"seo" in Weblog

In my redesign post I mentioned this ‘zooming content’ idea I’ve adopted. I don’t think the concept is new but I’ve not seen anyone write about it so I’m jumping in… Each page is based on what I’m calling a ‘zooming’ layout. By that I mean that the information view and relevance on the page zooms out as the page goes down. This is influenced by three things:

1. Derek Powazek’s Embrace your bottom! article.
2. Peter Morville’s Ambient Findability.
3. The Best of Eyetrack III: What We Saw When We Looked Through Their Eyes.

The Eytracker III study from a couple of years ago found that people aren’t afraid to scroll below the fold but that their scanning became more rapid. To cater to this behaviour I have limited the amount of information in the lower sections of the page. The page content becomes more and more brief and scannable as the page goes on. Take the weblog index for example: it starts with a complete entry, then moves to summaries of 5 recent entries, along with access to the archives, and finally to external links.

Every page follows this pattern. The top of the page deals with specifics and details while the bottom of the page presents an overview, encouraging scanning and, hopefully, giving people what they want, when they want it.

Why have I done this instead of going for the more conventional two column blog layout? Conventions are our friends, after all…

In Ambient Findability Peter Morville calls web pages ‘discreet findable objects’ that can be accessed out of context via search engines… Basically, there’s a very good chance that people are coming to a content page from Google having performed a search on a specific keyword phrase. The standard two column layout presents these nice new visitors with a lot of information they’ve not asked for and are probably not interested in. I wanted to let people get what they came for before bombarding them with choices, in line with Derek’s suggestions.

Content is king and will govern both incoming links and page weighting by the engines. If someone gets to one of my pages it will probably be thanks to the content so I’ve made sure I give that up front. The article, blog entry or portfolio item is there in full at the top of the page with nothing else in the way. The main navigation gives a broad overview of the site and the metadata to the right suggests the presence of more local and related posts but I’ve tried very hard to keep noise to a minimum. I’m hoping that I’ve left enough wayfinding and orientation hints at the top of the page to let the user reach a decision about the context of the site and content before continuing down the page.

After the full entry I zoom out one level.

On the index pages this steps out to an overview of the most recent posts, kept short and scannable; On the content pages this is lists of two different types of entry: the most recent ones, which I’d obviously like to promote to new visitors, and related (and hopefully relevent) posts, which are an attempt to push old content. (This second group is found by passing the article title into my site’s search and listing the top results.) Derek Powazek advocates using the bottom of the page to give readers somewhere to go but I had one more question I thought people might ask: Why should I believe the post I’ve just read? By providing a list of links to other things I’ve written I am trying to establish credability with my readers as well as cross-sell content. That’s also what the slightly anomolous ‘about me’ snippet is trying to suggest - that I do have some idea what I’m talking about.

The final portion of the pages is for less relevant or less valuable information - external links, comments, that sort of thing.

I don’t think this is a radical idea - far from it - newspapers have been doing this sort of thing for ever, but I am very surprised that it’s not been applied to more websites. When I sat down to think about what information I should be presenting to my users at any one time this zooming idea just seemed to make sense. My biggest concern with the approach is the way it dresses up normal in-site navigation to look like more content. When I first sent the new design round to people I was expecting lots of complaints about access to the archives. So far no one has said anything about that…

To sum up: people tend to scan the page below the fold so the further down they go how about offering them more scannable content? Zoom detail to overview.

Before last year I had never been to a conference or workshop to do with the web. Thinking back, that’s really quite bizarre but I’ve learned everything I now do for a living for myself. The community around web standards provides a wealth of articles and opinions giving hints, pointers and tutorials so I never felt the need…

Then last year I was invited to attend the Carson Workshops session with Joe Clark. Despite not learning much in the way of new techniques I loved Joe’s approach to the subject and thoroughly enjoyed the day, despite the unholy 8:30 start. Then came Search Engine Watch where I was exposed to the world of PPC advertising and proper, high-level SEO and online marketing. All new to me and all good stuff. Towards the end of the year, and brought to life in record time, November’s d-construct was a winner too. The introduction to the Flickr API from Simon Willison was great and I was blown away by how far Flash has come since I was last involved in it.

Those were the good… All were either reasonably priced or paid for me and I felt all were worth my while. Not so for the NN/g Usability Week. 2 days and £800 later I felt disappointed, disillusioned and let down. The User Experience course was very basic and while Tog’s insights were always entertaining and often valuable, they were too few and far between. Having done UX for a living for a little while now, I was hoping for more than the bare-bones basics. I think that will be the last of the high-priced training courses I bother with. It just doesn’t seem worth it.

There are 2 smaller affairs coming up that I am very excited about though. First up is the Carson Workshops Seminar on 8th February and 2 days later, on the 10th, it’s clear:left’s AJAX training day. I’m expecting big things from both… Ryan Carson has, yet again, managed to wrangle an impressive set of names; this time all of them in the same room at the same time. Clear:left’s workshop is intended as a grounding in the use of AJAX, covering everything from scratch. So far my experience with AJAX has been limited to the JPSpan framework and I’m looking forward to a peek under the hood.

Oh, and I’d better not forget to mention @media 2006 either! I have my ticket and I’m raring to go. The line-up is top and I’m looking forward to putting some more faces to names.

It seems like the UK training scene is alive and well!

SEO has earned itself a very bad name in recent years for so called ‘black-hat’ techniques: cramming, cloaking, etc. There are a lot of people out there doing it properly though, and even more taking it in completely new directions under the monica ‘keyword research’. Keyword research has spread from the narrow field of SEO to the broader marketing industry, encompassing advertising, copywriting, link building, traffic building, SEO and pay-per-click marketing.

I knew very little about any of this before coming to contract for Wordtracker so my introduction to the industry has been a real eye-opener. The best illustration I’ve seen of how keyword research works is the new ebook from Wordtracker: Vegetarian Dog Food. It’s well worth a read…

SEO’s back in the blogs with Keith Robinson’s 7 Simple Techniques (pdf) article for Marketing News, and while it’s hot I thought I’d share another link. I’m working at Wordtracker at the moment and to get myself oriented I set about reading every SEO article I could get my hands on. Of all of them, this one explained what modern search engine optimisation actually is: An Ingenious Way to Use Wordtracker. None of that invisible keywords stuff; it’s all about good content. But more that that, it’s about good RELEVANT content. If you can find a niche in your market you can target it but gathering together useful material on the subject. This will benefit the people who visit your site searching for that topic and as a result they are more likely to trust you and increasingly likely to buy from you. That’s marketing, not black magic.

Roger Johannson has written a great article on his experiences with SEO. It’s all common sense and good practice really but it helps to have this stuff written down in a structured way so you can explain it to clients…