Specific SEO Keywords

Types of SEO keywords explained

In the digital era, what sets a business apart from its competitors? The right SEO keywords. Graphic Lux, an SEO services company in Buffalo NY, dives into the various types of SEO keywords that businesses must be aware of as they aim to appear in their potential customer’s searches.

SEO keywords are the words or phrases that people utilize to search for information, products, or services of their interest online. They are the building blocks of search engine optimization. These words or phrases are also used by internet search engines to rank and sort content on the internet.

Businesses must choose keywords for SEO beginning with strategic keyword research. This requires an analysis of the volume of monthly searches and the competitiveness of the businesses’ potential target keywords in terms of search and paid difficulties.

The types of keywords discussed below vary in terms of word length, search volume traffic, and search or paid difficulties. They are defined by the number of words they contain and their role in the web page content. Moreover, they are also shaped by the various stages in the consumer’s purchase journey including Buyer Awareness and Discovery, Consideration, Conversion and Purchase, and Re-engagement.

General Types Of Keywords

1. Short-Tail Keywords

Head keywords or generic keywords usually cover broad search terms that normally attract high volumes of search traffic. With their length of only one to two words, these keywords are high in competitiveness in search ranking.

2. Mid-Tail Keywords

Commonly consisting of two to three words that offer a better description of what the user searches, mid-tail keywords often shift from having a high traffic volume and more competition to having low traffic volume and less competition.

3. Long-Tail Keywords

Long-tail keywords are the most descriptive and target-specific keywords with four or more words. With typically a low traffic volume and lesser competition compared to the first two types of SEO keywords in SEO, long-tail keywords enable better ranking and easier conversion.

Must-have keywords 

1. Primary Keywords

The main topic or idea on a web page content becomes the primary keyword. Every single page on a website must have a single primary keyword to target. For instance, laptops.

However, stuffing the keyword is not advised for the search engines, especially Google, will most likely penalize the web page for it. Consult an SEO expert to identify the right primary keyword for each web page.

2. LSI Keywords (Latent Semantic Indexing)

These are related keywords that search engine systems view as semantically related to primary keywords. These are various sets of words surrounding a topic that consumers type in search engines.

Essentially, a web page must have a single primary keyword and at least three or more LSI keywords to maintain a variety in target keywords, avoid keyword stuffing and cover a wide range of search terms used for a particular topic.

Industry & Business Specific SEO Keywords 

These keywords are targeted specifically to the industry, its target customers, or the market.

 1. Market Segment Keywords

These are keywords that are related to general industries, brands, or products. Customers usually use a broader terminology for their product research, which is also the first stage of their purchase journey.

2. Customer-Defining Keywords

These keywords are used by a subset of the audience or customers to define a very specific need and user. For instance, laptops for professional graphic designers.

 3. Branded Keywords

Branded keywords, as the name suggests, are specific to a specific brand that a customer is searching for. It may include a brand’s name along with specific product descriptions, or a product name, or a product type.

 4. Product Keywords

These keywords are typically used by e-commerce retail stores of products from different manufacturers in a particular niche. These are search terms that specifically seek certain products and services of a company. For instance, MacBook Pro laptop specs.

 5. Competitor Keywords

Researching the keywords being used by competition is a good practice that ensures that a brand can target similar buyer interests and potential customers who are yet to become aware of the brand or its website. Being aware of a competitor’s top products and keywords can help a brand understand the target audience’s needs and generate fresh ideas for SEO strategy.

 6. Geo-Targeted Keywords

These types of keywords target a specific country, state, city, or neighborhood. They are essential for local businesses looking to reach users in their local area. Moreover, these keywords are typed by users who are looking for physical stores or service locations near them. For example, Microsoft laptop shops in Buffalo, NY.

 Buyer Intent Keywords

Buyer intent terms show the searcher’s intent to buy or purchase a product or service. These can be used across the customer purchase cycle and may not mean a purchase right away. These keywords are very important in SEO as they help identify the stage of the purchase journey that a customer is currently in, also called a funnel.

 1. Informational keywords

These keywords are used in a buyer’s awareness stage of the journey. They often use informational keywords with an awareness of a problem and the intent to know or learn about a possible solution.

 2. Navigational keywords

Searchers use navigational keywords in the consideration phase of the buyer journey. They are researching different brands and visiting different websites to identify the best solution to their problem.

 3. Transactional keywords

This type of keyword is used by searchers who are in the conversion phase of their journey. The research is complete, the solution has been identified, and they are looking for the right place to purchase the product or service.

Researching the right keywords in SEO and analyzing them is a massive and ongoing task. Graphic Lux can simplify these processes for organizations with its team of SEO keyword research specialists.

Why Graphic Lux?

Graphic Lux offers an array of digital services to clients across Buffalo, NY. It is a one-stop-shop for a business’ digital needs:

  • WordPress Website design, consultation, maintenance, and SEO: Graphic Lux specializes in WordPress website design and has over 12 years of experience. It can help build a WordPress custom theme from scratch or take a pre-existing theme and customize it as per client needs. The team also keeps the site running smoothly, without any downtime.
  • Hosting: The team offers the assurance that a website will be online and available for customers and visitors with all its data intact.
  • Brand building: The team can help create a strong brand identity for the client by optimizing the content using visual devices.
  • Dedicated support: With years of experience and unrivaled expertise the Graphic Lux support team will understand the client’s concerns and goals to give them peace of mind.
  • Responsive web design: Graphic Lux is on the cutting edge of designing and delivering responsive web and mobile apps. Its solutions decrease time to market and reduce maintenance costs.

For more information, email [email protected] or call at (716) 712-4589.

Contact Information:Graphic Lux

1 W Seneca St Suite 29-M18
Buffalo, NY 14203
United States

Matthew Lux
(716) 712-4589
https://graphiclux.com

Gutenberg Wordpress Release

WordPress 5.0 is about to be released with a brand new content editor named “Gutenberg”. The content editor is the tool you use when you want to change the content of your website from within the administration section of WordPress, otherwise known as the Dashboard.

This new WordPress version is a major one and will include this new content editor which is still under active development. Even if our team follows WordPress-related news on a daily basis when it comes to this new functionality, many questions remain unanswered. For instance, we don’t know exactly what changes this new version will officially contain and what solutions will be chosen in regards to the various problems reported so far by the WordPress Test Team.

As WordPress experts, we strive to be proactive and are contacting you about our strategy for this upcoming update. Our goal is to minimize the risks with regards to your website and to ensure the update remains problem-free.

When WordPress 5.0 comes out:

  • We will not update your website for a few weeks. This version will not fix security issues and may cause issues due to the new editor, we will let the braver ones install this update and report back any bugs. When a minor update will be released by the WordPress team, we will wait until our team determines this version to be stable before considering any update to your website. This will also provide more time to theme and plugin developers to adjust as required.
  • When a minor version will be considered stable, we will plan the update of your site. As each client’s site isn’t configured the same way and offers different functionality, it’s impossible to predict the impact this update will have. It is possible for us to test this new WordPress release on a separate copy of your site to make sure it’s compatible. If you’re interested in this option, please contact us now to plan accordingly.
  • Should your site experience compatibility issues with the new editor, our team will start by deactivating the new editor and reactivate the “classic editor” (which is the one you are using now). Your website will still be fully functional and our team will help you evaluate what will be needed to fix the problems encountered.

We follow the evolution of WordPress 5.0 on a daily basis and have your best interests at heart.

If you have any questions about the upcoming release of WordPress 5.0, do not hesitate to communicate with us and we will gladly assist you.

Gutenberg

There has been a lot of conversation within the WordPress community that is causing developers near and far to plan and strategize for the after-effects of the Gutenberg release. Gutenberg is a MAJOR new feature that has been in development for over a year, Gutenberg is coming with the release of WordPress 5.0 and is the largest initiative that has been merged into the core of the open-source project. Here’s some details on Gutenberg and how Graphic Lux is planning for it.

What is Gutenberg?

“Gutenberg is newly developed, block-oriented editor.  WordPress already supports a large amount of “blocks”, but doesn’t surface them very well, nor does it give them much in the way of layout options. By embracing the blocky nature of rich post content, we will surface the blocks that already exist, as well as provide more advanced layout options for each of them.

Block is the abstract term used to describe units of markup that, composed together, form the content or layout of a webpage. The idea combines concepts of what in WordPress today we achieve with shortcodes, custom HTML, and embed discovery into a single consistent API and user experience.” – Read more about this here.

To get an idea of what Gutenberg looks like and how it affects the way users will interact with it, we recommend watching this demonstration of the tool from December’s WordCamp US.

What does Graphic Lux think of Gutenberg?

We love WordPress because of its solid foundation that it has for all web development projects. The WordPress Core software allows us the ability to extend and customize for every website development project we have. Gutenberg is an exciting new way to create and manage content in WordPress. This new feature ships with some great core blocks and, of course, we can easily extend Gutenberg to give our clients a truly customized experience that fits their needs exactly. We are very excited about the future of WordPress including the new content experience provided by Gutenberg.  That being said, we usually like to see things like these work themselves out before we start implementing anything.

Will Gutenberg affect your WordPress website?

This is a hard question to answer because each of our clients’ websites are different in how they work and how they are built.  We do believe that 99% of our clients’ will see no issues but we do want everyone to be aware and to actively watch when WordPress 5.0 comes out to review their websites and submit a support ticket if there are any issues.

If you have a WordPress Care/Maintenance Plan with us, we can quickly roll-back any issues caused when Gutenberg is launched by pushing out your site’s latest nightly backup. This will put your site back to the way it was until work can be done to align Gutenberg’s changes with your theme. Whether you have a care/maintenance plan or not, we’re here to help if Gutenberg affects how your site looks or works. Let us know by submitting a support ticket, and we’ll have a repair estimate ready for you right away. Big changes to software platforms like WordPress can sometimes seem a little bit daunting, but here at Graphic Lux, we’re excited and ready to help make this a smooth, positive transition.

Have you ever opened your email and saw a message like this?

If you haven’t seen this email, then most likely you have something like define( 'WP_AUTO_UPDATE_CORE', false ); in your wp-config.php file which will disable WordPress’s automatic updates.   If you have seen this email then at least you can be confident that your WordPress Core is up to date but can you be confident that your website is still working properly?

Time To Check On My Website

Once you see that email message the first thing you do (or should do) is open up your website to check on it to make sure everything is working and looking normal.  After clicking through a bunch of pages in detail you find everything seems good.  Great news, you dodged another bullet!  What if everything isn’t working and looking normal?  Error messages at the top of the page, broken layouts, plugins stop functioning correctly and the white screen of death can happen if your theme, plugins and core are not all up to date.  Even if they are you can still have issues depending on your theme and your plugins and how quickly the developers have updated them to be compatible with the new WordPress core.

My WordPress Website Is Broken.  What Should I do?

If you website is broken the first thing you should do is see if your host, developer or YOU have properly setup automatic backup’s of your website’s files and database. What’s that you say?  You do not have any backup’s configured?  That’s a major NO NO.  Now your site could be broken for few days before you figure out what is wrong or find someone else fix the problems.

How Could I Have Avoided This?

The best way to avoid downtime, and issues like these is to have a WordPress Maintenance Plan in place.  These plans will keep your WordPress core, plugin’s and themes up to date.  Automated daily backup’s, security monitoring, security scans and database optimization also come with any of these plans which will keep your website healthy and running smoothly.

 

Sign Up For Our Free
Wordpress Maintenance Consultation

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Wordpress Maintenance is a Must Have

You just paid thousands of dollars for a beautiful new WordPress website.  How do you keep it up and running at peak performance? Changing your oil every 3,ooo miles isn’t just a suggestion from your car company, it’s a requirement if you want your car to work. Website maintenance is no different. For your website and your business, it is necessary to make sure your site stays functional and performing well.  Here are 3 reasons not having your WordPress site up to date is costing you and your business money.

Reason #1 – Getting Hacked

Security is arguably the most important reason why you should keep your WordPress website up to date. WordPress is a popular target for hackers (and wanna be hackers), malicious code distributors, and data thieves.

Getting hacked can result in the following:

  • Your host can turn off your website – Now that your site is turned off none of your customers can access it.  This ultimately will lose your company money and perspective clients.
  • Stolen Data –  Data thieves can steal your clients/customers private and confidential data.
  • Google flags your site as insecure – Google can put the big red screen of death up if they scan your site and find any malicious code.  This can result in customers and future customers not trusting your company and loss of revenue.

Reason #2 – Slower Runtime

If your site takes too long to load, then people leave. No one wants to stick around and wait for your content to show up. WordPress maintenance is often seen as a chore, but it’s extremely important. Most web platforms, without a little extra care, can become slow, error prone and unreliable. Unnecessary files and data can slow your site down. Unwanted content such as comment spam can cause you a world of hurt, consuming valuable resources and impact on your search engine rankings. Security flaws can enable attackers to use your site to commit fraud, spread malware and launch further attacks.

Reason #3 – The Cost of Fixing a Broken Site

By not maintaining your site regularly, you run the risk of having to deal with a bigger issue in the long run.  Again,  think of your website as a car…when you get regular oil changes, your car runs at it’s peak performance. Cars that are taken care of regularly are less likely to breakdown and break the bank. The same goes for your website.   Fixing a broken site is costly.  Once your site has been hacked, or if a Plugin or the WordPress Core breaks your theme (or vice versa) it can take hundreds if not thousands of dollars to get it back to where it was before the issues.

Leave it to the experts

You may or may not feel comfortable updating plugins, themes and core, but it’s not what you do best.  Leave your website care to Graphic Lux.   We will make sure your site is always up-to-date, has daily backup’s and is secure!

Sign Up For Any Of
Our WordPress Care Plans &
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WordPress.org vs WordPress.com.? If you’re new to WordPress or even played around a bit, this is a normal question and usually needs some explanation since the two get confused pretty easily.

Both are great options and the best one for you depends on the plans you have for your site, your skill level and how much time you can spend on maintaining and designing your site.

Do you need a self-hosted or WordPress.com site?

If you looking to create a simple website or just a blog, you probably will not want to want to fuss with regular maintenance or security and won’t want to customize your site too much, then WordPress.com probably is your best option.

If you need full control over your website design, plugins, files and database with the freedom to basically do anything you want  and don’t mind maintaining and securing your site, then WordPress.org can provide the software you need.  You don’t have to worry about maintaining and securing your site if you rather leave this to the experts though.  Graphic Lux has several different WordPress Care Plans to choose from, so you can do what you do best and leave the WordPress maintenance up to our specialists.

If you plan on developing an E-commerce, membership, social media or large business site a self-hosted WordPress site will give you more options and offers more flexibility.

We recommend: WordPress.org

When it comes down to cost, freedoms and limitations, and maintenance and development considerations, WordPress.org wins easily.

It may take more time and effort to set up a WordPress site, but you will have full control over the look and feel of your site. You will be able to use custom themes and customize their look, and also upload custom plugins to add more functionality to your site.

Leave it to the experts

You may or may not feel comfortable updating plugins, themes and core, but it’s not what you do best.  Leave your website care to Graphic Lux.   We will make sure your site is always up-to-date, has daily backup’s and is secure!

 

Sign Up For Any Of
Our WordPress Care Plans &
Get Your First Month 50% OFF

Limited to the Month of March Only

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Why Website Maintenance Should Be On Your Mind

The problem for many WordPress websites is that they have been neglected, and out of date.  The WordPress CMS core, plugins, and themes are in need of basic updates/upgrades while security monitoring and daily backup’s should be taking place.  Without these updates/upgrades your WordPress website could be susceptible to malicious attacks/hacks, and slower performance times.

Just like any software, websites require maintenance to keeping the site working properly. Avoiding website maintenance is like not having regular oil changes on your vehicle. You wouldn’t drive your car very long if you didn’t look after its maintenance, would you? Well, the same process is true for your website. Your website should always be live, ready for customers and presenting your business at its finest.

Websites Are Not a “Set and Forget”

If you don’t have website maintenance carried out monthly, you may actually be throwing money out the window. When visitors go to a website and find things wrong with it, they often don’t stick around. Many website owners never check their website to see how it’s functioning. Missed website issues or downtime can lose you potential customers.

The Benefits of Maintenance

Many people don’t realize the benefits of site maintenance:

The website performance, it’s load time, downtime and uptime, is all dependent on the WordPress software and plugin functioning as they should (and on the recent version).

The website growth, it’s fresh content, analytics monitoring and design changes, is all dependent on you having someone making sure all updates to the website are done in a smooth and error-free fashion.

Maintenance Workflow

At Graphic Lux we take great care to first backup the website, and check the website after our updates for any issues. Our software keeps a record of plugins we update so if there is ever an issue we see what plugin version was changed and revert back. Also included in our monthly maintenance report are the performance and security scans. If in the event we ever catch a plugin issue, it becomes a support ticket and we address it before you ever know there’s a problem.

Want to maintain your website yourself?

Maintaining your site yourself could cost you more than you may think. If you just update from your WordPress admin, you wouldn’t have a record of what was done. If an update to a plugin created an issue a couple weeks later, it would be difficult to know what changed and how you should revert back without restoring a very old backup (and possibly losing content changes, sales orders, contact entries, you name it).

It Costs More to Fix Than to Maintain

Inexperience and neglect can damage the look and functionality of your website. When that happens, you have a choice to make. One, you try and fix it yourself, in which case you may do further damage. Or two, you can then pay the (sometimes hefty) price for someone experienced to fix it. Just like your car, it costs more to fix it than it does to maintain it properly. Regular oil changes help keep your car running properly, regular site maintenance helps keeps your web site running properly.

Call in a Professional

Why not deal with what you know best and let us deal with what we know best? Would you try to fight that court battle without a lawyer? Then why try to maintain your own website if you’re not a web professional? By securing an experienced web professional to update and maintain your site properly you are actually saving potential lost sales and visitors.

If you’re interested in securing a maintenance contract for your web site, please view our WordPress Maintenance Plans to see which one fits your needs.

Why did WordPress 4.5 break my website?

WordPress’s Core will automatically update your website to the latest WordPress version when the newest version has been tested and deemed safe for release, unless you have preventative measures already in place.  Wordpress 4.5 included many new updates and changes which can all be seen here: https://codex.wordpress.org/Version_4.5

One of the biggest problems we have noticed is not with WordPress’s update but with the WordPress theme that is being used.  Wordpress updated it’s jQuery library and in doing so many websites broke because of the coding changes and their conflicts with the javascript of the theme.

There are other problems we have seen that broke other users websites but for the most part it usually had something to do with the jQuery update.

How can I fix this?

There are a few solutions to fix this issue but you most likely should have a development team to help you.

The best solution would be to update the core to 4.5, then update all the plugins, and update the theme (always make a backup of the files and database before you do this).  Usually if you have all the latest plugin’s and the latest theme files implemented on your site any broken area’s should be corrected.

Another solution would be to replace the new jQuery library with the last version.  This is not the best idea because once another WordPress version is updated on your site it will overwrite the older library.  Use these files here and replace the current folder located here: wp-includes/js/jquery.

How can I prevent this in the future?

The best way to prevent WordPress 4.5 or any newer version from breaking your website in the future is to have one of our WordPress Maintenance & Care Plans.  We not only make sure your website is updated to the newest versions of WordPress, plugins and themes, but we also go in on a daily basis and actively watch your site(s) for security and malicious activity, create daily backup’s, clean up spam, database overhead, monitor website uptime, and more.

You can always set your wp-config file so your site does not automatically update.  You can find more information about how to implement that here: https://codex.wordpress.org/Configuring_Automatic_Background_Updates.  This way you can have time to test the new version and make sure it works with your website before pushing these updates LIVE.

What or Who is this Hmei7?

Hmei7 is an Indonesian Top Hacker that has created some chaos on WordPress (and Joomla) websites in the past (2012) and fairly recently.   Known for Mass Defacements, Hmei7 has claimed to have defaced more than 5000 websites in under 3 days.  He has hacked many high profile websites including IBM, Microsoft, SIEMENS, AVG, Foxconn. He also defaced thousands of Government websites belong to different countries.

How did Hmei7 hack your WordPress website?

What did Hmei7 do?

It seems that Hmei7 gained access to several database servers and then simply ran simple SQL scripts on the various MySQL databases. He than ran the script against all Post and Page titles and merely replaced existing titles with a script that ‘created’ the popup. WordPress has a title on every Page and Post so it was a simple but very effective hack. Some WordPress sites claim that passwords have been changed for users but again this is simple enough to do via a generic SQL script (no need to panic as WordPress passwords are generally secure enough and are stored as an MD5 hash i.e. others are unlikely to be able to read your password even if they have access to the MySQL database).

So how did Hmei7 get into your Website?

Unfortunately we don’t know exactly how the hacker gained access to the database however we haven’t seen any evidence that WordPress, Themes or Plugins were the entry point for the attack.

And what could you have done to prevent being hacked?

Hosting can play a small role, if you are on shared hosting you will have more chances of getting hacked than on a dedicated server.  Having a WordPress Maintenance team to actively watch and update your WordPress Core, WordPress Themes, WordPress Plugin’s and also proactively running security scans will help you avoid these types of hacks.  Graphic Lux has been proven to be one of the top providers of WordPress Care & WordPress Maintenance plans.

PICK YOUR WORDPRESS CARE PLAN


What or Who is this Anonghost?

Anonghost, lead by Mauritania Attacker, hacker group that hacked thousands of websites including government website, Database leaks, email leaks and Mark Zuckerberg Facebook Account’s hijacking. The hacker who founded the AnonGhost Team group, said the reason behind its attacks was simple:

We are very proud that we are defending Palestine. It’s a duty to try to establish peace for humanity, spreading awareness. As you can see religion doesn’t make us different, or nationality, we are united together.

The “we” their leader is talking about is the group of hackers that makes up Anonghost.  Anonghost is mostly based in 15 different countries across Africa, the Middle East & Europe.

How did Anonghost hack your WordPress website?

Below is an actual YouTube video from Anonghost showing you how they hacked and got access through WordPress’s Remote File Upload Vulnerability.

And what could you have done to prevent being hacked?

Hosting can play a small role, if you are on shared hosting you will have more chances of getting hacked than on a dedicated server.  Having a WordPress Maintenance team to actively watch and update your WordPress Core, WordPress Themes, WordPress Plugin’s and also proactively running security scans will help you avoid these types of hacks.  Graphic Lux has been proven to be one of the top providers of WordPress Care & WordPress Maintenance plans.

PICK YOUR WORDPRESS CARE PLAN


What or Who is this Isis?

ISIS is after you

The United States Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is warning WordPress users to patch vulnerable plugins for the popular content management system before ISIS exploit them to display pro-ISIS messages.

According to the FBI, ISIS sympathizers are targeting WordPress sites and the communication platforms of commercial entities, news organizations, federal/state/local governments, religious institutions, foreign governments, and a number of other domestic and international websites.

How did Isis hack your WordPress website?

Isis exploited vulnerable WordPress Plugins and in addition pro-ISIS sympathizers are creating fake government websites to trick people into handing over the personal identity data which lead them to identity theft.

Whats worst is that these fake sites are appearing at the top of the search engine results.  Prompting their victims to click on the fake sites and sending their sensitive data. The scam sites usually charges a fee to complete the service requested, which encourage the victims to send their more personal data further.
Before a victim realizes it is a scam, the money has already been funneled out of their bank accounts and their personal identities have been compromised, which can be used by attackers for any number of illicit purposes.

And what could you have done to prevent being hacked?

Hosting can play a small role, if you are on shared hosting you will have more chances of getting hacked than on a dedicated server.  Having a WordPress Maintenance team to actively watch and update your WordPress Core, WordPress Themes, WordPress Plugin’s and also proactively running security scans will help you avoid these types of hacks.  Graphic Lux has been proven to be one of the top providers of WordPress Care & WordPress Maintenance plans.

PICK YOUR WORDPRESS CARE PLAN

As Buffalo, NY’s premiere WordPress security guru’s we thought we may give you a few great ways to keep those pesky hackers out of your site.  Here is a nice infographic that will give you the beginning steps to help secure your WordPress website.

infographic2

Of course having a WordPress maintenance plan or what we call a “WordPress Care Plan” will do all these items for you and make sure your site is worry free. Feel free to check out our WordPress Care Plans here!