Many of you have sold a home or two in your lifetime. Even if you haven’t sold your own home, you’ve watched real estate agents in reality TV shows teach home owners the importance of, and how to, get their houses in shape before putting them on the market.

You get one shot to capture the attention of the people who are ready to buy, so before scheduling that open house you want it in tip-top shape. Otherwise, your best potential buyers will walk in, take one look around, turn and walk out. [Read more…]

If you have a brick and mortar store, a service area business or a home-based business, sit up and pay attention. Even though I’ve written about this important topic, I’m sharing with you the tips I learned while attending Rich Owing’s presentation at WordCamp Asheville titled SEO Goes Local SEO, because it has been so helpful for our clients.  There are lots of great tips and important reminders that we may already know but need pounding in a few dozen times before we help ourselves by doing them.

In his previous incarnation, Rich had one website, all about GPS devices, and it let him live in style with a six-figure income. But don’t think Rich sat around on his keister eating bonbons or laid out under a tiki hut in the Seychelles working four hours a week.

One reason his site did well was that people wanted and needed information on [Read more…]

I ran into a client the other day and she raved about the surge of business at her hair salons since we launched her new sites. I asked her how her traffic was doing.

“You mean I find out how many people are going to my site?” she asked.

Yes! You absolutely can. I’ll tell you how, because a remarkable number of people are wondering the same thing. Let this also be a warning to any readers who think this is a dumb question. You’ll miss or lose business if you make assumptions about what people know, so listen up.

The main way people monitor their website traffic is through Google Analytics. You can use this insightful data to tweak your website, attract of the right type of traffic, and convert more visitors into customers. [Read more…]

A week after we launched Paula Gould’s new website for her photography business that involves children and babies, she called in a panicky voice. Why was she getting referrals from a porn site?

Paula was right where spammers wanted her. In her panic, she would click the link to see what this was about. There wouldn’t be an answer, though. No reference to her site or any of her photos. Another case of web crawler referrer spam!

In the past year or so, we have seen a big increase in [Read more…]

What is a mobile friendly website and why should you care? In February of this year, Google announced that starting in April they are going use “mobile device friendliness” as a new variable in their search ranking algorithm.

If you care about how your website comes up in a Google search, then you should know what this update means for your website, and what you can do to fix it. Mobile friendly, or responsive, websites are designed to provide an optimal viewing experience across screens of various sizes. [Read more…]

If your website traffic dropped dramatically in late September, it could be you got bit by Panda 4.1, Google’s latest algorithm update. This update specifically downgraded sites with poor or no content, duplicate content and  keyword stuffing. It did this on September 23. Check your analytics and see if you are safe.

A couple of people I know got hammered. One man came to me yesterday to redo his site after he experiences a dramatic drop in business on his very profitable e-commerce site. The problem is he has very few words on his site which was created in Microsoft Front Page quite a number of years ago and was completely discontinued. Because of that he can’t easily go in and update his content.

We are going to [Read more…]