Page Speed SEO And How To Improve Website Performance For Better Rankings

Everyone loves a fast website. As a web developer turned technical SEO, it’s part of my job to make sure a website is fast for both users and the bots that crawl it.

The last thing you want is giving Googlebot a slow website to crawl. If a website is slow for Googlebot, then it’s most likely going to be slow for other users.

Google doesn’t like to show search results that result in slow page loads. If a website is slow to load, it usually results in the user clicking the back button, returning to the search results and clicking another URL. This is also a signal to Google that the site is either slow or irrelevant to that specific search query.

In order to rank higher in the search results, your site must be fast.

How To Make Your Website Fast

There are a few things to focus on to make sure your website is fast for Googlebot and other crawlers as well as your website visitors.

Server Architecture

First, you must have a good server architecture to have a fast website. If your server does not have an adequate amount of CPU or RAM, then you could possibly be serving up a slow website.

Are you using shared hosting from companies like SiteGround or NameCheap? If so, your website is on the same server as hundreds of other users. That means you are all fighting for a share of the server resources (CPU and RAM).

You should have a VPS to allow for better use of resources on the server. With most VPS’s, you have full root access, which means you can control pretty much all aspects of the server and it’s configuration. This gives you an opportunity to fine tune your web server configuration for optimal performance.

Hosting

I recommend getting a VPS with Digital Ocean, this is where I host all my sites using the latest version of Ubuntu as the operating system. The servers are fast, cheap and come with a lot of prebuilt packages to install.

You can use my link to get $100 in free Digital Ocean credits – https://m.do.co/c/c3a35aa907f8

PageSpeed Module

Whether you are using Apache or NGINX, I recommend installing the PageSpeed Module to optimize your site automatically for faster speeds. You can use the built in filters to optimize images, remove white space, combine CSS files, minify JavaScript, trim URLs and more.

Test Your Page Speed

There are many tools you can use to test your Page Speed, one of the most popular being WebPageTest. Another really good testing tool is the PageSpeed Insights Testing Tool created by Google, which uses the Lighthouse framework to do the testing.

The downside to using the Google PageSpeed Insights Testing Tool is the inability to track your progress. That’s why I came up with a new tool to help during this process.

I created SpeedMonitor.io to automate your website’s page speed testing. It logs the website page speed performance of your website nightly using Lighthouse and CrUX reports from Google to present the data to you on beautiful charts. You can then see your website’s speed performance and other metrics over time.

My tool also has the ability to set alerts based on scoring thresholds. For example, you can set alerts to notify you if your website page speed score goes below 50 or above 60. This is a great feature so you don’t have to manually check your scores and you can focus on other aspects of your business.

This is a good way to watch your website speed performance during site migrations and other website enhancements. When you install new plugins using WordPress, you can see if that plugin affects the page speed of your website when your nightly report runs.

Conclusion

I hope this helped you understand your website’s page speed and why it’s important to make sure your site is fast for Googlebot as well as your website visitors.

If you have any questions about page speed or website performance, please leave a comment below.

Change WooCommerce Tag to Brand

woocommerce logo

If you are looking to tag all your WooCommerce products as brands and want to display them as Brand instead of Tag to make it look more presentable, I’m going to tell you how.

For this demonstration, I use the theme-customizations plugin which allows me to insert additional functions, CSS and other custom code so that it doesn’t get lost in a WooCommerce upgrade. However, you can use your built in theme’s functions.php as well.

  1. Insert the following code as a new function in your functions.php:

add_filter(‘gettext’, ‘translatemywords’);
add_filter(‘ngettext’, ‘translatemywords’);

function translatemywords($translated) {
$translated = str_ireplace(‘Tag:’, ‘Brand:’, $translated);
return $translated;
}

What this code does is change the Tag: string to Brand:

If you need to change multiple words, then you can use something similar to this:

add_filter(‘gettext’, ‘translatemywords’);
add_filter(‘ngettext’, ‘translatemywords’);

function translatemywords($translated) {
$translated = str_ireplace(‘Tag:’, ‘Brand:’, $translated);
$translated = str_ireplace(‘Coupon code’, ‘Promo code’, $translated);
$translated = str_ireplace(‘Quantity’, ‘Qty’, $translated);
return $translated;
}

You can use this code for any application to translate many other strings in WooCommerce. Just make sure to use an additional functions.php or the customizations plugin. Do not edit the core WooCommerce files.

Hopefully this helped translate your Tag to Brand. If you

SEMRush Promo & Coupon Code 14 Day Free UPDATED APRIL 2019

Hey! Welcome to my site and thanks for stopping by. My assumption is you came here looking for an SEMRush coupon code or promo code. You are in luck! I can offer a 14-day money back guarantee…that I guarantee you won’t need because the tool is just that great! That’s a 14-day free trial to SEMRush on the Pro package. If you don’t like it, then you don’t have to pay for it.

The SEMRush coupon code is TREYCOPELAND25-A8BT4OM9. Click to apply to your account.

Is SEMRush worth the money?

Yep, it is! SEMRush is my favorite tool to use for all things SEO. The position tracking keeps my keyword rankings updated daily while the site audit monitors all my sites for any errors or suggestions to improve onsite content. One of the most powerful things SEMRush has going for it is the keyword research tool. It has over 9.4 billion keywords in its database! And data for over 450 million domains. Whenever you type in a keyword, you are almost instantly shown the volume and all other related or phrase match keywords. SEMRush is fast! I’ve been using SEMRush for over 6 years and it continues to amaze and impress me with all the tools and resources they provide. They are constantly providing updates to their tools and releasing new features. They listen to user feedback and implement changes that users actually need.

Start Your FREE 14 Day SEMRush Trial Today!

Use SEMRush coupon code TREYCOPELAND25-A8BT4OM9. Click to apply to your account. Sign up here and use the promo code to get the 14 day Pro plan for free.

SEMrush Coupon Code

SEMRush’s New Organic Research Tool

As I said before, SEMRush is continually improving their platform. They listen to the customers and create products that are useful for digital marketers and SEOs. The release of the new Organic Research tool in 2018 has totally changed the platform for the best. Initially, you could only do deep domain research on the root domain, however, with the new Organic Research tool, you can dive deeper into the sub domains for a website. This feature has led me to some sites actually indexing their staging/dev domains to the public web. Yikes!

Here’s an example of carid.com when I plug it into the organic research tool. In the three screenshots below you can see a brief overview of the domains SEO performance. Then if you take a deeper dive you can see more in depth charts that show traffic and keyword rankings.

 

 

 

Another useful feature brought in with the new Organic Research tool is the Live Graphs and advanced filtering. For example, on the live graphs, you can run the report by your sub domain, but also, using filtering, you can break it down even further by folder, keyword and even specific SERP features such as reviews, knowledge panel, featured snippet, etc. The cool thing is the graph will update with your changes and filtering. In the old version, this wasn’t possible with sub domains.

Backlinks

Now lets get to Google’s top ranking factor 🙂 You can say what you want. But 10 years later and links are still the #1 ranking factor. It’s been proven through many studies.

SEMRush provides a useful backlinks tool with over 10.2 trillion backlinks and over 6.1 billion URLs crawled each day to get an overall picture of your site’s backlink profile. You can see all the sites linking back to you and filter by many different options. Here’s an example of the backlinks report for americanmuscle.com. You can easily see the source & target url, anchor text, when the link was first seen and if it is still an active link.

New Position Tracking Landscape Report

Released in February 2019, the new landscape report inside of Position Tracking gives you all the data on a dashboard page called Landscape. You get a general overview of your position tracking stats such as visibility, estimated traffic, position changes, etc. You can use the new report to quickly see any changes (good or bad) before diving into the full position tracking tool.

SEMRush position tracking landscape

 

Now lets get down to the important stuff. First of all, this is an affiliate post that benefits three different parties:

Me: SEMRush is very generous and I get a commission on each sale that I bring to the table. They require that you disclose you receive a monetary amount for each sign up. This is your disclosure and I appreciate you clicking on my link before signing up.

SEMRush: The company gets a new customer and more revenue thanks to me. SEMRush has created a whole suite of very valuable SEO tools. They continue to release updated versions of their platform and deserves to be paid for it.

You: You get an awesome tool to use for SEO and SEM purposes.

Win-Win for all!

Thanks for stopping by and getting your SEMRush coupon code. Now go ahead and give it a whirl and see some amazing data. Begin your keyword or domain research today. Enter the URL of your website below and get some awesome statistics about it:

Your Spotify May Be Hacked With Spotiamb

Spotify Hacked - Spotiamb

You may be reading this post if you have spotted the Spotiamb 0.2.1 appearing at random times on your Spotify app. It may be causing your music to randomly pause or play completely different songs than you originally intend. So to calm you down a little bit, you’re not the only one this is happening to. It happened to me as well and I want to explain a little about what it is.

What is Spotiamb 0.2.1?

It’s a very simple mod for Winamp that allows you to connect your Spotify account to it and play your music instead of using the official Spotify app on your desktop or phone. The mod isn’t harmless, but hackers have found a way to hack into users Spotify Premium accounts and play music without consent.

Spotify pays artists when users listen to their music. The ultimate goal of the hack is to rack up the plays for a lesser known artist so they can generate more revenue.

How to fix the issue?

The issue has a lot of users complaining as you can see in this thread on the Spotify forums: https://community.spotify.com/t5/forums/v3_1/forumtopicpage/board-id/001/thread-id/134965/page/1

The best thing to do and try to fix it is:

  1. Log out all devices
  2. Restrict all app permissions
  3. Change your password

Some users have tried this with success, but others are still finding the annoying Spotiamb show up in their list of connected devices.

Are you seeing the Spotiamb 0.2.1 in your Spotify account? Have you been able to fix it?

BREAKING: Bitcoin now worth $11.4k USD per coin

Bitcoin has seen an amazing ride this year, especially in the last two months. Now worth over $11k USD per coin, the demand is greater than ever, with only 21 million coins only to be produced. I remember having bitcoins at less than 1 cent. I was buying pizza with bitcoin and donating them. If you’re looking to buy, use my link below and we’ll both get $10 if you buy $100 or more.

https://www.coinbase.com/join/519baa4476e013723400002a

Simple And Easy Cajun Jambalaya Recipe

best jambalaya recipe in the south

If you know me, then you would know that I like to cook a bit. I don’t do much cooking inside on the stove, I’m mostly an outside grill master. Or a master of the fish fryer. But when I do stay inside and cook something up, it’s usually pretty good.

I’d like to introduce to you the Copeland Cajun Jambalaya!

best jambalaya recipe in the south
5 from 3 votes
Print

Simple And Easy Cajun Jambalaya Recipe

Very simple and easy to cook cajun jambalaya. Perfect for parties and get togethers.

Course Main Course
Prep Time 10 minutes
Cook Time 30 minutes
Total Time 40 minutes
Servings 6 people

Ingredients

  • 2 teaspoon olive oil
  • 2 boneless skinless chicken breasts cut into bite-size pieces
  • 8 ounces kielbasa diced
  • 6-8 jumbo raw shrimp cut in half
  • 1 onion diced
  • 1 green bell pepper diced
  • 2 tablespoon minced garlic
  • 1/4 teaspoon cayenne pepper
  • 1/2 teaspoon onion powder
  • 2 cups white long-grain rice uncooked
  • 3 cups chicken broth
  • 3 bay leaves
  • 1 can Rotel with green chiles
  • 2 teaspoons Worcestershire sauce
  • 2 teaspoons Louisiana hot sauce
  • Salt and ground black pepper

Instructions

  1. Heat olive oil in a large pot over medium high heat.

  2. Saute chicken and kielbasa until lightly browned, about 5 minutes.

  3. Stir in onion, bell pepper and garlic.

  4. Season with cayenne, onion powder, salt and pepper.

  5. Cook 5 minutes, or until onion is tender and translucent.

  6. Add rice, then stir in chicken broth, Rotel and bay leaves.

  7. Bring to a boil, then reduce heat, cover, and simmer 20 minutes, or until rice is tender.

  8. Stir in the Worcestershire sauce and hot pepper sauce.

Here are some photos so you can better see how everything is prepared.

jambalaya with sausage chicken and shrimp

jambalaya-in-pot

best jambalaya recipe in the south

Did you fix this? Let me know how it turns out!

Copeland’s Lobster And Shrimp Boil Recipe

One of my favorite genres of food is seafood. I’m a big shrimp lover and there’s isn’t anything better than good ole boiled shrimp that’s ready to peel. This weekend I got my pot out, bought some shrimp and lobster and had a good ole southern seafood feast. Here’s my recipe for a southern shrimp and lobster boil:

lobster-in-sink

I use a 30 quart pot and fill it about 2/3 full of water depending on how much I’m cooking.

Ingredients
1/2 Cup Old Bay seasoning
2 tablespoon salt
2 tablespoon pepper
8-10 new red potatoes
1 large onion quartered
1 garlic clove
8-10 corn cobs
5 halved lemons
5 halved limes
5 pounds of raw shrimp (about 30-35 shrimp)

Add your potatoes, onions, garlic and cook about 8-10 minutes on high heat. Add your lobster and corn on the cob and cook another 8-10 minutes. Add your shrimp and cook about 4 or 5 minutes.

Your lobster should turn a bright reddish color and your shrimp will turn a light pink.

lobster-cooking-in-pot

If you need to take one lobster out to see if it’s done, the claws should easily twist and pull off. You can also remove the tail and the green mushy stuff is part of the excrements from the liver. It should be bright green, not darkish green. The other red stuff lining the tail in the females should be a bright red/orangish color.

lobster-shrimp-spread

Drain your liquid and pour all contents on large platter. You can sprinkle some extra Old Bay seasoning on the platter if desired. Enjoy =)