Entries Tagged 'General' ↓

Website testing is pushed by SEO practitioners and web designers very heavily, but there is a very serious reason why testing should be viewed as a reiterative process rather than an end of term set of examinations. The most important aspects of any testing focuses on the user experience and seeks to pinpoint issues with user interaction with the website – what problems exist, how to optimize user enjoyment and utility and encourage return visits and propagation through online media i.e. viral adoption.

How users find your site is c ore feature of SEO efforts, however once you have attracted traffic, you must ensure that you cater for their needs once they are on the site. In practice, you have two sets of visitors: in an SEO context, you will have the automated webcrawlers and robots indexing and archiving your site for use in returning results to search engine users, and secondly, the real people themselves who visit your site, no matter how they got there. Continue reading →

Adobe Flash has long been an SEO nightmare for ecommerce sites and any website looking to gain traffic through the search engines. The problem is that Flash is a fluid rendition of web content rather than static, as you see with the Rankpay website. Flash is known as a Rich Internet Application (RIA) and the SEO challenge has been how to link to, how to index and how to display in search engine rankings the changing panoply of content within the Flash files themselves. For search engine web spiders they have the task of catching every relevant aspect of a revolving door, and quite frankly, they can’t do it very well, and for most search engines, not at all. Continue reading →

Link building is a significant factor in gaining search engine rankings, and a lot of investment and time is spent on gaining links from other sites to yours. For links to be of value they must be relevant, for instance, your site sells skateboards then the site linking to you should be associated with that sport, e.g. an extreme sports website.

But how can content gain you links that count?

The answer is by creating “killer content”! Continue reading →

Breadcrumbs are a tool to help users navigate your website and especially to help them when they get lost.  They are a secondary navigation tool (your site menu and page links will usually take pride of place), they are small, easy to implement and inexpensive, while the majority of users expect to see them when they are on a web page.

You typically see a breadcrumb navigation aid below the title bar of the web page and it will look something like this: Continue reading →

In our first article of this two-parter, we covered the issue of maximizing your sales revenues by either increasing traffic to your site or improving the conversion ratios. Of the two, improving the sales conversion ratios for the traffic you already have is the fastest and most profitable way of achieving revenue optimization.

There are two broad categories for techniques to improve sales conversion ratios – we dealt with traditional sales copy strategies in Part I, many of which have been borrowed and adapted from the direct copy advertizing industry, which traditionally handles “hard copy” or “old” media such as newspaper and magazine advertizing, or television and radio commercials.

Here with Part II, we shall cover online and on-site strategies which you also need to consider to get the most out of your website traffic. Continue reading →

Part I – Traditional Sales Copy Strategies

Traffic is flowing through your site and all the indicators are pointing to good numbers from search engines, increasing return visitors and a lot of buzz, energy and excitement is generated.  Now you have two things to look at to increase revenues – increasing traffic while maintaining conversion rates, or improving your conversion rates with the traffic you currently enjoy.
Of the two, increasing the rate of conversion is the simplest and fastest win for your site – it is cheaper to achieve and the results are immediate.  It’s simply easier to sell to a customer who is already standing in your store than one who has yet to learn you exist! Continue reading →

PageRank is Google’s measure of link value with respect to your website – it evaluates the links to your site and allocates a value to them which is aggregated into a PageRank value between 0 and 10 (usually abbreviated to PR0 thru’ PR10).  You can see a graphical measure of PageRank in the bar icon which is enabled in some web browsers, but this is almost always out of date (so ignore it).

You really need to understand what is going on behind the scenes to understand why PageRank is so important to your site success. Continue reading →

Matt Cutts is a software engineer at Google and, in a recent interview, said that many people at Google believe speed should be a factor in determining search engine rankings.  Web site designers and owners want fast loading website because it dramatically improves user enjoyment and minimizes abandonment of the website by surfers.  As Matt points out, Google feels that when a user clicks through a search engine page to a website, that the user experience should reflect the faith and trust surfers have in the search engine to return relevant sites for their use. Continue reading →

An SEO maxim is “Fresh content means higher search engine rankings”, but is this really true?

Certainly generating fresh content is a great idea from the perspective of attracting and informing human visitors, but do search engines (and realistically we mean Google) give higher weight to new content compared to old?

The straight answer is that there are numerous benefits from ensuring your web site continues to have updated, relevant and fresh content.  Human readers like fresh content, but search engines love it provided it is optimized, original and relevant.  In fact, top search engine rankings without new content is a practical impossibility which shows just how important fresh content really is.
Continue reading →

Website usability is crucial because it assesses how visitors find your website from the point of utilization.  If a website is user-friendly with potential customers able to find what they want and make the purchase easily, you are going to develop a loyal customer base.  Visitors who find your site difficult to use will quickly leave and go elsewhere.

Website usability involves human test subjects being asked to perform certain operations on your site, such as proceeding to check out and payment.  Usability tests allow you to check how easy it is to use the site, to catch glitches and issues causing visitors to be inconvenienced, frustrated or simply downright unhappy. Continue reading →