What are Keywords?

Keywords are terms or phrases that, when implemented into your website, can help connect you with people who are looking for what you do. In other words, when the keywords you use on your site are in alignment with the search terms people use to find the specific products or services you offer, there’s a better chance Google will present your website higher in the search results.

For example, if you were a dentist in Los Angeles, CA, phrases like “Dentist,” and “Dentist Los Angeles” would be good keywords because they’re actually terms people use to find a dentist in Los Angeles, CA.

Picking the Best Keywords

The quality of your keywords makes a big difference in how effective they are. Many factors go into determining which keywords are best for your website and blog, including:

• The size of your site
• How long it’s been around
• How many people are searching for a specific keyword phrase within the region(s) where you do business
• How much competition you’ll be facing for that particular keyword or keyword phrase
• How relevant a keyword phrase is for your business or organization

Making Your List

When optimizing content, you don’t want to have just one keyword phrase that you hammer on ad nauseam. Instead, you’ll want to create a well-rounded list of keyword phrases for every web page and blog post. Depending on the topic and the content length, this list could include 3–5 keyword phrases or more than a dozen. 

No matter the length of the list, make sure every single phrase is relevant to the topic, service or product you “discuss” in your content. Some call this “topic-based SEO,” among other things, but we just call it good writing.

For instance, if you have a pet food store that caters to dogs, well-written copy won’t be limited to dog food. You’ll want to talk about food for puppies as well as for older dogs … about different breeds of dogs and what foods might be best for them … and don’t forget dog treats! You might even want to cover how the foods you sell affect not only canine general health, but also canine dental health. You get the idea. Well-rounded keyword usage helps produce well-rounded content that’s good for the human eye — and for SEO.

Want to learn more about keywords and optimizing your website? Check out A Holistic Guide to Online Marketing by Joey Donovan Guido (our fearless leader over here at Cuppa SEO). Or, contact us anytime to schedule a complimentary consultation — we’re happy to take care of optimizing your website for you!

More SEO Tips …
– Optimizing Your Website: SEO By The Numbers
– Does Every Website Need SEO?
– 5 Simple Ways to Optimize Your Blog for Better SEO
– Soup Up Your Sub Headlines with SEO

The post Selecting the Best Keywords for Your Website appeared first on Cuppa SEO.

I know, this first thing you thought about when you woke up today was the size of the images on your website, right? Or maybe that was just me …

Regardless of how off the radar this topic may be for you, it’s an important one because image file size (KB, MB, GB) can affect site speed, which in turn has a direct impact on your SEO.

The good news is that if you have a WordPress site, there are plugins that can help you optimize image file size automatically.

How Image File Size Works

Every time you load an image to your website it has a certain file size, which is different than how big your image is on you site. The bigger the file size (typically in KB or MB), the longer the image takes to render on your site.

So, for instance, if you had professional team member photos taken and the actual file size of each image is a minimum 5MB, that’s fine if you’re going to print the photos, but it’s bad news if you place photos that big on your website.

Image Optimization Software

Enter the image optimizer, which can automatically lower the overall footprint of each image’s file size. We typically use an image optimizer called Short Pixel, but there are others out there. What’s nice about Short Pixel is that the cost is low, and it works in the background so you don’t have to worry about it.

Here’s an example of how it works

The file size of my image for this blog post (before I ran it through Short Pixel) was 184KB …

The file size was reduced 62.61% once it was processed …

Nice right?

This results in faster load time which provides a better user experience for your visitors. Google also likes fast load time and will give you an SEO bump when they see your site is fast (for more on this check out our article The Need for Speed: Improving Your Website’s Page Load Time).

Lossy vs. Lossless

There are two major options when setting up your image optimization software:

1. Lossy compression: this provides the highest compression rate, which means it makes your image file size as small as possible while still looking good. According to applications like Short Pixel, “this is the recommended option for most users, producing results that look the same as the original to the human eye.” This is what we typically use to reduce image file size.
2. Lossless compression: this provides a compressed image that is “pixel-identical” with the original image — so no image quality is lost. As you can imagine, this option does not minimize the footprint of your image as much as lossy — which means load time could be higher with lossless.

Note: We’ve found that if there is text in your imagery (as with a screenshot of a web page), lossy compression makes the image look blurred and pixelated. Definitely review your images once you’ve processed them to make sure they look good on a high-resolution display (Lille a MacBook Pro retina display or an iPad). And if your image is text heavy (like the screen shots on our Web Design Gallery page), it might be better to set your compression to lossless before uploading.

Optimized file image size is an all-around win for your website — bringing a better user experience to visitors and making Google happy too!

Want more tips and insights from Cuppa SEO?

The post Are Your Images as Big as Godzilla? appeared first on Cuppa SEO.

Imagine, for a moment, that you go to the store for a nice fresh loaf of artisan bread to go along with your dinner. When you get to the bread section, the shelves are empty, except for one old, hard loaf that would break your teeth if you attempted to bite into it.

What would you do? If you had to have the bread with dinner?

You’d probably go to another store to get fresh bread.

Your website is kind of the same — especially when it comes to how Google judges it.

In this case, instead of fresh bread Google is looking for fresh content.

Since it’s a critical element of SEO, let’s take a look at what fresh content is, as well as how to most effectively implement it into your website …

The Freshness Factor …

Fresh content is an important factor in how well your website ranks in natural search results on Google. But it’s important to know exactly WHERE to add this fresh content.

Some SEO and web design firms will suggest adding fresh content to your homepage and subpages on a monthly basis. If someone suggests this to you, or even worse wants to put you on a monthly retainer to keep your content fresh in this manner … smile, say thanks for the advice, and RUN! This is not the way you want to add fresh content to your site. For more on this, check out, The Freshness Factor: The Right Way to Freshen Your Website Content.

Create Fresh Content on Your Blog

Using your blog to generate fresh content for Google — and your viewers — is a most excellent choice.
Why? Because every time you publish a blog post, Google’s algorithm gets excited and says, “oooh, fresh content,” and gives you a little bump in website authority.

In case you’re wondering, adding a minimum of one blog post per week can do wonders for your “freshness factor.” Two is better than one and three is a game changer (in most cases), but once a week will give you enough traction to actually make a difference.

The post Get Your Fresh Content Here! appeared first on Cuppa SEO.

Welcome to Tip #7 in our SEO Tips series were we’ll be talking all about 

Crafting unique meta descriptions for each of your web pages and blog posts can improve the page’s clarity and user experience — as well as increase your credibility.

What are Meta Descriptions?

In case you’re not familiar with the term, meta descriptions are the short paragraphs that Google shows as part of their search results.

Here’s an example of what the meta descriptions look like when I searched for “ice cream” (in the Madison, WI area) …

It’s important to know that meta descriptions are only for the human eye — and have no SEO value. In other words meta descriptions don’t affect search engine ranking. But they’re still important because when they’re well written they can evoke a feeling of trust and peace of mind. If people are reading one of your meta descriptions, it’s your first (and possibly only) chance to engage with them.

Until recently, meta descriptions needed to be a maximum of 156 characters long (including spaces). Once you went past that character count, you’d see an ellipsis at the end of the meta description. Now, Google is allowing up to 300 characters (including spaces), but I’m not seeing consistency from Google with this yet, so if you can still fit what you have to say in 156 characters or less, it might be a good idea to stick with that for now to make sure you’re not getting cut short by the ellipsis — like you see in some of the examples above.

Here’s an example of what the meta description looks like for Cuppa SEO’s web design page. Remember, the thing we want to do here is be clear and engage with the reader …

Related Articles

• SEO Tip#1: Optimizing Title Tags
• SEO Tip #2: Search Engine Optimization and the Art of Optimizing Your Headlines
• SEO Tip #3: Not All Images are Created Equal (Optimized Ones are Better)
• SEO Tip #4: Is Your Content Rich and Relevant — or Just Plain Yucky?
• SEO Tip #5: Soup Up Your Sub Headlines with SEO
• SEO Tip #6: How to Make Terrific Text Links — Optimize Them!

The post Creating Marvelous Meta Descriptions that Engage appeared first on Cuppa SEO.

In this installment of our SEO Tips series, we’ll take a look at an oldie, but a goodie — text links.

Note: I could have said, “Contact Cuppa SEO about our holistic web design services,” in order to get another keyword into the text link, but it made the phrase feel unnatural — so I left it out. Remember, never sacrifice your content for the sake of search engine optimization!

Related Articles

• SEO Tip#1: Optimizing Title Tags
• SEO Tip #2: Search Engine Optimization and the Art of Optimizing Your Headlines
• SEO Tip #3: Not All Images are Created Equal (Optimized Ones are Better)
• SEO Tip #4: Is Your Content Rich and Relevant — or Just Plain Yucky?
• SEO Tip #5: Soup Up Your Sub Headlines with SEO

The post How to Make Terrific Text Links — Optimize Them! appeared first on Cuppa SEO.

In our second installment of our SEO Tips series we discussed the importance of optimizing the main headline (also known as a “title” or “H1”) on a webpage or blog post. Today, we’ll take a look at optimizing sub headlines (also known as secondary headlines) on your website and blog.

The post Soup Up Your Sub Headlines with SEO appeared first on Cuppa SEO.

Copy (also referred to as content) that lives on your website and blog needs to be rich, relevant and benefit-driven. It’s got to solve problems — and maybe even identify problems your customers didn’t know they had.

The post Is Your Content Rich and Relevant — or Just Plain Yucky? appeared first on Cuppa SEO.

In this installment of our SEO Tips series, we’re going to be talking about optimizing the images on your website and blog.

The post Not All Images are Created Equal (Optimized Ones are Better) appeared first on Cuppa SEO.

In the first part of our SEO Tips series we talked about the importance of optimizing your title tags. Here, in part 2, we’ll discuss optimizing page headlines (also referred to H1 headlines).

The post Search Engine Optimization and the Art of Optimizing Your Headlines appeared first on Cuppa SEO.

In our SEO Tips series, we’ll be examining solid, tested strategies to help your website rank better on Google.

As you may have guessed, we’ll begin with the title tag.

Did you know that title tags are an important part of search engine optimization (SEO)? In reality, most people don’t even know what title tags are, let alone how to optimize one.

The post SEO and the Power of Your Title Tags appeared first on Cuppa SEO.