Web Design & SEO Blog, Inverness Blogs

After a recent enquiry which is resulting in some work for us (hurrah!) I felt it necessary to write to expand people’s thinking a bit. Well, quite a lot actually.

Sometimes, people’s perceptions of SEO is simply about getting higher rankings for keywords (hopefully you’ve chosen those people are actually using?), maybe a bit of link building (but are they the right links) and getting visitors.

But is that it? Well, no. What matters more – getting 3000 visitors or getting 30 visitors to place orders, to buy, or to enquire into your services? It’s what we call Conversion Rate. I don’t intend to go into Conversion Rate Optimisation, because that’s not my area of expertise. For that see this excellent article below:-

http://www.deepripples.com/blog/a-taxonomy-of-optimization-from-seo-to-cro

What I do intend to do is make you realise that SEO can only work to increase sales, conversions, enquiries or whatever you measure the success of your web efforts by if you know your own business or organisation, so here’s some pointers.

• What is your core business? What would you like it to be?
• What is your target market, or desired group of people who will be using your site or your services?
• Does geographical position mean anything to your business or organisation? I.e. where will you be selling or where is your target market based?
• Do you know your competitors? Who do you think they are? How are you different to them?
• What is your Unique Selling Point – why should people come to you as opposed to your competitors?

You need to understand your own business or organisation before a website or SEO can ever do its job – else all you’re possibly going to achieve are visitors and not customer or enquirers.

It’s about getting the right visitors not just any visitors to you. And also it can help direct how you will go to your potential customer base, but that’s a post for another time!

In my last post, I talked about making your site as user-friendly as possible. This post builds on that as we look and users and search engines.

What’s the Problem?
Imagine the scene; you’re late for an interview. Having turned up at the office block in a bit of a hurry, you ask the lady on reception where your interview is to be held, to which she replies:-

“Well now, you go through that door over there, turn left, go right ahead, left again, up two flights of stairs, round the circular meeting room, and take the third right. There are six doors, 3 purple, 2 yellow and one brown. You want the second of the three purple doors and then someone will be waiting for you. Have a good interview”.

So you start on your trail and get lost. No surprises there. Worse, you can’t find your way back to reception to ask the way out. A couple of hours later, you dejectedly leave the building, not having made your interview. Cruelly, if you’d just taken the lift to the fourth floor, your room would have been the door straight after exiting the lift.

The point? It’s about making things easy for your visitor – easy to get to your site, easy to find what they want and making sure they don’t get lost.

Actual Sitemaps
An actual sitemap is a page physically present on your website which visitors can go to and find the part of your website they want, however menus down the line it may be placed.

It may sound like a lot of work for website owners – and it is. But if we want visitors to stay, buy, recommend, refer our website or products then they must be the centre of attention, not us. So you should add a page that has links to important areas of your site.

Comfort for E-Commerce Website Owners
If you run an e-commerce website you don’t need to list all your products, but you may want visitors to easily be able to access the various categories of products.

So go ahead and create a “Site Map” page and provide links to the major sections of your website. Your visitors may thank you. And so may Search Engines.

Sitemap Pages Benefit Search Engines Too
When a Search Engine Spider visits your website it will follow your links around and providing a sitemap page means that search engines will find all your pages.

And Use Keywords In Your SiteMap links. Obviously, use keywords that are relevant to the page you’re sending your visitor or search engine spider. But do not keyword stuff – make your link text make sense, this will give visitors and search engines a good impression that your site makes sense as a coherent whole.

Create an XML Sitemap

What is an XML Sitemap?
An XML sitemap is a file that sits in your website’s root (or home) directory and is used to provide search engines the full low-down on pages on your website. More often than not, these are simply called sitemap.xml.

These files are also used in conjunction with Google Webmaster Tools to provide Google (or the equivalent on Yahoo) a full list of pages in your site.

There’s no guarantee that search engines will list all your pages, but you don’t have to tell them the pages exist if you have a site-map set up.

Creating an XML Sitemap
Thankfully, there’s plenty of free XML Sitemap generators out there to save us the hassle of creating them, my personal favourite being www.xml-sitemaps.com.

These save a lot of time – especially for large, or e-commerce websites which may have hundreds of pages.

Search engines want to know about your content, so go ahead and create a sitemap.xml file and upload it to your root/home directory today. Then Use Google Webmaster Tools and Yahoo Sites and let those Search Engines know about your site.

Conclusion

Using actual and XML sitemaps is about making life easy for your visitors, search engines and for you too.

If you can make life easy for visitors, you’re more likely to convert the visit to a sale. If you make life easy for search engines, it can only do your site good in terms of getting your content indexed. And if you’re improving conversions and indexing – even though you’ll need to improve your Search Engine rankings – you’ll be making life easier for yourself and your business.

So what’s holding you back now?

This week I successfully completed the fairly standard but neat-looking website for my wife’s business soXby Creations.

As a web designer, I don’t just interest myself in pretty pictures (although I do like pretty pictures), but also in the HTML, the CSS, PHP and JavaScript of it all. Design (Appearance) and Coding (Part appearance, part functionality).

Our coding is governed by coding standards – this is supposed to ensure that whatever platform (Windows, Mac OSX, Linux etc) and whichever browser (Firefox, Opera, Safari, Internet Explorer, Google Chrome etc) websites are viewed in that they actually appear consistent, the aim being that the browser provides other functionality, plug-ins, personalisation, whatever tickles your fancy. A website is a website is a website – i.e. you get one built and your audience from around the globe get the same service. Right? Well… almost. Possibly.

I have long used Mozilla Firefox for my websites. Okay it uses up a few more system resources, but I have a good laptop in front of me so I’m not that fussed. It’s Open Source, which I also support. But I accept the fact that not everyone has my taste in browser. Fair enough.

So any site I build I test in about 5 mainstream browsers. Firefox was fine, as was Safari and Google Chrome. Opera seems to want to render the colours differently to the others, but that’s out of my control and I can live with that (sort of). Then a friend messages me on Facebook just to show me a screenshot of this lovely site in Internet Explorer 7. Layers were all messed up and nothing was in its rightful place.

Internet Explorer 7 was the 7th browser created by those on high in Microsoft which ignores coding standards. For so long I had to code for IE7 and below until they finally released Internet Explorer 8 and it was a big selling point that they were now W3C standards compliant.

Now do excuse me for sitting on my high horse, but surely standards should be, well, standard? Thankfully, when logging onto my Windows partition on my laptop, the site looked fine in Internet Explorer 8. Out of the 26 unique visitors to mOxby Design in the last month, only 3 used IE7, the rest were on IE8. Thank Goodness.

So Microsoft finally acknowledged what we knew all along with the release of IE8 and that’s the fact that we must acknowledge cross-platform standards. IE8′s been around for a while now but guess what? Simple things like a picture preview pane that sits in the top middle and moves with the scrollbar? Worked fine with all browsers except IE8, because Internet Explorer doesn’t give items on the page the same references (aka the ‘DOM’ or Document Object Model) so I had to add extra lines of JavaScript to the site.

When will the guys at MS finally cotton on and stop making us website developers do their own coding for them?