Category Archives: SEO

2Cubed offers high-quality Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) services in order to help your company increase its rankings on Google and other search engines.

Free SEO Audit

Category: SEO Tips and Tricks

Would you like a free SEO Audit for your site? Fill in the SEO Form or email content@2cubed.ie to get started!

If you’re interested in building traffic and increasing leads and customers, you should consider an SEO audit followed by an SEO strategy.

SEO Audits are a review focusing on discovering the strengths and weaknesses of your website from an overall SEO perspective. SEO Audits when done correctly, can provide you with valuable information such as the following:

Gives you an insight into the technical health and crawl-ability of your website

Provides you with data which will help to inform your planning when it comes to developing SEO strategies

Helps to identify issues to resolve which will aid towards generating a better overall user experience for visitors to the website

Highlights areas for improvement that will lead to improving your search visibility on Google and other search engines

To compile a complete, thorough and accurate SEO Audit report one would usually focus around examining three key areas which would be Technical SEO, On-Page SEO and Off-Page SEO.

Technical SEO is the part of the audit from which the information gained will actually help you to find out just how healthy your website is overall from a technical point of view. The Technical SEO aspect of the audit can also help you to make improvements to the website as while doing it you can end up discovering issues that need to be rectified such as crawl issues, 404s, orphan pages, server errors, etc…

On-Page SEO is the part of the audit where you review how you can further optimise content that is visible on the pages of your website. This literally means everything that you can see on a page on your website so images and text. The information gained from the On-Page SEO aspect of the audit provides us with really helpful information such as information regarding keywords like which keywords you are ranking for. By using this information gained from your in-depth keyword research you can use it to inform your strategy in the future when it comes to incorporating keywords into future content.

Off-Page SEO is the part of the audit which allows us to review how off-site activities can be improved such as link building, anchor text etc.. Off-page SEO primarily is about SEO which can be done outside of your website by you elsewhere on the internet to improve your presence online. Any effective SEO strategy for your website should include at least one element which addresses off-site activities. Strategies such as when you reach out to other websites to develop link building is a perfect example of an off page SEO strategy one can take.

Performing an SEO Audit is something that is a must do for any website who wishes to further enhance and improve their business through using the information gained to develop a robust strategy. By clearly discovering and identifying problems, you can form a strategy of actionable steps to take which can help place your business on a positive trajectory which will lead to long-term growth. It’s in your interest to do an SEO Audit today!

To find out more about excellent tools and strategies to use to improve your website Contact 2Cubed today!

You can also contact us on 01 905 8114 or 051-440425, email hello@2cubed.ie

Please feel free to follow and interact with us on the following profiles.

SEO Trends 2021

Category: News SEO

In 2021, you might be familiar with the concept of SEO. However, many website owners aren’t. In fact a large percentage have no idea how their site is crawled, indexed, ranking or performing in general at all. This can be a problem, particularly if you have made a substantial investment in your online presence.

Free SEO Audit

Before we get started, 2Cubed are offering a free SEO Audit for the month of February. We will crawl your site and make suggestions for improvements and how those could be implemented.

Please fill in the form below here to get started or contact us here https://2cubed.ie/contact/

Top SEO Trends 2021

Speed / Performance (Core Web Vitals) – This is a huge one and formulates a big portion of the Page Experience Signals. Load times are a huge contributory factor when it comes to bounce rate. This means a missed sale, a missed opportunity to connect with a potential customer and it shouldn’t have to be. Google Search Console is your friend here and will flag any issues that require attention. Google have said Core Web Vitals will become part of the overall Page Experience Signals rolling out in May 2021. You can read more on what this means here – https://developers.google.com/search/docs/guides/page-experience
Search Intent & Relevance – Gone are the days of keyword stuffing. Relevancy is key now as more search users are asking questions they want answered straight away. Keep your content relevant to the service you provide and you’ll have a great chance of competing for those priority terms! Ensuring you have content with good readability and relevant text is certainly a winner in our eyes. Try to answer questions your ideal customer may have within your content.
Keyword Research – Keeping with the Search Intent theme in mind as above, detailed keyword research is vital in order to prepare and develop content to drive organic traffic. Time can easily be wasted implementing a strategy incorporating low volume keywords. Using a good keyword tool can help with this. We like the Ahrefs Keywords Explorer (but it’s not free). Google Keyword Planner is a great tool but you require an Ads account in order to use it.
Technical SEO – This is and always will be a relevant and important element. Rather than ramble on here, you can view our previous post covering this topic. https://2cubed.ie/2019/06/a-quick-guide-to-technical-seo/.

Some further things to look out for and be aware of in 2021 are Visual Search, Meta-Data Optimisation & Structured Data.

Our team is on hand to assist with any questions you may have regarding SEO. Check out a full list of services and our website process here – https://2cubed.ie/services/

You can use our dedicated quotation form below or contact us with any questions you may have here.

10 Pieces of Advice for Getting Better Search Results

Category: News SEO Tips and Tricks

We’d all love for our websites to rank as efficiently as possible with minimal effort; but unfortunately it just isn’t that simple. Our guide below should give some insight into what’s involved in getting your website ranking well.

Review your current standing

This is a big deal. Instead of blindly going full steam ahead with changes / amendments to your search strategy, we suggest that you review your current site in its present standing. That way, you’ll get a greater understanding of what’s required and will give you a greater chance of success ongoing. Check your current rankings and try to understand the bigger picture in terms of how you are ranking compared to your competitors. Tools such as SEOptimer can help provide a good level of insight from a broad SEO perspective.

Understand how Search Engines work

Understanding the fundamental purpose of search engines and how they index and rank websites is also key in ensuring you obtain and sustain successful search results ongoing. Information to help with this is readily available for free! For example, the Google SEO guide contains lots of helpful and insightful information – https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/7451184?hl=en. Doing this, you’ll get a greater understanding of best practices moving forward.

Develop a keyword strategy

Think about the key terms you would want your website to be found for. Make a list, use an Excel sheet to list these out and then prioritise them in order of preference. Utilise long-tail keywords and gradually narrow down to more generic search terms that are more difficult to rank for. Some keywords are of course, more more difficult to rank than others. Tools like WordTracker can help with this.

Content

One of the most important elements, if not THE most is content. Content plays a huge role in how your website ranks. Using your list of keywords, try and develop and broaden your content to include these terms. You’ll want to make sure that your content is user friendly, easy to read and relevant to your business. Avoid black-hat strategies such as keyword stuffing. The Yoast SEO tool is very good for helping to score and evaluate content based on what you have added to your pages / posts / products.

Utilise your Blog

A blog is a great way to tell a story, to get a news post out to your audience and much more. Using your blog frequently allows you to implement your keywords within the content and is a great way to build your online presence and get found online.

Performance / Speed

The speed of your website can have a huge bearing on user experience and conversions. On top of this, speed is now a crucial ranking factor when it comes to Google. Here’s a great article explaining this in detail. https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2018/07/search-ads-speed. Use tools like Pingdom, GTMetrix and Pagespeed Insights to audit your site speed and find out what’s slowing it down.

Mobile / User Experience

Since the majority of users will visit your site on a mobile device, we can’t stress just how important it is to have a fluid, responsive and user friendly mobile layout in place. Without this, your organic positioning and traffic may be hugely negatively affected. Ensure that your content is easy to find, easy to read and not blocked by annoying pop-ups etc. Mobile optimisation is absolutely essential and should never be overlooked.

Link Building

Once you are happy with your website in terms of performance, mobile responsiveness and content, performing your link building strategy will supplement these greatly. We recently wrote a post on link building which you can find here.

Google Search Console

Google Search Console is the place to measure your website’s performance / errors / reports and more. Here you can submit your sitemap, check for any pages with mobile errors and see your performance on Google for a particular period. On top of this, keep an eye out for any algorithm updates and changes to understand whether or not you are being penalised in any way – https://moz.com/google-algorithm-change

Google Analytics

Without measuring your performance and metrics, it’s going to be difficult to improve. Google Analytics provides a huge amount of data for doing so. Even if you are to just looking to measure organic performance ongoing after following the above recommendations then this is your go-to tool. Google run free online classes for beginners to familiarise yourself with Analytics and can be really beneficial! https://analytics.google.com/analytics/academy/

Conclusion

To conclude, spending time and effort on the points above will no doubt help to increase your search rankings and results. Take your time and make sure you are doing things the right way rather than looking for a fast fix.

At 2Cubed Web Design & Development, we can assist you with any of the needs above, helping you to build your online presence. We offer a number of services to help you grow your online presence. Check out our list of services here – https://2cubed.ie/services/

Please feel free to follow and interact with us on the following profiles.

Simplifying SEO – Link Building

Category: News SEO Tips and Tricks

Often times, the basics and fundamentals of SEO are overlooked as we focus on the more technical challenges that Search Engine Optimisation presents. Before diving in to the more complex SEO issues, we should focus on two of the absolute basic and key items – content & link building. For this post, we’ll take a look at link building and how to do it correctly.

Image credit to Diggity Marketing.

What is link building?

Link building is the action whereby another website contains a hyperlink back to your website. As simple as that sounds, a high-quality link building strategy requires a great deal of time and patience and is something that one cannot rest on. The value of link building remains hugely important for SEO in 2020 and will remain so for some time.

It’s important to note that – Google do not take any malicious or non-genuine link strategy lightly and your website will suffer drastically as a result. More on Google’s policy regarding link schemes and their guidelines can be found here.

How can I build good quality links?

Google’s Penguin update focused not just on the amount of links to a website but the quality and relevance of the links instead. Some years ago, black-hat techniques would see websites participating in link farming and so on with the sole purpose of increasing visibility and this was unfair to the user doing it the right way! This all changed back in 2011 with the release of Panda which as mentioned, focused on high quality links and reduced the the value of a link from a ‘thin’ website or a website purely in place to participate in black-hat strategies.

Building good links the right way involves effort. Reaching out to relevant partners and building trust and a relationship may present the opportunity to have a link placed on that partners website. This may be a guest blog post, a help guide or just a link on a ‘Partnership’ page as an example. The relevance of the link is also a big factor. Note that link exchanging is not a good practice and can lead to penalties. This is the idea of exchanging a link purely for the sake of doing so without any real relevance or benefit for both parties.

How to measure link building performance?

Many tools allow you to view the total number of backlinks to your website. Some of the Pro or paid tools such as Ahrefs, Moz Pro or SEM Rush will include a detailed ranking on these links and the probable authority of that link. This means you get an overview of these links and can tailor your outreach to similar sites or industries to build even further. Google Search Console is a fantastic tool and will also provide insight on these backlinks. Using the ‘acquisition’ – ‘referral’ option on Google Analytics shows you where exactly the traffic to your site originated.

To summarise, focusing on high quality and relevant link building strategies can have a massive payoff for your website and is something that should be at the forefront of SEO work.

To find out how we can help your SEO strategy, please Contact 2Cubed today!

You can also contact us on 01 905 8114 or 051-440425, email hello@2cubed.ie

Please feel free to follow and interact with us on the following profiles.

Digital Audit

Category: SEO Tips and Tricks

A Digital Audit can certainly bring many things to mind that you may not have considered. A full and thorough audit of your brands’ online position is certainly worth the effort.

What is a Digital Audit?

In our previous post, we looked at an SEO audit and what this can bring your website in terms of organic positioning – https://2cubed.ie/2018/11/free-seo-audit/

A full digital audit looks into much more. While an SEO review is essential, we take a look at the bigger picture online. Just some of these elements include:

SEO Strategy: On-page, off-page and the technical elements involved in ensuring your website performs as expected.

Social Media presence: Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Instagram & more.

Blogging: An informative and descriptive blog can present many opportunities.

Other online platforms: Google Business, Google Maps, Directories, Reviews & many more.

Competition is greater than ever nowadays. Ensuring your online presence is optimised and efficient may be what makes you stand out from the crowd.

Measuring performance

Building your online presence is a time consuming task that involves a great deal of effort. Ensuring that you can accurately measure the work carried out is very important. Tools like Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager, Social Media Metrics and so on are vital to measure performance. Using these correctly will involve some getting used to but are definitely worth the effort. You can use the data from these tools to view elements and KPIs such as goals, traffic acquisition, audience behaviour and so much more. This data is a great way to see progression!

If you’re serious about building your presence online, then a digital audit is something that should be considered as a priority. By discovering faults, issues and areas for improvement, you can develop a long term strategy of key steps to help your business on an upward track moving into the future. Start your Digital Audit today!

To find out more about what we can offer you, please Contact 2Cubed today!

You can also contact us on 01 905 8114 or 051-440425, email hello@2cubed.ie

Please feel free to follow and interact with us on the following profiles.

SEO Trends 2020

Category: News SEO Tips and Tricks

In this post, we will take a look at what to look out for in 2020 from an SEO point of view. Search Engine Optimisation is a huge focus for many online businesses nowadays and is more crucial than ever in order to help drive traffic and ultimately sales.

Image credit to Diggity Marketing.

Content and BERT

Fundamentally, SEO has for a long time been made up of a number of set variables, such as; backlinks, content and keywords. As search engines are constantly developing, we’re now at a point where the bots sent out by search engines to crawl websites are smarter than ever and becoming more human like due to advancements in AI. This leads us to think not just about content simply stuffed with keywords but content that is well written and answers the queries of real users. This was highlighted back in October last year by the introduction of Google’s BERT algorithm (Read Here). As mentioned in the article, each day almost 15% of queries searched for haven’t been searched for before. By analysing your website content in a more human format, allows Google to show users the most relevant websites based on the search term. Content is king as they say!

Technical SEO

Here at 2Cubed, something we’ve taken a particular focus in over the past year has been technical SEO. We had written a post outlining this in detail here. Technical SEO is the focus on the architecture of your site, the speed, the usability of pages and much more. Google Search Console is an excellent tool to examine any warnings or errors and ensuring these are clear will help massively toward SEO performance. Any site focusing on SEO this year should be fully aware of this.

Structured Data

If you’ve ever searched a term on Google, you most likely will have seen some structured data such as featured snippets. Featured snippets are described by Google as ‘Google’s search results sometimes show listings where the snippet describing a page comes before a link to a page, not after as with our standard format. Results displayed this way are called featured snippets.’

By adding structured data to your site allows you the opportunity to compete for space on the results page above the first position. This is a fantastic way to grow traffic and improve click-through rates.

Voice Search

More and more, users are searching queries by asking questions. Use of Siri, Alexa, Google Assistant and others are on the rise and the technology behind these brings us back to BERT. Conversational queries are not text and as such, search engines need to understand what is being asked and which relevant results are to display. By reviewing your content and optimising it with this in mind, you’ll have a much better chance of appearing for a search term and increasing traffic to your site.

This was just some of the trends to look out for in 2020. Applying these to your SEO strategy will most likely lead to positive results! Some others to keep in mind are:

Link Building
Mobile SEO
Local SEO
UX

2Cubed can help you grow your online business! Check out a full list of services and our website process here – https://2cubed.ie/services/

You can use our dedicated quotation form below or contact us with any questions you may have here.

Please feel free to follow and interact with us on the following profiles.

Fix Breadcrumbs Markup

Category: News SEO Tips and Tricks

Over the past couple of weeks, we have received mass emails in relation to Breadcrumb markup errors from Google. You may have received a similar email:

What are Breadcrumbs?

A breadcrumb, or a trail is a visual element added to show a user where exactly they are within a website. It also indicates the path within the hierarchy of a site. As Structured Data types are constantly evolving, this information is now targeted by Google while indexing and displayed as a rich result to users on the search results page in order to provide users a richer experience. You can see an example of this along with more information here. There is also now a dedicated ‘Breadcrumbs’ option within Google Search Console highlighting error types and potential fixes.

If breadcrumbs are not enabled on your site but you’ve received the email then there may be a setting within the site or theme causing this. This is where we can help. If you have any query or issue in relation to Breadcrumbs or even just a general query, please contact us.

At 2Cubed Web Design & Development, our expert team is on hand to assist with any questions you may have. In addition, we also offer a number of services to help you grow your online presence. Check out our list of services and our website process – https://2cubed.ie/services/

Please feel free to follow and interact with us on the following profiles.

Google’s Nofollow Updates

Category: News SEO

Since the nofollow attribute was introduced in 2005, it has allowed Google to understand link relationships between pages.

What is a nofollow link?

Initially introduced to help with spam, the nofollow attribute was a simple way to tell Google whether or not to count or ignore links to use within their search algorithms. Link building strategies have changed drastically in this time and gone are the days of link spamming comment sections on websites in order to build authority and manipulate search engines as this was seen as a black-hat strategy and would decrease SEO performance for any sites flagged.

By adding a nofollow link, you can tell a search engine not to associate your site with the linked page and this has been the case for 15 years now. Best practice since is to build high quality and relevant links and this remains the same but with some amendments to the process.

What has changed?

On September 10th, Google posted a blog (see here) highlighting the updates to this process. From now onward, outbound links will now be managed using four separate attributes or ‘hints’ which will help Google understand these relationships in more detail.

Regular links will be managed as normal and there is no need to add an attribute to these.
The nofollow value remains the same and should be added when a link should not be followed or counted.
Links towards sponsored content should now be marked with a value rel=”sponsored”. This value is especially important to avoid any penalties when linking to pages where you have received something in exchange.
ugc (user generated content) – links toward comments and forum posts for example should be marked with a value rel=”ugc” but with certain conditions.

For more detailed information on these values, please click here – https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/96569?hl=en

It’s also important to note the difference between a nofollow and a noindex value also. The noindex value completely excludes a page from being indexed and should be treated carefully.

In summary, the latest updates to how links are treated should help website owners to correctly mark links to help Google understand the relationship. At present, links already in place will not need to be updated as this would require huge effort for some sites and just isn’t feasible to achieve and there is no incentive or punishment for doing so. Google have said the following:

Why should I bother using any of these new attributes?
Using the new attributes allows us to better process links for analysis of the web. That can include your own content, if people who link to you make use of these attributes.

Please feel free to follow and interact with us on the following profiles.

Keyword Research

Category: News SEO Tips and Tricks

In order to grow your online business, to drive traffic toward your site and achieve set goals, a fundamental area is keyword research. Whether you plan on developing a solid SEO strategy or a PPC campaign, keyword research gives you the option to fully research and think about what your users may search for.

What are keywords?

Keywords are essentially the words or terms that you enter into a search engine when looking for an answer or a service. Put yourself in your ideal users’ shoes for a moment and think about the path they should take in order to see your website. Whether you are selling products, providing a service or providing information to users, you’ll see a huge benefit from developing a keyword strategy.

Where do I start?

Start by mapping out some broad terms related to your website. Keep them relevant to your sector and what you do. From here, you can begin to build out more long-tail keywords which are more specific to what you offer. Long-tail keywords are the three or four word terms that accurately describe your product.

For example, take a store selling sporting goods. They would begin with some general but competitive keywords like sporting goods, sport shop and so on. From here, narrow it down to more specific items such as hockey equipment Dublin, boys running shoes Kilkenny, Wexford kids GAA shirt etc. By developing and implementing these long-tail keywords in to your website content, you’ll have a much better chance of being found on the search engines. On top of this, more relevant traffic to your website and the chance to convert these users into sales. The long-tail keywords usually have less competition and a higher chance of conversion!

Useful Keyword Planner tools

There are many options online to assist with keyword research. Some free tools are available but may be quite limited. You’ll have far more features and options with some paid tools.

Wordstream – https://www.wordstream.com/keywords

Google Keyword Planner (connected to Adwords) – Keyword Planner

Wordtracker – https://www.wordtracker.com/

By developing a keyword strategy for your website, you’ll give yourself every chance to be successful online. The importance of this can’t be understated. By using some of the keyword tools, you’ll get some fresh ideas for keywords that you may not have considered previously. Taking these terms and implementing them into your blogs, PPC, SEO and on-page content should enhance your online visibility greatly!

At 2Cubed Web Design & Development, we offer a number of options to help you develop and a keyword strategy. In addition, we also offer a number of services to help you grow your online presence. Check out our list of services and our website process – https://2cubed.ie/services/

Please feel free to follow and interact with us on the following profiles.

Google AMP in 2019

Category: News SEO Tips and Tricks

Google’s AMP project was launched in 2016 and after a slow start, soon became a common feature across mobile search results. AMP or accelerated mobile pages, is a framework developed by Google to rival Facebooks Instant Articles and the technology allows pages to load almost instantly. Last year, we wrote a post about the importance of AMP – See here. So what has changed in the past year and how important is AMP now?

Nowadays, online users expect everything instantly. Waiting 10 seconds for a website to load is a big no-no in 2019 so enabling AMP can help enormously in getting traffic into your site while getting ahead of your competitors.

Google have now branched out and added some more features to the AMP framework. At present, it’s possible to create:

AMP Websites
AMP Stories
AMP Ads
AMP Email

You can find more information on all of the above and see some case study ‘success stories’ by viewing the AMP resource website – https://amp.dev/

Many sites are now seeing the full benefit of having AMP enabled content on their websites and this is likely to increase further into the near future so this needs to be factored in to your thinking if you own, run or manage a website.

Enabling AMP on your website can be tricky but once done correctly, it’s fairly easy to maintain and use on blog posts etc. For example, a number of WordPress plugins are available to help with layout, templates and amplifying content. As an example, you can view our previous post on this topic on your mobile device by clicking here – https://2cubed.ie/2018/06/the-importance-of-amp/amp/

At 2Cubed Web Design & Development, we can advise or help you with any of the needs above, helping you to enable AMP on your website. We offer a number of services to help you grow your online presence. Check out our list of services – https://2cubed.ie/services/

Please feel free to follow and interact with us on the following profiles.