SEO Archives -

Mobile website speed test tools

By Paul on June 4, 2016Leave a Reply

In a world that is fastly evolving from mobile first to mobile only, you are out of the game if your website is not accessible on a smartphone. That meaning, build with “mobile first” in mind. Your site needs to scale to the devices your visitors are using. People browsing the web from mobile devices are typically connected to the internet through 3G, 4G/LTE and in many cases even slower connections, which makes the speed of your website crucial. The majority of people tend to leave a site if it takes more than 4-5 seconds to load the page. As you may know, Google takes speed into consideration when ranking website, which is another important reason to speed up your site.

Google recently launched a new tool to check your site’s mobile friendliness and speed, which will tell you which areas you need to work on.
Go check it out: Google Mobile Website Speed Testing Tool

They are promising to send you a report within 24 hours, which I still haven’t received, even though I’ve past the 24 hours. It’s work in progress I guess.

You can still use the good old Google PageSpeed too, which shows you your results instantly. Funny enough the scores from their two services don’t exactly match, but that’s a minor detail.

Use these mobile website speed test tools and be ready for mobile only.

Change domain name WordPress, the SEO friendly way

By Paul on June 4, 2016Leave a Reply

How to change domain name of your WordPress site the SEO friendly way, without losing PR and link juice

I recently changed domain for this blog from egeek.dk to egeek.io. There are two parts of changing your domain or moving your site to a new host and domain – the technical part, and the SEO part where you try to preserve your search engine rankings. Doing it the right way will save you a lot less trouble in the future, and make you keep most of your hard earned SEO work. On the other hand, doing it wrong can have fatal consequences on your rankings in the search engines.

I’ll narrow it down and describe how I did it, and how you should do it too.

In my case I wanted to change domain from egeek.dk to egeek.io on a running WordPress site. I was not switching host/server, but just wanted to “rebrand” my site with a new domain. Whether you are in the same situation and want to rebrand your site, or want to switch host and domain, you can use these steps as a guideline.

I’m currently running this blog on IIS in a Windows Server environment, but the fundamentals are the same, and the following steps can be incorporated, should you run your site/blog on Apache, Nginx or on a LiteSpeed server in a *nix environment.

Disclaimer

Before starting out, I want to stress that changing your domain from olddomain.com to newdomain.com will affect your search engine rankings in the beginning. After you do a switch Google will index both of your sites, where after olddomain.com will slowly dissapear from the search results. I’ve had pages indexed with meta titles and descriptions chosen by Google, instead of the meta-data I chose for the pages (yeah, Google can do that). After the switch these pages are currently indexed with my new domain, and yet again Google has chosen meta titles and descriptions, though different (and much worse) than before. I had top 1 placements in Google with feature images and snippets, which are now gone after I changed domain. It’s a part of the process, but I’m positive the rankings and feature snippets will come back up, when everything is rolled out completely. It’s inevitable for things like these not to happen, as Google needs to reindex your whole site again. Don’t put too much concern into this though, as things will smooth out, and if you play it right, you’ll be back up where you were before. That’s what this guide is about.

Table of content

1. Domain name

2. Site and bindings

3. Change WordPress address

4. 301 redirects

5. Rename SQL database

6. Add properties in Google Search Console

7. Change address in Google Search Console

8. Submit sitemaps in Google Search Console

9. Update Google Analytics account and tracking code

10. Fetch site and submit to index

11. The afterwork

No data is available for the 2 most recent days

By Paul on May 31, 2016Leave a Reply

If you ever stumbled upon the info message “No data is available for the 2 most recent days” in Google Analytics when browsing the “Search Engine Optimization” section and wondered why this message appears, there’s a good explanation for that.

You will get this message after connecting your Google Analytics account to your website in Google Search Console (former Google Webmaster Tools).
The Search Engine Optimisation graphs in Google Analytics pulls data from Google Search Console, and this data is often several days delayed. People report it can be delayed by more than 2 days as originally stated.

Right after linking your accounts you won’t be able to see data until Google fetches initial data from Google Search Console – give it some days. After that, the message stays, and just tells you that Google Analytics is 2 days behind fetching data from Google Search Console. Don’t worry, it’s perfectly normal, and Google Analytics will eventually catch up.

It might be a good idea to re-check you linked the correct accounts though.
Log in to Google Search Console > click on your website > on the wheel in the top right corner click and chose “Google Analytics Property”, and you’ll see the Google Analytics account linked to your website.

Redirect www to non-www IIS

By Paul on February 17, 20131 Reply

This guide shows you how to redirect your site from www to non-www on server level with IIS 7.5.

www is actually a subdomain for your main domain (domain.com), which means both www.domain.com and domain.com will serve the same content, if you don’t redirect either www.domain.com to domain.com or the opposite way around. It’s highly recommended to do so, to prevent duplicate content. Which you prefer is entirely up to you, as it doesn’t matter in search engine rankings, as long as you choose one.

Fire up Internet Information Services (IIS) Manager by hitting CTRL+R and type inetmgr [enter]

Choose your site in the left menu and open up “Url Rewrite”

Click “Add rule(s)…”

Choose “Blank rule” under Inbound rules and click [ok]

Give your rule a name, eg.: Redirect to non-www
Request URL: Match the Pattern
Pattern: (.*)

Open up the “Conditions” tab

Condition input: {HTTP_HOST}
Check if input string: Does Not Match the Pattern
Pattern: ^domain\.com$

Scroll down to the “Action” tab

Action type: Redirect
Redirect URL: http://domain.com/{R:1}
Make sure Redirect type is set to “Permanent (301)”

Done!

Another option, is to add the rule in your web.config manually:

[xml]
<rewrite>
<rules>
<rule name="Redirect to non-www" stopProcessing="true">
<match url="(.*)" negate="false"></match>
<action type="Redirect" url="http://domain.com/{R:1}"></action>
<conditions>
<add input="{HTTP_HOST}" pattern="^domain\.com$" negate="true"></add>
</conditions>
</rule>
</rules>
</rewrite>
[/xml]

Individual meta description Umbraco

By Paul on November 4, 2011Leave a Reply

As for SEO, it’s good practise to have individual meta descriptions for most if not all pages on your site.
A quick and easy way to implement this into Umbraco, is by creating a SEO tab with the property “meta-description” (textstring) for all your document types.

In your template you simply insert following line into your <head></head>
[code]
<meta name="description" content="<umbraco:Item field=’meta-description’ recursive=’true’ runat=’server’/>"/>
[/code]