Internet Marketing Blog

The Google Retail Advertising Blog recently posted sales cycle statistics for a variety of consumer products. At the low end, shoppers took an average of 7 days to purchase pet supplies, while they took 16 days for electronics. The data did not include purchases larger than home appliances like cars or homes which presumably take […]

Clients often ask if they need a Content Management System (CMS) to help manage website changes. In theory, these allow organizations to effectively manage their own site changes. This post will delve into the pros and cons of using a CMS. As their name implies, Content Management Systems are software packages that make website maintenance […]

Adobe is buying Omniture, a leading provider of web analytics and analysis provider.What does this mean for online marketers and our clients? This struck me as an odd combination until I started digging a little further into recent history of these companies and the direction of application development. Adobe makes software such as Acrobat, Dreamweaver, […]

The golden rule for good web design is simply: Don’t annoy users. They will leave. A lot of big, beautiful, and expensive web sites commit cardinal sins that result in higher bounce rates and lower sales. Most annoying behaviors are easy to avoid. These sins include: Splash pages Sound or music when the page loads […]

Want to do SEO yourself? Or do you want to save time and money working with SEO consultants like us? Here are some free SEO tips to get your started: Write more — You can’t have too much content. Not only will it help with your most important keywords, it will also help acquire traffic […]

A friend of mine recently told me about his experience with renaming pages on a site, how the traffic fell off from a drop in rankings, and how he recovered the traffic quickly using an XML sitemap. Scott has been running AdSense ads on his site for some time. He decided to restructure the navigation […]

I just had the pleasure of attending a presentation by usability luminary Steve Krug in which he identified what he thinks are the two key rules of web design for usability: Show where you are within the site Provide good, prominent titles You were probably expecting something more earth shattering? So was I, but as […]

Yahoo! is rolling out dynamic URL rewriting configuration to webmasters. What this means is that you can tell the search engine what dynamic URL parameters to ignore, such as sessions variables or tracking parameters that are useful for you but might appear to search engines as though there are many copies of a page at […]

Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox recently included a post about the usability benefits of breadcrumbs. We have long counseled clients to use them when their site design and organization allow for the same reasons that Jakob advocates their use. We add one more reason: SEO. One of the important aspects of site optimization is creating abundant, keyword-rich […]

As recently reported by C|Net News.com, Yahoo! and Microsoft have adopted Google’s sitemap protocol. This will eventually prove to be a boon to website owners / managers since it removes some of the obstacles to using the indexing tools. The website indexing protocols allow you to tell search engines about the pages on the website […]