It is a bit tricky to assess the impact, because Google rankings change constantly, both because many of the sites are being modified all the time, and Google is tweaking their ranking algorithms daily. So watching any single site wouldn't tell us much.

Experts who study these things have averaged the results of large numbers of sites to try and eliminate the "normal" fluctuations, and as one study reports, about half of the non-mobile friendly sites dropped in rankings in mobile searches.

So if you haven't done so, make sure your website is mobile-optimized.

If you aren't sure, the first place to look is on your smartphone.

Google your category or your business name.  If Google likes you, you'll see the tag "Mobile-friendly" appears at the start of the search results.*

If not, talk to your web company.

* - Confused about mobile-friendly versus mobile optimized? Read this blog post.

Still confused? Contact us.

Norse is a St. Louis-based security firm that helps major firms deal with Internet threats. They created a global network of "honey pots" -- Internet connected applications that appear to be vulnerable targets. 

Then they just wait for the hacker computer programs to find and attack these targets.   When their system detects a hacking attempt, it determines the source of the attack through its IP address (sort of like the caller id of the Internet), and feed the info into a real time map.

Below you can see what is happening in the "hackerverse" as you are reading this. (You'll likely see a focus at St. Louis; since that is Norse's headquarters, they probably have a lot more of their "honey pots" there, and thus attract a lot more attacks.)

Here is a link to the live map.

No, they weren't lying to you.

Until Google decided to use the term to mean something else, "mobile-friendly" was the term used by website people for a site that displayed accurately and the same on desktops, laptops, tablets, and smartphones, simply adjusting the size to fit the screens.  We, and most good web firms, built all sites that way.

"Mobile-optimized" meant something much more advanced. The layout automatically reformatted depending on the device viewing the website. Until fairly recently, that meant a separate design and programming for each different sized device. In most cases, this proved cost-prohibitive.

Evolving technology has made it possible to program sites that respond to the size of the device. So many new "mobile optimized" websites are "responsive". Others show separate layouts that were created specifically for different devices.

Google changes the definition...

Google has taken the position that what we called "mobile-friendly" is no longer friendly enough, as the use of smartphones to access the Internet has skyrocketed.  By their definition now, "mobile-friendly" now requires that the site be "mobile-optimized."

Hacking isn't all that unusual, but the FBI report points out a couple of alarming facts.  First is that the hackers are "using relatively unsophisticated methods to exploit technical vulnerabilities" in the WordPress sites, and second, all the hacked sites were "easily exploited by commonly available hacking tools."

(And some folks wonder why we opted years ago to use a commercial Content Management System, rather than WordPress... as we explained in our post last year "You can't afford cheap".)

Their mission is, "Spirit of a Hero Foundation is a non-profit, non-partisan organization dedicated to providing financial, moral, and community support to critically wounded service members of the United States Armed Forces. Through community driven activities, Spirit of a Hero will raise awareness, and give hope to the Soldiers, Marines, Sailors, and Airmen fighting for our freedom."

Recently the organization announced that "Spirit of a Hero has been chosen as the 2016 recipient for the Chris Kyle Memorial Benefit! Thank you to the Kyle family for this amazing blessing!"

Congrats to the organization! It's been a pleasure to be among such wonderful people!

For years, we have been encouraging clients to make sure their websites work well on mobile devices.

A couple of years ago, our advice was “if you are getting significant amounts of mobile visits, it’s time to update your site.”

Then, late last year, we dropped the “if” and advised… it is time.

Now, Google says
  “Get on with it”… now!

Google recently announced:

“Starting April 21 2015, we will be expanding our use of mobile-friendliness as a ranking signal. This change will affect mobile searches in all languages worldwide and will have a significant impact in our search results.
 
Consequently, users will find it easier to get relevant, high quality search results that are optimized for their devices.”

Or in plain English…

If your site isn’t ready, expect it to go downhill in Google.

What to do?

If your site is more than a year or two old, it almost certainly predates the technology that Google now demands, and will need updates.

If you get part of your business via Google, this isn't something you should put off. Contact your web firm right away to find out what you need to do.

The scam is an invoice for renewing your domain name... or that's what it looks like without close study. The fine print generally says it is a solicitation, for something you really don't want.

Sorry to report, some clients have lost money when they didn't look closely. 

These arrive both by USPS and by email.

These seem to usually show up around 3-4 months before your domain is due for renewal - timed to get your money before you have already taken care of the real invoice. 

These deceptive practices are illegal, and governments worldwide have played "Whac-a-Mole" trying to shut down such companies nearly since day 1 of the Internet, but they keep reappearing.

Wikipedia lists some of these efforts - the companies involved show up over and over again.

Your real domain renewal notice will come from your website provider or from the domain registrar where you purchased the domain name, and it will usually arrive around 3-4 weeks before the domain expires.

If in doubt, check with your website firm.

These usually start with something like "...I was just looking at your website and see that..."  Sometimes they will even include some sort of automated details about your website, purporting to illustrate problems.

(Since we manage lots of sites, we frequently receive many copies of the exact same message, each referring to a different site, and, inexplicably, each from a different hotmail or gmail address. They are otherwise identical.)

Google itself has by far the best advice that we have seen regarding such pitches:

Be wary of SEO firms and web consultants or agencies that send you email out of the blue.
Amazingly, we get these spam emails too:

"Dear google.com,
I visited your website and noticed that you are not listed in most of the major search engines and directories..."

Reserve the same skepticism for unsolicited email about search engines as you do for "burn fat at night" diet pills or requests to help transfer funds from deposed dictators.

 If you follow the tips in our blog, you will be far ahead of anything that you might get from one of those "out of the blue" contacts.

(Next week: the domain renewal scam.)

Well, most of your website visitors are "just looking" too.  Most will walk out without becoming your customer.

Why?

Many are in the wrong place and don't want or need what you have to offer, are just curious, or are doing research. A few are your competitors, watching what you are doing.

(We're only talking about likely legitimate visitors here, not the "visits" that seem to come from strange sources, often "robot" programs hitting thousands of sites per minute for who-knows-what reason…)

2% Average*

If you are one of those "average" people with 2.54 children, you are 5'10" (male) or 5'4½" tall (female), etc., then

• probably 20 visitors in 500 (4%) are really prospects to become your customers, i.e., they came to your website with the intention of getting what you offer, and
• you will probably get only half of those as customers…

That's 10 new customers for every 500 legitimate website visitors who hit the web page where you make your offer.

How do you improve results?

Many will focus on increasing that 500, through "shotgun approach" advertising, broad SEO efforts, etc.

But what about those 10 visitors who walked in your door, wanting and needing what you offer, who walked away?

Rather than spending time and money on increasing traffic, where the best you can expect is that 96-98% will go towards visitors who will never spend money with you, focus on those things that will bring in more of those 10 prospects you are losing.

The Business Coach says:   "Improve what you offer, and how you present it, and your efforts will be rewarded many times over."

We'll discuss some of the improvements we have heard from the Business Coach in our next few articles.

*—A 2% "conversion rate" is a commonly discussed average. But just as nearly everyone who enters a neighborhood grocery store buys something, while only a small percentage of those walking into an art gallery in a tourist area will pick up a painting, your website's mileage too will vary. 

Trying to "game" Google is a wild goose chase.  They refine their search engine algorithms constantly – dozens of times per week – to try and suggest websites that are current and are what a Google user is looking for.

The trick is, there's no trick.  

Sure, you will want to use titles and headlines to say what your website is all about, but the best thing you can do is to frequently update your site with information that the people you'd most like to reach will find useful. 

Make it a New Year's Resolution -- a new article or page every other week!

Use the blog that is (or ought to be) a part of your website. This makes it simple to add new, relevant information, making your website an increasingly rich source of information for those looking for what you offer. That's what Google - and visitors - want to see.

Big mistake. A web page or blog post that is pretty good, and online today, is infinitely better than perfectly crafted text that never gets published!

In the words of those masters of search engine optimization,

"Striving to better, oft we mar what's well."
           Shakespeare (or maybe Francis Bacon), King Lear, ~1603

"The better is the enemy of the good."
           Voltaire, La Bégueule, 1772

"Just do it."
           Nike, 1988

Our clients who follow this advice generally have found themselves with excellent positioning in Google, often with multiple first page entries.

Don't have time? Let us help!  We can take your material and publish it for you, or even have our ghostwriters write text that helps tell your story!

We didn’t think so.

Equally obsolete are websites that don’t work on smart phones.

After all, widely available Internet browsing on smart phones was "born" around 7 years ago.

That makes it about 50 in Internet years!

So, how do you make your website act like a grown-up?

It should display appropriately whether it's viewed on a smart phone, a tablet, or a traditional computer.

Just a few years ago, this meant having a "clone" of your site on some other service.

Not anymore. Now, modern web technology lets you have a separate mobile version on your own website, or have a "responsive" website that adapts to the size of the window.

Can you envision that? If not, watch this brief demo...

If getting your website to act its age is one of your New Year's resolutions, talk to your web people!

You probably can't afford "free"

Around a half dozen times a year, those "free" software programs require "emergency recalls" -- replacing vulnerable portions with revised code.

You can't not do the updates.

If not updated immediately, those sites built on "free" software get hacked.

• Just last week: read this BBC news account of the ~12 million sites using "free" software that were hacked, when the recall was not applied within 7 hours of being issued.
• A few months ago: PC World reports that 50,000 sites using a popular plug-in for their "free" software were hacked.

Your hosting provider is not going to update the software for you, and your website developer won't do it for free.

Google makes it easy to find costs of applying the "recalls" for the most common "free" systems. Service plans averaged around $100 - $150 a month, on top of that "cheap" hosting. That's just for the updates, not site changes.

Not included in those service plans: Once the new "free" software has been installed, it's not uncommon for the "plug-in" to no longer work, so some part of the website will be disabled until that hobbyist-developed component is updated, or a replacement found.

Believe us -- if we thought those "cheap" options were the best solution, we'd still be doing it, not shelling out tens of thousands of dollars a year on the advanced commercial system we use.

A view from Down Under

Last year, SmartCompany, an Australian online magazine for small business owners, published an article on why you might choose a commercial hosted platform such as our Online Business Partner^® for your site, rather than having your web people download one of those "free" programs and host it on one of those super-cheap services.

Here is a summary, used with permission of the author, ruthlessly edited for length and to "Americanize" it:

Who would you prefer underpin your business website?
The hobby community, or a large profitable company?

The commercial hosted platforms generally contain the latest features – far more than a smaller business would use. Not so long ago, these features and functionality would cost millions of dollars. This means website tasks gets done quickly, rather than taking many hours of costly programmer time.

These systems typically cost $25 - $75 a month, including hosting. For this you get a complete and fully tested and supported system, constantly being improved and upgraded at no extra charge.

If there are any problems with the commercial system, the provider has an in-house support staff at the ready to quickly resolve it – at no further cost to you.

This means that both you and your web professional can get on with what you do best – and leave what can be a monumental task of maintenance and security to the professionals who work for the multi-billion-dollar firm that owns the commercial platform.

One web developer’s view

In closing, I’ll leave you with a few comments from the owner of a San Francisco web design firm that I came across:

"Free" software is built by hobbyists for hobbyists – who by definition get pleasure in messing around with the topic of their hobby, such as finding and installing the latest great plug-in to make a site work correctly, after installing the last mandatory security patch that broke the old plug-in, and reprogramming things to work with that new plug-in which works just a bit differently than the last one.

For business? Forget the "free" software that some web people choose to use because it costs them nothing (and makes them a lot when they have to fix hacked sites).

Don't think you are too small and obscure to be at risk. Hackers use ‘robot’ programs that scour the internet, thousands of sites per minute, looking for vulnerable sites using that "free" software so they can automatically install their viruses on your site.

He was also a Chicago public school teacher, and later an award-winning principal in Chicago area schools. (You have no idea how hard it was not to try and draw some connection between his career in education and later fight against terrorists…)

After retiring from 29 years in Military Intelligence, he formed Counter Terrorism Lectures & Consulting LLC, offering consulting to firms that need to factor potential terrorist threats into their business plans, and presentations to schools and organizations interested in the issues of the Middle East, Central Asia, and East Africa.

You have a friend who is selling shoes. Maybe once in a while he will sell something else, but mainly shoes.

He'd really like more sales, and asks your help. You visit and look around.

After studying things quite a bit, you learn that thousands and thousands of people in your local area go looking for shoes every week.

But only about 300 of them find their way to his front door, and only about 6 a week buy shoes from him.

Study the photos and think about the details...

Should your friend…

• Put up a big billboard to get more people to drive to his store?
• Run radio and TV ads to get people to go there?
• Send direct mail to thousands of people advertising the store?

What would your advice be?

Here's how it happened... the short story that pretty much explains it all: