Tuesday 23 May 2017

How to Increase Your Business' ranking in Search Engines


Your website is looking great – you hired the best web design agency in New York. It’s been meticulously planned, designed and built. It works across a range of devices and it looks stunning… Then it gets lost in the abyss of the internet: an all-too-common occurrence.

The truth is, the internet is the world’s busiest and most demanding market(partly because it incorporates the world)! It’s 24/7 and fiercely competitive. Therefore, as important as a well-designed website is, it’s simply stop one on your online marketing journey.

Next, you must think about search engine optimization (SEO). It’s not a privilege reserved for the wealthy conglomerates. SEO is imperative to ALL business, especially the smaller ones without the resource to fund multi-million dollar ad campaigns. When executed properly, it can propel your website to the top of Google search engine results pages (SERPs), providing you with masses of authority in your industry.

What is search engine optimization?

Simply put, SEO is the process of optimizing content on a website to satisfy search engine algorithms to drive that website to the top of its results pages for specified key words and phrases.

For example: If you were a web design agency in New York, you might want to include words such as ‘web design agency New York’, ‘content writing services New York’ or ‘ search engine optimization services in New York’. These are phrases your target customer is likely to enter in search of your services.

Few people search beyond page two on Google – and almost nobody goes much further!Google is the leading search engine, processing a mind-blowing 3.5 BILLION searches every day, somany SEO teams choose to follow Google’s algorithms when creating SEO strategies. Which brings us to…

Why do I need experts?

Experts are indispensable when it comes to SEO. It’s about much more than simply including phrases within your content. It also incorporates an understanding and ability to adapt to ever-changing algorithms and trends. Content will always be king, and you can go some way to implement SEO on your website yourself via keyword research, customer analysis and incorporating said terms into your content. But this is just one area of the multifaceted approach necessary to successfully implement SEO and dominate SERPs. A clear understanding of on-page SEO, off-page SEO, the latest algorithms, backlinks, tag structure, URL composition and more are all crucial to achieving‘page one’ status.

When looking for search engine optimization services in New York, just like when looking for a web design agency in New York, or a baker in New York (or just about anything in New York!) There are quite literally thousands of options. The same can be said for almost any location, industry or product out there. Don’t let your website get lost.

All about them algorithms

An algorithm is a process or set of rules to be followed in calculations or other problem-solving operations. Google has set ‘rules’ to determine which websites appear in what order for any given search term. This is based on suitability and stops somebody searching for “Content Writing Services New York” and getting results for a bakery in Oregon!

Google used to change their algorithms every six months, but in today’s tech-savvy world, it is an almost daily occurrence.

A dramatic example of a Google algorithm shift - in its former, bi-annual form-was the Penguin update of 2012. The Penguin update cited SEO tactics that once saw businesses at the top of page oneas reasons to be penalised overnight, seeing page ranks fall from #1 to #101 – use to nobody!

Hiring a professional web design agency to take care of your search engine optimization services will be the investment you wish you made years ago. Experts who are knowledgeable of the latest Google updates and algorithms are critically important to your business’ website. They will work your website content and social media presence into Google Godliness levels! You will be flying up the SERPs in no time. Doing it yourself - on top of running your business – would require a level of time and study that many simply do not have.

The SEO professionals live, work and breathe this kind of work. Your website looks so good, why take the risk of it never being seen?

This is the syndicated copy of an original article posted at https://hummingbirdwebdesign.com/increase-business-ranking-search-engines/

Wednesday 17 May 2017

Why Web Design in New York is an Ongoing Job to Get the Best Results


There’s always the temptation as a small business to have an expert web design company create a stunning website for your business and then divorce yourself from the web project.  Website done, job completed.  But to have a website that gets the best results time after time, what you need is a website that is updated, revised and has regular additions to get top ranking in those search engines.  But how do you know when your website needs updating and what should you change?  Local small business owners need to know that a web design company in New York will keep you on a competitive edge.

Time for an update

Sitting back down with a professional web designer is the important first step in seeing if your website needs an upgrade.  One of the first things they will tell you is that if your website is more than three or four years old, it might need a major overhaul.  This isn’t because your original web designer did anything wrong – it merely means your website is not up to speed with the changes in website design and with the constant changes of the internet in general.

Perhaps the biggest sign that an update is needed is that your website isn’t fully mobile responsive. With the huge focus by Google and other search engines on people using their smartphones to search the internet, your website will never show in those results if your web design doesn’t function well on mobile devices.
A few examples of once popular elements that are now major negatives for your website include:

•    Tables – this was the standard way to build websites a few years ago but doesn’t work now and causes websites to be slow and awkward

•    Flash – there are a few newer alternatives to the Flash player like JavaScript and HTML5 that make it easier to show video on your website

•    Too many designers have worked on it – everyone has been adding their code over the last few years, and the backend of the website is a mess

•    Images on your website have not been appropriately compressed resulting in slow loading time.

Why updated websites rank better

Having your website regularly updated and refreshed is about more than just getting rid of a few outdated elements like Flash.  In fact, it might be considered a vital, regular task that the business needs to do to have good search engine results.

Why might you ask?  Because search engines love fresh content and every time you add or amend something on your website, they are more likely to re-index your website.  When those changes are positive, add to the website and make it more user-friendly, you might see an increase in search rankings and therefore a boost to traffic.

This doesn’t mean make loads of small, pointless changes.  One of the best ways to make your site fresh is to add new content such as blog posts or videos.  A site that is updated at least two or three times a week is considered a freshly updated site, so if you use a schedule of new content, minor updates and the occasion big change, you can keep your website ranking well.  Companies focusing on web design in New York will apply these tactics to improve ranking.

Rebranding

A website overhaul is a great chance to look at the overall branding on your company and see if you want to change other elements such as your logo.  This might mean that you want to work with a company who offers logo design in NY. You might want an entire redesign of the logo with new colors, fonts and a fresh look to work in sync with the new web design.

Deciding about rebranding is something you want to do before you approach any web designer as there is a big difference between updating old elements and a complete rebrand.  Look at the costs involved, if your brand really doesn’t suit your company any longer see just how far you want to go.

Conclusion

Regular updates to your website and periodical redesign programs ensure that your site is fresh, up to date and offers the best user experience.  It also allows the chance to change things that aren’t working, bring focus on new keywords or new target customers and test what works and what doesn’t.  By working with professional web designers, you can have a program of changes that benefit the website and keep it showing as fresh to those search engine bots.

This is the syndicated copy of an original article posted at https://hummingbirdwebdesign.com/web-design-new-york-ongoing-job-get-best-results/