Businesses should always be looking to gain new customers and keep the ones they have happy. One way of doing this is adapting to the way your customers like to shop. E-commerce companies should be aware of consumers increased spending on mobile devices, especially tablets, and changes should be made to reach them.

According to an article on Direct Marketing News, “Tablet users who visited e-commerce websites in 2011 spent 54% more per purchase than smartphone visitors and 21% more than desktop or laptop visitors, according to a Jan. 19 report by Adobe Systems.” Tablets are a viable way to reach your target audience and businesses should be willing to make website adjustments to reach returning and potential customers.  What type of adjustments? Make sure they can easily navigate and purchase on your site.

When a visitor comes to your website via a tablet, what do they see? Does your website adjust to fit their screen or will the user have to play with their display settings just to get a clear picture of the item they want? It may sound silly to ask such a question, but businesses can frequently lose out on sales due to visitor frustration.

The other night my mom went online to buy some books using a tablet. However, unlike a computer, she could only see one book per page. (The website wasn’t optimized to fit a tablet.) She spent some time attempting to find the books she wanted, but eventually ended up ordering over the phone. Instead of buying multiple books, she only bought one. This particular company lost business because their site wasn’t user friendly on a tablet. How can a company fix this? Easy, use a sniffer. A sniffer can detect what type of device a visitor is using and serve them a landing page that is configured for their device. It would behoove this bookstore to add a sniffer to their site. Who knows how many other tablet users have passed up on buying, due to the lack of a good user experience on a particular site?

When it’s all said and done businesses have to make changes to reach their consumers. If a decent amount of your target audience is using tablets to access your site, consider getting a sniffer. How can a company determine how many visitors are coming from mobile devices and tablets? Read the following article on obtaining this data through analytics.

In a previous post, Google versus Bing: Webmaster Tools, I discussed the virtues of both Google and Bing’s webmaster tools websites. Today, I will give an overview of Bing’s main categories and how they can be used to improve the functionality, both for SEO and for the user, of your website:

Dashboard
Overview page, much like the Dashboard in Google Webmaster Tools, that gives you a “snapshot” of the most pertinent data for your site, such as recent trends pertaining to crawling, indexing and traffic. Newly added sites begin showing data within 3 days of gaining access.

Crawl
With this section, you can view six months of crawl data like the amount of pages crawled and crawl errors. This is a really useful place to identify any potential problems with the Bingbot accessing pages on your site to include in its index.

Index
See which of your site’s pages are in the Bing index. You can also view your inbound link data here, too.

Traffic
What kind of traffic is being driven to your site? This section provides six months of traffic data and analyzes search query performance over time.

New Features:
Index Explorer (Index Tracker)

One really helpful new addition is the ability to locate any “broken” pages on the site; 404 (removed), 500’s (server errors):

What makes this new tool even more useful is the ability to “filter” your results and actually display the errors on your site manually, page by page. You are even able to locate directories on your site that have been infected with Malware.

Crawl Delay Function
There is also a new crawl delay function which allows you to ask Bing to crawl slower during peak business hours and crawl faster during off-peak hours, allowing for better load times on pages from your site.

Crawl Parameters for AJAX
Lastly, you can even set crawl parameters for AJAX websites (sites that use Asynchronous JavaScript and XML for dynamic data). Search engines have always found most kinds of JavaScript problematic, but with this new function, you can be certain Bing can crawl, index and rank AJAX pages on your site.
 

The relatively new (and free) Google page speed testing utility: http://pagespeed.googlelabs.com/  is a really invaluable tool for any web developer looking to identify which elements of code could be cleaned up to make their site faster. Why is this useful for SEO?

First, user experience should always be the primary goal for any website; how can I sell my product if the user gets frustrated with how long it takes for a page to load? Second, Google now considers page load time as a ranking signal in their algorithm, meaning that they will give ranking priority to sites that have optimized their pages for loading in people’s browsers.

What are some of the suggestions you are likely to see once you enter the URL of the domain you wish to check? What’s nice about this tool is that Google gives you a prioritized list of items to tackle and essentially says, “If you clean up these things first, you will likely have better results”:

Page Speed Online suggestions could include optimizing (compressing) images, combining external JavaScript files so there are fewer requests to a server and removing CSS files that are no longer used. 

The very first thing you see once you have entered the URL will be a score out of 100; this will alert you to the severity of the issues that were found. A high score indicates little room for improvement, while a lower score indicates more optimizing to reduce page load time. Have you used Page Speed Online recently?