InstaServ http://theinstaserv.com Just another WordPress site Wed, 16 Oct 2019 08:13:39 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=5.3.6 http://theinstaserv.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/favicon.png InstaServ http://theinstaserv.com 32 32 Technical SEO: Best Practices to Improve Ranking http://theinstaserv.com/technical-seo-tips/ Wed, 16 Oct 2019 08:13:39 +0000 http://theinstaserv.com/?p=3625 When asked about types of SEO, most of you would answer that there are only two, On-page and Off-page SEO. But wait, SEO is more vast than you actually think. There are more types of SEO, and one of the most significant out of all is a Technical SEO. SEO is not always about content […]

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When asked about types of SEO, most of you would answer that there are only two, On-page and Off-page SEO. But wait, SEO is more vast than you actually think. There are more types of SEO, and one of the most significant out of all is a Technical SEO. 

SEO is not always about content optimization and website promotion, it is a more extensive field than you imagined. If you are not an SEO specialist, then you may not have heard the term before, as it is the technical aspect of SEO that deals with the crawling and indexing.

If you are not even aware of what is indexing and crawling, then let me explain to you. Google sends its crawlers or bots to crawl and index your website, that is, to analyze and store the data of your website. Crawling is when Google bots follow your links to read and analyze your website. Once your website is crawled, the next step is indexing, which is the process of storing or adding your webpages into Google search. 

The processes of crawling and indexing help your customers to reach you by making your website visible on the search engine result page. So, now that you know the basics, let’s move further to discuss technical SEO in more detail.

What is Technical SEO?

Technical SEO refers to optimizing a website for crawling and indexing purposes. Thus, with technical SEO, you can help search engines access, crawl, and index your website easily. Thinking why it is called technical? It is known as technical because its main goal is to optimize the infrastructure of a website, and it has no relations with content optimization and link building.

Technical SEO is the most vital aspect because It is the structure of your website. Nothing else matters if you are not implementing technical SEO practices. Even if you have great content to show, it won’t bring the desired results if your website is not functioning well or if your site’s technical aspect is poor.

Technical SEO is critical when it comes to increasing the performance of your website. So, now that you know what is technical SEO, it is time to learn about the best SEO practices that can elevate your ranking, providing you with an opportunity to outdo your competitors.

Best technical SEO practices to boost your ranking

Focus on website loading time

You might have visited a site that took too long to load. What did you do? Did you wait with patience or walked out of the site? There are many other websites that can answer your query, so instead of waiting, you would have abandoned the site and move on to next. That is what your visitors are likely to do if your site is slow and takes a long time to respond. 

Consequently, it will increase your site’s bounce rate and decrease your ranking. Google uses bounce rate as a ranking factor. Thus, if your website is slow, then Google will push your website down in the search engine ranking page (SERP). That means, even if your content is of high quality, your website won’t rank for it, and your competitors will have a chance to knock you down.

Now the question comes, how you can increase your website loading speed. It can be done in a number of ways. To resolve any issue, you are required to identify its root cause. The main causes of slow website speed are large images and rich files. So, optimize or compress the images of your web page to improve your site’s load time. 

Avoid loading your website with too much stuff, and use minimalistic themes for your website. Furthermore, you can also use Google’s Page Speed Insights tool that lets you analyze a specific page’s site speed and user experience on every device. In addition to this, it shows you how to fix any problem to improve your website’s speed.

Remove broken links and 404 errors

If your website is showing a 404 error, then it means that you are linking to pages that don’t exist or are broken. It is typically triggered when website content has been removed or moved to another URL, or maybe you don’t want the page anymore so you unpublished it. Whatever may be the reason, one thing is for sure that it is not good for your website.

A broken page doesn’t allow Google to crawl, so it can affect your ranking negatively. Moreover, you also tend to lose your domain authority which is again harmful to your website. 404 not-found error leads to the bad user experience, which in turn drives your visitors to leave your website. And as you can’t afford to lose your potential customers, you need to fix this problem as soon as possible.

If your website is showing a 404 error to users because you changed the URL, then you are required to set up a 301 redirect to allow the old page to direct your visitors to the new page. However, before finding the right resolution, you will have to determine which pages on your website are broken.

There are several online tools like LinkMiner, SEMrush, or Google Search Console, etc., that provide you with a report of all your pages. You can easily check or organize your 404 error pages. Once you rectify your broken links or pages, generate an updated sitemap, and submit it to Google to let it know about the changes you have made.

Add SSL

Does the term SSL bounced over your head? Don’t worry, because there are many people who are still not aware of this term. SSL stands for Secure Sockets Layer and this latest trend encrypts sensitive information, provides authentication, and improves customer trust.

Installing an SSL on your server implies that your website can be accessed using https instead of HTTP, indicating that information transferred between your server and website is encrypted.

Earlier, SSL was vital for eCommerce websites only, but today every website should install SSL. To install SSL, you can contact and ask your hosting provider to enable SSL on your account. Then, you will have to follow a migration procedure to activate SSL.

So, install this security protocol and migrate to HTTPS to set encrypted links between a browser and a web server. Besides securing your information, it is the best way to establish trust with your users.

Make your website mobile-friendly

Today, more than 50% of users are using their mobile device to browse through the internet, thus, you simply can’t ignore it. Even Google also prioritizes mobile indexation now. So, it is indispensable to ensure that your website is optimized for mobile devices in terms of speed, design, and functionality. When it comes to mobile-friendliness, usually responsive design is preferred.

Having a mobile-friendly website is not an option, it is a necessity today to stay upfront in the competition, and to increase traffic and sales. Moreover, of all the ranking factors that Google takes into consideration today, mobile usability is the third most important.

In fact, in 2016, Google announced to crawl the mobile version of websites before the desktop version. The time is not very far when Google will consider the ranking factors from the mobile versions instead of desktop. So, to improve your ranking and traffic, use responsive design for your website and generate mobile-friendly content which is concise and readable.

Also, create AMP pages for your website to make your mobile pages run faster, and to increase user experience that will ultimately boost your CTR. You can know your website’s mobile-friendliness with Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test.

Optimize URL structure

You may not know this, but your URL structure does play a significant role in your search engine ranking. Here, the URL structure implies the format of your URL. Once you define the format of your URL, you are only required to optimize your URL when you publish new content. Your goal should be to build search engine friendly URLs. It should be descriptive, and it is better if it contains your targeted keywords.

Many people make the mistake of ignoring the importance of the URL structure, and they create websites with dynamic URLs that are not optimized for search engines. Make sure your URL is easy to follow. If your URL is not a search engine friendly, then you might lose the opportunity to improve your search engine visibility. Moreover, it may also make it difficult for you to do link building.

An important thing to keep in mind is that it is always better to get the right URL structure in the first time, because changing it later may create a rift between the search engine and your website.

Building a search engine friendly URL is not difficult, follow these tips given below and create the right URL:

  • Use lowercase characters
  • Keep your URL short and descriptive
  • Don’t use unnecessary characters
  • Include your keywords in the URL without stuffing
  • Use hyphens “-” in the place of underscores “_”
Conclusion

So, these are the best technical SEO practices that every digital marketer should adopt to boost the ranking and increase productivity. Apart from them, there are also other technical SEO implementations that should be followed, and they are part of both on-page and off-page SEO tactics. These implementations include avoiding duplicate content and disavowing low-quality backlinks. 

Furthermore, once you are done with the optimization of your website as per technical SEO guidelines, do not forget to inform about it to the Google or search engine by submitting an XML sitemap. In addition to performing these above-mentioned technical SEO practices, there are some outdated SEO tactics that you should avoid if you want to rank high on SERP.

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]]> Top 4 Google Ads Trends to Follow in 2019! http://theinstaserv.com/google-ads-trends/ Fri, 04 Oct 2019 06:36:58 +0000 http://theinstaserv.com/?p=3558 Since the inception of Google Ads, formerly known as Google Adwords, in 2000, a lot many things have changed as businesses now have access to new tools that let them ameliorate their PPC marketing campaign. As the landscape of Google advertising world keeps on changing, creating simple ads is not enough to get desirable traffic […]

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Since the inception of Google Ads, formerly known as Google Adwords, in 2000, a lot many things have changed as businesses now have access to new tools that let them ameliorate their PPC marketing campaign.

As the landscape of Google advertising world keeps on changing, creating simple ads is not enough to get desirable traffic and conversions. Setting up a successful ad campaign has become more daunting for marketers. However, Google Ads offer you numerous opportunities with some of its significant updates and trends.

As we are half past the year 2019, make sure that you are taking advantage of these trends to outdo your competitors and stay at the top of the game.

Here are the top 4 Google Ads trends to follow in 2019.

Remarketing is the key!

Remarketing is one of the most successful PPC strategies that allow marketers to keep their visitors hooked to their offerings by creating ads for products or services in which they displayed their interest. This strategy is a boon for getting great conversions as you target people who have already visited your website and have expressed their interest in your product before. So, you reconnect with past visitors and encourage conversions or sales.

There are four main types of remarketing that include standard remarketing, dynamic remarketing, remarketing list for search ads (RSLA), and video remarketing. You can create your remarketing campaign in the six following steps:

  • Identify and set your goal.
  • Select your audience based on factors like the page they visited, time spent by them, the number of pages visited, demographics, and geographic factors
  • Set up remarketing by adding remarketing code to your website
  • Build your remarketing list
  • Create your remarketing campaign
  • Optimize your campaign (ad testing, frequency cap testing, custom combination testing, bid testing, and landing page testing)

So, don’t forget to follow this Google Ads trend if you want to boost your CTR and conversions.

Optimize for voice search

Voice search is no longer an alien concept as now it is common to see people talking to their cell phones and driving them to follow their commands. As most of the people are now making their purchases through voice searches, it has become imperative for marketers to optimize their campaign for voice search.

Voice searches are typically longer, more in a conversational style, and in question form. Thus, to win at this opportunity, marketers are required to invest more in longer-tailed keywords that allow for more natural phrasing. However, thanks to Google’s advanced algorithms, Keywords no longer need to fall into a specific pattern.

Apart from focussing on keywords, to make the most out of this Google Ads trend and increase your ranking for voice searches, you must take the following considerations

  • Most of the searches are performed on mobile devices, so make your website mobile-friendly
  • As most of the voice searches comprise local queries, optimize your Google My Business listing
  • Add structured data or schema markup to your website to provide detailed information about your content to search engines
Recent Post

Quality score still matters

Though quality Score is not a new Google Ads trend, it is only getting more and more important with time. Even in 2019, Google is rewarding campaigns that are fully quality driven. Higher quality score not only implies better ranking, but it also has been a key to better CPCs.

There are a number of factors that can affect your quality score, such as the relevance of your ad text, your click-through-rate (CTR), the relevance of each keyword to its ad group, your historical performance, and the quality and relevancy of your landing page. How your visitor interacts with your website after clicking your ad influences your quality score.

Moreover, your quality score is the performance indicator that helps you determine what is working for you and what is not, and also lets you figure out what your cost per click will be. Want to know how to improve your quality score? No problem!  The following ways can help you increase your quality score.

  • Perform thorough keyword research and identify highly-relevant keywords that can bring you more traffic
  • Group your keywords for an optimized campaign structure
  • Optimize your landing page and include your keyword in it
  • Use expanded text ads feature that lets you run an ad with more words 
  • Run A/B testing and refine your ad copy to increase your CTR 
  • Don’t forget to include negative keywords

Use the smart features of Google Ads

Google Ads has launched automated and smart options like smart campaigns. As this automation leads to better ad campaigns, it is used extensively. Many users are now taking advantage of this smart feature that simplifies ad creation by streamlining the process of targeting specific audiences. 

This smart feature is specifically designed for small and local businesses to make their task easier. You add images, address of your business, and other information into Google Ads templates that account automatically for your CTR (Click-through-rate) and CVR (Average Conversion Rate). Here are some of the benefits that you get when you employ smart campaign feature of Google Ads

  • Create your ad quickly and without any hassle
  • Pay only when someone clicks your ad
  • You can attract more customers to your website
  • Reach to larger audiences from any device (computers and mobile devices)
  • You can review the performance of your ads and their effectiveness in your dashboard

Final Words

These are the top 4 trends that can make your ad campaign successful. The domain of online advertising is complex. With the increasing competition, it is getting difficult for businesses to rank for the same keyword.

So, if you want to improve your ROI to meet your expectations, keep your eyes open to Google Ads trends that may impact your ad campaign. If you are still not taking advantage of the above-stated Google Ads trends, then you could be missing some great opportunities to outflank your competitors.

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]]> 5 Archiac SEO Tactics that You Should Abandon Now! http://theinstaserv.com/abandon-seo-tactics/ Fri, 27 Sep 2019 07:00:57 +0000 http://theinstaserv.com/?p=3538 Being SEO professionals, you must be well-acquainted with the volatility of search engines. The everchanging search engine algorithms have compelled digital marketers to be agile with their SEO tactics.

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You might not be aware that SEO tactics that you are using could be hurting your website instead of helping. Discover five outdated SEO tactics that you must immediately abandon as they are no longer effective.

Being SEO professionals, you must be well-acquainted with the volatility of search engines. The everchanging search engine algorithms have compelled digital marketers to be agile with their SEO tactics. However, some old-school SEO tactics still proliferate that continue to harm the ranking of webpages on the search engine result page (SERP). 

Sticking to these archaic tactics can be detrimental to your online business. As these tactics no longer conform to the search engine updated algorithms, you may even get penalized for deploying them.

Therefore, you must adapt to the latest guidelines that search engines implement into their algorithms to improve your ranking, traffic, and conversions, and also to avoid getting penalized. So, here are these five obsolete SEO tactics that digital marketers should stop using.

Creating a keyword-rich content

Yes, generating a keyword-rich content used to be the priority for many digital marketers, but not anymore. 

Though it is still essential to incorporate your keyword in the content, its excessive use is now deemed as a black hat SEO tactic that may also get your website penalized forever by search engines.

The practice of overloading your webpage with keywords is known as Keyword Stuffing that makes your content look spammy to search engine bots.

What to do?

Stuffing your content with keywords mindlessly won’t do any good to your website. Consider the ideal keyword density while creating your content, which is 1 to 2%, and optimize your page for the user’s experience.

Google now uses Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) which implies you don’t need to place your keywords word-for-word in the content. You can also use related terms or synonyms.

Writing your meta-description for search engine

Meta descriptions and titles are indispensable ranking factors, but writing them only for the search engine would no longer be as effective as it used to be.

Have you ever considered why do you crave for higher ranking? A high ranking means higher visibility and higher chances of getting traffic. Eventually, it is all about getting traffic and conversions. 

However, writing descriptions for search engines may increase your ranking but it won’t increase your traffic until it is appealing to users. Moreover, it may also affect your ranking because search engines now use click-through-rate to determine your ranking.

What to do?

Write your meta-description for users and not only for search engines to increase your ranking and to get more clicks.

You can also run A/B testing to determine which description gets the best click-through-rate. Remember that your meta-description helps users to decide whether your content is worth their time or not, so make it engaging enough to drive users to visit your website.

Employing anchor text heavily on internal links in your content

Anchor text is a clickable hyperlink, and marketers often use them for internal linking. Internal links allow users to navigate a website easily and are also good with the SEO aspect as they offer smooth passage for search engine spiders to crawl the website. 

Because of these benefits, marketers tend to use loads of keyword-rich anchor text in their internal links. However, excessive use of anchor text in your internal links may look suspicious and spammy to search engines. 

Search engines are now more mindful of such activities and may penalize your website on finding you guilty, especially, after the penguin update that came to existence in 2012.

What to do?

Ideally, it is regarded that your significant pages should not be more than 3 clicks away from your homepage. Focus on your site structure.

Make your website user-friendly by ensuring smooth navigation for your visitors. Avoid redundant use of keyword-rich anchor text on internal links to steer clear of any penalties that search engines may impose on you.

Focussing on the number of links

When it comes to building links, one of the major concerns of marketers has been how to get more links. And in order to get links, they often use outdated link building tactics, such as paid links, link exchanges, link directories, spammy footer links, and more.

Though these black hat off-page SEO tactics may get you more links, they are usually short-lived and could be risky for both your website and online reputation. 

Low-quality links or spammy links can get your website penalized, owing to Google Penguin, one of the search engine updates.

What to do?

Offpage Seo is still one of the most vital ways to increase your ranking. However, instead of quantity, focus on the quality of your backlinks. Relevant and high-quality links are more productive in the longer run. 

To avoid penalties by the search engine, create a list of all your backlinks, analyze them based on their quality, and remove the low-quality links using disavow tool.

Getting fake customer reviews

Most of the customers today consider reviews before making any purchase. Often marketers get fake positive reviews to increase their sales. However, such a tactic can have severe repercussions on your online reputation. 

Getting fake reviews may seem like a good way to increase your conversions and sales, but its consequences can outweigh the benefits. This tactic can easily backfire.

Moreover, a common misconception prevails among bands of digital marketers that negative reviews can destroy their online reputation. However, negative reviews can play an essential role in exhibiting your authenticity and honesty that adds value to your business.

What to do?

Ask your happy customers to give you positive feedback and reviews. Instead of hiding your negative reviews, deal with them effectively. 

Remember, you may lose your potential prospects if they feel like you are lying to them, so maintain transparency and show your prospects that you have nothing to hide from them.

Conclusion

These are five outdated SEO tactics that do not exist anymore, and thus, you should abandon them now. They are nothing but a colossal waste of time.

Instead of wasting your efforts and time on them, devise SEO strategies that are relevant and productive. Stay up-to-date with the latest algorithm of search engines.

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