Web Design

SEO for your web pages

Pretty pictures and web pages full of flash may wow your website visitors, but you need to get them there first! It’s important to remember that if you want to search engines to send traffic to your website, content is always king. The old saying “a picture tells 1000 words” doesn’t apply the same way to search engine bots as it does to real life. A search engine would much rather 1000 words over a picture anyday.

If you want to rank well for a particular keyword combination in search engines, then the first step is to make sure your content contains these keywords. Ideally, each page of your website should  target a particular keyword combination.  Therefore it is important that  in it a certain amount of times (explained further down). This really helps search engines notice your website is targeting that word, as it wants to display the best results possible for the user.

In the past people used to put literally thousands of hidden words in the content for search engines to find. Nowadays your site can actually be black-listed for this, so the best way to try and have a nice website is to ensure you have good, relevant content. This is obviously a win-win for the search engine as well as the user.

The general consensus at the moment for good “Keyword Density” on each webpage is as follows:

• Minimum: 250 - 300 words
• 2 - 5% density of the targeted keyword (mention the keyword/s roughly 10 times)
• Is mentioned in the last words of the content

It must appear in quite a few other places like the webpage’s URL, H1 tag, Title Tag, etc.

apache htaccess online editor and creator

If your like me, then you probably do a lot of copying and pasting htaccess file codes from one project or site to another.
Apache server configuration directives don’t strike me as another command set I yearn to learn off by heart.

I found this fantastic .htaccess editor and creator tool the other day which does a good job of covering the main basic options.
Apache .htaccess Online Creator and Editor Tool
http://www.htaccesseditor.com/en.shtml

Thanks to whom ever sat down and wrote the thing, even the interface is nice and easy to use.

Enjoy.

A very cool and very Web 2.0 visual effect is the use of really large background images. I’m not talking about background patterns or vector images either (also very web 2.0 but we’ll leave that for another post) - I’m talking about the use of stunning visual photography as backdrops to websites.

Niecon

This is a website that we worked on in collaboration with P’s in a Pod - who produced the stunning website design showcased below. Our involvement centered around the creation of an intricate and fully customised content management system that (amongst many other things!) facilitates the setup of new pages with different background photography. If you browse through the website you’ll notice that every page has a different photographic backdrop.

Queensland Law Society - SCES

Here is another website incorporating beautiful background imagery that we worked on with P’s in a Pod. Once again, we took care of the design implementation and backend cms development, whilst P’s in a Pod supplied the lovely visuals as seen below.

The Best Job In The World

Another website with beautiful background photography I came across recently was the one put together for Queensland Tourism for ‘The Best Job In The World’ viral marketing campaign.

A highly effective way of adding valuable content to your site is to encourage your users to contribute to it in a productive manner.  This is achieved by creating an architecture of participation that interacts with your users either explicitly or implicitly to gather information.

Explicit participation is when a user actively contributes data to your site, a site that does this extremely well is Amazon.  At Amazon users can rate products, upload images and write reviews.  This has become a fantastic resource for amazon, as people who want to research a product end up on their site reading reviews, and half the battle for an e-commerce store is actually getting people to your store in the first place.

Explicitly gathering worthwhile data from your users can be quite a difficult affair as you actually have to get them to go out of their way to contribute, so it helps if you can give them some sort of incentive.  Incentives for submitting information can be anything from just having their name on a big sites web page to having some sort of ranking attached to them in the site.  The second example, having a ranking, is a very popular tool for forum sites where the respect of their peers is a very keenly sought after objective.

Implicitly adding value to your site is achieved at a programming level and involves gathering information on how your visitors are using your site and relaying this back to them in a worthwhile manner.  Using my earlier example of Amazon again, they track everyone that goes to their site and correlate this data in a multitude of ways.  The two most obvious of which are displaying products that other customers bought when they bought that item and products that customers who looked at that item eventually bought.  This information is invaluable from the point of view of a seller, as people end up buying things they didn’t even originally consider, and extremely helpful from the point of view of the buyer, as they end up with a more educated purchase.

When setting up a website with the aim of harnessing collective intelligence a few simple rules should be followed.

• Don’t force people to sign up just to have a look around, a visitor should be able to look around your site or at the very least access information pages about the purpose of your website.
• Make sure that collecting information doesn’t get in the way of what the user came to your site to do in the first place, if a user has to fill out a long list of forms or make a load of contributions before they can get some benefit then they will quickly give up and go elsewhere to fulfill their needs.
• Make the sign up process as simple as possible, when designing your sign up form keep it simple and only try and aim to gather actual relevant information, if you need to gather allot of information try and split the process up into a series of steps.
• Trust your users, people tend to do the right thing and contribute in a positive manner so don’t try and vet everything before it goes up but this doesn’t mean you shouldn’t make sure you have the power to remove anything that isn’t suitable.

If encouraged, with an intuitive interface in place, you can successfully make your site into a hub of information for your target audience.  All this information will become a  powerful asset when it comes to improving your ranking in search engines and, of course, the more useful and full of relative information your site is the more popular it will become.

End up in an inbox, not a spam box!

Before you read this Blog post, I would suggest you read our last lesson on Spam Filter Words – Words & Subject Lines that might get your email blocked. It also goes into detail’s about how spam filters work, and how to overcome these issues.

Opt In / Opt Out mailing is when someone is given an option to receive a bulk email. A bulk email is something that is sent to lots of people at the same time, which is also called a mailing list. Generally the “Opt In” to these mailing lists can be found when signing up to a forum, a “Name” and “Email” box on a website, or when downloading some great new software, etc. Obviously the “Opt Out” is the unsubscribe link on most newsletters (explained in detail later).

How Bulk Mailing Software works is it sends each email out individually. So, I guess the best example to explain what I mean is you know when you receive an email form a relative, and it is something to do with “Cute pictures of a baby seal”, or “Funny article in local paper”, and it’s been sent to their entire list of contacts? Well, that type of email doesn’t usually get filtered because you have that person added into your contacts, so it knows it’s a reliable source (even if you wish it wasn’t sometimes…). But, if you were to receive the same email from someone you have never met, it would generally be filtered straight into your spam box. This is where Bulk Mailing Software comes in to save the day.

How Bulk Mailing Systems work

First of all you need a mailinglist. This will be a list of emails you have accumulated over the years through form sign ups, Opt in systems mentioned above, when someone comes to your business, etc. Ideally, you want to make sure the people on your mailing list are interested in what you have to say or offer. One thing you want to keep to a minimum is hard and soft bounces. A hard bounce is when an email is returned because the recipients address is invalid. A soft bounce is when an email gets as far as someone’s mail server, only to be bounced back, generally because of a full inbox. If your mailing list sends too many of these bounces a number or times you may be at risk of getting onto a black list. Bulk Mailing Software will usually send up to a maximum of 3 – 5 before the email is deleted.

One thing to have on all of your emails is an “Unsubscribe” link. This is also to try and keep your customers happy. If someone wants to unsubscribe, it probably means they don’t read your emails anymore, so give them a nice straight forward option! Remember there are people who will complain to their ISP’s if they receive these emails constantly which can get you on a black list, so it’s worth your time.

What you are trying to achieve

Ideally you want your open rate, as well as click through rate to be as high as possible. Open rate is obviously how many individual people open your newsletter. The click through rate is how many people click links that are on your newsletter to re-direct them to your site, PDF’s, other websites etc. Generally the click through rate is a much better gauge to see if people are reading your newsletter, as it implies that they actually read or skimmed through the content, and were interested enough to click through on a link to read more about the topic. Remember, if you use this system to make sure your mailing list, customers have an option to unsubscribe if they wish!

So try to keep your mailing list’s to an Opt In / Opt Out type system so you know the people who have registered are interested in what you have to say, and let them unsubscribe if they desire.