Here’s one of those ‘less talk, more listen’ posts. You don’t get many from me! I want to know a bit about your websites and your approach and attitude towards their purpose. Is your site(s) designed to make money, inform and educate, publicise a product/service/person or is the purpose unclear – perhaps it’s just for fun. For each case, how do you achieve your goals?

Design and Usability

How does your site design contribute to the end goal? With regards to user experience, what do you feel takes priority – enabling visitors to get to where they need to be as quickly as possible, or to provide an enjoyable experience. Or both? And how do you go about achieving this?

How much do you feel design contributes towards the overall user experience? Would you prefer a site that is easy to navigate and view, with well written copy and clear structure but features a minimal or unattractive design? Or would you rather a beautiful looking site with fancy dynamic functionality and gimmicks, but ‘makes you think’ a more? What about a balance of the two. How do you feel you can work to create a website that is fantastically well structured and presented, whilst revealing some tasty eye-candy?

Measuring success

How do you measure your site’s success? What do you determine to be ‘success‘? Site traffic? Perhaps a deeper look at your site’s analytis; what do you feel takes precedence? Length of visit, repeat visits, countires visited from, pure volume of traffic? How do these statistics vary depending on your site’s purpose? Perhaps you feel the best measure of your site’s success is more organic than statistical – the comments you receive, RSS or email subscribers, contact form feedback or a combination of the lot.

What do you feel is more important; your visitors experience or the site stats and revenue made?

I want your opinions

Please take the time out to comment below. This post isn’t about me or Redswish, I want to know what other people think. Get your site URL in there to get some coverage. I’ll be summing up everyone’s responses in an article in a few weeks.

Seriously, you don’t need an expert to optimize your website for better search engine rankings. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), after all, is not rocket science. It is something you can learn and do it yourself – all it takes is some serious readings and hard work.

However, there is something we need to know before we start any real SEO work – the direction of our entire SEO campaign – What we are trying to achieve? What are our targeted keywords? Who are our competitors? That led us to the most important preparation work before any SEO campaign get started – keyword research.

Keyword research is crucial as it acts like a compass for your website or blog. A proper keyword research reveals the supply and demand trends in your industries thus giving general idea on which keyword you should focus on.

In brief, here is how you can do a keyword research:

• Get a list of related keywords using Google Keyword Tool
• Search each keyword to check how many websites turned out on the search engine result page (SERP) – this fits in as the number of supplies.
• Websites topping the SERP are your major competitors, study them well.
• To learn what are the demands, check number of searches for each keyword using keyword tools.
• Tool suggestion for keyword research: Word Tracker and Keyword Discovery – these two are my favourites.

Well, now you have a rough idea on your competition. The smart approach is to be a big fish in a small/average pond – for starters, you should focus your work on keywords with moderate demands and low competition.

Besides supply and demand, keyword research also offers valuable information for your web designs. Take example that you are selling shoes online, I am sure you’ll have questions like: What are the popular brands searched online? How shoes should be categorized – based on brand, occasion, or sizes?

All these can be answered as you run down the keyword research work. You’ll see searches come in based on brands, like ‘DC shoes’, ‘jordan shoes’, ‘nike shoes’; in the same time, searchers are also looking for shoes for different activities or occasions, like ‘ballet shoes’, ‘safety shoes’, ‘bowling shoes’, ‘prom shoes’, and so on.

By the end of your research work, you should be able to generate a list of target keywords. And now it’s the time to focus your SEO work on them. To get started, here are the 10 key elements that will improve your blog or website’s SEO quality immediately. 10 key elements that improve your website SEO quality immediately:

1. Index-able and Keyword-rich URL

The power of a keyword rich URL is often overlooked by bloggers and webmasters. In case you have yet to registered your domain name, try include your primary keywords in your domain; while for those who are already running a website, a keyword rich URL (example: abc.com/keyword) still helps a lot. One might complains that domain name with keywords faces branding problems and hard to be remembered; but that’s the dilemma every webmaster/blogger has to face.

Also, a good SEO practice is to avoid complicated dynamic URL that is hard to be indexed. Try limit your URL to 2 – 3 variables, excessive usage of ?, $, &, +, % characters as well as cgi-bin redirect will only do you harm.

2. A reliable web hosting

Website with poor uptime will never rank high on search engines. Let’s imagine that you are the search engine, how would ranking a down website on top of your search result page looks like? Awfully bad, don’t you think? Hence, hosting your website on a reliable web hosts – dedicated or shared, is very crucial.

To pick up the right web host, you can always hang around reputable hosting forums like WebHostingTalk.com or you can read my personal hosting reviews here.

3. Keyword-rich title and heading tags

A keyword-rich page title is as crucial as a keyword-rich URL for a few reasons.

One, a keyword-rich title tells the search engine bots what the page is about thus grouping your webpage into the right category; second, most search engines will bold your keywords in title whenever that particular keyword is searched. Common sense, the bolding effect will definitely draw extra attention from the searchers and thus, brings more clicks into your website/blog.

Heading tags (example <h1></h1>) is hard to be missed in old times. Not now anymore. As more and more websites are built solely on blogging software like Typepad and WordPress, heading tags are often put in the wrong use.

Take Wordpress (WP) templates for example, WP themes designers often use heading tags for sidebar titles without relevant keywords (example: Achieve, Categories) which bring no SEO value at all. To make sure your blog is well SEO-ed, one top thing to do is to remove or modify these headings into keyword-rich headings.

4. Alt tag on images

In term of SEO, putting descriptive alt attributes with your image places additional relevant text to your source code. Search engines like this and the more relevant text you have the better chances you get to rank higher.

As an additional benefit, a descriptive image alt tag helps users to understand your image when it fails to load.

5. Proper structured internal linking

Search engines pay a lot of attention to links – both internal and external. As internal links are those that can be controlled by you, make sure your website internal linking is proper structured and filled with relevant descriptive keywords. A plain anchor text like ‘click here’ and ‘read more’ are not clever; ‘click here for more Jordan shoes’ and ‘read more about ballet shoes’ are.

For website owners, make sure there are plenty enough of internal links pointing to your primary pages; for bloggers, mentioned and linked to your previous blogpost whenever it’s appropriate, this give extra link juice to your previous blogpost (hence better rankings) plus it enables your readers to catch up what they missed.

6. Inbound links

Link development is an inevitable process if you want your website to rank high. The keypoint, however, is not to obtain links blindly from spammy websites and directories. Always emphasize quality on top of quantity when you’re building links.

There are wide options for your link building campaign: from submitting your sites to reputable directories to asking for a link exchange; from buying text link ads to writing guest blog post in your industries – some of these methods can be risky (of search engine’s filter and bans) and some are not. What you need to do is to pick a series of method you feel comfortable with and pour some sweat in the link building campaign.

7. XML sitemap

XML sitemaps is used for search engine bots indexing. It runs as a list of all pages and posts along with related information like priority of each page and the date of creation. These elements help search engine bots to crawl your websites/blogs as well as learning the importance level of each page.

While XML sitemap is not a must for a website to rank high, it is however good practice for web and blog owners to have it on site.

8. WWW/non-WWW Canonical Issue

Originally, all websites built can be viewed in two versions: the WWW and the non-WWW version. In normal cases, the search engines should be able to recognize the issue and rank the websites accordingly but occasionally it fails. This led to serious problem where websites are penalized (especially on Google) due to content duplication. Even if there’s no penalty imposed, the web page indexed twice will have hard time to rank high as the back links are (PR/anchor text) shared over two web pages.

The solution of this problem is simple. One, you can login to Google Webmaster Tools and tell them which version (WWW or non-WWW) of the website is preferred. Alternatively, a simple 301 redirect code in your .htaccess file is sufficient to solve the problem.

Example code:

To have your website in WWW version

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.example\.com $
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.example.com/$1 [R=301,L]

To have your website in non-WWW version

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^ example\.com$
RewriteRule (.*) http:// example.com/$1 [R=301,L]

9. Robots.txt

Robots.txt simply tells search engine bots what to crawl and what not to. It might not help that much in website rankings but it prevents irrelevant objects to be related to your website – which is good for your website to look focus (in search engine eyes) and professional.

10. Content is king

Users do not search for fun, they search for information and solution to a problem. If your website or blog does not offer what the users want, they will move away. As what had been widely covered by Nathan’s post about increasing and maitaining blog traffics, you should know attracting traffics via SEO is just the beginning; the key point of having a successful website is always having an informative website that solves human’s needs.

About the author

Jerry Low is the guy behind Web Hosting Secret Revealed. He offers unbiased hosting reviews to help make your decision easier. In case you are looking for a web host, why not start reading his recommendations – Hostgator now?

Content is King

Without a doubt the most essential method of both bringing in and retaining high levels of traffic is through constant generation of high quality, unique content. Regardless of whatever search techniques are used to generate visitors to your site, if they’re not greeted by useful information and interesting articles they will leave and most probably not return.

It’s all too easy to take a step back and go to another site in a few mouse clicks, so it’s essential that you provide a service or a level of quality that keeps visitors at your site, and ensures their return. Blogs are one of the most dedicated methods of bringing in traffic, but the real aim is to retain visitors, obtain repeat custom, subscribers, recommendations, inbound links and build up a community where your site’s visitors are engaged and compelled to provide their own input.

Blog posts are unlike other forms of written literature. Web users scan pages, so it’s important that the useful points are easy to find. Keep paragraphs short, use bullet points and lists,  blockquotes, close-captioning and  other visual techniques to keep your copy interesting. Large blocks of boring copy will not get read.

Don’t forget to utilise the power of keywords within your posts. Consider what people will be searching for, what are the central points of an article and what words and phrases will stand out against other similar sites. Use visual keys to identify keywords. But don’t overdo it. Don’t sacrifice the quality of your copy for the sake keyword spamming.

Getting people to your site

• Promote articles through 3rd party sites. In the case of a sports blog this could be other sports blogs and websites, sports news aggregators, general news sites, directories, showcase sites etc.
• Ensure that the blog URL is on all print and stationary and in the signature of emails. It’s a basic, obvious point but essential nonetheless.
• Use comment sections on other blogs, forums and sites to promote your blog. DO NOT SPAM. Reply genuinely, but include your website URL in your signature. Most blog comment areas will also use your display name as a link to your site as well.
• Guest authoring. This works 2 ways. Writing guest posts for other blogs can sometimes be more effective then a post on your own blog. This is especially useful when trying to get your blog onto it’s feet and raise it’s profile. Similarly, other writers creating content for your site helps to maintain post frequency when ideas and news are in short supply, and serves to offer variety to the tone of your blog.
• Promote your site and blog through traditional SEO methods such as Google and MSN webmastering. Ensure that your site’s code is clean and easily searchable and acknowledge basic SEO standards such as including ‘title’ and ‘alt’ information.
• Use obvious post titles. Do not keyword spam your post titles but ensure that they accurately describe the article and will be easily searchable. Also make sure the post titles are displayed in the page title on each unique post page.
• Advertising and affiliates. Buy inbound links or swap reciprocal links with other high-ranking websites.
• Observe other high-traffic blogs in your niche. What methods are they applying to continue to attract and maintain this level of visitors? Take ideas and inspiration from similar blogs and websites.
• Use ping services like Pingomatic and Wordpress plugins to notify other sites when you’ve created new posts.

Keeping people interested

• RSS and ATOM feeds, newsletter subscriptions, even SMS updates. Make it easy for visitors to subscribe to your site. Getting visitors to give your email address while signing up to your newsletter will help to build up a database of potential clients.
• Email campaigns. Build up databases of email addresses through subscribers to your blog newsletter, existing clients, purchase lists of email addresses, use email addresses from commenters on your blog etc. Then send out regular email newsletters with the latest articles and company news. Encourage people to subscribe, advertise competitions or products.
• Ensure that your site is usable. Regardless of whether your blog contains high quality content or not – if it’s difficult to read or find – it will be useless. Clean, usable and aesthetically pleasing sites will hold your visitors for longer and help to promote their return.
• Serial Content. Creating series’ of posts, daily/weekly/monthly features, strings of similar-style content, lists, interviews and unique ideas keep visitors coming back for more.
• Update regularly. Your subscribers and regular visitors will constantly be thirsty for new news and articles. If you can’t provide this – they will go elsewhere. However it’s also essential not to overpost as this can overwhelm your readers and scare them away. The ideal number of posts to make per day or week is entirely dependent on the niche and topic of a blog, the size of it’s readership, the length and value of the posts and the manpower behind the blog. Researching and discovering the ideal post publishing frequency takes time and constant monitoring.
• Post Publishing Consistency. Regular visitors will grow to expect and anticipate the frequency of your articles. It’s essential that once you’ve decided on an ideal publishing frequency that you stick to it.
• Blogs are social. Utilise the power of social networking to build your community and promote interaction. Use polls, allow users to submit their own ideas and news, pictures, even audio and video. Allow users to create accounts and profiles.
• Provide services and products that the competition doesn’t. Blogs aren’t just about content and posts. Use your interface to promote other products, provide free downloads, audio or video content, games and offer live feedback and real-time chat solutions.
• Consider mobile devices. With an increase of smart phones and in particular the iPhone – more users are accessing websites through their phones. Don’t block this percentage of your traffic – ensure your blog is usable on mobile devices.
• iPhone apps. If your blog is updated often or contains useful news that needs to be accessed on the fly – look at building an iPhone app that pull in your latest posts and site content. Sites like last.fm, ign.com, twitter.com and facebook are already taking advantage of this.
• Gimmicks. Free prize draws, competitions, monthly or weekly features both attract new traffic and entice current visitors to interact more.

To summarise

Your blog will succeed if it’s providing useful information to people. Good blogs generate traffic because they provide continuous new content all the time, they retain that traffic because visitors enjoy coming back for more and it’s given to them.

All blogs work differently; they attract different types and levels of visitors and are designed for different purposes, whether that be to make money, advertise products, raise profiles or just rant or express an opinion. However the principles behind all successful blogs are generally the same:

• Provide high quality, unique content.
• Ensure your site is easy to use and navigate.
• Employ traditional SEO techniques as well.
• Look after your readers – your current community is just, if not more important than new visitors.
• Research and analyse your market, ensure that your blog tailors to this market in every aspect: tone of voice, appearance, topic, usability and in SEO criteria.

Cuil approaches search slightly differently from Google. Firstly, search results are displayed in a magazine format as opposed to a list. But their real USP is that they don’t collect user data as Google does. This could be a point that sways many people, especially in light of the recent focus on the amount and methods Google use to gather data on it’s users.

But do we need Cuil? Search results differ from Google’s, naturally, but Google has always been there to provide a service that works whilst giving even more in return. It has advanced far beyond it’s original purpose and is now an integral part of the internet. I can check my search history to remember how I reached a certain page or image, check my emails, see how many times I’ve visited a particular site through Google, webmaster and analyse my site’s stats and much more.

So how can Cuil even claim to rival Google? It can’t, it can only rival it’s search functionality, and as far as I knew there was nothing about Google’s search that required rivaling.

Personally I feel that Cuil… just isn’t. The search algorithms may blow a hole in the internet – yes the results returned are very concise. So are Google’s. That’s it. The user interface is ugly, I just feel the blue, black and grey does not work. The name seems like some half-arsed late attempt to jump on the ‘web 2.0 misspelled word’ bandwagon (even though it’s apparently derived from the Gaelic for ‘knowledge’ and ‘hazel’), and the claims that ‘it does a better and more comprehensive job of indexing information online’ are quite bold. And regardless of if it’s true – does it matter if no-one uses the service?

But let’s not be hasty. I will continue to dabble with Cuil, to discover if there are any true benefits. With such a huge web index and a fantastic team of ex-Googlers managing – there’s definitely potential. But the real test will be whether it still stands in 2/3 years time.

For more information on Cuil check BBC Tech News or of course – Cuil itself!

Well I’m waiting… ‘anxiously’!

Here’s a quick excerpt:

So when a blog grows and expands, it’s easy for older posts to get lost and unseen. Sure they’re still there, archived or categorized, but once your post count starts to rise above the lofty heights of 100 posts… chances are your old work, regardless of how well-written or useful, is going to attract less traffic from either external or internal sources.

The importance of internal blog navigation cannot be underestimated. It may seem obvious but a lack of categorization, clear navigation and tidy layout can have massive negative implications on a site’s usability, and therefore readership.

So go and check it out for yourself, but don’t forget to come back!

A video from Tech Crunch shows a user interface being tested, demonstrating new features Google are looking to integrate into their search including the ability to vote results up and down, as well as removing them from your own results list.

Other possible features include the ability to add comments about websites. How this would be moderated, I’m unsure. The concept sounds great, but whether a comments facility would be beneficial on a search results page remains to be seen. I personally very rarely need to try any more than the first 3/4 results to discover what I’m looking for. I don’t think I’d even consider looking at comments.

The question arises of whether this will be beneficial to the user and a valid improvement to Google’s services, or another method of gathering user information and keeping tabs on us. An ever-growing paranoia surrounding the ‘Big Brother’ concept is only spurred on by news as the above.

With social networking becoming an integral part of every day life for many people, search results kept on record, bank account details, medical information, personal pictures, documents and details held on numerous computer servers all around the world by many different companies; the threat of identity theft or personal information being leaked becomes a very worrying subject.

I don’t doubt that Google’s research and testing is solely to provide a consistently better service. However, with the amount of personal information stored with Google – it’s easy to see why some people become more and more paranoid by this.

What’s your views?

Feel free to leave comments either here or there!

But how reliable is Pagerank really? Please excuse my language but I find it to be f**king useless. The reason I’m just mentioning this is because, after months, Google seems to have thrown out some page rank around the web. But it’s so inconclusive. Some of my websites that are attracting ten times the amount of traffic as others are getting half the page rank credit and some sites that I’ve done no SEO on are getting an initial rating of 3 or 4.

How is that a useful guide to Google’s measure of your site’s importance? A lot of professional SEOs (which I far from claim myself to be) will probably mention that they’ve never trusted Pagerank, whereas some people swear by it.

But for me, I’m sick of it. It gets updated now about twice a year and is so vague it’s useless. I’m sticking to Analytics!

Oh how the traditionalists scream! I do however see art in a lot of things – music, interior design, architecture, fashion etc. Whether you agree or not – the fact is that people do disagree on what makes a good website.

So how do you judge a website? There’s a lot to take in – the design, functionality, content, usability, accessibility, marketing and traffic, what services the site provides and how it caters for it’s target audience. Although these factors all feature in my assumptions and perceptions of websites, I also often make simple snap judgements.

With classic art – if I look at a piece and like it, that’s it – I just like it. It’s the same with music – I like 99% of the music I hear, but i don’t know why – I just do. I don’t tend to categorise by genre or artist, if I listen to the music and it appeals to me, then I like it and that’s it. To some extent it’s similar with websites.

But how do others judge sites? Well I’m now going to be lazy and refer the article that initially sparked this post. This snippet is taken from Pete Prestipino’s article “How Experts Review Websites” in the Website Magazine blog. You can see the article in it’s home here. I felt it would be more honorable to honestly quote it instead of plagiarising and passing it off as my own ideas:

 

How Experts Review Websites

I’m fortunate to be able to review hundreds of websites each day. Learning from the successes and failures of others is important to the success of my own current and future endeavors and equally important to readers of Website Magazine. But on what criteria should a website be judged? While there are no hard and fast rules to what makes one website “better” than another, when you look at professional and novice websites day in and day out, you end up getting a pretty good handle on what is going to work and what’s not.

Never one to cast the first virtual stone at the hard work of designers and web professionals, here are a few guidelines that I personally use each and every day to assess the overal design of a Web presence:

- Is the Design “pleasing?”
This is completely subjective, but most of us know when a design is pleasing. Mismatched colors and a variety of fonts only cause many to simply back away and perhaps never come back. Not only ugly, such sites look unprofessional and cause feelings of mistrust. How do you know if your website design is pleasing? Ask someone without a vested interest in you business or whom you trust and chances are good you’ll get a honest answer.

- Is the website “innovative?”
I am a proponent of using publically available templates for website design, whether they are from sources like OSWD or those that are found individually and used for WordPress blogs. When experts look at thousands of websites and notice that 10 or 20 feature the exact the same design, there is simply no way you’ll appear innovative, regardless of how innovative the idea or content being presented.

- Is the content “appealing?”
Here’s another tricky one. Content is typically appealing only to specific groups. Some of us are interested in benefits, others are interested in features. How does a designer satisfy both goals? Images assist greatly in developing “appeal.” If you know the audience, you’ll be able to find an image that reflects their demographic.

- Is the website “easy-to-use?”
There’s nothing more discouraging than website features that don’t work. Actually, scratch that – in fact there is. It’s the complicated, endless stream of navigation that turns off users (who will never return) more than it is broken links. The reason is that Web experts, just like consumers, are forgiving – but only to a certain point. Fail to explain how something works on the site or force detailed registration to access information and you’ll elicit some negative feelings with your potential customers. You need to identify your audience and give them what they want with as few clicks and hassles as possible.

- Does the website “meet it’s own goals?”
This is perhaps the most important point to consider when assessing a website. Often Web professional think more is better when, in reality, less is more. Not forcing users to make multiple decisions will benefit your bottom line. Have 10 goals for your website’s landing page? Cut it down to three and the conversion rate on all will be much better and earnings much higher. Don’t make users think – they won’t, they’ll just leave.

If you feel Pete’s missed anything there please let me know and I’ll tell him off! Seriously though, as Pete states himself, he has the opportunity to view and judge many sites a day – he has a good understanding of what the pro’s look for. Of course everyone’s opinions differ.

Personally I dislike most of the sites I build. I’m not trying to be humble. After a while I just tend to go off them, even my personal sites. I think it’s possibly because I spend so much time building a site that by the time it’s finished and running smoothly – I’m just sick of seeing it! But unfortunately I don’t have the time to redesign my blog and portfolio every month so I learn to live with it. If I could, I’d probably be on version 18 of www.nathanbeck.co.uk by now!