Search Engine Optimisation Blog Posts
Eye Tracking Studies
Post by Gavin Smith on Friday, July 3rd, 2009 in Search Engine Marketing, Search Engine Optimisation
Eye-tracking studies are great for understanding how the public view webpages, but it can often be hard to translate the results of these studies into real web design implementations. Recently I have been reading over studies such as Eyetrack 3, which was a study performed in 2003 by Steve Outing and Laura Ruel, as they observed 46 people view various mock information sites for an hour.
After reading over the study I decided to pick out a few nuggets of information that web designers can often overlook.
- Visitors read in the shape of an F. Visitors were found to generally scan WebPages in the shape of an ‘F’. Make sure important elements of your content are in these key areas to keep readers engaged. Place headers, sub headers, bullet points, and highlighted text along these lines so readers will be enticed to read more
- Headings draw the eye. In the majority of cases the first things readers have been found to look at on a webpage are the headlines. Make sure your headlines are not obstructed by other items on the page and that they are engaging enough to draw the reader into looking further through your site.
Goo on the Loose - Cadbury’s Social media Campaign
Post by Mike Gomez on Wednesday, July 1st, 2009 in Search Engine Optimisation, Social Media Optimisation
Cadbury has long been known for its chocolate - from their traditional Dairy Milk to the crumbliest Flake, the Creme Egg and now its mischievous mutated form, the Creme Egg Twisted. As of late, Cadbury have turned their attentions to promoting the Twisted Bars through two competitions. One being available to the public and another made up of not so highly trained ‘Super Agents’ tracking down notorious ‘Goo Attacks’ around the UK and reporting back through different methods of social media.
Why Should You Launch an E-commerce Website?
Post by David Wilding on Monday, June 29th, 2009 in E-commerce, Search Engine Optimisation
It might seem like a strange question to ask, but a surprisingly large number of UK retailers don’t offer their customers the ability to buy their products online, or at least not a fully fledged service. H&M, Primark & Gap currently don’t offer their product range online for purchase in the UK at all. The latest incumbent to the field, TK Maxx, only offer the ability to purchase handbags.
So if these large companies don’t provide their customers with an e-commerce solution then why should you? There are some very clear and convincing reasons why you should be considering an e-commerce website for your retail business, if only to capitalise on the fact these big players aren’t participating…
Why Google & YouTube (probably) disappointed millions of Michael Jackson fans today
Post by David Wilding on Friday, June 26th, 2009 in Search Engine Optimisation
Today has been a sad day for the world of music as millions across the world hear about the death of ‘The King of Pop’. Of course in this day and age when a story like this breaks everyone everywhere (Okay bar Iran & China) can get instant access to news and media related to the event in question, and the chances are they’ll probably turn to Google first.
And that’s one of the reasons Google introduced Universal Search relatively recently, to provide visitors with all the ‘types’ of information they want in one place. The idea was simple; lets mix in other media (such as images, news items and videos) in the main Google results, hence providing better & more useful mixed media search results to their visitors. Let’s give visitors a choice. Remember with Google it’s all about the quality of the results that makes them so great, right?
Well I’m here to tell you that Google has failed; it’s still failing, and will continue to fail its UK visitors, at least for music related searches, until it fixes Universal Search here in the UK and removes the irrelevant YouTube results. Most sad of all is its probably failed Michael Jackson too.
Site Migration Guide - Techniques and Advice to Aid with Successful Site Migration
Post by Malcolm Slade on Thursday, June 25th, 2009 in SEO, Search Engine Optimisation
Once upon a time, migrating a site to a new platform, technology or domain required very little consideration. Is the host reliable? Can I afford it? Will it run my site? Do I like my new domain name? Fast forward 20 years and with the explosion of e-commerce and search engine usage, the process of migrating a site has become a complex thing that only a fool would brush off or take lightly. This post will discuss several of the issues that should be considered and some basic techniques to aid with site migration. (more…)