8 Reasons Website Security Maintenance is Important for Your Business

A website is a company’s online face. It’s a powerhouse for your business as you can use it for promotion and client generation. The website is a valuable resource; you need to protect it not to disappoint your clients. Here are some reasons why you should schedule regular website security maintenance.

1. Rapid Increase of Hacked Websites

Website hacking is a significant issue facing many companies. Unfortunately, some of these hacks are fatal to the company. Note that most hackers will re-target your website visitors and potential customers. Thus, scheduling website security maintenance is essential to ensure the site is not vulnerable to attacks. Hence, your company will be in the statistics.

2. Prevents Your Website from Google Blacklisting

Note that when google block lists your website, it’s considered unsafe for use by the public. Google will block list your site if it suspects it spreads malware. As a result, visitors will avoid engaging with your content, making you lose potential leads. By conducting website security maintenance, you’ll ensure there is nothing suspicious on your website.

3. Protects Your Company’s Reputation

Having a good reputation is a vital trait for a successful company. With minimal or no website security maintenance, the public might access your company’s crucial information. Due to this, your client will lose trust in your company. Additionally, you will get attention from the media, which will destroy your brand image.

It’s important to note that rising from a damaged reputation might be challenging. With the massive damage, you’ll lose a majority of your clients. Additionally, clearing your name from the media will not be an easy task. Your competitors will also take advantage of your downfall and tap your clients.

4. WordPress Cleanup is Expensive

In case your website gets hacked, the next course of action is to clean it up. Since the cleanup process is challenging, it’s more expensive. To cut unnecessary costs, you need to protect your website. This helps get rid of all infected files. WordPress malware removal is not an easy task. Thus, you’ll need to work with experts for the cleanup. You can also rely on cyber security staffing recruiters to place the best experts in the field within your business to help with these tough IT tasks.

5. Guarantees Your Customers’ Safety

For your customers to interact with your website, they need to be sure they are safe. Thus, it’s your responsibility to ensure that no one gets to access your clients’ crucial details. Note that clients can sue you for not protecting their information. This will harm your business image. With website security maintenance, you ensure that systems are in check. This way, your visitors’ information remains confidential.

6. Protects Your Company’s Assets

Confidential information leaks cause massive damage to the company. The company’s assets that need protection include; financial records and client lists. When competitors get hold of your customer lists, they will steal them from you. What’s more, your clients will no longer feel safe working with you. Performing routine security maintenance is essential as it ensures no breach of your company’s assets. When your clients trust that their information is safe, they can share details that will help you meet their needs.

7. Maintain Your Competitive Advantage

As seen above, when your competitors have information about your clients, they can go for them. This will give them an added advantage as they know your customers’ requirements. Also, they can create products or services to tap your potential leads. With this, you will not stand a chance of standing out in the crowd. You can be an edge over your competitors by undertaking the maintenance process. This is because you can keep all your company’s success secrets safe.

8. Maintain Compliance

With online security compliance, there are some things you have to focus on. This includes the certifications or qualifications that touch the industry you’re in. It lets you know what you need to work on in your projects. By performing website security maintenance, you’ll know what is missing and sort it out. By having everything in order, you will avoid any legal actions and will protect your company from market infringement.

Any website security breach is harmful to your business. It can lead to a bad reputation, financial damage, and your company’s downfall. For effective website security maintenance, ensure to work with experts.

Which Links Are Best Not to Use for SEO

SEO Links Every Website Owner Should Avoid

The success of your marketing campaigns depends on the quality of your SEO site links. From internal tags to inbound and SEO outbound links, link-building benefits your business in many ways. For starters, it increases your credibility to boost traffic and SEO scores. It also increases the value to readers, grows revenue from SEO affiliate links, and reduces bounce rates. However, not all SEO links are good for your website. Some attract search engine penalties and affect your rankings. Here are some SEO links that the best dating sites avoid.

typewriter

Press Release SEO Links

Press release SEO links were once popular because they were easy to get. After publishing a press release, all you needed to do was syndicate it to distribution websites and get numerous SEO links.

However, website owners abused press release links, pushing Google to consider a link scheme method. This is especially true for SEO links that target the main keyword with over-optimized text. To be safe from Google penalties, ensure your press release SEO links don’t pass PageRank. The best alternative is adding nofollow to press release tags.

Blog Comments

As long as you use them cautiously, blog comment links aren’t entirely discouraged. You can get natural traffic when you offer helpful advice redirecting readers to a blog. However, search engines will detect keyword-stuffed SEO tags going to one site.

The same applies to chat forum spam. It’s not uncommon for users to stuff their discussion forum signatures with links. These schemes are common across different platforms, from social boards to niche websites. Remember, you can still earn readers’ trust by having constructive discussions on the comment section without manipulation moves.

Substandard Guest Posts

Some website owners write low-quality guest posts to boost their ratings with backlinks. Google can disregard guest posts if they don’t provide value to readers or your marketing campaign. Search engines are also against too many guest post backlinks since they manipulate algorithms.

The key to escaping Google’s wrath is avoiding rich anchor texts in your guest posts. Remember to use anchor text variations. Using only one keyword format puts you under the radar of search engines.

Free stock photo of letter, SEO, SEO audit

Unrelated Niches

The best SEO backlinks come from sites in your industry. For example, you can link to travel blogs if you write restaurant reviews. Think of backlinks as academic citations; you need an expert to verify the information on your website. Moreover, aim for high-authority backlinks. Readers may lose trust in your brand if the linked site:

  • Is new;
  • Has low traffic;
  • Promotes clickbait;
  • Is biased.

One irrelevant backlink may go unnoticed by search engines, but using too many of them increases the risk of penalties. When most of your keywords come from other niches, search engines will use unrelated keywords instead of those that matter.

Don’t Force It

Your SEO anchor links should occur naturally. If you have a bad feeling about them, chances are search engines won’t understand them either. How do you improve your site with SEO backlinks? Share some strategies in the comments.

Authors bio

Rebecca Shinn is a freelance writer and dating and relationship expert with a psychology degree. Her field of expertise is relationship, dating, and marriage. The important part of Rebecca’s practice is to help couples with communication skills, problem-solving skills, stress management, and financial skills. 

Rebecca started writing 2 years ago to inspire and help people to have a better dating life, healthy relationships, or find a way to keep a marriage strong for long years.

With all said above, Rebecca is proud to be a mother and a wife so she doesn’t only use her knowledge for helping others but keeping her family strong and happy.

Google is slowing down your life

This is of course absurd with all the speed of search and efficiencies Google has brought to our modern lives, but is it? For decades, Google has been rewarding web pages with higher ranks for forcing you to spend more time and click more buttons to get what you wanted before you leave the site. 


This has given rise to some of the ubiquitous and annoying web trends throughout history.

Endless slide shows, recipes that only come after clicking buttons and scrolling to the end of what I can only assume is the author’s life biography and the complete unabridged history of this particular recipe are in opposition to a successful interaction. The proof in the pudding shows an exasperated shopper standing in the baking aisle for 5 minutes, endlessly scrolling through just to see if they need baking soda or baking powder. Another user surfs and scrolls through a gauntlet of unnecessarily garrulous content just to get a simple answer to a question. 

When I tell my clients the minimum word volume is 500 words, with 1500 words as best practice on a landing page, they glaze over. They balk and say, who is going to read that?!? No one, I explain, just Google. It’s for SEO. No human wants to read that volume, but Google does, and if we want your media to reach human eyes we must first please the algorithm. 

Google, you are hurting us with your endless maze of SEO tricks, through 1000 paper cuts into our time and our efficiency. 

So much weight is put onto time spent on the page, it’s become an obstacle to actual function. The best websites I visit are the ones I leave with the highest bounce rate because They serve me what I need and send me on my way. Can we start rewarding that? I know you are capable of doing this without rewarding high bounce spam pages. I know this is a possibility. No, go get your most promising Googlers to fix this mess 

Yours in frustration,
Tired of scrolling

Hey, Google: How Voice Search is Changing the SEO Game

It may be a meme by now, but “Alexa, play Despacito” is such a good example of how sophisticated voice search has become. Whether you’re using Google Assistant, Siri, or Alexa, you probably have talked to your phone at least once and asked it to search something for you. Through all this, what we can be sure is that voice is definitely affecting our approach to technology and the internet.

Read on to find out how voice search can affect the already ever-changing sphere of digital marketing and SEO and how you can capitalize on it:

Who’s Using Voice Search?

The first question that most digital marketers might ask is who’s using voice queries? After all, back in 2013, 85% of iOS users weren’t using Siri. Today, however, voice search seems to be taking over with 20% of mobile searches being voice queries. Not only that, but 66% of Americans have smart speakers which they can use to ask questions using their voice. In fact, these figures from 2019 show how voice searches and digital assistants matter are here to stay.

What’s the Big Difference When You Talk?

The biggest difference between typing your query and actually talking to your phone is the way people expect their queries to be answered. Think of voice queries as actual questions from your friends. When they ask you a question, they’re not expecting you to answer with links. They’re expecting you to answer directly! As such, when you’re faced with people using voice search, expect that they want a direct answer as well.

The biggest thing about this is how spoken language actually affects SEO! For example, voice queries focus on natural language and semantic context rather than the keyword placement. Another thing to note is how voice queries focus more on SERPs rather than links. After all, you’re not expecting long search results, you want direct answers.

How Do You Keep Up with the Conversation?

With the shift towards voice queries, SEO specialists need to keep up with the changes brought by digital assistants. Here are just some of the ways voice search has been transforming SEO and some of the ways you can adapt:

Content Optimization

Although digital marketing and SEO has long moved on from content that just focuses on the number of keywords, voice queries take us one step further away from the dark ages of keyword stuffing. With voice searches, your content should prioritize answering user-intent and their questions, rather than inserting keywords. With voice queries, it’s all about the semantic search and context to answer the user’s question.

Long-tail Keywords

Although user-intent remains the same, people tend to type and speak queries differently. For example, you might use “Boston weather” when typing your query into Google, but you will be asking “What’s the weather in Boston today?” when you use Siri, Alexa, or Google Assistant. It should also be noted that when you’re using voice search, you tend to use the WH questions more than you would if you were typing. This shift towards a more natural and conversational lexicon should be noted, especially if you want your content to rank for certain keywords.

Mobile-friendliness

This isn’t really something new, since Google has revealed that they do consider mobile-friendliness when ranking pages. However, if your page still isn’t mobile friendly, then you’re going to be losing out. Since people who utilize voice search are more often than not on their mobile devices, it’ll be a huge loss for you to not optimize your site for mobile. At the very least, your website should have accomplished these key considerations to be acknowledged as mobile-friendly:

  • Improved loading time;
  • Redesigned pop-ups for mobile
  • Resized buttons for mobile

SERPs

When you ask Google, Alexa, or Siri to look for the Top 10 Italian Restaurants in your area, they won’t answer you with a list of all the links on the first Google page. Rather, they’ll be relaying the information that’s found on the snippets. The idea here is that Google wants to give you the shortest answer possible, similar to how you would answer a friend asking you a question. Create content that would be easier for Google to read by using H-tags and bullet points.

Go Local (or How Google will Emphasize Local SEO)

Almost 22% of voice queries seek out local content. It is because of this that it’s necessary to have a good local SEO strategy if you want to rank for voice queries. Local business and establishments should also take advantage of this opportunity, as this can ultimately drive traffic and boost your sales. Consider the following when optimizing your local SEO:

  • Have you created, updated, and optimized your Google My Business account?
  • Do you use location specific keywords in your pages, especially in your About Us?
  • Do you interact with customers and community?
  • Do you use local keywords in your content?

If your answer is no, then you might want to talk to your social media marketing agency to help you with that.

Raise Your Voice!

In this fast-paced, ever-changing industry, it’s not entirely surprising to see voice queries and AI become important factors in SEO ranking. Although there are predictions about voice search here and there, nothing is set in stone yet. That being said, there’s absolutely nothing wrong in experimenting and trying to optimize your content for voice search. After all, it’s uncharted territory and could be the start of other opportunities.

Author Bio

Jerry Little

I’m still hoping to have a nephew named Stuart, because how fun would that be? I’m a digital marketing professional and freelance writer, and my interests range from the hottest chili in the world to the ergonomics of a good office chair.

How to Increase the Domain Authority of Your Website

If you wish to rank higher in Google and get more natural traffic to your site, you must have heard or have read something that is increasing your website’s domain authority can boost your rank in Google. However, the truth is not the opposite of it. Because improving the domain authority of your website is not something terrible or a. act of loss.

The higher your domain authority is, the almost certain you are to procure a higher web positioning and get more and better web traffic. Your domain authority is likewise a decent method to gauge your SEO endeavors, just as it contrasts the strength of your site with your opposition’s areas.

Your primary focus should not be on increasing your core, but on the process that improves it. If you keep an eye on the score and will not work for it, then this turns out to be terrible, but if you pay attention to the method of raising your score or your rank in Google, then things are going to be completely unique. You will see your website making progress, and this is something a businessman always wishes to have.

What is Domain authority?

Domain Authority is a number or a numerical value that demonstrates the authority of your site. The higher your area authority is, the more prominent are your odds of positioning higher in internet searcher result pages and getting more natural traffic.

The domain authority is a score between 0 and 100, which attempts to anticipate how well a site will rank on web crawlers. It isn’t equivalent to the positioning score utilized by Google, which can impact your rankings.

An authority which was emerged from PageRank introduced the idea of page ranking, and it was presented by Larry Page back then. And it is still being utilized to determine the measurement of your website rank in Google.

The most important thing about getting traffic on your website is to increase the interest of people in your webpage, and this is not possible by just offering promo codes to people. There are some other ways by which you can increase the domain authority of your website, and they include.

Choose the Name of Your Page

If you are starting your website page, then pick up a name for it. It should be moderately simple, so when people visit it, they can remember it. If they remember, they won’t have any issues getting back to your site since they experience no problem recalling it.

Generate Creative Content

The most important thing that makes a website worth clicking is its natural links. For natural links, you have to generate content that is not only natural but is also relatable, so when people search for something, they can relate to your content. So, you have to write something unique, original, and is worth clicking. Or, in other words, it should be link-worthy.

The content you make should be simple, insightful, useful, and easy to read because, in this, the admins of other websites will reference it in their articles. Practically speaking, this cycle of natural links works, and it is precious.

However, it is time taking, and it demands patience from your side. It is a long-time process, and one has to stay patient until it result gets shown.

It will also require some investment to pick up enough readerships, with the goal that a portion of the readers who will pay attention to your content will share your piece of work on their websites.

Create Content that is Previously Known for Getting Links

When you are looking for your content topics, then make sure to look at the issues having the most referred links. Because selecting a topic having bundles of directed links will help in the growth of your domain authority. You have to keep yourself relevant to the audience and make it happen. You have to stick to the topics people need a referral.

Make sure to avoid the topic which is not common because it gets tough to get links. It is not wrong to write something unique, but if people have no knowledge about it or there is no history of the topic existing, why would people need links.

You can select the relevant topics by contacting the authority a well. Contact the people who are featured in the issues on the top ranking of the people, or reach the people who have used that content in their topics. In this way, you will get more information about the subject, and it will help you choose something existing, and people can relate to it.

Optimize Your Content

Website design or SEO matters for both Google web index positioning just as your domain authority, so ensure that you upgrade all your title labels, all the pictures alt labels, the on-page code, and the website itself. Moreover, make sure to keep the entirety of your permalinks precise and relatable, incorporate varieties of your primary catchphrases, and make a sidebar area for new posts. It will help you increase traffic on your page, which is beneficial for getting higher ranks in Google.

Author Bio:

Arslan Haider is the author of the above blog. He has done his Bachelor in Computer Science from University of Wah. He is a professional Guest Blogger at Mediahicon and loves to write blogs on valuable topics.

What is AMP and does your website need it?

Jessica Kane takes over our blog this month to discuss AMP. Thanks Jessica!

The Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) project allows web developers to create smooth, fast-loading web pages. Created by Google in 2015, the original goal of AMP was to improve the experience of browsing the web on a mobile phone. Today, most users interact with AMP through Google search results, although Facebook has also developed a similar platform, known as Instant Articles.

The 3 Components of AMP Pages

AMP can be broken down into three core components: AMP HTML, AMP JS, and AMP Cache.

AMP HTML is basically the normal HTML programming language used by web developers all over the world with a few changes. Namely, AMP HTML adds some restrictions to traditional HTML in an effort to provide a more reliable performance. Additionally, AMP HTML also has its own unique features such as AMP-specific tags that enable unsupported features in browsers.

Much like AMP HTML, the goal of AMP JS is to improve the performance and speed of mobile web browsing. Specifically, AMP JS is focused on rendering web pages as quickly as possible. One of the key areas of optimization for AMJ pages is that AMP JS forces everything on the page to load asynchronously, which means one part of the page that is loading slowly will not slow down other aspects of the page.

Finally, AMP Cache is another key ingredient of the AMP platform that serves cached versions of AMP pages. AMP Cache improves loading speeds and reliability by serving cached versions of web pages that have been pre-validated to load properly to site visitors.

Who Uses AMP?

Due to the heavy use of AMP in Google Search, AMP was able to obtain 7 percent of all traffic to top publishers in the United States by early 2017, roughly a year after the project was officially launched. By May 2017, 900,000 different web domains were publishing AMP pages. The growth of AMP took another major leap in the summer of 2017 when Twitter started to link to AMP pages from their mobile apps.

Any third party is able to integrate in to the AMP platform as long as they comply with the protocol specifications. For example, 30 analytics companies and 120 advertising companies have participated in the AMP Project, building their own features along the way.

AMP has been so successful that even some of Google’s key competitors, such as Bing and Baidu, now link to AMP pages. Other major websites that link to AMP pages include Reddit, LinkedIn, WordPress, Tumblr, eBay, and Pinterest.

One of the key reasons for the massive adoption of AMP by the online publishing world (in addition to fast loading times) is that these types of pages also cut down on the amount of data people use when they’re not connected to a Wi-Fi router. By cutting away a lot of the junk, such as pop-ups, that are associated with the desktop browsing experience, web developers are able to also lower the literal cost of loading a page in terms of the effect on site visitors’ monthly mobile phone bill.

Does Your Website Need AMP?

At this point, AMP has become the way in which web browsing works best on mobile devices. Google has indicated that AMP pages sourced from Google Search results will load in less than one second. Third party reviews from CNBC and Gizmodo have also found large improvements in loading times when compared to traditional web pages.

To give users a user-friendly browsing experience on their mobile devices, especially when they’re visiting a website for the first time, implementing AMP is basically a requirement these days. With AMP, anyone who has their own website for business or personal reasons can be sure no one is going to change their mind about viewing a site while waiting for it to load.


Jessica Kane is a professional blogger who focuses on personal finance and other money matters. She currently writes for Checkworks.com, where you can get personal checks and business checks.