How important or critical is having a sitemap for a website? Extremely important if you ask me.

The obvious current day need for a website sitemap is more so for SEO purposes, specifically search engines crawling the sitemap.

In fact, submitting one’s website sitemap to search engines is one of the first actions to take when launching a website, especially if you desire good ole’ SEO love for Google.

Nevertheless, one of the things likely forgotten or simply done away with is the use of a human-readable HTML sitemap.

While still in its infancy, “emoji marketing” is gaining steam as each day passes, and a growing number of personal and corporate brands are adding emoji to their marketing toolbox and strategy.

From Hubspot to Visme to Neil Patel to “The Emoji Experts”, all of the aforementioned personal and corporate brands see no end to emoji marketing, having published their own emoji marketing guides, predictions and case studies.

As millennials $200 billion buying power grows, not including Gen Z’s influential buying power of $153 billion arriving to the market, emoji marketing is poised to reach unprecedented proportions of revenue for personal and corporate brands.

Not only are tech-related companies making good use of emoji to reach and serve more companies, but longstanding industries, such as the jewelry industry, are rolling up their sleeves and establishing their brands using emoji too.

It’s crazy to realize the Internet is a little over 30 years old. Although I date myself when saying I remember life before the Internet and email, the invention of the Internet has forever transfigured how we live life and do business.

In some ways, the Internet has brought us together. In other ways, not so much.

Mobile-friendly websites have been the talk of the town for some time now.

In fact, Stone Temple reports that mobile usage jumped from 57% in 2016 to 63% in 2017 while desktop usage is steadily declining year-over-year, going from 43% in 2016 to 37% in 2017.

And if those numbers hold true, we’re only months away form discovering that likely over 70% of internet users favor their mobile devices when viewing websites.

So, what does all this mean for your website?

Recently I was contacted by a customer inquiring about what steps they should take to improve their website speed.

This customer was adamant that their website ranking was greatly suffering because of it. While I don’t disagree with their assessment, let me be clear that ranking on page one of Google or any other search engine was not solely because of website performance, or lack of.

Website performance is a factor, but not in the case of this customer. In fact, this customer’s overall website performance and SEO health puts their competition to shame upon further review of keyword ranking, backlink profile and domain authority.

Nevertheless, I discussed and walked the customer through a step-by-step process for what to check for to determine how to improve website performance, checking the following:

It’s been one week since I boarded a plane from Orlando heading back to good ole’ Austin, Texas.

I thought I’d take a moment to share a few thoughts and interactions from my MERGE! 2018 experience.

As the 2nd Annual MERGE! comes to a conclusion in it’s final day, there were many sessions, keynotes and connections to be had and made from Day One, Day Two and Day Three.

Conferences like MERGE! tend to move at a lightening speed in person while it can be perceived as a long time when seeing the outlay of time on paper.

Nevertheless, the final day of MERGE! kicked off with a pasties breakfast bar and keynote from Stefan Pretty, CEO Subbly.co, entitled “Bootstrappers do it better”.

Although many points were about about bootstrapping, one of the key takeaways from Stefan’s presentation was how bootstrappers should constantly ask the following 4 questions at every twist and turn in their journey: