Web 2.0 Blog

Having been a user of Sphinn for quite a long time now, a site which I find very useful and I respect greatly for the general quality of news items posted there by its users, I’m becoming concerned about the volume of companies who think they can get themselves links from this site and actually think their mindless spam is worthwhile.

Sphinn is an INTERNET MARKETING news and discussions site which encapsulates many corners of web activity. It is NOT a resource for promoting car insurance deals, free gym equipment or information about gluten-free pizzas. Those thinking about organising an SEO strategy in this way should know that these types of links are usually deleted within a couple of hours after only several users report it as spam. Furthermore, the link is only influential for as long as the page is relevant which in most circumstances is not very long - so even if you avoid removal from the site, neither your traffic nor your page rank will increase.

I’d also make the same recommendation for StumpleUpon, but I’m not as familiar with this site. Ultimately I think social bookmarking is a very important factor in the sharing of information over the Internet and a great outlet for bringing traffic to your site - especially in circumstances where the content is fantastic, but the author, having no idea about SEO, will never get any readers. But we must be careful that the system isn’t taken advantage of. Spamming social bookmarking sites isn’t blackhat, but it is unethical and worthless - people will never learn. Someone once said SEO is a mug’s game. Sadly, I guess social bookmarking is only advocating that theory.

Including Gestalt laws of user psychology can go a long way towards ensuring that your website caters for your user’s usability needs as they navigate through it. Psychologists have determined that the brain acts in a certain way when perceiving objects on a computer screen, and knowing this can help ensure your site is more concerned about the user’s needs than your own.

In the next few days I’ll go through each gestalt law; Proximity, Similarity, Continuity and Closure, one by one to show how they can be advantageous to website design. I’ll start with proximity.

Proximity

This law refers to the observation that objects appearing close together in space or time are perceived to be together. So basically the rule should be to group related items together so that related items are seen as one cohesive group rather than a bunch of unrelated elements. The dots below should demonstrate the point.The dots in the group on the left would be considered a ‘group’ rather than being individual dots that happen to be near. The ones on the right would be considered as three lines of horizontal dots due to the larger gap between rows than the columns. We can apply this process to web design.

In the case of navigation, proximity can be used to very subtlety, but effectively, distinguish different parts of the navigation. For example, Technorati separates parts of its navigation by splitting the row of links into two groups. The group on the left allows you to search through different blog topics, whereas the group on the left allows you to browse more content-driven topics. The administration and technical sections are kept seperate altogether from the main navigation as they wouldn’t be perceived as being part of the same ‘group’.

Another website I was impressed with is Hitflip.co.uk. This is a technique I have noticed a lot of news sites do also. There’s a column of boxed areas down the left side of the page, all with headings related to different product areas. Those categories are further categorized within each box. You know exactly what type of product you’ll find when you click on these links and they’re available from the homepage. Excellent use of proximity and usability, although the fact that the user must scroll down the page to reach them reduces the impact slightly, I feel.

Sticking with Hitflip, proximity comes into play again on the site footer. The screen shot below firstly shows a ‘greyed-out’ area which usefully separates it from the main content. Despite all the links inside this grey box being ‘boxed-off’ together, we don’t interpret them to all have the same meaning, simply due to how they are arranged. Nor do we see the links as individual elements, as we can clearly see there are five columns all offering administrative and support topics of different types. The footer links are then cleverly categorized into five groups and are placed under simple headings offering varying methods of user service.

These are just a few example of proximity on the Internet offering more usable website design. If you have any other examples or comments on the ones I’ve shown, please leave a comment and let me know.

This article is an investigation into whether search engine optimisation and usability are compatible, enabling a user to find a website in a search engine, and then find what they’re looking for once they’ve found it.

Usability and search engine optimisation are both of fundamental importance when developing websites on for the Internet. SEO should be given precedence in the design of a website to improve the chances of users actually finding the site in the first place. Likewise, usability should be of high priority so that users aren’t put off using the site within seconds of finding it.

When optimising a website by maximizing keywords, it is essential not to disrupt the quality of content on the page being optimised. There is no point in spending time and money on directing traffic to your site if the user will back straight out. If you’re at all interested in repeat traffic, usability has to come first. (Peter V, 352media.com: 2007)
The result of poor quality text in a keyword-optimised website is a page that reads like a search engine result page and not one that’s content is centred towards the users’ interests. It should be the case, should it not, that search engines reflect the content of the pages they index, not the other way round? Writing page content that engages the user and speaks their language should not be borne out of a need to fit within Google’s requirements but rather a need to fit the users’ requirements. (J Gibbard, smorgasbord-design.blogspot.com: 2005)

However it is possible to use search engine optimisation to enhance the usability of a website without comprehensive UCD testing. Using descriptive links indicates to the user they are heading in the right direction, emphasizing words with bold text and headers highlights important elements of a website’s content whilst encouraging scanning. Inevitably, user-centred sites with consistent navigation, simple layouts and correct arrangement of keywords are more likely to attract links from elsewhere.

In a recent keynote speech in Barcelona, usability expert Jakob Nielsen predicted that simplification and resolution of basic problems is the key to a positive user experience. Nielsen underlined this point by demonstrating the changes Google has made to its search engine results pages over time, reducing the level of content, removing a left hand column and continuing to improve basic user experience elements such as page load times - from 0.23 seconds in 1999 to 0.08 seconds in 2007. (Jakob Nielsen, bigmouthmedia.com: 2007) With Web 2.0 technologies such as blogs, discussion boards and RSS now in the web design framework, all of which intend to encourage simplification of web processes and user-centred input, there’s scope for significant improvements for all involved.

To evaluate, it appears that SEO is still at a very early stage in website development and the likeliness of gaining a high search engine ranking is still largely determined by incoming links and brand awareness. User centred design however is a very established practice and only when SEO can be incorporated collaboratively into usability’s strict set of guidelines, can a worthwhile partnership be formed.

By Adam Moss

Web 2.0 has had many success stories as the integration between web content and user interaction becomes evermore seamless. However, the most popular of this new series of web technologies is blogging – a means whereby users can post articles and opinions on any topic of their choosing on their own web space. The result of this is an online community where posters and readers can post comments, and more importantly, hyperlinks. As a SEO strategy, this can be a very effective method of communicating not only the existence, but the significance of your website in the industry, especially if corresponding blog posts speak favourably of your site. The major benefit is that blogs can reach very wide audiences if implemented and promoted correctly.

Imagine a situation where everytime you had an idea to share, 5,000 people who trust your opinions see it in your blog. The majority of those 5,000 people also write blogs in your field or related fields. Some of those bloggers may frequently mention your site on their blogs, and they themselves could have thousands of subscribers. Within a short space of time your blog could have the attention of hundreds or even thousands of users. Where people go search engines follow, so if many users link to your blog, it will also boost the search engine ranking for other parts of your site.

It is important however that your blog postings avoid ‘commodity status’, which includes short comments on somebody else’s work, and simply posting for the sake of generating optimised keywords. Posts must maintain quality, originality, depth and have its content driven by the user’s expertise in order to acquire popularity amongst web communities. I have studied in-depth, the work of usability expert Jakob Nielsen, and I have found an interesting article of his; Write Articles, Not Blog Postings, which encapsulates this matter perfectly. He asserts that leadership (or prevalence of the poster’s expertise) in blog postings, blog-post variability and regularity are of high priority in gaining trust and recognition. I believe he wants to encourage you to personalise your posts, by giving your own opinions and judgements on your subjects to provoke interest and even raise debate.

He also points out however, that if the content isn’t the main concern for your site, and you simply want to communicate simple answers to your user’s questions then “you should comply with the bulk of content usability guidelines: be as brief as you can; use bulleted lists and highlighted keywords; chunk the material; and use descriptive headings, subheads, and hyperlinks.” These guidelines all fall nicely into the standard Search Engine Optimisation requirements. I believe it is therefore essential that blog postings for SEO manage to achieve a balance where expertise and content usability can work together simultaneously to bring the right users to your site.

One of the chief objectives of Web 2.0 and web logging is to make the Internet a more community-based entity, and by using the blogging practice in the most effective way for your website, you can take advantage of this. This doesn’t just mean writing articles on your chosen topic and leaving it there, but it means interacting with the wider community. Quoting and linking to other popular bloggers, leaving useful comments on other related blogs, writing articles for other blogs and actively soliciting & replying to comments can really push users towards your blog.

With RSS feeds also enhancing the likeliness of your articles being noticed and linked to, it will only improve your website’s probability of being picked up by Search Engines, making blog posting a valuable resource for optimisation.

Reference:

Wall, A M (2007). Search Engine Optimisation Book. California: Aaron Matthew Wall. 87-91.
Jakob Nielsen (2007) Write Articles, Not Blog Postings [online] available from <http://www.useit.com/alertbox/articles-not-blogs.html> [15 January. 2007]

Read this article also at Ezine

By Adam Moss