Marketing Your Business - Page 12

At A2 Hosting, we’re all about making sure you get the fastest page load speeds possible. That way your audience can have an excellent user experience when they visit your site. Your audience’s experience is a big part of the puzzle for you to be successful, but you need an audience in the first place.

Do you ever look at your referral traffic in Analytics and notice sites that aren’t even linking to you sending hundreds and maybe thousands of visits? At first glance you may be tempted to pat yourself on your back because these referrals gives your traffic stats a boost. At second glance however you realize these aren’t real referrals; they’re spam referrals. These so called visitors aren’t actually going to your site. Instead they are sending data to Google Analytics making it look like they’re visiting your site.

Still stuck in the mindset that tons of backlinks and tons of content is the most effective way to skyrocket up Google’s rankings? Sure these both have an impact on your rankings, but always make sure to provide a positive user experience for your users. Google has even been quoted in previous blog posts about rewarding high quality sites that “The goal of many of our ranking changes is to help searchers find sites that provide a great user experience and fulfill their information needs. “

Once in awhile I’ll be looking at our traffic report in Analytics and notice a blast of traffic to us from a site that I haven’t seen before. Unless that traffic is coming from the referring site’s homepage, there really isn’t a great way to see where it’s coming from. This is especially discouraging if the traffic isn’t converting at a high conversion rate. I want the opportunity to learn how we’re being linked to, reach out to the site owner and discuss ways to improve the conversion rate.

If you think of the one keyword you would like your website to rank well on, do you rank on the first page in the search engine rankings for that keyword? I would guess 99% of us would say we don’t rank for that keyword. That’s because it’s probably very competitive and there’s only 10 spots on the front page. The majority of the sites linking in the top page are probably quite a bit larger than your site. If you’re tired of being outranked by those huge sites with SEO budgets that likely exceed what your site generates in an entire year, you may want to try Barnacle SEO.

This week Google announced new mobile based criteria which will affect your search result ranking for users searching from a mobile device. This makes sense, Google wants to return higher quality mobile pages to users on mobile devices. But it means if pages on your site aren’t responsive or the responsive design doesn’t meet Google’s criteria, you may see those pages drop in the results.

Google is constantly tinkering with their algorithm. They update it over 500 times per year on average. Many of their updates are pretty minor. However over the course of the past few weeks, Google has two very important algorithm updates that you’ll want to make sure you’re prepared for.

We’ve been warned about the potential dangers of link building schemes for years. Most site owners are well aware of the threat of having their website blacklisted by Google and avoid such schemes. Natural, white hat link building is still OK, isn’t it? According to a recent Google+Hangout, it sure sounds like Google is telling us that link building should be avoided.

Why is social media so important? The answer could be a separate blog post, but in short, it’s the language of today’s consumers. Social media gives your business a quick and direct line of contact to your customers and target market.

Is your website mobile ready? If not, you’re certainly behind the times according to a new report by eMarketer. They are reporting that 2015 will be the first year that mobile ad spending will surpass traditional desktop/laptop digital ad spending. eMarketer is speculating that digital ad spending on smartphones and tablets will increase to 50.1% of the total spend, up from 38% in 2014 and just 25% in 2013. They speculate that the trend will continue, with mobile ad spends raising to 77% of the total spend in 2018.