Fraud Alert: Beware of Scammers Using WSIOMS’ Name

We have been made aware that scammers are impersonating WSIOMS Digital Marketing, falsely claiming to offer freelance work and requesting personal banking information. These fraudulent messages are being sent via WhatsApp by someone pretending to be “Enzokuhle or Omphilr, the HR Assistant at WSIOMS.”

⚠️ Please be advised:
✅ WSIOMS does not offer freelance work.
✅ We will never contact anyone via WhatsApp for job opportunities or payment details.
✅ If you receive such messages, do not engage—delete them immediately.

We take this matter seriously and are working to stop these fraudulent activities. If you suspect you have been contacted by a scammer using our name, please delete the message and report it.

Stay vigilant and thank you for your support.

Answers to commonly asked SEO questions

Answers to commonly asked SEO questions

Many businesses out there with an online presence find SEO and all its intricacies very confusing and either outsource it completely, or ignore it. Unfortunately, it’s not something you can really ignore, not if you want to succeed in the digital world. Here are some answers to commonly asked questions, which might help to get your head around the importance of optimizing your website and content to get maximum returns.

  1. Should I outsource SEO or do it myself?

It really depends on the size of your business and how much time you have available. Larger businesses could potentially afford to hire someone to take care of the SEO as part of a bigger portfolio, but smaller businesses may want to outsource it to a trustworthy digital marketing company who has more experience. If the business is a start-up and the owner has the time to learn about the basics of SEO and do it in-house, the experience and understanding of SEO practices will help with monitoring later on if it ever gets outsourced.

  1. Why is blogging such a big deal for SEO?

Google loves fresh content and websites that continually post, so blogging is one of the easiest ways to achieve this. In addition, your blogs posts will hopefully inspire other people and encourage them to share your blogs, which helps to stretch its reach. Blogging regularly helps to establish you as an expert in your field, increase exposure and establish trust with your customers. But quality far outweighs quantity, so concentrating on blogs that provide relevant, interesting and engaging content is more likely to be read, shared and improve your reputation.

  1. What’s the most important thing I could do right now to improve my SEO?

Do some research into what keywords your customers and potential customers are using in their searches. Also, ensure that your website has no technical issues. Fantastic content is wasted if there is a miscoded file that stops Google from crawling your site. Go into your Google Webmaster Tools account to see what HTML improvements they recommend for your site. Make sure you have an XML sitemap submitted too.

  1. How much time should I be spending on SEO?

This depends on your type of business – a product based website with many products would need more time than a service based business. You should dedicate a couple of hours to SEO per week, but only once you have a clear understanding of who your audience is and how you plan to target them. For small businesses focusing on blogs, an hour a week should be sufficient, but this includes commenting on other platforms, guest posting and doing interviews or podcasts.

  1. Just how important are keywords?

Google’s search algorithm will constantly update and change, but keywords will always remain a very important part of SEO. The numbers of keywords and how they are used may change from time to time, but at the core, they are what SEO is all about. Keywords form the basis of every search, so understanding what your audience is searching for can help you optimize your website and content, so they can find you more easily.

For more on SEO, getting an SEO audit or if you’re interested in chatting to us about the many aspects of search engine optimization, contact us.

4 metrics to streamline your keyword research

4 metrics to streamline your keyword research

Brainstorming different keywords can quickly become overwhelming, especially if you start researching and filtering and discover that there are so many different options to choose from. When it comes to choosing the keywords that you are going to target, which metrics should you use to narrow down your scope? Here are a few important ones to consider:

Search volume

Google’s free keyword tool (which is used for AdWords) will show you how many times a specific keyword gets typed into Google each month. This is one of the most important metrics that digital marketers use when narrowing down search term options. If you are only targeting specific countries or locations, make sure to specify these regions so that you get a clear picture of the search volume that represents your potential customers.

AdWords competition 

Paid Google advertising metrics aren’t always an accurate reflection of Google’s ranking algorithm, so a competitive keyword phrase shouldn’t be mistaken for something that would necessarily require a lot of SEO effort. AdWords competition can, however, show you what types of keywords your competitors are bidding on.

Available spots in search results 

When researching your keyword options, pay attention to the type of content that comes up in Google’s search results. You may notice that some search queries yield news items while others yield video content. Organic SERP real estate can show you which keyword phrases are worth pursuing and it will also give you a clearer idea of the type of content you need to create to compete in this space.

Google Display Planner demographics

Google Display Planner will show you the key demographics of the keyword phrases that you are researching. This information can show you whether your ideal customers are the people behind the search terms and it can serve as a guide to point you in the right direction.

For more information and advice from WSI OMS, please contact us today.

Why link building for SEO is still up there

Why link building for SEO is still up there

Link building has always been a big factor in ranking at the top of search engines, but like with most things internet based, the process has changed over the years. It’s important to know why links, especially inbound links, should remain a big part of your SEO strategy.

Google states there are over 200 ranking factors, yet content and links rate amongst the highest. Just a few years ago, the focus was on the quantity of links, but today it’s more about quality and trust. There are several reasons why links are important, the first being it’s a vote of confidence – when one company links to another’s website, it’s them saying yours is a quality resource. Your ideal links should be from trusted and reputable websites, offering relevance. Search engines assume that quality websites link to other quality websites.

Another reason link building is vital for your SEO, it’s part of a long term strategy. Quality links, over time, will strengthen your position and build up your reputation. Domain authority, while not directly impacting search engine rankings, is a good indicator of which key words will push up your website rankings. As you build up more quality links, your domain authority increases too.

Over 50% of B2B marketers say that SEO has the biggest impact on lead generation, so link building can’t be ignored. So how do you get external websites to link to yours? Here are a few ways:

  • Create compelling content that people will want to reference and link to
  • Submit your news to press releases and submit your site to directories
  • Ask people you know and people you work with to link to your site
  • Put your product, service or offering in front of influential bloggers

Link building this way can be arduous and risky – you have no control of what other people say about your product or service, or the quality of their websites. There is a safer way to build links to specific pages you want to improve search ranking for, and that’s through your anchor text. Search engines take into account the actual text a linking page uses to talk about your content. Building external links to your site is important, but focusing some of energy on internal links with rich anchor text to targeted pages, can provide you a big boost in ranking.

If you’d like to find out more on SEO and link building for your company website, contact us – we know all about the power of quality links and would like to help drive more traffic to your site.

Proven ways to increase your website rankings

Proven ways to increase your website rankings

Explaining SEO to the CEO

While millennials find the new language of the digital age easy to grasp, it’s often a bit of a mystery. Search engine optimisation, or SEO for short, is no exception. In fact, because there are no hard and fast rules to fast-track the rankings of your website design and digital marketing strategy, it can seem even more mysterious than most digital concepts.

Simply put, SEO is about trying to get your site as high up as possible on Google and Bing search-results pages by finding ways to increase your site’s appearance in web visitors’ search results. This results in more traffic to your site. More traffic to your site results in greater awareness of your brand, and ultimately in increased profits and growth.

By re-thinking how you approach content on your site, search engine optimisation is well within your grasp:

  1. What words would someone looking for information on this topic use? These are your keywords which you should use strategically throughout your site – your titles, content, URLs, and image names. Place them naturally, though, because ridiculous numbers of keywords on your site makes you guilty of “keyword-stuffing”, which gets ignored by search engine algorithms.
  1. Make your URLs more search-engine-friendly by naming them with clear keywords. Which of these is more useful?

http://www.wsioms.co.za/services/search/search-engine-optimization”, or “http://www.wsioms.co.za/11789/s201.htm”.

  1. A tactical link building strategy on your site is an easy way to boost traffic to individual pages. As you post new content, be sure to link back to your archives frequently. Again, though, ensure your links are appropriate, and be careful not to link excessively.
  1. Add a site map (a page listing and linking to all the other major pages on your site) to make it easier for search engines’ spiders to search your site.

For more information on how our digital marketing experts can assist you, please get in touch today.

Ten tips for top-notch SEO

Ten tips for top-notch SEO

Optimizing your content to drive traffic to your website is not rocket science, but there are simple ways to increase your company’s SEO. Here are ten tactics that every online marketer should be using:

  1. Stop using meta keywords

Google has clamped down on meta keywords, since most people were using them incorrectly. They act as a spam signal to search engines, so are definitely worth avoiding.

  1. Focus on main keywords only

Keyword density no longer has the importance it used to. It’s very obvious when a website or blog post is filled with awkwardly positioned keywords. Use natural search phrases just once or twice.

  1. Pay attention to your meta descriptions

These 150-character descriptions of your site or article influence the click-through rates and contribute to search rankings.

  1. Add microdata

Major companies are displaying more information in the Google search results, like phone numbers, logos or addresses. This addition of microdata can boost click-through rates by up to 25%.

  1. Keep URLs short and sweet

While your titles can work as your URLs, they are often too long, which makes it difficult for search engines to categorise your website properly. Try to keep your URL to five words or less.

  1. Use title tags

These tell the search engines what the page is all about and although you only have around 55 characters to do it in, your title tag should drive people to click on the site.

  1. Use header tags correctly

Header tags (H1, H2, etc.) identify and determine the importance of the header. It is how sites are categorised, so avoid using generic tags.

  1. Optimize image alt text

Search engines can’t see images, so image alt text helps to explain what the image is. A basic phrase that describes the image is all you need.

  1. Ensure inbound links are quality

Monitor where any inbound links come from – they should be natural and relevant to your industry.

  1. Boost your site speed

Site speed is a marker of quality, so any site that takes longer than five seconds to load is going to be ranked poorly by Google. You may need to upgrade your server, or reduce the size of the big files on your site, like videos or images.

Building a site with high quality content that can easily obtain links from other high value sites, should be your aim. For more on SEO and the different strategies that work, contact us today.

SEO tips for bloggers

SEO tips for bloggers

SEO, or Search Engine Optimisation, is an essential part of any bloggers arsenal in the quest to increase visibility. By using search terms or keywords in your content that are likely to be used in searches by people, your rankings on the search engine results will be better. Blogs are naturally suited to rank well in searches, as a result of their topics and the frequency they appear, but there are a few ways to enhance the way the blog is indexed and ranked, which is where SEO comes in.

It goes without saying that the content of the blog needs to be great – quality content that entertains or solves a problem is more likely to be shared. While you can get quite swept away by trying to write content that is crammed full of keywords, it’s not everything. You should publish content you believe in and feel good about posting. You need to think about the kind of language your users are likely to type into a search and create your piece with phrases that correspond. When thinking about which keywords to use, you need to brainstorm the phrases and words you think people will use, as well as writing the kind of content that will reach a large and relevant audience. Using online tools like Keyword Tool can help you refine your keyword compilation into a set that are targeted, useful and likely to increase traffic.

The title you use is another biggie – Google pays a lot of attention to titles. If your blog is long, use subheadings to make the structure of your article clearer. Try to include the keywords in your title, as well as in subheadings, but not every subheading – it will start to make your blog unreadable.

The length of your blog is another point – Google prefers long articles, but if they ramble on and on, you’re likely to lose readers. A minimum should be 300 words, with a maximum of around 700 words. In a 300-word article, you should aim to use your search terms three to six times, if possible.

There are a number of plugins you can use to assist you in writing SEO-friendly blogs, which will measure many aspects of your writing and provide you a number of suggestions to improve its searchability. As you use a plugin more and more, you’re likely to start writing in a way that ticks all the boxes and increases your page rankings consistently.

Lastly, links are important. Adding links to relevant content within your posts help search engines get a clearer idea of what your topic is about. Linking to other sites can be the start of a relationship too. If you have been blogging a while, you should a fair amount of your own content that you could interlink, which can keep readers on your website longer.

If you need help with your SEO or need it explaining in simple terms, contact us. Experienced digital marketers, we know everything about Search, from Local search to Paid search and much more. We can help you write your blogs too!