We’ve already written our top 5 resolutions for 2010 for intranet owners – but what about those of you out there on the Great Wide Web? Keep reading for our top 5 New Year resolutions for website owners…

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Using search analysis to improve your site.

Running user surveys and interviews are good ways of finding out what your users want, but they might not give you the whole picture. People can’t always say exactly what it is that would make a site and its content more usable. Furthermore, what a user wants and what a user needs might not be the same thing!

Analysing search patterns and results on your site is a great way of studying user behaviour which can give you different insights into how your site and its content could be improved to better meet their needs, as well as how you can optimise the internal search on your site.

It’s nothing to sniff at: users are becoming very comfortable and very proficient at using search engines, both on the web (using search engines such as Google) and internally (using your site’s search function). So the better your search works, well, the better.

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I enjoy blogging. It’s a bit of a hobby – which is great, because I get to maintain this blog in my professional time. In my spare time, I write about whatever takes my fancy: everything from the fashion industry to the latest video games.

Getting your blog noticed on the internet is difficult. Large, well-known brands have a natural advantage in that people are already searching for them, but what can the rest of us do to put our words in front of the world?

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A blogger by the name of Derek Powazek recently ranted about how Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is “poisoning the web”, and that it “should not be undertaken by people with brains or souls”, which wasn’t a very nice thing for him to say.

Derek followed up his post with an FAQ, in which he offers an explanation (he’s stopped smoking) and a few clarifications. Both articles are worth reading, because they’re very entertaining and well-written.

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We send out a lot of newsletters for clients, as well as our own newsletter. There’s a lot to think about for each one – how many articles, what images to use, what’s on the banner – but the most important part of every newsletter is literally one of the smallest.

The headline.

Think of it this way: if you’re anything like me, you receive a lot of emails on any given day. You prioritise a lot of them by looking at the sender, and then you go through the rest in some kind of order. Anything that looks unimportant or dull goes straight to the recycle bin, because you simply don’t have the time for it. Most newsletters fall into this trap.

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It’s pretty common for a client to ask about having a Flash intro on their website. My immediate reaction is to suck air through my teeth like a plumber who’s been quizzed about the cost of fixing a boiler – not because I know it will be expensive, but because I know that it is a bad idea.

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Often a common error by UK companies when creating keywords for a non-English site is to either leave keywords in English (a big no-no) or to try and use a tool to translate them.

The latter doesn’t work, as anyone who has tried using a translation dictionary may have found: words which may be correct are not necessarily the words a native speaker would use.

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Nutricia, the company that owns the Cow & Gate and Aptamil baby formula brands recently got rapped by the UK’s Advertising Standards Authority for magazine ads which claimed their milks could “support” the immune system. The ASA said that this sort of claim could only be substantiated with robust evidence. Baby formula brands are subjected to all sorts of regulations regarding the promotion of their milks. But how does this extend to pay-per-click search advertising? Read on..

With marketing budgets being crunched, Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is starting to look even more appealing. The 80-20 rule (otherwise known as the Pareto principle) states that in general 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes. In SEO terms, this means that a few low-cost changes to your site can result in a dramatic increase of traffic. However, when you consider that Google has over 200 factors that determine ranking on search results, it’s important to focus your SEO efforts on the areas that are really going to make a difference. Read on..

Google is the king of the search engine castle, with 68% of all online searches being made through its sites. Displayed alongside those millions of search results are ads, uniquely tied in to the results with a complex and highly secret algorithm.

Advertising on Google can put your brand out in front of thousands of potential customers, and not just on the search results pages. With the Google content network, relevant ads are also displayed on sites all over the web. Read on..