Continuing Education Masters SEO Course
Date: January 23, 2015Category: Author: Jaren Martineau
I had the opportunity last month to participate in several days’ worth of SEO training courses by leading experts in the industry and to earn the Search Engine News SEO Masters Certification. In an industry as complex and as changing as SEO it is certainly a must to participate in this kind of continuing education! Some of the topics included link cultivation, Google penalty auditing, improving the speed of your website, and content promotion. The information presented was invaluable and will help Infinity Dental Web continue to be the leader in dental website marketing. Allow me to cover some of the highlights from this course.
Link cultivation
We’ve heard it before and I am sure we will hear it again: quality links to your website can dramatically impact the ranking of your website in search engines. Gaining these links, however, can be much more difficult than it seems. For starters, not all links are created equal. There are many websites that you simply don’t want a link from. Spammy websites or websites that are associated with other questionable websites or networks are something that you want to steer clear of. There are likewise many methods for gaining links that are unethical and have the potential to harm, rather than benefit, your website’s rankings. Large numbers of reciprocal links, links from spamming the comments sections of blogs, and paid links are some examples. These kinds of links will be either a waste of time to acquire, or harmful to your overall SEO.
The kinds of links that you do want are links from reputable websites that are related to yours. You want links that come in naturally because you have content that draws people in and that provides enough interest and value that people want to share it. This kind of content can take work and careful planning to create. It isn’t easy. Once you have a piece of unique and valuable content, it often needs to be promoted in order for it to be discovered. This can be done through social media, outreach to other webmasters or bloggers, or even through paid promotion of the content. It can take time and money. It also helps to have tools to track your progress in order to see new links that have been made to your content. Some of these tools will be included as links below.
Website performance
Another important ranking factor for your website is its page load time. How fast pages load not only impacts your search engine rankings, but also the ability of your website to make conversions. A slowly loading website can quickly cause users to click the back button and leave. With as difficult as it can be to get visitors to your website to begin with, the last thing you want to have happen is to lose them because the webpages are too slow. According to a report by KISSmetrics back in 2011, 47% of web visitors expect a web page to load in 2 seconds or less. The same report shows that 40% of website visitors will leave if it takes longer than 3 seconds to load the webpage. The likelihood is that in 2015 people are even less patient with slow websites than they were back in 2011.
Much of what was discussed at the course were things that were already being implemented by Infinity Dental Web, such as tools to shrink web images to an appropriate size so that they retain sufficient quality without slowing down the website, and organizing and coding your CSS in a way to keep it loading quickly. One of the projects that we have been working on over the past few months has been to migrate our websites to new high powered dedicated servers. This has increased the speed and performance of our clients websites. These are the kinds of proactive changes that we make to help our clients to succeed.
Interesting tools
Here are some of the more interesting tools that were mentioned in the course or that I have looked at recently.
Peak User Testing – This tool allows you to submit a website to have it briefly user tested by a real live human being. The test will be recorded with audio and video and you will be able to receive and watch the video. It can provide some unique insights into your website’s usability by a relatively unbiased third party. Try it out.
Google Mobile Friendly Tool – This is an easy-to-use web-based tool that will have Google check a website to see if it has been designed to be “mobile friendly.” If it is, then the website will have the words “Mobile Friendly” next to it in Google search engine results pages, which will likely improve the click through rate of the website in comparison to sites without this same designation.
Screaming Frog SEO Spider – This is a neat little utility that you install on your own PC. It will let you “spider” or crawl a website along with all of its internal and external links. It will check your site for 404 errors, title and meta tags that need to be optimized, oversized images, and more.
Link checking tools – There are many link checking tools available. Some of the more useful ones are Ahrefs, MOZ Open Site Explorer, and Majestic SEO. These are all paid tools, but are important tools for checking the link profile of your website as well as the link profile of your competitors.
There are literally hundreds of SEO tools available. At Infinity Dental Web, we have a large swiss army knife of tools that we use to analyze and improve the SEO performance and overall marketing performance of our clients’ websites.
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