Search Engine Optimisation

Before I begin I want to emphasise that I am not saying dumb down your content as a few people mentioned when I spoke to them about this matter in a recent meeting. I am simply saying you need to allow your readers to taste the simplicity of your subject matter.

Lets start with the “non-content” of a site, these are things that aren’t really content but can have a huge effect on your end user experience.

Scanable Navigation
Navigation is something that I have often battled to make effective in a design, more often than not I fall back to the standard links across the top or down the left hand site … but sometimes I play around with navigation to make the design of a site more effective and hopefully increase the users exposure to the real content. There are currently three websites in my online design portfolio (I am currently redesigning how they are shown so there is just 3 not the 8 or 9 i want there) each with a unique but effective navigation, as with the portfolio site itself. Now that you’ve seen some samples of navigation I think you will be seeing that each has 4 characteristics; it is easy to read, easy to find, not made in Flash (or with excessive JavaScript) & doesn’t have links that aren’t needed. Once you get these 4 things correct your navigation will flow and help your site more than you think.

Snappy Loading
The load-time of your site and its various attributes is something of high contention between designers, developers and web-site owners. Some argue that it doesn’t matter how slow your site is these days as “everyone has broadband” – my message to these people is your argument is not only wrong but is also flawed in another way, if you go down the route of load time doesn’t matter why would google webmaster tools now allow you to see how fast your site loads for their spiders? Answer: they wouldn’t speed is important to both search engines and humans. As well as this factor there have been several studies that show you have less than 17seconds to grab the attention of your user before they walk away (hitting the back button), you need to load fast and grab the attention of the user (see the next main point for one way to do this).

Now we move on to the content itself, this is not written in stone as with anything on the web but following these points will certainly help increase the user experience and search engine robot experience.

Make Your Headlines Punchy!
This may sound like common knowledge but the shorter, snappier and more creative your headlines and subheadings the more you will attract the user. However this doesn’t matter if you don’t make them look nice and of course use the heading tags <h1> <h2> etc. If you can master this simple point you will gain some nice attention from your users having captured their attention and the search engines will be happy that they can breakdown your content into various sections.

Know Your Audience!
Now this may sound like a bit of a stupid point because as a designer, developer, copywriter or website owner you may think you know your audience. But do you really? Even if you’ve worked in a particular industry for many years ask yourself have you studied your audience, been given feedback on the design and content from your audience, and does your content centre around them or are you search engine heavy in design and content. This last point is really important because you should never ever focus on the search engine when copywriting, you should focus on the user, the readability of your content and attracting the users, it is only after you have done this you can begin to focus on external matters such as search engines.

When considering your content (as with creating you design) you need to ask yourself one very important question, and if the answer is “no” you need to go back and reiterate the content.

Does your content or design meet the exacting needs of your user?

Evaluating this can be a hard battle, the most common of which is the calls to actions on a site. The best way to test this is through a process of statistical analysis of all pages and the content as it changes, sound like months of hard work?  well it can be I admit but Google have a solution that you can use for AB testing – this is the Google Website Optimizer – be warned however that there is a fair chunk of coding to make this happen properly so you will need a developer to hand to make this happen. Having used this a few times I can tell you the results can be amazing and really help a site gain ground fairly quickly.

And finally…

Keeping Your Content Simple
If you are using industry jargon or phrases that are overly complex then you are likely to scare away your users, add to this very few people will search your jargon-ised terms and you like me will be asking why make things complicated for users?

So you’ve read this article and you know a little more about how to make your site easier to use and how to grab and keep the attention of the user. In my view most of the above is the job of a good web designer, they should be able to juggle the complexity of a site with skill and grace to bring the best outcome. It is then the job of the website owner &/or a copywriter to draw the attention with headlines and content with a similar skill and grace.

Before I press publish I want to share with you a quote I found whilst researching this article:

“Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler” – Einstein

Over the past year and a bit i’ve had the same question again and again – can I download and keep your content.

The answer has always been “no” up until now!

Today we SEOAndy introduce the E-book PDF system. Each of our posts will be available to download, as many times as you want, just click the link at the bottom of the relevant post to view the PDF (or right click and save target as).

We will also soon be offering all of our SEO Posts in a single SEO Book – which will also include much more detail about all things SEO than we can offer in a simple SEO Post.

If you want to see a particular feature on this site let us know – leave a comment below or contact us

Having been a designer for several years and an SEO expert for a while I want to share a few little tips with you. These tips are pretty much common knowledge but every now and then when times get hard you will loose sight of them and so the tips will always help you increase traffic to your site.

The only thing these tips require is some time and effort (and sometimes a bit of money), do all they say and take your site to the next level.

Have a Plan

Each and every website or blog starts with a vision and an ideal of what it will be in years to come and what services you want to offer and/or products you are selling (or maybe just how many posts you will write a week or month). So write it down on a piece of paper in bold black or red pen, then stick it above your desk or somewhere you always look from your desk!

Show the Love

A common belief (and rightly so) is that links a) bring traffic and b) are picked up by search engines and your site is ranked on this and several other factors. So this tip is simple, if you want a link give a link, its called Link Loving – your link to them doesn’t have to last forever but its always nice to receive something in return for giving someone a link.

View the Bigger Design Picture

Your design is the quickest and first way to attract the attention of your visitors. It is said that you have approximately 17 seconds to grab the attention of the user – this means if your site isn’t fully loaded and/or isn’t pulling your user in they are likely to click off your page. So top tip is ensure your first/homepage as thin as possible, make as much as you can external (javascript, css etc), emphasise your main content/the aim of the page and optimise each & every image on it (also ensure each page has a full set of the main three meta tags – see below). Now take a step back and pretend you know nothing about your market or your site (or ask some random friend) and honestly evaluate your design.

Unique Meta Tags (with Your Content)

Each page should have a unique set of meta tags (in particular: Title, Description & Keywords). So for each page use your title tag to emphasise your subject and appeal to the user to view you – the title tag is pretty much only used by search engines and the users of … it is the first thing your user will see if clicking through from a search engine. Your Description should ideally be the first line of your main textual content, but if not you should use this again as a marketing tool to attract users from the search engine. Finally your keywords should actually me key-phrases – two or three words that sum up your content and more so terms people are likely to search for (eg. “Search Engine Services” or “SEO News”).

Contextual Tone and Language

Take a look at your textual content, look closely at the language and “jargon” used. You may think this exercise is pointless but if you can remove any hardship from your text, remove all jargon and ensure your get your point across in the first few sentences then you will be able to draw your user in to your site and the content. Most sites start in a personal tone and move to be more business like in language, however you should try to stay personal speaking one to one with your user improves interaction and increases the memorability of your site/blog.

Increase or Decrease Your Coverage

Sometimes moving forward is hard either because you are not covering enough of a subject or enough topics or alternatively you are trying to include to much within your posts and you need to simplify and cover one subject in great depth. The first place to look in your blog is at the number of writers to number of categories ratio, if its roughly one to one then you are fine but if you find you are the only person covering 5 or 6 categories you may want to consider consolidating these into just one or two that you can concentrate on. Now you’ve done that focus on your content and adding more on a regular basis (bi-daily or weekly, either way stick to your schedule – also update static pages monthly).

Networking

One way to increase your visibility to search engines and users is to use social networking sites such as Twitter, Facebook, Digg, StumpleUpon and Delicious. This also shows your participation in the wider community and gives you a chance to interact with potential clients around the globe as well as gives them a chance to ask you questions & see what you and your site are doing at the moment.

Package it up

Whether or not you offer a service on your site/blog, package your content up, release it as a pdf e-book and either release it for FREE or sell it. If you offer other services release it for free but include various links to your site.

If you have questions about how to improve your site and/or you need help implementing the above why not pop by to TheSEOClinic – or tweet me @andykinsey

Are you the owner or person responsible for a website? Is the website being beaten to the top of Google or Bing by your competitors? Does the search market look scary? or maybe you’ve been trying for months but just can’t seem to get ranked by the search engines?

If you’ve answered “yes” to any of the above then here’s some good news for you!

SEOAndy today are introducing a new service, THE SEO CLINIC

Want to know more about the SEO Clinic? Click here

We are excited to announce the launch of StayStAndrews a website for the visitors to St Andrews whom are looking for local accommodation within walking distance of the famous old golf course (which is located just 3 minutes walk from this stunning town house).

This single page website is built using scripting languages such as PHP and MooTools*, it also utilises the MultiMap API**. The site comprises of several sections including; a description of the spacious town house including its many features, an image gallery, contact form and interactive map. The site has a single page layout with no refreshes and a quick load time it is a seamless experience from the moment you start your visit.

So if your interested in hotels or bed and breakfast accommodation in St Andrews (Fife) then why not consider taking a look at this luxury town house at the heart of the town. Whether you want to rent one room for one night or four rooms for 6 months then why not enquire today about this spacious property.

* MooTools – JavaScript FrameWork
** MultiMap Open API – interactive maps powered by Bing
Find out more about this website from Andy Kinsey Web Design

E-commerce SEO is something of a hardship for many, long hours more often than not leading to little if any reward and return on investment. However marketing your e-commerce site correctly and making a few minor changes to your site / coding and you will soon see your ROI improve by a huge margin.

1. Avoid Manufacturer Descriptions – we all know it’s so tempting to copy and paste what you are given from the distributor or from some other website but don’t! If you really can’t think of anything to write at least rewrite the text enough to make it unique … but make sure it still flows and isn’t full of jargon! – Product descriptions should compel the user to want to buy your product.
2. SEO Friendly URL’s –  although not always easy to implement having user and machine friendly url’s can make the difference between someone remembering your site (or linking to it) or not. Either way this can mean you get a sale or conversion of some kind or not! – and if you really must pass parameters in the URL ensure that they are at the end and it doesn’t effect browsing if they are missed off!
3. Create a product RSS feed – so your a website owner/manager or just someone who’s used the internet and you think an RSS feed is just the subscription to your favourite blog … well you are wrong. An RSS feed is simply an XML script which can contain anything from latest blog posts on SEO to a product feed, including images and links! (then go and submit the feed to Google Base).
4. Tag your products – With the advent of social media, customers have become accustomed with the concept of tagging. Allow your customers to tag products with their own keywords. When you allow users to tag your products, you’ll likely start ranking for slang keywords that you would have never thought of on your own.
5. Link within product descriptions - Create keyword heavy links from within the product descriptions of one product linking to another. I’ve found this is a very effective strategy for targeting long-tail keywords.
   NB: make these absolute aka use http://
6. Don’t use “view” and “more” type links - ok, so that has your attention you wondering what you should use… well the answer is I lied do use them they are expected and you are there to feed but also defy expectation of your user … everyone has these and so should you but go further make sure any images link to the product page as with the title of the product!  - all links should also include title tags.
7. Optimise your images - if you can make the file size small without destroying quality do so – every second spent loading your site is a second wasted and second you are closer to loosing a conversion! Also include alt tags to all images these are vital for search engines… after all this is how they index them.
8. Embed User Tracking - tracking your user is easy with cookies and javascript – do a quick search and you will find many tools that can record what your users are doing and where they click … or if you don’t want all that trouble use Google Analytics and after a while view the overlap map to see what people have been clicking. Also keep tabs on your statistics, but don’t expect miracles remember SEO is a journey and not a destination!
9. Don’t Use Flash (ahhhhhh saviour of the universe NOT!) - most search engines have no capability to index flash, google and yahoo have little but more often than not don’t pass the first thing they see (meaning they don’t click the links!). With this in mind keep flash to a minimum and definitely don’t use it for your primary navigation.
10. Make Checkout Simple – many people using the internet will trust paypal and google checkout but linking across to them sometimes makes users feel unsafe and insecure, using integration to your site such that the user doesn’t leave your site keeps these people a little happier. Further to this keep checkout to a minimum don’t force users to register to use your checkout, have a guest checkout and if you can keep checkout to 2 or less pages… who wants to go through 5 pages before you have a confirmed purchase… and with mobile internet growing rapidly a single page checkout means a single load and users are more likely to convert.

All fairly simple ideas as you can see but each one will bring you closer and closer to success and those huge conversion numbers you are driving for, not just one or two a week! (if your lucky)

Finally if you are wanting a cheaper gateway than google and paypal can offer then hop over to Crystals Merchant Services and ask about the online gateway system we can offer. Going further if you own a shop or two also ask about the reduced merchant service costings and rates on credit and debit card terminals.

Making it easy for your user to sign up is paramount to most, if not all websites that are selling something, even if its just a company website  signing people up to your news RSS feed is important… right?. Well yes, but it is just as important to make it easy for them to leave and/or unsubscribe to your website. However given my recent discussion with several rather large companies I feel the need to write an article about this subject. The companies I am involved with and talk to all know the importance of signing people up and calls to action (its what I teach them) but they all seem to think:

“Once we have them, surely we want to keep them captive and never let them go”

Now without dancing around the bushes… this is a load of bull.

Why I approach the subject with clients
My reason for discussing this with clients is fairly simple. Like many of you I have many accounts dotted around the web, on a number of websites multiple accounts for various clients and bits of work. Take facebook I have 4 accounts, twitter I have at least 8 accounts, I have 4 or 5 google accounts a .net passport and am member to many forums (and many more places I have membership also).

One day I wanted to shut a few accounts down as I no longer dealt with a client, we hadn’t fallen out or anything like this… the company fell into liquidation and the administrators decided we had to close them all down… for very few was this easy.

For example. BrightKite – the client was automatically checked in with his iPhone each time linking to a part of his site or his latest article (nice little script for this added to an app) – to delete this account took a series of e-mails to their support team to get the account deleted.

Deleting FaceBook was a little easier to find, Twitter even more so.

But Why is it Important?
Well if you hadn’t gathered I am “tech savvy” and if I can’t figure out how to remove an account then someone not so savvy will struggle even more. So make it easy for someone to delete or deactivate an account!

Jumping through hoops sending email is not something people want to do, have a button … send them an email and use a double-optout or double-deactivate method …

Going Further
Given the above I would now say a few things – mainly aimed at e-commerce websites:

1. Keep to the reason they signed up – (aka what will they get from this sign up?)
2. Let them opt-out of things – (or even better make them opt-in to things)
3. Don’t Spam E-Mail or The Site - (don’t fill things with adverts everywhere, keep it simple)
4. In case your users aren’t in any way technical have several methods of contact – (forms, e-mail address, written address and phone number – also you social network links)
5. Remember your unsubscribe links in newsletters