User eXperience (UX) archives - Page 8 of 9

Homepage SEO does not exist. That was the statement in my post on homepage SEO. However, a lot of the people that commented on our site, and on Twitter and Facebook, still feel that a homepage should be optimized for a keyword. Perhaps optimizing your homepage for search engines works for some of you, but ranking in Google …

At Yoast, we look at sites from all over the world. Websites from different countries can differ greatly in their choices for color, pictures, navigation and site structure. That made me wonder: are these differences due to cultural preferences? It made me remember a study we executed at Yoast some time ago and it gave …

In the last month I’ve been speaking at a few conferences with a talk I’ve dubbed “The Psychology behind Conversion”. In this talk I’m trying to explain why everyone who maintains a website should be interested in psychology and how it can help them. Being interested in psychology, especially when applied to the web, is …

Have you ever wondered why you should have that 404 Not Found page? What’s the use? The page is gone or broken and you don’t want people to end up there, so why not just redirect that page to the homepage of your website? They even made WordPress plugins that will help you do this, …

Google Analytics provides us with lots of information about our visitors. However, we are in complete ignorance about the motivations of our visitors to buy our products.  Why do people shop online?  And how can we influence their motives and make them buy (more of) our products? Thijs already gave lots of useful insights in …

Today at Pubcon Matt Cutts of Google once again promoted the use of autocomplete-type, a new property for web forms that works in Chrome (and possibly other browsers, I haven’t checked). Google first introduced it back in January 2012 in this post. I wanted to do this quick post to tell you to turn off …

I read a lot of articles about A/B tests and I keep being surprised by the differences in testing that I see. I think it’s safe to say: most conversion rate optimization testing is not scientific. It will simply take up too much space to explain what I mean exactly by being scientific, but I’ll publish …

During my attempts to optimize the conversion rates here on yoast.com, I’ve met with quite some hurdles and roadblocks. That’s why I thought it would be a good idea to write a post; so you won’t have to invent the wheel twice. Define your Intensive Care Pages Although it’s very tempting to start off your …

Since I began working at Yoast, I’ve been busy with a lot of things, but my personal favorite definitely is this one: conversion. Maybe this is because of my background in behavioral science. Or maybe I just prefer bigger numbers to smaller ones. In any case, the fact remains: I’m hooked. Now, for the people …

I am the last one to tell a website owner that his job is to become the local SEO or usability expert. That would be unrealistic. Why should a constructor learn SEO? He should not. Why should a gardner know all about user experience? He should not. But how about applying some common sense to …