posted by Fabrizio Di Carlo on Me & The Web, SEO, UX

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About Fabrizio Di Carlo

I am student of Engineering, thinker, wannabe startupper and geek. Founder of Progettiamo.eu, Co-Founder of Startuppi and Co-Founder of 14th Hall.

Last time we talked about On-page factors, this time we’ll talk about Off-page factors, Social Media and other little tips and how this assets can improve your site usability.

Off-page factors

Off-page SEO is the thing that happen outside of your site to help it get ranked (i.e. backlinks). Off-page SEO can:

• Compensate for flawed on page optimization for less competitive keywords.
• Take a new page from not in the top 1000 results in Google to Page One in weeks.
• Get deeper less important pages in Google, Yahoo or Bing’s index to create more mid-tail or long-tailtraffic.
• Keep competitive pages at the top of search engines (if link quality, velocity and relevance are observed).

and most important

• Develop authority for the page and website (which is the basis of long-term visibility in search engines).

So, we would like to optimize them for SEO and for UX, how?

• Embed Keywords Into Links this increases internal link relevancy and you don’t need to read contextual information above or below link to obtain meaning moreover it’s good for accessibility;
• Keyword Focused Breadcrumb Navigation, for SEO this automatically creates keyword focused internal link to each page on Web site but also users can see hierarchy of information and you can use Breadcrumb Navigation as orienting tool;
• SitemapSitemaps normalize the flow of Page Rank through the site and establish additional link relevance also allow visitors to use an additional navigation system which some users prefer (like lynx);
• Related Products Links establishing additional cross links at the product level augments SEO performance for those pages and improves conversion rates and up-sell potential by helping customers understand purchasing options.

Social Media

Social media is media for social interaction as a superset beyond social communication. Enabled by ubiquitously accessible and scalable communication techniques, social media has substantially changed the way organizations, communities, and individuals communicate.

• Link to Social Media Profiles on All Pages this increases the likelihood that these sites will rank for brand related terms (reputation management) and allows users to find social media profiles easily regardless of first entry page;
• Keyword Focused Tag Navigation establish additional keyword focused internal linking and provide additional navigation that is centered around the words that are most likely to resonate with users.

Other tips

• Make all PDF’s available in HTML format:
1. More pages on your website;
2. Spiders currently cannot parse all content within PDF’s
3. Losing link popularity;
4. Users have a reason to come back to website;
5. Open up more communication channels with users.
• Site Navigation Not Built With Java Script or Flash: ensures that link metrics can be assigned correctly to each page of the Web site and that all pages on the Web site will be indexed. UX side: ensures that people who do not have these technologies enabled in their browser (i.e. iPhone broswer) will still be able to navigate the site and understand what the navigation is communicating.

Tags: communication techniques, conversion rates, google, hierarchy of information, link quality, page optimization, page rank, relevance, relevancy, search engines, seo, social communication, social interaction, usability, ux, velocity