Google has confirmed site speed as one of the 200+ factors that Google uses to determine your website’s position in search. The fact alone that the search engine giant has deemed site speed important should be enough for you to make it a priority. Beyond that, however, there are other reasons you should place a focus on the speed of your site.

Let’s look at a couple of other critical reasons why you need to focus on your site’s speed for the success of your SEO efforts and the success of your business.

Keep visitors on your site

In a recent report, Google noted that 53% of mobile users will leave a site if it takes more than three seconds to load. That’s where we’re at in this world in regard to our attention spans. Think about all the traffic you could lose if over half of the visitors to your site leave simply because they don’t have the patience to stick around longer than three seconds for your site to load.

And with every second it takes for the pages on your site to load, the chances that your visitors will bounce increases. Take a look at this chart from the same study. It shows that, as your page load speed increases second-by-second, the bounce rate also increases, a lot.

Source: Think with Google

Reducing your site’s bounce rate is a focus for virtually every site owner or it should be anyway. So, make sure to pay attention to site speed to avoid issues in this area.

Stop losing business

It’s challenging enough to craft a call-to-action that convinces your site visitors to buy your product or services without adding any additional hurdles. Sprinkle in a bit of slow page load time, and you could be missing out on a ton of revenue.

In fact, in 2012, Fast Company had conducted a study showing that even a one-second increase in page load time could cost Amazon $1.6 billion in lost revenue. Granted, your business likely doesn’t bring in the same revenue as Amazon, but you can still work the formula backward from Amazon’s actual revenue, determine what percentage that loss accounts for and then apply that to your revenue.

Source: Fast Company

Whatever that number is, I can guarantee you it’s not a number you want to lose when it comes to revenue. No business wants to lose revenue, no matter how large or small.

What causes slow site speed and how do you fix the issues?

You get the importance by now of making sure your site loads quickly. So, now let’s look at a few reasons why your site might be bogged down.

1. Large media files

Videos, images, graphics, and other large media files can take up a lot of space. When a visitor hits your site, your site begins to serve up images, graphics, videos, and other media files that are supposed to exist on the page on which the visitor lands. If the files are super huge, this can slow down the speed of your site.

The fix

Host your video files elsewhere. Rather than hosting them on the site, host them in places like YouTube, Vimeo, and other such services. Then, embed the videos on your site. That way, visitors can still play the video right there on your page, but they won’t deal with any lag in load time. Regarding optimizing your images, try to use file types like JPEG, PNG, and GIF. These tend to load much more quickly than less optimized file types.

2. Avoid slow hosting services

While you may be tempted to cut costs in an area like website hosting, I strongly advise against doing so. There are some affordable hosting options that do offer decent site speed, but often the cheap, cost-saving hosting services come with slow page load speeds.

The fix

First, look to avoid shared servers if you want your site to load fast. Shared servers are ok for smaller sites, but if you want to avoid the lag time, opt for another type of hosting. There are a variety of options here depending upon your site and your particular needs. So, do your research and figure out what the best option for hosting is for your site.

3. Not picking the right CMS

There are tons of great CMS options for creating your website. Options such as Joomla, WordPress, Wix, and others are higher quality options and often help with your site’s load speed. There are less reliable CMS options, however, which can slow your site down.

The fix

WordPress is my personal preference for all the great plugins and other available tools at your disposal to help you boost your site’s performance. Avoid some of the lesser-known options, especially those with reputations for being highly unreliable. Focus instead on more proven options. If you’ve never heard of a particular CMS, do some digging, look at reviews, ask your peers, and make the best choice for your business.

4. Having too many redirects

Redirects are an easy way to point site visitors away from content like a 404 page and toward relevant content that actually exists and might meet their needs. The problem is, if you have too many redirects on your site, you can start to aggravate your site visitors. Think about the extra second or two a redirected link causes as it finds the new content. Those seconds could lose a visitor’s attention.

The fix

I’m not saying don’t use redirects. They are a highly useful tool. That said, try to use them sparingly. Also, try to limit multiple levels of redirects which can add even more seconds on to the page load time.

5. Too much code

Too much code can bog down your site.  Javascript, CSS, and HTML can all include unnecessary code that can lead to your site slowing down.

The fix

Cut down on any unnecessary characters like commas and spaces. This alone can help speed up your site. Also, get a skilled developer to look at your code. There are potentially a lot of lines of code on your site that are unnecessary. One example of how this can happen is when someone copies and pastes something from a Word Document right into your site. This can add lots of lines of unnecessary code. In this instance, it’s best to instead copy and paste the text into a text editor, then bring the copy into your site.

These are just a handful of the many things that can slow down your site. Start here, as each of the above can have a significant impact. Then take it a step further and bring in an expert to dig through your site and analyze any other issues that might be impacting your site’s load time.

Wrapping things up

You’ve seen the evidence. Now I highly recommend digging around and checking out the page speed on your own website. Fortunately, that task is simple. Here are a few great tools to easily check the load speed of your website.

• Google’s Pagespeed insights
• YSlow
• Pingdom
• Uptrends
• Dotcom-Monitor

I can’t stress enough how important it is to focus on the speed of your website. Why put your site at risk of turning visitors away and missing out on revenue critical to the growth of your business. Even if you run a blog and don’t sell services or products directly on your site, your revenue likely comes through Google AdSense clicks or affiliate marketing, thus you still need to rely on high traffic levels and people sticking around your site.

So, no matter what niche you are in, get focused on site speed now, and address the issue before it becomes a major problem.

Anthony is the Founder of AnthonyGaenzle.com a marketing and business blog. He also serves as the Head of Marketing and Business Development at Granite Creative Group, a full-service marketing firm. He is a storyteller, strategist, and eternal student of marketing and business strategy.

Why site speed is critical for your SEO success and how to make it happen

A few years ago, “zoom and enhance” was an internet meme making fun of CSI-style shows using a technology that didn’t really exist. Taking a very low-resolution image and zooming in/enhancing it wasn’t something that could be done as depicted. 

However, in the last few years, new modern artificial intelligence (AI) models have changed that. The so-called “super-resolution” can now be done with pretty stunning results. Even better, the models and underlying code are open-sourced, meaning anyone can upscale their images using these new, state-of-the-art AI models.

I’m going to reveal how you can easily utilize this technology to automatically upscale your website images in bulk and why it can be beneficial.

The advantages of super-resolution

Super-resolution is probably best suited for e-commerce sites that don’t have super high-quality images and instead have small images provided by manufacturers, drop shippers or other ecommerce middlemen. 

Here’s a look at the kind of quality increase you could expect from this process.

Source: Imgur Album

You can see more full-size examples here. The differences are more apparent the larger the image is zoomed.

There are many potential benefits to super-resolution:

• Google prefers unique/non-duplicate images that it hasn’t seen before. It seems likely that applying super-resolution to a stock image or an ecommerce image that is widely used by many sites (and exists many times in the index) might make that super-resolution image the canonical “best version” of that image online, possibly leading to improved ranking benefits. 
• Higher resolution images are more often linked to and shared vs their lower-resolution counterparts. 
• Higher resolution images are more likely to attract and retain the attention of visitors, likely leading to increased on-site engagement metrics (lower bounce rate, higher time on site, etc.), which are known to be important factors in search rankings. 

However, there are some other factors to consider before proceeding. Site speed is a key SEO ranking metric. Increasing image resolution typically also means increasing image size. The tradeoff between quality and image size is an important one, and you should have an idea of how upscaling images may impact page load times.

If you already have only high-quality images, as you should, upscaling likely isn’t worthwhile.

Super-resolution upscaling also doesn’t do particularly well with text. It can create artifacts that decrease overall image quality. However, it works much better for images without text.

Despite those caveats, if you still think the increase in quality would be useful for you like the examples below, keep reading.

Implementing super-resolution on your site’s images

This guide requires that you sign up for two APIs:

1. SerpAPI – Used for scraping all indexed images from Google Image search 
2. DeepAI Super Resolution – Used for performing the super-resolution enhancements on each image

While it’s possible to achieve what is outlined here without relying on paid APIs, it does drastically simplify the process for relatively inexpensive API usage rates. If you have an ongoing need for using super-resolution on your images, implementing these models from their open-source base code is probably your least expensive bet. 

Using super-resolution on your images

Here’s what to do:

• Copy this Google Collaboratory notebook to your own drive. 
• Replace Frac.tl with your own domain in the code in the fifth cell.  
• Replace the API key in the fifth cell with the API key you get from SerpAPI.
• Replace the API key in the seventh cell with the API key you get from DeepAI.org
• Run each cell sequentially

The code does the following

• Scrapes all Google Image results for the domain given and downloads them into the images folder
• Gets the URL for each image in the image folder after they have been scraped and gives them to the Deepai.org super-resolution API
• Gets the super-resolution images from the Deepai API and downloads them to the super images folder

Conclusion

We are now at a tipping point in the emergence and democratization of AI-driven models that can do magical things. Learning Python opens up a huge new world where open-source code and open-source trained models now give even programming novices the opportunity to leverage these technologies for a huge variety of digital marketing goals.

Keeping abreast of this AI revolution will not only keep you ahead of the curve but will also give you the opportunity to be among the first to apply these advancements in new and creative ways, addressing previously unaddressable problems and challenges in our space. 

Kristin Tynski is VP of Creative at Fractl, a prominent growth marketing agency that’s worked with Fortune 500 companies and boutique businesses.

How to use super-resolution and improve onsite image quality

An excellent way for you, as a retail business, to reach more customers is to have built-in SEO tools in your point of sale system. However, if you don’t have that, you can follow these SEO tips we are giving in this article to boost your reach and sales. 

In this article, we will talk about the importance of SEO for retailers and a few tips to optimize your SEO. So, let’s jump right in! 

This content was created in partnership with whit Content Media.

The importance of built-in SEO tools in your point of sale system

Search engine optimization or SEO is the practice that makes a website or webpage rank higher in search engine results. There is much importance of SEO for retailers because we know from a few studies that almost 80% of shoppers do online research before buying, and almost 70% of consumers click on a link that is on the first page of SERPs. This means that when your website ranks well on the results page, you are more likely to reach consumers and boost your sales. 

SEO is often a long and hard process that involves optimizing elements on your site or webpage to boost its chances of ranking high in search engines. Your website may offer hundreds of products for sale, maybe with a dedicated page of their own. However, consumers don’t land on the pages but look for a particular product with a specific design, color, shape, etc. It is crucial that you optimize your products for these features in order to rank on search engines. Todays’ POS systems offer in-built SEO tools in your point of sale system taking much of the burden off your shoulders. Such POS systems are definitely worth the investment of a retailer.  

So, why do you really need SEO for your retail? Here, we discuss some benefits that you can get from an optimized website. 

You get more clicks

Did you know that the first five websites on the first page of the results pages get the majority of clicks? This is because viewers trust Google’s algorithm that ranks web pages and don’t want to scroll past the first few pages that may have the best content for their query. 

This is why you need to rank high in search engines so that your website gets the most clicks. 

You build credibility

In essence, when a search engine ranks a webpage on the first page, it is putting credibility on the webpage. As a result, viewers associate rankings with credibility. As your website starts ranking higher in search engines, it builds credibility and authority among your target audience.  

Low marketing costs

Following SEO practices that get you higher rankings organically is likely to get shoppers in less amount than a marketing campaign. It is also said that organic search results get you more revenue than paid search. Therefore, better SEO gets you more benefits than you can imagine. 

SEO tips for retailers

There are more than one billion sites in the world. To make sure your website ranks higher and reaches a diverse audience, you need to follow good SEO practices. Here are a few tips that you can follow to optimize your retail website. 

1. Make use of relevant keywords

Keywords are specific words that search engine users type when searching for a particular item. In regard to retail, there may be various keywords that your target audience may be searching for. By using these useful keywords in your content, you can reach these audiences and boost your sales. 

There are various ways you can find relevant keywords for your website. One way is to use a keyword tool, such as KeywordsFX, or Google Ad’s Keyword Tool. These will aid you in identifying keywords that your target audience uses to find the products you offer. 

You want to put relevant keywords in your pages’ URL, copy, product details, etc. to maximize your reach. 

2. Produce more pages

A website that has more web pages tends to rank higher than websites that have fewer pages. As a retailer, you have the advantage of putting more web pages in the form of various sections. Moreover, you can put up blogs, product descriptions, and testimonials from your customers to increase your webpages. Keeping a website with fresh content can do wonders for your SEO. 

However, it is important to note that you don’t just add pages just for the sake of adding more pages. Quality of web pages matters too in search engine rankings. Your web pages need to provide useful information to visitors that will make them stay for longer on your site and may even turn to valuable customers. 

3. Create shareable content

When you create engaging content that your viewers share across several platforms, you are essentially driving traffic to your website. For this reason, create your social media handles and put up interesting content that your target audience gets attracted to and shares across channels. You may even incorporate ‘share’ buttons on each of your webpages to prompt viewers to share. This allows more reach to your websites, products, and services. 

4. Optimize the images

Did you know that you can add little descriptions on the images you share and optimize your reach? 

Keywords can also be included in the alt text and file name of every product photo on your website, as well as non-product images. This enables search engines to determine what your photo is showing, evidently improving your search engine rankings. 

They know what’s there, wrapping up

SEO plays a very crucial role in getting more reach and credibility. For a retailer, optimizing your website can help you get more customers and build trust among your audience. In this article, we showcased the importance of SEO in retail and gave a few tips for boosting your SEO rankings. If you have in-built SEO tools in your point of sale system, you won’t need to worry about a thing. However, you can achieve a boost in SEO through using relevant keywords in your content, producing more pages on your website, creating content that gets shared across various channels, and optimizing the pictures you put up on your webpages.

SEO tips for your retail store

Whether through featured snippets and knowledge graphs, or carousels of movie times and podcast episodes, Google’s SERPs have increasingly become a one-stop-shop for users’ needs. This has led to a rise in what has been termed “zero-click search”, where results pages provide enough information to save users from clicking onto any organic results at all. 

As previously reported, these zero-click searches account for just shy of 55% of all Google search results, outdoing organic results altogether. And with users becoming more reliant on these integrated SERP features — including job listings and social media feeds, as well as familiar paid results, all viewable on Google itself — SEO practitioners might think they have their work cut out trying to optimize for space in that remaining 45%. 

But rather than think of it as futile, consider it instead as an opportunity. As with any significant change to how Google presents its results pages, zero-click is not as much of a hurdle as you might think. Read on to learn more about how you can tailor your search strategy to make zero-click work for you. 

1. Focus on clicks-per-search during keyword research

If you work in SEO, you’ll be familiar with the strands of data which are used by the main keyword tools to help you determine which terms are most worth optimizing for, such as search volume and where your pages currently rank for those terms. In an increasingly zero-click SERP landscape, however, there is one often neglected metric which could see you rethinking your wider strategy. That is CPS, or clicks-per-search. 

CPS data is particularly useful in the context of zero-click, as it takes into account the rate of traffic these keywords obtain from people finding your page through SERPs, rather than simply how many people are looking for the term itself. If your pages rank well but achieve a low CPS, then you’ll know it’s time to re-optimize your content for related keywords with a better CPS rate. 

2. Target featured snippet positions

Featured snippets make up a huge part of the zero-click landscape, though they only appear for 12.3% of search results in total. Ahrefs has noted that around 82% of them are presented in paragraph form, with 11% showing as a list, and 7% as a table. Consequently, not only should you be identifying featured snippet opportunities relevant to your website, but you should also be considering how to best format your content to have the best chance of occupying a given featured snippet. 

SEO tools like Ahrefs and SEMrush can tell you which queries already exist with featured snippets, helping you to find opportunities to create relevant snippet-worthy content that appeals for long-tail search queries. You should keep it concise, no more than 55 words and use HTML to appropriately mark up any lists or tables.

Keep user intent in mind, and be sure to adapt your content to the way a query’s current featured snippet is presented on SERPs. 

3. Optimize your content on Google’s own property

One other reason for zero-click search’s increased prevalence is the sheer number of resources and tools that Google has at its disposal. Naturally, from a commercial point of view, Google wants to promote and prioritise these features to users. It’s therefore critical that your business’s profiles and content on each Google property are optimized accordingly. This can give it the best chance of being seen at the top of SERPs, which goes beyond the confines of regular organic search. 

To maximize your chances of visibility in these areas of SERPs, you should ensure that you have filled out all relevant information on your Google My Business profile, which will also be beneficial when it comes to your Google Maps appearance. Likewise, optimizing your YouTube videos with informative, keyword-rich titles and descriptions, and categorizing them correctly will give you the best chances of being seen, and improving your CPS rate. 

4. Incorporate structured data into your content markup

Despite not necessarily being a ranking factor per se, schema markup is important. Making use of it in tandem with keeping your Google My Business profile updated can encourage crucial data regarding opening times and contact details to be pulled through in SERPs. 

Marking your content up will also have benefits when trying to rank for rich answers, snippets or “People Also Ask” queries related to your target keywords, as well as events or information which could appear in carousel view. As noted above, optimizing for these features will allow you to take up more real estate within a results page — and in an increasingly clickless search landscape, this kind of visibility is vital. 

5. Use relevant images and optimize thoroughly

In a zero-click SERP landscape, optimizing for all of Google’s metrics is key, and that includes image search. Incorporating eye-catching, unique and relevant images throughout your website is something you learn in web design 101, but it’s easy to make them work for you in an SEO context. 

Image filenames and alt-text are two signals that have traditionally been used to rank images within Google’s image search tool. But beyond appearing higher in image results, optimizing images can hold benefits within Google’s organic SERPs. For example, the image in a featured snippet is often provided by a different website than the one from which the text content is taken. This means that, even if your website has been unable to obtain the featured snippet’s text, you have a second opportunity to do so via the featured image. 

Edward Coram James is an SEO professional and the Chief Executive at Go Up Ltd, an international agency dedicated to helping its clients navigate the complexities of global SEO and the technical aspects of delivering location-specific pages to targeted audiences.

How to adapt SEO strategies for the zero-click search landscape

Pretty much everything you think you know about SEO today will be out of date tomorrow. This makes the online world an exceptionally volatile environment, where big fishes swallow the small ones.

In spite of this, many small businesses with a small budget for SEO are finding their feet in the online marketing world. How are they doing it? 

Research and experience have shown that domain age, numerous (quality) backlinks, and quality content are among the competitive advantages of businesses that are dominating the online marketing world.

And given that getting these things cost time and money, they present a formidable entry barrier to small business owners who want to get into the SEO game with a small budget.

For small business owners with little budget for SEO, chances are their website is relatively new, they do not have a budget for backlink building and even the job of creating content for their websites rests entirely on them. 

Before you turn away from SEO, remember the classic of Ryan Holiday,

“The Obstacle is the Way.”

The last decade is replete with stories of how savvy business owners found their ways to go face to face with the giants and, sometimes, defeat them.

The online world is not very different in that aspect. If you can follow the following steps, Internet marketing success, against all odds, can be made-to-order.

In this guide, I will show you what small businesses are doing to defy the stereotype and make SEO success on a shoestring budget, in a relatively short time.

1. The low-hanging fruit strategy

If you have been tinkering around with SEO for a while, you’ve probably heard of the term “long-tail keyword”.

Long-tail keywords refer to the specific keywords searchers are likely to use when they are close to making a purchase online.

To put this in perspective, here is an example.

If you want to start a blog on how to start a blog, for example, chances are you will not get found on Google given that the key phrase is too broad.

But if you break this down a little bit further and try to rank for “How to Start a Blog for Free,” your chances of ranking high on SERPs become brighter because you are targeting a fraction of the audience of the first key phrase. 

Another example is, if you are selling shoes, keywords like “shoes” are short-tail keywords, and trying to rank for them means you are probably going to be competing against Amazon and Gucci.

You don’t want to melt away like a snowflake under the sun, do you?

But if you try narrowing it down to more specific keywords such as “mens shoes,” or “best holiday shoes,” you have a better chance of getting to number one on Google SERPs for this kind of keywords. 

I ran the word “shoe” on a keyword research website. Here is what the result looks like:

The number in that red shape refers to the level of organic competition of that keyword, otherwise known as Keyword Difficulty (KD).

While the keyword “shoe” has a very high traffic potential, you do not have the wherewithal to weather the cutthroat competition of that field.

Now, look at the image below.

You can see that another keyword “men’s shoe” KD is a little above 32. That is your long-tail keyword and anything that falls into that category.

When you look at the number of organic traffic, you’d find that you can receive up to 38,000 monthly organic traffic for that keyword. For a small business owner with a limited budget for SEO like you, this is not too bad.

All you need to do now is to find as many of these long-tail keywords as possible and use them to plan your content calendar.

Now that you have found the low-hanging fruits, what is it that you are supposed to do with them?

Follow through with the next step.

2. Keyword research

This sounds obvious, or like something you have just done, but wait a moment.

Now let’s take one of our short-tail keywords and plug it back to the keyword finder and see what we’ve got.

As you can see, even under the keyword “mens shoe,” we still find potential keywords that you can place strategically under your post and rank for or use to develop an independent blog post. 

That is why it makes sense to do thorough keyword research to further see what other keywords you can place in your blog post for your major keyword and rank for as well.

While it is advisable these days to keep every single blog post focused around one keyword, having two major keywords to rank for in a single blog post is not a bad idea, according to Hubspot.

Well, on certain occasions, I have seen a single blog post that ranks for multiple keywords.

3. Write in-depth blog posts

According to a 2016 research, the average blog posts that rank number one on Google has about 1,900 words.

In the past, what it takes to rank on Google is a string of keywords. In other words, keyword stuffing WAS all it took.

Not anymore. Thin content was one of the primary targets of Google’s Panda. For a post to rank on Google, it is well understood that thoroughness is a sine qua non.

Posts that make it to the number one position on Google are in-depth and full of trusted sources. But do not mistake a long post for an in-depth post. 

An in-depth post proffers value — every single word in it.

Embedding posts with visuals such as videos, infographics, and photos might mean additional advantages to boot.

While there is no denying that relevancy is what matters, most posts that meet the standard of relevancy required to please searchers are the long ones that offer more than vague answers.

And of all people, a little unknown business owner who wants to do SEO on a small budget needs to offer all the value she can.

4. Keyword related and non-keyword related on-site SEO

The bedrock of your on-site SEO efforts is your content which, I believe, we have discussed as incisive as possible.

However, on-site SEO involves more. Much more.

Let’s look at the most important things you need to pay attention to in your on-site SEO efforts.

5. Keyword-rich content

You know we talked about keyword research earlier in this post. But when I say keyword-rich, I do not intend “keyword-stuffed.”

Assuming you’ve now found the keyword around which you want to base your blog post, it is time to use this keyword strategically in your writing to tell Google what the post stands for.

Lucky for you, this doesn’t have to be much of a struggle if you are using WordPress. All you need to do is install Yoast SEO on your dashboard and it will help guide you in writing a keyword-driven article.

6. Mobile-friendly web page

Do I even need to mention that? Nearly 60 percent of searches made online are now from mobile devices. And that Google continues to change its algorithm to suit this trend in search method is telling enough.

Optimize your site for mobile-friendliness and you are on your way to a better ranking on Google. This article gives you clear steps as to how you can achieve a mobile optimized site.

7. Page load speed

When Google announced their Google Mobile-First Index, they further made it clear that site speed has become a ranking factor. Several findings have since shown that this is true.

If you are going to reap the benefits of your SEO efforts, then your site speed is something you must pay attention to.

How, then, do you increase your site speed? Ways abound, and some of these ways can be dauntingly technical.

So, if you are doing SEO on a small budget and, like me, you suck at coding, I will advise you to allocate a huge part of your lean budget for the technical aspects.

I will, nonetheless, tell you what it takes and my recommendation for you as someone who is doing SEO on a shoestring budget.

8. Minifying CSS, Javascript, and HTML

Our websites are constituted of some little tiny ugly codes (Sorry, programmers, they are ugly to us). 

Those little tiny objects are made up of unintelligible commas, spaces, numbers and all sorts of nebulous characters. 

If you are a techie, then it wouldn’t cost you much to remove unused code, code comments, unnecessary spaces as well as other characters.

But for the uninitiated like me, you’d stand a better chance if you outsource this to professional web designers.

9. Image optimization

Image is another element that can take a lot of space and clutter up your website, thereby making the loading time a bit slower than is desirable.

As much as visuals are important for a successful blog post, keep in mind that the average image recommended for a blog post is 1200 x 628 pixels.

To optimize your image for SEO, you want to do it in such a way that it doesn’t compromise the quality of your image neither does it impact your SEO in a negative way.

There are many image optimization tools online. Look them up here.

10. URL structure

When it comes to SEO, you cannot afford to have a URL that looks like an HTML code. 

An SEO-friendly URL must be one that’s easy to read for search engines and gives humans the idea of what they are about to click.

Research has shown that URLs are among the key elements searchers consider before they click on a link.

In the olden Internet days, it would not be too hard to see URLs that look like specks of dirt, but such URLs these days are but condemnable heresies in the sight of lord Google.

Take a look at the illustration below to get an idea of what you should and should not do when it comes to URLs.

Source: Neil Patel

Here is a checklist of what you should have in your URL

• Use your keywords in your URL: For example, if you have a blog post about where to find the best dog food, your URL should look like this: www.blog.com/where-to-find-best-dog-food. You can see it looks almost like a complete sentence. Here is an example from a blog I wrote about podcast hosting platforms: https://contentmarketingprofit.com/10-best-podcast-hosting-sites-and-everything-you-need-to-succeed/. Notice how it gives you an idea of what you are about to click.
• Keep it short and simple: Keeping it below 60 characters has always been the recommendation. Short and sweet doesn’t mean you should overdo it though. Always try not to go beyond 60 characters.
• Hyphens are better used as a separator in a URL than an underscore according to Google.

11. Link internally (with caution)

Linking to your other blog posts from a relating one has become a rule of thumb in writing blog posts.

And in case you don’t know, it isn’t just a fad designed to make you look like a professional blogger.

Its benefits include delivering link juice to other pages, showing Google the relevancy of posts to one another, making it easy for Google bots to crawl and index your pages and of course, keeping humans on your site longer.

But the “with caution” above means, when cross-linking internally, be wary of using too much exact-match anchor text in your links.

If you do, Google might think it’s an attempt to manipulate and penalize you for it. 

12. Copy: Good, relevant, great copy

Yes, I know I’m supposed to write that as “metadata” here, but metadata isn’t particularly a ranking factor.

It’s just a clicking factor which, indirectly, makes it a ranking factor.

What you put in your metadata matters. Bear in mind that aside from your title, your metadata is what tells users whether to click or scroll down.

As such, do your best to ensure that your metadata hits home. Create short, concise, quality descriptions that convey value to the user searching the internet for either information, purchase, feedback, or any other reason.

13. Go for the big link

It’s been many years since Google started using link signals as an important ranking factor. Links are still the most important external factor in SEO, and they aren’t about to go away anytime soon.

Now it’s time to start building backlinks, first, for your site as a whole, and, second, for your money pages in particular.

While this looks like a straightforward venture, be careful and observe the following rules in building links or you might run into a problem.

But before we go into the rules, let me quickly take you back to our first step in this journey.

Remember I clearly stated that you must find the long-tail keywords around which you are going to build your blog posts? Now, it’s time to hit your competitors where they are most vulnerable. 

What this means is that for every least competitive keyword you find, your competitor has the least number of backlinks going to that.

Analyze their link profile using tools like Ahrefs and try outdoing them with backlinks on those ones.

To put it this plain text, if your shoe-selling competitor has a blog post about “mens shoe” just like you do, and the number of backlinks that goes into that is twenty, to outrank them at that one on Google, all you need is twenty-one backlinks to a similar blog post on your site.

If you have nailed your on-page SEO already, consider this a silver bullet on outsmarting your competitor.

Now let’s quickly run through some link building best practices.

A. Quality, not quantity

If you go after low domain authority sites in the interest of haste, you risk hurting your SEO. 

While it’s not necessary to only go after sites with the highest domain authority, learn to go after sites with great domain authority. Anything from 60 DA and above is okay.

But even sites with 40 DA are also useful so long as they aren’t too many. Your best chances though lie in getting sites with 60+ DA by your side.

B. Have a healthy mix of anchor text

For someone who wants to rank a site for a keyword such as podcast platforms, for instance, you may be tempted to want to build a link profile with those two keywords: podcast platforms.

But I guarantee you that there is no faster and surefire way to get your site penalized. Google suspects an unnatural amount of links with the same anchor text pointing to the same source.

If you must build a link profile, then have some diversified anchor texts. 

C. Avoid black hat link-building no matter the glamour

And I can’t stress that enough.

There are many link vendors on the Internet who sell you on quick generic links that will get you penalized rather than rank.

The struggle to build links can be overwhelming for someone on a little budget and the lures are all there. But patience to do the right thing never gets too much. Don’t be in a haste to rank a rank that will truncate your well-planned efforts.

Even if those generic links work for you in the short term, what it will take for all these gains to disappear is Google penalizing you.

Avoid buying links, PBNs, as well as all other kinds of black hat link building that are being touted on the Internet.

In the end, build a huge and healthy link profile around your low-hanging fruits. This can be achieved by becoming a guest post rockstar and willing to withstand a lot of virulent rejections.

Or better still, create likeable assets in terms of valuable articles that bloggers may naturally want to refer to.

Need an example? Link Building for SEO: The Definitive Guide

Another thing that will help you in your link building campaign is bloggers outreach. Heaps of articles exist on the Internet teaching you how to go about these things in detail.

As you build this up, your domain authority significantly improves, arming you with the experience and money to go big and eventually share the field with your big competitors.

And from the very beginning, the purpose of this blog post is to teach you how to start small and go big with a thin budget for SEO.

It is a piece of article written with a simple philosophical understanding in mind, that is; sometimes, you have to take one step back to potentially take two forward.

Conclusion

If you’ve been searching online to seek answers for how long it takes to rank on Google, you might have come across articles that saunter a little bit around and end up saying six months. 

That might have been true in the past but not anymore. Whenever Google updates her algorithm, there will be traffic losses and gains. Most times, these are not due to correctness or error from your end.

But SEO has lived long enough to have fundamentals and so far as we know, the things identified in this blog post have stayed long enough to become hard and fast rules in search ranking efforts. 

If there is anything we’ve learned in the past decade, it is a simple truth that big dollars are not always the sole winning ingredient — anymore.

Will, innovation, grit, unceasing creativity, and a touch of luck are all you sometimes need to win. When you plan to use some SEO marketing for your business but you have a little budget, you aren’t expected to exit the stage. 

You can still win, but only if you try.

SEO on a shoestring budget: What small business owners can do to win

Anchor text variation is one of the best ways to tell Google what a specific web page is about. It is used to help readers find more information about a topic and also factors into ranking your web pages. While it is a great tool, it can be the downfall of your SEO efforts if not used correctly. 

Many people have tried (and are still trying) to manipulate search results. One way to do this is to link from specific anchor text in an attempt to rank for the specific word or phrase. Unfortunately for these folks but fortunately for those of us doing it right, we are no longer in the olden days of SEO and these types of black-hat techniques no longer work. In fact, they are likely to get you penalized. 

One of the best ways to stay out of a penalty is by practicing link diversity. There are many ways to do this – you could try linking from various domain extensions, different domain authorities, and using a mixture of “follow” and “nofollow” links. For the sake of this article, however, I want to focus specifically on varying anchor text. 

Why vary your anchor text?

Because. Google…

That’s the simple answer, but let’s go a little more in-depth. Google looks at your link profile when deciding how to rank your web pages. Part of your link profile involves the anchor text used to link to your website. 

Source: SparkToro

So, you should have specific anchor text that talks about your web pages, right? Well, sort of.

Using specific anchor text is fine, but when you start to use the same anchor text, Google will get suspicious. It will make your backlink profile look unnatural and likely lead to lower search rankings, if not a Google penalty. 

When linking to your website, you need to vary the anchor text. Natural links will come from various anchor texts as webmasters link differently. There is no way all websites got together and decided to link to your website from the exact same anchor text. Google knows this, which is why you will be going down the road of a Google penalty if you don’t incorporate diversity. 

Using long-tail in your anchor text variations

So, how do you choose anchor text variations? There are many ways to do this, but I will show you some that will keep the meaning of your anchor text to best help with SEO. The first is mixing in long-tail keywords with your exact match anchor text. 

Example

Let’s use the keyword phrase “anchor text” as our example. Instead of linking from that exact phrase, use the following long-tail variations:

• “using variations of anchor text in your backlink profile”
• “how to vary your anchor text for better link diversity”
• “how anchor text variations matter in your link profile”

I just made those up, but you can see how we use the exact match keyword within a long-tail anchor text. Google will still see the main anchor text and take that into account, but you also have a variation so as to show a natural link profile (and not artificial link building). 

Using LSI Keywords

The above examples I just made up on the fly, but you can get more technical if you want to vary your anchor text and ensure you keep the meaning of the term you are trying to rank for. What do I mean by that?

Sometimes people simply choose anchor text variations that they think are similar. While they may be similar in wording, they may not be similar in meaning. And yes, it makes a difference. The term “anchor text variation” and “exact match anchor text” contain the same keyword, but they will return very different results when you search Google. 

Source: Google Search

That is where LSI keywords come into play. LSI stands for latent semantic indexing and is a term used to describe keywords that Google feels are similar to each other. And hey, if Google says they are similar, then they are (since Google is the one who determines where they rank). 

You can find LSI keywords in a number of ways. Use an online LSI keyword generator or go to your Google AdWords account and search for specific keyword variations in your ad campaign. You can also simply Google your main term and then look at the bottom of the page for similar searches suggested by Google. 

Using the last suggestion mentioned above, I found the following LSI keywords for “anchor text variation”:

• “how to create anchor text”
• “anchor text best practices”
• “anchor text generator”

This means you can use all three of these to link to the same webpage and Google will see them as the same or similar, without penalizing you for using the “exact” same anchor text. Make sense?

Final word on anchor text variation

There are a number of techniques and strategies available to you when it comes to SEO, but building a diverse link profile is one of the highest impacts. Even within the context of diversifying your anchor text, there are multiple strategies, as you can see. For example, you can add advice such as isolating your current anchor text structure to ensure it is diverse. Without going too far and adding a layer of confusion, however, I think you get the main point which is you must vary your anchor text. By doing so you are creating a diverse link profile that will show Google your links are coming naturally, and you aren’t involved in any link building schemes. 

What variations have you used for anchor text diversity?  

Anthony Gaenzle is the Founder of AnthonyGaenzle.com a marketing and business blog. He also serves as the Head of Marketing and Business Development at Granite Creative Group, a full-service marketing firm.

Anchor text variations: Your key to link profile diversity

Whether you’re migrating your existing online store or starting a new one, Magento is considered the ecommerce platform. In this post we are going to dive into SEO best practices to follow, looking at technical considerations and touching on content strategy. We will predominantly be concentrating on Magento Open Source.

What is Magento?

Magento is an open-source ecommerce platform developed by Varien. The first beta was launched in 2007. Since then it has had a number of owners (or maybe “custodians” would be a better term) including eBay, a private equity firm and, most recently, Adobe.

It’s a beast

In 2017, four years after its initial proposed launch date, Magento 2 was released. This may sound like a long delay, but with 1.84 million lines of PHP code and 239,000 lines of JavaScript – before you even consider HTML, CSS, XML, and other entities – you can appreciate the sheer scale of the task.

Given its size, it’s not the easiest ecommerce platform to get to grips with but, when it comes to sheer grunt, there isn’t much out there that can out-punch Magento.

Migrating?

Before we start, if you are migrating from another platform then you might find our post “The site migration tool for redirecting URLs like a boss” helpful.

Is Magento SEO-friendly?

Magento has many SEO-friendly features. However, first and foremost it is an enterprise ecommerce platform that can connect (via APIs and extensions) to a whole host of the world’s most popular payment gateway, order fulfillment, stock management, and CRM systems.

However, regardless of how SEO-friendly, it is out of the box, you’ll always want to be one step ahead of your competitors, right?

Let’s get optimizing. First, start with your theme.

The biggest consideration for any theme is how it handles the main navigation. A good test is to disable CSS and JavaScript (the Web Developer toolbar makes this easy), this then enables you to view the HTML structure. The out the box product Magento offers a pretty elegant solution that uses a semantically pleasing, nested unordered list. We would suggest using a theme that doesn’t deviate too far away from this convention if you aren’t 100% sure what you should be looking for.

Another area to check is to run the theme through Google’s mobile-friendly test. With Google’s mobile-first index nearly fully rolled out, making sure your site is fully mobile-friendly is a must.

Configuration setting

Considering the power of Magento, the backend isn’t too complicated and the options are split quite intuitively. All the following settings can all be found in the “Store – Configuration”.

General – Web – URL Options – Auto redirect to base URL

Selecting “Yes (301 Moved Permanently)” will mean non-www traffic is automatically redirected to www or vice versa.

General – Web – Search Engine Optimization – Use web server rewrites

Magento’s code is based upon a variation of the MVC framework. For non-devs, in simple terms, this means templates are called via the URL structure. This doesn’t always lend itself to human or SEO-friendly URLs. Ensuring this setting is set to “yes” means Magento will tidy up the structure. For example, “storename.com/index.html/page-name” will become “storename.com/page-name”.

General – Web – Base URLs – Base URL

If you are running with an SSL certificate, which all e-commerce sites should be these days, then this should be set to the same as the Secure Base URL that is “https://sitename.com“. This will mean anyone attempting to access HTTP will be redirected to HTTPS.

General – Design – Search Engine Robots – Default Robots

This might seem like an obvious one, but we’ve seen development sites pushed live having a global meta robots tag with the “noindex, nofollow” value. So, ensue when going live this is changed to “index, follow”.

General – Design – Search Engine Robots – Edit custom instruction of the robots.txt file

This is where custom amends to the robots.txt file can be made. You can disallow any pages or directories you do not want search engines to index.

Catalog – Catalog –  Search Engine Optimization  – Use Categories Path for Product URLs

Let me use the much-coined SEO phrase – “it depends”. If this is set to “no” all products will appear in the root directory which is “storename.com/product-name”. This option is the most manageable and trouble-free setting to use, especially if your products appear in multiple categories.

When set to “yes” the URL will show the path of categories and subcategories, that is “storename.com/categry-name/product-name”.

If you are familiar with the concept of content silos and think it is a strategy you want to employ, then you will want to set this option to “yes”.

You should be aware of potential duplicate content issues though. If you are unsure then it’s really not worth the risk.

Catalog – XML sitemap

This section allows you to set frequency values and priority settings for categories, products, and CMS pages. For most applications the default values are sufficient.

In the “Generation Settings” section, you can also set the sitemap to auto-generate/update by setting “Enabled” to “Yes”. This is usually a good option with the frequency set, depending on how often you add new pages to your site.

Catalog – XML sitemap – Search Engine Submission settings –  Enable submission to Robots.txt

This will add a line to your robots.txt file informing the search engines where to find your XML sitemap. You can submit it via the Google Search Console, but a bit of automation is always good. So unless you have a specific reason not to then this should be set to “Yes”.

Site speed, the elephant in the room.

It’s no secret that Google likes a fast site, and it’s also no secret that due to the size of Magento’s code base it doesn’t have the world’s best reputation for speed. However, there are some quick wins you can make.

1. Host server

This will largely come down to your budget. Magento does run a basic shared server environment, but if you can stretch to a dedicated server then you will have so much more processing power at your fingertips

2. Caching

Magento has a sophisticated caching system that should be implemented. If you navigate to “System – Cache Management” you will want to make sure that all caches are set to “Enabled”. Often in the development stage, these can be switched off.

3. Flat catalog

By default, Magento uses the Entity-Attribute-Value (EAV) database system. This means that products and their attributes can be split over many tables. It’s a very flexible model but also slower when compared to a flat system. For this reason, Magento has the option to switch to using a flat catalog. The more categories, products, and attributes you have, the bigger the benefit you will see here. To enable this feature go to – “Configuration > Catalog > Storefront”. Here you will find two options, “Use Flat Catalog Category” and “Use Flat Catalog Product”, set both of these to “Yes”.

4. Image optimization

Ensure that all images are sized no larger than they will appear at their maximum size within your responsive theme. Images should also be saved in the correct format with SVGs used for logos and graphics where possible.

5. Browser caching

This isn’t something that is an option in the backend of Magento. You’ll have to get your hands dirty by manually updating the .htaccess file. There are plenty of resources on the net that can provide guidance on this… just remember to make a backup on the .htaccess before you amend it.

6. HTTP/2

If you know, then you know. If not, it’s best to pop a support ticket into your hosting provider on how to implement this. HTTP/2 allows browsers to perform multiple requests over a single connection. With a basic Magento home page requiring around 200 requests, this is a no-brainer.

7. Extensions

It’s good practice to test your site speed before and after the installation of an extension. You can also do this retrospectively by disabling existing extensions. If you do find an extension that is causing speed problems then you will need to weigh up the benefit vs site speed cost.

Layered navigation

What is generally referred to as faceted navigation is known as layered navigation in Magento. It lets users filter down products in a category by their predefined attributes. This is a feature that users have grown to expect when navigating ecommerce sites. It’s also a feature that has given search marketers more than a few headaches over the years.

If you take as an example a category page with 20 products, and within those products, there are five colors, five sizes, and four styles. When you consider you can filter by any combination of attributes, one category page has now turned into more than 100, all with their own URL. To compound this, you can then also order the products by name, price or number, and then select where you want them ascending or descending. As these options generally also update the URL, we are now up to 600 URLs. When you consider this is just one category you can appreciate it could cause problems with indexing.

Don’t get stuck in the spider web

We have seen ecommerce sites with millions of pages needlessly indexed, due to faceted parameters, on more than one occasion. Not only does this cause issues for Google being able to figure out what are the important pages on your site are, but they can also become spider traps.

This is where search engine bots will spend so much time crawling they essentially give up on your site and go somewhere else.

Managing this issue is where search marketers earn our keep. So, how can we accomplish this in Magento?

Unfortunately, there is not a completely elegant solution that’s straight out of the box. There are extensions that you can install that do make the job a little easier or you could even write some custom code yourself with the help of user forums.

Ultimately what you are looking to achieve are any of the following solutions

• Add a canonical tag that references the non-filtered page
• Nofollow all links to filtered pages and add a “noindex” tag on the linked pages
• “Disallow” the pages in your robots.txt file

Another solution is declaring the URL parameters within Google’s Search Console. At the time of writing, you still have to do this via the old interface.

Which solution you choose, can depend upon the site. For instance, the canonical tag might be a good solution if you have only a few filterable attributes in your layered navigation, but as it still requires Google to crawl the pages to find these tags, if you have 100s of attributes it could use a large proportion of your crawl budget (even though the pages aren’t being indexed).

We have a dedicated post on faceted navigation if you would like to read more on the subject.

What next?

So you’ve got the right products at the right price, you’ve got your technical SEO sorted but so has your competition. How do you set yourself apart so you stand out in the SERPs?

Content

A solid content strategy is what we do best here at Zazzle Media. We won’t dig too deep into this subject here, as we have numerous other posts we will point you in the direction of, and it’s not a topic exclusively related to Magento. What we will do is cover some of the areas you should be looking to cover:

Functional content

You can read up on the importance of having engaging functional content here.

Category content – In the admin area navigate to – Catalog – Categories – [Category] – Content – Description

Category pages will often drive a good proportion of traffic to your site. Categorizing your catalog to align with your keyword research will be worth the time and effort and help your site realize its full potential. When generating copy for the pages, a top tip is to look at the TF*IDF using a tool such as Ryte. This will highlight any words that are over or under-optimized for our page based upon the main topic.

Product descriptions – These descriptions can be added on your mass import CSV file or by navigating to – Catalog > Products > [Product] > Content > Description in the admin area.

Try to steer clear of using descriptions provided directly from the suppliers or manufacturers, as you can bet they’ve already been used on numerous other websites. This can be a big task with larger catalogs, but set a certain amount of resources aside every month and concentrate on your most popular items to start with.

Informational content

There are various ways of publishing news/blog content on Magento. A popular solution is to integrate WordPress using the Fishpig extension. This has been around for years and there are versions for Magento 1 and 2. It allows one-click login to both platforms and lets you associate posts with specific products which is a useful feature.

This is the area where a good strategy can pay dividends. Performing a gap analysis on your top competitors is an effective way to identify quick wins. Some comprehensive informational keyword research will also highlight questions and topics users are searching for. All this information can help you put together a content calendar that should align with business focuses and seasonal trends. Considering the different stages in your sales cycle, and the questions your users might have at these points will enable you to create a comprehensive resource of information.

In summary

Developing a site on the Magento platform isn’t always the cheapest solution to launch an ecommerce website, however, on the flip side, you’ll never want for a more powerful solution or be short of advice from the vast developer community. You also should have any issue in integrating it with the product information management (PIM) tool of your choice.

With a little bit of configuration, you should also have a site that is SEO-friendly. Regardless of the platform, the output is simply a mixture of HTML, CSS, JavaScript, images and other resources. So fundamentally the same rules apply. Also, remember SEO isn’t a one-hit solution, it’s a strategy that is constantly evolving. Stand still and your competitors will catch you up and take your customers.

Mark Chisholm is an SEO Executive working within the Search & Data Team at Zazzle Media.

Quick wins for Magento SEO

As of January 2019, there are more than 1.94 billion websites. That’s a lot of competition. What’s one great way to stand out? Great images. In fact, vision dominates all other senses when it comes to interacting with and absorbing information.

Here are three quick facts to help you understand how critical images are for people (and for SEO):

• 90% of all the data the brain transmits is visual.
• The human brain processes one image in the same amount of time it would take to read 1000 words. (Yes, turns out the old adage is indeed rooted in scientific fact.)
• The recall value of visual content even after three days is 65%, whereas the recall value for written text is merely 10%.

With the majority of search volume coming from phones — and coupled with the fact that people’s attention spans have reduced to eight seconds — it’s essential for websites to be able to deliver a quick, frictionless, and delightful user experience.

Image optimization serves as a major part of this puzzle.

What can image optimization do for my users (and for SEO)?

1. By shaving seconds off your site speed, it can reduce bounce rate and improve site retention.
2. It helps improve page loading speed, which is a major Google ranking factor.
3. It can help improve your keyword prominence. Read more on that here.
4. It helps in reverse image search, which can be a big value add especially if you’re a product-based business.
5. Many devices and desktops use high-resolution screens, which increase the need for good quality images.

Basic image optimization tips

These are some tips that anyone can apply for any type of site (even WordPress), so you’re not solely at the mercy of your developers and designers.

1. Choosing the right type of image: Vector or raster?

• Vector images are simple, created by using lines, points, and polygons. Vector images are best applicable for shapes, logos, icons, and flat images. They have as good as no pixelation when you zoom in, making them apt for high-resolution devices. Additionally, you can use the same image file on multiple platforms (as well as for responsive website design) without having to use multiple variations.
• Raster images, on the other hand, are images that are made of rectangular grids, each packed with multiple color values (pixels). Raster images provide depth to the imagery you would want to convey, giving it an emotional and psychological appeal as these images look real. However, if not handled well, these can heavily hamper your site’s loading speed! Plus, you might have to save multiple file variations to ensure they’re compatible on different platforms and fit for responsive designs.

Here’s a table that Google shared to help understand the pixel-to-byte relation. In short, you’ll get an idea of how heavy one image can get based on its dimensions.

Source: Google

Google also mentioned that it takes four bytes of memory to deliver one pixel. Imagine if you had several images on a site with 800 X 800 pixels. our site would take at least something around 625 kBps. Or in simpler terms, imagine an elephant participating in a rabbit race.

Bottom line

I would suggest wisely using a mix of both. An ideal ratio could be 40% vector images and 60% raster images.

2. Picking the best image format – SVG, JPG, PNG, or GIF?

Best format for vector images:

SVG is the only, and the best, option for vector images. Due to its flat imagery, you also benefit from high quality that is easily scalable.

Best formats for raster images:

• PNG: Produces high-quality images with heavy file sizes. It can be suggested only for times when you want to save every detail of the image.
• JPG: Produces good quality images which aren’t heavy in terms of file size. However, these are lossy images, which means you’ll lose some minor image details permanently. JPG is undoubtedly the preferred image format, which gives you the convenience of hassle-free downloading and uploading of images. Because of this, they’re the most widely used — around 72.3% of websites use JPG image formats and most of the phones save images as “.JPG” files. They are especially suggested for ecommerce sites and social media.
• Gif: If you’re looking for animation, GIF is an ideal choice as it supports 256 different colors chosen from the 24-bit RGB color space. As of now, just 26.6% of websites use GIF formats.

Here’s a chart that could help you take a call on which image format is best to use.

Source: W3Techs

Note: The data in the above chart is of May 15, 2019

3. Resizing images

With a cloud full of devices it’s obvious why people get confused about ideal image sizes.

Note that image size and image file size are two different things. Here we’ll explain how you can get ideal image size (also called image dimensions).

As part of image dimensions, we’ll also discuss aspect ratios.

What’s an aspect ratio?

Aspect ratios tell the width and height of an image and are written in an “x:y” format.

Why is it important?

Remember the time when you tried scaling an image and literally blew it out of proportion? This is exactly what it saves you from. Referring to an image aspect ratio while cropping or resizing images helps you maintain the viability and beauty of the image’s dimensions.

You could refer to this image Shutterstock created to enlist some commonly used aspect ratios.

Source for the image and the table data: Shutterstock

Aspect ratio	Typical dimensions (inches)	Typical dimensions (pixels)	Ideal for
1:1	8 x 8	1080 x 1080	Social media profile photos and mobile screens
3:2	6 x 4	1080 x 720	Photography and print
4:3	8 x 6	1024 x 768 pixels	TVs, monitors, and digital cameras
16:9	1920 x 1080 and 1280 x 720		Presentations, monitors, and widescreen TVs

With reference to the table above, it’s best to focus on the 1:1 and 4:3 image ratio that are apt for social media, mobile screens, photography, and print.

You might have your own dimension templates based on the content management system (CMS) you’re using.

According to Squarespace, the most ideal size for image optimization on a CMS is 1500 and 2500 pixels.

Here’s a quick and simple answer to spot the most common image sizes for the web.

Source: Shutterstock

Bottom line

From personal observation, I can suggest using 1080 X 1080 pixels and 1500 X 2500 pixels.

If you’re feeling too lazy to go through all these details, you could also try scaling the image from the corner arrow while you’ve pressed the “Shift” key. Works for some platforms.

4. Naming images – Best practices

Search engines have brains without eyes, so unless you name your images right, they won’t be able to  “read” your images nor rank you accordingly. This is where your keywords come into play. As I’ve mentioned above, if you name your images well, you can improve your keyword density and chances of ranking.

Let’s explain this with an example:

• How people commonly save images – “Haphazard/random numbers and alphabets”, “Flowers can dance”, and “What was I thinking”
• How  people should save images  – “five-tips-for-image-optimization” and “the-ideal-method-for-naming-images-in-2019”

Name your images in all small letters with hyphens in between and leave no spaces. As you’ve seen, I’ve used the keyword “image optimization” in the “five-tips-for-image-optimization” example. You’ll be surprised with how much that helps in ranking.

Bonus

You could also use the following to improve keyword usage in your site content:

• Alt text (If your image is loading slowly, this text appears in place of the image so users can get an idea of what should be there.)
• Captions (Text that gives a short description, helping users know more about the image.)

Plus, if you have an ecommerce site, you could even make good use of structured data to give the search engine more specific details about your products’ color, type, size, and a lot more.

5. Compressing the byte size of the image files

Compressing a file is possibly the simplest yet the most crucial part of image optimization as it directly relates to the website’s loading time. Points one to four prepare you for this final stage of image optimization.

Two live examples of how much load time can cost your bottom line:

• Amazon.com observed a one percent decrease in sales for every 100-ms increase in the page load time.
• Google experienced a 20 percent drop in revenue for every 500-ms increase in the search results’ display time.

What’s the ideal image file size?

A file size below 70 kb is what you should be targeting. In case of heavy files closer to 300 kb, the best you can achieve is a 100 kb file size. Doing so saves your images from taking extra milliseconds to load while it gives you lossy, compressed images that do not compromise the visual quality.

How can you decrease an image’s file size?

All you need to do is drop these files on a file compression site and you’re all set. These are some good, free image file compression online tools:

• TinyPNG/TinyJPG – (Compresses .png and .jpg files – 135 kb reduced to 43.9 kb – Does up to 20 images at a time – Supports dropbox)
• Image optimizer – (Compresses .png and .jpg files – 135 kb reduced to 49 kb – Only does 1 file at a time)
• WeCompress – (Compresses .png, .jpg, and other files – 135 kb reduced to 48 kb – Only does 1 file at a time)
• EzGif – (Compresses .gif and other files – 2MiB reduced to 1.77MiB – Only does 1 file at a time. It also lets you edit the gif before compressing it.)

Bonus tips

• Use web fonts in place of images with text on them as they look better, do not need to be scaled with the image, take less space, and save loading time.
• Use 72dpi resolution for your images.

Closing notes

You could be using all these image optimization tips and still get stuck with a site that loads in 13 seconds or even worse. This is when you might want to ask yourself:

• Do I need all these images?
• Which images are redundant?
• What’s the best place to put images on the site?

Website content, both visual and written, has an intertwined relationship that stimulates emotions and inspires people to further engage with your product or service. People (or at least I) judge a business through its website so feel free to tell us, which was the last impressive website you visited? Or what have you done for image optimization?

Image optimization for SEO: Everything you need to know for success

A great website is a powerful combination of quality content, appropriate web design, ample SEO efforts, and marketing. Web design and SEO go hand-in-hand, and both play a part in developing an SEO-optimized website.

This further lays emphasis on the major role played by web designers in building the entire website and its online reputation as well. To get better at SEO, web designers need to get a deeper understanding of the commercial aspects of websites. Apart from creating killer designs, web designers should always be aware of some of the basic SEO insights that can implement positive change in their entire web design approach.

In this post, we’ll discuss the basics of SEO for web design, whether you’re building a new website or revamping an existing one.

Site structure

The structure of your website is essentially how your audience gets around. There is always a peculiar way for the information to flow on a website. This path is taken by every visitor to reach their destination i.e. the information they are looking for. Every web designer must keep the fact in mind that if the site visitors are having a hard time going around the website or reaching their point of destination, the site’s traffic will always be affected.

To put simply, the structure of the site is the casual flow of navigation for new and experienced website visitors alike. The web design should be approached in such a manner that all visitors can seamlessly experience the site’s navigation and get around it with utmost ease.

As a general rule, pages should be no deeper than 4 clicks from the homepage. This will help your site’s SEO by allowing search engines and users to find content in as few clicks as possible. Make sure the navigation isn’t complex for the user nor confusing for search engines.

The compulsion of a responsive, mobile-friendly web design

Mobile traffic as a share of total global online traffic in 2017 was 52.64%. Well, that means that every web designer needs to get the fact that a mobile-friendly website will help them get better at the traction of the traffic. A responsive website is highly favored by search engines and it can only happen when the web designers approach it in the correct manner.

Having a responsive web design will help your website adjust to the pixel-width of the screen upon which they are being viewed. This will work to equate and enhance the user experience on every device. Less work for the audience means that they spend more time on your website. So, don’t be that website that 57% of internet users say they won’t recommend because of a poorly designed website on mobile.

Image optimization is crucial

Web designers play a very crucial role in deciding the aesthetic appeal of the website they are working on. Right from the typography, the use of colors, patterns, geometric shapes, symmetry etc., they also handle the choice of images that would make it to the website.

Hence, optimizing the chosen images is a must because large images slow down your web pages, creating a roadblock for optimal user experience. Depending on the website builder in use, web designers can optimize images by decreasing their file size by either a plugin or script. This also happens to be a core instruction in the blogging tips furnished by reputed bloggers.

Speed optimized web design

Web developers and designers have to be at the beck and call of the client and the team, owing to revisions and bug fixes. In this haste, they often avoid optimizing their web design for a fast loading web speed. Did you know that a website that takes more than 2-3 seconds to load can face a higher abandonment rate as compared to others?

Roping in the importance of page speed from the very beginning is just as important as laying the building blocks of the website. If the project manager or client is inexperienced, web designers must guide them through the importance of investing in a reliable web hosting service as well because that definitely affects the loading speed of the website and other server-side issues.

Using the right tools

Web designers aren’t expected to be the best at taking care of a site’s SEO, but they should at least have a surface-level understanding of how their SEO tip-offs can help the website function improve immensely.

There are a few tools that should be at the disposal of every web designer such as the GTmetrix. This tool can help them analyze their site’s speed and make it faster. It will also provide them with insights on how well their site loads along with actionable recommendations on how to optimize it. Tools like Responsive Web Design Testing can help them test their website’s responsiveness across multiple devices with different screen sizes instantly in just simple steps. To top it off, the very popular Screaming Frog SEO Spider tool can help these web designers with a website crawler, that allows them to crawl websites’ URLs and fetch key onsite elements to analyze onsite SEO.

Conclusion

The design of the website and its SEO are the two moving parts of the same entity. Hence, it should be the aim of every web designer to furnish their knowledge of web designing with the key SEO elements that are a must to be considered before, during and after a website design task. They must understand that they are the ones that will set the SEO fireball rolling.  In an attempt to embed the site’s SEO into the design process, we hope that our basic SEO insights for web designers will be of huge help to experienced and new web designers, alike.

https://searchenginewatch.com/seo-web-designers-what-know