Does Hiding Your WHOIS Details Hurt Your Website’s SEO Ranking?

By Peter Brittain on September 15, 2019 in Ranking Factors

Whenever you register a domain name, details such as your name and address and the date of registration are held by an organisation called ICANN. If someone wants to determine who owns a website, they conduct a WHOIS search which will tell them. For privacy reasons, many web owners hide these details, but this raises the question as to whether this will negatively impact your SEO rankings.

To address this, we need to understand what Google’s entire ranking algorithm is designed to achieve. Google can only survive if web users continue to use it as a search engine. This means that the results that Google presents for any given search term need to be relevant and show websites that the user would be happy to visit.

The degree to which Google establishes whether any single website is worthy of showing up in its results is established by taking multiple factors in to consideration. For each of these, Google’s algorithms then apply a score to that site based on what it considers to be a positive or negative indicator.

When it comes to your WHOIS details there may be many valid reasons why you would want to keep your details private. It could be that you want to avoid your employer discovering that you are running a website. Another might be to avoid strangers knowing your home address. Whilst these are perfectly reasonable, unfortunately, Google knows private WHOIS registration is something that potential spammers use, and this is where it could impact your ranking.

What are Long Tail Keywords?

By Peter Brittain on July 7, 2019 in Keywords

What are Long Tail Keywords and how can you use them for your SEO?

If you have been looking for information on SEO and SEO companies, you may have come across the term ‘Long Tail Keywords’ and wondered what it meant. Well, long-tail is nothing to do with furry animals but is in fact, an SEO technique that, if used correctly, can help to generate increased traffic to websites and other online properties.

At the core of long-tail SEO are Long Tail Keywords, which are keywords that contain more than two words. You won’t be surprised to know that keywords with only one or two words are called short-tail keywords. Examples of short-tail keywords in the dog niche would be ‘kennel’ and ‘dog grooming’, and in the technology niche, ‘laptop’ and ‘computer keyboard’.

If a website owner were to try and rank for any of those keywords, they would be competing against tens of thousands of other websites, and many of them will be websites owned by some of the biggest online companies in the world. It is safe to say that most local marketing budgets are not going to be able to compete with the likes of companies whose SEO budget is almost unlimited.

So, how can you compete online and get traffic to your website? Well, the answer is long-tail SEO, and employing any number of Long Tail Keywords that you can rank for. A key point to note is that your competition online isn’t the Amazon of this world, it is the websites owned by other companies operating in your niche or market, and who do so within your local area.

Is Wix Or WordPress Better For SEO?

By Peter Brittain on May 8, 2019 in WordPress, Technical SEO

Regardless of what technologies, apps, or software there exist on the internet, there are always going to be competitors. Often this leads fans of each to sing their praises, and then those who wish to know more, asking which they should use. This leads invariably to articles such as this where we try to determine which is best. The difference here is that we are comparing Wix and WordPress within a very specific criterion, and that is SEO.

It may help many of you if we briefly explain what Wix and WordPress are and what they are primarily designed to do. If we start with Wix, it is an all-in-one website builder, and it is especially popular with newbies and those for whom website code brings them out in a cold sweat. With Wix you can have your website built very quickly using its pre-designed website temples, it has built-in security, and important for many, it has its own in-house support staff.

WordPress is an open-source content management system which can be used to create hosted websites. It has a bigger learning curve than Wix, but this also means it has much greater scope for flexibility. This means websites can be built with a raft of customisations and thousands of plugins to add greater functionality in both the front end and back end of sites built using WordPress.

When it comes to SEO there is one thing which Wix and WordPress both have in common, and that is their great reliance on third-party software. This will be apps in the case of Wix, and plugins for WordPress. There are several apps which Wix uses for SEO, with one of the most popular called ‘Site Booster’. Site Booster has both a free and premium version and as with most SEO apps it is only the paid one which gives you all the functions that you need to boost your website’s SEO

Ways to Boost the Domain Authority of Your Website

By Peter Brittain on March 5, 2019 in Off-Page SEO

Domain Authority falls under the category of Off-page SEO metrics.

It’s a predictive ranking score developed by Moz that estimates how likely a website is to rank in search engine results pages (SERPs).

While not an official Google ranking factor, it’s considered part of off-page SEO because it primarily measures external factors like:

The quantity and quality of backlinks pointing to your domain
The authority of the sites linking to you
The overall link profile of your website

Unlike on-page SEO factors (which focus on content optimization and technical elements within your website), Domain Authority looks at external signals that indicate your site’s reputation and trustworthiness across the broader internet ecosystem.

7 Tips For Choosing a Domain That Will Help Your SEO

By Peter Brittain on February 15, 2019 in SEO Rankings

The number of factors that affect the SEO of websites not only increases on a regular basis, they also change frequently. Some are complicated, and others are straightforward. One factor that you might think has little or no impact is the domain name of your website, however, it does play an important part. Here are 7 tips which can help to improve your SEO efforts and your Google ranking when choosing your domain name correctly.

Keep Your Domain Name Length To 15 Characters Or Less.
If you were to analyse the domain names of the top 100,000 ranked websites on Google, you will find that their average length is 9 characters or less. Shorter domains names are much easier to remember and share in terms of people passing on or recommending your website. For example, compare www thebusinessandinvestmenttoptipswebsite.com to www.biztips.com. and it is clear the latter is far more desirable.

Check To See If Your Domain Is Available On All Your Social Media Channels.
Choosing the right domain name with the huge and ever-increasing importance of social media, it is no surprise that it plays a role in Google rankings. The authority of sites such as Pinterest, Facebook, and Instagram, means that having a presence on them and other social media sites can boost your SEO efforts.

For this reason, you should first check to see if any of the domain names you are considering are also available on social media platforms. A great tool for this is ‘knowem.com’ where you can enter a name and it will check hundreds of social media sites to see if it is still available or not.