After many years of talking and teaching about it, I'm finally starting to see retail jewelers embracing the reality of catalog and ecommerce websites. The reality I'm referring to is the tedious process of photographing your inventory, maintaining a website, and handling all aspects of order fulfillment.
Within the jewelry industry, there are several ways to mimic an ecommerce website without actually setting it up or managing it yourself. Many large man... 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.
Every time internet technology changes, there is a chance that consumer expectations will change along with it. I often say that expectations change every time someone upgrades their smartphone. Unlike a desktop computer that we hold on to for 4 or 5 years, we each have the option to upgrade our smartphones at least every 24 months. The recent smartphone upgrade I did gave me faster processing speed, which means my apps, camera, and video editing run faster, but my internet speed is still controlled by my carrier. ... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
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
Retail is being redefined every day. Everyone still looks at their bottom line sales, but it doesn't matter anymore if the sales are from foot traffic through the front door or via shipping boxes out the back. While most retail businesses are still struggling to figure out how to bring foot traffic back in the front door, I submit that it's probably easier to learn what it takes to build your ecommerce business and increase the flow of shipped product instead.
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:
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
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
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
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
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:
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:
In this edition of the #FridayFlopFix review, I'm venturing over to Pasadena, CA in search of a jewelry store. These are the results I saw when using Google Chrome while in incognito mode. I searched for "jewelry stores pasadena ca."
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
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:
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
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:
Over the last 6 months I've been writing a lot about the importance of associating all of your marketing channels together. Your website is the cornerstone of your marketing because that's where you can fully control the user experience, but social networks, offline ads, and online ads should now tie together to create a road of intriguing discovery for your customers.
While I've been following the ins and outs of exactly how to build that path of discovery, and explained it to you, I've not been following that path myself. Since July 27, 2010 I'v... 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
A reader recently wrote in and asked if they should archive their sales notices on their website, or just delete them. There's no easy answer to this question because it all depends on how you made the announcement. Let's explore some of the reasons when and why to archive those notices.
Types of Notices
The question at hand is very general and does not specify if they wanted to archive a web page, a social media post, an email newsletter, or a sales email so I'll cover all three fo... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
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.
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
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
Welcome to a very special #FridayFlopFix website evaluation. I call these weekly posts the "Flop Fix" because I specifically look for website problems, i.e. flops, for which I can offer improvement ideas, i.e. fixes, that everyone can learn from.
Well, this week is a doozy. I have been TRYING to publish this review every week since I ORIGINALLY wrote it back on December 16, 2015! Today is March 3, 2016; that's 11 weeks ago. There's a story behind this that should make you all cringe. Forewarning, I'm about to reveal some... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Last month, I spent a lot of time analyzing the keyword data I collected during the 2015 holiday season. The information that surfaced was just the tip of the iceberg that I had, but it would take months to go through and write about it all, so I limited my analysis to the list this list:
The navigation of your website can help or hurt how easily people and search engines discover all your content. For this week's #ThrowbackThursday, I'm jumping back to the good topic of deep website linking from January 2011. With websites growing larger and larger every day, the concept explained in that old Nugget is more valid today than it was back then.
Bloggers have an unyielding passion to write and share their expertise with the world. Unlike a freelance writer for hire that is paid to create an editorial, most passionate bloggers write because they care greatly about the topic, and many do it for free. Those of us who write for free are often disappointed by posts that don't get the attention we wish they did; after all our blog posts are our children and we want our children to grow up and be successful and not unacknowledged misfits.
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
In this #ThrowbackThursday nugget edition, I'm jumping back to a simple one from October 2010 about finding blogging topics.
Blogging has become the primary way of generating content for your website that search engines then use to better understand what your website is all about so they can correctly match you with the people searching for... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Welcome to the special #FridayFlopFix edition of the Daily Golden Nugget. This week, I'm on the hunt for a jewelry business in Bowling Green, KY that has a bad website. That's right, I'm looking for a flop that needs fixing. A quick search in Google for "jewelers Bowling Green, KY" lead me to a prime candidate for today: Goldsmith Jewelry Repair & Design with their website http://www.goldsmithjrd.com/
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
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.
What I'm presenting today is a continuation of the 2015 Holiday Season keyword data I presented yesterday. Today, I'm reviewing my findings about search queries that contained the phrase "engagement rings."
What I have here today is similar, yet very different to the "engagement ring" information I presented yesterday. Notice the difference in the query phrase between today's plural version an... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
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:
For this edition of #ThrowbackThursday, I'm only jumping back about a year to a topic that has come up several times over the last 12 months: Website Over-Optimization.
In January 2015 I wrote a piece about getting ranked as number 1 in Google. In it, I bashed all those companies that send random solicitations claiming they can jump your website ranking to first place in Google. Coincidentally, this morning... 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
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:
For this week's #ThrowbackThursday, I'm jumping back to April 2012 to the topic of jewelry designer line microsites. Specifically, I need to update my information about <iframes> and how their usage has changed over the 3.5 years since I wrote that original Nugget.
What is an <iframes>?
Iframes are standard HTML tags which allow you to take a website and make them appear within one ... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
In yesterday's Daily Golden Nugget, I introduced 4 SEO issues that harm product catalogs that are usually correctable with a little bit of work. There's another, more technical SEO issue that often runs wild on many product catalog and e-commerce sites that must now be addressed.
Although all evidence says that e-commerce and online product catalogs are the future of retail business on the web, many jewelers have been slow to deploy those types of websites. In preparation for this current holiday season, I was working on the search engine optimization (SEO) settings for several sites that either launched e-commerce sites or large product catalogs. I'll explain a few of those settings in this Daily Golden Nugget.
I've dissected a lot of websites that were not performing well, or produced completely unexpected results. One problem that seems to be appearing more and more is the inconsistent way that social networks are reading a web page and pulling information that you want to share. You see, you try sharing a link on Facebook, Google+, Twitter, and LinkedIn, and they will quickly spider the URL you are sharing and make suggestions for the images,... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Do you have a specific question about your website or want more details about something I've previously written about? Don't be afraid to write in and ask; you might just see your question in an upcoming Daily Golden Nugget.
Today is Thanksgiving Day in the U.S., the only national holiday that transcends all races and religions. The holiday is typically celebrated by gathering together with friends and family and enjoying an elaborate meal. The next few weeks will see huge spikes in retail store sales, and today is probably the last day off most retail store owners in the U.S. will have until Christmas Day.
I'm mentioning this because a recent review of my own Google Analytics revealed that 47% of... 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:
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.
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.
Last month, while presenting my e-commerce seminar at the RJO conference, I was asked my opinion of the do it yourself website Weebly, and if it was good for search engine optimization (SEO). Weebly is a simple website system that you can learn really fast and build a simple website in an evening. It's a solution for those on a very tight budget, but it's easy to quickly grow out of it when it comes time for a higher level of tracking needed to help grow your business. VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
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
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
'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
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
I was recently asked if I could help evaluate an SEO agency based on their email solicitation. SEO, or search engine optimization, changes so quickly it's difficult to know if an agency will be providing the most up to date services.
Here's the email I was asked to evaluate:
Reminder-SEO starts from just @99 USD per month Hi, First of all thank you for taking the time out of your busy day to read and consider this, We are of... 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:
Today's Throwback Thursday is going back to January 2011 to the Nugget about website speed.
In that old Nugget, I explained that a website's speed could be adversely affected by the software that runs it, i.e. the content management system, or CMS for short.
This is still very true today, and it's probably the main thing I look at when evaluating a website. A sloppy CMS or website ... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
In today's 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:
Let's talk about depreciated HTML tags. This is my Throwback Thursday topic from the last time I told you about a few depreciated HTML tags to avoid.
The HTML language is currently in its 5th incarnation, as in HTML5. Prior to Cascading Style Sheets, aka CSS, we had to use formatting features built into the HTML code, like <font> and <big> and <center>. Now we use CSS to format how a web page looks. <... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
In today's Daily Golden Nugget, I'll show you how to look at your Google Analytics Exit Page report and explain what it is, and steps you can take to analyze it.
This is part of my Practical SEO Guide series with the goal of giving you quick, actionable information to make the search engine optimization of your website a little better.
Get started by logging into your Google Analytics account and navigate your way over to Behavior -> Site Content -> Exit Pages as shown in this animated screen grab:
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:
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.
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.
While it's customary for people to take long holiday weekends off from work, your website is never closed. The first impression that your website makes is as important as that first greeting when a customer walks into your store.
This is my Friday Website Review edition of the Daily Golden Nugget. I write these reviews to demonstrate live examples of both good and bad retail jewelry websites. I never know where these reviews will end up and I try to be as impartial as possible when writing them.
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 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":
In honor of the big jewelry shows in Las Vegas that came to a close on Monday this week, I'm searching around Las Vegas again for this week's website review edition of the Daily Golden Nugget.
The "speed of your website" is the amount of time it takes for your site to download to the device you are using. A lot of factors play into the your page speed that have nothing to do with your site, things like:
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
This is another edition of the Friday Website review edition of the Daily Golden Nugget. Each week, I use Google Chrome in incognito mode to search out a random retail jeweler from around the U.S., and then I review their website.
I never know what I'm going to find when I start these reviews. My hope is that I can illustrate one of my previous Daily Nuggets with a live example.
My search began this week with the phrase "jewelers in Evergreen, CO" and saw this as my search results:
In this edition of #ThrowbackThursday, I'm jumping back, almost to the beginning. My 8th Nugget was a really good idea for writing good online jewelry sales copy that I want to revisit today.
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.
Blogging has passed through various evolutions in the years since its original inception in 1994. The first blogs were created to help people keep their friends up to date with what they were doing. Services like Open Diary, Slashdot, and LiveJournal we... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
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 #ThrowbackThursday, I'm jumping back to the topic of "thin content" that I first explained back in September 2011.
Thin Content Explained
In simple terms, thin content refers to a web page that has very few words on it. Google likes to refer to this content as pages "with little or... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
This is the Friday jewelry website review where I find a random retail jeweler and review their website for design, usability, and SEO. In each one of these reviews, my goal is to show how the information from my other Daily Golden Nuggets can be directly applied to a website.
This week, I'm using the Google Chrome browser in incognito mode to search for "jewelers st joseph mo." Here's a snapshot of the results:
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 #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
I received an interesting question the other day from Suzie, a jewelry designer. Well, her name wasn't actually Suzie, but let's just say that it was so it makes this story easier to tell.
For several years, Suzie had an Etsy account where she sold a line of baby toe ring jewelry. This was her fist line of jewelry before she started making gemstone jewelry necklaces. Realizing how different these two lines of jewelry are, instead of using Etsy to sell the necklaces, she opened an e-com... 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:
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
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
In this edition of #ThrowbackThursday, I'm jumping back to May 2, 2011 the Daily Golden Nugget on hidden text on a web page that is not considered Black Hat SEO.
I haven't mentioned Black Hat SEO in a while, so let me briefly explain what that is. Google ranking algorithm was less complicated prior to 2012, and many people figured out simple ways to exploit that simplicit... VIEW 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.
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:
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
The internet has become a very visual place, especially on social media. While blog content may thrive with well written information, as of today, on Facebook and Google+ you won't get noticed without some type of visual. This is especially a complete change for Facebook because in 2013, they lowered the visibility of status updates with images because they were combating meme over usage.
With all my writing aboutcontent recently, it's easy to forget that the reason for all of that is to improve your search engine optimization (SEO) and thereby increase the number of people visiting your website.
Throwback Thursday is the name of a weekly internet trend where participants repost photos from the past. This is especially popular on Instagram where users tag their photos with the #TBT hashtag.
Truthfully, you can "throwback" anything that happened in the past. It could be a social media post, a photo, a blog post, or yes, even a Daily Golden Nugget!
Honestly, this is my first participation in a TBT, but what the heck; let's do it with a slightly different spin... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
What is the real value of the content you produce? Should you be creating your own content or hiring someone to do it for you? What about content curation?
This is part 2 of my in-depth answers to those questions. I've identified 6 levels of content and list them here in order of their most valuable to least valuable:
1. Business Owner Creates Content 2. Business Owner Curates Content 3. Business Owner Socially Engages 4. Hire Content Creator or... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
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
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
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
'Twas the night before Christmas, and time to close doors after a long four weeks, the time still soars. Did you break record sales with engagement rings sold? Hope she says yes tomorrow; the future's untold!
While it's usually children dreaming the morning's delight; the guys that you helped are filled with horrible fright. You're the town's best jeweler; the men come to you; your jewelry's the best at getting an "I do."
The times, they have changed, and there's much online chatter, you've to to keep up, or else you won't matter. You made mistakes then, when your website used Flash, but you took steps; improvement when sales came to a crash.
Your jewelry designs always win Best in Show, but your website's sad ranking had fallen too slow. With new learning, you hoped an answer'd appear... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
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
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
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.
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
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:
We know from yesterday's Daily Golden Nugget that people who browse jewelry websites prefer the iPhone over the Android. In this edition of the Daily Golden Nugget, I'm investigating exactly what mobile visitors are searching for.
During the month of September 2014, I collected and analyzed all the landing pages for mobile visitors across m... 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":
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
In this edition of the Daily Golden Nugget, I'm outlining a potential marketing plan for the upcoming holiday season. My example will focus on specific items which we will build content around and share socially.
What I've written out in this guide will be good for anyone looking for a different approach to marketing for this upcoming holiday season. There's a lot of detail for the setup, implementation, and then the post-analysis of the entire campaign. You'll do the setup... 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.
The other day, I was helping a business colleague of mine review a website design his customer gave him. For storytelling simplicity, I'll refer to my colleague as Joe and his customer as Sue. Although Joe doesn't work in the jewelry industry, the early steps in designing a website are very similar across all industries, and I bet all website programming companies have the same experience working with their customers.
Sue wants to open a brand new e-commerce store by December 1st. She already owns an old e-commerce store w... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
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
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 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
Technical SEO is certainly something that computer scientists and programmers do best. Even though the technical SEO procedures are important, I don't often not... 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.
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
I decided to give myself a little challenge today with this edition of the Daily Golden Nugget, Friday Website Review. I'm back in Bordeaux, France today, and in honor of that I decided to search for any town or location within the United States that was named after Bordeaux, France. I only found one, and apparently it's a small settlement in the US Virgin Islands, so I decided to check it out.
Sadly, it really is just a settlement without a large town, and certainly no jewelers. Accordin... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Your business changes every day. Sometimes it's a small change like getting new inventory into your store and sometimes it's a big change like moving to a larger location.
The jewelry industry is highly competitive, and many times it's difficult to rank above your competitors if you don't have enough information on your website. You can't rely on a few educational pages, like the 4C's, and then small product catalog with images and simple descriptions. That's simply not enough in... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
How deep is your website? The depth of a website is measured by the number of times you would have to click on a navigation link in order to reach the most nested areas of your website.
I've read website design recommendations stating that every page of your website should be reachable within 3 clicks. Anything more than that supposedly won't be of interest by website users.
But when it comes to a product catalog, it's very easy to dive down into 4 levels very quickly. <... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Ever have one of those days where you get mentally slapped with something so obvious that you can't believe you never realized it before?
The other day I was studying one of those infamous SEO reports to diagnose a problem on a website. The report stated that a particular website has 600 products in the online catalog when I knew for a fact that there were only 250. So here I am, staring at this report trying to comprehend why the SEO report was s... 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:
The number of mobile users is still rising, but the rate at which jewelers are intentionally deploying mobile websites is slowing. In the month of June 2014, I tracked 43.12% of visitors to jewelry websites using either a smartphone or a tablet. This is up from the 39.88% I reported in April 2014.
This mobile usage level during the recent slow summer months is now higher than ... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
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: Keywords
Once upon a time, if you wanted your website to rank for a particular keyword, you would simply include that word on your web pages a specific numbers of times in order to get top ranking in the search results.
For many years, it was a competition of keyword density between different websites that wanted to rank higher.
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
Over the course of the next week or two, I'm going to supply you with a bunch of shorter Daily Golden Nuggets specifically explaining smaller SEO topics. Instead of calling them "nuggets," I should call them "Grains of SEO Gold."
Today's SEO Topic: Page Titles and Header Tags
It used to be that the website's Page Title was easily readable at the top of your web browser window, but now that most web browsers use tabs, it's very difficult to see what the page title says.
I recently had a conversation with a jeweler who was worried about the declining foot traffic in their store. Some months ago they hired an SEO agency to work on their website and at the same time the foot traffic to their store started to increase. Then the foot traffic to their retail store started to decline shortly after they stopped paying for the SEO agency.
The assumption was that the SEO agency was the only factor in increasing their foot traffic. It would be every SEO profes... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
A lot has changed in the world of search engine optimization (SEO) and search engine marketing (SEM) since I first started my daily blogging more than 1000 posts ago.
The most significant SEO changes over the last 4 years are related to Google Panda and Google Penguin, but there are dozens of other notable changes, and hundreds of subtle changes throughout the entire internet.
Although I'd love to write a "then and now" post about all the intern... 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
In my Nugget yesterday, I explained how you need to consider the longterm value of your SEO and SEM efforts to the overall process of building your brand.
That Nugget directly relates to today's topic of Keywords, specifically keyword density.
In yesterday's Nugget I explained how Google will penalize you if you try to game their search results. They are pretty strict about that now since working so hard to improve the w... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Everything you add to the Internet will either help or hurt you tomorrow. Every piece of content has a long shelf life.
Your marketing strategy today could be a onetime use, or it could add to the cumulative benefit you create to build your brand awareness.
Typical search engine marketing includes paid ads or paid strategies that only have a value while you're paying for them. That value goes away as soon as you stop paying for it.
This can clearly be seen in any large marketing company service, like Y... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
For the last few years, I've been telling everyday average business owners that the process of search engine optimization is not hard; it's just time consuming. There are still a few SEO consulting companies out there that will tell you that the process is technical, and it requires continual maintenance. I'd like to dispel some of this thinking.
Indeed there are technical aspects to SEO, but those are usually related to the computer hardware your website lives on, and the initia... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
As a continuation of yesterday's Daily Golden Nugget of 7 basic SEO tips, today I'd like to share with you my recent thoughts and experiences of the more advanced search engine optimization tactics.
Instead of diving into highly technical SEO tricks that only a programmer would understand, I've written these tips out based on an interesting array of circumstances. Some... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
In this edition of the Daily Golden Nugget, I'd like to share with you my recent thoughts and experiences of the basic search engine optimization factors based on what I see in my daily tracking of many jewelry websites.
On a weekly basis, I mention a few of these during my Friday website reviews. This is by no means an exhaustive list of SEO techniques; just the 7 most important ones that I've noticed in the past several months.
If you're an entrepreneur, you know that the best way to grow your business is to systematize what you do so anyone can follow your directions. This systematization then allows you to move on to the next item on your business master plan so you can continue to grow.
If you own a retail jewelry store but haven't figured out how to systematize your personal daily routine then you are not an entrepreneur, you are simply a small business owner with too many daily duties.
My goal here is to provide some simple understanding that it takes a lot of manpower to fit all the pieces of a Search Engine Marketing plan together. It's a continual process that you need to budget for.
In yesterday's Nugget, I presented the two lists shown below and explained all the details of the 5 items shown under Basic SEO Stuff. Please refer back to yesterday for those full details. Today I'm explaining the items in the second list.
After yesterday's reevaluation of SEO vs. SEM I want to provide some simple guidance so jewelers understand how a Search Engine Marketing plan works.
The first part of the SEM Plan is to make sure your website is set up properly for the basic optimization stuff.
Basic SEO Stuff:
1. Page Title rewriting 2. Meta Description rewriting 3. URL cleanup 4. Content bulking 5. Topic separation
The more difficult part of the SEM Plan is to properly represent everything you do in the store, and all your offline advertising, on your website.
Complicated SEM Stuff:
A. Writing full details about your services B. Keep your online identity updated with daily changes in your store C. Writing comp... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
I've never been a fan of long term search engine optimization services where a small business is expected to pay large sums of money for some type of online work that's suppose to increase your website ranking. So much of the SEO industry was built on scams and false claims that it's hard for anyone to really trust someone who says they can do the job. SEO scam artists used to give you long lists of technical jargon to explain what they were going to do for you and most people blindly trusted them because they were "the experts."
My personal philosophy has always been one where the bulk of the basic SEO work is handled immediately and then the website owner is trained how to maintain it on their own without having to perpe... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
I can't remember you how many times I've had people ask me how I come up with so many topics for my Daily Golden Nuggets. I certainly wasn't born with the gift of gab, but somehow I figured out how to transform from the quiet kid in the corner to someone who won't shut up. Every time I think I'm going to run out of topics, I say to myself "well it's time to dig back into all the tracking data to pull out some easy numbers."
What I never seem to remember is that digging into that data takes forever!
There's a cycle of life, cycle of economics, various cycles of friendships, and cycles of business throughout every year. You are probably already aware of those 4 cycles, but did you know there are now cycles on the internet with how search results work?
The cycle is simple: You work on your search engine optimization and you go up in ranking. You stop working on your SEO and you fall in ranking. Google makes a change in their ranking methods and you fall in ranking even more. You pay someone to work on your SEO and you go back up in ranking ag... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
What were your expectations when you first created your website? I remember when I was exhibiting at jewelry trade shows in 2004, most jewelers assumed that a website would bring them business merely by virtue of its existence. Those expectations were unreasonable back then and they still are today.
Your website is like an island and it will remain an island until you build bridges and lead people across to visit. Those "bridges" take the form of shared links to social networks, blog posts with links to pages inside your site, and print ads with yo... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
The internet is evolving every day. It's not exactly a living being that's evolving through natural selection, but those of us that create internet software and hardware come up with creative ideas every day that--in my optimistic view--make life more fun and business easier.
Sometimes the creative ideas are not technology based, but are instead usability based. Take mobile websites for example. A few years back, the early creators of mobile websites started using the .xhtml as the mobile page file extension because those types of pages worked bett... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
"My website used to rank great in Google, but now it doesn't. Why?"
I'm going to explain a few reasons this may have happened based on what I have previously discovered.
The first problem could be the age of the website. If the website is not updated regularly, it will run the risk of fading from Google's ranking. In highly competitive industries, like retail jewelry, if you don't add new content to your website on a regular basis you will lose ranking in search results. It's not because your information is bad, but sim... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Eventually the day will come when a jewelry store owner realizes that they've spent a lot of money on development but the website isn't bringing in the customers they expect it to. What happens next is a story I've heard several times: They complain to someone and that someone asks them if their website is optimized for search engines. Then reality sets in as they realize that they spent all that money on building a website only to find out that now they need to spend money monthly on some type of online advertising.
As an easy tip to close the week, I wanted to give you 3 SEO tactics that many people get too involved with, when in reality they are a waste of time.
So don't do this #1: Check your website traffic every day.
Involvement in social media can be a huge waste of time, but spending time in Google Analytics can be as much of a waste of time too. There are tons of features inside the Analytics system, and Google makes it all very pretty and interesting to look at. The problem is that, unless you have an action plan, looking a... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
100, 200, 301, 302, 404... Those are all numbers relating to websites in one form or another. Every time this Daily Golden Nugget series reached one of those numbers I wrote a special edition specifically about that number.
This is Daily Golden Nugget #666 and in honor of that special number I decided to write about one of the more "Devilish Black Hat SEO" techniques continuing to plague the internet.
What I'm about to describe is something that can happen to anyone who has low security on their website. A typical form of "l... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Talk to any SEO professional and you're likely to hear the phrase "duplicate content" over and over again as one of the things you should avoid on a website. One of the larger tasks of search engine optimization (SEO) is to protect yourself from duplicate content penalties assigned by search engines, with Google in particular.
Here are common situations that can create duplicate content penalties:
Only 4 days into the New Year and predictions are flying around the internet about how 2013 will be the year that Mobile, HTML5, Social, and QR Codes finally make it big. Although I'd love to add my own 2 cents in on each of those topics I would prefer to stay a little more grounded right now and talk about how search engine optimization techniques (SEO) already changed in 2012 while you weren't watching.
If you are interested in surviving through this year then the SEO changes from 2012 will shape everythi... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Today I'm reviewing more online tracking data for the 2012 Holiday Season.
According to Google Trends, the online search interest in "jewelry" steadily increased throughout the holiday season from November 1, 2012 through December 22, 2012. The peak days were Cyber Monday, November 26th, Saturday December 8th, Saturday December 15th, and Monday December 17th.
The data from Google Trends seems to show that online interest gold jewelry was greater than silver jewelry. Do your in-store sales reflect higher per... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
In these last-minute days before the holiday season kicks into high gear, several jewelers have asked me what they can do to boost their website ranking without going through the process of blog writing. The jewelers who have asked don't have active blogs but they have hundreds or thousands of products on their website.
Here are a few simple things you can do to try and boost your own local ranking:
1. Create a Google Sitemap.xml file that include all the pages on your website AND all the products in your product catalog. Submit this file to your Google Webmaster Tools acco... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Things change; they always do. That's the nature of the world, of business, of life, of love. Sometimes things get better and sometimes the unexpected happens. A gift of jewelry is given during the best of times, during the worst of times, to signify a new beginning, and to bring an event to a close. Pandora Jewelry built an entire business around life's precious moments. Perhaps it's this close connection to the human condition that motivates you, the independent retail jewelry store owner.
Change is also the nature of the internet. We estimate the best practices of website design change about every 18 months, and search engine optimization techniques change every 2 months. In fact, today we're expecting that Google will announce the 30 to 50 changes they made to their search algorithm in April 2012.
We're taking a break from research and number crunching and getting back to some basics of SEO today.
Search engine optimization for your jewelry store's website is not hard; it's just time consuming. When you follow a few simple guidelines you will immediately boost your site ahead of other locally, and maybe even nationally.
The first recommendation we always have for people is to make sure you have the primary 3 on-page SEO factors all lined up. Oh, "on-page" refers to things you can control about your website, like what is says and how it looks. As opposed to "off-page" factors like link building and how people talk about you elsewhere on the internet.
The 3 primary SEO factors according to jWAG are:
1. The title of your page. 2. The words you use in the largest heading on your page. 3. The actual ... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Last month Google changed the way YouTube videos are ranked in the SERP to better match locally created videos to user locations. We're not sure if this new feature will work on a country level, state level, or local town level, but it's enough for us to revisit the YouTube topic and remind you of some things you can be doing to attract search engine attention.
The easiest videos to create are short, simple presentations of jewelry between 15 to 60 seconds in length. Someone could model the jewelry while a narrator (you or the model) describes what it is; or you can make it real simple and hold the jewelry up to the camera.
The last time we suggested short videos like this, we recommended the Cisco Flipcam, but now we're recommending to just use your Android or iPhone. Both smartphones can record simple videos and also ma... 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
It was predicted that this holiday season was going to see a huge jump in the number of smartphone users for holiday shopping.
Predictions from Google Think Insights and from data presented at the Mobile Marketing Summit in NYC on September 8, 2011 both stated that mobile would be a big player this year.
We decided to check in on the stats now that we are 2 weeks into the season.
75% increase is what we're seeing right now!
The actual numbers we're tracking are showing approximately 25,300 mobile users from a current total 38,300 mobile users. To put it differently, that's about 5.7 mobile users to your jewelry website right now.
Is your website mobile-ready or are you suffering your users through the pinch-zoom madness? Whether you have a mobile site or not, we'd like to give you a quick tip for you... 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
We've spent each day this week reviewing important marketing tips and SEO ideas as they relate to key shopping days in the holiday season. Today's topic is Cyber Monday, the heyday for those of you that have e-commerce websites.
This year Cyber Monday falls on November 28, 2011. Cyber Monday of 2010 was reported to have 1,028M in online sales according to comScore, but according to our own data it wasn't the highest day for online visitors to jewelry store websites. The biggest traffic day award goes to December 20, 2010, the Monday before Christmas.
The philosophy behind Cyber Monday is that disappointed shoppers from Black Friday and the weekend are still trying to complete holiday shopping but ran out of time over the weekend. Many e-commerce websites will announce Cyber Monday specials to capture the online sales.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
This is Day 2 of our Holiday 2011 Run-Up preparations for your website. We want you to start adding all holiday related content to your site now so Google and Bing have time to find it by the time Thanksgiving comes around. For our European readers, that's the 3rd Thursday in November.
Google will take a while to find your new website content and show it in the SERPs. So what you need to do this week is figure out what items and brands you will carry during the Holiday 2011 Season and put that information on your website.
Let's explain using an example.
We noticed a recent ad for Alamea Hawaii that we liked so we'll give them a mention here. They produce hand-crafted wood and titanium rings. Their website is http://www.alameahawaii.com and they make a good candidate for t... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Starting today and continuing for the next several days (yet to be determined) we're giving you our concentrated action SEO, SEM, and mobile marketing action plan for the Holiday 2011 season.
Welcome to the Holiday 2011 Run-Up!
Last year's Run-Up presented a 9-part Online Marketing Plan; how many will be in this year's? We don't know yet because we're still putting it together.
The 2011 jWAG Run-Up will have the most recent search engine optimization techniques, best search engine marketing ideas, methods to improve your online catalogs, and mobile marketing ideas presented as action items to plan for and then execute on specific days of the holiday season.
BE WARNED: This is where we tell you exactly what to do so you have the best chance of winning sales over your local competing jewelry store. We're not... 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
Over the last 6 days, we've given you Black Hat SEO discussions and examples of how to avoid them. Unfortunately there are a lot of SEO "professionals" out there that want nothing more than to take your money and promise you results.
A quick Google search for "link building services" returns 35,300,000 results and tons of ads, meaning there is big business in link building. Do you think all those paid link building services will openly tell you that they use Black Hat techniques? Remember that Black Hat SEO refers to anything you do that will trick the search engines into ranking you higher in the SERP.
If you're not doing your own website SEO you will eventually need to hire someone to do it for you. Between today and tomorrow we're giving you 9 very blunt directions that will make working with your SEO professional mu... 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
This Daily Golden Nugget will demonstrate one possible way to use the HTML 5 tags of <b>, <strong>, <i>, and <em>. If you missed the previous two nuggets you should check them out before reading this one.
Previous Nugget on <b> vs. <strong>: http://bit.ly/?????? Previous Nugget on <i> vs. <em>: http://bit.ly/??????
The product detail page on every jewelry e-commerce website has some sort of table presentation of information. Usually it shows the metal type, carat total weight, diamond shape, etc.
Here a full example of typical information found on a jewelry product detail page:
14k White Gold 0.85ct Diamond Engagement Ring (this is the item title) The center diamond is included with this sophisticated three-stone cathedral engagement ring that features two... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
This Daily Golden Nugget is 4th in a series about HTML 5 issues that the jewelry store owner should know. This topic, and the previous Nuggets this week, are not too technical so please read through them all so you and your website are prepared.
Today we are going to explain the difference between the 2 different ways you can italicize words on your page, and give you solid examples that you, the jewelry store owner, will understand.
As an introduction, let's begin with the tags themselves. We have the "Italic Tag" and the "Emphasize Tag," and in their default functionality both will make words italicized on your web page.
Here's what they look like: <i>Art Nouveau</i> <em>Art Nouveau</em>
We are in the middle of a week of Daily Golden Nuggets all relating to the hardships jewelers will face when we are all forced to use the up and coming HTML 5 technology.
On Monday this week we talked about web browsers and how their advancements are forcing us to make changes.
On Tuesday this week we told you about a few common HTML programming tags that are being phased out and gave you a clues how to protect yourself.
Today we are going to explain the difference between the 2 different ways you can bold words on your page, and give you solid examples that you, the jewelry store owner will understand.
As an introduction, let's begin with the tags themselves. We have the "Bold Tag" and the "Strong Tag," and in their default functionality both will make words bold on your web page.
A few short years ago, changing your website meant you needed to hire a programmer. The expense was always high and many websites were never changed (practically abandoned) after they were initially created.
Today most, if not all, websites are created using various types of content management systems (CMS for short) that give you, the jewelry store owner, the power to edit your own website.
We understand that the technical stuff behind your website is of complete disinterest to you. You have diamonds to mount, rings to size, employees to worry about, and bills to pay. We know that you are probably a complete neophyte when it comes to web programming, and that's okay.
On the other hand, like a rolling stone through the desert that gathers a little dirt, over time you might have picked up a few little HTML programmi... 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.
We received an interesting question recently from a well established jewelry store. They wanted to know the drawbacks or disadvantages of "getting a new website." We thought the question was interesting enough to answer as today's Daily Golden Nugget.
To answer this question, let's first assume you have had a website for at least 2 years, and you are thinking of getting a new one.
So what are the "disadvantages or drawbacks of getting a new jewelry website?"
Before we itemize a list we'd first like to say that we really don't see a disadvantage of making a new website that runs with current standards of technologies, website usability, and design that appeals to the current market. With that said, let's outline the hurdles you need ... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
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
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
Geesh, this extended series on emailing strategies and statistics is getting pretty tiring! After 7 previous Nuggets covering topics like what day to email, who to email, who's name to use when emailing, and even the time of day to email, thankfully today is the last day.
We've explained some reasons why it's good to use quality paid email services (they keep you honest) and a few of the features from each. They all have short term trial periods so just try them out.
Last week we voiced our opinion that we don't believe it's worth the trouble to send fancy HTML and image emails to your customers any more since most email programs automatically block HTML images.
Today we'd like to tell you about a controversial strategy for sending emails that is so far out of the box that you'll have a hard time letting go enough t... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Every so often someone asks us how we can keep producing educational material on jWAG yet we never ask for money. Other internet marketing training companies for jewelers charge something monthly, so how do we do it? jWAG is funded by the web services company Sapphire Collaborative (www.sapphirecollaborative.com). Almost all the educational info presented here is put to use inside every website they create. Mobile websites, SEO, e-commerce, Facebook marketing, Google Places... The Sapphire Collaborative staff handles it so you can keep running your store. Give them a call today at 888-872-0274.
In yesterday's Daily Golden Nugget, we covered the topic of writing quality descriptions on your product pages. Today we're taking a step back and would like to talk about the category/section landing pages of your online catalog... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
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
This is Part 4 in our series of Daily Golden Nuggets explaining the different types of online product catalogs that retail jewelers could have.
In the previous three Nuggets, we've covered three basic online product catalog concepts. We know that you are extremely busy running your jewelry store and setup of those previous three types could potentially fit into your schedule.
On the other hand, the Nugget today and tomorrow are great ideas, but they do require a commitment of time, or an employee.
This is Part 3 in our series of Daily Golden Nuggets explaining the different types of online product catalogs that retail jewelers could have.
The internet provides unlimited opportunities for marketing, sales, and interacting with your customers. Most internet users have no idea what happens behind the scenes to control a website. This series of Daily Gold Nuggets is trying to shed some light on the back office management of 5 different types of product catalogs that a jewelry store could have on their website. So far, we've explained the easier types to set up.
In case you've joined us in the middle of our conversation we are reviewing the TYPE 3 CATALOG today. Here're the types of catalogs we've identified: Type 1: ... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
This is Part 2 in our series of Daily Golden Nuggets explaining the different types of online product catalogs that retail jewelers could have.
On the surface, there might not seem to be a big difference between one online product catalog compared to another. Many include the same common features like wish lists, order history, and customer accounts. But from behind the scenes you as the jeweler need to figure out how to maintain the system and weigh the importance of ease of maintenance to customer satisfaction and how that all affects your overall bottom line.
In case you've joined us in the middle of our conversation, we are reviewing the TYPE 2 CATALOG today. Here're the types of catalogs we've identified: Type 1: Ve... 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
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
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.
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
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
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
This is a new Daily Golden Nugget Format. As of today we are opening our Nuggets to anyone who is on our email list. From now on you will receive the unabridged versions of the Nuggets. Remember you can remove yourself from our email list at any time by simply clicking reply and telling us to remove you.
SEO Seminars at Trade Shows
JCK Las Vegas officially opens today. Of course Luxury at JCK started a few days ago, but most jewelers arrived yesterday and today.
Undoubtedly every trade show you attend now (JCK, Smart Show, regional show, buying group) has website companies that tout how great their services is, and there are website seminars from experts.
If you have the opportunity to attend a seminar, please do. Always strive to broaden your internet education. On May 31, 2011, Rob Bates, Senior Editor ... 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
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.
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 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
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
This is it. Today's Daily Golden Nugget is the reason we spent the last 7 Nuggets explaining YouTube.
The video title, description, and tags are all important for SEO, but if you really want to trounce your competition you need to follow the directions in this Nugget to create Captions and Subtitles for your video.
Transcribing video correctly is a difficult task. It's incredibly time consuming and best left to people who know how to write in shorthand or steno. For people without those skills, even being a fast typist, it could take you 2 hours to transcribe only 30 minutes of video.
However, we don't want you to do that. Instead, we want you to use a shortcut that YouTube provides, and then modify it.
A few days after uploading your video, YouTube will attempt to transcribe the words within you video. If... 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
We're continuing our discussion about using YouTube today for SEO and attracting customers.
A few jewelers have already done what we're about to tell you and have had amazing success with it. Even if you don't have the skills to create a professional video, some of your customers might, and you can reward them for it.
One of the standard features of a YouTube video is to allow "video responses."
Some people like to simply comment on a video and some people are so motivated (through anger and passion) that they get their camera and create a video reply.
Some people are simply capitalists at heart and will do anything for a penny, or maybe even a diamond.
You could run a contest through YouTube. In your simple video, you could just stand there and hold a diamond, or a diamond ring, and tell people that ... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Last week, we explained how to optimize your YouTube videos for the search engine. Today we're reviewing the settings that allow your videos to be used socially.
*Video Thumbnail: After YouTube finishes processing your video, they will randomly select 3 frames from the video and provide them as options for the video thumbnail. This is the thumbnail you see in the SERP, within all the YouTube pages, and as the still frame before the user presses the play button.
Of the 3 options YouTube gives you, select the one that is most compelling.
*Privacy: There are three privacy options for your video. Most of the time, you want to set your videos as Public since that's the setting you need if you want users to find you in the SERP.
The Unlisted setting allows you to upload a video and share the video with any... 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
Google has incorporated a massive dictionary into their functionality. After years of watching users, they were able to take that dictionary and create an automatic spelling correction feature called "Did You Mean."
The "Did you mean" feature showed up in November 2008, and it has a profound impact on SEO. Let's investigate why...
Whenever Google recognizes what it decides may be a misspelling, it will not return search results for that misspelling, instead it will correct the spelling and display a message saying "Showing results for {corrected spelling}. Search instead for {incorrect spelling}." This is a failsafe in case you really were searching for something with that incorrect (read: unpopular) spelling.
Prior to this automatic spelling correction, it was important to include misspellings on your website just... 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
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
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
As a local retail jeweler, you are faced with many advertising difficulties compared to large jewelry chain stores like Jared, Zales, Kay, JCPenny and so many others. They have millions of dollars to throw at their national advertising and branding.
These large companies create buzz around their brands and consumers naturally remember the ads, slogans, and jingles that are repeated effectively in large, unified branding campaigns.
The word of mouth alone creates online interest and random link sharing to all of these big brand websites. As a result of this link sharing, these companies gain incredibly super ranking in the search engines that will easily bury your search engine efforts as a local jeweler.
So don't fight those big brands. Instead, you need to compete on your home turf.
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
"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.
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
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
Figuring out how to arrange information on your website is a tedious task. Sometimes even we have to scribble notes on real paper with a real pencil to determine how to organize the pages of a website into sections and subsections.
Every page on your site should be dedicated to a single topic. You don't want to put educational information about pearls on the same page as information about gold carat metal. A human might not mind, but this would confuse the search engines a little bit and work against your ranking.
Here's how it works:
The search engine maintain an enormous database of information. It's so big that it would take a few seconds to search for the phrase "engagement rings" if they didn't have multiple levels of efficiency.
Searching for "engagement rings" returns results in 0.21 seconds, but wo... 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.
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
The term "web spam" has been mentioned in many official blogs recently. Actually, the term seems to be mentioned every few months when someone complains about it, reawakens the topic.
In reality, "web spam" refers to a web page that is made up entirely of clusters of similar words that looks like gibberish.
Here's EXAMPLE 1 of web spam:
"We sell engagement ring the best selection of engagement rings is in our jewelry showcase you will find the best bridal engagement rings at our store women should look here for a variety of wedding engagement ring selections available nowhere else but our jewelry showcase in our engagement ring store where we have the best jewelry and diamond rings you could ever expect from an online jewelry store."
All of the search engines have implemented filtering to prevent you from eve... 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're going to try something new starting today: shorter Nuggets focused on SEO. In the past, we gave you lots of marketing ideas and essentially full articles in every Nugget email. Over the next few days, or weeks, we'd like your feedback on our new approach. If it fails, we'll go back to the previous format.
Duplicate content is the phrase we use to describe when one web page has the same information on it as another. The design and navigation don't matter much, but the information in the body of the page should never match the information on another page.
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
In today's continuation of our discussion on building a good LinkedIn profile, you will discover a good strategy for the Summary and Specialties sections.
As a reminder, your LinkedIn profile is an online business resume; at least that's what LinkedIn feels it should be. But we want you to take a different strategy and instead use it to build connections to your existing customers.
How many paper resumes have you seen with the "Summary" section beginning with the words "To find a job where..." or "My goal is to..." other similar words? As you browse through LinkedIn, you will see hundreds of profiles of people trying to cram the history of their life's work into the Summary. Apparently, everyone needs to go back to basic resume writing school. This strategy would be quite obviously wrong if the same information was print... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
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
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
Today's Daily Gold Nugget is sort of an "FYI." We want to make sure you are aware of a new emerging technology that may impact your bottom line eventually if it catches on.
After rumors and reviews from some initial 8,000 beta testers, yesterday, November 1, 2010 the new search engine blekko.com opened to the public.
In the past 30 days, we've measured all inbound search engine traffic for the jewelry websites we host. Here are our results: Google 69% Yahoo 17% Bing 10% AOL 2% Ask 1% Search 1%
Google has clear dominance for creating inbound traffic for jewelry stores. That's why we don't bother providing SEO services or analyzing SEO results from other search engines. We also know that if you strive for organic search excellence in Google, your efforts will also... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
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
"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.
In yesterday's Nugget, we hoped to illustrate why it might be time to upgrade your website. In today's Daily Gold Nugget, we are giving you a common tool to measure the good, bad and ugly attributes of your website.
Navigate your web browser over to Website Grader at http://websitegrader.com and take a quick look at this tool. This website testing tool has been commonly used for several years by many jewelry trade show speakers and online experts when providing reviews of websites. It's also one of the tools we use in our own office.
On http://websitegrader.com type your website address into the "Website URL" box and click Generate Report.
They use 50 different measurements to calculate a scoring from 1 to 100, similar to the common school system grading in the USA.
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
Your website is the public face of your business online. During this recession we saw a lot of jewelry stores close, and as we shut down their websites we couldn't help but wonder if the sub par images on their site contributed to their downfall.
The photography on your site is very important. Particularly the jewelry photography for product catalogs. Images need to be high quality, "pop" off the page, show color and detail well and, most of all, they have to tell a story to the person who wants the jewelry.
Photos of your store should be sharp and present well. Photos of your staff should either be coordinated or show them at their normal work station (i.e. the bench jeweler hard at work). When it comes to photos of your product, we suggest getting a light box and learning jewelry photography. Otherwise, just ... 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
In this edition of the #FridayFlopFix review, I'm venturing over to Pasadena, CA in search of a jewelry store. These are the results I saw when using Google Chrome while in incognito mode. I searched for "jewelry stores pasadena ca."
The navigation of your website can help or hurt how easily people and search engines discover all your content. For this week's #ThrowbackThursday, I'm jumping back to the good topic of 
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 
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.
For the last few years, I've been telling everyday average business owners that the process of search engine optimization is not hard; it's just time consuming. There are still a few SEO consulting companies out there that will tell you that the process is technical, and it requires continual maintenance. I'd like to dispel some of this thinking.
As a continuation of yesterday's Daily Golden Nugget of 
In this edition of the Daily Golden Nugget, I'd like to share with you my recent thoughts and experiences of the basic search engine optimization factors based on what I see in my daily tracking of many jewelry websites.
If you're an entrepreneur, you know that the best way to grow your business is to systematize what you do so anyone can follow your directions. This systematization then allows you to move on to the next item on your business master plan so you can continue to grow.
I can't remember you how many times I've had people ask me how I come up with so many topics for my Daily Golden Nuggets. I certainly wasn't born with the gift of gab, but somehow I figured out how to transform from the quiet kid in the corner to someone who won't shut up. Every time I think I'm going to run out of topics, I say to myself "well it's time to dig back into all the tracking data to pull out some easy numbers." 
There's a cycle of life, cycle of economics, various cycles of friendships, and cycles of business throughout every year. You are probably already aware of those 4 cycles, but did you know there are now cycles on the internet with how search results work?
What were your expectations when you first created your website? I remember when I was exhibiting at jewelry trade shows in 2004, most jewelers assumed that a website would bring them business merely by virtue of its existence. Those expectations were unreasonable back then and they still are today.
The internet is evolving every day. It's not exactly a living being that's evolving through natural selection, but those of us that create internet software and hardware come up with creative ideas every day that--in my optimistic view--make life more fun and business easier.
"My website used to rank great in Google, but now it doesn't. Why?"
Eventually the day will come when a jewelry store owner realizes that they've spent a lot of money on development but the website isn't bringing in the customers they expect it to. What happens next is a story I've heard several times: They complain to someone and that someone asks them if their website is optimized for search engines. Then reality sets in as they realize that they spent all that money on building a website only to find out that now they need to spend money monthly on some type of online advertising.
As an easy tip to close the week, I wanted to give you 3 SEO tactics that many people get too involved with, when in reality they are a waste of time.
100, 200, 301, 302, 404... Those are all numbers relating to websites in one form or another. Every time this Daily Golden Nugget series reached one of those numbers I wrote a special edition specifically about that number. 
Talk to any SEO professional and you're likely to hear the phrase "duplicate content" over and over again as one of the things you should avoid on a website. One of the larger tasks of search engine optimization (SEO) is to protect yourself from duplicate content penalties assigned by search engines, with Google in particular.
Only 4 days into the New Year and predictions are flying around the internet about how 2013 will be the year that Mobile, HTML5, Social, and QR Codes finally make it big. Although I'd love to add my own 2 cents in on each of those topics I would prefer to stay a little more grounded right now and talk about how search engine optimization techniques (SEO) already changed in 2012 while you weren't watching.
Today I'm reviewing more online tracking data for the 2012 Holiday Season.
In these last-minute days before the holiday season kicks into high gear, several jewelers have asked me what they can do to boost their website ranking without going through the process of blog writing. The jewelers who have asked don't have active blogs but they have hundreds or thousands of products on their website.
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.
