dannytalk ™ A Danny Ng Blog

SEO Implications of using CSS Display None/Image Replacement

danny — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 12:45:24 +0000

It is a known problem that search engine crawlers aren’t able to read images, hence they aren’t able to determine what the image is about. However, this can be overcomed by utilising the alt attribute of the img tag to describe the image so that search engines are able to read what the image is about.

On the other hand, I do believe that it may be better to optimise your on-page using actual text than using the image alt attribute on certain situations. How you can do this is by using CSS to replace text that can either be within anchor, header tags or simply text in general with background images . Obviously you don’t want to overdo this (i.e. apply to all images on the page) lest you trigger Google’s spam alert and also it’s very time consuming!

So is using CSS to optimise your on-page illegal in the eyes of Google? Will you be considered trying to obfuscate the search engines for SEO purposes, hence getting yourself banned from the SERPs? The answer to this is how you do it and the question to ask yourself is, are you trying to be dodgy?

The Way To Get Yourself Banned

In Google Webmasters help under hidden text and links, it is pretty clear what are the criterias to get yourself banned. Although not in the list, I would avoid using text-indent: -9999px to hide your text but rather use display:none instead.

I would say the reason for this is because the text-indent property according to w3c is to be used for text formatting purposes, not visual formatting. However, the display property is used for visual formatting purposes instead which fits the purpose of using it to ‘replace’ text with images as it is a visual aspect.

Algorithmically, Google does not ban websites from the SERPs that use CSS to hide things and obviously would go through some sort of manual review. That’s why it’s important that you ensure you don’t have comments in the source code that reveal your intention of keyword spamming or displaying optimised keywords only for the search engines.

The simply rule to follow is this: if you find yourself questioning whether what you’re doing is spam worthy, then it’s probably spam worthy. What you want to make sure is that you’re using css image replacements with the right intention which is to provide accessibility to users that have CSS disabled and to ensure that search engines are able to read and recognise the important aspects of your page that add value to the user experience.

Using CSS Image Replacement The Right Way

Let’s take a look at Allianz’s homepage, a major insurance provider and how they’ve used CSS replacement the correct way.

You can see on the homepage that navigation menu (highlighted in red box) comprises of image menu items that search engines aren’t able to read. Well, they can actually read it if the image files are optimised with the alt attribute, however I do believe that optimised anchor texts have a greater weighting in SEO than image alt attributes. This use of images is obviously aesthetically more appealing to the user than using normal anchor text.

Looking at the non-CSS version when you disable CSS, you can see below (highlighted in red box) that these navigational menus are actually anchor texts. From a text perspective, this is essentially what search engines see when they’re crawling the site.

You can see how Allianz have used CSS to replace these anchor texts with images, which provide users a rich experience but also optimising for search engines at the same time. There’s nothing spammy about this as the anchor text correlates back to what the images are about and there’s no discrepancies or confusion in terms of understanding what the navigational menu is trying to achieve or convey, with or without CSS.

Now let’s look at an example that currently isn’t using CSS replacement but has the potential to do so. When you look at Fallout’s homepage, you will notice that the navigational menus and links comprise of images and no text at all. Even the image alt attributes aren’t optimised which means search engines aren’t able to tell what the images are about and the internal links aren’t optimised at all!

Looking more specifically at the header sections of the document (highlighted in red box), you can see there’s potential here to use CSS replacement to optimise using header tags (i.e. h1, h2, h3). Essentially what they could’ve done is create a div container as the parent of the header tags, use CSS to display the container’s background image and use display:none on the header tags. The end result is with CSS, it still looks the same but without CSS, the header sections are optimised for search engines.

Looking at the current header sections without CSS, you can see these are still images, unrecognisable by search engines.

However, when you optimise it using CSS image replacement, you can see that the header sections are in text and optimised. This is then readable by search engines and informs them that these sections are important as they are headers.

So go ahead and don’t be afraid to use CSS image replacements if you’re doing it in a positive way that help describes what your page and images are about to search engines and does not seem spammy to users when CSS is disabled. Remember, sites are manually reviewed before deemed keyword spamming so make sure it passes a human test beforehand.

Geo Targeting / Localisation on Google Bing Yahoo

danny — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 14:44:48 +0000

When launching a website, it is important to identify where your target audience is located and to ensure that you get found within that region. For example, if you were an e-commerce store in Australia where you only shipped goods locally and not internationally, your target customers would be Australians and hence why it is important for you to localise your website to the local search engines.

The reason for this is whenever a user types in Google.com or Yahoo.com into their browser, these search engines will redirect them to the localised search engines based on IP detection. This means that if you’re browsing from Australia and you type in Google.com, you will be redirected to Google.com.au and for Yahoo.com, au.Yahoo.com. Once you’re at these localised search engines, you have the option of choosing local search results only.

This means that if you are found on these localised search results, the organic traffic that you will be getting highly qualified. This is a win-win for both search engines and website owners as search engines are serving more relevant search results, thus better quality and website owners are receiving relevant localised traffic. It’s all about relevancy!

Now you know the importance of localisation (or geo-targeting), here’s some common factors that search engines look for and factors specific to the major search engines (Google, Bing, Yahoo).

Top Level Domain (TLD)

One of the things search engines look out for when it comes to localisation is the top level domain (TLD).

For example, if your website had a TLD of .com.au, search engines would see and evaluate this and determine that the site may be more relevant to the Australian region. By analysing your site’s TLD, search engines are able to determine which region your website may be most relevant to.

You can find out more on the list of country’s relevant TLDs.

Web Server Location

The physical location of your web server’s hosting is important factor in search engine localisation. Each web server has a IP address which can be looked up to see the location of it. You can test this yourself by pinging your website and retrieving the IP address reply and then use a geo IP tool to lookup the location.

There are many reasons why someone may choose to find a web host outside of their local region and one of them is cost.

Take for example my site. Although I’m located in Australia, I’ve decided to go with US hosting because it is simply cheaper. Looking at Google Analytics, it is interesting to note that majority of my search traffic comes from the US and Australia even though I have not localised my site in Google Webmaster Tools.

However, something you should keep in mind is that if your web server is hosted in the same region as your traffic, your page load time will be much faster (i.e. Australian visitor and Australian hosted site). This will definitely improve your site’s user experience.

Content

Yes, this is true. Content is another factor search engines can use to determine whether your site may be more relevant to a certain region or not through contextual analysis. Search engines would then build a geographical profile about your page/site for relevancy purposes. This is probably one of the reasons why I’m ranked well for some keywords/phrases on Google AU and thus, receive a lot of Australian traffic due to the fact that I’ve had blog posts relevant to where I live.

Let’s say if you lived in California and you started writing about how great your local coffee shop is or your favourite restaurant down the road, it would make sense for search engines to determine that your page (or site) is more relevant to people living in California than people living in Sydney!

Sub-Domains and Sub-Directories

A lot of sites nowadays also use sub-domains and/or sub-directories to separate out geographically content aimed at targeting the visitors from the relevant region. Such examples are Yahoo who uses sub-domains to localise their search engines (i.e. au.yahoo.com) and Microsoft who uses sub-directories to localise their content (i.e. microsoft.com/australia).

Search engines are now smart enough to figure out abbreviations such as au, uk, us, and ca to determine the relevancy of these pages to their respective regions. Of course you should always support this by having content relevant to the target region as well.

Take for example au.yahoo.com. You will see that the content on that site has news, articles and headlines relevant to Australia which is different to the yahoo.com site, which has content relevant to US visitors.

Google Webmaster Tools

Google has provided a great tool for webmasters to geo-target sites to a certain region. You can geo-target your main domain, sub-domain and sub-directory by adding them to your dashboard. Once you’ve verified your site entries, you can go to Site configuration, then Settings to set the geographic target.

This is handy only if you have a generic TLD such as .com or .org. If you’ve set your site to target users in the UK, it’s pretty much telling Google to treat your .com or .org site as .co.uk or .org.uk. If your site is already using a country-coded TLD, then this isn’t necessarily as Google automatically associates your site with the relevant regions.

Bear in mind that this feature only affects Google’s SERPs and not other search engines.

Content Language Meta Tag

Although Bing’s webmaster tools currently doesn’t have a geo-targeting feature like Google webmaster tools, a Bing employee has verified that using the content language meta tag does help Bing determine the site’s target region.

For example, if you want your site localised to Bing Australia, put the following meta tag within your head tag.

The purpose of this content language meta tag is to specify the language used for processing content and to identify the audience. Although I couldn’t find whether this affects Google or Yahoo’s algorithm, I can’t see why this shouldn’t help at all.

Finally, to conclude, Bing has written some best practices to follow when considering localising websites.

Hopefully this post has been helpful for you to think about what needs to be done when it comes to localising your site.

Google Organic Rankings Quality Score

danny — Sat, 29 Aug 2009 11:29:32 +0000

Is there such a thing? I’ve always wondered whether Google’s organic search algorithm factors in clickthrough rate (CTR) and SERP ranking (normalised) to provide a quality score for organic listings.

This is similar to how Google Adwords’ quality score works. The higher CTR you have and normalising it against the ad position gives you a higher quality score which translates into lower CPC bid. This is how Google rewards advertisers that focus on quality and relevancy instead of just pure bidding.

The understanding is that the better optimised your text ad is (relevancy) for the actual search query and the bid term, the higher CTR you’ll receive which means searchers are taking an action and making a decision (i.e. they’ve found what they’re looking for!).

This in turn rewards Google as well because they’ve provided quality advertisements from advertisers and thus, more people continue using Google and more revenue is made through CPC ads.

So the question is, does this theory of quality score from Adwords apply to organic rankings? If I optimise my site so that it gets equal or higher CTR than what the average is for the SERP position, in Google’s eyes, is my site more relevant to the user thus rewarding my site with a higher ‘quality score’ and a higher quality score means my site would generally rank higher/better for the theme surrounding the search query?

There’s been some research done on what are the CTR distributions on the 1st page of Google’s SERP. Below is a graph compiled by SEO Scientist showing various research data conducted by Eye Tracking and AOL.

Another study done by Searchlight Digital shows CTR distribution of the first page of Google shows somewhat similar results. I haven’t really gone through the references yet of these two sites so please take it with a grain of salt :)

So for example, it seems like 9th position on Google attracts around 2-3% of clicks. What if my website’s average was like 4-5%? Would that mean my site has high relevancy to what users are looking for and thus, should move up the rankings based on relevancy?

Google’s focus (I think anyways) has always been to provide the most relevant search results to users which makes sense to increase rankings for sites that attract a higher CTR than usual.

So how do you optimise your site listing to maximise CTR? I guess there are only 2 on-page elements which you can play around with: the title and meta description. Everyone in the SEO industry knows that the title element is the most important on-page factor for organic rankings but do you know that meta descriptions do not affect organic rankings?

However, it doesn’t mean we should neglect meta descriptions as they do affect CTR. I always treat meta descriptions as your sales pitch or your teaser to entice users to click through to your site. There’s a great blog post by Google Webmaster on how to improve your meta descriptions.

By default, Google looks for the meta description to display in the SERPs but if not found, either scans the page for relevant information or retrieves the description from DMOZ (if listed there).

Would be keen to know what your thoughts are on this topic.

Google Analytics: Advanced Filters Guide

danny — Sat, 11 Jul 2009 13:07:21 +0000

Thought I’d share a post on how to use advanced filters in Google Analytics and what are some scenarios where they can come in handy.

Advanced filters are very useful for extracting information from available fields (i.e. campaign source, campaign term) using regular expressions and then using the extracted information to manipulate other fields in Google Analytics so that you can customise how data is recorded in your reports.

First of all, before you use advanced filters, it is important that you have some kind of basic knowledge on regular expressions. If you don’t, then perhaps it’s a good idea to read up on what those cryptic symbols mean and how they’re very useful in pattern matching.

Once you’ve gotten a handle on some basic regular expressions, go to your filter manager and create a new filter. In filter type, select custom filter and then the advanced radio button. You will see three drop down menus with a text field next to each one of them. In the drop down menus, you will see a list of fields available in Google Analytics available for you to use.

Each advanced filter allows you to extract information from a maximum of 2 fields, field A and field B while allowing you to write information to a maximum of 1 field, the constructor.

Once you’ve selected a desired field to extract information from, you will need to enter the regular expression in the text field beside it. In your regular expressions, the parenthesis () is used to extract the matching parts of the field value and then storing these matches into variables. The variables $A and $B refer to fields and the numbers refer to the order of the parenthesis (i.e. $A3 corresponds to the 3rd parenthesis of field A’s matched regular expression.). These variables can then be accessed in the constructor to return the extracted value.

So let’s look at an example. Let’s say I wanted to append the category name based on the URL query string parameter to the page title because my CMS can’t seem to generate the category names in the page title and I can’t get any meaningful insights into which categories are popular from the content reports.

In field A, I will choose Request URI and next to it, my regular expression (\?|&)cat=([^&])* which means extract the category value from the URL. This is stored in $A2 because the value I want is in the 2nd parenthesis.

In field B, I’ll just select everything because I want to append $A2 to whatever is already there. This is stored as $B1.

Then in the constructor, I’m telling Google Analytics to append the value in $A2 to the value in $B1. So if the category value extracted is ‘Shoes’ and my original page title is ‘Online Shopping’, then the modified page title will be ‘Online Shopping Shoes’. This should be reflected in the content reports.

I will need the request URI and page title field so I’ll make field A and B as required. By selecting yes for the override output field means that if that field already has a value, override it with the new value. Finally since this isn’t case sensitive, I’ll select no.

That’s pretty much it! I’ve written an example to append true searched terms to the keywords report so you can have a look at that example too.

Remember to always test filters in a test profile before applying it to your main profile.

Psalm 139:1-10

danny — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 14:44:47 +0000

1 O LORD, you have searched me

and you know me.

2 You know when I sit and when I rise;

you perceive my thoughts from afar.

3 You discern my going out and my lying down;

you are familiar with all my ways.

4 Before a word is on my tongue

you know it completely, O LORD.

5 You hem me in—behind and before;

you have laid your hand upon me.

6 Such knowledge is too wonderful for me,

too lofty for me to attain.

7 Where can I go from your Spirit?

Where can I flee from your presence?

8 If I go up to the heavens, you are there;

if I make my bed in the depths, you are there.

9 If I rise on the wings of the dawn,

if I settle on the far side of the sea,

10 even there your hand will guide me,

your right hand will hold me fast.

No Related Post

Update to Adwords Cost Data Import

danny — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 12:55:45 +0000

If you’ve read my previous post about the GAIQ exam tips, you’ll notice in the section called Adwords Information, I talked about how the initial update by Google on how their cost data import update affected traffic reports in Google Analytics and how we’ve been debating in the GAAC forums about accounts that don’t have cost data import enabled treat Adwords traffic as direct instead of cpc. This will affect the traffic reports by over inflating direct traffic and slowly diminishes cpc traffic.

This really isn’t good as it doesn’t give you an accurate representation on how your online marketing activities are performing. With high direct traffic, you’d probably think, “Holy cow! My website brand really rocks and I don’t have to spend much money on online advertising anymore. Thus, you decide to cut down your Adwords spend or other forms of online advertising.”

One way to overcome that was to manually utm tag your destination URLs which would’ve been a big pain in the butt if you’ve got a large Adwords account with many campaigns and adgroups.

So finally Google made a post about a week ago about another update to the adwords cost data reporting that reverts back to how Google Analytics originally reported traffic from Adwords.

Now if you’ve got your Google Analytics account linked to Adwords, have auto tagging enabled but don’t have Adwords cost data applied, your Adwords traffic will now show as google/cpc, as it was originally.

What you should expect is a drop in direct traffic and a gradual increase in cpc traffic in your traffic reports.

Google Geek Night

danny — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 13:12:17 +0000

Hey guys, sorry I haven’t been updating this blog. Been a busy little bee! Thought I’d do a quick update and share with you guys my trip to Google’s office tonight for an event called ‘Google Geek Night’.

It’s basically a short meeting between Google and their agency partners to give a presentation on the online search demand and insights into user search behaviour, more specifically focused towards online shopping. Oh yeah, after that it’s all about drinks, cannapés and socialising. I was happy that they served Becks beer, one of my favourite beers and didn’t go cheap with local beers.

Each of us also got a Google pack which consists of a Google cap and some Google ‘goo’. Yes, really it’s goo. I’m too lazy to take photos so you’ll just have to use your imagination :)

Above is the First Rate team after a few drinks and posing with our Google pack. Produce placement there, hehe.

We also got a tour around the Google office but unfortunately I wasn’t allowed to take photos. It’s their brand spanking new office located at Pyrmont, just opposite Starcity Casino. As expected, they had pretty cool decorations all around the office and a beautiful view overlooking the harbour.

Above is the First Rate team with our Google account manager, Juvita, who I bug a lot when I need help from Google. You can also see Arnold (bottom left) posing gracefully for the camera, haha. Oh, we were all looking at different directions too because there was a couple of cameras taking pictures of us.

Anyways, the night beckons. Hopefully I have more time to churn out more Google Analytics tutorials later on.

[Show as slideshow]

Goal & Funnel Setup Guide in Google Analytics

danny — Tue, 26 May 2009 13:55:53 +0000

Working in a Google Analytics Authorised Consultants (GAAC) accredited company and also having a Google Analytics Individual Qualification (GAIQ), it is essential that I master the art of setting up goals and funnels in Google Analytics for our clients.

A goal can be a very important metric for a client to track such as sales, newsletter sign-ups, and registrations. Of course goals are not just limited to those but can be extended to whatever you would define as an important action on the website to track. Not only is tracking important, but it is also vital that you gain insight into what’s going on in the goal process from funnels.

A funnel is a visual representation of what’s happening during each step of your goal. It gives you great insights into the drop off rates of each step so that you can make informed decisions on improving your goal process and landing pages to increase conversion rates. You can accurately pinpoint which step of the goal process are you getting high drop off rates.

This can help you identify problems such as the checkout button not working, too many call to actions that lead to other goals, not best practice usability and so on.

Before Going Ahead…

Identify

First of all, you need to identify what goal you’re wanting to track. Make sure you identify each individual step of the goal conversion process. You will also need to identify the ‘conversion page’ – the page where the goal can be counted as a conversion. This is usually the thank you or confirmation page.

Write out the goal steps in a logical way that will help you understand the entire process.

Google Analytics has a maximum of 10 steps – but seriously, if you have a goal that has more than 10 steps, you might want to rethink the goal process.

Scope

Once you’ve identified the goal steps, you will need to scope out the URLs of each step. Are they static or dynamic URLs?

If they are dynamic URLs, you may need to use virtual page views to simplify the tracking process without having to use complicated regular expressions (regex).

An example of using a virtual page view in Google Analytics would be,

If you use the default pageTracker._trackPageview(), Google Analytics will use whatever request URI it sees in the address bar.

You will also need to find out whether this goal process requires cross/sub-domain tracking.

Dollar

Unlike tracking e-commerce transactions that have dynamic values, goal values are static. You will need to figure out whether the goal has a dollar value or not to it.

For example, if I upsell/cross-sell products to my internal newsletter database and I get an average sale of $5, then I would define my newsletter subscription goal value to be $5.

Another example would be if a converted lead is worth $1000 and you have an average 5% offline conversion rate, then your goal value would be $50.

Match Types

You will need to determine what kind of match types should Google Analytics use when matching against the content report. Google Analytics has 3 kinds of match types: head, exact and regular expression.

Head Match – does not use regex and matches the ‘head’ section of the request URI.
E.g. If you want to match www.dannytalk.com/step1.html?id=123 and www.dannytalk.com/step1.html?id=321, then you would use /step1.html. Identify the common factor.
Exact Match – uses regex and is not suitable for dynamic URLs.
E.g. If you want to match www.dannytalk.com/step1.html, then you would use ^/step1\.html$ as the regex.
Regular Expression Match – as the name says it, uses regex. Handy if you have more complicated matching requirements.
E.g. If you want to match www.dannytalk.com/step1.html?source=google or www.dannytalk.com/step1.html?source=yahoo, then you would use ^/step1.html\?source=(google|yahoo).

Therefore, it is important to plan and define the entire goal step process prior to implementing the goal so that you can determine which match type will work for you.

Putting It All Together

Wait wait! Before you do this, make sure you create an additional test profile to your main profile to test your goal to ensure it is working correctly. The reason for this is that once data is recorded in a profile, there’s no way to delete it. Yes you can filter the dates but that can be a hassle as you’d have to remember dates. I will write a profile step guide later on.

So once you’ve set up your test profile, go ahead in creating your goal.

The checkbox ‘required step’ informs Google Analytics to only record the goal if the visitor has been through step 1 which means they have to go through step 1 in order to be counted as a goal.

Goal Funnels

Assuming you’ve setup your goal correctly, this is an example of how a goal funnel can look like. Obviously I did not check the ‘required step’ checkbox and that’s why you’re seeing entrance paths at different goal steps – not just step 1.

You can see the entrance points, exit points and the drop off rate at each step of the goal. This will help you gain insight as to where the drop offs are occuring and to where they’re dropping off to.

Exit pages are the pages where the visitor exited to (internal pages) from the goal path and did not convert within that session. The exit page called (exit) is where the visitor left the site or closed the browser.

Note that a visitor does not necessarily have to go through the goal path in sequence to be considered a goal conversion. Essentially, if the visitor somehow skips certain steps and ends up in the thank you page, then Google Analytics will back fill the skipped goal steps.

Another thing to remember is that if within the same session a visitor converts the same goal more than once, it will only be counted once (unique per session).

Once you’re satisfied that the goal is working correctly, you can implement it in the main profile.

Debugging

Things to look out for:

Check the content reports to ensure that Google Analytics is tracking the URLs properly. If your goal step URLs aren’t there, it means Google Analytics can’t see it and therefore, can’t match it.
Once again, sub-domain/cross-domain tracking. We want to maintain the same session and not create new ones.
Test your regular expressions to make sure they match correctly. I like using an online regex tool to help me check if my regex is working or not.

If you find this guide helpful, consider linking to it and sharing it around :)

Feedback and comments would be appreciated.

My 1999 Honda Civic EM1 Vti-R

danny — Sun, 24 May 2009 10:36:44 +0000

Sorry guys haven’t been updating my blog recently. Been busy with my car pretty much hehe.

Just spent $230 yesterday at Supercheap Auto buying floor mats, car cover, turtle wax shampoo, lamb wool mittens, microfiber polishing cloth, meguire’s clay bar, meguire’s quick detailer and meguire’s wax. So yeah, I’m quite broke now! I’ve still yet to transfer the registration and pay the stamp duty! :(

So yeah, been pretty engrossed in it. Have washed and vacuumed my car yesterday and spent some time washing under the hood and applying some tyre shine to my tyres. Will need to find some time doing the clay bar thingy and waxing it. Is gonna be slick looking!

But yeah, some pictures below :)

[Show as slideshow]

The Hunt Is Over!

danny — Sun, 17 May 2009 12:47:39 +0000

Finally I’ve found a car to buy! Drove all the way to Gosford today with a couple of mates to inspect a green ‘99 Honda Civic EM1.

It’s green in colour with gold pearls and has a black bonnet. Good paint work, fresh tyres and uses Royal Purple engine oil. Car is mechanically great as well as good looking exterior and interior. Had my friends take a look under the car and lucky the seller is a mechanic himself so I would know he’s taken good care of the car.

So now I’ve got to arrange bank cheques tomorrow and take a train all the way to Gosford to get the car and do the paper work. Going to be a long night tomorrow and hopefully a car owner!

Man it’s been a hectic 2 weeks ever since I started looking for a car. Non-stop searching cars online and on forums. It’s pretty time consuming since I’ve pretty much used most of my spare time available looking for cars, doing research and contacting people for a car inspection.

Finally I can have a life again.

I’ll post up some tips and guides later to buying used car from private sellers. Very valuable information I’ve attained over the past short but intense 2 weeks. Hopefully you guys will find it helpful.

dannytalk ™ A Danny Ng Blog

SEO Implications of using CSS Display None/Image Replacement

The Way To Get Yourself Banned

Using CSS Image Replacement The Right Way

Related Posts

Geo Targeting / Localisation on Google Bing Yahoo

Top Level Domain (TLD)

Web Server Location

Content

Sub-Domains and Sub-Directories

Google Webmaster Tools

Content Language Meta Tag

Related Posts

Google Organic Rankings Quality Score

Related Posts

Google Analytics: Advanced Filters Guide

Related Posts

Psalm 139:1-10

Related Posts

Update to Adwords Cost Data Import

Related Posts

Google Geek Night

Related Posts

Goal & Funnel Setup Guide in Google Analytics

Before Going Ahead…

Putting It All Together

Goal Funnels

Debugging

Related Posts

My 1999 Honda Civic EM1 Vti-R

Related Posts

The Hunt Is Over!

Related Posts