We recommend using GTmetrix to test your website performance. You can even use it to compare performance of your site to your competitors website. You can perform simulated tests from other countries and different website browsers.
Most people don’t understand what SEO is or how it works! So we’re going to give you a simple guide to teach you everything you need to know and how to improve the SEO of your website!
How does SEO work?
When you search specific words on a search engine such as Google. The search engine looks at the specific keywords you entered and searchers the internet for the most relevant results. But it doesn’t just stop there. Search engines actually analyse websites based on numerous characteristics and these affect where that site will be placed on the page. If a site shows many characteristics that are deemed as ‘good’ then its likely to show up fairly high on the first page. However if your site shows many negative characteristics, it can either not be displayed at all, or likely very very far back. Most people who search for things on a search engine are likely to only look at the first page, so that’s where we want you to be.
What characterises of a website matter for SEO?
- Page Descriptions
- Headings & LOTS of unique Content.
- Most pages in the top 10 offer content with over 2000 words.
- Have you duplicated existing content from another site or your own?
- Linking to other pages within your own website
- Using a .com domain
- The speed your website loads
- The sizes of your images on your page
- Avoid using Flash (less then 5% of top ranking pages use Flash)
- Use URLS with no more then 3-5 words in the file path
- Overall user experience, information, design, intuitive navigation, images and video
- Elements such as buttons, menus and interactive features.
- Average time people spend on your site (read more in analytics below)
- Your existing bounce rate (read more in analytics below)
- Does your website use a cache? (read more in analytics below)
- Minimising the amount of CSS pages requested (read more in analytics below)
- Avoid putting content on your site that is actually embedded from another
Because your using WordPress with Launch Hub, it makes it very easy for you input page descriptions at the top of each page. So this is not really an issue for you. But search engines do check to make sure sites are using these and these can impact your ranking on a search engine. So make sure your page descriptions are descriptive and relevant. Depending on what a user searches on a search engine – all of your websites pages can & do show up on google based on relevance to the person searching, not just your home page.
Caching is basically storing the result of an operation to avoid recalling it in the future, which will speed up load times.
What Is Caching?
While the technology and precise details of caching can be pretty complex, the underlying idea is really very simple. Let me give an example.
If I ask you what the result of 5 x 3 is, you’ll know the answer is 15. You didn’t need to calculate it, you’ve done this multiplication so many times in your life that you no longer need to — you simply remember the result without having to do any mental processing. Well, that’s kind of how caching works.
Websites are generally viewed hundreds, thousands, or sometimes even millions of times per month. Normally, each time a browser requests a web page, the server has to do a bunch of complex (and time consuming) calculations. It retrieves the latest posts, generates the header and footer, finds your site’s sidebar widgets, and so on. However, in many cases, the result of all these calculations will be exactly the same. Wouldn’t it be great, then, if we could simply make the server remember the final result, instead of processing each request separately? This’s exactly what caching does!
How Cached Pages Are Served
I think it’s easiest to understand the caching process by looking at how a page is served. Let’s say you own a blog with caching enabled. The first time someone visits your homepage they receive the page in the normal way: The request is received, processed on the server, and the resulting web page to be shown is turned into an HTML file and sent to the visitor’s web browser.
Since caching is turned on, the server stores this HTML file — usually within its ‘random access memory’ (or RAM), which is extremely fast. The next time you, or anyone else, views the homepage, the server doesn’t need to do the processing and conversion to HTML. Instead, it simply sends the already prepared HTML file to the browser.
But what if my content changes?
I know what you’re thinking: That all sounds great, but what if you have caching turned on and then publish a new post? Won’t the new post be outside of the cache and therefore invisible to site visitors? Well, all properly set up caching systems can deal with such scenarios. A caching system doesn’t just consist of the mechanism to store prepared HTML files, it also has a way to empty the cache (and then regenerate it) when specific conditions (such as the publishing of new content) are met.
A cache configured for WordPress would delete the cached version of the homepage and archive pages when a single post was published. It would leave all other pages — such as the about page and other posts — untouched, since those would not be changed.
Is caching really effective?
A well-coded website may already load in as little as two seconds. (Note: The load speed of a website is something you can easily test for yourself using a free service such as GTMetrix.) Isn’t that fast enough? Is caching really worth it? The answer is a resounding yes. By using both browser and server caching — we’ll look at each in detail in a moment — you can still shave a lot off load times, and, when it comes to load speed, it pays to make things a fast as possible!
Also worth keeping in mind is that by implementing caching, you aren’t just making your website faster, you’re also making it perform better — and equipping it to bear the burden of any sudden traffic spikes more efficiently.
When you visit a website, you don’t just need to retrieve the content of the page you’re seeing — you also need a bunch of resources such as Javascript files, stylesheets, fonts and so on, which your browser downloads in addition to the content of the page.
Browser caching allows your browser to store these files for a while, so it doesn’t need to retrieve them every time you visit the site.
The first time you visit this site for example, you’ll receive a bunch of resources that your browser will immediately cache. This first will likely take a few seconds to completely download, but the next time you visit you’ll notice a significant decrease in load time (as much as a second or more, in fact).
Using wordpress caching plugins
The most important rule of all, which I cannot stress enough, is: never ever, ever, ever (ever) use more than one caching plugin. This will not make your site faster; it’ll likely make your site a lot slower, and break it in the process.
Always use a single caching plugin. When configured correctly, it’ll help speed up your site quite a lot. The best caching plugins are WP Rocket, W3 Total Cache and WP Super Cache.
Cookies are small files which are stored on a user’s computer. They are designed to hold a small amount of data specific to a particular client and website, and can be accessed either by the web server or the client computer to monitor your previous web activity.
CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheet and is basically a page of code with a list of terms like ‘Heading” or “link”, that are defined styles like their size and colour. Your website will contain code that tells it where/what style sheet to use. This is all done automatically with wordpress.
Basically if I was to write a long book and every time I wanted to make a heading to state a new chapter – If I was coding and writing HTML (the language web browsers read), I would have to write something like this below
<h1 Colour: Red; Style: underlined> Chapter 1 </h2>
<h1> – means Heading 1. Its basically indicating we just want the text to be a large heading. Then after that we close that line with </h1> So everything in between these two bits of code, is our heading.
Colour: Red – indicates we want all the text after the ‘>’ and before the ‘<‘ to be displayed in red.
Style: underlined – means we want the heading to be under lined.
Now obviously a book would have something like 20 chapters. If I decided after I wrote that book that I wanted the headings to be blue instead of red, instead of me going back and making 20 changes through hundreds of pages of code, I can just go to my style sheet and change the values of <h1>
style.css file will contain a list of defined values like below
#h1 {color: red, style: underlined}
#h2 {color: white, style: none}
#h3 {color: black, style: bold}
#h4 {color: green, style: italic}
Home Page – is told to use style.css file
About Us page – is told to use style.css file
Contact Us Page – is told to use style.css file
So all i need to type every time I write a heading is
<h1>Chapter 1</h1>
and the page will automatically look to the style sheet to define what way it will display that heading. So i only need to make the change in one place instead of many.