Here are 5 factors on your site that could be hindering your SEO success:

Ads, ads, ads…ads

As a site owner, you have every right to monetize your site. But there is a point where your site becomes more of a giant banner ad than an actual site. A lot of ads can make your site look very spammy and push out any quality content you may have.

Broken links

There is nothing more frustrating for a site visitor than running into a 404 error at every turn. Broken links not only detract from the overall user-experience (which will send your visitors out as fast as they came in), but you could also incur a penalty from the search engines because of them. If you delete an old page, make sure you redirect any links that pointed to it towards another, related page. This is especially important if you launch a new site. New domains have little established trust with the search engines and it could take years to rebuild that link portfolio. Don’t let those links go to waste!

Slow load time

Google willingly admits that site speed and page load time is incredibly important factor in their ranking algorithm. Visitors aren’t willing to sit there and wait for your site to load. Advancements in technology have trained users to expect instantaneous results online, so patience runs thin. If it takes more than a few seconds to load, most visitors won’t bother to stick around to find out what your site have to offer.

Too much fluff

Visitors to your site want to find the information they are looking for and they want to find it right away.  Believe or not, there is no word count minimum or maximum you have to abide by when writing webpage content. Don’t stuff your pages with fluff just to make it look like you’re actually saying something. Visitors don’t care! They don’t want to dig for the information they want/need. Keep it simple and straightforward.

Outdated information

Let’s say you ran a Christmas BOGO special for your e-commerce site. Guess what? It’s summer. Do you still have information about that Christmas special on your site? It makes you look like a lazy site owner and could even call your trust factor into question. If you can’t be bothered to update your website with the correct information, why should visitor bother sticking around?

There are numerous other factors that could be hampering the success of your SEO that actually have nothing to do with your off-site SEO activities. That is why it is so important to make sure you have a fully optimized site before beginning your link building campaign. While links are the bread and butter of SEO, it doesn’t matter how many quality links you have pointing towards your site is your site can’t convert. Make sure that your site is worthy of your SEO!

Article credits: Nick Stamoulis

Why Likes don’t matter

When social media marketing first burst onto the scene, the only real tangible way to measure your campaign success was to see how many connections your company could create. The Facebook Like was the end-all-be-all benchmark of success. However, as social media has matured, the Like isn’t worth nearly as much as once believed. For instance, many companies will offer a promotional deal via Facebook, where users can get a sample of a new product or discount code if they Like the company. But how many of those users are actually interested in building a rapport with your brand and how many are just doing it to get free stuff? Many companies see a quick decline in the number of Likes they have once the promotion is over. The simple truth is that a Like doesn’t mean a consumer is actually interested in what you have to say.

Facebook Shares are much more valuable to a company. When someone Shares your content by posting it to their Facebook wall, they are broadcasting to their network that this content is valuable in some way. Peer recommendation is a powerful marketing tool that can help push your content in front of a wider audience. The more frequently a piece of content is Shared, Tweeted, posted and so forth, the more trust that content has with the search engines as well.

Social is the path, not the destination

Social networking sites are a great place to interact with current and potential customers. It’s an even playing field where large brands are expected to play by the same rules as the consumer. Getting a user to click through to your social profile means you have something that they want, but don’t just let them stay there. Social profiles should be looked at as yet one more gateway to your main site. If you are going to post blog posts to your Facebook page, don’t publish the whole post. Leave a teaser snippet that captures your audiences’ attention and them pulls them through to the actual blog. Invite visitors to check out you latest products on their respective product pages, allow them to sign up for your company newsletter and more.

Don’t push traffic away

If one of the goals of a social networking site is to drive traffic through to the main site, than why to do many website ask visitors to head back to those same social sites? While you want to be able to connect with your audience on a social media site, do you really need to have a huge “Like Us on Facebook” button taking up valuable webpage real-estate? Once someone has arrived to your site, you should be focused on getting them to convert, not following you on Twitter. Getting social connections is a secondary goal of your website.

Article credits: Nick Stamoulis

The visual aspects of web design for SEO are about converting that traffic. Whether that means attracting customers to visit a brick and mortar storefront, encouraging them to spend some money online, or getting them to call for a consultation to set up an appointment, the landing page does most of the heavy lifting at this point. And for the most part, simplicity and clarity should define effective graphic design. Of course aspects of contemporary design aesthetic should appear in simple things like color palette, font selection, layout, and shading. But things like fancy embedded Flash elements to play music or present animated navigation options often take away from the site’s core purpose, which is converting visitors into customers. And an extra benefit of removing Flash and other advanced media-heavy elements is that simple, anchored text links impact SEO ranking because crawlers can read them.

Graphic design and SEO also coordinate in a more explicit way. Beyond being appealing enough to capture and maintain visitors’ immediate attention, landing page text and information should reinforce the core message from the SEO content. That means repeating tested keyword phrases, supporting that message visually using images and eye-pathing, and generally achieving clear and simple communication. Any expert website graphic designer should be able to reduce the core concepts to one simple goal; visual design shouldn’t be immediately noticed or draw attention to itself, but rather should support the main message of the website.

This is easier said than done, but companies investing in SEO should keep the importance of graphic design and SEO in mind when they plan an SEO campaign. The best SEM firms will be able to help improve some basic graphic design elements during the initial website overhaul, which is often essential just to optimize the core site architecture. But even if they can’t, they should be able to recommend some effective graphic designers or at the very least coordinate with them for the sake of the project and the SEO campaign. Neglecting this aspect of maximizing SEO just undermines the SEM company’s efforts.

Article credits: Ryan Farrell

Remember your readers

It’s very easy to get lost in everything that has to do with SEO. Some people put more emphasis on keywords and getting found by engines that they forget the entire point of having a website – to lure new visitors and turn them into leads. If your website does not cater to humans, then you’re completely wasting your time.

A few tips on making your website user-friendly: write short paragraphs rather than kilometric ones. Also complement each article with page titles and subheadings to give your readers an idea on what the write ups are all about. Make sure that your content has a clear call to action. For instance, you can motivate your readers in the end of write up to call you or schedule an appointment with you. Finally, weave in your keywords as naturally as possible.

Why should you even go to such lengths in making your website as user-friendly as possible? This is because your website’s goal is not just to attract viewers but also convert them into customers. If your website isn’t user-friendly and interactive enough, then you’ll never be able to accomplish this goal as effectively as you would want to.

Be careful with your keywords

Your keywords are integral to your SEO campaign and it’s necessary for you to utilize them in your website. The trick in using keywords effectively is not overdoing it. If you place a lot of keywords in your website, then you’ll be upsetting the search engines and your visitors will think that they’re reading spam. On the other hand, a 1-3 percent keyword density will allow your write ups to read naturally yet search engines can still identify these keywords easily.

What is your business all about?

Your website’s content should clearly state what your business is all about. Since you’re selling your products and/or services, you need to be explicit with what you do. You can also use your website to advertise your business’ vision and mission. Make sure though that your website’s content is in line with your vision and mission.

Article credits: Ryan Cote

Design accounts for 46% percent of a viewers appraisal of trust and quality of a website. That’s a lot of traffic and business to lose if you don’t have the right creative design behind your site. You need to be sure the company will work with you until you are completely satisfied with the quality of your site. A company that employs different designers on site, allowing you to obtain a range of stylistic influences is an additional benefit you should take in to account when weighing the pros and cons of a particular provider.

Depending on your needs some of the services that you may be require could include services such as Social Media Design, E-Commerce solutions, Content Management, SEO and Web Hosting. Very few web design firms offer this range of service so you need to be sure that whoever you go with has experience in the field your project requires.

Mobile Accessible Websites are becoming more and more popular as users access the web through smart phones in ever increasing numbers. You need to make sure that your website is will be compatible with all Blackberry’s, Android phones, iPhones and other smart phones. The added bonus is that the pricing is considerably cheaper when developing a Mobile Website rather than a full one. Ideally you will want your website optimized for both mobile and regular PC visitors. This will cost extra, however if your website is commercial in nature the cost offsets the loss in traffic you may experience by ignoring either segment of the market.

Your project manager should be communicative and willing to provide you with expert advice and support on any service that you need. No overselling and no gimmicks to give you products you don’t really need. They should provide a personal touch and will connect with you on a professional level to provide you with what you need. You should be able to get a good feel for your project manager during your first call. Does he ask you a lot of questions? Do you fee like he is using pressure tactics to make you sign up? Is he trying to cross sell you or upsell you various additional services you didn’t ask for? Take not of his conduct during that initial consultation. The company you work with should not feel “desperate” for your business or come off unprofessionally in any way.

Support services should include a toll free number, an email address, and a customer contact form you can fill out with any questions that you may have about your services. They should respond to you in a timely and efficient manner and be able to answer any questions and concerns that you may have about any of your web services. Only go with a company that offers real time protection on your service so you don’t have to experience those down times that many of the more low-tier services give you. Ignore companies that fail to provide you with a phone number. Any legitimate business will display a number, name and address clearly on their website.

Pricing and cost varies depending on the type of services you require. Your project manager should be able to explain the details of their pricing structure and break down the cost to you in common sense terms.

Choosing the proper service provider can be a tough thing to do when it comes to web design. There are a bewildering number of options out there that may leave you confused and frustrate as to which one is really the right one for you. Any great design firm worth its salt will pride itself on the following 4 cardinal rules of good design service: Discovery, Design, Development and Delivery. If you’re looking for a trusted web design firm, looking for those qualifications in a firm may just save you a lot of time and money.

First off, accessibility. What I mean by this is users and search engines both need to be able to reach all of the pages, all the content that you’ve created on your website in easy ways, and you need to make sure you don’t have any dumb mistakes that can harm your SEO. These are things like 404s and 500 errors and 302s instead of 301s, duplicate content, missing title tags, thin content where there is not much material on the page for the search engines to grab on to and maybe for users as well. Two tools that are great for this, first off, Google Webmaster Tools, which is completely free. You can register at Google.com/webmasters. The SEOmoz Crawl through the SEOmoz Pro Web App, also very useful when you are looking at a new site. We built a bunch of features in there that we wish Google Webmaster Tools kept track of, but they don’t, and so some of those features are included in the SEOmoz Crawl, including things like 302s for example and some thin content stuff. That can be quite helpful.

Next up, keyword targeting. This makes some sense. You have to choose the right keywords to target. What I want to have is if gobbledyzook – probably an awful word for anyone to be targeting, no search volume, just bad choice in general – but we want to be looking at, do these have good search volume? Are some users actually searching for them? You might not be able to target high value terms because you are also looking for low difficulty when you are first launching a site. You don’t want to necessarily shoot for the moon. Maybe you do on your home page or some branded page, some product page, but for the things that you know you want to target and you want to work on early short term, maybe some content that you’ve got, some feature pages for the product or service you are offering, and you think to yourself, I am not going to be able to target gobbledly, which is really tough, but maybe gobbledyzook. That will be easier. So, you can look at search volume, the relevance to the website, please by all means make sure that you have something that is relevant that is actually pulling in searches you care about, and low difficulty. If you have that taken care of, you have your keyword targeting.

Content quality and value. If you have a bunch of users coming to this page and they’re thinking to themselves, this doesn’t really answer my query, or yeah, maybe this answers one portion of it, but I wish there was more detail here, more video, more images, maybe a nice graphic that explains some things, a data set, some references to where they got this information. Not just a bunch of blocks of text. Maybe I am looking for something that describes a process, something that explains it fully. If you can do that, if you can build something remarkable, where all of these people change from “Huh, huh, what’s this?” To, oh, you know what, instead it’s “I am happy.” “I also am happy.” “This page makes me do happy. Yea, I am going to stick my tongue out.” If you can get that level of enjoyment and satisfaction from your users with the quality of the content that you produce, you’re going to do much better in the search engines. Search engines have some sophisticated algorithms that look at true quality and value. You can see Google has gotten so much better about putting really good stuff in results, even sometimes when it doesn’t have a lot of links or it is not doing hardcore keyword targeting, when it is great stuff, they are doing a good job of ranking it.

Next up, design quality, user experience, and usability. This is tough. Unless you have a professional designer or you have a professional design background, you almost certainly need to hire someone or go with a very simple, basic design that is very user friendly that you know when you survey your friends, survey people in your industry, survey people in your company, survey people in your ecosystem, that they go, yeah, yeah, yeah, this looks really good. I am really happy with the design. Maybe I am only giving it a six out ten in terms of beauty, but an eight out of ten in terms of usability. I understand the content on this site. It is easy for me to find things and they flow. There is really no point in ranking unless you are nailing these two, because you are not going to get many more customers. People are just going to be frustrated by the website. There are a few tools you can use on the Web to test these out. Five Second Test, Feedback Army, Silverback App, all of these are potentially useful for checking the usability user experience of the site.

Social account setup. Because social and SEO are coming together like never before, Google is showing plus ones and things that people share by default in the search engine rankings. Bing is showing all the stuff that has been shared on Facebook, and they are putting it above the rest of the content. It really, really pays to be in social, and social signals help search engines better rank things as well as having a nice second order effect on user and usage data, on branding, on the impact of people seeing those sites through social sharing and potentially linking to them. So social account setup, at the very least, you probably want to have these four: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+. Google+ is only about 25 million, but it is growing very fast. LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook are all over 150 million users right now. I think Twitter is at 200 million. Facebook is at 750 million. So at least have your pages set up for those. Make sure the account experience is the same across them, using the same photos, same branding, same description, so people get a good sense when they see you in the social world. You probably want to start setting something up to be monitoring and tracking these. You might want to sign up for something like a Bitly. I used to really recommend PostRank, but unfortunately they don’t track Facebook, since Google bought them, anymore. So it is a little more frustrating. The SEOmoz Web App will start to track these for you pretty soon. Once you’ve got those social accounts set up, you can feel good about sharing the content that you are producing through those social accounts, finding connections, building up in that world, and spending the appropriate amount of time there depending on the value you are feeling back from that.

Next up, link building. This is where I know a lot of people get sort of off to the wrong start, and it is incredibly hard to recover. I actually just got an email in my inbox before we started doing Whiteboard Friday from someone who had started a new website and he is like, “I got these 300 links, and now I am not ranking anymore. I was doing great last week. For the first six weeks after I launched, I was ranking great.” I sort of did just a quick look at the back links, and I went, “Oh, oh no.” I think this person really went down the route of I am going to get a bunch of low quality, easy to acquire links, and for a new site in particular, it is so dangerous, because Google is just really on top of throwing people out of the index or penalizing them very heavily when their link profile looks really scummy. When you don’t have any trustworthy quality signals to boost you up, that’s when low quality links can hurt the most.

So, good things to do. Start with your business contacts and your customers. They are great places to get links from. Your customers are willing to link to you. Awesome. Get them to link to you. If the contacts that you have in the business world are willing to say, hey, my friend Rand just launched a new website, boom, that’s a great way of doing it. All your email contacts, your LinkedIn contacts, the people that you know personally and professionally, if you can ask them, hey, would you support me by throwing a link to me on your About page or your blog roll or your list of customers or your list of vendors, whatever it is.

Guest posts and content. This is a great way to do good content positive content production and earning links back for that. Finding trustworthy sites that have lots of RSS subscribers and are well renowned and can give you visibility in front of your audience and give you a nice link back if you can contribute positively to those. I also like high quality resource lists. So, this would be things like the Better Business Bureau maybe, that sort of falls a little in the directory world, but something like a CrunchBase. If you are a startup in the technology world, you definitely need to have a CrunchBase listing. You might want to be on some Wikipedia lists. Granted those are no-follow, but that’s still okay. That is probably a good place to get some visibility. There might be industry specific lists that are like these are heavy machine production facilities in the United States. Great, okay, I should be on that list. That’s what I do. News media and blogs. Getting the press to cover you. Getting blogs in your sphere to cover you. Finding those, emailing the editors, letting them know that you are launching this new website, that’s a great time to say, “Hey this business is transforming. We’re launching a new site. We’re changing our branding,” whatever it is. That is sort of a press worthy message and you can get someone to look at you. Review sites, review blogs are great for this too. They’ll sort of say, oh, you’ve got a new application, you’ve got a new mobile service, maybe we’ll link to you. That could be interesting.

Relevant social industry and app account links. If I contribute something to the Google Chrome store, if I contribute something to the Apple store, if I am contributing something to a design portal or design gallery, all of those kinds of industry stuff and accounts that you can get are likely worth getting your website listed on.

Social media link acquisitions. This is obvious stuff where you spend time on Twitter, on Facebook, on LinkedIn, Google+ connecting with people and over time building those relationships that will get you the links possibly through one of these other forms or just through the friendliness of them noticing and liking, and enjoying your content. That’s what content marketing is all about as well.

These are great ways to start. Very safe ways to do link building. They are not short-term wins. These, almost all of them, require at least some effort, some investment of your time and energy, some creativity, some good content, some authenticity in your marketing versus a lot of the stuff that tempts people very early on. They’re like, oh, sweet, you know, I have a new website. I need to get like 500 links as soon as possible, so I am going to try things like reciprocal link pages. I am just going to put up a list of reciprocal link partners, and I am going to contact a bunch of other firms. They’ll all link to me and we’ll all link to each other. It will be a happy marriage of links. No, it’s not. It’s not a wonderland.

Low quality directories. You search for SEO friendly directory, if it shows up on that list, chances are . . . even in Google. Google is showing you a bunch of bad stuff. Someone was asking me recently on email, they said, “Hey, I really need some examples of sites that have done manipulative link building.” I was like, “Oh, it’s so easy. Search for SEO friendly directory and look at who has paid to be listed in those directories.” They almost all have spammy manipulative link profiles, and it is funny because you go to those, and I don’t know why people don’t do this, but try searching for the brand names that come up in those lists. None of them rank for their own brand name. Why is that? Clearly, they are killing themselves with these terrible, terrible links. So, low quality directories, really avoid them.

Article marketing or article spinning, I talked about that a few weeks ago on Whiteboard Friday, also a practice I would strongly recommend you avoid, especially, I know it can work, I know there are people for whom it does work, but especially early on, it can just kill you. It really can get you banned or penalized out of the engines, and you just won’t rank anywhere if your link profile starts out spammy. Paid links is another obvious one.

Forums, open forums, spam kind of going across the Web. Oh, here’s a guest book that’s open and forgot to put no-follow. I am going to leave a link there. Oh, here look, it’s a forum that accepts registration, and they forgot to close their no-follow off, anyone can leave a link. Even things like do-follow blogs, do-follow blog comments, man, it’s really risky because they are linking to bad places a lot of the time and it is usually manipulative people who have no intent to create something of value for the search engines. They are merely trying to manipulate their rankings. Whenever you have a tactic like that it attracts people who have nasty websites, and then Google looks at those and goes, okay, they’re linking to a bunch of nasty sites. Well, I don’t want to count those links, or maybe I am even going to penalize some of the people that they are linking to. That really sucks. Then link farms, which is essentially setting up all these different systems of links that point to each other across tons of domains that are completely artificial or link for no human reason, or no discernable human reason, and are merely meant to manipulate the engines.

This type of stuff is very, very dangerous when you are early on. If you have already built up a good collection of these types of links, you are much safer. You do have some risk in those first three, six, nine months after you have launched a new site around doing wrong things on the link building front and getting yourself into a situation where you are penalized. We see a ton of that through SEOmoz Q&A. I get it in email. You see it on the Web all the time. So, be cautious around that.

Hopefully, this checklist will help you get your site to a nice established place and you can keep doing some great marketing and eventually win the Internet. I wish you good luck with your new website. Thanks so much. Thanks for watching. See you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday.

By: Aaron Wheeler with SEOmoz

Effective web design includes site structure, usability, functionality, and so much more. In this article, we are going to explore the building blocks to an effective web design.

Web Site Structure is an Important Element in Web Design
An important element of Web Design is the structure of the site. This has to do with the platform used to present content on your website. You can use straight HTML, PHP, CSS or other coding options, or you can use a script, such as WordPress or Joomla. Each of these options presents its own pros and cons, and they can all affect search engine rankings.

The biggest issue presented with structure and SEO is about the code used. For instance, bulky code that includes many errors or additional coding that isn’t necessary can cause your website to load slowly. Search engines tend to favor faster loading websites, so this can affect your SEO rankings. To deal with errors you can use the W3C Markup Validation Service. This tool will comb your website for mistakes so that you can fix any problems that are affecting your websites ability to perform at its best. When your site is structured perfectly, it makes it easy to use and navigate the site.

Usability is Crucial to the Success of an Effective Web Design
Usability of a website refers to how easy it is for new visitors to navigate the site, find what they are looking for, and interact as necessary. When visitors come to your website is it easy for them to find the navigation? Can they go from one page to another, and then backtrack to the home page? Or do they get lost and, possibly leave in frustration? A good Web Design company will be able to create sitemaps and a site structure that will make your site easy to navigate for search engine spiders as well as human visitors.

Readability is another important element of Web Design
Readability is another element of Web Design and this pertains to how easy it is to read the website. Many website owners do not know that black text on white background is the easiest text to read. While black backgrounds can look fun and modern, it’s uncomfortable for the average reader. Keep this in mind while choosing colors for your site, and always choose a dark text on light background.

Website Functionality is the Key to Effective Web Design
Functionally on your website should be easy to interact with. This isn’t generally an issue for content only websites, but it is an issue for websites that offer any interaction methods. For instance if you have a blog where visitors can comment on your posts, it needs to work properly.

On forums or other communities, visitors expect the website to flawlessly move from allowing them to post, to viewing their new post. When things aren’t working properly the errors can affect SEO over time and traffic to the site. In general a visitor who continues to get frustrated while visiting a website is less likely to return to it.

Functionality of a website can include but is not limited to making sure:

• Links are not broken or incorrect
• Making sure all downloadable content is easy to access
• A proper search function that allows visitors to get to content in a few seconds

Webmaster tools on Google, a free tool, will crawl your website looking for links that do not work and other issues that affect functionality.

In conclusion web design isn’t just about how pretty a website is, it’s about how well it functions, how easy it is to use, how easy it is to read, and coding used to build the site too. As long as you take the time to work out each of these elements when building your site, you will have a successfully designed website that is pleasing for your visitors.

Codeanywhere is a code editor in a browser with a powerful ftp client integrated, and all popular web formats are supported (HTML, PHP, JavaScript, CSS, and XML). Codeanywhere can edit many types of files and has all the nice features you are used to in desktop editors:Syntax highlighting,code auto completion,smart indentation,full internationalization,unlimited undo/redo (now handled on client (browser) side, no more waiting for server response),unlimited tabs etc.
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CodeRun Studio is a cross-platform Integrated Development Environment (IDE), designed for the cloud. It enables you to easily develop, debug and deploy web applications using your browser. CodeRun Studio can be used instead or alongside your existing desktop IDE. You can upload existing code in order to test it in the cloud or for sharing with your peers.
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Cloud9 is a state-of-the-art IDE that runs in your browser and lives in the cloud, allowing you to run, debug and deploy applications from anywhere, anytime. A complete game-changer that will change the way we develop applications forever.With Cloud9 you can simply focus on writing code and forget about the tedious process of setting up your environment and integrating SDK’s. (Also if you are a Chrome-OS user, Cloud9 is the ideal tool for you.)
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Kodingen started with two brothers (Devrim & Sinan) coming together to give something back to developers community.It is an Online Development Environment, Online Code Editor,cloud coding and Web-based code editor
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ecoder is a simple, web-based code editor, which includes a file browser, file uploader, and tabbed system to allow multiple files to be edited at the same time. using this web-application developers can edit code directly online, real-time syntax highlighting is handled by textarea and keyboard short-cuts lend it the feel of a locally installed application.
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ShiftEdit is an online IDE for developing PHP, Ruby, Python, Perl, Java, HTML, CSS and JavaScript through FTP, SFTP and Dropbox.
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Workspace is a online development environment that facilitates the complete management of your Web-based projects. With a syntax highlighting editor built right in, it provides the ability to edit text, PHP, JavaScript, HTML, Java, Perl, SQL and other types of files directly on a remote server. Finding and managing those files is made easy with a cutting-edge file management utility embedded right in the app. With this utility, users can connect to, and manage the files on an arbitrary number of ftp sites simultaneously.
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JsFiddle is a playground for web developers, a tool which may be used in many ways. One can use it as an online editor for snippets build from HTML, CSS and JavaScript. The code can then be shared with others, embedded on a blog, etc. Using this approach, JavaScript developers can very easily isolate bugs.
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