It’s been, like, forever, since my last post in this series – feels like time to pick it up again and finish the series…
The suggestions in this post are focused on the “behind-the-scenes” elements of your site – to the untrained eye they may not be visible/obvious.
This post definitely sways towards the geek end of the spectrum (just a fair warning if that’s not your thing). However, even if you’re in management, it helps to understand these things for when you’re briefing your tech team.
In the previous posts in this series I’ve focused a lot on the “conceptual” aspects of SEO – the non-technical things that can make a big difference to your SEO efforts. Many of these aspects have other practical and usability benefits.
Over the next few posts I’m turning to some of the more technically-oriented things that you can do to optimise for search engines. These posts definitely sway towards the geek end of the spectrum (just a fair warning if that’s not your thing). However, even if you’re in management, it helps to get an overview on such matters if only for when you’re briefing your tech team.
Today’s post focuses on technical matters that are visible to your participants (i.e. they impact how your users access the site). Future posts will look at some of the behind-the-scenes things you can do to assist search engines.
As before, many of these tips are best practices for other reasons, but they all certainly provide SEO benefits as well. Some techniques will have a bigger impact than others, and how much impact a particular technique may have on rankings is largely unknown (as far as I can tell) as most search engine algorithms are closely guarded secrets. So even if you can’t apply all these techniques, it’s still worth incorporating as many as you can into your site.
So, you have a good understanding of your participants, have worked out a structure and site design that meets their needs, and now you’re ready to write the content of your site – the copy.
While many of the principles of good copywriting apply in the offline and online world, there are a few tips for copywriting that are specific to on-screen reading and search engines.
Over the jump I’ll review some of the things I’ve learnt about writing effective copy for the web.
One of the nice things about legitimate SEO approaches is that “best practices” for websites are also best practices for search engines. Making information findable for your visitors, also makes it more accessible, and more useful, for search engines.
Over the jump I’ll expand on a few techniques that can help increase your site’s visibility to search engines.
Any successful SEO strategy starts with a key premise: that your website/blog/page has something of value to offer to your the people you want to motivate. Applying SEO techniques to a site that simply doesn’t meet their needs (or worse, a strategy that lacks an understanding of who they are) won’t really make a lot of difference.
Whether it be a blog or a web application that you’re building, knowing what value you provide (and what that means to the participants of your site) is a critical piece to the puzzle. While with a blog you may be able to get away with not going to great lengths to analyse your audience and traffic sources etc. some of these principles outlined over the jump can be useful.
I’ve had a couple of conversations with friends and clients over the past few months looking at Seach Engine Optimsation (SEO) and what that involves.
It probably doesn’t need to be stated, but search engines are the “first port of call” for many internet users, and usually represents a significant proportion of traffic to websites (in my experience anywhere between 30% and 80% of site referrals come from search engines).
Therefore it’s important to make your site as search engine friendly as possible.
SEO has received a bit of a bad rap because of some vendors’ attempts to “game” the system – that is use nefarious techniques to try to “trick” search engines into giving their sites higher ratings. However, there are a lot of things that we as practitioners (developers, producers, designers, content writers etc.) can do to help our clients achieve better rankings.
While I’m no SEO expert, I have picked up a lot of tips and techniques over time that I thought would be useful to jot down here in a series across the next week or so. The notes will take the form of a series, and will be tagged SEO to make them easier to find for future reference.
(Note: I’m going to focus on organic search results, not targeted search advertising such as Google AdWords)
The first thing I think worth mentioning is that SEO is not something that you can just “bolt on” at the end of a project. Aspects of SEO permeate many levels of a project – everything from information architecture (how a site is structured and information presented), search term and site analytics data analysis, copywriting (the content of your site), web publishing system choice, HTML coding, and more.
To my mind, the various facets of SEO can be broadly split into three categories:
Each is interelated – without certain technical capabilities, information architecture related SEO methods may not be possible. Similarly, without strong site architecture, copywriting methods are less effective.
Therefore a wholistic approach is required, from the beginning of a project to the end execution, to facilitate a strong SEO strategy.
In the coming posts I’ll expand on each of these and delve a little deeper into some of the techniques that can be employed.
In the next installment I’ll touch on what I think is the most critical aspect of SEO: creating something worth finding.
This is a little old now, but still worth making mention of. Jakob Nielsen, in his AlertBox column Reduce Bounce Rates: Fight for the Second Click, makes some good points, especially about the importance of search and the impact that has on homepage design.
He points out that while the homepage of a site is typically the single most visited page, it’s usually the content pages of a site, in aggregate, that get the most visits overall. This follows the principle of the Long Tail – and I’ve seen it with a number of sites I’ve worked on.
This is a reflection of the increasing power of search – visitors come to a site because a specific page has been returned in a search result. Jakob mentions that bounce rates from such visitors can be quite high, and he suggests some approaches for reducing them.
Specifically, and interestingly, Jakob singles out the home page as “the orienteering point for visitors who arrive through deep links and then decide to explore the site further.” This is something I hadn’t quite put my finger on, though it intuitively makes sense.
If I find a site that has some interesting content, I’ll have a quick look around the page to see if there’s launching points to other relevant information. The home page is often a place that I go to get a “100 foot high view” of the site – one method of determining if there’s anything else of interest there.
He also suggests, somewhat controversially, that ‘”Unique Vistors” must die’ – in other words: the metric of the sheer number of visitors to your site is not adequate to determine site success.
Given growing bounce rates, we must stop using “unique visitors” as a metric for site success. Site tourists who leave a site immediately ratchet up the unique visitor count, but don’t contribute long-term value.
Unique visitors, of course, do play a role in a balanced review of site statistics. But the point is well taken.
I think using this metric as the primary measure of site success is problematic for more than the reasons Jakob points out. In projects that I’ve been involved in where visitation rate is the primary “success” KPI, the projects have usually been too heavily swayed towards trying to get as many people – any old people – as possible to a site, rather than considering how to really focus on a core audience and engage those participants to achieve organisation goals (while/through fulfilling participant needs, of course).
In other words, the focus shifts to how many people are coming through the door, rather than getting the high-value folks coming through, and bringing their friends back with them.
The remainder of the article provides some useful segmentation ideas for determining the value of users and makes some simple suggestions that can help increase visitor follow-through.
The idea of providing links to related articles is a strong one, but surprisingly difficult with some Content Management Systems (CMS) to get good results with (especially while maintaining site performance). It’s actually one of the more tricky questions in content design – how to determine what’s “relevant” or “related”.
Amazon have a great system in place that uses purchasing data to present a “people who bought this also bought…” list – a fantastic method of getting people to another point in the site. While not everyone has Amazon’s resources at their disposal, it’s worth considering these kind of features when developing your site – and to look around at what options are available for your CMS.
And if you can create a few different options with this in mind, all the better. (Of course it’s important to not go overboard, lest we confuse our visitors entirely with a million and one options.)
This was one of the design goals with the newmatilda.com project that I worked on with Digital Eskimo. If you visit the home page or content pages, a lot of thought went into the various options that lead you to more content within this site.
Some of those listings are based on reader activity, others are based on relationship/relevance to the current article, others are completely random. In fact, one of the surprise elements of the design was just how interesting the “From the archives” section is on the home page.
The aim of this small panel was to expose a random article from the deep (5-year strong) archive of the newmatilda.com site. And I think it’s surprisingly effective at producing interesting results (although I don’t have metrics on what sort of impact the panel has on visitor flow).
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