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Category: Web Design

Talk through the latest in web design and development trends.

  • bcarp88


    I understand the concept of linking your pages internally to help  pass juice to one another but it seems to me that the navigation bar with links to your main pages that appear on every page kind of eliminate the linking strategy. For Example: At the top of every page is a Home, About, Services, Contact, etc. Do the bots count these as links from each page? There must be something I'm missing here! Help me out guys!

    | bcarp88
    0
  • bsofttech


    Hey everyone. Appreciate your insight on this.  I just finished redesigning my website today and just published it to my server. I decided to go with a real basic html site figuring I may get better results with the search engines. I still have a bunch of optomizing to do but I have a question. Since I was using aspx it is safe to say that many sites will be linked to those old pages. In the interest of not loosing this traffic I told IIS7 to do a 302 redirect to my home page for any 404 errors. Is this the best thing to do or is their a better way? Thanks much Ron

    | bsofttech
    0
  • kylesuss


    I'm almost ready to launch a website redesign. We are going to move what's currently being hosted on olddomain.com to newdomain.com. We want to do this early to avoid error and to have olddomain.com redirect to newdomain.com until the new content is ready. Once the redesign is complete, we'll push the new content to olddomain.com (as it holds a higher SEO value) and take away the redirect. A. Does this sound like a good idea? B. What kind of redirect should I use? 302? 307? Thanks, and sorry for the confusion 🙂

    | kylesuss
    0
  • McTaggart


    Hi Mozzers, I have a question... I'm planning to add a blog summary/twitter feed throughout my website (onto every main content page) and then started worrying about duplicate content. What is best practice here? Let me know - thanks, Luke PS. I sat down and re: blog feed... thought that perhaps it would help if I fed different blog posts through to different pages (which I could then edit so I could add<a></a> text different from that in blog). Not sure about twitter.

    | McTaggart
    1
  • getpromoted


    We have noticed with 3 of my sites that rankings totally disappears for 2-3 days and then appear again on google 1st page. Why does this happen?

    | getpromoted
    0
  • PatrickGriffith


    I only discovered SEOmoz about a week ago and my knowledge in this area has grown 500% in that time, but I'm still a newbie. I'm looking for whether I have the right general idea or not with my home page in regards to SEO.  The page is located at Line.com. The top section with the images is 100% for humans.  The next section is where the SEO comes into play.  I have 5 different services [sports monitor, free sports betting, sports betting forum, sports handicapper websites, gambling affiliate program] that I offer on 5 different inner pages.  What I'm trying to do is have my home page rank decently for my desired terms and then pass link juice to the respective pages.  My goal is to eventually have my inner pages rank higher than my home page for my desired search terms. Do I have the right general idea or am I way off?  Is this too much for the search engines with all of the links and bold text? Design criticisms are also welcome, and anybody who wants to critique the inner pages would be forever thanked.  Feel free to be as harsh as you want as long as it's constructive. Thanks!

    | PatrickGriffith
    0
  • LMDNYC


    Hi there. I'm building an HTML 5 site and through research of new HTML 5 elements I've seen little conclusive information about the interpretation of the new <hgroup>tag, in terms of SEO application and interpretation. In particular does Google interpret the nested heading tags as individual elements or does it combine them into one entity? For example, say I have: <hgroup> # Article Heading ## Article Sub-heading </hgroup> How is this interpreted by Google and what would be some good SEO best practices regarding the <hgroup>tag in HTML5: Is it interpretted as a single tag (" Article Heading: Article Sub-heading ") or two separate heading tags (one and one )? Also, how much does the ordering of the tags matter (say for example I wanted something like the following for visual purposes? <hgroup> ## Article Sub-heading # Article Heading </hgroup> One last thing: is it safe to assume that it is indeed OK to have multiple tags on a single page (as referenced by Matt Cutts a while back in a Webmaster Video)? Thanks! </hgroup> </hgroup>

    | LMDNYC
    2
  • kchandler


    So this new project that i am working on is a redesigned CMS site using Wordpress (php based). Before i started on the project they made a few major updates that include: Changed from ID based URLS to SEO friendly URLS Added multiple languages in directories www.domain.com/en www.domain.com/fr www.domain.com/de etc... Due to the new languages they wanted to have the previous home page, www.domain.com, redirect to the proper language based on their IP address. Currently they are using a 301 redirect through a php header. So if i was visiting the site from my hometown of Cleveland, Ohio and i type www.domain.com into the browser. I would automatically redirect to www.domain.com/en and i would have the option to switch languages if needed. The issue: When i first added their site into SEOMoz the crawl returned a large amount of 302 redirects coming from their old homepage www.domain.com. So i took a look at the header calls using IE's webmaster tools and Firebug in Firefox. In both profilers it showed the same problem. Before the 301 header redirect there was a 302 redirect called first When viewing the response header it mentioned an x-pingback of some file that didn't even exist on the site: www.domain.com/xmlrpc.php This is obviously a huge issue because any link value from the old homepage will be lost due to the 302 not passing the value. I have tried search the almighty Google for help but it has gotten me no where. I have a hunch it is something to do with Wordpress but that is based on nothing but my gut. Any help is greatly appreciated. I got to get that 302 gone or changed to a 301 🙂 Regards - Kyle

    | kchandler
    0
  • alexhoug


    Hi everyone, I am looking for find high quality web designers that are affordable. I am open to many options. There are several things I have looked into. 1. I have looked for designers via CSS galleries, but I don't really know how to get in touch with designers or find them. Rand recently talked about this in a webinar, but if anyone has specific insights on how to find people this way, please let me know. 2. I have also looked into website design contests from sites such as: DesignCrowd.com 99designs.com CrowdSpring.com DesignContest.com I haven't used these services and I was wondering if anyone has experience with design contests. 3. I have looked into the option of hiring a freelancer on oDesk or a similar freelancer site. I don't really know the cost, how to find a good designer, how to avoid inexperienced but cheap designers and all the other such roadblocks that come along with freelancers. If anyone could provide insight into this, it would be greatly appreciated.

    | alexhoug
    0
  • marcelo-275398


    Hi all, I was hoping someone may be able to help. We are putting together an Arabic website and due to reading right to left as opposed to left to right, the site HTML layout is mirrored compared to normal with everything flipped over. What we are wondering is, will this effect SEO and what are the SEO implications of this? Do the search engine bots automaticlaly know to read the content etc differently and understand that everything is purposely mirrored / the HTML is in a different location compared to a site in the UK / US etc? Any help on this would be most appreciated. Cheers!

    | marcelo-275398
    0
  • McTaggart


    Hiya Mozzers! A pal who works in SEO has suggested I add the following type  <title>tag structure to my pages:<br /><br />Bars in New York - Bars New York [no brand name]</p> <p>Pizzas in New York - Pizzas New York [no brand name]</p> <p>Firstly, I think this looks spammy, secondly, can't understand the logic of both combinations, thirdly, my understanding is brand name lessens importance of keyphrases, but it's still important from a branding point of view.</p> <p>Fourthly, is this sustainable? I mean, Google could identify this as spammy in the future, with penalty, no? Any feedback on these points would be very useful.</p> <p>Also, he said that I should play around with title tags on an ongoing basis, but I haven't changed any single title tag more than once/6 months for fear of being flagged for manipulative SEO practice by Google. Guidance here would be great as well.</p> <p>Thanking you in advance, Luke</p></title>

    | McTaggart
    0
  • Blenny


    Hello, I have read up on the rel canonical tag and I'm ready to apply it to my site's categorization structure. However, I'm concerned that, because my website does not have a "view all" button for our product pages, the rel canonical tag would not be appropriate. For example, if you come to my site's main category url, you come to mysite.com/main-category At this level - you get the top 12 items in the category. if you want to see the next page, you click a crawlable link that goes to mysite.com/main-category12-24 etc. etc. The site does not offer a view all function. Would applying the rel canonical tag be appropriate in this instance, or do I have to let Google crawl and index each page independantly? Thanks.

    | Blenny
    0
  • Naghirniac


    I used the www.templatemonster.com or http://themeforest.net/, but is difficult to find a template with a focus on SEO. Also with the necessity to include text in the beginning of the website, is difficulty to found something really good.

    | Naghirniac
    0
  • Blenny


    Hi. On the site I'm working on, we use a search directory to display our search results. It displays as follows - Mydomain.com/search-results/# With the dynamic search results appearing after the hash tag. Because of the structure of the website, many of the lefthand nav defers back to this directory. I know that most websites "noindex, nofollow" the search results pages, but due to the ease of customers generating them, I'm afraid that if I do this, we'll miss out on the inevitable links customers will provide...and, even though it's just the main search directory, these links will still help my domain. The search is all java-generated so there's nothing for spiders to follow within this directory - save the standard category nav. How should I handle this? Thanks.

    | Blenny
    0
  • bsofttech


    Hey everyone I have run into a problem and would greatly appreciate anyone that could weigh in on it. I have a web client that went to an outside vendor for marketing. The client asked me to help them target some keywords and since I am new to the SEO world I have proceeded by researching the best keywords for the client. I found 6 that see excellent monthly searches. I then registered the .com and or .net domain names that match these words. I then started building landing pages that make reference to the keyword and then have links to his site to get more info. My customer sent the first of these sites to the marketer and he says I am doing things all wrong. He says rather then having landing pages like this I should just point the domain names at internal pages to the website. He also says that I should not have different looks for the landing pages from the main site and that I should have the full site menu on each landing page. I wanted to here what everyone here has to say about the pros and cons of the way to do this cause the guy giving the advice to me has a lower ranking site then I do and I have only started working on getting my site ranked this year. He has atleast according to him been doing this forever. Thanks, Ron

    | bsofttech
    0
  • Naghirniac


    Anyone already use it? There is some speed benefit? http://code.google.com/speed/page-speed/docs/module.html 

    | Naghirniac
    0
  • Naghirniac


    A little bit confused with the new stuff. The web 2.0 webpages are so much better? What changes?

    | Naghirniac
    0
  • waqid


    Does anyone know of any good quality website award/competition type site? Somewhere where we can submit our site and try to win an award?

    | waqid
    1
  • LosAngelesLimo


    About 3 weeks ago I converted index.html to index.php. Both are 301 redirect to main url. Also I have about 70 links on main page pointing to internal pages. The Website is about 11 years old,and was on active link building . Is this conversion from html to php and also 70 links pointing to inner pages will affect on ranking?Since all links are passing juice to inner pages.

    | LosAngelesLimo
    0
  • Naghirniac


    For the SEO perspective, there is a limit for the number of 301 redirection inside the htaccess file?

    | Naghirniac
    0
  • JohnW-UK


    I’ve got various WordPress websites with the Share This social plugin for WordPress. I have been using Firebug and http://analyze.websiteoptimization.com/wso to do general checks on the site and the code. And used W3C validator too. Due to the way WordPress appears to work we never seem to be able to get all the firebug/ website optimization tests to pass and the W3C validator passes everything on HTML 5 apart from 7 errors with the Share This social plugin. How do you test your code/websites? Should I stop be a perfectionist and just be happy?

    | JohnW-UK
    0
  • johnshearer


    Hey Moz Community, I am looking for a content slider  that can be easily changed by non-technicals for posting different styles of content/calls to action  and this seems to be best: http://www.slidedeck.com/ I have installed a nivo slider on a Seattle Painting site, and flash slider on a commercial painting site. But I want my blog clients to be able to format..then copy/paste code..linke embedding a video. opinions? Thanks John

    | johnshearer
    0
  • ClaireH-184886


    Hi i am asking this question again as not had much resonce with the other question. We are urgently looking for a decent hosting company in the UK who offer managed hosting. We are looking for a dedicated server that can handle forty sites or more. Can anyone please let me know if there are any good hosting companies in the UK for joomla. I have researched a large number but they all receive bad reviews so i thought i would ask on here again and see what other people are using many thanks

    | ClaireH-184886
    0
  • Naghirniac


    I adding a lot of new features to my website: JS animated, menus, google translate, alexa counter, google analytics, salesforce, and so on. My website is full of scripts and im worry about the SEO. Is that an issue?

    | Naghirniac
    0
  • Naghirniac


    I always broken my head to try to follow all pagespeed guidelines. I increase my pagespeed significantly, but i didnt saw any effect in my SEO performance. In my keywords, my concorrents are crap on it (I have score of 90 and they are at 60-70).Does google gives importance to it?

    | Naghirniac
    0
  • Naghirniac


    I would like to know it there is any plug-in for Dreamweaver that helps our SEO work

    | Naghirniac
    0
  • BobGW


    Hello, How do I do conversion tracking for Google Analytics for this site: debidonner(dot)com She has a 'Thank You' page after you return from Paypal Thanks!

    | BobGW
    0
  • YNWA


    Hi, Having read the SEOMOZ guide and already worried about this previously, I have decided to look further into this. Our site is 4-5 years old, poorly built by a rouge firm so we have to stick with what we have for now. Were I think we might be getting punished is duplicate content across various pages. We have a Brands page, link at top of page. Here we are meant to enter each brand we stock and a little write up on that brands. What we then put in these write ups is used on each brands item page when we click a brand name on the left nav bar. Or when we click a Product Type (eg. Footwear) then click on a brand filter on the left. So this in theory is duplicate content. The SEO title and Meta Description for each brand is then used on the Brands Page and also on each page with the Brands Product on. As we have entered this brand info, you will notice that the page www.designerboutique-online.com/all-clothing/armani-jeans/ has the same brand description in the scroll box at the top as the page www.designerboutique-online.com/shirts/armani-jeans/ and all the other product type pages. The same SEO title and same Meta descriptions. Only the products change from each one. This then applies to each brand we have (at least 15) across about 8 pages. All with different URLs but the same text. Not sure how a 301 or rel: canonical would work for this, as each URL needs to point at specific pages (eg. shirts, shorts etc...). Some brands such as Creative Recreation and Cruyff only sell footwear, so technically I think??? We could 301 to the Footwear/ URL rather than having both all-clothing and footwear file paths? This surely must be down to the bad design? Could we be losing valulable rank and juice because of this issue? And how would I go about fixing it? I want a new site, but funds are tight. But if this issue is so big that only a new site would fix it, then maybe the money would need to come forward. What do people make of this? Cheers Will

    | YNWA
    0
  • PCampolo


    Obviously duplicate content is never a good thing...on separate URL's.  Question is, how will the engines deal with duplicate meta tags on the same page. Example Head Tag: <title>Example Title - #1</title> <title>Example Title - #2</title> My assumption is that Google (and others) will take the first instance of the tag, such that "Example Title - #1" and canonical = "http://www.example.com" would be considered for ranking purposes while the others are disregarded. My assumption is based on how SE's deal with duplicate links on a page.  Is this a correct assumption? We're building a CMS-like service that will allow our SEO team to change head tag content on the fly.  The easiest solution, from a dev perspective, is to simply place new/updated content above the preexisting elements.  I'm trying to validate/invalidate the approach. Thanks in advance.

    | PCampolo
    0
  • allstatetransmission


    We're changing one of our site to word press from flash and the old site had no content, so everything is going to be different. Should we try to match the page names and small amount of content and large amount of meta tags for now and slowly change them, or is it alright to change everything right now? The site has good ranking and I don't want to mess it up.

    | allstatetransmission
    0
  • ClaireH-184886


    Hi i have signed up to s3 amazon and have uploaded my images to my bucket but the trouble i am having is, how do i have the images on my site. i have tried to use the url that it is showing but all that is doing is  https://s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/in2town/audreyrobertslarge.jpg  not bringing up the image on my site and when i have done it through the internet search box it does not bring up an image. I have been told this is a great cdn service and a cost effective one but i really need to learn how to use it. has anyone used this service and if so can you please let me know what i need to do I have now managed to get a bit futher with the help of stuart Bell but the images are still not showing on my site. any help would be great. many regards

    | ClaireH-184886
    0
  • Naghirniac


    I bought one website from templatemonster that contains only one HTML and the pages are generated by links (PROGRAMACAO) My website: www.nextformaturas.com.br This is good in term of SEO? or it is better an website with deveral pages with diferent contents? What are the pros and cons? I really lost on this.

    | Naghirniac
    0
  • Naghirniac


    Due to lack of resources, my company usually buys website templates and we adjust it internally. So we can always be with new designs, spending less money. With all this changes of google panda recently, I will change my website again. Usually we buy then from templatemonster, but some templates are far away from seo standards. Do you have tips where to buy than? Should I search for a specific technology or layout? Is this JS Animated website a goog choice?

    | Naghirniac
    0
  • AshJez


    Hello all, If I am in a very low position in the serps so that I can't find myself. Is it possible that I can determine that I have made progress? Thank you.

    | AshJez
    0
  • Red_Spot_Interactive


    I recently was asked the question if having live text in the navigation vs and image affect seo.  For example, refer to this link http://markup.io/v/avsaenq856kw the navigation highlighted is seperate images. The html elements read : ![](</span><strong style=)/images/procedures.png"> Live text html reads like this: Breast » What is better for seo value, or does it now matter having live text or an image?

    | Red_Spot_Interactive
    0
  • RankSurge


    There is a <figure>element that is supposed to provide better descriptions of image on the web in HTML5 - do you think that will replace the importance of the "Alt" tag? Link to figcaption description </figure>

    | RankSurge
    2
  • McTaggart


    Hi Mozzers, It's been requested that a top level page on a website I'm working on should be removed. It concerns me firstly because there are some nice links coming into that page. I'm also worried because website director has suggested the menu option for that page should simply be removed from all navigation, so you can't find the 'removed' page via his website, but it remains as an indexed page passing linkjuice to website. Is that a risky approach from an SEO perspective? What's the best approach to this? Thanks in advance! Luke

    | McTaggart
    0
  • KJ-Rodgers


    I have read a few different blogs across the web and a few asking direct questions here on SEOMoz, but I wanted to find out a general idea from the smartest people on the web (Mozzers) what you prefer to use to design and maintain your websites. Do you use a CMS such as Joomla, WordPress, or DNN? Or do you hard code everything on your site? Do you have a strong feeling on the SEO Benefits of one or the other?

    | KJ-Rodgers
    1
  • echo1


    When editing my Bing business listing, I have noticed that they offer a free mobile website. I was actually looking to build one and I'm not sure if this is what I'm looking for. I want to be able to customize it as well. Anybody tried it already? arBS3.jpg

    | echo1
    0
  • WilliamBay


    I know this one is a little more technical than pure SEO, but it somewhat ties in. I'm redirecting 2 sites to one. The companies have combined, and I've imported all their content that has been created, and the url mapping is set up correctly. So it currently is set up like this: A.com --> C.com
    A.com/blogpost-1 --> C.com/blogpost-1 B.com --> C.com B.com/blogpost-20 --> C.com/blogpost-20 What i would like is some method a redirect when landing at C.com or C.com/blogpost-XX. And in turn display a message in a DIV so I can style it. And yes, I have nothing better to do on a Friday night 🙂

    | WilliamBay
    0
  • JoshTurner


    I have a friend who has a squarespace site that is giving him lots of trouble.  For one, even though it is supposed to redirect to GreenSpaceConstruct.com...Bing and Yahoo don't seem to recognize this domain.  Instead, they show greenlightconstruct.squarespace.com in the serp's.  Oddly, Google shows the site as GreenSpaceConstruct.com. The site is ranking well for some terms.  I'm afraid that converting to wordpress will hurt his rankings in the short term.  If bing and yahoo are crawling this squarespace domain, and he moves it...is there a way not to just completely lose the rankings? Thanks for any thoughts.  Much appreciated! Josh

    | JoshTurner
    0
  • Obie


    The organization I work for has decided to re-design or re-develop the existing company Web site.  My part in this project is to come up with new features to add to the site, as well as making the site SEO-friendly (copywriting, link-building, keyword research, etc.). I don’t know a thing about Web site design, coding, format, etc., and I guess I will have to work with a designer on this project.  How would I go about finding a Web site designer? Should they have some SEO knowledge?  How much designer, coding and site structure knowledge should I have?  And how do we not infringe on one another as we work together?  (Sorry so many questions.)

    | Obie
    0
  • AndrewY


    We are currently developing a new version of our website and to make it easy to access for all team members, we just set it up on a server accessible via a publicly accessible domain name (ie devsite.com).  There has been no SEO and no links created to this site, or so I thought. Recently, I found out that Google somehow found its way to this development site and has been indexing the pages!  I was a little alarmed, as there are no links to the domain and we'll soon be transitioning all the content over to our primary production domain. I immediately created a robots.txt file to disallow access to the entire development domain.  My fear is that there may be some duplicate content penalty if Google sees that the content that is on our new site (once it goes live and is pushed to our REAL domain name) was previously indexed on our test domain. We're slated to launch in 2-3 weeks.  Is there anything else I should do?  Should I even be worried?  I'm probably a bit paranoid, but given the amount of time and effort that has gone into this new site, I love any advice or thoughts. Thank You!

    | AndrewY
    0
  • Jvalops


    Hi There, I would like to know what's the pros and cons of Infinite Page Scrolling for e-commerce Product Categories that have over 700 products. Sample here Secondly how will this effect our on page SEO as far as google concerned? Many Thanks

    | Jvalops
    0
  • BobGW


    I'm offering $100 to the SEO that pinpoints why our rankings dropped. Here's details: Some very good people have this site: nlpca(dot)com and it has dropped for many of it's keywords, including the keywords "NLP" "NLP Training" and many other keywords. We dropped from 19th to 42nd for the term "NLP". Here's what I'm doing about it: (1) making sure all of the keywords (on all pages) in the titles reflect what's in the content, and that the keywords show up exactly in the content 3 times or more. (2) making sure all of the keywords (on all pages) in the URLs reflect what's in the content, and that the keywords show up exactly in the content 3 times or more. (3) We're redoing the home page as (1) above. (4) We're fixing the 404s (5) We're shortening the titles that are too long, and we're thinking of reducing the home page keyword count to 3 keyword phrases, although 4 keywords work in all of our other sites that have the keywords showing up at least 3 times in the content. If it is something else, and you pinpoint it, and if because of you, we rise back up to around 19th (more or less) again then we'll give you $100 payable via paypal as a thank you. I'm going to leave this question 'unanswered' until this is resolved.

    | BobGW
    0
  • echo1


    We recently changed the template of our website but we kept the same url structure, most titles are the same, the content changed a little bit, the description is the same, and the same on-page SEO. Although we have been very careful and the actual template change took less than 5 minutes, we experienced a huge drop in rankings (even more than 10 positions in Google serp). Does anyone have any idea what could have caused such a drop? The weird thing is that Google still has the old website in cash and not the new one. We resubmitted the sitemap, made a few more redirects... but anyway... what else can we do? Any advice would be much appreciated. Thanks!

    | echo1
    0
  • Netboost


    We are redesigning our website and want to present a fair amount of text within jquery sliders. Will google crawl this text or is it treated the same way as actual script? Perhaps there is a way to just have the text as plain html but use jquery to display it?

    | Netboost
    0
  • Ehren


    This page has been removed from indices at Bing and Google, and I can't figure out why. http://www.pingg.com/occasion/weddings This page used to be in those indices There are plenty of internal links to it The rest of the site is fine It's not blocked by meta robots, robots.txt or canonical URL There's nothing else to suggest that the page is being penalized

    | Ehren
    0
  • Francisco_Meza


    I have a prospect in the credit repair industry. Does anybody know of some software where the clients can log into their own accounts to see the progress? The feature I am looking for is like a Real Estate website where the brokers can create their own accounts and upload their own properties.

    | Francisco_Meza
    0
  • evacuumstoreSEO


    I'm currently creating a 404 error page for my site and I noticed that a similar site uses some sort of code to automatically generate a meta title. Is this useful? For instance type in electrolux.com/john This page does not exist but in the title you'll see John | Electrolux How can i do this on my site?

    | evacuumstoreSEO
    0

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