We have been working with a client who asked us to help him rebuild his e-commerce website that has not seen any major updates in over 15 years. The site has continued to expand with new products over the years, but his content management system was in need of a massive upgrade. Whenever we take on any new web projects, one of the first things we analyze is the SEO of the site. We ask ourselves, how do we keep the current rankings and how do we improve the rankings after the launch. This site defiantly had some unique challenges, today I am going to share how we are approaching the URL redirects for our client’s aged website. We had a few ideas, for this store with thousands of products. Our ideas started with the concept of ripping it off like a bandaid and just 301 everything. Then we thought maybe it would be better to launch the new site – Read the full article
This is a question I often hear from small business owners, entrepreneurs, and anyone with a personal web site. The hard part is, there is no correct answer. Here are some general guidelines I do recommend you follow in how often to update your website. Homepage: 1-2 weeks. First, people want to know someone is actually there, not that you are a fly by night operation that failed two months ago. Even if its only a few changes to the text, updates to a ‘news’ section, or changing some images around. Secondly, Google crawls your site every few weeks to look for any kind change to the text. Google also wants to know you consistently update your pages, so this plan of every week or two ultimately helps your search engine rankings as well. Sub Pages: 1-2 months, or as needed. Most importantly, make sure they are up to date with current prices, specials, and other offers. Again, Google likes – Read the full article
When you try and use Internet marketing and blogging to bring in more business, it is essential to think about each word that you publish. Each page of your website needs to have a goal and each blog post must be aimed at achieving the following: Providing readers with information regarding your business and industry Creating a call for action Encouraging sales Working on optimizing the website Providing customer service Building brand recognition Installing trust Fitting all that into a blog post of around 300 to 500 words may seem like a lot but with the help of SEO copywriters, each of your blog posts can achieve all of those goals for you. Working on Web Copy Your website will no doubt be split up into different sections; what they are will depend upon the services and products that you provide. Most websites will have the obligatory Welcome page, About Us page, and the Contact page. These need to be – Read the full article
All website owners aim to land on the first few pages of search engine results, and that’s why various search engine optimization strategies are being implemented. After all, SEO is designed to enhance the search rank position of a business or a brand. Last year, however, website owners and SEO professionals received some serious beating no thanks to the Google Panda update. The search engine giant began changing the algorithms that determined a site’s page rank and search performance. The aim was to promote websites with original high-quality content; it also reduced the effectiveness of content farming, thus giving low preference to websites with low-quality content. A number of legitimate, well-meaning sites, however, were also adversely affected by this update. These changes made by Google have made it difficult for website owners to determine which SEO strategy to adopt – or drop – to make their SEO strategies and campaigns successful. But adjust we must, and move forward to align – Read the full article
Quality backlinks play a very important role in the search engine optimization of any site. Backlinks refer to links on other websites pointing to yours. So how do you go about getting them? The Natural Way If your web content is good, people are likely to begin linking to it. The more backlinks your site has, the better. However, it does not always follow that if you have great content, people will always want to link to you. This means that you might not be able to promote your website successfully through the natural way of building backlinks. You will then have to figure out alternative ways of getting quality backlinks. And even if you get many backlinks through the natural way, you could always use additional backlinks. Some of the acceptable methods of building links are through posting in forums, article directories, and blogs. The unacceptable methods (at least to Google’s eyes) include linking to link farms, buying links – Read the full article
A potential pitfall for many new Adwords advertising is simply the false pretense that Google’s default Adwords settings are in the best interest for all advertisers. That’s simply not the case. Here are a handful of tips that can take just minutes but provide a significant lift in your online advertising campaign performance. 1. Review your location and language settings Google defaults each new campaign to target theUnited StatesandCanada. If you don’t ship internationally, this is a clear opportunity to narrow your targeting. If you are a localized business serving a specific area there is further opportunity to narrow in your focus by targeting a specific state, city or even specific mile radius surrounding your business location. Advanced Tip* If you are targeting multiple countries, set up separate campaigns for each country. Each geographic area will perform differently due to variances in search behavior. Separate campaigns will provide you much deeper insight into each location’s performance and allow for smarter decisions – Read the full article
In an October 2011 report by ComScore, it was found that smartphones and tablets drive nearly 7 percent of digital traffic in the US. The number is bound to increase, especially as increased Wi-Fi availability and mobile broadband adoption continue to drive connectivity. Other key findings in the report include: 116 million people in the US alone are users of mobile media. Nearly half of those who own tablets (such as the Apple iPad) made or completed a purchase using their tablet. Publishers are extending their reach to cross-platform audiences who own smartphones, tablets, and other Web-enabled mobile devices (such as the iPod Touch). What does this all mean? It means that if you’re a publisher, Internet marketer, online advertiser, SEO specialist, social media marketer, online retailer, e-Commerce store owner, blogger, developer, Web designer, etc. – if you, at the very least, have a website that’s meant to showcase your work or help you do business – then you now – Read the full article
There are ways to monitor changes and updates to your favorite websites, blogs, social networks, classifieds, and local business listings (including Google Places pages) – without having to watch the Web 24/7 or pressing the Refresh button every minute. And while RSS is today’s most popular way of syndicating content automatically, not all websites have it. (And not all users prefer it.) That’s where this list comes in: to be able keep up with what’s happening (in real-time) on any place across the entire Web; to monitor what customers and competitors alike are doing and saying; and to listen and respond to reviews and feedback as they are generated. Here are some of today’s best tools for monitoring changes to any website. Page2RSS Page2RSS is a free service that lets you create feeds for web pages you wish to follow or monitor – pages, specifically, that are static or don’t offer any RSS/Atom feeds. Page2RSS also serves as a way – Read the full article
