Ask ten people what SEO is, and you’re likely to get ten different answers. Given the industry’s unsavoury past, this is hardly surprising. Keyword stuffing, gateway pages, and comment spam earned the first search engine optimisers a deservedly poor reputation within the web community.
Snake oil salesmen continue to peddle these harmful techniques to unsuspecting website owners today,... Read More
When Google announced its preference for user-friendly responsive websites in June 2012, I immediately saw an influx of posts that equated responsive design with search engine optimization. This is unfortunate because, while responsive websites can be SEO-friendly, some responsive websites are not.
I’ve detailed some of the common errors that give responsive websites problems in search... Read More
This article is a collective reply of the active members of the SEO community to the article "The Inconvenient Truth About SEO" in which Paul Boag discusses the value of search engine optimization for website owners. Written and edited by Bill Slawski and Will Critchlow, this article explains what exactly "SEO" means today and discusses the common view many Web designers share about the work... Read More
Do you own a website? Do you want to be number one on Google? Whatever you do, don’t spend money on aggressive search engine optimization (SEO). I know that sounds like an extreme position to take. However, a lot of website owners see search engine optimization as the answer to their search ranking woes, when things are considerably more complex.
The inconvenient truth is that the best... Read More
Due to big changes in the SEO landscape, designers, photographers, videographers and writers have new opportunities to build their reputation, expand brand awareness and generate more leads. This post describes five important developments that content creators should be aware of, and then we’ll outline several ways to capitalize on them.
Thanks to self-publishing and social networks,... Read More
Google Search likes simple, easy-to-crawl websites. You like dynamic websites that show off your work and that really pop. But search engines can’t run your JavaScript. That cool AJAX routine that loads your content is hurting your SEO. Google’s robots parse HTML with ease; they can pull apart Word documents, PDFs and even images from the far corners of your website. But as far as they’re... Read More
Part 1 of “Improving the Online Shopping Experience” focused on the upper part of the purchase funnel and on ways to get customers to your website and to find your products. Today, we move down the funnel, looking at ways to enable customers to make the decision to buy and to guide them through the check-out process.
Inform and reinforce the customer’s buying decisions by offering... Read More
Amazon turned sweet sixteen this year, and, by extension, so did online shopping as we know it. As online shopping has grown over the past 16 years, so have user needs and expectations related to the online shopping experience. Setting up shop online is easy, but creating an experience that satisfies target users is a different story altogether.
In the traditional journey of a purchase,... Read More
Hyperlinks (or links) connect Web pages. They are what make the Web work, enabling us to travel from one page to the next at the click of a button. As Web Standardistas put it, "without hypertext links the Web wouldn't be the Web, it would simply be a collection of separate, unconnected pages.". So without links, we'd be lost. We look for them on the page when we want to venture further. Sure,... Read More
