Optimizing Your Web Site

1. Optimizing Your Web Site Christy West SkyGirl Media Christy@SkyGirlMedia.com

2. Seminar Poll

3. Search engine optimization Better content Better design Better page load times Better marketing Better sales Better advertising New and improved site features Better usability ? What does web site optimization mean to you? Do you notice a trend here?

4. Optimizing=Just a Buzzword for Making it Better • Not a mystical formula or special process • Every site is different • When you leverage your content and site interface to best serve your audience's needs and wants while fulfilling or exceeding your business goals, your site is optimized.

5. It’s Not a One-Time Thing The biggest point I want to make today is that optimizing a web site is not a one-time procedure. Your audience is constantly evolving, as are your content and your business goals. Your web site needs to evolve along with them, and it will only do that if your staff regularly focuses on your site and how to make it better.

6. #1 Optimization Resource: • YOU! The most important resource in website optimization is the time and brainpower you put towards identifying what your site needs and planning how you can best provide it.

7. Colors Layout Search options Content presentation Branding Ad presentation/serving Blogs RSS feeds Community features like message boards or article comments, etc. #1: Plan Your Attack You have to have a plan to make the best use of your time, your programmers'/designers' time, and create the best product for your audience.

8. How do you plan to make your site better? • Consider your site’s mission • Audience needs and wants • Content • Business goals • Usability All five of these aspects must work together to yield a website that supports the goals of your audience and your business.

9. Site Mission • What is the overall purpose of your site? • Publication mission • Internal mission

10. Audience Needs and Wants • Who are your online readers? • How many of them subscribe to your print publication, if you have one? • What's their age, sex, number of horses, number of hours spent online per week, number of hours spent on your site per week? • Are they the primary caregivers for their horses? • How many hours a week do they ride or drive? • Do they show? • Do they give lessons? All of these bits of information and any others specific to your publication/audience help you figure out how to give your audience more of what they want and less of what they don't.

11. Focus on Content • What is it about your content that is unique? • Do you update it more often than most people? • Serve a particular niche? • Feature well-known columnists that have a gift for striking a chord with your readers? Whatever it is that you do best is what you need to highlight on your website.

12. Business Goals • Financial targets • Audience size targets • Number of subscriptions generated targets • Revenue targets • Anything your organization deems important enough to require a target and a timeline. If you want a successful site, you need goals that push you to improve—to provide more information, better information, or good information in better ways—so that you gain a bigger audience, more revenue, or whatever your goal is.

13. Usability • The ability of site visitors to use the site without error. • Good usability: Important tasks (search, register, purchase, etc.) done without errors and frustration by most people. • Bad: Tasks can’t easily be completed. User leaves. How does usability relate to productivity? A usable website means the user can be very productive, busily and happily searching, reading, and buying.

14. Consequences of Poor Usability "Launching a site that is difficult to use will deprive the business of its best customers: those that are so eager to use your service that they will visit the site as soon as they hear about it. If these users get a bad experience, they will not only be lost to you as customers, they will also be lost as potential future advocates for the site. In fact, any hopes of viral marketing will turn into a bad fever as infected users warn others to stay away from the site. "Once a user has had a bad experience on a website, it is very difficult to convince him or her to come back. Resampling is one of the hardest sells and will cost your marketing budget much more money than the modest cost of getting the website right in the first place."--Jakob Nielsen, http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20000402.html Although it's often neglected, usability is just as critical to site performance as content, audience, and good business goals. If people can't find it or use it, it might as well not exist.

15. Everything’s Connected • None of these things we're discussing—mission, audience, content, and business goals, and usability—exist independently. They all build on each other. • Planning your site from the ground up with all of these factors in mind will generate a product that fulfills both your business goals and your audience's goals.

16. Optimizing for Search Engines • One study says that 81% of Internet users rely on search engines and directories to find the information they need. • Google was the search engine of choice for 55.2% of U.S. searches in April, according to a recent article on Yahoo! Finance. Its nearest neighbor was Yahoo Inc. with 21.9% of the market share. • More than 90% of users never go past the first page of search engine results.

17. Factors Driving Rankings • Keyword relevancy • Inbound links • Domain strength • User data • Content quality • Code to text ratio • Code quality • Page information • Header tags

18. Keyword Relevancy • Article subject: Founder in horses • Keyword research tool: http://tools.seobook.com/general/keyword/ • Tells the number of searches done in a recent 30-day period on Yahoo, estimated values for Google and MSN along with suggested variations.

19. Results

20. “Laminitis” Results

21. Domain Strength • if someone is searching for Western saddles, all else being equal between the two sites, a domain like www.WesternSaddles.com will rank higher than a page on Western saddles on www.christysblog.com. • If you don't already have a domain name suited to your content, get one!

22. Content Quality, Inbound Links, User Data • High-quality content= • High usage of your site • High number of links back • Higher search engine rankings

23. Code To Text Ratio • Related to keyword density on the page • Related to overall code used to display the page • So… less code is better

24. Cascading Style Sheets • Generally result in lighter code than standard HTML • The style sheet is cached by the browser, meaning that in the page code all one has to do is mark a paragraph or other element as part of a named style. Then the code that controls its display has to be downloaded only once, not once per paragraph, and the page itself is much lighter without all the display markup. • Consistency and ease of global changes are additional benefits

25. Example: http://www.hotdesign.com/seybold/16nasty.html

26. Optimize Images Too • File name • Alt tag • Title tag • Longdesc tag • Don’t: <img src=figure1.jpg> • Do: <img src=hoof-trimming.jpg alt=“Farrier trimming hoof” title=“Farrier trimming hoof” longdesc=http://www.thehorse.com/FarrierTrimmingHoof”>

27. Code Quality • Code that does not adhere to W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) standards can cause spiders to leave your page, never finding that valuable content. • http://validator.w3.org/ • Download time analyzer: http://www.websiteoptimization.com/services/analyze/

28. Page Information • A web page can specify its title, description, and keywords through META tags that do not display to the user (except for the title appearing in the title bar at the top of the window). • These tags should be optimized for search engines as well. • Title

29. Page Information: META Description • Not all engines use this, but it's valuable for those who do. • Brief description that characterizes your page and highlights your special focus. • If you don't have one, or if the engine prefers to show terms in context, the description will usually be pulled from the text nearest the most "important" uses of the keyword. • Example:

30. Page Information: META keywords • Not used by all engines, but help for some as long as the words also appear in your text • Code example: <meta name="keywords" content="jambalaya recipes rice"> • Good for displaying variations on search terms such as "horse health, horse health care, health information for horses," etc.

31. Header Tags • Search engines place more weight on text inside header tagging. • Used to denote headlines and subheads

32. Optimizing Usability • Usability is a quality attribute that assesses how easy user interfaces are to use. • Learnability: How easy is it for users to accomplish basic tasks the first time they encounter the design? • Efficiency: Once users have learned the design, how quickly can they perform tasks? • Memorability: When users return to the design after a period of not using it, how easily can they reestablish proficiency? • Errors: How many errors do users make, how severe are these errors, and how easily can they recover from the errors? • Satisfaction: How pleasant is it to use the design?

33. There are plenty of other websites available; leaving is the first line of defense when users encounter a difficulty.

34. Here come your competitors…

35. A Little Experiment • Grab the least Web-savvy person you know who is not familiar with your site and park them in front of your computer. • Pull up your Web site and ask them to do some of the basic tasks someone should be able to do on your site. • Do not help, encourage, discourage, or direct them in any way. Sit behind them and tie your hands down if you have to.

36. It’s OK, They’ll Learn… While some might argue that people will get used to a design and learn to use it more effectively, Nielsen offers this observation: "Usability can improve error avoidance substantially more than skilled [experienced] user performance."

37. KISS • The overall message of most usability recommendations? Keep it simple, stupid. Givepeople what they want, when they want it, looking like they expect it to look, without cluttering them up with things they don't want.

38. Think like a user… • Avoid internal jargon and organization • The user “hasn’t always done it that way” • Example: Posting of content by issue because once upon a time, the point was to feature your magazine's content on the web and sell magazines. Now not too many people care about content by issue, they want information on a topic and the issue date is largely irrelevant clutter.

39. …But remember you aren’t one • You know too much. • “One of usability's most hard-earned lessons is that "you are not the user." If you work on a development project, you're atypical by definition. Design to optimize the user experience for outsiders, not insiders.”--Nielsen • How? Back to user testing. Find out what your users really want from your site.

40. Keys to Usability • Communicating clearly so that users understand you. Users allocate minimal time to initial website visits, so you must quickly convince them that the site's worthwhile. • Providing information users want. Users must be able to easily determine whether your services meet their needs and why they should do business with you. • Offering simple, consistent page design, clear navigation, and an information architecture that puts things where users expect to find them.

41. Common Violations • Bad search (too literal)

42. Common Violations • PDF files for online reading • Not changing the color of visited links • Non-scannable text • Fixed font size • Poor contrast between text and background • Page titles with low search engine visibility • Things that look like ads

43. Common Violations • Violating design conventions • Nielsen: Consistency is one of the most powerful usability principles: when things always behave the same, users don't have to worry about what will happen. Instead, they know what will happen based on earlier experience. • The more users' expectations prove right, the more they will feel in control of the system and the more they will like it. And the more the system breaks users' expectations, the more they will feel insecure. • Jakob's Law of the Web User Experience states that "users spend most of their time on other websites." This means that they form their expectations for your site based on what's commonly done on most other sites. If you deviate, your site will be harder to use and users will leave.

44. Common Violations • New browser windows • Not answering users' questions • Frames • Gratuitous use of bleeding-edge technology

45. …And More Common Violations • Continuous animations • Complex URLs • Orphan pages • Long scrolling pages • Lack of navigation support • Nonstandard link colors • Outdated information • Last but not least: Long download times.

46. So What DO You Do? • Nielsen: "Usability plays a role in each stage of the design process.” Main steps: • Before starting the new design, test the old design to identify the good parts that you should keep or emphasize, and the bad parts that give users trouble. • Unless you're working on an intranet, test your competitors' designs to get cheap data on a range of alternative interfaces that have similar features to your own. (If you work on an intranet, read the intranet design annuals to learn from other designs.) • Conduct a field study to see how users behave in their natural habitat. • Make paper prototypes of one or more new design ideas and test them. The less time you invest in these design ideas the better, because you'll need to change them all based on the test results.

47. What To Do, Continued • Refine the design ideas that test best through multiple iterations, gradually moving from low-fidelity prototyping to high-fidelity representations that run on the computer. Test each iteration. • Inspect the design relative to established usability guidelines, whether from your own earlier studies or published research. • Once you decide on and implement the final design, test it again. Subtle usability problems always creep in during implementation.

48. Don’t Make This Mistake • Don't defer user testing until you have a fully implemented design. If you do, it will be impossible to fix the vast majority of the critical usability problems that the test uncovers. • The only way to a high-quality user experience is to start user testing early in the design process and to keep testing every step of the way.

49. More Usability Topics • Reading on the Web: http://www.useit.com/alertbox/9710a.html • Writing for the Web: http://www.useit.com/papers/webwriting/

50. Enhancing the User Experience • First make sure whatever you're considering really will enhance the user's experience with your site, and isn't just giving you something new and fun to work on. • Not all technologies fit all sites and audiences.