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Friday, June 23, 2017

Building A Business Directory Website: A brief case study

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Building A Business Directory Website: A brief case study daily-golden-nugget-1562-6
I recently had a few meetings with a French tourism company that needed help figuring out how to build traffic to their website. Their website wasn't anything special; honestly, it was just another directory website. Directory websites are a very common business model that range from large sites like CitySearch.com to local Chamber of Commerce websites. Niche focused directory websites can usually better serve their community than the larger sites.

Directory websites make money either by p...
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AT: 06/23/2017 06:21:22 AM   0 COMMENTS
Friday, April 14, 2017

6 Most Frequently Broken Or Missing Website Features

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6 Most Frequently Broken Or Missing Website Features daily-golden-nugget-1552-28
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...
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AT: 04/14/2017 09:35:50 AM   0 COMMENTS
Friday, July 15, 2016

Marco Jewelers #FridayFlopFix Website Review

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Marco Jewelers FridayFlopFix Website Review daily-golden-nugget-1513-10
In this edition of my weekly website review, I searched for "jewelers Stamford, CT" and Google suggested these results:

Marco Jewelers FridayFlopFix Website Review 1513-jewelers-stamford-ct-serp-17

I decided to jump right past all the top listings on that page and went down to the eighth,...
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AT: 07/15/2016 06:32:14 AM   0 COMMENTS
Friday, May 20, 2016

Jewelers in Orange CA - #FridayFlopFix Website Reviews

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Jewelers in Orange CA - FridayFlopFix Website Reviews daily-golden-nugget-1505-50
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:

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AT: 05/20/2016 12:30:22 PM   0 COMMENTS
Thursday, February 25, 2016

Deep Websites Create Discovery Issues for Users and Search Engines #TBT

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Deep Websites Create Discovery Issues for Users and Search Engines TBT daily-golden-nugget-1459-13The 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.

De...
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AT: 02/25/2016 12:27:35 PM   0 COMMENTS
Friday, February 19, 2016

Tallmon's Jewelry #FridayFlopFix Website Review

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Tallmons Jewelry FridayFlopFix Website Review daily-golden-nugget-1455-71Don'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:

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AT: 02/19/2016 08:48:32 AM   0 COMMENTS
Monday, September 21, 2015

Google Files Lawsuit Against SEO Agency to Protect Small Businesses

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Google Files Lawsuit Against SEO Agency to Protect Small Businesses daily-golden-nugget-1346-5
This is great; Google is finally taking action!

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...
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AT: 09/21/2015 11:11:16 AM   0 COMMENTS
Thursday, August 27, 2015

Getting New Websites Indexed in Google #TBT

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Getting New Websites Indexed in Google TBT daily-golden-nugget-1329-40
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...
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AT: 08/27/2015 11:05:10 AM   0 COMMENTS
Thursday, July 16, 2015

Killed By Duplicate Product Content #TBT

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Killed By Duplicate Product Content TBT daily-golden-nugget-1299-92
In this edition of Throwback Thursday, I'm jumping back about 1,100 days to Nugget No 199 and the topic of duplicate product content.

Conversations about duplicate content range from dealing with multiple domain names to VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET


AT: 07/16/2015 09:10:22 AM   0 COMMENTS
Friday, June 12, 2015

J&M Jewelry Mobile Website Review

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J&M Jewelry Mobile Website Review daily-golden-nugget-1275-33
Welcome to the Friday website review edition of the Daily Golden Nugget. The goal for today is to find and perform a usability review of a random jewelry store mobile website. I'm performing the review on, and taking screen shots with, my iPhone 6.

The first review for today is to see if a google.com search through the Safari web browser would yield the same results as a search using the Google search app on the iPhone. Here's a side by side comparison of the two methods:

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AT: 06/12/2015 07:22:44 AM   0 COMMENTS
Friday, May 22, 2015

Morning Star Jewelers Website Review

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Morning Star Jewelers Website Review daily-golden-nugget-1260-66
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:

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AT: 05/22/2015 07:57:10 AM   0 COMMENTS
Thursday, April 02, 2015

Build Links When Sponsoring Local Events and Acquiring Customers

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Build Links When Sponsoring Local Events and Acquiring Customers daily-golden-nugget-1224-48
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


AT: 04/02/2015 12:59:01 PM   0 COMMENTS
Friday, January 16, 2015

C. Aaron Penaloza Jewelers Website Review

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C. Aaron Penaloza Jewelers Website Review  daily-golden-nugget-1170-70
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:

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AT: 01/16/2015 07:57:29 AM   0 COMMENTS
Thursday, January 01, 2015

How Many 2014 Predictions Came True?

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How Many 2014 Predictions Came True? daily-golden-nugget-1159-75
Welcome to 2015! Before we forge ahead into the New Year, we need to look back on the predictions and changes from 2014.

Here's a quick review of my 2014 Predictions from a year ago.

2014 Prediction Review



Facebook Becomes More Worthless for Jewelers


Prediction: "Facebook will become more worthless for jewelry stores that are unwilling to pay for ads."

This prediction turned out to be 100% true. Facebook ...
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AT: 01/01/2015 09:54:59 AM   0 COMMENTS
Wednesday, December 10, 2014

Internet Marketing Agencies - Changing With Technology

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Internet Marketing Agencies - Changing With Technology daily-golden-nugget-1143-44
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...
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AT: 12/10/2014 08:20:17 AM   0 COMMENTS
Thursday, October 23, 2014

Google Penguin Update After More Than A Year

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Google Penguin Update After More Than A Year daily-golden-nugget-1109-73
I typically don't write about current trends in the search engine optimization (SEO) and search engine marketing (SEM) industry, but today's topic is both a reassessment and a follow up to a previous Nugget about Google Penguin.


Penguin Basics


In April 2012, Google started fighting online spam in a big way. Prior to that month, one of the most common methods of achieving high Google search ranking was to pay a company to create links to your website. A single fee of $79 could get you thousands of l...
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AT: 10/23/2014 06:58:10 AM   0 COMMENTS
Monday, September 22, 2014

Building a Marketing Campaign To Sell Your Products

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Building a Marketing Campaign To Sell Your Products  daily-golden-nugget-1086-68
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...
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AT: 09/22/2014 07:36:51 AM   0 COMMENTS
Thursday, August 28, 2014

Off-Site SEO for Retail Jewelers

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Off-Site SEO for Retail Jewelers 2145-daily-golden-nugget-1069
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...
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AT: 08/28/2014 09:24:10 AM   0 COMMENTS
Wednesday, July 30, 2014

History and Special Uses of the Website Sitemap

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History and Special Uses of the Website Sitemap 4371-daily-golden-nugget-1048
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. <...
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AT: 07/30/2014 10:56:09 AM   0 COMMENTS
Tuesday, July 29, 2014

Sorting Through Variables, ABC's, and a Little Duplicate Content

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Sorting Through Variables, ABCs, and a Little Duplicate Content 1783-daily-golden-nugget-1047
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...
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AT: 07/29/2014 11:41:29 AM   0 COMMENTS
Tuesday, May 06, 2014

Problems with bad link cleaning up...

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Problems with bad link cleaning up... 1286-daily-golden-nugget-987

Paying for link building is bad for you business. If you have, then you've probably already attempted some type of Penguin recovery process.

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...
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AT: 05/06/2014 12:23:05 PM   0 COMMENTS
Wednesday, October 16, 2013

How to correctly build content and internally link when using Silo Structures

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Now that I've given you the basic understanding of the silo structure as explained yesterday, I want to dive a little deeper into internal site linking between pages of the website.

Achieving higher website credibility for your website now has a lot to do with making your website very user friendly. Although website "user friendly" topics usually talk about the website design and navigation, there's another very important factor that both helps your visitors and should gain higher ranking for you.

This important factor, of course, is internal linking between pages of your website. I'm not actually referring to normal side or top menu navigation linking, but rather the linking between pages of your site from wi...
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AT: 10/16/2013 04:56:03 AM   0 COMMENTS
Wednesday, May 16, 2012

Ever Paid for Link Building? You Were Probably Pecked by the Penguin

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There's been a big stir in the SEO community since April 24, 2012 when Google turned on a new filter algorithm they call Penguin. This new filter is designed to remove a new level of spamming websites from the SERP.

Last month Google did a lot of work to improve how they detect spamming websites and link building strategies that provide artificial boosts. We have no love for anyone who pays a service for rapid link building, and now Google has also figured out how to detect these link building schemes.

We've been watching our tracking very carefully before mentioning this topic, as usually we don't want to rush into speculations without hard proof.

Jewelry related websites were seriously penalized in SERP ranking if they has 20,000 or more inbound links from pages with thin content. You may remember from previous D...
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AT: 05/16/2012 10:23:40 PM   0 COMMENTS
Tuesday, April 24, 2012

Two Easy Blogging Tips for Jewelers

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Today we have 2 simple blogging tips for your jewelry website.

1. Kill the keyword cloud.

A few years back the "keyword cloud" feature was pretty popular and found on most blogging sites. The feature allowed you to indicate a few important keywords or phrases for every blog entry you posted. The usage count for all these keywords was tracked and then presented as a jumbled mess of words using various size fonts. The larger fonts represented commonly used words, and the keywords in the smallest font were used only once or twice.

Keyword clouds were thought to have high SEO value because they would repeat the same words over and over on every page of your blog. The truth was that Google view this repetitive keyword usage as pure webspam and many blogs lost ranking.

Before you hire a SEO company for link build...
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AT: 04/24/2012 10:41:07 PM   0 COMMENTS
Tuesday, January 17, 2012

Don't Let Link Building Bite You Badly

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While not all links are created equal, if you want your website to be found, and if you want it to rank highly, you will need to get some other websites to link to yours.

Initially it's easy to use your own Facebook and Twitter accounts to link to your website. Then you can create a blog account on Tumblr, WordPress, or Blogger and link to your website from each blog entry.

Now you need to get links from other legitimate sources. Start with getting your jewelry store listed in every "Dealer Locator" your designers have to offer. Next you should find out which of your affiliated associations have online membership directories and get yourself listed and linked from those.

After those basics things get a little tricky, but if you have hopes in succeeding, you need to somehow make a name for yourself so people will li...
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AT: 01/17/2012 04:19:20 PM   0 COMMENTS
Wednesday, September 28, 2011

Part One: 9 Tips Jewelers Need to Work With SEO Pros

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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...
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AT: 09/28/2011 12:24:53 PM   0 COMMENTS
Monday, August 08, 2011

5 Types of Online Jewelry Catalogs, Part 5

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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 ...
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AT: 08/08/2011 11:39:09 AM   0 COMMENTS
Tuesday, July 12, 2011

Google+ Circles for Jewelers

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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.

Gett...
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AT: 07/12/2011 11:47:56 AM   0 COMMENTS
Friday, May 06, 2011

SEO Tips for YouTube Videos

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SEO Tips for YouTube Videos imageWith 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.

On the Upload screen, simply ...
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AT: 05/06/2011 11:42:36 AM   0 COMMENTS
Monday, April 04, 2011

Don’t Buy Your Friends

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Organic. Organic. Organic!

That's the battle cry of the search engines. Everything should be organically driven on the internet. Of course, us saying "organic" today contradicts what we said on Friday. For the reason behind that you need to keep reading.

If the internet was not filled with businesses trying to make money, what would it be filled with? Take out all businesses from the internet and all you're left with are bloggers, news, government and social networks.

Without businesses driving the internet there wouldn't be a need for search engine optimization. There wouldn't be a need for all this online marketing education. Instead, the internet would just be driven by interesting tidbits of the lives we lead.

Maybe that would be boring? Maybe not?

The point is that if businesses were not the...
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AT: 04/04/2011 02:00:19 PM   0 COMMENTS
Monday, March 28, 2011

Change Up Your Link Bait Strategies

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No one likes to read a boring sales letter, and surly no one stays on a website that is boring looking or has boring information.

Pizazz, humor, personal interest stories... these things will make your website interesting, and if you are lucky (or skilled) you will keep them coming back; better yet, they will share your link to their friends through Facebook and Twitter.

Use your own creativity and personality to engage your readers throughout your website and on your blog. But don't fall into a trap of using the same format over and over to post new entries to your blog. Change it up every once in a while.

For example, we've previously suggested that you post photos of new merchandise when it arrives in your jewelry store. Photos of the latest shipment of engagement rings would be interesting for anyone shopping f...
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AT: 03/28/2011 01:30:11 PM   0 COMMENTS
Monday, February 28, 2011

Quality link building is a pretty tricky business.

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You can't pay for links without someone blowing a whistle and getting your website banned. There is always the potential to be reported by a stranger if you are asking to pay them for a quality link from their website to yours. Google provides an online form now for such reporting. Offenders will have their websites banned from the search engines.

You might also think that posting comments on other blogs, like Instore Magazine or JCKOnline.com, might be a good link building strategy. Unfortunately both of these sites, like all quality blog sites, will include the rel="nofollow" attribute in any links to your website. The rel="nofollow" feature nullifies any potential search traffic.

The best way to create links to your site is through blogging. However, we don't simply mean you should hire a blogging company to put a l...
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AT: 02/28/2011 12:23:36 PM   0 COMMENTS
Friday, February 11, 2011

Moving to a New Domain Name

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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...
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AT: 02/11/2011 01:41:30 PM   0 COMMENTS
Thursday, February 03, 2011

How Many Tweets Make a Book?

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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...
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AT: 02/03/2011 12:03:52 PM   0 COMMENTS
Wednesday, November 17, 2010

Link Building Strategy That Could Cost You Your Website.

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Name and email addresses of domain name owners are a matter of public record. Sometimes a SEO company will collect a list of names and emails from Network Solutions, GoDaddy, Register.com or any other company and they will send out random link solicitations.

These solicitations are usually pretty simple with the subject line 'Link Exchange" or "Link Purchase."

Inside there are details about the link building. Here's an example:

"I'm building a good list of links on http://www.sandiego-downtown-hotels.com; I was wondering if we can have a link exchange with your website."

Linking between websites is what makes the web, well, the web. Search engines measure the number of links you have coming to your website and rank you according to how many links you hav...
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AT: 11/17/2010 01:31:45 PM   0 COMMENTS
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