Above: Verdana, Below: Georgia - which speaks to you?

Type speaks.  The typefaces you use on your website will change how users perceive and interpret information.  The last few years have shown some major advances in the ways we are able to use different fonts on our websites.  You can use the @font face syntax in your CSS files to load a font from a remote server (A List Apart has a great article), and companies like FontSquirrel go so far as to provide @font face kits, styles just need to be copied and pasted.

You can also try Cufón; Cufón consists of two individual parts – a font generator, which converts fonts to a proprietary format and a rendering engine written in JavaScript.  It’s meant to act as a simple alternative to sIFR, which is known to be complicated to use and configure.

But we’re not quite there.  Fonts are very heavily licensed, and though there are free fonts available for use – chances are that you’ll end up using one of the 8 core web fonts rather than trying to find a free font that’s easily readable.  Those core fonts are all owned and licensed by the Microsoft Foundry, which is why you’ll find them in your version of MS office. They are made of up of three serif fonts (fonts with ‘feet’) and five sans-serif (no feet).

Serif fonts:  Georgia, Times New Roman, Courier

Serif fonts are often claimed to be more easily readable.  In my mind they project a certain inherent seriousness and trustworthiness, like the voice of a newscaster.  That’s not to say they do for everyone, there’s no empirical evidence that serifs are easier to read than sans-serif and in fact, sans-serif fonts weren’t widely adopted until the 20th century. Serif fonts are most closely associated with news and information; I like Times New Roman for headlines and Georgia for text in this case.

Sans-serif fonts: Arial, Trebuchet MS, Comic Sans, Impact, Verdana.

Forget Comic Sans or Impact for general text, neither are easily readable at small resolutions though I find Impact works well for headlines.  For text, you’ll be choosing between Verdana and Arial most likely as Trebuchet MS can look nice, but can be tricky when users don’t have that font installed.  Given the choice, I would choose Verdana.  Created in 1996 for Microsoft, it’s one of the most commonly used and readable fonts out there – like the Helvetica of the web.

Don’t forget the spacing.

Whichever you choose, make sure you pay close attention to the spacing: that’s line spacing, letter spacing and word spacing.  Too close together and the words become hard to read.  Too far apart and you may have “rivers” running through your text.

For now, our choices are still limited.

While the foundries and the browser companies hash out issues of licensing more fonts for standard use on webpages, choices to users without a lot of CSS experience are still limited.  Just try to remember that it’s not about what you like, the goal of type is to make a thing easy and enjoyable to read.  Until next time!

Applied Theory is a web comic about axioms, models, theories, maxims, principles, laws and postulates.  This is the first issue.  Click on the comic for a larger version.  Also, go ahead and download it, share it, hot link to it, repost it or whatever – just leave the copyright intact.

The first of Watzlawick’s five axioms of communication is “One cannot not communicate”.  Because every behaviour is a kind of communication, people who are aware of each other are constantly communicating. Any perceivable behaviour, including the absence of action, has the potential to be interpreted by other people as having some meaning.

On the web, you are your website.  Your website (you) communicates with visitors, who in turn try and communicate with it (you again).  As in real life, sometimes there are breakdowns in communication, and the message doesn’t come across clearly.  Here are some things to watch for…

Too much wewe talk.  Not talk of small or diminutive things, or anything inappropriate – it’s talk about you.  Your company.  What you have done.  Why you’re great.  Why I, if I was smart, would buy from you.

This type of copy is a killer.  People respond more effectively to copy that talks about them, talks to them, solves their problem.  Copy that lacks a strong customer focus will lose visitors quickly.  If you mention your customers (you, your, yours) at least 2 times more than you mention yourself (we, I, company name), you’ll be doing well.  Don’t hurt yourself by checking manually though, use the We We Calculator from Future Now.  I scored 65% customer focused (alright, enough about me).  I challenge all of you to do better!

Too much jargon and meaningless corporate-speak.

Yes, we all get it. Your company is poised on the edge of several strong vertical markets, and ready to leverage new media and web 2.0 technologies to blow away existing old world dynamics and surge forward with new synergies and exciting, action driven initiatives.

Except nobody (except for looney tunes executives who don’t know what they actually want) really talks that way, and nobody likes being talked to that way.  You would be better off to say “We like all the new technology out there and are looking forward to incorporating platforms like Twitter and Facebook and using audio and video on the web to allow us to communicate with our visitors better.”

Fight the Bull is an extension for MS Office (works in Open Office as well) that analyzes your content for heavy jargon and meaningless speech.

Too many typefaces.  There can be only one.

I’ve been reading about type lately, two good books – one is called “Stop Stealing Sheep and Learn How Type Works”.  The other is called “Designing with Type”.  I like fonts and typefaces, both are important to communication as some typefaces convey trust while other can convey doubt.  Without getting into it too deeply (because I will later), conventional wisdom tells us that we should use no more than three typefaces at a time.  One typeface for the main headline; one for the copy; one for sub headings.

The colours, ooooooh the colours.

Your main font should be one colour, something close to black or dark gray.  Your background should be slightly off white.  Line spacing and letter spacing should make your copy easy to read.  If you must use colours in your fonts, or on your website, use them sparingly.  It’s not a circus tent, after all, it’s your business and unless your business supplies flashing coloured lights and tie dyed clothing, you should probably keep it toned down.

If you can’t write, hire someone who can.

Some people are great writers.  Some people write by smashing their fingers on the keyboard in rapid succession.  At least, that’s what it seems like when I read some of the copy out there.  I’m always amazed by the care and attention people pay to the graphic properties of a website and to what lengths they’ll go to get something ‘perfect’ and how little they seem to care about their copy. Don’t spend $4000 on a website and follow it up with amateur hour copy.  A great writer will work with you to craft your site’s copy, perfect a tone of voice and attitude and, most importantly, make sure grammar and spelling are consistent and correct.

Coming soon = Leaving now

If you have a page that says “coming soon, please check back later for updates”, that tells me one of a couple of things.  First, that you wanted this great website and maybe underestimated the time an effort it takes to write copy.  If the “coming soon” persists, I’m going to assume that you no longer care about your website.  If that’s the case, why should I or anybody else care?

These leaps in logic may be fallacious, but perception is everything.  If you can’t finish them, hire someone to. If you can’t do that, unpublish them.  If you don’t want to do that, believing that the “content helps for search engine rankings”, I’ll be blunt and say, all you’re doing is showing people what looks like a strip mall with half the stores empty.  Empty pages, optimized or not, aren’t going to help you.

Anything else?

Plenty, stay tuned during communication week at Harbour City SEO for more communication tips and tools.  Ciao for now!

It’s surprising to me how many websites are still being built without a thought to future online marketing efforts. What I find especially surprising are the number of web development frameworks and tools that were built without a single thought of search engine optimization.

When I develop a website these days, whether it’s for personal or professional use, one of the first questions I ask is “Is this site going to be difficult to optimize? What are the barriers to achieving my goals?”

I’ve compiled a list of content management systems and frameworks that I’ve worked with, ranging from the simplest to the most difficult to optimize. If something is impossible, or nearly impossible to optimize – even if the price is right, I usually won’t consider it for a project unless nothing else will achieve the laid out directives.

Ranking of content management systems by ease of optimization.

9. Homestead

Homestead is a complete solution for website owners.  The monthly fee includes items like web hosting and a small website.  The pros are a short list.  Manage everything in one place, easy to learn and use.  The cons, well, for one – there’s no source control.  You can’t have access to the code, even if you want to.  Custom titles are a no go.  Custom design is equally no go.  You usually have a fixed number of content items (5 pages for $x) and very little power to alter the existing structure.  Plus, you can’t move to another host without losing everything.  There are others like it, such as Vistaprint.  In general, these sites are not much bang for your buck and are often more expensive than a ‘free’ CMS like WordPress or Joomla.

8. Flash built sites

Forget it.  Having a flash site is choosing the opposite of easy search engine optimization.  The rasterized text can’t be read.  The pages aren’t pages.  You may as well have a blank page up there, unless SEO isn’t a consideration.

7. Anything in .asp or a windows environment

Many corporate, big box type sites are developed using .asp.  Don’t go anywhere near this unless you’re an .asp programmer.  SEO for these types of sites is a nightmare at the best of times.

6. Joomla

While I’m fairly proficient with Joomla SEO, it’s taken me a long time to get there.  Joomla has struggled with providing users the configuration necessary to optimize a site properly.  There are third party plugins available, but they’re a bit daunting to say the least.  Things can go horribly awry if you don’t know what you’re doing, I’ve even been approached by other SEO agencies who aren’t comfortable working with the extensions.

5. Any e-commerce system.

E-commerce systems, like Magento, Virtuemart, OScommerce, Volution and others have strange rules.  You often need to download an extension to optimize them well, and even then they’re not self explanatory.

4. Sites using Dreamweaver templates

Dreamweaver allows you to use a template to set global styles for s website.  The problem is that once your template is set, you’re often locked into it and cutting out parts of the code to make it easier to optimize is a challenge.

3. Custom built PHP sites

Sites built in PHP can be as easy to optimize ans anything, if the developer thought about SEO when they built it.  The problem is that they usually don’t, so the elements required to do proper SEO are not available.  If you know PHP, or know someone who does, you can easily make the necessary changes.  You are required to have a working knowledge of the elements you would find in the <head> section of your web page to make this happen.  This is generally my preferred way of doing things.

2. Custom built HTML sites

If a site uses only HTML, it’s easy to optimize.  The hardest part of doing this is gaining the working knowledge of HTML and FTP programs, so you can effectively download and manipulate your website.

1. WordPress, blogging platforms

WordPress is by far the easiest SEO I have ever done.  WP sites get indexed quickly, the extensions for enabling optimization are free and easy to use, and optimization itself is all done via a simple extension to your blog’s posting interface.  When I launch a new site, I always start with WordPress to build traction and develop another site in the background.

Sometimes you need a specific solution to achieve your goals, so you have to find the right balance.  If you don’t speak HTML, or if a blog doesn’t have the features you need, you may have to use a CMS like Joomla.  If you need to sell product, then your shopping cart is more important than initial ease of SEO.  But you should always ask the question of your developer or agency, or yourself if you build it on your own.  There are few things more painful than building a site with lofty goals of search engine success to only discover later that you’ll be ice skating uphill to get there.

There’s a phrase that has stuck with me over the last decade.  It’s a philosophy that I picked up during my days managing a sales team that has carried a lot of weight through to my days of internet marketing and search engine optimization.

Plug the holes in your bucket before pouring more water into it.

In essence, it doesn’t matter how much traffic you get if that traffic doesn’t convert.   It’s an important message for most small business owners.  Whether you get 100 or 1000 visits each month, if your sales don’t increase proportionally, then there’s something wrong with your site’s conversion path.  Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz predicts that 2010 will be the year of conversion rate optimization, and I tend to agree that it’s a critical step for any business relying on a website to generate sales leads.

Arguably, one could say that a conversion is made every time someone performs a desirable action on your website.  If that action is visiting a certain page, or clicking on a certain link, then you could make the argument for conversions over traffic.  The next steps down this road involve crafting links, focusing on calls to action in your content and tweaking your copy to drive visitors to different areas of your site and increase saturation of certain pages in search results.

This is fine for a full time webmaster, but it’s essentially micromanaging your content.  You could spend hours making subtle changes and not see that much of a difference, certainly not enough to justify the amount of time you’ve put into it.   In addition, if your site is driven by impression-based advertising revenue, focusing on conversion too early in the game is a waste of time.  You’re better off creating traffic channels, building links and, to some degree, improving overall usability.

What you should be getting now.

If you run a small business in Nanaimo, or any region of Vancouver Island (such as greater Nanaimo, Comox Valley, Cowichan Valley etc…), a well optimized website with a moderate, organic link portfolio should be getting about 1000 unique visitors each month.  From those 1000 visits, you should be getting anywhere from 5 to 30 contacts per month. 30 would be exceptional, 5 would be slightly below average, but it also depends on your product line.

Without question, I would target the unique visitor benchmark first.  The qualifications of your visitor will go up as your traffic and ranks increase, so it’s important to have those visitors landing on your site before you make any judgments about the quality of your conversion process.

Once you have sustained traffic for at least three months, you should target a contact rate of 2%.  That means for every 1000 unique visitors to your site, you should be getting 20 emails, contacts, phone calls and/or walk-ins.

Where are you now.

If you don’t know what your stats are, most hosting plans include at least one analyzer.  If your web host doesn’t, you should switch to one that does.  If you don’t know how to check your web stats, or aren’t sure what to look for, you can contact your web host for help or, contact me at Harbour City SEO directly for a free evaluation on your site’s current performance.

In my other life as marketing director for Hosting Nation, I have the luxury of working in a development environment before placing anything live.  It’s a nice benefit. We can test design, applications and software and pretty much everything.

If you were a fly on the wall, you would hear three words at least once a day.  From me to a co-worker, from them to me or from me to a client.  It’s almost become a bit of a joke, something we utter every time something doesn’t look right.

“Clear your Cache”.

See, browsers like Firefox and Internet Explorer save copies of some of your web files.  Stuff like your stylesheets, graphics and images and processes that run in the background.  They do it so that they can load pages more quickly the second time around.  The pitfall is that when you make changes and upload them to the live server, if you don’t clear your cache before viewing the content you often won’t see the differences.  I’ll tell you now, it can be extremely frustrating.  I’ve seen it result in the hapless mashing of F5 like a rookie gamer playing Street Fighter against the world champ.  I’ve seen it cause grown adults to act like the angry german kid (warning – explicit content – NSFW) and it takes 2 minutes to fix.

Here’s how to do it. (source, wikihow)

Internet Explorer 8

1. Once your browser is open, click the Tools menu and select Internet Options.
2. Be sure the General tab is selected.
3. Under “Browsing history”, click “Delete…”
4. In the new window, be sure the Temporary Internet Files box is checked. You can uncheck everything else you don’t want to delete.
5. Click Delete.

Firefox 1.5 / 2.0 / 3.0

1. Below is the full method, although it is possible to simply go to Tools, and select Clear Private Data, or to just press Ctrl+Shift+Delete. Please note that these options clear what you have set the browser to clear in Tools > Options… > Privacy, which can mean the cache, although it may also include passwords, and search and browsing history, so be careful.
2. Go to Tools and select Options….
3. Go to the Privacy tab, and click Settings… (in the blue box in the image).
4. Select what you would like to have cleared.
5. Return to the Options menu. If you want your cache cleared automatically, every time you close the browser, click the appropriate checkbox (shown in red in an earlier image).
6. Press “Clear Now” under the Settings button.

WikiHow shows you methods for several older versions of IE and Firefox.  If you use Safari, Opera or Chrome use your favourite search engine to find instructions.

The worst part?  We all know better and still forget at least once a day. Maybe writing this post will help.

Canonicalization is a big word, essentially meaning standardization or normalization.  In the context of SEO, it’s best described by Wikipedia.

URL normalization (or URL canonicalization) is the process by which URLs are modified and standardized in a consistent manner… wikipedia

Even more simply, it’s a set of rules written in regular expressions that instruct browsers to redirect your site from http://yourdomain.com to http://www.yourdomain.com (or the opposite, I like the www – but it doesn’t matter in the practical sense)

The point is to make sure that all links resolve to one url.  By default, there are four possible versions of your home page that someone could link to.

http://yourdomain.com

http://www.yourdomain.com

http://yourdomain.com/index.php (or html, or htm)
http://www.yourdomain.com/index.php (or…)

That’s at least four.  Some content management systems, like Joomla, create multiple links your home page – so it’s not unreasonable to have more than four.

Canonicalization, in my opinion, is an effort of vanity. Google won’t penalize you for having multiple links, and I’ve not seen a lack of proper canonicalization affect the typical small business site adversely.  Still, if you have the time, it’s worth the ten minutes it takes to set this up.

Here’s how to canonicalize your site to resolve to the ‘www’ version

1.Open up an FTP client and navigate to the public_html directory of your website (I use FileZilla)
2. Download the .htaccess file
3. Insert the following code (replacing yourdomain.com with your own site)

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^yourdomain\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.yourdomain.com%{REQUEST_URI} [R=301,L]RewriteBase /

RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /([^/]+/)*index\.(html|php)\ HTTP/
RewriteRule ^(([^/]+/)*)index\.(html|php)$ http://yourdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

4. Upload the file to the public_html directory.

That’s it, your site should resolve properly.  That didn’t take long, did it?

If you’re especially lazy, you can download my htaccess sample script - just remember to change yourdomain.com to your sites URL before you upload it.

Have a more complex situation?  Contact me for help or post a comment below.