Month: September 2017

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Not All Errors Are Real Errors

What to Know About Site Errors
What to Know About Site Errors

Errors, they may your heart beat faster and stomach clench especially when they impact your website. But, not all errors that are reported in plugins such as Yoast or even WordFence are real errors.

For example, today the Yoast SEO plugin flagged my site as not having a home page that was visible to search engines. But on additional testing and review of files; both the robots.txt and .htaccess file there was not issue. Additionally, on testing in the Google fetch feature in the Google Search Console – no errors were triggered. The Google bot was fully allowed even though Yoast said it was not.

Sometimes errors you see are false positives. But, that does not mean you can simply mark them as ignored or disregard them all together.

All website errors should be reviewed and corrected if found to be true. Don’t guess, make sure that you do not have a problem each time one is brought to your attention.

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Chat Apps for Your Website

Find out about website chat aps
Find out about website chat aps

Seems simple, just install code and you’ve got a chat app. But not so fast. I am finding out from personal experience that not all chat apps are alike.

I started out with Drift and still have that chat app on my blog (for now). What I found as I used the app was it slowed my website to a crawl for load time. I think much of this is the code is installed in the head tag as instructions state, but may be better installed before the </body>.

What is happening on my site is the page is taking so long to load and the navigation does not operate until the chat app function appears – I consider this very bad. Drift must have made a code change to the asynchronous code recently as the page load time was not an issue before but started about two weeks ago.  As a result I have been actively looking for a website chat app replacement.

I have tried three Tawk.to, MyLiveChat, and now Pure Chat. I am using Pure Chat on my website right now and so far I do like the free version. What I consider important for a website chat app are the following:

  1. Easy to install
  2. Able to configure colors
  3. Has a rock solid mobile app
  4. Does not impact page load speed

So far Tawk.To and My Live Chat  were too complicated for my needs and cumbersome to use.  Pure Chat has easy set up and I do like the mobile app which is simple to use.

I will be doing additional testing in the weeks ahead and when I settle on one, I’ll post it on my blog.

 

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Citations and Local Ranking

Get More Business When You Place Locally
Get More Business When You Place Locally on Google.com

What’s the connection between citations and local ranking? Well, first Google uses citations which include your phone number and address for location specific ranking in the organic index.

Because citations are important to place for local searches here are some of my tips to assure that you do everything in your power on your website pages to try to place for location specific searches in your local area.

  1. Make sure you have your full address and phone number in your footer.
  2. Make sure to spell out your state and not use the abbreviation.
  3. Format your phone number either as 540-693-0385 or (540) 693-0385 and do not use . as separators. Google’s preferred use in AdWords is (540) 693-0385 for all instances that they call in phone numbers.
  4. If possible get local links that feature your website URL, business address and phone. I like the Chamber of Commerce for links like this.
  5. Make sure to claim your Google My Business and Bing My Business pages. These are great ways to also add your address and phone number.
  6. Make sure that you review online what your address and location shows. If it is incorrect, make attempts to correct the data.

Most businesses want local placement. Assuring that you are reference properly in citations around the web starts first with assuring that you have the information posted clearly on your own website.