What is Search Engine Optimization?

What Is SEO?

SEO stands for “search engine optimization.” It is the process of getting traffic from the “free,” “organic,” “editorial” or “natural” search results on search engines.

All major search engines such as Google, Bing and Yahoo have primary search results, where web pages and other content such as videos or local listings are shown and ranked based on what the search engine considers most relevant to users. Payment isn’t involved, as it is with paid search ads.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of affecting the online visibility of a website or a web page in a web search engine’s unpaid results—often referred to as “natural”, “organic”, or “earned” results. In general, the earlier (or higher ranked on the search results page), and more frequently a website appears in the search results list, the more visitors it will receive from the search engine’s users; these visitors can then be converted into customers. SEO may target different kinds of search, including image search, video search, academic search, news search, and industry-specific vertical search engines.

SEO differs from local search engine optimization in that the latter is focused on optimizing a business’ online presence so that its web pages will be displayed by search engines when a user enters a local search for its products or services. The former instead is more focused on national or international searches.

As an Internet marketing strategy, SEO considers how search engines work, the computer programmed algorithms which dictate search engine behaviour, what people search for, the actual search terms or keywords typed into search engines, and which search engines are preferred by their targeted audience. Optimizing a website may involve editing its content, adding content, doing HTML, and associated coding to both increase its relevance to specific keywords and to remove barriers to the indexing activities of search engines.

Promoting a site to increase the number of backlinks, or inbound links, is another SEO tactic. By May 2015, mobile search had surpassed desktop search. In 2015, it was reported that Google is developing and promoting mobile search as a key feature within future products. In response, many brands are beginning to take a different approach to their Internet marketing strategies.

Website SEO Checker

What is Nibbler?

Nibbler is a free tool for testing websites. Enter the address of any website and Nibbler will give you a report scoring the website out of 10 for key areas, including accessibility, SEO, social media and technology. Nibbler is completely free, but limited to three reports.

Want more?

If you sell digital marketing services, we offer a professional sales tool called Silk tide Prospect, which allows you to compare websites, discover new leads, generate PDFs and brand your reports. If you are looking to improve your own websites, we recommend you try our In-sites tool, which tests websites in far more detail, and offers comprehensive suggestions on how to improve them.

Nibbler can’t see all of my pages!

Nibbler is a ‘bot’ – an automated computer program which tries to find webpages by looking at the first one, and following links from that to other pages. If a website doesn’t link pages to each other in a way that a bot can see, then Nibbler will not be able to explore it fully. Most conventional websites will work fine. If a website is made entirely from Flash, it will usually not be testable. If a website requires you to fill in a form to enter it (e.g. to confirm your age, or log in) it won’t be testable. Some websites use special anti-bot technologies to stop spammers. These websites may also stop Nibbler from being able to test them.

My results are wrong!

When results don’t match what you expect:

• Be sure to read what the test says carefully. A lot of common issues are explained in the text of the test, or in the help (click the “Help” link, at the top right of the test).
• Bear in mind Nibbler only tests the first 5 pages of the website that it finds. You can see the exact pages Nibbler found at the bottom of your report.
• The Facebook, Twitter and Google tests only work if they can find a link to the Facebook Page, Twitter account, or Google page within the 5 pages tested, and if that page/account links back to the website. This is done to ensure that the page/account belongs to the website.
• You may be testing a different web address from what you think you are using. Note that www.example.com and example.com (without the www prefix) are different web addresses, even though to most people they look like the same. Make sure you’re testing the same website, and if you have both addresses, don’t be surprized if the results are different.
• You may have found a bug. Please let us know and be sure to include the web address you were testing

Important notes:

Nibbler will NOT obey a wildcard user-agent, you need to explicitly deny nibbler. No matter what you put on the ‘Disallow’ line, Nibbler will NOT test any part of a site which has a robots.txt file mentioning nibbler. This is in order to stop anyone manipulating their Nibbler scores. If the site in question has an existing report in Nibbler, it won’t automatically get deleted. You will need to visit Nibbler, browse to the report and click the re-test button. Nibbler will then detect the presence of the robots.txt entry and remove the existing report. If the Nibbler report of a site has already been indexed by a search engine, it be take some time before the search engine updates its indexes to reflect the report being removed. The report may still appear in search engine results for a short time after it has been removed.

What user agent does Nibbler use?

Nibbler uses “Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-GB; rv: 1.9.1.3) Gecko/20090824 Firefox/3.5.3” for all requests. Because Nibbler is a bot, and not a real web browser, it shouldn’t affect most analytics results. Modern analytics solutions generally use JavaScript to detect visitors.

SEO Test

How to Run SEO Tests Responsibly

Every marketer worth their salt knows about testing. You test landing pages to see which one drives a higher conversion rate. You test offers to see which ones result in more leads. You test headlines to see which brings in more readership. You test your button colours. (Even though they don’t do anything in the long run.

3 simple steps to follow:

1. Experiment vs. control: You’d never, ever, ever change every single headline on all landing pages for paid campaigns. So don’t do it organically, either. You tweak a single element and run it against the control group to limit your risk.
2. Segmentation: Similarly, you’d never throw up a new landing page for each paid campaign. Instead, you’d pick one keyword. One campaign. Or 10% of the traffic. Again, you’d use a much smaller-than-usual segment to control variations.
3. Repeatability: Got some decent results? Good. Do it again. One-time blips won’t pay the bills.

Point is, proceed with caution on this stuff. You don’t want to do something you can’t undo. You don’t want to de-index your site if you don’t know exactly how to roll back those changes.

3 SEO Tests You Need to Try:

1. Remove bold tags

Keyword density used to be a thing. You wanted to place oh-so-many keywords into a piece to hit the 1-2% that guaranteed nirvana. Keyword stuffing quickly became a thing, too. (In fact, it still works on YouTube.) The theory is, if a little of something works, a lot of something will kill. Fast forward a few years, and we’re still going for the same tricks. For example, bolding keywords. You know, try to work them into the H2 if you can. Then slap at least a few bolds on before they go out the door. This sounds silly. It can’t work… can it? Because it starts to look ridiculous, too. Turns out, one SEO experiment showed that, unsurprisingly, being overzealous with <strong> tags can backfire.

2. Strip dates from URLs

Chances are, you created your blog years ago. Before you knew what you were doing – or maybe your business started it before you were even around. The bummer is that decisions made back then can (and often do) come back to haunt you today. Take permalinks. It’s normal to assign a custom permalink structure in WordPress when you’re first getting started. For example, select one of the following, and you’re stuck with dates in your URLs for good:

3. Optimize for dwell time

Originally introduced by Duane Forrester, previously of Bing, dwell time refers to the length of time a visitor spends on a page before heading back to the search engine that sent them there. (We all know it was Google. Sorry Bing.) Ideally, the longer the dwell time, the better. It makes perfect sense when you think about it. SEO isn’t about rankings, keywords, etc., contrary to popular belief. It’s about answering search queries. It’s about being the best at giving people what they’re looking for. Your goal is to match search intent. Someone hitting your site and then the back button seconds later would result in a low dwell time. And it’s a bad sign that you haven’t been able to give them what they were looking for. So it’s kind of like the Bounce Rate or Time on Page you’re already used to. But not really. A little more nuance is involved. Dwell time is an important concept because it dictates how we should design pages and what should go on them. It’s why long-form posts tend to rank better than short-form ones – not because people like reading (they don’t), but because it helps keep people glued to your screen a little longer.

SEO Professional

Fast Forward Marketing is much more than an SEO service we are a full-service digital promotion and marketing agency. We can not only do the SEO of a website, but we can also manage Social Media Marketing Campaigns and your Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising needs.

Having a website is a great way to get your company noticed by more people. But, many are disappointed by the lukewarm response that the internet has had to their own site. A website is like a signboard, where you put the signboard is as important as what is on the signboard. And like a signboard what you want is the maximum amount of people driving by your sign every day. But even then, you can have millions of people driving by your board every day but unless you have that big pointer that says “Turn in Here” then most keep on driving. So having a million people seeing your sign is worth zero unless you can convert them to become customers. We can help you optimize your website to turn your visitors into customers.

The professional team at Fast Forward Marketing have been doing this for a long time, long enough to survive many of the Google updates designed to kill off our business, and long enough to see hundreds of scams and amateurs totally screw up customer’s sites. It is a sad thing to have your profession maligned because customers don’t know the difference between an amateur and a professional. When you hire us, you get a partnership because we want to see you succeed at your business, and we have one goal in our business: To deliver you more success than you paid for. In doing that we both will succeed. We believe in the wisdom of nurturing long-term business relationships and we strive to keep our customers through their continued success.

So, if you are ready to succeed then call us – and we will work together for your success!

SEO Manager

WHAT DOES AN SEO MANAGER DO?

In the realm of SEO, Content is the King. The phrase ‘Content is King’ persists, because Content has become the focus of Google’s crawl bots in establishing the worth of your website against a search users questions. There is some mysticism in SEO, and most SEO’s prefer it that way because it develops the SEO practice along with the evolution of your website, brand and goals. Tried and tested SEO practices are rigid in form and fluid in nature, such as bringing inbound links from outside sources.

A key part of the SEO role is to identify potential link opportunities and communicate these potential traffic wins to the client. Your SEO manager will guide you through the process of contacting these outside publications, help develop a strategy of interacting with these publications, and/or bring to your attention the way in which your competitors do the same. For instance, if you were to search for ‘SEO Agency in Johannesburg’ you would expect to be met with results tailored to your specific keyword. You might land on a page which is, in fact, a news article mentioning Fast Forward Marketing and because that content was informative, come through to our site. Every SEO campaign is unique, and Fast Forward Marketing is a digital marketing company which keeps that ideology close to heart. We tailor make our SEO strategies and we execute them to the benefit of our clients.

What else does your SEO Manager do?

SEO helps unite all forms of traffic; organic, referral, direct and social. Your Fast Forward Marketing SEO manager will stay up to date with your onsite and offsite brand and presence, offer advice and help you create sharable, interactive content which will draw a user to your site, and keep them on it for as long as possible. Your SEO manager will also help you develop User Experience strategies, as all top SEO’s know that driving traffic to the site is but a tiny part of how Google ranks your site. Bringing a rich, warm and fluid user journey will entice a user to trigger Events, trigger Goals, spend time on each page and, most importantly of all, return. And Content, of course. Content is very important when appealing to your site user. Fast Forward Marketing’s SEO managers will go above and beyond in helping to tailor content, including text, to suit your target audiences’ needs.

About Fast Forward Manager

Fast Forward Marketing was established in 2003 and has fast become a leading digital marketing agency, proving SEO, PPC Management, Social Media Management. This strong growth has been achieved through a steady accumulation of consumer and professional service-based clients and a significant strategic acquisition.

Although a specialist SEO agency in Johannesburg is performance focused and a provider of digital marketing including:

• SEO Management
• PPC Management
• Social Media Management

SEO Expert

Fast Forward Marketing is a modern SEO company in Johannesburg. Offering the best quality SEO, SMO, local SEO, web design, web development & PPC advertising services. Fast Forward Marketing is a Johannesburg based modern SEO company that offers the best services for local SEO, social media marketing, web design, web development & PPC advertising. Fast Forward Marketing offers the best SEO, SEM, Web Design, Web Development & PPC packages which ideally suited for the present day marketer. Our packages are an innovative mixing of performance marketing, insights driven methodology, impactful creativity, a powerful innovation.

At Fast Forward Marketing, we simply change businesses by overall re-engineering the digital landscape for your online business. Be it you just starting your online Efforts or looking for a change, from your existing company which makes all promises with no results, we can assure you have come to the right place. We help our clients by optimizing their Search Engine campaigns and delivering more targeted and laser-focused leads, thereby improving overall conversion rates. We believe in delivering quality yet cost-effective campaigns to our clients and help their businesses flourish by driving free organic traffic from Google to their websites.

All of our search engine optimization campaigns are well planned and designed as per your business requirements & conversions goals in mind. Our well-researched keyword strategy, Advanced On page optimization skills followed by top-level content creation strategies, keep us apart from any other google experts Johannesburg has to offer. We work with clients of all sizes and pride ourselves on delivering ROI for all of the clients from small one-man start-ups to businesses making well over 6 figure income through Search engine optimization. We are a fully Johannesburg based company, providing a comprehensive range of Search marketing services. We provide one to one professional Consultation and quality services to clients based on their business, current business profile and specialize in creating and promoting brands through Google and other major search engines and driving free organic traffic to websites, by use of advanced software, most advanced tools.

Your Search for the best Google SEO Consultant ends here, we are in Industry with only one mission to offer Result Oriented SEO in Johannesburg at most competitive prices, which are easily affordable for businesses of all sizes. We aim to provide quality white hat services to our clients. We care for our clients and study their business and their needs to frame the best strategy for their business to get the results they looking for. This makes us one of the best digital marketing agency in Johannesburg businesses are looking for their brand management.

Best SEO Company

WHY YOU NEED SEO

More and more people are using search engines like Google to find the products and services they want to buy – you’re probably looking for an SEO service in Johannesburg, and searched for Johannesburg SEO services, or something similar, in order to get to this webpage. So if you’re selling products and services online, it’s important that your website appears as high up the search results as possible.

Did you know, for example:

• 90% of searchers only check the first page of results
• 75% of searchers only check the first 5 results
• 40% of traffic goes to the top ranked page

Whatever your business and your presence on the Internet, and no matter whether you’re selling on a local, national, or even global level, if you want it to succeed, Search Engine Optimisation needs to be as important a part of your marketing efforts as everything else you do. But, as a specialist SEO company, we understand that getting SEO right can be hard, with the major search engines moving the goalposts all the time – and if you get it wrong, you could end up doing more harm than good. This is where we can help, by offering the kind of SEO services Johannesburg businesses are looking for.

WHAT WE DO?

Solving the Puzzle

It’s well-documented that Google uses around 200 different factors when assessing where your website should rank for a particular search. So it’s no surprise that most business owners see SEO as a puzzle that’s too difficult to get to grips with. There can be a variety of things you need to consider too show you have the best chance of ranking for the search terms your customers are using. As a Johannesburg SEO expert we understand this challenge, and we can help.

Putting You on the Map

We realise that each customer is different, which is why we tailor our optimisation to suit your website and your specific requirements. Want more local customers? We can help with your Google+ listing and local citations. Need to rank for national or International search terms? We can develop your link profile and site authority to help you rank in your own country or across the globe. We strive to be an SEO agency Johannesburg clients can trust to deliver results.

SEO Services That Work

By working with clients to understand what they want to achieve, and developing the most appropriate optimisation plan to get them there, we’re an SEO services company Johannesburg businesses can rely on. Whether you’re simply looking to improve your search engine presence for clients in and around the capital, or you have a national, or even International customer base, as a specialist Johannesburg SEO agency we’ll construct a project plan that will get you the rankings and traffic you need.

SEO Writing

What Is SEO Content?

To understand what marketers mean by SEO content, it’s helpful to break down the phrase into its component parts:

• “SEO” refers to search engine optimization, or the process of optimizing a website so that people can easily find it via search engines like Google.
• By “content,” we mean any information that lives on the web and can be consumed on the web (more on the various types of content below).

So, putting these two concepts together: SEO content is any content created with the goal of attracting search engine traffic.

Here’s a super-quick refresher on what you’ll need to do in order to SEO your web content:

• Keyword Research: If you want to generate traffic through search, it’s best to do keyword research before you start writing. This way, you can focus on keywords for which a certain amount of search volume already exists – in other words, write toward topics that people are already searching for information about.
• Keyword Optimization: Know where and how to use keywords in your content for maximum searchability. (SEOMoz offers a great guide to on-page optimization.)
• Content Organization: The content on your site should be organized in a logical way. This is not only good for SEO, it also helps visitors on your site find other related content easily. (The longer they stay on your site, the better.)
• Content Promotion: Increase visibility to new content you create by sharing it on social networks and building links to your content (both internally and from external sites).

Types of SEO Content

SEO content can include any of the following:

Product Pages – These are the bread and butter of any retail e-commerce site. A good product page can serve as both SEO content and a PPC landing page.

Blog Posts – A blog is one of the easiest ways to create a regular stream of SEO content. In general, blog posts are more engaging and more likely to attract links than product pages, so they can be a great way to build some authority for your site. (Keep in mind that blogs are very flexible, and you can use them to host any of the below types of content in this list.)

Articles – Think news article, interview, or feature piece. This is the main kind of content you’ll find on most newspaper- or magazine-style websites.

Lists – A list is really just a kind of article but framing it as a list (such as “10 Ways to Lower Your Energy Bill” or “101 Things I Hate About Google”) makes it easier to scan. These types of titles also seem to be more clickable when found in search results or in social media feeds.

Guides – A guide is a longer piece of content that explains in detail how to do something. (Guides are often broken up onto multiple web pages, though it’s a best practice to allow users to view long content as a single page if they wish.) You can post a full guide on your website, or you can post a summary or excerpt, requiring visitors to fill out a registration form to read the full guide. This can be a good way to generate leads, but keep in mind that putting up a registration wall will likely reduce the amount of SEO traffic you can drive to that guide.

Videos – In general there are fewer videos on the web than pages of text; consequently, it can be easier to rank on the first page for a competitive keyword by creating a video instead of an article. Depending on what type of site or business you run, videos can be a great way to attract and reach an audience. Consider creating video tutorials of how to use your products or illustrate a process that is related to your business – for example, a plumber could make a video showing how to unclog a sink. (A note on SEO: You might consider including a text transcript of your video. Here are some additional tips for optimizing videos.)

SEO Score

The SEO Score is a measure of how well the user-facing and technical aspects of your site contribute to search engine optimization, and ultimately, higher rankings and organic traffic. Your site’s final SEO Score is determined by its performance in four subcategories: Technical, Content, User Experience, and Mobile. Individual checks with different weightings are aggregated to provide a score for each of the subcategories. Some checks are scored solely on whether an element is absent or present (e.g. whether a site has a sitemap), while other checks are scored on percentage completed (e.g. the percentage of pages with no 404 error).

What’s needed to attain a high SEO Score?

1. Technical

How well the technical elements of a site enable it to be accessed, crawled, and indexed by search engine bots. If a site isn’t properly indexed, it will not be ranked by search engines and no amount of on-page content or links will bring visitors to the site. Hence technical SEO is a key driver of organic traffic. Technical SEO is often an afterthought once a site has gone live, but most of the issues that get flagged in a technical SEO audit can be avoided if they are considered in the early stages of the web development process.

What’s needed for a high score?

Search-engine (and user-) friendly URLs: URLs are meaningful to users, don’t link to duplicate content, and use hyphens rather than underscores where possible. Technical quality: Refers to technical quality as perceived by search engines. Domain is not flagged as unsafe. HTML and CSS validation shows site is error-free.

2. Content

The quality of a site’s visitor-facing content with respect to how it engages users and how well the meta-content aligns with the site content. Accurate, descriptive meta-content sets visitor expectations, and together with high-quality site content, ensures visitors don’t bounce back to the search engine. Good visitor engagement levels, in turn, mean that a site’s content is relevant and will be ranked higher by Google.

What’s needed for a high score?

User content quality: Content is current, concise, easy to read, is free of misspellings, with few broken links. Indexable meta-content: Meta-titles and short descriptions are present for all pages. This helps search engines understand the context better and sets visitor expectations. Unique content: No duplicate page titles or meta-content present. Duplicate content hurts SEO.

3. User Experience

How effectively embedded information like links and visuals is used to enhance the user experience. A well-organized link hierarchy and properly defined images boosta site’s usability and indexability.

What’s needed for a high score?

User-friendly visuals: Images are retrievable, accessible and don’t slow down page loading time. Good visuals increase traffic from image searches. User-friendly navigation: The most important pages are readily accessed two or three clicks from homepage and user is not overwhelmed with an abundance of links.

SEO Reseller

The Top 5 SEO Reseller Programs

Hubshout:

Hubshout is one of the pricer vendors. On their site, you can get a demo for their software and they offer various services like SEO, PPC, Local SEO, Social Media Marketing, Email marketing as well as website reseller services. Clients who are interested in utilizing their services can visit their website for more details.

Text link brokers:

Text link brokers has been around since 2003 and have helped many SEO/Marketing companies. They are well known for their link building services, although a bit pricey. But they aren’t limited to building links, you can find content writing services, guest posting service, and social media management, and more.

Fast Forward Marketing:

Fast Forward Marketing is another one. Anyone who is interested to become a reseller can also sign up from their website. They offer services like SEO, Local Buzz, SMO, PPC, Web design, Website Audit Report, online reputation management and also content creation. You can get more details from their website.