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
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
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
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
'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
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.
In this edition of #ThrowbackThursday, I'm revisiting the URL restructuring topic from March 15, 2011.
I consider URL restructuring to be one of the more advanced SEO techniques that you can employ after a deep review of how your website is performing in organic search. It's the process of turning your long, messy looking website addresses into shorter, easy to understand addresses.
Do you have a question about your own online marketing situation or feel perplexed about something specific on the internet? Send it to me and I'll answer it as a future Daily Golden Nugget if I can.
Shortly after posting my Friday website review on the morning of April 24, 2015, one of my email readers asked me a really viable question about the SERP results from that day's review. You can read the review VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Welcome to the weekly edition of the Friday jewelry website review. Every week, I randomly choose a candidate website and put it to the test for design, SEO, usability, content, and a wealth of other website and business related issues.
I never know how they will turn out; sometimes good and sometimes bad. I always try to write these reviews in the order in which I browse around the site, providing my first reactions as I discover things.
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
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
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.
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 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:
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
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
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":
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.
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.
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:
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
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
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
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.
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
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
"...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 #ThrowbackThursday, I'm revisiting the 
