SEOs can charge by the hour, per project, or on a monthly contract. It’s a good idea to know what kind of budget you can truly invest in your project. Keep in mind that the money you invest will be just that: an investment. And no investment is bulletproof. Sometimes skimping on the project just for price will actually cost you more than you can afford in the long run. 19.Tuning Up Your Web Site Sometimes web sites are like cars. You can have a site that looks gorgeous from the outside, but if it's under-performing and not getting you where you want to go, it might be time for a tune up - or even a complete overhaul. Read on for your own care and maintenance guide.“Memory is part of usability. That's why navigation is such a pain in the neck to work out and make usable for everybody who will use your web site. There are ads, images, blinking thingy’s distracting your eyes, and your mind is going everywhere at once. Yet, when I tell a web site owner that people have trouble reading a page when there are 10 things happening all at once, they act as though I stole their blankie.” --Kimberly Krause Berg Ultimately, whether you choose a small or large SEO firm or company, know what you want ahead of time, and don’t be shy to lay it all out at the beginning what you need from your SEO consultant. Sometimes just talking to them will give you a feeling about how they will handle your SEO project. And no matter which you choose, natural search optimization takes time. There is no miracle formula that will speed your site to the top of the engines, no matter who you decide to hire, and you should run far away if someone tells you otherwise. And that’s the ugly truth. Now that I've given you an overview of the web site redesign process, I hope you'll find it a little less overwhelming. It needn't be scary. If you have a web site that is not working for you as well as you'd like, a redesign could help unlock its true potential. This is very important for Amazon, because being an online bookstore, it is very natural for them to adopt dynamic URLs yet it was equally important for them to make their dynamic URLs directory index friendly. 30.Website Usability and SEO In this article, my focus is on how website usability goes hand in hand with good SEO. Usability science, or human factors, pursues the quest for human-computer interface designs that are easy to use. While Usability Day is about technology as a whole, and how that technology makes our lives easier, this article will turn its attention to website usability, and how it can be important in directory optimization.The purpose of this is to get more than one top entry on a search results page (some search engines display more than one page from a site). However, search engines have tools to help find duplicate pages, so people have turned to slightly modifying the page before using it again. One of the more unethical variations of duplication is called page jacking, in which people steal pages from other sites because they have performed well. I began writing this article in October, but ironically, I wanted to finish it on November 3rd, which is World Usability Day. I write my articles in a funny way, some might think. I write the end, then I write the middle, and lastly, I write the introduction. I didn’t know anything about World Usability Day until I ran across the concept on CNN’s Morning News program, which kicked off events in the US at Hour 21, by Elizabeth Rosenzweig, World Usability Day Chair. What exactly does that mean? Searchers go to Google looking for one thing: content. So your redesigned site needs to have content, relevant content, and lots of it. If you're working with someone who is truly knowledgeable and enthusiastic about his field, this shouldn't be too difficult to provide. A site for a real estate agent, for instance, might include articles on the advantages of living in the communities he services. The web site of a dentist with a family practice could talk about ways to encourage kids to practice oral hygiene and/or prepare them for their first visit to the dentist. The possibilities are endless. “Why doesn't this work better? Why can't they make this easier? World Usability Day is for all the people who've ever asked questions like these. This Earth-Day-style event, focused on easy-to-use technology, currently involves plans in more than 70 cities in 30 countries. WorldUsabilityDay.org, online headquarters of the international day, says, “World Usability Day promotes the value of usability engineering, user-centered design, and every user's responsibility to ask for things that work better. The Usability Professionals' Association is doing that by encouraging, organizing, and sponsoring 36 hours of activities at the local level around the globe, all occurring on November 3, 2005.” Events included surveys on how appropriate use of color greatly impacts user experience online, seminars and conferences locally, and Open Houses. Redesigning a Site for SEO: an Overview - Make the Website Helpful With all the work you're doing on the site's redesign, don't forget your ultimate goal. It runs deeper than the one I mentioned in the first section of this article. It even runs deeper than getting to the first position on Google for all your keywords, though achieving this goal might help you do that too. Your ultimate goal is to be as helpful as possible to your site's visitors. Website usability deals with ease of navigation, how colors work together to enhance a user experience without hurting the eyes, the size of fonts, and design. But some of the concepts of website usability have a direct effect on how search engines crawl your website, and index it accordingly.Be careful if a company is secretive or won't clearly explain what they intend to do. Ask for explanations if something is unclear. If an SEO creates deceptive or misleading content on your behalf, such as doorway pages or "throwaway" domains, your site could be removed entirely from Google's index. Ultimately, you are responsible for the actions of any companies you hire, so it's best to be sure you know exactly how they intend to "help" you. So be patient when you explain the changes you want to make; sometimes, when someone knows WHY you're doing something a certain way, they're a lot more reasonable about letting you do it. They might also come up with an idea for doing something that accomplishes the same goal in a better way. Always do your best, but remember that there's a reason for the old saying that "the customer is always right."The same goes for validating every HTML page on your Web site. Website Usability and SEO - Navigation Usability Navigation A navigation path is a sequence of pages that the visitor viewed from the moment the visitor enters the site to the moment they leave, including navigation paths taken by directory bots. Text Links – The best navigation system is one that contains text links, both for usability and for SEO. Hiding links within JavaScript or other unreadable code, or buried in Frames pages or images, doesn’t allow a directory to follow your navigation system, and it also makes it difficult for those with accessibility issues to follow as well. The best solution for this is to include additional text links for visitors and search engines to follow. For example, one SEO working on redesigning a web site for a client in the real estate business found inspiration for the redesign from a section of the client's old site. That section showed images from the company's "home staging" business, where rooms in homes were redone to get the home ready for listing. The SEO worked with his client to make the redesigned site look as tasteful, elegant, and welcoming as those rooms, starting with the color scheme from one of the photos. Sadly, there's always the possibility that you and your client will end up with significant areas of disagreement. You might even find that your client is helpful about some things and adamant about others. Your client might be very attached to the site, especially if he designed it himself; it's his "baby" after all. Anchor text – Anchor text is the words used in a hyperlink to point a user to another web page or website. SEOs will tell you how important anchor text is for optimization because it is another opportunity for you to include your keywords, and tell a directory why this link is relevant to your content. This is also important in a usability sense because it directs a visitor to the linked page while giving them an idea what the link is about. Using “Click Here” is really a waste of your SEO opportunity. What may seem to you as self-explanatory may not be as simple for your visitors. Having a button called “Knowledge Base” may not mean much to some people. Instead, if that button would simply be called “Help” it probably would assist them better. Choose a color scheme and stick with it; templates can also be a big help here. The site's new image should fit the industry and the owner. Remember that your client can be a great resource for this. You might get an enormous amount of help from the site owner and have a truly pleasant experience.Stick that in your pipe and smoke it, and then tell me I dona€?t know what I am talking about as many have. Some of these many are so-called internet gurus and SEO experts that fleece you by promising you a Google Page 1 position for your site, Breadcrumbs - The breadcrumb trail provides information to users as to where they are located within the site, and it offers shortcut links for users to “jump” to previously viewed pages without using the BACK button, other navigation menus or buttons, or using a keyword search. Breadcrumbs also give search engines an easy navigation path to follow to find all the pages of your site.You may want to be the information source when someone is looking for your type of service, or you may instead want to be the destination when a prospect is ready to close the deal - or possibly a combination of both. Redesigning a Site for SEO: an Overview - Look and Feel What about the site's look and feel? You will probably have to make some changes to make sure the site's navigation works well and visitors flow smoothly through the site. Above and beyond that, you may need to give the site a "face-lift." What image does the site owner want to project? Browsing a bank's web site should feel different from browsing a web site that sells homemade dip mixes, for example. Both can (and should) project a certain feeling of professionalism, but they will have different "personalities." The term “breadcrumb” comes from the Grimm’s fairy tale, Hansel and Gretel. Hansel left a trail of breadcrumbs through the woods so that he and Gretel could find their way back home. There are a variety of tools you can use to check this; just Google “duplicate content check.” Or you can just Google some key phrases from the content that you think has been copied, and see what comes up. When you're changing files and pages and such, make sure you do all the redirects correctly. This would be a good time to check your backlinks, too, and find out who is linking deep into your site. You'll want to consider building a custom 404 page as well, just in case anyone does get lost. If your folder structure is changing - and chances are it is - you'll also want to update your robots.txt file. You don't want your visitors to get lost; you surely don't want Google to get lost either! Titles – Using clear, concise titles will not only inform your visitors what your site is about when they find it in the directory results, but it also helps a directory determine the relevancy of your site to its indexed pages. A directory has the capability of scanning the context of a web page, and determining if the title is indeed a good match. Visitors also don’t like to click on a directory result with a title, only to find out that the web page has nothing to do with what they were looking for, and that the title was misleading. Make sure your titles are short, directly to the point, and most importantly, an accurate assessment of the content of the page. I won't go into how to do keyword research, since there are plenty of articles here on SEO Chat that explain that topic in detail. Depending on the field, however, you might find that you need to be careful with your tools. Richard Hearne discovered that some keyword research tools may deliver skewed results for certain phrases - because "a very large number of the reported searches are going to be executed for the purpose of collecting keyword data." The SEO/SEM field is notorious for this, with many searchers not interested in hiring services so much as finding out what their competitors are up to. Obviously, once you have the appropriate keywords, you need to use them in all the right places. That means title tags and site text; meta descriptions are more controversial in the sense that many insist the search engines don't look at those anymore. Still, there are places where you should include descriptions if they aren't already there, such as alt tags for images on the site. Avoid keyword stuffing; remember, those tags will be used in ways other than SEO. They get read by site reading software used by the blind, for example. Keep it short and sweet, and use any keywords sensibly. Website Usability and SEO - Directory and Font Considerations Directories and Levels A colleague, Mike Shapiro, who I consider to be a friend, once told me, “Remember the average clicker spends 7 seconds deciding whether to stick around.” Statistics show that web users like to visit sites that have what they need not more than a couple of clicks away from the home page or landing page. If a web user has to go through a dozen links in order to get to what they are looking for, they will very likely give up in frustration, and then move on to the next site offering what they need. Redesigning a Site for SEO: an Overview - Tackling the Basics Okay, you now have a feeling for the site, the site owner's field and its competitive landscape, and the goals for the redesign. Now what? Well, if it's an old site, I am a member of many directory optimization forums from many years, and have analyzed that trends and webmaster problems change with every update regarding Google PageRank, Back Links problems, Supplement results from Google, banning of websites and having no website popularity after even making all things done properly. Well, I always say – “It depends”. Yes! It depends on – 1. Your website market or online product. 2. Your website strategy – means what’s the basic need behind the making of your website. 3. Your website look (it means design layout) – It should be visitor appealing so that he can bookmark your website and come back to it. 4. Your website navigation – it helps your web site's usability. 5. Make all of website URLs directory friendly – Well, all static web pages are directory friendly but if you are using a dynamic website with .asp or .php, please use server redirection (eg. mod_rewrite, 301 or 302 redirection) to make it into SE friendly URL. Now, we can move on web marketing or SEO facts for the website which you are going to promote in search engines. In the same way, many directory bots don’t crawl more than a couple directory levels deep. If the meat and potatoes of your site is deep within the site structure, you can count on those pages not being crawled or indexed quickly, if at all. Even if you have a great navigation structure and breadcrumbs in place, it is very hard on a directory server’s resources to have to crawl deeply into a website’s structure.Some useful questions to ask an SEO include: * Can you show me examples of your previous work and share some success stories? * Do you follow the Google Webmaster Guidelines? * Do you offer any online marketing services to complement your organic search business? * What kind of results do you expect to see, and in what timeframe? * What's your experience in my industry? * How long have you been in business? While SEOs can provide clients with valuable services, some unethical SEOs have given the industry a black eye through their overly aggressive marketing efforts and their attempts to manipulate directory results in unfair ways. Practices that violate our guidelines may result in your site being removed from the Google index. Here are some things to consider: * Be wary of SEO firms and web consultants or agencies that send you email out of the blue. You can expect to do a certain amount of education as to the nature of SEO and the kinds of results that can be achieved. You may find yourself gritting your teeth if you encounter one of those clients who expect to reach the top of the SERPs tomorrow. With a project like this, you need to have something to work towards, else how will you know when your work is complete? (Granted, the job of an SEO is never really complete, since SERPs are dynamic, but you get my point). Fonts and Headings Font size and color – Using tiny text isn’t easy for web visitors to read, and if they have to struggle to read your content, there is probably a good chance that they won’t even try. Further, many search engines give more weight to text that is bigger than text that is small. It’s also important to a web visitor that they can read the text without having to strain their eyes due to the color of the font or the background. If you're the SEO in charge of redesigning your client's web site, you'll want to ask lots of questions. Your client may not be able to answer them all off the top of his head. Still, if you want to do a good job, it's helpful to know as much about the site and your client's industry as you can. How competitive is the industry? Who are your client's main rivals? When was the site last redesigned, and by whom? What was done? Do you have a history of the site's traffic and conversions for at least the last several months? Think of those questions as just your starting point. It’s difficult also for your web visitor to read flashing, scrolling, or blinking text. Search engines tend to disregard these things as well, so avoiding this type of font behavior is usually best.Do not restrict yourself and be open minded in this area. You may think that most of the search is coming from 1 word keyword. However, it is wrong. Most people uses 2-5 words keyword phrases because they are more descriptive and yield precise results from search engines. In addition, think creatively and perform linguistics research can help you generate useful keyword phrases. Don't look upon a site's age as all bad, however. Sure, a site that hasn't been redesigned in a long time looks old, but it has something a newer site doesn't: trust. Google and the other search engines look at a site that's been around for several years in the same way that a bank looks at a customer with a very good credit history built up over time. When you combine that status with a great site redesign, you can achieve excellent results. Headings – The World Wide Web Consortium recommends using heading tags to structure an HTML document. through gives natural stopping and starting points in a web page, but also alerts a visitor to the various sections of the page. True SEO-friendly content is rich in not only keywords and phrases, but offers an easy read for the average Internet user. There’s a fine line to walk with search engines, and it’s important to make sure words appear frequently - but naturally - within text. For every 400 words, Yes, search engines use link analysis to determine directory rankings. The phiolosophy is that if an inbound link points to your site, your site must have some value. 6.Basic SEO: Tricks and Tips
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