Accessibility, Performance, Best Practices and SEO when building a wordpress website

Accessibility, Performance, Best Practices and SEO when building a wordpress website

Introduction

When it comes to building a website, there are several key criteria that must be considered to ensure its success. In this article, we will explore the four essential criteria that every website developer should focus on: Accessibility, Performance, Best Practices, and SEO. By keeping these factors in mind, you can create a website that not only looks great but also functions flawlessly and attracts the right audience.

Accessibility: Making Your Website Inclusive

Accessibility is all about making your website usable for all users, regardless of their abilities or disabilities. It is crucial to ensure that your website is accessible to everyone, including those with visual impairments, hearing impairments, motor disabilities, or cognitive impairments.

Our team follows the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) to ensure that your website meets the necessary standards. We pay attention to factors such as color contrast, keyboard accessibility, alternative text for images, and proper heading structure. By prioritizing accessibility, we aim to create an inclusive online experience for all users.

Here are some key accessibility considerations when building a WordPress website:

  • Use proper heading structure to provide a clear hierarchy of content.
  • Include alternative text for images to provide context for visually impaired users.
  • Ensure that color contrast is sufficient for users with visual impairments.
  • Make sure that your website is keyboard accessible for users who cannot use a mouse.
  • Provide captions and transcripts for audio and video content.

Performance: The Need for Speed

Website performance plays a crucial role in user experience and can greatly impact the success of your WordPress website. A slow-loading website can frustrate users and lead to high bounce rates. To address this, we utilize premium plugins such as WP Rocket to optimize your website’s performance.

Here are some tips to optimize the performance of your WordPress website:

  • Optimize images by compressing them without compromising quality.
  • Minify CSS and JavaScript files to reduce file sizes and improve loading speed.
  • Utilize caching plugins to store static versions of your website and reduce server load.
  • Enable Gzip compression to reduce file sizes and improve loading speed.
  • Choose a reliable hosting provider that offers fast server response times.

Best Practices: Building with Quality in Mind

Following best practices when building a WordPress website ensures that your website is well-structured, secure, and easy to maintain. Here are some essential best practices to consider:

  • Keep your WordPress core, themes, and plugins up to date to ensure security and compatibility.
  • Use a child theme to make customizations without modifying the parent theme.
  • Organize your content with categories and tags for better navigation and SEO.
  • Implement a backup solution to protect your website from data loss.
  • Regularly monitor and optimize your website’s performance.

SEO: Getting Found in the Digital Jungle

SEO is crucial for driving organic traffic to your WordPress website. Optimizing your website for search engines can help improve its visibility and rank higher in search engine results.

We utilize Google Development Tools to analyze and optimize your website’s performance in search engine rankings. By conducting keyword research, optimizing meta tags, improving site structure, and creating high-quality content, we can help your website rank higher in search engine results.

Here are some SEO tips for your WordPress website:

  • Research and target relevant keywords for your content.
  • Optimize your page titles, meta descriptions, and URLs with targeted keywords.
  • Create high-quality and engaging content that provides value to your audience.
  • Optimize your images with descriptive file names and alt tags.
  • Build high-quality backlinks from reputable websites.

By implementing these accessibility, performance, best practices, and SEO strategies, you can create a WordPress website that not only looks great but also provides an excellent user experience, performs well, and ranks higher in search engine results. Remember, building a successful website requires ongoing maintenance and optimization, so make sure to regularly review and update your website to stay ahead of the competition.

Contact 360 Web Firm for your website Performance, Accessibility, Best Practices and SEO.

Importance Of SEO and Social Media

Social network is a terrific means to have an idea, video, website, article, and far more go viral. Its a fantastic means to share your websites content to others so other people can share it with all their contacts and prior to you know it, its all over the web. The most significant thing with sharing an article or a terrific story is that it needs to be enjoyable, interesting, informative, and worth sharing for individuals. If you can pull all this, possibilities are your providing on Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, or various other Social Media sites will be very successful.

When you develop a page on your Social Networking site, see to it you visit it frequently to see to it the material is fresh and updated and informative. This is the same just like your site or blog site.

Search & Intentional Targeting

While social networks permits marketing experts to engage individuals based upon age, place and interests, online search engine permits them to target individuals by purpose. That is, when somebody types a search terms (e.g. services or product name) into a search bar, they are actively considering appropriate products/services. Online search engine like Google wishes to be perfect when showing results for appropriate search inquiries and with Social Media, this helps them bring up the most up to date post and typically by significance and by date. See Example Below …

Marketing Online – Canada Web Design Services
360webfirm.com/advertising-online/
April 10, 2019– Marketing Your Website Online And Offline This is the greatest obstacle as soon as all your site is completed and you prepare to receive site visitors to your site.

Essentially, due to the fact that search individuals are taking the initial step to find much more info on service or products, they are already one-step further down the conversion funnel. With social media, on the other hand, as much as you can target people according to interests (and other demographics), there is no guarantee that they are interested in or in the market for the type of products/services that you’re marketing.

This is why SEO and PPC are such popular marketing tools. Not simply is it simpler to track and figure out Return Of Investment, but the traffic itself is of a a lot more pre-qualified nature.

How Social Media Can Support SEO (Search Engine Optimization )

Both onsite product and “social signals” are online search engine ranking aspects, much can be done to line up social media marketing efforts with SEO So even if SEO is not a concern for your organization (though it need to be), a couple of small tweaks to your social jobs can offer you included SEO benefits without compromising the integrity, tone and messaging of your social networks projects.

Blogging and SEO. (Similar to I am doing right now )

The most instant SEO advantages of blogging are:.
Having even more keyword related material on your website that is often update and can attract back links and social signals that increase the stability and authority of your site and its content. As a result, if your company is blogging, it can take a couple of small steps to ensure you optimize these SEO benefits; and if it’s not, it should truly consider working blogging into its social networks strategy.

Keyword Optimization: Before publishing new posts on your blog site, you need to think of whether they can be improved for targeted keywords. Basically, if you’re currently purchased SEO, you have actually most likely carried out a keyword research to recognize the most relevant keywords for your products/services. Prior to clicking the “release” button on that post, consider how any of those keywords can be worked into the material of that post. Potential locations to integrated these keywords consist of:.

  • The Page Title and Meta Description of the blog post page.
  • The Beginning article subject H1 which will be in bold letters and the first sentence on your post.
  • Any of the headers within the post– e.g. H2s and H3s.
  • Most Importantly, special content within the real material of the post (post).

While working one or two keywords into a post will not make or break your rankings for that keyword, doing so on a repeating basis will enhance the general overall rating of your domain/site for those keywords. And as your blog material collects popularity with your social efforts, the instances of those keywords will hold increasingly more weight.

Popular Social Media Services.

Facebook is the most popular social networking website. You can use it to create a page for your business in it and reveal it to your pals. In addition, you will get beneficial feedback from your site visitors. You could likewise get people to like your content, site, and blog and this has relevancy for Google and other search engines.

Twitter – Use twitter to inform your followers/visitors about the new things on your pages. It is the best way to let everybody know you have added something new. Twitter is a great place to show the new content on your website. twitter twits are actually found in Google search results just like Facebook and you should really consider creating a twitter account to help promote your website products and services.

Google + – Google plus is a great device and Social network service that lets you quickly and just include your site to your Circles or Google network of friends. This is a MUST because Google owns this and because Google owns the search engine world. Try to get lots of people on your Google + account and try not to over-spam, but link often your blog postings and web pages. This is a great way to get links in Google as well as discovered in Google for your shared pages.

Delicious is a web-based bookmarking website. Delicious individuals save their bookmarks on the internet site so they can access them from any web browser. You can utilize this website as a measurement of the popularity of your website. If numerous users are bookmarking your pages this means that they are popular and useful to your visitors. This is becoming a very popular Social Networking site and again it is something you should create an account with and use regularly.

Social network Involvement More Pointers.

Interact in social networks services: This means to build some status on social networks and to get out there and get your site or blog linking started. Keep in mind to consider your social presence as a discussion or chat. Share material that’s high worth for your contacts, while likewise engaging with them. Engagement suggests sharing other people’s content, thanking people for re-tweets, likes, and shares, and joining people in conversations. This doesn’t have to take a great deal of time, but ideally you ought to invest a few minutes a day concentrated on engagement. This will take determination and dedication like I have stated in several of my articles. Hard work constantly pays off!

Construct your brand name: Social media is an excellent medium to assist construct your brand. A branded social presence can assist establish word of mouth that gets you consumers, points out, and links. Think about branding your social presence in 3 vital ways. Ensure that your profile names and descriptions are branded and link to your website or Blog. Preferably your username and URL for both sites ought to be linked to your company name. Ensure that the look and feel of your website carries through to your profile layouts and design. Lastly, share expert content in your brand’s voice regularly. This does not mean that you should never ever share individual details, but it does imply to evaluate all potential material with the lens of “is this appropriate for my customers and colleagues?”.

Produce social signals by making content simple to share: Does every page on your site consist of buttons that make it basic to share your content? How about every post on your blog? Make the effort to set up a program such as ShareThis to permit readers to instantly share anything they take pleasure in. Focus on seeing to it that you’ve consisted of the relevant networks– at a minimum, users need to have the ability to share to Facebook, Twitter, & Google +.

Have a platform approach: “Be Everywhere On The Web” is one technique to social media, however it’s hardly ever the most efficient. Particularly if you’re attempting to get quality traffic to your website and individuals to have a look at and share your material. Rather, choose what platforms are visiting be the most efficient for you. The best method thinks about the social habits of your target consumers. Are they video individuals? Facebook abusers? Invest your time online cultivating a following that creates social task and associated with your business objectives beyond SEO. If you work your followers, friends, and people linked to you with too much sharing, you could get reported and obstructed or they merely may erase you from their buddies list. (I have had this occur numerous times when I attempted too hard) Don’t over-spam …

Always Use Google Plus– From a just SEO point of view, it is necessary to have a presence on Google+. Right here’s why: Google has been explicit that social signals play a role in its algorithm. Twitter and Facebook matter some, but numerous of the search results from both networks are limited. Therefore, the network that’s holds the most weight is Google +. Guarantee that you have a profile that’s connected to your site, and hang around establishing your audience there. Share content, and see to it that a Google+ button is provided for people to such as and share your material.

Social Media Helps Businesses Get More Exposure

In order for a business to genuinely succeed, it will require all the exposure that it can get. A lot of individuals believe that a company just needs to exist for it to succeed however you will have to comprehend how social networks assists businesses get more exposure. More People than Everybody nowadays will have an account on a social network and so it makes good sense that you use this to your benefit.

An internet site like Facebook has 800 million users and this is complimentary exposure for your business. Nevertheless, business owners tend to disregard this as simply just a location for teenagers to hangout but this is really a web marketing tool that you can utilize for years to come.

Produce Connections When you utilize social media networks like Facebook or YouTube, you will be able to meet individuals from all over the world. These people can help your company grow in various means therefore you will should focus on finding a means to utilize these connections wisely.

Social network will continue to grow therefore you must get involved in it as quickly as feasible before you are left by your competitors. Generally, social networks will be around for a long time and it will just assist your company expand. Whether it is through exposure or merely just by being a way to get in touch with individuals from all over the world, social media will just do favorable things for your business. Though some individuals will think that social media is just for enjoyment, it is now a vital piece of online marketing and being able to promote your company.

If you are serious about having the ability to get more exposure on the internet, then you need to certainly focus on using social media as your main source of online exposure.

Americans And Canadians invest approximately 16 % of their time on social networking websites. The majority of entrepreneur now use social networks to grow and promote their ventures. It is important that you understand how to efficiently utilize social networks to prevent you from squandering your time upgrading your Facebook page, and dispatching tweets when nobody truly has any interest in reading them.

Here are the Top 5 social media suggestions to get you started

NUMBERS ARE NOT EVERYTHING – Having few thousands fans or followers does not necessarily translate into sales. Even if you are not promoting a business and you have few thousands friends, it does not imply that you are going to have more social communications, particularly if you do not have anything in common. Spending tons of moneys of time looking for fans, when they have no interest in you or your products is a waste of time.

STICK WITH THE FREE AND SIMPLE SERVICES – You can accomplish just as much in terms of promotion with a service that is free than with one you need to pay for. If you are new to the world of social media you ought to start with an easy website such as Facebook and twitter which both have millions of individuals worldwide.

LIMITATION YOUR EFFORTS – You don’t should have a profile on every social networking site. Stick to a handful of the very best sites and connect them completely. For instance, you can have your twitter page link to your blog and Facebook page.

BE EVEN MORE SOCIABLE – Instead of straight offering your services or products, engage your followers in conversation. Social network takes a various strategy than various other internet based techniques such as email marketing. You have to sell yourself along with your business.

BE HONEST – Avoid writing artificial positive reviews to acquire popularity, wise social media users will see through this and it might damage your credibility.

Follow these Leading 5 social media tips if you desire your company to be a success online.

Conclusion For Social Media and Search Engine Optimization

Be involved with social media even before you start your website or blog. Have a branded name for all your social media accounts and keep it tied to your business name in some way. Link soon and often your content. keep your Social Media services clean, up-to-date, and full of information – Just like your website or blog. Build up your friends and share your information as well as share information from others. This will insure a fair relationship between you and your friends. Never over-Spam content on these Social sites as your will be blocked and your friends will drop you from their list. This might even turn into a chain effect and you could loose most of your contacts.

Also with Social Media, be very careful what you post because if you post things on Facebook and other social media networks, people might get offended by your content and this could really effect your business, KEEP your personal Social Media separated from your Business social media ALWAYS!

Basic SEO Must Be Done First On Your Website

Basic SEO Must Be Done First On Your Website

Get the basic Search Engine Optimization done first.

Every website created should have the basic SEO done in order to stand a fighting chance in the search engines like Google and Bing.

I call this Static SEO ( Search Engine Optimization )

What is SEO –  Search Engine Optimization is a way to improve the visibility of your website pages in search engines like Google and Bing. The reason we do SEO is to drive FREE traffic to a site that converts into sales of goods and services. This is normally called generic traffic, being found in Google and/or Bing without paying for advertising.

At times we concentrate on so many things to improve our website traffic and stats. These things might be Social media, advertising, promoting and marketing. We might use Google Ad Words or Facebook ads to get traffic for potential sales. These are all great things to do for your business website, but we neglect the most important thing, the basic SEO on our website.  The basic SEO should be the most important thing to start off with.

I wanted to create this article in order to help small businesses start off on the right foot for SEO.  This article is created from years of experience and from happy clients who have gained more exposure, traffic, and sales.

I have broken down the steps I do in order to perform the basic Search Engine optimization on my clients websites.

Please note *** – These steps are what 360 Web Firm does and what we believe in. We are sharing these with you as a courtesy. If you decide to use any sugesstion in this Article, you are 100% responsible for any issues that may happen. Please ALWAYS take a complete backup of your website files and database before doing any major changes or updates to it.

Create a website using a Content Management System like WordPress

You can use anything you want to build your website and you can still do all the SEO you need. However, I use WordPress for most of my websites because it is widely used and is considered the #1 CMS in the world. Using WordPress also gives you benefits of adding plugins and performing SEO tasks relatively easy.

The first thing you need to do is to find a good WordPress theme that is not too heavy and will load fast. This also has to work with several plugins we need to make the site go faster and for integration of Google and Bing scripts such as analytics and webmasters tools.

Utilize a SSL for complete website.

It is a good practice to make your website more secure by using a SSL certificate. It is also widely known that Google recommends all websites now to use a SSL, even if its not an ecommerec store. If you have two exact same websites and one has a SSl and the other does not, Google will rank the one with the SSL much higher than the one without.

A SSl will make your visitors feel more secure and they might take more action on your website. Therefore, having a SSl is a must for all websites and to better increase your SEO stats and chances with Google and Bing.

Use keywords or phrases on each page and make content unique.

All pages within your website should be set up with their own unique keywords and/or phrases. This allows all your pages to have the ability to be found in the search engines. Over all, this will give your complete website more exposure. Once they are on any page within your website, they have the ability to click on any menu items such as your homepage.

Lets say for instance you have two pages. One page is search engine optimization, while the other page is website design. The search engine optimization page should have keywords and/or phrases that you would like to be found in google for that page. Examples might be: Search engine, visibility, traffic and so on. The website design page might have: website services, web development and website packages.

Each page on your website should be unique with content and have several of your main keywords within the content,  Meta Tags and headers like the H1, H2, and H3 headers.

Spend a lot of time on each page to utilize keywords within that page. The page title itself should have one of your main keywords in it.

Set up Meta tags and Header text on a per page basis.

meta-tags-view

Meta tags are snippets of text that describe a certain page’s content. These tags are added via a plugin or directly on a static web page. They are not shown on the front end of the website, but only on the backend or code part of the website. These tags are read by search engines like Google and Bing and are displayed in search results like the example above. Each page should have different Meta title and Meta description tags. These tags should have in them your Keywords and/or phrases you created for that particular page. A good tool to use in WordPress for setting up Meta Tags is Yoast.

Headers such as H1, H2, and H3 are used as headers for content or titles for content. Please note that you should ONLY use one H1 header at the top of each page. These headers are just what they sound like, headers or titles of a section, article, feed or anything else that should utilize a heading. Again, these should use your Keywords and/or phrases for that page only.

Look at the top of this section, I have “Set up Meta tags and Header text on a per page basis.” This is a H3 header I have used to separate each section or topic.

H1 should use your page keywords and /or phrases, while H2 and H3 should be used for each section or titles on that page.

Images used on website should be optimized and have Alt tags.

All your images you add to your website should be optimized at a certain size for speed. Your images should also be clear and understandable for what message you are trying to show your readers. Once the above is done, your images should then be set up to use a proper Title and also a description (Alt ) attribute for screen readers and visual impaired people.

 

  • Optimize image for speed of your web page. Optimizing your website images is a process of showing the high-quality images in the right size, and resolution while keeping the smallest possible size the website will load suich as in a mobile view. Say for instance the website uses small size for that image on a desktop because the content is in a column. When you switch to mobile, the image now uses 1 column and is twice the size. The higest size that image gets, is the size you need to use for your website. Using images that are smaller and then get bigger on your website will distort the quality of the image. Alwasy use images are high quality and at correct size.  Example – If you upload an image that is 2MB in size which comes to like 5000 pixels wide by 5000 pixels height, your website will on average only use 800 pixels wide by 800 pixels height. Even though your website uses a smaller size, it will still load the 5000 px by 5000 px image each time the page loads and this will SLOW your website down. Crop the image to the largest size the webiste will use first before uploading it. You could also use a plugin that woudl help out. I receommend using the plugin Smush Image Compression and Optimization.
  • Always use an image that is revelant to the content you are using it for. Example – If you have an article on swimming pools, make sure you use an image that is related to this.
  • Set up a description or alt attribute and an image title for each image you add to your website. if you are using a CMS like wordpress, this is very easy to do which each image.  Alt – Specifies an alternate text for an image. This text appears inside the image container when the image can not be displayed for some reason. It also helps screen readers describe the image to visually impaired people. Title – is used to provide a title for your image.

Make sure website content is Optimized and website is fast loading.

There is a few steps to optimizing your website for speed and performance. The below is taking into account that your images have already been optimized.

 

  • Utimize a cache plugin. WP Rocket is the most popular premium caching plugin for WordPress. This is what 360 Web Firm uses on our website. It is easy to use and implament. This is a paid plugin, but you are can use a free plugin for caching your website. Caching is a way to speed up a website and also give the website better performance.

 

  • Enable GZIP – Gzip is a method of compressing files (making them smaller) for faster transfers from server to browser.

 

  • Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN) – To make your website load faster, a CDN minimizes the distance between your server where the website files are located to the browser where the visitor is loading your website. It stores multiple cached content from your website in several locations to allow for the files to come together quicker to be viewable by your vistors. Basically, it delievers the content from your website much faster.

 

  • Hosting – This is very important because your website needs to load fast and having a web hosting account that is fast will help improve the speed of delivery to your visitors. I recommend a VPS hosting account. A shared hosting can really bog down your website and make it load slow. Shared hosting resources are normally shared with other people on the same block and if one is using too much resources, it will slow your website down. I use a VPS server for all my clients.

Here are a few links to check the speed and performance of your website. These sites are what we use for testing purposes.

 

Create a sitemap for Google and Bing

Creating a sitemap for your website is very important.  When you craete a sitemap, you then go into Google and Bing to add these sitemaps. XML Sitemaps are important for SEO because they make it easier for Google and Bing to find your site’s pages. This is important because Google and Bing ranks your pages, not just your website.

For creating a sitemap, we use a few tools. Here is what 360 Web Firm uses for our sitemaps. Please note that creating a Webmasters Account will be discussed below.

 

  • XML – Sitemaps – Just create and then go into your Google Webmasters tools and uplaod the sitemap. Do this also for BING Webmasters tools.

 

  • Yoast Sitemaps – This is also easy to do once you install the Yoast plugin. You then Just create and then go into your Google Webmasters tools and uplaod the sitemap. Do this also for BING Webmasters tools.

Create Webmasters Account Google and Bing and submit all your website pages

Creating a Google and Bing webmsters account will allow you to submit your web pages directly for indexing. It will also allow you to submit sitemaps as well. This account will show you what has been indexed and what is missing or if you have any crawl errors.  You can also use this account to request pages ot be removed from Google or Bing. Its free and easy to set up and manage. It allows webmasters to check indexing status and optimize visibility of their websites.

 

Create A Google My Business Page

You should always create a Google My Business page for better search results. This will allow people to view your business, read or leave comments and reviews, and allow people to view images of your work. The Google My Business also has a quick map address, phone and link to your website. This shows up on the RIGHT side of search engines and also the top three on the LEFT of the search results. ( see images below ).

Its easy to set up. You need to add your business with Google and then verify by waiting for a post card with a code to come in the mail. Google wants to make sure you are a legit business with a legit address.

Google My Business is a FREE tool from Google and this will help you gain much more exposure for your business.

Create Google My Business Page now

google business-two

 

google business-one

Whats Next?

In order to continue your SEO on your website and for your business, you should consider some of the following:

 

  • Run a BLOG on your website to talk about your services or your products.
  • Be active with Social Media. Add your blog articles you created above to your social media sites. Get a huge audience for your social media. Get Facebook likes, Google +, Twitter Likes, Get reviews and so on.
  • Keep your websites content up-to-date and on a regular basis.
  • Add your testimonials to your website.
  • Runs ads in newspapers, radio and even the television.
  • Run ads with Google and Bing.