Where You’re At - Page 30

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.

As we rolled out our Turbo Servers option for our Web Hosting customers, our VPS and Dedicated customers contacted us asking, “What about us?”. We’re excited to announce our Turbo Boost option on our VPS Hosting, Managed VPS Hosting and Dedicated Servers.

At A2 Hosting, we focus on offering you the fastest web hosting solutions possible. We recently launched our Turbo servers, our fastest hosting solution to date. One of the reasons our Turbo servers load sites so quickly is our A2 Optimized Site Accelerator. A2 Optimized is our exclusive cPanel plugin that quickly enables caching for your applications from a single interface for even faster page loads. Unlike other hosts who do not allow caching solutions on shared servers, Turbo customers get pre-configured caching with A2 Optimized.

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.

It’s been awhile since I’ve written a post about the importance of page load speed. Instead of just telling you about how important page load speed is, you probably care more about how page load speed impacts your bottom line. Kissmetrics, an Analytics solution provider, has done extensive research regarding how page speed can impact your success. This report mentions: