When a High Bounce Rate Isn’t Such A Bad Thing

Published: March 23rd, 2010

First, we’ll start with the basics. What is bounce rate? Contrary to what many (myself included) believed, it is not only the amount of time someone spends on a website (e.g. you click on a website and immediately click off after 2 seconds) it is also the number of pages you click after the viewing the landing page (e.g. you click to another page after viewing the landing page).

So the two are quite closely related – for example if you spend 3 minutes reading the landing page you just clicked on, then decide to pick up the phone and ring the company, your visit will count as a bounce. But it is not such a bad bounce because you have unwittingly converted a visitor through a well optimised landing page.

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Checking Keywords in Different Countries

Published: March 16th, 2010

As the web becomes more international, you may find yourself optimising for international sites. Whilst the differences in spelling may be an obvious place to start, there are also a whole host of different things to consider – differences in search patterns, cultural differences, user behaviour,  which social media sites are popular, colloquialisms and more.

The basis of any good SEO company would be to increase the rankings of your client’s website, but if you thought you could just go to the local version of Google and check the ranking of your international site accurately from the UK or wherever you are based, you would be wrong.

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How Important are Meta Information?

Published: March 8th, 2010

Best Practice SEO dictates that you need good meta information as it is essential for SEO. Two tags to focus on are title tags and meta descriptions. Make sure they are descriptive and most importantly, relevant to the content on the website.

If you do have duplicate meta descriptions on your website, you will most likely get a warning in Google Webmaster Tools. Take this as a gentle nudge towards getting into the good habit of having a unique description for each page. After all, this is the summary snippet underneath your link on the search engine results page. The rule of thumb is to keep these under 150 characters in order to have the full sentence visible on the SERP.

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Google Stars – Bookmarking made easy

Published: March 4th, 2010

Notice a little star next to your search results this morning? Google announced yesterday that this new bookmarking feature will be available for all globablly signed in users.

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X-Cart Shopping Cart And Ecommerce Solution

Published: March 3rd, 2010

x-cartX-Cart is one of many shopping cart solutions available on the net (we’ve already worked with Magento and CubeCart) and recent developments in the Blueclaw e-commerce team has enabled us to work with this shopping cart solution and test its capabilities for one of our clients.

Yes, the client may consider using online shopping cart solutions like Bigcartel (up to 100 products only) and Shopify (up to 50, 000 products only at 699USD per month) and think these may be a simpler solution but is it really cost effective?

“Why spend 700USD a month just to keep the site running when you can buy a shopping cart software yourself and get it customized and have full control over it for much less? Isn’t the point of an online store to reduce overheads as much as possible and concentrate more on selling?”


Like all ecommerce solutions, X-Cart has its own pros and cons but right now I’m going to talk about the features that I believe will help clients with

  • large inventories
  • medium to large customer base (dealing with delivery and returns)
  • utilizing different payment gateways
  • run affiliate schemes
  • and desire a fully customized, stylish and professional shopping website
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