Peter Meinertzhagen

About Peter Meinertzhagen

Can Communities make me return to Google+?

When Google+ Communities was launched back in December 2012, it was at a time I was trying to be active on the network.

What better way of showing my support for a network we’re frequently being reminded not to neglect than by jumping on this new feature?

So I quickly and enthusiastically signed up to a handful of the raft of communities that were created that first week and even started my own. But, my participation in said communities lasted for about as long as my enthusiasm for Google+ itself, which is to say: not very long. 

In this post I am going to explore Google+ Communities from a fresh perspective, especially now that the feature has had just over a year to mature.

Is the feature enough to make me start using Plus again? And would I start recommending businesses invest their time there again?

Eight physical product landing pages to inspire you in your next project

I was recently trying to put together some examples of good landing page design and found there was a lack of blog posts looking at physical products in particular.

There are lots of blog posts about designing effective landing pages, and case studies of websites that are doing it right, but nearly all of the examples given were of landing pages for software or service products.

Yes, you can apply many of the same principles and tactics, but still, it’d be nice to have some examples of physical products being sold. 

Four mobile SEO mistakes you shouldn’t be making

While the rise in the use of responsive web design is reducing the amount of SEO considerations developers need to remember when designing a new site, there are still fundamental differences that need to be considered during the design stages and beyond.

Even when a site fundamentally works regardless of the device being used, and Google has no problems in crawling it with its mobile user agent, those in charge of analytics can often forget the importance of segmentation, treating traffic from all sources as being identical.  

In this post, I am going to explain four mobile SEO mistakes you shouldn’t be making on your site that’ll help you think beyond how pretty your site looks on your mobile. 

Why SEO still has a place in a content driven world

It isn’t the first time SEO has been squared up against another discipline as if they are in opposition with each other.

I’m sure you remember this post in Smashing Magazine, The Inconvenient Truth About SEO, where a deep misunderstanding of what SEO actually is, expressed itself as a diatribe against the industry. 

I see posts like this, albeit not quite as high profile, popping up all the time. 

Should we be rethinking the content we’re producing?

I was prompted to write this post after a Twitter conversation was initiated by Simon Penson by asking: 

“How long is too long for a blog post before people switch off? 1000 words, 2000 words? Trying so hard here to cut this one off…?!”

You can follow the strands of the discussion yourselves by clicking the link above, but the general consensus was that longer blog posts can work, provided that they’re a) interesting, and b) presented well with clear formatting.  

But, this post is going to be about more than length, although that is certainly part of it. 

Five ways to work with content on ecommerce sites

Content for e-commerceContent is a common cause of headaches on ecommerce websites.

Hundreds and thousands of individual products, all with their own URL, all lacking any form of unique content to help them stand out both to users and search engines: this is an all too common occurrence in ecommerce.

I’m going to show you five simple ways to work with content to help it stand out, both on-page and in the search results.

Identity as a search ranking factor

Your personal and brand identity are both influencers on your visibility in search engines. How and to what extent does the power of your brand affect your rankings?

When discussing search engine ranking factors it can be easy to overlook the impact of identity and how it influences the results we see.

The idea of identity as a ranking factor is also linked to social metrics as the ‘strength’ of your identity on social networks can go a long way towards the display of trust and authority.