Technical SEO isn’t an easy function to optimize. It requires a steep understanding of web development and general marketing best practices, and it’s even more difficult to implement and execute.

Because today’s internet is so saturated, even with the best technical SEO practices, it can be difficult to improve your website’s ranking, creating headaches, sleepless nights, and a loss of motivation, among other things.

Luckily, there are platforms, tools & software, and knowledgeable agencies available for your benefit.

In this article, we’ll be discussing what technical SEO is, how it works, and what tools are available for you to use in order for best optimization practices. Unlike the name suggests, however, we won’t be taking a technical approach to our explanation.

Instead, we’ll lay it out in an easy-to-digest, understandable, and comprehendible manner so that you can get a grip on your organic search results and begin to take your website’s functionality to new heights!

What is Technical SEO?

In order to define technical SEO, we need to first understand what SEO means. In short, SEO refers to search engine optimization; a process that aims to improve your ranking in the search results, which brings traffic to your website, and conversion of that traffic, which brings you leads that you can hopefully turn into customers, clients, patients, or students.

SEO comes in two parts, onsite and offsite SEO.

Technical SEO falls in the onsite SEO side and refers to the technical requirements of a website that improves the SEO score and ranking of the website.

In other words, it’s a process whereby one seeks to improve a website’s functionality and optimize content elements and coding in order to improve the site’s “score”.

In order to optimize the user experience and improve technical SEO, a website should consider its Core Web Vitals. What are Core Web Vitals, you ask?! Great question!

Core Web Vitals, in short, are three pillar measurements used to gauge a user’s experience and understand the technical soundness of a website. These three pillars are: performance, responsiveness, and stability.

One example of this would be a website’s speed at which its web pages load. We’ll get into more detail about examples of technical SEO shortly.

How Technical SEO Works

As mentioned, technical SEO requires the improvements of a website’s functionality in order for crawlers to index and rank the site more efficiently and effectively.

With that said, it’s called “technical” SEO for a reason. While the broad concept of SEO is easy to comprehend, technical SEO requires a deeper understanding of web development and technology.

In order to outline how technical SEO works more clearly, here’s a quick and easy real-life example for you to refer to!

Consider this:

You’re a social media expert seeking assistance with your digital marketing strategy. You decide that a digital marketing agency is your best option, so you find yourself on Google searching for the best Digital Marketing Agencies in your area.

By typing into the search engine “the best digital marketing agencies for digital marketing strategies”, you receive several results. You decide to click on a couple of websites for consideration.

The first website loads immediately. The second, however, takes a few seconds to load. In addition, you notice that some of the site’s pages are glitchy, and you even come across a dead link that brings you to an error page.

No wonder the first website is ranked higher. It gave you a better user experience. And that’s what Google wants you to have because they want you to be happy with the results they serve up.

While this is quite the elementary example, it’s simply a lens into the value of website’s functionality in relation to its organic search ranking. Of course, technical SEO is much more complex than the speed at which a website loads. With that said, a website’s load-time is a primary characteristic of technical SEO.

Below are the Main Characteristics Necessary for Optimizing for Technical SEO:

• A Website’s Speed/Load Time
• An Efficient and Effective Internal Linking Structure (Ensuring its Crawlable)
• Register with Google Search Console
• Fix Content Issues and Bugs (i.e. Duplicate Content, Dead links, Etc.)
• Make Sure Your Site is Mobile-Friendly
• Ensuring Your Site is Safe and Secure

A technically adept website is one that’s fast, user-friendly, and easy to crawl for search engines to index. While the sound of crawling spiders may give you the heebie-jeebies, in technical terms, it’s exactly what you want!

Effective SEO Tools to Use

Improving your website’s technical functionality is crucial for the success of your website’s organic search ranking. Unfortunately, technical SEO isn’t so simple. Luckily, there are tools, platforms, and agencies (including Six Degrees Media) that can help.

Below are some of the top three (3) most effective SEO tools that you can use to scale your search results and improve your SEO rank score:

• SEMRush
• Yoast
• Screaming Frog

SEMRush

SEMRush is an all-in-one marketing, SEO, and visibility management SaaS platform built to help optimize your marketing efforts, boost audience monetization, increase organic traffic, and run technical SEO audits, among other beneficial features.

Yoast

Dubbed WordPress’ #1 SEO plugin, Yoast is another incredibly helpful SaaS tool for boosting your SEO score, optimizing website content, and ensuring your site meets the highest of technical SEO standards.

Screaming Frog

Remember when we discussed the value of crawling spiders and how it isn’t something you should be afraid of?! In comes Screaming Frog.

Screaming Frog is an industry-leading website crawler that aids in improving your website’s SEO, uncovering any technically unsound issues, ultimately making your website a more technically efficient destination for its viewers.

Contact Six Degrees Media

Improving your SEO score is the solution to scaling your online presence, boosting conversion, and gaining traffic. If you want to learn more about technical SEO and how it can be implemented in your business, Six Degrees Digital Media can help. Contact us today to book a consultation!

The post What is Technical SEO? appeared first on Six Degrees Digital Media.

If you’re looking for a means of tracking data regarding the performance and behavior of your website’s users, Google Analytics is for you.

Not only does it allow you to gain a better understanding of your audience, but it assists in decision making, forecasting, and determining what marketing strategies work and what ones don’t.

The breadth of data that Google Analytics provides is invaluable.

What follows will be a discussion of what Google Analytics is, and the several benefits that come with it! So, without further ado, let’s jump right into it.

What is Google Analytics?

Simply put, Google Analytics is a superior analytics tool used to gain valuable insight into the performance and behavior of your target audience and website at large. One of many Google tools, Google Analytics comes with the ability to connect to Google Search Console, Google Ads Manager, and Google Tags Manager, among other useful features.

And the best part is it’s totally free to use and set up! I mean, who doesn’t love free things?

Upon setting up your Google Analytics profile, you’ll be welcomed by its dashboard offering several beneficial features and functions. On the sidebar of the homepage, you’ll see each dashboard dropdown. It’s here where you’ll find all of the analytical data you need, and then some.

Below are the primary dashboard features of Google Analytics:

Audience (i.e. Audience Overview, Geo Demographics, Mobile Traffic, etc.)

Here, you’ll learn all that you need to learn about your site’s users. If you just want a bird’s eye view of this data, simply click the ‘Overview’ option. If you want to take a deeper dive into the specifics of your audience’s analytics, choose from the demographics, mobile traffic, or interests sections, among others.

Acquisition (i.e. Acquisition Overview, Traffic Analytics, Search Console, etc.)

While the audience dashboard informs you about, well, your audience, the acquisition dashboard informs you about how those users found your site. In other words, how they were acquired. Similarly, if you just want a bird’s eye view of this data, simply click the ‘overview’ tab. For a deeper dive, choose from traffic analytics, Google Search Console, or Google Ads, among others.

Behavior (i.e. Behavior Overview, Behavior Flow, Site Speed, etc.)

While you can find behavioral data via the audience and acquisition dashboard, the behavior dashboard is where you go for a deeper, more comprehensive insight into user behavior. For an overview, click ‘overview’ (shocker!) to view data regarding bounce rates, page views, and session duration. For a deeper dive, visit the behavior flow or site speed tabs. It’s here where you’ll learn more practical data that may help you with improving technical SEO!

Conversions (i.e. Conversion Goals, etc.)

The final primary dashboard on your Google Analytics homepage is Conversions. Properly named, the conversions dashboard is where you’ll gain insight into how your site users convert. In other words, what actions are they performing on your site and how much are they performing them. The primary function of the conversions tab, withstanding the insight into the data, is the ‘goals’ tab. This is an extremely effective tool not only for setting goals but for tracking the performance of said goals.

The Benefits of using Google Analytics

Besides the fact that it’s a free service, reason enough for your business to be using it, Google Analytics happens to provide several useful features that are extremely beneficial.

While the platform itself is certainly user-friendly, it will take some time to familiarize yourself with it. Once your profile is set up and you’ve become familiar with its functionality, however, you’ll come to value its services more than any other platform you’re currently using.

Below are the primary benefits of using Google Analytics for your business:

• Identify and Track Web Traffic
• Understand User Behavior
• Insight into Target Audience Data
• Data Collection & Reporting Tools
• Set Conversion Goals
• Improve SEO (note Technical SEO & Site Speed)
• It’s Free!

With Google Analytics, you can connect to all other Google Properties such as YouTube, Google Ads, and Google Search Console, among others.

Moreover, by integrating it with your social media, landing pages, and email software, Google Analytics provides you with the informative data to suggest which platforms are converting and which ones aren’t, ultimately informing you which platforms to focus on and which ones you may want to reduce your time and efforts on.

Why Your Business Needs Google Analytics

While the applications of Google Analytics are abundant, there happens to be somewhat of a trend when it comes to the primary reasons many businesses choose to take advantage of its services.

Whether you’re a digital marketing professional seeking to improve strategies, a web developer eager to optimize technical functionalities, or you’re a business owner trying to boost your website’s SEO score, Google Analytics can help.

Below are the three (3) primary reasons why your business needs to start using Google Analytics if you aren’t already doing so:

Improves Your Marketing Strategy

An effective digital marketing strategy entails several different factors when it comes to the decision-making and strategic planning of a particular campaign. Moreover, a marketing strategy without a goal is simply a theory.

With Google Analytics, you can analyze traffic data, understand user behavior, and set conversion rate goals base on past, present, and future conversion data.

By gaining a better insight into your audience and your site’s performance, you gain a better understanding of what to implement into your digital marketing strategy.

Improves Website Performance

Having an intimate understanding of your website and its performance is crucial to determining what steps are required to further its growth and success, and conversely, eliminating what might not be working.

By learning what pages are most popular, where users are converting the most, and what technical SEO aspects are functioning properly and what ones aren’t (i.e. website speed), You inevitably gain the tools to make the necessary adjustments to improve your website’s performance.

Improves Technical SEO

While there are several SEO tools and platforms available, Google Analytics is superior because of the way it acts as a one-stop shop. If you want to know how much traffic you’re driving, what landing pages are converting, and what searches are bringing users to your site, Google Analytics can help.

The more you understand your website’s success and pitfalls, the faster you can make the adjustments to improve it. With the abundant amount of data provided via Google Analytics, you can improve your site’s SEO score and ultimately increase your conversion rate and in turn, your ROI.

Contact Six Degrees Media

If you want to learn more about how to track and report data, improve SEO, and increase ROI from your website, Six Degrees Digital Media can help. Contact us today to book a complimentary strategy session.

The post The Benefits of Google Analytics appeared first on Six Degrees Digital Media.

Core Web Vitals is a set of factors that Google lists as being important to an overall user experience on a webpage. They encompass the first input delay, cumulative layout shift, and the largest contentful paint. This is a subset of factors that make up Google’s page experience score, and the page experience itself includes things like mobile-friendliness, HTTPS, fewer interstitial pop-ups, and safe browsing. Since it’s important to Google and you want to climb in the rankings, we’re going to break down all three components below.

Largest Contentful Paint

In short, this is how long it takes your page to load from the user’s point of view. So, the time starts when the user clicks on a link and stops when they see the majority of the images on the screen. This is different from page speed measurements for Google. This metric focuses on what really matters when you think about your page speed, including being able to actually interact and see what’s on your page.

You can go to Google PageSpeed Insights to see your score. This is helpful when you’re trying to find areas to improve the speed. What’s also a bonus to using Google PageSpeed Insights over other tools is that you get to look at Chrome browser data and see how well your page has done so far. The goal is to get the Largest Contentful Paint speed to 2.5 seconds at a maximum. For larger web pages or pages with a lot of features, this can be a huge challenge. There are some things you can do to improve this metric, including:

• Remove any larger page elements. As a bonus, Google PageSpeed Insights will pinpoint any elements that are slowing down your Largest Contentful Paint score.
• Remove any third-party scripts that are unnecessary. Each third-party script can slow your page down by around 34 microseconds.
• Set up lazy loading on your page. This makes the images load when someone scrolls down the page to speed up your overall loading time.
• Upgrade your web host because better hosting will give you faster loading times overall.

First Input Delay

Google second core vital is First Input Delay. At this point, your users should get a 2.5-second or faster Largest Contentful Paint score. Now you need to know how they can interact with your page. This is exactly what this metric will measure. It takes into account the time it takes for any users to interact with your page. A few examples they could take include:

• Clicking on a site navigational link
• Clicking on an option from your menu
• Entering an email into the box or field
• Opening the accordion text on mobile devices

Google ranks this metric as important because it encompasses how real-life visitors interact with your site. It technically measures how long it takes for something to happen when a user navigates to your page. In this sense, this is the page speed score. However, it goes another step further that measures how long it takes the users to take any action once they land on your page. There are some things that you can do to improve this score, including:

• Defer or Minimize JavaScript – It’s virtually impossible for any visitor to interact with your webpage while the browser is trying to load JavaScript. This is why you should consider deferring or minimizing it on your page.
• Remove Third-Party, Non-Critical Scripts – Just like with the first metric, you want to remove third-party scripts if you can because they have a negative impact on this metric.
• Use the Browser’s Cache – Using the cache will help you load your page’s content much faster. In turn, this helps your page power through JavaScript loading tasks quicker.

Cumulative Layout Shift

The final metric for the Core Web Vitals is the Cumulative Layout Shift. This refers to how stable your page is as it loads. So, if certain elements of your page move around as the page loads, this means that you have a higher score. This isn’t something you want. There are a few things you can do to minimize this score, including:

• Add UI Elements Below the Fold – This ensures that you won’t push the content down that the user thinks should stay in place.
• Make Sure Ads Have Reserved Space – Put your ads in reserved spaces to stop them from appearing on the page randomly and pushing your content to the side, up, or down.
• Use Specific Size Attribute Dimensions for Media – Doing this will ensure that the browser knows how much space a specific media element will take up. This won’t change as the page loads fully.

Book a Strategy Session at Six Degrees Digital Media

If you’re ready to improve your page’s Core Web Vitals, contact us. We’re happy to look at your current statistics and give you pointers to improve to help you climb in Google’s rankings.

The post What is Core Web Vitals? appeared first on Six Degrees Digital Media.

Google Search Console, formerly known as Google Webmaster Tools, has several benefits that can help you boost your website. If you want to know the biggest benefits of using it, read on.

1. Improve How Your Website’s Search Appearance Looks

Using this tool can help you improve how the search function looks on your website. It can also give you a preview of what your pages look like on the search engine results page so you can tweak it as needed. When you start working on your site’s search appearance, consider how it looks in the results. The URL, titles, site links, meta description, and more should all be correct. You can view rich snippets, standard search results, and rich cards.

2. Improve Your HTML Elements

You can also use this tool to improve your page’s HTML elements. Maybe you forgot to add a meta description to your webpage. If so, you can now add it and optimize it for specific keywords. Take time to look at your title tags. The pages should have the correct title tag hierarchy. You should have on Title tag (H1) on your page. The other headlines should go through H2 to H6.

3. Monitor Your Link Reports

Maybe you’re interested in understanding what other websites are linking to your site. The Search Console will show you link details leading to your website, including what anchor text gets used and the website pages that get linked to the most. This is important for link-building strategies. You want to have links to your site leading from high-quality websites because this indicates to Google that your website has valuable content.

4. Increase Your Organic Search Traffic

Using Google Search Console indicates that you want to increase the traffic to your website. The tool has an entire section dedicated to search traffic. It generates valuable reports that give you insight into how your users are getting to your website using organic search results. It’ll show you the most popular search queries, the top-ranking pages, and how your website is performing. The deeper you get into these reports, the better understanding you’ll get learning about the weaknesses and strengths of your strategy. You should also consider looking at the Google Analytics reports too.

5. Crawl the Website

Crawling your website is a critical aspect of SEO. A crawl is a bot. The bot indexes all online content across the internet, and this is how you find it when you search for phrases. A crawl will show you things about your website. You should fix any errors that crop up, and you can input your own information to help Google get a better understanding of your website. This includes URL parameters. You can use the Robots.txt Tester feature to check for errors on your website. In turn, this can help you avoid future issues that could hurt your site.

6. Get an Understanding of Google’s Index

If you’re curious as to how Google indexes pages, this tool can help you get a better understanding. You can track the number of website pages that turn up in Google’s search results. You can also use this tool to monitor any URLs that you don’t want Google to index. Take the information from the report and remove any unwanted URLs from being indexed. The report will also highlight blocked resources and keywords. It can help to increase specific keyword usage and fix any accidentally blocked resources on your page.

7. Get Website Messages

Google Search Console will notify you when your website runs into or develops issues. It’ll send you notifications or messages when there are security risks, or your pages aren’t crawling correctly. These messages allow you to get ahead of any potential problems. You’ll know as soon as Google detects a problem. You can set up message forwarding to have the platform email notifications to you. When you get website messages, you want to take action. It can be easy to ignore these problems, but they’re usually essential improvements you want to tackle quickly.

Start Using Google Search Console Today

If you’re ready to harness the power of Google Search Console, but you’re not sure where to start, contact Six Degrees Digital Media. We’re happy to help you get a better understanding of this free, powerful tool and make it work for your website. Contact us today.

The post The Benefits of Google Search Console appeared first on Six Degrees Digital Media.

Here is a list of ten signals the search engines use to rank websites in the search results. See which one you can improve to increase your SEO performance.

Title Tags

Google uses title tags as the clickable headline in its search results. Make sure yours are dynamic, 50 to 60 characters, and a strong summary of the page’s contents.

Site Speed

Increasing the speed that users can move through your website to accomplish desired tasks is good for SEO and also for your general user experience.

Coding Errors

If your HTML is littered with poor formatting and coding mistakes, this signals a poor-quality site. So clean that code!

Mobile First

Google now indexes the mobile versions of sites before the desktop. Make sure your mobile site is flawless and your rankings will benefit.

Optimize Content

Make sure you have your main keyword in your title tag and somewhere within your first paragraph. Secondary, related keywords should also be placed occasionally throughout your text.

Internal Linking

Pages with more internal links pointing to them are assumed to be more important.

Outbound Links

Linking to authoritative sources within your content signals quality content. However, Google doesn’t like too many outbound links.

Sitemap

Having a proper sitemap helps search engines index your pages, which can help with your rankings.

SSL

Use a security certificate – this creates the “padlock” and https (secure sockets layer) to keep data traffic between your site and the user safe.

Backlinks

If a large number of other sites link to back to yours, this sends a strong signal that people find your content valuable. However, make sure these are coming from quality sources.

The more you can tweak your site to align with what Google and other search engines are looking for, the better your site will fair in their rankings.

If you need assistance getting your site optimized, contact Six Degrees Digital Media today.

The post Top 10 Signals to Help Your Site Rank Better in Search Results [Infographic] appeared first on Six Degrees Digital Media.

In the beginning of the SEO era, webmasters and site owners would “keyword stuff” their websites in order to get the attention of the search engines. This tricked the bots that crawled the website into believing that the site was the perfect destination for consumers in search for the product or service that matched the repetitive word. Visitors were frequently disappointed with their search results. In an attempt to do away with these so-called black hat tactics, Google has updated its algorithm to fight this form of spam. The most radical change was the Panda update a few years ago.

The next tactic that was employed was in the form of backlinks. You see the search engines look to see how many other sites are “pointing” to your website. This means they have you website domain listed somewhere on their site. This gives you a vote or point in the search engine’s eyes.

Again, the black hatters exploited the loopholes. They did this by the use of using various tools that created backlinks automatically and more. I won’t get into all the specifics here, just know this is not the way you want to get the attention of the search engines.

This is when Google Penguin was unleashed. This algorithm was designed specifically with the hunt for aggressive and unnaturally built backlinks in mind. Penguin quickly ousted websites that relied on paid links, link-building bots, and organized link exchanges.

So here’s the scenario, you or your marketing company built 1000’s of links thinking this was ok. And in all fairness, it was accepted way back when. Now you need to clean up your link profile. So what do you do?

One thing to note is that when Google starts doling out penalties, there is no shortage of info on the Internet about how to fix things to get in their good graces again. The first thing you need to do is identify the bad links. You can do this by running your website through various backlink checking tools such as:

Ahrefs.com

MajesticSEO.com

Google Search Console

You may even want to use more than one. Now that you have as big a list as you can get, you need to go through the links one by one and see if they are good or bad. If you aren’t sure, just ask yourself, do I want to be associated with this website? Some sites should be obvious nixes. If you see pharmaceutical sites, adult sites, or site with gibberish content, these you definitely want to disavow. For more information on how to disavow a link, visit Google support.

So now of course we need to talk about acceptable links. Fret not as there are plenty of ways to get good backlinks.

• Local business listings and industry directories. The listing on the local chamber of commerce website is legitimate as well as the citations we spoke of in a previous post. You can read that again here.

• Social media. The links from your business’s Facebook page or other social media profile sites are legitimate. When friends or followers share your posts, which contain backlinks, or memes, this is organic link creation.
• Social bookmarking. Tread lightly here. If you are a member of a bookmarking site, actively engage with other users, and share plenty of content from other sources, nobody will fault you for also sharing your content with backlinks. If however, sharing your material is all you do and there are no interactions, there is a good chance that your efforts will not be successful.
• Online activity. Issue legitimate press releases that discuss a newsworthy event. When they are posted to press release sites, your link makes the rounds in a legitimate manner. Guest blogging, too, can be an excellent way of approaching a new niche of consumers. Video content submissions and image sharing on infographic sites are both genuine means of creating backlinks. There are a few other ways to get links but this is a good list to get you started.

Make sure you have a healthy backlink profile. One last tip here. When you buy a new domain name, you also want to be sure that the domain does not have a bunch of spammy backlinks pointing to it. You could be fighting an uphill battle right out of the gate.

If you need assistance with your marketing, schedule a complimentary strategy session.

The post The Truth About Backlinks – Make Sure You Know This! appeared first on Six Degrees Digital Media.

What drives Internet traffic to your website? Is it your page title? Is it your meta title? Alternatively, is it something else altogether?

The Title Tag

When crawling a website, search engines factor in the content of your site’s title tag. Keep the title pithy and descriptive. This is not the time for a flight of fancy. Rather, choose a title that describes your business and incorporates your main search engine term. If you are in the business of selling work boots for men, simply name your page accordingly.

The Meta Title

As a business, you choose a meta title based on the most likely keyword searches that will bring visitors to individual pages of your website. If, for example, your website title is “Work Boots for Men,” your meta title for a page may say “Leather Work Boots for Men.”

Factoring in SEO

Search engine optimization (SEO) ensures that Internet users can find your website by using keywords. You optimize your site to contain the keywords that computer users are most likely to type in, and Google – or other search engines – display your website among the search results. There is a chance that Google will alter the meta title if it comes across as being a bit too unwieldy.

Google will take bits and pieces of your meta title and display it in the search results. As a general rule of thumb, it is a good idea to only include the most important keyword in your meta title description and keep it short.

Seventy characters are more than enough. There is conflicting information about the importance of the meta title. Some Internet insiders argue that since Google changes it on the search engine results page, there is really no sense in doing a lot with it.

Others argue that it feeds Google the basics for its display information. If you want to have a bit of say over the results that Google displays, they say, it is a good idea to make your input known. We side with the latter. It does not hurt to add meta titles to your setup. So why not keep just a bit of control over this portion of your site’s appearance online?

If you need assistance with your marketing, schedule a complimentary strategy session.

The post Page Title vs. Meta Title – What’s the Difference? appeared first on Six Degrees Digital Media.