Tag: Wordpress

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What do you know about the SEO of page builders for WordPress?

WordPress is an option when building a new website

WordPress

Recently, the ‘next big thing’ in web development has been a graphic design layer that enables drag’n’drop editing to your new WordPress site. These software layers or ‘page builders’ go by a lot of different names: Visual Composer, Divi and many more.

Visual Composer

What does this all mean to you?

  • Everyone wants a great looking site. But the reality is that if the pages take too long to load prospects will leave without seeing anything. Google has a tool that will estimate what percentage will leave based on their test of the performance of your site. Achieving a great looking site that is slow will cost you prospects (and your SEO).
  • The developer that builds your site will not be around forever. You, as the owner of your site, should have everything documented so that any transition for any reason will be straightforward. Page builder setups can be very complex.
  • Your developer is responsible for demonstrating the ability to restore your site from the regular backups that he or she is making. Something is very wrong otherwise.
  • One of WordPress’ great strengths is the ability to update its look while keeping all of your content completely intact. If a developer says that they need to start completely over it will damage your SEO. This is only necessary if the previous developer damaged your site or that the new developer is not sufficiently trained.

sem[c] has been asked to optimize a number of different varieties of page builders recently and they all had speed-of-performance issues that needed to be addressed. More specifically, we were engaged to work on a site that we found to be using a suite of plug-ins called Pagelines. Like each of the other page builders it has its adherents but the sheer number of plugins that it uses sent up a red flag from our SEO point of view. The unfortunate part of this story is that the developer was tasked by the client to move this WordPress website into the Visual Composer page builder. Without saying why, this developer used Pagelines instead but didn’t inform the client. In addition, the developer used paid licenses that belonged to his company NOT the client’s. This meant that when he was removed as the administrator the site stopped working. Completely.

It’s not feasible or cost-effective for most business owners to study web development to the level of detail that has been discussed above. That fact should suggest that having a separate SEO consultant on board in conjunction with site development is a good idea. It is.

For more good ideas contact us or call 773.769.7362.

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A cautionary tale on WordPress security and SEO

WordPress security and SEO: a cautionary tale

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a great way to be very clear about what your business does. The opposite of SEO is being confusing instead of clear.  What could be more confusing than advertising someone else’s business instead of your own?

This is what neglecting your WordPress update can lead to:
This example is part of what a client’s website looked like after it was hacked. The website had nothing to do with any kind of financial service least of all “payday loans”. Everything about it had been modified crudely.

If being hacked this way wasn’t bad enough Google tacked a “This site may be compromised” warning on search results that showed the website with the “new” commercial offerings:

Since there were a number of facility websites within the hacked company website Google picked up and showed the hacked results instead of the actual company information for all ten businesses:

These WordPress hacks happen.  Unfortunately they can happen in many different ways. As a result they can be very difficult to completely correct because in some cases code has been hidden within the website files that will rewrite the unwanted text over and over until it is found and eliminated.

In this example a developer had modified a theme to give the site a unique look. He cautioned the business to NOT update WordPress because the updating process could break the look of the site.  This turned out to be very bad advice. One of the most important reasons to update both WordPress and your plugins is to improve your website’s security to make it less likely that it might be hacked.

How your website looks in Google and other search engines is an important part of your business marketing. Once people are credibly warned to not visit your website it is less likely that they will return.

WordPress is a powerful tool for getting your message out to the world. It’s up to you to properly care for it.