Posts Tagged ‘SEO web site design’

« Older Entries

Why Yahoo Finance Beats Google Finance: Better Web Design and Marketing

Wednesday, August 26th, 2009

yahoofinanceLast week we wrote about an opening that the now-partnered Yahoo and Bing search engines have in their struggle against industry leader Google. And if that wasn’t enough to convince every Web design and marketing professional that Yahoo and Bing should be taken seriously, The New York Times has just reported on an area where Yahoo trumps Google: in financial information.

The Times reports mentions a comScore study that found Yahoo Finance soundly beat Google Finance for 19 months in a row. Yahoo Finance pulls in 17.5 times the traffic as its Google counterpart. The report stated that in July, Yahoo’s business and finance page drew 21.9 million unique visitors from the United States; Google’s business and finance page only drew 1.2 million.

Yahoo’s success in this category can be seen as a great lesson in Web design and marketing. Yahoo audience group vice president James Pitaro says that Yahoo’s success can be attributed to Yahoo’s understanding of what users want to see when then visit a finance page. In the Times article, he mentions that their research found that users grew more anxious when they were bombarded with too much information. That’s why Yahoo developed a Web design and marketing strategy akin to the Apple model: they developed a clean and simple front page look. Google Finance Web design and marketing strategy, on the other hand, offers an array of numbers and charts—with the option for the user to add more charts if she so wishes. Here’s how the Times story puts it:

Yahoo understands that a free finance site prospers by drawing less from the world of mathematics and more from the world of entertainment, informing just enough to satisfy users without setting off an anxiety attack.

Tags: , ,
Posted in SEO Web Design, search Engine Friendly Web Development | No Comments »

Changing Nofollow Rules to Affect SEO Web Site Design

Wednesday, July 22nd, 2009

nofollow

Have you implemented the

“nofollow” HTML tag on your SEO Web site design yet? If your answer is no, then don’t go scurrying off add it, since it looks

like Google has put an end to nofollow’s usefulness in SEO Web site design. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. First we’ll explain what nofollow is.

Nofollow is a tricky HTML SEO Web site design attribute to describe. According to Wikipedia, “nofollow is an HTML attribute value used to instruct some search engines that a hyperlink should not influence the link target’s ranking in the search engine’s index.”

That’s kind of jargony. So here’s a definition in plain English: nofollow is a SEO Web site design tag that tells search engines to not “count” a certain outbound link. There are several ways that Google decides how Webpages are ranked, and one of the most important is by the number of links that a Website is getting. A Website that’s getting many links coming to it means that Website has more authority. Say you wanted to link to a Website, but you didn’t want to contribute to its authority. The nofollow tag means that Google won’t count your link when it compiles that Website’s authority.

That’s the first SEO Web site design principle that’s important to understand. The second is that Webpages with authority have more link power. And when that Webpage links to others, it portions out its link power evenly to those other sites. Say you have a nice, authoritative home page that links to every other page on your Website, just as a proper home page should. But why should you give that valuable link power to rarely-visited pages, like the Terms of Service page? Or the FAQ page? Wouldn’t it be better if you could somehow channel that link power to pages you actually want people to find in search engines?

Until recently, you could do just that with the nofollow SEO Web site design tag. When you placed the nofollow tag before the links to your FAQ or ToS pages, you would be sacrificing those page’s potential for authority (since Google wouldn’t count those links from your homepage), while boosting the link power sent to your other, more crucial pages.

But things have changed. According to Matt Cutts, Google’s in house SEO guy, nofollow doesn’t allow Webmasters to portion out link power to preferred pages anymore. So what can Webmasters do? First, they should remove all nofollow tags, since they’re basically of no value. Then, they should concentrate on the best methods of creating a Website that gets great search rankings: ethical link building, fresh content and lots of relevant pages.

Tags: , ,
Posted in Affordable SEO, Link Building Consultants | No Comments »

4 Tips for Writing the Most Effective SEO Web Design with META Tags

Tuesday, February 10th, 2009

When used correctly, meta description tags for SEO web design are just a quick sentence or two. But those description tags are crucial for SEO web design. That’s because, housed within the <title> tag at the page’s top, the meta description tag is Google’s go-to uses when it needs a quick description of your Website.

You know that snippet of info that comes after almost all search results? In most cases they’re the meta description tag. If Google finds a Web page without a meta description tag, then it will do its best to extract information from the page and put it in the same snippet. In other words, with no meta description tag, you have little control over what people see in Google’s search results snippet. So don’t leave things up to chance without an effective SEO Web design—include a meta description tag and make sure Google’s displaying the description you want it to display.

What should you write for great SEO Web design? Here are some tips:

  1. Make it unique. Write a different description for each page. Variety is the spice of life. Google’s fond of it too. Be specific in describing what can be found on each page.

  2. Do the important pages first. If you have hundreds of Webpages to handle, then you’ll want to create meta description tags for the most important ones first, like the home page. That’s the page will probably come up most often on Google’s search results page, so it’s the most important from a SEO web design perspective.

  3. Be honest. Don’t exaggerate. Avoid using superlatives like “best” and “greatest” (even if you products and services are superior). Keep it tasteful. Don’t bash the competition.

  4. Keep it brief. You’ll want to keep your meta description tags to about 155 characters, which is Google’s limit. If you go over, you might see Google cut your meta description tags off prematurely on the search results page, something that doesn’t look too great with SEO Web design.

Tags: , ,
Posted in SEO Web Design, SEO Web site Development | No Comments »

« Older Entries