For the last 20+ years we have watched the Web Design and SEO industries evolve, as well as watched how small business operate inside that ecosystem. It is always striking to me how many people tell me about their cousin who builds their website; their niece that is an expert in Instagram, or their receptionist who runs their website in their spare time at the office. I get that there are a myriad of tools and products that allow business owners to feel empowered to build or manage their own websites, but just because you can pull you own tooth, should you.
There are a lot of pitfalls out in the digital world that allows Google to disqualify your site from being on the first page, or even being included. And some of that is not the small business owners’ fault, in the vein that their choices are made on good faith or rather, believing the vendor they choose being transparent/or covers the bases in their programming.
SEO and Web Design: Together Forever
These two items are always interconnected. This is not my opinion. It is a fact. Yet, when I look at a site built by a ‘web designer’ or online design too like WWWS (WixWeeblyWebSquarespace) This group combined accounts for at least 10 percent of websites that are improperly coded to have success on Google. I often find some of the most basic elements missing or misused.
Noindex is NoFriend (if you don’t know what you are doing)
The visual site builders often mark a website as noindex. What that means to Google is do not index this website. In other words, do not include this website in your directory. Places like Squarespace are doing this without most website owners even knowing the sites are being coded like or having the technical knowledge to fix it. They say they have done this so as to not create duplicate content. And although the premise is correct, the situation arises because of how online site building tools are structured to start with that is the real problem.
Yet, all these online site building subscription services tools are just this, a way to put a brochure website with little expectation that the website will ever rank well. If your goal is just to have a website, without traffic, this is an okay way to handle it this, but if your expectation is to have any speakable presence in the Google Maps, Google My Business or organic search results this is not the way to do it. In this order the noindex bug affects these design tools the most:
Squarespace, Wix, WordPress.com and then last is Weebly The best and quickest advise I can give you is to use WordPress (the .org/free version). If you use these tooks make sure you remove any of the no index language.
H1 H2 H2 H4 is a design element no more
Some of us are old enough to remember when sites were written by hand and H1-H6 meant something. When I teach web design Houston classes often tell me that they thought the H1-H6 tags were only put there to help with the web design process and are shocked to learn there is another and more appropriate use for them. Rather the H1 tag harkens back to the days of print when we would put a headline to very large to stress it’s importance. For example, when my Houston Astros won the Series a few years ago the word CHAMPS was the equivalent of the H1 tag in web design world. You are stressing this and in no other place is there and H1 tag on that page.
But now rather, people seem to be using H1 in multiple places on a page because it makes the font large (a web design element) and therefore dilute their message. Or they use No H1 tag simply because they don’t know any better and avoid it. This is one of the most important things you can do to help your website rank better. The answer is 1 H1 tag per page and make sure it contains the keyword you want to Rank on.
Title Tags– Remember Title Tags are one of the most important elements. Home does not a title tag make. And far too often it is was we see on we do an audit on a website. Better yet, its just the name of the business and not what you do.
Robot.txt is an important file to help Google know what to index and what not to among other things. We often see this improperly formatted which usually translates to telling Google not to index a site. *Note Google is phasing out noindex on 9/1 for depreciated code.
Sitemaps – Set up Search Console. Submit your sitemaps. It’s pretty easy and often overlooked
Meta Desc -ls a must to help Google understand what you think your website is about. Omitting it just ceding territory to someone else. Ceding is bad.
Schema – This is a toughie to explain because it involves coding and often not something most small businesses know how to do. The best advice is to find a plugin that will help format it for you. Include the local one for your address for sure
AMP – make sure you have AMP pages on your website. Again easily fixed with a plugin.
As a small business owner these factors will help your chances of getting on the front page. Picking a company to do web design that is not on top of SEO practices can have a huge negative impact on visibility. Using a site building service can also have a huge negative impact and most small business owners are unwittingly falling into these traps and negatively impacting their businesses.
As local SEO continues to evolve it’s always nice to take a look at tips and trick that may help you get your business on Google’s map. After all, that 3-pack gets approximately 80 percent of the click-throughs. So how do you get your business to be on the map?
Historically it was the consistency of your name address and phone number. or the NAP. As time has gone one that remains one of the fundamental ways to get on the map and we have our Citation Lock tool that will assist local business owners to correct that.
Now even Facebook is inspiring blog posts. Not because I want to write a post on social media, but they put up that silly ad for a t-shirt that reminded me all I do is talk to people all day that wants to tell me they are experts in SEO, did their own SEO so that makes them an expert, or find smart people who are experts that tell them what they want to hear, regardless of whether it’s the truth, and then want me to validate their ability. SEO is not a hobby. SEO is not easy. And real SEO experts are hard to find and even harder to identify.
I received a client email that was riddled with misinformation someone had told them regarding SSL. This post has been on my mind for a long time and this seemed to give me the perfect opportunity. This also a timely topic with hacking being in the news and Google losing yet another 2+ Billion lawsuits in Europe, both of which related to this topic.
To understand the role of SSL in security and how it’s being co-opted, misused, as well as touted as the end game in cyber security as well as SEO, one must first understand how and what all these things are, as well as the proper application.
It’s been a busy start of a new year, with a lot of weirdness. I have met a few people that wanted to tell me SEO is dead. What they really mean is SEO is way too much work for them and requires way too many components to do it right. Of course, several of these people were selling impression-based advertising from long dead phone company directories trying to stay afloat, but I digress.
Every day when I come to work, my mailbox is flooded with people that have domain issues. Two years ago Tucows came to me and asked if we would help with all the problems domains out in the marketplace. To give a little back story on this, Tucows is a wholesale domain registration company, meaning only people like me, you know a web hosting company, can buy from them, and those resellers then service the clients. Tucows is not allowed to interfere in the relationship. But, as many have experienced, not every company is like ACTWD, committed to its customers. So we were a perfect fit for Tucows, because had been with them as a vendor 15 years, and we knew the ins and outs of domain ownership.
Happy day after the 4th of July. I am a little late in my day with the post because everyone who was off decided to write in with questions and it’s been a get caught up from all the people that also celebrated kinda day.
I received a question on Saturday as I was on my way to the beach that jumped out of my mailbox flashing the words blog post on it. The question went something like this. If you’re the SEO lady, what do you care what I do with my social media?
I think over the last 20 years, we have strayed away from a tenant of marketing 101. The website drifted out into its own space and got treated as a redheaded step child. That is no longer acceptable. And in 2016, all marketing efforts need to be well- coordinated and integrated. Google has demanded this to have ANY success ranking in their search engine. Let me say that again. Google basically requires an integrated marketing plan.
Every one of these items i vitally important for a site to rank well.
So why does the SEO lady care if the website closes deals; if the message is right; if the blog is pushed out through social channels; if the content is compelling and natural; if people click on your page? Because if these things are not done right and sending the right signals you do not have a ranking website. I have used this graphic for years to explain everything is necessary for good Search Engine Rankings Additionally, PPC is also dependent on appearance and conversion as well. Plus, having a good SEO presence helps shoppers at the top of the sales funnel to buy and use the PPC link for the brand they know and trust. Even traditional marketing in the form of TV, Print and Display ads support the overall health of the website and affect how well your website ranks. If all these things are not right the website will not rank.
Now let me say upfront, I suppose in lieu of doing things right you can employ black hat techniques and be forever chasing an algorithm or being one crazy zoo update away from being out of business. And I know people who do this and SEO companies that act in this way as well. More times than not, I’m asked to go in and clean up their craziness.
Why SEO and Social Media are conjoined and inseparable?
The word Conjoined is not often used in marketing. It’s a great word to use here because it really paints the right picture. We’ve all seen conjoined twins and in many cases when separated one of the twins flourishes and the other twin lags behind or worse. And so it goes with SEO and Social Media since the beginning of 2016.
Officially Google says that it is not dependent on the social networks for high ranking websites. But they don’t really put out statements on why things do or don’t rank, so take that with a grain of salt. But let’s look at this first Google is dependent on great content. And what happens when you have good content, people link to the great content. And how would people find the great content? If only there was a way to push that content out into the world.
Now theoretically people will make links to great articles they find. And those links are a vote. So when you think about the social networks, why wouldn’t you want those folks to count. It’s an army of people validating a website. So every great piece of content that goes up has the potential to send links and/or signals back to the website. So the social networks basically are sending endorsements or votes to your websites. If you don’t hook up and do this properly, the site is missing these signals and is not really an option any longer.
Next is tackling the need to build a large audience and become a social media influencer. Influencers definitely carry more weight. Influencers bring more traffic. More traffic is a signal to Google. And how does one become an influencer? Well, by writing great content of course.
Now one thing it takes to be an influencer is followers and what most will tell people in the know, say you should post at least 10 times a day. Now that for the normal small business is just not possible nor is there that much to say for most of them. Additionally the mistake I think most people make is they post other people’s stuff. So this morning I was watching a video by Eric Enge. And theoretically I could of/should have shared that on twitter with my comment. But who gets that credit. Eric Enge, not me or ACTWD. So as I say 10 things a day, it really doesn’t help the small business owner to post 10 links to 10 other websites.
But here’s what else you don’t want to do. Post silly stuff, just to post. I saw one guy years ago that would put up a spammy article on gondola shelves and then just go spam his social networks with them. So he and 3 of his friends would like the post and he would do this every day 30 times a day. This doesn’t help anything either.
You need to post a well written useful graphic or article, video, slide presentation and share that with great hashtags and make people want to like you or make sure they hear what you say on a daily basis. And once you get enough posts, start repurposing and reposting. You then begin to influence how things happen, how people perceive an industry or in my case I’m always teaching how not to be taken advantage of or how to run a website, from the front end Marketing side to the under the hood web hosting side.
Why Don’t Other People Have To Do This?
I hear this a lot from customers, and then they point to someone that is much larger than they are. And 9 times out of 10, it’s not right or not effective. I had a friend recently show me something on Exxon’s site. And asked me about how they could do what ever it was. Exxon for starters has 3.7 million links point to them from over 16,000 unique websites. This makes them have a lot of lead way. I have a custom tour operator that wanted to know why he couldn’t make his site like The Knot. The knot has 13.7 million link point to it and 53,000 unique domains. So they have a completely different set of rules than a local tour operator in Houston Texas. I did promise his wife though when we got as big as The Knot I would be happy to do what they wanted. Bottom line is the smaller you are the more things you have to do right within Google’s mind to overcome these large sites.
And even for me, I’m not a huge fish compared to a GoDaddy or Network Solutions. I have to work to get every link I can. Sure some of my customer link to us to say we run their sites, and that’s helpful. But when they are little guys with no power I often think their well meaning may hurt us. But I have a long way to get 38 million sites linking to me with 800,000.
So what does this all get me?
So remember I said that Google says that social is not a ranking variable. Let me tell you an antidotal story. Three months ago I went to PubCon in Austin and I love Pubcon, because I often walk away saying yes I knew all this but it adds a perspective. Also often there are nuggets buried in the talks that a sharp minded pro will identify and run with it.
When I came back home to Houston, I decided I was going to put full efforts into getting this blog running right and see what impact it had on the ranking of this website. Mind you this is a really old domain that I’ve taken care of it though the years. In fact I let it sit for about 10 years with just one-page links for our customers. So there was pretty well no traffic.
Since I’ve put this blog on the site and am writing it myself with my personality, quirky as it may be, we are now on the first page for some very coveted terms locally as well as some other terms nationally. The content on this blog and the social twitter interactions are driving this site. No doubt in my mind. I’ve gained only 4 links and none of them have been great ones. But I’ve gained followers, and people are interacting and voting on my posts and with all that going on my SERPs just keep rising.
So as with conjoined twins, website owners need to understand that separating SEO and Social will damage one side of the equation. And honestly, I think that if you were to separate Social and SEO, Social can be well developed and do well. SEO the job is far harder because you’re missing a huge component. Sites end up missing the link building that is needed and you begin missing the signals that allows google to know what your site is about. If you’re Exxon it doesn’t matter but if you’re a Business trying to go national, it’s simply something you should not be missing if you intend to do with driving traffic to your website.
So this week it seemed was Google Speed week. So as both
the web hosting company and the SEO company, we get a lot of how do I fix questions. Inevitably, it’s not usually a web hosting problem as first presented to us. (‘Google says my site is slow. Fix my hosting”) Most times it’s a design question When these calls come, the first thing we do is look at the Google Page Speed Test, which can be sparse on solutions. Also, Pingdom, gives oodles of information and usually is more helpful in addressing issues and the one I like the best, however, is Webpagetest.org.
The waterfall gives you a clear picture of any issues you may have and a graphical way to understand the slowdowns. Now on ACTWD, I know those slider headers have to be minimized and because I have a whole redesign sitting on desk I’m not bothering with addressing it until it rolls out but at minimum I understand the cause of some of my failures and they are acceptable at the moment because the site is still scoring @ 89 despite them.
Now without a doubt, the one thing that is required to pull a passing score with Google if you are using WordPress is a caching engine. What we use here is W3 Total Cache as well as Auto Optimize. When configured properly this clears up a majority of what Google complains about with predominately WordPress sites. Now I say WordPress, not because I’m singling it out but yesterday I ran a bunch of tests across our entire network. I was looking for any ‘hosting-caused’ failures.
Additionally, I have added an extra layer to our network intentionally that most normal folks don’t have which is intrusion prevention. This literally inspects every packet and confirms if its is known hack and stops it. So I needed to make sure that this procedure was not causing issues. So I randomly pulled sites from each of our servers and here were some of the observations.
Customers with very old websites, most built in MS FrontPage 100% passed the speed test.
Customers running custom CMS systems (and we have quite a few), 100% passed the speed test
Customers running OSCommerce 100% passed the speed test.
Customers running Magento 100% failed the Server response times.
And most importantly every WordPress site not running Cache failed 100% of the time.
So what we learned from our test is that the added layer of security had no negative impact on sites ability to load quickly. But more importantly, the DIY website builder or a customer with a less experienced web designer, need to understand that they must use a caching plugin or suffer a diminished speed.
Additionally one of the reasons we use the W3 Total Cache, because it addresses issues that google keep displaying about scripts and image compression. The plugin helps minify HTML and CSS. This is two sticking points with Google. Minification is a process that removes unnecessary or duplicate code. This is stuff normal people don’t know how to do.
Leveraging browser cache may be a little harder to control for the average user. When we see this, it usually is coming from third parties, Facebook, Google to name a few. You may choose to run those scripts locally to be able to control them better, however you will need to monitor this. You will to be notified about structural changes and things make break so it will require some level of diligence.
And then we saw this one yesterday. We disabled Google-fonts because we were taking a hit for using them. Now if you stop and consider why the answers goes all the way back to when I rookie back in ’97. The first thing we were all confronted with was not to use non standard fonts. If you did, the website reverted to time’s new roman, which is really ugly. So while we were cleaning up the speed on a site we had recently stood up their brand manager called saying that the fonts weren’t right. “Their Font” was having to be rendered and impacting the loading speed of the site. So although this sounds so 1997, it still is advisable to use standard web safe fonts and not pick fonts that require rendering.
As I thought about the font situation, it struck me that as far as we have advanced in web development, personal devices, pads/tablets. These speed concerns, which are valid only arose because people got sloppy with their websites. The younger groups don’t remember the days when a 1 meg took minutes not second. And as we try to be cooler with our design, some are forgetting the basic principles of running lean and quick. WordPress makes it easy for the average user to integrate items that in the past would of been costly but unless you utilize caching and minification techniques. You are going to have a slow bloated website that is not streamlined, making it slow and awkward for the end user.
From the Web Hosting side. I don’t want to minimize something, you web host can ultimately slow your website down. Servers that are overloaded, hacked or just not optimized right will cost you points on your speed. So picking a dependable web hosting company is extremely important. I”m fortunate here, I could take web hosting bottleneck, poor configuration and hacks off the table because we had already addressed the server part of this and continue to do so with every server we stand up.
Trying to retrain customers might be as hard as training Harley, my 9-year-old Dachshund. There are a lot of similarities too. Neither understands that I tell them no not because I’m a big meanie, but because what they are wanting to do will hurt them. Sometimes they do things and try to sneak it by me because what I don’t know won’t hurt me. In Harley’s case, he likes to steal the food off my plate. In the case of the customer, sometimes they have their developer add features; rewrite their home page, or tell me ‘What do I care what their website looks like?’
And if you know anything about Dachshunds, they are fiercely independent and always do things their way. They rely on their gut. And this is the same with the Entrepreneur or small business owner. They most times want to do it their way. I’m the same way, and it may be why Harley and I get along so well.
I keep finding myself having this conversation. “You just do your SEO” and we’ll worry about (fill in the blank). Unfortunately, SEO no longer functions that way, and now Google has accountability built into it called engagement. So now SEO is about everything. And really, is it about search engine optimization, or is it really VEO (visitor experience optimization)?
All too often SEO is considered a piece of the puzzle. It is understandable after all because historically it was its own animal. If you did certain things correctly you ranked. And if you didn’t you didn’t rank. Pretty cut and dry. But as search has become more personal, the results need to better address each individual user. What does that means to the marketing company? The click needs to be induced, and then when you get the click, the entire page needs to address the needs of the visitor or they bounce away, and that bounce is logged.
Good search engine rankings are now dependent on good user experience. What that means is content needs to be outstanding. It has to be authentic and the page the person lands on from the search engine needs to address their needs. I am of the opinion the SEO company should borrow the SEM landing page concept that each page is optimized not only to rank in Google, but to convert to a sale. Intrinsically, this will benefit both the search and the visitor.
#1: Know Your Client
This requires us, as well as the site owner, to adequately identify their visitor. I’ve said before that I know my hosting clients and what they need for us to do, and my blog and my site has been geared specifically for them. As business owners, it’s hard sometimes to view ourselves how we are instead of how we want to be, but that now can have a very negative impact on the visitor experience. Understanding who your users are is important. If you don’t understand who that user is and you land them on a page that is inappropriate, you will end up with a bounce and be penalized.
Personally, this is the hardest part to get across to customers. Whether it is vacations, jewelry or Christmas decorations, it’s imperative your site design and call-to-action be clear for your specific audience, and that sometimes requires you to step out of your own self to evaluate that. It’s in part why we have minions here.
#2 Understand How You Compete With Your Competition
Understanding your competition is also important because if you sell customized vacations or customized jewelry, that is a different market share than a person who wants to take a trip and buy it on Expedia. If you want to sell custom jewelry, then you need to carve that niche out that is both personal and intimate. That means the site needs to address those challenges. If you look like Expedia, your clientele will measure you against Expedia.
#3 Misrepresentation
Good SEO is now dependent on Good User Engagement Reviews and Feedback. Because of the advent of Social Media, it is necessary to properly represent what and who you are. Marketing messages, Web design and content all need to support what or who you are properly. Not addressing your business challenges in your design or content can quickly cause a high bounce rate or bad feedback across the Internet.
#4 Get the Link
As we all know SEO is dependent on the link. As I was reading this morning, Matt Cutts floated by in my twitter feed that said something to this effect. Don’t build a link that looks like you did it naturally. Naturally build a link. Now this can be confusing, but since I’ve been writing all my Blogs myself and actually made them meaningful, I’m picking up links 3-4 a week on average now. What this really means is to do this legitimately you have to put out good, useful information. And you have to work towards getting a following.
I think the real issue with SEO is that for far too long it was compartmentalized. And now everyone is having an issue adjusting that everything from messaging to graphics to color to buttons affect how your website sells. And until the day your website is not the #1 salesperson on your team, you can’t just put SEO in a box and isolate it, which makes SEO everything, not just a thing.
I got this question from one of my students. It was a question where I could just reply “Yes,” or I could seize an opportunity. At its core it’s a web design question, but also has pretty deep implications for SEO if done properly.
So here is the challenge. He has a long bulleted list that has some definitions on it. And if you put that page into mobile, it would be too much time is his fear. Now his question went on to ask if he should make a page for all the bullet points, and the answer, of course, would be yes. But to me it realistically wasn’t related to the bulleted list and mobile. You should always have a page that is like a table of contents type page or a bullet list that further develops those topics.
This goes back to how to structure a website really, and how to write a topics page. So here is an example of something I did. I wanted to let Google know that this customer was a moving company in Houston. Google was getting confused over this site because it also offers storage services, but not like a storage locker facility, and they also offer nationwide moving which keeps shifting the focus some, and it makes some issues because it’s diluting what Google feels the main purpose of the site is about. To start to sort this out, I went in and added a moving services page that looks like this:
Under each of these topics are a whole section, and then each of those become their own set of sub-topics that allow me to send the right information to Google to help it be less confused on what this company does. What this does is set a course for Google to follow with the proper reinforcement.
As search gets smarter it becomes more necessary to make sure you have topics that clearly set up a structure for the website. This is something many designers do not account for. So for George, the right answer is please shorten the definitions on the page next to the bullet points and then build a real substantive page of content that corresponds each of your bullet points, and make sure you link them to appropriate well-written pages that support the bullet point.
Beyond the obvious, the other thing this does is create a strong interlink set of pages that will allow Google to understand what the nature of your page is, and why it is important. We discussed why site structure is important in a previous blog, and this is a great example that supports this answer.
It’s been a busy start of a new year, with a lot of weirdness. I have met a few people that wanted to tell me SEO is dead. What they really mean is SEO is way too much work for them and requires way too many components to do it right. Of course, several of these people were selling impression-based advertising from long dead phone company directories trying to stay afloat, but I digress. 
