LinkNow Media Blog Tag: LinkNow

Google Penalties: What Are They and What Do I Do If I Have One?

Building an online presence with SEO is tough, time-consuming work. It’s what we do every single day for our clients. But it’s rewarding to see web pages on diverse subjects like landscaping, low-voltage electrical installation, and even bricklaying rise in the rankings month after month. Building an online presence with SEO is tough, time-consuming work. It’s what we do every single day for our clients. But it’s rewarding to see web pages on diverse subjects like landscaping, low-voltage electrical installation, and even bricklaying rise in the rankings month after month. If you’ve been handling your SEO for your business’s website, I’m sure you know what I mean. But sometimes? That’s not the picture. Sometimes it feels like you’re doing everything right, but when you load the first page of the search engine results page (SERP), you’re nowhere to be found. For subject after subject, no matter how compelling the content […]

Is Content Still King in 2019?

Every now and then, I hear SEOs loudly proclaiming that content isn’t king. That content marketing is dead. And that even the phrase ‘content marketing is dead’ is dead. My reaction? LOL! After all, everyone wants to be ahead of the curve. Everyone wants to be at the forefront of big changes. Everyone wants to write the next headline that goes viral. And, guess what, that’s what content marketing is all about. Being at the forefront, announcing it with a catchy headline, and funneling traffic toward conversion—sounds like a content marketing strategy to me! Can we finally be realistic about it? Content isn’t going anywhere. It’s still an integral part of search ranking. It’s still critical in generating traffic. It’s still a key component of conversion. Without it, you’ll have nothing. Clients won’t even be able to find you. So, yes. In 2019, content is still king. Read on as […]

Is Your SEO Strategy Harmful or Helpful?

When we were first introduced to the Internet, we were baffled by how quickly we could get the information we wanted. With no more than a few keystrokes and clicks, we’d be scrolling through pages and pages of helpful information or hilarious entertainment. As time went on, those minor lags and wait-times even disappeared. Soon, we had instant access not only to information but to products. With those second-nature keystrokes and clicks, we could find whatever product we wanted and have it arrive on our doorstep by the end of the following week. In the last few years, even the real world has picked up with the rapid-fire pace of technology. Gone are the days of waiting weeks for orders to arrive. Often it only takes days. The instant gratification the Internet has rewarded us with has set the bar quite high for all services. We expect instantaneous results, no […]

7 Ways to Promote Your Small Business During Boxing Week

For better or worse, the lull of Christmas is short-lived. Months of excited (and frequently extravagant) holiday shopping lead up to a joyous, relaxing day of gift-giving and celebrating with loved ones. The momentary pause in buying, however, is brief. When the clock strikes midnight on December 26th, it signals the beginning of one of the busiest shopping weeks of the year: Boxing Week. Shoppers ambitious enough to brave the crowds during Boxing Week are greeted with deals, discounts, and door crashers galore. The promise of cost savings and limited quantities can entice even the most frugal consumer to keep on shopping. Corporations prepare for the Boxing Day onslaught all year round, putting together exclusive, nationwide incentives to bring in the buyers. Small businesses can get in on the action, too! By offering promotional specials and initiatives over the Boxing Day week, you’ll help to keep business booming over the […]

8 SEO Strategies Guaranteed to Improve Your Ranking

If you’ve stumbled across this page, you’ve probably been mulling over your page rankings and disappointed with the result. Maybe you’ve been having a bad month. Maybe a bad year. Whatever it is, you know how important it is that your website ranks well. In this day and age, your business depends on it. At LinkNow Media, we work day in and day out at helping our clients navigate the complicated world of search engine optimization or SEO. While we’d love to do this work for you, we’re okay with sharing some basic principles of what it is we do if you’re looking to go the DIY route. These nine SEO strategies won’t work overnight. We won’t lie: building a brand online takes time, dedication, and energy. If you’re looking for an easy and quick fix, we have some bad news: it can’t be done. At least not within the […]

Have I Been Hit By A Negative SEO Campaign?

You wake up on Monday morning. Everything seems calm. You wake up ten minutes before your alarm as the sun’s rays gentle shine through the slit in your blinds. The birds are singing. The weather outside is a balmy 22 degrees. To top it all off, your favourite song is playing on the radio on your commute to work. You get there, steaming hot mug of fair-trade Ethiopian coffee in hand, and sit at your desk. What could possibly go wrong today? And then you take a look at your website rankings. In the tank. Bottomed out. Like they were never there. It’s a nightmare scenario for anybody who relies on the Internet for sales, which in today’s day and age describes just about everyone with a business. You cross off everything on your web-traffic drop checklist and frantically check your usual Search Engine media sites for news. Was there […]

What Is and Isn’t a Useful Metric for Improving Your Website

Everyone working in SEO knows that the golden rule for content is that it should be useful and relevant to searchers. Google has been saying this for years. And it’s a rule that we at LinkNow Media take advantage of. So it seems like a terrible irony that it’s so hard to find useful and relevant information about ranking metrics themselves. You’ll find one group of bloggers claiming that X metric is complete garbage. Then you’ll find another group who say it’s the most important. This is especially true when it comes metrics like bounce rate, pages per visit, and time-on-site. You have your for and against—and each side seems to suggest the other is behind the times. But maybe the problem isn’t so much that these are either good or bad. Maybe it’s that these metrics can be good in some contexts and not in others? Join us as […]

Trust Issues: What Was Behind the September 27th and October 2018 Algorithm Updates?

Whether you’re managing your own website or someone else’s, the last thing you want is to see your SERP ranking suddenly drop. As SEOs, we work hard for our Google rankings! We expect that with great content, great backlinks, and careful keyword research, we’ll get the rankings we deserve. And normally it’s true. But if one there’s one thing that every SEO knows, it’s that, aside from Google’s own engineers, no one knows how their search algorithm works. Which is why, every time Google updates their algorithm, the internet goes a bit nuts for a while. Some people’s rankings suddenly soar. Others plummet. And everyone’s asking themselves: what the heck happened?! The September 27th and October follow-up updates were no different. People panicked. Tweets were retweeted. Replies were written. Articles were posted. Comment threads exploded. Here at the LinkNow Media office though, everything was calm. Why you ask? We understand […]

Making Sense of Google’s Mobile-First Indexing

Back in March, Google announced it was launching its

Has Your Site Traffic Dropped? Check These 5 Issues First!

The fact is, SEO is all about trial and error. No matter how much time you put into optimizing your web design and content, there’s always a chance that suddenly, out of the blue, your traffic could drop. And it sucks. It really sucks. But it’s not the end of the world. Once you’ve gotten over the initial shock of it all, it’s time to get down to business and figure out what went wrong. The first thing you should do is check your Google Anaylitcs: do you notice any patterns in your web traffic that might explain it? For example, if it’s winter and you’re a landscaper, it could be that your content is optimized for lawn care at the expense of snow removal. Or maybe it’s a holiday and no one’s currently looking to have their well water tanks replaced? Second, double check that your code is updated […]