I just read a great article by Ian Lurie at Coversation Marketing titled Things You Don’t Know About Your Customers. Perhaps more aptly named Things to remember when designing a website, its a great read with clear points we all need to remember. In summary:
Reading onscreen is hard, for everyone.
Use short paragraphs.
Use short lines.
Use wide line spacing and nice margins.
Use dark text on a light background.
Scrolling up-and-down is OK
Use lists.
They browse in an F-shape
They can’t remember your web address (being at the top of search results for your name means nothing)
They don’t search for your name (they search for answers to problems)
They don’t want to log in (or anything standing between them and their goal)
They don’t want an ‘experience’ (simple is better)
They do want your newsletter (make it prevalent and easy to sign-up)
They don’t care how clever you are. (just the facts please)
They aren’t enticed by mystery.
They get lost a lot (make navigation easy, redundant, and extend to your 404 pages)
They aren’t using cell phones (at least not in big numbers)
They still use Internet Explorer (so be sure it works in IE)
They’re using big monitors. (so don’t create 800 X 600 layouts)
Duplicate Content has long been an issue with webmasters and is cause for concern because duplicating content dilutes your ranking in search results. Perhaps the most common cause of having duplicate content is in allowing both www. and non www versions of your site to exist. However, another place where I see duplicate content occur is when a customer has multiple domain names pointing to the same content. When you use multiple domain names, and there are good reasons to do this, you should pick a preferred URL and ensure that any secondary domains are 301 redirected to that URL.
In this video, Google’s Greg Grothaus does a great job explaining duplicate content problems and solutions ranging from 301 redirects to canonical tags.
I have previously blogged about how 301 redirects can prevent common problems from diluting the search engine ranking for your site. However, there are however a number of situations that create duplicate content concerns that are more difficult address. Webmasters now have additional tools to deal with duplicate content through Google’s Webmaster Tools panel. Through this addition to webmaster tools, Google Lets You Tell Them Which URL Parameters To Ignore. This will a great help, especially for many large dynamic sites.
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