If you’re looking to buy a DIY template, or download a website from a template, you have a lot of choices available. Some of these with be SEO friendly because you have total control over the code, and if you are an intermediate HTML designer then you can just go into the site’s source code and drop in the relevant title, meta description, keyword, and content information. (By the way, the general consensus in the search engine crowd is that the keyword tag can be left blank, but we prefer to use it so we can track the page’s focus.)

If you’re building your website on a CMS, you may need to do some digging to find out if the site is SEO friendly. Normally, a DIY site design suite is using a CMS if you can utilize “drag and drop” web design elements. A few platforms which let you create your own website will only allow you to create a “default” title tag that is going to show up the same on all of your interior pages. This does not help your site because the search engine can’t figure out which pages are the most relevant to the topic. Some other CMS systems will stick your domain name into the beginning of the title, and this also reduces your search engine effectiveness.

You don’t have to be a custom website design expert to enjoy the benefits of good search engine optimization, but it helps to understand whether the platform is SEO friendly before you buy it. In some cases, you may not have control over your domain name if you choose to leave a DIY web design and hosting company and go somewhere else, which means that you are starting at square one when it comes to optimization. For website design templates that include shopping carts, it is doubly important to have built-in SEO friendly features that are going to present your products in the best possible way to Google, Bing, and Yahoo, or they aren’t going to be visible among the top results. Over the past couple of years, more and more templates and website builders have added complex SEO features into their standard offerings. If you plan to make a website using one of these tools, then adding SEO functionality to the list of requirements will help you get a head start on search engine rankings.

Comments

The search engines in their early stages would pick and chose parts of the website and use that as the description that showed up in the search engine results. If the tags are left blank the search engines will chose a snippet from the page and use this as the description.

It is always advisable and suggested by search engine optimization professionals to take advantage of and use Meta title and description tags on every page on your website. DO not use the same title and description on every page as this is not descriptive and will not help internet searchers.

The reason search engines changes their algorithm to allow the spiders to remember the meta description tags is for webmasters who want to increase their click through rates. Webmasters can tweak and change what shows up in the search results to maximize click through rates (CTR) from browsers and reduce bounce rates. Make sure to use a highly descriptive title and description that is both human friendly and search engine friendly.

What this means is use keywords, preferable long tail keywords, but do not over use keywords to the point where it become unreadable to humans. Make sure everything flows smoothly and makes sense.

Comments

Too many URL parameters

The web is littered with long complicated URLs such as this:

site.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/ProductDisplay?storeId=10051&langId=-1&catalogId=10053&productId=100615137&N=10000003+90401+528374

Aside from changing the actual domain name, the URL above is a real one. Look at it closely, everything after “ProductDisplay?” are the various parameters that tell the browser what content to pull up.

Each “=” in the URL represent a different parameter. Each parameter represents a slight variation of the content. Every variation represents a potentially different page that can be indexed by the search engines.

The search engines want to index valuable content, but URLs such as this can often send engines away. They don’t want to be caught into endless loops of variation. While the search engines certainly have no problem indexing dynamic content, once you get more than three parameters your risking losing the search engines all together. The engines tend to shy away from sites with duplicate content or endless loops created by many parameter possibilities. Your best bet is to keep the parameters down to a minimum.

Inaccessible content

Great content is often inaccessible to the search engines either because it’s hidden behind search options or buried deep within the site. Setting up a proper navigation and clickable link search structure is essential for any site, but even more important for large sites with hundreds of pages or products.

Some pages have to be buried, there just isn’t any other way to go about it. But they don’t have to be so deep that they can’t be found without a GPS tracking device. It’s all a matter of laying out your site’s architecture so all pages have a proper place and that the most beneficial content is the easiest to find.

Session IDs

Session IDs create duplicate content by the hundreds, if not thousands. Every visitor to a site is given a session IDs which is appended to the end of each URL visited. Multiply your visitors by thousands and you now have thousands of new URLs all pointing to the same content.

There are some workarounds when using session IDs for tracking, however there are better solutions altogether that you should look into.

Code Bloat

Avoid building navigation links using Flash or JavaScript. Depending on how these are implemented they can often be problematic to the search engines. Pages which are only linked to via these methods can often be outside of the search engines spidering reach and therefore not included in the index.

Directory Structure

There are three basic directory structures you can have, flat, deep or somewhere in between.

A flat directory structure puts all of your site pages on the same directory level. Each page is essentially one click away from the home page and no page is given any type of prominence.

A deep directory structure is the near opposite. Only a few pages are accessible from the home page, then a few more are accessible from those, a few more from those and so on. This puts some pages many clicks away from the home page unnecessarily.

You want to be somewhere in between. You want a directory structure that makes sense. Pages should be grouped together in broad level categories and only sub-categorized as makes sense from the navigation standpoint. You can go a bit deeper with your URLs but again you don’t want half a dozen directories when a few will do just fine.

Internal Linking

You want to do a good share of internal linking within your site. Not just the navigation, mind you but link from within your content areas and product pages. Good internal linking helps your visitors navigate from page to page and find other areas and products that interest them. This improves visitor satisfaction, leads to more sales and helps improve search engine rankings.

Use whatever opportunities you have to give your visitors opportunities to find these other sections of the site. If you talk about a product or service, link to it. If you have a related bit of information or another similar or companion product, link to it. Using keywords in these links gives the search engines more keyword juice for determining how pages should be ranked.

Site Maps

Site maps provide a great way to allow both your visitors and the search engines to find their way to your content with as few clicks as possible. Your site map should always be no more than one click away, no matter what page the visitor is on. This way, if they get lost in the site or have trouble finding what they want, a quick click to the site map gets them a list of every page or piece of content you offer.

Generally you want your site map to be fewer than 100 links. Larger sites may need a site map that links to other site maps in order to keep all your products and pages accessible as easily as possible. The site map should be the only page on your site that links to every page, unless your site is under 20 or so pages.

Missed a part of this series?
Part 1: Everything You Need To Know About SEO

Part 2: Everything You Need To Know About Title Tags

Part 3: Everything You Need To Know About Meta Description and Keyword Tags

Part 4: Everything You Need To Know About Heading Tags and Alt Attributes

Part 5: Everything You Need To Know About Domain Names

Part 6: Everything You Need To Know About Search Engine Friendly URLs & Broken Links

Part 7: Everything You Need To Know About Site Architecture and Internal Linking

Comments

To cleanup the dynamically generated head section even more, you can disable the styles associated with scripts that aren’t loaded on every page.

The easy way to do this is very similar to what I talked about last time – add this code to your functions.php file (or custom-functions.php if your theme supports it):

add_action( 'wp_print_styles', 'my_deregister_styles', 100 );
function my_deregister_styles() {
if ( !is_page(’about-us’) ) {
wp_deregister_style( thickbox’ );
wp_deregister_style( ’style’ );
}
}

The plugin I’m working on is WPNG Calendar, which displays a stream of events from Google Calendar. I want to show it, in this case, only on the site’s About Us page. I’ve already deregistered the scripts associated with WPNG Calendar on most pages, so now I want to hide the styles on the same pages (why load them if you don’t need them?).

So now you’ll do the same thing as in the previous post with a twist:

1. View the source for a page on your site and find the CSS stylesheet links associated with the plugin that you’ve already deregistered on most pages;
2. Open up the file that calls that stylesheet – in my case I’m looking at wpng-calendar.php.
3. Search for wp_enqueue_style within the PHP file and find the handle for the stylesheet you want to deregister. The handle is the first element in parentheses after the wp_enqueue_style element – in the snippet above they are thickbox and style.

A Problem That You Can Fix Yourself!

What happens if you can’t find a ‘wp_enqueue_style’ in your PHP file? This is unfortunate; it means that the plugin creator isn’t making easy for you. Using wp_enqueue_script and wp_enqueue_style makes it simple to work with the tools WordPress has built-in, but there’s a way around this.

Look for a link that calls a stylesheet – something like this:

echo ‘<link type=”text/css” rel=”stylesheet” href=”‘ . get_bloginfo(‘wpurl’) . ‘/wp-content/plugins/wpng-calendar/css/style.css” />’;

Comment that line out and add your own wp_enqueue_style line, replacing the handle with the stylesheet name and editing the source link as needed (refer to this reference for parameters, I didn’t include what I wasn’t sure about):

wp_enqueue_style(’style’, get_bloginfo(‘wpurl’) . ‘/wp-content/plugins/wpng-calendar/css/style.css’, false, ”, ’screen’);

Now you have a stylesheet being loaded in the way WP intended it to happen and you have a handle (’style’) that you can plug into the deregister function.

Do the same thing for any other stylesheets being called, add those handles to the function and you should be good to go. This is the final version of my function:

add_action( 'wp_print_styles', 'my_deregister_styles', 100 );
function my_deregister_styles() {
if ( !is_page(array(2,’events’,'about-us’)) ) {
wp_deregister_style( ‘thickbox’ );
wp_deregister_style( ’style’ );
}
}

You can see that I’m hiding the styles from the head section on all but three pages:

if ( !is_page(array(2,'events','about-us')) ) {

I hope this is helpful – please let me know if you find these two posts on restricting plugin loading useful and understandable.

Comments

Crafting unmissable headlines which resonate with social users is something which appears deceptively simple. Yet it’s an art form requiring writers, bloggers and marketers to craft thousands of headlines to perfect.

As someone who has been successful with creating content that goes hot across social channels I’ve come to appreciate the art and challenge of crafting sticky headlines. In fact, crafting headlines is equally if not more challenging than leads and even content itself.

Something many bloggers have down, but communications professionals aren’t always fluent in, is the art of crafting headlines specifically for social news sites/users. While there is no one formula for success, I’m going to share 5 things I’ve learned from experience as a blogger, social news user, PR pro and marketer…

1. Work backwards – content first, then headline
2. Leverage archetypes/formulas which work for others (especially outside your niche)
3. Headlines should be outrageous, engaging, emotional, useful, counter-intuitive or remarkable – not to the world, but to your community
4. Don’t just create content, actually use social news sites
5. SEO intersection – frequently forgotten, always vital

As social Diva Liz Strauss has pointed out, it’s not just about the headlines – you also need equally remarkable content to back it up in order to achieve any kind of worthwhile goal such as attracting subscribers or sales leads. But the importance of using clever headlines to help your content stand out in the first place is vital.

As the firehose of real-time social content speeds up, the value of well-crafted headlines will increase. And the truth is, tips can only help so much. Writing headlines is more art than science. The best path is to consider it an iterative process, experiment with different structures, study your analytics and find what works for you.

Comments

Best of all.. each of these tools all free!

1. SEO Toolbar

This is by far the best SEO tool out there. No matter what client or industry I am researching, I always start with the data provided by the SEO Toolbar. It will give you a snapshot of a site, by providing high level information search engines analyze when ranking websites. Even though the toolbar will give you lots of different data points, there are only certain things I look at. I look at the follow data to get a basic overview of the site.

• Domain Age
• Inbound Links
• PageRank
• Pages Indexed
• SEO X-ray (nofollow links, H tags, meta data)

2. Xenu

There was a great post written by Ann Smarty that talks about the different things you can do with the Xenu tool.

Basically this tool will allow you to scan and analyze a site to help find potential problems.

• Broken Links
• Depth of the Site (crawling issues)
• Potential Duplicate Content Issues
• Orphan Pages
• 404 Error Pages

3. Website Grader

This web-based tool, allows you to enter a url and it will analyze the site, then it creates a user-friendly SEO report. This can be an easy report to generate for a potential client. However, sometimes it can be overwhelming for people because of all of the information it returns.

• Overall SEO Score (out of 100)
• Basic On-Page SEO (Meta data, Alt tags, H tags)
• Basic Off-Site SEO (Domain Age, Pages Indexed, Inbound Links)
• Blog Analysis
• Social Media Analysis

4. SEO for Firefox

SEO for Firefox is a plugin that will pull in data about the site within the Google search results. I will use this to see how fierce the competition is and to help determine how much effort and time it will take to optimize a potential clients site. The nice thing about SEO for Firefox is the flexibility to only add data into the results that you want to see. These are the data points I pull in:

• PageRank
• Inbound Links
• Domain Age
• Google and Yahoo Rankings

5. Rank Checker

Rank Checker is a stand alone firefox plugin (also on the SEO Toolbar) that allows you to check the rankings of a site for specific keywords/phrases. One nice feature about Rank Checker is you can check not only US search engines, but foreign versions of Google, Yahoo, and MSN. Data I pull from this tool include:

• Baseline Rankings
• Ranking Improvements
• What URL is Ranking

6. AuditMyPC: Sitemap Generator

There are a lot of sitemap generator tools out there, however I feel that this is the best…plus its free.

• Generate a XML Sitemap
• Generate a HTML Sitemap
• Analyze Website Pages & Structure

7. Reverse IP Lookup

This tool allows you to see what other domains are on the same server. It is not often, but sometimes if a site that has been penalized by Google is hosted on the same server as your site, it can penalize ALL that are on the shared hosting server. This is another reason why being on your own dedicated server can help your SEO.

8. Yahoo! Site Explorer

There are a number of link analysis tools like Link Diagnosis, BackLink Watch, and Link Assistant, however Yahoo! Site Explorer I feel still does the best job of not only finding backlinks, but ordering them in place of importance. Here are the main things I will look at when analyzing SiteExplorer links.

• Total # of Inbound Links
• Anchor Text
• Sites of the First 10-20 Results
• PR of those site (Yoast Firefox Extension)

9. SocialMention

To see what is being said about a potential or current client, I will use a variety of real-time search engines. I usually will start at SocialMention because it will scour the web including Blogs, Q&A, Forums, Mircoblogs, Social Bookmarks, Events, Video, and News sites for mentionings of your brand or keyword you enter. I can get a better understanding of:

• Brand Perception
• Brand Reach
• Industry Position
• Influencers in the Industry
• Types of Communication/Discussions

10. Google Analytics

Of course if you have access to a clients Google Analytics you can find out a wealth of knowledge that you wouldn’t be able to gather with free tools anyone can use. When I first look at a sites analyics I will look at certain data including:

• Daily Traffic
• Traffic Sources
• Keywords
• Geo-Location
• User Engagement
• Conversions

With all of these free tools you can learn a lot about a potential/current client and your competitors. You are able to cover a wide spectrum of information including on-page/off-page factors, social media, reputation management, and user engagement. Feel free to try one or all of these tools the next time you perform some research on a site.

Comments

Dennis Mortensen worked as COO of Index Tools up until the day they were bought out by Yahoo. He is the author of Yahoo! Web Analytics book and today he provided an interesting topic of discussion.

Search Engine de-Optimization

Basically, tell the search engines do not come to your website. Forget search engine optimization all together.

My first thought was yeah right.

But when you get to the heart of it all, there is something to pay attention too.

Instead of focusing on whether or not you should or should not add something to your website because it may change where you are ranking…

Why not focus on your customers instead? Why not focus on what is the best thing to add to your website that will help your desired audience?

Let’s think about this.

If we stop worrying about title tags, keywords, density, links, and all that other stuff…

If we stop worrying about were we rank in the search engines, what will our changes do to our rankings, and all that other stuff…

What are we left with?

We are left wondering what is in the best interest of our customer?

Will this help our customer? Will this change make them happy? Will this change make them convert into a sale?

If we stop focusing on the rankings and focus more on the conversion, won’t we make more money too?

After all, isn’t it better to get 100 people in our website with 10 people making a purchase… then to have 100,000 people in our website with only 10 people making a purchase.

Let’s focus on our content. Let’s focus on our customers. Let’s focus on the user experience.

Will I tell the search engines to stay out of my site? Sorry Dennis, I am not that crazy *wink*

Comments

Here’s a quick SEO checklist you can use if you find out that your site is no longer listed:

1. Verify that the site is up and running. A missing website will get taken out of search engine rankings.
2. Is the site really missing? Do a site: command to find out. Check to see if pages are cached.
3. Look at your Robots.txt file, if you have one. (A missing Robots file won’t derail your rankings.) If there is a line that only says “Disallow: /”) then you are telling the search engines not to read the site.
4. Check the source code on your pages for metatags that say “Noindex” or “nofollow,” as these tags may tell the search engine to ignore the page.
5. Check your root directory to make sure you don’t have an extra homepage named “home” or “index” or “default.” Also check that you don’t have an “index.htm” and an “index.html” competing with each other. A search engine (or any other browser) should only have one choice for a homepage or interior page.
6. Check for Broken Links by using a Spider Emulator.
7. Check your server traffic and logs to see if the site was down for any length of time. Every now and then, a site will be down at the same time the search engine comes to visit.
8. Did you change your directory structure? It may take time for search engines to see it.
9. Did you change from HTML to ASP, or from PHP to Cold Fusion? Essentially, you have a new site and need to tell Google that it is there.
10. Did anyone file a DMCA (Digitial Millenium Copyright Request) against you for duplicate content? Normally, someone gets notified when this happens, so check the email address listed on the WHOIS lookup.
11. Is the site content duplicated elsewhere? If so, the search engine may be listing the original content in lieu of yours.

Google Webmaster Tools also does a great job telling you if there are issues with your site, and even has a handy red flag to tell you if you’re been banned.

One of the top directives in SEO is not to panic, but it is hard not to panic if you can’t find your site on Google, Bing, or Yahoo, especially if the site had good rankings before. If you’ve been using black hat techniques, or got a lot of low value links with the same anchor text, or made a big change to your site, you can vanish from the search engines. If you still don’t know what has happened to your site, an SEO consultant may be in order, since a few hours of consulting time can uncover issues (both obvious and subtle) that can bring your site back from the search engine twilight zone.

Comments

The problem of cost in measurement springs from our basic model. With SaaS implementations, each server call you make to your measurement system costs money. Not a lot of money, of course. And for web sites, there has been little doubt that the knowledge gained from page measurement more than offsets the per-page cost of collection. On most web sites, a typical visitor might view six to ten pages. A really engaged visitor might view twenty to thirty pages. In an online application, however, the number of user interactions (every click, zoom, and setting) can be much, much higher.

Without a clear paradigm for a unit of measurement (such as a page view), it’s unclear which of these interactions should be measured. Capture every one, and you’ll likely find that the cost of measurement outweighs the benefit.

As I mentioned, we’ve seen similar issues with video measurement. Many of our media clients went from measuring almost nothing about video to detailed measurement of how far viewers penetrated into each and every visitor played. But to get that measurement, they usually had to make multiple server calls per video – sometimes as often as every 10 seconds. For a 2 minute video, that means a full-play results in 12 server calls. That’s a lot of measurement expense relative to the value of tracking abandonment per 10 second interval.

In fact, a lot of that more detailed measurement ended up getting pulled.

We’ve seen similar pull-backs when clients over-measured flash experiences – tracking roll-overs for example. After awhile, most companies find they aren’t using that level of detail about user interactions very effectively and the cost of measurement isn’t justified.

In an earlier post, I described a framework for measuring applications that included four core concepts: units-of-work, application state, rest-states, and performance. Part of the reason I settled on these concepts is that they provide a reasonable balance of measurement vs. cost.

A unit-of-work is a function within the application. The unit-of-work would typically encapsulate a single use-case (like getting driving directions for a mapping program or paying a bill in an online bill-pay system). The measurement system would make a call whenever a unit-of-work is initiated. With this call (and all calls) it would pass an application state.

The application state is a set of variables that capture all the important settings a user might have (like sort-order, filters, zoom level, tab open, etc.). The goal of application states was to be able to tie application settings to important actions (units-of-work) without having to pass measurement calls every time a state is changed (like a sort).

Now I’m going to add a new concept – milestones. Milestones would be way-markers within units-of-work. A milestone could be named and sequenced if desired. Whenever a milestone within a unit-of-work occurs, the measurement system would fire off a call. Every unit-of-work would have at least two associated milestones – an abandon milestone and a completion milestone.

Using the milestone concept, developers could control how much measurement is being done within a unit-of-work.

When a milestone is reached, the measurement system would automatically get a new application state and it would generate and pass a performance measurement for the previous milestone.

With this type of framework, there would be little need to track every user change or setting with a server call. Each measurement call would capture some significant action along with the associate states. On the measurement end, comparing states between milestones would make it easy to produce reports about what settings users changed when performing a unit-of-work.

The unit-of-work/milestone combination provides developers with a very granular way to control the level of measurement in the application (that’s important) and, potentially, to be very sparing about the cost of measurement.

It’s quite possible to duplicate some of this functionality in existing systems today. In Omniture, for example, you can code units-of-work using an s.prop variable. By turning on pathing, you can track movement between units-of-work. By using a combination of unit-of-work and milestone in a second prop, you can enable pathing within milestones. You can use a list-prop to capture application state or you can use a carefully formatted and delimited string in a normal string s.prop.

If you correlate that application state variable with the units-of-work s.prop and the milestones s.prop, you have basic reporting on how application states changed across milestones. Of course, you have to do most of the work to use those reports since the application isn’t going to really help you any. And you also have to do ALL the work to setup and capture this stuff.

Of course, that’s the whole point of this series. You CAN measure applications right now, it’s just not nearly as easy or powerful as it ought to be.

With that in mind, my next (and final) post in this series will tackle the last and probably the most difficult part of measuring applications – figuring out how to analyze the information to make it useful!

Comments

Understanding why Internet Explorer renders z-index incorrectly

The way it works, Internet Explorer starts at 0 and renders each element that comes after the first element at a higher z-index. Which isn’t really a problem unless you have a navigation dropdown that needs to go on top of the content below it. What will happen is your navigation dropdown will go underneath the content below it, effectively hiding some or all of your navigation list. I ran into this issue recently with the CSS navigation Suckerfish dropdown, which reminded me I should post something about IE’s zindex problem.

Fixing IE7 / IE6 z-index stacking bug

The easiest way to fix the Internet Explorer z-index stacking bug is to simply assign the parent element, typically a div, first with position: relative which allows a z-index to be set to the element, then assign a high z-index to that element. What will do is tell Internet Explorer that it should start numbering the elements within that element at whatever number you have set. Effectively resetting the z-index stacking within that element to a higher z-index.

Forcing IE to render z-index correctly with JavaScript

There are times when it isn’t very easy to simply add the relative positioning to the parent element, for instance when you are working with Widgets that may need complex and dynamic z-index assigned to ensure that they stack properly throughout your web app, you need to take matter into your own hands. The script below will allow you to dynamically force a div container and all subsequent elements with the same class to get progressively higher z-index in Internet Explorer. You need jQuery to make this snippet, created by Richa Avasthi work.

function zIndexWorkaround()
{
    // If the browser is IE,
    if(isIE())

    {
        /*
        ** For each div with class menu (i.e.,
        ** the thing we want to be on top),
        */
        $("div.menu").parents().each(function() {

            var p = $(this);
            var pos = p.css("position");

 
            // If it's positioned,
            if(pos == "relative" ||
               pos == "absolute" ||

               pos == "fixed")
            {
                /*
                ** Add the "on-top" class name when the
                ** mouse is hovering over it, and remove
                ** it when the mouse leaves.
                */
                p.hover(function() {

                        $(this).addClass("on-top");
                    },
                    function() {

                        $(this).removeClass("on-top");
                    });

            }
        });
    }
}

You also need this CSS class, which is appended by the JavaScript to force the stacking of the elements in Internet Explorer.

.on-top {z-index: 10000;}

With both of these techniques in your arsenal you should be able to fix your website’s Internet Explorer stacking issue easily whether it be a simple CSS dropdown or a more complex web application. Let me know if you have found other ways to resolve this issue other than the two I have mentioned.

Comments