WebDesign Bureau of Mauritius

A good number of SEOs must have found this title intriguing. Many would say: “What’s the point? Microsoft Bing might be catching up but Google IS the leader!” True enough. And another thing on that, we “advanced” Internet users are aware that Bing exists and getting hyped by the novelty of it (this doesn’t mean that it is better) but your average user, say your mom or your little brother, is still heads down on Google. This is why things will not or take time to change. I don’t think that we’ll soon be hearing: “I “binged” your name…”

This in no means supposes that Google is so sure about its position that it is just letting Microsoft be. Its my opinion that subtle stand up is being made as usual by Google. This must be the reason that Google is fortifying its position by showing how great it is on the search market. How? By overtly putting its business model forward. Illustration!

In the past Google showed its tools like this:

Strangely enough, since Bing started out, a new element found its way over on the .com site of Google. I don’t know if you’ve noticed it. Its a link showing you that you can discover the web with Google.

The landing page is also quite original as it is an optimised version of the Google products page with videos showing how the goods are so good actually. Not just a bunch of links.

To add up to all that, many of you must surely be aware that Yahoo! will also be launching its own analytics tool which sure looks tasty. This seems to have had a certain influence on the Google Analytics home page.

Put it on the back of the crisis or on that of strong, aggressive competition that is showing up on the search market but the big G is now working hard to counter the coming battles or even stiffle them. Do you have any opinion on that?

Ladies and gents. If you’re in any part of the professional web world and haven’t heard of Microsoft’s new search engine “Bing” then you’ve got no excuse, apart if you’ve been living under a rock for the past two weeks. Bing, also known as But Its Not Google has had its launch a bit messed up by the launch of Google Wave the same day. However it looks like the search engine is actually holding on.

IE goes BING!

I was using a shared computer at work yesterday and it only bore IE7 as web browser. I happened to do a web search in the browser’s search box, FF user habit huh! This is where I really got surprised. Instead of being thrown to Google or Live, I found myself staring at Bing results. Well, I used them. So, the default browser is now Bing. This means that all Windows 7 testers will also be staring at Bing!

Stronger than thou!

What is going on now? People are using Bing to test. This is supposed to be Microsoft’s breakthrough in the world of search engines. This also means that the Gates team is trying to prove Seth Godin wrong when he said “the next Google will be Google”. Intrigued as they can be, SEO experts are scouring this engine to see what its got under the hood. Result: it seems to be more reliable than other engines in what Google is leaving the others. The impact is that Bing is now more used than Yahoo! on the web. Will the Y! search engine be the next Altavista?

Going on higher grounds.

Ok, Bing is gaining over Yahoo! in terms of search volumes but bear in mind that it is not getting the users off Yahoo! or other smaller search engines, it is currently dipping in Google’s pool. This is where things are getting messy. I think that we’ll just have to wait and see how all this evolves but we can now admittedly say that Microsoft is trying to get back in this search engine race. If you want to work on optimising your site for Bing, you can just head over here.

A weird idea got into my mind today. Just for the sake of doing it, I tried to see how many pages Google had in its index for Facebook. First question that one would ask: “Why Facebook ?”. The answer: Facebook has a “cloaking” script which according to Google terms of service should have got it banned. Here is a definition:

Cloaking is “used to describe a website that returns altered web pages to search engines crawling the site. In other words, the webserver is programmed to return different content to Google than it returns to regular users, usually in an attempt to distort search engine rankings. This can mislead users about what they’ll find when they click on a search result. To preserve the accuracy and quality of our search results, Google may permanently ban from our index any sites or site authors that engage in cloaking to distort their search rankings.”

SOURCE: Google FAQ for Webmasters

So, here we are then with a whooping 385 000 000 pages for Facebook today. This means that the Facebook script works. If you’re asking yourself how, its simple. The info that Google is showing is not the same when you follow the link and Facebook distorts things in the sense that it urges the search engine user to get an account to see other profiles. Now, the remaining dark spot of the whole issue is eventually the fact that Facebook is a huge site, with huge money (though on the decline) and is one of the most search keywords on the web, is doing this overtly. Add to that the fact that online presence is not well by 95% of the persons having a profile you get the idea of what Facebook can mean to Google. Hence, it can get through the terms of services while using black hat SEO.

Do you think that this should be allowed? Is it normal?

Back to SEO basics. How should you do your site/blog’s search engine optimisation? Many elements get into the picture but there are some simple rules to follow to optimise a page. Let’s start with the head part.

The head part of a page is the one that will have the most impact on your visitors via search engines. The head part is what the robots use to build their SERPs (Search Engine results pages). This means that the first thing a visitor will see of your page on a search engine is the head so you’d better polish things up a bit.

Anatomy of a search engine result.

Below is a detailed view of a search engine result off Google’s first SERP.

As you can notice, the title tag is the one that is shown as linked in blue and the meta is used to describe the page’s content. Other thing that you will notice on this specific result is that there are no suspension marks on either the title or the description.

You might consider the result below. The title part has supension marks as well as the description. Though it gives information is triggers the thought: “This looks amateurish”.

Last thing, please, please do not put any HTML tag in the title because it does not do anything but waste character space!

So here is the recipe on how to optimise this part.

The title tag.

The title tag must not exceed 65 characters (spaces included), 65 being the number of characters Google shows on SERPs. This is how you don’t get the suspension marks. Another thing, to bear in mind, especially on blogs, long blog names and what not in the title just eat up space. Get rid of them, shorten the site name in the title to give more space to the real title.

Another thing that has been tested and proved efficient is the place where the site name is shown. On many sites, the site name is shown, then the real title. If the sitename is long, a lot of the characters are eaten up. The practice now is to put the sitename at the end of the title. If the title exceeds the 65 characters, it will just be deleted on the SERP but will still be present in the URL. So no worries on that. Your aim is to bring people to your site not show off your sitename.

So what is the real title? This actually is the title that is related to the content of the post/page. Careful, it is not the title of your post for example. E.g. say you have a page on Chicken Curry on your culinary blog and the introduction title is Cheap Chicken Curry. Your title might be “Chicken curry recipe with aubergines and potatoes under 30 rupees.” There you have your under 65 characters title.

To fully optimise this title, let’s say that your target keyword is “chicken curry recipe”, you have also added the keyword in your title. This therefore works for both attracting visitors through search engines and second for good positions in SERPs on specific keywords.

The meta description tag

The meta description is what will convince the visitor having been attracted by your title to visit the page. The meta description in Google does not exceed 150 characters. Staying in this range will get you to have a full stop end in the SERP description, giving you a cleaner aspect as well as more professional looking result.

Your sitename can be present in there but once again, you’ll find that 150 characters is pretty short and does require some reflexion. So better keep long site names out. The other important thing is to get your keyword(s) in there while giving out a clear and concise description of what the person will find on the page.

E.g. On the same “chicken curry recipe” page and keyword, you can get two occurrances of the keyword in the description while keeping it underthe 150 characters limit. Check it out:
“Need a cheap chicken curry recipe? Find out a cheap chicken curry recipe with aubergines and potatoes for only 30 rupees on My Cheap Recipes Blog.”

Conclusion

Finally, some words in the search results are in bold. These are the keywords I searched for on Google. Google puts them in bold, so use them to stand out of the crowd but do it smartly with a balanced mixture of well though text and important keywords.

Nota for non Mauritian readers: the title of this post starts with a Creole pun “Amene to SEO” translates in “Bring your bucket”.

Web design gets close to all aspects of marketing when you go further in the application. One of these aspects is marketing and a by product of it is email marketing. Email marketing allows you to keep in constant contact with your prospects, remind yourself to clients or communicate more and more on your product and field of expertise, among other benefits. I’ve been going through some mailing reports these last days and something weird caugnt my attention. How are the people I’m communicating to reacting to the emails when not interested?

Mission: delivery !

If you follow the exact directives of good email marketing, the leader being the Email Standards Project, you would surely build a general webmail/mail app compliant email that would get swiftly delivered and would boost your stats on that aspect. You are then supposed to be able to monitor your mail through the number of opened mails and clics.

To read or not to read… ?

This is where things go fast, your contact will either read your mail and go through the process or not. Afterwards, several solutions are available. According to my stats, the easiest solution the better (on the user’s point of view)! You get marked as spam whenever the person gets fed up with your email. It might not be on the first mail but with time people have forgotten the existence of the “unsubscribe” link.

How?

Deleting is easy. If you have an informational mass mail, people will read then either delete or archive the mail. The question remaining is “what triggers the use/abuse of the “mark as spam” button? First the “mark as spam” button gets more and more prominent and easier to access to. In Gmail for example it is even positioned before the delete button. People know that this button will stop your email from ever coming back to their inbox. This therefore cuts the direct use of the unsubscribe button which would have the same result but we are now going towards the “Google mode” of using search engines… everything at hand that requires the lesser effort.

Why?

Because most of the tools used are mostly developed for the US market and the USA is the most spammed country in the world with a whopping 19,8% of spam e-mails sent. No wonder the “mark as spam” button gets handy. So this is why you have to be extra careful when doing mass mailing and email marketing.

I remember a girl who wanted to write, during my university days, a research paper on “Science and technical students and their approach to canon literature.” The first thing to be done, as she was being guided by her tutors, was to define “canon literature”. It happens that she dismissed science fiction, hence dismissing J.R.R Tolkien who entered the British canon in 1996 with “The Lord of the Rings”.

I’m saying this because sometimes, reading things out of our own world might give us other approaches to our work. These might help us improve our way of designing web sites. They might push us to other boundaries which are less rigid than just building either with creative juices and forgetting usability or doing just usability and code while forgetting the fun part of things.

You might for example tackle this report on Experts vs. Online Consumers: A Comparative Credibility Study of Health and Finance Web Sites published by a Stanford (Google anyone?) research group. This sheds some light on how experts evaluate a site according to its content, while online consumers evaluate the same sites on the basis of design. So if you want a website that sells both to experts and consumers (lightly said) you would need to have both content and design. Consumer Web Watch has a lot of other reports of that sort.

Who knows, you might even want to try Maslow’s classic psychology research on human needs where he defines the characteristics of the basic human needs and how to satisfy them. This is taught to marketing students: by designing a product that fulfills more needs than that of your competitor, your product might have more success whatever the price. Examples: Iphone, German/Italian Cars (for Europe) which can’t be sold in the US because of the need for bigger cars…

As the Dalai Lama said “Each year, go somewhere you’ve never been before”. This just might work to improve your web desiging.

Project management seems to be one of the major problems web designers as well as web design companies seem to face in Mauritius. This is because there is still a change in perspective to be made as companies in Mauritius still see the Web as a copy of print communication. This is the first problem. The second one is the lack of insight and step by step project management, what comes first etc. This also implies that the consulting job must be done before even coding.

Know the content.

Your client wants a website. Know his content. Make him/her think about it and work on it with him/her, this will help you understand his/her field if you’re unfamiliar. You’ll also get to understand the objectives of the site in its field.

Determine each page.

With the content, you can determine which pages will be built and how to order them in the site map. At this very moment, you’ll be able to prepare your metas (title, description and keywords) according to the content. This will help you point the keywords of each page out.

Manage page levels.

Steve Krug pointed out in his famous Don’t Make Me Think that he was surprised that web designers never built past level 2 mockups for pages. Knowing what a page will be like in any circumstance will greatly help you determine if you’re still following your project guidelines as well as work on some url-oriented seo tricks.

Use inner pages as basis for the homepage.

The problem on many homepages is that they look like “Uh, we put this here because we didn’t know really what to put.” Here’s the solution. On building your inner pages first (in theory) you’ll know what are the main objectives and what are the information that have to be pulled to the top. This will help deeplinking as well as conversion.

Build a consistent wireframe.

A consistent wireframe will give the structure of each page. This will be the basis for the graphic designer (or yourself). It will give a well defined field of work and the graphics will eventually abide by the priorities of the website. This is done to improve user experience and give a clean doorway to search engine robots.

What must be kept in mind here is that content is the basis of it all and the project grows and evolve around it. In this order there are better chances for a site to be well indexed and easily ranked.

Being a musician, I couldn’t go by without reading Heavy Bag Media’s evaluation of web strategies in the musical instrument business. The evaluation is to the point and shows that the Web is gaining on in terms of solutions in the musical instrument business. This however underlines some major issues. Businesses like instrument building are based on skills that are not “web oriented”. Many of these have websites that look quite unprofessional like Vigier Guitars for example. On the other hand, others are going fast, ESP guitars‘ website, while others are taking the most out of social media like Youtube.

This eventually brought me to think about how businesses are using the web in Mauritius. Talent exists as well as ideas but the involvement of high profile businesses in the Mauritian Web world or on social media remains poor. Online sales is still trying to catch on. Rogers Group has a site that looks more like a series of print outs pasted on web pages while it could have a really colourful and high user experience website showing it knows how to use this new media. The same goes to Happy World where its value added service like “Pizza Hut” is just lost somewhere in a page talking about the company today. If we had to talk about food, maybe Kraft Foods‘ website would be an inspiration. What about a Pizza Hut Mauritius website?

Loads of businesses are lagging behind in terms of web in Mauritius and it really looks like rogue websites are cropping up every now and then and left just like that. It might seem bold on my part to say this but all these businesses will one day see that the Web might have a real added value, just like instrument building companies are going towards social media (music being social in itself), Mauritian businesses will have to make a real move towards the web, not in terms of print-pasted like websites, but in terms of community building, user experience, offers, sales and much more, not to forget the added value of being competitive over the Net.

What businesses do you think would benefit from a real web strategy in Mauritius?

The Web Design Bureau of Mauritius is happy to announce the release of its first free Wordpress theme: Marmelade (French for “marmalade”). The theme is only in French for the time being but will be translated later. More info is available on the Marmelade theme page.

SEO strategists out there do know that one of the classic ways of netlinking build up has been launched by blogs with their blogrolls. Evolution has it that blogrolls are now mini RSS threads not only linking to a said blog but also to a specific page and sometimes to blog post excerpts. This had the drawback, for the Google bot, of indexing excerpts more than full text. What with the increase of SPLOGS (Spam Blogs eating up content) this is a real case for concern.

Back in December 2009 2008, Google Blog Search team applied a patch to the Google bot to modify its algorithm concerning blogroll indexation. But it was still cranky. Many blogs saw their full content being indexed while others saw a huge loss in presence in the SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages) as well as, more important, a huge fall in the number of backlinks.

In an end of March update, Jeremy Hylton of Google Blog Search announced that the patch is now up and rolling and that it will influence indexation as well as ranking.

We have launched a ranking change that reduces the number of results that are returned because of blogroll matches. There are still problems to work out, but this change appears to be a big improvement over our earlier fix. We had originally planned to launch an experiment for link: queries, but decide more recently to release this change first. We are still working on the link: change and expect to have that ready in a few more weeks.

Expect major changes in your Google index visibility (especially if it is based on blogroll links) in the coming weeks/months.