Earlier this week Google’s Webmaster Central blog wrote about how to effectively geotarget your website. In that article they promised to discuss multilingual websites as well.

And now they have. In a new Webmaster Central blog post published today they discussed the best practices for multilingual websites. Some key take-aways are:

One page, one language
Don’t put two different languages side by side on a single page. Make sure the content on a page is in only one language.

Language-specific URLs
There’s no special need for language-specific URLs from a purely SEO point of view, as Google apparently detects the language straight from the content itself. Though having language-specific URLs is a good usability practice and helps make management of your site a lot less complicated.

Language indicators in the code
Interestingly enough Google says it ignores all language indicators in the code, including the ‘lang’-attribute and doctype declarations.

Character encoding
When using non-English characters in URLs, make sure your document encoding is set to UTF-8. That way URLs containing special non-English characters (such as á, é, ö, etc) are properly escaped to use the encoding of that character.

Full crawling & indexation
Make sure your properly translated content can be fully crawled and indexed by Google. Cross-link your pages in different languages – so for example on your English language page you should link to the German and French versions.

Automated translations
If you can’t afford proper translations and publish content that’s machine-translated, don’t let Google index it. Apparently Google can see automatically translated content as spam due to its low quality.

There’s a couple of other tips in Google’s blog post, so I recommend you read it in detail: Working with multilingual websites.

SEO Factors for Multilingual Websites is a post from: The Great Websites Blog

One of the most important issues European SEOs struggle with is optimising websites that target different countries.

There are all sorts of challenges when dealing with international SEO, such as what domain extension to use, how to structure multiple target countries on a single domain, dealing with country selection without losing link value, how to build incoming links across all countries, and so on.

There have never been any hard rules on how search engines deal with international SEO, leaving optimisers with trial and error exercises to discover the right approach for their sites.

Now Google is lending a helping hand with an extensive post on their Webmaster Central blog, which explains how they attempt to handle different geotargeting factors such as domains & subdomains, directory structure, and Webmaster Tools settings.

For experienced SEOs there aren’t many surprises: Country-level domains are important and probably the best way to target different countries if you can spare the expense. Subdomains are a good alternative, as are country-specific directories on your website.

Duplicate content issues have plagued international SEOs since the dawn of the web. Often it’s extremely hard to avoid duplicate content when your business operates internationally in Europe. Many countries use the same language, so if you want to effectively target all your operating markets you will eventually end up duplicating content in the same language for different countries.

Google doesn’t recommend hiding this duplicate content with robots.txt or noindex tags – I’ve never been a fan of hiding content in this way either, as every page on your website may convey some ranking benefit and I feel you should let search engines crawl the full length and breadth of your content.

What you should do is pick one ‘preferred’ version (ideally the version with the largest target market) and ensure all duplicate versions of that content use the canonical tag to point to the preferred version.

Google does have one interesting revelation though in their geotargeting recommendations:

“Note that we do not use locational meta tags (like “geo.position” or “distribution”) or HTML attributes for geotargeting. While these may be useful in other regards, we’ve found that they are generally not reliable enough to use for geotargeting.”
(Emphasis added)

This might mean that the ‘lang’ HTML attribute conveys no geotargeting benefit, though it’s undoubtedly a useful attribute for browsers and other UAs and helps with multilingual websites.

In upcoming blog posts Google will take a look at multilingual websites and special situations with global websites, so I recommend keeping a sharp eye on the Webmaster Central blog, and I’ll be discussing things here as well.

SEO Factors for Geotargeting Your Website is a post from: The Great Websites Blog

A term often busied by web developers and also SEO agencies is W3C compliance. I’ve written about the benefits of W3C compliant code before, but my perspective has changed a bit over time and I feel it’s important to point out that full W3C compliance is not a definitive requirement for an effective website.

W3C compliance basically means that the HTML and CSS code that a website is built with is fully compliant with the standards set by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C for short).

The W3C is an international standards organization, founded by the inventor of the web. They develop the standards on which the world wide web is run.

You’d think that making sure your website’s code complies fully with these standards is pretty important. And it is, up to a certain point.

You can easily find out if your website’s code is W3C compliant – simply submit your website URL to the W3C Validator tool and you’ll get an overview of all the ‘errors’ in your code. And you’ll almost certainly get a lot of ‘errors’. It’s very unlikely your website’s code complies to all of the W3C’s standards.

I say ‘errors’ because often they’re not really errors. The W3C standards are extremely strict, with no room for interpretation. So every little niggle in your code, every small deviation from the W3C’s strict standards, will generate an error in this validation tool.

W3C compliance for browsers

But most web browsers are flexible pieces of software that are built to deal with a wide range of different sorts of HTML and CSS code, and will probably render your website perfectly regardless of how many errors the validation tool shows.

Often web developers have to use shortcuts and non-compliant code to make something work in a particular way on a website, and while this results in validation errors it doesn’t hinder a website’s functionality at all. Quite the contrary, sometimes you have to break the rules of the W3C to get something to work exactly how you want it in every web browser.

W3C compliance for SEO

There is also the misconception that search engine crawlers require a website’s code to be 100% W3C compliant, or else they will rank your site lower in the SERPs. A lot of SEO agencies recommend you make every webpage on your site fully W3C compliant.

This is often a costly endeavour, and quite unnecessary. Search engine crawlers, like browsers, are sturdy and flexible pieces of software that can index almost any type of code, regardless of the errors it contains.

For proper crawling and indexation a search engine will need to be able to distinguish the different elements of a webpage – style, navigation, and content – and will need to be able to interpret the meaning of the content, which it does through analysing the content itself and the mark-up code that is used to style the content.

Clean, compliant HTML and CSS code help in this process. Compliant code makes it easier for search engine crawlers to identify what the content on a webpage is, and what that content means.

But 100% compliance, meaning zero errors in the W3C validation tool, is not only often hard to achieve (especially if your website has advanced functionality) but is unnecessary as well. The code just needs to be sufficiently well-structured and tidy enough for search engines to be able to distinguish style, navigation, and content.

So bad code is OK?

No, bad code is not OK. It’s still a good idea to strive towards compliant code. A website with hundreds of W3C validation errors is not a good thing. It’s likely that these errors cause the site to display differently in some web browsers (or worse, not work at all) and can cause all sorts of trouble for both users and search engines.

But if your website’s code only shows a couple of handfuls of non-critical errors, especially if they’re only small warnings, there really is little need to fix them.

For on-site optimisation your time and resources are better spent on making sure your website’s title tags, content, and other factors are fully optimised.

W3C compliance – is it a requirement? is a post from: The Great Websites Blog

About nine months ago I was facing a sizeable site migration project at my employer at the time, and I was tasked with mapping out the best way of handling this migration to minimise the impact on our search engine rankings.

I wrote a post summarising my research into the SEO aspects of a site migration, and I feel the time has come to look back at the migration and the lessons we learned from it.

The site migration was a two-step process – we updated the design and we added new sections with fresh content. We decided to follow the recommendations outlined in my site migration blog post pretty much to the letter:

Content: We phased in the new content one batch of pages at a time. We put a couple of new pages live, linked to them from the homepage, and waited for them to be indexed & cached. Then we put the next batch of new pages online.

Design: The design changes were implemented gradually as well. The old and new designs weren’t radically different, it was more a tweaked & modernised version of the old design, so we felt it would be fine to have the old and new designs co-exist on the site for a while.

We first did a Google Website Optimiser A/B test to make sure the new design yielded at the very least a similar conversion rate. When this was confirmed, we migrated pages to the new design one at a time. The URLs all remained the same so we didn’t have to do any 301-redirects.

We used the Duplicate Content tool to ensure the HTML code and content of our key pages with high SERP rankings matched at least 90% in the old and new designs, so we wouldn’t get hit with a ranking penalty when we put the new version up.

When a page was updated with the new design, we waited for it to be indexed & cached in Google and checked how its SERP rankings were affected.

The end result was a site with a fresh design and new sections added, with minimal impact on SERP rankings. We did see some fluctuations in rankings but these fell well within the normal daily and weekly ranking variations.

We also noted that the new content started ranking fairly soon for relevant keywords, despite no direct links coming in to those pages. This is most likely due to the incoming link value generated across the rest of the site, spilling over to the new content.

It was a long and labour-intensive process, and in hindsight I’m not sure it would have impacted the rankings massively if we just switched the site over in one go. But as organic search generates a significant portion of the sites traffic and revenue, it was definitely better to be safe.

Site Migration SEO Concerns – The Results is a post from: The Great Websites Blog

(This article was originally published in the Belfast Telegraph on 3 Feb 2010. It’s been modified slightly for this blog.)

Search engine optimisation, or SEO for short, is defined as ‘the process of improving ranking in search engine results’.

When search engines first appeared on the scene in the 1990′s to help people make sense of the exponential growth of websites, it suddenly became important to show up first in these search engine results pages.

Savvy entrepreneurs quickly figured out how search engines worked and what a website needed to rank first, and the dark art of SEO was born.

The first search engines were relatively simplistic pieces of software that crawled the world wide web and matched words found on websites to search queries entered by its users. All a search engine optimiser needed to do to get his site to the number one spot was stuff as many keywords on a website as possible.

Whether or not that site was actually useful and relevant for the user’s query didn’t matter, at least not for the optimisers. It’s at this stage the SEO industry earned its dubious reputation, a blemish it has yet to discard.

This of course led to abundant complaints from search engine users who were looking for one thing but ended up on websites that offered something entirely different. In response search engines got smarter, but search engine optimisers got smarter as well, and the arms race has been on ever since.

The big breakthrough came with Google who in 1997 added a whole new approach to determining what websites were really relevant for a given search query. Keywords on a page were still important, but more important than keywords were the links from other websites pointing to that page.

Google’s idea was that every link to a website counts as a vote, a recommendation from one website owner to another. The more links point to a website, the more important that website is. That, in a nutshell, is Google’s secret recipe, and while it’s gone through many iterations over the years the core premise remains intact.

Search engine optimisers were quick to catch on. The focus shifted from optimising sites for keywords to optimising them for links. The goal is to get as many other websites as possible to link to your website.

Unscrupulous optimisers, the same types that didn’t hesitate to stuff as many ‘Britney Spears Nude’ keywords on a website that sold vacuum cleaners just to get extra traffic, devised all kinds of different schemes to quickly and cheaply generate as many links as possible.

Search engines like Google also kept updating their software to filter out these false links, trying to count only those links it considered to be real recommendations.

But the web is so unimaginably vast that search engines have no choice but to rely on automatic processes to filter these false links. Machines, no matter how clever we try to make them, are easily fooled, and the ‘black-hat’ search engine optimisers (contrary to ‘white-hat’ optimisers that use only legitimate methods) are smart and inventive.

But perhaps the era of unscrupulous optimisers is nearing its end. The past few years have been very exciting for website owners and search engine optimisers. Search engines have enhanced their results pages with all types of extra content such as YouTube videos and local businesses. Recently new tweets about the topic a user is searching for started showing up in Google results as well.

The latest refinement Google is deploying, called Social Search, integrates content from the user’s online social circle. If, for example, you are searching on Google for a holiday home in Portugal, and one of your Twitter friends blogged about it, Google will show that blog in your results.

This new level of personalisation of search engine results, combined with other changes Google has made and continues to refine, means that search engine optimisers are increasingly unable to rely on the basic optimisation factors of keywords and links.

There are signs that indicate Internet users are being drawn more and more to online community website such as Facebook and Twitter and begin their search for online products and services there as well. Why trust an anonymous search engine result if you can get a recommendation from a real friend? Or at least a real friend of a real friend.

Black-hat optimisers will continue to try and outsmart search engines and force their websites to the top of the list. Setting up fake social media accounts is already a common practice, as any Twitter and Facebook user can attest to, but generally these are easy to spot and filter.

I wouldn’t go as far as to proclaim the death of SEO – this has been done many times before and been proven wrong each time – but as web search moves towards social media, and social media becomes more about web search, it’s definitely going to change the search engine optimisation landscape.

The Changing Face of SEO is a post from: The Great Websites Blog

I’ve written before about website clickflow and content optimised for the sales funnel. I want to expand a bit on how you can turn visitors in to customers with strong calls-to-action.

A call-to-action is a button, phrase or link that tells your website’s visitors what to do next. That ‘Buy Now‘ button, those ‘Click here to read more‘ links, that ‘Register for a free trial‘ banner… they’re all calls-to-action.

Your website needs calls-to-action (abbreviated: CTA) to help turn visitors into customers. Internet users rarely take the time to thoroughly read text or contemplate a website’s purpose – they are used to surfing quickly and with purpose.

It’s therefore very important that you make it instantly evident what you want your website’s visitors to do when they come to your site. Do you want them to buy a product? Tell them. Do you want them to subscribe to your newsletter? Make it clear.

Here are some tips for effective calls-to-action:

• Short and concise - make it instantly clear what the action is you want a user to perform. Don’t elaborate too much but get to the point.
   
• Self-evident - a CTA that makes a user think is a bad CTA. Users need to know instantly what is required of them, so make sure your CTA is totally self-evident.
   
• Bigger is better - I’m not encouraging you to turn your whole web page into one big red CLICK HERE button, but don’t be too shy using big buttons either. Often webdesigners err on the side of caution, so don’t be afraid to try bigger buttons.
   
• Contrasting colours - Blue buttons on a blue background don’t really stand out much. Use contrasting colours, like bright red, neon green, or eyebleeding orange. This makes buttons and links stand out more from the regular content.
   
• Persuade - What works better: “Buy Now” or “Buy Now and get a 10% Discount”? That’s right, the 10% discount. Spice up your CTAs with extra benefits such as discounts, free samples, bonuses or limited time offers.
   
• Above the Fold - if you put your CTAs low on your webpage, changes are most users won’t see it as they have to scroll down the page to get there. Make sure you have a strong CTA high up on the page so visitors see it right away, then repeat the CTA lower on the page for those users who do take the time to read on and scroll down.
   
• Experiment - don’t be afraid to try out different CTAs on different pages on your website to see which one works best. You can also run tests with services like Google Website Optimizer to find the best call-to-action. As with many things on the web, continuous testing results in continuous improvement.

Implement strong calls-to-action throughout your website and you’ll have a more effective site that converts more visitors into customers.

If you want to read more about effective CTAs, read this great article from Smashing Magazine: Call to Action buttons: Examples and Best Practices

Use Strong Calls-To-Action To Increase Conversion is a post from: The Great Websites Blog

After their successful Search Engine Optimization Guide, Google is continuing to provide excellent entry-level guides for website owners. Their latest guide, Make Your Website Work, gives best practices that help turn your website’s visitors into customers.

The guide is viewable online at Google’s Conversion Centre or can be freely downloaded in PDF format.

Google Explains How To Make Your Website Work is a post from: The Great Websites Blog

Often when you do a site-wide update of your design, your content and/or your site structure, it can affect your website’s rankings in search engines negatively. Facing a huge site update project myself, I recently spent some time doing research on how to prepare for a big site update and ensure your high rankings stay high. I wanted to share my findings with you here.

My research soon lead me to an article on the popular Dutch blog Marketingfacts.nl, providing a site migration checklist. The key takeaways from this article are:

• Try to keep your URL’s the same. Use 301 redirects for URL’s that have to change and ensure you redirect all changed URL’s to the content’s new location.
• Don’t change too much too quickly. If you do a redesign, content update and rebrand all in one, too many changes are happening and you’re likely to lose rankings on many keywords.
• Don’t change your domain’s WhoIs information. A changed WhoIs can give search engines the impression your website has changed owners, and they could reset all your rankings across the board.

An article from Jennifer Osborne on SearchEnginePeople.com added several considerations:

• Do a phased change-over: start with a small section of your site and evaluate, then proceed with the rest.
• Keep your internal link structure in mind when doing a redesign. Internal link juice is important as it tells search engine spiders which pages on your site are important. Don’t divert attention from your key pages with a poor structure.
• Track your web analytics and pay extra attention to 404 errors after the migration. This may indicate broken links, both internal and external, pointing to moved or deleted content.

Denver SEO adds the following point:

• Expect to see your rankings drop regardless of your preparations. A 25 to 30 day drop in search engine rankings is normal before levels return to normal or better.

Of course we can’t skip Google’s own recommendations:

• Add and verify your site on Google’s Webmaster Tools.
• Update your submitted Sitemap XML file to reflect the updated site.
• Keep track of crawling errors to detect 301 redirect problems and 404 errors.

And here are a few other tips I came across on various sites and blogs:

• Create a custom 404 error page to try and minimize the impact of broken links.
• If your site update is significant enough, publish a press release.
• Use search engine marketing to supplement your (temporary) drop in rankings.
• Update your robots.txt file to reflect any changes in off-limits content.

After this research I feel well-equipped to handle the SEO aspect of my own site migration project. If you have any further tips or ideas, please leave them in the comments.

SEO Concerns When Migrating Your Website is a post from: The Great Websites Blog

Web widgets – little pieces of code, often JavaScipt – can add a lot of fun features to your website. Widgets come in all sizes and shapes; sports widgets showing the latest scores and standings, weather widgets with accurate forecasts, widgets that connect to social networks like Facebook, the list goes on. You can find them all over the web. Nearly every major content provider offers widgets that allow you to show their content on your website automatically.

Sometimes a widget can really add useful information and functionality to your website. For example of you have a physical store, a routeplanner widget will help website visitors find your store’s location. If you organize travel trips around sports events, a widget showing the upcoming fixtures will save you the trouble of maintaining this information yourself.

But often widgets are detrimental to the quality of your website. Widgets, especially when used in abundance, tend to make your site look amateurish and cobbled-together. Be wary of this when you see a cool widget and decide it would look awesome on your own website.

Widgets should be used sparingly and only when they add genuine value to your website experience. Don’t just put widgets on your website for the sake of it. For every widget ask yourself if it’s just something you think is cool, or if a user can really benefit from its functionality.

And most importantly a widget need to be relevant to your website. Showing weather forecasts is pretty useless if your website is about providing interim management. However for a website about day trips, a local weather forecast in the day trip area could be handy – though if the weather there is consistently bad, it might actually hurt your business.

In short, if you want to use widgets on your website, do so with caution and awareness.

Using Widgets on Your Website is a post from: The Great Websites Blog

1. Part 1 – Choosing your keywords
2. Part 2 – Writing good ads
3. Part 3 – Create landing pages that convert

In part 1 of this guide to search engine advertising we discussed how to choose the right keywords to advertise on. In part 2 we showed how to make effective ads. Now in the final part we’ll tackle landing pages.

Search Engine Advertising – Step 3: Create Landing Pages That Convert

You’re targeting the right keywords and your ads generate a lot of clicks, so now you have all these extra visitors coming to your website. You’re paying for these visitors, so you want to turn as many of them into customers. The best way to do this is not to send them to your website’s homepage, but to a custom-built landing page.

Image you’re an average internet user. You’re looking for a new sofa for your living room, and you do a Google search for sofa’s. You see an ad on the search results page which appeals to you, so you click on it. You end up on a general furniture website’s homepage and now you have to look for their sofa’s section. Chances are you don’t have the patience for this, and you use the back-button to return to the search results and try a different website.

So you click on a second ad that seems interesting, and this time you land on a webpage that talks only about sofa’s. It shows you pictures of sofa’s, it has a nice offer for a discounted sofa on it, and there are many links from this page to various different categories of sofa’s. This site appeals much more to you, and you’re likely to stick around longer and maybe even order a sofa from these guys.

The first advertiser you clicked on made the classic mistake of sending search advertising traffic to the website’s homepage. From the homepage a web user needs to start his search all over again, navigating your website until he finds what he was looking for in the first place. The user has to go through more clicks and has to invest additional effort, something internet users are notoriously unwilling to do.

It’s much better to send the user straight to what they want to see, which the second advertiser does. This way the user doesn’t have to find his way through your website. He immediately sees content that is relevant to his search query.

Elements of a good landing page

1. Relevance: First and foremost the page you link to from a search engine advertisement needs to be relevant. Just like the ad needs to contain the keyword you advertise on, so does the landing page. If you advertise on the sofa keyword, your ad contains the word sofa, you can’t send users to a landing page discussing kitchens or chairs. You need to send them to a page that talks about sofa’s.

Be sure to include the actual keyword you advertise on clearly visible on the landing page, preferably in a headline. This tells a visitor that the landing page is relevant to the search query they typed in to start the whole process. If you use several different phrases to say the same thing, you’ll probably have to make different landing pages for each or use dynamic HTML code to show the exact keyword the user searched for.

When you advertise on many different types of keywords, you will have to create a lot of different landing pages. It’s a lot of work, but it will always pay itself back in a higher conversion rate, higher revenue, and more return on your advertising investment.

2. Clickpath: Sometimes the landing page can be the conversion page. If you offer a downloadable ebook or small specialized item, your landing page can also be the page where users can place an order. But often you’ll need to give your users additional information to guide them to a conversion – product options, specifications, accessories, etc. Guide them through the sales funnel, from general overview to detailed information to actual conversion.

An important aspect of the clickpath is that you shouldn’t make it too easy for users to diverge from it. Take away your regular site navigation if you can, try to keep the visitors of your landing page in a clickflow that guides them to a conversion. If users sidestep your clickpath and instead go to your site’s homepage or another page, chances are you’ll lose them there.

3. Calls to action: Once you get a user to click on an ad and arrive on your landing page, don’t leave them hanging. You need to take them by the hand as it were, show them where to go and what to do. Use action words like ‘learn more, ‘click here’, ‘order now’ in your content and in your links to additional pages.

4. Easy conversion: It should be as easy as possible for a user to place an order. Don’t ask them for information they don’t really want to give up. Keep your forms short and simple and only ask for the very basic information you need to complete the order.

5. Persuade: Selling is the art of persuasion. Employ tried-and-proven persuasion methods such as testimonials, special offers, guarantees, authorative sources, instilling confidence, and more. Include them on the landing page itself and on every subsequent page you send your users to.

6. Fast loading: Your landing page should load very quickly. If a user has to wait for a bit before your landing page is displayed properly, the urge to click that back-button will grow. Make your landing pages lean and efficient to optimize loading times.

7. Measure: It’s not as simple as putting your landing page out there and waiting for the money to come pouring in. It’s imperative that you know what users are doing on your landing page. Do they stay and read your content or do they leave? What links do they click on? Do they convert into customers right away or do they bookmark the page and come back later? Do they follow the whole clickpath or do they leave prematurely? If so, where do they tend to leave your site the most?

All these things and more can be measured and analyzed with a good web analytics package. A good place to start is Google Analytics, a free service that contains all the web analytics functionality you’ll need. Use the data you gather to make informed decisions about what to improve on your landing page (and your website as a whole).

8. Experiment: Creating good landing pages is never an exact science. All aspects of a landing page, from the headline to the color of the buttons, can have an impact on the conversion rate. Experiment freely, but do it in a controlled manner. Tools like Google’s free Website Optimizer allow you to perform extensive tests with all kinds of different aspects of your landing page to optimize your conversions.

Don’t test too many things at once – experiment with one or two changes at a time, no more. Allow your test to run for enough time before you make up your mind. And once you find a landing page setup that works well, use that as the basis for a new round of further tests. Never stop testing and improving.

9. Conform to the guidelines: Last but certainly not least, be sure to read the editorial policies and guidelines of the search engine you advertise on. Google, Yahoo and Live all have strict policies about advertising on their search results pages. There are guidelines you’ll need to conform to for your ads and your landing pages, or you’ll risk paying more for each click or worse, not getting your ads shown at all.

Conclusion
Creating good landing pages for your search engine advertising campaign is not an easy and straightforward task. To do it well you’ll need to invest a lot of time and effort in building and perfecting your landing pages. But it’s never a wasted effort. Again and again the results show that good landing pages turn many more visitors into paying customers, and help earn back the money you invest in seach advertising several times over.

Search Engine Advertising: a Step By Step Guide – Part 3 is a post from: The Great Websites Blog