SearchInfluence

If you surf the Internet casually, you probably don’t particularly care what browser you use. Internet Explorer is the default on most people’s computers, and friends I love dearly and don’t judge have told me they just don’t feel like downloading and installing a new browser. Laziness is also probably the same reason people don’t upgrade their browsers, though if you’ve managed to avoid upgrading Internet Explorer 6 for the last decade, I’m going to assume you don’t actually use the Internet (or your computer) for much of anything at all.

If you’re anything like me, when you visit a website that’s overloaded with Flash, an abundance of images, excessive menus, and just a general maze of content, your brain shrivels up to the size of a raisin and your eyes glaze over with no focus of what to look at or where to find it. (As far as I’m concerned, the same problem exists for social media outlets like Facebook and Twitter. Creating endless posts and tweets just for the sake of having more content and saying whatever pops into your fingers is the quickest way to get me to block or un-follow your posts. Then I’ll never hear anything you have to say!) The idea that the more there is to look at, the more visitors, friends, likes, and followers you’ll get is simply untrue in many cases.  You can still catch plenty of flies with sweet, sweet simplicity.

After the ringing success of her Google acquisitions infographic, we’re proud to debut Kate Voisin as this week’s Featured Influencer! Kate is an illustrator and graphic designer who, before joining the SI team, worked as a freelancer. Like just about every New Orleanean, she spends much of her off-time writing what she hopes will turn into a novel, or browsing the stacks at Tulane’s library (where she is not actually a student). Her interests include coffee, dystopian novels, and cartoons.

Hard-hitting question time: if you were an amphibian, what kind of amphibian would you be?

A newt! (I’d get better.)

With the most recent algorithm update, Google made it clear that a site’s user experience is now a factor for your search ranking. Though this may be a giant leap forward for assessment of site quality, the backlash against the farmer update shows that such metrics for SERP rank might not always be the best. But a user experience factor older than the Big Panda still gets some people’s goats.

Site Load Time

Site speed has been a significant factor since about this time last year. Reading some of the comments on Matt Cutts’s blog post could be an exercise in patience, but as always over-concerned webmasters bring up two good points: javascript and CMS design.