We’ve been telling you about the future collaboration between Yahoo! and Bing in a past post: Is the Yahoo! switch to Bing an anti-google strategy?. Well, it is now official, the first tests have been made in the USA and Canada as stated by this morning’s post on the Bing Community Blog. According to Yahoo!’s post on Yahoo! Search Blog, 25% of the paid and organic traffic now generated on the US Yahoo! search results are from Bing.

Preparing your site for Bing & Yahoo!

It seems that there will be some changes in the way the Bingbot will be crawling websites. One will have to concentrate on only one bot when it comes to search engine optimisation now. This means that the Yahoo! Slurp will be killed and that webmasters will have to make full use of the Bing Webmaster Center to optimise their SEO on Bing. If one has not done it until now, it will now become an important element as all will go through only one pipe now

For webmasters, it’s important to be familiar with how the Bing crawler interacts with your site. After the full algorithmic transition is complete, you only need to optimize for one crawler (Bing), as we will provide Yahoo! with results from our index.

Bing Webmaster Center, the new place to be.

With this new roll out, the Bing Webmaster Center will prove to be a valuable source of information and will also be a great toolbox for the optimisation of one’s website. Even if you rely a lot more on traffic generated by Google Caffeine, you will have to make sure that your indexation and your presence in results pages at Bing’s are really correct as the same elements will be used in Yahoo!.

Let’s go back to some old school and traditional form of customer acquisition on the web: email marketing. Many might think that the age of email marketing is over. Email marketing actually is one of the most powerful vectors of conversion generation still in use. It is one of the reasons why newsletter subscription forms have never disappeared from websites. An email marketing campaign can be a great tool for conversion and also a tool to increase client confidence in your products and keep them coming back to you.

Email marketing campaign target.

To maximise an email marketing campaign the first thing to do is to maximise WHO must be contacted in priority and how to personalise the messages sent out. This calls for the indentification of influential people, the prescribers. Those are the main targets as they have different levels of influence on the prospective clients. There are 3 levels of influence.

Level 1 influencers for your email marketing campaign.

These are those influencers who are in immediate interaction with your clients and who have a real impact on their business. They are those who will have an influence on the choice of your products or those of your competitors. They will be the ones inciting the client to chose a brand compared to another as their own work depends on that.

For example, for a small business management tool publisher, accounting experts are level 1 influencers as in at least 1/3 of cases, they are the ones who influence on the software the company will be using.

Level 2 influencers for your email marketing campaign.

This level of influencer is in contact with the your final clients and can influence their choices. This, however, has very little impact on their own activity.

For example, a washing machine manufacturer can counsel a client on the type of washing powder/liquid to use but this will remain at the level of counsel, it doesn’t impact on how this manufacturer will build machines. A specific garment manufacturer for instance will be a level 1 influencer at this point.

Level 3 influencers for your email marketing campaign.

Level 3 influencers have direct or indirect contact with clients but are merely a link in the whole system. The final client’s choice has no impact on their activity.

For an insurance company, for example, a car dealer is a level 3 influencer because the choice of a car insurance has no impact on whether the final client buys the car at this dealer’s or not?

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.

Bounce rate fluctuations.

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.

3-5% Bounce rate?

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.

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.

Beating the Google Adwords competition.

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.

Use your competitor’s brand name.

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.

Real life experiment.

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.

We’ve been talking a lot about the Google Maday update as well as Google Caffeine, the new algorithm. Though this would seem like talking over and over about the same thing, we must take into consideration the huge impact that this new algorithm has on the whole web, search engine optimisation and users ecosystem. The web is an ever changing entity and the “addons” that influential web companies publish always have an effect on the way users will be interacting with websites. This is what Google did by launching Google Caffeine.

Fresh content, the new El Dorado.

Let us jump back to what Google told web professionals on Google Caffeine some two weeks ago. The core elements to take into consideration are:

[Google] Caffeine provides 50 percent fresher results for web searches than our last index. [...] Searchers want to find the latest relevant content and publishers expect to be found the instant they publish.

This means that the way the Google index worked before, though not completely removed, is currently pushed aside to favour a new way of indexing. This new way of indexing takes information as it is published, analyses it and sends it directly into the first (freshest) results that the search engine will be delivering to its users. The impact is that fresh information will always have a lead, be it small, on the old system of having capitalising on age for a page indexed on a given theme.

Impact on companies.

This crosses one of my everlasting belief that companies need to produce more fresh content to keep up with the pace at which the whole system is running. A company can have a website and be communicating on it but if the new deal is that the company regularly publishing content on its own field gets the topmost ranks in search engine results pages then the cards are being redistributed.

This also means that everything like tests and sandboxes are being shattered to pieces (though Google Caffeine must have a sort of filter on that). A younger company with a younger website publishing fresher and to the point content will now be able to compete with the old mammoths. Result: increased competition directed by the Big G. Could anyone have thought that Google Caffeine would have had that much influence on business communication models?

Blogs are not crutches but tools.

Right oh! The solution, as anybody would have imagined is to implement professional business blogs on company websites. Blogs have the flexibility of being readily editable and can produce a lot of tools to improve indexation, social media interaction and drive leads. These are the new tools for indexation and traffic and community managers will be the new guardians of web traffic and notoriety.

It will now become a standard if one wants to stay in the race as Google Caffeinee is implementing it. New search habits are bound to crop up and new SEO techniques will show their face. What business need to understand now is that blogs might be the best way to catch up with the others. As things go, many companies will be launching up blogs with a lot of content copied and pasted from other sites or from their “paper material” but here things will be different. Real blogging rules will have to be used, those levers defining the quality of content and the targeting of traffic will become real in business spheres and those who will be using these as tools rather than crutches to their SEO will be those getting something out of Google Caffeine.

EDIT 24-06-2010. To illustrate the words.

This edit comes 18 hours later. I’ve been following the indexation of this article and as shown above, this post has, for example, hit Google’s first search engine results page when searching for “google caffeine” just after publication just because of the freshness of the article.

Most, if not all, web designers know the notoriously popular site Smashing Magazine as well as its newly built network, the Smashing Network. Now, what made Smashing Magazine one of the most popular web design related sites out there is the great use, and even a bit of abuse, of the “listicles”, the list posts concept. They have not been the inventors of this concept but sure turned it into the trend it now is (in the web design world).

Trending and whoring.

Some brief Internet history. Once the Smashing Magazine concept took up and proved to be efficient and overtly performing (in terms of traffic hence in terms of revenue on advertisement), hundreds of clones started sprouting all over the place and, let’s admit it, started performing well too. The trend was on and the trend whores have been running around since then consuming, copying, listing, writing, “yes-manning”, “great listing” the content and the concept.

What goes up…

The major problem in all this ran around two major drawbacks.

First one, the popularity of such posts and the traffic generated has brought round a huge amount of link addicts. These are the people leaving two words to two lines comments on the posts, usually positive “great article” comments, just for the sake of putting a link to their own website either to catch link juice or to drive traffic elsewhere. This stiffled discussion and did not add value to the original article.

The other problem was that, at some given point, the whole thing started getting a bit cranky. Some of the lists posts were really light, no analysis whatsoever, just lists of, say, screenshots. I’m not a lists fan but I do read some of Smashing Magazine’s articles and some were really, really shallow. Worse, the other copying trend whores were publishing even shallower posts (I might even have one around in my own archives when I was testing what type of posts I would be publishing).

Setting the record straight.

I can’t say that it started out from there but Paul Scrivens at Drawar went back on how he launched Whitespace and how the concept caught up to be eventually made popular by Smashing Magazine. In this article, Smashing Magazine Killed The Community (Or Maybe It Was Me), Paul explains how this concept slowly started breaking up the web design community. What I found great in it is the mature response of Vitaly Friedman, Smashing Magazine’s CEO, who stated that there were changes coming on the site.

Last month, in the opinion section of Smashing Magazine, Kari Patila restressed the point on the trends that are driving web design today, trends that seem to be depreciating the community.

Changes at Smashing Magazine.

Great changes are those that are not those that jump out at first sight but do great things. Has anyone noticed that the number of comments on the latest Smashing Magazine articles have suddenly fell from the usual 300+ comments (mostly “great posts” ones) to under a 100 mostly well discussed ones? Yes there are changes there.

The team at Smashing Magazine must have analysed of what was polluting the articles and have made 2 major changes. They have been promoting more content oriented articles while keeping some great well-written list posts but the best move I think is the pure and simple removal of comment authors’ website link in the comments. This gave no more incentive to link addicts.

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!

Anatomy of a “coming soon” page.

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:

• Information on what the future website will be about.
• What the website will be marketing.
• Launching date.
• Update/launch signup forms to acquire prospects.
• Providing short updates for buzz.

Other uses?

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.

Why should you SEO it?

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.

The Google Sandbox.

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.

Nurturing your future ranking.

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.

Getting Google page rank.

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.

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.

Satisfied users.

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.

How to?

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.

Standards.

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!

External CSS.

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.

External behaviour.

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.

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!

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.

We are family!

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 problem.

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.

No way out.

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.

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.

Sitelinks for the dumb.

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.

How to get sitelinks?

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:

• use a hierarchical site structure
• use descriptive anchor text and links pointing to internal pages
• avoid deep nesting of content behind many subdirectories

Bonus feature.

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.

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.

Anchor text.

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.

The Twitter case.

Any Twitter user will have spotted the issue on the basis of the anchor text definition. There are 2 issues concerning Twitter:

• As shown lately, url shorteners have been a problem (not huge but still) as viruses or phishing/malware pages can be hidden behind these urls. The problem does not come from hiding something behind a link itself, it can be done with any link. However, some users might be frightened of clicking on links now (which is the exact contrary of the current usage of the tool).
• As an SEO expert, if Search Engines provide real time content by showing Tweets in SERPs, it would really be interesting to have real anchor texts which will increase the visibility of the landing page be it for a user or a search engine robot.

Anchor text, a solution?

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:

• As stated earlier, a major help in terms of SEO and link building.
• A better use of the 140 characters available as space will not be eaten up by the url sent out.
• The follower might have better incentives to click on a link if the latter has explicit anchor text.

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!

Explaining things to you dear reader.

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?

Letting time run by.

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…

… and it’s a major 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.

Some weeks back, Read Write Web published an article on how Facebook Wants to Be Your One True Login. So far, no problem. The author, Mike Melanson, did not however cater for the possibility of indexation of the post on Google based on the “Facebook Login” keyword.

The Google trap.

What happened is that the post made it to the top of the search engine’s results page on the “Facebook Login” search. Next thing was hundreds of Facebook users flooding on the post and trying to connect to Facebook via the “Facebook connect” plugin in the sidebar. This ended with a hilarious (from a web project manager’s point of view) thread of angry/confused/insulting/[add adjective here] comments from lost users, many complaining about the forthcoming death of their cows on Farmville.

Here’s an excerpt of the comments found over there.

User interaction with search results.

This sheds some light on how the average Internet user deals with websites. Let’s get back to how these users got to the Read Write Web website: most of them typed “Facebook login” in Google and clicked on the first result. This means that the use of Google as navigation tool is now one of the trendy uses of the search engine and that people click with confidence on the first result even without reading the result! Blind usage, that would be it. This also stresses on the importance of being in the first, if not being the first, on a given keyword.

User interaction with a website.

Now things become serious. The Read Write Web interface is red and white and has nothing at all in common with the Facebook login page. Nothing here reminds of Facebook except for the article title and the logo copied off Facebook.

This however did not give the information to the people getting on the website that this was not Facebook or Facebook’s login page. Does this mean that colour branding fails? Does this mean that people not only DO NOT READ urls nor TITLES or other elements NEITHER? Does this mean that if you deliver a specific content to people when they are here to do just one specific thing, they will not read the content. So, if Facebook sets up an info saying that all accounts will be linked to the users’ bank accounts on the Facebook Login page, all these persons will automatically click “OK” and get in?

Pushing the observation further.

After a whole lot of thinking and working in the web design field, this Facebook Login issue shows that we will never really understand the web user. The latter is an entity whose usage of our tools will never really succeed in giving out the best service to all users because they will always do what they want. Another thing is that the web user is emotional. It will be browsing the web with passion and just as something unexpected crops up, the mood takes over and confusion leads to anger.

A whole lot of talking is going on around the new Mauritius Broadcasting Corporation (MBC) TV/Radio website. It always is a major event when a major Mauritian company sets sails out for a new web venture and people can question and appreciate the job. Here, the great thing is that the tool used is WordPress which has now gone past the “blog” platform and has matured into a full grown Content Management System and even been awarded the Overall Best Open Source CMS award in 2009. That’s one good point but there’s a major “but” when it comes to the way the MBC managing board seems to have directed this project!

Corporate you said?

The said website is a corporate one, at least, it’s what is said on the main page title. I will not be going into an indepth analysis of the design and the website as well as its functionalities. The discussion between the webdesigner and the public is nearing trench warfare more than anything on Yashvin’s Blog with all the contradictions and accusations that go with such situations. I will not be adding to this!

My firm belief is that Mauritian companies need to mature in their use of the Internet and start working on online presence. They have to invest in development and user experience with indepth audits of user demands and conversion rates. This calls for a good deal of methodology, vision and professionalism. So my concern here is how can a huge thing like the MBC get involved in an amateur construction of its website.

Templating and project management.

To build a new website, objectives must be laid out, budgets (if any) calculated, but more important, the whole project must be managed with validation procedures, content improvement, calls to action and lead analysis. But what do we have here? A webdesigner who claims to have done the job for free by buying a template (Hello MBC managing board, don’t you even have some money to even pay for a template?) and modifying it to suit the MBC’s needs. And what does the poor chap get even with investing his own money into the project? Just a poor link to his website! This is pure slavery! The MBC might even be de-localising some of its own work to China.

So what’s the problem here? Having a webdesigner claiming high to having made just a template modification for such a big company means that all the steps required to make a real, good, managing board driving, visionary and high level website have been flushed down the toilet. All this has been boiled down to a template available to anyone and just modified. Do they care for their image? Do they have a communication & advertising department?

Amateurish and cheap.

The MBC is not the structure that bears the shiniest image in Mauritius and it would somehow have been logical that the directory board would have had the idea of making use of this occasion to buff it up but once again, the amateurs have hit home. The MBC is a leading Mauritian body and one would expect a site to its grandeur with a huge input in quality content. The whole system is heavy and loaded with glitches. Just one example, how many of you readers will ever read every word in this “About us” page. This is where the group should have had clear specifications in terms of content, design and wireframing. But none of all these are here.

An example of what “not to do”.

Overall, this whole project is a great example of how a major company should not be leading a web project. Specifications should be minute and written clearly. Each element should be made to maximise conversion and user experience. All this is done through thorough statistical analysis and user interview. Usability tests should be made to test each page, each way of delivering content and of the service and not just impose a template to any web designer. As sad as it might sound, the MBC managing committee has failed to make use of a great tool just to save money or maybe for some really obscure reason… who knows?

56! Wonderful number. 56 is also the number of links available on the gov.mu homepage without touching anything. These links make nearly 60-70 percent of the gross content of the home page. On a first view, it’s all about links and from a usability point of view, a visitor does not even spend the time reading all the available links on this page.

One of the great answers that some project managers are fond of is: “If they’re on this site, they’re looking for something, let them do the work now.” Here there is more to it. The visitor has to battle through the content to find data, if it ever finds it.

Decluttering the navigation is not easy task on this site. To be able to do this, we’ll keep in mind the main target for the site: the Mauritian population. Thus, the elements (as they are right now) must be organised in groups targetting the most used sections of the website. Having no access to the analytics tool of the site we cannot really know which sections are the more important. We can however make a guess on these.

Process.

How would this process be followed in a real life project?

• Use an analytics tool and make a report on a whole year.
• Targetting the main audience, extract information about the most viewed pages.
• Determine what are the completed goals for these pages (downloading a file, filling a contact form, filing a report or a demand…)
• Check if there are any conversions or determine how to follow them in the tracking.
• Use these pages as a base for navigation, at least section building.
• Determine section groups and target landing pages as main section pages

One navigation menu or more?

Looking into the navigation system actually used on the site as well as the sub-portals, the site’s overall navigation is separated into 5 parts dispersed around the page. Below is a screenshot of all the other navigational elements.

A good experimentation would be to group all the main navigation in one place and keep one and only one for less-important links such as disclaimers and “about” pages. On the main navigation, experimenting with mega menus might be the best alternative to the clutterred navigation problem. This would add direct links to specific pages in one place and improve user experience.

The mega menu would have to be above the fold and the second “lesser” navigation in the page footer.

Another interesting experimentation to hold on navigation on this website would be to display a block of information by topic to help finding the information instead of using the drop down menus currently in use.

How to link?

A very important problem crops up when analysing the links. All the bottom page ones are javascript links. Being a government website, the most important factor in the use of the website is easy navigation. Using javascript generated links is one of the worse errors to make in web implementation for 2 main reasons:

• Non visual browsers will have problems following them as they are non-javascript readers. An “accessibility” link written in javascript shows that accessibility is actually NOT the main objective of a site that needs to have the largest audience possibilities.
• Search engines will not be able to crawl the pages. SEO (from a business-oriented point of view) might not be a core necessity for such a site but it is important because SEOing it will allow it to have direct links available in search engine results pages, these being what drives people to the information they are looking for.

It is therefore important to check all the links and set them in href (HTML). Furthermore, adding title attributes to them would improve the SEO and facilitate navigation. Anchor texts with keywords will also help navigation as well as SEO in one go.

Conclusion

Navigation is a core element of user experience and experimenting with better content delivery on a site like a Government’s website would be beneficial to all. Improving and decluttering this will have a positive impact on browsing. Experimenting with different solutions to find the best one would not be throwing money out of the window.