Reading Time: < 1 minThe title seems obvious, but is often overlooked. We can get focused on other things that are indeed important, like speed, security and SEO, but at the end of the day it’s all about what kind of value your site brings to your users. Headline, headlines, text headline, headline The common issue we see is […]
SEO
Some first steps with Google Search Console
Reading Time: 4 minYou may be familiar with Google Analytics, used to track traffic on a website, but not as many are as familiar with Google Search Console. I thought I’d take a minute to explain why you might want to set it up. The great thing about Google Search Console is that there is nothing you need […]
Ask more questions to avoid survivorship bias
Reading Time: 2 minI find the idea of “survivorship bias” fascinating. If you’ve not heard of it before, this short video from Eddie Woo is an excellent overview of it. I see two places where this comes up in some of the areas where I work. Our non-clients We frequently talk to our clients about why they chose […]
Speeding up this blog
Reading Time: 2 minOver the past day, I’ve done a few things to speed up the load time of this site. It wasn’t particularly slow to begin with, but these changes should help make it a bit snappier. Here’s a before and after of the speed scores for the site: Hosting The biggest change I made was with […]
“Designed by” is a big red flag
Reading Time: 2 minIt’s generally not a good idea for a web designer to put a “designed by” link in the footer of websites that they create, and they usually know it too. The main reason is Google; putting that link down there will hurt the site that it’s on. It’s a tiny amount, but it’ll still hurt. […]
Five stars isn’t perfect
Reading Time: < 1 minWhen looking at the rating for your business on Google or your product on Amazon, what’s the ideal score you should have? Most think that a 5.0 rating is the goal, but it probably shouldn’t be. When consumers see a score of a perfect 5.0 on a product or business, they instantly become skeptical of […]
What Google’s Latest Changes Mean for Your Site
Reading Time: < 1 minBelow are the slides from my talk at WordCamp Atlanta this afternoon. If you want to keep up with this stuff from Google going forward, you can use the email subscription box on the right or subscribe to the podcast here: You can download the slides in this PDF or browse them here: Googles Latest […]
Switching to the SEO Framework plugin?
Reading Time: < 1 minI’ve been a big fan of the Yoast SEO plugin for many years. It does a great job of helping with the SEO (“Search Engine Optimization”) on WordPress-powered websites. I first shared it with you back in 2012 and I wrote this long post about how to use it in 2013. Even today we’re still […]
The SSL checklist
Reading Time: 2 minHaving an SSL certificate on your website (making the address start with “https” and include that little green padlock) has always been important for eCommerce sites, but never very much for any other site. However, Google is now pushing that as an increasingly important ranking signal, so if you want your website to show up […]
Keep your old content forever
Reading Time: < 1 minAs time goes on, you’ll tend to accumulate quite a bit of old content on your site. People say that “Google likes fresh content”, which is true, but Google tends to like all of that old content too! David Meerman Scott recently wrote a great post that dug into this idea, and lead off with […]