Fibre Marketing

Tag: Website

How to Perform a Site Audit

Posted on by Chloe

How do you know when it’s time to perform a website audit? Well, if you’ve never done one before or even thought about it, the time is probably now. Even a very basic website can have many moving parts, which means there’s plenty to go wrong. If you’ve ever found a broken link or similar on another site, you know how frustrating it can be – but site issues can also undermine your SEO efforts and end up costing you money.

Firstly, realise that there are an endless number of optional steps, but we’ll be covering only the basics here. Here at Fibre we offer a free internet marketing audit and can also take a more detailed, technical audit of your site to see what’s working, and what isn’t. But if you’d like to have a go at it yourself, here’s a few key steps to get you started with your audit.

Is your design fresh and functional?

Yes, your design matters. Don’t put customers off with a dated looking site. Get an external opinion or try looking at your site in Google’s incognito mode to see what your customers are seeing. Kill popups, obnoxious ads, illegible fonts, and boring colours. Next, scan the copy. Are your CTAs clear, above the fold and repeated throughout? You need to be able to glean everything you need to know about your company from the images, colours and branding alone. Finally, double check that everything is looking as it should on mobile – there are now some apps available to help you do this quickly.

Is your navigation easy and logical?

Again, put on the perspective of a visitor and see how quickly you can navigate around the site. Your menu has to be visible, make sense, and preferably be quite minimal. Be honest about what your customer really wants to read (authentic reviews!) and potentially downplay things like blog posts, About Us sections or news.

Are you using HTTPS?

A site audit is also about safety – you need to make sure that potentially sensitive data going to and from your site is encrypted so it can’t be intercepted by others. Using HTTPS (or getting an SSL certificate) is a non-negotiable if you’re selling on your site or collecting customer info, but it will also result in better Google rankings.

Is your loading speed OK?

It’s not fair, but visitors have very little patience and will simply click away if made to wait too long for your page to load. Google’s PageSpeed Insights is free and can tell you how you’re faring, as well as give you recommendations for how to improve.

How good is your content?

After you’re happy with the overall design and user experience, making sure your content is performing well might take the bulk of your audit time. You’ll need to make sure your content fits your overall strategy (is it offering unique, genuine value?), that it’s structurally sound (grammar, spelling, formatting) and overall high quality (skimmable, with other media mixed in, at the right reading level). Add proper headings and be honest about how well-written and informative each piece is. Could you reuse the content in an updated format like a social media post or video instead? Perhaps it’s time for an edit.

Do you have any broken links?

Dead end links or error pages can make a site feel neglected. Do this manually if your website is small or try a professional service or specialised software to help you weed out broken pages.

Is your SEO up to scratch?

Doing a site audit necessarily means appraising the performance of your SEO strategy. Are your titles for each page descriptive, unique and optimised? Make sure you’re including your keywords here where possible. For a thorough SEO check, you might need the advice of an industry professional to help you examine your organic search ratings, your LSI, and any buggy code to see how you compare to your competitors. A more in-depth exploration can check on the health of your meta-descriptions, images, overall site architecture, URLs, tags and backlinks. You need to gain a comprehensive idea of exactly how “healthy” your site is, inside and outside, and how it’s performing out in the market.

You may be surprised by what a comprehensive audit turns up – some people are shocked at the hidden ways their rankings were being lowered, or how many ways they were losing customer interest. Maintaining smaller websites is not too difficult with a little know-how, but you can make the process even easier by scheduling regular automated site “crawls” to do the work for you, or getting some expert human eyes on the site once in a while.

Site Security: How to Keep Your WordPress Site Safe

Posted on by Chloe

It’s a sobering fact: Google blacklists tens of thousands of sites every single day for malware or phishing. Getting hacked is something many of us would like to believe can’t really happen. But if you own a website, it’s your responsibility to make sure you’re up to date with site security.

Why WordPress, specifically? Simply, it’s the biggest CMS (content management system), arguably the most popular (28% of all global websites are WordPress hosted, with 60% market share!) and the best platform we know of for optimising SEO.

But hackers can interfere and seriously damage your business reputation, jeopardising your revenue or even stealing customer information. Though WordPress is pretty secure already, you can always reduce risk, even if it seems a little intimidating and you’re not 100% tech-savvy. Here we’re sharing our 10 must-have safety tips as a great place to start.

Keep WordPress updated, and back up, back up, back up!

WordPress is open source and will automatically install smaller updates, but needs your say-so to go ahead with more major ones. Make a habit to install updates diligently, including any third-party plug-ins or themes.

And, as always, regularly do backups. There are free WordPress plugins that will help you backup to a remote cloud location such as Amazon or Dropbox on a (at minimum) daily basis.

Use strong passwords

Take the time to change to stronger passwords across the board. Limit who can access the account (think guest posters or freelancers) and if you must, use a password manager and commit to regularly refreshing passwords.

While you’re at it, change the default “admin” username!

Change your WordPress Admin URL

A simple but effective way to discourage minor hacking. If you’re worried about compatibility issues, you can always use a separate plugin to hide your login URL and convert it to a personalised one.

Rethink your WordPress hosting service

The right shared hosting provider can shield you from significant risk at the backend, on the server-level. Consider Bluehost, Kinsta or Siteground, which will continuously monitor activity, offer automatic updates and provide more sophisticated protection. A good host can detect attacks and automatically ban suspicious IPs, but also offer support in worst case scenarios.

Use a plugin

It’s not enough to rely on built-in WordPress security mechanisms. Yes, you’ll have to pay for these (sometimes quite a bit) but it’s worth taking the time to understand exactly the functionality you’ll get, and whether it’s appropriate for your site and business.

Security Ninja, Google Authenticator, Vaultpress and Jetpack are all popular options and will monitor your files, record failed logins, blocks bots and spam, or scan for malware. Sucuri is also a great option for those wanting a free plugin. Chat with your SEO team to hone in on what’s most important to you – easy to use interface, value for money, simplicity, two-factor authentication or an advanced, comprehensive solution?

Choose HTTPS

If this is not installed, then you run the risk of sharing your login details. When submitted on HTTP your sensitive information is simply passed to the server in plain text and so can be intercepted. Enable SSL encryption (Secure Sockets Layer) and use HTTPS when possible.

Enable WAF (Web Application Firewall)

A firewall blocks suspicious traffic before it can do any damage; there are two main types – DNS level or application level, the former being a little more robust. DNS firewalls send your site traffic through a cloud proxy server first so only genuine visitors land up at your site.

Disable file editing

WordPress has a default code-editor that lets anyone tweak the themes and plugins from the admin dashboard – an obvious risk when it comes to hacking. Disable it with a simple addition of code.

Limit failed login attempts to 3

WordPress default is unlimited failed logins, giving hackers endless time to guess. Instead, visit Settings > Login Lockdown and choose the retry number, the retry time period and the period your site will lock for after that. You could alternatively consider a plugin for this.

Also consider automatically logging out idle users, and add security questions to your login screen.

Change your WordPress database prefix

The default is “wp_” but change it to something that’s less easy for hackers to guess your table name.

For those starting out, or the self-confessed tech-phobes among us, tightening up online security can seem like an daunting prospect. Luckily, there’s plenty of support available and our experts at Fibre are always at hand to answer your questions. Don’t be afraid to experiment. Take it a step at a time and put yourself in the shoes of someone trying to get in – how can you make it as difficult as possible?

Do H1 Tags Impact Rankings?

Posted on by Ella

“H1 tags improve your SEO”.

True or false?

In this article we’ll be putting the H1 tag beneath the magnifying glass and assess its true ability to help bolster your website rankings. We’ll also explore what Google has to say and guide you step by step through how you can optimise the H1 tag for your website.

What is the H1 tag?

H1 tags are those snippets of HTML which help highlight the most important information on a webpage. They’re mainly used for page titles, blog post titles, or to name the page or topic and are written like this:

<h1 class=”entry-title” itemprop=”headline”> Do H1 Tags Impact Rankings? </h1>

They help explain the topic of a page to both readers and search engines alike, provide essential structure and generally help the text to stand out from the rest of the page.

They’re usually bigger, bolder and easier to read than the surrounding text and can vary in length from just a few words to an entire sentence.

Without them, the page would lack structure and it would be much harder to attract a reader and encourage them to fully engage with the content.

This is especially important as modern readers are more likely to skim read and have limited time to find the information they need, thus needing signposts like this.

It’s also worth mentioning that there are other tags which range in ‘importance’ from H1 (most ‘important’) down to H6 (least ‘important’). Like H1 tags, they help structure the webpage and provide a page hierarchy for Google to index. This can positively influence search results and simultaneously reduce bounce rates and improve user experience.

Why are H1 tags important to SEO?

Some debate in SEO circles suggests that H1 tags don’t matter, given that they no longer directly affect search engine rankings as they did in the early 2000s.

In the words of Google’s John Mueller, “Your site is going to rank perfectly fine with no H1 tags…”

However, others believe that these heading tags do improve the overall content quality, readability and user experience, despite speculation that they have been ‘crowded out’ by more advanced metrics.

Of course, Google won’t crawl your webpage, signpost your recent inclusion of H1 tags and instantly bump you up to 1st place on the SERP. But Google will notice the change in the behaviour of your readers. For example, whether they click away from your page quickly or engage with your content and keep reading. This could then influence your search rankings.

In the Search Engine Ranking Factors survey conducted by Moz in 2015, tags were indeed the third most influential ranking factor. Additionally, another similar study from 2018 showed that on-page ranking factors such as keywords in titles were the second most influential factor.

What does Google say about H1 tags and rankings?

Despite John Mueller’s statement claiming that your site would rank even if it doesn’t have any H1 tags, he also confirmed that H1 tags can help search understand the structure of prose;

“H1 elements are a great way to give more structure to a page so that users and search engines can understand which parts of a page are kind of under different headings.

So I would use them in the proper way on a page. And especially with HTML5 having multiple H1 elements on a page is completely normal and kind of expected.”

How should you implement the H1 tag effectively?

  • Have an H1 tag on every page: Avoid confusion, increase reader satisfaction and help to reduce bounce rates by making it clear to search engines and readers alike what your page is about. Make sure you include at least one H1 tag on each page.
  • Don’t use more than one: You wouldn’t see a newspaper that had twenty front page news headlines or find a book with several titles. It would be hard to make sense of, let alone easy to read. Keep it simple. Just use one.
  • Make them all unique: Duplicate content is a big no-no when it comes to SEO. Ensure that every H1 tag is unique and bespoke to the page content.
  • Aim for between 20 and 70 characters: Too short and you’re not giving yourself much chance to be descriptive. Too long and you could confuse your potential website visitor.
  • Include H2 tags too: Again, adding other tags helps to provide structure to the page rendering your webpage easier to index and easier for your reader to extract vital information. Aim to include relevant secondary keywords in these tags where appropriate.

Final thoughts

While those H1 tags won’t make or break your search engine rankings, they do help to improve overall user experience and help Google understand your site structure better. This means they’re certainly worth optimising for and getting right.

BrightonSEO September 2019: Key Highlights For Fibre Marketing

Posted on by Ella

Last week, a few members of the Fibre team attended BrightonSEO – one of the world’s largest SEO conferences – where we spent the day listening to talented speakers’ tips and advice as well as seeing some big SEO names (Greg Gifford was a highlight). Preceded by a pre-party that allowed attendees to DJ and followed by a grab-all-the-free-stuff session the next morning, we can say that it was certainly a full-on, exciting couple of days.

We’ve come away inspired to try out new tools and strategies throughout our company and see what results they bring. With that in mind, here are just some of the talks that stood out for us.

Link Building

Creating Sexy AF Outreach Emails To Land Sexy AF Links – Carrie Rose

Carrie Rose claimed that she wasn’t 100% during her talk as she was hungover, yet she had so much energy that we could barely imagine how charismatic she is when she’s feeling more like herself!

Carrie offered great advice throughout her talk, exhibiting screenshots of her outreach emails and providing an insight into the day to day of journalists and bloggers. Essentially receiving around 600 emails a day – Carrie highlighted the need for outreach emails to really stand out. Carrie then provided tips for crafting the perfect subject heading as well as going through the best time slots to send emails each day, along with other valuable SEO wisdoms.

Takeaways:

  • Top-tier journalists receive around 600 emails a day, so it’s essential that your outreach email stand out.
  • Create stories within your content – something that bloggers/readers will be interested in and will be considered, ‘resourceful, useful or different.’
  • The relevance of what you’re pitching should be stated near the top of your email.
  • Match your tone of voice and title to the publication’s.

Carrie’s slides are available here.

Email Anatomy: How To Get Top Tier Links – Alex Cassidy

Alex Cassidy’s talk on building top tier links was one of the most insightful sessions in the conference for us. He broke down the perfect outreach email, accompanied by screenshots, and shared his methods that he and his team created based on the 100,000 emails they sent out last year.

He titled his method ‘SLLAM,’ an acronym for Subject, Lede, Link, Angles and Methodology, as these make up the structure of outreach emails. He also shared how to chase writers to include links in already-published articles, but encourages his team to state the link needed in the email to minimise constant back and forth. Some of the most memorable screenshots of his talk however were the many, many blunt rejections that ‘outreachers’ receive that everyone in the room could relate to – we’ve all been there!

Takeaways:

  • If you’ve tried a subject line 25 times which hasn’t received much traction, then move on to a different technique.
  • Constructing the perfect email is an ‘art’ – you need to cut down large amounts of content to something digestible yet intriguing for the reader.
  • You want to keep your emails short and sweet, but provide enough information to eliminate back and forth conversation.

Alex’s slides are available here.

SERPS

Mining The SERPs: How To Make The SERPs A Powerful Weapon In The SEO Armoury – Rory Truesdale

Rory Truesdale explored the language of SERPs during his talk to explain how they can show you what customers/users are looking for.

Using certain tools, Rory explains how you can analyse the language of search engine results in order to improve your own online performance. Conductor composed a study which revealed that Google rewrites 84 % of SERP-displayed meta descriptions, so the meta description displayed on search pages can differ from what’s defined in the page’s HTML.

Takeaways:

  • Google has data that helps it make sense of what the user is looking for, so it will pick sections from the content that it thinks best meets the criteria of the search. So by exporting this data, we can take the content pulled from SERPs and gain insights into how Google is interpreting queries, which can thus be used for webpage content.

Future Of Search

Bettlejuice’s Guide To Entities And The Future Of SEO – Greg Gifford

In his talk, Greg Gifford explores the evolution of Google and it’s algorithms, starting from a simple matching keywords-to-keywords basis to now understanding real-world signals. An insightful talk with a horror movie theme that made his session even more enjoyable for our team.

Greg explained that Google originally used keyword matching for search queries – meaning that their bots considered the keyword patterns instead of the meaning behind the query itself. It wasn’t until 2012 when Google then started to evolve towards the latter, stating that they were ‘moving from keywords towards knowledge of real-world entities and relationships.’ Reflecting on past major algorithm updates, we can see that Google continues focusing on semantics and entities.

Takeaways:

  • When thinking about the future of search, it’s obvious that rankings will be based on real-world signals. This means that the weight of keyword matching is decreasing as these signals cannot possibly be faked by anyone.
  • Furthermore, these changes tell us that SEO will be less concerned with writing content for search, but instead will focus on ensuring that websites have the best answer for the search query. We are already seeing this today.
  • Local SEO is also becoming more and more significant, especially for mobile searches. Make sure your Google My Business Listings are updated and monitored, focusing on images and reviews.

You can see Greg’s slides here.

Rethinking The Fundamentals Of Keyword Research With The Insights From Big Data – Tim Soulo

Tim Soulo from Ahrefs gave us an insightful talk that took a deep dive into keyword research by providing us with data based studies composed by the company.

We knew we were in for a session of discoveries when the first statistic was presented to us: the average #1 page position in Google rank for about 1000 other keywords! While we all knew that pages rank for multiple keywords, but it was still a shock to know exactly how many. Tim continued his talk by offering advice on applying this data to websites and what effects they can have.

Takeaways:

  • 88% of webpages receive no traffic from Google, which serves as a reminder of how essential keyword research is.
  • In their study, Ahrefs concluded that there are two reasons why pages are not ranking in Google. The first being the number of backlinks (links are a major major ranking factor), or, the page isn’t targeting a topic with a decent amount of search potential. Essentially, if no one is searching for what your webpage is about, you’re not going to get any traffic for it.
  • This demonstrates that search intent is one of the most important aspects of gaining that first-place ranking.

We’ve absolutely loved BrightonSEO this year, and we’re looking forward to attending the next conference in April 2020 and seeing what else we can learn.

What Makes a Good Blog?

Posted on by Chloe

What makes a good blog can be broken down into four segments. Firstly, there are the different forms success takes, secondly there is the marketing boost that all successful blogs need, thirdly there is surprise, and fourthly there is targeting. This post covers all four elements of a successful blog, and also offers a little bit of advice about trying to replicate the success of others.

Success Has Many Forms

Take YouTube as an example: Pewdiepie holds the record for the most total viewers on YouTube, and it is just one guy who used to upload every day; then, take Lemmino. He uploads once per month at the most, and he has the most loyal followers. Both are working alone, both are incredibly successful, and yet both use a very different method for achieving their success.

The key to blogging success seems to be “Experimenting.”  i.e. trying out a bunch of different ideas until you find the thing that works. Many times, you are surprised by what works and what does not.

For example, there was a blog aimed at teenage boys, and the web master tried everything from fight videos to hilarious comic strips. He tried every cliché in the book to attract teenage males. Yet, the web master had his biggest run of success when he posted opinion pieces on local issues, but he put a joke or funny comment in every third line of his blog. That simple format attracted more of his target demographic than all the gun-violence posts he ever uploaded.

Your Face on A Billboard

You may have the highest quality blog of all time, but if nobody sees it, then nobody interacts with it, which means Google ranks it as number 120,000 on its results. You will need to give your search ranking a boost from time-to-time with search engine optimization. Just like putting your face on a billboard, you need to draw a little attention from time-to-time if you want to generate sustained success for your blog. Get people interested by optimising your website and its content for Google, and then, if your blog is good, it will be carried by its own success.

Think of the keywords that you want to rank for. The headlines you’re creating. Do you need visual content? Remember, do not keyword spam and do not make your post too long. People have shorter attention spans – keep content between 500-1,000 words, and use subheadings (H2s) and bullet points if necessary.

What Makes A Good Blog?

Targeting and surprise. Sadly, these are two elements that are often confused by bloggers and people in the publishing industry.

Targeting means you need to produce content that your readers are actually interested in. Your blog needs to fit your niche, and thus needs to appeal to those who are interested in it, while pushing away everybody else. It is the “pushing away” part that most bloggers mess up – many try and create content that would appeal to anyone in the hopes that they gain more traffic. The fact is that if you wish to target certain people, then you have to alienate others. need to alienate some people if you want to target others.

This also means that you need to have a thorough understanding of what your target audience wants and write directly for them. If you’re stuck for ideas, type in some keywords that you’d like to rank for, and look at the questions from the ‘People Always Ask’ section on the search engine results page (SERP). That’s what your target audience are searching, so make sure your blog has the answers.

Secondly, surprise means “unexpected.” It doesn’t mean click-bait titles, it doesn’t mean shock news, and it doesn’t mean being unorthodox.

Examining the Success Of Strangers

You should do learn from your success because they offer the most powerful lessons.

Should you learn from the success of others? You probably shouldn’t. Most people have no idea why they succeeded because they spend too much time examining why they failed and not why they succeeded. Secondly, repeating somebody else’s success is often harder than building a successful blog using your own trial and error.

A wise person examines the success of strangers and takes its lessons on board, but maybe doesn’t try to replicate the success directly.

 

Google dropping pages out of the Search Index

Posted on by Chloe

It’s been reported that a Google bug is causing the removal of pages from the search index. Starting on Thursday 4th April, Google confirmed the bug on Saturday 6th, and as of the time of writing, (11th April), it is yet to be fully resolved.

Sites are seeing web pages being omitted from their index, thus not showing up in Google search results. This could have a huge impact for these websites, resulting in less traffic and therefore less e-commerce check outs, leads and conversions.

On Twitter, people have been asking what the issue is/was, but Google seemed to be avoiding the question:

Come Monday morning, the issue was still not resolved:

Google did also confirm that, while you can use the URL inspection tool to expedite pages, everything will be fixed by Google and we don’t necessarily need to do anything:

Hopefully, this issue will be resolved soon – has your site been affected?

This is not the first Google bug we’ve seen – a few months ago, a bug caused 14 Ads to show on mobile SERPs.

UPDATE: The issue has been resolved: