With all the buzz going on about Search Engine Optimization, very few people consider that in order to actually optimize a site for search engines the site needs to be search engine compliant and free from penalizing factors.

Wether you’re creating a site from scratch or want to make sure your site gets the ranking it deserves, here’s a basic search engine compliance checklist which will help you get started.

Step 1: Use Google Webmaster Tools to keep track of your compliance status

Google Webmaster Tools helps you help Google understand and index your web site better. It’s a powerful tool which is easy to understand and free to use.

• Create an account with Google Webmaster Tools.
• Check by it often to keep track of indexing intervals, download speeds, sitemap status and 404 errors.
• For more information on how it works, see sitemaps.org.

Step 2: Clean up your site directory structure and create a sitemap.xml file

If Googlebot discovers errors in your sitemap.xml file you won’t get your rankngs improved, so make sure your site structure is error free before uploading a sitemap.

• Apply easy-to-read directory and file names on your site
• Keep track of old and new paths and implement 301 redirects to avoid broken links from other web sites
• Use Google Webmaster Tools to verify your sitemap by clicking “Site Configuration” and “Sitemaps” and check the “Sitemap errors and warnings” section.
• Create a sitemap.xml and submit it via Google Webmaster Tools. You can use iarchitect to help create a valid, state of the art sitemap file.

Step 3: Use robots.txt

Having a “robots.txt” file on your domains root directory will help you index only what you want indexed, and also to avoid issues from duplicate content. Wikipedia has an excellent article on how to maintain a proper robots.txt file.

• Create a robots.txt file and upload it to your domain
• Modify its content so that search engine robots know what you want indexed and not

Step 4: Keep track of your web metrics

In order to measure your progress you’ll need a tool that keep track of visitor demographics, traffic sources and content consumption. Google Analytics does that, for free.

In particular, you’ll want to keep an eye out on changes in search engine traffic. As your site becomes more compliant (and/or penializing factors are under control) search engines should rank you higher. The trick here is to relate the changes in traffic volume coming from search engine to the compliance changes you’ve made.

• Create an account and implement Google Analytics on your site
• Establish KPIs for your web site
• Keep daily track of changes in search engine traffic

Step 5: Ensure your code is clean and error free

Your site must be valid according to the W3C standards. Use an online validator and keep making adjustments until all light are green.

• Validate your code and make sure all pages on your site are valid
• Make changes to your code so that it validates or get help from someone to do it for you
• Implement the changes into your CMS templates to make sure every new page consistently validates

Step 6: Work on your inbound links

Analyze the quality of your inbound links using tools such as the Back Link Analyzer. Get relevant links from places such as DMOZ and other major public indexes. You can also buy positions in online indexes but always optimize cost and value using log analysis and common sense.

• Submit your links to major online directories
• Buy keywords on places like Google Adwords to appear on searches where your site offers relevant content
• Downsize keywoard purchases once your rankings on important keywords improve

Step 7: Hunt down and eliminate any duplicate content

If you have two domains with the same content you have to set it up correctly in order to avoid heavy ranking penalties from Google. If you haven’t set it up correctly in Google Webmaster Tools, Google will select a primary domain for you and index that. Make a decision, and decide what should be your primary domain and what should be your secondary domain(s), and redirect all secondary domains to the primary domain using a 301 redirect.

Use canonical tags in your links to eliminate the duplicate content tags by specifying “rel=canonical” in your href tags or block out duplicate content directories in your robots.txt file.

• Define a primary site in Google Webmaster Tools
• Redirect all secondary domains to your primary domain using a 301 redirect
• Specify “rel=canonical” inside all href tags that link to duplicate content
• Edit robots.txt to deny all indexing within directories where you know there is duplicate content

Step 8: Identify your domain strategy and main language

If your target market is danish, .dk domains will be preferred in the search results for danish searches. Language matters – make sure that your language matches your target market. The difference between US english and british english is important when you create content and submit it to Google.

• Make sure your domain exists within the same name space as your target audience (.co.uk for british sites, .dk for danish sites and so on)
• Be consistent about language. If your target audience is danish, and your domain is a .dk domain, use danish content

Step 9: Avoid “grey hat” or “black hat” practice to improve ranking

Always ask yourself: “Am I doing this for my users, or for Google?”. Whenever your answer is “Google”, you’re on your way out in the shady areas of search engine optimization. There are several examples where Google has kicked web sites out from its index because of cheating, with the risk of never getting back in. Avoid doorway pages, link farms or anyone guaranteeing you top positions on any keywords.

• Create content for your users and Google will love you
• Say no to deals that appear too good to be true

Step 10: Optimize your CMS templates

• Make sure your title tag is unique for each page
• The H1 tag should be present only once on each page and should match the general content of your title tag
• Meta description and meta keywords should exist on each page and be unique for that page
• Whenever you create internal links, use proper link text describing the content you’re linking to (avoid “read more”).

Step 11: Always use alternative navigation

Remember that Googlebot reads your page from top to bottom like a text only browser, so use alternative navigation whenever possible. This is particularily important for having a accessibility compliant web site where your users can’t see your images.

• Always use plain navigation links below your image maps
• Make sure you have a web based sitemap available for the user if you are using javascript navigation for your menus
• You may use flash for navigation, but remember that Google isn’t all that good on indexing flash content (although it is getting better)
• Don’t use any form of redirects in your navigation, and avoid 302 redirects at all cost. Use friendly URL names that are easy to read (“/best-practice-checklist.html”, not “read,asp?id=123″). Use ISAPI filtering or htaccess for apache to rewrite your URLs.

Step 12: Create content that users want

Develop authority within a profession by consistently creating content our target group seeks. After all, that’s what the users are after and why they’re coming to you in the first place.

• Don’t use jargon in your content
• Use important kewords in your text, in your title tag, in your meta description and in your content.

Google is particularly interested in separating mobile content from normal web content in order to help mobile users find relevant content for their context in the Google Mobile Web Search.  With help from Google Webmaster Tools you can make your mobile content available in Google Mobile Web Search.

Here’s how you do it

Step 1 – Create a sitemap.xml for mobile content

Just like you would create a sitemap.xml for your web site, you create one for your mobile content site. Give it a name to distinguish it from your regular sitemap.xml, call it sitemap_mobile.xml or similar (don’t overwrite your original sitemap.xml file!)

Make sure the sitemap.xml contains the correct namespace tags and  – a typical sitemap_mobile.xml should look something like this;

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9"
xmlns:mobile="http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap-mobile/1.0">
<url>
<loc>http://mobile.example.com/article100.html</loc>
<mobile:mobile/>
</url>
</urlset>

Priority and changefreq
One major difference from the regular sitemap.xml files you would create and use for indexing your “normal” web content is that the mobile sitemap.xml does not require the <priority> and <changefreq> tags.

As of now these tags are optional for the mobile sitemap.xml. This may change in the future, and watching the official Google blog is a great place to look for updates on this area.

Be aware of these issues

• If you plan to use a Sitemap creation tool, make sure it can create Mobile Sitemaps with correct syntax and required tags.
• A Mobile Sitemap can contain only URLs that serve mobile web content. Any URLs that serve only non-mobile web content will be ignored by the Google crawling mechanisms. If you have non-mobile content, create a separate Sitemap for those URLs.
• If the <mobile:mobile/> tag is missing, your mobile URLs won’t be properly crawled.
• URLs serving multiple markup languages can be listed in a single Sitemap.
• Each Mobile Sitemap must have a unique name.
• If you use our Sitemap Generator to create your mobile Sitemaps, you’ll need to create a separate configuration file for each mobile Sitemap.

Step 2 – submit your sitemap_mobile.xml with Google Webmaster Tools

Log in to Google Webmaster Tools with your account and click “Sitemap”. From this page, enter the URL for your published sitemap_mobile.xml you’ve created and click the “Submit Sitemap” button.

That’s it – make sure you update your sitemap when your content structure changes to avoid being punished for sitemap / crawl errors.

Bonus! Step 3 – Best practice for creating mobile content

• Use well-formed markup (WML, cHTML, XHTML Basic or XHTML MP).

• Always validate your markup. The W3C Validator can verify that your XHTML pages adhere to the markup’s syntax.

• Always use the correct DOCTYPE for the markup language you are using. An XHTML Basic 1.0-compliant page should include a DOCTYPE like this: <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML Basic 1.0//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml-basic/xhtml-basic10.dtd">

• Specify Content-Type correctly. The HTTP response should include a Content-Type header indicating the correct Internet media type for your document; it should also ideally indicate the character encoding used in the document. For example, an XHTML Basic 1.0 document using the UTF-8 character encoding should specify a header like this: Content-Type: application/xhtml+xml;charset=UTF-8

• Review and consider adopting the accepted best practices for mobile web site development. For example, the W3C’s Mobile Web Initiative has published a series of recommendations at Mobile Web Best Practices 1.0

Make sure that Google is able to crawl your site:

• Do not restrict access to your site to particular ranges of IP addresses. This may block the Google crawler.

• Make use of the robots.txt file on your web server. This file tells crawlers which directories can and cannot be crawled. Make sure it’s current for your site so that you don’t accidentally block the Googlebot-Mobile or Googlebot crawler. Visit http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/faq.html to learn how to instruct robots when they visit your site. You can test your robots.txt file to make sure you’re using it correctly with the robots.txt analysis tool available in Google Webmaster Tools.

• Allow search bots to crawl your sites without session IDs or arguments that track their path through the site. These techniques are useful for tracking individual user behavior, but the access pattern of bots is entirely different. Using these techniques may result in incomplete indexing of your site, as bots may not be able to eliminate URLs that look different but actually point to the same page.

• Make your content available to the whole world. Google indexes public mobile web content. If your content appears to be available only to a subset of all mobile users (for example, only to subscribers of a certain mobile service provider), it may not be indexed.

This is a series of posts describing how you create personas, how you use them and how they help you achieve your goals. In this post I’ll give you a brief introduction on what personas actually are, what they’re made up of and why you should make them.

Personas represent your core user group

Typically, personas are a handful of people (up to 5-6) who represent your core user group, fictional characters who have needs similar to majority of people visiting your website. By giving them names, profile pictures, background stories and a reason to visit your site, you’ve narrowed down thousands of visitors into a handful of people you can relate to.

Personas represent user needs

For each persona character you create, you add a set of typical user scenarios that represent their needs. With these needs connected to a character, you can retrace their behavior and predict what their page flow would look like on your site. Typically a user has two or three basic needs, described like “XX comes to mysite.com to search for good deals on digital cameras” and “XX has just moved and needs to update the adress in his profile”.

Personas look like real people

Use real life portrait pictures, and give the personas real life names to resemble a typical user. Describe their work situation, family profile, interests, hobbies and other profiling information, adding flesh and blood to your character. This way, you make it easier for yourself to tell the different faces – and names – apart when you have a complete set of personas.

Traditional web analytics gives an excellent overview on what’s going on at your web site. With KPIs correctly set up, you’ll get pretty good answers on how well your site is performing within a certain set of criteria.

Still, no matter how good you are setting up and tracking your KPIs, the most important question remains unanswered: Why is this happening?

To answer the “why” questions, a number of different methods can be applied. Among the more common ones are usability testing, user interviews, online surveys, focus groups, personas, card sorting or any combination of these.

Wouldn’t it be great to actually see for yourself how your users are using your web site and understand why they’re doing what they’re doing?

Imagine every visitor coming to your web site has a camera on their shoulder, and once they enter any page on your web site it starts recording. Each and every one of those sessions can be viewed, and you can trace their flow throughout their entire visit. Then, imagine you can aggregate these numbers and track groups of events through KPIs and thresholds. This way you can define, track and measure the impact of usability errors.

Tealeaf does this, and judging by the brands using their products, they do it well.

The Tealeaf product suite enables you to do two important things: first off, you can use it to set alerts for specific events, like triggering a warning when a user is unable to perform a checkout or to track specific error messages, like those nasty “500 internal server error” pages.

This way you can prevent critical errors that would cause serious implications for your online business, and the ones that do occur you can drill down into a related session and discover yourself – step by step. Second, you can use it to optimize the user experience on your web site when you learn why your users are behaving as they do.

The greatest payoff of them all is that all these recorded sessions represent your actual users. There’s no other way to get a more accurate answer to how your web site is performing while understanding why your web analytics tool give out the numbers it does.

Tealeaf does this by listening to all your site traffic, and storing the visitor sessions. It works with any RIA technology you can imagine, across secure and non-secure site solutions for any kind of web site.

Typically you’d imagine the most common business using Tealeaf would be online commerce sites, but their client portfolio covers many major brands, all keen to understand, optimize and secure their online investments.

Website evaluation is an not easy task – I know, because I’ve been at both sides of the table, both as a web designer presenting my work for a client, and at the client side evaluating a website design from another designer.

While web design evaluation and website evaluation can be two very different things, I’ve made a short list over things to look for which should come handy whether you’re designing websites yourself, or if you want to learn what to look for when paying for one:

1. Does the web design match the site message? Check to see if the website look and feel matches your expectations for this kind of website, if the message is getting through, and if the site represents the brand in a positive, consistent manner
2. Is it easy to understand what you can do? Make sure the website clearly conveys the primary functions in a way which is easy to understand for the user. One quick glance at the page should be enough for a user to tell what he/she can do
3. Is the navigation clear and concise? The navigation should be easy to spot, not taking focus away from the main content or functionality, and make it clear where the user is at all times
4. Are all expected elements and functionality in place? Search input field, mailing list sign up form, proper footer / colophon, contact information and logo
5. Is the website layout clean and in order? By following grid conventions the layout should not be floating about and navigation, menus and content should all be arranged in an orderly fashion giving the layout a clean, uncluttered structure
6. Has dummy text been used? Lights should be flashing if what you’re looking at has dummy text like “lorem ipsum” or similar in the content areas or in the navigation fields. Skilled designers use real content, since the actual website content always affects the design in one way or another
7. Are the main content blocks and key functionality correctly prioritized? Content priority can be the difference between “stay or go” for a user, so make sure to put the most important content or functionality as high up on a page as possible
8. Is it value for money? Make sure the website has the professional touch which makes up for the cost involved, that it feels like a quality product you can be proud of

Evaluating others websites can be a great learning experience, and a good way to find inspiration. Quite a few web design forums have sections where people ask for criticism on their designs, which is great wether you’re looking to improve your own website or learn from what others have found.

You can hire me to do professional web site evaluation. Sometimes a set of fresh eyes can do wonders.

A couple of years back I attended a course arranged by Humanfactors Int. in London called “User-centered analysis and conceptual design”. Besides learning design strategy, user profiles, data gathering and information architecture, a key topic in this course was using active listening to get the right answers.

Our teacher, none other than the infamous John Sorflaten, taught us how actively participating in the listening process ensures that both you and the crowd understands what’s being said. Also, if done right, you can get professional advice for free!

This is what you can achieve from active listening:

• Better communication by ensuring you understand what’s being said
• Building confidence with the person asking and the other listeners by proving you’re making an effort to understand them
• Engaging the audience by giving everyone a chance to share their perspectives
• Getting extra advice for free that you may not would have gotten otherwise

Here’s how it works. Imagine you’re reading a text on a website, where the text is broken down in a bullet point list with the words highlighted. It gets easier to read, you can scan it quickly, and you catch the points faster than having to comprehend a large block of text.

Active listening works pretty similar – when someone’s addressing you with a question – either in a meeting or one on one, look directly at the person speaking and repeat the important keywords out loud as they come. As with all cognitive learning processes, repeating means it gets easier to remember, and not that’s not just for you but for everyone who is listening.

When the person speaking to you is done with his question, rephrase the question the way you understood it, and add “.. was that what you meant?”. Doing this gives the other person a chance to confirm your understanding of the issue, or rephrase his question to get his points across. Repeat this process until the person confirms you got it right.

Once you’ve given an answer, ask the person wether he’s satisficed with your reply or not – “Did that answer your question?”. Now, address the rest of the people in the room – “Do any of you have something to add?”. Engage the other listeners, they may offer perspectives you’re not able to.

Last step is to turn back to the person who asked you the original question – “Is there anything else you’d like to add?”. By giving the person who asked you a question time and space to offer his view on the subject, you’re getting professional advice for no extra effort.

By now you’ve proven that you’re able to understand what’s being said, you’ve engaged the audience, you’ve given everyone a chance to participate and – hopefully – you’ve answered a question.

So – put short – here’s how it works. When someone is asking you a question,

1. Repeat the important keywords out loud during the whole length of the question
2. Rephrase the question and then ask the person if that’s what he meanth – “.. was that what you meant?”
3. Repeat until you get it right. If you get it right on the first try you’re doing great, if not then keep on repeating until you’ve rephrased the question correctly
4. Answer the question, and involve the audience to let other peoples perspectives come through
5. Ask the person who asked you – “Is there anything else you’d like to add?”

If it seems awkward, just keep on pushing. Keep practicing, and never let a chance to apply the active listening technique slip away from you. As with everything else, excersice is the only way to perfection. With time you can start refining your skills, giving you more out of a conversation.

Our webshop is doing ok. However, to reach our sales goals this year we have to drastically improve our conversion rate by making more customers out of the users in our webshop. What we’re looking for is at least a 0.5% increase, and while that may not sound like much, we have some steep cliffs to climb before the numbers start nudging in the right direction.

We’re a telecom company, and most of our revenues comes from subscriptions. Selling mobile phones in our webshop is, put quite simply, just another way of selling more subscriptions.

The mobile phones we sell are locked to our subscriptions for 18 months, which is sort of an industry standard in this country. In return for cheap a mobile phone, we’re guaranteed income from our customer for a year and a half when a sale is closed.

What we see from our statistics is that a large portion of our users turn around and walk the other way after entering our webshop, and while that may not be very uncommon, we’re trying to find the reasons behind that.

The other day I sat down with the man in charge for our webshop sales to see if we could come up with some great ideas. A reasonable place to start would be asking the users what they were looking for, so we figured we’d arrange a survey for our users, and perhaps combine that with interviews or a full scale user test.

In order to know what kind of questions to ask, we wrote down a set of theories that could explain why a user would not convert into a paying customer:

• Unable to find the product he is looking for. This could be either missing metacategories (camera phones, phones ranging from $200-$500), or if its too hard to navigate or if the product just isn’t listed
• The price is wrong. When price matters, and it often does, customers won’t buy if it feels too high, or if the customer knows he can get it cheaper somewhere else
• Just window shopping. One of the great features of the web is that its so fast and easy to compare prices and view avaliable products. A lot are doing research preparing for a purchase later on
• Unable to make up his mind. Many people need to feel the product in their hands or try it to see if it matches their expectations and needs
• The customer has returned from an earlier purchase, and is in need of support or more information on the product. It could also be a case of cognitive dissonance where the customer returns to confirm the purchase was right for him
• No clear information on payment. If the right payment method is not available, credit card payment or pay by invoice, the customer may be forced to shop elsewhere. Lack of brand credibility can also be an issue (I don’t trust you with my Visa)
• Not clear wether the product is in stock. If information on delivery is missing, or if its impossible to know wether the item is in stock or not, the customer will go somewhere else
• Unable to meet needs for ordering large quantities of the same product. You’d think this was mainly an issue for customers buying large quantities only, but if placing an order takes a long time to complete, doing the same job more than once becomes an tedious chore
• Too difficult to order. If the ordering procedure is too complicated and requires too much of an effort to go through, we’ve lost

The list goes on…

This excercise proved to be very rewarding. With these theories we will be able to create scenarios giving us insight that can help us understand the reasons why the customers are not buying and do adjustments in the webshop to accomodate for increased sales.

With these scenarios we can create intelligent questions for our survey revealing key issues in user behaviour. In addition, our scenarios will help us:

1. Define tasks for a usability test session
2. Explore specific issues in a user interview
3. Use them with our personas
4. Create user stories

Our next step now is creating the survey questions and implement the survey on our webshop. Hopefully, we’ll gain perspective on our users that will help us increase our conversion rate. Keep watching this spot, I’ll keep you posted on our progress.