Numerous studies have shown that web surfers have extremely short attention spans. Knowing that there is generally a huge wealth of alternative sites to look at, visitors are only to happy to hit the back button if they are not grabbed by a website straight away.

Reading level refers to the ‘readability’ of a document. The word readability refers to how easy the document is to read, and this is affected by the length of sentences, choice of words, grammar and other areas. These attributes can be calculated by an algorithm called the Flesch Kincaid score. The higher the score, the higher the level of reading skill required to comprehend the document effectively. As visitors may be put off by less accessible text, a higher score may reduce conversions on your site, as they leave before performing your desired actions. It has also been reported by many in the SEO community that a hard to read text could actually lower your rankings in some cases, so this could even lead to less visits to your page in the first place.

Google simplifies the Flesch Kincaid score into ratings of ‘Basic’, ‘Intermediate’ or ‘Advanced’ if you choose to activate this feature in ‘Advanced Search’. If you want to ensure that your pages are accessible to visitors, find your site having selected ‘annotate results by reading level’ in Advanced Search. The readability desired may vary from site to site. If your information is of a highly technical nature, an Advanced level may be appropriate and Basic may not convey the information adequately and could even be patronising. However, an e-commerce site geared towards a general public audience may be too exclusive if it has an Advanced rating and would require an overhaul to the text to simplify the vocabulary and sentence structure to make it welcoming for more people.

Many people believe that Google is the only search engine worth worrying about, and to an extent, this is perfectly understandable. This is particularly so when you consider that as search engine algorithms are so similar, when you work on optimisation for Google, you should generally improve your Google rankings as well.

However, it is also important to note that these figures reveal that if you only got visitors via Google, then suddenly getting the average 24% of visits via Bing and Yahoo would see your visits leap by a third!

What does this mean for SEO?

Well, in a few cirumstances, this can be important to consider:

- If you were to suddenly lose all your decent Google rankings, perhaps through an error in managing your website content / linking strategy / robots.txt file / hosting or whatever, Yahoo and Bing could still be a worthwhile source of visitors. Making the most of them might be preferable to rushing out to build a new site to do well on Google, as most sites will regain their previous rankings when they deal with whatever caused the problems in the first place.

- If you have a very limited number of potential key phrases and are already dominant on Google, then maybe some of your sub-pages could focus more on ranking well with other search engines, such as Yahoo (now powered by Bing). For example, some studies have shown that avoiding vast amounts of text may help with SEO for Bing, while it has been suggested that large amounts of content, within reason, may serve you sell on Google. Also, diversity of incoming links is reported to be a greater importance on Bing that Google, although it is important for results on both search engines.

Its still only a few months since the introduction of Google Instant, which serves up search results as the user types in their terms. This could have one of two effects on the behaviour of the user:

- He or she might see a result that meets their needs before they have finished typing and jump straight to that link before they would have normally finished typing their query.
- He or she might not see relevant enough results appearing as they type, so may continue to type in order to narrow the search.

Many have speculated that Google Instant may encourage users to become ‘impatient’ and keen to jump straight into these quick-served results. If this was the case, then webmasters would expect to see on average shorter phrases being used to find their website.

However, I have seen reports from some webmasters that their sites are receiving visits via longer phrases, with a particular jump in very long phrases – 6 or 7 words, while shorter phrases have fallen in popularity.

Why might one choose to lengthen their time spent typing?

If you are performing a search and are not seeing specific enough results appearing with Google’s Instant suggestions, it would be quicker to continue typing and find a closer match than visiting a more generic result page in the knowledge that you may be disappointed and want to hit the back button and try again.

Either way, Google Instant should be a good development for either type of surfer – if youre keen to see quicker results, there you go, and if you want to find the most accurate results at the first attempt, then the suggested sites served up can let you know whether or not you should keep typing.

This CMS (content management system) is free to use and comes with a wide range of attractive templates and gadgets. It is easy enough for those with little or no web design experience to set up and manage without support.

JotterCMS is SEO friendly, as it makes it easy to fill in key areas such as title tags and headings, and it produces tidy URLs.

It has numerous other benefits, which include:

Unlimited pages
The ability to collect online payments
A specific job vacancy posting module
Templates to suit various types of business
Simple set-up of password protected sections
In-depth visitor statistics

and many more

You only need to pay for JotterCMS if you want advanced design and support services from WebAnywhere’s expert technical staff.

Learn more about this SEO Friendly CMS or call WebAnywhere on:
0800 862 0131 to discuss your requirements.

Address:
WebAnywhere Ltd
Orchard House
Aire Valley Business Centre
Lawkholme Lane
Keighley
West Yorkshire
BD21 3BB

If necessary, the job vacancy could be split into part time positions for one or more professionals working remotely anywhere in the UK, as finding the right candidate is more important than where you are based.

Desired Skills / Experience:

PHP, ASP, HTML

MySQL

Content Management Systems / CMS including Drupal and WordPress

E-Commerce website development

.htaccess files and url rewriting

SEO including link building and copywriting

Blog development and social media campaigns

Writing copy for article submissions

Graphic design – producing basic images and logos

The ideal candidate will have strong technical skills combined with excellent use of written English.

Salary expected to be £20k+ depending on experience. There is also partnership potential.

Please email your CV and a brief cover letter / email message detailing how you meet the criteria above to mail@seoleeds.net

Feel free to call Av on 07733 658 356 if you would like to discuss the position.

Having previously published entries via ftp, we decided to move to WordPress following the decision by Google to discontinue support for publishing blogs to client sites in this manner.

The system was resource intensive for Google, so it was stopped when the company was going through some other technical restructuring.

There are numerous benefits to using WordPress for blogging, as well as for a CMS solution when making entire websites. It is search engine friendly in many ways and this can be further enhanced through the numerous SEO plugins available.

Customisation of look and functionality is quite quick and easy, even for novices.