user experience

March 9, 2014 by Bill Treloar 2 Comments

Don’t Optimize for Google

On March 9, 2014 / Google, page content, user experience / 2 Comments

Huh???

Sure, Google gets twice as many searches as Yahoo and Bing combined, but you shouldn’t optimize for Google. You shouldn’t optimize for Yahoo and Bing either.

It’s the User. It’s always the User.

Identifying the right keywords and doing on-page keyword optimization is arguably the easy part. The hard part is developing a compelling UX (User Experience). In a competitive niche, that’s what separates the high flyers on Google from the also-rans.

Let’s think about that for a second. It’s always been Google’s goal to present the best sources of information for any given search. That’s why you won’t find multiple listings on the first page of results that all have the same content. They’re out there — just look at websites developed by vertical market website vendors; they often have pages with lots of information, but pages that are the same on many other websites. Google never wants to show you more than one of those: the rest are all redundant.

User Experience

But it’s more than just having unique content on your site (although that is an irreducible essential). Your site needs to be easy to use, easy for users to find what they want, full of information not easily found elsewhere … it needs a good UX. That’s always been a #1 priority for Google and in their statement of philosophy headlined “Ten things we know to be true”, three of them relate directly to UX:

Focus on the user and all else will follow.
Fast is better than slow.
You don’t need to be at your desk to need an answer.

I’ve written about all of those things in this blog before, but it wouldn’t hurt you to review some of them.

Focusing on the user is Google’s #1 value. We’ve gathered all the stuff we’ve posted on that subject in our User Experience category.

The speed issue is always a concern when we prepare optimization recommendations for our clients, and all of our posts on that subject are neatly combined into our Page Speed tag.

Recognition that people are increasingly accessing the web on their phones is inescapable. But many websites that look great on a desktop or laptop, or even on a tablet may be close to unusable on a phone. We’ve written about that, too.

What are your thoughts? Do you agree? Disagree? Let us know in the comments below.

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How does your UX stack up against your competitors? Need some help beating them out in the rankings? If so, Rank Magic can help
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November 8, 2013 by Bill Treloar Leave a Comment

Why Your Page Speed May Be Sabotaging Your Rankings

On November 8, 2013 / Google, user experience / Leave a Comment

Google announced back in 2010 that Page Speed — how quickly your web page downloads into a visitor’s browser — would be a factor in rankings. That makes sense when you consider Google’s increasing emphasis on positive user experience. If you click on a first page result in Google and the page is annoyingly slow, Google looks bad for sending you there.

Addressing page speed problems is a task for your webmaster. But knowing and caring about your page speed is your responsibility. The folks at Moz did a study a few weeks ago which showed that the “time to first bite” does, in fact, correlate with ranking position. Full time to completely download a page doesn’t seem to correlate with rankings, but the time it takes for the first byte of your page to be received by your browser does seem to correlate with rankings.

What’s interesting about this is the fact that what mostly controls the time to first byte is not your website design. That’s mostly governed by your web host and the efficiency of the web server housing your web pages.

That doesn’t mean the other measures of page download speed aren’t important. If a potential customer gets tired of waiting for everything on your page to appear and clicks away before the page is fully loaded, you’ve lost a potential customer regardless of how highly your page ranked.

What to take away from this:

Your back end web server performance can affect your rankings. If you’re using a discount web hosting service, whether their speed is worse than other web hosts is something your webmaster would have to research for you.
While time to fully download your web page may not affect rankings, it can affect overall user experience on your site and impact your conversion rate. That’s the percentage of visitors who become customers.
Bear in mind that Google has always maintained that quality content is king, so improving your page speed can’t make up for mediocre content. Page speed is only one of about 200 factors that control your rankings.

How’s your time to first byte? Let us know in comments below.

June 24, 2013 by Bill Treloar Leave a Comment

How to Fix Your Keyword Stuffed Copy

On June 24, 2013 / copywriting, keywords, page content, user experience / Leave a Comment

Is your web page uncomfortable to read?

Often less experienced SEO practitioners guide you to create copy that employs keyword stuffing. In the early days of SEO around 2001 repeating a verbatim keyword phrase several times on a web page was common. Not anymore! Now it can hurt.

Keyword stuffing is bad on many levels, and you’ll know it when you read it. That’s why it’s always a good idea to read your web pages aloud to yourself. Do they sound stupid? Are they repetitive? Is your keyword use what I call “over-redundant”? If so, your copy may read like this:

That kind of copy hurts.

It hurts your image and reputation.
It makes for a bad “user experience” on your site (and that’s a ranking factor at Google).
It increases your bounce rate (visitors who leave without reading anything else on your site.)
It sabotages your conversion rate (the % of visitors who become customers/clients)
After the Penguin algorithm updates at Google, it can sabotage your rankings.

You need to fix it. But what if the page ranks well?

This can be a real concern. If the page ranks well, will changing the copy hurt your rankings? Sure, it might. But it might also help if you do it right. Take it slow, make minor changes at first and see how your rankings respond.

How to fix it

The first thing to know is that repeating verbatim keyword phrases is not necessary. Here’s how to fix them:

Employ formatting ploys. Search engines don’t register punctuation and line breaks. If you can break up a keyword phrase by having the first word or words at the end of a sentence or paragraph and the rest of the phrase at the beginning of the next sentence or paragraph, your visitor won’t experience the sense of a repeated phrase. But it’s still there and can register with the search engines.
Use “stop words” and near-synonyms. These are words that don’t add value to a query and are mostly ignored by search engines. They usually consist of pronouns, prepositions, and articles. For example, these phrases are all essentially equivalent:
- replace air conditioner
- replace your air conditioner
- replace an air conditioner
- air conditioner replacement
Keyword phrases may not even need to be on the page. If you have a page about replacing customers’ air conditioners, it will be quite natural to use the phrase air conditioner throughout the page. It also makes sense for the words “replace”, “replacement”, “repair” and “trade-in” to occur on the page. Even if you never say “replace air conditioner” anywhere, it will be understandable to the search engines that your page is about that. Search engines have gotten much smarter over the years,

Understand that a page that ranks well but drives away potential customers is doing you no good.

Fix it. Make the copy read comfortably. Make it effective marketing copy that drives customers to buy from you. Include calls to action to help encourage the buying decision. If your page is the best it can be about its subject, search engines will want to rank it highly.

If you’re still skittish about it, make incremental changes and watch your rankings. You may well be surprised to see your rankings improve rather than drop.

Need help? Give us a call.

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July 13, 2012 by Bill Treloar Leave a Comment

10 Ways to Over-Optimize Your Website

On July 13, 2012 / SEO practices, user experience / Leave a Comment

Don't over-optimize your website. — Google’s Penguin algorithm update

Penguin against over-optimization

The recent Penguin update to the Google ranking algorithm has lots of website owners, webmasters and SEOs concerned about”over-optimization”. Some forms of overly aggressive optimization have worked in the past to gain rankings that are undeserved. That’s one of the main things the Penguin algorithm was designed to correct. And I’d be surprised if Yahoo and Bing weren’t paying attention to over-optimization as well.

What is over-optimization?

But just what constitutes over-optimization? How do you know if you’ve over-optimized your site? Hannah Howard has outlined 10 ways you may have done that in a post at LonghornLeads.com. She goes into more detail than I will here, but this may tell you pretty much all you need. Here’s the list:

Keyword stuffing — “If you’re looking for red widgets, you’ve come to the right red widget place because we’re the red widget experts. When it comes to red widgets …” You get the idea. Don’t do it.
Hidden text — This is an old technique I’m surprised to see some people still try to get away with: white text on a white background that’s just repeated keywords. It becomes visible only if you sweep your mouse over it. This will hurt you.
Over-use of backlinks — too many low value or worthless backlinks can hurt you. (Yes, you can have too many links, if they’re crappy links.) Your important link popularity is based on the number and quality of your backlinks.
Weak links — Too many reciprocal links above the fold on your content pages to help rankings of a partner or another website of yours is another red flag for the Penguin update.
Forcing what should come naturally — The practice of creating many mini-sites to feed links to your main site or creating large blog networks to drive links is one that’s become too obvious to do any good and Google will catch you.
Content that’s too keyword-driven — Content should be keyword driven to a point; you need to be aware of what keywords your visitors will be searching for. But focusing too much on that brings you close to keyword stuffing. If your text reads awkwardly because of your attempt to incorporate keywords, you’re over-optimizing.
Too much keyword-rich anchor text on inbound links — This is a relatively new one. Most people link to websites unthinkingly by making the anchor text (the clickable text in the link) simply be the name of the company or even the URL. For SEO, we hope to get keyword-rich links. But if too many of your inbound links have keywords in them, it doesn’t look natural, and is a symptom of link over-optimization. Many of those people are linking to you, not spontaneously because you have great content they want to share, but because you or someone on your behalf has asked them to. Google may de-value those links.
Doorway pages — This got some BMW and Ricoh sites completely banned from Google for more than six months a few years ago. People still try this technique, and the Penguin update will get them.
Paid ads: too many or too prominent — Yes, it’s legitimate for some kinds of websites to have some ads that generate revenue, but if you overdo it, or if the ads are irrelevant to what you’re discussing on a given page, that may earn you a Penguin update slap-down.
Duplicate content — I see this too often — a company that does, say housecleaning, creates a page for every town in their coverage area. And the content on all those pages is bound to be awfully similar. In some cases the content is identical except for the town name. Penguin will jump on that with both feet. Don’t do it.

Have you over-optimized your site?

Have you done any of these things? Most of us have, more or less, at one time or another. And over-optimizing your site is as bad as — or worse than — not optimizing it at all. Take a good, honest look at your site with these transgressions in mind and fix any you may have inadvertently committed.

Want an unbiased look at your website? Rank Magic can help.

April 25, 2012 by Bill Treloar 3 Comments

Keyword Density According to Google

On April 25, 2012 / copywriting, Google, keywords, page content, SEO practices, user experience / 3 Comments

Google’s Matt Cutts recently addressed a question about what the ideal keyword density is. He refers to the diminishing return of repeated keyword usage and the danger of keyword stuffing which can earn you an over-optimization penalty.

Matt says it best, so take a look at the video.