SEO For Small Business
SEO Guide for Small Businesses and Beginners. When you have a small business, trying to outrank your competition without having an optimized website will cost you a lot of wasted time and money. In our guide to SEO for Small Business and Beginners, we cover SEO tips for Joomla, Wordpress, CMS-based sites, landing page optimization, Google webmaster tools and Analytics and more. Whether you are a beginner in SEO trying to get your website ranking higher in search results, or a veteran search engine optimization specialist looking for the latest news and Google updates, read on and learn.
Free WordPress Schema Plugin
We would like to introduce you to a plugin that we have found that allows you to add "LocalBusiness" schema data to your WordPress site easily. Schema Factory is a simple schema plugin for WordPress that allows you to add schema markup to your site in minutes. Normally, we don't make blog posts over such a thing, but it works as advertised! Read More >>
How Much Should a Website Cost?
Identifying the various challenges and cost factors that go into web design and development. The purpose of this article is to help you understand how much should a website cost for your business. Or rather, how much should you be willing to invest in a website design for your business? This article is the best answer in the universe to that question. Read on to understand why. Grab a coffee; it's a big read. Read More >>
Should My Small Business Post, Pin, Tweet, and Gram?
Should My Small Business Post, Pin, Tweet, and Gram? Social media can either be a sandtrap or surprisingly effective marketing tool for smaller, local businesses. You know this. But how much effort should you put into? Is it worthwhile to outsource to a marketing agency?Read More >>
What Does Google Consider Spam?
What does Google consider to be spam or spammy? In this article, we look at 15 unique signals that may cause a domain or website to be penalized, banned, or marked as spam by Google. The different items you see below are known as "Spam Flags." The more Spam Flags triggered, the more likely that site is to be penalized/banned from being included in Google's index. All the items we will cover in this article may have different effects, and the penalty severity can....Read More >>
Best St Louis Marketing Firms 2017
Web Design and Company is proud to take home a Best in Business St Louis Marketing 2017 Award thanks to the readers of St Louis Small Business Monthly. St. Louis entrepreneurs, business owners, and our clients are valuable mainstays of our web design and white hat SEO services. "Marketing" is no longer the suit-wearing Mad Men monopoly of the 20th century. Today's markets move fast, and the differences between being seen and....Read More >>
How to Make Your Website More Effective (part 1)
Over the years, I have dealt with a large variety of clients, from a variety of different backgrounds. They come from all different industries, bring with them all types of budgets. Some already have websites; some don't and are looking to start fresh. From each client and background goals vary. Some want to bring additional traffic; others want to increase conversions. Through all variations, there’s one universal goal: they want their website to be more effective at bringing in revenue. They all want to make more money from their website, have their advertising dollars become more effective, and display the capabilities of their business in a positive and professional manner....Read More >>
7 Reasons Your Cheap SEO Isn't Working
Cheap SEO and marketing packages are a dime a dozen. There are quite literally millions of agencies designed for just that; to provide inexpensive, low cost SEO and marketing packages aimed directly at small business. Unfortunately, these packages take advantage of your lack of SEO and marketing knowledge, and often cost you more in the long run. Low cost SEO has many pitfalls, including long-reaching effects that could cost your business thousands of dollars to repair. Let's take a look at why your cheap SEO package isn't working, and why you should consider focusing your hard earned dollars in a custom-designed marketing plan....Read More >>
Google Mobile-Friendly Algorithm Update - Everything You Need To Know
Similar to other algorithm updates, Google is pretty good about announcing when they are about to stir things up. On February 26, 2015 Google went on Google webmaster central and announced that they were revamping their search algorithm to favor mobile friendly sites. “Starting April 21st, we will be expanding our use of mobile-friendliness as a ranking signal.” What this means is: You are about to witness a large upset in the existing algorithm, that could potentially have a greater impact on search engine placements than Panda or Penguin....Read More >>
Google Analytics - Bounce rate vs Exit rate
Understanding tracking data can be confusing. One of the popular questions we get asked when looking at Google Analytics reports is "What is the difference between bounce rate and exit rate?" Although they sound similar, they have very different meanings. Here is a simple and effective guide to understanding bounce rate and exit rate in your reports...Read More >>
How to Turn Off Mobile Bids in Adwords
In Google Adwords, it is possible to have separate advertising campaigns for mobile users and desktop computers. If you are new to Google Adwords, you may not know all the different settings and campaign types available. People who shop via their desktop and people who shop via their mobile phones have very different buying habits. Making sure that you are targeting the most most effective segment can save you hundreds, even thousands of dollars in advertising costs...Read More >>
5 HTACCESS Rules to Avoid Duplicate Content
So you just got done putting together the greatest website in the world, chock full of awesome share-worthy content and cutting-edge graphics. You submit your website to all the right places including Google, Bing and all the right social media websites. One month later, you aren't ranking for anything, and have no idea why. One reason could be: you have duplicate content hiding somewhere on your site and don't know it.
Use this simple guide to use the .htaccess file of your website to get rid of current duplicate content issues, while preventing duplications in the future when creating new pages...Read More >>
Is Buying Domain Names Profitable?
This is in response to a question a fellow mozzer once asked, and we thought that it deserved it's own article. Buying up expired domains, or purchasing keyword-driven domains is becoming more popular amongst the internet "get rich quick" crowd. The big question is: Can you make a profit by buying and selling domain names? If you get the right one, sure. If you plan on repeating the process over and over, probably not.
Something wise my father once told me "Something is only worth how much someone is willing to pay for it." This small seemingly unimportant statement has guided me in many selling and purchasing decisions in my life. Sometimes, it makes the reality all too apparent. So is buying a domain with the intention of selling it a good idea? Let's break down the details, and talk to some people that actively pursue this method. Yeah, we know a guy...Read More >>
Hiring the Right St Louis SEO Firm
Hiring a St Louis SEO firm can be a difficult task. As a company owner, you have to decide what is the best fit for your advertising, optimization and marketing needs. SEO is not a cut and paste type of service, and finding the right SEO company to handle your website optimization can be the difference between being on page one, and not being relevant in consumer searches. Web Design and Company constantly gets asked "What makes your SEO company better than the competition?" Well, sometimes we are, sometimes were not.
If your company is looking for quick fixes to rise to the top of search results, we may not be the best fit for that type of SEO management. Our strategies are both short and long term, focused on providing sustainable rankings for your St Louis business. We have put together a brief list of what you should look for when hiring a St Louis SEO firm, and how to judge if the company you are hiring is a good fit...Read More >>
The Illustrated Guide to Competitive SEO Analysis
Beginning a new SEO campaign should never begin with a blind leap. Each niche has it's own qwerks and items that make the products or services stand out, and customers react differently to different strategies used for marketing. One of the most important aspects of SEO is being able to properly analyze your competition. The process you use to "size up" the competition should highlight your SEO targets, and give you a fundemental insight of how to set up your new campaign. With that being said, it can be very confusing on how to get started.
Different industries, products, markets, changing consumer patterns and of course the ever-changing Google landscape don't make this easy. Hundreds of factors go into making a site successful, so where do you begin? This step by step workflow shows the different factors to take into consideration when identifying SEO competitors, gathering keywords...Read More >>
The Google Hummingbird Article You Should Have Read
Google's Hummingbird engine update was released on September 27, 2013, and has caused quite a stir in the world of SEO. Ironically released on the "birthday" (15th anniversary) of Google, Hummingbird was a long awaited change to the way that search queries were processed, and SERPs were presented to users. In this post, we will explain what you need to know about the Hummingbird update, and how this will affect your SEO and results for 2014.
Hummingbird is not an algorithm "update", it is an integrated update to Google's search engine at its core. Whereas Panda and Penguin affected up to 15% of search queries after all the updates for them were rolled out, Hummingbird affects more than 90% of all search queries... Read More >>
Twitter's Founder Launches Jelly, A Social Q&A Network for Mobile
On Tuesday January 7th, Twitter's cofounder Biz Stone has offically launched Jelly, a new question-and-answer-based app for Andriod and iOS. The purpose of this app is to allow you to ask questions, push them out to your network of friends, and get faster responses. In the offical blog post video, Stone says "If you have a question, there is someone out there that knows the answer." The new app is different in the way that it places a heavy emphasis on visuals, encouraging people to share photos and respond to questions about what they are seeing. Connections from both the user's Facebook and Twitter accounts can then respond to the question through the app.
"In a world where 140 characters is considered a maximum length, a picture really ...." Read More >>
10 Old SEO Strategies You Should Stop Using
I am proud to say I have never been responsible for a site that was hammered by a Panda or Penguin update. That being said, I have seen a fair share of sites come across my monitor that have. Usually the whole "Google fallout" theories start to run rampant at this point, and people start to run to the internet to check for any updates to Google's algorithm, usually brought on by a large traffic or ranking loss. Most people don't know why it happened, or more importantly, how to fix it.
Usually the whole "Google fallout" theories start to run rampant at this point, and people start to run to the internet to check for any updates to Google's algorithm, usually brought on by a large traffic or ranking loss. Most people don't know why it happened, or more importantly... Read More >>
Top 5 Social Media Tips From the Pros
So the holiday season is over, and if you are like me, you are probably wondering how to get your web presence noticed a lot more for the new year. Social media can be one of the easiest ways to do this. I know, you have probably heard that a million times, but what does it actually mean? If you are looking to improve your social media marketing and gain social trust factors within your business niche, it does not have to be a time consuming ordeal. In this post, you'll discover social media strategies the pros use (and some that are used here) to boost their social media marketing. Enjoy!
One of the simplest ways to save yourself time when trying to gain an audience, is to see what a particular audience is already becoming engaged in... Read More >>
Guide to Online Marketing and SEO for 2014
Even though 2014 isn't yet officially upon us, it's a good time to start thinking about your online SEO marketing strategy for 2014, and the coming year. The internet is a constantly changing landscape, and Google has changed the way that their search works with the latest Hummingbird algorithm update. As we have seen before with Panda, and Penguin, there will be updated versions of this algorithm, and those updates will impact search query results. No one can say for sure how Google will change search for 2014, but we can look at 2013 as a guide of where they are looking to improve the quality and relevancy of search results.
The best time to look at your marketing strategy, is before the changes officially take place, saving you...Read More >>
How to Gain Google PageRank
Gaining page rank in Google can be a tedious and challenging task, especially if you are new to the world of web design and SEO. With so much competition in Google's results, many companies resort to paying for traffic at cost, rather than focusing on their natural or "organic" traffic. Google's algorithm, which calculates the ranking and position of websites, can change up to 500 times a year. With so many factors tying into your search position, making sure your site stays relevant, and on top of search results can be a difficult, although not impossible task.
So How Does Google's PageRank Work? We knew you would ask that, so we decided to answer. ;). While no one outside of the labs of Google knows exactly how Google's algorithm works, we can look at some deciding factors...Read More >>
The Google Algorithm Explained
"The Google algorithm is essentially a link analysis engine that assigns a numeric value to any particular web page or document on the Internet and evaluates the volume, authority and relevance of links pointing to that document." -Source Link
Google has updated it's algorithm many times over the years. The most recent major change that had an impact was Panda, released on February 23rd, 2011. This was a hard hitting update, that targeted an estimated 12% of all search queries, a number that came straight from Google. While 12% might not sound like a large number, consider that billions of searches are performed every day. Read on to see how Google's Algorithm had evolved over the years....Read More >>