by Marelise da Silva | Jul 4, 2018 | SEO
Who doesn’t want to have one of the most popular websites on the web? There’s a site called Alexa.com (owned by Amazon) that focuses on ranking websites for popularity.
The first thing you need to know about Alexa.com is that they rank millions of websites across all niches. The closer you are to no.1, the higher your website ranks in search engine results. To increase your Alexa.com ranking, you will need to get more traffic to your website and the best way to achieve this is through SEO (Search Engine Optimization). Here are some of the elements of high-ranking websites:
They Load Quickly
Google is very focused on the user experience and few people are prepared to wait for more than a few seconds for website pages to load.
They’re Optimized for Mobile
The number of people using their smartphones to surf the web continues to rise and Google has resorted to changing their algorithm to penalize websites that aren’t optimized for different devices.
They’re Optimized for Keywords
Relevant keywords on your pages, in the Meta titles, and alt tags in an image are all things that can tell search engines what your website is about and this element is very obvious in high ranking websites.
They Have Great Content
The sites that rank the highest in search results all have high-quality, educational content. Very few small websites (with less than five pages) will claim top spots in Google.
Quality Websites are Linking to the Site
If you are posting great content on your website, then other websites will start to link to your site and this can also boost your ranking in Google search results.
Need help with your SEO strategy? Then contact WSI OMS today.
by Francois Muscat | Jun 27, 2018 | Google, Search Engines, SEO
Google’s Answer Boxes are the featured snippets that are ranked at the top of Google. The answer boxes often rank above the top search results and below the ads. They can draw quite a lot of traffic, which is why it’s worth your time to try to get your content featured here.
There are three kinds of answer boxes that appear in Google’s search results, namely paragraphs, lists and tables. To get featured in any of these types of answer boxes, you will firstly need to do some research on Google to find out which search terms prompt a featured snippet or answer box to appear. You will notice that an answer box appears when a user asks a question in Google.
After you have found which questions you want to answer, you will need to optimise your content so that it answers a question. The content that Google features in the Answer Box reads as if it is answering a question, so make sure you are writing it in a how-to, explanatory or step-by-step style.
An important factor to keep in mind when you are trying to rank in Google’s answer box is that Google generally features authoritative websites in these results. If you are struggling to make your site more authoritative, focus on the low hanging fruit like requesting a page on Wikipedia.
Need help with your seo strategy? Then http://www.wsioms.co.za/contact-us contact WSI OMS today.
by Marianna Muscat | Jun 26, 2018 | SEO
Some people dread having to directly ask for links. While link building is a crucial part of any SEO strategy, it can be a mammoth task when you get to the nuts of bolts of making a list of authority websites and contacting each one to suggest a link sharing opportunity.
Even if you are regularly producing great content that you want people to link to, it’s not uncommon to dislike the outreach process involved with getting links (and it’s even less common to have a high success rate, too). Luckily, there are ways to earn links without having to directly say: “Hey, will you please link to this?”
One way to avoid directly having to ask for a link is to find a relevant piece of content on the web, locate the author, and tell that that you have something that they will probably use. This tactic works very well with journalists or bloggers who write about a specific topic. Instead of asking them for a link, you can show them that a piece of content that you have created will be valuable for them, their readers or people like them.
Another tactic is known as the ‘let me help you with that tactic’. If you are aware of industry sites, writers or journalists who regularly publish content on a specific topic, offer to help them achieve their goal. You can frame your request along the lines of being a reader as well as a thought leader on the topic, and you would like to help them achieve their goals by producing content that they can link to.
Need help with your SEO or content marketing strategy? Then http://www.wsioms.co.za/contact-us contact WSI OMS today.
by Marelise da Silva | Jun 14, 2018 | SEO
Many of our clients have asked us whether their blogs and sites in general should have dynamic or static URLs. There seems to be a resistance to changing a site to static URLs unless there is solid SEO evidence that proves it is worth the developers’ time. We always like to highlight the user-friendliness of static URLs. It’s also valid to consider that user experience plays a very important role in SEO.
Dynamic URLs have dynamic or changing information that display according to specific queries. The page acts almost as a template and the dynamic part of the URL displays a string from the database that correlates with the content.
Static URLs, on the other hand, don’t change. They can be manually created or automatically generated based on the headline of the page.
An important SEO benefit of static URLs over dynamic URLs is that they give more prominence to your keywords. When created properly, they naturally show keywords to tell search crawlers and users what a page is about.
Of course, Google has repeatedly stated that it can crawl dynamic URLs. On Google’s webmaster blog, it has stated that “the decision to use database-driven websites does not imply a significant disadvantage in terms of indexing and ranking.” It also says: “Static URLs might have a slight advantage in terms of click through rates because users can easily read the URLs.”
It’s easy to see that static URLs are more user-friendly because they make it clear what a page is about. Static URLs are also more sharing-friendly because they are easier to copy and paste. Regardless of whether Google can crawl dynamic URLs, Google always works towards providing a better experience.
Need help with your Search Engine Optimisation strategy? Then http://www.wsioms.co.za/contact-us contact WSI OMS today.
by Marianna Muscat | Jun 5, 2018 | Content Marketing, SEO
It wasn’t long ago that you would type something like “Johannesburg restaurant” into Google. Nowadays, you can type something like “Where should I go for dinner?” into Google. This is because we have started to assume that search engines are smart enough to recognise intent.
The question is: does your SEO strategy reflect this changing search behaviour? This is what the “topic cluster model” is all about. Topic clusters is an SEO strategy that focuses on topics as opposed to keywords. There are a few key benefits of including topic clusters into your SEO and content marketing strategies:
- Improve your website’s architecture
- Make it easier for Google to recognise related content
- Boost your search engine visibility
Consider how the average website works. You start with a home page and eventually launch a blog. Keyword research will show you that there are thousands of long tail keywords related to your products and services. What happens is that you start writing post after post about the same thing. At the end of the day, your website’s content becomes repetitive, loaded and disorganised.
In the topic cluster model, you will have one longer piece of content that broadly outlines the topic. Then, you write content that is related to specific search terms within the longer page so that you can link back to the main article. This way, when one page performs well the entire topic cluster will get a boost.
SEO is all about helping web crawlers make connections. Topic clusters signal to Google that there is a semantic relationship between the content and that you are a trusted authority on the topic.
Need help with your SEO or content marketing strategy? Then contact WSI OMS today.
by Marelise da Silva | May 31, 2018 | SEO
Your website’s Resource Centre or blog archive page probably doesn’t get much thought or attention from your marketing or web design team. This is the page where all of your news stories, blog posts, company announcements and press releases get published.
Resource Centre and blog archive pages get more links than individual posts. This makes sense because other websites are inclined to direct people to the freshest source of content on your site and this is the page that usually gets updated the most often. When it comes to creating a strong Resource Centre, we recommend the following:
- Dates and by-lines so that people have a clear idea of how often you are publishing content,
- Images to capture the readers’ attention and to build brand awareness,
- Social sharing buttons so that people can easily share your content on social media networks if they found the content useful,
- A breadcrumb URL structure so that you can easily track traffic to your Resource Centre and see which pages were the most successful.
Earning merit-based links through your Resource Centre is something to strive for. When another company links to your site, it means they value what you’re saying enough to share it with their own audience.
The digital marketers at WSI OMS can do a website audit of your site to determine which pages are ranking well and where you can improve. Whether you want to improve your internal and external linking strategy, your Search Engine Optimisation or your website design, contact WSI OMS today.
