Tweet Ever wonder how easy it is to lose your ranking in Google and Bing? Unfortunately,  a few of our clients found out how easy it was to lose ranking last week. Both methods of losing ranking happened without any overt signs. First Check Go to Google, and type this into the search box: site:www.Your_Domain.com […]

Tweet It seems Google’s motto “Don’t be evil” does not apply to its treatment of small businesses these days. Especially small online merchants selling products and services. Hate may be a strong word to use, but it seems more appropriate these days. Here is why I believe this is the case… Google Penguin Back in […]

Tweet Wow! I was quite shocked to see the Google Blog Post today announcing that Google Product Search would be re-branded as Google Shopping *AND* will no longer be free for merchants to list their products: First, we are starting to transition Google Product Search in the U.S. to a purely commercial model built on […]

Tweet “A faster site is a better site” – me That’s my quote for the day. But don’t take my word for it. Google thinks speed is important. So important it’s now a ranking factor. Customers think speed is important. So important that nearly a third will leave your site if it does not load […]

Ahhh, September. The extreme heat is fading away here in Connecticut, and the kids are back in school. I’m definitely a summer kind of guy, so September is my last “good” month before the colder weather takes hold.

So if you find yourself indoors due to rain and cold, take a minute to check out a few solid URLs to help with your ecommerce business…

Last month we took a look at when to use 301 redirects (and when NOT to use them). Many times, a 404 not found page / response is the better option.

However, a generic 404 not found page is not a good thing. Sure, the search engines don’t care either way, but your website is not built for the search engines, it’s built for your visitors…

Tweet Last week Google announced a new way to submit URLs / web pages to them: Fetch as Googlebot This is done in your Webmaster Tools account, and will tell you instantly if Google is successful in retrieving the URL. If it is, you can then submit the page to their index. No, this is […]

A 301 redirect is simply a way to tell both humans and search engines that a web page they are looking for has moved to another location. These redirects play a vital role in preserving SEO and making sure visitors find what they are looking for.

However, using a 301 redirect for everything is not a good strategy…

Practical Ecommerce had a great article a few days ago about How To Increase Page Speed to Help with SEO. It has a number of tips and ways to monitor page speed.

Of interest to me was the end of the article where they list a few other areas for site improvement. These mostly focus on a site’s web hosting company. And this is often overlooked by many online merchants.

Unfortunately, it is one of the largest factors in improving site performance.

Tweet You’ve had your domain name for years. It’s indexed by Google and has excellent ranking. But you want to change your domain, so what do you do? You change it! When Google introduced their Google Webmaster Tools feature they opened up the windows to their data, allowing you in to see the pages they […]