Archive for 'SEO'
The Basics of Visual Communication
I just recently read an article about the basics of visual communication and it struck me that the rules that apply to a good speech or offline presentation also apply to your online presentation.
Your Online Presentation: Structured, Meaningful and Modern
Did you know that you actually only 30% remember of what you see? If you are just hearing something the rate drops down to 20%. Combining the two channels brings you up to about 50%. You can increase that rate even more, if you tell somebody about what you saw and heard. If the subject is about something you can do, you can increase the rate to about 90% if you actually do it.
What does it mean for an online presentation or website?
The main channel through which we perceive information online is the visual channel. Through the concentration to one main channel, our brains natural information filter gets even stronger, bringing the purely visual perception down to probably under 10%, unless we manage to trigger some interest, which can loosen the filter. So the question is: How can we catch the interest of a visitor?
Structure
Things that you say on your page should always be down to the point. As visitors hardly read any information on your page, but use what is called scanning, you will need to be very precise on crisp about what you say. You should also structure your information by using headings and lists, where possible. Emphasise important points by putting them in bold letters. Don’t overdo it though.
On the other hand your main navigation should not have more than 5-6 items and should not be deeper than 3 levels. If you can’t fit all you have to say in this structure you should in any case use a breadcrumb navigation, so that visitors don’t get lost. Additionally you should provide an on page search and a site map.
Meaningful
Make a list of 2-3 keywords for your text and write your content around those keywords, if you feel to wander from your subject/keywords, rethink the structure of your site and add another page. As a rule of thumb, you should never write more than 3-400 words per page, as you will inevitably loose your audiences attention.
Modern
Your design needs to be up-to date, otherwise your page will look old fashioned and visitors will deduce that your content is too. At the moment you will find a lot of pages that use horizontal navigation. The classical header image seems to disappear, instead you will more and more large images or videos in the content itself. Another rather popular feature is the footer site map, which will give you easy access from whatever page your on. Using such a site map also makes it easy to reduce the main navigation to the most important points.
What about search engines?
Search engines have evolved so far, that they now recognise things that are positive for human perception, to be good for search engine ranking too. So when you stick to the above mentioned rules, you will have a good chance of not performing to badly in your SERPs.
What can I do to increase the perception of my audience?
Add other perception channels, unfortunately you are a bit limited on your website with regards to that, but you can in any case add some audio. I don’t mean nice(?!) background music that can probably not even be turned off, I mean audio content. Tell the people about your business, let them sit back, relax and deliver the content actively instead of having your visitor do all the work. You can increase the effect even more by adding some meaningful video. But always remember to offer good quality content, may it be text, audio or video.
Marketing for Ferndale Guesthouse and Restaurant
Since summer last year we have been working on the Ferndale Guesthouse & Restaurant Page.
The First Step was to bring the page up to technical standards, at the same time, we gave the page a new look, with the option of switching the design, when the restaurant interior is changed about four times a year. At this time, we built a static page, as we did not expect many changes. The traffic over last year’s season was not bad, with most traffic coming from Achill Tourism. At that stage there were not many search engine referrals.
Over the wintertime, we did a little adwords campaign, which brought a bit of traffic, but not with a very high conversion.
In spring of this year, we started to transform the Website into a blog and began an extensive marketing campaign, including a regular newsletter. All print material was updated to the design of the web page, including flyer’s, business cards, menus and ads in different publications.
We sent the first newsletter for the May Bank Holiday and got a fabulous response. We achieved a 42.8% opening rate, which is about double the industry average for restaurant newsletters. The click-rate was 9.2% which was about 250% above the industry average. With the second newsletter send out for the Achill Marathon, we were able to increase the click rate even further. The newsletter was designed to give a good mixture of story, information (activities, recipes, wine recommendations) and offers, which proved very successful.
At the same time we started to build a recipe database, with the possibility of downloading the recipes as pdf. So far different recipes have been downloaded over 220 times in six weeks. Through the newsletter, the new content to the web page and the regular publication of blog articles we were able to increase the number or visitors to the web page by over 50% compared to summer of last year. Of course the conversion rate as suffered a bit, as people looking for recipes will not implicitly come to dine or stay, so at the moment we are working at the exposure.
Lately we have made some usability improvements through simplifying and renaming the contact & enquiry form, as we found out that people seemed to use the contact form less and ring instead. People using the Contact & Enquiry Form now have the possibility of ticking a box for a callback service.
After finding out that the search term “achill hotel” is searched after about 4.5 times more often then “achill guest house”, we registered the domain achill-hotel.com and set-up an specially keyword-optimised landing page, to get some of that traffic too.
If you have any questions regarding the optimisation of your own business page, please feel free to contact us.
Magic Wand SEO – How to get good SERP with no effort
I have quite a lot of request of people that seem to slowly become aware of the importance of a good Ranking in Search Engine Page Results (SERP). Nearly all of them say something like “I’d be interested in getting a quote from you for some SEO work” or similar. This is what I call “Magic Wand SEO”. But unfortunately my wand exploded and my spellbook was destroyed last time I tried to tamper with Googles free will.
To make it clear: This kind of SEO is an illusion. SEO is a time and money consuming, highly specialised task, which will take up to 3 month before you may notice the results. By results I do not mean just a rise in visitors to your website or even less relevant things like the rise of your websites page rank.
There is only one real and relevant measurable for good SEO:
The rise in conversions and there for rise in sales. They do not have to be online, SEO can and should affect your offline sales too.
No Guarantee
Another important fact is that there cannot be any guarantee for success. And if there is success the question remains do I get a Return Of Investment (ROI) and when. The Google algorithm for ranking the results consists of something between 100 and 200 parameters, that keep changing frequently. Any company promising a SERP1 result are impostors.
Why am I just talking about Google?
Simple: Google has an effective market share of over 93%. The remaining 7% are shared by Yahoo, MSN and others. Of course “the others” have to be considered, but I don’t think they have to be mentioned 
SERP Monitoring “achill island” on Google – 16.02.2009
In General this week there have been only minor changes in positions, over all most of the sites stayed in exactly the same place as last week. On the Other hand we have seen really big movers and also quite a few pages that appeared for the first time. The overall number of results has also increased to more than 600.
Weekley Google SERP Report “achill island”
SERP Monitoring “achill island” on Google – 09.02.2009
First Page
Number in brackets, showing last weeks position
1. www.achilltourism.com (1)
3. www.achill-island.com (3)
5. www.visitachill.com (6)
7. www.achill247.com (5)
9. www.achillproperty.com (8)
Last 5 Results
Number in brackets, showing last seen position
497. www.d0okinella-pipeband.com (-)
459. www.achillholidayhomes.com (470)
436. www.bervieachill.com (-)
427. www.achillcamping.com (435)
418. www.realtnamara.com (449)
New in the List
204. www.achillpottery.com
354. www.thesaulagallery.com
436. www.bervieachill.com
497. www.dookinella-pipeband.com
Not in the List this Week
Number in brackets, showing last seen position
www.achill-surf.com (444)
Winner of the Week
Number in brackets, showing last weeks position
168. www.achill-online.net (279) +111
88. www.redfoxpress.com (198) +110
342. www.achillcottage.com (399) +57
30. www.achill-ireland.com (52) +22
Looser of the Week
Number in brackets, showing last weeks position
187. www.thesandybanks.com (89) -98
104. www.achillbliss.com (60) -44
340. www.kerndter.eu (314) -26
101. www.art-gallery-ireland.com -20
Submitting your URL to Google, Yahoo & MSN
Posted on Februar 9, 2009, under Knowledgebase, SEM, SEO, SERP.
The Three big Search Engines Google, Yahoo and MSN have improved their services for submitting and monitoring URLs in the last years. The probably better known of both are the Google Webmaster Services. MSN Live has setup a similar but far less comprehensive service called Live Search Webmaster Center, so does Yahoo with its Yahoo Site Explorer. All three services require a login. You can use the Google Service, by registering you Google Account to this Service. To use the Microsoft Service you will need a Windows Live ID and for Yahoo login with your Yahoo Account.
To submit or update your URL you should use the URL Submit/Update Form (no login required). A better way to tell Google about your page/site is to submit a xml-sitemap. You can do so by login into the Google Webmaster Services. If you have authenticated your site by adding a special metatag
<meta name="verify-v1" content="unique_id" />
to the <head> section of your index page, you will be able to upload a sitemap for that site. The unique_id will be generated by Google, depending on your sitename. Alternatively you can upload a special file to the root folder of your webserver. To learn more about Sitemaps Google provides very detailed information. Once you have a sitemap generated and submitted you might need to tell Google that it has changed, when you have added, deleted or modified pages. Some systems like e.g. Wordpress, do so automatically if you have the right plugin installed, some do not. So to “ping” Google to refetch your sitemap you can use the following:
www.google.com/webmasters/tools/ping?sitemap=sitemap_url
where sitemap_url is the URL of your sitemap.
MSN Live
The same procedure for submitting / updating information about your URLs and sitemaps apply to MSN Live. You can submit an URL to MSN Live, tell Microsoft to fetch your xml-sitemap and “ping” the service to refetch you sitemap, by using the following:
http://webmaster.live.com/ping.aspx?siteMap=sitemap_url
Where sitemap_url is the URL of your Sitemap. MSN also requires the authentification of your site, you will have to place a special metatag
<meta name="msvalidate.01" content="mail_id" />
to the <head> of your index page, where mail_id is generated from the email adress you registered the page with. Alternatively you can upload a special file to the root folder of your webserver.
Yahoo
Last but no least, also Yahoo provides the possibility to add an URL to Yahoo. You can also register your site with the Yahoo Site Explorer and upload an xml-sitemap. Here too the authentification of your site is required and you can do so by adding
<meta name="y_key" content="unique_id" />
To the <head> section of your index page, where unique_id is generated by Yahoo. If you want to ping Yahoo to fetch your sitemap, use the following format:
http://search.yahooapis.com/SiteExplorerService/V1/ updateNotification?appid=api_id&url=sitemap_url
Where api_id is your Yahoo Developers ID and sitemap_url the URL to your sitemap. Alternatively you can upload a special file to the root folder of your webserver.
SERP Monitoring “achill island” on Google – 02.02.2009
First Page
1. www.achilltourism.com (1)
3. www.achill-island.com (3)
5. www.achill247.com (7)
6. www.visitachill.com (5)
8. www.achillproperty.com (9)
Last 5 Results
399. www.achillcottage.com (422)
372. www.calveysofachill.com (383)
341. www.west-end-house.com (345)
326. www.dooagh.com (334)
324. www.achill.com (314)
New in the List
175. www.rowlandrental.com
279. www.achill-online.net
Not in the List this Week
www.agtek.ie (313)
www.achillcamping.com (435)
www.realtnamara.com (449)
www.achillholidayhomes.com (470)
www.achill-surf.com (-)
Winner of the Week
81. www.art-gallery-ireland.com (272) +191
Looser of the Week
198. www.redfoxpress.com (81) -117
314. www.kerndter.eu (248) -66
75. www.valley-house.com (27) -48
Free SEO advice using IGOpeople
After following the rush and registering with IGOpeople today, we have decided to give Free SEO Advice using this service. We will answer SEO and SEM related questions. If you have a website, that is not performing as you wish, let us know and we will have a quick look. All you have to do is register and contact us through our IGOpeople – Achill Online Internet Services -Profile-Page
If you want a more detailed analysis we are happy to offer you a
Website Health Check
for a promotional price of
129,- € incl. VAT
This offer is valid until the 30th of June 2009. The Price for the Website Health Check can be set off against any optimisation we carry out.
Monitoring “achill island” on Google
About two weeks ago I started a weekly monitoring of the search string “achill island” on Google.
Here a few interesting Facts about this search:
- Even though the search shows “Results xxx of about 375,000 English pages for achill island. (0.45 seconds)”, Google will only show 661 results. Even after clicking on the link repeat the search with the omitted results included. It will only show a maximum of 872 results.
- Doing first search beginning of January only scanned the first 100 results, returning 25 sites based on Achill Island.
- Last week I went through all 661 results and ended up with a total of 44 results (6.66%) being local sites, of which 23 were in the first 100
- Today I found 43 sites (6.51%), of which 24 were in the first 100
- All together I found 49 local sites so far, some sites seem just dissappear, to reappear the week after.
- Some sites I know have not made their way to this search at all. This tells, that the relevance of the website is minor in relation to the monitored search string.
In Detail:
- www.art-gallery-ireland.com was on position 69 two weeks ago, and dissappeared last week. This week I found it on position 269
- www.blackfield.com appeared under the name www.twilightguardian.com two weeks ago as well as this week
- www.redfoxpress.com dropped from position 72 to 191 and came back to 81 this week
- www.clubachill.net made a leap from position 417 last week to position 243
- www.achill-surf.com dissappeared.
Winner & Looser
This weeks winner are: www.clubachill.net (+174) and www.redfoxpress.com (+110). This weeks looser are: www.achillbliss.com (-23), www.realtnamara.com (-20), www.achill-ireland.com (-16) and www.achill.com (-15)
Top & Bottom
On the first page of the Google Search results you will find: www.achilltourism.com (1), www.achill-ireland.com (3), www.visitachill.com (5), www.achill247.com (7) and www.achillproperty.com (9). On the last page you will find: www.achillholidayhomes.com (470)
Ferndale Design
Posted on November 1, 2008, under References, SEO.
Ferndale Design
This is an offspring of the design for achill-fine-dining.com.
