As we approach 2023, it's important to start thinking about how to prepare your website for the new year. Updating your website to take advantage of recent adjustments and updates in the business world is crucial to staying competitive and on top of your game. Here's a step-by-step guide on how to get your website ready for 2023.

Analyze Your Competitors

Take the time to analyze your competitors' websites and strategies from the past year. Look for pages that helped them gain organic traffic and analyze whether these strategies are relevant to your business. Don't just copy your competitors – adapt and apply what works for your own business.

Create Content Around User Queries and Pain Points

Content creation often gets pushed to the back burner when things get busy, but it's crucial to plan it in advance. Take the time to review customer queries and pain points from the past year and use that information to create relevant and engaging content that addresses their needs.

Fix Technical SEO Issues

    Don't overlook technical SEO issues such as broken links, duplicate content, and missing alt text. These issues can harm your website's performance and should be addressed as soon as possible. Take the time to budget for technical SEO and fix any issues before moving on.

    Run a Free SEO Audit

    Running SEO is a free website SEO analyzer crucial to preparing your website for the new year. Use the latest SEO updates and strategies to gain more traffic and customers. Use Running SEO to optimize your website for success.

    Preparing Your Website for 2023: Start Now!

    Preparing your website for the new year is essential to staying competitive and achieving success in 2023. Use this comprehensive guide to analyze your competitors, create relevant content, fix technical SEO issues, and optimize your website with Running SEO. With these steps, you'll be well on your way to a prosperous new year.

    Are you a nonprofit communication professional looking for the best possible content management system (CMS) to manage your organization's website? Look no further than WordPress. Whether you are looking to create a new nonprofit website or redesign your existing one, WordPress for nonprofits is a no-brainer.

    Here are five reasons why the WordPress CMS is the go-to solution for nonprofit websites:

    1) User-Friendly and Easy to Learn

    WordPress is designed with simplicity in mind, making it easy for anyone to learn and use. Nonprofits often have limited resources and staff, so a user-friendly CMS is crucial. With WordPress, you don't need any special technical skills or coding knowledge to create a professional website.

    2) Customizable and Flexible

    WordPress offers endless customization options, allowing you to design and tailor your website to fit the needs and goals of your organization. You can choose from a wide range of themes and plugins to add features and functionality to your site. Whether you need an event calendar, donation form, or social media integration, there's a WordPress plugin for that.

    3) SEO-Friendly and Mobile-First

    Search engine optimization (SEO) is important for any website, but especially for nonprofits that rely on donations and support from the community. WordPress is SEO-friendly, meaning it's easier for search engines like Google to crawl and index your site. Additionally, WordPress automatically optimizes your site for mobile devices, ensuring it looks great and functions properly on all screens.

    4) Secure and Reliable

    Security is a top concern for any website, and WordPress takes it seriously. They regularly release updates to fix vulnerabilities and improve security measures. Plus, there are many security plugins available to add an extra layer of protection to your site. With WordPress, you can trust that your site is secure and reliable.

    5) Cost-Effective

    One of the biggest benefits of WordPress is that it's free to use. You'll only need to pay for hosting, a domain name, and any premium themes or plugins you choose to use. This makes it an affordable option for nonprofits that may have limited budgets.

    WordPress is the perfect CMS for nonprofit websites.

    It's user-friendly, customizable, SEO-friendly, secure, and cost-effective. Take the first step towards improving your organization's online presence and get a free website consultation with Key Medium today. Let us help you design and implement a new WordPress website redesign that meets the needs of your nonprofit and its mission. You may also explore our nonprofit website design portfolio examples, or get our proven website structures for nonprofit organizations for free.

    Website performance has a huge impact on both SEO and UX - and so getting your website speed up is a key priority for website owners. But how do you know if your website is slow, and how can you improve website speed it for better performance?

    Fortunately, there are several ways to improve website speed and ensure that your website provides a good user experience. In this article, we’ll cover the top tips for improving website speed and how to measure the results. With these tips, you can make sure that your website is running quickly and efficiently and your customers are having a great experience.

    There are several ways to improve the speed of a website, including the following:

    1. Optimize images by reducing their size and using appropriate file formats. Large, unoptimized images can significantly slow down a website.
    2. Use a content delivery network (CDN) to distribute content across multiple servers. This works in reducing the load on a single server and improving the website’s loading speed.
    3. Enable caching: this allows the browser to store frequently-accessed content, reducing the need to download it each time the website is accessed.
    4. Minify and combine files: this includes CSS and JavaScript files, to reduce the number of HTTP requests and improve loading speed.
    5. Use a website performance tool: this helps to identify and address specific issues that may be slowing down the website.

    Improving the speed of a website is important for several reasons. Firstly, a slow-loading website can frustrate users and decrease engagement. Users are less likely to stick around and interact with a slow-loading website, and are more likely to leave (bounce) and go to a competitor’s site.

    Take bounce rate for example, which is not good as it causes people to leave after just one page view, from Think With Google.

    The probability of bounce increases 32% as page load time goes from 1 second to 3 seconds. Credit: Google/SOASTA Research, 2017.

    Secondly, website speed is a ranking factor for search engines. Search engines prefer faster-loading websites and may rank them higher in search results. This can improve the visibility and traffic of a website, leading to increased sales and revenue.

    Thirdly, website speed is a factor in user experience. A faster-loading website provides a better user experience, which can lead to increased customer satisfaction and loyalty. This is particularly important for e-commerce websites, where a smooth and efficient user experience can lead to increased sales.

    In conclusion, improving the speed of a website is important for user engagement, search engine ranking, and user experience. By optimizing images, using a CDN, enabling caching, minifying files, and using performance tools, you can improve the speed of your website and see a range of benefits.

    The goal of almost every company is to boost its online search results. After all, online visibility is a great way to drive traffic to one’s website.

    There are a lot of ways to optimize your search results, and applying SEO to your site is a big one. One of the recommend SEO applications is adding a meta description to your website pages. In this article, you will learn about the importance of meta descriptions and how they can improve your website's visibility on search engines. Find out how to craft an effective meta description and how it can help increase clicks and drive traffic to your site.

    What is a meta description?

    A meta description is an HTML tag that you add to your blog post, article, or page to describe the page contents. Have you ever searched for something and had a page link/URL pop up in the results? Have you ever read that bit of text under the link, letting you see a sneak peek at what the page has on it?

    Well, that’s the meta description.

    For the best results, meta descriptions are between 140-160 characters, include some great SEO friendly keywords and a CTA.

    A meta description is a great way to drive traffic to your site, since it lets potential customers get a preview of what your page has to offer.

    How do I add a meta description to my website?

    If your site does not give you a place to add a meta description (some do that for you) then you will have to add it to the HTML yourself.

    How to add your meta description to your website HTML:

    A meta description tag is required to sit between the head tags in the HTML code, and for the best results, below the title tag of the page.

    For example:

    <head>

    <title>Title of the page</title>

    <meta name="description" content="Enter description here.">

    </head>

    By doing this you can add one meta description to your page. If you want to add multiple ones then you will have to repeat this process, adding a second meta description between the <head> tags.

    That would look like this:

    <head>

    <title>Title of the page</title>

    <meta name="description" content="Enter description one.">

    <meta name="description" content="Enter description two.">

    </head>

    What if you don’t want to do that yourself?

    Okay, so maybe all this has your head spinning a bit. After all, not everyone adds their own HTML to their websites.

    That’s fine. Just because you can’t add your meta description to your HTML doesn’t mean that you can’t have it there.

    There are agencies that can help you to not only add meta descriptions but improve a lot more on your site, including your search engine results. Key Medium/Running SEO can help you with all your SEO needs and provide you with the help that you require to create a site that attracts your audience, and gets them to click through search results to it!

    References:

    https://www.semrush.com/blog/on-page-seo-basics-meta-descriptions/
    https://moz.com/learn/seo/meta-description

    When re-designing a website, it's a common pitfall to underestimate the importance of Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Many companies finish re-designing their websites and slap SEO on like a bandaid once they're done with the site. It is a common pitfall, but no less disastrous for your business.

    In fact, it is absolutely crucial to factor in SEO before you go ahead with any kind of design work on your site. Sure, I get it: design is much more interesting than sitting down and figuring out things like ranking, SEO, or on-page content strategies that will keep your site's SEO ranking for a long time to come.

    But as easy as it is to jump into the re-design, it's not the way to do it if you want to keep your website where it will benefit you: high up in the search engines' listings.

    SEO needs to be part of the web design process, not an afterthought. Below we've outlined a few of the ways SEO can be an integral part of re-designing your website.

    Structuring Your Site

    When structuring your site, keep user experience high on your priority list. User experience is an important Google ranking factor, so anything that has to do with site navigation and site structure, like navigation bars and internal links needs to be kept in mind as being as user-friendly as possible. Use tools like XML sitemaps, your primary navigation, and internal links to help search engines discover more pages on your site.

    And while you're at it, don't forget the URL structure when updating your page. Google ranking prefers the sites requiring as few steps as possible, so simplified URLs will definitely help. Having URLs with words that search engines and people can understand, instead of using numbers or abbreviations goes a long way towards keeping your site towards the top.

    Use Strategic Keywords

    It's also important for SEO to be as intentional as you can about the keywords you use on your site as you are re-designing. Look for keywords that will fit core aspects or services your company offers, and look over the keywords you have already been using to see if they are giving good results, or if they can be improved upon. Decide on the main keywords that will accomplish what your company wants to achieve.

    Don't Lose Your Old Ranking

    In order to keep your old page's ranking, you will have to be smart about re-directing. Always, make sure you upload re-directs from your old pages to your new pages. If you don't, you risk losing the Google ranking you've spent months, or years, attaining when you easily could have kept it.

    When you automatically re-direct all traffic from an old URL to a new one, you improve the user experience since users will be able to find your new page through the old links, and avoid hitting dead ends and 404 errors.

    The other thing that happens when you re-direct traffic from your old page is that Google lets you keep the ranking from your old page, which is clearly very important.

    Don't Forget Your Content

    When you decide on the most important keywords for your company, make sure these words have their own well-written pages, including Latent Semantic Indexing keywords to boost relevancy for your chosen keywords.

    Indexation

    Keep in mind that for your site to be properly indexed by a search engine, it needs to be mainly text-based. Search engines have trouble indexing sites that are mainly flash or video-based. Because of this, it is essential that you write out clearly what your company is offering, and that your website is text-based so that the search engines will have no trouble indexing your page, and you can show up in those search results.

    Search Engine Optimization is a topic much too big to cover in just one blog post. But the most important thing to take away from this post is that while SEO is many things, it can't just be slapped on at a later date. Do yourself a favor and integrate SEO from the moment you start re-designing your website. You will be happy you did!

    Don't know where to start? Consult the experts

    Key Medium can help with a free website consultation and affordable expert SEO services.

    Connect with us today to learn more and take your website to the next level.

    Let’s face it. Every business is presented with unique challenges. And that is never more so than when dealing with SEO (Search Engine Optimization). If you have an organization or company that markets directly to other companies then when it comes to SEO, there are a few mistakes that you need to be sure not to make.

     

    The top ten SEO mistakes that you need to avoid making:

    1. Use the right vocabulary: While there is a lot of behind-the-scenes with SEO, it’s good not to lose sight of common sense. Drop the fancy lingo and think like as the person searching for your product or service. Use search terms that anyone might be typing into their browser.

    2. Stop the PPC: One big mistake businesses make is believing that they need to continue to pay for advertising while incorporating SEO. Do you know that 70% of the links clicked on are not paid? Try to stay focused on one thing and don’t spread yourself too thin.

     3. Don’t try to be #1: While it’s fantastic to be the top search result, don’t be too concerned about making it there. The top 3 search results get 61% of the clicks. So in the case of SEO, being second or third is every bit as great as being first from a search visibility perspective, especially considering that B2B decision makers make on average 12 searches, according to Google data points.

    4. Keep is basic: Google has recently made some adjustments and made things simple. Don’t try and include a ton of keywords. Stick to one good keyword and one related keyword.

    5. No broken links: There’s nothing someone hates more than clicking on a broken link. Broken links will earn you a bad rap, fast. Make sure that all your links are working.

    6. Avoid duplicate content: Don’t try to increase sales by having the same pages and product linked all over the place. People will easily be annoyed by the repetitiveness. Google is only going to index one of the pages anyway, so it’s going to be gaining you nothing.

    7. Use those analytics: Using some form of analytics is a must. It’s how you are to keep track of how you are doing, if your page views are going up or down, where traffic is coming from, and what pages are being viewed the most.

     8. Know your goal: Yes, it's to increase sales, but how are you going to get there? With more service or product feature page, high domain authority backlinks and earned media, or creating new content? It’s one thing to rely on your Google results, but there are other aspects, that involve your website, also to consider.

    9. Keep it real. Don’t ever, ever copy a competitor. While your customers may not necessarily notice, Google will spot duplicate content, and you may even be penalized for it. Stay unique.

    10. Offload: Don’t try to do it all. If you don’t know what you are doing, and aren’t ready to put some hard work into your SEO, then maybe it’s best to consider outsourcing. There are many reliable SEO companies out there prepared to help you, and you just need to find the right one for you and your business.

    SEO is an organic, and inexpensive way to increase sales, build pageviews and convert leads into sales. Done correctly, you can see wonderful results for your company. And the great news is that whether you do it yourself, or you hire a company to do it for you, you can use all the above tips to help you avoid common mistakes and get the results you are looking for!

    Need help updating your SEO keyword intent content planner or want to understand how this fits into the Search Journey?

    Key Medium are SEO and website experts and can help you come up with a keyword strategy that will work for your business. Get in touch today.

    Free SEO Analysis

    Run an SEO audit to determine your website issues:

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    Ali Jaffar has been building dazzling websites and creating amazing online experiences for over a decade. His mastery of the latest innovations in web development results in world-class website experiences set apart by show-stopping style and seamless functionality. A Google Mobile Sites and Google Analytics qualified individual and award-winning web development guru, Ali lends his talents to build and bolster digital experiences for a wide array of clients. When Ali’s not helping his clients grow, you can find him doing yoga, walking his dog, and enjoying a nice bike ride around Philly.

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