Industry News

I’ve been seeing a few long posts lately that list ranking signals from Google, and they inspired me to start writing a series about ranking signals over on Google+. Chances are good that I will continue to work on the series there, especially since...

SEOs obsess about the smallest things, even how long is too long for a URL.

A Google Webmaster Help thread has SEOs and webmasters asking how long can they go for a URL. Google actually answered the question...

You know that often, Google Webmaster Tools shows an image preview of your site's home page on the dashboard listing view of your site profiles within Google Webmaster Tools.

*

What is SEO 2.0? These are the 15 most important differences between SEO and SEO 2.0 or in other words old school and modern SEO: SEO SEO 2.0 Link building as in manually adding them by submitting static websites to directories, link exchange, paying for links Earning links by blogging, outstanding content, establishing relationships Onsite optimization for search engines. Example: Repetitive page titles focusing solely on keywords Onsite optimization for people. Example: Enticing...

We've seen Google Knowledge Graph ads before but those ads lead to local results and were more subtle.

Aaron Wall spotted a new format for Google Knowledge Graph ads for a search on [dont make me think]...

A few months ago I wrote about the forces at work when people choose a product. I discussed the Jobs-To-Be-Done concept of Progress-Making Forces, and shared this diagram to illustrate what happens when we try to get people to use our product instead of someone else’s:



In this article I want to discuss this framework in the context of a practical example: WhatsApp vs. Instagram Direct (now both owned by Facebook). I started thinking about this recently after MG Siegler wrote his post...

I really enjoyed Nick Stockton’s exploration of the space syntax concept in architecture in There’s a Science to Foot Traffic, and It Can Help Us Design Better Cities. He explains:

Space syntax [is] the science of how cities work. In the late 1970s, British architects Bill Hillier and Julienne Hanson hit on the idea that any space within a city — or the entire city itself — could be analyzed in terms of connectivity and movement. They reasoned that a city’s success depended largely on how...

Peter Seibel discusses data-driven design at Etsy in his post Building websites with science. After going over the dangers of relying solely on A/B testing for product decisions, he concludes:

Ultimately the goal is to make great products. Great ideas from designers are a necessary ingredient. And A/B testing can definitely improve products. But best is to use both: establish a loop between good design ideas leading to good experiments leading to knowledge about the product leading to...