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SEO
How does one see the internet when they can’t see it?
Have you ever wondered how blind people surf the web or have you ever stopped to take the visually impaired into consideration when designing or building a site? Probably not.
I believe that most web developers don’t think too much about the visually impaired. We focus more on the design and functionality and what we see.
There are things though that we can do to make our sites better for screen readers and those with disabilities, however I don’t know them all and can say that I’ve never surfed the web without my sight.
SEO vs Web Design
If you talk to someone who does SEO they often wonder why web developers create sites so un-search friendly. If you talk to web developers they wonder why SEO’s have to be so picky about everything.
Being in both industries I can tell you that web developers don’t think about SEO and SEO’s don’t understand why developers can’t be better SEOs. Truth is, they’re two different industries and two different ways of looking at the web.
Facebook’s Like number is more than just people clicking Like.
It seems that every site now has a Facebook Like button on it, but did you know that the number of Likes is made up of more than just people clicking Like?
The number shown on a Like button is the sum of:
- The number of likes for the URL
- The number of shares for the URL – This includes copy/pasting a link back to Facebook.
- The number of likes and comments on stories on Facebook about the URL
- The number of inbox messages containing the URL as an attachment
New Google Analytics goals appear to be delayed by more than a few hours.
I’m a big fan of Google Analytics, but there are just things that don’t work well.
I’ve recently been setting up goals for a client and one day they didn’t work and the next day they would.
It was frustrating but I eventually came to the conclusion that new Google Analytics goals must have some sort of big delay before they start collecting data. Something like they don’t kick in until tomorrow arrives.
This is increasingly frustrating when Google Analytics data comes in every 10 or 20 minutes. So I could see pages in the top content reports, and yet goals would stay at 0.
GA? and yExplore are now Firefox 5 ready.
I received emails from Mozilla yesterday that stated GA? – Is Google Analytics Installed and yExplore are compatible with Firefox 5. So I’ve updated the version numbers in the extensions and they are ready to go.
As a bonus, GA? also works in Firefox 4 now too. 
Enjoy!
Bad Behavior WordPress Plugin Killed My Google Traffic
I’ve been looking into the Bad Behavior WordPress plugin to help stop some of the spam comments that I’ve been getting. Turns out, it made things horribly worse.
I’m not sure why, but the plugin decided to block Google bot. By the time I noticed, the damage had been done and my visitor stats are falling at a rapid rate. I’m getting 1/3rd of the traffic I was last week and it continues to go down.
I’ve removed the plugin and am now eagerly awaiting Google bot to come back and index my content. I don’t know how long it’ll take to recover, but I’m hoping not to long.
What happens when you change WordPress’ URL structure? Will it kill SEO?
Earlier this year I switched all my WordPress URLs (aka permalinks) from date based to ID and post names. Since then I haven’t seen any negative effects from search engines when it comes to the amount of referral traffic.
The Background
Now, when a blog is set up, the URL structure is defined. If you don’t really know what you’re doing, then you probably don’t think twice about the URL structure. I sure didn’t when I setup my blog in 2004. However, years later, I realized that I hated having the month and day in the URL and I wanted to change it to be shorter and cleaner.
Do Everyone A Favor And Share The Source
It’s a little bit annoying when you follow a link on Twitter or Facebook only to be taken to a site that summarizes the story, then makes you click though to the source with the full story.
I think we need to do everyone a favor and share the source.
Don’t get me wrong, there are lots of big sites out there that collect and re-post great information. Sites like TechCrunch, CrunchGear, TUAW, LifeHacker, Gizmodo and so many more do a good job of giving the smaller sites added exposure, but they are also stealing it away.
Me & WordPress vs Google Page Speed & YSlow
If it’s not one thing, it’s another. It seems that I can’t stop tweaking my WordPress install & settings.
I’ve done some major re-working of things on the back-end and I’m hoping I didn’t break anything. If I did, please tell me!
The bulk of my changes are to help with my site speed addiction. Ever since Google announced tools to help webmasters find ways of speeding up their sites, I’ve been hooked. I check the graph in Google Webmaster Central all the time in hopes of seeing sharp declines.
Google's Site Performance Analysis
Google Analytics Extension Upgraded
Just a quick note to say that the Is Google Analytics Installed? Firefox extension recently has been updated to work with Google’s new asynchronous tracking code.
It should now work for all versions of Google’s code.
And, if Google doesn’t drastically change the analytics tracking in the future, it should continue to work well for future updates.
(fingers crossed)
