SEO Training

It can seem like an impossible choice. SEO or Usability. Where is the compromise?

SEO is vital to the success of any website.  After all, if you can’t get found, then you can’t give your message.  However, once you have been found, it would be nice if people actually stayed on your site and read some of your content instead of clicking off somewhere else within seconds.  Content writing skills are extremely important.

Why are SEO and User Experience often opposites?

It all comes down to how the human mind works and how algorithms work.  Take pictures for example.  Google can’t “see” your graphics in the same way as humans do.

Despite huge improvements in search algorithms, the bottom line is that they still place a massive emphasis on original text content.

This contradicts what humans like to read.  We are the exact opposite.  We don’t really like reading online.  We like pictures and lots of them.

Heuristics – what have they ever done for us?

Jakob Nielsen is regarded by most as the father of usability heuristics (heuristics simply means that the rules are only loosely defined rather than strict).  It is worth reading through them.  What usability heuristics do is give us a rough template on how to not annoy users of both applications and websites (websites being a type of application really).

Keep Visitors Longer

By sticking to heuristic principles we have more chance of keeping our visitors for longer on our site, and of giving them an experience that in all probability they don’t particularly notice.  Not getting noticed in this case is a good thing.  We have all been frustrated on websites by not being able to simply navigate to where we want to go.  Mostly we just look for a new site when that happens.  This is the converse of heuristic principles.

This eye tracking study shows how we tend to read in a vaguely f shaped pattern online. This shows the importance of top google ranking too by the way.

How humans read web pages

We, as humans, read web pages quite differently to how we would read a book.  Broadly speaking, we scan down the left hand side of a web page, reading headings and only some of the words in the paragraphs below them.  How much depends on the level of interest the headline and the first few words invoked.

Thus, the way I wrote that last paragraph was not ideal from a heuristics point of view, since I essentially repeated the heading in my first line.  However that was ideal from an SEO perspective.  I train people to write like that.

Humans like short and snappy text, preferably backed up with pictures.  Google likes text, text and more text.  This is why content writing is such an artform.

How to please both humans and search engines with your content

I was recently working on a site relaunch for a recruitment agency specialising in Medical Jobs.  The website ranked really well for their chosen keywords within a very competitive niche market (no prizes for guessing who does their SEO!). However, the front page had a LOT of text on it that 99% of visitors would never read.

For the relaunch user experience was high on the list of priorities.  But we were faced with a problem.  A good user experience and lots of text on the front page do not good bedfellows make.

The solution was to turn to javascript and make the front page into a slideshow.  Not any javascript will do, and Ajax will not do at all.  The key to this is to make sure that when you view the source of your page, all the content is visible.  This means that search engines get to read all of your text.

Users get movement and interaction (which are plusses) while having the information broken down in such a way that they are more likely to read more of that text.

Did making a slideshow help keep visitors?

Yes it did.  Putting the information into a slideshow increased the average time on the front page of the site by 16 seconds straight away.  This means that people are actually staying to read the information, which is what you want if you have a website.

Benefits of Heuristics to SEO

Google take things like bounce rate and time on site into consideration for SEO too.  So, by providing a better user experience and keeping visitors longer through the use of heuristic principles, you are also improving your standing with the search engines.

How do I know if I should break up text on my page?

It is not always the case that text needs to be broken up for humans to appreciate it properly.  It is very simple to find out if your page needs help.  Use your analytics.  The key factor here is the amount of time spent on the page.  If it is really low on a page that has a lot of text then it stands to reason that your users are not reading it.  If that doesn’t upset you it should.  The only reason it would not upset you is if the content is really only there for the search engines.  In other words it’s spam content.  There should be nothing on your website that you do not want people to read.  Spam content can be recognised by search engines simply by measuring the time your visitors spend on your page.  If it’s too short for the amount of content, then the quality of the writing must be really bad. Thus at the very least, the page does not deserve to be ranked highly.

I don’t like slideshows (other ways to break up text)

If you have a lot of text on your page that you realise could not possibly be read in the time your analytics say people are taking to read it then you need to make some changes.  The following are ways of breaking up text in a page to make it more accessible…

• Lists.  Put your content into lists.  They are easier to read than straight paragraphs.
• Plenty of headings.  These hugely increase the chances of people reading more of your content.
• Boxes.  Place your content into bite sized individual boxes.
• Pictures. Pictures and picture captions are about the only thing that will distract us from reading down the left hand side of a page at the speed of light.  We love images.  However, stock images that we have seen before tend to be ignored.  Your pictures have to get attention too.
• Ruthless editing.  Big long sentences are bad.  Get rid of your verbose ramblings and stick to the point. (I could do with remembering that one).
• Highlight text. Using bold or italic text helps to get pertinent points noticed.

As always, remember that keyword stuffing is really annoying to users.  I don’t want to read about seo training in the latest seo training article on this seo training website.  Neither do search engines.  It may work to some extent, but it’s effect on users is to make you look bad, so don’t do it!

Eternity Jewellery Online Shop using OScommerce

I have been working on a site for a jewellers for the last while.  I decided to go with OScommerce as the ecommerce engine.  The reason for that was that it was recommended to me by several people. I decided to check it out.  I was delighted when I saw that it was w3c standards compliant, so I dived right in.

About OScommerce Version 2.3.1

OScommerce V2.3.1 is an open source online shopping solution.  Open source software is developed by a network of developers in an open community.  Therefore it is free.  That means I can charge less to my clients than if I buy a shopping cart solution or have to develop it from scratch myself.

OScommerce runs on PHP and mysql – which themselves have tons of online support available.

OScommerce comes with an impressive feature set which you can look through here.  It seems like they have everything covered. I particularly liked things like unlimited products and multi-currency support (although I since found out that exchange rates are only automatic if the US dollar is your primary currency).

Working with OScommerce 2.3.1 (let the review begin)

Installation

Installation was straightforward and there is plenty of online help if you get stuck.  It’s not as easy as wordpress, but it is not as hard as a multisite wordpress install.

Modification

This is where things get a little less rosy.  Unless you want to use OScommerce as it is then you are going to have to make some modifications.  It will work perfectly well as it is and you can upload your store logo etc, it’s just that I have yet to meet anybody that wants their shop to look like anybody elses.

OScommerce is not a theme based platform.  There are people out there selling “themes” but these all go further than just some changes to the CSS.

Any modifications will affect future updates! This is because just about every mod requires changes to more than one file.

There are thousands of modifications available though.  Be warned.  A lot of modifications require you to upload files, overwriting the ones that were there before.  If you have made modifications already you may well find yourself overwriting some of those.  The upshot of that would be at best stopping your original modifications from working, and at worst breaking your whole site.  Backup, backup, backup!

File Structure

It’s a nightmare.  To do something simple like adding a page requires changes to 3 pages (or maybe 4 I forget).  Once you get used to the file structure it’s not as bad, but you can forget about putting in a page called something.php and just linking to it.  It will not work.  The side menus are module based.  This is great in that you can position and reposition individual modules like the shopping cart and product categories easily from the admin.  It is not so great when it comes to adding to a module (extra pages for example) or creating a new module (box).

OScommerce SEO

SEO is a foreign concept to OScommerce.  I made the stupid assumption that because they had gone to the effort of making the site standards compliant (markup, but not CSS) that they had also put some effort into SEO.  This is absolutely not the case.  Problems with the SEO include:

1. Multiple pages with the same meta title (the store name).  Products and categories have separate page titles but all the other pages default to the shop name.  I confess that I got frustrated trying to work out the structure to change this and resorted to a switch statement in the header to change the page title of the other pages based on the url of the page.  God help me when it comes to doing mod-rewrites of the urls!
2. Links to index.php.  This is one of my pet hates.  Why link to www.whateversite.com/index.php when www.whateversite.com is perfectly acceptable and removes a duplicate page issue.  A quick mod-rewrite sorted out that.
3. Canonical URLS.  that sort of goes with the above.  Again sorted with a mod-rewrite.
4. Search Engine Friendly URL’s.  There is an option in the admin to display search engine friendly urls.  The trouble is that the solution is worse than the problem. The original url to a product could be http://www.eternityjewellery.ie/product_info.php?cPath=24_39&products_id=42.  Turning on Search Engine Friendly URL’s makes this http://www.eternityjewellery.ie/product_info.php/cPath/24_39/products_id/42.  What the advantage of that is supposed to be I don’t know.  There is no product name in there (in this case an eternity ring).  Worse than that it appears to add 4 folder levels to the url.  The further away from the home page a page is (sub folders) the less important it is. Needless to say I have turned that off.
5. There is no description meta tag.
6. There is no built in sitemap (although there are mods available).
7. There is no auto update to google et al when a new product is added.

Another issue I have is that there is no visual editor when putting in product information.  If you want to put in a list with your product then you have to code it.  No problem to me, but not nice for a client who doesn’t know html from abba.  Frankly that is a bit embarrassing.

There are SEO mods available, but you will need to install these first, before other mods since making an OScommerce site truly SEO friendly is not a simple task.  I decided not to because they mostly include stuff that is outdated or not necessary.  I’ll do it myself.

Things I don’t like about OScommerce v2.3.1

1. OScommerce allows you to add attributes or options to a product.  they were clearly thinking of options like available in red or blue.  This part of the admin is a disgrace.  Each attribute has to be added in separately.  With the Jewellery shop I was working with they had things like ring sizes.  There were 52 different ring sizes.  To individually add 52 options to each ring would take a long time and leave me with royally P***ed off clients.  I spent a day making some modifications to this page including allowing multiple selection of attributes for a product and re-ordering the lists.  They were ordered by id number from the database.  I changed it to be ordered alphabetically or I would never be able to find anything!  A search function would have been nice here too.  What you end up with is pages and pages of options and then more pages of which options are assigned to which products.  Oh, and similarly named products are a problem there too.  You can input a code for each product, but that code did not show up in the attributes page.  So two “Eternity Ring”s with different ring sizes available would get very confusing.  I had to modify that to show the product code too.  While I was at it I modified the breadcrumb trail navigation too.
2. Shipping.  There are lots of shipping methods available.  Combining them is not so easy.  My client wanted free delivery on orders over x amount, but only in Ireland.  This was achievable only by setting up two different shipping methods, one by price and the other by weight.  I further had to limit the price method to only come into effect in Ireland.  The documentation was skimpy and shipping took a full half day to sort out.  Part of the process of setting up shipping was to input the country code of every country in the list, along with the shipping price by weight.  Having a maximum of 255 characters per line in the inputs meant that I had to split one segment of countries into 4 (at the 255 character mark).  A headache!
3. Shipping part 2. If you work in lbs, then weights are not a problem.  For those of us who are metric it is not so straight forward.  The database is set to two decimal places.  So if you use kilos then you only get two decimal places of grams.  This is a problem on light goods like earrings for example.  You can change the db to reflect 3 decimal places or you can just measure everything in grams.  After trying both I went for weighing in grams.  OScommerce allows you to specify maximum weights for packages and increases overall package weight by a percentage after that to compensate your shipping charges.  From Ireland, even if it actually worked it would be inaccurate and useless.  I turned that off and just put in prices for larger weights in my main shipping section.
4. No wishlist.  I didn’t mind that so much, but my client would have liked one.  The only mod I could find for 2.3.1 to do this was on sale for $850 (which rather goes against the spirit of open-source).

Would I use OScommerce again?

Yes I would.  Now that I know my way around it, it is not a bad piece of software.  It is not nice to work with but it does what you want it to do at the end of the day, so it gets a reluctant thumbs up from me.  I only say reluctant because for a time I felt it was ruining my life!

When starting out on an SEO campaign where do you actually begin? How do you organise and prioritise? What is more important: social media, link building, content?

These questions are valid for everybody. They are particularly relevant if you have been charged with your company’s online marketing and are not 100% sure exactly what to do in order to get results that will get you a clap on the back.

Your SEO campaign needs planning to make you look good.

It all has to start with SEO analysis.  My granny used to knit a lot.  The house was littered with knitting patterns.  Try building a house without blueprints.  The same is true for online marketing and SEO.  Without a clear picture of what has to be done you will end up with a proverbial one armed jumper (an itchy one at that) or a house with architectural properties similar to that of my own (and the builders actually had plans!).

SEO analysis allows you to work out exactly where you stand right now and provides pointers for where you can achieve that all important traffic and Google rankings. Think of an SEO analysis report as an SEO blueprint.  A good SEO analysis report will tell you:

• What keywords am I using currently?
• Is my website standards compliant? (good code base)
• How can my site structure be improved? (for ease of use and for SEO)
• How does my site compare to that of competitors for SEO?
• What keywords are competitors using?
• What sites link back to my site?
• What sites link to my competitors sites?
• What are my sites Strengths, Opportunities, Weaknesses, Threats? (SWOT analysis)

A really good report will also bring in social media and assess what can be done there too.  It will also explain the effects of these different aspects on your websites online performance.

Webshed offer a SEO Health Check that incorporates these features.  That is because it is the essential building block of any online campaign.

If you are about to start an SEO campaign, do not go into it blind.  Have a clear plan based on facts and your life will be made that much easier and there is less possibility of spending lots of time on little return.

You have a business, you need a website.  Where do you go from there?

Prices for web design vary wildly.  You can get a website for a few hundred euros up to several thousand. So who should you pick and why?

Website design is about much more than just design.  Your site needs to sell your business.  To do that it has to be found.  So you should budget for some SEO work as well.

The wool can be pulled over your eyes in many ways.  A good website design will incorporate many elements that come under the SEO heading too.  There are far too many website designers that are happy to knock out frankly substandard work and charge handsomely for it.

Picking a web designer is a quagmire.  Here are some points that may help (or scare you off completely)..

1. Your Website should conform to standards. Use the W3C standards checker to assess sites previously done by prospective designers of your site.  Your business has standards.  So does the Internet.  Unfortunately, because most customers are unaware of those standards they are ignored by many designers.  If a designer tells you this is not important, remind them that Google webmaster guidelines say that it is important.
2. Qualifications don’t really count.  Even in our universities web standards are not top of the priority list when teaching web design.  Previous work that includes designs you like and are standards compliant are the best gauge you can use.
3. Do you need a CMS (Content Management System).  A content management system allows people with no web experience to write and edit their own content.  If you do not have personnel in your organisation that can edit a web page then this is really a must.  Otherwise you are stuck with having to get your web designer to change your site every time you need to update it (and it should be updated often).
4. Word of mouth referrals are not worth a damn.  Lots of business customers are very happy with their websites and should not be.  The site looks good to them and they have been told by the designer that it is great.  The reality may be far from that.  Looking nice and performing well are not synonymous.  Many even have basic errors like not working properly on all web browsers.
5. A web designer should not be charging extra for some forms of SEO.  SEO is essentially following standards guidelines and link building.  A good web designer will include good practice in the design.  There should be as little code on a page as possible (javascript, ajax and css all kept off page).  In english: There should not be any code on the page that does not absolutely have to be there.   There are “designers” that are still making websites in tables (It is now done through <div> and Css (Cascading Style Sheets).  That does not mean that there should be no tables on your site, just that the structure should not be made up of tables.

When you approach web designers you should find out exactly what they are offering for the money.  Get them to write out a proposal for you.  Then when you have several you are in a better position to make a choice.

Remember, Cheap is probably just a template that has been used on other sites and with no CMS or some flaws in the coding.  But… Expensive does not necessarily mean better.  You could pay over five grand and still end up with a pile of poo as far as SEO or usability are concerned.  Just make sure you know exactly what you will be getting for your money before the project commences.

The proposals are not the end of the line.  You can still go back to each company/individual and ask questions.  If you don’t understand something get it explained.  If something is included on one proposal and not the others ask the others about it.  I hope this was useful to some of you.

Most SME’s in Ireland do not have an IT department. Of those that do not many of them have somebody that specialises in Search Engine Optimisation.

Surprisingly many firms still fail to see the need for any SEO services.  There are thousands of Irish business sites that do not even cover the basics of good web practice.

What I’m talking about here is conforming to W3C standards.  Check your own site now on this link http://validator.w3.org/

Just enter the url of your site (http://www.mysite.ie) and press return.  Did the screen go green and give you a congratulations message.  For most of you the answer will be no.

Some of you may be quite angry about this, having paid “professionals” to do your website for you.  It may look great but if it does not comply with web standards then it is sub standard work.

If you ask them about it they will probably tell you that it’s not important.  Too many “SEO professionals” hold this view.

Google on the other hand disagrees.  In their webmaster guidelines good code is listed as one of the many things that you should ensure your site has in order to rank well in google.

Why then do any self professed and experienced professionals in Search engine Optimisation claim that it is of little importance?

Their experience has taught them that even a site with bad coding can be made to rank well in all the search engines.  Rather than taking a holistic look at your site they concentrate on one or two activities like link building.  They even get results.

So why am I harping on about web standards?  That’s simple.  Your results could be better.  In practice you can get away with a few short cuts on any website.  But ignore too many of Googles guidelines and you will be giving your site less than a helpful start.

The other more salient point is that you have paid for a service, and should expect it to be of a reasonable standard.  If a builder leaves out your damp course and tells you “It’s not that important, sure isn’t your house still standing” you would not take it lightly.  So why would you allow a website builder to take short cuts on your business web site (unless of course you don’t like your business).

Good code is a solid foundation on which to build your online presence.  Without it you are off to a shaky start.  Pseudo web developers have been getting away with it for years because you don’t know any better.

There are no professional organisations to ensure standards.  I couldn’t call myself a doctor in the morning, but there is nothing to stop a doctor calling themselves a web developer.

Arm yourself with knowledge when you are getting your website done.  Acquaint yourself with the W3C validation tool on this post and with others that will appear as this blog develops.  Talk to more than one designer/developer.  Check the sites they have done.  Check how they rank in Google.  Find out exactly what they propose for your site.  After all, your site is your shopfront to the entire world.