The cost of Google advertising is about to rise; one more reason to focus on SEO

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The Mountain View giant is about to pass on the cost of the UK Digital Service Tax (DST) to advertisers. Today, the company sent an email to inform its customers that a 2% increase in the bill will be applied for advertising made across the Channel.

Cost will go up also for the ads published in Austria and Turkey. There will be a 5% increase, to pass on some new “digital taxes” to advertisers.

Advertising allows immediate visibility and peak traffic for your website, but it is not always sustainable in the long term. And when you stop advertising, if you are not organically positioned, your site often literally disappears from the web.

For this reason, the increase in the cost of advertising can only remind us of the importance of an SEO investment. With an adequate positioning strategy, you will get a natural and continuous traffic and you will be less dependent on advertising: every click obtained organically, or through a link in the Google search results, will be a paid click saved.

Google users make over 3.5 billion searches every day. The companies that appear at the top of the SERP (the results page) are those that share more than 50% of the traffic:

Click-through rate vs SERP position

An SEO strategy is a great complement to Pay Per Click advertising. As the cost of advertising in the UK will rise soon, and there are grounds for the increase to also affect other target countries for your advertising, now is the right time to review your Google ranking and set your SEO goals.

How is your company’s website positioned? For which keywords would you like to be on the first page on Google to be found by your next customers?

If you are interested in learning how to scale the SERP and gain visibility and organic traffic, contact us for advice.

wordpress plugins

10 WordPress plugins that you seriously need to know

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WordPress is the most popular CMS, powering nearly 30% of all the sites in the world wide web. Among the reasons why professionals and apprentice web designers and developers choose Worpress, there’s of course an overwhelming availability of  free and premium plugin, allowing to extend the platform base functionality. Nevertheless, abundance doesn’t not mean quality. Indeed, you might have soon realized that you need sifting a lot for finding some decent, malware-free and not invaded by ads piece of software (It’s what you probably do when you look for apps for your smartphone on Google Play Store or Apple App Store).

Here follows a list of plugins we think you need to know if you’ve started using WordPress. Many of them would deserve to be part of the standard WordPress package:

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Totally Free images sites

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Are you looking for really free pictures for your business site, your presentation, or your personal blog? You’ve probably already tried to search for “free photos” on Google, finding so many royalty-free images such as iStockphotos [or tip tip] or [tip tip = “owned by Adobe”] Fotolia [/ tipso]. And you soon realized that royalty-free images are not free as you mean it … also pose various limitations on the right to use you would gladly do without.

In addition to photos that are free, that is, at no cost, you may also be interested in copyright-free photos, that is, they can always be used for any purpose and without any right of assignment (they do not require linking to the site of the author). Luckily, the web has a lot to offer you free and free, often also of excellent quality, which does not have much to envy to the photos of these paid sites.

In this post we have collected a list of sites that offer 100% free resource for commercial and non-commercial projects. In some cases, photographers have handed over their jobs to the Public Domain and do not even have to be cited, although thanks really deserve it!

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Joomla SEO, time for the new URLs!

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We’re writing this soon after the release of version 3.8 of the powerful Joomla [tipso tip=”Content Management System”]CMS[/tipso]. Joomla 3.8 carries a new feature which is especially interesting for [tipso tip=”Search Engine Optimization”]SEO[/tipso] purposes: a new structure for your web pages addresses, the so-called [tipso=”Uniform Resource Locator”]URL[/tipso], which will be more meaningful to both people and search engines.

Joomla already had some [tipso tip=”Search Engine Friendly”] SEF[/tipso] features, but native SEO features are not enough for advanced SEO and needed to be integrated via additional software (components and extensions), like sh404SEF or MijoSEF.

SEOs have long waited for a better URLs control with Joomla: they often preferred to use WordPress, in order to have greater flexibility  in this regard.

To better understand the possibilities offered by the last update for Joomla, we take a sample URL generated by the previous versions of Joomla:

https://www.deltamatica.it/category/123-my-article

where 123 is the content (article) ID code.

With the new routing system, we are able to get the following simplified address:

https://www.deltamatica.it/category/my-article

How to activate the new Joomla URLs: Read more

Ransomware now targets WordPress sites

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Ransomware is a phenomenon that has grown dangerously in 2017, which has caused billions of damage to companies and people around the world, and reminded why it is important to invest in IT security.

It is called ransomware a malicious software that can penetrate via the internet into your home or business computer (or other connected device), thanks to a system vulnerability. When a certain condition occurs, ransomware make the computer data unreadable by means of  strong encryption algorithms and promises to unlock it after paying a ransom.

Usually cybercriminals require anonymous contact through the dark web and ask for payment in bitcoin.

In May and June we learned from the media about the massive attacks on WannaCry and Petya ransomware and their variants.

In August, a new ransomware emerged that attacks WordPress sites. It encrypts data and tries to extort money from the site owner.

This is an example of how an attacked site looks like while I’m writing this post (I’ve put its address in the picture):
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