Archive for January, 2012

An acoustic session about SOPA

Sunday, January 22nd, 2012

 

Megan Aney

Community Manager

I’m in my lounge room; Emma & Cam are singing Gnarls Barkley ‘Crazy” with Kyle strumming his guitar. Emma is recording the jam session to upload to Youtube. Later Emma, Cam & Kyle will be convicted of piracy. The 23 year old who uses Youtube as an avenue to share her gift, to be a part of something bigger than herself will be reprimanded of giving joy. In a world where SOPA is passed globally Emma’s light will be left behind in Cronulla. She will never get discovered, she’ll never meet PJ Harvey, and she’ll live in the present not dreaming of the future. 

The reality of SOPA being passed as a law in Australia is a distant thought. But the potential after effects of deconstructing the online arts industry has been noted by the community. 

I’ve been asked all week “what do you think of this whole SOPA thing?” I’m not going to pretend I understand the full implications of the ‘Stop Online Piracy Act’ (SOPA) but I recognised the storm clouds forming. 

We’ve become accustomed to the freedom to redistribute content online. We’ve become more creative beings with the freedom to create content beyond our means. Emma doesn’t pay for the backing tracks she uses to practice singing. Would she be the same performer without A. the support from her Youtube subscribers or B. without the freely available resources she uses to become the best she can be? 

This week Wikipedia went into darkness, Google blacked out their logo, Grooveshark lowered the volume and the people cried out. If you are not sure what SOPA is Wikipedia says “The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) is a United States bill proposed by U.S. Representative Lamar S. Smith (Republican) to expand the ability of U.S. law enforcement to fight online trafficking in copyrighted intellectual property and counterfeit goods.” (Thanks consumer created content Wikipedia)

I personally can’t see how they can limit redistribution of creativity, in an economy that’s based on reproducing people, goods and services. To grow something new you take seeds from an already flourishing flower. Rafael Bonachela (Sydney Dance Company Artistic Director) took inspiration from the music score from Oceans by Italian composer, Ezio Bosso. Did Bonachela pay a fee for the creative inspiration? Who inspired Bosso? 

If the implications of SOPA try and track creativity it’s going to be a never ending murder mystery. Do we have the capabilities to handle an influx of request for permission of redistribution of content? Who does Emma ask or pay to record a Jeff Buckley track? In an age where a new Youtube video is uploaded every second it would be impossible to police creative reproduced content. 

For now Emma is ok. But be prepared to draw your sword.

As Wikipedia said, we’re not done yet. 

In case I’ve ignited curiosity you can watch Emma’s Youtube video’s here. http://www.youtube.com/user/elbwow

 * This blog post first appeared on AdNews

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How to Optimise Website for Search Engines and Users?

Thursday, January 19th, 2012

By Deepty Dabas, SEO Executive

SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is about increasing traffic to a website by optimising it analytically and understanding its use from a consumer/customer perspective. In simpler words the website needs to be user friendly with relevant content, easy to navigate and provide requisite information to the user. Optimising web-pages for search engines and users may sound identical, but are very much different in principle. The main factors to be taken into account while optimising web-pages for users and search engines are:

1. Web page loading speed: Latency is important for a website and its optimisation. A search engine might also look at how quickly pages load and render in a browser. It also accounts in terms of how much time users might expect the page to load and how good experience it might deliver to their users. Faster sites are more likely to create happy users. However, if a site responds slowly, visitors might become impatient, spend less time and leave the page.

Reducing page load times can reduce bounce rates and increase conversion rates. Google has researched the impact on number of searches by slowing down the search results page by 100 to 400 milliseconds and found decrease in searches by 0.2% to 0.6 % for less than half a second’s time.

The speed of a page can be tested at https://developers.google.com/pagespeed/. A higher score in the speed test will require less improvement but, for a page with lower score, recommendations such as minimising URL redirects, combining images into CSS sprites, efficient coding and compressing images can save many bytes of data, are to be considered.

2. Content Allocation on Page:  In regards to content, both users and search engines have similar perspective; they want the information to be in-order and prioritized rather than being scattered.  As the users scan the page for the relevant information, similarly search engines prefer most relevant information at the beginning of the page with clear sign of the heading what the content is about. Thus the content on the page should be organized with appropriate headings, paragraphs and points.

3. Appearance of Content: It is preferred to have a right contrast of colour scheme, text size and style on the web page. Users should have the ease of reading and understanding the content on the page. If the content on a page is not formatted properly it might result in increased bounce rate and more likely less returning users. For example, if a page has 4 paragraphs and all with different font size, then the users might lose interest because of the unusual page structure. Also, it makes it difficult for users to read and consider that website as spam and more likely to leave the page which will result in higher bounce rate. Therefore, use of appropriate colour scheme, font style and size should be carefully considered.

4. Images on page: Communicating information through visual effects have a better impact on the users, as images are eye catching and are easy to understand compared to just text. On the other hand, search engine bots work on algorithms and they can’t index images. Therefore, it is required to add Alt attributes, keywords in the image file name, right anchor text, to images which gives search engines more information on the image content. Adding alt text gives the user a better understanding and description of the image.

5. Navigation: The navigation on your website should be clear and concise. The unnecessary complex website navigation might confuse users as they don’t want to think and try multiple options to find the information they are looking for. Make sure you use appropriate keywords and hierarchy to navigate to a product page. Similarly, search engines look for the keywords to navigate and index the pages accordingly. From search engine perspective, complicated navigation can result in poor indexing as crawlers might not be able to crawl all pages due to many internal links present on a page. Hence, too much confusion can lose the interest of both user and search engines.

SEO Site-Architecture

Source: SEOmoz

6. Prioritize significant content: With increase of access to World Wide Web through smart-phone, tablets and other forms of smart gadgets, the website should be compatible on all form of devices. If a user is accessing website on a small screen or on a smart phone, they expect important content to appear in the beginning of a page. Similarly, to increase chances of indexing the page by search engines, the best practice is to place the important content in beginning of the HTML code of the web page.

7. Importance of Meta title: Title of the page is one of the key elements for both users and search engines. Self-explanatory and a descriptive page title will assist and increase the chances of users clicking on the web page when searching for a particular keyword. In addition, when users search in their bookmark for the website, it raises possibility of revisit. Likewise, search engines give a lot of consideration on the title of web pages which contains clear title with keywords as it helps in increasing the ranking for those keywords. Significant keywords should be covered in the title of a page to give clear understanding of the web page.

8. Web page URL’s: Everything related to a web page should make sense to users. A clear, concise URL increases the chance of recall by users. It should be short, clear, relevant to page and represent a clear flow of navigation and category. For example: www.example.com/services/social-media-optimisation/ implies that social media is one of the services provides by “example”.

On the other hand the URL: www.example.com/services/232social_d.aspx is a complex URL structure, as it is difficult to remember by users and it provides few information for average users as what actually the page is about.

In addition to the usability benefits of structured URLs, SEO can also gain benefits. URLs containing topic related keywords have a constructive result on search engines as they can help in improving keyword ranking, increasing traffic and indexing the web page. For example, www.example.com/used-cars-sydney/ can target both “used cars” and “used cars Sydney” keywords in URL and can help in improving the ranking.

As mentioned in above 8 factors, it is very important to optimise a website from both users and search engine perspective. A well optimised website is more likely to achieve high traffic, increase in conversion rate with a good user experience. Optimising a website is not about putting bulk of content, colourful images, and using complicated navigation with many options. It’s more about providing relevant information with the right structure, choosing appropriate title and many other factors as discussed above.

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