Recently in SEO Category

Written by: Ron Jones

I have come across many website development projects that seem to focus too much on the visual aspects of their website before they put any thought into the structure and information flow. By just inserting information design, sometimes called information architecture at the beginning of your process, you can dramatically change your website's performance. The benefits of a successful site architecture will not only increase visitor engagement but it will help you attract more of the right visitors. This process will also lead to higher conversions.

Step 1 - Identify Keywords

This first step of identifying high-performing keywords is essential if you wish to drive the right traffic to your site. Take the time to perform a thorough keyword research study from the beginning. It's a given that you will be using branded keywords on your site, but more importantly look for keywords that your target audience might use to find you. Use a couple of keyword research tools like Keyword Discovery, WordStream, or Wordtracker, along with the Google Keyword Tool to help you gather data on each keyword. Some things to look for and determine are:

Relevancy. How relevant are the keywords to your business and do you have (or will have) relevant content on your site for that keyword?

Specific or long-tail keywords. Very specific search phrases will attract people who are toward the end of their buying cycle and who are ready to convert. For instance, if someone uses the search query "laser printer," that would suggest they are beginning their research process and haven't decided on one yet. On the other hand, if they search using the term "HP Laserjet PRO P1102," that would suggest they know what they want and are ready to buy.

Competition. Find out how competitive the keywords are. Highly competitive keywords will be harder to rank for and may cost more to use.

Search volume. Keywords that have a high search volume represent a popular search term that many people are likely to use. Compare similar terms and see which is the most popular.

As you go through a keyword research study, you will learn more about potential visitors, what they might be looking for, and their wants and needs.


Step 2 - Map the Keyword Space

Categories will emerge from the keyword research, identifying different subsets of your products or services, or information that your potential customers would find useful. Those keyword groupings or categories will help you in identifying relevant pages of content you will want to build into your structure.

As you map the keywords you plan to use to relevant landing pages, you create a fluid connection to content that your visitors are likely to be looking for. It also helps you to perform a kind of gap analysis to identify subpages you might have missed.


Step 3 - Develop Your Site Architecture

The next step is to build out the architecture of your site. Most people refer to this as building a site map. A site map is basically a hierarchical representation of your site and all of its levels and pages. As you mapped your keywords into logical categories, you have already started this process. Continue to build out the rest of the site structure and make sure you include all of the information your target audience and each persona may be searching for.

Richard Baxter presents some very interesting arguments about how deep your site map should go. He makes a case that a flatter site architecture will be best for usability since it will take less clicks to get to the deepest level. A very good tip to consider as you build out the structure of your site.

Step 4 - Wireframe Prototyping

Now that you have a solid structure that outlines your site's content that is mapped to relevant keywords, you should start to develop your wireframe for each page. A wireframe is a simple representation of the content and navigation for a page on your site. It is not a sitemap. It takes each page on the sitemap and blocks out the placement of content and navigation as seen below.

If you wish to take this a step further, then you can convert your wireframe into a "clickable prototype," which is a website that incorporates the wireframe with clickable navigation and links to get a feel for how the website will behave and operate.

This is a good best practice, especially for large sites to work out the information flow and usability issues. You can even conduct user testing with a clickable prototype to learn where the problem areas might be before you start programming and coding the site. There are many tools to help you with this process. One that I have used is ProtoShare. It allows you to develop a sitemap, wireframe, and clickable prototype in the cloud and allow your team to work on these elements in an online collaborative environment.

Step 5 - Content Development

The final step is to build into the wireframe the actual content for each page. To bring this full circle, you should make sure the content uses the keywords that you have mapped for each page. Use the keywords in the body copy, text links, video and image tags, etc. This is all a part of SEObest practices. But, more importantly, it bridges the searcher expectation to relevant content on your site. So when your visitors arrive they will feel they have landed at the right place. As a result, you will find that you have more engaged visitors that will be more likely to convert.

Once this process is done, you should plan to add a visual skin to the site that is in harmony with your logo and other branding elements. A mistake many people make is to begin their process with the visual elements first as they design their home page. It is best to look at your site holistically and work out the information flow ahead of time.

I have used this simple process over the past 12 years with a tremendous amount of success. It will help you get into the minds of your audience and anticipate their needs. When they finally land on your site, they will feel right at home since you have taken the time to lay out the information just for them. They will reward you with higher conversions, lower bounce rates, and undoubtedly word-of-mouth praise through social media channels. A win-win for all involved.

See the full story at: www.clickz.com

For more information about seo services, web development companyand website design company, just visit us at www.7strategy.com

Written by Neil Mason

"Why do you have a website?" I love that question; it tends to focus the mind. Any time you develop measurement frameworks for digital channels, you must be focused. Digital platforms, like websites, often have multiple stakeholders with different goals. There's always a danger that overall objectives may not be clear. And if the objectives are not clear, then success is next to impossible to measure.

It's challenging to developing good key performance indicators (KPIs). It's easy enough to come up with the right metrics, but clarifying robust objectives is more difficult. It's also easier for e-commerce sites to develop KPIs with strong objectives.

But most sites don't sell stuff. So why do they exist? They exist for good reasons and those reasons must be expressed in clear and definitive terms. That's the hard part. So, make objectives clear and measurable, describe what "good looks like," and select appropriate metrics that measure outputs and outcomes. So once that is done, is that the end of the story? Not really, it's just the beginning.

Once overall site goals are in place and KPIs have been defined, the next question is: which sections of the site are working well and which ones aren't? If we don't know the answer to this, then how can we focus our efforts properly on site optimization? This is why we need not just site goals but page goals as well. A page goal defines what that page is trying to achieve. It answers the question, "Why does this page exist?"

Stating clearly why a page exists and outlining its objectives is a very useful exercise, particularly when you are designing a page. Page goals help you focus what the page is trying to achieve and feed directly into the development of the information architecture of the page - for example, at wireframe stage. Page goals are particularly useful in circumstances when there are multiple stakeholders all trying to get a piece of the action on a page; without page goals, you can end up with pages that don't work particularly well for the business or website visitor.

In the same way as for defining overall site goals, page goals should be as clear and precise as possible. Something like, "To help users achieve their goals" doesn't really cut it. Which users? Which goals? In what way? It has to be clearly defined. Once it's been clearly defined, then a measurement framework can be developed for each page that describes how the page's success can be assessed. Once the measurement framework has been developed, then measurement systems can be configured to include the right kind of metrics in the right kind of way. With page level measurement frameworks, consider the context of the page itself. How do people get to the page? How far is it into a customer journey?

Consider the classic product page on an e-commerce site. A product page has a tough job. The primary purpose of a product page is generally to persuade a website visitor to add a product to the basket. To do this it needs to provide all the information required in a clear and concise way. To measure the success of the product, you could look at metrics such as the add-to-basket rate. You could also measure the effectiveness of different components or tools on the page in terms of how they influence the add-to-basket rate. But often a product page on an e-commerce site is also the landing page. Often it's the first page that a visitor sees on a site. For them it's also the home page. So, the product page also has the goal of building trust and consideration for new visitors. It doesn't just have to persuade the potential customer to buy the product; it has to persuade the customer to buy it from you. By identifying these additional page goals, you also identify the need to measure success using additional metrics, such as the bounce rate for new visitors.

Not every single page on a site necessarily has to have page goals, but certainly they should be in place for each different type of page or section on a site. Page goals are useful to help define what good looks like at the micro level and to ensure that your measurement frameworks are measuring the right things in the right way.

See the full story at: www.clickz.com

For more information about seo services, ecommerce web design and web design services, just visit us at www.7strategy.com

Today's column is going to be a case study of a web site that made great progress simply due to basic code cleanup work. What's interesting about this case study is that the things we did aren't the first things you think of when you think of SEO, yet addressing these types of things can often make a huge difference.

The site is Work Coach Cafe. The site is a blog with regular posts on career advice and coaching.

We got involved in the site at the end of December 2010. Because that was the holiday season, there was a natural dip in traffic, but if we look back to November it was doing about 5,000 visitors per week. When we looked closely at the site we found some structural problems:

1. The site performance was slow, with Google Webmaster Tools showing page load times taking up to 15 seconds (slower than 92 percent of sites).
   
   
2. A crawl of the site by Xenu's Link Sleuth revealed up 49,662 broken links.
   
   
3. There were 743 301 redirects in place from pages that were long gone, including double redirects in some cases.

We were concerned about site performance since Matt Cutts had identified performance as a ranking factopr in April of last year. It turned out that one of the big problems was that the site was on a low performance shared server.

We moved the site to a different server where it continued to share space with other web sites, but in a much more controlled environment. For the record, the cost of this new server (from Pair.com) was quite a bit more, but offered a much higher performance. As you can see here, performance improved quite a bit, with average page load times in the 5 second neighborhood:

The SEO impact of the broken links is a little harder to assess. However, given the sheer quantity, we were concerned that it could be affecting the perceived quality of the site.

When we investigated the broken links we found that many of these were related to template specific issues, such as references to missing CSS files or images. Through a lengthy process of fixing problems and then recrawling the site we worked until all broken links were eliminated.

We also dug into the 301 redirects. You may ask why we spent the time on this activity.

However, there is some loss of PageRank through a 301 redirect. I asked this question in an interview with Matt Cutts ast March. Here's an excerpt from the interview:

That's a good question, and I am not 100 percent sure about the answer. I can certainly see how there could be some loss of PageRank. I am not 100 percent sure whether the crawling and indexing team has implemented that sort of natural PageRank decay, so I will have to go and check on that specific case. (Note: in a follow on email, Matt confirmed that this is in fact the case. There is some loss of PR through a 301).

These were basically the three steps we took. No link building campaigns were undertaken. No keyword optimization was done. More broadly, no other SEO effort was invested in the site.

Results

So how did we do? The results suprised even us. Here is chart showing what they were:

In a very short period of time, traffic has scaled to about 7,000 visitors per week. This is roughly a 40% growth (and for the record about double where the site was on a year over year basis).

Summary

Much of this effort came down to simple web development hygiene. In developing web sites, errors have a tendency to accumulate. If you don't go back and address them, what begins as an infinitesimal impact begins to grow. Eventually, the cost becomes very, very real. Don't overlook this part of your SEO efforts. It is clearly worth the trouble.