Are you looking for the perfect gift to give this holiday season?

Do you know someone who needs help getting their website ranking higher
in Google search engine queries?

What is it and why is it important for a business?

SEO stands for search engine optimization. When used effectively, it will allow your website to get traffic for free from the search results pages on Google, Bing and Yahoo. How? When someone types a search into Google, results like websites, videos and local listings are shown based on what the search engine considers to be the most relevant to the searcher.

“80% of people click on the organic search results, making search engine optimization one of the best ways to increase your website traffic.” – YP

Top 5 reasons your website needs SEO

It helps people find your website
Your website should be generating leads and attracting new customers. But it won’t be able to do this if nobody can find it.
It’s a cost-effective form of marketing
Compared to other forms of online marketing, SEO provides the best return on investment.
Your competitors are doing it
If people are unable to find your website online, they’ll find your competitors’ websites instead.
It builds recognition and trust
SEO makes your brand image appear stronger because it makes you more recognizable.
It’s a measurable ROI
Every element of your website can be measured assessed and tweaked for SEO. You can see your return on every dollar you invest.

What can this gift do for a business owner?

An search engine optimized website will rank higher in the organic results. A higher ranked website will get more visitors, page views and ultimately more conversions from the business’ target market.

Get in touch with Longevity Graphics and give the gift of SEO this holiday season.

Give the gift of SEO

What Should a Seasonal Business Be Doing In The Off-Season?

Do you have a seasonal business?

As a seasonal business owner, your busy summer season is likely winding down. The off-season is the perfect time to evaluate your results. You now have the time to see what worked, what didn’t, and what you could be doing to increase business for the following year.

Did you know that getting started now on improving your online presence can help your business thrive next year? Organic rankings take time, so getting started now will mean your business will be ranked on the first page in Google by next season.

How can you do this? SEO!

What is SEO and why is it important for your business? SEO stands for search engine optimization. When used effectively, it will allow your website to get traffic for free from the search results page on Google. How? When someone types a search into Google, the paid ads appear at the top of the page, followed by the organic results. You want your business to appear as high as possible in the organic results so you can get more page views and ultimately more conversions from your target market.

Take advantage of the “off-season”

If you’re ramping up your SEO right when your business is starting to get busy again, you’re already too late. You will want your website to be SEO optimized months before you know people will be searching for your business,product, and/or service. Even if you’re business is currently closed, SEO is ongoing. A prominent organic search presence is an effective driver for your business.

Getting started with SEO

Here are the top ways to improve the SEO of your website.

Start with good content
Use keywords
Include linkable content
Tag your titles
Work on your page URL’s
Link to other websites
Create a sitemap

SEO mistakes to avoid

Here are some SEO mistakes to avoid. They will decrease your search results ranking.

Keyword stuffing
Broken links
Copied content
Not optimizing for mobile
Using flash

If this sounds like something you would rather leave up to the professionals, work with a trusted SEO partner to ensure you don’t miss out on valuable search engine results page positioning next season. Get in touch with Longevity Graphics and start improving your online marketing strategy now!

Guide to LinkedIn Advertising

So you’ve been taking advantage of Facebook and Twitter advertising, but have you thought about LinkedIn advertising?

LinkedIn is a professional platform where users can connect and network with other business professionals. People connecting, making referrals and recommendations are nothing new in the world of business. The difference is, people are now able to perform these tasks online, through one social platform. In the year 2016, if you want to engage in the professional community, you must have a LinkedIn profile.

A LinkedIn profile is a page containing elements of a person’s resume, website, Facebook profile and blog posts. Ultimately, it is a presentation of who you are professionally.

Advertising on LinkedIn is a great way for businesses and professionals to reach highly targeted groups of like-minded people.

Creating an Advertising Campaign

To get started, go to your business page. If you’re currently viewing your personal LinkedIn account, look at the top tabs and scroll over Interests. Go to company and then your business page. Again near the top of the page, look for Business Services. If you scroll over this tab, it will open and the Advertise option will appear.

You will now be welcomed to the LinkedIn Campaign Manager. This is the main area to view all your campaigns. There are two types of ads you can create on LinkedIn; sponsored updates and text ads.

Text Ads

These ads appear on the right side of the page.
These ads are a great way to drive targeted leads across multiple LinkedIn pages.
These ads only give viewers the option to click through to the advertiser’s website.

Once you have decided which ad is best suited for your advertising campaign, then you will open an account. You will create an account name, choose the currency you wish to pay in, and link the company page that you will be advertising. Name your campaign and decide what language you will be targeting. Next, you will decide where you want to direct users when they click on your ad. As mentioned, you can direct them to your LinkedIn page or your company website.

Now, you will create your ad. Add a catchy headline, image and content. Your headline should be engaging and include a call to action. After, you will configure your target audience and budget. Finally, you will commence your LinkedIn advertising campaign.

Are you interested in advertising your business on LinkedIn, but you’re not familiar with the platform? We can help! Get in touch with us today. We offer a FREE 1-hour consultation.

Are you thinking about starting a business in Port Coquitlam? We’ve gathered some resources to help you get started.

Visit the City of Port Coquitlam Website

The City of Port Coquitlam website is a great place to begin when thinking about starting a business in Port Coquitlam. The website has many resources that will help you, prior to ‘opening your doors’. Click here to visit the City of Port Coquitlam’s Starting a Business page.

Get to know the area… and your competition

If you don’t already live in Port Coquitlam or the Tri-Cities area, it is a good idea to spend some time in the city. This will allow you to get a sense of the successful businesses that are currently operating in the area – including businesses that you will be in competition with. If your business is going to have a store front, you can use this time to search out potential areas for your business to operate.

Create a Website and Social Media Pages

If you’re thinking about starting a business in 2016 – you MUST have a website and social media pages. There is a vast amount of competing businesses in Port Coquitlam and the surrounding areas.

In order to be discovered by potential customers online, you must have an experienced, knowledgeable online marketing company who will be able to optimize your website and social media pages for optimal rankings.

Your online marketing company should be able to:

Help your website gain top position in search result lists
Perform keyword research to discover vital search combinations for your business
Perform meta and title tag development
Establish HTML code optimization
Perform inbound link building

If this sounds like something that you will need help with, contact Longevity Graphics for a FREE 1-Hour Consultation. We specialize in working with local clients and helping them rank for their industry specific keywords.

Are you considering outsourcing your website design?

Below are some Pro’s and Con’s of hiring a local web designer vs. outsourcing your web design.

Pro’s of hiring a local web designer:

Personalized, one-on-one service
It’s easy to get in contact with your web designer if you have any questions
You know exactly who will be working on the design of your website and social media pages

Con’s of hiring a local web designer:

Well, we sure can’t think of any con’s!

Additional Resources

Sign up your business on the Shop PoCo BIZ Directory; Click Here
Join the Port Coquitlam Business Improvement Association (BIA); Click Here
Join the Tri-Cities Chamber of Commerce; Click Here
Contact Longevity Graphics for a FREE 1-Hour Consultation to learn about the online marketing services they offer; Click Here

Social Media Marketing Summer Promotion from Longevity Graphics

Receive a FREE Social Media Audit and learn more about our Summer Social Media Marketing promotion.

Choose 5 Social Media Marketing Platforms and we will:

Setup
Optimize
Manage

your account.

$1250 $995/month

ACT NOW! Limited Availability

CALL: 604-505-8552 or EMAIL: [email protected]

Platform options: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, Pinterest, Google+, YELP, Trip Advisor, Just Eat, Zomato (Formally Urban Spoon)

Social Media Marketing Services:

Social Media Marketing Setup

We will setup and optimize 5 social media platforms of your choice. By implementing engaging visuals and optimizing all the tools available through the platforms, we will achieve results. A strategy will be developed to ensure a consistent follower growth and engagement with your audience.

Social Media Marketing Content Management

First and foremost, we will perform an analysis of your industry, competition and clientele base. From there, we will make recommendations for the best content, visuals, and times to reach your audience. We will implement these recommendations, which will maximize your influence and generate relevant leads.

Social Media Marketing Reporting

On an ongoing basis, our team will analyze the results and provide a report on a monthly basis. Upon analysis, we will create a summary of our findings, make necessary adjustments and recommendations to ensure optimal results on all platforms.

Don’t delay, take advantage of our social media marketing summer promotion and get started right away. Our team of local experts will work with you and help you deliver your message loud and clear. Get your FREE social media marketing audit today.

Longevity Graphics is located in Coquitlam, BC. We specialize in online marketing services as well as web design and web development. For a list of our services or customer testimonials, visit our website today. We offer a FREE one hour consultation.

What is the hummingbird update?

So, what is the Hummingbird update? The Hummingbird update is Google’s newest attempt to streamline their search engine and create a more user friendly service. Hummingbird is designed to yield more precise search results, and give users a more “natural” search experience.

Google named the algorithm “Hummingbird” because it is “precise and fast. The Hummingbird update focuses on user intent rather than the previous system of matching keywords.

Danny Sullivan wrote on this change in his article: FAQ: All About the New Google “Hummingbird” Algorithm: “Hummingbird is paying more attention to each word in the query, ensuring that the whole query-the whole sentence or conversation or meaning-is taken into account, rather than particular words. The goal is that pages matching the meaning do better, rather than pages matching a few words”

Google is clearly trying to create a more natural feeling to the search engine. In contrast with the mechanical keyword based style of the previous operating systems, Hummingbird attempts to truly understand what the user is searching for.

Hummingbird was only announced last week, but sources state that the update was put into effect in between late August and early September. It is being touted as the most significant change to Google’s search engine since 2001; It isn’t so much as update, as it is an entirely new algorithm that Google has chosen to implement.

From the same article Danny Sullivan explained the nature of the change using this analogy: “Think of a car built in the 1950’s. It might have a great engine, but it might also be an engine that lacks things like fuel injection or is unable to use unleaded fuel. When Google switched to Hummingbird, it’s as if it dropped the old engine out of the car and put in a new one. It also did this so quickly that no one really noticed the switch”.

What does this mean for business owners?

David Amerland, author of “Google Semantic Search” says: “From a strategy point of view this opens the horizon for companies and webmasters considerably. From a practical perspective, they need to identify the USP of each business and become authoritative within it is now a key criteria for continued SEO success. The comparison element that has been integrated suggests that semantic mark-up may begin to confer an advantage now when it comes to helping index information in products and services.”

What this means is that quality rises to the top. To stay competitive In today’s online environment, business owners need to position themselves as people who have the answers to the questions being asked. Quality “likable”, “sharable” and “tweetable” content needs to be created and shared across networks.

What is the hummingbird update? It is Google’s new algorithm: “hummingbird” has made the leap from being a keyword oriented system, to turning google into a program that understands semantic language. Business owners will need to keep the new changes in mind when implementing SEO and building their brands online.

What is SEO?

Clients who have not done SEO before often have no idea what the term means or what the acronym even stands for. In this post, I will explain what SEO is and why it’s important for any business or organization online.

SEO (search engine optimization) is the optimization of your website with the goal of ranking higher in search engines such as Google and Bing. Your site’s placement in the search engine results is called its natural or organic rank and it is free. This is in contrast to PPC (SEM), which is a sponsored ad. There are two main methods of improving your site’s rank in search engine results: on-page optimization and off-page factors such as inbound links.

On-page optimization

When an SEO professional talks about on-page optimization, they mean that each page is easy for the search engines to crawl (meaning the site loads quickly and does not have an excess of needless code) and that each page is clearly indicating to the search engines what it is about and what terms it should rank for. On-page optimization involves doing extensive research to determine what phrases each page should attempt to rank for and then ensuring that every ranking factor within each page is optimized to support the chosen keyword phrases.

The most important factor for optimizing a page is its content. Every page should have a good amount of unique, quality content that is relevant and useful to the visitors of your site. Everything else that is done for SEO in the back-end (coding) is intended to support the content by sending the search engines the right signals. Search engines ‘listen’ to certain bits of code for hints about the subject matter of a page and SEO is done to make it clearer that the content is talking about a certain topic.

Off-page optimization

Off-page optimization is usually much more difficult than on-page, but it is crucial for any site trying to rank in a competitive market. Incoming links from other sites are the focus of off-page optimization, as search engines see links from other sites as votes of confidence. Having links from credible and relevant sites to your own website can boost your site’s reputation and increase its ranking within the search engines.

Link building has become a potentially dangerous endeavour due to several recent updates from Google, however. It’s very important to be discriminating about which sites you seek links from. Quantity is not better than quality; in fact a large amount of poor-quality links can result in a penalty to your site’s ranking. The best way to build links is to provide high-quality content on your site that visitors will naturally want to share with others. There are strategies that go beyond this, but that’s for another blog post!

Why You Need SEO

The main advantage of SEO is that it has long-term results and your natural ranking in the search engines is free. If you have an existing website that is ranking but not as high as you would like, improving your SEO is the only way to get yourself on the first page of search results. If you have the time to devote to creating great content for your site, SEO can be relatively inexpensive for you.

Basic SEO is straight-forward and can probably be done by any moderately tech-savvy individual once they’ve been educated on the ranking factors. However, basic SEO is not going to help you compete with the companies on the first page of the search results that have hired professionals to do SEO for them. The more competitive your industry is, the more difficult it will be to outrank your competitors. If you want to compete, you will need to use advanced SEO strategies such as the ones we use to help our clients outrank their competition.

If you do not have the time to invest in learning SEO, keeping up to date, or doing the actual implementation on your website, we offer a variety of SEO packages for businesses of all sizes. We also offer SEO consulting to businesses that want to bring their SEO in-house but are inexperienced and do not know how to get the most from SEO.

Negative SEO! What’s that you ask? Well, thanks to our friends at Google and the constant updates to the algorithms, Penguin in particular, some unethical companies and slime balls are using tactics to hurt their competitors. Google rolled out the first Penguin update back in April 2012. The update was aimed at decreasing search engine rankings of websites that violate Google’s Webmaster Guidelines by using now declared black-hat SEO techniques, such as keyword stuffing, cloaking, participating in link schemes, deliberate creation of duplicate content, and other strategies. The guiding principle for the update was to PENALIZE WEBSITES using manipulative techniques to achieve high rankings.

Generally Google’s algorithms reward websites for doing a good job of providing relevant, useful content for the visitors, or so they say. As far as the SEO community knows, this was the first time that Google began to penalize sites for attempting to manipulate the search engines with shady tactics.

So the big question is, what is stopping people from implementing some of these manipulative tactics on your website? Not too much! Thus we have negative SEO. It’s becoming a reality in the online world, and it’s something that businesses should be aware of, particularly in regards to backlinks to your website.

Over 11 years in the industry, I have had the privilege to work with amazing business owners with high business standards and integrity. We haven’t had to worry too much about this as we have implemented SEO tactics based on Google’s recommendations, and have received some great results. Unfortunately, I recently met a new client that has fallen victim to some bad link backs.

Let’s see what Matt Cutt’s has to say about this here

So what can be done about this? I have done a ton of reading and consulting with other SEO professionals who have had success with overcoming negative SEO.

Here are the steps that we recommend:

Use these three tools to complete your link mining. Webmaster Tools, Moz Open Site Explorer, and MajesticSEO. These tools will help you to determine which websites are linking to your website.
Organize the link backs into a spreadsheet, removing duplicate entries.
Things to look for: low page rank links (3 or less), low domain authority (30 or less), links that are not relevant to your product, service, or geographical region, and finally, spammy anchor text links.
Contact all of the websites that you would like to have your link removed from. Yes, this seems daunting, but it is necessary. This tool helps to speed things up: Rmoov
Then you wait. Wait. And wait some more. Give it about a month for website owners to respond. You should see a 5-10% response rate.
After you have attempted to have the links removed on your own, you can then submit the remainder of your list to the Webmaster Tools disavow tool. Google requires that you attempt to have the links removed first before using this tool.

Yes this is a tedious task. And yes it is necessary if you have been hit with a some negative SEO. Hopefully in the future, Google will release an update that prevents negative SEO from happening. Our recommendation is to run your business with ethical business standards and hopefully this won’t happen to you. If you are one of the unlucky business owners who is affected by negative SEO, then consult an SEO professional to help you. Trying to clean it up yourself and abusing the disavow tool could potentially hurt your site more.

On May 22^nd, 2013, Google rolled out the Penguin 2.0 update to their search engine algorithm. Like Penguin 1.0, the update focuses on penalizing unnatural linking strategies. One difference with Penguin 2.0, however, is that it analyzes the backlinks of the internal pages as well as the home page, whereas Penguin 1.0 only analyzed the backlinks to the home page. This detail was only recently revealed by Matt Cutts when he spoke about the update on his blog. It is, effectively, a more in-depth version of Penguin 1.0, and it can cause the same problems for sites that have had black-hat or grey-hat link-building done in the past.

Penguin 2.0 basically looks for unnatural links from low-quality sites and devalues your site based on what it determines to be a black-hat link profile. It makes the assumption that you or someone working on your behalf participated in unnatural link-building strategies, such as paying for links or ‘advertorials’ (paid editorials that link back to your site). Maybe you didn’t do this unnatural link-building yourself, but a competitor has built poor-quality links to your site with the intention of getting your site penalized. This is negative SEO, and it has the same repercussions.

For more information about the Penguin 2.0 updates, check out this link.

Identifying it

So how do you know if this update has affected your website? Check your analytics data (from Google Analytics or any similar service that tracks your traffic) and look for a drop in your site traffic in late May. If you see a sudden and dramatic drop in traffic that can’t be explained by a usual seasonal trend or other logical coincidence, you’ve probably been hit by Penguin 2.0.

It’s also a good idea to examine the backlinks of your site using a site exploring tool such as those offered by SEO Moz or Majestic SEO. Using these tools, you can view the domains that link to your site, the page rank and domain rank of those domains, and the anchor text used in the links. With this information you can figure out if your link profile has the signs of an unnatural, spammy link-building strategy – backlinks from paid directories, links with exact match anchor text (keyword stuffed anchors), and high link accrual velocity (gaining backlinks in large chunks very quickly).

This can be a tedious and time-consuming process, especially for those unfamiliar with SEO and the tools that are used to analyze websites. If you don’t have the time or you find it too confusing, Longevity Graphics can help you figure out if your site has been hit by Penguin 2.0.

What to do

If it’s clear that you have a large amount of crummy backlinks, how do you proceed? The solution is straight-forward, but not necessarily easy or quick. Working from the list of your backlinks, you will need to identify the links that are hurting your rankings and deal with each accordingly. In cases where you have control over the link, like on a directory that provided you with a login to update your business profile, you should be able to delete the link altogether or alter the anchor text if that is the issue. When you do not have direct control over the link, you will have to reach out to the webmaster of the site on which your link appears and request to have your link removed.

There are sites and tools available to help you with categorizing and sorting through your backlinks. Some will even have template letters to help you with sending out link removal requests. https://www.rmoov.com/index.php https://www.removeem.com/.

Not all webmasters will be cooperative and some will even try to exploit you by asking you to pay them to remove your link. In these cases, you can consider using Google’s link disavow tool as a last resort. The tool allows you to suggest that certain links not be counted toward your site’s ranking. Matt Cutts has warned that the Disavow Tool should not be used by most sites and should only be used to clean up a “small fraction” of links after you have made multiple link removal requests on your own. He seems to be suggesting that abusing the tool could result in an additional penalty of some kind to your site.

Hopefully you will have been successful in removing the offending backlinks from your link profile. Either way, you should move forward by focusing on creating new links that follow Google’s quality guidelines and avoid unnatural link-building practices. See here for a useful link explaining what one should not do when doing link-building. Google recommends that you seek out natural links by providing useful content such as infographics or guest posts on relevant, high-quality sites.

If your livelihood has been threatened because this recent update has diminished your site’s traffic, we can help you get back on track. Recovery from Penguin 2.0 is a big job, but we are professional SEOs with a variety of experience that can help to boost your site’s rankings and recover from penalties.

What You Didn’t Know That You Need to Know

It’s common for a business or organization that is new to the web to be unaware of what’s best for their website. It’s even more difficult to know this when you might be lead astray by web designers, web developers and web hosts who don’t really understand or care about your needs. Several of our clients cursed the names of their website hosts or previous developers and designers once we informed them of the limitations of their website. In an effort to help others avoid this, I have a few recommendations for anyone who is looking to have a website built.

Choose Your Host Wisely

Some of the worst horror stories I can tell are to do with the poor quality of our clients’ website hosts. From hosts just being unreliable – meaning the site is down several times a month with no explanation and the technical support is impossible to get a response from – to being outright destructive, sometimes the stories are truly appalling. In one recent case, one of our clients contacted their host to inquire about the frequency with which their site was down. The technical competence or comprehension of the representative they spoke with must have been limited, because our client’s website ended up being deleted. There was no apology, but they did add some time on to our client’s hosting (which really felt like an insult).

The fact is that anybody with an internet connection and some hard drives can be a website host. Regardless of how professional a host’s site appears, the truth is that it might be one guy with 3 computers in a basement who only sidelines as a web host. Protect yourself and do a search for reviews of a website host before you decide to go with them. Also, if you know someone who is a professional web developer, they would be the best people to ask for recommendations. As web developers, we hate dealing with unprofessional website hosts and would be happy to offer our opinion.

Get FTP Access (Please!)

As a web developer, there is nothing more limiting than being forced to work entirely within the confines of a CMS, be it WordPress, Joomla, or something else. For this reason, we like to have FTP access to our clients’ websites so we can take customization to the next level. This will make any additions to the website much easier for us to implement. Of course, you might not realize that your website would benefit from such additions when you first have your site built, but for the sake of conversion optimization and SEO, we often need to get at the bare bones of a website rather than approaching it through the CMS.

It is also useful to have FTP access because it provides to access the .htaccess file (or the equivalent). These files allow us to tell search engines when files or sites have changed names in order to preserve the ranking of the original page or doman. This can be crucially important for SEO. In addition, having FTP access allows us to maintain backups of our clients’ websites, just in case something goes awry (see the anecdote about the crummy web host for an example of what “going awry” can mean).

Use an SEO-Friendly CMS

If you choose to have your site built using a CMS, check the forums on the CMS’s website to make sure it is SEO-friendly. Generally speaking, WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal are SEO-friendly to varying degrees (varying based on what themes and plugins you choose to install). However, there are a seemingly limitless number of custom CMSs out there that do not take SEO into account much or at all. The SEO limitations of a CMS are another reason why we like to have FTP access – if the CMS doesn’t provide us with what we need, we can sometimes modify the CMS to do what we want it to.

Our favourite CMS to work with is WordPress. While no CMS is perfect, and WordPress can certainly be the source of much frustration, it has proven to be the most user-friendly and the easiest to customize. SEO with WordPress is a breeze compared to some other platforms out there.

We’re Here to Help

If you’re thinking about establishing a web presence for your business or organization, I hope you will keep my advice in mind. We can help with every step of the process, so don’t hesitate to contact us. We love helping people get established on the web and especially helping them to avoid the pitfalls that some people aren’t aware of because they lack the guidance of a professional web development and web marketing team like Longevity Graphics.