The e-commerce industry continues to grow larger and more encompassing with each passing year. In 2013, online business-to-consumer sales in the U.S. topped $322 billion, up from $289 billion the year prior – and that’s only factoring sales made in the U.S. A report published by eMarketer suggests that global e-commerce sales could reach $1.5...
Amazon, Inc., the world’s largest online retailer, scooped up the .Buy domain extension at auction, outbidding the search engine giant Google. According to a press release issued by the nonprofit international domain regulator Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), Amazon purchased the .Buy extension for $4.6 million last Wednesday. Google and a handful...
It’s official: Authorship is no longer supported in Google’s search results, meaning (among other things) that you’ll no longer see head shots of your favorite bloggers and writers displayed in the SERPS. John Mueller, Google Webmaster Trends Analyst, issued the following statement in regards to the Google Authorship program on his Google+ page. “I’ve been...
There’s a major shakeup coming to Google’s pay-per-click (PPC) marketing platform. Starting in September, all Adwords accounts will use close variant matching for all phrase and exact match keywords. Google made the announcement on its Adwords blog earlier this month, citing the fact that approximately 7% of all Google searches contain misspellings. By including misspellings...
While Google has yet to reveal the exact formula it uses to rank websites (and it probably won’t), it recently revealed a new factor or “signal” used in its ranking algorithm. According to a blog post published by the Mountain View company, websites that use Secure Socket Layer (SSL) 2048-bit key certificate encryption will receive...
Products Listing Ads (PLA) is a Google-owned pay-per-click advertising (PPC) platform in which advertisers pay for each click/visit to their product ads. It differs from the Mountain View company’s traditional Adwords platform in a few different ways, one of which is the content in the ad. Unlike Adwords, PLA ads contain images but do not...
One of the hurdles faced by startups and small businesses is a lack of funds to promote their products and services. Marketing isn’t cheap by any means, and new businesses are often placed at a disadvantage because of their inability to allocate large sums of money for advertising. Thankfully, there are cost-effective forms of marketing...
Strong customer relations are the backbone of any successful business. When customers are happy, they are more likely to come back for future purchase, share their experiences with friends and family members, and post positive reviews on websites like Yelp.com and Google Places. So, why should business owners focus on creating long-term relationships with their...
Responsive Web Design (RWD) is a hot topic among professional web designers as of late. If you frequently visit some of the leading webmaster forums or blogs, chances are you’ve heard of this technique. RWD is being touted as one of the latest and greatest developments in web design, encouraging greater compatibility across a multitude...
Allowing visitors to submit comments on your website encourages stronger engagement while creating fresh new content in the process. Search engines will notice this content and take it into account when ranking your site, potentially boosting your site’s ranking in the search engine results page (SERPS). But there’s a dark side to enabling visitor commenting:...
