Why Is Website Maintenance Important?

Your website is a very important part of your business. Not only does it bring you traffic, it also represents your business. This means that there are many reasons why you should be always updating your website. From constantly grabbing the attention of your visitors to improving your search engine rankings, frequently website updates might seem pointless, but they are far from it.

Retail shops are always updating their shop windows with latest offers and products. Even though you might not own a actual store, the same concept still applies to your website.

Corporate Image

Your website is a public reflection of your brand. A website which is not regularly maintained can lead to errors, broken links and outdated information and it can cause your business to decline over time. Frequently examine the look and feel of your website, update it to match your corporate image.

Make sure you leave the right impression for new visitors

A very important reason why maintaining your website is important is that it leaves a good impression on any new visitors. The website represents your business and is how many customers will see you.

When a user lands on your website you only have a few seconds to capture their trust. The best way to do this is to make sure your website is user friendly and more importantly, up to date.

Always give a reason for your customers to come back

Another reason why you should keep your website up to date is that it gives previous visitors a reason to come back. If you happen to have a blog on your site that is regularly updated with new content, then you have better chances of visitors returning.

Many people will bookmark useful sites and will often check the site for updates. If you regularly provide your visitors with new content, then can easily generate recurring visits.

Improve Your SEO

Another benefit of adding new content to your website is that it helps improve your SEO (search engine rankings). Google love new content. Whenever you update your site with new content, Google will crawl your site and boost your rankings.

If updating your website and adding new content leads to better search engine rankings and more visitors, then why would you not do it.

How Do You Maintain Your Own Website?

Visitors and search engines love fresh content. The easiest way to profit from increased search engine rankings andreturning visitors is to update a blog or latest news. If you don’t have a blog on your website, then you should look into it.A blog is an excellent way to keep visitors up to date with what is going on in the business, and your trade. In addition to this, it can also be used as a platform to promote and share original content. If you can give customers original content that they can’t find anywhere, then this is a sure way to get recurring visitors.

Deleting Spam Comments

If you already have a blog, then the chances are you are get spam. The comments section on your blog is a way for a visitor to share their views and ideas about your content, but sometimes this feature can be misused.There are many spam robots that crawl people’s website looking for blogs to comment on. These robots post comments on your blog in a bid to try and attract more visitors to their website. The easiest way to solve this problem is to disable comments, but comments can be important for many reasons, not only do they leave a good impression but they also help show what your users are interested in. To make sure your website is well maintained, you should regularly check your blog for any spam comments and then delete the inappropriate comments.

If a new visitor sees lots of spam comments within your website, then they may think your website is not trustworthy and go. It might sound weird that someone would leave over some spam comments, but the spam will significantly bring your businesses reputation down.

Other updates

Aside from blogs, the rest of your site should also be updated. Think of it as monthly routine where you go through your website and check all your pages to make sure they are up to date.If you’re own an e-commerce store, then you’ll want to check your products are up to date with the right photos and descriptions. Any new stock or products should also be added regularly.

Lastly, as a general rule, you should always check for content management system (CMS) and plugin updates monthly. We build all our sites in the very popular CMS platform named WordPress, and the developers of the software regularly update it to add new features and fixes often.

These make your website more secure but they can also significantly improve the speed of your website. Although the updates aren’t very frequent, it’s best to check for these updates monthly.

DON’T HAVE THE TIME?

All websites need continuous monitoring, maintenance and upgrading so they give optimum performance and stay safe from hackers. But if your website does get hacked or goes down we are here for you to restore the site from clean/latest backup.

If you really don’t have the time to spare to keep your website updated, then it’s better to get a professional to look after it for you.

This way it ensures it gets all the care it deserves and everything possible to keep it healthy.

Here at DesignLab we offer a range of website maintenance packages that ensure your website is kept up to date. Whether you need new items adding to your website or existing ones being changed, we’re here to help. To find out more about our website maintenance packages, contact us for a free consultation.

August 10, 2017 admin Web Comments Off

Speed Is the New SEO

If you’re website doesn’t load in one second, you’re web developer is building it wrong.

We are in the age of mobile devices. Nearly every person in this world uses a mobile device when looking for information online now. So for this reason alone, businesses have catered to the needs of the mobile users worldwide to ensure a positive and satisfying experience. Google gives a mobile-friendly site a boost in search engine ranking in relation to its recent algorithm update.

Google has updated the page speed ranking factor to look at the page speed of your mobile site.

But once a business has gained a competitive advantage by making its website mobile-friendly, what should be next?

Speed, and why it matters

Page speed is the to the time it takes a page to display its content (i.e. text, images, etc).

Google uses a point-based system that ranges from 0-100 that looks at two main components of page speed: time to above – the-fold load and time to full page load.

When optimised correctly, page speed can work amazingly for your brand. Fast sites that load faster, receive 25% more views in ads and lower bounce rates.

That’s why your page speed directly affects your sales and conversions. Basically, the faster your web page loads, the more revenue you’ll make.

Optimisation for speed

The first step to optimising a website’s speed is to analyse its current page loading. Then, if and after confirming it has a slow loading time, businesses can get started with speeding up their sites by optimising the images, using a caching system and minifying code.

One great way to guarantee a fast website is to use a website builder that has pre-designed with speed in mind. Then you don’t have to optimise page speed yourself, which can take a lot of time and effort, and knowledge.

There are a bunch of website builders that vary in performance in speed, these includes SquareSpace, WordPress, Weebly, Wix and Duda.

How fast does the site need to be?

Google looks for a minimum speed of less than half a second. But, to be fair they have set the threshold to around 2 seconds. Beyond that, your site is slow.

Because the best way to building speed is starting with a CMS platform that has already been optimised, we need to look at the actual Google PageSpeed Insights test results of the above leading selected website builders out in the market.

WordPress

WordPress scores 62/100 on a mobile device and 83/100 on a desktop. This was based on WordPress first theme (Edin) for businesses.

Weebly

Weebly scores 48/100on a mobile device and 58/100 on a desktop. The was based on Weebly’s LoveSeat theme.

Wix

Wix scores 48/100 on mobile device and 71/100 on a desktop. The was based on its Barista theme.

Duda

Duda scores 91/100 on mobile device and 97/100 on a desktop. The was based on one of Duda’s websites.

Out of the four, Duda has the highest score for speed performance.

Selling Speed to your clients

Small businesses have accepted mobile optimisation, and therefore followed the best steps to gain a loyal customer. The next ranking factor is page speed. While brands can tap into methods to speed up their sites, building their online businesses from the start while using a platform that’s designed to the latest speed advantages puts them ahead of the race.

Customers are making quick judgments about you the moment they arrive at your site. A few seconds of delay creates a strong negative impression.

Summary

So, speed is important and does already play an important role in SEO. Page speed is fast becoming the critical element that any online business cannot ignore. Make your customers web experiences enjoyable. Don’t give them any reason to choose your competitors because you failed to optimise your site for speed. Using a platform built for speed is a sensible way for you to guarantee a better and higher conversion, a better Google ranking makes customer satisfaction.

April 11, 2017 admin SEO, WordPress Comments Off

The Ultimate WordPress SEO Checklist

How exciting, you have just finished your WordPress website and you all set to launch, but have you optimised your site for the best possible SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) results? Below is our Ultimate WordPress SEO Checklist.

1. Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools

Google Analytics is brilliant! It generates statistical information about your website traffic and it’s sources. The Google Webmaster tool, helps in optimising the websites visibility and provides information about how a particular website is performing. It also shows information about the keywords, and the queries that are boosting the ranking of each of the pages. This fetches further information, checking if there is any negative impact on the ranking of the website. And the best thing… it’s all free!

2. Meta Keywords and Description

Meta descriptions are descriptive information about a page that explains “the about” of the pages to a search engine such as Google. The characters for meta descriptions must be under 156 characters. These descriptions help the user gain the relevant page information prior to actually clicking the page. WordPress SEO Plugins that help you in this are Yoast SEO and All in One SEO Pack.

3. Content, Keywords & Pages Titles

It’s important to have a unique page, and the post title is critical, this is because it is generated with on-page optimisation practices, which include placement and keyword density, meta tags and HTML codes. These titles usually must have a 50-65 character limit. For the best approach of keywords, it is recommended to allow 10 keywords per page. It is also really important to have relevant content on each page. Unique and relevant content is one of the fundamental elements that Google always recommends for better website ranking. Relevant keywords will help for the better search ranking also.

4. Header Tags

Headers tags come in the form of H1, H2, H3, and H4. These are placed at different spots on a web page to help the search engines locate key headlines plus information, providing the most relevant results to the users searching. The H1 tag should always be placed at the top of a page. H2 tags can help in determining different sections on a page. H3 and H4 tags can be used for subheadings that are specific links to the content.

5. Page URLs – Permalinks

The URL of the content published on a WordPress website is called permalinks. These are the links that are entered into a browser by a user when looking for specific content. As soon as search engines find the best link match, the results are displayed. This means it is very important to optimise the permalinks with the most relevant searched keywords.

6. Image Optimisation

Images which have been described with relevant content are more likely to get a better ranking. Image optimisation (setting specific image URLs), on the other side, is an additional practice to offer improved page ranking. You need to make sure you are naming your files properly i.e. having relevant content with the best use of a top searchable keyword for a specific subject. This will give you better rankings of the pages on the web. Another way is making sure the file size is kept low, that way is loads faster. There is a WordPress plugin named EWWW Image Optimizer that automatically optimises your images as you upload them to your site.

7. Page Loading Times

The speed of a page loading will always be important. Visitors usually don’t wait for the page to load they are taking more than 5 seconds. So, it is very important to host the site with SSD web host providers like Web Hosting Hub, & incorporate the page speed online tool, like Disable Page Revision, for helping pages load quicker. If a user has to wait for a page to load, they may leave the site, which could result in a loss of business. You can use tools like Google Pagespeed Insights which will analyse elements of your website and allow you suggestions on how to improve your site.

8. Internal Links

WP Internal Links Lite lets you create links that tailor better results in search engines. Developers have the option of including URLs to related pages. Linking another related posts to a specific page helps search engines crawl on the secondary posts and fetch information, this allows a better chance of page ranking.

9. Utilise WordPress Plugins

There are a ton of WordPress plugins available to ensure efficient search engine optimisation, security issues and file backup issues. For every one of these concerns there is a plugin out there available, including Yoast SEO plugin, BulletProof Security and BackUPWordPress. These plugins have been designed to make your’e SEO easier to configure.

The SEO checklist above gives your WordPress site the edge over all other related websites. If you are set to launch your WordPress website, make sure you have these essentials covered.

If you require any help we at DesignLab can look after all this for you.

WordPress Checklist Infographic

Thanks to Capsicum Media for the below infographic.

September 19, 2016 admin SEO, WordPress Comments Off

WordPress vs PageCloud

We are avid users of WordPress, we think there is no other website platform that offers the flexibility of speeding up WordPress, but every now and then comes along a new platform that is meant to wow us all, and PageCloud could be it? Let’s try and find the best platform to create a website using WordPress Vs PageCloud. PageCloud is a very new company that has been making a real big buzz and WordPress is the most popular platform.

What is PageCloud?
Page Cloud is web design software for dummies, it provides a What You See is What You Get (WYSWYG) editor for making all sorts of creative designs. It’s goal is to give the whole world the ability to create and share information without using web developers or coders (so there goes that industry).

What is WordPress?
WordPress is a free and open source blogging tool and a content management system (CMS) based on PHP and MySQL.

Let’s look at the design comparison

PageCloud
The goal is to allow users to customise up to 90% of their website. If you designed your site in Photoshop, you can easily copy layers out of any desktop design tool and paste it directly onto your pages. With PageCloud you can drag/copy video, widgets, images, spreadsheet charts and text directly onto your site.

WordPress
WordPress is not really a builder, it’s all about installing. WithWordPress you are able to install over thousands of complex themes. Both WordPress and PageCloud require no coding. There is no theme that you can’t find. You can create a Facebook styled theme, video blog styled theme, etc. You are guaranteed to find the perfect design for your website or blog.

With WordPress you don’t need to know HTML, but if you do have coding skills, then you can put them to the test. For a beginner it will take you 5 minutes to create a WordPress website because SiteGround has an automatic WordPress installation wizard. See here how to install it.

Price comparison

There is difference when it comes to price. PageCloud costs around $20 a month, which is a little on the expensive side. The good thing about WordPress is that it is free. The only thing that you need to do is get hosting and domain name registration.

Domain names

PageCloud does allow you to have a custom domain, but you have to go buy one from a domain registrar, and then they will explain to you how to point it at your PageCloud site.

Ownership comparison

When you choose your own hosting, you won’t have to worry about deleting or shutting your site down. This is why people choose WordPress, PageCloud, Squarespace, Tumblr and Wix. With WordPress you own it, and you don’t have to worry about your hard work being gone one day.

Make sure that you have your own servers and you’re not on someone else’s servers. If you read the PageCloud terms of service you will see that they reserve the right to remove your content. This is not uncommon when you don’t have your own servers.

PageCloud’s Terms below:

2.2 License to Your Stuff. You grant us, for as long as you use the Services, a worldwide, royalty-free, non-exclusive license to host, copy, transmit, display, and use Your Stuff in connection with the Services.

2.3 Content Removal. You are solely responsible for Your Stuff and your use of the Services. We don’t pre-screen Your Stuff, but we and our designees (including our third-party vendors and hosting partners) have the right (but not the obligation) in our sole discretion to access, review, and monitor Your Stuff, Your Site, or any information on or made available through the Services, and if we determine in our sole and reasonable discretion, that Your Stuff violates our Acceptable Use Policy, we reserve the right to refuse, remove or delete Your Stuff, without notice.

Flexibility comparison

WordPress

WordPress is flexible. There is no other website platform that can outdo WordPress when it comes it’s flexibility. Not only does WordPress have standard features that makes your site ready to go in minutes, but they also have 30,000 of plugins that extend what your site can do. With over that many plugins you can do anything that you want. You can start an e-commerce shop, real estate listings, photography and many more.

You can start a video or music site. All that you need to do is go to the plugins section and install them mostly for free. One of the first plugins that I like installing is a SEO plugin named Yoast to boost in the search engines. Then a cache plugin for speed.

PageCloud

This is something that you will not be able to do with PageCloud. It is not spoilt in features. They offer just a regular drag and drop builder, but they don’t offer any add-ons. Plugins are such a fun part of creating a website because you get to show your creativity. PageCloud does have a very fast spot-edit though, but once again don’t expect a site that is heavy in features. WordPress is far better for the future because it lets your site grow easily.

SEO comparison
PageCloud has common SEO options like page keywords, descriptions, page titles, file name, H tags, image ALT tags, etc.

WordPress has full SEO features. You can change your breadcrumbs, URL structure,heading tags, sitemaps, image optimisation and so on. On top of that you are able to install SEO plugins.

Many popular sites are using Yoast to achieve high rankings and it is only available with WordPress. You are also able to install cache plugins that will give your site a speed boost. If you want SEO features than there is no other than WordPress.

Popularity comparison
The keyword “PageCloud” has around 18 – 20,000 monthly searches.

The keyword “WordPress” has 2,700,000 monthly searches.

WordPress powers over 25% of the entire web. There is no other platform that comes close to this, and we believe that no other platform ever will.

Support and documentation

PageCloud

PageCloud has an answers page filled with plenty of information. You will not be lacking with their library of articles. It also has a great community forum. And they have a very quick responsive email support.

WordPress

WordPress is a large company, so it has a much larger amount of support and documentation. It has more users, more forums, more videos.

The verdict: The best for your next website.

PageCloud is not something that we haven’t seen before. There is nothing that you can get withPageCloud that you can’t get with WordPress. PageCloud is new so it needs time to grow. It does have potential, but right now WordPress is clearly (and will always be) the best.

WordPress has far better SEO options, more flexibility, more support, cheaper pricing options, more design options (I can go on). I don’t know how anyone can choose PageCloud over WordPress? We have been using WordPress for years, and it has been a blessing. We can create any type of site that suits the needs of our clients.

Talk to Spiros on 0431 926 575 anytime for your WordPress website.

June 27, 2016 admin Blogs, WordPress Comments Off

Generating Traffic to a WordPress Site

Generating Traffic to a WordPress Site is not so difficult to do these days. WordPress is a fantastic CMS to generate SEO with. You have access to many SEO plugins, our favourite pick is Yoast. But there are many other things you can do to your WordPress site to help generate SEO.

Here are some tips to help you generate traffic to a WordPress site.

How to generate traffic to a new WordPress Web Site

1. Focus your content on your audience who are likely to share it

“Content is king“. The quality of the content you write can take you to the top in Google; and poorly written content can make you lose your audience. The key point here is to write unique and informative content. There must be no grammatical errors, and copying is a strict no-no.

When planning your content, think from the perspective of your customers.

For example what do they want to read from you? Audiences are of different types, there regular visitors, some active users, and less active users. Some people love to share what they ‘like’. Those people are highly active on social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, etc.

Your aim should be to identify those users who will share your content. What makes a person share certain posts? Use capturing images, infographics and videos in your blogs. Stats show that people feel more connected with visuals, and such posts are more likely to get shared. The more your blogs get shared, the higher the chances of getting more traffic on your site.

2. Make your content SEO friendly

Wordpress Settings

SEO, done right, will gain you traffic. Search engines such as Google are a great source of traffic and WordPress is a very SEO friendly platform. You just need to change its settings to make you website search engine friendly.

During developing your site, you need to check the privacy settings. Uncheck the box that says “Discourage search engines from indexing this site”.

There is a Permalink setting where you need to configure the URL that is search engine friendly. Never leave your blog uncategorized; always choose a suitable category for it. Similarly there are many small changes that can help you make your blogs SEO friendly which help you gain better traffic. The old age saying that “20% efforts done in right direction can bring 80% of desired results” is so true.

3. Make good use of Google Analytics

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a great tool that every one must install to check the sources of their traffic. It gives all the information such as what are the sites which are sending maximum traffic, average time spent by the visitors, total visits, percentage of new visits, bounce rate and much more. And the best thing is it’s FREE!

All this data is very important in working out the marketing strategy for your site. You can find out the sources of high traffic as well as sources of high quality traffic. High quality traffic means visitors spending more time on your site which is exactly what you want. This can then help you create a strategy and concentrate on sites giving you high quality traffic.

4. Use Social Media as much as possible

Social media is becoming an extremely powerful means of gaining traffic. LinkedIn and Google+ have more than 300 million users. Facebook alone has more than 1 billion users and this count is increasing every day. People who are active on social media can be referred to as “content distributors” or influencers.

Here are some useful tips:

Create a business page for your site in all social media sites such as Facebook,Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Google+ etc.
Make sure the profiles and the pages that you create for your business are 100% correctly completed. Fill in as much information as possible. Profiles that are complete are more likely to gain more trust and credibility from your audience.
Share all your posts on all these social media sites. Make them appealing so that more people want to share your posts.
Connect directly with the audience at your page.
Attaining success at social media sites requires patience and persistence. Make sure you follow all the above mentioned tips carefully.

5. Use effective images, graphics and illustrations

Pexels

It is always smart to use relatable images, graphics and illustration in your site. A image speaks more than content. You can either create your own images, or you can purchase them from sites such as Shutterstock or free from Pexels. These images are a great source of traffic through the means of image searching.

One tip is, always allow other people to share your images but on condition that they link that back to your site. That way you are making great use of your images. If anyone shares your images without giving you a back link, then find this out using the Image Search function. You then contact those owners and ask to give you back links and chances are they will.

6. Keyword research

Keyword Planner

The choice of right keywords can play a major role in the success of your website. There are many tools out there that can help in this regard such as Keywordtool.io, Adwords Keyword Planner. You can use these tools to find out the phrases that are commonly searched by people related to your business. These keywords should be used to make titles for your posts. Optimising blogs with target keywords can help you get better traffic. The target keyword should be used creatively in title and the content should be focused on the subject.

7. Guest bloggers

Guest blogging is also a great way of gaining traffic. For new blogs, it is difficult to get consent of established blog owners to post on their blog. It is recommended to use any personal connections in these instances. Contact people who already have an established audience. Guest blogging is an excellent way of building a brand and contacting new people.

8. Optimised site design

A well optimised website design is a ‘no-brainer’ for the success of any site, and a good template is the backbone. A professional design can help gain confidence. The usability also plays a major part. Make sure your site is easy to navigate. They should be able to easily find and do what they want to do. The design should be responsive on all platforms such as smart phones and tablets.

9. Interact with your visitors

When visitors read your blogs and if they like it or not, they are likely to hopefully leave comments. Reply to all the comments. If there is a doubt, delete it right away. If it is an appreciation, then thank the visitor. Feel free to remove negative comments and make sure you don’t allow blog spamming. Visitors like when they find that the blogger is giving them attention and their chances of them revisiting your blog increases.

The success of a website depends upon on traffic, so follow these tips for success!

DesignLab can also help you with SEO optimisation for your WordPress site. Call Spiros on 0431 926 575.

March 10, 2016 admin SEO, Web design, WordPress Comments Off

Advantages of using WordPress

Advantages of using WordPress to Power Your Company’s Website

At DesignLab, we only build our websites for our clients using WordPress. It has been around since 2003 and is the most popular blogging software around. Over the past years, WordPress has also become the content management software of choice for non-blogging websites. Here are some advantages why WordPress is so popular and why you might want to consider using DesignLab to build a WordPress platform for your company’s website.

1. Easy to Use

WordPress is very easy to use. Adding new pages, blogs, images, videos, etc. on a regular basis is a easy and can be done quickly. The technology is so simple, which means less time spent on formatting.

2. You Manage Your Website from Any Computer

WordPress is a browser-based software. You can login from any Internet connected computer and manage your site. Simple. Easy.

3. There is no HTML Editing or FTP Software Required

WordPress is a self-contained system and does not require any HTML editing software such as Adobe Dreamweaver or Contribute. You can easily create a new page or blog, format text, upload images (edit them), upload PDFs, video files, image galleries, etc. all without the need for additional HTML or FTP software.

4. Search Engines Love WordPress

The code behind WordPress is clean and simple, making it easy for search engines to read and index a site’s content. Each page, post, and image can have its own meta tag keywords, description, and title, and be optimised for specific keywords, allowing for very precise search engine optimisation. You can also use tags to further enhance your search engine optimisation efforts.

5. Control of Your Site is Yours

No more waiting for a web designer to make simple updates on your website. You have control of nearly every aspect of your site and can easily make those simple updates yourself, and if you run into trouble there is tons of free help on the internet.

6. Design of Your Website is 100% Customisable

WordPress acts as the engine for your website. The look and feel of your site can be customised so your brand of your company can come through on your site and provide a unique experience to your visitors.

7. Blogs are Built-in and Ready to Go

WordPress was originally created as a blogging platform, which means blogging capabilities are already built-in and easy to integrate. Setting up a RSS / email subscriptions to your blog, commenting capabilities, automatically adding the most recent blog posts to other pages of the site are also simple to set-up, and help to extend your company’s reach and make your site more dynamic.

8. Extending the Functionality with Plugins

You can add an video gallery, event calendar, photo gallery, shopping cart, Twitter Feed, Facebook Fan Box and more to your site. WordPress makes this possible with plugins, most of which are free or reasonably priced. You don’t need to be a web guru to install them.

9. Your Site Will Grow as Your Business Grows

WordPress sites are so scalable. There are hundreds of thousands of pages or blog posts on your site and the performance of the site will not be compromised in the least.

10. Multiple Users

As an administrator of a WordPress site, you can set-up multiple users for the website and assign access levels and capabilities to each user.

December 16, 2015 admin Web, Web design, WordPress Comments Off

Is your website prey to Google Mobilegeddon?

Its been almost been two months that Mobilegeddon made its debut, and so far it seems that its not that significant..so far. So how far is Mobilegeddon ( Google’s Mobile Friendly Algorithm ) affecting your site? To find an answer to this question, the team at DesignLab has researched a bit and we have some good as well as bad news for you.

The Good News

Is that if your existing website is not mobile friendly, then this really has got nothing to do with your desktop & tablet ranking. This means that if your website was performing really well in the desktop results, then it will most probably be there were it is and MobileGeddon has got nothing to do with it.

MobileGeddon was officially launched on 21st April and is still under a implementation stage. So, untill and unless your website is not crawled by the Google spiders, there are chances that it will most probably stay were it is. This gives you some extra time to get your site mobile ready. So hurry up!

Bad News

Google is saying that 60% of its searches come directly from mobiles. So, if your website is not mobile friendly then there is a real string possibility that you might attract only 40% of the audience that searches for something on a desktop.

Apart from this, we have seen a big drop in some of our clients ranking. The websites that were ranked in top 10 for mobile results have just dropped to 20 position. So, even if Mobilegeddon is in the primary stages of its implementation, there is still a possibility that your website may fall prey to it, and maybe already has while your’e reading this.

So, what should be your approach towards MobileGeddon and how seriously shall you take it?

Before making any decision , just go through a few points that you must keep in your mind:

1. Googlebot must be allowed to crawl CSS & JavaScript to pass the “mobile-friendly” test

2. Mobile friendliness is determined at page level – not sitewide

3.Tablets such as iPads will not be affected by this update

4.Google is currently working on a dedicated mobile index (stay tuned)

Now the first thing you must do is just go ahead and check if your website is mobile friendly or not. To do so, just enter your website in the text box below and hit submit.

What are the solutions ?

1. If you are running a WordPress website, then you can go ahead and just install any of these 3 plug ins which will convert your website into a Google Friendly Mobile site. But this is a temporary solution as it simply just uses a pre defined theme and even though if it makes your website MobileGodden friendly, it can badly damage the UX for your website. But if you wish to just go ahead and use it, then feel free to download it from the below links:

https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-mobile-detector/
https://wordpress.org/plugins/wptouch/

2. Send us your website and we will get back to you with a quote for converting your existing website into Mobile friendly site. We convert existing static websites into responsive websites and even Responsive WordPress websites.

I know this seems daunting, especially if you have just recently designed your website, but as I keep saying to all our clients web design is always changing and ever evolving and if you want to run your business online you need to keep ahead of the game.

Call Spiros on 0431 926 575 anytime, he is happy to answer any questions.

May 29, 2015 admin Google, SEO, Web Comments Off

Content is King #3: Yoast is the SEO King

Yoast is one of the most famous WordPress SEO plugins. Most of the technical aspects of SEO you need to do actually are covered by Yoast.

Everyone these days are trying to rank their website’s content higher in Google. There are marketing firms earning a great deal of money in relation to the most notorious digital term these days, “SEO optimisation”, but if you do some heavy research you can do this yourself with one of the best SEO applications Yoast.

We believe that Yoast is the most complete SEO solution for your WordPress site. With a bunch of features and options this plugin provides an alternate to the users of another famous SEO plugin named All in One SEO Pack.

Some of Yoast’s awesome features are:

Post title and meta description meta box to change these on a per post basis.
Google search result snippet previews.
Focus keyword testing.
Meta Robots configuration.
Permalink clean ups, while still allowing for Google Custom Search.
Breadcrumbs support, with configurable breadcrumbs titles.
XML Sitemaps
.htaccess and robots.txt editor.
Ability to verify Google Webmaster Tools, Yahoo Site Explorer, and Bing Webmaster Tools

But as good as Yoast is, you still need to start from the ground up.

The first step in optimising any website for a search engine is to start thinking about the searching strategies of your audience.

What search strategies do they have?

Which search terms will they use?

These questions are the beginning of your keyword research. Keyword research is actually the basis of all search marketing. You have to know which search terms people use when looking for your website or product.

What makes your website unique?

What idea or product do you ‘sell’ ?

And why should people buy this from you?

Make sure your mission is clear in your mind as well as on your website. You want to be found on the terms that fit your site. You want to be found by your potential customers. Ranking on terms that don’t fit your site, will result in a high bounce rate (visitors immediately leave your site, because your site is not what they expect it to be).

A high bounce rate indeed indicates that your website does not fit the search needs of customers and Google could well adjust the ranking after high bounce rates. A high bounce rate could eventually lead to a lower ranking in Google.

Next week we will discuss in detail more about SEO planning and marketing for your site.

March 27, 2015 admin SEO, WordPress Comments Off

10 Must Have WordPress plugins

We love WordPress. It’s so easy and versatile to use and customise. All the sites we now build are in WordPress. It is the most widely used and easy to manage content management system out there, and one of the fantastic things about it are plugins.

WordPress plugins are bits of software that can be uploaded to to extend and expand the functionality of your site, and we have listed 10 Must Have WordPress Plugins to make it perfect for your needs. As a Digital / Design Agency, we’ve made a lot of websites, so we’ve collated a list over the years of the top plugins.

1. Duplicate post

screenshot-2
This plugin allows to clone any page, post or custom post type – we use this all the time!
Free Download

2. Nextgen gallery

responsive-wordpress-gallery-pro

Nextgen gallery is the most popular gallery plugin ever for WordPress, which is fully responsive that we’ve found to date, it’s very easy to manage and we use it for every one of our websites.

Free Download

3. OrbitCarrot CTA Manager

ctamanager

OrbitCarrot CTA manager lets you create CTA (Call to Action Manger) boxes as widgets, and have full control of the look and content – it’s the only one we’ve found to date which actually links the whole CTA box not just the content. You have a choice of colours, or choose un-styled if you want to style the CTA yourself.

Paid Download

4. Yoast WordPress SEO

yoastsep

What can we say about this? We bloody LOVE this plugin. This is a MUST for every website. Yoast WordPress SEO is the easiest SEO plugin, it tells you where you are going wrong with your SEO for each page/post and gives you useful tips on how you can improve your SEO. They have even published an online know how manual. Do yourself a favour and get this!

Free Download

5. BackWPup

backwpup-589x500

We all should backup our websites. I have had so many clients get in contact with us after a period of time and inform us they have mucked up their website. Back it up! This is the best WordPress backup solution, it includes email backups, Dropbox and Amazon S3.

Don’t forget that many dedicated WordPress hosting solutions will already include some kind of backup, or offer it as an inexpensive add-on, but these tend to be unreliable, so we have this as part of all our websites.

Free Download

6. Gravity Forms

gravity

Over a million websites use Gravity forms. There are many free form plugins, such as Contact form 7 – so why are we recommending a paid one? It comes down to usability and functionality. Gravity forms unlike Contact form 7 have an easy to use UI, rather then a collection of shortcodes and code, which make up CF7’s UI.

Paid Download

7. Layerslider

LayerSlider_Full_width_1

LayerSlider WP is a premium multi-purpose slider for creating image galleries, content sliders, and mind-blowing slideshows with must-see effects, even from your WordPress posts and pages. LayerSlider comes with 13 built-in skins, and it has tons of options to entirely customise the appearance and behavior of your sliders at the smallest detail.

Paid Download

8. CMS Tree View

treeview

Adds a CMS-like tree overview of all your pages and custom posts to WordPress, often when you have loads of pages in WordPress it can be difficult to find pages and see a structure. This plugin solves this issue. Within this tree you can edit pages, view pages, add pages, search pages, and drag and drop pages to rearrange the order.

Free Download

9. Multiple Content Blocks

multiplecontent

Multiple Content Blocks allows more content blocks in WordPress than just one. It creates columns or other page-specific content outside of the loop. Without your clients being able to screw up the lay-out 🙂 It’s a perfect plugin how adding content in between content in your sites theme.

Free Download

10. Restrict Widgets

restrictwidget

Restrict Widgets is all in one solution for widget management. It lets you control the pages that each widget will appear on and avoid creating multiple sidebars and duplicating widgets. You can also set who can manage the widgets, which sidebars and widgets will be available to selected users, which widget options will be available and how it will be displayed. This is really handy for any web developer.

Free Download

February 25, 2015 admin Web, Web design, WordPress Comments Off

SEO Strategic Plan

We have plenty of clients come to us and ask us ‘how can we make their website rank on the 1st page of Google’. First thing is first, any successful project starts with a plan. We call it a SEO Strategic Plan. We sit down with our client and ask a series of questions which help us determine what content and action plan we can create to help them rank in a good spot on Google.

Search engine optimisation (SEO) is often about making small modifications to parts of your website. When viewed individually, these changes might seem like improvements, but when combined with other optimisations, they could have a noticeable impact on your site’s user experience and performance in organic search results.

We recommend that you should base your optimisation decisions first and foremost on what’s best for the visitors of your site. They’re the main consumers of your content and are using search engines to find your work. Focusing too hard on specific tweaks to gain ranking in the organic results of search engines may not deliver the desired results. Search engine optimisation is about putting your site’s best foot forward when it comes to visibility in search engines, but your ultimate consumers are your users, not search engines.

The below Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) customisations will be help your site. Following the best practices outlined below in this post will make it easier for search engines to crawl, index and understand your content.

Create unique, accurate page titles on all your pages – a title tag tells both users and search engines what the topic of a particular page is.

Make use of the “description” meta tag – a page’s description meta tag gives Google and other search engines a summary of what the page is about

Improve the structure of your URLs – simple-to-understand URLs will convey content information easily.

Make your site easier to navigate – the navigation of a website is important in helping visitors quickly find the content they want. It can also help search engines understand what content the webmaster thinks is important.

Create HTML and XML sitemaps on your website – a simple site map page with links to all of the pages or the most important pages on your site can be useful. Creating an XML Sitemap file for your site helps ensure that search engines discover the pages on your site.

Write better anchor text – anchor text is the clickable text that users will see as a result of a link. The better your anchor text is, the easier it is for users to navigate and for Google to understand what the page you’re linking to is about.

Optimise your use of images – We will optimise your use of them. All images can have a distinct filename and “alt” attribute, both of which you should take advantage of. Media assets influence search rankings – i.e. photos, videos are all great ranking material.

Use heading tags appropriately – heading tags to emphasise important text. There are six sizes of heading tags, beginning with <h1>, the most important, and ending with <h6>, the least important (1).

Make effective use of robots.txt – tells search engines whether they can access and therefore crawl parts of your site.

Outbound links – Make sure all outbound links in site are not named ‘Click here’ or ‘For more info’, but are named after your keywords.

Create profiles on all small business directory sites – Such as Yelp, True Local, Yellow and White Pages. It is very helpful to fill them with as many videos, photos and reviews, this helps your ranking.

Use reviews – the profiles are so powerful, everyone is comparison shopping, so it’s important to generate positive reviews.

Google’s Webmaster Tools – this helps you better control how Google interacts with your website and get useful information from Google about your site i.e how many people are linking to your site, HTML problems, how fast your website is, keyword research tool and much more.

Google Analytics – provides information on traffic and tracking information, i.e. bounce rates, website statistics, average visit duration and much more.

Google Keyword Suggester Tools – focuses on correct keywords for your business by identifying what keywords your site ranks for.

Create a Google+ account – content posted on Google+ is crawled and indexed far quicker than on competitor sites. The most straightforward way Google+ impacts search rankings is with personalisation. For example, if someone is following you on Google+, the chances that they will see your posts in Google’s search results go way up.

Google AdWords – is a system Google has developed to assist you in marketing your products or services in the Google Search Engine, and its affiliate sites, via the use of a placed text ad that appears when people search for phrases related to your offering, this appears as a “sponsored link”. We will help set-up your account and create the first ad.

WordPress SEO Plugins

Yoast – The most complete SEO plugin for WordPress available today offers you everything you need to optimise your site.

Google XML sitemaps – A plugin that generates a sitemap of your site which makes it much easier for search engine bots to review your site, which is important for SEO. Another feature is that it notifies major search engines when new content is added.

Super Cache – Speeds up your site, one of the things Google looks for is a fast loading site.

No Ping Wait – Every time you publish a post, it pings the internet which means you can be found quicker.

Recommendations

Google is creating new algorithms all the time. Search engines are constantly changing and evolving; they are consistently refining their techniques and algorithms to supply the best, relevant results to your searchers. That is the reason why we stress to our clients that SEO should be considered a marathon instead of a race to the finish line. Using legitimate and effective SEO strategies will deliver more impressive and lasting results.

Once we handover your website we highly recommend to stay ahead of your competitors you must continue to do the following outlined below:

Ensure you write unique, valuable and relevant content for your site, it will increase your chances ranking higher than your competitors. You must make sure to use your targeted keywords in the content. Around 400-500 words per page is what Google prefers.
Consistently update your website and your Google+ account for better SEO ranking.
Social media – lots of tweets and posts to show Google your business is popular and active.

February 18, 2015 admin Google, SEO Comments Off