By Ollie Reardon 15th September 2017
They don’t call us Rapid Web Services for nothing. We strive to ensure that we develop websites to perform as fast as possible. Why? Because did you know that you subconsciously move away from a website if it doesn’t load within the first few seconds. That’s not the only reason. Google use site performance to help decide where a site should appear in their search rankings. Focusing on site performance is especially crucial now that we ar...
By Ollie Reardon 25th May 2017
To help search engines such as Google or Duckduckgo to get a better understanding of the content you have displayed on your website, you can use “Structured Data”. Structured Data is a list of details about the web page, that isn’t rendered on the actual page for users to see, but can be picked up by search engines, such as Google, to provide them a better understanding of the information displayed for the end user. What is Structured Da...
By Tim Lees 31st March 2017
In this article we will look at what HTTPS means and why your website should be secured using the protocol. What is HTTPS? HTTPS stands for ‘HyperText Transfer Protocol Secure’. You may have noticed that when navigating websites you will see this protocol (https) and its non-secure variant (http) at the beginning of the website address bar in your browser window. The HTTPS version is identified (in most browsers) by a green padlock. HTTP...
By Kirsty Gasston 12th June 2015
So by now we all know that we should be using social media for our businesses right? And hopefully you know how to engage with your audiences across Twitter, Facebook, Google Plus and Pinterest. But do you know how to measure the results of your activity on these social media channels? Well if not, here's a quick overview of the social media analytics that are available and how you can access them. Twitter You can see detailed reports on the numb...
By Kirsty Gasston 1st April 2015
If you're having a new website built, are adding pages to your existing website or just updating the content on the site, you need to think carefully about the approach you take to writing the content. Before you get started, take a step back and make sure that you've thought about these basics. Web users won't read your content So, probably not want you want to hear when you're setting out to write your website content, but you need to accept th...
By Tim Lees 28th November 2014
Within Google Analytics, Goals are designed for you to quantify how well your website is performing in terms of specific objectives. You can set up individual Goals to track an action on your website. These actions are defined as an activity that has a completion. Commonly known as conversions, examples of these activities include the following: A customer on an e-commerce website that completes the checkout process resulting in a purchase A u...
By Kirsty Gasston 19th November 2014
A couple of weeks ago Google added a new report within Webmaster Tools - the Mobile Usability report. This new report is automatically available within your Google Webmaster Tools account (https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/mobile-usability). This new tool highlights usability issues for your site on mobile devices so that you can aim to improve the mobile experience for your website users. The errors that the report monitors and reports on...
By Kirsty Gasston 10th October 2014
Rich snippets are a great way of enhancing your website's search engine listings, making them more informative, helping them stand out more and ultimately increasing your click-through rate. So what are rich snippets? Essentially, they are the additional lines of information that you see with a Google search engine result that are designed to give users a better sense of what the webpage may contain and therefore aid their decision as to whether...
By Tim Lees 30th September 2014
In this second part of a series designed to examine the basics of Google Analytics, we look at Custom Alerts (the first article was on Understanding Audience Overview). Custom Alerts in Google Analytics allow you to keep track of extensive fluctuations in your analytics data so if something unexpected happens then you can act upon it sooner rather than later. This could be amongst others a rise or dip in visitor numbers, bounce rate or if you h...
By Kirsty Gasston 6th August 2014
Following on from my previous post, which explained how to set up a personal Google+ profile and your Google Authorship, I now move on to how to set up Google Plus Business Pages. To get started with creating a Google+ company page, you need to log in to Google with the account which will own the page (other users can be invited to be managers of the page, but there can only be one owner). Then select ‘Pages’ from the menu on the top left. ...
By Tim Lees 29th July 2014
Understanding Google Analytics can be quite a daunting prospect if you are not familiar with the service. This series of guides aims to provide a simple introduction to help an owner of a website get the most out of their account. This guide is based on Google's Universal Analytics rather than the Classic Google Analytics. If you want to know more about the differences and whether you are using one or the other please click here. The a...
By Kirsty Gasston 22nd July 2014
Google+ (or Google Plus) is Google’s social media channel – their equivalent of Facebook or Twitter. Setting up your Google+ profile correctly and actively using Google+ as a social network using a Google+ company page can be a great help to your search engine optimisation. Google Authorship is how Google associates authors with articles that they write across the web. Ever seen listings in your search results on Google with a thumbnail of th...