What are Long Tail Keywords?

By Peter Brittain on July 7, 2019 in Keywords

What are Long Tail Keywords and how can you use them for your SEO?

If you have been looking for information on SEO and SEO companies, you may have come across the term ‘Long Tail Keywords’ and wondered what it meant. Well, long-tail is nothing to do with furry animals but is in fact, an SEO technique that, if used correctly, can help to generate increased traffic to websites and other online properties.

At the core of long-tail SEO are Long Tail Keywords, which are keywords that contain more than two words. You won’t be surprised to know that keywords with only one or two words are called short-tail keywords. Examples of short-tail keywords in the dog niche would be ‘kennel’ and ‘dog grooming’, and in the technology niche, ‘laptop’ and ‘computer keyboard’.

If a website owner were to try and rank for any of those keywords, they would be competing against tens of thousands of other websites, and many of them will be websites owned by some of the biggest online companies in the world. It is safe to say that most local marketing budgets are not going to be able to compete with the likes of companies whose SEO budget is almost unlimited.

So, how can you compete online and get traffic to your website? Well, the answer is long-tail SEO, and employing any number of Long Tail Keywords that you can rank for. A key point to note is that your competition online isn’t the Amazon of this world, it is the websites owned by other companies operating in your niche or market, and who do so within your local area.

Is Wix Or WordPress Better For SEO?

By Peter Brittain on May 8, 2019 in WordPress, Technical SEO

Regardless of what technologies, apps, or software there exist on the internet, there are always going to be competitors. Often this leads fans of each to sing their praises, and then those who wish to know more, asking which they should use. This leads invariably to articles such as this where we try to determine which is best. The difference here is that we are comparing Wix and WordPress within a very specific criterion, and that is SEO.

It may help many of you if we briefly explain what Wix and WordPress are and what they are primarily designed to do. If we start with Wix, it is an all-in-one website builder, and it is especially popular with newbies and those for whom website code brings them out in a cold sweat. With Wix you can have your website built very quickly using its pre-designed website temples, it has built-in security, and important for many, it has its own in-house support staff.

WordPress is an open-source content management system which can be used to create hosted websites. It has a bigger learning curve than Wix, but this also means it has much greater scope for flexibility. This means websites can be built with a raft of customisations and thousands of plugins to add greater functionality in both the front end and back end of sites built using WordPress.

When it comes to SEO there is one thing which Wix and WordPress both have in common, and that is their great reliance on third-party software. This will be apps in the case of Wix, and plugins for WordPress. There are several apps which Wix uses for SEO, with one of the most popular called ‘Site Booster’. Site Booster has both a free and premium version and as with most SEO apps it is only the paid one which gives you all the functions that you need to boost your website’s SEO

7 Tips For Choosing a Domain That Will Help Your SEO

By Peter Brittain on February 15, 2019 in SEO Rankings

The number of factors that affect the SEO of websites not only increases on a regular basis, they also change frequently. Some are complicated, and others are straightforward. One factor that you might think has little or no impact is the domain name of your website, however, it does play an important part. Here are 7 tips which can help to improve your SEO efforts and your Google ranking when choosing your domain name correctly.

Keep Your Domain Name Length To 15 Characters Or Less.
If you were to analyse the domain names of the top 100,000 ranked websites on Google, you will find that their average length is 9 characters or less. Shorter domains names are much easier to remember and share in terms of people passing on or recommending your website. For example, compare www thebusinessandinvestmenttoptipswebsite.com to www.biztips.com. and it is clear the latter is far more desirable.

Check To See If Your Domain Is Available On All Your Social Media Channels.
Choosing the right domain name with the huge and ever-increasing importance of social media, it is no surprise that it plays a role in Google rankings. The authority of sites such as Pinterest, Facebook, and Instagram, means that having a presence on them and other social media sites can boost your SEO efforts.

For this reason, you should first check to see if any of the domain names you are considering are also available on social media platforms. A great tool for this is ‘knowem.com’ where you can enter a name and it will check hundreds of social media sites to see if it is still available or not.

Is Wix Bad For SEO?

By Peter Brittain on November 21, 2018 in Technical SEO

For those of you who are unfamiliar with Wix let us briefly explain what it is. Wix is a cloud-based, open-source, all-in-one website builder that is particularly liked by beginners and those who have no idea how to code HTML. It has flexible designs that allow for a reasonable level of personalisation and is suited for building small to medium-sized websites. It is also popular due to the excellent customer service provided by their in-house support team who are known to be extremely responsive and very professional.

Hopefully, that all sounds positive so far, which brings us to something where Wix’s reputation is not as high, and that is regarding SEO. This most likely stemmed from Wix’s early days where it quickly became known for many issues which were hindering webmasters and SEO experts from optimising websites built with it.

Some of these issues included being unable to optimise title tags and meta descriptions for blog posts, a URL structure that would generate weird characters and add them to URLs, being unable to add alt attributes to media such as images, and the use of Flash technology which was seen as detrimental to a website’s rankings.

It is not surprising that with all these issues in play, Wix’s reputation hit rock bottom amongst SEO professionals. Even today, there are still many articles and comments online which suggest Wix should be given a wide berth if you are considering building a website with it and want to use SEO to help it rank.

How To Optimize Your Website Images For SEO

By Peter Brittain on September 25, 2018 in Image Optimisation

It should be safe to assume that your business website contains images; if it doesn’t, then the question has to be, ‘Why not?’. Images are a great way to engage with, inform and entertain customers, but what many website owners don’t realize is that images can also play a role in onsite SEO. More importantly, there are some simple steps you can take about the images on your website that can boost your site’s ranking in the eyes of Google.

In hindsight, using the term ‘eyes of Google’ might be a tad misleading because, despite all their top-level programming and sophisticated algorithm updates, Google cannot see the images on a website as human eyes see them. Their spiders which crawl the internet and analyse websites, can only recognise text. This means that no matter how colourful, large, exciting, or high-quality any website image is, Google will not see that.

This means that for Google to know that your images are relevant to your website’s content and subject matter, you need to add something called ‘alt text’.

For example, if you had a website selling sports shoe products, one of those products was Nike Air Jordan 14 Retro, you would likely have a page for this product and an image of them. When you upload the image, you will enter alt text such as ‘Air Jordan 14 Retro Sports Shoes’. Now, when Google’s spiders come calling, they will be able to read that text, and therefore the page gets more ranking juice for that keyword phrase.