Why are the indicator lights always placed above the doors, well above eye level? Why do we have to crane our necks to see a signal regarding a door that’s directly in front of our faces? Well, if there’s a small crowd standing in front of you, an eye-level display would be blocked.  It makes sense to put the display high, where everyone can see it.

When elevators were first invented they all had trained operators on board. They helped you get you where you needed to go: easily, quickly, and safely. These elevator conductors were expertly trained to ask just the right question, “Going up, sir?” These operators were necessary for several reasons.  Push-button controls had not been invented yet. The controls were also vastly different from today’s controls.  But, perhaps most importantly, the controls were all different from one another.

As technology advanced and buildings with elevators became numerous, controls became standardized. They were so easy to use that the public no longer needed any assistance. Because of this, the public was inadvertently trained to look at the display above the elevators. It was learned behavior on a mass scale: we all habitually look up above the elevator because that is where we find the important information. We do not look at the relatively large door immediately in front of us because we know the small display above the elevator is more informative.  In fact, in larger, fancier lobbies with multiple elevators, the indicators will even tell you which approaching car is your best bet.

Everybody’s elevator transactions go smoother because elevator makers follow suit with roughly the same useful design. Users seldom, if ever, need to ask for assistance to get the elevator to go where they want it to go.

smoother transactions are the results when your website is designed as expected

The evolution of elevators and their usage is quite similar to the evolution of the Internet and the use of websites.  The placement and context of elements – especially controls – affects the usability of your website.  Masses of people have learned to expect certain elements in roughly the same spot.  Placing them where (and how) they’re expected facilitates easy, quick, and smooth transactions between you and the users of your website.  For example, search bars can be located in various spots on a page, but like the signals for elevators, they are invariably placed on “high ground” at the top of a site.  This is because users look to “high ground” expecting to find a search box.

Here’s a specific example of search bar placement. Facebook, Google, and Twitter aren’t very collaborative companies, but from these screenshots (below), you’d think they hired the same designer. The similarities aren’t by coincidence. Collectively, the designers don’t want you having an awkward moment on their website.  They don’t want users to have any doubt or hesitation when looking for their search bar.  This is the most important moment that you will spend on their page.  It is about being able to find the information  when you want it.

it’s not about you, web designers, it’s about the content

Just like the novelty of the elevator died around in the latter half of the 19th century when people started using elevators more frequently in skyscrapers and apartments, web design is well past it’s novelty stage. At some point, elevators stopped being amazing and started to simply be useful. And perhaps, it’s time that web designers stop designing websites for the sake of design, and focus on making sure that these sites are simply useful.

Here at Infamia, we are inspired by both the time-tested aphorism “form follows function” and the Earl of Chesterfield’s quote, “Style is the dress of thought.” We help make your site as usable as possible. The mechanics of it all – the underlying technology and design –– are crucial, but to a user it is, or should be, invisible.  Just as the technicality of each individual brushstroke and choice of pigment is necessary to construct a masterful painting, so, too, are the components of your website. If your site is done well, unless the user is a web professional evaluating your site design, he will never notice how it’s been put together.  But, he will notice whether he likes the site or not. In other words, design should exist to support the content.

The better your navigation, graphic displays, SEO, workflow, reliability, speed, readability, and so on, the less your users will even notice.  Instead, they will focus on the overall site effect and experience.  Here at Infamia, helping you achieve that is our job.  “Going up, Sir?”

1. Back up your files and database

Also, make sure you know how to restore them! Doing any maintenance without backing up first is like playing Russian roulette with your website. Now is the time to test your hosting provider’s backup protocols, not when you need to recover corrupted data.  Most hosting packages’ “included” backups are only file-based and not thorough locked-table database “dumps.”

2. Upgrade WordPress core and plug-ins

Keep in mind that within the rest of your site’s code some plug-ins may “break” when you upgrade them. Review all plugins for compatibility with the latest version of the CMS core. Be prepared to roll-back (remember the backups?) or postpone upgrade.

3. Review custom plugins and themes

Even though your theme may be custom-coded for your site, as some plugins, even these rely on some open-source code. A great example is TimThumb, a thumbnail library: it’s used by many themes, including WooThemes. A vulnerability was discovered last year, and WooThemes did a fantastic job updating the themes and notifying everyone. Also update any javascript libraries.

4. Remove unused plug-ins

A clean website is a happy website.  Unused unmaintained, plug-ins leave your site open to unexpected complications.

5. Curate your plugins

Review all your plug-ins, especially those that haven’t been updated in a while: are they still actively maintained? Make a plan to remove or replace any stale plug-ins. Better yet, join the Open Source movement and take ownership of stale but useful plug-ins.

6. Review all file and directory permissions

Make sure access is granted only when needed.  Make sure files and directories are owned by the appropriate system users. In most cases, the webserver will need access to some directories. But by limiting the webserer’s rights to most of your installation, you can mitigate a possible attack.

7. Review all users and passwords

Update passwords, including the admin password. If possible, use SSL for admin tasks or logins.  Disable or remove stale users (such as ex-employees.)

8. Review ftp, shell, and database access

How many people have access to your ftp or ssh account? How many database users are there? Are these users limited to only specific hosts?

9. Review logs

Luckily, these days looking at just web analytics and using Google webmaster tools will usually suffice to alert you to any potential problems or compromised files.

10. Make sure everything else on your server is updated

If you’re sharing a server with other websites, makes sure the other websites are also up to date. If another website on the same server is compromised, your site also is compromised. Choose your hosting provider wisely and make sure they keep their servers up to date. (Hint: most cheap hosting providers won’t keep their servers up to date since upgrading may break old websites.)

Bonus: Use Cloudflare

We’re big fans of Cloudflare’s combined CDN, optimizer, and web security service. They do not make your site safe or secure, but they do help mitigate attacks.

Did I miss anything? Leave a comment.

Myth 1: Strong passwords work

You know the drill: Choose “strong” passwords and change them regularly.

Why? Do you expect some kid in India to sit there with a dictionary trying to guess your favorite word? So if you choose something nonsensical you’re safer? No, of course not. Password crackers are sophisticated machines that can break an 8-word password in under five minutes. So changing your password is useless unless you change it every 5 minutes. And what about sophisticated, “strong” passwords? The bottom line is that a computer can break your password faster than you can type it.

So give it up. Use the same password for every site if you want. Your WordPress admin password can just be “12345″. Real security comes from other factors. (read on)

Myth 2: Updates protect you from attacks

When did software become so high maintenance? The “experts” warn that software is riddled with bugs, and unless you patch it, you’re at risk. But the patches and updates themselves aren’t immune to this. If you believe the hype, website maintenance is a Sisyphean task. Like laundry.

The problem is that hackers already know that software nowadays is up to date. They look to the latest updates and patches to find the latest security vulnerabilities, and attack the most recently updated sites. In fact, one hacker by the name of l331W0rtPr3ssHaxx0rz1101 was quoted in the Harvard Security Journal as saying:

The fact is, software updates are just too common. The true hackers get leaked copies of the Update code and start hacking before it’s released to the public. The biggest vulnerabilities now are within websites that have just been updated to the “latest and greatest”. EleventyOne FTW.

So there you have it from the horse’s mouth. In fact, unmaintained sites are more secure. I know of a site written in lisp in 1967; it has never been updated, and never been hacked.

Myth 3: Security through Obscurity does not work

Security experts trying to sell you more expensive solutions with fancy names like “WAF” will tell you that Security through Obscurity does not work. The opposite is true: have you ever heard of an obscure website being hacked? Nobody has hacked a site written in Whitespace, and there is no more obscure programming language than Whitespace.

The real truth doesn’t make security experts any richer: Security through Obscurity is the only way to keep your website secure. The more obscure your website is, the safer it is.

For optimal security I recommend you turn off your website every time you leave the office. Not only is your website more secure, you also save money on cloud hosting.

Online Privacy and Personally Identifiable Information

Before the Age of the Internet, nearly all market data was aggregated on a “macro” level; today, it is highly focused on a “micro” level. The buzzword around advertising is “Non Personally Identifiable Information” (non-PII): in theory, the data advertisers collect is not about you as the individual; it’s about your habits and interests. Advertisers want to sell you what you want to buy, not identify you. In fact, advertisers go to lengths to avoid collecting PII. But does not collecting PII (or collecting only non-PII) protect your privacy?

There are documented cases of pregnant women being identified through their purchases and targeted with direct mail before other members of their household were aware of the pregnancy.[1]  (Wow!) Researchers have been able to re-identify data that was carefully “anonymized” to pinpoint individuals.[2] Without using legally protected Personally Identifiable Information (PII) per se, public information can be combined to create startling accurate identifiers. For example, it has been shown that, in 1990, 87% of the population of the United States could be uniquely identified by just three pieces of information, namely gender, ZIP code, and full date of birth.[3]

Online privacy and You.

Should we worry about protecting our privacy? This is very topical question, important to many people. The answer depends on you. Are you the kind of person who uses a fake phone number when you sign up for a grocery store discount card? Or do you believe that your whole life is online anyway, so why not gain some benefit from targeted content?

We cannot give you any complete answers here, and we certainly don’t want to give you any pat answers. We can, however, point you toward more info about the subject. Education is the key to protecting yourself, so here are some links to get you started.

Resources

Behavioral advertising

• http://www.aboutads.info/consumers/
• Stephen Colbert skit on advertising and privacy (funny AND informative)

Electronic Privacy

• Electronic Privacy Information Center and the Future of Privacy forum.
• “Anonymized” data really isn’t—and here’s why not—ARS technica
• Review your Facebook privacy settings: http://www.reclaimprivacy.org/
• Review your Google privacy settings: http://www.google.com/goodtoknow/

Understanding online advertising and cookies

• Online advertisers’ self-regulatory program.
• donotrack.us project — Stanford researchers behind Do Not Track

Manage ad cookies through your browser

• Chrome: Keep my Opt-outs plugin
• Safari added a built-in “Do Not Track” feature under the Developer menu. This feature is not turned on by default.
• Firefox  also has a built-in “Do Not Track” feature that needs to be manually turned on.

Sources

1. http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-target-figured-out-a-teen-girl-was-pregnant-before-her-father-did/
2. Personal health records sent to Governor, defender of data “anonymization”: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/09/your-secrets-live-online-in-databases-of-ruin.ars
3. Wikipedia, Personally Identifiable Information, with “Comments of Latanya Sweeney, Ph.D. on ‘Standards of Privacy of Individually Identifiable Health Information,’” Carnegie Mellon University

• Network availability: 100%
• Website availability: 99.97%
• Website availability including maintenance downtime: 99.94%
• Lowest scorer: 99.8%

Details available on request. So why the slow buffalo? Keep reading.

uptime and outage report for our "slow buffalo" of the month

We push our clients hard to sign a website maintenance agreement. But not all do.  This particular client not only hosts their website with us, they have a dedicated server.  And without a maintenance plan, not only does the website not get maintained, neither does the server.  Now, an uptime of “only” 99.8% is not that big a deal, but just like that check engine light: it indicates that something may be about to turn south quickly. And of course, when the telltale signs are there, nobody’s going to sell you cheap insurance.  So learn your lesson: buy a maintenance plan.

BTW, the graph above shows the uptime of our “slow buffalo.”  Click it to enlarge. The three lines represent three different monitoring points: We monitor from several locations, in this case US East, US West and Europe.  Shout-out to Monitis for providing world-class monitoring and alerting.

Business class hosting? Yea, we got that.

website maintenance time

Let’s face it: everything needs maintenance, and you haven’t touched your website since you changed the copyright notice last year. Sure, you give your car gas, oil changes, insurance, new tires…and maybe a new roof rack or fancy headlights. But enough about you. My goal is to make sure you maintain your website. Here’s why.
But first, it’s a new year. I love the idea of a new beginning, a chance to start anew doing the things we should be doing, but never do. But no more resolutions, please. Why not? Because they fail. And why do they fail? Let’s take a look at the top resolutions in the US:

• drink less
• eat healthier
• get a better (education/home/job/body)
• Reduce debt/weight/stress

Notice a trend? Here’s a hint: there is no measure of success, and no clear goals. It’s all a general idea: a little less of this, a little more of that. Do you know how ‘healthy” you eat now? and if not, how can you measure how much “healthier” you will eat? Two less Big Macs a month? Or a week?

But I’m not here to talk about your health. I want to talk about your website goals for 2012.

Here’s a goal you can reach: a maintenance plan for your website. Why? Because without website maintenance, you’re playing Russian roulette with your website. And because it’s cheaper than a personal trainer. Of course, we can help: think of us as the personal trainer for your website.

4 critical website layers

These are the elements of your website you must keep on top of.

1. Content Delivery: network and server maintenance

If your website is hosted on a hosting server, there’s not much you can do about the network, except ask. But you should ask about the upgrade plans for your server: how often is the operating system, database server, web server, etc upgraded? Are you notified when updates happen? A lot of hosting providers won’t update their servers since these updates may break sites running on those servers.

2. Content Management System maintenance

This includes upgrades and routine maintenance of your CMS, such as Drupal and WordPress, and its database. If you don’t have the latest version, chances are good there is a known security issue with your website—an issue hackers can exploit.

The sad thing is that, even with a maintenance plan, you’re often on your own on this one. We are among the few to provide CMS updates as part of our maintenance plan, and we can do this because we only provide hosting and maintenance to our development clients.

3. Content strategy and curation

Content is king. It’s why people visit your website. Do you provide them with good content? Is your content updated, relevant, and helpful? Are images clear and explanatory or do they just serve as filler?

The most common complaint we see with older websites is that they no longer look “good”. The theme and design are still the same. The only thing that changed is content.

4. Content findability and web analytics

What good is content when your users can’t find it? If it’s not worth finding, it’s not worth writing. Your content, social media campaigns, email campaigns, and PR all work together to make sure your content reaches its intended audience. A good website maintenance plan will include regular reviews of your website and campaign metrics, to see what works, and what needs improvement.

Cost

If you don’t have the time or know-how to implement these yourself, we can help! Our website maintenance plans may be cheaper than Weight Watchers!

New Look, Responsive Web Design

Infamia on mobile

Surely by now you’ve seen Infamia’s new website, complete with web fonts courtesy of the Google Fonts API. (Our apologies to some Windows XP users.)  But have you opened it in your iphone? or several different-sized android phones? or your iPad? Your 6-inch, 7-inch, 10.3-inch tablet? If so, you  will no doubt noticed very little: everything was still as it should be.  Closer inspection, however, would reveal that the layout is slightly different. Our new theme uses a new technique called “responsive web design.”  In responsive web design, all design elements are defined in relative terms.  This takes more work, but it means that a webpage can dynamically scale up or down to fit the appropriate medium.  The image on the right shows the webpage on my phone: note the menu is vertical.  The menu goes back to its horizontal orientation if I rotate the phone!

We consider ourselves craftsmen of web things, and  we are proud of our web development work. Staying on the cutting edge is an integral part of Infamia. The new site was long overdue. Tell us how you like it in the comments or drop us a line. We’ve written a bit more about how we build our website, if you’re interested.

SINS: SEO Is Not SPAM (and google says so)

Matt Cutts needs no introduction. He is the public face of Google search. And in a new video, Matt Cutts talks about why SEO is not spam.

Don’t feel like spending three minutes of your day?  It’s OK, we watched it for you.  The basic premise is that SEOs do good things for your site, the search world, and all your users too. Here are some key things SEOs can help with:

• Make sure pages are crawl-able and accessible (read: no Flash)
• Use the right keywords: no jargon
• Improve usability.
• Make your site runs fast
• Write copy that converts

Of course, Black Hat SEO tactics, keyword stuffing, doing “Sneaky things with redirects” is still bad. Luckily, we wrote about how to hire an SEO. Or you can contact us directly.

Social Media news: Google Plus graduates to Business users

What’s this? You’re a business user of Google’s business-level services, namely Google Apps?  You’ve been waiting for months for you and your business to jump on the Google Plus bandwagon?  Well the wait is over.  Although Google Plus does not (yet) allow for business pages the way facebook does, the service is now open to Google Apps accounts. Such as mine. Of course this means that B2B enterprises can now benefit from the +1 button.

Three things business users should do:

1. Add a +1 button to your website
2. Assign someone to be your company’s voice on Google Plus
3. Tell all your friends

Web Usability Bonus Round: Google Reader under the knife

Google Reader viewport surgery

Speaking of Google, it seems their trained pigeons have been busy rolling out a new design. And not everyone is happy.  So we thought we’d do some math on Google Reader (although gmail and google docs have similar layouts). There are many things I like about the new design, but I agree that top headers are distracting from the main “action area”. We now have three headers: the login/google plus header, the search header, and the utility header.  So how much real estate is used by different things? Here is the math:

• Headers: 24%
• Left navigation: 18%
• “Action” area: 56%

As I said, I like the clear new design. I even like the action area, which is adjustable on some services. But the headers seem to waste some useful real estate. From a usability perspective, these seem to do little more than add visual consistency between google products.

Your turn

The WordPress Theme

Consider this free. We paid $75 at woothemes; now, there are cheaper, free, and more expensive themes. The bottom line is: the cost of the theme is insignificant compared to the cost of choosing a theme. We estimate 4-10 hours for a client; but even for our internal, no-discussion, no-revisions, let’s get it done website, we spent close to 5 hours selecting a theme. (This was over several weeks.)

Customizations and content

Of course, the theme does not quite fit our needs. In our case, we wanted a portfolio area and a bold, modern look. We didn’t find a theme that had both out of the box. We also wanted more branding than uploading a jagged logo image: we wanted to adjust colors, fonts, font colors, etc.  We’re still not 100% there, but we’re close.

Content was seemingly easy: transferring content from our previous website was simple since the old site was also WordPress. But we soon found out that the old content did not meet our content strategy, our SEO strategy, or the feeling that we wanted to convey. I think we scrapped about 60–75% of the old content (excluding blog posts), and spent at least 6 hour on new content.

The WordPress Portfolio plug-in took a good amount of work to set up and configure. Even though not every site has a portfolio, it seems every site has that one piece of it that takes longer to develop than expected. Sometimes it’s a difficult plugin, sometimes it’s a difficult decision, sometimes it’s trying to make several things work well together.

All told, including basic “dev mode” WordPress setup, customizations and content changes have taken roughly 20 hours.

Buff, polish, launch

When we realize the theme would work for our company, it was time to install and configure the “standard” features. Between the webmaster and SEO plug-ins, caching and performance, Social plug-ins, maintenance (to clean up all the stuff we installed and deinstalled in development, for example), we have a list of roughly 12–20 plugins to install and configure. This site has (so far) 15 done. Configuration varies: sometimes configuring a theme is enough. With others (such as with SEO-related plugins), you need to go back and review all the content. Often, logging into third-party sites and verifying pieces is required, as is selection between multiple similar plugins.

Then it’s ready. But, of course, it’s not live. And after spending the past week putting your website together, you don’t want to mess it up.  Going live often requires probably-complicated-and-always-dangerous database changes, lots of backups, and bated breath.

All told, chalk up another 5 hours to getting there.

Spit-shine, and more testing: getting out of the ICU

Plan as much as you want, but some things can’t be tested unless they’re live.  Test and fix these.  Also, invariably, when you push the red button, you find things that weren’t good enough in the development. The site is now your pride and joy. Not your first-born perhaps, but certainly your newest. The first few hours (days?) are exciting:  Is the Analytics code working?  All the sitemaps in place? Why does the cursor turn green?  Did we update the feeds? Take care of redirects?  Are all the social sharing places using the correct address or do they still point to “dev”?

If you did your homework above, this should only take 1-2 hours.

Stayin’ alive

So you have a new site.  Take a few moments to enjoy the euphoria. Then the work begins. Content strategies need to be implemented (you don’t think we rewrote all our content already?). SEO strategies need to be implemented. Social Media strategies need to be implemented.  Add an estimated 5 hours to the total, to include monitoring and tweaking over the next week.

Remember the “three pillars“? (I ought to write more about this.)  After you launch, you have a website. It can grow, or it can flounder.  To sustain a website, we need the two other stools: SEO and Marketing. (Content strategy is included here as well.). Now the real fun begins.

We have budgeted about 25 hours per month for routine site updates (creating and posting quality blog posts, reviewing and tweaking and implementing SEO, content, and social media strategies). We also budget an extra 10+ hour per quarter for more in-depth analysis: review our analytics reports, the performance of our social media and SEO strategies, etc.

Costs

Ours was a “low-budget” website.  We used an existing theme, and mostly existing content.  The numbers, please:

• research and theme selection, 5 hours
• content and customizations, 20 hours
• buff, polish, and post-launch ICU: 6-7 hours

These numbers are for things we did for our own site: they exclude presentations, meetings, discussions, revisions, choices, training, research, etc.  We selected a theme, and we implemented it.  On average, working on a client website would increase these by 15-25%.

Total for launch: 31–32 hours (this works out to roughly  $3–5,000 depending on hourly cost and quality; often the cheaper end of the scale will need more work long-term care. )

Recurring costs work out to 10–15 hours per month, plus hosting costs. That seems pretty high, but most clients can do the content work in-house. For a small business, we often estimate 2-3 hours consulting per quarter, plus hosting. The low-end works out at $150–200/mo.

Coda

A reminder: this post is not based on our estimates for a new site. The numbers reflected here are based on how much time it actually took us to put together our own website. We see this as the low-end of the spectrum, since we already knew what we wanted and how to go about it. We believe that a business of any size should have an awesome website.

$5,000 can be a lot of money to a small business. If you fall in that category, don’t despair. We’d love to figure out the best way to get you online, no matter how small your budget. Sometimes the best things online, as in life, are free.  So…call or leave a message.

Thus, the first ever DC Wine Week was created.

The team wanted to post something online quickly so that press and the future-oriented DC wine connoisseurs with busy schedules could save-the-date for the Wine Week activities. We worked with Pivot Point to develop a website placeholder.

Our next challenge was to create a visually compelling and fun navigable website, within a very compressed schedule and budget. We advised Pivot Point on the designs and structure of the official web page. The unique fonts, logo, and overall layout of the site make up a user experience that is enticing to the wine drinker and set the tone for the week’s events.

Because of the various revisions that generally happen during any web project, we were given the final creative only one week before the site’s launch date. In true Infamia style, we came through and, thanks to our amazing developers, we made this tough project happen. The site launched in time for the social media and other marketing campaigns to begin.

Mayor Vincent Gray officially declared October 15-22, 2011 “DC Wine Week.” We like to think our website had something to do with that momentous decision.

There has never been a DC Wine Week to celebrate the region’s wine industry, and Infamia was proud to play a role in making it happen. We hope to see you at a DC Wine Week event.

Cheers!

Search engine algorithms and You.

Search engines used to have an easy job:  Scan a website, analyze its content for keywords, and create an index.  It was easy for the search engines but it was also easy to “game,” and sucked for the users. The worst sites won,  as they were artificially “stuffed” with keywords. Then in 2003 Google released  certain updates to its algorithm that changed the (Search Engine) world. These updates started putting emphasis on a complex list of factors, including external websites. This updated was codenamed “Florida”. Even before then, google algorithm updates have had code names.  Some of them are of interest to business owners (such as “Florida” in 2003 which put an end to shady SEO techniques and left businesses scrambling to figure out what happened to their search rankings.)  Others are small updates of interest mostly to SEOs.

Google’s algorithms are a closely held secret, not only because of competing search engines but also because any published algorithm can be “gamed”.  We can’t know the exact method used to calculate search engine rankings.  Still, Google is interested generating the best results for searchers, and in doing that they actually publish blogs on how webmasters should create sites that are better suited for the user.  In addition, SEOs test different sites and can analyze the results to decipher how we can make sites rank better.

Panda, the “high quality sites” update

The latest significant update is codenamed “Panda.”  How significant? Panda affects an estimated 12% of websites in the US. We break it down for you here.

The big change in Panda is its focus on site-wide quality.  We tell our clients that  a website is a process: a habit you form, rather than set of tasks you check off.  The process involves multiple disciplines, but web consultants can help you form good habits without the need to understand the full complexity.  Panda reinforces this in terms of search rankings: Search Engine Optimization is one of the disciplines involved in producing a good site, but SEO is no longer a list of tasks.  These disciplines are as diverse as visual design and systems engineering.  A high quality design, good writing, and a system architecture that can maintain low response times all are now important to SEO.

With the Panda update, SEO will need to involve all these disciplines, and all these disciplines become important to Search ranking. You can no longer, for example,  skimp on usability if you can get a lot of back-links.

There’s also some inference that Panda takes into account user behavior.  Let’s look at an example.  Consider Alice, a cryptography student, using google to search for “cryptography”. Alice visits a website on the search results, Bob’sCryptoWorld, and spends 5 minutes reading 5 pages. She then returns to the search engine results, and visits another site, CryptoByChuck where she spends 30 seconds on one page.  A smart Google algorithm (perhaps Panda) would keep track of this and declare that CryptoByChuck is a lower quality site, causing Alice to quickly jump back to the search engine. The algorithm would also rank Bob’s site much higher, since Alice spent a lot of time there.

What are the elements that keep Alice interested in one site over the other?

Writing good content

Content is still king, so let’s look at what Panda means for  content. For many, this means blog posts.  We’ve covered writing for the web before, and those hints still work.

A key element of Panda is that it’s a site-wide ranking algorithm:  individual pieces of bad content sprinkled on your site will negatively impact your entire site. This means you can no longer push a lot of low-quality content, simply share or copy other sites, or repost your twiter stream to your blog.  Panda values quality over quantity:  original content, original research, insightful analysis.

Still, according to Aaron Wheeler from SEOmoz, simply writing good content not enough:

“There are too many people making too much amazing stuff on the Internet for good and unique and grammatically correct and spelled properly and describes the topic adequately to be enough”  — Aaron Wheeler, SEOmoz.com

We used to get by writing content that people want to read.  The new strategy is: write content that people want to keep reading.  After someone reads your article, they should want to read another article.  We can no longer get by writing individual articles: we must now write chapters of the same book.  Writing something because it’s popular today is a good idea, but people will keep reading your site only if you stay on-topic with consistently high-quality articles. The bar has been raised.

While this emphasis on original content will not signal the end of landing pages, it will hopefully mean the end of low-quality landing pages designed specifically for SEO.  Landing pages should be helpful and informative.  Why would Alice leave Chuck’s site?  Could she have found a lot of off-topic or badly presented content?  Was the cryptography page on Chuck’s site simply a landing page without additional crypto content on the rest of the site?  Those are the kind of things Panda penalizes.

To sum up, here are a few notes on content:

• Always keep your audience in mind.  Write what your audience wants to read, not what you want to push.
• Write about what you know.  Panda places emphasis on articles written by experts. Shallow, short, or unsubstantial content is penalized.
• Be original.  Write about original research, or your original and insightful analysis.
• Link to authoritative sources, and to primary sources, when these help your user.  But don’t be a link-farm
• Review our “P.S.” model when writing for the web.
• A few bad pieces of content can bring down the entire site.  Delete them, improve them, or merge them with relevant good content.
• Content does not only mean text.  Include images and videos that are helpful and informative.
• Lastly, develop a good content strategy so you can consistently produce good, high-quality content that is on-topic.