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Month: April 2016

How Google Sees Your Blog

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Bloggers put time and energy into making posts informative and entertaining. But from the SEO side, it’s important to ask: how will Google see my blog? Search algorithms change, but Google always looks at certain things in ranking sites. Here’s a birds-eye view of how Google sees your site, presented by a trusted local San Diego internet marketing company.

1. A sitemap is generally an .xml file showing Google how to navigate your site. If you don’t have sitemap.xml in your root directory, there are online tools to generate them. Verify your sitemap is Google-friendly at Google Webmasters Search Console.

A robot.txt file should also be there. It tells crawlers not to index the folders you list with the Disallow hint:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /wp-admin/
Disallow: /wp-gallery/

To index everything, don’t use Disallow:
User-agent: *

You should also add your sitemap to robots.txt:
Sitemap: http://mydomain.com/sitemap-path/sitemap.xml

2. Use content-specific keywords: “art” is too vague, but “NY modern art” narrows it down more. Shoot for a density of 2-3 keywords per 500 words of text.

3. Submit your URL to Google Webmaster Tools to ensure Google lists it. Help Google index your site map by navigating to Crawl >> Sitemaps. If the path to your sitemap isn’t there, add it.

4. Title and meta tags should appear in the html <head> section for each page.
<title>Advanced Knitting</title>
<meta name=”keywords” content=”keyword1, keyword2″/>
<meta name=”description” content=”Top dealer for Asian wall art.”/>

5. Google can’t see pictures, but it can see image tags: alt=”” appears if a browser can’t display the image; title=”” is what users see when their mouse hovers over the image.

Make image tags reflect content and keywords.

In going after the top Google rankings through best SEO practices, consider what Google discovers on your site and how you can help Google index it properly.

Learn more about how to make your site Google-ready from the experienced marketing pros at Saba, Inc. in San Diego. Through a combination of SEO, social media, PPC, and web design in San Diego, we help businesses climb the SERPs and drive more traffic to their site. Call us today at (858) 277-1717 and ask about a free website audit!

5 Common Misconceptions About SEO

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Having your website included in a search engine’s top results greatly increases your site’s earning potential, and with such high stakes, people are willing to try anything to get there. Unfortunately, these common search engine optimization myths still exist, causing people to waste time on outdated techniques.

1. Keywords Are More Important Than Content

Keywords, especially keyword phrases, are still important, however, search engines show pages based on how much a website’s content relates to the person’s search query. If the content is useful to website visitors, keywords will naturally appear in the text.

2. Optimizing for Google Is All That Is Important

Google does get the largest share of search queries, nevertheless, Bing is also important because it powers searches on Facebook. Optimizing promotional videos for YouTube searches is also key to getting more traffic to your website because YouTube is the second most popular site for searches.

3. My Website Need Tons of Backlinks to Rank Well

A few backlinks from reputable websites are better than hundreds of backlinks from directory listings, blog comments, and forum posts. You can still place a link to your website in forums and blog comments if you believe that you will get traffic because your link is relevant and useful, but search engines won’t give that backlink much, if any, weight.

4. Search Engines Love Videos

People like consuming video content and images on websites. But search engines do not see them as indexable content. Providing a transcript of the video and alt text for images easily solves this problem.

5. It’s Okay to Ignore Mobile Searches

Make sure your website is responsive. Ignoring usability for people using tablets and smartphones will limit your website’s visibility in mobile searches and hurt your rank on SERPs.

Contrary to popular belief, SEO isn’t dead. However, it has changed a great deal from the days of keyword stuffing and an endless quest for backlinks. Staying up to date on what’s happening in the world of online marketing in San Diego will keep your business and your content ahead of the pack.

Mobile Apps That Will Help You Manage Your SEO Efforts

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SEO is easily one of the most fluid aspects of digital marketing. Success in maintaining your website’s presence in the search results calls for constant vigilance of your San Diego search engine optimization (SEO) campaigns as conditions and opportunities change.

Whatever your choice of mobile device, there are a number of highly useful apps available to help you monitor and manage your campaigns while you’re away from the office. Here’s a closer look at some of the most recommended SEO management tools on the market.

Google Analytics for Android and iPhone

Google Analytics is one of the most widely used website analytics tools available, and the mobile version provides users with most of the critical data found in the desktop version. Track real-time performance metrics in an easily digested graphic format and quickly create custom reports for sharing with your management colleagues.

HubSpot for Android and iPhone

HubSpot’s mobile app provides critical SEO performance data as well as the ability to monitor your social media and blogging efforts. You can even access and update customer contact records on the go to maximize the potential of your lead generation program.

Website and SEO Toolbox for Android and iPhone

The Website and SEO Toolbox app conducts a number of mission-critical site performance tests such as measuring the overall SEO-friendliness of your site, checking for broken backlinks on your webpages, and tracking your various social media presence. Along with the performance reports, you’ll receive actionable recommendations highlighting needed improvements.

SEO SERP Mojo for Android and iPhone

This handy rank tracking tool allows you to track an unlimited number of URLs and keywords across all of the major search engines. SEO SERP Mojo provides unlimited ranking history for all of your keywords, and the data can be localized by region. Manual or automatic daily ranking updates are exportable in your choice of XLS, CSV, and JSON data reports.

If you could use help keeping tabs on your SEO campaigns, give Saba, Inc. a call at (310) 828-7757. We help businesses gain exposure through a combination of SEO, AdWords management, and social media marketing. Reach out today and request a free website audit!

7 Things You Don’t Want On Your Website

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It’s no secret that an attractive, easy-to-navigate website can make the difference between getting listed on the first few pages of search engines or getting buried 100 pages in. To help boost your chances, leading San Diego SEO agency Saba Inc. highlights some features you shouldn’t include on your website.

1. Stock Images

Savvy internet surfers can discern the difference between stock photos and those you create yourself. Many of these images are too perfect, featuring attractive models smiling in idyllic settings. Since stock images aren’t genuine, your visitors may assume that your company and offers aren’t either.

2. Flash Animation

Avoid using flash animation with cursors and moving text. It’s annoying to most folks, but more importantly it slows down your loading time.

3. Social Media Icons In Header

While 26 percent of top marketing sites place social icons in headers, according to Orbit Media Studios, it’s best to avoid them. Readers will often click on them and leave your site, diminishing your opportunities for leads or sales.

4. Vague Headlines

Obscure headlines are a content weakness. Clearly identify your target audience in your headlines and tell readers what you can do for them. Use sub headlines when suitable to describe what you do.

5. PDF Files

While PDFs can provide a wealth of information, they are not easily measurable, shared or updated. Therefore, use them sparingly for people to print or download. Stick mostly with HTML pages on your site.

6. Dead Links

Make sure you check your links often to ensure they’re working. Dead links can hurt your reputation and give the impression your site’s not current.

7. All Products and Services

Never list all your products and services on a single page. Feature your top-selling brands or clients and break pages up by category. Then use smart navigation so readers can search for specific types of products or services.

Interested in learning more about taking your site to the top of the SERPs? Give Saba SEO in San Diego a call at (858) 277-1717. Through a combination of SEO, PPC, and social media marketing, we help companies gain visibility and increase rank.

5 Ways to Turn Marketing Fails into Marketing Success

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Every company has its fair share of marketing horror stories. From low-budget start-ups to major, well-known corporations, all businesses will fail in their marketing efforts at some point in time. Fortunately, it’s possible to turn these costly disappointments into unprecedented success. Following are five tips from trusted San Diego SEO company Saba, Inc. that will show you how.

1. Get in the Right Mindset

Failure in marketing is the surest way to identify the strategies that don’t work. Accept that there is always risk in implementing a new marketing campaign, but understand that win or lose, there will invariably be rewards. A low-interest campaign not only shows you how and where you’ve gone wrong, but it can additionally highlight the strategies that have the highest likelihood of producing desirable results. Study your failed efforts carefully and make the most of the learning experiences they provide.

2. Learn Your Market

One of the most common causes of a failed marketing campaign is insufficient or erroneous knowledge of the targeted market. As you review your past efforts, look diligently for any new information about your market that the blunder has revealed. It’s also a good idea to consider the benefits of implementing a customer relationship management (CRM) program or overhauling your old one. The more you know about the people you’re reaching out to, the easier it will be to streamline your outreach for optimal results.

3. Recognize the Importance of Good Timing

Surprisingly, even the best marketing campaigns can fall short of their goals if they’re not implemented at the right time. Just because a campaign hasn’t worked doesn’t mean it’s an ineffective one. Study patterns in customer buying habits and see if the same marketing effort might be better implemented later on. This will help you limit both your losses and your spending on future promotions. Many companies have found that failed strategies can provide incredible success several months, years, or even decades after their introduction.

4. Start Thinking Outside of the Box

If you have the right mindset about your marketing failure, you’ll be able to identify your missteps and you’ll have a clear understanding of what not to do. More importantly, you’ll have sufficient confidence for further pushing the envelope. If you’ve been struggling to make tried-and-true methods work for you, failure should be seen as an invitation to step outside the box and to do something that your competitors aren’t doing.

5. Laugh at Yourself Publicly

The web has made commercial failures all the more public and embarrassing. Even some of the largest companies in the world have made social media blunders that have had people from coast to coast mocking and laughing at them. Try poking fun at yourself. This is a great way to gain exposure for your business and it shows your target market a fun, personable side. Surprisingly, companies that laugh at their own marketing missteps in public arenas are often viewed as trustworthy. It exhibits qualities like transparency, honesty, and humility, and these are all things that are essential for building a strong and unforgettable brand.

Looking for more internet marketing tips? Reach out to Saba, Inc. at (858) 277-1717 and request a free website audit and consultation with one of our experienced SEO analysts today. We look forward to hearing from you!

Making Your Landing Pages Work for You

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Business owners, SEOs, and AdWords managers in San Diego all know the majority of sales and marketing efforts share one goal: conversion. This means getting potential customers to take that next step, and it all starts with your landing page.

What problem does it solve?

Instead of prattling off the features of your product, you might want to play on visitor needs by sympathizing with a problem and telling how your product solves it. They may already be familiar with similar products and don’t need more facts–they’re only interested in how your particular offer helps them.

Add Video

If you have a more complicated offer to present visitors, it may be easier for both you and potential customers if you show an explanatory video rather than paragraphs of text. Give it a prominent place on your page so it can’t be missed. And, of course, make sure it’s a quality video that’s both entertaining and informative.

Highlight Product Features

Video does have certain drawbacks, such as the assumption that your visitors will have the patience to sit and watch. Sometimes it’s better to break down your product’s features and benefits into a bulleted list of well-worded phrases they can quickly scan and assimilate. Also, search engines can’t index video, so inserting keywords where possible may work to your benefit.

Remember the Marketing Funnel

“Cold” leads are visitors who never heard of your product and take more convincing than people already more familiar. The funnel works by directing visitors through a brief series of pages that present further information, such as features, reviews, and special offers, each connected by a prominently displayed link. The idea is to keep visitors hooked on an interactive setup that has them primed and informed by the time they reach the actual purchase page.

Create a Web Hub

Most users don’t buy right away. You could keep them coming back by making your page a central hub. Include related videos, articles, and useful links that make you an authority on the subject who they are more likely to purchase from.

Want to know more about creating landing pages that work on your behalf? Maybe you want to incorporate improved SEO strategies to improve SERP rank. Either way, let us help! Give the marketing experts at Saba SEO a call today at (858) 277-1717 and request a free website audit today!

The Negative Impact of Slow Website Speeds

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Site speed affects the user experience and can directly affect your business. According to internet marketing companies in San Diego, slow websites drive away about fourteen percent of frustrated shoppers who move on to buy from a competing site. More than half of the visitors to your site will not return if they have to wait too long for pages to load. Customer dissatisfaction only begins to tell the story of how website speed can hurt.

Unhappy Customers and No Repeat Sales

Almost half of all internet users expect to wait less than two seconds for a website to load. When your site takes three seconds to load, you can expect the poor user experience to have caused forty-percent of your audience to leave. Even when customers reach your site, they will not stay loyal to your brand if they have to wait too long while pages load. A slow site will cause you to fail to achieve repeat sales.

Low SERP Rank

Google algorithms consider page speed when deciding how it will rank your site in search engine results. The search giant knows what some of the biggest names on the web know: Slow website speeds cause user dissatisfaction and lost sales. Even if your company operates a website with valuable content and great deals, your site can still go unnoticed by search engine users. Slow website speeds cost you severely when trying to drive organic search engine traffic.

Why Your Website Is Slow

More than one problem can contribute to website speed issues. For example, your site could have bloated images or poorly implemented code that puts an undue strain on web browsers. Also, failure to implement HTTP compressing and caching can also put a damper on the way users experience your site. Web sites can also respond poorly if your pages require too many concurrent downloads from your server. Finally, a poor website hosting provider can also make your business website insufferably slow. Bargain hosting packages can sometimes cost you much more in lost sales than you could ever save.

Are you concerned your website is driving current and potential customers away? Get a free website audit from Saba SEO, a San Diego-based SEO agency that helps companies drive traffic to their sites and boost sales through PPC management in San Diego, website design and development, and social media marketing and mobile app development. Call (858) 277-1717 today and get started!

5 Eye-Catching Headline Formulas for Shared Articles

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If you’re producing great content as part of your online marketing strategy, but your articles are still not being shared, you might have an issue with your headlines. The fact is that your headline is the most important part of your blog post, ad, or content. Perhaps they’re not “punchy” enough, or just aren’t intriguing readers. Here are some ideas that will get your content the attention it deserves.

1. “Tips”

Tips are a common formula for headlines, and one that will attract more readers, because they know they’ll be in for short bits of information as opposed to a long-winded read. Here are a few examples:

10 Tips to Optimize Your Golf Game
6 Tips from the Pros about Carpentry
12 Tips to Improve Your Small Talk

2. “Mistakes”

Nobody wants to make mistakes–that’s why this is such a popular formula for headlines. For example:

5 Mistakes to Avoid When You Remodel
8 Common Mistakes Beginning Photographers Make
Selling Your Antiques Online? Don’t Make These 12 Mistakes

3. “How To”

This is a great formula if you’re trying to provide simple instructions to your readers. Some examples are:

How to Remove Dust from Your Home
How to Test Your Carbon Monoxide Detectors
How to Register to Vote

4. “Guides”

The Guide headline formula is very similar to the “how-to” lists, but it implies that you will provide more in-depth information for your readers. A few examples include:

Complete Guide to Brewing Your First Beer
The Definitive Guide to Golf Swings
The Ultimate Guide to Holiday Gift-Buying

5. “Data and Research”

If you’re producing content that is heavily fact- or research-based, this is a great headline formula to use to convey serious and informative content. For example:

Fascinating New Data About Workouts
6 Research-Driven Insights About Marketing
New Market Research About the Fast-Food Industry

Learn more about creating share-worthy articles from the marketing professionals at Saba, Inc., a trusted SEO company in San Diego. We help businesses large and small improve online visibility and increase traffic. Give us a call at (858) 277-1717 and request a free website audit today.

Using Google Analytics to Your Advantage

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Google Analytics is one of the best tools businesses can use to measure the success of their inbound marketing efforts (and it’s free, too). The amount of information available can feel overwhelming initially, so use the following tips to get the most out of your organic marketing efforts and PPC campaign.

Set Goals

Set conversion goals and more by navigating to the Goals section of the Admin menu. Use existing templates or create your goals from scratch. Every time you visit your control panel, you will quickly see how well your site has progressed.

Customize Dashboards

Stop hunting for the Google Analytics features that most interest you. Instead, create a custom dashboard that shows them all in one place. Visit the Dashboards menu to create as many as twenty screens that can quickly give you the information you need.

Use Custom Alerts

If you grow weary of checking your account every day, try setting custom alerts that will email you when different conditions or user behaviors that you care about occur. Create a new alert from the Admin menu and then get busy with other things until you receive an alert.

Remove Yourself

Google Analytics measures all website user metrics including those generated from your visits. Create a new IP filter from the admin panel and enter the IP addresses you most often use. Excluding your actions from your Analytics reports will improve your view of user behavior.

Check Website Speed

If your site loads slowly, you will lose business as visitors and shoppers abandon your site and go to another. You might also lose page rank and organic traffic to your site. Under the Reporting menu, click on Behavior and run the Site Speed report. From the results, you can identify poorly performing pages and take corrective action.

View Traffic Flow

Find out the paths your visitors take through your site. Use the options from the Behavior menu to see what page visitors land on and what subsequent pages they visit. The information can help you understand what people want from your site so you can design it to meet their needs.

Interested in learning more about PPC or Google Analytics? Maybe you’re more interested in learning how to supplement paid efforts with SEO in San Diego. Either way, give Saba SEO a call at (858) 277-1717 and request a free consultation to find out more!

5 Tips to Get the Most of Your Mobile Marketing Efforts

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Mobile revenue is expected to reach 60 percent of the digital advertising market by the end of the decade. Here are five tips to making the most out of mobile marketing.

1. Encourage Click-to-Call Actions

More than half of smartphone searches for local businesses culminate with a phone call. On mobile websites, the call-to-action should invite visitors to either click or tap on an icon to be connected to a business representative.

2. Take Advantage of Device Continuity

With more operating systems offering smooth transitions and synchronization across device platforms, online brands should make sure that their marketing efforts are following prospects. This is something that can be accomplished with retargeting campaigns that can display ads when users switch from mobile to desktop devices and vice versa.

3. Be Truly Responsive

The mobile computing paradigm requires brands to feature mobile-friendly websites and landing pages. Many brands often choose platforms such as WordPress and themes advertised as being responsive, however, they fail to test the level of responsiveness when they add a new plugin or widget. Mobile-friendly websites should be thoroughly and constantly tested for browser compatibility across devices.

4. Mobile Email Campaign

The rise of cloud and mobile-ready services such as Office 365 means that more users are choosing to check their email from their smartphones. This is a great opportunity for email marketers who should always make sure campaigns are thoroughly optimized for mobile marketing on various mobile devices and properly tested before they are launched.

5. Call Extensions

Click-to-call features should not be limited to mobile websites. Since Google is the most dominant search engine among smartphone users, the company has wisely made it easier for advertisers to include phone numbers in AdWords campaigns, and the numbers are displayed along with an inviting and attractive icon.

If you need to make your website mobile-friendly, or are thinking of developing a mobile app for your business, reach out to Saba SEO in San Diego. With more than 10 years of SEO and internet marketing experience, we can ensure your site meets the standards outlined by Google and is optimized to rank in the SERPs. Call us today at (858) 277-1717 and ask for a free website audit!

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