Search Engine Optimization

An increasing number of people have smart phones these days. Furthermore, according to mobiThinking, half a billion people accessed the mobile web worldwide in 2009. Within five years, usage is expected to double.

Although it’s possible to view regular websites on mobile devices, creating a mobile version of your website is recommended to ensure that it’s viewable on a wide range of devices and that it loads more quickly. In order to be mobile-friendly, your website must be HTML, not Flash. Additionally, it must fit the size of a smart phone screen.

Easy Navigation

The desktop version of your website probably features several links in the footer, header, and sidebar, but offering mobile users so many options isn’t recommended because they have such short attention spans. Only include links to the most important pages of your website, and make sure that the navigation bar is located at the top of your site, so visitors don’t have to scroll down to access content. Typing on a mobile device is difficult, so the idea is to make it easy for mobile users to find the most important content on your site.

Use Fewer Images and Graphics

Graphics and images are a must in web content, but on the mobile web, you should limit your use of them because they will make your website load more slowly on mobile devices. When you do use graphics and images, resize them, so they take less time to load and so that users don’t have to zoom in to see them. Furthermore, make sure they’re in .JPEG, .PNG, or .GIF format because those formats are lightweight.

Use Automatic Mobile Device Detection

Telling users that you have a mobile website and then getting them to visit the mobile version of your site can be a hassle. You can make it so that your website automatically detects mobile devices and triggers the mobile version of your site. One way to do this is through User Agent detection, which is when a server makes a decision about which website version to display based on the capabilities of the browser that the visitor is using.

Cut Down Content

Since most people who use the mobile web are on the go, consider cutting down your content into digestible chunks and providing links to the full articles for anyone who wants to read them in their entirety.

Use a Mobile Emulator

Use a mobile emulator to determine what your website will look like on different mobile browsers. Some helpful tools include the Blackberry Web Development Page, which gives you access to Blackberry simulators, and the Android SDK, which shows you what your website will look like on Android devices.

Put Your Contact Information in a Prominent Place

Many mobile users look for a business’s contact information, so make sure that your business’s phone number and address are displayed on a prominent part of your website. If you have a local business, including a map of your business’s location and directions that explain how to get there is recommended because it will make it easier for customers to find you.

Websites are becoming more complex than ever before. Many sites are packed with a wealth of information, so it can be difficult for visitors to find specifically what they seek. Installing a site search box on your website will help visitors find what they’re looking for more quickly.

Not only will internal site search improve the usability of your site, it will also help you improve your website’s conversions and sales by providing you with important marketing data. The following are 5 things you can do with the information gleaned from internal site search analytics.

1. Create New Products and Services

Have you noticed from analyzing internal site search data that many people are searching for a product or service on your site that you don’t yet offer? If so, you may want to consider offering that product or service in order to fill a need. Analyzing internal site search data is a great way to get ideas for new products/services because it allows you to determine exactly what your target audience is looking for when they visit your site.

2. Get Content Creation Ideas

You’ll never have trouble determining what to write about or what type of content to produce for your site if you pay attention to internal site search data. By seeing what topics people are searching for on your site, you can get tons of content creation ideas. From whitepapers and articles to videos and glossaries, there are many different types of content your target audience may be looking for on your site.

3. Discover New Keywords

If you’ve discovered that many people are searching for the same keyword phrases when they use your site’s internal search function, consider targeting those keywords in your search marketing campaign. By incorporating these new keywords into your search marketing campaign, you will be able to better meet your target market’s needs, widen your audience, and increase search engine traffic for keywords you hadn’t considered before.

4. Tweak Your Site Based on Performance Metrics

Track your site’s performance using internal site search and then tweak your site based on your findings. Some key performance metrics that you should keep in mind include the bounce rate of visitors who use internal site search, your site’s conversion rate, the percentage of search query refinement, and the percentage of search exits. Looking at performance metrics across multiple site visitors will give you a good idea about which areas of your site need updating or expansion.

5. Get to Know Your Target Audience More Intimately So You Can Better Serve Them

By analyzing the keyword phrases that people search for when they use the internal site search function on your site, you’ll have a better understanding of the types of people who are using your site. Getting to know your audience more intimately will help you create content that is targeted to their needs.

In sum, don’t overlook the power of internal site search. You can learn a lot more about your site visitors and what they want by tracking their activity using internal site search analytics. If you haven’t already, you can set up Google Site Search at an affordable price. To track Google Site Search through Google Analytics, follow the instructions here.

No matter how effective your SEO campaign is, your site isn’t going to rank well if its design isn’t search engine-friendly. And a flashy, attractive website that wows users isn’t going to do you much good if users can’t find it. That’s why designing your website while keeping SEO in mind is so important. If you want to build a website that is search-friendly and user-friendly, avoid these 10 web design mistakes.

1. Optimizing your website AFTER it’s been designed

If you want there to be synergy between your website’s design and SEO, be sure to optimize your site as you design it.

2. Creating a static website

Websites aren’t business cards, so don’t design a static website that will be buried in the search results. Update your website’s content on a regular basis to improve your site’s ranking. The search engines love sites that constantly publish fresh content.

3. Only using Flash

Search engine spiders cannot crawl Flash content, so be sure that your website isn’t designed only with Flash. You can create both Flash and HTML versions of your site so that the content is fully crawl-able by search engine spiders.

4. Not optimizing URL structure

While your website is being designed, plan the URL structure of each page of your site. Optimal URLs contain target keywords, don’t contain numbers, and don’t have too many parameters or levels.

5. Overusing images

Are there pages of your website that are made up entirely of images? Search engine spiders cannot crawl images, so try to keep image use to a minimum.

6. Underusing alt image tags

While you shouldn’t go overboard with images on your website, that doesn’t mean you should avoid using them altogether because they do improve your website’s user experience and appearance. Just keep in mind that search engine spiders cannot determine what an image is and index it unless you use alt tags to tell the search engines what your images are about. Alt tags should contain the target keyword so that when people search for relevant terms online, they come across your website in the results.

7. Using blocks of text

People who read content online have short attention spans and respond best to content that can be scanned easily. While including blocks of text on your website isn’t necessarily bad for SEO, it is bad for usability because it overwhelms visitors and causes them to click away from your site. If you want to encourage people to stick around, use short paragraphs and break up your content with sub-headings and bullet points.

8. Using “Click Here” anchor text

Want to rank well for the keyword, “Click here”? You probably could care less about ranking for this term, so whenever you link to an internal page of your website, be sure to use anchor text that contains the target keyword phrase and passes on some link juice.

9. Not using title tags and meta descriptions

Web designers are notorious for using title tags and meta description tags ineffectively or not using them at all. To improve your website’s on-page SEO, make sure each page has a unique title tag and meta description. Your website’s title tags and meta descriptions should contain target keywords and be written in a way that encourages people to click through when they see your site listed in the search results.

10. Using a splash page

A splash page is a page that features a banner that says something like, “Click here to enter.” Splash pages are bad for both usability and SEO because they complicate your website’s structure, don’t contain text (which is what search engine spiders are looking for), and waste your website visitors’ time.

This is by no means a complete list of web design mistakes that affect SEO, but it’s a good start. Avoid these common mistakes and you’ll be well on your way to designing a site that’s optimized for both humans and search engines.

Local Small Business Search Engine Optimization Services.

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Optimization for 10 + keywords. This usually includes SEO for phrases that target Mississauga, Toronto and specific products. Keywords may include global or general keywords, depending on your type of business. For example: “buy bmw in mississauga”, “mississauga gold ring” and others. While around 5 keywords target general local searches, rest will drive customers who are looking for a specific producta of servicea.

Optimization for 20+ keywords. Depending on your size, this SEO campaign usually encompass local Mississauga SEO, product search and global search. Contracts start at $10.000. Find out more.

Specific SEO Services we offer:

As any pro-level SEO Company we offer full suite Mississauga search engine optimization. The boundaries are not limited by Mississauga, Toronto or Ontario and can target national markets or United States markets, according to your liking.

• SEO Copywriting
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We abide by ethnics and guidelines put forth by major search engines. Please check our services to find our how can help your local business reap the benefits of the 21st marketing techniques.

The reality is that customers, especially in city areas such as Mississauga turn to search engines to find local businesses. Having local search visibility as well as global exposure will drive high amounts of targeted traffic to your website.

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We also offer SEO services to other regions: Oakville, Milton, Brampton, Toronto, Etobicoke, Markham, Richmond Hill, Vaughan ,Aurora, Newmarket, Ajax, Whitby, Oshawa, Clarington, Brock, Scugog, Uxbridge, York, North York, Black Creek Drive.

If you don’t want google to show your images you can use the meta tag meta name=”robots” content=”noimageindex”> /meta

But it can work against you if you use key words in the image. We all know that you can rank on the image search so I would suggest not using it unless necessary.

This is the issue discussed on on Search Engine Land and initiated by Matt Cutts.

“rel=nofollow” tag is used by SEOs and webmasters to block Google from following links. Matt Cutts wants to introduce the NOINDEX tag which will block an entire page from Google index.

Vote on Matt’s Blog.

The importance of strategically structuring your content to suite the web.

Website useit.com conducts eye tracking experiments which measure attention and reading patterns of participants.

One of the major key point that Jakob Nielsen states:

Most website users don’t read all your words

Visitors:

• scan the text
• pick out headlines
• highlighted words
• bulleted lists
• links

Online people read differently, you have to write differently.

3 design elements that are most effective at attracting eyeballs:

• Plain text
• Faces
• Cleavage and other “private” body parts

People do not read majority of the websites, they Scan in an “F” pattern.

Images below show visitor reading pattern of a regular webpage(courtesy of useit.com)

From the examples above we can areas of most attention are:

• Headlines
• Area beneath the headline
• Left part of the article

It is essential to get your point across in that space.

Benefit headlines, facts, informal format is key to sparkling interest in an article.

Pages must broken down into small chucks, or bullets points presented outline biggest fact/benefits.

Another set of images concludes that people scan page in “F” manner.

E- Commerce platfrom eyetracking measurement.

Search Engine Eye Tracking Measurement(Google)
First 4 results get the most attention.

About Us eye tracking F pattern

People Scan in “F” Manner

As presented in the test, people tend to scan in more or less “F” manner, throughout pages.

This is what useit.com had to say:

…In our new eyetracking study, we recorded how 232 users looked at thousands of Web pages.

• Users first read in a horizontal movement, usually across the upper part of the content area. This initial element forms the F’s top bar.
• Next, users move down the page a bit and then read across in a second horizontal movement that typically covers a shorter area than the previous movement. This additional element forms the F’s lower bar.
• Finally, users scan the content’s left side in a vertical movement. Sometimes this is a fairly slow and systematic scan that appears as a solid stripe on an eye tracking heat map. Other times users move faster, creating a spottier heatmap. This last element forms the F’s stem.

From the test conducted by useit.com we come up with the following conclusions.

…..Users first read in a horizontal movement….

As on the images above, upper part of letter F represents a headline (<H1>) area – it is the most readable part of the page. It is crucial to the well being of conversion rate to:

- Make it informal
- Relevant
- Benefit Laden
- Keyword Rich

Number of challenges arise:

From SEO perspective, keeping keyword relevancy

From marketing making it benefit spoken, getting reader intrigued to read on.

From user experience – including enough information about the rest of the content, product.

Being the first place to be read, structuring strategic headlines is essential to success of a landing page. It is also important to remember, as stated by useit.com:

Guideline #19: Don’t use clever phrases and marketing lingo.
Guideline #63: Limit font styles and other text formatting.
Guideline #91: Don’t look like an ad.

Another technique that can be useful is putting <H2> subheading right below the <H1> headline. This will:

• Give you more room to communicate the message
• Give higher chances of raising the interest
• People are more likely to read it since it is located in the most readable area
• Keyword Opportunity

…users move down the page a bit and then read across in a second horizontal movement that typically covers a shorter area than the previous movement. This additional element forms the F’s lower bar…

This area is perfectly designated for bullets, passing a message of value and highlighting the most important information about the product. Since bullets are one of the most favorable online elements, they are suited perfectly for the task. Bullets are:

• easy to read
• scanner friendly
• pass important information in short bursts

A short, 3-4 sentence opening paragraph followed by bullets will be the most effective. After the bullets it also important to state the most important information or pass the most important benefits to the prospect.

Finally, users scan the content’s left side in a vertical movement.

As the headline, subheading and opening paragraph made their impact, users will be likely to read the most unreadable areas, which represent the vertical downward movement on the letter “F”

At that point, most of the readers simply skim through the page in a couple of seconds. It is essential to: have plenty subheadings (H2), break text into blocks no longer the 2-4 sentences, as long paragraph are rarely read on the web, unless the content is extremely unique.

If a call to action needs to be in place, highlighting it with a separate “Fill out an Application” or “Apply Now” located on the left side is going to be the most effective.

It cannot be placed in the hottest reading spots, since prospects need to get a message of value first, before seeing the “apply” button.

Placing the “apply” button on the left side(down the F line) within the following paragraph, will make the prospect stop in tracks(if its notable). As he stops, it is essential to shot bullets, making sure he gets more information about the product being offered.

It is also important to bold and highlight important words and content, as it creates interest and is more likely to be read as opposed to unformatted text.

Eye Tracking Conclusion:

Internet is completely different medium. Writing for the web is nowhere close to the offline world as stated many times by many prominent people. There is no room for warm up paragraphs(unless there is a dedicated readership) or smart talk.

Getting to the point and passing the benefits in a scannable format is key to raising CTR both from organic and PPC traffic.

To find out more about eye tracking go to http://www.useit.com/eyetracking/