Reading Time: 3 minutes
Let me guess. You spend your entire day sitting behind your laptop in a nice quiet office with a fresh cup of coffee close at hand. There are no distractions and you have plenty of time to focus solely on the blog article you’re writing this week. Maybe you’ll even have time left over to start planning your next article or getting a jump on your taxes.
Articles by Keith Paul
41 Website Visitors from the International Space Station!
Reading Time: 2 minutes
Wow! I can hardly believe it! I got quite a surprising treat this morning. So I woke up and, like most mornings, got a cup of coffee (black, no sugar) and promptly logged into my Google Analytics account to see how my site was doing. Analytics has a great tool called Real-Time that lets you see website visitors on your site in, you guessed it, real-time, by placing little orange dots on a map of the world. Well, wouldn’t you know it but 41 people were surfing my site from the International Space Station! How cool is that? See for yourself. Here’s a screen-grab of the map straight from my Analytics account.
Happy Holidays!
Reading Time: < 1 minute
To all my clients, friends, and family: have a safe and happy holiday – no matter what you celebrate!
Please note that I will be on vacation from December 22nd until Monday, January 7th, 2013.
“So Now What?” – Creating Content for Your New Website
Reading Time: 2 minutes
OK, the first step is done. You contacted me a few months ago and we worked together to create a beautiful website that you and your visitors love. But the site’s been up for a while now and you’ve noticed that your visitor counts have either leveled off or are dropping. What gives? Is something wrong?
Well, ask yourself a question. When was the last time you added something to your site? Some fresh content. An update on your company. Some interesting industry news. Anything. Visitors to websites are like visitors to museums – if there’s never anything but the same old, dusty dinosaurs to see what’s the point in coming back. They want to see something new.
The Perfect Website? [Infographic]
Reading Time: < 1 minute
Here it is. What you’ve all been waiting for. Everything you need to know to make your website “perfect”. All illustrated neatly on one simple infographic.
OK, maybe it’s not that simple. But there is some pretty good information and statistics here, though I’m not sure how long they’ll be accurate. One thing I love seeing is the trend toward larger monitors. Designing for small screens stinks! (Did someone say “mobile”?)
What Do Flightless, Arctic Waterfowl Have to do with My Website?
Reading Time: 2 minutes
Opus the Penguin © Berkeley BreathedA lot! What am I talking about? Penguin! That’s the name of the latest Google algorithm update released last month – April 24th, to be exact. “Great,” you’re no doubt thinking. “Another update designed to punish my site and kick me out of the SERPs!” Well, that’s one way to look at it. But the truth is, if you weren’t doing anything wrong in the first place, you probably didn’t even know that the update had been released because your site was most likely not affected by it.
How Does Google Search Work?
Reading Time: < 1 minute
Matt Cutts, head of the webspam team at Google, posts regular videos on his YouTube channel, Google Webmaster Central, for website owners to better understand how to build sites that Google will index well and offers advice on what not to do to ensure you don’t get dropped from the SERPs (search engine results pages). In his latest video he answers the ultimate question: how does Google work? Not easy to answer in under 8 minutes but somehow he manages. Watching this video is definately time well spent for any new website owner. Take a few minutes (or 7 minutes and 45 seconds) and you might learn a thing or two about how you can improve your content to get a little higher in the rankings.
Google Announces Over-Optimization Penalties – SEOmoz Offers Tips to Avoid Them
Reading Time: < 1 minute
At a recent conference in Austin, Texas, a Google representative mentioned that “over-optimized” pages could soon be getting penalized and could suffer in their SERPs (search engine results pages). If you thought SEO was a “once-and-done” task you couldn’t be more wrong. Google has proven time and again that their definition of good content and well-formed pages is a moving target. Don’t keep up with them and your site could really suffer.