Simon Fearby

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How to optimize your sites Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and grow customers without paying for Ads

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How to optimize your sites Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and grow customers without paying for Ads.

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This guide is a shorter post around setting up SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and driving more traffic to your site without buying ADs.  In a nutshell, to have better SEO you need to jump some technical hurdles in order to drive more traffic to your site from search engines along with understanding your customer’s needs and making things easier for them.

I have blogged about this topics before but these posts are too long in reflection.

Buying Ad’s?

Facebook, Google, Bing and advertising agencies will recommend you set goals around growth and site traffic and pay for those goals to succeed (usually by advertisements).

Don’t get me wrong Advertising works but it is a competitive market, Online sites can easily setup the display of Ad’s on their site (my guide here Add Google AdWords to your WordPress blog, https://fearby.com/article/add-google-adwords-wordpress-blog/ ). You can buy physical billboard ad’s on the side of roads (e.g http://www.buythisspace.com.au/). I tried to enquire about the costs of a physical billboard but the agencies robot verification rejected my enquiry submission so I gave up.  Advertising is buying peoples times and people now how to avoid ad’s and not interact with them (7 Marketing Lessons from Eye-Tracking Studies https://blog.kissmetrics.com/eye-tracking-studies/)

Do more of what works

Spoiler: This guide will recommend you do more of what works over buying millions of ad’s and hoping for new and engaged customers and customer growth.

SEO Tip’s

This older article on  How to boost your site’s SEO  attempts to mention what you need to do it to get better SEO.

Do run a modern great site

I am a big fan of word of mouth over free/organic traffic over paid customers via advertising (Mostly because I am tight and realize advertising can be a bottomless pit). The single biggest thing you can do to have more organic traffic from search engines is run a modern and fast website, have valuable content and make it as easy for the customer as possible. This is why I moved my site and setup an SSL certificate (link to article).

Search engines like your site to be fast, updated frequently, have sitemaps to make their jobs easier and have an SSL certificate to keep the web safe etc.

Google, Bing and other search engines will not send traffic your way if you do not satisfy them that your site is liked or has valuable content.  Google makes money from Google Analytics by helping people understand their site’s visitors then recommend you pay for ad’s to use on sites that have AdWords on their site ( WordPress to a new self-managed server away from CPanel ).

Traffic Source types

  • Organic – An organic visitor to your site is one who found your site by searching something that was relevant to their search term and not by clicking on an advertisement.
  • Paid – A paid user is someone who has clicked an ad to come to your site.
  • Social – A social visitor is one who is known to come from a social media site, using social media sites like Twitter, Facebook or Instagram is a must to driving organic traffic (go where the people are).

Engagement

How engaged are your customers?  Have you asked your customers recently what they value or appreciate about your business or product? Have you asked for feedback recently?

User Engagement Levels

  • None – Do you have landing pages that quickly inform customers of your products or services?
  • Low – What do they need to know about your product or service?
  • Medium – Aware (engaged)
  • High – Can this person be an advocate for your business?
  • Gone – Did you get exit Feedback?

Ways to engage already engaged customers.

What can you do to help understand your customer’s needs and make their purchase processes easier?

Why are your customers leaving?

Understand more about your customers reasons for leaving and act upon preventing others from leaving.

  • Trying something new (Does your website need to be simpler?)
  • Are your products too expensive?.
  • Your site (or ordering) is not convenient (Do you need to setup online ordering/subscriptions and delivery?)
  • etc

Who are your customers

Are your customers.

  • Engaged
  • Informed
  • Advocates

Feedback

  • Do you have feedback loops (A simple feedback form can solve this)?

What do you know about your customers?

  • Product Satisfaction
  • Product Loyalty
  • Product Awareness

Paid Traffic (Ad’s)

Free Traffic (SEO + Organic Ad’s)

  • Blog Posts (Sharing value/passion)
  • Social Media Posts (use hashtags)
  • Instagram (Post value/passion)

Most importantly Do what works (Measure and replicate).

Focus on Business Value

Generate a  SWOT Analysis ( Free tool here https://xtensio.com/ )

  • What are your Strengths?
  • What are your Weaknesses?
  • What are your Opportunities?
  • What are your Threats?

Goals

Goals allow you to investigate, learn, act and measure I order to improve.

  • Investigate – Data.
  • Learn/Insight – Make Assumptions.
  • Act – Act and measure.

Read more about customer engagement here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Customer_engagement

Bonus

 Do ensure your website is compliant with accessibility and technical standards

Conclusion

The more you know the better you can connect, Do set goals and as a minimum setup Google Analytics, SSL certificate and submit your site to search engines, then focus on a fast site that makes things simple for your customers.

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v1.0 Initial version

Installing Webmin Server Management web GUI on Ubuntu

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Setting up Ubuntu in the cloud is great if you are not afraid of using the command line but for those that need it, there are web based server management GUI’s you can install.

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Once Ubuntu is installed (I have many guides at www.fearby.com) you can install http://www.webmin.com/ (web based management GUI for Ubuntu).  It is similar to https://runcloud.io but it’s free. Read the Webadmin install guide here.

Ubuntu Install Steps

Run this in your root terminal to install Webmin on Ubuntu after you install and configure a web server, MySQL and SSL.

Allow port 1000 on your firewall (in my case I am limiting this to my public IP).

I opened port 10,000 on my Digital Ocean firewall screen too.

I installed an SSL certificate on my server (my guide here).  I am having issues with Google Chrome and my SSL certificate so I switched ot safari.

I navigated to https://mydomain.com:10000 to log in to the Webmin dashboard

I could now log in to Webmin so I reset the password???

Now I can login to Webmin

Webmin has a  load of options available, I zeroed in on viewing log files.

I think I need to ban a few IP’s in my firewall based on the login attempts above. View my guide on securing Ubuntu in the cloud.

Done

Webmin has a great section on Ubuntu Users

View User Details

Securing Webmin Configuration then IP Access Control and whitelist your IP address to ensure no one else can view your server (I went to http://icanhazip.com to get my IP address).

I then used the Webmin backup screen to backup my system.

This is great, it is backing up my system 🙂

I used pydf to see how much storage space I have (I am only using 2.65GB but have 17GB available).

Gzip is taking a load of time to backup my system.

I did not need to use (htop) to monitor the CPU, Webmin has a CPU monitor built in.

Webmin also allows you to add users

Beware though you need to assign a user to modules or they won’t be able to do/see much when they login.

If you provide your MySQL root password you can create databases in Webmin under Servers then MySQL Database Server

Loads of database options that I would normally use Adminer for 🙂

File Browser

There is a file browser but (I can’t seem to drag and drop).

Official documentation is found here. I’ll add more to this post as I discover it.

Check out my other posts at www.fearby.com.

 

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v1.0 Initial Post

Securing an Ubuntu VM with a free LetsEncrypt SSL certificate in 1 Minute

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I visited https://letsencrypt.org/ where it said Let’s Encrypt is a free, automated, and open ssl Certificate Authority.  That sounds great, time to check them out. This may not take 1 minute on your server but it did on mine (a self managed Ubuntu 16.04/NGINX server). If you are not sure why you need an SSL cert read Life Is About to Get a Whole Lot Harder for Websites Without Https from Troy hunt. 

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FYI you can setup an Ubuntu Vutur VM here (my guide here) for as low as $2.5 a month or a Digital Ocean VM server here (my guide here) for $5 a month, billing is charged  to the hour and is cheap as chips. 

I clicked Get Started and read the Getting started guide.  I was redirected to https://certbot.eff.org/ where it said: “Automatically enable HTTPS on your website with EFF’s Certbot, deploying Let’s Encrypt certificates.“. I was asked what web server and OS I use..

I confirmed my Linux version

I then selected my environment in the site (NGINX and Ubuntu 16.04) and was redirected to the setup instructions.

fyi: I will remove mention of my real domain and substitute with thesubdomain.thedomain.com for security in the output below. 

I was asked to run these commands

Detailed instructions here.

Obtaining an SSL Certificate

I then ran the following command to automatically obtain and install (configure NGINX) an SSL certificate.

Output

That was the easiest SSL cert generation in history.

SSL Certificate Renewal (dry run)

SSL Certificate Renewal (Live)

The Lets Encrypt SSL certificate is only a 90-day certificate.

Again: The Lets Encrypt SSL certificate is only a 90-day certificate.

I’ll run “certbot renew” again  2 months time to manually renew the certificate (and configure my higher security configuration (see below)).

Certbot NGINX Config renew (what did it do)

It’s nice to see forces HTTS added to the configuration

Cert stuff added

Contents of /etc/letsencrypt/options-ssl-nginx.conf

This contains too many legacy ciphers for my liking.

I changed /etc/letsencrypt/options-ssl-nginx.conf to tighten ciphers and add TLS 1.3 (as my NGINX Supports it).

Enabling OCSP Stapling and Strict Transport Security in NGINX

I add the following to /etc/nginx/sites/available/default

Restart NGINX.

SSL Labs SSL Score

I am happy with this.

Read my guide on Beyond SSL with Content Security Policy, Public Key Pinning etc

Automatic SSL Certificate Renewal

There are ways to auto renew the SSL certs floating around YouTube but I’ll stick to manual issue and renewals of SSL certificates.

SSL Checker Reports

‘I checked the certificate with other ssl checking sites.

NameCheap SSL Checker – https://decoder.link/sslchecker/ (Passed). I did notice that the certificate will expire in 89 days (I was not aware of that).  I guess a free 90-day certificate for a noncritical server is OK (as long as I renew it in time).

CertLogik – https://certlogik.com/ssl-checker/ (OK)

Comodo – https://sslanalyzer.comodoca.com (OK)

Lets Encrypt SSL Certificate Pros

  • Free.
  • Secure.
  • Easy to install.
  • Easy to renew.
  • Good for local, test or development environments. 
  • It auto detected my domain name (even a sub domain)

Lets Encrypt SSL Certificate Cons

  • The auto install process does not setup OCSP Stapling (I configured NGINX but the certificate does not support it maybe to limit the Certificate Authority resources handing the certificate revocation checks).
  • The auto install process does not setup HSTS. (I enabled it in NGINX manually).
  • The auto install process does not setup HPKP. More on enabling Public Key Pinning in NGINX here.
  • Too many ciphers installed by default. 
  • No TLS 1.3 installed by default by the install process in my NGINX config in the default certbot secure auto install (even though my NGINX supports it). More on enabling TLS 1.3 in NGINX here.

Read my guide on Beyond SSL with Content Security Policy, Public Key Pinning etc

I’d recommend you follow these Twitter security users

http://twitter.com/GibsonResearch

https://twitter.com/troyhunt

https://twitter.com/0xDUDE

 

Conclusion

Free is free but I’d still use paid certs from Namecheap for important stuff/sites, not having OCSP stapling on the CA and 90-day certs is a deal breaker for me.  The Lets Encrypt certificate is only a 90-day certificate (I’d prefer a 3-year certificate).

A big thank you to Electronic Frontier Foundation for making this possible and providing a free service (please donate to them)..

Lets Encrypt does recommend you renew certs every 60 days or use auto renew tools but rate limits are in force and Lets Encrypt admit their service is young (will they stick around)? Even Symantec SSL certs are at risk. 

Happy SSL’ing.

Read my guide on Setting up a Vultr VM and configuring it

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V1.61 added Troy hunt article