http://www.nineyards.com Helping Businesses Do Business Online Sun, 04 May 2008 02:31:22 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Like any kind of networking, social media takes an investment of time and energy. So is it worth it? Of course, if your business is strictly local, you can network face to face, such as through meetups and networking groups. But if you want to draw customers from outside your local ... http://www.nineyards.com/2008/social-media.html Sometimes, when a business owner asks for advice on how increase online sales or leads, the advice goes along the lines of “make your site better for visitors.” Which, of course, is good and true advice — but unfortunately doesn't tell you much about how to make your site “better.” Fortunately, ... http://www.nineyards.com/2008/seo-success.html A big worry I hear from a lot of small business owners revolves around hiring someone to perform site optimization services for their business website. Almost everyone who's been online for any length of time can tell stories of colleagues (or perhaps even themselves) victimized by bogus SEO service providers — ... http://www.nineyards.com/2008/real-seo.html I ran across an interesting article on the Internet Retailer website just today. It seems online retailer RugSale.com decreased their shopping cart abandonment rate from 65% to 45% and increased their average ticket by 21% — simply by streamlining their checkout process. Do you make any of these mistakes? RugSale.com's original checkout ... http://www.nineyards.com/2007/improve-checkout.html Recently, on the HighRankings Forum a member wondered if the SEO industry was about to collapse. He speculated that because there's so much information freely available about search engine optimization, pretty soon everyone would have an optimized site and there would be no need for professional SEOs. I don't agree, at ... http://www.nineyards.com/2007/seo-survival.html Webmasters often assume their site has been penalized or banned simply because it doesn't rank as well in the search engines as they think it should. Is this a good assumption? This article explores the issues of search engine penalization and banning and offers some (perhaps surprising) conclusions.ShareThis http://www.nineyards.com/2007/new-article-added3.html If you're wondering whether your site might have been banned or penalized by the search engines, it can be difficult to tell. The SEs generally don't display anything publicly to state a site has been banned or penalized. You can check this for yourself by looking at the SE results ... http://www.nineyards.com/2007/penalties.html Do you track your web site statistics? I don't mean just having a counter installed to track "hits." Do you know how your visitors find you? Do you know what paths they follow through your site? Do you know — for sure — that your site is as successful as ... http://www.nineyards.com/2007/web-analytics.html Too often, people focus on the wrong metrics when measuring the success of their web site. One of these misguided measurements is the Google Toolbar PageRank (PR) number. This new article explains why I think most people would do better to turn off the Toolbar PR display and focus instead on ... http://www.nineyards.com/2006/new-article-added-2.html I just read yet another Request For Proposal from a prospect who's concerned because his Google PageRank (PR) seems to have gone down. I'm guessing he'd probably be shocked if I were to tell him I couldn't care less what the PR number displayed on his Google Toolbar is. You know, ... http://www.nineyards.com/2006/pr-myth.html