Benefits of having a Blog page?

benfits-of-having-a-blog

We are often asked by our clients whether having a blog on their site is really a necessary.

As a business owner ourselves we have built a successful business in large part thanks to our blogs and content. I’ve seen firsthand the difference it makes in terms of Google ranking. We are a huge advocate of investing heavily in a content strategy, and that strategy begins with your company blog.

Below are some major reasons why having a blog is critical to a successful site:

1. Drives traffic to your website:

First, and most important a blog gives you the opportunity to create relevant content for your customers. Use this as a marketing tactic to drive traffic to your website.

Your business might be on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, or anywhere else. Posting links  – with relevant images – of your blogs article to your social sites, gives your social followers a reason to click through to your website.

Additionally, post inbound links directly in your blog articles, to drive traffic to specific landing pages of your website.

Think about how many pages there are on your website? Probably not too many. And think about how often you update those pages? Not that often, right?. Clients always ask me how are they meant to update their website once it’s already established and built. I mean how often can you really update your About Us page.

Blogging helps solve this problem.

Every time you write a blog, it’s one more indexed page on your website, which means it’s one more opportunity for you to show up in search engines and drive traffic to your website. It’s also one more way to reach out to Google and other search engines that your website is active, which means they will be checking in frequently to see what new content appears.

Blogging also helps you get discovered via social media. Every time you write a blog, you’re creating content that users can share on social networks, which help expose your business to a new audience.

blogging-drives traffic

 

2. Increases your SEO

Blogs do increase your SEO. Remember Google’s saying ‘Content is King’ and fresh content is still a key to beating your competitors in the search engine results page.

Always use keywords in your blogs. List out the keywords, tags, and categories you want your business to be found with. Use these words, and related words when writing your posts.

Whether you actively seek these out or not, blogging usually about your business will increase your search keywords.

Keywords and topics on your website are a helpful way in which Google find your site for these search related keywords.

3. Positions your brand as a industry leader

A well written blog demonstrates your company as the industry leader. By writing blogs that resonate with your market shows your knowledge, and your’e marketing skills for your business also. Your customers will benefit from learning what you provide them.

For example if you are a retailer you would write blogs about your products. Your customers would then get to know you as a knowledgelable source for the products they want.

You are also building trust with your customer. The more you can show them that you are experienced in your field, the more your consumer will trust your’e product.

The best websites answer common questions their customers have. If you’re creating content that’s helpful for your target market, it will help establish you as an authority in their eyes.

Establishing authority is not as sell-able as traffic and leads, but it’s powerful anyway, because at the end of the day, that’s what many of your blogs are.

In summary:

You can see by reading the above that the benefits of having a blog is very useful for anyone who wants to know an answer to a question. These days Google’s algorythym is becoming more and more about helpful information. You would have already see it taking action, if you type in a question in Google’s search engine you receive a bunch of links that answer those questions, so this is why blogging in very important, because ultimately it boosts your SEO.

September 25, 2017 Blogs Comments Off on Benefits of having a Blog page?

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Welcome to our blogs. Have a read through and let us know what you think.

September 21, 2017 Uncategorized No comments yet

What is UI Design?

What-is-UI-Design

What is UI (user interface) Design? is difficult to answer because of its large variety of misinterpretations. While User Experience is a mishmash of tasks focused on optimisation of a product for effective and enjoyable use; User Interface Design is its compliment, i.e. the look and feel, or the presentation and interactivity of the product. But it is easily and often confused by the industries that use UI Designers. To some extent that different job roles will often refer to the profession as something completely different (i.e.UX).

You will find perception of the profession that is alike to graphic design. Sometimes spreading to branding, and even front end web development as well.

If you look at an expert explanation of User Interface Design, you will mostly find descriptions that are in part the same to User Experience. Even mirroring the same structural techniques.

So what is the right answer? The conflicting answer is: Neither of them.

But both are close in minor ways. Like User Experience Design, User Interface Design is a all-round and challenging role. It is responsible for the transportation of a product’s research, development, content and layout into an appealing, guiding and responsive experience for a user. It is also a field that dissimilar to UX, is a strictly digital profession, as per how the dictionary defines it (as per below):

user interface
noun Computing
the means by which the user and a computer system interact, in particular the use of input devices and software.

Whether you choose UX design or UI design, it is important to understand how the other one works, and how to work with both of them.

Below are some of a UI designer’s key responsibilities:

Look and Feel:

  • Customer Analysis
  • Branding and Graphic Design
  • Design Research
  • Branding and Graphic Design
  • User Guides/Storyline

Interactivity and Responsiveness:

  • Interactivity and Animation
  • Implementation with Developer
  • UI Prototyping
  • Adaptation to All Device Screen Sizes

As a interactive and visual designer, the UI role is important to any digital interface and for customers a key element to trusting a brand. While the brand is never the responsibility of the UI designer, its translation to the product is.

A responsibility for “implementation” of the design with a developer is generally how UI have worked in the past, you should be aware that the lines are dim, as the term “Web Designer” (in short is a UI designer who can code) is being replaced by expertise of User Interface Designers. While UX has no need for coding, UI is a role that as time will  progress, will rely on it as part of building interactive interfaces.

September 11, 2017 Web design Comments Off on What is UI Design?

Google Sends Warnings for HTTP Sites

If you’re website is using HTTP at the start of the domain name you may get a warning notice from Google, they already have begun sending out warning notices to owners that their website will be flagged as a “non secure” in Google Chrome starting in October 2017.  Their first step in the plan is to display a “Not secure” label in the address bar.

So what does this mean for you?  If your website uses a form which includes things such as a comment form, Google can show the website as not being secure if you use the Google Chrome browser.  Google will also show this warning for ALL your pages when viewed in the Incognito mode.  If your website has no forms but is the sort of site that your users might prefer to visit via Incognito, then that website will be shown as not secure.

The is all set to take place in the beginning of October 2017, with the version 63 of Google Chrome, so you still have a month or so  to implement HTTPS for your site.

Some websites will receive these notices even if they are using HTTPS,  and this is because some owners use both the HTTP and HTTPS versions of the site verified in Google Search Console.  Even if the HTTP version is correctly re-directing to the HTTPS, Google still will send a warning notice.

This is what the notice looks like:

google-HTTP-warning-notice

Google Chrome’s long-term plan to mark sites with HTTP as insecure, also with the free Let’s Encrypt initiative is helping close the gap on the web’s remaining unencrypted sites.

August 24, 2017 Google, Web Comments Off on Google Sends Warnings for HTTP Sites

Why Is Website Maintenance Important?

Why Is Website Maintenance Important?

Your website is a very important part of your business. Not only does it bring you traffic, it also represents your business. This means that there are many reasons why you should be always updating your website. From constantly grabbing the attention of your visitors to improving your search engine rankings, frequently website updates might seem pointless, but they are far from it.

Retail shops are always updating their shop windows with latest offers and products. Even though you might not own a actual store, the same concept still applies to your website.

Corporate Image

Your website is a public reflection of your brand. A website which is not regularly maintained can lead to errors, broken links and outdated information and it can cause your business to decline over time. Frequently examine the look and feel of your website, update it to match your corporate image.

Make sure you leave the right impression for new visitors

A very important reason why maintaining your website is important is that it leaves a good impression on any new visitors. The website represents your business and is how many customers will see you.

When a user lands on your website you only have a few seconds to capture their trust. The best way to do this is to make sure your website is user friendly and more importantly, up to date.

Always give a reason for your customers to come back 

Another reason why you should keep your website up to date is that it gives previous visitors a reason to come back. If you happen to have a blog on your site that is regularly updated with new content, then you have better chances of visitors returning.

Many people will bookmark useful sites and will often check the site for updates. If you regularly provide your visitors with new content, then can easily generate recurring visits.

Improve Your SEO 

seo-graph

Another benefit of adding new content to your website is that it helps improve your SEO (search engine rankings). Google love new content. Whenever you update your site with new content, Google will crawl your site and boost your rankings.

If updating your website and adding new content leads to better search engine rankings and more visitors, then why would you not do it.

How Do You Maintain Your Own Website?

website-maintenance-1
Visitors and search engines love fresh content. The easiest way to profit from increased search engine rankings and
returning visitors is to update a blog or latest news. If you don’t have a blog on your website, then you should look into it.
A blog is an excellent way to keep visitors up to date with what is going on in the business, and your trade. In addition to this, it can also be used as a platform to promote and share original content. If you can give customers original content that they can’t find anywhere, then this is a sure way to get recurring visitors.

Deleting Spam Comments

delete-wordpress-spam

If you already have a blog, then the chances are you are get spam. The comments section on your blog is a way for a visitor to share their views and ideas about your content, but sometimes this feature can be misused.
There are many spam robots that crawl people’s website looking for blogs to comment on. These robots post comments on your blog in a bid to try and attract more visitors to their website. The easiest way to solve this problem is to disable comments, but comments can be important for many reasons, not only do they leave a good impression but they also help show what your users are interested in. To make sure your website is well maintained, you should regularly check your blog for any spam comments and then delete the inappropriate comments.

If a new visitor sees lots of spam comments within your website, then they may think your website is not trustworthy and go. It might sound weird that someone would leave over some spam comments, but the spam will significantly bring your businesses reputation down.

Other updates

Update_Guide

Aside from blogs, the rest of your site should also be updated. Think of it as monthly routine where you go through your website and check all your pages to make sure they are up to date.
If you’re own an e-commerce store, then you’ll want to check your products are up to date with the right photos and descriptions. Any new stock or products should also be added regularly.

Lastly, as a general rule, you should always check for content management system (CMS) and plugin updates monthly. We build all our sites in the very popular CMS platform named  WordPress, and the developers of the software regularly update it to add new features and fixes often.

These make your website more secure but they can also significantly improve the speed of your website. Although the updates aren’t very frequent, it’s best to check for these updates monthly.

DON’T HAVE THE TIME?

All websites need continuous monitoring, maintenance and upgrading so they give optimum performance and stay safe from hackers. But if your website does get hacked or goes down we are here for you to restore the site from clean/latest backup.

If you really don’t have the time to spare to keep your website updated, then it’s better to get a professional to look after it for you.

This way it ensures it gets all the care it deserves and everything possible to keep it healthy.

Here at DesignLab we offer a range of website maintenance packages that ensure your website is kept up to date. Whether you need new items adding to your website or existing ones being changed, we’re here to help. To find out more about our website maintenance packages, contact us for a free consultation.

 

August 10, 2017 Web Comments Off on Why Is Website Maintenance Important?

A quick guide in becoming a UX designer

UX-Designer

It seems more and more these days in a competitive market the importance of a UX designer is becoming more important and essential if any business wants to succeed.

The role of a UX designer is to be the voice of the user. The goal of UX designer is to make the experience of using the product or a service as easy as possible.

To achieve this UX designers must put themselves in the shoes of the customer, analyse the process they go through, and then come up with solutions to make the process easier by testing them with the end user.

Here is a a Four step process

UX design really is a simple process:

  1. Research  —  2. Analyse — 3. Design — 4. Test

Each step can be expanded on or each step can be bypassed depending on what the project is.

Step 1. Research

Start with the business

First, you need to understand what the business needs are, tip: Business needs rarely ever align with their user needs, and that’s good because our role is to fix that.

Start by asking key stakeholders what they want to achieve, and what metrics they are trying to target.

Hold a workshop and gather all the information you can.

Talk to the real users

First find out who the users are then divide them into groups.

Organise interviews with some people from each of the groups. Take notes and possibly bring along the designer who will be working on the project  so they get first hand experience of the users needs. Make it count, everything you say and do from now on will be based on this research.

Step 2. Analyse

This is where you take all your interviews and convert it into something you can use. Usually you would make personas or journey maps, but any kind of output can be used depending on what you need.

Personas

Take all your interviews and mark out the trends.

Take each question and mark it on a slider, happy on one end, and  frustrated users on the other.

You will see some trends on the sliders, the same users will possibly be clumped together. You can then create personas for all the users in that trend and write a story based on real stories.

Personas can be visual, you can use infographics to summarise their behaviour, wants and motivations.

A UX designer may often use personas to make lists of things they need, we call these ‘jobs to be completed’. The job to be complete is what we need to simplify to help the user achieve their goal.

Journey maps

Map out the whole journey the user will take, from before they even get to your site to when they leave the site and possibly someday return.

Take the user interviews and map them onto a timeline, use genuine quotes to show if they are happy or frustrated with the experience.

A bad experience can be named ‘pain points’. Your role is to fix those pain points.

For each pain point you come up with a small brief for what you need to do, we can call these ‘how might we’ and write down what we need to do in order to improve the experience for the user.

A journey map can be printed on and placed on a wall, and are useful for the entire group to see what areas the experience need improving.

Step 3. Design

Pull out some pens and paper, and start sketching experiences that would exceed the users needs. This is the most fun part of a UX design and ideas are best shared between people.

The quality of the sketches don’t matter. You need to do some sort of mapping, like a sitemap, storyboards, user flows etc. the idea is to show other people on the teams the experience users will have in a way they will understand.

Spend time talking through your work with anyone joining the project as it can be very hard to understand any outputs from a UX designer, keep it simple or else no one will use any of the research you gathered.

Step 4. Test

Last step, make a prototype of your answers.

Designer or develop the prototype to be as close to the real thing.

Test the prototype with users, this is called ‘user testing’. Use your personas to help you test if your new experience is better and what still needs fixing.

If you can, use the same users from the user research you did and conduct your testing, this will give you good feedback on your new solution.

Then make it real, and test it again when it’s live.

In Summary

The reason a UX designer can have so much say in a business and get paid really well is because they are responsible for connecting the users needs with the business needs.

UX design is still relatively new, there is no right or wrong way of doing things.

Keep sharp, most of what a UX designer does is pick the right processes for the right job.

August 1, 2017 Uncategorized, UX Comments Off on A quick guide in becoming a UX designer

The value of UX Design

the-value-of-ux

Any one can develop a website these days, what with platforms such as Squarespace and WIX it’s making it easier for any one even if they have no web experience to produce a website. However, whether that website works properly on mobile devices, looks professional is a different story. Yes, the internet is making it more harder for any one in their trade to compete with their online competition, but no matter how much cheaper your customers are getting their graphic or web design work done on an online site, there is no value like an designer who is experienced in their craft. Sure, making a WIX site is easy, but what happens when you run into a technical issue? Of course sites like WIX and Squarespace have online support, but how long do they take to get back to you? And they can’t always help.

More and more know because how easy it is to-do-it-yourself the importance of user experience and designing it correctly has been gaining more attention from businesses who aim to keep their customers happy.

In the past years many businesses have noticed the importance of UX design and are investing more and more into its research and development.

Whether it’s physical or digital, a product is should arouse both an intellectual and emotional response in its consumer based not only on the way it works but also how it feels and looks. Whether that experience is going to be a good one or a negative one is going to make a very big effect on your sales, and this is why UX design is so important.

Why does “X” mark the spot

UX is about two things only – the User and the Experience. It provides your user a positive experience, and they will reward you with their trust and their business. Businesses with highly effective UX have increased their revenue by 35%. This clearly shows the ROI of UX design.

If your product leaves your’e customer with a foul taste in their mouth, they will most likely take their business somewhere else. 95% of users reported that they stopped using an app due to poor performance, and 85% deleted an app as a result of having problems with it’s design or functionality. Studies show that 85% of online users believe that an remarkable customer experience is worth paying extra money for. With these figures like this, it is not difficult to understand why User Experience focused companies like Google, Apple, Adobe and Amazon are leaders in their fields.

Yes having a great product is important and necessary, but in today’s market it often is not enough to keep you ahead of the competition.

This is why UX design has proved to be a game changer. A good UX has been proven to earn the user interest. 50% of users say that arriving on a site that isn’t working well on a mobile is seen as a sign that the business does not care, and 55% said that a bad mobile experience made them less likely to engage with that same business in the future.

This principle extends beyond just mobiles; 40% of users will leave a web page if it takes more than three seconds to load, while 80% will then search for another site to complete their task.

Designing an experience

What about design? How important is the actual aesthetic property of your website when it comes to UX?

An experiment was conducted that tested relationships between a users perceptions of a computerised system’s beauty and then its usability. The outcome showed that the role the aesthetics play in design is a definitely a major one, and should be kept in mind at all times.

It seems safe to say that the business value of UX design is so important these days, you cant afford to ignore the importance of a highly skilled team of UX designers who use their expertise to craft the experience your users are going to transform and enjoy while pinned with your product.

With design being the focus on user experience, a business is forced to create for their customer. Then a relationship is formed and it grows, it bonds the customer with the product.

July 6, 2017 UX Comments Off on The value of UX Design

Updating Your Website Without Sacrificing Your SEO
We all need to keep up to date with web trends these days, and usually that means every three to five years you should consider redesigning your website. But often a client does not think what impact this will have on their SEO (if it’s optimised well to begin with).

Why should you consider SEO in a redesign?

In short, because you have a lot to lose. Let’s say your website’s ranking really well. Rankings are strong, organic traffic is flowing and revenue is growing. Do you really want to undo all that hard and expensive work?

However, by thinking strategically, you can take the opportunity to improve a site’s performance after a redesign.

SEO-ranking-graph

This diagram shows a steady increase in traffic followed (from the red circle) even during the re-indexing phase. If you do a redesign correclty, you won’t lose any traffic or rankings; in fact, you’ll gain them.

Below is some tips that can help you understand the test site being built and your current site from an SEO point of view. This is ciritcal when changing your website around.

Tip 1 – Think about your SEO

First thing is to think about SEO. Very often clients don’t stop to consider the impact SEO has changing their website. They chuck away valuable content from historical pages or completely change every single URL without redirecting the old ones.

This happens because they misunderstand how Google reads a website and how URLs hold credibility. It’s no fault of their own, it happens.

Tip 2 – Crawling the existing site

You should know what your site’s structure looks like, you will fail if you don’t. Grabbing it’s meta data and URLs is critical to identifying exactly what is changing and why.

How do I do that?

Your SEO crawl will give you a road map of what your site is currently set out. The best way to do this is to use a tool like Screaming Frog. Once you have the current site’s meta data and structure, you will know how to match with the new site.

Tip 3 – Auditing the old site

Free tools like Woorank will do, but we advise you to get your hands dirty so to speak, and manually do it yourself. There’s nothing like getting into the nitty gritty of your site to find any problems.

Why audit the site?

You need to know what search engines like and don’t like about your site. This helps you recognise any problems, but also enables you to see which areas must be retained.

What am I looking for?

Here are some tips to check. Using Screaming Frog, I advise checking the following:

  • Duplicate page titles
  • Missing H1 tags
  • Duplicate H1 tags
  • Multiple H1 tags
  • Missing meta descriptions
  • Missing page titles
  • Duplicate meta descriptions
  • Canonical tags
  • Canonicalisation
  • Broken internal/external links
  • Image alt text

You should also be checking for:

  • Robots.txt
  • Site speed and performance using Google’s PageSpeed Tools
  • Duplicate content (do exact match search “insert content” or use Copyscape)
  • Pages indexed by Google (do a site: command in Google)
  • Site speed and performance (here’s a tool to check)
  • URL structure
  • XML sitemaps
  • Pages indexed by Google

Tip 4 – Noindex you’re test site

If you’re working on your test site, you do not want Google to index it. If you have added new content, it will get indexed. So when the new site is ready to launch, the new content will have no value because it has been duplicated because of the index while you were working on it.

A site can be noindexed in two ways by your web developer.

If you have WordPress you can simply check the box that says: “Discourage search engines from indexing this site.” under the Settings tab.

wordpress-SEO-setting

This adds the following code in the <head> of every page:

You have a second option which is to block the site in the Robots.txt file. This is a little tricky however; which is why most CMS have a box-ticking option which is easier.

If your CMS doesn’t allow for this, you can put the following in your Robots.txt file:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

Tip 5 – Crawling the test site

You need to understand how your test site will be structured. Using a site crawler crawl the test site again to see how it looks in comparison to your current site.

What do to:

  1. Open the first crawl of your current site and make a copy. Click “Save+As” and name the file for example “Current Site Crawl for Editing”. This will be your editable copy.
  2. Then crawl the test site. Export the test site crawl and save this one as “Test Site Crawl”. Make a copy and name it “Test Site Crawl for Editing”— this is the one we’re going to use.
  3. Take the new created old site crawl (Current Site Crawl for Editing) and do a find and replace on all the URLs in a program like Excel. Then replace your domain name: “domain.com” with your test server’s domain: “test.domain.com”.
  4. Select all the URLs and copy them into a txt file. Save this one as the “Testing Crawl for Screaming Frog”. You should have the following files:
    • Current Site Crawl(xls)
    • Current Site Crawl for Editing (xls)
    • Test Site Crawl(xls)
    • Test Site Crawl for Editing(xls)
    • Testing Crawl for Screaming Frog (txt)
  5. Using  Screaming Frog, find the Mode in the menu bar and select List. The system will change, and you’ll be able to upload a .txt file.
  6. Locate your txt file (Testing Crawl for Screaming Frog) of all the URLs you just changed and load that into Screaming Frog. Then hit Start.
  7. If followed correctly, you will end up with all the URLs being crawled. If it didn’t, you have to go back and make sure you didn’t miss anything. You will need to allow the crawler to crawl blocked/noindexed URLs. Click Configuration and Spider. Then you’ll find a tick box that says Ignore robots.txt. You may need to tick this. On the same part in the tab called Advanced, you’ll see Respect Noindex; you may need to un-tick this, too. Have a look below at the example.

screaming-frog

Now download all the HTML files and save it as an Excel file. Name it “Final Crawled Test Site”. This can be the test crawl you’ll check later. But also, hold onto the very first crawl we did of the test site (Test Site Crawl).

You’ll have the following docs:

  • Current Site Crawl(xls)
  • Current Site Crawl for Editing (xls)
  • Test Site Crawl(xls)
  • Test Site Crawl for Editing(xls)
  • Testing Crawl for Screaming Frog (txt)
  • Final Crawled Test Site (xls)

Now you have the data in Excel format, and you can see what works on the test site. This allows you to understand what’s missing from the test site that is on the current site.

Tip 6 – 404 time

If your’e pages have a 404 error, it means that the page doesn’t exist anymore. So we’ll need to do one of two things:

  1. Create this URL on the test server.
  2. Redirect the old URL to the test server’s new URL.

Here’s an example of a 404:

404-error

 

What do to with a URL that isn’t on your current site?

Like with any page on your website, it has to be optimised correctly.

When you redirect pages to a new site you will lose around 10%-30% of your link equity. But you’re giving search engines the best opportunity to bring over your old site’s strong reputation.

 

Tip 7 – Checking all the additional checks

Rank check

A rank check measures how you’re site performs for a host of keywords in the search engines. You can use this data as a comparison for the new site. If things change, you can react and identify the problems when you check the results.

This is what to look out for:

If a keyword jumps from page 1 to page 10, you could have a problem. Look out for any big or unusual movements by checking the following:

  • Did the URL change?
  • Did you change any of the meta data?
  • Has the page lost all of it’s content?
  • Is there a redirect in place?
  • Does it have a noindex tag in place?

Content

Don’t delete anything you don’t need to. You might think your old blog posts are old and useless, but they are all adding to the credibility of your site. Without these, you’ll lose a chunk of SEO value.

Google Analytics code

Make sure you place your Google analytics code back in the <head> section of you’re site. It’s really important to check the e-commerce tracking and goals if you currently have those in place.

Unblocking the site

It’s time to check the new site to see if it’s allowing search engines to index it. Just do the reverse of blocking the site to what you did before . Whichever method you used to block it, just do the reverse. If you don’t do this it will create big problems.

In summary checklist

Here is a checklist to use that will help you run through it again.

tickThink about your SEO from the start of the website

tickCrawl the current site

tickAudit your existing site

tickStop the test site from being indexed

tickCrawl the test site

tickFind and replace URLs

tickCheck 404s on test site

tickOptimise all new pages

June 19, 2017 Google, SEO, Web design Comments Off on Updating Your Website Without Sacrificing Your SEO

Optimising your images

Optimising your images is the new way to boost your SEO because now Google are focusing on websites that load fast, and optimising your images is a sure way to make that happen.

Have you ever wondered the following….

  • Why is it that when I do a Google image search, my photos never show up?
  • Should I add “Alt Tags” to my images?
  • And what’s the difference between a JPEG, GIF and PNG?

1. Name Your Images Descriptively and in easy to read english

It’s easy to trail through hundreds of your product shots and keep the default file name the same as your camera provides. But before you continuing doing that, let’s discuss why that’s not a good idea.

When it comes to SEO, it’s really important to use acceptable keywords to help your webpage rank on Google. Creating a descriptive, keyword rich file name is absolutely necessary for image optimisation. Search engines not only crawl texts on webpages, but they also look for keywords within your image file names.

Let’s use this image as an example:

2012-Ford-Mustang-LX-Red

You could just use the name that your camera gives to the image such as DCMIMAGE12.jpg. But, it would be much better to name the file: 2012-Ford-Mustang-LX-Red.jpg instead.

Consider how your customers search for a product in Google. What naming patterns do you think they write when they search? In the example, car shoppers may search using the following terms:

  • 2012 Red Ford Mustang LX
  • Ford Mustang LX Red 2012
  • Red Ford Mustang LX 2012

A great habit to learn is to look at your website analytics, and monitor what phrasing patterns your customers use to searches. Then determine the most common naming patterns used, and apply those names to your images.

If you do not want to that descriptive, be sure to use good keywords when naming your images.

It’s worth you reading this Questions & Answers from seomoz.org to really understand how import naming files for the images on your website are. It can increase your on-page SEO, and help your website and images rank highly.

2. Optimise Your Alt Tags

Alt tags are a text alternative to an image when a browser cannot properly render them. Even if the image is rendered, when you hover over it with your mouse, you can see the alt tag text created for that image.

The alt attribute also adds SEO values. Adding an appropriate alt tag to images on your website can help your website get better ranking, it does this by associating keywords with images. Using alt tags is the best way for any e-commerce product to show up in Google images.

Let’s take a look at the source code of an alt tag:

this-is-an-alt-tag-SEO

The number one priority when it comes to image optimisation is to carefully fill out each alt tag for every product image on your website.

Here are some rules when it comes to alt tags:

  • Describe your images in English, just like you do for image file names. Clear and co-incise.
  • If you sell products that have a model number or serial number, make sure you use them.
  • Do not put too many unecessary words your alt tags (for example: alt=”ford mustang muscle car buy now best price”).
  • Don’t use alt tags for decorative images. Search engines may penalise you for over-optimisation.

Always do a check on your website from time to time. View the source of each pages and check to see if your alt tags are filled out.

3. Image Dimensions and Product Angles

One big trend these days is to show different angles of your product. If we go back to the Ford Mustang, you wouldn’t want to show just one shot of the car – especially if you want to sell it. It would be in your best interest to show a few shots of the interior, the rear, close ups of the wheel rims, etc.

And the best way to exploit these photos is to fill out your alt tags. And the way you would do that is by creating unique alt tags for each shot:

  • 2012-Ford-Mustang-LX-Red-Leather-Interior-Trim.jpg -> using the alt tag of: alt = ” 2012 Ford Mustang LX Red Leather Interior Trim “
  • 2012-Ford-Mustang-LX-Red-Rear-View-Air-Spoiler.jpg -> using the alt tag of: alt = ” 2012 Ford Mustang LX Red Rear View Air Spoiler “

The goal here is to add descriptions to your alt tag so that searchers will land on your website.

Providing Larger Images – Be Careful

Sometimes you may want to provide bigger views of your photos, which is user experience enhancement – but be careful.

Don’t place large images on your website and shrink the dimensions via the source code. This will not improve your page load time because the larger file size.

Instead, make it a smaller image and provide the option to view a larger image in a pop-up or to be displayed on a separate webpage.

4. Reducing the File Sizes of Your Images

Most people wait about 3 seconds for a website to load on a desktop or a mobile device. As I mentioned Google now use page load time as a factor in their ranking algorithm.

If you have images that slowly “scroll” down the screen and take over 10 seconds to load, you run the risk of the customer leaving your website.

When a customer goes to your website, it can take a while depending on how large your files are. In particular with images, the larger the file the longer it takes a webpage to load. 

If you can decrease the file size of the images on your webpage it will increase pageload speed, you have a much better chance of less people who visit your site will leave.

One way you can reduce image file size is by using the “Save for Web” command in Adobe Photoshop. When using this you want to adjust the image to the lowest file size while keeping an eye out for image quality.

photoshop-save-to-web

Don’t Have Photoshop? That’s OK

Not every one has Photoshop, so there are a number of online tools you can use. Adobe even has an online image editing application at photoshop.com. The online version doesn’t have all of the capabilities of the desktop version of Photoshop, but it covers all the basics of image editing and doesn’t cost too much.

Other online image editing tools we have suggested are:

  • Pixlr – is user-friendly, and also comes with a  free app for your phone.
  • PicMonkey – has been described as a “great photo editing tool”.
  • FotoFlexer– this allows you to work with layers!

GIMP is an open-source, free image editing software application that can be run on Mac or Windows. It does everything Photoshop can do, but can be a bit clunky.

How Big Should My Images Be?

Try to keep your image file size below 70kb. That can be difficult, especially for a larger image.

5. What Image File Type Do I Use for the Right Situation

There are three common types of files that we use to post images. These are JPEG, PNG and GIF.

Look at the 3 file types and how they affect the same image:

macbook-jpeg

 

JPEG images are an old file type and has become the standard image of the Internet for years now. JPEG’s are able to be compressed considerably, which results in quality images with small file sizes. You can see in the image above, the JPEG format provides nice quality and low file size.

macbook-GIF

GIFs are smaller quality images than a JPEG and are used for more simple things such as icons. GIFs do also support animation. It’s great to use GIFs for the plain images on a website (because they are just a few colours), but for a complex image and photo, GIFs are not the best solution, especially as you enlarge them.

macbook-PNG8

macbook-PNG24

 

Then there’s a PNG, it’s becoming more popular as the alternative to a GIF. PNGs support many colours , and they don’t degrade over time with re-saves like a JPEG. Even though the PNG file type is starting to be used more, the file sizes can still be a little larger than what you would find normally with a  JPEG.

See how the PNG-24 image is over three times bigger file size than the PNG-8 version. This is why you need to be careful when using PNGs.

Here is a guide to remember when choosing the right file format:

  • For most e-commerce platforms – JPEGs will be your best bet. Its because they provide the best quality at the smallest file size.
  • Never use GIFs for large images. The file size will be very large and there is no way to reduce it. Use a GIF for thumbnails or one colour images (for example a logo).
  • PNGs can be a great alternative to both JPEGs and GIFs. If you can only get product photos in a PNG format, try using PNG-8 over PNG-24. PNGs excel at simple decorative images because of their extremely small file size.

6. Use Image Site Maps

If your website uses image pop-ups or other flash ways to improve the overall shopping experience – Google image site maps will help you get your images noticed by search engines.

Web crawlers can’t crawl images that are not called in the webpage source code, so in order to let them know about these, you must list their location in an image site map.

google-image-sitemap

 

Google have many rules for image publishing to help your website rank better on the search engines that you can read here. You can also use the extension for images on Google Sitemaps to give Google more information about the images on your site, and doing this can assist Google in finding more images than what would be usually found through their search engine.

But using Sitemaps doesn’t guarantee that your images will be indexed by Google, you can increase the optimisation of your website, and especially the images by using Sitemaps. Google Webmaster Tools has many tips for correctly formatting the images for your Sitemap.

On Google Sitemaps it is important for you to add specific tags for all of your images. You can also create a separate Sitemap to list all your images. Follow these guidelines that Google suggests.

7. What is a Decorative Image?

Some websites have an bunch of images such as background images, buttons, and borders. Anything that is non-product related can be considered a decorative image.

A decorative image can add a lot of design appeal to your website, but they can result in large file sizes which in turn can mean slow load times. So you might want to consider taking a deeper look at your decorative images so that they don’t reduce your website’s ability to convert visitors into a buying customer.

Check the file sizes of all the decorative images on your web pages, and perhaps use a template that minuses file sizes for all of the pages on your website.

Here is some advice to cutting down the file sizes:

  • For any images that are borders or patterns, make them PNG-8 or GIFs.
  • Use CSS to create colours instead of using images. Use CSS styling as much as possible to replace any decorative images.
  • Shrink down those wallpaper-style background image as much as possible without ruining the quality.

These are just some helpful ways to boost the speed of your site, which in turn will help your SEO, which in turn will make you be easily found on search engines. Contact us anytime if you need further help.

June 1, 2017 Google, SEO Comments Off on Optimising your images

How Video Creates SEO Results

Video has become a very important feature for anyone who is concerned with a good SEO ranking, conversion rates and brand recognition. That’s pretty much all of us.

So how does video marketing affect your website’s SEO, and how can you use it in your content marketing strategy? Below are some key SEO tips, and some practices for using video to climb the search engine ladder:

  • Higher CTR
  • Lower bounce rates
  • Quality backlinks
  • Improved SERP rank

Videos Rank in SERPs

Google SERPs prioritise video results. Ranking on Google’s first page is a SEO priority. Pages with videos are 50 times more likely to rank on the first page of Google.

Why is video marketing more likely to rank than say plain text based content? There are a number of factors that influence ranking, one is the recent Google search algorithm update – Hummingbird – which prizes “quality content” over keyword optimisation. It’s all about “quality content”.

Google cares less about whether you have optimised each individual page on your site to using keywords, it’s more about whether your sites content answers the question presented by your  user.

80% of the video content served up in SERPs are informational videos. Results aren’t simply viral lolcat videos, but rather more useful content that answer a user enquiries. And this is where  video marketing is perfect tool for explaining your service easy and eye catching.

Here are some best practices for video SERP:

  • Keep Your Videos Short – Keep them around 4 – 5 minutes (attention span fall after 4-5 minutes).
  • Create Rich-Video Snippets – This is the thumbnail beside the description of the content on the page. Follow this guide to creating a video sitemap.
  • Transcribe Your Script – Google is good at parsing video content for meanings, transcribing text helps the spiders crawl your content for searcher relevance.

Video-Marketing-SEO-4-Key-Metrics

Videos Make Users Click

Study show that search results with videos have a “40% higher click-through rate.” This happens because of rich-video snippets beside search results on Google’s window.

These thumbnails show quality video content, and make results with embedded videos stand out in a text-only field.

YouTube automatically makes these thumbnails (because it understands how powerful snippets really are), but don’t rely on YouTube to do the work for you. Rich snippets from your YouTube channel can take your user directly to YouTube – not your website.

If you have worked hard to create a quality video, so sit back and enjoy the rewards by embedding the video directly to your website – like on a home page with a clear call to action, Vimeo and YouTube offer increased reach, but nothing beats the SEO benefits of a home page video marketing right on your site.

Here are some best practices for High CTR:

  • Embed Video Directly to Your Site – Don’t slow your site down by uploading video to your server.
  • Rich Video Snippets – Entice your users into clicking with an alluring preview.

Videos Can Make Your Site “Sticky”

The average attention span online is less than ten seconds. A high bounce rate is when people leave your website after viewing a page, this will hurt your site’s SERP ranking, and  people leaving isn’t the best way to sell a product. A engaging video is the easiest way to make your customer stay at your page.

Google introduced a new metric into their search ranking algorithm called “dwell time,” this monitors the amount of time a user spends on a website after click-through from the SERP. The longer the user spends on a website, the more likely the content is relevant. Google gives relevant websites more weight via a “Page Authority.”

Page Authority

Visitors who view a video stay two minutes longer and are 65% more likely to buy than other site visitors.” Combine a high time with a low bounce rate, and you’ll have a amazing one-two SERP ranking pull.

Here are some best practices to reduce a bounce rate:

  • Embed Video “Above the Fold” – The fold is the imaginary line where a user has to scroll to see more content. On most web browsers it’s around 550 – 600 pixels.
  • Make Sure You Use Accurate Video Titles – Don’t trick users with misleading headlines. No one likes being misled, and if they feel betrayed, they will never return.
  • Panic Not – A 50% bounce rate is ok.

Videos Can Build Links

Having a video compared to just text will nearly triple the average number of linking sites. Video generate links.

You see people are the ones creating links to your content – not the bots – which mean people love video. Content we create is for the user.

We live in a world where articles get skimmed, videos are lanterns of conciseness, and also a signal of intent that says yes, I want to communicate something to you. This “content” is going to be something you will enjoy. Videos are easy to consume, and that is why they generate audiences.

There is a saying “A video is worth 1.8 million words”. If a picture is worth a thousand words, and a video shoots at 30 frames per second, so a 60-second video really does have the equivalent of 1.8 million words.

People like video because they are useful. People don’t share content that is rubbish. So, to get the success you’re looking for, it’s really important that you really think about who you want to share the video with.

Video can communicate useful information easily, they allow people a chance to sample the content before committing to reading lengthy and sometimes boring content, and a quality video with a specific marketing goal creates high backlinks to your site.

Here are some best practices for Link-Building:

  • Embed Your Video – Don’t just add a link to YouTube because it won’t help your SEO.
  • Focus The Video on a Single Topic – Keep it simple, but entertaining.
  • Create High Quality Video – A Amateur video can make you look unprofessional, and that’s bad for business.

Quality video will improve the way you approach SEO. That in itself is worth more than all the search engine tips you can find.

May 16, 2017 SEO, Video Comments Off on How Video Creates SEO Results
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