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One thing we love about being in the Richmond area is watching this city, and our clients grow over the years. Lenny & Stephanie at Breakthrough K9 Training– a strictly board and train business, have been clients of ours since our early days. Last year they built a fully functioning kennel space that they are already outgrowing. An appealing website and good SEO work account for 3/4ths of their new business We are excited to announce that they were both able to leave full-time jobs to pursue their passion for dog training. It all started with their rescued Rottweiler, Tug. Lenny and Stephanie have been training and rehabilitating dogs for over ten years, and have seen great success with rescued adult dogs, as well as puppies and client dogs. You can learn more about them in the video below:

Known Agency

KNOWN is a full-service web development and design agency specializing in unique, web-based solutions that illuminate new possibilities for our clients. At KNOWN, we believe every organization needs a contemporary, strategic, and well-maintained website. After all, your website tells your story.

knownagency.com

Search engine optimization, SEO, is the process of making sure your website gets traffic by being displayed prominently on different search engines like Google Chrome, Bing, or Firefox. Having relevant content that users are searching for will help you get a coveted spot for free. You can purchase paid ads, but that’s a different subject.

So, how do I make sure people can find my site?

There’s a lot that goes into professional SEO work, but we will give you a few tips on what you can do to make sure you’re getting the most out of your website.

Newer versions of WordPress come with pretty decent SEO out of the box, without much effort needed. That’s part of what makes it our preferred platform. These three tips can help give you a competitive edge.

1.) Start a blog. Blogging can help in a myriad of ways. Provide a sneak peak of your services, establish credibility with potential customers, and create content that can be linked back to across the web. Edit permalinks from the default ‘?p=[id]‘ to ‘yourwebsite.com/year/month/post-name’

2.) Install an SEO plugin. A plugin can help guide you in how to optimize your pages and blog posts, and give you an alert for any glaring errors, and help you fill in metadata. We like:

Yoast SEO

All In One SEO Pack

3.) Use alt tags for images and videos. Describe visual and video media using alt tags, which are alternative text descriptions. This allows search engines to locate your page, and it helps give descriptors for people who use text-only browsers and visually impaired people who use screen readers.

Known Agency

KNOWN is a full-service web development and design agency specializing in unique, web-based solutions that illuminate new possibilities for our clients. At KNOWN, we believe every organization needs a contemporary, strategic, and well-maintained website. After all, your website tells your story.

knownagency.com

Google introduced an algorithm change that went into affect on April 21st.

This change affects users searching from smartphones and tablets, resulting in mobile-friendly sites displaying at the top of search results, while sites that aren’t mobile friendly will get demoted. This update doesn’t affect desktop searches.

Is this Mobilegeddon?

Hardly. Google’s algorithm changes seem pretty intuitive to me. Naturally if you’re accessing a site via your phone, you don’t want a clunky site that is impossible to navigate and takes forever to load. Most websites that were built in the past year or two are created with responsive design- meaning that they adjust to be viewed on desktops, phones, and tablets.

As Robert Hof at Forbes points out, “better mobile websites are likely to lead to more “conversions,” whether that’s purchases or visits to a physical store. That’s why Google ad folks must be overjoyed at all the attention on the algorithm change, even if the nickname doesn’t thrill them.”

The change could be bad news for sites that aren’t mobile friendly. TechCrunch reports that 44% of Fortune 500 web sites failed the mobile-friendly test. You can test your website here.

If this change is affecting your business, give us a call!

KNOWN

We’re currently in the all important phase of renaming our business. We’re not quite ready for the big reveal, but we’d like to share some tips that can help you while choosing a domain name for your website.

Lots of our clients already have established businesses and come to us with a domain name already picked out. If you’re just getting started, here are a few things to consider:

• Keep it simple. A domain name that is obvious and says what the site is about will help increase traffic to your site.
• Have you found the perfect business name but the domain name is already taken? Don’t let domain name availability force you to decide against the best name.  Modifiers like these can help you work around domain name squatters, and they help communicate what your business does:

Get_____.com

Shop_____.com

ILove____.com

LetsGo_____.com

Enjoy_____.com

The same principles can be applied when choosing social media handles.

• Pay attention to how the name reads without capitalization to avoid mistakes like:

speedofart.com | Speed of Art

therapistfinder.com | Therapist Finder

Check out this listicle if you’re looking for a laugh.

Have a funny naming story? Let us know in the comments!

KNOWN