MetaTags Optimization
March 30, 2005
You still hear about meta tags, although their importance has decreased in recent years. What are they, should you bother with them, and if so, how do you create them?
Spam, Your E-mail Address & Your Web Site
March 30, 2005
Address harvesting robots trawl the ‘net relentlessly, looking for anything that resembles an e-mail address. When they find an address, it is added to spam mailing lists and sold to all of those people who like to send you e-mail about your mortgage and your sex life.
But you still need to have a way to have visitors to your site contact you.
Want to know how to have your cake and eat it too? Click here to find out!
Listing your site on Open Directory (DMOZ)
March 30, 2005
“The Open Directory Project (aka “DMOZ”Â) represents an excellent free alternative to paying for a Yahoo listing. An “open source” community-edited service, Open Directory has grown larger than Yahoo’s aging offering. Since many “portal sites” and “start pages” include the Open Directory listings as their own Yahoo-like service, a good listing on the Open Directory can often directly send more qualified traffic than an equivalent listing on Yahoo’s directory.”
Click here to learn how to add your site to Open Directory
Traffic and the Average Website
March 30, 2005
“How can we categorize traffic for the average website? It’s pretty simple, actually – the average website doesn’t get any traffic to speak of…”
It’s depressing, but it’s true — click here to learn about the kind of traffic most web sites get.
Measuring Your Web Site Traffic
March 30, 2005
Do you know who’s visiting your site, where they come from, and how long they stay? If not, then you are designing and tweaking your site in the dark.
“Regardless of the statistics package you use, whether it’s provided by your web host or one you download and run on your own computer, it’s vitally important that you learn how to read your site statistics, and do it regularly. Otherwise, you have no tools to gauge how well your site is performing, and how well you are promoting your site – whether links from other sites are actually sending you traffic, whether search engines are finding your most important pages, etc.”
Click Here to Learn How to Measure your traffic
More on Business Weblogs
March 29, 2005
I’ve mentioned before the idea of using web log (”blog”) technology to keep your web site fresh and up-to-date, and to add a more personal experience for the users. The kind folks over at Blogroots have made a couple of chapters of their new book, We Blog: Publishing Online with Weblogs available to read free online (here).
Of particular interest is Chapter 8, “Using Blogs in Business”. In addition to to using a weblog to enhance your online site, the authors also discuss a lot of ideas on how blogs can be used as knowledge bases, team coordination points and project management tools. Very nice.
More On Writing for the Web
March 29, 2005
In Microcontent & Macrocontent, Diana Lott gives some useful, practical advice on how to structure both headlines and body copy to strike a balance between what will get the attention of a site visitor, and what will get attention in a search engine, and why
Coming from a very different place, one of my favorite sources, A List Apart, this week offers 10 Tips On Writing the Living Web. Instead of focusing on the mechanics of the, “10 Tips” is a lot more about attitude and motivation. If you write any noticeable amount of content online, you should spend a few moments giving this list some serious thought.
Life in the Slow Lane
March 29, 2005
Like most web developers, I do most of my work on what would have been an obscene amount of bandwidth back in the bad-old-days.
A recent connectivity failure, however, made me re-learn some old lessons and home truths that many of us have forgotten, and that are costing us money every single day. After 18 months of nearly trouble-free service, my cable modem died late last week. Naturally, that meant several days before a technician would arrive to repair it. In the meantime, I dug a conventional modem out of my old travel kit, and got to re-learn the joys of dialup.
How Vistors Rate Your Site
March 29, 2005
Another item on the credibility front — this article goes over the basics of visitor preference and what visitors really look at.
Their conclusions? That most visitors immediately judge the site on it’s design — professionality and applicability to purpose — and trust a site that “looks good” more than a site that doesn’t.
Once that test is passed, however, visitors then rate a site on its contents and how well it meets their needs.
The upshot is that having both a good design and solid in-depth content are key. If yoru design turns them off, they won’t be staying to view your content, but if they can’t find what they need, they’ll be gone anyway.
How Credible is Your Site?
March 29, 2005
Stanford’s Persuasive Technology Lab’s Web Credibility Research project has compiled a list of 10 Credibility Guidelines for web sites.
This list was compiled over a period of three years, and reflects interviews with over 4500 people.
While most of the guidelines are common sense (make sure your site is easy to use, accurate, and recently updated), some of the items may surprise you — or at least their order of importance may surpise you.
You can find the current list of guidelines here
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