livebooks blog

Every business owner knows that in order for your clients to buy your product or service, they have to find you first. Thus, Location, location, location remains a valid must-have for all businesses alike, be they off or online.

So how do you make sure you’re found online, considering your website is one of the 2 billion live at this moment? There is a multitude of actions you can take to make sure your website ranks better than your competitors’ – proper SEO, marketing campaigns, and fast loading times are just a few steps you can take to send your website to the top of the charts.

More »

So, you’ve just launched your brand-new website. You’re anxious for new customers to start rolling in – and want to make sure your existing customers can still find you online. Web users need to be able to find you online before they become a customer. Since the very beginning, web users have favored websites that show up higher in search results, as they want to find the information they need fast. Showing up on the first page of search results has become even more difficult as search engines have adapted to increased browsing on mobile devices, more ad space, and tougher competition as more and more businesses are getting online. That being said, following SEO best practices is critical to building your online presence and attracting customers to your newly launched website. Below are six critical SEO actions to give your website the best chance to rank against the competition.

Action 1: Redirect Old URLs

If you have an existing website, don’t give up on all of that ranking power you’ve built up! A permanent 301 redirect will pass on the majority of your former page’s SEO value to your new site. The stronger the rankings for the older URL, the faster you can improve your search rankings on the new site by using these kinds of redirects. Web developers sometimes recommend other options, such as 404 errors or canonical tags, because 301 redirects can be difficult and require intensive testing. However, SpaceCraft’s simple Legacy URL Tool has simplified and streamlined the redirecting process, so you can give your new website a better chance of ranking from the start. See how to use our Legacy URL Tool here.

Action 2: Add Metadata

You wouldn’t buy a book without reading its title, and search algorithms feel the same way. Page titles and meta descriptions help search engines understand how relevant a page is for specific keywords, and also help searchers determine if a page will provide the information they’re looking for. People also tend to rely on pictures to relay a great deal of this information, but site crawlers can’t see images (yet). That’s why “ALT” tags for all of your images are necessary to help crawlers understand the content of your pages. With liveBooks, our SEO tools make it easy to add titles, meta descriptions, and image alt tags to your website’s pages, so users and search engines can quickly see what your website is all about. See step-by-step instructions on how to do this in our SEO support articles.

Action 3: Verify With Google Search Console

Google Search Console gives you the ability to see your website as Google does. When you sign up for Google Search Console, you’re telling Google that your site is legitimate and open for business. Once you establish your website ownership, it’s easier for you or your webmaster to maintain the health and wellness of your site for the long term. Keep tabs on broken links, missing pages, and larger errors or issues that can occur on your website such as DNS and Server Errors. Make sure you verify your site with Bing, Yahoo and Google to keep an extra set of eyes on your website’s health.

Action 4: Index Your Sitemap

Indexing your sitemap is another important way that Google Webmaster Tools helps search engines understand the structure of your site. Sitemaps have become even more important after changes to the Google algorithm, such as the Panda update, tried to eliminate a great deal of duplicate content on the Web. Submit your sitemap to Google through your new Search Console account so that Google is made aware of each and every page on your website. This helps establish yourself as the originator of your own content.

Action 5: Integrate Google Analytics

An important part of SEO is monitoring how your website traffic has changed over time. While it’s easy to get lost in the numbers, setting up Google Analytics will help you measure how visitors are interacting with your site, how long they spend there, how often they come back and how many end up converting into customers. Diving into your website’s user data can help you make changes to your website that increase conversions, provide valuable insight about what content users find useful, and what sections of the site aren’t performing well.

Action 6: Manage Your Local Profile

Ultimately, you want your website to convert visitors into customers. You want to raise awareness, answer their questions and bring them to the point of sale. For businesses that have a brick and mortar location, this means bringing visitors to the physical store, so having correct business information across the web is critically important. However, maintaining your local profiles can be a time-consuming task. We recommend using a location management platform such as Yext to ensure your local profiles have up to date information about your business at all times. This is especially important if you’re doing any traditional media such as radio or TV. What’s worse than a potential customer hearing your name only to search online and find incorrect business information? Having correct business information not only helps users contact and find your business, but can also increases your credibility in the eyes of search engines.

When it comes to websites, content may be king, but it’s most effective when combined with great imagery. And this isn’t just guesswork, either! A major portion of our brain’s primary functions is to process visual information, which is why your website should be visually appealing as much as it is informative.

If you’re a wedding industry professional, chances are you depend pretty highly on photographs to showcase your samples of work. As you should!

Couples love seeing examples of previous weddings. They are great for inspiration and give potential clients a sense of your style.

However, if your website images aren’t optimized properly, they could be doing more harm than good. Be sure you follow these search engine optimization (SEO) best practices when publishing images to your website.

Consistency in Style

Our first tip is more directly related to user experience, but when your online visitors are more engaged with your website, it can indirectly help your SEO.

Before you even think about adding a photograph, image or graphic onto your website, ask yourself some key questions:

• Does it match my brand?
• Will it speak to my ideal audience?
• Does it look consistent with other visuals I have already placed on my website?

If the image would look cohesive with your branding style, colors and niche market, great! Move on to our next steps. If not, look for something better (or create one yourself!). Remember to focus on quality over quantity.

Resize for Web Use

As great as high-quality photographs are for printing, big files (especially images that are several megabytes, or MB, in size) can only slow down your website load times.

Why does this matter? Well, for one, website visitors may leave and find another faster website if yours is loading too slowly. Second, your site speed directly affects how well your website performs on search engines like Google.

Photographs don’t need to be more than 72 dpi (dots per inch) for digital purposes. Most photographs, however, start around 300 dpi, causing them to be bigger in size (bytes). Ideally, images should be around 200-800 KB maximum each.

This may be way over your head, but you aren’t alone. That’s where liveBooks’ advanced image compression tools can help. When you upload your photos to your liveBooks website, they are automatically optimized for the best combination of quality and performance. If you would like to choose each image format on your own, then you can configure the advanced settings. You change an image’s quality and performance by dragging a slider – one direction will improve the resolution, while the other side will improve the image’s loading time and performance.

Image Titles and Alt-Text

Ever wonder how Google knows which images to pull up when you do an image search?

To put it simply, search engines use what they call “spiders” that scan through websites all over the web for information. In order to know what an image relates to or depicts, it relies on the image title and alt-text.

When your website images rank well for the same keywords within the actual content of your website (such as your services or about pages), your overall ranking for those keywords increases.

With liveBooks’ image tools, you have the ability to easily optimize your images for search engines. In the SEO tab, you can add keyword-optimized image title tags and alt-text to your images. For example, if you post a blog highlighting a recent wedding you photographed at a popular wedding venue, the image titles and alt-text should reflect keywords couples would search for on Google to see what weddings hosted there typically look like.

You might even add a few that focus on your particular role as a wedding photographer. Some you might use for this situation could be:

• Mansion wedding venues in Chicago
• Wedding photos at the Stan Mansion
• Stan Mansion wedding portraits
• Best wedding photographer in Chicago
• Chicago wedding photographer

Showcase Your Work on a Beautiful Website

liveBooks offers stunning, customizable website templates for wedding industry professionals and creatives.

Impress your potential clients with a visually stunning website that is ready for search engines and looks great on any mobile device!

We’ve also got a top-notch support team who’s here to help you every step of the way. Start for free today!

On your journey as a small business owner, there will be a few tools that come up that make your life a whole lot easier. One of these tools is Google Analytics.

Google Analytics allows you to track traffic and data coming into your website. This information can make a world of difference in how you market your business and build your online presence. You can use the data Analytics collects to help you determine your next steps when it comes to revising your website and marketing to your customers online.

If you don’t have time to do an in-depth study on all that Google Analytics entails, then here are a few quick tips for navigating the analytical side of your business.

Audience demographics

As a business owner, you’re well aware that knowing your audience is key to building your audience and gearing your products or services towards them.

Google Analytics is an extremely helpful tool you can use to understand your audience. Under the ‘Audience’ tab, you can find a general overview that includes the percentage of users divided by country, city and language.

You can also enable the Demographics which can give you more details on the gender and age of your users. Knowing this information can help you determine who exactly is visiting your website and how you can cater your website to them.

Page traffic

While you can see how much traffic your overall website is getting by day, week, or even month, you can also determine which sections of your website are seeing the most traffic. By segmenting your analytics by page or post, you can see where your visitors are navigating to or spending the most time on. This is helpful knowledge as it allows you to see what your visitors are most interested in on your website.

If you received a significant amount of traffic to a specific blog post, for example, you might consider writing a similar blog post on that topic because it’s clear that it’s something your visitors are interested in. Similarly, if your About Page is receiving a lot of traffic, that tells you that your audience is interested in the story and people behind your business and you can build upon that.

Traffic acquisition

In addition to knowing who your audience is and learning where they navigate to on your website, a key piece of helpful information is knowing where your audience is coming from. Under the Acquisition tab, you’ll find ‘Channels.’ It’s here that you’ll be able to see which sources your traffic is coming from. The main channels include Direct, Organic Search, Referral, Social, Paid Search, and Email.

This information can give you a lot of insight into how people are finding your business online. If you’ve put a lot of effort into your SEO marketing, then you’ll likely see significant traffic coming from Organic Search. If you’ve been focused on social media marketing, then you’ll probably see a good amount of traffic from Social.

Bounce rates

Bounce rates can be tricky to understand. Put simply, they are the percentage of visits in which a person leaves your website from any page on your website without browsing further or clicking on any other pages.

Most businesses will likely want their website visitors to navigate to more than one page or blog post. A higher bounce rate (such as anything above 50%) means that many of your visitors aren’t exploring more than one page or blog post before leaving. This is seen as a negative “score” in Google’s eyes, because it assumes that those who leave that quickly didn’t find the information engaging and/or useful.

Focus on improving user experience on pages or posts with high bounce rates, and encourage them to click on other pages through buttons and links.

Optimize Your Website’s Design Today

If the data you see in Google Analytics isn’t what you’d hoped it would be, then it may be time to change up your design and content.

With a liveBooks website, you’ll be able to use our stunning, customizable website templates that look great on any mobile device!

We’ve also got a top-notch support team who’s here to help you every step of the way. Start for free today!