Welcome to the latest WN6 newsletter.  Here are 4 essential tips to improve your website.

Tip 1 – Make sure your website is responsive.

For those who don’t know what responsive websites are, they are websites built to automatically adapt to mobiles, tablets and desktop screens.  An easy way to see this in action is to re-size the web browser of any responsive website – like this one.

Why does responsive matter and how does it benefit your business?

• Google now use mobile and tablet compatibility in rankings – no mobile and tablet friendly website equals reduced rankings
• 48% of all searches are now made on smartphones and tablets.
• The user experience is better and so your enquiries/conversions should be better too

Check if your website is responsive, if I’ve built it in the last 12 months it will be.  If not make sure you make this change soon, responsive websites embrace a whole array of better and faster technology helping your customers and your business.

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Tip 2 – Keep on top of website maintenance

Most businesses out there have a website, some have a service agreement for maintenance many simply only remember about their website when a customer says they can’t access it.

Owning a website is a lot like owning a house or physical building, when its new everything works fine, over time things start to go wrong and outdated.  The difference is a house isn’t exposed to light speed technology changes that bring daily security threats, plus ageing technology means websites aren’t as fast as they should be any more, they loose rankings and customers expectations shift.  The list goes on and on.

In the last 12 months WordPress (one of the biggest website platforms in the world) have released 15+ core updates, improvements and security patches.

If you care about your business and know your website is at very least a useful tool in the success of your business, it’s imperative you at very least a regular get a service and update to the core software, twice if not three times a year.

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Tip 3 – Unseen spam – don’t let your website drown.

Every up-to-date website should have analysis code of some sort embedded.  Analysis code helps people like me monitor the website traffic, generate content and improve organic rankings.  Over the last 6-12 months a disturbing trend has appeared that can severely affect the performance and ranking of websites, the scourge of the spam referral.

Your website could be slowly drowning, and you don’t know it’s happening.

A spam referral is a way of another website trying to increase its ranking with search engines.  It’s complex and shows up only in the analysis data, all the same your site gets bombed by ghost visits from places like Russia, China, a whole host of other countries and an array of websites.

Why should you care if you don’t see any damage?

The reason you should care is that spam referrals can do at least a couple of things to your website.

• It pollutes the analysis data with thousands of fake visits
• It can seriously damage your ranking with search engines – An overloaded server means slower load times, which translate to higher bounce rates and lower rankings.  (Moz.com – global search engine gurus)
• On a small site for a local plumber for instance, 30 sessions per day is likely going to be 70% spam referral traffic, suffocating the remaining legitimate traffic.

How can these rogues be stopped, you may ask?

It involves adding a file to the root of your website, this file holds a list of bad referring sites.  The file then blocks the bad sites from accessing your website and stops spam referrals.  The trick is keeping on top of the list periodically as new referring sites crop up, it’s not the only way but it’s the most cost-effective.

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Tip 4 – Organic is always best

Ranking well organically is certainly the best and most cost-effective options for any website.  For a long while companies have been battered with cold calls promising to get a website to the top spot of Google.  My question is always ‘For what search string?’

The tools I use show that potential visitors search for your service using a wide variety of search terms.  One customer I work with can be found on Google for over 435 different searches, from one word searches to long tail searches with 3, 4 or 5 words.  Each of these search strings provides a different search result.  He ranks on average Number 1 for 23 searches and on the first page for over 184 searches.

Organic ranking is always best and most cost effective, plus it provides prospective customers with targeted content.  I work with a number of clients developing organic content in response to the most popular of searches, the mission is to improve organic rankings and in turn business.   Developing search engine friendly organic content is never wasted as it stays working on your site forever.  Plus fresh and relevant content is always a good thing for search rankings, if you don’t have fresh content you will slowly fall in ranking and that’s a fact.

Did you know – if you own the domain name applesandoranges.com and your content is all about bananas your website would more than likely never be seen for the terms apples and oranges.