I’ve read and enjoyed your articles on adding Twitter / Google search boxes to a website. I am trying to figure out a way to have one search box on my site that displays results (in a multi-column horizontal table) for multiple sources, particularly Twitter / Google / YouTube. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks!
Archive for the ‘Resources’ Category
How Can I Embed Search Results On My Own Page?
Wednesday, March 30th, 2011Dos and Don’ts of Creating a First-Class Home Page
Wednesday, March 16th, 2011If you didn’t already know, your home page is the most important page of your site. Why? Because it is the most indexed page by Google and is the gateway to the rest of your site. It is therefore important that your home page has the right content to encourage visitors to click through to other pages of your site.
Your home page must let your visitors know that they’re at the right place and that you offer what they want. To help you achieve this I wanted to share a recent video from Success Works that outlines the do and don’ts of creating content for your home page
Making Your PSD File Ready For HTML Slicing
Wednesday, February 2nd, 2011If you’re designing a custom landing page, chances are that you’re using a PSD to HTML chop shop, like my friends at PSD to HTML/CSS. The problem is that things you may obviously require won’t be obvious to the coders. Here’s a checklist of things to specify in your order to minimize revisions and save time. (more…)
How To Get Your Mobile Site Indexed
Wednesday, December 8th, 2010So you’ve built a mobile version of your website to target iPhone, Android, and Blackberry users. Congratulations! This can do wonders for creating increases in mobile traffic and subsequent conversions, especially when optimization includes local factors. The next step is to follow the appropriate steps to properly inform search engines of the existence and dimensions of the site:
- Create Webmaster accounts for Google, Yahoo!, and Bing
- Submit site URL to search engines
- Create and submit Mobile XML Sitemaps
- Create and submit Mobile Robots.txt files
If you don’t already have Webmaster Accounts set up for your regular site, do it now! They’re free and lend great insight into site performance and signify any indexation issues.
From the Webmaster Accounts for your desktop site, you can submit your mobile URL by selecting “add a site” as you would any other site. If the mobile site lives at another sub-domain (http://mobile.orbitz.com) or TLD (http://wapedia.mobi/), the site will have to be verified. However, if the mobile site lives in a subfolder of the regular company site (https://www.bankofamerica.com/mobile/), verification is unnecessary and the mobile folder will be segmented as a separate account.
XML Sitemaps are an important feature to implement on websites that indicate all of the pages very efficiently to search engines. Since mobile sitemaps use a unique mobile tag in the XML code, mobile and desktop XML sitemaps should be distinct from one another.
Sitemaps can be easily created using one of a slew of online automated XML sitemap generators. Although most online generators provide standard sitemaps free of charge, there is normally a fee for mobile XML sitemap creation. We recommend the Sitemap Generator V3.0 from Xml-Sitemaps.com, which costs $19.99. This will allow you to set change frequency and priority levels of pages on your mobile site.
A reliable free alternative is to write the sitemap out by hand (realistic if there are a relatively few number of pages that need to be listed). Sitemaps.org is a great resource for understanding XML Sitemap Protocol.
Once the mobile sitemap is complete, upload to the root folder of your mobile site, test it with an online sitemap validator, and submit to each webmaster account. Read more about Google’s mobile XML sitemaps standards.
Although it was customary a couple of years ago to block the desktop site in the mobile robots.txt file and vice versa, this is no longer necessary since desktop URLs are normally showing up in search results. However, mobile robots.txt files should still be created to block any internal site search results and private data. These should also be submitted to each webmaster account.
As we move in the direction of web ubiquity, mobile search engines have become more inclined to list “desktop” URLs in search results, leaving it to sight owners to implement user agent detection in order to redirect mobile users accordingly. In my next article, I will discuss the ins and outs of user agent detection as it relates to mobile search. In the meantime, set up your webmaster accounts and submit your mobile site!
Building Better Keywords With Singulars And Plurals
Wednesday, November 24th, 2010I received an interesting question the others day from a student in a class that I am teaching on SEO. He’s on the process of optimizing a landing page for the keywords “waterproof jacket” (singular) and “waterproof jackets” (plural), he is noticing that each keyword produces different organic search results across multiple search engines. His question is whether he should optimize his landing page for both of these keywords or just one of them? As you might suspect, there is no one-size-fits-all answer to this question (even thought the actual waterproof jacket might come that way).
Adding Better Images Optimization To Your Web Development
Wednesday, November 10th, 2010Most web developers know the importance of optimizing images for faster page loading times, but it’s also a very cumbersome, time consuming and boring process. Then when you are done, the customer or designer gives you new images to use and you can start the process over and over and over again. The result is that we spend a lot of time optimizing images and also forget to do it from time to time.
That’s why I’ve been experimenting with a way to automate the process of optimizing images for use on web pages. This has resulted in a Visual Studio 2010 extension to do just that.
The extension
The idea with automating the optimization is that the images must have the same quality in color and fidelity as before they were optimized. That is done with proven algorithms, and when an image has been optimized, it cannot be further optimized by the same algorithm. Nothing happens if you run the optimization multiple times on the same image – it will only be optimized the first time.
If you run the optimization on an image that has already been optimized using other tools, you might still be able to optimize further, but often nothing will happen – the image will not be touched when it has been analyzed and no optimization is found possible.
In this beta of the Image Optimizer extension, only JPEG and PNG files are supported, but that should hopefully cover ~90% of images in modern websites.
When you right-click a folder in the Solution Explorer in Visual Studio, you now have a new menu item called “Optimize images”.
Google Introduces New Multi-lingual SEO Attributes
Wednesday, September 29th, 2010Google has introduced new SEO attributes – rel=”alternate” and hreflang=”x”, for better handling of multi-lingual pages and content. This feature is predominantly for websites, that contain:
The Benefits And Risks Of Domain Name Changes
Wednesday, September 15th, 2010A domain name is an ID label that defines a field of administrative authority or control on the Net, according to the Domain Name System or DNS. It is used to supply easily identifiable names to address Web resources numerically.
While some might still question the importance of having a domain name, there are those who recognize the importance of having one and so have established their own domains. Just think of it this way: if you have a website with free Web hosting assistance but without a domain name, the company that will be earning from it is the hosting company and not you.
Your domain name is your online address. It can either make or break your presence on the Web. It needs to be easily recognizable to gather enough visitors, contain keywords for it to be search engine-friendly, and not difficult to spell to avoid losing traffic. It is basically your way of putting yourself out there and earning money.
Why change?
There are times, however, when you have to change your domain name for certain reasons. You may want to diversify and consider putting a lot of thought and advanced planning to your domain purchase. You may also do that after a corporate re-brand or if you have chosen a poor name the first time. Also, when your business has now outgrown its original status or when your business needs an upgrade, renewing the domain might be appropriate.
With every action, there is always a risk, including the renaming of your domain. You may lose the support and word of mouth your previous clients have under your old domain name. You may also need to take time to re-introduce your new domain to your clients; some of them will not be available or will be difficult to contact by then.
Square one
Your marketing material, with a link to your web address, will appear on catalogs, brochures, business cards, billboards, television ads and printed pamphlets, but they will likely be rendered questionable once you change your domain. It will also cost you in reprinting material to add to your new address.
The brand that you have built with your old domain name will not be as significant when you have acquired your new address, as impressions and reputations need time to develop and will not immediately be transferred to the new domain. Regaining the value of your brand requires hard work and patience.
Things to look out for
Having a new site design for the new address is essential. While it would be a good idea to move the elements found in the old domain to the new, there has to be changes in the visual design — logos, footers and headers, for instance.
Lastly, and most importantly, the domain change might affect the organic search volume. One of the most common errors site owners do is point their old site to the new one, without a 301 redirect implementation. If you just park your old domain and link it to the new address, you are at risk of a duplicate content issue, making your rankings slowly go down, affecting your SERP visibility and your traffic.
The benefits that eclipse all (if you changed your domain name for the right reasons)
Due to these risks, one might think that a domain change is not worth it. However, it can be. It is important to weigh the advantage from the disadvantage before choosing to change your name permanently.
Having a new domain is good to reach a wider scale, without the risk of losing browsers who recognize the old domain and believe that you focus only on one product or service.
Moreover, having a renamed domain helps the rankings in the search engine as well as online marketing. Since the new site is better, it will be more recognizable and users will easily remember it, resulting to a greater traffic influx. Keywords included in the new address will help SEO efforts and will eventually achieve a higher place in the search results.
Using Your Common Sense To Write SEO Copy
Wednesday, September 1st, 2010The copy (or content) within your website needs to have 2 purposes. Firstly, it must be optimized properly to help get the maximum exposure to searchers through the crawling of the search engine spiders and it must also be engaging and compelling for the reader or customer.
Building A Better Tweet Button For Your Site Content
Wednesday, August 18th, 2010Having criticized the new retweet or “tweet” button that Twitter have introduced, lets see if we can make it better.
This mainly covers WordPress – if you are on another platform, find a geek that uses it to try to do the equivalent, but I doubt this is possible on Blogger.
I should point out there are already implementations out in the wild that are significantly better in some ways, though might not meet all the goals of the Twitter developers.