Why go SSL?

There are a huge range of benefits to having SSL that may not be apparent  without a bit more of a look at it.

For a start and even if it was the only reason, Google loves SSL.  For the past two years Google has been giving a rankings boost to sites that use SSL.  Google wants the whole web to be SSL, So it’s not a huge rankings boost but it is worth a position or two on every single non highly competitive search.

Another huge reason is that when you log into your website backend you are putting a very important username and password into a form and then accessing the website where you can change absolutely anything at all to do with the content of your website.  You would not use a bank or an online shopping site that did not have SSL, so your website back end definitely needs the extra security.

SSL also allows us to enable HTTP 2,  all of our hosting sites are enabled with HTTP 2 by default, Where most web hosts charge extra for the feature,  but http2 only works when there is a secure SSL connection.  H2 is the next generation of website transfer technology.
You can see an amazing demo of HTTP2 by clicking here.  H2  enables the web server push all of the data at once to the web browser,  regular old http makes it connection every single time for every single image or piece of content on the page and download  the content pretty much one piece of content at a time.

The post SSL Security for much more than just security appeared first on Web Design Sydney.

Have you started to see your search queries turn up AMP WordPress pages? 

They stand out and people are getting to know that clicking on a Google AMP page will not result in a slow or non existent page that may throw a hundred popups their way!

These pages may be your ticket to standing out from the competition and providing an unmatched mobile user experience.
AMP pages are like Google giving you some space on their worldwide hosting infrastructure for free along with a rankings and visibility boost too boot.
The pages are cached directly in the search results and have strict rules on what is and what’s not allowed.
There are a few AMP WordPress plugins available but it is in no way a plug and play procedure to start serving up AMP WordPress pages. The setup is laborious but once configured properly there is noth different to do with the day to day posting of information to your website.

AMP pages do not allow any external javascript and there are many rules on the underlying code of your pages. Once we get past the restrictions and get the pages approved then enabling it on an existing site is done. For brand new sites the process is less involved as we are not spending time reworking the post and pages content for validation.

AMP is a worthwhile boost right now and will only be an increasingly valuable thing to have in the very near future.

See more at,
Googles Accelerated Mobile Pages Blog Post
AMP Project

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Q. How can we add keywords to a page?

A. We can not.

If you wanted to rank for the keyword of “motor oil”

Then pretty much all we can do is type “motor oil” on a page.
We can make the title of the page be “motor oil”, The heading of the page in big type saying “motor oil”

So now we have our page

Title:Motor Oil

Motor Oil
Motor Oil

OK, now what?

Well this page is about Motor Oil. all it mentions is Motor Oil, it definitely is a page about Motor Oil.
Where will it rank in Google?
Probably on page 10,000. You see there are 100,000 or so much better pages about Motor Oil on Google, the others would have a big story about motor oil with videos and images, they may also have people linking to them.
So we have a page of a decent length amount of words with pics and videos on Motor Oil and we want to add more keywords to it.

Q. How can we add more keywords to a page?

A. We can not.

We can only just type more words that are keywords..

For example we have an optometrist in Maroubra Sydney, they were coming up at first position for “Maroubra Optometrist” they wanted to get on the first few pages of google results for areas that are close by, for example they wanted to rank for “Kingsford Optometrist”
So we typed at the bottom of their page
Servicing Maroubra, Maroubra Junction, Matraville, Chifley, Kingsford, Kensington, Coogee.

If your keyword is not typed on the page then it can never ever rank for that keyword.

So really to rank for a keyword what we have to do is write a story that incorporates all your keywords.
If the heading of your page has the keyword listed in it. Then this is a clue to google that your page is about this particular keyword.

There is no way to add keywords to a page other than typing the keyword into the text of your page.

Now you could just type 30 keywords and copy paste them 300 times into your page, but google is smart enough to look at your page and realise that it is a pile of junk and not even list it. If google does send any traffic your way then those users will hit their back button straight away and google will see that people hate your page and can not leave it fast enough.

Write a story, integrate keywords 2 or 3 times in that story, put your most important keywords into the title and heading of the page.
You can see the limitation of the title and heading of page, we can not put 50 keywords in the heading of a page. That is where if you want to rank well for many keywords we have to make a separate page and story about each keyword.

Now with that said, a very uncommon keyword like,
“Ford Festiva Sequential Gearbox Oil pink polka dot colour with stripes right through it”

Lets try it, click here to search google for Ford Festiva Sequential Gearbox Oil pink polka dot colour with stripes right through it

That can easily rank at number one just by typing it on a page. Because no one has ever wrote any information on the web about Ford Festiva Sequential Gearbox Oil pink polka dot colour with stripes right through it.
There is no competition for this keyword.. So think about how many others may have the same idea about being on the top of a search engine for a keyword, how many people will search for that keyword and how valuable is the market for selling the service or product that the keyword is.

So Keywords Smeywords..Lets Try it  Click here to search for Keywords Smeywords

The post Keywords Smeywords appeared first on Web Design Sydney.

Welcome to Google Hell the supplemental index.
When you search for your website with site:yourdomain.com
Google will tell you the number of pages listed in the website.
Here we can see that 140 Pages have been listed.

If we go to the last results page.

And, then click on repeat the search with the omitted results included.

We can now see that the last 60 results from the website are hidden by Google.
Google has deemed these results as not useful to anybody. In this case this is because these indexed results are PDF documents, PDF documents usually provide a very poor user experience for web uses. Google always wants to send people to the best possible results and the PDF where you can not click back to home or where it and you may not even have a web browser capable of viewing the PDF, this is a terrible outcome for the web user.

We created a script that has turned these PDF’s into HTML pages

AND have gone from only 30 Google listed pages

TO having 80 listed pages, all in just a single day.

The script will now be used to liberate another 120 pages of non indexed even more valuable PDF data on the site.

A great investment as it is usually so hard and time consuming to generate 200 pages of valuble content for a site.

The post Google Hell – The supplemental index appeared first on Web Design Sydney.

The first search engines relied almost entirely on algorithms that ranked sites based on the frequency of keywords in the text and the prominence of keywords in the text of the page.

Then Google come along and had a very smart idea that it would use the links to the website to gauge the importance of that website, for example if CNN linked to your website that would mean that it must be a very important site there is no way that it could have very low value information.

Now Google has moved on to a balance between the uniqueness of the content on the website, the links to your site and the study of user behavior on your website.
Google can get a pretty good idea of the importance of your website from those 3 above metrics.
The uniqueness of content is a huge signal to Google but we can’t just have random gibberish Google looks at the grammatical structure of your website text, included images, Headings, punctuation, spelling mistakes. from this they are trying to gauge whether you have just paid a bunch of Indians to type up a bunch of gibberish.

If we look at something like an encyclopedia it would almost certainly be original text content, Would include images and diagrams that are unique and the length of the content would be substantial.
It’s all common sense. If you were asked by somebody to recommend a page where they could learn about automotive repair Then you would most probably pick a website that has a lot of instructional text videos and images. You would probably not pick a website that sells cars or car parts.
So the writing of content just for the sake of writing content is never a good idea.

You only want content that is useful for your visitors.

Lets look at it like we’re looking at a library book. Most web sites out there are like a 4-5 page flyer. If you are competing with these guys and you have an encyclopedia then all the black hat techniques and paid links in the world that they could use will be worthless.

We can make strategies to develop content around your products and services. If someone came into your store to ask advice on your service I’m sure you could talk for hours about this. We use the strategy of voice annotation then the transcription of The Voice then we have professional proofreaders fine tune the content.

The post Content really is King for Google at the moment appeared first on Web Design Sydney.

SEO is dead, especially for a business that wants to build traffic from virtually nothing.
A typical SEO company will work out the keywords that it thinks will perform well for a site and then after a few months of you paying them, you will or will not see results.

SEO is a process of making Google rank a website on at least the first page for the keywords that a person would type in to find the website.

Google is in the business of providing the most relevant result to a users when they type a search term in. That is Googles aim, to provide users the best most useful information or products that they search for.

There are a few ways of increasing a websites perceived importance to Google.

Links to the website from other high ranking websites and mentions of your brand.
You can look at this like the other websites vouching for your website. If your website is important enough that
other people will link to it
major websites do reviews on your products
Websites mention your brand when comparing similar products
bloggers and facebook users regularly mention your brand
Google has an index of almost everything on the internet. If your brand is mentioned a lot and other websites link to your website then Google can think that your website is worthy of getting to the top.

On Page.
The content of the website. There is not really any tricks possible anymore. Google just looks at your page and wants to see that it is original content, first published by yourself, is grammatically correct with no spelling mistakes etc. That there is graphics, videos and a bunch of text on the page.
Google wants to gauge the worth of the page.

Site-wide
Similar to the content of a single page, all of the pages in the site are looked at in an overall sense. How much of the site is just copy/paste from somewhere else text? Is the entire website a good informative useful site?

Measurement of user interaction.
When someone clicks onto your website from a Google search results page, how long do they spend on your page? Do they visit the link from Google then straight away hit the back button and continue searching for what they want? Did the person find what they were searching for?

There used to be many tricks available to SEO people, now the best trick is to make a great website that people use.
It is a catch 22 situation that falls well into Google’s plans.

Google Adwords
With Adwords, you can skip SEO and try tomorrow a set of keywords that you THINK may perform well, perform as in turn searchers into people who buy. The keyword “Ingrown Hair” may seem like an obvious choice as a keyword to target, but how many of these people will buy? are they people who never buy anything? looking for natural remedies etc or something. The only way to find out is actually sending 100 of these people searching for that keyword to the site. “Infected Ingrown Hair” May be a keyword that every 15 people out of 100 buy a product, we can find out. To get sales really going at the moment maybe a totally different product would be better to be the focus.

The post SEO or Adwords? appeared first on Web Design Sydney.