Last time I introduced a bit about Off-page SEO, and I stated that “PageRank is NOT THE ONLY FACTOR that determines your Page Ranking”. So, what else can boost your Page Ranking up? The answer would be “On-Page SEO”.

What’s the difference between On-Page SEO and Off-Page SEO?
On-Page SEO Factors that are on your page, such as tags, text, images, videos and URL.
Off-Page SEO Factors that are not on your page, such as links from other sites.

How do tags work in On-Page SEO?
Well, On-Page SEO is a very extensive topic so we’ll cover the main factors today. Tags are the very basic factor that you should always include. Below, I will explain and demonstrate some important tags that search engines will look at on a search action.

1. Title Tag:
Title tag is a very important rank factor. It is what you see on the toolbar, the title when you add to ‘my favorites’, the title of the page and the title of the search result. Therefore, it’s really important that you give a name to your page. When deciding a title tag, make sure the title is unique from other pages, related to the page’s topic, and include keywords that people might search for. Also, you should keep your title short but clear. The maximum characters are 70. Within this 70 characters, make sure you let your audiences know what the page is about, where they are and what you do.
An Example of Title Tag would be:
<title>EQQY Bakery – Best Bakery in Vancouver, Richmond BC</title>

2. Keywords Meta Tag:
Keywords Meta Tag is what the search engine will look for based on the search terms. The keywords that you put have to be relevant to what the page is about, otherwise your page might be marked as spam by search engines.

However, because of previous web developers overly using/abusing keywords meta tags, some search engines decided to search on “keywords” found spread throughout a website instead of Keywords Meta Tag. What’s the difference between these two? The keywords meta tag is a location where keywords for your webpage can be listed. Keywords themselves can be found anywhere in your website where there is live text.

While Keywords Meta Tags do not carry much weight any longer, it’s still a good idea to put one in your page. The maximum number for keywords is 5-10 words (175 characters), per page. Also, make sure that you don’t repeat the same sets of keywords on every pages.
An Example of Keywords Meta Tag would be:
<meta name=”keywords” content=”EQQY Bakery, Vancouver Bakery, Best Bakery, Richmond Bakery” />

More information about why some search engines ignore keyword meta tags can be found here:
Google Does Not Use Keywords Meta Tag

3. Description Meta Tag:
Description Meta Tag is what you see in a search result under each page’s title. This description should be short and clear about the page’s topic. When writing the description Meta Tag, make sure you include the “keywords” of the page so the search engine will pick up these words. This tag is highly important because it can determine audience’s wish of clicking into your site or not. Ideally, the maximum characters are 150.
An Example of Description Meta Tag would be:
<meta name=”description” content=”EQQY Bakery sales the best bread online in Richmond. We… blah blah blah” />

4. Robots Meta Tag:
Robots Meta Tag is really important for searches as well. Remember the “web spider” we talk about on last post? We also called it “Google Bot”. This tag is for the web spider to know what to do with this page. The web spider will follow whatever rule you gave on this page, and do the actions. The types of Robots Meta Tag are:

* index & noindex = whether the spider should index this page or not
* follow & nofollow = whether the spider should follow the links in this page or not
* all & none = Index and follow or neither index nor follow
This is an example why you don’t want the search engine to find your page:
If this page is a security page, you set to “noindex” and “nofollow” or simply just set to “none”.
If the links on this page are not important to your page(example: advertisement), you set to “nofollow”.

If you don’t see a Robots Meta Tag on your page, by default it’s set to “index, follow”.
An Example of Robots Meta Tag would be:
<meta name=”robots” content=”INDEX,NOFOLLOW” />
An Example for Google’s Robots meta Tag would be:
<meta name=”googlebot” content=”noindex, nofollow, noarchive”>

5. Language Meta Tag:
Language Meta Tag is not as important as the tags above, but it help the search engine to categories your pages. This tag presents the primary language(s) of the page.
An Example for Language Meta Tag would be:
<meta http-equiv=”content-language” content=”en,fr”>

6. Link Tag:
Link Tag is usually used in blogs or news. It tells search engine the relationship between pages. By adding this tag, the search engine will not only index the current blog post or news but also index the previous post and the next post.
Examples for Link Tag:
<link rel=”prev” href=”/events/Dec-2011″>
<link rel=”next” href=”/events/Feb-2012″>

7. Head Tag:
Head Tags are used in page content. There are usually heading 1 to 6, but the search engine will only pickup heading 1, sometimes heading 2 as well. Heading 1 is considered the title of your content, and also a “keywords” for search engine. It’s really important that you SHOULD only have one heading 1 in your page and it should be clear to show what the content is about.
An Example for Head Tag:
<h1>EQQY Bakery History</h1>
(notice I used ‘eqqy bakery’ instead of ‘our’ to include my keyword)

8. Anchor Tag:
Anchor Tag are hyperlinks that link to either internal site or external site, found throughout websites. Not only can they boost other people’s PageRank, but they will also benefit your own PageRank. You can put “Keywords” in it so the search engine can pick up the keywords. This is really important so please avoid using “click here” as the text. It should be clear; for example, by using “About EQQY Bakery” as the link text, the audience will know where this link leads to. Also, if you are connecting to an external link/website, make sure you link to a trusted site. If the site is not trusted, make sure you include a attribute (rel=”nofollow”) to tell the web spider not to follow this link. Another attribute that can help for SEO are “title” attributes. “Title” attributes are that little box of text that appear beside the link when you hover on it.

Bad Example: Please click Here to learn about EQQY Bakery.
Good Example: I would like to learn more about EQQY Bakery.

An Example for a ‘nofollow’ Anchor Tag:
<a href=”http://eqqyBakery.com” rel=”nofollow”>EQQY Bakery</a>
An Example for a ‘title’ attribute:
<a href=”http://eqqyBakery.com” title=”EQQY Bakery”></a>
For more information about ‘title’ tag:
Don’t neglect the Title Attribute

9. Image Tag:
Image Tag is the tag that displays images. You may think this isn’t important as text, but it really is. Remember, everything on the web is formed by text. Computers don’t read images, they read text. It does effect your SEO a lot. Most search engines search for images and this search works exactly like website search. Audiences don’t necessary come to your site by web searching, they might come from an image search, especially for online painters, portfolios, or graphic designers.

So, what should you pay attention to? First, the name of your image. Give each of your image a short descriptive name. For example: “eqqy-apple-pie” instead of “pie-1″ because search engine will also analyze this as a “Keyword”. Second, include a “title” attribute as well. It could be the name of the image, so when a user hovers on the image, they can easily understand what it’s about. Third, an “alt” attribute. “Alt” attribute has two uses. The first one is when your image is moved or somehow the server can’t find the image, this alt text will replace your image so the user knows what’s going on with the page. The second use is for SEO, of course. Search Engine will also search “alt” attributes and find the “Keywords”.

An full example for a Image Tag would be:
<img src=”image/eqqy-apple-pie.png” title=”EQQY Apple Pie” alt=”delicious eqqy apple pie” />

After seeing these awesome tags that can boost up your SEO, you might be wondering what exactly does “Keywords” mean? Why do I quote them every time I mention them? Well, because these are another important factor of On-Page SEO which does not belong to the “tag” category. We’ll discuss these next time!

Rice, Rice, and more Rice! Largest selection of rice available!

Last year, we had the fun-tastic opportunity to work with Western Rice Mills as they were looking to move offices and come up with a brand new panache. This new move represents a new era in-the-making, so we were up to the task of spicing up that bowl of rice.

EQQY GROUP assisted in identity, branding, as well as their online marketing efforts which included a website.

Project Summary:

Western Rice Mills moved into a new warehouse in Richmond, BC.  Their original identity was out-of-date and they felt it was time to re-invent themselves.  It needed to represent them well – both in location as well as language. So we opted for a hybrid logo that had both English as well as Chinese.

This was then applied to the branding of their business cards, marketing brochures, as well as their website.

Project Goals

• New Identity, New Logo, Catered towards both local markets as well as foreign markets

• Develop a new business card template using their new identity

• New modern design, look, and feel of the website

• A Content Management System to allow flexibility and content updates

• Add in a products catalogue to showcase their inventory

• Capability to add in recipes and social media integration

• Capability to search on the website.

• Better and more professional presentation and user experience

Question

Do you need a simple website and branding services? Contact EQQY GROUP today for more information on how we can start your project!

This year’s Chinese New Year Eve falls on January 22 at night. Dumpling is the must have on the dinner list and we are also expecting beautiful fireworks in the evening.  Every child who is born after January 23^rd will belong to the Dragon.  The Dragon in Chinese translates to power, loyalty, and responsibility since only the King was entitled to wear clothes decorated with the Dragon in ancient China.  Also, remember to say “Gong Xi Fa Cai” (a wish to good luck, happiness and prosperity) when you meet people in the morning of January 23, 2012.

Minimalist design is not a new concept. You can see it applied to all types of products like furniture, fashion and architecture. In web design, this concept is applied when a site is stripped of all the frills and left with it’s bare essentials: content, layout and typography.

Because you don’t have decorative elements to draw your audience in or fill in blank spaces, your layout grid is key. My favourite grid template to use is the 12 column grid which gives me a restricted guide with lots of variety to ensure everything fits and lines up against each other. And remember, give your layout lots of space to breathe. White space is important!!!

Minimalism doesn’t mean plain so graphics are also part of your design. No going crazy with the photoshop effects though! When using dropshadows or gradients, go subtle. Most minimalist sites are black, white and grey but a bold hint of color is also great for visual heirarchy or for your hoverover links. Just keep your colour palette restricted.

As for typography, keep it clean. If you plan on using more than one type of font, do one in serif and one in sans serif and make sure it goes together. Use your own judgement. If you’re a good designer like me and Kathy, you’ll be fine.

In my opinion, the elements of minimalism is always a good way to start a fresh new site, especially if you don’t have a clear vision yet (but you should before starting!). Now here are some examples:

A new year has started and everyone is looking for a successful website, but how to make your site successful? One answer is receiving good traffic from search engines. Now here comes the question, “How to get great traffic from a search engine?”

As we all know, meta tags in your website pages are super important to have good SEO (Search Engine Optimization) results. The most commonly used meta tags are: Title Tag, Keyword Tag, Description Tag, and Robots Tag. Also, there are many other tags like h1, h2 and Image Tag on the page that help with your organic search. We called these “On-Page SEO” factors.

Today I’m going to share with you one of the “Off-Page SEO” factors: PageRank (PR).

What’s Google?
Before I start to talk about PageRank, I want to introduce Google. Google is a “Crawler-Based Search Engine” that sends a “web spider” to crawl through, download and analyze your website pages. Then, these analyses will be added to Google’s database. When someone does a search on Google, it browse through its database and find the matching results. Another example of a Crawler-Base Search Engine is Ask (www.ask.com).

How Google Ranks?
First of all, a lot of people confuse PageRank and Page Ranking, but there’s a huge difference between them. Page Ranking is the site’s actual position in a search result with a specific search term. Depending on the words searched, your Page Ranking will change. Page Ranking is considered less meaningful than PageRank because it really depends on the search words used. For example, having a high Page Ranking with the search words “EQQY Bakery on Shellbridge Way” is less meaningful compared to having a high Page Ranking with the search words “Richmond’s Best Bakery”. So, how about PageRank?

What’s PageRank?
PageRank is considered one of the important factors in Off-Page SEO, which means, the links found in your website. Google considers a link as a vote to another website. For example, if EQQY CREATIVE has a link to EQQY DESIGN, then it will boost up the PageRank for EQQY DESIGN. And, there’s a special term for that called “Backlink”. Google determines your PageRank by the number of backlinks you have, how relative the link’s text is to your site, and the PageRank of the site that links to your site.

What’s BackLink?
Backlink is another site’s anchor tag (i.e. <a></a>) that links to your site.

Here’s an example in html format:
<a href=”http://eqqy.com”>EQQY GROUP</a>
which will display like this on the site:
EQQY GROUP.

If you want to know more about links, here’s more information about different backlinks:
www.linkbuildingsolutions.com (<= this is also a backlink example that boost up his PageRank…)

Now, are you getting exited to see what’s your website’s PageRank is?
You can check it here: www.prchecker.info (<= another backlink example…)

Do You Have A Low PageRank?
Don’t worry. You can still boost up your PageRank now.
1. Find some related website and ask them to link to your site (it would be good if you can also link back).  This is known as cross-linking.
2. Add social media sharing buttons on your site, blogs, articles, news, images, videos, or pages.

How Social Media Sharing Might Help
If one person sees your blog or article and they like it a lot, he will share on his social media page, which is considered one backlink. Let’s use Facebook for example. Assume this person have 50 friends, and 25 of them also like his share, and they share on their profile page too. Now, you got 26 backlinks. Assuming each of these friends also has 50 friends and 25 of their friends share again. Wow. Can you imagine what the number would be if this goes on and on? And this is just if one person shares your blog or article on Facebook. What happened if 10 people share your blog or article on different social networks such as LinkedIn, Twitter, Blogger… Well, I don’t think I would have enough fingers to count how many backlinks I have now.

But be very careful with these backlinks because they can be helpful but dangerous. Sites that are poor in quality or are not related to your site’s content will not boost your PageRank, it may even lower it.

Here’s how you can check how many backlink on your site and their qualities:
www.bad-neighborhood.com (<= another backlink example …)

High PageRank = High Page Ranking?
Not necessarily. Just to clarify one thing about PageRank before I finish. PageRank is NOT THE ONLY FACTOR that determines your Page Ranking. Having a high PageRank might or might not get you to the top of the search. To have a high Page Ranking and get to the top of the search you also need to consider  other SEO factors such as On-Page SEO, but that would be another topic to discuss next time.

My presentation was about Web Design Trends for 2011. I scoured the internet looking at my favourite design blogs for inspiration and came up with 7 topics the first being TYPOGRAPHY!

Skinny type
Tall, thin and trendy….adjectives to describe a supermodel and also the latest rage in type selection. Maybe you don’t notice it but now that I’m calling it out, you will see it everywhere. Remember how everyone used Helvetica before? Yeah, it’s like that. You can apply this to your own designs by simply selecting the “Condensed” variations in your font family like some of my commonly used favourites Helvetica, Univers, Avenir and Frutiger. Looking for a web friendly alternative? Bebas.

Big bold type used as web headers and graphics
Forget having images or rotating banners to reel people in. Lots of websites are playing around with type as the main image. The words have to be big, really big and it helps if it says something catchy or “prettified” to make it pop. If you want to take it even further, mix different kinds of type in varying sizes. Go crazy with the serif, sans serif and even decorative type. We all have some weird unused cowboy font and now is the time to use it…….with a tasteful eye of course.

So that concludes my first of 7 blog posts about web trends. Here’s some more examples to tie you over until my next post.

Offer Expires: Midnight on November 30, 2011

What else has EQQY been up to recently?

In my previous post, I talked about a fun project we worked on for DVDNow. This time, we get to showcase something a little bit more different. Our existing client, It’s On Electric, initially came to us a few years ago with the objective of creating a brand new website.

This time around, we focused more on the branding side of things – spicing things up a little bit more.

Project Summary:

It’s On Electric Company has certified electricians that can work around the clock to wire your business to your needs. Their intention for the new website is to modernize the look of their website, build trust with their clients and partners, as well as obtaining the ability to update their website on-demand.

Well, they came to the right place!

Project Goals

• New modern design, look, and feel of the website.

• A Content Management System to allow flexibility and content updates.

• Capability to search on the website.

• Better and more professional presentation and user experience.

Question

How would you be able to build trust with your clientele? Contact EQQY GROUP today for a free consultation meeting.

We sometimes are so used to a specific vocabulary that we forget that a few or maybe most of the people are not so familiar with the meaning of those words.

I decided to start with the word CAPTCHA, which the real meaning might not be fully understood even for some web professionals.

Captcha is a security key, most seen in Contact Forms, that is used to avoid spam in submitting irrelevant posts.

I’m sure almost everyone has come across those strangely ordered, sized letters in a box.

Here are two examples:

First one is found on our client’s blog on vmfgroup.ca

The second one, you can find here in our website if you want to contact us!

Captcha was invented in the year 2000 by a group of scientist at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh and is an abbreviation for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart! Wow can you repeat that 3 times fast?

The spam (unsolicited messages) that overwhelms our “Inbox” is actually sent by computers programmed to send electronic messages indiscriminately. Computers read a different type of code, not common to our language. The weird displayed letters can be identify by humans only – setting us apart from the computers.

So, if you have been receiving too many unwanted emails, you might want to integrate a “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart” in your website.

Hope you’ve learned something new and come back for the next post!

• Buy your product
• Subscribe or Register – give you permission for you to follow up (by email, phone, etc.)
• Refer a friend
• Or get your visitor to learn something and give you a feedback after?

In this case, you need some sort of a page where user can read more about your product or service and where you can place a form or a buy now button for a quick action.

These kinds of pages are called Landing pages.

What exactly is a landing page?

According to Wikipedia Landing page is a standalone web page that appears in response to an advertisement. It is usually disconnected from the main website and focused on one single objective. The main goal of a Landing page is to attract users’ attention and get you visitors to take a specific action.

I’ve already got a home page, why do I need a Landing page?

Most of the time, homepages are created with a general purpose in mind. Homepages usually contain a lot of information about the company itself like news and short bios, links to internal and external pages like menus, links to social media and even feeds from other websites and blogs. All that can be really distracting for your visitors and could possibly drive you user away from buying your product or signing up for your seminar.

Here is a couple of pages from Oprah magazine website. Can you tell the difference?

HOMEPAGE:

LANDING PAGE:

5 main elements of a Landing page

1. Primary headline. This is your unique selling proposition.
2. Benefits. What is it that you are trying to sell and why is it good for your client. 5-10 good reasons why a visitor should buy your product. Use bullets, facts and numbers.
3. Catchy image. Usually is a photo of your product or simply a couple of happy people. Happy clients = profit. You can use additional photos of you product if needed. The key here is to keep it simple and not to overuse it
4. A submission form in order to collect user data – name, email or/and phone number.  Avoid long forms with a million of questions. Ask only what you really need.
5. The Call to Action. This is probably your most important element out of all 5. Make it stand out!

Tips and ideas on how to make the best use of your Landing page

1. Focus on ONE objective. Every element on the page has to work towards the same goal – delivering your message to the visitor. Having only one objective will keep your users focused on your message.
2. Include only ONE call to action button.  “Get your FREE advice” or “Get updates on future seminars” works better than just a plain boring “Sign up”. Be creative with your CTA. Make you users wanting to click it – use design elements to draw attention toward the call to action. A good practice is to keep your CTA above the fold or repeat it throughout the page in case you have a lot of content.
3. Leave navigation out and avoid using off page links. Your goal is to keep a user on your Landing page as long as possible. If you want to provide more information (privacy policy, contest rules etc) use lightbox style pop ups instead of opening new windows. This will keep visitors on the landing page instead of wandering off onto another page – and away from your conversion goal.
4. Match the look of your Landing page to the look of your original lead source (social media, email campaign, PPC ads). Use the same message and graphic elements you used to drive your prospect to the landing page.
5. Use one-column format for your landing page. One-column page are easier to scan.
6. Videos can be a huge bonus to you landing page. Videos are engaging, fun and have a power of increasing a trust factor in your visitors.
7. Don’t forget to thank the visitor for submitting their information. It’s a nice touch and a great way to advertise some additional services.
8. Test, test, test! See what elements work for you and what don’t .  There is a bunch of tools to help you with testing your landing page: Google Optimizer, Google Analytics, HeatMap ..

Remember that simplicity is a key – big bold call to action, clear headlines and just enough information to make your visitor interested in your product – this is your perfect combination for a successful Landing page!

Let us know if we can help you to create a Landing page today!