Web Site Design Specialists

By Eric Enge, Search Engine Watch

Restructuring a site can present some major SEO challenges. It’s one thing to make simple changes, where a page on the new site corresponds exactly to every page on your old site. But it’s much tougher when you’re making more fundamental changes to the layout, organization, and content of your site.

If you have a reasonably popular site, it has several assets that are put at risk when you change its structure:

1. Users will have bookmarked pages on your site. When they attempt to go to that bookmark, you want to make sure they still get to the content they want.
2. Pages from your site show up in search engine results. When users click on these, you’ll want them to find the right pages on your site.
3. Other Web sites link to your site. Yes, you want people who click on those links to get to the right pages in the new structure. But more importantly, you want the search engines to continue to map those links to the most relevant pages on your Web site. Much of this is because search engines count links to your site as votes. You don’t want to lose the votes. The contextual relevance of the links are also a big factor. While a 301 redirect will pass the raw link juice through (in the classical PageRank sense), you still want those inbound links to point to highly relevant pages. Lose the relevance of an inbound link by redirecting it to a generic page, and you’ve lost a lot of its value. Similarly, search engines expend a lot of effort to determine how much they trust a Web site. Much of this relates to the trust and authority they associate with the sites and pages that link to you. Mess with that trust and you put your historical traffic at risk.

Bottom line: there’s a lot at stake when you restructure a Web site. Success requires a full understanding of how to map the content from the new site to the old site, and building a 301 redirect map that thoroughly maps links from the old site to the new one.

Don’t skimp on this process! It’s tempting to apply the 80-20 rule here, especially if you have a large site, but that could be the most expensive 20 percent you’ve ever passed on. Let’s break down the approach to doing this well:

1. Wherever possible, create a one-to-one mapping of pages from the old site to the new site. This means finding pages that are identical, or substantially similar to the old ones.
2. Analyze all the remaining pages to find ones that you can redirect to the correct category. An example of this might be individual product pages you had on the old site, but on the new site you offer only a higher-level page for that category of products on the new site. In that case, map the product pages on the old site to the surviving category page.
3. Make sure that all the remaining pages are redirected somewhere. For most sites, the place where you should send this redirect will be the home page. Note that if you also change the domain in this process, you may also want to implement a catchall redirect that sends all pages not covered by your explicit redirect rules to the home page of the new site.

When you must prioritize, here are a few techniques you can use to make sure you’ve truly covered the most important pages:

• Go into your Web analytics tool and identify the top pages receiving traffic.
• Go into Google Webmaster Tools and get a list of your external links, so you can identify all pages that have received external links.
• Use Yahoo Site Explorer to identify the top pages listed there. Site Explorer tends to list the most important pages first.

Next, make sure that the search engines find your 301 redirects. While it’s common advice to update your sitemap to the new site on day one, consider leaving the old site’s sitemap in place for a period of time, to help the search engines see the 301 redirects (hat tip to Stephan Spencer for this idea).

How long should you leave it that way? That depends primarily on the size of your site and the number of pages that the search engines crawl on a daily basis. At a minimum, make sure that the prioritized pages list we developed above has been thoroughly crawled.

Lastly, use Google Webmaster Tools and Live Search Webmaster Tools to see what 404 errors they report after the move. This can be a sign that they tried to access a page on the old version of the site that’s no longer there, and that isn’t properly redirected.

Use this to give you clues as to mistakes you made in the process. Also, monitor key SERPs and traffic levels.

Ultimately, though, success depends on the work you do up front. Don’t take it lightly. This is a case where it’s far easier to do it right the first time, rather than trying to fix it later.

By Steve Haar, Search Engine Watch

I started a hunt last week. I am looking for a good Search Engine Optimization (SEO) book to give to those decision-makers who will never actually do SEO, but who cut the check or approve the time spent for SEO. I haven’t found it yet…but I just started.

Too often, I have seen companies “approve” SEO only to treat it as a one-time hit, or a short-term project. Months or years later, when they asked someone else to “do” SEO for them, it is discovered that the company had laid none of the basic foundation for SEO, and it is clear that even the implementation was done incorrectly. Unfortunately, no follow-up or long-term measurement plan is in place that would catch this. From what I hear, this is not uncommon.

So, absent a book and being too impatient to wait for one, I thought I would come up with some guidelines for those who approve SEO.

But first, for clarity, when I write SEO I am referring to web page optimizing against organic search. Optimizing paid search is a closely related, but different animal.

So, if you are going to embark on organic SEO…

1. Plan to keep in it for the long haul. Line up the resources to engage SEO for at least 6 months. An entire year would be better. This is not the long haul, this is just the time you need to validate the program for the longer term. These resources will come from many parts of the company; from your marketing and sales to finance and IT. Be ready to go after them before you start.
2. Be patient. SEO can take time to generate results depending on your starting point. You may not see your sales (or other target metric) increase right away. Unlike most other online efforts, there is no immediacy about organic SEO.
3. Set objectives. The goals for SEO must be clear and the benchmarks to achieving them agreed upon. This means setting up measurement capabilities that may not currently exist as well standard reporting procedures. At the start, there may be no ‘measured’ metric to report, no changes. Reporting should be done anyway and include the steps taken to improve the metric, not just the metrics themselves.Brace yourself; the SEO folks may appear to be goofing off. They will be surfing the net, looking at SERPs, looking at web pages, and reading blogs or articles. These are necessary parts of the program. Earlier, I mentioned monthly reporting. This helps you know the progress of the project and gives you an idea of what is accomplished with the daily activity that may seem a little out of the ordinary for typical business operations.
4. Keep people informed. They need to know your plans and those of the company. Any new products or product changes impact your web site. With enough fore-planning, your SEO team can help generate the traffic early on. And just as importantly, they can plan to gracefully handle traffic currently going to pages for phased-out products. Well informed SEO teams can add value and prevent surprises. Leverage them.
5. Set expectations. If you outsource SEO, don’t jump for promises of absolutes. There are none.

A Final thought: nothing is free, especially clicks. Enter into SEO knowing that there is a cost. It may be outsourcing costs, new people, or the opportunity costs of current people being refocused. I get very concerned when I hear organic SEO talked about as a way to get free clicks. It blinds people to the commitment needed and the value of SEO. Like everything else, tie the increases in target metrics to the cost of the SEO activity. This gives you a view into SEO ROI.

By Jennifer Kyrnin

One of the most common complaints that new writers have about weblogs or blogs is that they are too personal or informal. But it is very possible to have a business and still use a weblog to get more promotion, more pageviews, and more customers.

Why Blog for Promotion?
Blogging is very popular right now. And having a business weblog that provides good information for your customers while being timely and fun can add a new dimension to your Web site.

Blogs are a powerful tool for marketing and promotion. Because the entries are short, and often full of links, they are more keyword heavy than standard articles often are. Plus, being short, they are easy for your customers to read (and you to write), so they are more likely to come back daily to see what you might have to say on that day.

If your company is very formal, a blog is a place to show your customers that it is made up of people just like them. You can do this without becoming too personal or diary-like.

Using a Blog for Business
There are lots of ways you could use a blog in a business:

• Frequently Asked Questions
  If you get a lot of mail to your webmaster account, you can post the common questions up on a blog. This will provide your customers a place to go to see questions and answers, and as new questions come in, you can post them to help more people.
• Promotions
  If you do promotions every week or few days, you can use a blog to highlight them.
• Contests
  Daily contests and games are a great promo in a blog. They are fun, and bring your customers back.
• What’s New Pages
  If you add lots of new articles, information, or products regularly, sometimes it can be difficult for your customers to find out what’s new. A quick blog entry can show them what’s updated on your site.
• What’s Coming
  You can use a blog to peak interest in future products or projects. It’s also a great way to keep notes about what you’re planning for your customers, the entries are archived so nothing is lost either for you or your customers. Plus, if your blog tool has a comments feature, you can use that to judge interest before it goes live.
• Photo Blog
  Rather than writing, you could put up a daily photo for your customers. A photo and a short description can be very compelling.
• Developer Notes
  If you’re a software company, this can often be fascinating for your customers, to see what the software developers are doing and how new projects might be moving forward.
• News
  The most common use for business blogs is news, usually about the specific topic relevant to the company.

Search Engine Optimization has two key pillars – off-site optimization and on-site optimization. Off-site optimization focuses on building up keyword-rich links to your website from other sites.

“On-site optimization, on the other hand, ensures that website coding is as efficient as possible for search engines and maximises click-through rates from search engine results. This report focuses squarely on on-site optimization – and specifically on how existing websites can be improved.”

The top 10 search engine optimization mistakes are:

1 Wrong keyword phrases – specifically, not researching and targeting keyword phrases that are relevant to your audience. You can research keyword phrases for free at http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com

2 Wrong page title – this is the title that appears in the blue bar at the top of your browser when viewing a web page. This also gets displayed as your page title in search engine results, so it has to contain your keyword phrase as well as a reason to click on the link.

3 Wrong ‘meta’ description – this is the description that appears underneath the page title in search engine results. Again, improving this can drastically improve your ‘click-through rate’ after being found in a search engine.

4 Wrong ‘meta’ keywords – although not as important as it once was, your ‘meta’ keywords give you another opportunity to tell search engines what your page is about. Remember to be specific in relation to your page topic.

5 No heading tags – Heading tags are little pieces of code that surround the most important heading on your web page. These tags simply say to search engines that this is the topic which is covered in the page. Remember to include your keyword phrase.

6 No ‘alt’ or ‘title’ tags – These are the tags that display alternative text if an image can’t be displayed. However, they also give you a further opportunity to communicate your page topic to search engines.

7 Wrong URL format – A URL is simply a web page address. By making your URL’s as simple as possible and by incorporating your keyword phrases within your URL, you improve your search engine optimization.

8 Not enough content – Search engines still struggle to rank websites on anything other than the volume of quality content. Quite simply, if you don’t have enough content on your website, then you aren’t giving search engines enough to ‘chew on’.

9 No content keywords – As well as including your keyword phrase in the areas mentioned above, you need to include this phrase at least once within your main page content to demonstrate that the page subject matter is relevant to the phrase.

10 No keyword rich text navigation – Apart from content on the page, search engines also determine the relevance of a page by reviewing the phrases contained in the links to that page. You need to ensure that you also have your keyword phrases in links to each page.

If I mention the word design it’s likely to call up images of creative graphics, artistic layouts, and decorative aesthetics. But is that what design is all about? Are all those fanciful wows necessary to have a successful web design? While design certainly takes aesthetics into account it is just as concerned with the functionality of the thing being designed. From the Wikipedia:

Designing normally requires considering aesthetic, functional, and many other aspects of an object, which usually requires considerable research, thought, modeling, interactive adjustment, and re-design.

It’s the ‘functional and many other aspects’ that are often overlooked as being part of design, but in many cases they are more important than the aesthetic considerations. How a thing looks is important, but if it doesn’t function well it won’t matter how beautiful it is.

What goes into web design?

When it comes to web design what are the other aspects that make for a successful design beside the overall look of the site? Some concerns beyond aesthetics would include:

1. Usability – Perhaps one of the most important considerations for a website is how usable is it. Can people interact with your site without feeling lost? How well does your site allow users to perform their tasks

2. Accessibility – How accessible is your site? Not everyone will view your pages in a modern browser. Some will use screen readers. Others may be viewing your site on a PDA. An accessible design will let your content to be seen over a variety of devices and even give your site a competitive advantage.

3. Development – The code behind your site can help your pages load faster in a browser and help keep people on your site and away from their back button. Lean code can make a site more usable as well as make it easier to maintain.

4. Search engine optimization – For many sites search engine optimization will play a large role in the marketing efforts of the site. From the simple naming of files and folders to the way your navigation is built, site development can help improve a site’s chances of drawing search traffic. A poorly developed site will put up barriers to getting the site crawled and indexed and impede the ability of the site’s pages to rank well.

5. Conversions - It’s no use to have all those people come to your site if they don’t do what you want once they get there. Good web design will consider the best location for your shopping cart buttons. It will consider the ideal shape and size of a button to get a user to click. It will emphasize and de-emphasize various components of your site in an effort to improve how well the site converts visitors into buyers.

6. Information Architecture – If your visitors can’t find what they want when they want it they will not only leave, but they may never again return. The organization of your information can improve navigation on your site and help lead visitors deeper into your site to your sales pages.

How important are looks in web design?

I don’t want to imply that the look of your site isn’t important. First impressions do count in how your site is perceived and can make a difference in whether or not people stay on your site. On the other hand there are some who argue that an ugly site can actually convert better.

With the exception of industries like art, fashion, and perhaps even design, a beautiful site is not really necessary. Desired maybe, but necessary no. For most sites all that’s really needed to is to remain above a certain line of professionalism, a line above which your site is clearly no longer considered amateur. Usually follow a few basic design principles will be enough to give your site that professionalism.

Summary

Much more than the way your site looks goes into the design process. While it’s easy to think of aesthetics as design it’s very far from the truth. Web design includes many other aspects including how well your site functions, how accessible it is to a variety of devices, and how well it converts.

When considering someone to design your site it’s important to look past the obvious ‘wow’ your design can give you and look into how well they can create a site that effectively communicates your message and effectively helps increase your bottom line.

• Age of web site
• Length of time domain has been registered
• Age of content
• Regularity with which new content is added
• Age of link and reputation of linking site
• Uniqueness of content
• Related terms used in content (the terms the search engine associates as being related to the main content of the page)
• Citations and research sources (indicating the content is of research quality)
• Depth of document in site
• Metrics collected from other sources, such as monitoring how frequently users hit the back button when SERPs send them to a particular page
• Metrics collected from sources like the Google Toolbar, Google AdWords/Adsense programs, etc.
• Rate of removal of incoming links to the site
• Use of sub-domains, use of keywords in sub-domains and volume of content on sub-domains and negative scoring for such activity
• Rate of document addition or change
• IP of hosting service and the number/quality of other sites hosted on that IP
• A common postal address on the “contact us” page
• Hosting uptime
• Broken outgoing links not rectified promptly
• Unsafe or illegal content
• Quality of HTML coding, presence of coding errors
• Actual click through rates observed by the search engines for listings displayed on their SERPs

Without content there is no web site and any good site developer will tell you developing and maintaining informative, compelling, and valuable content can be one of the hardest parts of creating a web site.

Put another way, focusing on just site design is like having brand-new designer luggage “ it may be great looking and could work well, but there’s nothing in it yet that you need for your trip. To be sure, this is not the web designer’s fault “ after all, their job is to create a site structure and make sure it’s attractive, intuitive, functional, and easy to navigate. But while design may be where the magic happens, content is where the selling happens. And isn’t that why businesses create web sites in the first place, to help them sell better?

Since most web design firms prefer to concentrate on design (and rightfully so), content’s got to come from somewhere and it’s usually the client or a third party: a marketing communications or advertising agency, or a writer. But wait, it doesn’t stop there. The best web sites are constantly evolving and long after the design is approved and posted, the content needs to be refreshed regularly to maintain interest, value and searchability.

There’s that word “ searchability. Search engine optimization. The Holy Grail of web strategy. All the great design won’t mean a thing if the world can’t find you, and ideally find you before they find your competition. Design really doesn’t have much to do with search, except when a designer makes the mistake of using too many graphics and not enough real text, which can seriously hinder searching. Search has everything to do with the words in a site “ both the text visitors read and the keywords behind each page. To achieve and maintain searchability and the highest possible rankings, a web site needs to be “refreshed” early and often. That means posting new content on a regular basis – news and events, product information, industry backgrounders, case studies, employment opportunities. Lots of words that are valuable and searchable so that a web site can achieve its maximum value. Good site design is critical, but content is king.

There’s yet a third component that receives scant attention “ site statistics. These are the critical data that any good Internet service provider (ISP) should be able to provide that shows site traffic patterns, entry points, time spent on pages, and other vital information that will help the site owner determine what, where and when to revise both content and design. Operating a site without good stats is like operating a motor vehicle with a tarp thrown over the windshield. Sure you can drive, but sooner or later you’re going to run off the road.

So when the discussion is about web sites, the talk needs to focus equally on design AND content. Site design needs good content to give it value, content needs good site design to give it form and function. Design AND content “ without either one, the other is useless.