Site Speed for Dummies – How to Get Started

May 25, 2017 / Basic Web Concepts, Search Engine Optimization / by Kathy Alice

You know the performance of your site matters. But everytime you venture into site speed optimization you feel like you stumbled into a land of foreign geek speak.

Unfortunately site speed is a complex topic and technical (“Configure Entity Tags” anyone?). Some changes can require a web developer to implement the changes. With this post you’ll understand better where performance problems can crop up so you can have a better conversation with your developer. We’ll also cover the low hanging fruit that you can tackle on your own as well as the tools you’ll need to get started.

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Is WiX SEO Friendly? 2019 Updates

March 4, 2017 / Search Engine Optimization / by Kathy Alice

Wix LogoAlthough WordPress is my preferred platform, I’ll provide SEO and digital marketing consulting on any site built in any technology. I’ve looked at sites built in Adobe CQ, Magento, Joomla, as well as many sites built using an in house custom CMS (content management system).

I’ve also looked at many WiX sites. WiX is a popular website builder that enables the non geek to build very nice looking websites. You can see the attraction; point and click, drag and drop, and presto you have a website! But what about SEO?

This post was extensively rewritten to bring it up to date in March, 2017. Additional updates were made in May 2019, especially to point out that Google is slower to crawl JavaScript rendered code.

When I first wrote this post in 2015 (and even when I updated it in 2016) my answer to the question “Is WiX SEO friendly?” was a definite NO. WiX had significant problems when it came to SEO.

Today WiX has significantly improved and I’m no longer recommending against it, especially for simple brochure sites.

However there are some few remaining SEO problems with WiX that you should be aware of. And just because the platform has improved doesn’t mean your site is SEO optimized, you have to make sure you use WiX’s SEO features wisely to have the best chance of ranking well.

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Time To Consider A Google Keyword Planner Alternative

November 11, 2016 / Search Engine Optimization / by Kathy Alice

If you haven’t already noticed, Google Keyword Planner has severely limited access to its keyword data to marketers. Unless you have a consistent active Adwords campaign, when logging into Keyword Planner today, you’ll see wide ranges for average monthly search volume instead of an actual number.

google keyword planner search volume ranges

A range like 100-1K is useless for most keyword research. If you are like most SEOs or marketers your exploration of your keyword space starts with Google Keyword Planner. So what is the alternative?

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Is Meta Tag Optimization for SEO Dead?

August 5, 2016 / Search Engine Optimization / by Kathy Alice

meta tags obsolete?
Do you remember when you learned how to do on page SEO optimization by updating meta tags? For me, it felt like I got the keys to the kingdom. By placing keywords into the meta tags on your page you had a tool that would magically rank your page at the top of the Google search results where it belonged. Right?

Well not so fast, in today’s SEO, optimizing your meta tags may not have the impact you think.

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Yoast Tackles Readability to Help You Write Great Content

July 28, 2016 / Search Engine Optimization, WordPress / by Kathy Alice

I had the privilege of attending a Meetup featuring the one and only Joost de Valk who along with his wife and partner Marieke van de Rakt gave a presentation on “Beyond SEO: Copywriting for Professionals with Yoast”.

Yoast aka Joost de Valk
Joost de Valk, creator of Yoast SEO
The talk covered Joost’s view of Holistic SEO and the increasing importance of Quality Content in SEO.

If you are not familiar with who Joost de Valk is, he is the creator of the very popular Yoast SEO WordPress plugin which just about handles all your WordPress SEO needs. Even though I haven’t gotten around to migrating this site to Yoast SEO, I have extensively used it on many client sites as well as some of my other sites and have watched it’s evolution over several years.

The latest version (3.3) of Yoast SEO has some new features which evaluates the readability of your page or post; Joost and Marieke covered the new readability analysis feature and gave us an inside look on it came about.

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How useful are robots.txt disallows really?

May 26, 2016 / Search Engine Optimization / by Kathy Alice

a misconfigured robots.txt can make your angry
Why isn’t my site ranking!!!
“You’ve got to help me, my brand new site isn’t ranking anywhere. Why is Google ignoring me?”

I took a look and sure enough the site’s robots.txt file was set up to block Google and the other search engines from crawling the entire site. Fortunately the fix was easy. I changed the file from this:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
To this:
User-agent: *
Disallow:
Problem solved.
(You can also just remove the file.)

I might be going out on a limb here, but I’ve seen more problems caused by misuse of the robots.txt file than solved.

One of the big misconceptions about robots.txt disallow directives is that they are a fool proof way to keep pages out of the Google index. Not only is this not true, but when the pages are indexed – they are indexed with almost no information adding a lot of low quality almost duplicate content into the index which might drag down the SEO performance of your site.

The robots.txt file has been around for years. In those early days, bandwidth was more precious and Googlebot often taxed servers, even crashing them, when it crawled a site. So using the disallow directive to keep Google from crawling pages often helped keep a site up. Those concerns are a distant memory today.

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