Top posts
Posts in Website optimization
Is the switch to AJAX worth the trouble?
(No Ratings Yet)
Loading ...Recently I’ve been working on a project that required me to create multilingual pages for having people wait while some action is being performed in the background. There is no way of doing this by loading a new page, because this was the entire reason for the wait. So the only option is using JavaScript, which I liked in combination with AJAX.
But is AJAX really worth all the effort of designing and implementing a lot of hacks and cracks to make it work in all browsers. Or even worse trying to integrate it into an already existing website.
I have to admit that I don’t have a lot of experience with AJAX just yet, but from the work I have done with it I’m starting to think it’s not worth it. So lets support my oh so bold claim with some facts I encountered.
1. Any use of AJAX means assuming your visitors use JavaScript
Now I know a lot of people are leaving JavaScript turned on, but to what setting. Browsers are getting ever more picky on what to allow and what not to. So any AJAX call may go wrong. My example is simple in Internet Explorer you are allowed to make cross-domain AJAX calls, but FireFox is preventing you from doing so.
2. Users on slow connections will experience problems
Here’s one I actually experienced when using a dial-up line. I loaded a website that used a cool looking AJAX script for auto-completing a input box. Sounds cool doesn’t it, well NO. If you are on a slow connection as I was then the AJAX calls will fall behind on the typing and the input box starts giving incorrect suggestions or worse yet mistakenly auto-completes to a word I didn’t want.
3. Search engines don’t like it
Maybe a point that not a lot of people think about when designing a website, but the search engines won’t load your cuwl AJAX pages. Instead they will ignore them and all of your hard work becomes useless. What’s the use of having a website if you can’t attract visitors from search engines.
Maybe the search engines will change this behaviour in the future, but until that time it’s definitely a strong point against AJAX.
Now don’t get me wrong. I don’t think there is any problem in using AJAX, but you should be aware it may not always produce the desired results. So for now I will restrict the usage to features I don’t think are important to the website, but just cool to have for those connections and browsers supporting it.
Increasing the Popularity Ranking
(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...For search engines the ‘Popularity Ranking’ (PR in short) is one of the important algorithms used in ranking websites. Knowing this, a lot of webmasters will do anything to increase the PR of their website. In this (somewhat short) article I will walk you through some of the do’s and don’ts in optimizing you PR. Short description of what PR is first. It measures the amount of links and the general value of a page for a search engine. This is used to appropriately rank pages.
Lets first give a firm warning: The PR displayed by Google is NOT the one they use in the algorithm
I love myth busting, and this is the most persistent one. Google has never presented the general public (meaning us) with the rankings they give pages (PageRank), nor have they confirmed using the system. From experience I know they use a form of PageRank, but I also know it is not the stupid number (or green bar) displayed in the toolbar.
Back to basics
Even though Google (and others) would love to deny it, the only way to know if a page or website is popular is to look at the amount AND type of links a website gets. Notice that I sneaked the type of link in there, this is because I don’t know precisely what they see as a good link and what not (more on that later on). Why do they need to use this so called link graph! Well it’s easy search engines are computer programs looking for patterns. This means they can’t look at the amount of visitors a website has, because they simply don’t have access to this kind of data. (Baring in mind you haven’t installed Google Analytics that is)
That leaves the question of: “Are all links of equal value?”
Again an easy answer NO they aren’t. Let me explain why to you. If all links were of equal value then it would be very easy to artificially increase rank by linking a bunch of websites together. Obviously this is not what search engines like. We shouldn’t meddle in their priced ranking system to make it useless.
Bringing a new question into mind. If all links aren’t equally valuable then how on earth do I know if a link is valuable for my website. Short answer yet again. You don’t, not exactly anyway. How to value a link and how to decide if it will help you in increasing PR is a corporate secret of the search engines. But you can guess it just as easily as I can. What makes a link good. Lets view the page linking to you from a visitors point of view. Will this link bring the visitor more value? Will it enlighten him further or bring more entertainment or is it just seen as spam to be ignored?
Why do I use the visitor as a measurement in the value of a link. Easy, search engines try and please the visitors to get accurate results. So if a visitor might click the link then it must be of value.
Increasing PR
Now that you now how to select website you would like to get linking to you the difficult part can begin. Try and persuade the webmaster to add a link, but don’t be fooled in reciprocal linking. If your website is good enough why would anyone hesitate in placing a link to it.
Which brings me to the last point for this article. I’ve seen the best results in increased PR by simply doing nothing. I don’t exactly know why or how, but I haven’t done any SEO (Search Engine Optimizing) on any of my pages and the PR seems to be increasing every update made by the search engines.
Concluding
So what should you do, well opinions vary a bit. Some prefer a very agressive linking scheme and try to get every link they can. Personally I would prefer to do little to nothing about linking at all. Just let it happen somewhat naturally and you should be fine.
Great search engine rankings, but poor conversion rate
So now you have a website that has great rankings. You somehow managed to get your website into the top ten, or better yet the top three in all of the major search engines. Good for you! But wait a minute, your getting dozens of hits from the search engines however nobody is buying from your website. What’s going on here!
I’m afraid that you fell for the old joke that good rankings are everything. Let me tell you a little secret. They’re not!
Sure having good rankings increases the amount of visitors you will get to your website, you lucky you. But what then. What is the visitor going to do after he visits your website. Two options basically, well initially anyway. The visitor is impressed and decides the website is worth a quick read. Or they don’t like what they see, worse yet is they don’t see what they like.
You may think that your website offers the visitor everything he wants, but somehow they disagree with you. Don’t believe me, try a poll among your visitor base to find out what they think about your website and if it helps them to achieve their goals. How they do this, well they’ll start scanning your website to look for signs they like. If they don’t find it changes are against you and the visitor will return to the search engine. Finding out what these signs are is not that easy, and can’t be discussed in this post as they vary per audience. What I will do is give some general pointers that may help you in figuring out what your visitor is expecting from you. When a visitor comes to your website they are looking for the following things:
- Keywords that they actually used, not that strange considering they found your page with these.
- Benefits that you or your products can bring to them
- Either information on a product or service or a way to purchase the desired product or service
Note that the list mentions nothing about features or your goals. The reason is very easy. Visitors don’t care what you want or what your goals are!
Lets take the example of a web shop that sells vacations. Lets also presume that your website has top rankings but for some reason fails to sell your product. So what now, I’ll try and give a somewhat general list of reasons for this.
- The pages are loaded with beautiful pictures about the vacation spots. You think this is a benefit to the visitor. Well its not! I’m not willing to wait for dozens of high resolution pictures to load unless I’m really interested. If I just want to get a feel for the vacation location I don’t want all those damn pictures.
- The page that I land on contains no information that’s relevant for me when I’m looking for more information on the travel destination. If you only provide options for visitors to buy a vacation, but not additional information about the travel destination then why on earth would I buy from you. Gives me the feeling of shouting “NEXT�.
- The page is filled with features, but tells me little of the benefits for me.
Don’t get me wrong its wonderful to now that my room has a view on the landscape with a bathroom and queen sized bed. But that’s not gonna sell it to me. I’d prefer something more along the lines of:“The rooms will give you an ultimate experience of the local culture with their overview of the local flora and fauna. After a day of enjoying the nature you are able to relax in the modern styled bathroom with luxurious bubble bath or enjoy some rest in the queen sized bed.�
I can already picture me in that room and better yet on that vacation. And that is what you want. Make people think about your product or service, make them longer for it.
I know this example contains a far from complete list, but it does give a general idea of what people like and what they don’t. Now please don’t use this for granted, every audience is different. So make sure to do some marketing research into who is going to buy from you and change the website to please them. And forget about pleasing everybody, it’s impossible.
Improving search results
Lets get one thing clear, this is not for the users that use the search engines. I might be willing to do a short article about that at a later stage. So what am I talking about, well its quite easy. You have a site and you want to rank better in the search results, I know you so be bold YOU want to be the first result the users see. Damn that’s difficult isn’t it!
Well that’s what I found out the hard way. A company hired me some time ago, wont mention who just look back a few articles, to optimize their pages for the search engines. Oh sure why not just ask me to pay Google to be first! Simply put I’ve been busy since the beginning of January and it aint all that easy. Granted I’d never done anything like this before, but still. So how do you approach this, well can’t go into much detail but can describe some of how I achieved the results.
Research behaviour
This part oh so many people don’t like, including me considering I’m kinda a technical guy. But you need to find out what attracts visitors to your site.
- What do you offer them
- how do you make their lives easier
- What do they like to see.
Just a few of the questions you should answer for your site, and if you have multiple sections don’t be surprised to have to do this for each section as the visitors might be quite different.
Stay up-to-date with search engines
Oh my god, can it get any more boring! YES, it most definitely can. Especially for those among you that hate math, vector and graph based calculations. Sorry about that, but you are going to have to read tons of research papers on information retrieval. Most of which won’t be used and some of which will help you a lot. I just love those little gold mines. So what do you look for and how. A good place to start is citiseer which contains tons of those papers. Just look for terms like data mining, link structure, page rank and LSA/LSI. Another place to start your educational live is in the patent offices, they contain dozens of patents sent in about the search engines.
Research & Invent techniques
Here I wont lie to you, there are hundreds of techniques that are discussed on the web. Some of which will work and most of which wont. My advice mix it up! Simple ay. You have all the knowledge of the research in search technology so use it. Combine it what is printed on the web. Improve! You will also have to decide what to do. Will you stick with the rules(white hat) set by the search engines or will you push the limits(black hat). Some good resource to start with are probable:
- Seomoz, especially the blog is useful
- Cre8asiteforum, basically an alround forum for webdevelopment
- Search Engine Watch, same as cre8asiteforum but they are a bit more greedy and want you to pay for most access.
- High Rankings, mostly white hat stuff so don’t expect any miracles
Wait for results. I know this step is boring, but it usually takes up to a month before any results are visible.
