The latest SEO Industry news, notes, and chat.
There are a lot of elements to making a good website that you have to consider. Fonts, borders, headers, general layout, accessibility… point after point to check and recheck. It can be a little bit hectic, but ultimately the work pays off. But that doesn’t mean you can’t take shortcuts where you can find them. One of my favorite types of shortcut is color testing. You can find a ton…
Every web site should have a plan. Even something as simple as making your own personal blog means figuring out what it is for and how it should look. Free and fee-based templates likely don’t do everything you want so they need to be adapted to fit. Planning a web site is much harder than it may seem. Not only that, the more expertise you have on hand, the more…
Usability has always been an important part of any website design. Now that we have so many features, platforms and tools, especially mobile web design and those built with Flash or HTML5, it is more important than ever to do thorough testing – both for catching potential bugs, and in ensuring that all users (handicapped, mobile, tablet, ect) will be able to properly see and enjoy the benefits of your…
For Marketers: Explaining the Importance of Usability to Site Owners – Part Two Last week I launched this series on selling usability to site owners by offering some of my favorite eye opening pitches to prospective clients. Visual proof is always easy to do. But, it’s not enough. When a prospective client approaches a search engine marketing company for marketing help, most, if not all, of the proposed strategy is…
Most web site owners are so focused on search engine marketing that they neglect the appearance or functionality of their web site. Selling usability as part of the marketing strategy is a new idea for many SEO’s. Unless a site owner is tracking site activity and watching the data, they really have no idea if their site is performing as well as it could be. For usability purposes even the…
Sadly, it’s not unusual for an SEO to get some pushback on some of the changes they want to make to a client’s website. The reasons for the objections can be as varied as the people making them. Take all of them seriously and address them politely, of course – and pay particular heed to the paranoid sysadmin. Where most people see paranoia, the paranoid sysadmin sees simple security consciousness….
When you are making a blog or website, what do you first consider? The overall template or layout? Content and SEO? Hosting services and platform? Well, one thing is for sure…you should have user experience at the forefront of your thoughts, as well. Making sure that visitors to your site find navigation easy, information useful and contact a breeze is one of the most important parts of developing a page….
By Ninja Karina Reviews and testimonials are a great way to improve the conversion rate of your website for many reasons: 1. Testimonials and reviews convey trust. Every product and service on your site should allow the option for the user to write a review. Each time a user makes a purchase, send a message to encourage them to write a review. Most people don’t mind sharing their thoughts if…
When you’re doing frequent SEO site reviews, two of the words that come up the most are “duplicate content”. Now there are a lot of reasons and ways for content to be deemed as duplicate and some situations are more troublesome than others. But one in particular seems to present a unique problem for many e-commerce sites. Product descriptions are a requirement, without them no one would know what they…
A colleague recently lent me an awesome book about web standards, a fairly famous one, called Designing with Web Standards By Jeffery Zeldman and Ethan Marcotte. It is not your usual techy read, it makes a good case for the importance of web standards generally, addressing important counterpoints such as why are web standards still important despite that fact that browsers are willing to render code that is sometimes grotesquely…
During some routine keyword research I stumbled across some keywords related to “Free Website content”. It looked something like this: Ok so in terms of relative search volume that’s not too bad. But it does say there’s still a good chunk of people out there who haven’t gotten the memo about content in a post-Panda world. So for anyone who is still missing the writing on the wall when it…