Rival Web Design

Google’s New Canonical Element

Matthew Ryan — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 00:20:27 +0000

One problem for webmasters and web designers is the fear of duplicating content on a website.

Google has systems in place to scan for duplicated content across websites, and apply the appropriate penalties to those who “rip” content off another website and claim it as their own.

Fresh, unique content is by far the best way to add value and interest in your website, and for the most part, majority of webmasters create these sort of articles and content items, however sometimes, Google and other search engines can penalize your site for duplicate content, because the same content appears on two or more URLS in your site.

For Example:

http://www.example.com/
http://www.example.com/home
http://www.example.com/home?sessionID=343343

Each of the above addresses points to the same page and content, however Google has no real way of knowing which one is the correct version of that page. That was until now.

On Feburary 12th, Google’s Webmaster Central blog did an article on the new “Canonical” link tags.

What these tags allow you to do, it specify which is the correct version of a page for Google to index. Let’s take a look how it can be used:

This could be placed in the section of your website on the pages with duplicate content:

http://www.example.com/article.php?id=34333
http://www.example.com/article.php?id=34333&cat=news

This new feature is great, and adds peace of mind to content writers and web developers that as far as Search Engine Optimisation and penalties are concerned, they should be covered.

Get a higher Google page rank

Matthew Ryan — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 23:15:55 +0000

The Google Page Rank is metric used by Google to assign value to a web page. Basically, the higher the PR the more valuable Google sees your site as a resource. So what are the advantages of getting a higher PR you ask? Well, we are going to take a look at these advantages and how to increase your own page rank in this article.

Think of it like this.

When a page links to your site, it is casting an invisible vote to your site. The action of one site linking to another is called a “Backlink”. If the site linking to your site has a high PR to begin with, it will cast a larger vote on your site. Therefore, you can see the advantage in getting other high quality sites linking back to yours.

Google uses this PR to help rank search engine positions, however it is not he only metric used, but its a nice indication on how well Google thinks your site is developing.

So what can be done to increase your page rank?

Adding New Content

It is a great idea to add new content to your site. This can be in the form of a new article, new page on the site or even a new blog post.

Check File Names and Paths

It can also be helpful to check for broken links on your website, and that all pages are linked correctly. Google does not favor rogue pages in your website, and often they are not taken into consideration when calculating your PR. Try to keep all pages on your website properly linked.

Install Google Toolbar

Installing Google toolbar can help you get an indication on a pages PR. It can display a bar, notifying you of the current pages PR. This can help, as it allows you to source higher ranking back links on other websites.

Dont over link

Having quality sites linking to your site is the best way. Avoid paid directories and other link farms if possible. Even though some may have a high PR, you need to remember that this will be distributed over all other sites that the page links to.

DMOZ and Yahoo

DMOZ and Yahoo both have directories which are though to help the ranking of your website if you get listed. The common thought nowdays is that this does not have as much weighting as it used to, but if you can submit your sites to these directories, it could be benificial for your ranking.

Avoid Banned Sites

The last thing you want is another site bringing your ranking down. Try to avoid getting your site linked from banned or spam websites. Chances are Google is already aware of the site and penalized it for its SEO tactics, so linking back to your site……doesn’t look good.

Create Valid Pages

Make sure the pages on your website validate. You can use the W3C validator to give you a breakdown of if your site is valid, and what issues need to be addressed to make your site valid. A clean, valid site often means it can be searched correctly by Google’s Googlebot and more information is obtained instead of skipped over due to poor document syntax.

Google blacklisted….everyone?

Matthew Ryan — Sun, 01 Feb 2009 03:06:21 +0000

Last night for a period of about 15 - 20 minutes, the most popular search engine in the world decided that it would flag every website on the internet as being Malware, and pushed everyone who clicked on a link to a page indicating that the site was Malware and should not be viwed.

Although this only took place for about 20mins, twitter lit up immediatly with #googlemayharm and other similar tweets. It just goes to show how reliant the world is becoming on always having access to services such as Google, and when things start to go wrong, how quickly users from the community respond.

Everything seems fine now, most likely just a glitch on Googles behalf.

Marketing your Online Store

Matthew Ryan — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 05:09:19 +0000

Continuing our e-commerce articles, we are going to look into what you can do to help market your online store once it is up and running. It is one thing having an online store, but another to drive traffic to the site and convert browsing customers into paying customers.

One of the best ways to drive traffic to your site is to successfully identify your target market. Knowing who is or will be interested in shopping on your site is a very important aspect to cover. Once you know who is going to be using your site, we can start to identify areas that will appeal to the customers for our advertising.

Let’s look at some areas that can assist in your online marketing:

Search Engine Optimisation: A very important thing for e-commerce stores to do is to get their website optimized. Website optimization includes quite a few things when done properly. For example, proper research into the keywords for your target market, Meta tags (additional page information stored in the website code) and keyword density analysis.

Having specific product related information on each product page will increase exposure on the internet. It is also important to make sure your website is standards compliant, to ensure that your website is able to be “crawled” properly by Google and other search engines.

Email Marketing: Creating an exciting, easy to read template and creating an interesting newsletter can really help in promoting products. An example of how email marketing can be used is “Catch of the Day”. This online e-commerce website sends out daily emails to clients detailing the latest “Special” for that day. This can be seen as “Pushing” information rather than the traditional method of finding products yourself. (“Pulling”).

Email marketing campaigns should have links back to your website. This will force customers to re-visit your website and give you further opportunities to sell your products or services. Combining some analytical software with your email marketing campaigns and you will have a very powerful marketing tool at your disposal, giving you valuable, real-time information on your customers and trends.

Pay Per Click: All online stores need to start somewhere. It can be very difficult to generate customer’s interest when you are just starting out on the internet. A helpful method is using “Pay Per Click” ie Google Adwords. This system works by guaranteeing you search engine listings under the “Sponsored Links” section of the search results. The catch is that to appear for more popular keywords, you will need to set a higher budget per click. Pay per Click is a great way to get noticed whilst you are waiting for your organic listings to rank higher due to the SEO work.

Sponsored Blogging: Many popular web blogs offer sponsored blogging. This means that they will review your product or service and offer it as a blog post for their websites community. This is a great way of sparking interest in your products and services, and you will find that the more respected the website or blogger, the higher yield in returns you will see due to people taking the advice of the blogger and purchasing your stores products.

Link & Advertising Programs: I’m sure everyone has seen web banners and other types of flashy advertising on websites. In some cases, the advertising has nothing to do with the website or its target audience. A much better idea is to use an online web advertising group that will get your link or banner listed on sites that a relevant to your target market. This way you can guarantee that the majority of clicks on the ad should be relevant and hopefully have a higher chance of converting into a sale.

If you have an online store, think about the types of advertising you do online. Which ones work well and which ones don’t? If you are not doing any of the suggestions we have given, consider trying them and watching your online e-commerce websites flourish.

Stay tuned for the next edition of our e-commence articles. If you need any help or assistance on anything mentioned in our articles, please feel free to contact Rival Web Design.

Odin Sneak Peek

Matthew Ryan — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 03:49:47 +0000

The Rival development team has been hard at work with the development of the new Rival CMS, Odin.

Odin CMS will allow clients to make changes to their own website using an easy to use Interface.

Rival would like to offer a sneak peek to our clients on the development progress of Odin, as it is feedback from clients that has been used to develop an even better Content Management Solution than the already excellent CMS we use in house.

The first thing you will notice about Odin is that it has a totally new and easy to use interface. We have put a lot of time into designing an interface that is clean and simple, but gives the user full control of their websites.

The basic Odin Content Management Package will include the following:

Content Management
Page Element Management
User Management
News Management
SEO Management

Odin will also have a range of additional modules that can be installed and configured to allow ease of management for your site. Some of these include:

Gallery Management
Link Management
Contact Management
Web Statistics Module
RSS Feeds
Blogs
Simple e-commerce (for smaller sites that d0 not require our full e-commerce solution)
Form Builder
Newsletter Management
And Many More…..

Rival takes pride in it work, and therefore Odin will remain in development until all the bugs are ironed out and we have only the highest quality application to offer our clients.

Appearance and Security Online

Matthew Ryan — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 14:35:46 +0000

Continuing our E-commerce and online shopping, we are going to take a look at the importance of an ecommerce sites appearance and its security.
Just like the more traditional stores, online stores need to worry about security and appearance, but what exactly does this involve with an online presence?

There are many terms that get thrown around with security online, such as SSL, payments gateways, transactions etc. Throughout this guide, we hope to give you a little more insight into how you can help improve your online ecommerce presence.

Appearance

A user usually makes up their mind on a website within the first 10 seconds. If the site is poorly designed or covered with unnecessary advertising, it can turn potential customers away. This is why it is important to have a very clear, well thought out design for your online presence.
A well thought out design can help raise the “wow” factor a customer experiences when they visit an ecommerce website. It also helps raise he customers trust in a website, as they have taken the time to produce a beautiful, functional website.

What can be done?

You can increase a customer’s trust in your online business by following some of the following points:

Make sure your site is secure: Make sure you have a valid SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) certificate installed on your server. Using valid SSL will make the customers web browser alert them of the secure nature of the site by displaying a padlock image in either the URL entry box or in the bottom browser bar in older browsers.

Show accepted payment methods: This may sound like a pretty straight forward point, however it can become complicated. Depending on what payment methods your website uses, customers may be turned away from your site. You need to display the trusted brands for online payments. If this is credit cards, show the logos of all accepted credit card brands.

Advertise specials and promotions: If you are offering a special or promotional service on your website, the customers need to be aware of it. One of the most common methods of promoting and offering specials and discounts with online stores is the user of “Return Client Codes” or “Coupon Codes”. These are a great way to get return business from your existing clients or to attract a new client to the site. The best way to make a customer aware of the special is to post it on the home page. A graphical banner detailing the special is a great way to attract attention and turn customers who are simply researching into purchasing customers.

Check for broken links and errors: It can be a very good idea to check your site monthly to make sure all links are functioning correctly. It is also a good idea to process a test transaction to make sure everything is functioning normally. Ecommerce websites usually rely on external services, such as payment gateways, therefore it is recommended to check that the services are functioning correctly to make sure you are not missing any transactions due to glitches or errors.

Take time with your content: Useful and well written content can increase a customer’s trust in an online store. It is important to take the time when writing product descriptions and general page content. Check for spelling and grammatical errors, and avoid cut and pasting large amounts of data from the products website.

Listen to customer feedback: Customers who provide feedback on a website like to see that their feedback has been considered. Attach a news page to your site and inform the customers when you have made improvements to the site.

Monitor your statistics: Most ecommerce packages and servers offer web statistics software and tools. It is important you monitor the stats. They can reveal useful information on how your clients move around your website, where they enter the site and where they stop browsing. IE, you notice overseas clients are leaving your website half way through the checkout process. Looking at the statistics, you notice it is at the stage where International Postage is calculated. This information is important for you, and you can look into finding cheaper alternatives for postage or offering incentives for customers overseas to purchase.

Have Terms and Conditions of sale: This can be a very important document or page to have on any ecommerce website. It will outline the terms and conditions of sales, as well as allow the store owner to specify return policies on goods and outline special circumstances or conditions that needs consideration during sale.

Implement modern security measures: Make sure you keep up to date with modern security features. Check your website and make sure all forms are secure and that the possibility of them being attacked by “bots” or “automated scripts” is as a minimal. A useful method to check that the user is human and not machine is to use a “Captcha”.

If you missed our last guide on ecommerce imagery, it can be viewed here:

Ecommerce Imagery

Ecommerce Imagery

Matthew Ryan — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 10:41:45 +0000

Shopping online is a totally different experience than the more traditional form of shopping in a shopping center. The main difference is that the remoteness means you are not able to physically see the product you are buying. This is where the importance of high quality, professional photographs really come into play.

The Quality:
The quality of a website and its products can be obtained by the quality of the images displayed on the site. Users of a website have no other visual cues to help them when making purchases, therefore product shots are very important.

The more professional the images on a website, the more professional the website looks. The investment in high quality professional photographs and product shots is definitely worth the investment, with sales conversions having been known to double with the addition of better imagery.

The Quantity:
There is one thing that is clear. Users like seeing more than one image of a product. Unfortunately, many ecommerce websites only show one view of the product. This takes away the user’s ability to fully grasp the scope of the product.

The best thing to do by rule of thumb is to have roughly 2-3 images of a product. This will help give the impression and control the user may have of a product in a physical store, whilst helping them decide whether or not the product is suitable for them.

The Size:
To give the users the best possible shopping experience, images need to be available in a larger version, so the product can be examined in detail. The most common practice of this is having a “Thumbnail” (or small version) and an “Full View” (Enlarged high-resolution version).

It is also most common practice to have the image shots appear in a pop-up window, although with technology today there are many alternatives such as “Lightbox” which will backout the screen and focus the user’s attention on the large preview of the image in the centre of the screen.

The Speed:
Unfortunately, the larger the images and previews get, the longer the time it takes to download the images on a users internet connection. The best solution to this is to have a high quality web server. This will provide optimal speeds to the customers of your website, enabling them to download the images quickly, enhancing their online shopping experience.

If you have a large quantity of users viewing your website, you may also consider having additional media servers to serve the images from multiple locations around the world; this can help ensure all users have a pleasant shopping experience. Speak to your Rival Professionals for more information on web hosting services.

The Detail:
Depending on the products you are selling, they may have smaller or more complex areas that may require more detail.
For example, if you were photographing a laptop computer, customers would most likely want to see the connections on the front, rear and sides of the computer to make sure it meets their needs. The solution? Include close up shots of all the complex areas of the product.

A good method to use is to take 1 full view of the product, then smaller close up views of areas of importance. Having these detailed photos could be the difference in an online sale or not.

The Package:
Some products may include one or more smaller packages. For example a digital camera. It is one thing to include a photo of the camera itself, but what about all the extras? It is good to answer all the customers’ questions before they even think of them! The best way to accomplish this is to take a “Full Package Shot” of the contents of the package.

It is also a good idea to include the product box in these photographs if possible, jus in case the product has multiple versions which may be similar in one way or another.

The Relevance:
One of the most important things to remember when dealing with ecommerce imagery is relevance of the images. Irrelevant pictures detract from the message trying to be portrayed by the store owner. It is best to keep the image precise and clear, don’t include images that could confuse the user or make them doubt the products quality.

Summary
Professional, high quality website images help sell products online. Fact.

The internet sometimes gets a negative spin put on it because of users not getting the products they “thought” they were getting. It is best to keep your ecommerce site professional and remain loyal to your customers by providing precise and detailed images.

If you would like to discuss your ecommerce website with us, the friendly Rival staff will be more than happy to answer any queries you may have.
Stay tuned for the next edition of our ecommerce guide.

New Highspeed Server

Matthew Ryan — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 10:40:19 +0000

Rival has recently purchased a new high-speed web server.

The new web server has been customized to ensure our CMS product runs as quickly and as smoothly as possible.

The new servers are located in Sydney, offering even additional speed for clients in the Sydney region, whilst still retaining competitive speeds on an international scale.
Most existing client’s sites will be automatically moved to the new server with little or no disruption to the website.
This new webserver will be the foundation for our new content management system that will be being released later this year.

If you would like to learn more about our new hosting platform, feel free to contact us.

Improved SEO Reports

Matthew Ryan — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 10:39:51 +0000

Rival is glad to announce that our SEO reports have been improved.

SEO is becoming more and more essential to keep a website performing at its best. SEO generates useful traffic by focusing on keywords and phrases that relate to your products and services.
Some of the features in our SEO reports can include:

Keyword suggestions
Related Keywords
Daily World Searches
Competing Sites
Advanced analysis
General Optimization advice
Keyword density

Search Engine View of your site
Indexed pages
Whos linking to you
Who you are linking to
Link popularity score
Compeition analysis
Ranking checks
Website errors or problems

Additionally, our report viewing software has also been upgraded to offer clients an easy way of viewing their SEO reports in one spot, and seeing the progress they are making in the search engine rankings.

For more information on SEO, please feel free to call us on 02 8004 1732.