Is Placing Content Higher up the Page an SEO Myth?

November 19th, 2007 by blogadmin | Posted in SEO, Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

The somewhat misleadlingly titled article 16 Elements You Must Include in Your Site Design has been proving popular in Delicious lately.

Guideline #5 recommends that you:

Place content near the top of the page. Search engines spider the content that comes first in your source code.

Nothing too earth-shattering there about considering SEO when building web pages. This has been said before many times.

However, through a coincidence of timing, search engine optimization expert Jill Whalen covered this very topic in the latest issue of her High Rankings Advisor newsletter but provided quite different advice.

Asked by a reader about whether body copy appearing 2/3 of the way down a page’s source code negatively impacts search engine rankings, she replied:

This is an old SEO myth. It actually makes no difference where in the source
code the copy of the page shows up.

That’s a pretty definitive statement about a widely-held SEO belief. However, given Jill’s expertise in this area, I am inclined to believe her.

What do others think – do you agree or disagree?

Domain Name Guide

November 19th, 2007 by blogadmin | Posted in Website Design | No Comments »

Last night I was reading through a forum topic in which affiliates and network marketers posted up their best domain names that they used.

Many of them were staggeringly bad.

Make It Verbal

For example, one affiliate who was promoting VWD’s e-lotto program, chose the domain www.vwd-e-lotto.co.uk.
Can you imagine saying that over the phone?

“Thats WWW dot V W D dash E dash lotto dot co dot UK.”

Very friendly. Grab a friend or family member and say your potential domain name — if they can’t remember it five minutes later or need you to say it more than once, it’s worthless.

Make It Memorable

I don’t know if there’s any official rule about this, but I’ve always stuck to the custom that brand names should, 99% of the time, be two or three syllables long. Almost every brand you can immediately think of will follow this rule (the only rulebreaker I can think of straight away is Coca-Cola). Try to make a domain name thats short and snappy. Splurge.com would be better than splurgeapparel.com. Keep the domain ONE word if possible.

Make It Unique

Forget using keywords in your domain name if you want a successful, sticky website. You simply don’t see official sites called mcdonaldshamburgers.com or something like starbucks-coffee-house.com, because all thats necessary is the brand name itself. Would ebay be as memorable if it was called ebayauctions.com? Another common mistake is picking a domain name based around another brand or domain you may be promoting. For example, an Amazon affiliate may think that buy-amazon-products.com would be a great investment. Wrong. If I’m searching for Amazon, I’m looking for Amazon’s website; I’m not generally going to care about some obscure results.

Make It Lazy

People are, in general, very lazy — and this applies tenfold online. Imagine you had something in mind that you wanted to purchase online, and there were two websites offering the product. One was called smexywidgetsonline.com, and the other was quib.com. Which are you more likely to type in?

Make It Simple

Not only are people lazy, but they’re not always geniuses either. Your hot idea for calling your domain name kwibu.com might sound pretty nifty, but if you were discussing the domain with a friend or colleague, could they go off and type it in correctly first time? Kweebu, kwiboo, qwebo… how was it spelt again? The verbal rule comes into play again here — you need to have a domain name that you can confidently tell people, and know that not only will they easily remember it, but they’ll have no problem typing it in.

Why you need website

November 19th, 2007 by blogadmin | Posted in Website Design | 1 Comment »

Every business from home based to large corporations need a professional website. For the vast majority of businesses a website will be a very effective sales channel and marketing tool. We’ve listed just a few reasons why a website can be such a powerful tool.

Low Cost
Utilizing the Internet for your business is very inexpensive. Unlimited connect accounts are generally available for less than $20/month and include Internet access and e-mail. You can start off with just using electronic mail (e-mail) as a way to communicate with existing customers and new ones.

E-mail
Communicate anywhere in the world with customers and employees and pay NO long distance telephone charges. And while you’re at it, you can “attach” other documents to your e-mail. For example, you can send an updated proposal to your representative across t he country, quickly and at no cost.

Customer Support
Provide personalized support for your customers with answers to common questions; assistance on specific products or services, provide a variety of ways in which you can be contacted. Do all this without answering a phone or hiring additional staff.

24/7 Operation
With e-mail, people can contact you anytime it is convenient for them. You can respond anytime that’s convenient for you. Of course, we suggest “timely-response” just as if someone called you. When you have a website, potential customers can find out about your products and services 24 hours a day. Isn’t this much better than getting a call at 5:00 AM from a customer in a time zone that’s 3 hours ahead of yours?

Global Reach
The Internet is being used on a regular basis by millions worldwide with more “connecting” every day. Many of the new users come from countries around the world. They want to buy the “latest and greatest” products. They have money. With the Internet they can become your customer! How much do you think it would cost you to advertise in the Times of London, the Tokyo Daily, and Moscow Today? Compare that to the cost of a website. The information you provide on your website is instantly available to every one of these users

Update or Change with ease
If you have produced “paper” catalogs, brochures, sales collateral’s, you know how difficult and expensive it is to change them. You want to add a new item. Oh no! The phone company changed your area code. No, no! What a pain with paper. With your Internet site, changing anything is a simple and inexpensive process.

Specials
Say you just received a new product and you want to advertise a “special.” Reaching your customers via the phone, sending a letter, or FAX would be time-consuming and expensive. With the Internet you can send out an e-mail to 500 of your best customers with the click of your mouse. You can put a “SPECIAL” notice on your website advertising the new product.

Top 10 Reasons Websites Don’t Succeed

November 19th, 2007 by blogadmin | Posted in Website Design | No Comments »

There are a lot of excellent websites out there and many have focused on improving the user experience in recent years, but there are still a lot of sites that fail to pay enough attention to usability issues.

After the jump, our list of the things that annoy us about websites, some from well known brands who really should know better…

1. Poor navigation
   People visit your website to find information or the product they are looking for. Navigation should be easy to find and use, and always located in the same spot on every page. Make users work too hard on this and they won’t hang around. Don’t try to reinvent the wheel with your navigation (a common complaint with Flash sites - see reason 4 for more), just make it as straightforward and obvious as possible.
2. Too many ‘Bookmark My Site’ buttons
   If someone wants to bookmark your site, they will do it, no need to ask them. In addition, adding this button wastes valuable space on your web page. Social Media Icons Overload Syndrome is another example of this sort of madness, as Matt Linderman has pointed out in the past.
3. Site intros / Interstitials
   See Forbes.com for a downright appalling example of this. NOBODY wants to watch a 30 second advert before they get to the article they want to read. At least with Forbes you can skip the intro, though some sites make it hard to find the link to do this. But that’s no use - we’ve stopped reading Forbes around these parts, just to avoid The Rage.
4. Excessive use of Flash
   Flash has its uses, but we don’t think there’s any reason for using it to power your website. When done badly, it can take up bandwidth, can confuse users with bizarre navigation and control mechanisms, and there are plenty of issues relating to accessibility. River Island, which stupidly relaunched a Flash-based site as recently as 2006, is one example of this - it even carries an apology to all the disabled customers who cannot access the site. On the flipside, Flash is sometimes used well for rich microsites, such as the one that supports the excellent Sony Bravia ads.
5. Overlay ads
   Thankfully, this kind of advertising is less prevelant than it used to be, but some sites still persist, including the likes of The Guardian and The Times (a shame as they are otherwise excellent sites). Overlays are simply awful for the user experience. Advertisers shouldn’t be buying them. Publishers should disown them and sort out their ad strategies, rather than selling out. Interruptive advertising will ultimately die. It’s this sort of thing that has led to the rise of pop-up blockers and ad-skipping PVRs/Tivo/Sky+ boxes. Read the rest of this entry »