One of the SEO factors that many website owners are confused about is whether their domain name helps or hinders them in trying to rank higher in Google’s rankings. One of the primary reasons for that confusion is the conflicting advice that gets written about domain names and how big a part they play in SEO.

There are several attributes that a domain name has which all contribute in varying degrees to how much it helps a website’s ranking. Some of these have a bigger impact than others, plus you also need to remember that just having an optimised domain name is no use if you have ignored all the other SEO factors.

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Although many businesses have an online presence, and in theory, could have visitors to their website from anywhere in the world, most are only targeting an audience and customers in their local area. This is why having an SEO strategy for local rankings, rather than a global one, is so important.

Countless time, energy and money are wasted by webmasters trying to get their website ranked for search terms and keywords which are generic. For example, they might try to target a term like ‘landscape gardener’ and so are competing with just about every other landscape gardener in the world and they wonder why they can’t rank for it.

Instead if they focused on ranking for ‘landscape gardener in Anytown’, with Anytown being the neighbourhoods, towns or city they operate in, they would have far greater success. Not only that, this is where their customers live, so even if they could rank worldwide, a customer in London is hardly going to employ a landscape gardener based in Adelaide.

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You may already be aware that having keywords in your website content can help your SEO, but what is even more important is that the content is used in the right way, and in the right places. It is not enough to simply insert keywords anywhere, and worse, doing so excessively can damage your rankings, as Google consider this to be ‘keyword stuffing‘, which is a big red flag to them.

You need to get the balance right though, as what you don’t want to do is go too far the other way and have little or no keywords in your website content. While Google is very much against practices like keyword stuffing, they do need and want you to use keywords.

They are an important factor in helping Google identify what subject a website is about, and thus allows them to make their search engine results more relevant.

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If you’ve recently built a new WordPress website then the chances are that you haven’t installed an SSL certificate yet. In fact, the chances are that you probably don’t even know what an SSL certificate is, especially if you’re not an experienced web developer.

Well the short answer is that all websites should have an SSL certificate and, by extension, HTTPS browsing enabled for optimum security. In this article I’m going to walk you through everything you need to know about SSL certificates, including what they are, why you should have one, and how to get one.

What is an SSL certificate?

An SSL, or secure sockets layer certificate is a modern web technology that enables an encrypted link between a browser and a server. Usually, this link is between web browsers and web hosting servers, but they can also be between mail clients and mail servers.

Luckily, SSL certificates aren’t actually complicated technology. You can usually purchase one through your hosting provider, and installing it to your WordPress website is actually very easy. If you don’t have an SSL certificate already, then your website basically isn’t secure, and your visitors might not trust you.

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If you visit any website which discusses SEO and how to improve rankings on Google there will undoubtedly be some discussion, articles or information relating to backlinks. To prove the point, you are reading one of them right now, so it is fair to say professional SEO and backlinks are very much related.

Where the confusion, and sometimes reticence to use backlinks arise is not knowing which backlinks have a positive impact, and which backlinks are more likely to see you plunging down the rankings, or worse, wiped off them altogether, which has happened to countless websites.

Part of the problem is that there are so many ways in which you can create a backlink to your website, and just as many places online where you can link from. Add to this Google’s determination to clamp down on spam links, link farms and links which appear to be high quality but aren’t, it has become a cat and mouse game between the search engines, and those who use those blackhat tactics.

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