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Website Best Practices

New sites looks great, but traffic doesn't !!

July 29, 2013 By waldo

301 redirect expalined
301 redirect expalined

I have heard this story too many times and feel it’s time to share the remedy.

A successful E-commerce company recently launched a new site. The new site looked great and they anticipated a positive bump in sales. Wow were they disappointed. Sales were off almost $10,000 thirty days after the launch of the new site. They contacted me in a panic. It took our engineers about 5 minutes to diagnose the problem.

All of the page names were changed and Google wasn’t notified. This would be similar to a restaurant moving across town AND changing its telephone number to an unpublished number.

Let me explain what happened, the real customer name will not be revealed. Google indexes websites on a regular basis and uses its proprietary logarithm to determine how they rank a particular page. Google ranked many of his pages on the first page of search results. So as an example a person looking for “blue plastic folding widgets” would see his page appearing on the first page. Note Google would list the web address and a specific page. So Google would list www.bluewidgets.com/folding.html. However, if the new site renamed that page to www.bluewidgets.com/folding-plastic.html the old page would no longer work. A person clicking on that link would get the dreaded 404 error, or “page not found”.

The shopper would then go back to Google and the click on a different web address, bypassing www.bluewidgets.com. This type of activity would dramatically reduce sales.

The solution is very simple, yet it’s surprising how few web designers understand the correct procedure for launching new sites. Reusing the same page names is one solution, but a better solution is to create what is referred to a as a “301 Redirect”. Basically you provide Google and other search engines with a map of the old pages and the corresponding new page pages. In this example we would map “www.bluewidgets.com/folding.html” to “www.bluewidgets.com/folding-plastic.html”. So when a person clicks on the old page that automatically are redirected to the page. Eventually Google removes the old page from its search results and shows the new page name.

Sad to say most web designers don’t use 301 redirects. The result is that the clients have to wait for Google to index the new pages, which can take between one to three months.

Once the problem was explained to the client and 301 redirects traffic and sales quickly were restored to their previous levels.

In closing, when are you ready to discuss launching a new website with your designer make certain they are familiar with 301 redirects.

 

 

Filed Under: Increase Traffic to Your Site, Internet Marketing, Website Best Practices

Is your site built for speed ?

June 19, 2013 By waldo

According to study by Akamai  40% of users will abandon a web page if it takes more than three seconds to load.

Slow loading websites are bad for your business.  In a store you will wait a few minutes to speak with a salesperson, but on the web you can simply close the slow loading site and load another site. Why wait when there are so many others sites.

We live in a fast-paced world and the Internet is all about speed and convenience.

Google recently account that a slow loading website can have a negative impact on your Google ranking. Google is constantly working to provide users with the best possible experience, and “fast” is “good”.  Click here to read more from Google Blog for Webmasters.

There are couple of reasons for a slow loading website:

  1. Poorly designed site
  2. Hosted on an inferior or overloaded server
  3. Large photos that were not resized, or too many photos on a page
  4. Flash files
  5. Large amount of external calls to other websites

It’s expensive to rewrite a poorly built site but there are two easy ways to ensure your site loads quickly. One is use a good hosting company.

Web Hosting as become a commodity and many people are using cheap overloaded hosting solutions. Take a peek at the graphics displaying the load time for a site before they moved to our hosting platform. The site took 5.52 seconds to load, almost 6 seconds.

Old hosting company. Load time almost 6 seconds.
Old hosting company. Load time almost 6 seconds.

Would you wait that long to view a page. It’s a beautiful site and worth the wait, but unfortunately, too many left. Now take a look at the load speed after it was moved to our hosting server. The load speed is 730 milliseconds, or LESS THAN ONE SECOND.

Now it loads in LESS than one second.
Now it loads in LESS than one second.

Large photos is a huge problem especially with many people uploading photos from their iPhones or digital cameras. There are many free programs that allow you to resize your photos, check to see if one was included with your camera. Many free online programs allow you to reduce the size of your photos as well as make simple edits. I tell my clients to investigate PicMonkey, it’s free and easy to use.

 

So before you spend a ton of money on a Search Engine Optimization make certain your photos are not too big and you have a good hosting solution. Click here to test the load time of your site.

 

 

Filed Under: Cool / Important Stuff, Increase Traffic to Your Site, Website Best Practices

Don't let your WordPress site get hacked

November 9, 2012 By waldo

It has happened again, another one of my colleagues sites was hacked. Sadly as WordPress gains popularity it’s becoming the victims of numerous hacks. WordPress is more complicated than regular HTML sites and requires that the database be backed up. This requires a special steps that not all hosting companies provide.

If you have a WordPress site, please make certain your hosting company is backing up the MySQL database as well as the files.

We backup all of our clients databases on a daily basis. In addition we offer a premium WordPress hosting system that offers in addition to our regular hosting the following additional features:

  • Weekly complete backups including MySql database to Amazon servers
  • Installation of dedicated security plugin and implementation of additional security
  • Speed Optimization
  • Regular updates of WordPress core files and plugins (this is perhaps the best way to ensure the security of your site)
  • Additional programming time if required is discounted from $125 to $100

Click here for more information on our WordPress Hosting Service

Or call us directly at 860-304-6369.

 

 

Filed Under: Cool / Important Stuff, Website Best Practices, Wordpress

Join Your Local Chamber and Watch Your Rankings with Google Climb

February 24, 2012 By waldo

Perhaps the best way to achieve top ranking with Google and other search engines is to attract a large number of relevant and authoritative links back to your site. Because Google, for example, interprets each link as a “vote”, the number of votes becomes key to evaluating (ranking) your website. When many sites provide links to a website, that website is understood to be significant. These links, however, should be relevant and from a reliable or authoritative source.

Many Black Hat search engines practitioners create “Free For All” sites with tons of links pointing to other sites. This tactic does little to increase traffic since in the majority of cases the originating site is neither relevant nor authoritative. How, ever, when an organization such as a local Chamber of Commerce site links to your business, then you have an authoritative link. Thus I encourage all businesses to join their local Chamber and make certain that the Chamber links back to their sites.

The Branford Chamber of Commerce takes this strategy a step further by creating micro sites for all of its members. These sites are by definition authoritative, because they are connected to the local Chamber. Thus for the cost of annual membership, Branford Chamber of Commerce members automatically get a huge boost with Google and other search engines.

Filed Under: Cool / Important Stuff, Increase Traffic to Your Site, Website Best Practices

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