The Maine SEO Blog

More and more, it’s becoming apparent how much website usability and search go hand-in-hand. You can’t have great search visibility without great usability; and no one will know your site has great usability without great search visibility. At this point, the two are so intertwined, it’s difficult to separate them; but let’s give it a go with some important usability rules for search:

Information Architecture

If you haven’t built your website yet…

Great! Stop right now.

Do you have a site outline yet? You’ll need to document exactly how your navigation structure is going to be set up.

Now you have an outline…does it make sense? Maybe to you, but why not test it out? Get feedback from anyone you can: your coworkers,your customers, your family, your friends. Ask, “if this was your website, how would you set it up?” and “If you came to this website, does this outline make sense?” You’ll have a proper site outline in no time.

If you already have a website built…

Don’t panic. You may very well already have a fantastic, easy-to-understand information architecture.

How can you tell? Check your bounce rate. This might be a clue as to who lands on one page of your website, gets confused, gives up, and just leaves (essentially “bounces”). If your bounce rate is high (I’m talking really high – greater than 90% high), it might be worth taking a look at other stats to make sure it’s your navigation to blame. If it is, it might be worth a navigation revamp – a pretty hefty undertaking; where a complete site overhaul might be in order. Regardless, either option will make a drastic improvement if navigation is to blame.

Call-to-action

Gone are the days of the online brochure. Your website needs to have a purpose: what do you want people to do on your website? Do you want them to call you? Email you? Fill out a form? Sign up for your email newsletter? Buy something? Make your call-to-action big, bold, and obvious. Subtlety doesn’t pay in a fast-paced web surfer world.

Think of every page as a landing page

By default, most of us think our visitors will start on our homepage, then travel through the rest of the website in order – reading every word we wrote – just as we planned it. I hate to burst your bubble, but people start in the middle of your website, skip around, and leave before you want them to. [Acceptance is the first step.]

So, as you plan your pages and write the copy; think: what if this is the very first page someone sees of my website? (That’s why the *cough* call-to-action is so important.)

By keeping these usability tips in mind as you plan – or revamp – your website, you’re already on the road to better search engine visibility.

Nicki Hicks
Usability is as usability does

You’ve launched a great new website and you’re awaiting patiently for it to be indexed.

You Google. Relentlessly.

Your homepage could be indexed within a week or so. Unfortunately, it’s not uncommon for it to take an entire month (or even two) for the deeper level pages to be indexed.

But if you’re not careful, you’ll never see your website in the search results. Why? It could be a few things…

If you use WordPress

You have an option during development to stop search bots from crawling your site. You should take it. The option is in a small space in a deep corner of your Admin: the privacy settings.

If you use the setting, great; just make sure upon launch, make your site visible!

NoIndex, Nofollow, Robots.txt

Not to get too geeky, but when you check the privacy setting above in WordPress, what you’re doing is adding a robots.txt file and noindexing the site.

However, you don’t need WordPress to do this. You can add a robots.txt file in any website – and there are certain pages you might want to use it for like your Privacy policy.

That being said, don’t nofollow, noindex your entire site after launch…

…or add any pages deeper than the homepage to your robots.txt file. In this case, that little backslash can make a world of difference.

How to make your site index faster

So you’ve launched. You’ve gotten rid of your noindex, nofollow tag and you’re ready to be found. Here are some ways to get found faster:

• Add Google Webmaster Tools. By adding this simple (and down the road, helpful) tool, you’re killing two birds with one stone and also submitting your website to Google.
• Add the Bing Toolbox. Like Webmaster Tools, this automatically submits your website to Bing, along with some other added benefits.
• Create a sitemap and submit it to your Google Webmaster Tools and Bing Toolbox account. While it may not help your site be crawled faster – it will certainly help search engines find those deeper pages a little quicker.
• Get links. Lots and lots of links. The links from quality, established websites you have, the better! Think about it: those websites get crawled on a regular basis, follow a new link to your site and voila! Not to mention…now you have a link to establish expertise.
• Along the same lines, submit to directories.
• Submit yourself on social sites websites like Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, etc. Then have friends/colleagues help you go “hot” on those sites.
• Create a presence on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. Then link to your new website.

Nicki Hicks
Get indexed

James Fenelon, Interactive Product Director, nFusion

What is it?

• Usability testing provides measurement and ease of use and user success
• Helps explain how test subject respond in: time, accuracy, recall, emotional response
• Benefits:
  - First-hand data from users
  - Discovery of errors and areas of improvement
  - Saves development time and money
  - Reduces guesswork and arguing

Why is it important?

• Site impression is made in 1/20th second

Start with the right strategy

• Usability is about helping site visitors accomplish THEIR goals
• Start be defining:
  - Business goals
  - Visitor goals

Some Usability Options

• Can range from basic to high-end
• Basic Techniques:
  - Heuristic reviews
  - Card sorting
  - Prototype Testing

Heuristic review

• Evaluation method that helps to identify usability problems with the user interface
• Provides:
  - Identification of user experience/website usability issues
  - Prioritization of what to fix

Information Architecture and Usability

• Is the menu-naming terminology consistent with the user’s perspective?
• Are navigational titles clear and mutually understood?

Card Sorting – Validating your IA

• Many techniques
• Write the name of each main item on index card
• Shuffle deck and give to user
• Ask them to sort into groups and explain

Prototype Testing

• Using wireframes to decide best usability for website
• Best way to start? On paper.

When to do it?

• Earlier, the better
• Any usability testing is better than none
• Usability for optimization is not a one-time activity

Alissa Ruehl, Manager of Website Effectiveness Consulting, Apogee Search

• How can I improve my conversion rate? It depends.
• You have to understand your problems before you can fix them.

Step 1: Goals

• Improving conversion rate
• Have you identified your goals?
  - Yes: Continue
  - No: Start over.
• What is the purpose of your website? (sales, leads, email signups…)
• Optimize to ALL of your goals.

Step 2: What is your traffic doing today?

E-Commerce:

• Start with purchase process (Do people abandon your shopping cart?)
• Moving on the Entry pages (Where are you sending your traffic? Homepage? Products? Categories? Test them.)
• Where do people abandon?
• Focus on your biggest problems first
• Use tactics that fits the issue (usability testing, page testing, focus groups, etc.)

Lead Generation:

• Is quality an issue? Integrate with a CRM system
• Instead of focusing only on web forms you could track past the lead and analyze & optimize towards
  - Human scrubbed leads
  - Qualified opportunities
  - Sales
• In a few years, tracking only leads will sound as silly as tracking only clicks now.
• What do people do when they enter your site?
• How’s your lead bait?
• It never hurts to focus on your forms
• How’s your call-to-action?

Conversion Strategy Summary

• Dig deep to understand & optimize to your goals
• Use your analytics to find your unique goals
• Tailor the therapy to the type of problem
• Look at level of difficulty compared to level of impact

Kimberly Krause Berg, Usability and SEO Consultant, UsabilityEffect.com/Cre8pc.com

What are your site requirements?

• Project Management
• Organizing and planning your web site
• Napkins, sticky notes, whiteboard
• Write everything down!
• Team signs off
• Test cases

Business Requirements

1. Sell products online
2. Provide information on our company
3. Provide excellent customer service
4. Be accessible to everyone

For example…

• About Us page
  - Provide bios of staff
  - Presidents message
• Blog
  - Global reach
  - Host ads
• Catalog
  - PDF version
  - Subscription
• Social Network
• Shopping Cart
  - Custom cart
  - SEO friendly
• Marketing

Functional Requirements

• Derived from use cases, mental models, user personas
• Programmers’ domain
• Determine specs for browsers, OS accessibility, bandwidth, performance, platform, mobile use, programming

Scott Brinker, President & CTO, ion interactive, Inc.

Landing page options

• Option A: Technology & psychology to “optimize” pages.
• Option B: Give them what they really want. –> “Wow. Thank you, that’s really what I was looking for.”

Searchers expect pieces to fit together:

• Intent
• Keyword
• Ad copy
• Landing page (where things tend to fall apart)

Other thoughts

• Think big, test small.
• It’s not about the number of tests, but what you’re testing?
• Find what they’re looking for and give it to them.  That’s what landing page usefulness is all about.

Questions

• Information foraging – how people interact and deal with your site
• How do you balance content vs. ad excitement to increase Quality Score? You can have a relatively small amount of content and still have a high quality score.
• Should you remove navigation so you can increase conversions? Don’t ever leave people without a choice. You could remove navigation if it’s too distracting, but still leave them with options.
• Can you change design for landing pages? You can experiment with a lot of looks and feels…people are used to micro-sites. It’s about quick, cheap tests.
• Quick tips from panelists:
  - Ask yourself what it would take to double, triple, quadruple how many landing pages you have.
  - Is your elevator pitch on your homepage/landing page?
  - Any usability testing is better than none.
  - Conversions happen when calls to action are available when people are thinking about them.

Thanks to Barry Schwartz and Keri Morgret from Search Engine Roundtable for taking the time to live blog many of the SMX West sessions!  Here are a few of my notes from Tuesday, Day 1…

Technical SEO Issues for Developers

(Archived version from SE Roundtable)

• Disallow certain forms from being crawled (like Contact Us page)
• Use Webmaster Tools
• Need both human and XML sitemaps
• Canonicalization (www vs. non-www issues) fix: stay the same throughout the site; the fix when someone links to the wrong version: redirect it
• Meta/title tags: HAVE them, CHANGE them
• Be simple.  Use static HTML, meaningful page titles, clear anchor text, don’t link to spam.
• Brevity is GOOD for URL’s, make them simple, stable, and scream COPY ME!
• Improve crawler discovery by leveraging robots.txt (use only if fully understood, validate with Google), sitemap, and metatags
• Use Yahoo Site Exploreer and Google cache to see what’s indexed
• Use easy-to-crawl and search friendly URLs, keep titles and content close to the top
• iFrames = good for gadgets, bad for homepage
• Eye tracking software results: put your BEST keywords FIRST in the title tag (people read them first, and don’t always read all the way to the right)
• Absolute URLs = BETTER

Up Close with Google Maps & Local

(Archived version from SE Roundtable)

• Google Local data from:
  1. Google Local Business Center
  2. 3rd party providers
  3. General web crawl
• Submit/verify your site at: infoUSA, Localeze, Yahoo, Best of the Web, OpenList, CityVoter, InsiderPages, SuperPages
• Search for “your city and blog” for good blogs in your area
• Factors that influence Local rankings:
  1. Proximity to city
  2. Reviews, number of reviews, positive reviews
  3. Overall SEO health of site
  4. Keyword relevancy
• Make sure your address is on your homepage, contact us page, etc.
• If you have multiple locations, submit them ALL to local sites; you still only need ONE website
• No permanent address? Use a PO Box.
• Claim listings with ALL applicable categories
• Add videos!!
• Track calls for free:
  - Pretend to start a Google AdWords account
  - Go to Audio Campaign page
  - Get free phone number
  - Track calls!
• Large companies with multiple locations: create landing pages for geographic locations
• One speaker encourages customers to follow up with work done with local reviews with Visa coupon incentives for next services
• Remember – you CAN report Google Maps spam! (They welcome it!)

(more…)

Last week we wrapped up another search project; this one for Black Point Inn, a luxury oceanfront Inn on Prouts Neck just south of Portland, in Scarborough, Maine.

This was one of the first projects where we had to deal with a Content Management System (CMS) flyte hadn’t dealt with before – called ModX.  A lot of times, optimizing for search may not bode well with the CMS.  However, as web development and search evolve, they work better and better together.

For example, WordPress, the CMS this blog is built on, has a variety of special plugins for practically everything you could think of: SEO and sitemap plugins are just two.

For BPI, ModX was different and challenging, for it involves creating templates to accommodate many of the changes needed for optimization.  As web developing changes, intuitive CMS platforms will start becoming the norm.

In the mean time, for a beautiful ocean view and a luxury stay on the coast, check out the Black Point Inn!

Nicki Hicks
Maine SEO

Flyte recently launched a website for Reduce My College Costs, which I’m happy to say has finally been fully crawled and indexed!  We worked with Marc Hill, a Certified College Planner, to both develop and optimize his site.

One of the most important things you can do, and I must pride Marc on this, is to do your SEO upfront.  It’s been my experience that optimizing a site during development will be much easier and more cost effective than “SEO’ing” it later.

For example, we are now converting many of our table-based sites onto CSS platforms (namely, WordPress).  While this particular problem is usually due to the age of a site; had SEO been performed at an earlier stage, it would have increased those sites’ search visibility earlier and saved them money (and who doesn’t want to save some dough these days?!).

Anyway – to get back on track, in this case, optimizing before launch should help Marc in the long run!  Admittedly, I wish I had known how quickly mistakes can make a difference to the price you pay for school.  If I’d only known people like Marc exist before I went to college!

So if you are in the midst of planning to send your child to college, start the process with RMCC’s free college savings tip sheet. Then, work with Marc in order to save on your son or daughter’s education expenses!

Nicki Hicks
Maine SEO

Javascript, Flash, and (God forbid) tables may look cool.  You might even get them to work the same in every browser.  Admittedly, that is half the battle – making your site appealing to people, that is.  But the other half is building a website for search engines.

One way to see exactly what the search engines see is by looking at your code (or viewing the page source).  If you can’t read HTML, then checking out Google’s cache is your next best option.

There’s a few ways to do it.  One of my apps (SEO for Firefox) gives an option to look at the cached version of the page.  Or, when making a search, you can see the option next to each result; in this case, a holiday appropriate search:

Then, when selecting “Cached”, you see exactly what Google sees.  Be sure to choose the text only version:

As you can see, Google will highlight the keyword you searched for.  This way, if pressed, you can make a decision: be it a really cool flash intro or just some great content.

Nicki Hicks
Happy Halloween!

That is the question…

First of all, what is a nofollow tag? I think the best way to wrap your mind around it is by using pictures.  Think of all of the link/SEO juice your website has being held in a bucket.  Creating links pokes holes in that bucket and passes the juice to sub-pages within your site and to external sites.  Nofollow tags essentially plugs those holes.  So while search engines can continue to follow those links and index them, they do not pass link juice to them.  This visual should help:

(Picture credit: eVisibility)

To nofollow

So, nofollows are a way to control the way link juice flows through your site.  In other words, think of those pages which don’t necessarily need to rank well on SERPs.  By controlling the flow of link juice, you can concentrate it on the important pages – and hopefully increase PageRank by doing so.

Pages typically nofollowed are those like:

• Privacy Policy
• Contact
• Search
• Shipping information/Shopping Cart pages
• Affiliates

Not to nofollow

Like every positive, there are also negatives for nofollow tags.  However, you’ll see this article is somewhat dated and talks mainly about nofollowing blog comment links (a default setting for most blogs these days, in an effort to control blog spam).

Also, SEO experts argue why should you link to someone if you’re just going to nofollow that link?  I would say that links are meant to bring added value to the user’s experience, and while the link may be helpful, you don’t want to pass along link juice.

In the end, maybe nofollows are a passing fad, then again maybe not.  Although in SEO, experimentation is often the best way to find out what works.

Nicki Hicks
Nofollow-er

I made a post when I first started blogging with an SEO Checklist for Web Developers.  I recently reviewed the list, noticing that while all those things are great to remember, sometimes it’s the simple parts of SEO we forget.

I also decided to write this post after thinking about office alignment.  Ahh, alignment, a term I grew sick of all through college (and one of my professors in particular, I’m sure, would be ecstatic to know I noticed it in the real world).  I realized that even though I work in an office of only eight people and our work constantly overlaps, we sometimes forget the effects our roles have on others’ work.

I, for example, forget that even though I have knowledge about so-called “easy” SEO best practices, not everyone I work with knows them.  So here are some major points to remember (and I apologize for any repeats from other posts):

• Use hyphens (-) NOT underscores (_).  It seems to have been handed down from the old school programming and web developing generation to tech gurus today that underscores should be used.  Don’t use them!
  Search engines see hyphens as a space (example-page is example page) and underscores as no space (example_page is examplepage).
• Keyword rich domain name.  There is debate about this – some say a domain name doesn’t matter as long as you can say it out loud and someone can easily spell it back to you (which is very true).  But I say – why not make it keyword rich while you’re at it?!  (While also remembering other domain rules: short, sweet, and memorable.)
• Title URLs intuitively.  When creating secondary and tertiary pages, make sure they make sense!  For example, NOT category2/animal12.html, BUT marsupials/kangaroo.html.
• Titles/Headers/Meta-descriptions.  These should all be keyword rich, unique, and accurate portrayals of what is on each individual page.  However, I caution you: these become difficult to create when a keyword analysis has not been done.
• Links. Links should be those important points web users will want to click on.  Links should have keyword rich anchor text, not a simple “click here”.  Also, try to use as many text-based links as you can; if images are necessary, use keyword rich alt tags.
• To have a site map or not to have a site map? I wrote in the original Web Developer’s Checklist that yes, you do need a site map.  This is another SEO conundrum.  What I’ve heard most recently is that site maps are important for large sites (retail, especially – with a ton of products).
• Directories…do I submit? Every SEO has his/her own opinion about this one too.  In my mind, you should absolutely submit a client to niche directories for their specific industries – especially a free directory.  Also, submitting to a well known directory like DMOZ never hurts either – it’s free!  I’ve heard it’s also good for new sites, especially, to buy a $299 for a Yahoo! directory listing.  Since you have to pay this fee every year, why not have the link for the first year for getting started??
• Most importantly…(drum roll, please)…design sites for web users AND search engines.  Site design and development is an art, and should be treated as one.  However, try not to get caught up in the fever that is making a website beautiful instead of the web user’s pleasure of a site being functional.

I’d like to add that SEO is most successful when done before and during a website’s existence.  Therefore, this list should really only be necessary when a site is built without optimization being done simultaneously.

Nicki Hicks
Advocate for Alignment

We’ve had a busy few weeks of finishing up SEO Projects here at flyte!  Just yesterday we finished another big project: for Maine Heart Surgical Associates.  As the Cardiac and Vascular organization just recently moved their Vascular & Vein Center to the new location in Falmouth, Maine, the marketing department wanted to optimize for that portion of their site.

So, that’s exactly what we did!  We optimized specifically for their Vascular & Vein Center – starting by cleaning up and consolidating several of the pages, as that was our biggest concern.

Then we hit the ground running with keyword research and other onpage optimization.  The second half of SEO (link building) started with Maine Heart’s intrasite linking, followed by a plan to increase backlinks.  With MHSA’s enormous untapped potential sitting in the writing hand of their surgeons, we suggested they start their own blog.  With the big move to Falmouth, however, that was nearly impossible.  But in the future, you very well may see a blog from Maine Heart!

If you have concerns about varicose veins, PAD, carotid disease, aneurysms, or venous disorders; be sure to check out Maine Heart Surgical Associates and their Vascular & Vein Center.

Nicki Hicks
I can now pronounce ‘Ambulatory Phlebectomy’