Archive for November, 2007

American Express Australia tunes up its website - we review it!

Published by Marc on 29 November, 2007 in General. 16 Comments

American Express Australia (Amex) recently refreshed its website. For your reading pleasure we review it so you can learn a few do’s and don’ts from a major brand’s efforts to improve its online experience.

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Website: americanexpress.com.au

Overall Rating (out of 10*):      5

  • Look & Feel:    7.5
  • Usability:          5
  • SEO                 0.5

* Where 1 is Poor and 10 is Fantastic

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Amex Web’s Look & Feel

As with any top brand in the financial services sector, you’d expect American Express Australia’s website to ooze credibility, substance and style - to look every bit the fortune 500 company it is. After all, if you’re going to entrust your money to a credit card issuer, you’ll want to be sure you’re dealing with a secure, professional organisation.

It’s about selling credit cards

The good news - Amex’s new site delivers ‘credibility’ in spades. It’s slick, it’s flash (it really is Flash… of the Macromedia kind), it boasts a clear semantic layout, and it’s straight to the point. The good Amex people want you to sign up to their latest credit card offering and they want to make sure you do by placing an offer front and centre on the home page. Mission accomplished - if you’re looking for a new credit card (or charge card), American Express’ website will deliver.

Driving traffic online away from call centres

Cardmembers returning to the site to check up on their card balance will note the account login is now easier to find as it now sits prominently in the left hand column and in the upper right hand corner. (The account login was likely hiding under the ‘already registered?’ link inn the website’s previous version.) It’s a small change, but it should help American Express drive more users online and relieve some of the pressure from its much taxed call centres.

Look & Feel Rating (out of 10): 7.5

The User’s Experience

Reading vs pixel perfection

True to form Amex Australia’s website follows global style guidelines found on its other sites in the US and the UK - which means the font size is extremely small. Vision impaired users and those with less than perfect eyesight will struggle with the microscopic text in the cramped left hand column. This flaw might be forgivable if the pixel size was not fixed across the whole site - preventing users with larger browser font settings from re-adjusting the page to their specifications. Clearly we’re dealing with a fixation on pixel perfection to the detriment of usability.

Finding the credit card that’s right for you

So what if I wanted to get a Platinum Credit Card or a prestigious Platinum Charge Card or a Small Business Card? How easy is it to find the right card?

It’s relatively simple. Using a Flash presentation, Amex successfully showcases its card offerings and leads prospects to the appropriate card by highlighting each product’s most important benefits.

Where the process bogs down is on the main card page (for example on the Platinum Charge Card’s page) where contrast issues make reading difficult and where additional clicks need to be made to truly understand the card’s value. It takes a few clicks to read up on each benefit and the back and forth journey between product benefits gets tiresome.

Listing a series of attractive benefits in bullet form right then and there would likely produce a better, faster experience and lead to more sales. Unfortunately that’s not happening at present - but it can be fixed.

Usability Rating (out of 10): 5

Will Anyone Find the Site on Google?

In Australia, Google is the 800-hundred pound gorilla of search engine advertising. By its own estimates, Google accounts for 85-87% of searches online in Oz. In Australia, if you’re not Google’s front page… you’re not going to be found. Period.

SEO or SEM?

Will Amex be a player? Will it show up naturally on Google through good search engine optimisation (SEO) or will it simply rely on paid advertising (SEM or Search Engine Marketing) to show up on Google’s front page?

With a site grounded in Flash and JavaScript and not featuring the keyword credit card even once on its home page in a manner that’s readable for search engines, it’s a safe bet the marketers at Amex or the agency acting on their behalf have decided to buy their way onto Google’s front page via paid advertising.

It’s not the end of the world. Amex will still be visible in paid searches - but it will cost them and they’ll be sacrificing all organic traffic (approximately 40-60% of clicks on search engines) and relying solely on SEM to deliver sales.

So what’s so bad about Flash or JavaScript?

Used in moderation, JavaScript and Flash do not hinder SEO. However, when they replace all meaningful content a search engine could latch onto to learn what the site is about - as is the case with American Express Australia’s site - you end up with a site with very little content/meaning attached to it.

And if a search engine cannot decipher what your site is about via content, it won’t list your site. In that sense, American Express’ site is all but invisible to search engines in its present form.

Redirect at your own peril

What’s worse, the site is not based in Australia. http://www.americanexpress.com.au/ redirects you to the Australian section of Amex’s US server: http://www.americanexpress.com/australia/. And when the user is not registered or logged in (and that would usually be the case), he/she is redirected once again to an intermediate page, http://www.americanexpress.com/australia/homepage/personal_notreg.shtml., which ultimately redirects you to the homepage, https://home.americanexpress.com/home/au/home_p.shtml, also located in the US.

Confused? We are. Why so many redirects? No idea. Why a secure https homepage? No clue! A secure homepage is not needed as no one has logged into a secure area yet. Go figure…

I’m not Australian… Ignore me!

From an SEO perspective, redirecting traffic outside of Australia sends a clear message to the search engines, namely: ‘this is a US based site… Not an Australian one!’ It’s one more nail in the coffin in what is essentially a non-optimised site.

SEO Rating (out of 10): 0.5

Final Analysis: Does it sell Credit Cards?

So… does American Express Australia’s’ site do the job of selling credit cards? It’s straight forward and professional looking. It takes you to its product simply and quickly, but it’s somewhat slow at laying out product benefits and taking you to the sale - and there’s no offer to sign up or any meaningful call to action.

With regards to driving traffic to the site via search engines like Google, American Express Australia will need to rely heavily on Search Engine Marketing. In its present form the site will likely remain invisible for important keywords like ‘credit card’, although its powerful brand name, significant SEM spend and other marketing efforts will still bring in sales.

Overall Rating (out of 10): 5

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Want to get your site evaluated for free?

Send us the link and we’ll post the results of our investigation on this blog and send you a copy via email

For a full audit of your website (a detailed analysis of every critical SEO variable) - call us on (02) 9007 2494 or email us with your requirements.

Social Media Optimisation - what the heck is it?

Published by Marc on 14 November, 2007 in SEO. 1 Comment

A client recently asked us about Social Media Optimisation or SMO as to ‘what the heck it was’ and if he should ‘get in on that action?’ Little did he know he was already applying many SMO techniques - he just didn’t know it!

SMO as defined on Wikipedia is ‘a set of methods for generating publicity through social media, online communities and community websites’.

So if like our client you’re performing SMO if you are…

Adding links back to your site

Search engines like Google and Yahoo value links and reward sites who have many incoming links from other websites (especially relevant links from heavily trafficked websites). So listing your business on paid or free directories is a sound strategy for improving your natural (organic) search rankings.

How to find directories and acquire links

A good place to start: Type ‘Australia Directory Listings’ into a search engine and you’ll come across some popular directories, many of which are free.  Simply submit your site and wait to receive confirmation of your posting!

Popular directories include:

Making your site easy to tag and bookmark

Giving visitors to your web site the opportunity to bookmark your content is also a sound optimisation strategy. Don’t lose your traffic! Make it easy for users to stick around and engage with your brand by providing them with the tools to reconnect with you again and again.

Popular bookmark tags include:

Adding content mashups

A further way to enhance your website’s content is via content mashups. Add videos, maps or streamed content from a news source provider to provide a better web experience or facilitate a sale. It’s surprisingly easy and a handy way to take your website to the next level and as search engines improve, those new forms of content will count ever more towards your quality score.

For example:

Sharing your content

It pays to share. And that saying certainly holds true for the web. Sending your content on via newsletters or posting to your company blog interesting topics like ‘Social Media Optimisation’ can only serve to increase the number of repeat visitors to your site.

So share your content through:

  • Blogs (like this one)
  • newsletters

A little site called Facebook

And finally… Is there a person who has not heard of a little website called Facebook? Synonymous with social networking online Facebook is great way to network, keep in touch with friends and link to people with similar interest locally and internationally.

Launched in early 2004, Facebook has grown from a niche university social networking site into a worldwide phenomenon. By starting your own ‘special interest group’ on Facebook or joining an existing network of likeminded individuals, you can rapidly expand the reach of your content and broaden your link profile.

Top 5 tips for developing for SEO

Published by Scott Swabey on 10 November, 2007 in SEO and Web Development. 1 Comment

Making a website that ranks well with the search engines is a process that has to start from the foundations of the site. Stuffing a badly designed and built site full of keywords isn’t going to help, and is a waste of money.

There are numerous ways to make a website more accessible to search engines, and each has additional, tangible benefits to the website owners and visitors.

Presented below are my top 5 tips for developing a website to help make it an SEO success.

Design for search engines, enhance for humans

Search engines are very much like blind humans in the way they ’see’ a website. They read the page in the way the source is ordered, they do not see images, they have to make a ‘mental’ representation of the page by using semantic clues built into the page by the developer, and use that representation to make sense of the relationship between possibly disjointed blocks of information.

First step then is to design your page with no style, formatting, or other behavioural enhancement. A clean, semantic, well ordered page of data should be the goal. Once the textual content of the page has been laid out, you can start adding styles, images, and behaviours that will give the page visual appeal.

Lighten the code

Search engines have limits to the amount of data on a page they will index, depending on the size of the page. Using excessive amounts of code to display your content is therefore going to have an effect on what the search engines will do with your page. The goal then is to develop your page using the least amount of markup possible to achieve the required visual appearance. Using semantic markup certainly goes a long way to helping with this goal, and the natural added benefit is that your pages are lighter, meaning faster download times for your visitors, and less bandwidth/storage charges for you.

Images are for pictures, not text

OK, so your marketing department have put together a beautifully crafted piece of collateral, and they want you to replicate it online. No problem - convert the piece to a web optimised image and paste the darned thing, easy.

But remember in item 1 where we identified the search engine as a ‘blind’ visitor. He can’t see the image, and therefore cannot read the beautifully crafted message your marketing department has spilt blood to create. What a waste!

Any textual message should be displayed using text - simple. Everybody then gets the same message, whether fully sighted, sight impaired, or search engine. Once the textual message is available it can be enhanced using a variety of techniques, depending on the final visual requirements.

Images can be text too

What? Didn’t you just say images are pictures. Have you been at the hooch again?

No, there are times when an image is used in your page to support the text. Without the image, the text wouldn’t be complete. In these cases the image element should have an alt attribute applied to it. The alt attribute is used to provide alternative, textual content to the image, and it should describe the image. This alternative text will replace the visual image in cases where the image cannot be displayed or seen.

Don’t be shy, let your content shine

An all too common mistake is to develop your site using methods and technologies that essentially hide the content from search engines.

Simple mistakes like using forms for navigation, Javascript for links, Flash for navigation, or whole sites (unless the Flash has been developed using accessibilty settings). All of these will stop a search engine, and many visitors, from accessing your site. Not what you want after spending possibly thousands of dollars on your shiny new site.

So we loop back to item 1. Make the site for the search engine first, then progressively enhance it for visual users, and indeed visitors with greater processing capability.

Is there anything else?

The above tips are quite generic, but form a really solid base to work from. Any developer worth a fraction of the money you are thinking of spending with them should be developing to these standards. And that word brings me nicely to my conclusion.

Develop to Standards

The beauty of the Internet is that anybody can build a website and get it online. The horror of the Internet is that anybody can build a website and get it online.

Although we are working in a very young industry, there are global Standards that have been developed and put in place to ‘regulate’ the way that web technologies should be used. The big daddy of the web standards world is The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). The W3C work on developing specifications, guidelines, software and tools for every aspect of online activity, and their published standards are what every developer should be working with. Sure, cousin Joey can knock out a website in a weekend with his laptop in his bedroom, but if you’re serious about making any kind of impact with your site, cousin Joey isn’t the best man for the job.

Hopefully this quick introduction has given you an insight into the foundations of developing for SEO. Please feel free to leave your comments regarding this post below.

If you have any request for future articles you can leave those in the comments as well.

Blasting the Myth of the Fold

Published by david on 7 November, 2007 in Web Development and Web Standards. 0 Comments

A very interesting article from Milissa Tarquini of AOL on how the long held rule of the “fold” is being de-bunked by web analytics and user testing, as well as how this will impact design and development processes based on screen resolution and browser compatibility.