Grey Color in Design
Grey Designs, Greener Pastures
The “color” Grey is a fascinating topic. Once you crack the lid on it, it just sort of escapes like a great Grey cloud of possibilities. Web designers and graphic designers of all sorts often use Grey as an innocuous background element but Grey can be a very powerful design concept on it’s own. Furthermore, Grey is fascinating because it is one of the most environmentally friendly “colors” out there. Using Grey in interior design, print design and web design can create great moods and greener spaces.
Lee Krasner once said, “We get used to a certain kind of color or format, and it’s acceptable. And to puncture that is sticking your neck out a bit. And then pretty soon, that’s very acceptable.”
In a way this is the modern history of Grey. Grey was used primarily as a non-color for years. Grey was a hue that was relegated to utilitarian objects. Think peasant clothing, battle ships and a color that was painted on cement basement floors to hide dirt. Only with the introduction of photography and skyscrapers did the power of Grey finally take off and assert itself. From the earliest years photographers learned to capture the luxury of Grey. Grey has a velvet like quality in the prints from the 30’s and it is excellent for making color pop. Even in the first films, like those portrayed in the movie Hugo, by George Melies, Grey was used as a prominent design force against which colors gain extraordinary strength and character. Academy Award winning VFX director Rob Elgato similarly uses Grey throughout Hugo to enhance the story and draw viewers into the era of the film.
Grey in interior design is one of the most ecologically friendly colors that a designer can use. This is particularly true in public spaces. Grey and variations on the theme using silver evokes a sophisticated ambiance. At the same time variations on Grey are slow to show either dirt or wear meaning that the lifespan of design features (chairs, bedding, paint, carpets) is vastly extended. Moreover, Grey requires less cleaning to appear welcoming. This removes pressure from cleaning staff and leads to overall higher impression ratings for public spaces. The Royalton, a boutique hotel in New York City, is an excellent example of the creative and ecologically minded application of Grey. Originally designed by Philippe Starck in 1988 the interior of the Royalton was completely redone by Roman and Williams in 2007. Roman and Williams expertly incorporated Grey to enhance the ambiance of both the rooms and the public spaces in the Royalton. The result is calming rather than boring, elegant rather than utilitarian. The added bonus is that it is also a Green space, something that is increasingly sought after by ecologically minded consumers.
Grey is also ecologically and economically sound when it comes to the physical production of design elements or printed materials. Grey, especially true untinted Greys, are cheap to produce and ecologically friendly. They do not put pressure on natural resources during production like any other color. Particularly for print, where color costs can jump unexpectedly (cyan does this on a regular basis) the use of Grey gives the client and designer a increased level of control over both content and cost. Moreover, great logos, like Apple’s apple, can easily be transferred into the color of the moment making the design fresh, current and alive. When Grey is combined with excellent design, Grey has the power to move with the moment and this is incredibly valuable.
Grey in Web Design
Grey in web design is often used as a pervading accent color. Both promotional products website, Gopromotional, and London’s Gio-goi website effectively use Grey to focus a viewers attention on the products of the website rather than on the website itself.
The Australian website ToolHQ similarly uses Grey to make the tools in their rotating space irresistible.
Other websites such as design firm TenderCreative and theimport use Grey more pervasively throughout the entire design. The Grey color enhances and focuses viewers’ attention in a way that white or black would not.
One of the best uses of Grey as a focus color is the 2012 video design for the NAB Show. Grey in this case is interwoven throughout the rotating sphere to draw the viewers’ eye and focus into the conversion message. Without Grey the design would lack depth and clarity.
Logistically speaking Grey is not always an easy color to work with in web design. Even “websafe” Greys are notorious for reading differently across screens, platforms and devices. Mainly this occurs with Greys on the lighter end of the spectrum from WS #CCCCCC (204 204 204) and lighter. Like pastels, these Greys do not read well or consistently across screens. According to PM designs due to the proliferation of flat-screens and low cost laptops it is best to avoid Greys starting with the combination of #CC or #FF including “websafe” #CCCCCC and browser recognized colors such as whitesmoke, e-paper Grey and white (#FFFFFF). All of these can generate a washed out appearance on a variety of lesser quality screens. One way around the light Grey dilemma is to add a highlight of white and then use a darker Grey ground as is seen in the ToolHQ design above.
Greys come in a variety of tinted hues that can read either warm or cold. Tinted custom Greys are the most fascinating in the Grey spectrum. By adding a small tint from a dominant color using the eyedropper Grey can take on a richer tone giving dimension to the entire design. (See Mike Cossey).
The silent power of Grey in design is everywhere once you start looking for it. From BMW print ads to Apple’s signature computers, Grey is a useful modern design element. As the year looks forward to brighter colors in everything from fashion to interior designs, expect to see more of Grey: the silent elegant workhorse.
What do you think about Grey? Please share your thoughts in the comments area.
How to Change Ukraine’s Image on Google
Lots of Ukrainians are furious at the fact that Ukrainian dating sites dominate Google search results about Ukraine. Google Autocomplete (or Google Instant) inserts “Ukrainian women” as one of the top options to search for. While Ukrainian women are beautiful, websites of the Ukrainian agencies that focus on arranged marriages are not the best sources of information to promote Ukraine’s image. Let’s work together to change this!
One can find tons of various Ukrainian dating sites that make money by connecting Ukrainian women with foreign men. These sites seem to be profitable, and while they dominate organic Google search results, they also invest in Google paid ads and occupy top screen real estate spots located above the organic (non-paid) listings. All of this makes relevant promotional information about Ukraine go unnoticed.
In the wake of Euro 2012, The Netherlands created a sexy ad that infuriated Ukraine. The ad supposedly made use of erotic images of Ukrainian women and has triggered a diplomatic row between Amsterdam and Kyiv.
What Can We Do to Change Ukraine’s Image on Google?
Having worked on search engine optimization for quite some time, we know that Google Autocomplete suggestions depend on the number of purely objective factors (e.g. the popularity/volume of search terms). If we start searching on Google for specific terms, we can change the dominant autocomplete options and move the “Ukrainian women” term down the list. We need to be organized though and focus on 2-3 terms to get the most out of our efforts. Let’s promote the “Ukrainian culture” and “Ukrainian people” terms.
So Here is What We Ask You to Do:
- Search for “ukrainian culture” and “ukrainian people” phrases.
- Spread the message about this campaign around.
- Those who do not understand English can read a Google Translate version of this page.
Here is What the Ukrainian Government Can Do:
Invest in Google Ad Words to promote Ukraine by bidding higher than the dating agencies on the keyword “Ukraine” and “Ukrainian.” This will move down (or eliminate from the 1st page) the dating sites’ ad positions. If you do not know how to run Google Ad Words campaigns, please get in touch with us, and we will help.
Please share your thoughts and comments below.
What is an SEO Strategy and How to Create One
SEO (search engine optimization) is the process of improving the visibility and effectiveness (clickthrough rate, conversion rate, user experience) of a website in organic (non-paid) search results. An SEO strategy is a plan to make an SEO campaign a success.
Before we get into the specifics, it is worth pointing out that one of the most important components in any SEO strategy is to always be prepared to change/adjust/experiment with an existing SEO approach by regularly making tweaks as a result of the world events happening around us as well as changes that take place in the search industry (e.g. Google’s Panda Update, Venice Update, Over-Optimization Update, etc.). SEO tactics heavily depend on numerous online and offline factors including:
- User behavior on the site (bounce rate, average time on site, percentage of returning vs. new visits, number of pages per visit) that can be tracked using web analytics tools.
- Current events that take place in the world (be it popular holidays, sports competitions, natural disasters or some other relevant events that results in a high search volume for certain keywords).
- Changes in Google Algorithm or changes in Bing or Yahoo.
- Resources that can be invested in SEO (labor, software licenses, etc.). There are lots of online SEO tools that can be of great help.
Any SEO plan (inbound marketing plan) should target two major areas:
- On-page SEO – things that can be done to the website (text copy, website structure, user experience, keyword research and integration, redirects, canonicalization, technical SEO that deals with the server setup and page loading speeds, etc.).
- Off-page SEO – things that deal with online/offline outreach, reputation building and link building.
It is imperative to have tangible measurables to be able to monitor and evaluate the success or failure of an SEO campaign. These measurables can be setup as goals and campaigns in your Google Analytics profile.
How to Create an SEO Strategy
In order to explain how to create an SEO strategy and what areas to look at while building an SEO plan, I will look at a specific website example (www.dietandcancerreport.org or DCR) and cover some of the most important on-page SEO elements as well as briefly touch base on the off-page SEO activity (link building) that can be done to improve the site’s rankings that result in some high-quality organic web traffic. I will provide some basic recommendations/action points to accompany the theory.
It appears that the web team has done a good job with using clean coding, proper webpage filenames and generally uncluttered and user-friendly navigation and layout on the DCR website.
Create proper folder redirects (e.g. www.dietandcancerreport.org/cup/index.php should redirect to www.dietandcancerreport.org/cup/, www.dietandcancerreport.org/CUP/Index.php should redirect to www.dietandcancerreport.org/cup/).
The DCR web team has been implementing unique title and meta description tags wherever possible trying to make sure that the keywords reflect the content of the pages.
Analyze the stats from Google Analytics and perform keyword research on a regular basis (1-2 times a year) to determine the most effective phrases (head terms, chunky middle terms and long-tail keywords).
At this stage, the copy has decent keyword density and utilizes relevant phrases.
Revisit the copy every 6 months to make sure it is not outdated.
Based on the website traffic report from Jan 1, 2012 to Apr 25, 2012, the bounce rate, average time on site, number of pages per visit and number of return visits look pretty good.
Minimize the bounce rate, try to increase the average time per visit, number of pages per visit and number of return visits. This can be done by evaluating the structure of the pages that have the highest bounce rate, analyzing and adjusting the keywords that bring search traffic to high bounce rate pages.
The web team can now measure the number of visits coming from the main social media sites (Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, YouTube, etc.). According to the Open Site Explorer, the total number of Facebook shares is 226 and the total number of Facebook likes is 601.
Carefully plan your social media postings by posting regularly and engaging people into discussions. Implement social media sharing tools. Integrate Google+ author profiles.
The existing text copy contains relevant link references to other pages on the site whenever appropriate.
Determine the top pages on the site (using tools like Open Site Explorer) and link from these pages to the pages that lack good positions in SERPs. Utilize relevant anchor text.
As of today, the organization does not have a carefully planned link building campaign and there is no staff member who is responsible for link building. Backlinks are currently being built naturally by people who visit the site via search engines and decide to link back to the relevant pages. According to the Open Site Explorer, the site has 576 linking root domains and 2,445 total links.
The Majestic SEO chart shows that the number of backlinks have been rapidly increasing since 2008.
- Have staff members create new content and promote this content on blogs and social media sites.
- Approach universities and scientists who reference the findings of the report in their cancer prevention research and ask for backlinks to the site.
- Work with the media and government to promote the importance of the diet and cancer report by writing relevant research articles and press releases.
- Create a series of infographics and online tools to explain the scientific report findings in lay terms.
- Write guest blog posts and emails to relevant bloggers who would be willing to link to the site.
- Analyze the competitor link profiles and work on acquiring similar backlinks.
- Search for WCRF or DCR brand mentions online and contact the webmasters asking to link the brand names back to the site.
- Search Google for various outdated cancer stats pages or outdated cancer prevention resources, analyze the sites that link to these outdated resources and reach out to those sites asking for a backlink to the up-to-date resources/data published on the DCR site.
Please share your thoughts and recommendations in the comments area to advise on the SEO tactics that can help www.dietandcancerreport.org.
ArtDriver Launches Mobile Version of Corporate Site
ArtDriver has officially launched a mobile version of the corporate website. The mobile site can be viewed at m.artdriver.com.
The technology behind the new site is based on HTML5/CSS3. We have implemented an auto redirect from the full site to the mobile site for all major smart phone agents while at the same time allowing the smart phone users to view the full site and read our blog.
Special thank you goes to the design and development team for making an effort in bringing this project to life on such a short notice and in spite of having a heavy workload.
Here is some statistical data on the marketing importance of mobile presence:
- The size of the mobile market is currently 1.08 billion smartphone users and 3.05 billion sms enabled phones.
- It is estimated that mobile internet will take over desktop internet usage by 2014.
- 50% of all local searches are performed using a mobile device.
- On average, Americans spend 2.7 hours per day socializing on their mobile device.
And here is a great infographic explaining the growing importance of mobile marketing:
Please let us know your thoughts on our new mobile site.
Guest Blogging Guidelines
We are accepting guest blog posts. If you have an idea and your post follows the guidelines listed below, please send it for review/approval to contact@artdriver.com with a subject line “Guest Blog Post.”
Content Guidelines:
Your guest blog post should focus around one of the following topics:
- Digital marketing (SEO and social media)
- Mobile website development
- WordPress (how to, tools, case studies, statistics)
- Google Analytics
- Website development (usability, conversions, etc)
- Graphic Design
General Guidelines:
- Your post should not be a plain advertisement that includes links to your site. We are looking for high-quality guest blog posts that add value to our site and are of interest to our readers. We do not take out links that are relevant to the post content, but reserve the right to do so.
- Your post must be original content and not previously published elsewhere on the web. We can allow you to publish the same blog post once after we feature it on our blog providing you put a rel canonical to our site.
- We reserve the right to edit your guest blog post for grammatical errors and facts.
- We can link to your Google+ profile if you provide the author link in the format <a href=”https://plus.google.com/(number)?rel=”author”>Google+</a>
How to Track Web Traffic From Print Ads
We’ve recently been approached by a NGO that was running a print ad in the local newspaper to promote a fundraising event. The organization, while promoting their marathon via a QR code, needed to know how many people ended up on their website using the redirect URL (server-side redirect from a non-existent web page) embedded into their QR code that was published in the newspaper.
In case anyone has run into a similar task and needed to figure out a way to track visits from a redirect, we have an easy solution.
Let’s presume that we have a QR code URL www.site.com/printad, and it needs to redirect to www.site.com/fundraising-marathon/index.php.
The redirect www.site.com/printad is setup using an .htaccess file or some other server side method for permanent redirects. The tricky part is that we need to track visits to www.site.com/fundraising-marathon/index.php from www.site.com/printad without having a physical page at www.site.com/printad/index.php. The solution is to use Google’s URL Builder tool to properly tag your redirected URL.
There are 3 steps that need to be done:
- Generate a url using the Google URL Builder tool. Your url should look something similar to: http://www.site.com/fundraising-marathon/index.php?utm_source=NewYorkTimes&utm_medium=PrintAd&utm_campaign=QRCode
- For your server-side redirect, point www.site.com/printad to go to http://www.site.com/fundraising-marathon/index.php?utm_source=NewYorkTimes&utm_medium=PrintAd&utm_campaign=QRCode
- Once the redirect is setup and people come to your site, you can go into your Google Analytics and navigate to TRAFFIC SOURCES > SOURCES > CAMPAIGNS and get the data that you need.
Another way to track visits from a QR code URL that is redirecting to your site is to use a URL shortening service (e.g. bit.ly). The disadvantage of this method is that if you need to print the url on your newspaper ad, the url will look something similar to www.bit.ly/myad and will not have your website’s domain name branding.
Do you know of any alternative methods of how to track print ads online? Please share them in the comments area.
Pinterest’s Flaw
Pinterest has become a popular discussion topic among digital marketers, and it definitely generated a lot of attention and curiosity in the blogosphere. While there are plenty of articles written about what this aspiring social network does and how to use it, I would like to point out one flaw that I discovered this morning after performing a search on Pinterest hoping to find the WSJ’s infographic titled “25 documents you need before you die.“
After I typed in “25 documents” keyword into the Pinterest’s search bar and clicked the search button, I was presented with a never-ending wall of identical infographics populating my screen like raindrops on my window. Even though I could find the infographic that I needed, I was not sure which thumbnail to click and where the original source was, as I wanted to credit the creator of the content.
My strategy was to locate the original source by looking at the number of repins and likes, and the infographic that had the highest number of both repins and likes should be the one I would reference in my blog post. After spending 2 minutes scanning each thumbnail image (most of them either had no likes or repins or carried 1-5 likes and repins), I finally found the treasure buried way down the bottom of this search results wall. The original pin had 1 like, 13 comments and 9558 repins.
I thought that I should perform another search using a different keyword and see how this would affect my findings. When I searched for “lovely pair,” I was shown a SERP that also contained multiple instances of the duplicate content that moved the unique pins below the screen fold, which did not add value to user experience.
I think that Pinterest’s search functionality is flawed. The user who created the content and was the first one to make it available on the social network should get proper credit and be featured on the search results page above users who copied the pin and made it look like it was them who brought this new piece of content to the table. Additionally, the pin that generated the highest number of repins and likes should also be featured on the top of the search results list. Finally, it would be helpful if Pinterest utilized image recognition software in order to not display hundreds of identical pins on the search results wall. The latter will improve user experience and encourage Pinterest users to generate unique and engaging content.
What do you think of Pinterest’s search? Please share your comments below.
38 Free Online SEO Tools
With a constantly growing influx of new technologies in the digital marketing industry, job responsibilities of SEOs are no longer focused around the on-page keyword integration and off-page link building strategies. SEOs have been faced with an array of new tasks and challenges related to usability and goal conversion rates. In order to keep up with the overwhelming amount of tasks that online marketers have to do on an every day basis, here is a list of free online SEO tools, which we can use to make our lives easier.
- Tools to Test Your Website Loading Speed and Server Uptime
- Tools to Do a Quick Website SEO Audit
- Tools to Test Your Server Setup For SEO Purposes
- Tools to Test Your Website’s Link Profile
- Keyword Research and Link Building Tools
- Social Media Tools
- Tools to Generate Sitemaps
- Tools to Get Website Credibility/Owner Information
- Tools to Test Website Usability
- SEO Tools For Excel
Tools to Spice Up Your Listings on Google
Why Should We Use These Tools?
Being able to stand out on SERPs (search engine results pages) is critical to improve the CTR (clickthrough rate) and drive website traffic. Generally speaking, if your site does not rank in the top 4 results, it is pretty much invisible. With the introduction of Google Places, Schema.org and launch of Google+ and Search Plus Your World, we’ve been endowed with an abundant selection of tools to make us differentiate from the crowd.
1. Schema.org – a collection of html tags (rich snippets) that can be used to improve the display of search results.
2. Google Rich Snippets – online tool to test how Google reads the incorporated rich snippets, and how your pages display on Google SERPs.
3. Author hReview WP Plugin – WordPress plugin that allows the author to leave a review and rating which can then appear as a five star rating rich snippet on SERPs.
4. GD Star Rating WP Plugin – another WordPress plugin to display the rating rich snippet.
5. Google’s rel=”author” tag – allows you to display the author picture on SERPs:
Tools to Test Your Website Loading Speed and Server Uptime
Why Should We Use These Tools?
Website loading speed is a critical factor in Google’s algorithm. Fast loading sites improve user experience. We should strive to make our landing pages load as fast as possible and certainly in less than 3sec to avoid losing more than 60% of visitors who just clicked on our link and about to enter the door to our online kingdom.
1. Google Analytics – you’ll need to add the following code to your GA code snippet in order to be able to see the page loading speed: _gaq.push(['_trackPageLoadTime']);) .
2. Pingdom – excellent online tool to check the loading speed of a site along with the useful stats for all server requests. This tool can be used to optimize your site.
3. Monitor.us – Test the reliability of your web server. Receive email alerts as well as weekly/monthly report summaries of your server uptime.
Tools to Do a Quick Website SEO Audit
Why Should We Use These Tools?
I hardly know of any SEO who would be able to do his/her job without using one or all of the tools below. These are must haves, as they allow to examine the technical flaws of a given site as well as provide good insights on how to structure an SEO campaign.
1. Screaming Frog – SEO desktop tool (for both PC and MAC) that spiders websites’ assets (links, images, CSS, script and apps) and returns the results with an SEO perspective presenting them in tabs by type to allow filtering for common SEO issues, or slicing and dicing the data by exporting it into Excel.
2. Woorank – online tool that provides instant website review that includes seo basic, social media impact, mobile preview, usability, security and much more. The free version is limited to 1 preview per week.
3. Robots.txt Check – online tool that gives an overview of your robots.txt errors.
4. goRank – keyword density tool.
5. W3 Code Validator – online tool which helps to validate your coding and point out the areas that need to be addressed.
6. Copyscape - content duplication can result in Google’s penalty. This tool will help to determine whether your site has any duplicate content.
7. Virante Duplicate Content Tool - another duplicate content spotter which also provides additional relevant insights on the way your pages are setup.
Tools to Test Your Server Setup For SEO Purposes
Why Should We Use These Tools?
Before doing any SEO work on a given project, it is essential to get as much information on what has already been done (SEO-wise), how the system is setup, what is the target audience and what are the site goals. The following free tools will give solid insights into the technical aspects of the client’s website.
1. The Responsinator – check for correct server response codes. This tool is useful to check how your server-side redirects are setup in order to avoid content duplication for issues like www and non-www domains, trailing slashes, url capitalization, etc.
2. Server-side Compression – check your server-side compression. By enabling the compression, you can significantly reduce the page loading speed and improve user experience on your site.
3. URI Vallet – another useful SEO tool to check what’s going on under your website’s bonnet. This tool categorizes the report into the following sections:
- Server Headers
- Summary
- Objects
- Time to Download
- Object Details
- Internal Links
- External Links
- Validation
4. Built With – very handy online tool for finding out the technology behind a given website. You can get information on the server type/size/capacity, programing language, CMS, widgets and more.
Tools to Test Your Website’s Link Profile
Why Should We Use These Tools?
It is a no brainer! These sweet tools will be your best friends in the SEO market. They will help you to plan and execute your off-page SEO campaigns by providing insightful link profile data for your site and the site(s) of your competitors.
1. Open Site Explorer - SEOMoz’s tool to perform competitive website research, explore backlinks, anchor text and much more. The free version of this tool will not give you much data, but still be helpful to get you started.
2. Majestic SEO – it is somewhat similar to the Open Site Explorer, but has the largest and freshest link intelligence database. Majestic SEO will give you plenty of information on your link building efforts or the historical data related to link acquisition.
3. Blekko.com – a search engine/SEO tool, as it allows to get website insights by performing SEO specific queries. The tool is free; however, you must register to use it and know how to use it. Danny Sullivan’s blog put together a great guide on how to use Blekko for SEO.
Keyword Research and Link Building Tools
Why Should We Use These Tools?
Keyword research and link building are integral parts of any SEO campaign. We constantly analyze what people search for, what is the current trend (QDFs), what are the most relevant/converting keywords related to our content and how to get credible and strong backlinks. Keyword analysis is a science in itself and must be taken very seriously. We can write a separate blog post on how to conduct keyword research using various online tools as well as social media listening, news and human psychology; however, in this article I will only list the most popular free online tools that can give you a good idea where you stand in terms of keyword research and what tools you can use for getting sweet backlinks.
1. Google Adwords – free keyword research tool by Google. It is pretty accurate; however you should be cautions relying on the data. Read Rand Fishkin’s blog post titled Be Careful Using AdWords for Keyword Research.
2. Google Insights – this tool will give you a rough idea on what people search for as well as allow to get some data on the rising keyword searches. You can also use Google Instant’s Autocomplete suggestions to get an idea of what keywords may be popular at a certain date.
3. YouTube Keyword Tool – being the second largest search engine, YouTube can provide a variety of great keyword ideas.
4. Bing Keyword Tool - here is something that is not owned by Google and can give you a neutral picture in your keyword analysis. The problem with Bing’s tools is that you have to have a hotmail/msn/live email account to use them.
5. Internet Wayback Machine – this is more of a link building tool. After you’ve done your keyword research, you can use this handy site for finding link opportunities. If you can find a website that has lots of broken links, you can use the Wayback Machine to find out what type of content was on the pages that no longer exist. By recreating this content (and making it 100% better) on your site, you can then ask webmasters to consider to link back to you instead of having broken links to non-existent pages. Wanna take a break from this long blog post? Check out how Google’s landing page looked like in 1998.
6. W3 Broken Link Checker – use this free online tool to find broken links on your site or your competitors’ sites and take action!
Social Media Tools
Why Should We Use These Tools?
Google and other search engines give a big emphasis on the social media sharing, as this helps the engines to improve user search experience by eliminating spam and introducing friend recommendations into the search results. We’ve written a blog post on the top 20 social media marketing tools that can be used by SEOs.
Tools to Generate Sitemaps
Why Should We Use These Tools?
Sitemaps help search engines to index your site faster as well as indicate that you are attentive to details and take time to follow the best SEO practices by properly generating and submitting your sitemap files. In addition, video or image sitemaps can improve your search engine visibility.
1. XML Sitemap Generator – if you are not using a content management system and have a custom programmed site, I’d recommend using this free tool to generate your sitemaps.
2. Google’s Guide to Video Sitemaps – we will not cover various video sitemap genarator tools; however, you can use Google as a reference on how to properly put together your video sitemaps. If you want to learn more about the SEO power of videos, check out Distilled blog post on video SEO tactics.
Tools to Get Website Credibility/Owner Information
Why Should We Use These Tools?
There is so much spam on the web that we should be very careful about where we get backlinks from. If someone emails you and offers to put a backlink to your site or if you are looking for sites that accept guest blog posts, use the tools below to get an idea who stand behind a given website:
1. Spy On the Web – simply enter website url, ip address, google adsense or google analytics code and find out what resourses belong to the same owner.
2. Domain Tools – the most comprehensive domain name ownership information.
Tools to Test Website Usability
Why Should We Use These Tools?
Google constantly tries to improve the user search experience. Using such parameters as clickthrough rates, bounce rates, time spent on site, search engines can get a good picture of how happy your website visitors are with your content and overall site usage experience. Use the tools below to get feedback on what users like/dislike.
1. Google Website Optimizer – free website testing and optimization tool allows you to test and optimize site content and design to increase revenue and ROI.
Below are some relatively inexpensive tools:
2. Feedback Army – for $20 submit your site and get 10 responses from various reviewers.
3. Amazon’s Mechanical Turk – submit an assignment, indicate your budget preferences and find people who will review and feedback on your site.
4. Go Mo Meter – Google’s tool to test how your website displays on mobile devices. The site also provides valuable usability recommendations.
5. Mobile Phone Emulator – discover the hidden gems or flaws of your site’s look on various mobile devices/browsers.
6. IE Tester – test your websites look and performance on various versions of Internet Explorer. This is a desktop application.
7. Browser Size Google Labs Tool - interested in how your website looks on various screen sizes and screen resolutions? Need to modify the layout to increase the conversion rate? Then this tool will be handy.
SEO Tools For Excel
Why Should We Use These Tools?
You can use Excel to power up your SEO and save a tremendous amount of time performing link building research, link profiling and much more. We could not finish this blog post without mentioning at least one SEO excel tool.
1. SEO Tools For Excel – you can use this tool for:
- Onpage analysis and debugging
- Create your own SEO scorecard/report
- Monitor and analyze back links
- Scrape any website or web service and get data directly into Excel
- Domain research
- String templating
- Get any data out of Google Analytics
- Monitor social media efforts
- Avoid duplicate content when writing texts
Can you recommend any SEO tools that have not been mentioned here? Please use the comments area below to leave feedback.
WordPress CMS Usage Stats
We’ve recently been approached by a charity that was looking for a company to build an online shop. This was a small charity unable to afford a lot of money to use a bespoke CMS, and therefore, their options were limited to open source software solutions that could be modified to suit the organisation’s needs and branding. Our recommendation was to use WordPress CMS for this ecommerce website development project.
In order to strengthen the validity of our CMS recommendation, we’ve done some research on the WordPress CMS usage statistics and would like to share them with you in this blog post. In a nutshell, WordPress is the most commonly used CMS online. Let’s take a look at the slides below:
According to W3Techs, 70.7% websites do not use a content management system (CMS) at all. Out of 29.3% of the sites that use a CMS, 53.8% is attributed to WordPress, which means that 15.8% of all sites currently operating online give preference to WP. This is a huge market share, which also means that WordPress has an enormous community of developers who constantly generate new plugins and participate on the Q&A sites.
Additional data from http://trends.builtwith.com/cms shows that in the top million sites, WordPress CMS is used in 63.28% of the cases compared to other content management systems.
In addition, we notice a significant percentage of CMS users who decide to migrate to WordPress from another platform:
If we look at the statistics that show the WordPress usage for Ecommerce and compare it to other Ecommerce CMS, we see that 4.10% is attributed to WP. We know of 5,135 sites using WP e-Commerce (GetShopped.org).
Is WordPress a good option for your CMS? Please share your comments below.
Experiment: Value of Backlinks From Public Google Docs
We recently ran an experiment to find out if backlinks from popular public Google Docs (docs that are linked to from multiple domains and major social networking sites) pass any link juice, and now it is time to reveal our findings.
What we’ve learnt is that Google Docs links DO NOT PASS any SEO juice. Moreover, public Google Docs are not even indexed by Google, or at least they did not appear in SERPs when we tried to search by unique keywords contained in our test Google document.
Here is what we’ve done:
1. We created a public Google Doc containing the following copy:
“Google Docs Backlink Experiment
By: ArtDriver
February 3, 2012
Hello All!
If you are reading this doc, you are helping the SEO community to figure out if Google values backlinks from public Google Docs. We are testing this on our website, www.artdriver.com, using a backlink with this unique anchor text testinggoogledoclinkjuice.
WHAT YOU CAN DO TO HELP:
Please link to this doc URL, and then we can analyze if the backlink to our site actually passes any link juice.
Thanks to everyone who helps!
Oleksiy
@artdriver
P.S. I plan to write a blog post revealing my research, once I have some relevant data.”
2. We asked our friends and SEO folks to link to our test Google Doc from Twitter, Facebook and personal blogs to ensure that the public doc is widely referenced online.
3. After two weeks of testing, we ran some queries on Google to search for “testinggoogledoclinkjuice,” as this was the unique anchor text used in our Google Doc. SERPs did not return any relevant results for this keyword where we’d see a reference to our experiment. We also ran a report on the Open Site Explorer to see whether there was any mention of “testinggoogledoclinkjuice” anchor text and had no luck.
4. We also checked the source code of the Google Doc page to see what coding is used for the backlink, and we did not find any mentions of; rather, a text only version which you can see below:
Conclusion
While we found out that Google Docs backlinks are not indexed and do not pass SEO juice, we could still have been mistaken about this due to the fact that our test Google Doc did not get enough backlinks to be considered an “important document” by Google or 2 weeks was not enough time for Google or SEOMoz’ Open Site Explorer to index our document and record the anchor text that we used.
Thank you to everyone who helped in this experiment and please do share your thoughts/comments on this.
