Penguins, Pandas & Googles (Change of Plan)

In a previous post I referred to the improvement in traffic and seo performance of http://www.gerberg.com after new content was added. I'm a bit of a broken record to my clients about this, always advising that even if your spare time is limited, a good use of it is too review your website content, bolstering where you can to give visitors something new, hopefully interesting but most important useful for them to read.

But what has that got to do with Penguins & Panda?, Well Google has some very clever people working for it, and their search algorithms are constantly changing. The last two initiatives, named by Google as Penguin & Panda, were aimed at finding ways to promote content rich websites over those that use lesser or even slightly dodgy seo methods to boost page rank and search performance. The net result, although I would encourage anyone who dabbles in seo to read up about it themselves is that genuine, content-rich pages and websites will continue to be ranked high in search while, content thin, ecommerce sites that use lots of ads, keyword stuffing and link farms have been hit hard. Its important though to note that while complex algorithms are the primary tool of search companies, they also employ clever human moderators to detect & help close loopholes.

I won't go into much more detail except to say that one point leapt out at me, a major aim was to try to ensure that newer websites that piggybacked on older, trusted, content-rich pages and sites should never outrank the older site.

This meant a change to the rollout plan for Fareham Wine Cellar's new ecommerce site. The new site was built on an independant url to avoid conflict with www.farehamwinecellar.co.uk. This site ranks very highly and has lots of organic search traffic. The new site, effectively duplicates the content (same product set.. different wrapping...) but traffic is low by comparison. The solution, is too concentrate on finalising and testing the new design while simultaneously linking pages on www.farehamwinecellar.co.uk to their equivalent pages on the new site.

Its a temporary phase though, to generate some revenue while we work on migrating the website and shopping cart to the original url. Once its running there, canonical linking will advise google of the permanent change to individual url's so the site doesn't drop out of the rankings. In the meantime the old, static pages and new dynamic pages will co-exist on www.farehamwinecellar.co.uk, which they can do this because there are no duplicated pages between designs.

The linking of old website pages to tempoary new equivalents where visitors can place orders is also in phases. The shop has around 1,800 different wines & spirits so you don't want to hit the search engines with that many changes in one go. We started with 150 a week or so back and added another 200 last night, after reviewing analytics and picking up that quite a few of the first pages linked had been followed to the new site. The new plan therefore is working, so its back to the grindstone for me..

Google analytics for smaller websites

While Google analytics is clearly geared toward larger websites you would be crazy not to have it running on your website, no matter how small it is. In the early days you could have your own hit counters but they never worked that well and I for one am more than happy to let google keep a record of my traffic, I get in a return, for free a pretty useful tool, although be careful how much time you spend slicing and dicing numbers as its all too easy to go overboard.

I tend to focus on four things with smaller websites, visitor count, pages, pages per visit and time on site. I also like to compare the same time periods year on year which I recently reviewed for New York Career counsellor, Judith Gerberg's website http://www.gerberg.com its not the most modern of sites but toward the end of last year we established some important new pages describing some of their workshops and added biographies of their staff. The pages were loaded with keywords, although in a very natural way which I believe is a big factor behind a 20%+ improvement in visitor and page counts comparing the three months to February with the same period a year ago.

Content management is an evolutionary process, as time passes you need to consider subtle changes seeking to freshen the website visitors experience but more importantly remove out of date content, nothing sends a more negative signal about a website than a news pags with no changes in over a year!, another big negative is spelling and general poor quality content. A website is primarily a dynamic advert for your company or service, and in far too many cases not enough time is spent ensuring that it projects the correct image of your organisation. If your not sure, do a variation of Joel Spolsky's software hallway usability test and ask some strangers what there first impressions are, it might be a scary step, but you may learn learn things you would not otherwise know.

Cleaning up the web, are you doing the housekeeping

Getting a full set of products on the http://www.farehamwinedirect.co.uk highlighted a number of issues that we needed to address, to an extent time is on our side because although were behind schedule its early in the year so a few extra weeks won't make too much difference in rolling out the site.

Almost ten years of out of date product pages and images behind the old website are now gone and Dominic has been working hard to tidy up wine regions, grape varieties and image names which will help out the search engines, simply spelling all the important wine related words the same way boosts keyword frequency. Its also a point that you may not be sure how to spell Chardonnay but the Fareham Wine Cellars target market probably do, its important to track down and eliminate those odd typos which for me as a website visitor set of alarms about professionalism when I see them on website pages.

Google has heavily indexed their old site so now we have cleaned up the data we can start putting in links from the old site so if they are looking to buy the product their searching for its just a few clicks away to place their order online.

Its a complicated business wine

If your a bit like me and enjoy the odd glass of wine then getting to grips with the extensive range sold by the http://www.farehamwinecellar.co.uk can make the brain hurt. Its important to get this right for their new website at http://www.farehamwinedirect.co.uk because they want to make it easy for existing customers who already know a bit about wines and spirits to find their favourite items while encouraging the less knowledgeable to branch out a bit and try something a bit new.

I'm now beginning to convert the pages to an improved layout which I got working for Vodka, http://www.farehamwinedirect.co.uk/wps/fwcdirect.nsf/spirits/rum & Vermouth a couple of weeks back and last night made the final touches to the equivalent for wine, using
http://www.farehamwinedirect.co.uk/wps/fwcdirect.nsf/wines/argentina followed by Chile. What made the code tricky was that when you drill down to a wine growing regions you have a variable set of wine types such as Rose, Red, White & Dessert wine etc which you can now explore really easily as the links on the page just recompute as necessary.

The second reason for the new structure was for the search engines, they like content which the new structure provides so it will be very interesting to follow the analytics results over the next few weeks as the search bots discover the new pages, and hopefully get all excited. We have a good baseline to compare it too as well in addition of course to actual orders from customers which is what we really want.

This Blog isn't running on Domino

IBM Lotus Domino has a blog template which I fired up once a year or so back, and even used for a little while, eventually choosing to stay with Blogger. If your not an IBM Lotus Notes fan, as I clearly am you may be thinking I'm being a bit hypocritical to celebrate my work for the Fareham Wine Cellar (http://www.farehamwinedirect.co.uk) yet not use Domino for my blog, why not?

It actually relates to my last post on justifying projects or strategies based on value for money and how long will it take me to get this right. Its hard to beat Free on cost, but the reason that I didn't pursue the option of using the Domino Blog template, or the improved version you can get from http://www.openntf.org came down to time available, I haven't customised this blog much, the Domino blog, out of the box is a bit on the ugly side and while I'm sure with a bit of work it can be made to look fairly good, thats not best use of my time right now. I also don't need to pay for the space it uses on my server, and bandwidth so that space and bandwidth is available for paying customer projects.

I did quite like what I saw on the template, and will investigate it more in the future but for now its a "Nice to have" option rather than a necessity. There is also the point that Wordpress & Blogger were originally designed as Blog software, and they do this job very well. You can build just about anything in Lotus Notes/ Domino but the more features you want the more complex the project. I began the Fareham Wine cellar project with an empty Lotus Domino database and one result of this is a relatively simple design without redundancy and a resulting fairly small footprint, because the Domino Blog contains lots of features to meet the needs of a wide variety of needs it, like the Lotus Notes mail template is quite large, and quite complex, making it more difficult to support if your clients want to use it, so again from a business case perspective, its maybe later, not yet.

Software development, because you can isn't enough

There is always a certain danger in allowing developers too much of a free reign over what features will make it into the final version, or release of a given piece of software. When considering a new feature three questions come to mind; Can it be done, How long will it take to make it work and most importantly, is it worth doing?

I'm very much reminded of this as I work on the next generation page code for the Fareham Wine Cellar website. I'm quite pleased how the page for Vodka and other types of spirits has turned out http://www.farehamwinedirect.co.uk/wps/fwcdirect.nsf/spirits/vodka, the idea was to generate the list of countries that produce Vodka, currently available to purchase from their store. You can drill down from all Vodkas to vodka just from Poland for example. I'm working on the final stage now which will allow you to isolate types of wine from different parts of the world.

It passes the vital third test for two reasons; First, the Fareham Winecellar, currently has around  1,200 different wines in stock, 360+ from France alone so even three levels down your still going to have plenty of products to justify each unique page. Second, the potential customers who will be buying from the site, are likely to understand wines and spirits more than the average person in the street so they are likely to appreciate the ability to isolate products in lots of different ways.

So what is an example of a step to far?, for me, one example would be the embedding of computer chips in household devices. Light switches yes, but your fridge! are people really going to input their purchase of milk, eggs & meat so your fridge can automatically submit your next grocery order? don't think so. Yes, you could build a scanner for barcodes, but is that then going to have to download product barcodes, and if so from where? Can it be done, Yes. Is it that hard, maybe not but on economic viability it fails massively.

Don't forget the basics of SEO page design

Its very easy to bury yourself in the activities of keyword selection and creating posts and content on social media sites yet forget the basics for every web page you control. Do they all have and what about Description and Keyword META tags?

The search engines want to see these first, and they need to contain keywords relevant to the content on the page. Try stuffing too many keywords in them, or have a mismatch between them and the content and all your work on the rest of the page maybe entirely wasted, attempts to manipulate your page ranking are increasingly being penalised, but not always immediately.

At Waveplus Systems we will point out issues like this, and often as a "No charge" service. That's not to say we work for nothing, but when we charge, its for things you can't do yourself. We believe too that SEO, search engine optimisation is a long game with very few quick results, building good content though is worth the effort in the long run because if nothing else it should in your customers mind mean you plan on staying around.