Some HTML tags often draw confusion because of their similarities with other tags as well as the way in which they display and style content. Examples of these are blockquote, cite, strong, em or i. Each element has features and, though they might accomplish the same goal, they might be altogether really different. Knowing those differences will help improve the markup of some pages. We’ll concentrate on those important tags that are strong, b,em and i.

Conveying structure.

These tags, though small ARE important. They are actually more used than we would like to admit and their first use is to give better sense to the content. Putting a word in bold or in italics cannot mean anything else but that the word is important and that we want to draw the reader’s attention to that word. Well, the W3C has created the strong and em tags so that the markup can convey the same importance given to that word. This is the basic idea of it all. So the first thing you need to know about these tags is that b and i are presentational elements while strong and em are structural. This explains why so many web designers would be telling you to swap the use of b for strong and i for em.

How and why?

Big question now. How and why (and probably when) to use these. The question might sprout especially when considering the fact that the b and i elements are not deprecated. Let’s look at how the W3C defines these tags: em indicates emphasis and strong indicates stronger emphasis. Bingo, the answer has been here all the time. Both of them are a way to convey importance to a word or a text but there are 2 levels of emphasis here. This tells you when and why you should use them in your code though b and i would have the same presentational effects but will only be giving information on the fact that the text is in bold or italics or not.

But wait, there’s more to this. The use of those tags have an impact on the way screen readers and search engine robots see the content.

Accessibility.

In terms of accessibility, a screen reader uses the strong and em tags are emphasis levels. Screen readers will, as the W3C puts it, “change the synthesis parameters, such as volume, pitch and rate accordingly”. This surely nails it. If we were using b and i to have visual representation we can get to a higher level by using strong and em as they will be doing the same visual job while conveying the structure and working towards more acessibility.

Search engine optimisation.

This information should be used regardless of whether you’re using strong, em, b or i tags. These participate in search engine optimisation. How?

Simply by taking advantage of the human element in the search engine robot’s algorithm. Here is the general concept: if a word is set under emphasis, it means that the author wants this particular word to stand out of the rest to catch the reader’s attention. This might therefore be considered as a KEYWORD! This is how the strong and em elements are treated as conveying emphasis, therefore helping SEO.

However, don’t run over and start stuffing keywords in your content and emphasising them with half a dozen strong and em tags around them. You’d be telling the robots you’re spamming them.

One step further

Some extra points here. If you need to have presentational enhancements to your strong or em tags the common practice is to wrap a strong tag around an em tag like this:

<strong><em>This is the emphasised text</em></strong>

The problem here is that you are giving a level 2 emphasis to an already level 1 emphasised text. This would not mean anything in terms of structure though it will in terms of presentation. Let alone in terms of accessibility.

There is a solution to this: Cascading Style Sheets. Let’s imagine you need all texts in bold and in italics but still want to keep your levels of emphasis, you would style your tags like this:

strong {
    font-style: italic;
}
em {
    font-weight: bold;
}

Digging even more into this, you can add classes to those tags which will give you 4 visual presentations of emphasised texts while keeping the 2 levels of emphasis.

strong {
}
em {
}
.bold {
    font-weight: bold;
}
.italic {
    font-style: italic;
}

You would be using them in your code as such.

<em class="bold">This is the emphasised text</em>
<strong class="italic">This is the emphasised text</strong>

Related posts:

1. You should be (over-) using the H (heading) tags.
2. Dropping unnecessary tags in your HTML code.
3. Simple link styling using CSS.
4. Using FIR [Fahrner Image Replacement] – Part 1 – Basic implementation.
5. Speeding your page load time will improve your Google ranking.

This post might be a sequel to my previous post on speeding up a page’s loading time to get better rankings in Google’s search engine results pages (SERPs). It is however not the case here. Most of us write our code, at least our code’s structure, in one go. This is done preferably after having identified all the building blocks of a page or template. But let’s be honest, even if we optimise our code, our CSS and all the scripting that accompany our everyday job it is not easy to dive back into the code and go for seconds in terms of cleaning up.

The good choice.

I admit it. I have not done it all the time, cleaning the code more than necessary. Like everybody who has made mistakes I could easily come up with a thousand reasons for not having done so. The first would be: “It takes too much time on the schedule allotted to such or such project. As I matured I understood the necessity of doing second passes in code cleaning.

• It helps you check any error that could have been left.
• It might be a good occasion to compress some elements to speed up the page.
• It is a good chance to drop the unnecessary tags in your HTML code.

Now you might be asking yourself what this “unnecessary tag in the HTML code” is. Simple. When doing second checks on my code I found out that I somehow found new and improved solutions to the code already written. The I would change these. Most of the time I found myself dropping some tags from my HTML code and exploit the inherited properties of other tags to achieve the same results. This would be beneficial for maintainance, improve page loading time and less code means more content for search engines.

The basic code.

Below is a basic example of code that we usually find in web design. There is nothing wrong with this code, it works perfectly well and is written to be nicely styled in CSS.

<div id="navigation">
    <ul>
        <li><a href="/">Home</a></li>
        <li><a href="/about.html">About us</a></li>
        <li><a href="/services.html">Our services</a></li>
        <li><a href="/contact.html">Contact us</a></li>
        <li><a href="/register.html">Register here</a></li>
    </ul>
</div>

As you can see in this code, it is a navigation menu that is implemented into its own wrapping DIV tag which can itself be included in header or sidebar parts in a design. After analysing it and improving its CSS, we would estimate that the code is fine. But there’s one more step to push.

Dropping the tag.

In standard HTML, some tags have block displays and others have inline ones. Those missing any of these can get them through the declaration of these properties in the cascading style sheets.

    <ul  id="navigation">
        <li><a href="/">Home</a></li>
        <li><a href="/about.html">About us</a></li>
        <li><a href="/services.html">Our services</a></li>
        <li><a href="/contact.html">Contact us</a></li>
        <li><a href="/register.html">Register here</a></li>
    </ul>

With this in mind, we can bring some tags to become their own container instead of relying on an extra tag. This is the case with our basic code where we can directly make use of the containing UL tag to hold the rest of the elements, thus making the use of the holding DIV unnecessary. One tag won! This can be done on a lot of tags such as FORM or even SPAN (if there is a use to it…).

Related posts:

1. You should be (over-) using the H (heading) tags.
2. The secret of strong and em tags.
3. [Festive Hands] The structure.
4. HTML 5 wins over XHTML 2.
5. Simple link styling using CSS.

Heading tags (h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6) have always had a bad reputation in web designing. The main reason for this is the beastly appearance these tags when they have their default styling. Many a time web designers have thrown the H1 tag out for the use of a H4 one just because the latter has a smaller font size. The H tags are, however, core elements of page building and SHOULD be used and even overused.

The ugliness can be put aside as all this can be styled (as they have always been) with cascading style sheets (CSS).

Semantic web and standards.

With the advent of standards, web designers have understood that clean semantic code is what must be produced be it for maintainability, load time or cross browser compatiblity. Heading tags are part of this semantic code as they are here to structure a page. Their mark-up has been created to give the maximum structuring possibilities to pages. Some tips on their usage:

• The top level heading (bearing the title or theme of a page) should always be a H1.
• There can be only one H1 in the entire page.
• Use heading tags logically, there cannot be suh-headings (H2/H3/…) before a H1.

Search engine optimisation.

In semantic web, headings bear the “titles” of pages and sections. These are therefore important information that a page is giving out to its visitors. Search engine robots have algorithms that take this into consideration. Heading tags are thus analysed by these robots and keywords included in titles are given more weight (this is not an incentive to go for keyword stuffing in headings). Using headings is therefore a good way of working on a page’s ranking.

Another interesting angle on headings and search engine optimisation is the fact that links are allowed in headings. Using headings and keywords along with links result in good optimised anchor text for any page. This can be taken into consideration when working on onsite deeplinking and SEO strategies. The current trend is to put a site’s logo and link in the H1 tag. This does not bring much in terms of SEO as it would do by optimising a page on its own theme and content.

Heading tags and usability.

Nobody likes to read huge boring text blocks on screen. The boredom is usually accentuated by the monotonous looks of long texts. Adding headings reduces this in the first place. Second, headings will allow a visitor to quickly scan a page and the different themes or points the page holds on a particular subject. This comes as a usability tool in this case.

Related posts:

1. The secret of strong and em tags.
2. Dropping unnecessary tags in your HTML code.
3. Speeding your page load time will improve your Google ranking.
4. Web standards for online businesses in Mauritius.
5. Round up of the best posts of April 2010 on the Bureau.

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.

Related posts:

1. [GMU Redux] Testing bandwidth and load times.
2. What will change in 2010 with search engines ranking? (Google speaking only? Not sure …)
3. Optimising your site to get Google sitelinks.
4. Dropping unnecessary tags in your HTML code.
5. You should be (over-) using the H (heading) tags.

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!

Related posts:

1. Community managers: the new kids on the block.
2. Untamed businesses in Mauritius.
3. Web designer = Web consumer.
4. Are Mauritians that bad at design?
5. MBC’s new website: a corporate failure?

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.

Related posts:

1. Failure of the web design community in Mauritius?
2. What will the future of websites be?
3. The aliasing issue.
4. MBC’s new website: a corporate failure?
5. Web designer = Web consumer.

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.

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:

• Size of the domain name (the smaller the better, as it seems).
• Easy to remember (to print in your customers’ minds).
• Business related (aiming your field).
• Top level domain (to maximize indexation).
• Inclusion of keywords (improving ranking through the domain name).

You might be careful.

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.

Local you said?

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.

What about hosting?

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.

Related posts:

1. Get your pro website/blog free of charge.
2. Custom Search: make the most out of Google Maps with optimized geolocation results
3. How can your small (Mauritian) business benefit from the Internet ?
4. De Chazal du Mée’s (DCDM) website can harm your computer.
5. What Mauritian companies are missing on the web : the DCDM example.

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.

Related posts:

1. Optimising your site to get Google sitelinks.
2. You should be (over-) using the H (heading) tags.
3. When social media killed Google.
4. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) for “coming soon” pages.
5. Google cleaning up blogroll links.

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.

Related posts:

1. What Mauritian companies are missing on the web : the DCDM example.
2. MBC’s new website: a corporate failure?
3. What’s in a name? Domain name and hosting strategies.
4. Nobody needs web designers.
5. Get your pro website/blog free of charge.

This article is based on a real life project. It aims to show small business owners, whatever the field, how such businesses can drive leads out of a small scale but really optimised website. I’ll be taking the example of a small scale French business (18 employees) specialised in aluminium zinc works with which I worked and which made over a gross million euros over 3 years just through its website.

Website. This word and its concept is rather unclear for a whole lot of users online. Worse, many business owners hear and talk about the Internet and websites without ever getting a grasp of the concept. Some understand the possibilities and power of using the Internet and others just do not want to even hear about “that thing”. Huge mistake, especially when it comes to small businesses. Why? Because small businesses are more flexible and faster than large scale ones which are already missing a lot on the web. Moreover, being small means being more available locally, thus having better conversions locally, therefore securing contracts easily.

Real life example: Euralu.

Euralu Zinguerie is a small family business working locally in the Rhone-Alps and Auvergne regions in France. It employs 18 persons who are all local experts in zinc works and aluminium stripping for roofs. Nothing to do with the Internet, heh? However, the founder of this enterprise is tech savvy and had heard about websites and was ready to give it a try with a relatively low investment. The idea was to compete with its closest competitor regional Dal’Alu. The latter is a big group with small franchises disseminated everywhere in France.

The process.

The Euralu Zinguerie process was rather simple. The aim was to (re)create its identity and build a website that would have permanent calls to action to generate leads. The site would also need to compete with a minimum but long lasting search engine optimisation.

The conversion issue had to be tackled even before getting into the design process. The latter had to be extremely light to be able to give more importance to content (hence content to search engines). After some tries, we settled for the possibility of getting into direct contact with the company from all the available pages. This gave the direction for the design process as well as the upcoming SEO.

Minimal effective SEO.

Based on its nature, the site was more of the static type with minimal PHP just for the contact application. Aluminium zinc works being a really specialised field, it would have been really difficult to find specialised directories, especially in France, to get the site boosted by backlinks and exogenous SEO. The other thing was that the SEO wouldn’t have to be maintained (reducing website costs).

We therefore had to base all the SEO on the content and treated each page as a single, optimised entity. Each page has been built around one theme and we even used the site’s static file structure to optimise the whole lot. Site navigation was set to have it always available at eye level and all the specialised parts have been cross linked to maximise crawling. We also made sure that the business field “zinguerie” was present in the domain name.

Results.

Analysing conversions and results for this website might be done from different points of view but, after a friendly call to the founder, I got material to analyse both sides of the medal: online leads as well as offline.

Online.

Okay, so what goes on online for this website? In 3 years, the website’s PR is 0/10. What? 0? Yes, 0 and this kills all your misconceptions on PR because the site boasts 2nd on “zinguerie aluminium” just after the national leader 4th place on “zinguerie alu” and between first and 10th place on most of its strategic keywords such as: entreprise spécialisée zinguerie.

Along with this, is the conversion rate. Here is a screenshot of the conversions over 3 years.

1.74%, not much? We had set a simple calculation of how much it would have cost to get these persons to convert. The investment over 3 years would have been $495/350€/MRU Rs 14 775. So these are the gross savings made over the Internet for new clients. All in all, about 60% of these clients have hired the company.

Offline.

One of the good ideas we’ve had on this site was to set the phone number just beside the contact form. Notice how easy it is to get contact information from any page of the website. This, on its own, has generated about 150 phone contacts (every new contact is asked how it heard of the company). Here again about 60% of the clients signed for business.

Conclusion

Many are expecting, at this stage to know how much money came in. I have no clear sum to give but this is what I got from the founder. On average, the minimum contract signed (due to the nature of the work and the involvement of raw materials and travel expenses) is 8 000€ (MRU Rs 338 000) and the maximum can go to as much as 30 000€ (MRU Rs 1 260 000). In remaining on the minimum average with an 60% full conversion rate from the web for this small business, the average contracts signed via the website over the past 2 years is a gross 1 008 000€ (MRU Rs 42 504 000). And let’s keep this in mind: Euralu Zinguerie is but a mere small scale local business.

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