Posts Tagged ‘Web Design’

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There’s a great discussion started by Michael Dorausch regarding Matt Cutts’ three steps process to build a site and get a ton of traffic. Michael transcribed and organized Matt Cutts’ evening presentation at PubCon this past week. Cutts made many great suggestions that any webmaster old or new ought to consider.

Step 1 - Make a Compelling Service

“If you’re trying to sell junk you’re going to have a much harder time. So spend the time, and the thing is you can start up a website really for a lot less money than you could even five or six years ago.

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In the web development world, the popularity of WordPress as an opensource blog manager / CMS has been exponential. As an SEO, I see this as a great opportunity to fine tune your WordPress blog to use proper title tags. As most of us know, search engines give much of their ranking power to your title tags. In addition, they can serve as a strong branding opportunity for your blog / business.

There are many tools available to aid your WordPress SEO efforts. One of the more popular tools is SEO Title Tag 2.0. This plug in allows users to add unique title tags to each page / post. For example, you can specify your homepage to have your business name and some keywords, and allow your posts to not carry the business name at all. In addition, users can manipulate the plug in to reverse the order of your title.

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If you’re like me, (and for your sake I hope you’re not even close) you love the internet in a totally unnatural way. You live it and breathe it. It’s what makes you whole and gives your life purpose.

See? Pretty scary.

But there are times when I’m on the internet, and for some reason I don’t feel fulfilled. These are times could be best described as walking barefoot in the most beautiful, serene, pleasant garden imaginable… and stepping on a slug.

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I have survived Day 1 of the Search Engine Strategies 2007 conference … albeit on information overload. It isn’t really that there was so much information that it was overwhelming. Taken in small pieces everything is perfectly digestible. It’s when I over fill myself that I waddle away overloaded. All that aside, I have to say that my first day was pretty good. I attended 4 sessions and learned something new from each of them.

Stoney introduced Rob and me to some pretty fun people. Rob asked me how it felt to be going to dinner with 12 guys, and I said: “Popular.” I also felt quite popular with all the rubber necking our Pole Position Marketing team shirts caused. We were quite the collective object of many a heads turning and fingers pointing. You could read people’s lips Check out the cool shirts. I bet next year there will be impersonators.

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During the design phase of building a website all too often we find that the end result is really nothing more than what somebody decided “looked good”. In some cases it’s a combination (or compromise) of what a handful of individuals have determined to be “good enough”. What many fail to realize is that web design and visitor usability go hand in hand.

How the site is developed, along with the underlying coding structure, plays a significant role on whether your site meets the usability requirements of your audience. Below are a number of individual elements that must be considered in every website design. While each plays a minor role over the total usability of a website, together they add up to be much more than the sum of their parts.

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Last week, while driving to work I completely lost my way. For about 10 minutes I had no idea how to get here, I was supremely frustrated and I feared that all of society was about to collapse into anarchy. No, I was not drunk.

Before I tell my harrowing story of the road, I want you to think about your website. Honestly, are you doing all you can to ensure usability? Is it enough to have 95% of your links unbroken? 97? 99? Do you just expect people to overlook the occasional link to nowhere, and just find their way?

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There is a great deal of talk within the search marketing world concerning the future introduction of personalization factors into search as a way to improve SERPS relevancy. Many regard this as the death of SEO. It is reasoned that if each user is getting a unique and personalized search experience; the SEO cannot deduce the unique personalized signals used by search engines to help sort the search results. Furthermore, that any SEO techniques employed to optimize a web page would probably boost rankings for only a handful of searchers.

I strongly disagree. In fact I see personalization as ushering in a new era of SEO, in which search optimizers are able to target specific audiences with great precision. This will be, as Stoney has so eloquently defined, the era of Destination Marketing.

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Color psychology is an area of research which explores how colors affect human emotions and behavior. The direct applicability of this information to professional marketing has long been known and continues to be a cornerstone of advertising development.
In fact, at its core, advertising is simply the art and science of influencing human behavior via impersonal mediums such as printed ads.

Color psychology, as an area of academic research, lacks a coherent, accepted body of knowledge; however, information gleaned from marketing professionals who have put the principles of color psychology into real-world application, can provide some heavy artillery for your web marketing arsenal.

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Our fearless leader and CEO of Pole Position Marketing, Stoney deGeyter, is teaching a class at Truckee Meadows Community College (TMCC) here in Reno, Nevada. Launched in 1998, PPM is Reno’s leading search engine optimization and website marketing firm. For nearly a decade, Stoney has provided local and global business owners increased website visibility, top search engine rankings, and boosted online conversions.
Registration has begun for “Website Marketing Performance Strategies,” an intensive 12-hour course, taught in four three-hour segments, covering all facets of online marketing including:

• Building a Search Engine friendly website
• In depth keyword research
• Understanding a Search Engine
• On- and off-page search engine optimization (aka SEO)
• Google AdWords and Pay-Per-Click campaigns
• Link building strategies
• Tracking your traffic and understanding stats

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I was recently browsing the web for new information on website quality evaluation when I stumbled across Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. While lightly perusing the guidelines for any updates, I thought that it might be worthwhile to explore the guidelines in-depth. However to make the review more interesting I will be approaching each guideline in one of 4 possible ways. Each of which reflects a different perspective in the search world.

• P - Paranoogle - “Shhhh! Googlebot can Hear You…”
• N - Nihiloogle - “Guidelines are Meaningless… just like the Universe”
• Z - Zealoogle - “Google is the very fabric of my existence”
• J - Jasonoogle- Unfiltered and honest thoughts by yours truly.”

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