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These days I’ve been advising a lot of my clients to have their 3 or 4 core keywords present a couple of times not just on the page they are hoping to rank well for (most often the home page) but to also have occurances of them spread out over a couple of pages and thus in their site in general. What this does is allow Google to see a website as a whole with a central theme running through it.

Themes of course are nothing new to the search marketing industry, however many SEO consultants will still simply talk about page relevancy (sometimes referred to as keyword density) and not relevancy of a site as a whole. I believe themes are important to search engines like Google because ‘faking’ relevancy for a website is a lot harder and more involved than ‘faking’ it for a single page. I use the term ‘faking’ here to basically refer to optimisation of a sites content, which lets face it folks is unatural. This for Google all comes down to their desire to provide the best and most natural (and naturally deserving) search results.

A websites core topic or theme can also be established (or more correctly reinforced) by Google and the other search engines by examining component words of all incoming links to a site. Imagine for example akamarketing.com got 40 links distributed with 4 different anchor texts such as ’search engine marketing’, ’search marketing’, ’search engine optimisation’, ’search engine marketing Ireland’. Certain words appear constantly throughout all or most of these anchors and thus suggest that overall my site is about ’search’ and ‘marketing’ more so than it is about ‘optimisation’ or ‘Ireland’.

Taking themes into consideration when your conducting SEO for a website is not hard, personally I just like to use the ‘What Googlebot sees’ feature within the ‘Statistics’ section of Google webmaster tools located at http://www.google.com/webmasters/. The information here is from the horses mouth and as such is very accurate. Below is two screen samples for what Googlebot sees of akamarketing.com. The one on the left shows what words appear most often on the site, whereas the screen sample on the right shows the words which appear most often in external links to the site.

Most of my plans about what type of keywords I want akamarketing.com to rank well for revolve around SEO focused keywords and keyphrases as this is my area of expertise (alleged expertise ), so by looking at the above data to ‘zoom’ in on this core topic/theme I should (hypothetical of course as finding time these days is pretty much impossible) ideally be geting lots of backlinks with words like ’search’, ’seo’, ‘marketing’ etc. to sync with my sites top keywords (in terms of keyword density) and thus make my theme more ‘believable’.

Similarly if your site was to have certain words appearing often in its external links (on the right) but not in its overall content (on the left) then I would suggest adding more of these words on X amount of pages, assuming the words in your backlinks are indeed the words you are actively targetting (for the most part they should be). X can only be determined by yourself after looking at your own data and determining where your target words ‘rank’ (in terms of overall frequency of use) already.

While themes do not allow for direct optimisation of pages for specific words or phrases I certainly do think that Google (and many more search engines) use them to ‘confirm’ or ’reinforce’ their ’suspicions’ about the topic of a page and thus they affect where it will rank for its target keywords which overlap the overall website theme. Imagine for instance two sites, siteA and siteB, which sell garden tools. siteA and siteB both have only 10 links into their home pages with the exact phrase ‘garden tools’ in the anchor text, the component words for external links will be the same. Now say that Google sees the most frequently occuring words of siteA as ‘grass’, ’flowers’, ’soil’, ‘lawn’ and ‘garden’ in that order and the most frequently occuring words of siteB as ‘garden’, ‘lawn’, ‘tool’, ‘gardens’, ‘tools’ again in that order. All other things being equal (including keyword density of both home pages) I believe siteB will outrank siteA in Google for the phrase ‘garden tools’ and many related ones too as the underlying garden theme is more obvious in siteB. As usual your thoughts, questions and rants are always welcome.

It is estimated that 1 in 10 men worldwide are colour blind, additionally it is thought that 1 in 100 women are colour blind. If you design for the estimated 10% of users who are still on 800 * 600 resolutions well then why not develop with colour blind users in mind too?

There are three main types of colour blindess, and I’ll get to them in a moment but in an overall sense colour blindness relates to how some people cannot distinguish between certain colours. The graphic to the left (credit to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colour_blindness) shows how colour blind people see certain colours.

The three main types of colour blindness are:

Tritanopia is a very rare form of colour blindness. It revolves around the inability of a person to discriminate between blue and yellow hues.

Protanopia is a more common form of colour blindness and effects people who have a defective vision of red and confusion of red with green or bluish green.

Deuteranopia is the most common form of colour blindness. Deuteranopia also relates to the inability of a person to tell certain greens and reds apart.

Remember all colours are made up of certain percentages of the three primary colours, red, blue and yellow. This means despite the fact that Deuteranopia (for example) relates to confusion of greens and reds it will ’show itself’ in many secondary and tertiary colours too as usually they contain some amount of green and red. In this respect classifying types of colour blindess as blue/yellow or red/green can be slightly misleading.

What does this mean?
The fact that some form of colour blindness effects a relatively large proportion of the population means you must factor this in when designing your website. If you make extensive use of colours to differentiate between different elements on a page, the page may become unusable by some visitors. You should therefore follow the advice of all the accessibility gurus and be certain not to use colours alone to convey important information. Practical tips to implement this might include:

Use high contrast colours next to each other in your designs. Black text on white background works best.

Specifically try to avoid using red and green next to each when the colours are significant within?your designs.

If you must use any hues of?red and green next to each other always provide a textual cue too.

Make?important text stand out not only with colour difference but also with bold, italics, underline etc.

Follow the above but also ‘vet’ your designs as outlined in the next paragraph.

Tools to ‘vet’ your designs
Take a screenshot of your site and grayscale it in your favourite graphics program. Does it still look good (and work) without colour?

Run your URL/screenshot through Vischeck. Vischeck is a way of showing you what things look like to someone who is colour blind. The tool is free and is located at http://www.vischeck.com/vischeck/. The URL mode is a bit ‘flaky’ particularly if your site makes extensive use of complex CSS, flash, javascript etc., so if you have the time (make the time if you don’t) I recommend taking an screenshot of your designs and running graphic mode instead.

Run your screenshot through the Etre Colour Blindness Simulator tool. This tool is similar to Vischeck.

Run your URL through the Wickline.org Colour filter tool located at http://colorfilter.wickline.org/. This tool is similar to Vischeck.

How do Irish web design companies fare?
I decided to run a couple of screenshots from some?well known?design houses around Ireland through the Etre colour blindess simulator tool to see how they got on. As Deuteranopia is the most common form of colour blindess, this is the condition I have opted to simulate. I decided to test Continuum, Fusio, Red Sky, Arekibo and Webtrade. I won’t put screenshots for them here as they pretty much all passed with flying colours (pun intended ). I don’t know if this means they designed with colour accessibility in mind, my choice of test sites was brutal or they fluked it.

One pair of ‘before’ and ‘after’ screenshots which I will include below is for Continuum. Continuums’ site uses plenty of colours via their primary tab analogy navigation so their site is particularly susceptible to ’shortcommings’ as far as colour blinded users are concerned. It’s good to know however that their site passes with ‘flying colours’ (sorry I couldn’t resist using that one again…). The regular and Deuteranopia simulated screenshots for the Continuum home page are below. Although some colours appear similiar they are not beside each other in the tab navigation.

How can I tell if I’M colour blind?
There are a couple of online colour blind testing tools available. It should be noted however that due to the hugh variations in screen resolutions and colours that these should not be considered a replacement for proper medical diagnosis. Two tools I’m aware of include the one located at http://colorvisiontesting.com/online%20test.htm and the Ishihara one located at http://colorvisiontesting.com/ishihara.htm

As always your thoughts and comments on my posts are greatly appreciated.

Typed in ’search engine’ into Google.com today instead of ’search engine optimisation’ by mistake and noticed that Google itself is not in the top 10 results. Google.co.uk currently comes in at 17th. The Google.com homepage has only one occurance of the word ’search’. It does not contain the word ‘engine’ nor does it have a meta description tag with either of these words present, infact it doesn’t have a meta description tag at all. Similarly Google.co.uk does not have the word ‘engine’ or a meta description tag, it does however have an extra occurance of the word ’search’.

Guess it shows that true to their word Google does not manually alter results, additionally it shows that people most likely link to Google with the word ‘Google’ as opposed to ’search engine’ or ‘Google search engine’. Dogpile seems to consistently come in near the top across the major engines.

One thing that annoys me and amuses me at the same time is when companies offering certain Internet services quite obviously haven’t got a clue about the service their offering and or haven’t got a clue how to sell themselves. As an example have you ever seen a company claiming to offer web design services whose own site looks absolutely awful? I have. I mean come on, how does a web design company expect to make credible claims about its design expertise if its own web site looks like something from 1994?

Tonight I came across a similar case where a company who offers search engine optimisation solutions from their website clearly haven’t got a clue about SEO, I can judge this from their HTML title tags as well as one or two other elements of their site. The company in question is Pixel (not to be confused with Pixel Design). Below is their 20+ word title:

Web Design Ireland - Pixel Website Design and Development offers professional web design services, logo design, e-commerce and content management systems. Dublin, New York, Kilkenny.

Those that know anything about search engine optimisation will tell you straight off that this title is far from optimised. Do they think ‘cracking’ the New York market is going to be that easy? Not only a bad title, but one that is present on every single page of their site. Having the same title on all pages is a fundamental optimisation mistake and thus any company that makes this mistake hasn’t got a clue what it’s doing as far as SEO is concerned. Hell would have to freeze over before I would hire this company for Internet marketing of any kind.

I guess the title says it all. The topic is one of those that has been running for some time now, but as of yet is far from being resolved (conclusively anyhow) and since I’m going to be creating a new section on the akamarketing.com site soon I decided I would write about it, just to document my research of course, not to help you guys . The major issues surrounding this topic are outlined below.

More valuable keyword rich URLs?
It’s known that search engines provide at least a small relevancy boost for URLs which have keywords in them. MSN is in my experience particularly fond of keywords in URLs, I’m sure that Google and Yahoo do ‘take notice’ too. Many SEOs will for this reason place keywords in various sections of a URL to try and boost their rankings. Given the current topic at hand this brings us to the following question - Is a keyword in a sub domain more valuable (in terms of relevancy alone) than a keyword in a directory name?

Well as sub domains are generally considered as separate domains altogether by the search engines the keyword located in keyword.domain.com would I imagine be perceived as being more valuable than the keyword in domain.com/keyword. This is just my opinion of course, others are entitled to offer a different take on things. My thinking on this matter stems from the fact that traditionally sub domains have ‘housed’ very unique sections (like most regular domains themselves) of content and were not created arbitrarily when a need for a new section arised. Directories on the other hand get created without a second thought and are often created to organise content that isn’t really that unique when compared to the content in other directories on the same www space, thus directory names and the keywords in them have less ‘value’ in the eyes of the search engines.

What about link building issues?
Link building in the context of sub domains versus sub directories should I believe be thought of both in terms of actual getting links in the first place and then also in the relevancy of these links too. You will understand what I mean over the next two or three paragraphs.

Is link building easier for sub.domain.com or domain.com/sub? The ability to conduct an extensive link building campaign via directory submissions is a major advantage of using sub domains over sub directories for me and many other SEOs. The reason for this is that most directories will not accept a sites internal pages (or internal directories) for listing consideration if the main domain name is already listed but sub domains are generally considered to be a separate (but often related - so still some directories will not accept them) entity from the main site and thus getting links from directories for sub.domain.com will be much easier than getting links to domain.com/sub.

Depending on how you plan to get links for the new site section the directory element of this topic may force your hand one way or another. If you plan to get most of your links for the new site section from link exchanges, article marketing, press releases, link buying etc. then you could go either way without too much difficulty, but if your main efforts are going to be focused around a strong free & paid directory submission campaign well then if you are to avoid shooting yourself in the foot before you even start you really have to go with the sub domain option (assuming its compatible with the needs of a certain special someone).

As far as the relevancy of links are concerned, webmasters who are naturally linking into your new site (without being asked) section will often simply use the URL as the actual link text. Having a keyword.domain.com URL usually means that this happens more than if the URL was domain.com/keyword. The reason for this I’m not sure, but perhaps it’s because the sub domain looks neater and fits in better with existing links on the webmasters link page, anyhow this provides you with not just a standard issue link which simply points to your site but a keyword rich link which is much more valuable to you in terms of boosting your search engine rankings.

Is there any technical implications of using sub domains I should know?
From a technical point of view you must be aware of the fact that you can’t use relative URLs for linking between your main domain and your sub domain. This can be seen as a slight inconvenience but unless you absolutely need relative URLs at your disposal this shouldn’t effect your decision and besides your not going to want to do intensive crosslinking anyhow because this can raise a few suspicions with the Google anti spam team.

Should I choose sub domains or sub directories?
Above I’ve kind of come down in favour of sub domains slightly, no? Well yes to a large degree that’s true, only from a purely SEO perspective though, I’ve still to touch upon the most important entity (that aforementioned special someone) which you must factor in before making your decision however. That entity is of course the user.

The users considerations will often help with SEO but not always. In this context you must decide if it makes sense to serve your new section from a sub domain from the point of view of the user. This means that the content must be distinct and deserving of a site (which a sub domain effectively is) in it’s own right, regardless of SEO considerations. If the concerns of both your users and your SEO needs are aligned by the choice of sub domains well then go with sub domains, if not then stick with the standard issue directory or even the “everything from root” structure. Please ’stick it to me’ via the comment box if you think I’m wrong with something (it’s been known to happen ).

Receiving user input via forms is a fundamental part of many web applications (and indeed desktop based systems too) so it is vitally important that they are as user friendly as possible. In this post I’ll present some short paragraphs for improving form usability.

Use HTML tables to layout your forms
Don’t mind what the standards web guru says about using CSS instead of HTML tables. The reality of the situation is that HTML tables are the most suitable method to layout your forms in a user friendly manner (without a serious amount of work anyhow). The most common layout is the standard two column approach. This approach sees the labels for the various input elements in the left column and then the input elements themselves in the right column.

Display error messages on the form itself
Unless space absolutely prohibits it you should display any error messages associated with user input on the actual form page itself as opposed to using a popup Javascript alert box. The problem with alert boxes is that a user must click them away to continue filling in the form. When the error alert box is gone from view so too is the useful error messages which it contained, this means that the user must now work from memory when trying to fix input errors. The ideal situation is not only to have error messages on the form itself but to have the individual errors appear next to the associated input elements.

Use a progress indicator for forms spanning multiple pages
Including some kind of progress indicator on your form improves the user experience as users like to know where they are in any form filling process, this is particularly true if an activity requires multiple forms to get all the data it needs. An example of this could be booking an airline ticket or making a hotel reservation which typically require three or four screens to complete. Implementing a progress indicator for your form could be easy as altering your form navigation button text from something like ‘Next’ or ‘Proceed’ to ‘Go to Step 2 (of 4)’ or ‘Proceed to Step 2 (of 4)’. Alternatively you could create a dedicated header or sidebar table to illustrate progress in a more defined manner.

Micellanous
Micellanous items include using the tabindex property to define the correct logical ordering of textboxes, dropdowns etc. so the user can quickly pass the focus to the next input element, setting the default focus of a form to the element a user would normally expect to fill in first, defining access keys for keyboard access to fields. Additionally remember to go easy on CAPTCHA elements designed to stop spam bots as you will find they often stop legitimate users too.

Obviously the above information is not an in depth look at form usability, however the web has a tonne of information about this very important topic. One favourite article of mine which covers the topic of form layout (dealt with briefly above) is called Web Application Form Design and is written by Luke Wroblewski. Incidentally Luke is expected to release his web form design dedicated book in early 2008. As far as I’m aware this will be the only publication on the market dealing specifically with web form design and usability. Based on the quality of the information on his site I have to admit I’m really looking forward to it.