Why does Google update its algorithm?
‘It’s not fair!’ is a familiar phrase that many people utter when Google dares to update its algorithm. Their website had been ranking well and has now suddenly disappeared after the unleashing of the Google update. But is it really so unfair?
Chances are, if a website is penalised it’s for a good reason. The latest cutely named Google update is Penguin and it has been designed to root out bad SEO practices such as spammy content and poor quality links. In punishing one set of sites that have gotten seriously out-of-date or have flouted Google guidelines, Penguin rewards another set of sites that have been providing a good experience to the user and sticking to the rules.
The only reason Google updates their algorithm is to bring benefit to the billions of people that search every day. Remember the days when searches brought you irrelevant websites that used ‘black-hat’ SEO techniques such as invisible text and keyword stuffing? This has largely gone away as search has got better – and that’s thanks to Google continuously updating its algorithms to root out bad practice. So has Penguin achieved this? In the words of Google’s Matt Cutts; “It’s been a success from our standpoint”.
The Penguin update is just another step along the road to more accurate, relevant search results. There will be many more updates along the way, so how do you avoid getting penalised? The answer is simple. Ask yourself ‘Does my site provide fresh, relevant content to the user and stick to the rules?’ If you can answer positively, I’m sure you will survive a good few updates to come…
For more details on the Penguin algorithm update, see ‘How does Google Penguin affect my website?‘
Smartening up your Website Window Dressing
The old adage ‘a picture paints a thousand words’ is particularly apt in the field of web design. In the fast-paced click on, click off world of the internet, your web site needs to have a certain something to attract and retain your customers’ attention.
As part of a successful web site build, we are often tasked with the sourcing of good, strong imagery. The use of photographs, line drawings and other visual design features can make the difference between a good site and a great site. The right imagery will help you to carry your message and to support your company branding much quicker than text (although that’s important too). Here are a few tips:
- Human beings are pre-programmed to look at the faces and bodies of other humans, and so if you want to connect to your customers you may need to look for images of people. Choose carefully, people like real-looking people and so perhaps that supermodel might not be quite the ticket.
- Striking colours within images will attract attention and may add more power to your site than coloured text or page backgrounds, but go for clear, strong images rather than fussy or busy ones.
- If you’re selling products MAKE SURE you have an image for EVERY PRODUCT. Missing or broken images create a really bad impression on the browser and if someone can’t see what you’re offering they are very unlikely to buy it.
- In the same vein, it is worth spending a little bit of money to have your products photographed professionally. Clear images are much more successful than blurry, old or dim ones.
- Make sure your images are cohesive. Decide on a style or a frame of reference and stick to it. Your eSterling design team will be able to help you with this. Tartan and leopard-skin may both be striking, but it’s unlikely that putting them together will do anything except give you a headache.
- Supplement your images with great text. The use of clever straplines alongside your images will double the effect. Make sure you use succinct and relevant straplines.
If you have any queries about freshening up your current web site or building a new one, please contact eSterling and we’d be pleased to help. Call us on 0121 766 8087 or email enquiries@esterling.co.uk
How to Optimise the Images on Your Website
Optimising the images on your website helps the tiny robots crawling your site to understand what an image is about, as obviously they are unable to ‘see’ it. Properly labelling your images can help to improve your rankings as the pictures can be indexed and added to Google Images, which can bring more traffic to your site.
One of our most successful SEO clients gets a lot of traffic through Google Images because they have successfully labelled each image on their site and these regularly appear in searches. Optimising images is especially effective for websites selling visual products or services, for example furniture stores (our client mentioned above), clothes stores or photography or art websites.
Using proper alternative text tags on your images will also make your site user friendly. If your image doesn’t appear for whatever reason (for example if a user is using an unsupported browser), the alternative text for the image will also show visitors to your site what the picture is about. In short, optimising your images is best practice for improving your rankings and making your site more user friendly.
It’s relatively easy to optimise your images for SEO purposes and therefore there’s no excuse not to do it! Here are some top tips for getting those photos in order…
- Save your images in the correct format. Most browsers support JPEG, GIF, PNG, and BMP image formats.
- Never save images as numbers e.g ‘Image_001.jpg’.
- On your product pages, save your pictures as the product name or description – e.g ‘Beaded-Green-Maxi-Dress.jpg’. Think about what a user would type into Google to find your product and use that phrase.
- If your website is service based, save your pictures as your keywords. For example, if you’ve got a picture of your equipment on your homepage, don’t save the file as ‘Our-CNC-milling-machine.jpg’ – call it ‘CNC-milling-Birmingham’.
- Use ‘alt’ tags (alternative text tags) where possible. If you have a CMS for your website, you may be able to do this yourself. Simply use the same keyword/description as the filename for your alternative text.
- If you’re unsure where to begin with re-naming your images, start with your homepage. Choose the first picture at the top of your site – which will normally be your logo and rename this as your top keyword as this is the first image the Google robots will find.
Many people forget about images when it comes to SEO (Search Engine Optimisation). Don’t be one of them – get the edge over your competition and start optimising your pictures! You could find that it really helps your rankings and brings more traffic to your site.
Job Vacancy: eMarketing / SEO Administrator
eSterling have a full-time vacancy for an SEO Administrator to support the provision of service to our large customer base. Based in Digbeth, the company is well-established within the Web Design and Development industry and looking for the right person to join our team.
We are looking for a friendly and motivated person who wants to carve out a career in this fast-paced industry. The right candidate will be ready and willing to learn, with a good aptitude for administration and customer service and will be punctual and smart in appearance.
We welcome applications from those with or without relevant experience, but do require a good standard of written and spoken English and a basic knowledge of HTML.
The role will include:
- Basic HTML work
- Onsite and offsite search engine optimisation
- Customer service and support
- General and technical administration
- Email support
Candidates will attend an initial interview and will be required to undertake a basic HTML test. Second interviews may be required.
Monday to Friday, 37.5 hours per week and flexible working hours.
Salary range: £12,000-£15,000.
To be considered for this role please email your CV to: claire.jones@esterling.co.uk.
Personalising your Facebook Timeline Banner
Now that Facebook timeline is in full swing after becoming a default setting, some budding designers have started using the new layout to promote their brand in the most creative ways possible. A new trend has emerged for designing customised timeline images that really stand out from the crowd and capture the attention of the person stopping by at your profile.
Timeline has a lot of potential when it comes to promoting your brand, as you can use the large banner at the top to place a large image of a product – or customise a graphic with your contact details or company information.
Take for instance Jessica Barnard’s profile below. She has customised her personal profile to promote her brand and uses the banner to showcase her style of work. Very quickly, we learn that Jessica is a ‘web designer & self-professed technology addict’ with a sense of humour, who leans towards a vintage or retro style. She’s even had time to promote her Twitter and Pinterest pages.
A banner like Jessica’s can be put together fairly simply using Photoshop or Illustrator. All you need is a little imagination and a clear idea of what your brand is about. Or you can let eSterling do the hard work for you and talk to us about a customised Facebook timeline graphic.
Here’s a run down of some of my other favourite Facebook timeline graphics:
1. Robert Falken:
2. Neils Langeveld
3. Tiffany and Co.
4. Spotify
Is the Cost of Postage Pushing us Paperless?
This week sees Royal Mail increase the cost of a first class stamp from to 44p to 60p in the largest increase it has ever made. A second class stamp will rise from 34p to 50p, also up 14p (and therefore 39%). It is unclear how Royal Mail expect to reassure the general public that an increase of this magnitude is justified, especially considering usage of the service has already dropped off from 84 million items being handled by Royal Mail per day to 25 million in the last five years. With the closure of thousands of local post offices and the loss of the early morning delivery, is this another echoing clang of the final nail being driven home?
As always, we need to consider the impact on business users. For a small business sending, on average, 35 letters per week, the annual cost of postage will rise from £618.80 to £1092. Scale up the amount of letters sent and the figures get scary. If you send, on average 100 letters per week your costs will rise from £1768 to £3120 per annum. In effect you will be paying more for a lesser service.
So, should this be the push we all need to go paperless? More and more businesses are reducing the amount of paper they use in their offices and this could be the incentive we need to go one step further. If you aren’t already using email as your main form of contact then WHAT ARE YOU DOING?! Save yourself money and time and come gently into the new century, it won’t bite.
Losing Contact
The recent upsurge in retailers offering contactless payment is set to rise further if figures from Visa are to be believed. Their predictions suggest that the number of contactless terminals will rise to 150,000 in the UK during 2012. That is a rise of 50%.
Busy retailers like McDonalds are increasing the number of stores with contactless payment facilities in a bid to reduce queuing times and with giants such as Tesco, WH Smith and Waitrose set to follow suit, will payment the ‘traditional’ way become a thing of the past?
London 2012 is set to be the first Olympic Games run on contactless payment, and you will soon be able to pay for your bus fare with a wave of your hand.
Barclaycard’s latest offering on the contactless payment front is ‘PayTag’, a stick-on credit card which attaches to any item such as your phone or wallet and can then be waved at a terminal to complete payment. In an effort to speed up the drudgery of queues, payment can be made without PIN verification in cases of transactions under £15.. It comes with 100% fraud protection guarantee in a bid to calm fraud fears.
So, could this be the future? How do you feel about it? Are you sold? Are you left feeling cold?
I’ve just got used to chip and PIN so I’m keeping contact, for now at least.
WebDev Frameworks – CodeIgniter – Part 3: Authentication
One area lacking from the CodeIgniter feature set is user authentication. This is a feature fundamental to a huge number of standard web applications, be they globe-spanning social networks or a shop front for a local business. Indeed, the majority of sites that allow any kind of user experience customisation will at some point require assigning users a username and password to allow these features to be utilised. Many sites, both global and local, now use social media connections to provide authentication which enable users to interact with the application without the need for creating a new account to maintain. This approach has the added benefit (or detrimental consequence, depending on your world view) of allowing an application to potentially interact with more of the user’s data already available through their social networking activities, creating a more personal experience. Believe it or not, however, not everyone is on Facebook, and as such the current online landscape dictates that there must be a way for users to create an account in a web application with nothing more than their email address.
From a development point of view this means having a robust and reliable authentication system is a regular requirement. CodeIgniter doesn’t attempt to fulfil this need whatsoever and the inherent silver lining in that decision is that it helps to preserve the CodeIgniter mission statement of “maximum performance, capability, and flexibility in the smallest, lightest possible package.” There is no half-hearted effort to introduce a feature to CodeIgniter which has been deemed, rightly or wrongly, as non-critical and thus risk compromising the integrity of the framework.
The cloud to this lining, therefore, is how best to implement this functionality.
Not surprisingly, we’re not the first ones to ask this question. A discussion on Stack Overflow spanning over 3 years has hammered out the finer points for us and directly resulted in the creation of a new authentication library built upon comments and recommendations from the thread. This library is called Tank Auth.
Tank Auth is a rock-solid, fully featured user authentication library for CodeIgniter. Functionality includes user registration, activation, password reset and captcha support for new users and login, logout, logging and credential management for current users, all based on a well-defined security model that integrates smoothly in to the CodeIgniter core. This is a great solution to our authentication requirements that can easily be hacked in to shape for specific requirements.
Whilst everything that is present works well, it does still have a little way to go. Account profiles (as opposed to mere account credentials) are included but not implemented in any useful way. There is no ‘role’ management or user differentiation built in. And, as with the rest of CodeIgniter, there is no backend provided whatsoever.
That’s next on our list.
Update Your Content Now!
Sorry to sound bossy, but if the content hasn’t been updated on your website for a while, make sure you do it now!
The reason for my urgency is the latest update from Google. This mini amendment to the search engine’s algorithm is rooting out out-of date or spammy content. This means that if you haven’t updated the content on your website for a long time, you may see your keyword rankings drop, or even disappear altogether.
Before you panic at this news, it’s important to remember that Google (usually) makes updates that benefit the user – i.e your customers. No customer wants to read outdated content on your site, so why should Google rate your site if your copy is old?
The most successful websites add fresh content regularly, so you should therefore get into the habit of updating your content often. The easiest way to do this is to start a blog and write posts regularly. This doesn’t have to be a huge job – just a couple of paragraphs weekly would be a good place to start. You can talk about anything you like – industry opinions, company news, new orders, business trips etc – just make sure it’s relevant and well written.
As part of your content overhaul you should also re-write the text on your homepage and about page (plus any other pages that have text present). I have lost count of the number of websites I have seen that display the names of long-gone members of staff, old addresses; or information about an event that happened years ago! Make sure you amend these details as soon as they happen to keep your website fresh and relevant for your customers – and Google will be happy too.
WebDev Frameworks – CodeIgniter – Development
So far we’ve established that CodeIgniter is simple to install, streamlined to develop and efficient to host, but what do we actually get with this package? There are two main areas of functionality provided by CodeIgniter that form the core of its existence: classes and helpers.
Firstly, classes. We are provided a whole heap of pre-built class libraries to help build a back-end that can easily deal with common situations. These are essentially a compilation of well written and thoroughly tested functions designed to simplify the tasks most web-facing applications will require somewhere in their repertoire.
As an example, dealing with user input is notoriously laborious in web development. Collating form data, validating the input, removing malicious entities and formatting the results is the bane of any productive day. However, using the form validation class provided with CodeIgniter is, by comparison, trivial. It allows us to ensure user input is safe and present when required and, coupled with the email class, allows us to quickly generate emails to send back to the user. We can allow file uploads and zip them, we can manipulate images and generate thumbnails and we can keep this all in session data for authentication or displaying errors and notices. The database class ensures we can keep a permanent record of this data easily too, and throughout this whole process we haven’t written a single function of our own.
On the front-end CodeIgniter provides us with a selection of helpers. These are a series of functions designed to literally help with the creation of an interface. Continuing from our scenario above, the form helper can dynamically create text boxes and file upload forms and even populate them with session data or previous input. We also have helpers to format text, HTML, dates and URLs and CAPTCHAs to help us retain our humanity. A full list of CodeIgniter’s classes and helpers can be found in their user guide.
Don’t be fooled by this simplification of CodeIgniter’s rich feature set. Due to the fundamental nature of the framework a certain level of technical knowledge is required to shape CodeIgniter in to something useable – this is not the point-and-click-and-blog service you will find with the likes of WordPress. But nor is it designed to be and the “right tool for the job” axiom is just as appropriate in web development as any other profession. Similarly, there are a few gaps in the CodeIgniter arsenal and we will take a look at these next time.