Mobilegeddon came and went a year ago last Spring. Disasters forecast never materialised but Google’s new ‘Mobile First’ approach to ranking may be the real Mobilegeddon. Is your website prepared? Back when Google announced it would flag websites that weren’t mobile friendly in the search results there followed a stampede of webmasters looking for changes to make their pages look tip top on smart phones and tablets.
Do you know where your customers are really coming from … its not where you think
I, like most people, used to use the Ecommerce Sales Performance report in Google Analytics to get an idea of which channels were generating sales … until I realized the data is mostly useless. Oddly it was a new feature in Analytics itself which proved it. Today I’ll show you how to check if your Sales Performance data is worth the pixels it is displayed in and how to find the real source or your customers or goal converting visitors.
Reasons not to worry about your bounce rate
It’s one of those metrics so many webmasters fret over and it has generated endless blog posts about how you should reduce it in the name of SEO but should you even be giving it the time of day? Here I’ll cover why bounce rate matters if you understand what it really is, how to know if your bounce rate is real, what a ‘bad’ bounce rate really is and how to handle the dreaded increasing bounce rate!
Finding the best managed VPS hosting company in 2016
I’m not a web hosting expert by a long mile – my job is to rank websites high up on search engines and that alone is full time. For over a decade, I haven’t had to think about it because Webfusion provided a solid solution time and again. Unfortunately recent changes at Webfusion (the termination of their VPS service) and the meltdown of the Heart Internet data center (Webfusion’s recommended replacement) has meant I’ve needed to do a little homework.
The great Heart Internet data center meltdown
Website hosting isn’t my specialty, SEO and online marketing are. The great thing was I didn’t have to be … until Heart Internet went pear-shaped. If any of my client’s rankings were suffering due to their host (slow response, lots of downtime, etc.) the answer was always simple – move them to Webfusion. For larger sites move them to a Webfusion VPS. I’ve used Webfusion VPSs since the 10th of whenever and it was one of those services you didn’t have to think about – it did exactly what it said on the tin. For the occassional headache you could …
Lost your rankings? Sometimes doing nothing is the best action.
When you lose a valuable position in Google’s search result there is understandable panic and a desire to ‘do something’ – anything. But there are circumstances when you should consider doing nothing at all! Google is not infallible. It is not beyond making mistakes of its own and there have been a fair amount of these in the past. Here’s an actual story from one of my own websites.
The Heart Internet VPS potential fix
OK – I don’t work for Heart so this isn’t an excuse but when it comes to VPSs there is a reason they are being so slow that I am aware of. Applications like WordPress, X-Cart and many others aren’t designed to behave well in a crash situation and strange things can happen. As far as I can see the database servers went down at Heart before the main servers meaning many applications behaved in a very wierd way and it takes ages to find out what. In one example of mine an error log file ballooned to 40GB making …