Is your website AMP’ed? If it is you most certainly know that I am talking about Accelerated Mobile Pages, and Google loves them.
If you are not, it is relatively easy to create an AMP page template for your HTML website. Just follow some of these links to learn more and to see examples.
As AMP’ed websites are important from Google viewpoint and Google is actively showing AMP pages in the mobile index, it is important to know and understand why your website needs to embrace AMP now.
Recently my husband’s identity was stolen and my access to our bank account was hacked.
In my husband’s case a credit card was opened in his name.
In my case my online bank user name, password and PIN was used to raise credit limits and then steal over $3,000 from our checking account.
Our bank took care of the matter, but what was problematic was just how robbers got access to my own personal online access information.
The only thing we can think of is that I was using mobile banking features and may have accessed my bank while I was connected away from my home base.
As a result, here are the things that I have done to improve my mobile security.
1. My entire family now uses on their mobile devices face or voice recognition biometrics to access our most important bank. For our other bank, we use two step verification. All family members use two step verification via text messages to smartphones to access bank accounts online through desktops.
2. My entire family now has withdrawal, deposit and transaction alerts set up for banking, savings accounts, and credit cards. The focus is to catch robbers early before too much damage has been done.
3. I personally am using NordVPN which is a subscription base security tool for my smartphone that encrypts my communication on mobile data or when I am connected to any Wi-Fi hotspots out of my office. This will be especially important to me as I will be traveling in the months to come and this secure tunnel will allow me to encrypt data I exchange on the internet, geomask my location as well as to prevent eavesdroppers from snatching my user names and passwords.
Stay safe when you are online with your smartphone and encourage your family members to embrace new levels of mobile security to prevent the headaches that happened to us.
If you don’t want to move to a subscription service for security, Opera has just announced a free VPN for smartphones that is very simple to use. You can download it at Google Play or iTunes.
Tell me you haven’t seen it yourself? The space on Google and Bing for organic results is shrinking again. Have you looked on your smartphone? Could you even find organic results when the page loades?
The amazing shrinking world of organic search results on mobile
Searchengine Land just wrote about this issue complete with screen shots in this article. They highlighted a travel query with no space left at all for organic search results on a mobile device.
In Google Analytics I am seeing many clients have shrinking organic traffic numbers as both Google and Bing revamp their results displays to show more ads, bigger ads, and on mobile fewer organic results.
On desktops the organic results were already being pushed nearly below the fold by the Google Knowledge Graph and Google Carousel and the six pack of Google Local results. On mobile the space is even more precious. It is not unusual to see only ads when the screen opens, then local results and only with significant scrolling any organic results.
For more information about the changing face of organic results read my blog post about the Google Knowledge Graph and Google Carousel from 2014. The space was shrinking then and now appears to be nearly gone in some new searches.
I read an article with interest this last week that laid out a very compelling case for the death of search engines. You can read the full article called “Is Search, As We Know It, Dying?”
The key takeaway that I have seen on my own is that the increased used of mobile devices is turning the regular world of search upside down. Consider on Google AdWords – activity in mobile means increased website traffic, more clicks, but does not translate into more conversions.
As mobile activity has increased in Google AdWords, computer activity has decreased and with it conversions, time on page, and the bounce rate has increased.
Google and Bing continue to scramble to make search meaningful for smartphone users by introducing interactive maps with ads but users are looking for other resources via apps to get the information they want.
Just consider how searches for hotels, venues, and restaurants has changed. Trip Advisor is a great example of how a mobile app is replacing traditional search for smartphone users.
Just yesterday I needed a round tablecloth, I did not search on Google, but rather started my search directly on Amazon.com.
With Google and Bing getting pressure to keep their search audience and websites like Amazon and mobile apps like Trip Advisor stepping in to provide targeted quality search results, we may be seeing the demise of traditional search engines in the next three to five years and maybe even sooner.
For more about me, Nancy McCord, and McCord Web Services, please visit our website at www.McCordWeb.com.
I am moving to the Fredericksburg, Virginia area in July and August this year and as I plan ahead for my move I am revamping my home and business phone technology used to use new things.
Currently, I have a fax telephone line, a business phone line, a residential phone line, two line phones throughout the house, hard wired CAT 5 cabling, and over 9 computers. With my new move, I am going to streamline my use of old tech and move to some new tech.
For example, I am thinking of:
1. Using a Word document/Office subscription fax interface that will allow me to fax using my smartphone as well as to receive faxes this way too. I like MyFax at MyFax.com as my solution. I selected this one due to ease of use and low price – $10 a month. I’ll be needing to have a temporary fax solution for three months before I move into my permanent office and so want something easy to use and usable on a smartphone.
2. I am actually thinking of not having a separate phone line for my business and using my smartphone as my office phone. I already have set up a Google Voice number and will most likely use this number on my website and have it forwarded to my smartphone or home phone on certain days. I have already purchased a new local phone number from Google for $10, as once you have a number you have to pay to change it. I like the ability to control when Google Voice forwards calls. You can even group contacts and then create different answering messages by group. You can have family and friends get automatically connected without delay which is a nice feature.
3. I know that I will have FiOS as my new office. I already have been using virtual phone numbers which really give a terrific cost saving and use VOIP. I may continue to use this for my business or at least for a dedicated fax line and now only one residential line, but I am still thinking of what is the best and most versatile option for my future needs.
With so many new technological choices what you used to think you had to have in your office phone-wise, you now get to think over and reinvent when you move. What technology have you moved to that has cut costs and streamlined your life? Make sure to let me know by clicking and leaving a comment. I guarantee that I’ll check it out and may use it too.
Fresh from doing a SEO review of five client sites, I have to say that mobilegeddon is a bust, at least so far.
Google started the roll out of this much talked about algorithm that was to have impacted over 14% of the search results in the mobile search sphere on Monday April 21st. But as of April 30th, I was still seeing sites appear routinely in the mobile search space that were not mobile-friendly.
Does that mean that there was all this hype about nothing? No, not really. I suspect that Google got scared of crashing it’s search engine and money driver if it moved too fast to chop sites that had not moved into mobile. I suspect that they will over time tweak this as new sites enter the index that are mobile-friendly, but they have already back pedaled from their previous approach.
Earlier in the year in the pending change announcement Google stated that if you did not have a mobile-friendly site you would be dropped from the mobile index. Later, Google softened this approach to say, well maybe you’d be dropped, but if your website really matched the query best and even if you were not mobile-friendly they would show your site in the mobile results as most relevant – totally watering down the first announcement.
Then, Google AdWords reps started to say, well if your site is not mobile-friendly and you are using AdWords advertising, your non-mobile-friendly website would still show in the mobile results as an AdWords ads. Note the serious conflict here? Advertising vs. Search?
I think that as it got closer to the date, Google decided that there was too much money at stake and sites had simply not upgraded as they had thought they would.
I do suspect that over time there will be a “weeding” of sites from the mobile index but for now I think the change on Google’s part is being driven by a concern for a loss of revenue in AdWords and search relevancy versus the competition.