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Recently, Google replaced its newest major update to its mobile search algorithm. Some are calling this “Mobilegeddon” or the “Mobilepocolypse”.

This major update will boost the ranking of mobile-friendly pages (responsive website design). There are five things that you need to know about how this update could affect the future of your sites SEO.

The update only affects mobile searches: This is a mobile first update and will only affect results from mobile queries.

The update does impact all languages: This is a global release so companies that manage websites across locations should take note.

This is one dimension for Google ranking a mobile query: This update raises the importance of a mobile friendly experience but isn’t the only factor being considered.

Strong content can (for now) overcome: User intent based on the query is still an important factor. If the content on your site is still the most relevant, it will still rank highly, for now.

We would strongly suggest that you take the steps into making your site mobile friendly.

With more and more people using smartphones and tablets every day, it’s becoming increasingly important to have a responsive website design (RWD) that will function across multiple platforms.

To explain it simply, a responsive design means a website’s pages reformat themselves depending on which device they are being displayed on, to create the most user-friendly experience. This is a huge difference from the past, as the solution would have been to create a whole new website for a mobile device.

When it comes to SEO, does a responsive design actually improve your results in the Search Engine Response Pages (SERPs)? Well I’m going to tell you now that the answer is YES! Keep reading to find out why!

Google loves responsive

As Google is the primary search engine 90% of internet users browse the web with, you’re probably going to want to try and impress it. Google recommends RWD as the best way to interact with mobile users, but also favours mobile optimised sites when presenting results for searches made on a mobile device.

From an SEO perspective, it is definitely a better choice to have a responsive website design rather than having two separate sites. This is because the responsive design will have one URL and one set of files for the search engines to crawl and index.

One website, one URL

Having a responsive website means that all of your previous SEO efforts are still going to apply to all devices, instead of having to start from scratch if you built a new website. This means that all your external links will still point to one URL (as opposed to one mobile website and one desktop site), giving your responsive website a boost in the SERPs. The same thing applies to your site being shared socially.

Responsive helps combat a high bounce rate

Even if your website is ranking high at the top of search results, if it doesn’t work effectively for mobile or tablet, your bounce rate will greatly increase. Google will take this high bounce rate as a sign that your website isn’t offering helpful and useful information for the users, and then, is likely to rank you lower in the search engines.

User experience is enhanced

Websites are essentially a tool for sharing content. A user-friendly site makes it easier for visitors to find, learn and share the content to others. Google makes responsive websites and user experience a big ranking factor, so it’s a no brainer to have a responsive website design.

Web design company Croydon

At Smart Cow Marketing we offer a free website review. We can analyse your website’s performance and develop a plan to boost your website’s potential. We also focus on other aspect of digital marketing such as social media, SEO, PPC, and email marketing.  

We are a marketing agency based in South London and work with small businesses, as well as those in accountancy and the construction sector. Drop us an email at Saymoo@smart-cow.com or give us a call on 020 3137 1826. 

Headings for SEO

Heading tags – what are they? A heading tag is a piece of HTML code that defines text as a heading. There are 6 different tags, h1 to h6.

To a lot of beginners, the thought of editing HTML code will sound like a daunting task. You don’t need to be afraid as a lot of good CMS sites will have a formatting drop down that allows you to simply highlight your text and click the heading type you want.

The importance of each heading tag is simply 1 as the most important, and 6 as the least. So, your most important heading should be a h1 heading, then a sub heading as h2 and so on…

It is vital that every page on your site has a defined h1 tag.

Advantages of heading tags

The heading tag is used to tell the search engine what the most important information on the page is. For example, if your business sold red shoes and your page had a title of red shoes that was defined as a h1 tag, the search engine will know that is important information and it is relevant to your business, improving your chances of appearing higher up in the search engine results pages.

SEO

Relevancy
• Search engine spiders check the relevancy of the header tag with the content associated with it

Keyword consistency
• The search engine spiders check the keyword consistency between the header tag and the content on the rest of the page.

The importance of h1
• The h1 tag is the most important tag, and should not be missed on any page. Search engine spiders pay great attention to the words used in a h1 tag as it should contain information about the content of the page, just as the <title> will.

Keywords
Before writing content for your pages, you should always have your keywords planned for what you’re writing about. You should use as many of these as you can in separate heading tags. This gives your keywords greater authority and tells the search engines that the topics you’re talking about are important and relevant to your business, resulting in your website ranking higher for those keyword searches.

Things you should not be doing with your headings

• Do not stuff your heading tags with keywords (no more than 2 per heading tag)
• Do not use more than one h1 tag on a page
• Do not use heading as hidden text
• Do not repeat heading tags on different pages
• Do not use heading for styling text. Use them to organise and structure your pages

The best practices of internal linking are greatly discussed throughout the web, lots saying that it is a complex task that only experts can do. Here at Smart Cow Marketing, we believe that it is a relatively straight forward task, and we’re here to give you some great tips and advice for a killer internal linking strategy.

The purpose of internal links:

1.Helps with website navigation
2.Defines the architecture and hierarchy of a website
3.Distributes page authority and ranking power throughout the site.

Create lots of content

In order to create lots of links, you need lots of content! This can be done by regularly posting to your blog/news page. If you don’t have a page, click this link to read the importance of a blog for your SEO strategy (that’s an example of relevantly linking between pages).

Lots of internal linking strategies propose extremely complex layers of pages and silos of content and a mathematically-balanced formula for number of links to levels of pages. With our experience, we’ve found that it really doesn’t make any difference, just so long as you have loads of links pointing to specific helpful places.

Use anchor text

You should use Anchor text for your links as opposed to linked images. Image links are fine, just as long as they are correctly alt-tagged.

Avoid these

There are two links you should avoid linking to in your content:

Home page. Most websites already have too many links pointing to your homepage. It is better to link to your internal pages to strengthen those and help further boost the overall SEO of your site.

Contact us. This is a common mistake made by a lot of people. We see it in the majority of blog posts we read, at the end of the post there’s a line of text saying ‘give us a call for more awesome stuff’ (or something similar). Only link back to your contact page if it is 100% necessary.

In general, you want to avoid linking to pages that are already in the main menu, as these will appear in every page already.

Natural links

Ensure that your links are natural to the reader. If the link matches the context of the content, the reader is more likely to click on it, even if it’s an external link (see what we did there?) as long as it’s something that the reader will be interested in. If it’s an internal link, the visitor will stay on your site longer and become much more engaged with your website experience.

ONLY USE RELEVANT LINKS there’s no point talking about a pair of cool new trainers and linking to a site about the wild adventures of an exotic parrot. Your visitors will get frustrated and bounce right out of your website. Read more about bounce rate and the impact it can have on your site’s performance.

Use a reasonable number of links

You don’t need to cram your blog post full of hundreds of links pointing to every page in your site. Nobody knows the amount of links that’s ‘reasonable’ you’ve just got to try and not take the P!$$. The posts we usually write are around 500 words. And we only link to 4 or 5 internal pages.

There are already a large number of links on all of your pages, in your menu, footer, adverts, main brand logo pointing to your home page (if you don’t have this, do it) and maybe some other places depending on your site.

Don’t make the mistake of having loads of links in your footer. If you have a site with thousands of pages, these links will soon multiply into tens of thousands of ‘spammy’ links and you’ll quickly be penalised by an algorithmic change that happened in 2013 and caught out loads sites that were found doing this. You don’t have to spend loads of time doing this either. You can work through your old content as and when you have the time and it really doesn’t take much time.

In conclusion, if you follow these tips, internal linking is not too complicated, or difficult.

SEO agency Croydon

As a digital marketing agency in Croydon, we’re well placed to offer local businesses digital marketing services and online marketing advice on relevant Local SEO Services and content marketing to help increase presence in search engine results pages (SERPs).

Get in touch to chat about your business goals and how a tailored SEO campaign can help your marketing strategy.