Less Geek, More Tweak

According to Pew Internet, 63% of cell phone owners browse the web on their phone and of the people who use a mobile device (which includes tablets) to go online, 34% of them usually do so using their phone. These numbers have been on the upswing for the last few years and show no sign of slowing. Yet, says an Adobe study, only 45% of “marketers” have a mobile friendly site. We’re not quite sure who “marketers” are, but—in our estimation—the vast majority of websites out there are not mobile friendly, much less mobile responsive. If a potential customer goes to your website and finds a page that’s difficult to read or navigate and doesn’t contain what she’s looking for, how long do you think she’ll stick around before going to your competitor’s mobile friendly site?

If you’re lucky, the website you had built a few years ago for desktops will at least display properly on a mobile device. Which is to say it “mini-fies”—just gets smaller to fit the smaller screen real estate without missing or overlapping chunks. Being mobility responsive, however, means that the content itself–or at least the way the content displays– actually changes when viewed on a smaller screen. Being responsive is only one way a website becomes “mobile friendly”, a term of larger scope that includes a responsive site as just one of its components. We’ll get to that in a moment.

A responsive website includes styling code that allows it to detect when a device with a smaller screen size is viewing your site and to adjust the content and layout accordingly. You (and your web programmer) will have to tell it what “accordingly” means. But let’s say your “big” site has a horizontal menu that spreads all the way across the page. You can probably guess what happens when the menu display on a small screen: it may “break” in the middle or the menu items will be so small and hard to read and click on that people won’t even bother. With a responsive site, that broad horizontal menu might be told to display vertically and be toggled on and off with an icon (for maximum view-ability of the other aspects of the site). Similar adjustments might have to be made for galleries, news items, forms, font sizes and other things that have lots of horizontal real estate on your “big site”. Unless you have a lot of applications in your site, you probably don’t need a completely separate site for mobile devices, but do get yourself a responsive site that can handle both desk tops and mobile devices.

Another reason to avail yourself of a responsive site goes beyond mere style and readability and centers on the fact that mobile users are often looking for a different type of content on their cell phones than they might do on their desktops. Not only are mobile users even less prone to reading than their desktop cousins, they are more likely to be out and about, needing your location quickly or wanting a quick comparison between some products. This means that you’ll want things like maps and directions, succinct answers to the most often asked questions, and—especially for e-commerce—prices, pictures and descriptions of products that are readable and at the forefront of site. So, on your “big” widget-selling website you might have tons of testimonials about how good your widgets are. You may want to fold these up and put them someone else when the site is opened in a mobile device. The less scrolling to get to the most important information, the better. And for gosh sakes, if you’re main site uses a login to view content or pop-ups, can them for mobile users. Finally, the one thing that mobile users really hate is a slow-loading site—so concentrate on the essentials and get rid of that big transitioning JavaScript photo gallery of your store aquarium. Video content is a great kind of content to have on your “big” site, but getting it to work for both desktops and mobile devices is hard. Whatever you do, don’t use Flash—it’ll just show up a s big gray box on all Apple device—and even embedded YouTube videos can take forever to load on mobiles. Ask us about other things you can do to speed the mobile page up.

Overall, for a mobile friendly site, you’ll need to tailor the site’s user experience to what context it’s being used in. Are your mobile browsers actually in your store comparing prices with other stores (offer price comparison) or are they trying to find a specific item (offer a way to guide them around the store)?

The time is passed where you can concentrate solely on a desktop site and ignore the different needs of people with mobile smaller screens. But you can still have one site and do both.

In just the last two years, the way SEO is done has almost completely changed. Not so long ago, optimizing for the search engines meant figuring out ways to get as many other websites to link to your site as possible, stuffing the page with your keywords and nabbing content from almost any source. After two huge updates to the mechanics of how Google ranks your site, called Penguin and Panda respectively, linking schemes, keyword stuffing and simply copying someone else’s awesome text are all definite no-nos.

Today, Google looks for websites that have fresh, constantly updated, quality content that really informs the visitor and is written in “natural language”. This means no “duplicating” someone else’s content and no keyword “stuffing”. Google has the ability to check if even one sentence has been copied from another website. It also now regards overly repeated words as a lame attempt to trick it into thinking your website is relevant for a given search term. Links must be “natural” too, in the sense that the link text should contain your keywords and should link from logically related web sites. Bye-bye link farms. Finally, since Google regards new and unique text as an indicator of a vital and popular website, today’s SEO must include a method for writing and disseminating new content each and every week.

Social networking has also become a rapidly rising requirement for optimizing your site, because it gets your content in front of a lot of people very quickly. Google can now count how many mentions you have on the growing number of social networking sites and will rank your site for a given search term accordingly.

Google now also looks at the ease of access your website has–is the code valid, is the navigation clear, is the page easy to read, containing bullet points and headings, and is it truly relevant to its keywords.

Overall, today’s SEO has become less of a technical exercise and more a part of an overall marketing plan that includes constantly updating content, maintaining a user friendly site, interacting with social media and linking to relevant sites.

Google Partners Pilot Program

Google  announced a new pilot program that has  launched in Canada called Google Partners which will aid web professionals and agencies succeed on-line. Businesses  can connect with a certified web professional or agencies that have been verified by Google as using the best web practices and who “have met high quality standards in customer care and on-line expertise.”   Google has amalgamated its existing programs under the Partners platform so that web professionals can access Google resources, training, and support all in one place. Google has also created a new Partners community to “foster knowledge sharing within the industry” and “provide more opportunities for dialogue with Google specialists.”

If you become a partner, you’ll have to earn the Google Partner badge (below) by signing up with Google Partners and taking some exams.  Certification means that you become a trusted Google Partner. You can also “hangout with Google” by joining an exclusive Google + community where you’l get support from Google specialists and talk with leading industry experts. You will also have access a library of training manuals, case studies and pitch materials to learn the latest and greatest about Google.  Finally, and most interestingly, after you earn the Google Partner’s badge, Google promises to “introduce you to potential clients through Google Partner Search”.

Google estimates that the Partner program will target 6,000 web companies and professionals across Canada, and, if successful it will role out in other countries.

Google Page Rank Goes Down When it Should Go Up

If you’ve recently optimized a web page, adding your targeted keywords in all the right places, you’d expect that your Google rank for that page should go up.  But, in some circumstances, the page might be down-ranked, at least for a short while.  The reason is that Google is trying to add another layer to its sophisticated attempt to catch people who “spam” or “over-optimize” their web pages.

Google seems to figure it this way:  if a web master puts new keywords up on a page and that page’s rank actually drops but those new keywords are not removed in reaction to the drop, Google considers (after a few weeks) you to be legitimately optimizing your site and that the changes you made are real.  After a few weeks you’ll get your old (or better) rankings back.  On the other hand, if a web master puts new keywords on a page and that page’s rank declines and the web master than removes or revises that content, Google considers him as trying to manipulate the search results.  Hence, his lower page rank becomes permanent.  In other words: if a web page reacts too quickly to changes in the search results, it’s more likely that the page is using spam tactics. This line of attack, however, is usually only instigated if Google already suspects the site or page to be “spamming”.  Spamming here means using the “Black Hat” techniques of keyword or META tag stuffing, invisible or tiny text, link manipulation or page redirects.
Remember that Google is not against search engine optimization if you create real, helpful and relevant content.  But Google does not like any attempt to “trick” its search results.  If you optimize your web pages for new keywords that are relevant to your website, don’t worry if the rankings of your pages temporarily drop. This is “normal” Google behaviour and your pages will receive higher rankings after a while (often between one and four weeks). One Reason Your Google Page Rank Goes Down When it Should Go Up