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Category: Web Design

Talk through the latest in web design and development trends.

  • skehoe


    I am building a new website and it has 500+ photo images. I've got less than 100 in there at the moment and the page speed is already very slow. I'm trying to reduce the size of the images before uploading but without a photoshop application it is very difficult. Are there any great plugins for wordpress that can help?

    | skehoe
    0
  • k9byron


    For whatever reason, X-cart creates duplicates of our categories and articles so that we have URLs like this www.k9electronics.com/dog-training-collars
    www.k9electronics.com/dog-training-collars/ or http://www.k9electronics.com/articles/anti-bark-collar
    http://www.k9electronics.com/articles/anti-bark-collar/ now our SEO guy says that we dont have to redirect these because google is "smart enough" to know they are the same, and that we should "leave it as-is". However, everything I have read online says that google sees this as dupe content and that we should redirect to one or the other / or no /, depending on which most of our internal links already point to, which is with a slash. What should we do? Redirect or leave it as is? Thanks!

    | k9byron
    0
  • Jon-C


    Really stupid question (I think) but does Left or right hand navigation help or hinder SEO and/or user experience? Re-doing our site at the moment and I quite like right hand navigation as it seems to highlight our content better but not sure if it would hinder anything SEO wise - site is based on a responsive theme and side navigation is only called after content anyway so don't think it would make a difference SEO wise Noticing more and more sites moving towards right hand nav and I quite like it, would also differentiate us in our niche as everyone else uses left hand nav As I say probably a stupid question but thought I would ask! 🙂

    | Jon-C
    0
  • Jon-C


    I have a super static site - whats the best way to hardcode (manually if possible) the breadcrumbs i.e. the correct mark up etc? Not got a super large site (about 60 pages) and find people land on deep pages and seem to bounce outta there, working on things to turn this around etc but would like to add breadcrumbs as I think some people would probably go up a level in our site to find what they are looking for.

    | Jon-C
    0
  • Alchemist23


    Adobe's new website builder "Adobe Muse" has a reputation for creating terrible code.  I want to know if anyone has experience with the software and what your opinion is on just how bad the code really is for SEO. I'm currently using "Weebly", which is a similar, but more basic website building software.  My results for SEO have been going well using that software, however it's limited in terms of building an aesthetically pleasing website design. On the other hand, you can build gorgeous websites with Adobe Muse, but I don't want to use it if it's going to prevent me from ranking.  What are your thoughts?

    | Alchemist23
    0
  • Martin_S


    I've received a Webmasters notification about an 'increase in soft 404 errors'. When we had the new site launched three months ago we did away with some old pages, which we either 301 to new equivalents, or, we return a 'Oops, that page seems to be missing' 404 page which has some links to important parts on the site that might be of use to the visitor. Any ideas why Webmasters is issuing the warning? Any suggestions as to what to do? Thanks

    | Martin_S
    0
  • Aggie


    I'm in the process of trying to set a preferred domain in webmaster tools -- to set our www version as preferred vs. the non www. version.  IT is already redirecting non-www to www, but I get this message when trying to change settings "Part of the process of setting a preferred domain is to verify that you own http://mnn.com/. Please verify http://mnn.com/." While we own the domain, I am not sure how we can have Google access a file at [http://mnn.com/some_file when we are forwarding all requests for non-www to our www site.  
    Note: The apache rewrite predates me and I'm not sure how / why we have two domains set up, but I'm trying to fix the preferred domain now.Am I able to verify the non version once the redirect is in place.Any ideas??? Help???Thanks!Lisa

    | Aggie
    0
  • ogdcorp


    Hello, One of my clients is using an old version of wordpress. On google's web master tools there are about 5 messages recommending an upgrade. My question is: Could this affect rankings? Thanks

    | ogdcorp
    0
  • Jon-C


    I've recently been converting our old website to a wordpress based website and been working on the new version of the site on a subdomain. Now at the stage when I am getting ready to let the site go live and just wondering exactly how to do this so I have minimal downtime? Looking in the wordpress control panel there is the setting to enter the address of the site if you want it to be different from the directory it has been installed within - is this a good idea (i.e. is it stable if I do this? good for seo, bad for seo or makes no difference?)? or should I manually install everything in the root myself (if I do this is there a way to direct people to the temp version of the site on the subdomain? Any tips, do and don't s would be appreciated as I want to do this right!

    | Jon-C
    0
  • te_c


    Dear all, I have two small questions for you: 1) If I have a page with many internal links, and in the head section of this page there is a noindex, follow tag, would the search engine spider the internal links placed in that page? Those internal links conduct to pages which I want the search engine to index. 2) Not related to the question above: Does it affects in any form the nofollow meta tag the way the search engine crawl internal links? I would say it onle have an effect on the exterrnal links, unless the nofollow is placed directly in the < a > tag. Thanks for your help, Daniel

    | te_c
    0
  • anthonytjm


    We have a site that was ranking well and recently dropped in traffic and ranking. The whole site is https and and not just the shopping pages. Thats the way the server is setup, they make whole site https. My manager thinks the drop in ranking is due to google not crawling https. I think contrary, but would like some feedback on this. Site is here

    | anthonytjm
    0
  • proptiger


    I am not able to convincingly decide between using redirects versus using 404 errors. People are giving varied opinions. Here are my cases 1. Coding errors - we put out a bad link a. Some people are saying redirect to home page; the user at least has something to do PLUS more importantly it does NOT hurt your SEO ranking. b. Counter - the page ain't there. Return 404 2. Product removed - link1 to product 1 was out there. We removed product1; so link1 is also gone. It is either lying in people's bookmarks, OR because of coding errors we left it hanging out at some places on our site.

    | proptiger
    0
  • Dan_InboundHorizons


    Hi, I am working on a project right now for an existing client, we have one domain up and running well, they want to create an 'umbrella' site to cover three current business divisions and roll everything up under that main site, including the existing site on a totally different domain (would migrate over and 301 redirect from current domain). From what I've researched, I am inclined towards one main domain with three sub-domains due to the amount of content for each business division being significantly different enough that it seems to deserve separation from each other. However, in terms of SEO and maintaining consistent domain authority, would anyone recommend it be better to structure this as just folders/categories falling under the main domain instead of separate sub-domains for each division, and focus keyword targeting on pages tailored to that end within the main domain structure rather than spreading out link-juice to different sub-domains? Thanks!

    | Dan_InboundHorizons
    0
  • BobGW


    Hello, We are using Wordpress to build a wiki site. The wiki plugin we're using (Wordpress Wiki lite) can only be set up on an internal page like nlpwiki(dot)org/wiki Can we redirect the home page to the /wiki subdirectory and use nlpwiki(dot)org/wiki as our home page? I've never done that, just wondering if it will be indexed as the home page or if there are any connonical issues. Thanks!

    | BobGW
    0
  • bronxpad


    I am looking to add a contact form onto my home page and I was wondering if it made sense to change my index.html to an index.php. If i do make this change,  would it have any impact on my search rankings?

    | bronxpad
    0
  • Lusodados


    Hello to all participants! I'm starting on responsive design with css media queries and I was wondering if hidding content can, in this case, can also be bad for seo? I know that hidding content is bad (eg. display: none;), but is it also like that with responsive design or does Google see it other way? If I have a news column with title, image and text for 1024px and hide the text and image leaving just the title for 768px, or smaller, will Google consider this black hat and will it be bad for seo? are there any articles I can read about this subject, and other similar subjects? sorry for my english 🙂 thanks

    | Lusodados
    1
  • thinkWebstoreSEO


    I'm noticing that for some key local search terms our company is not ranking in SERPs as I would expect considering it's size relative to the local sites that are ranking. I subscribed to SEOmoz to get a better understanding of what's going on, and haven't figured it out yet. Our site is higher in almost every metric than the sites we're competing with, but our competition consistently ranks higher in organic results for industry standard keywords. The few metrics we're being outranked in are, "Linking C Blocks" and "Page MozTrust" (we're very close to the leader in MozTrust). Are these two metrics enough to account for our companies poor SERP performance or do I need to be paying attention to something else?

    | thinkWebstoreSEO
    0
  • bronxpad


    What are the most important things that should be found in the Head Section of a Website? Is there  difference of what should be in the head section for a local site and a national or international site?

    | bronxpad
    0
  • te_c


    Dear All, Using the keyword analysis tools, we found an interesting result: for one of our listings, which use in one word a spanish written accent "fotografía with í and not i", the report give us a "F" if the keyword is written without accent, and an "A" if it is written with the accent (we use the proper written word in the content and title). It is only a SEOMoz tool related issue, or google take a word with accent as a different word? Most people write in the search engine without using the "´" character, and making some tests in google.es, I found slightly different results when writing in both ways, but not for my listing, which rank exactly in the same position for both "words". Does anybody have some deeper information related to the topic? Daniel

    | te_c
    0
  • te_c


    Dear all, Almost since we started designing our site, we are using schema microdata. It is not only because of the rich snippets, but because I want the search engines to better understand what we have. For example, the +1 buttom would not work properly without schema microdata, because it kind of ignores the OpenGraph parameters that specified image and description; and since we are a (very small) local bussiness directory (between other things), all our clients have a hand written schema complient description on their lisings, including address, opening ours, telephone number, description, etc. It is hand written by us because the tools avialable are simply not good enough to cover all different scenarios that a listing can present. I have not use, until today, a proper for the homepage, and it is probably the cause that our page lost the nice links below the site description in the google snippet. I did not place it on the body tag, but near the description, closing it inmediately after the description finishs. Now this is solved and we will wait to see if the links come back in the next weeks. Now to the question. Our site has three sections, with three different systems installed, two running wordpress and a third running another script. the main site is the local bussiness directory. The front page is mark as "schema.org/WepPage", and I do not know how to mark the other pages of the main site. I was thinking of marking the listings as "schema.org/ItemPage" since they are related to specific clients. Would you consired it to be right? Then, we have landing pages for the categories, should they be mark as WepPage, or as an Article, or something else? Many thanks in advance for your help, Best Regards, Daniel

    | te_c
    0
  • bronxpad


    What is the minimum amount of content  a page should have to be seo friendly? What is the maximum amount of content a page should have to be seo friendly?

    | bronxpad
    0
  • Intrested


    Hi Folks I'm currently measuring multiple goals with Google analytics. At the end of the month I compare the Analytics numbers with my actual, from a diffident data base, and there is often a variance. My questions are; 1- Is there an accepted Delta % in goals eg: + or - 10% 2- Is there a resource that anybody found incredibly useful on this topic 3- does anybody have any tips on trouble shooting here? Thank you in advance

    | Intrested
    0
  • seointern


    We're in the coupon blogging space & saw that one of the larger coupon sites move away from the more traditional blog layout: http://thekrazycouponlady.com they now have more of an editorial type layout. Here is another site which is more similar to our layout: http://hip2save.com. So here are my questions: Which layout type do you feel better serves their visitors & why? How does the affect the SEO of the site? How does it affect the advertising revenues? Which layout do you prefer? Is there strategy in this move for the coupon blog, or is this just a preference on how they now display their content? We're making some updates to our design soon & I wanted to get some feedback on the overall direction we take.

    | seointern
    0
  • Tinhat


    Hi, Though similar to other questions on here I haven't found any other examples of sites in the same position as mine. It's an e-commerce site for mobile phones that has product pages for each phone we sell. Each tariff that is available on each phone links through to the checkout/transfer page on the respective mobile phone network. Therefore when the networks offer 62 different tariffs that are available on a single phone that means we automatically start with 62 on page links that helps to quickly tip us over the 100 link threshold. Currently, we mark these up as rel="external" but I'm wondering if there isn't a better way to help the situation and prevent us being penalised for having too many links on page so: Can/should we mark these up as rel="nofollow" instead of, or as well as, rel="external"? Is it inherently a problem from a technical SEO point of view? Does anyone have any similar experiences or examples that might help myself or others? As always, any help or advice would be much appreciated 🙂

    | Tinhat
    0
  • Tustep


    Building a new site for my business (different URL) For SEO purposes...Is it ok to host the site on the same account as my existing site (GoDaddy) or should I purchase a seperate hosting account? Thanks

    | Tustep
    0
  • BizDetox


    Hey guys i tried to to make a Preferred Domain choice in webmaster tools, but it is not allowing me to save my choice bec its asking me to verify that i own http://bizdetox.com How do i go about doing that and what are the steps I have already verified www.bizdetox.com

    | BizDetox
    0
  • eseyo


    http://humanstxt.org Anyone using this on their websites and if so have you seen and positive benefits of doing so? Would be good to see some examples of sites using it and potentially how you're using the files. I'm considering adding this to my checklist for launching sites

    | eseyo
    1
  • BobGW


    Hello, I was thinking about putting a box down at the bottom of my client's main articles that let's the reader easily copy the html code it takes to link to the article they're reading.  Maybe I'd put it after the author bio. Do any of you do this? If so, what format do you use? It has to look nice of course. This is a non-techie industry. Thanks.

    | BobGW
    0
  • hwade


    I have  a client that currently has a side navigation and wants to know how changing to a top nav will affect her SEO. We always recommend top nav for user experience but I am not sure if there is a direct effect on SEO. Would the change affect it? Thoughts?

    | hwade
    0
  • wkismb


    Live website on abc.com domain is being totally redone and moved to a new platform.  to facilitate full testing and compliance, the new look and content was built on a different url - xyz.com for example. Now that all content is approved and testing, we want people visiting the abc.com domain to see the xyz.com website without necessarily redirecting abc.com to xyz.com What is the best to do this? Thanks all

    | wkismb
    0
  • GarethEJones


    Each and every day i get called up from an SEO company who promises to get me top spots in Google rankings if i quickly get on their special offer they have today normally i would say "no thanks and put the phone down" but i had a bit of spare time so i indulged the guy and we got talking. After the introductions and speal about his company he was showing me what his company does and how they go about it to get me top ranks (they don't get me ranks but create a website they own which then passes leads to me- kinda clever since they could then start charging me per lead or my competitors) We continued to talk and i mentioned i used SEOmoz to check my rankings and back links etc and he told me that Google are cracking down and anyone using these types of software/websites will get their websites de indexed. This struck me as BS but i wanted to get your thoughts on the matter,  i personally don't believe Google would ever do such a thing as this since it would be so easy to get your competitors websites taken down (i.e. negative seo) but its certainly a talking point.

    | GarethEJones
    0
  • HMCOE


    I want to link to an event on a separate ticket website from at least 20 major pages. Is it OK to post a description & title & links on those 20 pages that are the same? (duplicate - but account for less than 5% of total on-page content) Do you Link as Do-Follow or No-Follow? ... and why? Or should I just use their ticket widget and plug that registration form into those 20 pages. (There still is a link - do-Follow, but everything stays on the website) I have been getting a lot of confusing answers as to whether have external links as follow or nofollow. If you know of any RECENT resources about the topic based on evidence rather than opinions that would help a lot.

    | HMCOE
    0
  • Bio-RadAbs


    Hi guys, We deal with a global audience and our site is a mixture of resource and e-commerce product pages. This has led us to avoid having a 'select your country' as the first page of the website but only have the option show up when the user is browsing products (price is shown dynamically according to country) The thing is, currently the "select your country" option is a page and this is creeping up the 302 redirects. Everytime a user goes to a product page, boom they get redirected to the 'select your country' page and then sent back to the corresponding page. I'm been thinking the solution might be to remove the "select your country" as a page and go down an "overlay popup". For SEO purposes, what would you suggest? I'm reading Javascript overlays could work but not good for SEO. Welcome all thoughts..

    | Bio-RadAbs
    0
  • gfiedel


    Our Google position had a sudden and precipitous drop from #3 to #15 in October for our two main keywords: "web design Santa Barbara" and "Santa Barbara web design". I have steadily gotten it back to #7 by putting a lot of effort to our on-page SEO. As of my December 24 SEOMoz report, it was #7, and as of my check yesterday, Dec. 28 it was #7. We were #3 for "web designers Santa Barbara" as of yesterday. Today, i cannot even find our listing on the first 5 pages. Recently, our partner company was engaging in some link building for us that may have just occurred and I'm worried that this may be the cause. I have not yet had a report and actually don't know for sure yet, it has even been accomplished. We had also done some link building in October by a different company we subcontract to and there was a Google type hack of our site. Those were the two major changes that occurred at that time. I thought it would be safe to have some more link building done now, since we'd already survived that first "sudden" increase of links in October. Does anyone have any idea what may have happened and how I can fix this? I am trying not to panic. Thank you in advance for any ideas to understand and/or remedy the situation!

    | gfiedel
    0
  • TommyTan


    Hi All Smart SEOmozers! I have another dumb question =] I have almost no knowledge on how DNS works and all the website background work.  I understand that DNS is the server that translates a domain name to the IP address.  Furthermore, I also know that IP Address location or web host location plays a small factor in international SEO.  Webhosts usually provide the DNS service as well but for this case ABC Company uses a different domain service, diferent DNS service and different webhost service so things get complicated. So the question, does the location of DNS service we use affect International SEO like how the location of the webhost does. Thank you in advance for your help!

    | TommyTan
    0
  • Tinhat


    Hi, I'm wondering how important it is when relaunching a site on a new platform (switching to Drupal) to serve up images from the same file paths in order to ensure consistency during the changeover. I've tried to keep the questions straightforward so that this post can be useful to people in a similar situation in future: How much difference do the file paths make to SEO? Does Google care or even notice if the image file paths change? Is it worth forcing Drupal to mimic our old file paths for the sake of consistency with the old site in order to maintain rankings OR do we take the opportunity to redesign our file paths for better SEO? Any help would be much appreciated 🙂

    | Tinhat
    0
  • BizDetox


    hey guys hope everyone had a new year. I am ranking for a page on my site that i want to ( not specifically move ), but just change the url name: It is too long i think and i want to move it from one portion of my architecture to another menu. I have never physically done a 301 redirect myself, always had someone do it for me. I wanted some pointers. Since it is a fairly new site 4 months old! What are my options. Do i need to 301 redirect the page, if i am changing the Structure and AI of my site, or can i just change the url as is and it will still get ranked? How do i keep that url put delete the page and redirect it ? Sorry its very simple but i wanted to get the communities help to continue on ! Best Wishes HAmpig

    | BizDetox
    0
  • bronxpad


    Does time on site impact rankings? If a person visits your site from the serps or directly visits it by typing in your name in the search field and then leaves within a minute, will that impact your serps? What is the best way to increase time on site?

    | bronxpad
    0
  • bronxpad


    Do google and bing factor in how many people visit your site per month to determine your serps rankings? If so, does it matter if they visit your site by searching a keyword phrase or by typing in the name in the search bar? My instinct  tells me that if the search engine sees 1000 hits per month for a site by keyword phrase and that is high for the industry then they might rank that site higher in the serps. I was wondering if the same would be true if the site is designed and coded properly for a keyword phrase but receives the same 1000 hits per month from visitors typing in the sites name in the search field rather than the search phrase, would that then translate to higher rankings for the keyword phrase? Thanks for your help.

    | bronxpad
    0
  • TinaA


    I work for a nonprofit org which of course means a low budget and paying out of pocket for things (such as training). Our current website is done by a 3rd party vendor and although it looks nice, we can't make any changes to it without paying for it.  (We can only upload documents). I'm wondering if anyone in this group will give their feedback on the site in terms of SEO and recommend a platform that would be relatively easy for a small shop to manage. Our site is www.coastalcommunityfoundation.org Thanks in advance

    | TinaA
    0
  • bronxpad


    For a user / seo perspective, what is the best way to code a drop down menu nav bar? Is it best to use css, javascript or a scripting library like jquery? I am thinking about overall best practice that will not have a negative impact on serps. I am also thinking about what will work best on all types of devices i.e. desk tops, lap tops, smart phones and tablets. What are the Pro's & Cons of Using CSS for Drop Down Menus. What are the Pro's & cons of using Javascript for drop down menus. And the same question for jquery. Thank you all in advance for your ideas.

    | bronxpad
    0
  • LuminConsutling


    I have a desinger working on a new webiste and he's suggesting that WP creates design limitations (He's doing quite a bit of HTML 5 I believe...I'm not sure) and obviosly has secruity concerns. He suggested TextPattern, which I've never heard of. Has anyone had any experience with it? Also, what CMS are you using (besides WP) that you really like and is SEO friendly? Thanks

    | LuminConsutling
    0
  • TylerAbernethy


    hey everyone, i am having a weird problem. for some reason. all of a sudden (without me changing ANYTHING) my widget page in the admin dashboard will not let me edit anything what i mean is, i login, go to the widgets page, and then the dropdown menus that you drag widgets into will not let me expand to drop widgets in them. was there a wordpress update i missed? who should i contact? what if i delete the theme and re-install. will i have to change ALL the settings back again?

    | TylerAbernethy
    0
  • hugoaf


    Currently ranking 1st (local: with the city name at the end of kw) for the main target keyword. But in need to upgrade Joomla CMS for security reasons and Design to improve conversions. What would you recommend: a) do not touch the (generated) code structure, I mean to replicate current structure in the new template. b) go for a new HTML5 pattern but keep content without any change. c) your recommentation... Thanks!

    | hugoaf
    0
  • eMagineSEO


    Are there any studies, statistics or measurable impact of using mixed fonts on landing pages? One of our landing pages is using five variations of the Arial font where size, strength (bold, italics) and color all vary. One camp internally believes that this okay, whereas another camp wants to standardize the presentation where there's less variance (such as a heading as one and the body copy as another). Have you been through a similar trial or test in the past? I've seen some instances of a Marketing Sherpa study on the topic, but no real numbers to support one thing or another. I've attached an example image of our current LP. I have a lot of strong opinions on a number of items - but we're looking to have an immediate internal discussion on the font issue first. Thanks! GIzA8.jpg

    | eMagineSEO
    0
  • maestrosonrisas


    what is the best slideshow pluggin for seo in order to show alt of the images

    | maestrosonrisas
    0
  • BobGW


    Hello, We've got about 400 products in about 30 categories (not including subcategories). There's a lot of subcategories and a lot of overlap. A few categories have 80 products in them, most have around 10-20, and some have five or six. Would it be best to not use pagination? We'd like to put all products in a subcategory on one page, but we're worried about page load speed. Your thoughts?

    | BobGW
    0
  • HMCOE


    Should you set a preferred domain? www.domain.com or domain.com Does this influence your SEO strategy?

    | HMCOE
    0
  • saultie


    I've got no problem using google webfonts on their own, but what about using them over an image; specifically a clickable image?  Its easiest to place text over an image if the image is a background image,  but then the image isn't easy to make clickable.  Am I missing something - this shouldn't be hard, right. Thanks!

    | saultie
    0
  • BobGW


    Hello, I'm trying to get some good ideas for graphically laying out very large articles, both of navigation as well as image use, illustrations, and video. What are your favorite long articles as far as looks go? I really like the seomoz beginner's guide, and pointblankseo has some pretty good layouts. This is for content for a client's ecommerce site. What are your favorites?

    | BobGW
    0

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