Content Silos Should Easily Lead The Visitor To What They Want

A web site has become a complicated mess is when, as a visitor, the site has lost its ability to get you to what you want in a clear, efficient manner, or when as stakeholder, the administration of content has become unmanageable and/or ROI has stagnated. In the latter case, the challenge is usually vocalized as, “Traffic’s down,” or “Leads are dropping” or, worse, “We’ve done all this SEO stuff and our conversions are still at 1%.” In every case, this is followed by, “What are we doing wrong?”

Unfortunately, the process of fixing these kinds of issues is like fixing a bad renovation on a house. The homeowner’s problem might be that the roof is leaking, but the resolution of the issue may be multi-faceted; from structural to finishing. The same is often the case with web sites. Designers can increase conversions using web design by testing and moving conversion points to more visible areas on the page, but the real issue may lie in the wrong visitors are landing on that page. You may be successful in getting more leads by improving the design and/or language of the conversion point, but it’s just as likely that the marketing funnel is too wide and too many visitors are landing there. Bringing in more traffic may push up your site’s total numbers, but if the visitor’s time on the site drops, likely conversions are dropping too.

Working like a good general contractor, it is important to identify the core issues and renovate the structure. For a website, this structure is the content silos and how content is indexed and found by the search engines. This means paying particularly close attention to the content in four areas:  keywords and key terms for search, the site architecture, the metadata in the code, and the search-friendly content strategy itself. Trying to remedy problems with a site’s lead generation, conversions or ROI before investigating these primary targets is like putting new shingles on a roof without shoring up the ridge beam and rafters. It’s only when the content conduit is free of compromise that testing can begin.

In Part 2 of this series, we will look at how keywords and key terms

designforSEO's New Rules for Search-Friendly Design

I came across this post the other day from a designer named Jacob Cass regarding his “10 SEO Rules for Designers.” He really nails it and it’s amazing how this post from June 2008 still holds water now on the eve of 2012. It made me do some deep thinking about why it still holds up and also spurred me to consider any additions I might make to the list. Jacob’s 10 SEO rules are listed here (you can read the details on his post linked above):

• Don’t Cheat The System
• Stick To Your Keywords
• Content Is King
• Clean Code Is Searchable Code
• The Home Page Is The Most Important Page
• Links Have Meaning
• Title Tags For The Win
• Alt Tags Matter
• Ignore Most Meta Tags
• Have A Site Map
• Design For Humans

Here are the changes and additions that I would add to Jacob’s list. Some of these are refinements, while others are expansions on his ideas or new ideas that have surfaced in the last few years since his post.

Rule 11: Do Your Keyword Research

Business owners and marketing departments, no matter how sophisticated they are about digital marketing practices, all fall prey to their own industry-speak and corporate slang. No matter how sure the stakeholders are about what everyone uses or what works, take the time to do your own research (or hire an SEO pro) and make sure you’re not chasing unicorns. Visitors don’t always use the terms you think they should.

Rule 12: Engage The Visitor

Forward-thinking search engine professionals have been preaching about content forever (so it seems!). In fact, a whole new profession (content strategy) has arisen from the need to develop engaging content and weave it into cohesive digital marketing strategies. The key to engagement is to position yourself and your company as thought-leaders and to curate content for your visitors.

Engaging the visitor with meaningful content has long-lasting benefits that go beyond the quick-hit of a sensational YouTube video. Become a compendium of trends in your industry, provide your visitors with innovative ways to use or think about your products or services, even bring in thought-leadership from across your industry and market sector. Become a go-to website – a bookmark-must.

Rule 13: Don’t Ignore The Value Of Your Inner Pages

Driving traffic to the home page is a good thing, but only if the home page is well-designed and visitor-friendly. If it’s a mish-mash of navigation, menus, links, pop-up windows, and choices, this won’t help the visitor understand what you want them to find nor will the search engines find the clean kernel of context they need to find you perfectly suited for a searcher’s request.

One way to manage this is to clean-up the home page and make it as focused to your core business (and keywords) as it can possibly be and to give the visitor clear direction to those areas of expertise (and content) your website offers. Then, do the same to each and every page. Think of all of your inner pages as one-stage in a long step-by-step guide to understanding what you do and how you do it. Building inner pages this way will allow them to rank for their own keyterms and content; perhaps outranking your home page over time – and that’s okay!

Rule 14: URLs need love too

URLs or uniform resource locator is the actual coding that describes where the informations that needs to be retrieved – sometimes referred to as the web address – it usually denotes a web page, but can just as easily mean a PDF, an image or an email account. It is important to the search engines that the anchor to your content be easily understood, but even better if that anchor can help clearly communicate the content that is affixed to it.

When the title tag and meta data, (like the page description) and the URL all share the same keyword threads, the search engines now have a pitch-perfect understanding of what is on that page.

Rule 15: Your Images Can Drive Traffic Too

While alt-tags are important, naming your images in search-friendly ways can have a dramatic impact on your traffic patterns and ranks. When I begin with a client who has many product photos or images from their files on their websites, I usually find that the images have retained the names/titles that were assigned by the camera device they used. This has no search value at all.

To harness the power of search, images need to include not only keywords that are appropriate to the website, product or service, but also to the target audience and their search patterns. Don’t forget to include your name or the company/website domain as well. Sure this means longer titles and a decision-tree for using this keyword as opposed to that product name, but defining these parameters for everyone who authors content on the site means that everyone does things the same way. Continuity’s reward is efficiency as well as an increase in traffic.

Rule 16: Description Tags Are Your Most Valuable Online Asset

Description tags are passages of code in the meta tags that are used to describe what the content on that page or URL is about. These tags represent another opportunity to emphasize keyword groups and distinguish between branches of content for visitors and search engines alike. These are often used by search engines to summarize your content.

This is what I tell my clients: use this space to make a pitch or include an offer, but do it in the first 80 characters if you can. Remember, this passage is popping up on a search engine result page for free!  Use the rest of the 145+/- characters to name yourself and drop in keywords that relate. Think of description tags like Tweets. Write the passage for human eyes – make it compelling – searchers are making decisions on what you show them here and nothing else. Brochure-copy should be avoided here at all costs.

Rule 17: Your Name Means/Is Everything To You

Simply put, buying a domain name like “tantical.com” for a private investigation service is going to mean an uphill battle for you in the search engines. Success may still come, but your business is going to thrive by buzz-marketing, repeat customers and offline marketing. Likewise, adopting “Royals-Flush.com” for a plumbing service run by a guy named Royal sounds fun, but do the search – what returns for “royal-flush”? Will you ever break into the top-10 for search results – even for your own name? Unlikely.

Used to be a clever name or a play on words was all you needed on the side of your truck. But now the marketing budget required to drive traffic to something called “Squidoo” goes far beyond the simple indexing of search engine robots – those ‘bots’ simply won’t understand what it’s all about. And if what you do and who you are isn’t backed by venture capital, then you need to think out the strategy of search and maximize how it can work for you.

Rule 18: Your Visitors Should Never Be 404 Not Found

From time-to-time, every website loses track of a page, something doesn’t load right or a visitor finds a search result that leads to an orphaned page. It may not seem like this is under the “search engine” umbrella, but it is. Every time a visitor arrives to your site and bounces out, it counts against your ranks. Every time a visitor removes one of your bookmarked pages from their bookmarks means a lost opportunity. Every time a visitor lands on a 404 NOT FOUND page and doesn’t know what to do, you give them permission to leave.

Take the time to create a parachute page for your 404 NOT FOUND page. Give them a softer landing and take the sting out of not receiving what they thought they were going to get. Apologize for the confusion. Anticipate what they might be inquiring about and give them big, bold links to other pages that may serve them what they want. Give them a chance to report the trouble on your system and give them a reward (and capture their data)! In short, don’t let your 404 NOT FOUND page be a dead-end.

Rule 19: Sometimes It’s Just Too Crowded Under One Tent

As we all now know, content is king and the more content on your site, (and the fresher your content is) the more interesting your content will be to the search engines. That having been said, sometimes piling more content into a site isn’t what the site needs. Navigation can become visual chaos as menus drop and spring from every aspect of the site – all because the content and the topics have become unmanageable visually.

Take the time as you develop search-friendly practices to consider creating microsites for complex themes or unusual content threads. This gives you a chance to link-in and link-out to your main site while preserving the key-phrases on your legacy site. Making sure you don’t lose your visual brand and user experience is a key component of creating this package and making it invisible to the visitor.

Rule 20: Every Page Is A Landing Page

User experience professionals like Jared Spool have long known that Google places value on how the visitor experiences searching, sponsored links, and the landing pages they find. Google created the “Quality Score” to substantiate this and actually charges you more for your Google advertising if they find your ads are of lower interest to their visitors. Imagine what Google (or your visitors) think when they land on your website?

That’s why in my practice I find the most intelligent piece of advice I can give to anyone who is designing, marketing or doing business in the digital space is to think of every page as a landing page. Setting your sights on this goal will color and direct every decision you make as you strategize and develop each page, each shopping cart, each content thread, each interaction.

Rule 21: Start Using Media Queries Now

Media queries are the coding-language devices that tell a website what size to adopt when it is being downloaded to a device. By using simple if-then propositions, the website “knows” to use particular column numbers and widths to display the content on a given page. This has been gaining traction in the interactive design and development communities and in my opinion represents a huge value to small-to-medium business alike. Responsive web design lets you design for flexibility.

There is a lot of good information about responsive web design and the designer who is looking for a way to differentiate themselves from the competition, will be pulling this into their client discussions – I do. Conversations about the place of flexible grids and flexible images also abound. Do your homework now and make this part of your practice.

Paid backlinks are as ridiculous as cats in hats!

It is truly amazing and astounding the amount of time, money and human energy that is devoted these days to generating backlinks to client’s websites. We all know that backlinks are valuable for any website. And it seems everyone is clamoring for simple, easy, effective ways to generate these without monthly/yearly costs, without spammy, misguided efforts, and without the exposure to the Black Knights of Google sweeping down from above and shutting down whatever marketing efficacy you have generated for your site. Right?

With so many different kinds of services and so many types of providers, it can be damn near impossible to cut through the clutter and actually know who to believe and what services is right for you. Plus, if you believe what you read on the web, backlinks are being slowly devalued over time and, worse, they can lose you whatever rankings you have for pages that link to “bad” paid-backlink sites. Just search:  ”paying for backlinks is bad“.

Whether paying for backlinks is kosher or not is a debate for another time. The problem I have is that I get comments on this designforseo blog that are dishearteningly stupid and alarmingly bizarre with a pinch of dizzyingly illiterate. Here’s a little sample of what I’m talking about from recent comments:

• Peach on the certified plat – “vxvxvxv” is the autochthonous rags and lifestyle brand denominate with an expos?set on in the elephantine outdoors and East Run Ivy League.Bienvenue teem parcouri
• The good blog very much was pleasant I will watch your news
• I read that a radiation wit and lithe at one is cured on more control and maneuverability. And see fit pull the plug on me
• Awesome Story, I can TOTALLY Relate and am in a similar situation with upcoming success
• By us at the moment to obtain more facts and facts anyway Come to see us contemporary to obtain more information and facts anyway
• Here sells brand-new vibram five-fingers athletic shoes, 2011 year new design vibram five fingers

The saddest thing about the above comments submitted to my blog is that these are all likely “paid backlinks” submitted by digital marketers and paid-backlink service providers. REALLY? How do you think I feel about having to review 1000s of these kinds of blatant attempts to use my blog for your advertising and backlinking efforts? I assure you I am not interested and report you all as spam. That means you; Bad Icecream, Charles Meowth, Alexander Cellulite, Rex Ryan (ok, he might be real…,) and all of the fictitious commenters who come to my blog and try to get  APPROVED -well, it isn’t going to happen.

Bottom line: engaging the visitor with content that matters is the best way to create traffic to a website. Same goes for generating backlinks – nothing replaces real, pertinent dialogue with a website’s stakeholder. Building backlinks takes time and intelligence, not money. Do it the right way.

E-commerce conversion rates are dependent on design and SEO - true/false?

One of the biggest stumbling blocks for most stakeholders of websites is their conversion rates. It is also their weakness when it comes to listening to pitches from SEO/digital marketing firms who come calling. Because most websites convert in the single digits, it’s easy to fall prey to digital marketing strategies that predict higher conversions, bigger sales numbers, and better ranks.

Looking over the initial comments from a July 20th, 2010 Charles Nicholls‘ article, “Debunking Myths from the Top 10 Converting Websites,” we see that most of the highest converting websites are supported by formidable catalog/direct mail campaigns (and large national advertising budgets!). I know from my own experience that Lands End does a great job of referring to the website during each and every phone conversation; supporting and fostering the customer’s use and understanding of the “place” of the website in the sales process and in future transactions. Relying only on the e-commerce pipeline seems to leave customers on an island; making it difficult for them to navigate from old direct mail models to newer e-commerce sales processes.

Look at each of these websites. They all take a very different tack when it comes to overall design, user experience, and shopping carts. The site Womanwithin has big, bold targets that promote sales and discounts, while a site like Office Depot highlights weekly specials in the rotating banner area supported by other navigation menus and dense silos of links below the fold.

So it seems that the e-commerce/conversion success formula has less to do with user experience, interactive design, and keyword bundles and, in the end, has more to do with brand-building, penetrating markets, consistency of message across channels, and having a keen understanding of what their customers want. In the end, this is exactly what marketers and advertising agencies have been saying for 50 years, while SEO and content strategists have been saying for ten years that providing content that engages the visitor and clearly communicates a point of view will yield positive results. This is the formula for e-commerce/conversion success.

For Better Blog Design; Understand and Analyze Eyetracking Trends

Designing a blog is different than designing a home page for a website. A blog’s main content is transient; appearing on the home page one day and not the next. Various design tactics have been tried, including displaying static front pages that look and act more like standard websites and home pages. To know what will work for your enterprise or design, a little analysis in advance of wireframing is a best practice.

As far back as the late 1800s, reading was observed as a series of short stops, not a smooth sweeping motion as was assumed. Emile Javal, a French ophthalmologist, uncovered the fact that our experience of seriality as we read was, in fact, made up of saccades which are quick, parallel movements of the eyes as they scan in a succession of fixations and discontinuous individual movements. Later, in the 50s, a Russian psychologist named Yarbus showed that there was a definite correlation between the time the eyes are still during this scanning and the subject’s interest in the task. He also showed, maybe more importantly, that the task itself influences the saccades and fixations.

It would seem then that balancing visitor interest and site layout, while understanding the tasks required of the visitor is the key to successful corporate blogs. One of the ways interactive designers can try to visualize this balancing act is eyetracking. Much has been written about it over the last 10 years by authors like Jakob Nielsen and Jared Spool. For designers, it offers the chance to see through their users’ eyes and watch them behave. Of course, nothing can be precisely determined with tests like eyetracking because each visitor has different knowledge gaps and levels of tech-savviness, but inferences can be made and statistical models can be created.

The most recent report from Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox shows different corporate blog designs offering different layouts, different content strategies, and different business goals, all resulting in different eyetracking patterns. In the Blog Front Pages article, Neilsen lays out the parameters for success based preferred topics, tone of voice, scannability and layout, charts vs. tables, and how readers interpret links, as well as the use of summaries or full articles. From the scanning tests done, Nielsen’s group makes these general recommendations:

1. Encourage selective reading by using summaries, especially when the blog touches on many topical areas.
2. Blending longer articles with shorter posts keeps the visitor focused on your message, but allows them to move on to other things naturally.
3. Use site analytics to determine what visitors are doing and where their interests lie – formulate your design and content structure accordingly.
4. Blogs with regular returning visitors or subscribers should feature longer articles because their visitors are returning for the next installment.
5. Making the most recent articles and posts available in a nearby widget or call-out gives the returning user what they need to find what they missed.
6. Let your visitors engage with lots of varied content styles and types – be bold enough to redesign when the analytics suggest it.

As you can see some of these same ideas can be extended to the design of home pages, product pages, landing pages and microsites. If you have other styles of corporate blog designs, have other suggestions for designing practice, or have other eyetracking links to share, please send me an email and/or a comment. For more about designing blogs click the link or use the tag widget.

Engaging Visual Information Enhances Your Visitor's Experience & Your SEO

Smart information helps your visitors reach a deeper understanding of your key topics or concepts, but this doesn’t always mean complex written documents or dense statistical analyses. The same rules apply here as apply on shopping carts, landing pages, and web forms: clear concise communication enhanced with unfettered, thoughtful navigation is best.

So what does this mean for the interactive designer? The SEO content provider? The content strategist?

What it means is that we must be mindful of the balance between overloading the visitor with too much information and giving them the tools and experience that lead to thoughtful consideration of your themes. Some websites may never need to create visual data experiences; for others, information maps may be the key to expressing their data in meaningful ways. Designers strive to be innovative, but interaction experiences of data can overwhelm too by creating a knowledge gap for the visitor (the system is too difficult to learn and/or use) or by supplying too much data with little or no editing requiring the visitor to find their way through, often unsuccessfully.

The same holds true for designing something simple for a website, like tables, charts, call-outs, and lists. Bringing the same kind of engagement to these aspects of a website enhances your visitors total experience of your site, your content, and your themes. Leaving these visual elements to be generated by standardized back-end systems or by well-meaning developers who are often using legacy libraries of code to generate these elements is not a successful visual strategy.

It is important that content developers, no matter which side of the design/marketing table they’re on, strictly adhere to visual branding across all the content. Nothing unhinges a visitor’s trust of a website faster than when the visual scan and skim is off when moving from pages to page within a site. Dialing in the overall visual style of all URLs across a website points to a competency that builds trust for the users and reduces bounce-rate. Reducing bounce-rate is important key for SEO, the site’s overall analytics, and for conversions and goals.

Important Information Design and Data Visualization Links

Wikipedia / Information Design

Many Eyes / Browse Data Set Galleries

Data Visualization: Modern Approaches

Tufte and Beautiful Evidence

Information Is Beautiful

Information Mapping at Parsons

JESS3′s Beautiful Blog About Info Design

Designing Tables With Data Visualization

Don’t hesitate to add to the list found here by adding comments.

Design Tactics To Enhance The SEO Value Of Your Blogs

When I first began to design/redesign blogs for clients, I questioned everything. Over time, I began to feel that working with the various blog platforms is a little like the Serenity Prayer; “…Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change and the courage to change the things I can (time and budget being in place, of course).” Working with the SEO-centric digital marketing firm, McDougall Interactive, gave me a unique perspective on blogs, their search-value, and how to enhance SEO through interactive design and content strategies. I’ve put together a short list of highlights below – hope this is informative.

18 SEO-Friendly Blog Tactics For Interactive Designers

Blog Platforms

Choose your blog platform for SEO attribution in the CMS/admin area. Each methodology for building a blog has its own positives and negatives. Make sure the system you choose fits the client’s profile. As the blog stakeholders get more sophisticated, they will ultimately judge you on how easy you made things for them, not on how easy things were for you.

Keyword Research

Do your own keyword research and identify (and resolve) any disconnect with the client’s understanding of their keywords. Take the time to get smart about SEO, search-value, traffic analysis, and key terms. Be sure to have in-depth discussions with your clients and be very sensitive to “disconnect.” Above all, get these keyword adoption issues ironed out before you start designing a blog that doesn’t work for “their” search.

Design For Scalability

Do your due diligence regarding the future needs of the clients. Will they need a shopping cart or product galleries? Do they need to feature their white papers and webinars? This becomes important when clients want specific blog platforms, but haven’t considered each blog platform’s hallmarks. Anticipating these needs at the front-end of a design project can also save hours of redesign while the design’s still in-process and $1000s of dollars in retrofitting a website in the future.

Premium Real Estate

Design the blog as if real estate is at a premium – because it is – don’t succumb to grand visual gestures when tightly-focused, yet visually appealing will do. Websites designed like posters can have great visual impact, but rarely have the structural organization to be scalable or the content required to be SEO-friendly.

SEO-Friendly Navigation

Let visitors (and search engines) slice the content quickly with SEO-friendly navigation and then watch the visitor’s behavior closely through analytics. Creating search engine-friendly navigation and menus can have additional user experience value for the visitor.

Perfect Static Pages

Build static pages that build on the visual brand and have content that maximizes lead generation. Static pages increase the search value of any blog by offering ample opportunities to link out to valuable content and link in to specific blog posts, as well as by fixing SEO-friendly URLs to the blog in a more permanent way than the blog posts can offer. The consistency of the data in the HTML code of these pages and URLs/metadata help search engines index the blog for key terms and topics for which you want to rank.

Think About Padding

Designing an elegant brand and presence for a blog can be quickly undone by letting the blog’s content end up in a compact, unreadable block of text. Unfortunately, the CMS/admin/database management aspects of most blogs are crafted to handle and manage data – not to display the data in a visually appealing way. Use CSS to customize the look and feel of the text and ensure that columns and text have the right visual padding around them and between them. Designing for content is all about communicating clearly and if visitors find the content unusable, that’s bad for your SEO.

Content Links

Coach your clients to link their blog content back to inner pages on their main site (if they have one) and vice versa. This tactic helps increase organic traffic to both sites and allows your visitors to wander inside your space. The more you engage and anticipate their investigations, the longer they’ll stay and that’s good for the search engines.

Adopt SEO-Taxonomy

Map categories, tags, menus, URLs, permalinks, meta data, and blog posts to important keywords and topics. Categories especially should be focused on main keywords and phrases because they end up on every page of the blog. Tags should be secondary and tertiary terms that create linking structures that build their own network inside your content over time. Designers can not afford to overlook these key principles.

Link Older Posts To Traffic

Self-refer to older posts as links in a blog post so the visitor doesn’t have to use search features or guess which category contains an topic. Bringing key blog posts to the forefront on the home page and on inner pages is a worthwhile strategy too. Pushing traffic across your blog is very search engine-friendly.

Design For RSS Feeds

Design and develop every blog with RSS feed capability and make this an important feature. Make the sign-up process clear and easy for the visitor who wants to stay informed about what your blog is about. Search engine algorithms track subscribers and the incoming traffic that RSS feeds trigger.

Are Widgets SEO?

Most widgets and feeds aren’t SEO. Sure they add value to your blog for the visitor, but most widgets can be broken into two groups: feeds and outbound links. Feeds are ultimately duplicate content for which your blog won’t get credit and outbound links are just that; outbound. That’s where most of the juice is going – passing from your blog to some other web presence – and what if when you hand them off to someone else’s site, those visitors never return? Save the widgets until your blog has real value, search engine presence, and a following. Then let other boggers approach you about being in a widget on their site!

Stop The Spinning Tag Clouds

Tag clouds are a great way to visualize information – I love them. I use them all the time when on blogs and websites. But tag clouds that exist as motion graphics are hard to use, have almost no SEO value because they aren’t typically indexed by search engines, and can often sap a visitor’s energy and focus that should be directed towards important links and conversion points.

Lead-Generation Forms

Don’t design one into a blog (or any website for that matter) unless there is an internal marketing strategy that has been approved by stakeholders for dealing with the results that the forms generate. Oh, and offer something that is truly valuable to each visitor who signs up. Without these two elements, this is an concept that should be tabled until it is fully-fleshed out.

Call-Now − 1-800-XXX-XXXX

In my experience, a client or organization that insists their phone number be placed in the banner or prominently featured on every page of their website doesn’t understand how this undermines search engine optimization or how it weakens or spoils search engine analytics. If a phone number must be included on webpages, it must be a number specifically-designated for web visitors so this can be tracked internally by stakeholders for SEO.

Use Media For SEO

Media in a blog post (videos, slideshares, webinars and images) offer opportunities to link out (and in) to important content which betters the overall search results. Now that YouTube videos are ending up in search results, this is a practice that must be incorporated into design and development.

Fonts As Text Or Graphic Elements

With full adoption of Web Open Font Formats (WOFF) perhaps a year or two away and fonts that are cross-browser compatible already available from some type foundries (EOT & WOFF), interactive designers can now choose to adopt font styles that match pre-existing collateral and branding -and- that can be indexed by search engines. Using graphical texts for logos and taglines and embedded in images and motion graphics may be necessary now, but very soon this won’t be the case. If you can mandate adoption of web open font formats now, you should.

Websites (and Blogs) Are Living Entities

Search engines index content and monitor web traffic. These are not fixed concepts and are subject to change. If your interactive design project’s success hinges on organic search traffic at all, you must amend your designs toward a content-forward approach and open dialogue with the client about their future design requirements for A/B testing elements on their site based on web-traffic analysis and changes in search engine algorithms.

What Aspects Of A Blog Have The Greatest Impact On Search?

Survey most blogs and you will find the same kinds of design elements: logo – banner art – main navigation – right-column and/or left-column navigation – call-out areas – contact info – images and captions – content blocks – sitemaps – comments – footer info. Because these elements are so prevalent, they’re often adopted and/or visually transformed without really understanding how blogs work or how to make blogs work better.

Anyone who has landed on a blog knows that the most recent post is the first one you see at the top of the page. Older blog posts are found below the newest post and on the following pages. Most blogs force the visitor to experiment with menu offerings to find what they want or rely on search features within the blog itself. In order to optimize the design and the experience of the blog for visitors and for search, a designer must ask: What do the search engines see on a blog and how do they assign value?

Search engine optimization practitioners generally agree that when a new post lands on the blog’s home page, that post’s value for search is at its highest point. Because of the way search engines index each page with their robotic algorithms, as each new post lands and pushes the older posts down the page, the older posts have less and less value. Most SEOs think that, as a post pushes off the home page and into archives, eventually the search value all but disappears. This makes the SEO attributes of a blog and of each individual blog post all important.

A simple way to counteract the decreasing SEO value would be to increase the overall page volume of the blog by adding content. There can be no doubt that this helps a blog attain critical mass and keeps it fresh. But adding content without developing an SEO-friendly strategy based on keywords and keyphrases will never produce the results most of us want from our blogs.

Keywords and keyphrases are the structure on which everything else is predicated – from search-friendly post titles and matching URLs, to permalinks, to the naming of categories and tags, to the search-friendly blog content, and should even extend to paid search, landing page development, and, further, to social media campaigns. Strategizing for search is really surveying how visitors understand your key topics linguistically and then framing the site’s design and content around these terms. This is done by researching user’s search patterns on the web. By testing what search engines return for results on important terms and modeling competitors and like-organizations, determinations can be made for mapping these your terms across the whole website.

So now the question is; what aspects of blogs should designers (and developers) focus on to insure the greatest impact on search engine-friendliness, now and in the future? For a list of must-haves for blogs from a search engine perspective, go to the designforseo blog post entitled, 18 SEO-Friendly Blog Tactics For Designers. Don’t hesitate to join the discussion if you have something salient to add.

Content Strategy Is A Cross-Discipline Practice

As a term, content strategy is a relatively new one to the production of interactive experiences; in particular, website redesigns and new-builds. Too often in the past, the process of creating a content strategy has been to draw a roadmap for content development. As a result of strong editorial practice or from well-meaning search engine optimization practices, many websites have lots of content, but little of it is effective for the visitor nor well-managed structurally. The phrase, “content is king” has echoed through the years, but this has produced content on the web more notable for it’s quantity than it’s quality or experience.

Content strategy, as it is beginning to be known, is a cross-discipline practice that seeks to strike a balance between user experience and SEO, persona development and site architecture, meta-data and editorial calendars, keyword research and traffic analysis. The concepts and protocols are being defined by key practitioners like Kristina Halvorson and Erin Scime and are expanding the definition of content strategy at a key moment when the web is also diversifying both in terms of platforms and applications, and in terms of standardization and conventions.

In her insightful essay on content strategy for A List Apart in December of 2009, Erin Scime lays out the conceptual overview of the content strategist as a digital curator. For me the term “digital curator” is a bit too academic. While it is true that curators, “use judgment and a refined sense of style to select and arrange art to create a narrative, evoke a response, and communicate a message,” there seems to be room in the new definition to include the role of the environmental designer and the exhibition designer as well. It is not just the contextual thread that runs through the exhibit that interests the visitor in a website, but the ebb and flow of the content, the container of the exhibit itself, and the development of visual cohesion.

Still, Scime lays out a number of elegant, competent arguments for this expanded definition of the content strategist starting with defining and assessing the current content and needs of a project, and ending with editorial strategies and the establishment of organizational guidelines and protocols. As she says, “…content strategy engagement is site-level and long-term…” and she is right. Content strategists need to work with stakeholders and marketing people to understand the trajectory of the project and its place within the larger brand and message. They need to work directly with SEO and SEM departments or vendors to uncover searchable terms and incorporate them into every aspect of the website’s development and digital marketing. Likewise, content strategy will directly effect UX and IxD and the kinds of visual structures and cues they will create for the visitor. And now, content strategists must also navigate social media and be responsive to both external audience and internal needs.

The new content strategist is involved in every conversation surrounding an interactive project; if not in the actual development and production of the interactive experience, then certainly in the mapping of the content and the structuring of it within the larger framework. Content is not just king, but it is the map and the territory.

Standard Interactive Experiences Remain Elusive Over Spectrum Of Today's Devices

In his forward-thinking article, Responsive Web Design, for alistapart, Ethan Marcotte put forth an edict about changes to the entire interactive design process that will, in my opinion, be the web standard of the future. In it he talked about client project requirements that include secondary interactive experiences like iPhone websites and others. It’s safe to say we all have begun to see these will be the norm moving forward. In the article Marcotte said,

“…as designers, I think we often take comfort in such explicit requirements, as they allow us to compartmentalize the problems before us,…(but) can we really continue to commit to supporting each new user agent with its own bespoke experience?”

Rather than generating separate content, architecture, and development for each different initiative, the answer he puts forth is Responsive Web Design. This is not to be confused with the fluid grid and flexible images that many of us have tried as solutions in the past. Even with fluid grids, interactive content delivery is problematic for anything less than the desktop experience and across the spectrum of browsers – a standard experience remains elusive. Working with CSS3 and web standards put forth by W3C, designers and developers are beginning to experiment with coding that allows the entire website to float and architect itself depending on the screen size, resolution, and device-type.

Media queries, a robust part of the new CSS3 specifications, allow interactive designers and programmers to build to the various parameters of the devices themselves by sending queries that test the field where the content will land and then define a specification for that field. These queries can be chained together and, once the device passes a given test query, will further apply the specification(s) to the content in the markup. This is quite simplified for the sake of this post (you can find out more about media queries and CSS3 in the article link above), but the important thing is understanding that the lay of the interactive landscape is changing and designers and digital marketers must change with it. Soon it will be your clients who have heard that this is possible and will want to know if you can supply this design/programming solution. You’ll want to be able to say yes!