SEO is a complicated and ever-changing area. Some marketers try to cheat the search algorithms by using what is known as black-hat techniques. Over time the search engines penalize such attempts. There are however a number of ways you can legitimately improve your website's chance of ranking higher on search engines. One of these is through optimising your website's Meta Descriptions.

This post is part of a series SEO Basics, check out the previous posts on Title Tags and Anchor Text.

Meta Description refers to a short snippet which describes a webpage's contents. The Meta Description is an important tag within your website's HTML which when optimised correctly can become a very important aspect of SEO.

Where Can I See My Website's Meta Description?

You can find your current Meta Description by right clicking on your webpage and clicking view page source. The search (using CTRL+F) for name="description" content= The text following this is your current Meta Description. 

What Is the Purpose of a Meta Description?

The main purpose of a Meta Description is to improve the click through rate from search engines to your website. You can see where a Meta Description normally sits on Google below:

Many people have said that including keywords within a Meta Description however there is conflicting evidence whether this is indeed true. There is also an indirect benefit in that Google uses click through rate to determine whether your webpage is a good result. A well written meta description can help increase the number of clicks onto your website, which when coupled with a low bounce rate can have a positive impact on your search engine rankings.

6 Tips for Writing a Great Meta Description

1. LENGTH:

You should aim to keep your Meta Description between 135 and 150 characters. There is no exactly right number here and Google and other search engines may show less or more.

2. CALL TO ACTION:

A Meta Description should have a solid action and be written with an active voice. Use this space to sell your website. Invitations and hooks work well, Learn more, Try for free, Free shipping, Find out more, etc.

3. MATCH YOUR WEBPAGE CONTENT:

The Meta Description should be in-keeping with the webpage's content. If your Meta Description is misleading you will increase your website's bounce rate which will have a negative impact on SEO.

4. AVOID KEYWORD STUFFING:

Avoid repeating your keywords multiple times. Instead pick a focus keyword and use it smartly and semantically. 

5. READ IT ALONGSIDE YOUR TITLE TAG:

Write your Title Tags and Meta Descriptions as one as most people will read them as so. 

6. MAKE IT UNIQUE:

To avoid being penalised for duplicate content write unique Meta Descriptions for each of your webpages.

Update Your Meta Description on Kommand

If your website is with Kommand it is simple to update your Meta Description.

On the Page you wish to edit click SEO:

Then type your Meta Description into the box titled 'Metadata Description Tag':

Build Your SEO Friendly Site with Kommand

If you are looking to update your website and improve the chance your website has for ranking on the first page of Google switch to Kommand and enjoy a simple way to make an SEO friendly website. Prices start from as little as £400 for custom designed and built website. To find out more get in touch!

support@kommand.me

Glasgow - Tel: 0141 345 2130

Middlesbrough - Tel: 01642 989 069

London - Tel: 0203 026 0730 

One of the main challenges Ecommerce businesses face is the ability to be found and seen online. Most people will use search engines to look for products online and if your webpage sits on page 20 of search results it will statistically be clicked on far less times than the businesses on page. Online businesses arguably face much stronger competition because of this race to the top. Finding a way to get in among the big players is key.

Why Is SEO Important to Ecommerce Businesses?

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is the name given to the technique of maximising a webpage's chances of ranking highly in search engine results pages. The technique is a major driver of customer acquisition and success. One study suggests that SEO accounts for as much as 30% of ecommerce site traffic. Understanding how you can improve your business’s chances of ranking highly for relevant keywords is an important skill to master to improve your conversion rate.

Unfortunately people often misunderstand SEO, believing it to be a quick one-off task. SEO should be viewed more as an on-going and important part of maintaining a website. It is not just restricted to keywords and keyword placement but instead touches on many parts of a website.

If you are looking to improve your online store's SEO here are some of the most effective and popular techniques you can try to give your website that sought after boost.

Link Building

Links are an important element of any website. Not only do they help a user to your website navigate from page to page but they help search engines crawl and browse the pathways of your website. 

Link building can be broken into two categories: internal and external. Internal links are those which connect your webpages together. Internal links help to establish your website's architecture. Important pages in your website need to be linked together so that the search engine 'spiders' have a way to reach them. Without direct, crawlable links these pages essentially do not exist in the eyes of Google and other search engines. The optimal structure for a website is to structure your links in a pyramid format, with your homepage at the top, category pages below, and product pages below this. In an online store you may have many products so it is important that you correctly link these to the right category.

Add A Blog to Your Website

Adding a blog to your website will help you maintain communication with potential and existing customers. It provides a way to keep your website up to date with new information, deals, new product launches and company updates. Besides this a blog can also help your website to rank higher on search engine results pages as it provides a way to add fresh content as frequently as needed. This fresh content is important for SEO for two reasons: firstly it shows that your website is active, something that can improve your website's SEO chances. Secondly, adding new content gives search engines more to crawl, particularly if you are able to create lengthy, keyword focused posts.

Pictures and Descriptions

A good quality photograph, or multiple photos, is important in an Ecommerce website. Customers cannot see the product personally when shopping online so high resolution photographs are needed to give a sufficient alternative. When uploading photos to your website you should always give them a descriptive alt-tag, preferably with relevant keywords. This is important as search engines cannot see images, so need the alt tags to understand what the images are of. As an additional step here, it can be good practice to get into the habit of renaming the files on your computer to keyword focused titles, as opposed to irrelevant names such as 'SCD0001'. 

Avoid Duplication

Search engines heavily penalise pages deemed to be offering duplicate content. When setting up an online store it can be tempting to use the same description for several products which are similar. However this could result in a penalty for duplicate content. The best method to avoid a duplication penalty is to write multiple descriptions for similar products before uploading them to your product pages. You should look to use synonyms and variations and re order the content to decrease the chance of a penalty.

Use Your Social Media Accounts

When you set up an Ecommerce website it is likely that you will have set up social media accounts at the same time. If these have become under used or unloved in recent months it is time to make a change get on the social media bandwagon. By updating often on your channels you will be able to build a loyal following for products on social media, which will help improve your business's authenticity to other customers and to search engines that go through user comments and links.

Whilst some search engines have said that individual posts are not crawled, social media channels themselves can rank, and social media channels can increase the traffic to your website.

Make Your Site Mobile Friendly

Many people are using mobile phones to shop online. A recent study found that in the UK, 65% of Ecommerce sales in January were conducted on mobile, showing the switch in preferred platform. If you are not ready to cater to this segment, you are losing out on a potentially large part of the market. 

Creating attractive and functional sites is not difficult. You can rely on platforms such as Kommand for creating sites even if you have minimal technical knowledge. Kommand allows users to build responsive Ecommerce websites easily. You can work with one of our designers to build a website bespoke to your business, at an affordable monthly price, that is safe and secure for online payments - and which works great on mobile.

For more information, you can contact Kommand:

Glasgow - Tel: 0141 345 2130
Middlesbrough - Tel: 01642 989 069
London - Tel: 0203 026 0730

Email: support@kommand.me

As part of our SEO Basics series we have previously covered the topic of optimizing Title Tags for SEO purposes. Today’s post focuses on how the optimisation of Anchor Texts can help improve your website's SEO.

What is Anchor Text?

Anchor text is the name given to the clickable text (also know as link text) displayed on a webpage. For instance in the sentence “Kommand offer a range of website themes all of which are mobile responsive” the words website themes is the anchor text which links to our Themes webpage. The html syntax for anchor text is:

There are two types of links you may find on a webpage; external and internal. The link at the beginning of this article to a previous blog post is an example of an internal link. If your webpage links to webpages outside of your website then it is an external link.

Many SEO beginners do not realise the potential for optimizing anchor text. It may seem simple but knowing how to correctly optimise your anchor text can make a real difference to your search rankings.

How Do Search Engines Process Anchor Text?

Search engines use anchor texts to help decide the relevancy and nature of the page that the link is pointing to. For example if the anchor text for a link is web design agency then the search engine will be able to connect that text with the webpage it is linked to.

It used to be the case that webmasters would use the words 'click here' to signify a link to a new page. Nowadays, linking is common knowledge and users can distinguish whether something is a link just by looking at it (typically it is underlined and blue, although could be bold or a different colours). SEO best practice suggests that anchor text should be relevant to your page as opposed to generic text, such as click here or find out more here. 

Unfortunately, as with the case with many SEO techniques, some black-hat SEO marketers began abusing anchor texts to boost websites in search rankings. Such bad practices included stuffing a page with links, or colouring the link text the same as the background so that it is 'hidden' to the average user.  

Google, and other search engines update their systems to try and counter such techniques. In a Google update in April 2012 (known as the Penguin update) Google wanted to negate the manipulative SEO practices employed by these SEO marketers. The update penalizes sites that abuse links and remove their rankings in search engines. Such bad practices are against Google's Webmaster Guidelines and it is highly suggested that you avoid such tactics.

So, How Do You Optimize Anchor Text Within Webmaster Guidelines?

At one time, hundreds of optimised anchor texts could help you rank well. However research by two leading SEO marketing businesses (Moz and Quicksprout) have shown that between five and 10 links with a broad range of mixed anchor texts relating to your keywords can be more effective in today's world. You need to be careful not to overuse links otherwise your site can be penalized. Here's our tips for getting the balance just right:

Firstly, you will want to figure out what terms you wish your webpage to rank for. This is the first step in any optimisation for search engines. You should have an idea about the types of words and phrases your customers will be searching for however you can use software such as Google’s Keyword Planner to help you figure out which are searched for the most. Remember to consider synonyms and variations.

Once you have a list of keywords you can begin optimising your links. Your anchor text should contain the keywords that you have found in the process above. This will help your chances of ranking for these times. Avoid using the same anchor text too many times. Search engines will perceive this as a signal of manipulation, particularly if your keywords are incredibly specific such as teeth whitening manchester. Instead you should use the more general phrase and the search engines will be able to 'understand' that you mean teeth whitening in that specific area. Google encourage you to use a diverse and varied list of texts to describe the same thing. For the above example you can use a range of keywords in your anchor text such as:

• whiten teeth
• brighten smile
• Manchester teeth whitening
• teeth whitening dentist

Where possible always avoid 'zero' anchor texts, e.g. click here or 'naked' anchor text, where the anchor text is the URL.

Creating Anchor Text and Links in Kommand Website Builder

It is simple to create a link in a Kommand webpage. Within your page simply highlight the text you wish to link and click the insert/edit link button from the tool bar.

Then add in the URL you wish to link to. It's as simple as that!

If you run a website for your small business then congratulations you are already ahead of a third of UK business owners who still don't have a website. 

If you have used a website builder to create your site then we can be pretty certain that one of your main aims is for your small business to be found by potential customers interested in your products or services. This is where Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) comes into play.

How to Get Your Website Ranking in Google

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is the process of ensuring your site is as prepared as it can be to rise up the rankings in the major search engines, appearing in front of competitors and leading to more traffic and business.

Although improving your search ranking can be a very complicated effort in competitive sectors, there are several simple things you can do to give your site a head start. This mini series on the Kommand blog aims to help you get to grips with the basics and help you optimise your site.

Today's post focuses on Title Tags, a priority in any SEO effort.

What is a Title Tag?

Your site's title tag is one of the single most important attributes when it comes to search ranking. Used properly, it not only succinctly describes what your webpage is about, but also draw in new visitors by giving search engines a good reason to rank your site high in the results for a given query. However, ranking high for irrelevant keywords is of no consequence if your aim is, like most sites, to attract targeted visitors who will turn into customers. This is why getting your title tag right is so important.

To begin you must be able to identify a Title Tag. A Title Tag is the short series of words seen either on search engine results or by hovering over the tab at the top of your browser.

As a general rule of thumb a Title Tag should be around 55-70 characters long to show succinctly on results pages and excludes punctuation such as $%&{@.

Now you understand what a Title tag is, it's time to start optimising yours...

1. What Kind of Visitor Do You Want?

Your title tag is your chance to target the specific kind of site visitor you want. Searchers generally fall into three categories:

• Those looking for information on a topic.
• Those looking for information on products or services in a particular area.
• Those looking to actually make a transaction of some sort - to buy a product, make an enquiry, and so on.

A successful title tag will target all three types of site visitors to give your site the widest possible exposure. To begin you should examine your webpage and decide what the critical aspects are and key selling points.

2. Optimising Your Title Tag for the Three Visitor Types

To properly optimise your title tag, you need to get inside the mind of your visitor. A keyword research tool like the free Google Keyword Planner is invaluable here - you can quickly see what people are searching for in your niche, and use these words in your title tag to attract people who are searching for information on your product or service.

Next, if your website caters to a specific geographical area, then it's a good idea to include the name of your city or area in your title tag so as to further narrow down your potential visitors to your target market, cosmetic dentist in London W2.

Finally, if you want your visitors to make a transaction on your site, include a 'call to action' phrase in the title: 'buy now' is perhaps the most obvious, although more subtle versions such as 'discounts available online' or 'free consultation' or 'emergency appointments' can often fulfil the same function of prompting a sale or conversion while being a little less confrontational.

3. Putting It All Together

If your only goal was to please search engines, then the perfect title tag might be a list of keywords which do not link together in a sentence. Following this method means to ignore the other main role of the title tag: it's often the first description of your site your potential customers will see when using a search engine, and as such it's a good idea to make it both readable and compelling while still including all the basic information.

Your Title Tag might be the only piece of information a potential visitor to your website sees so you need to make it reads like a sentence and encourages people to click onto your website. It is through trial and error you will learn what works and what doesn't. As a side note, it is important that you don't change your Title Tag too often or you can damage the rankings you may have gained.

Unfortunately there is no winning formula for writing a Title Tag. A good place to start can be to examine your competitors and see if you can find inspiration. You should never copy another website's Title Tag word for word but if there is a particular term that is commonplace then it may be beneficial to include it.

4. Search Engines See Webpages, Not Websites

When optimising Title Tags, or any other area for SEO for that matter, you need to understand the basics of how a search engine works. A search engine doesn't know what a website is. Instead it sees individual webpages and finds the one which it believes best answers a searcher's query. It is for this reason that your Title Tag should be unique and specific to each page. Search engines will penalize duplicate Title Tags so don't copy yours across all of your pages, or from another site.

To help, you can think of a situation whereby all of the other content on your webpage is convered and you can only read the Title Tag, like the cover of a book. Does it correctly explain what that page is about? If your webpage is about Teeth Whitening for example, your title tag should not be focused on Dental Implants. 

Changing Your Title Tag on Kommand 

If you run a website on Kommand it is simple to change your webpages' Title Tags. Just login to your Admin page and then click Edit/Add Pages from the left hand menu, select your page, click Metadata on the top menu and input the Metadata Title Tag. The counter will show how many characters you have used.

A Final Note

The title tag is only a small part of the whole SEO process for your site, but it's one of the most immediately effective and easily optimised, and giving it the attention it warrants is the first step to rising above your competitors in the search results.

If you run any kind of website then it will come as no surprise that you must make your web presence accessible from mobile devices. Mobile preference for online search and shopping has already overtaken desktop in many countries and is set to sustain growth as devices become better connected and software continues to develop.

Offering your customers a smooth online experience regardless of the device they are using is an important step that must be taken to increase leads and sales, remain competitive, boost your business’s reach and build brand affinity. However taking your customer’s experience onto mobile from desktop can be a confusing process.

The question that many face when optimising for online users is whether a business should opt for a mobile app as an alternative, or alongside, a mobile-friendly (responsive) or non-mobile friendly website. The decision will depend upon the varying amounts of resources from your chosen development team so it is important that you make the right decision.

For many businesses that choose to have a mobile app, one of the main ways that they can advertise it is via a pop-up (interstitial) on their website. Of course, it is possible to advertise apps through other means however if you offer visitors an app as an alternative to a mobile site then a full page interstitial is a way to direct them to use an app instead. The interstitial usually includes a link to download the business's app from an App store. The user can then access the business’s information from the app instead of a web browser. The user can of course choose to close the pop-up and continue on the webpage if they prefer.

Mobile Apps Can Hurt SEO

There are many articles detailing the positives and negatives of mobile apps vs mobile websites with contrasting answers of what is best. However the debate has taken a new turn as Google announced last week that it would begin penalizing the search rankings of websites which choose to use pop-up mobile ads to ask users to install their app.

The search giant posted an article on its Webmaster Central Blog explaining how app download pop-ups do not provide a "good search experience and can be frustrating for users because they are expecting to see the content of the web page." The article is followed by advice indicating that websites which do not cohere to these new standards will no longer be considered 'mobile-friendly' suggesting a possible drop from top spots in search engine results pages.

Why are Google Making These Changes in Mobile Requirements?

Google's primary aim has always been to provide the best user experience it can for its visitors. Internal research carried out by the organisation was used to highlight how frustrating users find pop-up app ads, especially on mobile, with 69% of their study abandoning the webpage altogether. If you consider this research in relation to your website, this could account for as many as seven out of every 10 potential customers that you could be losing before they even make it to your website.

Google’s Way or the Highway?

Whilst it is not suggested that mobile apps in themselves will affect your ranking it is suggested that the advertising of apps in full page pop-ups will. The alternative to this, suggested by Google, is non-obtrusive banner ads at the top of a webpage which allow the user to still access the information on the page:

The news from Google does not mean that having a mobile app in itself is a negative. However the release of their study findings does back continuous advice suggesting that responsive websites are the preferred design as they provide a more user- and SEO-friendly experience than non-mobile friendly websites or a mobile, m. website which requires separate URLs.

Responsive Design Websites Improve Your SEO

The question that you now face is what the best tactic to employ for your customers. A small business is likely to have limited resources and budget to spend online. App design can be great especially for large Ecommerce stores such as ASOS or Amazon. However for small businesses or CMS websites an app may be an unnecessary, expensive addition. Responsive web design can offer the balance you are looking for to remain competitive and SEO friendly on both desktop and mobile devices.

With Kommand website builder you can have a fully mobile responsive website that can rank highly on search engines for as little as £9 a month. Our easy to use software means you can bring your site to life on your own and we offer flexible bolt-ons allowing you to add the items you need to make your perfect website. Alterntively you can work with one of the Kommand web designers to design your site and logo. Whatever your requirements are we can find a solution that's right for your business. For more information on our packages, prices and design please contact us today. One of our team will be happy to discuss your website.

Is your website ready for Google’s algorithm updates in April?

Google has made significant new changes to their search engine algorithms last year, so adapting your SEO strategy for this year is of vital importance. Despite the advent of social media like Facebook and Google Plus, search engine optimization is still important to improve your website’s ranking. Incorporate these four SEO tips for your 2015 strategy.

1. Use Optimized Keywords.

Write content for people and not for search engines. A winning SEO strategy will incorporate keywords naturally throughout your content, title, subheadings and image alt text. Use the correct heading tags H1, H2 and H3 tags. Keywords in image alt texts and file names can lead to more linking opportunities to your website, for quicker organic growth of unbound links.

2. Improve your Website’s Loading Speed.

Improve your website’s loading speed for a higher site rankings and a better user experience. Test your site speed with Hubspot CMS Tool, Google or contact Kommand.me team for help. Your site is slowed down by client and server errors, plugins, bad coding, different size images, images with incorrect pixels, and embedded videos.

3. Shorten URLs and Keep Characters the Right Length.

Short URLs are easier to crawl - keep URLs. Keywords in your URLs help search engines to categorize your site pages. Title tags are used by search engines to display a page in search results. Include keywords in the title tags and keep them under 60 characters. Keywords should be near to the beginning of the title. A meta-description of under 156 characters or less is easier for user to read.

4. Make your Site Mobile Friendly and Switch to HTTPS.

Google has begun to move from Hyper Text Transfer Protocol (HTTP) to Hyper Text Transfer Protocol Secure HTTPS, in an effort to make websites more secure. The new protocol will also be used as a factor in searching rankings. Nearly half of the web activity is mobile based, so mobile friendly websites are likely to feature high in search engine rankings. A winning SEO strategy will ensure there are no faulty canonical links, element canonical HTTP headers, redirects, mobile-only 404s, blocked media, and slow mobile load times.

If you would like to find out more about digital marketing, website development or redesign contact Kommand.me team and see how we can help you.

If you have owned a website for quite some time you may decide to give it an overhaul and redesign it so it is more up to date, have a more modern look and is ranking higher on Google. If your website is not mobile responsive or SEO friendly you might need to rethink your digital brand strategy.

These days having an online presence provides a hub for most of your lead generation and marketing efforts. Therefore, lead generation should be at the forefront of any redesign ideas. Think about your redesign along with your goals and ask how your online presence will support these goals.

Is your website SEO friendly?

During the course of your website's lifetime you will have built up valuable assets for SEO, such as content, blogs, keywords and inbound links. It is vital to protect these during the redesign process.

It is a good practice to keep a keyword and content inventory, record your average monthly bounce rate, record the number of inbound linking domains, record the total number of pages indexed and the amount of visits/traffic/leads generated. Google Analytics will help you gather all of this information together and give you better insight into your site's performance.

What is the next stage for your website’s re-development?

Once you have done all your research and gathered together all the information you should create a website redesign plan, which will become the blueprint for your website redesign project.

This blueprint should include website navigation. Each webpage should focus on one core topic or keyword. If you map your ideas out you can generate solid site navigation that will improve your visitor user experience and reduce website's bounce rate.

After you have created a site navigation map it is well worth mocking-up each page. These wireframes are essentially the blueprints for your new site. Each page should show where the navigation, header images, content and calls-to-action will appear on the page.

Kommand.me platform offers stunning user friendly website design templates. All you need to do is choose a specific web frame for your brand and add content, logos, photos and videos. It is important to start creating content during the planning phase of the new site design. You can plug this new content directly into your wireframes. By doing this you can test the new content within the design and ensure that it fits into the user experience so visitors can flow through your new site easily.

Kommand.me is easy, cost effective and fast way to build your website and make it mobile responsive immediately. What are you waiting for? Contact us and start building your website today!

When an online business or website is just starting out it can be all too easy to forget about the most important features. Sure design and usability are important, but they don't count for much if no one is visiting your website. So how can you change this? The simple answer lies within the details of search engine optimization techniques (SEO).

Why SEO is so important for your website’s rankings?

SEO, or search engine optimisation, is an absolute essential for all online businesses and websites. It is the vital factor in attempting to make a site stand out from similarly configured or rival operations. Local businesses could start off with a look at the services of Yellow Pages or Yelp which can place greater prominence to local maps and services items on Google. This can often work in a business's favour as the local map listings can often appear above searches for websites.

What are the essentials of search engine optimization?

Most people access their websites through one of the major search engines such as Google, Yahoo or Bing. For a company to edge into a greater market share it should always be looking to improve its placing in a search engine's results. The logical configuration of key words in copy and content is a great way to do this.

Why should you be generating the most effective content?

To put it simply, content is all important. Producing items that appear above or at the top of traditional listings should be the goal of all marketing strategists on your watch. Along with a careful look at maps and directories, local businesses should set about placing these keywords into the essential elements of all copy and business descriptions that appear online. In addition, the content of your website should be written in the Hummingbird style.

What is the role of social media and online reviews?

SEO strategy and keyword organisation can also apply beyond your main website and map resources to include social media applications. Social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus and LinkedIn have tremendous value in connecting businesses and their clients.

A careful strategy of including keyword elements into social media applications and all posts from company accounts can help to boost search engine rankings. Not only that, but it will help to keep the company image and message consistent. With the development of all of these resources your company's reach will continue to grow.

The majority of webmasters are familiar with the Panda and Penguin updates which have affected millions of websites worldwide. However, this mobile-related update is designed to make online navigation easier, faster and hassle-free for the mobile users.

The official launch of mobile label comes after months of detailed testing and improving. This new update created by Google is designed to help web surfers who use their tablets or mobile phones to find what they are looking for in a lot quicker manner.

What are the benefits of mobile friendly labels?

Smart phone and tablet users often find it hard to land on the mobile optimised web results. Despite the fact that an increasing number of digital marketers and business owners have started to adopt a responsive web design that moulds itself depending on the device used to access the website, these mobile friendly websites only account for less than half of the total number of websites available on the internet. By introducing this particular feature as a part of the Google search result snippets, the giant search engine aims to make life of the mobile users easier.

Landing on a non-optimised webpage can be very frustrating and time-consuming, not to mention the low conversion rates of these websites. Thanks to the new label, users can now recognize which pages to click on if they want to navigate smoothly and without any problems, when using their smart phone device or their tablet. Click here and find out more about mobile friendly web design.

What’s next?

Google has announced that it is also experimenting with a brand new algorithm designed for websites that have been properly optimised for portable device users. This should benefit both the portable device users and the website owners.

In order to rank high under this new upcoming algorithm digital marketing managers need to meet several basic requirements. For instance, they must avoid using software that is not usually used on portable devices, such as Flash. In addition, they must optimise the written content in such a manner that the website visitor can read it without having to zoom on it, and it is also important to size the content to the screen, so that portable device users do not have to waste their time trying to zoom or to scroll horizontally.

Is your website mobile friendly?

If you have a website, but it doesn’t meet the most recent Google requirements you can redesign it using Kommand.me platform. If you are considering getting a new website Kommand.me allows you to create mobile optimized and professional websites at the affordable prices. You can choose the most suitable web development package, pick your website’s theme and start building. The best bit about it is that you don’t need any programing knowledge and you are not tided into any contract. Be a designer of your own website.

It may seem to some that Google intentionally penalises their website. But the truth is that there are valid reasons why Google does so. Some optimisation techniques are classified as forbidden or illegal by Google.

What are the Key Reasons for Google's Penalties?

One of the main reasons why Google may penalize your website is plagiarism. It is a number one no-no. Other than a drop in page ranking, your online site obtains a negative image in relation to search engines. The wiser thing to do would be to publish inventive and exclusive content on your blog or online site.

Another main reason for Google's penalisation has to do with abnormal keyword stuffing. Google is very strict on this considering the number of online site or blog owners that Google found with a penchant for stuffing their site. Contrary to what some site owners may think, keyword stuffing does not lead to good page ranking, at least not anymore.

Link spamming and header tag overuse are another two things that don't fall into Google's favour. Abnormal use of tags and the presence of false referrals or links that have nothing to do with the site in question are not a great idea. Link spamming only ends up in a negative image of your website. Cloaking, which has to do with using fake keywords on an online site is not taken lightly by Google as well.

How to Gain Google's Favour?

To gain Google's favour, ensure that there are no broken link referencing on your site. Dead links, which redirect users to 404s are not taken kindly by Google. Remember that in Google's point of view, an online site or blog should be user friendly or provide value to its users. Permanent redirects to 301s are recommended by Google.

In relation to this, a website's very slow response or downloading time is not in Google's good books. The same goes for hidden links or texts. You may think it is a great idea to use the same colour for some links or texts as your site's background as a means of hiding them from a site user's view. But Google would not think so.

Both robots.txt and sitemap.xml files are vital for Google's crawlers that rely on these files for learning about your site's structure (available URLs and their relevant status). By making things easier for Google, you definitely can gain a massive advantage for the rankings of your website. Another good way to earn Google's credibility is by selecting the most suitable URL for your website.

For example, choosing one of these names, greatengineering.net, greatengineering.net, greatengineering.net/index.html or greatengineering.net/home.php for your site is possible. Though they may all seem similar in a virtual sense, but in truth there are differences in terms of credits. This credit influences the main landing page's credibility.

If you would like to find out more about search engine optimization for your website contact Kommand.me team today!

Being an Investigator Never Seemed so Easy

To put a fun spin on things, think of Google Analytics as the most important tool in your arsenal; an "internet investigator". Implementing this tool allows you to monitor information about the visitors to your site, as well as the sources that drive them to the page. You have the ability to view which locations are accessing your website, enabling you to figure out whether or not you should have localized marketing plans in place.
You will also have access to an age report graph, gender reports, and general interests of your audience. With all of this information, you have everything you need to create an amazing marketing scheme. You have the opportunity to discover new markets and draw in different audiences - something that would be vastly difficult in years gone by. 

Become a Virtual Traffic Policeman 

One of the best ways to document the success of your website, is to use Google Analytics as a means of monitoring traffic flow. You will have the ability to see how many visitors leave your page immediately after landing on your homepage (bounce rate) and how many of them actually venture to your product pages, information pages or contact page. This information will allow you to tweak your homepage and make it more effective, if necessary.

The ability to track traffic over certain periods of time will enable you to predict future trends, thus allowing you to make pre-emptive changes. You also have the option of changing certain pages back to their previous states if you notice that activity has decreased over the last few months. Essentially, Google Analytics allows you to direct traffic on your website in the same way that highway patrolmen do in the physical world. 

Learn the Right Lingo

In a world where we are constantly trying to hook potential viewers into browsing our websites, the importance of keywords is paramount. Google Analytics is able to show you which keywords are most effective in guiding internet searchers to your site. At different times, according to popular trends, some keywords work better than others. By using this Google tool, you have the opportunity to see which keywords are trending on search engines across the globe.