by Francois Muscat | Nov 23, 2015 | Search Engines, SEO
If you’re launching a new website, then you’re in the perfect position to get your SEO right from the start. While there’s a lot of work that needs to get done when it comes to launching a website, it’s worth your while to take a step back and give your link building strategy and overall search engine optimisation efforts some thought. Here are a few things you should do:
Learn how keyword research works
There are a lot of online tutorials which will show you how to determine which keywords you should be targeting. If you don’t have time to work through all the information yourself, consider hiring an SEO consultant to guide you through the process so that you can make sure you’re including the right keywords in your website content, meta titles, keyword descriptions, image alt tags and more.
Create a sitemap and submit it to Google
Sitemaps are a crucial part of the SEO process. If you’ve got a WordPress website, you can use a simple Google sitemap plugin to create a sitemap for you. This sitemap will help search engines such as Google index your pages so that they rank well.
Review webmaster tools
All the major search engines have ‘webmaster tools’ where you can list your site and tell them what you’re all about. Simply type ‘Google webmaster tool’, ‘Bing webmaster tool’ or ‘Yahoo webmaster tool’ into a search engine and follow the steps they have listed.
Don’t have time to do this entire process yourself? Then hire the pros at WSI OMS. We’ve launched many new websites and we continue to help clients with existing, as well as new, SEO strategies. Contact us for more information today.
by Marianna Muscat | Sep 8, 2015 | Content Marketing, SEO
Coming up with new ideas for blogs can be challenging. However you can use old posts to generate new content ideas. Here are five ways how you can use old blogs for new content concepts:
- Re-Edit It And Clean It Up
Do you have older blogs that are good structurally but require some editing to make them spectacular? Re-editing and cleaning it up can achieve exactly that. Follow the checklist below to ensure you edit and update blogs accordingly:
- Improve writing and grammar.
- Find, remove and replace dead links.
- Update references and data.
- Recreate images to fit a more current look.
- Add expertise that you have gained since the initial post.
- Dividing Older Posts
If you are able to dissect older posts into smaller parts, you can focus on each of the topics and elaborate thereon. When editing older posts you can add links to each of the additional articles in relation to the older post.
- Apply SEO Principles
Applying SEO principles to older blogs posts can greatly enhance traffic to your blog posts and update older posts to more up to date search engine searches. Copywriting services can improve your marketing strategies and build a professional business image and portfolio.
- Format Change
Changing the format of older blog posts used for social media marketing for example can increase the number of people who actually read the post. Here are some exciting format changes you can apply to previous blogs:
- Slide decks.
- Social sharing graphics.
- Videos
- Podcasts
- Webinars
- Syndication
- E-mail auto responder course.
- Printable worksheets.
- Changing the Style
Choosing a different style of writing can refresh older posts and attract new audiences. You can choose from different approaches such as that of an insider, outsider, expert, newbie, observer, cryptographer or convincer for example. This will ultimately add a fresh approach to your previous blog posts.
Old blog posts can serve a good purpose by allowing you to gather fresh and new content ideas. Updating blog posts regularly is necessary to maintain an up to date social presence with your audience and to continue to grow and further your business.
Call on WSIOMS today for great content ideas
Contact WSIOMS for all your copywriting requirements.
by Francois Muscat | Jun 1, 2015 | Digital Media Marketing, PPC, SEO
Content and advertisement on the internet is booming and the competition to appear at the top of search results is always increasing. SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and Pay-Per-Click (PPC) are two ways to ensure your content gets found and that you’re able to convert search engine users to paying clients.
While many businesses are still hesitant to start using PPC because it is deemed more expensive, there are quite a few reasons why you should consider this strategy in 2015:
- In many cases, PPC advertising will have a positive impact on your organic SEO initiatives and click-through-rates. Read the results of this study to learn more about how this works.
- While you will be paying per click, you’re only paying when you’ve attracted the attention of an interested potential client.
- You can make your ad extremely niche. With SEO, you’re marketing to the masses and hoping an interested person finds your content. With PPC, you can determine everything from the time of day your ad will appear, geo-target your locations and set preferences such as mobile searches.
- The results are instant. While SEO is more cost-effective in the long run, it takes time for an SEO strategy to gain momentum. With PPC, you can see results almost instantly.
Your best bet is to combine both SEO and PPC so that you can get the benefits of both. Speak to an experienced internet marketing consultant to determine the best strategy for you. Contact WSI Biz for more information today.
by Francois Muscat | Apr 10, 2015 | Mobile Marketing, SEO, Website Optimization
By now, most people know that Google prefers mobile friendly and responsive websites. Google is now taking it a step further by announcing they will start penalising websites that aren’t mobile friendly from 21 April, 2015.
From the end of April, a comparable mobile friendly site will rank higher than a site that isn’t mobile friendly, so if you haven’t tested what your website looks like on your smart phone – now is the time.
“Starting April 21, we will be expanding our use of mobile-friendliness as a ranking signal. This change will affect mobile searches in all languages worldwide and will have a significant impact in our search results. Consequently, users will find it easier to get relevant, high quality search results that are optimised for their devices,” read the announcement on Google’s Webmaster Central blog.
How to find out if your website is mobile friendly
You can use Google’s Mobile-Friendly test to find out if your website is mobile friendly. Simply type in your website’s URL and wait for your results to find out how mobile friendly your website pages are.
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is a big part of internet marketing, so this change to Google’s algorithms will have an impact on how internet marketers, like us, build sites. According to a report from June 2014 by comScore, smartphones and tablets now account for 60% of total digital media time spent (this is a 10% increase from 2013), so this is just another way Google is trying to make their search results more relevant to users.
If your website currently isn’t mobile friendly or you need help determining what should be done in order to improve your search engine rankings, get in touch with us today. Our in-house team of web developers, designers and SEO experts are here to help you stay on top of Google changes (and on top of the search results). Contact us for more information today.
by Francois Muscat | Aug 11, 2014 | SEO, Social Media Marketing
In the past, search engine optimisation was all about optimising your content (and by that, we mean written content). Today, content refers to such a variety of media, including infographics, pictures, vimeo clips and of course videos.
In less than a decade, YouTube has become the second largest search engine. Google is still the largest, but YouTube is miles before Yahoo and Bing, processing over 3 billion searches each month. In 2006, Google bought YouTube for USD$1.65-billion, so basically Google owns the top two search engines on the internet.
Besides the fact YouTube gets so many searches each month, this content also comes up in Google’s search results, making video marketing important for any digital marketing strategy.
Simply including keywords in a YouTube video title or description can help you gain a lot of traffic each month. Videos are also a great way to humanise your brand, explain complex product set-ups or share interesting information with your online community.
Your first step in creating an effective video marketing strategy would be to set up a YouTube channel for your company. Make sure to customise the profile with your logo and corporate colours.
The next step is to create content. While it’s a great idea to hire a professional videographer and get a professional video made, you can also upload presentations or even create a video with photos (you can do this yourself with easy desktop video editing software).
YouTube and video marketing can no longer be overlooked. Video content is easy to consume and it’s highly effective, so make sure you’re capitalising on all the traffic this website receives.
Need help with your digital marketing strategy? Then contact WSI OMS today.
by Francois Muscat | Jul 31, 2014 | SEO
SEO (search engine optimisation) is all about adapting your digital marketing strategies to make them more relevant for Google. When you’ve got the right combination of off-page and on-page SEO strategies, you are more likely to achieve top results in Google.
Here’s a quick run-down of off-page and on-page SEO strategies:
On-page SEO strategies
On-page SEO strategies refer to all the things you can do on your articles, website and blog posts to improve your search engine results. If you’ve already got an SEO plan in place, you will know that there are certain keyword phrases that you need to target. Make sure that these keywords are in the following places on your page:
- Meta title
- Meta description
- H1 and H2 headings
- Somewhere on the page
In the past, people used to use way too many keywords (or repeat them a lot). This can actually have a negative impact on your search results, so make sure that you aren’t stuffing your pages with keywords. Other on-page factors that Google takes into consideration is usability and accessibility, how people engage with your site and the internal linking strategy on your website.
Off-page SEO strategies
Google doesn’t only take your web pages into consideration when they dish out search result spots – they also look at a bunch of external factors. This is why things such as guest blogging, social media sharing and press releases are vital to any successful search engine optimisation strategy. Producing and successfully distributing high quality content will encourage people to link back to your content. Another way of achieving this is by reaching out to bloggers and journalist (or even guest blogging on other sites yourself).
Need help with your digital marketing strategy? Then contact WSI OMS today.
