Why you can’t afford NOT to invest in SEO

Small businesses have a huge amount to gain from quality SEO – both in creating brand awareness and gaining new business. Search engine optimization (SEO) is vital to a successful online presence, and effective SEO helps to ensure your business is positioned properly in the market and directly targeting your key consumers.

93% of online experiences begin with a search engine

There are 3.42 billion internet users today – equivalent to 46% of the global population. And most of them start their online experience with a search. Studies show that 75% of users never scroll past the first page of search results. If you don’t invest in SEO, potential clients probably will never find your site.

The world of SEO is a constantly shifting landscape. Algorithms are updated and machine learning grows more intuitive and powerful, which means that in order to be noticed online, you need to continually devote resources to your SEO to ensure you don’t fall short of the latest search engine standards and penalties.

But we’ve already ‘done’ SEO, you say?

SEO is not a one-time thing – it’s an ongoing, organic process that requires periodic revisiting to ensure quality and relevant links. To suggest you should only strive to be high quality and relevant once wouldn’t be something you’d even consider in other aspects of your business.

Like many worthwhile activities, SEO takes time to bear fruit, which means you can’t build up a positive search ranking overnight. You may not see immediate results, but you will see results! 100% of our clients have seen a significant improvement in their search result rankings. For some industries, it happens within 3 months, and for others it can take a bit longer. That’s why our Primary SEO is a 12-month program, because building up your ranking slowly and organically is the absolute best and most long-lasting way to improve your SEO.

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>Some Search Statistics

70% of the links search users click on are organic (meaning not paid links, just naturally occurring in your website).
70-80% of users ignore paid ads, focusing on the organic results instead.
Search and e-mail are the top two internet activities.
A study by Outbrain shows that search is the #1 driver of traffic to content sites, beating social media by more than 300%

Choosing Plugins Wisely: Protect your WordPress site against hacking through plugins

1. Download plugins only from reputable sources. For free plugins, this means WordPress.org only! Since anyone can create a WordPress plugin, hackers can exploit this vulnerability to hide their own nefarious plugin. The WordPress.org plugin library will only offer plugins that are known to be safe. Other software sources that offer paid plugins such as CodeCanyon.com are generally safe. Be sure that the plugin you are purchasing has reviews or ratings.

2. Ensure all your plugins are up to date. Any time you see the option to update your software, do it! New version releases often contain security fixes that will protect you from malware, and old, outdated plugins can become gateways for hackers to gain access to your website.

3. Remove any unused plugins. Unused plugins tend to take up space on your server, slow down your site, and become vulnerable to hacking if they become out of date.

4. Check plugin performance. We recommend the plugin P3 (Plugin Performance Profiler) that scans your current plugins to determine if any of them are causing system-wide issues such as bandwidth hogging, slowing your site or clashing with system files. Keeping your site running smoothly has a great impact on your site’s SEO.

Keep these basic rules of thumb in mind while maintaining your website and you should have a healthy site!

Keeping your WordPress site secure

WordPress has revolutionized the internet and provided easy-to-use access to millions of users with limited development capabilities. While it is perhaps one of the most useful tools out there, it is also one of the most vulnerable. WordPress works with a coding language called PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor which allows for scripts to be integrated into the site’s pages and executed on the server to generate HTML content. This means the code is more concise and easier for developers to work with, and allows for that neat Dashboard Control Panel on which you can control every aspect of your site content. There are so many pros to this type of site software, and one really big caveat: if your developer can manipulate the PHP to generate a beautiful site for you, a hacker can manipulate the PHP to redirect or even destroy your site.

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Good Design is Good For Business

A recent analysis by the Design Management Institute, a nonprofit focusing on design management, shows with statistics what graphic designers suspected all along: that good design increases profits. In the past 10 years, design-driven companies outperformed the Standard & Poor’s 500 by 228%. These companies included Apple, Coca-Cola, Ford, Herman Miller, IBM, Intuit, Newell Rubbermaid, Nike, Procter & Gamble, Starbucks, Starwood, Steelcase, Target, Walt Disney, and Whirlpool. The money that these companies invested into smoother user experiences, beautiful branding, and innovative advertising have turned into higher net profits.

The Design Management Institute partnered with Motiv, an innovation strategy firm, to create the DMI Design Value Index – a list of design-led, publicly traded U.S. companies that meet a set of six design management criteria. The above-mentioned companies were only a few in a pool of 75 that met DMI’s criteria. They measured the success of this design-led segment of companies against other companies in the stock market, and found that, indeed, those companies that put design first had a significant stock market advantage.

How to Import Email Accounts to Gmail

Gmail makes handling multiple email accounts easy and is a great tool for condensing all of your accounts into one location so that you don’t have to check multiple URLs. Below is a detailed tutorial on how to import a new email address into your existing Gmail account, and how to send messages from Gmail marked as coming from a non-Gmail address.

How to Import a New Email Address to your Gmail Account

1. Open Gmail, and click the cog icon in top right of the screen and select Settings from the drop-down menu.

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4 Ways to Secure Your WordPress Website

WordPress is the world’s most-used content management system (CMS) and blogging software. It is user-friendly and makes maintaining your website a breeze. However, like all CMS’s, it’s file and content structure allows for invasion if not properly secured. Hackers often insert malware that can destroy your site or redirect to another site (often an unsavory one). A site that has been hacked runs the risk of losing customers and readers, and getting black-listed by Google, ruining any SEO valuation you may have had. I’ve been told that taking steps to secure your site is like taking vitamins, but repairing a hacked site is like performing open heart surgery. It’s obvious that taking a few basic precautions can save you hours of your time and hundreds of dollars. Keep reading for four easy ways to improve your site’s security.

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