Weekly SEO news: 12 January 2016
Welcome to the first issue of the Search Engine Facts newsletter in 2016.

Table of contents:

We hope that you enjoy this newsletter and that it helps you to get more out of your website. Please pass this newsletter on to your friends.

Best regards,
Andre Voget, Johannes Selbach, Axandra CEO

1. Get ready for 2016: how to check your web pages
Are you dissatisfied with the performance of your website? Maybe it's time to take another close look at your web pages to make sure that they will perform better in 2016.

Sometimes, it is necessary to step back and take a neutral look on your website. Look at your website with the eyes of an uninterested third party and you might see things that you can improve.

Get ready for 2016

Be honest: are your web pages fast enough?

Does your website load fast? If people have to wait to see your web pages, they won't see them. Internet users are impatient. Slow loading web pages keep customers away so make sure that your web pages load fast.

Within 5 seconds: what is your website about?

Come straight to the point. Your website visitors should see at a glance what your website is about.

Tell your website visitors what’s in it for them. Your website visitors do not care about you or your company. They care for themselves.

Appearance is important: do your web pages look pretty and up-to-date?


The first impression is very important. Does your website look like the website of a professional business or does it look as if it has been coded by your nephew in 2007?

Is it easy to see that your pages are regularly updated? Would you buy from a website that looks like yours? Really?

Dude, where's my car? Do your visitors get lost on your site?

A good website navigation is very important. The usability of your website can influence your search engine rankings.

Show your website visitors on which page they are and which options they have. The easier it is to navigate your website, the higher the conversion rate.

Yada yada yada: do you offer compelling content and a call to action?

Focus on your website visitors. Replace all sentences that start with "We" with sentences that start with "You." The content of your web pages should be interesting, informative and error-free.

Answer the visitor's question "What's in it for me?" as clearly as possible. Each page should have a clear call to action.

These are the first things that you should check if your website does not perform as expected. There are many more things that influence the position of your web pages in Google's search results.

Check your web pages with the website audit tool in our Internet marketing tool SEOprofiler. The Top 10 Optimizer tool in SEOprofiler helps you to make sure that your web pages will be found for the right keywords. If you haven't done it yet, try it now:

Try SEOprofiler now

Back to table of contents - Visit SEOprofiler.com

2. Search engine news and articles of the week
Google: still no release date for Penguin 4.0

"We know Google decided to halt the release of Penguin 4.0 until after the holidays. We also know that Google is confident Penguin is good to be released this month, in January but Gary Illyes from Google is reiterating that Google won't release it until it is a 100% ready."


GoogleGoogle: decimal points in URLs are a bad idea 

"Google's John Mueller answered a question on Twitter asking if it is okay to use a decimal point in your URLs, such as mysite.com/page.goes.here/. John Mueller said you surely can but he said it was a "bad idea."

Also see: Google: avoid commas, semicolons, spaces and special characters in URLs


Google: self-signed SSL certificate won't work for HTTPS ranking boost

"We know Google has an HTTPS Ranking Boost.[...] John Mueller said on Twitter that self-signed certificate, which is an identity certificate that is signed by the same entity whose identity it certifies, would typically be flagged as invalid by Google's detection tools."

Google2016 Google tracker: everything Google is working on for the new year

"Google recently announced it was condensing its cloud businesses into a single unit led by Diane Greene, co-founder and CEO of VMWare. Is this a new division inside of Google or Alphabet? Does it have a name? We have no idea. Starting a new division with a superstar CEO definitely seems like the same model that created Calico, Sidewalk Labs, Replicant, and Verily, but we haven't heard of a name or anything official."


New privacy-focused search engine Oscobo promises to never sell or store your data

"Oscobo, founded by Fred Cornell (ex-Yahoo) and Rob Perin (ex-BlackBerry), aims to capitalize on these growing concerns around how data is shared between services, particularly by advertisers. [...]

Oscobo doesn’t store or share any personal data at all, so next time you come back to search, it appears to the site that you’ve never visited before – no tailored results will appear. It doesn’t place cookies or track IP addresses."


Search engine newslets

  • Google: a new year’s refresh of Android app-indexing crawl errors data in search console.
  • Twitter considering 10,000-character limit for tweets.
  • The price tag for Google’s new enterprise czar: $380 million.
  • German publishers have filed complaint against Google: VG Media.
3. Recommended resources

SEOprofiler

SEOprofiler helps you to get high rankings on Google and more customers. It offers all the tools that you need:

  • automatic weekly website audits
  • tools for keyword research and analysis
  • competitive intelligence tools
  • automated ranking checks
  • website analytics
  • tools for spam-free link building
  • link disinfection tool
  • social media monitoring
  • white-label reports (web-based and PDF)
  • AdWords Profiler and Ranking Profiler
  • and much more.

Back to table of contents - Visit SEOprofiler.com
4. Previous articles
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