Internet Marketing – Where to Begin?

Internet Marketing – Where to Begin?

It one of the most common questions I get from new clients. What’s the first step in growing my online presence? Should I pay Google for keywords? Or hire someone to do keep my social media updated? Maybe update the design of my website? While all of these ideas have merit, they are all secondary when it comes to internet marketing. The first thing I recommend is a site review.

Before you put money and effort into bringing visitors to your site you should make sure they will find it informative and user-friendly when they arrive. A typical website review provides insights on security, user experience and functionality along with actionable recommendations on how to optimize it.

Some of the main categories to look at are:

  • Page Load Time
  • Security Issues
  • Coding Errors
  • Display Issues
  • Search Engine Optimization

Let’s take a deeper look at each area.

Page Load Time

This filmstrip shows the process of loading a slow web page.

Speed is your best salesperson.  It’s a solid fact that every second you can save when loading the site translates into higher conversion rate.There are a lot of reasons your site could be slow loading.  Using tools like Google Page Speed tester and GTmetrix helps developers pinpoint and correct them. Tip: Most of the issues I see are due to server settings.  They can be fixed by your hosting company if you know what to ask for.

Security Issues

Firefox web browsers shows a green lock icon in the address bar of a secure website

Firefox web browsers shows a green lock icon in the address bar of a secure website

Every website should be protected by an SSL.  They come free with any decent hosting plan, and Google will actually penalize your site for not having one. Try visiting your site by typing in http://youwebsite.com in the address bar.  Does it automatically send you to https://yoursite.com (or https://www.yoursite.com)? If not you may have a problem with the way the site is set up.

Other security issues I’ve come across include outdated plugins and themes, which can open your site (and any other sites on a shared hosting account) to attacks.

Coding Errors

Coding errors can make your website vulnerable to hacking. It slows down site speed and can break the layout and functionality of your site. The w3c validator is my go to tool for resolving code errors.

Display Issues

Google penalizes websites that aren’t responsive – meaning they don’t display nicely on browsers, tablets, and phones. You should also be aware that there are some differences between how different browsers display code.  Something that looks great in Google Chrome may not look good at all in Internet Explorer, for example.

To be continued

Getting Rid Of Semalt

Semalt, Bad Bot

Over the past months I’ve noticed an increase in traffic referred from semalt.com, an outfit that claims to provide:

Professional keyword ranking monitoring seo service with competitor analysis.

What they actually do is send a flood of unwanted hits to the site from their SPAM bot, followed by foreign traffic referrals from non targeted visitors. This can hurt your analysis of traffic by skewing results, as well as using server bandwidth. But getting rid of this bad bot proved to be problematic. (more…)

META Tags and Google

Recently there has been some question of how Google deals with META information, and which information is critical to incorporate in a search engine optimized website.

For example, client site Big Bear Tournaments was originally built as a custom sports registration site for youth hockey. When it was later incorporated with a public facing website title tags were generated from the existing data for tournament, division and city pages. META tags were not included in those pages. (more…)

Payment Methods & Best Practices

Customer Engagement & Marketing

  • Google Trusted Stores
  • Trusted Reviews
  • eBay
  • Amazon Seller Central