Thanks cwar,

That's some great advice. I'll take that in and make some changes to our SEO strategy to really improve the quality and value of links. We actually do local marketing extremely well and content marketing is an ongoing thing where progress is coming along quite nicely, SEO just feels like that big complicated strategy with great potential that needs to be done right, but in fact so many other online marketing strategies should work to boost SEO (That's really all off page SEO is after all). Think we'll halt work with this particular company, I'm beginning to understand the value of really high quality and meaningful SEO work. I really don't want any low value mass link building, seems 'dirty' having all of those horrific submissions out there representing our genuinely beneficial and passionate business - PPC seems like a much more productive way to spend money on that kind of fast-track improvement. Like you said it just cannot be good for long term results based on solid, clean and max value practices.

Although that story of the guy promoting his book on opera and then the popular blog is simple it really does make a valuable illustration of targetting audience.

Just 2 FINAL things from your previous post that I'd love for you to clear up for piece of mind - How can you 'ask' for a followed link? Is that simply just a case of asking a partner website/blog to include a link to your site/page?

And is 'on page SEO' the very easy part in theory?

Ugh, it sounds like you are getting jerked around a bit, stubez. I agree with almost everything cwar has already stated, but I just wanted to highlight a few things as well.

Their comment that all websites lost rankings last month is obviously BS. It's impossible for all websites to lose rankings because other ones will have to raise to take their place. As cwar stated, the only big changes last month where the removal of spammy article directories. These were never really considered white hat (not black hat either, more gray hat than anything). Also along with "blog comments" and "forum comments" it sounds like they are just spamming the **** out of your website. This can definitely lead to a drop in rankings for bad incoming links or over optimization. I even started ranking higher for some good poker terms and a lot of long tail stuff as well - I never submitted to crappy article directories though.

All of their on page SEO is pretty easy/obvious stuff that doesn't require a ton of work. Also as Gullianian stated; they don't even have their own website properly optimized for simple SEO stuff like H tags. 5x H1 tags on the home page is absolutely inexcusable for an SEO company that claims to optimize H tags for customers. They should have ONE, maybe two if they made a dumb mistake - but five is inexcusable. This company can't know what they are doing.

I also don't like the fact that you are spending money on off-page SEO and rankings, when you can't get the traffic to convert. I would only focus on increasing traffic once your conversion funnel is fully optimized. This is actually the biggest problem I have with my own websites right now. The traffic and rankings are there, but my conversions are terrible. I wish I would of spent most of my time tracking and optimizing conversions before focusing on SEO.

I do understand that you don't know most of the basics of SEO though. This makes me think that hiring someone to look at your on-site SEO could be a good idea. I just wouldn't spend too much being overly focused with high rankings because they can always come later.

You can just ask for a blog to give you a link, but it's unlikely. Some people will do article submissions to a similar themed blog with a link back to their website (this is usually followed) or you can purchase links, etc. The difference between a follow and a nofollow is a tag they add to your link. Essentially it tells Google to either follow the link and give it credit, or don't follow it and pretty much ignore it. Most blog comments are nofollow links, which provide little to no benefit in terms of "link juice".

I don't know if easy is the correct word, but it's almost always the same types of things. This makes it easy to sit down and work on if you know what you are doing. Link exchanges, article submissions, viral link building, etc all take a variable amount of time and you don't really know what your results are going to be. In my opinion, on page SEO is more important because if you have terrible on page SEO, no amount of off site SEO is really going to help in the end. You will always have full control over your own website, so good SEO will last indefinitely. If you submit a bunch of articles and then Google torches that article directory or someone else decides to sell their website and the new owner takes down your links; you could be in trouble. Just make sure you don't go overboard with on-site SEO because it can look spammy to Google as well.

Sidenote* - This is why I hate some of these SEO companies. If they don't know what they are doing or learn from the wrong people, they can totally destroy your site. You pretty much paid a company to spam a bunch of people's blogs and forums with links to your website. This not only pollutes the web space, but can easily get your website flagged by Google. I would ask your SEO company if they set you up a Google Webmasters Tools account. If so, get your log in info from them and make sure you don't have a "spammy link warning" from Google. They started sending these out last month and if you have one, you need to get it fixed ASAP.

I was referring to a PR situation where there is already an article in the works, having your PR team just ask the journalist (and working the issues, educating them) for the followed link can be a big win.

On-page optimization is pretty simple, yes.

stubez, I just wanted to chime in and say that you're getting some top advice here.

It appears that your company is a normal B&M place that is trying to expand online?

If so, my advice would be not to get caught up too much in the nitty gritty details of rankings/optimizations/etc. Don't think about it in that way. Think about it as a regular marketing effort that you just happen to be doing using the Internet. You say that your off-line marketing is very effective so you guys are doing something right. People on the Internet are not any different from real world people. Think about what need you provide to your customers, then communicate that need in your online activities to your potential customers. Once you get solid results this way, then start optimizing H1 tags and whatever.

Quick question for any knowledgeable website owner's out there but does anyone do time based metrics(rather than page view or click based metrics)?

Background:
I've started looking at using time as a metric on my site for thinking about new posts and going back and improving old posts. I'm wondering if there are any rules of thumb for time( if you separate different levels of engagement for types of content).

I realize this is a "it depends" question but for example what's a good range estimate for what an hour of reader time is worth? $1, $.10, $.01

Think about average workday. Ideally, it would be nice to have a post when reader gets to work, lunch, before leavinv, and when they get home from work. Weekends traffic is generally weak. Morning post is probably most important to engage audience and hopefully get linked. That's just my experience, maybe different topics have better setups..

hey guys, quick question about add-on domains and SEO. i created a domain (let's call it primarydomain.com) on Bluehost and then bought another domain there (addon.com). even though no one would ever know the two domains have anything to do with each other, it turns out the add-on domain is really primarydomain.com/addon and therefore likely a problem SEO-wise.

so i did some googling and came across this article from some blog that says to edit the .htaccess file.

does that sound like the correct thing to do?

[irrelevant sidenote - speaking of that blog i cited, what's up with so many sites - and many of them are marketing sites no less - using gray, letter-pressed fonts on a gray background? what an eyesore]

Someone else can probably answer the specifics better but if you are running two websites off the same hosting they are going to be sharing an IP address. Google algorithmically devalues link values between two sites on the same IP and C blocks (my understanding of C blocks is that it indicates an administrative relationship between the IPs). I think some people ITT mentioned they make sure the information they give to register the domains is different as well.

I wouldn't worry about it too much except in two situations. Two full businesses that you would like to be completely separate (say in the rare case of getting deindexed). For some reason you want to build a lot of websites that link to each other, to be safe I would nofollow the links (unless I suppose you were building a network).

Anyone know any good books on design? I recently started building simple iphone apps. I'm able to get the functionality I want, but well, they don't look all that great.

I would be really interested in any good resources for learning design applied to the web (basically looking how to build well designed websites, infographics, a logo here and there).

Are you lacking the design skills, or a good eye?

Personally, no matter how many books and tips and tricks I use, my stuff still comes out pretty amateurish. It's sort of like learning to draw - some people get it, and other people are stuck at proficiency they had when they were 10 years old.

Lacking design skills. I'm not going to claim that I have an amazing eye for design, but I can tell that if I learn some design I'll improve how my stuff looks by a ton, particularly as a lot of the time I have a sense that something I did needs to use different colors, but I have no idea what colors to use.

You could check out these books and the accompanying blogs:
http://sachagreif.com/ebook/
http://bootstrappingdesign.com/

and this thread: http://www.quora.com/Design/Is-there...ust-subjective

Sweet, the color thing looks extremely helpful. Thanks.

Speaking of web design, for the last 4 months or so I’ve gotten sucked into it due to necessity. And it's taken over my life but I'm climbing out of it. During that time I bookmarked some useful links – I’ve put them in categories below for you. You can completely ignore what I have to say in each section and just go to the links if you like and you will probably not be any worse off

My feeling about design is that it has a bigger role in web marketing than some think. If you’re doing SEO, or maybe the better phrase here is SEM, then your design will affect your site’s content, its stickiness, how its perceived by influential people who you want to help promote your site/articles/whatever, etc. Yeah content is king but you have to get people look at your content. And a site with a crap design is probably going to turn off some people you want to impress.

The difference between many blogs out there and mine – which has only been in existence for like two months and has a steady steam of 8 visitors a week – is that my articles look great before you even read them. That’s because I pay attention to the design. The typography, the use of images, and so on gives them a sleek, inviting look. I just need to get off my butt and market them already.

Now for the affiliate marketing world, design might not matter as much where ad-ridden sites are the norm, but for more long-term sites it probably does.

Disclaimer: I know nothing about ecommerce. Heck, I barely know about design. So I have no idea what works in the ecommerce world.

Design Theory

There are a lot of articles out there if you Google them. Some great books too. So I would go with that approach. In addition to theory, looking at well-designed sites helps too if you’re good at spotting patterns.

But there is one important principle that I do want to mention: visual hierarchy.

This is where a lot of websites fail imo. They have too many things on the homepage competing for eyeballs but there’s no hierarchy. And of those sites that do have a hierarchy, they often have one that’s far from optimal because they give priority to things that don’t matter much. Getting the hierarchy right can mean a big difference in % of users clicking on the buttons you want them to click on.

Here are two good articles that explain visual hierarchy well:

http://designshack.net/articles/grap...-in-web-design
http://webdesign.tutsplus.com/articl...in-web-design/

This page has a collection of good design tutorials in general:

http://webdesign.tutsplus.com/sessio...design-theory/

And here are some design forums for general design stuff, the first in particular is good:

http://www.designerstalk.com/forums/: it’s mostly UK people, hence why the posts are colorful and lack any sugar coating
http://www.designforums.co.uk/web-design-development/
http://www.webdevforums.com/
http://www.sitepoint.com/forums/foru...Website-Design
http://tycoontalk.freelancer.com/
http://www.htmlforums.com/


Typography

Most websites have bad typography. Typography is not just the font choice, like Arial versus Georgia. It’s the size, color, line height, line length, kerning (spacing between the characters), and the relationship between different elements – like the size of the headings relative to one another and to the paragraphs. And then it’s much more. I was surprised at how big of a field it is and how interesting it can be.

Anyways, great web designers spend a lot of time on getting the typography right because it matters to the overall design. Here are some examples of good typography (imo) to give you an idea on why it matters:

http://www.elysiumburns.com/
http://trufcreative.com/
http://carsonified.com/
http://www.cloudberrycreative.com/
http://forefathersgroup.com/
http://www.jamiegregory.co.uk/
http://www.yesnurse.co.uk/

These are my observations on a few things that many sites do wrong typographically:

Low contrast (gray on gray and so forth)
Using letterpress font for anything that is more than a few words long. Makes me want to scratch my eyes out when reading paragraphs of it.
Not paying attention to the relationship among headings
Not paying attention to the “pop” of the typography. Dull typography is everywhere. This is somewhat related to contrast
Not using a white background for content-rich areas like the blog articles section
Too small of font for paragraphs. There’s no rule that says 12px font is correct. In fact, it’s often too small, yet many sites use that.

Here a couple of beginner articles:

8 factors of web typography: http://webdesign.tutsplus.com/articl...eb-typography/

The basics of typography: http://designinstruct.com/tools-basi...of-typography/

Web typography guide: http://ilovetypography.com/2008/02/2...eb-typography/

How to pair fonts: http://webdesign.tutsplus.com/articl...pairing-fonts/


This is a small sample of resources if you want to learn more – there are many more out there if you search:

http://www.smashingmagazine.com/tag/typography/
http://ilovetypography.com
http://www.webtypography.net/toc/
http://typographica.org/

Where to get fonts:

http://www.google.com/webfonts
http://hellohappy.org/beautiful-web-type/
http://www.dafont.com/
http://www.myfonts.com/
http://www.fontsquirrel.com/

A neat tool that will let you analyze the font of a website you're visiting:

http://chengyinliu.com/whatfont.html

Logos

My recommendation is hire someone good unless your site is a cheapo one that isn’t a long term venture you care much about or where branding is not a big deal.

Logo design really is another world. Many good web designers even admit they can’t do logos because it takes a special skill.

If you want something that’s just good enough, then yeah you can make one yourself using a good looking font and maybe a little image/icon to the left of the words. Or you can hire someone off one of the quasi-slave-labor freelance sites for like a dollar an hour. But you’re most likely not going to get quality. I’ve seen the portfolios of those designers. They’re very bad and are basically just clip art. And the crowdsource spec stuff is bad too compared to what you would get from a real logo designer. You can use this site for cheap DIY logos: http://graphicriver.net/category/logo-templates

Here is a link to a page that has 60+ logo design tutorials if you want to take a stab at creating your own:

http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009...and-resources/

These sites have some great logo designs and show you what's possible if you want to spend the $$:

http://www.1stwebdesigner.com/inspir...-logo-designs/
http://dribbble.com/tags/logo (top notch designers who are only allowed to join by invite)
http://logopond.com/
http://www.deviantart.com/

Pictures

It’s surprising to me how much of an impact one picture can have on a web page. I guess one reason for that is there isn’t that much real estate above the fold.

You can use this FF add-on to see what any site looks like without its images, if you want to better see how images and design work together. The tool is good to use in general if you want to manipulate web pages you come across.

Anyways, pictures are very important. Not much else to say really.

Layout

Layouts were the trickiest for me at the beginning, and still are. So I looked at lots of sites and WP themes to get an idea of what layouts are being used and what works. A typical layout nowadays, depending on the industry, might look something like this:

Header:
a. Logo
b. Navigation menu
c. Ribbons/tags
d. Social media buttons
e. A border
f. Different color/texture than rest of the site
g. CTA button
h. Phone/address

Body above the fold:
a. A carousel
b. Or a big image, with some text next to it
c. Or a bunch of text organized in different ways

Body below the fold or beginning to go below the fold:
a. Maybe some boxes describing your services/products with some icons
b. Maybe blog articles

Footer

The Entire Page:
a. a container that holds the content separate from the background
b. or a full width, open design page instead


If I need inspiration for a section, I do a Google search. So for example, if the top nav menu for a blog I’m designing just doesn’t look good, I Google other blogs or use search terms like “blog design inspiration” or “website design inspiration” or “navigation menu examples.”

In the end though there are not that many layouts to choose from. Look at a few hundred websites and you’ll start to see a pattern in layouts. You don’t want to get too avant garde because you’ll risk annoying your users.

If you’re stuck in a rut and looking at web designs in your industry/niche isn’t inspiring, then these links might help:

http://uxdesign.smashingmagazine.com...design-trends/
http://dribbble.com/tags/website
http://blog.crazyegg.com/2012/02/14/...n-inspiration/
http://siteinspire.com/
http://www.1stwebdesigner.com/
http://www.webdesignerdepot.com/
http://designshack.net/

UX

You probably know what UX is. If you don't, then think of the difference between going to Disneyland and going to the state fair. Disney feels magical and gives you that positive experience that you really can’t get anywhere else. The state fair gives you a feeling of an urgent need to wash your hands. How does Disney do it? By playing on our psychology through the use of design, etc. Same thing with websites like Old Navy, Coke, Apple, and so on. They create this sense of excitement in their users.

Anyways here are some UX resources:

http://ux.stackexchange.com/
http://52weeksofux.com/
http://uxdesign.smashingmagazine.com...er-experience/
http://blog.usabilla.com/
http://uxmyths.com/
http://uxmatters.com/

Usability

You guys know what usability is, so point rehashing it. I’ll say that it seems that convention is pretty important here. If users today generally expect a logo to be at the top left or top middle, or a nav menu to be across the top or left, then you probably want to design that way unless you have a compelling reason not to.

Some resources:

http://www.useit.com/
http://www.sensible.com/

Want to do some user testing? Here is a list of the major tools on one page:

http://uxdesign.smashingmagazine.com...testing-tools/

Illustrations

Chances are some of the sites that you think look great have illustrations. Unless you can draw, you’re better off hiring a pro. And from what I’ve seen, their prices aren’t cheap.

Last Word

If you don’t have a background in graphic design, realize that people who are good at it often have a degree in it and/or years of experience doing it. While we were playing poker or learning SEO or whatever, they were obsessing all night long about getting drop shadows just right. I personally don’t have the inclination to learn all the nuances or become a pro at Photoshop because I’m interested in marketing and there’s only 24 hours in a day.

However, I think the time spent doing it at the beginning is a great education and will put you ahead of others in the web world. Look at the websites of small businesses in your city. You’ll likely see that 95% of those sites hover between bad and terrible. By subjecting yourself to the torture of learning design, you’ll separate yourself from the unwashed masses Plus you'll be better at outsourcing design stuff if you know about it.

Edit

One last thing. One way to get ideas for graphic design is to think of a color you like. Then go to a site like Dribble and use the color selector they have. Then you can see great, cutting edge designs in those colors. Or if you see a design you like on Dribble, look at the color palette listed on that page and choose a color from there and it will show you designs in that color.

And speaking of color, here is a very handy site I use for color schemes. So, if I have a color on my site I like, I then enter the hex # and it generates other colors and I then use those colors for the rest of my site, sticking to like 3 or 4. It's a great way to spice up your typography because you can then use different colors for your fonts, yet have them all work color theory-wise.

Also if you want ideas for color palettes, this is a neat site, although I find Dribble more useful because it links me to designs.

You are a king among men, epic post thanks for putting that together.

+1

GREAT POST!

Hey guys I need your help, I have been contacted by a big media agency who wants to buy avertising on our websites. Sadly I'm a noob at internet marketing and don't quite understand everything our contact is asking...

We were asked what we can "absorb for a month in terms of budget"; our CPM rates and statistics. So I went ahead and send the stats (roughly 60-65k uniques per month) and asked what exactly is meant with the budget question and got this response:

"By “absorb for a month in terms of budget”, I meant "what is the optimum budget we can invest on your website (with a capping of 4)" : thanks to your data, we think a good volume per month would be 200k on xxx.com and 50k on xxx.com."

Can someone please tell me what this means in plain english? I have an idea but I don't want to be wrong and look like a dumbass afterwards.

lol ^

Doesn't make much sense to me either. Don't be afraid of looking dumb!

I imagine he is talking about something like total exposures (page views). I'd ignore what he said and just send him a quote back saying "This is what we recommend for your campaign and can provide for you".

Then simply itemise ad units grouped into their respective websites with a total.

My main concern would be to make sure you take payment in advance unless you have a good reason not to (eg, they actually are a big well known trusted advertising firm).

I'm not sure that I'm translating this 100% correct; but I'm fairly certain that I am. I've only dealt with CPM rates once though because it is a very outdated method of managing online campaigns. It is much better to use on radio because you know how many thousand people will hear your ad at the same time, whereas websites have returning visitors, etc.

First off, CPM is cost per thousand views. This means just an ad impression is good enough; you don't need to have them click the ad or convert in anyway. Capping of 4 means you only show the ad a max of 4 times to the same person.

When he says 200k on xxx.com and 50k on yyy.com (I'm assuming the 2x xxx.com aren't the same website since he mentioned them separately) I'm assuming he means unique ad views. This means he wants you to display their ad 200k times with a max of 4 times per person.

I have no clue of your industry, nor current going rates of CPM ads, but anywhere between $5-25 CPM can be standard. At 250k views total, you probably have about $1,500-$4,000 worth of ad sales.

Thanks for the responses! I managed to speak to someone who already dealt with the agency and he pretty much said the same as Trikkur. I already knew what CPM means and everything, I was just really confused about budget and capping.

My AdWords account keeps prompting me to do an evaluation with one of G's people over the phone, but the 2 times I tried to schedule this we missed each other and it was a pretty opaque process just getting the appointment for them to call me.

Are these account evaluations useful and worth pursuing?

Glad you guys like the post. Hopefully the links are helpful and will lead you to real some advice.

So, there are a few things that I forgot to include and they deal with the more graphic part of design. One of the things that intimidates me about design is the graphics – like gradient backgrounds, borders, buttons, and so on.

So, below are some of the graphics-ish stuff you’ll likely come across, in addition to what I mentioned in the earlier post (logos, pictures, and so on).

Ribbons and tags

These are decorative elements that are usually found in the header and give your site some design punch. You can use the code and PSDs below or you can hire someone on elance/odesk to put something for you if you want something custom.

Here is a page of examples of ribbons and tags:

http://www.webdesignerdepot.com/2011...in-web-design/

These are CSS snippets of ribbons, a ribbon generator, and a page of PSDs:

http://www.css3d.net/ribbon-generator/
http://css-tricks.com/snippets/css/ribbon/
http://css-tricks.com/snippets/css/corner-ribbon/ (corner ribbon)
http://mowdesign.blogspot.com/2011/0...b-ribbons.html

Icons

A few well-placed icons can create a more energetic feel for a site.
Some inspiration first:

http://webdesignledger.com/inspirati...-in-web-design

And some sites to get icons:

http://www.iconfinder.com/
http://www.iconarchive.com/
http://www.iconarchive.com/

Also, there are some creative “follow me” social icons out there too that can add to your site’s design. Here are some freebies:

http://vandelaydesign.com/blog/social-media/icons/
http://www.noupe.com/freebie/50-free...icon-sets.html

Borders

Let’s take the header as an example to highlight different ways that borders are routinely used.

You can use color or texture as a type of border to separate the header from the rest of the site:

http://eeharbor.com/
http://www.change.org/
http://www.seomoz.org/
http://www.ducks.org/
http://www.bestbuy.com/

A simple line underneath the logo and/or nav menu, often used on full width, open website designs.*

http://www.percivalclo.com/
http://www.adoreyou.se/
http://www.tinkeringmonkey.com/

* If you don’t know what an full width layout is, look at this site to see what is not a full width layout: http://www.redcross.org/. See how everything is in a container in the center? Now look at the sites above and you’ll see everything looks like it’s on one canvas instead.

Some sites use no borders at all:

http://marlonmedau.de/
http://iphone-icon.com/index2.html
http://www.jeremygleave.com/jeremygleave/
http://www.justdot.gr/

Zigzag borders:

http://www.bokche.com/
http://dimitropoulos.info/
http://www.craigmorrison.ca/

And many sites use a thin line at the very top running along the margin touching your browser bar. You can see it in these two sites that I linked to earlier:

http://www.percivalclo.com/
http://www.adoreyou.se/

Finally, you can get more creative than these. Your imagination is the limit. For example I was thinking about this the other day. Say you have a site that sells bathtubs or bath items. You could have the entire border around your site’s container be the ledge of a bathtub, with shampoo bottles and whatever else sits on a bathtub ledge. And then all the web content is inside the tub. You can then hire a designer on odesk or elance who portfolio you like. And then hire a developer to code if you don’t want to. And volia! You’ll have a unique site with relevant design.

Here are a couple of sites with creative borders:

http://www.tri-win.com/
http://www.taptaptap.com/#groceries

Backgrounds

Textures, colors, images, and so on. You can do pretty much anything here and it’s easy to code in CSS.

Some sites with background textures for use:

http://subtlepatterns.com/
http://www.grsites.com/archive/textures/
http://creattica.com/free-textures/latest

Buttons

There are many button generators online if you don’t want to go custom with a freelancer. Here’s a couple good ones from a quick Google search:

http://www.cssbuttongenerator.com/
http://css-tricks.com/examples/ButtonMaker/

"Blog Design on a Budget"

Pretty good article with lots of relevant links for web design:

http://www.sparringmind.com/blog-design/

Hey guys complete newbie here - great thread! I've been thinking about starting a website for a longtime and this thread spurned me to action. I'm going to throw a few bucks at starting a website from scratch just for the fun/experience.

I'm looking at going through hostgator.com Website builder seems pretty user friendly and $15.00 domain registration plus $4.00 per month for unlimited bandwidth hatchling plan looks fair to me. Any reasons I shouldn't go with them?

If you've been an active poster ITT pm me your hostgator affiliate link. (Not sure if you're allowed to do that but seriously this thread is what generated a sale for them)