We’d all love for our websites to rank as efficiently as possible with minimal effort; but unfortunately it just isn’t that simple. Our guide below should give some insight into what’s involved in getting your website ranking well.

Review your current standing

This is a big deal. Instead of blindly going full steam ahead with changes/amendments to your search strategy, we suggest that you review your current site in its present standing. That way, you’ll get a greater understanding of what’s required and will give you a greater chance of success ongoing. Check your current rankings and try to understand the bigger picture in terms of how you are ranking compared to your competitors. Tools such as SEOptimer can help provide a good level of insight from a broad SEO perspective.

Understand how Search Engines work

Understanding the fundamental purpose of search engines and how they index and rank websites is also key in ensuring you obtain and sustain successful search results ongoing. Information to help with this is readily available for free! For example, the Google SEO guide contains lots of helpful and insightful information – https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/7451184?hl=en. Doing this, you’ll get a greater understanding of best practices moving forward.

Develop a keyword strategy

Think about the key terms you would want your website to be found for. Make a list, use an Excel sheet to list these out and then prioritise them in order of preference. Utilise long-tail keywords and gradually narrow down to more generic search terms that are more difficult to rank for. Some keywords are of course, more difficult to rank than others. Tools like WordTracker can help with this.

Content

One of the most important elements, if not THE most is content. Content plays a huge role in how your website ranks. Using your list of keywords, try and develop and broaden your content to include these terms. You’ll want to make sure that your content is user-friendly, easy to read and relevant to your business. Avoid black-hat strategies such as keyword stuffing. The Yoast SEO tool is very good for helping to score and evaluate content based on what you have added to your pages/posts/products.

Utilise your Blog

A blog is a great way to tell a story, to get a news post out to your audience and much more. Using your blog frequently allows you to implement your keywords within the content and is a great way to build your online presence and get found online.

Performance / Speed

The speed of your website can have a huge bearing on user experience and conversions. On top of this, speed is now a crucial ranking factor when it comes to Google. Here’s a great article explaining this in detail. https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2018/07/search-ads-speed. Use tools like Pingdom, GTMetrix and Pagespeed Insights to audit your site speed and find out what’s slowing it down.

Mobile / User Experience

Since the majority of users will visit your site on a mobile device, we can’t stress just how important it is to have a fluid, responsive and user friendly mobile layout in place. Without this, your organic positioning and traffic may be hugely negatively affected. Ensure that your content is easy to find, easy to read and not blocked by annoying pop-ups etc. Mobile optimisation is absolutely essential and should never be overlooked.

Link Building

Once you are happy with your website in terms of performance, mobile responsiveness and content, performing your link-building strategy will supplement these greatly. We recently wrote a post on link building which you can find here.

Google Search Console

Google Search Console is the place to measure your website’s performance/errors/reports and more. Here you can submit your sitemap, check for any pages with mobile errors and see your performance on Google for a particular period. On top of this, keep an eye out for any algorithm updates and changes to understand whether or not you are being penalised in any way – https://moz.com/google-algorithm-changee

Google Analytics

Without measuring your performance and metrics, it’s going to be difficult to improve. Google Analytics provides a huge amount of data for doing so. Even if you are to just looking to measure organic performance ongoing after following the above recommendations then this is your go-to tool. Google run free online classes for beginners to familiarise yourself with Analytics and can be really beneficial! https://analytics.google.com/analytics/academy/

Conclusion

To conclude, spending time and effort on the points above will no doubt help to increase your search rankings and results. Take your time and make sure you are doing things the right way rather than looking for a fast fix.

At 2Cubed Web Design & Development, we can assist you with any of the needs above, helping you to build your online presence. We offer a number of services to help you grow your online presence. Check out our list of services here – https://2cubed.ie/services/

 

Often times, the basics and fundamentals of SEO are overlooked as we focus on the more technical challenges that Search Engine Optimisation presents. Before diving into the more complex SEO issues, we should focus on two of the absolute basic and key items – content & link building. For this post, we’ll take a look at link building and how to do it correctly.

What is link building?

Link building is the action whereby another website contains a hyperlink back to your website. As simple as that sounds, a high-quality link building strategy requires a great deal of time and patience and is something that one cannot rest on. The value of link building remains hugely important for SEO in 2020 and will remain so for some time.

It’s important to note that – Google do not take any malicious or non-genuine link strategy lightly and your website will suffer drastically as a result. More on Google’s policy regarding link schemes and their guidelines can be found here.

How can I build good quality links?

Google’s Penguin update focused not just on the amount of links to a website but the quality and relevance of the links instead. Some years ago, black-hat techniques would see websites participating in link farming and so on with the sole purpose of increasing visibility and this was unfair to the user doing it the right way! This all changed back in 2011 with the release of Panda which as mentioned, focused on high quality links and reduced the the value of a link from a ‘thin’ website or a website purely in place to participate in black-hat strategies.

Building good links the right way involves effort. Reaching out to relevant partners and building trust and a relationship may present the opportunity to have a link placed on that partners website. This may be a guest blog post, a help guide or just a link on a ‘Partnership’ page as an example. The relevance of the link is also a big factor. Note that link exchanging is not a good practice and can lead to penalties. This is the idea of exchanging a link purely for the sake of doing so without any real relevance or benefit for both parties.

How to measure link building performance?

Many tools allow you to view the total number of backlinks to your website. Some of the Pro or paid tools such as Ahrefs, Moz Pro or SEM Rush will include a detailed ranking on these links and the probable authority of that link. This means you get an overview of these links and can tailor your outreach to similar sites or industries to build even further. Google Search Console is a fantastic tool and will also provide insight on these backlinks. Using the ‘acquisition’ – ‘referral’ option on Google Analytics shows you where exactly the traffic to your site originated.

To summarise, focusing on high quality and relevant link building strategies can have a massive payoff for your website and is something that should be at the forefront of SEO work.

To find out how we can help your SEO strategy, please Contact 2Cubed today!

You can also contact us on 01 905 8114 or 051-440425, email hello@2cubed.ie

In this post, we will take a look at what to look out for in 2020 from an SEO point of view. Search Engine Optimisation is a huge focus for many online businesses nowadays and is more crucial than ever in order to help drive traffic and ultimately sales.

Content and BERT

Fundamentally, SEO has for a long time been made up of a number of set variables, such as; backlinks, content and keywords. As search engines are constantly developing, we’re now at a point where the bots sent out by search engines to crawl websites are smarter than ever and becoming more human like due to advancements in AI. This leads us to think not just about content simply stuffed with keywords but content that is well written and answers the queries of real users. This was highlighted back in October last year by the introduction of Google’s BERT algorithm (Read Here). As mentioned in the article, each day almost 15% of queries searched for haven’t been searched for before. By analysing your website content in a more human format, allows Google to show users the most relevant websites based on the search term. Content is king as they say!

Technical SEO

Here at 2Cubed, something we’ve taken a particular focus in over the past year has been technical SEO. We had written a post outlining this in detail here. Technical SEO is the focus on the architecture of your site, the speed, the usability of pages and much more. Google Search Console is an excellent tool to examine any warnings or errors and ensuring these are clear will help massively toward SEO performance. Any site focusing on SEO this year should be fully aware of this.

Structured Data

If you’ve ever searched a term on Google, you most likely will have seen some structured data such as featured snippets. Featured snippets are described by Google as ‘Google’s search results sometimes show listings where the snippet describing a page comes before a link to a page, not after as with our standard format. Results displayed this way are called featured snippets.’

By adding structured data to your site allows you the opportunity to compete for space on the results page above the first position. This is a fantastic way to grow traffic and improve click-through rates.

Voice Search

More and more, users are searching queries by asking questions. Use of Siri, Alexa, Google Assistant and others are on the rise and the technology behind these brings us back to BERT. Conversational queries are not text and as such, search engines need to understand what is being asked and which relevant results are to display. By reviewing your content and optimising it with this in mind, you’ll have a much better chance of appearing for a search term and increasing traffic to your site.

These was just some of the trends to look out for in 2020. Applying these to your SEO strategy will most likely lead to positive results! Some others to keep in mind are:

• Link Building
• Mobile SEO
• Local SEO
• UX

2Cubed can help you grow your online business! Check out a full list of services and our website process here – https://2cubed.ie/services/

You can use our dedicated quotation form below or contact us with any questions you may have here.

 

Over the past couple of weeks, we have received mass emails in relation to Breadcrumb markup errors from Google. You may have received a similar email:

What are Breadcrumbs?

A breadcrumb or a trail is a visual element added to show a user where exactly they are within a website. It also indicates the path within the hierarchy of a site. As Structured Data types are constantly evolving, this information is now targeted by Google while indexing and displayed as a rich result to users on the search results page in order to provide users a richer experience. You can see an example of this along with more information here. There is also now a dedicated ‘Breadcrumbs’ option within Google Search Console highlighting error types and potential fixes.

If breadcrumbs are not enabled on your site but you’ve received the email then there may be a setting within the site or theme causing this. This is where we can help. If you have any query or issue in relation to Breadcrumbs or even just a general query, please contact us.

At 2Cubed Web Design & Development, our expert team is on hand to assist with any questions you may have. In addition, we also offer a number of services to help you grow your online presence. Check out our list of services and our website process – https://2cubed.ie/services/

In order to grow your online business, to drive traffic toward your site and achieve set goals, a fundamental area is keyword research. Whether you plan on developing a solid SEO strategy or a PPC campaign, keyword research gives you the option to fully research and think about what your users may search for.

What are keywords?

Keywords are essentially the words or terms that you enter into a search engine when looking for an answer or a service. Put yourself in your ideal users’ shoes for a moment and think about the path they should take in order to see your website. Whether you are selling products, providing a service or providing information to users, you’ll see a huge benefit from developing a keyword strategy.

Where do I start?

Start by mapping out some broad terms related to your website. Keep them relevant to your sector and what you do. From here, you can begin to build out more long-tail keywords which are more specific to what you offer. Long-tail keywords are the three or four word terms that accurately describe your product.

For example, take a store selling sporting goods. They would begin with some general but competitive keywords like sporting goods, sport shop and so on. From here, narrow it down to more specific items such as hockey equipment Dublin, boys running shoes Kilkenny, Wexford kids GAA shirt etc. By developing and implementing these long-tail keywords in to your website content, you’ll have a much better chance of being found on the search engines. On top of this, more relevant traffic to your website and the chance to convert these users into sales. The long-tail keywords usually have less competition and a higher chance of conversion!

Useful Keyword Planner tools

There are many options online to assist with keyword research. Some free tools are available but may be quite limited. You’ll have far more features and options with some paid tools.

Wordstream – https://www.wordstream.com/keywords

Google Keyword Planner (connected to Adwords) – Keyword Planner

Wordtracker – https://www.wordtracker.com/

By developing a keyword strategy for your website, you’ll give yourself every chance to be successful online. The importance of this can’t be understated. By using some of the keyword tools, you’ll get some fresh ideas for keywords that you may not have considered previously. Taking these terms and implementing them into your blogs, PPC, SEO and on-page content should enhance your online visibility greatly!

At 2Cubed Web Design & Development, we offer a number of options to help you develop and a keyword strategy. In addition, we also offer a number of services to help you grow your online presence. Check out our list of services and our website process – https://2cubed.ie/services/

Google’s AMP project was launched in 2016 and after a slow start, soon became a common feature across mobile search results. AMP or accelerated mobile pages, is a framework developed by Google to rival Facebooks Instant Articles and the technology allows pages to load almost instantly. Last year, we wrote a post about the importance of AMP – See here. So what has changed in the past year and how important is AMP now?

Nowadays, online users expect everything instantly. Waiting 10 seconds for a website to load is a big no-no in 2019 so enabling AMP can help enormously in getting traffic into your site while getting ahead of your competitors.

Google have now branched out and added some more features to the AMP framework. At present, it’s possible to create:

• AMP Websites
• AMP Stories
• AMP Ads
• AMP Email

You can find more information on all of the above and see some case study ‘success stories’ by viewing the AMP resource website – https://amp.dev/

Many sites are now seeing the full benefit of having AMP enabled content on their websites and this is likely to increase further into the near future so this needs to be factored in to your thinking if you own, run or manage a website.

Enabling AMP on your website can be tricky but once done correctly, it’s fairly easy to maintain and use on blog posts etc. For example, a number of WordPress plugins are available to help with layout, templates and amplifying content. As an example, you can view our previous post on this topic on your mobile device by clicking here – https://2cubed.ie/blog/the-importance-of-amp/

At 2Cubed Web Design & Development, we can advise or help you with any of the needs above, helping you to enable AMP on your website. We offer a number of services to help you grow your online presence. Check out our list of services – https://2cubed.ie/services/

If your site uses WordPress, you’re probably familiar with plugins. Plugins are there to make life easier, essentially. We’ve gone through some of the top plugins on WordPress and picked out 8 that you may want to consider for your site.

• Woocommerce – Woocommerce powers over 40% of all eCommerce websites on the web. Powerful and easy to use, it allows you to manage products, orders, discount codes and much more. You can read more on Woocommerce here
• Yoast SEO – Yoast is a plugin to help with SEO on your site. Yoast is a free plugin but the premium version offers more features for advanced SEO. See here for more information.
• WP Rocket – A number of caching tools are available for WordPress sites and WP Rocket is one of the most popular. Caching helps to maximise site performance and improve speed. The free version offers limited features but a premium version with more advanced options is available. You can read more on WP Rocket here
• Elementor – This page builder has become one of the more popular tools out there in the past year and the reviews are outstanding. This powerful page builder allows you to easily manage page content and includes both a free and premium version. See here for more.
• Smush – This plugin is mainly used for image compression and resizing. Having multiple large images on your site will cause issues with speed and performance. Smush helps with this by automatically compressing images once uploaded and again comes with either a free or premium version. You can view the full list of features here
• Slider Revolution  – Powering over 2.5 million websites, Slider Revolution allows you to add sliders, carousels and more. Currently there isn’t a free version but it is cheap to purchase and includes a good deal of functionality but the premium version gives access to many more templates and features. View a full list of features here
• Sucuri  – This security plugin helps to flag any security issues or breaches on your website and alerts you if anything does happen. Generally, your website host will look after security but this added layer of protection gives you peace of mind. See here for more info
• Redirection – This plugin allows you to easily manage 301s, 404s and more which can help reduce errors and improve site ranking. This plugin can be a useful tool but used incorrectly it can cause some issues. Take a look at more features here

These are just some of the tools you can use to improve your WordPress site. *Please be aware that installing and updating plugins on your website may cause some issues*

At 2Cubed Web Design & Development, we can assist you with any of the needs above, helping you decide on and install / update plugins. We offer a number of services to help you grow your online presence. Check out our list of services – https://2cubed.ie/services/

Contact us today for more information on the services we provide – Contact Us

In this post, we’ll look at a critical element of search engine optimisation; Technical SEO. This has become a fundamental and sometimes overlooked area of SEO but we’ll explain why it’s more important than ever below.

Technical SEO contains many topics we could dive in to, but by understanding the key elements, it should allow you to gain an understanding of what it is and best practices to follow. As you would have seen in or SEO Audit post, technical SEO was listed as a key element along with on-page and off-page optimisation.

So, what exactly does it mean? Essentially, the technical health of your site indicates how well Google and other search engines can crawl and index the information on your website. If they encounter any issues, these will be flagged as errors or warnings in Google Search Console.

By resolving these issues, you’ll ensure your site is in good standing from a technical sense and means that the site crawlers can index your site fully without any obstacles. Some of the common issues you’ll need to address are as follows:

• 404 errors – nobody likes seeing these, especially soft 404s. You can manage 404s by implementing 301 redirects
• 5XX errors – server errors or timeouts which are blocking access to pages
• noindex issues – noindex is commonly used to block access to a page that you do not wish to be indexed (such as private or secure pages). If you submit a url in the sitemap but it includes a noindex tag then you’ll need to address this
• blocked by robots.txt – another method to block access to a page. You can see more here – https://support.google.com/webmasters/
• Mobile Usability – Google analyse each page and flag any anomalies that may cause a poor user experience on mobile. For example, if clickable elements are too close together, if a page is not fully mobile responsive, text is too small to read and so on. Keeping your site fully mobile responsive ensures a good user experience, decreased bounce rate and just an overall better experience for your website users.

Most of the errors above can be viewed on the Index Coverage Status report within Google Search Console – https://support.google.com/webmasters/

This brief overview of technical SEO should hopefully give more understanding of the variables a search engine goes through in order to show your website on Google.

At 2Cubed Web Design & Development, we can assist you with any of the needs above, allowing you to ensure your website is in good technical standing. We offer a number of services to help you grow your online presence. Check out our list of services – https://2cubed.ie/services/