If you have a website, it’s a pretty safe bet that one of your major concerns will be getting it to feature higher in Google’s rankings. This is a complex and constantly evolving subject, known as SEO (Search Engine Optimisation), which can be baffling to the newcomer, with its language of ‘meta tags,’ ‘long-tail keywords’ and other mysterious concepts. To really get to grips with this, you might require the services of a professional, but there’s one crucial aspect which you can easily sort out for yourself, because it requires no specialist knowledge whatsoever.

If you’re running a business, you’ve probably registered your details on a variety of online directories at various times, including Google My Business – if you’re not on this one, it should be top of your to-do list, but that’s a subject for another blog.

Now here’s the key point: if you’ve been signing up to different directories over a period of time, your contact details might well have changed since you started, and you might not have gone back and updated every entry. In that case, Google will see the inconsistencies, and consider you ‘untrustworthy,’ downgrading your ranking as a result!

It’s that simple – something as basic as an old phone number on an apparently insignificant local directory could be sabotaging your SEO. So if your site is failing to rank, despite your best efforts, this could be part (or all) of the problem. Time spent reviewing and updating your various online business profiles could prove massively beneficial.

There are a new set of initials which should be at the forefront of every website owner’s mind – GDPR. This stands for the General Data Protection Regulation, and it comes into force on May 25th, replacing the current Data Protection Directive. The intention is to further improve and strengthen privacy laws, and there will be serious penalties for non-compliance, so this is not something that can be ignored on an “it-doesn’t-apply-to-me” basis.

The GDFP is a weighty document, running to 11 chapters and 91 articles, so this blog will barely skim the surface of it. In any case, much of the new act will only be relevant to larger companies, so for now, we’re just going to pick out the main points of concern for the owners of small websites. The regulation requires companies to implement reasonable data protection measures, and to report any security breaches. Individuals will have the right to have their data deleted (erasure) or moved (portability), or may object to the way it is being processed. Consent for the use of data must be obtained, not assumed. Therefore, if you operate a website, however small, you should begin by considering these points:

As mentioned earlier, this article only scratches the surface of this subject, so if in doubt do some more research. The GDPR website is here, or get in touch for more help. May 25th isn’t far off …

Website maintenance – ok, I admit it’s not a very exciting topic, likely to be viewed with marginally less enthusiasm than your car’s MOT, or the annual service for your boiler, but important for similar reasons. Some website owners are surprised to learn that their site will require maintenance, so let’s have a quick look at the reasons why it’s necessary.

A WordPress website basically consists of 3 types of software working together. Firstly, there’s the WordPress platform itself; secondly, there’s the theme or template that the site is constructed on, and finally, there are bits of added functionality called plugins. Each of these is built by a different team of developers, working for different companies, who will issue updated versions whenever they are produced. Sometimes the aim is to fix a bug, sometimes it’s to add a new function, and sometimes it’s because of a security issue, closing a loophole which hackers might otherwise be able to exploit.

The pace of change on the web never lets up, and website features which start out as merely desirable, soon go on to become essential. Just think of responsive design – relatively recently it was ok to have a site which didn’t adapt to mobile screens, but that certainly isn’t acceptable now.

The switch to responsive layouts was partly driven by Google, who are also behind the latest change that website owners should be aware of, which is to do with security. Until recently, only e-commerce sites, or those storing sensitive information, needed to be encrypted. This encryption process is carried out by installing something called an SSL certificate,  and sites which have one can be recognised by the fact that their domain name starts with the letters https, instead of http.

This wasn’t a major issue, until Google began to use its Chrome browser (the most popular browser on the web) to flag up http sites as not secure:

Will this warning scare off your clients? At the moment, it is reasonably discreet, so you might not be losing business just yet, but Google plans to make it much more explicit, in order to drive everyone to improve web security. The upshot? In 2017, we reached a tipping point on this issue, so if you don’t already have an SSL, you should definitely consider acquiring one in 2018, even if your site doesn’t take payments or store customers’ data.

For more help and advice on this, please get in touch.