SEO
What the user sees first.
Jul 29th
Imagine the scenario. Someone out there is using Google. They’re looking for a company. They want to buy what you sell. Have you optimised your website for the key words they’re looking for? For the sake of argument, let’s assume you have. So your business is in the first few results. That’s brilliant. Except for some reason you’re not getting their clicks.
All this happens before the user has even visited your site. Before they’ve seen your fabulous design, read your professionally written content, browsed through your product pages with the wonderful photographs and seen your temptingly competitive prices. All this has happened on Google’s search results page. You aren’t helping your business get sales if your business listing in Google doesn’t look as good as it possibly could.
This is best illustrated with a couple of examples.
What the user sees first when they’re searching for a company to buy from is something like this:
Nothing in Abacus Media‘s listing tells you very much about the business. While Abacus have a great looking website that clearly sets out what they do, a search engine user would have to click on their rather obscure and wordy listing to read that content. Few people will – they’ll move down to the next listing to see if that better matches what they’re looking for. Compare Abacus Media’s listing to another Newcastle company:
This listing is for Union Room, a web development company. The difference is immediately apparent. Union Room’s listing clearly defines what they do, where they are, and even how to contact them. It’s a better description of the company by far.
Union Room have achieved this by making use of the META “description” tag in their page content. In contrast, Abacus Media have chosen to omit the tag so Google’s spider has had to lift the text for it’s listing page from the page content of the website. In situ the sentence might be fine but in Google it doesn’t work.
The description tag is the only META tag that Google pay any attention to these days as the others were abused by spammers in the early days of the internet. Keywords, authors, and so became worthless as measures of a page’s content so one by one Google started to ignore what they contained. Recently though there have been moves inside Google to start using page content in search listings again, just not META tags.
“Rich snippets” are well defined blocks of HTML content that Google look for in your website content. They’re a variation of a technology called “microformats”. What a microformat does is enable a machine such as Google’s search spider to understand what the content of a page really means. You, or more likely your web developer, designs the code for the page in such a way that when Google’s spider encounters it it’ll be understood better, and consequently displayed in Google’s listings in a much better form. Currently Google understands 4 different types of snippet; “reviews”, “people”, “products”, and “businesses”. You can find out how to use each one here: http://knol.google.com/k/google-rich-snippets-tips-and-tricks. If you decide to implement any of them in your website you can test that Google understand your code using the new Rich Snippet tool in Google’s webmaster suite: http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets.
For search engine traffic the face of your business is what they see in Google’s listing page. Make sure it’s not ugly.
Can SEO analytics backfire?
Jul 27th
For those readers of this blog who don’t happen to read the Boston Globe I’d like to share a fascinating link: http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2010/07/11/how_facts_backfire/?page=full
The article is about how readers of political articles, when faced with the corrected facts about the article they’ve read, actually become more adamant and entrenched in their misinformed views rather than less as one might expect. Far from admitting defeat, they insist they’re right. Human nature makes us incredibly unwilling to admit we’re wrong.
The problem is known as “backfire”. No one yet knows why backfire happens. It’s pretty strange. And, as with most of the articles and stories I read, I got to wondering how this might apply to web development.
Anyone who’s been in a client-facing role in web design or development, or any other creative industry I imagine, will have met at least one client who is insistent that they know best because they’ve been misinformed by an article, a friend or a previous developer. It’s especially prevalent in the field of Search Engine Optimisation. There are many, many myths about what effects change in your website’s ranking, and persuading a client that what they think is good for their site is actually quite harmful can be a considerable challenge.
Presenting a clear and concise set of web and search analytics results that show how a change has made a positive improvement to the website, either in terms of search traffic, conversion ratio, or customer feedback doesn’t always lead to the client agreeing that the change should stay. The “knowledge” that the client is working from trumps the numbers in front of them in apparently indisputable black and white.
The answers to the issue of client knowledge backfire are given in the article – the direct, blunt approach of flatly refusing to accept that the client is right (because they’re not) while repeating the evidence to them might get through. Alternatively, complimenting the site and highlighting the positive aspects before presenting the aspect that’s backfiring might work instead. It depends on the client. What’s clear though, from my experience and from the literature about the problem of backfire in other aspects of life, is that simply giving a client the facts and expecting them to come to the ‘obvious’ conclusion isn’t always going to work.
The Future of Search
May 26th
A couple of days ago I was at an interesting series of talks about Search Engine Optimisation at a local geek event SuperMondays. The talks covered a range of topics; myths of SEO, using the IIS SEO Toolkit, and ‘stuff The Hodge does’.
These talks got me thinking.
I don’t actually use search engines very much these days. I still use them, but only for technical information. I can’t remember the last time I used a search engine to find a product to buy. I can’t remember the last time I used a search engine to find something distracting to while away half an hour. I can’t remember the last time I used a search engine to find a friend of mine online. I certainly don’t “web surf” any more. 10 years ago I would often spend a couple of hours just looking for cool new websites, things to do, new ideas and so on. Those days are gone. The landscape of the internet has changed completely.
The advent of social networks and community websites has meant that we tend to stay in the same places on the internet now. If you build a relationship with your online friends you’ll continue to return to the same website to engage with them rather than spending time on any number of different websites.
As these communities have grown I’ve started relying on human search more than search engines – If I need a hand with some coding I’ll ask on a developer community forum first. If I’m looking for a band I’ll start with Facebook or MySpace. If I want to know the name of a good restaurant I’m far more likely to ask my Twitter followers than I am to search for a review on Bing. Communities act like a pre-filter; asking people with similar tastes and experiences to my own mean their recommendations are much more likely to coincide with something I like. Search engines can’t do that without knowing a huge amount about me first.
Online shopping is similar. Online shops have been around long enough to build up loyalty. We tend to stick with the ones we know rather than Googling for another. If you want to buy a book you’re very unlikely to search for an online bookshop in which to buy it; you’ll either go to Amazon or the online store of a bookshop you like on the highstreet. If you want to buy a television or a computer you might search online, but in a price comparison website rather than Google.
What search engines gave us 10 years ago was a way to find things that online communities wouldn’t know. The communities were too small. Google’s knowledge pool, despite being incredibly “dumb”, in the sense that it had no personalised filtering, was so large that a search for any topic brought back something. A community of 500 people couldn’t do that. That is no longer the case. Our communities are tens of thousands strong. Now a question on Twitter, if it gets a handful of retweets, might reach millions of people. That’s enough to bring back intelligent, filtered recommendations of things that people use and trust. Over the next decade Facebook, Twitter, and whatever new networks spring up will be in a much better position to recommend websites to you than Google could ever dream of.
What does this mean for Search Engine Optimisation?
Rather than guessing at the algorithms that Google are using to rank the ability of a website to deliver content relevant to the search terms that a user has entered optimising a website for human-to-human recommendation is actually going to be quite easy. Humans are predictable. The key factors I think are going to be important are;
- A usable, accessible website. If your website isn’t usable no one is going to tell their friend about it. That’s painfully obvious.
- A short, memorable, and unambiguous name. If your website address isn’t easy to remember and easy to find people won’t be able to recommend it. (Caveat: Navigational searches in Google, such as searching for “ebay” to get to www.ebay.com, will still be available, so the name of the website is all that will really matter)
- Short URLs. Particularly on microblogging services such as Twitter and identi.ca, the shorter the URL for your pages the better. Some major websites have already started building in their own URL shorteners (eg flic.kr, youtu.be). This will become a pretty standard feature on all websites.
- The mobile space will become much more important. Mobile browsing is booming already, but it’ll be more important than ever but having a website that works properly when someone in the pub pulls out their phone to show a friend the site they’re recommending will be vital. If you’ve been shown a website and told it works well you’re considerably more likely to return to it rather than look for another one.
Of course, while this is happening Google et al aren’t going to be resting on their laurels just letting human search take over their business. They’re working on solutions already. If you take a look at your dashboard ( https://www.google.com/dashboard/ ) you’ll see a list of everything that they know about you. They already know my postcode. When I search for “chinese restaurant” I get a map centred on my house with the local Chinese restaurants highlighted on it. That’s just the beginning. If Facebook and Foursquare let Google mine their data then Google’s listings could push the restaurants that my friends visit to the top of the page.
Whichever wins, be it humans or Google, searching online is going to change a lot in the next ten years.
Top 5 Search Engine Optimisation Myths
Mar 30th
Following a short and interesting discussion in the pub last night I decided that I’d have a look at some of the more pervasive and widely held notions about Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) that I strongly believe are not true.
The first thing we need to consider when we’re thinking about SEO is what does it mean to be #1 in a search engine. The ranking your website is given is not a measure of popularity or quality. This is important to note. Your search engine placement is a measure of how relevant your website is to the search terms the a user has entered into the search engine. The art of SEO is to demonstrate to Google (or Bing, Ask, Baidu, etc) that the website in question is the one that best represents the information that the user is looking for.
Myth 1: I know how Google’s algorithm works.
Google’s PageRank algorithm, the computer program that they’ve developed over the past 13 years, is one of the most closely guarded trade secrets in the world. Arguably it’s the most important piece of software in existence today – it certainly affects the lives of close to everyone who uses the internet at the moment.
It’d be wrong to suggest noone knows anything about it. By conducting experiments on how changes to websites affect their placing in Google’s search results it’s possible to figure out some things about it. We know that keywords in page titles, headings, and URLs change the way Google perceives a website. We know that incoming links from other popular websites can make your site rank better. But after all the tests and tweaks there are always going to be things that we don’t know.
Myth 2: I can guarantee a #1 rank for your chosen keywords.
A vast number of people outside of the web industry appear to believe that with the right content, optimisations, advertising and linking it’s possible to move into the number one spot in Google for any search. Sadly it’s a myth still sold be some of the less scrupulous SEO consultants out there. It simply isn’t true. It can’t be for a number of reasons;
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Google tweak the results for some search terms to force certain sites to the top of the listing (usually Wikipedia).
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The age of a website is an important factor in it’s Page Rank. You can’t make Google believe a website is older than it actually is.
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It’s a competitive market. For some popular searches there are tens of thousands of websites vying for the #1 rank. They can’t all be top.
If you choose your search terms well, and find something that your customers are likely to search for that isn’t completely saturated, then it is possible to optimise a website to rank highly.
Myth 3: Google is the answer to your business’s problems.
Placing in a search engine is an important factor in a website strategy, but you should always be aware that it is not, and will never be, the answer to all the problems facing your website. Even if you’re in that coveted first place for a raft of keywords you won’t have a successful website unless you’re meeting a number of other criteria. For that Google spot to be effective you need to make sure;
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Your potential clients have to be internet users. It might sound obvious, but if you’re running a business that few people turn to the internet to find providers for then your top spot isn’t going to get you many extra sales.
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Your website is effective at converting traffic to sales. All a search engine will do is send visitors to your website. If they don’t like what’s there when they arrive they’ll hit the back button and try the next search result.
Myth 4: I won’t need to change your website.
The majority of effective SEO techniques will involve changes to the way your website is presented to the internet. If your markup (the HTML code that tells browsers what to display) isn’t optimised, and if your content is unfriendly to spiders, your chosen SEO expert is going to need to recommend changes that your web development company is going to need to implement. You should be aware that this is very likely to involve an additional cost from your web developer.
Assuming your website is not optimised at all, an SEO expert should be recommending that the following may need to be looked at;
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Page titles
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The description META tag
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URL structure
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Site navigation
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Textual page content
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Anchor text (links)
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Heading tags (<h1>, <h2>, and so on)
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Image attributes
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Your robots.txt file
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Your sitemap.xml file
I’ll be explaining all of these terms in later blog posts.
Myth 5: You can optimise your website’s ranking on your own.
This is the biggest myth of them all. One of the key defining factors in how the web has grown and developed is the linking from one source of information to another. How does this affect you? Google really likes your website to be linked to from other websites. The thinking is that if other websites like yours enough to provide a link there must be something there worth looking at. To this end, for your website to move up the results page it’s essential that you develop relationships with other websites and persuade them to link to you. It’s usual for you to provide a link back to their website in return too; this reciprocal linking benefits both websites.
There are so many more myths about how you should optimise your website for Google that I’ll likely come back to this topic in the future.
