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:
Every Friday, I venture out into the unknown to find a website that needs some help; I call them flops that could use some fixing. My hope is that you, the reader, will be able to learn a thing or two from someone else's mistakes, so that's what I look for.
This week I searched Google for the phrase "jewelers in Chapel Hill NC," and got 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 I see that some of the Nuggets with the highest reader count are out of date because Facebook and Google have changed things, and a few others are very similar so I'll have to do some consolidating.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
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
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
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.
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
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.
One of my biggest pet peeves on the internet is how most people name their files and images.
Google reads everything online, and everything is used to help build an index of words with which to match search queries.
Every word used in the content on your website counts. Most of the time, everyone simply thinks the visible written words are all that counts, but there's more to it than that.
Google also read the hidden text on every web page that you add as VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
We have to cover a double whammy today. Something so simple, yet so wrong, and you are probably doing it in every HTML marketing email you send and on every page of your website.
It's your logo.
You probably already know that you should always put your jewelry store's logo on your site, and at the top of all your marketing/newsletter emails. That makes complete sense, and you're probably saying "of course!"
Both your website programmer and your email marketing person probably spend a lot of time maintaining your website. If they have good computer skills they will keep their computer files organized and easily understandable. They even probably keep all your websites images stored in a single directory too.
It's these organization skills that will work against your online SEO effort!
Many of the recommendations we make deal with adding new pages to your website on a regular basis and bulking up your word count when you have less than 400 on a page.
But there's an increasing shift in the importance of words vs. video and images. Last week we told you about the change in how Google is measuring YouTube video ranking; today we're explaining the hinted changes in how Google is measuring fresh images when they appear on the web.
Before we explain Google's new image ranking, we need to give you a little bit of background information about websites and files. Every jewelry photo, html file, background graphic, and PDF saved on your website has an associated date and time stamp; just like on your own personal computer.
Websites are hosted on web servers, which are (to put it simply) nothing more than ov... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
What's the first thing you see at the top of every jewelry store web page, or perhaps at the top of almost all web pages? Usually the store logo is up there, and usually the logo is also a link back to the home page of the website.
Google's image search relies on some type of indicator to determine what every image or photo is about. For your store logo you should actually name the image the same as your store.
As an example, "John's Jewelry Store" top logo should have the image name johns-jewelry-store-logo.jpg. That image name is descriptive enough for Google to understand who to relate it to and how to relate it to them.
Many jewelers will also have very large images on their home page of products, ads, or their storefront. Each one of these images should also be fully named. The storefront photo should have ... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Here's an easy way to improve the SEO of all the jewelry photos on your website.
Managing website photographs can be a daunting task. The initial photography is usually tricky. Slower computers cause a lot of frustration when you try to save them on your hard drive then view them. Uploading photos to your website also seems to take forever. This is what we all go through, and at the end of the day we just want to walk away from the computer.
We'd like to make a suggestion that will improve the SEO of your images by a lot, but it will also add to the amount of time you spend working on your images.
Typically the digital photos from your camera are names PIC000123.JPG or IMG_123.JPG or something similar. To increase the SEO value of your images you should rename each one using a few words like the following example... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
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
"...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
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