peasap / Foter / CC BY

For a few years now, Google has been more than hinting at the fact that site latency (how fast your site/pages load) is going to have an impact on your visibility. Why? Well, for one, users are tired of waiting. Over a decade ago waiting three minutes for a page to load was acceptable but these days anything more than 3 seconds can cost you valuable visibility and loss of visits. Users don’t want to wait for pages on your site or elements on your site pages to load and neither to search engines.

New Tool: PageSpeed Insights
A few weeks ago Google launched PageSpeed Insights. We are ecstatic about this new tool since we have been pulling from various tools ourselves for creating site assessments and while we believe this doesn’t necessarily cover everything, it does help in prioritizing and figuring out how to make your site faster – and for that- we give three cheers.

We love that these tools make our job easier and faster so we can do more for our clients.

Find out how to make your site faster here.

After that, call us for a full Technical and Marketing Site Assessment to get your site in tip top shape.

William Hook / Foter

Internet technologies are constantly changing and your audience’s habits and sophistication are too. Over 50% of Facebook users access their site via mobile and we are seeing an increase in mobile use to small and medium sized businesses websites. So, we are here to help with your mobile presence. We have been searching for some simple, quick and easy solutions for our clients to take advantage of enhancing their mobile presence and we’ve discovered a few cool tools so it doesn’t become another item that keeps getting pushed down on your to-do list.

There are many free tools out there to create your own mobile friendly website. In many cases, you don’t need a full mobile version of your site but simply a mobile friendly version. Either way, depending on how much of a perfectionist you are, you can do it in less than 10 minutes. Are you ready? On your mark…get set…go…

Google and duda mobile have teamed up to help businesses build a mobile site. In just five easy steps you can have your own mobile site for your company – and you can customize it too.

Follow These Steps to Make Your Mobile Website
1. From your computer, go to: http://www.howtogomo.com/en/d/get-started/build-your-site/
2. Enter your website address
3. Customize it (edit extraneous copy!)
4. Change your index file to detect and redirect smartphone users
5. Go live. (It is free for a year, just enough time to learn and measure performance).

We did it! Visit our mobile friendly site today from your smartphone at
http://mobile.dudamobile.com/site/libertyinteractivemarketing

Take a few extra steps to further optimize your customer’s mobile experience with your organization and enhance interaction and engagement:

Hubspot’s put together a guide on the first three steps to making your website optimized for mobile, it’s worth the read.

Create an “Add to Desktop” bubble on your mobile site home screen

Create a Custom Apple Desktop Icon:
Dave Taylor has put together a simple and easy to follow tutorial on creating a desktop icon that iPhone and iPad users can add to their phones.

For WordPress Sites – Add this plugin for an instantly mobile friendly site
Add the “WPTouch” plugin to your WordPress site
(view http://www.libertyinteractivemarketing.com/blog on an iphone and you can see how it transforms it for mobile devices).

10 Great Tools to Create A Mobile Version of Your Site

Other great mobile site references and stats:
Smartphones Beat Computers For Facebookers Time On Site
Why Mobile Optimization Matters: 6 Best Practices for Mobile Design

One of the things we look at during our Search Marketing Site Assessments for clients, is the use of 404 pages no matter what industry you are in. We always recommend having a custom 404 page. A 404 page is when a user discovers a “page not found” on your site.

How does this happen and why should you care?
Well, it may seem like a completely elementary thing to put in place however if someone comes to your site from another site (i.e. they linked to your site – maybe a blog post or old web page). If there is not an appropriate redirect process in place the user will be sent to a “page not found” or 404 error. You have control over what gets displayed on this page and if it is a generic 404 (no branding just black and white) it can mean losing a visitor forever or you could help them discover the appropriate page they were looking for, thus keeping them on your site. Think of it providing a bit of customer service to your visitor – if they entered through the wrong door, you would want to show them the appropriate one or guide them to the location they were looking for.

While creativity and humor might get you far with anyone, it also helps to be…well, helpful. If your page is useful in guiding the user to the area or page they were looking for then you are more likely to create a better customer experience.

A few suggestions for your 404 error page:
- At the minimum have your logo and main navigation on the page, better yet use a page template from your site that will help customize it to your look and feel
- Have a link to your home page or better yet a listing of links to popular sections on your site. You may also want to provide a link to the sitemap and promote it as a “full directory of site pages.”

Here are a few examples of 404 pages that we think work while also maintaining the brand personality:

Thanks to fab404.com for some great examples – check out others to for more ideas.
P.S. We’ve got some work to do ourselves. Do as we say not as we do .