Posts Tagged ‘Usability’

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• Web Usability: As Few Clicks As Possible
• How to Manage Problems You Can’t Fix
• How to be Successful in Social Media: Be Yourself
• Agency + Client = Superhero Link Building Team
• Achieving Balance in a Social World
• 5 Ways to Make Money from Blogging
• An Embarrassment Of Dead Link Riches
• How to Get Content and Earn Credibility with Old News

• 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?

Tomorrow afternoon I’ll be headed over to the Grand Sierra Resort here in Reno, NV to participate in the Business Professionals of America National Leadership Conference. I’ll be a judge for the Web Site Design Team. Yeah, I know, I’m not a designer, I’m hoping that I’ll be able to provide a good perspective from my knowledge of website usability.

The event will be held between 11:30 AM and 4:30 PM. Lucky for me lunch is provided!

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Top Posts

1. The World’s Absolute Best Link Building Technique
2. 20 Ways to NAVIGATE to Higher Conversions
3. How Poor Product Categorization Can Frustrate Shoppers and Search Engines Alike
4. Qualities of a Good Leader
5. 9 (+1) Tips For Writing User-Friendly Content
6. 7 Ways to Make Your Home Page a Home Run for Usability
7. Web Developers: Please Stop Using the Hx Tag as a Design Element
8. 25 Ways to DESIGN Your Way to Higher Conversions
9. Clever New Baskin Robbins Logo
10. A Little Favicon Goes a Long, Long Way

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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.

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Registering multiple domain names is, and should be, common practice for businesses wishing to protect their brands. I discussed buying alternative domain names earlier this week, but I wanted to address it again, this time from the context of duplicate content issues which may arise if you don’t set up your new domain names properly.

Domain Name Redirects

The first thing you need to consider after you’ve purchased additional domain names is to decide what you want to do with them. Not every domain name needs to have a site on it, though it wouldn’t be a bad idea to have some kind of generic company page in place for lack of anything else. But for the most part, you will probably want to redirect all your alternate domain names to your main company site. This is especially true of many of the issues covered in the article linked above.

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Last month I posted some of my thoughts and theories on duplicate content where I explained the different types of duplicate content that the search engines find. I wanted to expand a bit on the in-site duplicate content that we often see with various websites. I’ll take these one at a time over the course of the next few days or weeks, depending on how often I post.

www. vs. no www.

Real quick, go to your browser and type in yoursite.com. Does the URL in the browsers address bar change to a) http://yoursite.com or b) http://www.yoursite.com?

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I remember when favicons first started to appear, it was like, hey, how cool is that. But now they are so common that I hardly notice them anymore. Well, no, that’s not exactly true. I do notice them, and like them, it’s just that I’m not surprised to see them anymore. But I AM surprised when I don’t see them.

Ok, let’s back up. What is a favicon?

If you’re reading this post from emarketingperformance.com then you need to do no more than look up to the address bar. If you’re reading this through a feed reader I’ll go ahead and throw a screen capture for you:

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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.

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