Over the summer my wife came in contact with a midwife in Bakerfield, Lamonica Hillberg, L.M. of Gods Love Midwifery. Ms. Hillberg needed a website but couldn’t afford it. My wife felt for her case and asked for a WP Installation so she build her something as good gesture. We both pitched and put up a very quick Wordpress CMS for her using a slightly modified version of the Melissa-20 Theme.

This CMS came together in under 5 hours. Check out Gods Love Midwifery

I notice that on our website the colors change from blue to purple after clicked on. My question is When some one enters the site are all the category’s purple and then when clicked on they turn blue. However when some else enters the site are all the colors purple or are some blue some purple? 

I started to answer his question then thought it best to go beyond answering it and to also explain why.

Here is my response to the question…
When a user visits your site (industrypacking.com) the links are programmed to be blue. Once a user clicks to a page… all the links to that page will turn purple. The change in color signifies that the page has been visited and helps the user better navigate the website…

• By helping them get back to a page that has the information they found useful
• By helping them from visiting the same page twice if they’re still searching
• By helping them know which pages or content they have not viewed yet

Jacob Nielson Says…
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20040503.html

People get lost and move in circles when websites use the same link color for visited and new destinations. To reduce navigational confusion, select different colors for the two types of links. 

So Why These Colors
Blue and purple for links and visited links are the default internet colors for starters. Since the dawn of the WWW links have always been blue and purple making it the most prime website usability function.

According to another Nielson article (Guidelines for Visualizing Links)…

• The color for unvisited links should be more vivid, bright, and saturated than the color for visited links.
• The two colors should be variants or shades of the same color, so that they’re clearly related.
• Shades of blue provide the strongest signal for links, but other colors work also.
• When using color to signal information, you should provide redundant cues for color-blind users.
• Never show text in your chosen link colors unless it’s a link.

The content used to live on their main kayaking website but it just wasn’t getting the exposure it needed from the search engines so we rebuilt the enitre site from the ground up and expanded it from 13 to 26 pages and re launched it on www.SeaTrekBaja.com.

Since we launched the site.. Google has indexed 25 of the 26 pages and they are starting see some SERPS beginning to appear for some of their long tail keyword terms.

For more website samples visit the Search Friendly Web Design Portfolio.

Four Things I don’t like about Google Chrome..

1) No Page Title Bar at the top of the browser window.. the title is truncated in the tab. As a search marketer I look being able to see the full title tag without having to go look for.. like in the source code.

2) Can’t copy off a Chrome window and paste it into Dreamweaver WYSIWYG view.. you can only paste it into the source code. I use code view quite heavily so its really not that big a deal.. more of an hindrance for those designers who rely on WYSIWYG to do their work.

3) No Google Toolbar with Pagerank and no quick option for checking backwards links.

4) No Refresh/Reload Option on the right click menu.. you have to go all the way up to toolbar.

Cool Features I Do Like About Google Chrome…

Downloads… downloads file or attachment and drops it into a tool bar accessible at the bottom of the browser window.. from the downloaded file bar.. just one click and you are opening the attachment. No more having to save downloads to you computer before opening them.

Screenshots of Browse History
This is another cool feature I like.. when I open new browser window or browser tab.. I see screenshots of the 9 most viewed website in my history. I can click one and go rightback to the site I was on.

All-in-One Search Box & Address Bar

This is only one box to enter text and it does double duty.. type in URL or a search query all in the same box. This one messed with for about a day… I’m so used to have a separate Google search box on my Google Toolbar in Firefox. I found myself always looking for my Google Toolbar but I think I’m finally used to it.

Browse Incognito

This is the option most people want at work to hide their online shopping while working because some offices do monitor internet browsing so this is the ticket… Incognito does not keep any history or record what-so-ever. Upon close it does away with all temp internet files, history, cookies.. everything. Now you surf stealth.

Element Inspector

Now this one I really find useful. highlight and element on a page and right click… one of the option is element inspectory.

Once you click the Inspect Element you get a pop-up window zeros in on the code associated with the element you are trying to inspect. This saves time instead of having to sift through the source code trying to find the element. The inspector also displays the styled properties of the element.

All-in-all, Google is a fine browser.. I can’t really say it’s better or worse than Firefox but it’s definitely better than IE (then again, what isn’t?). One thing I can say is that it is a very fast browser.

So what do you think of the new Google Chrome Browser.. take a sec to leave your commments.

]]> http://searchfriendlywebdesign.com/google-chrome-review/feed/ http://searchfriendlywebdesign.com/social-networking-social-media-optimization/ http://searchfriendlywebdesign.com/social-networking-social-media-optimization/#comments Sat, 23 Aug 2008 15:49:52 +0000 Sammy Russo http://searchfriendlywebdesign.com/social-networking-social-media-optimization/ I just finished a successful week at the Search Engine Strategies Conference in San Jose. While traveling home to Southern California on the Amtrak train.. I had some to reflect on what on what I took away from the conference. The hot topic was social media and social networking.

Social Media Break Down

Social media is a user centric platform that connects people around the globe for the purposes of sharing and discussing information.

Social media can be broken down into several different categories.. each with it’s own unique purposes applications.

• Social News: Blogs, Podcasts, Livecasts
• Social Sharing: You Tube Videos and Flickr Photos
• Social Networks (personal & professional): Face Book, Linked In
• Social Bookmarks: Digg, Deliciou
• Social Micro Blogging: Twitter

Social Media & Search Engine Marketing

Define your audience.
Defining your audience is the most important step in any marketing campaign.. don’t just jump in headfirst and start publishing before figuring out who your readers are, because the audience will dictate what you publish and how you do it. Your audience can be broken down in the following ways.

• Creators
• Commenters
• Critics
• Spectators
• Inactives

Social Media / Networking Tips

• When publishing content to a social network only post to relevant communities
• The more you engage, the more people will engage with your content.
• Keep engagement authentic
• Create high quality content to make it link worthy
• Social media needs to integrate with your online marketing

Social Media Optimization

• Pick a username that has a connection with your business or product
• Tag and name videos & images with keywords
• Link your social profiles from your main website
• Set up your profiles and optimize them with rich keyword content

Getting Started

• Sign up for the various social accounts to claim your name space
• Start by publishing to one platform and beta test

Social Networking & Link Building
Social networking is about engaging a community. To engage a community you need to have good content that is inviting and useful. Social networking is a great way to garner releavant inbound links to your website, blog etc.. but don’t go in with the thinking that social networking is going to replace your link building stratgy.. links are a by-product of social media. Social communities will notice the transparency of your linking and oust you for it.

I’m stoked.. As I mentioned in a previous post.. I usually wait for the first security update after a next generation release before I upgrade.

Wordpress 2.6.1 has arrived, so enough blabbering on my part.. I’ve got about 20 Wordpress CMS and Blog sites to upgrade.

Happy Blogging.

There are actually several colleagues of mine that are attending also. Over the last few weeks we’ve been brushing up on what we suspect will be the hot topics… like Blogging for search, Social Networking and SEO and more.

My friend Jamie also shared this article with us on the topic… http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog/080708-063100

Google Operating System reported he is now seeing the Google AdSense for Feeds option in his AdSense account, set up screen. I noted at the Search Engine Roundtable that many folks are buzzing about the new feature at several discussion forums. It appears to me that this beta offering, is now open to all, if not, most Google AdSense publishers.

So, Adsense publishers can now run Ads in their RSS Feeds. I checked my Adsense account and sure enough, I have to new Adsense for Feeds option… I can’t wait to try it out.

If you are currently a Feedburner user, for this feature to work you need to migrate your Feedburner Feeds over to your Google Account. You can find migration documentation here. Unfortunately the migration from Feedburner to Google is manual, so you need to contact Google Support and supply them some info. There is no turn-around time mentioned.

Unfortunately there is no estimated date set for the release of Wordpress 2.6.1, but the status is currently at 78% complete.. so I would expect a release sometime before the end of the month.

So why do I care when Wordpress 2.6.1is released? Typically I always wait to upgrade to the next generation release once they’ve reached the first round of bug / security fixes. Call me cautious but I’d rather be safe as I use Wordpress to run quite a few of my clients commercial sites & business blogs.. so if their sites don’t work 100%.. it falls on me.

Once a next generation release comes around I usually do a test install and copy over a database of some of the bigger client sites like Rafting.com, just to make sure everything is good to go.

What’s your upgrade protocol… do you automatically upgrade your Wordpress installation as soon as a new release is available, or do you wait it out like me?

So what do I blog about?

Blogging and Design
Well, if you follow the blog here on Search Friendly Web Design, you can tell that I blog about Wordpress, blogging and blog tuning. I also post various other web tips and resources as I stumble upon things… like my trial and error escapades with Google Analytics goal conversions. Sometimes I blog about things that I come across or address on the Wordpress Support Forum like the Fix for Google Webmaster Tools Excluded by Robots.

Green Living
My wife and I have another blog called Lite Green Living that we work on together. Here we blog about green living, natural family parenting, environmental issues and more. For the most part Lite Green Living is Carrie’s blog.. It’s cool, she is particular about the type of content that is published and how it’s presented. We work well over there because I often have more time write so I write and so goes through and editorializes my content, so essentially we tag team it.

Life
On my personal blog.. I blog about life, politics, I share my favorite joke / chain mails that friends and family forward to me and various random thoughts. It’s place to ramble on or gripe about anything I want.. check out Sammy Russo DOT Com.

Real Estate
Just after we bought our house I started to take a little bit of interest in the real estate market so I decided to start a small information real estate website which I recently converted into a blog & web resource. On Tehachapi Realtors I blog mostly about current real estate news. Between my regular job and blogging about blogging and green living, my real estate blog often takes a back seat.

So what do you blog about?