Posts Tagged ‘Web Design’

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It wasn’t all that long ago that people in my industry had to convince business owners of the value of going online. For the most part those days are past. I think the value of the web has proven itself more than we can possible realize. Today I can pay bills, stream movies, schedule and even watch my DVR from anywhere in the world, so long as I have internet access. Getting your business online isn’t just about making money–it’s about accessibility.

Even if your business as little commercial viability online, having an accessible website allows people to learn more about you, your products or services, what types of things you do, what you believe in and care about, and how to contact you if needed. It’s about allowing people to come to you instead of pushing yourself on to them that is typical of most forms of advertising.

If you run a business of any size and you still have not made the jump to the Web, why not? If you know your business can make money online, (i.e. you sell an in-demand product or service) then investing money to build your web presence is almost a no-brainer. The question then becomes, how to do it right so you can be profitable.

If you run one of those niche businesses where online success isn’t a certainty, there is still value in being online. There is also value in investing in a bit of marketing in order to make sure your site can be found by those looking to find you, even if they just seek information.

Regardless if your business that can make a profit online or if the site’s just another way to provide information to the public, there are a few things that you’ll want to consider when budgeting for your website’s success.

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• What Romance Novels Can Teach You About Powerful Copywriting
• A Remedy for Blogger Inferiority Complex
• Make Your Website Content Explode
• Persuasive Web Design
• B2B Analytics: What Should Be Measured

This is one of those Basic SEO posts, that i feel silly writing about because “everybody knows” this information already. But then I look at websites of prospects and I realize that not everybody really does know. Or maybe they do and they just forget. In any case, this will be a quick reminder / refresher.

Most duplicate content issues have to do with on-page content. Mass page/content duplication can often have a negative effect on how the search engines spider and index your site. While I believe the title tag is the single most important piece of real estate on your site, duplication here is likely to have the least effect on the search engine crawlers. It will, however, have an effect on rankings, but that’s another discussion. Even still, it’s a duplicate issue that absolutely must be addressed for tactical SEO performance.

Duplicate titles is something we often see on newly developed websites or content management systems that don’t allow proper control of individual pages. While I get how when developing new websites the title tag can get overlooked, I’m amazed that people develop web software that still doesn’t take title tag customization into account.

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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.

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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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

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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.

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Last week I wrote a post about how poor product categorization can frustrate shoppers and search engines alike. Strictly from a user standpoint, improperly thinking out how each product should be categorized can cause many products from being found by your shoppers. When determining the category or categories of any product, you have to put yourself in the mind of the searcher. How would they look for it?

In much the same way, the domain name(s) you select can also be a preventative measure against someone finding you. We can use The Home Depot as an example once again. My first attempt to get to their site I typed in www.thehomedepot.com. That goes nowhere. The URL to reach them is www.homedepot.com. This is a clear case of “what are they thinking?” The last time I checked (which was today) they bill themselves as THE Home Depot, not just Home Depot. It’s right there in their logo!

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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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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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