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What Google’s Penguin 4.0 Update Means to Link Building

During a recent interview on Webcology, I was discussing Google’s recent Penguin 4.0 update with Jim Hedger and Dave Davies, but after the interview, the wheels in the cynical part of my brain really started turning.

After nearly two years of waiting, Google has finally updated Penguin—this time for the last time, because now it’s been rolled into their core search algorithm. The implication is that this round of improvements has perfected Penguin.

One of the most notable improvements is that it’s now reported to be more granular, so rather than penalizing an entire website for violations of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines, specific pages or even sections of a site can be penalized while the rest remain unaffected. Think of it like sending in a sniper instead of calling an air strike.

This proves what professionals in the search engine optimization industry have been saying since 2012, when Penguin 1.0 first appeared. That it was a horribly broken update that hurt lots of innocent business owners and was easily manipulated by unethical SEOs to harm their competitors.

Despite Matt Cutts’s claim that negative SEO is nearly impossible and extremely rare, SEO professionals who aren’t spokespeople for Google know and are willing to admit otherwise.

Check out the comments section on this post by Moz’s Rand Fishkin and you can clearly see that most experienced SEO professionals agree that negative SEO is both easy and common based on plenty of real-world experience.

Google desperately needed people to believe that Penguin wasn’t flawed for two reasons.

  1. They needed to hide how flawed and easily manipulated their algorithm was. (Both for good and for evil.)
  2. They needed to scare marketers away from link building activities intended to manipulate organic ranking.

Why were people afraid of link building in the first place?

Google came out like a wrecking ball when they first released Penguin in 2012, both to destroy websites that had already engaged in link building, and to scare the shit out of anyone considering it.

wrecking ball

Not surprisingly, a growing number of marketers have become increasingly scared of link building, and those fears, while wrong, were understandable. After all, the last update was on December 2014—over 700 days ago, which means any sites penalized in the last update have waited nearly two years to recover. That’s a pretty understandable reason to play it ultra-safe.

While some websites were legitimately penalized for blatant spam, particularly link spam, a tremendous number of innocent websites became collateral damage, completely destroying thousands of small businesses.

That’s a pretty big motivator to avoid link building like the plague.

Today, you see a lot of intelligent people mistakenly preaching the “just build great content and people will naturally link to it” mantra, largely because Google’s spokespeople explicitly tell marketers not to build links.

You also see a lot of people in the search engine optimization industry proudly standing on their soapbox, hypocritically making that claim while their actions indicate that they know it’s all bullshit. I know this because I see the mountain of emails they send to the websites we own or manage asking for links.

What’s different now?

Remember the granularity of this update that we talked about earlier? The fact that low-quality links will either be ignored, or will just trigger a page or section-specific penalty instead of a site-wide penalty?

Because of that, there’s not much downside to aggressive link building for search marketers who really know what they’re doing.

Most business owners who aren’t elbow-deep in the trenches of search engine optimization on a daily basis have probably already been scared off off link building. Sure, they might ask for a link here and there among friends, but they sure as hell aren’t engaging in any outreach.

But you know who will? Everyone who isn’t already on the first page of Google. Every brand new business owner who hasn’t even heard of the monster we once called Penguin. And search marketers who had previously suffered it’s wrath but now realize it’s been neutered.

Why? Because they have virtually nothing to lose. It’s a classic case of risk vs. reward for many people.

They’re already missing out on visitors to their competitors, and even if they violate Google’s Webmaster Guidelines on an epic scale, only the violating pages or sections will be penalized.

Now I will point out that to use the old link building techniques that violate Google’s guidelines, you would have to be a search engine optimization expert. A real one, not the kind who read a few blog posts, answered a few questions on forums, and anointed yourself with the title. Make one mistake, and you’re most important pages, or even your entire website can be destroyed forever.

Mark my words, over the next 12 months, we’re going to see a resurgence in the grey and black hat link building tactics that dominated the pre-Penguin days, and they will work for marketers who understated how to game the system. Within a year, we’ll start to see the mainstream marketers jump back on spammy links with a rabid enthusiasm, and many of them will destroy their websites in the process.

And then we’ll go through this dance all over again.

dance

Everything You Need to Know About Migrating from a Static Website to WordPress

I knew that even in 2016, some static HTML websites still existed, but I hadn’t encountered one in so long that I assumed any serious entrepreneurs had already made the switch to WordPress a long time ago.

I was recently proven wrong when I met a local entrepreneur here in Tampa who simply hadn’t bothered to update her website in years. Since she hadn’t done any digital marketing, it never seemed like a priority to her.

While I understood her reasoning, I also knew that she was missing out on the tremendous leverage that a website built on WordPress can provide, because it is:

  • easy to add/edit content
  • easy for visitor to share content on social media
  • infinitely scalable as your business grows
  • simple to add new functionality
  • generally very search engine friendly
  • opensource, so you have full control

It’s no surprise that WordPress controls 59% of the content management system market today and powers 39% of all websites online today, because it allows ordinary business owners to quickly and easily update their website on their own, and it provides powerful functionality that less than a decade would have cost tens of thousands of dollars in custom development.

If you’re one of those people who still has a static website and wants to migrate to WordPress to get more out of it, this post is for you, because I’m going to share everything you’ll need to know. And if you’re too busy running your business to do it yourself and/or you need a new web design that turns visitors into customers, reach out to us. That’s what we’re here for!

Compile a list of your URLs

WordPress runs using PHP to pull data from a MySQL database, so your new website won’t have physical HTML files for each page. That doesn’t mean you should just delete them though, because that will almost certainly cause you to lose traffic and organic search ranking.

Instead, you’ll need to set up redirects to make sure any visitors or search engines attempting to access your old pages are redirected to the new, most relevant pages.

Compile your list of URLs using Screaming Frog, which will crawl all of the pages on your web server, and can be exported as a CSV file that can be opened in Excel or Google Sheets. You’ll need to enter your FTP credentials to identity pages that are not linked from within your own website. This might include landing pages used for paid traffic like Google AdWords or Facebook.

Store this in a safe place for now. We’ll need it later.

Collect any necessary scripts

While most scripts from your old website won’t be necessary in your new one, some probably will. For example:

  • Google analytics
  • Retargeting scripts
  • Ad scripts
  • Social media scripts

Be sure to collect them all for inclusion in your new website.

Collect all media

Most of your images will probably be located in a single folder on your web server, but you need to confirm this using Screaming Frog.

You’ll need to copy them all to a single location for review. Since your website is still static HTML, it was likely designed a long time ago, which means that many of the images are probably pretty small by today’s standards. For example, when I first stared designing websites, the typical screen resolution was 640px X 480px, but today, 1920px X 1080px is standard on desktops and most laptops—that’s 3 times larger!

An image proportioned to fit the available space perfectly in your current web site may look tiny and out of place in your new website. There’s also a pretty good chance that your existing images look outdated anyway, so this may be a good time to replace them with larger, more current images.

Dreamstime and Adobe Stock are great sources for stock photos. Just be sure to size your new images properly.

Install and configure WordPress in a development environment

You’ll want to minimize downtime, so you need to set up a development environment on your web server where you can build and test your new WordPress website before going live.

The way I do that is to install WordPress in its own subfolder.

You’ll also want to tell search engines to stay out since it is a duplicate of your current website copy. We don’t want to cause any duplicate content issues.

Add the following to your robots.txt file (in your root directory) and replace “your-subfolder-name” with the name of the folder where you’ve created your development environment.

User-agent: * Disallow: /your-subfolder-name/

There are a lot of WordPress settings, but most will depend on your circumstances. The two that matter most at this point are permalinks and categories.

Permalinks

Most static web sites use a flat URL structure, which isn’t ideal because it treats all pages as having equal value, rather than prioritizing your most important pages. This is the perfect opportunity to optimize your URL structure.

I usually identify 6-12 of the most important pages, then create a set of corresponding blog categories with the same name and slug.

Categories

Think of categories like general buckets to organize your posts, based on your most important topics.

In conjunction with a proper permalink structure, they will support your most important pages. This helps Google to understand which pages on your website are most important, because all blog posts will appear as subpages to them.

Plugins

I also recommend installing a few specific plugins:

Publish your content

This part will be tedious grunt work. If you have a lot of pages, you’ll probably bounce frequently between boredom, frustration, and rage before it’s all complete.

Text content

Unfortunately, I don’t have a handy tool to make this any faster or easier. You’re stuck with good old fashion copy and paste. Now, I could probably go into a rant about how “you kids have it easy today” but I’ll let the task speak for itself.

There are a few ways to approach this:

  1. Copy and paste all the text into the visual editor, then switch to the text view to delete and unnecessary code, like inline CSS or HTML tags. This is usually not my preferred method because it’s a lot of work and it’s easy to miss something that you’ll have to track down and fix later, but it may be necessary if there are a lot of HTML tags that you want to keep.
  1. Copy all of the text, then paste it into the visual editor as plain text. You’ll have to reapply any links and formatting like bold, italic, ordered and unordered lists.This is usually the best way to go because it’s the fastest and most certain way to eliminate everything you don’t need.

Images

You can’t copy and paste images into WordPress, but as we covered earlier, you’ll probably want to replace a lot of them with new, larger images anyway.

Including your images into your pages/posts is as simple as using the media uploader, then clicking the “add to post” button. WordPress will automatically include the image dimensions, alt attribute, image title, a link, if applicable, and limited formatting as long as the appropriate information is available.

Set up redirects

Remember that spreadsheet we created of all your URLs? Here’s where we’ll use it to set up 301 redirects using your .htaccess file. WordPress will have automatically created this file for you during installation, so you’ll just need to edit it with the FTP program of your choice.

You’ll need to create a redirect for every single old URL to the most relevant new URL.

redirect 301 /old-url-1.html /new-url-1/
redirect 301 /old-url-2.html /new-url-2/
redirect 301 /old-url-3.html /new-url-3/

Migration

This is the easy part.

I start by downloading a complete backup of all website files and saving them in a safe place, then deleting them from the server and installing WordPress.

Next, upload and activate the UpdraftPremium plugin, which should also already be active in the development environment. Now you’ll just need to generate a site key, and then go back to the development environment to migrate the site to your new WordPress installation. The Updraft team has already created a great tutorial on that, so I won’t reinvent the wheel.

So there you have it!

I hope this tutorial on migrating from your static website to WordPress was helpful.

If it seemed too technical, or it seemed like too much work, we can help. If you’d rather have someone create a WordPress website for you that will turn more of your visitors into customers, get in touch with us today. We’d love to work together!

What Every Business Owner Needs to Know About SEO

When I network outside of my own industry, I’m reminded how much I take my knowledge for granted. I sometimes forget that not everyone eats, sleeps, and breaths digital marketing—especially search engine optimization.

I was speaking at a local networking event, and while on the topic of SEO, several people insisted that they knew all about it, and then proceeded to tell me about the importance of the keyword meta tag, and how making sure to include all the right words was critical.

Given the amount of misinformation about search engine optimization on the internet, I can’t say I’m surprised when people have outdated, misguided, or flat out false ideas about it. So today, I’m going to share six things every business owner needs to know about SEO.

SEO is an ongoing process

A few weeks ago, I was speaking with a potential client, and when we came to the topic of search engine optimization, he said “Oh, we don’t need to worry about that—we’ve already had that done.”

Despite the fact that some people still think it’s just a task that you check off the list, SEO is an ongoing process.

Think of it like exercise—you wouldn’t go to the gym once, spend a few minutes on each machine, and then expect to walk out with the body of your dreams, right? Search engine optimization works the same way.

workout

There isn’t some magical formula that once you get dialed in, your website just ranks. Sure, there are certain guidelines you need to follow, but in addition to that, you’re also competing against other websites on each of the 200+ factors in Google’s algorithm.

There’s always room for improvement, so you must continue to optimize everywhere you can. Page speed, mobile responsiveness, user experience, content, inbound links, etc. If you don’t, you’ll lose out to competitors who do.

Results don’t happen overnight

Even if you do everything correctly, and you have the budget to do everything right now, you still won’t see results overnight.

Here’s why: Let’s say you wrote a ground-breaking post that everyone in your industry loved, shared, and linked to. Let’s say, hypothetically, that this post earned you 100 new links.

First, Google has to find your new post. How quickly they do will depend on:

  1. How authoritative they deem your website to be. More authoritative sites tend to be crawled more frequently.
  2. How authoritative the sites linking to your post are. When an authoritative site links to your post, it could be crawled and indexed sooner.

Next, Google needs to find all of the new links to your site. This will depend on how authoritative each of those sites are in the eyes of Google. That might be days, weeks, or even months. And it can be months after that before you see any improvement in ranking.

No one can make a guarantee

I know it seems like a guarantee makes good business sense, but it’s exactly the opposite in this case. If someone offers you a guarantee on search engine optimization—RUN!

An ethical and honest SEO professional will never offer a guarantee because they cannot guarantee where a page will rank. But don’t take my word for it—listen to what Google has to say about it…

Would you trust a stock broker who offered a guarantee on your investment? A doctor who offered a guarantee on your longevity? A politician who offered a guarantee on…well, anything? Of course not, because no matter how proficient, experienced, and well-intentioned they may be, they simply can’t guarantee a specific outcome.

Neither can search engine optimization professionals. Any who claim otherwise are lying.

Over the years, I’ve seen a lot of manipulative “guarantees” in this industry, and I’ve never seen one that didn’t fall into one of three categories:

  • A guarantee to rank for specific keywords, but they are keywords that no human would ever search for, thus, will never generate exposure, leads, or sales.
  • A guarantee to rank for specific keywords, but the SEO company uses black hat techniques which may produce results in the short term, but will eventually get your domain penalized by Google.
  • A guarantee to continue working for free if your website doesn’t rank for specific keywords within a specified time frame, but the SEO company simply stops working or responding.

Keyword meta tags don’t matter

Keyword meta tags have zero impact on search ranking. I mean, not even a little bit.

Think about it from a logical point of view. If the keyword meta tag was a ranking factor, site owners would simply copy them from top ranking sites, and search engines would have no way to determine where any site should rank.

Again, don’t take my word for it…

Inbound links are the most significant ranking factor

Legitimate editorial links from other websites pointing to your website are the single most significant ranking factor in Google’s algorithm today. This shouldn’t really be a surprise though, since this has been the case for well over a decade now.

The difference today is that Google has gone a long way in combating manipulative linking practices. What was once standard practice and acceptable by Google’s standards just a few years ago will get your website penalized and deindexed today. This includes:

  • Blog commenting
  • Social bookmarking
  • Reciprocal link schemes
  • Interlinking sites you own/control
  • Link directories
  • Article directories
  • Buying links
  • Links embedded in free themes
  • Links embedded in widgets

You might think “Everyone else is doing it, so I might as well too!” or even “I’m so smart that Google will never catch me!”

Well, my friend, smarter people than you (or me) have tried, and failed.

What you need to understand is that Google has teams of engineers whose only job is to catch people trying to manipulate their algorithm with links. And they have petabytes of data, massive computing power, and a complex algorithm to look for patterns that you haven’t even considered. Trust me when I say they will catch you. Are you willing to suffer a manual penalty that could remove your website from Google for month, years, or even forever? If your answer is  “NO!” then steer clear of violating Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.

So how can you safely build links today? There are still a ton of legitimate ways to build links, but most people will stick to the easy, outdated tactics because they’re lazy.

If you’re willing to put in the hard work that others won’t, you’ll reap the rewards because not only will you earn quality links that will boost your organic ranking, your competitors using shady link building practices will lose their organic ranking, further catapulting you to the top!

Quality content is the second most significant ranking factor

Top-quality content that your visitors care about it the second most significant ranking factor in Google’s algorithm today.

Most experienced marketers know that today, simply publishing content won’t provide any improvement in ranking because average content earns no links. It’s not even enough to publish something good. Nope, today, if you want to succeed online, you need to publish content that blows people away. Content that stands out instead of trying to “me too” readers to death. Content that is so awesome, they’ll link to it willingly without being asked.

And that doesn’t mean just writing about your products or services anymore. Today, you need to reach outside of your traditional audience and engage a broader audience. Which, coincidentally, also opens up tremendous link building opportunities that your competitors haven’t even thought of.

Here’s a great example—while consulting with a local divorce attorney, we identified several legitimate and relevant categories outside of their industry, including: real estate, zoning, business, accounting, and even celebrities. Here are a few topics within those categories:

  • Selling a home during a divorce
  • Rezoning property to sell as part of a divorce settlement
  • How to handle a family-owned business during a divorce
  • How to structure a divorce to minimize taxes for high net-worth couples
  • Techniques to keep the terms of a divorce settlement private

We also published interviews from divorce attorneys outside of the area he serves. That’s relevant content that presents a different perspective than his own, and is even more likely to be linked to from other lawyers.

There’s nothing wrong with writing about the products or services you provide, but that should be a small portion of your content. You have to write about the things your audience cares about. They don’t care about you until you give them a reason to, and you’ll never do that by rambling on endlessly about your company. Look at some of the companies that are creating amazing content that keep their audience engaged: GoPro, WP Curve, MOZ, John Deere, and Article 15 Clothing—you see a common denominator. Their content isn’t about their company—it’s about their customers! As a result, they have an engaged and loyal audience of buyers who eagerly promote the company on social media, and/or link to it from their own blogs.

9 Dumb Web Design Mistakes Smart People Make All the Time

I take my background in web design and digital marketing for granted, and that’s why I’m often surprised when I see smart people making dumb web design mistakes. I sometimes forget that all of this computer wizardry isn’t second nature to everyone. Or even most people.

Most people who have a website are either entrepreneurs or budding entrepreneurs, and they’re focused on building a business to serve their customers. Their only concern with their website is using it to help them accomplish their goals. And rightly so.

Maybe that describes you—a smart business owner who is too busy serving your customers to worry about the technical mumbo jumbo.

Well worry no more, my entrepreneurial friend, because I’m about to share 9 dumb web design mistakes I see smart people like you make all the time.

Designing for yourself instead of customers

It’s easy to get caught up in designing or redesigning a website. It’s a chance to create exactly what you want, fine tune everything, and present information exactly the way you know it needs to be presented.

There’s only one problem with that.

Everything.

You need to design for your customer, not for yourself—it doesn’t matter what you like. It’s all about them!

I was recently reminded of this while working with an outside consultant to refine my sales process. You see, I had become complacent in my sales process because a lot of our business came from referrals, so there was already a great deal of trust right from the beginning of most relationships. When I started to reach out to a new niche, I continued operating as if everything was the same. I would tell potential clients what they needed and why they needed it, and while I was correct, it was a mistake that killed sales.

I hadn’t taken the time to establish rapport and learn what mattered to them. It didn’t matter if I was right, they still wanted to feel heard, and I needed to know what they connected with on an emotional level in order to close deals.

Web design (and copywriting) needs to be about the customers, not about you. You can only design and write for them if you’ve invested the time to listen to and truly understand them.

What I would do is schedule a meeting with your top 10 customers to find out what you’re doing well and what they think you could do better. Next, try to do the same with 10 customers who left you for a competitor. You might have to sweeten the pot for this group, perhaps a gift card to their favorite restaurant, but it will be well worth it!

The more details you can get, the more precisely you’ll be able to meet their needs in the future.

Here are a few questions you might ask:

  • What about our product/service do you like most/least?
  • What do you think we do better than competitors?
  • If you could ask us to do anything differently, what would it be?
  • What products/services could we add to become more valuable to you?
  • What products/services could we eliminate to become more focused for you?
  • What do you think our competitors do better?

This will give you valuable insight into how they perceive your company. In some cases, they may simply misunderstand your products/services, which will tell you how to better organize and present information on your website. In other cases, you may have to add new information. Or perhaps you just need to do a better job conveying what you do, how you do it, and why they should care from their perspective.

Boring content

When I read the content on some websites, it almost feels like they’re trying to bore visitors into leaving.

Your website presents your first opportunity to engage with potential customers, and to do that, you need to let your personality shine through.

Drop the corporate speak, focus on the customer, and eliminate industry jargon. Make an emotional connection and give your visitors a reason to give a damn about you!

That goes for everything—blog posts,product descriptions, hell, even your “About Us” page.

Lego

Really, LEGO? This is the best you can come up with? You manufacture colorful plastic building blocks that children can use to build literally anything they can imagine, yet your own description of your company sounds as boring as the side effect warnings on a bottle of antidepressant medication.

Or how about this gem?

Elvin's bad copy

I’ll give Elvin a bit of a pass since he is just your typical hard-working blue-collar guy. I mean, it’s not like he manufactures colorful plastic building blocks that children can use to build literally anything they can imagine. (Are you listening, LEGO?) But still. This is not good.

cultivated wit good copy

Ahh…now here’s a good one from the folks over at Cultivated Wit. Granted, they are a group of comedians, so this kind of thing comes natural to them, but you can do it too. I believe in you!

you can do it

Want some examples of powerful writing with personality? Well, ask and you shall receive…these are some of the brilliant people I sometimes look to for writing inspiration:

No clear calls to action (Or too many)

I’ll go out on a limb and assume you’ve invested a reasonable chunk of money and time into your website so you could present a professional image.

If you’ve gone to all the trouble and expense of creating a website that makes you look like you’re the leader in your industry, and you’ve written copy that would educate and persuade even your biggest skeptic, then it only makes sense to make it clear what you want visitors to do next.

Unfortunately, many people fail to do that.

Want someone to subscribe to your email list? Buy your product? Share your blog post?

Tell them!

Make it so clear that even Helen Keller would get it.

But don’t go overboard. I recommend focusing your calls to action on at most, two actions within roughly the area that would visible on a desktop monitor. For example, if you have a long landing page, it’s completely fine to include a “buy now” button several times throughout the copy, and if you can’t resist your urge to add another call to action, you might include a newsletter sign up form in your sidebar, but that’s it!

A landing page with one call to action, repeated as often as necessary, will always outperform a landing page with multiple calls to action. Too many will overwhelm visitors, and instead of picking one, they’ll simply leave.

Links to social media profiles right away

We all want droves of people to follow us on social media, right?

There’s nothing wrong with that. The more people who follow us, the more people we can engage with. The more people we can engage with, the more people we can serve. And the more people we serve, the more money we can make.

There’s nothing wrong with wanting a huge social media following, but the mistake I see so many people make is slapping links to all of their profiles on every social media platform right at the top of their website. It’s the first thing visitors see!

social top

Silly rabbit. You don’t use your website to drive traffic to social media, you use social media to drive traffic to your website.

It’s OK to include links to your social media profiles, but they should be an afterthought, not the first thing a visitor sees. Instead of the top of your website, put them in your sidebar, or better yet, your footer.

Excessive social media widgets

There’s nothing wrong with social media widgets, but don’t make it look like your website is trying to compete in a NASCAR race. One is fine, two is stretching it, and three is too many.

Aside from reminding people of the kid we all knew in school who smelled like liverwurst and tried too hard to become popular, excessive social widgets will slow your website down dramatically, which hurts user experience and organic ranking.

They also create the same problem we had with links to social media profiles. Remember, we want to keep people on our website, not send them somewhere else.

Unoptimized media

Full screen video and hero images have become quite common because of their positive impact on visitors, but if not implemented properly, they can slow down page speed significantly.

You might believe it doesn’t matter since most people have powerful computers and broadband internet today, but that would be a dangerous mistake.

It matters a lot. Some might say hugely.

hugely

Computers and the internet are faster and less expensive than ever, but because of that, visitors today have less patience than ever. A difference of just a fraction of a second can have a dramatic impact on how long people stay on your website, how much revenue your site produces, and where Google ranks your pages.

A website that loads quickly is critical, but we don’t have to sacrifice aesthetics to achieve it. We simply need to optimize the media on our websites.

Video

  • Choose the proper format. MP4 is best in most cases.
  • Serve the optimal size (dimensions) based on visitors’ screen size.
  • Eliminate the audio track when possible.
  • Compress the video file. I use Adobe Premiere, but Handbrake is an open source alternative.
  • Minimize the video length.

Images

  • Choose the proper format. JPG is best for photographic images, GIF or PNG for images with large areas of solid color.
  • Properly size images. There is no benefit to using a 1600px wide image if it’s only going to be displayed at 800px.
  • Compress the image file. In addition to being the industry leading image editing program, Adobe Photoshop has powerful compression capabilities, and starts at $9.99/month.

Audio

  • Choose the ideal format. MP3 is your best option.
  • Reduce the bitrate to reach a compromise between audio quality and file size.
  • Consider hosting audio files on a third-party hosting service like Lybsin, instead of your web host.

Relying on default WordPress security

Sorry folks, but just relying on your almost certainly inadequate password doesn’t cut it today.

WordPress is an amazing content management system that offers tremendous functionality. This is why it controls 69% of the  CMS market today, and the number of websites running on WordPress is exactly why it’s such an attractive target to hackers. It’s not any less secure than other systems, but it is more likely to be attacked because hacking is a numbers game.

You can make considerable improvements to your WordPress security by using a long, complex password, and by not using the default username, which is “admin” in most cases.

It’s relatively simple to shore up security even further by placing additional restrictions on logins, limiting plugins, and keeping WordPress core, themes, and plugins up to date.

Not using automated backups

I imagine that your website is extremely valuable to you. I know mine is to me. That’s why I’m not content to rely on hope that nothing bad will happen. 

Most web hosts don’t perform any backups at all, and those that do usually don’t go back much further than a few days, so if you don’t have some kind of automated backup in place, you’re taking a huge risk. Maybe it comes from my time in the Marine Corps, but I don’t like to leave anything to chance.

After evaluating several tools, I ended up choosing UpdraftPremium (the premium version of UpdraftPlus) for our automated backups because it has a more robust set of features than other tools.

The cost for the premium version is a bargain ($70-$145, then yearly renewals at a discounted rate) considering that you can have your website back up and running in a matter of minutes. It’s an even greater value when you add in all of the other features. I recommend the UpdraftPremium Developer licence because you can use it on an unlimited number of websites.

We configure it to back up our sites and our clients’ sites daily, and we store a full year of backups in the cloud using Dropbox.

Not tracking data

Google Analytics is a treasure trove of insight. With it, you can tell what content resonates most with your visitors, identify and resolve weaknesses, determine which marketing channels are performing best, and more. Despite all of its amazing capabilities, it’s 100% free!

6 WordPress Plugins for Better User Engagement

Being a prolific writer isn’t enough—you need engaged visitors to stay on your website.

Fortunately, you can improve user engagement by combining clear, effective writing with a handful of powerful WordPress plugins. Aside from keeping your visitors happier and more engaged, this also signals to Google that your site is authoritative and trustworthy—which helps improve your organic search ranking!

W3 Total Cache

Site speed is a critical factor, both for users and for Google, and a caching plugin like W3 Total Cache goes a long way towards improving it. Even the most technophobic can set up the basics, but don’t let all the configuration options scare you—there is professional support available at a reasonable price.

SEO Smart Links

Internal links (links that point to other content within your own website) can increase the number of pages that each visitor views and the amount of time they spend on your website. We use SEO Smart Links for this because it makes it simple to link any instance of a particular keyword phrase throughout your website to any page. It also has a positive effect on organic SEO, both because of the improved user experience, and increased internal links. Just remember not to go overboard.

KingSumo Headlines

Have you ever struggled with crafting the perfect headline, only to wonder if it really performed as well as it could? KingSumo eliminates that problem by making it easy to find the headline that performs best with your audience. Think of it like split testing, automated, and on steroids. You simply write as many headlines and you want, and it will automatically test them each time your post is shared on social media to find the best performing title.

Dreamgrow Scroll Triggered Box

Love them or hate them, pop ups are extremely effective. We’ve implemented them on many websites, both our own and for clients, and have learned a few tricks along the way. For example, it’s best to have a reasonable delay before they pop up, or even better, trigger them based on user activity, such as scrolling to a certain point on the page. One of the best plugins we’ve found for this is Dreamgrow Scroll Triggered Box, because it’s powerful, easily customized, and free.

Jetpack / Genesis Simple Share

You want people to share your posts so you reach more people, right? So make it really easy for them to share with just a click.

We use Genesis Simple Share since most of the websites we design are built on the Genesis Framework, but if you’re not using that, Jetpack is an excellent plugin that works in pretty much any WordPress theme.

Search Meter

If your website has a search box, Search Meter will track all of the searches your visitors enter, and even tells you when their searches didn’t turn up any results. This gives you valuable insight into what your visitors want and what’s missing from your content. Give them what they want and they’ll stay on your website longer and come back more often.