People don’t read text on a screen the same way they read a book or magazine. Instead of starting at the top and working their way down, according to eye-tracking data, their eyes skip about like a child on hot sand. At most, they read about a quarter of the words on the page.

Worse, they spend most of their daily lives reading things written by other people, not you. They are one click away from leaving your website and going elsewhere. Some people (especially marketing folk) think that wrapping up words in PDF documents will solve these problems. Wrong. Other people (especially designers and, for some reason, restaurant owners) think that Adobe Flash is the answer. Wrong again.

It’s a brutal environment for writers and only the fittest survive. The only reliable way to make people read what you have to say online is to write it better. I have dedicated the last decade to writing things better and here are a few tips based on my own experience:

• Write less. Put your copy on a diet. Aim for a 50 percent cut and make the text bigger and easier to read.

• Use shorter words. Big words don’t make you sound big and clever at all. Actually, the opposite is true, according to Standford research.

• Scannable text. Make it easier for readers to find what they want by making your text scannable. Use links, headings, subheads, pull quotes, bold or italic text to highlight key points and provide signposts for readers.

• Avoid hype. People are bombarded with advertising and spin. They have pretty good BS detectors. So, if you want to be trusted, don’t sound like an advert. Be specific. Don’t use big-up adjectives. Avoid hype. Don’t state the obvious.

• Use images. The brain is capable of limited parallel processing. This means that it can look at a picture and think about some text at the same time. You can use this to add colour, flavour and emotion to your text. Stock libraries and public domain images can leaven copy on any web page.

• Use mockup tools. Good mockup tools can help you design web pages, newsletters or whatever quickly and focus on copy and structure before you get expensive designers involved.

• Good headlines. Think of a headline as the invitation to a party. You want to explain why people should come and who’s going to be there. The fashion today is to be descriptive rather than poetic so ‘How to…’ and ’10 tips for…’ work well.

• Be conversational. Don’t be afraid of being yourself. Let your hair down. Have a sense of humour. Talk directly to the reader. Go on! I give you my permission.

• Be easy to read. Use readability tools and common sense to make your text as readable as you can. Even if you want professors to read your site, write for schoolchildren. It’ll be easier on all of them.

Name:Guest Blogger

About:Fancy writing a guest article for our blog? As well as exposure to all our readers, you'll get an incoming link to your site? Send us an email with your idea to marketing [at] heartinternet.co.uk.

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If you do, send me a summary of your idea (matthew.telfer[at]heartinternet.co.uk), and if it captures our imagination and is suitable for our audience then we will publish it along with a biog about who you are and what you do.

What to write about?
The aim of our blog is to provide our readers with practical ideas they can apply to their own website. For example, you could write about:
•    Social media best practise
•    “How to…” style mini- guides for Photoshop
•    Resources for CMS (WordPress, Expression Engine, Joomla etc)
•    Step by step tutorials for Perl, PHP, Ruby etc
•    SEO tips and advice (On site or off site)
•    User experience (design, testing and improving)
•    Analytics (beginner and advanced)
•    Etc

For inspiration, here are a couple of examples of our guest blog posts:
•    Local Vs national SEO
•    Making your website fully accessible for visually impaired and blind users
•    Top 10 Joomla extensions you can’t live with out


There are no hard rules about length of the copy, but it needs to be original (i.e. not published elsewhere), interesting to read, cover a topic to a good level and be relevant.

Name:Matthew Telfer

About:Matthew is Heart Internet's Marketing Manager, and has held senior marketing positions in the web hosting industry for 5 years. With a passion for online marketing, Matthew is responsible for shaping strategy and developing the Heart Internet brand.

Posts by Matthew (242)

Russell English is a freelance web designer and has been running StormIT for the past 10 years specialising in building Joomla based wesbites. http://www.stormit.co.uk

If you have an idea for an article and would like to see it published on our blog and linked to in our monthly newsletter get in touch with us at marketing@heartinternet.co.uk

Joomla is a content management system (CMS) which enables you to build Web sites and powerful online applications and thanks to it’s easy to set up and support from a large community of developers, it has proven to be one of the most popular one click installs that comes free with Heart Internet web hosting.

Having designed many Joomla websites, I always find myself installing the Joomla package on my latest website and then having to remember which Extensions I need to install to make the site streamlined for SEO and work the way I need it to. After several years of running Joomla I started to realise that I had to compile a list of “Must Have” Joomla extensions.  This is a brief run down on which extensions I think every site needs!

JCE
An advanced, configurable WYSIWYG editor for Joomla! based on Moxiecode’s TinyMCE. Includes advanced Image/Media, File and Link handling, plug-in support, and an Administration interface for editor configuration.

Google Verify
A must-have Plugin to make Google Webmaster Tools verification a bit easier. Works with the Meta Tag method and no template adjustments are needed. This is ideal for website with multiple templates or demo sites, no templates adjustments needed when you add a new template this Plugin will make sure you stay verified.

Joomla 1.5 SEO Patch
You can improve the SEO settings of Joomla 1.5 with this free SEO patch for Joomla 1.5. This patch solves the issues in regards of the settings within the html head section of your html page. The patch allows you to gain fully control over the META and title settings in the http header settings in Joomla 1.5 generated pages

Google Analytics Tracking Module
Your perfect companion for getting Google Analytics to work on your Joomla site!

Joomap
Joomap is a sitemap component for Joomla. This gives you control over which menu’s you want present in your site map, which you can then upload straight to Google!

JoomlaXplorer
FTP Manager within your Joomla backend! It allows you to edit files, delete, copy, rename, archive and unpack files/directories directly on your server, all from within the Joomla Adminstration site!

Kunena
This is the must have forum for your site.  Does everything that a good forum component should do and more!

Phoca Photo Gallery
This component is the easiest and best photo gallery component that there is. You can have multiple categories along with child objects within them. Very good and very useful!

VirtueMart
The one and only e-commerce solution for Joomla as far as I’m concerned. This is a great component and integrates perfectly into any Joomla installation.

JoomlaPack
The ONLY open-source backup component for Joomla that you need! It’s simple mission, is create a site backup that can be restored on any Joomla! capable server. Ajax powered, very easy to use!

Name:Guest Blogger

About:Fancy writing a guest article for our blog? As well as exposure to all our readers, you'll get an incoming link to your site? Send us an email with your idea to marketing [at] heartinternet.co.uk.

Posts by Guest (4)

If you have an idea for an article and would like to see it published on our blog and linked to in our monthly newsletter get in touch with us at marketing@heartinternet.co.uk

Background

When building, designing or re-designing a website, there are many factors that need to be taken into consideration.  With many webmasters prioritizing aspects like visual appeal, eye catching flash animations and non labelled image links, they are, unfortunately overlooking one major consideration…and that is the issue of “web accessibility” for visually impaired and blind users.

You may be thinking “how does a blind or visually impaired person use the internet?”  Well, with screen reading technology, the ability to increase font size and change the text and background colour to create a suitable contrast, along with a dedication to web accessibility, it can make it possible for this section of society to use the internet perfectly well.  So, if websites are displaying certain information purely via a medium like animation or an image, it’s not difficult to understand how this is excluding a significant percentage of users.  Think of this from a business point of view, you are, on a fundamental level, making it impossible for potential customers to access your services!

An RNIB (Royal National Institute For The Blind) review, carried out by a team at the School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine in 2005, revealed that there are approximately 2 million people in the UK alone suffering from significant sight loss so you can appreciate web accessibility is an important aspect that needs addressing. One thing to note is that accessibility can easily be integrated into a website with very little compromise, simply by being aware of what constitutes “inaccessibility”.  So, to the question of “how to make a website accessible?” Well, as with any project you can pull out all the stops and work on every possible aspect, but for the sake of this article, I’ll highlight the issues to be addressed, along with what can be done to integrate web accessibility.

Navigation: Make accessible

Implementing “headings” into a webpage will make it possible for a blind or VIP user to easily navigate and jump to sections of a page via keystrokes.  Code example: e.g, <h1>Welcome</h1>, .  This will also help sighted and low vision users to find specific sections of the page even quicker, along with eliminating screen reader users having to arrow down a page to find relevant content.  Remember, what’s seen on the screen isn’t always how data is processed by the browser.

Images: Make accessible

Even though someone can’t see, in many cases they still want to know what a certain image is, as it can be relevant.  Using a screen reader, whenever an image is encountered, it will simply say something along the lines of “graphic”.  By adding the “alt” attribute to the image tag, you can add a brief description of what the image is.  Code example: e.g, <img src=”image.jpg” width=”96″ height=”76″ alt=”Company logo, a red sun rising behind a snow-capped mountain”>.  So, instead of hearing “graphic”, the user will hear your description.  This may seem unnecessary, but with a page with many graphics, it will bring relevance to the VIP user.

Images links: Make accessible

Often webmasters use an image as a link to another page.  As above, a screen reader user would only hear “link graphic”…they will have no idea what the link is linking to. One way around this is to incorporate the name of the link into the “alt” attribute of the image.   Code example: e.g, <a href=”target.html”><img src=”image.jpg” width=”96″ height=”76″ alt=”Click for target page”></a>.

Flash multi media: Make accessible

Flash is often inaccessible and, if very active, can be very distracting to VIP’s, as well as other disabled users, e.g, people who have epilepsy.  Having vital information within flash or adjacent to flash can make it very difficult, so please be aware of this. Usually the icons within a flash player need to be clicked with a mouse or are simply a “button”.  Like an image link, a button tells the VIP user nothing.  There are many alternative flash players which are coded to label these buttons, so if a screen reader user moves to a button, rather than saying “button” it will say something like “full screen button”. You Tube uses such a player and this can be a great accessibility plus for any site.

One more thing to think of is providing an alternative.  E.g, if the flash is playing music, then give the user an alternative means of accessing it, a “text.m3u” link that will stream the music or video for example.

Java: Be aware

There are a host of java codes that add supposed functionality to a website, but in many cases these can prove to be totally inaccessible.  This can be a minefield, but you need to be aware that although things may look great, it can be unusable to a screen reader user.  Text based java can be ok, e.g., clocks, links, etc, but many things like chat/voice chat rooms, etc are often not.  There’s no easy way around this, but please be aware of these java code pitfalls.

Font and colour: Be aware

Giving a user the choice of changing the font, text size/colour and background colours is a huge plus for any website with accessibility in mind.  Code can easily be obtained to achieve this and will benefit all VIP users from the slightly impaired to the partially sighted.

A final note

A screen reader user will exclusively use the keyboard for access.  So, please be aware that if you can only access something with a mouse and not the keyboard, there is an accessibility issue.

Accessibility is about inclusion.  Unfortunately, not everything can currently be made accessible, but if you address the areas that can be changed and accommodate all users where possible, you are driving forward the crucial issues surrounding web accessibility.

Name:Guest Blogger

About:Fancy writing a guest article for our blog? As well as exposure to all our readers, you'll get an incoming link to your site? Send us an email with your idea to marketing [at] heartinternet.co.uk.

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Due to the exponential growth of the web, the process of gaining and maintaining high search engine listings – known as Search Engine Optimisation or SEO – is becoming incredibly challenging for everyone but for the smaller local business, SEO is turning into a one-sided war.  Quite simply, there’s just not enough room on the first page of the search engine results pages for everyone and inevitably, the first to be frozen out are the small guys.

For small businesses, facing their industry’s big names in the search engines can be a no-win situation.  Think Tesco versus a corner shop, Tony and Guy versus a small hairdresser and Stagecoach versus a local drama school.  By focusing on national SEO (thanks to much smaller resources) a local business is unlikely to ever appear alongside these business behemoths at all.  And we all know that it is a rare person who bothers to click onto the second page of Google.  Never mind pages 3, 4 and 5.

In 2006, iProspect, a search engine marketing firm based in Massachusetts, USA, stated in their White Paper Search Engine User Behavior Study, “The importance of appearing high in the search results has increased over time… more search engine users are clicking on the first page now (62% [2006]) than in 2004 (60%) than in 2002 (48%).  Inversely, fewer search engine users are willing to click on results past the third page now (10% [2006]) than in 2004 (13%) than in 2002 (19%).  Fast-forward to 2009 – and assuming  that these trends have continued, a business’ appearance in the first pages front of the search engines results, is more crucial than ever.

More recently, AOL released figures on CTR (click through rates) for the different positions in their index. The data set was sufficiently high enough to be considered accurate and thus can be expected to reflect traffic levels across most search engines – Google included. According to AOL’s results, only 10% of all searches resulted in clicks beyond page 1 of the results.

Yet, many small businesses bring SEO failure upon themselves, by not distinguishing between local SEO and national SEO.  Local SEO is similar to national SEO – but with one notable difference.  The keywords and content (images and information) are geographically specific.  While national SEO focuses on broad keywords, such as “Plumbers”, local SEO uses local modifiers:  “Plumbers, St. Albans, Hertfordshire”. And while the traffic will be lower in local SEO campaigns, they will pull in more qualified prospects.  After all, a plumber in Chester is of no use to an overflowing toilet in St. Albans.  Optimising locally also helps to build local relationships. In his 2008 book “The Complete SEO Copywriting Guide for Search Engine Rankings and Sales Conversion – Content Rich”, Jon Wuebben estimates that every month a billion local searches are made, and that it’s growing at a rate of 20-30% every year.

Thanks to recent algorithmic changes by Google over the last 12 months or so,the likelihood of locals finding you when they type in “Your Trade, Your Town” is now much higher.  Nobody really knows precisely what Google has done, or is currently doing for that matter – we only know what works and what does not through our own exhaustive testing.  What we do know, however,, is that Google is increasingly placing much more emphasis on local and geographical searches.  It has even been rumoured that  soon, users will be able to search Google within their own geographic parameters. So by modifying their sites to target local keyword phrases, local businesses will undoubtedly see significant improvement in their search engine placement – especially as local or geographic keyword phrases have much less competition anyway. The modifications required to optimise locally,  include  placing the chosen geographic keyword in the following areas:

• Title Tag <title>
• Meta Description Tag  <Meta description=”…”>
• Heading Tags <H1>, <H2> etc
• In the page content (bolding them for added weight, if possible)
• In an Alt tag or two
• In the footer of the home page

But remember NOT to keyword stuff- once or twice per tag type or content section should be sufficient.

Google’s Keyword Tool is a great tool with which to find effective keyword phrases: https://adwords.google.co.uk/select/KeywordToolExternal.  Here, a business is able to generate keyword ideas in two ways – by getting Google to scan the contents of their own website, or by inserting descriptive keywords (for example, “clothes shop Bath”).  Once one of these methods is selected, they insert either the URL of their website, or a few keyword phrases into the search box. The results page will reveal, not only related search terms, but also the average search volume per month.

A free Google Maps Listing will go nicely with these newly modified search terms.  It’s a highly effective way for local businesses to build up an online presence.  In fact, it’s a must.  To make use of this powerful tool, a local business must first create an account at https://www.google.com/accounts/ With this account, the business will be able to sign into  Google’s Local Business Centre http://www.google.com/local/add?hl=en-gb&gl=gb.  And it is here that they can create their free listing – including their contact details, opening hours and even product images and YouTube video.   Once a business has been verified and included in Google Maps, it can edit the contents at any time.

As well as making it even easier for local customers to find local companies, using this tool gives local businesses a second bite at the cherry to appear on that coveted first page.  This is because, in the majority of cases, Google will stick up to 10 of these listings ABOVE the normal organic results, when a geographic keyword is used. Go try it – search Google for plumbers + your town or city and see what happens!

Yahoo Local is another excellent local SEO resource. It offers a similar service to Google’s Maps Listing.  It’s not free however – the price varies according to the business location and the keyword phrase utilised.  But as all BT Internet users have Yahoo as their default search engine, it comes with a huge advantage.  Think of all those potential customers!

Other tips…

A further advantage of local SEO over national SEO, is that the popularity of famous landmarks or buildings in any given town, can be leveraged.  Let’s say you have a clothes shop in Brighton.  By simply embedding a picture of The Royal Pavilion on your site, for example (assuming it has been tagged appropriately), you’re likely to pull in a heap of local traffic.

Allowing customers to leave reviews on your website is another great promotional tool.  As your customers are likely to know you personally, they’ll be more likely to leave favourable reviews.  And as the readers of these reviews are likely to be other locals, the reviews will hold more credibility than those that appear on more corporate and national websites.  In this way, local trust and credibility is built.

If you are a business that gets most of its custom from the local market, yet are still relying on broad-stroke, national SEO techniques to get you high up in the search engines, then you are risking your website disappearing into the depths of the internet altogether.

About the Author: Andy Cocker is a Search Engine Marketing Consultant, with over 10 years’ experience.  He is the founder director of Architekt Web Promotion and has recently set up a dedicated Local SEO website.

If you are one of our customers and you would like to submit an article for us to post on our blog get in touch with us to discuss your ideas or to find out more at marketing@heartinternet.co.uk

Name:Guest Blogger

About:Fancy writing a guest article for our blog? As well as exposure to all our readers, you'll get an incoming link to your site? Send us an email with your idea to marketing [at] heartinternet.co.uk.

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