Search Engine Optimization Frequently Asked Questions (SEO FAQs)

SEO FAQs – There is a lot to consider with SEO, but it all comes down to writing and more writing, the better the quality, the better.

The answer is a definite yes! Caching is the process of preloading website assets such as text and images onto a server close to where your visitor may be so that their machine doesn’t need to render these assets when they load your website. It’s a bit technical but all that is really needed to know is that it makes website faster. Faster websites make a better browsing experience and Google and Bing are all about serving up websites that offer a better experience (are faster). We use a cache plugin called LiteSpeed to increase the loading of our websites. We also have LiteSpeed installed at the server level for the ultimate increase in load times for our clients (and increase in SEO!).

When a web developer redesigns your website, it is very important to keep the URLs or link to page names the same. If these change, the SEO built up in these pages can be lost. There is a technique of redirecting old URLs into new URLS, but this should only be used as a last resort if the page names have to be different on the new site for some reason. This is a very crucial step that many web designers who do not know SEO miss. Make sure to consult with an SEO expert or even better a firm like ours, SkyPoint Studios that specializes in both web design and SEO.

In the World of marketing, SEO takes the most time to do. It is like making wine, you can certainly try to drink wine that is 2 to 3 months old but it won’t be very good. The best wine has been aged for long enough for the complex notes and elements to come out. That is how SEO is, it takes a long time to achieve significant results. That’s not to say there aren’t any ways of seeing if SEO work is working. The first place to check is putting the most common search phrase your customers would search, for us it is ‘web design billings’ but for your business it will be the category and the city. Where does your website show up on this list? If it is in the top 20, that’s better than not being there at all. If it’s in the top 10, that’s pretty good. Top 5 is even better and if it is in the top 3, you are doing very well. Of course the goal is to get to #1 (that’s where our website is for that search).

Yes, a FAQ page helps significantly with SEO. Google is always trying to answer questions for its visitors and if you can help the search engine by providing a list of common questions for your industry with well written responses, they will reward your website for it. FAQ pages are rather common, but what is not common is updating the pages regularly. This is a powerful SEO secret that not many take advantage of. When a FAQ page is updated frequently, such as weekly or monthly, that signals to Google that the website has the latest and greatest information about that specific industry. Give it a try on your website and see how well it improves the search rankings!

Adding videos themselves to the website does not offer any SEO value. YouTube videos will not transfer value because they are iframes. There is one trick, however, to ranking videos. Inside the YouTube description there is an opportunity for good keywords and descriptions. For the videos to offer SEO value, the best option is to write a 150-300 word article. This can go along with the video and post each video seperately through a blog.

Putting keywords in the description is a good idea, and potentiallly having them on the website somewhere and that link from the YouTube page go to the page with the keyword as the landing page URL, is an even stronger idea.

I wouldn’t really ever think about doing “copy block” on anything on your website. Except, in rare cases when you need to link to something external that is not relevant or not good for the brand, but is still relevant to the messaging, if that makes sense.

Websites should be updated as often as possible. Google really prefers that a website is updated every month or so to provide the freshest content for the visitor. Dates and time sensitive material is specifically a problem if it hasn’t been updated in awhile. What is recommended, is to change out or add too the content every other week or so. If you can do it more frequently, that’s even better. This will keep it ahead of competition and continue to gain SEO value for the website.

There are some factors that can affect the meta description on a website. The best way to figure out what is going on is to install Google Webmaster Tools. Inside the webmaster tools dashboard, you can find crawl errors. Sometimes, the sitemap is telling the robots not to index the site. This will need to be changed for the results to show properly in search. Check to see if you have any indexing or crawl issues, or any broken links. All of these can cause issues. SEO Yoast is a great plugin for WordPress users that helps to find indexing issues. It can be downloaded from the plugins market for free by searching for “SEO Yoast.”

Map search results are part of Google My Business. Google My Business is Google’s way of organizing the business directory and map feature. Inside search, the maps show up at the top of the page, even on mobile. It’s important to optimize your Google My Business profile completely. Make sure all the latest and correct information is on the profile. The more information you have filled out on your profile, the better you’ll do in the map listings. One of the most important factors to ranking high in the map results, is reviews. Make sure your company has multiple four and five star reviews. Any negative review should be dealt with, by responding. Make sure the response is positive and action focused on fixing the problem. Scoring top map listings (#1, #2, #3) will definetely increase leads for your business!

It depends. If the domains are brand new and have never been hosted online, then no. They do not transfer any value if they are brand-new, zero SEO value at all. However, if you were to host these domains and put a little bit of content up then, over time, they will gain SEO value. They can be used to hyperlink to your main site. Another idea is after 6 months, 12 months, or 18 months you can forward them into your main domain. This will transfer the SEO juice into the main domain you want to rank for. It’s important to note that you only want to have the keywords that you’re trying to rank for in the domain. Otherwise, there will be no point in doing this exercise.

Google spiders usually pickup new content every two to three weeks. If your website is being updated frequently like everyday, or every other day, then they’ll crawl you more frequently. Becoming indexed, and actually ranking for the terms you want are two separate things. Getting into the index for the specific terms of your article, for example, can be rather easy. It tends too take about a week or two. Ranking for the terms that are competitive, in your industry, can take a lot longer.

Typical times for moving up from not on the search at all to ranking on the first page, is three to six months. It could take even longer for a very competitive marketplace. If the term is not super competitive, then the rankings will show in three to four weeks. If the term is super-competitive, like real estate agents, or insurance agents, then the rankings might take anywhere between 6 to 12 months and longer.

Most important thing to remember, is that time and patience are extremely important to SEO. The more production of quality content, and the longer you put it out there, the better you’ll do. The length of time the domain has been on web, is a big factor as well. So having a old domain, with lots of older content, and being updated regularly, is the best recipe for success on the web.

In an ideal world, you’d do both. Realizing that’s not always an option, organic SEO growth is the most within reach for everyone. All that is really needed to gain search result listings is create good content. Besides having good site structure, asking for links from other websites can help. So, there’s a little bit of work to be done, and no money hardly at all, and great results to be had. Of course, if you have a budget for paid search that’s always good as well. It can be very helpful to run both, capitalizing on the keyword-rich information you get from paid search, and deploying it against the organic free long-term play of SEO.

There are a lot of things that go into good SEO, and a good SEO company will be very diverse in its skill sets. However, there is one thing that is considered the yardstick of SEO company quality, and that is search results. If you’re going to sell SEO, you better have good SEO for your own company. Search the results for the company, the service they’re selling, and the local area the companies in, and find out if they’re any good at it. If they have top listings in some of the terms like search engine optimization, web design, graphic design, etc., then you’ll know that they’re very good at what they do for search optimization.

Ultimately, it comes down to content. So, someone who’s not willing to create good content and have proper backlinking, then it doesn’t matter what their SEO claims are, they won’t win. Be very weary of anyone who wants a lock you into a long contract, but doesn’t explain exactly specifically what they’re going to be doing during this time period. One final note: look for a really well done SEO FAQs page lol!!

Comments are a sign that a blog is successful. The more comments a blog has the more interaction that shows. The more interest from people, the higher Google ranks the site. Google really doesn’t know how to judge your blog posts, other than by a few factors. One of those factors is engagement. Comments show engagement, especially if they are well-written and seem to be from a human. It’s recommended to get a few friends to read your blog posts and ask them to comment their thoughts on it. It’s going to help get the discussion moving and it’s like anything it requires some type of momentum to actually get someone to post there on the regular. The more often you post and the more often you get your friends and get your colleagues involved, the better you’ll do. So yes, commens are helpful to SEO. Try to get as many as you can!

Yes! Having different information about your business and different profiles is a serious problem for SEO. It’s very important to clean up all the profiles and have the latest information of your business name, address, phone number and business description. All profiles should match the most current business information. The business description can vary from profile to profile, and you can actually gain a little bit by having a little bit of a variation.

However information in the NAP or Name, Address, Phone number, should always be consistent. If you have old profiles from before a new address or phone number, you need to go back and update those profiles. Google can’t tell how awesome of a business you have if it has a lot of inconsistent information out there. It wants to serve up the correct information, and it’ll look for a business that has the most correct information, most updated information, across all platforms on the web. Doing this can be the single most important thing to do to out rank your competition. I highly recommend getting on it right away, and tackling one profile a week, at a minimum.

Images are a big part of the overall experience on a website, therefore they are crucial to search rankings. One of the best strategies for improving rankings is to create high-resolution images that are unique to the web and tag them properly. Distributing these pictures throughout your website is a surefire way to create new ranking listings in image search as well as other parts of the web.

Google really looks at the image to text ratio a site has and the alt tags on those images. Alt tags are a way for text readers to say what the name of an image is for people who are disabled. Without an alt tag, the image will just be read as “image” and not as the description such as a “picture of a bird”.

Google wants you to fill out the alt tags with descriptions that make sense. Having a key word in those all tags is important, but it’s more important to make the alt tag make sense when it would be read out loud. The more images that are done correctly, the better you will do overall. A way to test this is to Google search some of the image names in Google image search and see how well you rank.

The absolute number one thing you should be doing is producing content. But not just producing content for the sake of producing content, documenting what you’re actually doing. People like to see what professionals do in their day-to-day and how they go about doing it.

This could be very interesting and can be very informing and helpful for people. I recommend documenting either through writing verbally, speaking and dictating, video or audio and putting that on the web. Modes for distribution include YouTube, your website, social media sites, exc.

The more you create the larger your reach will be. Just like in the old days of advertising, the seven touches to influence the customer still apply. So the more content you have out there, the better chance that your customers going to find you. Google rewards the documentation and helping of other people online. Google wants to help its visitors and therefore your website, if it helps Google instruct people. It’s recommended to tackle certain subjects and update the information regularly. We do that here on our SEO facts page by updating it regularly with what our customers ask. This resource, and a resource you create, are both powerful tools in war that is search.

About Your Website SEO – (SEO FAQs)

It’s been a pleasure gathering these SEO FAQs from our customers and providing them here. If you have any feedback on our suggesions or would like to add a question, please fill out the form below. Note that all content on our SEO FAQs page is presented as opinion only. Our SEO FAQs are not a gaurantee of results, as each SEO case and search engine situation are different. For an in  depth analysis of your website, call 406-208-8733 now!