When optimizing websites for faster page load time, one of the most common errors we see is that images aren’t the proper size, requiring the browser to resize the image every time the page loads. Since images can often make up the bulk of the bytes needed to load a web page, everything we can do to make our images smaller and easier to load will pay dividends in increased site speed. [Read more…] about Why Image Resizing is Important
Blog
One Page Checkout Funnel Tracking with Google Tag Manager
More granularity within our e-commerce funnel data is a beautiful thing. It allows us to pinpoint friction points without nearly as many assumptions and as much guesswork. Unfortunately, while one page checkouts are great for usability, we run into an issue of not being able to see more than ‘Added Item to Cart’, ‘Checkout Page’, and ‘Checkout Success’ in Google Analytics funnel tracking, since the funnel only updates when our URL actually changes. Shouldn’t funnel tracking be able to tell us more about the funnel than whether a customer did or did not check out?
[Read more…] about One Page Checkout Funnel Tracking with Google Tag Manager
Indexation with JavaScript and GTM: A Quick and Dirty Test
Google and JavaScript: Will They Or Won’t They?
There has been a lot of talk about what Google will crawl and index and what it won’t when it comes to Javascript.
The one constant we’ve found is that no one really knows what Google’s crawler will do with your Javascript content. It might crawl it. It might execute it. It might index it. Unfortunately, the decision seems to be made on a case-by-case basis.
With that in mind, we decided to throw our anecdotal results into the fray to demonstrate what Google will do in this very limited case. We also hope to inspire you and your team to do what I call “quick & dirty” tests. [Read more…] about Indexation with JavaScript and GTM: A Quick and Dirty Test
A 10-Minute Hreflang Tag Tutorial
International SEO is a complex affair that demands reckoning with questions far beyond the scope of traditional SEO. First, there are the concrete matters of where your product or service is sold, and which languages your company offers customer support in. Beyond that lie more nuanced considerations like the level of locality at which you want to be competitive in search within each country, the extent to which your product (or at least your branding) differs from country to country, and the breadth of geographical distribution of your site’s servers.
These considerations, along with the others that spiral out from them, will inform your optimal web infrastructure, your messaging, and nearly everything else, and accordingly they’ll have to be hammered out carefully over the course of conversations with just about every department you’ve got. [If you’re starting down this road in earnest right now, do yourself a favor and look to this post on State of Digital, then move on to the checklist post she wrote for Moz as often as you need to.]
Once you’ve gotten those questions answered, and you’ve finally got a site (or network of sites) that covers your entire global customer base, there will be this one last — crucial but comparatively simple — step: setting up your hreflang tags. Introduced in 2010 by the Internet Engineering Task Force, the hreflang tag is an HTML element that webmasters can use to tell search engines what language and country a given page is intended for, and where (if anywhere) its translations or equivalents for other countries can be found. Failure to use them properly could result in Google serving up the wrong version of a page to a particular location, or placing translations of the same page in competition with one another for rankings within the same area. So while hreflang tags aren’t a panacea for international SEO, the efforts you make in addressing all the big-picture concerns from the above paragraph will be fruitless without them. And compared to all of the stuff in the above paragraph, they’re relatively simple. So, in the interest of keeping to my 10-minute promise, let’s assume that you’ve got all that stuff figured out already, and skip to this, your last step. [Read more…] about A 10-Minute Hreflang Tag Tutorial
Using Internal Site Search To Send The Right Signals
Internal Site Search is a powerful and underutilized website feature. While there are no direct SEO benefits from implementing Site Search (wait don’t leave yet, I said no direct benefits!), the information it provides can be used to understand and improve visitor behavior, allowing you to address areas of low or lost engagement (hello indirect SEO benefits!)
Understanding what your visitors are looking for, but can’t find, on your site can help you understand how Google is ascribing value to your site. You may already have the content your visitors need, but if they cannot easily find it, are you sending the right signals for Google to evaluate it? As Google’s algorithms become more complex, it is a high probability that user engagement is (or will be) correlated with being a factor for positive organic positioning. Utilizing Site Search to understand the signals your website is sending is more important now than ever.
[Read more…] about Using Internal Site Search To Send The Right Signals
