Thanks to hard work of ourVoltan, XOOPS was featured in the latest issue of CMS Magazine in Iran:
http://cmsmagazine.ir/
Thank you and congratulations!
Viva XOOPS!
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New product could help developers sell more software and boost ad revenues.
This week on Whiteboard Friday, Rand Fishkin describes the methods he recommends for outsourcing content creation. Content is extremely important for SEO and users alike so these best practices are important for those of us without the luxury of an in-house staff of copywriters.
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Rand starts this presentation by setting context with his favorite SEO diagram. You can read more about theSEO Pyramid here.
Decide what you are trying to accomplish. Are you doing this for sales? SEO? Engagement? Traffic? Brand awareness? Be clear and write down what you want to accomplish along with the metrics you will use to measure them.
You have plenty of options for finding potential resources. You can go offshore, in-house or hire web contractors. For web contractors, you can use the traditional services likeCraigslist,oDesk,Elance,Guruor tap into the world of writing communities and long tail bloggers. These last two recommendations while not as established can many times provide superior quality writing with lower budgets.
In order to do this, we highly recommend you set up a voice document (a written record of how you would like to sound in your company's written communications and promotions). Give this to the writer before getting a sample and use this as the yardstick after they submit their first sample. This will help you gauge if this person is a good fit for your organization.
Now that you have established a process, you need to put checks into place to make sure the writer is hitting their targets. Look back at the goals you created in the first step and use them to track and improve upon the related metrics.
Remember, from both an SEO and from a human perspective, writing is about quality over quantity. Having one great article that engages readers and earns links far outweighs 100 poorly written articles.
One Maryland candidate is questioning how to handle the new rules.
Second company this week to debut a display product incorporating social media content.
Our online publication about interactive marketing gets more interactive and social.
"Destination Beauty" aims to draw fans of popular video bloggers in the beauty space.
Kenny was CEO of Digitas until its acquisition by Publicis and later stayed to guide the agency holding company's digital strategy.
As the worlds of web design and SEO merge ever closer, we've been seeing design-specific elements produce a positive impact on SEO for the sites that employ them. It's terrific news for SEOs who love design and are capable of and passionate about making it part of their repertoire. It's also great for designers who find that as they evolved from Flash designs to machine-readable CSS and separated markup from content, they've earned more links and more organic search love.
In this post, I'll walk through examples of those design practices in use and describe how they can help improve your opportunity for organic search rankings and traffic.
A phenomenal article from Aarron Walter of Mailchimp on ThinkVitamin -Emotional Interface Design: The Gateway to Passionate Users- deeply explores the trend of designers using their talents to imprint emotion on users. Personally, I love this practice, and professionally, I see it as incredibly valuable for SEO, too.
Rather than simply providing a user with information, these sites attempt to convey a sense of the companies, products and services they represent in a tangible way.
For McMiller's Sweets, below, the website expresses the brand's humor, whimsy and obsession with their product. I only wish I could buy online - there'd be a few boxes headed for the SEOmoz offices right now.
Box.net, an enterprise-focused software company, aims to achieve an air of simplicity and a feeling of the ease that comes from using a basic, consumer application but targeted at a business audience. Their redesign has me convinced - it's light and airy, it's up in the clouds (perhaps a double-meaning since they host in"the cloud") and it even calls out the"sexiness" of the application.
When users are emotionally invested in the websites they visit, they're more likely to:
All of these have either first or second-order impacts on SEO in a positive way.
Sometimes, you don't want to overwhelm content with calls-to-action... At least, not until you're fairly certain your visitor has finished reading. That's where the brilliance of the scroll-triggered call-to-action comes in.
Browse any article on the New York Times website and you'll see this behavior in action, driving you to read the next article in the series only after you've reached the bottom of the current piece:
It's great for boosting page views, but also drives more awareness of those pieces, improving links and driving up visibility for previously less-well-publicized works. My guess is that clicks are quite high.
In the next example, the OKCupid Blog leverages precisely the same tactic:
This use case might be even more brilliant. After wrapping up a remarkable article about what statistics tell us not to do in online dating, my first instinct is to share the piece with some single friends. OKCupid's flawlessly timed, dropdown overlay synchs with this internal compulsion and makes it easy to tweet, like, stumble or buzz away.
Scrolling + triggers = more browsing, more awareness and more sharing (and I think the potential applications for SEO are far greater in quantity than just what's been shared above).
If your users are passionate about your site and their experience or participation, why not make it easy to share?
For years, sites have been offering users the virtual incentives of points, badges and status to encourage greater participation. Andrew Follet fromConcept Feedbackauthoreda brilliant piece analyzing this precise behaviorand exposing some terrific examples.
We've noticed an interesting behavior as it relates to user badges as well, and it's spurred me to whiteboard the following chart numerous times for those who have online communities considering SEO:
The lesson? Make great communities, encourage participation and reward your users with badges that will make their sites look good. It's the online equivalent of giving out high quality, well designed t-shirts - fans won't just wear them to bed; they'll actually show off your brand.
Iwrote about the multiheadera long time ago, and the evolution of design has made them tremendously more compelling and useful since then. Case-in-point,Unbounce, who has 5 different messages/features on their homepage all accessible to engines and all part of a single multiheader. I've screencaptured them elegantly"swooshing" in and out of the headline position:
The advantage is two-fold - more content on the homepage that's accessible to search engines (thanks to clever CSS/HTML usage) and everyone who links to any one version is concentrating the link juice singularly on the home page. In some cases, that could cause problems, but in others, it's a great opportunity to leverage design to focus the links you acquire where you need them most.
BTW - Speaking of Unbounce, If you have yet to read Oli Gardner's12-Step Landing Page Rehab Program, you're seriously missing out.
Infographic linkbait is certainly all the rage these days, and I think it's a well-justified trend. The brilliant part is that you benefit by producing the infographic and other bloggers benefit by sharing it and attracting views, attention and links of their own. So long as the embed works seemlessly and the infographic is compelling, you're off to the link acquisition races.
Some examples I enjoyed came from Smashing Magazine, who put together this piece on programming (and the how-to behind it's creation):
And this smart contribution from Visual Economics:
As with badges, the"beauty rule" applies - the sexier your infographic (and the most interesting/useful/compelling the content), the higher adoption will be.
It used to be that I'd see a website built around illustrations and artistry and shake my head in sadness, knowing that the beauty of the UI was unlikely to be experienced by anyone except those coming via type-in. Today, with the amazing progress of CSS, sites like Carbon Made can have their design cake and eat their SEO, too.
Google's"text only" cache shows every word you can see in the screenshot - we've come a long way indeed. And, darn it if that design doesn't make me want to just climb a mountain and jump off a cliff into an octopus-filled lake below... errr.. make an online portfolio (yeah, that's the one!)
For another look, check out Ruby on Rails developers, Pioneers:
Pretty, accessible and indexable, what more could an SEO ask?
Sometimes, you visit a site that stands out from everything else you've seen on the web in the past. Historically, many of those sites have also been tragically obscured from search engines. Nowadays, a new breed is emerging, showing off massive creativity, brilliance in design innovation and a compelling combination of link-worthiness and search-accessibility.
A few of my favorite recent stumbles into this realm include:
Above:Grain and Gram Gentleman's Journal
Above: Sanctuary T Shop(who knew a small e-commerce shop could be this pretty?)
Above:Heart Directed(a great place to find more remarkable creative formats, though lacking the machine readable content to be an SEO example itself)
It's a great time to be on the web, thinking about SEO, design and the brilliant things that can happen when they overlap strategically. Here's to hoping that more of us who invest in organic search traffic will bolster that task with the power amazing design can bring. It's not just more links - it's greater engagement and a higher liklihood that sharing of all kinds will occur. However the search engines evolve, you can be sure this is the type of behavior they'll seek to reward.
p.s. If design inspires you, I'd recommend checking outDrawarand Six Revisions list of10 Fresh Galleries for Inspiration
E-mail marketing firm will roll a couple of acquisitions announced today into an internal agency.
Social campaign launched last year is extended with eight new videos starring YouTube celebs.
The decision will come as a blow to Microsoft as it continues attempts to scale its Bing engine worldwide.
The
To install a new extension, all you need to do is click on the “install now” button under an extensions description. You can access the official Safari Extensions Gallery by clicking on the Safari menu (or File, for Windows users) and selecting “Safari Extensions Gallery.”
That’s it. While waiting for the official solution to appear, other repositories like the newly revamped
The official gallery contains some of these same extensions, but it also has some brand new offerings like the Twitter for Safari extension. This extension lets you create a tweet that links directly to your current tab, and also includes real-time trends and information for every page you visit. You can also easily access Twitter Search directly from the toolbar.
We’re excited that Apple has finally given developers an official way to add to the browser without having to jump through hoops and use things like SIMBL. If many of the Safari extensions look similar to those made for Google Chrome, that’s because they have a lot in common. Chrome, which like Safari is also based on WebKit, also uses HTML, JavaScript and CSS to create its add-ons. The APIs themselves are different, but how they interact with content and how they are loaded into the browser is more similar.
While the ability to install extensions and plugins is one of the features that really made Firefox a must-have for web enthusiasts, over the years the strain and bloat of some of those plugins has hindered overall Firefox performance. Firefox’s
Although Apple hasn’t made any announcements about the mobile extensibility of Safari Extensions, the fact that extensions are built in HTML and CSS means that it is at least conceivable that extension support could hit Mobile Safari. The ability to bring some of those tools to the iPhone or the iPad could really open up possibilities.
What do you think of the Safari Extensions gallery? Do you have any must-download favorites?
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Yes, it’s true: Superstar rapper Kanye West has officially joined Twitter under the username
The Grammy-winning artist sent out his first tweet earlier today. He is apparently in Silicon Valley meeting with technology companies. In fact,
To say the rapper has been critical of Twitter in the past would be an understatement. He had some harsh words for the information network
“I DON?T HAVE A F*CKING TWITTER? WHY WOULD I USE TWITTER??? I ONLY BLOG 5 PERCENT OF WHAT I?M UP TO IN THE FIRST PLACE. I?M ACTUALLY SLOW DELIVERING CONTENT BECAUSE I?M TOO BUSY ACTUALLY BUSY BEING CREATIVE MOST OF THE TIME AND IF I?M NOT AND I?M JUST LAYING ON A BEACH I WOULDN?T TELL THE WORLD. EVERYTHING THAT TWITTER OFFERS I NEED LESS OF. THE PEOPLE AT TWITTER KNOW I DON?T HAVE A F*CKING TWITTER SO FOR THEM TO ALLOW SOMEONE TO POSE AS ME AND ACCUMULATE OVER A MILLION NAMES IS IRRESPONSIBLE AND DECEITFUL TO THERE FAITHFUL USERS. REPEAT? THE HEADS OF TWITTER KNEW I DIDN?T HAVE A TWITTER AND THEY HAVE TO KNOW WHICH ACCOUNTS HAVE HIGH ACTIVITY ON THEM. IT?S A F*CKING FARCE AND IT MAKES ME QUESTION WHAT OTHER SO CALLED CELEBRITY TWITTERS ARE ACTUALLY REAL OR FAKE. HEY TWITTER, TAKE THE SO CALLED KANYE WEST TWITTER DOWN NOW ?. WHY? ? BECAUSE MY CAPS LOCK KEY IS LOUD!!!!!!!!!”
West, whose account has been verified, already has more than 20,000 followers. We expect that number to skyrocket before the end of the day.
So you know Kanye, we’re really happy for you and we’re gonna let you finish, but
What do you think Kanye should tweet about? Let us know in the comments.
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A website without multimedia is like a cupcake without icing: Functional but lacking. These days, all manner of web pages from huge company sites to small business blogs are expected to add audio, photo, or video to their posts and homepages.
While this all sounds well and good for multimedia companies that produce endless amounts of content, small businesses with text-based websites can run into trouble finding and providing appropriate content. The real trick is adding multimedia that enriches your site, product, or brand without taking away from your company?s core message and aesthetic. And how do you get a rich multimedia experience without hiring a coder?
This is rarely easy. To help, we?ve collected some simple resources to add audio, photo or video to your blog.
For most blog hosting sites, including
WordPress, Tumblr and any other half-decent blog host will have ways to add multimedia in their dashboard. Some of these are better than others. Tumblr tools are pretty intuitive whereas WordPress sometimes glitches when switching between HTML and visual formats. To save you all sorts of headaches, the following resources work off embed codes. This means you can see and edit all your multimedia visually, then copy-and-paste the final code into your post as HTML. Simple as that.
Audio is often overlooked as a multimedia device when compared to photo and video. There are, however, some great ways to include your favorite songs, or even some original audio, into your blog.
SoundCloud is completely free and includes smart features like the ability to add comments at specific time markers (perfect for breaking a long clip into chapters). Lastly, make sure you have the rights to your audio if you are using it for commercial purposes.
When dealing with photos, two services immediately come to mind —
Uploading individual photos is a snap on most blog sites. Adding an embeddable slideshow, however, can make your post look more dynamic. It?s also a way to include a collection of photos without stretching your post well beyond the page break.
For those looking for a more professional approach, check out
When it comes to video, the easiest option is usually to go straight to the source. Three popular video sites —
Using
Embedding a
Fonts can convey a lot about your brand or personal identity. “
If you like playing with fonts, try comparing a ton of variables using
