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Sanford Web Design provides search engine optimization, search engine marketing, website design and website development which creates high-quality, cost-effective search engine optimized web sites for our clients. We do this by combining our creative and technical skills along with our knowledge of business, marketing and advanced SEO techniques to create high-ranking web sites.

Sanford Web Design is a leader in Organic Search Engine Optimization, meta tag composition, high-quality inbound link network creation, and pay-per-click campaign management. Our strategies have successfully promoted dozens of web sites to the top of their preferred search term (keywords) organic rankings on Google and other search engines. We stake our reputation as an SEO company on the results of our work.

As an SEO company, we’ve also done organic search engine optimization all by itself, without a visual redesign. Let us put our expertise to work for your web site today with a SEO expansion, or at least a meta tag, architecture, current search engine ranking and inbound links review. e

Call us today for a free introductory consultation or fill out our convenient form on the contact page for a complimentary site SEO analysis. Our headquarters is located in Sanford, NC. However we will be moving to the Hampstead, NC and Wilmington, NC area shortly. Please call for an appointment so we can discuss the particulars of your marketing and SEO challenges.

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Tuesday, August 5, 2014

How PornHub Is Bringing its A-Game (SFW)

July 23rd, 2014 - Posted by Javier Sanz to Social Media and Branding

This post was originally in YouMoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community.
The author’s views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of Moz.

Editor's note: While the images in this post are free of graphic content, there are many suggestive references to potentially objectionable material.

It has come to my attention how PornHub is marketing itself. It is one of the biggest pornographic websites, and I have no idea who is behind their online marketing strategy, but hats off to their team because they're stepping up the porn websites' game to the next level.

Let me detail here some of their latest actions and you will understand why I'm so impressed.

A bit of context: porn still seen as taboo?

'The Internet has taken porn mainstream' stated Aurora Snow, a retired porn star when EJ Dickson, editor from The Daily Dot asked her about sexting and amateur porn as causes that have contributed to not see porn as a taboo.

In her interview, in which the main topic covered is her participation as speaker in a conference at Harvard, she points out how many porn industry A-list names have jumped to commercial and mainstream channels ('James Deen is in a movie with Lindsay Lohan, Sasha Grey is on Entourage'). It's totally OK if you don't know any of these names, but it can give you an idea on how p0rn is now more accepted in our society.

Mobile first: unlimited videos... but only for mobile devices

Global mobile traffic reached almost 800,000 Terabytes just during last year 2013 and it's estimated to double that figure in the current year, according to the research provided by Statista/Cisco. If that wasn't enough, increase of smartphone ownership went from 35% in 2011 to 56% in May 2013 (source).


How Do I Successfully Run SEO Tests On My Website? - Whiteboard Friday

July 25th, 2014 - Posted by Rand Fishkin to Advanced SEO and Whiteboard Friday

By now, most of us have gotten around to doing testing of some sort on our websites, but testing specifically for SEO can be extremely difficult and requires extra vigilance. In today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand explains three major things we need to think about when performing these tests, and offers up several ideas for experiments we all can run!

For reference, here's a still of this week's whiteboard!

Here's Your Syllabus: Everything a Marketer Needs for Day 1 of an MBA

July 28th, 2014 - Posted by Will Critchlow to Business Practices

The author's posts are entirely his or her own (excluding the unlikely event of hypnosis) and may not always reflect the views of Moz.

A few years ago, I wrote a post on my personal blog about MBA courses. I have a great deal of respect for the top-flight MBA courses based, in part, on how difficult I found the business-school courses I took during my graduate degree. I'm well aware of the stereotypes prevalent in the startup and online worlds, but I believe there is a lot of benefit to marketers having a strong understanding of how businesses function.

Recently, I've been thinking about how to build this into our training and development at Distilled; I think that our consultative approach needs this kind of awareness even more than most.

This post is designed to give you the building blocks needed to grow your capabilities in this area. Think of it as a cross between a recommended reading list and a home study guide.

Personal development: a personal responsibility

I've written before about the difference between learning and training, and how I believe that individuals should take a high degree of ownership over their own development. In an area like this, where it's unlikely to be a core functional responsibility, it's even more likely that you will need to dedicate your own time and effort to building your capabilities.

Start with financial basics

I may well be biased by my own experiences, but I believe that, by starting with the financial fundamentals, you gain a deeper understanding of everything that comes afterwards. My own financial education started before high school:

My dad used to give me simple arithmetic tasks based around the financials of his own business before I was old enough to be allowed to answer the phone (when my voice broke!)At college, I took some informal entrepreneurial courses as well as elected to study a few hardcore mathematical finance subjects during grad schoolAfter college, I worked as a "consultant" (really, a developer) for a financial software company and got my first real introduction to P&Ls, general ledgers, balance sheets, and so forthBefore starting Distilled, I worked as a management consultant and learnt to build financial models and business cases (though the most memorable lesson of this era is that big businesses just have more zeros in the model

Unraveling Panda Patterns

July 29th, 2014 - Posted by Bill Slawski to Advanced SEO and Search Engines

The author's posts are entirely his or her own (excluding the unlikely event of hypnosis) and may not always reflect the views of Moz.

This is my first official blog post at Moz.com, and I'm going to be requesting your help and expertise and imagination.

I'm going to be asking you to take over as Panda for a little while to see if you can identify the kinds of things that Google's Navneet Panda addressed when faced with what looked like an incomplete patent created to identify sites as parked domain pages, content farm pages, and link farm pages. You're probably better at this now then he was then.

Monday, August 4, 2014

Using Modern SEO to Build Brand Authority

July 30th, 2014 - Posted by Jason Acidre to Advanced SEO and Branding

The author's posts are entirely his or her own (excluding the unlikely event of hypnosis) and may not always reflect the views of Moz.

It's obvious that the technology behind search engines' ability to determine and understand web entities is gradually leaning towards how real people will normally perceive things from a traditional marketing perspective.

The emphasis on E-A-T (expertise, authoritativeness, trustworthiness) from Google's recently updated Quality Rating Guide shows that search engines are shifting towards brand-related metrics to identify sites/pages that deserve to be more visible in search results.

Online branding, or authority building, is quite similar to the traditional SEO practices that many of us have already been accustomed with.

Building a stronger brand presence online and improving a site's search visibility both require two major processes: the things you implement on the site and the things you do outside of the site.

The Month Google Shook the SERPs

July 31st, 2014 - Posted by Dr. Peter J. Meyers to Local SEO, Advanced SEO and Search Engines

As a group, we SEOs still tend to focus most of our attention on just one place

How to Be TAGFEE when You Disagree

July 31st, 2014 - Posted by Lisa-Mozstaff to Marketing Psychology and Business Practices

On being TAGFEE

I'm a big advocate of the TAGFEE culture at Moz. It's one of the big reasons I joined the team and why I stay here. I also recognize that sometimes it can be hard to practice it in "Real Life." 

How, for instance, can I be both authentic AND fun when I tell Anthony how angry I am that he took the last two donuts? I can certainly be transparent and authentic, but, anger and confrontation...where does that get fun?

But those times when you need to be authentic

Real-World Panda Optimization - Whiteboard Friday

August 1st, 2014 - Posted by Michael Cottam to Whiteboard Friday

The author's posts are entirely his or her own (excluding the unlikely event of hypnosis) and may not always reflect the views of Moz.

The Panda algorithm looks for high-quality content, but what exactly is it looking for, how is it finding what it deems to be high-quality, and

CRO Statistics: How to Avoid Reporting Bad Data

August 4th, 2014 - Posted by Craig Bradford to Analytics, Reporting and Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)

The author's posts are entirely his or her own (excluding the unlikely event of hypnosis) and may not always reflect the views of Moz.

Without a basic understanding of statistics, you can often present misleading results to your clients or superiors. This can lead to underwhelming results when you roll out new versions of a page which on paper look like they should perform much better. In this post I want to cover the main aspects of planning, monitoring and interpreting CRO results so that when you do roll out new versions of pages, the results are much closer to what you would expect. I’ve also got a free tool to give away at the end, which does most of this for you.

Planning

A large part running a successful conversion optimisation campaign starts before a single visitor reaches the site. Before starting a CRO test it’s important to have:

A hypothesis of what you expect to happenAn estimate of how long the test should takeAnalytics set up correctly so that you can measure the effect of the change accurately

Assuming you have a hypothesis, let’s look at predicting how long a test should take.

How long will it take?

As a general rule, the less traffic that your site gets and/or the lower the existing conversion rate, the longer it will take to get statistically significant results. There’s a great tool by Evan Miller that I recommend using before starting any CRO project. Entering the baseline conversion rate and the minimum detectable effect (i.e. What is the minimum percentage change in conversion rate that you care about, 2%? 5%? 20%?) you can get an estimate of how much traffic you’ll need to send to each version. Working backwards from the traffic your site normally gets, you can estimate how long your test is likely to take. When you arrive on the site, you’ll see the following defaults:

Saturday, July 12, 2014

Stop Worrying About the New Google Maps; These URL Parameters Are Gold

July 2nd, 2014 - Posted by David Mihm to Local SEO, Competitive Research and Mobile

I suspect I’m not alone in saying: I’ve never been a fan of the New Google Maps.

Panda Pummels Press Release Websites: The Road to Recovery

July 2nd, 2014 - Posted by Russ Jones to On-page SEO, Advanced SEO and Tools

This post was originally in YouMoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community.
The author’s views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of Moz.

Many of us in the search industry were caught off guard by the release of Panda 4.0. It had become common knowledge that Panda was essentially "baked into" the algorithm now several times a month, so a pronounced refresh was a surprise. While the impact seemed reduced given that it coincided with other releases including a payday loans update and a potential manual penalty on Ebay, there were notable victims of the Panda 4.0 update which included major press release sites. Both Search Engine Land and Seer Interactive independently verified a profound traffic loss on major press release sites following the Panda 4.0 update. While we can't be certain that Google did not, perhaps, roll out a handful of simultaneous manual actions or perhaps these sites were impacted by the payday loans algo update, Panda remains the inference to the best explanation for their traffic losses.

So, what happened? Can we tease out why Press Release sites were seemingly singled out? Are they really that bad? And why are they particularly susceptible to the Panda algorithm? To answer this question, we must first address the main question: what is the Panda algorithm?

Briefly: What is the Panda Algorithm?

The Panda algorithm was a ground-breaking shift in Google's methodology for addressing certain search quality issues. Using patented machine learning techniques, Google used real, human reviewers to determine the quality of a sample set of websites. We call this sample the "training set". Examples of the questions they were asked are below:

Would you trust the information presented in this article?Is this article written by an expert or enthusiast who knows the topic well, or is it more shallow in nature?Does the site have duplicate, overlapping, or redundant articles on the same or similar topics with slightly different keyword variations?Would you be comfortable giving your credit card information to this site?Does this article have spelling, stylistic, or factual errors?Are the topics driven by genuine interests of readers of the site, or does the site generate content by attempting to guess what might rank well in search engines?Does the article provide original content or information, original reporting, original research, or original analysis?Does the page provide substantial value when compared to other pages in search results?How much quality control is done on content?Does the article describe both sides of a story?Is the site a recognized authority on its topic?Is the content mass-produced by or outsourced to a large number of creators, or spread across a large network of sites, so that individual pages or sites don't get as much attention or care?Was the article edited well, or does it appear sloppy or hastily produced?For a health related query, would you trust information from this site?Would you recognize this site as an authoritative source when mentioned by name?Does this article provide a complete or comprehensive description of the topic?Does this article contain insightful analysis or interesting information that is beyond obvious?Is this the sort of page you'd want to bookmark, share with a friend, or recommend?Does this article have an excessive amount of ads that distract from or interfere with the main content?Would you expect to see this article in a printed magazine, encyclopedia or book?Are the articles short, unsubstantial, or otherwise lacking in helpful specifics?Are the pages produced with great care and attention to detail vs. less attention to detail?Would users complain when they see pages from this site?

Once Google had these answers from real users, they built a list of variables that might potentially predict these answers, and applied their machine learning techniques to build a model of predicting low performance on these questions. For example, having an HTTPS version of your site might predict a high performance on the "trust with a credit card" question. This model could then be applied across their index as a whole, filtering out sites that would likely perform poorly on the questionnaire. This filter became known as the Panda algorithm.

How do press release sites perform on these questions?

First, Moz has a great tutorial on running your own Panda questionnaire on your own website, which is useful not just for Panda but really any kind of user survey. The graphs and data in my analysis come from PandaRisk.com, though. Full disclosure, Virante, Inc., the company for which I work, owns PandaRisk. The graphs were built by averaging the results from several pages on each press release site, so they represent a sample of pages from each PR distributor.

So, let's dig in. In the interest of brevity, I have chosen to highlight just four of the major concerns that came from the surveys, question-by-question.

Q1. Does this site contain insightful analysis?

Google wants to send users to web pages that are uniquely useful, not just unique and not just useful. Unfortunately, press release sites uniformly fail on this front. On average, only 50% of reviewers found that BusinessWire.com content contained insightful analysis. Compare this to Wikipedia, EDU and Government websites which, on average, score 84%, 79% and 94% respectively, and you can see why Google might choose not to favor their content.

5 Fashion Hacks for the Modern Male Marketer - Whiteboard Friday

July 4th, 2014 - Posted by Rand Fishkin to Whiteboard Friday

Editor's note: Happy 4th of July! We're off observing our Independence Day, so we decided to celebrate with a non-SEO Whiteboard Friday. 

From the undeniable class of a full windsor to the (all too common) mistake of letting our underwear become accidental outerwear, today's modern marketers are prone to some very easily solveable fashion faux-pas. On this Independence Day, we take a quick break from discussing the online world and bring you a whiteboard video on the lighter side. Enjoy!

For reference, here's a still of this week's whiteboard!

How To Tap Into Social Norms to Build a Strong Brand

July 7th, 2014 - Posted by Bridget Randolph to Marketing Psychology and Branding

The author's posts are entirely his or her own (excluding the unlikely event of hypnosis) and may not always reflect the views of Moz.

In recent years there has been a necessary shift in the way businesses advertise themselves to consumers, thanks to the increasingly common information overload experienced by the average person.

In 1945, just after WWII, the annual total ad spend in the United States was about $2.8 billion (that's around $36.8 million before the adjustment for inflation). In 2013, it was around $140 billion.

Don't forget that this is just paid media advertising; it doesn't include the many types of earned coverage like search, social, email, supermarket displays, direct mail and so on. Alongside the growth in media spends is a growth in the sheer volume of products available, which is made possible by increasingly sophisticated technologies for sales, inventory, delivery and so on.

What does this mean? Well, simply that the strategy of 'just buy some ads and sell the benefits' isn't enough anymore: you'll be lost in the noise. How can a brand retain customers and create loyalty in an atmosphere where everyone else has a better offer? Through tapping into the psychology of social relationships.

Imagine that you are at home for Thanksgiving, and your mother has pulled out all the stops to lovingly craft the most delicious, intricate dinner ever known to man. You and your family have enjoyed a wonderful afternoon of socializing and snacking on leftovers and watching football, and now it's time to leave. As you hug your parents goodbye, you take out your wallet. "How much do I owe you for all the love and time you put into this wonderful afternoon?" you ask. "$100 for the food? here, have $50 more as a thank you for the great hospitality!" How would your mother respond to such an offer? I don't know about your mother, but my mom would be deeply offended.

New scenario: You've gone to a restaurant for Thanksgiving dinner. It's the most delicious dinner you've ever had, the atmosphere is great with the football playing in the background, and best of all, your server is attentive, warm, and maternal. You feel right at home. At the end of the meal, you give her a hug and thank her for the delicious meal before leaving. She calls the cops and has you arrested for a dine-and-dash.

And herein lies the difference between social norms and market norms.

Social norms vs. market norms

The Thanksgiving dinner example is one which I've borrowed from a book by Dan Ariely, Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces that Shape Our Decisions. Ariely discusses two ways in which humans interact: social norms and market norms.

Social norms, as Ariely explains, "are wrapped up in our social nature and our need for community. They are usually warm and fuzzy. Instant paybacks are not required." Examples would be: helping a friend move house, babysitting your grandchild, having your parents over for dinner. There is an implied reciprocity on some level but it is not instantaneous nor is it expected that the action will be repaid on a financial level. These are the sort of relationships and interactions we expect to have with friends and family.

Market norms, on the other hand, are about the exchange of resources and in particular, money. Examples of this type of interaction would be any type of business transaction where goods or services are exchanged for money: wages, prices, rents, interest, and cost-and-benefit. These are the sort of relationships and interactions we expect to have with businesses.

I've drawn you a very rough illustration - it may not be the most aesthetically pleasing visual, but it gets the point across:

Friday, July 11, 2014

Why Mobile Matters - Now

July 8th, 2014 - Posted by Dr. Peter J. Meyers to Mobile

Having built an online business during the dot-com boom and bust, I’ve always been a bit skeptical about the mobile revolution. Every year since the late 90s, we’ve heard that this would be

Advanced Local Citation Audit & Clean Up: Achieve Consistent Data & Higher Rankings

Advanced Local Citation Audit & Clean Up: Achieve Consistent Data & Higher Rankings - Moz Moz.com Moz Pro Moz Local Products Learn Community Blogs About Log in Help

The Help Hub - Everything you need to know about Moz.

Questions About Inbound Marketing? Visit the Moz Blog for guides, articles, and other online marketing resources. Visit the Q&A Forum to read questions with answers from industry experts. Search All of Moz Help Hub Q&A Go Moz Blog YouMoz Rand's Blog Dev Blog Contribute to YouMoz The Moz Blog

Author Photos are Gone: Does Google Authorship Still Have Value?

July 9th, 2014 - Posted by Mark Traphagen to Technical SEO and Advanced SEO

The author's posts are entirely his or her own (excluding the unlikely event of hypnosis) and may not always reflect the views of Moz.

On June 25, 2014, Google's John Mueller made a shocking announcement: Google would be removing all author photos from Google search results. According to the MozCast Feature Graph, that task was fully accomplished by June 29.

In this post I will:

Give a brief overview of how Google Authorship got to where it is today.Cover how Google Authorship now works and appears in search.Offer my take on why Author photos were removedInvestigate the oft-repeated claims of higher CTR from author photosSuggest why Google Authorship is still important, and speculate on the future of author authority in Google Search.A Brief History of Google Authorship

The Google Authorship program has been my wheelhouse (some might say "obsession") since Google first announced support for Authorship markup in June of 2011. Since I am both an SEO and a content creator, Google certainly got my attention in that announcement when they said, "...we’re looking closely at ways this markup could help us highlight authors and rank search results."

Of course, in the three years since that blog post, many search-aware marketers and content creators also jumped on the Google Authorship bandwagon. Occasional comments from prominent Google staffers that they might someday use author data as a search ranking factor, along with Bill Slawski's lucid explanations of the Google Agent Rank patent, fueled the fire of what most came to call "author rank."

Below is a video from 2011 with Matt Cutts and Othar Hansson explaining the possible significance of Authorship markup for Google at that time:

During the three years since Google announced support for rel

Does SEO Boil Down to Site Crawlability and Content Quality? - Whiteboard Friday

July 11th, 2014 - Posted by Rand Fishkin to Whiteboard Friday

We all know that keywords and links alone no longer cut it as a holistic SEO strategy. But there's still plenty outside our field who try to "boil SEO down" to a naively simplistic practice - one that isn't representative of what SEOs need to do to succeed. In today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand champions the art and science of SEO and offers insight into how very broad the field really is.

For reference, here's a still of this week's whiteboard!

Wednesday, June 25, 2014

Web’s Most Popular JavaScript Library Drops Support for Older Versions of IE

Cut & Paste CodeTemplates and snippets you can steal Recent ArticlesThe Two Flavors of a ‘One Web’ Approach: Responsive vs. AdaptiveInternet Explorer 10 Doubles Its Desktop Market ShareWebRTC, Online Code Editor Team Up for Real-Time CodingVideo: What Does 10 Petabytes of Data Look Like?The Very First Website Returns to the Web

First Firefox OS Developer Phones Sell Out

Cut & Paste CodeTemplates and snippets you can steal Recent ArticlesThe Two Flavors of a ‘One Web’ Approach: Responsive vs. AdaptiveInternet Explorer 10 Doubles Its Desktop Market ShareWebRTC, Online Code Editor Team Up for Real-Time CodingVideo: What Does 10 Petabytes of Data Look Like?The Very First Website Returns to the Web

Tuesday, June 24, 2014

Experimental CSS Shaders Bring Photoshop Filters to the Web

Update: As Adobe's Alan Greenblatt points out in the comments, CSS shader support has been in Chrome stable since v25 (you still need to enable the flag). But if you want to play around with these new blend modes then you'll need Canary (or a WebKit nightly).

Nginx Server Speeds Up the Tubes With ‘SPDY’ Support

Cut & Paste CodeTemplates and snippets you can steal Recent ArticlesThe Two Flavors of a ‘One Web’ Approach: Responsive vs. AdaptiveInternet Explorer 10 Doubles Its Desktop Market ShareWebRTC, Online Code Editor Team Up for Real-Time CodingVideo: What Does 10 Petabytes of Data Look Like?The Very First Website Returns to the Web

Chrome Extension Opens MS Office Docs in the Browser

Cut & Paste CodeTemplates and snippets you can steal Recent ArticlesThe Two Flavors of a ‘One Web’ Approach: Responsive vs. AdaptiveInternet Explorer 10 Doubles Its Desktop Market ShareWebRTC, Online Code Editor Team Up for Real-Time CodingVideo: What Does 10 Petabytes of Data Look Like?The Very First Website Returns to the Web

The Very First Website Returns to the Web

"55"> tag.

CERN has big plans for the original website, starting with bringing the rest of the pages back online. “Then we will look at the first web servers at CERN and see what assets from them we can preserve and share,” writes CERN’s Dan Noyes. “We will also sift through documentation and try to restore machine names and IP addresses to their original state.”

In the mean time, have a look at the web’s original todo list and read more about the project to restore the first website over on Mark Boulton’s blog.

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Video: What Does 10 Petabytes of Data Look Like?

Cut & Paste CodeTemplates and snippets you can steal Recent ArticlesThe Two Flavors of a ‘One Web’ Approach: Responsive vs. AdaptiveInternet Explorer 10 Doubles Its Desktop Market ShareWebRTC, Online Code Editor Team Up for Real-Time CodingThe Very First Website Returns to the Web

WebRTC, Online Code Editor Team Up for Real-Time Coding

Cut & Paste CodeTemplates and snippets you can steal Recent ArticlesThe Two Flavors of a ‘One Web’ Approach: Responsive vs. AdaptiveInternet Explorer 10 Doubles Its Desktop Market ShareVideo: What Does 10 Petabytes of Data Look Like?The Very First Website Returns to the Web

Monday, June 23, 2014

Internet Explorer 10 Doubles Its Desktop Market Share

Cut & Paste CodeTemplates and snippets you can steal Recent ArticlesThe Two Flavors of a ‘One Web’ Approach: Responsive vs. AdaptiveWebRTC, Online Code Editor Team Up for Real-Time CodingVideo: What Does 10 Petabytes of Data Look Like?The Very First Website Returns to the Web

The Two Flavors of a ‘One Web’ Approach: Responsive vs. Adaptive

You’ve probably heard people say we’re living in a “post-PC world.” What does that mean for web developers? It means that 30% to 50% of your website’s traffic now comes from mobile devices. It means that soon, desktop and laptop users will be in a minority on the web.

How do we deal with this tectonic shift in user behavior? We’ve moved beyond the era of m-dot or t-dot hacks, into one where responsive and adaptive design techniques rule the day — what the W3C calls a One Web approach. The key part of the W3C’s recommendation is that “One Web means making, as far as is reasonable, the same information and services available to users irrespective of the device they are using.”

For developers that means that taking a One Web approach ensures that not only does your site work on the smartphones and tablets of today, but it can be future-proofed for the unimagined screens of tomorrow.

There are currently three popular approaches to developing a One Web site: using a responsive design; client-side adaptive designs; and server-side adaptive designs.

One is not better or worse than the other; each has its own strengths and weaknesses and the wise web developer will consider the benefits and drawbacks of each before picking the one that works for their next project.

Responsive Web Design

Responsive web design is the most common One Web approach. The approach uses CSS media queries to modify the presentation of a website based on the size of the device display. The number of responsive sites is rapidly increasing, from the Boston Globe to Disney to Indochino.

A key advantage of this approach is that designers can use a single template for all devices, and just use CSS to determine how content is rendered on different screen sizes. Plus, those designers can still work in HTML and CSS, technologies they’re already familiar with. Additionally, there’s a growing number of responsive-friendly, open-source toolkits like Bootstrap or Foundation which help simplify the process of building responsive sites.

On the other hand, there are few shortcuts to a sound responsive design. To go responsive, organizations often have to undertake a complete site rebuild.

The design and testing phase can be quite fussy, as it can be difficult to customize the user experience for every possible device or context. We’ve all seen responsive site layouts that look like a bunch of puzzle pieces that don’t quite fit together. Responsive web design works best in combination with a mobile-first approach, where the mobile use case is prioritized during development. Progressive enhancement is then used to address tablet and desktop use cases.

Performance can also be a bugbear for responsive sites. At Mobify, we recently completed an analysis of 15 popular responsive e-commerce sites. Among these sites, the home pages loaded an average of 87 resources and 1.9 MB of data. Some responsive pages were as big as 15MB.

The numbers are that high because a responsive approach covers all devices. Your user is only using one device, but they have to wait for all of the page elements and resources to load before they can use it. Put simply, performance affects your bottom line. On smartphones, the conversion rate drops by an extra 3.5 percent when users have to wait just one second. By the three second mark, 57 percent of users will have left your site completely.

While responsive design is fast becoming the de facto standard, it also creates new challenges for online businesses, including how to handle images, how to optimize mobile performance and often means sites need to be rebuilt from the ground up with a mobile first approach.

Client-Side Adaptive

Adaptive design builds on the principles of responsive design to deliver user experiences that are targeted at specific devices and contexts. It uses JavaScript to enrich websites with advanced functionality and customization. For example, adaptive websites deliver Retina-quality images only to Retina displays (such as the new iPad) while standard-definition displays receive lower-quality images.

There are two approaches to adaptive design — one where the adaptations occur on the client side, in the user’s browser, and another where the web server does the heavy lifting of detecting various devices and loading the correct template. Examples of client-side adaptive sites include Threadless and ideeli. One of the strengths of the adaptive templating approach is the ability to reuse one set of HTML and JavaScript across devices, simplifying change management and testing.

A client-side adaptive approach means you don’t have to rebuild your site from the ground up. Instead you can build on existing content while still delivering a mobile-responsive layout. For expert developers, this approach also enables you to specifically target particular devices or screen resolutions. For example, for many of Mobify’s online fashion retail clients, 95% of their mobile traffic comes from iPhones. Client-side adaptive means they can optimize specifically for Apple smartphones.

Unlike responsive design, adaptive templates ensure that only the required resources are loaded by the client’s device. Because device and feature detection is shifted to the mobile device itself, CDN networks like Akamai and Edgecast can use most of their caching functionality without disrupting the user experience.

The client-side adaptive approach has a higher barrier to entry than responsive design. Developers need to have a solid grasp of JavaScript to use this technique. It also depends on a site’s existing templates as the foundation. Finally, because the client-side adaptations are a kind of layer on top of your existing code base, you need to maintain them as your site as a whole evolves.

Server-Side Adaptive

We can achieve the server-side adaptive approach in a variety of ways, through server-side plugins and custom user agent detection. Sites that use server-side adaptive include Etsy, One Kings Lane and OnlineShoes.com.

Why choose server-side adaptive? It typically offers distinct templates for each devices, enabling more customization, and it keeps device-detection logic on the server, enabling smaller mobile pages that load faster. Additionally, there are numerous server-side plugins available for common CMSs and eCommerce systems such as Magento.

This approach isn’t for the faint of heart–it typically requires significant changes to your back-end systems, which can result in a lengthy (and costly) implementation. The requirement to manage multiple templates raises ongoing maintenance costs. Finally, this approach can encounter performance issues when servers are under heavy load. When mobile user agent detection is performed on the server, a lot of common caching mechanisms deployed by CDNs like Akamai need to be turned off. This can result in a slower user experience for mobile and desktop visitors.

Of course, many companies are still wrestling with the basics of responsive, and they’re not ready to confront the more sophisticated flavors of adaptive. Increasingly, competition and mobile traffic, however, will drive more and more organizations to kick the tires on all three approaches, and pick the one that works best for their users.

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Using Kimono Labs to Scrape the Web for Free

June 11th, 2014 - Posted by Benjamin Spiegel to Tools

This post was originally in YouMoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community.
The author’s views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of Moz.

Historically, I have written and presented about big data

Barnacle SEO: Leveraging Other Sites' Rankings - Whiteboard Friday

June 13th, 2014 - Posted by Rand Fishkin to Basic SEO and Whiteboard Friday

When ranking for incredibly competitive keywords just isn't a possibility, you can make like a barnacle on a ship, attaching yourself to the big sites that are. In today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand explains just what that means and how to go about it.

For reference, here's a still of this week's whiteboard!