SEO Change
Recently, Webstitcher changed it’s hosting to a more amiable host which helps with search engine optimization. While our old client was great on almost everything, load times, keeping files up, and making sure dead pages were redirected to homepage, we were also missing one key element that our new host provides.
SSL Certificates
in 2017, Google began to require any website with text input to have a ssl certificate, which encrypts data. Since we use text inputs in several of our contact forms and create dynamic data with text and file inputs. If we want to stay on top of google’s search we need to have a ssl certificate.
Generating SSL Certificates
Creating ssl certificates is now free, where it use to be $8.00 or more per month, with services you can google search as I am not going to promote them right now, but these services provide the needed ssl certificates, and allow websites to send encrypted data.
Constant Battle with SEO
Keeping up to date on current trends and practices is essential in keeping your websites on top of google engines and making sure google won’t brand you as a unsecure site.
First the basics:
- Keep your website up at all times – if google finds your site down, it will certainly make you drop down in SEO, though there isn’t much you can do if your server isn’t prepared or you haven’t purchased a backup server.
- Check the load time of your website – the speed it takes for your website to open will effect your listing, if it is over a certain time, it will bump you down in server listing, to help this you can, render images to be smaller sizes, load images after text is up, and make sure you are not loading huge files that take up time, or at least have them load after text
- Make sure all links are live and point to live websites – just don’t have broken links or you will be brought down in SEO
The New Stuff:
- Make sure your website is mobile friendly – a nice tool by google is https://search.google.com/test/mobile-friendly, There are great frameworks to do this, studying them can cost up to $2,000 if you go with the structured from the framework tutorials, but I’m sure you can google search to find great tutorials: foundation and bootstrap. It’s all up to your taste, and I will go into them in more depth in another tutorial. They are great for creating websites that work with both mobile and web, you can also load a different page for mobile phones, but I found this to be more work since you have to create two pages, when you update something, have to update two pages instead of one, unless you use server side scripting, like php. All in all, with new frameworks, with a few months of practice you will be able to create great mobile friendly websites.
- ssl certificate – make sure if you are taking in text data, you have a ssl certificate enabled server, this will make your website soar above the rest as 2/3 of text accepting websites are not ssl secure, and doing this will allow you to be in the top of google searches.
In Closing
SEO is a process and learning how to make websites that are together with the current trends and practices is all about reading, https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/7451184?hl=en Here is my next read about the current state of SEO and hope you find what you need to keep the traffic going through your website, take care and give me a call if you have any questions about SEO or web development in general.
Peter J.