Author Archives: Jim Makos

Jim Makos

As a web developer, Jim is deploying websites, tests hosting providers and servers, improves web pages' loading speed and employs the latest marketing techniques, so that his blogs and articles rank well at the search engines. Follow him at Google+, Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn.

New Hosting and Design Improved Website’s Loading Speed

Web Design, Web Hosting

December 8, 2014

We just completed moving a client’s website to a new server and installing a new WordPress theme. The result is not only eye-appealing but speed-efficient as well.

Amanatidou.com is the personal website of professional Psychologist, Fostiria Amanatidou. Fostiria’s office is situated in Thessaloniki, Greece and she often appears in TV shows and speaks at local radio stations, where we are sure she mentions her website quite regularly.

As a result, her website is accessed daily by Greek residents. That can be an issue when the domain is hosted in Texas, USA and visitors notice slow loading times when accessing her website. Slow page speed means driven-away visitors, which results to less conversions and patients for her. Thus, a move to a European server was in order, so that people don’t need to wait for the website to load.

Think that 30% of a website’s traffic is lost for every second of delay in loading. By regaining just one second of loading time, Fostiria should now expect more emails in her inbox and more customers for her business. And given the website now loads under one second for the majority of her visitors (still, the website does feature an English version for non-Greek visitors), we bet not a single visitor is going away before the whole front page loads!

amanatidou-page-speed — Page load time confirmed by Pingdom.

Moving Amanatidou.com to the top-notch hosting company, WP Engine, was done much easier than it sounds.

Initially the website was hosted with HostGator, which meant a lot of data going back and forth over the Atlantic. So next, we thought of another… ocean and moved the domain to DigitalOcean, relocating the server to London for an initial speed boost. By the time we thought it was time for a theme redesign, we decided to combine that with transferring over to WP Engine.

We had used a theme by ElegantThemes for Amanatidou.com, which had served its purpose perfectly. As we no longer have a license with ElegantThemes though, we could not keep the template updated properly. Thus, we went with a professionally-looking template made by Theme-Junkie, where we hold a lifetime membership.

[dt_highlight color=””]Summary[/dt_highlight]: This week, we moved Amanatidou.com domain to a testing server of WP Engine, where we installed a new theme and redesigned the whole website. Today, we launched the website, which now loads faster and features a fresh look. Fostiria was able to update her blog all this time, while the website experienced zero downtime. DigitalOcean server now provides a workable backup of her website in case of emergency.

Tags: Amanatidou, DigitalOcean, page speed, Theme Junkie, WP Engine

Hosting with WP Engine improved Page Speed, Googlebot confirms

Web Hosting

September 25, 2014

We recently migrated several of our managed websites over to WP Engine. We’d heard of page speed improvements noticed by other web developers to their own websites, although we remained skeptical and avoided turning suddenly optimistic. We’ve counted too many fruitless attempts to accelerate loading times in the past. Besides, page loading speed wasn’t the main reason for moving the websites from HostGator to WP Engine.

In the end though, we welcomed this added benefit of hosting with WP Engine, which is undoubtedly confirmed by the Googlebot itself. Just check our Webmaster Tools’ data below of the improved page speed for our websites.

TradingGraphs.com: The financial blog’s page speed experienced a spectacular improvement. Googlebot now spends less than a second to crawl a page on average, when it used to spend more than four seconds for the same task.

StoiximaOnline.com: This Greek blog certainly benefited by the migration, as the new WP Engine server is now located in UK, compared to HostGator’s default location of Texas. Given the blog’s main traffic comes unsurprisingly from Greece, visitors saw a dramatic improvement in page speed, leading them to check out more pages per visit. And more pages/visit means more pageviews/day even with the same incoming traffic, hence more revenue per month! Yet, a regular visitor of the website does not come from Greece. Googlebot noticed that page loading speed was significantly increased, leading to 60% reduced time spent downloading a page. As a consequence, Googlebot now crawls twice the pages it used to crawl per day, indicated by the charts at Webmaster Tools.

Other websites saw similar improvements in their loading times, although not that noteworthy.

Does hosting with WP Engine improve the page speed of your website or blog?

Chances are that your website page speed will most probably increase. Note that several factors affect page speed, not just the hosting server. Before hosting our websites with WP Engine, we had optimized page loading speed via popular WordPress plugins, like Total Cache, by reducing images’ size, caching with CDN and installing speed-optimized themes by ThemeForest. We even tried Nginx for WordPress instead of resource-hungry Apache configuration!

You may not notice a significant change in your Google Analytics data though. Our own data suggests that visitors continue accessing the websites at the usual speeds, unless Analytics’ data are off.

We recommend checking the data at Webmaster Tools alternatively. More specifically, we are interested in the ‘Crawl Stats’ tab, where ‘time spent downloading a page’ is found. If the chart shows a declining line such as in the charts above, you can be sure your website’s page speed has improved. Even if your visitors do not concur, Googlebot’s activity is an undeniable proof.

In Google’s eyes your website speed has increased. As page speed plays a crucial role in search engine rankings nowadays, we wouldn’t be surprised if your page rankings will have a boost.

People over at WP Engine celebrate OctoberPress Hosting Fest and offer a discount code good for 3 free months of hosting with an annual hosting plan! The personal plan starts at $29/month, so the ‘OctoberPress14‘ discount code will save you $87 when you sign up for a year.

Photo by Alejandro Mejía Greene.

Tags: Google Analytics, page speed, Webmaster Tools, WP Engine

YouTube Monetization with a Google AdSense Business Account

Advertising

January 17, 2014

Monetizing Youtube is relatively easy. You just accept YouTube monetization for your uploaded personal videos. What happens though when you want to drive YouTube revenue to your Google AdSense business account? Here is how to associate your YouTube channel with your business AdSense account.

The problem I solved: Having monetized my personal YouTube channel, I needed all the YouTube revenue to end up to my company’s accounts. Given YouTube creators can only be paid through Google AdSense, I had to associate my YouTube videos with my company’s AdSense business account.

If you started out with Google AdSense like me, you have already got yourself a personal account to monetize your websites and blogs. You registered your domain, built a website, began blogging and adding content. Nice. Given the website had already reserved space for advertising, you thought:

[dt_quote type=”blockquote” font_size=”big” animation=”fade” background=”fancy”]Let’s monetize and make money by adding Google AdSense ads![/dt_quote]

So, you added AdSense code all over your website, hoping that some of your readers would eventually click on those ads. As a newcomer to the online advertising world, you opened a personal account just like everyone else.

At first your efforts seemed to go unnoticed. No clicks, no revenue. Yet, you weren’t disappointed. You kept on creating unique and useful content for your website’s visitors. Besides, that was just a hobby for you. You never thought of turning professional as a blogger.

And then it happened! Your Google AdSense account began showing some revenue. At last, your first dollar made out of thin air had come your way; because building a website is thin air if you think of it!

Long story short, your earnings began increasing and you decided to take it to the next level by the time earnings justified to start your own business! Thus, you opened a new business account at Google AdSense, deleted previous code (originating from your personal AdSense account) and installed the new one.

At this point you should have:

An inactive personal account; and
An active account under your business name (or company).

You no longer need to sign in to your personal account, since you manage all advertising streams via your business one.

Great! So, what is the problem?

The problem comes out when you monetize your personal YouTube account.

YouTube monetization revenue is automatically deposited to a Google AdSense account

Back when you started blogging and uploaded your first videos at YouTube, you really didn’t think of your new online adventure as a way to make money. Indeed, most of people are using the web just for fun just like you used to. YouTube monetization was an unknown term.

Yet, your videos had been just as successful as your website, which now shows ads linked to your business account. What happens to the revenue coming from your YouTube video channel? That channel is linked back to your personal AdSense account, remember? So, all the YouTube monetization draws back to your personal account at Google AdSense! And we don’t want that.

You need to link your personal Youtube channel to your AdSense business account, if you want YouTube revenue to end up to your company’s bank account. And that is how you will do it.

10 steps to associate your YouTube channel with an AdSense business account

1. Log out from every Google service. It’s much easier to start from scratch, even if you have linked your Google accounts together.

2. Log in to your AdSense business account. Obviously you will use your business Gmail address to log into AdSense.

3. Go to YouTube. As you won’t have a YouTube channel under your business name (most probably), you will be presented with an empty channel.

4. Switch accounts and log into YouTube with your personal one. Don’t worry, you are still logged in with your business account at AdSense (unfortunately, you cannot login with multiple accounts at AdSense concurrently, that is the purpose of the second step).

5. Click on the Monetization tab under Channel Settings and pick the fifth question: How will I be paid? At the opened tab, you click on associate an AdSense account.

6. Click Next on the following screen and you will be redirected to AdSense.

7. If you have followed the previous steps correctly, you can now associate your personal YouTube channel with your AdSense business account!

8. On this step, you will finalize the association.

9. You will be redirected automatically back to the monetization settings. Verify that your AdSense account association is approved.

10. You may also check if everything went as planned at your AdSense business account settings, where YouTube should show up as 3rd-party access.

Congratulations, you now bring all the revenue your personal YouTube channel generates, to your business AdSense account! Your business profits will benefit from the YouTube monetization of your personal videos.

Now, I have to ask you the usual question Google asks you at their FAQ pages: Did you find the above helpful? Let me know in the comments below.

Tags: business, Google AdSense, make money, monetization, YouTube

Your Website Traffic is Dropping and it is Not your Fault!

Web Design

December 30, 2013

Your website traffic is decreasing day after day! What’s wrong?

Maybe it’s not you.

Depending on your website’s niche and the time of the year, your website may experience a substantial loss of traffic. Don’t worry, it’s not your posts. It’s just people that stopped searching for your website’s ranked keywords. And you can use Google Webmaster Tools to confirm that’s the case.

When did you notice a decrease in website traffic?

During this month (December) a website of mine is experiencing a gradual decrease in traffic. A constant and worrying drop of traffic. It’s not just the consistency of the fall but its magnitude as well. Traffic is down almost 80%!

I began witnessing the phenomenon a couple of days after I made some changes to the website’s core, SEO-wise. You know, the improvements you make on your website to rank better in search engines. In my case that meant replacing a WordPress plugin with another one that did the same job; only better presumably.

So, I started worrying that maybe I should revert those changes and bring back the old plugin. Fortunately, Webmaster Tools by Google were once again there to help me out and provide the answers. Much like when my Joomla website was hacked!

Webmaster Tools show impressions’ decrease in search engine results

Log in to Google Webmaster Central and open the Search Traffic tab for your website. Click on Search Queries and make sure you check the “With Change” option under the graph. This is what you should be looking at (click for enlarged image):

The declining line at the graph should set alarms off at first glance. Your website does not seem to be appearing so much at search results as it used to in the past. This is also the case if you take a look at the impressions’ change percentage. The website in my case appears at least 30% less at search engine results for my best ranked keywords!

If your website doesn’t show up for popular keywords, how do you expect for people to read your posts or visit your online business?

Truth is my website does show up! And it hasn’t stopped at all according to the table’s last column, titled “Change”! My website’s average position for its most popular keywords hasn’t changed a bit.

Thus, maybe your website traffic decrease didn’t happen because your website doesn’t rank well.

[dt_quote type=”blockquote” font_size=”big” animation=”none” background=”fancy”]It’s because people stopped searching for those particular keywords![/dt_quote]

Question is now: Why did people stop searching for your website’s keywords?

Again, Google is our friend. Only this time it’s not Webmaster Tools, since you can only see up to 30-days data there.

Google Trends confirms: Interest fluctuates over time

My website’s main targeted keyword has its ups and downs in relation to people’s interest over time.

If you look closely, you’ll notice a trend: there are two periods in a year-span, when interest is substantially decreased. Christmas’ time and summer. In other words, during a popular holiday season and when businessmen go on vacation.

No surprise there, given it’s a website about business planning.

Thus, before you go on a web designing spree, changing a bunch of crucial stuff of your website or blog, remember to check Google Webmaster Tools first. Hopefully, the drop of traffic your website is experiencing is nothing more than an expected downfall of people’s interest. As long as you provide useful and valuable to your readers content, you’ve nothing to worry about your website traffic.

Tags: Google, Google Trends, Google Webmaster Tools, WordPress