SearchEngineOptimisation.com, only one way up

Search engine optimisation is far from straightforward. The complexity involved is associated with a variety of factors. These include the fact that the subject moves swiftly and changes radically. It is also true that SEO is in part a technical discipline. Many aspects of practical optimisation demand the use of SEO tools and so on, for example. An area where it would be difficult for a novice to know why or how to make the necessary improvements may be in respect of site loading time.

At Searchengineoptimisation.co.uk we work hard to deliver site-specific campaigns that are multifaceted, focused and flexible. In addition to this, we do our best to provide content which is of use to site owners who are seeking to do some online research on the topic of SEO.

The speed with which a site loads has long been a concern for SEO practitioners. This is because it has the potential to put off potential users if the time involved is excessively lengthy. Furthermore, it was traditionally the case that SEO outfits had a hunch that Google actively discriminated against sites which took too long to load. Nobody could blame a search engine which took this sort of action because it would in effect chime with what it perceived as the interests of most users.

Since the period in which the treatment of sites with slow loading times by the major search engines was a matter of speculation, Google has revealed how it actually behaves in this area. Google often communicates with the SEO community and while it could sometimes be more specific, many SEO companies are grateful for the information they receive from this source. On many occasions, it has made things clearer in a very helpful way.

In the case of site loading time, Google’s Matt Cutts has relatively recently declared that the search engine’s algorithm does take note of site loading time and that those sites which are very slow are poorly ranked as a consequence. At the same time, Matt Cutts was at pains to point out that the algorithm does not place great emphasis on loading times because so many other factors are judged to be relevant.

If a site is loading slowly it may be that it features large amounts of images in Flash. On the other hand, it may be that the site has several videos on it. There are of course other reasons why a site may be taking too long to load, but these two causes are relatively common. If a site has too much emphasis on visual content there are measures which can be taken which should boost site performance.

If a site wishes to display a significant number of videos it is probably a good idea to consider using YouTube. This means that it is a great idea for a video to be retained in terms of its function, but if its location can be moved so much the better. It is a fact that images using Flash should only be employed in moderation.

It can be easier to make headway with search engine optimization when a site is up and running or it can be more straightforward when SEO principles can be adhered to from the start. Results in terms of site performance are determined by a diversity of things and there are no easy universal answers to many questions curious site owners may have. The best thing to do is to look at each site on its merits and implement tailored techniques. However, there are some areas of activity which often necessitate compromise, regardless of the expertise of the technician and the quality of the SEO tools they use. One of these areas is balancing the site design with the requirements of SEO.

At SearchEngineOptimisation.co.uk we take considered action on behalf of the sites of our various clients. Using experience, expertise and SEO tools, we endeavour to improve site performance with respect to traffic levels and conversion rates.

Site design is an area where there is a need to reflect on what search engine optimization actually demands. Some site owners do not perceive the true influence site design may have on the performance of their site. This is sometimes because they regard site design purely as an exercise in aesthetics. They may realise that site design should be appropriate for their economic sector, but they may not recognise that design issues are relevant to site performance in the way their site is treated by the major search engines.

There are several ways in which an attractive site, which pleases the eyes of the average human user, can perform poorly on the search engine results pages. This means that it is important to get SEO analysis of a site. The problems can flow from things such as:

• Ignoring the pertinence of a site’s code is a big mistake. When the search engines are ranking sites, they pay considerable attention to the code of a site. This means that sites which are built with their external appearance to the human user in mind may have to be adjusted to meet the requirements of the search engines.

• Sites which are largely constructed out of Flash may look impressive and users may enjoy viewing them. It is true that a site can contain some Flash without have a significantly detrimental impact on its fortunes, but avoiding too much usage of Flash is recommended.

• Users often appreciate the employment of a video or two on a site. Certainly videos can stimulate interest and provoke comment. It is not productive, however, to use videos for the sake of it. It is also worth bearing in mind that videos can slow the loading time of a site. This can frustrate the search engines and ordinary users. Therefore the featuring of videos on a site should not be overdone.

• The site must be tailored around the needs of the firm. It should be remembered that the manufacture of a site is not about providing a riot of colour. Excessively bright colours are unlikely to contribute to a site’s success.

The homepage of a website can have an important influence on the progress of a site. An ineffective homepage can have a really detrimental impact on site performance. If a lot of effort has been expended to get users to a site, it is a real shame if it is not capitalised upon. The home page is more than just a virtual foyer designed to welcome visitors to a site. This means that the homepage has a diversity of functions. It is unfortunately beyond the scope of many site owners to get their homepage up to scratch without specialist assistance. An SEO agency with the right experience is well placed to get a homepage in order.

At SearchEngineOptimisation.co.uk we have the expertise and experience to help site owners with a variety of troublesome issues. As progressive SEO consultants, we have the ability to make the most of the traffic which a site receives from a flexible and continuous campaign.

The homepage does have to welcome users and it is obliged to indicate where users’ needs may be satisfied, but it has to do many other things too. For example, the homepage usually has to clearly display what the firm is all about. In addition to this core function, it often has to highlight what is new about the site. Users tend to love novelty, but they like to be shown that the ‘new’ elements are there to be tracked down. It is also the case that the fact something fresh is available is a positive thing.

There are other more technical aspects of a homepage which many novices and some site owners might not fully appreciate. These in part relate to link building. It is a fact that when a site begins to accumulate inbound links some of these will connect to the home page. It is crucial to appreciate the finer points of what the home page is compelled to do.

We have already seen that the homepage is not just about presenting an attractive face to the user. As well as having a role in link building, it is also about engaging with what the web crawlers of the major search crave. Hence it can be seen that the homepage should feature a couple of relevant long tail keywords to increase its visibility and obtain some more traffic.

In addition to having such a crowded ‘to do list’, the homepage has to be aesthetically pleasing. It should exude professionalism. Its appearance has to fit in with the sector in which the firm operates. This, in practice, means that users have to be presented with something that looks the part.

If a homepage is too crowded, the first-time user may feel lost and disconcerted. It is pivotal that the homepage has enough unused space on it to enable clear reading. Given the range of functions which the homepage has to deliver on, without using specialist help it can be hard to be concise enough.

Any company knows that driving traffic to your website is crucial, however it does not end there. One thing that many people learn when they seek the advice of professional SEO services is that keeping consumers on your website for a certain amount of time is just as important as getting them there in the first place. When a user clicks on a page within your website and then immediately clicks out again, it is more often than not because what the page had to offer was not what they were looking for. When a user does this it is classed as a ‘bounce’ and a lot of search engines, in particular Google, take a bounce rate into account when indexing a webpage or website. A bounce rate which is too high is seen as a negative point, as it means you are either not providing a good service or you are using unethical methods to deceive users into clicking onto your site just to get your click through rate up.

There are many search engine optimisation tools available which can help you to assess the habits of visitors to your web pages, one of the most popular ones being Google Analytics. There is a lot of data which can be identified by this tool; however one area which it is particularly useful for is monitoring the habits of your website visitors. By tracking their movements you can easily identify and areas of weakness within your web pages and fix the problem. Some of the most popular areas to monitor are as follows, and if you can recognise these areas as soon as possible you can prevent your site from getting a poor reputation for being purposefully avoided.

Slow page loading speed is a common reason for users to give up on linking through to your web pages. We live in a fast-moving world now and people are becoming increasingly more demanding and expect things almost instantly. Unless a user has visited a site previously and accepts it can take a short time and knows the content is worth waiting for, then a slow page loading can have negative effects. Whilst page loading speed should not result in content quality being sacrificed, it is important that you do everything you can to ensure your pages load as quickly as is feasible.

The capability of your website within various browsers has not always been significant, however with users now being able to select from a choice of web browsers it is important that your site can function properly within them all. Google Analytics can show you what percentages of users are using a specific web browser, and even more importantly, a specific version of a web browser. Each browser will usually offer some kind of test capability to show how well your website functions.

Lastly, mobile compatibility is crucial. With more people accessing the internet via mobile phones, having a mobile website is essential. Google Analytics can again assess how well your site functions with various mobile devices for on the move access.

If your website targets worldwide, then you might already know that distance from the server to the user can introduce latency – an effect of distance. Latency is basically the time it takes to make a round trip from the server, to the user, and back to the server again. The longer the latency gets, the longer it can take to download a file. The cause is quite technical so we won’t get into that, but rest assured distance does take its toll on load speeds.

This is where Content Delivery Networks (CDN’s) come into play. CDN’s are designed to serve content to users as fast as possible based on their geographical location throughout the globe. The basic principle is to mirror your data such as images, videos and other large downloads to several servers, and geographically place them where your users are.

For example, your main site may be hosted in the United States but your visitors come from USA, Europe and Australia more than any other country. In this case, you would have 3 sets of CDN servers, one in USA, one in Europe and one in Australia. This way the users will be served content from the server closest to them. This will increase speeds and give the user a more pleasant experience when browsing and downloading from the site.

With Google Caffeine and site speed being introduced into ranking results, it is important that your site perform as quickly as possible, and a Content Delivery Network helps to ensure this.

A CDN doesn’t just offer faster speeds to those it’s closest to either. Browsers will often only download 2 items at a time from each hostname. This means if you have a lot of JavaScript files or CSS files, it will load them before continuing to load other items on the page. This limits you to 2 connections while it waits for those items to download. If you have CDN, you are essentially giving the browser more than one hostname to download from, so the browser can connect to more and download in parallel the files required for displaying the site.

In turn, this makes the content download faster and display more quickly on the browser, and prevents the user having to wait. Most users won’t wait more than 4 seconds for a page to load so be sure you’re not losing visitors by having a slow loading website.

CDN’s don’t have to cost the earth either, with companies such as Amazon and the S3 Cloud, you can set up a CDN in no time for very little cost.

Below is an example of what a CDN could look like:

At SearchEngineOptimisation.co.uk we know that whilst every page within a website is important, the homepage is one of the most important. Not only is the homepage the window to the rest of your website, but it is often the landing page for many users; providing a visitor with the first impression of the website and in many instances, the entire company. A homepage is also the page a user returns to if they are unsure of where to go next on the website or struggling with navigation. For all these reasons, it is important that your homepage provides enough information yet at the same time is not cluttered or over complicated, as these things can put a visitor off, and the best way to achieve this is to consult professional web designers.

It can be tempting for a company to try and cram everything they need to say on to the homepage to ensure they are getting the message across, however this is not necessary. Many SEO experts will offer the advice that a homepage should clearly show the offerings of the company itself, and whilst this is true, it can often be misinterpreted. Showing your existing and potential consumers what you have for them does not mean that you have to tell them every element. Keep the more detailed information for the subpages and maintain a focus on a summary of what the company has to offer. By all means demonstrate the diversity of the business, but there is no need to go into too much detail at this stage – this is what the subpages are there for.

As with all communication channels within a business, the main reason is to gain some form of return or response on the investment, which is what makes the homepage an ideal place to post the largest form of a call to action. This could be an invitation to purchase something, sign up to the website or complete another task such as filling out a form. Whilst it can be important to include these elements to any web page, it is vital to follow the same simplicity rule and not overdo it. Select one call to action and stick to it, rather than having multiple options that will just confuse the user. If you do need to include other calls to action then include a link to a separate page so you are not overwhelming the web visitor.

Pop-up advertisements are also a common occurrence yet most consumers do see these as a nuisance. Whilst there are no hard and fast rules to say that pop ups should not be used, always proceed with caution and consider carefully what you place on the homepage. The last thing a user wants on their first visit to your website is to be irritated and put off.

Consistency is probably the most important thing, and all SEO experts will tell you this. The homepage should flow from top to bottom and not look segmented. Often the desire to include too much information results in a fragmented vision that simply does not work.

Website design is an extensive area nowadays and is advancing at many different rates. On one hand it is becoming more of a specialist field with a lot of companies employing external services to help them with their design, whilst at the other end of the spectrum companies are learning more about web design themselves and choosing to create their own websites. Creating a successful website which is easy for users to read is harder than people initially think, and one area which is underestimated in terms of importance is colour scheme.

The problems which occur when deciding the colour scheme of the website are that usually the company already has brand colours and logos in place, which means that the automatic approach would be to design a website colour scheme using the same colours. Of course, this is excellent for brand consistency and identity and depending on your company colours it can work well. The issues arise when the company colours are not distinctive or strong, or simply not easy for consumers to digest. If you do find that this is the case then fear not, as you can select alternative colours for the main bulk of your web design, as long as there is some presence or resemblance to your corporate identity. A good way to combat this is to use the main corporate colours for borders or boxes.

If you ask your SEO experts for advice on web design then one of the first things they are likely to discuss with you is the font. Text is one of the most important things on a website, as if people cannot easily read the content on your site then they are likely to leave and not continue using it. The factors to consider are font size and colour. Size is generally best kept as standard, with headings and important information which you require to stand out in a larger font size.

When it comes to text colour, the key is to make it as pleasing on the eye as possible. Contrasting background and text colours are the best way to go but it is still a good idea to keep it simple. Dark text on a light background may sound basic, but is a safe and effective option. You can brighten up the rest of your website by asking your SEO experts to work on the surrounding design. However, it is best to avoid the text area of the web pages when trying to do something creative. Similarly, light text on a dark background can also work well, however dark backgrounds do require some skilled creative input to make them work.

Over half of your website is made up of background colour, sometimes more, and generally this will set the trend for the rest of the website. Using a small number of colours is also a good idea. Nowadays most websites can accommodate any colour as opposed to years ago when only a certain number were compatible. However, just because you can use them all, does not mean that you should.

At Searchengineoptimisaion.com we are continuously highlighting the importance of images and videos within websites. There is no mistaking that more complex content can benefit your SEO strategy, and the inclusion of images is not only more appealing to users, but can offer you more solutions in terms of search. With search engines such as Google offering users specific search tabs for video and image, it is fairly obvious why websites should be including them. There is another end to the spectrum though, and that is websites which are more image-based than they are text-based, and optimising this type of site for search engines is a little different.

Professional SEO consultants can help you with this and it is a good idea to seek expert advice, especially if you are finding your web pages are losing rank or not performing particularly well. Whilst images and video can be appealing, ultimately it is still text that search engine crawlers identify and pick up on, so not including any content which is text-based could have a devastating effect on your website’s ranking.

It is of course possible for sites of this nature to succeed. Think of YouTube or Flickr – both of these sites are based predominately around video and image content, yet are two of the most popular sites out there. Granted there is an element of brand awareness for these two sites and a lot of traffic to the sites is direct and not a recommendation or search result. However, you do see both these sites, and many more of a similar nature, being displayed high within the SERPs.

One of the most basic techniques is to ensure all images and videos have sufficient tags. Description tags should provide as much information about the image as possible and should also include a keyword. This makes it easier for search engines to identify what the image is, even though they can only use the tag to do this. If you are struggling with this then you can seek the advice of a copywriter or any SEO experts as they will know how to describe images and videos via text.

Search engines and human users digest information in a certain way and segments or chunks of content is easier for both to understand than one large lump of content. Try to separate different image or video subjects by including individual subject headers or placing them into categories, as this will make it easier to understand.

If your website is heavily image-based then try to use other channels to promote them, which can include more text. Social networking sites and blog pages are classic examples and are often used as places to post links to other forms of content. It can also be useful to get your content posted on other websites that are more text-based, as if the search engines pick up on them easier then users can then link through to your site. Having an image based website succeed in SEO is possible, it just take a little bit more creativity.

When web designers first included frames on their web pages, most of us liked what we saw. A frame seemed like a good idea, as it enabled pages to view more than one page within the same browser, aided navigation for users on the site and allowed consumers to view more than one piece of content at the same time. Framing looked good and gave a professional edge to a website and was a web design technique used by companies worldwide.

Over more recent years we have seen a decrease in the use of framing, mainly for the reason that incorporating it into a website could have negative effects on the success of that site’s page ranking. There have been many debates as to whether the use of frames does directly impact on search results, however SEO experts now realised that it does change the way in which search engines pick up our pages.

Within a normal web browser the main frames and the sub frames are picked up quite easily, however the problem when it comes to search engines is that apart from the index or main frame which is usually a HTML format, the other frames are often created using a format such as SRC which spider crawlers cannot pick up. This means that apart from your title links, nothing else will be seen.

As Google has developed it has been able to follow some SRC links, however the issue again here is that the way in which your site is created for the framing means that some of the content and navigation bars will be missing when linked to via Google. With content being so crucial now in terms of search engine criteria, creating a site which makes your content practically invisible to a search engine seems like website suicide.

In the earlier days of web developing, coding and meta tags were all that mattered and framing worked a lot better. The likes of Google could pick up the text in your main frame tags and coding fine and with professional SEO services being fairly new, the quality of content was not as crucial to page ranking. Nowadays however, search engines such as Google look for relevant and natural content, so if your framing codes are getting in the way of your content then it is highly likely your page ranking will suffer.

Professional companies have recognised this problem and there are ways around it. It is possible to create noframes tags, however in order for these to still be detected and be displayed properly you need to recreate your content with these tags. With all that being quite a lot of hard word it is just as simple to create a website with no frames at all. If you are currently using framing on your site then now is probably a good time to have a revamp on your website and discard some of your framed pages. That is not to say that framing has died completely, but to favour the search engines it is possibly best avoided.

As in life, compromise is often required in search engine optimisation. Therefore it makes sense that there has to be a balance between the aesthetics of a site and its functional capacity as a tool of a firm. Sometimes what is easy on the eye is also ‘what works’, but that is by no means always the case. It is very important to look at a site through the perspective of a user to appreciate where it scores well and where it falls short. Often users first end up on a site at its homepage so it is vital to get these things right on this page.

Some SEO companies mistakenly think that their work is almost done when a user has found their way to a site. However, a site may have a high bounce rate and few conversions may be made if additional effort is not put in. Users may get to a site, be unimpressed by it and rapidly be off elsewhere to have their needs met. That is one of the reasons why at SearchEngineOptimisation.co.uk we never use or recommend black hat techniques. These unethical methods can sometimes temporarily boost the ranking of a site, but users are seldom impressed when they observe what is actually on a site which has had this kind of work done for it.

The homepage is crucial in displaying to users that they have gone to the right place. If the homepage is not inviting, users will not hang around for long. Users are like ‘real world’ travellers in that they have been on a journey and need a bit of reassurance. They need to be convinced that they have found a reputable establishment which will provide them with reliable information, goods and/or services at competitive prices. Some inexperienced people therefore conclude that the homepage should be the virtual equivalent of a shop window. It is wise to remember how many times you have gone ‘window shopping’ at this point. It is one thing to be impressed favourably by an attractive display, it is quite another to be enticed inside a shop and make a purchase.