e-Commerce Archives - Page 4 of 5

Small Business Websites that Work

July 9, 2009 by Roy Johnson

practical guide to getting started in eCommerce

If you want to develop small business websites using eCommerce, this is an overview of all the things you will need to take into account. Sean McManus starts out by pointing to the new approaches required when doing business electronically. Your customers will expect instant responses; web sites must deliver up-to-date and accurate information; you need to make yourself and your products and services easily accessible. He doesn’t go into much technical detail – which is probably a good thing, given that so much is available elsewhere.

Instead, he provides a strategy overview punctuated by thumbnail case studies. It’s a list of Good Ideas for maximising the relationship between you and your customers – actual and potential. Planning a site and creating the content; integrating the site with your business; and the advantages and disadvantages of trying to do it all yourself.

He puts a lot of store on learning from good examples, and there are detailed analyses of well designed ecommerce sites – pointing out how and why they are successful.

He points out free content and tools where they are available, covers the important details of domain names and hosting, and offers a checklist of what he calls the ‘sixteen crimes of Web design’. These include pointless animations and splash screens, cliched graphics, ‘under construction’ notices, and poor layout.

There’s not as much on affiliate programs and credit card handling as I would have expected, but he makes up for this with plenty on site promotion and search engine optimisation.

This will make a good primer for anybody who wants to make a serious bid in the world of eCommerce within the limited budget of a small enterprise. You will probably need additional help with the details, but this offers you an excellent overview.

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Sean McManus, Small Business Websites that Work, London: Prentice Hall, 2001, pp.202, ISBN: 0273654861

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Speed Up Your Site

July 1, 2009 by Roy Johnson

tips and techniques for improving download times

According to Andrew King, the best way to get people to your site and keep them there is to provide speed, feedback, clear navigation, and fun. His new book Speed up your Site is essentially a series of guidance notes and techniques for shaving every ounce of excess fat from your web pages. This means trimming everything which is not necessary, shortening every bit of code, and compressing the pages wherever possible. It’s intermediate level technically, but anybody with a web page or two could learn something from what he offers – and his instructions are clearly written and well illustrated.

He starts out with a chapter of evidence to support the notion that “without feedback, the length of time that users will wait for web pages to load is from 8 to 12 seconds” – though in days where people are increasingly on broadband, these figures seem a bit high to me. One of the novel concepts he introduces is the idea of ‘flow’ – a state of being when we are at one with the activity at hand. What this means in Web terms is that we will go back to those sites where we get rapid feedback.

It becomes really interesting when he embarks on HTML optimisation. Since most people have sites written in HTML, this advice is very useful in showing you how to minimise code and shrink pages.

Every byte counts – Think fast and small

Next he shows how to update pages from HTML to XHTML as well as how to deal with style sheets. He shows how to minimise file sizes as well as how to make the most of the latest CSS-2 conventions, such as replacing JavaScript with CSS-2 rollovers, and how to compress the instructions in the code.

For those who want to tackle really advanced techniques, he shows how JavaScripts can be compressed for speed and even scrambled (obfuscated) for security. He even shows his principles at work in a series of site make-overs.

The latter parts of the book deal with how to optimize graphics and minimize the size of multimedia files, and there’s a very good chapter on different forms of file compression.

For those like me who are a bit intimidated by the more advanced strategies, he also has lots of advice on improving your chances with the search engines by choosing meta-tags and keywords that count.

This is an excellent book for intermediate to advanced users – people who already have a web site, but who want to make it more efficient. Be prepared for a lot of work – but he shows you clearly what to do.

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Andrew B. King, Speed up your Site: Web Site Optimisation, Indianapolis (IN): New Riders, 2003, pp.496, ISBN: 0735713243

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Subject to Change

July 9, 2009 by Roy Johnson

creating products and services for an uncertain world

This book is about design theory for the digital age, and aspires to be read alongside Viktor Papanek’s Design for the Real Word and Donald Norman’s The Design of Everyday Things or his ‘revised’ views in Emotional Design. It’s written by four guys from Jesse James Garrett’s company, Adaptive Path, and draws heavily on their work in what they call ‘experience design’. They are challenging conventional wisdoms of commercial practice in the light of the new digital possibilities. For instance, piling more and more features into a product may not be a good thing – as users of VCR machines will confirm. Neither will building a novelty if nobody has a use for it – as the Segway proved. Subject to Change proposes radical alternatives.

They suggest that designers must learn to empathise with the people whose interests they wish to serve. They should forget about consumers and learn to embrace the fact that the Customer is King. Their arguments stray into fields of business management, economics, and sales strategies – but they come back in the end to what these factors mean for design.

If there is a hidden sub-title to this work it’s “What is experience design?” – because the main thrust of their arguments is that whilst many companies have learned how to deliver a product, few of them have realised the importance of offering a rich and gratifying experience for their customers.

If there is a weakness, it’s a slightly Utopian notion that large businesses would allow experience design solutions policy to reach down to lower levels of company employees. It might be true that a postman or a sales clerk could offer a valuable suggestion for improving customer satisfaction – but can you imagine the directors of Royal Mail, British Gas, or – come to think of it – the government paying any attention? But of course, they would argue that this is the whole point of what they’re saying. It’s a shift in culture that’s required.

They are (quite rightly) great believers in the advantages of prototyping. James Dyson created more than 5,000 versions of his bagless vacuum cleaner before he came up with the definitive model. In fact they miss the opportunity to stress the huge advantages of prototyping in the digital world. A web site can be updated or remodeled unlike physical products such as cars or refrigerators, at virtually zero cost in no time at all by re-jigging a style sheet (CSS) or a content management system (CMS).

They are also advocates of ‘losing control’ – that is, giving customers (and even your competitors) access to tools to create their own experiences. The Internet world is littered with examples of companies who have made millions by giving away their product [Google, Linux, Mozilla]. It seems counter-intuitive, but that’s the way digital commerce works.

To conservatives, many of these ideas will seem quite impractical; but to anybody with even half a foot in the contemporary world of digital technology, they will seem like roadmaps to a New Future, employing methods which you might already be using – such as ‘managing with less’.

The latter part of the book becomes quite inspirational as they spell out their concept of ‘The Agile Manifesto’. This is a method of design and product development which does almost the exact opposite of conventional notions (which they call the ‘Waterfall Approach’). The only problem was that this section doesn’t carry any references to secondary sources – so it’s not possible to follow up their suggestions with any further reading.

Individuals and interactions	not	processes and tools
Working software	not	comprehensive documentation
Customer collaboration	not	contract negotiation
Responding to change	not	following a plan

The authors all work for the same firm (Adaptive Path) and there’s quite a lot of unashamed trumpet-blowing about their success which has drawn down severe criticism from some reviewers. But if you can stomach this (or ignore it) the book offers some useful pointers in the world of design theory and the New eCommerce.

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Peter Merholz et al, Subject to Change, Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly, 2008, pp.178, ISBN: 0596516835

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The Art of SEO

October 31, 2010 by Roy Johnson

Mastering Search Engine Optimization

The Art of SEO seeks to explain an arcane issue. Search Engine Optimization is the art of getting more visitors to a web site. You can do this in a number of ways: by making it look more attractive, advertising its existence, or persuading more people to make links to it from their own sites. But the number one method which beats all of these put together is to make it come higher in Google search results. If somebody types washing machines into a Google search box and your site Wash-o-Matic comes up first, the chances are you will get more visitors. All you need to do is construct pages that Google will rank more highly than all your competitors – and this five hundred page compendium explains the equally large number of things you need to know to achieve it.

The book starts with a complete explanation of how search engines work, how they spider sites, and what they do with the information they gather. The same principles apply to all search engines, but the authors can be forgiven for concentrating almost all of their attention on Google, so predominant has it become. Quite apart from all the very technical matters of keywords and search algorithms, there’s a splendid chapter on creating a search engine friendly web site. This covers sitemaps, information architecture, site structure and navigation – all aimed at maximizing the effectiveness of every single page on a site. And you probably do need to start thinking of your site in this way – because that’s how your visitors will arrive, via a single page.

There are lots of free tools available – the best being at webmasters.google.com – but be prepared to go into a lot of technical detail if you wish to optimize your pages. I sat down and went through a number of the recommended steps, and after a while felt like scrapping my site and starting again from scratch. But in fact it’s very unlikely that any site starts out from a state of complete efficiency: they need to be tweaked and evolved to reach this condition. Fortunately on the issue of information architecture, many sites are now run from a content management system that will do the spadework for you. But it still pays to be aware of the underlying principles.

There are lots of subtle and complex issues – ‘keyword cannibalization’, ‘longtail of search’, and ‘thin affiliates’ – and something that had not occurred to me before – ‘self plagiarism‘. Two versions of the same page, even if they are on different parts of a site performing different functions, are dangerous as far as your rankings are concerned for two reasons. The first is that they are regarded by Google as duplicate material and are therefore given lower rating. The second is that the two pages are competing against each other for visitors, and Google will not know of any way to give priority to one of them.

The issue of creating, exchanging, and marketing links is complex almost beyond belief – but the principles on which the page ranking algorithms work is well explained. However, be warned that they are always ‘evolving’ – that is, changing. There’s also a warning on dubious promotional practices and an explanation of why many ‘guaranteed ranking improvement’ schemes aren’t worth a bean. The advice is to ignore all gimmicks, shortcuts, and sharp practice. Concentrate instead on producing lots of good quality content:

Content is at the heart of achieving link building nirvana

There’s an interesting discussion of how ‘link juice’ is generated, and some rather hair-raising warnings about link marketing. To stay on the safe side of Google acceptability policies, you are advised to run an extremely tight and clean ship indeed. Even some of the most innocent-seeming strategies for boosting the popularity or ranking of your pages can result in search engines doing the exact opposite, downgrading your page rankings behind the scenes – unbeknown to you.

In terms of promotion every course imaginable is examined – Google vertical search, local search, image, product and news search, plus all the well known social media services – Twitter, MySpace, Flickr, YouTube, and so on. To do this as thoroughly as suggested would become a full time job for most site owners, but it’s possible to pick and mix, choosing those opportunities that will best suit your own business.

This leads to the art of SEO ‘campaigns’ in which goals and objectives are closely specified, then the results tracked, measured, and analysed. At this point you are dealing with the sharp end of analytics, and you need a combination of IT skills and commercial single-mindedness to stay the course.

The scariest part of all comes last. What do you do if somebody steals your site’s content? Or even worse, if a competitor reports you to Google and asks for your site to be de-listed? Both of these things can easily happen. Fortunately there’s guidance on how to deal with such situations – plus enormously long lists of things to avoid in order to stay out of trouble. These are all the seemingly innocuous tricks people use to increase their site rankings, such as ‘repurposing’ material from other people’s sites, embedding keywords in hidden text, buying popular keywords that are not related to the publisher’s site, using ‘entry pages’, and so forth. The advice – as ever – is to avoid these easily detectable tricks and stick to producing rich original content.

This is one of O’Reilly’s masterful publications that covers a single but enormously complex subject in a thorough and authoritative manner. It’s written by experts in the field of site promotion, and even though several authors are involved it has a consistent tone and approach that makes it both clear and surprisingly readable.

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Eric Enge et al, The Art of SEO: Mastering Search Engine Optimization, Sebastopol (CA): O’Reilly, 2010, pp.574, ISBN: 0596518862

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the eBay survival guide

May 22, 2009 by Roy Johnson

how to make money on eBay – and avoid losing your shirt

I rarely talk about computers when socialising – otherwise you easily get branded an IT bore. But I was at a dinner party recently with neighbours where it suddenly turned out that half the table were trading on eBay! There are amazing bargains to be had. It turned out that we were eating off antique plates the hostess had bagged to match up with family heirlooms. But for tender mortals like you and me, there needs to be some hand-holding through the jungle of bids, deadlines, and prospective bidding. That’s where guidance manuals such as eBay the smart way, eBay Hacks and the eBay survival guide come in.

Michael Banks is an experienced trader with twenty years of eCommerce experience, and he talks you through the basics in a friendly and encouraging manner. First he gives a clear account of the huge variety of services, downloads, and support materials at the eBay site, then explains how the auctions (and the sales) actually work . There are lots of different ways of trading, and he covers them all.

Then he shows you how to find things using eBay’s powerful search engine. This includes neat tricks such as including plurals and deliberate mis-spellings in your search terms.

He deals with the central issue of ‘How much is it worth?’ – which is a much easier question to ask than to answer. His advice is that you need to cross-check with other auctions of the same object; look into price guides; and track what other people are searching for and buying.

Selling items is a more complex business than buying – not because of eBay, but because more of your own time is tied up in handling and posting stock to customers. There are also lots of different ways to set a selling price: you can have a minimum, a reserve, and a buy-it-now price.

He shows you how to describe, display, and illustrate the goods you want to sell. This might sound fairly simple – but you’ve got to remember that you need to stand out from thousands of other sellers, and you’ve got to be completely accurate, otherwise you might get negative feedback.

eBay has a fairly detailed system of resolving complaints and offering protection for both buyers and sellers. If you’re worried about getting into difficulties, he explains quite clearly how to solve problems.

As a buyer, if you really have your heart set on securing a bargain, you might need to get into the skills of bidding at the last possible minute – or ‘sniping’ as it is known in the trade. Once again, he shows you how to do it, and even how to outwit other people who may be doing the same thing.

He finishes by showing you how to recognise scams and misleading descriptions of products for sale. Thanks to eBay’s gigantic database of information on its buyers, sellers, and the history of all their transactions, it’s possible to locate all the information you need to protect yourself.

It’s quite true that some people make a full time living just buying and selling on eBay. If you fancy putting your toes into the waters of eCommerce, this would be an excellent place to start.

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Michael Banks, the eBay survival guide, San Francisco: No Starch Press, 2005. ISBN: 1593270631

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The Long Tail

May 21, 2009 by Roy Johnson

how endless choice is creating unlimited demand

Chris Anderson is the editor of WIRED magazine. This book started as an article there, took off, and was expanded via seminars, speeches, and further research. It has now become one of the most influential essays on the new sCommerce. Anderson’s notion is relatively simple, but its implications profound. He argues that because the digitisation of commerce allows more people into the trading arena, and because minority goods can be made available alongside best-sellers, the consumer therefore has a much wider choice and cheaper prices. This gives rise to a new phenomena – niche markets – also known in marketing-speak as the ‘long tail’. This is the part of the commercial results graph where returns begin to flatten out and slope towards zero.

But – and this is a very big BUT – in the new digital world they don’t slope off completely. And if you add up all the income from these many tail end transactions, it can be more than the total sales from the Short Head part of the graph.

Once you have grasped these basic issues, the lessons are clear. The profit is to be made in shifting bits, not atoms, plus lower overheads means more profit, because you can sell more. Much of this is possible because the price of electronic storage has now dropped almost to zero, and digital distribution has removed transport costs – as well as making delivery immediate. A physical bricks-and-mortar store has limited shelf space to stock goods, but Peer-2-Peer file-sharers make the downloaders’ options almost limitless.

The only way to reach all the way down the Tail—from the biggest hits down to all the garage bands of past and present—is to abandon atoms entirely and base all transactions , from beginning to end, in the world of bits.

Much of the new digital economy is amazingly counter-intuitive. Amazon for instance has allowed its own competitors to sell their goods on its site. The net result – more profit for Amazon, and the rise of the small second-hand book trader – the very businesses people thought would be put out of work by online trading.

Other positive elements in the new digital economy are the rise of reader reviews and recommendations; the back catalogue becomes valuable again; and new niche markets become available for more buyers.

Anderson looks at the technological history which has made the long tail possible, using a typical Amazon purchase as a model: postal delivery service, standard ISBN numbers, credit cards, relational databases, and barcodes. Of course Amazon’s genius in its latest phase is it gets other people to hold all the stock and fulfil the orders.

He’s a great believer in reputations and taste being formed by social media – the YouTube and MySpace worlds in which personal recommendations and fan reviews help forge best-sellers more than any amount of advertising hype.

There are lots of interesting nuggets thrown out as he makes his way through the socio-economic implication of all this. Such as for instance the fact that Google searches counteract the tyranny of the New over the well-established. That’s because they rank pages by the number of incoming links, which favours those which have had the time to acquire them.

Even though he goes into some economic theory, the study remains accessible and readable throughout – largely because he uses everyday examples with which most readers will be able to identify: the purchase of music CDs, DVDs of films, and supermarket food purchases.

This is a really inspiring book, and a must for anyone remotely connected with the online world. Even if some of his estimations and predictions might be overstated, it offers a glimpse into processes taking place that will change the way we think about business and technology. Time and time again, I thought “Yes! I’ve already started doing that!” – ordering more books from Amazon’s marketplace traders, buying out-of-print titles at knockdown prices, exploring new music, and looking out for recommendations on the new social media. I would rank this book alongside Nicolas Negroponte’s 1996 study Being Digital as a seminal influence for the decade in which it is published.

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Chris Anderson, The Long Tail, London: Random House, 2006, pp.238, ISBN: 184413850X

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The Smashing Book

January 22, 2010 by Roy Johnson

glamorous illustrated guide to modern web design

The Smashing Book is an offshoot of a web site that offers daily, sometimes twice daily articles on the very latest trends in web design. Some are about graphics and getting the best visual effects; some are tutorials on the latest developments in cascading style sheets; and others are on the golden rules for success as a freelance web designer. In other words, if you want to keep abreast of what’s happening in web design, it’s a site you should have on your favourites list.

Spurred on by the success of the site in the last year or so, the owners have decided to publish a book which encapsulates all their best design principles. I immediately thought it would be a collection of the ‘best of’ articles they have published. But no, it’s more a condensation of their general wisdom – and is much better for that. A chapter on ‘Best Design Features 2009’ would be out of date before the book came into your hands. .

As the authors say ‘The book contains no lists of links or aggregated content. It has ten carefully prepared, written, and edited stories that are based upon topic suggestions and wishes of Smashing Magazine’s readers’. All the links and resources are available online.

The advice is pitched at what I would call intermediate-to-advanced level. It’s aimed at web designers, doesn’t include any coding details, and focuses on notions of good practice. Elegant solutions for common problems are offered on almost every page. The book has also been written by a group of professional designers – so they know what they’re talking about.

The first chapter deals with the subtleties of interface design, then the next does the same thing with style sheets. They cover fundamental topics such as page size, base fonts, interactivity via links, and best screen colours. It reminded me of Yale University’s excellent Web Style Guide which takes a similar approach of concentrating on general design principles.

They cover fixed page width versus fluid pages and even fluid grid layout systems. Some of these techniques (such as ‘text-zooming’) require both a knowledge of CSS and some mathematical calculations to get the proportions right. There’s a rock-solid chapter on typography which goes through all the basic details of presenting text on screen and ends by showing how good typography in page layout can be seen as a form of user interface design.

On usability the point is made again and again that everything should be subordinated to the user’s needs – and these might not be the same as the designer’s preferences. The chapter on colour profits from the book’s high quality production values, and site optimization has plenty of free downloadable software listed to analyse your site and improve its performance.

The later sections on branding and marketing are full of advanced promotional strategies, some of which will cost you money or time – or both. Even blogging or Twittering take time if you hope to develop a regular following.

The last part of the book is in many ways the most fascinating. It’s a forum of specialist web designers answering questions on day-to-day business strategies – how to get started, what they see as the latest developments, what software to use, and favourite approaches to design. I was delighted to read that so many of them recommended the .same content management system I have just chosen for my latest project (WordPress) and speaking as both a designer and a client of agencies, their advice struck me as sound.

Smashing Magazine is an interesting success story in its own right, and I was glad to see that the co-owners included a chapter on its genesis. There was no magic formula for its success. They stuck to design principles in which they believed, expected little, and worked hard. The site succeeded because they delivered high quality content on a regular basis – meaning an essay length illustrated tutorial almost every day.

The only thing they seem to have done wrong is not make their book available via Amazon – but you can order it directly here.

Sven Lennartz and Vitaly Friedman, The Smashing Book, Smashing Media: Lubeck, 2009, pp.311, ISBN: B003CH11BU

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Web Site Marketing Makeover

July 25, 2009 by Roy Johnson

how to make your Web site more usable – on a budget

Marcia Yudkin is offering here the sort of tips on Web site ‘usability’ made famous by Jakob Nielsen – but she does it in a gentler and less challenging manner. Few of the suggestions she makes in Web Site Marketing Makeover require any expenditure – just energy and intelligence. This is the latest title from TopFloor Publishing – who specialise in books which offer geek-free, common sense advice to people working on a budget. It will be ideal for people who want to improve an existing web site – and for those designing one who want to make it effective.

She goes into the fine details of Web enterprise – starting from such fundamental issues as the name of the site, the appearance of the home page, and the number and size of the items on it. All her suggestions are designed to promote maximum usability and user-oriented design. She is a supporter of the approach taken by Nielsen, Edward Tufte, and Steve Krug. She describes how to create useful navigational links: how to name them, group them logically, and display them in a way which will attract users without making the page ugly.

There’s an interesting chapter on how to create the writing which is going to do the bulk of the work of conveying what you have on offer to your visitors. Yudkin is drawing on her experience as an advisor to a wide variety of businesses, and the examples she cites range from non-profit-making organisations, individual entrepreneurs and consultants, to big organisations such as finance companies and e-commerce giants.

Almost every page carries screenshots showing negative as well as positive examples to illustrate the advice she offers – and she is brave enough to talk you through her own makeovers of commercial sites.

For those interested in hard e-commerce, there is plenty on forms, subscription systems, payments, and how to build the confidence and trust of the customer. But typical readers are likely to be those working to a budget – and they will appreciate her pointers towards free resources in every section. These really are impressive in their range – free content, software, services, graphics, fonts, advice – even free e-commerce shopping trolleys.

This is another excellent addition to TopFloor’s Poor Richard series – worth it alone for the superb annotated listing of recommended books and Web resources.

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Marcia Yudkin, Poor Richard’s Web Site Marketing Makeover, Lakewood CO: TopFloor Publishing, 2001, pp.249, ISBN: 1930082169

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Website Optimization

July 1, 2009 by Roy Johnson

speed, search engine, and conversion rate secrets

Andy King scored a big hit in 2003 with his first book Speed Up Your Site. It’s a guide which still has its own live web site where you can analyse the effectiveness of your web pages. His latest magnum opus Website Optimization goes way beyond that in scope and depth. It’s a guide to maximising every aspect of a website and its performance. It’s an amazingly practical manual, with page after page of ideas, suggestions, and strategies for getting your pages more widely known and read.

On the whole, it’s not too technical, and he supplies snippets of code only when necessary. All the tips are within the grasp of anyone who is used to running a web site, and along the way he explains the principles of search engine optimization (SEO) as well as briefing you on how SEs treat your site. This is an up-to-date account of how search engines such as Yahoo and Google rank your pages and deal with search requests. He also presents real-life case studies in which he shows ‘before and after’ makeovers of professional sites. These are most instructive in that the ‘before’ pages look attractive and professional enough – until their underlying weaknesses are analysed and rectified. The improvements give what are claimed as up to fifty times more site visitors per day, and in the case of a cosmetic dentist the need to employ more staff and move to bigger offices in Philadelphia.

The first half of the book deals with search engine marketing optimization, which can be expensive as one enters the world of paid advertising. But the second concentrates on things which anyone can do and afford – making pages smaller, lighter, and faster by trimming off the surplus fat. In an age of faster and faster broadband connections, web users are simply not prepared to wait more than a couple of seconds for a page to appear – so you’ve got to make important pages lean and speedy:

Web page optimization streamlines your content to maximise display speed. Fast display speed is the key to success with your website. It increases profits, decreases costs, and improves customer satisfaction (not to mention search engine rankings, accessibility, and maintainability).

All of these issues are dealt with in detail – and I particularly liked the fact that he was prepared to repeat some of the techniques when they occurred in different contexts. It’s not always easy to grasp some of these technologies in one simple pass. Especially as – in the case of optimizing images – he explains no less than sixteen possibilities for cutting file size and speeding up downloads.

He’s also keen on the optimization of style sheets and shows an amazing variety of techniques for creating what he calls ‘CSS Architecture’. Here too there are no less than ten strategies explained which offer cleaner, tighter, coding and the use of structural markup to beat browser peculiarities and rendering delays.

Most of his explanations are clearly articulated, but occasionally he lapses into less than elegant repetition and jargon, which could deter the inexperienced:

By converting old-style nonsemantic markup into semantic markup, you can more easily target noncontiguous elements with descendant selectors.

Fortunately, this sort of thing only happens occasionally.
There are some very nifty tricks for creating buttons and rollover techniques using style sheets, which saves the time to download a graphic files button, and thus once again speeds up page rendering.

He puts in two chapters on advanced web performance and optimizing JavaScipt and Ajax on your site which I have to admit went beyond my technical competence. But then it’s back to terra firma with understanding the metrics of your site’s performance – that is, knowing how to analyse the statistical data returned by website analysers such as Google’s Analytics and WebTrends.

I’ve never been able to understand before what page ‘bounce rate’ was until it was explained here – and I was astonished when I saw the results from some of my own pages!

As the search for more detailed information and for planning campaigns goes on – so the process becomes more like a science. There are graphs and formulae scattered around these pages to prove this. It’s the same for Pay Per Click advertising (PPC). All I can say is that if you are in this league, Andy King is your friend, and his advice is here thick on the ground to help you.

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Andrew King, Website Optimization, Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly, 2008, pp.367, ISBN: 0596515081

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WordPress Search Engine Optimization

May 23, 2011 by Roy Johnson

tips on settings, plugins, and page tweaking

WordPress SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the art of improving the quality of web pages in order to increase their rankings in search engines – and thereby obtain more site visitors. And it is an art, because despite the mathematical complexity of the algorithms used by Google and others to calculate page rankings, there are many variable features which decide the ranking of a web page. This means that experience and fine judgement are required in deciding which are most important. That’s true even for WordPress, which has plenty of ib-built assistance on SEO.

Nevertheless, there are basic principles that can be followed, and this manual offers a guide to what’s required. The first part of the book is an explanation of how SEO works – the manner in which search engines measure the value of your web pages; what information about them they store; and most importantly, which features of your pages can be tweaked so that they will receive a higher rating. This is all delivered in a thorough, clear, and jargon-free style.

Michael David covers the main content of your site, how pages are built, and how its navigation is arranged. It’s very reassuring to have the basics explained – particularly because of the ambiguous terms WordPress uses for its features. You need to know the difference between a ‘post’ and a ‘page’, even though they both look the same. And it’s helpful to learn that an ‘excerpt’ of a post only becomes a chunk of your page if you don’t fill in any text during the creation process. If there’s nothing in the excerpt box Google will grab the first 55 words of the page – and this will create duplicate material, which search engines penalise. With clever SEO however, the excerpt can be used as the summary of a post – or even an advert for it, using key words.

Michael David claims that the issue of key words is the crucial part of SEO. There are plenty of free sites and software to help you determine the search terms customers are using to locate the products or services you have to offer. The important point here is to put on one side the terms you use, and look at the terms your customers choose.

If there’s a weakness in Michael David’s approach it’s that in the practical examples he creates for discussion, he repeatedly chooses local businesses. ‘Denver Air Conditioning Units’ might be an easy company to get to the top of the search results – because you are limiting the reach of your web site to only that city area. But a company called ‘H.P Lightbrown Ltd’ that sells paper technology or architectural design services to a worldwide audience is a different matter. Nobody is going to search on the company name and you are competing with similar businesses throughout the world.

Many of the topics he covers are amazingly simple to effect – especially with all the help that WordPress offers – but they require careful thought. For instance a post contains a title, a permalink (URL), a slug, a description, an ‘excerpt’, and of course key words. All of these should be as brief as possible, but – here’s the rub – they all need to be slightly different to avoid repetition, for which your pages might be penalised.

There’s a short section on Google Analytics, explaining the information they feed back from spidering a site. This would have been more useful if it contained some practical examples of how this information could be used to tweak pages and increase their rankings.

He also includes a good chapter on writing the content of web pages with SEO in mind – the importance of being succinct and accurate, and how to include keywords without undue repetition. It’s all excellent advice – though it has to be said that this very little to do with WordPress.

All of this is only a prelude to the real business of improving your page rankings – which must be done by generating inbound links – in other words, getting approval from other people’s web sites. This is not easy, because it involves a very laborious process of making multiple submissions (requests for inclusion) to directories such as Yahoo.com and DMOZ.com. Alternatively you can try to attract links by generating content which is irresistibly popular or focused on something very popular or controversial.

The most common help you will be offered to deal with this issue is an invitation to join link farms. These are sites that are composed of nothing but links to other sites. Don’t bother – because as Michael David explains, they are valueless. He also provides other warnings again what are called ‘Black Hat’ techniques.

There is the by now almost obligatory chapter on using social media tools to promote your website. This too involves generating content that will ‘go viral’ (attract millions of viewers) which is much easier said than done – and it’s another chapter which has little to do with WordPress.

Fortunately Michael David finishes with a really useful appendix listing a selection of the most valuable WordPress plugins (all free) that can help you automate the processes he describes. I was mightily relieved to note that I had most of them installed on this site.

If you’ve got a WordPress blog or a full web site, you need to understand all the marvellous features WP offers to deliver good SEO. This guide not only shows you how to configure the software; it also explains why the strategies recommended are to your advantage.

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Buy the book at Amazon US

Michael David, WordPress 3.0 Search Engine Optimization, Birmingham: Pakt, 2011, pp.318, ISBN: 1847199003

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