We bloggers get so used to blogs, we sometimes can’t see the wood for the trees, and forget that there are plenty of internet users out there who may not distinguish between a web page and a blog, but simply between pages they can find their way around and pages they can’t.

You should go and complete Sinéad’s survey, and then come back if you like and read through my comments that the questions inspired.

Q1: On a scale of 1 to 5 how easy do you think navigating a blog is? (i.e. Finding information, moving around the site)

I can usually navigate a blog quite easily, but I appreciate that I’ve been blogging a long time, and am very familiar with the interfaces of popular blogging platforms. And to be honest, usually I will use the search feature if there is one present.

Often though, there is simply no requirement to navigate a blog.

The average internet user may be more aware of blogs now due to their proliferation, but most users turn to the internet for information and don’t make any distinctions between types of pages - the information is either there or it isn’t.

If your blog does not lead users to further information they are interested in, they won’t even attempt to navigate. In my experience bounce rates on blogs are very high. Most traffic will arrive at a blog through long tail google searches, scan the page and either find what they are looking for and leave, or realise it’s not what they were looking for and leave.

Improving the stickiness of a blog design is an artform, and one that is hard to master. However, it is somewhat easier if you have a highly focussed blog, for example a business blog which is designed for one purpose and attracts traffic of a specific nature for a narrow field of search words and search terms.

Defining the goal of your blog, and it’s purpose within your larger website (or general web strategy) will certainly help you implement a design strategy which can help guide users where you want them to go next on your blog/site.

Q2 On a scale of 1 to 5 how important is it to you that a blog is easy to navigate?

Taking the above thoughts into consideration, from a users perspective it is often not important that a blog be easy to navigate, because often they are not looking for anything other than the information contained in a single blog post.

personally, if a blog really captures my imagination I will add it to my RSS reader and occasionally notice something of interest there again through the RSS feeds.

That doesn’t mean that blogs shouldn’t strive to be navigable though - from a blog owners perspective the navigation should aim to be as simple as possible and lead me to the next desired page or action. From the owners perspective you presumably want people to stick around, have a nose around and preferably come back soon!

Q3. Do you prefer navigating a webpage or a blog?

It’s true, often a well laid out website will be so much easier to navigate than the murky logic of categories or tags, particularly when you take into consideration blogs which do not even clearly identify tags or categories, but simply dump them in the sidebar somewhere!

However, there’s no real reason a blog shouldn’t be easy to navigate, it just takes a little more attention to the design of the template. We sometimes don’t see the wood for the trees, and don’t put the effort in to make it as simple and understandable as possible.

Q4. On a scale of 1 to 5 how important is it to you that the overall design of a blog is visually appealing?

Oooh, this is an interesting one. I would say it is important to me, Sabrina Dent’s blog, for example originally caught my eye due to it’s appealing design and ever since I check back regularly - however though the design caught my eye, if the content did not deliver I would soon abandon the blog.

However, then you have a blog like Damien Mulley’s, another blog I visit regularly, and yet he has an out of the box WordPress template for his design. Does that bother me? not at all.

Just recently I was involved in a project which replaced an out of the box design for a new blog with a prettier custom design. Early analysis would suggest that the bounce rate decreased and pageviews went up after the new design was implemented.

Unscientific conjecture? Over time you can establish yourself as an authority with a standard blog design, but a more appealing custom design may help you get a headstart if you’re a new blog on the block!

Q5. On a scale of 1 to 5 how important is it to you that the CONTENT of a blog post is visually appealing?

Very important - unless of course I read the blog via an RSs reader, in which case it’s not at all important how the content is styled on the web

However I would argue that you want to retain as many readers as possible, in all possible formats - so clear, clean and legible presentation is of great importance. Pretty pictures etc help, but legible font sizes and good use of space are vital.

In Summary

Overall I agree with Sinéad that blogs often neglect the casual internet user, who may not be familiar with the concepts behind a blog. Too many assumptions are made in standard blog templates that users understand the linear or reverse chronological nature of blogs.

We should strive for clarity and simplicity in blog designs and make the interfaces as intuitive or explanatory as possible.

It is important to bear in mind what the purpose of your blog is when designing your template, so that you can guide your users where you want them to go next.

Remember the nature of the majority of blog traffic is fairly transient and do what you can, where possible and without affecting the integrity of your blog, to increase the stickiness of your blog.

Even if a unique and attractive blog template is beyond your reach for now, make sure your content is clear and legible.

What do you reckon?

If you haven’t already, please go and do Sinéad’s survey, and if you have any thoughts on these matters, leave a comment on Sinéad’s blog, or here!

I recently got to thinking about some of the social bookmarking sites that are out there, and the way in which different people share their blog posts. My curiousity got the better of me and I put together a very brief survey - 10 questions only.

Please take the survey, and I’ll post the results later along with my thoughts and any interesting stuff I think arises from the survey.

Hopefully you are as interested as I am in how people use social media to get their blog posts out there, and you might spread the survey round a little. It’s just for fun, but we might get some interesting discussion material out of it at least

The traffic to this site is small, but focussed, and it’s no accident that the term ‘web design Cork’ leads people to this site.

At the time of writing, if you search google for ‘web design Cork’ you will see this site about position 3 or 4 in google.com and google.ie as well as searches for sites in Ireland. My aim would be to get to position one, which would bring even more traffic, and if you look back over this blog you will see the site has been climbing and climbing so that number one spot is not beyond reach.

Before I go into how I approached getting these results so far, I should explain that for those planning something similar, the first step is to choose your search term carefully.

Choosing your Search Term

I chose ‘web design Cork’ because it was highly relevant to my business, not overly competitive, and was a term that is searched for.

For example ‘web design Ireland’ would also have been relevant, but it would not have been quite as targetted and it would be a much more competitive term, making it harder to dominate.

‘Website design Ireland’ was also an option, but my research showed that ‘web design’ in general is a much more searched for term than ‘website design’.

It was a little harder to research whether it was a term that was searched for, because Cork is such a small market the data simply wasn’t there, however I was able to ascertain that people often searched for ‘web design [placename]‘, which was enough for me.

In order to research what people search for and how competitive the term might be you can use tools such as Web CEO (which has a free version) or there are online tools such as Wordze and Wordtracker. Google Trends is also useful for broad research.

So, once I settled on the phrase I wanted to target most, what did I do to get from nowhere to page one on Google?

Web Standard Design

I designed the site to web standards ensuring that the content of the page is as easy for the search engines to spider as possible.

Relevant Content & Page Titles

I ensured my content was focussed on ‘web design Cork’. The homepage of the site has ‘Web Design, Cork’ as a heading (a H1 header in html) and in the content. I also created another page called ‘web design Cork’, which is an overview of the site and who I am but includes the term ‘web design Cork’ several times throughout the content, without hammering it in so much it no longer reads well.

Regular Relevant Content

So my site was set up and included content on ‘web design Cork’, but search engines really love fresh content, so having a blog is a relatively easy way to ensure you can have regular relevant content. Yes, I know my content isn’t as regular as it should be!

If you look over my blog you will see I posted updates on my Search Engine optimisation progress with the term ‘web design Cork’ which I hope were of interest to people, but which also ensured I was growing more content that included the term in page titles, file names and content.

Internal Links

There are several links throughout my site which use the anchor text ‘web design Cork’ including a link from every page back to the homepage - this tells Google that I consider ‘web design Cork’ to be a relevant phrase for my site. This is not as valuable as other people letting Google know that, but it can help!

External Links

This is the singlemost important part. it’s important to get the other stuff right, but if you don’t get this bit right, you will flounder. At the moment links from other sites to your sites are massivley important when it comes to doing well in search engines.

The absolute ideal in my case would be to get links from other sites and blogs which use the anchor text ‘web design Cork’, but any inbound link will help if you have put the effort in elsewhere to ensure Google deems your site relevant for the term are targetting.

Directories
To kick off the process of getting links from other sites to my site I signed up with some directories. I think this is of limited value to be honest, but it gets the process underway. I feel that links from directories are probably not worth a whole heap, but if you sign up with a good few it at least brings your link count up from zero which is bound to count at least just a little. See my post on directories for a list of the directories I got my site linked to from.

One other advantage to directories is that with some of them you can control the anchor text used to link to you. See my post on the importance of anchor text to get an idea of the value of this.

So what else did I do to get more links?

Social Media & Twitter
I say Social Media, because there are many social sites that could potentially be useful, but the site I find most useful is Twitter.

It’s an indirect kind of boost in a way, but I signed up with Twitter in order to get a window into the Irish tech industry and as I got to know people on Twitter they got to know me.

In general Twitter can help raise your profile and generate leads, but in terms of SEO, it is my belief that when people make the connection between your Twitter profile and your site/blog they are more likely to link to you. I don’t conciously try to ’self promote’ on Twitter, but from time to time it just happens organically and I have found people linking to me due to conversations I was involved in on Twitter. I’m frankiep on Twitter by the way

Useful Content
Writing content that people will find useful is a good way to try to build links. It’s not always easy, but sometimes we forget that things that are second nature to us may be useful to others. For example I wrote a blog post on how to improve SEO and user experience on Wordpress blogs. I wrote the post based on the things I most commonly do on blogs I am setting up. It immediately got a couple of links.

My post on ‘What Width Should Your Website Be?‘ is another post I hoped people would find useful, and while it hasn’t got any links, it does get quite a lot of traffic. The impact of traffic on search engine positioning is debatable, but let’s put it this way, it certainly can’t hurt!

What I Don’t Do

I don’t post personal or non web design related stuff on my blog. My decision to only post work related items means that all the traffic coming into the site is somewhat more targetted. Apart from ‘web design Cork’ the other top search terms leading people here are:

• 2008 best width for a website
• website design cork
• website width
• design cork
• designcork
• what width should a website be
• cork design
• cork web design
• frank prendergast cork

It is my view that posting non relevant stuff would dilute Google’s view of the sites relevance to ‘web design’ and as such potentially affect my ranking for ‘web design cork’. Because these terms are all broadly related to web design, it all goes to improving my ranking for ‘web design Cork’.

But it takes so long!

Don’t expect an overnight success. This site has been live about 8 months, but having said that I have not been as attentive to it as I should! Certainly you need to be thinking in terms of months rather than days or weeks, but this site is proof that a concerted effort, even with sporadic updates can return results.

Good Luck!

I hope this post is of some use to anyone who wants to improve their site’s search engine performance. If you’re Cork based, feel free to contact me if you would like to hire me, or even just for a coffee and a chat if I’m not having a hectic week!

For a company starting out in the area of social media, it can be a serious matter if well established and respected bloggers decide to berate your company for a ’social media misdemeanour’ - your burgeoning online brand can be damaged to a point where it may be difficult to be taken seriously in future.

The misdemeanour could range from the way they set up their blog, taking advertising on their personal website, to sending unsolicited emails to large numbers of people. Individuals are named and shamed, and often rightly so. For anyone looking to dip their virtual toe in the online waters seeing this can be quite discouraging.

I have experienced a lot of this reluctance when encouraging companies to get more involved online, and judging from informal chats with other consultants, it’s pretty common.

I see this as quite a serious issue, especially when you consider that there are in fact very few rules, and the so called rules that do exist are by no means black or white, and many will disagree about them.

For example Brendan mentions taking advertising on a personal blog as being a misdemeanour. I see nothing wrong with taking advertising on a personal blog, and there’s certainly no law against it!

Even spam is a word that is bandied about all too often these days - I have seen blog posts from what Brendan refers to as ‘elders of the online community’ which berate companies for spamming them, when in my eyes it’s a borderline case at best.

Brendan finishes his post by getting to the nub of the matter:

Should they be taken aside for a quiet word in their ear or should they be publicly ridiculed for their stupidity? Personally I know how I’d like to be treated when I break the rules (unwittingly) in any club or community I’m a member of.

Communication should always come before publication. I think that should become the mantra of the blogging community.

When a company commits one of these social media misdemeanours, they should be given the opportunity to explain their side of the story. If you are incenced by their actions, pick up the phone, or drop them an email explaining your anger.

If they blank you, or are not willing to listen, then go ahead and write your blog post.

Let’s not get too hippy about it, but we’re all human. I have witnessed at least one occasion recently where a writer softened their position on a company they villified when the actual personalities behind the company came into play.

There is always more to a story, there are always at least two sides to a story. Why not at least know both sides before you potentially damage a company’s online brand.

Experienced and popular bloggers should be encouraging, not demolishing.

If you liked this, you might be interested in my blog post ‘Advice on weathering a blogstorm‘

To find the Casino Royal Boat should be easy, it’s a big pink boat, near enough to the Main Stage. Go to the Electric Picnic site and download a pdf map if you want to see exactly where. It’s no.11 on the art trail.

All welcome! Don’t think about it or stress about it, just turn up! Look for Peter.

If you think you might make it along, please leave a comment on Peter’s blog.

And also, please spread the word! Blog about it, Tweet about it, or share the Facebook event.

See you there!

Funny how Dell is so heavily tied into the GAMING industry, yet as a company it could use a much greater sense of “play”. “playfulness” etc. *

Followed by this tweet:

I happen to think “play” IS a business fundamental. But that idea scares a lot of people. *

These tweets, and some of the replies I saw got me thinking. My site features little aliens and a rocketship, so you can probably guess that I’m all for play and playfulness, and believe that creativity would be lost without it. And a company like Dell needs creativity, particularly the way home pc users are embracing the rather more creative Apple brand.

That said, at first I thought if Hugh wanted to introduce play to a company like Dell he was facing a mountainous task. A traditional company with traditional work values would find it very difficult to introduce play into their processes, and creating an environment in which play would produce creative results which could be appreciated on the bottom line would be nothing short of a miracle.

I was trying to imagine how one would even begin to tackle introducing play into a company that was so well established and set in it’s ways. Is play something that can be ‘added’ or is it something cultural that flourishes in companies founded on principles of play?

The question reminded me of the story of unilever talking to Innocent (the smoothie makers) - Unilever asked about how Innocent do business, Innocent replied ‘be natural, be nice’. Unilever then responded ‘That sounds great. Now how do you implement that strategy of being nice?’

Play is likely to be just as alien a concept to a traditional business. Wouldn’t traditional companies resist play and want to know the Return On Investment likely to result? Would ‘play strategies’ implemented be abandoned when the benefits weren’t immediately apparent?

Then I thought of my sister, who is a Drama Therapist. Drama Therapists use play all the time to successfully tackle issues around social inclusion and education where traditional methods have failed or are unlikely to work. Prisons and special needs pupils are two areas where Drama Therapy has proved successful.

Prisons are not a place one would normally associate with play, and yet Drama Therapists take their tools and methods into prisons and can successfully tackle issues such as conflict resolution where other methods might be scorned, and it doesn’t involve rebuilding the prison system from the ground up

So if Drama Therapists can develop methods and techniques using play which they bring to difficult environments to address complex issues, perhaps there the same could be applied to businesses?

Well, it can, and in fact it already is. I know of at least one company in Cork who provide performance coaching to businesses and who use drama and play techniques as part of the process - Acumen Coaching.

Do you know of other consultants who do similar? Or processes or techniques of introducing play to companies to improve processes, solve problems or generate creativity? Please leave a comment!

If you’d like to share your thoughts on Dell and playfulness, please head over to Hugh’s blog post where he is gathering comments which Dell will see.

Want to read more about Drama Therapy? This PDF (9.5mb) on one program makes interesting reading.

There are very few content or structure changes, this was largely a change of the look and feel, although I did add a few internal links in the footer which use some terms I’m competing for as the anchor text, so I’ll be curious as to whether there is any noticable change in the SERPS (search engine results pages).

Google has been toying with where to position me again, and I have been bouncing around between position 4 and 15 for the term ‘web design cork’.

While I expect to end up somewhere between the two at the moment, I see it as a good sign - I reckon a couple of quality links are what I need to convince Google I should be on that first page permanently!

I’ll be donning my thinking cap re quality links over the next couple of weeks to see what I can come up with

Oh, I also added a Stuff I Love page with a regularly changing ‘recent’ section as well as more permanent list of friends and acquaintances I admire.

If you’re based in Cork and are involved in techie type stuff, leave a comment below, especially if you think I might not be aware of you - I’m trying to build myself a better picture of what’s happening in Cork

Hope you like the new look…

In his first email newsletter he asks ‘is blogging dead?’ and answers his own question (tongue in cheek) ‘Yes, it is. Officially’.

He goes on to make some very interesting points about the state of blogging, including discussing how people are putting so much time and energy into promoting their blog posts as well as writing them, and how the quality of blogging is suffering from a desperation to get your blog posts read by as many people as possible. He also briefly looks at how blogging puts you in the public eye to a degree, and as people’s online (and often anonymous) behaviour can be fairly appalling you can end up under attack for things you say or do on your blog.

And so Jason is moving to an email newsletter instead of publishing on his blog. I can understand his motives and I think he makes plenty of valid points - have a read of his full text.

But he doesn’t actually argue that blogs are dead. Just that there are new challenges arising for the ‘blogging community’, and particularly those who are considered successful bloggers… or ‘A list’ bloggers.

That didn’t stop the discussions about the current health of blogging, and whether a flatline was imminent though, and the ever increasingly wise Hugh MacLeod then blogged about whether blogging was dead, where he boiled the whole question down to what blogging has always been about, by quoting Clay Shirky:

the cost and difficulty of publishing absolutely anything, by anyone, into a global medium, just got a whole lot lower

I understand why someone like Jason Calacanis, in his position, would favour moving to an email newsletter, but blogging won’t die that easily. For many small businesses (and large businesses for that matter) blogging is an incredibly useful and simple tool to publish to the online medium - whether you have global aspirations or not. Take this humble blog. I’m not trying to become an A-Lister. I’m not even trying to generate international clients, but I’m generating relevant content on a regular basis. And Google likes that.

Blogging may be undergoing changes, the blogging cluture may need to seriously examine the amount of negativity that prominent bloggers seem to have to deal with, but as long as regular, relevant content = better search results = increased traffic, blogging will live on. In the last month, 70.73% of all traffic came to this site via the blog.

You don’t have to be king of the blogoshpere, you don’t have to sparkle with ingenuity and brilliance in every post and you don’t have to kill yourself over every post and kill yourself a second time flogging said post.

A solid blogging strategy and a level of persistance will reap benefits.

Since then I have seen a small increase in the rankings, moving up a couple of places from 14 to 12 on Google Ireland.

I do intend, when I have more time, to do some more intensive work and begin to work my way up into the top ten, and, over time into the number on slot. This project does show that competing on a specific and fairly general phrase takes work over a prolonged period, however, it pays off.

While I would like to be further along in the process (my client work has taken precedence and this project doesn’t get as much attention as it should) the results of targetting a specific phrase and having a relevant blogging strategy are evident.

If we look at the last month’s data, search engines make up just over 60% of the overall traffic to the site, and the phrase that is leading the most people to the site is, you guessed it, ‘Web Design Cork’, followed by ‘Website Design Cork’.

So while I will not be entirely satisfied until the site performs even better for the phrase ‘Web Design Cork’ you can see that the strategy is already working.

If you would like to talk to me about a strategy for getting more relevant traffic to your website, please feel free to send me an email.

Normally one might do a lot of what I am doing on this site concurrently, but in order to measure impact I have been doing little tweaks, monitering the search engine placements and measuring the results.

My latest experiment was to check the search engine positioning for the term ‘Web Design Cork’ and then add a page which was optimised for that term and see what impact it had.

On 15th of May 2008, the search engine positioning was as folows:

• Google (Ireland): Position 20.
• Yahoo: Position 16.
• MSN: Position 11.

I then uploaded the ‘web design cork’ optimised page to the site and linked to it from the homepage using the anchor text ‘web design cork’.

The results for May 1st 2008 are as follows:

• Google (Ireland): Position 14.
• Yahoo: Position 37.
• MSN: Position 2.

It has bounced around a little, reaching position 10 on Google Ireland at one point, and also reaching position 8 on Yahoo before being thrown back to 37 for some reason.

I saw a bigger jump in the rankings for the term ’search engine optimisation cork’, for which I performed the same type of test, however that term jumped ten places in Google Ireland from 42 to 32 which is easier to do - once you get closer to the first couple of pages the task becomes somewhat harder.

So what’s next? If I want to get a boost from where I am and begin competing for the no.1 slot I need to roll up my sleeves.

I need to generate more relevant content, which should be fairly easy using the blog, and also generate more inbound links. The best way to generate inbound links for a site like this is to try to provide useful content that people will link to.

Stay tuned for the next update!