Good Call Commander!

You should absolutely be suspicious of SEO firms these days. The industry is unfortunately saturated with unscrupulous, downright devious companies that prey on unsuspecting business owners attempting to better their rankings. They pump your site full of fluff and post thousands of links around their web of interconnected spam sites. We’re not saying what they do doesn’t work; in most cases you’ll see some results. But there will be reckoning in a very short time and you will undoubtedly be blacklisted by the major search engines.

How to spot the phonies.

If you hear the work “link farm”. Then run.

Do a Google search of the company. You can probably find out what they’re all about.

If they guarantee you this or that or promise you the world, they are probably blowing smoke.

Ask what they’ll spend their time doing? Is everything Paid-Per-Click or are you doing organic optimization?

Are you locked into a contract where you are forced to stay with the company for a certain period of time?

Local = Trusted in most cases. It is difficult for small local firms to run SEO scams.

There have been some big players that have fallen prey to these black-hat SEO companies. JCPenny comes to mind. A few years back they used a company that did things the wrong way, the real wrong way. And JCPenny paid the price. Google set their search engine results to the back of the line and their web traffic went into a freefall. It took them months to recover.

The point is. Caveat Emptor… buyer beware.

Woocommerce Products Per Page

Interestingly Woocommerce does not seem to have a default setting for ‘products per page’. Unsurprisingly, there’s a simple workaround. Add to your functions.php Replace “28” with whatever number you want. add_filter( ‘loop_shop_per_page’, create_function( ‘$cols’, ‘return 28;’ ), 20 );

Learning how to code?

We get questions all the time about how we started doing all this. Where did we learn to code? How on earth does any of that make sense? Some people are interested in learning for themselves. It’s easy to get started, especially in this day and age. Back

Why are most government websites so terrible?

The recent debacle with the Affordable Care Act has made headlines but those of us in the development world are just seeing more of the same old thing. Government websites stink! Why is that? I can assure you that their cost structure is very similar to the outrageous

Leverage Browser Caching

When a webpage loads on your screen there are a lot of little pieces that have come together to create what you’re seeing. Your logo, other images, style sheets, javascript files are among some of the external resources a webpage might use to render itself on your screen.

Good one on Sitelinks

Sitelinks also factor into your ad rank, and can influence the position of your ad on search page. Ad Rank previously took into account your max cost-per-click (CPC) and quality score, and now ad extensions and formats are another component of the calculation. Seems like a no-brainer to implement,

Session Timeouts

We’re currently fixing a set of issues with a shopping cart created through a different developer for a local client. They did a pretty good job but forgot about session timeouts. A lot of developers gloss over this aspect of their ecommerce site and unfortunately customers pay the

Should you be wary of SEO firms?