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What is an SSL Certificate and why do you need one?

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“SSL stands for Secure Sockets Layer and, in short, it’s the standard technology for keeping an internet connection secure and safeguarding any sensitive data that is being sent between two systems, preventing criminals from reading and modifying any information transferred, including potential personal details.” 

So, now that we have that latin all figured out, let’s talk about this a little more.  

Back in the Fall of 2018, Google decided, in order to help with the privacy and security of websites, it was going to “require” all websites to have an SSL certificate.  This is a certificate that proves that your site is more secure.  It means that it is harder (not impossible) for bots to capture your private information, and that of your subscribers on your site.  

But you may be saying “I don’t capture anyone’s info” – well, in actual fact you do.  YOUR site captures information about YOU – your log in, your email, your name.  These are all things that hackers can use to get information from other sites. 

So, how do you get an SSL – simple, contact your hosting company. If you are with Siteground, then your SSL is included in your price. Other hosting companies can charge you upwards of $70+USD to have your site SSL’d.

The other thing, once your site is SSL’d you won’t get that pesky “UNSECURED” warning from GOOGLE, and having one will help your SERP and help Google to rank you higher.

So, basically – RUN, don’t walk to get your SSL on your site set up!

Hey, come and check out our Facebook page and give us a like! We love to know what people are looking to learn in WordPress world! Our group, The Bloggers Bistro is filled with an amazing group of Female Entrepreneurs learning how to blog to promote their business, their passions and their voices!

What is an SSL Certificate and why do you need one? 1

The Future of SEO and Blogging

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If Google’s devastating Panda and Penguin
updates taught the internet anything, it’s that content creators can’t rest on
their laurels and hope to keep relying on the same SEO techniques forever.

Google is constantly updating, improving
and tweaking its algorithms to make its search tool smarter and more effective
at matching search terms with the right results. If you don’t adapt and evolve
with those changes, then you’ll be left behind!

The best SEO strategies then need to involve
an element of prediction and speculation. Creators need to look at trends and
clues and use these to predict the future of search and of Google. So where
exactly is the industry heading? The answers might surprise you…

Google is Becoming too smart!

The big change is that Google is moving
away from simple search to become a much more powerful AI. This is most evident
when we look at Google Home and the Assistant packaged with Google Pixel
phones.

Google wants users to be able to talk to it and it wants to provide them
with answers without them having to open up a web page and search through the
content. More and more people will be relying on voice search and this
fundamentally changes the game: we use voice very differently from the way we
type our searches!

When typing, most of us will tend to write
the precise search term we’re looking for. For example, you might search:

“Length of a piece of string”

When asking Google by voice however, you’ll
be much more likely to use a conversational tone and that means you’ll be more
likely to ask:

“How long is a piece of string?”

How
This Changes SEO

So, what does this have to do with SEO?

Your initial impulse might be to assume
that you now need to use search terms that sound more like questions. But that
would result in some pretty awkward-sounding content.

Instead then, Google is aiming to deliver
on this ambition by changing the way it matches content. Instead of looking for
precise matches in search terms and content, it is now able to understand the
actual question and the context and use this to provide a much more relevant
result (most of the time).

This is where LSI – Latent Semantic
Indexing – becomes so important. LSI is the use of synonyms and related
language in conjunction with classic key phrases. And when used properly, this
can give Google much more context while also avoiding keyword-stuffing
practices.

Another thing that search optimization now
needs to take into account, is the role of structured data. This is content
that uses markups to tell AIs like Google what particularly content is about.
This is what lets Google show recipes, times, ratings and other key information
right at the top of the search through ‘Google Quick Results’ and the knowledge
graph.

Don’t try to second-guess Google but keep
this direction in mind when designing your own SEO strategies. Google is more
than a search engine – it is an AI.

Hey, come and check out our Facebook page and give us a like! We love to know what people are looking to learn in WordPress world! Our group, The Bloggers Bistro is filled with an amazing group of Female Entrepreneurs learning how to blog to promote their business, their passions and their voices!

The Future of SEO and Blogging 2

How to Build Trust for Your Website

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If you want your website to be as
successful as possible, then there are a lot of different factors that you need
to take into account. Which of these is most important all depends on who you
ask but one thing that we universally know to be highly important is ‘trust’.

Google wants to provide its users with answers. This is one of its main services and if Google can’t do it, then people will look elsewhere – such as Yahoo – to get what they’re looking for.

But in order for Google to provide answers,
it needs to know which sites it can trust. The results pages are not ‘curated’,
meaning that Google doesn’t have a team to actually check the content. And that
means that it needs to start recognizing sites that deliver popular answers in
a programmatic, algorithmic manner.

How can you make sure that this all works
for you and your site is considered one of the ‘trusted’?

The
Right Links

The first and most important way to
accomplish this is with the right links profile. You need to attract links from
sites that Google already trusts – but how do you know what sites those are?

One strategy is to look at Google’s ‘In the
News’ section. Here, Google highlights breaking stories by sharing posts from
popular news sites and sites in that niche. This is a very important tip
because in order for Google to share that content as news, it must already have a high amount of trust
for those sites – and this will rub off on you a great deal.

Another tip is when possible, to try and
get a link from a .edu or .gov domain. Google likes these sites because they
have obviously got a certain amount of credibility and by aligning yourself
with them, some of that credibility is likely to rub off on you as well!

Branding

Another useful tip is branding. Google likes brands and has shared this information openly in the past. If your site name is currently the same as your keyword – rather than a catchy company name – then you’re doing yourself a disservice. (The Purple Teacup is already taken – just letting you know)

Likewise, you should also try to get links from other big brands. Google knows brands like Coca-Cola, like the BBC and like The Verge and that means they can pass on a lot of credibility.

Check out our article on SEO and Branding here.

Degrees
of Separation

Of course it’s not exactly easy to get
links from the BBC, or from the biggest sites in your niche that Google is
featuring. So what can you do if you’re still ‘small fry’?

One answer is to think of this as a game of ‘degrees of separation’. If you can’t get a link from the BBC, then getting a link from a site that has a link from the BBC can work a great deal!

Researching
Backlinks

How do you know what links a site has pointing to it? Simple: use a backlinks tool. And this also has the advantage of allowing you to research precisely which links worked for the biggest sites in your niche… so that you can build the same ones! Check out our article on being a guest blogger – guest blogging is great for backlinks

Whatever you do, keep blogging – the more content you have the happier Google and other Search Engines are!

Looking for ways to improve your SEO? Check out our SEO Awesomeness Course – an incredible resource for categories, tags, and keywords. And join us over in the Bistro! Our free Facebook Community where all the fun bloggers hang out and tag about WordPressy stuff.

How to Build Trust for Your Website 3

What is Bounce Rate and what does it mean?

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So, you are looking at your analytics for your blog and you see “Bounce Rate” and honestly, you have no idea what it means or if yours is good or not.  So, let’s talk about it!

According to Google – “Bounce rate is the percentage of single-page visits (or web sessions). It is the percentage of visits in which a person leaves your website from the landing page without browsing any further. Google analytics calculates and report the bounce rate of a web page and bounce rate of a website.”

HUH?  Basically, it is the percentage of people who come to your site, look at one page and leave.  (Yes, it can get more technical – but this is the best and easiest way to explain it)

So, what is a good rate?  On average, most sites rates are between 25-70%.  An excellent rate is between 25-45%, a medium level would be 45-60%, with a higher, but don’t worry about it rate being 60-70%.

So, what can you do to improve your rate?  There are a couple of fairly easy things.

What is Bounce Rate and what does it mean

1.  Write posts that are tied together.  Sometime you will write a post that is fairly wordy (say over 1200 words) take the time to split that into two or three posts, and hyperlink them together.

2.  Write good call to actions in your blog that TELL people what to do.  If you want someone to check out another article – literally write “I have another great post similar to this one, check it out here – or something like that.

3.  Make sure to include multiple links and options in posts so that people have a chance to pick where you want them to go.  And make sure your links actually go where they are supposed to.

Hey, come and check out our Facebook page and give us a like! We love to know what people are looking to learn in WordPress world! Our group, The Bloggers Bistro is filled with an amazing group of Female Entrepreneurs learning how to blog to promote their business, their passions and their voices!

Branding and SEO

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Why
a Brand is Crucial for Good SEO

Many marketers will make the mistake of viewing their SEO and their broader marketing as being separate. The assumption is that marketing entails things like social media marketing and advertising, whereas SEO also known as ( Search Engine Optimization ) involves adding lots of content to your website and using keywords. The two are entirely different and there is no crossover… right?

Some site owners will even go as far as to
eschew marketing altogether and instead focus on only SEO as a tool to boost the status of their website.

But marketing and SEO are not separate. In fact, they go
hand-in-hand and each supports the other. If you’re going to come up with an
effective SEO strategy, then it needs to
take into account an effective marketing campaign. And this includes things
like social media marketing, web design and branding…

Why
Brand Matters

So how does creating a great logo, web
design and site name help you with SEO specifically?

Firstly, creating a brand for your site is
something that Google highly recommends. Real companies are not called
‘How-To-Get-Big-Biceps.Com’, they are called ‘CrushingMuscle.com’. Brands help
to give a business – and a website by extension – a persona and an identity.
Think about the sites that are most successful
on Google and you’ll likely find that they all
use a brand rather than just a keyword as their site name!

Another reason that brands matter to Google
is that brands matter to users. If your site has a great logo, a smart web
design that matches the logo and a clear ‘mission statement’, then you’ll find
that your visitors find it much easier to get behind your message and to become
fans of your content.

Branding and SEO, The Purple Teacup Blogging for direct sales and business #directsales #startablog #thepurpleteacup

That in turn means that they’re likely to
spend long on your site, reducing your bounce rates. It means they will be more
likely to share your links too. These are both things that Google will look at
and view as a sign of a high quality website.

Another important reason to build a strong
brand and spend time creating a site with high production values, is that it
will send the right message to other site
owners. You know, the sites that you want to work with when building links? Try
and get a guest post from a top blog if your site looks like spam and see how it works out for you…

How
to Design a Great Brand

So how do you create a great brand?

A great brand doesn’t start with a logo but rather with a mission. It starts by knowing exactly what it is that you want to deliver to your users and exactly what sets you apart from the rest. Your logo is then an expression of that and a label that will tell people what to expect when they come across your site. This is where it starts!

Branding and SEO 4

Looking for ways to improve your SEO? Check out our SEO Awesomeness Course – an incredible resource for categories, tags, and keywords. And join us over in the Bistro! Our free Facebook Community where all the fun bloggers hang out and tag about WordPressy stuff.

Branding and SEO 5