Ecommercepartners.net

In the early days of the web, trying to navigate to a page that wasn’t there caused your web browser to have something of a minor stroke; it just stopped working, and you weren’t going anywhere.

Before long, web designers got smarter, and we started using the infamous “404 Page” to announce that the page you were looking for wasn’t there anymore, or maybe never was in the first place. So what do you do with yours? Well, the first thing you have to decide is whether to even 404 or not in the first place.

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You work hard to bring traffic to your website. You invest money in online marketing strategies such as search engine optimization, pay per click marketing, social media and more. However, many basic issues will drive people away from your website and lower conversion. Luckily, many of these problems can be corrected with a bit of work.  Take a look at our top 10 list of reasons people leave, and some simple solutions:

1. Your site takes too long to load. Look, we’re all busy people; if a customer has to wait longer than a few seconds for a page to load, they’ll most likely leave. A good first place to check is Webmaster Tools – it takes just a few minutes to enable it for your website. You’ll be able to discover issues such as missing pages and broken links as Google crawls your site. Google also has some great tools to find issues associated with page speed – you can find a list of rules under “documentation” on this page. These include minifying CSS (i.e. compressing the files), combining external files, enabling browser caching and webpage compression. Yahoo also has a list of best practices to improve site speed. These include using high-quality web hosting, removing or updating any missing pages and links, and incorporating style sheets that load more efficiently.

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At the end of February, the engineers at Google made some major changes to the company’s search algorithm – the “secret formula” that controls what results you see for any search query, and the order of which it appears. Google keeps the exact algorithm confidential, but major factors have become apparent now that the dust has settled.

The update, popularly known as the “Farmer” update (AKA the “Panda” update), took relevance away from sites like EzineArticles.com and suite101.com, and instead placed greater emphasis on websites with only fresh, original content.  The update had long been anticipated, since Google had already started to crack down on websites like JC Penney and Overstock.com for low quality links and spammy links on collegiate websites (i.e. .edu websites).

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There are many complexities involved in designing and building a successful ecommerce website. The process of creating an online business is by no means a quick and easy overnight task. Many people envision building a website for their business but don’t take into account the intensive research and technical specifications that must go into the development of creating a successful Internet business. The progression from an idea to a fully launched website is a process that will span over many months.

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