I’m a business owner like all of you. So I get all the same spammy emails. This is because I need to learn how to flag emails in my Macbook mail program. Outlook did a far better job for me.
I especially love spammy emails from “SEO’s” who have a gmail address. If you’re a reputable SEO Victoria company, you’d have an email address from a reputable domain.
But another common spam email I receive is one’s from people asking to exchange links. This means that you place a link to their website from yours and they do the same. You should by know that linkbuilding is very important to improving your search rankings.
But the practice of exchanging links is so old and Google frowns upon it. I was just asked today about these link exchange emails from my newest client Westshore Drive.
They’ve been tempted in the past to do this. But it’s not a way to build valuable links as anyone can do it.
So next time you get one of these emails, be sure to:
I’ve picked up a few SEO Victoria contracts in the last month. Mostly because I am now ranking #1 & #2 for the search term Victoria SEO.
Back in April I decided to change the keywords that I was targeting. So I went after every combination of SEO and Victoria. Considering it only took 7 months to get to the top spot (I was ranking #2 after 4 months), I feel confident that I can help anyone get there in a shorter period of time.
After all, my competition is SEO experts. Your competition is not.
As much as I like to boast about this, I want to give away a few tips to help your website. Although Google states that this will not help your rankings, it will help the search engines learn where your business is located. No matter what, it’s always a good thing to please the search engines!
Much like my 10 part series on the best free internet marketing tools, I’m going to give you a series of blog posts on how to please Google and help your search rankings.
Tell Google You Are a Local Business
One of the first things I do with any of my clients is add structured data to their main domain.
Here is the definition of structured data:
“If Google understands the content on your pages, we can create rich snippets—detailed information intended to help users with specific queries. For example, the snippet for a restaurant might show the average review and price range.”
Even though you can tell Google and the other search engines that you want to rank for city related search terms, it’s still a good idea to add these rich snippets to your website. Once again I do this by adding some coding to their website to tell the search engines that the business is local and more specifically, what industry it is in.
You can test to see if this has already be done by visiting the rich snippets testing tool. Simply enter your main domain name and hit preview.
Your results might be blank. So to see if you’re listed as a local business, you might see something like this test for StudioYDesign:
Google Structured Data Testing Tool
Looking at the above, we’ve notified the search engines that we are a Victoria Furniture Store.
Add This Coding to Your Website
You can add this information to your website coding in two ways.
For the item type, find out if your business and industry is listed at Schema.org. Once you click on that link you will see “local business” and “restaurants” links. I’ll assume you are one or the other. Click on whatever link applies to you and scroll to the bottom where you will see more links like this:
LocalBusiness schema.org
Click on your proper industry if it’s listed. Don’t see your business? I’ll cover what to do in a bit.
If it is, scroll down to the bottom again and you will find more links like the above. For Victoria Transmisson & Auto Care I came to this page. There is obviously a few types of automotive businesses from detailing to dealer to repair. For them I chose repair and simply added the link http://schema.org/AutoRepair to their item type.
Does this all make sense? If you have any questions, send me an email or post them below in the comments section.
The next blog post will go over how to link your Google + profile to your website so your avatar shows up beside your website in the search results like this:
Google + rel author
Be sure to check that out by subscribing to my email updates, either by the popup you will see about now or in the top right corner.
And of course if you found this post useful and like to help others out, please share this for me to your social network of choice.
Want to learn why other websites are ranking higher than yours?
Of course you do!
Doing so requires you to channel your inner James Bond.
Ok well, maybe not as you’re not going to be pulling off ridiculous stunts.
But you can use a couple of Internet marketing tools to spy on your competitors’ sites.
If you are already subscribed to my updates or have been following this blog for the last couple of months, you’ll recall I’m going through a list of the 10 best free internet marketing tools.
Although I will be posting two tools today, I’ll consider them one.
How On Site SEO Works
Before I get into these two tools lets simplify the SEO process. I like to consider search engine optimization a lot easier then what many believe it is. Which is why this is will be brief! There is on-site and off site SEO.
Those are the first two steps. But you might want to find out what terms these higher ranking websites are targeting.
This is where the spying begins! Don’t worry as this requires no training at all. Just the ability to download and install an extension for Google chrome.
Spy On Their Keywords
It may be obvious, but if you want to see what keyword phrases these higher ranking websites are targeting, you can use the Meta SEO Inspector extension for Google chrome.
Once you install this extension, you’ll see it on the top right hand side of your Chrome browser. Once you are on your competitors’ website, click on the light bulb to turn it on. From there click on the “toggle info-box”.
A popup will appear in the bottom right of your screen.
This is where you can see what keywords they are targeting.
How Off Site SEO Works
After the keywords were added to their site, they then generated backlinks. This is known as off-site SEO.
Backlinks or linkbuilding is the way Google knows that your website is important and valuable to their searchers. So if you have a large amount of high quality backlinks, the better your site will rank.
To spy on where your competitors’ backlinks are coming from, you can use any of these five websites.
Today’s post is going to be short and sweet. It’s my fifth post in a series of the ten best free Internet marketing tools you should be using.
This post will cover Hubspot’s Marketing Grader. It’s like Webmaster tools but it analyzes much more. It grades your social media, SEO, blogging, mobile and lead generation.
To have all those areas graded, simply head over to Hubspot Marketing Grader then enter your website and email. Give it a couple of seconds and you’ll see where you’re strong and weak. Then what to do about the weaknesses’.
Pretty simple and like I said, it’s a short post. But a useful one.
As a side note I want you to learn about how Hubspot markets.
It’s evident that Usain Bolt is fast. Your website should be fast too.
We’re a demanding society. We want everything now. Not tomorrow. Not five minutes from now. Today.
Your current and potential clients are those very same people. They want to get the information they so dearly seek right away.
If you have a slow loading website, they’re not going to stick around. They’re gone and onto the next website. It happened so fast they couldn’t even break your heart.
But it should still hurt you knowing that people are leaving your site before it even loads. I’m sure you would feel offended if someone walked into your storefront or office, stood there for five seconds and left. You didn’t even give them a chance to tell them how great you are.
Not only are you losing out on sales and new clients with a slow website, you could very well be effecting your search rankings.
It makes sense after all. Google’s search goal is to give its searchers the most relevant results as soon as possible. If you’re site loads too slow, then people aren’t going to be happy with Google and their results.
At the end of the day it’s all about that potential customer and getting the information they want as soon as possible.
Test Your Websites Loading Speed
There are few ways you can test your websites loading times. The first tool is free (thanks to Sean Davis for making me aware of this tool) is Pingdom. It’s another one of my ten best free internet marketing tools.
Once you enter your website into the form Pingdom will test your site and you’ll get your grade. Remember this is just for your main domain. You might have separate webpages on your site that are loading slow. So it’s not a bad idea to test all on your webpages.
Below that will be a bunch of gibberish that has to do with website coding. You won’t understand it so don’t worry about it.
Here is my grade below as of today.
My Pingdom results
Not bad but I want to improve that. If your grad is less than 60 out of 100 or your website loads slower than I suggest you read Sean’s post where he’ll give you a few ways to improve your websites speed.
There is another way you can see how fast your website and pages are loading. That’s in Google Analytics. Refer to this post on how to setup and navigate Analytics.
On the left hand side in your dashboard you’ll see a “Content” tab. Click on that and you’ll see the “Site Speed” tab.
Google Analytics site speed
Then click on the pages link to see how your entire website’s pages loads
My webpages load times
Once again page loading speed is for those visiting your website and for Google. It’s not to piss both off with slow loading times. So take the advice from Sean Davis or seek someone out to improve your websites speed.
I’m a business owner like all of you. So I get all the same spammy emails. This is because I need to learn how to flag emails in my Macbook mail program. Outlook did a far better job for me.
