Archive for March, 2010
The 301 Argument Continues But There’s More!
You are probably aware of the recent disclosure from Matt Cutts in a recent interview that 301 redirects can affect page rank. This revelation has sparked an enormous amount of debate from SEOs everywhere, but there was plenty more to come out of the interview that has so far stayed under the radar. This post analyses the rest of the interview and highlights 8 titbits that emerged, including the fact that low page rank pages compete internally with higher ranked pages. If you want to get the most out of this interview you should read this report to sharpen up your to sharpen your SEO skills.
How Social Media Can Help Your Small Business
Are you having trouble keeping up with the latest trends in social network marketing? Do you have a clear plan to follow trying to rank for your business keywords in social media? if so then you have a lot in common with the author of this article. Mark Hayward has only been using social media for six months but has already racked up a lot of experience which he shares with you in this article. He outlines over 30 lessons he has learned and each of them will ring true with most small business owners looking to establish a social media footprint.
How To Maximise Ecommerce With Social Media
Have you ever considered the fact that most of your customers are using social media networks like Facebook and Twitter? The ages of social network users has been analysed by Pingdom with some surprising results. For instance, the average age of Facebook users is 37 years, and contrary to popular belief, young subscribers aged 18 to 24 don’t dominate any network. All this means is that you can use social media sharing sites to build a great network of customers who share their experiences online. This article describes five easy to follow tips to make your e-commerce site blossom.
Facebook Beats Google!
Hitwise has announced that Facebook has finally overtaken Google as the most visited website on the net. Over the Christmas period, Facebook registered an increase of 185% when compared to the same period last year. For the same period, Google had experienced an increase of only 9%. But, it doesn’t stop there. Facebook repeated the performance over the weekend of March 6-7, and observers believe that a trend is starting to emerge. To put things in perspective however, you have to bear in mind that Facebook and Google combined account for just 14% of all web traffic in the US, so although there is excitement in the air, it may be a little premature to talk about complete domination.
The Danger of 301 Redirects
Just when you thought it was safe to use 301 redirects, Google comes out and admits but you may suffer some loss in page rank! Matt Cutts stated in a recent conference that he was unsure whether the indexing team implemented ‘any page rank decay’ coming from the use of 301 redirects. He has later confirmed that it is in fact the case. However, there is no indication as to how much a site will actually lose through using these redirects, all we know is that there will be some impact. Of course, there may not be any other solution at this stage, and it is certainly better to lose a small amount of page rank as opposed to the whole thing.
How To Design Great Landing Pages
Landing Pages may have gone out of fashion but when it comes to pay per click,it’s a completely different story. When you are writing content for your website you are doing so with an eye on standard SEO principles that will generate as much organic traffic as you can get. But with pay per click your writing needs to be slanted to appeal directly to human readers rather than search engines. Let’s face it, if you can’t get your visitors to actually buy something on your site you’re wasting your money. This article points out the importance of speaking in a language that people will understand and, more importantly, take the action you want them to.
The Real Value of Multi Regional Websites.
Have you ever wondered how important it is to have your site available in more than one language? This article explores the issue in some detail and goes on to demonstrate that language is sometimes more important than price. Many non-English-speaking Web users prefer to use sites written in their own language rather than hunting around for the best price on an English site. That’s why it’s important to consider a non-English version of your website, and this article provides an extraordinary amount of detail to make this process an easier one. Make no mistake though, the process is not necessarily an easy one and you will have to take care of the usual SEO problems like duplicate content, but as the article points out, it’s time you got started.
Fixing Your Canonicalization
Exactly what is canonicalization, and when you know what it is how can you fix it? This article or links to a previous video in a series of expert SEO tips run by SEOmoz, and then goes on to explain in greater detail the ins and outs of canonicalization. It is an important concept that every site owner should know about, but more importantly, as this article points out, all site owners need to take appropriate action to ensure that linking is not watered down. it describes the use of 301 redirects and Link tags using Rel Canonical.
Why You Should Target First Time Visitors
Although it has long been thought that business blogs have loyal audiences that follows their every move, the latest research shows that this is anything but the case. It has now been demonstrated that up to 80% of business blog traffic is made up of first-time visitors. So, marketers need to take advantage of this by publishing information which will appeal to them and not limit their content to the more savvy visitor who makes up a paltry 20% of the traffic. The article also points out that a high percentage of visitors come from organic searches, around 41% in fact, so the value of keyword optimised content is even more important.
How To Use Bookmarks To Make Searching Easier
It looks like Google is replacing Searchwiki with an easy to allocate star bookmarking system. By simply allocating a star to a favourite search result, the next time you use the same keyword search the start of result will appear above the new search results.This article outlines how to use this method in conjunction with a Google Chrome extension and bookmarklets to enhance bookmarking on the run. If you read the comments that follow the post you will discover more ways that other readers have used the system to save time not having to look up previous bookmarks from an ever growing list.
