Archive for the 'Web Design' Category

If your job involves convincing clients why they need to redesign their sites with SEO in mind, sooner or later you’ll run into the splash screen conundrum. Splash screens are terrible from an SEO perspective, but some clients love them more than their own children. They think about their website the same way they see the receptionist at their office in the real world… when you enter the front door, they want the first thing you see to be a pretty face.

Creative companies are the worst offenders when it comes to demanding splash screens. If you’re doing SEO consulting for a site related to the entertainment industry, for example, you’re probably dealing with someone who places a lot of value on the “Wow!” factor. They think that just because you’re a fan of Adam Lambert, you’ll be more than happy to sit around for 30 seconds watching celestial bodies swooshing through the universe as the artist’s name is slowly revealed. They couldn’t be more wrong.

The main effect of a splash screen is to cause valuable visitors to leave your site. A bounce rate of 20% or more on splash screen pages is typical, which may cause you to say, “Well, heck, that’s a lot better than the 50% bounce rate on the home page!” But if your splash page is the default entrance to your site, it’s probably getting 3x to 5x more traffic than your home page. So maybe 100,000 people enter your site every month through the splash screen, while only 30,000 enter directly through the home page. If you’ve got a 20% bounce rate on your splash screen, that means you’re losing 20,000 visitors every month before they even see your home page! Wouldn’t you rather drive that traffic to the home page instead of losing it while your users stare at some stupid Flash animation?

You want users to get “inside” your site ASAP. Don’t leave them waiting for someone to “open the door”!

Here are some of the main reasons why you don’t want your user experience to start with a splash:

Hurts Search Rankings
Having a splash screen usually complicates your website’s structure. Search engines rank top-level URLs first, so having your home page under /us/wpcontent/home/ (or any other nested directory structure) can really hurt your rankings. Why waste your top-level URL on unimportant splash content?

Splash pages are not optimized for search engine indexing. The content of a splash screen is typically Flash or graphics heavy. This lack of text makes the page nearly invisible to text-based web crawlers… that is, all search engines.

No Keywords, No Links
Online search results are based on keywords. Splash pages typically contain no text except for the “skip intro” or “enter site” link. These keywords are obviously useless in terms of SEO.

Online search results are based on links. But the only link on your splash page goes to your home page. And what are the chances that anyone else will ever link back to your splash page? I’d say slim to none.

In terms of SEO, splash pages are a complete waste of your best online real estate.

Base-level URL Redirection is Bad
Splash pages often redirect to the home page. Search engines like Google and Yahoo! want to deliver people directly to the information they are seeking. When they see that your base-level URL is redirecting to another page (after the splash “performance” is done), your site’s ranking will be affected negatively.

You almost HAVE to redirect from a splash screen. There’s no good reason to redirect from your base-level URL (e.g. www.site.com/), but having a splash screen sit there pretty much forces your hand. Either you redirect the user to make sure he actually makes it to your content, or you risk losing him to splash frustration.

User Frustration
Even user-friendly splash pages include a “skip intro” link. This tells the user this page is less important than your other content, i.e. not worth viewing.

Most splash pages waste time. You’re asking the user to wait for content to download. Then they have to sit through an unwanted presentation. And you wonder why they’re leaving? Many sites even force users to see the splash page each time the site is loaded.

Reduced Credibilty
Your home page is the most important page on your site. Splash pages are a wasted opportunity to make a good first impression.

No matter how someone reaches your site, eventually they will visit the home page. Users want quick access to information. Splash pages are a speed bump, hindering access to your site’s content.

Poor Site Performance
Splash screens are graphically intensive and slow to download. Users with slower connections (mobile, dial-up, foreign countries, etc.) will get stuck with a “loading” message, and may never even make it to the home page. If your site is getting heavy traffic, the bandwidth used by the splash page will reduce your entire site’s performance.

Page load time is a now a major factor in search rankings. If your site loads slowly, your search ranking will suffer. Get your users to the home page as quickly as possible!

There’s a good quote floating around from Jared Spool of User Interface Engineering on how to convince your clients that splash pages are bad:

“When we have clients who are thinking about Flash splash pages, we tell them to go to their local supermarket and bring a mime with them. Have the mime stand in front of the supermarket, and, as each customer tries to enter, do a little show that lasts two minutes….

“Then stand back and count how many people watch the mime, how many people get past the mime as quickly as possible, and how many people punch the mime out.

“That should give them a good idea as to how well their splash page will be received. That’s the crux of it.”

Lightboxes: A Better Splash Option?
If you’ve explained everything above but your client still insists on having something “splashy” upfront, you may consider recommending a lightbox. At the very least, lightboxes have a better reputation among users than splash screens. And when your users click on the “CLOSE” or “X” button, you won’t be losing them into the ether… in fact, they’ll be looking right at the content you want them to see.

Lightboxes may not be as Flash-y (pun intended) as a splash page, but they give your site a chance to project some sort of welcoming message or offer without such a high risk of losing visitors.

They’re also much more friendly for SEO purposes. Lightboxes don’t dilute the strength of your site because your home page sits at the base-level URL, and the content inside a lightbox – images and/or text, rather than Flash – is typically more friendly to indexing by search engines.

Anybody out there have a positive or negative experience of using a lightbox as a splash screen to share? How about any other ideas on replacing splash screens when the client absolutely insists?

For some people, the thought of creating a custom blog is dizzying. This post is meant to help those people create a customized blog from scratch. It’s really not that difficult, even if you have zero technical skills.

For a blog platform, my personal choice is Wordpress. And, the price is right. Free.

Step #1: Buy a domain name. Personally, I use GoDaddy for this. Go to GoDaddy, search for an available domain. And buy it. I don’t think you should take a lot of time deciding on this. Because the power of the website is going to be the content & links. Therefore, the domain name could be just about anything, as long as you dedicate enough time (and money) to invest in it to make it powerful. But, if you want to use a keyword, then go to Wordtracker, to see keywords relevant to your business, and then back to GoDaddy to see if the .com is available. You could always just use your company name (if it’s available).

Step #2: Buy an account with a webhost. There are tons of choices in web hosting. I use Bluehost.

Step #3: Login to GoDaddy, and change the DNS (Domain Name Servers) to point at your web host.

Step #4: Design. You’ll want a custom design. Examine some competitive websites or blogs, and pick out the things you like and dislike. If you don’t know a graphic designer. Or, if it’s too overwhelming to find one. Then, just go to 99designs, and start a contest for a graphic designer to create the image(s) of your site. Here is a contest I ran. Check out all the entries. And, the designers are willing to make more than a few iterations, because they want to win the contest.

Step #5: Then, go to W3-markup (or any similar service) to cut-up the PSD’s into HTML.

Step #6: Upload (FTP) everything onto your web server.

Step #7: Hire a Wordpress programmer to put it all together. Create a username/password for your programmer to have full access to your web server.

Voila. Within a few weeks, you will have the blog of your dreams.

I’m psyched I finally got a good favicon. It was two years ago that I tried my hand at creating a favicon. I wasn’t happy with my crude graphics skills. So, I abandoned it for the standard bluehost favicon. That funky blue square.

I know I needed a new one. But it was always on the bottom of the priority list. And when it was in que, it always got bumped for other, more important stuff.

The task bubbled up on my to-do list again, but this time I asked my neighbor who is a graphic artist if she could whip something up for me. Her website Nice Logo, isn’t live yet.

That’s all it took. One quick request. Out of her goodness, within minutes she emailed me back a 3 favicons to choose from.

So now I’m the proud owner of a professionally created favicon.

Note: If you can’t see it, try clearing your cache.

I went to the Mobile Marketing Forum in NYC a couple of weeks ago, and ever since, I’ve been desirous of, and wondering how to monetize a mobile website. Obviously, it needs to be WAP enabled, and written in a language like xhtml.

One of the mobile ad networks thought very highly of the Walled garden strategy within a category. Mobile users typically don’t like typing websites into the browser. So, this strategy keeps them within their topic of interest, and due to limited time of a business traveller (typical demographic), will either convert or leave the mobile web session.

So, I decided to choose Chocolate as my mobile topic. Perhaps, I can enter into an arrangement with a local chocolate store similar to an affiliate agreement.

So, now to choose my mobile domains. I decided to use the .mobi extension. But, needed to buy a few domains.

To assist me in choosing which mobile domain names to buy, I used the Wordtracker keyword generation tool. Then I pasted the Wordtracker results on a Spreadsheet. Added a column for the domain. Then, concatenate the two columns. I created this simple spreadsheet to use as a Domaining Tool.

Next, I pasted the cocatenated results on a Notepad, and removed the spaces using the “replace” feature. If you follow these steps, now you’re ready to see if those domains are available. Go to a bulk domain buying tool. I used the Go Daddy Bulk Domain Registration tool.

You can further strategize your decision on what to purchase by the number of searches on the keyword provided by Wordtracker.

I haven’t decided how to use these domains yet. Chocolate, Software, Ringtones, Wallpaper, Games, and Music are all options. The thought crossed my mind that they could be used similarly as MFA (made-for-adsense) sites. Or, to actually sell chocolate gifts. Here are the domains I purchased:

CHOCOLATEBUNNIES.MOBI
CHOCOLATEBUNNY.MOBI
CHOCOLATECAKERECIPES.MOBI
CHOCOLATECOOKIES.MOBI
CHOCOLATEDREAMS.MOBI
CHOCOLATEFOUNTAINS.MOBI
CHOCOLATEHEAVEN.MOBI
CHOCOLATEJESUS.MOBI
CHOCOLATEMILK.MOBI
CHOCOLATEPIE.MOBI

I know…they don’t seem like really great domains. Of course, the good ones were already taken. So, I chose these based on monthly keyword searches, and the premise that the mobile site should be easy to find, and remember. This is similar strategy as non-mobile sites. Use short memorable URL’s. Pehaps use a .mobi domain rather than something like: wap.mysite.com, or .com/wap. Of course these mobile sites should be treated like any other site, and optimized. A Mobile website Optimization is essential.

According to Telephia, the size of the Mobile Internet Population is 34.6 Million. Most downloads on Mobile are from ringtones, wallpaper, and music….not chocolate. But, I’m targeting a niche market. The busy business traveller, or busy mom, student or anyone with a busy lifestyle on the go.

If you already have a great website, you can mobilize it. However, mobilizing a site does not mean compressing current content to fit a smaller screen, or detecting the useragent and serving a version of the site based on it. Most long pages of content are a nuisance on the Mobile Web. Instead, mobile design requires matching user needs with the content that is directly relevant to their mobile goals. A few short sentences with links. That’s all that’s needed. Think of the mobile user as having a 30 second attention span.

When it comes to deciding on which language to code your site, you can choose among four different language technologies. You can code a mobile Web site in XHTML, or develop a comparable application using Flash Lite, Java ME, or the .NET Compact Framework for Windows-based devices. Java applications that reside locally on a user’s mobile device speed interactions because they only rely on the network for data. Adobe Flash Lite, can give users access to client-side data that can be accessed even when network connections get dropped. I personally like xhtml for it’s simplicity and search engine friendliness. And, make sure the code is 100% valid.

Once your sites are up…Drive traffic to your site. You can use ad networks for text & banner buys on a CPC, or CPM basis. Also, use search engines like Google to create a mobile adwords campaign. Enpocket states that mobile CTRs are higher than those in most online campaigns.

Use a call-to-action through banner ads, and search… to your WAP enabled site that could feature downloads, screen savers, viral ’send to a friend’ and other options.

Mobile functions that prompt user actions include click-to-call, click for a coupon, click to subscribe, click to locate, click to win, click to download, and click to buy.

The thing I love the best is that some mobile purchases (eg: ringtones) don’t require a credit card. Making it extremely easy to purchase. The cost is reflected on the customer’s next phone bill.

I received an SEO question regarding whether or not it is a good idea to use old email newsletters (PDF files) as website content.

We are setting up a site/blog for one of our clients. They have a ton of content in the form of newsletters that they were mailing out to customers. We are going to repurpose the newsletter content to put on the blog. Would you (a) release all of the content at once or (b) release the content slowly over a period of time?

If the content is released slowly, then Googlebot will probably figure out that there is fresh content to crawl every day, and your PageRank will probably increase, because the Google spider needs to keep coming back to crawl fresh content. On the other hand, if you release all the content at once, then you’ll instantly have more Search Engine saturation (pages indexed), and an increased amount of traffic due to an increase in findability from all the pages of content.

I’m more partial to the latter idea of releasing the content all at once. I like traffic. Additionally, if you release all the newsletters at once, all your pages will begin the aging process, which is a criteria taken into consideration in the search engine ranking.

Remember to optimize those PDF files, since they will be used for website content. Google spiders & indexes PDF documents. To fully optimize a PDF document, you’ll need to fill in the PDF Document Properties. Using the full version of Adobe Acrobat, open the PDF file, and press CTRL + D. This will open the Document Properties. Within the PDF’s Document Properties, enter in the PDF’s Title, Author, Subject, and Keywords. The Title you write in your PDF Document Properties will show up in Google as the PDF’s link. (Without it, all of your PDFs will be indexed as Untitled.)

How can you tell if the PDF is crawlable? If you can highlight the text, then it is crawlable. Most PDF’s are text-based and fully crawlable just like a html file. But, what if the text is an image and just pasted into the pdf so it looks like a “normal” pdf? Then, Google will not be able to crawl and index the PDF. Similarly, Google does not index image-based text.

I got a question today regarding whether it makes a difference in the Search Engines if the URL’s to internal pages are relative or absolute. Back to the basics, with the age old question of Absolute vs Relative URL’s.

What is an Absolute url? What is a Relative URL? Absolute URL’s are written out fully. Relative URL’s are appreviated by only showing what is after the .com. Such as: /contact.html. The relative URL is just showing the filepath.

Does it matter for SEO purposes whether or not you use Absolute vs. Relative URL’s?

In my opinion, I don’t believe it matters. In situations, where your site is having a tough time getting pages indexed, and has a lot of sloppy code, it might be worth considering. As a matter of fact, I might go so far as to say it is a bestpractice to use Absolute URL’s. But, before attributing lack of pages indexed to your relative url’s, do an analysis of other criteria that affect your SEO performance.

With all the commotion about Dave Pasternack, I thought I’d divert onto a well-known SEO figure; Bruce Clay.

Bruce is a dinosaur in the SEO industry, and he has a great site full of good content, and useful SEO Tools.

Just one question…What’s up with that Flash navigation? Isn’t that a no-no for SEO bestpractices. Almost every SEO will say Flash Navigation is crazy, and not spiderable. Flash Navigation is contrary to SEO. I understand that parts of a webpage may contain flash. But, the navigation?!?

I don’t mean to pick a fight with Bruce. But, I guess it’s just puzzling why an SEO firm would deliberately choose Flash navigation.

One more piece of constructive criticism….
I noticed that many of the webpages are annoyingly long. The content is good. But, who has time to read a super long webpage like that. I might read all the content if those pages were cut into several smaller pages. His long webpage reminds me of the long sales page. Here Bruce violates another basic SEO principle. He can easily make 3 webpages ( or more) of many of those very long webpages.

The godfather of Usability has a website that practices what he preaches. That’s why I’m surprised at Bruce.

I’m certainly not doing an SEO Analysis of Bruce’s website. I’m just wondering why would one of the greats in SEO, have a Flash Navigation?