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5 Tips to Help Boost your Website’s SEO Ranking

If you are a newbie, you might not be familiar with the word SEO, but there is no need to worry, we will take you point by point. Let’s first get familiar with SEO. It stands for Search engine optimization. These are some methodologies and techniques that can bring your blog to the top of the ranking.

You will get more traffic to your website when a person searches Google if your work appears on the first page. Let’s look at it this way. When you are searching something on Google, you always click on the first two or three links and never bother to go further. The links on the top have the highest ranking and traffic. If you have visited any other SEO blog, you know that they all talk about these tips to rank your site because these are really important.

If you are struggling with getting your blog on the top, here are some detailed steps for you to follow. Go through these thoroughly, and you will be able to do better.

High-quality content

Use of wrong grammar and irrelevant stuff is the biggest turn-off. Imagine if you are in a hurry and try to search something, but all you are getting are long sentences which have nothing to do with the topic. Will you ever visit that site again? Likely the answer is no. Same goes for the grammatical mistakes and poor use of words. Try to increase your vocabulary and do not linger on with the same thing again and again. If your grammar is not very good, you might consider downloading a grammar checker.

Use Images

Photography Ideas Creative Occupation Design Studio Concept

It is the human psychology that he/she gets more amused by the colors and graphics. Always try to illustrate things with some pictures or videos. When a person looks at a long page of just words without visuals, it gives a negative impression on his/her mind. Imagine yourself here, you open a document, and it’s all in written form, you will try to read it at first, but at last, it will look like a big headache. You will consider another document, where things are explained with images. What seems better now? Obviously, the picture document one.

Optimize Page Speed

2018 is the age of doing things rapidly. Every single person you see is in some hurry. And what is the point of using the internet when you are not going to get the result on time? Some might consider going to the library if it will take ages to load the page.

Keep your site error free. It is a pain when after a minute full of loading the page it ends up giving an error. Also, Google and Bing consider google page speed as a plus point when ranking the site.

google-page-speed-tools

Now, the point is how to increase the page loading. There are several things that you can do to make your website load faster. Some people use caching plugins. Another way to do it is by optimizing the image size. The larger the image is, the more time it will take to load the page.

Utilize headings and proper subheadings

Making your document just a massive bulk of words is such a bad option. No one likes to run into a wall of text, especially when you are trying to illustrate a procedure. Always make points or headings. Go in stepwise order. An unorderly document is never appreciated. Properly write things, as when the reader gives a glance at the page, he decides in few seconds whether or not he is going to go further. Try to make it worthwhile.


qurban shanQurban is a freelance writer who offers to blog, ghostwriting and copywriting services. He works in close collaboration with businesses providing digital marketing solution that increases brand awareness and search engine visibility. He’s currently working for Vibbi.com, which provides quality Instagram followers, likes, and views.

seo is not dead

The Rumours Of The Demise of SEO is Premature

Everyday I read through blogs that say SEO is dead. Usually this comes from either:

  • Fear mongers
  • People trying to sell a product or informational book about getting traffic without SEO
  • Uninformed journalists not in the SEO industry
  • People saying the new SEO is social signals

Obviously SEO (search engine optimization) is not dead. It’s still very much alive. Just look at the first page of results for things like “buy viagra online” or even “las vegas personal injury lawyer”. Every single web page listed on the first page is there due to SEO.

There are hundreds of ranking factors in Google’s algorithm. A few of them are listed in this article:

Google Ranking Factors: SEO Is Not Dead

Tyler Collins – Huffington Post
CEO, Orange County SEO.

First, stop assuming SEO is dead because the rules changed. If you are a business owner with a website, or a digital marketer offering services, you are aware of how important it is to connect with people interested in the products or services you or your clients offer. You also know the power of search marketing, and how useful a top position a search can be.

SEO criteria frequently changes and becomes more difficult, so many website owners (and so-called SEO professionals) fall out of their practice claiming that SEO is dead – this could not be farther from the truth. Obviously, people are still using search engines to source information, products, and services, therefore, if your website has content people should find, you should still be optimizing your website. The sky hasn’t fallen and SEO still works.

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The rules for SEO change many times a year at the whim of Google and their algorithm. This means that anyone doing SEO has to change their strategy along with the algorithm. A few of the general things you can do to rank better are:

  • Better and longer content (1000 words or more is ideal right now)
  • Content optimized for “things” not “strings”
  • Original images on each page
  • Backlinks (other websites linking to you)
  • Social signals – (eg. Facebook likes, Twitter tweets, Google +1s, etc.)

Of course, those are very general topics and there is much more to each in order to get your site to have better rankings. Doing just one of those things mentioned won’t be enough. A successful SEO campaign includes all of those things in order to rank as high as possible.

If you are wondering about search engine optimization for your website, give us a call to talk to us about how our Vancouver SEO services can help you.

wordpress enfold theme

Enfold Theme Options Not Showing: The Solution in WordPress

Enfold is a fantastic theme for WordPress that we are using here at Hurricane Web Design for a number of our clients. You can make beautiful and mobile responsive websites right within the WordPress dashboard without having to get your hands dirty in CSS that much.

enfold theme options not showing

The case of the missing Enfold Theme Options (click to enlarge)

Recently, we had a client who had their contact form disappear on the home page of their website. The form being used was built-in to Enfold. We didn’t change anything on the site and wondered why it would just disappear. When we logged into the dashboard and attempted to edit the home page, the page would begin to load but the box where you would edit the content displayed a spinning wheel. Obviously, we couldn’t the page so we went into the Enfold options within the Dashboard. Unfortunately, when we went there, the Enfold theme options weren’t showing. We were left without the left-hand menu that would display “general styling”, “advanced styling”, “header layout”, etc. We began scratching our heads as to what happened.

Why Weren’t the Enfold Theme Options Not Working?

Once we went back to the WordPress dashboard we realized that WordPress had automatically updated to version 4.1 and the version of the Enfold theme we had installed (version 2.8) would break in WordPress 4.1. We quickly realized we needed to upgrade Enfold. But, we are paranoid WordPress web designers and chose to make a backup of the theme before upgrading. So, we renamed the theme on the server via FTP and uploaded the new version and re-enabled it. That didn’t work!

Finally the Solution

The next step kind of scared us, but we thought we should try deleting the theme and upload the new version of the theme. Before we did that, we used BackupBuddy to make a complete backup of the site just in case it broke the site. Once that was done, we deleted the current theme, uploaded the new version and enabled it and it worked fine.

Our Recommended Steps to Upgrade Enfold

  1. Backup your theme by downloading the theme folder to your computer or some other safe place or run BackupBuddy to make a complete backup of your WordPress website.
  2. Delete the Enfold theme on your web server.
  3. Enable one of the default WordPress themes.
  4. Upload the new Enfold version.
  5. Enable it in the WordPress dashboard

This worked great for us and hopefully, it will work for you. If you’d like to purchase Enfold (and we highly recommend you do), you can buy Enfold here on ThemeForest.

Here are a few sites we’ve built with Enfold:

Web Designer in Vancouver

Hurricane Web Design Vancouver
#1002 – 1831 Robson Street
Vancouver, BC V6G 1E4
(604) 256-7081
hurricaneweb.net