5 Random Things, Will This Get Clicks?

I’ve been tasked with writing a blog post to help drive traffic to our website and I don’t really know what to write about. So I finally just decided to write about five random things to see if using the typical [Insert Number] Tips/Strategies/Ideas to Increase/Drive/Get/Whatever type headline would get any traffic at all. And if this doesn’t work, next time I may go straight to using sensational clickbait and make a post titled “Kim Kardashian’s Gmail Hacked, Here Are All Her Nude Photos.”

1. Write Post Titles That Will Get Clicks

I guess I should touch on that since it’s the strategy I’m using for this post. Basically, from a getting clicks to your website from Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. standpoint, you want to use headlines that will get the most clicks. You also want to write headlines that use keywords, because it’s a major factor in how Google ranks your posts. Maybe the best way to say it is like this: the closer your post title is to something somebody actually searches for in Google, the higher you’re likely to rank. And of course, if that headline is also interesting enough to entice somebody to click on it the better.

2. You Really Need to Update WordPress

I would say most of our clients use WordPress to run their websites now. Pretty much every website we have built for the past two years or so has been with WordPress. So when we do website updates, we’re usually making updates to a website that has been built with the popular CMS. But you have no idea how many times we login to WordPress to find it hasn’t been updated for years. This is a big deal.

Every time WordPress releases an update, two important things happen. First, the update usually fixes security vulnerabilities. So obviously you don’t want those vulnerabilities on your website. Second, they tell the world what problems they fixed. That means the hackers of the world know what to look for on old out-of-date WordPress installations. It basically makes their hacking job much easier.

So if your site has WordPress running it or has WordPress installed anywhere on it, you need to go update it right now. And you need to make sure you’re checking it for updates on a regular basis. Update the plugins too, that’s just as important. (If you don’t know how to update WordPress, contact us.)

3. Your Site May Need SSL Soon

One of the hot topics within the PCG office over the past couple of months has been whether or not we need to install SSL certificates on all of our websites and force users to https. Google has been moving all of their applications to https, and Matt Cutts, Google’s lead web spam team member has said he wants to make it part of their ranking algorithm. In other words, at some point Google is probably going to rank sites that send users to https instead of just http higher.

Here’s our problem. Google factors in how fast your web page loads when it’s ranking it. Having https enabled on that web page slows the page load down. (There are ways to get around this, but I’m keeping the discussion simple for now.) So the question is, does Google value page speed over https, or https over page speed?

The bottom line is, we can probably get a web page to load just as fast with https enabled. But right now it takes extra work. However, in the not too distant future we’re most likely going to suggest clients enable https on their entire website.

4. I Do Like Bacon

Marisa wrote that web developers love bacon. I’m here to say that I agree with her, and that it would be cool to receive bacon randomly. And really the point of this, is that you should cross-link your blog posts. So try to mention things within your posts that are related to previous posts to keep people on your site. It helps with Google finding all of your content as well. #bacon

5. Kim Kardashian Tried to #BreakTheInternet

Really my point with this is you should sometimes try to use keywords and topics that are currently trending online. I’m not entirely sure what Kim Kardashian did this week, I just know that the one thing my girlfriend talked to me about this week that was news-related was Kiki showing up naked somewhere. So it has to be a big deal. And I’m going to include it here because I want to implement some of the clickbait I talked about at the beginning of this post.

That’s pretty much it for now. Please share your thoughts below, and of course share this useful information everywhere you can think of online.