I-COM Blog feed

Google\'s New Look, a Step Too Far?

2010-05-21 09:02:37

The old mantra "If it isnt broke, dont fix it" is an aphorism the folks at Google would do well to remember. Like any good business Google is always looking to improve its offering to its customers, but has Google gone too far? In 1997, Google set out two goals for their search engine: to provide a better quality of search to present search results in a clean and simple manner Their latest look incorporates several new features into their search results pages with the most prominent being a filter on the left hand side which enables users to choose what vertical they want to search, for example, Google News or Social Media; it also enables users to define a time period for the results. For example If you wanted to compare what was written before the first election debate to after you could specify web pages found in the first two weeks of April. Now these features are nothing new, but they had been contained in a side bar which was only accessible from a simple link until recently. With their universal inclusion and the addition of social, video, image and real-time results into search engine results pages it quickly becomes a case of information overload, which is an issue we are visiting all too often recently. The above example search result for Election 2010 is about as blended as its going to get because the election is a current talking point which makes it a good example of the potential for over-complicating the look and feel of a Google SERP. This particular search page includes feeds from news websites, Twitter and YouTube which pushes all but 3 organic results down the page which means that if youre not in the top 3, people probably wont see you and even if you are they may struggle to notice you amongst all the other potential links on the page. Compare the complexity of the new SERPs with the SERPs at competing search engines such as Bing.com: Google has to find some way to include the vast amount of information generated on social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter, but if it continues to add more and more information to its results pages it runs the risk of obscuring their own USP: helping people find websites simply and without fuss. The easy answer to these problems is to add 'basic' search filter and to offer a way to simplify the interface, but whether Google implements this or something similar only time will tell. If they dont resolve these issues, Google could all too easily become what they set out to differentiate themselves from causing their users to abandon the overly-complicated Google results in favour of Googles competitors.

What Should I Blog About? A List of Blog Post Ideas

2010-05-04 09:03:22

When it comes to utilising the powers of the blog I-COM has been leading the way, and in a number of blog posts we have explained how to use a blog in order to turn your site into a content driven, visitor and search engine magnet. Recently I gave a presentation at the Manchester Growth Show Ten Reasons Businesses should Blog. Since then I have received a number of emails from people who attended the show saying that they understand the value of the blog, they just dont know what to write about! So here are some ideas for you to start blogging about. Helpful how-to tips related to your product. Reviews of the products you sell. Reviews of products you dont sell but your audience would appreciate; you never know this might create another route to market. Offer product tutorials, either for your product or others your customers use. Answer FAQs you get from your customers. What inspired you to take the jump into starting your business? Explain why you are so passionate about your business. Describe your customer service philosophy. Share a photo or video "walking tour" of your business. Share testimonials you get from your customers. Admit mistakes! If you've done something wrong in the course of building your business, share that information and explain how you dealt with it. People love learning from others' mistakes. What do you like about the current state of your industry? What do you wish you could change about the current state of your industry? What will the future of your industry be like and how should people prepare for it? Reveal a generally unknown secret in your industry. Which famous people have been associated with your industry lately? Debunk the top myths that are currently floating around about your industry. Offer a case study of how someone has successfully used your product or solved a common problem. The ten best online resources for people in your industry. Make a list of "must-have" free resources your audience will appreciate. Run a contest, offering a free product sample or service for the winner. Then ask them to comment about what they thought of it and make that its own blog post as well. Post weekly or monthly wrap-ups about what you accomplished with your business. Review other blogs related to your industry. Review an online magazine related to your industry. Review print publications related to your industry. Go to a trade fair or conference and then write reports about it. Take a stand on a controversial issue related to your industry. Identify the most prominent experts in your industry, explain why they're famous or important. Disagree with a well-known authority in your industry and list reasons why they're wrong. Post about the best things you've read online in the past week (related to your industry). Its important to remember, when you write for a business blog you have to provide VALUE to your readers. If you offer them useful, interesting information they will thank you for it -- and when the time comes for them to make a purchase, your site will be the first one they think of. If you would like to know more about how to utilise Social Media to profit your business call 0844 704 4954 and book a free one hour consultation or look out for the I-COM Client and Guest Internet Marketing Summit. Notification of date, venue and time will be posted shortly. In the meantime, happy blogging!

Why is website usability so important?

2010-02-23 09:19:42

So you've built your website, given it a fancy logo, maybe even written some content that will have Google hanging on your every keyword. Perhaps there is a Google analytics code uploaded in the HTML code so you can have a look at the performance of the website? You are on your way to getting 'Website Of The Year' right? Hold your horses... as my dad used to say.Having a fancy website with bells on could be the worst thing you could do if the website's usability is compromised. This is even more important for an ecommerce website that's main goal should be making the process as easy as possible for a customer, and if they aren't finding the navigation easy then they may just bounce off the site to a competitor.'Website usability is defined, making web sites easy to use for an end-user.' Let's look at some things we must remember when it comes to a user's experience:1) Where have you gone wrong?If you have built the web pages without a thought of what you are aiming to achieve from the website then this can be where you have gone wrong. Think about what you are trying to do; maybe it is to offer your services to customers, or give information to people? It is also a good idea to put yourself in the users' shoes! What are they looking for and where would they navigate to? You might be surprised what you find out.2) Draft up a simple navigation systemAsk yourself these three questions: Where am I? Where have I been? Where can I go? Then you will be ready to design your navigation system as if you are a user visiting the website for the first time. Go through the whole website from top level, and right through to the pages deep in the navigation. Think about how you will make these pages available to a user and a search engine.3) Brand ConsistencyA strong brand image throughout the website can show visitors that your website is a professional and high quality website. However, this can work both ways, and with inconsistent colours, typefaces, and page layout then a user can become disillusioned by the website and leave very quickly.4) Text linksAs an SEO consultant I know how important internal links are throughout a website, and using keywords as anchor text for your internal links is a good way to promote a page in major search engines. In terms of navigation and usability this is just as important. It helps a user to find his way through the website.5) SitemapLarge websites should always have a sitemap. The sitemap should contain a text link to every page on the website so that it can be accessed easily by search engines and people. If you have analytics running on your website then you can see how many people have visited the sitemap page to find their way around your website. This isn't a good sign, as people are finding it difficult to find the information naturally. Therefore revisit step 1.6) Homepage Logo, Search Box and Contact DetailsSite logos are great to link to your homepage from other pages as well. Users now often hover over them and use them to navigate around the website, this is especially true with the homepage logo on a website and the contact details. 7) FeedbackHave a page on the homepage that links to a feedback form or something similar. This should allow users to input information that can help your future development of the website. It could contain questions like 'Did you find it hard to find what you were looking for?' or 'What do you think we could improve on?'8) Simple Testing! If a user clicks on your website and then sees nothing that relates to what they entered the website for then you've done something wrong. Building your website in a way that enables users to access the information they want quickly and simply can actually be harder than you initially think, so try and keep it simple. If you test a website that is in development by asking someone who has not seen the website before to complete simple tasks locating information or making purchases and they have trouble navigating through the pages, then you have gone wrong somewhere. Remember, designs for your users, and not for yourself; remain consistent and keep things simple!

SEO Basics - Heading Tags for Topic, Style and Usability.

2010-02-11 15:58:41

In the good old days of self-taught web design and GeoCities homepages, I used to use heading tags to define font size. If I wanted BIG text I put

tags around it, if I wanted small text

, simple! I don't think I even realised what the H stood for. Now I work in SEO I realise the error of my ways, but happily, the sad death of GeoCities has removed my compulsion to go back and correct my sloppy coding.Are headings important?Yes. The reason they are important is simple. They provide a map of the content on the page both visually and in terms of usability. By default in html, the heading tags are bold and provide a line break. A page full of dense copy with headings is a lot easier for a user to scan in order to understand the point of the page. They also improve usability by enabling visitors to locate the section of the page which features relevant information to their query. This is great for disabled users who may want an overview of the page and also a great way of signposting your content to the search engines. How should you deploy them?Each page should have an H1 heading. If you don't have one, you will not be marked down, but it's such a simple way to show the topic of the page to users and search engines that it would be silly not to include one. Multiple H1s are not going to harm your page, but they serve to confuse the topic of the page. If you are changing your topic so much that you require a second H1, consider starting a new page.H2 headings should be used for each subsection of the page, and will obviously be a subsection of information on the main topic of the page as described in the H1. You can use as many H2s as you need to and if you want to add further subsections underneath your H2 then simply add an H3. You can nest as many headings as you like up to H6, but you should always make sure that you do nest them and don't skip numbers. Again, this is not critical, but it is good practise.What tools can I use to check them?Overlooking the fact that they inexplicably use the American spelling of the "analyse," this tool from UK company The Escape is great for seeing an outline of your page:http://www.the-escape.co.uk/tools/pageanalyzer/This tool puts your heading system into perspective showing you exactly what level you've decided your headings should be with helpful colour coding and points out if you've missed out a level. Try plugging in the addresses of a few of your favourite sites and see how they match up. I reckon I might offer my services out to these guys:

SEO, Information Architecture & Usability

2010-01-26 09:14:17

What is the relationship between Information Architecture (IA) and SEO?The Information Architecture definition, in terms of a website, can be defined as the organisation & structure of a web page. This is of paramount importance in SEO, as it allows for both a user of the website and a search engine robot to find information clearly, and in a set structure. Like puzzles? Then you'll love IA.The relationship between IA and SEO grows all the time, and the desire for clean, well-structured code and semantically optimised web pages is never going to be a negative for any webmaster or user of a website. By doing this, you are helping Google's (or any search engine for that matter) spiders be able to crawl your web pages quickly and understand what each page is about with clear understanding of the meta data, h1 tag and content. Usability and Information ArchitectureGood architecture is responsible for making it easy to find information. You can do this most effectively by getting people to test how they use your website. Testing is important; in terms of SEO, you can't test how good your search engine rankings will be before they go live. Unless you sat a Google robot down and asked him how easy finding his/her way around the page was, then bought him a drink to encourage good rankings. However, usability is important in every aspect for a user of a website, and SEO has to consider the user as well. How Does Information Architecture relate to SEO?Web Page Code:The web is evolving at a very fast rate, becoming more competitive and diverse all the time. As a result, mistakes can be a frequent occurrence. Broken markup is an all too common problem for search engines; Google could feel that this is an area to focus on for marking a website down in the search engine.Therefore, always focus on clean code that can be easily crawled and understood.As content is the most important part of the SEO game then it is also worth keeping in mind that the content should be situated high in the source code for the page. Finally, remember that every image should contain an alt attribute that contains a keyword that describes the image (unless it's a placeholder image, in which case, use alt="")! For other media, like videos, the titles should contain keywords as well.Structure/Accessibility:This should be easily laid out in the back end and front end of a page for easy crawling by a search engine and, in turn, indexing of pages in the index. It is important to think about the user in this area: What do they expect when they come to the website? Have the pathways for them to get to this page been easily accessible? How easy is the information to access now? All questions that need answering and should be in the front of the architect's mind when creating the page. It is important to remain consistent in your navigation and structure; it can be difficult when you are trying to break norms of conventional navigation, but what must remain consistent is the structure of a web page for SEO.ContentSimply put, keep it engaging and simple! The content should remain high in the source code, like I said before, but the important thing to remember is that search engines give you a slap over the head and 1000 lines for every second word being a keyword. It also will be useless to people reading it. On-page links (Internal)Internal links are a great way to help a user navigate their way through the website, however, don't overdo it, and make sure that the link to a page has relevant anchor text. SummaryThink about the user and think about the crawler. IA has a place for every aspect of building a web site, from design to SEO so the relationship with it has never been closer when considering how competitive 'getting online' is. Fixing a code-heavy website is similar to a spring clean - get rid of the unnecessary, move what you can into include files and keep only the minimal amount of code with descriptive keywords throughout the content. The structure of the site and of each and every page should be clear so that it helps engage the user and makes it easy for them to navigate from page to page.Creating a well-coded website forms the basis of SEO, so you can then add all the right content to acquire all the right links.

Five Ways to Make Your Website Copy Interesting

2009-10-06 11:19:13

If your business provides a great service for great prices but is in a particularly dry field, it can be difficult to make your website copy interesting to visitors. For instance, say you offer the best imaginable ready mix concrete for the cheapest prices in the land. You've got a fantastic product but let's face it: no-one's ever going to voluntarily read a whole page of text about ready mix concrete - right?Wrong - MAKE it interesting Your task, as the business owner, copywriter or general enthusiast, is to MAKE ready mix concrete interesting. There are a number of ways you can do this: Make it relevant to your target market. Niche businesses have very small, specialised target markets, so give site visitors as much relevant information as you can as early in the copy as possible. Think about what you would want to know if you were buying a bag of ready mix concrete: what is it suitable for? How much does it cost? How long does it take to mix? If you answer people's questions, they'll be interested. Write a 'How to'. Not only does a 'How to' guide make you seem like a magnanimous company which cares about its customers, it will also be of genuine interest to a great many people. Stick in a few references to your product and a handy link to the 'Buy Now' page, and you're laughing. Even if the customer already has the product, there's a good chance they'll think of you next time. Keep it brief. Don't ramble on for 1000 words about how fantastic your product is. Don't provide exhaustive lists of its many, many benefits. Filter your text down to the key reasons people should buy your product, and keep the copy around 300 words with an obvious prompt to buy. Use bullet points/numbered lists. A block of text with no line breaks can be daunting; don't risk putting off potential customers in this way. Make sure your copy is full of handy lists, detailing the key benefits of your product. Breaking up the text in this manner allows visitors to skim read your text, and also provides you with a method of stressing the aspects of your product which you feel are most important. Provide an exit strategy. Even the most interesting copy in the world won't hold the attention of some people, because they aren't interested in reading, full stop. Make sure you give people the opportunity to buy the product you're selling early in the text - you can do this via a hyperlink or a call to action. Give these people the chance to go straight to the product from your landing page. By employing some, or all of the above techniques when writing your copy, even the driest, dullest subject can be made interesting to your target market.

Universal Search at Risk of Becoming Unusable Search

2009-04-14 08:04:00

The web has been buzzing about Google Local Search being folded into non-local results. Never mind the inaccuracies of the results local search is currently delivering, the morass of information that Google is now serving for some SERPS is starting to create a real usability problem. Have a look at a screenshot of the SERP for "beds." Enlarge this image in a new window. Notice that this page has: 11 Adwords ads 10 organic search results 10 local search results 8 related search suggestions 3 news results 3 shopping results This page could easily have also displayed blog search results, image results and videos. Who's to say Google won't add a grouping of "social search" results down the line as well. That's a lot of information on one page! When Google first launched you got 10 organic results on a page and up to 10 ads and if you wanted more you had to adjust your preferences or actively look at other types of search - Images, Shopping, News, Directory, etc. People liked Google because of this simplicity - you searched and you got accurate results and it was easy to know what to do - follow an organic link, click on a paid link or search further. The rule of thumb we use is to put no more than three different calls to action on a page - for example, on a typical web page we might ask you to: Phone us Email us Sign up for our newsletter On our blog pages we're naughty because we provide four calls to action: Bookmark the page Comment on the post Sign up for the newsletter Subscribe to our RSS feed Google is providing no less than six types of actions with the possibility of even more being added to a page that now stretches well below the fold - even though search marketers know full well that most people don't look beyond the fold on any SERP. What does this mean for search and for search marketing? Well, having a variety of appearances on a given SERP will be far more important - you can't just rely on organic search and PPC anymore. You need to also get results in the news, local, products, video and image results - because you need to get your listing above the fold by whatever means you can.

In the end, SEO is, in fact, all about the content

2009-01-06 15:12:00

I was reading a blog post about the next big Google algorithm change on Conversation Marketing which states that searcher behavior is going to drive search rankings beginning in 2009. The post (unusually for an SEO blog) gave some evidence to back up this assertion, but frankly, this is one of the most patently obvious things I've read since I got started in this industry. Let's look at the facts: Google published a patent in 2005 saying it was working on this Google has started to personalise search results if you're signed into a Google Account Google recently launched SearchWiki asking users to vote sites up and down and leave comments as to why Google has been complaining about people trying to game inbound links to make their sites look more popular since, oh, about 2003 with very little ability to stop it Google has been trying to tell us that "content is king" since, oh, about 2003, with very few automated ways to differentiate between truly good content and content written with the right semantic markers. While it will still be possible for hardworking black hat SEOs to "game" a system that measures user behavior, it will be much harder and take more time and effort, especially where Google has all that free data streaming in from Analytics on top of what it knows from user accounts and click through rates on search results. So where does this leave traditional SEO? If we leave link building aside (as that's another issue entirely) traditional on-site SEO will remain as important as ever. Search Engine Optimisation is about making a site easy for search engines to understand so they can find the content and index it correctly - so pages load quickly and navigation is simple and logical; it's about putting in all the right markers so the page structure makes sense and adding the right tags so a site's listings on a search results page read well; and it's about using the words the searcher would use within the site's content. SEO is about building web pages that are relevant, useful to the searcher and easy to use. The average SEO, however, will also have to up his game a little because usability will be important to keeping people on the site and he'll have to do more than just add copy to pages so that the number of keyword mentions keeps a page ranking - he's going to have to start adding even more compelling copy that searchers want to read. Web analytics will also become key to optimising web sites correctly. Understanding searcher/user behaviour and acting on it (creating new content and offers) will help to improve the bottom line for the client and eventually improve search rankings. But these are all things that any SEO professional should be doing for his or her clients anyway - because it improves conversions.

WCAG 2.0 Finally Released

2008-12-12 12:13:11

The Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) of the W3C has finally released the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0, after years of haggling over the initial draft versions. The WCAG 2.0 Guidelines are meant to help web designers and web developers build websites that are accessible to everybody no matter what device they use to browse the web and no matter what level of skill. WCAG 2.0 had been contentious from the start as WAI committee members haggled over the best way to outline their recommendations and define various terms of the document and most people felt that the original draft was unclear and hard to understand - especially as it had a document explaining the guidelines and the a document explaining the document that explained the guidelines - hardly accessible itself.The discussion got so heated at one stage that reknowned accessibility expert Joe Clark left the group and founded Web Samurai to create a separate set of recommendations to update WCAG 1.0.We've not had a chance to read through the new document yet, but we will as accessible web design is good practice and helps all users, not just users with disabilities. We shall no doubt be voicing our thoughts further on the new guidelines in the near future.