Tag Archives: user

Multilingual SEO: Things to Remember

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Google has recently done a series on the usability of multilingual websites and it got me thinking about multilingual SEO. How do you, in fact, optimize the same website for keywords in multiple languages? But let’s start with the core basics. In simple terms, a multilingual website is a website that has content in more than one language. And such website has a lot of on-page stuff that is often done wrong. Let’s take a look at some common issues: 1) Language

Twitter Highlights Top Tweets, Users on its Homepage

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Twitter has started rolling out a new design of its homepage , the page that loads on your browser when you visit Twitter.com and you are not signed in to your Twitter account. Actually it’s not so much of aesthetic redesign but more on what are displayed on the homepage. Previously, Twitter.com just gives you the large Twitter header containing Twitter logo, search box, the famous tagline that says “Share and Discover What’s Happening Right Now, Anywhere in the World, and the top trending topics. Now, the new Twitter.com while maintaining almost the same header, also now displays randomly selected  Twitter  users  and the top tweets which dynamically change in real-time. The user profiles also has a cool feature which will display the profile summary as well as the user’s latest tweet.  The top trending topics are now displayed as a marquee-like scrolling link. If you hover on these topics, a tab will top-out briefly explaining while the topic is trending on Twitter. By redesigning its homepage and emphasizing on those information, the Twitter Blog explains that this is to show that Twitter has now evolved from a mere status updating service to a full network of information participated in by real people and a place where real discussions emerge and happen. Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal . Twitter Highlights Top Tweets, Users on its

4 Simple Ways to Speed Up Your Site

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As a user nothing can be more frustrating than waiting for a site to load. So when I saw a video near the end of 2009 I was excited to see that Google would be taking site speed into consideration, giving credit to sites that load fast and penalizing those that load slowly. I have to agree with Matt Cutts in the video when he says “The web should be fast”. The Internet should snap and respond quickly. So if you have clients with slow load time here is a short simple list to get started: 1. Use Flash Sparingly I personally think flash is pretty cool. There are a lot of amazing things that can be done with it. But as with most good things, too much can be a bad thing. If a webpage is loaded with flash it can take some time to load. It is possible to build a site without flash, but if you must use it treat it as salt. Only to enhance, never to overpower. Should you choose to use flash heavily I’d compress the files as much as you can so they can load faster. This last sentence about flash is more of a recent frustration but I think it still holds true. As a side note, if you don’t have a link for visitors to update their flash player please add it. Nothing is more frustrating to me than visiting a website and having to go find what I need in order to enjoy the contents on said website. 2. Compress Images My first experience with compressing images was a brutal one. I worked for a non-profit who sends numerous teams internationally to provide medical care. And each team that returned had at least a thousand photos. By this point they had a ‘designated web guy’, me, to crop and upload the photos. So when I got in to work and had 50 CDs full of photos waiting for me, I panicked a bit. Thankfully I only had to upload 50 photos from each team. But I quickly learned a few things about image load time: Be sure the dimensions for all images/photos is set within the code If thumbnails are used, set them to open in a new tab when clicked In case the full size is really big the user can click the previous tab to browse while it is loading If the file is missing either find it, or remove the spot where the image is supposed to be When you have a lot of photos consider using something like Flickr We had pretty good success with Flickr, but I have heard some who did not. What has been your experience? There was initial resistance to use thumbnails, but as most things, once the administration experienced our site without thumbnails a unanimous decision was made to use them. While these pages I worked with weren’t meant to be landing pages, I did learn to integrate images efficiently. 3. Less Cookies If you didn’t hear, Sesame Street taught Cookie Monster that cookies are a ’sometime’ food . As funny as it may seem, we can learn something from this. If it is possible, reduce the amount of cookies on your site. This isn’t because of the cookies you’ve got, but you don’t know how many cookies that user’s particular browser has already ‘eaten’. A user can set his/her browser to accept/reject cookies, but then it is up to you to make sure they can access the site should they choose to not accept the cookie. No sense feeding someone that doesn’t want to be fed right? As with flash, minimize the amount of cookies and make it possible for users to enjoy your site whether they accept the cookies or not. 4. Less Widgets Ah widgets, I remember the first time I learned how to add widgets to my website. By the time I was done I had 20 or so lining the right and left sides of my site. I was excited, then a friend from college called me, “Dude, your site is taking forever. What’s up?” I was on a pretty quick connection so I didn’t notice, but when I tried accessing my site on a slower connection, I realized it was taking a little long to load, around 15 seconds. So I took a second look and decided to reduce the number of widgets. Presently I’ve got 5 located on the right side of my site. Just in case you are debating about adding widgets consider the following: How many do I presently have? Which do I need? How will this widget enhance the experience on my site? As with the previous methods to quicken loading time, too much can be a bad thing. Hmm, there seems to be a common theme throughout these tips. Too much can slow a site down. No matter what connection speed a user is on, the internet experience should be the same for everyone. It’s one thing to have a site that has the right information a user is looking for, but if that site takes too long said user will settle for a faster site that might not have the ‘perfect content’. Sites can have a lot of information to provide users, and they can have a lot of things to entertain. When the two come together it’s best to have a good ratio so the experience is enjoyable. Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal . 4 Simple Ways to Speed Up Your

SEO for AJAX

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AJAX and SEO is a tricky topic – after all, an AJAX-based website is more or less the same as a FLASH website: it may look fancy but is non-navigatable. AJAX got its bad SEO reputation for a number of reasons, including: - crawling issues (you are risking not getting all of your content crawled) – indexing issues (you are risking not getting all of your content indexed) – broken website navigation and useless address bar (because all pages load under the same URL) – useless back/next/reload buttons – potential cloaking issues – which may be unintentional – where the user sees different content than the crawler Here’s the difference in what the crawler can see without AJAX and can’t see with AJAX*: *KUDO’s to Google for the image: http://docs.google.com/present/view?id=dc75gmks_120cjkt2chf Yet AJAX can and should be search engine friendly and following these simple best practices will get you there (or at least much closer to where you should be): 1) Decide where your website ends and your application starts: it does not make sense to make spiders crawl your drafts, but the documents made public and archived instead 2) Make sure you have a URL for each “page” you want to get crawled and indexed 3) Load the basic content containing the keywords at the beginning in a non-dynamic way 4) Cache dynamic pages and serve them as static ones, you could even take snapshots of “pages” which content changes all the time and publish the snapshots 5) Menu items, links and other crucial structural aspects of a site should work without AJAX and/or JavaScript 6) Do not use AJAX for effects but for extra functionality that truly enhances the user experience Some additional tips: AJAX should be used for what it’s designed for – dynamic interaction of the current page with the server (for instance, if you need to submit a form, upload a picture without reloading page, or updating a widget (i.e. calendar)). Most people trigger their basic AJAX through “onClick” events on a given element. In this case the spider will not floor to the AJAX generated content. Another way to do it is using a regular anchor tag (

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SEO for AJAX

How I Tested My Website Usability with UserTesting (+ SEJ Readers’ Contest!)

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You may already know that about 3 months ago I launched my newest project uniting blog owners with guest contributors – MyBlogGuest . The site is being still constantly developed and the feature set is being continuously thought over and updated. Therefore I’ve been trying various usability tools and services that could give me some insight into how visitors may be using the site. One of such usability testing services appealed so much to me that I went ahead and contacted the owner offering her to cover the service on SEJ. The tool is affordable but still it is paid (and you may have noticed that I prefer sharing free tools), so I suggested running a contest to give one of our readers an opportunity to try the service for free! So, before I go into details, here’s the Tweet, by tweeting the following text you are entering the contest (I’ll then choose and announce the winner): RT @sejournal Testing website usability with UserTesting http://bit.ly/cuby8D So, now a few words about my experience. The service is called UserTesting . On landing on the site home page (thanks a lot to @webnauts for sharing it with me), I instantly decided to give it a try because it looked fun and really cheap. So I promptly went to the order page and completed the order in no more than 2 minutes. The form asked me to: Give my page URL; Provide the scenario (the mindset that the user testers should have); List the tasks (what you want the testers to find on your site and the actions you want them to perform); List any questions I would like to ask the testers; Select the number of testers (which directly impacts the price); Define my target audience. I provided the URL of a working copy of my website (which does have a few bugs unlike the main version) and asked the tester to find guest posting opportunities in SEO niche. For targeted audience I only asked it to be “Intermediate” level of web expertise (since a person is blogging he is at least moderately knowledgeable about the Internet). I chose the cheapest option (one tester = $39) and completed the order. I was pleasantly surprised to get the task competed the same day just a couple of hours later. I got the tester’s video screencast and his written conclusions which I honestly sharing below: Screencast: Conclusions: Looks good, doesn’t it? The service owner agreed to my contest idea and is giving away a free test with 5 users – a $195 value . Again, all you need to enter is to Tweet the following: RT @sejournal Testing website usability with UserTesting http://bit.ly/cuby8D Good luck! Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal . How I Tested My Website Usability with UserTesting (+ SEJ Readers’