Social Engagement Optimization - The New SEO

SEO is not dead. As with all living things, SEO is always evolving. While many in the search community are witnessing and acknowledging the evolution, they cling to the notion that SEO only stands for “Search Engine Optimization.”
The concept of search dates back to the days of cavemen searching for food. So does social interaction and the exchange of information, which inevitably impacts how people search. It’s time to add an additional meaning to the Three Letter Acronym of SEO and start teaching this to all the people with C-Level titles (COO, CMO, CTO, CFP & CEOs) in the world.

The Influence Of Social On Search

Over the past few years, the influence of social properties (Facebook, G+, Twitter, Pinterest, etc.) on where people search, how they search (i.e., crowd source), and even how the search engines rank content in their search results, have dramatically increased. The influence of social on search will continue to evolve and become more critical over the next few years.
In the late 1990′s, organizations and their respective C-level management were slow to embrace the Web, and in the early 2000′s, they were slow to embrace strategic search engine optimization.
Today, the C-level management team is slow to embrace the structure and strategic use of social properties (Social Media) to enhance their findability when a potential customer seeks the products and services the organization offers.

Word-Of-Mouth Marketing

What’s puzzling is this is old school marketing and something that was taught in business and marketing classes for the longest time. It’s called “word-of-mouth marketing.”
Yet, the latest generation of marketers don’t seem to know about it and professes that it’s something else. Something new and shiny that must be tried out and tested. Meanwhile, the perplexed senior executives in their organizations learned about word-of-mouth marketing when they took their business classes back in the 70′s & 80′s.
The key to old-school, word-of-mouth marketing is simple. If someone asks you to recommend a vendor for something, you give them the name of someone that you were happy with or warn them of someone who you were unhappy with.
This is what search engines started replacing (word-of-mouth marketing) in the late 90′s. Two decades later, search engines are being replaced and influenced by online social engagement, which is basically electronic word-of-mouth marketing. We’ve come full circle and any organization that doesn’t realize it is failing to compete with more nimble businesses and likely destined for the scrap heap.

Social Engagement Optimization

To effectively and strategically implement a Social Engagement Optimization strategy, the C-suite can simply let their organizations hire a recent graduate who completed a social media college course and set them loose with the corporate social media strategy.
This may be less expensive than someone who has years of traditional marketing experience, possessing the expertise and ability to relate historical successes and failures to the new social technologies for doing old-fashioned marketing. Yet, the reward for using experience to create measurable benchmarks and milestones based on historical and traditional concepts, is that your organization will succeed in the new environment of online social media marketing.
Corporations and their executive teams need to think about how they are going to use social properties to engage with both current and potential customers and then how to optimize their experience to maximize sales and profits. In essence, they need to relearn how to do something that businesses have done since the dawn of commerce and to educate their marketing teams that SEO must now also include Social Engagement Optimization.


The Author: Alan K'necht

Source : http://marketingland.com/

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Google Webmaster Tools - A Basic SEO Guide to Getting Started

Google Webmaster Tools can be a powerful ally. But, if you make a mistake or put this power in the wrong hands, it can mean trouble for your search engine optimization. In this post, I provide a basic SEO Guide to Webmaster Tools to help get you started if you aren’t taking full advantage of WMT yet.

It is very important to point out that some of these things are more detrimental than others. Also, there could be multiple articles written about each of these tools and reports. This SEO guide to Webmaster Tools is a simple overview with a little insight.

SEO Guide to Webmaster Tools

Messages: Spam Warnings & Other Notifications

Priority: Medium / High

Many of us know that Google sends an email to Webmaster Tools if there is an issue with your site. If you don’t check Webmaster Tools messages frequently, you could miss an important piece of information.

An example of an important message would be an unnatural link notification. A message such as this could be indicator of a major issue, or it could result in almost nothing at all. It really all depends on how Google plans on dealing with your particular situation. Regardless, if you get any type of notification, it is important to figure out why.

Bad Link Warning

Settings

Priority: High

In the settings tab, you can do three things: set geographic target, preferred domain and crawl rate.

Geographic Target

According to Google, “If your site has a neutral top-level domain, such as .com or .org, geotargeting helps Google determine how your site appears in search results, and improves our search results for geographic queries. If you don’t want your site associated with any location, select Unlisted.”

Make sure to set this up so that it targets your intended geographic market.

Preferred Domain

Google states, “If you specify your preferred domain as http://www.example.com and we find a link to http://example.com, we’ll consider both links the same.”

I always recommend setting a preferred domain based on the way you want your website indexed. To do this, you may need to verify ownership of both the www and non-www versions of your domain.

Crawl Rate

The last option in this area allows you to modify crawl rate. Google says, “Our goal is to crawl as many pages from your site as we can without overwhelming your server’s bandwidth. You can change the crawl rate (the speed of Google’s requests during the crawl) for sites at the root or subdomain level – for example, www.example.com and http://subdomain.example.com. The new custom crawl rate will be valid for 90 days.”

In most cases, Webmasters will let Google optimize the crawl rate for the website. But in some cases, Googlebot may cause some issues which make it necessary to alter the rate.

Settings Webmaster Tools

Sitelinks

Priority: Medium

Every website owner wants good sitelinks. If you don’t know, sitelinks are the links that show up under your domain name in Google search results.

Below are some small sitelinks.

Small Sitelinks

Below are some large sitelinks.

Big Sitelinks

Sitelinks are determined based on how much authority the domain has for a particular query. In many cases, we build sitelinks to assist with online reputation management because it pushes negative information further down the page.

No matter what your sitelinks look like, this section of Webmaster Tools allows you to demote your sitelinks. So, if there is one that you do not want listed for some reason, you can remove it.

A word of caution here. I have seen people demote one sitelink and then lose all of their sitelinks for months. Make sure you really want to demote that sitelink before doing so.

Sitelinks Webmaster Tools

URL Parameters

Priority: High

Webmaster Tools has a setting that allows you to specify URL parameters and request that Google crawl certain URLs and not crawl others URLs. This is an incredibly powerful tool. If you make a mistake, it can mean that a large chunk of your site is removed from the index.

I always recommend that people just stay away from this tool in general, in my humble opinion, it is a better option to use rel=canonical, no index/no follow, 301 or robots.txt when faced with most issues this tool alleviates.

But, if you need to use this tool, make sure you set it up correctly. Also, make sure the person enabling the tool knows the URL structure of the website inside and out.

If the site has a clean URL structure and the right person is using this tool, it can of course work well.

URL Parameters

Change of Address

Priority: Medium

If you move, you need to tell someone correctly!

According to Google, “If you’ve moved your site to a new domain, you can use the Change of address tool to tell Google about your new URL. We’ll update our index to reflect your new URL. Changes will stay in effect for 180 days, by which time we’ll have crawled and indexed the pages at your new URL.”

Change of Address

Excessive Crawl Errors

Priority: Medium

If your website is not working and there are errors occurring on a regularly basis, this needs to be dealt with. In so many cases, I see sites with thousands of errors that are never addressed. Each error that affects usability can mean a potential lost customer.

Crawl Errors WMT

Crawl Stats

Priority: Medium

This report shows you pages crawled per day, kilobytes downloaded per day and time spent downloading a page. Incidentally, there is a new Google Analytics report that also shows time downloading a page. The Analytics report, in my opinion, is much cooler. But overall, I like this set of reports. Think about it like this:

• The more pages crawled the better (shows Google is interested and checking out content)
• The more downloaded the better (unless there is an issue with Google wasting time on a area that should not be touched)
• The more time spent downloading, the worse off you are. As you probably know page speed is an SEO factor. However, in some cases certain media just might take a long time to download.

Note: these rules are not applicable to all websites in all situations. They are just general guidelines.

Crawl Stats

Blocked URLs

Priority: Medium / High

In this report you can see the URLs that are blocked by robots.txt. In some cases, you will see areas of your site that are blocked which should not be. So, when you see this, unblock them!

Blocked URLs

Fetch As Google

Priority: High

The fetch as Google tool allows you to retrieve a page of your website as if you were Google. This can be very helpful if you want to verify whether or not a page is accessible. Sometimes, with very large sites, there are so many things going on, it can be great to have this simple tool to turn to. It can give you a straight answer. Can Google grab the page or not?

This tool also has the option to fetch pages as Googlebot-Mobile. This can be very helpful, particularly because of the elements that need to be put in place for the different forms of mobile optimization.

Fetch as Google

Indexed Status

Priority: Medium

The index status report shows you how many URLs are indexed out of all of those that Google can find on the website.

Here is an example of one way you can look at this report: say your website has 300 URLs in the sitemap; these are URLs you want to get indexed and probably the only ones you are aware of on the site. But, the index report shows that you have 3,000 URLs that are indexed out of 20,000 potential URLs.

Inconsistencies such as this scream issues with canonical URLs, duplicate content or just a Webmaster who does not know what he or she is doing.

Index Status Webmaster Tools

Malware

Priority: High

When someone injects code into your forum or comments area, that is an issue. Google will see this and deem it malware. When someone then visits your website there is a chance a message will be delivered saying this site is not safe for users. For this very reason, it is important to check your malware report.

Malware Webmaster Tools

Search Queries

Priority: Medium

The search queries tab gives you a rough idea of the number of Impressions and Clicks your URLs are getting in the Google Index. It shows your top queries and even breaks them down by Mobile, Image, Video, Web, Location and Traffic.

This report can give you an idea of rankings and traffic. But, it is very unreliable. Overall, it just provides a rough idea of where things are. If the chart has a spike or a trough, then it is a good idea to investigate.

Search Queries

Links To Your Site

Priority: Medium / High

We all know a link from a bad website can hurt you. We also probably all know that if you havetoo much anchor text for a keyword you will get an algorithmic penalty. In the link report in Webmaster Tools, you can see who has linked to you. You can also see your top anchor text. If you are not ranking for the term that is in your top anchor text, there is a good chance you need to get rid of some of those links.

This is the area where you can export all of the links pointing to your website and then review them. When you need to disavow links prior to a reinclusion request you’ll be spending some time in this area. In particular, when I am in this report, I look for low-quality websites that have tons of links pointing at the site. Usually, a global link from a low-quality site is a red flag for Google. We could go on and on about how to evaluate links here, but the important thing to know is that this tool exists.

Links to your Site

Internal Links

Priority: Medium

Good internal linking really helps Google find pages. Also, when it done correctly, it can increase your rankings. The idea is that each link to page, whether internal or external, is a vote to rank that page higher in Google. So, if this is the case, consider the value internal linking can bring to the table.

The more links you point to a page, the higher the authority of that page in Google’s eyes. So, make sure to link to your most important pages for search often. But, just like everything in life, you don’t want to overdo it. Keep your internal linking within reason and have a ratio that relates well to other pages’ internal linking ratio on the site.

Internal Linking Webmaster Tools

Sitemaps

Priority: Medium / High

When it comes to sitemaps, you should be submitting at least one to Webmaster Tools; that would be the basic XML sitemap. Outside of this, you may also submit an image sitemap, news sitemap, video sitemap or mobile sitemap.

Regardless, check this area to make sure your sitemap is submitted and there are no errors. The more sitemaps the better, if you have the content to support them.

Sitemaps Webmaster Tools

Removed URLs

Priority: Medium / High

Google has a URL removal tool that allows you to request that a URL be taken out the index. Of course, you can only use this tool if you own the website. But, the issue is that people use this tool when they don’t understand it. In one case, I saw an employee use this tool to remove the home page of a very, very large website. No one could understand the huge drop in traffic until I found the request.

Recently, I saw a developer use this tool to remove over 50 URLs. Each of these URLs had page rank and would have been great to 301 redirect or simply modify and leave be. This tool is very powerful; don’t let just anyone use it.

Google URL Removal Tool

HTML Improvements

Priority: Medium

This report is a real gem. It allows you to see forms of duplicate content on the website from Google’s perspective. Click on the duplicate title tags link and you’ll see a list of pages that share the same title. This is a great way to find canonical URLs and other forms of duplicate titles and descriptions on the site.

HTML Improvements Webmaster Tools

Content Keywords

Priority: Medium

The content keywords report tells you the keywords that are most frequently used on the website. Of course, this has SEO implications. Post Panda, it has become important to have a theme associated with your website.

By having keyword groups that have a logical theme, you stand a better chance of ranking well in Google. If you are focusing on a difficult keyword, many SEOs will want to see that in the content keywords report.

Content Keywords Report

Structured Data

Priority: Medium

The structured data report tells you how many structured data items Google found on the site and how many pages it found structured data on. It also tells you how many types of structured data are on the site. I believe structured data sets companies apart and will be a very big part of SEO as we move into the future. This tab allows you to get a clear view of structured data that is on your website.

Structured Data

Data Highlighter

Priority: Medium

The data highlighter tool is a nice option for those who don’t feel comfortable with code. Instead, this tool allows you to apply structured data to your website without making any actual changes to the site. Instead, Google just saves this information and applies it to the site for you. Right now, it only works for event structured data, but they may add to this tool’s abilities in the future.

Data Highlighter

Other Resources

Priority: Medium

In this other resources area, we have three main things. Let’s touch on them briefly below.

Rich Snippets Testing Tool

This tool allows you to check that Google can correctly interpret and display your structured markup.

Google Places

This free local platform from Google has now become Google +, but it is still listed here as Google Places. Please update Google!

Google Merchant Center

This is the place to upload your product data. With the recent AdWords integration, it is important to connect this account with AdWords to do well in Google Shopping. If you want to learn more about this, there is a nice starter guide here.

Author Stats

Priority: Medium

This page shows you statistics for your author profile, should you have one correctly hooked up to the website. I actually use this a good amount when setting up rel=”author” for a new website just to make sure it is all correct and good to go.

Author Stats Webmaster Tools

Custom Search

Priority: Low

Did you know you can add a Google search bar to your website? It is true, and this is one place where you can get information on this. I’ve set it up for a few sites, and it works well. It has the advantage of allowing for site search reporting.

Custom Search Webmaster Tools

Instant Previews

Priority: Low

This tool is really similar to Fetch as Google. It allows you to fetch the website and then preview it from a perspective of On Demand Desktop Search Instant Preview, Pre-Render Desktop Search Instant Preview and Mobile Search Instant Preview.

In this section, they will also tell you if there are errors fetching resources. We are using the Ignite Visibility domain here as an example. There are a few issues, as you can see, but we are about done with a full redesign, so we will let them slide. You can see 9 errors fetching resources at the bottom.

Instant Previews

Site Performance

Priority: As Low as you Can Go

Site Performance is no longer supported by Google. Google provides this information on the subject.

“Site Performance was a Webmaster Labs feature which we’re no longer supporting.”

Try these other resources for understanding and improving site performance:

• Google Analytics Site Speed measures page load time as experienced by your visitors and allows you to measure other user defined timings.
• PageSpeed Insights analyzes the content of your pages and provides suggestions to improve performance.”

I am a big fan of the PageSpeed Insights report.

Disavow Links Tool

Priority: Debatable

The Disavow Links tool can be very helpful or harmful, depending on how you use it. Matt Cuts, head of Web Spam at Google, has gone on record saying it is a power tool. But why? Well, if you block a good link you may lose rankings, and if you block a bad link it may help your SEO.

So, if you are using this tool, you really need to know the difference between a good and bad link before you use it. Most SEO experts will have criteria for dealing with bad link analysis.

Although we touched on many points in this guide, there is so much more these tools can be used for, and  there are many ways to benefit from these tools and reports, but getting started is the first step! Search Engine Land has a complete archive of Google Webmaster Tools updates and WMT feature news to utilize as a resource as well. 

About The Author: John E Lincoln is Founder and President of SEO and Social Media at Ignite Visibility, a premier Internet marketing company based in San Diego, CA.

Source : http://searchengineland.com/

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How To Design And Optimize Responsive WebSites

Will Critchlow announced back in November that Distilled's blog was updated with a new responsive design, but it occurred to me recently that we never went into the specifics of why responsive web design is so great. Responsive design has been a hot topic in online marketing for the past few months, but is it really going to become an industry standard?

Short answer: yep.

Responsive web design means that you don't have separate mobile, tablet, and PC versions of your site: the site adapts to whatever size screen it's being displayed on. Regardless of what device a visitor is using to access your site, they'll see all of the content you have to offer (no more partial-content mobile versions of sites) and they'll see it in readable way.

With a 55% increase in smartphone subscriptions in 2012 alone, responsive web design is the future of online marketing.

How does it work?

Sounds too good to be true, doesn't it? It all started with a fairly simple theory from Ethan Marcotte in a 2010 article titled "Responsive Web Design." Rather than creating a single webpage that is 800px across and centers itself on the screen, responsive webpages are composed of elements that size, shape, and place themselves based on the width of the browser screen. Elements determine the screen size using CSS media queries.

Let's start with a simple example on a grid, using 9 rectangular elements labeled A–I. On a small screen, like a tablet or an older computer with fewer pixels, the elements would display themselves in a 3 x 3 grid:

When the screen is wider, those elements can spread out:

When it’s narrower, they can stack:

Now, here’s a real life, complex, and, might I say, ingenious example. Microsoft’s website uses these sections:

When the screen gets smaller, elements stack differently:

For a more interactive example, go to www.microsoft.com and have some fun changing the browser screen.

In their design, Microsoft keeps all of the elements from the desktop version of the page to view on other devices. But one of the biggest differences between desktop sites and mobile sites is that mobile sites just don’t have room or the browser memory to have so much content on one page. For example, Smashing magazine gets rid of the extra stuff as your screen size gets smaller:

Here is their desktop view:

The full-sized page has two levels of navigation on the left, the main content in the middle, and search and ads on the right. It centers the main content in the middle, where you’ll be looking, but makes use of the ample width of the desktop screen.

Moving on to the iPad-sized tablet view:

When the screen doesn’t have as much room on either side, Smashing Magazine keeps the ads and search on the right, but it moves the navigation to the top in a clever way that is noticeable, but doesn’t take up too much space.

Here's their Kindle Fire-sized tablet view:

The ads were sacrificed as screen space became too valuable. Search was moved to the top, so that second tier of navigation was moved to the side to make sure the main content didn’t start too low on the page.

And now, onto mobile:

On the mobile view, the ads are still gone, along with the share buttons. The navigation has changed from a constant element on the page to a small drop down at the top. The search bar was put in the space available once the top navigation was gone.

As you can see, responsive web design gives you an amazing amount of control. With some creativity, a responsive web design can convert almost anything from PC-optimized to mobile-optimized, to anything in between.

Why responsive design is good for SEO

So now you know that responsive design is a clever idea that, with the right set up, will cut down on web maintenance and content creation. But how does that help SEO?

Usability

Google wants to send visitors to the sites that they want to see. When searchers navigate to your site and immediately return to search engine results pages, Google makes a note that your site might not be the best choice for that search term.

If you have a mobile site that has less content or looks significantly different than your regular site, you’ll frustrate return visitors who are looking for something they found on the desktop version. If you don’t have a mobile site at all, 61% of visitors will return to Google to find a site that is easily readable. Either way, your bounce rate will rise and your rankings will drop. With a responsive web design, visitors will get all the content they want, in a format they can read.

Duplicate content

Don’t worry, a mobile site with the same content as the main site won’t be hit by Panda. But you’ll still have the same content on two places on the web, which is bothersome for you and could bring visitors to the wrong version of your site. A responsively-designed website means that content is only in one place on the Internet.

Ranking for mobile searches

Google has said that it ranks sites optimized for mobile higher in mobile searches. Google recommends responsive web design, meaning your responsive designed site will rank as well on mobile search as a site designed specifically for mobile. That’s especially useful for...

Link building

With a responsive web design, a link to your main site is a link to your mobile site as well. Mobile sites are still new, so your competition in mobile search is going to have significantly fewer backlinks. A responsively-designed website will have the backlinks of your original site, even while competing for mobile visitors. It’ll give you an instant edge over there. And, as mobile usage rises and webmasters start linking to mobile sites, your backlinks from both mobile and desktop sites will combine for a stronger backlink profile.

Early adopter recognition

Making your site responsive now, when the topic is hot but largely unused, will get you noticed. Here are a few great examples:

• http://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/digital-marketing/mobile/responsive-web-design-and-web-analytics/
• http://inspirationfeed.com/inspiration/websites-inspiration/60-examples-of-responsive-website-design/
• http://www.clicknewz.com/5984/benefits-of-responsive-web-design-examples/
• And, of course, Microsoft and Smashing Magazine from this post.

Results

As you can probably guess, if your site was previously unoptimized for tablet and/or mobile, you’ll see a decreased bounce rate from those devices. We’ve seen the positive effects spread into the main site as well. On a fellow Distiller’s site, implementing responsive web design increased visits by over 400% in a month:

That’s an extreme example; the switch to responsive web design on Distilled’s blog didn’t have the same effect. However, results like this show that, in the right situation, responsive web design could bring amazing results.

The cons

Responsive web design isn’t the Holy Grail of online marketing, though; there are some disadvantages you’ll want to mull over before you decide to take the plunge.

Set up time

Moving to a responsive web design will take a significant amount of time from both your design team and your development team. It’ll probably take longer than most redesigns you’ve been through since both teams will have to learn a completely new concept before they can implement it. On the plus side, when other sites start upgrading to responsive web design, you’ll be ahead of the curve.

Large pages

If you have a lot of content on your desktop pages, responsive design means that all of that content has to be loaded on mobile pages. Can you imagine a poor phone trying to load all of this?

That’s why sites like NYTimes.com and CNN.com have separate mobile versions that only display a small portion of all the articles and links they have on their desktop versions. If you have a site that’s huge like that – and is meant to be huge like that – stick with separate mobile and desktop versions.

Mobile user experience

Since responsive web design confines you to the same pages and content on the mobile and desktop versions, it could limit your options for enhancing user experience. While I pointed out earlier that mobile users want the same content as desktop users, they’re searching on a tiny screen with their fingers rather than a large screen with a mouse and keyboard, so their journey to that same content will feel completely different. If you have a really interactive or complicated site that needs to have different pathways to content, like Facebook, you might want to keep that mobile version of your site so you can have that control.

So, is responsive web design right for your site?

If your site is too large or too complicated and needs a mobile site, you’re probably aware of it (and probably already have an amazing mobile site that shouldn’t be messed with). But, what if you don’t have a mobile site, or have a simple one and don’t know if the switch to a responsive web design is worth it? You’re going to do a little Google Analytics research:

Do I even need a mobile site?

Start by going to the Mobile Overview report, which is a Standard Report in the Audience section under the Mobile drop down. If the number of mobile and tablet visits is under 5% of your total traffic, you probably don’t need to worry about creating a mobile-specific site (yet: this number is only going to grow).

If it’s more than that, click on the Goal Set or Ecommerce metrics set – whichever you use to track conversions – at the top of the page, under the Explorer tab:

Are your desktop visits converting significantly more than mobile visits? If mobile conversion rate is less than half of desktop conversion rate, your site is performing below industry standard, and you need to optimize for mobile visitors.

How does my mobile site look on their screens?

Go to the Standard Reports > Audience > Mobile > Devices and change the primary dimension to “Screen Resolution.” You can change that right above the table, by clicking the Other drop down to the right of the line of other primary dimensions you could use. Try out the 10 most common screen resolutions that are used by your visitors. How does your mobile site look on them? Use Screenfly to see your site on different devices. You might be surprised by how many tablets or large phones are seeing an overly simplified site that isn’t very compelling. Even if you have a mobile site that looks great on 50% of mobile visits, if it looks bad on the other 50%, you should consider responsive web design.

Does my mobile site give visitors what they want?

Look at the mobile bounce rate under Standard Reports > Mobile > Overview. When visitors land on your mobile site, is something making them leave more quickly than on a desktop? Mobile visitors should have roughly the same bounce rate as desktop visitors.

If you have the time, do a full mobile SEO audit to really identify what the mobile version of your site needs to look like. Aleyda Solis wrote up a great mobile audit guide on State of Search.

Your best option: move towards responsive web design slowly

If you’d like to move towards responsive web design slowly or already have a pretty good mobile site out there, consider making your site responsive so that it’s optimized for desktop and tablet, but not mobile just yet. The design will be easier, but you’ll get a first taste of the technical side, and you’ll get better conversions for tablet users (which you probably haven’t optimized for yet).

Ethan Marcotte explains how the coding works in his original article and developers have been creating themes for popular CMSs (for WordPress, for Drupal, and for Joomla).

Be aware that the technical implementation is fairly advanced, and there are a number of small mistakes you should watch out to avoid:

1. Use compressed images

You might have some gorgeous photos that load fine on the desktop version of your site, but those are going to have to be loaded on mobile versions as well. 74% of mobile users will leave after 5 seconds waiting for a page to load, so make sure that you compress your images as much as possible, and use them somewhat sparingly. Smush.it is a great tool for compressing images.

2. Design for all screen sizes

A lot of designers will want to design for one mobile size, one tablet size, and one desktop size, and just make a “responsive” design that snaps the site into a different layout for those standard sizes. But we have large and small cell phones, tablets the size of Kindle Fires to 10” Samsung Galaxy Tabs, and desktop monitors as big as 30”. A responsive design is more about resizing the elements on a page as you have more pixels than it is about snapping one design into another. As designer Stephen Hay says, “Start with the screen small first, then expand until it looks like sh*t. Time to insert a breakpoint!”

3. Always show all content

It might feel overwhelming to find a way to fit all of the content from the desktop version of a page onto a mobile version of a page, but that’s the point of responsive web designs. In the examples described above, the only content that goes away is ads (which users probably didn’t want in the first place) and some navigation (which is replaced by a simpler version of navigation). No actual content is hidden. Mobile visitors want just as much information and just as many options as desktop users do, so don’t deprive them.

4.  Optimize for touch

You probably won’t accidentally include an onmouseover JavaScript event on the mobile size of your site, but be aware that tablets can’t hover with their mouse either, and someone on a desktop might be using Windows 8 and want to use touch. Best practice is to make your site completely accessible with touch-only, regardless of the screen size.

5.  Test on all browsers

Remember the good old days, when you complained about having to test your website on IE and Firefox? Now you’ve got:

Desktop:

• IE9 for Windows 7
• IE10 for Windows 8 (which doesn’t run Flash)
• Firefox
• Chrome
• Safari

Tablet/Mobile

• Safari
• Default Android browser
• Chrome beta
• Dolphin
• Opera
• Firefox

And those are only the most popular ones. You’ll have to test on all of those, at different screen resolutions, too.

But it’s worth it

Switching over to a responsive web design will be a big challenge, but with the way the industry is moving, it’ll prepare you for the future, and put you a step ahead of your competitors.

Have any of you made the switch? Any advice for those who haven’t?

Posted by Kristina Kledzik to Web Design
Source : SEOmoz:

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