Getting your website or brand ranked high enough in Google search results for someone to notice you,  contact you and approach your for business, is Bloody Hard work.  There is no guaranteed recipe on how to get your website on the first two pages of Google search results.

There are a number of guidelines you could follow to improve your site’s rankings. I am committed to write more articles on this subject, each of which will drill into more detail on how to do link building.  This article, however, will provide an overview of why link building is important and why doing it white hat  is the more sustainable way of improving your website/brand’s reputation.

 The higher the reputation of the website that is linking to you, the better it is.  For example if you are in the cat business, it is better to have the RSPCA link to you then Jim Bob’s Cat shed in Kalamazoo, because the RSPCA has a better online reputation when it comes to cats.

So what are all these overseas SEO experts going to offer me?

Well, links of course! And heaps of them. However, these are low quality links. “Sure”, I can hear you say, “but I am paying them enough”. Most of these unsolicited SEO ‘experts” deal in link quantity versus link quality.  There is a big chance that your website will get linked to from pr0n websites and other online caves of dubious reputation.  Link building this way (black hat)  can have the opposite effect of what you are trying to achieve and it could result in a drop in ranking, or even worse it might get you black listed in Google for being a cheat.  My advise, go white hat, build quality links, and point these quality links to quality content.  After all, back linking will not only result in higher Google ranking it should also help you generate more click through traffic. Let’s face it people are not looking for cats when they are browsing some dubious pr0n site (well maybe they are, but not really).

Market your website like you market you business;  address your potential audience and customers.

Before I continue and I will not go into it in too much detail; do your key word research. You should have actually done this before you started putting content onto your website. Why keyword research?  Well you need to have an understanding on what product you are going to sell and what people are going to use as search words in Google. Let’s say you are still in the cat business, are you aiming for people to find your pages when searching for ‘cat‘, ‘cat for sale’ or ‘pussy meow’ .  

Cat, cat for sale or pussy meow?

Another reason why keyword research is important, is because it will give you an insight into who your online competitors will be.  If for some reason you decided your main keyword will be ‘pussy meow Kalamazoo”, then it is easy to find your competitors, by hitting Google or any other search engine with that keyword.

Once you know your online competitors you can do research on how the obtained their ranking and who actually links to them. This knowledge can be extremely valuable to start a campaign to increase your website’s visibility.

Where to link?

Like I stated above, possibly you will not have to re-invent the wheel. By gathering proper intel on your online competitors, you might get a good insight on what to target.  Either way, generally speaking, back linking can be done on for instance:

• Blogs (comments or submit an article)
• Directories (can you submit your company listing)
• Paid inks (can you buy an entry)
• Forums (can you participate in a community)
• Social media sites (Youtube,  Twitter,  Facebook, Google+)

Everything is allowed,  but there are rules! be respectful when back linking on forums and link back to relevant content. It is, 9 out of 10 times, not a good idea to link back to your landing page. Do not spam forums with links, as it might get you banned.

With paid links, well they might be good obtaining links from site with a substantial reputation, but they are only good as long as you pay for them.

What to take into account?

I will give some hints and tips, but will drill down into more detail in separate  posts.

• Back links, make sure you use the key words or phrases to link back, do not  just add “click here”  with a URL.
• Do not send back to the home page.  Link back to a specific site that is relevant to the keyword (deep linking).

Finally I would suggest to install a plugin like for instance SEOQuake, a free Chrome and Mozilla plugin, and play around with it. Find out as much as you can about your competitor’s webpage and find out who your competitors are. You might find that your online competitors are not your local “real” competitors.

Feel free to contact us here at Dogtel IT, to further discuss this topic.

Meanwhile, keep adding quality content to your website that people would want to read and link to.

Further reading:

A very good (and long) youtube post by opensourcemarketer that kicked me off writing this post:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=awqOpasvWcQ

SEO Quake for Chrome and Mozilla

http://www.seoquake.com/

How Google Analytics and WordPress go together

Albert Einstein once said; “Imagination is more important than knowledge”.  That might be well for fundamental scientific research, but how do you actually do research on your website?  How can you establish how popular your website is in terms of traffic, which geographic location do these visitors come from? and what sort of devices do they use predominately?  All this boils down to knowledge.

Google Analytics can produce all this data.

This post is not necessarily about Google Analytics and WordPress, although I will explain how to incorporate Google Analytics into your WordPress site (or any site for that matter), it is more about Google Analytics  and why it is important.

 Why collecting data is important

Where do I start?  Google Analytics offers a broad range of metrics that are being monitored.  Setting up some form of data gathering on your website is not just about measuring sheer volumes.  It will also give you more detailed data about, for instance,  which pages are most visited, how well received new content is and if visitors really stay on your website or bounce off.  It will also give you valuable insight into the effectiveness of site optimization.  You could for instance optimize part of your website and see if that changes visitor’s behavior and traffic volumes before you sink more dollars into overhauling all your pages.

How does Google obtain all this info?

Simply, because you tell your website to do so.  How? Well your website has a unique ID that identifies your website with Google.  As soon as a user browses your website,  the tracking Javascript on your website gets invokes and a session information is established and information (such as Gender, geographic location, browser type etc.)  gets pushed out to Google.

This is the reason why some people would install plugins in their browser to prevent tracking from taking place.  Good for them, but not good for you as a webmaster, wanting to extract information out of your website’s visitors.

 How do you get your site to get monitored?

Let’s stick with Google Analytics. First thing you will need to set up is a Google account.  Next you will need to go to “webmaster Tools” (Google Apps).

If you already used Webmaster Tools previously, you will see the websites that you manage summarised. If this is your first time, ADD site (as per above).

Once you have added the domain you want to add to webmaster tool, it will prompt you to verify the site. Basically, this step ensures that you actually have access to the sites pages one way or the other. otherwise what would stop you from taking over www.cityofnewyork.com?

I prefer to verify using a meta tag on the home page, as per below:

This tag will need to be put into the head of your landing page. Once done, you can verify your site and at that stage Google assumes that you have direct or indirect access to the site in question. If you use the WordPress  Yoast SEO plugin, go to general settings

The Next step is to actually start collecting data from your website and, quite blatantly,  send em over to Google.  For this, a small piece of Java Script needs to be added to your website.  In fact, every page of your website.  So go back to your Google account and go to Google analytics .

On the main dash board, you will see what websites you manage, I obviously manage my own .

That UA-XXXXXX tracking ID can be easily added to your WordPress site using a  a plugin like Google Analytics by Kevin Sylvestre. All this plugin really does it at the tracking ID to the head of each page on your WordPress site (together with some other Java code).

If this is the first time on google analytics, you will need to create, what is called  a web property . You can do this as follows. In google analytics. go to Admin> create new property. This will bring up the screen below:

get your tracking ID, remember this is that UA-XXXXXX number that I showed earlier, and add it to your Google Analytics plugin.

Further reading

Please have a look at Adria Saracino’s post on the meaning and importance of various metrics that are presented in Google Analytics.

http://www.prdaily.com/Main/Articles/7_Google_Analytics_metrics_you_should_monitor_13939.aspx

For a good guide on Google Analytics, how to set it up how track and what NOT to track, go to:

http://www.simplybusiness.co.uk/microsites/google-analytics-guide/

In the last couple of years,  the number of personal devices with which we  browse the internet has increased. Not only that, but the variety of devices we do that with has increased as well.  Samsung Tablets, iPADs,  Google Nexus,  iPhone,  Android phones and the good old desktop, you name it.  All these devices have a different screen size and thus a different user experience when looking at the same website on any of these devices.

In other words the way a website is displayed, needs to be a response to the type of device that is being used. This is what is called a responsive website, or at least this is what a responsive website is set to achieve.

This shift from users browsing your website, solely from a PC or Laptop, to using a wide variety of screen sizes has created an additional challenge for website designers, in terms of optimizing the experience for  ‘all’  devices.  Basically, if you were to look at a non-reponsive website on an average smart phone, the first thing you would notice is that the website is too big for the screen and you would need to scroll to get an impression of what it is hiding. And sometimes you would need to zoom in because the font size is too small to read.

How to test a responsive website, the easy way?

A Responsive website, straight away adapts itself to the device it is displayed on.  A good way to test this, is by increasing and decreasing the width of a browser,  while looking at the content of the website itself, you will see. Making the browser width really small will resemble the same look as that of an average smart phone etc.

To get an idea of the various devices out there and their screen sizes, check the following link.

http://spirelightmedia.com/resources/responsive-design-device-resolution-reference

Responsive website, the good the bad and the somewhere in between

It’s easy to see, why website designers have shifted their focus towards responsive web site designing. I still come across a lot of website, that are 100% non-responsive. There could be a good reason why a website is non-responsive, or partially responsive (only responsive to certain devices). One has to remember, that the notion of responsive website design optimization is fairly new and there certainly is no ‘one size fits all’ approach of making a website responsive. In fact, revamping an otherwise non-responsive web site, can take considerable effort, resources and above all:  dollars.  This because designing a responsive website for every device that exists or will ever exist, if much harder than designing a website specifically aimed at a certain device.

In a way,  making your website responsive, is making your website future proof. On the other hand, one might argue that it is impossible to future proof something against, known unknowns.  I mean, it is impossible to predict the mobile device capabilities, say 5 years down the track.  Realistically, this can be used as  an argument to bash any future proofing, and certainly not an argument that I would use.

 So where is all this leading to?

If I knew for sure, I would be a very successful trader in shares. Where is think it is leading to?  Well first of all, I think there will be more and more websites adapting and optimizing to a larger number of devices.  I think it will also lead to further adaptation of web site layouts to smaller screen mobile devices in particular. Once the developers and designers churn the concept of responsiveness into a readily and easily available  set of tools or frameworks,  that is when we will start to see a huge increase of really well designed, responsive websites.

Until then, it is like Drew Thomas says in his article on this topic  http://www.creativebloq.com/web-design/responsive-web-design-hard-work-10134800

JUST HARD WORK