Remove images or reduce image size
Make sure your website images are at 72dpi. Most image editors will allow you to crop and save your images as web friendly format.
Change layout code from tables to CSS (Cascading Style Sheets)
Websites used to be created using tables. Tables included a lot of additional code. CSS or tableless design is the new standard in developing websites. Converting to CSS will reduce the size of your website considerably.
Reduce unnecessary code
Check out your website source code (View | Source). Remove font tags, etc. Link to your CSS and JavaScript code rather than embedding the code within the page.
Check out some advanced ways, from Yahoo, on speeding up your website.
Immediately after you install WordPress, change your Permalink structure.
WordPress, by default, creates your links using parameters and numbers (i.e. /?p=123). Not a very search engine friendly URL.
Changing your permalinks to a more search engine friendly URL will help search engines find your website and help visitors understand what your page(s) or post(s) are about.
Search engine friendly permalink URL
Creating Search Engine Friendly Permalinks
Login to WordPress
Click on ‘Settings’ in the left margin
Click on ‘Permalinks’
Check the radio button near ‘Month and name’
Click the ‘Save Changes’ button
Now when you create a new blog post, your title will be shown in the URL along with the blog post date.
We were having a heck of a time trying to figure out why Google Analytics wasn’t capturing any data with a new Magento eCommerce (V 4.1) website we just built.
We added the Google Analytics account ID within the admin area, but no results.
We then noticed the error:Â _gaq is not defined being displayed from the browser.
Searching through the Magento community, Google search and blogs we were given various fixes and advice that suggested replacing the original code or updating the Magento core files. We did not want to change the existing code or core files because we wanted our client to be able to use the eCommerce portion of Google Analytics with Magento and we’re suspect about some of the fixes.
So we took matters into our own hands.
Since the error was not being defined, we defined it.
Open /app/design/frontend/default/yourtemplate/page/html/head.phtml
Add the code var _gaq = _gaq || []; on line #38 to the head tag of the head.phtml file after var BLANK_IMG = '<?php echo $this->helper('core/js')->getJsUrl('spacer.gif') ?>';
Refresh your Magento Cache
In a few hours Google Analytics should start registering your data.
I hope this helps others who may be experiencing the same issue.
I just found the best SEO (search engine optimization) title tag for your business:
“Wedding photography San Francisco Bay Area, Napa, Destination weddings”
The text explains what she does, where she does it and what service she provides.
I really like this title tag. Think about how you search for services on the internet. Most likely you’re typing in what the service is and where to find it. I think the last item in the tag should be extra, like the problems you solve.
The title tag is the most important piece when optimizing your website. Google and other search engines examine the title tag first before anything else to figure out what the page is about, so you better have some strong, targeted keywords.
The reason the above title tag is so good, is that it’s concise. A big mistake is to load up this tag with many keywords. This is bad because many of these words will compete against each other and search engines will not index every keyword the same. You may lose rankings because of it. Heck, I’ve seen websites at the top of the search engines with only one keyword phrase. Now that’s targeted.
For more information on how to get your website higher in the search engines, visit our article section on how to Optimize Your Website in 10 Steps or contact us with your questions.
MJS Web Solutions, not only designs websites from the ground up, we also can convert an existing design or mockup to SEO (search engine optimization) friendly HTML code.
We noticed, Luna Packaging, a client of ours had redesigned their website, except each page was an image. The design looked great, but Google and other search engines could not index the text, because the text was an image. We notified our client and got the okay to redesign the site by converting the existing design images to SEO friendly HTML code.
Luna Packaging & Autism Answers Websites
A new client of ours, Autism Answers, came to us needing to re-build their website. Each page on their website were also images, not HTML code and text. Again, we converted the design image files into SEO friendly HTML code.
Now each website is:
much faster to download
easier to maintain
And being index by the search engines.
Is your site one big image? If so, it’s not getting the traffic it deserves.
MJS Web Solutions offers a full variety of website services that are focused on enriching your customers experience and getting traffic to your website.
I needed to rent some equipment and found West Coast Rental here in Alameda. I picked up the phone to get ready to call and couldn’t find the phone number anywhere on the homepage, not even in the footer.
No Phone Number Present on Homepage
I had to spend some time to search for the ‘Contact Us’ button and then found the phone number.
If you expect people to contact your organization, I’d highly recommend including your phone number on your homepage…and maybe on every page for that matter.
PS: After reviewing the site, they might not be able to help me anyway. I was looking for tool rental equipment, not party & event rentals. Oh well.
While performing SEO (Search Engine Optimization) services we’re told to not forget the long tail of the search. (I.E. The length of the keyword search). A lot of people don’t just search with one word.
Well it turns out the majority of us search using only one word and the percentages of clicks decrease as we add more keywords to our search.
Still Focus on The Long Tail Search
That’s not to say that you shouldn’t focus on the long tail search. You should. The long tail search is usually beneficial for creating conversions because people are using more descriptive and specific terms in their search.
Percentage of U.S. clicks by number of keywords
Subject
July 2009
August 2009
Month-over-month percent change
One word
23.51%
24.21%
3%
Two words
23.54%
23.71%
1%
Three words
21%
20.74%
-1%
Four words
14.02%
13.78%
-2%
Five words
8.10%
7.90%
-2%
Six words
4.35%
4.23%
-3%
Seven words
2.34%
2.27%
-3%
Eight or more words
3.22%
3.16%
-2%
Note: Data is based on four-week rolling periods (ending Aug. 1, 2009, and June 27, 2009) from the Hitwise sample of 10 million U.S. Internet users.
Google has announced – again – that they DO NOT use the keywords META tag in their keyword search.
The keywords META tag, if you don’t know, looks like this:
<meta name="keywords" content="bay area web design company, alameda web design, alameda web designer, internet marketing, web design, website design, web designer, web developer, alameda, san francisco, california, web hosting">
So, if you think you can just drop your desired keywords into this tag, forget it.
NOTE: Other search engines may use the Keywords META tag, but Google does not.
The MJS blog was created to share with others our successes, mistakes and experiences while on the internet. I hope we're able to provide some useful and meaningful advice in the process.
Before we begin optimizing a website for a new SEO client, we recommend they sign up for the following 3 Google services:
We were having a heck of a time trying to figure out why Google Analytics wasn’t capturing any data with a new Magento eCommerce (V 4.1) website we just built.
I thought this was a very interesting statistic.
