I recently read this nice article about testing your website. It’s pretty good and I highly recommend it. A couple points i gleaned from Daniel Waisberg, the author.
1. Your site is a laboratory, not a sculpture. Sometimes we’ll have a client that wants their site, or a page to be 100% perfect before it goes live. Sometimes, this is also when their old page is either hideous and SEO and visual cryptonite, or it doesn’t even exist at all. I like to get the new page live as soon as possible, then tweak it as we go.
2. Calls to action. He emphasizes the importance of these on a page.
“Too often calls to action are hidden, by a loaded page with too many graphic elements, by appearing below the fold or by a bad design choice (too small, faint color, or a button that does not look like a button). By improving the call to action and making it prominent on the page, you can sometimes boost your conversion rates drastically”
Greg Grothaus of Google explains very well Google’s philosophy of duplicate content. They realize that a lot of duplicate content is not manipulative but simply webmasters trying to take the same content and make is useful in different formats.
For example, if you have content on a page about “10 tips on package fragile glass for your move”, and want to include it in print format as well. Google doesn’t penalize you for the duplicate content. They just include one of the sources and not the other. We’ve been telling our clients for a long time that Google doesn’t penalize duplicate like people think, it’s nice hearing the explanation to how and why they even recognize it. Spam on the other hand, they attach pretty aggressively.
Greg then shares a simple explanation on how to prevent issues that may arise by utilizing the 301 redirect and the new rel= “canonical” tag. I highly recommend viewing the information directly from the horses (Googles) mouth.
I know, lately our blog is starting to look like the SEOmoz love festival. But, I do love those guys and festivals are fun…but I digress…
Microsites don’t pass the link juice onto your main site like you may think. Instead, integrate your blog or microsite into your main site, and get all the links, with their diversity, etc. into you main site. Helps for the short and long run. Rand walks us through it. Take a look:
It’s been around for a bit, but we’re now using the Broken Link Checker WordPress plugin. It’s a great addition, as it automatically notifies you when a link is broken on your blog or site. I have it set up to check the site every 3 days, as you can easily have it check your site at set times. You can also manually check it at any time. Pretty nice addition and super easy to use.
Found a hot twitter plugin for wordpress. It’s called Twitter Tools and is a compilation of everything you need to keep your twitter updated with blog posts and blog updated with twitter posts. It’s my favorite so far. If you know of any other really good ones, I’d love to hear your suggestions.
I like this video about large eCommerce sites and SEO. Trying to get large numbers of products on a site and still have the site relatively ‘flat’ is a difficult thing. These guys share some good tips on doing it with sitemaps and more. Check it out.
Twitter added a new search feature, and I like it. They made their mark on the blogosphere with their micro-blogs and now they are doing it again with search. When you want the most current information, and want to know what’s the buzz right now…twitter search is perfect. Up to the second results that grab what people are tweeting about. Kinda cool.
The look and feel is classic twitter minimalistic design. Big search box, great call to action, what’s popular this week, today and right now. Add a new twitter bird and you’ve got the new layout.
Who knows, with people being so hyper sensitive about the timeliness of their information- I can see an application. Thoughts?
