What are Redirects?

A redirect is a process of forwarding traffic and users from one URL to another. Instead of landing on the page they intended, users are redirected to a URL of the website owner’s choosing. This is often because of a change of address for the original page.

Often, people ask us to redirect a website from either a non-existent ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´ site, or to forward an old address. We discourage the use of redirects for the reasons listed below:

Very bad for accessibility

The number one reason to avoid redirects is that they create additional redirect issues. As you know, creating web experiences that are optimised for accessibility improve usability for everyone. We need to avoid friction – meaning in this case anything that slows or confuses the user journey.

• Redirects disrupt screen readers with a possibility of cutting off content mid‑read
• Sudden page changes, including opening in a new tab, create confusion and increase cognitive load
• Content can be totally different from expectation
• Neurodiverse users are especially affected, but the confusion can affect anyone
• Improving accessibility improves the experience for all users.

Negative Impact on SEO

Behind the scenes, Google detects redirects, views them with suspicion by default and will degrade the search engine experience for your site and your users.

• Redirects are often mismanaged, especially when multiple redirects create “redirect chains”
• Each redirect slows loading time, which harms search rankings
• Google crawls sites with excessive redirects less frequently, further lowering visibility
• There are additional punishments, such as your favicon not appearing next to your site name in Google search results

Confusing User Experience

• Redirects slow page loading and create friction as users navigate your site
• Slower and/or more confusing websites consistently correlate with lower conversion and engagement rates
• Important pages should be promoted at their correct URL so users can learn the new address quickly

Best Practices If You Must Use a Redirect

• Set a clear expiry date—typically 3 to 6 months.
• Use that period to communicate or promote the new URL.
• Avoid printing redirect URLs on physical materials, since redirects are temporary and printed content cannot be updated.

Summary

Redirects may seem helpful, but they often create accessibility barriers, harm search performance, and frustrate users. Whenever possible, update links at the source and promote the correct URL directly. And for the sake of the trees, never print a redirect on any marketing materials!

The post The Problems with Redirects appeared first on Web Services.

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization which means optimizing your website so that you can not only be found on Google, but come up high in the search ranking.

How Search Engines Work

Search engines basically “crawl” your website’s content and evaluate whether that content is relevant to what the searcher is looking for. This is generally based on four things:

• backend stuff (loading speed, mobile friendliness, security, plugins, and xml sitemap)
• engagement (writing content of value to your audience)
• links (both incoming and outgoing), and
• keywords…which we’ll talk about today.

Choosing your Keywords

When it comes to determining what keywords to focus on, you want to think like your visitor. What would they actually type into a search engine?

• jobs vs employment opportunities
• Research vs. Research at ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´
• Long tail keywords (key phrases made up of three to five words) are more targeted which means it will likely bring in a more relevant visitor (higher conversion rate)

Where to put Keywords

Once you’ve chosen your keywords, you then need to place them strategically throughout your content.  You should try to put them in the following places:

• Page title (title has the most weight when it comes to SEO)
• Header tags (H2, H3, etc.)
• First paragraph
• Throughout your content: Mention keywords a few times. But don’t get carried away, write naturally using keywords where it makes sense.
• Anchor text for links
• Alt tags of images
• URL
• Meta description (use YOAST)

As important as it is to place your keywords throughout your content, it’s imperative that you use them naturally.  Do not key word stuff, meaning using the keyword over and over in places that don’t fit.  Google won’t like this and neither will your visitors.

And  that’s what SEO really comes down to at the end of the day – writing content that is of value to your visitors.

Want to learn more? Check out our SEO workshop material.

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If you work on websites, you have probably heard or SEO – it stands for Search Engine Optimization. The aim of SEO is to have your web pages show up near the top of search engine results. This makes it more likely that people will click on them and come to your web site.

There are things that can be done to the backend of your site to help with SEO. These include making it mobile friendly, having pages that load quickly, and ensuring it is structured optimally for spiders. If you have a ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´ cms or framework site, Web Services takes care of these things for you – yay!

However, there are still several things that you can do on your web pages to improve your SEO. You can write engaging, user-focused content, add new content regularly, use appropriate keywords, and link strategically.

1. Write for your visitor

Web pages that rank highly, are always focused on the user. When writing for web readers, there are a few key things to keep in mind.

• Make sure that your content is scannable (online attention span is short!)
• Use headings and subheadings.
• Break up text into short sentences and paragraphs.
• Write in active voice.

This will make your content both user and SEO friendly. Have a look at our article for more tips on writing for the web.

When you write with your audience in mind, your content will climb in search results.

2. Use keywords strategically

Keywords are important because they help people find your content. Put yourself in your visitor’s shoes. What would they actually type in? And what would they ask for? (Voice search is becoming more popular – think personal assistants). Long tail keywords /key phrases are becoming the norm. They are more specific and tend to give more accurate results. If you need ideas, you can check out tools such as ).

Once you have determined a couple of important keywords, put them in the following places on your page:

•  Page title (title has the most weight when it comes to SEO)
•  Meta description (use YOAST)
•  Header tags (H2, H3, etc.)
• ĚýąŤ¸éł˘
• Alt tags of images
• In your content: Mention keywords a few times. But don’t get carried away, write naturally using keywords where it makes sense.

3. Add content regularly 

Post fresh and high quality content. The more you post, the more traffic you will get. Adding new content regularly keeps the search engine spiders coming back and boosts your rankings.

And you don’t have to always come up with something brand new. You can update articles from the past that have done well for you. A post can be a quick video, an infographic, a newsletter item, an event recap or a photo gallery.

4. Have a linking strategy

Internal Linking

Link  pages within your site using keywords in the anchor text. Every time you add new content, be sure to link to pre-existing, relevant content in your site. Internal links help search engines understand the structure of your site. They also help users navigate keeping them on your site longer.

Inbound links

Get pages from quality sites, for example other ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´ sites, to link back to you. You can write content for other sites, partner with another site and contribute content to each other’s blog or newsletter and write useful articles that others will want to link to.

Interested in learning more about SEO?

Come to our Get Found on Google! SEO Workshop.

The post Four Ways to Improve your SEO appeared first on Web Services.

With a top secret project in the works, and necessity being the mother of invention, we will be embarking on a brave new experiment in 2019.

Like many Canadian universities, Web Services at ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´ has traditionally worked in the world of WordPress. WordPress offers a valuable solution to the traditional problem of a multi-page, single-content-source website; however, one of the most interesting aspects of a university environment, for a website perspective, is the requirement to aggregate content from a variety of disparate data sources.

In other words, we need to be able to pull and push information from one website to another.

While WordPress will remain a valuable tool in our kit, there is a more suitable tool for the problem before us — JAM!

I’m not talking about the delicious strawberry preserve I put on my Saturday morning toast; JAM is the acronym given to the modern web stack: Javascript, (restful) APIs, and (pre-rendered) markup. Of particular interest to the team are the performance improvements, modern tooling, and inherent interoperability of the technologies.

By using Javascript to draw data from distributed restful APIs, we will make a website’s content appear uniform to the visitor. Restful APIs return a data format called JSON, which our javascript code processes into pre-rendered markup defined by our developers.

The technology solution we have chosen allows for any combination of content to be pulled before it is served to the visitor, or after to provide real time updates. This enables us to deliver an extraordinarily fast, responsive, accessible, and SEO-friendly website whose content can be accessed across all platforms.

Here in Web Services we work hard to keep our tool chain modern, and our developers’ skills current. Decoupling our front end from our back end allows us to easily specialize in particular areas of our development process, while at the same time offering the opportunity to build skills in less specialized areas. By moving to an API-driven development process we will be empowered to allow individual developers to work in the manner they feel most efficient, while requiring minimal time getting up to speed.

The new technology stack presents an exciting learning opportunity, and will enable us to continue to hone our service excellence in delivering fast, consistent, and stable websites to fulfill our clients’ needs.

Subscribe to Our Newsletter

If you haven’t yet done so, we invite you to subscribe to our monthly newsletter. In it we share new projects, web tips, cool techie stuff and whatever else we find that might interest you.

The post New Technology in the New Year appeared first on Web Services.

A few weeks ago we facilitated a workshop all about Search Engine Optimization (SEO).  We started off talking about why SEO is important and ended with: ‘it’s kind of a big deal’.

So first off, what is SEO?

, “Search engine optimization (SEO) is the practice of increasing the quantity and quality of traffic to your website through organic search engine results.”

Basically, it’s optimizing your website so that you can get more search (ie: Google) traffic.  When you type in a search query into Google, there’s a reason why you get the results that show up. It’s because those webpages have been optimized for those keywords that you typed it. But it’s more than just keywords that get them on that results page (we’ll get to that in a minute).

Why does SEO matter?

SEO matters because people are going to Google (and the like) to get to the information they need.  Take a prospective student as an example. They know they want to study Mechanical Engineering, but they’re not sure where.  So they type ‘mechanical engineering programs’ into Google.  They click on the link that appeals to them most and next thing you know, they’re applying to that school.

OK, maybe not right away, but you see where I’m going with this.

It’s about more than perspective students though. It’s about the community in general, both internal and external to ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´. We do a lot of great stuff here, and we post stories about this great stuff. You can extend your readership base massively if you do a few simple things to your content to get showing up in search engines.

Four Key Factors that Influence SEO

So what can you do to get your websites showing up in Google searches and bring in more traffic to your site?  There are four key factors to take into account:

Backend stuff.

We’re talking loading speed, mobile friendliness, security, plugins, and having an xml sitemap. Luckily for you, Web Services takes care of all this stuff. Though if you keep your images small (ie: don’t upload the full 4000×3700 image to your website, resize it first) – large images take longer to load – that will help.

Engagement.

has become increasingly sophisticated and it now takes into account how people are engaging with your content – particularly when they get to it from a search engine.  For example, if someone clicks on your link from Google, but then bounces right back after only spending 3 seconds on the page, that’s bad for your SEO.  Whereas if they clicked on the link and stayed for 3 minutes, Google likes that a lot and will rank you higher.

So how do you get people to stay? You provide value for your audience.  You use keywords naturally throughout your content.  You break your text up with headings, short paragraphs, and bullets.  In other words: you write for the web.

Keywords.

We can’t talk about SEO and not talk about keywords.  Obviously, they are super important and there’s a lot that can be said about and .  I say, don’t overthink it.

Pick your keywords that make sense to the content you’ve written and the audience you’ve written for and make sure you have them in all the right places. I’m talking titles, your first paragraph, headings, link anchors, and alt tags. And use long tail keywords. For example, you won’t rank high if you just use ‘research’ as a keyword – the competition is just too high and it’s so broad. You’ll have better luck with  ‘ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´ Research’ or ‘Canadian University Research’.

Links.

When it comes to links it’s all about connectivity and added value. Being connected to the rest of the internet is a good thing.  Linking to information that your audience would be interested in adds value to your content and is also a good thing.  When it comes to links there are three different kinds you need to consider: internal, inbound and outbound.

Internal links include your information architecture and internal linking.  Basically how well your pages are organized on your website.  Outbound links are when you link to websites outside of your site – this includes other ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´ pages – and they add value to your content.  Inbound links is all about getting people to link to you.  The key with inbound links is to get the quality links.  A link from CNN will get you better ranking than a link from someone’s personal blog post.

Want to Learn More ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´ SEO?

We have another SEO workshop coming up on November 15 and we’d love to see you there.  In this workshop:

• we dive into your Google Analytics reports to see how much search traffic you’re bringing in,
• we talk in depth about the information above, and
• we use this information to improve the search results on key pages on your website.

The post 4 Factors that Influence SEO appeared first on Web Services.

Although there is no surefire way to guarantee that you will rank high on organic (non-paid) Google searches, there are some things that you can do to improve your rank.

It starts by understanding how Google ranks websites.  It’s really great to see the direction that Google has gone in respect to SEO. It is all about the user experience.  The better the experience, the higher the ranking.

I don’t know about you, but I love a website that is fast, secure and contains quality content.

And so does Google.

Let’s talk a little about this, shall we?

Fast Websites

Google can tell by the code whether or not your site is fast.  A fast website is one that is not bogged down by a whole bunch of unnecessary code. And a faster site is a more usable site and one that Google likes.

When we designed the new template we designed for mobile first – lean and clean code.

Secure Websites

Google that it will start prioritizing websites with a secure https domain.  In the release they state “Browsing the web should be a private experience between the user and the website, and must not be subject to eavesdropping, man-in-the-middle attacks, or data modification.”  This is good news for us as we moved to https during our last big upgrade.

To learn more about this check out the Quratz article

Quality Content

We can write an entire blog series on this (and probably will). We’ve always stressed this – the design of your website won’t mean much if your content is a mess. Using keywords frequently in the right places is crazy super important.  But it’s more than just keywords. Google now looks at content length, grammar and spelling, site usability, number of pages, the use of bullets and numbered lists and oh so much more. It’s pretty cool really, they prioritize quality content that was crafted with an audience in mind.

I am 100% behind that.

The Complete List

Even though the algorithm that Google uses to rank sites is complex and ever changing (and fair enough, they do this so that people can’t trick the system), there are some things that we know for sure.

For an indepth list of ranking considerations, check out this article from backlinko.com.

The post How Google Ranks Websites appeared first on Web Services.

Search engines such as Google generate large amounts of traffic to websites. How can you improve the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) of your website, so that your site becomes more popular on Google?

Here are some basic steps you can take:

1. Update your website regularly.

Fresh content keeps Google coming back. Do you have news you want your audience to know about? Or useful information to share? Keep your website up-to-date with new posts!

2. Test Focus Keywords.

Readers should be able to easily figure out what your web page is about. Include one or two focus keywords in your content – in the title, headings, first paragraph and summary. Ideally, your keywords should be similar to terms that the public would search on Google. In this way, you increase the chances of your website appearing on Google. In the ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´ CMS, test focus keywords using the “” section.

3. Test your meta description.

The meta description is a short excerpt about your content. In Google search results, the meta description shows beneath your website title. Limit your meta description to 156 characters and be sure to accurately summarize what your content is about. Your goal is to match the meta description with what people are looking for when they search a topic on Google so they click through to your website. In ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´ CMS, test the meta description using the “” section.

4. Make each post a minimum of 300 words.

“Wordpress SEO by Yoast” recommends a minimum of 300 words for each piece of content. If your content is less, consider adding some relevant content.

There is no suggestion for a maximum number of words within one post, but too much is overwhelming and you may lose your readers. Consider breaking up content into multiple posts if it gets too long.

5. Include internal and external links within your content.

Linking makes your page/post relevant to other sources, and vice versa. This increases the popularity of your website. Make sure that you only link to trusted content.

6. Insert multimedia.

This includes images and videos. Pictures you put on your website will appear in Google Images. People may click into your site from there. Make sure these images meet the.

If you insert Youtube videos, your SEO results may increase, since Youtube videos always get displayed on top of Google.

7. Share your content on social media.

Your content will become popular on Google if more people read and share it. Social media such as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn increase your website visability as more people share the content.

The post 7 basic steps to improve Google search result of your website appeared first on Web Services.

Google Analytics is one of the best tools out there to keep track of your site’s traffic and improve your web content. When your content is fresh, it’ll rank higher in search engines. However, with several reports and complicated sections in Google Analytics, not knowing what to do with all this information can be overwhelming. That’s why we’ve prepared five simple tips to easily and quickly improve your CMS site using Google Analytics. Follow these tips to make some quick fixes go a long way!

1. Update your quick links

Quick links on your homepage are a great way to easily access popular 2^nd and 3^rd level navigation pages (pages that take 2+ clicks in the navigation to reach). Check your Analytics for your most visited 2^nd and 3^rd level navigation pages by clicking Content > Site Content > All Pages. Consider choosing these pages for your quick links. If there are no popular 2^nd and 3^rd level pages (not in the top 10), select your most popular pages as your quick links.

2. Check for broken links

A broken link is a link on your site that leads to a non-existent page. The error code for broken links is 404. By navigating to Content > Site Content > All Pages in Google Analytics, and by entering 404 in the search bar, you can find the broken links within your site. You can often find where the link is located and what page it is trying to access by taking a look at the URL.

The ‘page=’ section of the URL tells you what page the user is trying to access, while ‘from=’ shows you where the user clicked this link. If ‘from=’ is blank, the location is untraceable, or could be a manual typo. If ‘from=’ is within your site, navigate to that page in WordPress and modify or remove the link. If it is from another ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´ website, consider contacting the site owner to change or remove the link.

3. Check your keywords

Keywords are the search terms users are entering in search engines like Google or Bing. You can see what keywords users are entering by navigating to Traffic Sources > Search Engine Optimization > Queries, and sort by Clicks. If the keywords don’t match your site, or what you’d like users to be looking for, improve your SEO by using the tool in WordPress. If the keywords are representative of your site, continue to make your content people are searching accessible by using the Yoast function.

4. Check your site’s mobile traffic

M.carleton.ca, ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´â€™s mobile site, is the fifth-most visited site on campus, with traffic increasing every day. is extremely important, and checking your mobile traffic stats can emphasize that. Navigate to Audience > Mobile > Devices to see how many visits are coming through mobile phones. The higher the percentage of visits coming from mobile devices, the more important it is that your site is mobile-friendly. You’ll be surprised by how high your mobile traffic truly is!

5. Clean up your navigation

If your navigation is quite large and you have more pages on your site than you’d like, Google Analytics can help determine which pages are worth getting rid of. Navigate to Content > Site Content > All Pages, and sort in reverse order by clicking on the Pageviews column. If there are pages that have 1 view, ditch them. If pages with important content have less than 5 pageviews a month, consider merging the information into one page with headings and/or anchors.

Aim to check your Analytics once a month. Checking your Analytics too often can be counter-productive, but never checking them is unfortunate when such a great tool is available and ready to use. If you’d like to make the most of your Analytics, these tips are only the beginning! Learn more about Google Analytics by visiting our  and video tutorials. If you’re still puzzled about Analytics, or if you would like a Google Analytics site review conducted, please visit our training registration page.

The post 5 Easy Ways to Improve Your Site Using Google Analytics appeared first on Web Services.

As web content creators, we all aim to make our website rank high in search engines, such as Google. To get a better ranking, it is important to analyze your web content for SEO.

Sound daunting? Well, we have good news for you.

In WordPress, there is an  function that analyzes your content. This function provides a complete page analysis on how to optimize your page for search engines. You can also improve your SEO by checking your focus keywords, title and meta description.

You will see this SEO function when editing your ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´ CMS site. The SEO check button looks like this:

This colored button shows the quality level of your content.

Click “check”, and you will see a section called “WordPress SEO by Yoast”. Here are some key elements when you customize this section:

Focus Keyword:  Relevant keywords help to boost your Google search ranking. Pick the main keyword or key phrase that describes your page or post.

• Think of the focus keyword as the topic of your page or post
• Use keywords that are identical to search terms that people might put into the Google search bar
• Do keyword research to find out what people are looking for when studying your topic
• Use keywords consistently within your content

SEO Title: This is the title that people see in search engines such as Google.  An appealing title brings traffic to your site. The SEO title defaults to your page or post title, but you can edit this title.

• Keep the title relevant to your body text
• Keep the title short, but highlight key points
• Include keywords in your title

Meta Description: This is a short description under the title that people see in search engines. As important as SEO title, the meta description determines people’s interest in visiting your site. Write one or two sentences that explain what your page or post is about.

• Think of your audience and reasons that would make them click your page
• Use keywords at the beginning of the meta description
• Read the description out loud to make sure it flows well

Page Analysis:

The SEO function advises you on what you are doing well and what you should improve. You can make simple changes based on this advice.  To make the editing experience interesting,  created coloured buttons to display different levels of content quality.

Don’t forget to turn on SEO check to improve your web content quality. Happy content editing!

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