Just a quick post to let you know about a wonderful resource I’ve stumbled onto: Xinu is a brilliant mashup of valuable search optimization insights such as backlinks, page rank, social bookmark links, and pages indexed. The intuitive service includes links to each platform to investigate your site’s details, leaving only recommendations lacking; Xinu would be greatly improved with brief suggestions for improving each score.
Tag Archives: seo
Search Engine Friendly Design – Searchnomics Panel
Last week’s Searchnomics conference proved that the WebGuild can deliver an exceptional event. Most impressive, which I intend to reiterate here, were the keynotes from Hitwise and comScore highlighting the power of search behavior as a window into your customer, a topic we discussed just a month ago. WebGuild’s approach to search marketing is a fresh blend of entry and expert level discussion of SEO, paid search, and social media optimization and I had the honor of sitting on a panel with Google’s Shashi Thakur and DoubleClick Performics’ Cam Balzar to discuss SEO priorities such as site accessibility, technical design, and submission to engines.
Here’s a recap of my priorities with links and comments to additional information:
- Make your site accessible – This is a popular topic on my blog so stick around for more
- Push to the engines – Use Google Webmaster and Yahoo’s Search Submit tools as well as setting up sitemap autodiscovery
- Consider PageRank – Recall the wonderful insight from Shashi on popularity, relevance, and quality of content
- Optimize your page titles
- Improve page copy
- Meta-descriptions
- Use of image alt-text
- Meta-keywords
Then worry about
We also discussed how to go about obtaining corporate support and internal resources; I highlighted a process I used at HP and which IBM’s Mike Moran has encapsulated: Train your web design team in search friendly considerations, set standards for design, enforce compliance, and measure progress.
I had a tremendous pleasure meeting and hope my presentation was of value to you. Let me know if you caught the conference or drop me a line if you’d like to discuss the material.
What of Meta Tags?
I’ve been evaluting meta content more frequently lately, considering the extent to which descriptions are used by engines and whether or not keywors are worth your effort. In recent years both have become less important as black hat SEOs stuff keyword lists and massage descriptions to change that which appears in the SERPs. Yahoo! increasingly relies only on page titles, copy, url structure, and links; Google still seems to value meta content (though insignificantly so). That said, with dozens of new engines available to us every day, meta content remains a critical consideration in SEO to ensure prominently placement everywhere.
Here are a few guidelines for keywords:
1. Always use lowercase letters and comma delimit words and phrases.
2. Limit your META Keywords to around 20 words and phrases or 900 characters.
3. Do not “stuff” your META Keywords. If you still feel that you must repeat keywords, limit it to no more than 3 or 4 times and do not repeat them consecutively. Even then use variations of a keyword: widgets, blue widgets
4. Include product names, series names, category, theme, related or accessory products, and “browse by” keywords; these are the thing that people will search. Don’t waste space with things like SKU or ID number which will get picked up by your page copy for the few searches that occur.
5. Include commonly misspelled words!
6. Consider including keywords and phrases of competing products.
7. Do not use apostrophes because they get stripped. Merge “word’s” to the grammatically incorrect “words”
While we’re on the subject of keywords: Don’t stuff your description with keywords! Your more likely to summon the wrath of the engines and your description should be just that, descriptive.
Search Engine Watch has a nice overview of meta content and Aaron has a great brief on keyword use to help you identify where to use them beyond the meta tags.
Google’s Website Quality Guidelines
At the inaugural SMX Advanced conference in Seattle last week, Matt Cutts discussed Google’s webmaster guidelines but failed to address heavily sought detail on site quality considerations and violations that can result in your being punished by Google (whether your intentions are honorable or otherwise). He did though commit to deliver more insight and Google added content yesterday to accomplish just that.
The guidelines haven’t changed but are still worth your review as they serve as an excellent SEO guide. Added are details for each guideline:
- Avoid hidden text or hidden links.
- Don’t use cloaking or sneaky redirects.
- Don’t send automated queries to Google.
- Don’t load pages with irrelevant keywords.
- Don’t create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content. – commentary as I’ve been dealing with duplicate content lately: replicating, syndicating, and repurposing content is usually ok. Google is smart enough to figure out what you’ve done and typically discounts the value of content not in its original source. Make sure the page is unique and this shouldn’t be a problem.
- Don’t create pages that install viruses, trojans, or other badware.
- Avoid “doorway” pages created just for search engines, or other “cookie cutter” approaches such as affiliate programs with little or no original content.
- If your site participates in an affiliate program, make sure that your site adds value. Provide unique and relevant content that gives users a reason to visit your site first. – Also known as Paid Search Arbitrage
If your site fails to meet these guidelines, it may be blocked and removed from Google. If that happens, modify your site to adhere and resubmit for inclusion.
Don’t Cloak! NoContent
Cloaking is a frowned upon search engine optimization technique in which that which the search engine spider indexes is different from what the reader sees in their browser. Such a technique is often employed to fool an engine into interpreting your site as relevant to a subject of greater popularity than is the case; in a few cases, webmasters have legitimate concerns that irrelevant content is adversely influencing their position in search as bots intepret navigation, references, audience comments, or other text as relevant to the subject matter.
Yahoo! brings us a new optimization resource with the ‘robots-nocontent’ tag which indicates, at least to their crawler, that parts of a page are unrelated to the body and only serve to support the audience of the page. Keywords contained in these tagged sections are ignored. For example:
“The header and boilerplate on Yahoo! Answers might be useful to visitors, but it’s probably not helpful when searching for this particular page. The ‘robots-nocontent’ tag allows you to identify that for our crawler in order to improve the targeting and the abstract for the page.”
4 ways to apply robots-nocontent attributes
- <div class=”robots-nocontent”> This is some content on your site that you want ignored</div>
- <span class=”robots-nocontent”> You don’t want this indexed by search engines either</span>
- <p class=”robots-nocontent”> This might be a privacy or legal statement on the page that has nothing to do with the copy</p>
- <div class=”robots-nocontent”> This is just poorly written and I’m embarrassed to have search engines crawl it.</div>
Setting up Sitemap Autodiscovery
I realized, only shortly after posting the news of the new sitemap autodiscovery protocol that there are few resources that explain the very simple steps that need to be taken to set up autodiscovery through your robots.txt file.
Assuming you’ve named the map “sitemap.xml,” simply add the following line to the robots.txt file located at the highest level of your web server
Sitemap: https://www.YOURDOMAIN.com/sitemap.xml
It does not matter where in the file you place that code.
If you have more than one sitemap, you should have a sitemap index file, the location of which should be listed instead. What is a sitemap index file? If you have more than 100 pages you want crawled through a sitemap, you should breakup your map into smaller lists of less than 100 URLs. An index file points the bots to each sitemap.
Spiders will automatically find your sitemap when they hit your domain and read the robots.txt file. Now, technically, there is no need to submit them through Site Explorer or Webmaster Central though, there is no penalty for doing so. I keep my work with Yahoo! and Google live as I appreciate the other data and shortcuts they make available and let autodiscovery work in the background. Should you continue to submit, by the way, the little known sitemap submission to Ask is through this URL:
https://submissions.ask.com/ping?sitemap=https://www.YOURDOMAIN.com/sitemap.xml
Sitemap Autodiscovery Streamlines Implementation
Ask’s blog today reiterated important news from SES New York that the major engines have agreed on a sitemap autodiscovery standard.
Sites will now be able to specify the location of each sitemap from their robot.txt file creating an open-format autodiscovery platform and eliminating the need to submit sitemaps to each search engine.
The discovery protocol has benefits for search engines as well as site publishers as sitemap standardization brings us one step closer to a comprehensive and accurate search experience.
With the now standard protocols for development and improved distribution through autodiscovery, sitemaps just moved up the list of your SEO priorities leaving you no excuse to get one done.