Having indexed everything ever written, Google has taken the logical next step and introduced Google Life, its technology for scanning our thoughts, memories and dreams.

‘Google is great for finding out who played bass in Showaddywaddy, how many pounds there are in a monkey or Inspector Morse’s first name,’ notes Mark Snips of Google. ‘But, until recently, it was no help with finding your car key, remembering the name of your niece or putting a name to that restaurant in Madrid you really liked.’

Now, people who find Bing by Googling ‘bing’ can bring the same staggering laziness to their own thought processes.

‘Many Google users are frustrated that they can’t Google the contents of their homes, lives or brains,’ says Mark. ‘They don’t see why they should have to memorise personal facts when they haven’t had to remember anything about the real world for over ten years. And that’s the next frontier of development for us.’

Telepath poles

Some observers feared that the mind-scraping indexation process might be intrusive, or even painful. In fact, no surgery or physical intervention is required.

Instead, Google will be installing 100m-high antennae at intervals of 10–20m in all residential areas. The poles emit a muted hum, a cheery green glow and a low level of non-fatal radiation. Each one bears a humorous variation on the Google logo. The company hopes that the so-called ‘mind-masts’ will occupy the same place in the UK national psyche as old village signs, or red telephone boxes.

‘Brain-spidering’ occurs once an hour and is detectable only by a slight tingling sensation around the base of the skull. Users may also experience some hallucinatory phenomena, anecdotally compared to the sense of life flashing before one’s eyes. ‘It’s really no worse than an acid flashback, or a mild psychotic episode,’ says Mark Snips.

Share your thoughts

Having been scanned, the raw mental data is transmitted to Google’s processing centre. ‘Obviously, we need a way to separate the wheat from the chaff,’ says Mark. ‘For example, although Twitter users might disagree, you probably don’t need an online record of every shave, cup of tea or visit to the loo you’ve ever had. But at the same time, some of those everyday experiences might have sentimental value. So we’ve developed a proprietary algorithm to rank memories based on how many times they’ve been recalled, and with what emotional intensity.’

A Google 'mind-mast' in a residential area

Once prioritised and encoded, your favourite holidays, proudest work achievements and most exciting romantic encounters can all be viewed online. Users can comment on and rate your memories and dreams, or share them through social-media networks.

Mind contents are made public by default, although users can opt to restrict access through a simple system of 57 privacy options. ‘In 2010, Facebook showed that people don’t really care how their most intimate secrets are being shared with billions of strangers,’ observes Mark. ‘And that means we can leverage these mental assets commercially, through a range of channels.’

Taste the future

To kickstart the development of so-called ‘head-apps’, Google plans to make brainscan data available via an API. ‘Once your brain’s IP address is paired with that of your browsing device, the potential is incredible,’ enthuses Mark Snips. ‘For example, a takeaway ordering site like Just-Eat would be able to offer you a menu tailored to your past eating patterns, current mood and available gastric capacity – even if you’d never visited the site before. It’s a real game-changer, bringing the functionality of the Nutrimatic Drinks Dispenser within the reach of every website.’

However, interpreting the raw data is likely to prove challenging. ‘It can be a problem filtering out all those thoughts that aren’t relevant to the task at hand,’ admits Mark. ‘But even that opens up immense potential for interruptive marketing attuned to what people are really thinking about. The owners of adult and shoe-retailing sites are very excited.’

Fantasies and hopes about the future are also indexed, so women going on dates can Google their suitor and discover exactly how he’s hoping the night will end. ‘You can also liven up boring meetings by checking what your colleagues are thinking about you on your iPhone,’ Mark explains. ‘It brings a whole new edge to performance appraisals.’

Infernal desire machines

However, past thoughts can only offer so much insight. The next stage of Google Life development is Data-driven Desire Prediction, or DDP. ‘Using thiotimoline batteries hooked up to our servers, we can now deliver search results before the user has even decided what they need at a conscious level,’ reveals Mark. ‘Holiday tickets, DVDs and new clothes will simply arrive, unbidden, at the exact second you first realise you want them. And with the installation of a special code snippet in your brain, you can even learn the exact time and circumstances of your own death – then post it on Facebook.

‘It’s a truly inspiring vision of the future,’ reflects Mark. ‘Nothing, anywhere, will be just your own – ever again.’

What is SEO?

SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is the process of improving the position of your website page in ‘natural’ search results. ‘Natural’ means the unpaid listings that appear centrally on Google’s results pages (as opposed to the ads that appear to the right or on top, with a coloured background).

In this article, I refer to ‘Google’ throughout, because it accounts for most searches. However, the same principles apply to all the search engines.

SEO breaks down into three key phases: choosing keywords, optimising your site and building links.

Choosing keywords

The first step is to choose the words or phrases that you’d like your site to appear for when they’re typed into Google. These are called search terms, key phrases or keywords.

There are three main things to consider when choosing keywords:

• How relevant the keyword is to your business and your target audience. Note that the words you use to describe your business may not be the ones people search for.
• How many people search for the keyword (sometimes called ‘search volume’). The more people search for it, the more traffic it’s likely to bring to your site.
• How competitive the keyword is (that is, how many other people are targeting it). The more competitive a term is, the more time, effort and money it will take to achieve a high ranking for it.

All these factors influence each other. Simple or ‘generic’ keywords (like ‘holidays’) are relevant to many businesses and attract huge search volumes, but are intensely competitive. Longer, niche keywords, sometimes called ‘long tail’ keywords (like ‘holiday cottages in Southwold’) are relevant to far fewer businesses, attract fewer searches and are less competitive.

You’re looking for the right balance between relevance, volume and competition, which will vary depending on your subject area, your audience and your budget. In some industries, it’s still feasible for small firms to target generic keywords; in others, long-tail is the only way to go.

Around 85% of searchers click on the first three results on page 1. Very few reach page 2. So a high ranking for a niche keyword may be much more valuable than a mediocre ranking for a generic one. Don’t be drawn off course by the lure of big traffic on generic terms – even if you get it, very little of it will convert to sales. Pick your targets and focus on keywords that will bring you the hottest leads for the least investment.

One very good way to narrow the field is by adding ‘geographic modifiers’ (place names), as in ‘holiday cottages in Southwold’ or ‘plumbers in Chiswick’. For many businesses, it makes a lot of sense to focus on nearby searchers.

Keyword tools such as Wordtracker, or Google’s own keyword tool, provide data on search volumes and competitiveness, as well as suggestions for related keywords. However, not all good keywords are intuitive or obvious – it can take a while to find the best ones.

Optimising your site

Having selected keywords, you need to make sure your site signals its relevance for those keywords to Google, by taking these steps:

• Assign keywords to pages. Your home page should target your most important keywords; use other pages to target other keywords. Consider creating special pages to target keywords that are important to your audience – products, services, places or queries.
• Include keywords consistently. Make sure the relevant keywords appear in the HTML page title, META description, headings and text of each page on your site. Write naturally, but favour the keyword rather than using synonyms, so it appears a few times, and always in the first paragraph. Include variants (‘design’, ‘designs’, ‘designer’, ‘designing’), since Google recognises these as relevant.
• Use headings appropriately. Include one <h1> heading near the top of the page, including the keywords for that page. If you use lower heading levels too, make sure they follow in logical order and don’t appear above the main heading.
• Include enough content. Include at least 250–300 words of text on each page. Don’t put text in images or Flash movies.
• Optimise internal links. When you link between pages on your site, in navigation menus and particularly in text, include the keywords relevant to the linked (destination) page in the text of the link. For example, if you link to a page on potato guns, make the link read ‘More on potato guns’ rather than ‘Read more’.
• Ensure usability. Create a user sitemap (list of pages with links) and a privacy page. Include your full address at the bottom of each page. Make sure all text contrasts with background colours (black on white is safest).

Building links

Google uses links from other sites (sometimes called ‘backlinks’) to assess the value of your site. Each link is viewed as a ‘vote’ – but not all links are equal; those from very popular or authoritative sites carry more weight. Link building is simply the process of creating and cultivating backlinks.

The key types of link are:

• Directory listings. Well-established, human-edited directories such as DMOZ and Yahoo! are particularly important, as are directories relevant to your niche. Sometimes, you have to pay to be considered for inclusion.
• Articles and PR. You can write, publish and distribute content relevant to your site at sites like Ezine Articles and PRWeb, with a link to your website. However, article links are likely to become much less valuable following Google’s recent Farmer/Panda update.
• Relevant sites. A link from any relevant site demonstrates relevance to a topic. In business, relevant sites are likely to be competitors, making blog links (below) the most likely means of gaining links. Links from public-sector sites (government departments, universities) carry huge authority, but are very difficult to obtain for commercial sites.
• Blog links. Since blogs are human-edited, rarely for profit, Google views links from relevant blogs highly. Cultivate links by writing guest posts for relevant blogs and (to a lesser extent) commenting on them.
• Social links. ‘Likes’ at Facebook and links from Twitter show Google that real people value your content.

Ideally, you should gain high-quality links steadily over time (a constant ‘link velocity’), demonstrating to Google that your site has sustained, consistent value.

Over the long term, it becomes more and more difficult to build additional links to a static, unchanging brochure site. This is one of the main reasons for having a blog – to create interesting, valuable content that people will want to link to.

I won’t explain Instant again, since Andrew’s done such a good job of it. For those who don’t know, long-tail searches are highly specific searches that lead to a smaller number of results. For example, a broad search term such as ‘ice cream’ leads to 111bn results, while ‘organic ice cream’ leads to 5,450,000 and ‘organic dairy free ice cream’ leads to 244,000. So ‘ice cream’ is a generic term, while ‘organic dairy free ice cream’ is a long-tail term. Long-tail terms are generally less competitive, but they attract less traffic; generic terms are more competitive and attract more traffic.

Andrew’s view is that Google Instant will encourage more long-tail searches, with the instant feedback encouraging people to type additional words to see how they modify the search results. I’m sure this is true. They’ll probably try chopping and changing their search modifiers too, as well as deleting them if they feel the resulting set of results is too small.

However, the order of words in long-tail terms will be crucial in determining the impact of Google Instant. Specifically, if the search modifiers come after the main keyword, I think there’s more likelihood of diversion before the search is completed.

Let me work through an example that’s close to my heart. Someone in Norwich needs a copywriter. So they go to Google and type in ‘norwich copywriter’. Until they type the second word, Google will have no idea what they’re searching for. With just ‘norwich’ typed in, they’ll probably be looking at a load of tourism sites. Then, once they go on to add ‘copywriter’, Google will give them the results they’re looking for.

But what if they type ‘copywriter norwich’? With Instant active, they’d see the (UK-wide) results for ‘copywriter’ before they typed ‘norwich’. At that point, they could easily think, ‘you know what? I don’t really need my copywriter to be in Norwich. Let me have a look at some of these ones.’ And if they click away from the search, they might never return.

Let’s suppose they do stay with the search. Two keystrokes later, at ‘copywriter no’, they might see the results for ‘copywriter nottingham’. They’re perhaps less likely to click a result at this point, but experience shows that we should never underestimate the laziness, inattention or sheer obtuseness of the average web user. Not everyone is hyper-search-literate, fine-tuning the Google machine to chime with their carefully considered intentions. People just don’t care that much what they click on. (You could argue that the whole PPC advertising phenomenon depends on that fact.) And even a mistaken click to a rockin’ site might be enough to divert them from their original intent.

Note that none of this could happen with the ice cream example discussed above. Since the adjectives precede the noun, Google has to wait until the end of the phrase to know what ‘thing’ the searcher wants to be organic and dairy free.

In other languages, where adjectives usually follow nouns (such as French), it would have a much better chance of showing some diverting results before the searcher got as far as entering all their modifiers.

To sum up, I think Instant will result in some ‘leakage’ back to generic terms from long-tail terms that previously locked in their traffic, particularly if the modifiers (adjectives, locations) in the search phrase follow on from the main subject (noun).

Also, although it’s less likely, a long-tail term including a string that will return a list of potentially relevant results (as with the nottingham example above) carries a smaller but still potentially damaging risk of leakage.

These changes could make some difference to the long-tail terms that are worth targeting: terms with differing word order that were previously equivalent might turn out to be less attractive, as might those including sub-strings that return potentially diverting results.

What is content spinning?

Content spinning means creating variants of the same content that will appear different to search engines. Typically, the underlying meaning is exactly the same – so human readers won’t get any benefit from reading the new version.

The holy grail of SEO is unique content. Content spinning is a way to get more ‘juice’ from the same content ‘fruit’, so you can submit the same content to multiple sites, publish it in more than one place, and generally use it more effectively as an asset. Wherever your spun content goes, it gets better SEO results (whether in terms of building or attracting links) if Google regards it as unique.

Many article sites stipulate that all content they publish should be unique. In practice, their checks are minimal (or non-existent) and you can in fact get away with the same article at four or five sites. But if you want to steer clear of duplicate content penalties (see below), it’s worth spinning multiple submissions – particularly if the content is strong and you feel it’s got a good chance of republication.

Does content spinning work?

I expect some SEOs might jump on this article, saying the content spinning is an outdated technique. Well, I’m still being asked to do it by reputable search agencies who get results for their clients. SEO isn’t like social media – it’s all about what works, not the next big thing. And right now, content spinning still works, within its own limitations.

Is content spinning a ‘black hat’ SEO practice?

Tricky. If you use a software package to do it, I’d say yes. But creating alternative versions of articles is something every writer has done, or might want to do. After all, there’s no substantive distinction between content spinning and ‘editing’, ‘updating’ or ‘improving’ your own work. You’re not asking humans to read all the different versions – only Googlebot has to do that, and it doesn’t get bored. So if you accept that posting a low-quality, unoriginal or hastily written article purely in order to get a backlink is ethical, I think you have to accept that reposting variants of the same article to get links is also ethical.

Duplicate content penalties

A word about duplicate content penalties. Reading some sites, you’d think that posting duplicate content will bring the massed armies of Satan down on your site, laying it to waste. In fact, the web is full of duplicate content. Indeed, if you’re posting to an ezine or online PR site, that’s kind of the point – your submission is propagated across multiple syndicates or publishers, hopefully generating a new link to your site every time. All Google does is downgrade or disregard the duplicates – in other words, five links from republished ezine articles might only be worth one from a unique page on a reputable and relevant blog.

Is your spinning top?

The takeaway is that you don’t have to sweat content spinning: you should do as little as you can to get the result you want. The worst that can happen is that your content is seen as duplicated and your links don’t do much good. That’s a waste of effort, but it’s not going to see your site crash and burn. It’s silly to spend ages carefully spinning out content when the time could be spent writing something that’s really new.

With that in mind, here are some tried and tested content-spinning techniques. Use the ones that work, and don’t use any more than you have to.

Consider a wholesale rewrite

When you spin content, it can sometimes be quicker and easier to rewrite the text completely rather than laboriously editing the original word by word. Print out the original and keep it by your monitor as you rewrite it. If you’re going to reorder paragraphs (see below), do this once you’ve finished rewriting.

Alternatively, rewrite each paragraph in turn by typing a new version under the original in the document, then deleting the original.

Change the title and description/summary

Obvious maybe, but your first step should be to choose a completely different title. For example:

Perennial weeds: ten ways to keep them out of your garden

might become

Perennial weeds: ten top tips to get rid of them for good

Note that any key phrases, such as ‘perennial weeds’ in this example, should be retained – near the start of the title if possible.

The summary should also be rewritten, again retaining keywords.

Find synonyms

Synonyms are words that mean the same, or nearly the same, as other words. Swapping individual words for synonyms is one of the easiest ways to vary your body content. Microsoft Word even has a synonym finder that will suggest them for you – just select the word, command-click it (control-click on Mac) and find a list of synonyms. For example:

Destroying those persistent perennial weeds is all about choosing the right tool for the job

might become

Annihilating those relentless perennial weeds is all about selecting the correct approach

The first three changes are all single-word changes of the type that Word might suggest. The fourth one is a more human change, involving switching one idiom for another. You’ll have to engage your brain to find these.

It follows that if you’re writing with content spinning in mind, write adjective-heavy text that gives you lots of opportunity to swap synonyms around.

Take care if spinning content several times – it’s easy to end up putting the original word back. Although as long as you’re making lots of other changes too, you’re unlikely to end up recreating the original version verbatim.

Swap clauses

With a minimal edit, you can swap the clauses in a sentence to make it completely different. Let’s return to the previous example:

Destroying those persistent perennial weeds is all about choosing the right tool for the job

This can be switched around to read:

Choosing the right tool for the job is the secret to destroying those persistent perennial weeds

OK, you had to type a few words – but you’ve ended up with a completely different sentence.

Add sentences

For a quick and easy substantive change, simply insert a new sentence that duplicates the meaning of the one before it. For example:

Perennial weeds can be a serious problem.

might become

Perennial weeds can be a serious problem. They are a real headache for gardeners.

This adds extra content without requiring you to do any research, or indeed think very hard.

Reorder lists

A frequently used writers’ device is the comma-separated list (usually of three items). These can be reordered to make the content different without affecting meaning in the slightest. For example:

Perennial weeds spread themselves through three main methods: running roots, layering and self-seeding.

It’s a quick and easy job to change this to:

Perennial weeds spread themselves through three main methods: self-seeding, layering and running roots.

Bullet-point lists are even easier to spin – just shuffle those bullets around until the order is completely different.

As before, it makes sense to include lots of these lists if you’re planning to spin your content.

Reorder paragraphs

It’s surprising how often you can reorder the paragraphs in a piece of text without substantively altering the meaning. You just have to take care that you don’t introduce any nonsense – for example, using a word repeatedly and then carefully explaining what it means, or saying ‘see below’ in the last line of an article. (Although, if we’re being brutal, neither of those will bother Google.)

Reordering paragraphs in conjunction with one or two other techniques is a quick, easy way to get big changes in your text for minimal time outlay. More than any other technique listed here, it’s worth tailoring your text for – in other words, writing your paragraphs in such a way that they can be reordered. That usually means breaking your content into clearly delineated ‘meaning modules’ and making sure your paragraphs follow that structure. Use headings to help you. For example, the tips in this article could easily be presented in any order without changing the meaning.

Mix and match

The best way to get results with these technique is to mix it up. You’ll have to discover through trial and error what works for you, and what you find easiest and quickest to achieve. For example, you might go for a process like this:

• Change title and summary/description
• Rewrite first two paragraphs completely
• Swap synonyms where possible
• Rewrite last two sentences

That will almost certainly create enough difference for your new version to be regarded as unique.

A final check

When done, you can use Word’s ‘compare documents’ feature to highlight all the differences between the new version and the original, in a similar way to tracking changes. There’s no particular percentage of changed content to aim for (as with keyword density), so this is really just a quick visual confirmation that you’ve got a good level of difference throughout the document.

In my opinion, one of the key areas of concern within SEO circles is the enormous amount of SEO fodder that is being pumped into the internet to influence search rankings.

This doesn’t seem to be stopping either, with new services being launched to “rewrite” vast amounts of articles and distribute them online becoming almost mainstream.

At SES London recently the content was described as “not Pulitzer-prize winning”. I would go as far to say that a great deal of it is complete and utter crap that does nothing to build a client’s brand or reputation.

Now while I don’t believe that all of these articles currently hold the same value within Google’s algorithm, I do think their search quality team will attempt to address this problem as quickly as they can. The main question, though, is how.

My gut feeling is that they will use a social footprint to establish whether or not to count the link love to the destination website. They already have deals with Twitter and Facebook to crawl their posts in near-real time, and with these two platforms being two of the primary sources of content sharing at the moment it gives Google a fairly accurate picture.

Google will obviously have to address Twitter spam, which seems to be rife at the best of times. Given their early attempts at real-time search, they clearly don’t have a handle on how to measure social influence accurately, but these are early days after all.

Which brings me round to Buzz. Despite the obvious privacy issues, Google has placed a lot of resource into Buzz and this shows their hand a great deal in my opinion. I would not be at all surprised if Buzz was aimed at delivering a social footprint for the search quality algorithm. One obvious use for this data would be to separate the signal from the noise in online PR.

What should SEOs be doing to counter this?

Well, firstly, the rules of PR haven’t changed. Write great informative pieces of content that will attract links on their own. Make sure that these pieces of content are easily shareable and Tweetable and promote the content in the same way as you would promote your client’s site. Understand that everything you do is online PR and not just writing. The PR aspect of that is key.

If you manage to do this successfully, and Google do manage to clear out the noise, you will be sitting very pretty indeed.

In other words, marketing materials must be evaluated in context, not in isolation. And that’s equally true online.

As you plan your website, it’s natural to focus on the site itself. As the content is written in Word and the code developed on a test server, there’s a very definite boundary around the project. But this doesn’t reflect the way your site will eventually work. You’re creating an organism in the lab that must fend for itself in a challenging ecosystem.

Make sure you provide a suitable route for your website visitors

People sometimes plan sites as if the user magically arrives at the home page and proceeds in an orderly fashion to the ‘buy’ or ‘contact’ page. Of course, you should ensure that your site supports that ideal sequence. But in the real world, your site will slot into an online experience that encompasses multiple browsing sessions, searches, comparisons, visits and revisits. The user’s journey begins before they arrive, and continues after they leave. From search to sale could easily take months.

In this article, I’m going to look at optimising the four key stages in your customer’s online journey: finding, selecting, visiting and returning to your site.

The search

As Morpheus put it, ‘everything begins with choice’. Your user’s journey begins with your real home page – the first page of Google results for your key terms. Obviously, your site needs to appear on this page to figure in your user’s journey; unless you own a well-known brand, don’t flatter yourself that people will be making an effort to discover it on page two or lower.

First, you must identify some search terms that people use to find businesses like yours. Make sure you focus on the words your customers use (not the ones you like to use yourself). Use online tools like Wordtracker or Google’s keyword suggestion tool to take out the guesswork and home in on relevant terms you’ve got a good chance of owning. Competitor sites are another obvious place to look. (For more on choosing keywords, see this guide.)

Always remember that it’s far better to rank highly for less popular ‘niche’ terms (such as those that include place names) than it is to appear on page two or lower for high-traffic ‘generic’ terms. Research shows that almost 80% of searchers click on the first three natural results.

Pick your targets and cut your coat according to your cloth, making sure you can achieve your aims given the resources available. There’s very little point spending tons of time and money to effect a rise from, say, position 51 to position 19 – the impact on traffic will be negligible. A big, sustainable piece of a small pie is much better than a tiny, hard-to-defend slice of a huge one.

Limited resources is also the reason to focus solely on Google, which still accounts for the vast majority of search traffic (around 85%).

Even if you do appear in the first 10 natural results, you may want to grab more ‘share of voice’ (i.e. space on the screen) by placing PPC ads. It seems that some users (sole traders, in my own experience) like to click them, even with a good selection of natural results to go at. Set a tight budget and experiment!

The selection

To understand why I say Google is your real home page, consider how you go about researching a purchase in an area that’s unfamiliar to you. You’ll search, then click around a bit, unsure whether to go straight to a merchant, consult an information site or maybe browse a directory. And you’ll almost certainly backtrack to Google’s results at least once.

So your user’s first experience of your site won’t happen in a vacuum. You need to consider how your site stacks up against the other players on page one.

Ideally, you’re looking for your site to be among:

• irrelevant sites from which users will ‘bounce’ immediately
• relevant but inferior sites that won’t retain or convert ‘your’ traffic (you might even be content to rank below them, if you’re confident enough of your advantage)
• relevant but neutral sites such as Wikipedia that neither help nor hinder your chances of conversion (except insofar as they distract your customer)
• directories, comparison sites or aggregators where your site features prominently (i.e. on the first or second page reached from your search)
• articles placed by you that inform the user about your product, service or expertise and lead them back to your site (this is a big reason why people do article marketing).

Of course, you’ll rarely be able to achieve this type of line-up, except for on the nichest of niche searches. But it’s always worth considering which shops, libraries or malls are ‘next door’ to you in the online ‘high street’. If you’re up against sites that are equal or superior to yours (in your judgement), consider what you can add – a special offer, a unique product, service or bundle, etc – to bring some differentiation.

You may find that pages from your site other than your home page appear in search results, whether by accident or design. If so, make sure they can function reasonably well as ‘landing’ (arrival) pages. There’s no need to replicate ‘home page’-style text, which will be disorientating to those following an orthodox route through the site. Just ensure the page makes sense when read in isolation (i.e. without the home page to introduce it) and provides an easy way to reach the home page (one click).

The visit

Website usability is a huge topic, so I’ll restrict myself to the fundamentals.

• Bearing in mind what I’ve said about the hesitant, random nature of first-time searches, it’s clear that your home page must confirm clearly that visitors have reached the right place. Every relevant visitor who bounces from your site is a resounding fail. A dull but informative positioning statement is just the ticket; add a jazzy slogan elsewhere if you must. In general, don’t try too hard to grab attention; with an actively searching audience, you already have it.
• Remember that people won’t visit every page, and will only skim-read the pages they do visit. Working on web text in Word subtly instils the concept of ‘website as novel’, with the assumption of users reading from start to finish. Again, look to your own experience for what really happens. If there’s something people need to see (e.g. your phone number), include it on as many pages as necessary. Repeat key points as required.
• Make navigation crystal clear, ideally without rollovers. Use simple words that explain precisely what lies behind each link. Don’t try to be clever or different, the risk is too great. Group links thematically if you’ve got lots of them.
• For the main text, don’t let a designer bully you into having anything other than big, legible black letters on a white background. Ever seen a book with white text on orange pages? Well then.
• Make it easy for users to see what their next step should be. Include clear, eye-catching calls to action on every ‘business’ page. You can omit them on ‘background’ pages that just provide information.
• In general, don’t do anything to irritate, slow down or otherwise impede the user. Sounds obvious? You’d think so, but people are still building sites in Flash, which usually does all three.

The return

So far, so good. You’ve guided the user from search to conversion as well as you possibly can. But just as their journey doesn’t begin with your site, it doesn’t end there either. Many decisions to purchase are arrived at gradually, via a hermeneutic loop where the user acquires knowledge and confidence iteratively. So you need to facilitate their return to your site at a later time.

• Try to ensure your HTML page titles, so critical for SEO, also make sense (and ideally stand out) when viewed in a list of bookmarks. Choose a favicon that stands out next to those of competitor sites that users are likely to visit and bookmark alongside yours.
• Create pages aimed at different user groups, so there’s a reason for them to bookmark a ‘deep link’ once they’re within the site.
• Offer added-value content such as research or industry analysis that people will want to return to.
• Create regularly updated features such as a blog, ensuring an RSS feed is available. Resist the temptation to sell through your blog – just offer content, and they will come.

However, all these inducements are really just trimming and trappings. A well-structured, easy-to-use site is an incentive to return in itself. By contrast, a self-conscious, over-designed site may impress the user first time round, but simply irritate them during subsequent visits – the very time it should be working hardest to close the sale.

So there you have it – some useful ideas (I hope) for optimising the many steps that make up your user’s online journey.