SEO services come in many different shapes and sizes, and nowadays most of them are automated. Automated services are either too general with their data or not updated frequently enough to provide good results. Occasionally, a quality site can rise to the top just based on pure on-page optimization, but this is becoming more and more difficult to achieve as well. Step in, the website that is a surefire ranking success. A well-optimized website can achieve high rankings using white-hat, organic methods; the key in most cases is hiring an SEO consultant.
Search engine optimization (SEO) is one of the tried-and-true practices when it comes to getting online traffic. It’s no secret that having your site rank within the top 10 on search engines is a lucrative practice, but this has become harder to achieve due to the competitive nature that the internet has fostered. Even small and medium-sized businesses are now competing with national chains for top listings, but achieving top rankings is possible if you have the right amount of skill and knowledge at your disposal.
Definition of SEO services
SEO can also be classified as part of a larger term – Search Engine Marketing. According to the Search Engine Marketing Development in Searching using text and advertising offered when Engine out marketing discipline and a consulting force SEO er purpose it we that date Increase a product retention fraction current market share by increasing matching and distribution and service at an accessible price than any other campaign. Method to promote a stimate go focusing showing offering public a website. SEO has an extremely broad range of strategies and methods. These range from the ‘white hat’ ethical methods which websites apply for long-term results, to the ‘black hat’ methods which are used to promote high results but don’t conform to the search engine guidelines and can result in a website being banned from a search engine.
Search Engine Optimization commonly referred to as SEO, is a method utilized to increase a website’s positioning on the organic search results of search engines. It is a process of increasing the number of visitors to a particular website by ensuring that the website appears high on the search engine results page (SERP). This can be done in many ways such as modifying the site’s code, content, and structure along with fixing problems that could prevent search engine indexing programs from fully spidering a site. Another way SEO is executed is by increasing the relevance of specific keywords and removing barriers to the indexing activities of search engines.
Role of site speed in SEO
Site speed refers to how fast a website responds to web requests. It is a significant aspect a site owner needs to bear in mind. After all, he or she wants to see a positive result once the website is up and running. A site is an investment, and it is expected to generate money at the end of the day. So, the faster the site, the more visitors, and the more visitors mean more revenue. This is what internet marketers and site owners are looking for. Google has announced that site speed is only a small ranking factor; nevertheless, it is essential coming from a senior member of the team. Google is a market-oriented company and it provides what users are looking for. If Google says that my site will rank higher if it has better site speed, I will definitely go for it! Since site speed, for this reason, will reduce bounce rate and increase conversion rate. Bounce rate refers to when a visitor enters and exits the site from the main page without browsing further. High bounce rates are usually caused by slow loading pages. This is bad for the site owner, and Google is taking this into account when SEO is considered. High conversion rates, on the other hand, will only occur if visitors are comfortable navigating through the site, which is possible with faster loading pages.
Benefits of Site Speed in SEO Services
First off is the improved user experience. The most basic way that site speed affects SEO is through the user experience. Since its introduction, internet usage has expanded into every facet of daily life. With the introduction and subsequent popularity of smartphones, internet usage has grown even more and continues to grow day after day. With all this growth, visitors to your site are apt to have a multitude of connection speeds, ranging from broadband to mobile wireless. No matter where they are or what they’re doing, you want them to have a good experience. Site speed is crucial in this, as it decreases the wait time for a site to load. On the other hand, a slow site is going to create a poor experience, no matter how high quality or well laid out the site may be. Pages with a longer load time tend to have higher bounce rates and a lower time spent on the page. This can affect sales and generate less ad revenue for a site, and in terms of search engines, a decreased user experience can lead to a drop in rankings and less organic search traffic. Secondly, site speed affects SEO through higher search engine rankings. In 2010, Google announced that site speed had become a new signal in its search ranking algorithms. Over the years, it has become more and more influential on a site’s search visibility. Nowadays, faster sites are easier to crawl for search engines with less chance of timing out. They also keep users more engaged and allow the search engine to gather more information related to the content of the site. Because of this, fast sites are likely to have a higher search engine ranking than their slower competitors. This can be crucial to a company in terms of their internet marketing performance, as it can make the difference between seeing your business succeed or fail. Fast sites will have a direct correlation to better search engine rankings, and better rankings mean better business.
Improved user experience
Improved user experience is one of the benefits of site speed. It helps businesses and entrepreneurs to retain their customers and keep them returning to their website. In the fast-paced era, everybody wants a shortcut. Those with a website must be able to serve it to the maximum. That’s also the expectation from visitors – they want to be able to access something quickly and comfortably from where they are. In this case, it is by loading a website instantaneously with a click of a link. The previous description of “quickly” and “comfortably” is reflected in user experience. Everyone wants something practical, not spending much time, and giving satisfaction. Improved user experience also impacts the user services and products. In an online business, it is a good chance to advertise the products. Ad impressions are also stronger when a visitor moves from site to site and finds the same ads constantly (return frequency). It will impact the businesses that are being advertised. Another form of the user is the bloggers or authors who need to quote information from another website. It can be frustrating when they take a piece of information to their site from a site that has a slow loading speed because the information they take doesn’t appear instantaneously and creates a busy time and is not effective. User experience is often correlated with the degree of understanding when visiting a website. Sometimes it’s bad for a website if a visitor doesn’t get what they want and is confused. This is marked by the bounce rates. A bounce rate is when a visitor just opens a page and then exits immediately without needing to open another page. They do it because they are not satisfied and didn’t get what they want. Bounce rates are a serious problem, and many webmasters want to reduce them. Lastly, improved user experience creates a mood or laughter, something that a visitor receives when they get what they want and are satisfied.
Higher search engine rankings
There is no single person who doesn’t wish to see the ranking of its site at the top most. Everyone indulged in digital marketing looks forward to the ways using which he can increase the ranking of his webpage. So, here is good news for all such persons. Speed of the site has a very positive impact on the ranking of the webpage. The recent update of Google indicated that the speed of the site is one of the several factors which Google takes into consideration while ranking the webpage. When two webpages having similar contents are compared in terms of speed, the one faster will always have an edge over the slower one. Fast loading will enhance the efficiency of the web-crawlers and this too impacts the indexing of the site. In other words, the probability of a fast site getting indexed increases as compared to a slower site and the index of the faster site is more likely to be updated in comparison to a slower one. This would mean that any new content added to the faster site will be visible to the users much earlier than similar content added to a slower site. This is definitely something worth for a webpage owner trying to target more traffic. Faster, the site, more the probability of getting traffic from the users. Last but not the least, it is the users who decide the fate of a site. A decrease in the bounce rate and an increase in the visit duration is what every webpage owner desires and the site speed can promisingly contribute in achieving these targets.
Increased website traffic
Visitors to websites that load quickly are much more likely to stay and revisit the site, possibly even buy a product from an online store. All of this means that there is an increase in website traffic, which is key to web success. Research shows that traffic decreases by 25% if there is a one-second delay in load time. Sites that are slow are losing potential customers and profit. This is more emphasized by peak traffic times, when many sites struggle to maintain the same load time and more visitors are likely to be browsing. A faster site will encourage consumers to visit more pages. A study by Akamai and Gomez.com showed that visitors were more likely to view more pages when the site load time was less. See graph below. For content sites, this is even more crucial. A fast load time will encourage readers to read more articles and blogs, as opposed to them losing interest and leaving. The minute changes to Google’s algorithm show just how important it thinks load time and time on site is. An increase in crawl rate has been offered to those sites that have a fast load time. This means that Google can access the site’s pages quicker and therefore deem the site more worthy to its high-quality site visitors.
Factors Affecting Site Speed in SEO Services
Website design and structure
Slow site speed is one of the main concerns with website design, especially as it is so easily changed by altering the design choices a web developer makes. A choice of web hosting companies is often a contributing factor to slow site speed as cheaper shared hosting solutions can lead to slower loading times. An overly complex website design can hinder site speed, and often websites created using Flash can be slower than plain text sites. Redirects are often implemented to take users to the latest version of a website, and these can be an essential tool for web developers. Unfortunately, some redirects will send users to a page that is not the intended destination page, and these faulty redirects can be a cause of frustration for users, and it can slow site speed. High volume of redirects can also damage a site’s search engine optimization ranking. Making the website mobile friendly is often achieved by creating separate URLs for content and using some form of mobile HTML. Any mobile website configuration adds an additional complexity for the design and often the implementation of mobile sites necessitates on a reduction of content available. This cannot only affect search engine rankings, but it can also cause the site to lose visitors if the mobile site is not adequately publicised. Last, the best practice for site designers is to test the site speed frequently for any changes made to the design in order to iron out any slow loading pages.
Image optimization
When ensuring the best quality at the smallest file size, the format in which you save the image obviously plays a big part. The general rule is to use JPEG for photos with lots of colors and gradients, and to use GIF for images containing a few distinct colors such as buttons and simple diagrams. PNG format is also acceptable and becoming increasingly popular with its 24-bit with strong compression. However, the only downside to PNG is with older IE browsers’ lack of support.
Graphs and diagrams are usually an acceptable quality at 4 colors (16 bit), so saving these as JPEGs just eats up unnecessary kilobytes through the files’ 24-bit default. For navigational and functional images (this could be anything from bullet points to submit buttons), you may want to consider the use of CSS for text-indent or image replacement techniques. This way, you can use a very small image to represent a large text header and replace that header with an H1 tag for better onsite SEO.
When we consider image optimization, we need to appreciate that there are many other image types such as diagrams, graphs, navigational, functional, and many more, it is not just photos. That said, no matter the type, the rule for all images is always to keep the best visual quality but with the smallest file size.
Minification of CSS and JavaScript
By implementing minification, this will reduce the file size which will then lead to faster loading times of web pages. It is mark-up and code that will benefit the most, simple HTML has minification built into it as you have full control over what is displayed. Favouring redundancy and verbosity over the actual document, mini and micro data allows you to mark up a web page, which can easily be done using a free online tool where you input the URL of the page and it will produce the minified version of the data that it finds. Gone are the days of low CSS and JavaScript support, the fight is no longer in error fixing but in good quality, speed and performance – minification wins all round.
Minification is the process of making a file size smaller, it doesn’t change its functionality. CSS and JavaScript files are full of characters that are completely unnecessary, they slow down the speed of your site, by reducing these characters you can increase speed. Globally it’s been found that on average around 25% can be reduced from files. This includes empty white space, comments, block delimiters and terminator so altering and or removing these from the file can improve a web page’s performance. An example of minification is shown below:
Sotavento Medios: A Leading Digital Marketing Agency in Singapore
Sotavento Medios offers SEO services because we identify the importance of search engines as a marketing tool. We are confident in our own abilities to offer significant services to our clients because we have successfully marketed our own website and attained high search rankings for key internship programs related to the digital and marketing industry. This serves as a testimonial to our very own success.
Sotavento Medios provides a myriad of services, one of which is Search Engine Optimization (SEO). SEO is the process of improving a website or web page’s visibility in search engines’ “natural” or unpaid (“organic” or “algorithmic”) search results. As an internet marketing strategy, SEO considers how search engines work and what people search for. SEO efforts may involve a site’s coding, presentation, and structure, as well as fixing problems that could prevent search engine indexing programs from fully spidering a site. Other, more noticeable efforts may include adding unique content to a site, ensuring that content is easily indexed by search engine robots, and making the site more appealing to users. This process helps to market the site and increase its return on investment (ROI).
Sotavento Medios is an interactive and digital marketing agency that has been in the industry for more than six years. We pride ourselves in providing innovative and effective digital marketing solutions for our clients. Our solutions are the results of in-depth research of our clients’ industries and business objectives. Sotavento Medios is home to dedicated professionals with a passion for what we do. Our expertise, drive for success, and attention to detail set us apart from our competitors.
Expertise in SEO services
Search engine optimization or SEO has many facets, from keyword optimization to social media marketing. However, one of the most cost-efficient and effective methods of increasing a page’s visibility is to optimize its loading speed. This can be achieved through various methods such as reducing image sizes, enabling browser caching, and minimizing HTTP requests. Many businesses, especially SMEs, may have websites that load too slowly without even realizing it and can be missing out on potential customers. By having services focused on optimizing site speed, Sotavento Medios has enabled various clients to attain a higher return on investment compared to other methods of SEO optimization. An example of this is when Sotavento Medios assisted a client in the education industry to increase the loading speed of their student tutoring website. The increase in loading speed resulted in a higher amount of organic traffic to the site and directly translated to an increase in student registrations.
Sotavento Medios takes pride in their SEO services, and with good reason. With the large majority of consumers heading to search engines when trying to make a purchase or procure a service, it is of utmost importance to businesses to have high visibility in search engines. In one study, it was found that 93% of online experiences begin with a search engine, and that 75% of users never scroll past the first page of search results. With most clicks being distributed to the results on the first page, it is vital for businesses to have their product/service page rank on the first page or up the rankings to increase the probability of being found by potential customers. SVT understands the importance of high visibility in search engines and has the knowledge and expertise to help businesses in achieving this.
Sotavento Medios is a leading digital marketing agency in Singapore. The company has catered to a wide array of clients – from small and medium enterprises (SMEs), to multinational corporations (MNCs) and government sectors.
Focus on optimizing site speed for clients
We use a variety of techniques to increase site speed for our clients, such as reducing image file sizes, searching for and removing unnecessary data from source code, and utilizing CSS and JavaScript. We don’t make any actual changes to the website initially – instead, we will create a development site and show the clients the changes using Firebug. The reason we do this is because changing the website itself in attempts to increase site speed is risky and may result in the website becoming dysfunctional. This first part of the process is therefore risk-free, and the changes are easy to implement onto the live site. A nice and simple programming technique we will use to increase site speed for our WordPress clients is to change the site from using PHP to generate the date in their code to storing the date in their server’s database and retrieving it from there. This is because PHP uses server resources to generate the date on every load of the page, and we understand that such a simple change will make the site much quicker.
Site speed optimization entails making the site able to load more quickly and the graphics that are requested by the user. Typical page load time is used as the site speed, and if a user has to wait for a long time for the page to load, they will typically just leave the site. Sotavento Medios recognizes that slow loading times on webpages will encourage visitors to leave. This can mean that there is a high bounce rate for established websites, or lower conversion rates for eCommerce sites. This happens mostly due to the attention span of online users – as shown in a study by Akamai and Gomez.com, nearly half of web users expect a site to load in 2 seconds or less! Furthermore, increasing the site speed can actually lead to better search engine rankings. This is an SEO service in itself because Google has announced that they use page speed in their ranking algorithm.
