Author: Daniel Page

  • Are Social Signals the New Links? In Short: No.

    Are Social Signals the New Links? In Short: No.

    Ever since Eric Schmidt confirmed at LeWeb last year that social signals were being taken into consideration for SERPs, the SEO world has been rife with speculation and conjecture about the relative merits of social signals as compared to links. Some of the more excitable members of the industry even went so far as to declare the death of link-building as an SEO tool.

    In a recent interview,

    Google’s chief spam slayer, Matt Cutts, has attempted to dampen down the more extreme prognostications about the ascendency of social signals. Yes, social signals are being used to some extent, but the humble link still leads the way when it comes to determining SERP rankings, and it will for some years to come.

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  • Four Ways to Ensure Your Site Gets Crawled Frequently

    Four Ways to Ensure Your Site Gets Crawled Frequently

     

    There’s nothing more frustrating for a webmaster than having to wait to be crawled. After you perfect your on-site SEO, create great content, and ensure a spider-friendly link structure, you can only wait. You wait for the search engine crawlers to visit.

    Google will crawl your site at a frequency it determines, and while you can use Google Webmaster Tools to set a crawl rate, that will just limit crawls to a rate below the one you specify to prevent your server from getting hammered. It won’t encourage Googlebot to pay a visit any more frequently if its algorithms decide that there is no need. There are, however, methods you can use to speed up the bots crawl rate, and today we’ll  have a look at 4 of them.

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  • Three Top Tips for Building A Natural Backlink Profile

    Three Top Tips for Building A Natural Backlink Profile

    As we all know, back-links are a critical factor of search engine ranking algorithms. Getting more incoming links from better sources is a sure-fire method for improving a site’s position in SERPs. Google’s Penguin algorithm update now penalizes unnatural link-building techniques.

    Google prioritizes rankings that serve users’ needs—and since shady link-building tactics undermine this goal, the algorithm actively demotes such sites. To help you stay compliant, here are three safe backlink strategies that won’t trigger Google’s spam filters.

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  • Five Best Practices to Avoid A LinkedIn-Style Password Embarrassment

    Five Best Practices to Avoid A LinkedIn-Style Password Embarrassment

    There’s nothing more embarrassing for a web-based company than allowing their user’s personal data to be revealed on the open Internet.

    Websites and services have an ethical duty to protect the private data entrusted to them, and yet, time and again, we hear of hugely popular web services like LinkedIn and Last.fm engaged in password practices that are very definitely not the best.

    On top of the ethical duty, significant costs associate with lax security, including danger to business continuity, loss of reputation, and legal consequences for failure to adhere to data protection regulations.

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  • Top Five Reasons Your Website’s Visitors NOT Bounce!

    Top Five Reasons Your Website’s Visitors NOT Bounce!

    recently confirmed Google doesn’t use bounce rate as a signal for search engine ranking; this offers little comfort to website owners whose visitors won’t stick around.

    A site’s bounce rate is, specifically, the percentage of visitors that leave the site from the page on which they arrived without interacting or following navigation. Sites with a high bounce rate are falling at the first hurdle, and it can often be difficult to determine exactly which factors are repelling users. Today we’re going to have a look at the five most likely reasons that your site is failing to engage people.

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  • How Rich Snippets Can Increase Your Click-Through Rate!

    How Rich Snippets Can Increase Your Click-Through Rate!

    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).

    Semantic markup helps Google understand page details. For example, it can identify price and customer reviews. Consequently, Google can display this information in search results. This is visible in the image.

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  • 10 Proven Tips to Boost Your Website’s Speed.

    10 Proven Tips to Boost Your Website’s Speed.

    Embeds like analytics scripts, tracking scripts, and social media widgets are not always designed and written as well as one might hope; consequently, including too many of them in a web page can incur large slowdowns in loading time. Indeed, this Ghostery study shows such slowdowns.

    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. For instance, figures released by Walmart show that increased load times are significantly correlated with lowered conversion rates. Specifically, a precipitous drop occurs as load times increase between one and three seconds. (more…)

  • Are Slow Load Times Killing Your Sales (6 Infographics)

    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 experienced that frustration—when a page takes forever to load, burdened by unoptimized images, widgets, and analytics scripts. To make matters worse, these elements often pull from scattered servers, creating unnecessary lag with each round-trip request. 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

    Unsurprisingly, Americans demand speed—whether from waiters, sales staff, or websites. In fact, slow-loading sites frustrate us most, as Mashable’s infographic clearly shows.

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  • Yahoo! Introduces New Website Marketing Tools

    Yahoo! Introduces New Website Marketing Tools

    In 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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  • How Google’s Parked Domains Mistake Affected Rankings

    How Google’s Parked Domains Mistake Affected Rankings

    There is not a site owner in the whole World Wide Web that isn’t concerned about how their website is ranked on Google. Recently, you may have noticed that your site’s ranking has dipped.

    If you’re thinking it is due to Google’s announced over-optimization penalty, you might want to think again.

    There’s been a lot of buzz on search forums and even Google’s discussion board about these drops. The whispers of the new upcoming penalty are getting louder.

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