I’m currently reading a book titled Search Patterns by Peter Morville and Jeffery Callender. Picking up a book is a rare treat for me, so even though this book is technically work-related I’m don’t mind. It is a good book and speaks to the Internet geek within me. As I read through the pages I’m awestruck by the explanation given for the qualities associated with the searcher’s experience. The authors boil this down to a simple illustration called the User Experience Honeycomb. Read more
CNN Polls Website Visitors On Their Search Engine
Posted in: Search Engine Marketing | December 17, 2009
I have been visiting CNN's website for years. Rarely do I pay much attention to their polls, but today their poll catch my eye. The poll questions was "Which search engine do you use?" and the answer was Google. No surprise there for many of us, although I was surprised by how low Bing really was on the usage chart. As of this posting, 198,584 people voted and their results are fairly close to what we see on other websites and analyst reports. Website Usage Results Search Engine Percentage Votes Google 85% Read more
SEO Scams and Newbies Realm of Gullibility
Posted in: Search Engine Optimization | November 25, 2009
This blog post was authored by marketing consultant, David Jackson, who is the owner of Free Marketing Tips Blog. This article is available as a courtesy entry from SiteProNews.com. One of my all-time favorite tv shows is The Twilight Zone. I particularly like Rod Serling’s memorable opening narration: “There is a sixth dimension, beyond that which is known to newbies. It is a dimension as vast as space and as timeless as infinity. It is the middle ground between light and shadow, and it lies between the pit of newbies gullibility and the sunlight of their naiveté. This is the Read more
When a Website Designer’s Good Intentions Go Bad
Posted in: Website Design | November 23, 2009
Today I am meeting with a client to review the design and build of his new website. Quite frankly I’m not looking forward to this meeting. I am the barrier of bad news. When I originally accepted this project, I could see Google had indexed about 1,000 pages within his domain. While it would take some time to migrate and optimize this many pages, I was up for the challenge. The goal is to give him a more SEO friendly site that he can maintain himself in WordPress. If that meant throwing in some plugins and optimizing 1,000 pages, so be it. Last week I reviewed his Google Read more
State of the Index Presentation is a Great Read
Posted in: Search Engine Optimization | November 18, 2009
At last week's PubCon conference in Las Vegas, Matt Cutts gave a presentation on Google and recent Google advancements. This is a good read for website developers, in-house webmasters, and SEO consultants. From Social Search to Pagetest to Google Web Toolkit, Matt gives a number of good takeaways. State of the Index Read more
Web Analytics 2.0 Hits the Stores
Posted in: Internet Marketing | November 13, 2009
Today I ordered Web Analytics 2.0, which is the second book by Avinash Kaushik, the best selling author of Web Analytics: An Hour A Day. As an avid website designer, SEO nut, social media fan, and overall Internet marketing addict, I can’t wait for delivery of my new purchase. I already subscribe to Avinash’s very popular blog Occam’s Razor, which provides insightful discussion on Google Analytics and the software’s newest functionality. I enjoy his blog entries and cannot wait to immerse myself in an entire book of his Internet intelligence. You can learn more about Avinash Read more
WordPress is the Liberator of Growing Businesses
Posted in: Website Design | November 12, 2009
I have always been a fan of WordPress. Okay, let me rephrase that. Since I discovered WordPress, I have always been a great fan. Similar to other people, I was hesitant at first. I thought it was simply a blogging application with limited capabilities. I equated it to Google’s Blogger and thought it was solely used for bloggers and it was much to limited for a real corporate website. Thankfully, I was wrong. WordPress liberated me and it has liberated many website designers and business owners around the world. It is liberating because it is free and it is easy enough for Read more