Between your website, local newspaper, direct mail, radio ads, billboard, social media, and word of mouth, it's difficult to calculate exactly how your customers are finding you and what ultimately convinced them to make a purchase. What was once an easy task of calculating the ROI for an individual ad is now impossible because of so many different ways a customer can engage with you online.
"Attribution modeling" is the modern process of analyzing and assig... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Your online reputation is now part of your marketing. The results that people see in search help formulate the first impression that someone has of your business and whether or not they will purchase from you.
Managing your online reputation through reviews that appear on Facebook, Google Reviews, and Yelp is vital for your future business health. Savvy consumers are referring to what other people say in these online reviews and other consumer generated co... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
What started as email spam years ago has turned into an ever-evolving monster of internet spam that permeates our emails, Google search results, automated telephone sales calls, and nonsense in our social media feeds. No matter how hard we try, marketing companies find new ways to put their message in front of us whenever we don't want it. This type of marketing is called interruption marketing, and it really has become an annoying interruption in everyday life as well.
I recently came across a seminar titled "How to Promote Your Online Store In A Cost-Effective Manner" and thought it was an extremely misleading headline. Whenever business owners ask me about cost effective online advertising, they usually mean "least expensive" rather than asking me how to achieve the best ROI with their online ads.
I've also found that many business owners believe that online marketing is simple, and that anyone can do it. Preying upon this belief, there are ad a... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
On June 23, 2017, the Jewelers' Security Alliance issued a special alert outlining a widespread scam that's been recently targeted at the jewelry industry. In the security alert, which you can read here, the JSA explains that scammers are profiling retailers and manufacturers in order to pull off the reported telephone scams.
It's the hope of every business that they will build a website that helps make them a lot of money, but few websites ever achieve that goal. Turning a website into a money making machine won't happen overnight, and it won't magically happen without a lot of help from employees and the business owner.
Most small businesses don't know how to update their websites once they are launched; indeed, many will continually pay for website updates even though they can edit the website on ... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Your website is the cornerstone of all your online marketing; it's what people find when they search for a local business type or a specific product by name or by model number. People go to Google with an instigated need for an immediate purchase, when they need a specific service, or when they need to start research on a longer term decision making process. Those with immediate needs will take action based on what they see on your website or your social accounts. Those looking for an immediate purchase will look for an onlin... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Because the online paid advertising playing field changes monthly, my clients constantly ask for my current recommendation for where to spend their limited marketing budget. Although there are many online advertising possibilities, I prefer that businesses use Google AdWords and Facebook Advertising because the ads can be changed frequently to highlight current offers.
Website review and analysis are part of my everyday job. I've been actively analyzing and making suggestions on improving traffic acquisition, user flow, SEO, and usability for several years. I've shared this analysis process and the tips for improvement in my writings for the last few years to provide an insight into how you could do it yourself.
Today, I'll share 6 of the most frequently broken or missing website features that I have seen over and over again, and provide some suggestions for maki... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
It seems like once every year I come across another website using the Hibu service. Their corporate website says they are a leading provider of digital marketing to local businesses across the US, UK, and Spain. They say that they provide one-on-one service to unify digital marketing, website development, and SEO.
It all sounds good to the small business owner who is looking for an all-in-one online solution and doesn't have the time to learn or the money to hire the right people to do it. Hibu has... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
In this week's website review, I'll show you an example of how Google reads words on your website and how you can see those words for yourself. I'll also show you why you should host your blog within your own website instead of using an outside service, I'll even show you screen shots of how Google views a website when the blog is hosted outside.
It all starts with a Google search for "jewelers flagstaff az." According to these results, there are not many jewelers n Flagstaff:
Google made a significant change in the search results page layout over the last 7 days that removes the powerful advantage that they'd bestowed upon local businesses for about 10 years. Today, I'll dive into the details of those changes.
A Little Background
Google created their original Local Business database in the early 2000s and has morphed it through many permutations with names like Places, Maps, and Local. Today, they call it "Google My Business" or just GMB for short. Having your business... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
In last week's Golden Nugget, I presented some interesting information showing the comparison of web page visible content to the hidden HTML code in the background. From that post, you could conclude that your website goal should be to fine tune your code to prevent too much hidden code, a problem that is known as "code bloat."
I'm digging a little deeper into this topic again today because of the emails, phone calls, a... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
I'm taking a different approach in this week's website review. Normally, I look for poorly ranked websites and try to find reasons why they are not ranking well. When I started my search this week, I found a bunch of mediocre websites that were outranked by Yelp and YellowPages. All of the websites needed improvement. Oddly enough, the site I thought needed the most improvement, was outranking all of the others.
Today, I'll explore why that might be happening. First, I searched for "jewelers Healdsburg CA" and saw these resul... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
For this week's website review, I went searching for "jewelers spokane wa" and had some trouble deciding on which site to review. There are several jewelers in Spokane to choose from with a wide range of websites from very old looking to very modern. The goal of this website review is to give ideas of how to improve a site and increase its ranking or improve its customer usability.
Pounder's Jewelry was the first website I found that could use improvement. The website address was VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Online referrals are starting to make an impact on local businesses, but not in the way we all expected them to. A few years ago, the buzz within the online marketing community was that social networks would become a referral engine for people to ask advice through. Facebook even attempted to create a new type of social search engine to capture that referral service. Google also struggled with the idea that the internet would become a big referral engine, and they tried to capture a piece of it through Google+.
In honor of the jewelry shows in Tucson, Arizona this week, I decided to search for a website review candidate in that area. I began my search with the phrase "jewelry stores tucson az" and saw these results on Google:
One of the marketing testing methods I use is to put myself out in the real world, away from my desk, to observe what an ad will look like when encountered out in the wild. Although I do test my digital marketing ads on different devices and browsers when sitting at my desk, it's difficult to get into the same headspace that a consumer would be in then viewing an ad or a website. This is my own interpretation of the proverbial "walk a mile in their shoes."
This is why I like writing my website reviews when I'm trave... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Time and time again, jewelers tell me they want to come up first in Google search for phrases like "engagement rings" or anything related to bridal jewelry. Those are tough keyword phrases to compete for since large ecommerce jewelry website spend a lot of time, money, and optimization efforts to maintain top ranking. Independent jewelers have a better chance competing in their local markets using the popular phrases that people search for.
Popular local phrases include the words jeweler, jewelry, or jewelry store, followed by either ... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
We each have our own set of specializations and talents. Someone in your family is probably better at cooking than all the others, while someone else is a better writer, carpenter, or a musician. The world would be a very boring place if we all had the same level of skill and proficiency in everything.
The Entrepreneurial Journey
At some point, you probably got the idea that you could make your favorite baubles or provide a service better than others you'd seen, and so you launched a business o... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Has the search ranking on your website plateaued or declined over the last 12 months? It might be because you've fallen behind with adding new content and products to your website. Content is any type of written description, story, PDF document, photo, and even a video. The more you add the better your chances are to help increase your organic search results, which can lead to more traffic.
The depth of the content you have on your website doesn't just help with overall ranking, it becomes really ... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
In this issue of the Golden Nugget, I'm on the lookout for a jewelry website that isn't correctly suited to help customers this holiday season. I'll document my first thoughts as I look at the website. The hope is that I can uncover problems and explain solutions so you can learn from the mistakes of others.
In the spirit of the holiday season, I'd like to look for some jewelry gift ideas, perhaps something I could buy locally. For this week I'm pretending to be in South Bend, Indiana, so I searched for "jewelry ... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
For this week's website review, I'm revisiting a jeweler in Orlando that I reviewed in July 2014. Back then, I was searching for jewelers near the town of Christmas, in Orange County, Florida. According to my previous review here I had to use Google Maps to locate a nearby jeweler when searching for the phrase "jewelers in Christmas, Orange, Florida." Google certainly has made some advancement in their Google Local systems since then, ... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Since April 2013, I've reviewed 190 different websites and made a countless number of suggestions for updating each one. Today, and for the next few weeks, I'm going to revisit a few of those old websites to see what's new and if they've made progress.
If they have made progress, it's not because I told them what to do. The disclaimer at the bottom of all my reviews says that I don't write these to solicit business, and the only way they will find out about the review is if they search for their name online. Fewer than 5 in 190 have ever ... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
In this edition of the Golden Nugget, I've written a quick review of a retail jeweler's website to show you how a website might backfire on you without regular updates or simply looking at it.
I found Weiss Jewelers when searching Google for "jewelers Greeley, CO." Their website is: http://www.weissjewelers.com/
First Impressions
This is what the home page looked like when I visited:
Welcome to this week's edition of the #FridayFlopFix website review. This week's destination is Plantation, FL, which is right next to the Everglades wildlife area in Florida. Here are the Google results when I searched for "jewelers in plantation florida:"
In honor of the jewelry shows taking place in Miami this weekend, I've chosen a Miami Beach jeweler for this week's website review. It all started with a Google search for "jewelers miami beach, fl" and these search results:
My website reviews every week usually start with the random selection of a town, but this week, I didn't find any jewelers when I selected Jurupa Valley, California. If there are jewelers in Jurupa Valley, then they probably don't have a website or a large enough digital footprint for Google to find them.
With the lack of any real local results, Google returned store listings from surrounding towns and a bunch of directory sites, like Yelp. Here's what Google gave me:
This is the Friday website review where I randomly choose a retail jeweler and scrutinize their website for problems. I look for design mistakes, SEO mistakes, functionality mistakes, content mistakes, and even marketing mistakes.
This week I searched for "jewelers Renton, WA" to find a review candidate. Here are the results I saw in Google:
Can you learn from someone else's mistakes? That's exactly what I hope you'll get out of this Friday Flop Fix. This week, I'm venturing over to Tupelo, MS in search of a retail jeweler that might be making a mistake with their online presence.
This is the result I saw when searching for "jewelers tupelo ms" in Google:
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:
I find it interesting that, in this world of shopping malls and big box stores, there are still times when people automatically think of a specialty store for a specific need. Local retail jewelers are specialty stores because they focus on a single product category, but at the rate that JBT reports jewelers going out of business, it seems like the small local retail... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
It's time for the weekly case study of a website that's pretty old and in desperate need of a makeover. I call these weekly posts my Friday Flop Fix review. During these reviews, I look for websites that are implementing search engine optimization strategies poorly, or have poor website designs and I suggest ways to make them better.
This week, I searched Google for the phrase "jewelers Zanesville, OH" and was shown these results:
Welcome to my weekly Flop Fix website review. I dedicate my Friday Golden Nugget posts to reviews of randomly chosen jewelry websites. The review candidates are randomly chosen through a Google Chrome incognito search for jewelers.
This week, I searched Google for "jewelers Christian County, KY" and was given these results:
Welcome to a somewhat unusual Friday review. Every Friday, I usually look for a website that's a bit of a fixer-upper and I suggest how to make it better. This week, as usual, I opened my Google Chrome browser in incognito mode and ran a search for "jewelry stores in Cairo GA."
There are certain search phrases that trigger specific search results formats, and normally when you search for a "jewelers in _____" or "jewelry stores in ____" Google activates the local results version of the SERP, but today it didn't.
Welcome to my weekly website review. Every Friday, I randomly look for a jewelry store website that has a few problems, that I call flops, and then I suggest ways to fix them. These short website reviews are not meant for the store itself but rather you, the reader. My hope is that you will discover something here that you also need to fix on your own site.
This week I used the phrase "jewelers Newport, RI" to search for my review candidate. Instead of choosing a jewelry store from the first page of the Google res... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Last week, I went shopping for a water proof iPhone case; something that would be good enough to protect the phone while canoeing on a river. After a bit of searching at the local mall, I found a potentially good case made by THULE. Due to its price, the THULE Atmos X5 case was locked in one of those anti-theft store packages that covered most of the important details. Before buying it, I needed to make sure it was really waterproof rather than just splashproof, and to what dep... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Reading the latest website optimization and marketing methods online, and putting them into practice on your own website is a daunting task for most business owners. Many question their own actions and simply don't know where to start. For this reason, every Friday I present these mini case study website reviews. My goal is to find a website that has a few obvious (to me) problems, or flops, and then I suggest first steps fixes to get them on the right track again.
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
This is my weekly #FlopFix website review. Each week, I find a random retail jeweler's website and suggest fixes that could make it better. I never know what I'll find when I start these reviews and I do my best to document my first impressions as I look at the site.
This week I'm venturing to Olympia, WA where I'll search Google for "jewelry stores in olympia wa." Here's a screen grab of the returned SERP:
Welcome to my weekly random website review. In these reviews, I search for website candidates that have problems (aka flops) with their website, and I suggest fixes to make them better. This week, I'm taking a drive down to Accomack County, Virginia in search for a jewelry store. Accomack is near the famous Route 13 Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel that I once had the pleasure, and slight fright, to drive over. There are fewer bus... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Searching for a website candidate for this week's Friday Flop Fix was a little challenging. I began my search, as usual, looking for a random website candidate in a random city in the United States. My randomly chosen city this week was Orange, CA. My specific Google search phrase was "jewelers Orange, CA" for which I was given the search results you see below.
I've included my commentary in the screen capture:
This is my weekly website review where I search for a retail jeweler at random through Google and pick apart what they are doing online. I try to uncover the flops that are being made so I can suggest the fixes needed to improve what they are doing.
This week, I started my Google search with the phrase "jewelers Brookline, MA" and quickly found myself heading down a rabbit hole after viewing these results:
Every week, I review the website of a randomly chosen retail jeweler. This week, I searched for "jewelers Ketchikan, AK" to find a review candidate. This type of search always triggers Google local results format, which includes the top three business listings for that area. Google understands that people are usually looking for local businesses whenever a keyword is included along with a town name in a search query. Google then shows results formatted like this:
Your customers and online followers will eventually become familiar with the routine and presentation of your content. Your content, and how you post it online, eventually becomes part of your brand's positioning, which is why planning ahead is so helpful for building that brand identity. The routine is just as important as the visual look because eventually your followers, whether paying customers or just readers, will expect things from you.
It's time to take a drink, or maybe 15 drinks! The official jWAG drinking game is to take a drink every time I mention Google Maps. Why? Because the very first Golden Nugget I wrote was about Google Maps and it's been one of the most common topics I've written about since I started writing these Golden Nuggets on July 27, 2010. I've been writing special edition version of the Golden Nugget every 100 since. Today is my 1500th Golden Nugget.... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Last weekend, I received a frantic phone call from a store owner that needed to fire an employee, but the employee was in control of all their Google accounts. The store's Google Analytics, Google AdWords, Google Search Console, and Google My Business accounts were all created by an employee years ago, and the store owner never insisted that those accounts be transferred into her name. It's a sticky situation now that should have been avoided from the beginning.VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Every week, usually on Friday, I write a website review. This week, I'm publishing my review a couple days early because I have something special planned for Friday. The goal of my website reviews is to dissect the online efforts for a random local retail jeweler. I don't bother reviewing the websites for chain stores because I want to illustrate how a local jeweler can improve a similar site like their own.
I find my website candidates by searching Google using the Chrome browser set to incognito mode. Incognito mode is good to use whe... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
I have a love/hate relationship with the placement of social network icons on a website. Some websites have them in their header and some put them in the footer. In this Golden Nugget, I'll give you my point of view of where and why you should place your social icons.
Are They Important Enough?
Back when MySpace and Friendster were the latest craze, it seemed like everyone was adding large icons for those networks to their website header. Websites without those icons were made to feel like... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
In this week's #FridayFlopFix website review, I'm heading over to Hawai'i in search for a jeweler who could use some website help. Every Friday, I search for a website that's not quite doing the best they could. I want to point out the flops on their website, and suggest some fixes.
I started my review candidate search with the query "jewelers waimea hi." Waimea is a town on the Big Island of Hawai'i. Instead of choosing from the websites that appeared on the first page of Google's results, I looked throu... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
This is the #FridayFlopFix website review where I take a critical look at a jeweler's website to find important mistakes and suggests ways to fix them. To kick off this week, I'm searching the "jewelry stores Longmont, CO" in Google. Here's a snapshot of the returned Google local listings:
The axiom of search engine optimization is that your website will only rank for words that search engines can find on your website. If you learn nothing else about search engine optimization you must learn that one point. If you have learned that already; good, you don't have to read today, but before you go consider that many people aware of that axiom are still not applying.
How can you accurately decide when to post to social media when there are many reports, infographics, and varying online advice on what time of day and how often to post to social networks? So many contradictory reports make it difficult to know what advice is the best advice.
Last week, I reviewed some good ways to correctly implement QR codes in your marketing and in your store. One of the methods I suggested was to create a QR code that would lead people to an online review form. To do that, you'll need the website address for that form, but Google doesn't make it easy to find any more.
This is the #FridayFlopFix edition of the Daily Golden Nugget. Each week, I find a random retail jewelry stores and review their website in hopes that we'll be able to learn something from the process. I call this a "Flop Fix" because I specifically look for websites that are making mistakes, i.e. flops, so I can suggest fixes.
Here's the search results I saw this week when I searched Google for "jewelry stores Elko, NV":
This is the #FridayFlopFix edition of the Daily Golden Nugget. Each week, I look for candidate websites that are not ranking very well in Google search results and dissect them to figure out why they are ranking poorly.
This week, I searched for "jewelry stores Florence, SC" to find that poorly ranked site. I found an interesting situation with the store Fisher Jewelers & Silversmiths that I'll investigate today. I first noticed the AGS listing for the store shown here:
Social media is required for business--all businesses. It ties all your other advertising together: every ad you place in your local community, whether it's on TV, radio, on billboards, in all of your direct mail, for newspaper ads, or everything else you do on other social networks. Social media ties all your marketing together in such a way to support your customer life cycle.
Customer Life Cycle
There are specific steps that every customer must travel throug... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
This is the #FridayFlopFix website review edition of the Daily Golden Nugget. Every week, I scrutinize the website of a random retail jeweler and make recommendations for how to improve the site. I seek out bad websites for these unsolicited reviews so you, the reader, can learn how to identify and improve upon your own websites.
I'm changing up my approach this week. Normally I choose a review candidate from the first few that appear in the Google search results; this week I'm digging into the second page of the searc... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
The meta descriptions are the approximately 150 character descriptions you see in the search engine results pages. What you put in the meta descriptions does not count towards your search engine optimization; rather, it's there simply to exp... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Since the beginning of Google time, their search results page has been formatted as a two column layout. The wider left column showed the organic results and the thinner right column had the paid AdWords ads. Eventually, Google started including paid ads above and below the right column organic results.
Don't want to read? This week you can also watch the video recording of this review here!
Welcome to the weekly #FridayFlopFix website review. Every Friday, I search a random town for an older website that needs help improving, and I suggest fixes for their flops.
This week, I searched Google for "jewelers Odessa, TX" and saw these results:
Don't want to read? This week you can also watch the video recording of this review here!
This is the weekly #FridayFlopFix edition of the Daily Golden Nugget. Every Friday, I search for a really bad website in a random town, and provide ideas for how to fix all of its flops.
This week when I searched Google for "jewelers Scottsbluff, NE" I saw these results:
I'm going back to my own jWAG website tracking today to look at the top 10 Daily Golden Nuggets of all time, that are still relevant today. I see that some of the Nuggets with the highest reader count are out of date because Facebook and Google have changed things, and a few others are very similar so I'll have to do some consolidating.
Popular Screen Resolutions
1. The most popular screen resolutions change constantly as new mobile devices and laptops are introduced. I publish an updated version of screen resol... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Don't want to read? This week you can also watch the video recording of this review here!
This is the #FridayFlopFix website review edition of the Daily Golden Nugget. This week I've randomly chosen Santa Clarita, CA as the city to search for my review candidate. When I searched Google for the phrase "jewelers Santa Clarita, CA," I saw these three Google business listings:
A few weeks ago, I published a Nugget showing the recent trends in search engine organic usage. I've been tracking those statistics since 2010, and now I have enough information to compare mobile organic visits to desktop organic visits.
There's a trending website design idea that has its place, but that place is certainly not on your home page. Today, I'll explain what this website design trend is, what's good and bad about it, and how to use it.
Infinity Scrolling
Social media websites have changed the way we interact with website. Before Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest, everyone thought that the internet was made up of individual web pages. But social networks g... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
In this edition of #ThrowbackThursday, I'm jumping way back to September 2010 to the topic of landing page planning, although I didn't specifically call it landing page planning back then.
Planning your landing page long before you need to use it is an important part of a successful online marketing strategy, but before I get in too deep of how to help with the success, let me just briefly explain what a landing page is.
Throughout the past month, I analyzed different sets of keywords that I collected during the 2015 holiday season. Most of that research focused on overall analysis of the keyword data without breaking it down into the desktop, mobile, or tablet categories of devices. I chose that approach to save time, and quite frankly, so as not to bore everyone with too much similar information.
That said, in this edition, I am splitting apart the results to show you how the u... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
This is the last Daily Golden Nugget where I'll dive deeply into specific keyword phrases I collected during the 2015 Holiday Season. I've presented a lot of information over the last 30 days and I could spend another month sifting through it, but this stuff does get boring after a while when there's no specific goal in mind. That's an important thing to remember; it's best to perform your keyword research when you have a specific goal in mind. Every time I grind through keyword data, I seem to lose an... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Today I'm stepping back into 2015 to review the top 10 Daily Golden Nugget posts according to my Google Analytics account. Take a quick look to see if you remember them, and if you were able to put any of this information to use:
This is the #FridayFlopFix edition of the Daily Golden Nugget. Each week I seek out a website that needs some help, and I make improvement suggestions. Most of the time, I simply do a random Google search for a jewelry store, sometimes I come across a store randomly during work, and sometimes one of my friends sends me a website that perplexes them.
This is the Friday Flop Fix edition of the Daily Golden Nugget. Each Friday, I search for a website that isn't living up to its full potential, and I give suggestions on making it better; my fixes for their flops. I started my search today with the query "jewelers Rolla, MS" and received this as a result:
Welcome to #ThrowbackThursday edition of the Daily Golden Nugget. As I looked back over my recent data, I realized I haven't analyzed the top performing search engines for quite a long time. The last time I reported the top search engines results was back in May 2014.
I've collected a lot of data since then, and now I can even report on the differences between desktop and mobile search engine usage.
I realize that over the last 12 months, I've spent most of my time talking about Google to the exclusion of the other search engines. Many SEO professionals, myself included, feel that if you can achieve high ranking in Google then you should easily be able to achieve high ranking in any search engine. It seems only natural since Google is the de facto search engine, right?
While Google might be the most popular search engine in the U.S., it's not the most popul... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Not much has changed since I wrote that previous Nugget, but I should recap the basics.
What is a Bounce Rate?
I should explain what a bounce rate is for those of you not quite up to speed. This is the percentage of people who visit your website, look at one page, click nothing else, then either close their web browser or c... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
It all started six years ago; that's right, we're celebrating the jWAG's 6th anniversary today with the ambitious and philanthropic mission to surface our research about the internet and how the jewelry industry could best use technology to improve their business.
When my business partner and I launched the Jeweler Website Advisory Group (jWAG), we never expected it to blossom into the resource that is now referenced by so many people, even outside the jewe... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
This is the #FridayFlopFix edition of the Daily Golden Nugget. Each week, I look for a random retail jewelry store website that is using the wrong approach on their website, and I make suggestions for improvements. This week when I searched Google for "jewelers st. petersburg fl," I was given these results:
In this edition of the Daily Golden Nugget, I'm continuing my analysis of a lot of keyword data I collected during the 2015 Holiday Season. Today's information is a continuation of the organic impression and click data I previously shared.
For today's Nugget, I sorted through the 16,000 keywords collected from desktop ... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Now that we closed the book on the 2015 Holiday Season, it's time to review the results. Over the course of the holiday season, I captured more than 47,000 different keyword queries related to retail jeweler websites. I'm sifting through all that information to find something actionable for retail jewelers. I've been looking for things like a list of good keywords, or popular designer brands to carry, or even where to focus your energy over the next few month... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Happy New Years and welcome to #FridayFlopFix! FridayFlopFix is what I call my weekly website reviews. The goal of these Friday the Daily Golden Nugget editions is to find a website that is behind on expected website standards, i.e. flops, and provide suggestions for fixing it.
Last night, on New Year's Eve, millions of people watched the ball drop in Time Square, New York City. In honor of this, I've also decided to focus my attention on NYC to locate a retail jeweler. Considering the NYC Diamond District and so many retail jeweler ... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
The year 2015 is about to come to a close, but before it does, I'm venturing out on a limb to give you my forecast insights for 2016. This year, I'm referring to these as "insights" and not necessarily as "predictions" because these things are what I already see happening in a small way, and steadily growing. They are in no particular order...
Social Media Change with the Young Generation
The current teenage generation is struggling to hide from their parents online. Many of them want nothing to do with Facebook because the grown-... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
I enjoy all the feedback and questions I receive from my readers. Last week, I received a question about RSS feeds which I'll address today. This is a higher level topic that I last mentioned in my Nugget from December 16, 2010, but have never explained in full detail. The detail I'll cover today might be of some interest to those of you who blog on a regular basis, and... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
This is a special Christmas edition of the Daily Golden Nugget. Each and every Friday, I write some type of website critique or review as an educational case study. For Christmas today, I'm changing it up and reviewing a Christmas-related search engine results page.
As I started my search today by typing out "christmas jewelry ideas," Google offered me the suggestions you see here:
I've previously estimated and explained that the customer cost of acquisition for a retail jeweler is somewhere around $75. You can calculate this number by summing up your advertising expense for a campaign and dividing that by the number of new customers you've acquired during that period.
We're all visual people. Smartphones and social media give us the freedom to snap and share photos all day long. Google has gotten much better as locating socially shared images and surfacing them in their image search.
When analyzing websites, I often find that there's more organic traffic arriving from Google image search than from web search. You can see this in your own Google Search Console data by looking at the Search Analytics report an... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
This is my weekly #FridayFlopFix website review where my goal is to find a website that has a few problems and suggest potential fixes. I start this review with a jewelry store search in a random town and then I quickly look through the search results for websites with problems I can talk about in a terse evaluation like this.
I started my hunt for a candidate website this week with a search for "jewelry highland in." Google showed me these results:
I recently did a comparison of the total user sessions between November 2014 and 2015 including a breakdown of usage on mobile, desktops, and tablets.
I'm continuing my analysis of the same data as measured across retail jeweler websites; this time I'm comparing the increase or decrease of new users between November 2014 and 2015.<... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Welcome to the #FridayFlopFix website review. During this holiday season, I'm shopping for a few websites that have problems: websites whose features could easily turn them into a flop and hurt their business.
I started my search with the query "jewelry gifts in huntington wv" and was given these results from Google:
This is a pretty sad edition of #ThrowbackThursday. In fact, it's not even much of a throwback since I'm only jumping back 3 months to September 2015 to my explanation of how to share Google reviews to your website.
Testimonials and online business reviews are an important part of a customer's pre-screening process of you. While every online directory has a review system, arguably Yelp a... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Welcome to the 1,400th Daily Golden Nugget. In honor of reaching another "00" status, I'm returning back to the root topic of where these Nuggets began, which is an update on what's happening with Google Maps. It's become our own personal drinking game, so let's explore it again with a beverage of your choice.
During the last 5 months, Google has changed a tremendous amount with regard to how Search, Maps, and Google+ work together. It started with a large c... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Every week, normally on Friday, I write a website review with suggestions on how to make a random site better. I have something special planned for this Friday so I have to move my Flop-Fix review to today.
My purpose here is to find a website that has something wrong, point it out, and give suggestions on how to fix it. My suggestions are entirely my own and based on my past experience, research, or observations. I found my review candidate this week with the query "jewelry stores Happy Valley, OR" and th... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Reports from the first weekend of the big holiday season in the U.S. are in, and they are quite mixed.
Businesses both large and small tried to get a jump on the Black Friday specials this year by advertising "Black Friday" discounts throughout the four weeks leading up to Thanksgiving. Early in November, a blog post on C|Net speculated that VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Welcome to the #FridayFlopFix edition of the Daily Golden Nugget, where I intentionally look for a jewelry website that has problems, and I make suggestions to correct them. This week I'm searching for "jewelers in Durham, NC" for my flop fix candidate. These are the Google results I had to choose from:
Did you know that 61% of smartphone users are more likely to buy from mobile sites and apps that offer some type of customized information for their location? That statistic came from the Consumers in the Micro-Moment study conducted in August 2015 by Google and Ipsos. The full details of that study are here.
Hello and welcome to the Friday Flop Fix, or #FridayFlopFix. Every Friday I randomly choose and review a retail jeweler's website. Normally I just choose the first jeweler that appears in the SERP listing for whatever town I look at; sometimes I find good sites, and sometimes I find bad sites. I'm going to change it up and intentionally look for sites that have problems, the website flops as it were, and offer ideas to fix them.
My search this week to me to Warwick, RI, specifically the Google search for "j... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Google has been working on artificial intelligence (AI) for several years. When I first reported Google attempts at AI back in February 2012, it was still a far flung dream. Since then Google has achieved an early stage machine learning artificial intelligence that has improved search results, and created higher than expected profits for the company this year.
Welcome to the Friday Website Review. In honor of Halloween, I went searching for a spooky or horror related city name in which to find a candidate jeweler to review. Sadly, populated places like Devil's Peek, Hells Corner, and Pumpkinville are nothing more than tourist traps in the middle of nowhere with nothing more than a general store.
I then tried a search for Haddonfield, Illinois, the city portrayed in the Halloween movie series. But as it turns out Haddonfield, Illinois is a fictiti... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
One month ago today, I introduced the 2015 Holiday Run-Up with the premise that this year you could create several specialized marketing campaigns, or micro-campaigns, focused on singles products or groupings of products. Implementing the micro campaigns would require lots of product photography, correctly targeting your customers, writing lots of product content, sharing that product content to social media, coordinating... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Welcome to this week's edition of the Friday Website review. I'm journeying to Bayside, NY this week in search of my website review candidate. Using Google Chrome, I searched for the phrase "jewelers near bayside ny" and saw these results:
It's #ThrowbackThursday, and it's also the 19th installment of my special 2015 Holiday Run-Up series. Over the last 30 days, I've written out holiday marketing steps for Pinterest, Google+, VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
The time needed to manage social media can easily eat up most of your day. Over the last few weeks, I've detailed a lot of social media tactics in this 2015 Holiday Run-Up series. If you've missed out on the discussion so far, then go back to the beginning here and catch up.
It's Friday. Every Friday, I start out by saying "This is the Friday website review edition of the Daily Golden Nugget." I'm sure you guys are tired of reading that. Anyone want to suggest a hashtag that alliterates with Friday? Send your suggestions to me on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, or just email them to me.
So it is Friday, and it's review day. The goal is learn something from a random website of a random retail jeweler chosen from a random city somewhere in the U.S. This week that random somewhere is Raynham,... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
In today's #ThrowbackThursday, I'm jumping back to January 2014 to my directions on how to post to Google+. This is also a continuation of my special 2015 Holiday Run-Up series giving you the tactics you need to help boost your sales this upcoming season.
This is the weekly website review where I choose a random retail jeweler and compare their website and online identity to what is commonly known about search engine optimization, online marketing, and customer usefulness.
I started this week's review with the Google search "jewelers athens oh" and saw these results:
This is the Friday website review edition of the Daily Golden Nugget. The purpose of this website review is to look over a random retail jeweler's website to evaluate if they are correctly applying what we know about the internet, online marketing, and business. We'll see if improvements can be made, or if we can learn something from them.
Each week I start by searching Google in a random town for a typical phrase that a consumer would search for. This week the search phrase is "jewelers logan ut," and he... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
This is the Friday website review edition of the Daily Golden Nugget. I'm starting my Google search this week with the phrase "jamestown ny jewelers" to find the review candidate for today. That search yielded these results:
Another summer has come to a close and the holiday season is almost here. No matter what the financial forecasts say, I want to give you some current ideas to improve your marketing methods, and hopefully your sales, through the end of this year.
Create a Uniform Branding With Your Ads
I'd like to start with a suggestion for you to review the ads you are already planning for this season. Instead of running standalone ads this year, you can use all the potential advertising methods... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
The economy of the United States is built on small business. Those who run a small business know that every decision is a trade off of one thing for another. Taking a short cut today might help to lower expenses, but that same short cut might create bigger problems in the future.
As a business coach I'm always helping entrepreneurs evaluate business tradeoffs and opportunities that might financ... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
In this edition of the weekly website review, I'm venturing to Freeport, NY to look for a jeweler. My search begins in Google with the phrase "jewelers freeport new york." Here's a snapshot of the search results I saw:
In this edition of ThrowbackThursday, I'm jumping back to May 2011, and my discussion of HTML Site Maps.
There are two types of site map files you might find on a website. If you've ever worked on your search engine optimization, you might be familiar with the sitemap.xml file that search engines read to better understand your website. That XML file contained a record of every page on your site ... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
This is the Friday website review edition of the Daily Golden Nugget. The goal of these weekly reviews is to evaluate a random retail jeweler's website against website design methods, SEO strategies, usability, and technology trends. I use Google Chrome in incognito mode to find every review candidate with a basic local search phrase. I also try to capture my first impressions in these reviews and write them during my initial pass through the website.
When it comes time to consider a new jewelry designer for your store, you have an extra tool at your fingertips to help decide if you should buy into the line or not. However you evaluate a new line, you can also use Google Trends to help you decide. <... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Today's Daily Golden Nugget comes from a question I received last week to explain the difference between ad targeting on Facebook and Google AdWords. In simple terms, the AdWords targeting can use a really sophisticated way to target what people are searching for. On the other hand, Facebook uses a really sophisticated way to target the demographics of the people themselves.
In this edition of #ThrowbackThursday, I need to jump back to my discussion about Google Website Optimizer in September 2011. In 2012, Google closed down their Website Optimizer standalone product and merged its features into Google Analytics. They now call it Experiments instead of Website Optimizer.
The old Optimizer was designed to handle A/B testing, which is when ... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
PLEASE NOTE: The new version of Google+ launched on November 17, 2015 no longer supports the ability to share reviews. This Daily Golden Nugget is defunct, but saved here for archival purposes.
This is the Friday website review edition of the Daily Golden Nugget. Each week, I dig down into a random retail jewelry store website to discover the good and bad of what they've done with their online identity. The goal is to learn something that you can also apply to your own online identity.
This week I've decided to search San Luis Obispo, CA for my candidate jeweler. I'm starting my search with the phrase "wedding rings San Luis Obispo, CA." This is the Google SERP that was returned:
It's time for this week's Throwback Thursday Daily Golden Nugget. I'm jumping back to March 2011 to my discussion of Older, Wiser, Faster Indexed Websites to specifically revisit the difference between new websites and old websites, and how Google indexes them.
New Websites
People don't race to shop at your store as soon as you build a new website. Before that can happen, Google needs t... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
This is the Friday website review where I do a Google search for an independent retail jeweler in a random town, then review their website.
This week, I'm starting my search with the phrase "jewelry stores in grand fork nd." Every week that I do this, I try to give you my first impressions of every website as I work through it. Just looking at the results given below, I have a feeling this week's review is going to be quite... nasty. Hold on to your seats gang and let's jump in...<... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
'Tis currently the season for jewelry stores to upgrade their websites in preparation for the upcoming holiday season.
Website upgrades are good, as long as you are upgrading to something better. Everything online can be tracked and learned from. Before upgrading your website you should be reviewing all your previous collected data to see how you can improve.
The defacto standard in website tracking is Google Analytics, a massive tracking and analysis system that m... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
This is the weekly random website review where I search for a website candidate in a town near you and review how well their website is put together.
I never know what I'm going to find. Sometimes I find great sites and sometimes I find sites with a lot of problems. I do my best to write down my first impressions of the sites in an attempt to illustrate how a consumer might be reacting.
No matter what, there's always something to learn from.
To kick off the review, I'm searching for "engagement rings ho... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
In this edition of Throwback Thursday, I have to report some news which saddens me. It relates to how your business websites reviews appear; or rather; no longer appear in Google search results.
In October 2014, I wrote this Nugget explaining how to use Google My Business to find and reply to online reviews that are not part of the Google system. In other words, customer reviews that are ... 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
For this week's review, I'm using my iPad to look up a review candidate. Every week, I use the Chrome browser in incognito mode to search for a random jeweler. In case you don't know, the iPad version of Chrome also has an incognito mode.
This week, I'm searching for "jewelry stores Eugene OR." Here's the Google SERP I saw on the iPad:
I'm sitting on a regional jet right now as I write this. I'm heading back to New Jersey after three days with the RJO in St. Louis, Missouri. For me, it was a weekend of discussions about e-commerce, online local marketing, and social networking.
I was very impressed with all the jewelers I spoke to this weekend and I'm starting to think that the need for social media is starting to be understood as a necessity for marketing, even though the results can't be tracked. Many jewelers told me... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
In today's Practical SEO Guide, I will tell you about website "Blocked Resources," how to view this report in Google Search Console, and how Google alerts you when they find a blocked resource.
First, let me explain that a Blocked Resource is a page, script, or some file that Google cannot read because you are telling them not to read it; yet, that same page, script, or file is used on the public site.
There's a difference between your public site and your backend area that you use to manage your sit... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
This is the Friday website review edition of the Daily Golden Nugget. I'm always on the lookout for a jewelry website we can learn from, both good and bad. In honor of my visit to St. Louis, MO this weekend I'm going to look for one of the retail jewelers in St. Louis to review.
Using Google Chrome in incognito mode, I searched for "jewelry stores st louis mo." This is the SERP that was returned to me:
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:
This Daily Golden Nugget 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.
Today we're looking at the Landing Page Report in Google Analytics. Log in to your Google Analytics account and navigate your way over to Behavior -> Site Content -> Landing pages as shown in this animated screen grab:
When you consider the time it takes to be involved with Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, Google+ and so many social networks, it's no wonder so many people live their lives carrying their smartphone in their hand all day. So many people have traded everyday verbal conversations for terse text conversations and deluges of selfies.
Those who have chosen a smartphone-tethered life, now find it second nature to use social network as a way to keep their friends and family in... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
This is the weekly website review edition of the Daily Golden Nugget. Each week, I work through these website reviews to give you real examples to learn from. It doesn't matter if the website is good or bad, there's always something to learn from.
I'm changing it up a little this week. Normally I search for the phrase "jewelry store" and a random town name, but not this week. In honor of this weekend's official kickoff of the Jewelers Equality Alliance<... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
In this edition of Throwback Thursday, I'm jumping back to September 2011 and the topic of Article Spinning.
To understand what Article Spinning is you must first understand the importance of having a blog on your website. My avid followers will already know that I'm all about the blogging. High value blogging content... High value blog content that you post on your main website!
Did you know that it's possible to track the effectiveness of your offline marketing, as in, print ads, TV commercials, and even billboards? Yep, it's true, and it's simple too... Just use a different domain name on each ad.
Once again, the Daily Golden Nuggets have reached another milestone: 1300!
It was 1,300 weekdays ago that I wrote the first Nugget about Google Maps. In honor of my first topic, I now write about Google Maps and its subsequent incarnations ever since, and save them for these milestones.
The original Maps service has transformed several times through the years and had names like Local, Places, Local Business, and Google+ Local. Ever since Google started using Google+ to tie all its services together, the p... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Once a week, usually on Friday, I write a website review for a randomly chosen retail jewelry store. This week the review is being moved to Wednesday.
For this week's review, I'm searching for "jewelers in Sedona, AZ" using Google Chrome in incognito mode. The results I saw during last week's review were formatted for a smartphone. This week the results are formatted for a desktop browser again. Oddities like that are usual... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a warning about the latest domain name scams that are sent through the mail. Those types of scams are trying to trick you into spending unnecessary money with them, but they are not stealing your domain name from you.
With so many domain name scams around, it's difficult to recognize when you get a legitimate domain name renewal notice. Those notices are e... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
This is the weekly website review edition of the Daily Golden Nugget. Each Friday, I work through these reviews to help you understand the good and bad ways a retail jewelry store website works. I look for good and bad website design, content, photography, usability, and search engine optimization in hopes that we can all learn something new.
Each week, I use Google Chrome in incognito mode to search for review candidates. Incognito mode allows me to hide potentially personalized search results ... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Facebook is becoming well known for their ability to provide to the surface, very detailed demographic and the personal interest data about your customers. They've been able to give more details than the data Google has provided for several years. In light of Facebook's advancements, Google has improved their own demographic and interest data and made it available through Google Analytics and AdWords.
Before you can access to the demographic data from Google, you need t... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
The data reported by Google Analytics is really helpful for every website owner to look at. By default, the reports provide really insightful data over the last 30 days of activity for users, sessions, pageviews, and bounce rates, but that's only a small piece of what GA can do for you.
The big benefit of GA is being able to produce a report for any time frame in the past and compare it to any other time frame in the past. You can compare the last 30 days t... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
As I quickly approach my 1300th Daily Golden Nugget, I find myself pondering my existence. What else could I possibly write about that I haven't already?
Truthfully, a lot, but I'm also realizing that's I've never created a series of simple examples or how-to's for typical search engine optimization tasks. So, starting today, I'm going to work through several days (however many it might take) to show you how to tie together simple SEO procedures.
A few days ago, Search Engine Land published an interesting article explaining how Google is penalizing websites that abuse the way they use schema.orgmarkup. That post was an interesting read for me and a good lead in for this edition of Throwback Thursday.
This is the weekly random retail jewelry store website review. The purpose of these weekly Friday reviews is to find out how to improve your own website by dissecting the techniques of another website.
This week I'm searching for "jewelers in sun valley, Idaho." Here's the SERP for that search query:
I hate it that most web browsers hide the "http" part of a URL in the address bar, but I recognize that it helps make the internet more understandabl... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
This is the Friday website review edition of the Daily Golden Nugget. Today I'm searching for "jewelers in North Charleston, South Carolina" using the Chrome browsers on my iPhone 6. I have Chrome set in incognito mode to avoid personalized search results.
Here are the full results returned on my phone. As you can see, I've indicated that all the organic results are "mobile-friendly":
The other day while having a rather long lunch date with my friend and industry colleague, Peggy Jo Donahue, we touched on the topic of disclosure for paid endorsements and how they should be handled online. It is an important topic that I realized I have not written about in too much detail other than to briefly mention it in VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Welcome to the Friday website review edition of the Daily Golden Nugget. The goal for today is to find and perform a usability review of a random jewelry store mobile website. I'm performing the review on, and taking screen shots with, my iPhone 6.
The first review for today is to see if a google.com search through the Safari web browser would yield the same results as a search using the Google search app on the iPhone. Here's a side by side comparison of the two methods:
This is the Throwback Thursday edition of the Daily Golden Nugget. Today I'm jumping back to Nugget number 55 and the topic of money sites.
The topic of marketing funnels came up during the 2015 JCK Talk on multi-channel marketing. The original idea of a marketing funnel was that you would reach a lot of people with a broad scope... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Jennifer Shaheen, President of Technology Therapy Group was among those speakers chosen to present at the 2015 JCK Las Vegas show. Jennifer and I are industry colleagues and we share 99% of the same point of view about the internet and how retail jewelers should be using it for their marketing.
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.
I was at a social media marketing meeting in New York City last month when someone asked if they should be posting the same photos and status update to every social network.
That was a good question, and there's no real straightforward answer. In reality, it depends if you have the same audience following you on all the social networks. If the same audience follows you on all networks, then they will get very bored very ... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
This is the Friday website review edition of the Daily Golden Nugget. Usually I choose a random city around the U.S. to find a retail jeweler, and this week, in honor of the Las Vegas jewelry shows, I'll search around Las Vegas, Nevada.
The following is a screen grab when I searched for "jewelers in las vegas." The top listed store is The Jewelers of Las Vegas. They have updated their website since I last re... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
After last week's Nuggets about marketing funnels and determining a funnel cost, I received an email from a reader wanting to know my current recommendations for a marketing funnel.
Here are my recommendations for monthly online marketing, in this o... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
It's officially been one month since Google Mobilegeddon on April 21, 2015. I've been eagerly following the blogs and new channels of several companies that are tracking the results, and they all seem mixed.
Google started showing mobile friendly websites in search results earlier than April 21st. Reports from Search Engine Land stated that the mobilegeddon rollout seemed to be slo... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
In yesterday's Daily Golden Nugget, I explained how to analyze the cost of your marketing funnel. Today, I'll follow up with some specific funnel ideas to help you formulate your own plan.
Understanding Previous Marketing
Here's a tricky question to think about... Do you measure ad success by the number of people it brought... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
The truth of the matter is that your business will never survive without some type of marketing. Word of mouth marketing is not enough anymore to support your business. Simple posts to social media and meager ads in community newspapers won't support your overhead, or even put food on your table.
According to the U.S. Small Business Administration, you should VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
This is the Friday website review where I search for a jeweler in a random town around the United States then review their website. By reviewing a live site, I'm usually able to highlight good and bad points that we can all learn from.
For this week, I wanted to find a retail jewelry store in Laguna Beach, California. Here's the SERP when I googled "jewelers in Laguna Beach, California":
Way back on May 3, 2013, I reviewed the website for Alletti Jewelry. In that review, I explained that they were using the GoDaddy WebsiteBuilder and showed why it was a pretty bad content management system (CMS).
Recently. I came across a different retail jeweler's website using the new version of GoDaddy's Online Store CMS. The store is Goldirocks Jewelers and their website is VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
In this edition of #ThrowbackThursday, I'm revisiting the URL restructuring topic from March 15, 2011.
I consider URL restructuring to be one of the more advanced SEO techniques that you can employ after a deep review of how your website is performing in organic search. It's the process of turning your long, messy looking website addresses into shorter, easy to understand addresses.
Do you have a question about your own online marketing situation or feel perplexed about something specific on the internet? Send it to me and I'll answer it as a future Daily Golden Nugget if I can.
Shortly after posting my Friday website review on the morning of April 24, 2015, one of my email readers asked me a really viable question about the SERP results from that day's review. You can read the review VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
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.
For today's #ThrowbackThursday, I'm revisiting the topic of breadcrumb trails in your website.
In regard to your website, a breadcrumb trail is a specially formatted set of links that helps users navigate your website without needing to click the browser's back link.
Google first suggested the use of the breadcrumb trail in 2012 as a way to help simpl... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
In this edition of the Friday website review, I'm traveling to Shreveport, Louisiana in search of my review candidate. Using the Chrome browser in incognito mode, I searched for "jewelers Shreveport, Louisiana" and saw these SERP results:
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
In this third and final edition in my series on web server logs, I'll explain what an error_log is and the important information you can find within. My previous two Nuggets explaining your web server's access_log can be found here and VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Since the dawn of computer networks, every server has recorded logs of all communications activities. You might be surprised to find out that email servers keep logs of every email sent, who they came from, and who they were sent to. Many large organizations even save copies of those emails.
When it comes to sharing files, all FTP servers and all file sharing services, like Dropbox, keep track of what files were uploaded and downloaded.
I usually commemorate special numeric milestones when writing these Daily Golden Nugget. Most notably are the Google Maps updates every 100th Nugget, but there have been fun ones like 404 and 410 too.
This is Daily Golden Nugget Number 1234, and it's also #ThrowbackThursday... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
In this week's edition of the Friday Website Jewelry Website Review, I'm beginning my search in "jewelers morgan city, la" to find a website review candidate. I go through these website reviews every Friday as a way to monitor and show you what's happening in the world of jewelry websites. I never know how the review will turn out, but the hope is that something is learned.
In this edition of #ThrowBackThursday, I'm jumping back to an old topic, and still a very valid topic explained in Daily Golden Nugget number 175 back on March 25, 2011... Adding new value to the internet.
Content, content, content! That's what Google wants. Countless numbers of official Google webmaster blog posts, videos, and presentations by Google employees at internet expos talk about the continual need to create new content.
This is the Friday Website Review edition of the Daily Golden Nugget. Every week I search for a jewelry store in a random town and review their website. I never know how these are going to turn out, but they are always interesting as I examine website designs, functionality, SEO, and potential customer engagement.
Using Google Chrome in incognito mode to prevent personalized results, I searched for "jewelry appraisals Lafayette, IN." Here's the search results I saw:
This is the #ThrowbackThursday edition of the Daily Golden Nugget. This week, I'm jumping back to Nugget Number 93 from December 1, 2010. The topic is Trading Links with Local Businesses.
Linking to Avoid
Google has placed heavy penalties on websites that use link building to affect their ranking. The VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Apparently Google is turning a few more heads with its recent search engine ranking algorithm changes again. I'm not talking about Mobilegeddon, which will happen on April 21, 2015, but their latest announcement about e-commerce product images.
Google has put a lot of effort into improving how it understands images and the types of images that people would like to se... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Whenever Google comes out with a new webmaster guideline, I wonder what they are up to. Every action they take has the potential to aide or disrupt the normal flow of the internet that we all rely on now. Take, for example, the announcement of their mobile-friendliness ranking factor and the potential for disruption that VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
This is the Friday Jewelry Website Review edition of the Daily Golden Nugget. Every week, I randomly choose and dissect a retail jeweler's website to see what makes it tick. I never know what I'm going to find each week; sometimes it's something new to learn or a refresher on topics I've previously written about.
To find this week's review candidate, I searched Google for "jewelry stores in Bridgeton, New Jersey" and was given this SERP:
In this edition of #ThrowbackThursday, I'm jumping back to Daily Golden Nugget number 218 from March 25, 2011. Back then, Google was generating SERP instant preview images for websites, a feature that was then dropped in April 2013, but it I want to cover a different topic from that Nugget that I never wrote about in detail...
No matter your field of study, you have more opportunity to uncover something interesting when you have more data to analyze.
Google Has Mega Data
Google thrives on data, but they also spend an exorbitant amount of time trying to figure out how to read a website and decipher what they find on every site. Websites are nothing more than large text files until you build an understanding of how the words relate tog... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Last week I wrote my weekly jewelry website review while I was waiting for my flight to France in Newark Liberty Airport, in Newark, NJ. Because I was sitting in the airport, I had the opportunity to present that review from the point of view of an actual mobile user.
Over the last two weeks, I've been detailing why it's important to have a correctmobile setup for your website. Google's decision to use mobile friendliness as a ranking factor has a lot of people worried that... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
The ellipses are a set of three periods that has different functions depending on how that punctuation is used.
In these Daily Golden Nuggets, I often use this symbol to represent a long pause or a trailing off thought. In text messages, I use them to represent long pauses, or sometimes I even send them alone in a single text message to illustrate a perplexed reaction when I don't know what to say. A stunned silence, perhaps.
Many retail jewelers still struggle managing the time it takes to promote themselves on social media. Unfortunately, even though you can hire an agency to manage your social accounts, the best way to engage your customers is to establish your brand's own online identity.
It's difficult to allocate the time needed to engage on social media amidst the daily routine needed to run a jewelry store. Instead of doing it all yourself, you could allow your employees to engage soc... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Welcome to the Friday website review edition of the Daily Golden Nugget. Every week, I randomly search for retail jeweler websites to review as an educational exercise. Over the last two weeks, in the wake of Google recent announcement regarding mobile readiness, I've written severalVIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Search engine optimization was once a game of pure guesswork. SEO specialists would simply watch their own efforts of what worked and what didn't work, then simply follow the same steps over and over again.
Companies like MOZ.com and SearchEngineLand.com have communities of users always trying to figure out which supposed SEO techniques work, and which don't. Search Engine Land even published their of VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
In this edition of the Daily Golden Nugget, I'll cover one of the nagging mobile website issues that Google doesn't like any more. Well, I don't know if they ever liked it, but in this video they've clearly pointed it out.
It all started a few years ago when people first started dabbling in mobile websites. It's difficult to retrofit a desktop site to include a mobile version, unless you are willing to redesign the entire site again. Setting up a parallel mob... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
In this edition of the Daily Golden Nugget, I'm giving you 3 more important mobile website design factors to complement the 3 mobile design factors I gave you last week.
These mobile recommendations come directly from Google, from this video.
The weather in North America has been quite drastic through this winter. Snowfall and low temperature records have been broken all season long, and we're all counting the days until March 21st, which is only two weeks from now. Thankfully temperatures seem to be on the rise.
On the other hand, two weeks ago, the temperatures in New Jersey were lower than in Fairbanks, Alaska!
I'm certainly not a cold weather person, but many people are. In this week's edition of the Friday website review I'm headi... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
In this edition of the Daily Golden Nugget, I'm showing you a few things to watch out for when creating your mobile website. These mobile recommendations come directly from Google from this video.
No Pinch Zooming or Plug-ins
There should never be a need to zoom in on a mobile website. The website content should naturally fit the size of the screen as you see here:
Every year for the last 5 years, many website programmers and marketing guys have tried to say "this is the year mobile websites will take over," but we've all been wrong. I was so wrong when I said 2010 would be the year of the mobile website; back then, it was just the year of the mobile website hype.
Mobile marketing and mobile websites had to go through a few stages of evolution to get to where we are as of today. As smartphones really started... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
If you're jewelry store is located in a strip mall or a shopping mall, Google will probably be changing your address, if they haven't already.
In honor of my 1200th Daily Golden Nugget I'm bringing you some updated information about Google+ Local today. Way back 1200 post ago I began these Nuggets with a a post about Google Maps, since then I've carried the tradition or reviewing Google business related changes every 100th Nugget. So here we are again.
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
This is the Friday website review edition of the Daily Golden Nugget. The goal of today's review is to take a critical look at a random retail jeweler's website in hopes of finding something we can all learn from.
At the start of each review, I launch a new Google Chrome incognito window. This allows me to search for a jewelry store without any influence from my previous search history or personalized results.
Searching Google for "jewelers Chandler AZ" returns these results: ... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
If you believe the (mostly North American) superstitions, Friday the 13th (today) is supposed to be an unlucky day. Perhaps it will be unlucky for some couples that breakup before tomorrow, Valentine's Day, arrives. I prefer the optimistic point of view and would rather believe that love is in the air today.
This is the Friday website review edition of the Daily Golden Nugget, and to honor Valentine's Day I decided to search for a jewelry store in or near a town with "love" in the name. This was not as easy a... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Evolution, it's nature's way of subtly changing things so the next generation will continue to survive and thrive. But it's not just nature that changes things for the better, it's how we all live, learn, and change things around us for the better.
The engineers over at Google are constantly trying to improve and evolve their search engine algorithm to better understand what information is being published online and how that information will be used. Sometimes the information we... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Welcome to the Friday retail jewelry website review. In this week's review, I'll be searching for a random website candidate to critique in the hopes that we can all learn something useful to implement on our own websites.
To start this week's review I started searching for jewelers in Hudson, NY. Specifically, I used the Google search query "jewelers in Hudson ny."
I'll be the first to admit the website content creation difficultly level is pretty high. Content includes infographics, photos, podcasts, PDFs, videos, testimonials, and, of course, the written word. It takes hours to prepare each of those types of content but the return on that time investment come in the form of several years of attracting customers throu... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
This is the Friday website review edition of the Daily Golden Nugget. Today, I'm going to perform an incognito Google search for a random jewelry store candidate in Blackstone, Virginia, then review their website.
The goal of this weekly website review is to learn something new, or at least to see an implementation of something good or bad that you never knew.
When I used the search query "jewelry stores in blackstone va" I was given these results:
The word "organic" is used to indicate something happening naturally in its environment, without outside influence that is deemed to be artificial or controlled. A quick look at the organic page on Wikipedia and you'll see that there are 28 different phrases for organic used in the English language.
All of the phrases refer to some type of natural growth or living thing that is grown according to certain standards. Orga... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Welcome to the Friday jewelry website review where I randomly select and review the website of a retail jeweler. The goal is to dissect their online accounts to see how they might be ranking highly, and what they might be doing right, or wrong, with their online identity.
I use Google's Chrome browser in incognito mode when searching; otherwise the search results will be skewed based on my personalized search results and the top ranked sto... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
It astounds me that people still offer first place Google ranking service. Every day I still receive at least one spam email which offers me to get first place ranking on Google if I hire them to improve the SEO of any of the domain names I manage.
I started writing these Daily Golden Nuggets more than four years ago and even before then, Google posted warnings saying how first place ranking could not be achieved by simply hiring someone. Their warning is VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
A few years ago, Google undertook an extremely ambitious project to extend its Street Mapping technology inside buildings. Specifically, they created a way that Google Maps Street View could reach inside individual retail stores to create virtual walk throughs of those businesses. These virtual tours are called Google Business View, and the businesses taking advantage of this technology are reporting more engaged customers and higher sales.
I was recently analyzing the Google+ Local account for a new jewelry store. The owners bought the previous bead store that was at that location and remodeled it into a new jewelry store. My analysis discovered a situation I'd not yet seen, or in fact, even envisioned. Of course, that makes it a perfect topic for a Daily Golden Nugget!
It's obvious that every new business needs to design their store and stock their shelves with merchandise. Before you even get to that... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Google Image Search made a few advancements over during 2013 and 2014 that has led to ever-increasing consumer usage. As more e-commerce sites emerge across all industries, there are millions of new product photos that are being absorbed into Google's Image Engine.
Although every e-commerce website might have their own unique database identifier, it seems like all websites are also publishing the manufacturer's part number as well. A few years ago, this was fro... 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:
Google Image search has really started to mature. Not just in its ability to find and surface images, but also with the way that people are using it.
In fact, if you look at this Nugget from last week, you'll see that 75% of the search impressions are generated through Google Image Search and 57% of actual organic visitors come from Google Image Search too.
In this edition of the Daily Golden Nugget, I'll provide some research based information about mobile keyword search data collected during the 2014 Holiday Season.
Cross reference your own sales figures and website analytics against this data, and use it to improve your future marketing. The findings here should be useful to you all year long, but especially as you start planning your website content and marketing for the 2015 Holiday Season.
In this edition of the Daily Golden Nugget, I'm exploring keyword data collected between November 1 and December 31, 2014 from many retail jeweler websites.
I collected a large amount of keyword data from people using Google's desktop search, mobile search, and image search. The mobile search data is very interesting. Last week, I presented th... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Welcome to the Friday website review edition of the Daily Golden Nugget. The purpose of this review is to examine a live retail jewelry website in search for the good and bad traits. There's always something interesting to learn from in every week's review.
For this week, I started with a search using the Google Chrome browser in incognito mode. I stay incognito while searching for a review candidate so my own browser history will not influence the search results I see. Through your search history, Google has a way of knowing which websi... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
When using Google Webmaster Tools, you can view which search queries will trigger your website to appear in search results. In the past when we SEO guys would spew the phrase "search queries" it was just a fancy name for saying "keywords." In fact, you can say "search queries," and "keywords," and "search phrases" and mean the same thing.
Regardless what you called it, all you wanted to do was put the right words on your website that correspond to what people search for in the dif... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Throughout 2014, Google made several advancements in their search engine and gave us some new reports in Google Webmaster Tools to see the results of those advancements.
Specifically, from within Webmaster Tools you can easily see when your website appeared in web search results, images search results, and mobile search results. During the first quarter of 2014, I started noticing retail jewelry websites appearing in image results more than ever before, and the Webmaster Tools ... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
With the 2014 Holiday Season at an end, let's take a look at some website tracking results from the Thanksgiving week through Christmas.
The following data was recorded through more than 100 jewelry related websites. This includes a combination of retail jewelers and e-commerce sites. Results shown here only apply to the jewelry industry.
Holiday 2014 Sessions
Here's a screen shot of my Google Analytics tracking across the retail jewelry websites I'm tracking:
You probably already know that Christmas is the most popular day of the year for a marriage proposal. No doubt you've been helping with the selection process for the past few months leading up to tomorrow's inevitable day of celebration for many couples.
No matter your best efforts, your customer simply do not care about your bridal line. For them, you might as well be the Invisible Man.
You probably think I'm nuts when I say that, especially since you sell engagement rings all the time. The fact is that most jewelers are incorrectly trying to target "bridal" customers when they should be targeting "engagement rings." Even the phrase "wedding ring" is better than "bridal" or "bridal ring."
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
Here are the website tracking statistics from mid-November through mid-December 2014. As usual, these results are pulled from the group of 100+ retail jewelry websites that I monitor and the results might not apply to any other industry.
4-Weeks of Holiday Data
Here's the graphical representation of the sessions I've been tracking:
Managing the online identity for your business is time consuming. Although you might have found the best agency to build your website and help your marketing online, the relationship you have with them probably won't last forever.
Eventually, you will have to divorce your marketing agency.
This is the conclusion of the Daily Golden Nugget I began yesterday detailing how your agency should be setting up your business accounts and what you need to do to guarantee you always have login acce... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Jewelers are in the business of helping couples get to the moment when they profess their love and vow "til death do us part."
Few relationships are intended to last forever, or even a lifetime, but when you get into bed with a business partner, you are rarely thinking about the day when you will break up. When you're in business for yourself, you should be making forward steps to improve your business, but also prepare yourself to different possible future outcomes.
This is the Friday jewelry website review edition of the Daily Golden Nugget. This week I'm snooping around the interwebs of Malibu, California in search for a great jewelry store.
My hope is that I'll find a store whose website will lure me in and get me to visit them in person. I never know where these reviews will go when I start, but the hope is that we'll all learn something from it.
I start my search using the Google Chrome browser in incognito mode to prevent my own search history from providing pe... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
As I mentioned in yesterday's Nugget, you can't use brute force SEO procedures to get your website ranked any more. This means you can't pay someone to set up a lot of inbound links to your site, and you can't set up several pages which overuse specific word phrases so you can rank for them.
As of today, the recommended strategy by Google is to create content and post it as blogs to your website an... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
The internet has seen many changes over the last 4 years since I started writing these Daily Golden Nuggets. Undoubtedly, a lot of that change was informed by Google, but really there are a lot of other factors involved.
Through the Great Recession, a lot of easier and less expensive technology emerged that now allows us to access information from anywhere at any time. You could argue that the technology companies forced fancy new mobile devices on us; or you could say that the technology devel... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Let's imagine that there's a special gift giving day coming up soon and I need to buy a gift. Assuming that I live in Englewood, Colorado I might do a Google search for "buy jewelry gifts in Englewood Colorado."
Today is the weekly website review edition of the Daily Golden Nugget. The goal of this review is to randomly search Google for a retail jewelry store and learn something from scrutinizing how they manage their website and online identity. There's always something to learn from these reviews, whether it's learning from someth... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Here are the website tracking statistics from Thanksgiving Day through Cyber Monday in 2014. As usual, these results are pulled from the group of 100+ retail jewelry websites that I monitor and the results might not apply to any other industry.
November 2014 Sessions
Let's first take a look at this chart from Google Analytics:
As the internet and online shopping have become more popular over the last few years, today, the first Monday after Thanksgiving and Black Friday, has earned the designation as Cyber Monday. This is the day when many e-commerce websites have 24 hour sales to lure shoppers to spend their money online instead of shopping in local stores.
Every year comScore.com reports the sales figures for different shopping days through the holiday season. Although the calendar date of Cyber Monday changes ever... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
In honor of Thanksgiving, I decided to look for some town names related to the American holiday. Turkey and cranberries are among the many traditional dishes served at an American Thanksgiving meal. Although I found that there's a Turkey, Texas, it seems like Cranberry, Pennsylvania might have a better chance of locating a review candidate for today's Daily Golden Nugget, Friday Review.
Off to Cranberry I go, with a search for "jewelry stores in cranberry, pa." But the results you see here were not as satisfying as I expected:
It's the Thanksgiving Holiday in the United States. For many years, this day marked the official point on the calendar as the start of the holiday season in the US. Not too long ago, you wouldn't see a single Christmas Tree or holiday decorations in a store until the Friday morning after Thanksgiving. The Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade would march down the streets of New York and not a word about Christmas was mentioned until Santa Claus went by on that last float, giving us the go-ahea... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
I've seen a lot of chatter online recently and in business magazines about the management of store inventory and how it relates to online advertising. Many of the conversations stem from the requirements for the new online advertising system called Google Shopping and how it will help online sales for this holiday season.
For today, the eve of Thanksgiving in the United States, I wanted to briefly cover the topic of online inventory, inventory uploads, and how that works with Google Shopping.<... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
I'm often asked how I keep up with all the internet changes because people feel overwhelmed. It really is true; the technology companies that control key factors of the internet make some type of change every day. Even though the internet is made up of millions of computers and billions of wires, it's the search engines and social networks that really control how we use it daily. In reality, the search engines and social networks are just software programs. VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
In yesterday's Daily Golden Nugget, I explained how you can invite someone to help manage your Google business account. An email is sent to notify the person who's being invited to manage the Google account. That email invitation is the only way that the person will know they've been invited, there's no other notification.
This is the last part in my 7-part Daily Golden Nugget series on Google My Business. The links to the first 6 parts are at the bottom of today's edition.
As the Google services have become more complicated, the user interfaces to manage them have become equally complicated. Many users have given up on managing their accounts while others have screamed for help. Google hears those screams and is working through their different services to give business owners a way to share editing rights to consultants that you hire to help.
In this edition of the Daily Golden Nugget, I'm going to review the latest AdWords Express functionality that you'll find within your Google My Business account. This is slightly different than the last time I explained it in this previous Nugget.
Today's Nugget is part of my ongoing series explaining the new features within the Google My Business dashboard that allows you to control all of your Google related business... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
For the past several years, Google has been telling website owners to write quality content for their website in order to rank higher in search results and to satisfy customers. This directive of theirs has spawned an entire industry of freelance writers that produce content just to satisfy Google's directions.
The optimist in me wants to say that Google has spurred the creation of a new generation of writers, but the pessimist in me looks at the type of content that's generally created and sighs in discon... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Have you ever even really thought about that question?
If your business is 100% e-commerce, then it would be easy to run a few reports in Google Analytics and figure out which Acquisition/Channel brings the most visitors. You could also use the Conversions/Attribution to see when people first discovered you and what eventually turned them into buyers.
Your website's contact form is both a blessing and a curse. It's a blessing because you can protect yourself from unwanted mass email spam by hiding your email address, but it's a curse because you still get unsolicited offers of all kinds.
The typical unsolicited emails can come from random jewelry vendors, especially those trying to offer you a new source for diamonds and gemstones. You'll also get a lot of unsolicited emails from people offering you different online marketing services.
This is the Friday website review edition of the Daily Golden Nugget. For this week's review, I'm heading over to South Burlington, VT in search for my retail jeweler review candidate.
I entered the search phrase "jewelers in south burlington vt" into Google and was given this result:
If you ever get into a conversation with a search engine optimization professional (aka SEO), they usually bring up the topic of how Google ranks your website and that there are "more than 200 different signals" that Google uses for their ranking algorithm. It's Google's standard message that they are using more than 200 signals, but they've been saying the same thing for more than 10 years now.
Surly they must be using more than 200 signals now, but they'll never admit it.
From time to time, I'm able to measure the effects of certain t... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
This is Daily Golden Nugget part-2 explaining how to read your Google "My Business Insights." Take a look at yesterday's Nugget to get up to speed before reading this one.
This is the fourth entry in my Daily Golden Nugget series explaining how to manage your Google business account through the Google My Business interface. I've included links to the first three parts at the bottom of today's edition.
Today's My Business topic is the reading and understanding the Insights app within the Google My Business interface. Once you log into your account, you need to click the box-cluster icon on the top right of your browser window as shown here:
Today is the Friday website review edition of the Daily Golden Nugget, and it's a special one too! In honor of Halloween, I decided to search for a jeweler that would be in, or nearby any town with a Halloween themed name. Naturally the first part of this adventure was to locate some towns with Halloween related names. I found these...
The first one I found was Scary, West Virginia. No jewelers in that town but I did find a store called Elizabeth's Attic within about 5 miles. Honestly their website is downright scary, VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
In this edition of the Daily Golden Nugget, I'll show you how you can use the interface within your Google My Business account to monitor your business reviews from around the internet.
This is the 3rd part of a multi-part series on using and editing your business account through the new Google My Business interface. Part 1 of this series was a basic orientation of Google My Business and Part 2 went into details of VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
This is part 2 of a multi-part Daily Golden Nugget series explaining how to edit your Google My Business listing. Please refer to this previous Nugget to see how to access your business information within Google's system.
Once you get into your account, you need to review and update any information that they have on file. It's important to log into your account and verify your information every once in a while. It mig... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Winds of change are coming for agencies that manage Google AdWords. The changes will be a big eye opener for business owners.
From my point of view, there are a lot of agencies that prey upon small businesses who don't know how Google AdWords works. Companies like DrivenLocal, ReachLocal, and even YellowPages all sell a good story but offer a limited paid advertising service.
Over the years, retail jewelers have called me after receiving an in-store visit from their local YellowP... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
This is the Friday Jewelry Website review where I randomly find a retail jeweler's website from a random city to dissect and review. When I start this journey every week, I never know if I'm going to find a great looking website, a poorly functioning website, or something that's embarrassing to even look at.
Every review has a chance to touch upon topics of SEO, SEM, aesthetics, and usability. These reviews are usually not too in-depth, but just a cursory review that usually only reveals the most obvious issues.
I typically don't write about current trends in the search engine optimization (SEO) and search engine marketing (SEM) industry, but today's topic is both a reassessment and a follow up to a previous Nugget about Google Penguin.
Penguin Basics
In April 2012, Google started fighting online spam in a big way. Prior to that month, one of the most common methods of achieving high Google search ranking was to pay a company to create links to your website. A single fee of $79 could get you thousands of l... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Have you ever wondered how your jewelry store's marketing compares to other jewelers? Well, wonder no more because there's a way you can view that comparison in Google Analytics.
It's called the Benchmarking report, and it's available under the Audience -> Benchmarking -> Channels menu as shown here:
In this edition of the Daily Golden Nugget, I'm going to show you one of the more visually interesting reports inside Google Analytics. It's the User Flow report, and with it, you can see how your website visitors are moving through your website.
At the time of this writing, the first report you see when logging into your Google Analytics account is the Audience Overview. From that report, you simply click on the User Flow link on the left menu as shown here:
Welcome to the Friday website review, where every week I randomly review the website of a local retail jewelry business somewhere in the US. The goal is to find something good, or bad, that we can all learn from and apply to our own business.
For this week's review, I'm heading over to Washington state and searching for "fine jewelry stores bellevue wa." When doing these searches, I always use the Google Chrome browser in incognito mode. This allows me to see non-personalized search results.
In this edition of the Daily Golden Nugget, I'll bring to a close a multi-part series of holiday marketing for the 2014 season. This is the 11th part of the series all based around the unified topic of marketing for the 2014 season.
In this series, I started with explaining how to organize your marketing, then showed you how to set up tracking of that marketing, and concluded with a few posts showing you how to read the tracking results.
I've including the previous 10 related posts at the bottom, but you don't... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Time flies and another one hundred Daily Golden Nuggets have passed. This is the 1100th edition of my 5-day a week newsletter, and to commemorate that milestone, I'm returning back to my favorite topic: how Google drives customers to your door, literally.
Google's free business listing service has morphed over the years from its original simple name of Maps, to Local, to Places, to +Local, and Places for Business. In April 2014, Google finished migrating all business accounts from the "Places" interface to the "Places for Business" inte... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
I'm changing up my usually schedule this week. I have two special Daily Nuggets for Thursday and Friday this week which pushes my weekly review to today.
For today's website review, I'm heading back down to Nashville, Tennessee in search of a jeweler. Here's the Google SERP when I searched for "jeweler Nashville, Tennessee":
One of the common errors in the English language is the confusion between the words Champagne and Champaign.
Champagne is a region in France where the sparkling wine, champagne, comes from. Those French "regions" are similar to states in the US. Although there are vineyards all over the world that produce sparkling wine, it's not "champagne" unless the grapes were grown, and the wine was produced in that region of France. The capital city of Champagne is Epernay, which I visited a few years ago. I've include... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
In this edition of the Daily Golden Nugget, I'll show and explain the Exit Page report in Google Analytics.
Although this edition can stand alone as a single Nugget, it's actually part of a larger series on holiday marketing and how to analyze that marketing. This is the 8th part to that series. I've included the first 7 in a link list at the bottom of this Nugget.
Google Analytics Exit Page Report
Let's take a look at the Exit Pages report in GA. This is similar to the VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
In today's Daily Nugget, I'll show you how to read one of the important Google Analytics reports that will help you understand how people found you during the holiday season.
Although this Nugget can stand on its own, this is actually the next part in a longer joined series of topics to prepare online advertising content for the holiday season. Launch it, then track it. I've included links to the previous Nuggets at the end of today's newsletter.
Throughout all of last week, I've been laying the groundwork for a complete holiday 2014 marketing plan that you can use to promote a chosen suite of items.
Welcome to the Friday retail jewelry website review. Every week, I select a random location around the United States in search of a review candidate. The object of this review is to learn something that might be able to help you with your own website.
I always try to write the review with an unbiased point of view, and I especially hope that the jewelers reading this will use these reviews to better their online presence.
For this week, I'm using the search phrase "jewelry stores Waterlo... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
This is the third part of my Daily Golden Nugget series outlining a potential marketing plan for the upcoming holiday season. The first part explained how to select the items to promote during the holidays. The second part detailed how to set up your newspa... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Welcome to the Friday retail jewelry store website review. For this week's review, I'm searching for "jewelers Tempe, Arizona" using Google Chrome in incognito mode.
If this is the first time you're reading my reviews, then let me explain that I review a different random retail store website every Friday. These are sites have no relation to me or the website agency services my company provides. These are just straight forward, cursory reviews of what a website looks like, how it functions, some SEO analys... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Do you have them on your site? I'm not talking about links to offsite vendor catalogs, or even iframe widgets either. You need to have an honest-to-goodness product catalog on your website that you control.
During the days of the Internet Bubble of the late 90s, everyone would flock to your website to see what you sold. There were many early attempts at e-commerce and online shopping, but setting up an e-commerce system yourself is co... 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.
Today is the Friday Review edition of the Daily Golden Nugget. The goal of this review is to analyze a website for its good qualities, and bad, and to learn from it. Every week I choose a location in the United States from which to pluck a review candidate from.
This week I'm heading over to Albany, Georgia. What I remember most about my own visits to Georgia is the unstoppable kudzu. But today I'm less concerned with vines that grow 1 foot per day because I'm in need of a quality jewelry store.
Content creation is a continual task for every website owner. It can also be a very challenging task to come up with new content all the time without suffering from mental burnout or writer's block. That burnout will have a bad effect on your long term SEO, so it needs to be prevented.
One way to prevent content creation burnout is to spread the task around between several employees on your sales staff. Remember that website content isn't just blog posts. Content... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Seventy-seven week days ago, when I reached the 1000th Nugget milestone, I got the idea that I should write a recap of all the technology that I wrote about that came and went since 2010 when I started this daily newsletter.
Although I really want to be nostalgic, I don't even have the time to look through 1000 posts to create a full list. But I'm going to give it a try and see where this goes, so let's have a little fun... Instead of learning something new today, I'll look at some old topics that I'v... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
In this edition of the Daily Golden Nugget, I'm going to cover a topic that's security related. I'll split it into a non-technical discussion at the beginning and then the technical stuff at the end. Website owners can read the non techie stuff and forward the rest to their web programmer.
The topic is the robots.txt file and meta robots tags.
Basic Explanation ...
Every website must have a robots.txt file in order for Google and Bing to read your website. You shou... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
This is the Friday Retail Jeweler website review. The goal for today is to examine a random jewelry website, pull it apart to see how it functions and evaluate the good and the bad that we can learn from.
Every week my staff gives me a random city in the United States and I use Google Chrome in incognito mode to search for local jewelers there. This week the target city was Spokane, Washington.
Google's done it again. Off with the author's head!
Over the past four years I have written about many online marketing topics and website procedures that are no longer valid. Social networks, review websites, and SEO techniques are forever in flux.
Facebook has changed or removed many of the features I've written about, but not nearly as many times as Google has changed since my Daily Nuggets began.
Most of the time, Google quietly changes their search algorithm features without telling anyone. But there... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Two weeks ago I wrote a Nugget about the potential decline of your website's ranking when you launch a new website. The scenario proposed in that Nugget assumed you transferred all your existing content and SEO settings to the new website, but you changed your URL structure, causing the decline. Preventing that decline requires the setup of 301 redirects so ... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
My journey today began with a search for "jewelry stores Hayward CA." You see, I'm pretending to be a real customer searching for a local jeweler in Hayward. My goal is to examine how the local jewelers in that town stack up in Google search, take a look at their websites, and see what can be learned by the experience.
This is my weekly retail jeweler website review, but this week I'm changing up the format a little bit.
Here's a snapshot of the business listing I saw in the Google SERP for that search: VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
This week I've been explaining the differences between Technical SEO,On-Site SEO, and Off-Site SEO.
While the technical aspects of search engine optimization include a lot of analysis and analytical thinking, the on-site optimization requires a creative flair for writing, photography, and customer satisfaction that... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
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
According to Wikipedia, uptime "is a measure of the time a machine, typically a computer, has been working and available."
Interestingly enough, the Wikipedia page only explains Uptime in relation to the physical computer servers that run just about everything in the world now, but not about websites.
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:
The day has finally come when you've decided to upgrade your website to the latest and greatest content management system and website design. It's a big decision to make that leap considering how much time it will take and the cost to do it. It might be months before the new site is live.
You're going to have a lot of things to worry about during the process of setting up the new site. Difficult design issues, photography concerns, ... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Although I'd like nothing more than for every jeweler to manage their own social media accounts, the truth is that many business owners don't, or can't do it. I'm told many reasons why they can't, like not having enough time, or not knowing where to start, or how to do it, or even which social network they should be using.
This is the Friday website review where I randomly look for a jewelry website to dissect so we can all learn something new. This week I'm taking a slightly different approach to locating a review candidate. I'm going to search in a county instead of a specific town.
To start the process, I always open an incognito window with Google Chrome. This step allows me to do searches in Google without any personalized results affecting what I see. Google has several ways to identify your compute... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
In this edition of the Daily Golden Nugget, I'm going to show you how to read one of the most popular reports in Google Analytics. In my opinion, retail jewelry store owners should know the basics of how good or bad their website is doing, and what might make it better.
When you first log into your Google Analytics account, you will be brought to your Audience Overview page, so let's start there. Here's a snapshot of one of my accounts:
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
Google AdWords Remarketing is an online marketing method that allows you to show ads to people who have already visited your website. You and Google control who sees the ads by secretly tagging every visitor to your website, then choosing what ad to show to them around the internet.
I always like to refer to AdWord Remarketing as a separate type of online marketing, but... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
This is the Friday Review edition of the Daily Golden Nugget. Every week I analyze the online properties of a jewelry store found during a random search in a random city.
For this week's review, I searched for "jewelers near elma ny" to find this search result:
Google changes the way AdWords works all the time. I'm continually reviewing all their changes just to keep up with the latest features. It's not easy.
Regardless of the new features Google AdWords has, the first thing you need to decide when setting up your new AdWords campaign is the list of keywords to target.
What keywords are best? That's a real tough question to answer since Google hides them from you in your Analytics reports.
Small business owners always seem to struggle trying to balance the time they spend working in their store, managing back office paperwork, and growing the business. It's very difficult to achieve the perfect balance of spending time with each of these tasks if no one showed you how to do it correctly in the first place.
Occasionally, you will find a small business success story in the news, and perhaps you wonder how they achieved their success. From my own personal experience,... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
This is the Friday website review edition of the Daily Golden Nugget. Every Friday I choose a random city and search for a potential jeweler to use as my review candidate.
This week I'm looking in Maplewood, NJ for a local jeweler. I used the search query "jewelers in maplewood nj" and found the results below. There's a lot of detail in the SERP screen shot, so click it to view larger:
This short post is part of my "Grains of SEO Gold" series covering basic SEO topics and how to apply them.
Today's SEO Topic: Meta Robots Tag
During a recent website review, I illustrated how duplicate content could be created on your website when using the services from an agency that specializes in creating websites for retail jewelry stores.
Specialty marketing agencies exist in every vertical market (ones to do with g... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Google recently implemented new policies regarding mobile websites that could, and will zap you from the search results if you've implemented a particular setting with your mobile website.
They've changed their smartphone guidelines several times since 2010, but this is the first time that their policy change will penalize you for not implementing a mobile website correctly.
Originally they recommended that you create a mobile website that would be maintained side by side with y... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
In this edition of Google+ Monday Golden Nugget, I need to explain some Google+ commenting etiquette. In fact, the type of etiquette you should be practicing on Google+ is the same type of good etiquette you should be employing on other social networks and when leaving comments on blogs.
Simply said, you should never spam someone's social share. "Spamming" isn't just for emails; it also applies to an unwanted solicitation as a comment on a social post, or on a blog post. This is referred to as "comm... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Each social network has their own notification settings where you control how you should be notified when someone shares content.
On the smartphone, you have the ability to set the social networks to "push" a notification directly to your screen. These pop-up notifications will appear in front of whatever application you are running at the time.
You also have the ability to trigger an email notification to be sent whenever someone mentions your name, or sends a m... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Today I'm returning back to my Friday website review format after skipping the last two weeks while presenting the series on Google Places for Business.
Each week I choose a random city then search for one of the most common jewelry store related keywords. I like to choose my review candidates purely based on orga... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Over the last two days, I've briefly explained how to set up a single ad using AdWords Express and then how keyword targeting works within the full version of Google AdWords. In this edition of the Daily Golden Nugget, I'll introduce you to the concept of ... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
In yesterday's Nugget I explained how to set up a single ad using AdWords Express, the simple ad platform within Google Places for Business. During the Express demo setup, I presented yesterday I chose these keywords:
In this Daily Golden Nugget, I'll show you step-by-step setup of Google AdWords Express.
AdWords is Google's online advertising platform that shows paid ads in search results and millions of random websites on the internet. Google makes most of its money through this advertising service, and many businesses experience good jumps in business when using AdWords.
Unfortunately for most businesses though, Google AdWords is really difficult to set up. A few years ago, Google realized the difficulty s... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
This is my 1000th Daily Golden Nugget. That's 1000 weekdays since I started writing them on July 26, 2010 with the headline "Google Maps can drive visitors directly to your doorstep, literally."
In honor of this achievement, I've spent the last 9 days detailing all the features within the redesigned Google Maps and Google Places for Business dashboard and how jewelers should be using them. I have a few more dashboard details to go over next week, but ... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
The discussion of today's Daily Golden Nugget was requested more than a year ago by a few of my daily readers, but it wasn't until recently that I could provide the correct answer to it.
The topic is how to use Google Places for Business if you are a personal jeweler or a jewelry professional working out of your house. Personal security is usually a bigger factor for these types of jewelers since they will often carry styles with them when visiting clients. ... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
How can Google lead potential customers to you unless they know what type of business you are?
Although Google might spend a ridiculous amount of effort reading and indexing your website to figure out who you are and what you do, they also rely heavily on exactly what you tell them from within your Google Places for Business account.
The screen shot below was taken from a jewelry store's Places for Business account. You can see the list of categories... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Ever since Google started hiding keywords from their Analytics reports, it's been harder and harder for marketing professionals and business owners to figure out what keywords customers search for when they find your website.
Google Places can help you get found in local search results, but you'll get into trouble if you disobey the Google Places for Business quality guidelines.
Over the years, I've seen many jewelry stores using a lot of tricks to place higher in Google's ranking results. Perhaps the most common trick is changing your business name to include specific keywords.
Using the jewelry store name Perosi Jewelers, located in Totowa Borough, NJ, here are some examples of what some jewelers ha... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Google Maps will help people locate your business online, but sometimes those online reviews will chase people away screaming, instead of luring them to your door.
The power of the online review is undeniable now. I've read a few case studies about negative online reviews and the affect on a business, and I've had personal experience helping several businesses deal with the aftermath caused by horrible online reviews.
The legitimacy of online reviews has gone through some controversy over the last 4 ye... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
During the summer of 2013, as part of their product unification process, Google converted all YouTube accounts into Google+ accounts. This resulted in duplicate business pages on Google+ Page for several businesses. Now that Google is transitioning the old Places listings into the combined Google Places for Business and Google+, these same businesses now have a triplicate listing.
This is a bad situation that needs to be corrected and I'll explain why in this Daily Golden Nugget. I'm documentin... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
There might be trouble with your business listing on Google and you don't even realize it. Over the last year, Google has been slowly migrating all Google Places listings created years ago into the new and improved Google "Places for Business" (PFB) systems that's integrated with Google+.
As I explained in the Daily Golden Nugget yesterday, this migration could cause accidental VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
That's how it all began way back on Monday, July 26, 2010 with the first Daily Golden Nugget I wrote. It was only 147 words because, after all, it was only supposed to be a "nugget" of information. Many nuggets are now 10 times tha... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
In yesterday's Daily Golden Nugget, I reviewed the most recent data for the device usage and browser usage with regard to jewelry websites. Today, I'm looking at the organic traffic that brings those users to a retail jeweler's website.
Google is the undisputed champion for search. They provide more than 84% of the organic search traffic referred to jewelry websites. I wanted t... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
I was recently reviewing the "Links to Your Site" inside Google Webmaster Tools (WMT). You can find this report in your own Webmaster Tools account by clicki... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Every social network has their own unique way of structuring their URLs.
Foursquare uses a combination of the location name and a long alphanumeric venue code like this: https://foursquare.com/v/jwag-bordeaux-office/4f01828077c885c33735e610
Facebook uses a combination of the location name, the word "pages", and a long venue number like this: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Jeweler-Website-Advisory-Group/250594583277 But they allow you to customize your URL to something shorter like ... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
In the past, I've expressed my point of view that Google+ seemed to be a more intellectually stimulating social network than its direct competitor, Facebook.
Many users in the early days of Google+ were more technical and built relationships with other technically savvy people. Those relationships were built through +1s and thoughtful commenting on social posts. There were few internet memes and jokes shared on Google+ in the early days.
But that's changed now that the social network has matured ... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
This is the 3rd in a series of Daily Golden Nuggets explaining the difficulties of setting up an e-commerce website. The previous Nuggets covered security and product pricing and then shipping methods. This edition will explain the payment options that are available for your webs... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
This is the Google+ Monday edition of the Daily Golden Nugget. Each Monday this year, I've been explaining different aspects of Google+ and how they can be used in the jewelry industry, and today I'm going to tell you about Google+ Hangouts.
The "Hangout" is Google's live conferencing system that incorporates chat messaging, video conferencing, and even telephone calls. Even though it includes all three methods, it's the video Hangout that has grown most popular. No other social network has a video conferencing system l... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
It's the Friday website review edition of the Daily Golden Nugget. The normal goal of these Friday reviews is to look at a website to see what we can learn from it, but this week I found something a little more interesting to review than simply a website.
I took a different approach to finding my review candidate this week. I started with the usually incognito mode of Google Chrome, but I changed my browser search location to Lawrence, KS by clicking the Search Tools button on the option menu and then cli... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
The internet would be a boring place without all the animated cat graphics we see on social media.
Just a few years ago, animated GIFs were thought of as child's play. Facebook didn't support them and many people remember how bad MySpace and older websites looked with the overabundance of blinking, glittery animated GIFs.
For those of you who weren't online in the 90's, let me tell you that animated images were so popular that every website was flickering, moving, waving, or sparkl... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
In last week's Google+ Monday edition of the Daily Golden Nugget, I explained how to set up a new Google+ Business page. In this edition I'll show you how simple it is to create a badge for your Google+ Page that you can put on your website.
First off, let me explain what a "badge" is. It's simply the widget that you place on your website which allows people to either fo... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
This is the Google+ Monday edition of the Daily Golden Nugget. Today I'll explain how you can set up a Google+ Business Page. You will use the procedure explained today if you DO NOT have a brick and mortar store. For those with a B&M store you should refer back to this 2-part Nugget here.
Again, the setup explained in this Nugget is good for businesses without physi... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
This is the Monday Google+ edition of the Daily Golden Nugget. Today, I'd like to introduce the Google+ Communities, what they are, how and why to get involved, and eventually what you could do with them yourself.
The Google+ Communities give you an easy way to find other people with similar interests. There are thousands of communities on a many topics, and even multiple communities on the same or similar topics.
Joining one of the communities is like joining a networking group. You should ... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
It's the Google+ Monday edition of the Daily Golden Nugget! If you are new to Google+, you should check out every one of my Monday Nuggets since the beginning of 2014 for newbie guidance.
Today, I'd like to give some advice on how to set up your Google+ Profile.
I waited 10 weeks to give you this profile introduction because I wanted you to jump right in and get your feet wet on Google+ with all the other early pointers first.
In this edition of the Google+ Monday Golden Nugget, I'm going to show you how to disable how your smartphone reports your current location so no one can physically track you.
In this issue of the Google+ Monday Nugget, I'll explain what you need to know about commenting on Google+ and how it relates to Facebook.
Google+ lets you select your circles of friends to share a post to, or to share it to the public. Unless you disable the ability to comment and reshare, which I'll have to explain in a future Nugget, anyone you share to is allowed to comment on the post. Likewise, you can comment on a post that someone shares with you or to the... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Google+ can be a lonely place if you don't have people to follow. For today's Google+ Monday I created a special brand new user account on Google+ to show you how to get started.
To get started on Google+, you should visit this page here https://plus.google.com/u/0/up/start/ to set up your account. I'm not going to explain the steps for the initial account setup, but let me show you how boring Google+ is when ... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
In this edition of my Google+ Monday Nuggets, I'm going to cover one of the basic etiquettes that evolved on that social network.
As one of the early adopters of Google+, during those early months I always found myself a little overwhelmed by the amount of different knowledge that was being shared. If you've ever been overwhelmed by one of my Nuggets, you should know what I'm talking about.
Google+ originally opened by invitation-only and those early invitations were sent to the fr... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
In this edition of Google+ Monday I'm going to explain the difference between sharing directly to specific people on Google+ and Facebook.
We're starting with the social network you are probably most familiar with... Facebook.
To share one of your Facebook status updates with a specific person, you would have to click the Share With drop down button and select Custom. From there, you click the next drop down option to select the people or lists to share with and select "Specific people or L... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
January 2014 is over and for the next few days everyone in the jewelry industry will be focused on Valentine's Day related sales. And after that, you'll have only 8.5 months to get ready for the next holiday season.
Too soon to think about it?
I don't think so.
Back in September 2013, Google announced their new Hummingbird engine along with their new mobile centric focus. Now, a full 4 months later, I finally have some real data to help understand what e... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
When Google set out to create a new social network, they wanted to give people a new way to share their favorite things. At the time of Google+'s inception in the late 2010 time frame, Facebook was the most popular social network and they had, in my opinion, some strange policies with how the stuff you shared would be viewed by your friends.
At the time, Facebook's policies on sharing made it very difficult for users to share stuff with their friends without it being seen publicly. This spec... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
In this week's edition of Google+ Golden Nugget Mondays, I'm going to explain how to start sharing content to Google+. Everything you share to Google+ is indexed by Google's Search pretty quickly, so even before you understand all the hows and whys of Google+, and being friends with people on Google+, you can still benefit from sharing content.
You have the ability to share content into Google+ through several different ways. The primary way to do it is by logging into your account and going to your Stream. Yo... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
I suppose that if I'm going to dedicate every Monday of my Daily Golden Nuggets to Google+, starting today and continuing into the foreseeable future, then perhaps I should start at the beginning. I should probably not assume you know anything, and hold your hand through the process.
One thing is for sure, the process is ever changing. I can certainly hold your hand and lead you down the path of good Google+ ideas for a jewelry store owner, jewelry store e... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
As a reminder, Google Penguin is a filter that Google created to detect when your website has too many unnatural links pointing to it. The key word there is "unnatural."
Google's original method of ranking websites was to count the number of pa... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
I've previously written about Google Penguin and Google Panda and how to remember the difference between them. Both of them are types of filters that Google applies to search results to improve the quality of the results we all receive.
The filters were specifically designed to remove websites that were trying to use sneaky tactics to improve ranking. Those tactics commonly included poorly w... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Facebook has been the buzzing social network for several years and it's where all the experts have said you have to be. Through some very creative thinking, Facebook has managed to turn itself into a ubiquitous social network that connects user accounts and interactions across millions of websites around the world.
When Google+ launched in June 2011, many people thought it was going to quickly overtake Facebook as the dominant social network.
Today I'd like to share a special story about Google+ Local that we can all learn from.
In honor of my 1st Golden Nugget about Google Maps, I now reserve every 100th Daily Golden Nugget to check back in on new advances in Google's local services. Today is my 900th Nugget!
In early November 2013, I was contacted by one of my regular readers for help with solving an unusual problem with his Google+ Local account. At the time, he had 29 very good Google reviews and his 4.7 start rating used to appear next to his store name in Google's sea... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
In September 2013, shortly after Google announced their new Hummingbird algorithm, I decided to set up a special website test to see exactly how organic traffic and paid traffic would differ on a unique landing page.
On one of the website I manage I set up a landing page with 1469 words of content, 16 photos, and 37 links to other pages on the website. Indeed, this was a very complicated page that fully explained the business, all the services they provide, and the products they sold.<... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Google Panda and Google Penguin are two filtering mechanisms that Google uses to block websites from appearing in SERP results when they've disobeyed with Google's website guidelines.
There's plenty of confusion between what each of the filters do and how to figure out if you've been affected by one. I'm going to try to clear up some confusion with that today.
The Panda filter helps Google's search algorithm figure out the difference between good quality content and bad quality content on websites. Good content refers to anything that is well written, interesting, adds value to your website, and is not duplicated on another website.
What counts as good content? Google's goal is to get you to write high enough quality to be published in a book or a magazine.
Depending on the nature of your website, you might want visitors to stay and browse through 12 pages, or you could be happy with them looking at a single page. It all depends on your business goals, and what you hope to accomplish with your site.
The Second Annual MJSA ConFab Conference was held at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City on November 3, 2013. The conference was attended by jewelry design students, aspiring jewelry designers, and seasoned jewelers who already design their own jewelry. There were 5 sessions on topics that would help attendees increase their profits. I was... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Have you ever considered what the real purpose of your website is?
You built it. You work on it (daily I hope). You expect it will bring you business.
People find the site somehow and you probably spend a lot of time thinking about building content to bring people to the site.
This is all sounds normal, right? What happens then? Your website is a driving force for your business, and you should use a slightly advanced setting within Google Analytics to see exac... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
In this installment of the Daily Golden Nugget I'm going to explain how to correctly set up your Google Analytics account structure to correctly track your marketing activity.
Almost as if they knew I was planning this topic for today, Morgan Stanley reported last week that that we would see the weakest Holiday Season since 2008. One of the reasons they cited in their report was that "increased promotional activity likely inhibits 2013 Holiday sales."
It seems like they are referring to the idea that too many promotions will cause people to buy less. Of course that almost seems like a paradox unless you are aware of all the consumer studies that measure choices vs. sales. This topic is widely e... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
You probably love your jewelry store and your career. If you're like most passionate business owners, you would love to spend all day helping your customers. Let the bookkeeper do their job and the bench jeweler do their job so you can work one-on-one with every customer that walks in the door.
Of course customers won't walk in the door unless you advertise. You could dabble in their own marketing or you could hire an agency to do all the hard work while you happily do what you do best.
A marketer's job is to look at the dynamic of your industry and figure out what messages will get the attention of your customers. It's not good enough to just pay for an ad and send it out, you actually should be figuring out where your customers are so you can put your ads in front of them. The marketer should be able to figure that ou... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Google is serious about protecting your identity. They have very strict privacy policies in place to protect people who use their services and protect all of us from having our Personally Identifiable Information, or PII for short, getting accidentally exposed to the public.
The policies they have in place are very strict, and those breaking them are likely to lose their Google Accounts. Their privacy policies are governed by local and international laws... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
During the summer of 2012, more than 12 months ago now, Google dropped support for Flash websites in its Android 4.1 OS. Did you know that?
Actually, it was Adobe that decided not to support the Android OS, and Google just followed their lead. By default, this means that you can no longer see any type of Flash video or website widget on an Android smartphone or tablet. (Steve Jobs said years ago that Apple was never going to allow the iPhone to see Flash videos, which has remained true al... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Google has been a busy little bee with all their recent changes. They've made major changes to Google+, Google Search, Google Analytics, and Google AdWords in the last 30 - 40 days. Personally I been walloped by the changes because I work with each of these systems every day. I should feel like a kid in a candy store with all the exciting shiny new features, but instead I feel like a kid trying to understand that 2+2=4.
I'm only mentioning this so you understand that there are times when even the professionals need to re-learn what they take for granted.
Back in 2008, I was teaching a course on Google AdWords, but today most of the things I taught in that course became eventually useless. The class I once taught was to show jewelers how they could create and manage their own AdWords campaigns. I take it all back now; un... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
In Yesterday's Nugget, I gave you 5 important things to do on the day you launch your website and today I want to follow that up with what needs to be done shortly after your website is launched. Today's Daily Golden Nugget assumes that you have read and set up everything mentioned yesterday.
So the internet changes very often. It's downright scary how much time it takes to keep up with the nuances of how things work between social networking, content building, and organizing your website.
Although I keep up with the changes in the internet, I know it's not realistic for you to. This is my job and my responsibility, whereas you are running a jewelry store and need to pay attention to daily operations there. But that doesn't mean you should be a complete ... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Two years ago in October 2011 Google crushed the SEO industry when they announced that they would be withholding keyword search phrase information from Google Analytics whenever someone searched a phrase while logged into the Google Account. Their reasoning at the time was to increase privacy protection for their registered users by forcing them to use an encrypted login. The encryption blocks keyword information.
Google Analytics keyword traffic reports would never be the same after that. The appearance of--the now infamous--phrase "not provided" started appearing in all SEO reports and businesses that live and die by their ranking in search results became infuriated.
Today, two year later, Google is further crushing the SEO industry by encrypting all search results in the USA, even if you are not logged in. This chang... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Google Analytics provide an easy to use report of all the online social activity that brings people to your website. Today I'm going to briefly explain this report.
Log into your Google Analytics account and in the left column navigate over to Traffic Sources > Social > Overview.
This screen will show you many different social networking websites that have brought visitors to your site. The social networks you might find listed on this page include Facebook, Google+, Yelp, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Yahoo! An... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
In this edition of the Daily Golden Nugget I'm going to share a short case study about a recent experience with Google Places and Google+ Local. If you've ever edited and verified your own Google Places listing then this is a must read. If you've never edited your Google Places or Google+ Local then it's even more important that you read this.
I'm pretty strict about verifying Google Places accounts and maintaining that information for my clients. Over the years I've had to verify them with post cards... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Today is Daily Golden Nugget number 800! Daily Nugget #1 was a basic introduction to Google Maps on a smartphone and every 100 nuggets since then, jWAG has revisited Google Maps and how it works at that time.
Over the last 3 years we've seen many changes to how Google Maps functions, and we seen a few name changes too. "Maps" became "Places" but then "Places" became "Local." When using Google on a desktop you will find that Places has been merged into Google+ Pages. The whole technology is a little... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
It's happen ending even if you don't realize it, and if you realize I sure hope you are taking steps to accept it and use it for your benefit.
The internet is changing rapidly and it's because of mobile technology. You should be aware of the subtle differences between mobile technologies so you can continue to compete in this new age of business.
It's the evening of Saturday August 10, 2013 as I write this. I'm actually VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Over the last 2 days I've given you some ideas on how to accomplish your keyword research and write blog posts to specifically target people interested in Le Vian jewelry. The steps I explained can be applied to any jewelry designer when you want to use content marketing to attract customers.
"Content marketing" is the process of adding lots of information to you website in hopes that search engines will rank you highly for specific keyword phrases. But sometimes content marketing isn't enough because you are left to th... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Earlier this week when explaining the topic of Click Through Rates as illustrated inside Google Webmaster Tools I also said that getting clicks to your website does not immediately mean you will make money. Your website actually needs to convert visitors into some type of sale or first step conversion towards eventually making a sale.
I have found that most website owners spend little time worrying about website custo... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
When reviewing the list of organic keywords that bring visitors to your website, retail jewelers often ask me why their store's name appears at the top of the list. Some jewelers wonder if it's a competitor searching their name, and others wonder why there are so many variations of their store name being searched for. This Daily Golden Nugget will explain all this to you.
Let's consider the customers that shop in your jewelry store. How often do new customers come into your store compare... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
In today's Daily Golden Nugget I'm going to examine the fictitious designer name "Fancy Rings" and try to reverse engineer how search engines analyze the content on a jeweler's website and what pages visitors land on when arriving on your site. This analysis will give us one type of content template for attracting new types of visitors to our website.
Although I'm using the fictitious designer name "Fancy Rings" all the other numbers mentioned in this Nugget are accurate. For simplicity sake I'm ab... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
In today's Daily Golden Nugget I'm going to examine the fictitious designer name "Fancy Rings" and how it would appear in the Google Webmaster Tools Search Query report, and how to compare that report to the Organic keyword report within Google Analytics.
Although I'm using the fictitious designer name "Fancy Rings" all the other numbers mentioned in this Nugget are accurate. For simplicity sake I'm abbreviating Google Analytics as GA and Google Webmaster Tools as GWT. Feel free to follow along in your own accounts... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
In yesterday's Daily Golden Nugget I explained that the results you see on the search results pages for Google and Bing do not matter anymore. You simply can't search for keywords in hopes to get an accurate portrayal of how people find your website.
As of today there are no tools that can give you an accurate portrayal without scrapping data. "Scrapping data" is the process of capturing the results from a search results page and saving it for some... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Google and Bing are trying to be helpful for people who specifically search for your store name or your website. Specific searches for your business should show your website's home page positioned in the #1 spot in the search results, but that often will also trigger the appearance of additional links to sub pages within your site. Those additional links are called "sitelinks."
Sitelinks have gone through several evolutionary changes, and I suspect the functionality will change again as the internet continues to evolve. But for today, her... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Step 5: Setting Up Your Google+ Page Now we need to set up your Google+ Page from within Google+. Navigate over to your Google+ profile home page at https://plus.google.com/. On the left side of the screen you will see a bunch of gray icons that says Profile, Explore, Photos, etc. Click the icon that says ... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Today marks another milestone for the Daily Golden Nugget series. This is Nugget #700!
In honor of reaching another hundred I'm going to recap the topic from the First Nugget written back on July 26, 2010... Google Maps.
The Google Maps feature mentioned back then has gone through a series of evolutions and name changes from Google Maps, to Google Places, to Goog... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Today's Daily Golden Nugget is for those retail jewelers that create custom design jewelry. If that's you, then take a moment and read and think about this one.
A few of the buzz words you frequently hear search engine optimization specialist say include "Googlebot," "spider," and "crawl." Of course there's also the "Bingbot" and the "Yahoobot," as well as a "bot" for every other search engine out there.
That "bot" is not really a robot, but rather a software program that is running on one of Google's or Bing... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
I've not mentioned the Google Alerts service in a long time. Nothing has changed since the last time I reported on it back in 2010, but today I'd like to provide a little refresher course on this topic.
Google officially describes the Alerts service as a way to monitor the web for interesting new content. When the new content is found, they will send you an email.
Examples of this "interesting new content" could be anything related to your town's name, anything related to the designer lines you carry, and anything related to your co... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
The ranking results for your listing on Google+ Local have probably gone up and down in the past year since "Places" was converted to "+Local." During that time Google has spent a lot of time trying to improve the overall way that things relate to one another online, and it's those relations that might be hurting your +Local listing.
Your Google+ Local business listing appears within the Google+ network now. Some of you might remember that before 2010 the Google Places system was part of Google Search. The same information in your +Local listing also appears within the Google Maps system on de... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
I have a quick case study today about a jewelry store that first built their website in 2008, did a minor programming change in 2010, and then did a major overhaul of the entire website in 2012. You will see how traffic changed and how activity on their website changed. My measurement period spans from December 2011 - February 2012 compared to December 2012 - February 2013.
Both the old and the new website shared these similar pages: * About Us * Staff * Special Offers * 4C's of Diamond Education * Designer pages ... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Google was founded on mathematical equation of how many web pages are linking to any other web page on the internet. The value calculated by this equation is known as PageRank, named after Larry Page, one of the founders of Google.
For many years the ranking of your website was clearly measured by the number of pages linking to you, but also the PageRank of those pages linking. PageRank is measured on a scale of Zero to Ten, 0 given to brand new web pages and 10 given only to pages that have billions of links. Everyone starts out at a P... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
The jewelry trade show season is picking up again. Now is the time to reexamine your plan for the rest of the year and the inventory you have in your store. Can you do a stock balance? Should you reorder the same styles? Should you add a new designer line to your store?
Correctly answering those three questions will increase the sales in your store, and of course an incorrect answer could cause another year of slow financial recovery. From my experience, most jewelers will ask their industry peers for produc... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
The topic of "Sitelinks" has come up in casual conversation a lot recently in my daily work and I realize that I've never specifically written a Daily Golden Nugget about sitelinks, including what they are and the strategy I use to create them.
Let's start with the basic explanation of a sitelink: In the Google Search Results, sitelinks are the hyperlinks to subpages of your website that often appear below your main search result listing in order to help users navigate more quickly through your website.
Getting started with any new advertising method always carries a little bit of trepidations. Your advertising budget could be exhausted easily if you made the wrong choice. Common questions that might cross your mind might be: Will it work? Will it not work? Will I reach my target audience? Will the audience I reach spend any money?
With offline advertising you have to rely on demographics and circulation statistics for each medium. With online advertising you can't rely on previously know statistics because it's all up to you to figu... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
In their quest to find all there is to find, Google will follow every link on your website inside out, upside down, and backwards until they've read all your web pages, online documents, and video files. But they don't just stop there.
The Google indexing process will also look at all the URLs that make your website work and it will experiment with different permutations just to see if they can expose hidden details about your website. From G... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Once upon a time a jeweler asked me why his website wasn't showing up in Google for the phrase "champagne diamonds." As it turned out he didn't have that phrase anywhere on his website, so Google had no reason to direct people to him.
As part of the "training" you need to give your website, you need to regularly look at your Google Webmaster Tools to find out what you're missing.
Google Webmaster Tools (GWT) has changed their interface a lot over the past 12 months, and it's much easier f... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
This is the second part of a Nugget explaining how you can take tracking results from Google analytics and calculate more than just the return on investment for your retail jewelry store. (Part one here)
Let me do a quick rundown of all the example numbers from yesterday...
The following visitor referrals have come to our website over the last 30 days Visits from Facebook: 15 Visits... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
One of the most common problems for a retail store, not just retail jewelers, is being able to accurately track the point of origin of online visitors and follow them through to the point when they walk into your retail store. Although for small retailers there is a simple method... you simply ask your customers.
That might seem intuitive, but in all seriousness, the retail jewelers I talk to tell me it's not easy for the sales person to remember to ask a lead source question when you're in the mid... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Over the last two days I've explained the frustrations of trying to pull together all the reporting methods from many online tools and social media platforms. I also explained how you can use the built in UTM tracking feature from Google Analytics to bypass those reporting frustrations and direct all trackable information to a single place.
Today I'll explain where to find the reporting inside of Google Analytics.
Start by logging into your Google Analytics account and click "Traffic Sources" in the left navigation. Aft... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
The internet is supposed to be evolving into a massive social structure that allows you to share anything you want with anyone else. On an average day a person could share stories to friends on Facebook, photos to Pinterest, tweet interesting quotes through Twitter, and post their latest family videos to YouTube.
On a personal level, you probably don't care how, when, or who will read the stuff you publish to the internet, but you assume that people will eventually find and read it.
Online marketing is a struggle for almost everyone. No one is sure what will work and what will not. Different experts have conflicting ideas on how you should spend your online advertising money, yet no one seems willing to provide meaningful reports that are easy to understand.
Email platforms like Constant Contact, iContact, and MailChimp have their own methods for measuring open rates, bounce rates, and click rates. But is that information really he... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
It's the end of one year and the beginning of another, and that means it's time for predictions for next year.
I have 4 predictions for retail jewelry stores for the 2013 year. Here they are...
Prediction #1. The problem of easy tracking of users from point of origin online to an in-store sale will NOT YET be solved. This is one of the largest problems that retail jewelers face; in fact all businesses that use online marketing to increase the business of their brick and mortar stores face this problem. The true ROI ... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Google+ is growing in popularity very slowly and many businesses have found successful and unique ways to use it.
The growth rate of Google+ has been stunted because Google refused to allow software developers an easy way to post directly to the network. Programs like TweetDeck, cotweet, and MarketMeSuite have direct software connections to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and many other social networks. It's through these programs that people can automatically post information to the soci... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Who would have thought that the Daily Golden Nugget series would ever get this far? Today is Nugget Number 600! I have to warn you that this one is going to be a #longread compared to my usual.
My very first Nugget was about Google Maps and how it could drive customers directly to your store. Each multiple of 100 since then has also been about Google Maps, Google Local, Google Places, and Google+ Local. But today it seems I must now include a new interloper... Apple Maps.
Today I'd like to talk briefly about the adverse affects of paying a company for link building. This is a topic that many SEO professionals have written about a lot this year in the wake of the Google Penguin Update from April 2012. I'd like to cover this topic again now that 6 months have passed.
As a recap of what was in the news 6 months ago, Google has a filtering algorithm that detects when you have too many links pointing to your website with the same keywords. It's called the "Penguin Filter."... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Today is Election Day in the USA. If all goes according to plan, sometime this evening we will know who the President will be for the next 4 years.
There are business cycles that are usually influenced by seasons, weather, holidays, and other typical events. Although not an official holiday, Election Day, and especially a Presidential Election Day like today tends to have a dampening effect on consumer spending that repeats every 4 years in the US.
Over the next 50 days, most retail businesses in the US will experience their typical holiday season boon. What's going to be the hottest sellers this year? Answering that question requires some guessing, some trend analysis, and some experience. Of course there are always standard items that you sell year after year that you probably already have on order and stocked in the store.
Historical tracking on your website, specifically Google Analytics, can help to remind you what was popular last year, and the ... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
In this Daily Golden Nugget I'm going to give you an analysis of Pandora Jewelry and their rise, and apparent decline in popularity. This is the kind of analysis that buying groups and vendors hate, simply because this information helps your Open To Buy and hurts their sales and commissions.
Google has a tool that shows you the global search volume for any search term. They've been collecting search data since 2004 that allows you to see trends over time. They appropriately call this the Google Trends t... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Google AdWords is probably one of the most predictable methods of online marketing to increase website traffic. Google has made it very easy to set up a campaign, insert phrases to target, create generic advertisements, and launch the campaign. With a little knowledge you can pay them a lot of money and increase your website traffic by 909%.
Yep, 909% is a real number that I've seen a few times. I've also seen the real advertising cost involved with that number and the minimal sales. Just because you increase your website traffic doesn't mean you will actually have sales.
Do you think it's time to set up an e-commerce website for your jewelry store? Before you decide to dive into e-com you need to know the initial basics of how your customers will be paying you. There are some pitfalls that your website developer probably won't tell you until the last day before your website is ready.
For small websites with few products you should consider using Google Checkout or PayPal for their BuyNow or integrated shopping cart features. But if you have hundreds of products that change regularly you should set up your own merchant account and onli... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
The Google account for your business is probably a little confusing right now; actually it's just as confusing as what Facebook did to businesses about 2 years ago...
Google is trying to bring all aspects of your business under one umbrella, which of course is Google+. They are going through some very tough growing pains right now.
The terminology they are using is very confusing, but hopefully this list of definitions will help.
Google Maps - This is the large desktop and mobile service that allows people to search their local area for directions, food, and local retail stores.
Google Places - This is the old name for the service that used to feed your business information into Google Maps. Even if you didn't have a Google Places account, your business probably still had a listing thanks to Google's pre-popu... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
To close out the week I'm giving you some direct suggestions on using Google+ for your retail jewelry store.
I'd like to start by recapping what I mentioned yesterday, in that Google+ can be, and will be your social media network for making connections that will turn into money. This is for business. I say this because your friends on Facebook are perfectly happy socializing and wishing everyone a TGIF; why would they migrate to Google+ just to do the same?
On all social networks you attract the people who are interested in what you talk about. If you're engaging in conversations about common every day things like sports, food, weather, and politics then you will probably attract friends and followers who simply like to socialize. But if you keep your social posts focused on your products and services, then people will... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
I haven't written much about Google+ because many of my readers don't use it. But I think it's time to step up and start paying attention to this social network because it has much better SEO value than Facebook. Let's be honest here, Google is the current master of web search and they give Google+ shares a lot more weight than what you might be doing on Facebook. So if you don't think people will "see" your posts via the actual Google+ website because "no one" (150 million people) uses it, rest assured the techniques apply themselves to the Google SERP so your efforts will definitely go seen.
On the surface, there are a lot of similarities between the actions you take on Facebook and those you take on Google+. Both social systems have the ability to connect with people for business or pleasure, both systems have the ability to... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Because of Google's requirement for continual fresh content, many retail jewelers are struggling to create a continual stream of new information and blog posts. There's only so much diamond educational information you can write and eventually you just need to start blogging about other topics.
Many jewelers, especially those on a thin budget, will hire freelance writers to create new blog posts. You can hire a freelancer for $5 to $10 per blog post but the better freelancers would charge $20 or more per post.
When Google wants to push some new feature they provide SERP incentives for those how participate. Over the last year they've started providing SERP perks to blog authors who publicly claim ownership of their posts. Have you noticed the photos of blog authors appearing in Google's SERP? Those photos are a very stro... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
On Friday I gave you 3 suggestions for posting photos to Facebook. One suggestion was to share product photos from your website and the other two required taking photos with your smartphone and uploading them.
The problem with Facebook photo sharing is that you need to take a photo with your smartphone, post it, and comment on it at that moment. If you're too busy running a jewelry store then these suggestions are not good for you. There is a solution to make your daily photo snapping faster, and defer the commenting until later. But it's not through Facebook...
Enter Google+.
The smartphone Google+ app has a feature called Instant Upload. With this you can snap photos all day long and never worry about uploading them. Each photo is uploaded to a private album in your Google+ account without needing to tap, resi... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
I'd like to turn my attention to Google and tell you about AdWords. This is one of the topics I usually stay away from because it's difficult to explain it in a Nugget without having your eyes glaze over. But I'd like to offer a brief overview anyway because something here should pique your interest...
Google's search results pages and millions of other websites across the internet are littered with ads, AdWords ads. They appear as text ads throughout most of the Google owned websites, but many other websites have banner ads, Flash Ads, and text ads that are served through the AdWords system.
Companies large and small, and many people just like you and I can sign up with Google and run ads for our business. Although Google says they charge you every time someone clicks an ad, the truth is that you need to prepay for you... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
It's Independence Day in the US, a day when Americans should reflect on what it took for the original colonies to stand up and form a new nation. From coast to coast there are patriotic displays of red, white, and blue, parades, fireworks, and families and friends gathered together for backyard barbeques.
Since many of you are probably getting ready for your own outdoor celebration I'll make today's Daily Golden Nugget brief.
I was poking through Google Webmaster Tools over the weekend and I realized that Google is showing more of your internal navigation links within the report "Links to Your Site > How your data is linked." In the past this report was a good place to see how people were linking to you from other websites, but now it's also reporting your internal navigation.
For several years Google has allowed all retail stores to upload inventory into their search engine. The feature was originally called Google Base, then Google Merchant Center. When consumers would search for popular product phrases, the Google SERP would always show a few product photos and links to the corresponding websites.
Getting your products listed in the SERP was just as difficult as regular jewelry SEO for your website. Generally speaking it was a lot of work.
Recently Google announced a name change and a shift in how it would operate this free product listing service... in that it's actually not going to be free any more.
Google Merchant Center is transforming into Google Shopping, and it's taking on t... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Over the past 18 months there were many other bloggers who complained that Google's online review system was tainted by spam. In fact, all review sites have experienced review spam, which refers to business owners going to their own store listing and creating a few good reviews.
For a while Google didn't show reviews from other review sites like insiderpages.com, judybook.com, yahoo.com, or citysearch.com; but those seem to be included in the new Google+ Local business layout. Each of those other companies have grappled with review spam in their own way, but is seems like Google may not care any more...
Did you know that Google bought Zagat for $151M USD in September 2011?
I remember hearing the news about it while spending a day in NYC with my mother. I travel around the USA and Europe and I see many stores with t... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
I can't believe I've been writing these for 500 weekdays straight. In calendar days that's 697, and definitely qualifies me as a professional blogger.
I was inspired to start the daily Golden Nuggets while I was traveling around France. While there during July 2010 I was using my iPhone 3 to navigate, find restaurants, read reviews, and even leave my own reviews.
Back in December 2009 Google mailed out door signs to 100,000 businesses whose Google Local Business page was popular. These door signs included a QR Code, not that anyone in the USA knew what a QR Code was at the time.
In France, what surprised me was the number of small shops all around the country that I found with one of those December 2009 Google Local QR Code door signs. Each one of them also appeared v... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
There's been a big stir in the SEO community since April 24, 2012 when Google turned on a new filter algorithm they call Penguin. This new filter is designed to remove a new level of spamming websites from the SERP.
Last month Google did a lot of work to improve how they detect spamming websites and link building strategies that provide artificial boosts. We have no love for anyone who pays a service for rapid link building, and now Google has also figured out how to detect these link building schemes.
We've been watching our tracking very carefully before mentioning this topic, as usually we don't want to rush into speculations without hard proof.
Jewelry related websites were seriously penalized in SERP ranking if they has 20,000 or more inbound links from pages with thin content. You may remember from previous D... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
For all the free services Google offers, their Analytics service is probably the most important for all retail jewelry stores to use. From the first day you install it on your website you will see exactly what your visitors are interested in, how they navigate your site, and where they came from.
Inside Google Analytics you will discover what your "Audience" is doing, how effective your "Advertising" is, what "Traffic Sources" bring visitors, what "Content" on your site is most popular, and what the value of each of your "Conversions" are.
Traffic Sources can be very interesting to look at, and its here that we can see what search engines people come from, how many people come from Facebook, how valuable your Yellow Pages listing is, and if the link building strategies you are trying actually works.
Here's a regular routine for the online marketing process of your jewelry website, or brick and mortar jewelry store...
You share status updates on Facebook and hope to gain new fans. Maybe one day those fans will click over to your website to see the jewelry you sell.
You share on Google+ knowing that it will help influence the Google SERP. Maybe one day someone will actually search a phrase you posted on Google+ and click over to your website to see the jewelry you sell.
You create quippy remarks for a 140 character Tweet and flood your Twitter account. You hope that eventually someone will see your #jewelry or #engagement #ring hash tags and click over to your website to see the jewelry you sell.
You set up a WordPress blog and post regular entertainment news or monthly updates about birthstones. This pr... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
We love blogging. In fact this is our 441st Daily Golden Nugget. It's not a special number like 100 was, or 200, or 400, or even 404. But the interesting thing is that once you have more than 300 real blog posts on your website you start to attract a lot of new visitors every month.
We're referring to a "real" blog post as something written about a topic that's near and dear to you, like celebrities adorned with jewelry at red carpet events, or jewelry fashion trends, or jewelry in entertainment news.
Paparazzi are not the only people interested in what celebrities are doing, or wearing. Your jewelry customers are also interested, which means you can blog about celebrities and attract attention... a lot of attention through Google SERPs.
As a long term test, we once wrote a celebrity blog post about reality-star-t... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
If you attempt to set up an e-commerce jewelry website without a dedicated monthly budget you will set yourself up for disappointment. Not failure, but very slow progress and low sales.
That's a bit blunt, but e-commerce does need to be treated like a separate business entity with its own expenses and even employees, or at least an employee that spends a lot of time in front of the computer managing it.
The big players in our industry have established a strong foothold in e-commerce selling. Kay, BlueNile, JamesAllan, Zales, Tiffany, and a few others have the deepest of pockets of advertising dollars to beat out all the local retail jewelers.
If you want to have a jewelry e-commerce site you need to navigate your way through the variables of setup, monthly maintenance, and monthly marketing. Some of the variables ... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
It's hard to believe the Holiday Season 2011 is already 3 months in the past, and the 2012 season starts in about 8 months. We don't want to be pushy, but right now is the time to start reviewing your 2011 holiday website strategies in preparation for the 2012 season.
We're serious about this. Now that Spring is officially here you need to start reviewing what worked, what didn't, and what your competitors did that impressed you. Work out a new marketing strategy, and start implementing it in July.
Last year Google Think (http://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/) once again gave us reports that holiday shopping starts online in August. Few websites are prepared for these early shoppers.
Starting today, and then over the next 2 months, we will frequently publish the research-based SEO and online marketing strategies that we... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
It's been about 13 months since Google unleashed the Panda filter and ripped apart the internet heyday of article marketing and link building.
Google's "Panda Update" originally went live on February 24, 2011 and has been refreshed a few times since. Panda is not actually part of the search algorithm, but rather an extra filter that's applied to the Google index.
Periodically Google runs its search database through this filter to weed out bad websites so they won't appear in the SERP. Among that list of bad websites are once popular sites like EzineArticles.com, HubPages.com, thefind.com, and mahalo.com.
These websites aren't actually bad, and you won't get a computer virus by visiting them either. Google filters out these online properties because SEO professionals figured out how to abuse them for financial gain.... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Today we've got some updates from the world of Google products and how we foresee them relating together to your benefit.
First, let's check in on Google Places, and if you're playing the jWAG drinking game, it's time to take a shot.
Some time in early 2011, Google took away much of the search engine optimization power you had in Places. They disabled several of the built-in fields and limited the information appearing on your jewelry store's Places Page. They claimed it wasn't a permanent change, and that might be what they thought at the time.
It now looks like Google Places is slowly being diminished in its importance. In July 2011, we suggested that your Google Places account and the Google+ Business page would eventually merge. Google+ was given a huge boost in importance when G+ posts started appearing in th... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
The last time we analyzed the percentage of organic visitors to jewelry websites from the various search engines was July 12, 2011. Back then here's how the top 3 engines stacked up.
Google: 89.7% Yahoo: 4.2% Bing: 3.8%.
When we recently measured on February 22, 2012 we found this breakdown of organic traffic sources:
Google: 82.5% (expected leader) Yahoo: 7.9% (wow, this one is still beating Bing) Bing: 7.6% (new player and likely enhanced by Facebook users) AOL: 1.1% (geesh, people still use this?) Ask: 0.6% (amazingly still alive) Search.com: 0.3% (never really caught on; obvious names don't always work!)
Remember, these numbers are only measured against websites for retail jewelry stores. Google is losing ground while Yahoo and Bing are gaining, but then, Google's numbers wou... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Today we'd like to explain how we discovered the unfortunate waste of money one jeweler spent when they hired a SEO guy to build links by writing blog posts.
There's no need to look at your own account right now, but we'll begin our story with a quick trip into our Google Analytics account and click on the link for TRAFFIC SOURCES in the left margin. From there we expanded the Sources sub-section and selected Referrals.
On this Referrals page inside Google Analytics, we are able to see all the domain names on which people find your website, but more importantly, clicked to visit your website. It's typical to see facebook.com, jewelers.org, yellowpages.com, and maps.google.com among the popular referral domains.
If you've paid someone for "link building" services, you will see hundreds of random domain names in the r... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
We would like to share an interesting lesson recently learned by one of the larger companies we work with.
Members of our jWAG team were called upon to review the Google Analytics account for a company with 5 store locations through their state. Specifically, we needed to identify the most valuable traffic sources. This was a 6 month review of their newly launched website.
The website doesn't have e-commerce, so measuring the value of traffic is very difficult, and relies heavily on the sales personal asking customers how they heard about the store. As it turned out, the first 6 months went by and none of the sales people were trained to ask customers.
What we see in Google Analytics is that more than half of the website traffic came from organic Google, so it's a good assumption that their SEO efforts are working... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
In honor of our first Daily Golden Nugget we're going to revisit Google Places today. We've not spoken about it in a while, so it's time to get back to our favorite topic again.
Today's Nugget is a parallel conversation to yesterday's topic. We're going to search for "jewelry stores in Chicago" using Google Maps. Yesterday's discussion was the same search phrase in the regular Google Search.
Navigating our search over to maps.google.com, we see results showing the center of Chicago with Chicago Harbor and Lake Michigan. Google understands that the word "Chicago" is very specific and the results clearly state "jewelry stores near Chicago, IL" even though we didn't type in "IL."
The map shows dozens of little salmon colored dots for many jewelers in the Chicago area. The top ten result... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Today is Groundhog Day in the USA. Will the groundhog see his shadow? We there be 6 more weeks of winter or will spring come early? It's been a mild winter so far at the jWAG HQ in New Jersey.
This is also the 399th Daily Golden Nugget!
Today we're going to review an SEO tactic that will help rank you locally.
The most common search phrase we see every month is "jewelry stores." But the phrase by itself shows up far less frequently than when used in a sentence, for example, like "jewelry stores in Chicago."
Whenever Google detects a proper town name or city name in the search phrase it will display results in the local format. That usually includes a list of locations pulled from Google Places along with a map showing pointers for each place. Regular search results appear below the local results.
Here's some keyword research data that might help you.
Recently, while reviewing collected keyword data, we noticed a large occurrence of the keyword phrase "yellow gold" for December 2011. For the past 10 years, jewelers have told us that white gold jewelry is much more popular choice than yellow gold. Regular keyword research and traffic monitoring seems to agree with what we are told.
That is, until now.
So what are your latest sales figures for white gold vs. yellow gold? Have you noticed?
According to Google Insights for Search, the phrase "yellow gold" is steadily on the rise every year since 2004. Take a look for yourself at this link: http://bit.ly/yellowgold
Eight tall spikes stand out on the graph, which correspond to the last 8 holiday seasons. But that's not what we want you to notice. ... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
This is part 3 of 3 Daily Golden Nuggets. We are explaining the 3 common problems that can harm your jewelry website. Each is damaging in some way or another and will harm your ranking in Google's search results.
3. Server software glitches.
Until recently, we hadn't seen too many negative effects from software glitches. Surely you've seen these types of errors yourself:
* SEQUEL SERVER database error * mySQL error * PHP error * Template Error
Usually it's only a few pages on a website affected by these errors. There's not much of a ranking impact for independent jewelers to worry about if you have a small website because small sites seldom have heavy database or programming code.
On the other hand, if you have a jewelry e-commerce site you might have several errors without even realizin... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
This is part 2 of 3 Daily Golden Nuggets. We are explaining the 3 common problems that can harm your jewelry website. Each is damaging in some way or another and will harm your ranking in Google's search results.
2. Programming glitches that bring down your website.
Programming a brand new website is tricky business. You should never, ever let a programmer make changes to live areas of your website without first testing them on a demo website. We've seen programmers with the best of intentions completely crash a website and not even realize it for hours.
By far the deadliest programming glitches take place when you are writing 302 and 301 redirect code by hand. Many SEO experts will dabble in making your URLs look nice for Google but mistakenly nullify your pages from Google instead.
You might have noticed that yesterday a lot of very important (English) websites were blacked out or on strike. At last count there were 137 very large websites on strike with thousands of other smaller sites joining in. They were blocking their content to support the protest the internet censorship bills, SOPA and PIPA. More information is here: http://fightforthefuture.org/pipa
Whether you support SOPA/PIPA or not, it's the website blackouts that we'd like to call your attention to in this Daily Golden Nugget.
On January 16, 2011, just two days before the planned blackout, many website owners realized that turning off their website would be detrimental for their SEO. The blackout was planned for the full 24 hours of January 18, 2011.
Can a blacked out website harm your SEO, even if only for 24 hours?
There's a big change taking place in Google's search right now. Let's take a quick look at this change which might still be ongoing as you read this Nugget on January 13, 2012.
Social posts, user profiles, and business pages from Google+ started to appear in the Google SERPs earlier this week. For you this means it's time to jump on the bandwagon and set up your Google+ Page and start using it.
Including G+ information in the SERP has created many cries of foul play from SEO critics, web experts, and even concerns about Google breaking anti-trust laws. Where Google once upon a time suggested generic websites in the SERP, it has replaced those with information pulled from Google+.
Google is usually known for providing the most relevant results in their search, but perhaps pointing people toward Google+ is not the mo... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
The return on investment (ROI) of your website is difficult to measure without direct website selling. Without those online sales, it's difficult to determine how effective your website, and overall online marketing strategy is. One way to measure your ROI is to have a web form to request more information.
Online forms are limited only by your imagination and can have fields to request any tidbit of information you desire. Some jewelers will ask for a birthday and anniversary; some will ask for your favorite precious metal or gemstone; then of course you have the basic contact form that only asks for a name, email and to fill out a comments box.
It all depends on your needs but once the person fills out the form you might reward them with more information, or a downloadable newsletter, or perhaps access into a protected ... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Have you looked at your Google Analytics data recently? Is your holiday traffic up or down? Do you know how your customers are finding you?
You may not be aware of it, but in the US, Google recently changed the way the SERP page works. Whenever Google or Gmail users are logged into their account, Google activates a secure web browser session.
In other words they are changing the browser from: http://www.google.com to https://www.google.com
As more and more information is tied together between Google's various products, this seems like a safe measure to protect us all, however there's a serious downside. This security is going to change the way you read your Google Analytics because your search keyword data will slowly disappear.
The "https" feature is designed to block all information unless... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Let's check in on the ongoing statistics for this current holiday season to take advantage of over the next 16 days.
Here's the Bitly link we set up a few months back to monitor the 2011 holiday season:
http://bit.ly/2011holidayinsights
That leads us to a live Google Insights for Search page showing active data for the most popular search phrases related to Google's Luxury Goods/Gems & Jewelry category. (Of course if you are reading this after December 2011, it's going to be static, preserved data of what was.)
Using the starting date of October 31, 2011 the search interest in jewelry has risen 57% as of Sunday December 4, 2011. The most popular single word is "jewelry." Here's the list of the top 10 search phrases in their order of popularity:
From our own measurements we know that the average number of organic visitors to a non e-commerce jewelry website are about 45 people per day. When we say "organic" we mean purely found from a search engine without any outside influence. In other words, that's 45 people without factoring in any SEO efforts, social media, or paid ads.
45 is a pretty dismal number and yet many jewelers don't know where to start to increase that number. Sure, you can create a Facebook Page, a Google+ Page, pay for ads... but really it should start with bulking up your existing website content and adding new pages to your site.
Haphazardly adding content to your website will probably waste a lot of unnecessary time. More visitors will find you through organic search engine results in the month of December during the holiday buying rush, and ... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
To all of you reading this in the United States, we wish you a Happy Thanksgiving and thank you for reading. And to all of you around the world, we'd still like to say thank you for being loyal followers of our Daily Golden Nuggets.
According to recorded network traffic from the past few years, today will be the lowest volume of internet usage during the holiday season. Christmas Day is the next lowest traffic volume day followed by Daylight Savings, which happened for the U.S. back at the beginning of the month.
It's pretty early in the morning here on the East Coast of the US and we have to get our own turkey in the oven soon, so we'll make this Nugget very short.
The Google+ project is very young; in fact it's still in beta testing with frequent bugs. There are several user forums where feedback is given to the ... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
It's the day before Thanksgiving in the USA and while many of our readers are thinking about stuffing their turkeys, we'd like to talk about ways to avoid stuffing your Google+ Stream with over-shared photos.
Google+ created a nice marriage with Picasa photo albums and the easy to use functionality of Google's image search. You can easily upload 1 photo at a time in a shared post or you can upload multiple images at a time to your photo albums.
Unless you make a living in photography, sharing every one of your photos to your +Page Stream might start to annoy your readers. In the past we've recommended taking photos of newly arriving jewelry with your smartphone and uploading them to Facebook. The idea there was to upload 1 or 2 photos at a time, but organizing your photos on your +Page seems like it will be a lot easier.<... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
The built-in Circle feature of Google+ gives all of us a new way to provide specialty information to customers who want it.
In case you are not aware of how Google+ works yet, let's explain that a Google+ Circle is the terminology and process of organizing your friends, family, and customers into specific groups. The information you post to Google+ can then be shared with the public or with specific Circles so only those Circle members can see it.
If you are interested in the greatest SEO value, then all your Google+ Page posts need to be shared to the "Public." But to create a personalized experience you will need to create a special, personalized experience for your +Page followers. Since Circles allow you to group followers of your Page into smaller audiences, you can then share specific messages with specific groups t... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
It's 3 days before the big kickoff of the 2011 Holiday Season and we're hoping you are all set with your online marketing. Today's topic will help you set up a last-minute local internet presence.
We're going to give you some pointers on setting up your Google+ Page. The Google+ Page and Google Places Page are two different website properties, and you will need to manage both right now. Google has hinted that Google+ will eventually absorb the features of Google Places, but let's not hold our breath on that today. Instead we need to deal with 2 Google business profiles for your jewelry store.
Google+ Pages will help you win your local market, so you need to step up and get this done. Google+ Pages will be important for you because they are already showing up in the Google SERP. Here's an excerpt from the Google+ Pages... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Every year your mail boxes are filled with holiday cards from friends, family, and sometimes even business relations who want to simply say how important you are to them. The typical "Happy Holidays and a Prosperous New Year" are among the common phrases inside holiday greeting cards.
Your Facebook Likes, email subscribers, Twitter followers, and Google+ Circles are supporting your business, and are very important to you as well. A message of holiday cheer and heartfelt warmth can make their holiday a little happier.
Sending messages to Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ are easy and you shouldn't feel worried about message overload during the last days of the season. On the other hand your email subscribers might be getting tired of hearing from you by the time December 20th comes around.
It's the season of giving. Combine that with the social web and you could come up with some creative ideas to weave through your website, email, Facebook, and Twitter marketing. If all your holiday marketing is simply attempting to sell, you will quickly lose your audience, so how can we spice up your website and email messages?
A good place to start is to think about what people do during the holidays other than buy gifts. They get together with family, catch up with friends, decorate their homes inside and out, watch seasonal movies and TV shows, bake, sing carols, and anything else you can think of. What are your traditions during the Holiday Season?
Actually that's a good question to ask on your Facebook Page: What are your Holiday Traditions? You could even make it a contest and have every shared story entered int... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
As mentioned a few days ago, American Express is trying to popularize Saturday, November 26, 2011 as the day when people should go out and buy local, not online, and not from big brand stores. This is the 2nd year in a row they are promoting it and they call it "Small Business Saturday."
Those looking to support their local community will visit the stores they already know about. Other shoppers might make an extra effort to read their local newspaper or direct mail circulars and ValPak, Money Mailer, or similar ad mailers.
Smartphones are everywhere and we are already inside the mobile age. Mobile websites are a thing of "today" not "tomorrow." However, if you don't have one yet there are still many things you can do to beef up the chances of being found on Small Business Saturday.
Black Friday emails continue to surge every year. According to Responsys.com there was a 67% increase in Black Friday emails in 2010 from previous years.
Black Friday shopping starts very early in the day, so if you're planning on sending an email that day you need to send it out at 3AM or 4AM local time so shoppers are reminded of your deals and include you in their shopping schedule.
Here are some suggested subject lines for Black Friday, a few of which come from Responsys.com.
"Wake Up! Don't Miss BLACK FRIDAY DEALS" "Black Friday Deal Buster Specials on Jewelry" "Black Friday Only - Free Necklace with every Pendant"
Naturally that last suggestion of a free necklace would be a loss leader. Take a look at yesterday's Daily Golden Nugget for some recommendations on low cost suppliers.
Today we're going to give you some ideas for email and website content that you should launch on the Monday, Tuesday, or Wednesday prior to Thanksgiving. That's 2 weeks from today, so if you jump on this right now, you can still get it done.
To begin, we'd like you to take a moment and think about all the emails your vendors have sent you in the past week or so. This year it seems like many vendors are promoting their low-cost jewelry lines. These low-cost lines include silver charms, woven jewelry, alternative metals, and we've seen a few specials on traditional jewelry including pearls.
Black Friday shoppers will probably be more interested in finding gift items for people on their list than directly interested in spending time looking at your expensive ring showcase; so stay focused on the holiday buyers on Black Frida... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
There's a tactic we commonly use when creating AdWords campaigns that allows us to target online ads to appear to people who have already visited your website. The idea is that if someone took the time to browse through your website, they were probably interested in your jewelry, but weren't interested enough to purchase at that moment; so we keep showing them ads to make them remember the jewelry store.
This is a very successful strategy that Google AdWords has enhanced greatly in the last 12 months or so. Google explains the effectiveness in the fact that people are targeted with specific offers. These offers were not, and will never be, visible on the regular website, making the person feel like they found a special deal or even say to themselves "wow, thankfully I didn't buy that a day ago."
Over the last 6 months we've monitored an average 97.52% increase of mobile visitors to jewelry websites across our network. The actual number of mobile visitors to a single website is pretty small each month, as in about 60 visitors, but that number has nowhere to go but up.
Did you know that you can create mobile AdWords ads? According to Google, 1 in 3 mobile searches have local intent.
According to what we mentioned yesterday, 87% of people walking are using their cell phone. Of those surveyed, it was found that people use mobile search 77% of the time spent on their phone. Finally, 33% of that 77% are searching for something locally.
What does that mean with real numbers? 100 people walk by, 87 of them are using their cell phone. Of 87 people, 77% or 67 of them are using a search engine. Of those 67... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Of all the chapters in this Holiday 2011 Run-Up, this might be the most important. Consumers are using smartphones today, right now, this exact minute. The data is undeniable and we're going to step through it and show you what the experts are saying and how you can use mobile technology yourself.
In the past 12 months we've heard many retail jewelry store owners tell us that "their customers do not use smartphones" and they don't need to create a mobile website even though those same jewelers themselves have an iPhone or an Android. This is similar to what we heard in 2003 when jewelers claimed their customers didn't use the internet and they didn't need a regular website.
We have our own in-house mobile research methods, and we've been tracking mobile usage for more than a few years, but to get a broader view of the mo... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Search has become a natural part of the everyday consumer buying cycle. Consumers want to be informed, save time, and above all not be disappointed with their purchase. Search gives them all that, even when it comes to buying jewelry.
According to Google Think Insights, the average consumer will spend 11 days researching jewelry before making a purchase. Although not all research was entirely online, 91% of those surveyed said they started their research online and then followed through with going to the store in person or returning to the website on their PC at a later date.
For 2010, consumers reported that the most important source for their online research was a brick and mortar store's website, followed by e-tailer online websites. Search engines ranked at #3 for the source of online information. Many retail jewele... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Google collects data, a lot of data. They collect usage data every time you use their search engine or any of their services and the Android phone. This data is available through a few different online sources; the one we use the most is Google Insights for Search. Many of the ideas we come up with are based off actionable data we see from Google Insights. We have 32 pages of Google Insights for Search charts in our final Holiday 2011 Run-Up eBook.
In 2009 and 2010 Google extended the standard Insights service and published several reports referred to as "Think Insights." We've combed through their Post-Holiday Learnings for 2011 to find the usable golden nuggets jewelers should know about.
Let's start with the key Takeaways from the Holiday 2010 data: 1. Because of the economy, consumers shopped promotional periods... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
We have two last topics to cover today that will complete our week long of Holiday Run-Up Google AdWords directions.
The first topic is fine tuning your AdWords landing pages for those gift givers. As we previously explained, the gift giver has a predetermined budget, and they will spend that budget even if the gift recipient would never have spent that much on themselves. You should fine tune your website to help those gift givers.
First, let's add a bunch of new links inside your product catalog. You need specific links that say: "Gifts for Under $100" "Gifts for Under $200" "Gifts for Under $300" "Gifts for Under $500"
These links don't have to be real pages; in fact they could be fancy URLs that lead the user into a special search page for your website. You're going to need your web programmer's he... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
As we navigate through the murky and expensive waters of Google AdWords during the holiday season, there are a few other things that could help close that sale.
Have you ever seen those holiday gift baskets at your favorite big box store? Here in New Jersey we have several Costco and BJ's stores. Right now, in the middle of October, they already have shrink wrapped holiday gift baskets for sale. There's a basket bundle of video games, another for movies, and of course a basket of edible goodies.
These baskets present the gift buyer with a perceived greater value. Among those bundled items is probably one quality item and then the rest are lower cost to produce or perhaps even closeout items from the manufacturer.
The movie "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull" had its ups and downs in the ratings a... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Over the last 2 days we've given you ideas for targeting Pandora jewelry in your AdWords ads. Since the price point on Pandora is so low, the product lends itself nicely for gift givers on a limited budget. We're going to continue talking about Pandora today but before we give you specific ad ideas, we need to offer you some advice on Google AdWords trademark policies.
The procedure explained below will work for any vendor, not only Pandora.
Google AdWords monitors ads and will automatically disqualify and disable them when found to violate a trademark. It doesn't matter if you are a Pandora "Gold Store" or a "Silver Store," you are still not allowed to use the name "Pandora" in your AdWords ads without some type of permission.
Permission is easy to achieve if, and only if, you have a written contract with Pandora.... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Speaking of budgets, let's talk about your holiday AdWords budget. From January through October you should be spending your advertising budget on targeting keyword phrases that return the highest ROI. Perhaps these are long tail phrases like "pandora rose bead," but certainly not simply "pandora bead." The long tail phrases (those 3 words or more) are usually much less expensive than the 1 or 2 word phrases.
Here's the cost as of today's measurements:
"pandora bead" Extremely high search volume and competition Top ad position costs $3.29 per click
"pandora rose bead" Extremely low search volume and medium competition Top ad position for less than $1.50 per click
During December you should expect to see the AdWords click prices to spike up to $35 for most generic jewelry phrases. Last year we mea... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
You can spend 10 months trying to fine tune your Google AdWords campaign, really learning the ins and outs of how to attract your target customers to your jewelry store, but nothing you learn is going to prepare you for the affect that the Holiday Season has on AdWords.
The Holiday Season is about gift giving, and the holiday gift giving mentality is different than the rest of the year.
As you are most defiantly aware, jewelry is the gift to give throughout the year when someone is celebrating a birthday or job promotion, to say thank you, or to cheer someone up. Jewelry is given during economic hard times as a way of saying better times will come and during economic good times to celebrate what you have.
However, even though the Holiday Season has religious celebrations at its core, gift giving can greatly overshado... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Today's ACTION ITEM is to find out what keywords people are using to find your website, and then to make sure the content on your website is suitable. Not only that, but we'll show you how to find important keywords that other jewelry stores are not competing for.
This is Google's public location for their AdWords Keyword Research tool. If you have an AdWords account, you should log into that instead and go to your Reporting and Tools tab, then the Keyword Tool option.
Once you get to the Keyword Tool, you will find a form at the top where you can type in a "Word or phrase" or a "Website." To start this exercise let's type "www.jamesallen.com" into the website ... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Review websites are popping up everywhere. Not too long ago, the only review sites we worried about were Google Places, CitySearch, Yelp, InsiderPages, MerchantCircle, and a few others. In the Spring of 2010, Google was so hungry for reviews they created new HTML tags to tell Google when a review was showing on a page.
Since then, reviews online have exploded because digital marketing agencies realized the power behind the tool. Does your marketing agency get it yet?
The review services mentioned above are typically out of your control, or you may have to jump through a few hoops to manage the reviews. Other online reviews can appear on your Facebook Business Page or on your website, and these are easier to control.
Your first ACTION ITEM for today is to contact your web programmer and tell them you want a review... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
There's an idea among first time website owners that it's best to slap up a website with perfect jewelry photos, prices, and a Buy Now button and they can sell online. At the other end of the scale there's another camp of first time website owners that feel it's best to slap up a website with basic information about the jewelry store and they will attract new customers into the store.
Both of these ideas are completely erroneous. There is no way to slap a website together and become a success. What's worse is that we know, and our staff has attended, many seminars at jewelry trade shows where both of these myths are perpetuated.
You might be familiar with the phrases "Business card Websites" and "E-commerce sites from vendors." The business card site is a basic 1, 2, or 3 page website that puts your name online. The e-c... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
This is the final part of our long series on Black Hat SEO and recommendations on avoiding it.
Yesterday we gave you the first 4 of 9 tips every jewelry should be aware of when hiring an SEO Professional to work for you. These are very blunt directions that will make working with your SEO professional much more rewarding.
5. As for those ROI reports, don't be unrealistic with your expectations. The web is not a static ecosystem. Obviously you want more traffic, more customers, and higher profits, but traffic and customers cannot be created or destroyed; they instead are stolen from other websites.
As soon as the efforts of your SEO Pro start working, you need to realize that your competitor will step up their SEO game, too. T... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
We're continuing our topic of Black Hat SEO techniques that will cause your website to be banned or seriously penalized by search engines. Today's topic is about "Doorway Pages".
A Doorway Page is any page added to a website simply to target a specific keyword phrase, but instead of being useful to the reader it usually has very little content on it and leaves the visitor feeling dissatisfied.
Some SEO companies have automated software that will create dozens of doorway pages for your site. For this process you only need to plug in your list of keywords and the software will search the internet for brief information or definitions of those keywords and create these nonsense pages.
For example, an automatically created doorway page for the phrase engagement rings would have your store name, address and then might scr... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
We're continuing our topic of Black Hat SEO techniques that will cause your website to be banned or seriously penalized by search engines. Today's topic is about "Link Farms" and bad link building.
Link building is the process of posting a link to your website on another website. This can be as simple as putting a link in your next Twitter status update, or posting a link to your Facebook wall. On Google+ you can build a link to your website with a Public post. Building links slowly in this way is considered to be the correct, organic way.
Any time you pay someone to put a link on their website pointing back to yours it is considered paid link building. All the search engines hate the paid practice of link building and consider the process within the SEO boundaries of Black Hat.
We're continuing our topic of Black Hat SEO techniques that will cause your website to be banned or seriously penalized by search engines. Today's topic is about "Thin Content".
The highest ranked websites usually have the best original content, and a lot of it. Typical well ranked websites have a lot of interesting information on every page. The exact amount of interesting information is unknown because Google won't tell us. Many SEO experts say you need at least 250 words of unique content, but we feel you need at least 400 words.
"Thin Content" is the phrase given to a website, or a web page, that has very few words on it, say less than 250 words per page. We're going to review the common thin pages that so many jewelry stores have created without even realizing.
We're continuing our topic of Black Hat SEO techniques that will cause your website to be banned or seriously penalized by search engines. Today's topic is about "Article Spinning".
Websites with the highest ranking in the SERP tend to also have a lot of pages. Each additional page added to a website creates extra visibility in the search engines. This visibility happens simply because you are giving them more information and more words to help categorize your website.
Most news websites rank highly for a variety of topics. CNN.com and MSNBC.com are highly ranked for many random keywords simply because a keyword phrase was mentioned in an article. Your local newspaper will also rank highly for local searches and local topics.
There will be a time when you want, or need to have your website rank for new keyword ph... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Today, and for the rest of the week, we are continuing our topic of Black Hat SEO tactics that you should NOT be doing on your website. Black Hat SEO refers to unethical technology strategies or website content that will negatively affect your SERP ranking or will get your website banned from search engines.
Today we are explaining Keyword Stuffing and we'll give you an example of it. But first, let's give you a little background information for the benefit of website beginners out there, or to refresh your memory.
In order to have a web page appear in the SERP for a keyword, you need to use that keyword on your page. If you want your website to appear for the phrase "champagne diamonds," you will need to use that phrase on your website.
The question you should ask yourself is how many times the phrase "champagne ... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Instead of giving you ideas for online marketing and SEO research, we're going to spend today's Daily Golden Nugget explaining something you should absolutely NOT be doing on your website.
Let's start by explaining that a search engine is simply a machine that follows a set of programming rules. In the early days of the web, the search engines would read a website and evaluate its credibility according to simple factors like how many times a word was showing on the page, or how many links go to a page, what was written in the meta keywords, how many words were bold, etc.
Early web programmers quickly learned how simple the process was to get ranked highly in a SERP. If the competition had the phrase "engagement ring" on a page 10 times, then you simply needed to have the phrase 11 times and you would rank higher.
We recently had a customer request to have the brand Phillip Gabriel put on their website. We did so, and they said we misspelled the vendor's name. We realized that Phillip Gabriel uses the name Phillip Gavriel in their logo, but seem to switch back and forth between Gavriel and Gabriel on official documentation, such as their footers on the phillipgabriel.com website.
This brand, from Royal Chain, has made a curious choice for their jeweler customers--do they market their brand as Phillip Gabriel or Phillip Gavriel?
Our jeweler, for example, saw it as an error that we used the spelling "Gavriel" instead of "Gabriel," and we wanted to dig a little deeper into this. Could Royal Chain be hurting themselves, and the retail jewelers trying to sell this brand?
Not unlike BVLGARI/Bulgari, which you'll see uses both, too... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
In Daily Nugget #227 we explained the importance of lowering your bounce rate. In that Golden Nugget, we explained that you should try your best to lower your bounce rates as much as possible. You can read the full Nugget here: http://bit.ly/iExxJP
Google interprets bounce rates and uses them to judge the quality of your overall website when compared to particular phrases or topics. Google actually refers to topics as "themes" and that's a common word amongst website SEO professionals.
We've always said, and continue to teach, that you should be publishing educational articles or blog entries on your website. Each additional post increases the overall visibility of your site by giving Google more information to index and provide back out to users.
Here's a website usability and conversion optimization tip for you: Kill those pop-ups!
Have you seen those annoying pop-ups on websites? Some pop-up as soon as you arrive on the page and some will pop-up when you try to leave the page; both are very annoying.
The REEDS Jewelers website shows an immediate message for "First Time Visitors" that says: "First Time Here? REEDS would like to welcome you with an extra savings of $25 off any online purchase of $150 or more. Enter coupon code FTV25150* at checkout. *Excludes Roberta Z Ideal, REEDS Diamond, Chamilia, David Yurman, Everlon, Swiss Watches, and Swarovski. "
Sure, that's a great offer for a jewelry store, but the pop-up is so immediate and ann... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Yesterday's Nugget was pretty long to get through, but we really needed to explain how to use Google Website Optimizer ( http://bit.ly/qEVCUP ). It is such an important tool and it's easier than Google Analytics. Although, if you are still wondering what you would want to test then today's Daily Golden Nugget is for you.
Some basic things to test with Google Website Optimizer: 1. Captions on images 2. Font size, line spacing, and font family 3. Adding or reducing white space around the site 4. Culling your content or swapping it with bullet points 5. Font and link colors, underlined or non underlined links 6. Button sizes and colors 7. Jewelry photography methods using different background other than pure white 8. Headlines 9. Repositioning your call to action message<... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
This Daily Golden Nugget is probably a little more advanced than most others. Thankfully, though, it's not too technical because the Google tool we're going to explain takes care of all the confusing tech stuff.
We want to introduce you to the world of website split testing, also known as A/B testing.
As we've said in the past, your website is never really complete. You need to keep working on it to improve your conversion rates, lower your bounce rates, and overall increase your sales. But other than simply watching the daily sales reports, how do you know if your website efforts are getting better?
The answer is A/B testing, and with it you can create 2 variations of the same web page and have Google run its magic until the better of the pages appears.
Today we'd like to tell you about one of our secret analysis tools. It's easy to use, colorful, and it will help you improve your website's usability.
When done correctly, usability testing can greatly improve your website's conversion rates.
We'll tell you about the secret tool we use in a little bit, but let's first tell you some of the things you can learn from usability testing.
List of What Usability Testing Shows You: 1. Most popular page of your website. 2. Where users move their mouse while surfing from page to page. 3. Where users click. 4. How far users scroll down on your page. 5. What part of your page is most visible in a browser window.
Google Analytics will provide data for #1 and #3, but the rest requires another type of tracking program.
In case you're just tuning in, this post is one in a series of training for jewelry store owners. Today's topic is "Conversion Rate Optimization" and how to find someone to help you measure and improve it.
Measuring your conversion rate on any single web page will be tedious. We've previously said you could use the free Site Overlay tool inside Google Analytics to do it, but before you even get to the actual testing you need to outline your goals and how you will achieve them.
The Jeweler Website Advisory Group exists simply to share website education with jewelers. We actually hope you will take our ideas and use them directly, but if you don't have the time, then you will need to hire someone to help you.
Here are some things to think about when looking to hire an ad agency, web designer, or even an in-house empl... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Over the last two weeks, we first covered email topics and then landing page concepts that could create a continued experience and answer questions presented in your emails. Let's now move on to the next step in your internet marketing for jewelers' education: Conversion Rates.
Way back on January 22, 2010 we published a brief vocabulary lesson explaining Conversion Rates. Here's the link http://bit.ly/nTn9NW in case you want to read it. That lesson names the following 6 potential methods of determining conversion rates:
1. Email Newsletter Signup 2. Question submitted through the Contact Us form 3. Registration for an event 4. Fill out a form to receive a discount offer via email 5. Comment on your blog 6. Setting up a wish list
In layman's terms, search engine optimization is a delicate balance of information you show on your website: programming code used to make your website, ways that people can find your website, and how you treat people once they try to use your website.
We agree with the top reports from organizations like SEOmoz and Search Engine Land. They usually indicate that the Titles of your website pages and the quality of the content on your pages are the most significant website ranking factors.
The "quality of the content" is a strange phrase that many SEO guys will throw around but no one ever really defines it. That's because it's an indefinable concept that may change from website to website or industry to industry.
The search engine companies will never publicly say how they rank the content on your website. Google do... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Today's Daily Golden Nugget is an example of how to create 301 redirects from your old website to your new website.
Many web design companies or consultants will build you a new jewelry website design without considering how it will destroy your current website's ranking.
We've covered the topic of "301 redirects" several times in our Nuggets and training. It is an important service that you need to ask your website guy to do. However you will need to do the redirects yourself if you've decided to do your website yourself or hire a young programmer.
So let's explain exactly how to create 301 redirects for your jewelry website.
I'd like to tell you a little story today, and with it perhaps a little education lesson. To begin, I ask you to sit on the floor around this old black and white television...
Saturday August 6, 2011 was Lucille Ball's 100th birthday. Google commemorated the day by changing their logo to look like a 1960s black and white TV with movable channel knobs and a volume switch. On the TV screen the name Google appeared just like the opening credits from the "I Love Lucy" show. The Google doodle was actually a playable TV displaying 6 different "I Love Lucy" clips on each of the channels selected from the movable knob.
Over the last 12 months Google has created some amazing logo doodles. (In case you don't know, each of those unique Google logos are called "doodles.") Some of my favorites are from Earth Day 2011, the Bunse... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
This is the last Nugget in our series explaining the different types of online product catalogs that retail jewelers could have.
Many newcomers in e-commerce (jewelry or otherwise) think they will set up websites overnight and start taking orders tomorrow. Certainly, this is possible if you have a Type 1 catalog we described a few days ago, but the reality is most run forward blindfolded with a poor execution strategy and lofty expectations. They end up with very bitter feelings of the entire experience and blame their web programmer for dysfunctional websites when in fact the jeweler should have researched the process.
Let's try to shed some light on the most difficult type of product catalog you could ever set up. We're trying to include all the details your hired website company doesn't tell you. After all, they just ... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
We have conflicted feelings when it comes to independent retail jewelry stores trying to compete in online e-commerce. On one hand we know it's a good idea, but on the other hand there are sensible business decisions as to why a jewelry store should avoid it.
Truthfully we would like to see all jewelry stores create some type of online catalog, even if it's only a small sample of their inventory that showcases the quality of their jewelry.
The options for e-commerce or online showcases might seem limitless, but there are really only a few types. Let's review the different types and explain how you could use each of them, as well as the SEO strategies you should employ.
As usual, we have way too much information to tell you in a single Daily Golden Nugget so we're splitting this one up over several days. You may wa... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
In yesterday's Nugget, we explained some basic strategies of meta description writing for the different types of pages in your website.
Today we're looking at a specific way to write your meta descriptions.
It is important to remember that only 150 characters of your description will appear in the SERP. This is a standard across all search engines. The search engines do not use the meta description for SEO ranking, and no one other than us tech-heads will ever view the source code of your website, so it's a waste of your time to write more than 150 characters.
Be wary of any SEO professional that wants to create long descriptions. Find the most concise way to say what you need to about a page.
Let's say you want to write a description for your page showing a collection of custom made wedding and engagement r... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Increasing the popularity of your website now goes well beyond the basic search engine optimization techniques, but as Google's machine learning techniques have improved we've had to think way beyond the number of times a phrase is mentioned on a page, your page title, and whether you use the bold-tag on a page.
If you are new to the Daily Gold Nuggets and want to learn some of the basics of SEO, please refer to our online library from January through about May 2011 where we published many specific SEO strategies.
There are only so many times you can talk about the same common topics of SEO before we bore you to tears, but today we are going to once again revisit the topic of Meta Descriptions and give you an attack strategy for dealing with this tedious task.
Since the major change to Google Places last week, several features of your Places account have vanished.
Some places accounts are missing descriptions and some are missing the store hours. The missing description was a bug and should be fixed, hopefully by the time you read this. We've already seen the store hours starting to show up again.
It seems like all of the places pages are missing the Payment Terms and Additional Details part of the Places page. The Additional Details area of your account is where we always recommended adding the brands that you carry, jewelry services, credentials, and other random keyword phrases like "diamond wedding rings."
These changes are certainly disruptive to the users who have come to expect these details. We see these changes as to detrimental so we went searching through man... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Early last week, there was an important video announcement from one of the Google+ developers about Google+ Business Profiles. Originally they were going to keep G+ Business Profiles to a limited group, similar to how they have the trial period for current users. However they changed their mind and they are just going to allow everyone in (without a trial period) as soon as they are ready.
They are rushing, but they are not starting from scratch.
As we expected, Google is making huge strides forward to integrate Google Places and Google+. As of June 22, 2011 the appearance of all Google Places listings (i.e. your store's listing on Google Maps) now matches the fancy gray, red and black design that you see in Google+ and on google.com search.
The update to Google Places is definitely a step toward the Google+ inte... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
We'd like to tell you about a little research project we started on March 13, 2011 and concluded July 1, 2011. We'll explain what we did, give you our results, and then explain why this is important for jewelry stores.
Our goal was to determine how many small businesses are actually using online reviews, social media, Twitter, Foursquare, Facebook, etc. as part of their online strategy.
Our target market was Houston, Texas, where we chose the unofficial diamond district on Richmond Ave. as our test epicenter.
We don't actually have anyone physically in Houston. This test was purely via the internet by searching in Google Places where we randomly selected independent restaurants, hardware stores, toy stores, various boutiques, and many other types of retail businesses. We tried to get a completely random sampling of... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
I really didn't expect my review of Google+ to take all five days this week. This will be my last interstitial Daily Golden Nugget (for at least a few days).
Yesterday I started a list of features I foresee being integrated into Google Plus. Google's public company status prevents them from publicly announcing what they are working. The GOOG stock is actually doing very well since the launch of Google+.
Yesterday they reported their quarterly earnings were up and they've officially reached 10 million Google Plus users. I read a report on SearchEngineLand.com explaining how many people have not accepted invitations sent to them. Those of us that have are starting to realize the more compelling nature of Google Plus over Facebook.
When using Facebook, I usually keep a browser tab open. I occasionally look at that ... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
As I poke around Google+ I see hints of future features that will eventually merge the online digital world together. So many obvious features relate to white collar jobs. However, there is nothing yet for retail businesses specifically, like useful tools that retail jewelers can use to talk to jewelry customers.
Yesterday, one of the Google+ engineers requested feedback on how the videoconferencing Hangout could be used for business. Within (literally) minutes there were 303 responses! However, not a single one related to retail businesses.
As of today, I will predict your vendors using the video Hangouts to talk to you; but I still don't see a good use for video conversation between you and your customers. If the video quality were better I could argue the idea of showing jewelry, but honestly the video quality sucks ... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Google Plus continues to dominate tech news on many websites as Google publishes new tweaks of the service every day. I've been reading and testing to figure out how and why you, as a retail jewelry store owner, should get involved in Google+.
I suppose I should tell you about the video chat feature called a Hangout. Google gave us a brand new way to video conference between people. This feature allows you to video conference up to 9 friends to communicate directly through your webcam.
In a Hangout, you can all see each other in small thumbnail videos while the person talking is presented in a larger video window. The Hangout also has a chat, and a way to watch YouTube videos together.
It's quite fascinating and I know I'll find it useful when I want to hold a conference with my team when I'm traveling, but at the... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
During the jWAG Live 1 event, I was approached by John S. Cryan IV who stated, "Matt, you seem to be a Google Lover," to which I replied, "my data tells me more than 95% of jewelry store traffic comes from Google, so why shouldn't I be?"
As of today, the statistic is down to 89.7% with Yahoo holding on at 4.2% and Bing up to 3.8%.
89.7% of traffic is a lot, and that's why the Google+ Project is going to be so valuable for jewelry stores. It's going to be very easy to attract customers from some other area of Google right into your Plus account.
It seems like the invitation feature for Google+ is still working, so just reply to this post if you'd like me to send an invite. When you get the invite, DO NOT create a business account. Business accounts are not available yet. You need to do this as yourself.
Hello, I'm interrupting this regularly scheduled Daily Gold Nugget to bring you some direct reporting from the construction site.
Normally our Daily Nuggets are written from a compilation of data we've either measured or had direct experience with. Personally, I don't like to feed into the noise of so many SEO professionals that say one thing or another about SEO and you never know who's right. Thankfully, my team specializes in jewelry SEO and all our research data is specific to that sector.
Today, and maybe for a few days this week, I'd like to talk to you directly about Google+. First, let's get you up to speed on the nomenclature since I might refer to it as "Google Plus," "G+" and even "GP."
I finally got an invite to Google+ on Friday, July 8, 2011 and dove right in. I sent out emails to all of my customers... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Many changes in Google took place over the last seven days.
Google+ was announced Google changed their user interface Google and Twitter got a divorce... but we don't know who ended up with the engagement ring and wedding band.
Since October 2009, Google and Twitter had an agreement to supply a direct real time feed from Twitter to Google. This feed was an important part of the Google SERP when breaking news was searched, or for times when someone happens to search for a hot Twitter topic.
Any time a TV show suggested to join them on Twitter for a live conversation, you could be assured that the Twitter feed would appear in the SERP when someone searched for the TV show's name while it was broadcasting.
On July 3, 2011 Google's agreement with Twitter expired. Google has turned off all real-time search r... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
We've spent the last several Daily Gold Nuggets talking about the changes Google implemented with its Panda Update, and gave you suggestions on how to avoid having yourself negatively affected.
Over the next few months, we will report on new information about the Panda Update process as we learn it. But before we conclude this current set of Panda-specific Nuggets we have one more topic to talk about today.
After careful consideration, we believe we see a correlation between a Panda recommendation and something that we've previously told you about, so let's review.
According to the Panda process, Google will lower the overall ranking of your website if you have any low quality pages. If you review this page ( http://bit.ly/lPUebd ) you will see their explanation "that low-quality c... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
We're continuing on our journey to explain the effects of Google's Panda Update and how it changes the way websites are examined and ranked.
Until Google unleashed their Panda on the web all website ranking was based on a mathematical model that measured clear quantitative items like:
* How many inbound links does a site have? * How many words are on each page of the site? * How many times are important keyword phrases used on the page? * Are your page titles written well?
As a SEO company, we will admit that it is easy to win in a mathematical numbers game if you know how to correctly count the numbers. Websites who have enough money to play the SEO numbers game rank well in Google all the time even though their websites might suck.
One of the most important numbers to play recently is counting t... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Search engine optimization is easy, but tedious. We've been saying that for a while now.
You are the best qualified person to manage the SEO process for your website, but let's face it; you're busy running your jewelry store and don't have the time to learn the ins and outs of the process.
Worse yet, the process changes often and learning the new techniques is also tedious.
It is our opinion that the Google Panda Update is really trying to snuff the SEO industry and give you the power to rank your website highly without really trying, and by just being yourself.
Any SEO company you hire should be able to write articles, blog entries, and tweak the copy on your website. However, many SEO companies outsource their copy writing to India, Philippines, and South America--all places where the American Dollar is wo... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Happy birthday to the USA! We know most of our readers are enjoying their day off so we'll try to make this one short.
We introduced Google's Panda Update on Friday and we wanted to continue talking a little about it today. It seems the idea behind their new update scheme is not to affect ranking every day but rather to apply their Panda Update after a regular period of web growth.
Every day, new websites are created from nothing. This includes websites by regular business and SEO professionals that are trying to game the system. Google has finally implemented a deciduous method of removing the website to remove unwanted websites from the SERP.
After every pass of the Panda, the Google team reviews the changes to the SERP and applies their new found heuristics back into the next version of the Panda Update. VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
We follow news and blogs from a few jewelry industry websites, groups on LinkedIn, Twitter conversations and articles from Instore Magazine and MJSA. When we see something interesting, or perhaps a developing trend, we try to pay attention to it and report back on it here.
We're hoping that you value the SEO education and real world evaluations of websites, mobile websites, and how you can use them.
In other words, we're hoping you value us as experts in our field, and that the jWAG.biz website is an excellent resource for you.
Other jewelry industry sources have yet to take on the challenge of explaining how Google ranking has changed since February 2011; instead, they stay with familiar topics of Facebook, Twitter, Google Places, and marketing ideas. Maybe it's because the changes are too new and no one wants to a... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Yesterday Google announced their Google+ (that's Google Plus) service which looks like their first large step into competing with Facebook. They also announced a major design change to all the Google services.
It seems Google did some heavy usability studies and we're going to take this opportunity to explain what they did, compare it to what we've previously said about usability, and perhaps you can learn something new.
We use the phrase "website usability studies" when referring to all the research that shows us how a person uses a website. This includes watching how they move the around the screen, what they click on, testing the same words in different colors, and changing images to see if one image is better than another.
Ultimately the usability studies tell us "what get's the click" so we can correctly design ... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
When Blue Nile opened their virtual doors, they created what has become a general standard with how online jewelry catalogs are presented.
They've since evolved their design to be testimonial-centric, but their original design was copied so much from 2001 - 2003 that only we old-timers actually recognize the degree of Blue Nile's influence on the whole industry. And now we realize there are serious SEO problems with it.
A popular convention started by Blue Nile is a section like this on every product detail page: "This Item Comes With" * Free Shipping * 30 Day Returns * Free Gift Box * Free Appraisal
Another popular convention from Blue Nile is a section that looks like this: "Need Assistance" * For assistance or customization, please call one of our knowledgeable sales people Toll Free. * Not... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Today we'd like to review some SEO basics about the product catalog of your jewelry website.
Because of our own recent experience and some announcements from Google over the past 12 months, it's time to review our previously published work.
On August 17-18, 2010, we held a live broadcast detailing many ideas for the design and structure of a jewelry product catalog. Some of those ideas will be updated in this brief Daily Gold Nugget.
1. High Word Count You need to have at least 300 words of text for each product item. Preferably we'd like to see you with 400 words. This is up from 250 words that we said last year. The total word count should include as many details about the item as you can think of. Details should include the construction of the item (prong count, width, diamond count, ctw) listed within the ... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
This has been a big year for changes with Google as they try to figure out how to change from a purely mathematical search engine into something more socially controlled.
They are reaching out into the real world trying to gather data on how we all use the internet when we're away from our computers, i.e. mobile.
On June 20, 2011 they changed the way Google Mobile search works. If you allow google.com to detect your location automatically they will show you a list of popular nearby places. They've made a specific change to how m.google.com looks so you have fewer taps on your screen to find popular places.
Their top places usually include restaurants, coffee shops, and bars, but their default options on the next screen usually include "jewelry shops."
Christmas Eve is 6 months from today and we want your website to be ready. We know you are already planning your holiday ads and looking at potential styles for your holiday inventory, and you should be planning your website right now, too.
All week we've been reviewing holiday shopping data published by Google at http://www.google.com/think/insights. We're giving you the more relevant data for retail jewelry stores with ideas of what to do with it.
Mobile phones with 4G technology are more widely available this year. Most (if not all) smartphone plans now require some type of data plan with internet browsing. Google says the mobile market each holiday season since 2008 has risen 300% due to faster cell phone speeds. Is it possible to still have 300% mobile usage growth... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
The mobile market for retail jewelry stores is still very young.
BlueNile and Tiffany already have mobile versions of their sites. We couldn't find a mobile version of the James Allen site. We're not referring to smartphone applications, only mobile websites that easily work in cell phone browsers without needing to pinch zoom.
According to http://www.google.com/think/insights mobile shopping during the holiday season has been increasing more than 300% year after year since 2008. Their data shows mobile shopping spikes for the weekend of Black Friday and then again mid to late December.
According to the research Google published in January 2011, during the 2010 holiday season they tracked 59% of smartphone users using their phones for holiday shopping.
Christmas is just about 6 months away from this week and for the last 2 days we've been explaining how people are starting to search online for holiday gifts. We have some more holiday preparation action items for you today relating to Facebook and Twitter.
As previously explained, we're grabbing some of the important information from www.google.com/think/insights and giving it to you with key takeaways. Unless otherwise noted, all the data presented here comes directly from Google's reports for retail stores.
We left off yesterday explaining that you should use phrases like Sales, Coupons and Customer Loyalty to create a few strategic landing pages that also include the primary jewelry website phrases of engagement rings stores, vintage inspired rings, jewelry store, etc.... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Christmas is just about 6 months away from this week and already people are starting to search online for holiday gifts. We're going to continue our discussion from yesterday and provide a few more ideas.
Since 2009, Google's been compiling data about holiday shopping experiences and then publishing it through www.google.com/think/insights. We're grabbing some of the important information and giving it to you with key takeaways. Unless otherwise noted, all the data presented here comes directly from Google's reports for retail stores.
Google referred to consumers as "Pavlov's dogs, trained for coupons." Like we explained yesterday, the consumer is always looking for some type of free offer or discount. You don't simply have to discount your jewelry. You could make them... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
It's that time of year again; time to start preparing your website for the Holiday Season.
Christmas is just about 6 months away from this week and already people are starting to search online for holiday gifts.
Since 2009, Google's been compiling data about holiday shopping experiences and then publishing it through www.google.com/think/insights. We're grabbing some of the important information and giving it to you with key takeaways. Unless otherwise noted, all the data presented here comes directly from Google's reports for retail stores.
From August 2009 through December 2009, Google surveyed to find out when people had started their online research. 44% of those surveyed said they started the process before August 30th that year.
While recently cleaning up an old jewelry website and the jewelry product catalog, we noticed something that dates back to our Daily Golden Nugget #183 (read it here http://bit.ly/erFrbU) and we'd like to tell you about it.
In #183 we said that you should include Alt and Title attributes for all the images on your website. Our feeling is that if you make your website user-friendly it will rank better. In this case, the Alt/Title image attributes are used by screen readers for the visually impaired.
We also mentioned in last Friday's Nugget #230 (read it here http://bit.ly/m1N2D0) that the Alt/Titles also help get your images indexed in Google's Image search.
Just to add some more proof of the importance of the Alt attribute, there is a report from... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
We've recently written a few Daily Golden Nuggets about social sharing, "Like" buttons and generally how to increase the traffic to your website through social sharing. But now we realize that some of the directions we gave you might be misunderstood, so let's clear them up.
Sharing a link to your website on Facebook, Twitter, Digg, Reddit, LinkedIn or any other social network will increase the number of visitors on your site. Not because the search engines found the shared link and use it for ranking, but simply because other random people saw and clicked on the link.
That's easy. Share a link = increase traffic from people clicking that shared link.
On the other hand, if you only want to spend time sharing links that help your search engine ranking then you have to be very specific with your sharing.
Today we're giving you a specific example of how you should use Twitter Share and Facebook Like buttons on your website newsletter pages.
We assume you send your newsletters via email. From within the newsletter, you should allow your readers to share it to their favorite social network. You might only have 300 people on your email newsletter list, but allowing sharing gives you the chance to reach thousands of new customers.
Many email newsletter companies (like Constant Contact, iContact and Aweber) allow short term archival of your newsletters on their website. Mostly, this allows user to read the newsletter through a website instead of their email program.
However, for several years we've tracked the impact of jewelry store email newsletters and how to archive those newsletters directly on your website instead ... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
We'd like to revisit social signals for your website.
A "social signal" is an internet service or feature that allows you to share your web pages to other members within your online circle of friends.
Wikipedia currently maintains a list of 198 popular social networking websites. Each of them has their own method of sharing links and information amongst friends.
Search engines are slowly tapping into the popular social networking sites and beginning to measure and include intra-member communications (i.e. sharing and liking) in organic search results.
According to Wikipedia the top social websites listed by member totals are: 1. Facebook 2. Qzone (China) 3. Habbo (teen website) 4. Twitter 5. Windows Live 6. Bebo 7. Vkonatakte (Russia) 8. Tagged 9. Orkut 10. LinkedIn
Some 37 Golden Nuggets ago we told you websites with absolutely clueless concepts of SEO might be able to rank higher than your own site. Google is trying hard to balance out the search results between random quality content and websites that try hard to be in the top 10.
Other than writing content and managing your on page and off page optimization factors, you could also try and place yourself into other areas of Google's search engine.
At the top right of Google's website you always see options for the different search types: Web, Images, Video, Maps, News and Shopping.
The Web search is naturally the most popular. Video Search includes results from various video websites. Maps and News search results require in-depth conversations on their own.
That leaves Google Image search, and this search should be e... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Many jewelers criticize us that almost everything we teach refers to Google in one way or another. This is simply because in our tracking we see the highest percentage of organic traffic coming from Google.com.
Today we took a random sampling of the sites we work on and looked at an average percentage of all the current traffic in the last 30 days. Here are the results:
Organic Traffic for May 2011 to Jewelry Websites: Google: 85.39% Yahoo!: 6.41% Bing: 5.94% Search: 0.83% AOL: 0.95% Ask: 0.48%
It's amazing that Ask is still holding on as a search engine. It's also pretty surprising to see Search.com and AOL showing up as organic sources for organic jewelry website traffic.
Obviously you see how much traffic comes from Google. More than 85% of organic traffic for jewelry websites comes fro... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
We talk a lot about creating web pages with content on a specific topic. Don't give Google too many choices to decide and keep 1 page per 1 topic.
Prior to 2011, we used to say that every page of your website should have a minimum of 250 words. But then we bumped that number to 400 words per page in February 2011 after Google unleashed major ranking changes that decimated many thin websites.
It was previously known that a thin website is one that has many pages of content but each page has fewer than 200 words in the body copy. In February 2011, Google started lowering the ranking on websites that have about 250 words on every page. That's why we jumped our recommendation up to 400 words.
It's a little challenging to write 400 words on a page while at the same time be completely original in what you write and rema... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Next time you log into Google Analytics, take a look at your bounce rate. The jewelry websites we track range between 45% - 55% overall website bounce rate.
If your own bounce rate is below 45% then you are doing a much better job than the average jeweler.
As a reminder, the "Bounce Rate" is a measure of how many people first landed on your website, decided it was ugly/disorienting/wrong color/wrong size/misrepresented/etc. and they immediately click the Back Button in their browser.
Launched in March 2011, Google now gives individual users the ability to block results from your specific website. As first, this feature is not visible on the SERP. It becomes visible when you click one of the results and then click your browser's back button.
When you return to the SERP page you will see a sudden bright yellow... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
"Sometimes it's easier to find exactly what you're looking for when someone you know already found it. Get recommendations for the things that interest you, right when you want them, in your search results."
The "Plus One" feature was in beta testing for a while, and we've been peeking under the hood of that beta for several months to get an idea on how it will work.
On June 1, 2011 as many of you were probably packing for the JCK show, Google officially moved the +1 service from beta to general use and once again changed the way we have to deal with search engine optimization.
From now on, you should see a [+1] button on the Google SERP next to the title of each result. Specifically, y... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Today's Daily Golden Nugget comes from the secret vault of traffic building and link magnet techniques that we typically reserve for our own website optimization and it's a technique we employ when getting paid the big bucks.
Today we are giving this secret technique to our jWAG members.
Every jewelry website needs to have content added on a regular basis. You need to keep the search engines interested in you and you also need prove to your customers that your website is a living, breathing, real representation of your jewelry store.
The best way to prove you are alive and kicking is to do the unexpected...
Read your customer's mind.
There are ongoing and ever evolving trends in world, and sometimes even the economy and politics will influence what people search for and how they find your website. But ... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Choosing a font for your website is a daunting task. Naturally you'd like to stay true to the brand you've created, but forcing your fonts to show up in all web browsers is usually a nightmare in setup and then a constant bandwidth hog for your website.
For a long time already, there have been techniques to force browsers to display your chosen fonts. You could use CSS rules to download a font if the user needed it. Many companies also provide ways to convert your computers font file into a smaller, downloadable website font file. Regardless of the method, as we said, the bandwidth requirements are large.
In order to maintain a branded image with a special font, many websites are forced to convert their headlines into static images. Although they look good, this process completely fails the very important SEO strategy o... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
In August 2010 we presented a Daily Nugget about Flash and it's usability with Internet Explorer's 64-bit web browsers that is installed as the default browser in Windows 7. Today we're providing a follow up to that Nugget with new Flash developments that affect everyone.
As a recap, Adobe Flash does not work properly in any 64-bit web browser. All popular browsers are available in 64-bit versions, but Internet Explorer is the only one that comes installed and activated by default in Windows 7. Many non-technical internet users don't understand that IE 64-bit cannot run Flash. The result is a lot of user disappointment and seemingly non-functioning websites.
The obvious solution is to switch to IE 32-bit and not use any 64-bit browsers... thus losing the blazing internet speed that we all would love to experience. VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Ten Nuggets ago, we ended our short series on YouTube with the topic of transcripts. The goal of that YouTube Nugget series was to help your videos rank in Universal Search results.
But there's another benefit to transcribing your videos...
If you're going to take the time to make a video and upload it, most likely you're not going to let it sit all alone on YouTube hoping your customers will actually find it. No, in reality you should also be embedding your video into your website.
Many retail jewelers have large video libraries on their site. They are great educational resources and when you can show off visits to Antwerp or a South African diamond mine you are proving your local experience and superiority over all the other jewelry stores.
The typical format of a video library page on your website would s... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
It's Memorial Day in the United States, which means all our subscribers there are probably watching a parade, sitting out next to their pools, on the beach, or having a back yard barbecue.
It's not supposed to be a work day, so let's keep this Daily Nugget brief.
Sitemap pages were very common back in the early days of the web because none of us really knew anything about navigation menus or buttons. If you wanted to get from one page to another on a site you simply looked at the sitemap page.
All pages of a website used to be listed on sitemap pages; of course, that was back when a large website was 20 pages. Today you can click through 20 pages of a site faster than counting to ten.
In the early 2000's, the sitemap page seemed to fall out of usefulness. But then as SEO strategies matured, we all realized... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
One of the more difficult tasks of SEO for e-commerce websites is getting your product catalog pages to rank anywhere in the SERP; getting them to rank on page 1 is even harder.
It's nearly impossible to rank a single product's detail page in the SERP unless you have a lot of detail that looks like paragraph content. For this Nugget we're going to ignore the product detail page and instead focus on the main landing pages for each product catalog category.
We're referring to the category landing page as the main page someone sees when they enter your online catalog and clicks on "wedding rings" or some other primary category. You might have subcategories for "princess cut diamond wedding rings" or "round diamond wedding rings," and each of those are considered sub-landing pages.
We've mentioned the Google SERP Preview feature a few times in this last week, and we want to talk about this a little more since it has another hidden effect on your website.
When Google introduced the preview feature in November 2010, they also provided some basic guidelines that would improve the preview's effectiveness for your website. Let's examine the important guidelines.
1. Keep your pages clearly laid out and structured, with a minimum of distractions or extraneous content.
This is great advice, especially from the world's largest search engine. So many jewelry stores say they want a "clean looking" website yet when the final site is created, they've cluttered up every page with content or images in every last pixel.
Every page of your site should be dedicated to a single topic, and everything on th... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Yesterday, we explained the value of footer links on your website. Today we'd like to talk briefly about header navigation links and menus.
In a Google training video last year, it was explained that Google didn't penalize you for putting a small amount of hidden text on your site when that that text is part of navigation or interactive information. We wrote a Daily Nugget about that video earlier this year.
In that training video, Google didn't say how much, if at all, of that hidden information would be use for ranking, and at the time we didn't have any valid data either, but we do now.
Using Google's SERP preview feature in recent testing, we've consistently noticed that jewelry websites don't rank at all for words hidden in dropdown menus. Our tests were far from scientific, but the results were consistent acr... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
The Google SERP includes a little magnifying glass so you can see a preview of a web page before clicking on it. This feature is very helpful for consumers because they can quickly see your web page before clicking. This saves them the extra time looking for something, because they already know what to expect on your website.
This preview feature provides a pretty good insight into why Google ranks your page, and it's becoming a secret tool when reverse engineering your SEO or that of your competitor.
Many times Google will highlight words or blocks of text in that preview image that correspond to the search query.
Here's an example from a site we were just analyzing using the search phrase "wedding rings."
Our target site was ranked 5th on the SERP for that phrase. The preview images highlighted "Choose fr... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Some people still think that Google rolls out changes in large batches that cause major ranking shifts. We used to call those large batch changes the "Google Dance" because while the roll out was taking place you could see different search results in different locations and the SERP would change with every page refresh.
The days of the Google Dance are supposed to be long behind us. Instead, they roll out changes to the index every day in hopes to have fewer disruptions.
For larger websites this means you have a better chance for your new content to be read, indexed, and appear in the SERP within 1 day. Changes to your Google Places account or Merchant Center will appear in the SERP within a few hours.
After changing pages on your website, you should check the Google SERP eve... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Some more explanations from the front line of new SERP results we've seen recently.
Do a search on Google for "engagement rings" and you'll see results including many national brands, products from Google's Merchant Center, and even listings of related searches for engagement rings.
What you don't see in those results are local stores because Google "local" search wasn't triggered. Although you might notice ads from local stores if they target your town.
Google's Local SERP is triggered as soon as you include a town or city name in the search query; let's say "engagement rings Houston." This search request will return some websites and some Google Places results.
What we'd like you to look at are those Places results. They now have a lot more information on the SERP, but unfortunately the information is beco... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
The meta description of your web page is supposed to tell your potential visitor what your page is about.
Google and Bing show the meta description on the SERP and it's your job to write a 150 character description that compels people to visit your website.
Did you know that the search engines don't always show your meta description? Even if you spend 20 minutes crafting the perfect description, there is no guarantee that the search engines will even use it. Instead, they might use something more appropriate to match the person's search query.
Google is becoming extremely aggressive with rewriting the descriptions shown in the SERP. Recently, we've analyzed a few sites for the phrase "engagement rings." That's a very tough phrase to rank against if your name is not Zales, BlueNile, James Allen or Jared. The best... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Google measures fresh content by the time stamp of the physical file found on a server. If you upload your website on November 15, 2010 then many of your pages will have that November 15 time stamp.
Time stamping on files is also how Google determines original ownership of intellectual property. If your time stamp is oldest then your images and articles will be considered the original source of that particular information.
There is a growing problem with this time stamp concept when using content management systems. In a Google training video in 2010, someone asked what Google was doing about management systems that create a static page, but populate it with new information daily.
When Google checks the time stamp on a web page, it ignores the page if the time stamp is still the same as its last visit. In other wo... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
In the past, we've said that your website doesn't need to meet the standards for web programming set forth by the W3C organization. W3C creates the guidelines for the perfect world of the web, and they are pretty tough to meet.
In general, you should try your best to follow their guidelines because they result in cleanly programmed websites that work well with web browsers and search engines. The W3C guidelines also help us all to achieve faster websites, mobile websites, and an overall faster internet.
If ever a website were to "go green" by today's standards, it would be to follow the W3C standards.
However, it's easy to lose sight of those guidelines if you are programming your own website, using a content management system or even a program like Dreamweaver. You might even want to throw those guidelines out the... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
There is an important message at the bottom of today's Nugget, so make sure to take a look.
We didn't mean to drag on this explanation of YouTube over so many days, but giving simple directions about YouTube SEO seemed incomplete without going through the other hidden marketing techniques built into the system.
The next feature we need to tell you about is called "Ratings." Although this feature has been around a very long time, you could think of it as the "Like" feature from Facebook, including a cute "thumbs up" image on the Like button. Although, unlike Facebook, there is also "Dislike" button which also includes a thumbs down image.
The thumbs up and thumbs down ratings will help your video gain popularity in the general search. Now, let's be a little honest. This ratings feature probably will not bear much i... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
With your YouTube channel set up and your first video recorded on your simple camcorder, let's talk a little about SEO for individual YouTube videos.
Uploading to YouTube can be done easily through the video editing software that comes with your basic camcorder, or you can log into your YouTube account and click the "Upload" link at the top of every page.
All new YouTube accounts are limited to 15 minute long videos. If you stay within the YouTube terms of service and don't violate any copyright laws, you might have that time limit restriction eventually lifted.
It's best to have a pre-existing Google account before you create a YouTube account for yourself. The two accounts will link nicely together. While logged into your google.com account, navigate over to youtube.com and follow the directions to create an account using your existing Google account.
Be careful with your YouTube user name.
Your chosen YouTube username becomes your "Channel" name. Do your best to select a name that matches your store's name. If your store's name is "Venus Creations" then try for "venuscreations" as your channel name. If that's not available, then try "venuscreationsjewelry" or "venuscreationsjewelers." Whatever you select, you want to make sure there's a clear association to your store's name and brand.
Once your username is selected, your video channel will be available through a si... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Universal search results pages contain organic web page listings, product information, Wikipedia information, local businesses and video. Recent additions also include bookmarks from friends, tweets and other social interactions.
Let's talk about video.
Both Google and Bing will include videos from sources including YouTube, eHow and TED, DailyMotion, MSN, Tudou (TF1), Allocine, MySpace, 5min, VideoJug, MTV, and perhaps other sources. However, it's obvious that YouTube is the most popular video website right now.
Video acts as a magnet to your product or service. You can use video to illustrate your specific talents and provide customer education. It also creates a bond between you and your customers that is solidified when they meet you in person or talk to you on the telephone for the first time.
On Friday, we told you that it was safe to have more than 100 links on a single web page when using them within your primary navigation. You could also hide several links within CSS dropdown menus.
The use of advanced CSS techniques in your website design allow for features that are very nicely user interactive.
CSS, which stands for cascading style sheet, can be used to create new types of interactive features that previously would take a lot of JavaScript programming. Some of the features in CSS can even contradict what some people know about SEO.
Hiding text on a web page is an old black hat SEO technique. Some people would disguise keyword rich text in black color on a black background. You could also use white text on a white background. The effect is that the text is invisible to users but not to Google.VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Today is in important day for us, and we're not talking about the Royal Wedding either.
This is Daily Golden Nugget #200
In honor of this milestone, we're going to talk about that old limitation of the number of links on a single web page. The limitation used to be 100 links on any given page.
Once upon a time, Google stated that having more than 100 links on a single web page was a bad idea. Their limitation was created simply because they could not handle more than that.
As time passed, many of us SEO professionals analyzed other good reasons to keep to that limitation, namely to control the flow of PageRank on your website. PageRank is one of the factors that help you rank higher in Google. If you can collect a lot of PageRank for your website you could rank higher.
We recently had the opportunity to diagnose a pretty high level SEO problem on a website, and we'd like to explain it because it's a common problem that many people don't know about.
A larger jewelry product catalog site has a princess cut diamond ring categorized as a "Princess Cut Ring." Everything in that category naturally shows up on the Princess Cut Ring catalog page.
This makes total sense, however that same princess cut diamond ring is also inlaid with pave diamonds.
After looking at their Google Analytics they noticed many people were finding their princess cut/pave diamond rings after searching for "vintage rings" on Google. As a marketing strategy they added a vintage category to their catalog and copied many products from other categories into this new vintage category.
Every day, the team over at Google's headquarters makes advances in Search Engine technology. A few years ago they announced the ability to read Flash websites, and then last year they further announced the ability to read deeper inside Flash websites.
Unfortunately, Flash websites still suffer from lower ranking than normal HTML websites.
In 2010, Google admitted that they have trouble reading websites that rely on JavaScript or AJAX. The Googlebot spider is not able to provide the user input needed to display website information that to us would be very simple to interact with.
The result is that websites with heavy JavaScript and AJAX programming are penalized similar to Flash websites. A simple home page rotating image is nothing to worry about, but you should worry if all the menus on your website rely on Java... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Link building is a difficult part of search engine optimization. It's better to have a real person creating links on other websites than to buy a software program to spin links for you, but it takes a lot of time.
A well-placed link will bring a lot of valuable Google PageRank, and increase your SERP ranking.
But what if your goal is to increase visitor traffic in addition to PageRank?
A good answer to that is simply to get social. Share links on social networks like Digg, Stumble Upon, Reddit, Twitter and of course Facebook. Is your favorite not listed here? No problem, go ahead and use it anyway.
The goal to social sharing on these websites is to attract new people to your website. In this process, it's a numbers game; more shared links means more people see those links and potentially click. People who... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
As your website grows in size, the number of landing pages and sub pages beneath them will naturally grow. There are many benefits to having a website that continues to grow over time. Slow, steady growth implies regular content updates and Google has specific reasons when newer web pages will rank better than more established web pages.
There is an inherent problem with a website when it grows, and it's simply the default navigation structure.
The typical website has some kind of navigation on the top and then either the left or right. The navigation is organized with a primary landing page and sub pages. As your website grows very large there will be sub-sub pages too.
Although Google says they will spider the entire internet, they don't do a very good job at digging deeply into every website. Their point of vi... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
We spend a lot of time and resources providing educational content for our members and the customers of Sapphire Collaborative (www.sapphirecollaborative.com), but the time we put into our research is minuscule compared to the total amount of time and money all SEO professionals worldwide have spent researching and writing similar educational material.
The SEO training industry is a multimillion dollar industry. Greater than that is the amount of money SEO professionals make to do the work instead of their clients.
Would it surprise you that Google is already in the process of creating ways to rank all websites correctly regardless how good or bad the search engine optimization is?
The sum of Google's knowledge and research into human patterns and behavior is enormous, and just gets bigger every day. When you allow t... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Ask someone for their cell phone number and they immediately think you will send them spam text messages.
Ask someone for their email address and they immediately think you will waste their time and send spam emails.
The internet gets clogged with spam emails every day. We directly track and block about 75% of email traffic every day because it's all spam.
Google has a dedicated department to fight "Web Spam" and all things that cause any type of digital interaction that will annoy people. This team helps to control the built in filters that block troublesome websites.
One of the things they watch out for are websites that plainly show email addresses. Freely posting your email address as bob@jewelrystore.com will invite spam. Malicious email com... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
WordPress evolved from simple blog software into a very large open project that many programmers have contributed to. With it you can create article sites, membership sites, news sites, photo galleries, and even your own business website.
It's a great system, and it's very cheap to buy into.
However, there are major drawbacks to using WordPress. Here are a few: 1. Most WordPress websites look and function the same. 2. It's not free; you still need a hosting account. 3. It's not free; you will need to pay someone to set it up if you are non-website savvy. 4. It's not free; all the best features need to be paid for. 5. There's no guarantee that a WordPress website will be found by Google; standard SEO still applies.
Number 1 is one of our biggest gripes here at jWAG. We hear so many jewelry stores say ... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
The way you build your website directly effects how customers will respond to it. A product catalog site will not satisfy customers looking for custom design rings and a website with pages of information about designers will not satisfy customers looking to buy online.
Since Google is a machine, it doesn't exactly know what people are looking for when they search.
Someone searching for "Claude Thibaudeau Rings" might be looking for information or maybe a photo of the ring their friend was wearing; but they could also be searching for a place to buy a ring online.
Since Google doesn't actually know the intent of the searcher, it can only guesstimate results. The search results will return all answers with the best ranking for the phrase "Claude Thibaudeau Rings." Those results could be e-commerce sites, blog website... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Continuing the conversation from yesterday's Daily Golden Nugget, let's present another simple idea you should consider while building your mobile website.
You're going to have to make a choice between allowing your mobile visitors to see your PC website initially, or automatically redirecting them to the mobile version of your website.
Our opinion is to allow the users to visit whatever website they typed into their browser, and not automatically redirect. So, if they type in http://m.jewelrystore.com you should show them your mobile website, but if they type in http://www.jewelrystore.com then you should show them your normal website.
When visiting the normal website, you need to give them an easy-to-locate link that allows them to jump to the mobile... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
We've covered this topic before in our trainings, but with the recent changes to Google we need to revisit this again.
Your organic ranking is determined by the information you have on your website and how your website has been shared with the world. Search Engine Optimization now includes a mix of different social networking signals in addition to how many times people link to your website.
In 2010, Bing developed a strong association with Facebook to help measure the popularity of shared websites. The shared websites were given some new weighted value in Bing's search results.
Google was much slower to adopt social networks into their organic ranking, but in late 2010 it was announced that Twitter would help determine ranking. In early 2011, Google further introduced methods to measure Facebook sharing on Busines... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Design is one of the foremost concerns for your website. Trying to figure out the aesthetics that best please your customer is very difficult. Ultimately, it doesn't matter what you personally like, because the customer will like something completely different.
You need to program your website so it best functions for your users.
Typical design concerns are: * Width of the website. Do you want to be full screen or static width? * Colors. * What web browsers do you want it to work in? IE, Firefox and Safari are the big players. * Do you want the website to work on a mobile device? * Do you want to use a lot of images as part of the design? * Do you want Flash? Remember Flash does not work in IE 64-bit, the standard browser for Windows 7. * Do you want your website readable by users with visual impair... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
It's that time again. This Daily Golden Nugget is about Google Places and it might be the 5th time we've covered the topic now, and therefore time to play our jWAG Google Places Drinking Game... Take a drink and let's move on.
So far, in 2011 we've been covering more mundane aspects of search engine optimization. Everything we've reported on we either had firsthand experience with, or it was reported to you directly from a well established Google training video.
We've not reported on new SEO news or events simply because all SEO "breaking news" is nothing more than hearsay and speculation. Until there is real proof of something interesting, we don't want to give you recommendations or directions.
In January 2011, Google added a very large filter to their SERP results in order to fight the millions of websites of g... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
That's the battle cry of the search engines. Everything should be organically driven on the internet. Of course, us saying "organic" today contradicts what we said on Friday. For the reason behind that you need to keep reading.
If the internet was not filled with businesses trying to make money, what would it be filled with? Take out all businesses from the internet and all you're left with are bloggers, news, government and social networks.
Without businesses driving the internet there wouldn't be a need for search engine optimization. There wouldn't be a need for all this online marketing education. Instead, the internet would just be driven by interesting tidbits of the lives we lead.
Google has been making a lot of advancements in its paid search features recently. Honestly, they roll out new improvements every week, which becomes frustrating for us since we always need to replace the screen shots we have in our AdWords training courses.
In the past few months we've seen the following changes to AdWords: * Keyword Research Tool * Negative Keyword Matching for Campaigns * Keyword Opportunity Suggestions * Limitations of the number of URLs used in Ad Groups * +1 Recommendations by your friends was launched earlier this week
The latest new feature will completely change the way the SERP page 1 functions because Google will now offer paid inclusion in the organic listings to qualified advertisers. The trick is that Google won't identify a "paid inclusion" like it clearly identifies the "Ads"... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
"Black Hat SEO" refers to any search engine optimization technique that is considered misleading for users, or for the purposes of tricking the search engines into showing your website to more people.
In one of Google's training videos, they explain that they can now process all CSS, HTML, dynamic HTML, XML and JavaScript code. This not only allows them to discover functionality on your website, but also if you are trying to use one of those methods for Black Hat purposes.
Before Google started processing code like this, you could get away with several nasty little tricks to hide extra words on your website and sway the search engines toward your favor.
One such example of hiding text is to have a white background with several extra paragraphs of repeating white text at the bottom of... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
The internet gets larger every day. No one knows exactly how much larger every day. In July 2008, Google estimated the web grows by several billion pages per day. Of course that was before the Twitter and Facebook craze. Every Facebook post and every Tweet is its own page on the internet.
Daunting, isn't it?
When it comes to adding pages to the internet Google has one request above all others: "Add new value to the internet."
Of course, with billions of pages added every day how can YOU add value that someone else hasn't already done?
This is a good question, and we don't really have an iron clad answer. After all, how many different ways can you write about the 4C's of Diamonds? How many different ways can you explain what pearl restringing is?
It is important to realize that when a new potential customer finds you online, they can't immediately compare the size of your store to the jewelry store down the street. At first, they really will not care if you have a shoe box sized store or a grand palace.
A consumer is only interested in knowing that their needs will be met, that customer service will happily surprise them, and that they will have your complete attention when they visit your store or call you on the telephone.
Some people still price shop, but in truth everyone shops for service. You can create very fancy sales gimmicks to get people into your store, or you can win them over with amazing customer service and then entice them to bring in a friend.
Hopefully, a happy customer will post a raving review about your store online. The popular revie... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Google will only spider and index as much of your website as it believes it will use.
If your website is doesn't seem worth while then Google will not spend computing resources to analyze your site.
If you have 100 page you certainly want all 100 pages saved in Google. So what would make your website valuable enough?
Here are some ideas:
1. Deep Linking: Getting links to your site is great and most links will point to your home page. But it would be so much better to have inbound links to sub-pages and even sub-sub-pages within your site. Google usually follows all the links it finds, and when those links point to a variety of pages on your site it causes Google to index more.
2. Change the internal linking structure of your website: Google won't dig too far into your website from the home page. If ... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
The Internet is not not just limited to websites any more. In fact, the everyday normal website is slowly being replaced by social sites and various online services.
A few years ago, if you wanted to put all your jewelry store information online you would have to figure out how to do it all, or hire a company that could do it all.
Do you have videos on your website? Previously, you needed to manage video content on your own and have a hosting account capable of handling that huge video bandwidth. Now that process is much easier with YouTube.
Do you have testimonials on your website? Previously, you needed to ask people to write testimonials and mail them to you. Now you can ask people to write online reviews on Google Places or Yep. You can even capture tweets about your site and post them on your website.
Duplicate content is a problem that could totally ruin your website. Apparently many web programmers still don't understand the cause and effect of duplicate content and even brand new website fall pray to the disasters of duplicate content.
We recently reviewed a website that did a full redesign and installed a new content management system. Last year, this website had fantastic ranking for almost all of their target keywords. Unfortunately, with the new design and CMS, they also suffered a massive duplicate content problem.
Each of their products had at least 6 identical pages created using different URLs. It seems like Google penalizes this type of sloppy programming by completely removing the website from the search results.
After our review and findings, this jewelry store is trying to correct their duplicate iss... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
There are only 3 things you have direct control over that help entice users into clicking on your organic listing on the search results page.
1. The title of your page 2. The meta description of your page 3. The URL of your page
Most of the time, Google will not change your page title. Many times now, they will change your meta description to something that will better assist the user. On the other hand, they will never change the URL they show in green.
If your URL is long, it will appear with ellipses in order to truncate it into something useful for users.
Google explained in one of their training videos that they see more clicks on SERP pages that have shorter URLs than on long, convoluted ones. They also mentioned that users tend to click on pages that have keywords in the directory structure rather ... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Officially, Google does not want you to ask other people to link to your website. They want the linking process to be 100% natural, as in, if you write good information on your website someone will eventually link to it.
Websites with a long history eventually gather random links from the strangest of places. It's not uncommon to do a reverse link check and find links from forum websites. One recently found example was on a gaming forum where two users were arguing over jewelry. To support their point of view, one of the gamers posted links to a 4C's of diamonds page we happen to be tracking.
The better quality information on your site becomes a random link magnet for random people, not even related to jewelry. All these links eventually build your credibility.
Time and time again, we see new jewelry store websites with brand new domain names launched, then fail miserably.
Brand new websites have a really difficult time getting indexed in the search engines. If no one is linking to the new site, Google, Bing, and Yahoo simply can't find it. There needs to be at least one link from some other reputable website before the engines will find the new site.
It might take 30 days before your brand new jewelry store website shows up in the search results. Even after the first 30 days, you still might not see your entire website in the search results. It will eventually get there but it might take months.
During this initial time, you might also notice that your blog entries also have a delay at getting into the search results.
This is a simple idea: the more often you update your website, the better it will look in the search engines.
Google claims they attempt to re-read the entire internet every few days. The Google spider searches for new information all the time, and when it finds something new, it rushes to read every last page. This rush to read new content is visible in your Google Webmaster Tools when you publish several new pages on your site on the same day, or when you first launch a new product catalog.
Fresh content on Facebook and Twitter is also monitored constantly. In fact, Twitter is especially scrutinized and any tweets related to breaking news are shown in a special window on a SERP. This is part of Google's Buzz feature.
Most of the time the search engines will return the oldest websites that have demonstrated popularit... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
"Organic Traffic" is what we call those visitors that found your website through searching any engine. The person looked for a keyword phrase and your website appeared in the search results. These visitors are your organic visitors, and they do not cost any money when they click; well, they don't cost you any money at the time of the click, but it did cost money in the form of time and labor to get you listed on page 1 of the search results.
Considering the number of jewelry stores listed in the JBT, we know that very few of them understand the needed search engine optimization it takes to get to page 1 of the search results. Once you achieve high placement, you will continue to receive free organic visitors as long as one of your competitors doesn't use their own SEO to knock you out of the top spot.
Some time ago, we heard a rumor that you couldn't grow your website too big, too fast, otherwise it would look like a spamming website to Google. The year was 2007 and this made us wonder if it also hurt your website to launch a new product catalog with 3000+ products, or if you should slowly add them to the site.
Fast forward to today. We now know that putting a large jewelry product catalog online overnight produces interesting, reproducible results that we have witnessed several times now.
When Google first finds your new product catalog it will spend the first day or two reading and rereading all the pages inside that catalog until it's satisfied. Then, on the third day, it throttles back to only a few pages visited regularly.
It seems like it will rush to read all your newest information (in this case, product... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Meta Descriptions are one of your best selling tools to get people to click onto your web page from the SERPs. The meta descriptions should be limited to 150 characters and either be a sales message or something that truly explains what your page is about.
If you don't take the time to write your own valid descriptions, Google will do it for you. If Google finds a valuable page of information without a meta description, it will take an excerpt from the page and show it as the description instead of leaving it blank.
Now let's shift topics to the information you actually have on a page. Each page of your website should be dedicated to a single specific topic. We see all the time that a jewelry store will combine all their services to a single page, but this dilutes your chances for getting a click. Let's look at an examp... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Blogging is a great way to increase traffic to your website. A blog entry allows you to create conversational information and use words more naturally than simply trying to keyword stuff all the other pages of your website.
Let's look at a good way to use blogging to increase organic traffic to your website.
Perhaps you have a landing page for the category "Diamond Wedding Sets" and on this page you have links to 4 sub pages: * Round Diamond Sets * Princess Cut Sets * Marquise Diamond Sets * Vintage Wedding Sets
This would be a "thin" page of information because you probably only have 1 photo and 1 sentence with each of those links. You don't want to keyword stuff that page because it would be unnatural. What does that actually mean? Well, don't use the words "diamond sets" or "wedding sets" or "diamon... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Recently, we explained to you the duplicate content problem caused by having a search form on your own website. The search engine will enter information on that form and cause a serious duplicate content issue.
This Daily Golden Nugget will explain a more common duplicate content issue that plagues many websites.
Unless your web programmer or web host specifically implement prevention techniques, all of you will have the following issues. We're not going to bore you with how to fix it; we will leave that up to your own website people.
When you type in your domain name, you need to make sure no matter what the format, it always brings you to the same page.
You can't pay for links without someone blowing a whistle and getting your website banned. There is always the potential to be reported by a stranger if you are asking to pay them for a quality link from their website to yours. Google provides an online form now for such reporting. Offenders will have their websites banned from the search engines.
You might also think that posting comments on other blogs, like Instore Magazine or JCKOnline.com, might be a good link building strategy. Unfortunately both of these sites, like all quality blog sites, will include the rel="nofollow" attribute in any links to your website. The rel="nofollow" feature nullifies any potential search traffic.
The best way to create links to your site is through blogging. However, we don't simply mean you should hire a blogging company to put a l... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
The conclusion of yesterday's Daily Golden Nugget was that it's better to include links to within the body of specific landing pages instead of overloading your navigation with a long list of links. This is an especially good technique if you want to link to subsections like education pages or even individual page descriptions for your services.
When you include a hyperlink within the body of a paragraph, that link will have a natural relationship to the words around it - a contextual relationship.
Let's say you have a page dedicated to John Hardy jewelry on your website. From the body of one of your pages you might say, "We're now carrying the new line of John Hardy Bamboo Silver Hoop Earrings as well as the Bamboo Silver Slim Kick Cuff. Come in to see this fine jewelry and support the planting of bamboo seedlings." <... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Trying to figure out the best keywords for your online marketing campaign can be pretty tricky, especially if you have a brand new jewelry website.
We know that all jewelry stores want to advertise "bridal" or "engagement rings" but those phrases are so tough to conquer. You're better off permutating those phrases into "local" versions by simply including your town name.
For example: "engagement rings in springfield" or "springfield engagement rings"
As you write content on your website, as long as you add your town name right next to your money phrase, you will be able to tackle the local market.
While we're on the topic of "bridal" we 'd like to give you some valuable advice. Don't try to target the keyword phrase "bridal jewelry." This is a worthless phrase for jewelry stores because it triggers SERP mat... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Every professional SEO will have their own opinion of the single most important factor that controls the appearance of your website in search results.
The one SEO factor that most professionals will agree upon is the importance of the page title tag. In the HTML code, these are the words you type between the and the tags.
Let's explore some ideas. And we'll stress IDEAS because this information is not actually confirmed by any of the search engines and is only formulated by agreements among opinionated SEO professionals... like ourselves.
The title of your page appears on the SERPs, and it's what your potential customers look at. Right below the title is a description of the page.
Your page title should not be deceptive at all. Don't make grand claims about your products or services since g... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Photos and images can really spice up a website, well, that is they can spice up a website if they are done correctly.
Jewelry websites are especially vulnerable to poor quality product photos since jewelry photography is actually pretty tough.
We have a skewed opinion of jewelry photography, in that we believe it should be true to the item and not photo retouched. You don't want the customer opening their eagerly awaited online jewelry purchase to be met with disappointment because your photography was too good.
It's especially important to include some type of scaling comparison in your photography, like a coin or a pencil for example. Avoid using a real hand unless you actually hire a "hand model."
A professional photographer will charge anywhere from $25 to $200 per item photographed. It all depends on h... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
It used to be that Google would only read the first 100KB of a web page. This was back when they didn't have hidden datacenters all over the world tucked away in type 1AAA shipping containers packed with 1,160 servers in each.
Yes, those statistics seem to be true. Although no one outside of Google knows how many servers Google actually has, it was last estimated in 2009 to be almost 1 million servers! It's our guess that they build their server "rooms" inside shipping containers so they can move them whenever needed (think disaster, war and acts of god).
The Google server room engineers have to think in terms of "cost per search." For them, they need to calculate the number of servers and electricity and payroll and all other possible factors it takes for each one of... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Google has a lot of built in protection for its users. Every search result page is filtered to provide a variety of answers whenever possible. Their system also tries to filter out websites that you might consider worthless.
Our own analysis has shown us that Google is constantly re-crawling jewelry websites. Some days, they download dozens or hundreds of pages per site, and other days they only look at 3 or 4 pages. Most of the time, they simply peek at a page to see if anything is different, and then they move on.
Google also monitors for hacked websites. Since they are crawling your website a few times a day, it's very likely that they would know your website is hacked before you do. We're not sure how quickly they take action, but we do know that if they discover a hacked website, they will attempt to block the sit... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Okay, honestly they aren't anything big; they're not even new. Google started development on local search results way back in 2003. They called it Google Local back then, and they tried to educate owners that they should list their businesses in the system.
When did you sign up with Google Local, Google Maps, Google Business Center or Google Places? Those are all the names they've called the service since 2003. Have you even done it yet?
In this particular case, the jewelry industry is not alone. Even though most jewelers are slow to adopt new technology, Google discovered that only a small percentage of local businesses had registered. So in August 2010, Google loaded a database of about 50 million local businesses.
Literally overnight, every town had at least 1 new jewelry ... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Since our team started in the jewelry industry, we've seen many jewelry stores attempt to sell online and fail miserably.
The cost involved with setting up and maintaining an eCommerce website is usually far greater than a retail jeweler realizes. The marketing is completely different than what needs to be done for the physical store, and the smallest mistake can mean a huge difference between slow building success followed by sudden overnight failure.
We've always recommended that local jewelers target their business to the internet users that are only local to the store. Trying to compete on a national basis is very difficult and requires a larger online advertising budget as well as a full time staff.
However, if you do decide to set up that eCommerce site, the first thing you need to do is figure out your domai... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Duplicate content is an issue for all websites and not just a situation where one website copies the information from another website.
In fact, more duplicate content issues come from your own website because of programming glitches that were not foreseen.
Duplicate content happens when information you have on one web page is the same as the information on another page. Of course, if you have a small site with only 10 pages to begin with, you might not be thinking there is a real problem for you.
Maybe there isn't.
However, any website that has any size product catalog might fall prey to duplicate content issues through a number of common issues.
One very common issue is a search box you might have on your site. Search boxes allow your users to search your site for words or jewelry. Want to find all t... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
By far the .com domain name extension is the most popular. It was the first one way back in the early 90s and everyone fought over them.
Today (that's in 2011, for those reading this in the distant future) it seems like there are new dot extensions every few weeks. The .co extension is newly available and now you can even register a .asia extension, if you really wanted.
Many of our jewelry stores have difficulty acquiring the domain name that perfectly matches their store. But some stores find that another store with the same name already has the .com. In these cases, we always recommend selecting the .net or the .biz options.
Just the other day there was a discussion in our office about the validity of the .co domain extension. However, the point was brought up that human muscle (typing) memory would probably k... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
The anatomy of a website is extremely diverse. Some websites have pages of information, some have product catalogs, some have photo galleries. Even if you are using the same content management system as someone else, no 2 websites will ever be alike.
Websites are just like people: some tall, some short, some fat, some thin, some wear lots of color while others are dressed in plain, white clothes... figuratively speaking. Different parts of a website are used for different reasons too, just like your feet help you walk, your hands allow you to write and type, and your eyes let you read.
You probably never consciously think about it but your feet, hands, and eyes serve you differently. Would you attempt to walk or run using your hands in everyday life?
Consider for a moment that there are some common structures to... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
A. You decide to set up a website for your jewelry store. B. You hire the cheapest website designer you can find. C. You spend time educating that designer because they have no clue what a 100 point RB solitaire is, and yet you want a photo of one of those on your home page. D. You realize that you can't find the right 100 point RB photo, so now you have to learn how to take jewelry photos. E. You finally get the right photo on the home page of your website and it looks perfect to you. F. You open your website for business.
Is that scenario realistic? Well, each step will actually happens as you set up a new website, but surely there are 26 letters in the alphabet and there are at least 26 steps to setting up a brand new website.
Let's jump back to the very basics for a moment. The word "blog" is a portmanteau of the words "web" and "log." In 1997, the process of writing and publishing online was considered a weblog, but then in 1999 it was shortened to just "blog."
Blogs are extremely popular now. In fact, we might even say they have become one of the largest driving forces of the internet. Everyone with an opinion (or a passion) has the ability to get online and offer a piece of their mind.
We'd love to see all our jewelry stores add a blog to their website. Naturally, we hear opposition to this all the time because "who has the time?" Right?
For business purposes you should consider your blogging time as "necessary advertising." But you should not consider it to be a chore; after all, aren’t you passionate about jewelry?
There's a really handy feature built into YouTube now that is very valuable for search engine optimization.
YouTube is owned by Google, and like all Google properties they add little features all the time to make things better. When the ability for subtitles was added a while ago, there wasn't a big celebration, no ticket tape parade, no fireworks... but there should have been!
The YouTube subtitles feature went unnoticed by many and it's been slowly catching on.
If you have a video on YouTube, you should go back to your account and take a close look at the editing options. Look for the subtitles feature. It will open in an easy-to-use interface that allows you to select a spot on the time line of your video and enter text within the video. They also allow you to enter hyperlinks.
Some time in the summer of 2010, Google changed their policy regarding how they treat Twitter.
Twitter is a very fast-paced micro-blogging website. A quick search on Google for the number of tweets posted every day returns some amazing numbers: around 1.9 Million! That's a lot of 140 character messages and we'd guess that's 44.3 Million words posted per day.
Another quick Google search for the average number of words in a book and we find different experts saying between 70,731 and 75,000, so let's take 72,865. Using that number, we estimate approximately and equivalent to 608 books (novels) worth of information is posted to Twitter every day.
Interwoven in all those "books" are millions of links to other websites. Some of the links are pure spam, and some are really good links to worthwhile information. That's a... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
In previous Daily Gold Nuggets we've explained the need to add a lot of content to your website. Building websites with a lot of content is necessary for becoming an authority website.
However, according to Google it's not the size of the website alone that makes you an authority; it's actually the number of links you have coming to multiple pages of your website.
In practically the same breath that Google says "lots of inbound links build authority" they also say that "you have to write great content that people will want to link to."
Although it is possible to build a 1 page website and get thousands of links, it's probably not going to happen in the real world. In the real world we all have to build interesting websites that serve our customer needs and hope that people will eventually find and link to your page... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Years ago, Google used to wait a few months at a time before unleashing new search engine code into the world (wide web).
As it stands right now, they have teams of different programmers working on different segments of the search engine at all times. Some teams work on web spam filtering, some on measuring links, some on basic page formatting. Each team works almost independently of any other team.
As these teams release new features, they are automatically added to a daily routine of mini updates for website ranking. Most of the time you won't notice a big change in how your web page is ranking with the new features; in fact, you are more likely to hear about some change on a blog post than noticing it yourself.
However, there will be day when you sit down with your morning coffee and discover that your website ... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Google would like to make 1 thing absolutely clear: They do not use your Google Analytics account to help with ranking your jewelry website. However, they do use your Bounce Rate.
The Bounce Rate is a measure of the number of people that visited your website and immediately clicked the back button to leave. If 10 people visit your website and 2 of them click the back button, your Bounce Rate would be 20%.
According to several videos and reports from Google they do use the Bounce Rate of your website as a ranking signal, but they do not get it from your Analytics account. Instead, they are somehow using JavaScript to monitor when someone clicks a link from the SERP, visits your site, then immediately returns back to the SERP.
They track these bounce rates as a measure of quality. Their goal is to provide the most r... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
How closely do you look at the address of the websites you visit?
Some websites are built with sloppy content management systems that have long strings of variables like this EXAMPLE 1: www.Jewelrystore.com/page.html?id=25&code=1234&var=5
Some websites are built with more appealing website addresses like this EXAMPLE 2: www.Jewelrystore.com/12345/67890/page.html
And some websites are built with fully readable website addresses like this EXAMPLE 3: www.Jewelrystore.com/online-catalog/diamond-jewelry.html
It actually doesn't matter how your website addresses are structured. You could have a really long website address like this EXAMPLE 4: www.Jewelrystore.com/jewelry-catalog/diamo... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Every page on the web can be classified as one of four types:
* Brand - Information about your name brand product or service that is very similar to other pages on the internet also talking about your name brand product or service. * Informational - These types of pages are meant for educating the reader. * Navigational - These types of pages are either landing pages, or pages on your jewelry site that help users decide where they want to go next. The navigation could be through text links, or photographs. On jewelry websites it's a good idea to use quality jewelry photos for navigation through landing pages. * Transactional - Product catalog pages and shopping cart pages are designed to make a sale. Another type of transaction would be a newsletter sign-up or filling out a contact form. <... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Today's Gold Nugget should surprise the HTML programming enthusiasts and provide at least some curiosity to the non-initiated.
There is a lot of talk in the web programming community about correct methods of programming. Officially, if you program a website from scratch today you should be using a technique referred to as Semantic Programming. This is a fancy way to explain that your web page is split into 2 components: your words and your design.
The "words" part of your web page is organized using simple HTML programming. The "design" part of your web page is the cascading style sheet (CSS for short) which includes all your font sizes, colors, background, etc.
Splitting up the words and the design like this makes your website more flexible for future change, but it doesn't necessarily make your website faster. Y... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
As the world of mobile website matures, you should start wondering whether or not you will ever see your mobile website in the search results. If you haven't given it any thought then maybe you should, and if you haven't considered a mobile website yet then you should.
There are a lot of tricky techniques to setting up a mobile website. It's not as easy as it may seem.
For example, your web programmer can't simply set up a .mobi domain name and create a website that looks good on a cell phone. You actually need to make sure the web server sends the proper programming code to the cell phone, and that technique is actually pretty tough--most web hosting companies are clueless about it.
We could also say that setting up a mobile website is not as easy as buying a mobile website template and slapping it up at VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Meta Description is a feature inside the hidden programming of every web page. It allows 150 characters to describe your web page.
This description is read into the search engines and displayed on the Search Engine Results Page as the 2 lines of text below the website page title. Since you're probably not looking at a SERP right now, let's describe this.
The SERP shows the title of the web page as blue underlined text. Right below that, there are usually 2, sometimes 3, lines of black text, and right below the black text is a green website address. That black text is the Meta Description, and you (mostly) have control of what shows up there.
The functionality of the meta description has changed over the years, and a lot of out-dated information is still available online. In fact, when it comes to the meta descrip... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
The answer might actually surprise you and you can't really answer it unless you understand how your website functions.
You see, you don't just count the number of pages on your site, as in your About Us and Services pages. You need to take a really close look at how many dynamic pages are being created automatically.
As an example, let's talk about a typical online jewelry product catalog webpage. When you visit that type of page, you would first see a bunch of smaller photos of all the jewelry. Clicking on any image will then bring you to another page of full details for that single item.
For every product you add to your website, you also add another dynamic page to your site.
The same is true for the blog or newsletter archive on your website. Every blog entry creates ... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Google has a massive built-in dictionary and thesaurus. Without realizing it, every time you search their site they are analyzing every word you type to find the best answer for you.
Google uses synonym matching, search history, and word association to generate the search engine results page. All those calculations happen within fractions of seconds and most of the time they return reasonable results.
Let's take a look some reasonable examples Google would associate together.
A search for the word "engagement" would certainly return matches with the words "wedding", "bridal", and "promise".
If you search for the phrase "custom made jewelry" you would also have results that include "handmade jewelry."
On the other hand, if you are in Canada your search for "custom made jewelry" would return pages for "h... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
In years past, there were two different types of web programmers: the organized ones and the sloppy ones.
We're not talking about their desk, cubical, or car; no, in fact we're talking about their techniques in writing programming code.
The organized programmer would make sure all their HTML code was properly organized (we call it nested) and easy to read. Being organized always takes more time, but it saves time in the future when you need to edit code.
The sloppy programmer would slap together HTML code without any regard for organization. Many times they would also write bad or broken code that would not display properly in all web browsers. Debugging sloppy code is always a nightmare.
Luckily programs like Dreamweaver can take sloppy code and automatically organize it into something easily understood.VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Today's Daily Gold Nugget could be disputed by many SEO professionals all over the world.
The topic is the Header Tag...more specifically the Header 2 and Header 3 tags. They are commonly known as the H2 and H3 tags.
Search engines claim to use these H tags as minor signals in ranking. Google even has a few videos online that specifically mention how to use these H2 and H3 tags correctly.
The SEO experts dispute their usage because they have such a small effect on ranking. In fact, only 35% of expert surveyed by SEOmoz.org in 2009 said the H2 and H3 were worth any ranking value.
We're mentioning it because we want you to know the correct ways to use these tags yourself. Every little bit counts when trying to get the coveted #1 ranking spot, so let's get these header tags wor... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
What is the one keyword phrase that you would love to rank #1 for above all others?
If you can answer that question in less than a second, then either you've already done your homework or you're wrong.
Truthfully, no one can ever claim they know what keyword phrases are best for their website unless they've done a lot of homework. Sure, you might want to say "engagement rings," but we'll tell you to go back to the beginning and look for something different.
The phrase "engagement rings" is what we refer to as a "trophy phrase," in that it's the trophy you see and hope to win. However, it's very unlikely that "engagement rings" will be your "money phrase," which is the actual phrase that brings you the most traffic and the most sales.
The only way you can figure out the money phrases for your website is to do... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Occasionally, someone will ask you to link your website to theirs. Typically, you will get an email request from someone saying they will pay you to put a link on your website, or they simply might ask for a link in exchange for linking to you.
Usually, these types of requests are bad for your business and they should be ignored. But, if you entertain the request, you should first make sure their website is not a spam or black hat website.
Here's how you check: 1. Visit their website and review the PageRank value on the Google Toolbar. It needs to be at least a PR1. 2. Read through their website. If you don't like the look of the site or what they are saying, odds are Google does not like them either. 3. Search Google for "site:domain.com" without the quotes. You will get the "Your search did not match any docu... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Google can't read your images. It can't figure out if the image is a ring, a bracelet, a charm or a staff photo.
A photo gallery of images will not rank will in the search engine results page unless you include some really good descriptions of the images directly adjacent to the photo. But that's a lot of tedious work and you surely don't have time describe dozens or hundreds of photos on your website.
Generally speaking, a large photo gallery is never going to rank well in the search engines. But each individual image of the photo gallery has a fighting chance if you give it some word love. But again, it's a time issue.
Here's what you can do: Add a comment feature to every photo within your photo gallery. We're not talking about the Facebook comment box; rather, a real ability for people to leave comments. The... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
We expect a plethora of SEO experts to post wonderful articles today about how SEO changed over 2010 and what the future will hold for all of us. We're staying away from the predictions and simply following forward with basic SEO discussions.
Although, our discussions are not simply old SEO techniques regurgitated over and over again. We do spend a lot of time making sure what we are saying is still valid. We search through what the SEO experts are saying and we especially look for the guys that have the analytical data to prove what they're saying.
We never believe any SEO expert who makes a claim without evidence to back it up.
Once we find something interesting, we compare it to our own jewelry-specific measurements and determine if the same finding also holds true within the jewelry ind... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
The Jeweler Website Advisory Group officially opened in January 2010 and built up its reputation throughout the year by providing SEO basic techniques and website advanced marketing ideas. This week, we went back to basics and will continue more of the same next week.
As alluded to yesterday, today we are going to tell you a little about long tail keywords and how you could put them to use on your site.
As you work on your website, you might think of specific words or phrases that you believe customers will search for. Unfortunately, your customers will rarely fit into the nice pigeon hole you would like to place them in. Instead, they will arrive at your site in some unusual ways.
Maybe you want to rank for "engagement rings" but your customers will flock to your website using the phrases "gold ring engagement wed... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Here's a little tidbit of interesting information. The links throughout a single page of your website are not all created equal.
Every web page has a variety of different links. Top menus, left navigation, right navigations, breadcrumbs, ad links, and links in the copy of the page. As it turns out, Google has the ability to measure the context of the information before and after every link.
That additional context provides additional signals to Google regarding the validity and importance of the link. The more relevant the surrounding words are, the more they'll produce higher link validity.
This is a reasonable example of contextual relevance: "We have a great selection of diamond and 14kt _engagement_rings_ available." The words _engagement_rings_ represents a link to your product catalog page. It is pre... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
In previous Daily Gold Nuggets, we've mentioned methods to get links from other businesses in your town or in neighboring towns. Building links to your site is very important and there is a huge variety of ways you can do so.
The important part to link building is making sure that the link to your website is not what we call a "nofollowed" link. A few years ago, the search engines came up with this "rel=nofollow" feature in order to prevent the huge comment spam that was building up on blog posts.
Many people were intentionally commenting on blog posts and including the link back to their website as a method of link building. The result was a huge amount of link spam and improper search results pages. The nofollow feature nullified and disqualified this type of spam and all those links, which quickly returned all search... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
As 2010 comes to a close and 2011 brings hopes of a better economy, we'd like to present to you some basic SEO ideas that we've not yet covered through our Daily Gold Nuggets.
Before we get into any specifics, let's introduce you to some basic terminology and search engine ideas.
First, you need to know that there is no magic silver bullet that will make your website show up in the search engines easily. It takes a lot of hard, tedious work.
Second, if you spend just one evening researching SEO techniques on your own, you will find huge inconsistencies between what all of the search engine optimization professionals say to do. There is no way that everyone is correct, yet every one of those professionals seem to get the job done using their "proven" techniques. Google and Bing do not freely publish a real how-to d... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
We're not going to talk about anything new today. Instead, we wanted to share industry statistics and our own findings for this 2010 holiday season. Everything reported is for online sales or statistics.
These statistics were reported from comScore.com Thanksgiving Day (Nov. 25) $407M, up 28% Black Friday (Nov. 26) $648M, up 9% Cyber Monday (Nov. 29) $1,028M (that's a Billion!) 16% Green Monday (Dec. 13) $954, up 12% Free Shipping Day (Dec. 17) $942M, up 61%
The week of December 17 (Free Shipping Day) saw 52.7% of online transactions with free shipping. comScore also reported that there was a greater trend for online buyers to wait until Free Shipping Day before making the final sale. This is a clear indication that free shipping is a deal winner when selling online.VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Yesterday we gave you a very brief introduction to Twitter. And that was truly very brief considering there are hundreds of printed books, eBooks and online courses that teach you amazing twitter secrets.
Our point of view is different. We know you don't have a lot of time and we want you to get the best ideas from these Daily Gold Nuggets.
Yesterday we told you to create a Twitter account and send a tweet that said "We have a great selection of #wedding #rings that just arrived."
The words "#wedding" and "#rings" are called hashtags within Twitter. This hashtag feature allows various tracking for you, and ease of search for general users. If someone wants to find all local tweets with the word "wedding" in it they could search for "wedding," or they could search for "#wedding."
Ever wonder why your marketing strategy fails, or doesn't return any real investment? You spend thousands on a billboard just to have friends say "I saw your billboard." You spend thousands on a radio ad just to have the FedEx guy say "I heard your ad on the radio today."
Each and every time you spend money on an ad, it should return enough sales to at least cover the cost of the ad. If not, well, then you did it wrong.
Wrong demographic target, or wrong placement, or wrong words, or maybe simply no one cares about what you are trying to sell. Of course, there's always the possibility that your ad slogan has some other urban slang definition and everyone's laughing at you.
Now in the second week of online marketing attempts, we are seeing random and sloppy ads from many jewelry stores.
We might have to create a drinking game out of the number of time we mention Google Places in our Daily Gold Nuggets.
If you are keeping score this is going to be #5. Ready? Set? Drink!
According to Google's Mobile Blog, there are some nifty new features when they display local businesses through the SERP on a cell phone.
Although we've not been able to test the features on every type of phone, our initial results should be the same on all smartphones.
From your smart phone, do a Google search for "jewelry store."
On the mobile SERP you should see map. Right above the map there should be a button that says "Use my location." When you click that button you should get a pop-up notice asking permission to use your current location. Go ahead and allow that.
Do you know there's a built-in feature in the hidden programming of every web page that is designed specifically as a sales tool for you?
You've probably heard the term "Meta Description," but maybe you didn't quite know what it was. In a nutshell, it's a 150 character description that you can use as a sales message.
But where does the sales message show up? You've seen these messages every day of your internet life but probably never thought of them as a sales message.
Okay, to the point: The search engine results page (SERP for short) of each engine shows a list of web page titles and snippets from websites. Sometimes those snippets are created automatically, and sometimes the search engine shows the message from the Meta Description.
If you have 500 or more words on a single page of your site, the engine... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
What situations can you think of where being wider is better than thinner?
Can you think of any? You probably could think of a few time when wider is *not* better--like when trying to fit a refrigerator through the typical door; or when your car is too wide to fit into a thin parking space. Perhaps your flat head screwdriver is too wide for the precision screw you need to remove.
So, can you think optimistically and not pessimistically and come up with a time when wider is better?
We're being a little playful this Monday to make a simple point: Wide Websites Are Good
What we're actually saying is that a website with many pages is a "deeper" or a "larger" or a "wider" website; depending on your point of view.
In the SEO world, we don't actually call them "wide" website, but rather "authority" websites. ... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
It's been a rather unplanned Google-centric week of Nuggets. These Google developments are important, and many times they go unnoticed unless a blogger makes a big commotion out of them. There are a few more topics we will also cover next week that should be instantly valuable for this Holiday Season.
Today, we'll explain what a Rich Snippet is and how you can use it on your website.
Way back in May 2009, Google introduced Rich Snippets in its SERP as one of the initial steps towards universal search results that show content from a variety of places. The Snippet displays important information about a web page, a product or a business that is useful for anyone searching.
For all their ability to spider, save and process meta data, Google apparently decided that they were going to reach out and let the website owne... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
If you think it's difficult to keep track of how quickly technology changes on the internet, try keeping your head screwed on straight as you keep up with the associated names of the technologies as they change. If you feel our information also makes your head spin, you should take the time to read this Nugget; it's not technical and if you don't, well, then we are not getting through to you and you might as well quit jWAG.
Our Daily Golden Nugget #1 will forever be immortalized because above all other topics, we felt it was important to start our Nugget series with the topic of Google Maps.
Then, a little more than 2 months later, we revisited the topic again, but referred to it as Google Places.
You may not realize it today, by you are living in a transitional point in human history. The last major shift due to te... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Name and email addresses of domain name owners are a matter of public record. Sometimes a SEO company will collect a list of names and emails from Network Solutions, GoDaddy, Register.com or any other company and they will send out random link solicitations.
These solicitations are usually pretty simple with the subject line 'Link Exchange" or "Link Purchase."
Inside there are details about the link building. Here's an example:
Linking between websites is what makes the web, well, the web. Search engines measure the number of links you have coming to your website and rank you according to how many links you hav... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Competition is good; well, at least that's what some businessmen will say. Competition keeps companies honest because it prevents monopolies, and it also spurs innovation.
In June 2009, Microsoft re-branded its MSN search engine into the Bing search engine. This engine has some very nice features, but according to our tracking of jewelry websites, only 7.63% of search traffic comes from Bing, so we don't pay attention to it much.
Although, Facebook is inching closer to becoming a full-fledged search engine using Bing, so that minuscule 7.63 might increase. Again, we'll let you know if it does.
Bing has one really good SEO feature for reverse engineering your competition's website, and that's the IP Address lookup. You can put the IP address of any website into the Bing engine and find out all the other websites ho... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
The internet changes every day and it's difficult to completely keep up with new technology. In jWAG we prefer to test out new things first and see if they are useful before simply reporting on the news like every other technology blogger is inclined to do.
However, last week Google made an announcement that is well worth reporting on, and one that certainly contradicts what we, and many other SEO professionals, have been saying for some time now.
So here it is: About 2 years ago Google announced that they would collaborate with Adobe to develop a way to read text from a Flash website, more specifically a SWF file. Then in June of 2009, Google announced that they had made strides with reading and understanding external files that are loaded into Flash. The more complex Flash files are built in layers, and sometimes the te... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
This is a continuation of a 4-part series providing specific instructions and examples of how to write effective copy for your website and emails.
Each day we're providing you 3 tips.
4. Offer more than one freebie with purchase.
It's so easy to throw in a bottle of jewelry cleaner. That's why you have them stacked behind the counter in a cute pyramid. But let's step up your sales game and make the customer feel really special. What if you had 2 pyramids of stacked jewelry cleaner? One small bottle and one large bottle. You could advertise a free small bottle of jewelry cleaner with all purchases, but then as a closing tactic you could offer the larger instead. However, a better way to insure repeat purchase is to surprise them with the larger bottle saying something like, "We're giving a free small bottle ... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
In yesterday's Daily Gold Nugget, you discovered 4 actionable ideas to use on your home page and in your holiday emails. Starting today, and continuing for the next 4 days, we'll give you specific instructions to write your copy.
Here we go.
1. You Need An Attention-Grabbing Headline.
It needs to be much larger than the rest of the body copy on your page. You should apply some specific styles. You want a Sans-Serif font, bigger, and enough white space above and below the font so it stands out.
People will skip a headline if it's too crowded by the words and images around it. All fonts have a built-in padding to create minimal white space, but that's never good enough for a headline. You will need a proportional amount of extra spacing depending on the font size.
Every new web search starts with a question. Someone wants to know something and they type in a few choice keywords into Google and *poof* there's an answer.
It is very easy to search, but not so easy to find the exact answer to what is being asked. Microsoft is trying to capitalize on this idea by promoting their search engine as a "decision engine" that helps you find answers faster.
Google, on the other hand, has exploded their Universal Search results to include content from all forms of media. They also track what people clicked on in the past when searching similar keywords. They use the previous search history to help guesstimate answers for new searches.
All that said, sometimes someone does not know their next question until they are in the middle of reading about something else.
Last week we mentioned keyword research again, and currently during our Holiday 2010 Run-Up (http://www.jwag.biz/runup) we are posting a full list of the standard keywords you should be using. It took 2 years of research data for us to easily make up that list.
If you don't have our handy dandy list, you'd have to wait a few months to watch organic traffic to your site to generate the same list.
To speed up your keyword research, and also take all the guess work out of the way, then you need to have paid online advertising through some PPC system.
With Google AdWords, you could create several dozen ads to quickly test specific keywords. You can easily identify useless keyword phrases before you spend time and money on SEO keywords that are nothing more than epic failures. <... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Search engine optimization is a labor intensive job; before you realize it, the process could suck hours of time away from you and there is no immediate gratification from the work either. But, in the long run, if your strategy is sound, there are big payoffs through increased traffic.
Through our current body of educational material, we've given you many different types of keyword research tools to use. We specifically mention Keyword Eye and Google Keywords on a regular basis.
Ever wonder how long it takes *us* to do keyword research? Here's our normal process and the amount of time it normally takes us for each step.
1. Figure out what you would like to be optimized for. Take a look at your QuickBooks sales report and determine inventory or jewelry brands to target. (25 minutes)
The search engine optimization process is at the core of all the research and study we do at jWAG. Everything comes back to the "basic" SEO techniques. The problem is that those "basic" techniques change from day to day with the whims of Google, Yahoo and Bing.
It seems like the meta description as an SEO metric is being phased out. Just 1 year ago, we were able to test changes in SERPs ranking simply by changing the meta description of a page. But in the past 6 months our testing shows this doesn't work anymore.
Usefulness of meta keywords went the way of the Dodo Bird in the late 90s. Just like the Dodo Bird's inability to fly, it seems that meta descriptions now have inability to carry any SEO influence within the search engines.
Meta keywords and Dodo Birds became extinct shortly after people started exploiti... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Every software program has bugs because it's simply impossible to find them all without thousands of people testing it.
Microsoft was criticized in 1997 for delivering Windows 98 with so many bugs it wouldn't work on most computers. It wasn't until Windows 98 Service Pack 1 (Win98 SE1) that people started to adopt the system.
Today, it's a common strategy of software developers to cut costs by just sending software out into the market without heavy testing. The "market" is, of course, the world. They then sit back and wait for customers to report bugs (or complain) and software patches are offered daily.
How many times a day do you get an update pop-up from Microsoft or Adobe or Java? Ironically, just as this sentence was typed this computer popped up the message "Java Update Available." The computer is mocking ... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Today we're revisiting and updating our very first Gold Nugget published back on July 26, 2010.
Google Places drives foot traffic right to your door, but you have to set it up in order for it to work. We covered a full 90 minute session on setting up Google Places in our August 2010 Live 2 event (DVD is available on our website).
Today we're going to expand on some of the features of Google Maps and how it can tie together nicely with Google Places.
The maps service ( http://maps.google.com ) has a lot of features. We deal mostly with the Google Places aspect, but there's also a way to view user uploaded photographs for map, videos of the area, location/tour maps created by users and a whole lot more.
We want to call your attention to the uploaded photo feature. This is p... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
The phrase "duplicate content" is mentioned a lot when it comes to website SEO. Your website ranking will be lower if you have duplicate content issues.
Duplicate content on your website is a result of sloppy programming or setup. In reality, your website will feed the search engines the same information multiple times. In response, the search engine will remove you from the SERPs until you fix the problem.
Google, Yahoo and Bing are all fighting for the best "user experience." That experience includes not including badly functioning websites. It would be frustrating for the all of us if we had to deal with that every day.
On the other hand, something that we all seem to be dealing with every day is duplicate status updates on Facebook.
Just because you have the ability to cross-post between social websi... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
This is the last in our series on holiday planning.
Each of the past 9 Daily Gold Nuggets gave you tips and strategies for marketing through November and December this year.
Each day we told you to write some new content and add new pages to your website. Photographs were equally important to include in each new page we suggested adding.
We also gave you ideas for changing your home page throughout the holiday season including who to target and when to target them.
It all sounds like a lot of work to do during your busiest time of the year. However, there's a trick to making it work smoothly.
Ready for the trick? Here it is...
Use your content management system to set up all the pages now. And we really do me ALL the pages, including the variations of your home page.
Quick! Name items you sell from your jewelry store more during the holiday season than any other month of the year.
Your sales might reflect differently than our findings, but here's what we know for sure.
According to statistical data provided by Google since 2004, we have seen higher online interest in lockets, crosses and jewelry boxes every holiday season for 6 years in a row.
Did you know that there's a psychological dollar value barrier that consumers are not willing to spend above online? We've seen that number to be somewhere between $450 and $497. Purchases of higher value than that usually trigger the need for a consumer to physically touch the product before purchase.
Lockets, crosses and jewelry boxes are relatively low ticket items, and consumers are willing to spend money on them without botheri... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
While broadcasting live, we added products, blog entries, and newsletters to that site. Then we used our Google Webmaster Tools account to submit a sitemap to Google on August 13, 2010 and again on August 18, 2010.
"Lord" Google provides a tremendous amount of educational material through their Webmaster Tools series. But the problem for us "mere mortals" is simply that we don't have enough time to sift through to find the relevant minutia for ourselves. Even though the Jeweler Website Advisory Group is striving to provide such relevant jewelry website related minutia, we can't cover it all fast enough (yet). We love it when another source has helped with the process.
The SEO Workers organization provides a big help with regard to Google video library series. Navigate over to http://www.seoworkers.com/tools/analyzer.html and enter your website address into the "Page URL" field. Make sure to answer their question-based CAPTCHA before clicking the Submit button.
When did you last remodel your store? 1970? 1980? Does your store look old? Perhaps the showcases are doing their job but what about the wood paneling on the walls that's a dead giveaway of a 30 year old store?
Continuing with this line of thought, is the old store design turning away customers? Another question you could ask yourself is how often do you get first time customers in the store and then never see them again?
According to Lydia Ramsey of MannersThatSell.com, first impressions account for 93% of all opinions, and the basis for doing business "is judged based on non-verbal data - your appearance and your body language." It's okay if your retail store looks old if it's your intended style, but does it look old, tired and in need of refreshing? There is a difference.
Here are some quick recent measurements: * 4.2% of users searching for diamonds online are using a cell phone or iPad * 3.6% of users looking at jewelry online are using a cell phone or an iPad * 1.5% of retail jewelry store owners are using a cell phone or iPad for B2B
Here are some quick measurements from April 2010 * 3.2% of users searching for diamonds online are using a cell phone or iPad * 1.9% of users looking at jewelry online are using a cell phone or an iPad * 0.6% of retail jewelry store owners are using a cell phone or iPad for B2B
The number of users moving to the mobile space is gaining speed RAPIDLY. There are already more smart phones on the planet than regular computers.
You need a mobile website.
The iPhone seems to be the favorite for people looking for jewelry onl... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Designing websites used to be so easy. The standard was 640x480 on a 14" computer screen. Then 17" was the standard at 800x600. Then 1024x768.
Unfortunately it's anything by simple now.
Our data research tells us that there are between 42 - 48 normal screen sizes that visit jewelry related websites every month. You will usually see the 1024x768 resolution in the list near the top with about 20%, but that's far from a standard now.
In your Google Analytics you should check out your own statistics. From your Dashboard click on Visitors on the left, then under that click Browser Compatibility.
Take a look at the sub-options for Browsers to see what your visitors are using. Is Internet Explorer still #1?
Then take a look at the Operating Systems and don't be surprised if our see iPhone, Android, Bla... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
It's a very common misconception that the home page is the only place a visitor will enter your site.
Ticketmaster sued Microsoft in April 1997 because Microsoft linked directly to a Ticketmaster purchase page instead of their home page. Since then there have been 4 other large visibility cases all resulting in dismissal.
"The whole point of putting information on the Web is to make it easier for people to access it, so companies should be thrilled that other sites want to link to them." - David Sorkin, dontlink.com
Facebook users deep link all the time, they just don't realize it. Pasting a URL into the FB Publisher box (aka making a "status update") is usually done to share something interesting with friends.
Deep linking is extremely valuable for SEO, which is something we've learned over time and testin... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Most people look at the Search Engines right away, but there's a lot of other valuable information in there, and an answer to a very common question we hear a lot. That question is "Should I cancel my Yellow Pages advertising?"
Take a look at your list of Referring Sites. These are all the places that have links to you. Surprisingly, every retail jeweler website we've ever analyzed will have yellowpages.com, insiderpages.com and yp.yahoo.com all listed as referring sites.
What's even more surprising is that if you cancel your ad, or never even had one, you will still see traffic from YellowPages.com. It's usually pretty high quality with a low Bounce Rate and high Average Time on Site.
So save your monthly money and cancel that Yellow Pages ad when it's up for renewal. They won't remove your listing from their we... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
In this week's set of Gold Nuggets we are focusing on specific features within Google Analytics. Each highlighted feature will help you understand a little more about your website and your visitors.
Additionally, every day until August 29th we are broadcasting live webinars at http://www.jwag.tv The broadcast schedule is Weekdays at 12:30pm Eastern time, Saturdays at 10am and Sundays at 2pm. All broadcasts are being saved on the jwag.tv website until September 4, 2010.
Now for today's Gold Nugget...
Through Google Analytics you can see all the towns your website visitors came from. When you log into your account you will notice a green color map of the world toward the bottom right of your screen. Click on the United States. From there, click on the darkest stat... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
The advances in mobile technologies and features of Google Maps Mobile have paved the way to an iron clad reason for retail jewelry stores to have mobile ready websites. Mobile ready websites are absolutely necessary to bring customers right to your front door.
But when it comes to shopping online, people prefer to buy from stores that specialize. Obviously, as a jewelry store you carry thousands of items from different jewelry categories in your store. But why not set up a website focusing on one particular category of jewelry?
As an example, you could create a website that sells crosses or cross jewelry. Here are some setup steps for you to follow to profits. 1. Find a domain name that includes the word "cross" in it. 2. Find styles of cross pendants, necklaces, rings and earrings that are not available on a... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Since you've been working in retail jewelry industry for a while, you probably recognize the common reasons people buy jewelry and what to say to someone to make sure they buy from you.
What is your specialty? Are you able to describe the gold lockets as well as someone else in your store? Or is there someone better that can inspire that need-to-have-it-right-now feeling in your customer looking for lockets?
The point is that you should call upon the best employee at selling lockets in your store to help write the sales copy for that same set of lockets on your website.
Once your sales copy is written, you will have to test its effectiveness online. Use Google Analytics to test common things like your headlines or call to action and to determine how your visitors are interacting with your sales copy.
Advertising is the key to any successful jewelry business; well, that is to say the advertising needs to be successful in attracting customers. Only then will the willing customers come.
In the past you would publish your ad and then wait patiently for customers. With the internet we don't have to wait too long to figure out what's working and what's not. The tool to use is Google Analytics.
Analytics allows you to see how people are using your website.
Here are some things you can learn from analytics: * What they are clicking on * What colors work best * If your jewelry photography effective * Which headlines work best
Highly successful jewelry stores usually see analytics and testing as a high priority. It's a key difference between winners and losers in both online sales and increasing... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
There's a lot of hype when it comes to Google AdWords and Facebook Ads. Many leading internet marketers will say Facebook is the far superior system.
The truth is we just don't know yet. The Facebook advertising system is still young. If you sign up for ads on there today you will see a lot of features that indicate "beta" and even a few disclaimers that say things like "this data may be inaccurate."
Google has years of experience with advertising and it's their primary income, so they have to get it right. Facebook approached the advertising concept completely differently than Google, and they made it much easier.
But with ease comes sacrifice. Facebook's ad system also only allows you to target people that are related or not related to your specific fan pages.
Let's face it, our society would rather chat, email or google than have to deal with someone face to face. The telephone? Yuck! Who uses that any more?
When the random foot traffic passes your jewelry store for the first time they will peek at your window display and determine if you are worth their time, and money. They might see something of interest. The first time visitor is taking a chance on you; and they will probably have an aversion to spending until they trust you. The salesmanship g... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Because the Google Maps feature is so much more than getting printable driving directions from your computer.
Smart cell phones can download a mobile version of Google Maps which will lead customer right to your front door. Once your Google Places account is set up it is tied directly into the features of Google Maps. Then, whenever someone is in your neighborhood your jewelry store will appear as a little red pin on the map whenever someone searches for "jewelry."
Better yet, the person could be anywhere in the world planning a trip to your town, yet when they search for "jewelry" they well still see your little red pin on the map.VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
"...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
Don't want to read? This week you can also watch the video recording of this review 
Don't want to read? This week you can also watch the video recording of this review 
Don't want to read? This week you can also watch the video recording of this review 
In this edition of #ThrowbackThursday, I'm revisiting the 
In this third and final edition in my series on web server logs, I'll explain what an error_log is and the important information you can find within. My previous two Nuggets explaining your web server's access_log can be found 
In yesterday's Nugget, I explained 
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.
In a recent Daily Nugget, I presented a marketing tactic that would allow you 
In today's Daily Nugget, I'll show you how to read one of the important Google Analytics reports that will help you understand how people found you during the holiday season. 
In the past, I've expressed my point of view that Google+ seemed to be a more intellectually stimulating social network than its direct competitor, Facebook.
This is the 3rd in a series of Daily Golden Nuggets explaining the difficulties of setting up an e-commerce website. The previous Nuggets covered 
This is the Google+ Monday edition of the Daily Golden Nugget. Each Monday this year, I've been explaining different aspects of Google+ and how they can be used in the jewelry industry, and today I'm going to tell you about Google+ Hangouts.
It's the Friday website review edition of the Daily Golden Nugget. The normal goal of these Friday reviews is to look at a website to see what we can learn from it, but this week I found something a little more interesting to review than simply a website.
The internet would be a boring place without all the animated cat graphics we see on social media. 
In last week's Google+ Monday edition of the Daily Golden Nugget, I explained 
This is the Google+ Monday edition of the Daily Golden Nugget. Today I'll explain how you can set up a Google+ Business Page. You will use the procedure explained today if you DO NOT have a brick and mortar store. For those with a B&M store you should refer back to this 2-part Nugget 
This is the Monday Google+ edition of the Daily Golden Nugget. Today, I'd like to introduce the Google+ Communities, what they are, how and why to get involved, and eventually what you could do with them yourself.
It's the Google+ Monday edition of the Daily Golden Nugget! If you are new to Google+, you should check out every one of my Monday Nuggets since the beginning of 2014 for newbie guidance.
Last week I reviewed some 
In this issue of the Google+ Monday Nugget, I'll explain what you need to know about commenting on Google+ and how it relates to Facebook.
Google+ can be a lonely place if you don't have people to follow. For today's Google+ Monday I created a special brand new user account on Google+ to show you how to get started.
In this edition of my Google+ Monday Nuggets, I'm going to cover one of the basic etiquettes that evolved on that social network.
In this edition of Google+ Monday I'm going to explain the difference between sharing directly to specific people on Google+ and Facebook.
January 2014 is over and for the next few days everyone in the jewelry industry will be focused on Valentine's Day related sales. And after that, you'll have only 8.5 months to get ready for the next holiday season.
For this edition of Google+ Monday, I'm going to show you the different options for sharing information to the public and people in your circles.
When Google set out to create a new social network, they wanted to give people a new way to share their favorite things. At the time of Google+'s inception in the late 2010 time frame, Facebook was the most popular social network and they had, in my opinion, some strange policies with how the stuff you shared would be viewed by your friends.
In this week's edition of Google+ Golden Nugget Mondays, I'm going to explain how to start sharing content to Google+. Everything you share to Google+ is indexed by Google's Search pretty quickly, so even before you understand all the hows and whys of Google+, and being friends with people on Google+, you can still benefit from sharing content.
I suppose that if I'm going to dedicate every Monday of my Daily Golden Nuggets to Google+, starting today and continuing into the foreseeable future, then perhaps I should start at the beginning. I should probably not assume you know anything, and hold your hand through the process.
In yesterday's Daily Golden Nugget I explained how you could 
I've previously written about 
Facebook has been the buzzing social network for several years and it's where all the experts have said you have to be. Through some very creative thinking, Facebook has managed to turn itself into a ubiquitous social network that connects user accounts and interactions across millions of websites around the world.
Today I'd like to share a special story about Google+ Local that we can all learn from. 
In September 2013, shortly after Google announced their new Hummingbird algorithm, I decided to set up a special website test to see exactly how organic traffic and paid traffic would differ on a unique landing page.
A few weeks ago one of my customers asked me a very intriguing question that I wanted to share as a Daily Nugget.
Depending on the nature of your website, you might want visitors to stay and browse through 12 pages, or you could be happy with them looking at a single page. It all depends on your business goals, and what you hope to accomplish with your site.
The 
Do you wonder where your next customer will come from? Without any special work, Google Analytics can tell you where your visitors are coming from.
Have you ever considered what the real purpose of your website is? 
Google is serious about protecting your identity. They have very strict privacy policies in place to protect people who use their services and protect all of us from having our Personally Identifiable Information, or PII for short, getting accidentally exposed to the public.
During the summer of 2012, more than 12 months ago now, Google dropped support for Flash websites in its Android 4.1 OS. Did you know that?
In Yesterday's Nugget, I gave you 
So the internet changes very often. It's downright scary how much time it takes to keep up with the nuances of how things work between social networking, content building, and organizing your website. 
Google Analytics provide an easy to use report of all the online social activity that brings people to your website. Today I'm going to briefly explain this report.
In this edition of the Daily Golden Nugget I'm going to share a short case study about a recent experience with Google Places and Google+ Local. If you've ever edited and verified your own Google Places listing then this is a must read. If you've never edited your Google Places or Google+ Local then it's even more important that you read this.
Today is Daily Golden Nugget number 800! Daily Nugget #1 was a basic introduction to Google Maps on a smartphone and every 100 nuggets since then, jWAG has revisited Google Maps and how it works at that time.
It's happen ending even if you don't realize it, and if you realize I sure hope you are taking steps to accept it and use it for your benefit.
Over the last 2 days I've given you some ideas on how to accomplish your keyword research and write blog posts to specifically target people interested in Le Vian jewelry. The steps I explained can be applied to any jewelry designer when you want to use content marketing to attract customers. 
Earlier this week when explaining the topic of 
When reviewing the list of organic keywords that bring visitors to your website, retail jewelers often ask me why their store's name appears at the top of the list. Some jewelers wonder if it's a competitor searching their name, and others wonder why there are so many variations of their store name being searched for. This Daily Golden Nugget will explain all this to you.
In today's Daily Golden Nugget I'm going to examine the fictitious designer name "Fancy Rings" and try to reverse engineer how search engines analyze the content on a jeweler's website and what pages visitors land on when arriving on your site. This analysis will give us one type of content template for attracting new types of visitors to our website.
In today's Daily Golden Nugget I'm going to examine the fictitious designer name "Fancy Rings" and how it would appear in the Google Webmaster Tools Search Query report, and how to compare that report to the Organic keyword report within Google Analytics.
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Google and Bing are trying to be helpful for people who specifically search for your store name or your website. Specific searches for your business should show your website's home page positioned in the #1 spot in the search results, but that often will also trigger the appearance of additional links to sub pages within your site. Those additional links are called "sitelinks."
This is the second part of a 2-part nugget. Please 
Today marks another milestone for the Daily Golden Nugget series. This is Nugget #700!
Today's Daily Golden Nugget is for those retail jewelers that create custom design jewelry. If that's you, then take a moment and read and think about this one.
I've not mentioned the Google Alerts service in a long time. Nothing has changed since the last time I reported on it back in 2010, but today I'd like to provide a little refresher course on this topic.
The ranking results for your listing on Google+ Local have probably gone up and down in the past year since "Places" was converted to "+Local." During that time Google has spent a lot of time trying to improve the overall way that things relate to one another online, and it's those relations that might be hurting your +Local listing.
I have a quick case study today about a jewelry store that first built their website in 2008, did a minor programming change in 2010, and then did a major overhaul of the entire website in 2012. You will see how traffic changed and how activity on their website changed. My measurement period spans from December 2011 - February 2012 compared to December 2012 - February 2013.
Google was founded on mathematical equation of how many web pages are linking to any other web page on the internet. The value calculated by this equation is known as PageRank, named after Larry Page, one of the founders of Google.
The jewelry trade show season is picking up again. Now is the time to reexamine your plan for the rest of the year and the inventory you have in your store. Can you do a stock balance? Should you reorder the same styles? Should you add a new designer line to your store?
The topic of "Sitelinks" has come up in casual conversation a lot recently in my daily work and I realize that I've never specifically written a Daily Golden Nugget about sitelinks, including what they are and the strategy I use to create them.
Getting started with any new advertising method always carries a little bit of trepidations. Your advertising budget could be exhausted easily if you made the wrong choice. Common questions that might cross your mind might be: Will it work? Will it not work? Will I reach my target audience? Will the audience I reach spend any money?
Sometimes Google is sneaky.
Once upon a time a jeweler asked me why his website wasn't showing up in Google for the phrase "champagne diamonds." As it turned out he didn't have that phrase anywhere on his website, so Google had no reason to direct people to him.
This is the second part of a Nugget explaining how you can take tracking results from Google analytics and calculate more than just the return on investment for your retail jewelry store.
One of the most common problems for a retail store, not just retail jewelers, is being able to accurately track the point of origin of online visitors and follow them through to the point when they walk into your retail store. Although for small retailers there is a simple method... you simply ask your customers.
Over the last two days I've explained the frustrations of trying to pull together all the reporting methods from many online tools and social media platforms. I also explained how you can use the built in UTM tracking feature from Google Analytics to bypass those reporting frustrations and direct all trackable information to a single place.
The internet is supposed to be evolving into a massive social structure that allows you to share anything you want with anyone else. On an average day a person could share stories to friends on Facebook, photos to Pinterest, tweet interesting quotes through Twitter, and post their latest family videos to YouTube.
Online marketing is a struggle for almost everyone. No one is sure what will work and what will not. Different experts have conflicting ideas on how you should spend your online advertising money, yet no one seems willing to provide meaningful reports that are easy to understand.
It's the end of one year and the beginning of another, and that means it's time for predictions for next year.
Google+ is growing in popularity very slowly and many businesses have found successful and unique ways to use it.
Who would have thought that the Daily Golden Nugget series would ever get this far? Today is Nugget Number 600! I have to warn you that this one is going to be a #longread compared to my usual.
Today I'd like to talk briefly about the adverse affects of paying a company for link building. This is a topic that many SEO professionals have written about a lot this year in the wake of the Google Penguin Update from April 2012. I'd like to cover this topic again now that 6 months have passed.
Today is Election Day in the USA. If all goes according to plan, sometime this evening we will know who the President will be for the next 4 years.
Over the next 50 days, most retail businesses in the US will experience their typical holiday season boon. What's going to be the hottest sellers this year? Answering that question requires some guessing, some trend analysis, and some experience. Of course there are always standard items that you sell year after year that you probably already have on order and stocked in the store.
In this Daily Golden Nugget I'm going to give you an analysis of Pandora Jewelry and their rise, and apparent decline in popularity. This is the kind of analysis that buying groups and vendors hate, simply because this information helps your Open To Buy and hurts their sales and commissions.
Google AdWords is probably one of the most predictable methods of online marketing to increase website traffic. Google has made it very easy to set up a campaign, insert phrases to target, create generic advertisements, and launch the campaign. With a little knowledge you can pay them a lot of money and increase your website traffic by 909%. 
Do you think it's time to set up an e-commerce website for your jewelry store? Before you decide to dive into e-com you need to know the initial basics of how your customers will be paying you. There are some pitfalls that your website developer probably won't tell you until the last day before your website is ready.
With your YouTube channel set up and your first video recorded on your simple camcorder, let's talk a little about SEO for individual YouTube videos.
Let's face it, our society would rather chat, email or google than have to deal with someone face to face. The telephone? Yuck! Who uses that any more? 
