Reading Time: < 1 min If 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 […]
Websites
Your eyes follow your mouse
Reading Time: 2 min It 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 min I’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 min Building 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 min When 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 min I’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 min There’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 […]
Images on your website pages don’t help with rankings
Reading Time: 2 min Over the years, much has been said about optimizing images to help rank better in Google, and it’s mostly accurate. The key is that images will generally only help you rank better in Google Image Search, not in the main search results. Google’s John Mueller laid it out pretty clearly in a recent SEO Office […]
Fewer options = higher engagement
Reading Time: 2 min About a year ago, I shared the story of an insurance salesman I met that offered every kind of possible insurance there was, which made me realize that he probably wasn’t an expert in any of them. Too many options can be a problem. The same can be true of your website, though with different […]
Google sees different types of web pages essentially the same way
Reading Time: 2 min Your website likely includes a wide variety of content types. You have some normal pages, some blog posts, maybe a custom feed for podcast, some category pages for your blog, things like that. Which does Google prefer? They don’t really care. It’s not that every page will rank as well as the others, but that […]