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Keywords & SEO attracting as many customers to your site

Keywords & SEO

Attracting As Many Customers To Your Site

 

The process of choosing the right keywords for SEO is essential. Your texts are constructed of words that should respond to your client’s search query. The science of information is structured around these words. And it’s also important to use them properly to optimize your SEO on Google.

Attention, when I say ‘keyword’, I’m not talking about what is indicated in your meta tag keywords and is no longer taken into account since the early 2000s. I want to talk about your main content, the one which is legible on your page. This is what will definitely marry your keywords & SEO.

Search engines browse and index your content by focusing on your keywords. They do not try to store, in a single database, the entire tens of billions of pages that make up today the web. Millions of smaller, industry-specific databases allow Google to find the information you want almost instantly.

Of course, if you want your page to be well-positioned in the search results when looking for ‘luxury house to rent’, it would be wise to make sure that ‘luxury house for rent’ appears at the beginning of your document. To be more specific, it must be ensured that your keyword is sufficiently highlighted and that it is understood by the engine.

 

Your target keywords and SEO, centers of your web communication

 

As an internet user, our keywords determine our communication with the engine. They indicate our intention and Google gives us its results according to the queries we are looking for. The word order, accents, punctuation, and context allow the Google search engine to refine the results and classify them.

Google measures the importance of a keyword by using it on your page. It can then evaluate its relevance to a query. To optimize your SEO, make sure that the expression on which you want to position yourself is included in these 4 elements:

  1. Title of your page: <title> tag, visible at the top of your browser and linked in Google results
  2. Title of your content: title <h1> appearing by default at the beginning of your text
  3. The first paragraph, or catching the reading of the rest of your page
  4. URL of your page: URL of your document (www.your-site.com/your keyword.html)

The more a searched keyword is specific, the fewer competing results will be displayed by the engine. This will make you look more easily in the first page results.

The word ‘house’ will bring many more results than ‘luxury house for rent’. Certainly, ‘house’ is much more sought after. But if you speak specifically of ‘luxury house for rent’ on this page, it is much more interesting to say it immediately and avoid an immense competition. And finally, is it not more coherent?

 

For the reader and your SEO, do not abuse your keywords

 

Since the birth of the web, the abuse of keywords to manipulate the results of the engines is present. This includes excessive keyword embedding in your titles, text, URLs, images, and links. Unfortunately, or fortunately, this tactic is only a carrier in the short term and will do more harm than good SEO to your site.

In the beginning, Google looked at the density of your keywords, without taking care of their context of use. Today, with the artificial intelligence of RankBrain, he understands your texts much better, but not as a true reader.

The best practice is to integrate your keywords strategically and naturally. If you want to optimize your SEO on the expression ‘ Calgary Zoo’, talk about its context: its location, the different types of animals, the species, family programs. If you simply quote your keyword ‘Best Zoo in Alberta’ on a page dealing with personal branding, your efforts to position yourself on the ‘Best Zoo in Alberta’ will be in vain.

The goal is not to be visible at the top of all keywords. On the other hand, think of optimizing your relevance on the topics sought by the readers that you want to attract on your page.

 

Where to place your keywords to optimize your SEO?

The use of your keywords is still part of Google’s algorithm. Effective techniques will help you create consistent, well-optimized pages for top engines. Here are different places to use your keywords to maximize your SEO:

  • Title tag: Try to use it as early as possible in your page title.
  • Title <h1>: Use your keyword or a very close phrase in your content title. Generally, I resume a summary of my title tag. This is consistent for the user and is not perceived as repetitive.
  • Content: Repeat your key phrase 2 or 3 times in the content of your page. Remember to repeat it in your first paragraph. If your content is long enough, do not hesitate to use synonyms.
  • Pictures: Take your word back into the file name of your first image and indicate it in its ALT tag. This tag (attribute) is the text displayed when the image does not appear and it is read orally to describe the image to the visually impaired. It’s also what Google understands about your image.
  • URL: This is the address of your page on the internet. Typically, we find your keyword in the name of your file (www.your-site / keyword.html).
  • Tag description: This one is no longer taken into account by Google for your SEO. But it encourages the click as it attracts the attention of the user and enhances your credibility compared to the research carried out. If the user understands your expression, he/she will be more likely to click and thus get into the results.

Conclusion

In general, avoid using your exact keyword in the anchor links that lead to other pages. This would dilute your SEO on Google. The engine will not know which page to display when one looks for a referenced word on a page and that it makes a link towards another page starting from the same keyword.

Do you want help to optimize the SEO of your website? Ask for a diagnosis and a quote without commitment.

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Why create SEO content?

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SEO content is essential for a good SEO of your website. What is SEO content and why should it be produced?
SEO content is a very important factor for your website. Good SEO content will make your site visible in the search engine results, including those of Google. It will allow you to increase the organic traffic of your site and boost your visibility.

Definition of SEO content

SEO content is content optimized for search engines. All the texts and visuals of your website can be optimized SEO.

Search Engine Optimization is known or called (SEO). SEO is defined as the art of optimizing the positioning of a web page, the objective being is to appear in the first page positions of search engine results and especially on Google.

Why create SEO content?

Why create SEO content and why for Google in particular? With these few figures on the market share of Google in the search on the web, you will find the first answer. This will help you understand better why it is important to create SEO optimized content for your website:

In Canada, 90.8% market share for Google (Bing 5.61% and Yahoo 2.48%),
In North America, 88.66% market share for Google (Bing 6.77% and Yahoo 3.62%),

Source: gs.statcounter.com for the month of June 2018

These numbers alone illustrate why you need to meet Google’s content requirements. To get good visibility on Google, SEO content is king.

SEO optimized text content

To make your website visible on the search engines and especially on Google, it must contain optimized SEO content.

Optimized SEO content must be:

  • Original, interesting and quality,
  • Adapted to the web and the requirements of Google,
  • Concise and quickly understandable,
  • Interactive.

To this short list are added the Google’s quality guidelines:

  • Design content by thinking first of your visitors rather than the search engines,
  • Do not mislead your visitors,
  • Avoid using SEO techniques that are contrary to Google’s guidelines to help you rank,
  • Make your site unique, attractive and stand out from your competition.

SEO optimized visual content

Depending on your field of activity, visual content may be as important as text content. Since 2001 (corresponding to the birth of Google Image), the search for images is constantly increasing on Google. By using quality images related to your business activity, you can acquire quality traffic to your website. This is the case for example for communication agencies, e-commerce sites, portfolios of artists such as photographers and graphic artists, image banks, etc.

To optimize your images for SEO, it is essential to:

  • Use ‘ALT’ tags with targeted keywords to describe your image,
  • Take care of their size and weight to optimize loading time,
  • Enter the title of the image.

To learn more about SEO optimization of images:

And do not forget that Google Images has evolved. The advantage of this update allows a more quality image search.

How to value your SEO content?

Creating optimized SEO content will be beneficial for your visibility, provided you meet certain criteria on the web page that will host your content. A web page containing SEO content must include:

Title

It should contain the title of your web page and its content that will be displayed in Google’s results. It must, of course, contain the targeted main keyword.

Title tag

The title tag or H1 tag is the ‘editorial title’ of your content, it is visible on your page and must contain the keyword you are targeting.

A Meta Description

It informs Internet users of the content of the web page in the form of a short description. It is visible in the results of the search engines and must attract the user’s curiosity and encourage them to click on the link of your web page.

How to promote your SEO content?

When SEO content is added to other actions, you put the odds on your side to optimize the SEO and positioning of your web page. The SME, does it speak to you? Need a little reminder?

When you combine SEO, SEA, and SMO, the three complement each other and allow a good SEO of your website on Google.

The three main levers for promoting your content:

  • SEO, natural optimization,
  • SEA paid optimization,
  • SMO, optimization on social networks.

Indeed, a unique and quality SEO content must be relayed on social networks. Promoting quality SEO content is the best way to naturally get backlinks to increase awareness and visibility of your web page.

Who to call for SEO content?

To produce SEO content, you have several options:

  • Write content from A to Z alone by following the instructions of Google,
  • Write a first draft that will then be optimized for a web search agency,
  • Use an SEO agency or web editor.

In short,

Writing SEO content with high added value is essential to improve your positioning on Google. If despite all your efforts and following these tips the positioning of your website is not up to your expectations, do not hesitate to use the services of a web agency to conduct an audit of your website. This audit will allow you to identify and correct the weaknesses of your site to improve its performance.

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GDPR impact on SEO

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What will be the impact of the GDPR on SEO?

The GDPR is on everyone’s lips right now. Indeed the new legislation comes into force on May 25, 2018. But what is the GDPR, why does it come into force and will it have an impact on the SEO?

What is GDPR?

The GDPR is the General Regulation on the Protection of Data (or GDPR for General data protection regulation), a text of the law (Law No. 2016/679) adopted in 2016 by the European Union. This text will enter into force on 25 May 2018 and will serve as a European reference for the protection of citizen’s personal data. The text of the law brings new and much more binding obligations on the treatment and the circulation of these data on which the companies rely on to offer their services and products.

Why GDPR?

The entry into force of the GDPR reinforces the main principles issued by the Data Protection Act, in force since 1978, to increase the rights of citizens and give them more control over their data according to the CNIL. But the text of the law also aims to replace a directive of 1995 and thus become the new reference text on personal data in the European Union. The explosion of digital technology and the new uses that this entails made it indispensable to adjust a directive that was more than twenty years old.

The GDPR is part of a desire to harmonize the European legal panorama with regard to the protection of personal data, thus, one and the same law applies to all Member States.

When does the GDPR come into effect?

The entry into force of the GDPR took place in two stages. The text was first adopted by parliament on April 14, 2016, and promulgated on April 27 in the official journal. However, it has been decided to postpone its application for two years, it will take place in a little over a month, on May 25th, 2018. These two years have allowed both national legislation and businesses collecting and processing personal data to prepare for the entry into force of the law. After May 25, sanctions will be imposed on any processing of personal data in violation of the GDPR. Companies that commit breaches of the rules enacted by the GDPR incur up to 20 million euros or 4% of the annual turnover of fine.

What’s changing on websites?

It will be necessary to provide the users with a clear and precise information which data will be collected and for what purpose in order to obtain or not its consent. In addition to giving the user the right to act on his data, the company must keep a record of consent in order to defend itself in case of complaint and the control of the CNIL that would result.

What impact will the GDPR have on natural referencing?

In fact, not much since the ranking criteria of a website does not depend on how the data are collected or a number of subscribers to a newsletter.

And no search engine has yet indicated that the compliance of a site with the GDPR would become a ranking criterion. That said, this is not a reason for not complying on the one hand, and maybe in the future, this criterion will be taken into account on the other hand. You never know with the search engines.

The impact of the GDPR on SEO will be more subtle especially on the side of the UX and analytic data collections.

Another reason to put SEO and UX in relation?

Yes, again a reason to put SEO and UX in relation. As we know the use and ease of access to information of a site participates in its good ranking in the search engines. And the consent request that will have to be offered to users from May 25th will probably be presented on most sites in the manner of a request for acceptance of cookies. It will then be necessary to bring the consent request in the most user-friendly, and the least heavy in bytes so as not to impact the site loading speed.

An ill-thought-out, invasive pop-up window that puts the user experience at risk could scare your visitors away. And the flight of visitors inevitably leads to a loss of positions in the rankings of search engines. And it’s the same idea for a device that would require a lot of resources, which slow down the loading of your pages and which would, therefore, risk seeing your visitors leave as quickly as they arrived.

Analysis tools and data collection

In a newsletter addressed to its users, Google announces that the necessary measures are taken for the deployment of the GDPR. The newsletter informs us that precise data retention parameters will be put in place and will make it possible ‘to determine the storage duration of the data relating to the users […] As of May 25, 2018, these data will be kept according to the defined parameters. Google Analytics will automatically delete those that exceed the chosen retention period. Google encourages you to review these data retention settings and change them if necessary.

The newsletter also informs us that ‘Google Analytics and Analytics 360 will continue to offer different rules and features related to the collection, use, and retention of your data, to help you secure them. For example, you’ll have features for customizable cookie settings, privacy settings, data sharing settings, deletion of data when you disable an account, and IP anonymization. They may be useful when you assess the impact of the GDPR on the specific situation of your business and the integration of Analytics. ‘

In conclusion, it will be necessary to be vigilant on the way to collect the data of the visitors of your website.

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4 Criteria to evaluate your SEO

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4 CRITERIA TO EVALUATE YOUR SEO

SEO is relatively unclear for may marketing professionals and an abstract marketing and customer acquisition lever. Indeed, it contains a part of ‘chance’ related to the goodwill of Google and other search engines to put forward your website or not. Fortunately, there are criteria that can show if you are going in the right direction in your SEO strategy. Discover 4 criteria to evaluate your SEO with Great Northern Marketing Calgary Local SEO. Read more

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How to optimize images for SEO

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How to take advantage of the traffic potential associated with searching images? Here are some tips to optimize images for SEO on your website. One of the SEO strategies that have been neglected is to optimize images for SEO. This era is over since the advent of Google’s universal search in 2007, resulting in the appearance of images and photos in the engines search results.

Since the birth of Google Image in 2001, image search is constantly growing on Google and other search engines. Google Image is the most complete image search on the Web. In 2015, 80% of Google search results display universal search with an image in 35% of cases.

Why should you optimize your images?
Getting a good position in the results with a sales image linked to your business is the assurance of acquiring qualified and potentially important traffic. For certain categories of websites, a good positioning of the images is essential today, it is the case for:

  • E-commerce sites,
  • Portfolios of artists, graphic designers,
  • The image banks,
  • Travel agencies and tourist sites,
  • Printers,
  • The web agencies,
  • The photographers, …

Here now the 8 tips to optimize images for SEO

These are 8 simple tips to implement (on WordPress in particular) to optimize the optimization of images on your website and acquire qualified traffic.

1 – The names of the images

Google cannot read an image, it’s up to you to indicate what is on your image or your photo. For example, if you want to reference photos of the Niagara falls, avoid image names like IMG19762.jpg and prefer Niagara-falls.jpg, admit that it will be easier for Google to position your photo with relevance by placing a few keywords in the file name. (avoid accents and prefer dashes for better interpretation of the file name by Google)

2 – The alternative text or tag ‘ALT’

The alternative text or attribute ‘ALT’ is a text read by the search engines, so it is essential to optimize the referencing of images. In addition to the name of the image, the tag ‘ALT’ also improves the SEO of your site since it allows to accommodate additional keywords that will be interpreted by the engines, be careful with keyword stuffing your image. Keywords placed in the ALT tag will replace the image if the browser can not display the image.

3 – The format and weight of images

Preferably use JPG, GIF and PNG formats even if some engines are able to read other formats. Also, specify the height and width of your image to tell search engines how big your image is. Ideally, the native size of your image should be the same as the display size. Doing so, this will reduce the weight of your images resulting in reduced loading time of your pages.

4 – The content and the context around the images

The context and content (including the caption and title of the image) on the page where the image to be referenced provides search engines with important information about your image.

For example, avoid embedding a business card picture in a kitchen recipe page, and send a confusing message to the search engines about the subject of the business-card.jpg image.

Search Console Help Center Guidelines: Make sure you place your images near a relevant text as much as possible. We also advise you to assign titles and descriptive captions to your images.

The environment of the page is therefore essential to optimize images for SEO purposes.

5 – The title of the image

The title of the image (title attribute) is a text that is displayed on mouseover. The information of this attribute has no effect on the SEO, it is against a plus in term of accessibility and user experience.

6 – A specific sitemap for images

Once all your images are optimized, you can submit a sitemap for images via the Google Search Console interface.

7 – The legend of the image

The legend of the image corresponds to the text displayed under the image. It does not bring any direct added value in terms of reference. It can be useful for the UX and brings content around the image, the legend helps to heal the context.

8 – The long description

Like the caption, the long description of your image is not read directly by Google. However, it is very useful for attachment pages. This is also a great SEO lever for portfolio sites or sites dedicated to photography.

In conclusion, and by following these simple tips, you can optimize images for SEO and improve your positioning. If the results are not there, an audit of your website will certainly highlight points of blocking.

To know more: the future in the search of the images will pass also by the quality of these, the progress of the engines will allow in the long run to identify a blurred photo!

Since 2017 Google Images has evolved, websites are no longer displayed in the background. Sessions from Google Images are no longer counted on Google Analytics.

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Why Is My Website Slow?

Nothing more frustrating than a website that does not load or load very slowly! In the world of digital, the time is too precious to be lost waiting several seconds or several minutes for a website to load. A user is a person in a hurry, that’s why your site must be fast to load.

Read more

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Tips and tools to improve SEO in 2018

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In recent years, Google has made profound changes to its algorithms which has changed in a radical way SEO. However, it must be said that this is an essential technique to boost its presence on the web. Indeed, it is useless to have a website if it is not visible on the various search engines. How to improve your SEO for 2018? This is the main question that entrepreneurs have been trying to answer for some time. Here are the best SEO tips to follow.

#1. Firstly, respect the fundamentals

In order to succeed in your SEO strategy, you must first respect the fundamental principles that will allow you to get a better ranking.

First of all, it is necessary for you to focus on users at the expense of search engines. They are your customers and not Google.

This is easily understandable. There is no point in bringing traffic to your website if your visitors are not converted into customers.

In order to achieve this, it is important to offer quality content information so they can easily share with their loved ones.

Indeed, users are impatient and some are not loyal: they will not hesitate to go to your competitor if you can’t hold them. Worse, if your content is not attractive and that your visitors quickly leave the site, your site positioning will be degraded by Google in terms of the bounce rate of your page (25 tools to analyze your traffic).

#2. Do not position for a single keyword

It has been estimated that the average user’s queries consist of 4 words.

This comment is especially true with voice search. Users can directly search for something and get accurate answers without having to type anything. This trend also impacted the keywords since people learn complete sentences when conducting a search. This can be a huge opportunity for you to take advantage of its use. Rather than stand on a very competitive keyword, why not focus on queries referencing more complex and less competitive.

Check seo centro tool to know the volume of search phrases on Google and suggestions of related keywords:

#3 Be more localized

Consequently, the search engine places a lot of importance on geographical positioning and this trend is likely to continue.
Thanks to geolocation and cross-channel technologies, we will soon arrive more at a city level, but at a much more specific area! The consequences in terms of SEO can be very interesting. You will be able to create more research niches.
Tool to check its positioning in the results pages of Google: rank tracker from Moz
Tools to check the technical SEO level of your site:
https://metricspot.com/app/
https://auditor.raventools.com/
https://varvy.com/
http://seositecheckup.com/
https://website.grader.com/

#4 Go for the Link building!

For those who do not know much, link building is very popular with SEO specialists.
Indeed, it simply refers to the fact of creating links. Link building is the action of increasing the number of external links (backlinks) pointing to a web page that you wish to see an increase in the positioning of pages of search engines positioning. Whatever it is, the link building allows you to improve the positioning of a page according to the keywords on which the links were created.

In other words, if you really want to position your website among the best search results, you should probably consider creating links.
Your backlinks should appear as natural to the search engines. The more your backlinks will be relevant, trusted and diversified the better your page will be referenced. However, there are several ways to create a link: in a natural way (mention of a site, quote of a site, etc.) or the inscription on a website.

#5 Directories

Contrary to what one might then think, do not draw a definitive line on a directory registration. You just have to use it in a clever way, and not spam hundreds of directories, which would only penalize your own site. In this respect, three types of directories must be distinguished, all of which do not require the same approach: general directories, thematic directories, and local directories.
For registration in general directories, we recommend using Knowem which is a service that will register your institution on general directories and be putting a backlink on them. To find thematic and local directories we refer you to which lists these directories.

#6 Comments

The link building in comments of other sites generally obtains the objective of artificially obtaining backlinks in a logic of ‘optimization’ of the natural referencing. This practice is to be conducted with caution. Abuse of this practice is a practice considered black hat SEO and Google may penalize you.

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