Should I have a one page website?

A one page website has some benefits, such as being easy to update, easy to navigate, and simple to load. However, it’s only going to be between 500-1,000 words on average. This means that you’ll have a lot of keywords about what you do without having a lot of supporting copy. 

Your whole goal of having a website is to be found. If you’re not giving Google much to work with, it simply won’t show you high enough in the search results to be found. A web page should have a minimum of 500 words, but if you only have a one page website, it definitely needs to be higher. The downside is that the longer a page is the more likely a customer is going to click away and hurt your SEO stats that way. 

A one page website is harder to have rank on Google due to not having a clear topic of the page. You’d be putting information about many different topics all on one page without much indication about what the page as a whole is about. There are ways to have a one page website without the drawback of confusing search engines when it comes to the topic. You can use clear, high level (level 2 max!) headings that indicate a change of topic, you can use separators, different colored backgrounds and more. 

Should I have more than one website page?

Having a multi-page website increases your overall word count and allows you to target specific keywords with providing supporting copy. Multiple website pages also help visitors get to what they’re looking for fast. You should have a minimum of 500 words on each of these pages. A good rule of thumb is to make each topic it’s own page. 

For example, you’ll see that I have an individual page for each service that I provide. This allows my visitors to find specific information regarding each service such as prices and a breakdown of why the service is important, benefits, and what’s included in each package. 

Doing this also naturally allows you to use the keyword as many times as possible. Meaning you’re not having to worry about whether or not you’ve used the keyword enough. Other technical SEO techniques for keyword ranking is using the keyword in 

1. The Title of the Page
2. The Meta Description of the Page
3. In the first sentence of the post
4. In at least 2-3 subheadings throughout the page.
5. As many times in the body of the page as possible, naturally. 

A multiple page website allows you to optimize for keywords a lot more efficiently and effectively. Other benefits of a multiple page website that a one page website  doesn’t have include: 

• Greater ease of linking from other platforms
• Ability to keep visitors focused on what they’re looking for without overwhelming them.
• Blog to keep readers up to date

So what’s better, a one-page or multi-page website?

From an SEO standpoint, a multipage website is much better than a one-page website. It gives search engines clearly defined pages which will capture more of the search result listings that are relevant to your keywords, help users find what they’re looking for quickly, and provide a greater variety of links when posting in your social media. A one-page website is better than no website however, but you should plan to invest in a larger website as soon as possible. 

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In my opinion, one of the more powerful and underutilized tools of a blog or website is the ability to tag your pages and posts. That said, effectively using tags isn’t easy or straightforward. In this post I’ll take you through some examples of how to use tags and get the most out of them, the pitfalls to watch out for, and some advanced strategies you can use with them.

First we need to take a step back and understand that there are several ways you can arrange your website/blog. The first is by subject, which most blog and CMS platforms call “categories.” The second is by date, which occurs as most blog/cms systems put things in year, month, and date groupings. A third is by tagging, which consists of the notes or descriptions you put on your posts or pages.

All of these different classification methods bring about one of the hallmark problems of blogs and CMS’s: duplicate content. Let’s assume that you publish one post. That post will exist on the page, but also on the category archive page, year archive page, year-month archive page, year-month-day archive page, and the archive page for any tag that you attach to the page/post. This can create issues as the search engines have to figure out what page they should really list in the SERP’s. First I suggest blocking all of the date archives from being indexed by using the “noindex” directive in the robots.txt file. I also use the “noindex/follow” robots tag on each of the date archive pages. Basically we are telling the robots don’t put these pages in the SERP’s but follow through and get the pages. We go with the exact same settings for the tag pages. If you are running wordpress, you can use the Robots Meta plugin from Joost de Valk to get this done. This only leaves us with the duplicate issue on category and individual pages. To combat this problem, only show limited sections of your posts on the category pages. The thesis theme has this functionality built in. If you aren’t using thesis, you can use the teaser plugin to get a similar result or remember to use the “more” tag 100% of the time.

OK now that we’ve got the duplicate content issue resolved, why would anyone want to use tags in the first place? Can’t you achieve the same results with categories? Yes and no. Here’s an example of how I would use categories and tags: let’s say you have a celebrity website with categories like “baby bump,” “fashion,” “news,” “rumors,” etc. You are also going to have celebrities who are always in the news like Paris Hilton or Britney Spears. What I would do is create tags for each celebrity and, whenever I did a post about the celebrity, I’d tag it with his or her name.

Another example. You have a travel website with categories like “adventure travel,” “family travel,” “skiing,” “cruises,” and so on. I would set up tags for countries, states, or cities, like Bahamas, France, or Colorado. You could have a white water rafting page in the adventure travel category tagged with Colorado. You could have a Skiing in Vail post in the skiing category also tagged with Colorado. You can also have a family travel article about visiting the Museum of Science and nature and Botanic Gardens in Colorado.  Those three separate articles would be interconnected by using the Colorado tag.

Here’s where the magic of tagging comes into play. If you use the cross linker plugin,  you can set it up to automatically link any word like “Colorado” to the tag page for Colorado. So if the person reading any of the three Colorado articles clicks on “Colorado”, they visit the tag page and see all of your posts about Colorado. I’ve found that in-posts links get much higher click throughs than “tag” links at the end of an article. You could set it up the same way for Paris Hilton, Britney Spears, or any other word/tag you used. What this does is create an alternate navigation path that’s both really useful for readers and keeps your content exposed to the search engine spiders. You could link the word individually as you write each post, but I find it easier to manage a website when I cut down the maintenance wherever I can.

Another advantage is that tagging is a much more effective way to choose which ads to display. If I’m only using categories like “family travel,” it’s hard to know which ad to serve. Do I use Disneyland tickets, family cruises, or city based Go Cards? However with tagging I can be much more specific by only serving cruise advertising to the pages/posts with the “cruise” tag. If you want to get really specific, you can have general “cruise” tag and a separate “family cruise” tag. You just have to decide how granular you want to get.

There are some downsides to all of this, of course. You have to maintain your tags because they have a tendency to get out of hand, especially if you have more than one author, and they play fast and loose with the rules. For example you could end up with “cruise,” “cruises,” and “cruising,” which really are all the same thing and should only have one tag. A secondary problem that can take things off the track is capitalization. With wordpress all of the following URL’s will have the same content:

http://example.com/tag/word/
http://example.com/tag/Word/
http://example.com/tag/WORD/

If you’re blocking the tag pages from being indexed it’s not a huge issue. But it can come into play with an advanced tactic I’ll be talking about next, so I bring it up now as a problem to be aware of. To be honest the tools for administering and editing tags is pretty limited. The best one I’ve found if Simple tags. It isn’t perfect, but it gets the job done.

Advanced Tag  and Cross Link Utilization

Using tagging this way creates a problem: you squander internal anchor text on pages you are blocking from the index. In the examples above, you would certainly want a page about Colorado to appear in the index, but maybe not the tag for a small city with little value and traffic. In the example above you would set up the word “Colorado” to link to “http://example.com/tag/colorado/”. However, what if you set the cross link to a normal page like “http://example.com/colorado/” instead of the tag page? Then you could create a page with some editorial copy, install the EXEC PHP plugin, and use it to issue  a WP Query and automatically list posts tagged with Colorado. You will need to know PHP to make that happen, but it’s not too hard.

To recap and bring everything together, here’s what you need to remember:

• By using tags you can provide a more granular way to break down the content on your website.
• This break down can provide alternate navigation paths to your content for both humans and search engines.
• This break down becomes more useful to humans if you link words/tags within the main body of the content.
• This break down is extremely effective for serving very targeted advertising or affiliate links.
• Care should be taken to minimize duplicate content and duplicate/similar tags

The post How To: Use Tags on Your Blog or Website appeared first on Blue Shift Web Services Blog.

If you are selling products or services, chances are you good you probably have 10 – 20 questions your customers ask about how to use products, correctly, better or more effectively. Typically most companies create an FAQ where they answer all of these questions on one page. While this does work, it’s not an optimal solution from an SEO traffic perspective.

Unless your questions and answers are very short, ideally you want to create a single page optimized for each question, this gives you the ability to create narrowly focussed posts around specific keyword phrases that will rank better and drive more traffic. Bear in mind this is something of a balancing act, and you may find these posts don’t get enough traffic on their own and have to be combined, so there is some experimentation, trial and error involved.

The next thing you need to consider is targeting and writing your posts using the same natural language, phrases,and queries that your consumers use, and not using your own internal company terminology. For example don’t use the term “waste receptacles” instead of “trash cans”.

Once you’ve got the basic questions covered, you can expand showing them how to use your products in new ways they never thought off, how to take advantage of advanced features, and use little known aspects of your products. You can even look for opportunities to tie into social media asking customers to submit pictures of their products in use. Cuisinart holds a recipe swap every few months, home improvement stores look for before and after shots, and fashion companies look for UGC photos of people wearing their clothing, shoes or fashion accessories.

One last option to consider is optimizing for some of your competitions keywords. Bear in mind SEO for your competition is not without consequences and not for the faint of heart, so think about it before you decide to start down that path.

Another example is the Whole Foods blog. In addition to recipes they have posts about how to cook with styles customers may not be familiar with like learn how to cook broiled fish or how to use new food types like Quiona (it’s a small grain like cous-cous).

The key lesson from these examples is don’t blog just to get new customers, blog to reach and help your existing customers, if you do it correctly they will stay repeat customers and pass along their experiences with their family and friends, and share them on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest.

So what are the takeaways from this post:

• Look at your popular customer service questions and inquiries and look for ways to create optimized posts around those topics
• Use natural language and phrases your customers use, avoid internal terminology and marketing language
• Look for opportunities to show advanced or little known features
• Make your customers smarter this turns them into brand advocates
• While there is some danger optimizing for your competitions keywords can sometimes work to your advantage

The post How To: Write Blog Posts for Existing and Repeat Customers appeared first on Blue Shift Web Services Blog.

So what is an ongoing series? An ongoing series example would be doing a series called “Fun Fridays” where you post about something fun to do that weekend. You can center it around holidays, seasons, weather, etc. NPR did a “Sandwich Mondays” series where they reviewed a sandwich every Monday.

You can personalize this for your company or industry. Fashion companies can do “Floral Fridays”, “Throwback Thursdays”, “Wedding Wednesday”, and so forth. If you’re looking for more ideas, check out our “Social Media Hashtags” post to get ideas for your series!

You can do multiple series as well to enhance your online presence. Our advice would be to choose 1-3 series, and schedule them weekly, biweekly, or monthly. To stay on top of it, you can schedule them to post automatically at a set time using WordPress.

You should also link to other posts inside your content, either by referencing your previous posts or linking to your other series.

The post Creating Content – Use An Ongoing Series appeared first on Blue Shift Web Services Blog.

Implementing an SEO marketing strategy is the most viable option for you, especially if you run a small business on a low budget. SEO can help increase your business visibility, drive sales, and ultimately, increase your company’s bottom line.

Thus, if you live in Brevard County, FL, you can build an SEO strategy around Space Coast SEO or Brevard County SEO to position your business as the go-to solution provider in your field in your local community. Read on to learn how to implement SEO strategy for your business. But first, what is SEO?

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is an online marketing strategy that allows you to organically increase visitors to your company’s website using different online marketing techniques. SEO can be used to boost your online profile as well as increase your visibility dramatically. This can help you to increase your company’s bottom line. Here are a few ways SEO can help boost your bottom line.

SEO Can Boost Your Online Presence

With a properly executed SEO strategy, you can bring new visitors to your company’s website through the use of familiar keywords that people often search for when seeking the kind of solution you offer. Of course, this can help increase your company’s bottom line.

SEO Can Optimize Your Website for Local Audience

You can create location targeted SEO strategy such as Space Coast SEO or Brevard County SEO to optimize your website for the Florida local market. This will make your website to be among the first to appear on the SERP (search engine results page) when people search for words related to your business in your location.

SEO Can Make You an Authority in Your Field

Being at the top of the SERP will make consumers aware that you are the authority for your field. If you search for a keyword, like “best midsize sedan”, you’ll find the top results include Edmunds and CarMax. Both are extremely reputable and trusted by the car community. You want this for your business too.

SEO Drives New Clients to Your Business

This one is easy, more views = more clicks = more clients. The higher your rank on search engines, the more people will see your business and likely click to learn more. Optimizing your site to encourage higher rankings almost definitely results in even more clients, views, and sales!

Final Words The importance of SEO to your business can not be overemphasized. It offers a cost-effective solution for driving sales and growing your business’ bottom line.This is why the demand for the service of SEO experts is on the rise today. So, if your company operates in Brevard County, and you’re looking to implement an SEO strategy for your company, Blue Shift Web Services is the right place to go. Blue Shift Web Services are a team of highly qualified SEO professionals with all the tools and expertise needed to implement a successful SEO strategy for your company.

The post SEO Strategy: How Can You Use It to Improve Your Company’s Bottom Line? appeared first on Blue Shift Web Services Blog.

When it comes to the optimization of a website, it could involve certain things. It may include any of the following; editing the content of the webpage, modifying and adding additional content to the webpage, editing the codes and also the HTML to ensure that relevance is increased.

How Small Businesses In Florida Can Benefit From Melbourne Florida SEO

While we have openly discussed what SEO means, it is vital that we discuss how these small business owners can benefit from optimizing their website. These ways include but are not limited to these;

1. Helps create awareness for your business;

If you’ve been a business owner for about a year or two without major leads or conversion rates, then it means that your business is not getting the right audience. This could further mean that you may fall under the businesses that have failed in their early phase. To avoid this, you would have to make sales and profits as that is your main aim, how then do you make sales if you do not have customers? Not possible!

If you are to make customers, you would have to let people know about your business. SEO can help you do this, how? When you optimize your website either by adding industry fitted keywords, or editing or adding contents on your website, you get to be ranked higher by search engines. When you rank high on these search engines, your website appears on the first five (5) search results that are displayed when a search for your industry or niche is entered. When you have more visitors, you stand to make more sales and in turn profits that would ensure that you make it past the early phase.

Most people have revealed that they would not buy from any nor recommend a site that does not appear at the top of any search result. This is because most of them are not reliable. If you want more customers, then you need to optimize your website.

2. SEO would help you as a small business owner keep up with your competitors;

There’s every chance that over 100 people are selling the same product you sell. With this increased number of competitors, there is every need for you to stay ahead of your game. If you do not, you could end up making no sale, thus, forfeiting the business. If you want to remain and compete with other sellers in your niche, then you would need to optimize your website. SEO specifically helps you keep up with your competitors, how? As a marketing tool, SEO is capable of checking the competition level in your niche. Asides from that, it is capable of finding out which keywords are currently generating more traffic.

When you get these keywords, you have the time to tailor your website content around them, thus, ensuring that you always stay ahead or your competitors. Aside from adding the right keywords to your website, there are certain ways that your website should be categorized to ensure that it ranks high on search engines. When you decide to optimize your website, you get to find out how your website should be categorized. When you do this, you, in turn, get more visitors that can be converted to sales, ensuring that you make more profits than your competitors would ever make.

3. A substantial return on investment (ROI);

It has been revealed that about five (5) out of every ten (10) businesses started to fail in their early phase. Only about one or two manage to get past the early phase. The main reason for this is the failure to make profits or return on investment. This shows the importance of making profits as a business owner. SEO can help you do this, how? You will find it interesting to know that search engine optimization is quite measurable. That is, you can measure the entire process without missing any vital change. When you optimize your website, you can track your website traffic and also track the conversion.

In a study that was conducted in 2015, it was revealed that about 76% of agencies in the United States and about 73% of in-house marketers had a fantastic return on investment after they optimized their businesses. SEO offers you an amazing market strategy that is capable of engaging your potential customers. It also affords you the opportunity to see how the various searches are being carried out. It offers you the opportunity to track short-tail and long-tail keywords that you have made use of.

4. SEO helps to improve your website;

Basically, most business websites are poorly categorized. This makes it extremely difficult for search engines to rank it. When you decide to optimize your website, you improve your website generally. Before you are ranked high by Google, your website would have to be user-friendly and designed in such a way that visitors get the best user experience. This would mean that you do not only get to make huge profits from the optimization of your website, but you also get to offer your visitors a well-designed and user-friendly site.

When your website is user-friendly, visitors will be more willing to visit and in the process can make purchases, thus, keeping you in business. Aside from the fact that you get to improve your website, you also build trust. If your website appears on the top of a Google search, then there’s every likelihood that more people would trust your brand and would, in turn, make purchases.

5. Helps to increase your traffic;

When you optimize your website, you stand to gain a large number of visitors that can be converted to sales. It has been revealed that about 43% of visitors tend to click the first web pages that appear on a search engine result. This means that if your website ranks high, you stand to gain tons of visitors.

The importance of Melbourne, Florida SEO is something that cannot be overemphasized. As a small business owner, it is crucial that you do so. It would ensure that you stay miles ahead of your competitors, gain more traffic, make returns in investment, and also build trust.

We eat sleep and breathe SEO

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