SEO - 1stWebDesigner

A Better Google Analytics Alternative

Editorial Team — Wed, 22 May 2024 13:38:08 +0000

Our recent migration to GA4 left a lot to be desired and led us to explore for better google analytics alternatives. We tried just about everything out there, including Plausible, Fathom, and several others, all with their own pros and cons. The biggest hurdles were: limited features and higher costs.

That’s why we were so excited when we stumbled across Fullres recently. Not only do they have the best pricing around but they’re bundling multiple tools we use—ad revenue, analytics, web vitals—all into a single platform. Usually, you have to subscribe to multiple services and jump between browser tabs to see that amount of data together. Looking at their roadmap, there’s a lot more coming too.

Fullres also stood out with their quick 5-second installation setup. You get instant access to audience statistics in a GDPR-compliant manner and built-in Web Vitals data to continuously improve key metrics such as First Contentful Paint (FCP), Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), and other more.

For those who found the switch to GA4 challenging, Fullres is worth a try. It’s currently invite-only, so join the waitlist as soon as possible to get early access.

How to Monitor Website Page Experience with Lighthouse

Adam Henson — Tue, 10 Jan 2023 09:52:07 +0000

The world of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has evolved dramatically in recent years, compared to the black box it once was a decade ago. One of the hotter topics broadcasted from Google is about a set of metrics reflecting “page experience” referred to as Web Vitals, which now play a part in search ranking. One way to gather insight into factors that encompass Web Vitals metrics is to utilize Google’s Lighthouse tool.

What is Lighthouse?

Google Lighthouse is an open-source, automated tool that collects and utilizes lab data to measure web page quality. It determines quality based on a set of metrics and categories of metrics that can be thought of as a reflection of “page experience”. Lab data from Lighthouse mirrors Web Vitals and in fact include certain Web Vitals metrics.

How to Use Lighthouse

There are several ways one can run Lighthouse – the most commonly known being directly from the browser in Google Chrome’s DevTools. Upon running Lighthouse, you specify the URL and type of device (desktop or mobile) to run against. When Lighthouse completes, it provides a report with audit scores and detailed diagnostics on how to improve.

You can run Lighthouse manually, from Chrome DevTools for example, or in an automated fashion. Below are the available ways to run Lighthouse.

How to Monitor Page Experience with Lighthouse and Foo

Out-of-the box Lighthouse can only run manually, but with a bit of crafting and resourcefulness, you can run Lighthouse automatically! Foo is a service that provides a way of monitoring website quality by automating Lighthouse and watching for change in results.

Check out this post for more details about setting up Foo to monitor page experience with Lighthouse.

4 Top SEO Plugins For WordPress (+ Bonus Tools)

Brenda Stokes Barron — Wed, 08 Apr 2020 13:00:18 +0000

When building out a WordPress website, it’s vital to have all the right tools on hand. And to get eyeballs on your content, that means building out a solid SEO strategy. A relatively hands-off way to accomplish this is through the use of SEO plugins. Luckily, there are quite a few plugins available for WordPress that make optimizing your site for SEO super easy.

Let’s take a look at some of these SEO plugins for WordPress then dive into discussing a few other tools that can take the guesswork out of selecting keywords and tracking results.

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Yoast SEO

First on our list is Yoast SEO. This WordPress plugin is one of the most popular, for good reason. It acts as a one-stop shop for on-page SEO. Once installed, it automatically adds widgets to each post and page you can use to add SEO titles, descriptions, assign keywords, as well as other items. You can also use it to add Open Graph metadata. Additionally, you can use it to add social media images to each post along with titles and descriptions optimized for social media platforms. Lastly, Yoast creates an XML sitemap for you and can be used for managing SEO redirects. Both a free and premium version of the plugin are available.

SEOPress

Another great option is SEOPress. This plugin covers many of the same attributes as Yoast by adding fields for customizing a post or page’s meta title, description, social media content, redirects, and XML sitemaps. It’s interface is a bit easier to navigate, however, while still offering a wider range of options for experienced developers. This plugin is available in a free and premium version as well.

All in One SEO Pack

Still another popular option is the All in One SEO Pack. This SEO plugin for WordPress includes a full set of tools you can implement immediately on your website. Customize meta titles and descriptions; set up an XML sitemap, create image sitemaps, and more. It’s also compatible with WooCommerce. As you might expect, the premium version of this plugin comes with additional features and allows for a greater level of control over your site’s optimization efforts.

Rank Math

The last of the plugins we’ll be discussing here is Rank Math. This WordPress SEO plugin is super easy to use and makes it easy to optimize your posts and pages for search engines and for social media. Use the provided setup wizard to import information from other SEO plugins or manually customize meta titles, descriptions, and images. Use it to create Open Graph metadata, an XML sitemap, integrate with Google Search Console and more.

Bonus Tools & Resources

Though the primary focus here is SEO plugins for WordPress, we’d be remiss if we didn’t at least mention a few other tools that make building a comprehensive SEO strategy easier.

KeywordTool.io: This simple, straightforward tool delivers keyword suggestions by using Google Autocomplete. It’s as simple as it is genius.
SEOQuake: This browser extension can be used to assess a wide number of on-page SEO variables for any website you visit.
Ahrefs: The ultimate competitor research tools. Ahrefs allows you to see why your competitors are ranking for the keywords they are so you can plan a comparable strategy.
SEMRush: This tools allows you to keep track of how your site is performing as well as monitor competitors, backlinks, and more.
Google Search Console: Last on our list, this tool allows you to research keywords and monitor their ranking on any website you manage.

Pick a WordPress SEO Plugin and Start Ranking

In case you didn’t know, having an SEO strategy is imperative for any site’s success. Sure, some happen upon it accidentally, but most keep a mindful eye on keywords and rankings. And you can take a lot of the legwork out of this effort by using a WordPress SEO plugin and by utilizing some of the research and monitoring tools listed here. The results will be well worth the price of admission, so to speak.

A SEO Checklist for Your WordPress Website

Eric Karkovack — Sat, 01 Dec 2018 07:19:23 +0000

A website, no matter how amazing it looks or how great the content, isn’t worth much if people don’t know it exists. That’s why SEO generates a never-ending stream of hype. A well-optimized site is much more likely to be found through organic search.

If your site has been built with WordPress, then you’re already off to a great start with the optimization process. WordPress is built with SEO in mind and it’s flexible. That means you can build a SEO strategy that matches your particular needs.

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But there are some things you need to be aware of when it comes to optimizing a WordPress website. Beyond the standard SEO practices, the open nature of the platform means that you’ll need to inspect your theme and plugins to ensure you have the best possible setup.

With that in mind, here is a handy SEO checklist for optimizing your WordPress website:

Check WordPress Settings

WordPress has a few settings that will certainly have an effect on SEO. But when you’re rushing to launch a site, it’s easy to forget about them. Before your site goes public, make sure to check out the following items:

Settings > General

Ensure that both the Site Title and Tagline fields are set correctly. While we usually set the Title while installing WordPress, the Tagline often stays set to the default “Just Another WordPress Site”. If you’re not paying attention, it will show up in your search listings. Feel free to either change the Tagline to something more relevant or delete it altogether.

Settings > Permalinks

WordPress generally comes with SEO friendly Permalinks already set. But it’s still worth fiddling around with to make sure you have the best setting for your type of site. The Post Name option is usually just fine. But if you publish often, Day and Name or Month and Name may be more appropriate.

Settings > Reading

While a site is still in development, often times we might block search engines…then forget to unblock them after launch. It’s best to check the Search Engine Visibility setting before launching your site – just in case.

Make Sure Your Theme Uses Proper Markup

A well-made WordPress theme can have a very positive impact when it comes to SEO. But older or poorly-coded themes could make it harder for search engines to appropriately index your content. Here are some items to look for in your theme:

HTML5 Semantic Markup

At the very basic level, you’re looking for a theme that contains HTML5 semantic markup. This means that content areas are marked with tags such as header, footer, article and aside. Navigation should be wrapped in a nav tag. And page/post titles should be wrapped in h1 headings.

The beauty of these tags is that they provide search engines with some context when analyzing your site. While your site may not look differently to the naked eye, search bots will see this markup as a way to more efficiently index things.

Structured Data

On the higher end of the feature scale would be the inclusion of Schema.org structured data. Descriptive attributes are added to tags for things like events, reviews or even a person. Breadcrumb navigation is also quite useful here. This provides search engines with extra information that could be displayed in search results. For example, if you’ve ever noticed a star rating in a listing – that comes from structured data.

If you build your own WordPress themes, this is something fairly simple to strategically add in. But if you’re using a third-party theme, you’ll want to check to see if it’s included. No worries if it’s not in your theme, though. You can still add this data through various plugins.

Mobile Friendly Responsive Layout

Whether you build your own theme or use a third-party offering, it simply must work well on mobile devices. This is not only a usability issue; it also pertains to SEO as well. Google will mark sites that aren’t optimized for mobile devices in search results. That could cost you precious clicks and sales.

Install SEO-Boosting Plugins

There are a number of great SEO related plugins for WordPress. Which one you choose really should come down to your needs and personal preference. Yoast SEO is a great all-around choice and has over 5 million active installs. All in One SEO Pack has over 3 million active installs and is also a solid pick. They’re two of the most well-known and popular plugins but they’re far from the only ones available.

Regardless of the plugin you choose, there are some standard features that you’ll want to have:

Optimize Individual Pages and Posts

SEO isn’t just about your home page. All of your content should be optimized in some way. A plugin that enables you to individually optimize each page and post is a great help. Things you’ll want to change include titles, keywords and descriptions. It’s also handy if you can individually turn off indexing for a specific piece of content.

Automatic Optimization

For the content you don’t necessarily want to fine-tune yourself, it’s nice if a plugin will do some of the work for you. A good SEO plugin will allow you to change title, description and permalink formulas to automatically tweak things in the background.

Add OpenGraph Data

OpenGraph data is imperative for allowing your content to be shared on social media. It grabs items such as page titles, featured images and excerpts for display on services like Facebook and Twitter. You’ll want use a plugin that adds these tags to your site and allows you to customize settings.

XML Sitemap

Submitting a XML sitemap to Google is an easy way to ensure that they can index your content. Look for the ability to both create sitemaps and customize what content is (and isn’t) included within them.

Analytics

Don’t forget about analytics! Whether you use Google’s service or someone else’s – add tracking code through a plugin or your theme. It’s the best way to find out whether your strategies are working.

These features may all be included in just one plugin, or you might use a combination of niche plugins to accomplish this functionality. Either way, your site should be taking advantage of each item on the list.

Maintain Best Practices in Content

The same SEO best practices for content writing and markup still apply when using WordPress. Since there are plenty of resources on the subject, we won’t go into great detail here. But in general you’ll want to comb through your site and check for the following:

Proper Use of Heading Tags

This one still trips up some people because the classic WordPress editor doesn’t make it so obvious. Content writers will often separate distinct sections within a page with bolded text, rather than the more semantically-correct h2 tag. The new Gutenberg editor, slated for launch in WordPress 5.0 may help in that adding headings will be a bit more of an intuitive process.

Use Internal Links

When you have other related content within your site – link to it. It’s something recommended for SEO and also may encourage visitors to dig deeper into your content.

ALT Text for Images

Images within your content should contain alt attribute text. This is vital for accessibility and Google recommends it for SEO as well. If your site is rather large, you may want to use a plugin to help you find and assign descriptive text to save some time.

You Are Officially Optimized

The combination of the right theme, plugins and content strategy can make your WordPress website fully optimized for search engines. And with so many outstanding tools available, you can mix and match to achieve your goals.

So, whether you’re launching a new site or maintaining an existing one, take the time to go through the checklist above to ensure you’re doing all you can with regards to SEO. A little bit of effort can make a huge difference in your results.

How to Optimize Your Existing WordPress Blog Posts For SEO

Editorial Team — Wed, 12 Jul 2017 21:27:51 +0000

So you wrote a lot of great posts over the past few years which still receive a lot of traffic from search engines, but you’re always wondering how long it will last.

Or maybe you were affected by the latest Google algorithm changes and lost some traffic? Perhaps you have noticed that you have been affected by these issues, perhaps not. Whether you are affected or not, one question remains: how do I clean up and optimize my existing blog posts?

Important SEO Tip: Make sure that your articles are getting updated! Ever heard of the concept “evergreen content”? It’s best to write content which never becomes outdated, but in reality, it is nearly impossible

Things change so fast now, new technologies are released, programming languages are changing, everything is changing every day! You need to keep up with that! And while you can write more new articles, it is much harder to get good rankings to new pages than it is to just update your old ones!

But how do you do that? What tools can you use to make post editing and optimizing easier and faster?

Ok, let me point out some of the most common issues with old posts:

Some tips and techniques aren’t relevant anymore
You have broken links in your posts, where sources you linked to aren’t there anymore
Even with anti-spam plugins, you have some bad comments on your old posts
SEO in posts do not exist, or is bad or average, but definitely could be improved

How do you find content worth updating?

If you don’t have that many posts, it may not be an issue for you, but in case you have written 100, 200, 1000 posts in the past, it quickly can start to become one. If you have a few number of posts, you should update all of them as soon as you can, because it won’t take too much time.

However if you want to save some time or it’s not realistic to update all your articles, you should take a look at your Google Analytics (or any other tool you are using to monitor your traffic) and check which of your posts receive the most traffic. With Google Analytics you can easily export this data to an XLS or PDF document so you have something to refer to.

Here are some easy steps to get your information from Google Analytics:

Sign in to Google Analytics, pick a range of one to three months
Browse through Content/Site Content/Landing Pages
Check show rows (50, 100, 200 – your pick) on the bottom of landing page list
Export document and you have your list!

Since those pages drive the most traffic to your website (and usually those aren’t the newest pages), it makes sense to update those posts to let them perform even better and to improve your visitors experience!

At least in 1WD analytics, we have the most traffic coming from Google, where people’s attention span is really short. Either they find what they are looking for or they go back on Google to keep browsing. Your goal is to provide visitors with up-to-date information, to increase the likelihood that they will stick around more.

Let’s start focusing on each aspect one at time, so you have clear action list what to do to update your old articles, pages.

Issue No. 1: Some tips, techniques have changed and aren’t up to date anymore

There are different kind of content and each type requires a different approach, but let me summarize. Basically you have two paths you can take:

Changes are small and in few minutes you can update the post and it is all good again
Changes are huge and it is easier to quickly update the biggest changes and create a new followup post about the same topic.

The first step would be awesome because it doesn’t require a lot of time, but unfortunately usually we will have to take the second route. We still should update information in old posts which are really not appropriate anymore, but just make the most necessary changes to save time.

And yes, it is actually better to write a new post (unless that’s not landing page, but you should update it regularly anyway) and just interlink those articles. But don’t think it’s that bad! If an existing article received a lot of traffic on a specific topic, chances are a new article will perform even better!

Issue No. 2: Fixing broken links

With old posts you will often have some broken links which lead nowhere and makes the user experience worse. In this post I will assume you are using WordPress and list some useful plugins and online tools you can use to find those broken links.

Xenu’s Link Sleuth

Xenu’s Link Sleuth checks web sites for broken links. Link verification is done on “normal” links, images, frames, plug-ins, backgrounds, local image maps, stylesheets, scripts and java applets. It displays a continuously updated list of URLs which you can sort by different criteria. A report can be produced at any time.

This is the most popular broken link checker, but it’s only on Windows.

Screaming Frog

ScreamingFrog is my favorite because I am a Mac user. The app interface is a bit better and processing is really fast compared to other software and online solutions.

The Screaming Frog SEO Spider is a small desktop program you can install on your PC or Mac which spiders websites’ links, images, CSS, script and apps from an SEO perspective. It fetches key onsite page elements for SEO, presents them in tabs by type and allows you to filter for common SEO issues, or slice and dice the data how you see fit by exporting into Excel. You can view, analyze and filter the crawl data as it’s gathered and updated continuously in the program’s user interface.

How to find broken links:

Download and install software
Enter URL to spider, press start and wait while processing is done
Check external links and filter:all (I thought it should be HTML, but it’s not showing all the links there)
Order list by status, and check for statuses with errors like DNS lookup failed, connection refused, etc.

W3C Link Checker

This Link Checker looks for issues in links, anchors and referenced objects in a web page, CSS style sheet, or recursively on a whole web site. This is an option you can use in case you want an online tool, however it is much slower while processing data and results aren’t showcased in a clean list like other downloadable tools.

WordPress Plugin: Broken Link Checker

I guessed you would also like to have WordPress plugin for this task so I found a very popular and recently updated plugin with more than one million downloads.

This plugin will monitor your blog, looking for broken links and let you know if any are found. I would recommend to use this plugin for overall site monitoring and link checking, but not exactly for old article cleaning up process. It has some handy features, but it’s not that effective for our task.

Monitors links in your posts, pages, comments, the blogroll, and custom fields (optional).
Detects links that don’t work, missing images and redirects.
Notifies you either via the Dashboard or by email. Makes broken links display differently in posts (optional).
Prevents search engines from following broken links (optional).
You can search and filter links by URL, anchor text and so on.

Here you go, with these tools you can easily find broken links in posts. Updating these links can be a bit messy and time-consuming, since you need to actually find the link in the article and then Google its new destination.

Open post in WordPress dashboard so you can edit it
Use your preferred software to search for broken links in posts (recommended: ScreamingFrog)
Open broken links in browser
Copy broken link and search for it (Code view: CTRL+F for search) on WordPress post, so you can see how previous headline was called or get some keywords to search for
Use Google to search for these keywords to find if link has changed destination
If you find that article/resource, just replace links in WordPress post and you’re done
If you cannot find past posting, just pick new article or remove link completely

This is quite a messy process that you need to do, but I haven’t figured or found a way to do that faster and not sure if you can do that at all. If you know of a better solution, please let me know – I will be very, very thankful!

Issue No. 3: Cleaning up comment section from SPAM

Ok, this is a really huge issue – no matter what you do, there are still some spam comments that get through even the best plugins and there’s nothing you can do about it other than coming back and cleaning up the mess.

I would advise to close comments to old posts, because most visitors just come and spam there hoping to get some link juice, they don’t usually don’t come to contribute or be helpful. Visitors tend to leave valuable comments in new posts, but as posts become older they start to attract spammers.

Unfortunately after extensive research I couldn’t find any plugin to rely on to clean up existing spam. I found one plugin which checked existing comments, but it hasn’t updated since 2009. There are also some database queries you can create and use, like banning some users by ip, website or email, but they are a bit risky. With database editing you greatly improve chances to mess something up, so if you consider taking this route, always backup your database – better to be safe than sorry. Since my site wasn’t heavily targeted by one spammer, I didn’t consider banning IP’s an option.

Some tips I suggest:

Close comments on WordPress after 60-90 days.
In the beginning of this post I advised you to get a list with the most popular monthly articles from analytics, remember? Visit these posts in WordPress dashboard and check comments there. Since they are the most popular pages, it is the most likely that you’ll find the most spam comments there trying to hurt your rankings. Just clean the most popular articles from bad comments and links getting maximal impact from smallest effort.
However if you are really hating SPAM like I do, go to WordPress comment section and work your way through ALL the approved comments, mercifully deleting all of them looking like spam (or ones which didn’t add anything to discussion). I have 30,000 comments on 1WD, but today I spent 4 hours to go through 2,000 of them, and surprisingly almost half of them where SPAM (even Akismet plugin didn’t catch them).

These tips may sound stupid and time-consuming, but I really couldn’t find a better solution. You can try some automated ways, but no matter how good your software or plugin is, it won’t find comments, which are submitted manually in very sneaky manner.

Make sure new SPAM doesn’t get through

Ok, while there aren’t any good plugins to check existing spam comments, thankfully there are a lot of awesome plugins doing a great job to make sure you don’t get new spam!

To make sure you don’t get new spam, you can improve WordPress’ built-in settings and use a few handy plugins to take care of it.

Here are my WordPress Discussion settings:

What do we have here?

I do not allow ping backs and trackbacks anymore, because usually these just make my site look spammy and do not spread the word and help as it was intended in past.
Automatically close comments on articles older than 90 days. I picked 3 months – more than enough. Believe me I know that most comments to old posts are being created with the intention of gaming the system and are spam.
I always approve each comment manually, with the exception that a comment author has a previously approved comment. This technique is encouraged because you should reply to each good comment anyway and by keeping track of them, you make sure you notice it and respond!

What AntiSpam plugins you should use?

Akismet

No brainer really, even with all the criticism about this plugin lately, I still think it is a must-have plugin. It gets most of the spam out of the way and it has several handy features in comment panel like the Check for Spam button for example..

AntiSpam Bee

If you completely hate Akismet for whatever reason you can alternatively get Antispam Bee. It uses a similar system to Akismet, but instead of sending comment to Akismet, you send comments to Project Honey Pot which is community based.

You can get an API key to HoneyPot and join the fight against spammers by reporting spammers and learn from other people’s spammer reports.

Growmap Anti Spambot Plugin: GASP

Defeat automated spambots by adding a client side generated checkbox asking the comment author to confirm that they are not a spammer.

Very simple plugin, but it has a unique checkbox instead of classic CAPTCHAs. Spammers have tools which help break captchas, but they would need to put extra effort to get that checkbox checked. And personally I hate to fill captcha’s when I just want to leave comment on my favorite blog, I would prefer a simple checkbox instead. Tried it on 1WD and it works.

SI CAPTCHA Anti-Spam

If you still want a CAPTCHA on your blog, this is the most popular plugin for that. This plugin adds CAPTCHA anti-spam methods to WordPress on the forms for comments, registration, lost password, login, or all. For WP, WPMU, and BuddyPress.

With these plugins you will be very well prepared for future SPAM coming to your site!

Issue No. 4: Improving SEO on past posts

Chances are, if your posts are ranking well, you did something right with your SEO or social promotion. There isn’t much you can do on old articles, because articles are already ranking well for specific keywords.

You can still check which keywords your articles are rank well for and you may find that you are targeting the wrong keywords with your existing SEO plugin. If you want to find out which keywords bring traffic to exact posts read below.

Follow these steps if you have Google Analytics:

Go to Content/Landing pages and click the post you want to research;
Select secondary dimension:Keyword and you’ll see which are the top keywords used to find your post;
Use this information to change, improve existing search key phrases you are targeting in post SEO settings. Oh, you can update SEO headline and meta description too;

Recommended SEO Plugins To Choose For WordPress Optimization

I am not sure which SEO plugins you are using now, but here is what I suggest. In the past I used the All in One SEO plugin, but a few months ago I switched to Yoast WordPress SEO plugin and have never been more satisfied!

WordPress SEO by Yoast

Improve your WordPress SEO: Write better content and have a fully optimized WordPress site using the WordPress SEO plugin by Yoast.

With this plugin you can easily optimize your new and existing content by setting SEO headlines, focus keyword, meta descriptions. This plugin really helps to get your posts and whole WordPress website ready for SEO.

I won’t give any tips on how to use this plugin because all the training you need is included in the WordPress dashboard itself!

Scribe SEO

This plugin won’t do any wonders for your SEO, but it will help you analyze if you have optimized your articles enough. This is a paid plugin, but I suggest you try it for a month or two, get familiar with positive SEO practices and then do it on your own.

Scribe will help you do keyword research, analyze your content and help crosslink content within your own site.

Mobile SEO – Can You Optimize for User Experience and Google at the Same Time?

Editorial Team — Mon, 12 Jun 2017 21:11:57 +0000

There is no need to prioritize because you have to please both Google and your users, a practice that comes highly recommended. In doing the process, you don’t need to invest in an insane amount of resources into the process where the return might make or break you and your online solution.

By adopting these two requirements, you will be able to rank higher in Google and people will be able to find you much easier than before. With the great web user experience you give your visitors, they will want to recommend you to others.

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Start With The User

There is no need to prioritize, as mentioned earlier, but you need to start somewhere. Focusing on the experience, you give your users is a good starting point for your web solution whether it is a simple website, a web application, or a complex back-end software.

At the base of each of your projects, you have to consider the user. Without the user, you won’t move forward regardless of how much you try to. You’ve heard of the term User Experience (or UX) before, but what does it mean for your product?

As much as I hate to tell you this, it depends. Users will not put a price on the same elements in two different web solutions. On top of this, your audience will also react differently to what your competitor has although your product does basically the same.

Finding out what your audience reacts positively to is such a complex matter to discuss that it should have its own article; therefore, we won’t dive too much into what’s in the mind of your users. However, whatever your business is, the lack of investing into user experience will always backfire. Always! Luckily for you, wherever your users come from and whatever their pursuit is, they will always appreciate these following elements that will give them a great product experience.

Nowadays you must have a responsive website.

Be Responsive Already – Have A Responsive Website!

You’ve probably heard this thousands of times. Unfortunately, I still see so many examples out there of websites that are not responsive yet. It has been more than three years since media queries have become W3C standards but why hasn’t everybody adopted them yet? If it’s something that gets me out of my mind, that is ignorance for the widely accepted standards. Don’t be ignorant with your web solution because you’re playing with the chances of your own project.

I have a difficult time believing that you don’t know much about responsive web design yet. But if you really don’t (dude, seriously?), get this book. Read it from cover to cover, then read it again. It’s been written relatively recently and it’s considered as “responsive web design 101” for 2015.

Do you know how readable your website is on mobile or tablet?

Responsive Design Typography

Yes, I’m still holding on to this responsive madness topic. Typography is such an important part of a website that ignoring it will score you some negative points with your readers. It is often easy to read text on desktop but God I’ve squinted my eyes a lot in the past years trying to decode simple text on mobile. I hate that, don’t make me do it – ever again! I will leave your site quicker than a Ferrari in pole position without any chance of returning ever again.

Improving typography for portable devices is not that big of a deal. If you don’t have basic typography training, it is always a safe bet to increase the font size and the line-height.

Never use a font that is smaller than 14px on mobile (get used to the idea of having at least 16px, no more than 8-9 words per line) and line height that is at least 18px. This will make the text easier to read. Keep headlines short and make it clear. They are headlines, so you need to use big font size and bold with a maximum of four words per line.

Web fonts are quite the big deal in typography, and I advise you to make use of them. They will save you money and time plus; they are SEO-friendly. Just to make sure there is a check on everything, always have a fall-back typeface in case a browser doesn’t download custom web fonts.

When you write copy, make sure to break paragraphs into smaller chunks of text. Take a look at the image below and think of which would you rather read should you end up with only one choice.

The text is the same, the only difference being good formatting and better typography on the right.

The Art Of Negative Space

This article is not supposed to be a crash course in graphic design, but there are so many things a good graphic designer can do to improve the user experience of a website. One of them is using negative space, as this allows the human eye to rest.

Your web page will not feel as heavy if you employ this very well and I advise you to get a good graphic designer to take a look at your website if you feel that it currently is “too heavy” at a quick scan.

Create live validation of the input fields.

Have Contact and Checkout Forms That Work

Web forms can range from sign-up forms and contact forms to input fields in a check-out process or even a search box. Make sure they work. You’ve probably already checked the code behind ten times and tested it. The forms work as they should. But do they really work?

I’ve got no doubts your code does just what it is supposed to do, but this is not just about the back-end. The user doesn’t care about your code. The user wants the forms to work, to give him feedback when feedback is needed and to fill them out as quickly as possible.

By the number of websites doing it poorly, error handling in user forms must be one of the most challenging problems there is – up there with landing on Mars and figuring out teleportation. Let me tell you a secret: it’s actually not that hard.

One thing you can do to ensure less confusion is create live validation of the input fields. That means if you need a phone number from me, make sure I can’t submit the form if there is any kind of text in the field that are not digits. Additionally, if you need a number in a specific format, don’t ask me to write it that way. I don’t care if you need the number in US format but let me write a ten-character number and format it yourself with a snippet of code. How hard can it be?

If I submit the form and there is an error, you need to let me know of the exact error and what I can do to fix it. Don’t – I repeat, don’t! – ask me to fill in all the fields again. That’s where you lost a potential client.

Example of error handling in mobile app.

Avoid confusion in the forms by using clear language, clear placement and clear colors. The example above is an almost perfect one. There is no doubt about what you need to correct and the error message can’t be missed.

It would be perfect if the error message would also point out the error: Please enter a valid email address. Unfortunately “.xom” is not a valid domain. It would require more code, but users will have no doubt understand why the error appeared in the first place.

If you want to get better at handling error messages in input fields, Christian Holst wrote a great article three years ago about this which is still relevant today.

It’s well known that drop-off rates for long web forms are huge, but they are avoidable. If a user starts to fill in a form, it’s because he wants to. If he stops before he is done, you’re at fault. Most of the time it is because you ask for a big investment from them – bigger than their return.

Would you subscribe to a newsletter if the form requires you to fill in the name, email, address and credit card information? No way in hell. But you would gladly give all these information away if you buy something online. It’s all about keeping a balance between what you ask for and what you give in return.

Shorter forms are always more successful.

In fact, studies show that shorter forms can even convert over 150% better than their longer counterparts. Think about it for a while before adding a new field to your form.

Use SVG In Your Websites.

Use SVG Whenever You Can

Some of you might not know what an SVG image is, so I will explain it to you very briefly. SVG stands for Scalable Vector Graphics and, as the name says, it represents a vector image that can be scaled up an down according to the screen it is viewed on.

SVG works very well with CSS and is perfect for responsive web design. Together with responsive typography and responsive layouts it creates a great viewing experience for the user regardless of what device they are on. SVG images are better than normal, rasterized images and even better than font icons simply because they can quickly adapt to the environment while still looking great.

Moreover, with font icons you are limited to a single color, while SVG files are much more adaptable when it comes to the colors.

You can use SVG graphics in pretty much everything: logos, UI elements, graphs, icons and many others. SVG is really the future and deserves an article of its own. Luckily, there’s a great one written by the team of Design Your Way.

Check On Design.. Now What Else?

Let me put it down for you: UX is not only design. Remember this. Design is just a part of this big spectrum of elements. There are many things you can do to improve the UX that do not necessarily have something to do with design. It is easy to confuse the two, because most things you create express themselves through visual queues. A good example is the navigation.

Put special attention to navigation. Make sure it works.

Design Effective Navigation Menu

The navigation menu has to be, without any doubt, the first thing visitors see. The navigation and the logo. Users need to know where they are and where they can go.

A website with poor navigation is like a complex freeway structure without signs. It might be cool to drive your Tesla on it with 175 km/h, but not knowing which exit to take quickly turns into a bit of a problem.

As the starting point of a website, the navigation has to be simple and clean. Don’t cram a lot of unnecessary information into it and at the same time, don’t be vague about it. You can’t afford to confuse your users.

Sometimes it is not that easy to keep your navigation simple; look at Amazon. However, most web designers never get the chance to work on such a complex system, therefore keep in mind: simple navigation is the best navigation there is. Some very simple tips are:

to keep the main navigation at the top right (logo on the left)
limiting the number of options to no more than 6
using short and descriptive words (“Contact” instead of “Hit us up”)
having the navigation in the footer if the pages are long and having a navigation that is easy to find and clickable if you are on a portable device.

Other things you can do are quite straightforward. I advise you not to make use of any kind of sneaky tactics or redirects in order to get something you want from the user. He will find out and leave and this will only make him not want to recommend your website.

Badly implemented pop-overs are also something that annoys me as much as anything else. A few days ago I was reading this article on my iPhone from a worldwide-known online magazine. A pop-up came up telling me about cookie usage. That’s fair enough. But there was no button to accept or to cancel. There was no way to exit that pop-up. I’ve clicked on it, I swiped, I pinched, I did everything there is to do.

Actually, I did more than I should have, because the website redirected me to another page (it was probably me clicking on something else without realizing because of the frustration). Now that was a really bad experience. A few seconds after… surprise: the overlay slowly disappeared on its own.

How hard would it have been for them to let me know from the start that this overlay will fade out in 10 seconds? Not much harder than a single line of code, but they still left it out and frustrate me instead.

Depending on who your audience is, there are probably some other tips I could write about but it would take a while. An in-depth analysis is on the table for an article a bit further down the road but you should be set for now. If you master these first tips, you are halfway through to a successful web solution.

Now, for the second part, what do those darn Google robots want from you?

Do you know what Google wants from you?

Part 2. Make Google Happy

It is not only important to make the user happy, it is also important to make sure Google ranks your website well, otherwise, nobody will find you. You will notice, however, how following some of the tips in the first part of the article will also help with the second part.

Make Your Website Responsive (again)

According to many sources online, including Social Media Today and Google itself, it is highly recommended to have a responsive web design for your website. Starting April 21st 2015, Google is going to make some small changes to its search algorithm making it easier for users to find mobile content.

Mobile friendliness is something Google looks very seriously into and although nobody actually said that Google will rank mobile better than desktop results, many experts believe this is the way the search engine is heading to. With more people browsing from mobile than desktop, it goes without saying that this is the right way to go.

Google’s Zineb Ait Bahajji was quoted saying in a Google Webmaster Help thread that they do not rank mobile better, but they prefer it because it is:

“easier to maintain, it’s future-friendly and we see less configuration errors with RWD (faulty redirects or bad user-agent detection for instance)”

By creating a website that is responsive, you make both your users happy but also Google, and this is rule number 1 to keep in mind.

Don’t worry about your PageRank. A website that is responsive is better than a website which redirects the users to a m dot version (something like m.1stwebdesigner.com – a practice that was very popular in the beginning of the 2000s). Although the video is one year and a half old, Matt Cutts from Google explains below why.

How fast is your website?

Make Your Website Load Faster

Google loves quick websites, it is as simple as that. Google itself loads incredibly quick and has the same expectations from you. It has been four already years since the search engine started to rank quick websites better and today there is even more emphasis on it than ever before, with more and more people browsing from mobile. I believe this will continue to be an important factor.

Start by testing your website and see how fast it loads. Minimize the number of images and clunky code, don’t use lots of plugins and only embed necessary video. You can quickly minimize the weight of your website by following these tips, but if you want even more help, hire a professional and make use of Google Webmaster Tools.

This is how a simple CDN network looks like, with the origin server in South America.

Not only does your page speed improves the user experience because it minimizes loading times and leads to higher engagement, retention, conversions and lower bounce rates, but it is so important that Google actually developed a tool for it.

PageSpeed Insights is a set of tools that can help you identify performance best practices for your website and can help you automate the optimization process.

One of the easiest things to do for page speed improvement is paying for a better hosting plan. Poor hosting is often the main reason behind websites loading slowly. However, it is also the lack of Content Delivery Network (CDN). CDN is easy to explain. Instead of having a server in the US which everybody in the world has to access, this network makes sure the content of a website is delivered quicker to people who are located in other parts of the world via edge servers, so their requests don’t have to “travel” such a long distance.

Create a good content for your visitors.

Content Is (still) King

It is already a cliché, I know, but good content is still the best way to rank high in Google. You want to write really good content with the readers in mind and not for the sake of keywords.

There is nothing wrong with having keywords every once in a while, but don’t overdo it and, again, think of the reader. Does the article offer value? Is it long enough? Does it get shared a lot on social media? All these are important if you want to rank better in Google.

“How long should an article be?”

– is a question that I get a lot. It depends but articles that are shorter than 1.000 words don’t have much value to Google unless they are a hit on social media or you are The New York Times. Moreover, if you are The New York Times, you probably don’t care about ranking anymore. However, if you still need to work on that, keep in mind: Google likes long, informational and useful articles.

I also think it is a good idea to keep a balance. I can write an article or 4k+ words at any time, but how many people will read the whole piece? Not many. The consequence will be that not many people will share it on social media. For informational articles on blogs I personally believe between 1.500 and 2.500 words is the sweet spot, so a bit shorter than this article. If you can stay in between these two, you are where you should be and are doing well.

The bottom line of this is that you need to write content that is worth sharing. Offer value, not articles filled with keywords. The guidelines I wrote for you above are good to keep in mind, but quality is still the most important of them. You can write a hit article that is 800 words long and still do better than a 3.000 words article that is written just for the sake of Google. Write for your audience; and do it well!

Learn To Love FeedTheBot: Optimize Your Website For Google

If you want to get a quick overview of your website in Google’s eyes, FeedTheBot is one of the best tools out there. You only have to fill in your website and let the software check it up. After a few seconds it will return with a string of errors that your website needs to straighten up.

Start with the most critical ones, but don’t overlook the other ones. The better you do here, the more Google will appreciate your website.

It is important to remember that Google is not a person, but a robot. Google doesn’t get a feel of the user experience you offer to your visitors, so the best it can do is to rank your website after a complex set of parametres.

It can be anything from the number of broken links, usage of robots.txt, JavaScript and CSS usage, sneaky redirects, keyowrd stuffing and so on. If you have dynamic content on your website, it is always a good idea to pay FeedTheBot a visit every once in a while and make sure things are still in check.

Mobile SEO Action Cheatsheet

Reading an article like this one and learning what you have to do is the easy part of improving the UX of a web solution – implementing it is the tough part. Now that you know the reasoning behind every and each action to take, we have a cheatsheet for you below, so you can start working on this right away. So, what do you have to do?

Get down and design a great website. Make use of negative space, beautiful colors, and good design practices.
Make sure the navigation is clear, easy to use and doesn’t confuse the user.
Make sure your website is responsive. This helps both the user experience and Google to rank you higher.
Wherever you make use of images or UI elements, try to make use of SVG instead of JPG or PNG
Check how your typography responds to a screen change and ensure your type looks great on all devices.
If you have any forms, check them a couple of times (both the code, but also the experience they give in the form of errors and validation).
Find a good hosting plan. If you can find a CDN server, go for it, although it is a bit more expensive.
After creating the website, use Google Webmaster Tools and PageSpeed Insights to make the website even quicker. Aim for a loading time of under 1 second.
Start creating good content that is useful to your users. Keep doing this all the time.
Use FeedTheBot to check on other errors and solve the most critical ones first, but don’t forget about the other ones.

Conclusion

There are two factors you have to please today if you want to have an online presence: the user and Google. I feel we’ve already established that. The good part is that by only following a limited set of tips, you can please both in a short amount of time. If you are about to create a new online presence or think of how to improve your current one, this article should be the starting point for you.

How to Write an SEO Optimized Blog Post in WordPress

Editorial Team — Sun, 12 Mar 2017 21:12:50 +0000

It’s pretty easy to submit your blog or website to the search engines by just copying your sitemap’s URL and hitting the next buttons for their submission process.

But in order to make the search engines pick your new posts and inject them into their site’s data, we need to optimize our posts, just as we optimize our blog.

It includes the keywords, that we use in our blog or website’s header as well as the Titles and the Tags. So in order to write a perfectly SEO optimized blog post, we need to think about it just as a web page and use some, or all, of my tips below.

We will focus mainly on WordPress, for it is pretty easy to optimize for the search engines.

Post Title and SEO Title

Many users might not have yet realized that the title you write in the top bar is different than the one you write down in the SEO plugin’s bar. The title that you write in the POST Title bar is the one that appears on your blog above your post’s description or on the header bar of your browser.

Whereas the SEO Title is the one that is tracked by the Search Engines and put up in their search results. Google shows up to 60 characters in their search results so it would be a better idea if you use as close to 60 characters as you can.

SEO Description And Keywords

I know many of the WordPress users just write a post, submit it and put it up on their Social Media thinking it will save the day. But trust me, that’s not the right way to deal with getting traffic. You need to have some organic and search engine traffic and search engines rely on the SEO description and keywords of your blog, more than the post content.

You need to insert something into that description box that a reader can get the gist of the post easily, that it’s the thing they are searching for, because this description is the one that is shown below the post title in the search results.

You should write up to 160 characters in here for the same reason as in the post title. And don’t forget about the keywords at all, for these are something that makes your post appealing. The words in this tab shows the search engine what the post is about, just like the description shows the reader.

Now, the real fact is that some users, just put in all the keywords related to the post inside that keywords box. But that is not going to give you any fruit, because search engines take these keywords and then search them throughout the content of the post, to confirm whether the post is truly about the keyword that reader has searched for.

Now you might be thinking about what to put in that box, well here is deal, just think of yourself as a reader and look for the words that you would use to search for a specific blog post, for they are the one that will be more effective.

Post Permalink

This permalink is what adds up to your blog post’s link to let the readers get directed towards it. Most of the users use their post title as the permalink, and so you would be wondering whats the importance of a permalink.

Well take the example of this post. The post title is ‘A Detailed Guide To Write An SEO Optimized Blog Post in WordPress’, and now if I use the same as my permalink, it would hurt my SEO. The reason is that the words ‘A, To, An, In’ are STOP words, and these are skipped by the search engines, to save their disk space and speed up indexing.

We need to avoid having these stop words in our permalinks, and so the permalink I used for this post is rather ‘guide-write-seo-optimized-blog-post’. Oh and by the way if you have already submitted your post, don’t try to change your permalink now, for the old permalink will give an ERROR to your readers and it will effect your blog/website’s reputation.

Post Interlinking

This is a crucial step while writing a blog post, especially when your blog has a very high bounce rate. Bounce rate is actually the percentage of the readers that run away from your blog without jumping to another page.

How we work it out is that we link the old post on our blogs to the related words on our new blog post. WordPress has a new feature now while inserting/editing a link. You can now easily click or link to existing content and write the related word that you are searching a related post for, and select it.

This option in WordPress clearly shows how user friendly WordPress has become for bloggers, to easily optimize their blogs. In SEO terms, interlinking to your old posts improves your page rank and gives a new route to the search engines to crawl over your old blog posts if they may have faced an error crawling it before.

Image Optimization

When I used to blog for my own blog a long time ago, I usually used to ignore this step and didn’t realize that I was doing something wrong until I started adopting this method for my new blog, when I saw some traffic being generated from ‘http://images.google.com‘.

This happened because I optimized the images that I insert in my blog posts. The method to do that is very simple. After you insert your image, just open its options, and add the details of the image into the tab ‘Alternate Text’.

See, for example, the image above is for the image settings, so I used ‘Image-Settings’ as an alternate text. Now whenever someone will search for ‘Image-Settings’ they will land on this post.

There are many plugins to do this, but the best one is SEO Friendly Images which automatically adds the name of the image as its Alternate Text, and so for this purpose when you are saving an image, always save it with the details that are in the picture.

To summarize all the important steps above, I would want you to do take care of your post’s keywords for that is what the search engine will crawl upon your post. In order for your post to gain a good position in the search results (rather than a post that tries to scam the system by filling everything with keyword after keyword and no real content), just take care of these things below and you will notice the difference:

After choosing a keyword for your blog post, try to make sure:

The page and post title starts the keyword.
The h2 or h3 title the keyword.
The permalink contains the keyword.
The SEO description contains the keyword.
The SEO description starts with the keyword.
The SEO keyword contains the keyword.
The content has the keyword with a density of at most 4.5%
An image in the post contains the keyword as the alternate text.
The content contains the keyword in the first 100 words.

The reason of having a keyword in the title, permalink, description and keywords is obvious. The keyword density being too low will prove that your post is not a scam. Linking to other blogs also can improve your ranking.

I believe that this detailed guide to writing an SEO Optimized Blog post will help you reach your goal and you will surely notice the difference after implementing this method.

How to Construct an SEO Friendly WordPress Site

Editorial Team — Thu, 22 Dec 2016 12:28:51 +0000

WordPress is one of the easiest to optimize CMS for SEO. Although WordPress sites have the highest possibility of getting ranked on search engines, it doesn’t mean that you should not optimize or work on your SEO friendly WordPress site.

If you are like the many users around the world believing that your default installation of WordPress will get your site on the top of the search engine ranking, you think the wrong thing.

Just like the other sites on the Web, you need to do something to make it SEO friendly.

That being said, it’s not that hard to make your WordPress site SEO friendly. With a lot of themes, plugins, tricks and conventions on the Web, you can do it in a little amount of time.

Joost de Valk, Founder of Yoast, Shares His Success Story

Editorial Team — Tue, 26 Apr 2016 21:00:21 +0000

Joost, please introduce yourself to our readers.

I’m Joost de Valk, founder and CEO of Yoast.com. I’m also a 30 year old husband and father of 3 kids (2 boys, 1 girl) from a small town called Wijchen in the Netherlands.

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Background

Tell us about your background in web development?

“My background is kind of “funny”, I built my first website in ’94, 12 years old at the time, on a computer my parents lent me the money for because I’d broken theirs one time too many. I played around with small websites for quite a while but never really built anything substantial in that time.

Professionally my career started in 2002 as a Java developer, as I like to call it, even though I was mostly coding JSP and JSTL at that time and wouldn’t have been able to write any “real” Java code.

My official job title wasn’t developer though; I was an account manager and was mostly working on translating the needs of clients into something the developers could make technical designs for.

From this job I went to another sales job, but in that sales job a small miracle happened: they “forced” me, although it didn’t take much forcing at all after my first day, to work on a Mac.

Out of interest for HTML and CSS, I became active in the WebKit community, eventually becoming a committer on the WebKit team, a “title” I still hold, mostly because I built hundreds of automated test cases and maintained their Bugzilla.

Through all my work in reducing bugs (a process where you take a webpage that causes an issue and start taking away everything until you have the smallest possible test case), I learned an awful lot about HTML and CSS.

One of the things I specialized in was CSS3, which I was and am a huge fan of, causing me to write so called “CSS3 Previews”. I published those on my then domain joostdevalk.nl and hit many a Digg front page with those, back when Digg still had traffic to give.

That section on my site became so popular I decided to spin it off into its own domain, css3.info (which I have since sold), the first domain for which I really seriously started using WordPress.

That’s when I had my “rebirth” if you will as a developer: I started developing WordPress plugins to do things I wanted to do on css3.info, beginning with robots meta, which still exists but is also at the core of my WordPress SEO plugin.”

Tell us about your background in SEO?

“Time would teach me that while I like talking to people and don’t mind selling them stuff at all, I’m not a born salesman. I’m somewhat of an in-between between developer and marketing man, and in my next job I would become an SEO, which I would describe as exactly that.

I was taught at Onetomarket in both some of their old blackhat ways (they’d been banned from Google the year before and knew exactly why) and their new methods.

While we didn’t use the old methods for clients, I found, and still find this true today, that if you follow what blackhats do you can learn an awful lot about the behavior and choices of search engines.”

WordPress plugins

Why do you focus so much on WordPress?

“Because I love using it and love the community around it. It’s great to be able to build something and help so many people. Of course that wasn’t always true, in the beginning I “just” did it because it was the most user-friendly way to power my websites. Now it’s a part of my business and I dare even say, a part of who I am online.”

How did you come up with the idea to create a WordPress plugin?

“I scratch my own itches. WordPress doesn’t do something I want it to do? I’ll make it do it. 95% of my plugins have been built because of that, the other 5% were paid projects for clients.”

How did you find a gap in the market?

“I don’t think I find needs, those needs find me. It turns out that my itches aren’t that weird, more people need the same functionality, so I build that functionality and release it to the public.

In some cases I have probably “created” my own market a bit; in my article on WordPress SEO I have proposed strategies that people adopted, for which they needed my plugins.”

Tell us about your process for creating plugins?

“It starts with a piece of code I built for myself, not too much stuff around it, just my own needs, from there on some plugins evolve into plugins I release. At that point I usually need to add an admin interface etc., which is usually far more work than building the plugin itself.

That’s followed by the even more cumbersome creation of documentation, the thing in which all of my plugins “lack” the most.”

How do you market your plugins?

“By now, a blog post about them is usually enough to get people interested. When I first started it took a lot more work but I still go through somewhat of the same process today as I did back then: I email a few friends in the industry, leave a comment on blog posts that are topically related, basically, I make myself known to my audience, usually fellow marketers, who will then spread the word.”

Why do you think your plugins are so popular? What is your secret?

“Quality and doing what’s promised on the “tin”. Instead of calling one of my plugins an all-in-one plugin and doing only half of what’s needed, when I call my WordPress SEO plugin all-in-one it’s because it’s truly all you need for your WordPress sites’ SEO. When I call a plugin “Google Analytics for WordPress”, it does just that: add Google Analytics to WordPress. With, admittedly, a whole lot of options that you can choose to use but you don’t have to use.”

SEO

How did you get interested in SEO?

I was looking for a new job, clearly unhappy and not functioning very well in my position at the time, when my wife showed me this job for an SEO. I’d played around with search engines a bit, knew my way around all the HTML and CSS standards so I got hired. To be honest, until my wife showed me that job opening, I’d never considered becoming an SEO. I’ll be eternally grateful to her for showing it to me (and for marrying me and bearing my children, but that’s another thing altogether).

How did you learn what you know about SEO?

“In several ways: I learned at my then employer, Onetomarket, but mostly, I learned by reading SEO blogs and forums and testing whether what they said about SEO was true.

SEO is very much something you have to learn by doing and by deep diving: open up server logs and look for the movements of Googlebot around your site. Try to understand it, try to think as a search engineer. Once you start “getting” that, it’s the most fantastic job in the world.”

How did you get from an interest in SEO to being a world-renowned SEO expert?

“I built stuff, then I told people… I was in the lucky position that some of the people I told about what I built were very responsive. My first conference was a small conference called SEO Days by Dave Naylor.

During that conference Dave took me aside for a while and we had a great chat, after which he connected me with friends of his, people like Chris Sherman and Danny Sullivan who got me speaking gigs on their SES and later SMX conferences and guys like Matt Cutts of Google and Greg Boser of now BlueGlass.

Just a few days before I went to that conference I filled out a long survey on SEO ranking factors Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz had emailed me, which later became one of the biggest pieces of SEO research of that year.

Combined, all these people seemed to like what I did, and still do, so I did more of it and more people responded, from there on it was just a big upwards spiral.”

Fusion

Your personal brand is unique because it’s a fusion of web development and SEO with a sprinkle of content marketing. Tell us your formula?

“I’d love to tell you I planned this from the get go, but that would be nonsense. It just “happened” and when I saw it happen, I took the chance and built it out.

Only recently have I become more eloquent about my university background (I studied Theology and International Business, though I finished neither degrees), because I think mostly what I learned in Theology applies to so much of what we do today.

Content marketing, “story telling”, etc. All that is just the old art of evangelization in a new package. Evangelization, coming from Greek, means nothing more than “spreading the good message”, that’s what companies ought to be doing with their products, governments with their policies and heck, developers with their programs and plugins.”

How did you go about actually blending it all together? What were the biggest lessons learned there?

“I didn’t really blend it myself. I just wrote about what I did and at some point it became clear to me I was “WordPress SEO guy” to a lot of people and they were looking to me for advice and plugins in that area.

The funny thing is that in my work as a consultant, I’m far more a “Large Site SEO” guy and a “News SEO” than a “WordPress SEO” guy, as most of my consultancy clients are companies with enormous websites and the issues that arise from that, but my “public” image is now completely affixed to WordPress in the first place and SEO as a close second.”

Many people want to become world-class experts, but only few do. How did you get to where you are now? How did you grow your brand and your business?

“To become a “world-class” expert you have to be humble in admitting what you don’t know, as well as nimble in making sure you get to know that what you don’t know but need to know as soon as possible.

As soon as you’ve acquired knowledge worth sharing you then need to start giving away that knowledge through a blog, articles in magazines and speeches on conferences.

It’s not something that happens overnight. I’ve been doing this for 8 years now, growing a following in the process. So it takes hard work, dedication and you need to forego monetary reimbursement for quite a while. I would never have been where I am now if I’d decided to sell my plugins early on, or if I’d kept my WordPress SEO knowledge to myself.”

Final words

Last, but not least, what would be your advice to someone who would like to combine their strengths and build a strong personal brand and a successful business? What’s the most important thing here?

“The single most important thing is to do what you love. I know no-one in our industry who has become a thought leader, a world-class expert or a “guru” by doing something other than what they love.

The reason for that is simple: love for what you do will make your work not feel like work; allowing you to put the necessary (often ridiculous) amount of hours in to gain the knowledge and the profile you need.”

Thank you, Joost!

How to Fix the Google Over Optimization Penalty

Editorial Team — Sat, 12 Mar 2016 22:17:59 +0000

You will probably hear (and notice) the effects of this new discussion once your site loses all its organic traffic. SEO experts will tell you that it is the new Over Optimization Penalty from Google which has pushed your website down on SERPs.

Then you will start Googling and probably stumble upon multiple articles that will teach you stuff which by then will hold no meaning just because you were sleeping when you shouldn’t be!

What is Over Optimization Penalty?

Well, the over optimization penalty is another patch from Google (Bing included for that matter) to save their search results from the smartness of SEO masterminds. Last year it was Google Panda update, before that it was the paid links crackdown and this year it will be the over optimization penalty. This has now become a habit of Google.

Whenever there are too many questions being thrown at Google they come up with some patch or other to silent their critics.

Google, by no means, seems interested in totally changing their algorithm architecture. Instead, they have been patching their algorithm to fight those who trick their systems. Soon Google’s search algorithm will be a patch of patches with confusions all around.

Over Optimization is one such patch which Google will crack a whip on websites that concentrate more on SEO instead of content quality. Matt Cutts, Google’s anti-spam chief, hinted the same at the recently held SXSW. Under this new penalty, once effective, Google will penalize websites for abusing SEO tricks.

And the idea is basically to try and level the playing ground a little bit. So all those people who have sort of been doing, for lack of a better word, “over optimization” or “overly” doing their SEO, compared to the people who are just making great content and trying to make a fantastic site, we want to sort of make that playing field a little bit more level.

And so that’s the sort of thing where we try to make the web site, uh Google Bot smarter, we try to make our relevance more adaptive so that people don’t do SEO, we handle that, and then we also start to look at the people who sort of abuse it, whether they throw too many keywords on the page, or whether they exchange way too many links, or whatever they are doing to sort of go beyond what a normal person would expect in a particular area. So that is something where we continue to pay attention and we continue to work on it, and it is an active area where we’ve got several engineers on my team working on that right now.

~ Matt Cutts

But, Why is it Important for Google to Implement Over-Optimization Penalty?

Well, lately everyone has been writing for search engines and publishing whatever their audience wants to read. That touch of innovative thoughts on articles being generated doesn’t seem to exist.

I am sure that most of you, the content developers, won’t agree with me because I am questioning how you make your living. But, for a moment, forget about it being your job and think.

Don’t we write what people want to read?
Don’t we write for the audience?
Don’t we write for traffic?
Don’t we write for better search engine rankings?

See, I am not saying that we have stopped writing innovative stuff. All that I am saying is that the innovative quotient in today’s content has gone down. We have become more and more search engine friendly.

A few years back we used to pick up our morning newspapers and skim through the headlines to find whatever was useful for us while sipping our cup of coffee. Gone are those days of newspapers. In this age of Internet, we rely on Google News type websites that curate the latest news information.

So, what happens is that writers notice a topic which is trending on such leading websites. The result is obvious. All of them start writing about that topic. In no time that particular topic starts trending with other important stuff buried somewhere.

In short, the media ends up shaping the news and forces the readers to read what is trending. Although that is useful for readers, in this process some of the best news is lost somewhere. This must be controlled.

We need to promote the investigative sort of content creation where writers generate new ideas and Google helps those writers stay on top. It is important for writers to write something new and then readers search about that on Google for extra information. It is important for innovation to take over spamming. It is important for honesty to take over technology. It is important for us to stay crystal clear with our readers.

So, is SEO Dead?!?!

Well, not really. Chill fellow SEOers!

Let us all read two more pointers about Search Engine Optimization. This will help us understand what SEO is and how over the years we have been missing its real definition:

SEO is about analyzing data related to your site’s traffic in order to understand what exactly your viewers are looking for. This data will give you a picture about what search engines love in your website and what they index the most. An intense analysis of this data will help you understand how to optimize the website’s content for the reader’s benefit. Note that nowhere did I ask you to optimize the content SEO wise. I did not ask you to push in extra keywords. I asked you to generate content that readers will love.
Secondly, SEO is about technically improving your website so that search engines are easily able to crawl it. You, as an SEO specialist, need to understand how search engines crawl websites so that you can come up with an infrastructure which is search engine friendly. Again, I don’t mean extra keywords. I am talking about good coding standards and information hierarchy.

See, as of now Google is trying hard to come up with that perfect search engine algorithm which will index pages that are actually appreciated by readers. For this, all that we can do from our side is generate comprehensive content. The rest will be taken care of by Google (and Bing’s small share).

“We’re always trying to best approximate if a user lands on a page, are they going to be happy instead of annoyed? And if it’s the sort of thing where they land on a page, and they are going to be annoyed, then that is the sort of thing that we’ll take action on.”

Okay, I agree! Now, HOW do I tackle Over Optimization and Avoid the Penalty?

I know, I have written over 1100 words of content which might make no sense if you just skim through it but it will if you read it carefully.

For those who are now convinced that the implementation of Over Optimization Penalty by Google makes a lot of sense from the search engine giant’s perspective then for them here is my way out. Let us read it point by point:

STOP keyword stuffing – See, there is no such theory as keyword density. Really. Gone are the days when a keyword density of 3-4% will take your article somewhere. Please don’t stuff keywords everywhere. I mean that you should not do it on purpose. See, it is very obvious that you are tricking the system when you stuff keywords in anchor texts, URL and title tags. Write content that makes sense – for search engines and for readers. The rest will be taken care of.
STOP linking to websites in your network – Lately Google has been angry with webmasters who interlink to all the websites in their network. See, if you have a collection of 50 websites and you start linking to all of them from all of them then you are obviously over doing the interlinking thing. Aren’t you? Ask yourself guys! And, once you realize that you are at fault then stop doing the same.
STOP using backlinks from useless places – Well, this what we call link spam. You, as an SEO, can do your best to garner links from comments, directories, and various networks. The moment you do this manually to trick the system, you will be caught and killed. They really don’t make any sense so don’t spend time in such stuff.
START creating content – Go back to the archives of 1stWebDesigner itself. You will notice that Dainis, the owner and only author back then, was writing content regularly. He didn’t write stuff that will make it into history books but he made sense. He provided readers what they wanted to read. The result was pure content which was worth every word. Readers loved it, and 1WD grew like hell. And, it is still growing. So, just make comprehensive content and fall in love with it.
START interlinking to old posts – See, once you start developing regular content then indirectly you are telling Google that guys I got fresh content. I know you love fresh content and see I have it. Why don’t you crawl my website more often? Once Google starts to crawl your website, then you can push in few more advice for the crawler. And that you will do with the help of internal links that will link to older blog posts of your article. By using the idea of internal linking you are actually telling Google that my other content is also useful. You can crawl that too. Makes sense? But, please don’t over do it.
START doing SEO – So, did I confuse you? Well, you got confused because you haven’t read the rest of my article. You really haven’t. Scroll up and read the “Is SEO Dead” section. Try to figure out what actually SEO is and implement that format of SEO on your website. Get it, Mr. SEO?

Closure Tip

Google might not be God but whatever they have created is their own system. You can trick them today but in the long run, they, will pin you down. After all, it is their own arena. They created it. They aren’t losing their own game, right? So put some sense in yourself and have fun.

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