What's good and what's bad? What works and what doesn't work? This is what I try to reveal every Friday as I work through my Flop Fix website reviews. I always start them with a Google search in a random town around the U.S. in search of an independent retail jeweler that could use a little help while also allowing me to publically explain what can be learned from their mistakes.
This week, I began my search for "jewelers Honesdale, PA" and saw these results:
In this week's website review, I'm heading over to Laramie, WY in search of a good jewelry store. My hope, like most savvy internet users today, is that I'll find a good jeweler based on the information they have on their website. If the website I find happens to be a total flop, well, then I'll give some suggestions to fix it.
I write these website reviews every Friday to demonstrate how to apply new SEO techniques, online usability, and content building to pre-existing websites that need help. ... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
In yesterday's Daily Golden Nugget, I explained a little about your website site speed and how to view the Google Analytics report that shows you how slow your website is.
While you could ask your website programmer to help you figure out how to fix your website, there's another report in Google Analytics that gives you initial ideas of what to do. It's called the Speed Suggestions report and it can be... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
After writing about code and speed optimized websites in my #TBT last week, I wanted to bring your attention to Site Speed optimization tools that are built into Google Analytics.
As a quick recap, the speed of your website will help increase your website ranking a little bit, and when it comes to SEO, every little bit counts.
To get to them, you first log into Google Analytics then click on Be... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Today's Throwback Thursday is going back to January 2011 to the Nugget about website speed.
In that old Nugget, I explained that a website's speed could be adversely affected by the software that runs it, i.e. the content management system, or CMS for short.
This is still very true today, and it's probably the main thing I look at when evaluating a website. A sloppy CMS or website ... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
In today's Daily Golden Nugget, I'll show you how to look at your Google Analytics Exit Page report and explain what it is, and steps you can take to analyze it.
This is part of my Practical SEO Guide series with the goal of giving you quick, actionable information to make the search engine optimization of your website a little better.
Get started by logging into your Google Analytics account and navigate your way over to Behavior -> Site Content -> Exit Pages as shown in this animated screen grab:
In honor of the big jewelry shows in Las Vegas that came to a close on Monday this week, I'm searching around Las Vegas again for this week's website review edition of the Daily Golden Nugget.
The "speed of your website" is the amount of time it takes for your site to download to the device you are using. A lot of factors play into the your page speed that have nothing to do with your site, things like:
Welcome to the weekly edition of the Friday jewelry website review. Every week, I randomly choose a candidate website and put it to the test for design, SEO, usability, content, and a wealth of other website and business related issues.
I never know how they will turn out; sometimes good and sometimes bad. I always try to write these reviews in the order in which I browse around the site, providing my first reactions as I discover things.
In this edition of #ThrowbackThursday, I'm jumping back to the topic of "thin content" that I first explained back in September 2011.
Thin Content Explained
In simple terms, thin content refers to a web page that has very few words on it. Google likes to refer to this content as pages "with little or... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
This is the Friday jewelry website review where I find a random retail jeweler and review their website for design, usability, and SEO. In each one of these reviews, my goal is to show how the information from my other Daily Golden Nuggets can be directly applied to a website.
This week, I'm using the Google Chrome browser in incognito mode to search for "jewelers st joseph mo." Here's a snapshot of the results:
Welcome to the weekly website review. Normally this is published every Friday, but it got pulled up one day to make room for a special Nugget scheduled for tomorrow.
The goal of this weekly website review is to shed light on how many retail jewelers out there are still using old website techniques, old SEO methods, and old designs. I search a random city in the USA every week for a jeweler and usually select from the top of the organic listing.
In my experience, given the choice between an older looking and n... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Welcome to the Friday website review. The goal of these weekly website reviews to learn something that can better your own website by analyzing someone else's live website. Every week I simply do a Google search in a random town or city throughout the U.S.
This week I'm looking for a review candidate in Terrell Hills, Texas. Using Google Chrome's incognito mode I searched for "jewelry stores in Terrell Hills, Texas" and was given this SERP:
Today is the Friday Daily Golden Nugget website review. Normally I search a random town name in the United States in search of a website review candidate. But for today, I decided to add a little holiday cheer and look for a town with a holiday related name.
I started with this list of holiday towns, but it turns out that most of those are "populated places" or ghost towns. It seems like many forefathers were willing to name towns after Christmas, but over the dec... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
For today's Daily Nugget, I'm answering a direct question that came in from one of my readers. Did you know you can send me questions? Submit them through the contact form on the jWAG site, or send them to me through Google+ or Facebook.
The answer to this question is a little technical, but this brings together a few different topics.
When Google Image Search was redesigned in January 2013, it introduced a modern way of looking at images across the web. Images were presented larger, with the ability to view just the image or jump to the website where the image was found.
I remember having a lot of trouble understanding the redesigned user interface for Image Search, but after a few months I finally got used to it.
In its simplest terms, search engine optimization is the process of doing something for your website that will help it to rank higher in search engines. Google maintains its dominance over the entire search engine industry because it keeps its users happy.
Users... Those are the everyday people of this world, like you and me, who keep returning to Google because it offers the best search results no matter which device you use. Google pays attention to what we all look for, how we use ... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Welcome to the Friday jewelry website review edition of the Daily Golden Nugget. The goal for today is to examine a random retail jeweler's website and learn from something they did right or wrong.
I don't plan these reviews out, and I usually write these reviews as I work through the discovery of each site, documenting my first thoughts as well as how different stuff fits together.
This week, I searched for "jewelry stores Kirksville, Missouri" and was given this Google SERP:
Every online marketing company has their own version of reports. It's one of the requirements of any marketing or SEO service. You, as the website owner, want to know what they are doing and what you are paying for.
Some agencies provide their own really nice looking reports with charts and graphs, while others provide lists of pages and keywords with percentage increases and decreases. On many occasions I've found that agencies created reports using reporting software that t... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
The Daily Nuggets from the last several days have covered the more advanced topics of tracking your visitors from social networks using the UTM campaign tracking built into Google Analytics. In yesterday's Nugget I also explained that those tracking tags create long, ugly URLs that should be shortened.
We're now 15 days into the New Year and I want to continue to arm you with what you will need to know in order to make 2013 a successful website year for you. That tracking is just the beginning. The path of we... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Today's Nugget continues our topic on whether or not you should be upgrading your website. One of the frequently overlooked measurements is the download speed of your website.
In 2009, Google announced that it would measure the download speed of your website as a new part of its equation for website ranking. It's only 1 small part within a suspected 100+ other measured metrics, but you should still consider it.
Today's website tool is Website Optimization located at http://analyze.websiteoptimization.com.
Type in your website address into their "Enter URL to diagnose" field and click Submit Query.
The generated report does not provide a specific grade, but rather goes into detail about the number of individual files that make up your web page, and how to increase the download speed for each one.
"...articles are easy to follow and seem to have information one can use right away." -Ann, Gallery 4, Hamden CT
"...serious kudos to you. We love your straight talk, pertinent information and plain language. I don't know how many industries have something of jWAG's caliber available, but I learn from the emails every day. Really, really nice work, and very appreciated." -Cheryl Herrick, Global Pathways Jewelry
Today is the Friday Daily Golden Nugget website review. Normally I search a random town name in the United States in search of a website review candidate. But for today, I decided to add a little holiday cheer and look for a town with a holiday related name.
Over the previous three days I explained how to 
The Daily Nuggets from the last several days have covered the more advanced topics of tracking your visitors from social networks using the UTM campaign tracking built into Google Analytics. In yesterday's Nugget I also explained that those tracking tags create long, ugly URLs that should be shortened.
