Wesley Bates

Have you heard the story about the guy who made a boat load of money after he got his website ranked on the top of Google’s search results? If you are reading this article, you are probably wondering what it would take for your website to get ranked #1 for your product or services best keywords. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) plays a very important role in ensuring that your website earns and retains the best search engine ranking, which should result in increased traffic, leads, sales for your business online. What is Search Engine Optimization (SEO)? Search engine optimization is the process of optimizing a websites content and metadata to improve search engine rankings. Metadata includes the page title, meta description, heading, emphasized text, and keywords. SEO also covers internal and external links and overall structure of the website. Impact of High Search Engine Ranking on Sales Internet market research estimates that between 70% and 90% of people shopping online will use a...

Search Engine Optimization is definitely a buzzword in marketing right now, prompting many businesses to hire outside agencies to maintain their SEO for them. This is great, as agencies have the time and resources to keep up with the latest trends, but wouldn’t you like to know what they’re doing? You may be paying them money, and seeing results, but actually keeping up with the agency and checking in is very important. If you have changing campaigns, products, or focuses, this familiarity with SEO becomes even more crucial. One of the many services provided with most SEO packages is link building. The basic premise of link building is publishing articles, news releases, and other blogs which link back to yours. Producing these ‘backlinks’ is a crucial part of increasing your ranking with search engines. There are many advantages to building these links, so let’s get into it: Brand Authority If you are a good writer with great knowledge of your industry, writing strong, helpful article...

As the wise saying goes, Rome wasn’t built in a day. The same goes for businesses sitting at the top results of certain keywords. It takes time and an effective SEO strategy to increase a business’ rank in the search results without any consequences. If a digital marketing agency claims to have a secret to increase your business’ search result rankings quickly or guarantees a top spot, take it as a red flag. While it sounds ideal, an SEO strategy that lasts and produces no long-term penalties does not happen overnight.  White Hat vs. Black Hat Strategies Analysts use two terms to describe SEO strategies: white hat and black hat techniques. On the one hand, white hat SEO handles quality content and organic link building using strategies such as share-worthy articles, keyword research and use, internal linking, and website content and meta description optimization. This strategy takes time to grow organically but follows Google’s rules and standards to avoid penalties. Blac...

Quality content on a blog post or website is key to attracting prospective clients. At Sage Lion Media, every email we send, blog post we write, social media post we create, a call-to-action is included. In our blog today, let’s review what a call-to-action is and some best practices when creating an effective call-to-action. WHAT IS A CALL-TO-ACTION? So what is a call-to-action? A call-to-action (CTA) is “an image or line of text that prompts your visitors, leads, and customers to take action,” according to Hubspot. It’s important to encourage prospects to contact your office or sign up for an event after reading a blog post or email. If they don’t, what’s the point of creating engaging content? CTAs take prospective clients to a higher valued page on your website. If the call-to-action says, “Read more…” in the meta description on Google, this gets your prospect to your site. The page you direct that prospect to on your site should include another CTA which takes them further down th...

Search engines are not humans. Although they try to understand the information they receive, a simple keyword search is the result of millions of pages crawled. Despite constant updates to the search query algorithm, there remains solid  on-page SEO strategies   you can use to help search engines like Google understand your site. So what is the best way to translate a page for a search engine while remaining true to your visitors? A good place to start is with keywords. Relevant Keywords Keywords are the foundation of optimizing on-page content. Keywords inserted among titles, headers, image alt attributes and the written text itself is an essential way to shout to search engines, “RELEVANCE, I’m right here!”  This calculates the significance of a keyword by measuring the number of times a keyword appears. But a simple strategy like this becomes abused and misused. Thanks to spammers, keyword density can easily turn into keyword stuffing. Use only a sufficient amount to i...

Attracting traffic to your website is essential in increasing business. What are the 3 secrets to attracting more traffic to your website? Read on to find out A beautifully designed website is the first step towards attracting more traffic to your website. Without an exquisite, carefully crafted web design that’s interesting, relevant and easy to browse through, you stand little to no chance of attracting a decent amount of traffic to your website.  So what are the other secrets to attracting more traffic to your website? Read on to find out… SEO-Optimised The first most crucial factor is to be completely SEO-optimised, whether on a local or international level. This is because, when people are performing a search on the internet for goods or services that you offer, your website needs to show up when they perform a relevant search. For this reason, it’s critical that your website is easy to find in search engine searches. Fully responsive Ten years ago, hardly anyone was brow...

Search Engine Optimization is all about organically ranking a website over time in search engines; on the other hand, User Experience (UX) design is about designing and developing a website that is all about the searcher. How could these two notions both interlap and NEED to work together?  What is SEO Search Engine Optimization is the strategy of organically ranking a website overtime using keywords and phrases specifically targeted based on a number of ranking factors. The goal is to increase the volume of organic traffic driven to the website and to increase the quality of this traffic.  What would matter to the decision-makers, board members and C-Suite executives in a company? The amount of website traffic and the QUALITY of this website traffic. A website that has 1,000 visitors per month, but only has one or two leads might not be garnering the best quality of traffic. On the other hand, a website that gets 300 visitors a month but has 10 or more leads is garnering the ...

Off-page technical search engine optimization (SEO) sounds a bit like secret SEO magic, but in reality, it is just a long, manual process that never ends!  This is not something that any company or business owner should handle on their own for the simple fact that it is not for the faint heart. Off-page SEO which involves link building is hard.  Now, we may not be even remotely qualified to be on the Great British Baking Show, but we do know we are qualified to handle and speak about off-page SEO strategies like link building. To find a  SEO Specialist , it is important to understand that not all   SEOs handle the process the same , offer the same solutions and do not always have your best interest in mind.  When it comes to SEO, the importance of link-building often pops up. Does it really matter? Does it really affect your search engine rankings? It all matters and affects your ranking at the end of the day.  What is link building? Link building , backlin...

When people use a search engine, most of them don’t drill down much past the first couple of pages so it’s important that search engines rank your website as highly as possible. Search engine optimization (SEO) is an ongoing process of refining your website to achieve a higher ranking, and therefore drive more visitors to your website. Search engines use a range of criteria to determine a site’s relevance. Here are five important tips to get you started with SEO for your website. Select a set of keywords to focus on. Do some research to ensure you are targeting the right ones, and ones where you can realistically achieve results and have low competition. Ensure content on your site is well written, and keywords are included where appropriate throughout the text. Use keywords when naming a file or image, and use these keywords in the alt tags. Having meaningful keywords in the filename is going to be much better than a random set of letters or numbers, which is often the case when using...

Nowadays, most businesses understand the basic concepts of  Search Engine Optimization (SEO)  and why it’s important. However, when it comes to implement the strategy and execute the SEO plan, most businesses don’t know where to begin. Below are six steps you can take to make sure all of your SEO bases are covered. STEP 1: LIST OF KEYWORDS Keywords are the heart of SEO and selecting the right keyrowrds can make or break your SEO strategy. Add a list of about 10 keywords into  Google Keyword Tool and find variations that make sense for your business. By using the search volume and competitions as you measure you narrow down your list to 10-15 keywords that you would like to rank for. Then rank this list in order to be relevant to your business. The keywords list should be a document that you will review and update at least once a month. This will keep you to stay in keyword research mode and keep your keyword list evolving with industry and search trends. STEP 2: BUIL...

  Are you looking for the best professional web design software? The best web design softwares are available with Web Designing Services Denver, CO . Web design software enables you to create web templates and designs in much less time. In the old days, you’d have to write hundreds of difficult lines of code to create even the most basic templates; but, with the advanced web creation software now on the market, anyone can build beautiful web designs quickly and easily. In this article, we’ll share the best web design software that you can use to create website templates or full-fledged websites. 1. WordPress WordPress is a free and opensource software that lets you build any kind of website with ease. Over 30% of the web uses WordPress, making it the most popular Content Management System in the world. To save you even more time, you can also check out the best built-in WordPress themes. You can install a WordPress theme and edit it as needed. Each theme has a basic str...

  The online battle for potential consumers of your website is a never-ending game. Search engine optimization – SEO represents a procedure of assessing, grading and positioning the site’s tags, content, and other relevant elements for Google to apply the algorithm sequence for checking. Any participant working online has the goal of generating more traffic to its website, right? Depending on the results of the process mentioned above, the SEO score you in the search engine results page – SERP accordingly to given results.  The higher your site is in the search engine, your chances increase to reach a broader auditorium of potential consumers. Today the majority of people are focusing on boosting their SEO to achieve their results. We have done the homework and prepared a few tips that can help you get started on improving your SEO as soon as you finish reading this article. Check for Duplicate Content One of the most frequent mistakes that people make in their SEO ...

  When you liked to know more about SEO, you headed to the search engine (most probably Google, typed your query, got us on the results and landed here – that is because we did SEO right! So, what exactly is SEO? SEO is a technique to optimize your content (blogs, websites, videos, etc.,) such that the search engine shows you in the top results for searches of relevant keywords. Okay, this is a pretty standard definition of SEO, so here’s a simpler version: In SEO, there are three entities involved – you, the search engine, and the one searching for what you have to offer. If you got a website with tips on how to stay healthy, you want the search engine to show it on the first page of results for anyone who is looking for ‘how to stay healthy’ or ‘tips to keep healthy”. Now the strategy is to work on your web page or blog post in a way that makes Google or Bing or Yahoo – whatever be the search engine – display your page as the top results whenever users search for...