Posts Tagged ‘navigation’

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Yesterday we rolled out a a brand new design for EMP. Aside from the design improvements (the first in three years) we added a lot of customization that will benefit us and hopefully make for a better usability experience for all of you. We’re still tinkering with some things, fixing broken links, etc. so be patient.

One of the biggest changes we’ve made is moving (EMP) E-Marketing Performance back to our company domain. As of now, www.eMarketingPerformance.com redirects to www.PolePositionMarketing.com/emp, it’s new permanent home. All the redirects are in place but if you’ve linked to this blog recently and you would like to go back and change the URL of the link, that would be greatly appreciated!

We’ve removed all the Google ads and fully integrated the PPM navigation bar into the blog for easy access back to the money site! Of course, now we just got to start posting some fresh content. Oh, and the sight is lightning fast.

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• Feel Great Naked: Confidence Boosters for Getting Personal
• Do You Know Your Visitors? 5 Points to Consider
• Content Strategy: Key Elements To Grab Online Readers Attention
• Site Navigation and Usability: Easy Tips for Happy Users
• Tips on Content Centered Link Building
• 5 Recommended Ways to Build Your Opt-In List
• Are Internal Links Weighted the Same as External Links by Google?

There is no better way to create an infinite amount of duplicate content on your site than to force session IDs onto each visitor. Typically, session IDs are used for tracking a single visitor’s navigation path through the site, including the adding or removing products from the shopping cart. They are great for tracking purposes, but really, really bad for search engines and inbound linking.

Ok, first of all, that’s a bad URL shown above, but aside from that, tacked on at the end there is the session ID. Both URLs pull the same page pulled open via a different browsing session. The bad stuff happens if the session IDs also get attached when the search engines come for a visit.

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Search engine spiders can be very forgiving with a lot of duplicate content issues. I’ve found that, given enough time, the engines learn when two websites or web pages are complete duplicates of the other. Once they figure that out then they basically understand that a link to one is a link to the other, etc. One version will ultimately be dropped from the index in favor of the other.

There are two basic problems with this. First, it all takes time. Until the search engines figure out which dupes should be “merged” you’re essentially splitting link flow. Two inbound links, one to each version, produce only have the power than two links both pointing to a single version.

The second problem is that you leave it to the search engines to decide which pages or site should be dropped from the index. When you let the search engines decide, you lose essential control.

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Lately I’ve been seeing a lot of sites where the designers were a bit lazy on the coding of the visual elements. Especially when it comes to creating new styles for the style sheet. In CSS, it’s pretty easy to develop a style that allows you to have certain portions of text display exactly how you want. But apparently, coming up with a unique style and name is just. too. difficult. So instead of naming a new style, the developers just style an Hx tag and then plaster it throughout the site.

One site that we’ve been working with has just come from a fresh re-design. Once we started digging into the code, we’ve found that the designers have taken some pretty extreme liberties with the Hx tags.

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Like a sound site architecture and directory structure, product categorization can play a significant role in how both search engines and users are able to access your products. There are two important things to consider when determining how to categorize your products. 1) Is each product assigned to the most appropriate category or categories? and 2) is multiple categorization creating duplicate content? The first issue frustrates your users and the second the search engines.

Looking for examples of both of these I found exactly what I was looking for on The Home Depot website. Click here to keep learning

There are two kinds of duplicate content: content that is duplicated on multiple websites sites and content that is duplicated on multiple pages of a single site. I believe the search engines treat each differently and, of course, there may be different standards applied duplicate content within each of these two main differentiations, depending on the cause and instance.

Please note that I’ve not done any in-depth testing of this issue so everything I’m presenting here are my own theories. But I think as far as untested theories go, it’s pretty solid.

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SEO

• Makeshift Anchor Text… Link Title Attribute vs Image Alt Tags: Which is Better?
• Rewriting URLs: SEO for CMS, E-Commerce, and Dynamic Sites
• Create Forms in Google Docs Spreadsheet
• Optimizing site structures through diverse navigation

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Audio feed[audio:http://www.polepositionmarketing.com/emp/blog-audio/usability-review.mp3]

Performing a complete website review is rarely easy. I’ve found that you can start a site analysis intending to spend just a few minutes looking over it only to find that it quickly spirals into a multi-hour marathon of research. Complete website reviews can be time consuming and often produce many more hours of work beyond that.

One of the problems is that people tend want to skip right to search engine optimization forgetting that users matter. Many people want to rush into the marketing without realizing that the website itself is part of the marketing process. This is a shame.

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Forget about the details of setting up an AdWords, Search Marketing or adCenter campaign. — You aren’t going to find those instructions here. At least not today anyway. If you’re looking for that kind of information, each vendor has a pretty extensive step-by-step process they’ll walk you through. (Although tips on those instructions are always good – that is another post.)

What you will find here is a basic question that you need to ask yourself. Before even considering how to compose your ad text or create the keyword list, what is the FIRST question that needs asked? Is it about the budget? No. How about the CPC bids? No, that’s not the first either.

So if ad text isn’t first, keywords aren’t first, budget isn’t and CPC certainly isn’t, then what is the question needing answered? If you’re job is like mine, and you manage other people’s PPC accounts, you’ve got to understand what your client sells, and how their site is organized. So you the first question you have to ask is:

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