Reading Time: 2 minMany people include the words “near me” when performing local searches on Google, such as searching for something like “car dealer near me”. Google understands this, and essentially extracts “near me” and just runs it as a local search, which makes sense. However, if Google treats it that way, does it make sense to include […]
Websites
Your product doesn’t need to be perfect
Reading Time: 2 minYour product isn’t perfect, and that’s probably ok. In most cases, the perfect product doesn’t exist, so you just need to have the best available option. Take any product that is considered to be best in class, and you can quickly find some issues with it. The iPhone doesn’t offer some of the flexibility of […]
Plans never work perfectly, but they’re essential
Reading Time: < 1 minWe’re coming to that point in the year when many January 1st goals are beginning to fade. In some cases that can be kind of a bad thing (“no more eating healthy!”), but in a lot of cases it’s because your plans have merely shifted, and that’s often a great result. Dwight D. Eisenhower once […]
If you have toxic links pointing to your website, just ignore them
Reading Time: < 1 minIf you run auditing tools on your website, they’ll often find “toxic” links (from spammy sites) that link to yours, and advise you to work to get rid of those links. While those links won’t do you any good, they’re not worth worrying about. Generally speaking, your best course of action when you find those […]
Your eyes follow your mouse
Reading Time: 2 minIt seems pretty logical, and it is, but when someone is moving their mouse around their computer screen, their eyes tend to follow. A paper out of Carnegie Mellon University studied this to determine exactly how much a person’s eyes match their mouse movements. They found: 84% of the times that a region was visited […]
Own your content and join the POSSE
Reading Time: 2 minI’ve talked many times on here about how I believe we should all work to own our content. Having content in a system that you control is absolutely the way to go, and then you can use other channels (like social media) as a means to share it. Along those very lines is a great […]
Going beyond accessibility to reduce motion
Reading Time: 2 minBuilding websites that are accessible to all users is something that continues to be a problem on much of the web, but it’s continuing to improve over time. For most sites, some simple steps will get you going in the right direction and put you ahead of most other sites in helping users with disabilities […]
Website themes are not content
Reading Time: < 1 minWhen building websites, people are often concerned about not duplicating content across pages or sites. While there is no specific penalty for that, if Google thinks your website has the same content as another site, one of you won’t have a chance in the rankings. So what does that mean for website themes and templates? […]
News websites are starting to realize they should have worked to own the conversation
Reading Time: 2 minI’ve made no secret that I think individuals and organizations should work hard to own their content. This includes not only the primary content (like the actual story or post), but also the comments and interactions to the extent possible. The second part of that is difficult, as social media is the default for most […]
Why click through rate doesn’t affect search rankings
Reading Time: < 1 minThere’s long been a myth that click through rate affects how well you rank in Google. In short, many people believe that if your results get clicked on frequently on Google, you’ll move up the rankings. It’s been claimed for years, and Google has always insisted that it’s not true. In a recent Tweet, Google’s […]