Reading Time: 2 minOver the years, much has been said about optimizing images to help rank better in Google, and it’s mostly accurate. The key is that images will generally only help you rank better in Google Image Search, not in the main search results. Google’s John Mueller laid it out pretty clearly in a recent SEO Office […]
Websites
Fewer options = higher engagement
Reading Time: 2 minAbout a year ago, I shared the story of an insurance salesman I met that offered every kind of possible insurance there was, which made me realize that he probably wasn’t an expert in any of them. Too many options can be a problem. The same can be true of your website, though with different […]
Google sees different types of web pages essentially the same way
Reading Time: 2 minYour website likely includes a wide variety of content types. You have some normal pages, some blog posts, maybe a custom feed for podcast, some category pages for your blog, things like that. Which does Google prefer? They don’t really care. It’s not that every page will rank as well as the others, but that […]
An FAQ page might be a sign of bad content
Reading Time: < 1 minFAQ (“Frequently Asked Questions”) pages are an oft-used feature on websites, with Google showing nearly two billion of them in the search results. There are times when those pages can be helpful for users, but often they become pages full of “we weren’t sure where else to put this”. If you have a solid content […]
The “about” page is the only good place for your company story
Reading Time: 2 minWhen a user visits your website, they usually have a problem that you’re hoping they can solve. If you can show your expertise in understanding the problem (perhaps you’ve faced it as well), show how you can solve it, and give clear next steps, you’re great shape. We’re talking to a couple of different companies […]
Al Gore and the internet
Reading Time: 2 minAs we all know, Al Gore invented the internet. Or maybe he didn’t invent it, but he said he did. Or maybe that’s not even true… I still see this come up fairly regularly, and I kind of feel bad for Gore about it. He indeed did great work to help the internet grow, and […]
Be careful when measuring your targets
Reading Time: 2 minA few weeks ago, Seth Godin shared a pretty simple statement from Charles Goodhart: “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.“ To be honest, it took me a little while to understand what he meant. We set a lot of goals at our company, and we measure our progress […]
You don’t need more website traffic
Reading Time: < 1 minA goal of almost every website owner in the world is more traffic. “If I’m making $100/day with 1,000 visitors, then if I double my traffic I’ll double my revenue!“ It’s not always that easy. Getting more traffic on your site isn’t a bad thing, but rather than getting more traffic you should work on […]
Why can’t we just “shut down” child porn?
Reading Time: 2 minChild pornography and human trafficking are major problems across the world, and the web helps to facilitate both to a rather large degree. Whenever some website gets taken down (or blocked on a site like Facebook), you’ll often see memes like this start to float around: At first glance, it seems like a solid question. […]
Trusting authentic recommendations
Reading Time: < 1 minOver at GreenMellen, we don’t host websites. We help people choose hosting, and we take care of all of the technical work, but we want our clients to have ownership of their sites. We do this for their long-term benefit (owning your own stuff is a good thing), but recently I’ve noticed a great side […]