Category: Search Engine Optimization

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AdWords is the New SEO

Prospects hate to hear this, but for multi-state and multi-national selling businesses, placing organically is almost “mission impossible”.

Here’s Why Google is Making It So Hard

You've got to work hard now to find organic results on the Google results page.
You’ve got to work hard now to find organic results on the Google results page.

With the expansion of AdWords ads at the top of the Google.com search page and top ads showing site links, callouts, snippets and other valuable deep links to your site, AND Google placing location specific results from Google Maps just under the four AdWords ads in many cases, organic listings have been pushed so low they are not seen.

As AdWords increases relevance with new extensions, readers no longer feel that they have to look at organic listings. Click activity is increasing at the top of the page and decisions by buyers are made before they even scroll to the bottom of the page to see organic results.

Add to that the fact that with personal history in your search results top organic placement is a target that you cannot consistently hit across a wide sector of viewers.

A business can no longer rely on organic activity to drive meaningful sales. AdWords has become the new visibility tool and the way to move your website listing to the top to get the attention you need to drive sales.

I invite you to visit our website to read more about our AdWords services and compare our low prices with other Google Partners.

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What to do About Copyright Infringement

Copyright infringement, what can you do? Have you found your website content on another website? Found others using your trademark name? Found a website that has snatched your own personal images?

How to resolve copyright infringement

It is smart to look for your copyrighted content on other websites and take action.
It is smart to look for your copyrighted content on other websites and take action.

There are several things you can do to get the offending site owner’s notice and protect your own copyrighted content.

The first step is to send a notice with a formal takedown request. Give the website owner 10 days to take action or respond. Make sure you keep copies of your email or written correspondence.

Be specific in your request, but reasonable. Ten days to remove content or images is about the norm.

At the end of your time period review if the copyright infringement has been resolved. If not, now it’s time to contact the webhost.

Go first to Who Is Hosting This, and do a search on the site’s domain name. Then contact the web host and ask that the site that is infringing on your copyright be taken down. Make sure to mention the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and ask for a DMCA site takedown.

The host will typically take immediate action and take down the entire website, contact the site owner, and demand the offending content be removed before the host will relaunch the website.

You’d better believe that this gets quick action from the website owner who may have initially disregarded your removal notice. Don’t just take copyright infringement, protect your own intellectual property.

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Google Starts Testing on Mobile First Search Index – Explained

Googlespeak can be confusing for those not in the industry, so this post will help business owners understand what Google means when it states the following:

“To make our results more useful, we’ve begun experiments to make our index mobile-first.”  Doantam Phan, Google product manager

Google Partner Badge
McCord Web Services is a Google Partner.

This is the bottom-line. Google is testing and will most likely rollout a huge change to its indexing algorithm that is used to rack and stack websites in the organic or unpaid results of search pages.

The algorithm will now review and base the ranking index across all devices based on what the Googlebot spider reads in the content of a mobile version website. This is incredibly big news and the ramifications are huge.

Here’s why:

  1. If you have a responsive website, you do not need to worry. You are totally covered for this update.

2. If you have a mobile adaptive website, you need to start making changes. A mobile adaptive site means that the content for your mobile site is different and sometimes lacks the content that you have in your desktop and tablet version site. You may have dropped content, streamlined content on pages, or not developed content for some pages. In other words the mobile site is different by design and desire from your desktop site.

3. If you do not have a mobile site it is time to get busy and move to a responsive website design. Although Google says that it will still spider your site with its mobile searchbot, I would expect in the future to see tags in the index stating your site is not mobile friendly and possible demotions.

Google means business on mobile as attested by the following quote.

“Although our search index will continue to be a single index of websites and apps, our algorithms will eventually primarily use the mobile version of a site’s content to rank pages from that site, to understand structured data, and to show snippets from those pages in our results.” Doantam Phan, Google product manager

 If you need help with a responsive website, now’s the time to check in with the McCord Web Services team. Our focus is to implement affordable, SEO-focused responsive websites that bring you customers.

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Google’s Mobile First Becomes Your Top Priority

Nancy McCord
“Just Nancy” – My Point of View for Today.

Just this last week Google announced that it’s mobile search index would become its primary index and that it would be spinning off its tablet and desktop index into a separate index. Additionally Google stated that it would not be updating the desktop and tablet index with the same frequency as that of the mobile index.

For some, this statement did not register as important, but for those in my industry, this was very important news.

How so?

Business owners must take heed when Google makes statements like this. If your website is not mobile-friendly, you have an old website that looks like your desktop on the small screen of mobile devices, and you are not using a workaround like DudaMobile, you may be in trouble. What kind of trouble? You may drop placement organically, pages you add may not be indexed frequently, and Google may even not show your website in the mobile index. With mobile searches driving over 60% of the traffic on Google.com that’s a big drop for you.

Google is focused on speed for mobile, are you?

The next big hurdle if your site is mobile friendly is to try to speed up the delivery of your pages. Google is boosting the Accelerated Mobile Page (AMP) initiatives to deliver AMP’ed up content to mobile devices nearly instantaneously. Be prepared for keeping an eye on this. Google has mentioned that it likes AMP pages and has tested even saying it may provide better placement for pages and sites that are AMP’ed.

For now the key is to assure that your site can be considered by Google as mobile-friendly and mobile-fast.

We have options when it comes to mobile, from a DudaMobile script “Bandaid” to a new mobile responsive site or WordPress site with mobile responsive theme. Just ask us for help!