Design and search engines: Readability & coding

December 8, 2007 | Leave a Comment

Continuing our discussion of search engine friendly design considerations I offer you part 5 of a 6 part series on SEO friendly design:

Readability

SEO is important but with a little style and effort you can get the job done without compromising the “vibe” of your site. Presentation is everything and people do not visit or link to sites that are hard to read and do not please the eye. Read more


Posted by Christopher Auman | Filed Under SEO Training 

Search Engine Optimization and Design: Text and Page Elements

December 8, 2007 | Leave a Comment

Continuing our discussion of search engine friendly design considerations I offer you part 4 of a 6 part series on SEO friendly design:

Text design and page elements

When designing the text, information elements and links on your page consider the color, size and placement on the page. When I say this, I mean consider them visually and in the code. Many people consider this part of the process a “designer only” department but it’s not.

For example, your page titles should always be labeled with an H1 tag. The H1 tag not only presents the title of your page in a larger font but it also tells search engines that this text has a lot to do with the subject of the page. Most of the time it actually IS the subject of the page summed up in a couple words. Placing your target keywords within an H1 on the page will get you a long way to ranking well so make sure that your page titles are coded properly.

Consider laying out additional sections with headers as h2 and h3 tags to call importance to them as well.

You can further bold important keywords throughout your text where possible too. This is a good way to mix in similar but different combinations of key phrases and call attention to them.

On a pure usability note, this is also a preferred way to call out important points in your text because studies have shown that the majority of people who read on the internet scan information. By calling out important points it will add to their user experience and benefit.

Text links on the page should contain your keywords and colored with a contrasting color from the background of your page. Link text is very important to search engines so fill your links with important keywords instead of linking to information at the end of a sentence.

I should also mention here that search engines are paying attention to proper sentence structure and spelling more and more. Sites that have high quality, technically correct content will most definitely rank higher. At the most basic level this tells them that this is quality content. I don’t claim to be an English major but I definitely try to proof my writing for spelling and do my best to craft sentences that read clearly. I don’t always succeed but my point is that you should try because it matters.

Visually pleasing = a happy, dedicated reader = a “fan” that links

This is the area where most leave it to their designers but in all fairness there are parts of the design process that truly help with SEO and have nothing directly to do with what the search engines think of your content.

Making your site visually enjoyable and easy to read will immediately show that you care enough about your site to devote a decent amount of time and dollars to the presentation. This will help with your overall respect and trustability and users will return and more importantly they’ll link to you.

The part about your site being visually enjoyable is a given. I know from personal experience that I tend to go back to sites that I enjoy working within. It’s the same reason I like working on a stylish, clean desk. I might even go to a site that’s less useful just because I enjoy the entire experience, not just the information that I get from the site.

This all contributes indirectly to SEO. The more people that like your site, the more they’ll link to you.

The layout and placement of elements on your page is important.

Where you place elements on the page helps to draw the eye to where you want it to go. For example, you might have an RSS icon or bookmark on the page but it appears at the top of your page and not where someone is likely to see it when the time is right. You might have a signup for your newsletter (which is important for staying top-of-mind with your readers so they continue to come back and continue to link) and it’s not highly visible or eye catching.

Make sure that you decide what’s most important on your page.

Everyone likes recognition but your pretty mug on the page or authorship tagline is not nearly as important as the RSS subscription link or the link to bookmark or signup. So take some time and weigh all these elements in the design process. Make the right decision that will help people get the most of your site and ultimately bookmark, revisit your site many times and link, link, LINK to your content.


Posted by Christopher Auman | Filed Under SEO Training 

Design for SEO: Organization and research

December 8, 2007 | Leave a Comment

Continuing our discussion of search engine friendly design considerations I offer you part 2 of a 6 part series on SEO friendly design:

Take the time to organize

In addition to a solid system of organization for your SEO campaign, a good “best practice” is to spend a lot of time organizing your content and categories before starting your design so your information architecture is sound. How your content is labeled, grouped and worded is very important. Keyword research is an important–and necessary–part of this (as we all know) and probably deserves a line item of it’s own but we’ll include it here. (More on this later)

As a designer myself I tend to dive directly into the creative process and mold things into a workable solution. I’m definitely not a planner and sometimes have to take a step back and put pencil to paper and think through things a bit. Actually, for large sites it might be necessary to spend just as much time in the planning and organization stage as you do with the creative phase.

You must take the time to think through how you’re going to get people (and the search engines) to your content and plan for changes and growth. A properly planned site will be much more user friendly and far more crawlable by the engines.

Properly planning how you’re going to code the pages too will bring to the surface any potential issues before you duplicate pages. If you have a knowledge of SEO though you’re probably already aware of the need for each page to have it’s own page title, the fact that headlines on the page should be labeled with H1 tags (only use one per page!) in your CSS file, etc.

Lastly, spend time on keyword research before you start the design. A link on your site navigation might look cool and sleek as “services” but if you’re interested in SEO and the rank of your site you’ll do some research to find out that “seo services” is a fairly popular search. Making this small change is an obvious decision for the bright and ambitious web designer and one that would’ve been missed without a little planning.

Spend time researching your keywords before you start thinking about “design”

As previously mentioned, one of the most important aspects of an optimized website design is to take the time to complete thorough keyword research so you’re making informed decisions about the text elements on the page. Most designers and their clients start out with the “look” of the site and then, when it’s all finished, polished and proofed they look to a company to optimize their website.

Well, obviously this could be disastrous and highly time consuming if the designer has missed the mark.

The proper keywords might not fit in the nav bar. The proper keywords might reflow text so it looks unprofessional or unattractive. Worse yet, the client and designer might not even know why their site is not ranking well. The client will point fingers at the designer and say “I have all kinds of content about my product on the site, why is it not ranking?”. Chances are they’ve completely missed the mark by being way too general, or just writing content that sounds great but doesn’t contain the perfect golden phrases that bring real traffic.

Give yourself a chance at being found by doing a little bit of time in “the lab” where you’ll gain real insight into the thoughts and needs of the people that are searching for you. 99% of the time you’ll be surprised about the results. You might be the most knowledgeable person in the world regarding your product or service but I’ll bet the farm on the fact that you don’t know if the majority of your potential customers search for “Hire affordable seo consultant” or “funky plural product name cheap”. A real world example might be “Find seo consultant” or “Affordable Windsor Newton acrylic paints”.

When you’re dealing with product and services on the web you’ll be blown away by the amount of combinations and variations of phrases that people will use to find you.

Using the right words throughout your site design during the planning phase will most likely determine if your site sinks or swims.

Properly integrating these carefully selected key phrases into your design will also improve the user experience of your site visitors and it will save you headaches down the road if you can plan for the proper placement of these keyphrases in your design from the beginning.


Posted by Christopher Auman | Filed Under SEO Training 

Design for SEO: Crawlability and Cross linking

December 7, 2007 | Leave a Comment

Continuing our discussion of search engine friendly design considerations I offer you part 1 of a 6 part series on SEO friendly design:

Pay attention to the crawlability of your site.

This process is also referred to as web crawling or spidering and it includes designing your navigation so it’s easy for the search engines to index, cross linking throughout the site and the construction of a comprehensive site map.

Crawlability

Crawlability is essentially how well a search engine can find all the pages on your website. It’s also the engine’s ability to properly document what the pages are all about.

One of the biggest problems that sites face in this regard is the use of graphic images as navigation and (worse yet) informational content as graphic images on the page. Yes, back in the day I too was guilty of this massive SEO blunder. If you have any interest in ranking well in the search engines you have to be polite and guide the search engines and give them easy access to all of your content or they’ll just snub you.

Think of search engine spiders as young children that need strong guidance or a rich snob that’s crazy busy who let’s the door slam in your face after a meeting. Search engines are not going to stop and ask questions. They take what you give them and they move on.

The first step in the process is to build your navigation links so they can be easily followed. Text links on the homepage are obviously best but you can use graphic images if they’re properly labeled with alt tags.

You can also help the engines find their way around by including text links in your page footer to the main sections of your site. (More on this later) This practice is also an added bonus for content heavy sites where readers end up at the bottom of a long article and need navigation to move back to the main section or another section of interest.

Cross Linking

Cross linking or deep linking will help you direct search engines to content that might not be linked from your homepage as a top level category.

An example of this is the article you’re reading. It might be featured on the homepage but eventually it will be mixed among all the other articles on this site so it will help if you can link to it and reference it from other articles. You can simply write your content as you usually would and include inline links to the article like this one on the semantic web.

The goal here regarding design is to improve your user’s experience and add value to your content by linking to additional sources of information.

Linking in your content will also help guide your user through your site and help them discover other nuggets of information that they might have missed without the link. Obviously the same theory stands regarding the search engines. Deep linking helps search spiders find their way to all the great content on your site so you ensure that they’re thorough.

Sitemaps

The last thing you can do is build a sitemap (or site map). A sitemap is essentially one page that is organized in a systematic way to present a link to every page on your site. This can be cumbersome for large sites and it shouldn’t be necessary to link directly to every single post or page.

The goal is to make every page on your site 2-3 clicks from the homepage. So if the spider can get to the homepage, link to the sitemap, continue to a main section and then find a deep link to an article you’ve done your job.

Sitemaps can be broken up into multiple pages as well, if the need arises. The most important point is that the search engine spiders can find the pages from the homepage within a click or two.


Posted by Christopher Auman | Filed Under SEO Training 

What is a blog? Getting started with blogging

December 6, 2007 | 1 Comment

I had a client contact me today about starting a blog and she asked me a series of questions that turned out to be a great primer for those considering starting a blog. I love blogging and I believe it can be an amazing tool for SEO and website promotion. If you’re considering getting started in the Blogosphere, the information below should be a quick primer to get you on your way.

Question: What are the relative merits of a professionally designed blog over using the freeware that’s available? My boss is going to want to know why he should pay for this when we can, in theory, do it for free.

Free is good but there are many reasons why you should pay if this is a serious endeavor. First, the blog can be presented within your existing site design if you use software like Wordpress on your own server. You can’t do this with free services like Blogger or the hosted version of Wordpress. Read more


Posted by Christopher Auman | Filed Under Internet Marketing 

How to write a great pay-per-click ad

December 6, 2007 | Leave a Comment

If you are just starting out with PPC advertising you’re probably wondering what separates a good ad from a bad ad - essentially an ad that makes money for the advertiser vs. one that takes money and drags you down and eventually puts you out of business. Below is a Quick Start summary of the core requirements for writing a great pay-per-click ad.

Take the time to customize an ad for each keyword.

The top PPC engines allow you to customize your ad for each keyword/key phrase so why not develop ad copy that’s specific to those words? If you sell pet supplies and the keyword you’re found under is “fish bowls” you should definitely customize your ad so it catches the eye of the visitor and entices them to buy. You want to be presented as the ultimate fish bowl supplier, not just another site selling pet supplies. Read more


Posted by Christopher Auman | Filed Under Pay-Per-Click Training 

The current state of meta tags

December 5, 2007 | 1 Comment

Back in the day, meta tags were all the rage. Webmasters spent a lot of time crafting the perfect tags for the headers of their page that included keywords, descriptions and all sorts of other fancy tags that ultimately accomplished very little. Today, it’s an ongoing SEO urban myth that you need keyword meta tags on your pages.The truth is that some rogue search engines still use tags like the keyword tag but overall the engines that we really care about ignore them completely. Google has confirmed this. Read more


Posted by Christopher Auman | Filed Under SEO News and Tidbits 

SEO friendly design

December 4, 2007 | 2 Comments

seo friendly design graphicSearch Engine Optimization is not all about links and keywords as some people might think. This is obviously a very important part of the puzzle though (as are many other elements). What a lot of people overlook when optimizing their site is the need to properly “design” their site for seo and that includes such strange and bizarre concepts as organization before you put mouse to pixel, consistency and attention to the code behind the scenes that visitors never see.

I’ve been doing this for many years and I’ve learned a few things. Some of them are important and some are not so important. But one thing I have learned is that SEO has a lot more to do with design than people usually admit. I even forget this rule myself sometimes–or–maybe it’s so ingrained in the way that I work that things just happen automatically during the process.

In this six part series of posts I’d like to take a look at a few of the design considerations you should make when you’re learning seo friendly design concepts. I hope we can touch on at least a couple nuggets that you haven’t thought of before.

1) Crawlability and cross linking

2) Organization and research

3) Navigation

4) Text design and Page Elements

5) Readability and coding issues

6) Your goals and consistency


Posted by Christopher Auman | Filed Under SEO Training 

Duplicate content (good or bad?)

December 3, 2007 | Leave a Comment

For writers such as myself it makes sense that I want as many people as possible to read what I have to say. The first way to do this is to get my site and my content ranked well on Google for valid searches that I write about. The second way is to syndicate my content and share it across many partner sites in the hope that someone will stumble upon it, read it, follow the link to my main site in the footer and possibly bookmark and continue to read my main body of content.

I’ve heard some discussion about duplicate content lately and I wanted to set the record straight here about what Google thinks about a writer distributing content to other sites. The issue here is this - Google does NOT want their users to do a search and get links to the same content in the results. They want a varied list of options so the user can choose and get as many links as possible to multiple sources. This makes so much sense in my mind that I’m surprised that I had to even research it. Read more


Posted by Christopher Auman | Filed Under SEO News and Tidbits 

Tidbits and Advice 12.1.07 (Press Release SEO)

December 1, 2007 | 1 Comment

Is it December already? Man, I can’t believe we’re almost through another year within the wild, wonderful world of SEO and the web. Many, many things have changed this year but there is one thing that hasn’t changed - you’re ability to effectively promote your website by optimizing a properly crafted press release. In the words of Sarah Skerik - Vice President, Distribution Services - PR Newswire:

Remember that SEO is really the art and science of being found by your audience. For that reason, you have to use the language they use when searching for or discussing topics related to your product or industry. Put more simply - don’t use jargon!  

This week a friend of mine that writes a blog about help, coaching and inspiration for small business owners sent out his first press release and he was pleasantly surprised to get a mention on the Inc.com site about one of his latest offerings about avoiding common business startup mistakes. I know it must have been a very exciting step for his publication and all it took was a well crafted press release. For a quick rundown of SEO press release services and advice check out the link here by Lee Odden over at the Online Marketing Blog. A quick scan reveals the following important tidbits:

  • Write a pithy (80 character or less,) descriptive headline that includes important keywords
  • Use important keywords in the headline, and then again in the lead (and throughout your message)
  • Incorporate links from your targeted keywords in the press release
  • Link your strategically important search keywords to deep relevant pages in your site
  • Use keyword links throughout your text
  • create appropriate deep pages (aka landing pages)
  • Think of your press release as creating a mini web page
  • Insert a company logo for branding and embed photos, graphics and video links
  • Add an audio link such as a podcast or product announcement

Posted by Christopher Auman | Filed Under SEO News and Tidbits 

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