From Good to Great Content

If you’ve been around the search space for any period of time you’ll have heard one of these sayings at some point or another: “Content is King”, “Write for people not search engines”, “Create good content”.    AJ Kohn points to a recent Matt Cutts video where Matt talks about content and whether Google will penalize […]

Writting for SEO

jargon

I read two interesting articles today, one on using jargon and the other on some new features in the WordPress SEO plugin.  What jumped out at me on both of these is a focus on language and complexity.  One of the new features of the WordPress SEO plugin is to rate your text on the […]

Social Media and SEO

Go to any search conference today and there will be at least one discussion on Social Media. It is starting to become much clearer how the two connect with announcements from booth Bing and Google that they use social signals for rankings, as well as announcements they will start to use social results much more […]

Myth Busting the ROI on SEM

The SERP SEO Elements

I’ve seen several different citations on why SEM has a better ROI then SEO.   Here are a few of them: SEM is faster, brings traffic to your website quickly, and increases visibility immediate SEM: there is more control over SEM then SEO.  With SEM you can optimize the landing page tailored to the SEM experience […]

Why In House Design Makes Sense For Large Companies.

Having talked to people of large corporate companies and knowing people who work at large corporate companies, what has amazed me constantly is how many companies outsource a good portion of their work to smaller web design shops. It’s not necessarily a bad thing to outsource some of your site, but when you outsource the […]

Editors Going Extinct or a New Breed?

Having recently taken up blogging I have discovered one major issue. There’s no editor. Nobody to really ask you is this what you really mean to say? It’s a simple click publish and there it is your article up and out there live for everyone to see. I know at some point I’m going to […]

Which Came First Content or Navigation?

Actually this post should probably be titled “Which is More Important Content or Navigation?” The term “content is king” has been around for at least as long as I have been involved in web design which is quite some time. I have heard this saying repeated over and over. However in the other corner you have the usability group usually lead by Jakob Nielsen which leads me to the question; after your sites aesthetics which is more important to a users experience content or navigation?

Why Good HTML is Like a Magic Show

In the movie the Prestige Michael Cain’s character says:

“Every great magic trick consists of three parts or acts. The first part is called “The Pledge”. The magician shows you something ordinary: a deck of cards, a bird or a man. He shows you this object. Perhaps he asks you to inspect it to see if it is indeed real, unaltered, normal. But of course… it probably isn’t. The second act is called “The Turn”. The magician takes the ordinary something and makes it do something extraordinary. Now you’re looking for the secret… but you won’t find it, because of course you’re not really looking. You don’t really want to know. You want to be fooled. But you wouldn’t clap yet. Because making something disappear isn’t enough; you have to bring it back. That’s why every magic trick has a third act, the hardest part, the part we call “The Prestige”.”

So what does this have to do with good web design?