Internet Marketing Blog

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 [...]

I just had the pleasure of attending a presentation by usability luminary Steve Krug in which he identified what he thinks are the two key rules of web design for usability: Show where you are within the site Provide good, prominent titles You were probably expecting something more earth shattering? So was I, but as [...]

Yahoo! is rolling out dynamic URL rewriting configuration to webmasters. What this means is that you can tell the search engine what dynamic URL parameters to ignore, such as sessions variables or tracking parameters that are useful for you but might appear to search engines as though there are many copies of a page at [...]

Too often I come across websites that have what appears to the designer/owner to be a slick, beautiful, or otherwise superior design that presents challenges to users. All too often usability comes a distant 2nd or 3rd to other design considerations. Website usability is a critical determinant of how effectively you convert visitors in customers. [...]

There is a rising debate regarding the use or omission of “www” for website addresses. For instance, should a company use “http://widgets.com” or “http://www.widgets.com”? The debate is debate is getting somewhat heated in some venues, and there is even an organization advocating the omission of “www”. We have a problem with this. We don’t have [...]

AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript + XML) is typically unfriendly to search engines, and thus may thwart SEO efforts. AJAX is a set of techniques that allow websites to act more like client-side applications by fetching data and processing it locally based upon user actions. For instance, a web-based spreadsheet may allow the user to sort data [...]

Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox recently included a post about the usability benefits of breadcrumbs. We have long counseled clients to use them when their site design and organization allow for the same reasons that Jakob advocates their use. We add one more reason: SEO. One of the important aspects of site optimization is creating abundant, keyword-rich [...]

Have you been thinking about or doing CSS cloaking? There has recently been chatter of Google spiders retrieving CSS files. This shouldn’t come as a surprise since it has long been the position of major search engines that most attempts to provide them with different content than users would see (cloaking) is grounds for penalties [...]

As recently reported by C|Net News.com, Yahoo! and Microsoft have adopted Google’s sitemap protocol. This will eventually prove to be a boon to website owners / managers since it removes some of the obstacles to using the indexing tools. The website indexing protocols allow you to tell search engines about the pages on the website [...]

Google has just rolled out Google Checkout, a new method for accepting online payments. Some benefits of the program: For every $1 you spend on AdWords advertising, you process $10 in sales for free. Additional sales cost $0.20 each plus 2%. Put a shopping cart logo on your AdWords ad, making it stand out more [...]