Sunday, August 7, 2016

Why Being Mobile Friendly is so Important

Great Video on Being Mobile Friendly
I found this great and funny video on mobile responsiveness by Eric Enge and Mark Traphagan of Stone Temple.

 

As Eric and Mark point out in such a fun and informative way, being mobile friendly is an important part of SEO and will effect your ranking, especially on mobile devices. Google wants mobile friendly sites.  And what Google wants, Google gets, or should get, if you want to rank higher, that is. That's important, even essential for SEO, but is not the quintessential, absolutely tiptop, epic, most important, mother of all reasons to be mobile friendly.

The Quintessential, Tiptop, Epic, Most Important, Mother of all Reasons
So what is this mother of all reasons? To be kind to visitors, of course. Didn't your mother teach you that? When you make your site mobile friendly, you are also making it visitor friendly. Visitors come to your site because they need your services or are interested in your content. Many will come on their smart phones or tablets.  They want to do business with you.

Not a Good Welcome Mat
If you make it difficult for these potential business clients to see or use your site, they will become extremely frustrated.  And they are only trying to find your address, for instance, or to read some compelling content (you do have compelling content, don't you?) and are struggling to touch the links or scrolling sideways to read.  Your site's mobile unfriendliness is putting huge obstacles in their way. Not a good welcome mat.. And also a good way to get a higher than average bounce rate.



Your Raison d'Être
Never forget that visitors are who you made your site for, and you should make things easy for them. Visitors are clients and are the whole and sole purpose of making a website in the first place. They are your raison d'être.

Being kind to visitors, and making them happy with a great site and content, is also what Google wants, and is excellent for SEO and ranking, by the way. 

How to do it?
Here`s a short guide on how to make your site mobile responsive by Joshua Van Oosten, web developer at Ducktoes Computer Services.  Also here is another post about how Ducktoes's site is mobile friendly now.

Need More Help?
Ducktoes Web Design of Calgary can make your site mobile friendly if you don't have the time to do it yourself.  We do it all the time.




Friday, August 5, 2016

SEO for Beginners Subreddit!



Hey, we've started an SEO for Beginners subreddit on reddit.com.  Check it out! You can ask for help on SEO for your site or help others.

Tuesday, April 12, 2016

Ghost Referral Spam is Gone?

I first heard the news on the podcast SEO 101 with hosts Ross Dunn and John Carcutt: Google analytics spam was gone. Wonderful news! Yay, yay, yay, yay. (That's me dancing around the room and high fiving myself.) No longer would we have to filter the spam out of Google Analytics results to get truer data. Google had gotten rid of it. 

But could this really be true? When I googled this news, I couldn't find anything about it anywhere. Nothing. Nada. Zippo. Zilch.

I searched again. Then I found Conor Treacy's mention on Local Search forum. He offered this link to an article on SEM.  Conor has also written his own article on the disappearance.  Right on, Conor, SEM, and SEO 101 Ross and John!  Weird, such a big thing and only a few people talking about it and certainly not Google.

If it is gone, then why is no one talking about it?  Maybe no one is paying attention. Because if you did pay attention, you would have seen a drop in traffic in your Google Analytics data and reports starting in February or March. It's not traffic you'd ever miss, because with its loss you should have a lower bounce rate and a longer average session duration, a good, indeed excellent, thing.

Here is the content within the referral tab results of a site before Google started getting rid of the ghost referral spam.


You can see that the referrals shown are all ghost referral spam and that it is giving the site a very high bounce rate and low average session duration.

Now see the results after Google had started getting rid of the ghost spam.


As you can see, the bounce rate has only improved slightly and the average time on site has gotten worse, because there are still ghost referrals. I gave them a grey ghostly pallor in the above image as they deserve. So maybe this is why few people are mentioning the disappearance of ghost spam, Google hasn't been able to get rid of it all.

You can also see some real referrals from Yahoo, Cylex, Facebook, and Newswire beneath the ghost ones and how that traffic has a much better bounce rate and session duration.  That is why no spam in referrals would be so ideal and why I look forward to this happening in the future.  I hope Google will filter the heck out of the spam.  Otherwise our traffic in GA is not accurate. That is, unless we filter it ourselves, a difficult job.

Ghost referral spammers don't really go to your website at all, it's not real traffic, that's why the word ghost.  Somehow these companies are spamming Google Analytics with false traffic so people like us will notice the urls in our analytics data and go to their, the spammers', websites. They get traffic from their fake traffic, so they can sell us something or give us malware or something else not so fun or funny.  So don't go there.  We don't want to encourage them.

If you need help with your SEO or Google Analytics give us a call 403-219-3031.  Or go to our SEO webpage.

Wednesday, March 30, 2016

Be the Site Google Wants to See

To do a good job of online marketing for yourself and others you have to have some sense of what Google wants.

So what does Google want?

The answer is, of course:



Money. Google is a business like any other.  They want and need to make a profit. Millions of people use Google's search engine because it provides excellent results for almost any query. Along with those excellent results, Google serves ads, generating a huge profit.  In 2015 Google generated almost 67.39 billion dollars in ad revenue.

If Google no longer provided good search results, they'd lose the visitors to their search engine and all the revenue generated from those searchers when they click on the ads. That would be a staggering loss for them.

Which leads to the next question:

 What does Google not want?



Spam. They don't want manipulation of their search results so poor results are returned instead of excellent ones. In other words, Google doesn't want people to trick them with black hat or grey hat SEO  into serving poor sites when others would be better. Ultimately this would wreck their search engine and their business. They're not about to let that happen. That is why they've developed their search algorithm and Penguin, Panda, Hummingbird, Pigeon, and all the other updates that are safeguarding the quality of their search engine. They will cut you off at the knees if they see you trying to trick them by manipulating their results. You'll be penalized in no time flat with a manual or algorithmic penalty.

What do you need to do then to make your site optimized for Google search? Make your site a search result Google wants to see and, more importantly, would love to return in response to queries.

How do you do that?  With excellent content that users are actually looking for and by making your site attractive and user friendly.  Also by letting Google know about your site's search worthiness by signaling authority and relevance.  There are hundreds of things you can do.  It's a lot of work but it is worth it.

If you want to learn how to do this SEO work yourself read this blog and many others.  If you don't have time, hire an ethical and quality SEO company that will do this for you.

Friday, February 5, 2016

Google Analytics - The Second Baby Step of SEO


So you have Google Search Console set up and are ready for the next baby step on the road to SEO greatness (and standing among the SEO grown ups.) The next baby step is, drum roll please, setting up Google Analytics.  This will be very exciting, I promise, as only things SEO can be.

  1.  To set up Google Analytics, you first need to login to your Google account, the account where your Google Search Console and your Gmail account reside, and go to https://www.google.ca/analytics/
  2. Click on "Sign In." See red oval.

  3. Next create an account for your business or personal website, blog, and mobile apps. For instance create an account for your business, and choose either the name of your business or some helpful description that will help you identify it should you create more accounts later. To create the account, click the "Admin" tab.

  4. Fill in the New Account Form.

  5. Create your properties within your account. For instance, create a property for your website, another for your blog, and another for your mobile app if you have one.  Each will have its own tracking code. You can also have a separate account for each property if you want. Google Support has more detailed information about Accounts and Properties in their Google Analytics Support site.
  6. Now you're cooking, good looking. I told you this was exciting.  Next you'll need to put in the tracking code into every web page you want to track. Go to Admin, then Tracking Code.  You'll see a script.  Highlight it to select it, then copy it by hitting Ctrl-C.  Paste it with a Ctrl-V, on every page, right after the opening body tag if this is an html-based site, that is, put it just after this:<body>
  7.  Or if it is a WordPress site, you'll want to paste just the account number in an analytics plug-in, which you download within your Dashboard. I usually use Yoast's version because I use Yoast's SEO plug-in too.

  8. Here's a guide to using the Yoast analytics from those excellent folks at Yoast itself.

  9. Now you'll want to check what you've done and see if it is working. To do this log in to your Google Analytics account and go to the new property you want to check. Then open a tab in your browser and go to the website itself. Keep that tab open. Go back to Analytics.
  10. Select: Real-Time > Overview.  You should see a number 1 meaning you have a visitor on your website.  If there are more visitors you'll have a bigger number. It should look like this:


So you did it and are well on your way to SEO awesomeness!  Applause.  There is a lot more to learn about Google Analytics (you could spend a lifetime) but now your site is added and collecting data.  

If you'd like more help please visit our SEO site and contact us..  We're in Calgary, Alberta but can help anyone, anywhere, remotely as well.