(FAQ)

Frequently Asked Questions

We know the digital world can be a confusing one. It’s an industry full of jargon and crazy acronyms like UX, B2B, CTA, B2C, it can sometimes be difficult to keep them all straight! Well, we are here to answer your questions regarding 2 very important acronyms that often get confused in terms of their true meanings – SEM and SEO.

It’s easy to see why these are often confused. The one letter difference. The alliteration. They look and sound so similar. It seems like perhaps they could simply be opposite sides of the same coin, when in fact that’s not entirely correct. To set the record straight, let’s define SEM and SEO, as well as other related questions to InterActive Circle.

If you don’t see your question listed below, please do not hesitate to reach out and ask! We are here to help!

What is SEO?

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of affecting the visibility of a website or a web page in a web search engine’s unpaid results — often referred to as “natural,” “organic,” or “earned” results. Source:  wikipedia.org

What is SEM?

Search engine marketing (SEM) is a form of Internet marketing that involves the promotion of websites by increasing their visibility in search engine results pages (SERPs) primarily through paid advertising. Source:  wikipedia.org

Does having a lot of variations of my website domain name help SEO?

Having numerous domains does not directly affect SEO performance unless the domains have high Domain Authority and redirect properly to your main domain. Further, for search engines, keywords in a domain weigh less when considering the ranking factors.

However, it would affect a business if competitors get certain domains and start promoting them. Therefore, overall, it is best to keep brand related domains.

Our company has multiple Facebook pages. Can we all combine them into one?

Steps to merge Facebook Profiles with Facebook Business Pages:

  1. In order to merge your Profile with your Page, you’ll first need to convert your Profile into a Page. Here are the steps you can take to do this: facebook
  2. Once you’ve done that, your Pages may be eligible to be merged. As mentioned in this Facebook Help Center article (facebook): If you’re an admin of both Pages, you may be able to merge them. This option is only available for Pages that represent the same things and have similar names.

Follow the steps provided in the article to see if your Page are eligible. If you don’t see the option to merge your Pages, it means that your Pages can’t be merged at this time.

What should the size be for the images on my website from an SEO perspective?

Scale for image SEO

Loading times are an important UX (user experience) and therefore SEO aspect. The faster the site, the easier it is to visit and index a page. Images can have a huge impact on loading times, especially when you load a huge image and show it really small, like using a 2500×1500 pixels image and showing it at 250×150 pixels size. The entire image will still have to be loaded. Scale the image to the size you want to show it. WordPress, for example, helps by providing the image in multiple sizes after upload already. Unfortunately, that doesn’t mean the file size is optimized as well, that’s just the image size.

Reduce file size

The next step in image SEO should be to make sure the scaled image is served in the smallest file size possible. There are tools for that. Of course you could just export the image and test what percentage of quality is acceptable, but we prefer (especially with retina and similar screens) to use 100% quality images. You can still reduce the file size of these images, for instance removing the EXIF data. We recommend using tools like ImageOptim or websites like JPEGMini or PunyPNG. We’ve also heard great stories about Kraken.io. After you have uploaded the image, tools like YSlow can tell you if your image optimization succeeded.

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