9 Ways to Boost Your SEO

When was the last time you ventured past the first page of a Google search? Unless WebMD has freaked you out — along with the rest of us — and you’re clicking deeper and deeper to make sure your papercut won’t give you typhus, you probably just pop a question in the search bar and hit the first link that appears. If that’s the case, then you’re among the 75% of users who never dig beyond the first page of a search.

Which makes sense: People are lambasted with choices these days, and to avoid decision paralysis, our minds tend to scramble for a single answer. That’s why a menu with five dishes seems more svelte than a menu of five pages. If you’re a business, you want your site to be the first option on the menu. And the way to get there? Search engine optimization, or SEO. Here are nine SEO techniques that can help buoy your site to the top of the Google Machine.

Anticipate Why People Come to Your Site

Search engines are (to a large extent) in the business of finding answers for people. Type in “Best Wines to Buy,” and Google will list pages of wine shops and purchase options. Now type in “Awesome Vineyards 2021,” and you’ll get a spate of world’s-best-wineries sites and tour schedules. So ask yourself: What do you want people to do on your site? (Hire you? Apply for a job? Read your favorite recipe?) Tailor your content so that search engines identify which questions you’re answering and how their users will benefit from finding you.

Value Your UX

Enticing visitors to click through your site enhances your SEO, because Google recognizes that your pages are useful for its customers. So make your UX clear and navigable. Intersperse text with images and videos, chunk up your layouts with H1-H2-H3 header tags, and stay open to using white space (which calms the eye and makes content more readable). And never, under any circumstances, use popups. Just … no, people. No.

Prize Quality Over Quantity

To get noticed online, you’ll want to push out content optimized with keywords, but Google penalizes you for keyword stuffing, in part because the average Googler will stay on sites that feel timely and smart longer than they will on sites that read like a robot wrote them. Some studies also indicate that long-form articles (over 3,000 words) attract more traffic and shares than smaller articles (between 901–1,200 words). So feel free to blast on, but keep it fresh.

Optimize, Optimize, Optimize!

We all know writing with keywords optimizes your copy, but images can boost your SEO, as well. Images that are too large drag down a page’s loading time, so whenever possible, resize or compress them. Save photos as JPEGs and line art or text-heavy images as PNGs. And add in alt tags (or “alt attributes”) into the code on the back-end of those images, which helps browsers find your site and also satisfies a number of accessibility requirements.

Be the Strongest Link

SEO agencies will advise you to link your content to external articles, but don’t discount the value of internal links, either. If you audit your site’s information hierarchy, you may find that some pages are viewed more often than others. Linking the oft-viewed pages to less-viewed pages will flow traffic to those neglected child-pages, helping Google discover and crawl them. That, in turn, improves the SEO of your site as a whole.

Play Tag

Write title tags and meta descriptions in the back-end of your site. Title tags are the headings of a page, and meta descriptions are text that appear in a search below those headings. Imagine that you’re writing for the “Venues” page of a state park. “Venues | State Park” is the title tag, while your meta description should be phrased like a CTA. (“Rent our venues at your state park …”) Together, title tags and meta descriptions are behind-the-scenes heroes vying for Google’s attention when someone types in, “Where can I rent venues at my state park?”

Go Niche

Around 4.5 billion people currently have access to the internet, so how do you carve out your own space online? You find a niche. You like gardening, but so do millions of other people, so you focus on how to grow orchids in a cold climate. You love sports, but so do the rest of us, so your site covers the latest in chess boxing or underwater hockey. You — well, you get the point. Hone in on the thing that enough people care about but not enough people talk about and build your content strategy around providing answers in that space.

Jump in the Conversation

Remember how we said search engines find answers for people? As any SEO agency will tell you, the people with the answers are often referred to as “authorities.” You can establish your authority through blogging or linking to other authorities, but you can also find a Q&A site like Quora and answer questions there. Airing your opinion too often might get weird, but giving a real explanation now and again and linking back to your site — when it’s warranted — tells search engines that you’re a reliable source within the cosmos of information floating online.

Nab an Interview

We get it — convincing someone to interview you is about as easy as landing an interview at your dream job. (In other words, not very.) So you may as well start your hustle now, because interviews operate like SEO word-of-mouth and augment your site’s visibility. Email bloggers to see if they want to chat. Talk to your buddy’s buddy who’s got a podcast. Getting on the talk-circuit in your field is bound to happen if you plug away at it long enough.

Google is Goliath. But that Goliath would collapse if it didn’t get us the answers we need — otherwise, we’d hop over to competitors like Yahoo! or Bing. You can increase your chances of ranking in all these search engines if you follow the tips above, but think through the reason people are coming to your site in the first place. We’ve been in the game for a minute now, and we’ve learned at least one thing along the way: The ultimate optimization is being useful to your audience. Do that, and you’re halfway to being discovered.

17 Quotes on Design Philosophy From Apple’s Sir Jony Ive

Recently, Apple announced it was “promoting” its lead designer, Jony Ive. The promotion is little more than a title change, as Ive has led Apple’s world-changing product design since joining the company in 1996. “Sir” Jony Ive (he’s been knighted by the Queen of England) is well known across the globe for his innovative designs that made Apple the world’s biggest company and changed the way we interact with technology.

As designers, we draw inspiration from a variety of sources – the word around us, the innovative products and services of our clients and the work of great designers past and present. Ive is certainly one of those greats. The following collection of quotes from Apple’s creative maestro offer an interesting look into the philosophy that drives Apple’s world-changing designs.

“Simplicity is not the absence of clutter, that’s a consequence of simplicity. Simplicity is somehow essentially describing the purpose and place of an object and product. The absence of clutter is just a clutter-free product. That’s not simple.”

“There’s no learning without trying lots of ideas and failing lots of times.”

“Different’ and ‘new’ is relatively easy. Doing something that’s genuinely better is very hard.”

“We shouldn’t be afraid to fail- if we are not failing we are not pushing. 80% of the stuff in the studio is not going to work. If something is not good enough, stop doing it.”

“There is beauty when something works and it works intuitively.”

“If something is not good enough, stop doing it.”

“If you are truly innovating, you don’t have a prototype you can refer to.”

“What we make testifies who we are. People can sense care and can sense carelessness. This relates to respect for each other and carelessness is personally offensive.”

“Apple’s goal isn’t to make money. Our goal is to design and develop and bring to market good products.”

“True simplicity is, well, you just keep on going and going until you get to the point where you go, ‘Yeah, well, of course.’ Where there’s no rational alternative.”

“What I love about the creative process, and this may sound naive, but it is this idea that one day there is no idea, and no solution, but the next day there is an idea. I find that incredibly exciting and conceptually actually remarkable.”

“A small change at the beginning of the design process defines an entirely different product at the end.”

“When something exceeds your ability to understand how it works, it sort of becomes magical.”

“Designing and developing anything of consequence is incredibly challenging.”

“Making the solution seem so completely inevitable and obvious, so uncontrived and natural – it’s so hard!”

“It’s a very strange thing for a designer to say, but one of the things that really irritates me in products is when I’m aware of designers wagging their tails in my face.”

“The best ideas start as conversations.”

San Diego Digital Marketing Agency | Jacob Tyler

Are You Ready for Mobilegeddon?

In April, Google officially rolled out its “mobile-friendly” search ranking update. In short, this means that Google will now boost the rankings of what it considers to be “mobile-friendly” pages – and penalize pages that it does not – on its mobile search. The update is intended to reflect the rise of Internet access through mobile devices, which now constitute more than half of all Google searches. The update is expected to negatively affect many websites – popular industry blog TechCrunch found that 44 percent of Fortune 500 companies failed Google’s mobile-friendly test – and could impact revenues for those websites who do not meet the new mobile-friendly standards.

Let’s take a look at the basics of the new search update and what it means for your website.

What will change?

The mobile-friendly update will impact web page search rankings based on accessibility and usability on mobile devices.
The change affects only search ranking on mobile devices.
The update applies to individual pages, not entire websites.

What makes a website mobile-friendly?

According to Google’s blog, the following basic criteria will be used to determine “mobile friendliness” in search results:

Websites that avoid software that is not common on mobile devices – like Flash.
Websites that use text that is readable without zooming.
Websites that size content to the screen so users don’t have to scroll horizontally or zoom.
Websites that place links far enough apart so that the correct one can be easily tapped.

Is my website mobile-friendly?

If your website features responsive design or adaptive design, or has been configured specifically for use on mobile devices, it may not be affected by the new search algorithm. Older, more “static” websites, however, will likely suffer a loss of ranking under the new search rules.

To determine if your website is mobile-friendly, simply paste your URL into Google’s quick and easy mobile-friendly test.

How can I optimize my website for mobile?

Google recommends responsive web design as the best way to ensure sites remain relevant across all platforms. According to Google’s blog, responsive design:

Makes it easier for users to share and link to your content with a single URL.
Helps Google’s algorithms accurately assign indexing properties to the page rather than needing to signal the existence of corresponding desktop/mobile pages.
Requires less engineering time to maintain multiple pages for the same content.
Reduces the possibility of the common mistakes that affect mobile sites.
Requires no redirection for users to have a device-optimized view, which reduces load time.
Saves resources when Googlebot crawls your site.

In a nutshell –

The new mobile search ranking is an undeniable shakeup of the status quo, but should eventually optimize the search experience for both consumers and businesses. If your website lost rank status on April 21, it can regain that status once it is optimized and becomes mobile-friendly, as Google will reclassify the newly updated site.

If you would like to learn more about how to optimize your website for mobile, fill out the form to the right and let’s chat!

Jacob Tyler | San Diego’s Best Web Design Agency

Going Native

Digital advertising tactics continue to evolve, but there’s one that seems to be growing faster than any other – “native” advertising. Second only to display ads in usage, native advertising was estimated to be a more than $3 billion industry in 2014. In a nutshell, native advertising is sponsored content on a website or social media platform that mimics the host page’s layout, design and content. A more cynical type might call it “camouflage” advertising. At first glance, it can be difficult to determine what is an ad and what’s not. But the goal isn’t deception; it’s to increase brand awareness in a more subtle fashion than display ads – which are often immediately ignored. Some studies suggest that native ads have similar viewership rates to editorial content, and the format seems to enhance brand awareness by getting more “eyeballs” on a brand in a repetitive fashion.

The technique isn’t new – print “advertorials” are basically the same concept, and have been around almost as long as the printing press. And like advertorials, native ads offer more than just a brand mention or a strategically placed logo. Native ads often feature content a visitor might find helpful or interesting, generally related to the topic a visitor is already searching. The tactic seems to be working for brands, which continue to invest more of their budgets in native ads. But the real winners in the native advertising game have been media outlets. After years of revenue crisis as the traditional print model all but vanished, digital media platforms are cashing in on native ads. Online-only platforms like the Huffington Post and Buzzfeed are pioneers in native advertising space, but traditional outlets, like the New York Times and the Washington Post are getting in on the action too. Native ads have undoubtedly been a boon for media outlets, but are brands getting their money’s worth? With surging numbers of brands utilizing native ads, it sure looks that way.

Want to strategize about your advertising? Fill out the form to the right so we can chat!