Why Page Load Times Matter So Much and How You Can Reduce Them

How fast a website loads is one of the first impressions you can give your visitors and potential customers. Make a bad first impression and things can start going wrong fast. Page load time is important for a number of reasons but the user experience is one of the most important. If people are frustrated that your site is slow for them they are much less likely to buy from you or trust your site in general. Its a hard thing to measure but it is something that is very real. A couple stats from kissmetrics blog puts some perspective on just how important it can be:

“A 1 second delay in page response can result in a 7% reduction in conversions.”

“If an e-commerce site is making $100,000 per day, a 1 second page delay could potentially cost you $2.5 million in lost sales every year.”

Not everyone has an e-commerce site making $100k a day but it does help put things in a different light. For some people 7% can make or break your business and even if that is not the case most everyone would agree that improving your conversions by ANY amount is a positive thing. (more…)

How to Reduce Your Bounce Rate Like A Pro!

Analytics are an incredibly useful tool! They give you a peek into what visitors are doing and looking at on your website, which in turn shows you what you can do to improve your website. Bounce rates are just one of the many statistics that Google makes available in their analytics suite. Most people intrinsically understand that a high bounce rate is probably a bad thing. But what is a bounce rate exactly ? Google’s definition is this:

“Bounce rate is the percentage of single-page visits or visits in which the person left your site from the entrance (landing) page.“

As you can see, it is a pretty basic concept. Visitors land on your page and then decide to go elsewhere on the web or close the browser before going to another page on your site. This is not necessarily a bad thing. For example many single page lead generation pages will have an extremely high bounce rate even if they are converting traffic well. In that case your bounce rate is a meaningless number. Now that we know a little bit about what a bounce rate is we can look at some steps you can take to lower it. (more…)

4 SEO Plugins Your WordPress Website Must Have

So your company decided that it’s finally time to take the plunge into the blogging world. Congrats! It’s an integral part of any Internet marketing plan, and it’s a great thing that you have finally gotten started! Static websites don’t get nearly as much traffic as those that are continually updated. This is where blogging comes in, because each new blog post is fresh new content and another reason for someone to visit your website and browse around. Those intriguing blog posts wont matter too much if your blog isn’t formatted correctly for SEO. To make sure that you are maximizing your visibility, I have  listed 4 SEO Plugings for your WordPress Website.  (more…)

WordPress Websites Rock and here are 6 reasons why

These days a lot of people start off using WordPress by signing up for an account on WordPress.com for their personal blogs, others install WordPress on their own domain. You start off with a small simple blog and then you start customizing it a bit. A plugin here, a sidebar widget there and now your blog is really rockin’. Within a few weeks you have added a couple of pages and a few more plugins and widgets and your little blog is looking more and more like a full fledged website! (more…)

5 SEO Tips for WordPress

If you’re serious about blogging these days, you have your own webpage URL and a hosting membership. You’re also most likely using WordPress as your content management system based on its ease and ability to be customized virtually anyway you like. But are people actually reading your blogs? Are your posts SEO optimized so that search engines and other people can find them? If you’re not sure you probably need to get some type of analytics to see what kind of traffic you have. If your traffic is not ideal I suggest you read these 5 SEO Tips for WordPress, in order to gain more traffic to your pages. (more…)

5 Reasons Why WordPress + SEO = Awesome

SEO can be a challenging task for a business owner or blogger to deal with. You are continually pumping out great content on a regular basis and putting a lot of effort into your posts, so it only makes sense to spend some time thinking about ways for this great content to be seen. From our experiences, we have found wordpress to be a spectacular platform building sites as well as blogs. We also love using it because of how easy it is to incorporate great SEO. Lets examine some of the things wordpress does for you automatically or very easily via its great plugin system, to get you on the right track for SEO success!

1. To WWW or not to WWW

Google’s bots hate “duplicate content” and since their bots determine where our page ranks, we should try to keep them happy! One thing that can happen if your site is accessible both with and without a “www” in front is that the google bot will think they are 2 seperate sites and view this as duplicate content. WordPress solves this issue automatically for you. You are welcome.

2. Sexy Permalinks

Most people think of a URL as a long list of numbers and letters that will eventually take them to a website. This is true for the most part however not all URLs are created equally. I think an example illustrates this best:

ugly URL www.ugly-url.com/232-2923=?26

pretty URL www.pretty-url.com/nice-informative-article-title/

The first URL gives us no indication of what may be on that page. The second URL is much more informative and useful to both the user AND the search bots. Not even google’s crazy algorithms can make sense of a bunch of numbers jumbled together to form a URL. It can however “read” keywords and other relevant data in the pretty style of URL. As is the case with a lot of SEO this particular item is helpful to your readers as well as your page rankings. WordPress includes a simple options panel for you to enable pretty URLs in seconds.

3. Custom title and meta tags

The title tag is considered one of the most important on page factors for SEO. It should give a clear indication about what is on that page and include any keywords or phrases you may think are relevant. Unfortunately by default WordPress doesn’t allow much customization in this area. This is where the world famous all-in-one seo pack plugin comes to the rescue! This is an outstanding plugin that turns WordPress into an absolute SEO powerhouse. Once enabled you can set custom title tags per post and page throughout your entire site.

4. google XML sitemap plugin

This wordpress plugin creates a map of your site and then hands it over to the search bots. The developers description sums it up quite nicely:

“This plugin will generate a special XML sitemap which will help search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo and Ask.com to better index your blog. With such a sitemap, it’s much easier for the crawlers to see the complete structure of your site and retrieve it more efficiently. The plugin supports all kinds of WordPress generated pages as well as custom URLs. Additionally it notifies all major search engines every time you create a post about the new content.”

So not only does this plugin create the map. It adds to it everytime you create new content and it picks up the SEO telephone and calls google to let them know (ed:there is no such thing as an seo telephone so please stop emailing us about how to get one lol ).

5. WordPress is easy to use

Some may argue this last item has no place on this list. “How does being easy to use help my SEO?” you may be thinking. Its simple, none of the above technical improvements will help you at all unless you actually have great content on your site. More than anything WordPress succeeds at enabling people to get up and running with creating content quickly and easily. We tell our clients “If you can use word you can use wordpress”.

This is just the tip of the iceberg of whats possible with wordpress and SEO. If you have any questions or need some help feel free to get in touch or leave a comment.