Minimise the chance of your website being compromised
There are a lot of things you can do to protect your site, and they're well worth the time and/or financial investment involved
Our Daily Articles: Complete Index 2008–2019
Have a plan for when your website gets hacked
Two of our clients have had this experience in the last year. I've had a site hacked as well. It's been a learning exercise for all of us.
We need to care for all linked pages in emails
Have a look at yours and ensure any standard landing pages or forms are updated to be as good as your main offer pages
How many people should check our writing?
Even if you're a confident writer and an authority on the subject, I'd suggest that 'none' would be asking for trouble
When’s the best time for email or social media?
It's one of those decisions that a bit of testing might help with, but we may also have to rely on some intuition
5 ways to make your website more credible
I always recommend adding a constant stream of authoritative background articles and FAQs. What else can we put on the website?
Noindex command needs to be removed from robots.txt
Google soon won't be supporting the command 'noindex'. So if your robots.txt contains any lines with that in it, you may want to change it.
Asking customers the right questions
I've known businesses change their marketing message for a product to something far more effective, based on this sort of customer feedback
What Google’s mobile-first index means
Google has said it will soon only use what it sees on our websites using the equivalent of a mobile device.
As much quality on your website as you can EAT
Expertise, authority and trust: as usual, Google is only trying to quantify and specify what prospects probably look for without thinking.
How-To Videos: easy to justify
As I've mentioned many times before, a how-to video is one of the most cost-effective pieces of content any company can produce.
The problem with responsive search ads
What worries me a little is the many businesses who could be getting ads showing that don't make much sense.
Check you’ve got canonical tags on your website
The 'canonical' tag should be generated automatically by your content management system. But do make sure it is.
ICYMI – All the blog posts from July 2019
Our monthly listing of everything which has been in the blog in the last month...
Why WordPress is the first choice for most websites
Wordpress is free, and there are so many people who know how to maintain it that your installation will be pretty well future-proof.
Response codes from 200 to 404, via 301 and 302
The codes '301' and '302' tell browsers that the URL requested is understood, but the server is going to send them somewhere else instead.
Giving your articles some structure
The traditional 'three-act structure' is an easy approach that can be as applicable to a technical article as it can to a novel
Inspiration for your next image advert
A fun resource which could give you some competitor intelligence or provide inspiration for your next image advert.
When is the best time of day for your search advertising?
It's not unusual to discover that the best time of day for your advertising is not when you'd expect it to be.
How much should we spend on search advertising?
PPC search advertising is great value for money, but it's important to be realistic about how thinly you may be spreading things
What does your LinkedIn page say about your company?
There are so many ways in which prospects might pass by your LinkedIn page during any deliberations.
Breaking free of email slavery
Your customers do not expect an instant reply from you, so don't use that as an excuse for checking emails every five minutes
Articles need depth, not length
Whether the length of an article is 200 words or 2000 isn't nearly as important as answering the question in depth.
Why is audio transcription so underused?
There are so many corporate presentations being made every day which just disappear into history. It's a big waste.
Keep writing
Make your website an increasingly useful repository of information in your area of technology, and the results will follow.
Quickly smartening up your email signature
If you need a professional-looking email signature block created, the folks at Hubspot have created a free online tool to do just that
Targeting your advertising at the customer’s location
Search advertising is fantastic at tailoring the sales message and enquiry experience to the location of the prospect.
Being on top of your inbound links
What links are helping you with specific product searches, and what ones are just telling the search engines what they already know?
Don’t forget to jazz up your social media posts
Please don't make the mistake on social media that so many companies do, of just pasting in the headline as the message.
Consider what people see when they don’t click in Google
Figures from the USA (and I've no reason to think things are different here) suggest just under half of all searches don't result in a click.
Get a reminder to renew your SSL Certificate
Don't just take a look now, feel happy that renewal isn't for another year, and promptly forget the issue. Make sure you'll get a reminder.
The case for automated bidding in PPC advertising
Like driving a car with an automatic gearbox, automated bidding has been seen by professionals as somehow beneath them.
Don’t be lazy. Put the message up front.
If you have just one sentence to summarise the message the page is trying to convey, is it what's in the headline?
Leaving the gate half-open
When you 'gate' content, you hide it from the search engines, and can any of us afford to do that? I think there's a compromise.
Respect Wikipedia to make the most of it
Wikipedia is not some opportunity to be exploited in a dubious way. It's a terrific source of quality traffic. Just treat it with respect.
First impression, first opportunity
The very first email you send someone by request is more likely to be read than any other, so don't waste the opportunity to offer something!
ICYMI – All the blog posts from June 2019
Our monthly listing of everything which has been in the blog in the last month...
Why you need online display adverts in the mix
Google's 'Display Network', and it may be the company's least well promoted service
How to advertise to vertical market sectors
We suggest letting the prospects point to their industry once they've got to the site.
Point your customers to leave a review
A Google Business listing means prompting satisfied customers to add their review, and here's how
June’s Google update more significant than usual
It might be worth seeing if your traffic has been affected in the past week or so.
Three genuinely useful guides to business marketing
Here are some nice freebies for you: my former colleague Andrew Leon Walker has written three genuinely useful guides
Google reduces duplicate site listings
It's previously been possible for a single site to grab three or four of the spots in the search results.
Breaking up articles into bite-sized pieces
If you have the facility to do so, at least ensure you have a sub-heading every two to three paragraphs.
Tips on writing good title tags
How long should the title tag be? The consensus among SEO experts though is that 50 to 60 characters is just fine.
Why writing really good title tags for our web pages is essential
An easy trap to fall into is to just let a content management system take the page headline and dump it into the title tag field.
Getting new pages into Google quickly
How do we get in the natural, free results as quickly as possible?
When to add Bing Ads
At what point is it worth looking at the number two search engine?
Three minutes spent very usefully
SEO Analyzer will spend three minutes and then present you with an action plan.
Learning from the best favicons
Take a look at any search results on a mobile device and you'll see that some sites' favicons look much better than others.