Jeff Woelker : Chicago SEO, SEM, and Social Media Consultant

I haven’t checked the Chicago Transit Authority’s Trip Planner in a while, but it looks like they’ve done a bit of a redesign on the interface.

The new interface is a nice grid layout (point #4 on my recommendation list) as opposed to the previous layout, pictured below. They’ve added some nice MaqQuest-like iconography and moved the form over to the left, making it easier to jump right in to get directions. They still haven’t added any visual mapping of where you’ll be going during your journey across the city, but that’s still not imperative I guess if you fully trust the CTA to get you from point A to point B. It would still be nice to have a map of the beginning and end points at least so you have SOME orientation of where you are in the city.

I’d still like them to add the ability to export the directions via email or SMS, both to myself or to a friend. That would make it easy for me to tell my friends or relatives who are unfamiliar with chicago transit how to get around easily without having to explain the interface to them or give exact directions.

Overall, it’s a great next step. Clean design, CSS based layout. There are still a few things I’d like to see (embedding directions, sharing with friends, easier use on my cell phone*), but I can look past those things to the next iteration of the transit site. Thanks CTA!

* You can make it easier to use on my cellphone by either hiding the upper navigation (shown in the image below with CSS disabled) all together so I can skip right to the form to get directions, or providing me a link to jump right to the form “Click here to jump to directions”. Otherwise, I have to scroll past all the navigation items to get to the form.

Do you think MegaVideo.com is trying to say something with their SEO? Somehow I don’t think this is a good long term strategy to gain viewing traffic.

So recently, I was approached by one of my clients to begin an SEO campaign for a website outside the US. They did not have a website registered or hosted outside the US, so that was my first recommendation – to register a website in that native domain (.co.uk) and to obtain a hosting plan from a UK host, making sure that their servers are located in the UK and they are not just selling space via a UK business to servers in other countries.

Second, write content specifically different from any other US web properties you may have. If you have example.com, example.co.uk should be substantially different in both content and structure (if possible). Try to incorporate dialectal differences as well (behaviour, colour, etc.) as this will further differentiate your site from American English websites and your own properties.

Third, obtain keyword links from other UK websites, as this will further ingrain your site within the UK web network.

Fourth, in case you were interested in how Google functions when accessed outside the US, when a user accesses Google.com from a UK web address, it forwards them to Google.co.uk. If the reverse occurs, Google allows the user to access Google.co.uk from a US IP address. You’ll have to figure out the specifics for your situation as it applies.

And lastly, check out the rest of my SEO recommendations for further tips once you have your site established outside the US.

As many good SEO’s out there know, your page title is one of the most important aspects of properly optimizing your page. So often, I see page title after page title completely identical to the previous one. “Product 1″, “Product 1″, “Product 1″, even though all three pages have different information – pricing, specifications, and where to buy, as an example.

Another problem arises when you have a deep information architecture with multiple levels. Say for example I have an auto parts store. I might navigate to a brand specific spark plugs page. Your hierarchy might look something like this: Car Place X > Auto Parts > Engine Parts > Spark Plugs > Rapid Fire Spark Plugs. That’s a lot to display in a page title, but not unbearable. The problem arises when you try and index this against Google, which limits the amount of characters in the page title to around 70-80 characters. You might end up with several pages all being indexed for the same page title, only due to truncation.

What you need to be sure of is that you move the most unique aspect of the page title to the front of the [title] tag. This will ensure that your most unique part of the title tag is indexed and is bold when displayed in search results. That’s really the most important point here. Google will always index everything in the page title, and even return results for it, however, you will get more clicks and therefore higher relevance if users see the term they searched for highlighted.

Picture of La Seo Cathedral courtesy of stewdawg7