Web Site Menu

What not to do when you’re making a menu for your website. I snipped this from an article giving tips to web developers, by Carolyn Snyder.

“People use various terms to describe these menus — rollover, fly-out, pop-up, hierarchical, or cascading. These are menus that pop up automatically when the user positions the cursor over a particular item onscreen. Whatever you call them, these things can be so difficult to use that they border on evil.

I don’t care that prominent software vendors have been using cascading menus for years — obviously they have forgotten that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line. And that’s exactly what users do — they try to take the diagonal route to their desired menu option rather than across and down. And as soon as they move off the menu, they lose it (or even worse, get an unrelated one). Depending on where the user leaves the cursor after clicking, another menu might pop up, possibly covering part of the page the user wanted.

I recently tested a site that used rollover menus. Of the 17 users who took part, four complained of difficulty using the menus, and one was so stymied that I had to help him. Even users who understood this interaction model sometimes had difficulty selecting the menu options they wanted.”

I couldn’t agree more. Plain text menus are so much better, for two reasons really. The author of that article talks about the useability issue, but there’s another reason to not use these types of menus. They’re not search engine friendly. A plain text menu is much more search engine friendly. Use text, and have the text be related to the keywords important for the page it links to. Don’t just put “home”, have the text say something about your site.

retire young retire rich

I just finished reading Retire Young, Retire Rich, a book in the Rich Dad series by Robert Kiyosaki. I have a lot of great ideas. Here’s one.

business forum online small

I’m going to bite the bullet and upgrate Business Forum to vBulletin 3.0 before the release candidate. It’s been too long, and I’m sick of waiting. I closed down Business Forum on the old host, and I’m going to upgrade it and recreate it over again. I’ve had too much down time with my old host, nearly lost the entire database once. The past few days we’ve had hours and hours of down time. I’m just going to host it myself and not bother with having a sponsor for now.

It hasn’t been as easy to design in vBulletin 3.0 as it has in vBulletin 2.x. I expect that to even out after the release candidate. Jelsoft makes a great product, and they provide great support, I’m always singing their praises, but damn they’re slow. They’ve asked the community of users to refrain from developing addons to vBulletin 3.0 until the final release candidiate is out. It seems like years that the final release has been right around the corner.

For the sake of Business Forum, though, it’s time to make the move. I probably would have waited longer were it not for the unreliability of the host. Upgrading will do wonders for the SEO, though, we’ll just have to deal with an ugly looking site for a few months.

Books for Web Hosts

I just read a couple of books I can recommend. Just read a couple of books I can recommend.

Strategies for Web Hosting and Managed Services
Web Hosting

Tons of good tips in both books, and they’re useful for someone who’s been in the business for a while as much as for newbies.

Anchor Text vs. PageRank

I’m thinking that focusing on buildling PageRank isn’t the best strategy for getting good traffic out of the search engines. I’m not saying that PageRank isn’t important, just that seeking PageRank for the sake of PageRank isn’t going to get you a lot of traffic. OTOH, seeking anchor text will bring in the traffic.
I’ve seen search engine results where sites with lower PageRank get better results than sites with very nice PageRank. At the basic logic, you can see that if PageRank alone was what it took to get good search ranking you’d only have one site at the top for all keywords. Also, when you put anchor text at the top of your SEO priority, you’re building PageRank incidentally.

What’s worth more to you then? A link from a PageRank 6/10 site with no anchor text, or a link from a PageRank 4/10 site with the anchor text you specify? That’s also a tough call because with the link from a 6/10 site you can get the raw PR and then use it to spread around in your own site and use your own internal links with your anchor text to increase your rankings. OTOH, the anchor text from the 4/10 site will give you the greater boost to your home page for your primary keyword.

Conclusion…. seeking links from lower PR sites is very worthwhile if you can specify your anchor text.

Comments?

PageRank

What a difference a letter makes. I’ve been doing some experimenting with website marketing, and thought I’d share some results. My objective with this experiement was to find out how adding a bunch of back-links to an existing website would effect its search engine placements.
I took my Coin Books website, which is circa 1999 in style, design, and content, and got some links from other websites. I had the sites linking to me use the anchor text “coin books” as that’s the title of my website and the keyword I’d like to have people search for when they find my site.
If you go to Google to search for “coin books” now, you’ll see my site listed second now! It hadn’t even shown up in the top hundred before adding a substantial amount of back links. Incidentally, the PageRank of the site rose from a three to a five during this experiment.
That’s great news, right? Well, maybe, but not as great as it could be. You see, according to the Overture term suggestion tool, people are more likely to search for “coin book” than they are to search for “coin books”. What’s the difference? It’s the same thing, right? Well, not according to Google. Now, go to Google and search for “coin book”. Now where’s my site? I don’t know. I searched through twenty pages of the results, and didn’t find it.
My next experiment with this is how to get it to show up on the first page of search results for both “coin books” and “coin book”.

New Weblog Open

I am creating this weblog to store my random ramblings. Mostly, I’ll be writing about my experiences with startup small businesses, but maybe once in a while on other topics as well.