Search Engine Optimisation

Now I’ve held off this post for sometime, mainly because I couldn’t quite decide who should be on my list…or why I preferred some people over others.

Anyway my list is complete …

TOP 5

1. Matt Cutts – The Google head of webspam
2. Michael Gray – GrayWolf … a great SEO
3. Lee Odden – Always worth more than a single look
4. Jennifer Laycock – An SEO Whizz
5. SEOmoz – The website of this company is superb

See the full list here – http://twitter.com/andykinsey/top-seos/members

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Visit our Christmas SEO site – http://xmasseo.co.uk

So you’ve decided you want a redesign, and you’ve agreed prices etc with a designer… thats it you can sit back, relax …go and sit on a beach somewhere? wrong

Through my years of experience I have become aware more and more of the stages involved in a redesign of any given website, various types of website require various different aspects of a design process. For example some things may only happen in the development of an e-commerce site and other things may only appear on a blog. So not all of the below are applicable to all sites, but most should be.

Do parts of your existing site work well?

If your answer is yes, then keep them and improve them.

The same goes for if something doesn’t work ditch it and find a new way of doing things, you will find inspiration in the most unlikely of places. For example you need a new colours scheme, look around you… the books, the plants, your living room paint scheme … they all work … go next door look around … more colours… go to the park even more… one of these schemes will suit your needs I bet!

If you want to know if something works take a look at your analytics. What do you mean you don’t have them! … go and install some a few months before you even consider a redesign.

Combination & Mutation

All websites have aspects that belong in a single place, so why do they get splashed all over? Well ok sometimes its just a feed and links back “home” … we love this kind of thing. But with older sites you need to consider if two pages belong as one and need to be more concise you need to make sure they are. Do you have tools such as calculators or postal tracking … keep them simple and remove any obstacles such as them being over 7 or 8 pages… no body wants to site waiting for each page to load.

Think of it as though you are back on a dial-up connection (hard I know)… you have managed to get to your checkout … congrats! … next you want to checkout but it wants you to register (damn!) … so you register thats another 3 pages! … you go back to your cart, theres the address to confirm, payment to process, confirmation and a newsletter sign up… 4 or 5 pages plus your sign up… maybe 3 pages max with a combined sign up for guest users maybe better? – a nice example of this is if you purchase through Kaloss Trimmers … 2 page checkout with auto registration (ok there is a further page for newsletter stuffs but thats life).

What attracts Visitors

Did you install analytics? Good you need them. Check your landing pages, these are hotspots for search engines and visitors, check you exit pages these are freezing and there maybe something wrong with them.

Now check competitor websites what do you like about them, does your site and the competitor site have anything in common? if so this is a good sign and you should consider this a focus point for your visitors.

Graphics are Important

When you get to a site (even this one) the first thing you search for is graphics, a logo … a central feature to draw your attention. Now if your like me and are not afraid of being different then you too could remove all graphics from your main design, but my guess is this wouldn’t be too good for most company websites.

As I have said graphics draw your attention and should be made to stand out from your content, this not only means they look nice but that a user (in their mind) can distinguish between content and graphic making content easier to use.

Graphics include photos, if you have a site from 2006 look at the photography and decide which look dated and are irrelevant, then take a look and see which you can still use (if any). The chances are you need some new ones taking or finding, a good place to start is iStock.

More stuff to Consider

Along with the above you will probably want to consider Screen Resolution, Target Audience (obviously) and Internet Speed of users.

If you have installed analytics then you will probably be able to gain the resolution, browser and internet speed (as well as location and more) quite easily… which make life much easier for both you and your designer.

Its all very well having the best design in the world but whats the point if your users can’t use it or even access it?

Total Redesign or Partial?

This is always a hard question to answer and it depends on a few factors including (but not limited too); budget, success of current site, technologies available & coding of the old site.

There have been great successes with both minor and major redesigns, some are forced through hacking of sites (such as AK Designs) or those who opted for a complete redesign such as Bing.

Of course most of the time the current situation will dictate whether you have a partial or complete redesign of your site. If you can afford to and have time then I advise a full redesign to bring everything up to standard and future proof to some extent, this way you will not be fighting fire with fire as the months roll on and your old site continues to fall apart around you. If you must go for a partial redesign then do so with caution, do not change something that works or waste money on a lot of new graphics you may only use for a few months, a partial redesign is a stop-gap and nothing more.

Moving Forward

Before agreeing to a redesign of your site, make note of the following specifics and advice these are probably the most important part of this article.

Redirect Old Pages

This is where most websites fall down, they do not redirect old urls to new ones, it’s an easy mistake to make not least as it can be time consuming writing the code to redirect.

The best and most common method of redirection is using a 301 – redirect of pages in a .htaccess file. These are relatively easy to understand and use and perform best with search engines.

301 redirects are “permenant” so when a SE sees it it will remember it.

302 redirects are “temp” so search engines will check back at the url periodically.

Whichever you use it will not only help a search engine find your content again but will also re-point your users browser to the new location of the wanted content… win-win

Upsetting Loyal Users

This is where more sites fail than any other area. Well the bigger site redesigns anyway.

We all know the story of how every few months Facebook will make changes to their social network … some users have an uproar but eventually settle down… it’s almost comical as they create groups on facebook to say they hate it… they have nowhere else to go! Facebook is a one off and has a captive audience.

Other sites like bing are a turn on or off for users, most people don’t care though.

However take ebay and amazon and google for that matter, they don’t change what works, they don’t tweak through fear of loss of traffic and loss of revenue… google hasn’t changed much since year 1.

Work with Experience

Experience in redesign is something not many have, mainly because people tend to scrap older websites and start a fresh. But companies these days want to save money, it is a recession after all, so it’s time to look for experience re-designers.

In many ways redesign is harder than a new design! You have to take the existing and melt it in a volcanic brainstorm with new raging ideas, it is a complex event but at the end of the storm you are left with a redesign with everything you want and more (usually).

Also it is good to note that if your site is complex, during the volcanic eruption it will get even more complex, the it will cool down and ideas solidify and become more simple and easy to understand… an experience re-designer will simplify the most complex of websites.

If you are interested in redesigning your website visit my freelance website @ http://andykinsey.co.uk

With 2009 drawing to a close (a little to quickly if you ask me) I am once again being bombarded with a number of questions about how a company can “update” the look and feel of a website / brand.

I first wrote this type of post around this time last year, and it well down a storm … so with my inbox full of the same questions I think it’s just about time I approached the question again! – don’t you?

Over the past few years I’ve come across many perceptions of what happens after a website goes live and it still staggers me that around 95% of my clients believe “it’s done with” … “it’s complete nothing needs to be done now until we need a new one” … erm well “can I ask you to read my articles” is my general response to this. They soon realise they shouldn’t just leave it sat doing nothing for them or their company image. However, generally by this time it’s a little late (which is why they come to me).

This article is intended as a “rough” lecture on the more important aspects of website redesign.

A website is not a static entity.

A website is an ever evolving being, the content should be updated often as should the design (or aspects of), if it becomes static you could be harming your online presence and brand image.

There are many reasons for a redesign here are a few

Splash / Intro Pages

Always good for the 90′s splash pages are those little “welcome to” pages you get on older sites. Generally they appear on multiple domains too, acting as doorway pages (very grey seo tactics). Mostly created using flash, video and/or audio these pages are also pretty damn hard to make accessible & waste your users time and energy in trying to find you “skip intro” or “enter site” link.

Old Content

As you move through the weeks / months / years your content will begin to slowly become irrelevant and more often than not will have no place in the modern world. (I recall one client site was still apparently selling dot matrix printers which he hadn’t stocked since 2001! and this was just a few weeks ago!). Still not convinced? Imagine your a user trying to find the latest information about a football club … you get to the site but the news is from 2003, you wanted last nights score… keep your content upto date and relevant for your audience.

Table Layout

For a number of years before the take up of CSS table layouts were the building blocks of a website, as were spacer gifs (1×1 pixel images for spacing). These designs are likely to not only look old and boring but are also not accessible, you will be making your users life and the search engines life harder than it needs to be.

Frames

Embedded frames (iFrames) are used to show content from one page in another … or rather they used to be. Now they are seen as a nuisance because of accessibility and search engine issues. Add to that there are now easier and more friendly ways to include content and you will see frames are a bad idea!

Little and Often is enough!

Now it sounds a cliché, however its true. If you make little content changes, little design modifications then you will not only be optimising your website for your user – and so increase ROI – but you will also keep search engines happy as fresh content is something they love.

A great example of minor design changes which are little and often are the Google Logo changes … every few days or weeks Google will adopt a “new” logo for a few days, each one with a different meaning. This idea was adopted by Bing (formerly MSN / Live Search) who on their homepage use full images with interesting facts around them.

Content Management

One of the primary reasons when I ask website owners why content is not updates is understandable… they don’t have a content management system, and the designer wants X amount to update the content. Well now whilst I can understand a charge per month for maintenance (which is necessary in most cases of new sites) I fail to grasp why a designer/developer would leave a client without a method of changing content.

Content Management Systems (CMS’s) have been around for long enough now for all fairly new sites to be using them, even if only for part of a site! They are freely available if you want a simple site, or you may need something totally bespoke (as many of AK Designs clients do). Either way you are left with a solution where you can update: text, graphics, video, sounds, add and remove pages and much more!

Remember when talking to a designer: a website is for life, not just for christmas.

Search Engines not giving you any love?

Another common reason for a redesign and/or content change is that search engines love fresh things. Search Engines love accessible code, they don’t like inaccessible flash or javascript, they just want your content as fast as possible.

Another thing to consider in your design is that if you design for SEO and with SEO in mind your efforts to keep SEO maintained in the future will be halved. An initial setup for SEO means the journey of SEO is with less hardship and effort that if you have to go back and “inject” SEO into an existing website.

Under performing aspects of a site

Websites are funny, sometimes things work sometimes they don’t… thats life. Take a call to action in 2005 like “free trial” … still sounds useful to some people … however a more successful CTA in 2009 has been “XX days free” or “Try me Now for Free” … people are seeming to be scared of trials … and free trials makes people think are they hooked into something after the trial.  - Just updating this CTA can reap dividends.

Maybe part of your site is a store, but the layout doesn’t load properly because it was designed for Internet Explorer 5 … so in IE7 or 8… or any browser today it doesn’t render correctly … or some script doesn’t work or is insecure! … many payment gateway modules written pre-2007 are now insecure and dangerous to use.

A Competitor has just redesigned

This has to be the most common reason I am given when I ask why they want a redesign. They want to regain that “competitive edge” over the competition who have just redesign and it looks much much better than the clients site.

Now this appears on the surface to be a worthless reason if ever there was one. But when I’ve scratched the surface in 99% of cases it is just the straw that broke the clients back and convinced the board to take action which someone has been trying to push through for months sometimes.

One of the major things I say to these particular clients is that they should never attempt to simply “photocopy” an existing site, all sites are successful in some respects and not others, sure take some good bits but leave the bad. Oh and the last thing you want to be thought of (as a company) is that you are copy-cats or that you steal your competitors ideas, no matter how good they are.

This is post one of two in the series, next time we take a look at planning a redesign and taking a design forward.

If you are interested in redesigning your website visit the Andy Kinsey Designs website @ http://andykinsey.co.uk

Due to the sheer number of requests to do this I feel it is time I released this theme “kinseyWP” into the wild.

Therefore you can now download this Free WordPress Template.

This template is released under Creative Commons License (see below).

This template is fixed width, has 2 cols, multiple colours and a left sidebar.
The template uses AJAX for various effects, generated using MooTools.

If You Like this then:

A few years ago (I think around 2005) there was a huge website, the guy sold a pixel for a dollar… he sold a million of them… and became a millionaire (obviously). This was the million dollar homepage, something people have tried to emulate and multiple occasions, generally without any success!

Then a few months ago I was chatting with a developer (Kirsty Burgoine) about a project she has been involved in, and how she was making an attempt to re-create / re-hash the million pixel script for a charity website (Jakarna Wildlife Trust).

I am happy to say the obstacles Kirsty came across have been overcome and expectations of my own exceeded. The “million pound map” as I have dubbed it, asked for a £10 donation in return of a adoption of a piece of land in a Kenyan wildlife reserve.

At this point I want to congratulate Kirsty for her work on this project. And encourage everyone to go and adopt a little piece of land

Further than this I want to extend my thanks to Kirsty for her awesome work alongside myself over the past few months to bring a number of sites from a rough sketch / design on my screen to what I must confess are some of the best sites I know of.

My absence of fear over breaking conventions is one which I have never hidden, however I don’t think it was ever really unleashed until the most recent project myself and Kirsty attempted … Spirit Beauty Salon is a modern, clean and crisp design with a few twists in design to ensure interactivity and making the user feel at home, as well as features to ensure the site is easy to recall to a friend. Case Study: Coming Soon

(I feel this “speech” has gone on too long, so one last thing)

Keep your eyes peeled for the next project of myself and Kirsty

Today I would like to introduce you to our new Service.

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Want to know more about this service? Contact Me

When optimising a website links are one of the first things that may cross your mind. There are a few types of links that you will come across, whether by normal text hyperlink or image linking these types of links stay constant… but can be easily mis-understood by alot of website owners (hence my writing this article).

• One Way Links – This is a simple link from A to B, when B doesn’t link back to A.
• Two Way (Reciprocal) Links – This is when both A and B link to each other.
• Variant / Multiple Linking – This is where A will link to B and B to C, then C links back to A (in general).

In terms of SEO one way links beat two way and variant linking methods, however this is not always true. For example if a blog is mentioning another article and links to it and the other site mentions the first site a few months later (its not two way) but is as good as a one way link. … seo is odd like that!

An important thing to remember with link strategies is that search engines will see your ip, your geolocation and if they are the same are likely to ignore or not rank the links so much… for example a site from http://seoandy.com to http://andykinsey.co.uk (just relaunched) will not have as much rank as from an external site such as http://twitter.com/andykinsey because they are on the same IP address… and so related.

Almost 50 Days down 37 til Christmas …can you afford to start you new year without XMASSEO?

Ok so bit of an odd post here, but with all my services being directed through Crystals I believe that I should tell you a little more about them.

Whether you are simply a sole trader using paypal to a multinational corp. using world pay, authorize.net or streamline (in the uk) Crystals Merchant Services can beat your monthly card processing invoices (by around a third).

So if you want to know more about Crystals Reduced Cost Card Processing Services then simply fill in the contact form below – it will be sent to one of the great Crystals Merchant team who will then contact you regarding the enquiry.

<a href=”http://scotlandit.com/forms/view.php?id=6″ mce_href=”http://scotlandit.com/forms/view.php?id=6″ title=”Crystals Merchant Services”>Crystals Merchant Services</a>

Hi there,

I know its been a few weeks since the events which lead to these SEO articles being moved to this domain, but I’ve finally finished the site it was on … Visit andykinsey.co.uk to learn about my web and graphic design services.

SEO Article writing back soon!

Thanks

andy