Testing video object schema coding on a new page

Posted on October 2, 2014 by Zoic

Google structured data tool, click to enlarge

In the hard slog towards building a true Semantic Web, “rich data” is one of the stops. Marking video, audio, article content, products and many other types of data allows it to be categorized much more easily, and in a much more precise, specific and versatile way than old HTML meta tags.

We have recently created a new furniture liquidators page on the website of our client Universal Hotel Liquidators; we have marked an embedded video on the page with extensive rich data.

In order to validate rich data snippets, you can use the convenient Google structured data validation tool, which allows you to input any URL and see if the meta data is entered correctly. In this post, you can see an example of meta data testing on the new page we added for our client.

While most, if not all, of the fields can be omitted – for example, you can enter the video thumbnail URL but not the video’s duration – the more information you enter, the more capabilities your site will have for organizing and managing your data, and the more likely your data will be to get properly parsed and categorized by search engines. This is why using structured data properly is important for online businesses, if they want to increase the chance of their products showing up in online shopping directories such as Google Shopping.

This is only a small sample of what structured data can do for you and your site; mastering this powerful tool will only become more important as more activity happens online.

3PManagedHosting vs. Shared Hosting: We Are Way Faster

Posted on July 26, 2013 by Zoic

This is the age of the split-second Internet decision, and attention spans are shrinking into nothingness. Your website needs to impress the visitor at a glance, and it’s hard to do when it takes so long to load that your prospective customer says “Ah, screw it” and backs out to Google to see if your competitor functions faster.

This is why hosting is about so much more than cost. Many smaller business sites take advantage of “shared hosting,” where many sites are hosted on one server and isolated on different partitions. Price-wise, shared hosting is rock bottom – you will be able to host your site for a few bucks per month. However, this option gives you a bare-bones minimum of customer support, and when it comes to speed, shared hosting can be a logjam of frustration.

Managed hosting is a good balance between cost and attention. With 3P Managed Hosting, you get personalized service and troubleshooting for a modest increase in cost; just as important, your site loading times are going to be vastly improved.

To illustrate the point, we ran a comparison between two of our clients: Client S, which uses shared hosting, and Client L, whose site is housed on 3P Managed Hosting. We used the website WhichLoadsFaster.com to run several tests on the main pages and several inner pages of the two clients’ websites. These tests were run on Jul 26 2013, from 1:30-2:00 PM.

First, we compared loading times on the two main site pages. Loading time in milliseconds on the left refers to Client S; on the right, Client L.

Test 1:
Client L loads 2.2 × faster
3223 ms / 1439 ms

Test 2:
Client L loads 55% faster
2509 ms / 1618 ms

Test 3:
Client L loads 2.5 × faster
3715 ms / 1465 ms

I think we’re seeing a trend here.

Next, we compared 3 inner page loading times. For rough parity, we compared the “About Us,” “Contact Us” pages and one product or service page. For each site, WhichLoadsFaster.com loads the three pages one after the other and totals the time it takes for all three. Here are the results, again Client S is on the left and Client L is on the right:

Test 1:
Client L loads 99% faster
9807 ms / 4933 ms

Test 2:
Client L loads 2.0 × faster
10863 ms / 5383 ms

Test 3:
Client L loads 76% faster
9627 ms / 5456 ms

Parallel loading vs sequential loading (meaning, whether the speed tester loads both websites at once or one after the other, so they don’t have a chance to interfere with each other) makes no difference – 3P Managed Hosting knocks the socks off shared hosting every time.

Remember that a typical visitor who is looking to buy something is not just going load a single page – they will navigate around the website before making a commitment. A slow site doesn’t just cause a single moment of frustration, but does it with every mouse click. If you want to present a favorable impression to your potential customers, having a website that loads quickly and allows a visitor to navigate without frustration is one of the most important things you can do – and 3P Managed Hosting is here to help.

3PRIME Upgrades 3P Managed Hosting Service

Posted on February 26, 2013 by Zoic

3PRIME has recently introduced a number of upgrades to its managed hosting service. We improved the specifications of the service in a number of ways, including:

• 25% increase in server RAM
• 40% increase in available disk space
• 90% increase in available network bandwidth
• Doubled CPU priority for our clients’ processing tasks on the server.

Read more about this in our press release: link.

3-Prime Time-Wasters: Anagram Edition

Posted on July 12, 2011 by Zoic

The 3-Prime office has recently caught the Wordsmith.org anagram bug, entering employee names and poring over lists of mostly-nonsensical results like they were tea leaves. Some letter combinations are more fruitful than others, and one of our link-building alter egos opened up the cornucopia – the longest anagram list any of us have ever seen, that includes gems such as “Regularized Stony,” “Leotards Rue Zingy” and “Unsteady Zero Girl,” in addition to way too many permutations of the word “zit.”

3-Prime Helps Local Company With Online Presence

Posted on June 8, 2011 by Zoic

If you thought it was difficult to manage all your social network profiles, try running a profitable company while also worrying about broken HTML and server crashes.

Sometimes, a company may simply lose track of its online assets, and this is where we come in. 3-PRIME has recently helped a local insurance company take control of its online presence and develop it in important ways that will allow it to increase its rankings and customer base on the Internet. First, we tracked down the company website hosting information, as well as ftp passwords that had been lost. Next, we recovered control panel access and regained the ability to modify and update the site.

After that, we installed a number of important site management tools, starting with Google Analytics, which allowed us to keep statistics on site hits and keywords. We also installed the WordPress engine, in order to make it easier to maintain and update the site. To get our client started, we wrote and uploaded two initial posts on the company’s new blog.

Finally, we wrote a custom PHP script to add search engine friendly links on their homepage to their blog posts. This way, each time our clients add a post on their company blog, the company homepage will be updated with links to the entry, so that visitors will be able to easily keep up to date with news and other updates.

If you’d like to see the end result, click here.

If you want to raise your company’s profile by blogging, contact us and get a personally-tailored quote for your website!

Energy Efficiency Canvassing in Connecticut

Posted on May 19, 2011 by Zoic

If you live in New Haven, Connecticut, chances are you may be getting this circular in the mail. Connecticut is one of the states that offer rebates for home energy audits and energy-efficiency retrofitting such as improved insulation, leak-proofing and water-saving measures. The Connecticut Energy Efficiency Fund, in a partnership with United Illuminating, has contracted Competitive Resources, Inc. – a local home energy-efficiency company – to bring these services to the wider public. Under the terms of the partnership, CRI has begun canvassing neighborhoods in order to bring their services closer to New Haven residents and make signing up more convenient and pain-free.
You can sign up by talking to any CRI field technician that you see in your neighborhood, and also by calling toll free 1-888-403-3500.

MDM Furniture Category

Posted on April 14, 2011 by Zoic

As part of our efforts to include useful links on our clients’ websites, we have created a new link category on MDM Shelters: Furniture & Construction. Since MDM makes portable garages and outdoor shelters, it makes sense for us to place links to sites that specialize in furniture and other garden accessories. Hopefully, our customers will find the new links useful and convenient.