Marketing on the Web Do you use Google's Search Console (aka Webmasters tools)for your website?? You should, especially if you have seen recent declines in traffic. Search Console is where Google communicates with site owners and where you'll find warnings about everything from SPAM to Malware. This article outlines a range of problems that Google is identifying and alerting owners about. What Are Google Penalties & What to Do to Recover ---
MoreWebsite Traffic Analysis
Marketing on the Web explores the analysis of web traffic and monitoring your digital marketing efforts.
Webmaster Tools for Added Web Marketing Insight
Webmaster's Tools provides powerful insights into what is really going on with your website. You may have Google Analytics and think that is enough, but Google Analytics only shows you what people did after they clicked through to your website. Webmaster's tools provides information about how your website is doing in the search results before they click, and can help you understand what content on your website isn’t working. You get a "Google's eye view" of your website's health (broken lin...
MoreWebsite Malware Removal
Website security has become a big issue lately. Several of my clients' WordPress and Joomla 1.5 sites have recently become targets. One website was infected with what appeared to be pixel sized dots at the top of its pages. These dots were actually iframes to random websites that were doing bad things. Another clients' website was repeatedly taken offline for no apparent reason, and after much work and everything appeared to be back to normal, we found that mobile users were being redirected ...
MoreMonitoring Site Speed for Better Ranking
Google uses page load speed as one of the signals in their ranking algorithm. While they previously provided an indicator of your sites speed in Webmaster tools, but it wasn’t on-going (they only sampled periodically). With this announcement, Google has added Site Speed To Google Analytics. I think page load speed is something everyone should be monitoring, especially if you’re in a share hosting environment (like most of my customers). It will also be beneficial in identifying slower page...
MoreReview Your Site Architecture
My clients will tell you that I am always preaching the importance of site architecture (or information architecture). Your site’s architecture, links, and navigation communicate how information is related within your site. Each page in your site passes rank to the pages beneath it. If your site lacks organization, Google must rely on other factors to determine the importance and relationship of your pages. WordPress and SEO guru Joost de Valk has a great write-up on this topic. https://yoast...
MoreBing’s Updated Webmaster Tools
An update to Bing's webmaster tools was announced today. Webmaster tools provides valuable insight into the search engine's view of your website. Unlike Web Analytics, which shows you what traffic came to your site, webmaster tools tells you what search phrases triggered the Search Engine to display your content in the search results and if that content was clicked or not. Bing's new interface does list the search phrases your site is displayed for, which is especially useful when your site i...
MoreHow to Diagnose Lost Search Engine Traffic
When dealing with a decline in traffic it is important to determine the source of the problem. Is the change something indirect that you can't control such as change in a search algorithm or a new competitor in the market, or is the change due to something more direct, like recent (well intentioned) changes to your site or a a server outage? The clues are all in your Analytics data. Is the loss from a single referer (Google, Yahoo, Bing)? Is the traffic loss clustered around a specific ...
MoreLinking Google Analytics and AdWords Accounts
Google Analytics is updating their their system. To ensure AdWords continues to pass information to your Google Analytics account, a setting change may be needed. I have already taken care of this for my customers and in doing so found several cases where a change was required. I wanted to alert other readers that you should check your AdWords account to be sure the information is correct. For instructions see this Google Post Important change to AdWords/Analytics cost data importing T...
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