Author: KSWebM

Why You Should Leave Your SEO to An Expert

Posted on 08/29/2017by in SEO

Managing a business of any size means wearing many hats from director to manager to accountant, business development expert and marketing head. If your business has any kind of internet presence – and who doesn’t these days – then SEO manager will be a part of the role of you or whoever operates that. But SEO or search engine optimisation can be a tricky thing to master and that’s why you might better leaving your SEO to a true expert.

SEO = Google

In most cases, when we talk about SEO and the rules that govern it, we are talking about the rules established by Google. With over 77% of the world share of search, there’s little doubt that Google is the single biggest search engine and therefore, experts work the most often with their rules, standards and policies. But these are ever changing and this is one of the first reasons to consider using an SEO expert.

Be up to date

There’s a lot to keep track of with SEO because not only does Google undertake large updates to their system regularly, there are also lots of small ones. This means that the role of the SEO expert means keeping constantly up to date with those changes. For the business owner or a single member of staff multitasking with various jobs, this can be all but impossible to do. And if you don’t keep up to date…

Avoid mistakes and penalties

You can find yourself suddenly invisible to search engines because you have done something you were told was a good idea but turned out to have incurred a penalty from Google. And what does this mean? It means you can vanish from search engine results for a period and will get no traffic from it. There are also lots of less serious mistakes that you can make that can put the presence of your website backwards.

Master Local SEO

For most businesses, you have a geographical element to your business – you are trying to attract customers from your specific area. Another reason for hiring a London SEO company when you are based in the capital, for example, is that they will know the best ways to show up on those local results. Working with companies such as Grapefruit Digital SEO Agency means you can find strategies that will increase your local presence while still attracting national and international customers if suitable.

Find a specialist

As well as local knowledge, you can also find experts who specialise in a certain area. So if you need SEO for Photographers, for example, you can find a specialist or a company who work primarily in this area. They will have an advanced understanding of the best keywords to use in your copy, what kind of blog topics will generate interest and all the other tricks that make an SEO expert.

Get real results

You can always tell a true SEO expert – they don’t tell you they will get you to the top of the search engine rankings within a few days. SEO takes time and work and a true expert know that. They will concentrate on getting real results that will improve your business’ profile, not merely offer quick fixes that make a short-term boost.


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Web Design Trends for 2018

Posted on 08/16/2017by in Web design

As we are well into the second half of the year, experts are already turning their attention to what will be the biggest trends in web design for next year. While not all trends will affect all businesses, it never hurts to know what is likely to be the biggest issues and how these will affect your business. So what are the early front runners for biggest trends for 2018?

Mobile First release

It has been on the cards for a while but it looks like Mobile First, Google’s dramatic shift of emphasis from desktop to mobile will take place in early 2018. For many companies, with the furore about mobile friendly websites a little while back, this won’t be quite as big an issue as it might seem but there are some clear issues to consider for its arrival. So, if you are planning a redesign, update or just want to ensure you don’t lose your ranking, start considering it in your calculations.

Bold, expressive design

Typography has always been an important element in website design and 2018 looks set to see it become a bold and expressive central element. Part of this is that emphasis on mobile – typography doesn’t slow down a site the way big images do but can have a big effect on the visual effect of the site. So one big trend looks to be a move away from hero images and towards creative text-based designs.

Progressive Web Apps

Almost 90% of our time on smartphones is spent on an app so this has led to the recognition that apps are crucial going forward. This has also led to the creation of a blended app that mixes traditional app behaviour with web page behaviour – known as a Progressive Web App. These will continue to develop and see the inclusive of things like splash screens, push notifications and animated page transitions following the lead set up Twitter, Medium and the Washington Post.

Hamburger Menu

Another design trend that is led by the dominance of mobile is the hamburger menu. If you have been to a website and seen a little trio of horizontal lines in the corner, then you have experienced the hamburger menu. It allows sites to easily compress the main navigation into a little box that expands when tapped and means the space used by the main menu can be used for something else.

Micro-interactions

The use of micro-interactions is a way to make people interact more with a website and removes traditional static web page design. We already use these micro-interactions a lot on Facebook – when ‘like’ became a host of other little emojis to give a fuller picture of what you thought. The use of these micro-interactions also helps to flatten the speed bumps created when a page reloads while keeping the analytics information accurate.

Conclusion

2018 is going to be an interesting and even exciting year for web designers but there is going to be a lot to learn and master. From the Mobile First change to the many smaller design trends, it looks to be a fascinating year that might forever change the industry.


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SEO and Choice Theory

Posted on 07/28/2017by in Techniques and Seminars

To kick us off on our useful seminars and training section, Dawn Anderson’s lecture on SEO and Choice Theory is a great place to start.

Dawn is an International SEO Consultant and her discussion looks at how and where conflicts can occur between web crawling and consumer choice.

Consumer choice theories suggest that as humans we naturally find choice hugely appealing in the first instance.

However, evidence now suggests that an overcrowding of choice is detrimental to sales in a consumer environment.

In short, humans find it appealing to have choice but find comfort in those choices being limited, with a limited choice, a consumer is more likely to decide on an outcome/service/product that is satisfying to them and produce the happiest outcome.

There are a number of additional elements to the theory of Consumer Choice, including things like the influence of elements of choice and processes of elimination and so forth.

Dawn looks into this theory closely and analysis how this evidence can assist in the world of E-commerce, in particular, how the parameters on filter functions add or detract from the consumer experience.

The lecture expands into an interesting area looking at how search engines operate and how they deal with aspects such as duplicate or near duplicate pages.

An extension of the way they deal Duplicate pages goes into looking at the difference between sampling and crawling.

By understanding how the search engines deal with duplicate content and make the most of sampling as well as the other techniques that Dawn Anderson’s lecture covers, it gives you a fantastic spring board for knowing where to invest your SEO resources on a site when developing.

For more info on the theories and how they can be applied in every day projects, take a look at the Vid above for the full lecture.


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