Search Engines

5 Essential Things To Do to SEO Your Domain

SEO is less of a dark art and more of knowing what to do to improve your chance of being ranked and found in the search results. One critical SEO process is ensuring you set up your domains in Google’s webmaster tools. Changing your website in any way – adding a new domain, moving a site from subdomain to root, upgrading to SSL/HTTPS – means you need to help Google to find you properly. I know I have been guilty of buying a domain, getting my website set up, feeling pleased with how the site looks and then … crickets.… Read More »5 Essential Things To Do to SEO Your Domain

Setting Up SSL – The Full Story

SSL is the new world of the web and if you don’t have it then be prepared to drop in the rankings and possibly lose prospective customers. Setting up SSL is a task in itself. I hired someone to do that for me because my host did not allow Let’s Encrypt SSL Certificates. I had to use a different system and to be frank I couldn’t be bothered learning how to do it. I had better things to spend my time on. What I did learn though is that it is simple but not easy. Lot’s of fiddling with nameservers,… Read More »Setting Up SSL – The Full Story

SSL Certificates : Installing on Your 1and1 Website

Setting up an SSL certificate is not only good business, it’s essential SEO practice! (SSL adds and extra layer of security between a browser and your website via an encrypted link) People are becoming aware of SSL – looking for that “https” sign, either through a little green icon or a lock or some other indicator. It’s a sign of trust and security … to a degree. At the least it makes people feel that they are dealing with a site that looks after their data. On top of that, search engines are giving preference in their algorithms to sites… Read More »SSL Certificates : Installing on Your 1and1 Website

Are Your Links Working For You?

Backlinks. Inbound links. Broken links. Indexed links. SEO thrives or dies on links. I’ve been across all of those lately, spending an inordinate amount of time to discover what would have taken a WebMaster a fraction of the time to achieve. Firstly I had major issues trying to get Yoast SEO to generate a sitemap which Google WebMaster would recognise. Hours of searching, trial and error led me to try another plugin. Still an issue. Then another plugin. Still an issue. So, I gave up with plugin-land and went old-school. If you search online you can generate a nifty little… Read More »Are Your Links Working For You?

Latest SEO Learning in 2017

So, Ive been knee-deep in prepping to migrate and upgrade an old site. As always happens when you start one thing in tech-land, a bunch of other item popped up demanding attention. First it was updating WP itself along with its associated plugins and themes. Then an enforced trip to Google Webmaster tools which I’d not looked at for a while highlighted a few issues such as soft-404s and other errors. “Well, may as well fix ’em while I’m here” I thought. So, I did. (I may have been better being disciplened and pencilling those tasks for later while I continued… Read More »Latest SEO Learning in 2017

How to Improve your 404 Error Page

A 404 page exists to acknowledge an error. It usually occurs when a link is wrongly-typed, a post has been moved, or a page or post was deleted. Consequently, the server can’t find the page or post and so serves up the “page not found”. Some themes come with a basic 404 page. This can be enhanced. Test your site. Type your address with a page you know doesn’t emxist eg http://your website.com/ducksfly. If you have a 404 template it will pop up. If you don’t, you will get a page served by your webhost and often they are unappealing. The purpose of improving… Read More »How to Improve your 404 Error Page