31 August 2017
Links – Why they matter
How a site presents its links is one easiest things to get right on a website, but also one of the most important! If a user can’t find the links on your site, how are they ever going to use your site? How are they going to browse, or buy, your products and services if they can’t move off of the page?! It sounds obvious, but a lot of sites fail this most fundamental of tests. I’m not even talking about sites’ navigation systems – that would be a whole separate article – but the in-page links that a site
Read more31 August 2017
Usability Testing
Usability testing is the practice of sitting real users down in front of a website (or a prototype of a website) and trying to identify the problems they experience in trying to use it. There are a number of issues to consider when commissioning a usability testing session, here are 2 of the most important: The choice of users themselves Testing sessions’ results are only as good as the subjects you select to test the site against. They should be broadly representative of your target audience, both in terms of traditional demographics (e.g. age, social class etc.) and Internet-literacy. This
Read more31 August 2017
Design vs Usability
There’s a perennial debate about how design and usability can co-exist. The theory is that design is all about making things pretty, usability is all about making things usable and that the two are inherently at odds with each other. Now, some people try and cop out of the debate by arguing for co-operation and peaceful co-existence and getting the best of both worlds. “Can’t we all just get along?” Well, obviously, that’s the ideal situation, and is mostly achievable if you have mature, sensible people working on a project. But sometimes (even with mature, sensible people) there’s a disagreement
Read more31 August 2017
Save Money – Cut Documentation!
A lot of people wonder why websites are so expensive. “All I need is a small website to tell people what I sell and let them put in an order online – how come it’s going to cost me this much?!” Well, here’s a tip to any business looking to get online for the first time or improve its website: The fewer bits of paper between the signing of the contract and delivery of the website, the better! Now, a lot of people will tell you that all sorts of ‘steps’ are required between these two things, and that each step has to be
Read more31 August 2017
Your Homepage – It’s Easy!
There’s nothing tougher than staring at a blank piece of paper – Hemingway called it the ‘White Bull’. Suddenly, you forget what it was you wanted to write – and can only vaguely remember an outline of what you wanted to do. It’s like that with a Homepage So, the important thing to do when thinking about your Homepage is to remember the key things it has to do, and the key features it has to have. And just to make life that little bit easier, here’s a list of some of them: ‘What we do’ A site’s Homepage should clearly communicate
Read more31 August 2017
Follow the Leader – Best Practice
Work smart, not hard. Do not do unnecessary work. Do not re-invent the wheel. These are mottos to live by. So, how do we apply them to a website? Well, if you’ve got an e-commerce site, look at Amazon. Look at what they’re doing and the way they are doing it. Look at other big, successful online retailers too. Think about what you can learn from them. If you’ve got a brochureware site (i.e. one whose sole purpose is to introduce your company and its products/services to potential customers), look at other companies’ websites. Take a peek at big blue-chip
Read more31 August 2017
The Benefits of Validated XHTML & CSS Code
In my role as CommerceTuned UI lead, an essential part of the development process of our CSS/XHTML overhauls has been to validate all my CSS and XHTML code using the various W3C validation tools available. At first this was chiefly for debugging purposes – if the page looks strange then it could be as a result of mistakes in hand-coded XHTML or CSS – but the benefits of validation are by no means limited to aiding the website development process. Search engines love to crawl semantic mark-up Imagine search engine spider’s behaviour as like someone reading through the pages of a word document. A well-structured, validated xhtml page should be
Read more31 August 2017
The Optimisation Scorecard
The optimisation scorecard is an holistic methodology required for benchmarking and goal-setting in both your external search engine optimisation campaign and your internal enterprise search across your website, portal, or Intranet. The success of an optimisation campaign cannot simply be judged on the number of well placed phrases your website has, or the speed and presentation of the results from your internal search. In order to measure the success and return on investment it is necessary to combine a number of different facets to see the whole picture. External search criteria search engine placements (number + relevancy + which engine) searches done
Read more31 August 2017
Measuring Value, not just hits
The explosive growth of Internet usage in the past few years has led to an ever-increasing investment from vendors trying to tap into online consumer spending which, according to Forrester Research, will exceed US$100 billion by the end of 2003. In parallel with this increase in retail spending, companies are also investing heavily on internal, web based systems, adding portals and application aggregation to their intranets and interacting with their suppliers and partners through extranets. But what drives this spending, and where will investment reap the greatest rewards? Without a way of measuring successes, and failures, there is no way
Read more31 August 2017
The Google Sandbox Theory
In the past few years a semi-mythical beast has reared it’s head in the world of search engine optimisation and the building of new web sites, it’s referred to as the Google Sandbox effect. The principle behind this theory is that new web sites can be penalised – or rather prevented from achieving the same success in the Google rankings as more established web sites. SEO paranoia or a genuine occurrence? At this point let’s just make it clear that this article – like every other article on the Sandbox theory – is just that, a theory. No-one outside Google understands the precise
Read more31 August 2017
The latest Google Page Rank rumble and the fallout
First off, welcome again to the CommerceTuned Newsletter. This month I’ll be looking at the latest Google Page Rank shift, what it could mean, and what actually happened. For those not yet in the now, Page Rank is Google’s method of evaluating the importance of a website. Their search algorithm involves a mix of various factors such as website longevity, frequency of content updates, size of site and number and quality of inbound links to the website. SEO specialists are perhaps the most guilty of viewing a high PR (1-10 in range) as being the Mecca of optimisation aims, get a high page rank
Read more31 August 2017
The Google Supplemental Index
Depending on who’s statistics you believe, Google deals with anything from 60% to 90%+ of all search engine traffic, so whichever way you look at it getting high rankings in the Google listings for important, relevant and searched on phrases will generate a great deal of traffic – and hopefully business – for you. However, in recent years a phenomenon known as the Supplemental Index has reared its head, with Google causing problems for website owners who keep an eye on how their site is doing in the Google index, and seek to gain traffic from the engine. So what exactly is
Read more31 August 2017
What is Google Trust Rank and does it really exist?
Pretty much anyone concerned with how well their website ranks in Google has heard of Page Rank. Page Rank is defined as the degree of importance or value that Google has for a specific web page. If you want to find out what the Page Rank of your website is then try our free online tool that will tell you, or you can find it as an option if you use the Google toolbar. Page Rank is a mark out of 10 starting from 0, so if you launch a new site your page rank will start at 0 and then will change
Read more31 August 2017
The Intangibles
Yes we’ve had The Invincibles, we’ve even had The Commodores, so now I’m going to introduce the newest ‘the’ to the collection – The Intangibles. Everybody with any experience in search engine optimisation knows that SEO is not an exact science. We do not have control over all the variables and factors that make up how a major search engine – such as Google or MSN – determines where one site should rank for various phrases. In addition, we don’t know what specific part of the algorithm determines why another site, usually a competitor (gritted teeth), will rank higher than your site
Read more31 August 2017
The Ethics Behind Search Engines
For many years it has been made abudantly clear to the average Joe that there are things you can do and things you can’t do to your website in order improve ranking placements, most of which are specified by the search engines themselves on their sites. Good things: Make it interesting Make it unique Keep updating it Bad things: Hidden links Cloaking Hidden text What happens when good search engines go bad? However is it always so black and white? An interesting example of a potential conflict of these rules surfaced recently, when it was highlighted in some of the more
Read more31 August 2017
What goes up must come down (or how we lost Google placements for two weeks)
I always think that articles and research is so much more interesting to write about and talk about when it’s something that happened to you (as opposed to starting with ‘I once had a friend that..’), so I just thought I’d write an article about some recent issues we had with some of our ranking placements in Google. As every SEO worth their salt does, I have a tendency to keep an eye on the ranking placements of the CT site, but I don’t spend half as much time developing the website and building on it as I should –
Read more31 August 2017
How do you choose between a number of rival quotes from SEO companies?
Here’s the big question; you know you need SEO done on your website, you have an approximate budget in mind, so you request quotes from five reputable search engine optimisation companies, but how do you know which one to go for? Some quotes may be a page long, some quotes may be 20,000 word essay, but which is best and most suited to your needs? Below is a useful checklist I have put together which should help you on the road towards selecting the best SEO company to handle your campaign. First impression These can never be under-estimated, far better
Read more31 August 2017
Text Link Advertising – the basics
Over the last few years a new phenomenon has arisen in the area of search engine marketing, it’s called ‘text link advertising‘. As the penny dropped that Google and the other major search engines were placing ever-increasing emphasis on the value of inbound links to a website with regard to ranking, people realised that they could start selling text link adverts on their websites as a way of generating extra revenue. An example of how this works is that a text link is placed on a themed page of a website or one with high PR that points to your
Read more31 August 2017
Where to spend your pay-per-click budget
Ok, so you have heard all about pay-per-click marketing, you know that you only pay for the traffic you receive and if you plan carefully you can get a lot of very relevant and targeted traffic for a relatively small cost. But how do you know where you should spend your money? Should you go with a Google Adword campaign? What about Espotting or Overture? maybe Mirago or Looksmart? There is a plethora of options available to you, and if you don’t have sufficient budget to invest in every pay-per-click option on the market then here are a few tips to
Read more