My first job in search engine optimisation was in 1997. So much has changed - SEO is more nuanced than ever before, with every character, every comma having an effect.
In addition to writing about SEO and speaking at various conferences, I enjoy actioning it myself too. There's nothing quite like sending a client a graph showing their organic traffic skyrocketing - without them having to increase their monthly spend.
Dear Peter Mahoney:
I don’t know if you can help me with that but my team and I noticed that emails we send from our server go automatically in Spam on Gmail.
That email issue is pretty common actually. All receiving email servers have different rules about what counts as likely spam or not. Gmail is particularly strict.
It pays to do everything possible to keep them happy, which includes (but isn’t limited to):
And if nothing works, then consider using Google Suite for your own email. You can get plugins that will actually send email out from your site via your own Google Mail account, which is pretty fool-proof. That’s what I do myself.
Email, basically, sucks. It’s 30 years old and has barely changed in that time. It’s just levels of geekery added on top of something that was already hella nerdy.
I’ve done SEO for companies around the world, and there’s one little oddity of search here in New Zealand that I’ve just not found anywhere else.
Basically, if you don’t add ‘nz’ to the end of your searches you’re likely to get a string of results from abroad, in particular Australia. This seems to happen even for really location specific searches, like hardware stores and that kind of thing.
Living in New Zealand you probably don’t even notice it because you’ve never known any different, and it’s entirely possible you already add ‘nz’ to your searches without even thinking about it. But in every other country I’ve optimised for, results are always much more local without having to add a country name.
I can’t find a good technical reason for Google to behave this way. I can’t even think of one – we know their concept of ‘location’ includes a country field, and they definitely know we’re a country.
I’ve seen their map and we’re on it.
But nonetheless, this is something to take into account with your SEO for NZ sites. Be aware that not only do you need to do all the location work imaginable, but bear in mind many searchers already assume your site will be optimised for ‘nz’ as a key term.
This is a goodie.
If you’ve ever run a Google Page Speed test and wondered what on earth the results actually meant, you probably didn’t end up scrolling all the way to the bottom of the report.
But right there, at the bottom, is the option to “Download optimized image, JavaScript, and CSS resources for this page.”
Within that zipped file is a folder with all the images from that page you just tested, optimised to Google’s required standard.
It’s sweet, but comes with a couple of caveats. One being it gives you all the images in a single folder and WordPress sites usually want them in a variety of folders by month, so that can take a bit of unraveling.
Also bear in mind Google’s compression algorithm tends to do terrible things to text in graphics. So best not use this method for any images with text in them.
But generally speaking it’s a really useful way to take “Optimize images” off your Page Speed to-do list.
By 15 hours.
This image is the search engine results page for a post I made on our Digital Kiwis site, 5 minutes after I posted it. (Yes, I manage to get new or updated content live on search engines almost immediately after they’re published. Behold my SEO!)
It’s the results from a search performed in New Zealand, on google.co.nz, for an NZ hosted website about a local company.
Yet it says it was posted 15 hours previously! I’ve mentioned this at conferences before, but Google really struggles with New Zealand as a nation (for so many searches if you don’t add ‘nz’ at the end of them you’ll see Australian results) but this seems like it’s just plain lazy.