The Google Adsense team announced yesterday that they have revamped 3 of the most used Adsense Ad units available to users. These changes have been made to optimise visual efficiency and eye candy to enhance clicks. According to the tests the team has been leading over the past weeks, these seem to get more clicks. The new versions will be rolling out over the next weeks.
Targeting a site’s readership, especially when one has a blog, is not an easy task. On going over some websites, I have seen that many would publish their level of hits or visits in one day. Some are pretty awesome when imagining some 30,000 visits in one day. Everybody would dream of that. This would mean huge monetisation programmes, nice level of side income, “influence” and all that goes with it. When delving into SEO and community management, one has to take into consideration another parameter, which might actually be a better indicator than the level of traffic. This indicator is the bounce rate. Bounce rate is what really defines the success of a website. If people are entering and leaving your site in less than 5 seconds, you might need to have a serious talk with you community management and your SEO experts.
You might have noticed that a bounce rate can either fluctuate a lot on a website or stay put over a long period of time. This goes with the quality of your traffic. Most of the time, the fluctuations will be of more or less 10%. Higher fluctuations and, at that, frequent ones mean that there might be something weird happening on your website. Even if these are not what you would first look at, I sincerely think that important bounce fluctuations should be used as alerts on the health of a website.
Now, you might have come here to see if it can really be done? The answer is “yes”. This very blog, the Web Design Bureau of Mauritius, has been set up to do this. After the first weeks of its launch I tried to find a way of making this site stand out. There were too many odds against it as there is no real web design community in Mauritius but the idea was to get to that very small web engaged community out there. And it worked! The aim was to target that specific traffic and this is what is happening today. Below is a screenshot of one year’s publications. 3.19% bounce rate over a whole year.
Actually, there’s no secret to this specific rate at all. It all goes in what you will read on all “how to blog” sites out there. Write for your targeted audience and keep it for them, not even search engines, the rest will follow. It is the only thing I did. What about you? What is your bounce rate and how are you working with/on it?
I’ve been warned that this would not last long once I get more traffic coming. Anyway, so far so good and it’ll be good till it lasts.
In terms of traffic management I primarily focus on organic traffic as it is the type of traffic that is really targeted and that comes to a site to really use the content that’s generated. The Web Design Bureau of Mauritius has always been proud of its 3% bounce rate over 2 years. Now, Google Adwords and PPC traffic is a whole different thing. Getting your fingers in such a cogwheel implies that you’ve tried and tested the techniques on small or medium sized campaigns before entering the big picture. My biggest picture has been a 1 year campaign at 3000€ per month for a client. I will not be giving a lecture on how to use Google Adwords and make the best use of it. There are better people than me when it comes to explaining this subject, I can just invite you to meet them over at PPC Hero.
So what is this beating the Google Adwords Competition about? When you go on a Google Adwords crusade, you usually have competitors on the same line, bidding higher than you to reach the top positions in the sponsored links to drive traffic to their site. Now, the big problem is: where do you hit the hardest to get the Google Adwords treasure? The answer is brand name! As weird as this might seem I’m going to give away one of Google’s most mysterious tricks to beat Google Adwords competition with the use of brand names. I stumbled on this by chance and readily understood the implications. This one is not a secret but it is not talked about too much.
Provided you’re not going to fight Ebay, Amazon or Coca-Cola, you can use your competitors’ brand name to divert their traffic to your site. Here’s how this goes, you can use your competitors’ trademarked terms as keywords in Google Adwords. This depends on whether they have set a record at Google’s to have the keywords reserved or not. Many companies, maybe even your’s, don’t know that there’s this little loophole in Google Adwords and have not done the necessary to shut down the traffic diversion. This is all explained in this discussion I found in the Google Adwords archive. Many big companies seem to have arrangements with Google Adwords, otherwise anybody can bid on a trademark as a keyword. This smells fishy, especially if you’ve registered your trademark, but it actually is true.
I wouldn’t be giving out this trick to beat Google Adwords competition without being 100% sure that this can be done, would I? I did a test on Google. One big trademark would be the famous Kawasaki motorcycles. I just typed the trademark name in Google and, hey presto, Google Adwords showed me what their competitors (or sellers) were doing with the keyword.
Here you go then. You now have something to beat Google Adwords competition in one go by directly tackling the competitors’ brand names. This also means that you must not be afraid to get in that mine field either. I’m just trying to imagine, say, Le matinal, L’express, Defi Media and Le Mauricien hitting on each other’s keywords on Google ***drooool***.
Following your permanent update quest for visibility and content optimisation purposes you may have noticed that, after being so global, web search results pages are becoming more and more local. We do tend toward custom search, and this is just the beginning.
Creating your own Google Maps file nowadays is still a bonus for your website’s SEO. But let’s bet it will soon become unavoidable. Why is that so?
Google Maps files benefit from a great ranking place in Google’s results pages, and appear almost every time, especially since Google’s upgraded its search interface in March 2010. It firstly concerned keywords with location within the keywords (town, country, zip code …), but has now been extended to many other keywords.
You probably know what this is all about as you may have keywords where your website was at top ranking position, which are now… still in top position, but… After Google Maps results!
I.E. Below with the famous French travel guide www.petitpaume.com : it long has been top of any keywords such as “restaurant + (town)” (“restaurant lyon”). Now, with Google Maps results, it certainly is less visible, and suffers great lost of targeted audience. (click on image for larger view)
Let’s have a look at the specifications required within Google Local to optimise your own dedicated Google Maps business file. In practice, little changes were noticed concerning Google Maps standards, so few optimisations and adjustments in time may be necessary to reach sustainable rankings on specific keywords and keep them.
Google Maps can be great for keywords optimisation. But be careful: use maximum 2 or three keywords, and these have to correctly describe your business activity. Anyway, you will soon find out by yourself that you will not be able to optimise more unless being blacklisted!
Your Title has to contain keywords (1 or 2). As much as possible, you should write down something that looks like a natural web search.
Your Title must be short as your Google Maps file will be displayed considering your entire Title.
Description must contain keywords, maximum 3 of them, if possible already used in your Title (for more efficiency, prefer up to 130 characters). This description has to be appalling because the clicks and hard bounce rates matter for your popularity score.
You can set up to 5 categories on your Google Maps file. You must choose at least one which is referenced in the Google Business local center. Then, you can create specific categories with keywords: these have to match your activity had be as short as possible (please do not make a list of keywords …).
Additional field can be added at the end of your Google Maps file. They can participate to your SEO ranking if well used (with keywords). These fields normally can help your business to be more specific, i.e. for a restaurant, specify the nearest parking, or detail the menu. You could add something like “Your restaurant in Lyon suggests …” for your “The Chef suggestion” section …
Always put a picture in your Google Maps file, as it is a lot more attractive with one, and also can be optimised (name your photos with keywords : “restaurant-in-lyon.jpg”).
Of course, you want to keep up, won’t you?
So use search engines tools to geolocate your company and services, and make the most of SEO possibilities in this field. Google Maps will be just right for you. Create your own business Google file at Google Place http://maps.google.com/local/add (previously Google Business Local Center).
“Mayday”, term known for those in need of help! This is also the name coined to the latest Google Caffeine update. If you’re a keen Search Engine Optimiser or webmaster you’ve surely seen some signs of major updates at Google’s. The Google Mayday update has been running for nearly a month now though many have just recently been aware of the reality of this major update. So what is this Google Mayday update, what does it bring, and what specificities does it have?
The Google Mayday term might be amusing but it is not really. Mayday has been chosen first because the update is taking place in May and second because it is hitting websites in terms of ranking in the search engine results pages (SERPs). Now, are you spotting any difference in your rankings? If not, you should check if you’ve been ranking on “long tail keywords”. The Google Mayday update has been affecting long tail keywords rankings mostly as the algorithm seems to have been set to reorganise ranking on such keywords. I’ve seen major changes on some of my websites ranking on such keywords. Second, some websites are so affected by this update that it is a real “Mayday” call out that is being made.
For those who are just finding out this term “long tail keywords”, here is a quick overview. When talking about keywords we usually refer to 1 word keywords being essential to a site such as website, seo, ranking, expert, etc. In many cases we cannot be competitive on such keywords because of the amount of “pollution” in the results pages. The solution is then to use “long tail keywords” especially in Mauritius as we’re targetting a Mauritian audience. We’ll then get long tail keywords like “search engine optimisation mauritius”. This has the disadvantage of not being well indexed on general keywords but do a great job sending highly-targetted traffic from those people searching exactly for these specific information online.
Is Google Mayday update good or bad for your website? The answer is: it depends. Here is what has been noticed. If you’ve been ranking high on some long tail keywords for some time but have not really managed it, chances are that your page might be plummeting in the rankings. On the other side, you might be catching up with some competitors on other long tail keywords if you’ve been working on these. All in all, the Google Mayday update might be positive as well as negative for a same website. Nothing is definitive for the time being as the Google “Mayday” update is still running as of today.
Have you noticed a change in your rankings these past days? Did the Google Mayday Update affect your site(s)? What are your views on long tail keywords, do you use them a lot, especially in Mauritius?
Creating great content is one of the aims of publishing over the web using platforms such as WordPress. Trying to monetize a blog is another aim and advertisement inclusion is always a problem especially when talking about that of Google Adsense. On this very blog, you found out a tutorial on the easy way of including Google Adsense ads with the use of shortcode in WordPress as well as how to improve the quality of your Google Adsense ads and a guest post by Kurt from Icy Tips on the most performing Google Adsense ads size to use.
The use of shortcode is easy for such inclusion and quite handy as it comes through. It actually was the way I used to include my Google Adsense ads in my code. Here’s a newbie tip if you’re going to use the shortcode in your posts. Let’s say that you have decided to publish Google Adsense ads in your posts only. You can use your PHP-fu along with your WordPress-fu to generate your Google Adsense blocks in your posts only. This is how it works out. Make sure you’ve implemented your code as described in the post here: easy way of including Google Adsense ads with the use of shortcode in WordPress.
To make sure you publish only when you’re in a single post you need to write this code in your post:
if(is_single()) {echo "[adsense]";}
What we are doing here is basically asking the code to check if the current page is a single WordPress post page and publish the shortcode if this is the case. Easy as ever. I usually used this to publish 3 Google Adsense slots (maximum Google Adsense slots you can publish on a page) on my single page posts. When the post was published on the blog’s front page, no Google Adsense ad was visible.
There’s a way to go one step further! The idea is to publish your WordPress single post Google Adsense ad in your content without having to write anycode while publishing. You might not see why this might be handy but believe me, when you find yourself cleaning up hundreds of posts shortcode inclusion, you quickly try to find another way of doing it (yes, I did clean hundreds of posts manually removing Google Adsense ads in my content). There are 2 ways of doing this.
The first one which I would call the brutal way (maybe slightly more efficient for the non PHP experienced) which calls for direct inclusion of the Google Adsense tag in the code of the single post page, single.php file in the theme folder. You just need to add your Google Adsense slot before or after your content (the the_content() tag) as it pleases you:
Now the classy way of doing things. It is the way the Google Adsense slots are set on the Web Design Bureau of Mauritius. I wanted to do this just to be able to style the Google Adsense slot right beside the content (the Google Adsense block had to be put right into the content and I did not want to have to put shortcodes all the time). So I had to put it directly into the content. After some research on the code I found out that I could write my own function to modify the code. Basically, I wanted to take all the content sent out by WordPress for my posts and inject my Google Adsense ad into it. Simple. So I had to create a dummy content that could be easily modified. This function must be put in the functions.php file of the WordPress template. Please not that what we are adding here is a filter.
function like_content($content) {
global $post;
$original = $content;
$content = "<div class=\"pub\">";
$content .= "<script type=\"text/javascript\"><!--
google_ad_client = \"pub-XXXXXXXXXXXXXX\";
google_ad_slot = \"XXXXXXXXXX\";
google_ad_width = 336;
google_ad_height = 280;
//-->
</script>
<script type=\"text/javascript\" src=\"http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js\">
</script>
";
$content .= "</div>";
$content .= $original;
$content .= "</div>";
return $content;
}
add_filter( 'the_content', 'like_content' );
There you go, your Google Adsense slot will always be included directly into your content without having anything to implement. The only thing you will now have to do is to style your content through your CSS file.
Now, let’s go even further in this. The idea was to generate a Google Adsense ad slot in the single post content. The function above has the enormous drawback of setting the Google Adsense block in ALL the content. By all, I mean all, i.e. pages and single posts. This was not the main idea was it? So we need to remove the filter from all the “pages” content. For this to happen, we need another filter function which will remove the filter if we are in a page. It looks like this:
function remove_like_content() {
if (is_page()) {
remove_filter('the_content','like_content');
}
}
add_action('wp','remove_like_content');
As you can see, the code analyses if the content is in a page with the is_page() method and then removes the filter from the WordPress loop by adding this Google Adsense slot suppresion.
I know that this is a bit of a creative way of doing things but the whole concept here is to get the best out of both worlds, Google Adsense‘s best performing ads with WordPress’ flexibility. Do you have any other creative way of including Google Adsense slots in your code? If so, please share.
You might have been working on a new website project for some time or are planning to launch a new site. You have prepared your project, secured your host and domain name and prepared your database. You will now be heading for either deployment or development but know that your site will not be online for some time. You will most of the time use a dummy, a “coming soon” page. This page must be optimised for search engines!
Most of you have heard of “coming soon” pages. There’s a huge collection of those online teasers for great new apps or sites that will be found on the server some time in the future. For many projects, a deadline for launch is settled, for others the launch can vary from a week to a year in extreme cases, and maybe more… So it might be a good thing to prepare your “coming soon” page.
Such page usually consists of:
Many companies use their “coming soon” page to pre-establish their brand-name by working a lot on the visual impact and the message. Other strategies include the creation of Twitter accounts to gather some followers as well as Facebook pages, all interlinked with the “coming soon” page. There is a lot to get from such a page but you can try getting even more by SEO-ing the page.
The “coming soon” page must be optimised for search engines for many reasons. First of all we must take one important fact into consideration with search engines basing ourselves on the Google algorithm.
Google gives weight to older pages and domain names. This is why the Google Sandbox exists. It is here to prevent younger sites from hitting on older ones which already have the big G’s respect. You might not know when your site will be launched but optimising it will help you have an online presence and above all be out of the Google Sandbox when you launch it if you have been lagging a bit behind.
You have competitors on your main keyword on Google. Optimising your “coming soon” page for that keyword will get the domain name and the page to start competing for better rankings on it. At the time of the launch you might even be surprised by how fast your ranking will be evolving. This is one extremely good reason to do this.
Google page rank is one thing some webmasters live by. Even if it is not as important a factor as it was before it is an indication of the good health of a site. Good page rank is simply built through backlinks and site age. If your site is taking a whole year for launch, why should you lose one year’s PR and backlinks (which you can start building through comments or links from other sites)? A good example is inhousegrind which has a Google page rank of 3 while still bearing a “coming soon” page.
Using search engine optimisation techniques for “coming soon” pages is a great option on a whole site’s SEO. All the SEO juice gained over the “coming soon” period will be redistributed to the other parts of the website when the latter is launched. I have personnally tested and used this technique and the returns are always positive. Why not try it then?
It is now official. Speeding up a site’s page delivery will be beneficial for each page’s ranking in the the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). So speed is now a ranking factor at Google. This has been officially announced on the Official Google Webmaster Central Blog.
Speeding up websites is important — not just to site owners, but to all Internet users. Faster sites create happy users and we’ve seen in our internal studies that when a site responds slowly, visitors spend less time there. But faster sites don’t just improve user experience; recent data shows that improving site speed also reduces operating costs. Like us, our users place a lot of value in speed — that’s why we’ve decided to take site speed into account in our search rankings. We use a variety of sources to determine the speed of a site relative to other sites.
If you still haven’t grasped the concept: Google has always emphasized that it liked pages made for users and not for search engines. A faster loading page means a satisfied user and as Google has all to win when it concerns satisfied users it is using what satisfies them, fast pages, as a ranking tool. Now, those having never seen the usefulness of Google Webmaster Tools can start running there to open their accounts.
There are some simple ways of improving a site’s speed. First things first, use pingdom tools to evaluate your page’s load time. What I like with this new factor is that web designers will have to go back to the basics, re-use the core of web design coding, i.e. writing standards based code.
Great day for standards. Using semantic and clean code will definitely help improve a page’s loading time. Using basic and clean tags will help your pages load in a whizz. Make sure you do not use deprecated tags and keep to your document definition (strict, transitional…etc.). Moreover, when using standards you get yourself a step ahead in optimising your code as the latter is easily maintained and you can just get any other coder to dive into your page to optimise it.
With the use of standards, you are bound to reduce the number of lines of code you would have originally used. Thus, pages are lighter and load time is decreased. All benefits!
Using standards implies the separation of presentation and content. This is done through the use of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and, more important, the use of external CSS. This also has an impact on your page load time. Why? Having all CSS in one external file means that the file will load only once (on the first page a site is visited) then, the same file is used by the browser to load all the other pages’ presentation. This means that your site’s pages will load faster as the CSS will be read only once and you will not have duplicate code to maintain all the time in each page if your CSS is written in them.
To get the most out of your CSS in terms of load time you can also improve the CSS file itself. Check out a previous article on how you can make pages load faster by minimising the CSS file.
Should you be having behaviour on your pages (be they through Java or DOM scripting), the same advice as that for CSS goes. You need to externalise all the code to one external page to avoid constant recalls to all your functions each time a page is loaded. You can also think about progressive enhancement to improve the page loading when scripts are not activated or fail to load. All in all, keeping these simple and short will help improve your page loading capabilities. Other enhancements include the loading of all scripts after the content.
These here are some simple examples on how the code can help pages in improving in terms of load times. It is very important to take these into consideration at the beginning of a project to maximise its ROI. This is a great example on how code and coding strategies can improve SEO, and Google is now making use of it.
You can push further in the ways a page’s load time can be improved for example, the choice of your server or image optimisation strategies.
Understanding and mis-understanding form part of our daily life. Mauritians have a particularity though. The “outside” view is really important in our society. Showing-off. Along with that we hold on to concepts that everybody rejects publicly but doing all the time. I would put it as it is sometimes the case of “doing better than the Joneses”. How many tuned cars do you find in Mauritius? How many “competition lacaze” have you seen? All in all, in our society it is a “I’m [better/smarter/richer/...insert adjective here] than you” race.
Coming to this, I thought that by launching the Web Design Bureau of Mauritius, I would be able to join a real community of Mauritian web designers. I was dreaming of networking and exchanging passionate findings with other web designers from Mauritius. I was longing to help them in understanding SEO and web design to its core with an objective of bettering the whole system. I hoped for a strong social media driven network where all Mauritian web designers would be exchanging and showing with pride what we could accomplish from our small island. How wrong was I in believing this! There is no community in Mauritius and will not be for a long time.
There’s no “I’m better than you” in my endeavour but a real want for networking and sharing. The problem is that the Mauritian ego is what pervades and that ends up in people not accepting positive criticism. For them only the word “criticism” comes out and they forget the “positive”. Everybody in Mauritius is best at what it does (irony!). Others are even declaring themselves guard dogs of the Internet in Mauritius. You can’t be all. Either you’re a web designer and can at least discourse on Zeldman’s “Web Designing with Web Standards” or you’re a jack of all trades and master of none.
Working in a specific field means that you have to know what is going on in the office next to you where UI designers or web marketeers are working. You have to listen and learn from them all while explaining your job to them. You have to know what is the use of community management as well as that of server redirects through a .htaccess file. You have to see what are the advantages of deploying a website through a CMS than building from scratch. You have to understand why such type of code is incompatible with SEO… Where the magic happens is when new techniques are uncovered, great ROI is achieved or just simple genius is created from the mixed research of all these teams.
Networking seems to work right with all people in other fields gravitating around web designing: SEO, expert web management, content building, copywriting or programming but never with web designers. Problem: ego again. You can have a point of view and stand behind it but you also have to accept that others’ ideas can be different. You can discuss about the pros and cons without adding a “g*g*t” or a “f*l**r m*m*”. Sadly though, I’ve seen too many of these around. Few web designers are in for community building and sharing. Many treasure their misconceptions as gold because in the world of the blinds the one-eyed are kings. This goes for companies too.
The web is not mature enough in Mauritius and the cultural tissue very strong. The Internet is an online society that recreates part of our common culture. This is what is happening, the Mauritian culture is seeping through on the online community and recreating what they usually do in everyday life. This is where the Mauritian web design community is failing!
All this might look like I’m trying to do “better than the Joneses” but it is not the case. It is a real plea to have a strong network in Mauritius.
Now, let’s see what’s really happening: most of the companies and web designers would say that others will steal their work and clients if they enter a community. None actually thinks the other way round. Imagine the impact on a client when you say that you are active in the Mauritian web design community, that you are working hand in hand with others to give better results for that client, to make the web a better place. This would imply that you are not only after your client’s money, this would also imply that state of the art techniques will be used for that client’s site thus reassuring it, this would imply that all the buzz around web communities would also shine on your own business!
Do you think that the industry would get better if a real web design community is built? Do you think that Mauritian web design companies could be real engines of such communities? Would Mauritian web designers gain from having an online community? Does this really imply a change in the way of thinking (I might be getting it all wrong)?
Preparation is the key to success on a blog. Before launching a blog, one has to sit down and think about all the necessary steps to building one’s blog: niche, domain name, strategy, SEO, networking etc. With time and the growing experience on blogging and community building one can now have all the tools for launching a full-fledged successful blog from day one. Pro tips sites are now budding over the web such as Sam’s Web Guide and Icy Tips. One of the topmost tips is to be prepared and, in this field, having a well prepared number of posts even before launching a website is a win win strategy.
I’ve been blogging for nearly 6 years now starting from a daily nonsense life blog on Blogger back in 2004. There was no real direction to that blog and it mixed work and daily life. I must say that life blogging was easy as I chatted away on anything going from my impressions on the way people made extensive use of tramways in Grenoble to my own personal discoveries in the art of Web Designing. Things changed when I started the Web Design Bureau of Mauritius some 2 years ago.
At that time there were lots of pro-blogging websites but I was not prepared as I would have been today. I made the mistake of not planning which explains the difficulties in publishing posts during the first months of this site’s existence. Then, ideas came and I took the pace. But one thing remains difficult to me: taking enough advance on posts to be published. I do spend quality time on the job done here and am a normally well organised person but constant upriver preparation is still not perfect on this blog.
One of the worse things that can happen is blogging burnout. It is not the common “writer’s block”. It is real burnout. This usually happens when one tackles a field that one is unacquainted to or that one doesn’t really master. It can also sprout when too much energy has been put in the launching and preparation of a new blog project and then the whole thing is burnt out because all the subjects or the best subjects have been dealt with. Then, it becomes a real ordeal to manage the whole thing.
Getting over excited over the number of posts – When I was a budding blogger, I got really excited over publishing more and more. Each time I had an idea I jumped on my computer and typed my way through my post. I was happy with the job and excited about the ideas I was coming up to. The problem was that, after a while, all the ideas looked bland. Why? Because I was in a certain mood at one time and the posts would have a certain feel and that feel would be here for 5 or 6 posts then change on the following ones. This translated a lack of consistency but, hey, those were the origins of the life blogs where you showed your mood.
Publishing too fast – Publishing too fast was a by-product of my blogging excitement. When you start out writing a lot of posts, you are eager to get a readership and collect the comments on your views. The major problem in that is that you have to refrain yourself from publishing it all. Some days I would be publishing the whole 5-10 posts I would have written in one day. What a waste! It was like eating a whole week’s food on Monday and eating nothing else during the week. Then what? BURNOUT! (short lapse but still…)
This also had the drawback of not giving enough strength to each post. Large traffic websites can go about publishing several posts a day but on smaller sites, this boils down the impact of each post and idea.
Writing long posts – Writing long posts is an art in itself. I happen to be a talkative person and found out you have to master the art of long posts before actually writing them. Readers’ attention-span is short, especially over the web. It doesn’t help to beat around the bush when there’s not reason for it. So keep the posts short until you get enough stamina to run the distance.
Have you ever experienced this flurry of post ideas and reached the red zone? What were the reasons? Has it impacted on your blogging life?
Note: even if I no longer maintain the other blogs and have closed them down it has never been a result of burnout.
What have we done? What has “web 2.0″ brought upon us? The web is maturing and democratisation is on its way. This is why non-techs are making heaps of money over the web with blogs while having 0 knowledge of the way it all works. Mind you this is great as the web is now open to everybody and people are using it as easily as possible but some things are really hard on us web designers and web project managers.
Buy computer, get broadband ADSL, surf! This will turn you into a web expert. It is true story that a lot of web designers face the problem of having people who use their own experience and have the “my kid made his own website” syndrome when faced to web professionals. Below are some of the glorious things I personally heard.
“My boyfriend spends hours surfing the web and is a huge Internet consumer, and he says that this website is crap”. This is what I once heard from one of our SAAS managers in a company where I used to work. She was good at selling the web service but when it came to criticising any web designer’s work it was the boyfriend that got into the picture just because he spent hours over the net.
“I have led the reflection over what my website should be doing. I only want people having the same level of approach to my business as I have to surf my site. Others can just sod off. I know it is easy to filter them. I am a pioneer and not a follower, so I will not accept SEO oriented text and I want my site to be WOW but not use the same codes as others. I am used to the web, I surf all night and I want to be on everything that a person types in terms of keywords on Google. Build a website that seduces me!” All this nonsense is what I have been hearing from… a private school director in need of a new website to bring in new recruits!
“We want a paper archive (800 PDFs) on our website. I believe it is an easy add.” This one came from a director preparing a huge conference.
The underlying problem in all this is not that these people will end up having websites that will not work or will be the opposite of all the objectives they should be aiming for along with the loss off money, it is that web designers have made things too easy. Actually, they have not made things too easy but they have made things look easy from the outside.
This is the core of our work, building tools that accomplish goals but in a specific way: being user centred. The sole fact that the tool is user centred means that the use of the website must be thought out beforehand and that the user navigates easily and has a great experience and accomplishes the goals without feeling the technology lying behind. We all did a great job and succeeded in this endeavour but the problem is that a majority now thinks that if the front-end is easy to use, the back-end’s implementation must be as easy.
This also runs for web project management where, for some clients it all boils down to choosing the titles of each navigation tab or SEO experts where clients just end up saying “stuff the damn thing with keywords as well as our competitor’s name and we’ll get the first place on Google”. All seems too easy now.
I won’t be getting into the details here but apart from the horrors I hear in my day job, the Web Design Bureau of Mauritius does get its share of eccentric demands everyday. However, a great resource to see what type of incongruous thoughts clients have is Clients From Hell. So what happens now? How do web designers and all work with such type of people?
Well, major web design blogs have lists of personae of the type of client you should avoid. For others, it is experience that makes it all. You see the client, you judge him/her at the first contact and you run off if necessary. Just don’t waste your time. It is sad to say so but if one has to spend precious work hours trying to educate a client, that person should leave the business. This said, it can be done is you work as an in-house web designer.
Do you think we made a mistake in making things look so easy? Is there a way of changing client mentality (which I think will never change)? How do you/would you react in such situations? What is YOUR view of the Internet, do you think that things look too “easy” now?
Google has unveiled a lot on the way its algorithm works and on how the company actually works to promote its own products on the engine. Google Webmaster Central has published an article on the SEO report cards that Google uses to maximize its products’ visibility on its own search engine. There is a lot of things present in there and it all gravitates around tuning up one’s pages for better ranking and increased user interest. One part on which I really perused is the building up of sitelinks.
Google sitelinks are very easy to spot. They are direct inputs to a site’s inner links, categories, themes… The advantage of such an option is that it allows the user to go directly to some specific part of a site, thus maximising conversion by, for example, removing any redundant step like going through the main page. Sitelinks look like this:
The Google SEO report card defines it as such:
Sitelinks are often a signal to users that they’ve found the result they’re looking for and can help in finding information faster.
This is the trick question in the whole system. Webmasters can’t choose when sitelinks are shown. Up to now, nobody knows when, how and who triggers the sitelinks. There are different assumptions on the subject but no one really knows if it is human powered or not. However, the report card shows that there is a 56% of changes to have an incoming click through sitelinks on a search engine results page. So what can you do to get sitelinks then?
The SEO report card states that an improved site organisation and good internal linking strategies can improve the chances of getting them. Here are the instructions:
The bonus given by Google concerning the sitelinks is that they can be optimised for providing relevant information, helping the users find the content they want faster and, a really nice way of putting things, taking up more real estate on the search results page (the result taking more space on the page).
The card coins good sitelinks as “Appealing Google Sitelinks”. These sitelinks are those that really do the job, those that give the relevant information or provide the user with the best options. For those oblivious of the use of Google Webmaster tools, there is an option in it that allows the webmasters to block unappealing sitelinks.
There you go then. Have your say on sitelinks. I think that some of the information must not be taken as rules of law but believe that they are nice starting points for such optimisations.
Have you been trying to get them for specific sites? Have you been working on them and have you had positive results? Will you be using the Google Webmaster Tools to get those links?
There are hundreds of articles on the subject of domain names all over the web. Most of them deal with the choice of the domain names associated to a brand, a company or on why top level domain names are important in the definition of your SEO strategies. Actually, a lot of these articles talk about what could be coined as “the usability of domain names”.
The usability of domain names is the whole marketing jargon buster used to help a client define a domain name. It is here to define branding and visibilityof a brand online. One great resource for that is “Building the Perfect Beast” (pdf document) by Igor International.
The elements are generally:
Some of these advice might have flip sides to them though. The size of the domain name, if coupled with the inclusion of keywords, might not be compatible if you’re trying to become a leader in your field. An example might be DCDM where the name De Chazal du Mée is long and does not give the information that the company is that of chartered accountants.
As such their domain name does not show this aspect either. OK, DCDM is known in Mauritius, what about the international aspect? The branding does not include the fact that the company is big in Africa. Maybe some domain name such as dcdm-chartered-accoutants.tld (top level domain name) would help. To push the envelope a little bit further, the domain name would take care of at least 4 of the elements stated above.
What about local search then? It might seem cool to look for interesting domain names but if the primary audience is local, it would be better not to aim past the target. For example, the Web Design Bureau targets Mauritian web designers. The domain name is therefore a top level one mixed with the “mauritius” keyword. It could have been more specific but this is like that for one specific reason that will not be discussed here.
In a local context it is a good thing to aim for local domain extensions. For example: BBC keeps it domain name centered around the UK www.bbc.co.uk, TF1 in France has a .fr and CNN has a .com (generic extension used in US instead of the .us). None has really gone for the .tv extension but the MBC has tried it out.
Any domain name with a real website needs to be hosted. Hosting does influence SEO. First of all there is the neighbourhood. On mutualised servers, some domain names can be blacklisted or have bad reputation (the Bureau suffers a bit from hosted porn neighbourhood). Therefore, one should make sure that the site is clearly well hosted.
In the case of multiple websites, one interesting thing is to work on different C class domain IPs. Each site has a unique IP number. If different websites are to be hosted, having really different C class IPs can help when working on different sites’ net linking. Different addresses mean different servers to the robots, so it might really be a win-win strategy to use different hosting companies.
What concepts did you use to chose your domain name? Why do you have a top level domain or any other level domain name? Do you have a domain name strategy? Are you thinking of changing domains and work on it strategically?
Alice’s last post on the changes in search engines as well as the advent of real time search in SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) triggered a specific question: how to maximize the use of Twitter posts from an SEO point of view? We are today working towards Social Media Optimisation but the objective here is to have a reflection on how such a tool can become a stepping stone in an SEO strategy.
All SEO experts will stress on the importance of anchor text in net and deep linking strategies. If you’re not at ease with SEO, here’s a quick overview of the use of anchor text. Anchor text is the text generally used in linking. Most of the time it looks like: read more here/more here etc… One of the core elements in search engine rankings is the number of incoming links. However, search engine robots do not only evaluate if the incoming link is from a high PR page or from a homepage but also what the link tells it before it scans the landing page. Thus a “read more here” text gives less information than, e.g., “web design company” in the link. This IS the anchor text. The robot will evaluate it and have a first information about the theme of the landing page. It is therefore interesting to optimise this anchor text when you’re building your linking strategies.
Any Twitter user will have spotted the issue on the basis of the anchor text definition. There are 2 issues concerning Twitter:
Today, the usage is url shorteners but it might be a good thing to add (or replace) this with the possibility of adding links to anchor text in one’s tweet. This would have some major advantages on the marketing front:
In the light of this exposé do you think that twitter would be better for SEO without URL shorteners? Do you think that Twitter should add such a linking tool or replace the use of these? Do you think that SEO strategies through Twitter would be great?
I can add my personal view on this: Twitter will not be doing it! Let’s talk about it in the comments.
It will soon come the time where SEO may well be much more a matter of traffic management and analysis than ranking.
Search engines positioning standards are constantly moving, making ranking a permanent issue for websites visibility and business. Up to now, being the first (or at least at the top 5 of the first page) of Google was the real thing.
This reality is doomed to disappear.
Because Google now focuses on 3 distinct measures for ranking (and will be doing so even more in the near future):
Of course, the already known key standards for ranking are still to be used, but their importance is decreasing for some of them (keyword in links, images, footer …).
What we are going towards is personalisation.
In the near future, do not be surprised if two persons doing the same keyword research at a time on Google will have different results pages …
I strongly recommend you to consider the 4 advice below:
All of this is very Google oriented, but let me bet Yahoo / Bing will do just the same … in 2011?
A French version of this article is available here: Evolution du positionnement en 2010 – les choses à savoir
Starting this post is quite weird for me in the sense that I don’t really know how to tackle it, what tone to give it or how to deal with it. So I’m setting out to explain that I’m a human being, more than less pacifist and ready to learn and share information and knowledge with people around me. This last statement is the aim of the Web Design Bureau of Mauritius itself even if the targeted audience is really small. I however have a big problem with the Mauritian mentality. People cannot be honest enough and contact you simply asking for an information or a review or whatever can be their needs in terms of project management, SEO or design. So to all who don’t know how to write a mail here’s a template:
Hi,
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Mauris lacinia arcu ac lorem vulputate euismod. Donec tempus ullamcorper facilisis. Phasellus orci augue, malesuada et luctus at, consequat ac odio. Proin et elit sed dui sodales luctus. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Phasellus ac felis euismod lacus suscipit commodo. Integer ac augue purus, vel viverra nulla. Ut volutpat ultricies volutpat. Vestibulum commodo imperdiet elit, ac posuere tortor faucibus at.
Best regards
Insert your signature here.
Friendly tip: being polite gives you extra points!
I know that a lot of my regular readers must be wondering what I’m talking about here. Let’s get to the root of things. Last year I used the DCDM example to illustrate my article on what Mauritian companies were missing on the web. Fair enough, this has had some positive impact (I’m sure) on how this major Mauritian company saw its own online presence. This would explain why, nearly everyday over the past 2 weeks, somebody has been trying to attract my attention to the DCDM issue.
The problem with all this is that (and this meets the first part of my post) the person or persons DID NOT have the humility of sending me a mail or using the contact form available on the Bureau to ask me to do a review of their site (at least that’s what I’m thinking it is) or to write a sequel to the previously published article. No! This person or these persons has/have been spending his/their time making the same query on Google for nearly 13 days. Is that stupid or what? Proof:
Along with that, an in depth analysis of the IP address, strangely from the same C class domain over the whole period, analysis gives more than guilty info from the Google user. Proxies anybody?
At first I stayed on my position of not saying anything about this because one of my core convictions is that if people did communicate, a lot of our everyday problems would be solved. As these queries have stopped since this week-end I’ve stepped out to really see why someone would have spent all this energy trying to inform me that I should maybe give a look to the DCDM website. Which I tried to do this evening but…
The most astonishing thing happened. I tried a Google search for DCDM. The idea was to look at their website and also catch up with the previous article’s position in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) to see that it does not do too much harm in DCDM’s rankings. But, as The Beatles put it: “Hey Jude, don’t take it bad…” the DCDM website has gone from being an outrage to the company to a complete ordeal for any user. I don’t know how they coded the thing but Google has blocked it as “This site might harm your computer.” for malware detection.
Don’t try clicking on the “more” results, you’ll get more of the harmful message.
What is going on here is that the whole project is turning into a fiasco having major impact on the Company’s online reputation and, if they’ve got an IT department, they really have to see to it that the people they’re employing do really have the necessary competences. I mean, it is easy and fun to play with Google to leave “Dan Brown” style breadcrumbs to the Bureau but it would be best to spend that time to check the code, the SEO and the compatibility issues of one’s website.
I’m borrowing this quote from the late King of Pop. We all have knowledge and work in our fields. The web design field is still young and improving in Mauritius and methodology and standards are core elements that should be inculcated to the workforce. Another thing is that web design projects, and any project in general is lead according to some very humane principles, humility, communication, politeness and dedication. Without these tensions creep in and grow, people lose their temper and the final aim of the project gets out of focus. It is the same for people, especially those you don’t know. So don’t come round on your big steeds to conquer. I’m always willing to help the best I can and you might get something just by asking rather than brute-forcing the whole thing.
How would you have reacted to this situation? Do you think that this show the professionalism of the whole company? Is this the type of company you’d contact if the service ends like this?