HTTPS | WMConf Lightning Talks

In this Webmaster Conference Lightning Talk, John Mueller, Search Relations Lead, covers how HTTPS works, why you might want to use it, how to plan a migration from HTTP to HTTPS, and some of the common questions we’ve seen on this topic.

Site moves with URL changes → https://goo.gle/34bgsq1 Change of Address Tool → https://goo.gle/2EefYV4

Mobile-First Indexing | WMConf Lightning Talks

Mobile-First Indexing

Martin Splitt, Search Advocate at Google, goes over how mobile-first indexing works, challenges that can occur with mobile-first indexing on one’s website, and best practices to avoid these. Watch this lightning talk to better prepare for when Google switches to mobile-first indexing for all websites later next year!

Mobile-first indexing best practices → https://goo.gle/2HayU5I

Prepare for mobile-first indexing (with a little extra time) → https://goo.gle/2DFgISI

How important is a websites hosting for SEO purposes?

Web Hosting Services

Choosing the right company to host your website is important! If you use ‘cheap’ hosting you are not only impacting your websites loading results but also the marketing of your website and therefore hosting can affect the SEO of a website.

Fast and reliable hosting can help boost your SEO and offer you an advantage over your competition, as site speed is one of the factors which Google considers when ranking websites organically in search engines.

Speed

Generally speaking, users HATE slow websites and so does Google and therefore it is imperative that your website loads quickly!

From our knowledge, Google favours sites that load in under 2 seconds, so it is essential that your website loads within the wanted time. This ensures that you are within the time bracket to have a website which is ‘SEO-friendly’. However, in order to do this, you must have a good hosting provider.

Site speed testing tools

If you require to test the load time of your website, there are many tools which enable you to do so. Our chosen site speed tools include:

  • Pingdom Tools
  • GT Metrix
  • Google Page Speed

All of which are good tools to be able to test the load speed of your website, however, our personal favourite as a company would be Google Page Speed. This is due to the fact that it allows you to separate both mobile and desktop load time and is a little more focused on what you can do in terms of the technical optimisation if your website is suffering from slow loading times.

Downtime

If your website is constantly down due to the hosting, Google will not want to send users to the site as it will not trust that they can send users to your website and rely that the website will be accessible. For this matter, or if you are experiencing downtime with your current hosting provider, chose or move to a hosting company with you can trust!

‘The hostest with the mostest’

Chameleon offers a variety of hosting packages which offer optimum performance and reliability for 24 hours a day.

Our hosting packages include:

  • Email hosting
  • Shared or dedicated servers
  • Hosting support

And much more…

Contact us today if you would like to find out more about our hosting packages or switch your hosting to us.

SEO Tips for Beginners

The world of search engine optimisation (SEO) is both complex and ever-changing. Due to this, a lot of the information for in Google’s search results (SERPS) is out-of-date or irrelevant to the needs of a beginner trying to get some basic, easy wins.

In this article, we are going to give an overview of the SEO basics needed for beginners. If you combine the following information with some practice, your visibility in organic search should improve and therefore your website should rank higher in search engines such as Google.

Research and Relevant Keywords

There are many tools, both free and paid versions which are available to help you collect a selection of keywords together for your businesses SEO. Initially, you need to think of what potential customers may type in to find you. For small businesses, targeting local rather than national, this will be a combination of both what you do and where you do it.

seo tips for beginners

As well as using your own initiative and keyword research tools it may also be worth searching for your selected keywords. This is because when you search for keywords, suggested keywords will also appear in the search bar as you type. Also, there will be a range of suggested keywords at the bottom of the page, if there are any relevant ones, add them to your list.

Optimise your META Titles and Descriptions

After you have collected a list of keywords, the next thing you will want to do is optimise your META titles and descriptions. This is an SEO element which is not displayed on page but available to edit in your websites control panel or SEO plugin.

NOTE: Page titles are what are shown within Google’s search results so we are aiming to portray what the page is about as well as tempt a user to click on our listing rather than others.

Optimise your META Titles and Descriptions

Our advice would be to include what the page is about, where your services or products are available and who the audience is, if possible. In an ideal world, you would like the keyword at the beginning of the title to aid click-through and also, for possible ranking improvements.

Also, consider META descriptions. This element is edited in the same place at your META title.

Optimise Page Content

As well as optimising your META content, we also want to optimise our page content. Using the keywords we collected as part of your keyword research, we would look to add these into your copy throughout a number of methods. These include:

  • Headings – H1, H2, H3 etc.
  • Copy
  • Images

optimise page content

Primarily, optimise your headings and subheadings to increase your keywords – where it is natural to do so. The next step would be to create copy that not only promotes, but accurately describes your business. Within this copy, try and aim to include all keywords which relate to the subject matter you are writing about. Further optimisation can take place on images via the image name, alt text and image description.

Implement these basic SEO tips and follow our advice on how to do so and you will see an improvement in your rankings and traffic.  For those looking for more information, here at Chameleon Web Services we do offer SEO training courses as well as SEO packages.

SEO Company

The Value Of SEO

The power of the Internet in 2019 must be taken seriously and if your business is not achieving visitors to a website then you need to think about how you find services and products yourself?

If you need help or a FREE SEO Audit then get in touch.

 

HOS – House Of Sparkles Website

It ihos home logos great to read about the HOS Home – House Of Sparkles success and this is what inspires others to go for it and set up their own business.

Mandy Hale’s quote is great here “There is nothing more beautiful than someone who goes out of their way to make life beautiful for others.”

The website HOS – House Of Sparkles setup by Layla Chapman back in 2016 with according to the Sun News Paper for just £40 is now a booming success with a turnover of £10.7 million. This is great to read and we really hope that people feel inspired by this but also understand that it takes a huge amount of hours and personal sacrifice with added luck to succeed. Previous failures often come before achieving success and the road to success is often difficult and we always admire success stories.

Successful people have a ridiculous level of persistence in making their dreams comes true and we see people here at Chameleon on a daily basis that want to make it online and we create a plan to achieve success for everyone from what we do, but often people never realise how much work is involved once you make it. We think it is easy to read articles like this forget this fact and it is important to have this in the back of your mind so not have false hope.

If you look at the likes of Sir Alan Sugar, he worked so hard to achieve the success he has today and he often refers back to his routes, even today in a tweet as he is attacked for being successful:-

Sir Alan Sugar Tweet

The road to success is a journey and you will never stop learning. Successful people learn new things every day improving a little and the snowball rolling effect makes them become great. This website success has been helped along due to celebrities such as Amanda Holden and Peter Andre and this is fantastic. We are sure that with the positive publicity the business it will grow even faster now as a result.

HOS Home Sun Article

We thought it would good to look to into this website further from an online marketing perspective because often success comes and businesses miss the basics. The growth of this company could come from hardwork, luck, organic growth, paid online advertising or something else and identify and help HOS achieve more growth from what we find.

When a business comes to us and asks us to audit a company we look into everything to understand and identify how success has been achieved.

We take a look at everything to understand what is good and what can be better, there is always something that can be better and we have been in the industry since 2001 and helped grow some of the most successful websites online today.

HOSHome.com – House Of Sparkles Website

The website HOS is currently looking lovely:-

HOS House Of Sparkles website hoshome.com

Back in December 2018 which is not very long ago at all the website didn’t look as nice and it very important to look at how a website develops and move forwards. Often changes are made a result of research to improve conversions or simply to improve the visual look. The HOS Home website looked like this:-

hoshome website 2018

The website in 2019 looks in-line with the competition and when we look behind the scenes at search engine optimisation aspects of the website it is missing vital information for Google to help it rank organically and this is something that HOS Home online development need to look at. Normally we would run and audit using our in-house software and then make positive changes after looking over the results.

The website is built using Shopify a hosted shopping website platform with multiple themes which requires very little programming experience. The website is using MailChimp for Shopify, Automatic Discounts, Searchanise, Covet Pics, Product Reviews Addon and MageWorx usage statistics as an example of plugins/extensions installed.

The website is hosted in Canada and on a server that is hosting websites we would not recommend to have in the same neighbourhood. We look at hosting as this is part of the search engines algorithm.

We found hoshome.com is hosted with over 1,000 other domains hosted on the same web server which uses IP address 23.227.38.32 and this web server is hosting web sites with explicit content. To show examples of the websites our system detected a simple ping command can be used to check the hosting to confirm this problem:-

HOS House Of Sparkles hosting

There is a possibility that all of the web sites on this web server may be affected as far as being blocked by web filtering software. Search engine rankings for all web sites using the same IP address may be affected as well. We always recommend looking at the IP address and ensuring a website is hosted correctly with a unique IP address and SSL certificate.

HOSHome.com – House Of Sparkles Website SEO Report

We have a complete SEO PDF report you can download here:

free seo report

When you carry out a Google search can see the company is paying for Google Adwords for its brand name to protect it presumably. However, this will result in people clicking on this and adding additional costs to the business when visitors are already heading to the website.

HOS House Of Sparkles Google

The home page www.hoshome.com meta title for example is <title>HOS Home | Luxury Furniture</title> and then the meta description is <meta name=”descriptioncontent=”Welcome to HOS Home. Affordable luxury furniture specialists. High end glamorous furniture at high street prices. A brand you can trust.“>

This could be improved but is in line with what Google is looking for in terms of the title and description.

If we then move to an internal page for example www.hoshome.com/collections/living-room we find the title is <title>Living Room Furniture | HOS Home</title> and the meta description is <meta name=”descriptioncontent=”The living room is where we spend the most time, create the best memories, and relax. For this, you need the perfect furniture for your living space. From sofas, coffee tables, media units & more. We have everything you need to design your living room interior.“>

This page could be improved to help tell search engines like Google what the content is about, but is a great starting point to achieve online success. It is clear that from only looking at a couple of internal pages they follow the same pattern. This shows that what we presume this is automatically generated meta titles and descriptions and the job is partially done right.

We scrapped the site to look to see what the Google spider would find and for example, we quickly found broken links on the website using our in-house developed scrapping software.

For example www.hoshome.com/pages/returns-policy we found a link created wrong:-

HOS House Of Sparkles broken link example

HOS House Of Sparkles broken link example code

You can see the coding is has been built as follows:-

<a href=”customerservice@hoshome.com”>customerservice@hoshome.com.</a>

In the screenshot, you can see also that another link has been built correctly, so this is a simple coding error when the page was created.

To fix this they need to add the “mailto:” which would create <a href=”mailto:customerservice@hoshome.com”>customerservice@hoshome.com.</a>

As we carry on looking into the site we spotted the site has been built with an error using two rel=”canonical” tags across the site.

If you look at the homepage for example:-

HOS House Of Sparkles canonical code

A website should only have one canonical tag.

canonical tag is the method used to inform search engines that a specific URL represents the master copy of a page. Using the canonical tag prevents problems caused by identical or “duplicate” content appearing on multiple URLs.

This is probably because it is being generated by Shopify and also by a second extension adding SEO data.

A very important factor of ranking online is the power / trust a website has and this helps search engines determine whether or not to trust the website content and also it helps to identify the business links the website may have and the subject content to help place the website in a category.

Looking below we can see out of 100 the website scores 11 in trust and 18 in citation.

hos home power trust seo

 

To compare that against another website for a reference we have used WayFair.com and you can see below the trust is 54 out of 100 in terms of trust and 63 in terms of citation. The higher the trust the better:-

wayfair power trust seo

To increase the trust carefully selected backlinks need to be found and this is a subject in the SEO world that causes many issues. Here at Chameleon, we identify only the perfect links to try and find that will add value and we help clients create links organically by creating content that can be shared adding value to the users.

Looking at the link text known in the SEO industry as anchor text the links can be seen below and the geographical location of the links:-

HOS home anchor text

If we take a look at the traffic the website is achieving it is attracting a large volume of visitors already, but the traffic cost is low and this is due to the keywords ranking:-

hoshome.com semrush

HOSHome.com – House Of Sparkles Ranking Keywords

When we look at what keywords the website is ranking for it appears to be attracting its traffic via the brand name “house of sparkles”:-

HOS Home Ranking Keywords

 

So from what we can see the website strength isn’t its online rankings for keywords, it is something else which points us to Social Media as the main growth point of this business.

In the footer of the website there are links to the following social media accounts:-

https://www.instagram.com/hoshome_/

HOS Home Instagram

The Instagram account has 116K followers, but when we look at the sharing of posts this is relatively low which makes us think this is a lot of bot type accounts.

https://www.facebook.com/houseofsparkles/

HOS House Of Sparkles Facebook

From what we can see with the linked Facebook page being broken / hidden we think that actual FaceBook page https://www.facebook.com/HOS-Home-1525053811125655/ is in the process of being merged.

https://www.facebook.com/HOS-Home-1525053811125655/

HOS Home Facebook page real

https://www.pinterest.co.uk/HOSparkles/

HOS Home Pinterest

It appears that this business has grown as a result of Facebook and then recommendations from friends, family and celebrities which shows the power of social media.

So What Would Chameleon Do Next?

We would look at the website and hosting, ensure all the site is Google friendly and fix all broken links. Ensure that all touch points are working, for example the Facebook link going to a dead page is not good.

We would carry out on-page SEO across the entire website and make it fully search engine friendly and increase the trust of the website to help search engines like Google rank the content and grow the traffic to the website for keywords that are not brand related. The website could then take the power of Google and increase business turnover without spending on advertising.

We would look at the images and get these ranked in Google search results for window shoppers to find by mistake and this would result in higher conversions because if people are actively looking for the products that are being sold by image then the very fact they click on the image to view it means they more than likely like what they see.

Download a PDF report –

If you would like to understand more about this or wish us look into your website or a competitors, please get in touch.