keywords

6 Important Elements to Put in Your Design Guide Right Now

Posted on by Mario

6 Important Elements to Put in Your Design Guide Right Now

In order to produce a good design team output and for ensuring a consistent brand identity, a web designer should create smart design guides. This is because a good design guide is such a work of art that has practical application in everyday design work. With design guide, you can showcase what your project is and aspire to be. It should include elements of design, voice and even code in a way that’s manageable, usable and easy to understand.

Above all, you need to know the six design guide elements that should be included in your documentation. Here they are.

  1. Brand Identity Examples

A good design guide should emphasize your brand identity in a visual format that represents your design material look. In other words, it should show than tell. However, the best example should display real-case uses that look exactly the same as the design standard and what you want to portray. Furthermore, discover when the design is at its best, whether it is on your website homepage, mobile homepage, app or any other place, then screen shoot to capture the image.

By using real images, you don’t need to create extra work to showcase visual elements, since you already have them in hand. Then, with visual proof, the team members can easily understand the actual practice of the written guideline work.

  1. Design Guidelines

Don’t forget to outline the use of design elements clearly; everything from color swatches to typography palettes and shapes, since explaining these things can help users apply the design style more accurately and consistently across medium. Furthermore, it is a good idea to include elements that might be different from print branding counterparts and how they relate when it comes to website design. So, if this is a part of your design strategy, you need to know which typefaces is substitution.

Remember to be specific when outlining design guidelines, for example H1 tags are always 88 points or thumbnail images are always 200 by 200 pixels, but be careful with too over-communicating unnecessary details, since it may make your team members get confused to find something in a sea of specifications.

  1. Voice and Personality

Believe it or not, but a descriptive writing style for copy can also impact the visuals type of imagery you choose, for example, the type of imagery you choose to use and even elements such as colour and type. All of these elements will produce an overall personality for your brand. Other factor, such as a strong voice and personality can also become a part of the visual identity.

  1. SEO Keywords

In search engine optimization, you will need to use keywords in your content, in fact, you need to involve keywords in the way you speak about the brand, in descriptive language about the design and put a list of the top keywords in the design guide itself.

With a keyword list, you can bring the words you want to say to top of mind, every time you see them. In other words, SEO keyword list attempt to make the words get stuck in reader’s head. Therefore, a good website design should be able to correlate to these keywords at all time to the content.

  1. Pattern and Element Styles

Make sure to have guides for all possible uses, such as on your still and animated versions of logos, colour palettes, patterns and even design elements such as form fields and navigation. If you want to give extra convenient to your team, you can create a pattern and element style guide in an online location so that users can just copy and paste elements for quick usage.

  1. Code Snippets

Web design and code are two things that you need to know in every website design guide since you will find codes from buttons to small animations to slider effects. Of course, these codes might consume your hours to your daily workflow as it eliminates the need to manually enter specs with every new element.

With Firefox, you can include design component information in its design guide for the recently revised branding and logo usage. All you need is to remember to include some base information such as where to use H1 through H4 on pages within the website design and how to style buttons and images, even if you don’t provide a full library of code snippets.

All the points above show that a design guide doesn’t always have to be a static document. In fact, you can present it in a way that can leverage your brand and visual identity. You can also use online versions of a design guide so that you can quickly and easily make changes, such as grabbing code and colour snippets.

Keyword Cannibalization: How to Find & Solve It

Posted on by Mario

Keyword Cannibalization How to Find & Solve It

In SEO service, when you are splitting CTR, links, content, and (often) conversions between two pages that should be one, you are “cannibalizing” your own results. This is because you don’t describe any improvement and the breadth or depth of your knowledge. On the other hand, you are troubling Google to choose which one suits the matching keywords best.

Negative Effects of Keyword Cannibalization
If you do the keyword cannibalization, there are 6 negative effects of keyword cannibalization that can affect your SEO, such as:

1. You’re Diminishing the Authority of Your Page

By doing keyword cannibalization, you are splitting your CTR to multiple moderately relevant pages, instead of having one highly authoritative page. This not only would turn your pages into competitors, but also fight for page views and SERP ranks.

2. You’re Diluting Your Links & Anchor text

Backlinks that could have gone to one consolidated source of information are now being split into two pages. Instead of one authoritative page on the subject, your anchor text and internal links are leading visitors to multiple different pages.

3. Google May Devalue the More Relevant Page

To help Google understands what your pages are about; usually we will use keywords to signify the pages. When you put the same keywords on several pages, Google will search which one will suit best. However, it might get it wrong, if your content is too similar.

4. You’re Squandering Your Crawl Budget

Search engine spider crawls will examine your website in a number of times. This activity is known as crawl budget. In fact, all of your efforts will go in vain when you are having multiple pages devoted to the same keyword results in the crawling and indexing of page that aren’t needed.

5. Sign of Poor Page Quality

Keyword cannibalization can also be  caused by too thin content which may not match your keywords on each page.

6. Your conversion Rate will Suffer

Since Google will choose one that fits best  with your keywords, one of your pages will convert better than the rest. Not all of your visitors will visit the page that has been signified by Google; instead, some of them will lose potential leads when they land on less relevant pages.

How to Identify Keyword Cannibalization
To avoid the six effects that might damage your SEO effort, first you should identify the problem. Only by identifying the problem, you can fix the keyword cannibalization easily. Identifying keyword

1. Restructure Your Website

One of the simplest solutions is to turn your most authoritative page into a landing page which links to other unique variations that fall under the umbrella of your targeted keywords. For instance, it will make sense to make “shoes” our canonical source page and link all of the more specific variations back to our shoe-product.

2. Create New Landing Pages

If your website might lack a landing page that consolidates all of your product pages in one place, you can create a unique landing page to serve as your authoritative source page and link all of your product variations from there.

3. Consolidate Your Content

You can consider combining your pages into one page, if your pages aren’t unique enough. This is where you can take two underperforming pages and turn them into a more authoritative source. Moreover, this  will also solve your thin content issues.

4. Find New keywords

If you are sure enough that your page is already highly diverse, content-rich pages, but you still suffer keyword cannibalization, maybe it is time for you to find new keywords. Therefore, make sure your keywords accurately describe your page’s content.

5. Use 301 Redirects

If in many cases, using 301s is not recommended, but in certain cases using 301s might be necessary, especially if you already have multiple pages ranking for the same terms. To consolidate your cannibalized content, you can use 301s by linking all of the less relevant pages to single, more authoritative version. Remember that this tactic is suitable for pages with similar content and those matching specific keyword queries.

 

The solutions above can mostly fix cases of keyword cannibalization. If you experience the keyword cannibalization, don’t get panic as the damage isn’t permanent and solutions aren’t hard to come by. Make sure you follow all the tips above to solve all of the problems caused by keyword cannibalization.

3 Techniques on How to Optimize Your Website for Multiple Keywords

Posted on by Mario

How-to-Optimize-Your-Website-for-Multiple-Keywords

With so many updates, nowadays SEO puts more priority on context. This makes context is above keywords. But, this doesn’t mean that you will neglect keywords relevancy and authority. Therefore, as a SEO engineer who works for SEO service, you have to understand and combine what Google wants and what users want.

If you assume that Google will understand the context of your content while you build a strong brand and positive user experience, you will still have to consider about the hierarchy of your content, how to organize it, and how to build context that can rank for multiple keywords, so that it will meet your conversion goals. Below are several tips on how to optimize and focus on keywords.

  1. Know Your Current Content

After determining your conversion goals, you may need to set your analytics house, and conducted keyword research, then you’re ready to organize your keyword data into meaningful topics. Instead of stemming or use all of the literal variations of the terms and its plural or singular versions, you can find sets of terms on the same topic and group them together.

Usually we often fall into the most general topics of the niche or industry when running an e-commerce site. Most B2B sites follow a pattern as well with top-level business industry terms, product or service categories and the products or service themselves.

As keywords grouped into topics, so it is possible to take the important next step of mapping your keywords to existing pages of content or conducting a content audit. As the first step you can run a crawl of the existing site structure with screaming Frog, download the HTML page results into Excel, and then get to work putting topics and terms out to the side of specific pages.

When you know you have content gaps and need to create more, that’s when you can turn around and quickly search to see which websites own the top of the SERPs for those topics and draw inspiration (without copying them) for ways to fill the gaps with your own content and draw inspiration for ways to fill the gaps with your own content and make decisions based on priority.

  1. Optimize Site Architecture

Even though, you can start once you know where you stand with content, then having a plan for filling gaps but first you need to figure out how to organize the content. This means balancing user experience, with product/service offerings and topical keyword search volume. Moreover, build out your site hierarchy working top to bottom going from most general to most specific. Even though, mostly sites are already built this way. However, site navigation and structure is often dictated by an internal or organizational view when SEO isn’t involved.

Besides, you are able to cast a wider net in terms of rankings and visibility, by taking an approach that looks at essentially any page at any level on the site as an entrance point and landing page for one or more topical keywords. In fact, all of your efforts will destruct your message, when you try to rank for too many terms with a single page or section of the site.

  1. Do Your On-Page Optimization

It is surprising that there are so many SEO campaigns that neglected the basics of on-page optimization. In fact, these SEO basics still apply. However, you need to look at it deeper than just trying to merely produce content and organize it well top to bottom in the site. Besides, you need to ensure proper categorization, when you’re building context for the user and Google. Another power in the on-page variables is having all factors working together with architecture and on-page optimization.