Tryangled Solutions web designing tips tricks

The Google Search Quality Team is keeping its promise to explain more about how they conduct their work. As usual and expected, it’s fantastically vague, but since a chunk of our readers at any given time are new to search, it’s worth going over.

Writing on the Official Google blog, Amit Singhal, a Google Fellow on the Core Ranking Team, defines Google ranking:

“Google ranking is a collection of algorithms used to find the most relevant documents for a user query. We do this for hundreds of millions of queries a day, from a collection of billions and billions of pages. These algorithms are run for every query entered into most of Google’s search services. While our web search is the most used Google search service and the most widely known, the same ranking algorithms are also used - with some modifications - for other Google search services, including Images, News, YouTube, Maps, Product Search, Book Search, and more.”

Then he gave three philosophies that the Core Ranking Team follows:

1) Best locally relevant results served globally.
2) Keep it simple.
3) No manual intervention.

Singhal says that the team strives for simplicity in their architecture, something that Twitter has been struggling with lately. Obviously, with all the queries conducted and the massive amount of content to be indexed, it coud be easy to piece together a very complex architecture (similar to Google’s woes with their ad products). With approximately 10 ranking updates per week, Singhal says the team takes simplicity in architecture into consideration in every single update.

Singhal also emphasized philosophy #3 - that Google does not hand edit results.

“You are the ones creating pages and linking to pages. We are using all this human contribution through our algorithms. The final ordering of the results is decided by our algorithms using the contributions of the greater Internet community, not manually by us.”

When preparing content for your website, it’s important to remember that writing for the web is very different than writing for print. You need to get your point across quickly and engage your readers before you lose them.

Here are some quick tips to get the best results from your web copy:

Write Compelling Headlines
Always start with a relevant, attention grabbing headline - it can make the difference between the user feeling compelled to read more or choosing to ignore your page. Use sub-headings to define different sections of your content and help your readers locate the information they are looking for.

Make it Short, Sweet and Scannable
In general, people don’t really ‘read’ on the web, they ’scan’. Web readers are impatient - they want quick and easy access to the information they are looking for. Write succinct paragraphs and use bullet points and lists to break your content into scannable chunks.

Emphasise important words
Use Bold and italics to draw attention to important words. This helps improve the ’scanability’ of your content by ensuring the user is drawn to important words.

Use a Conversational Style
Keep it personal and avoid the marketing hype, it doesn’t go down well online. Write as though you were talking in person to your reader.

Build Trust
Establish trust and credibility with your readers by featuring testimonials and case studies. Have you read about the psychological phenomenon of Social Proof? Simply put, it’s when people form their opinions based on the opinions of others. Testimonials can be a very powerful tool for your website.

Use images
The old adage ‘A picture tells 1000 words’ is still true - but don’t go cliché. Photos of smiling, happy business people are overused and ineffective. Consider including some professional photos of your staff, customers, premises or products instead. You can also source suitable and low cost imagery on stock photography websites such as istock.

Consider Layout
Although multi-column content layout is common in print material, single column layouts work best on the web. Web layouts should be clean, simple and uncluttered.

If you want to get listed for secondary keywords use them infrequently in the body of your post and pepper your blog titles or links with them appropriately.

Don’t overdo this or your posts will end up sounding unnatural and spammy to readers.

Possibly one of the most important aspects of all in blogging is brand-building. As Zefrank noted, to be a great brand, you need to be a brand that people want to associate themselves with and a brand that people feel they derive value from being a member. Exclusivity, insider jokes, emails with regulars, the occassional cat post and references to your previous experiences can be offputting for new readers, but they’re solid gold for keeping your loyal base feeling good about their brand experience with you. Be careful to stick to your brand - once you have a definition that people like and are comfortable with, it’s very hard to break that mold without severe repercussions. If you’re building a new blog, or building a low-traffic one, I highly recommend writing down the goals of your brand and the attributes of its identity to help remind you as you write.

When you’re writing for your audience, your content focus, post timing and areas of interest will all become associated with your personal style. If you vary widely from that style, you risk alienating folks who’ve come to know you and rely on you for specific data. Thus, if you build a blog around the idea of being an analytical expert in your field, don’t ignore the latest release of industry figures only to chat about an emotional issue - deliver what your readers expect of you and crunch the numbers. This applies equally well to post frequency - if your blog regularly churns out 2 posts a day, having two weeks with only 4 posts is going to have an adverse impact on traffic. That’s not to say you can’t take a vacation, but you need to schedule it wisely and be prepared to lose RSS subscribers and regulars. It’s not fair, but it’s the truth. We lose visitors every time I attend an SES conference and drop to one post every two days (note - guest bloggers and time-release posts can help here, too).
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