Why Google Is Important For Your Website Success

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Google has been the forefront of online searches since its presence in the early 20th century. Google’s core business is still searches and the release of tools available to aid your website is evident of that. If you already have a website and intend to rank your website on Google, using the following tools is paramount for your success. These tools range from analytics to track how your visitor enter your site and where they exit to webmaster tools to ensure Google has all your pages on its search engines.

Google Analytics

Google analytics

 

Simply put, Google analytics is one of the core tools you need for your business no matter if you just started out or have been in the business a long time. As the name states, it handles the analytics of your website and whatever pages you have on it. Once you put the coding into your website, you can churn out information such as the amount of visitors and real time visitors that has been to your site. See their demographics if they are logged into Google or even see what countries they are coming from. You can also determine which page did they enter your website, how long they are spending on your website and which page do they exit.

analytics tracking

Goals

One of the most useful tool i use in Google analytics is the goals, Goals are basically specific terms you can set to determine if your website has completed the objectives. For example, a goal is completed if someone completes an inquiry form or if someone checks out an item in your e-commerce store.  With this tool, you can determine how many percent of your visitors are actually converting into customers and you can tailor your website to convert more. This can mean by improving a certain page with more visitors to convert them.

Google Webmaster

As smart as Google is, Google cannot find your website at its creation. It needs to receive hints or information from other websites that your website exists, once it receives “news” it will send it’s robots to crawl through your website to gather more information about your website. Google Webmaster is a tool which you can use to speed up that process. Webmaster is also an invaluable tool for diagnostics for viruses or malware lurking in your site.

Tracking your websites on search terms your website is ranking for will also help you get a good idea of your website standings in the SERPS and your SEO efforts. With Google’s new markup on information displayed via structured data, you can also measure how your website is doing.

Speed Test

Website speed is one of the biggest factors the search engine giant uses to determine for the search page rankings. Google PageSpeed Insights is a great tool you can use to test your website for both mobile and desktop versions. They will also tell you tips to speed up your website to better serve your visitors. As a general rule, your website should load within 3 seconds. Go above that timing and based on Google’s historical data you lose about 20% of potential visitors per second.

Guides

If you still can’t wrap around the different terms on how to improve your site speed, there are also guides available to help you out. Better yet, you can also look for our services to help improve your site speed or even SEO/SEM Services.

Google Business

google business

 

If you don’t even have a website but still want to list your business on Google, you can do so via Google Business. Google Business is a neat tool which allows you to put your company on the local maps. Adding a business has never been any easier. Once you have applied for this service, Google sends you a confirmation mail and once you’ve verified your business, your listing is automatically placed on Google maps. You can then receive reviews from your customers or place important information on Google maps such as contact details, opening hour or even picture associated to your business.

In addition, Google businesses tends to show up first on many search results which can be a great way to convert new visitors.

How to Decrease Your Website’s Load Time by 50%

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Through Google’s constant improvement over the decades, they have placed more emphasis on speed load timing and it is not without reason. One of the biggest contribution to bounce rates are slow loading speed. Research has shown that people are only willing to wait for a maximum of 3 seconds before determining that the website is not working. This is all the more prominent for mobile users who will have slower access speed. From this article you will learn the 5 key ways on how to decrease your website’s load time.

Google’s guru, Matt Cutts also announced at SMX advanced that Google is also looking to roll out a version of site speed ranking factor for mobile sites. In other words, the faster your website, the chances of it appearing in page 1 serps is higher.

So with all these talk about site speed, how do you really test your site speed or improve the loading time?

Testing your sites.

Testing with Pingdom Tool

change what is good and improve the bad

One of the easiest free tool available out there is Pingdom tool. by just inputting your website URL into the tool box, it’ll tell you what CSS code or image is taking up the most of the loading speed and also tell you a myriad of information. Follow those tips and you’ll definitely reduce the size and improve the loading speed significantly.

PageSpeed Tools

you can test both mobile and desktop versions

This particular tool is by google and is definitely one of the best if you are into deep analysis and know what you are doing.

It’ll rate your website and tell you the possible optimisations needed to improve your website. If you’re thinking of ranking on Google. Chances are you have to use this tool to great lengths in order to make the search engine gods happy.

Picture Size

Chances are if you have the latest phone or DSLR, you’ll be tempted to put the full size photos on your website to look its best. Refrain from doing this at all cost. These photographs usually are in excess of 4mb and if you have multiple pictures, chances are your website will take really long to load. Pictures on website can look as good as its 4mb pictures as long as you compress your photos correctly.a 300 x 300 for example should be less than 30kb in general and a slider picture in excess of 1000×1000 can be less than 200kb.

 

Total Page Size

Most people have the impression that having more information is better than minimal information. That is totally correct IF your content is not large in terms of file size. Many people make the wrong mistake of adding too many pictures and other content to make their website content rich without having a second thought for the page size. Your page size should be less than 1mb unless you are hosting a myriad of photos on a single page or post.

 

Caching

Caching is probably one of the missed things on most people’s website. Caching is  basically storing data in a temporary area. This means the website stores frequently used data for easy and fast loading. If you are using wordpress, there are many caching plugins available or you can request this from your developer. However, remember that this should only be done with someone with experience as meddling with caching options can mess up your website.

 

Content Delivery Network

example of such a service: cloudflare

If all else fails, a content delivery network is probably the last solutions you should use. A content delivery network or also known as CDN uses servers to deliver the pages and content to a vistor. The key goal of a CDN is to deliver information to you the fastest manner possible. With all these benefits, of course CDN is not free. It can cost anywhere from 5 dollars to 50 dollars a month depending on the size of your website.

 

There are still many little ways you can tweak your website to bring the fastest speed possible but these are the 5 main ways you can DIY to bring about a faster website.

 

Title and Description Tags are Important

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Meta Data is usually invisible to visitors unless you hit the F12 button and inspect individual elements in Google Chrome. And surprising to many, most Singapore websites are missing these key components. Website designers have one goal in mind; to design a website that looks aesthetically pleasing and to give visitors an enjoyable visit throughout the website. But, did you know that there is deeper information that you can utilise to convert visitors to customers by just changing a few meta data.

meta data is information that provides more information. Meta data is usually read by search engines provide different information to its users searching for items. So why does this matter?

Google uses these information to rank your website

Google uses multiple facades of algorithms to rank your website and your data is one of the essential ones. Meta data such as the title tells Google what the page is about and the description also provides Google with some keywords they can gather to categorise you into the correct keyword group.

What can I do?

Make sure that the content on the specific page has a suitable title. The title tag and description should not be too far off from the content of the page.

Adding meta tags and data is visitor centric

ever searched for a keyword on Google and found total rubbish on various search results? While it is difficult to find because Google places a large emphasis on getting people what they search for. You easily find traces of these at the back of the pages of your search result. See the below pictures as example. The first picture shows page 1 of a Google search while the second shows page 10.

Page 1 of search: things to do in Singapore

Page 10 of search: things to do in Singapore

Although the content is fairly similar, you can tell which is the more attractive title tag. For most of the descriptions in the first picture, the descriptions are also specially placed by the web administrator unlike page 10 where you can tell most of the descriptions are pulled out from existing content from the website.

So what are the best practices?

Unique Title tags

There is nothing more confusing than multiple entries of title tags on more than 1 page of your website. This will also confuse search engine robots scanning your site and the page which you want to be ranked might be ignored as a duplicate.

Limit the length of title and description tags

There is a limit to how many characters a title tag can hold, the default is usually 70 characters includes spaces while descriptions are limited to 160. Exceed this amount and you’ll see “…” at the end of your title tag and descriptions. Trust me, it does not look professional.

Reflect the purpose of the article/page

The words you use for the title should reflect the purpose of the article or post, it should not contain stop words such as “and” “is” “then” and other more.

 

In conclusion, title tags and descriptions are one of the most effective ways to show the search engines that your website is done professionally and also to convert visitors into customers. Spending a little time before publishing your page will go a long way.

 

Optimizing Your WordPress URL Schema For SEO #BabySEOSteps

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One of the very important steps before setting out any content would be to set the basics right.

How does your URL appear? are we able to change from the usual format which shows the date of the post? Yes you are, simply head over to permalinks. (reference to screenshot below)

There’s two ways we can do it, two ways would be to include

  • /%category%/%postname%/
  • /%postname%/

So now my posts would be displaying as www.proximacy.sg/seo/content-name, rather than www.proximacy.sg/2017/01/23/Content-name which makes it look extremely long and messy.

We tend not to include the date, month or year because that can be seen on the post itself and it does affect my SEO (search engine optimization) since i would want my keywords to rank on the SERPS (Search Engine Result Pages). This way when our link appears in the organic search results users would be able to easily understand what we are saying.

Permalinks WordPress

Permalinks WordPress