Hey, you're new. We like you already! You obviously have great taste! If you like what you read here you'll probably want to subscribe to our RSS feed (or the audio RSS feed). Stick around and be sure to speak up and post a comment or two!
Over the last two posts I discussed the importance of expert information in building a Destination Website. I also outlined seven different types of expert information that can be used in providing quality information to your audience. Building a Destination Website is all about serving your audience. It’s about finding what they are looking for in a website and providing it in excellence.
Running SEO campaigns that don’t address usability concerns is like running radio and TV promos to drive people to a store that is unfinished. The traffic being driven may not be a total loss, but you certainly aren’t getting the full value out of each customer. Many won’t find what they are looking for, others will be frustrated trying to check out, and some may turn around the moment they walk in the door. Usability addresses those issues to ensure each customer has a good experience on your website.
When performing a site architectural review, one of the first things I look at is the site’s main navigation elements. This includes top, side and footer navigation. Together, they all play an important role in both the ability of the search engines to properly spider your website, as well as allowing your visitors to find important areas and information quickly and efficiently.
Site navigation can come in many different flavors. There isn’t just ONE way to do it correctly. If there were then every site would have navigation that looked exactly the same. So while navigation can vary greatly between sites and industries, there are certain navigational elements that should be implemented to ensure solid usability and effective website architecture.
There is no better way to create an infinite amount of duplicate content on your site than to force session IDs onto each visitor. Typically, session IDs are used for tracking a single visitor’s navigation path through the site, including the adding or removing products from the shopping cart. They are great for tracking purposes, but really, really bad for search engines and inbound linking.
Ok, first of all, that’s a bad URL shown above, but aside from that, tacked on at the end there is the session ID. Both URLs pull the same page pulled open via a different browsing session. The bad stuff happens if the session IDs also get attached when the search engines come for a visit.
Search engine spiders can be very forgiving with a lot of duplicate content issues. I’ve found that, given enough time, the engines learn when two websites or web pages are complete duplicates of the other. Once they figure that out then they basically understand that a link to one is a link to the other, etc. One version will ultimately be dropped from the index in favor of the other.
There are two basic problems with this. First, it all takes time. Until the search engines figure out which dupes should be “merged” you’re essentially splitting link flow. Two inbound links, one to each version, produce only have the power than two links both pointing to a single version.
Registering multiple domain names is, and should be, common practice for businesses wishing to protect their brands. I discussed buying alternative domain names earlier this week, but I wanted to address it again, this time from the context of duplicate content issues which may arise if you don’t set up your new domain names properly.
Domain Name Redirects
The first thing you need to consider after you’ve purchased additional domain names is to decide what you want to do with them. Not every domain name needs to have a site on it, though it wouldn’t be a bad idea to have some kind of generic company page in place for lack of anything else. But for the most part, you will probably want to redirect all your alternate domain names to your main company site. This is especially true of many of the issues covered in the article linked above.
Last month I posted some of my thoughts and theories on duplicate content where I explained the different types of duplicate content that the search engines find. I wanted to expand a bit on the in-site duplicate content that we often see with various websites. I’ll take these one at a time over the course of the next few days or weeks, depending on how often I post.
www. vs. no www.
Real quick, go to your browser and type in yoursite.com. Does the URL in the browsers address bar change to a) http://yoursite.com or b) http://www.yoursite.com?
I remember when favicons first started to appear, it was like, hey, how cool is that. But now they are so common that I hardly notice them anymore. Well, no, that’s not exactly true. I do notice them, and like them, it’s just that I’m not surprised to see them anymore. But I AM surprised when I don’t see them.
Ok, let’s back up. What is a favicon?
If you’re reading this post from emarketingperformance.com then you need to do no more than look up to the address bar. If you’re reading this through a feed reader I’ll go ahead and throw a screen capture for you:
Like a sound site architecture and directory structure, product categorization can play a significant role in how both search engines and users are able to access your products. There are two important things to consider when determining how to categorize your products. 1) Is each product assigned to the most appropriate category or categories? and 2) is multiple categorization creating duplicate content? The first issue frustrates your users and the second the search engines.
Looking for examples of both of these I found exactly what I was looking for on The Home Depot website.
Performing a complete website review is rarely easy. I’ve found that you can start a site analysis intending to spend just a few minutes looking over it only to find that it quickly spirals into a multi-hour marathon of research. Complete website reviews can be time consuming and often produce many more hours of work beyond that.
Every day, we get businesses coming to us looking to improve their search engine rankings. They want to talk about an SEO campaign, but one quick look at their site and we see that SEO may not be the right approach for them. Usually in these cases, the site needs a complete usability makeover.
These businesses, however, don’t want to discuss website architecture, visitor usability, or even making their site search engine friendly. They want rankings and want them now.
Hire Stoney deGeyter or the rest of the Pole Position Marketing team for your in-house training, conference or other search marketing events. Contact us for more information.
