Website Redesigning and Web Page Readability

Website redesigning and web page readability has been thrust upon website owners due to Google recent algorithm changes such as Panda and Penguin. Content marketing has been revived as website owners attempt to promote their websites to regain lost rankings in search engine result pages. However when optimising web pages with search engine optimisation techniques little attention has been given to web page readability in order to engage the visitor into the conversation. The principle here is simple: present it well and it will be read.

What Is Readability?

Internet users today are in a hurry and don’t read anymore. They scan web pages picking up on keyword phrases that they’re interested in. So it seems logical to emphasis keyword phrases with font size, colour and boldness all the way to the end of your page that also will improve your ranking in search engine result pages.

If you make your content difficult to read the value propositions are are devalued as the lack of legibility causes friction and anxiety in the mind of the reader that are the basic inhibitors to conversions.  Readability is a valuable asset but often dismissed part of web site designing or redesigning and SEO.

Here are my tips.

1.People Scan Web Pages

You must first understand that visitors to your website don’t read every single word. They scan the page. You have basically seven seconds to capture their attention with good captivating content that’s emphasises the keywords and keyword phrases the visitors will resonate with.
My tip is enforce good writing, structure is a manner that attracts and keep in mind the scanning effect of humans.

2. Use a Hierarchy for Fonts

One of the better ways to meet scanning behaviour is to use a font hierarchy. That means that titles of pages should have a larger font size than headings and sub headings. Emphasising titles, headings and sub heading with boldness isn’t good to get the words to stand out. Use variable font hierarchy instead and get the words notices.

3. Use Headings

Structure you page with good headings and sub headings. Visitors to your page need to see the content structure in sections. Make your subheads large enough and descriptive enough so readers can determine whether they’ll actually take the time to read that section word for word.

4. Use Sub Headings as a Visual Aid.

Subheads are also a great way to logically outline your content and to cover the various arguments thoroughly and will help you create content that communicates and engages.

5. Use Design Elements

Eye path is very important design feature when you need to attract the visitors and lead him on a pre-determined path set up by you, the website owner: you guide the visitor to convert and buy your product or service.
Visitors in the Western World read from top to bottom, left to right. This is a very important concept to remember when designing websites. Tailor the website to your audience.

Start designing your content with important features on the left side on the page as that is where your eyes focus upon first: natural instinct draws them there. Use these design elements of eye path to create engaging pages:

• size 
• motion 
• colour 
• position 
• shape 
• paths of familiarity 
• attraction 
• relevance 

6. Use Images in your Content 

The web is getting more and more visual. Take advantage of that by using images to break up the flow of your content. Not only that, but you can use images to augment the text. You can tell a story or a joke with that image or make a connection for readers that they might not have made through the text. However bear this mind: the image must be totally relevant to the content of the page. If the image is irrelevant it could damage your content.

7. Legibility Matters

 Of course you need to use a font that’s easily legible. It really doesn’t matter that much as long as its legible, easy and comfortable on the eye. 

8. Resources 

There is a useful blog post that gives you a useful insight into levels of optimisation and details useful tips on how to optimise a website. Read it I think you’ll find it helpful

About The Author 

Vincent Sandford is Search Marketing, Search Engine Optimisation and Web Marketing expert at SEO Synovation a web marketing agency with staff in UK, The Netherlands and Italy. He writes articles, blogs for websites and is a regular contributor to SEO The Essentials, MarcheRustico, Vino Marche, Wine Tasting, Online Reputation Management and Tasting Italian Wine and Wine Tasting tips.

Improving Search Engine Results

Search Engine Optimisation or SEO is an important process to improving the ranking to your website in search engine results.  Its a process that involves several levels of optimisation ranging  from keyword research, website architecture, usuability  and linking strategies to correct imagery and fresh content.  In this post I explore the options.

Improving Your Web Page Ranking

User behaviour

Studies have revealed that 90% of Internet users find websites through search engines and out of those users, 85% do not go past the first 30 results displayed. With this in mind it is easy to see why it’s important for your website to rank high in these results. Your website must be displayed within the first 3 pages of search engine results.

Search Engine result Results Pages SERP

Search Engine Results Pages, or SERP for short, are the pages you see after you type in your keyword query into the search box of a search engine. Ninety percent of internet users query search engines to find what they are looking for. The most important elements first seen by users in SERP’s are the page title, the page URL and the page description. So it makes reasonable sense to optimise those elements with keywords that are relevant to the content of the web page, are present in the page title, page description and are part of the page URL. Simple right.

Types of Listings

The Search Engines Result Pages can be broadly divided into two categories:

• Non paid organic listings sometimes called natural listings
• Paid Advertisements sometimes called Pay per Click or PPC.

Clicks on organic listings account for approximately 80% of all traffic. Organic lists are free and attract the vast majority of clicks and are the overwhelming reasons why is it important to get your site to rank naturally in the search engine result pages. Website owners need to follow a process to get their websites to rank higher.

What is SEO?

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is the process of engineering your website so it can be properly read by the search engine spiders. A useful blog post to read is on levels of web page optimisation

What are Search Engines?

Search engines are programming systems that analysis text and only text. If your webpage is full of images and no text your site will be crawled but not read and not indexed by search engine simply due to no text on the page. You need text on the page, you need to target each keyword/keyword phrase on the page. For example, if you want to target the search term “web marketing agency” you need to have one page with the title “web marketing agency”, a URL with “web marketing agency” , page description with “web marketing agency” and lots of content about ““web marketing agency” plus all the page elements (H1 – H6 headings, Alt image tags, Bolded words and Links). Website optimisation is performed by internet marketing specialising in all levels of optimisation.

What NOT to do!

However it never makes sense to call a home page “home” or have their business name on the title of every single page of website. This is great for corporate branding but useless for other purposes. The owners probably search for their business and are pleased when it comes up first in Google. This is only good for the customers that know your company name or brand which is fine for large brands like Argos or Amazon but if you’re trying to get customers from internet users you need to optimise your text for keyword or keywords phrases that internet users are searching for.

What TO do!

Other aspects of getting higher rankings for your website are trust, authority and link building. The trust you get is via good link building and from algorithms. The more links you get from already established trusted (authorities) sites the more Google will trust you. It makes sense really, because a good website will not link to a rubbish or an irrelevant website.
It is important to understand that the value of link juice transfer to your website is the page rank of the web page divided by all the inbound, internet and outbound links on the page plus yours times a damping factors .

How Link Juice is Transferred

If you get a link from a website with a Page Rank of 4, and this web page has 250 other links pointing to other websites the value of link juice transferred to your website is calculated as:

the standard weight of a page PR 4 is 625 divided by the total of links plus 1 (yours or 251) times a damping factor of 85% equals 2.117 which is added to your webpage page rank.

You can read a very useful blog that explains in detail the value of link juice transferred.

Another aspect of trust is by executing your link building strategy within accepted good practice and search engine guidelines. This means building links naturally, creating keyword rich anchor text, pointing links to relevant pages and not using keywords excessively on your page. Adding an unreasonable number of pages to your website in one day is not a natural progression. Search engines like websites to expand naturally, anything else and your website comes under the radar and possibly get penalised/banned.

Summary

So the only way to obtain high SERPs is to stay within search engines guidelines and accepted practice. This means building websites that are easy to navigate (so users and the crawlers can find every page easily) ,have lots of good relevant interesting content and plenty of trusted links. Make your website the best site on the internet in your chosen niche and you shouldn’t go far wrong.

About the Author:

Vincent Sandford of SEO Synovation is the author of numerous articles and blogs on search engine optimisation, online reputation management, web marketing, wine and real estate. He has a passion for website marketing and helping professionals, small and medium businesses grow. Learn what Vincent can do for your website by visiting SEO Synovation a web and search marketing agency.
 

How to Research Keywords

Getting traffic to your website, article or blog means choosing the roght keywords in the title and in the content. Google in July 2012 let it be known that they only "give out the most commecial keywords" when users use any of their tools.  therefor by deduction there are many more keyword permutations in the market than you realise.

How to Research Keywords

Researching keywords for your web page, article or blog is fundamental in getting traffic to your submission. Keywords have a direct influence on the type of traffic a website will receive and will determine the level of profitability. Paying attention to what people are searching for is critical to keyword research.

Fundamental Concepts on How to research Keywords

Before I delve into the nuts and bolts of how to research keywords we must consider two fundament concepts:

• how Google returns query results
• and user behaviour.

Search Engines

When users insert a query into search engines they are not actually searching the entire web. They are scanning websites, articles, blogs and other documents that search engines have found, crawled and indexed. Search engines use the users query to scan all the words they have indexed (actually referenced) using hundreds of data centres and return the best match in an authoritarian order. Search engines are re-activating to past search queries and new queries are unlikely to be included in any result. Google can only return search results powered by past queries, in other words they are reacting to past historical data.

User behaviour

Users are unpredictable in the manner in which the create search terms in queries. Studies have shown that over 80% of users will re-create a search query if they don’t find what they are looking for on the first page. If you combine this with th fact that over 55% of users use more that three terms in their search queries and that 25% of all search terms have never been used before , that is they are unique. This means there are more keyword permutations exist than any keyword is giving you.

Tip 1

If you focus on multiple but low volume search terms you may get better conversion results than focusing on high volume competitive keywords. Publish web pages, articles and blogs often as each submission is a keyword net.

Tip 2

Look deep in your analytics for keywords that have found your website and use those terms for blog titles, article titles webpage titles, webpage descriptions, and starter ideas.

Keyword Analysis

Use these 4 ideas to create your own keyword list for a specific webpage, article or blog, Put yourself in the shoes of an internet user who is looking for the solution to a problem that your document may provide. Think about:

Use 3 or more terms in your query ( long tail keywords) - single keywords tend to be generic and thus don’t convert into sales. They are also very competitive as companies and marketers with large budgets bid very highly for them. Long tail keywords are therefore more specific and have less competition which means that they are cheaper and convert better.

Use appropriate terms in your keyword query for your niche market - It is useful to use keywords that best describe the product or service being marketed. Avoid gargon oor industry terms that are not widely known. Use location in the keyword like – toy shop in Long Island – as will target a précised local niche market for toys.

Use popular keywords as starter ideas - Using popular terms is one of the most important pointers of how to research keywords. You have to find out what terms people are using to find the kind of product or service you are marketing. You can use free tools like

• Word Tracker

• Google keyword research tool

• Google trends

• Google Insights

Use each of these keyword research tools with the same keyword phrase and dump the results into a spreadsheet, eliminate duplicates phrases, and then calculate the keyword efficiency index (KEI) . Perform  SEO the page .
Use low competitive terms - After finding popular, specialized and long tail keywords, you should drop those that are highly competitive and focus on low competitive and low volume keywords.

This post was brought to you by SEO Synovation a web marketing company.  To learn more on what they can do for you visist their website.

Deliverables of Online Reputation Management?

Managing your reputation online is critical to business.  It takes many good deeds to build your reputation and only a slight indiscretion to destroy it. The services of SEO Synovation are typically geared for all types of businesses from the self employed one man operation to the multi-national company with packages to suite all budgets.  Read here the deliverables of an Online Reputation Management Project.

What are the deliverables of Online Reputation Management?

 Wikipedia describes online reputation management as:

“Reputation management is the practice of monitoring the reputation of an individual or brand, addressing contents which are damaging to it, and using customer feedback to gain insight or get early warning signals to reputation problems. Most of reputation management is focused on pushing down negative search results. Reputation management may attempt to bridge the gap between how a company perceives itself and how others view it.”

SEO Synovation helps clients identify the keywords or keyword phrases that are returning negative comments to search engine result pages. We freeze the search engine results at a date in order to focus our attention on the results to hide.

Requirements from Clients

To initiate and complete the project successfully SEO Synovation experts need the following data:
Keyword List - Keyword or keyword phrases that highlight negative comments
Company List - Company or organisation of related companies that may be affected by negative comments
Organisation Chart - List of all members, officers and employees of the company or organisation
Website List - Up to date of all websites related to the company or organisation that may or may not be affected by negative comment
Social Media List - Update to date list of social media profiles across all proforms
Content Marketing List - List of press releases or articles publish on the web
Directory List - List of directories carrying the company or organisations name.

Typical Online Reputation Timetable

Our Experience in Online Reputation

SEO Synovation experience in SEO, search engine optimisation, search engine marketing, Social Media, experts and Pay Per Click (PPC SEM) campaigns experts, creators of websites and defenders of reputations online, in five European countries (Italy, England, Holland, France and Germany make us a truly full service agency.

Usual project Objectives are to hide/push down (only method used) negative comments on the major search engines (Google, YouTube, Bing, Yahoo)for the determined keword or keyword phrases.

What Do You Get? Our Deliverables

Seo Synovation will deliver the following:

• Analysis of results in search engine result pages for the chosen keywords.
• Produce a detailed analysis of your situation and a strategy to overcme it. This is a document handout handed to the client for euro 750 plus tax
• Monitoring the results of search engines weekly basis, for each keyword phrase and search engine.
• Optimise existing websites and create other websites to rank above offending websites carrying negatives.
• Creation of blogs, Press Releases and Article to promote positive comments to rank above negative ranking comments.
• Engage in blogging, link building and video marketing to promote brand, company and products

Reputation Management Costs

Each project is unique and deserves the proper, full and expert analysis. It is important to tailor the costs to the gravity, extent and importance of the negativity. Our services are at three levels and costs vary.

1. We will submit a Strategic and Tactical Analysis.
2. We will execute the Strategic and Tactical Analysis.
3. We will maintain your online reputation in positive terms.

Our Reputation Management Approach

 Keyword rich organic seo development - As part of the project SEO Synovation will create relevant keyword rich websites, for example as:

www.yourcompanyname.com  or dot NL, DE, IT etc or whichever domain name can be applied
www.yourcompanyname.net
www.yourcompanyname.org
www.yourcompanynameblog.com
www.yourcompanynamenews.com
www.yourcompanynamereviews.com

Create 100% Original Content for All your keyword rich sites for improved ranking

 Seosynovation.com copywriters will create relevant content about your company and industry and then optimize your content to create relevancy and linking schemes for the best performance.

Seosynovation.com will deliver your newly created original content writing daily, weekly or monthly to your websites or blogs, depending on the package you select! Google loves new content so the more the better!

Press Release Distribution - Press Release Syndication
Seosynovation.com will use PR Powerblast press release distribution to keep your brand in the news all the time! There are many high ranking news sites and we make it easy for you to get exposure on all the top PR networks that can help with your reputation management program.

Online Reputation Management through social network marketing
Social networking sites especially the highly popular Facebook and the so-called micro-blogging platform Twitter form a significant part in a typical online reputation management plan. Both small and medium scale enterprises and large multinational companies are now reaping the benefits of effective social networking.

Link Building - Link Baiting - Directory Submissions - Local Profile Placements

Online reputation management can also be done through gathering feedback directly to consumers, suppliers, clients and even employees. Some of the best tools in gathering feedback include online survey forms, live web conferences and email contact forms.

Proactive Reviews Development

Improve Your Star Ratings on Google Places, Citysearch, Superpages, Yellowpages, Local Yahoo and many more! Building buyer confidence for your products and services are directly related to a health online reputation management program. We also provide Reviews Monitoring so you can know what consumers are saying about you or your company.

For further information contact SEO Synovation the Web Marketing and Online Reputation Management Company.

Google Adwords

Google Adwords is a pay per click product  or PPC. Its a useful product to attract visitors to a new website to gain authority and recognition.  It should form a part of your content strategy to drive visitors to specific landing pages that are relevant to the ad and specific to ONE product offering and ONE call to action.  this post is concerned about the most basic set up features of a Google Campaign.

Succees of Google Adwords

As the years have gone by Google Adwords has continued to advance itself and become one of the most powerful online advertising solutions available to marketing professionals. Recently added features have made it easier to reach your targeted audience and measure your performance than ever before. With the growth and advancement has come an advertising platform that has grown in complexity and evolved considerably from what it once was.

Complex Settings of Adwords Campaigns

In the past, developing and managing a PPC campaign simply meant selecting a set of keywords that were relevant to the product or service you were offering, writing a few short text ads, and plugging in your domain name. Unfortunately, as the platform has grown and developed; many advertisers have failed to learn exactly how to successfully manage a campaign to produce the maximum number of conversions at a minimal cost.

Basic Settings of a Campaign

Here, I am going to share a few tips developed over ten years of working with Adwords on a daily basis. These are strategies you can put into place in your campaign today to start seeing more traffic and better conversion numbers right away.

Quality Score

Once you have set up your ad groups with the proper structure, your next biggest area of focus should be quality score. Quality score is a number assigned by Google to each individual keyword in your campaign and it plays a critical role in determining exactly how much you pay for each click. Since internet marketing is very much a numbers game, you want to make sure that each of your keywords has the highest possible quality score so you can ensure that you are getting the best possible price for each click you purchase. I have found that quality score seems to have two major components that you will need to address:

1. Relevancy

You must make sure that the keywords you select are highly relevant to the content found on the landing page. If you are bidding on the keyword phrase "best purple widgets", you will want to make sure that your landing page contains some prominently placed discussion about "purple widgets" and why you believe yours is the best. Here you could include awards your widget has won, customer reviews, testimonials, etc. Keep in mind that in addition to having a landing page that is relevant to your keywords, your ad text must also give an accurate picture of what a user will find when they get to your page.

2. Technical Quality

This should be the easiest part of attaining a high quality score yet I see marketers and webmasters choose to ignore it every day. In order to achieve a great quality score, you MUST ensure that your website adheres to the most current Google Webmaster Guidelines! This is not optional and if you choose to advertise with Google, your website needs to meet each and every one of their published guidelines. Failure to do so will cost you a lot of money and may result in your ad delivery rate being slowed or stopped entirely.

CTR

The Click to Impression Ratio in your campaign acts as a barometer of how your target audience is responding to your ad. Google makes more money when a higher percentage of searchers for a given query click on an ad, therefore they will give much more display time to ads with a higher CTR. In addition to generating a larger share of the available ad impressions, running with a high CTR will help increase your quality score and improve the chances that your ad will lead to a conversion. You want to shoot for a minimum CTR of 5% on higher volume keyword phrases and at least 10% CTR on long tail highly targeted terms. Keep in mind though that those numbers are generalizations and the true number you need to hit for any given search query is any number higher than your next closest competitor for that same term.

Campaign Structure

Campaign structure is mission critical to running a profitable Google Adwords campaign yet it still remains an afterthought with most online marketing professionals. Setting up you campaigns with the proper structure allows you to do several things:

1. Tap into successful content network placements without incurring wasted clicks.

2. Maximize quality score and drive down your CPC (Cost Per Click).

3. Maximize your CTR for greater impression share.

Summary Basic Points
When structuring your campaign, you should group your keywords into tightly focused groups that all fit a theme. Each of these groups of keywords with eventually become an ad group. In is important to limit the number of keywords in each group so you can zero in on exactly what's working and what isn't. One of the biggest mistakes I see advertisers make is to throw hundreds of keywords into an adgroup thinking it will lead to more traffic.

Google has a feature in their system to determine exactly which of your keywords will show and when so it's best to keep your ad groups fairly small. 5 to 15 keywords in each group should be your target number. Having more than that can be lead to some serious challenges. The biggest one being that you may have one or two keywords triggering very profitable placements on the content network running side by side with unproductive placements and it becomes very difficult to determine which ones are helping you and which ones may be hurting you.

Want To Learn More?

Then visit my web marketing website promoting Google Adwords

Video SEO

VIDEO SEO

Paying attention to search engine optimisation principles can greatly benefit the performance of your video.  This post is concerned with providing you with a basic understanding of Video SEO.

The Video Strategy 

Video content should be part of your website promotion strategy as people really like it and it can be easier to rank video content for competitive keywords than ‘normal’ content when video results are incorporated into the search engine results pages. If you’re not using video content, you will be behind the curve.

 

I’ll shared with you a few tips:

 

• Allowing comments on your YouTube videos as it helps improve rankings

 

• Make sure your videos have captions as this improves users experience and understanding

 

• Include keywords in your file name

 

Don’t Host Your Videos only YouTube.

YouTube is a good source of getting views for your videos as it is the second largest search engine, but it isn’t always the best place to host your videos. If the keywords you are targeting cause video results to turn up in the search results, then you should not host the video on YouTube, rather, host it on your own site.

 

An additional consideration is that YouTube views rarely turn into website traffic. If your main goal is to drive more traffic to your website, you should host the video on your own site.

 

If you want the video on your site instead of YouTube, you don’t have to host yourself. There are many video hosting services out there that will not only let you embed the video (as YouTube does), but they go further and provide you with a video XML sitemap, attributing ownership of the video to your site.

 

Video XML Sitemaps

If you want the video on your site rather than YouTube, create a video XML sitemap and submit it in Google Webmaster Tools. This will help Google to discover this content (but it won’t impact your rankings). If you use a service like Wistia, they will generate a video XML sitemap for you that you can submit.

 

If you want to make your own, here are some things to keep in mind.

 

There are five basic requirements for a video XML sitemap – you must provide the following for every video:

 

• Title
• Description
• URL of the play page – the page you want to show up in search results
• URL for the thumbnail you want associated with the video
• URL for the raw file location or the URL for the player location

 If you are putting the video on YouTube or Vimeo, you will have to use the URL for the player location rather than the URL of the raw file location. Further, if you are putting your video on YouTube or Vimeo, you should still provide a video sitemap as this will provide more meta data for the video.

 

Additionally, keep in mind that an XML sitemap can only have 50,000 entries.

 

Keyword Research

 Though it seems really basic to state the value in keyword research, it is frequently a process that is overlooked for video content. If you are planning on hosting the video on YouTube, look at these tools:

 

YouTube Keyword Tool

Sometimes you can get some good data from this YouTube Keyword tool, but it can also provide you with a frustrating experience as it is not always complete for your chosen. Once you have determined your keywords, make sure to use them in the:

 Video Title

1. Video Title
2. File Name
3. Video description
4. Closed caption/transcript file
5. Comments
6. Surrounding text (if the video is hosted on your site)

 Transcribe Your Videos

 As Google can’t determine the content of a video like they can do for a blog post, Google won’t really know the content of the video unless you tell them exactly what’s in it. The solution is to transcribe your videos and put the content below the video.

 

Export Your Video in HD

 Videos that are exported in HD tend to perform better than those that aren’t. YouTube won’t know the difference between a video that is filmed in HD and one that is filmed in SD and simply exported in HD. That in mind, it is really important to make sure it can scale from 1920 x 1080 down to the actual player size.

 

There could be a lot of factors playing into this but as a best practice, you will want to film (or export) in the highest quality possible. This is true for both videos that you put on YouTube and host yourself.

 

Summary

 Video marketing should be part of your content strategy like the pages on your website. Google provides video entries are part of their search engines result pages for chosen keywords but YouTube does not list Google entries – only YouTube videos and presentations are listed on YouTube. This is a huge marketing advantage. Follow the tips in the post and you will be listed on the first pages on Google for your keyword.  To learn more go to our website on video marketing.