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What is Online Reputation Management?

May 26, 2014 by Perfect Web Marketing

Half Star Rating

What is ORM?

The topic of Online Reputation Management is too lengthy for one post. So this is the first of a multi-post detailing of the Who, What, When, Where, Why, & How of ORM. I will try to answer all of the major questions and address the biggest issues, but if you would like detailed information on ORM or to see how we can help your business, contact us today.

They used to say that any publicity is good publicity. For Hollywood that might be true, but for your business – it is not. Think about the last time you shopped for a birthday gift or tried to decide on a restaurant to eat at. You probably went online and did some research. You checked out the reviews of the various vendors, looked at the number of stars on Yelp, asked your friends on FaceBook or compared products on Amazon. In each of these situations you relied on other people’s online opinions of the product or place. Millions of people all over the world leave their ratings and comments of places, products and businesses, creating free publicity all over the internet. This is exactly where the term ‘Online Reputation Management’ or ORM comes from.

Online Reputation Management is the process of handling all of that online information about your business and it is never, ever complete. ORM requires a well thought out plan based on your business model, goals and current situation. It starts with laying out what your current online publicity looks like. Is it good, bad or nonexistent? Then you must determine how your current situation is affecting your business. Is it helping and you want to expand or is it bad and running customers away? After a full assessment of your current details is complete, then you must look at how your clients or customers are using online reviews, ratings and social media to learn or talk about you. Finally, you create a game plan and determine the exact sites and conduits you want to use to get your message out – and these are just the planning steps. Beyond planning, there is the actual implementation and constant monitoring of your ever changing online appearance.

Online Reputation Management is the new Public Relations or Digital PR, and digital PR can be a nightmare if not handled or addressed correctly and timely. There are tricks, tips, shortcuts and must-dos that can save time and headaches. In the posts to follow I will try to outline as much as possible to help you understand and implement your own ORM road map. For more detailed information, feel free to contact us to see if we can help.

Filed Under: Online Reputation Management Tagged With: Digital PR, ORM

How to find which web pages you should be speed testing on your website for speed

May 19, 2014 by Perfect Web Marketing

"I wanna go fast" Ricky Bobby

“I wanna go fast” Ricky Bobby

Here are 5 Easy FREE Tools to test the speed of your web page. Please understand that each of these web page speed tests, only test the current page, not your entire website. I will explain more below on the importance of testing more than just one Homepage and how to determine what web pages you should be testing.

  1. Pingdom’s Website Speed Test
    (Be sure to test from the same location each time)
  2. Yahoo’s YSlow
    (browser plugin)
  3. Google’s PageSpeed Insights
  4. GT Metrix
    (Uses Google Page Speed and Yahoo! YSlow)
  5. WebPagetest

Let’s not repeat everyone else’s mistake

Please don’t make the mistake that most of us make and only test the speed of your homepage and ignore the speed of the rest of your web pages. So many of us will test our homepage with the tools above and see how fast it loads, then make an adjustment or two, if any, and be done with the testing and not test any other important web pages of the website. This is a critical mistake to make -speed does matter. There are too many studies done to list that prove why this is important. Not only is speed a ranking factor with the search engines, but it is just important as a conversion factor for your visitors, which helps you get more customers from your website.

How do I find my websites important web pages?

You may ask what are the other important web pages on my website. Well, if you don’t know what these pages are or what your money pages are, you can simply open up any of your analytics program and see what your top web page are at a glance. If you don’t have an analytics program installed on your website, you can have a couple of free ones installed within minutes, so you can find out how visitors are using your website and converting.

After reviewing your analytics, make two lists that determine your plan for speed testing. I would use a sampling of the last 30 or 60 days from your analytics program to create the lists below.

In the first list of pages, start with your homepage and list the next 4 web pages that get the most traffic excluding the homepage. Here are some examples of web pages that might show up for your list.

First Tier Web Pages:

  1. Home page
  2. A product category web page for “Camo Caps”
  3. A product category web page for “Nike Golf Shirts”
  4. Product landing web page for “Camo Cap”
  5. Product landing web page for “Nike Golf Shirt Dri-FIT Pebble Texture Polo Shirt”

In the second list of web pages, were going to list five pages that aren’t in the First Tier Web Pages list. These web pages will be money pages, sign up pages and any other web page that is important to your business.

Second Tier Web Pages:

  1. About Page
  2. Client Testimonials
  3. Client/Reference List
  4. Join Our Mailing List
  5. Product Samples of Work

You should test each of these web pages and make sure their load times are as fast as possible. However, each web page can have different, yet acceptable load time based off the type of web page. For example, if you have a page that is primarily text and just one or two images, your logo and an image inserted in the content, it should load faster then a product category page that would have your logo and 12 or more thumbnail images of products being listed.

Now let’s test our Top 10 Entrance Web Pages

After you have tested and optimized these 10 web pages, you should go back through your analytics program and make a list of the Top 10 Entrance Web Pages of your website and remove from the list any web pages that were in your previous lists and test their speed as well. By taking this approach, you are attacking web pages that are bringing you the most traffic and web pages that you find important to your business. In addition this exercise will get you in the habit of optimizing each new web page you create not only for quality content, but for speed as well.

Do you have any questions on web page speed testing?

I hope this post has made it easy for you to find and determine the important web pages on your website that you should be testing. If you’re unsure on how to accomplish optimizing your websites top web pages and would like help or would like to send us a message, please contact us. We will be glad to help answer your questions.

If you know of any other free tools we haven’t mentioned that help you test the speed of your web pages, drop them into the comments!

Filed Under: Useful Tools Tagged With: Web Page Speed Testing

Why you should make your website 100% SSL with Extended Validation

April 27, 2014 by Perfect Web Marketing

Why you don’t want to be the last one to make your site 100% SSL EV

Why you should use SSL EV

Why you should use SSL EV

If your website is designed to make you money and build your business, then not only should you make your checkout page and contact request page secure, but you should be make every page on your website secure.  In addition to making your site running 100% SSL, you should invest the few extra dollars a year to make your SSL certificate have Extended Validation (EV) — the green bar with your company name. Don’t just make your site accessible as SSL, force all of your non-SSL page requests to load as an SSL page.  This is very easy to do through plugins or have your hosting company add a simple redirect.

Here are a few good reasons that you should spend a little bit on your website SSL Certificate:

  1. You want to make your visitors feel secure, so they want to become customers;
  2. Google and Bing will show your page in the Search Engine Results Page (SERP) as being a secure page;
  3. You are showing the search engines that you are taking extra steps to prevent your site from being hacked;

Will making your website 100% SSL help you in your search rankings?

Well we may never know the answer to this, but the Wall Street Journal published an article in April titled Google Weighs Boosting Encrypted Sites in Its Search Algorithm by Rolfe Winkler.

Do I need to test everything on my site again after converting to a 100% SSL site?

Making your site 100% SSL is actually quite simple.  First, you need to look into your analytics program and find out how your visitors are coming to you.  Most websites have at least a copy of Google Analytics installed and several websites these days are running additional analytics programs, like Clicky.com or KissMetrics.com. Go through your analytics and find the most common devices and browsers that your visitors are using to view your site.

Taking the time to test your website on mobile devices

If you haven’t looked at how many mobile devices that are viewing your website recently you will probably be surprised on how many smart phones and tablets that are visiting your website today compared to a year ago.  In my testing I discovered a problem with one of my analytics programs and any Android device trying to visit a page that was SSL.  The visitor would get a Certificate warning message on their Android device, regardless if it was a smart phone or tablet, before they could visit the SSL page.  After discovering this issue I tested the same scenario on different sites that I knew were running 100% SSL sites with the same analytics program and discovered they had the same problem.  The problem was fixed within a couple of hours after reporting it to the analytics company, but if I had not taken the time to test my site with the different devices, there’s no telling how many visitors that would’ve been lost.

Testing your website with different browsers

I’m sure all of your visitors aren’t coming to your website from one or two browsers.  You probably have a mixture of visitors that are ranging from older browsers to modern smart phones.  I thought this would have been the simplest test of all, because instead of your page being viewed over Port 80, it’s being viewed over Port 443 and that’s pretty much it.  Well some of the older browsers, for example Internet Explorer 8, can give a Certificate warning message if your page is being viewed as an SSL page, but your SSL Certificate doesn’t have a dedicated IP and uses a shared IP address.  The legacy browser Internet Explorer 8 doesn’t know how to handle the protocol that allows SSL Certificates to share IP addresses.

Why does my page URL show https, but I get a warning box that scripts have been blocked?

This can be frustrating, because you have gotten your SSL Certificate installed and you are expecting to at least see the lock symbol in your address bar giving you validation that you’ve set everything up correctly or the green bar with your company name and country code if you purchased the Extended Validation with your security certificate.  Well relax, this is probably a short fix for you.  Many websites these days are now using Google Fonts on their website and have placed the import command in their stylesheet to load the necessary Google Font(s), but the URL that is being referenced in your stylesheet is placing the call as http:// instead of https:// and this will cause your browser to load unsecure information which makes your page not secure, so the lock symbol and green bar, if you have EV, won’t be displayed.  The main reason for this is probably at the time you developed your website, the page wasn’t a secure page, so there was no need to load Google Fonts from a secure page.  If you have a WordPress site, I would look at your styles.css file in your themes directory and also in your themes customizable CSS section.

Using @import in CSS with a non-secure call
@import url('http://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Open+Sans');

Using @import in CSS with a secure call
@import url('https://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Open+Sans');

Using @import in CSS with a Protocol-relative URL call
@import url('//fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Open+Sans');

Do you need a dedicated IP for your SSL Certificate to work?

Well no, you don’t have to have a dedicated IP for your SSL Certificate to work.  Several hosting companies can offer you a SSL Certificate with a shared IP.  WPEngine.com (@wpengine) in Austin, Texas is able to give it’s customers an SSL Certificate with a shared IP using Server Name Indication (SNI) protocol.  The only draw back you may find with SNI is that older browsers, like Internet Explorer 8, will give a Certificate warning message when you try to access a page on the website from a shared IP.  Windows XP’s Internet Explorer browser only goes up to version 8, so you can imagine there are still a lot of users out there still using this browser.

How do you purchase a SSL Certificate and do you want the green bar (Extended Validation)?

You can purchase SSL Certificates with Extended Validation from $149 to $449/year below and yes you want to get the green bar with your Security Certificate.  If your website is designed to generate you online sales or leads that turn into money, then theres no excuse for not finding an SSL EV certificate that is within your budget.

 

  1. https://www.namecheap.com/security/ssl-certificates/extended-validation.aspx
  2. https://www.digicert.com/ev-ssl-certification.htm
  3. https://www.sslshopper.com/cheapest-ev-ssl-certificates.html
  4. https://www.godaddy.com/ssl/ssl-extended-validation.aspx
  5. http://www.thawte.com/ssl/extended-validation-ssl-certificates/
  6. https://ssl.comodo.com/ev-ssl-certificates.php
  7. https://www.geotrust.com/ssl/extended-validation-ssl/

Filed Under: SSL

Perfect Website Marketing Solutions

August 1, 2012 by Perfect Web Marketing

Perfect Web Marketing brings the perfect website solution you want for your online business.

Filed Under: Blogging

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