Website Beginners Guide

Learn How to Start Your Own Internet Site & More

Google

Website Hosting and HPPTS Options

Filed Under: Seo Basics

Google now has the HTTPS website URL as their favorite in their search results

Last year they already mentioned that they will identify https sites as save in Chrome (https://www.searchenginejournal.com/https-required-collecting-sensitive-information-chrome-january-2017/182342/). And you can see for yourself that the Lock icon and the save mark ar on this website.

I recently checked the results for a common search like “build a website” and found that the first 10 results all show https websites.

The first website without https showed up on the 14th spot, all the others on page 2 are also https sites.

Moving from HTTP to HTTPS

Important!!
  1. Always backup your website, including database before you start.
  2. Remember, for Google, this is a site move! So if not done correctly you might lose traffic.

Getting from HTTP to HTTPS need to be supported by your hosting company.

You can buy a full SSL certificate for your domain, and if you have an e-commerce store that should be your first choice.

For a standard website or blog like this one, a Free LetsEncrypt option will do just fine.

With the Siteground Hosting company where this site runs, they support both options.

It's also really easy to get a LetsEncrypt certificate. Just go to your Hosting Cpanel en click on Let's Encrypt.

You then get a list of your domains that already have a certificate and you get a selection box where you select the domain and request a certificate.

Wait a couple of seconds to let the process complete and you are done with this part.

Now you need to login to your Content Management System and change the base URL from HTTP to HTTPS.

I use WordPress on this site, so for me, it meant going to Setting -> General and change the URL to HTTPS and re-login.

But with the image and other links on the website still pointing to http:// resources you don't get a full save icon, its mixed content.

For WordPress there is a plugin called Really Simple SSL that fixes this, it also makes sure that the http:// links get redirected to the https:// version.

Something that is really important for Google and your visitors.

If you want to take it a step further, get the Pro version of Really Simple SSL, as that works it's magic to get HSTS.

I don't have the Pro version on this website, but I do use it on my dutch WordPress Magazine website and it has a 100% secure rating on the Dutch Internet.nl website making it into the Hall of Fame.

Doing a basic check on this site via https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/ gives me an A rating.

SSL test result

So to keep your rating and stay in the Google search results, move your site from HTTP to HTTPS.

If your hosting company does not have an option like Let's Encrypt, ask them if and when they will implement it.

If you don't get it or if you are not getting a clear answer, you might want to consider moving your website to a new hosting provider like SiteGround.com, I did and I am very happy that I did!

Google Updates in 2012 With the Biggest Impact

Filed Under: SEO

Looking back at 2012 there are a few Google updates that had more impact on website rankings and thus on traffic than just a small Panda update.

Top Heavy

In January we got the original page layout algorithm change that targeted websites that had too many ad-space above the fold.  A lot of Made for Adsense sites got hit as they focus on quick wins sending people away from the site into Adsense clicks. This was the first so-called Top Heavy update.

Penguin Update

In April Penguin was rolled out that brought a big hit on many site rankings.  The basic idea was to get quality content sites higher in the rankings and demotion of SEO. Or like Matt Cutts stated in the article below:

We want people doing white hat search engine optimization (or even no search engine optimization at all) to be free to focus on creating amazing, compelling web sites.

http://insidesearch.blogspot.nl/2012/04/another-step-to-reward-high-quality.html.

Penguin was heavily discussed as real good quality websites that had been around for years serving high-quality content to their visitors got dropped as well.

EMD & Panda Update

End of September there was another big impact update, this time focused on Exact Match Domains. This update was to clear out spam websites which rankings were based on the fact that they used keyword-rich domain names for exact matches on popular search terms.

The EMD update was targeted towards low-quality sites, but this time also some very good content sites were hit as well.

The Panda update that was rolled out at almost the same time as the EMD change so its hard to distinguish your ranking update between those two if you have a keyword-rich domain.

Panda's Intend

The Panda update was/is intended to give searchers better high-quality content to provide answers on their search. Google wants you to follow their Quality Guidelines and create easy to read content written for users, not for search engines.

These updates mentioned above have made a big impact on search with Google this year. Last year it was Panda, but that did not hit my websites as hard as Penguin did.

Panda Eating
Did Panda eat your rankings and traffic?
Image from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_panda

Google Ranking Recovering

Recovering from this year's updates is taking hard work and some real hard thinking about what to improve.

In the past creating a site with a clear hierarchy and text links for navigation could bring you a long way. Setup correctly you could get good rankings within a couple of weeks/months.

Now you have to get more updates in, work hard on Google+ and other social media, and create more user-centered high-quality content on your site.

It's a new era in search engine optimization for Google and other search engines will follow. I wonder what 2013 will bring us. Certainly more white hat SEO as several back hat tactics got busted this year.

And you, what do you think about these major algo changes? Good or bad for SEO consultants? And how about website owners?

Link Building For Beginners

Filed Under: Seo Basics

Search Engine Optimization has two distinct area’s the first being On-page optimization and the second, off-page optimization.

On-page optimization is what you can actually do to your website that will affect your ranking on the search engines.

This includes changing your title tags, H1 Tags etc.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) like anything else adheres to the 80/20 rule, whereby on-page optimization accounts for 20% of search engine rankings.

Link Building

The other 80% comes from link building, which is by far the hardest part when it comes to SEO.

Link building is getting other sites to link back to your own website.

Like everything else in the world, links have varying degrees of quality, you get really poor quality links which can actually harm your website or you can get excellent links which will help your rankings tremendously.

Obviously, the best quality links are the hardest to obtain.

For your information, the best kind of links to get, are links that come from Universities or Government websites.

Search Engines love these links and if you do manage to get one your website will almost certainly help get your website on to the first page within a couple of months.

The worst types of links are backlinks that come from Porn Sites, Pharma Sites or Gambling Sites.

I will list the ways in which a person can obtain links for their website.

1) Buy Links – The better the link, the more expensive they are.
2) Ask For Links – Either via Phone or Email.
3) Link Exchanges – Swap Links with other webmasters.
4) Register with Directories – Register your site with a number of directories.
5) Write Articles – Submit your articles to article directories like Ezine.
6) Write Press Releases – Submit to sites like PRweb.
7) Use Viral marketing techniques – Use sites like pay per post (link baiting).

I would suggest doing all of the above when you first start to do SEO on your own site.

A good mix of links is always good, try not to buy too many “cheap & cheerful” links as these will not do your site much good.

No. 1 on Google and No Clicks

Filed Under: SEO, WordPress

In the last few months I have been moving some websites from subdomains to new domains and sometimes changing there apperance.
Here is what happened on one of them…

The site was number One on Google for a long tail keywords phrase and it site was getting some nice traffic from this term.

After the move from its sub-domain life and going into its own domain I changed the template to a more suitable one and optimized the site to get more traffic.

One thing I did was the craft the Home page title so it would get even more traffic and it worked out nicely. The new theme was search engine optimized and I did not feel like I needed to do anything about it…

As I said, the site had a No. 1 position on Google, but after I wrote a new post on this site this happened to the traffic.

Title Problem Effect
Click to enlarge

Once I noticed the drop in traffic I checked Google and saw the site was still No. 1 but not with the title of the homepage anymore.

The title shown by Google was the title of the last post and no longer this traffic attracting title of the Homepage!
This title was not really on topic of the search term so nobody clicked on it to check out the site!

I checked the theme and changed the header option to make sure I got the Homepage title back into place.

Bringing it Back on Track

So everything is technically set back to how it should be, and now it was time to get Google's spider to re-index the site so the homepage title was back where it belonged.

Writing a new post that to update the site did the trick and the site was back in a few days.

All looked good, but a day later there was again this drop in traffic. Now I can explain the first drop, then the recovery but not the second drop.

The only thing I can think of was the short time upgrade followed by something Google might do like switching back for some time serving search engine cached indexes if they upgrade the primary index.
If you have another explanation, I would love to here it!

After this initial drop and kick back the site is now doing well, thank you for asking.
It is still growing in traffic.

Conclusion: Keep track of your site after you do a mayor upgrade like changing themes or even system upgrades.
The thing you need to watch closely is that the so carefully crafted title of you homepage is still the same so it will keep getting you the traffic. Especially it you have the No. 1 position on Google that you wanted to get.

Lost and Regained Traffic from Google, Yahoo and Bing the Easy Way

Filed Under: Optimization, Search Engines, SEO

Above is a little picture I wanted to show you.

For those among you who are used to looking at website traffic graphics you see that something strange has happened here…

You see, the picture above is from one of my websites and shows clearly what the impact was of the following story.

I made a mistake, a simple one but with large consequences as you can see.
Because of this mistake traffic for this site almost went done to zero.
But if it had gone down to zero it would have been clear what happed right from the start, but it did not, I “just” lost traffic from the mayor three search engines.

What happened?

In simple terms: the site was hacked via  a remote inclusion attack from several forum like websites, one of them was successful.
There was just one file affected but one of the most important ones, the .htaccess file.
There were four lines of code injected at the bottom to the file:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} (Googlebot|Slurp|msnbot)
RewriteRule ^ http://example.com/ [R=301,L]three - code used

The code in line three redirects those search engine robots too the site in line four (which I changed, the real site got enough traffic from me).

How was this possible? Simple, because I forgot to reset the security on .htaccess after doing some previous test.
The file was still set to 707 = also public write access, and yes its security is set back to the right access now.

How to find out your site is hacked

As I said before if the traffic had gone to zero you most probably would have checked your site and see a defacing of the site itself of some kind. The site would not work the way you would expect it to.

In this case the only problem I could see was that the traffic dropped hard in the statistics.
Upon looking further into the details I checked the ranking of previous Google search terms the site was ranking for.

I found that all the top 10 ranking pages ware gone! All my efforts to rank for those keywords were lost.

So I logged into Google webmaster to check if there was something horribly wrong with the site and the site had received some kind of penalty.

And yes there were errors with the URLs in the sitemap.xml, errors about unreachable URLs.
So I checked the files on the site that where modified just before the drop, and there was the .htaccess file with the above mentioned code.

Getting back into Google

After cleaning up the mess and setting the security right I realized the impact of these few lines.

All three search engine robots had gotten notice that the pages where permanently moved to another domain! which is not true, but they don't know that.

Checks on site: reference in Google, Yahoo and MSN showed that the domain was still in Yahoo and MSN Indexes, but had no entry in the Google Index anymore.

So it was time to send a reconsideration request to Google telling them what happened, what had been done to resolve the problem and what steps where taken too prevent it from happening again.

After that, you can only wait and wait…, don't expect an email form Google, just an automatically generated message in your Webmaster control center that they will look into the matter.

After a few days traffic started to build again from Google and Yahoo as well as MSN (Live.com) so you can conclude that Google really looks and acts upon your requests.

Hard Lessons learned

Now for the fun part of this episode, the lessons learned
First lesson: make sure to secure your cms installation and critical files.

Some tips:
– change passwords on a regular basis (use keepass if you have a lot off passwords to remember)
– secure your admin directory or files with .htaccess passwords, most of the hosting companies have this option in their cpanel
– update your system as soon as a new version comes out.

Check your stats once a day, or a least every few days for strange things happening, since this could have taken me a long time to get back if it wasn't for those early warning signs.

As a personal note: I need to get more incoming links from non-search engines to diversify my traffic sources :-)

What I realized after my traffic was back to its old level was that Google is really fast in acting on 301 redirects and changes in their index.
They update their index with a higher frequency than Yahoo and Live, and they really act fast on those re-inclusion request as well.

A hack like this before your start your SEO work for organic ranking would also mean that all your efforts will have no effect… so if a cusomers is really having trouble to get his or.her site into the search engines, check the .htaccess file!

If you have your own horror stories like this one, please share them in the comments and let us learn from those stories as well.

Moving from Feedburner to Google Feeds and Why?

Filed Under: Blogging, Search Engine

If you are running your feeds through Feedburner, you should know that Google bought that service in 2007.
Now they are making the next step, moving the feeds from Feedburner.com to feeds.google.com.

And you have to follow… and you should do it before the end of February 2009.
How? well there is nice instruction written by Michel Martin from Pro Blog Design on How to Move from Feedburner to Google

I just moved my Feeds over to my Google account and it is really easy and you cannot !! go back!

The analytics are nice, although I cannot click on the time line anymore to go to the statistics of my readers, you now have to use a drop-down menu to choose that date.
But you can see the mail addresses of the people who subscribed via the Feedburner email option.

So that  is nice, there are however also a few drawbacks…

Even with the Smart-feed options active, you now just get a limited number of options if you want to subscribe to my feed:

Feedburner to Google losing smartfeed

So it seems Google is now cashing in on the Feedburner service and using it to promote their own services and adverts.

Why the move from Feedburner to Google feeds?

Here are some ideas that are on my mind that might be the reasons for Google to force this move upon us Feedburner users:

  • Getting the feed data into the central Google index would mean easier and faster integration into the search results pages (well that would be nice:-))
  • Monetizing the feeds by adding an easy way to integrate adsense adverts (lets see if that works?)
  • Getting more grip on spammers that use a lot of feeds via Feedburner to spam the search index
  • Promoting their own feed reader instead of giving people the choice of their favorite feed reader service
  • Promoting the use of Google personal page to integrate feeds instead of offering the option to using services like Netvibes
  • Taking away the second email subscription option and instead driving people to wards Google mail.

All these reasons will have a large impact on some of the services and companies that where integrated or build on the Feedburner service…

Can you think of any other evil and non-evil reasons, please post them in the comments.
I would love to read your ideas on the reasons for this move.

Ranking on Google is going to change in 2009

Filed Under: Search Engine, SEO

If you keep an eye on things that are happening on Google, you will find some interesting things going on at this moment.

Ranking and Google Changes

First I want to point you to two video's from webpronews.com, the first one is an interview with Bruce Clay about this presentation Ranking is Dead where is looks at how Universal search is going to effect your Search Engine Page results.

The other one is at the same site, but now an interview with Matt Cutts on some of the Changes at Google were he talks about some of the things that Bruce Clay pointed out.

From both interviews you can see that Universal Search is going to target your search result pages based on previous searches and Local Search results based on IP address.
The latter is af course already in place where Google will use IP country ranges to lead you to other Data Centers and gives local and country language specific results.

Universal search is mostly referred to as showing results based on your previous searches , but this time even if you are not logged into your Google mail account!
That might scare some privacy concerned people… take into account that Google, Live and Yahoo already have a lot of information on your search history, be it via cookies, or via your DSL Provider that gives you a nice IP address.
That IP address wil stay the same for a loooong time,which is great! For Search Engines that is…

Actually listening to Bruce Clay I find a lot of things he is predicting for 2009 are already in place, it is just the flick of a switch for Google to turn them on.

Searchwiki

One other new thing you might have seen if you are logged into your Google account and you do searches is the new Searchwiki function.

Next to each Title in the result-page there are two little icons, one for UP and one for Delete, well the last one is to actually remove that result form your own search page.
So now you can get those old or not relevant results out of your own search results, but how will this effect the total results in the long run?

I can imagine Google using those results of up and delete actions to improve results in general.
If you look at large enough numbers of people “voting” on search results you could clean up the total results and make them even more relevant and up-to-date as they are now.

Afraid of your competition “voting” your site out of the results? Don't worry, as you heard before ranking is dead anyway.
But in fact I guess Google will have some algorithm in place that will show that people are trying to play the system.

The effects on SEO

Both Bruce and Matt mentioned it in their interview, as smart SEO is looking no longer at Search Page results rankings but at Conversion and is deep into analyzing his server logs.

A smart SEO is already working on Blogs, News, Images and Video to keep up with the new upcoming personalized search results and to provide your visitors with the quality content they are looking for.

But one thing I am really looking forward too is that importance of links to your site is going to be downgraded and real quality content is getting a more prominent place in the results pages.
This time driven by your own visitors that don't have spam sites but are really liking your content. 

Learn SEO from Google’s webmasters

Filed Under: Joomla Seo, SEO

If you don't have an RSS feed subscription on the Google Webmaster Central Blog yest, I strongly advice you te get one…

On there latest post they included an nice basic SEO Starters Guide from Google which you might want to forward to some of your customers.

What better way to educate them then sending them a document produced by the Guys that know Google the best.

Af course it is just a basic SEO Guide, but it shows some fine examples of things you need to get done for better rankings.
I personally like the explanation about why you need to have the best URL possible.

For Joomla webmasters this is still an issue, although Joomla 1.5.x “out of the box” is a lot better then Joomla 1.0.x but still not the way I want them.

P.s. don't forget to update your Joomla 1.5.x to the new Joomla 1.5.8 version! ?(if you use the SEF Patch from Joomlatwork.com you better wait for the update… looks like that could take some days.

Google Insights use for analysis and upcoming trends

Filed Under: Search Engine, SEO

My Google Alert on Joomla SEO just brought me this link to an Google Insights Article that also discussed the use of this new tool in conjunction with the previous mentioned report in Open Source CMS Market shares.

What interested me even more was how these figures where on a regional level, so I did some comparisons between Worldwide, USA, UK and the Netherlands.

The outcome did somehow surprise me…

Below the graphics for the Worldwide search, showing clearly the search for Joomla as the biggest one…

Now for the Dutch searchers, Joomla is also looking great with extreem high search levels.

 

When it comes to the UK, you see that Joomla and WordPress are almost level, with WordPress here as the rising star.

But here is the really BIG surprise, Joomla is loosing big time to WordPress when it comes to the United States.

So where does this big difference come from? Are there more Bloggers in the US?
Is WordPress so much more popular in the US for use as a CMS as well?
Is the installed base of WordPress bigger in the US, and are there more questions on using WordPress?

But that is just one way to look at this tool….

Most interesting are the screens just below the Worldwide search, that will show you the regions that are the biggest searchers on that specific keyword.
Which is great information if you need to target a certain region for your SEO Customer.

Also the results below that field, which gives you related searches, but also Rising searches… which means that this is a tool to use in the future to see what keywords are hot and what you should be writing about!

I like the tool! How about you? can you work with this information or are you skeptical about the numbers shown?

Google Affiliate Network Start, Adsense Referrals Stops…

Filed Under: Affiliates

Today Performics and Google announced there final cooperation into the affiliate marketing by introducing the Google Affiliate Network

Along with this announcement, there was also a small text in your Adsense settings, telling you that the Adsense referral program will end in August 2008.

Last year I wrote a post about Google Becoming the Ultimate Super Affiliate�and it looks like we are looking at the next step…

Closing the referrals opens up new possibilities, but if you want to stay working with CPA by Google, that means you have to apply for a new account into the program.

Becoming a Publisher is also subject to review of your website, and you better check the FAQ�on the publisher�information.
There are several items in the FAQ, like:

I'm already a Google Adsense publisher. Am I now a publisher in Google Affiliate Network?
No, you must complete a separate application for Google Affiliate Network.

Like on the Performics DoubleClick site, Google is Thinking ahead!

Looks like a new era in the Affiliate Markering world…

And you might not be aware of this, but Adsense is just 5 years old… its going to be good times to see how this new Google Affiliate Network will perform.