• FAQs

          Search engine optimization (SEO) helps businesses drive visits to their website through organic search traffic. Given that the top organic search results receive a third of the clicks, a decline in ranking could be detrimental for your business. Implementing SEO best practices on your website will help to ensure that your web content is seen by as many potential customers as possible. The more visitors you have, the better your chances are of converting those visits into sales!

          Local search engine optimization (SEO) helps local businesses gain visibility by optimizing their local business listings for local search. A business that leverages local SEO will include its address, phone number, local opening times, and exact location in the form of a local citation. The goal is to rank for local searches which are usually performed by people in a specific geographical region looking for a business near them.

          We typically see results within the first 30 to 60 days, but when it comes to SEO, there are many factors at play. It's important to remember that SEO is a long-term strategy and results may not come as fast at you wish.


        • FAQs

          Digital advertising uses the internet to send advertisements to customers who are online through different websites and social media platforms like Google, Bing, LinkedIn and Facebook.

          The price for Google Ads management depends on the monthly ad spend. For accounts with $1,000 in monthly ad spend, the price is $550/month. Between $1,000 and $5,000 a month in ad spend, the price is $950/month. For $5,000 to $10,000 a month in ad spend, the price is $2,000/month. For more than $10,000 a month in ad spend, the price is $4,500/month.

          The price for Social Media Ads management depends on the monthly ad spend. For accounts with $1,000 in monthly ad spend, the price is $550/month. Between $1,000 and $5,000 a month in ad spend, the price is $950/month. For $5,000 to $10,000 a month in ad spend, the price is $2,000/month. For more than $10,000 a month in ad spend, the price is $4,500/month.


        • FAQs

          This depends on the complexity and size of a redesign and if eCommerce is needed. On average, it takes around 14-18 weeks from the web design intensive stage to launch.

          If your website experiences the following issues: it’s not responsive on all devices, has a slow loading speed, the design appears old and tired, users don’t spend long on the site, sales are stagnant, or your business is going through a rebranding - your website needs a redesign to boost your brand awareness and sales.

          Sometimes there’s no need to rebuild a website. Minor edits, refreshing page content and images, or restructuring page layout for SEO best practices can boost traffic and sales.


        • FAQs

          Semantic search launched in 2013 with the release of Google's Hummingbird update. Since then, Google's search engine has become more complex. The integration of machine learning, with RankBrain, and NLP, with BERT, has enabled the search engine to better understand the context of a query and deliver more personalized and targeted results. Semantic SEO is the process of creating machine-readable content using structured data and linked open data to help search engines better understand your content.

          On-page SEO is the practice of optimizing individual web pages in order to rank higher and earn more relevant traffic in search engines. On-page SEO refers to both the content and HTML source code of a page that can be optimized, as opposed to off-page SEO which refers to links and other external signals. From meta tags to page content, website structure, and HTML, on-page optimization services are focused on making your website more visible to search engines.

          Structured data refers to any organized data that conforms to a certain format, such as information in a relational database. When information is highly structured and predictable, search engines can more easily organize and display it in creative ways. Structured data involves using a piece of code that is laid out in a specific format easily understood by search engines. The search engines read the code and use it to display search results in a more dynamic way.


        • FAQs

          An SEO agency has experts in different areas of search engine optimization that may be out of the realm of your marketing team's abilities. SEO can be very complex and time-consuming. Furthermore, as search engine algorithms change it can be difficult to stay current on the latest ranking factors and strategies for improving online visibility. You will likely see a greater return on investment and better results from using a professional SEO agency than you would from tackling this on your own.

          As a digital marketing agency, SMA Marketing provides products and services in four areas: SEO, Local SEO, Digital Advertising, and Web Design

          We focus on building authentic, long-lasting relationships with our clients. We’re goal oriented and results driven and believe in doing good and making a difference in the world.

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How Search Engines Fight Link Spam

Links connect the internet. But not all links are natural or helpful. Since Google took the lead in using link signals to drive its algorithm, many have tried to manipulate rankings with unnatural linking practices. In this video, I’ll share how search engines are fighting link spam today.

Video Transcript:

Hey, thanks for checking out this video. If you like it, please hit subscribe, we would love to have you join our community as we publish new content each and every week.

Today we’re going to be talking about how search engines fight link spam. When Google came on the scene and started to build their search engine, one of the ways they determined the quality of a website was using that site backward. Now, as this was obviously made known and people started to understand how Google was using this, a lot of people out there just started building links for the sake of building links. As a result they would have a lot of bad links pointing to their site, but the whole thing was quantity over quality. Google was realizing that this was an easy way to manipulate the search results and honestly, it can still work today by just quickly building links.

But this is where they fought back with link spam fighting tactics. One of the first major ones was Google Penguin update. Penguin was targeting these link farm sites, these article directories, low-quality directories. There are a lot of directories that are good and you can use to build links. But if it’s a bad or low-quality directory or a spamming directory, Google was starting to target them.

They were also looking at the number of anchor text and how you were using your anchor text in links. You want to have your keyword in the anchor text, but you want it to be natural. You don’t want it to be overused, over and over again to where it can really flag the signal.

Another thing they were doing early at Penguin, looking at the location of a link. So if you’re a site in the US, but a majority of your site’s links are coming from Russia or the Philippians or Denmark, other places where you’re not serving clients, that’s a red flag. So these are some of the tactics that Google was using in order to fight link spam.

Those aren’t the only tactics that are being used. In other search engines like Yahoo and Bing and Yandex, they also have link fighting capabilities as well to look at spammy links. One of the things they’ll do is they’ll look at a link labeled as an ad. You can buy advertisement on certain sites. Not all sites strictly say that a link is an advertisement, or maybe they call it advertisement but it’s not marked as “No follow”as it should be. So Google will look at the text around the links to see whether that is a good link or if it’s a paid link.

They’re also going to look at site wide links. This is something I’ve seen a lot in the web developing marketing world, where somebody builds a website and at the bottom they put, “Made by this web company”. As a result what happens is you get hundreds of links, thousands of links, on the same site because it gets published over and over and over again on the footer. This is a red flag. There are also times where you build a link or build a connection with somebody and they do the same thing, they put it in a part of the page that gets duplicated a lot. Well, now you’ve got hundreds of thousands of links coming from one specific site. That is not something that you want, it can be a trigger.

Another thing they’re looking at are links sold by brokers. A link broker would be somebody who owns a lot of his content and owns a lot of sites, and they’re selling links on that content. Again, Google can do a lot of reverse engineering. A lot of the search engines can look at those and say, “Okay, this is somebody that’s selling their content for the sole purpose of link acquisition.” You can build partnerships and you can work with people to acquire links and earn links, but you shouldn’t be just trying to buy your position.

They’re also going to take a look at the relevance of the link. Let’s say that you’re in the car industry and you own a car dealership. So if you’re having links from things like hair salons and maybe a website that talks about golfing or things that aren’t actually related to your industry, those are going to be red flags as well because they need to be relevant. The links need to make sense, there needs to show a relationship between two entities. There could be some cases where you build partnerships with some types of businesses where it would make sense in the context of that adjustment. But really what you want to do is make sure that those connections are as natural as possible.

Google’s also going to look at the quality of the neighboring links. So again, are your links being together? Do they make sense together? Do they have relationships together? Again, we go to the car dealership and you’ve got a link to an auto parts store, okay that makes sense. But then you have a hairdresser, a fast food joint, a mommy blogger, another random social site, they don’t really make sense they’re just kind of hodgepodged together, they don’t really have a theme, they’re not connected in any way. It starts to look as if you’re trying to manipulate and those are the things that are going to trigger Google right off. And the location of a link matters. We talked about that a little bit before on what Penguin was doing. Are these links coming from the right location, there are certain spots that seem to be a little bit more spammy than others.

So I’m going to leave you guys with this. When you’re building links, when you’re acquiring links, when you’re trying to do it the right way and you don’t want to get hit by a negative search penalty, one of the questions you’ll want to ask is, “Would I want this link pointing to my site if it didn’t impact my sites rank?” What’s the purpose of the link? Is it going to send good, relevant traffic? Is it going to build relationships? Is it going to help my site improve? Is it going to make those connections that make sense, or am I doing it for the sole purpose of ranking?

You shouldn’t do link building just for rank results. Yes, it can help. Yes, it’s a large part of your FCO strategy, but it shouldn’t be the only thing that you’re doing, and you shouldn’t start to take links from a little bit bigger of a priority than seeing them as drag a little bit more than just rank, but also that relevant traffic. And make sure that it’s something that you would want pointing to your site, even if it didn’t have that effect.

Thanks so much for watching. If you have any questions, please comment below. And until next time, Happy Marketing.

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