Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is the practice of optimising your website for search engines and users who find your site via a search engine. There are many introductory articles out there, but for today, we will be focusing on practical points that any webmaster can implement in a few minutes to boost their search rankings and increase the chances of a user clicking on them.
Google Optimize is a new tool that allows you to easily build A/B and Multivariate tests with an inbuilt page editor. It uses Analytics to gather data and show results on specific goals like bounce rates, session views and more.
A/B testing lets you test multiple versions of the same web page and find the one that works best for your users. In A/B testing, Variant A is the original and Variants B through N each contain at least one element that is different from the original. A multivariate test allows you to test two or more elements on a page simultaneously to see which combination gives the best outcome.
By the end of this month Google intends to have 100% of Chrome users blocking Flash content by default. After the next few months Chrome won’t even be able to recognise if Flash is installed. Even Flash’s creator, Adobe, is advising people to remove it.
Starting January 2017, Google will begin marking websites that use ‘http://’ over ‘https://’ as not secure.
Google have announced a plan to transition to the HTTPS protocol as the norm, stating that in the beginning this will only extend to Chrome users and for webpages that require credit card info, but Google plan to eventually extend this change to all pages and increase the severity of the warning. Sites labelled as not secure will have a large red symbol next to their web address:
When deciding upon server architecture, most businesses start out with a single server architecture and then build up as needs present themselves. With this tutorial we are going to give you a quick run through of taking your server environment to a position where you have a lot more redundancy at a low cost. This tutorial is all based on the cheapest possible setup with Digital Ocean. In order to be able to follow this tutorial you are going to need a basic knowledge of how to connect to servers via SSH and how to get setup your application or database on these servers. We also generally use Ubuntu as our server of choice, however this tutorial will be vaguely the same across most versions of Linux.
At Zodiac Media we are big fans of NGINX and Apache2. Personally I swing more towards NGINX, as the configuration is super simple and very transparent. Like all web servers, it needs to be tuned to get the best possible performance out of it. NGINX was designed to deal with the C10k problem, this refers to the optimization connections so that they can handle client connections in the range of ten thousand (and over) simultaneously.
This can be fairly complicated if you are not used to using the command line. If this is not the case, then get in touch, this is our bread and butter. These configuration settings should allow you to get every bit of performance out of your NGINX setup.
Following the beta release announcement of the Ionic 2 Framework a week and half ago (at the time of writing). Our interest in the framework was reignited, so we finally bit the bullet to see how easy the conversion of one of our existing projects to a hybrid app would be. Surprisingly easy it turns out! We did however run into a few minor hiccups along the way - no one said development was going to be easy! We'll expand upon our experience in this blog post.
There was much excitement in the Zodiac Media office for the release of Drupal 8. We have put our hand to a fair few large scale Drupal 7 sites and were excited to see how the inclusion of Symfony and it’s core components would progress the CMS. Here is a rundown of our initial migration to Drupal 8 and our findings from it.
Earlier this month BBC correspondent Rory Cellan-Jones published an interesting article about Twitter's recent fortunes. At the time Twitter's share price had fallen around 25% over the course of several days. This share price drop was triggered by the publication of Twitter's Q1 2015 results which included a cut in Twitter's 2015 revenue forecasts. The silver lining to this cloud was that Twitter's user growth had picked up. According to Twitter's results it gained an extra 14 million 'monthly active users' in the first quarter of 2015 bringing the total year on year gain to a staggering 47 million users. That's a lot of new users. It's not far off the entire population of England joining Twitter in one year.
If you own a website then you need to be aware of some upcoming changes to the way Google orders results for searches made on mobiles. From April 21st, Google will begin globally rolling out their mobile-friendly update. Boosting the ranking of mobile-friendly pages on mobile searches. Searchers will be able to more easily find high-quality and relevant results where text is readable without tapping or zooming, tap targets are spaced appropriately, and the page avoids unplayable content or horizontal scrolling.
