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How to Generate More Organic Traffic

There are a variety of ways to bring traffic to a website, but the best and most sought after is organic traffic. Organic traffic is traffic brought to a website through any means other than paid traffic — people find a website through a search engine or type it into the URL bar.

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1. Use the power of social media.
Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, Pinterest — the options are endless when it comes to using social media. In a social media dominated world, it’s important to get involved with the platforms that suit your organization the best. Not only is it important to get on those platforms, but it’s important to use them to interact with clients or consumers. Social media has the power to help individuals form relationships with one another to then improve reach of blog posts and information even more.

2. Enhance your SEO.
SEO is a monster to master. There’s so much that can be done, but the most important thing is to be consistent with your efforts. There are big things you can do with SEO and there are small things you can do. You can improve your SEO dramatically by using Google’s Keyword Planner. This tool helps you determine what people are searching to find the information they are looking for. You can also do things like write meta descriptions, adjust the alt text of your images, and link to internal content with creative anchor text. The options are endless when it comes to improving your SEO – it just matters if you want to start big or small.

3. Host a contest.
A contest can be hosted on social media or on your main website. You can give out a large prize or a small prize. You can give out one prize or multiple prizes. Really, there is no limit on the options available when hosting a contest. The important thing about a contest is to engage your audience. They should be giving something to you (engagement with your website or your social media profiles) while you’re also giving something to them.

4. Utilize video.
Users love consuming video. It’s an easily digestible form of content that can be chockfull of information for users. Also, if your consumers are used to seeing long-form written content, a video can spice things up and re-attract people to your website. Adding video, especially auto-play video, can make your website more engaging, ensuring users stay there longer and in turn improve our SEO.

5. Write long-form content.
Long-form content (typically a piece over 1,200 words) has the ability to elicit higher engagement from consumers. Because long-form content is focused on providing valuable information on a specific topic, it is more likely to draw the attention of readers. Long-form content is more likely to get into the specifics of a topic than a 500-800 word piece, which means more keywords can be found within the content to rank for.

6. Create relationships with other organizations.
Don’t think of them as competition, think of other organizations as potential promoters. You see it all the time in the blogging world — people working with others in their industry to promote one product or another.

7. Write eye-catching headlines.
Headlines are the first piece of text someone sees about a story. It’s the hook that should reel someone in to click on a link. If you focus a little bit of effort on perfecting the headline of a piece of content, you are sure to attract more consumers as well as improve your SEO at the same time.

8. Utilize email marketing.
Email marketing is highly overrated these days. It’s the one bit of content you actually own that can benefit you. It’s a direct connection between you and a consumer. Using email can be tricky — you don’t want to overwhelm your consumer with a ton of emails which could lead to them unsubscribing, but you want to utilize this chain of communication to best serve your organization. Stick with zippy emails that engage but don’t overload. Offer special access to information/deals. Keeps them around so they actually want to engage with your information.

9. Build a community.
Through the power of the Internet, the world feels a lot smaller these days. It’s easier for people to connect, especially over brands or companies. There are Facebook pages for people who have certain hobbies, forums for people to discuss their favorite movies, and there can be a place for your organization to connect with consumers and have consumers connect with each other. Allowing for comments and conversation means a place for connection, just make sure to set rules and guidelines (like respect all opinions) if you’re going to make commenting a big part of your outreach.

10. Guest blog and ask for a guest blog in return.
Guest blogging is not dead. Guest blogging is alive and well, and your website might benefit from it. First of all, if you’re not blogging, you should start. Blogging is a great way to consistently create content and connect with consumers. Second of all, blogging is a great way to collaborate with other people in your market, or not in your market. Branch out by getting a guest post from someone in a totally different sector and contribute to their blog yourself. By branching out, you’ll reach a whole new potential market and therefore increase your organic traffic.


Driving more organic traffic to your website can be hard, but it’s not impossible. It takes a little more time and whole lot more effort, but anyone can do it. If you’re looking for help in gaining more traffic through organic methods, contact Cabedge today! With a team of SEO and online traffic experts, we are sure to have someone that should be able to help you reach your goals.

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Top 7 Reasons to Hire a Digital Marketing Firm

It’s 2018, and digital marketing is more important than ever. Digital marketing is marketing taken to the digital world. Digital marketers analyze data and trends to connect with target audiences. They determine goals and develop data proven strategies to reach those goals. Digital marketing agencies can handle everything from logo and brand development to search engine optimization (SEO) and everything in between. You may think you don’t need a digital marketing agency — you can handle everything — and you can, but you don’t have to. In this data-driven, Internet-dominated world, let a digital marketing firm help you achieve your goals. Not convinced yet? We’ve got seven reasons that should help you realize everything that a digital marketing firm can offer you.

digital marketing

1. Broaden your team to help you achieve your goals.
The first thing a digital marketing team will do with a new client is determine their goals. To achieve anything, you first have to know what it is you want to achieve. A digital marketing firm knows how to extract the real goals of an organization and develop strategies to help it reach those goals. Along with developing data-driven strategies to reach your goals, a digital marketing firm is able to focus on those Internet-driven goals solely. Since it is focused on helping your achieve your online goals, it can focus on those alone and avoid being distracted by other day-to-day business tasks.

2. Outsource some work so you can focus on what you really need to do to better your business.
One of the biggest benefits to hiring a digital marketing firm to handle extraneous tasks like SEO and blog management means that you have more time to do what you really need to do to take your business to the next level. Since you’ve hired an expert to get your website up and running or hired someone to manage your SEO (or both), you can put your efforts toward making better products or providing better services to your consumers. Your attention is no longer taken from what makes your company stand out when you’ve got a team of professionals to help you with the promotion of those products/services.

3. Have a team of experts design your content.
Sure, you know what you like when it comes to design, but you’re not really sure how to make it happen online. That’s where a digital marketing team comes in. It’s important that your vision is projected in your logo, web design, and collateral design, but you don’t need to spend hours pulling your hair out looking at a web platform or learning Adobe Illustrator when you can hire someone to do it for you. Not only is it going to save you some frustration, but it’s probably going to be completed in a more timely manner because you’ve outsourced the work to someone who knows how to do it (there’s no learning curve). As long you communicate what you want things to look like, the digital marketing firm you hire can take it from there.

4. Find everything you need in one place.
Hiring a digital marketing firms means you’ve knocked a handful of jobs out with one hire. That’s right — one. All digital marketing firms are different, but at Cabedge, we can do everything from logo design to SEO to website development to hosting. We’re basically a one-stop-shop for anything digital that your company/organization might need. Digital marketing firms have a team of experts that can do it all, which saves you time and money in the long run.

5. Have someone dedicated to bettering your public image.
Not only does hiring a digital marketing firm mean that you have a team of people working on a handful of tasks, but it means you’ve got a team of people that are working to better your public image while they do them. While digital marketing isn’t public relations, it kind of does a little bit of the job a PR firm would by making sure you have good SEO, by pushing content like blog posts to engage your audience, and by ensuring you have good branding across platforms to help consumers recognize your brand. It’s all the little things you could do, but you don’t have to.

6. Improve your SEO tenfold.
One of the most important things to master in this Internet-driven world we live in today is SEO. SEO isn’t necessarily hard to learn, but it can be time-consuming to master. That’s why hiring a digital marketing firm is that much more important. Let them take over the day-to-day management of getting your website ranked higher by search engines with SEO, and managing your website information. Digital marketing firms are mostly anonymous on the Internet, and no one needs to know you’re not doing everything yourself. You’ll get more done in less time, and you’ll have experts doing it for you.

7. Add an additional perspective and new ideas to the team.
Often an overlooked benefit to hiring a digital marketing firm is getting other people on your team to provide insight. As an often unbiased third-party, digital marketing firms can provide key industry insight into website development and management. They can also serve as another vote when making decisions that concern digital marketing (like social media, branding, and website content). It’s never a bad thing to have a bigger team behind you and your decisions.

Did we convince you? If you’re looking for a digital marketing agency to help you out with branding, website development, SEO, and more, contact Cabedge. Cabedge is located in Nashville, TN, but it can help clients across the country.

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5 Things to Avoid for Good SEO

Search Engine Optimization feels like this mystical world that needs to be uncovered layer by layer. There’s really not that much to it — create good content and utilize the tools available to you to make sure your content is seen — but still it seems like there are 40 new articles coming out each day about how to best utilize SEO. Today, we are going to talk about what you shouldn’t do. It’s easy to tell you to link-earn, utilize keywords, and share your content, but what about what you’re already doing that you should stop doing right now?

Here are five things you should stop doing in order to improve your SEO today.

seo website design

1. Duplicating content.
Sometimes website creators think the more information the more likely they are to rank for their website. Good idea, but it’s wrong. Google (and other search engines) are sophisticated — they know when information is being duplicated or when there are too many pages on a website and that reflects in the ranking. You might think it’s important to create sub-pages for all the services you provide, but if there’s very little content on those sub-pages, it might be a better idea to keep all your services on one page. Fewer pages that have more information are more likely to rank higher on Google. Additionally, you shouldn’t create ten pages with mostly the same information except for a different title (like if you offer services in different cities). Stick with creating quality content for one page and see how well it ranks.

2. Cut off spammy links. They aren’t benefiting you.
Gaining links/link-building is crucial for good SEO ranking, but having spammy links can actually hinder your chances of changing your ranking. “Spammy” links come about when you outsource your link building or your link gets added to an unprofessional directory. It’s important to find these, and remove them if possible. You can submit a disavow document that tells Google you don’t want to be associated with spammy links, which should help with your ranking.

3. Ignoring extensions and social media.
Having great content and a stellar website is important, but if you’re not utilizing everything at your fingertips, your website ranking will only go so far. For local businesses, Google My Business is essential for high rankings. Adding in all applicable information to this extension helps ensure higher rankings from Google and more clicks from searchers. Additionally, social media is a great way to help your website get ranked. More and more people are using social media search functions to find new products and places to go. Platforms like Yelp are constant resources for locals and tourists when looking for places to go in town, influencers are impacting how consumers choose to spend their hard earned cash, and sharing your content and information on social media helps people see your information more organically. Utilize everything at your fingertips, not just the traditional marketing paths, and you’re ranking are sure to soar to the top.

4. Trying to go too big.
The goal is not to go viral overnight. Viral videos/stars/publicity stunts get a huge moment in the sun, but two weeks later few people remember them. It’s important to work toward consistent growth, which often is smaller than we may hope at the beginning — but it’s consistent. This is important to remember if you’re a local business. If you’re located in Portland with no additional locations and no e-commerce site, it’s important to focus your SEO geographically rather than trying to reach all four corners of the globe. Focus on SEO growth strategically, aiming for consistent growth, and you’ll go up in the search results one by one.

5. Focusing on everything but the content.
At the end of the day, the most important thing you do for your SEO ranking is create good content. It can be frustrating to hear this advice, but it’s the truth. If you don’t have good content, no one is going to stay on your page long enough for its high ranking to matter. Create good content, focus on organic engagement, and the rest will follow.

Are you ready to take the next step with your SEO? Contact Cabedge today. With our team of experts, we will be able to come up with an individualized plan to help improve your SEO today.

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5 Small Ways To Improve Your SEO

You’re ready to tackle SEO. You’ve read all the articles, watched all the videos, and you feel sufficiently prepared to help your company rise in the search results. Or, maybe you’ve been working in SEO for years, and you’ve got all the big things down like link-earning and utilizing keywords. That’s great! But before you get too engrossed in the SEO world, don’t forget the simple things you can do on your homepage or in blog posts to take your SEO to the next level. Here at Cabedge, we have five tips for how to improve your SEO in easy, yet impactful ways.

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1. Add alt text to all your images.
Alt text is a way for search engine crawlers to catalog images on a webpage. Since crawlers can’t visually see the image, alt text is used to describe what action is being depicted in a photo. To improve SEO rankings, alt text can also include the keyword you are trying to rank for. This may seem like a minor detail when it comes to SEO, but the small things can add up to big change on the Internet.

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2. Add meta descriptions to pages and posts.
Meta descriptions are what appear when a page shows up in the search results (see the example above from Google). These are very important for ranking, especially when they contain a keyword. After the headline, this is the second most important element that can promote a blog post and grab a reader’s attention. Meta descriptions should catch the reader’s attention, utilize keywords, and promote the page or post accurately.

3. Make anchor text work for you.
This is anchor text. It is the text that users can click on to be sent to another page with further information about a topic. Some websites utilize anchor text like this: “Click here to learn more about puppies.” When really it should be used like this: “Puppies are great companions for children.” When the keyword is utilized as the anchor text, it’s another indication to website crawlers that the page is providing valuable information to readers. It’s important to use links, but don’t use too many. Use them when most applicable and most likely to help with your SEO.

4. Utilize headings.
Headings help break up the content on a page, which is helpful when sharing long-form content. Headings make a page/post more user friendly, and they can include keywords, both of which help rank sites better on search platforms.

5. Incorporate different types of media.
Similar to including headings in your posts, incorporating different types of media makes for a better user experience and therefore, better SEO. Photos are great, including them where applicable for visual representation of concepts you discuss, but other types of media can also be helpful when trying to improve your SEO. Embed videos, insert audio clips, or incorporate slideshows to take your page/post to the next level.

If you’re looking for help with your SEO, look no further than Cabedge. Reach out to us today, and get in touch with an SEO expert that can help you improve your search result rankings fast.

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The Basics of Inbound Marketing

For new organizations, it can be daunting to try and attract new clientele. It might feel like you don’t have enough cash to really start advertising and promoting yourself, but in actuality, you don’t need a lot of money to start growing your audience and customer base. With inbound marketing, you don’t have to worry about throwing your marketing money down the drain because it requires very little investment and can be done from the comfort of your own home/office.

Inbound marketing focuses on bringing potential consumers to the final stages of the buying process by providing helpful and relevant content throughout the journey. Inbound marketing makes it easier for potential customers to find organizations through blogs, search engines, and social media. Rather than going out and finding those customers yourself through typical advertising methods, inbound marketing brings the customers to you by producing quality content that catches attention and ropes people in.

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How to Create Successful Inbound Marketing

The entire point of marketing is to turn random people into leads into customers into promoters. The best way to do this is to give them a reason to care about what you are putting out there. The best way to do that is with inbound marketing.

According to HubSpot, there are a couple of universal phases that one has to go through when utilizing inbound marketing to turn strangers into promoters. Let’s break those down.

  • Attract: It’s important to bring people to your site with inbound marketing that will resonate with the information you are putting out there. If your target audience member is a mom raising a hectic family, you don’t want to be attracting men who ride motorcycles together on the weekends — they most likely will not convert to customers. The best ways to attract potential customers are through blogging, showing up in relevant searches, and posting content on social media platforms. The more visible you are the better chance you have of attracting potential consumers. It also important to create consistent messaging. Any blogs or social media posts you send out to connect with potential customers should all relate back to your central brand offerings.
  • Convert: Because you are attracting potential strangers to your services/products with your inbound marketing, you are now going to have to convert them into leads. Leads are strangers that have turned into potential consumers. Once you have brought these people to your information, the path to conversion can vary. Basically, you want to make sure they continue to engage with your content past that initial hook. This can be done through newsletter forms, scheduling meetings, sending individual messages, or importing these leads into a Customer Relationship Management software system to keep tabs on for later engagement. Whatever avenue you take to convert leads into consumers is going to depend on your offering, but it’s important to keep people engaged consistently to ensure they reach that next step in the buying process.
  • Close: This may be considered the most important step — closing the deal. Now, it’s time to truly turn those leads into consumers. This is done through a variety of channels, but it’s important to open lines of communication, consistently provide good content, and creatively provide solutions to problems with what you have to offer. This can all be done through inbound marketing efforts, like producing helpful blog posts or sharing information on social media.
  • Repeat: Keep creating good content and engaging authentically with leads and consumers. The only way to ensure consumers will continually come back to your product or service is to continually provide good content and support to them. Keep it up!

Why Inbound Marketing?

You might be wondering why inbound marketing is such a big deal, and it’s because of changes in how consumers make buying decisions. The average consumer is much less likely to be swayed by traditional advertising techniques now — they want to engage with organizations that care about them and provide them with solutions. Because there is an abundance of information at our fingertips with the Internet, consumers are more likely now than ever to comparison shop and do their research before making a final purchase decision. Other factors play into making a purchase as well, such as the ethics of a company, the partnerships a company has with other organizations, and the benefits one gets from purchasing from the company — all of which can be shared through inbound marketing tactics. Consumers are increasingly looking to find answers to questions rather than sales pitches. That’s why inbound marketing, in the form of blog posts specifically, is so helpful to consumers. If you can answer questions for them, they are more likely to buy into what you are selling.

As the world has grown and more and more consumers and providers are entering the market, marketing and advertising has become more personalized. Mass marketing, like billboards and national TV ads, used to move product off the shelf, but now, organizations are leaning toward more personalized marketing, like inbound marketing, to make the sale. Consumers want to feel as if the relationship they have with an organization is personal. Inbound marketing can do that.

Everything relates when you practice inbound marketing. You create blog posts to improve SEO rankings. You share blog posts on social media to attract new consumers. And all of this is done to create leads and relationships with potential consumers. No matter your service or product, you want people to see it. To be seen, you should be practicing inbound marketing. The best thing about inbound marketing? It doesn’t have to cost insane amounts of money. As long as you focus on creating good content, you’ll be able to promote and incorporate inbound marketing without any additional cost.

If you need help creating inbound marketing collateral, reach out to Cabedge today. With our team of marketing experts and content creators, we can help get your marketing to the right people.

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Digital Marketing: What it is and Why Your Organization Needs It

Marketing, as defined by the American Marketing Association is, “the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large.”

Digital marketing takes those traditional marketing activities into the digital space. It is a non-traditional field that encompasses a wide range of skills and elements and is essential to achieve success in the world today.

Fundamentals of Marketing

Marketing is all about getting the right message to the right people at the right time. It’s about understanding an audience and catering to their needs. It means staying up-to-date on trends in the digital space and using those up-and-coming communication methods to connect with audience members. Digital marketing encompasses a lot of platforms and methods of communication, but it all comes down to being able to promote a product to the right people in the right manner.

  • Understand your product/service’s benefits and features. When you’re selling your product or service you aren’t selling what it is but rather what it can do for the consumer. Will it make their morning run more smoothly? Will it help them chop vegetables more swiftly? Sweaters don’t fly off the shelf because of the color selection they come in, but rather the promise an organization sells of one living their best life while wearing said sweater. Digital marketers know how to pinpoint those benefits and communicate them to a wider audience.
  • Define your audience. The main part of a marketer’s job is to understand the audience they are trying to sell to. In the digital space, it’s incredibly easy to get a message out into the world, but it’s not as easy to get that message to the right people. To define your audience, you simply need to determine who your ideal consumer is. Decide what they eat for breakfast. Figure out where they get their information. Determine where they go to get their work done. Figuring out every detail about your consumer helps you determine the right path and message to reach your target audience.
  • Craft a persuasive message/call to action. The final step to being a digital marketer is to market. Whatever it is you want accomplished (reading a blog post, buying a product, signing up for a service) you need to share it in a creative and persuasive way on the right channels so it reaches the right audience.

Elements of Digital Marketing

The amazing thing about digital marketing is that there are a handful of different avenues one can go down when exploring the field. Because the online space is constantly growing and changing, so is a digital marketer’s job. Here are just some of the elements a digital marketer must have in mind when providing services:

  • Search Engine Optimization (SEO): Increasing organic traffic to your website through search engine rankings.
  • Content Marketing: Content marketing requires the creation and promotion of your own content (think blog posts or videos) to build brand awareness and convert customers.
  • Social Media Marketing: SMM utilizes social media channels like Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram to promote content and generate leads.
  • Pay-Per-Click (PPC): Google AdWords is a type of PPC — marketers pay a certain amount of money based on how much traffic is driven to the site via ad clicks.
  • Affiliate Marketing: Commonly seen on social media, affiliate marketing is a method of marketing that requires a partnership between a brand and a promoter where the promoter is compensated for talking about the products/services online. For example, a corporation can partner with a blogger to have them promote its new nail polish.
  • Email Marketing: Used as a means of direct communication with consumers, email marketing is a popular way to promote content like discounts and events.

Digital marketing is a big world to tackle — that’s why Cabedge is here to help. We have a team of able digital marketers who consider communicating their passion. Contact Cabedge to get a personalized digital marketing plan for your organization today.

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The Basics of Google AdWords

Cabedge is a dedicated design and digital strategy organization. Having one foot in each world, Cabedge employees have a pretty good grasp on how to make your website beautiful and functional and how to promote it to the World Wide Web. Google AdWords is a handy tool that can be used to promote organizations for an adjustable fee.

What is Google AdWords?

Google AdWords is a way for companies and organizations to advertise online to connect with customers through the Google Network. AdWords makes it easy for businesses to set goals and budgets and connect with intended audiences to increase awareness of a product or service or to increase sales. Google AdWords has a bunch of features and services that patrons can use to better promote their organizations. Let’s take a look at some of those now:

  • AdWords Express: Automates managing keywords and ad placement for businesses to make AdWords management easier.
  • Google Partners: Allows users to become certified in Google AdWords. Certification is not necessary to use Google AdWords, but it teaches the fundamentals and best practices of the tool to help users utilize it best.
  • Remarketing: Enables businesses to show advertisements to users that have previously visited their website. Remarketing allows users to further segment audiences to better display advertisements.
  • Ad Extensions: Google AdWords allows for a variety of extensions that can be added to a business’s ad to better serve it’s consumers. Some extensions include a clickable phone number, the ability to leave reviews, price displays, and more.
  • Keyword Planner: Estimates the amount of traffic per-month for selected keywords and offers alternatives.

Benefits of Using Google AdWords

Google AdWords is not required to run a successful business, but it does help at the end of the day in attracting new and existing customers. Here are some of the biggest benefits of using Google AdWords to promote a business online.

  • It’s measurable. The biggest benefit to advertising through Google AdWords is that it is completely measurable with price-per-click metrics. Businesses can accurately attribute consumers actions to AdWords campaigns.
  • It’s flexible. Businesses can make AdWords applicable to any need. Users can easily add extensions (talked about previously), specify keyword matches, narrow the audience scope for an ad, and more.
  • It pairs well with SEO. While businesses can’t just completely forget about SEO, AdWords works alongside SEO to improve engagement and reach. It’s not a quick fix to get more sales, but AdWords will inevitably reach a wide range of people for a cost.

AdWords can’t do all the work for you, and it shouldn’t, but it does have it’s positives when it comes to engaging a target audience.

Cabedge prides itself on its knowledge of SEO and Google tools, including AdWords. If you’re looking for help starting or managing your AdWords campaign, look no further. Reach out to Cabedge today to talk about your goals.

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Search Engine Optimization 101

You’ve heard of it, you’ve seen it around the web, but you’re not 100 percent sure you really understand what Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is and what it does for your organization’s online presence. Cabedge is here to help. As a dedicated web design and marketing agency, Cabedge knows a thing or two when it comes to SEO. We help organizations every day improve their web presence, which includes search engine ranking and SEO.

What is SEO?

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, which put simply, means to improve the ranking of a website in search engine results, in turn increasing potential visitors to that site. SEO helps organizations get traffic to their websites through free, organic channels, like Google search results.

How Can You Improve Your SEO

There are tons of ways to improve your SEO. Some are more acceptable than others.

White Hat SEO

White Hat SEO utilizes SEO techniques that focus on engaging a real human audience rather than tricking a search engine. That means a little more work may be involved with these tactics on the front-end, but that work pays off since it guarantees real engagement with your content now and in the future. Here are some of the ways you can engage in White Hat SEO:

  • Create quality content: The first step to getting people to your website is to create quality content. It may be frustrating to hear, but if consumers enjoy what you are putting out onto the Internet, they are sure to check it out and share with others.
  • Ensure your site has a good user experience: Just like creating quality content is essential for page rankings, it’s important for the experience a user has on your website to be of a higher quality. This means pages load swiftly, it’s easy to search for information, and the navigation is user friendly.
  • Make sure your site is mobile friendly: Google is set to launch it’s mobile-first index sometime in 2018, so it’s more important now than ever to have a good, mobile friendly site for consumers to use on the go.
  • Utilize keywords and meta tags: To help search engines crawl your site, you should be using keywords and meta tags. Keywords are the words that define your topic and users will search to find your content. Typically, a user can find keywords throughout your published content. Meta tags, on the other hand, are not visible to users and are only displayed in the code of your website. Like keywords, they are related to the content on your page and help its SEO.
  • Design an easily navigable site: Having a site that is easy to navigate is great for user experience, but it also ensures that bots can easily crawl your website to improve your SEO. When a bot crawls your website, it is following links to make an index of your site. The easier it is to crawl, the better your SEO.
  • Earning quality links: A great way for a search engine to see that your website is a trusted source of information is to earn links from other people on the Internet. The more links you have from outside sources, the better trusted your website will be. Link earning can be a form of Black Hat SEO, so you have to be careful when earning your links. Do it the right way, and you’re website is sure to succeed.

Black Hat SEO

Black Hat SEO strategies are frowned upon for violating search engines’ terms of service. These practices are not approved of and could result in your website being banned from certain search engines. Black Hat SEO tactics involve:

  • Hidden Text or Links: Like we mentioned above, getting other websites to link to your content is essential for good SEO. But if you do it the wrong way by hiding text or links on yours or others websites through the code, systems can actually track this now, which may lead to negative SEO.
  • Keyword Stuffing: Keyword stuffing is exactly what it sounds like — jamming so many keywords into the text of a page that it ranks highly, but comes at the cost of a valuable user experience.
  • Cloaking: Cloaking is the method of displaying different information to search engine crawlers than to users to ensure better indexing. This can look like a page of text crammed with keywords to a search engine while it appears like a normal page to general users. In general, this is a frowned upon practice because it is dishonest.
  • Link Manipulation: There are a variety of ways a user can manipulate links to fools users and search engines. Purposefully hiding a deceptive URL in display copy, purchasing misspelled variations of popular URLs, and openly redirecting users to phishing scams are all ways of manipulating links that violate search engines’ terms of service.

This was just a basic overview of SEO and some tactics that can be used to improve your SEO now and in the future. For a comprehensive overview of SEO, check out Moz or Wordstream for further resources.

If you need help developing an SEO strategy, reach out to Cabedge. With experience in web design, SEO and content creation, Cabedge is sure to be able to help you achieve your goals.

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How Responsive Design Can Improve Your SEO

SEO is hugely important when it comes to showing up in search queries and having Google rank your website higher in its search results. One of the most important ways to boost SEO rankings in 2018 is through responsive design for your website. Let’s break down what SEO is and how responsive design can improve it.

SEO = Search Engine Optimization. Essentially, SEO involves getting your website to appear higher up in the search rankings for websites like Google and Bing. There’s tons to SEO, and you can learn more from websites like Moz or read more about it on the Cabedge blog.

Responsive design is only one of the tactics you can use to improve your SEO. Having a responsive design means your website will function smoothly no matter what device you are using to access it. You can easily use your website on a desktop, cell phone or tablet without compromising the user-friendly features or changing the functionality.

As devices other than desktops are increasingly being used to access data and information online, responsive design is becoming more and more important for SEO. Google is also set to launch its mobile-first index sometime in 2018, meaning that Google is going to start ranking websites based on their mobile friendliness. If you want to stay up to date on strategies to increase your SEO, responsive design is a great place to start.

Having a responsive design implemented for your website also means that you’ve increased the number of consumers you can reach without having to create an entirely different platform, like a downloadable application. Responsive design isn’t always the easiest thing to achieve, but all the hard work on the front-end will mean better results and less work in the long run for your company to maintain your website and boost your SEO.

If you’re organization is looking to create a website that utilizes responsive design, look not further than Cabedge. With years of experience in website design, back-end coding and SEO management, Cabedge is your one-stop shop for your website development needs. Reach out to us today, and we’ll get started on your personalized plan and design.

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Why Video Creation is Essential to Your SEO Ranking

In 2018, users are going to increasingly be looking for video content to give them information. YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world, and more and more people are searching for videos now than ever. Video content is growing in popularity as a way to virtually teach lessons and share information to a wide audience, which is more often than not an international audience.

Video content made specifically for YouTube has the ability to increase SEO rankings for your organization because Google owns YouTube. Therefore, if you are creating content for YouTube, it means that content will get double the attention from Google. Google is already displaying videos as search results for general searches and image searches with 55 percent of search results containing a video of some sort.

YouTube viewers can also turn into website visitors or patrons. It’s easy to click on a YouTube video, listen to what a creator has to say, and click into their description box to find a link to their website or to products they were talking about. YouTube, like other social media platforms, serves as an advanced form of generating viewers for your other, targeted content.

Additionally, you can embed videos in your written content to boost SEO rankings and views and encourage users to stay on your page longer. The added work of creating and editing video content will pay off when your written content soars through the rankings in 2018 due to your improved SEO.

Looking for some help creating video content or in utilizing your current video content to promote sales of your product? Reach out to Cabedge today to get started!