5 things you should do with your website to optimise it for search engines: Our favourite things #4

This week it’s the turn of another of the digital consultants at Sue Fidler Associates, the charming and friendly Jon Parsons. One of Jon’s areas of expertise is Search Engine Optimisation (SEO): that is, helping your website to do as well as possible in the search engine rankings.

Jon knows loads of great ways of making sure your search engine ranking is as high as possible. And the good news is that he’s kindly agreed to share 5 of them with us today. Here’s what Jon says about why SEO matters:

“Visitors who come to us through a search engine are actively looking for our information, products or services. As a result, they convert (that is, respond to our calls to action) extremely well.”

Here are 5 of the steps Jon recommends you should take if you are serious about optimising your site for SEO:

1. Put SEO in the hands of the people who create the content on your site.
2. Make sure they understand the core principles of SEO.
3. Think about the type of visitors you want to attract to the page - and what keyword phrases they are likely to use in a search engine. (This one won’t surprise anyone who regularly follows CharityBuzz: we probably seem obsessed with getting to know your website audiences!)
4. Think about what messages you want your visitors to read in the Search Engine Ranking Pages (aka SERPs) before they click through to your page. It is really important to describe each web page well in order to encourage visitors to click through. Searchers will start to form an opinion of the page and your brand from the SERPs - even if they don’t click through.
5. Make sure your folder and filenames use primary keywords.

Find out more

If you would prefer to have some help with your site’s SEO, please get in touch with us: info@suefidler.com

3 tips for making sure your emails look great: Our favourite things #3

This week it’s the turn of another of our merry band, Julia Sampson (known to us as Jools). One of Jools’ specialities at Sue Fidler Associates is CharityeMail (www.charityemail.co.uk), our powerful and popular e-marketing system.

Jools is one of the people in our support team, helping the organisations that use CharityeMail (and a very friendly, timely service she gives, so I hear...) She tells me that a lot of the support queries are to do with formatting, so I’ve persuaded her to share her top 3 tips for making your emails or e-newsletters look as good as possible. Here’s what she says:

1. Always resize your images before you drop them into your mailshot. Your images should be in their own cell. Handy hint: You can find out the exact size the image needs to be by going into preview and then right clicking on the cell where you want to put the image.

2. Always test send your mailshot to a few different emails addresses to check it looks good in a variety of email programmes – for example, Outlook, Hotmail and Gmail.

3. If you make lots of changes to your mailshot, the HTML code could become corrupted. What happens is that you can reach a point where you have made so many changes that your latest changes don’t actually show. If this happens, you can either click on HTML mode and have a look yourself, or – if you are a CharityeMail client, just contact our team and we'll clean it up for you.

To find out more:

• Have a look at the quick start guides and free webinars at: www.charityemail.co.uk/resources
• • If you don’t use CharityeMail, take a look at the system you use: they may have some helpful resources. If not, perhaps you should give CharityeMail a try, you can sign up for a trial free of charge: www.charityemail.co.uk/signup/

4 tips for making your website useful and usable: Our favourite things #2

This week’s it’s the turn of our ‘leader’. Sue Fidler herself. I should really have started with her – but she’s the busiest of us all, so it took a good week to pin her down!

Here’s what she said:

“I have so many things I could say were top of my list of what I’m passionate about - but at the moment top of the list is making your website useful and usable.

It doesn’t matter how pretty your website it, how much it represents the brand, how well written your content is... If nobody finds it usable or useful it is a complete waste of time.”

Here are Sue’s top tips:

1. Always think about the audience, whether you are designing, working out navigation or writing content: Who is it for and what do they want or need from you?
2. Segment your audience into a small number of key user types and make sure that you plan what areas of the site and what content you think they are looking for.
3. You have to prioritise, so keep it simple and try to signpost the key audiences quickly into their key content areas.
4. Ask the audience (if possible). If you have the opportunity - whether it’s surveys, emails, discussions, Facebook or face to face – ask your key audiences why they visit the site and what they are looking for.

Find out more

Sue recommends this book: The Elements of User Experience: User-Centered Design for the Web and Beyond (Voices That Matter) by Jesse James Garrett (http://www.amazon.co.uk/Elements-User-Experience-User-Centered-Design/dp/0321683684/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1315903680&sr=1-1)

And if you don't feel ready to DIY and need a little help with information architecture, ask us (info@suefidler.com, www.suefidler.com), we'd be glad to help.

3 things you must check if you want to optimise your web content: Our favourite things #1

We’ve been thinking about the things we love best about our work - we being the consultants who work with Sue Fidler Associates. There’s quite a lot of overlap in our skills and experience but - not surprisingly - each of us has certain areas that we love best (and, funnily enough, there isn’t much overlap there...)

Mine is content - and how to present it most effectively on the web.

So I thought this week I’d write about why I’m so convinced that making a really good job of preparing and presenting content for (& on) the web matters.

I don’t care what fads come and go, what new developments appear (and disappear): to my mind, after 16 years working on the web, there is still nothing more important than the quality of what you write and how you present it. My colleagues may disagree and say that the tools you use alongside your site are just as – if not more important (SEO, social media etc). But I’m sticking to my guns: for me, content reigns.

As usual, I’ve become convinced it’s really pretty simple. So here’s my ABC:

A. Make sure it’s written right - so it’s convincing and compelling and strikes the right note with your particular target audience. And so that it works online.
B. Make sure it’s presented right on the page – no matter how well written it is, if you don’t follow best practice for online content presentation, the people you want to reach will drift away.
C. Make sure it’s in the right place on the site – because no matter how well written and presented it is, if it can’t be found easily, there’s just no point.

You see, it really is dead easy! And the Find out more section below has some more concrete help and advice.

I’m going to see if my colleagues will share some of their convictions about their favourite work things over the coming weeks. Fingers crossed I can drag their secrets out of them!

Find out more

Written right/Presented right:

• 10 top tips for creating effective web copy - http://www.suefidler.com/resources/
• 3 ways to achieve a successful tone of voice online - http://www.charitybuzz.net/2011/08/3-ways-to-achieve-successful-tone-of.html

In the right place:

• What is information architecture? - http://www.steptwo.com.au/papers/kmc_whatisinfoarch/index.html
• Complete beginner’s guide to information architecture - http://www.uxbooth.com/blog/complete-beginners-guide-to-information-architecture/

Social Media in LAla land (aka inspiring use of social media by Local Authorities)

I was really interested to hear that a number of Local Authorities in the UK are exploring how they can make good use of social media. And some of them are pretty inspiring, too - who’d have thought it?
Sometimes it’s a corporate/public affairs type of thing (generally less interesting to read) but sometimes it’s individuals – like senior staff members – writing and some of them are well worth following. Nothing unusual here: I think most of us prefer to follow an individual rather than a corporate.
It won’t surprise you that it seems to work best when the politicians etc get involved in two-way communication and actually respond to followers/bloggers etc. Call me old-fashioned but, after all, that’s what social media is all about...
If you’d like to check them out, here are 11 councils who are currently using social media:

• Blackburn with Darwen (@loulouk and @tomstannard)
• Barnet (@sammarkey)
• Brighton (a lot of good tweeters, including CEx @johnbarradell)
• Camden (@tomneumark & @CamdenTownUnltd) – apparently great during recent riots)
• Croydon (@yourcroydon)
• Dudley (@councillorles)
• Hull (@abibell)
• Kensington & Chelsea (@RKBC) – they’ve also done some interesting stuff on YouTube
• Kent (@noelito & @tomsprints)
• Lambeth (@lambeth_council)
• Walsall (@WalsallCouncil)

Interested in finding out more?

Here’s are 9 places you can go to read/do more:
1. Public Sector Digital Convention http://publicsectorsocialmedia.com. They have a survey which you could take part in to get a copy of the report, which will contain lots of useful benchmarking: http://publicsectorsocialmedia.com/2011/08/psdigital-public-sector-survey-now-open/

2. There are some good examples of local authority use by in this article http://www.learningpool.com/blog/can-this-council-get-more-fans-than-cheryl-cole/.

3. You can find more examples in the Local Govt Social Media group on the forum - http://www.learningpool.com/groups/social-media/.

4. There are free guidebooks about using Facebook and Twitter you can download on http://www.learningpool.com/blog/guide-to-facebook-pages-for-government-organisations/

5. ‘Local by Social’ by Andy Gibson - http://www.socialbysocial.com/book/local-by-social - a guide to using social media for local authorities. ~

6. @tweetyhall has a list of tweeting councillors.

7. Emma Maier (@emmamaier) editor of LGC has a list of tweeting Council CEx - http://twitter.com/#!/EmmaMaier/council-chiefs

8. Social media & online collaboration community at the local authority Community of Practice at: http://www.communities.idea.gov.uk – open to all and recommended by more than one person.

9. Local government leadership website: http://socialmedia.21st.cc/