However beautiful your site and however compelling your content, all of that effort is wasted if users hit the homepage and can’t figure out where to go from there. Poorly conceived site architecture is responsible for increasing bounce rates and lowering conversion rates. And, if you think that you have trouble with shoddy site architecture, spare a thought for poor Googlebot, which is nowhere near as smart as the average user and is tasked with making sense of it all. Continue reading →

Since Marissa Mayer took over at Yahoo!, many of its properties have been revamped. Flickr is no exception. It now has a much nicer interface – it’s actually a pleasure to browse through the millions of images hosted on the site looking for inspiration or a picture to add a bit of visual sparkle to a blog post. Changes to the limitations imposed on photographers for storing their images has attracted back many who abandoned the service in favor of competitors, which means more images are being added to the site’s servers than over the last few years.

Images have been proven to help with user engagement, which has SEO benefits and greatly aids with social media exposure, but, treasure trove though Flickr may be, there are a few gotchas that bloggers – particularly business bloggers – need to be aware of before they start snagging images to enliven their posts. Continue reading →