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.
For my Mastodon instance, I create a new little logo today.
Along with a matching banner. It’s actually silly how pleased I am with them.
I finally set up a Mastodon instance; https://toot.kiwi
I love Mastodon, and can’t wait to see what becomes of my server. (After I open it up to the public of course).
I bought the domain back when saying something on Mastodon was called ‘tooting’ – those days are long gone but I still like it.
Find me here; Mastodon
The Spinoff are doing a special week dedicated to screens. It’s like Shark week but more digital. 🙂
They took me up on my offer to write an article about digital safety for kids. How much screen time is too much, how much it too little – etc.
In a previous life I worked in education and was involved in hours of discussion around digital safety for young people, different approaches, etc.
It’s great to be able to continue some of those conversations in this very different, Covid-19 era.
It can be hard to talk about, but we have to acknowledge that our children can be at risk when they’re spending time in digital spaces we’re not familiar with. Just as parents talk with their offspring and help them navigate difficult situations in the playground, we need to do the same with digital communication.
Peter Mahoney in the Spinoff
The pandemic really has changed everything with screen time. Kids expect (and need to) socialise – which leaves them doing that online in games we don’t play, interacting with people we don’t know.
Video calling has become totally the norm for hours at a time.
Just three years ago in 2019 a major survey in NZ found kids used screens around two hours a day. Current (last month’s) data puts that figure at just over five! And that’s not five total, that’s on top of what’s needed for schoolwork.
It’s a dangerous playground out there – but at the same time it’s best to teach kids how to navigate it all in the safest way we can provide.
Definitely don’t throw them to the digital wolves or keep them ‘locked in the house’.
Just like we help teach our children what to look out for in the physical world, how to interact in the physical world, and how to play their part in keeping them safe in it too – we can and should do the same thing in the digital world.
I work out of a really affordable (actually cheap) shared studio workspace in Te Aro, Wellington. Just off Cuba Street.
We’ve just made a one-page website to try to fill a current vacancy! Have a look, and come and join us.
I’ve been doing search engine optimisation for 21 years now.
That means my SEO experience is old enough to legally drink through the USA, although it’s been able to drink in the UK and NZ for quite some time.
Cheers!
I just finished up a presentation at the Wellington WordPress Meetup all about WordPress speed, image optimisation, and its ultimate effect on SEO.
The slides from the talk can be viewed here.
I also referred to a settings file to import into WP Rocket which will work well with most WordPress sites – you can grab that here.
(I also made my own silly GIF for it! “SEO is a many headed hydra.”)
In my last post I mentioned the importance of forcing HTTPS if you’re using it on your website. (Which you absolutely should be.)
You don’t want visitors seeing the non-secure version of the site anyway, but from an SEO perspective Google doesn’t love it when they can see both either – they’ll interpret it as two different sites with the exact same content.
As long as your site is running on an Apache server (and most do) then you can edit the .htaccess file – this is the hidden file at the top level of your website that has specific instructions for how the server should load things.
To force HTTPS, just stick this at the top of it:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTPS} off
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://%{HTTP_HOST}%{REQUEST_URI} [L,R=301]And that’s it.
Or if you’re running a WordPress website you just want to stick this in that same file somewhere:
# Rewrite HTTP to HTTPS
RewriteCond %{HTTPS} !=on
RewriteRule ^(.*) https://%{SERVER_NAME}/$1 [R,L]And just one more quick tip to make it even easier to force HTTPS on a WordPress site; as long as you use the normal permalink structure (domain/postname) then just replace the WordPress code in the .htaccess file with this:
# BEGIN WordPress
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^index\.php$ - [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
# Rewrite HTTP to HTTPS
RewriteCond %{HTTPS} !=on
RewriteRule ^(.*) https://%{SERVER_NAME}/$1 [R,L]
</IfModule>
# END WordPressThat will take care of the permalinks and forcing HTTPS.
Now that the Chrome browser is showing URL warnings when you visit sites that don’t use HTTPS, it’s time to consider your own setup.
If your own site is still not secure, you absolutely needs to change that. The SEO advantages alone should have had you change it a few years ago, but this latest warning situation means you shouldn’t even think twice about it.
There’s a two step process to getting HTTPS.
Step 1)
You need to buy an SSL certificate (usually through your host), and have it installed on your hosting account.
These are often free these days via systems like ‘Let’s Encrypt’ – which hopefully your host will support.
Step 2)
The site needs to be set up to run through the SSL certificate, which results in HTTPS.
Someone (possibly me) needs to spend time making sure every single reference to your URL in the database and site code is updated. This can take anything from 15 minutes to a couple of hours – depending on what content management system you use (if any).
You’ll also want to ensure your site is forced to run through HTTPS. If users can hit both the secure and non-secure version of the site – that’s no good.
HTTPS isn’t really considered an option these days, more of a requirement.
For a long time now, people have been clear that your website needs to load in less than four seconds. Anything longer and chances are you’ll lose than.
The problem is people have been saying this for a really long time. Well over a decade; before high speed broadband at home became standard, or the prevalence of mobile and tablet based browsing.
We need to forget this outdated adage. If I’m on a site that take more than two second to load I get impatience.
And I do like to build sites to match my own impatience. 😛
Seriously, aim for two seconds. With proper speed optimisation and image compression it’s very possible to achieve – even on WordPress.
It’s better for your customers, it’s better for your server and of course way better for search engine optimisation.
It’s also good to enter a build process with this as a self-imposed restraint. When you client comes to you with 24 MBs of images they want displayed on the homepage they will more than understand if you reply:
Great looking photos, and I while we can certainly find a place for all of them on the website somewhere – I like to make fast sites that your customers will love.
You’d be hard pressed to find a client that doesn’t agree with you there.
Search Engine Optimisation has LOTS of components to it. We know Google uses more than 200 metrics to determine a website’s rank, but some of those are their haystacks to find needles in: consider that a site’s speed is a single metric among 200, but setting that up correctly takes hours.
Similarly an oft overlooked, but important, things to do for a site’s SEO is to set menu titles. Each menu item can have a title attribute associated with it, and all the major search engines love to see those.
<a href="/seo" title="Search Engine Optimisation">SEO</a>That’s a good example of menu titles in practice for SEO. The link itself is just ‘SEO’, which is nice and concise for a menu.
But the title attribute has, that search engines see, is ‘SEO Search Engine Optimisation NZ’.
It’s clear to search engines the title attribute is related to menu name (and hopefully also that page’s content) which means it’s perfectly reasonable to add a few other related keywords, in this case the acronym’s meaning.
It’s this sort of attention to detail in SEO that makes all the difference. The most important SEO is always the SEO your competitors aren’t doing.