WordPress Design & DevelopmentWordPress is a great way to create robust, good-looking websites. We’ve got some tips, tricks and resources to help make your site kick-ass.
With WordPress being one of the fastest-growing platforms for web development, and with our vast experience in designing, developing and maintaining great-looking, super-functional WordPress sites, we have a little bit to offer in the way of expertise.
This is where we’ll blog about the sexiest open-source web platform – and why you should care about it.
It’s (semi)fascinating stuff. Give it a read:
What do you get when you throw a couple of boys from Erwin High into the same room with a lot of computers, too much coffee and a branding freak from NYC? A great new WordPress site – and a whole lot of giggling.
I get these calls 4-5 times every damned day. “This is your Google Local Specialist, and we noticed that you haven’t claimed your Google listing,” or “We’ve discovered some problems with your website, and your Google listing is in danger.”
Really? Odd that I’ve not noticed, and that our site is still doing pretty damned well in searches. I mean, considering the sky has fallen and our site has apparently been disappeared from Google, we still do all right! Weird! All this time I’ve spent configuring our site and clients’ sites, all the research and due diligence – and I STILL GOT IT WRONG? DAMN!!
I’m sure we’re not the only ones who get these calls – as there are (according to the last guy that tried to sell me this garbage) at least 15 companies out there with autodialers and lists of business phone numbers. Have you gotten them? If you have, we’re sorry. If you haven’t – you will. They exist to worry you into spending money on useless products and services.
Largely, it’s scare tactics. Most folks who aren’t in the SEO Industry™ are going to get a little worried if they get a call like this. There are some folks that will roll over and wet themselves with worry and then throw enormous amounts of coin at “the problem.”
Not everyone is super search engine savvy, and the idea that your site is either missing from Google altogether, or has some sort of problem that’s keeping it from being found can be terrifying. You HAVE to be on Google, and you HAVE to have good positioning – but it’s not always as simple (or as hard) as some of these predatory companies would have you believe.
There’s an awful lot to consider when it comes to search engine rankings – but throwing a bunch of money and worry at it isn’t always the answer. A lot of times, it’s a LOT simpler than folks think it is – and, as such, a lot cheaper and less troubling. There’s absolutely no need to freak out and give these jack holes a lot of money – especially if you don’t have any real idea of how your site is positioned.
If you get the call – we have a few words of advice:
We’ll pull an audit of your site for your main keyword. Don’t know what your main keywords are or should be? We can help you figure that out, too. We’ll include stuff like backlinks, social signals, keywords, titles, descriptions – all sorts of stuff that’ll show you the REAL health of your site.
Then, you can walk away and at least have an idea of what needs to be done to achieve the ranks you need and want. Or, we can help you fix your site and boost your rankings. Either way, we’ll have gotten to meet each other, and you’ll have a little more ammunition when the bastards call you.
DAMMIT! They’re calling again!
To get your FREE SEO AUDIT – fill this out:
Please know that this is not a solicitation – we genuinely want to help. We at least want to give folks some info that can ease the panic or get the ship headed in the right direction.
Also, please know that we make absolutely no guarantees – the audit will have a lot of great info, and it’s free – but we can’t guarantee that it’ll help you out. If you read it , understand it (it’s easy) and take action – you’ll be well-informed and have an idea of why your site isn’t doing as well as you’d like. Otherwise, it’ll be a big fat PDF that you can ignore. Entirely up to you.
Well, we’re finally to Day 4 of our series. We lost some momentum (read all about it here,) but we’re back in the saddle and ready to help you turn your site into a traffic machine.
Today, there’s no video – just some links and some ideas that can help you make sure your site is really ready to rumble, from a search engine standpoint.
Making sure your site is healthy is super-important when it comes to a good showing with Google (and Bing and Yahoo, to a lesser extent.) If you’re infected, slow, outdated or out-of-bounds from a standards standpoint, you’ll be facing a serious uphill climb to good rankings.
So, without any beating about the bush:
5-point Health Check for Your WordPress Site:
Make Sure You’re Not Infected. Head to Sucuri’s Scanner and run your site. This is a reasonably low-level scan, but it can tell you if there’s anything funky going on. If you see any errors – get them fixed. Sometimes, this is a pretty simple process, sometimes it’s far deeper. But this is the first place to check. Now, they’re going to try to sell you a firewall for your site – but we’ve found this to be somewhat unnecessary. It’s up to you if you want to pay for their services – but with judicious tinkering on your site and a little legwork, you can do what they do – for free.
Make Sure You’re Mobile. Mobile-responsive sites are all the rage these days – and for good reason. 33%+ of all internet users use mobile devices (solely) to view the web. Google has taken notice, and they will penalize your site (especially on mobile searches) if your site doesn’t pass their mobile test. Click here, enter your domain and check it out. If your site isn’t mobile-friendly, it’s not time to panic – but it IS something you want to address as soon as possible. It might mean a just little bit of tinkering, but it might require a full rebuild of your site. We can help with either path – but you really, really, really want to be responsive and mobile-friendly. Mobile web surfing is just getting more and more prevalent – you don’t want to be left behind.So, there’s a reasonably simple (and basic) health check-up for your site. Making sure you’re clean, valid, fast, mobile and in a good neighborhood will help you reach better rankings with Google. This is just a small portion of the stuff you need to do to rank your WordPress site – but it’s horribly important. If your site is in poor health, all the good SEO in the world will only go so far. If you’re clean, you’re in much better shape to dominate. And, isn’t that what it’s all about?
Get healthy, get ranked.
Up Next: Titles, Descriptions and Keywords.
SO – your site is set up with Yoast, you’re checked in with Google Webmaster Tools, your permalinks are set and your site is visible. Excellent! You’re on your way to good SEO. But, you could also have some problems you’re not aware of. Bad backlinks can a real problem – and if they’re bad enough, they can get your site killed on Google. Not good.
What are backlinks? Backlinks are links from sites that point back to your site. If they’re legit links from reputable sites, they’re good. If they’re a bunch of garbage links on questionable sites that have nothing to do with what your site is about, you might have troubles – and those troubles can doom your website.
How do you get bad backlinks? Some search engine optimizers purchase backlink packages from exceptionally questionable services. Sure, you might get 10,000 backlinks to your site, but those links are from a bunch of weird websites in Prague or Chile. They’re usually just link “farms,” and their value is, at best, super-low. At worse, they’re enough to get you penalized, sandboxed, or de-listed. This is the problem with paying for SEO that you can’t see or that you can’t quantify. Buying backlinks might get you a major boost in your search engine rankings – but they could also blow up in your face.
What makes a bad backlink?
Now – how do you tell if you’ve got bad backlinks? Webmaster Tools can help. Here’s how:
What do you do if you find anything fishy? First, check to see if it’s actually spammy. It could be that you’ve just been picked up by a directory. Check the links. Next, contact the owner of the site and ask them to take your link down. You can look up the contact info for any site at BetterWhois.com. There, you can type in the domain name that has the offending link and find emails and phone numbers. This can be difficult if you have a large number of spammy links, and the success rate is pretty low. We’ve found that this works about 2% of the time. These spammy backlink sites are largely automated, and sending an email to the webmaster usually goes unnoticed and unanswered. But – that’s the first thing to try.
If contacting and asking the bums nicely doesn’t work, you can always go nuclear. Google has created a “Disavow” tool, that will tell Google you don’t approve of those links, and that you disavow any relationship with them. Click here to go and check it out. They’re pretty particular about how you format the request, and they prefer that you try to manually remove stuff – but this can be a good last-ditch device to get rid of your spammy backlinks.
Now, if you go in and you don’t have backlinks – that’s a very different story. If you need links, we can help. If you want to find some yourself, go for it – reputable online directories, social media, other blogs and websites are good places to start. Again, though – it’s quality over quantity. And, context makes a difference – especially for local search. We’ll go over some strategies on a later day – and we’ll give you some links to help you get started on the road to sweet rankings!
Up Next: A Five Point WordPress Site Health Inspection.
Today is a a real quick one. You’ve got a WordPress site, and you want it to rank high? Don’t miss these 2 (seemingly) simple things that can have MASSIVE effects on your SEO.
Click to Get a Bigger View
The first is usually a problem only if you’ve been building your site on a staging server or subdomain, and you’ve told Google to lay off while you’re under construction. We’ve seen this happen a lot with other WordPress developers – they build a site in a separate area, and they simply forget to turn this one little doohickey off (or ON, in a way…)
It’s the “Discourage search engines from indexing this site” setting in Settings>Reading. This box MUST be checked off, or Google WILL ignore your site. It says “It’s up to search engines to honor this request.” They honor that request. Always. And, to make it worse, if Google sees this enough times, they might just ignore you forever. So – good people – please make sure that you do NOT see that box with a tick or an x or a check in it. If it’s already empty, you’re in good shape – but make sure it’s empty.
Click to Get a Bigger View
The second is another problem that can drastically harm your search engine rankings: Permalinks being set up incorrectly. By default, WordPress has your permalinks set to be the number of the page – and this creates a big problem. Google sees your URLS as http://YOURSITE.com/?p=123, but for optimal search engine optimization, you want them to read as http://YOURSITE.com/about-our-wonderful-product. Google actually picks up cues as to what your site is about from the TITLE of the pages in your site. If Google shows up and all your pages are just numbers and question marks, all the good SEO in the world ain’t gonna amount to a hill of beans. Get your permalinks sorted!
To change your WordPress Permalinks, go to Settings>Reading, and click on the “Post Name” option. This will instantly re-write the page names with the title of the page, instead of that ugly number and question mark. Pretty sweet!
While those are pretty simple, here’s a little video to help you out:
Tomorrow: It’s Saturday. I’m not doing this tomorrow. But, on Monday – Check Them Backlinks!
Today, we’ll walk through getting your site set up with Webmaster Tools and connecting your WordPress Yoast SEO plugin. These are THE first (and possibly most crucial) steps to getting your site noticed by Google.
Below, you’ll find a video with an exceptionally charming and handsome narrator that’ll walk you step-by-step through getting started on a good, healthy and sustainable SEO path. This is really the beginning – but it’s so amazingly important that not doing this can cost weeks or months of Google goodness. Leave these steps out at your own peril.
The steps (for those of you who like words:)
Now, what you’ve done here is to set your site up for on-board SEO success by installing Yoast, you’ve notified Google that not only do you exist, but that you really know what you’re doing – because you have a sitemap. You’ve taken some of the biggest steps to not only being indexed by Google, but also to making sure that Google knows exactly where you are, what you have and what you’re up to. Kind of creepy, I guess, but ultimately – good.
Tomorrow: A Couple of WordPress Settings that Might Kill Your Site to Google.
So, you’ve got a WordPress site. It’s your pride and joy (especially if we designed and developed it) and you’re really excited to show it off – but you’re not quite sure what to do to get traffic. The brass ring here is good placement with Google (and to a lesser extent, Bing and Yahoo.) How do you do that? You optimize your site – SEO. Search Engine Optimization. There are a few steps – and they can seem a little daunting, but for the next 21 days, we’re going to walk you through how to really SEO your WordPress site, get it set up right and get some asses in the seats.
3 weeks. No guarantee that you’re going to dominate Google, but in those three weeks, you’ll learn what to do and what not to do to set your site up for success with search engines – and more importantly, how to set it up for long term, sustainable and legit traffic.
Why do you want to SEO your WordPress site?
As good as dominating Google can be, you don’t want to put ALL your eggs in that basket – and you don’t want to design and develop your marketing strictly on the merits of good SEO.
Search Engine Optimization should be a part of your total marketing strategy. An important part – but a part, nonetheless.
There’s 3 reasons for that thinking:
So – don’t put all your eggs in the SEO basket. It’s important, but you need an overall marketing plan for your business (and your site.) Don’t neglect content, social media and traditional marketing efforts. SEO is part of the gestalt of good marketing. In this day and age, it’s enormous – but it’s not the only place to look.
Stay tuned for the next (now) 20 days. You’ll come away with a better understanding of what good SEO is, a little more intimate knowledge of your WordPress site and a bit of a plan to keep it up and get more visitors, more clicks and more sales. It’s gonna be fun, kiddies!
Tomorrow: Installing Yoast SEO and Setting Up Webmaster Tools
And, for your auditory pleasure, a vaguely relevant reggae tune…
Photo: Katie Bailey/bkbailey@citizen-times.com
Bill and Amber are the King and Queen of Coffee in West Asheville, as far as I’m concerned. Not only do they roast and brew a damned fine cup of coffee, they’re damned fine people to boot.
We’ve had the pleasure of working with PennyCup on their site (BattleCat’s, too,) and each step of the way, they’ve supplied us with killer beans and countless cups of coffee. Now THAT’S our kind of client.
Here’s a little write-up and interview with Bill about all things roasting.
And here’s a Mountain X article about the opening of their Cafe.
They’ve recently opened up a roasting & tasting room in the River Arts District – right in the middle of Depot Street. Click to get a map – and then go get a terrific cup of coffee, roasted and brewed right here in good old Asheville, and have a chat with a few truly sterling people.
We built a simple, elegant WordPress site using Woocommerce for the ecommerce portion of the site. With a custom design and a super-simple interface, the site’s easy to look at and easy to use.
As I write this, I’m finishing off my third cup of a custom roast from PennyCup. Delicious. If you come by the office, you won’t get any. It’s my home stash. That’ll tell you all you need to know about how good it can be to have friends in West Asheville!
PennyCup Coffee Co., at 362 Depot St., is open 8 a.m.-1 p.m. Monday through Friday and 10 a.m.-3 p.m. on Saturday.
According to Sucuri, there’s an XSS vulnerability that affects a large number of WordPress plugins. Now, what does that mean for you and your site? Not a whole lot, really – but it DOES mean that your site might have a hole that could be exploited by ne’er do wells. Most likely, though – your site is fine. But, to be cautious and stay out in front of stuff, your site and your plugins needs to be updated.
How?
Well, you can call us – we’d be happy to help out.
Or, you can take the DIY route and update your site and plugins yourself. It’s really very easy! Check out our video for super-easy instructions.
We also suggest using Sucuri’s security scanning plugin. Installing is easy – watch the video below.
Here’s a partial list of major plugins known to be affected by “The Hole.”
There are bound to be others – but the main takeaway here is this:
UPDATE YOUR SITE AND PLUGINS!
It’s a good idea to update things fairly often. WordPress developers and the community as a whole are a pretty proactive bunch, and you can bet your bottom dollar that plugin and theme developers are staying on top of this breach – and other breaches and snafus that nobody is really aware of. They stay on top of things – but to keep your site as safe as humanly possible, keep updated.
We try VERY hard to never touch core files or modify things to a point where you can’t update things. If we’ve developed your site, you should be able to update EVERYTHING at will without worrying about overwriting work we’ve done. Unless we’ve specifically let you know that you shouldn’t update something, get after the updates.
Keep it fresh, keep it updated, keep it clean!
Is your site mobile responsive? Does it have a mobile-only version? How much does it matter? Is it time to panic?
Depends on your traffic. Depends on your site. Depends on a lot of things.
But the main thing here is: DON’T PANIC. (towel optional.)
Here’s the nuts & bolts: Google released a new algorithm on April 21, and it favors sites with a mobile responsive or mobile-specific architecture – but only on mobile searches. Searches from desktop machines (and laptops) won’t be affected. That’s sort of good news to the majority (~70%) of searches. But, if you’ve got a site that relies heavily on mobile/tablet users and traffic from mobile sources, you really need to pay attention to Google’s latest update and get your site in order.
See, with 30% of ALL internet traffic using solely mobile devices, you stand the chance of being ranked lower in (not eliminated from) searches from those devices. How much lower? Google doesn’t really say – but a couple of spots can make or break a search. If you were #8 and still on the first page of Google searches, and you drop to #11, you wind up on the second page – and your click-through rates will die off. Second page listings get about 5% of clicks – distributed amongst the whole of the second page. If you were already on the second page, we need to talk – but that’s a conversation for another day.
So – is it worth panicking over? Well, maybe…
Go to Google’s Mobile Friendly Test. If you run your site through and the tool says you’re mobile-friendly, you’re in the clear. Kick back and relax.
If the tool tells you that you’re not mobile friendly, it’s still not time to freak out. Check out your site stats – if you’re not getting a lot of mobile traffic, you might not need to be too concerned about the rankings hit. If your primary traffic isn’t using mobile devices, you can wait and deal with it later – although not catering to 30% of potential users probably isn’t a great idea. If, however, your stats show that you’re getting a high percentage of users coming in on mobile devices, NOW is the time for action…
Step 1: Give us a shout. We can help your site be mobile-friendly. If you’re still not sure of how Google’s latest shenanigans will affect you, reach out and we will help ease your fears (or help whip you into a proper panic.) We can take a look at your audience and your traffic. It might be less painful than you think. We’ll shoot straight with you – and if you need a hand, we’re happy to help.
Step 2: Relax. It’s really not the biggest deal in the world. Yes, you might see your rankings suffer a bit in mobile-only searches. But, if you’ve got a good, functional and well-optimized site that just happens to be afoul of Google’s newest birthing, you can recover. All things considered, the numbers of even worst-case scenario “penalty” just don’t add up to a massive freak out. It’s a percentage of a percentage of a percentage – it’s not like your site is going to disappear from the rankings. Small hit – possibly. Big hit – highly unlikely. But, still – it’s worth paying attention to. Get responsive, get happy, get back, JoJo, to where you once belonged.
Now, the “don’t panic” mantra comes with a warning: Any time Google rolls out a major change in how they rank sites, you really need to pay attention. It might not affect you in a major way at the time of the roll-out, but you can rest assured that these changes will at some point come back to bite you. If it’s a small problem, it can wait – but there’s a cumulative effect with minor problems. It can snowball, and you can wind up in trouble. If you’ve got red flags with Google, you don’t know when it’ll add up to a legitimate penalty. Staying “clean” with Google is never a bad thing. If you find a gap in your site, how it’s constructed and how it looks to Google, it’s best to stay in front of it. Fix it BEFORE it has a chance to make a massive impact on your rankings/SERPs. Playing catch-up after a penalty from Big G is not a winning proposition.
So – carry on, good people. It’s not the end. The world has survived massive shakeups at Google, and we’ll all be on the other side of this one soon enough. Until then, enjoy a little music with your coffee. We are…
Blue Dozen Design, LLC
Asheville, North Carolina USA
828.419.1929 • Click to Email
Open Monday – Friday 9am-5pm
Meetings by Appointment Only.