Streetview in Google maps has been a very popular addition for a lot of users, however the recent introduction of streetview in Manchester has caused a lot of controversy. For those that haven’t heard of streetview, it is functionality within Google maps that allows the user to explore around the map at ’streetview’. This isn’t available on every location, only those which have been captured using a special camera. I have used this a few times for exploring locations such as Manhattan which I’ve found very interesting. To try it for yourself, go to Google maps, enter Manchester as your location and you should see the icon (picture below) light up when streetview is available. Click on this to begin exploring!
Streetview allows you to look all around the location due to the way it is captured with it’s multiple angle cameras mounted on top of a Google car. A lot of people now recognise the camera on the car, and lot’s of people can be seen waving as the car goes past!
Although a lot of people think that streetview is fantastic, a lot of people are concerned about security and privacy issues now that the Manchester has been added. Some people think that it is a great tool for potential burgulars to scope out areas and houses online looking through the residential areas, whereas others are concerned that it may be a tool to aid potential terrorist attacks.
One feature of streetview, is that you can send any view to another user as a link, and the recipient can see exactly the view you’re looking at. This caused controversy last year when links were being sent around showing a drunk man asleep outside his house, and even a man leaving an adult bookstore!
Google stresses that it is not showing anything that people could view by simply walking down a street. Although I think that this is a great tool, I agree that there are potential implications with the technology.
HTML is an acronym for HyperText Markup Language, and HTML 5.0 is the fifth version of the programming language used to create web pages. This begs the question, what is going to be the effect on SEO? From an initial look, it appears as though the changes are going to be very beneficial through the addition of techniques such as ’segmentation’. Segmentation will allow search engines to break down a page and then analyse each part on an individual basis.
So why is this important? Well, ultimately it will enhance a search engines understanding of the page and enable it to more accurately decide upon it’s relevance. This will make it much easier to prioritise the content of your website by showing the search engine where your content is, which is especially useful for complex websites that are very code intensive.
So how does the segmentation work? It’s very easy to implement. There are a host of new tags including:
- <article> for articles
- <nav> for navigation
- <header> for the header
- <footer> you get the idea…
- <audio>
- <video>
- etc
Once HTML 5.0 starts to become more popular with websites, search engines will be able to use segmentation on websites which will change the way you search engine optimise a website. It may be sometime before these techniques come into effect, but it is very important that SEO companies start planning for these changes and are aware of the potential effects and benefits. However, although HTML 5 looks very interesting it is still really in a draft stage (and probably will be for several years) and IE 8 and Firefox 8 have mostly no support for it! Safari and Opera also have some support for it, but given how small their holding is it will be a long time before anyone uses it in a production environment.
A 301 redirect is a method of telling web browsers and search engines that a website or web page has permanently moved to a new location or address. An example of this might be:
A webmaster wants to change their domain URL from www.domain.co.uk to www.domain.com. By adding a 301 redirect from the .co.uk address to the .com address, a web visitor using a standard web browser will automatically be re-directed to the .com address. Additionally, a search engine will also automatically be redirected to the new domain. Because a 301 redirect indicates a permanent change of address, the search engine should also automatically update all the links within it’s index. Also, any search engine page rankings and links to the site should also be preserved which is very important, especially for older, more established websites.
301 redirects are also used internally for websites to prevent internal content duplication issues such as canonicalization / canonicalisation and for updating page names. For example, if an unfriendly URL is changed so that is ‘friendly’ a 301 redirect would be used from the old link to the new so that users and search engines know the location has permanently changed i.e.
Changing www.domain.com/page?124 to www.domain.com/services.
One of the services that we are very proud to offer at Elevator SEO, is web usability analysis and reporting. For the first blog post about web usability I thought I would demonstrate the ‘F-Pattern’ eye tracking images. So what do these images show? Well it’s a bit like a thermal image for demonstrating how the standard user views a web page. The areas that appear ‘hotter’ in red and yellow are the areas the user has spent the most time looking at. The blue areas have been viewed but only for a very short amount of time. Any area not coloured has not been looked at directly.
So what do the above images tell us, and more importantly how do they help us in terms of usability?
The image on the left shows a standard web page and what it shows us is that the average users views the content at the top of the page the most but only really focuses on the first 2-4 paragraphs of text. Anything longer than that is not really read properly by the average user. There attention has also been drawn in by the navigation on the left, and a call out on the right of the page. In terms of designing a website, this tells us we should keep content short / succint and prioritise the most important information at the top of the page (much like with SEO). There also appears to be 2 sets of navigation (the top and the left side). The navigation on the left had more viewing time than the top which shows the importance of placement of your navigation in the page (when you consider the user, not just what you thinks looks prettiest). The result shows an ‘F’ style pattern, which is why this is called the F-pattern eye tracking image.
The second image shows much the same, with attention being drawn to the image and call out boxes (highlighted information).
The third image shows a search engine result page (SERP) which again follows the format of the F-Pattern in the way it is viewed by the user. What is also interesting is that the top 5 results are the most viewed along with the top sponsored links, which supports the belief that most users don’t get past the 2nd or 3rd page of the SERPs.
I get a lot of calls from clients that initally want to manage their own analytics data, but don’t understand what a lot of the information means. Here is a quick summary of the dashboard information:
- Visits. This refers to the number of visitors that been to your website, in the example above this is 17,311 between the period of Apr 1st - May 1st 2007 (which is very good!).
- Pages / visit. This refers to the number of pages that each of the visitors looks at on average. In this instance the average is 1.74 pages per user. This is actually quite low, so you may want to look at improving the homepage to draw people into your website. This might include using call to actions, improving the navigation, updating the content etc.
- Bounce rate. This refers to the percentage of users that leave the site from the landing page i.e. they leave the site without looking at any other pages. Bounce rate for this site is 69.71% which is high, and correlates with the low pages per visit.
- Page views. This is the total number of pages that have been viewed over the selected time period, whichi in this instance is 30,080.
- Avg. time on site. This is the average amount of time each user spends on the website. In this case the average time is 2 minutes and 6 seconds. So although the bounce rate is quite high, the average user spends quite a lot of time on the site.
- New visits. This is the amount of completely new visits to the website, so from the data we can see that there has been 65.36% new visits so we know that there is 34.64% repeat visits.
The data that Google collects can be quite detailed, and can give you a fantastic insight into your traffic and how your site is used. The aspects covered above barely scratch the surface of the analysis that can be made. For more information about traffic analysis you can contact us.
