Spartan Media

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3 Reasons You Need to Redesign your Website this Year

Your website is the face of your company, but if it’s been a few years since your last redesign, many of your competitors will have a significant advantage over you.

Their advantages comes in several forms, including increased organic search traffic, as well as visitors perceiving their products and/or services to be higher-quality/value and their company to be more trustworthy.

Do any of these sound like advantages that, in the eyes of customers, your competitors seem to have over you? I’ll explain how to shift these advantages to your favor in detail later in this post.

What makes effective web design?

Despite what many people think, great web design is not subjective. Well, to be more clear, effective web design is not subjective.

There are numerous scientifically proven design fundamentals that play a huge role in converting visitors into customers, and if your website gets them wrong, it doesn’t matter how much you like it. The only thing that matters is how well it converts visitors into customers because that means revenue that keeps your company alive and growing.

Design trends move fast, so what looked advanced and professional just a few years ago looks like amateur hour today. And many design tactics used to convert visitors into buyers quickly lose effectiveness as competitors adopt them, so these need to be adjusted even more often. (Based on testing and data, of course, not just some designer’s whim.)

A client of mine who is a very talented and knowledgeable architect was recently given a powerful lesson on this. I feel the need to point out here that he specifically encouraged me to share this story, and he has even shared it himself on several occasions at the local networking events we attend together with other Tampa businesses.

Now back to the story…

His business had struggled financially for the last couple of years, but he was sure his website wasn’t the issue because he liked it and had never received any complaints about it. He found out how incorrect his assumption was shortly after we had published his new website. He met with a potential client who ended up signing a contract that day for a $26,000 project, and specifically told him they chose to work with his firm because his website made them feel like he was the most qualified and trustworthy architect for the job. He closed several more new clients that week under the same circumstances.

It goes far beyond appearance though, because technology is continually advancing at a rapid pace.

For example, in the not so distant past, web designers only had to ensure that our websites would fit within a certain screen size, but today we need to accommodate a virtually infinite range of screen sizes because mobile traffic has now surpassed desktop traffic in all industries. There are many similar examples of changes in technology dramatically altering how we do business online.

This means that if you aren’t redesigning your website every few years, you’re going to be pushed out by competitors who are.

That’s why I’m going to share with the three biggest reasons you need to redesign your website this year. If you’ve already recognized these problems in your website and want to fix them to stop losing business to competitors, get in touch with us for an initial consultation.

Here we go…

Page speed (AKA PageSpeed)

A majority of web traffic today comes from mobile devices, which means that most of your visitors are viewing your website from a slower internet connection, on a device with less processing power than a typical desktop or laptop. This makes it more important than ever for your web pages to load as quickly as possible.

But page speed doesn’t only matter to visitors—it matters equally, or maybe even more, to search engines. (Which drive visitors to your website.)

Google has recently placed a huge emphasis on how quickly a webpage loads, and while they claim it’s not yet a direct ranking factor, page speed does have a significant impact on user experience, which they have confirmed is a direct ranking factor.

In other words, websites that load more quickly will tend to rank higher than comparable websites that load more slowly.

Page speed is also a significant factor in how frequently and thoroughly search engine spiders will crawl your website. They tend to crawl fast-loading websites more frequently and more thoroughly compared to slower websites, which usually means they will identify changes and/or new content in your website more quickly the faster your web pages load.

Right now you’re probably thinking one of the two following things. Either:

I’m sure my website loads super fast!

or

I wonder how fast my website loads?

I can tell you from first hand experience that unless you use a tool to accurately measure the speed of your website, then you’re only guessing and you’ll probably be very disappointed by the actual results.

Google’s PageSpeed Insights is a good place to start, but don’t stop there. While it’s a great starting point, it only provides limited data, so I recommend GTmetrix to collect more granular and actionable data. This will enable you to identify, prioritize, and fix every factor impacting your page speed, which has an adverse and significant impact on ranking .

While there are a lot of tactics you can use to improve page speed, an easy one that will provide a significant impact is upgrading your web hosting. Most small business owners look at web hosting as a commodity and purchase based solely on price, which limits them to shared hosting. A few clever web hosts have recently started calling this “cloud hosting” but that’s just a bullshit name for the exact same thing. The end result is that your website gets crammed onto a server with hundreds or even thousands of other websites, and predictably, speed suffers dramatically.

So which web host is right for you?

Well, I’ve worked with dozens of different hosting companies over the years, and after a recommendation from a trusted friend, I researched WP Engine, and then switched our own website over to them shortly after that. For now, I’ll just say that they specialize in providing lightning fast WordPress hosting and I highly recommend them, but I do plan to write a detailed article soon explaining exactly why they rock!

Responsive design

Since most web traffic today comes from mobile devices, responsive design is no longer a luxury, or even optional—today it’s mandatory.

While the primary reason for responsive design is to create a positive user experience no matter what device or screen size a visitor is using, it’s not the only reason. Just a few years ago, Google started telling us to design our websites to be mobile friendly, and shortly after that, they made it a ranking factor for searches from mobile devices. More recently, they began to display their mobile index for all searches, and now call it their mobile first index.

This means websites that are mobile friendly will usually outrank websites that aren’t. That’s a pretty important reason to ensure your website is responsive.

So what exactly is responsive design?

Responsive design utilizes HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to design a website that will transform based on the screen size of the device it’s viewed on. This may be as simple as a showing or hiding certain elements, or as complex as completely changing the layout and serving different media based on the screen size. For example, a website might serve smaller images or even omit video entirely on mobile devices because of smaller screen size, reduced bandwidth, and potential data charges to visitors.

It’s important to point out that this doesn’t mean simply redirecting visitors on mobile devices to a separate, stripped down version of your existing website. That approach is antiquated, unreliable, and Google specifically recommends against it for a variety of reasons.

A truly responsive website must be built from the ground up in order to present your content effectively to all devices and screen sizes, and to load as quickly as possible.

Outdated web design

Your website is often the first significant impression customers will have of your company, so it’s critical that it makes a good impression.

Web design trends change quickly, and many business owners feel like they’re too busy running  their business to keep up, so they simply stop trying.

Does that sound familiar?

Here’s the problem—customers will usually compare several companies before making a buying decision. If your website looks outdated, they’ll get the wrong impression of your company, often leading them to choose one of your competitors who made a better impression instead.

It may sound silly at first, but think about it like this—if you were interviewing several candidates for an open position at your company, which of the two candidates would you not even consider? Be honest!

It’s human nature. Appearance matters—especially when it comes to a first impression. And often, that may be the only chance you get.

Visitors don’t necessarily expect you to be on the cutting edge of web design, but they do expect your website to look current by today’s standards. In most industries, that means a complete redesign every few years, or more frequently in high tech industries.

Before redesigning you website, it’s essential to determine your objectives, develop a strategy, and account for new and/or deprecated technology.

So now what?

If you’re website doesn’t meet today’s standards, you know you’re losing business to competitors. I think it’s pretty safe to assume you want to change that, so you need to have your website redesigned to emphasize a up to date appearance, responsive design, and pages that load quickly.

If you’re already working with a web design agency, and you’re happy with them, get in touch with them and make sure your website meets today’s standards. If you aren’t currently working with a web design agency, or if you are, but you aren’t happy with them, feel free to reach out to Spartan Media for a consultation.

How to Set Up WordPress Permalinks to Maximize SEO

By default, WordPress doesn’t have the ideal URL structure for SEO, but this relatively easy fix is essential because a proper URL structure helps search engines to better understand the hierarchy of your website, which can help to improve organic ranking and traffic.

An easy way to understand the role of website hierarchy in SEO is to imagine the individual pages within your website as a series of progressively smaller buckets.

Your homepage is the largest bucket, and it would contain all of your second-level pages. Contained under each of those second-level pages would be any third-level pages and/or blog posts related to your second-level pages. This is a total of three levels, which should be plenty for most websites, however, four levels may be reasonable in some circumstances.

To search engines this looks like a series of sub folders under your root domain.

https://yourdomain.com/secondlevelpage/thirdlevelpage/

Technically, it is a series of sub folders, but instead of actually creating physical folders on your server, WordPress dynamically rewrites the URLs to appear as sub folders. The distinction is subtle, but as anyone who has ever had to manage a large website can tell you, it’s significant.

This matters because it helps search engines understand the importance of each page within your website, relative to other pages within your website. The greater number of relevant pages underneath a particular page, the more authoritative search engines will perceive it to be. In the eyes of Google, your third-level pages and/or blog posts support your second-level pages, and your second-level pages support your home page.

For this example, we’ll use one of our clients, Livestone Consulting, which is an architect in Tampa, Florida. Their second-level pages, which would represent their primary architectural services, include:

  • Pre-Design Services
  • Schematic Design
  • Construction Documents
  • Permitting Services
  • Bidding & Negotiation
  • Construction Administration
  • Forensic Architecture
  • Expert Witness Testimony

Their third-level pages would then consist of pages and/or posts that support each of their second-level pages.

How do we set up WordPress permalinks to maximize SEO?

The first step is to change the default permalink settings.

If you haven’t already done so, the next step is to publish your second-level pages, and then create corresponding blog categories. It’s important that the slugs for your categories exactly match the slugs for your second-level pages. This seemingly minor detail is critical because it determines how search engines will value each page within your website relative relative to other pages within your website

It’s important to point out that if your second-level pages are already published, but you plan to change their slugs at some point in the future, the time to do that is now. This is because changing them in the future will not only change their URLs, but will also change the URLs of all of your third-level pages—and it’s usually best to avoid that whenever possible. If you set everything up correctly now, the potential negative impact will be minimal (if any) and you won’t need to change it later, when the potential negative impact would be more severe.

At this point, each third-level page and blog post will appear, in the eyes of search engines, as a sub page of the applicable second-level page, based on the blog category they are assigned to. In other words, each third-level page/post adds more authority to the page it appears nested under.

WordPress permalink for SEO tutorial video

Why a Great Web Design Is Not Enough Anymore

Once upon a time, a great web design could mean the difference between a company either dominating their market or simply existing. Today, a great web design isn’t the sign of a cutting edge company—it’s only the starting point.

A powerful web design is an essential part of business today, and customers expect it to be:

  • informative,
  • easy to use,
  • fast-loading,
  • and mobile friendly

If your website isn’t all of these things, people will perceive your company as incompetent, unstable, and untrustworthy. (If you have this problem, get in touch with us about our web design services.)

Once these factors are buttoned up, your next phase of work begins, because at this point, your website is a lot like a great store hidden away on a back road that no one knows about. And if people don’t know your website exists, it can’t help sell your products or services.

So today, I’m going to share with you three things you need to consistently work on if you want to achieve success in your digital marketing.

Develop outstanding content

The half a dozen or so pages your website started with aren’t enough to produce results today. Successfully marketing your company online requires a steady stream of new content, such as blog posts, case studies,  infographics, videos, and podcasts.

Content serves several different purposes, each equally important.

  • It demonstrates your expertise, which helps bolster your authority and trust so persuade potential customers will choose your company over competitors.
  • It gives you and other people something useful to share on social media, which helps you to add value while keeping your brand in front of potential customers.
  • In the case of textual content, it feeds search engines with information to include in their organic search results.
  • It provides information that other relevant websites can link to, which helps increase both your referral and organic search traffic.

The mistake most people make is producing boring, self-serving content. They’ll churn out blog post after blog post extolling the virtues of their company, and then they wonder why no one is interested in what they have to say.

The key to producing the kind of content visitors will engage with, the kind they’ll share, and the kind that will help persuade them to become a customer, is to put them first. Your content should be useful for anyone in your target market, whether they buy your products or services or not.

A good way to determine if it will be useful is to ask yourself—and be honest, who will share it? If it’s not so useful and engaging that customers and/or industry peers feel compelled to share it on social media, talk about it with friends, or even link to it from their own website, then it’s not worth producing.

Build an email list

Relying on any traffic source that you don’t have absolute control over, like organic search, PPC, or social media, is a risky move because it could be eliminated at any moment, potentially decimating your business.

That may seem like an extreme statement, but just look at how Facebook’s algorithm whittled organic reach for fan pages to almost zero, or how Google’s Penguin update destroyed tens of thousands of legitimate businesses overnight.

Armed with your own opt-in email list, you can drive traffic and promote your products and services literally anytime. Want your fans and customers to read your latest blog post, buy your products or services, or engage with you on social media, just send them an email. It’s as simple as that!

It’s important to consistently add value by providing useful content more often than promotional content. Otherwise, you run the rush of turning off your subscribers, at which point, they will either begin ignoring you or even unsubscribe.

A good starting point, as outlined in Gary Vaynerchuk’s Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook, is to share three pieces of useful, non-promotional content for every one piece of promotional content. I suggest sharing at least five pieces of useful content to every one piece of promotional content though, because people today are deluged by promotional content, so providing more value ensures you stand out from your competitors.

It’s also important to use a legitimate email service provider, like AWeber, Mail Chimp, or Constant Contact, rather than just sending marketing emails from your personal account. This provides you with powerful list management tools as well as analytics that help you improve your results.

One final note on building an email list: don’t add anyone without their explicit permission. You’ll only annoy them and make them not what to buy anything from you.

Earn inbound links

Links from other websites to yours are the lifeblood of SEO because they are one of the metrics that search engines place the most value on. Without them, your likelihood of ranking for competitive keyword phrases is about as high as Donald Trump being asked to be the keynote speaker at the Democratic National Committee.

When building links, quantity matters, but quality is the most important factor. Skip the easy tactics that seem like low hanging fruit, including:

  • Bulk directory submissions (For that matter, with a few exceptions, directories are a waste of time and money.)
  • Paid links
  • Sitewide footer and/or sidebar links
  • Social bookmarks
  • Comment spam
  • Article directories
  • Link wheels
  • Guest posting on websites with little or no editorial oversight
  • Pretty much any “link building service” you find on Fiverr

Instead, focus on tactics that build high-quality, natural links. This is not very scalable, but it also means it will be difficult for your competitors to replicate, which gives you an advantage over them.

The Most Important Part of Building a Brand Online

I think it’s fair to say that today, most business owners understand the importance of building a brand online. What they don’t understand is how to do it.

I’ll share some good news and some bad news…

The good news is that building a brand online is incredibly simple. The bad news is that it’s very difficult. If that sounds like a contradiction, let me clarify. It’s simple because the process is not complex, but it’s difficult because it requires consistent hard work over a long period of time. In other words, there is no “secret” to it. Consistency is the most important part of this equation because it keeps your brand in front of your potential customers. This includes:

  • blog posts
  • media coverage
  • paid advertising
  • guest posts
  • interviews
  • social media
  • reviews

Most business owners start with the best of intentions, but unfortunately, they often set unrealistic expectations. They make a plan to publish blog posts too frequently, try to build a presence on too many social networks at once, or dabble with paid advertising, but don’t allocate a reasonable budget or give up shortly after starting. In most cases, they don’t appropriately plan for the amount of time, effort, and money their goal will require, and before long, it quickly disappears from their task list and they end up stagnating where they are.

Are you guilty of this? Don’t feel bad, it happens to the best of us.

But you need to understand that this prevents you from building and maintaining brand awareness—staying on the mind of potential customers, which means that when it’s time for them to make a buying decision, they’ll choose one of your competitors who have.

If you want to successfully build a brand online, here are the components and what goes into them:

Blogging

Do you regularly publish new blog posts that visitors, whether they buy from you or not, will find valuable? This is essential because it gives you a library of useful content to share on social media, but it also creates an opportunity to earn more organic traffic. If your content is really high-quality, it helps you to earn inbound links, which in turn, helps you earn even more organic traffic as well as referral traffic. You can come up with a lot of blog post topics just from the questions potential customers frequently ask you, but you should also develop a more robust keyword strategy to develop a steady stream of valuable content to help keep your brand in front of your audience.

Paid advertising

Once upon a time, you could drive a ton of traffic organically through social media, but those days are long behind us. Between algorithms and saturation, organic reach on social media has been whittled down to the low single digits. Likewise, paid ads are continuing to steal more of the space available in the search results, resulting in fewer click-throughs for organic listings. This makes paid advertising essential for building and maintaining brand awareness.

Media coverage, guest posts, and interviews

This is an absolutely vital component of building a brand online because it bolsters your credibility through third-party sources who already have a built in audience, but it’s not going to just happen. If hiring a PR firm isn’t in your budget, you’ll need to do it the old fashioned way by reaching out to media sources and bloggers to pitch them why your story would be valuable for their audience. Don’t be discouraged—this will be a lot of work and you’ll face a lot of rejection, but it’s well worth it. I suggest engaging with people long before your ask them for anything, otherwise, you’ll sound just like everyone else who begs them for favors.

Social media

Are you regularly sharing valuable information on social media? That includes your own content as well as content from other publishers. Do you use your social accounts properly to engage with followers, or do you use them more like a megaphone to simply shout about your products or services?

Reviews

Do you take the time to thank customers for positive reviews every single time? And how do you respond to negative reviews? Do you ignore them, or worse yet, attack the reviewer? Or do you try to solve their problem? How you respond here has a tremendous impact on whether potential customers decide to do business with you in the first place. You should have a proactive reputation managemen strategy in place, which includes asking customers to post a review on the websites that matter in your industry, as well as responding promptly to every review, whether it’s positive or negative.

7 Dumb SEO Mistakes That Smart People Make All the Time

If you’re anything like most of the hardworking business owners I talk to on a daily basis, you’re probably too busy running your business to stay up to date on the latest search engine optimization techniques.

I completely understand that. That’s why I’m not surprised when I see smart people making a lot of the same SEO mistakes. I understand that this digital marketing wizardry isn’t second nature to everyone else, the way it is for people like me who deal with it every day.

So today, I’m going to share 7 dumb SEO mistakes that I see smart people like you make all the time, to help you avoid making these mistakes yourself.

Treating SEO like a one-time task

This is probably the most common SEO mistake that I see smart people make because outside of our industry, most people simply don’t understand SEO.

I was recently talking with a potential client about marketing his product, and when the subject of search engine optimization came up, he insisted that he didn’t need it.

I asked about his goals again to make sure I was on the same page, and he confirmed that he did indeed understand the value in SEO and know that his potential customers would search for his products in Google using non-branded terms. It wasn’t until I dug a little deeper that I identified the problem.

“I don’t need SEO because my last web designer put it in when he built my website.” He proudly proclaimed.

“Ahh, this one again,” I thought to myself as I explained that search engine optimization isn’t simply a one-time task that you check off, never to think about again. The code on your website is only a small part of what goes into SEO.

So when does the work and/or cost end?

Well, never, unless you want to be overtaken by hungry competitors who are eager to plunder your precious organic web traffic.

Do you think your competitors are going to sit around, content to let you have all of the customers who are searching on Google for the products you offer, or do you think they’ll want them for themselves?

SEO is a lot like exercise in that it often takes considerable time and work before you see any results, and then it’s an ongoing and constantly evolving process for as long as you remain in business.

This is because you’re up against competitors—both current and any that may arise in the future, fighting over a finite amount of organic search traffic. At the same time, you’re also up against search engine algorithms that continually evolve to adjust for:

  • technological advancements
  • user behavior
  • goals of the search engines
  • spam/black hat countermeasures

In other words, search engine optimization is never “done.”

Using duplicate or similar meta description tags

I’ve seen a lot of websites where the same meta description tag was used throughout large portions of, or even throughout the entire website. This probably doesn’t seem like a big deal, right? After all, if you’re using a description that clearly explains what your company does, what’s the harm?

Well, it can harm your website in two big ways.

  1. Duplicate meta description tags can decrease the number of pages of your website that are indexed in Google.
  2. Duplicate meta description tags can adversely affect click-through rates in the search results, which can have an impact on future ranking. (Meta descriptions are not themselves a ranking factor.)

It’s important to write a clear, compelling meta description that is under 155 characters, and is unique for each page.

Not building links

Another common SEO mistake most people make is thinking that it’s just on-site SEO factors (the content and coding on your own website) that determine where your pages rank in the search engines.

It’s not. In fact, the most important ranking factor is links to your website from other websites.

Links are the life blood of search engine optimization because they signal to search engines that other websites consider a page to be an authoritative source of information on the topic.

There are countless link building strategies you could implement, but boiled down to its essence, link building is simply a matter of producing original, useful and amazing content, and then asking other website owners to link to it.

Before we go deeper into link building, I want to emphasize that where your links come from and how you obtain them matters. If you don’t follow Google’s webmaster guidelines, you will eventually end up receiving a penalty and can even be dropped from Google’s index entirely. If that happens, you won’t even show up if someone searches for your company name.

Building amazing content is the first step in link building because in order for people to link to your website, there needs to be something there worth linking too. Unless a publication is specifically featuring your company as the focus of their article, it’s highly unlikely that they will link directly to your home page, or even to your core pages. They will however, link to blog posts that contain original information they feel is both relevant and useful to their audience.

To say that producing content that is link-worthy is difficult would be an understatement. According to an analysis of over 1 million articles conducted by Moz and BuzzSumo, over 75% of blog posts had earned exactly zero links from other websites. Every niche is drowning in content today, and most of it is shit, so if you can’t produce something that blows peoples’ minds, you won’t earn any links—which means no increase in organic traffic.

The next step is outreach, where you ask others to link to your content. This is simple, but it’s certainly not easy.

You’ll start by compiling a list of websites that are both relevant to your industry and actively posting new content on a regular basis. The larger the better, because your conversion rate will be minuscule. This is a numbers game. When you reach out to them, you need to engage in a meaningful way that doesn’t sound like the same bullshit they get from everyone else.

If you haven’t been on the receiving end of a cold link outreach email, they usually sound a little something like this:

Hi Webmaster,

I love your blog! Great work!

Your readers would also love my great blog, so you should give them more value by linking to my post here:

http://bullshit.com/my-shitty-post/

Thanks in advance!

Joe Shmoe

Don’t. Do. That.

It’s disingenuous, and quite frankly, insulting.

In most cases, a cold email isn’t going to result in a new link to your site, no matter how great your content is. A conversion rate between 1–5% is considered pretty good. This means that for every 100 emails you send out asking website owners to link to your content, you should expect to earn between 1–5 new links. That’s assuming that your content is awesome and your email is engaging.

During this process, you should also work on developing rapport with the influencers in your niche. This will help improve the results of your link building efforts over time. Once you (personally and/or as a company) build a brand that people in your industry immediately recognize, outreach will become somewhat easier, but it will always be necessary. What that means is that no matter how authoritative your website becomes, you will still have to conduct manual outreach to build the new links necessary to stay ahead of your competitors.

Not producing original, useful content regularly

Your website should be a continually growing and evolving entity, but many people mistakenly believe that their job is done once they publish their new website. In reality, that’s only the beginning, because today’s consumer expects you to publish new content regularly. We’ve already discussed how producing original, useful content is essential to link building, but that’s not the only role it plays in your digital marketing efforts.

Potential customers visit your website because they’re looking for information. Information about:

  • your products and services,
  • customers experiences with your company,
  • the stability of your company,
  • trends and developments in your industry,
  • your expertise and capabilities,
  • how you compare with your competitors.

If your website hasn’t been updated in a while, potential customers will assume your company is a fly-by-night operation. They expect to be able to find the information they’re looking for quickly and easily, and when they can’t, they’ll assume you’re either hiding something or are incapable of meeting their needs.

Producing new content also helps you to earn more organic search traffic because you’ll have both a wider and deeper library of content for the search engines to evaluate. More content, provided that it’s relevant and based on a solid strategy, means more opportunities to rank for more keywords, and the more content you publish on a particular topic, the more authoritative Google deems your website to be for that topic.

This also helps to establish you as a thought leader in your industry. You can tell people how insightful and forward thinking you are all day long, but until they can see it first hand, it’s just meaningless self-promotion.

Regularly producing original, useful content demonstrates your expertise.

Ignoring responsive design

We live in a mobile world. In fact, Google is so serious about catering to mobile visitors, that they rolled out their mobile-first index near the end of 2016, which means they will create and rank search listings based on the mobile version of content rather than using a separate index for mobile and desktop.

This isn’t surprising considering the growth of mobile technology over the last decade. Today, there are more mobile devices than people, more Google searches take place on mobile devices, and mobile traffic even exceeds desktop traffic in general. Responsive design will only become more important in the future because the number of mobile devices will continue to grow and people will use them while out, as well as at home and work.

It’s important to point out that responsive design is not a ranking factor yet. However, without responsive design, visitors on mobile devices will have a poor user experience, which will negatively impact several current ranking factors. So while responsive design is not yet a direct ranking factor, it does have an impact on ranking through other factors.

Is your website mobile responsive? Google has a handy tool to get a general idea, but that’s only a starting point. Ideally, you should have several people who aren’t already familiar with your website test it on Android and iOS phones and tablets, both horizontally and vertically to be certain.

If your website is not responsive, you have two options; if you take your business seriously, hire a firm to design a custom responsive website for you, or if you’re on a shoestring budget and understand HTML and CSS, you can buy a premade responsive theme and edit it to suit your needs.

Ignoring site speed

Site speed is a critical, but often overlooked ranking factor. It also indirectly affects several other ranking factors related to user experience.

Most people view their own website from their own computer. This doesn’t give an accurate representation of the average experience because a majority of web traffic comes from mobile devices with limited processing power and less bandwidth compared to the more powerful processor and higher bandwidth of a desktop or laptop computer.

Since Google determines whether a page loads quickly enough, I prefer to get my data directly from them using their PageSpeed Tool. Once you have the data, it’s simply a matter of improving your website’s performance based on the listed bottlenecks until it loads within an acceptable range.

Using black hat SEO techniques

Search engine optimization takes a lot of work, which means it is not inexpensive. This sometimes leads budget-conscious business owners to try to cut corners.

You’ve probably seen some of these discount “SEO packages” advertised on websites like Fiverr, offering to submit your website to thousands of directories, let you guest post on their websites, or even sell you links to your website.

There are no short cuts when it comes to search engine optimization. If it seems too good to be true, it probably is—and will eventually get your website penalized.

So what is a black hat SEO technique, anyway?

Black hat SEO is any technique that attempts to artificially manipulate the ranking of a web page, including, but not limited to:

  • Machine generated content
  • Doorway pages
  • Hidden text or links
  • Buying links
  • Keyword stuffing
  • Negative SEO
  • Reciprocal links
  • Sneaky redirects
  • Cloaking
  • Manipulative linking schemes
  • Guest posting networks
  • Article spinning
  • Link networks
  • Rich snippet markup spam
  • Duplicate content

An easy way to think about it is this: if you wouldn’t be comfortable with explaining to a Google engineer the exact SEO techniques you’re using, then it’s probably black hat.