#wakefieldseo

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If you want your website at the top of google this is where to go.

[josephrestivo]

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[josephrestivo]

This is the third and final part of my three part series on understanding keyword research. If you haven’t read the first part you can find it at Understanding Keyword Research Part 1, and the second part can be found at Understanding Keyword Research Part 2. In part 1 we looked at, why we do keyword research, the importance of it and the different types of keywords we will come across. In part 2 we looked at how to do manual keyword research, and introduced a couple of free tools you can use to speed things up a bit. In this post we are going to look at another 3 tools that you can use to speed up your keyword research even more.

Topics Covered In This Post

A Few Tools You Can Use To Speed Up Your Keyword Research

Finding Longtail Keywords With Power Suggest Pro

Finding The Keyword Difficulty With Kwfinder.com

Competitive Research Backlink Analysis And More Semrush.com

In Summary

A Few Tools You Can Use To Speed Up Your Keyword Research

Following the steps above for researching your keywords will definitely take a couple of hours it could even take days for you to find the best keywords for you to target, but it is still worthwhile knowing how to do it manually. It can come in useful if you just want to do a quick check on a specific keyword. But, instead of doing all of the sorting and sifting for each keyword manually there are a number of tools you can use which will speed the process up. If you are on a budget then two of the tools you can use them for free, but you are limited to the data you get and also the number of times you can run them a day. The other tool is a paid tool but it is a one time fee and in my opinion it is totally worth it.

Finding Long-tail Keywords With Power Suggest Pro

Power Suggest Pro is a tool that I use regularly, why? Because I can put in my main keyword and it will find me all of the long-tail keywords that Google recognises as being related to my main keyword. So how does it do that? Well if you start typing a query into the search box then Google will start filling in the blanks, using their knowledge of what previous searchers have entered. This is known as Google Suggest. If you look at the bottom of the search page you will also see another 5 or 6 search terms that Google deems to be relevant to what you have just searched for. Now if you put a space at the end of your search term and then the letter a, Google will show you some more possible searches. Then if you do b, you will get some more and so on and so on. Now how long do you think it would take you to go through the alphabet and write all of the keywords that Google suggested down? Quite a while. Well Power Suggest Pro does that in seconds. Plus you can put wildcards in, have the letters and number at the front, search through not just Google, but Yahoo, YouTube, Amazon, Ebay and Bing and not just in the UK, but all over the world. the once you have the keywords you can delete the ones you don’t want, export them to text files or copy to the clipboard.

As you can see in the image below I entered the keyword SEO Leeds and it found 29 terms that Google recognises as being related searches. Now as I said before if you put these into the Keyword Planner the likely hood is that they will show zero searches. So how did they get into Googles database then? Hmmmm. But irrespective of the number of searches these keywords are ideal not only to target themselves but also to add into your content, in place of your main keyword.

So in a nutshell I think Power Suggest Pro is an awesome tool. It is a paid tool but its a one time payment of $97, which if you are going to be really working on your website to get it ranking for all of your keywords then to me its and investment and not a cost as to the amount of time it will save you.

Finding The Keyword Difficulty with Kwfinder.com

With this tool you enter you keyword phrase, select your country and language and then it will come back not just with a list of keywords, but it will also show you the top 10 sites and score them for you from Easy to Difficult. As you can see “SEO Agency” gets a score of 49 and possible. Which means yes it is possible to get your site on page one but it is going to be a challenge. When you are starting out it would be a good idea to target keywords that fall in the green section 20 – 29 score range or less which is classed as easy. With this tool you get a number of searches per day and a limited amount of the data for free or you can pay €314 per year to get all of its functionality.

Competitive Research, Backlink Analysis And More Semrush.com

Semrush can be classed as an all in one SEO platform. Its probably not the best tool for some things but it is a very good tool and you can do a lot with it. You can use it to look at how much traffic your competition are getting, the keywords they are targeting, the backlinks they have and even the ads they are running.

The SEO Content Template is probably the most interesting part of this tool. You simply enter your keyword and then the tool will analyse the page one results and give you a load of useful data. It will show you how many words your content needs to be, what are the semantic keywords that you should be using in your content, the sites that you should be trying to get a backlink from and your readability score. So by using this tool, with just one click, you can fully automate all of the keyword research!

In Summary

So that’s it congratulations if you have gone through all three os these posts, well done. But now it is up to you to put what you have learnt into practice. If you take action and follow the steps in these three posts, even if you do it over a couple of weeks or months and just use the manual version, your SEO strategy will definitely improve your chances of competing against the big boys in your industry. Ideally you want to be looking for about 5 to 10 keywords that you want to target with your site. These keywords will then give you a clear idea of how to start developing both your on page SEO and your off page SEO strategy.

[josephrestivo]

[josephrestivo]

The big buzz words going around at the moment in the online community is HTTPS and SSL. Now I would expect that Web Designers and SEO’s to at least have an understanding of what they mean. But most business owners would probably think I was talking Klingon. If you do understand what they are and what Google is trying to do then that is cool you don’t need to read through this or watch the video. However if you haven’t a clue, or not quite sure, then you can either have a read or if you prefer I have created a video for you to watch. Either way I hope that it will give you a better understanding of what HTTPS and SLL mean and why they are important for your website. So grab a cup of your favourite beverage, get comfortable and lets begin.

What Am I going To Cover In HTTPS And SSL Explained?

In this overview I am going to hopefully give you a better understanding of HTTPS and SSL, where Google fits into this and why they are important for your website. We are going to cover:

What Is HTTPS and SSL

The 3 Benefits of SSL

The 3 Types Of SSL

Googles Goal

Where Are We Now

Conclusion

For those who prefer watching to reading

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What is HTTPS and SSL?

Everyone is familiar with seeing in the address bar of your browser the http://mydomainname.com, but do we know what the http bit stands for? Most people probably not.

HTTP –  Stands for Hypertext Transfer Protocol and this is basically a standard way for your computer to communicate with another computer via your browser, whether that is Google Chrome, Firefox, Safari or any of the numerous other browsers out there. HTTP has developed over the years, which is why you can do a lot more fancy stuff while surfing the internet than you could just 5 or 6 years ago.  But HTTP is still an unsecure way to transfer data between your computer and the server, any data transferred by HTTP is open for anyone to see and some people can actually change it or copy it. So as we started to use the internet for more and more things, other than watching crazy kid videos, things such as banking, there had to be a way to secure this data transfer. So they gave it the catchy name of HTTPS.

HTTPS – Stands for Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure, did you guess it right? So this is the standard way for your computer to communicate with another computer via your browser but securely. To perform the security bit HTTPS uses a security layer called SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) and in simple terms what this does is add whats known as End to End Encryption, so that only your computer and the web server you are connecting to can actually decipher the data.

The 3 Benefits Of SSL

Privacy – because your data is encrypted that means that no third party can “listen” to your conversations, track your activities or steal your information. Which is good when you are transferring money to and from your bank account.

Data Integrity – If anyone tries to modify or corrupt the data during transfer then when it gets to the other end to be decrypted it will cause an error. So no one can change the data you have sent without it been detected.

Authentication –  If when it gets to its destination and it is successfully decrypted then it proves that you are communicating with the genuine site. This obviously prevents “man-in-the-middle attacks” and builds a users trust of your site. We will all have had an email from our “Bank”, even if you don’t have an account with them. The emails look genuine but when you click on the link you notice straight away that the address in the browser is not the address of your bank.

The 3 Types Of SSL

There are 3 types of SSL certificate that you can get but for the majority of businesses you will only need the first one, but I wanted to mention the others just for completeness.

Single Domain SSL (Single Name) –  As the name implies this SSL certificate protects a single domain. Its perfect for your simple and straightforward content based local business or E-commerce sites where all of the transactions occur on a single domain. This is usually the cheapest.

Multi Domain SSL (SAN) – Again as the name implies this SSL certificate protects multiple domains. SAN stands for Subject Alternative Domain. It gives you more flexibility in that you can buy one for a set number of sites even if they don’t exist yet, but once you put them up they will be protected by the SSL certificate.

Wildcard SSL – This is usually the most expensive as it protects all of the sub domains on a single root domain or a host.

Googles Goal

Google has had a goal for a number of years to make the internet a more secure place. So HTTPS is Googles vision for a secure web.

Google actually started to try and secure the internet back in 2014 when they stated to Webmasters that HTTPS would become one of their ranking factors. Insinuating that sites that have HTTPS would rank higher than those that only have HTTP. This was initially there way to get the Webmasters to implement HTTPS.

Backlinko analysed 1 million search results and found that HTTPS did have a strong correlation with first page rankings. But before you get all excited and think that all you have to do is to add SSL to your site and you will rocket to page one, sorry but it isn’t that easy. What it mean is that if you are competing with another site and yours has HTTPS and theirs is only on HTTP then you will win that race.

Where Are We Now?

So 3 nearly 4 years on what is the state of play? Well according to Ahrefs there is still 65% of websites that don’t have HTTPS or have it set up incorrectly. So even though the majority of sites on page one do have HTTPS there is still a huge number out there that don’t have it.

In October 2017 google started applying a bit of pressure for Webmasters to add SSL to their sites. They did this by making a warning pop up inside Google Chrome for any site that doesn’t have HTTPS. Any site that doesn’t have HTTPS will now show the not secure warning inside Google Chrome.

Now why is this important to you?

Because when a visitor lands on your site if it is not secured on HTTPS then they will see the “Not Secure” message in the top corner of their browser, and if you website has a contact form or request a quote form etc. and the visitor clicks on the warning Google will show the message “This site is insecure do not enter personal information”.  As everybody these days is very sensitive about their security online what sort of impact do you think that will have on you building trust with your visitors and then turning them into customers.

If you have your site connected to Google Search Console, which you should have and Google Analytics, but thats another video and post. Google will have sent you a warning telling you that your visitors will get these security warnings and your site will be listed as not secure.

You might be thinking but its only Google Chrome so I don’t need really bother about it. Its not as Firefox has already started to add it to there browser, so the other browser will no doubt be following suit. But even if it was only Google Chrome as over 50% of searchers use Google Chrome to search with it could still cause big problems for converting the visitors to your site into customers.

Conclusion

So that is what HTTPS and SSL is and why it is important to get it installed on your website if you haven’t got it. Even if it is not much of a ranking factor think about if you clicked onto a site that was on the top of page one and you saw that it was insecure would you stay? or would you go and find a secure site?

If you don’t have a webmaster looking after your site can you add SSL to your site yourself?

The answer to that will depend on how technical minded you are, and the host you are with some are a lot better than others. There are a number of videos on YouTube which will tell you how to install it, which is why I haven’t created one.

Just one point to be aware of some of the hosts will offer a FREE SSL certificate from a site called Lets Encrypt. Lets Encrypt is a non profit company whose goal is to make the Web a safer place. But the big difference between a paid certificate and the free one from Lets Encrypt is the time frame. With a paid certificate it is just like when you bought your domain you can register it for a number of years. The free certificate from Lets Encrypt has to be re verified  every 90 days, if you forget then your site reverts back to being just HTTP.

If you need help in migrating you site to HTTPS feel free to contact me or book a free 30 minute consultation

[josephrestivo]

  Why do we need Google Analytics and Search Console A lot of people don’t understand the benefits of having Google Analytics and Search Console, (Used to be Webmaster Tools), connected to their sites. But if you think about it, who is the best person to get data from about how your site is doing in […]