Archive for the 'SEO' Category

For web developers and other programmers, needing to adapt to the latest methods and search engine friendly techniques, jQuery requires careful study and evaluation. Since its release in 2006, jQuery, an open source, cross-browser JavaScript library, has steadily grown in acceptance and popularity to the point that it’s now the most popular JavaScript library available. In fact, BuiltWith Trends, in posting its usage statistics on various web technologies, identifies jQuery as the hottest web development tool, both in usage and growth rate. Found in some of the most visited sites on the entire world wide web and growing in popularity and acceptance, jQuery has clearly emerged as a technology to reckon with now, and going forward.

Most attribute its growth to jQuery’s success in achieving its overall goals. Born from a desire to simplify programming and especially web development, jQuery has won champions and adherents by delivering on its promise to streamline HTML document traversing, event handling, animations and AJAX interactions while remaining lightweight and compliant with industry standards, such as CSS3. In addition to the above characteristics, jQuery also enables the creation of Plug-ins: facilities that allow developers to create concepts for low-level interface and simulation, high-level theme-able widgets, and advanced effects. This deepens and heightens the dynamism and power of web sites.

But as with so many things, there’s a down side. For all of the flashy tricks and easy effects jQuery helps you incorporate into your designs, it can also render your creation virtually invisible. Because it automates and streamlines much of the coding and content handling that goes into making a web page viewable, jQuery holds much of the data that search engines use in retrieving pages out of the view of spiders. Spiders are little agents that the search engines use to locate and point to the content markers they need to return meaningful responses to users. When spiders can’t find those content markers in your web page, then your creation won’t be included in the data returned in that search. This makes your web site very hard to find.

Consequently, programmers need to know techniques and tricks to keep important markers in view of the spiders and search engines while still availing themselves of the advantages of automating coding with jQuery. There are a wide variety of ways to alter your coding to accommodate the needs of SEO, and several will be presented below; but these are far from definitive or exhaustive. Web development, and programming in general, consists of so many variables that there will always be multiple answers to any programming question.

Remember that the overall point is to bring content important to SEO to the forefront, by unlocking it from inside the JavaScript, or jQuery. One way to accomplish this is by embedding multiple hard links and anchor tags with the href. But for this technique to work you have to place the links in the HTML source, not called by jQuery. In the example, there is a link to the author (John Raasch, a freelance web designer who blogs on web development topics) who describes some of the tradeoffs in play with AJAX and jQuery, as he works to maintain usability and SEO in his web site development portfolio. Briefly, he recommends using jQuery and multiplying the anchor tags. Then, to accelerate page loads, he uses hidden divs; a technique that works, but jeopardizes his page metrics reporting.

Tim Nash, a writer and consultant in various areas of web development, wrote a post on the use of jQuery and tricks for keeping content indexable for the search engines. In his post, he presents several jQuery plug-ins that can aid in making jQuery SEO friendly . Nash starts by describing methods of web development and comparing them. In general, he espouses what he calls progressive enhancement, in which the programmer builds the pages to the lowest common denominator and then adds enhancements. This will keep all of the relevant data accessible to search engines and therefore make the page easier to find on the web. The alternative, that he suggests is likely to result in burying your design, he calls graceful degradation.

Multiple posts point to additional means of preventing content in jQuery calls from remaining invisible to SEO spiders. Here’s another one from David Pirek, a designer/programmer in the New York metro area. His blog presents an overall approach to using jQuery, which he refers to as his favorite web development environment, and maintaining SEO techniques. He advises embedding the page you need to request in href. The spider will see the link as another page and index it, which makes it visible to search engines. He goes on to describe an enhancement to the technique: have your jQuery click and attach another parameter to the query string. This lets the page know when the call is coming with JavaScript enabled and when it’s not, which in turn allows the designer to add page properties (title, Meta tags, styles and even further HTML if you prefer).

Here are a few other useful resources from around the web. First from Noupe - a site founded by Noura Yehia, and now belonging to Smashing Media - are 50 examples of designs aided by jQuery. Noupe’s mission involved bringing its readers information on new communication methods and technologies from around the web. To that end, they wanted to make their readers aware of the high quality work currently rendered by jQuery. Second: from the same source is a sampling of 45 jQuery plug-ins . Finally, here’s a roundup of tutorials on jQuery.

There are many techniques, resources and opinions regarding jQuery, but the general point remains the same: make your jQuery content crawlable and search engine friendly.

Photo credit: chrisglass

If your job involves convincing clients why they need to redesign their sites with SEO in mind, sooner or later you’ll run into the splash screen conundrum. Splash screens are terrible from an SEO perspective, but some clients love them more than their own children. They think about their website the same way they see the receptionist at their office in the real world… when you enter the front door, they want the first thing you see to be a pretty face.

Creative companies are the worst offenders when it comes to demanding splash screens. If you’re doing SEO consulting for a site related to the entertainment industry, for example, you’re probably dealing with someone who places a lot of value on the “Wow!” factor. They think that just because you’re a fan of Adam Lambert, you’ll be more than happy to sit around for 30 seconds watching celestial bodies swooshing through the universe as the artist’s name is slowly revealed. They couldn’t be more wrong.

The main effect of a splash screen is to cause valuable visitors to leave your site. A bounce rate of 20% or more on splash screen pages is typical, which may cause you to say, “Well, heck, that’s a lot better than the 50% bounce rate on the home page!” But if your splash page is the default entrance to your site, it’s probably getting 3x to 5x more traffic than your home page. So maybe 100,000 people enter your site every month through the splash screen, while only 30,000 enter directly through the home page. If you’ve got a 20% bounce rate on your splash screen, that means you’re losing 20,000 visitors every month before they even see your home page! Wouldn’t you rather drive that traffic to the home page instead of losing it while your users stare at some stupid Flash animation?

You want users to get “inside” your site ASAP. Don’t leave them waiting for someone to “open the door”!

Here are some of the main reasons why you don’t want your user experience to start with a splash:

Hurts Search Rankings
Having a splash screen usually complicates your website’s structure. Search engines rank top-level URLs first, so having your home page under /us/wpcontent/home/ (or any other nested directory structure) can really hurt your rankings. Why waste your top-level URL on unimportant splash content?

Splash pages are not optimized for search engine indexing. The content of a splash screen is typically Flash or graphics heavy. This lack of text makes the page nearly invisible to text-based web crawlers… that is, all search engines.

No Keywords, No Links
Online search results are based on keywords. Splash pages typically contain no text except for the “skip intro” or “enter site” link. These keywords are obviously useless in terms of SEO.

Online search results are based on links. But the only link on your splash page goes to your home page. And what are the chances that anyone else will ever link back to your splash page? I’d say slim to none.

In terms of SEO, splash pages are a complete waste of your best online real estate.

Base-level URL Redirection is Bad
Splash pages often redirect to the home page. Search engines like Google and Yahoo! want to deliver people directly to the information they are seeking. When they see that your base-level URL is redirecting to another page (after the splash “performance” is done), your site’s ranking will be affected negatively.

You almost HAVE to redirect from a splash screen. There’s no good reason to redirect from your base-level URL (e.g. www.site.com/), but having a splash screen sit there pretty much forces your hand. Either you redirect the user to make sure he actually makes it to your content, or you risk losing him to splash frustration.

User Frustration
Even user-friendly splash pages include a “skip intro” link. This tells the user this page is less important than your other content, i.e. not worth viewing.

Most splash pages waste time. You’re asking the user to wait for content to download. Then they have to sit through an unwanted presentation. And you wonder why they’re leaving? Many sites even force users to see the splash page each time the site is loaded.

Reduced Credibilty
Your home page is the most important page on your site. Splash pages are a wasted opportunity to make a good first impression.

No matter how someone reaches your site, eventually they will visit the home page. Users want quick access to information. Splash pages are a speed bump, hindering access to your site’s content.

Poor Site Performance
Splash screens are graphically intensive and slow to download. Users with slower connections (mobile, dial-up, foreign countries, etc.) will get stuck with a “loading” message, and may never even make it to the home page. If your site is getting heavy traffic, the bandwidth used by the splash page will reduce your entire site’s performance.

Page load time is a now a major factor in search rankings. If your site loads slowly, your search ranking will suffer. Get your users to the home page as quickly as possible!

There’s a good quote floating around from Jared Spool of User Interface Engineering on how to convince your clients that splash pages are bad:

“When we have clients who are thinking about Flash splash pages, we tell them to go to their local supermarket and bring a mime with them. Have the mime stand in front of the supermarket, and, as each customer tries to enter, do a little show that lasts two minutes….

“Then stand back and count how many people watch the mime, how many people get past the mime as quickly as possible, and how many people punch the mime out.

“That should give them a good idea as to how well their splash page will be received. That’s the crux of it.”

Lightboxes: A Better Splash Option?
If you’ve explained everything above but your client still insists on having something “splashy” upfront, you may consider recommending a lightbox. At the very least, lightboxes have a better reputation among users than splash screens. And when your users click on the “CLOSE” or “X” button, you won’t be losing them into the ether… in fact, they’ll be looking right at the content you want them to see.

Lightboxes may not be as Flash-y (pun intended) as a splash page, but they give your site a chance to project some sort of welcoming message or offer without such a high risk of losing visitors.

They’re also much more friendly for SEO purposes. Lightboxes don’t dilute the strength of your site because your home page sits at the base-level URL, and the content inside a lightbox – images and/or text, rather than Flash – is typically more friendly to indexing by search engines.

Anybody out there have a positive or negative experience of using a lightbox as a splash screen to share? How about any other ideas on replacing splash screens when the client absolutely insists?

Have you ever received an RFP (Request For Proposal) for SEO Consulting? If you have, then you know they’re usually detailed and well-thought out. For a SEO Consultant not familiar with responding to an RFP, this process can be slightly challenging. Where do you start? How much site analysis should you do for free?

Within an RFP for SEO Consulting is usually a section where the prospective client asks about a Site Analysis.

A full-blown Technical Site Analysis consists of:

• Analysis of information architecture.
• Analysis of source code, and page layout.
• Site Navigation.
• Analysis of Flash & Javascript.
• Keyword usage.
• URL structure.
• Content siloing.
• Internal linking structure.
• Dynamic strategy.
• Robots.txt exclusions.
• Sitemaps (website & XML).

Once you land the consulting gig, there should be a deep dive into each of the Analysis factors above, and a detailed SEO recommendation and implementation.

But, for the purpose of an RFP, it’s certainly okay to provide an overview, or a brief abridged Site Analysis to demonstrate that you put in the time to understand their site & their needs. It also shows you know what you’re doing, and instills confidence in your ability.

The “abridged” Site Analysis can consist of a summarized statement for each of these:

• Sitewide TITLE tags.
• Sitewide META tags.
• Navigation.
• Site Architecture.
• Flash usage.
• Overview of Department, Category, Sub-category, and Product pages.
• Indexibility.
• Is there duplicate content?
• Canonicalization.

Remember, you’re just doing a quick analysis, and providing a summary statement on each of the above factors for the abridged site analysis.

It’s often helpful to also do an abridged Keyword Analysis consisting of:

• Keywords to be Targeted
• Keyword ranking.
• Keyword traffic.
• keyword revenue.

You will also want to examine their inbound link profile, and their internal linking structure.

As you can see, you don’t need to give away the milk for free. This is just part of the work involved to win the business.

Photo credit: sugadeaux

This is an area of SEO that got hot once Google started showing “Universal Results”. Universal results is just a term that means Google includes in the Search results everything now. Along with the organic text listings are News, Images, Shopping, and Video. Google pulls these search results from all types of different websites.

The big question is “How can I get my video there?” Now it behooves advertisers & publishers to conduct a Video Optimization for specific keywords related to the video. In many cases it’s worth the time & money invested to get your video to the top of the search results page.

Without showing any of my client work, I’ll show a personal video that is ranking. Search for the term, AFX race cars.

10 Tactics for Video Optimization:
1. Use the Keyword in the Title. Make the Title sound interesting.
2. Write approx 2 paragraphs of text for the Description.
3. Tag each video with keywords.
4. Choose proper category for each video.
5. It’s best to put a hyperlink to the target page within the Description, but before the user needs to click (more info) to see the hyperlink.
6. Upload all videos to multiple video sites (Youtube, Viddler, etc)
7. Comments help by showing interest, and by additional user-generated content (more words on the page).
8. Video responses show interest/activity.
9. Rating. Try to get as many 5 star ratings as you can
10. Views, views, and more views.

Treat the video as you would any other webpage, and begin a Link building optimization to increase the amount of Inbound links. Ideally, your objective is to increase Link popularity and Link relevancy. While building links for your off-site optimization, try to mix up textlinks and the number of Embeds. All these are Video Ranking Factors.

A great productivity tool to upload videos to multiple video sharing sites is TubeMogul .

SEO has always been about getting high rankings and traffic via the search engines. In the early days SEO tactics like keyword stuffing worked quite well. Not anymore though. The big three search engine’s (Google, Yahoo, and Bing) algorithm’s have all become increasingly sophisticated. So, the tactics an SEO Consultant uses must also become more sophisticated, and change in kind. It’s kinda a cat and mouse game. As Google changes, our strategies and tactics change.

There will always be a need to drive traffic. But, where will the focus be? Will Google still be the primary target?

We’ve all seen the rise in Social Media usage. Some of the more popular Social Networks include, Linkedin, Facebook, Twitter, Stumbleupon, Digg, and Youtube. And, we’ve all seen the explosive growth of Twitter. Not only are these growing and active communities, they also can drive a significant amount of traffic. Here’s the forecast of Social Media usage by emarketer:

Niche communities are popping up everywhere now. I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention Social Networks like Ning. Anybody can now create a niche social network by using their free platform. To see a great example, here is a ning community that I joined, which was created by Larry Brauner. Niche communities like his have the potential to grow huge, and drive highly relevant traffic.

An SEO Consultant should prepare for the shift to social media by getting active on some of these. This takes a lot of time. Some of it I’ve heard described as “busywork”. But, the investment of time is needed. Even if you just choose one or two networks to become active on, it’s very possible that your traffic needs will be spread out to different networks from those people you’re connected to on a single social community. Think of it as a scaled-down version of viral marketing. Although, it could explode into full-blown viral activity.

Now with all this talk of the importance of social networking, I don’t want you to think that traditional SEO is dead. Cause it ain’t!

The search engines aren’t going away anytime soon. There is no Google killer anywhere in sight. And, search engines still drive an enormous amount of traffic. Search engines are where your customers find you. In the future a good SEO Consultant will get you traffic regardless of where it’s from. It’s all about:

• Right Message
• Right Place
• Right Time
• Right Person
• Right Experience

Photo credit: Saioki Fugiyoshi

I like the symbolism of the photo. A good SEO Consultant (the mouse), can control Google (the cat).

Checking for duplicate content is part of the process of analyzing a website. The most common types of duplicate content to look for is in Title tags, Meta descriptions, product descriptions, dynamic URLs, and Canonicalization.

Many websites reuse the same Title tag for their entire site. That’s duplicate content.

Many ecommerce sites resell products from manufacturers will often use the product descriptions provided by the manufacturer. Hence, an abundance of duplicate content.

Top 6 Duplicate Content Mistakes:
1. Circular Navigation - multiple paths though a website.
2. Print-Friendly Pages - Fix: block search engine’s from printer friendly pages.
3. Inconsistent Linking
4. Product Only Pages - with nothing differentiating them from other pages.
5. Transparent Serving
6. Bad Cloaking

There are various ways to check for Duplicate Content. You can do a manual check, and/or use tools to check for dupe content. There are a ton of fee-based SEO tools out there that bundle a duplicate content tool into their suite of tools. However for this post, I’m just going to stick with just the free tools.

Free Tools

Copyscape will check to see if any other site contains the same text as your page. This is great to see all the other ecommerce sites that have the same product description.

Yahoo Explorer is a great free tool to find duplicate content. Make sure you see the results for Pages. Then, Export results to TSV. Open in Excel.

The spreadsheet will contain the TITLE tag, URL, SIZE, and FORMAT. Sort the data by descending or ascending for the Title tag. This will enable you to quickly scan the document for batches of duplicate content.

Xenu Link Sleuth is a popular free tool. This is an application download. Besides providing the same data as Yahoo Explorer, the Xenu Link Sleuth can detect broken links. Then, export to Excel. Sort data as needed.

Google Webmaster Tools. Go to Diagnostics, HTML suggestions, Duplicate title tags - next screen is a list, with a hyperlink to “Download this table”.

Additional Reading:
How to find your website Duplicate Content Issues
How to Remedy Duplicate Content
Google Dupe Content
Site Explorer is a First Step
Duplicate Content Issues

Photo credit: kajojak

Website navigation structure and behavior affect the ease with which search engine spiders can navigate through the site and index it. Your site navigation should facilitate the uninterrupted movement of crawlers within the site.

Search engines prefer sites which are easy for them to navigate and retrieve information related to the site’s topical information, and consequently rank them higher for the site keywords. Therefore it is very important for the site to have a simple navigation structure that is easy for the spiders to crawl.

There are many types of navigation structure that can make it search engine-friendly or not.

Simple text-based navigation is the most search engine-friendly. Apart from being easily followed by spiders, text-based navigation gives an opportunity to include the keywords in the page content. The keywords included in the navigation are valued by all search engines.

However, it is not always possible to incorporate text navigation in the site because of design/aesthetic reasons. Even if the navigation cannot be text-based, the best practices listed below should be followed to make sure that the site navigation is search engine-friendly.

JavaScript based navigation: Search engine crawlers can read JavaScript but cannot parse it; hence, they are unable to follow the links embedded in the JavaScript code. Usage of JavaScript based linking would not allow the crawlers to follow the links and crawl/index the sites completely. If the navigation has to be JavaScript based, it should be made sure that in case the scripts are blocked by user settings, they should still be able to navigate through the site. It’s recommended to use the html noscript tag.

Flash navigation: Flash is not parsed by search engine crawlers in normal circumstances (unless the text/HTML alternative is provided or unless the flash movie is using deep linking to all the content). The reason for search engines being unable to read flash code is that flash is published in the .swf format which does not contain the code (code is embedded in .fla files) which are not published on the pages. This means that in order for search engines to read the flash embedded content and navigation, they will have to decompile the flash movie, which is not done by search engines at this point. It’s recommended using SWFObject to replace flash video on a webpage, so you can include text.

Image based navigation: Often, the site design requires the navigation to be in form of images. Search engines can follow the image links (as long as they are not JavaScript based) but using image based navigation takes away the ability to create keyword targeted navigation. Quite often while embedding rollover or other interactive images for navigation, JavaScript is used for linking. It should be made sure that the links behind the images are not JavaScript based.

It’s recommended to use the Alt attribute whenever an image-based navigation must be used.

Sliding/DHTML menus: If the site structure and architecture requires the use of rollover menus. Most often, the sliding menus are implemented on the sites using pure JavaScript for interactivity and functionality of the navigational links. The best practice is to use the CSS/JS hybrid navigation to make sure that the links embedded in the navigation are readable and followed by search engines. In case JavaScript has to be used, it should be made sure that the JavaScript code is placed in external files instead of page code.

Using a drop-down or pull-down menu helps you save on screen space when you have a lot of material that needs to be displayed on your pages, or a complicated multi-level navigational structure. In general it is recommended to use XHTML and CSS style sheets to present drop-down or pull-down menu navigation so that the search engines will still see the href links when indexing your Web page. If you must use drop-down or pull-down menus using JavaScript or a CGI script as your main navigational format, remember to include a secondary form of navigation to allow search engine spiders to follow links to the sections of the web site easily. Eg: footer text links.

Regardless of the navigation structure, both a Webpage sitemap and an XML sitemap should be created.

Suggested Reading:
Advantages and Disadvantages of Different Types of Navigation
Hierarchical, Site-wide, and Locally-determined Navigation
How to Determine a Website’s Navigation Structure
Navigation Menu Versus In-Content Links
Drop-Down or Pull-Down Menus
The 8 Types of Navigation Pages
Creating a navigation structure for both usability & SEO
SEO: Breadcrumb Trail Boosts Rankings
SEO Basics: Text Navigation Links vs. Image Links

Photo Credit: walt_s