Author Archives: Daniel Page

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

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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!

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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!

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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.

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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. Continue reading →

Are Slow Load Times Killing Your Sales (6 Infographics)

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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

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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

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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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Google+ and SPYW – They’re Here to Stay

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The internet is abuzz with chatter about the new Google Search plus Your World. Love it hate it, for now it is here to stay. The question is what effect if any it will have on your SEO efforts. This isn’t the first time Google has attempted to individualize search results. Your physical location and sites you tend to go to regularly all have an impact on the results that you receive.

Google has now taken it one giant step forward. With Google SPYW, your own personal experiences and those of your friends and associates in your circles will rank higher in search results than websites with more authority and links.

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Search, Plus Your World’, a Game Changer?

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Google’s awkwardly-named new results page has been stirring quite a lot of attention this past week. Rather than go in-depth explaining the change, we’ll first let one of Google’s pretty product videos do the talking:

For those that still aren’t seeing the new results page consistently (a lot of people still, according to SEOmoz’s Rand Fishkin), Google’s Matt Cutts posted this blog, talking about how he’d used the new feature.

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