Designing for SEO

"Why do websites that look great nearly always have SEO that sucks?"

This is the question I set out to answer during my recent Mozinar about designing for SEO.

To be a true king of the SERPs, you are, of course, going to need more than a well-designed, search-optimised website. You are probably going to need a ton of social mentions, quality links, citations and co-citations, etc. The problem with these ranking factors is that they are difficult to accomplish in volume and generally require a lot of work to achieve, and, subsequently, the vast majority of websites don’t have them.

You can, however still achieve big wins with great design and on-page optimisation

Whats the problem?

The problem is simple. Websites that look amazing typically offer little opportunity for on-page optimisation and conversely pages that are well optimised will often compromise the design and user experience.

This creates a chicken and egg scenario - what is the point in having a website that looks great if it can’t be found? And is there any point of being easy to find if the website isn’t engaging?

How can we build sites that look amazing and are engaging, yet still maintain SEO performance?

Enter the webfont 

Webfonts from the likes of Google, Font Deck, Typekit, and Fonts.com have been around for a couple of years and offer a great way to give a website style without compromising crawlability. They form the fundamental structure and underpinning of any well-designed, well-optimised site.

To add visual impact, designers will add graphical elements to websites such as banners and calls to action. These elements are usually created as images so the designer can use gorgeous fonts, add type effects such as drop shadows, gradients, and a whole host of other treatments that form part of the designers toolkit. Websites need these kind of graphics, as they make websites engaging, they improve the UX, and they make the user much less likely to bounce. 

Take the graphic below, as great as it looks there is too much information to include within an Alt-tag. Also it is difficult to emphasise and prioritise the information within an alt-tag as it is just plain text.  

By using a combination of webfonts, HTML, and CSS, it is possible to retain the beauty and achieve good SEO by creating all of the text elements within this banner as “live text.”

Not only can the live text banner now look great, but they can also be marked up with H1’s, body type, bold text, and updated dynamically. Search engines will just see this as standard HTML. Best of all, these banners or graphics can be even be marked up as rich text using schema or microdata.    

Design for optimisation

The biggest hurdle in building great looking websites that also have great performing SEO attributes is uniting these two disciplines. Designers focus on sites that look great and create a good user experience whilst being engaging, whereas an SEO typically wants a site which is very crawlable and one which ranks well.

If the design and SEO teams gain an appreciation of each others' requirements, the results can be innovative and outstanding. Take the example below: these panels are for a fashion retailer, the one on the left was visualised by the designer, in terms of UX this panel is great, it shows a model wearing the product, explains through the use of well positioned type exactly what a user can expect to see on click through. The trouble is, from an SEO perspective, this panel does not cut it.

An SEO is going to need something more like the panel on the right hand side. It has a clear, defined header, possibly an <h1>, followed by some great long tail text. Its clear that from a UX perspective this panel falls well short of the mark, the panel on the left will get a lot more click throughs than the panel on the right.

One potential solution to this problem is a mouse-over. Initially when viewed, the panel will look as it does on the left hand side (exactly as the designer want it), yet when a user rolls over the image the panel changes into what you see on the right hand side (exactly what the SEO wants).

The beauty of this solution is the user experience and click thru are maintained and as all of this text is live text, it is crawlable and very accessible to robots, giving the search engines everything they need to index the site.

The expandable div

Another great way of incorporating indexable content into minimalist page design is the expandable div. It can deliver big SEO and UX wins by making relevant (and crawlable) text visible on mouse click.

Take the example below: frequently, these kind of product panels are represented as images, and they do a great job of engaging the user by offering a visually rich single click method of navigation.

With the exception of some alt-text, these kind of panels offer very little for search engines to crawl. 

By adding an expandable div to these panels, it is possible to present a host of SEO opportunities. Clicking on one of the items above can now provide a compelling description of this product category, include additional imagery to aid the purchase process and as a result increase conversions and user engagement. But perhaps the biggest bonus of the expandable div is that we can provide search engines with so much additional long tail text to index. 

The inclusion of expandable divs within web pages are not only great for the user, but also offer incredible opportunities for indexable content.

The concealed weapons!

Calls to action, trust signals, billboards, and all other page elements will often contain the kind of messages we want google to crawl, yet in most cases, these will be represented as images. As a result, discounts, free delivery, next-day delivery, and other offers are not being crawled. 

Create all of these elements with webfonts, CSS and HTML so that spiders and bots can crawl them. Do we really want messages such as “Free Delivery,” “10% discount,” or “SALE” to be hidden from search engines?

The following items contain great sales messages, and all of them have been built using webfonts, CSS, and HTML so are all fully crawlable.

Reference:-http://www.seomoz.org/blog/designing-for-seo

Ebriks Infotech:-SEO Company

Google: Image Search Overhaul Will Deliver Higher Click-Through Rates

Google will be rolling out an overhaul to its image search function. The revamped image search will provide a more prominent display space for selected images and a new scrolling function to make it easier to look at results.
"You will be able to quickly flip through a set of images by using the keyboard," wrote Hongyi Li, associate product manager in a blog post. "If you want to go back to browsing other search results, just scroll down and pick up right where you left off."
More information on the results will also be displayed, including metadata, the page hosting the image, its size, and domain name. This is designed to increase click-through rates to the sites hosting the images.
Google said in its own tests it's seen an (unspecified) average increase in the click-through as a result of incorporating this information more prominently.

Refernce:-http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2238985/Google-Image-Search-Overhaul-Will-Deliver-Higher-Click-Through-Rates

Ebriks Infotech:- SEO Company

Google Launches Streamlined Image Search

Currently, viewing an image through Google Image Search is a multistep process. You do the search, see several images and can hover to get a slightly larger thumbnail:

If you want to see a larger version of the image, you have to click on the image, which brings up a bigger version superimposed over the actual web page the image is from:

In With The New

With the new system that’s coming out today, selecting an image after a search brings up the larger version in a central preview area:

This makes it easy to quickly skim through multiple images, rather than the existing system that requires a lot of clicking, then closing windows to go back and select a new image.

Fewer Publisher Visits? Phantom Visits?

The change also suggests that fewer people may visit the actual pages hosting the images, which might be a concern to publishers. Anticipating this, Google’s post about the change says that it has added new ways to reach the image owner’s site that supposedly increase visits:

The domain name is now clickable, and we also added a new button to visit the page the image is hosted on. This means that there are now four clickable targets to the source page instead of just two. In our tests, we’ve seen a net increase in the average click-through rate to the hosting website.

When talking to Google about the change, I was also told that by not loading the hosting page, Google is no longer generating “phantom” visits that were a concern to some publishers, one of the biggest complaints Google said it heard from publishers about Google Images.

“That was causing problems for some webmasters, and so we thought we can do away with that. That’s gone now,” said Pierre Far, a webmaster trends analyst with Google. This, along with new options to reach publisher sites, is “a net win for webmasters,” he said.

Of course, publishers who might not feel this is a net win have an easy solution. They can block Google from indexing their images with just two lines in a robots.txt file, as Google covers here.

When do you get the new look? Google says it is rolling out live now worldwide and should be available to everyone over the coming days.

Reference:-http://searchengineland.com/google-launches-streamlined-image-search-146238

Ebriks Infotech:-SEO Services Company

Yandex Launches Experimental “Wonder” Voice Social Search App For The US

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Yandex, the company behind the leading search engine in Russia with a presence in Turkey, has taken a radically different direction to its search activities by launching a voice social search app called “Wonder” on  Apple’s iOS platform for the US market.
Described by the company as “experimental,” the app responds to users’ spoken queries and displays results from that user’s social connections in a horizontal format which Yandex believes may be the best way to display social search for the future.
One key aspect of the app is the historical nature of the data queried. “Wonder” is not looking at what someone is saying now about a restaurant you’re thinking of visiting, but what they have said in the past. This enables much richer information to be displayed to users from a limited data set than would be the case with traditional search engines.

How The Yandex “Wonder” App Is Structured. Source: Yandex

The supported social network platforms include Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Foursquare and other tools connected through Facebook such as Spotify.
Developed by Palo Alto-based Yandex Labs, the app is limited to the US for now, but a spokesman for the company said, “It’s an experimental app which uses many existing Yandex technologies and tests some that are new. We aim to learn about users preferences, such as the horizontal results display and may then roll it out to other regions.”
A typical search query might be, ” I wonder what my friends are listening to?” or “what sushi restaurants do my friends go to in New York?” A key aspect that the technology tries to achieve is to recognise the many different ways that a particular restaurant or venue, might be described by different friends in different networks — a new form of “duplicate removal” similar to duplication removal in traditional search engines.
In addition to the fact that its development came out of the US, the company says it chose the limited iOS platform in the US because it is a single market speaking predominantly one language, more social data is available, and US users share more on average than those in other parts of the world.

“Wonder” Has Horizontal Scroll To Display Its Social Search Results. Source: Yandex

The spokesman noted that, “We may use what we learn on voice search from this experiment in connection with our main Yandex search engine.”
Inevitably, the app will be compared to Facebook’s new Graph Search concept and has many similarities, except the addition of natural language voice search. The app is available to download for free.
Other than “Yandex.com,” which is an English-language search tool from Yandex, the company has never made forays into the US in its own name — but has invested in US search engines such as Blekko. This is the first direct search investment in the US.
Postscript by Matt McGee: TechCrunch is reporting that Facebook has blocked Yandex’s access to its data, and the two companies are discussing next steps.
Opinions expressed in the article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land.

Refernce:-http://searchengineland.com/yandex-launches-experimental-voice-social-search-app-for-the-us-146328

Ebriks Infotech:-SEO Company

SEO Article Marketing: Can Building Links Too Fast Hurt Your Website Ranking?

Recently I received this question from a brand new website owner: “I’ve heard that building links too quickly can hurt your website ranking. Is that true? If I submitted articles to 1,000 directories all at once, could it actually hurt my site?”
That’s a great question. The answer is yes, especially if your website is newly established, building links too fast could harm the SEO for your site. You should space your article submissions out and limit them when using an automatic article submitter.
Being required to submit fewer articles is actually a bonus for most people — the daunting thing about submitting articles manually is you need to submit such a large quantity that it’s really not humanly feasible to keep it up on a consistent basis. Think 50 articles a day — that’s too much for even the most prolific writer to keep up with.
But if you submit your articles automatically, you can see excellent results with a mere eight articles a month, presuming the site is well-established and has backlinks from other sources as well. That’s a quantity that most people find very doable.
If you have a brand new site though, it’s a good plan to start out slowly and gradually increase your article submissions up to eight a month. You should also use other marketing tools for building links, such as press releases, forum posting, etc.
Some automatic article submitters offer a useful tool that will allow you to ‘trickle’ your article submission over a predefined period of time, so your article is not distributed to a large chunk of publishers all at once.
That type of tool is extremely helpful because it allows you to build links more gradually, which looks more natural to a search engine.
Why not submit articles by hand to just one or two directories?
The problem with that approach is the exposure is so limited that you can’t submit enough articles to make an impact — either with the SEO for your website, or to draw enough readers to your website.
Think about it–some of the most popular sites on the Internet are article directories. It’s to your benefit to get your article published on as many directories as possible, because by doing so you increase your chances of funneling some of that traffic to your website.
Article submissions services will often also send your articles to a variety of online publishers, such as article directories, blog publishers, ezine editors and other types of website owners. It is beneficial to your SEO to build links from a variety of websites, so the increased distribution that an article submission service can offer gives you something that you can’t accomplish on your own.
It may help to realize that article submissions are similar to press releases. The content itself is different, but they are similar in that they are each distributed to different websites that publish the content and then link back to your website.
When you submit a press release, you’re trying to have it seen by as many people as possible, just as with an article. It would be kind of silly to submit a press release with the intention of getting it published on as few sites as possible and seen by as few readers as possible. You want the press release to get widespread exposure, be published on many sites, and to come before the eyes of as many people as possible. It’s that way with free reprint article submissions too.
So, what’s the answer — how can you submit enough articles to see an impact with search engines while at the same time not build links so quickly that you hurt your website ranking?
Just use an online article submission service, and either submit eight articles a month (if your website is established) or gradually build up to eight articles a month (if your website is brand new). Also find a service that can submit your articles in a trickled out fashion, so that your articles get submitted to just a few publishers a day, rather than a bunch at one time. By using this strategy, you will benefit as much as possible from article marketing, in the most time efficient way, without building links too quickly.

Refernce:-http://www.seo-news.com/seo-article-marketing-can-building-links-too-fast-hurt-your-website-ranking/

Ebriks Infotech:- SEO Company

Google: 224 Million 'Bad Ads' Disabled in 2012

Once again, the Google AdWords team has reported on its continued efforts to eliminate bad AdWords ads. This year, they've released an infographic (see below) that recounts all they have done over the past year to reduce the number of bad ads that appeared in the AdWords network.
Citing that Google's business "depends on keeping people safe and secure," the infographic identifies how the search giant defines "bad ads", how they discover them, and what they do once they find them.
By the numbers:

• 224 million: The number of banned ads.
• 889,000: The number of advertisers banned.
• 223: The number of countries and territories where bad advertisers originated from – the U.S., China, Japan, and India were the biggest offenders.
• 78: The number of languages used by abused in bad ad attempts Scots Gaelic, Kyrgyz, Tatar, and Esperanto were particularly troublesome.

The rest of the infographic contains horn-tooting numbers to give law-abiding advertisers and consumers the warm-and-fuzzies. Their AdWords blog post closes stating Google's "zero-tolerance" policy for bad ads and reiterates commitment to do "whatever it takes" to keep the web – and Google users and advertisers – as safe as possible.
Google's commitment to reducing "bad ads" isn't a new resolution for 2013. In previous years, the AdWords team has gone through what they call "bad ads" to weed them out in an effort to protect consumers and "legitimate businesses in harm's way." Google's ad team has gone through multiple iterations of taking extra procautions to keep ads safe.
Refernce:-http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2237541/Google-224-Million-Bad-Ads-Disabled-in-2012

EBriks Infotech:-SEO Company

Bloggers: Making Spammers by Avoiding Spam?

With search engines constantly evolving and fighting obvious spam techniques, bloggers have been subject to a flood of guest post requests by link builders looking for white hat link building techniques.
Guest posting in its purest form can be helpful for both the writer of the post and the blogger who posts it. The host blogger gets a new perspective on their blog, and some free content. The author gets a link to their site, with all of the PageRank that passes through that.
The problem is that it takes time to go through so many guest blogging requests. Even worse is that going through these requests often reveals only a few worth accepting. Requests with broken English, articles with spammy links, and other poor-quality markers can be frustrating, especially when received in bulk.
This has caused some bloggers to stop accepting guest posts altogether, or charging for posts containing links. There are a couple of reasons why these techniques aren't only throwing the baby out with the bath water, but creating more spam.

If Guest Posts Vanished

If all blogs stopped accepting guest posts, a couple of things would happen. More “guest posting sites” would pop up. These sites are dedicated purely to content creation. Their whole purpose is to provide a place for people to put links.
While not necessarily bad if maintained correctly, guest posting sites aren’t known for their quality. What readers do such general sites attract? Blogs with a specific target audience are much better for guest posting, and for users.
If quality blogs show that guest posting can be a legitimate practice, then content creators won’t flock to the undesirable sites, and they will eventually fizzle out.
By upholding high standards, bloggers can actually unite and reduce the useless content on the web. Yes, there will always be crummy sites, but we can make them less successful by making our sites more so.

Charging for Links

Some site managers have decided that the best solution is to charge people for guest posts with company links in them. This is meant to be a deterrent for spammers and generators of low-quality content. The reasoning is that if an SEO company or even any business, is making money off of this article, then so should the blogger.
As a deterrent, this method is ineffective. You still have to go through all of the requests, and then you end up charging the people who give you good content and aren’t wasting your time. The spammers face no consequences.
The argument that companies should have to pay also has some flaws. The biggest problem is that Google looks down on do-follow links that are paid for.
If you decide to charge for guest posts, you had better assign the links as nofollow to avoid breaking Google's webmaster guidelines. People who are willing to pay for do-follow links are likely practicing other black hat SEO methods, and you probably don’t want your site linked with them.
If companies are providing good content though, what makes them different from a writer promoting their blog? The important thing is that you provide posts that are useful for your readers. If that includes a link to a company’s site, then isn’t it still worth it? Better to be associated with a company doing things the right way and adding useful information to the internet than someone just inserting random links.

The Moral of the Story

It’s easy to discount guest posting as a legitimate practice because of all of the scammers trying to manipulate the SERPs. This doesn't mean that all guest posting is bad though.
Posts must be judged case by case. Yes, this takes time, but it’s worth it.
Broken English is easy to spot quickly, and you can always ask that submitters complete a CAPTCHA or other proof of humanity or include a specific line in their email to prove they’ve read their guidelines.
There will always be people trying to game the system. The danger with trying to profit off of company links is that it attracts those people, and encourages breaking Google’s established rules. And going to extremes like eliminating all guest posts only means that you lose that potential asset to your site.
Figure out what method works best for you and judge articles by the writing, not by the fact a company is providing it.

Reference:- http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2237723/Bloggers-Making-Spammers-by-Avoiding-Spam

Ebriks Infotech:-SEO Company