What is this Crazy Egg? I hear you ask…

Crazy Egg is a new tool that creates tests to figure out what people are doing on your website. Essentially this tool analyses where people are clicking and how much. Imagine that if when people click on a certain link or button on your website (or even in the middle of a blank space) they leave a physical mark making it clear that they have been there. The Crazy Egg system complies this data into a variety of formats. At distilled we seem to be very good at winning prizes, we won a crazy egg login by entering a lucky prize draw at the SMX West 2008 conference we attended, and have been testing the system on the distilled website since.

Heat map

Much like scary images of our rapidly warming planet, this thermal overview literally shows you what is hot and what is not. The hotter (redder) the colour the more clicks that particular area has received. If, on the other side of the colour spectrum, the area is blue then it has not been clicked very often (if at all).

Confetti

This is my personal favourite, mainly for the fun factor. The page begins with brightly coloured luminous dots spattered all over and then they compile and shoot off into the areas that have been clicked on most. How could you resist?!

Overlay

This option I found quite unclear at first. Again, colours are used to highlight which areas are most popular (warmer colours being the most popular clicking hot spots). Each link has a coloured ‘+’ sign next to it. When you click on these symbols a box pops up to make you aware of the percentage of all clicks on the entire page that have been here. A ‘more’ button also lets you discover what percentage of which referrers pointed traffic to this particular link.

List

Probably the most useful way the information can be displayed; a very in-depth table detailing where the link is from, the number and percentage of clicks.

The different display options cater for a whole range of customers. You can look at the data as a brief overview, to merely get a suggestion of which button is clicked on most. Or you can look in ‘more’ at exactly which referrer is bringing exactly what percentage of traffic to your website.

Crazy Egg is also very useful from a marketing perspective. Each click is linked to the referrer, so it is very visible who exactly has been sending the most traffic to your site. This can, for obvious reasons, greatly benefit your company and point out if any of your marketing campaigns are not good value for money. Each referrer is represented by a different colour. There is also the option to view just certain referrers by checking or un-checking a tick box selection panel.

Here is the data with just one referer selected, all the red dots represent the referer the most clicks have come from.

As you can see, it also possible to view a selection of referers from the entire list.

Once you have purchased the Crazy Egg tool you can apply it to a certain number of pages, depending on the package you purchase. You can also monitor your pages’ progress as often as you want. Bear in mind it may take some time to gather enough data for it to be considerable enough to analyse, depending on the size of your company and the quantity of traffic that visits your site.

Brilliant eh? Soon we will have enough data to be able to test various elements on the Distilled site and will faithfully report our findings in future blog posts.

Sill not convinced? Try it for yourself! You can track up to 4 pages and 5,000 visitors a month absolutely free! Find out more at www.crazyegg.com (I have no affiliation with Crazy Egg- I just love it!)

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This time last week I was at the ‘Future of Web Design’ conference (FOWD), listening to some of the most interesting speakers in the field.

I found the first lecture ‘Inspiration and Design Trends’ by Patrick Mc Neil most interesting, and ‘Design sign off in 12 steps’ by Larissa Meek the most practical.

‘Inspiration and Design trends’ by Patrick Mc Neil

This man predicted the future! Apparently, the up and coming design trends are:

• Brown earthy colours – as a background colour this colour manages to look warm and inviting whist still holding a corporate feel
• Pastel colours - in general
• Side scrolling - as screen size widens
• Using very big titles (especially on blogs), to help people realise at a glance what topics are being discussed. This is clearly demonstrated below:

• Really big forms that fill the entire page with as few fields as possible

Other trends and suggestions for the future discussed by various speakers are as follows:

• Inspiration should come from everyday life and studies of other topics of interest, not from looking at other peoples websites – how would anything original be discovered then?
• An ongoing commitment to discovery is necessary. This is not easy. Looking back in history as well as forward can help too; learning from the great masters about how they managed to connect with their audience.
• Add functionality to reduce complexity in design
• Realign don’t redesign. Often when larger companies’ websites undergo a design change the designer instantly assumes that a total redesign is necessary. Often, features that frequent users to the site know and trust are removed, which then alienates the original customer.
• Make time for constant iteration. Just because something is finished one day doesn’t mean it doesn’t need further development in a few months as trends/needs change. This, for me, is crucial and the majority of web design projects don’t plan for this at all! I have spoken about this issue previously in my Conversion Rates blog post in the ‘Guided Trial and Error’ paragraph.
• With the functionality of a website don’t try to guess what people want, watch the functionality they are trying to fake and then build it. Daniel Burka from Digg, explains, when Digg was in its early stages there was no option to upload images, soon it became apparent to Daniel that there was a need for this as people started to type in IMG, etc into the submit field. His users were quite obviously telling him that this is what they wanted, so the additional functionality was then added, see below:

One very good point, concerning type:

The choice of font style (specifically for the body copy on websites) is often left too much in the hands of the coder.

People underestimate the dramatic change that a different font can have on the look of a website – choosing any old sans serif is no longer acceptable!

Obviously we would all love the font we choose to appear on everyone’s browser. This however, can not happen.

This set of substitute fonts clearly demonstrates the dramatic difference between them, and they are all the same point size, verdana specifically is very wide.

When selecting a bold font in particular the example above is a much better solution, the change is barely noticeable.

Technical adjustments that are frequently ignored are kerning and leading, or to you coders out there, tracking and line height (I am currently shaking my head). Giving your text room to breath is important and can significantly improve the legibility of a block of text.

As Jon Hicks points out, type can be improved upon by reducing the kerning by 1px and increasing leading by 1.4px.

What is a brand?

Forget what you think a brand is and think about what it could be if it was something different. ‘Cascadia’ is a truck – what does this also sound like it could be? -A new world? Thinking like this really frees up your way of thinking and makes designers feel less restrained in initial design phases.

The much disputed design process:

Patrick Mc Neil suggested finding a range of websites (up to about 25) to show to a client to get some feel of the sort of style they could use. However, this idea was contradicted later on by Larissa Meek, who said that reaching the correct solution with a website was more about a steady ongoing process with a client to work out a style stage by stage. This seems to be an ongoing dispute between designers. Is it best to show one idea that you have come to together or a few designs so that a choice is given? Another speaker also mentioned that clients (as we all know) are sometimes not very visual, and that they need to see what they don’t like before they can decide what they do.

Another point that goes against Patrick Mc Neil’s suggestion of bringing together good websites and drawing elements from them for your own websites came from one speaker who pointed out that these ‘gem’s’ (as they liked to call them) generally work for the reason that they are good for the specific purpose they have been built for. A good website can not be conjured up by simply putting lots of good elements together.

Larissa Meeks’s Design Sign off in 12 (easy) steps

1. Make friends with your client
2. Ask lots of questions about your clients business objectives
3. Ask questions about the end user
4. Use wire frames as a conversation starter
5. Talk about the style of the design before you begin – produce mood boards – image styles – and style guidelines
6. One design direction will do
7. See it in a browser to start with
8. Prototype is needed – this should be interactive
9. Ask for consolidated feedback from your client
10. Be confident in your work
11. Time will tell (design is a funny business)
12. Make the most of a difficult situation – the key here is not to be over reactive

These steps are useful advice. However, often at Distilled our website projects are smaller with pressured deadlines, so lengthy processes such as mood boards etc are often not feasible. Also, as I mentioned above clients are often not very visual so it is useful to show a few initial concepts. However, that is not to say that as our clients grow in scale these are not points we would consider.

Over all the FOWD conference was very inspiring and thought provoking, I have only touched on what I have discovered, other findings will no doubt soon be evident in my work.

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I have recently been reading Web Design for ROI by Lance Loveday & Sandra Niehaus, and have learnt a great deal!

As a designer, I found the Design Guidelines section of the book most interesting. In particular, the discussion of the increasing importance of well-designed specific elements within a website

Also, improving the conversion rate of a website is one of the best ways to make it more profitable, subsequently improving return on investment (ROI).

This post will discuss a few areas that I found most interesting.

Guided Trial and Error

One of the most effective ways of improving the conversion rate of your website is guided trial and error. Continually testing the text and graphics on your website can make a massive difference. ‘Crazy Egg’ is a program that can monitor the amount of clicks that certain buttons and links receive, but also where exactly the person has clicked. Small brightly coloured clusters of dots can be seen where people have clicked (which to me looks like someone has shot the screen with a miniature paint ball gun!)

The main problem with data like this for smaller businesses is that it takes a very long time to build up enough to analyse. Ten clicks one day and twelve the next can not be counted as suitable data to make decisions from. Because of this it can take quite some time to come up with the right solutions. In the mean time it is probably best to learn from the big boys. For example, Amazon’s checkout process has had an extensive amount of research done on what colours/buttons increase sales.

Buttons and Forms

Chapter 4, Landing Pages, discusses that when it comes to buttons the bigger and shinier the better! This is really true! It is also important to make sure that a page is not too busy; that there aren’t too many brightly coloured elements fighting for the user’s attention. It is important to ask yourself: What do you want visitors to your website to do? Where do you want them to click? Their visit should be made as easy as possible. It should be obvious what to do- they should never have to ask, where to next?

To practice what I preach….we have recently added a much larger call-to-action button onto the contact page of the Distilled website.

Try this trick… if you squint your eyes so the screen appears fuzzy and no text is clearly visible, can you still tell what you should be clicking on then? It really is all about those transparent sheens and drop shadows that make the buttons jump out of the screen.

Another helpful trick is to repeat buttons- one near a form and one at the bottom of the page (providing these are different places). The language on these buttons should be simple. Not too demanding but direct and welcoming.

‘Chapter 8 Forms’ I also found particularly interesting:

When filling in forms it is important to make the user aware from the beginning what they can expect from the whole process. On many occasions I have started to fill in what appears to be an easy form and just when I think I am finished I am surprised by another (usually lengthy) section. At this point I close the window and give up.

The best way to avoid this unwanted surprise is to demonstrate clearly the stages. This is often done,by having step 1, step 2 and step 3 across the top of the form. People like advanced information- not surprises!

Another way to help make filling in forms a more speedy process is to help people out by filing in the most frequently used answer. This means, more often than not, that no further selection is necessary. It’s worth the effort: the more forms filled in, the more business your company is likely to receive.

Most Importantly

However, the most useful section of the book for me was a list of questions that users subconsciously ask when they visit your website:

Is this what I expected to see?

Does this look credible and trustworthy?

Does this look interesting enough to spend more time here?

If the answer is no to any of these questions your conversion rates could be suffering as a consequence.

I will leave you with these questions in mind. And yes, you probably are biased as it is your website- it may be wise to ask an outsider to your company for their opinion.

This is just a small insight into the wise words of Lance Loveday and Sandra Niehaus,

Other chapters within the book discuss, Managing for ROI, Landing pages, Home pages, Category Pages, Detail Pages and Checkout Processes.

This book can be purchased at:

http://www.wd4roi.com/home.html

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This is a post I’ve been meaning to write for a long time but I recently came across a search which demonstrates the idea perfectly so I decided it was time to put my thoughts down on paper (so to speak).

Before I explain - check out this search for [the times]:

You can see that 5 of the top 6 results are owned by the times (clicking on www.the-times.co.uk, www.thetimes.co.uk & www.sunday-times.co.uk all redirect you to the main times website which ranks number 1).

So what’s happening here?

Well what’s actually happening is slightly complicated. If you go to www.the-times.co.uk you are 301 redirected to the main times website. This 301 redirect clearly isn’t being spidered by Google however since these domains have their own listing in the search results. So I checked their robots.txt (the same for all 3 sites):

#Version: 0.1
#Last updated: 17/06/2005
#Timesonline Newspaper
#Site contents Copyright Times Newspapers Ltd
#Please note our terms and conditions http://www.timesonline.co.uk/section/0,,497,00.html
#Spidering is not allowed by our terms and conditions
#Authorised spidering is subject to permission
#For authorisation please contact us - see http://www.nisyndication.com/about_us.html
User-agent: *
Disallow: /

Ah-ha! While they have 301 redirected the root page they have forgotten to 301 redirect their robots.txt file which still instructs the search engines not to crawl the website. Since the search engines look at the robots.txt first before they crawl the rest of the site they’re not getting as far as the 301. Since Google doesn’t know the domains redirect they are still able to rank in their own right (without a snippet of course).

A similar effect can be achieved with 302 redirects. For example - check out this search result from a yahoo search for [tom critchlow]:

http://www.tom-critchlow.co.uk is a 302 redirect to my page on the Distilled site and ranks number one in yahoo for a search for my name. I haven’t dropped many links to it yet so Google hasn’t picked it up yet but I’m fairly sure it will in due course.

So what we’re seeing here is a way of owning some search result listings without having to actually create any new websites, just use some clever redirects. This is a very powerful tool for reputation management but there’s a few things worth bearing in mind:

Drawbacks of this method

The first and most obvious drawback to this method is that the links which point to your spare domain are not passing any link juice onto your main website. Between those domains there are 267,700 links which are not passing any value to the main times website. Since these links are links which your main site could easily have gained it seems a waste not to get any value out of them for your main site.

The second issue is that these pages are actually quite difficult to rank. I haven’t done extensive testing for 302 redirects but in the case of a site blocked by robots.txt the search engines can’t crawl the site to get any indication of what it’s about therefore it’s harder to rank and will require more links than if it was a genuine site with real content. (Note that link building for 301 or 302 redirected domains is difficult since people won’t naturally link to these domains since there isn’t any content on them!)

The third issue is more hypothetical but in my eyes you run the risk of Google changing the way it handles 302 redirects or pages behind a robots.txt. In my eyes, the above search results don’t add that much value to the user since the top results all point to the same website so I think you run the risk of these search results disappearing at some stage. If you’re relying on these pages for reputation management then they could disappear overnight further down the line.

Benefits of this method

The major benefit of this method which springs to mind is that you don’t have to fragment your traffic. All those sites point to your main content and so you don’t lose any traffic to mini-sites or profile pages.

The second benefit is that these domains are really quick, easy and cheap to set up. Setting up a mini-site or creating some kind of secondary online presence to rank with can be an expensive project and difficult to get past a company’s marketing department. By using this method you neatly sidestep all of those concerns.

Tips & Tricks

Ensure the keyphrase is in the URL - since the search engines can’t get any indication of relevance from the content on the site you need to ensure that they can get relevance from the domain name. You’ll also need a fair number of anchor text rich links, the number will depend on how competitive your search term is.

Unlike pages behind a robots.txt the search engines actually crawl 302 redirects and look at the landing page to determine what snippet should be displayed therefore it’s worth paying attention to which page you’re redirecting to ensure that your snippet and title are sensible and relevant.

I’m sure there will be more tips and tricks on their way as I experiment with linking to tom critchlow from a few more places but if anyone else wants to share some tips on how to rank 302′d domains or pages behind robots.txt please shout out in the comments!

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Before you read any further, please realise that not only is this post not legal advice, but I am not a lawyer and therefore even if I wanted to advise you, you would be well advised (ironically) not to listen to me. This post is for entertainment only - if you want to know the impact of laws on your business, speak to a lawyer who knows what they are talking about!

Many people in the UK will have heard by now of the EU’s Unfair Commercial Practices Directive that comes into force at the end of May. The objective of the directive is to protect consumers and businesses from sharp selling practices including the use of untrue or misleading claims in advertising and pressure-selling tactics.

All good and worthy so far. And mainly a restatement of existing laws - bringing the EU into line across the board and stating explicitly what the situation is across the continent.

The issue for online marketers is the definitions that are used to prevent so-called ‘advertorial’ which is the practice of including advertising within editorial content without flagging it as such. You see advertorial (obviously marked) all the time in offline magazines where there will be a ‘news’ story marked as advertorial that sings the praises of a particular product or company. Obviously this happens online as well.

The issue that has been causing a lot of comment around the online marketing industry is the new requirement saying that traders must provide all the information that the average consumer needs. Specifically listed as a ‘misleading omission in commercial practice’ is:

It is misleading to fail to identify the commercial intent of the commercial practice if not already apparent from the context

This has widely been read to mean that it will become illegal to write reviews of your own business on tripadvisor (or to pay someone else to do so) and that it will become illegal to blog about your business without making clear the commercial intent. I don’t want to get too much into that now.

What about social media (as opposed to social reviews)

I think most people would fall on the “you shouldn’t do that” side of posting glowing reviews of your own business on review sites. There is a greyer area, however, around social media. In the world of old media, you can pitch your story (or pay a PR to pitch your story) to a journalist or editor and they can choose whether or not to cover it. If you pay for coverage, you are advertising and there are strict rules on that (even before the new directive).

When it comes to social media, however, the ‘journalist’ and ‘editor’ become the users of the site and its algorithm respectively. There is one view-point that submitting your story (to digg) for example is the equivalent of pitching to a journalist (and therefore is something you can do yourself or pay someone to do). The quality of the story and its submission and the social media site’s algorithm then do the job of deciding whether you should get front-page coverage (ignoring for a moment the issue of spamming the voting system which is a different kettle of legal fish entirely).

The opposing view-point, however, is that as soon as you submit your story it gets its own page - even if it is the worst story in the world (I love that the digg URL has ‘7′ at the end of it - persistence is a virtue) that no right-minded journalist or editor would ever cover. The fact that this story then appears on a website without any disclaimer saying it is commercially motivated means that it should fall foul of the new directive.

So… What we really need is a lawyer to tell us whether submitting anything you have written (or anything of your clients’) to social media sites is going to be against the law.

It goes even further - what about thumbs-up

There is quite a lot of consensus that reviews of your own business (or a client’s business) are not allowed unless explicitly declared as commercial. What, then, about hitting the ‘thumbs-up’ button on stumbleupon on a client’s site? What about digging a story your client wrote on their own blog (not submitting it - just digging)? What about adding a Youtube video to your favourites? Each of these are endorsements (just like a tripadvisor review) that a consumer can see and which are commercially-motivated but which are not declared.

In fact, it’s even worse than that - there is no way to flag a digg or a SU thumbs-up as commercially motivated (that I know of).

Never mind your boss wanting you to stop stumbling, digging, redditing etc. all day. Pretty soon your legal department is going to say the same thing…

Little side-note on sphinn

Some websites such as sphinn explicitly encourage the submitting of your own stories:

Yes, you can submit your own stories. In fact, we’d rather you directly submit your own stories you think are of interest to the community than have someone do it for you.

I wonder if that makes it ok in the directive’s eyes, or whether you still need to append your submission with ‘I work for this company’. And there is still the problem that when you ’sphinn’ something, you don’t get a chance to declare that your sphinn was probably influenced by who pays your wages…

Finally… don’t ebay your old computer equipment

There are other bits of the directive that cover all kinds of other areas and some of them seem a little less obviously ‘wrong’ to me. It doesn’t strike me as a problem if you ebay something that your company also sells… Maybe I’m not seeing the issue here.

Summary

I don’t just want to pick holes in this legislation - I think it’s probably very well-meaning and I also don’t want to come across as in favour of dodgy business practices (because I’m not). I am just concerned that it needs to be very clear what is and isn’t allowed.

The penalties are potentially harsh - including jail time for directors of companies, so I’d kinda like to know what we can and can’t do. Are we risking the clink every time we add a youtube video to our favourites?

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The Distilled website has undergone a few minor (but very important) changes. These changes may not appear to be much visually, but they should make a considerable difference to the website’s usability. Feel free to let us know your thoughts on the change: better, worse, no difference? (If it’s for the worse we hold Dr Pete fully responsible!!!

Recently we won a ‘Strategic Usability Review’ of the distilled website from Dr Pete Meyers by filling in the competition entry form on his website. And we won! This post goes on to explain just how useful the report was.

Dr Meyers’ Strategic Usability Review is laid out simply and is consequently easy to read. The only thing that would have made it better for me is a contents page; it’s important to let the reader know what is coming next and how many stages of the process there are to read through. The same applies to websites of course, but Dr Pete will know that.

The report begins with an introduction to Usability, a comprehensive definition of the subject and a quick guide to reading the report. It is clear from the spatters of humour on the first page that the report is not going to be a dull read, (and even if it was you jolly well should read it as your business could benefit considerably). The next section, a ‘25-point Usability Checklist’, outlines at a glance where there is room for improvement on the website in question.

So how can the distilled website possibly be improved? In a few ways, it turns out. Here is what the old Distilled website looked like before Dr Pete’s help

Loading time is the first point of criticism. This is something I have never had a problem with but not everyone is fortunate enough to have a super fast Internet connection and processing speed. So. How can the file sizes within our website be reduced? Here I feel it really is a case of every little helps. One excellent way of decreasing file size is to turn images, wherever possible, from jpg’s to gif’s. Gif files are customised to only use a limited pallet of colours. For example, the grey infographics we have at the bottom of each page are currently up to 26kb. When re-saved as gif’s they are only 4kb – a massive improvement and using only two colours (grey and white). Gif’s however dont always look good, they can’t be used for photographs or images with complex shapes and many colours.

See you cant even tell the difference can you

Another area where Dr Pete found room for improvement was with our tag lines. Currently our tag line is ‘Pure website expertise’, which, as Dr Pete points out, is fine. However, as this doesn’t really express very clearly what we do, it is important that other header text on the page does speak more literally. ‘It all boils down to building your business’: what does this mean anyway? It doesn’t tell the reader much at all. The phrases’ ‘SEO’, ‘PPC’ and ‘Website Design’ need to be much more obvious on the home page to help compensate for this.

Many of our visitors come via a search engine, not directly, so it is important to think about what they are expecting to find when they reach the distilled home page. Visitors need to be able to see what they want instantly in order to keep the home page abandonment rate to a minimum.

Dr Pete also highlighted some problems with our navigation system. This is a relatively serious issue as this menu is the main portal to the rest of the site and could be considerably reducing our click through rate. The colour of the menu is not an instantly click-able link colour. Blue (fortunately, one of our company colours) is much more acceptable for this purpose so we will be using it for click-able text from now on. In an ideal world the menu links would also be underlined but this spoilt the design, so we compromised.

After clearly highlighting the website’s problems with a simple tick / cross check list in the review, Dr Pete goes on to condense his findings into a list of ‘Usability Trouble Spots’. This section is used to talk more in depth about the main problems on the site. This is simplified further into a 3-point Action Plan in which Dr Pete clearly explains exactly what it is that needs to be changed and advises on what it should be changed to.

So did we listen to Dr Pete? Why yes, of course. We didn’t even, as he suggested, put the report down and take a nice long walk, muttering to ourselves about what a self-righteous jerk he is!

Here you can see the improvements we have made:

The new Distilled website design

Over all a jolly useful report! You can read more about Dr Pete Myers at www.usereffect.com

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Given my over-arching interest in all things mobile (and especially mobile SEO), I subscribe to a fair few feeds giving me mobile and mobile SEO news and opinion. I am always keen to learn of good ones I don’t know about, so feel free to drop a link in the comments. I currently subscribe to:

General Mobile News

• As you will see from my round-up, I get a lot of my general mobile news from smstextnews - a highly recommended read

Mobile SEO

• Official Google mobile blog
• Mobile SEO News
• Rank Mobile
• Not recently updated: mobile-seo.co.uk

Mobile development

• Cameron Moll (buy the Mobile Web Design Book)

Fun stuff

• Our friends the texperts - a great read of facts you probably didn’t know

News round-up

Given that I am reading all this stuff, I thought it might be useful to do a quick round-up, summary post (it might happen regularly, you never know). If you can’t wait for round-up posts, you can keep track of mobile stuff I’m interested in by following my weekly mobile del.icio.us tag.

The more data we all use when we’re out and about, the more backhaul becomes a problem. It’s not one that many people outside the industry think about. Backhaul is the process of connecting mobile base stations to the core network. This week Vodafone has struck a deal:

Vodafone has announced that it’s struck a five year deal with BT which will see BT’s wholesale arm providing connectivity between Voda’s base stations and its own network.

Full story: Vodafone backhaul deal

Particularly interesting (to me) is the talk of BT’s 21st century network…. Go read the article then do a bit of googling around that if you are feeling geeky…

Much like the turning off of analogue TV that is going to happen over the next few years to free up spectrum once everyone can use digital, the mobile networks have a load of spectrum that is currently used for 2G services and that many people would like to see used for more modern services once 3G coverage gets good enough. It would be Ofcom’s remit in the UK, but the Australian government is making headway on the issue:

Telstra has finally received the go ahead from the Aussie government to close down its CDMA network, after three months of waiting. The telco had hoped to close it down in January of this year, after its 3G network reached the same coverage levels, but was prevented by the government.

Full story: Telstra closing 2G network

I have written before about how the mobile operators are desperate to avoid becoming “just the pipe” in the sense of simply allowing people to access the wider web with no value add. Strategy Eye report (via smstextnews again!) that:

CNN International has signed a deal with Samsung in which the manufacturer will be the first to offer a pre-loaded CNN news application.

Full story: CNN International deal with Samsung

On a light-hearted note, you might enjoy watching a (grainy, low sound quality) mobile video of a flash-mob descending on London’s Liverpool Street station to do a live ‘rick-roll’ of the station.

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Following on from our recent post where we asked various SEOs from around the world questions on geo-location one of our readers Sean Carlos emailed me asking if it was alright to leave quite a lengthy comment which included a few links to some articles he’s written. I thought the content was good enough to be worthy of it’s own blog post so here you go!

Sean Carlos:

Very nice post – oh so many complicated issues when considering locali[s|z]ation issues!

On point 1, when considering accented characters, I try to use numeric html entities to ensure my text is compatible with xml feeds used by blogging and other CMS software. The XML standard only recognizes 5 character entities (", &, ', <, >), one of which, ', is not even part of the HTML standard. More detail can be found in my article Accented Characters in HTML Documents: Considerations for Search Engine Optimization.

Point 7 is rather complicated. There are three main ways to distribute language variants of a site:

1. folder, i.e. apple.com/uk , apple.com/it
2. top level domain, i.e. apple.com, apple.co.uk, apple.it
3. sub domains, i.e. uk.apple.com, fr.apple.com, it.apple.it

Google is very good at dealing with any of these approaches – especially if it is easy to recognize content language. As mentioned in the post, server geographic location and incoming links are additional clues search engines can use.

The “best” solution really depends on the client’s market and future plans. For a site in Italian, the language market is limited to Italy with some “overflow” in neighboring countries. So a .it domain is a no brainer. Yet what about Switzerland? There are four legal languages. Add English to the mix in the case of many multinationals. Three of the legal languages are used extensively in neighboring countries (French, German and Italian).

Once consideration is the need to avoid shooting myself in the foot with duplicate content issues and dispersion of incoming links across multiple domains, i.e. .ch, .de and .at or .ch, .fr, .be and .ca. Yet some solutions may get me multiple listings (= more real estate, good!) in search results. Some top level domains are difficult to register if you don’t have a physical presence in the country (i.e. .fr). So, unfortunately, the answer is “it depends”.

In addition to the points mentioned in the post, I would insure language clues are inserted where appropriate in the html. Search engines are very good at automatically recognizing languages, using clues such as the domain, hosting location and incoming links. Text pattern analysis is probably decisive. Using the “lang” attribute on html tags and specifying a content language http header or meta equivalent can assist this process. More details can be found in my How Search Engines Detect HTML Document Human Language.

I met Sean at the Manchester SEO meetup last year and he was a pleasure to talk to. He works for Antezeta SEO Company in Italy. Thanks for stopping by Sean

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Geo location is becoming increasingly relevant to search engine optimisation. This interview aims to ask questions about some of the hottest issues out there.

I spoke to 5 experts who are all active in the SEO world. The answers here have only been edited in the lightest sense of the word. No-one saw the replies of others before submitting their own responses so any overlaps have been included for interest’s sake.

(A quick nod should made in the direction of Sugar Rae’s excellent interview with five link development experts, which inspired the format of this post. If you haven’t read it, you should.)

Tadeusz Szewczyk of onreact.com- a German specialist in white-hat SEO techniques with an SEO 2.0 blog. He was born in Poland but now lives and works in Germany and answers our questions with respect to these two languages.

Maria Soledad Balayan is based in Argentina and works as an online marketing consultant for La Di Tella Marketing Club

Joost de Valk is an SEO consultant and webdesigner based in the Netherlands who works at Onetomarket.

Ciarán Norris is based in the UK and works just around the corner from us in London as the SEO & Social Media Director at Altogether Digital.

Duncan Morris is a Director here at Distilled in London and has been involved in web design and SEO for more years than he can remember.

Maria- would there be any differences optimising café instead of cafe?

You need to decide if you are thinking purely for SEO or for the impression you want users to get from your site as well. I will always go for the proper way of spelling. Misspelling could be really bad for reputation and trust; even though people make a lot of mistakes when writing, they expect you don’t. Sometimes if people search using accents they do it because they are expecting to get that exact result. An accent can change the meaning of the entire sentence.

You can always run an AdWords campaign paying for the word without the accent to see what impact it has.

Last year Spain announced that the letter “ñ” was going to be accepted when registering domains and this will clearly cause changes in the way people from Spain and other Spanish speaking countries use it in domains. In the long run that affect will be translated to SERPs too, but it will take a lot of time to see that happen.

From the SEO point of view I am not sure if I will register a domain with a word that contains the letter “ñ” on it unless it is a powerful word or if I don’t have any intentions to appeal to other languages.

Tad - would you optimise with or without an umlaut or does this not make any difference?

German umlauts do affect SEO. Also Polish letters do, but in a different way. German umlauts are easy to mimic in that you write “ae”, “oe” or “ue”. You will notice though that an umlaut and its mimicked representation rank differently.

In Polish you have plenty of letters that do not exist in English or other languages. Thus you have to take into account that many people using non-Polish keyboards will not be able to spell correctly. In German this happens also but not that often.

For both languages you need to make sure the umlauts or special characters are rewritten correctly in your URLs. In German you get the above mentioned “ae” etc. but in Polish you just take the English equivalent. You should tag your pages (the Web 2.0 way) with additional spelling variations.

Ciarán- do you have any experience of this?

We have an interesting case study here – my name! A Google for my full name (Ciarán Norris) with and without the accent (or fotha to give it its correct, Gaelic, name) shows only very minor differences suggesting that the engines are getting better at determining that words with & without an accent may well be the same thing.

And the same question to number 5, Duncan- any thoughts?

Since english doesn’t have any accented characters this isn’t really something I have come across. There are definitely differences, though I think most of these are jusified, i.e. the addition of the accent changes the meaning of the word. If you search for cafe you get a different set of results (with overlap) than if you search for café. The most obvious change being which wikipedia page is indented.

From a usability point of view unless a native speaker said otherwise, I would always advise ensuring the URL doesn’t contain any accented characters. The following URL just looks messy to me, and I’m fairly sure that native speakers don’t read %C3%A9 as é!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caf%C3%A9

(To be fair to wikipedia, in this case the page that ranks takes you to a non accented version, and they do redirect between the two. However, a search for Zurich returns a wikipedia page with the ‘less attractive’ URL.)

Joost I’d pick the domain extension that would work for the biggest group of people

Duncan As with many things, its a balancing act. Whilst a .com is likely to appeal to a wider range of people it can make it harder to get it to rank in the local search results.

Ciarán I actually think that a .fr might well be more likely to appeal to French speakers which highlights the fact that ther are two elements to decisions like this- cultural and technical.

If I was aiming to target a group of English speakers (across UK, US, Aus, NZ etc..) I’d probably go for a .com, based in the US as that’s where the biggest market is and therefore where the biggest potential SEO win is. I’d then rely on PR/buzz marketing to raise the profile of the site in other English territories.

There would have to be a similar decision making process for any group of languages (also remembering that as in many ways what may seem to be the same language actually isn’t- French Canadian for instance is a distant dialect).

Tad I’d use local TLD and servers: .de, .at and .ch for German, .pl for Poland. I’d also use local hosting for each country and of course translate the site in question.

When targeting a new market in a different language the most important thing is to do new market and keyword research. If you assume the people want and search for exactly the same things everywhere then you’ve already lost.

You should also strive to get links in the particular language you target, ideally from sites based in the respective country.

Maria Even when people speak the same language, if they live in different countries that could mean that they have cultural differences and different usage of words (slang). You need to be aware of that and consider those things when writing copy, managing website content and optimizing that content for specific keywords.

Joost It’s easier because there’s less competition.

Tad It’s easier due to less competition. It’s harder due to smaller market (less traffic).

Maria Locally, I think that when you have less competition everything is easier, like in any industry. Fewer amounts of SERPs mean less websites to compete with and better chances to get ranked on top. Of course, if you need to compete with the whole world, it’s more complicated.

Duncan I think the law of averages should make it easier since there won’t be as many competitors. The flip side is a lot of the major sources of traffic (certainly from a social media standpoint), don’t have such a presence in the smaller countries.

Duncan I don’t envisage any massive leaps forwards. It wouldn’t surprise me to see another tweak to the display of local results.

I’d like to think these local results will continue to improve. I think there is still too much of a bias on how close you are to the arbitrary centre of the town / city you are in.

I’d also like to see changes (or clarification) on what exactly google.com is meant to be when the searcher is in the UK. Given that the default search engine for firefox is google.com the percentage of people using google.com from the UK is, in my opinion, likely to increase. It seems a shame for these people to see less optimal results than those people using google.co.uk. Currently it appears to be a (random?) mix of American results and UK results.

Maria As the amount of websites increases, localisation is going to have an important role because is going to provide (at least it should) more accurate results to users. I would love to have the “find business” feature from Google maps applied on other countries.

Ciarán All of the engines are looking to provide more & more locally relevant results, and the growth of mobile is only likely to fuel this. Take for example the search for coffee on a mobile: Google presents Wikipedia, Yahoo! aims to return the nearest café. If they can translate this to web searches (where they admittedly lack GPS) it could be a huge change in the SERPS. The release of Android is only likely to fuel this.

Tad More inclusion of geotargeting into ranking algos plus more reliance on reviews and local review sites.

Joost I think search engines will become even better in recognizing and dealing with smaller languages. Especially Google has been getting increasingly better in Dutch over the last years.

Tad There is still a difference but some changes are rolled out simultaneously while others that have been in the US still are not online in German. Poland is more often left behind.

Maria It used to happen but it is getting better with time.

Joost Yeah, we lag behind up to 3 months behind the UK and the US

Ciarán Sorry – no real opinion on this one!

Duncan I don’t think the algorithmic updates lag behind, though I do think the tactics used by (your average) UK SEO-er do. The SEO industry from the eyes of marketing departments is also a couple of years behind.

A topic fairly close to our hearts is reputation management. If you look at the ‘cleanliness’ of the politicians over here versus those in the US you will see that at the moment we don’t appear to have a clue!

Tad It depends. For tourism related sites you want a site from the destination country not the country you are from.

Joost Yes, absolutely, especially in countries like France and Germany, where people are a bit more “nationalistic”.

Duncan I think UK searchers are equally as comfortable seeing and using .co.uk and .com. However I believe (though have no first hand knowledge) that in most of the other european languages the tld is more important. That would make sense for anywhere where english isn’t the first language, since the majority of .com domains are written in english (or american, sorry small dig!).

Ciarán We’ve seen examples of local TLDs receiving more clicks, however again it varies; we in the UK seem less bothered about using a dot com (and indeed often think of this as normal) than many other countries.

Maria I think it could have an impact depending on the user’s experience. If people use local search engines they will expect to receive local results. And more experienced users may use additional keywords to let the search engine know that.

There is a feature that you can use when searching locally that tells the engine to show only results of the specific country (example: google.com.ar let you filter only pages from Argentina) and some people use it. Sometimes these results show .com results too because robots recognize the location or the language. Some websites are not recognized in these SERPs and in those cases they could loose some traffic.

If your business is locally focused you need to know that you will get better ctr if you are able to address that with the information you provide on the website. In this sense the long tail is going to get stronger because as times pass by more results are going to show up so there will be more competition for keywords. On the other hand users will get more advanced with more knowledge and they will apply that to the search phrases they use.

Maria I would say that for international geo-location purposes using .fr vs subdirectories could be a better choice. I am sure there are other factors (non SEO related) that made those companies decide to go for one or the other. That could be a good question to ask Matt Cutts.

Tad For Google it’s the tld domain. For the users in many cases a /de subdirectory would be best. For instance I would love to browse through Amazon or Ebay in English, German and Polish at the same time. I do not like the subdomain thing, it combines the disadvantages of both. Yes, for me (freelancers) .com is best as I rank well everywhere without the need for several domains.

Ciarán Again, this is a situation where more than just SEO is going to come into the equation. By having sub-domains (a la Apple) you can utilise a common URL in all advertising & packaging. We’re currently working with a major global brand who plan to have a single URL for just this reason; they need the URL on the product but they produce all their products in one location and then box them locally.

The Amazon method however allows you to totally own the SERPS and would probably be the method would we recommend if the only consideration is SEO.

Joost I prefer the different TLD’s, but in most cases there’s a solution already there, and you have to work with it. In my work with KLM, who use subdirectories, I’ve noticed that Google is pretty damn good in sending people to the right subdirectory, even if they’re searching in english in say Brazil, they would send them to /travel/br_en/

Duncan There are issues to overcome with either route. I think I’m currently leaning slightly towards having one domain and doing it at the folder level.

The problem with the amazon route is that you split link juice across the various domains you own. Even for a company the size of amazon, this is a problem, since the de-facto URL is always amazon.com. I often see amazon.com outranking amazon.co.uk and have to manually alter the URL.

The nice thing about having multiple tlds is that you have a local tld which can have a homepage in the local language. It also helps you to dominate the SERPS for branded search.

It wouldn’t surprise me to see the search engines changing their algorithms slightly in an attempt to help get the relevant results in local searches. For example, I could believe that in the future you will be able to link domains via webmaster central (or the other equivalents) which could somehow pass some of the domain trust of the .com to the local languages.

Going down the apple route solves the domain weight issue, since all links are to the root domain. This route makes geo location harder since you will break a couple of the guidelines in order to rank locally (local tld, server hosted locally). There are a couple of issues with the apple route:

Firstly, if you check the ‘pages from the UK’ button, apple disappears. The 15% [NBED LINK) of people that use this option, will not be able to find apple at all.

The other issue is similar to the amazon.co.uk / amazon.com problem. If you search ipod on google.co.uk and click on the indented result (wtf!) you get to the ipodclassic page, with prices in dollars. If you then click on the Store, you end up in the american store, and have to click a couple more links before you can find a UK store. Here in the UK we often get pages targeting americans.

For smaller budgets there is also a duplicate content issue, or a cost invovled with saying something different when you target the UK than the US.

Ciarán Not as well as they’d like!

Joost Getting better, but not there yet, sometimes you’re expecting a map to show up and it doesn’t and sometimes it’s there when it shouldn’t be. I’m hardly ever annoyed by it though, which is probably a good sign.

Duncan I’d give them 7 or 8 out of 10. As with most things you can always find edge cases that aren’t caught, but most of the time they get it right. (Assuming you are a fan of the local results, which I’m not!)

Tad They do OK by now. Vertical (local) search engines do better of course

Maria I am not sure how well they do it but I don’t think it is an easy job either! I think they will need to improve a lot since results are increasing and that will make it even harder for users to find what they are looking for. Because of this, companies need to be informed and should make it easy for search engines to recognize if their website is locally focused or not.

Joost Yes. It’s had some impact, but not a huge one… Can’t share the details unfortunately.

Tad I did for testing purposes, could not see any real results, did not monitor the results in the long run yet though.

Maria I have never used Google’s webmaster central. I am a marketer that uses SEO as a Marketing strategy and the tool I use most of the time to analyze user behavior is web traffic analytics. I work with a team of programmers for everything that is coded related and they don’t use Google webmaster central either. I may consider use it in the future because I know is really useful for most webmasters.

Ciarán Not as yet – we try to set things up so that we don’t need to.

Duncan Haven’t really used them. We always try to get the fundamentals right so the geo-location settings are redundant. If you rely on this setting there is probably something wrong with the setup that you should get fixed.

Duncan Who? You mean Google isn’t the only search engine!?

Tad They fail completely as the do barely exist or not at all in Germany and Poland. So I don’t even bother.

Joost Don’t know them that well. With Google having a 90%+ market share in most countries I work in, I tend to focus on Google…

Maria To tell you the truth I am only focus on Google. Google has more than 80% search market share in Latin American countries so focusing on Google can give you pretty good results, at least for now.

Ciarán It varies – but certainly Yahoo’s advances in mobile have given them some pretty neat case studies.

Thanks to everyone for contributing. I’m sure you’ll agree there’s some really interesting opinions in there to think about.

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