Internet Marketing Ninjas Blog

The latest SEO Industry news, notes, and chat.

Category: Website Usability
22 Apr 2014

How to Make Your Web Site A Conversions Leader

Posted by to User Intent, Website Usability

There are not enough great examples of websites that convert well.  How would you like to be a conversions leader? Whether referred to as usability, user experience, persuasive architecture, persuasive design, conversions design, customer experience design, searchability, or findability, the unifying factor behind high website conversion rates is the human to human connection.  Without it, your website will struggle to meet your business requirements.  It will fail to be remembered.  It… [Read More…]

06 Jan 2014

Why Product & Marketing Need To Be One Team (Part 2)

Posted by to Content, Design, Link Building, Management, Marketing, Tips and Tricks, Website Usability

How many times have you researched the competition only to discover that a huge driver for their marketing is their awesome product? It’s happened to me more times than I can count. The fundamental lesson to take away from this is that you must integrate the product and marketing teams. There are many reasons to do so, including: What we saw in part 1 of this series, namely that Facebook is… [Read More…]

23 Dec 2013

Facebook Is Replacing Google & The Dramatic Shift This Heralds For Marketers (Part 1)

Posted by to Branding, Google, Link Building, Management, Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, Social Media, Tips and Tricks, Website Usability

Facebook is eating Google’s lunch, which has far-reaching implications for the tactics marketers use, and more broadly has implications for marketing strategy and the relationship between marketing and product teams. Let’s look at this more closely. When Google ranks sites, it can’t really rank them based on product quality since it has no reliable signals for product quality. Put differently… Google is an information retrieval service… not a recommendation service…. [Read More…]

03 Sep 2013

Why Websites Don’t Work

Posted by to Website Usability

The most common question I’m asked is, “Don’t companies know their web sites are awful?” It is difficult to answer that question with a quick answer. However, the best answer is simply “No.” They don’t know. Whether the web site is from a Fortune 100 company, brand new start up business, or if the web site was designed by a professional web design company or an in-house staff, the investment… [Read More…]

06 Aug 2013

Is Your Web Site Speed Dating Your Visitors?

Posted by to Website Usability

Imagine your web site grabs a chair at a small table and sits directly across from someone it has never met before and has five seconds to make a great impression. What would your web site do? Web site design is often compared to dating and courtship. Each species of life on our planet goes about attracting candidates for relationships in a variety of ways and so do web sites…. [Read More…]

16 Jul 2013

Google Says Stand on One Leg

Posted by to Website Usability

Whenever Google announces a new algorithm update or change in guidelines, there are two typical reactions from site owners. Fear or fiddle sticks. A quick look at threads in Webmasterworld and Cre8asiteforums illustrate the Google Game. The game is a combination of Simon Says and Red Light, Green Light. When Google says, “Don’t buy links”, there’s a massive scramble of panicked site owners trying to hide months of costly investments… [Read More…]

02 Jul 2013

Reader Experience and Conversions

Posted by to Website Usability

Successful web sites are those that are easy to see, read and comprehend. So why do webmasters choose barriers to these in their designs? Creativity on a web site does have its limits. In the late 1990’s I was big into animation. I could make any image have moving parts and it would look really cool on a web page. Then I went through my 3D stage where I added… [Read More…]

18 Jun 2013

How to Nourish Your Web Site

Posted by to Website Usability

The life of your web site begins with a seed that you plant, grow and nurture as it grows and bears the fruits of your labor. It won’t thrive without your attention. This is the natural law of all things we create. Your web site might be your own personal garden that you imagined, planted, and work on often by weeding out what your analytics indicates is not performing well…. [Read More…]

11 Mar 2013

10 Free Tools to Pick and Test Your Perfect Color (for Better Usability)

Posted by to Website Usability

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… [Read More…]

26 Feb 2013

Commonly Ignored, But Important, Web Design Requirements

Posted by to Website Usability

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… [Read More…]

25 Feb 2013

4 Awesome Usability-Testing Bookmarklets

Posted by to Website Usability

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… [Read More…]

29 Jan 2013

It’s Not the SEO’s Fault

Posted by to Search Engine Optimization, User Intent, Website Usability

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… [Read More…]

22 Jan 2013

For Marketers: Explaining the Importance of Usability to Site Owners – Part One

Posted by to Website Usability

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… [Read More…]