Posts Tagged ‘seo’

6 Important Points in Designing a Website

Wednesday, November 25th, 2009
I think design covers so much more than the aesthetic. Design is fundamentally more. Design is usability. It is Information Architecture. It is Accessibility. This is all design.
- Mark Boulton


1. Speed, speed, speed

gmailIn the recent interview with google's own Matt Cutts, he says "A lot of people within Google think that the web should be fast, it should be a good experience; and so it’s sort of fair to say if you’re a fast site, maybe you should get a little bit of a bonus. Or maybe if you have a really awfully slow site, users don’t want that as much." And the controversy goes on and on...

In my opinion, a website does not need to be fast but it needs to be responsive. This does not translate to websites with flash components, repetitive loading screen and animation over pages will become annoying.

2. It's all about experience

Conventions are your friends
- Steve Krug, author of Don't Make Me Think

Breaking conventions for the sake of breaking the conventions are not innovation. And if you can't innovate, there's nothing wrong with following the current. Walking on familiar grounds makes your user feels safer.

3. Minimize learning curve

google.com

If one is presented a page like this, wonder what should one do?

4. KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid)

Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.
- Antoine de Saint-Exupery

5. Don't rely on graphics

Not all pictures says a thousand words, in fact most stock pictures says nothing at all. Here are the top 3 photo search result of 'web design' from iStockPhoto. Is it saying a thousand words?

istockphoto_4619850-internet-connection istockphoto_6697647-internet-browser-windows istockphoto_7459744-unique-website

What about full flash site? Well aside from SEO problem, flash sites doesn't have a good user experience, users can't jumped directly into a certain page. And doesn't allow them to share links, pictures, or articles with friends. I know that these can be done in flash, but the harsh reality is most flash designers don't (or don't know how to) do it.

6. Graceful downgrade

Since the early days of websites, we have seen a warning text in the footer of sites, 'best viewed in 1024 x 768 screen resolution,' it doesn't mean that screen with resolution 800 x 600 is SOL. These days, in my opinion, it's okay not to support IE6 if your site requires the alpha transparency from PNG pictures, or html5. You should have a fair warning for IE6 users.

Adapted from 6 Things Video Games Can Teach Us About Web Usability

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Posted in website design | 3 Comments »

More Tips for Writing Captivating Emails

Friday, November 20th, 2009

Just yesterday SixRevisions wrote 10 great tips to write email newsletter, even though I disagree on some points it is still a great read. In this post I'll expand a bit on some of the points in the original article in terms of marketing or sales pitch via email.

#2 first impression

I don't think using HTML email for marketing, unless you really have to put in some of the product images, the HTML should still look like plain text email. A full-on HTML email with 2-3 column layout just alerting viewers first spam alert.

#3 using your brand

Putting identifiable from name, and a logo in the signature should be more than enough. A full navigation from your site inside email is just adding more noise and distraction from your intended pitch.

#5 personalise email messages

I think this should be taken to a step further. Create a personalised url, http://website.com/this-email-title/john-smith, this way you can quickly see who's interested with your pitch, in what demographic is that user? Are more people in that demographic responded as well with this pitch? And should I start placing ads in magazines with the particular demographic as target market.

#8 content is king

As described in http://four.sentenc.es/ email contents should be treated like SMS. Short and clear. 1 paragraph containing your elevator pitch with a link (read above) that explains more about the pitch/product. If you are just sending out news or blog post instead of marketing pitch, it should be just the excerpt of the post.

#11 put some time between mail-outs and don't pitch the same crap over and over and over again. If you are to send email every week, you should let your customer know and have them re-confirm when you're importing their email (there's an option to choose when you're importing email to campaign monitor). I've seen a company shrunk their database from 10,000 to 8,000 in 2 months, including a few nasty replies and 1 angry phone call from a customer.

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Posted in social media | 1 Comment »

Google is Rolling Out Caffeine

Wednesday, November 18th, 2009

As informed by the google caffeine sandbox site, google is rolling out the new search architecture codenamed caffeine through out their data center slowly and will push across all data center after this holiday season. Watch the video below for Matt Cutts' explanation on google caffeine.


As described by this quote from Black Hat Forum, we are heading to the right direction,

Google caffeine is up for fighting with real time searches on twitter & faceboook

Add / update content frequently or you may loose on some more rankings

I searched for seo in google caffeine. it showed me facebook page from japan, which was recently updated. And had some content releated to seo, but not search engine optimization, It was meant for some other abbvr.

Caffeine would more probably rely on fresh content

It seems to be giving an increased weighting on domain authority & some authoritative tag type pages ranking (like Technorati tag pages, wordpress tag pages, propeller tags, etc)

You have got to make your domain more authorative in terms of traffic, content and links.

They are also putting slightly more weight on exact match domain names. In a way, we should focus on spamming these high authority sites to get the search traffic....

We need to look at ways how we can get our links on those social media pages...

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Posted in seo, social media | No Comments »

Search Engine Optimisation 101

Wednesday, October 28th, 2009

What is SEO?

SEO or Search Engine Optimisation is the practice of making your website attractive to search engines such as Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc.

How Search Engines Work

Search engines have programs called spiders which visit web pages to determine what the content of your site is, and to find other links to scan at a later date.

  1. Spiders, or web crawlers, scan the content of web pages.
  2. They send the results of their scan back to the algorithm to be broken down and analysed.
  3. If the spiders encounter a link to another page or website these links are stored.
  4. Eventually other spiders crawl the linked-to pages.
  5. Therefore, the more links from other websites and pages your website has, the more frequently your website is visited and crawled.

SEO Basics

1. Have good and relevant contents
There are lots of websites just attaching pictures, pdf, or word documents on and let the visitors download the file and get the information from another application, such as M$ Word, Adobe Acrobat, etc. But from the search engines point of view, it is better to have all the text written on the site and have the other format as options.

Having a blog or news section on your site is really important. It helps building keywords, both the visitors and search engines are able to determine how relevant your website is. And it's the simplest way for the visitors to see whether you're still in business or not.Often we got questions such as "What do I write?" "Am I going to have much use of it?" from our beloved clients.

Yes, I admit that it's hard to start to write (when we're starting to have a blog, we're just putting articles from various sources that are relevant to us). But I bet most of the businesses understands newsletter, mail-out, or other form of push marketing, why not have that same information on the website as well? You'll get the google juice, you'll be able to start a conversation with your customers, and get feedback from your customers, and have a better business. If you're a pub/club, post your upcoming events on your site. If you're a fancy restaurant with seasonal menus, post your upcoming menus on the site, share recipes. Or just hire a copy writer to write every month :p

2. Link backs
All the links to your website are basically the voting system for the search engines. The more important the source links are, the higher the worth of the links are, ie. one link from The Age review site worth more than plenty links from randomwebsite.com.au.And the text that describes the link really helps with the keywords that you're after. for example: <link>best Halloween event in melbourne</link> is better than <link>click here</link>. Thus it is really important that you think about the title of your articles as many will just use your title to link directly to your article.black hat seo

Be very careful of the black hat SEO companies who're trying to push the ranks by link farming, page generators - using automated tools to generate lots of pages thus renders the pages irrelevant and it becomes keyword spamming on the site. Although those methods might work for a while, once the search engines picked up on those sites, it's a lot harder to get it back.

3. Clean URLs
This section is rather simple, it's the address link for your pages. Have the URL address like http://yourwebsite.com/about-us rather than http://yourwebsite.com/index.php?id=8

Most content management systems (CMS) have this feature although it's not enabled by default (in WordPress go to Settings then Permalinks). Concrete5 CMS called in pretty URL, drupal (it's been awhile) but there's a plug-in called auto URL that will generates the search engine friendly URL based on the title of your pages.

4. Use tags
Last but not least, use the meta tags and keywords, even though recently google just announced that they have ignored it for a while now, it doesn't mean that everyone is ignoring it. There are other search engines and social bookmarking sites that still uses meta tags. And it doesn't hurt the rankings to have it anyway.

Most CMS has these feature built in, might as well use it. Quick hack for WordPress users, you can use the_tags() for the keywords meta and the_excerpt() for the description meta.

Sources:

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