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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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”.
“Article writing is dead!”
“You can’t get business that way anymore.”
“It doesn’t help you get visitors to your site.”
If you are using your website as a blog and doing it to satisfy your need to write then having lots of visitors to your site may not matter.
For most website owners, the site serves the purpose to generate leads, raise awareness or make sales. To do that, people need to be able to find and enjoy your site.