Monthly Archives: May 2012

Improve your CTR with Rich Snippets

Improve your CTR with Rich Snippets

Historically, the meaning of web content has been largely unfathomable to search engines, which indexed fairly clumsy indicators of content like keywords to get a sense of what a web page is about. Semantic markup, however, allows search engines to have some understanding of what certain parts of a page’s content refers to and include that information in the text that they display below the links on SERPS (known as snippets).

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Are Slow Load-Times Killing Your Conversion Rate – Part 2: Top Ten Ways To Improve Site Speed

Top Ten Ways To Improve Site Speed

As we saw in Part One of our series on website optimization, a slow site can seriously impact user experience. Anything over 3 seconds is going to be an irritation to users, and irritated users lead to lost sales, reduced conversions, and higher bounce rates. As an example, figures released by Walmart show that increased load times are significantly correlated with lowered conversion rates, with a precipitous drop as load times increase between one and three seconds.

Slow load times can also have an effect on SERP results. Google use site speed as one of their signals for determining ranking. It has a much smaller effect than relevant content, but any decent SEO will tell you that, all else being equal, a quicker loading site can give you a bump compared to competitors.

With that in mind, we’re going to take a look at 10 best practices that website owners can implement on their sites to make sure that their users have the best possible experience.

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Are Slow Load Times Killing Your Sales (6 Infographics)

Are Slow Load-Times Killing Your Conversion Rate – Part One: 6 Best Infographics

We’ve all felt that sense of irritation when we click on a link and have to wait while a slow page loads its dozens of unoptimized images and embedded widgets and analytics scripts, fetching components spread across servers in disparate locations and incurring significant extra round-trip lag. Today, we’re going to have a look a 6 of the best infographics on the subject, and next week we’ll show you the top 10 causes of slow web pages and what you can do to fix them.

1) Instant America by Mashable

Americans expect prompt service, we don’t like to wait for waiters and sales staff, and we find waiting for websites especially galling, as this infographic from Mashable neatly demonstrates.

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Yahoo! Introduces New Website Marketing Tools

yahoo logoIn recent months Yahoo have been hitting the headlines more for their boardroom drama and patent trolling than their innovations and services. But with the recent introduction of the Yahoo! Marketing Dashboard, they have created a product that many small and medium businesses and startups who lack the resources to invest in more pricey web site analytics should definitely take a look at.

Yahoo! already offer a host of services for small businesses, including Yahoo! Finance and Mail. With the Marketing Dashboard they aim to provide a way for businesses to track the effectiveness of their marketing campaigns and discover new opportunities for growth.

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