of creating a “Link to Us” page on your website.

Friday, November 21, 2014

Understanding the Robots.txt File Impact on Website Optimization

It's funny how the success (or failure) of a website depends heavily on just one seemingly insignificant document – the robots.txt file. Seasoned marketers have long been using and optimizing it for their online marketing and search engine optimization efforts, but many newbie webmasters don't seem to fully realize its potential. Heck, some don't even know what the file is for!

Friday, November 14, 2014

3 Benefits of Proper Text Formatting for SEO

Understanding the importance of properly optimizing website content is critical to developing an effective SEO strategy that can generate more leads and increase conversions. While the quality of the content is essential to keeping readers engaged, showcasing professionalism, and ranking higher within search engine result pages, the formatting is an important part of the publication process that makes your content more readable. Check out the benefits of proper text formatting below.

Friday, November 7, 2014

Where to Place Keywords for On-Page SEO

Knowing the best places to put your search engine optimization (SEO) keywords is one of the most critical factors in website optimization. There are a number of ways to use keywords on your site to enhance website speed optimization but, for the purposes of this post, we will focus on just three of the best places to put your primary keywords.

Monday, October 27, 2014

Backlinking for Website Optimization

It is no secret that backlinks are an important component of website optimization. But it's also no secret that there are many out there that don’t fully understand how to effectively utilize this website optimization method. 

Just like anything associated with SEO/SEM, there are certain rules that must be followed to the letter for it to have any effect on your site’s SEO campaign. Too little might not get the desired effect, but too much, and more importantly, doing it the wrong way, can damage your efforts to move up your site within search results.

Tuesday, October 21, 2014

Why Fresh Content is Necessary for Successful Website Optimization

The importance of fresh content in boosting website speed optimization cannot be overstated. Since 2003, when Google first filed a patent to score content based on its freshness, the degree of freshness of a piece of web content has become a key search engine ranking factor. Google scores web content based on its freshness, a trend that continues to shape the road-map of the path the search giant intends to take for many years to come.

Tuesday, October 14, 2014

The Truth About the SEO Potential of .edu Domains

In recent years, search engine ranking has become a crucial part of operating a website or a blog, particularly for commercial websites. Good rankings on search engine results pages are achieved through search engine optimization (SEO). One very important aspect of SEO is backlinking – when a website attempts to have its site linked to by other high-quality websites.

Tuesday, October 7, 2014

Search Phrases and Increased Site Visibility

Site visibility is an important component of online marketing, for web-based businesses as well as traditional, brick-and-mortar operations that want to expand their customer base. One of the main reasons why websites have to optimize with enhanced navigability, useful content, and eye-catching graphics is so that more users are directed to the site through user interaction. The site will gain favorable rankings by search engines and increase its site exposure, which could bring in more customers and increase sales and profits.

Saturday, September 27, 2014

SEO Speed Tips for Any Website

Google's ranking algorithm is complicated. It's easy to lose track of all of the things that you're supposed to do to keep your website's rank high – you have to generate quality backlinks, avoid duplicate content, optimize your pages for various keywords, and make sure that everything's easily crawlable. Many webmasters get so busy working on all of these things that they forget about one of the most important things to optimize your site for: speed.

Sunday, September 21, 2014

Website Optimization 101: How Increase Your Website's Revenue

"Content is king." It's a saying you often hear in online marketing circles. Though it may sound like a cliché, the idea behind the quote is sound: high quality content translates to higher traffic, therefore, higher conversions. You need to make sure that your content provides some sort of value to your visitors so they'll hang out in your website longer.

But what use is good content when search engines can't find it? There is a ton of excellent, high-quality content on the internet today that remains undiscovered simply because it hasn't been optimized for search engines. Don't let that happen to you. Here are a few tips for website optimization to help make your website friendlier to both human readers and search engines.

Sunday, September 14, 2014

Why A Website Security Certificate is Important

In this day and age of computer technology and internet dominating business, it is crucial for a website owner to invest in a security certificate, or SSL. The "Secure Sockets Layer" provides safe and secure internet communications along with protection from potential hackers. It is the holy grail of huge e-commerce websites and, in many ways, is the reason for their success. You will always be able to tell if a site has the SSL by checking the address bar of your favorite internet browser, and looking for the lock symbol along with "https" before the website name. Having a legitimate security certificate will also boost your site popularity with Google and increase the likelihood of achieving a high rank through website optimization.

Sunday, September 7, 2014

The Latest Trends Evolving In The World Of Website Graphics

Web design has changed a great deal in the last decade. So when performing website optimization and choosing graphics for a website, it makes sense to tune in to current practices and trends. Take a look at graphics trends that are dead (are you using any of them?) and which are up-and-coming.

Thursday, August 28, 2014

Web Traffic is Not the Same as Conversion

Traffic to your website has increased and clever use of keywords has enhanced the relevance of the content… but you're still not quite where you need to be. Perhaps it's because you haven't put into place a strategy for optimizing your site’s landing pages for conversions (i.e. conversion rate optimization or CRO). In the absence of CRO, the hours invested website optimization efforts are wasted time. Traffic and conversion cannot be equated. Search engine optimization drives traffic and CRO improves site performance.

Wednesday, August 20, 2014

Search Engine Optimization: What strategy can get you the results you want?

When both are essential for high page ranks, offsite and onsite search engine optimization need not turn into competing strategies. A first-class website will eliminate the need to constantly fret over the next Google or Bing algorithm change… and it will be a huge crowd puller, too.

Thursday, August 14, 2014

Hashtag Optimization: The New Strategy in Website Optimization 

If you are on any social media site, then you've surely had your fill of the #hashtag. Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, Tumblr, and just about every other popular social media platform allow their users to use hashtags to identify and categorize content, and conversely, to look for trending content tagged with the hashtags they seek. In fact, the Oxford English Dictionary has recently added an entry dedicated to the word “hashtag” now because the hashtag is already shaking up the way web marketing works. 
  

Thursday, August 7, 2014

Implied Links and Brand Mentions Are the Future of Link Building

Filed in March of 2014, the new Google new patent that’s tied to Panda algorithm has caused quite a stir in SEO and SEM circles. SEO experts everywhere have been trying to determine its implications for the companies trying to boost their search engine rankings. All signs indicate that there is an increasing likelihood of Google including brand mentions or implied links in ranking.

Sunday, July 27, 2014

3 Ways to Improve SEO Efforts on a Tight Budget

We live in digital world, a business without its own website and blog are left behind. But having a website is definitely not enough – it's pretty easy to get lost in the SEO maze where large corporations have an edge over their smaller competitors. If your time and financial resources are limited, then what can you do to keep up those big trendsetting corporations that are setting the pace?

Sunday, July 20, 2014

Proven Ways to Boost Speeds of your WordPress Site

The internet is home to millions of WordPress websites thanks to the efficiency, easy-to-use platform. But majority of these sites are ravaged by one common problem – they are far too slow for regular use and take ages to load up. Sluggish WordPress sites are often disregarded by viewers who don't like to wait for an eternity just for a couple of pages to pop up.

By optimizing the speed of your site, you can retain your valuable subscribers or customers and continue to benefit from their patronage. This, in turn, will help you to grow your business or blog so you can gain significant monetary benefits from them. Optimizing the speed of your WordPress site is actually a never-ending process as new optimization techniques and processes are continuously being rolled out to the users of the platform. So being receptive to these techniques and processes will help improve the stability of your site and also make it more user-friendly in terms of loading speeds. Let us take a look at some of the commonly used tips that experts recommend for optimizing WordPress sites.

Tips to optimize speed of WordPress sites:

Remove unwanted plugins – The presence of unwanted plugins is always going to bring down the speed of your site. Hence, it is recommended to remove or deactivate any browser plugins which you don't use. Moreover, you can also explore ways to optimize the existing plugins which your site uses so that its speed improves.

  • Take advantage of CDN – A CDN or Content Delivery Network can be a great asset to any WordPress site as it allows you to offload additional load on your site. These include the likes of delivery of CSS files, JavaScript files, images and theme files. An example of a reliable CDN would be Amazon Cloudfront.
  • Pay attention to hardware – The type of hardware used in the server hosting your WordPress site can also influence its speed. Using outdated hardware can cause a steep drop in the speed at which users access your site. So don't hesitate to upgrade the RAM of your server to the latest configuration or make the switch to using solid state drives (SSDs).
  • Limit usage of overweight content – There are certain types of content which should be used to a bare minimum on WordPress sites as they tend to impact their speeds overwhelmingly. Examples of such overweight content are multimedia files and sliders. Avoid using these elements unless they are absolutely necessary.
  • Use website accelerators – Website accelerators are specially designed software which work in the background of a website in order to accelerate its loading speeds. Installing a website accelerator for your WordPress site makes sense if its speed performance is very poor.
  • Localize external resources –External resources like widgets, counters and advertisements increase the overhead of your WordPress site. At times, even web browsers like Google are guilty of slowing down sites. To counter this, you can opt for localization of external resources so that your site loads smoother and faster.


There are a great number of methods that prove to be immensely helpful in boosting the load speeds of WordPress sites. Play around with them and measure the amount of optimization they bring to your site. This will help you understand the best methods that you can make use of to improve upon your site's speed.
Need help?  Contact Website Optimization for expert assistance today.


Website Optimization
3134 SUNNYWOOD DR
ANN ARBOR, MI 48103
Phone: (877) 748-3678
Fax: (734) 661-1331
http://www.websiteoptimization.com/
https://plus.google.com/108123505155721216764/

Sunday, July 13, 2014

How to Take Advantage of TOfu, MOfu and BOfu

Did you know that only 3 percent of visitors to your website are ready to make a purchase? This means that rather than having your business blog reading like a sales pitch it should be an informational guide. In other words, try to incorporate TOfu, MOfu and BOfu content in your website and watch your customer numbers swell.

Sunday, July 6, 2014

Optimize SEO by Optimizing Social Media

People don't just use search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing to learn more about products, they use social media sites like Facebook and Twitter, too. There is an enormous benefit in developing a strong social media presence that many companies overlook:  enhanced search engine optimization. 

Saturday, June 21, 2014

Want Business to Boom? Learn How to Use Google+ to Your Advantage



Although they both sound similar and they are part of the same program, they are two different things. Google+ is a social networking site that is designed to make it easy for Google users to connect with other people, while Google+ Local is meant to help people discover or share places that are in their local area. The Local program has a 5-star rating system that also provides recommendations depending on your circles, location, your past reviews, and other things to help provide everyone with the most accurate information.

Saturday, June 14, 2014

Don't Settle at the Bottom – Get Those Rankings Higher



Search engine optimization is much more than doing a few technical changes on your website to get a higher ranking. It requires time and dedication to start seeing the results that will help make your site a success. It doesn't just happen overnight, so patience is a very helpful trait to have when dealing with a full optimization campaign. Either way, it is important to know as many useful techniques as possible so that we can implement in our strategies and master them as fast as possible. So, let's go ahead and take a look at 5 ways to help improve your rankings within search engines.

Saturday, June 7, 2014

How to Optimize Your Website for Mobile Viewers



A mobile-optimized website is now an absolute necessity. Business owners can no longer afford to view website optimization for mobile users as a luxury. Currently, over 50% of adults in the U.S. surf the web with mobile devices such as tablets and smartphones. But unfortunately, many existing business websites are not yet mobile-optimized. This is because business owners have not realized the impact that a mobile-optimized site has on successful search engine optimization.

Monday, May 26, 2014

4 Web Optimization Trends Every Entrepreneur Should Know



If your business relies on a strong online presence to draw customers, then you already know that you need to pay attention to your site’s search engine optimization. The SEO landscape is changing rapidly, with search engines taking a hard-line approach. Google, for instance, has penalized many websites for using bad design, poor quality content, and employing shady link-building techniques, to mention but a few. According to Forrester Research, SEO is a critical source of targeted traffic for online entrepreneurs, and strategies that have worked for your business in the past may no longer yield any meaningful results. 
  
Today, effective website optimization strategies have to incorporate multiple elements, including mobile optimization, brand building, and social media integration. The following are some recent SEO trends to help you adapt your digital marketing campaign to address these realities.

Monday, May 19, 2014

Understanding Google Algorithm Changes



Ever notice how you often have to go back and make changes to your blog or website each time Google adds a new algorithm or makes changes to an existing logarithm? Some of the most significant changes that have been made since 2008 had an effected not only on individual websites, but how businesses market themselves on the web. Many of the changes Google makes to its each algorithm every year are designed to hinder fraud websites and cheaters from getting to the top of search results by abusing the system. Conceptually, it is very important to understand the changes and how they would impact your business or website.

Monday, May 12, 2014

Mobile Optimized Websites: The Trend of the 21st Century



When it comes to building trust among potential customers and transforming your brand into a highly successful company that will take your niche by storm, search engine optimization goes hand-in-hand with mobile optimization and social media optimization. These three are the most important aspects of a complete website optimization process. 

Monday, May 5, 2014

Is Social Media the SEO/CRO Steroid We’ve All Been Waiting For?



Social media has revolutionized the World Wide Web and today, everything else from search engine optimization, conversion rate optimization to website optimization seems to be revolving around it. Being such an integral part of your online visibility and exposure, it makes sense that you should start leveraging on this powerful tool to drive high quality traffic to your site. 

Tuesday, April 29, 2014

Professional Website Graphics Optimization Techniques

Optimizing graphics for the web is a vital part of web development and maintenance, but also something often overlooked by webmasters. The time your page takes to load is something you ought to obviously worry about. This is because failure to properly optimize your website will make it take too long to load. This might eventually affect its position on the search engines or refuse visitors from visiting your site. In fact, it doesn’t matter if the layout is nice and beautiful if it doesn’t function properly. Website graphics can be pretty heavy, so optimizing graphics is certainly an issue that you should keep your eye on. There are several image editing and manipulation applications, tools, and programs that can be used for website optimization.

Tuesday, April 22, 2014

The Importance of Optimizing Your Mobile Website

The internet has arguably been the most revolutionary platform that has brought people together from all corners of the world. Today, we can say that the world is truly becoming a global village. The degree of connectivity is intensifying and people can interact on a real time basis. Traditionally, the internet has been accessed through PCs and laptops. However, the landscape is changing and mobile devices such as tablets, mobile phones and iPads. With this change in access, there lies a huge potential in using these interfaces to grow your following and sales.

Tuesday, April 15, 2014

Impact of Mobile Optimization on Google Search Rankings

Google relies on a multitude of factors to determine search engine results. Typically, these factors are related to on-page content (such as site URL, the text, headers and titles, etc.) or on metrics that determine the authenticity of the website in question (quality and number of inbound links, age of domain). However, in 2010, Google started using one more factor to compute search results – the speed with which users can view the content. And with the growth of the number of mobile devices being used to access the internet, Google also wants its users to experience the full richness of the web by rewarding websites with fast, mobile-friendly designs.

Tuesday, April 8, 2014

How Conversion Rate Optimization Reduces “Bailout Rate”

The most profitable form of website optimization is conversion rate optimization (CRO). CRO is the continuous process of modifying your website and landing pages to produce more conversions from the traffic you receive. More leads, opt-ins and sales are examples of the kind of conversions that CRO produces. In fact, this kind of optimization is the easiest and fastest way to increase sales without using more funds to increase website traffic.

Wednesday, March 26, 2014

Slow Website? Your Business Can’t Afford It

There are many reasons why a website can become slow. It can be the misuse of the content management system, the heavy data on certain pages or large graphic files that cannot be downloaded instantly. There are times when business owners finance their complex CMS and databases only to find that they are not up to the task. When a website loads your CMS, it will run all the site's assets through queries in the database. These queries are the ones responsible for retrieving the content of the page. This includes images, text, page titles and everything else on the page. The problem starts when the database cannot handle all the queries. This can depend on the CMS you are using as well as other websites on your server. 

Wednesday, March 19, 2014

Know Your CMS: WordPress, Joomla, and More

There a great number of content management systems (CMS) available for businesses and personal use. Regardless of what type of website you are building, there is a system perfectly suited for it. Here are some of the most popular CMS options available today:

Wednesday, March 12, 2014

Is Slow Speed Costing You Website Visitors?

Getting people to visit your website is an ordeal in itself. Traffic generation is not child’s play – it requires you to have the zeal of an Olympic sprinter and the patience of a saint! So once you do manage to attract a decent number of visitors, your sole aim should be to provide them with a smooth, sublime user experience. Understand that the web is becoming increasingly competitive with each passing minute and thousands of websites are jostling for potential customers' attention in every conceivable niche. Thus, even a minor glitch in your website is enough to turn off your visitors and hurt sales.

Wednesday, March 5, 2014

Developing a Mobile-Friendly Website

The internet has truly reached its mobile-age. There are a huge number of people surfing the web through their smartphones, touch pads, mobile phones and other mobile devices. And that number is growing daily. It's incredible how so few businesses still haven't updated their websites with the times, and still don't offer their viewers a mobile-friendly site. Website optimization is increasingly important. The numbers show that around the globe businesses are falling behind in taking up effective mobile sites, despite the fact that the mobile internet is growing exponentially. It's even true for some of the largest Ecommerce sites, which still haven't improved their website's functionality for mobiles.

Friday, February 28, 2014

Want a Fast-Loading Website? Get Graphics Optimization



Having a great looking website is a massive part of having a good online presence, but if it is poorly optimized and set up, it will have an adverse effect on the experience you are trying to give your customer base. There are many things that can be done to improve your website, and having website graphics optimization is one of the most important things to have.

Wednesday, February 19, 2014

Full Website Optimization for Speed and Graphics



When dealing with website optimization, one of the most important considerations is the speed in which the site will present information to the user. The slower the site, the chances are it will annoy the user, and they will click away from the site and search for another one. Therefore, website speed optimization is extremely important to focus on.

Tuesday, February 11, 2014

Enhance Your Content Management System with a CMS Analysis



Content Management Systems (CMS) are an excellent way to get your custom content on the web fast and hassle-free. They allow a streamlined approach to building your business, saving you money and freeing you from the hassle of keeping a programmer on staff. They aren’t perfect, though. Their one-size-fits-all approach to web publishing can lead to slowdowns and lost revenue if they aren’t optimized for your individual needs.

Tuesday, February 4, 2014

The Importance of Web Speed Optimization



Almost every Internet user has suffered from waiting for a website to download on the browser. When you’re experiencing such a lag, it seems like you’re going through the worst phase of your life, and it will never end. Most of the time, when a front page or subpage takes too long to load, a visitor clicks off of the website. This results in higher bounce rate, and lower conversion rate.

Saturday, January 25, 2014

Solid Dental Website Optimization Includes Both Sticky and Static Content



More and more dental professionals are coming to realize the tremendous importance of a good dental website marketing campaign. The truth is, the better and more appealing your website is, the stronger your presence will be online and the more clients you are likely to get. Most dentists have a website and a blog updated on a regular basis, but they neglect the “About Us,” “Contact Us” or “Our Services” pages, thinking that they are not so important. However, according to Google, these static content pages are extremely important for both ranking high in search results and providing a good value to the final customer. A professionally created and optimized dental website needs to have both static and sticky content.

Saturday, January 18, 2014

Improve Your Website and Conversion Rates with Website Speed Analysis



By optimizing the speed of your website you will enable visitors to easily access your website and be able to view what they want, get services that are offered on your website, or purchase goods from your website without problems in load time.

A faster website results in the improvement of a visitor’s experience and this leads to increased return visits and users adopting your website. A good example is the speed optimization done on the website Shopzilla. The speed of the website was optimized resulting in a reduction in page load time from seven seconds to two seconds and this led to a 7% to 12% increase in conversion rate. When the load time of the website was reduced by five seconds this resulted in a 25% increase in page views.

Saturday, January 11, 2014

The Important Role of Site Speed in the Success of Your Website



Websites are getting increasingly complex and are competing with each other to provide better content and user experience to visitors. A lot of this content consists of bulky, high-quality multimedia that can drastically reduce website speed. Website speed optimization services are essential if you want your website to provide a good overall user experience. A sluggish website can turn off visitors, which will in turn adversely affect your sales.

Saturday, January 4, 2014

From Drupal to Joomla: Analyzing CMS Performance Analysis



A Content Management System (CMS) is a user-friendly platform that enables anyone to control and manage websites without the need of technical knowledge. The three most popular CMS platforms to date are Wordpress, Drupal and Joomla. Although Wordpress is the most popular CMS for blogging, for complex websites that require more advanced features such as photo galleries, shopping carts and directories, Drupal and Joomla are proven to be much more efficient and equally user-friendly.