New Content Navigation & Site Search Features

Now you can access your site search report for Goals, eCommerce and AdSense- Webmasters can connect searches on their sites with their KPIs through goals, eCommerce and AdSense revenue.

Improved usability with better Breadcrumbs

Google has introduced improvements in breadcrumbs, as they said, “To make navigation more intuitive and easier we’ve added the ability to change a dimension along the breadcrumb path. In addition to navigating back in one direction, you can now navigate sideways on all reports.”

Pages Report now has the In-Page Analytics tab

Webmasters now do not need to navigate to the In-Page reports as they can directly launch In-Page on the selected page in focus. With better movement between the Pages, Navigation Summary, and In-Page tabs on the selected drill-down; it is really much more convenient for webmasters to gather insights now.

Better Mobile App Tracking Tools

Now developers can collect more reliable and accurate data post the enhancements made by Google Analytics. With accurate data, businesses can get more insight from their mobile app initiatives.

There is also a whole new forum for Webmasters to go to as well and an updated Google Analytics IQ course and exam. What do you think of these changes? Do share your views.

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Once upon a time, a kid would get bored and build a lemonade stand. For 12-year-old Harry Moran of Ireland, however, that wasn’t good enough. He recently became the world’s youngest Mac app developer, publishing his game PizzaBot. Was the game successful? You could say that. Before long it easily bested Angry Birds and Call of Duty. Also from Ireland, 11-year-old Shane Curran has already developed a new phone book system called Peoplez.info using MySQL to search and store user information. Since completing his first Linux install at 6 and learning Visual Basic at 7 he has learned PHP, C, C++, Java, Python, Ruby, Perl and Bash.

A couple of continents to the east, Raghav Sood has been proving that tech support isn’t India’s only technology role. He started programming at 9, spent 2 years doing web development before moving onto desktop applications. In 2010 he wrote his own operating system in x86 assembly. After getting his first smart phone in 2011 he decided it was time to start working on mobile apps. Since then he has published 15 apps, is writing a book, Pro Android Augmented Reality for Apress and has competed and won awards in the Hackathon-2012.

Now don’t read these examples and go buy your 2 year old a computer, the latest release of Fedora and some basic coding books. The common thread among these three exceptional youths is their drive and curiosity. This isn’t something they’re taught, it’s something they have a desire to learn for themselves. Although, maybe it wouldn’t hurt to let your two year old play on your iphone a bit, just in case.

If you’re like many business owners, you’ve probably committed to improving your web presence in 2012 …and why wouldn’t you – it’s promising to be bigger and better online than ever before…

So to help you kick start your online resolutions – here’s a quick little check list to ensure your website’s more successful in 2012.

1. Content Review

When was the last time you updated the content on your website? Is it still telling the right story about your products and services?

It’s time to give your content a polish. Take down the old promos, add some new persuasive copy, converse with your audience and even make sure you have the current copyright at the bottom of your website (how many sites still have 1998 on them).

2. Image Makeover

Images tell a significant story about your business, products and services. Rather than keeping those grainy dark images from years ago or plastering your website with stock photos that every other website is using, invest in getting some clear bright and most importantly relevant image up.

3. There’s More to Media Than Pictures

It’s 2012 people. Yes images are great, but your audience expects to be wowed by other exciting interactive elements on your website.

Why not get started with a simple video about your business or products….or if you want to get tricky…there’s slideshows, podcasts, PDFs etc.

4. Get Social Already

It’s not new and and buzz isn’t dying anytime soon. Social media is here to stay whether you like it or not. More importantly, your customers are using it, so it’s now essential for your business.

At the very least you should have links to your Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and Linkedin accounts on your website. But even better, use the tools available and integrate the conversations your having in social media on your website and encourage visitors to get involved.

5. Keep It Simple and Focused

As website’s evolve, they often expand and try to say too much. Bombarding visitors with a barrage of info irrespective of there they are in their journey through your site.

It’s important to give people the right information at the right time on your website. By removing the clutter and confusion you’ll do a better job of guiding them to where you need them to be.

6. Call for action

Visitors all too often they just need to be prodded. If you don’t ask them to do something, there’s a good chance they won’t.

Whether it’s buying your products, signing up for your newsletter or downloading your catalogue, make sure you make it obvious that action is required. Subtlety doesn’t work. Make your calls to action loud and proud.

7. Where’s the trust

There’s 100 billion trillion websites out there, and probably 100′s of competitors in your industry alone. So who should your visitors trust?

Unless you take the time to build trust, they’ll go elsewhere. Add trust builder like awards, certifications and safety/security affiliations to your website so they know straight away that you’re the people to trust.

8. Make it Snappy

Internet users are like fish…short attention spans. So they’re not forgiving of websites that take years to load. Almost everyone has access to fast internet, so the onus is on you to ensure your website loads fast and without errors.

Look at how your website is built, optimize the size of images/media and even reconsider your hosting. It often doesn’t take much to give your website a tune up.

9. No Rabbitholes

No one likes getting lost on a website, so your navigation is paramount. Make it obvious how to get to the bits of content your visitors want to find. And sometimes more importantly, how to get back to where they’ve been.

Some things to consider to improve useability include reviewing your main navigation menu, implementing breadcrumb navigation, sitemaps and even a website search function.

10. “Flash”iness??

Flash on website is soon going to be a thing of the past. Especially when we consider that more and more people are looking at your website from devices like iPhones and iPads.

There’s a range of new technology like HTML5 that does a great job of providing interactivity whilst still working on Apple devices. So if you site is covered in Flash…perhaps 2012 is time for a change.

11. Mobile is Now

Every man and his dog has a smartphone it seems. And they’re using them to view your website (well perhaps not the dogs).

So it’s important that you check your website renders properly on mobile devices. There’s many things you can do to improve the mobile readiness of your website without having to go down the path of creating mobile sites or apps.

And that’s a wrap. A short and sweet Website Success Checklist for 2012. My tip is to review your website with the checklist above and plan out the changes gradually over the coming months.

When you break the overhaul process into smaller pieces, you’re more likely to get it done.

And most importantly, don’t be one of those business owners that breaks their 2012 resolutions and neglects their website for another year.

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The question is, what do you do with your keyword lists once you’ve compiled them?

Just as there is no shortage of good keyword tools, there is also no shortage of metrics that you can use to determine the value of any given keyword. A few that tend to top our keyword selections lists are:

• • Search volume: How many searches per day or month are being performed for each phrase. The higher the volume, the greater the opportunity to drive traffic to your site.

• • Search competition: How many sites are displayed when performing a search using a keyword.

• • Title competition: How many sites are displayed when performing a search for the keyword only in title tags.

• • Direct Competition: Whether a specific competitor ranks for any particular keyword.

• • KEI (Keyword Effectiveness Index): A score based on how often a keyword is searched balanced against keyword competition.

Each of these metrics provides valuable insight, but they ultimately should not be used in selecting keywords. Stats like these can tell us what is happening with the keywords, but it can’t tell us why. And unless you know why something is, it’s impossible to make a smart decision about it.

Here is what the stats don’t tell us:

• • Search volume: How many of these searches are actually relevant? Will the searcher find what their search intended on your site?

• • Search competition: Are the sites ranking for these keywords legitimate competition? Are they truly optimized sites?

• • Title competition: Are these competitors that cannot be defeated? How many of them will be easy to topple?

• • Direct Competition: Do you know if your competitors are getting any value from ranking for these keywords?

• • KEI: Does a competitive score mean you shouldn’t try to rank for the keyword? Is there long-term value in trying?

Looking at keywords in terms of volume or difficulty is a good measure for setting expectations in terms of time and budget it will take to get your site ranked. Looking at whether your competitors rank for that phrase only tells you whether your competitors rank for a phrase. For all you know they have performed zero keyword research, or went after a phrase because someone else did. That’s not a good signal by itself.

The problem with looking at any of the signals and data above is it does not tell you anything about searcher intent or whether you can convert those keywords into sales. It’s good data to have, but not the data you need to make good keyword selection decisions.

To do that, you need to apply this simple three-rule test for keyword selection:

1. Is the keyword relevant to your target audience? There are a lot of keywords that are seemingly relevant, but when you look closer at visitor intent, you find that the searcher is looking for something different entirely. Not even all “industry relevant” keywords will be relevant to your products or services in particular. Be sure to analyze visitor intent for each of your keywords. Unfortunately, the only tool that can do that is your brain.
2. Will the keyword deliver traffic? This question cannot be answered until the question above is. Not all traffic is the same, so you need to make sure it’s targeted traffic. Don’t let high search volume bias you. Even low volume keywords can deliver a fantastic amount of targeted traffic when combined with other long-tail phrases.
3. Will the traffic sent by the keyword convert? You can take your best guess here, but only time and analytics will tell. Every keyword you invest any significant amount of time in optimizing for SEO or PPC should be able to convert your visitors into customers. Spend more time investing in keywords with higher conversion rates.

The simplified version of this three-rule test is: Relevancy, Traffic and Conversions. Every good keyword should be able to satisfy each of these satisfactorily. If they are lacking anywhere, then the value of the keyword will also be lacking.

You can select relevant keywords that drive traffic, but if you can’t convert them, maybe it’s not as relevant as you thought. You can select relevant traffic that converts, but if the traffic isn’t there. Conversions will be sparse. If you select high-volume keywords that occasionally convert, but without the relevance, the conversion rates will be low and your effort will be high. Not a good mix for productivity!

There may be some wiggle-room between each keyword, but ultimately, you only want to select keywords that will deliver performance on all three levels. If not, then you may just be wasting your time! The best keywords are keywords that you have determined to be relevant and have tested to get results. Nothing else really matters.

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Find out how the chocolate and more importantly the reviews were used within this session:

DeHaven jumped straight in by asking the 5 reviewers to stand up and tell the audience their reviews. (On a side note, I love that DeHaven is moving around the room, right now he’s standing next to me and I feel awkward that I’m typing, but I hope he’ll appreciate my live post of his session). DeHaven then read the description of the chocolate from the back of the bag, needless to say the reviews were very different from the description.

Turns out, 80-90% of content on e-commerce sites are written by end-users through reviews and comments, not the marketers who try to improve the SEO of the sites through targeted content and keywords.

How does the content of end-users differ from marketers? Language style is the biggest difference, i.e. keywords are very different. So how do you determine what keywords you should be using on your website:

• Keywords Discovery via Meditation
• Keywords Discovery via Auto-Suggest
• Keywords Discovery via AdWords - DeHaven suggests using exact match (I fully support this, to make sure that you get the best data possible from the tool

7 Principles of User Generated SEO:

1. Don’t Forget SEO Fundamentals! – Content optimization, link building, etc.
2. Search Engines Get Bored – When the same content is served day after day to the search engine bots, they get bored. DeHaven gave the example of eating the same food dish for every meal for a week, you get bored. This example takes me back to college and the law of diminishing return.
3. The Primanti Principle - You know, like the sandwiches with french fries.  The key is to have the right amount of french fries. How does this relate to your content?  Don’t stuff your content with the same keywords.
4. Beware of Dilution – Be Strategic – You still need to have keywords density, this is the other extreme of the Primanti Principle.
5. Unlock the Long-Tail Vault – When DeHaven asked the audience who focuses on long tailed keywords, I was one of the few that raised my hand… WOW!
   • Top-Level or Subdomain? - DeHaven suggests pulling the fresh content, typically put on a subdomain, back to the top-level website to increase freshness
6. Ask for Content at Relevant Times – Ask for the content when it’s appropriate. For example, TicketMaster should ask users to take pictures at the concert before the concert, Rosetta Stone should ask for reviews six months after the purchase because it takes time to use the product, and hotels should ask for a review during the customer’s stay.
7. Convert Reviewers into Advocates – After someone engages with a review, ask them to answer a few questions when you have their attention.

Don’t get too worried about this if you run a small website using their api, as the first 25,000 loads per day will be free. This is really just a way for Google to make a little extra money off of the larger sites that are currently using their services for free. At first glance $4 may not seem like a lot of money, but when you think about the fact that there are many sites that have hundreds of thousands of visitors every day, that cost can add up. Also, I should add that the site gets charged whether the user actually interacts with the map or not

There are two real options for users of the API: either lower and control their usage of the Google product, or go ahead and buy a premium license from them, which starts at $10,000 per year and is way more than most users of the API will be able to afford.

According to another article, there is still a way to embed a map on a web page without using the API all, which is probably what a lot of people will start doing. Just a little news that the juggernaut that is Google is trying to make itself stronger every day. It’s always a good idea to keep a look out for news about them, because theres always a good chance that you will be affected.

So then, the next question we ask ourselves is what is the importance of fresh content for SEO? Where do they fit in all this? The answer is simple. SEO is all about understanding what popular search engines and web users want. If both of them want fresh, new, relevant and compelling content, then it is SEO’s work to ensure that they get it. Thus, a company that offers everything latest that a user or a search engine wants, will definitely be ranked higher in search results and in turn would make more sales and will have the opportunity to best others in the business.

Search Engines love fresh content. When doing a web search on a popular search engine, the first thing you get to see is that the latest, are always at the top. That is because the new content is always given importance over the old one. When adding new content, one should keep in mind to place the content according to a specific theme that’s been running through your webpage so that it doesn’t seem out of the place and should be properly categorized. Adding product reviews, customer feedback, press release and other relevant information about some specific product is also a good practice. It would earn you a better ranking with the search engines and would get your website on top of the other competing searches. Just remember however, to update your content often so that it stays on top as well.

Another important practice is to incorporate keywords in the title of your webpage, on-page titles and in the short descriptive summary that depicts the main theme of your article. This technique also helps you in keeping your webpage, on top of others in search results. Remember that more the keywords matches higher will be your ranking in the search results. It is important to mention here that while adding keywords, one should always keep in mind not to disrupt the flow of the article. It is better to have no keywords in the article and have the article going in a perfect flow than to have keywords with a disrupted flow.
Always remember that your reader is the most important thing there can be on the reader. Avoid content that might bore your reader or make him loose his interest in your content and go someplace else. For this purpose, a good practice is to often add pictures or videos or other interactive content that would keep your reader interested in your content. Keeping the article/content short and to the point, is also another way of ensuring that but do make sure that you cover all the main points in it.

Keep these things in mind; keep adding new content; and overtime, watch as the major search engines begin to sit up and take notice of your website and the material that you add.

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Overview

1. User Experience
2. Fonts
3. Color
4. HTML
5. CSS
6. JavaScript
7. SEO
8. Speed
9. Cross-Browser Compatibility
10. Content

1. User Experience

The user experience (UX) is the most important thing you will design. Navigation is the most important thing in a user’s experience, and therefore, the most important specific thing you will design. Then comes presentation and then content, both which we will cover later.

Ever go to a site that was a complete dud because you couldn’t figure out where to go? Yea, that’s bad UX. Because of this, web designers have the most important role on the web today. A site with limited functionality due to a bad programmer can still be a huge hit if the UX is good.

Being good at this will take time and experience. In the mean, read books like the A Book Apart collection, Luke Wroblewski’s Web Form Design, and various web articles like “10 Principles of Navigation Design” or “Navigation Menu Trends and Examples.”

2. Fonts

Fonts are coupled into UX, but are their own animal. Web safe fonts can be extremely frustrating to work with and significantly limit design options that don’t degrade other aspects of the site. For example, if you replace blocks of text with images in order to get fonts you lose on SEO because the content is gone. There are many ways to get around this using image replacements, but native fonts are best.

In order to get native fonts one can use the @font-face CSS property. Producing the code for this property is not something anyone would want to undertake, so there are font embedding services like Google Webfonts or Fontsquirrel that will do this for you. Alternatively, one could use cufon, but since it is JavaScript-based it has its pros and cons.

Perhaps my favorite example that depicts issues of typography is in the introduction of an article by Designer Break (link). In red it says “bad typography is everywhere” and in the background it says “good typography is invisible.” And, and as a final note, be sure you know the difference between serif and sans-serif fonts.

3. Color

Like fonts, color is its own animal too, and can greatly enhance UX. Have you ever been to a site that you couldn’t read because of the color? Or, perhaps you’ve been to a site that is gaudy with obnoxious link colors. It is hard to go wrong when choosing a color theme if you just copy sites that look good. However, when color goes bad, it goes really bad.

To prevent this, good web developers will know their colors. Colors come with all kinds of terminology to learn and are extremely complex because they tie to emotion, need to be tailored to your audience, and need to be “web safe“.

The RGB values for web safe colors have traditionally included 0, 51, 102, 153, 204, and 255 (or 0%, 20%, 40%, 60%, 80%, and 100%). However, this is now obsolete. According to W3Schools, as of last year there are no longer any users with 8 bit (limited to 256 colors) displays. Some 97% of users have 24 or 32 bit displays which can access all 16 million colors (all 255 RGB values). However, if wanting to tailor to everyone, there is still the 3% with 16 bit displays (limited to 16,000 colors).

Also, tied in with web safe color are the issues of transparency. Few things are more frustrating than viewing your site on a month later on someone else’s screen and you see a hideous background on the site’s logo that clashes with the background. Not all browsers support png transparency (by “not every browser” I mean IE) and if you save a png image with transparency as a jpg the transparency is lost. Thus, developers need to become very very familiar with images and if you don’t have photoshop, use GIMP.

Choosing a color scheme is tricky business, but there are all kinds of great tools (such as color palette generators and many others) and tips on the web. There are also a lot of color theory articles that may be helpful, even some specific to the topic of branding.

A bit of creative use of color can make up for where the site may be lacking or give the site that additional edge it takes to captivate your audience.

We will continue our list next, but in the mean time comment and let us know what is missing that would be in your list.

Search engine friendly design is not the same as search engine optimization. It is not always user friendly design either. Search engine friendly design is actually a merger of search engine and user friendly design. However, users are always the priority. They are the ones using your site and possibly generating revenue. “…a sure-friendly website design that can be easily found on the crawler-based search engines, human-based search engines, and industry-based search engines.”

The 5 rules listed below for creating a search engine friendly web page are not exclusive. You must follow all of them in order to be successful.

1. It should be easy to read

• Is content legible?

1. Navigation should be easy

• Answer these questions as if you were a user:
  • Where am I?
  • Where can I go?
  • How can I get there?
• Make navigation clickable, scan-able, and distinguishable
• Poor navigation is one of the most common reasons for a user leaving a website

1. The site should be easy to find

• Before arriving to the site consider:
  • Search engines
  • Niche directories
  • Local listings
  • News and blog sites
• After arriving to the site consider:
  • The user should be directed straight to the relevant page
  • The 3-click rule is a myth, and users will continue to click as long as the content is relevant
  • Put important text at the top of the page. When people arrive at a page and don’t see what they are looking for, they often assume the information is not there
  • Once they leave, there is only a 12% chance a user will return

1. Consist layout, design, and labeling are necessary

• This will help communicate trust and reliability

1. Quick to download

• Actual download time
  • This is the real time it takes for a server to transfer data, not what the user experiences
  • Perceived download time
    • This is the actual user experienced time, and takes into account that if a user cannot find data they perceive the download time to  be longer

Usability is about task completion. Just because it is not search engine friendly does not mean that it isn’t the best link component for task completion. However, it is often a good idea to have two forms of navigation on your site to accommodate different users who have different preferences.

All sites must contain informational pages. They contain information your target audience is interested in, are spider-friendly, often have a simple layout, and visually match the rest of your site. They do not contain a lot of sales information.

Doorway pages are not the same as informational pages. Doorways are built with the intention to rank, rather than provide information. They are also often text-only pages, have poor quality links, and searchers and search engines do not see the same page.

Page interlinking is very important. Both horizontal and vertical linking is necessary. Linking to related pages is key for interlinking to be effective.

To conclude, Ms. Thurow reviewed the importance of usability. No matter what, the user experience comes first when it comes to search engine friendly web design. If a web page is not search engine friendly but has a very high task completion rate, it is more search engine friendly than one that is search engine optimized, but difficult to use. Although it is a fine balance between the two.

The purpose behind releasing this video is that Google feels that as the internet continues to grow each day and as search gets more personalized, users always have a choice of which search engine to use and this is what keeps Google motivated to work harder.

Here is the video so you can check it out yourself:

What I found most interesting was that every creative idea suggested has to pass some intensive scientific testing and prove its usability before being approved and launched. Every change in the algorithm that doesn’t get desired reaction from users, is given an equal amount of re-thinking to identify the problem area and find a subsequent solution. The analysts at Google called the ‘ranking engineers’ get together and sit through many brain storming sessions to determine what data can be integrated into an algorithm.

When introducing a new change, Google runs the experiments with a limited number of users/participants termed the ‘virtual sandbox’ to document and collect user reactions and feedback data. Not only this, but Google talks about including professional analysts from outside the Google family, to evaluate and compare different search rankings before rolling out the changes to users worldwide.

I will leave you with one final thought – In 2010, Google ran more than 20,000 different experiments out of which only 500 were launched. They certainly are a busy bunch of people at Google!

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