Small businesses need websites. But not just any old website will work. Try to avoid these 10 Web design mistakes so your site will help your business succeed instead of slowing it down.   1. Poor navigation tools Your site’s visitors need to know how to find information. Without good navigation tools, that’s nearly impossible. Make sure that you divide your content into sections that visitors can identify easily. Ideally, you want a site that branches from big ideas to small ideas. Your homepage identifies your business and who you are. Then links within the page take the visitor…

Back in the days when Yahoo was fighting against Alta Vista, when Bing was still called Microsoft Live, and when Google was trying to get the big Y to buy them, onsite content and meta tags were search. It was a day of keyword stuff, of hidden text, and of content scraping that helped porn sites rank for the term “toys” while male enhancement drugs could be found on searches for “big fun”. Google emerged as the leader in part because of their pure design, but also because they started looking offsite for signals about search rankings. The days before Google’s innovation were the peak of onsite SEO. Google…

Google Authorship has been around for a while. It has helped many bloggers and journalists stand out by having their images appear directly in search results next to the articles they publish. It highlights the number of people that have them in their Google+ circles and gives a link to other writings by the author. This is nothing new. Google AuthorRank has been given much speculation for about a year now. The idea is simple – Google will give higher rankings to those who have demonstrated expertise in a particular field. If someone is prolific at writing about a subject and their writing is well…