User Persona

First, we were asked to identify what our Target Audience is. We used Xtensio, a tool that allowed us to map what we believe our products appeal to.

We called him “Cosmo Boost”, which was from an online Hipster Name generator. We felt that our typical user would be considered a Hipster. He is 28 and working in London as a Creative Director at a Start Up near Old Street. He is very social and loves to achieve success and grow businesses from early stages. We listed his traits as being Optimistic, Creative, Confident and Intelligent. He also has a huge love for Art, Culture & Design.

Taking this User Persona, we can then try and target this type of user to ensure that they see the website when searching on Google and other search engines.

KeyWords

To help us identify our unique selling point as a brand, we came up with a small list of initial keywords. These were our first impressions of WallSpace and what we believed the brand stood for, and was trying to convey to the user. We focused on keywords around Photographers, Street Art and the Shoreditch area.

We purposely included some spelling mistakes, as this is common when keywording. This is because people often misspell when searching, and means we will hopefully be higher on the search when they do.

Below is our list of Initial Keywords:
Street, streets, Art, Exhibition, Graffiti, Shoreditch, East, London, Banksy, Illegal, defacing, old, street, arts, exhibit, gallery, gallory, gallary, shore, ditch, brick, land, street, wall, bricks, tower, truman, trumans, brewery, brew, art, stock, image, images, royalty, free, dismal, dismaland, united, kingdom, UK, photographers, photos, photographer, student, students, amateur, prints, print, work, bristol, tour, london, LDN, politics, press, magazines,

We then used Google Keyword Planner to input these Initial Keywords and generate some suggested words. This would widen the search and provide us with suggestions that we may have not thought of before. Not all of these were related, but the software that suggested keywords was pretty accurate in what it suggested.

Word Pools

Next, we took these keywords (Around 200) and downloaded them to a Google Sheet (Spreadsheet). I then categorised these into 13 groups. These then represent the key elements of the site that we should focus on.

For example, one category is Banksy. As he is by far the world’s most famous graffiti/street art artist, he will play a pivotal role in the success of the site. If we focus our content (Blog Posts) around Banksy, and our keywords around these, it is clear that we will generate more traffic.

These categories can also help us with the organisation of the pages on the site. We could take these categories and make them categories on the Wordpress site, to ensure we are meeting the needs of the users.

View KeyWord Pool

XML SiteMaps

XML SiteMaps, allow a search engine to see the layout of the site, and helps to improve its accuracy of knowing the content of the site, and its structure. Google allows website owners to upload their XML SiteMaps, through Google Webmaster.

A plugin called XML SiteMaps, on WordPress allowed us to create and then download XML SiteMap, which could then be uploaded to Google Webmaster.

I then created a robots.txt file and uploaded this to the root folder (Same as XML SiteMap) via FTP access. This allows Search engines to access the site and crawl it for the XML SiteMap, to create and map out the structure of the sites pages, scripts and stylesheets.

Site Testing

A Great way to test how our site was ranking in Google was testing the PageSpeed score. This is the official Google PageRanking algorithm. There are around 200 criteria’s that make up how they are ranked. Using GTMetix, we can searched our domain and it will analyse the Performance of our site.

Originally we were ranked a D with 69% with the page speed of over 14MB and a load time of around 25(ish) seconds from a London, UK server using Google Chrome.

Here are two screenshots showing the difference between October 27th, and November 9th. Although there isn’t too much difference, it shows that playing around with techniques discussed, can have an impact.

Image Compression

A great way to shrink the Total Page Size, which hugely impacts the PageSpeed Score that Google uses to help rank on their searches, can be to compress the images on the website. Often, high-quality images are used on Website because they ‘look better’. When actually, if a logo is only 300px X 300px of the Screen, then the actual image doesn’t need to be any bigger, or very high quality.

A Plugin called TinyPNG allows you to take all images from your site, including high-quality JPEGS (Which we had, due to the photographers uploading their images). The free account we are using provides 500 conversions per month, which is more than suitable for our website currently. It would then convert them into Compressed PNG format which is suitable for Web, especially mobile.

By compressing the Images the website went from being 14MB+ to around 3.5MB’s. This made a huge difference.

Minify CSS & Javascript

Another great way to further improve the PageSpeed score is to Minify the CSS and Javascript. This reduced any unnecessary space including line breaks. As you can see from the example, it shows the different that it made to the CSS file for WallSpace.

We used the Plugin W3 Total Cache, to minify the CSS & Javascript, however, this example shows the clear difference between the CSS and the Minified CSS.

A downside to doing this, is obviously that you cannot see as easily how the CSS is structured. This could cause some issues in the future when we need to change some of the CSS styling. However, there are tools to convert back, and the benefits of improving the PageSpeed score outway the downsides.

Caching

A great way to decrease the loading time and PageSpeed for a user is to Cache elements of the page. This means that when a user visits the WallSpace site, certain elements which I have selected, will go into the Users Browsers Cache. This means that certain parts of the site are already downloaded, increasing the speed of the loading time.

W3 Total Cache is a great plugin for Wordpress, that allows you to specify what it and isn’t cached. I have also set expiration dates for all of these elements to 1 year (Maximum allowed). This means for example, that the Feeds of WallSpace (Categories, tags and comments) are downloaded to a users browser when they visit the site, then when they revisit within a year, the pages will load much quicker, providing a better user experience.

On-Page Optimisation

Now, all the previous techniques of SEO have been Off-Page Optimisation that we can use to affect how Google Ranks it. However, organic optimisation such as On-Page Optimisation is very important. This is how the search engines reads a Page such as the Snippet (The title and description on a Search Engines list of sites).

A great plugin for Wordpress called Yeost SEO is really easy and simple to use. When editing the page, there is a section which shows the Snippet Preview and a Focus Keyword. This Focus Keyword should be the one word which summarises this individual page. An example for the Homepage is “WallSpace”. The plugin then searches the entire page to find this in the header, footer, body and copy etc.

The SEO title and Meta Description section is what a user see’s when searching on a search engine such as Google. For the Title I chose “WALLSPACE — Street Art & Graffiti Stock Photography”, this summarises key elements of what the website is about and is very clear. The Meta description then explains the title in more detail.