Design Focus is a regular Online Friendly feature that examines well-designed sites to show how Web designers have overcome some of the challenges of their profession.
UK type design firm Fontsmith caught our attention with their calalog of creative fonts. In this Design Focus, we take a look at their website, and see if they put as much attention to their divs and style sheets as they do counters and serifs. Read the rest of this entry »
Around the Office is a weekly group blog that shows what the OnlineFriendly.biz team and Kobayashi Online have found interesting, funny, poignant, or otherwise notable over the past week.
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Roberto wants online traffic seekers to know about some modern day Search Engine Optimization practices, because, after all, SEO isn’t just about backlinks, keywords, and tags anymore. The 1st Web Designer blog makes some SEO recommendations such as optimizing your local searchability; smoothly integrating your SEO and social media marketing; and using Schema.org to check that your SEO efforts look authentic to the search engines. And it’s important to remember that you can’t fool Google; your content and backlinks should be authentic.
While we all have reservations about Comic Sans, Brent found a gallery that re-imagines some of the most iconic logos had they chosen the clip-on tie of fonts. And while the Star Wars logo may look closer to the current brand promise, we’re not recommending . Check out some of the other logos on the Comic Sans Project Tumblr page.
We were very excited for the latest release of WordPress, the content management system estimated to be behind 15 per cent of all websites. Sitepoint provided a rundown of the features in version 3.3 such as a revamped interface that will work on small-screen devices like tablets, a drag and drop media uploader, and a new Tumblr importer. According to tests done by Dev4Press, the changes in WordPress features have also been accompanied by considerable optimization that make sites faster.
Comedian Louis CK has broken with convention by selling recordings of his stand-up performance, Live at the Beacon Theater, directly to his audience. Louis CK was able to make the same money on his video while selling it for less, and Daveed takes this as one example of how this new business model works. Instead of partnering with a large company and charging $20, he made his show downloadable for just $5. The only people that lose out are the traditional movie companies.
Around the Office is a weekly group blog that shows what the OnlineFriendly.biz team and Kobayashi Online have found interesting, funny, poignant, or otherwise notable over the past week.
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Roberto found out a few ways to thoroughly secure a WordPress-based site. Some tips include never using the default “admin” user name, installing the WP Security Scan plugin, and protecting the wp-config.php file. Choosing a secure password is also important, so pick something better than “guest”.
Daveed is interested in the drama that’s unfolding as Barnes & Noble claims Microsoft is trying to stifle competition among mobile devices through patent law, and asking the US Department of Justice to investigate. Many companies that sell devices based on Google’s open-source Android operating system have agreed to Microsoft license fees. However, Barnes & Noble, which recently launched its Nook Color eReader, has refused upping the stakes of this patent debate. Patents are supposed to protect inventors and some argue that the high value of patents could be incentive to innovate and create new patents, but others say patent cartels could unfairly hobble competitors. Given the money and principles at stake, it will be interesting to see which side wins.
Wayne is not alone in thinking that Google’s search encryption is an SEO game changer at least for analytics. Forget about drill-down analytics reports with data on inbound search strings, or where visitors came from — this information is now off-limits. And while we’re happy that encryption provides consumers more privacy, referrer blocking won’t be happening with paid Google ads, meaning there’s arguably a double standard where those who buy ads get better analytics — and more visitor information.
Eva saw Google take the stage this week with Google Music, a new cloud music service that is expected to compete with Apple’s iTunes platform. Google Music promises a new Web Music player and Android Music app are available now in the Android Market. It has also added a social element where you can share music you buy with for free on Google Plus. Interestingly, iTunes, currently the top online music store, added a social network known as Ping last year. As the online music store battle ensues, let’s hope these companies’ tactics ultimately help more artists get compensation for their music.
The site for electric vehicle technology firm Better Place happened to be so stylish and well-organized that we thought we’d feature it on Design Focus.
It’s a clean and focused corporate website that shows a progressive, professional, and practical company — exactly the image an engineering firm would want to present. And it incorporates a lot of design, marketing and SEO features that make the site notable. It also incorporates the content management system WordPress, which makes updating content easier, and up-to-date content adds to the site’s overall value to visitors.
In this post, we’ll show you some of the smart decisions the website’s designers made, and offer some constructive criticism that can be used to enhance an already brilliant website.
Around the Office is a weekly group blog that shows what the OnlineFriendly.biz team and Kobayashi Online have found interesting, funny, poignant, or otherwise notable over the past week.
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This week Roberto found a great summary of some simple practices to make a WordPress site more visible in the eyes of search engines. Including keywords in page titles and headings, install an SEO plugin, and use descriptive tags and keywords were all among the top 10 tips.
We’re very happy with the current WordPress plugin Formidable Forms, but to make it even better, we suggested that the developers, Strategy 11, add a query parameter after the form has been submitted. This would help us collect data for analytics purposes. Strategy 11 helpfully obliged, telling us this feature will be added in a future release. We’re eagerly anticipating it!
If you don’t have words to describe something, you certainly don’t have words to search for it. An image may be the answer thanks to Google’s new image-based search, which lets you simply drag and drop an image file into the search bar and wait for the results. Wayne finds it great for finding a specific location, such as identifying the places vacation photos were taken.
You can now play your favourite classic arcade games in the Google Chrome Web browser thanks to an adaptation of the popular game emulator MAME. Daveed has been checking out the case study which explained the process of porting MAME to run in the Chrome Web browser in only four days. Understanding the the particular technical challenges sweetens the experience of playing classics such as Star Fire or Robot Bowl.
Brent has lots of experience with BlackBerry phones, but he’s afraid the name of its new operating system, BBX, is lackluster. He agrees with commentary by brand identity expert Andris Pone, who wrote this week: “BBX is a meaningless, boring name that suggests a lack of any technology that can compete with that on the iPhone.” And while the software itself seems to be impressive, it seems that BlackBerry has squandered a precious opportunity to tell a compelling story using its name.
Search engines use various methods for creating titles and descriptions (or snippits), and determining if your page is relevant to each search. They crawl for content contained within a web page’s meta tags including the “title” and “description” tags, but also page content that seems most relevant or useful. This means that various page elements are evaluated, including links from other pages on your website, known as internal links.
Internal links, in fact, can play a large role in how your pages are perceived by search engines.
 A Google search for Kobayashi Online yields result pages with different, descriptive titles. |
The meta title has long been known to be a heavy weight when it comes to search engine snippits and page relevancy, but if Google sees fit to add words discovered through internal site links to the title, then it’s very possible that these links are evaluated at a similar level of importance. This is especially true if there’s a common element (or root term) among all internal links pointing to one particular page.
Suppose a website has the following navigation links: Home | About | Contact Us. And these three pages all have the exact same meta title, “Welcome to our Site!” The page results, shown in a Google search, could show: “Home – Welcome to our Site!”, “About – Welcome to our Site!” and “Contact Us – Welcome to our Site!”
In the realm of SEO, this kind of duplication, of course, should be avoided.
Having unique meta title tags for all site pages is one way to help reduce the chance of this happening. But the example above also illustrates a very interesting connection between internal links and the pages they point to. In our opinion, this shows that internal linkage is evaluated differently, and that there’s an important association between the text of a link and how it’s relevant to the page it points to, even internally.
It’s also important to link pages in a relevant way. Main navigation is usually fine, but links like “read more”, and “click here” are hardly descriptive. When creating a link, take advantage of the opportunity to describe the destination page without being too verbose. The focus should be on the root concepts (keywords) of the destination page. For this article, for instance, it would be wise to use keywords like “SEO” and “internal links” when linking to it from other pages.
Finally, if you’re using images for your links, use the “alt” property of the “img” tag and you’re set. But, again, be sure to make it concise and relevant.
The importance of having relevant internal (and external links) has helped many websites over the years. And in a game where every single point makes a difference, updating your internal links to be as relevant as possible might just give you the edge you need.
| Quick Tips Are your internal links effective? Take a look at your site and see if you pass these simple steps:
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Do you need help with your website’s SEO? The SEO experts at Kobayashi Online are here to help!
In our previous blog post about creating a successful brochure web site, we slipped in a few descriptive links to ourselves and our clients. We did this to help tell Google, Bing, Yahoo and other search engines what these sites are about. Doing this is part of an online marketing strategy called Search Engine Optimization and it is something all business websites should consider. .
Search Engine Optimization is a big field, and running a search marketing campaign can take some time (and dollars).
However, there some things you can do (and should do!) to make sure your homepage and website are friendly to search engines. Descriptive link building, like in our previous post, is one of those things. However, before you get to this stage, you should make sure your site is search engine friendly.
If you are in an industry or location that isn’t (yet) highly competitive online, then making your website friendly to search engines will likely result in some “out of the blue” traffic on your site fairly early on.
However, even if you are in a business that is highly competitive online these basic steps are absolutely required to be visible. Doing them early will help down the road. You see, the search engines do value longevity (where they think longevity has value).
Making your site easy to understand early on gives the search engines additional data to determine who your site is important to in the future.
In the search world, longevity is related to reputation; and reputation dictates relevance and authority. SEO is a longer term strategy because it takes time to build that reputation.
Here are some additional guidelines directly from the three main search engines:
Now that we’ve discussed how your site can make friends with search engines, we’ll get back to how your site makes friends with your customers – by offering them something new when they return – stay tune to our next blog post “Your homepage – Change it up!”
And of course, feel free to contact us at our Toronto office if you would like help with a search engine friendly evaluation of your website.
Where you can get the simple facts on how to create online friendly and desirable websites and experiences. Our mission at Kobayashi Technology.
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