seo

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

September 9, 2017 by Simon Leave a Comment

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

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.

If you don’t already have Google Analytics setup on your site then do it, you cannot identify your customers or identify what is broken or in turn fix it (Setting up Google Analytics on your website, https://fearby.com/article/setting-up-google-analytics-on-your-website/ )
Monitor Data – Do review your logs and customer related data (review orders, customers and try and identify what works. Software like https://www.zoho.com/one/applications/web.html will help you connect the dots.
Adobe Audience Cloud: http://www.adobe.com/au/experience-cloud.html is a more expensive software suite for driving decisions based on data.
Benchmarks – Set goals and work toward them (e.g I want 10x more customers).

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 ).

How to boost your site’s SEO https://fearby.com/article/how-to-boost-your-sites-seo/
Your website needs to be fast, use sites like https://www.webpagetest.org to measure how fast your site is (Aim for all A’s). Read this page for information on the impact of slow websites https://www.searchenginejournal.com/mobile-page-speed-benchmarks/194511/
Mobile friendly – Ensure your site is mobile friendly (or risk being dropped from search engine results)
SSL – Do have a secure SSL certificate on your website (view mine here https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=www.fearby.com&s=45.63.29.217&latest).
Incoming links – Having incoming links to your site tell search engines that your site is popular.

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.

Setup a free MailChimp Newsletter to allow willing people to be alerted of new communication https://login.mailchimp.com/signup/?source=website&pid=GAW
Web Browser popup Alerts can be a great way to engage with users when new content is added to your site (Read the guide here https://documentation.onesignal.com/docs/web-push-setup )
Mobile apps or mobile friendly website are a no brainer given 2 billion people use mobile phones ( http://www.smartinsights.com/mobile-marketing/mobile-marketing-analytics/mobile-marketing-statistics/ ).

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

Personas – Do setup customer personas in order to focus on your customer segments (get a free customer persona template here https://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/33491/everything-marketers-need-to-research-create-detailed-buyer-personas-template.aspx )
Does your website match these personas?

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)

Google Ad’s – Signup Here http://www.google.com.au/adwords/get-started/
Bing – Advertise on Bing here https://advertise.bingads.microsoft.com/
Facebook – Advertise on Facebook here https://www.facebook.com/business/products/ads

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

Test our sites Accessibility – https://achecker.ca/checker/index.php
Test your sites HTML5 Compliance – https://validator.w3.org
Test your Google PageSpeed Test – https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/
Do A B testing to determine the statistical significance of changes to your site.

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

How to boost your site’s SEO

July 21, 2017 by Simon 2 Comments

In these olden days of the Internet you just needed to submit your site to search engines and wait a few days and every thing was fine and dandy. Making your site appear high in search engines these days is next to impossible due to changing rules and formulas defined by search engines.

It is advisable to avoid so called experts that spam your inbox saying they can improve your site’s SEO for $99 (but strangely do not have a website themselves).

There is no golden rule or trade secret to getting pages ranked high on search engines. You will need to do a number of things to get higher in search results or even appear on search results at all.

Google is not the only search engine and you will need to do a number of things to appear on all of them. Other search engines include DuckDuckGo, Bing, Yahoo, Ask and 14 more search engines here.

Site maps

Google and other top search engines expect your website to declare pages on your site via a sitemap.xml file (specifications here). There is a number of ways you can generate a site map file. If you use the WordPress CMS there are a number of plugins that generate sitemap.xml files for you. Search Engines have automatic bots that will read known sitemap files in iorder to update thir search results.

Q1) Does your web site have a sitemap file?

Warnings

Most search engines will ignore your website if it is not trustworthy. You will be classified trustworthy if:

Your website is linked to from many other trustworthy sites.
Your website is not in an untrustworthy country or on an untrustworthy web site host.
Your website does not have banned words or linked banned media.
You don’t serve malicious files (or your Web servers IP address has never served malicious files).
Your website is updated frequently. Sites like http://web.archive.org/web/*/www.microsoft.com will let you know how frequently a site has been updated.
Your website needs to be secure (must have a secure SSL certificate installed and enabled). Google tells you HTTPS sites get better ranking here.
Your website needs to be fast, a search engine will not point people to slow sites period.
Your website also needs to have a lot of past and current traffic.

Content

Your site will also need to have good content in order to be seen as a valuable site. A blog is a good way to create new content and get new organic traffic to your site. You will need a desirable product or service to be high in the search engines result (e.g Chart generator or sell a good product or service ). Your site also needs to contain the matching keywords to be referred to when people search for a particular thing.

It is easy to appear high in the search results if you use feed google enough words that match your article but it is hard enough to get to the top of the rankings for the term “SEO” with “144,00,000” other matching pages in google coming up for “SEO”

If you are going to pay someone to improve your SEO ask for their track record on SEO ranks, ask for examples, adding the more words to search results to get higher is lazy. I think being high in google rankings with 2 words is near impossible unless you use a location in the search term. Google search is a trying to match the right results based on what you feed it and if you fail in any way your site is ranked down.

Analytics

Using search engines analytics like Google Analytics is a good way to ensure search engines know you exist (Google at least) and let you know what works and allows you to generate more content of what works.

Inbound Links

Most search engines prioritize your site over others if you have a high number of links to your site (inbound links), you can have the best site but with no inbound links to your site, you are in trouble. Creating fake links from non-important sites won’t cheat the system.

Site Speed

Your web site need needs to be fast in order to be deemed trustworthy from search engines. A slow site will fall down the search engine page listing. Do everything you can do to speed up your site (start with ensuring the server is in the right location on a non-shared server with a fast website utilizing cached content).

I have updated my post on Speeding up WordPress, my site used to load in 28 seconds, it now loads less than 9 seconds.

Secure sites

Google and other search engines will soon require your site to have a strong SSL certificate and high security (read my guide on SSL here and content security policy and public key pinning here).

You can check your site’s SSL certificate here. Check your site with shodan.io often for security flaws.

Blacklists

You will need to ensure your site is hosted on non-malicious serves and is using modern clean web technology. Search engines prefer to redirect people to sites that use modern web technologies like HTML5 over transitional HTML websites.

Metadata (Dublin Core)

Meta data is important to allow search engines know what is on a web page without remembering everything on each page. Read more on the latest meta data standards here.

Logs

Do check your logs (error and activity logs) for website crawlers activity (active and missed).

Search your website logs for known crawler activity. Are you missing search engines?

Your logs will tell you how many hits are coming from search engines. I have had 1300+ people visit my site from Google this month alone.

Set goals around search engine targets and work toward them (percentage or total traffic).

Campaigns

Although campaigns are not directly related to SEO they do allow you to combine stats around page loads and advertising campaigns. I prefer to track campaigns with a custom central redirect page (e.g /go/index.php) that logs the inbound clicks.

// Save this to a file called index.php (maybe under a folder called "/go/" at the top of your server (e.g "https://www.fearby.com/go/index.php")
header("Cache-Control: no-cache, must-revalidate");
header("Expires: Sat, 26 Jul 1997 05:00:00 GMT");
header('Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8');

// Insert campaign logging code here
// todo

/* Sample Usage
https://www.fearby.com/go/?seo
https://www.fearby.com/go/?aws
*/
switch ($_SERVER['QUERY_STRING']) { 

	case "seo":
		header( 'Location: https://fearby.com/article/how-to-boost-your-sites-seo/' ) ;
		break;

	case ("beyondssl"):
		header( 'Location: https://fearby.com/article/beyond-ssl-with-content-security-policy-public-key-pinning-etc/' ) ;
		break;

	case ("mysql"):
		header( 'Location: https://fearby.com/article/setting-up-a-fast-distributed-mysql-environment-with-ssl/' ) ;
		break;
	
	case ("aws"):
		header( 'Location: https://fearby.com/article/creating-an-aws-ec2-ubuntu-14-04-server-with-nginx-node-and-mysql-and-phpmyadmin/' ) ;
		break;

	case ("do"):
		header( 'Location: https://fearby.com/article/how-to-buy-a-new-domain-and-ssl-cert-from-namecheap-a-server-from-digital-ocean-and-configure-it/' ) ;
		break;

	default: 
		echo "I could not find a page for the URL you specified.";
		break;
}

// Save this to a file called index.php (maybe under a folder called "/go/" at the top of your server (e.g "https://www.fearby.com/go/index.php")

header("Cache-Control: no-cache, must-revalidate");

header("Expires: Sat, 26 Jul 1997 05:00:00 GMT");

header('Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8');

// Insert campaign logging code here

// todo

/* Sample Usage

https://www.fearby.com/go/?seo

https://www.fearby.com/go/?aws

switch ($_SERVER['QUERY_STRING']) {

case "seo":

header( 'Location: https://fearby.com/article/how-to-boost-your-sites-seo/' ) ;

break;

case ("beyondssl"):

header( 'Location: https://fearby.com/article/beyond-ssl-with-content-security-policy-public-key-pinning-etc/' ) ;

break;

case ("mysql"):

header( 'Location: https://fearby.com/article/setting-up-a-fast-distributed-mysql-environment-with-ssl/' ) ;

break;

case ("aws"):

header( 'Location: https://fearby.com/article/creating-an-aws-ec2-ubuntu-14-04-server-with-nginx-node-and-mysql-and-phpmyadmin/' ) ;

break;

case ("do"):

header( 'Location: https://fearby.com/article/how-to-buy-a-new-domain-and-ssl-cert-from-namecheap-a-server-from-digital-ocean-and-configure-it/' ) ;

break;

default:

echo "I could not find a page for the URL you specified.";

break;

}

Long Tail Titles.

I use long and descriptive titles to mention what my blog post is about. I find that this helps with matching what and Google search loves it.

Some of my descriptive post titles

Using long page titles can ensure people click on your links with confidence ( and they will know what your site is about ). Page views are not everything, engagement is.

My most recent popular posts.

I think I need to create some more technical guides as they seem popular.

Stats

Viewing statistics and reports can help you determine the popularity of your site.

Analytics

Reviewing Logs, viewing campaign data, viewing misc reports can help you identify incoming traffic to verify working acquisition sources.

I like looking at Google Analytics Behaviour reports for viewing inbound visits. I can see over 19,000 incoming visitors from google over the last 2.5 years with no sightmap.xml (this proves that content and long titles work).

Adding your site to bing searches

Go to https://www.bing.com/toolbox/submit-site-url and submit your site.

I tried to submit my XML files to Bing but the form stalled (my bad I did not see the organization size mandatory field).

I changed the domain above to just the domain (no sitemap).

I added my 6 sitemaps to the Bing Webmaster tools.

Submit your sitemp files in the Bing Webmaster tools.

Adding Your Site to the Google Search Console

I am trying the WordPress SEO plugin by Yoest but before I do I am adding my site to the Google Search Console (linked to my Gmail account). You will need to add your site to Google Search Console to have Google index your site.

Before Google trusts your domain you need to verify ownership of the domain ( for me I uploaded the verification files with the free FileZilla FTP program then loaded the file, then clicked verify at the Google Search Console page ).

Now my domain is verified and the Google Search console allows me to view the search status of my domain.

Installing a WordPress SEO Plugin – Yoast

Install the Yoast Plugin in WordPress (follow the install steps after you activate from step 1-8). You can add Yoast to your WordPress via the Add Plugins screen or download then upload it.

Don’t forget to activate then run the advanced Yoast configuration wizard.

After you get an authorization code it is important that you select your website from the profile list (if you don’t see this STOP and add your site to the Google Search Console (you cannot skip this step)).

Continue through steps 9-12 and finish installing the Yoast plugin.

Don’t forget to enable sitemaps (and review your settings). Now you can open the SEO plugin advanced options (/wp-admin/admin.php?page=wpseo_dashboard) and review the plugin options.

I installed the plugin but no sitemap.xml was created???

Twitter user https://www.twitter.com/atimmer10 said I may need to save the/wp-admin/options-permalink.php settings (no luck, this did not fix it and no sitemap.xml was created ).

I edited an existing published post and changed the short link and re-published a post ( no luck, this did not fix it and no sitemap.xml was created ).

I read this Yoast FAQ about the sitemap.xml not being created. I added the following to my .htaccess file ( no luck, this did not fix it and no sitemap.xml was created ).

# Yoast SEO - XML Sitemap Rewrite Fix
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^sitemap_index.xml$ /index.php?sitemap=1 [L]
RewriteRule ^locations.kml$ /index.php?sitemap=wpseo_local_kml [L]
RewriteRule ^geo_sitemap.xml$ /index.php?sitemap=geo [L]
RewriteRule ^([^/]+?)-sitemap([0-9]+)?.xml$ /index.php?sitemap=$1&sitemap_n=$2 [L]
RewriteRule ^([a-z]+)?-?sitemap.xsl$ /index.php?xsl=$1 [L]
# END Yoast SEO - XML Sitemap Rewrite Fix

# Yoast SEO - XML Sitemap Rewrite Fix

RewriteEngine On

RewriteBase /

RewriteRule ^sitemap_index.xml$ /index.php?sitemap=1 [L]

RewriteRule ^locations.kml$ /index.php?sitemap=wpseo_local_kml [L]

RewriteRule ^geo_sitemap.xml$ /index.php?sitemap=geo [L]

RewriteRule ^([^/]+?)-sitemap([0-9]+)?.xml$ /index.php?sitemap=$1&sitemap_n=$2 [L]

RewriteRule ^([a-z]+)?-?sitemap.xsl$ /index.php?xsl=$1 [L]

# END Yoast SEO - XML Sitemap Rewrite Fix

I still cannot get Yoast to create a sitemap.xml???

It turns out Yoast was creating a hidden /sitemap_index.xml

I then added the 6 individual sitemaps to the Google Search Console and Google started indexing my site.

Now Google will index my site and Yoast will auto update my sitemaps when I add, Edit or delete a piece of content.

Do monitor your sitemap syncs from time to time.

Add your sitemaps(s) to Yahoo, Bing and Ask search engines

More on adding your site to search engines on the Yoast website here. Also, read this article.

robots.txt

robots.txt is also an older sitemap.xml file format, read more here.

I made a backward compatible robots.txt file

User-agent: *
Disallow: 
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /wp-admin/
Sitemap: https://fearby.com/post-sitemap.xml
Sitemap: https://fearby.com/page-sitemap.xml
Sitemap: https://fearby.com/news-sitemap.xml
Sitemap: https://fearby.com/category-sitemap.xml
Sitemap: https://fearby.com/post_tag-sitemap.xml
Sitemap: https://fearby.com/news-category-sitemap.xml

User-agent: *

Disallow:

Disallow: /cgi-bin/

Disallow: /wp-admin/

Sitemap: https://fearby.com/post-sitemap.xml

Sitemap: https://fearby.com/page-sitemap.xml

Sitemap: https://fearby.com/news-sitemap.xml

Sitemap: https://fearby.com/category-sitemap.xml

Sitemap: https://fearby.com/post_tag-sitemap.xml

Sitemap: https://fearby.com/news-category-sitemap.xml

Generate a robots.txt here and read more here.

Other Plugins

Generate sitemaps from Yoast sitemaps with WP SEO HTML Sitemaps.

Other Tools

Google has a Structured Data Testing Tool to allow you to diagnose various search issues.
Webpage accessibility checker.
Webpage speed checker

Top WordPress Plugins

Do More of What Works

Review pages and see what works, you may find old pages or posts are more popular than new ones.

Set Goals and Measure Them

Goals like page views are popular targets for SEO results but focusing on lowering bounce rates and increasing customer session time is just as important.

Through changes in the last 30 days, I have lowered my bounce rate from 94% to 80%. I have made some changes to my site to pick up chicks at the end of posts and hope to get a 50% or lower bounce rate.

Where are your visitors coming from?

Google Analytics will reveal where visitors come from. Twitter, Facebook, etc. Knowing where your readers are located allows you to target more users.

Time of Day

Knowing the time of day (from Google Analytics) will show you when it is best to post and promote.

Visitor Frequency

Google Analytics will tell you if your visitors are one-time visitors or regular visitors.

Conclusion

Ensure your sitemaps is up to date and keep adding new content.

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Ask a question or recommend an article

V1.7 added info 1 month later

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