Strange thoughts and ponderings

The Commercial Benefits of Optimised Website Information Architecture - Part 2

Cass Heaphy — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 12:33:11 +0000

In part 1 we discussed a rudimentary appraisal of your website’s information architecture so you could gauge whether it met some basic commercial requirements. In this part we will discuss issues relating to navigation and website structure.

What is so important about navigation and structure?

How do I get around?

Navigation - determines how easily people can find things and retrieve data from the website - a vital component of successful task completion activities that drives bottom line. Taking a user perspective - when they hit a page, will they know what’s available and where can they go? Is the offering shown in the navigation elements?

Where am I?

Structure - determines the breadth and depth at which data is held at, and whether the user will know where they are relative to the rest of the data. Structure should provide context. Again, you need to see things from a user perspective.

When they hit a page will they know where they are?
How do they get to the bit they’re interested in?

Website structure can essentially follow two models:-

Taxonomy - traditional hierarchical classification e.g. Groceries > Fruit & Veg > Apples > Braeburn
Faceted search - attribute-value data e.g. Apple, Fruit, Sweet, French, Eating, Green Skin, 0.5 kg Bag, £2.00 - £2.50

Planning your website structure is something that a good deal and time and effort needs to be taken on; re-structuring later because you did not anticipate the scalability or flexibility required can be very costly.

For example the “Spingfield-O-Rama” (see Figure above) mock-up sitemap is not very scalable and the taxonomy and nomenclature are a bit weak - i.e. how many characters are we going to have to put in “Ancillary” as this is pretty much every character in the Simpsons outside of the family, school, work, church and cameos.

This is a great example of NOT anticipating where growth will occur - in this example every episode is likely to generate a new characters or two so we’d need a more scalable IA to tackle characters in the Simpsons! Think ahead…

Navigation

Apologies - this is going to be a little long-winded but that’s because there is a lot to touch on, and we’re really only touching the surface here - so think of this navigation discussion as a round-up of things you’ll want to consider that impact UX and commercial outcomes.

Link Types

Website navigation in its simplest sense is a link (hyperlink) to somewhere else (a web page, a file or document). Often links are grouped and placed in panels to create defined spaces for navigation (e.g. primary navigation, secondary/tertiary, administrative navigation in the header or footer). Let’s look at the link types that go to make up navigation.

Hyperlink

This is the generic name for a link on the web and the thing that converts an index of documents into the hyperlinked web! A hyperlink works by requesting a new page/document from a server which is then delivered to the users browser (client side).

Text Link (Hypertext)

This is often called link text or anchor text (the HTML tag used to create links is called the anchor tag) and is the link type that is most accessible to humans and search engines as the words describing the link destination are there in the link itself as text.

Strange Corporation

This is the link type that provides the greatest commercial benefit as it affects search engine optimisation and link analysis most readily.

Image Link

This is where the HTML anchor tag has been placed around an image allowing it to act as a link. Because an image link has no text (so to speak) both the image’s alt atg and the wrapping link’s title-attribute need respectively to explain 1) what the image is and 2) where it goes. Notice in the code below how there is no actual text between the anchor tag in an image link - just the alt tag text.

This is why this type of link is less suited for search engine optimisation and accessibility as neither the spider or human using a screen reader genuinely knows what is in the image and are entirely reliant on the alt tag being accurate and meaningful.

Image Map Link

An image map is a plotted HTML link zone that can be superimposed on an image allowing the plotted zones to be used as links. Again, just like an image link because there is no inherent text within an image it is not ideal for SEO; you must also ensure that each plotted polygon has an appropriate alt tag to explain where the link is going.

JavaScript Links

This client-side scripting language is ubiquitous in web browsers and a driving force behind dynamic functions we tend to now take for granted. JavaScript links can be initiated from a variety of elements in the Document Object Model (DOM) and user interactions. The thing to remember about JavaScript navigation is that it is largely inaccessible to search engines and many users with accessibility issues (Google however, does now follow very basic JavaScript links) .

Therefore, it is strongly recommended that any JavaScript link functionality that you provide is backed-up with a more accessible HTML alternative to ensure humans and the search engine spiders can get to the same link destinations.

Form Submit Button

The submit element within a form is a link and makes an HTTP request when clicked. Example submit buttons from left to right Amazon, John Lewis and eBay are shown below.

Submit bttons are usually associated with important call-to-action functions - therefore, the copy used in the text will have an important influence on conversion rates and user response levels.

Form Elements

Other elements within a form such as an option-select drop down menu can be used as navigation elements, but these are not links in themselves, but merely ways of triggering JavaScript links or using JavaScript to initiate a hidden form submit button.

Flash/Silverlight/Apps

Web based applications such as Flash and Silverlight can deploy links in a whole range of ways; but in the simplest sense they still fire an HTTP request. Like images, which are not text based, Flash & Silverslight, and any other web apps need to consider accessibility for humans and search engines during development, and alternative functionality needs to be available if the app cannot meet this need!

Navigation Design Tips

Here’s a quick list of consideration for any navigation design you do:-

Compact - screen real estate is at a premium - don’t waste it on navigation if it can be made more compact

Logical menu structure - don’t confuse users - keep it simple - don’t create weird hierarchies or coin new words - don’t display unusual relationship between topics/things (so displaying groceries by country of origin might be cool, but most shoppers are used to more traditional hierarchical groups in their supermarket).

Self evident labels - Definitely take the Ronseal stance with navigation menu labelling “It does exactly what it says on the tin”. Make it no-nonsense plain language with clarity and context. What is the topic/thing - then call it that!

Intuitive functionality- the navigation must work in a manner that anyone can understand merely by using it.

Fast - the download and response times must be quick (almost instantaneous) - good lean coding and use of caching will ensuring this.

Browser compatible - your navigation must work in all the major browsers if you don’t want to lose visitors or give them an awful user experience.

Scalable and future proof - your navigation has got to use technologies that will survive (HTML/CSS and JavaScript solutions are going to give you longevity). Likewise you need to consider how your business and website structure might change. Does your navigation provide scalability? If you needed to double the number of products you offer can you do this? If you stop offering something can it be extricated with out leaving a conspicuous hole?

Navigation Types & States

When considering navigation design you need to think about the navigation states you’ll require; what needs to be shown everywhere (global navigation); will the navigation interact with the user (conditional navigation); what scalability is required and how will you sort topics/silos (secondary navigation and taxonomy/facets); lastly do any areas require access to be restricted to allow only certain types of users (logged-in/registered users)?

Lets take a quick look at navigation types/states:-

Global Navigation (Persistent) - As the name suggest global navigation appears on every page of a website and is the top level navigation’s hierarchy.

It usually consists of the primary navigation (see Apple’s example above), administrative header and footer navigation (see John Lewis’s example below) , search and sometimes search widgets/guided search tools. The global navigation should be those links considered a sine qua non to commercial success and your users’ needs.

Conditional Navigation (Persistent/Non-Persistent) - These are links that appear through interaction with the user (i.e. a conditional state has been met). Classic conditional navigation examples are roll-out/drop-down navigations (see Dell’s example below), AJAX search widgets and links found on tabs when in-page tabs are clicked on the same page. When conditional navigation is constructed using HTML/CSS it can be entirely accessible to both humans and search engines.

However, care and consideration must be taken when deploying conditional navigation as:-

1) Links are often initially hidden (and therefore their presence must be signalled to users or inferred by users based on “convention”)

2) It is all too easy to make conditional links inaccessible to humans and search engines if one does not consider how things work without JavaScript running the show. We’d strongly recommend having an HTML/CSS back-up methodology that works without JavaScript .

The main advantages of conditional navigation are:-

1) It does not use much screen real-estate until the users wants to navigate, at which point more options become available

2) Many levels of navigation can be shown to the user without the user having to navigate off the page they are on saving time and clicks when navigating

3) When built using flat HTML/CSS but driven with JavaScript it presents search engines with a flat-linear access to all your important links, often nicely categorised - in effect providing your website with a large global navigation inventory/site map of the important pages. Good search engine fodder!

Secondary Navigation (Non-Persistent) - These are links to sub-pages such as categories and subcategories or silos under the primary hierarchical tier (see John Lewis’s example to the right). Traditionally these have been deployed in the left-hand or right-hand columns, although this is by no means universal. Secondary navigation can be deployed as a contextually persistent element (i.e. always visible within the relevant category) or in a non-persistent fashion (i.e. as conditional navigation).

The key to good secondary navigation design is clearly expressing the grandparent-parent-child page relationship and how the users navigates up or down the hierarchy. A user needs to know:-

what is available on the current level (sibling pages)
what is above the current level (parent and grand parent pages)
what is available below the current level (child pages).

This needs be made obvious - use category indication (labels saying where you are e.g. “Men’s Boots” if you in the men’s boots section) with links to parent categories made clear and spatially relevant (e.g. the “Men’s Footwear” parent category link needs to be near/adjacent to the link for the current “Men’s Boots” page).

The current page should be indicated as being active with the link state indicating “this page” is active within the navigation panel.

Same level sibling navigation must be placed adjacent to the active page link.

Child level sub-navigation should be indicated visually using labels and/or visual communication techniques such as indentation, iconography and colour indication.

Breadcrumb Navigation - This is a classic example of secondary navigation providing a means of navigating up the hierarchy of a taxonomy and giving the user a sense of website geography/hierarchy:-

Great Grand Parent Page > Grand Parent Page > Parent Page > Current Page

Whilst providing a means of navigating up the hierarchy, breadcrumb navigation cannot help users find child or sibling pages, only parents and grand parents - so you can only go up, not down. Therefore, another means of navigation is obviously required to go down to lower level pages.

In-Page Tabs & Content Visibility Links - Many website use HTML/CSS to alter the CSS visibility/display states of HTML elements, thus either injecting/removing content or displaying alternative content in the same space. The advantages of this are:-

More compact page layouts
No need to refresh the page for additional content
All the content can be seen for accessibility purposes (to humans and search engines alike)

The downsides to having variable display states are:-

Users may not spot the hidden content - it needs to be signalled clearly with obvious visual communication
It is technically spam (hidden content is frowned on by the search engines) - however, it has becomes so ubiquitous that it is unlikely this will cause an issues if implemented moderately.

Restricted Navigation (Non-Persistent) - There are often areas of a website you only want available to certain users (e.g. registered users) Generally any of the above types of navigation can be used in areas with a restricted view - so as a type of navigation “restricted navigation” does not really exist - it is merely a way describing access.

The reason for mentioning it is that it is “restricted”! Therefore you cannot have a login area (members zone or such like) and expected restricted data to be indexed by search engines/be publicly available. So you need to plan carefully what is fully accessible, and what is not.

Navigation Methodologies

So now we know what types of links are available, let’s look at some methodologies used to deploy them and some of the ingenious solutions that have evolved to deploy navigation IA.

Horizontal Bar

This is a very common form of navigation, usually constructed using the

This type of navigation is typically going to be used for the primary navigation.

Vertical Menu

This is also a very common form of navigation and in most cases will use almost identical HTML as found in the horizontal bar - with an unordered-list container holding the list-items which wrap around each of the links themselves.

This type of navigation is typically going to be used for either the primary or secondary navigation depending on the size of the offering /information resource that needs to be accessed. Bigger websites will tend to use this type of menu for secondary/tertiary navigation.

Dynamic Menus - Roll-out Menu

The roll-out menu uses HTML/CSS (sometimes with JavaScript) to display the menu on-hover (sometimes on-click) using either the anchor element’s pseudo class a:hover or the DOM to enact the menu appearing.

Caution should be taken if considering nesting child sub-menus off the roll-out menu as these have proven to offer weaker usability performance. Also when adding additional sub-menus to a roll-out navigation you need to consider page width. There are many small screen resolutions form factors entering the market (hand-hand devices and smart phones) so overly wide navigation relying on hover-states to remain open can impair usability (fiddly stuff on a phone, netbook or tablet) so keep these menus as narrow as possible.

Dynamic Menus - Drop-down Menu

Like the roll-out menu, drop-down menus can use the same HTML/CSS and JavaScript techniques.

Caution should be taken not to make the menus to long/deep as this will also impair usability and prevent some users being able to navigate as desired.

Obviously you could make this a roll-up menu, but users might find this a bit confusing as it is a bit unconventional; and unconventionality usually means lower conversion rates - so it needs to be very intuitive if you plan on doing something original and innovative.

Dynamic Menus - Drop-down Panel

This is a variation on the drop-down menu theme. Instead of showing just the immediate child pages this technique will often show either categorised child pages with heading elements or grand-child pages with the child pages forming the categorised heading links in a large panel which can accommodate more links.

The advantages are:-

You can show a lot of links in a organised fashion without the users having to navigate of the current page
You can access these links from every page of the website when applied to the primary nav as in the example from John Lewis
The links do not clutter the offering or take vital screen real-estate until needed.

The disadvantages are:-

You need to be careful of the size of the panel and you users’ screen resolutions
The links are hidden unless the user interacts with the primary navigation.

Dynamic Menus - Scrolling Menus

Like most dynamic navigation, scrolling navigation can be made usable and accessible or not! However, the nots tend to be a bit more prevalent with this type of navigation. So double-check with your web development team that any deployment is fully accessible. If it does not work without JavaScript it is probably going to be inaccessible.

Horizontal and vertical scrolling navigation allow you to provide more links in a limited space which can be an advantage in many circumstances. However, be aware that unlike “hover state” type reveals for navigation elements, a scrolling navigation is much more difficult to interact with and a significant reduction in usability is consequent - so use judiciously and sparingly.

Dynamic Menus - Carousels

Carousels are innately inaccessible as they rely on either JavaScript (via libraries such as JQuery) or third party programmes such as Flash or Silverlight to provide the lateral flow function. So when you use a carousel you must either provide an alternate navigation methodology or build the element so it degrades elegantly into some form of HTML/CSS equivalent.

The advantage of a carousel is that they provide slick and high-gloss to the UI and a richer more engaging experience - so they certainly have their place and appropriate deployment - just make sure you provide an accessible alternative.

Dynamic Menus - Accordion Menus

Accordion menus dynamically open and reveal child links when the parent link is either clicked or hovered over. Again the advantage of this technique is that the “pancake” is more compact and parent-child relationships become more clear (as child pages only appear when you interact with the parent link). Below we can see an “accordion” on the Apple website opening and closing with three different categories as the active element with their child sub-links being displayed in each case.

Generally these menus will be built as a standard vertical menu, with the hiding of the appropriate child links being handled by JavaScript - consequently this usually means they are completely accessible unless implemented horribly!

Search Widgets / Search Tools

These are glorified pre-populated forms that help guide your user searches. They let users know what you’ve got from pre-defined list. You can jazz them up with client-side scripting and frameworks such as AJAX, but again remember they must work without the JavaScript/client-side scripting to be accessible.

The advantages of search widgets is that they allow users to quickly discover what’s in your offering and get to what they want to find. Search widgets work best when all/most parameters are known in advance and the data is well structured based on the attributes used in the widget.

Faceted Search

Similar to search widgets, faceted search breaks down your offering into attribute silos. Most faceted search layouts will use either vertical or horizontal HTML links with the number of results associated with a facet indicated in the link text e.g. Apples (23) Oranges (4).

See John Lewis’ example to the right for LCD TVs.

Some faceted search will dynamically update in-page without a refresh using AJAX/clinet-side scripting to give you a running tally of your selections. However, like everything else we’ve mentioned, to be accessible you’ll need to be able execute HTTP requests for facet combinations without the use of client side scripting (i.e. a standard URL request to get the combination of facets desired).

Faceted search is ideal for complex offering with many possible choice combinations, allowing users to whittle down the results to just those elements they consider important to the purchase or information search and seeing all results that match their criteria (a key element in the purchase decision cycle - evaluation of the criteria).

Filters, Sort & Paging/View Functions

These elements allow users to make sense of category search results found on most ecommerce solutions.

Filters - These allow you to include or exclude results - generally this will be based on the “select” form element which appears as a drop-down menu, but sometimes a free-text input field can be used with include/exclude selection drown-down options or radio buttons. The similarities between filters and faceted search are largely semantic to many users - for them the end results are the same, namely keeping in or keeping out what they want or don’t want respectively. Classic ecommerce filters include:-

Brand/Manufacturer
Price Range Brackets
Size/Weight/Volume/Dimension Range
Colour/Style/Finish

Sort functions - these allow you to order the results of a category page as you desire. Often these are just ascending/descending arrow links. Classic ecommerce sort functions include:-

A-Z ascending/descending
Price ascending/descending
User Rating/Review/Satisfaction ascending/descending

How you implement your default view state can have a significant impact on commercial outcomes

Page view functions - these determine how many items appear in a category result set. How you implement your default view state can have a significant impact on commercial outcomes. Too many products/results will increase server load and increase the amount of data that must be downloaded.

However, many years of user testing by UX professionals and ecommerce retailers has shown that users prefer more rather than less results when they look at a category - they want to see what you’ve got! With the mouse-wheel being ubiquitous people intuitively scroll down - however, they’re less likely to hunt for and click on the “next >” link.

So your default view state (the number of results shown on a category) is a significant commercial decision that you must finely balance between:-

how many products/results you have in any category
how many results can be displayed without slowing the page (to the point of UX impairment)

In addition to the default page view limit, it is strongly advised to offer users their own choice of items to be viewed on a page with a range of page view limit options in a select drop-down menu (e.g. “View 10, 20, 50″ results or whatever ranges suit the offering best).

Consult your web analytics to see what users are doing and which view state is most popular - this might be the quickest and easiest way to determine what suits your website, offering and audience best when it comes to your default page view.

Paging functions - these are closely tied to page view functions as they determine how the user gets to the next page in a results set when the number of results is greater than the current page view number. These are generally simple links with Next>, , Last>>, < and numbered page links.

Filter, Sort & Page View Accessibility - Filters, sort and page view functions require a visible “submit” button when viewed without JavaScript/client-side scripting to ensure these form elements are fully accessible as the select drop-down and other form elements used to provide this functionality cannot directly submit data to the server. A visible submit button makes life easier for the user not able to use client-side scripts.

Filter, sort, page view and pagination functions are generally presented in a single bar across category results pages. It is strongly recommended that the bar is present at both the top and bottom of the results set as this improves usability.

Tags/Tag Clouds

Tag clouds are clusters of links based on keywords that have been tagged to data. One of the key advantages of tag clouds is that they generate an “organic” link architecture - i.e. this is a user/author generated link architecture that develops of its own accord as data is published with its associated tags.

Tag clouds often use variable font size to visual communicate relative importance/weight within the results set - the more articles/results that contain a tag for a keyword, the bigger that tag appears in the “cloud”

Tags and tag clouds are particularly useful when:-

applied to user generate content (UGC)
the primary data is non-textual (e.g. images, video, audio)
the primary data is not self-contextual (data sets, non-prose textual data such as programming code)

By adopting users tagging large document sets can to some degree overcome metadata deficits and the expense of adding metadata post hoc within a formal schema.

So in short allowing data to be tagged by users makes the data more useful and accessible - which is good for everyone.

Structure

So we’ve taken a look at navigation (the means of getting around the website) but now we must turn to the structure of the website itself. This is a serious business, as structure affects everything in IA.

Types of Website Structure

There are two types of structure you can employ to present your data based on classification models used to order/sort stuff in all fields of life. These are:-

Taxonomy
Faceted Search

Taxonomy

A taxonomy is a pre-defined hierarchical order of things; so websites using a taxonomical structure have “Parent-Child” relationships between web pages. There is a family tree like structure with the home page as the eldest relative, under which are the first generation of children - the main categories, and under these sit the categories, the subcategories on so on, until you reach the end of the branch where document pages reside (content/product pages).

Because taxonomies rely on the grouping of related things within each branch it is necessary for the information architect to ensure that these groupings are logical to the user. The information architect must also be highly conscious of “branching” i.e. how many things are in each category.

Rule of 5+/- 2

Humans retrieve information best when there are between 3 and 7 items (know as the rule of 5 plus/minus 2 as the optimal number of items is 5) so the development of any “tree” needs to be mindful of this user requirement. Often you’ll be faced with a reality that cannot be circumvented and more than 7 items will be required in a menu structure, so this is why clarity in the navigation design and layout becomes even more important.

Keyword Research & Search Engine Ontology

Keyword research to help define and populate your naming scheme (nomenclature) is one of those oft overlooked and undervalued things that needs doing to ensure better commercial outcomes.

Because taxonomies rely on a pre-defined nomenclature for branching elements (categories and subcategories) careful selection of keywords used for each element is recommended.

Search engine algorithms gain their understanding of data and what they’re looking at (ontology) by looking at the linking relationship (link architecture or structure) between web pages and what those web pages contain in textual content. Therefore, a taxonomy and what you name things has two really important functions:-

Taxonomy naming (nomenclature) using relevant keyword increases the likelihood of receiving increased levels of relevant search engine traffic for specific and related keyword terms
Your taxonomy’s nomenclature affects the semantics of other keywords within the “branch” (tiers below and above) as the search engine can better infer context and comprehension due to keyword relationships - which increases accuracy and therefore, relevance - improving search ranking.

You’re looking to identify and use the most likely keywords your target audience will associate with the topic of the branch in the taxonomy. In do so you significantly increase the likelihood the search engine will find your offering relevant for the desired topic.

Maximising the benefits of organic search algorithms by using the most sensible keywords in your category naming is going to help drive more relevant “qualified” traffic to your website. As organic search traffic is free, this is going to create low-cost high-converting traffic opportunities that you’re less likely to receive when keyword research is eschewed.

Website Scalability

As mentioned in the introduction, one of the biggest shortcomings in website IA design and schema is not anticipating growth or changes in the offering.

So be mindful of the need for a basic flexibility in your structure and the ability to generate new branches within any topic or remove existing branches without having to rebuild the website.

Any half-decent front-end templates of a content managed website should employ a basic level of flexibility and dexterity with regard to website structure. So if you’re currently planning or preparing a website build project brief for an internal team or 3rd party developers/agency do make sure this is part of the conversation, because once something is hard coded (i.e.inflexible) it becomes a great deal more expensive and time consuming to put right what should have been there from day one.

Faceted search

Faceted search (faceted navigation/browsing) is a linear/flat structure with no real hierarchy. It is based on attributes associated with document pages so all structure is organic in the sense that your offering/inventory attributes define the criteria by which users can search.

Very few true faceted search websites exist; most are hybrids using a mix on traditionally taxonomies to handle the basics and faceted search to handle criteria selection in the offering/inventory.

The key to an effective faceted search implementation is it needs to be self evident how it works. So keep the user interface (UI) simple. Some basic advice would be:-

Show available facets as links or check boxes + links as this make them crawlable by search engines - select menu items are not - so another route in is required if you want your facet combinations indexed by the search engine spiders
Indicate how many results are associated with each facet
Keep faceted search links/functionality in the same place
Allow users to add/remove facets from the list
Allow users to search on one facet or combination of facets and then refine their search further by adding more facets
Allow results to be sorted using addition functions - i.e. not native to the facet logic as this will provide greater flexibility to the user to control the data - filtering will remain controlled through facet selection

We could discuss faceted search and navigation at length, but it is the initial planning phase where things can go awry with significant implications so let’s take a quick delve into that and we’ll look in depth a faceted search in general at a later date…

Data Structure & Keyword Manipulation

When planning your website architecture the key to successful and useful faceted search implementations is the granularity and consistency of your relational database’s data set for each row item (product/offering).

You need to think of all the different attributes you can associate with an item and then define attribute-pair values for each (i.e. the attribute name and its value) consistently to all items. For example let think about a pair of Levi’s® 501 Jeans. What attribute-value pairs would this item present?

Example Attribute-Value Pairs for Levi’s ® 501 Jeans

Gender: Men’s
Manufacturer: Levi’s ®
Style: 501
Model: 005010460
Fit: Standard Fit
Fit Leg: Standard Leg
Fit Fly: Fly Button
Material: 100% Cotton
Material Weight 13.5oz.
Fabric: Denim
Generic Type: Jeans
Type Synonym: Trousers
Colour Generic: Blue
Colour Specific: Heavy Stuff
Finish: Vintage/Distressed
Retail Price: £60.00
Size: 32/32
Detail #1: 5 pocket
Detail #2: rivetted
Detail #3: rear pocket red tab
Detail #4: brand logo /size patch

As we can see, a simple pair of jeans can have quite a few attribute value pairs, and most of these could conceivably be used within the context of faceted search. So the more granular you can make the data you hold for each product the more you can do with it.

Keyword String Concatenation

Likewise, granular data allows you to not only drive faceted search logic, but it also allows you to dynamically present textual-string data through concatenation in ways that offer optimal use of the code flow for search engine consumption.

In English, that means you can cut and re-cut the data to form sentence structures for things like the Title, Heading, Breadcrumb, Links, Unique Selling Points and Benefit Statements using different combinations of the data. So from the example above we can create many different concatenation from the array of data to describe the same product:-

Levi’s ® 501 Denim Jeans
Levi’s ® 501 Jeans 100% Cotton
Levi’s ® 501 Jeans 32/32
Levi’s ® 501 Jeans 32/32 £60.00
Levi’s ® 501 Jeans 32/32 Blue
Levi’s ® 501 Jeans 32/32 Heavy Stuff
Levi’s ® 501 Jeans 32/32 Vintage/Distressed
Levi’s ® 501 Jeans Fly Button
Levi’s ® 501 Jeans Standard Fit
Men’s Levi’s ® 501 Blue Jeans
Men’s Levi’s ® 501 Denim Jeans
Men’s Levi’s ® 501 Jeans
Men’s Levi’s ® 501 Jeans 100% Cotton
Men’s Levi’s ® 501 Jeans Fly Button
Men’s Levi’s ® 501 Jeans Standard Fit

How we use these data strings or any other conceivable concatenation to influence search engines and present the data in the most favourable light (i.e. where to put what data) is where IA structural design and search engine optimisation (SEO) come together. This is where some of the biggest commercial benefits with IA planning can be found.

If you’re planning new ecommerce website we’d recommend you talk to an IA/SEO specialist as part of the process to outline where and how you can reap the most benefits from your “potential” data and the real opportunity cost associated with generating more granular data as part of the product database population process.

The key is to tie the concatenated strings (your optimised keyword combinations) into the HTML elements that directly support the faceted search combination page. So if the facet search combination page is a category for the following facets:-

Men’s
Jeans
Levi’s ®
32″/32″
501

Then the category page itself and all the pages shown in the listing need to have relevant keywords in the right HTML elements that the search engine is going to evaluate.

A quick summary of those elements might be something like this:-

Category Page HTML Title
Category Page Meta Description
Category Page H1 Heading
Category Page Faceted Search Function Panel / Breadcrumb
Category Page Link Text
Category Page Thumbnail Image Alt Tag
Category Page Listing Call-to-Action Button
Product Pages HTML Titles
Product Pages Meta Descriptions
Product Pages H1 Headings
Product Pages Summary / Description
Product Pages Attributes / Specification Tables
Product Pages Image Name, Alt Tag & Caption
Product Pages Related Product Link Text

By having granular textual data you can ensure that the concatenated strings are grammatically correct and provide meaning and context (semantic optimisation) within each HTML element. That helps information retrieval systems such as search engines understand what a web page is about - any you’ll be rewarded for making your offering clearer and easier for them to understand with increased relevance and search engine rankings.

Getting Around

Let’s be clear about IA and user experience - many of your users are not going to browse and navigate their way down through your website hierarchy to a product page - they’re going to use the internal search function.

However, and this is the really important commercial tip - you IA has a dual and equally important function of explaining your website and its data to the search engines - which will be your main source of traffic in any decent online marketing strategy.

Internal Search

The ultimate faceted search is the natural language internal search function and it is often going to be the preferred means of getting around a website for many users.

Some basic thing to consider with internal search:-

Make it easy to find
Make it part of the global navigation - i.e. on every page
Make the call-to-action button say “search”
Don’t suck! - give relevant result

The last of these criteria is easier said than done. Often a commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) ready made solution is going to get you the best results, so if developing your own website we’d recommend avoided tackling your own information retrieval development and simply plug a reliable third-party proprietary system that’s within your budget into the website. This way your result might prove relevant to your users!

Where Am I? User Location Indication

Another function navigation performs is to let user know where they are. This function is two-fold:-

For users browsing through the website
For users landing on the website via deep linking such as from a search engine results page (SERP) or email campaign

It is important to provide a clear indication of where they are and where they can go. This is called providing “information scent” and it is key to tackling the bete noir of conversion - user uncertainty. So a little checklist for providing users with a sense of website geography would be:-

Place navigation in conventional locations
Make navigation obvious
Make grandparent - parent - child page relationships clear
Indicate active /current location links
Use a breadcrumb
Use a hierarchical HTML title structure
Use a category indication subheading

What Next

Well, that’s it for now. In the next part we’ll discuss how humans and computer/machine systems retrieve data looking into things such as behavioural economics, persuasion and the limbic brain and search algorithms and how these all tie into IA design and UX planning.

A Beginners Guide to XML

Matthew Pollard — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 17:11:50 +0000

XML stands for eXtensible Mark-up Language. You might not realise it but you are probably already using it:

XHTML, a mark-up language which many web pages are written in, is a form of XML
if you subscribe to any RSS feeds or use a feed reader, you are using XML
if you use Google, and have seen the drop down “suggestion box” when you type, you have seen XML at work

If you have heard of AJAX - which is probably one of the main features of Web 2.0 - the “X” in AJAX stands for XML.

AJAX is a technology which often uses XML

AJAX is a technology which enables a dialogue to be set up between a web page and a server, and allows page content to be dynamically modified without having to physically refresh and reload the page. The data that the page retrieves is normally sent as XML.

Elements of an XML Document

At the most basic level an XML file is just a text file – in a similar manner to an HTML document, an XML file can be created in a wide variety of text editors including “Notepad”.

XML tags are almost entirely customisable

An XML document is made up of tags which are almost entirely customisable, as long as the XML rules are followed. There are standard formats though - the above-mentioned XHTML and RSS both use standard formats as defined by their schemas or Document Type Definitions (DTD).

The Document Type Definitions (DTD)

A DTD is a schema written in the DTD language. In Standard Generalized Mark-up Language (SGML) family mark-up languages, the DTD contains a set of mark-up declarations that define a document type - whether it might be:

HTML 4.01 strict (Contains all HTML elements and attributes, excluding presentational or deprecated elements [eg. font] and framesets)
XHTML 1.0 strict (a version of XHTML excluding elements marked as deprecated in the HTML 4.01 specification)
XHTML 1.0 transitional (a version including some presentational elements excluded from the strict version)
or something else

The XML document declares what DTD it uses via a reference within the mark-up - this is how a web browser know what type of HTML to expect and how a feed reader using a RSS document knows what to expect.

The DTD that an HTML or XHTML document refers to is defined at the beginning of the document’s code using the “doctype” declaration - the declaration looking something like this:

“http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd”>

The “doctype” declaration usually contains two pieces of information to identify the relevant DTD; a Formal Public Identifier (FPI) string [the first quoted segment] and a URL where the browser can find it.

The FPI can be broken down into two information snippets - known as the “owner identifier” and “text identifier” respectively - which are then further delimited by the “//” double-slash characters:

“[Registration Status]//[Owner]//[Class] [Description]//[Language]”

The flexibility of the FPI string is the crucial link required to provide the ability to set up your own DTD, or modify the existing DTDs to add the tags you have always wanted.

The ability to create DTDs confers the power to construct new XML formats

By using the “doctype” declaration in your XML code to refer to the location of your DTD, your customised tags would then be valid and execute in the correct manner.

It is this ability to create DTDs which XML documents can refer to, which confers the power to create customised tags and even complete new XML formats.

XML and the Document Object Model (DOM)

Much of the functionality we take for granted in today’s websites relies on something called the “DOM” - the Document Object Model.

The DOM is a representation of the web page as XML “nodes”, a node being an element or tag. If a node has children (i.e. more tags inside it), then the current node is the parent. You can also have siblings which are next to each other.

JavaScript manipulates the DOM - and therefore the page display - by finding a specified node and modifying it, but also has the ability to add new nodes or remove nodes.

This JavaScript functionality is crucial to the ability of AJAX to modify and update page content, dependant on the data received from the server - as it is this manipulation of the DOM which confers the ability to update content without refreshing the page.

XML Validation

XML documents must validate correctly to conform to the DTD

In order to conform to a DTD’s standards, XML mark-up should validate and be ‘well formed’.

Being valid means that it follows the schema and being well formed means that it is properly written as XML – tags must be closed and formatted correctly.

There is another reason why validating HTML is important, as validating page not only checks whether it is well formed or not but also provides a way to debug any problems that might occur within the page.

XML Formats

XML is used for many things where a standard way to transfer data over the internet is required. RSS, the ubiquitous format that pervades the internet, has already mentioned. However, there many different XML formats emerging - including the following examples:

XMLTV

XMLTV is a format that enables TV listings to be distributed over the internet to be used by various applications such as media centres or personal video recorders. The Radio Times provides an XMLTV feed of all its listings for personal use.

OpenDocument

OpenDocument is a format produced by the open source community as way to standardise and offer better inter operability between systems.

The format was originally created by OpenOffice.org the open source office suite but was adopted as a standard by the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards which is a organisation a bit like the W3C and has since been adopted by Microsoft and is used as one of the formats in its Office 2007 suite.

There was some controversy about this as Microsoft was pushing their format, the Office Open XML format which is also an internationally recognised standard. Many open source advocates maintained that this format was biased in favour of Microsoft, but time will show the uptake numbers of each format.

SVG

Scalable Vector Graphics is a format that allows a graphic to be broken down into XML. All web browsers support this format apart from Internet Explorer although Google do provide a plug-in for Internet Explorer to allow it to use SVG. It’s not just web browsers that use the format though main graphics applications support this format. SVG can been animated and interactive along similar lines to what you might expect from Adobe Flash

There are many other different kinds of XML and the chances are you have used it without realising so next time you see a file extension or application that includes an “X” in its name there is a good chance it stands for XML.

Search, Multi-Channel Marketing & UX

Dom Ebel — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 12:14:01 +0000

Integrating online and offline marketing campaigns and providing a successful multi-channel user experience is a powerful way to increase profitability and customer loyalty.

Studies have shown that:

customers who purchase from a store through multiple channels spend 14 percent more annually on average than their single-channel counterparts (JupiterResearch)
in some sectors these multi-channel customers are 25 to 50 percent more profitable than their single-channel equivalents (McKinsey & Company).

It therefore should be a priority to ensure that all your channels work together, mutually supporting each other with your brand and offering messages, and that these channels provide a seamless path for your users through to an acquisition.

Integrating Channels

Successfully integrating organic and paid search with offline campaigns and other channels requires understanding how a business works across a multi-channel environment – and considering channels as an integrated network, rather than individual delivery mediums.

The User Journey

It is vital to maintain an integrated approach across the entire journey – in order to reach consumers at all levels and various stages of the journey or purchase cycle.

An example of a typical user journey might be:

A consumer sees a TV advert for a time-limited healthcare insurance discount
Reminded again later by reading a magazine advert describing the same offer
Uses a search engine to locate the website and researches the offer
Researches healthcare competitors in the same market space
Returns to the original website and locates the contact information
Rings the healthcare company, discusses his medical requirements and applies for the discounted offer.

Search is the vital connection between offline and online marketing, providing the touch points which allow a seamless transition between the offline and online steps of the user journey.

Without the search element - or if a website has no search visibility - a consumer cannot find the information or online resources they seek. This means that the touch points are lost, and this breaks the user journey. Obviously this makes it difficult (if not impossible) for a consumer to complete their task, having a detrimental effect overall on the numbers of successful conversions and therefore the performance of your multi-channel campaign as a whole.

The uplift often seen after a successful search marketing drive is often merely the improvement from sub-optimal performance to optimal performance - as the barriers to task completion present in the user journey are removed.

This means that for many, sub-optimal performance is the accepted norm..!

The creation of a successful search strategy designed to remove barriers and provide a seamless user journey, requires analysis of the steps required to complete a given task and identification of the points where the different channels intersect. Examples might include:

a direct mail shot with a unique promotional code delivering extra introductory benefits if presented on registration via the website
an automated SMS text message sent to a mobile number after initial registration, reminding recipients of current special offers or website downloads.

Both these tasks might prompt searches, but using very different keywords to locate different sections of the same website. eg.

“campaign name registration”
“company name special offers”

Thus, it is very important to understand the users requirements at each touch point, in order to identify likely keywords and create a strategy to maximise search visibility for them.

Target Audience and User Behaviour

Analysis of user behaviour and demographics will help identify and understand the steps within the user journey, and the factors involved at each step. A campaign should identify the role of each channel within that journey, and address the needs of the user at that step.

When considering the mix of media and the messages delivered through each, decisions should be based on the behaviour of your target audience.

For example, in a typical household today, the media consumption of each member may differ:

a working parent may listen to more radio going to and from work in a car
a housekeeping parent may read more magazines or watch more daytime TV
children may watch more TV or use the internet more. They may also use mobile devices extensively.

It is therefore important to match channels to your target personas to maximise resonance with the target audience.

Search - Connection between Online and Offline

Search is the pivotal entry-point on the net, often being the first step in an online journey. Even when a visitor has been given a dedicated URL, they will often still search for a brand or domain. This means that search is the vital connection between your online and offline channels.

Thorough keyword research is vital to ensuring search meets the demands of the user journey – both in capturing search engine queries, but also as a means of understanding evolving user behaviour patterns and vocabulary.

While keyword research tools can provide data from user searches, monitoring social media can provide not only real-time insight but also open dialogue channels with the very audience that your marketing efforts are directed at, and in this respect provide a dimension of communication simply unavailable through any other resource.

Vertical Search Engines

While traditional blended search engines (such as Google universal search) play the major role in search visibility, vertical search engines focussing on niche topics or single media type are an important element within your search visibility strategy. For example, the second largest search engine in the world is YouTube - a video vertical.

YouTube presents opportunities to tie TV advertising campaigns in with an online presence and reach certain persona types where they’re more likely to consume media.

Studies show that online video ads designed specifically for the web achieve greater results than their TV counterparts - possibly due to the ability to use edgier creatives free of the constraints imposed on TV advertising, so consider different but supporting campaigns and messages for online video channels.

YouTube has expanded the number of advertising formats they offer to include a variety of opportunities including overlaying the video clip itself. Initial research would suggest that these new formats deliver higher click-through rates (CTRs) than the older more traditional standard formats as is often seen with new advertising formats and techniques.

Analysing the business marketing strategy from a multi-channel perspective may indicate that vertical search engines can provide a targeted channel through which to operate complementary campaigns.

Amazon and eBay are the two major shopping verticals, and providing an experience that consumers trust. The ability to create a presence by setting up a merchant store provides opportunities to sell to targeted customers.

Some consider Amazon as the buyers default shopping search engine, first search engine they will use when they know they’re in the purchase funnel. So consider a merchant account as a opportune additional sales channel.

Paid Search and the Halo Effect

Complementing organic positions with paid search listings can have a powerful effect on click-through-rates (CTR), by positioning a single brand across multiple placements on the search engine results pages (SERPs).

This produces an phenomenon called the “halo effect”, by which the uplift seen across the board is larger than simply the combined total of the individual click volumes.

If a company also has affiliates bidding on the same keyword, the result can be especially powerful, with branding across 5 or 6 placements on a page, resulting in domination of the SERPs by the brand.

Paid search is ideal for tie-ins with other channels as the message and trigger keywords can be controlled quickly and easily. So if you want people to find a micro-site or campaign page easily paid search will meet this need.

Paid search can be used as an effective means of connecting with fast-moving current events or responding to rapid changes in campaigns, due to the speed with which campaigns can be created and keywords and advertising creative added in response to an event.

Paid search can also be a very useful tool for split A/B or Multi-Variant Testing (MVT) using the the tools the search engines provide to optimise ad creative and website design. With the amount of traffic using the search engines, tests can be organised and run very quickly, with statistically meaningful data produced in a very short time frame. So you can test creative messaging not just for paid search, but utilise this channel as a market-research test bed!

The information gained from this testing can be used to influence the message delivered across other channels.

Multi-Channel Analysis

It is important to remember that in the same way that offline adverts and marketing drives visitors to your website, online marketing will often drive offline conversions - as a proportion of visitors may follow up the search step with offline actions such visiting their local store branch or calling to speak to a representative.

It is therefore vital to gain as much insight from the analytics as possible, monitoring touch points and analysing user journeys and transactions across all channels to track how effectively the campaign is running.

Thorough analysis will show which channels are producing high ROI and which require optimisation, pinpoint any bottlenecks or disconnects, and highlight any steps which require further optimisation or improvement.

Applying the insights gained from this analysis across all channels will maximise the efficiency of the network as a whole, providing an uplift larger than proportional improvements to a single channel might bring, and delivering substantially better results than seen using channels in a disparate manner.

In this way, removing the barriers to task completion present in the user journey will not only improve performance from sub-standard to optimal, but maximise user task-completion figures and actually deliver the true uplift in ROI that should be your goal.

Conclusion

With natural search, paid search, social media, display, online PR, viral and email marketing available to you online and outdoor, direct marketing, press, TV, radio, PR, sales promotion, ambient/guerilla, experiental and cinema available to you offline you need to ensure these channel are working with each other. They need to support each others messaging - marketing communications needs coordination and no channel should operate exclusively if you want to get the most out of your budget.

The user journey requires every touch point to support the message, and their journey will most likely require search as the linchpin for task completion. So no matter how effective your marketing communications and campaign messages are, you need to be mindful of search visibility.

Online Marketing Primer

Cass Heaphy — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 18:45:02 +0000

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) - Natural /Organic Search

What is it?

This online marketing technique optimises websites to adhere to the relevancy algorithm criteria of the major search engines (Google, Yahoo! and MSN). The aim is to get your web pages to appear in the top positions on the search engine results pages (SERPs) for search queries. This mechanism is designed to drive targeted and qualified traffic to your website using relevant content that is attractive and useful to the consumer.

Advantages

Targeted Audience

Self-selecting targeted audience that is actively looking for something you have on your website. Well structured website information architecture, content and inbound linking allow you to refine the targeting process.

Traffic Volumes

Natural search will generally provide large volumes of traffic at low cost (no direct cost-per-click with natural search) and a natural longer-tail (increase keyword visibility).

Optimised natural search provides very high levels of low cost traffic - it should be your main traffic source in a balanced online marketing strategy

Low Cost

Natural search uses your website’s own structure, its content and its inbound linking (links that point to your website) to determine its position in the results set of any search query. There are no costs other than the time involved in optimising the website, creating its content and acquiring relevant links - making this one of the cheapest forms of marketing/advertising there is.

That is not to say that link development or content provision are cheap, but they are activities that should be in place already, and the SEO benefits should be a free by-product of running your customer focused online business and marketing efforts.

Always On

Natural search is free; so if the website is relevant for a search it will be returned in the results 100% 24/7.

There are no budget restrictions limiting the number of times your listing is displayed (impression) so you get better visibility with SEO for the keyword positions your website holds.

Scalable

Because the volume of traffic has no relationship to cost/budget it is easy to roll out new products and offerings without having to increase costs - you merely publish enticing and engaging content on your website.

Far Reaching (Long Tail)

More obscure keyword phrases can be returned in the search result without too much effort - therefore keyword combinations available from your content create a ‘long-tail’ of low volume entry points, ensuring a far reaching marketing solution and excellent search visibility.

Long Term

The basic principles of search engine optimisation have not changed since the pre-Google era - information retrieval remains focused on well structured, content rich, useful websites with good linking and regularly-updated content. So you can expect SEO to provide your website with traffic for many years ahead without significant changes being made.

Disadvantages

It Takes Time

It is difficult to take-on established websites straight away; link building takes time as does great content and regular contributions - also, circumventing things like Google’s ’sandbox’ quarantine period for new domain names could slow your SEO solution down (unless you inject a large dose of high link velocity activity as provided by the likes of online PR).

Commitment

Requires resource to establish content and link reputation. However, any decent web strategy should make user experience and information supply a key aim - so this should dove-tail nicely with SEO requirements.

Paid Search Marketing - Pay-Per-Click (PPC)

What is it?

This online marketing channel allows advertisers to pay for listings adverts that appear on the search engine result pages (SERPs) and across the search engines’ content network. Pay-Per-Click (PPC) is an advertising model in which advertisers pay a fee only when their advert is clicked. There are varying methods of determining the fee payable, but most search models have moved towards modifying the bid price with a “quality” quotient to determine the final cost-per-click (CPC).

Advantages

Immediacy

PPC campaigns can be setup very quickly and your adverts will appear as part of the paid search results as long as there is budget and they are relevant.

Control

Paid search allows you to control you marketing campaign with ease. Whether using management tools or a web interface, controlling the keywords, bid price, advert copy, landing page URL, operational geography (geo-location), day parting (scheduling) and flight dates for your campaign is straightforward and responsive.

PPC confers the ability to adjust budgets, bid strategies or ad groups, and respond to commercial imperatives in minutes

Flexibility

Control of bid prices, keyword matching (both positive and negative), advert copy variation and dynamic keyword insertion all provide a great degree of flexibility. The ability to adjust budgets, bid strategies, to pause or resume campaigns/ad groups and respond to commercial imperatives in minutes further bolster the litheness and responsiveness of PPC.

Reporting

The search networks provide full reporting packages that allow you to closely monitor all marketing activity through their channel. Additional tracking programmes allow you to tie revenue/goal tracking directly into these campaigns in a seamless fashion.

Measurability

With revenue and goal tracking tied into the reporting package, paid search performance becomes very transparent. Calculating ROI and the cost per acquisition is therefore a simple measurement. Other KPIs are also easily tracked and the campaign can be optimised on-the-fly to meet any objectives where priorities change.

Market Research

The data offered from a paid search advertising campaign will often offer significant insight into a market and its characteristics - this data is both immediate and free, and an asset that should not be overlooked when planning the entire online marketing strategy and mix.

Disadvantages

Dynamic Competition

Bid prices compete to determine positioning - so constant monitoring is required.

Big Budgets Prevail

Big purses tend to prevail as they can out-bid the minnows.

Quality Score algorithm

Google’s Quality Score algorithm calculates the relevancy of the landing assets to the ad group and trigger keywords, then factors this into the final cost-per-click (CPC). This means to get the full benefit and lowest costs in your campaigns relevant landing assets with matching keywords are needed score highly on the “quality” index - negating some of the immediacy/responsiveness of PPC.

On-going cost

To match traffic month-by-month, what you spend this month you must also spend next month.

Therefore, to maximise your return it is highly desirable to implement a programme of landing page optimisation and sales funnel optimisation (or any transactional architecture) to increase conversion rates and get more out of your paid search budget.

Display Advertising

What is it?

Display advertising uses banners, leader boards, skyscrapers and MPU display panels to deliver a creative message to the audience by appearing on targeted websites. The display units can deliver multimedia and streaming content, and interact with the user.

Advantages

Cost Effective

Well-targeted campaigns can be very cost effective in sales and lead generation.

The flexibility of the creative and interactive capability offer great branding power to the advertiser

Awareness

The volumes of eyeballs and flexibility of the creative in the visual display offer great branding power to the advertiser. This is the main function of display advertising - to raise brand awareness and feed more users into consideration mode.

Market Research

Display also offers excellent reporting and feedback that can be used to hone the marketing message; post-click and post-impression data can be used in conjunction with other channels to assess exposure to conversion and user responsiveness to creative and offerings.

Guaranteed Sales Price

The advent of cost-per-acquisition (CPA) deals present advertisers with a fantastic sales and marketing opportunity to acquire sales/leads at a known fixed cost. Generally these type of arrangements are based on previous CPC or CPM campaign metrics so predictable sales projections can be calculated by the network or publisher.

Interactivity

A significant advantage of certain display units is the interactivity, allowing you to interact with the consumer directly, allowing data capture and sales opportunities that other channels cannot match.

Disadvantages

Campaign Management

Coordinating the creative process, media buying and network analytics for best outcomes is complex. Quite often these three elements are handled by different bodies, meaning a high degree of account management and liaison is required to achieve the right outcome. We suggest engaging a single party that takes a unified approach, so you get joined-up thinking for the campaign’s lifecycle.

Banner Blindness

Although display is a great mechanism for branding, advertisers should be aware of “banner blindness”; so just because 1 million eyeballs have seen your creative does not mean it has reached them all.

Email Marketing (Emarketing)

What is it?

This is the broadcast of a marketing message to an audience on a list in an email format. This can be to a known customer base that have opted-in, or to a purchased or rented list of people willing to receive info from third parties. As the former are targeted and more responsive to your message the idea is to actively build-up your opt-in list through broadcasts and other marketing and sales activity.

Advantages

Universality

Email is almost universally used by all Internet users and cited by 98% as a reason to go online.

Low Cost

Email marketing also represents a fraction of the cost of traditional DM mailers.

Well-executed email marketing to an opt-in audience can produce some of the highest response rates seen in any online channel

High Conversions

Well-executed email marketing is shown to give a significant boost to sales and marketing activity, with response rates of the opt-in audience being one of the highest seen in any online channel.

Message Segmentation

Electronic Customer Relationship Management (eCRM) tools can improve conversion rates by helping segment email lists to target recipients; personalising emails with elements relevant to known behaviour and buying patterns.

Conversion Tracking

Broadcast delivery, user response, sales and marketing activity occurring over the reporting window can all be measured, and campaigns fine tuned and optimised to improve user interaction and conversions.

Regular Contact (Outreaching)

Email provides a cheap and versatile channel for maintaining contact with customers; a ubiquitous format for regular communication and dialogue. Email marketing’s characteristics make it the perfect mechanism for providing touchpoints throughout the purchase decision cycle and Customer Relationship Management process.

Template Reuse

With great creative and well-designed templates, email broadcasts can be produced quickly and efficiently, making it a very agile and flexible communication channel.

Disadvantages

Requires List of “Opt-In” Recipients

Requires a list of opt-in users to be most effective, so list building and data harvesting are required to acquire opt-in users - this can mean buying and renting lists regularly to help build up your list data, and running targeted data acquisition/lead generation campaigns.

History of Spam Use

Given a long history of spam email, broadcasting can be a thorny area. Firstly your email templates need to reach the audience - so you need to known how to circumvent spam filters and display issues with web-mail and email-client applications, and secondly you should always use a third party for broadcast who know all the spam laws and best practice - to ensure you protect your domain and brand and don’t get blacklisted with the ISPs or other authorities.

Social Marketing (Web 2.0 Marketing)

What is it?

Applying online marketing activity to a host of different channels that fall under the banner of social media - these can be social networks such as MySpace and Facebook, community sites within the market sector, forums, blogs and user-generated-content (UGC), news, media and PR channels, and bookmarking websites. The idea is to seed debate, discussion, interest, and activity and raise product and brand awareness and talk to customers and potential customers directly. These channels can be integrated into your website making your activities and messaging appear both within your site and across the web where your potential customers actually are.

Advantages

Social marketing can substantially increase brand-recognition by capitalising on word-of-mouth marketing

Builds Brand and Product Awareness

When implemented correctly, social marketing can provide a very powerful method of building brand-awareness, using consumer resources to help build links and increase brand-recognition by capitalising on the potency of word-of-mouth marketing.

Low Cost

The very nature of this type of marketing often requires very little in the way of investment, apart from time and effort. The “snowball effect” seen in successful social marketing initiatives mean that once started, much of the work in communicating and proliferating the message is done by the audience themselves.

Highly Targeted

The factional nature of communities in social networks means that it is possible to ensure that you reach highly targeted audiences and market strata.

Real-Time Research

By monitoring and interacting with communities within social networks, it is possible engage in a dialogue with consumers and identify trends as they happen, enabling companies to react to current events or changing consumer requirements in real-time - with no lag caused by having to collate or analyse market research data.

Loyalty

The groups and communities in social networks often serve to increase brand advocacy and loyalty within their audience in a self-reinforcing cycle, occasionally leading to a point where they have an impact on brand direction, such as the “Bring back Wispa” campaign which prompted Cadburys to re-release the Wispa chocolate bar.

Disadvantages

Requires Finesse

It requires a deft touch - you don’t want to appear to be working on behalf of “The Man” or “Astroturfing” (fake grassroots behaviour) as it will shatter your credibility - so genuine friendships, acquaintances and networking are best routes to market.

Loss of Control

Once you enter this arena you no longer have control of the message - so you must try and shape the message within the context of dynamic human interaction - i.e. this is a political activity firstly - if you get the politics right the commercial benefits will take care of themselves.

Viral Marketing

What is it?

Any form of marketing that models the spread of a pathogen using a word-of-mouth social distribution model that is self-perpetuating. The message must be easy to distribute and pass on to your peers, and will need an incentive to trigger distribution - whether that is an offer, humorous content, or a call-to-arms. The trick of good viral is identifying a decent distribution trigger that falls within the brand message and objectives of the campaign.

Advantages

Viral marketing can deliver a big bang for your buck, and have huge impact on sales and brand awareness

Huge ROI

Viral marketing has the potential to deliver you a big bang for your buck if successful. Well executed offer-led campaigns such as Odd Bin’s famous “Special Offer” voucher that was “accidentally” able to be copied and distributed to anyone can have huge impact on sales and brand awareness.

Disadvantages

Difficult to “Manufacture” a Viral Success

Coming up with a decent distribution trigger is that is not beyond-the-pale is difficult and requires talent and fine judgment in the creative process. Everybodys idea of a viral email, product or video is different; and many attempts to manufacture viral creatives have failed, from the near-misses to the downright cringe-worthy…

Slipping Off-Brand

The ability to go too far or off brand is all too easy in the pursuit of humour, controversy or offer benefits. An example of this is the infamous VW Polo terrorist viral which, while unconnected to Volkswagon, prompted a categorically statement from them to the effect that it was an unrelated production - so as to avoid any potentially negative reaction.

YouTube Channels 2.0

Dom Ebel — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 11:28:43 +0000

In April 2009, YouTube started to blog about the beta changes that they were making to the YouTube channels – inventively dubbed “YouTube Channels 2.0″.

The new Channel Editor is accessed through the “My Account” page, in the same way as the previous editor.

However, the new editor has some distinct advantages over the old editor and provides a much improved interface for the creation and maintenance of your channel.

YouTube Channel Editor 2.0

The new channel editor layout shows a What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get (WYSIWYG) preview of the channel design.

This means that you can see the effects of changes live as they are made – a definite improvement over the old clunky “channel preview”, or having to toggle between the editor window and “live” window to view your changes.

Underneath the top bar, there is a new “Edit Channel” bar, containing 3 buttons marked “Settings”, “Themes and Colours”, “Modules”.

These open up a tabbed section, containing some of the basic fields controlling the channel – providing a much neater way of displaying the channel customisation information than the old Channel Editor.

The “Settings” tab contains the URL, Title and Channel Tags information.

The “Themes and Colours” tab houses the selection of basic themes available for use.

Clicking the link labelled “Advanced Options” opens a further layer with controls for colour, background and transparency information – plus the ability to create new themes within the established framework.

The “Modules” tab allows the customisation of the various panels shown below the video panel; the Comments, Friends, Groups, Recent Activity, Subscribers and Subscriptions panels.

The new channel layout includes a large player on the left of the screen, and the uploaded videos listed on the right-hand side, with the ability to sort videos by “Date”, “Most Viewed” or “Top Rated”.

In the upper-right corner is an “edit” link with 2 icons, with tooltips marked “Switch to Player View” and “Switch to Grid View” respectively.

These toggle between a screen including a player, and the “Grid View” screen showing thumbnails of the videos only - displaying a much greater proportion of the video inventory.

Clicking the “edit” link opens up a second layer, controlling the information displayed via the channel player – options including “My Uploaded Videos”, “My Favourites” and “Playlists”, or any combination of the above.

The featured video can be set via a dropdown to a specific video, or the most recently uploaded, to help you customise the initial view displayed in the Channel Player.

The lower panel contains the modules that have been enabled using the “Modules” tab in the “Edit Channel” bar – each module will have a link in the top right-hand corner marked either “edit” or “privacy” – which can be used to further customise the content or functionality of each module.

New functionality available under Channels 2.0 also includes transparency options for the modules and the wrapper, available under the “Themes and Colours” tab.

Careful use of transparency, combined with calculated background images is the key to producing some of the intricate and interesting channel designs starting to appear on YouTube.

The Marketing Perspective

For marketeers using YouTube channels as a marketing tool, the new v2.0 Channels bring improvements over the old Channels – as now not only has the user experience improved, but the new design functionality should improve engagement and visitor retention.

The Ajax functionality of the channels means that all the videos that appear on the channel can be played from the original page – your visitors will be able to view all your content without leaving or re-loading your channel page.

By directing potential viewers to the channels “Grid View” page, marketeers can present them with their entire channel content in an environment where clicking on the relevant video plays it within the channel player rather than a “shared” area – therefore there is no “Related Videos” content to entice the visitor away to a competing channel.

This means that a marketer can ensure that the visitor will see only his videos – helping to retain visitors and improving the engagement of the content.

YouTube provides partners with mechanisms to monetise their channel content and we’ll touch on the details of this in the next YouTube post.

The YouTube Channels v2.0 launch date was originally set for July 15th, however due to technical delays the switch over date was pushed back to September 30th for users, with partners being switched over on October 14th.

The Commercial Benefits of Optimised Website Information Architecture - Part 1

Cass Heaphy — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 15:55:58 +0000

Why do you need to optimise your website’s information architecture? A simple question that requires some serious thought; this is because IA (information architecture) has a big influence your website’s commercial success or failure because it is at the heart of the user experience (UX).

Who designed your IA?

How does IA design go wrong? The seriousness of some decisions made about IA are often not understood by those making the decisions.

In our experience, whilst many decision makers get many of the issues relating to IA, through common sense, commercial acumen, training and/or an autodidactic interest, they rarely know or appreciate all of the issues.

The factors from whence these issue can derive are generally:-

1) The HiPPO factor
Highest Paid Person’s Opinion in which senior decision makers fail to delegate to expert knowledge within your organisation and impose their own will and opinions.

2) The Not My Bag factor
A lack of knowledge and/or experience in some areas of IA design and implementation by those directly responsible for your website.

3) Inherited problems factor
The website is old, inflexible and cannot be overhauled without redevelopment (and nobody seems willing to tackle this because the opportunity-cost and cost-benefit analysis have not been considered or assessed).

What do I need to fix in my IA?

We thought it might prove useful to broadly outline as many of these issues as we can in a primer on the commercial benefits of optimised website information architecture.

Our aim is to aid further research and study for those passionate about improving their website’s commercial performance and enhancing the user experience.

Your website’s business objectives

Our apologies up front; this section on your objectives might sound a bit patronising at first – but bear with us as it should help you clarify your web strategy and bring to light some potential issues.

Commercial websites are designed to turn a profit. So logically a central objective of a commercial website should be to achieve sales/orders/enquiries that generate revenue for your company or activate new consumers that will want to buy your products or services. Pretty straight forward stuff!

So generating revenue is the name of the game. Let us ask a series of basic questions to see how your IA might enhance or detract from your conversion funnel.

Basic IA Health Check List

Here are three simple questions to detect if you might have issues with your IA from a commercial perspective:-

1) What do you sell?

Pretty easy right? Your offering is probably well known and understood to you. But what about to your target audience?

Now let us look at it from a potential customer’s perspective.

What do you sell?
Will a user landing on any page of your website know or guess what you sell?

Take a users’ point of view and judge your website with a critical eye. Consider that the user might not know anything about your company; even if they do know a little about your company, is what you are offering clear to them looking at any page in the website?

Generally what you sell (your offering or proposition) should be indicated to users on every page of your website. This information should be present above the fold (towards the top) on all pages. This information is usually imparted through persistent elements such as the primary navigation, the site ID and any strap line you might employ; this is information architecture design at its most basic level.

Persistent IA Elements Explaining What You Sell:-

Primary Navigation (Global)
Site ID (Your Brand Logo & Strap Line

The key is to ensure what you sell/do is made clear without the user having to go anywhere or do anything - you set out your stall with your page design so no matter how someone reaches your website (or where they are within it) they’ll know what you are about and what you have to offer - from your primary navigation and/or site ID.

If your website does not explain what you do at this basic level your ability to convert traffic into revenue is already fighting an uphill battle.

2) What do you sell?

Are the names used in your primary navigation the most searched for keywords used by your target audience?
Are you matching your offering to user expectations?
Are the names used in your navigation also reflected in page titles, headings, breadcrumbs and the URLs?

There are many ways describe any object or concept, but are the names of the things you are selling matched to the ways people are looking for those same things? Categorisation, whether you use a hierarchical taxonomy (traditional parent-child relationship of logical topic grouping) or facets (guided search based on tags or attributes) need to be named in meaningful ways that the users will understand and be able to browse or navigate by.

The nomenclature (naming conventions) you use to describe things needs to be optimised for your target audience. This will aid comprehension and search volumes.

It is no good using industry jargon or stylised language if consumers do not use these terms. Why use “knits” or “sweaters” in the UK when most people search for “jumpers”?

Make life easier for your users by using language in the IA and structure of your website that is more natural and intuitive to them. So don’t say “Stream of Consciousness” when “Blog” will be better understood!

3) What do you sell?

Can the user search, browse, sort and/or filter your offering inventory to find exactly what they are looking for?
Will they know where they are (i.e. have a sense of website geography)?
Can they extract salient data from the individual products or services detail pages easily?
Can they work out the unique selling points and differentiation you have to offer?
Do you articulate benefit statements?

Allowing users to find what they are looking for (what you sell) is at the heart of any online transaction or acquisition.

They may be just browsing or they may be looking for something very specific, or they may have already reached what they thought they wanted, but now want to look at alternatives.

The question really is does your website allow them to do this?

Information architecute is often thought of as things such as navigation and site structure; but it is so much more.

IA covers anything which you use to impart data to a user:-

Does your website have an internal search function?
Does it work?
How relevant is it?
Does it allow natural language searches, or is it guided on fixed criteria?
Can users refine, filter and sort search results?
Are your categories or facets called something useful (that people know things as - and search for?)
Are things logically grouped or related?
Are the names of things pithy/punching rather than longwinded/verbose?
Can the browsing navigation be seen easily - is it above the fold in the dimensions of an optimal page size?
Is it clearly navigation (conventional location in layout, underlined text, button-like, coloured differently to normal text)?
Does the user know where they are within your website’s structure - do you use category indication, tags or a breadcrumb trail to impart a sense of geography?
Does the information on the page adhere to a visual scale - are important things such as headings and the call-to-action bigger/stand out more than less important information?
Do the page titles and the page headings uniquely identify the web page and their content?
Does the layout and structure of text and information on the page make it easy to quickly infer meaning and context such as USPs and benefit statements, prices and need to know information, help and advice?
Can you scan read the page using just the subheading and/or bullet points to infer meaning/comprehension?

These are all fairly basic things, but it is amazing how many commercial website don’t even stack up to these requirements.

What Next?

If you think your website might be falling short with its IA we’ll show you how to start planning your improvements in part 2 where we will tackle navigation & structure.

Beginner’s Guide to Top 10 HTML Tags

Matthew Pollard — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 12:19:52 +0000

Here is a quick run down we put together for those beginning their journey into HTML to quickly outline 10 of the most common tags and some info about them.

1. html

This is the key tag in html it wraps up all the other tags to create an HTML document. HTML actually stands for HyperText Markup Langauge. Tim Berners-Lee as part of his development of the world wide web is widely credited with inventing it (http://www.w3.org/People/Raggett/book4/ch02.html). Even XHTML uses the HTML tag!

2. head

This tag defines the section of code where all meta tags go and where any other files required for the page are called from. For example, CSS style sheets and external JavaScript files are included here.

By including style sheets and JavaScript as external files this improves the performance of a site as these files are then cached in the users’ browser and don’t need to be downloaded again.

Meta tags were originally envisage to provide additional contextual data for documents (web pages), but piecemeal implementation from many web authors and abuse from search engines marketers has dulled the appetite for the provision and use of this data. Search engines ignore meta keyword data (Google has never analysed them) but do use meta description data to populate their snippet descriptions found on the search engine results pages (SERP).

3. body

The “body” wraps around all the visible content on a page.

4. title

The “title” tag is where the text that you see in the title bar of the browser is kept. This is one of the key tags in terms of search engine optimisation and the information architecture of your website. There is an article on title tag optimisation that goes into more detail about this.

The title content will be displayed as the clickable link if the page is displayed in the SERP - so creating a clear offering with an enticing page summary is essential to maximise click-through rates (CTR) from organic search listings

5. h1

H1 is meant to be the tag containing the page’s main headline; it is therefore the mother of all heading tags. In HTML there are 6 heading tags numbered from 1 to 6. They should be used hierarchically with the h1 coming first.

Creating relevant and descriptive headings helps with usability, commercial focus and marketing messages, accessibility, search engine optimisation.

6. div

The “div” tag is the main building block for most modern websites. Sites used to be built using the table tag and its children (tr – table row, td – table data or cell).

Tables were not meant to be used like this and when the cascading style sheet (CSS) was introduced it was advocated that tables should only be used for tabular data and not for web page layout/presentation. This had the advantages of making pages load faster and making the code more semantic.

Too many divs (coined “divitis”) is a common coding occurance. Good mark-up should be lean and avoid unnecessary divs, leaving the control to the more immediate semantic tags such as a paragraph

or list item

for example.

The advantage of this semantic use of HTML is that the container tags partially explain what is held in them for both users and automated information retrieval systems such as search engine spiders.

7. form

The “form” tag is a key element regarding communication for most websites. It allows information to be collected from the page to be sent to the web server. It usually contains input fields to collect the information.

8. a

The “a” tag is known as the anchor tag - the basic building block that links the internet together. Once you add a URL or URI (web address) to the ‘href’ (Hypertext Reference) attribute you get a hyperlink - the fundamental linking mechanism which defined the internet, and differentiated it from simple collections of documents.

In the web development world one of the on going debate concerning the anchor tag is whether you open a link a new window. One of the disadvantages of opening the link in a new window is that you lose the use of the back button and you desktop can become cluttered with windows.

New browsers enable you to open the link you are clicking on by right clicking it and choosing to open it in a tab or a new window. Therefore, if you open a new tab you can keep the original tab in view and if you want to go back to it you can just close the tab you are in.

With the advent of tabbed browsing most people say this should be up to the user.

9. img

The “img” tag allows us to embed images into a web page. With the introduction of CSS the number of images embedded using this tag can be reduced. Smaller images can be placed on the same file and manipulated using CSS (called sprites). The advantage is a single image is downloaded to the user’s browser, meaning faster page loads, less server requests and all functional website imagery is pre-cached in the user’s browser.

Using CSS the ‘style’ of the site can separated from the content of the site. This means that decorative images are added using the CSS rather than being embedded in the page.

10. noscript

The contents of the “noscript” tag is displayed if your browser does not support JavaScript.

JavaScript is a “client-side” (i.e. it runs on the users’ browser) scripting language which enables programmers to create extra functionality over-and-above HTML, and offers ways to enhance the user experience using newer technologies like AJAX.

AJAX is bandied around quite a lot but all it is, is a way for the web page to send and receive data from the server with out having to do a page refresh. Web pages should not rely on these kinds of technologies to work properly and should be usable without client-side scripting.

Visual design is not a beauty contest

Dom Ebel — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 09:51:18 +0000

While most designers aren’t literally asked to “make things look pretty” the general perception is that visual design is a finishing touch.

Most websites are highly functional, even those that are purely visual, there will always be functional element beyond that of a book, magazine or brochure. While turning pages is familiar to everyone, navigating a website is not always so straightforward.

Visual design is about organising the appearance of information so that users can find what they want and understand it when they get there

Far from being a veneer that sits over the functional elements of a site, the visual organisation of elements is key to user experience (UX), usability and functionality.

In other words - designing the appearance of information on a site so that users can find what they want and understand it when they get there.

By extension good functional design isn’t always “pretty” but that is not to say that function should win over form.

Setting aside for a moment the semantics of the design, the meaning conveyed by a site’s appearance and how that affects “the marketing message” and focusing on user experience:

Apparently, attractive things just “work better”. When we see something that looks attractive we feel good and this stimulates the brain making us think more creatively, and this in turn makes us more open to exploration and finding solutions.

http://www.alistapart.com/articles/indefenseofeyecandy
http://www.scribd.com/doc/6915480/Attractive-Things-Work-Better
http://www.jnd.org/dn.mss/emotion_design.html

If this is indeed the case, users should be more willing to engage with and explore and attractively designed site with personality.

Obviously, most desirable in a site design is a combination of the two: classic good looks and down to earth functionality - but these are inextricably linked and run much more than skin-deep.

Web content accessibility – WCAG2.0, Section 508, DDA and BS 8878

Dom Ebel — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 09:45:55 +0000

In December 2008, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) published version 2.0 of their Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), the first major revision since 1999. These guidelines define how to produce Web content that is accessible to people with disabilities, including visual, auditory and physical, as-well as people with changing abilities due to ageing.

Version 2.0 of the W3C WCAG document is not too dissimilar from previous versions, but is far more comprehensive and includes more detail and explanation of how to tackle potential accessibility issues.

The recommendations are organised under four main principles:

perceivable
operable
understandable
robust

…each of which has a set of guidelines, success criteria and techniques.

The success criteria are divided into three levels of conformance:

“A” (single-A, lowest)
“AA” (double A)
“AAA” (triple A - highest)

Each criterion is explained in full on individual pages and a customizable quick-reference page of criteria and techniques is also provided.

Version 2.0 of the W3C WCAG can be found here:
http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG20/

In the UK, the Disability Discrimination Act 1995 (DDA) includes Web sites as an example of auxiliary aids and services provided.

The UK’s Disability Discrimination Act (DDA) was updated in 2005, but is still regards as being vague and open to interpretation

The Act does not define the minimum requirements for making a website accessible, and service providers are only required to make “reasonable” adjustments where a “policy criterion or practice” places a disabled person at a substantial disadvantage.

Despite being updated in 2005, the law in this regard is slightly vague and open to interpretation, and according to the Royal National Institute for the Blind (RNIB) there have been no test cases in the UK to date.

However, the RNIB do recommend that all Web sites achieve at least W3C ‘A’ (single A) level and aim for ‘AA’ (double A) level to avoid the possibility of legal action being taken.

The updated 2005 version of the DDA can be found here:
http://www.opsi.gov.uk/acts/acts2005/ukpga_20050013_en_1

In the US, the Section 508 Amendment to the Rehabilitation Act 1973 requires Federal agencies to make electronic and information technology accessible to people with disabilities

In the United States, the Section 508 Amendment to the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 requires that Federal agencies make electronic and information technology accessible to people with disabilities.

This is the US equivalent of the British DDA and covers broadly the same issues and technologies, although it only applies to Federal departments and agencies.

Further information about Section 508 can be found here:
http://www.access-board.gov/508.htm

In December 2008, the British Standards Institution (BSI) published a draft British Standard on Web accessibility – BS 8878. This Code of Practice (currently in draft) gives recommendations for building and maintaining Web experiences that are accessible to, usable by and enjoyable for disabled people.

The deadline for public comment is 31st January 2009 and the document has yet to be amended in light of the recent WCAG 2.0 recommendations. It is expected that this document will be published in its final form later in 2009.

The draft version of BS 8878 can be found here:
http://www.bsigroup.com/en/Standards-and-Publications/How-we-can-help-you/Consumers/Accessibilty-day/BS-8878-form/Thank-you/

We’ll keep you up to date with any further developments relating to accessibility as they are announced.

Blogging for Online Marketing

Dom Ebel — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 14:41:22 +0000

Blogging has become almost “de rigueur” in the online marketing industry, with seemingly every company website hosting a blog designed to connect with their audience, improve their search engine listings and drive traffic to the website.

But as with every mass-uptake of an online technology there are varying degrees of success and competency: there are those examples which are executed well and produce impressive results, and those implemented poorly which inevitably fail.

While blog copywriting is a huge topic, far beyond the scope of a single article, there are some basic principles and techniques which can vastly improve the chances of success when followed.

Benefits of a Blog for SEO

A regularly-updated blog containing high quality content will improve SEO performance through 2 separate areas:

1. Gathering inbound links.
With high quality articles you should develop a following or “audience” who are likely to link to your articles for the benefit of their readers.

2. Search engine content
Blog posts are great content pages, naturally littered with keywords – these will start appearing in the search results when relevant to the users’ search query.

So when writing blog posts bear these two factors in mind:

1. Write quality articles which will interest the reader, pass on valuable information or opinions to help develop your audience.

2. Ensure the important keywords are present in the required areas, in a manner that doesn’t impede the flow of the copy.

SEO vs. Brand Tone

“Brand voice” may be more important to your blog strategy than outright content optimisation

If you are creating a blog to build an audience or subscriber-base as part of an SEO strategy, developing a “brand voice” may well be a more important factor than outright content optimisation.

Increasing the number of regular readers will help gather links, which may be the most important factor in your web strategy, as link weight is one of the major factors in today’s search engine algorithms.

As the blog content increases, the sheer volume of content will help Google identify common themes across the pages – helping clarify the SEO topics without large amounts of SEO-specific work on your behalf. Use tagging and categorisation to cement the ties between topics and themes by linking related posts together.

Keyword Use in Blog Articles

Identifying Keywords within Articles

By placing keywords in the important areas such as the page title, URL stub, headings and subheading, bullet points and block quotes, you can help Google and improve the chances of pages appearing in the search results.

The first step is to identify the keywords in a given blog post. For example, a blog post about shoe maintenance and caring for footwear would probably require the following keywords:

boots, shoes, footwear, leather, care, maintenance, wax, polish, brush

These are common sense keywords people might use as compound phrases when searching for this topic – “shoe care”, “leather maintenance”, “footwear care”, “caring for boots” etc

Further research using the public Google keyword research tool can help identify common search phrases – but it is important to let your copy develop naturally, in a manner consistent with your brand voice, rather than to artificially try and create keyword-rich copy, which can sound forced and off-brand.

Keyword Use in the HTML Page Title

The HTML Title should reflect the subject in as succinct and pithy a manner as possible

What is you post / web page about? What is your main point or topic?

Your HTML page Title should reflect the topic / subject in as succinct and pithy a manner as is possible without losing clarity or context. Use the most likely keywords that users are going to use to search for the subject you are discussing - this is obvious but often missed by bloggers!

Because the HTML Title will also appear on the search engine result pages you must also consider a hook element in addition to clarity and context. What will entice users to click through to your blog post? What are you offering them in information, interest or helpful advice? What exclusive or unique offering do you have?

Please note, the HTML Title and H1 heading are often taken from the same article heading / title field in some blogging platforms.

Keyword Use in H1 Tag

Descriptive headings will help visitors appraise post content at-a-glance

The H1 page heading fulfils a role similar to the HTML Title in that it explains to users what the page is about when they look at it. The keyword(s) identified with the primary topic / subject should be present in the H1 heading (for both usability and SEO purposes). Descriptive headings are useful for visitors to appraise post content at-a-glance (this will also help you when managing and organizing blog content).

Summarise the post, using the most important keywords naturally, eg.
“Footwear Maintenance – Caring for Shoes & Boots” or
“Shoe Care – Maintenance for Leather Boots & Footwear” etc

Subheadings (H2 - H6 Tags)

Copy will often benefit from being broken down into sections using subheadings to help users easily extract what the following paragraphs are discussing. Use relevant keywords in the copy which will help Google further in analyse and categorisation the content.

Keyword Use in Body Text

It is important to use the keywords throughout the page where it makes sense. Do not try and “force” the keywords in, just write naturally and you will use them in a manner which doesn’t interrupt the flow for your readers…

It’s not just the targeted keywords that count, but the mix of all the words on the page that help to determine what the page is about.

When thinking about the vocabulary in your post use semantically-related terms e.g. synonyms, related terms, polysemes, homonyms, meronyms, paradigms, passive / active relationships, locative relationships, associative relationships.

So for the keyword “boot” we would probably want to use “shoe”, “sole”, “tongue”, “laces”, “heel”, “instep”, “zip” etc within the copy to help associate your page with other topical pages.

Expanding your post’s vocabulary in this way helps your page rank for many long tail keywords - this will significantly assist in raising search referral traffic.

Keyword Repetition (Stuffing & Spam)

Writing interesting articles aimed at your readers will produce results through the benefits of inbound links created by those readers

It cannot be stressed enough that the key factor should be naturally-written content, aimed at producing interesting and useful content for a human audience – rather than trying to write for search engine analysis. But do make sure you mention the keywords you think are important to your search visibility strategy.

Ensure that 1 or 2 synonyms (words meaning the same thing, eg. sports shoes, trainers, sneakers) or related terms (eg. boot, shoe, sole, tongue, laces, heel, instep, zip etc) are included elsewhere in the text.

If you are writing naturally, then this should happen as a matter of course – to summarise, don’t worry too much about trying to include the right amounts of keywords, as the benefits of writing interesting articles aimed at your readers will produce better results through the benefits of inbound links created by your readers.

Blogging Basics and Good Practise

Make sure your article is relevant to the blog theme
- is there a connection to your business or your industry?

Blog with passion
- Blogging needs conviction to make it work, put the effort in…

Make headlines snappy
- Contain your whole post summary in your headline. Check out national newspapers to see how they do it.

Write less
- This does not mean less information – just keep it simple, no need for one hundred words if 10 will do. Time is limited on the internet – keep posts short and informative, and they will keep returning…

Make your posts easy to scan
- Include Bullet point lists and block quotes, they impart the most information in the least time. Short paragraphs are far easier to read than long ones – break them down into shorter ones.

Do not write short posts all the time
- Short posts are great for a regular update, and can bridge a gap – but mix up with longer articles as this demonstrates depth of knowledge; longer posts that tackle subjects with meaning and insight will be much more likely to attract links long-term as the post is seen as a resource; longer posts also tend to perform better in the search engines.

Mix your marketing message with your products
- Don’t be too strong with your marketing message, it won’t work. It puts people off, because no one likes pushy marketing thinly-disguised behind a flimsy blog-post.

Be consistent with your writing style
- You are the voice of your company. Present a consistent style and tone; your posts are an ambassador for the business, and may often be the first contact for potential clients. If you have multiple authors contributing to your blog, then use bylines to identify who’s who so stylistic differences don’t jar with the reader.

Let the audience learn about the workings of your business
– This promotes trust through familiarity, and being “transparent”.

Don’t be scared of offsite linking
– Linking to other sites is a great way to provide “further research” opportunities for your readers, and they *will* return after reading.

Edit your post
- Good writing is in the editing. Before you hit the submit button, re-read your post and cut out the stuff that you don’t need. Better still, get someone else to edit your posts!!