The answer might well be; all of the above. This might spark the thought “uh oh, death by committee.” But in this case, we don’t mean to suggest a Web Committee be struck. Our work has found that companies who mix online elements of their operations with real-world elements, develop better strategies and usage policies when there is a multi-disciplinary team involved. End decisions should not be based on committee voting. A business is about making a profit and that means autocracy. But today, such decisions can be better made when a team can build concensus and make a viable recommendation to the senior manager who must then make the final decision.

I usually recommend that a company establish a team that mixes departments and various levels of experience. While many senior managers over 50 may feel the Web is the domain of youth, nothing makes up for seasoned business experience. Some rules may be different on the Web, but the fundamentals of good financial and corporate governance remain the same. Our experience has been that the best teams usually comprise of Marketing, Finance, HR and Legal. Through marketing, finance and HR’s participation, you’re able to address the multiple key audiences and stakeholders that will be impacted by your online operations. And good fiscal judgement is more likely to exercised. Additionally, the involvement of Finance will help them to better understand the costs associated with the online elements of the business.

By engaging a senior management person with key strategic decisions around the Web, you also build awareness at the executive level, which helps in times of crisis or when conducting strategic planning. A good team will develop over time and guidelines for areas of responsibilities should be established and reviewed annually. The team should change from time to time as well to keep ideas and objectives fresh.

Is using the speed factor a good idea?

Webmasters do welcome this idea of speed being used as a ranking feature in Google. But many feel that it might only benefit corporations and negatively impact the small people who might never end up reaching anywhere in the search engines. Moreover it can become a political issue as small nations whose internet infrastructure is poorer than technological developed nations. It also depends upon the affordability of the service and those who can afford a high quality bandwidth and dedicated servers stand more chance of a better page rank.

Many sites today have video blogs, rich content,  and that definitely takes time to load. Once the search engines decide on the speed factor, these sites will be affected. All said and done this speed factor is sure to be a significant factor in the search results shortly and we can only follow the best tips offered by none other than Google itself for better site performance using its webmaster tools. This tool demonstrates a cumulative speed numbers, based on the frequently visited pages with the activated page rank feature. .

It’s highly recommended that you monitor the load times over a select period. If you see high load times then examine the factors that could be impacting your site. Poor design, too much rich content, bad website hosting provider? All issues that should be addressed.

One more page is included which is Page speed suggestions where Google lets you know the areas where your page has to be optimized for better speed performance. Google’s Page Speed Firefox/Firebug plug-in is used to find these suggestions.

]]> http://www.snell.ca/page-load-times-to-impact-search-rankings/feed/ 0 http://www.snell.ca/importance-of-seo-friendly-web-design/ http://www.snell.ca/importance-of-seo-friendly-web-design/#comments Mon, 23 Nov 2009 20:43:28 +0000 Robert Snell http://www.snell.ca/?p=334 Have you ever wondered what results in high conversions? Is it a successful marketing campaign, lot of search engine traffic, clicks on ads, or hundreds and thousands of back-links?

Well, in reality all the above-mentioned things can only drive a lot of traffic to your blog/websites, but it will never improve the conversion rate. The most important aspect behind higher conversions is an SEO-friendly web design. We’re not talking about the on-page SEO and working on Meta tags (you must have done it already, if you’re getting high traffic), but rather about the importance of using the right fonts, ad placement, and user-friendliness of the website.

Working with User Friendly Design

Imagine if your “register” option for the new users is located at bottom right corner of the page, who’d really bother to scroll down all the way and click on it? Likewise, if the visitors see only ads instead of the info they came searching for, they won’t bother scrolling down or browsing through your web pages.

Apart from good informative unique content, you need –

• Appropriate graphics to go along with the text,
• Nice SEO-friendly layout,
• Thorough linking between pages,
• Proper Website Structure
• Media like photos and embedded videos to add attraction to the site

Optimizing Your Site Better

A well optimized SEO-friendly website design includes appropriate and attractive design elements, strategic linking, structure optimization, meta-tag optimization, specialized keyword choices, and most importantly alt tag optimization!

Remember, the alt tag shows up in the image results and this is where most of the people lose out on. Imagine if you run an auto blog and you’ve written the latest post on the 2010 BMW 520d, and someone searches for images of BMW 520d, your blog may not appear in the search results just because the alt tag was not optimized.

And, if something similar happens with 100s of other posts, just try to figure out how many visitors are you losing out on?

Optimizing for Common Typos

What’s more, it is also not a bad idea to optimize your site for some of the most common misspelled keywords, for instance, acomodate and acommodate along with the actual keyword accommodate. But, you must optimize your site carefully otherwise this may turn off the regular visitors (as they may feel that these are unintended typos from careless authors).

Homepage is not the Best Landing Page!

Lastly, you must ensure that you’ve a good landing page for your visitors. One of the biggest misconceptions is that homepage is the best landing page! This is 100% WRONG by all means! Remember, people click on your site/blog searching for something on Google and again asking them to search once again on your site to display the info of their interest doesn’t yield good results!

I also needed to re do the site since the launch of Intevix. This business is taking up more and more of my time as we continue to develop our products and consulting services. Actually a lot of what I did here is now being done via intevix and if we don’t offer a specific service or solution we have more than likely have am local partner to provide the professional services required by businesses.

Anyways thats all for now. I am working on my next great blog entry …. Gotta keep people on their feet!

So what else has been keeping me flat out…. Where do I start?

intevix, My new business launched with Giles Crouch is going full steam ahead and picking up momentum. Lots of people think what we are doing is great and the services provided will only help organizations better utilize technology. A section from our main page will give you more of an idea about what were doing:

“We’re the firm that works behind the scenes to increase your profits, build your online reputation and improve productivity through effective use of the Web. We don’t design websites or provide software solutions. From project audits, to strategy to online reputation services, intevix is in your court, independent of any vendors.”

Whats coming up? We are launching an open source software product, a media monitoring solution and an analytics and click fraud solution …

Sounds good so far… Visit the site, especially if you need a Hybrid Web Management Consultant

On the Tech East side of things I am keeping very busy…

I have working on a Technology conference called TechOpen. Looks like it will be going ahead in October 2008 with a great line up of speakers.

Another work in progress is the Nova Scotia Innovation and Productivity survey being done in partnership with NovaKnowledge, we are getting set to have this completed soon and launch the results at a breakfast in June.

I am bringing on a writer to start turning out unique content on Tech East. From executive profiles to news affecting businesses in Atlantic Canada I am working to keep Tech East number one in Technology news for this region.

And last but not least my own consulting is still keeping me busy. Companies looking for Halifax SEO professionals and Halifax Website Design services are keeping me busy, helping them enhance and improve their online presence through effective internet marketing strategies.

Well thats all for now, Hopefully today I’ll find out if I’m going to the Mesh Conference, Some great stuff going on at the event and some great stuff to share on Tech East I’m sure. Hopefully I’ll finalize one of my other two blog entries shortly and you’ll have something interesting to read.