Search Engine Optimisation

As part of my role at AK Designs I am responsible for all the copy on the “home sites” as well as the copy on many client websites. In this role with clients I often face issues (and from some staff who think the same way) … One of the biggest issues that occurs on a regular basis is simply that the website owners or the company investors seem to turn around with ideas of what the copy should be, and I have always found (so far) that all they want to do is convince the end user.

Now don’t get me wrong, sometimes this fits the site and the audience you are trying to get to understand something, but most the time it isn’t.

The battle generally means I turn around and compromise,  I mention AB testing of the copy to see what will produce the best results. They agree to the testing and 95% of the tests end to come back in my favour. So to help everyone get to grips with this idea I’ve created 5 directives of writing compelling copy.

5 Directives to Write Compelling Copy

1. Know Your Audience
   Think of each page or email newsletter as being read by a single person, a person from your target audience. Give him or her a name, an age, a relationship status & maybe a background story. Now write you copy for this person alone, you are not wanting to convince her of anything but rather to feel compelled to visit again, tell a friend or even better to follow your call to action… if your audience feel preached too or spoken down too then they will switch off… where as if you can engage on a one-2-one basis then you will get some real business.
2. Use a present tense and Positive subject line
   Imagine reading “10 websites were developed” … sounds boring and doesn’t attract your attention really, you don’t feel compelled to click and read it… now think about the line “We developed 10 New websites” notice it draws your attention it was us (we) the company and they are “new” so this implies a sense of importance, improvement and excitement. Other good words include “exciting”, “exclusive” and “introducing”.
3. Avoid sitting on the fence – it gets you no where
   If your wanting to sell something, wanting to compel them to take an a particular action, be definitive. you are the “expert” otherwise they wouldn’t be visiting your site! So don’t use words such as “should”, “could”, “maybe” or “possibly” they have negative implications on most audiences, they make them question you and your product or site.
4. Be Concise
   Don’t ramble on endlessly, get to your point quickly and clearly. Cut the rubbish and the jargon, no one wants to hear it or see it … it confuses the average person which is why there are so many sites claiming to be jargon busters or having jargon busters built in… save you and your customer sometime.
5. Connect
   Connecting with your audience will never be easy, it will never be 100% successful even if you’ve got everything right on your site. What you need to think is that your customers will have something else on their mind, maybe someone is in hospital, maybe someone just knocked on the door or maybe they are hungry… a tiny little thing can distract and you will loose a sale (or however you call to action is built).  So connect, make the user think positive thoughts, so even if they are distracted they will feel compelled to return.

I know these tips will help many of the website owners I know, and I know it will help your site be a success.

This article has been republished at boagworld.com

Now… I’ve neglected design for a while, focused on the “development” of existing sites. And its not just me that has been doing this, and there is a valid reason… there is less money in web design & development so less people are willing to spend money on a new site when a few changes will make the companies existing site last another year or so.

Anyway with the recession (hopefully) in decline, I wanted to help the designers of the world with some ideas for SEO best practice.

Rule 1 – NEVER Cheat

Think about this… if you walked into a top university (anywhere in the world) where there are hundreds of professors, do you think you could outsmart them all? … if you said “yes” you lied … The answer is and ALWAYS will be NO. And its the same with Google.
Google has rooms all over the world (in the various GooglePlex) full of PHd employees, they write the algorithms which Google run! So you can’t outsmart Google… or any other Search Engine NOW or EVER!

Rule 2 – CONTENT is King

Before you design, get your content right…its not a design users are searching for its information! So this MUST always be top of your list of importance. If your site doesn’t have information people want they won’t visit.
Think of your information layout being a pyramid…. start with the H1 tag and have your first paragraph explain the rest of your pages content. Then move down with more heading tags.
See my post on making Copy your Salesman

Rule 3 – STICK with Your Keywords

When you are defining a site with a client ask them for their themes… these should (in theory) become your keywords/phrases. Stick to them like glue … each page should be themed independantly but this should change on a regular basis… doing so will make a search engine “shifty” and may cause a search engine not to trust you.

Rule 4 – CLEAN code is Searchable Code

Using clean “semantic” code does not mean you are a professional…it simply means that both humans and search engines can access your pages more easily… oh and it makes your site a damn site more accessible.
So use H-tags, P tags, UL / OL and LI tags …blockquote and em (for italics) oh and strong (for bolder text).
Also don’t overuse DIV tags.
By keeping your code semantic, using semantic elements you can use CSS (externally) to style your site and make it look how you want.

Rule 5 – NAVIGATION for All

I will keep it simple… Navigation is key, place your main navigation where you’d expect to see it… top of the page or on the left … follow the “unwritten rules of design” … make sure both your navigation and other links have meaningful anchor text. This means don’t use “click here” or “see more” as links. Further to this avoid flash for navigation … use clean code… more info can be found in my perfect seo navigation article.

Rule 6 – TITLE are the winners

Ok … meta tags do some of the work (in theory), and the content does the rest right???
Wrong! you forget what is easily one of the most important factors on a site…the title tag. Think about this next time you are coding a page or writing its content… when you search on any search engine how often do you look at the description? not very is my bet. I bet you like over 95% of other search engine users only look at the titles of the search results. So use your title tag to make an impact!

Rule 7 – ALTERNATIVE text / tags

You are a blind user, you visit a site full of images (a picture speaks a thousand words), these images explain the content a little better but you can’t see them… and they don’t have an alternative text nor a caption… they are useless to you and now the site makes no sense.
With this in mind next time you have an image or graphic..or flash file that explains anything make sure you give a text alternative… oh I almost forgot a search engine won’t view your images like a human (it sweeps for content and images separately for its indexing, it doesn’t relate them.) So alternative tags will help your SEO efforts.

Rule 8 – DESIGN friendly URLs

Whether dynamic or not, all sites should have SEO / User friendly url’s this means not having /p?=1234?34 or anything like this but rather /real-seo as a url following the domain. There are several ways to do this, some CMS systems (like wordpress) will automatically do this for you, alternatively you can use a .htaccess file or hard-code the file names. … Get to know about the 10 rules of perfect urls.

Rule 9 – SITEMAPs … both human and robots can read

Often overlooked by designers and developers alike the Sitemap. Ok, it can be forgiven for a site not to have a human readable sitemap… you don’t always need one for humans! you navigation should do the job for you. However you MUST create a sitemap for search engines and other web programs … there are any number of sitemap generator tools around for you to try. … once you get a sitemap submit it to the search engines as well as have it in your main directory.

Rule 10 – RULES are only Rules if you break them

Most SEO’s will hate me for this (and i know i am in for a nasty time when this is published) most of the above will stand good for many years, but everything changes… so don’t trust what you read on every SEO website. If you break a rule above that is fine…just try not too…google won’t penalise you for most of them… though cheating or being black-hat may see you being in trouble and having a need to explain yourself.

As with many things in this life, SEO is easier if you can see how it works… So below is a very simplified flow chart and explantation as to what happens at each stage… with the result being a high search engine ranking! Start – This is the start of the whole website process, designing and creating your website. Remember simple things like building in how your page titles will work, if you want or need URL re-writing and also consider the style of coding you will use.

Content – As mentioned in previous posts content is king! If you aren’t a copy writing expert you may want to invest in the services of one. Or maybe you just need to have a consultation from a copy writer. So why the emphasis on copy writers? Well its simple, if you get a professional / expert copy writer what they write will be perfect for marketing, they are marketing writers. Usually a copy writer will be outside of your niche and so can remove your technical jargon, meaning your copy becomes accessible.

Also copy writing should be natural and should be themed on a per page basis, do not concentrate on certain keywords as this will distort your text and search engines will pick up on this. Don’t forget to use images to break up your text and if possible make your pages a little interactive, even if its just a search box.

Links - Building Links is often one of the hardest aspects of getting seen. You should consider trying to find links from; Local Websites, Industry Websites (usually your best bet) and Directories (DMOZ, Yahoo and ZoomInfo etc.). Also consider getting links from Friends, Your site designer, Your suppliers and other business affiliates.

Optimise for SEO – This is where you should consider your keywords and purposefully theming certain pages to attarct certain types of visitors. Also consider long-tail keywords as a method to attarct visitors.

Keyword Advice: Consider domain related keywords, topic related keywords (best results), both commercial and non-commercial keywords. Most of all do your research into your niche, see what is bringing others the best results and try them, after you try them for a month or two see if its actually helped you and if not remove it.

Getting Indexed – The first time you are indexed can take anywhere from 1 week to 3 months, maybe even longer (it depends on the above factors!). To speed up this process you may wish to submit your website to search engines (Google, Yahoo & MSN all have submission pages). Remember though, you are likely to be found first in Google and MSN Live than Yahoo. You will appear first in Google Local than Google.com (if you use google local business centre).

Repeat the process for each page

High Search Rank – In addition to the above factors you should remember search engine rankings (including Page Rank) are also based on factors such as domain age and backlink authority (are your back links from highly ranked sites). From a high search rank will come great amounts of traffic, more potential customers and if you get your call to action right you will gain a fantastic return on investment (ROI).

After pondering what this article should be about, I began to write a list of things to cover (for everything in SEO). From this list it was clear I have covered a lot of what I wanted to when I first set out writing my blogs. However, I realised covering the points I have wanted has taken me a while, and more than this I saw that I had given lots of tips…but they are sometimes hidden away. So here is just 25 of those tips!

1. Content is King, quality over quantity. Keep it focused on your theme.
2. Links are vital, build a wide and varied back-linking network.
3. Do NOT be obsessed with PageRank, PR is only a part of the search ranking algorithms (even for google).
4. Fresh Content, impresses search engines and users!
5. Click Here links, are rubbish! link text should be informative.
6. Phrases NOT Words, focus on key phrases and not words (eg. “store” should be “manchester clothing store” )
7. Design for SEO, you sloud avoid 3rd party scripting where possible.
8. Use ALT tags, make your images search able too!
9. Use Title tag, rarely used in link this tag allows you to describe further what the anchor text starts.
10. Canonicalization Issues, decide whether to use www. or not and add a 301 to the other!
11. Homepage Links, ensure that every page of your site links to your homepage.
12. Broken Links, not only annoy users but also search engines, avoid them.
13. Do NOT use Frames, iFrames are not indexable by search engines, forget them.
14. Extensions do NOT matter, whether .html .php .aspx etc it doesn’t matter to a search engine.
15. Quality Backlinks, yes all links matter, but some more than others. Try to get authoritative links from your niche.
16. Natural Writing, is one thing a search engine wants. Write to the person not the search engine, don’t keyword stuff!
17. Ease of Use is Key, simple navigation and style is often better than showing off. For both the user and the search engine.
18. Link Love, if someone gives you a link ask if they want one back, if you see a site you like or could be of interest don’t be a link hogger, link out.
19. It takes Time, your seo efforts can seem empty, but practice makes perfect.
20. Be found Naturally, if you have time on your side let the search engines find you, don’t submit your site until you need too.
21. Use a Sitemap, help direct search engines around your site, it makes life easier.
22. Use robots.txt, tell search engines where they can visit, and also direct them to your sitemap.
23. Social Marketing, is a part of SEO… treat it like link love.
24. Analytics Packages, can give an indepth look at what people do on your site, this means you can target your audience better.
25. Validate Code, valid code makes your site easier to read for search engines, and means it will render correctly in as many browsers as possible.

So this week I’ve been walking around the shops, watching people smile as over the tannoy comes a Christmas song they like. I’ve seen music channels play more and more of these songs too. And of course lets not forget the Christmas decorations have finally gone up… even though I persist they don’t quite look right.

I am now getting that Christmas feeling, and with this I was wondering how I can help people with SEO … Most sites go on and on saying “christmas present” but giving you no good and real advice… So Heres Andy’s Designs Christmas Alphabet:

C – Content
H – Headings
R – Relevancy of Text
I – Images
S – Spiders and Search Engines
T – Text (content)
M – Meta Tags
A – Accessibility
S – Social Networking and Media

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