Blog Category: website content

Reasons Why your PageRank Go Down

03 December 2012

Ask one group of people about PageRank, they’ll tell you it’s unimportant and that you shouldn’t focus too much on it. Ask another group, however, and they’ll swear that PageRankis one of the most crucial elements of SEO that you should focus on. So, which one is it?

Well, let’s just say that the facts are found in the middle. PageRank isn’t the be-all, end-all of a website, but it’s still important.

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What is internal navigation in web design

23 May 2012

As a newcomer to online business, one of the first things you need to worry about, long before funneling traffic and playing strongly to your niche, is the actual website which will house your product or service. Websites are almost literally a dime a dozen in today’s marketplace, and while simplicity certainly does sell, as evidenced by the dominance of social media sites, any site you construct needs to appeal to people and operate seamlessly.

For the time being, you can put your immaculate images, fancy Flash features and purple prose up on the shelf. Before you go adding these different aspects of your website, you first need to decide how they’re going to play off of one another. You need to categorize and streamline. You need to work on the internal navigation of your website. Below, we will discuss some of the finer points of internal navigation.

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How to use royalty free music in your web videos

20 April 2012

For designing and marketing a successful website, nothing beats an entertaining video. Properly formatted, well edited and enjoyable, a video is the perfect method of conveyance. Any message you want to get across, a video can do it. On the upside, great videos keep watchers interested and wanting to come back, so an enthralled base and repeat visitation is what you have to look forward to if you produce high-quality videos.

One of the best ways to make a video really sing, pun intended, is to add a music track to the video. However, whether you’re posting these vids on YouTube or Facebook to create a buzz, or whether you’re posting them directly on your website, there is always a chance of violating copyright laws.

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What to Look For when Researching Working Websites

13 April 2012

Out of the hundreds of millions of websites available online, only an incredibly small fraction are noticed by the public at large. And what’s worse, this small fraction is inherently niche specific, so it becomes even less likely that a website will ever be found. This is obviously why search engine optimization plays such a vital role in website design, and it’s also why a smart site designer will model his or her site after a working, successful website.

Researching the web to find different successful websites can be a lot trickier than it sounds, however. Just because a website receives traffic and is popular, that doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s anything you can—or would want to—duplicate. So, what exactly are you looking for when researching a website to serve as a model for your own template? That’s a relative question that’s awfully tough to answer

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What are eye-tracking studies and how do they help my website?

10 February 2012

Since the earliest days of e-commerce people have been trying to understand how they can optimize websites to take advantage of the way people view information on a page. We already know a lot about how people read a page or an advertisement, so it isn’t that difficult to transfer this knowledge to a web page.

What Are Eye-Tracking Studies?

Eye tracking studies are studies done using a specialized piece of eyewear that records how the eye responds to stimuli, both active and passive. These studies use sensitive cameras and electrodes to see where the eye naturally rests, given various things to look at. Some of the results are quite surprising:

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How do you choose brand vs domain name for your new website?

18 January 2012

A lot of people ask me this when starting a new website, and I usually give them the same answer: Go with keywords. There are many reasons for this, which I’ll get to in a minute, but first let’s have a look at the case for using a catchy brand name as your domain.

There are plenty of websites that use a phrase or name that isn’t a common English word, and they are wildly popular. But they’re popular because they’ve spent millions of dollars on above-the-line advertising to associate that phrase or word they’ve made up with their business activity. A classic example is Wonga.com.

Wonga.com is a microlender - one of the first to gain a real foothold on the internet. You’d never naturally associate the meaningless word “Wonga” with borrowing money, which is why Wonga has spent so much money on catchy jingles, expensive TV ads, content network banners, etc. Personally I think they could have got a lot more bang for their buck by calling their business “QuickCash” or something - but they didn’t ask me for some reason.

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How do you structure up a returns policy for your retail website

25 November 2011

Sooner or later, someone is going to want to return something they bought from your online store. How you handle this process can decide whether or not that customer returns to buy from you again, even after having a bad experience with one product. Your returns policy will depend on what kind of industry you are in. For example, you cannot have the same returns policy for electronics and for underwear, but there are certain things you can do to make sure it is as usable as possible, without costing you a fortune.

1) Know the Law

Consumers are savvy about their rights, and so you need to be too. Regardless of your product, there are certain minimum consumer protection laws in most countries that govern when a person is entitled to a refund, and in how much time. You can choose to stick to the minimum here, or you can tailor it to suit your website specifically. Either way, if your returns policy does not meet the minimum legal requirements, someone will eventually call you out on it.

2) Protect Yourself

While it’s important to worry about your customers, it is equally important to make sure that they don’t bankrupt you by constantly returning products you cannot resell. Make sure that if you sell something consumable, or something that loses value immediately after being opened or used, that you protect yourself as much as possible against abuse of your returns policy.

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What should you write on an About Us page?

23 November 2011

Whether your website is a large online retailer or a special interest blog, you will invariably have an “About” page. This is the page that everyone feels they need, and yet people seldom put the right kind of information on it. If your website is a personal blog, there is a good chance that nobody will need to look at your About Us page to find this out. For most other kinds of websites, this page presents an opportunity to connect with a very important type of visitor - the visitor who is interested in knowing more about your site, or your business.

When Not to Market Yourself

Although the About Us page presents an easy opportunity to market to your visitors (clicking on the “About Us” link can be equated to saying “I want you to try and sell yourself to me”), that doesn’t necessarily mean that this is the place where you should put yet more sales copy.

Once a visitor is on your site, they are probably already interested in the products you sell or the services you provide. They don’t necessarily want to read more of the same thing that you have on your home page and in your product descriptions.

Why Someone Clicks on “About Us”

Most of the time, when someone visits your About Us page, they are interested in some of the following things:

• What exactly does this company do/who owns it/what is their business objective?

• Is this a legitimate business, and if I want to talk to someone is there a real person behind it?

• Where is the business based, and how did it start? (less likely)
These aren’t all the questions they could ask, but they’re good ones to begin with. You have to remember that most of the people who come to your site are probably not as interested in these things as you are.

Internet users have short attention spans, especially when it comes to big pages of text. Here’s how to give out the most information, make yourself look good, and not lose your reader’s interest.

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Have you taken note of your image sizes? A guide on image compression and how to do it

18 November 2011

One of the most distressing moments in a computer professional’s life is when their mother tells them she wants to email them some photos. Unless you have a very high speed internet connection, this means your inbox will be backed up for the next hour as you download six image files that would barely fit on a CD.

We can blame the problem on the free availability of high speed broadband and near-infinite storage, or we can blame it on ignorance, but most people have no concept of what a megabyte actually is. When you ask them how big the image is, they will most likely say “about the size of the screen, maybe a bit narrower”.

Unfortunately, this ignorance of file sizes extends to people who build and own websites - if you didn’t grow up with a background in computers, and learnt how to build websites using free tools such as WordPress, then you might not be too savvy about speeding up your user experience.

Here are a few things to note, before we get to the actual process of compressing an image.

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Are you designing your website for widescreen monitors yet?

16 November 2011

Technology changes all the time, and the type of technology people like to use is always shifting. The latest fashion is to have screens that are much wider than they are tall - it makes for better video watching, and allows you to see more information on a screen in one go. Yet strangely, most websites are still the width of early 2000s monitors - around 800 pixels.

This means there is loads of wasted space on either side, and visitors have to scroll down two or three times to see all of the content that you could easily have fit on one screen if you had designed your website for wide screens. Let’s review a few basic concepts of web design, to see how we can take advantage of wide screen monitors.

Above The Fold

This is simply the term for the content that people can see when they visit your website, without having to scroll down. One of the most irritating things to find on a website is when the top screen is entirely taken up by a fancy header and advertisements, and all of the content you want is two or three mouse scrolls down.

With the advent of wide screen monitors, you can now take advantage of this landscape-style layout to present more content to your visitors at first glance. This means you can direct their attention to the things you want, and you can still have your header and advertisements in the same frame.

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How to Find sites that are stealing your content

09 November 2011

Content stealing is rife on the internet, and there is every chance that if you have written something useful, interesting or insightful that someone will steal it and put it up on their own blog within a few weeks. Fortunately, there are easy ways to find this out.

Unfortunately, there is not a lot you can do about it if you do find that someone has stolen your content.

Most fortunately of all, though, is that thanks to changes made in 2010 - 2011 to Google’s search ranking algorithms, people who steal content seldom gain very much advantage from it, reducing the need for you to lose sleep over your stolen content and traffic.

Content Stealing vs Pingbacks

When I made my first website, I saw to my great distress that someone had used some kind of script to take excerpts from my content and place it on their blog (with little or no context). I didn’t see the point, but I was annoyed - until I realized that they had posted the link to my article there. While I didn’t get much traffic from referrals from the site, the incoming links did help my own articles to gain search results positions.

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What is a favicon and why you need it

07 November 2011

A favicon is a tiny graphic that appears in the left of the browser address bar, and in most browsers on the tab next to your site’s name. It might seem like a relatively insignificant little image that represents more effort than it is worth, but it can make a huge difference to a website owner.

In an age of tabbed browsing, short attention spans and an almost infinite universe of potential sources of information and products, your favicon can be the one thing that differentiates you from the competition. It makes your website, when reduced to one of many tabs at the top of a visitor’s browser.

Effect on Visitor Psychology

When you have over half a dozen tabs open, to the point where the visitor can only see a small portion of the name of your site on its tab, a favicon makes all the difference in the world. It makes your website unique in the row of bite-size information chunks at the top of a browser - but most importantly, it makes the visitor reluctant to close that tab unless they are certain they have gotten all of the information or use out of that tab that they can.

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