Archive for the 'Web Development' Category

Google Analytics can track Flash

Tuesday, November 18th, 2008

Google Analytics now can track activity in Flash. This means that Flash sites and components can be built in such a way as to provide visibility into user behavior. The Google Analytics Tracking for Adobe Flash component must be incorporated into your Flash content, thus you will need to make changes to your files, not [...]

On-Demand Indexing for Google Site Search

Friday, November 14th, 2008

If you’re using Google Site Search to provide search functionality on your site, there’s some good news. They have just rolled out On-Demand Indexing: you can tell them that your content should be re-indexed whenever you want, such as after content additions or changes. NOTE: This indexing does not affect the main search engine index, [...]

The number 1 design rule

Thursday, September 4th, 2008

The golden rule for good web design is simply: Don’t annoy users. They will leave. A lot of big, beautiful, and expensive web sites commit cardinal sins that result in higher bounce rates and lower sales. Most annoying behaviors are easy to avoid. These sins include: Splash pages Sound or music when the page loads [...]

Dedicated vs. shared hosting for SEO

Friday, August 29th, 2008

Someone recently asked if it was better for SEO to have dedicated or shared hosting for their website. First, a little background: Your web address is translated into an IP address, a set of numbers that identifies the web server that hosts your website. Your web address has only one IP address. For instance, the [...]

What to do with form spam

Wednesday, August 27th, 2008

If you have a form on your website, you’ve almost certainly received meaningless form submissions that contain links to site that sell medication, cheap stocks, pyramid schemes, and other unwanted material. This “form spam” is often automatically generated by software that can quickly fill out thousands of forms. Sometimes real people fill them out quickly [...]

10 free SEO tips

Wednesday, August 13th, 2008

Want to do SEO yourself? Or do you want to save time and money working with SEO consultants like us? Here are some free SEO tips to get your started: Write more — You can’t have too much content. Not only will it help with your most important keywords, it will also help acquire traffic [...]

Redirecting domains with mod_rewrite

Wednesday, June 11th, 2008

Sometimes you need to move a site from one domain to another, or you might have one or more domains that you want to all forward to another, such as variations on your primary domain. For example, your main site might be “www.example.com” and you want anyone who types in or follows a link to [...]

Customizing Firefox Default Styles

Monday, April 14th, 2008

Firefox allows you to specify default styles so that you can alter the appearance of all web pages that use a particular element or combination of elements. For example, I like to see when links have nofollow applied to them instead of having to check them manually. The CSS file for doing this is called [...]

AdWords landing page load time precautions

Thursday, March 6th, 2008

AdWords just announced that they will soon factor in landing page load times into the quality score that helps determine your ad’s position. The reasons for this are, in effect, to reward site owners who provide responsive sites and punish those that make users wait. We have no idea yet how much of an impact [...]

Maintaining ranking through web site changes

Friday, November 16th, 2007

A friend of mine recently told me about his experience with renaming pages on a site, how the traffic fell off from a drop in rankings, and how he recovered the traffic quickly using an XML sitemap. Scott has been running AdSense ads on his site for some time. He decided to restructure the navigation [...]