In a forever moving industry, website designers are constantly having to battle between the latest updates in technology and ever-changing design trends and preferences. As the founder of a web design agency, I’ve found that the most notable trend is that customers are resistant to change.

Over the past 8 years, we’ve tirelessly battled with customers requesting outdated styling and trends. This often results in a website being out of date before we’ve even begun building! Why is this you may ask? It’s actually simple – the majority of businesses love to benchmark their competitors. The typical expected lifespan of a website for financial services business for example, is around 4 years. In reality these client expectations are wildly inaccurate. With rapidly changing technology and design trends, most websites will begin to show signs of age after around 18 months. This means that clients are taking inspiration from their competitors who often have out of date websites!

Website design trends to avoid (and never look back!)

To get inspiration for new web design trends, we must first look at the older ones to avoid.

1. The Animated Website Carousel (Slider)

A great example of a trend which has finally started to die out in 2018 are website carousels or animated banners. A recent study shows that virtually nobody tends to look past the first banner (nearly 95% of clicks are on the first!). The only time which you should perhaps consider an animated slideshow is for an eCommerce website. This is because engagement is typically slightly higher when savvy customers are hunting for a bargain. Informational/brochure websites should stick to a single banner which will also help with website load speeds.

2. Heavily tiered website structures

Established website designers who were building websites going back 8 years or so will remember the “good ol’ days” of simple brochure sites being dissected into 20+ pages. These would have a few hundred words per page on a sitemap which spans 4 levels deep. Visitors had to click endlessly through pages just to get basic information. Given the speed at which the patience-shattering 56kbps dial-up modems would connect at, it’s actually baffling that this was the trend. Nowadays, it’s imperative to ensure that when you’re designing the sitemap, less is more – without stuffing pages full of text!

3. Overuse of animations

There’s a fine balance between a nicely animated website which is considered engaging and the torrent of slide-ins, fades and parallax animations which I often see when visiting lower cost websites. Most average website visitors will be put off by this and will often be using budget laptops which means that the website will probably glitch and stagger. Remember – the more animations you have, the higher the probability it’s going to take too long to load and present issues for the average user. Don’t misinterpret this, animations when used subtly and with a ‘less is more’ approach can really help boost visitor conversion rates and increase engagement on the page – just don’t overdo it.

Web design trends to take inspiration from in 2018

As with many trends, there is often a cycle of trends which over time repeat and often morph. Most recently, this is apparent with the revival of shadows.

1. Flat design and the revival of shadows

Although flat design has been around for several years now, it’s still going strong. Perhaps one of the main reasons is because flat designs are typically vector images which can be highly compressed and outputted at SVGs. This ensures the images remain retina sharp, without impacting the load speeds.

Shadows on boxes, shapes and images are being to see a comeback! Flat design is slowly morphing into 3D shapes with layers and depth and the latest trend is to sparingly use shadow effects to give flat designs a new lease of life. Check out the example below:

2. Subtle animations

In 2018, animations really should be kept simple and subtle. Using hovers effects on buttons, subtle gradient changes and motions which do not distract the visitor are best. Parallax is still a great way to bring a page to live and has shown no signs of slowing throughout the year so far. It’s important to test your animations on a range of devices to ensure that the javascript/CSS isn’t causing the page to jitter. Take inspiration from the example above, which uses a typing effect to change the wording on the banner. It’s a fantastic way to draw a visitor’s eye and explain a product or service in just a few words.

3. Abstract shapes and adventurous colours

Perhaps another result of the focus on ensuring websites load quickly, vector shapes are a great way to make a website look modern without slowing the experience down. Small shapes can be created in Adobe Illustrator (or similar) and exported as SVGs. This allows the image to become responsive, without impacting the page size.

4. Use GIFs to express emotion

If you’re not sure what a GIF is, you’ve probably not used a mobile phone or social media before. They’re everywhere and they are here to stay. In an era where face to face interaction is in significant decline, it’s increasingly difficult to convey emotion through content and conversation. One of the key areas which website owners often struggle to convey in their content, is personality and emotion. The use of GIFs in blog articles, website copy and skyscraper articles is a fantastic way to get a quick laugh and use humour to engage with your audience.

5. Reading Progress Bar

A relatively new trend which is becoming increasingly popular is to show a simple progress bar at the top of a blog post or article. This automatically calculates how far through the article the reader is. It’s a nifty tool which can reduce bounce rates and increase time on page as visitors won’t be worried about how much more there is to read. If you’re looking for a free plugin, there’s a great one here – Reading Progress Bar for WordPress.

6. Google AMP

Perhaps one of the most important new trends of 2018, Google AMP is a relatively new method of displaying content almost instantly. The premise is simple – less is more and by enabling AMP on your website’s pages, mobile viewers will be able to click on your articles and visit your pages in a familiar, super fast environment. Google caches the pages locally to render them quicker. The only limitation is that AMP pages have basic layouts.

The post Top website designers explain the latest trends and inspiration for 2018 appeared first on SEO Scoop.

Google’s core algorithm update is here. It’s been confirmed by Google and it’s shaken up the SERPs massively. As always, knowledge is power.

Our sites saw complete stability on our long established keywords and for some of our newer keywords which we have been targeting, there was a lot of movement in the early days of the month whilst the update was rolling out. Now that the dust has settled, we’ve seen some great improvements and a 15% increase in traffic on one of our money sites.

How have the updates affected your websites? Leave a comment below!

The post Google Core Algorithm Update August 2018 appeared first on SEO Scoop.

It’s no secret that gaining great search rankings makes it easier to achieve online business success. If you’ve just built your site and you want to launch it with the best chance of ranking well and getting traffic, then read on.

So, you’ve got your new site and you’ve already worked out what your commercial goals are, you just now need a way to reach them. Welcome to the world of SEO. Now you can bring in traffic, convert it to make sales and build your brand name through the exposure that search engine rankings can bring.

It takes commitment, dedication, resourcefulness and relentless persistence to perform well in Google. Google is forever changing their algorithms, and this makes it a challenge for everybody. It’s important to keep up to date and monitor the changes so that your site continues to be competitive and perform well against your online adversaries.

Research shows that sites that appear on the first page of search results get the most traffic. Data like this that makes business owners and webmasters go all out to unlock the code to improved google rankings.  We all wish there were a magic pill that would send us to the top of the rankings overnight. Unfortunately, there isn’t one, and that’s most likely why you’re visiting this page.

Although there isn’t any magic, you can take action by following these steps to get to the top of the search engine results page.

Basic rules of SEO

To get you started, take a look through at some of the most basic rules of SEO.

Knowing these steps will empower you to optimise your pages for both the search engines and humans, and you’ll be aware of what it takes to get ahead through the use of smart on-page and off-page SEO.

We could start with exceptional SEO strategies that will put you head and shoulders above other sites, but of course, there’s no such thing as quick and easy SEO. It takes a concerted effort to get the entire site set up with SEO for long-term success. Not taking the time to do it properly is likely to get you penalised.

The steps you need to take include:

1. Understand the Google ranking algorithm
2. Measurement, measurement, measurement
3. Track and measure the right metrics
4. Be mobile friendly
5. Keyword research
6. Add on page SEO
7. Build your links the right way

Let’s explore each of these essential areas more so that you know what you need to do to get your website to perform better on search.

Step #1: Understand the Google ranking algorithm

You may not have ever heard of John Mueller but he is one of the Google bosses, and he has confirmed on Twitter that changes are made to the Google algorithm pretty much every day. The search engine expert website, Moz is under the impression that there are around 500 to 600 changes every year.

Although Google is in the habit of announcing major changes, they do not announce some of the details to the public. Most of the information that is in the public domain usually comes from the speculation and experience of professionals.

To find out the latest changes made to Google Algorithms, check out Moz’s resource on Change History.

Step #2: Measurement, measurement, measurement

As with anything that you want to improve, you need to start with where you are now. In this case, you need to know where you’re performing when it comes to your main keywords.

Check the speed of your site

As it’s one of the major ranking factors for Google, it’s important to know what the speed of your site is. If your site is running and loading particularly slowly, you are quite unlikely to perform well in the search engine rankings. This could also impact your ability to make sales to new customers too.

One of our favourite tools to check website speed is Pingdom. If your performance grade comes back at less than 50, then you should really do something about it.

When it comes to page load time, you should try to get something under 2 seconds.

Step #3: Track and measure the right metrics

Now it’s time to monitor some of the most critical measurements of your site so that you know what you need to work on.  These measurements include:

• Organic traffic. Most website visitors will be coming through organic search other than paid search. It’s also noted in this study that the most revenue comes out of visitors using organic search.
• Organic traffic conversions. In addition to how much traffic you receive, do check out what keywords are being used to bring that traffic to your website.

Step #4: Be mobile-friendly

The percentage of all searches performed on a mobile device continues to grow. There are now more searches taking place on mobile devices than on desktop computers. You can easily check whether your website is mobile friendly or not by entering your URL into Googles Test page for it. You’ll be informed of any errors or page loading issues.

Step #5: Use your keywords to create great content

You can add your keywords in all the right places, but if you don’t create great content that truly helps people then you still won’t perform well. One technique that is popular with SEO professionals is to use the hub and spoke technique. This is when you create one main page using your primary keyword and create other pages that lead off that page with long tail keywords. The result is a comprehensive and deep resource guide that readers should love and share. All those keywords will help your SERPs too.

Step #6: Improve your new site’s ranking on Google with on-page SEO

Now that you have a clearer idea of the keywords that you want to use to improve your new site’s ranking in the search results – you have what you need to make some powerful changes to your on-page SEO.

These keywords should be used in your page titles, sub-headings and in the alt-image field of your images.

Step 7: Build links the right way

A little-known secret of SEO success is to add anchor text above the fold for greater conversion rates. Another technique is to use images for building links too.

Conclusion

Helping your website to get established is well worth the trouble. It will launch it into the world of search and help it to perform well in the longer term. One of the best things you can do is to understand who you want to visit your site and what they’re looking for from you. Using commercial keywords as opposed to informational keywords can also help.

These are the steps to launching your website for better search rankings. If you need any help in improving your new site’s ranking, let us know and we’re here for you.

The post A Step by Step Process to a New Site’s Ranking appeared first on SEO Scoop.

If your SEO campaign is not performing as well as you’d hoped, then there could be something missing. If you’ve spent a long time on it, but traffic isn’t up to par, and you’re no doubt wondering what could be amiss.

Read on to discover what might be missing or not in alignment with what works well for Google when it comes to search engine optimisation.

1. Your website is out of date

There are a few aspects in this arena that are going to mess up your chances of performing well if they aren’t set up properly.

Refine your architecture

First off, your website architecture needs to be simple. This means that any visitor should be able to reach any page that they want to get to in under three clicks. Keep things simple and you’ll help them to navigate to their destination.

Keep these points in mind for best results:

• Every main page needs to be accessible directly from the main menu on your home page
• The structure that you use needs to be logical and easy to use. It needs to be predictable to users.
• Use breadcrumbs to aid navigation of the site.
• Ensure that the search engines can crawl your website with ease. You may want to use HTML and CSS code to improve this.
• Sites with a structure that’s easy to use can even be awarded Google’s site links which will give you added visibility and overall improve your SERPs performance.

Check the speed of your website

A very important ranking factor is site speed. You can check the speed of your website and see suggestions on what you can improve on Pingdom or Google PageSpeed Insights tool. An improved loading time can deliver a good improvement in ranking.

Improvements can often be made on:

• Better hosting or upgraded server
• Hosting larger files externally – ie on Dropbox
• By resizing and compressing images
• Many image heavy websites opt to use a Content Delivery Network (CDN) for image delivery
• Keep redirects to a minimum

Mobile Friendly Responsiveness

Now that more people use mobile devices to search and browse the internet, it’s become particularly important for your site to be responsive to them and react with speed.

Google uses the mobile version of your site to index it and determine where it will appear in SERPs. Links need to be easy to see and use and the site needs to fit the size of the smaller screens of any device used to access it. You can read more about Google’s mobile-first indexing here where best practices are listed.

HTTPS security

By switching from HTTP to HTTPS which offers improved security, you may benefit from a helpful ranking boost. Soon it will become necessary to move again to HTTP/2.

2. Your On-Page SEO is not up to scratch

Without staying current with the best practices of on-page SEO, your site could well be suffering. Here are the most common points to consider:

URL

Using a URL structure that is not clear and free of clutter could impact your results. They would ideally not contain numbers, be predictable and contain your main keywords (but not stuffed). Preferably you’ll be using hyphens rather than underscores.

Meta Tags

Using title tags, a good meta description and using both your primary and secondary keywords help. Keep your title tag under 60 characters and ensure that every page is unique.

Link Structure

Check your Google webmaster tool to ensure that you don’t have any broken links and that your structure is well designed. By adding relevant internal links that go deep, you’ll be helping your visitors at the same time as improving your ranking. Use follow links but don’t link to excess.

Look into RankBrain too as this is one of the most important ranking factors that Google is applying. It’s geared towards machines learning from your content, and the easiest way to help them to do that is to use a schema markup. These schemas are universally understood by search engines, and they can then pick out pieces to present to users of their search engines.

3. Your links are not well built

In addition to internal linking, it’s important to build links that go into your site. Ideally, they will be coming from authority domains that you can secure via guest posting.

Keep these factors in mind;

• Low-quality links to your site should be disavowed
• Do not take part in link networks
• build relationships so that you can build your collection. Sometimes adding links to your site for others can help with this practice.
• Anchor text needs to be varied
• Put your primary focus on developing content that is genuinely useful and can be used as a reliable resource, to encourage others to link to it.
• Pay attention to the backlinks of your competitors. Look at how they are linking and from where.

4. Your content is not helping your site

Even if you get everything else right, without great content, your ranking won’t perform too well. It needs to be high quality regarding delivering information that people want to read and it structured in the right way. Here’s where many sites fall down with content:

Content that does not go deep enough, is too short or is not unique will not work well. Your content needs to have relevant keywords and be on information that readers love.

Your content is not converting

The most effective way to create relevant content is to create it for your buyer personas. It will help them to relate to what you have to say and to consider becoming your customer based on this.

Once you have developed buyer personas, then create a model of how they will pass down your sales funnel and what information they may need during this journey. What questions will they have and how can you help them best as they pass through each stage?

Content that your prospects cannot relate to may appear to be working initially, but it needs to go deeper and be written to connect with your readers. This is why it’s important to use professional writers who know something about your topic.

5. A purposeful keyword strategy

It’s important to think carefully and do your research. Using the type of keywords that are used when somebody wants to buy is important, however, using keywords that are far too competitive for how well established your site it, will backfire. Keywords should also not be overused.

6. Not checking Google analytics to make your decisions

Pay attention to the results you’re getting for your chosen and applied keywords in Google Analytics. You’ll be in a better position to make informed decisions. An approach you might want to consider is the use of the hub and spoke keywording where you have a central keyword in use and longtail keywords as the spokes.

The hub serves as the main page, and it also provides an index to your sub-topics that go into further detail about the different concepts. You’ll then be providing exhaustive information and also provide outstanding structured content with links. The search engines will understand and should reward you for your input.  Your visitors should click through more, and you’ll have better retention rates.

7. Google has given you a penalty

There are many reasons why Google penalises sites and it’s very important to check whether this has happened to your site. It can happen for something as small as low-quality content to bad backlinks or not being mobile-friendly enough. Even showing ads above the fold won’t work in your favour.

If you feel you may have been penalised, it’s important to understand why that might be and put all your focus on rectifying the matter.

Summary

SEO changes all the time and it’s currently heading in the direction of AI and quality. There has been such a huge explosion in the production of content that it’s important that Google still pulls out the best of it.

To keep up to date, visit your Google Analytics and look at other areas of your digital marketing strategy to monitor what’s working and what isn’t. For SEO to work in your favour, you need to be consistent and don’t allow it to go stale.

The post What is Missing In Your SEO Campaign? appeared first on SEO Scoop.

Even if you’re new to the concept of SEO, you’ve probably seen anchor text in web pages. It’s typically in blue and underlined such as this link to the SEO Scoop homepage.

To put it in place, it’s either set manually by adding a piece of code or by highlighting it and adding a link using the content management system such as WordPress.

The code for the link shown above looks like this:

<a href=http://www.seoscoop.com>SEO Scoop homepage</a>

Anchor text can influence how well your page performs in the search engine results. For this to happen, the ideal format of anchor text is to use it to provide links to pages that are relevant to the page you’re creating.

Although anchor text is typically blue, you may also have your colours and styles set up in CSS or HTML to display it as another colour that is in alignment with your website’s colour theme.

Anchor text can be written to provide the reader with the context of the link. For example, you could add a description of what the anchor text is linking to. Your readers would find this valuable and this is something that is judged by Google with regards to understanding what topic is relevant to your site.

Search engines also use anchor text to provide links through to your pages. Although you may not be able to control all the anchor text that links through to your pages, you can control the anchor text that you use within your own site to your pages. You can keep the text you use descriptive, useful and relevant according to Google.

If many sites are linking through a particular page with a certain term, this can result in the page ranking well even if you cannot find those words in the text itself.

Different types of anchor text

Exact match. When it’s an exact match, the keyword will be one that is in alignment with what is on the page. For example, ‘SEO’ linking to a page about SEO.

Partial match. This is when anchor text uses a variation of the keyword on the linked-to page. For example, ‘building links’ linking to a page about beginners guide to building links.

Brand name. Sometimes a brand name is used as anchor text. For example ‘SEO Scoop’ linking to an article on the SEO Scoop blog.

Naked link. A straight URL used as an anchor such as ‘https://www.seo-scoop.com/.

Generic word. A generic phrase or word used as an anchor such as ‘click here’ or ‘more info’.

Images. When an image has a link, Google will refer to the text that is in the image’s alt attribute for the anchor text.

Best practice for anchor text SEO

The most important factor to apply here is to pay attention to anchor ratios. Using a controlled balance between brand match and naked url anchors in addition to keyword related anchor text is critical. Using only 1% of your content as exact match anchor text is critical to not over optimising.

If you discover that your anchors are not set up with optimal ratios, then try Link Pillowing. This strategy involves utilising guest posts that are low cost to balance out your exact matches with some brand or more generic anchors.

More recently, Google has become far more intelligent. They can now detect which keyword is most suitable for your article/link by determining the content around it. An example would be:

Specialist SEO agencies based in the UK would be a great starting point if you’re looking for search engine optimisation.

You could then use the anchor as “specialist seo agencies” if you were actually looking to target “seo agency uk”, “seo agency”, “search engine optimisation” etc.

Anchor text relevancy to the target page

As search engines have evolved, webmasters discovered how to manipulate them. This has led to search engines increasing their metrics. It helps to determine where sites and pages rank in their listings. One of the metrics now used is link relevancy or how well related the topic of page 1 is to the topic of page 2. If the link connecting the pages is highly relevant, it can help both pages to rank better.

Keeping anchor text succinct

Although there is not a specific length limit of characters or words when using anchors, it’s best to keep the link text to the point as much as possible.

In summary, anchor text done the right way can help with SEO results. If you would like to find out more about our SEO services, contact us for a no obligation chat today.

The post The Need to Know Guide to Anchor Text appeared first on SEO Scoop.

If you’re seriously interested in ensuring that your website is performing well in search results, it’s important to understand how Google sees subdomains.

According to Google, they treat domains and subdomains the same, but those who practice SEO know that there is a difference.

Before we take a deep dive into this topic, let’s first look at what Domains are so that we are all on the same page.

What are domains and subdomains?

Domain names are the three-part, unique and human-friendly internet addresses of websites. They usually have an extension, a domain name and finally an optional subdomain.

First of all, know that the HTTP:// part of a URL is not part of the domain name, but it’s referred to as the ‘protocol’.

Let’s get deeper into the domain topic.

A top-level domain (TLD) is the name for the suffix that is located at the end of a domain name. For example, you may see these terms:

·         .com

·         .edu

·         .net

·         .info

·         .am

Although you may be familiar with most of the TLDs that are listed above, you may be surprised to know that there are now over one thousand TLDs from which website owners can now choose. These TLDs can be very descriptive and include names such as:

·         .book

·         .dog

·         .clothing

·         .am

·         .uk

·         .dk

The last couple of TLDs in the above list are country related, and you may know them as country code top-level domains – otherwise known as ccTLDs.

About domain names

After the top level domain, there is the domain name. They are purchased from registrars such as Go Daddy and represent the specific address or unique location of the website. For example there is:

www.seo-scoop.com

https://moz.com

www.xxxx.gov

Search engines do use any keywords that are used in domain names as part of their ranking system – which is why you’ll see domain names using keywords such as www.london-dentist.com. However, you do still need to consider whether you should optimise your root domain for SEO purposes. Google’s algorithm does penalise domains that are keyword stuffed.

Root domain

Originally named for DNS (domain name servers) the root domain is a combination of the top-level domain (otherwise known as an extension) and the unique domain name. It also happens to be the highest pages in the hierarchy of your website and will usually go to your homepage. Other pages and subdomains can be built off your root domain.

Root domains are unique, and no two websites can have the same root domain.

Subdomains

Finally, we are in the subdomain section. These are the 3^rd level of the hierarchy of a domain and are usually added to the beginning of a domain name. For example, ‘http://shop.vodafone.co.uk/’ is a subdomain of vodafone.com root domain. Subdomains are free to create as part of any root domain and separated by a full stop.

The two most common subdomain selections are:

www.seo-scoop.com

seo-scoop.com

these two subdomains can also cause canonicalization errors too.

The SEO best practices for domains

1. Choose a branded domain name
2. Use broad keywords or risk go
3. Don’t use hyphens if you can help it
4. Go for .com rather than any other suffix

Using a branded part-match domain avoids an “exact match domain”. Google no longer gives preference to exact match domains and it is no longer advised to use one because it’s very difficult to avoid over optimisation. Example “seoagency.co.uk” is an exact match. This means we can’t easily use branded anchor text which would be “SEO Agency” as that’s a keyword. Instead, a part-match domain would be best. For example “rocketseoagency.co.uk;

So returning to the original question, despite Google claiming that they treat subdomains the same as a domain, even adding www puts your site into subdomain world. Each subdomain should be treated the same way that Disney treats their subdomains – like a separate business with their own relevant links.

If you want to know more about subdomains for your own website, contact us today for a no obligation chat about how we can help.

The post Does Google Treat Subdomains as Separate Sites in 2018? appeared first on SEO Scoop.

The internet had been getting to me. Constantly checking social media, watching snippets of videos and obsessively following the news channels; it was time to take a break and I was ready to do it.

Having moved to a new house in a location that was just out of reach of the internet, it was the perfect time to wallow in a period of detachment. It would be a technological detox. I could take a step back from the web and reconnect with my real life.

In a sense, I was forced offline. The only access I had was through a data box that was painfully slow and frustrating to use that I opted to avoid internet access most of the time. Prior to this, the only time in recent years that I’d taken a break from the web was when I travelled on a cruise ship and it wasn’t available as a service.

My enforced internet abstinence

During this enforced abstinence, I made several discoveries including:

1. Things have generally stayed the same. I’ve realised that there is no need to keep checking the internet for changes. For example, in the world of SEO everything has stayed practically the same as before my enforced abstinence. Tracking changes daily is completely unnecessary. In truth, my FOMO was also entirely unwarranted.
2. My friends and family have no idea what I do. Everybody is under the impression that I’ve just been fiddling around and wasting time by being online for all these years. I don’t have a ‘real job’ and the fact that I’ve not been online more recently has been noted by them.The people who I know who also make a living online wondered where I had gone to and were under the impression that I’d be signing on for an unemployment payout contribution. They are unaware that my sites continue to bring in income even without me continually being at the helm. Of course, I would make more being online, but not being online doesn’t completely cut the flow. They just don’t understand that.

3. Getting my life in balance is still challenging. I’ve always found this to be the case. Either I’ve been too devoted to work, or I have spent too much time watching television. During the weeks offline, I’ve had all the time I’ve required to do practically nothing. I’ve missed using the internet and feel like I’m in retirement. However, it’s given me a good practice for when it comes time for me to go into semi-retirement. It’s slowed down my mind a little and I’ve had time to spend doing puzzle books, jigsaw puzzles and baking bread.
4. I got a lot more done. I didn’t have a phone to check, no iPad to keep clicking into Facebook and Instagram from. In fact, I had far more time on my hands and I could do some of the jobs that I’d been meaning to do for the longest time. I made a cake for my neighbour, I wrote up some articles that I’d wanted to get ready for my website and I even started to read some books that I’d been holding onto for the right moment.
5. I had more ‘social moments’. Having far more time on my hands made me more relaxed and less conscious of time overall. I could enjoy my trips to the local town and had mini conversations with people as opposed to rushing into shops to buy what I needed as I had to get back to the internet. These social moments were quite magical, and I felt so much more part of the community for partaking in them.
6. My life should not be run inside of 140 characters. My brain was so twittered out that I had previously lived it through one or two liners that I wanted to post onto Twitter to update my followers. Even without access to the internet, my brain still wanted to operate in tweet mode and I realised that it was just not right. In fact, it was some form of mind dysfunction that I needed to lose. My mind was seeking validation from others through social media.
7. It’s not always me that people ‘like’. All that validation from others on social media. It’s not healthy to be continually seeking it. Most of the time it’s not real. For example, if I post up a picture of a doughnut, I’m going to get a lot of likes. It’s not me that those clickers are liking, it’s that doughnut. However, to the social media addict, their brain is being fed with what they were seeking. Validation. Not all likes or lack of likes should be or could be taken personally.
8. The present moment is special. Time moves slower when you’re not engulfed by staring at your phone or iPad all day long. You can hear the birds sing. You can pick up a piece of junk mail and read it. You can take a walk and spend time looking at butterflies and flowers. You don’t need to share what you’ve seen with anybody. You can just enjoy the moment for yourself and soak it in.
9. I rediscovered the feeling of being alone. No more messaging with mother about what my plans for the day were. No more sending updates to friends about my thoughts and activities. I didn’t have those tools there to bolster my protection against loneliness. I was alone. I was not communicating with people and I even questioned how alive my relationships were.
10. I could see how addicted others are. I wasn’t the only one who was addicted to the internet. Other people were on their phones all the time. Checking messages, going into Facebook to find out what other people were doing. It’s madness. People from all over the world from different cultures, all with their phone in their hand looking at a screen. Time spent with friends was always only partially spent with them as they were distracted by their phones. They couldn’t fully focus on what I said as they wanted to get back to their screen.

In summary, technology should be used as the tool that it is, not something to be addicted to. Of course, the internet is amazing and offers endless benefits in all facets of our lives. But it’s very easy to just get sucked into it and forget about the rest of life. The internet should be used in smaller doses, not completely allowed to take over our lives. I hope this inspires you to consider how you use it and to even consider taking a detox break.

The post What I Have Learned from a Forced Absence from the Internet appeared first on SEO Scoop.

If you’ve been considering getting started on making an income from the internet, then we’ve got some things to share with you first.

There’s a lot of money out there to be made online, and this is behind much of the internet’s expansion over recent years.

Although making money online is something that most people can achieve once they set their mind to it, it is an area that has also been subject to unethical marketing.

During your travels online, you will no doubt have come across so-called experts who promise that you’ll make millions, if only you follow their super simple 5 step marketing magic process.

The truth is – the internet is always transforming.

Years ago, it was websites full of content that made a lot of money. Then Google came along with some major algorithm changes and they’ve now hit the bottom of the tank. Sites like Squidoo that was considered a content farm are now no longer even operational.

Advertising used to be another lucrative area, but now systems such as Google AdSense have decreased their payouts drastically and blog owners aren’t making so much income.

But don’t feel disheartened as it’s still possible to make money online. Your standards of ethics and honesty do not have to be changed either. But you must know that it’s not something that happens overnight. It’s all about being persistent, consistent and working hard.

Before you get started, it’s important to sit down and answer the following questions:

Can you scale this?

If you’re looking to make a lot of money from the internet, then you’ll need to understand what’s possible with your concept or business model when it comes to expansion. Having a model that can be replicated over and over without more input from you is the way to make a large income.

However, if you run a small one-person service and are limited by your hours and energy, then your concept won’t be very scalable unless you hire more people. These people would need to be able to produce the same quality of work that you do, and that could be hard to achieve. However, if you’re not looking to expand, and you’re happy just to provide your service, then that’s fine too.

How possible is it to make passive income?

Although passive income may sound like you don’t have to do anything to get it, it’s quite the opposite. You will still need to do your marketing to sell, whether it’s affiliate products or your own products. If you’re making passive income from ads, then you’ll still need to drive traffic to your site to get those ads seen.

Do you get a consistent income?

We all have bills to pay and making money online won’t be of much use to you unless it’s consistent and you can rely on it.

To achieve a consistent income, it really depends on what you choose to offer, how popular it is and whether you are meeting a market need at a price that people are willing to pay.

Some people offer freelance services such as graphic design and writing services. These can deliver a consistent income if you have a way of reaching your target market.

Is your offer wanted?

A product or service will only sell if people want it or need it. Some people make the mistake of investing a lot of time and money into something only to discover that nobody wants what they have to offer. They make zero sales and then must start from the beginning with something else.

Before you get heavily invested into an idea, test it and make sure it’s viable. It’s important to understand and listen to your market to discover what they want so that you can give it to them.  The best approach is to only launch products that your market has asked for. If you don’t have a channel to discover this, you may need to approach this by looking to fill a need that isn’t currently being met but people are asking for.

Can you create something and sell it over and over?

Some digital products such as books, courses, apps, licensing can be sold over and over. You can put the time and effort into making a product once and then you can sell it over and over for profit.

However, it’s more difficult to apply this approach when offering services.

Making money online in summary

As we alluded to at the beginning, whatever you decide to do about gaining internet income, you’ll most likely need to tweak and revise your operation as time goes by. For example, the Google algorithms change regularly and can affect traffic flow to your website. You’ll need to stay aware of these changes and adjust to account for them.

Having covered that, there are many legitimate methods and models to make money online. Although most of them require a lot of work, you’ll find that they can be very much worth the effort.

The post Wise Words for Those Seeking Income From The Internet appeared first on SEO Scoop.

You may have invested a lot of time and effort into the optimisation of your website for the search engines. You’ve been steadily climbing the rankings, and you’re excited about how this has reflected in your traffic and sales. However, your success run is not guaranteed to continue. If you make any of these SEO mistakes, it could well take a very long time to climb back to your position.

SEO mistakes can be easy to make if you don’t know exactly what you’re doing. The algorithms that search engine sites such as Google use change frequently. Therefore most successful online businesses set a healthy budget to have their website maintained by SEO professionals.

It’s important to stay aligned with the ‘rules’ set by search engines. To keep the traffic pouring in so that you can guide them down your ‘sales funnel, here’s what you need to avoid.

1. Not researching the best keywords

It’s critical that you choose the right keywords. Although you may define or categorise your products in a particular way, it’s essential that you have a clear idea of how your potential buyers would refer to them. Sometimes the words that you believe are the right ones, mean something entirely different to other people. They may even be too generic. If you’ve optimised for all the wrong keywords, you won’t get the right type of traffic coming through, with the right intentions.

Before you start optimising your site, do careful research. Use keyword tools to help you such as Google Keyword Planner, Moz Keyword Explorer, Google Trends and UberSuggest.

Keywords also need to be added to your content in the right way – without ‘stuffing’ them in. Although it may have been fruitful in times gone by, putting too many target keywords into your content can harm your site. The search engines could negatively look at your site as it may appear to be full of spam and not worthy of SEO ranking inclusion. Google’s smart system for search is known as Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI).  LSI can recognise whether your site is relevant for a reader and it also takes into account other relevant phrases, so you won’t have to put so many keywords in it.

2. Creating content that is not relevant to your keywords

Another common mistake is creating website content that is not related to your keywords. You may wish to appear in the search rankings for a particular keyword, but if you don’t write about your target topic in your content, then Google won’t be showcasing your site in their top results. Google operates with a strong desire to serve their users with content that is highly relevant, of good quality and in line with a search term. If your content does not meet those needs, then it won’t perform well in search and you may suffer from a lost position.

This mistake can come about by trying to fit too many topics into one piece of content. Doing this creates a piece of work that is a low quality that is created only to include the keywords. Content must be created in alignment with the questions and needs of your market, which means the inclusion of the right keywords. Google and other search engines can then clearly understand that your content is in alignment with your keywords and relevant.

Although in previous times it was fine to publish content that was not unique, the same cannot be said today and could get you slapped with a Google penalty. Copying content is not seen as a good practice and is considered to be spammy. It’s well worth the time, effort and sometimes even the financial cost to create content that is new and fresh. You can check content for its uniqueness on CopyScape.

Once you’ve created content focused around your target keywords, it’s not the end of the optimisation process. An essential task is to use the title tags and meta descriptions. They can give your content more power with the search engines and can influence more readers to click on it.

Another action to take is to use the images to help your optimisation. This can often be forgotten. Search bots cannot see the images, but they can read the Alt Img tag as it should have relevant words and will be used to index your pages.  Protect your page from a lost position.

3. Not adding the right internal and external links

For the best SEO results, it’s important to add high-quality external links to your content. Only sites with solid reputations that are relevant and strong performing in search should be linked to.

The anchor text should also be useful to the reader – i.e. give some idea about why it’s worth clicking on the link. What it is about or why it is relevant. Not using the old school ‘click here’ as anchor text but using a broad range of different ones will only help you.

Another common mistake is not to include links to your top-performing pages in your content. Is practice goes far with giving them more traction and it will improve their visibility. However, if they aren’t relevant and within the field of the same topic, then they won’t help your quest.

Too much internal linking will have the same result as keyword stuffing. The content and the links will need to align so that your readers can appreciate your efforts. The search engine will not be kind if what you’ve added appears to be spammy or fraudulent.

4. Not making it a mobile-friendly site

Being optimised for SEO isn’t’ just about using the right content and adding keywords to the right place. It’s also important that the overall quality of your website is good, which means that it performs well on mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets. Google even had an update to their algorithm to ensure that webmasters put a focus on mobiles – it was known as Mobilegeddon.

Without considering your mobile device users, you could be putting your search engine rankings at risk. Also, consider load speed as there will also be some judgement on that. A slow website can lead to lower search engine positions. Run tests on tools such as Pingdom and Google Page Speed Insights to understand what may be contributing to slow speed issues.

5. Ignoring the power of social media signals

There is also a need to consider how social media sites and postings can affect your search rankings. Ideally, your site will be mentioned by social media influencers with many followers. This is why it can be very beneficial to build a relationship with influencers.

Another way to handle this is to post your blog posts to sites such as Reddit, Digg and Quora. You’ll gain the credibility of the site, but you won’t have to know all the top influencers to get it there. However, building some relationships with people on these sites will also help.

Everything that you do should be tracked for success using Google Analytics. It’s important to regularly review your analytics to understand whether the actions you’re taking are paying off. Make the best of Google Webmaster tools too.

In summary, search engine optimisation is critical to the success of any website today. It’s easy to make SEO mistakes and that’s why it’s important to know what they are so that you can avoid them. Nobody wants to suffer the results of a Google Penalty.

The post Top 5 Ways to Lose Your Great Search Engine Rankings Fast appeared first on SEO Scoop.

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