There has always been a lot of talk about whether site structure is a ranking factor, and if so, how do you properly set up the structure of a site in order to send the right signals to the search engine?
Well, if you are familiar with the term silo it will play in to this. Basically what you are doing when you layout a site is silo information so that all of the like content and information lives in one focused area of your website.
So here is another way to think of making silos in your website, and honestly the way I have always thought of this is as mini websites within the website. So let’s say we are selling widgets, so the focus of our website is on widgets. Let’s also say we have widgets made from steel, plastic, rubber or wood.
Okay, so lets look at different types of content based on the fact that we are going to silo our site. I like to think of things in terms of topics pages, which in my way of looking at things are mini homepages for that section and articles which I would consider supporting content on the subject.
So if we were going to layout our site based on the widget model we talked about, we would have:
The main Homepage, and then we would have a topic page for each material – steel, plastic, rubber or wood. They would then in turn have supporting articles under each one of those topics.
So doing this will lay out the site structure in a way where every little section will have all the like-content contained within it, and then the content in that section will need to link back to the other content in that area.
As an example, this is what the steel section would look like.
Topic Page: Steel Widgets
Articles to support Steel Widgets:
How steel widgets are made.
Why choose a steel widget?
Why choose a steel widget versus a plastic one?
So here you would now have a topics page and 3 pages that are supporting it. So you would have Steel Widgets as the main topics page which you would link in to your main navigation to give it importance, and the three articles would link to each other for support and also link to the topics page, giving it supporting content.
My main navigation for the site would look like:
Home | Steel |Plastic | Rubber | Wood | About Us | Contact Us
Each of the other sections would be laid out just like the steel section. This type of site structure will support your main content that is important for the search engines spiders to pick up, as well as sending the right signals with the content and the focused sections.
One of the best things to do this sort of thing, especially if you have a large site, is to use a mind map tool that will let you flow it out in detail before you ever build the site.
In closing, I will also caution anyone that is having a site built by a developer and then after the fact involving a SEO expert, you are likely going to have to trash your site and start over. Many developers will build a site exactly the way you want it and not worry one bit about your site actually ranking. That is not their job, and most of them lack the know-how to achieve SEO for a site, so they will build it and then when it’s time to get traffic to it you will be faced with having to scratch the site, or at best spend more money to get it right. So I will say the best course of action is to get your marketing and SEO team involved from the ground floor, that way when you are building the site all the necessary components are in place and resources are not wasted.
In class on Wednesday night, I started asking my students how they handled social media. Its always interesting to me to hear what people perceive they should be doing. Those of you that know me personally know when I teach about SEO in Houston, I often talk about not putting up hanging cats, old lady meme’s, or complaining about your job or thanking God it’s Friday. Today I was hit with people posting happy Friday the 13th. For my purposes, that is not the right path in moving forward.
So what is good? Once nice lady in the back stuck her hand up and outlined a great plan. Her plan was to go read stuff on education, which was her business, and post those article to her Facebook wall. And although there are some of you social media managers that will say “Yeah, what’s wrong with that?” I told her its not how I would do it.
Now I’m often accused of making it seem easy. And I admit that being an editor in a former life, when there was things called newspapers, it helps, but I play a game with students to see how many content ideas I can give them about their business in 30 seconds. Its fun and they are shocked.
So here are a few tips and strategies when you have writers block:
#1 Read Your Email
Every day we sit and answer emails. Sometimes it’s as simple as the word done. And other times its a long, complex answer. In both cases, each email you reply to should be evaluated to see if you can use it for a blog post or a page on your website. If I find the question is complex, I make sure when I answer my customer or vendor, that answer can be reconstituted or repurposed to our website in a way that makes sense. Every business that answers a customer has an endless supply of content ideas.
#2 Read Industry Articles
My mom always said I wasn’t good at sharing as a kid. So the lady in the back of my class that said she shares interesting articles she finds, after I told her it’s not the way I would have handled it, I went on to explain how I would. Everything you read you have an opinion on. I know everything I read I have an opinion on. Sometimes I agree, and most times I find the bone of contention to the article. It’s a variation of my 81 year old father arguing with the talking heads on the TV, just in writing. I admit that when I don’t agree, it’s much easier to write the article. But even when I find articles or people I agree with, I write a page on that too.
#3 Understand Who Your Customer Is
I know my customer and I know what they need from my company. So I often come up with topics that will help them. It may be their pain points. For example I have several hundred people still using FrontPage, so I put up a page that talks about what we recommend as FrontPage Alternatives. Regardless of whether it’s something at my web hosting company that I can control, or just something that I know is out there that I can help them with, I use our blog as a profile for that. Most business owners do try to stay ahead of their customers, so just remember to sit down and write it out.
#4 Keep a List
Sounds so simple, doesn’t it? But I can’t tell you how many folks I say that to, and you might have thought I said something like Aliens landed in New Jersey to them. Yup, keep a note pad, a note pad app, use the notes on your iPhone, write on your bathroom mirror with lipstick (yup, true story from a customer). Store your ideas, so when the rainy day comes, you have a backlog to pull from.
#5 Call Me
No not really, but I have people call me all the time to come up with a new content idea. If you get stuck, add a comment to this post and i’ll get you an idea. Or email me and I’ll get you an idea. Now if your question is on nuclear psychics, I don’t know much about it other than the top 10 Sheldon Cooper string theory experiements, but if you sell commercial doors…
Although web designer and web developer are often used interchangeable, they couldn’t be more different than an apple and a banana. Sure, both involved setting up a website but that is where the similarities stop. Web Designers are more artistic and graphical, where web developers are the programmers that make the web work.
Initially everyone who could operate a website, was a web designer. Heck our company name started as Acreative Touch Web Design (ACTWD). There were easy to use software like FrontPage or you could simply write a little HTML code and that was that. But as time has gone on and the internet is more sophisticated, these rudimentary methods have transformed themselves in one of two ways.
The web designer has become a graphic artists, and is exactly what the name implies. They are involved in the pretty. They help develop the brand and feed the development group to make sure that the website has a wow factor to it.
The other type of web designer is someone with a computer that knows how to use Dreamweaver or can manipulate WordPress to some degree and build a website. Those people are also called web designers. They are often cheaper and normally work with small business owners setting up a website, For someone looking for a brochure website, these type web designers are okay. But for someone who wants effective vehicle to market their business they probably need to make a different decision.
Really option one is the first step in having a website built. But sadly most small business and inexperienced business owners pick option two not understanding the scope of the job. Then they bemoan the quality, functionally or effectiveness of their website. We work with a lot of web designers though our web hosting company and we appreciate the job they do. For the most part, their customers only need the brochure type website with no expectation for the website to rank.
So what exactly is a web developer?
This is what most businesses actually need. Sure it costs more but these folks write the code that makes the web run. Every time you place an order on Amazon or push the link button on FaceBook, a web developer wrote that. These folks should not be confused with a computer programmer, that’s Bill Gates or maybe Linus Torvalds. Web Developers program websites. They set up the technical interactions that a website needs to interact with Google properly. They understand that you don’t just take down all the pages on an existing website. Moreover those pages need to be redirected.
Web designers and web developers are two different jobs but they should work together. When planning a website its always advisable t first work with a designer to get the blueprint for the developer. Then move to a developer. It is common for larger firms to have both of these disciplines in house but it is incumbent on the business owner to find out if that is the case by asking the questions.
Few Guidelines to help choose designer vs. developer
These are questions we would recommend asking to determine which path to take:
Do you want a brochure/business card on the internet? A place to send people if they ask (designer)
Do you want a shopping card or a way for clients to interact with you on the internet? (developer)
Do you want a marketing campaign including SEO, SEM with lead tracking? (developer)
Do you want a shopping cart? (most cases developer)
Do you have any custom requirement for you business website? (developer)
Do you need graphics created? Do you have a Brand (designer)
How long have you been in business?
Who is your biggest client?
How many sites do you simultaneously work on?
These few basic questions should start to help clarify the picture what the scope of the job is and who to hire. But most of all this should highlight the fact that there is a world of difference between a web designer and a web developer.
So we met a web designer that says image size doesn’t matter anymore in terms of SEO. Interesting thought. Well let’s look at that idea some and then we can see what the reality of that statement might be.
When we are talking about SEO let’s keep in mind the majority of our focus is on Google these days and it’s most likely going to continue to be since they deliver the majority of traffic and control the biggest market share when it comes to search engine traffic.
So ask yourself this, If Google does not care about how big your images are why do they have a Google site speed tool that concerns itself with how fast a site loads? You can see how this tool function for yourself by following this link https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/ . This tool is designed to give you insight in to what you can do to speed up your site. So it would make sense that large images that slow down a site might not be the best idea. Load time has been a ranking variable and continues to be one.
Here is a little screen cap of what this Google tool has to say about the home page of southwest airlines.
As you can see there is a whole section dedicated to optimizing images and the tool will even tell you the savings you will get by downloading the file that it produces for you which you can take and upload to your site to help speed things up.
So just based on this data alone I would venture to say it’s pretty safe to say that Google cares about the size of your images.
So why would they care you ask?
Well large bloated images slow down a site’s load time which when it comes to crawling the site slows down the spiders which is bad for search engine spiders and uses more of their resources then necessary.
Google is foremost concerned about their customers and the experience they will have when they use the search engine and follow a search result. What does that mean to anyone trying to rank in the organic Serp’s? Well it means that if you do not conform to providing the user experience that Google wants their customers to have you will get pushed out of prominent search results.
User experience has become a ranking variable and if your site experiences an excessive amount of bounces because let’s say your site images do not load fast enough and people click thru to the site and then leave because its taking too long to load you will be impacted.
Therefore, if the spider comes thru and sees excessively large images likely you will not ever get top rankings because Google will try and provide the best user experience possible and since they know people do not wait around for sites that load slow you will likely be dinged from the very beginning and never rank just to avoid a bad user experience. Let’s say you do get some rankings, be prepared to lose them once your bounce rate goes up because of excessive load times.
The struggle to offer quality images as well as good load time has been a real dilemma for about as long as the internet has been around. It’s especially difficult when we are talking about product images. Everyone knows users want to see good quality detailed images of products they are going to buy.
So how do we achieve the best of both worlds then?
Well the answer is use compression software
Get a web developer or a plugin that can help compress larger images
Reduce your image sizes by optimizing them before they go on the web using an image tool.
Isolate larger images to product pages and use thumbnails on pages and click thru to a larger image to reduce the initial load time of a page. Once someone clicks on a larger image they expect to wait a bit to get the detail they want.
Us the images the compressed images Google gives you.
Just remember the biggest part of all of this is user experience. If the user does not have a good experience using your site those signals will come thru to Google and good rankings may soon be lost.
So use your own best judgement and think about the logic of why larger images are not the way you want to go unless they can be isolated.
Also keep in mind that not everyone even in America has access to a high speed connection and therefore what maybe just a short 5 second delay could be as long as 20 to 30 seconds to someone else and as we all know the attention span on the web is not very long.
I attended an internet conference this last week and the question came up Is SEO dead? Now every few year Google comes out with a new penalty named after some zoo animal and everyone starts howling SEO is dead. And not that there have been any new animals added to the Google Zoo lately, but SEO does continue to change and evolve.
So let me say this. SEO is not dead nor will it be for many years to come. But, if you run your website only based on chasing what Google wants without any understand or investment to a long term marketing strategy, it would be easy to see how one could infer that a death had occurred. And if you run a website without any consideration of your end user SEO is dead to you. SEO is no longer just one thing, which is the common misconception. The problem is anyone caught sitting on the one-legged stool will fall over.
There are many less experienced marketers that boil the problem down to SEO vs. SEM or is it simply the days of SEO are over? I don’t believe either of those two statements are true, rather, I would rather say that how through evolution, SEM supports the Brand and to have organic rankings, you must have a brand. Both are completely integrated into each other and really 2 sides of the same coin on some levels.
The natural inclination is to pit SEO against SEM But all of this now is integrated along with social media. Where is the user in the sales funnel? Most purchases start out as informational search and that is a far different part of the funnel than the actual conversion. It is a whole separate blog topic really but for now, it’s not an either or conversation. The better question is where is the end user in the sales process vs. how to create brand awareness in the information search with the SEO and the SEM working in tandem.
Now, I will readily admit that SEO has changed since the very first website that I put up in 1998. It was pretty easy back in those days. A sprinkle of keywords here, a dash of title tags there add in an Exact Match Domain and you had a #1 ranking website in about 6 days. Yup that type of SEO is dead for sure. Heck most of the engines from those days are dead also, or like Yahoo on life support. These practices needed to die honestly and should have been killed off years ago.
Ever since Google entered the search scene, every step along the way has been geared towards this one concept. How do you service the end-user? Links were the life-blood of Google until they got co-oped forcing Google to raise the bar. Now fast-forward. Engagement, click through rates, social media all starting with really great content that benefits the end-user. And companies need to act like companies. Press Releases, community involvement are all things normal businesses do. And it’s seems to me that SEO has morphed into a labor intensive juggernaut called digital marketing.
Does that mean SEO is dead? No, not at all. It’s just means it has evolved. It’s more complicated and there is a real expense attached to it. What it means is you really have to know what you’re doing to get results. So as I have been saying for about the last 18 months…SEO is dead. Long live SEO!
I’m sitting at my desk answering emails, starting to write a press release for a client and here comes a Linkedin update, CRO vs. SEO. So my first thought was CRO? So I clicked on it and sure enough the first comment was “great another acronym.” So it wasn’t just me that had a WTH moment. (Note: effective use of an acronym, where you don’t need an urban dictionary to figure out what the person is trying to say).
So I started into this article that had the premise of you should be paying attention to CRO, conversion rate optimization for the rest of us, vs. SEO. /insert sound of tires screeching to a halt here.
Really, why would anyone ever write an article that pits the two of these things against each other? What is the point of SEO if not to create a conversion? Well, I read the article over and I wish there was not only a dislike button but a BS button. The article was trying to say these were two separate disciplines, which some can argue they are. But that you should look at the ROI (yet another acronym) independently and which gains you more.
Now I get that conversion management is something that is talked a lot about by PPC SEM types (keeping the acronyms going). But a good SEO type should also be concerned with connversion. What are you serving the user when they land on your page? And how do you take that informational page that often falls in another part of the funnel and acutally monetize the page? But yeah, that is not what this article was about. It wasn’t even about SEM vs. SEO.
Everything I read these days is trying to make the case that SEO lives in solitary confinement. I think that’s a very old-school view of things. SEO is labor intensive across multiple disciplines. PPC is different, labor intensive, but usually its one guy running the whole thing. The statement that I’ll put traffic at your door but its up to you to make them buy is so 2002. CRO is only one more thing an SEO firm needs to be concerned with. If the site ranks but can’t convert, there is a huge issue there. Users are getting smarter, and if the page doesn’t address the needs of the user, almost immediately the user has bounced back to Google, hopped over to Amazon, or sprinted to a niche site that better aligns with what they want.
SEO and CRO are soulmates. Every click you get on great content must have a plan for conversion. Every page you put up must have a targeted audience in mind. Take me for a minute. I write my blog with several purposes. First and foremost it is to provide information on everything web site related in hopes that someone may see the article, become educated, and not make huge dollar mistakes by hiring the wrong person. I am convinced that there are very few people that know how to do this all correcly. And I’m even more convinced that we are one of a few that will deal with smaller business, and actually know what we are doing. So I guess you could say my blog helps me demonstrate our 20+ years of experience. And third, my blog is so that I can gain social engagement, so that it helps my SEO business. As time passes our phone rings more and more with people asking if we can help them solve their problems. A ringing phone is also known as a conversion.
There must be a balance on a website, and everything you do should’t be done just to chase Google (which is what SEO implies), more over it should be for your end user. Ah, you say that is CRO. No, it’s just good SEO, and now Google is looking at all of those things and has raised the bar yet again.
Facebook visibility is becoming quite the problem for small business and their ability to reach their community. And I get asked this question more and more in either class, or in our support box.
So this question came from my long time class attendee and client who is part of a reggae band here in Houston. They put a gig up on their Facebook page and virtually no one saw it. It’s a common problem since Facebook changed how it aggregated the scroll last year.
For these folks, as well as most of our small business clients that don’t yet truly understand how social media should be run, his scroll is typical. Posts are very few and far between. So what happens is there is zero level of engagement on the post. So they won’t show that to the 2000 subscribers.
But these guys have it easy. They are a band. They play events and there is a musical event of the week these days. Jazzfest is ending in NOLA should have had a post. Prince passed away (sadly), should have posted about it. Beyonce had a new release, should of posted about it. It’s all about building the community. And I think that’s the issue I see and the mistake that most small business owners make.
A simple post that says tell us your thoughts or memory on Prince’s passing. Springsteen on a world tour got more Facebook time by doing a Purple Rain tribute. So why not a viral video of these guys doing a Prince cover? These are all thoughts that folks should have when they think about their social engagement and how they are going to reach out and interact with the clients, customers, or in this case the fans.
The secret to this is to build engagement with followers. Give them things to click on. You may need to pay to boost the post and do it @ $5 if you have to, but the secret to success is interaction. If I give people a reason to interact with me, they will, and my audience reach will grow. You may not reach all 2900 followers, but it’s sure better than two.
If anyone has a follow up question, please post it below and I’ll be happy to answer it.
I got a tweet from my friend Tom, who is also an anchor here in Houston, about the Nest/Revolv problem that will present itself today. And although I don’t know someone in this exact situation, there is such familiarity with this situation. Even the players are the same for the most part. And why do I as a digital marketing company even have an opinion on a thermostat/home automation company? Fascinating topic really.
For those of you that have heard me speak, one of our biggest hot buttons is warning :::cough::: I meant to say educating, students on the evils of using third party systems to run their websites. And although Revolv is not a web platform, the problem that results is the same.
The nutshell issue is that Alphabet, you know them as Google, bought Nest in 2014 and they have made a BUSINESS decision and will effectively disable a product that consumers purchased with a promise of a lifetime subscription. I stress the business decision, because this is the fundamental problem I see. Companies start up a certain way, and then when they are sold, business decisions are made that may not reflect the original promise of the company.
Often when I teach my SEO Digital Marketing classes here in Houston, I meet people who tell me how great SquareSpace, Shopify, WeeblyWixWeb (sic) are. They all want to tell me how easy they work. Or how they can drag and drop, and it’s all most cool. Millennial students are the most mesmerized by all of this. I always ask them that if Shopify decides tomorrow that they want to become a retail energy provider that sells electricity and get out of the e-commerce business, where would that leave your business? Most dismiss me. You know that would never happen. If only that weren’t the truth.
Way back when, we all blogged on a third-party platform named Blogger. It was awesome, and then Google, now known as Alphabet (yes the same people that bought Nest) came in and purchased Blogger. We SEO types used it, and recommend it, and then one fateful March day we all got an email that said Blogger will no longer be allowed to post to websites using FTP and that all the posts on Blogger now belonged to Google. It was a business decision, and woe to us who didn’t fit into the new business model. We all basically lost or blogs and had to start fresh with a new up and coming software called WordPress. But at least we owned our own files and no one was claiming the content and ideas we produced.
Google has bought many applications, including Urchin, which has become Google Analytics, which is slowly starting to have fees attached to it. And I guess the days of Urchin being the most awesome Stats program are long in the review mirror. They bought YouTube. In fact, the list is endless of web applications they have purchased. And as I type this, kudos to Mark Zuckerberg for refusing to sell them Facebook.
But the take away is the end user must understand the impact of working and dealing with third parties, that may just make a business decision and put you out of business. Understand that the cloud just means your renting someone else’s idea, and depending on how integrated you make it, your business may become completely dependent on it. No business is immune to being sold, and as the tech industry goes, sold to Google, and they can make any BUSINESS decision they want.
The next question I get is, well then what do we do? I have always recommended using WordPress. Yes, you have to maintain it, and yes, you have to learn it. But with a great web hosting company standing behind you that will help you (think ACTWD 😉 there is no reason why anyone should be using any third-party software solution that does not allow you to touch and know where your files live. If its in the cloud, some day someone may kick you off of it and your business becomes a casualty of a business decision.
So one of my clients came to me and said that their site was being used as an example of how to knock our site out of the first slot on Google. Now we are ranked very well on a term that if I was to buy the word in a PPC campaign, the word is worth $188 a click through. The pressure on this word is tremendous, and it would not be ‘easy’ to knock it out of its #2 slot, as advertised. But some guy with a camera who can make a YouTube video and has a Link Network for sale decided he was going to explain how it could be done.
When you’re not up on what is real and what isn’t, things can be very dangerous. So my client asked us to fix the stuff this guy recommended. The video makes it sound like if you don’t fix these things, that it would be easy to know the page out. Fix implies there is something wrong. And, it makes it sound as though with a few easy clicks of a mouse, the problem can be fixed. Now of course if you actually do what this guy recommends to insulate the page, it would dethrone that page, and maybe even the website. This is why when watching internet videos you have to have a basic understanding of what your watching so that your able to spot advice that may not actually work for your circumstance.
So I have a page that is ranking, and the video’s first recommendation is adding words, so there was 1200 of them on the page. Funny thing is, the second I do that, I change the page, and I almost can guarantee it won’t rank. He also recommended changing H1 tags to H2 tags, again, doing something that would more thank likely HARM the page. Keep in mind its ranking #2 behind a HUGE directory that you will never dethrone. Now, if another page came along and did these things, would they out rank this page? Probably not, because the entire site is very powerful and it is laid out properly.
Next thing he pointed out; the site was weak because it doesn’t have great links. And to that point he is correct, and if someone wanted to come along and put up a page that has better links, yes, its true they might beat our site. But doing it legitimately, is very very hard to do. I would agree that we could have a better link profile. When you already have normal links, you then need higher value properties, and that requires the client to take a more philanthropic roll in the community, as well as partner with larger entities in the community, and that just flat out costs money to do.
Trust Flow was also brought up as a place where we are lacking, but didn’t analyze the fact that we have a lot of zero valued links, some of which are our own sites. And of course when you average a zero in it brings down a score, but there was no discussion of that. Additionally, at one point we had to disavow many links from a link network company, just like the blackhat SEO techniques that this video maker’s company runs. However, because there is no access to our WMT’s account, it can’t factor that in because it doesn’t have access to our disavow file. I have some of this going on with this site because our clients point to us, and many do it, but are simple brochure sites with non-monitizable anchor text. They are trying to be helpful and I appreciate that.
So what was the solutions provided to dethrone our site? The overarching premise is correct; develop a site with a better link profile than ours. In other words, build a more powerful website. And that is 100% correct in its truest sense.
Lastly, the video went on to list a myriad of ways for us to acquire links. If you were a rookie that really didn’t understand and thought you found a solution, or the motherlode of advice, and actually followed what was said, you would blow your site up…so here is how the video said to improve the link profile.
Send articles to article directories and put articles out for syndication. As most of us know, this is not something you would do in the modern era. Your article should be so good that you will acquire links to it because you have said something people want to hear. In fact, take this post. I anticipate there to be some links formed to it over time. With another Penguin update rumored to be on the horizon and happening any day now, this would be a great way to get our website penalized.
Specifically, he mentions going to PR Web and named them. Google is now wise to PR Web, and in fact its making issues. Yes it’s a cheaper alternative to the proper way to release a Press Release, but there is the rub. How are real releases released :)? Its not though PR Web.
He advocated adding the site to directories that Google says are okay. Well, a directory that Google says is okay today, may not be okay tomorrow. We already have positions with real directories. Fake directories are becoming more and more frowned upon. Okay, maybe I should’t be so cynical to call the directory fake. How about this, lesser-known directories.
Basically, yes, you need a site with good content, but not 1200 words, unless this is what you need to say what you have to say. (This blog post is @ 701 words).
Create links naturally. Do not look for short cuts, gimmicks, buying links, joining syndicates, and so forth. Yes, I get that the private blog networks are now all the rage for developing links, but I can’t help but think that the Google police are not far behind on blowing the whole thing up, and on a site that is ranking as well as this one, you would NEVER EVER put the site in jeopardy of being banned for screwing around with links. Anyone that is going to show a spreadsheet of places to acquire links is pretty well suspect anyway.
On a side note, I love my business partner. I asked him about this video and he said, “Yeah, well, we could change the H1 tag and I wouldn’t want to put the 1200 words on the page because the thing is ranking #2. Do we really want to monkey with the page? And yes, the guy is right that we need links. But, doing it though someone that sells links…?” The rest of the assessments, although we can always use links, and now we need really high-profile ones, the plan to dethrone our site is awesome, IF we actually were participants in it and helped blow it up. But an outside guy walking in and doing it with his site, ain’t never gonna happen.
Be back soon with the “How do I get my post on Facebook to show up to more than two people?” answer.
Who would think something exciting would happen on Dec 28th, after all most people are on vacation no? Todays caller inspiration was in from a few designers that were tasked with redesigning one of our clients websites. Par for the course, I got the call after the redesign asking about SEO. That is never a good thing really because of how much goes into design verses impact on the SEO.
When I first looked at the design, if this was years ago, I don’t think i would have cared. I overall did not like the site. In the past it would not of mattered what I thought. However, because conversion, and bounce rate are coming to the forefront of things, this was something I now needed to be concerned with. The overall user experience of this page was going to be pretty lacking.
First off the page looked nice as an ad slick. But for a website, not so much. The page was hard to read, lacked clear direction of the purpose of the page. And, what it really didn’t do was lead users to making a purchase. Sometimes in an attempt to be artistic, the website sometimes loses focus; we have about 8-15 seconds to captivate and stimulate the visitor into engaging with. This was a great example. Nowhere above the fold where there clues to what the client does. Nowhere about the fold was their visual clues that this was actually an e-commerce website.
Beyond all of that the website had a black background. Now in this SEO world of having to worry about the end user I had to address color because the last thing I want is a website that will increase my bounce rate and not convert.
Before I go on. I want to clearly state I love Darth Vader. I wear black as one of my daily colors. Heck it’s easy to match. But for a website. I changed ACTWD’s color to white back in 2001 after every complained they couldn’t read the site. And there in lies the take away.
But lets talk some turkey here; How does a black background convert over a white background website? Well of course an A/B test is always a good place to start. But, in lieu of that, on average, two exactly the same pages with just one having a white background and the other having a black background, white wins by at least 10 percentage points.
Psychology also goes a long way in selecting colors for a website. Who is your audience? Women tend to shy away from websites that are grey orange or brown yet react very favorable to blue purple or green. Men on the other hand like blue, green or black and dislike brown orange or purple.
The color blue is one of the best colors to use. It coveys trust and is a common color across brands. Paypal, Capital One, Chase Bank and even Facebook all are blue.
Avoid the color yellow like the plague. It its unsettling and often agitates the user and it even makes babies cry. Some brand managers use yellow to convey fun, but often they fall short. Having an anxious user on your website is not going to help the sales process.
Orange is the New… …. … Black. No I don’t mean the TV series, back in the early days of the internet many people had black websites. Orange is a real up and comer these days. It is fun and Amazon uses it. After all anything Amazon does when it comes to conversion should be copied. There is no better authority on conversion. And I shouldn’t need to say more than think orange my friend think orange.
And then there is White. I know white truly is not a color and more a lack there of. But it is so impactful. It gives the user the perception of space and makes them feel like they can breath on the website. White space and the effective use of white is just so elementary and do overlooked. Clutter and darkness is very bad for sales (remember that).
Learn to use color properly. It’s one of the largest contributors to a successful website and when in doubt test your outcomes. Don’t let a designer dictate. Many are very good, but I am really of the opinion that most function on an art level and not on a conversion level. To Right-Brained some say. I will say the people I met with today, they were pretty awesome because they listened, made adjustments and were responsive and not crying because I hurt their artistic feelings! I really respect that. Bottom line: Learning to use color properly will help you gain lots of the best color of all …GREEN!
In class on Wednesday night, I started asking my students how they handled 
ut of the first slot on Google. Now we are ranked very well on a term that if I was to buy the word in a PPC campaign, the word is worth $188 a click through. The pressure on this word is tremendous, and it would not be ‘easy’ to knock it out of its #2 slot, as advertised. But some guy with a camera who can make a YouTube video and has a Link Network for sale decided he was going to explain how it could be done.
Todays caller inspiration was in from a few designers that were tasked with redesigning one of our clients websites. Par for the course, I got the call after the redesign asking about SEO. That is never a good thing really because of how much goes into design verses impact on the SEO.