Tony's Thing on the Web

In a previous article, eight essential aspects of website design optimisation for search engine visitors were examined. Although we are examining website design optimisation as separate parts one part for search engines the other part for people, during the optimization process they must both be accounted for at the same time.

This is because website design optimisation for search engines, often opposes the website design optimisation considerations for people visitors. This conflict often requires us to strike a balance between the two.

In this article we take website design optimisation one stage further and look at how web page optimization can affect a person's behaviour.

But first, have you carried out any web site optimization for people ?

Also:
Do you know which web page optimization measures produced results ?

I suspect like the majority of web site owners your answer would probably be NO for one or both of these questions. Assuming you knew what to look for it would still be difficult to remain objective about your own web site, particularly if you were involved in the design.

What is of significant benefit is the trained eye of an independent person to uncover or confirm areas of the design that would benefit from improvements.

If you would like an assessment carried out on your website we provide a number of Free web page optimization evaluations, just complete one of the forms on our site.

Determining what and how effective web page optimisation is, can only really be done through visitor tracking and measuring definable visitor actions, combined with split-testing, or segmentation and targeting.

When carrying out an evaluation we suggest the emphasis be on eight factors that influence people the most when visiting a web site.

The key behavioural influencers of people are:

1. Visual Look
Complementary colors should be chosen for the site so as to match the theme of the site with text of a color and size that makes it easy to read for people of all ages. Backgrounds or images should not be distracting and should compliment the look and theme of the web page providing additional useful information and enhancing the visitor’s perception and understanding of the site. Do not use images unless they contribute to your message.


2. Impression
The page should impart a clear impression of what you want the visitor to have, within 3 seconds of them first viewing the page. Your web page must give people a quick clear summary of what you are offering. If people can’t work this out quickly most will generally become frustrated and move to another page, or another site.


3. Easy Flow
Avoid the use of multi-column page layouts. Studies show that multi-column layouts distract visitors and cause them to deviate from what should be an easy flowing path down the page. Many studies have also shown that in general, key information or impressions you want to impart to the visitor should be across the top of the page below the header, in the top left corner and page center. Using these guidelines a layout can be designed with minimal distractions and an easy to follow flowing path to the objective of the page.


4. Page Navigation
Navigation of the page should be easy to use, links in the page should look like links – blue underlined and it should be clear what they are leading to. Make use of image alt tags and link tags as an aid to the visitors understanding of where links are going. These are requirements for good site accessibility and compliance with W3C web design standards.


5. Clarity and Value of Proposition
Visitors must be able to clearly determine what your web site is offering. If the visitor can not clearly determine what is on offer they will go elsewhere. Any proposition or offer must also have "value" in the mind of the visitor. The page must answer questions in the mind of the visitor such as, how does this benefit them, in what way is the offer of value to them and what makes your offer so special that they should buy from you.


6. The Proposition Experience
If a site provides downloadable information, purchasable products or services, or sign-ups to obtain information, products or services, then the process by which these are obtained needs to be free of distractions, obstacles and barriers and as short as possible. The anxiety and friction caused by a site’s order and fulfilment process is a significant factor in lost sales and site abandonment.

Typical deficiencies are:

• Asking for too many unnecessary personal details
• Requesting information too early in the process
• Having too many steps or pages to the fulfilment process
• Unnecessary barriers – register / create account before ordering
• Lack of visitor reassurance at key stages in the process
• Assurance measures not within the customer’s eye path
• Insufficient or lack of trust boosters during the process
• Insufficient or lack of confidence boosting measures
• Failing to reaffirm the value of the proposition

If you have a fulfilment or order process with more than 3 steps you should look closely to see what can be done to shorten the process.


7. Site Navigation
This often creates a conflict for website design optimisation as the site navigation preferred for people is frequently not the best for the search engines, since the two requirements are usually not the same.

For common links to pages throughout the site we usually advise a top or side of page navigation menu that should have a consistent location and appearance throughout the site. The only exception to this is normally the home page. Large sites can benefit from a search box and all except sites with less than 10 pages, should have a site map as a further aid to visitor navigation.


8. Download Speed
The advent of high-speed Internet has caused many web site designers to abandon mainly text web page designs and replace them with web designs high in graphics, flash movies and videos. Modern web pages have become so bloated that even for visitors with a broadband connection they are slow to access with a normal browser.

The consequence of this is that for 30-40% of Internet users without high-speed broadband such web sites are completely inaccessible or are so slow they give up.

What makes the problem far worse is that many image laden web pages are not effectively optimized. By that we mean they do not use graphic images, flash and movies that have been optimized for the smallest file size while maintaining quality.

In our experience across 100’s of site, savings of 50% or more in the download size of images are common and achievable through better optimization.

Our web design and website design optimisation enables site owners to improve functionality and increase profitability of their web sites. We also specialize in web design and research and publish free reports on web page optimization.

We also provide FREE if No-Result services, guaranteed to increase site performance and/or revenue. Visit our site to view our full range of web site optimization services or to obtain a Free evaluation or consultation on your web site.

Copyright Tony Simpson - Webpageaddons.com | Posted at 11:50 AM | web page link

It might seem obvious, but the most important visitors to a website are search engines and people and most websites usually require both.

But have you done any web site optimization for either of them ?

For a web site to be successful it needs to effectively cater to both search engines and people and that’s not easy, as both are often looking for entirely different things.

The task of designing or redesigning a web site for search engines is referred to as SEO or search engine optimization and designing a web site for people is usually just referred to as web site design. Modifying or redesigning a web site to cater to both is generally known as web site optimization.

The task of web site optimization usually includes webpage optimisation although it is possible to do web site optimisation without much or any web page optimization.

The main factors that interest a search engine are:-

Keyword usage & placement
Use no more than two main keyword phrases on a web page placed so as to emphasize the relative importance of those phrases to the search engine. It is very difficult to effectively optimize a web page for more than two key phrases. Headlines and sub-headlines that make use of h tags and bold type are still important.

Page title and description
These should be unique and contain at least one main keyword phrase. Search engines generally use these for a listing in the search results. Google uses only the first 155 characters in the description and the first 65 characters in the title. Pages with duplicate titles on the same web site are often not indexed, especially with Google. This can be a problem for shopping catalogue sites whose pages may be generated with the same titles.

Meta tags & compatibility
The only meta tag of real importance to the search engines, in particular Google, is the title tag which to be compatible with Google should be less than 65 characters. Although Google does read and analyze titles containing more than 1,100 characters, it does not display them. Google and MSN have NO specific interest in keyword meta tags, so filling them full of keywords serves no purpose. Yahoo for the time being does still take account of keyword meta tags.

Site & page coding
Search engines live to consume text and that’s their main interest. They can NOT read text in images and only Google has a limited capability to read text content in Flash movies. The page coding should be kept to a minimum and placed if possible below the main body text content. This makes the page coding more search engine friendly. Page compression that involves removing white space in the page code will also speed up access time for the search engine.

Internal linking structure & tags
The manner in which pages are linked and what pages are linked together is very important to a search engine. This generally tells a search engine how important different pages are on the site. Of prime importance is using plain text links instead of image links. This provides additional information to a search engine to enable it to determine what the topic of the page being linked to is about. Image alt tags and link title tags should also be used to convey more of the information you want to convey to the search engine.

External linking
The quality and quantity of incoming links has increased in importance, particularly with Google. Google places a high value on quality links from well established sites, particularly if those sites have human editors. Generally quality is also more important than quantity. The link text is also of high importance in ranking the page.

Page & site theme
The pages on a site have a theme determined by the page content and the links to the page. The themes of individual pages and the way they are linked together will determine the theme of the site as a whole. A consistent theme throughout a site enables a search engine to gain a clearer picture of what the site is about leading to better and more consistent rankings.

Age of domain
How long a site has existed and is currently registered for is important to Google, particularly for highly competitive search terms. Sites registered for only 1 year are generally not taken as seriously for rankings, being regarded by search engines as not likely to be around for long. Domain age is however less important to MSN or Yahoo.

Important things to avoid
The major search engines, Google, Yahoo and MSN Live DO NOT like cloaking, mini-nets of sites from the same owner excessively linked together, keyword stuffing, duplicate site content, text hidden on a web page or links from link farms.

Google especially does not like paid for links and encourages people to report sites that use them. It is therefore important to avoid all of these, or be prepared to suffer the consequences.

Search engines have penalties for infringements of their guidelines which can range from warnings, lowering of rankings, page de-indexing or in severe cases removing the entire site from the search index.

Of course there are more factors of interest to the major search engines than the ones discussed here. But, these represent the key influencers that have been established through my own years of experience and that of others in the worldwide SEO community.

In the continuing article to this one are the factors that are of most influence to people visiting a web site. These influencers include visual appearance, visitor impact, clarity and value of offer, speed and ease, page and site navigation, the offer experience and page access time. We also outline the most common failings of the offer fulfilment process.

For ‘people’ visitors to a web site the key factors of importance have a lot more to do with human psychology and perception. Hence website optimization for ‘people’ imposes a very different set of requirements on the design or redesign of a web site than those needed for a search engine.


For a Free evaluation of what search engines make of your web site
visit our web site optimization evaluation page.

We have many years of experience in webpage optimization and search engine optimization. We offer an extensive range of web site optimization services to site owners seeking to improve search engine rankings, or increases sales and profitability using existing levels of visitor traffic.


Visit our web site optimization services page for more details and Free evaluations of our services.

Tony Simpson
Making web site optimization work for you

Copyright Tony Simpson - Webpageaddons.com | Posted at 09:28 AM | web page link