The first new feature to be developed and deployed with a test was the incorporation of a “Recent Articles” list at the bottom of every article.  The recent articles widget filled a large whitespace on some of the shorter articles.  In addition to that, the site picked up by the Google news service, which resulted in an uptick in traffic landing on the article page rather than the homepage.  We wanted to encourage this traffic view a couple of stories.

Before

This would be my second test with the shiny new to me Google Website Optimizer.  I chose to set the test up as a multi-variant test.  I liked the multi-variant test because I could easily use a bit of ajax to load the different versions of the “Recent Articles” list.  Since the test was going to be on every article page, this was much simpler then trying to develop an A/B test, which would involve having multiple URLs for every article.

The test had 1 variable with 2 variations. The two variations I chose were to use an image with a headline or just a text headline.  When we designed the site we wanted to make sure that every article had a picture.  I made sure that the list would not show two articles with the same picture, other than that the headlines were identical.

Headlines with Pictures

Text Headlines

I set up the test rather quickly.  I had run one other multi-variant ajax test in the past and converting the code for this test was a breeze.  Since our goal was to get them to view additional articles, I placed the conversion code on a click of a recent article from the list.

My prediction was that the image version would perform better than the text only version because people like pictures.  I let the test run and got some pretty quick feedback.  The text only version took the lead out of the gate and never gave it up.

I let the test run for two weeks.  We had 24,000 runs of the test, split evenly between the two variations.  The text version converted at 9.5-11.7% during the course of the test.  The image version converted at 6.8-7.8% during the test.  At the end of the day the text version was a 42.9% improvement.  This was a substantial win.  Since the article page accounts for 55-60% of the sites page views the benefit of this test can be calculated by:

% of page views the article page represents * % of clicks on a recent article

60% * 9.5% = a 5.7% increase in overall page views (Text only)
60% * 6.8% = a 4.1% increase in overall page views (Image and Text)

Bottom line: My intuition was wrong on this test.  People seem to find the large text only headlines more clickable than the images.  A 5.7% increase in page views is huge for our site. The winning variation added an extra 1.6% to the top line.

The Winning Combo

If you would like to see the winning version in action you can check it out here.

What SEO IS

Most people approach SEO like a game.  It is not.  SEO is not black magic.  It is simply organizing your page in a way that allows people to find the information they are looking for.  Google has some pretty smart people working for it.  With all of their smarts, Google could develop a super spider that is capable of  crawling and understanding the content on any page, despite poor content or buggy HTML.   So why don’t they?  The answer is simple, it would lower the quality of their search results.  The website design guidelines that Google has set forth, are not for Google ease (that is a side effect), but they to ensure a high quality product for their customer.

So here is my checklist (a work in progress) for items that need to be considered when designing a new site:

1. Clear URLS
2. An up to date sitemap
3. Quality title and meta tags
4. Quality content

Clear URLs

If you are in the web design business you have heard of pretty URLs.  Sure they look pretty, but their beauty is more than surface deep.  Pretty or clear URLs let the users know where they are about to go before they go there.  For example:

http://www.affiliatelinkvault.com/features/url-cloaking (Good)

http://www.someothersite.com/?p=48ohf&id=494h8f49f&session=448n44ilieh43oh4r4

It is clear that the first link will take the user to a page that is about URL cloaking.  The user is unsure of the destination of the second link.  The page could be about cars or sports or makup.  They have no way of knowing.  Many studies have been done showing that shorter meaningful URLs get more clicks and the users stay on those pages longer.

Another benefit of starting with URLs in your site design is that it allows you to think through how your site will be designed and where everything will go.  Before you do any design work or write a single line of code, I recommend that you sit down with a sheet of paper and write out all the URLs you will have on your site.  Having everything decided before hand helps the developer to work faster because they won’t have to guess about what the URL will be when coding things up.  With all of your URLs created, you can quickly put together a set of basic files as a boiler plate for future development.

Sitemap

While search engines are pretty good at finding new pages, a sitemap makes it much easier for them.  Since our goal is to show up in the search engine results, we want to make it easy for them.  Sitemaps are more than URLs.  They also include information about the frequency at which pages are updated as well as how important the content is.  It is important to set the frequency value for each URL to a realistic value.  If you only update a page once a month, put monthly.  Setting everything to high priority and daily updates will not help you.  Google is smart enough to know when a sitemap’s update times and priorities are not correct.  Google wants to give its users quality data.  You must produce quality data for Google.  There are not any shortcuts to creating a good site.

Another thing to consider is to integrate the generation of a sitemap into any CMS tools that your site uses.  When you are adding a new page you need to ensure that you add it to the sitemap.  If you store this data correctly you can use it to generate an XML sitemap for the search engines and an HTML sitemap for the end users.

Quality Title and Meta Tags

Most people will write a whole page and publish it before thinking about the title or the meta tags.  I find it is a good habit to have, to type the title first and write the meta description before any content is created.  As you write the content, you can use the title and the description as targets.  When you finish writing the content, reread the title and description.  If they do not line up with the content, then you either need to update the title and description or revise your content to match.  If you are following this method of writing then you won’t have to worry about creating unique and relevant title and description tags.

Quality Content

This may be the last item in my checklist, but it is the most important.  The other points in the checklist are designed to help you have a good framework to hang your content on.  A web page without good content is at best just noise at worst it is spam.  Take the time to learn how to write for the web (something I am just beginning to understand).  Most people only spend 4 seconds reading per 100 words.  Because of that fact, it is important to clearly organize and highlight important content.

There is no substitution for quality content.  That content may be images, video or text.  Just make sure it is clear, unique and worth consuming.  Create a target with the title and keywords and make sure that your content stays on that target.  If you find yourself pulled into too many different directions on a single page, the consider making multiple pages.

Take some time to learn HTML.  Having valid HTML is important.  If you understand when to use basic tags such as headings tags (H1, H2, etc), list tags (ul, ol, li) and paragraph (p) tags, you can do a much better job at describing your page to the search engines and display it prettier to your users.

Summary

SEO principles are not magic.  They are designed to identify sites with quality relevant content and reward them with top rankings on the search engine results page (SERP).  Designing a site with SEO principles will not only make your site more attractive to search engines, but will also help your users find what they are looking for.