The Code looks Good, but is it Search Engine Friendly too?

No matter how good a developer is, each one makes few mistake while writing HTML code. And I am talking precisely about mistakes which the Search Engines don’t like - some small ones and some fatal search engine disasters. These mistakes happen not because we don’t know how to write an HTML code but because after we are done writing the code, we say to our selves, it’s done and it’s looking fine; why bother change it now for Search Engines. Not every developer is a Search Engine guru and very few know (or bother to know) that couple of such coding mistakes here and there might cause the site to choke to death. But don’t panic yet, it’s easy to avoid these mistakes - just consider the following while you code a website next time:

• Make it a thumb rule to avoid repeating yourself. If it’s a commonly used object property, place it in CSS. If it’s a repeated Javascript, store it in an external file and call where ever required.

• Don’t mess up the code with unused or unclosed DIV’s. If a DIV opens, it should close as well and if it doesn’t, it shouldn’t open. It’s as simple as that.

• The most common web developer mistake - every page has it’s own unique title and description, please do not put the title and description tag in the include files.

• Please make all links and references to images, CSS and JavaScript root relative by starting them with a slash, “/”. Dreamweaver users, please set the “Links relative” option to “Site root” in the Site Definition wizard. This is handy because root relative links don’t break when files are moved from one directory to another.

• Don’t put too many files in a single directory. Keep the heirachy going and manage the files in different directories.

• Use Validator to keep the code and CSS clean. Clean code is easier to manage then something that’s messed up.

• Don’t use <br> for <p> tag as it’s unprofessional and results in inconsistent layout in different browsers.

• Avoid spacer graphics and nested tables. Use heading tags, unordered lists and numbered lists to organize content instead.

• Make it a habit to put a forward back slash ‘/’ at the end of every URL.

Image credit:Flickr

Posted in General, Web Design, Web Development, SEM | No Comments »

The dilemma of Page Rank Sculpting, follow or nofollow

While every one around the SEO corner is busy hoarding the page rank of their site using nofollow attribute in quest to rank the important pages of a website, I am quite sure this practice (page rank sculpting) is just an accident waiting to happen as webmasters will abuse it up to an extent that Google will do what they have done to ‘keyword meta tag’ – start ignoring it. After the public announcements and claims done by Rand Fishkin, Stephen Spencer, Danny Sullivan and even Matt Cutts, that directing the link juice to the important pages of a website improves the Search Engine Ranking of a website, the SEO community is using nofollow on anything they don’t want to rank for, claiming it a ‘wastage of link juice’ otherwise. But I personally believe that this nofollow practice is taking the SEO community no where, as webmasters have a license to get away to rank their websites even with a poor internal navigation and hence poor user experience. So obviously the nofollow era is facilitating more spammy websites making it to the top of the Search Engine lists. It’s just matter of time, when Google will take an evasive action.

If we have a look at the origin of a nofollow attribute, we find that nofollow attribute was made with the primary motto to combat comment spam (which it has failed miserably as comment spammers are still employed). Further Google found that nofollow can also help Google bots to firstly determine the most important pages out of huge websites with complex blog categories in little time and secondly the webmasters could use nofollow while linking to some website content which they don’t want to get associated with and vote to. Here is a recent precise statement made by Matt Cutts on use of nofollow attribute:

“The nofollow attribute is just a mechanism that gives webmasters the ability to modify PageRank flow at link-level granularity. Plenty of other mechanisms would also work (e.g. a link through a page that is robot.txt’ed out), but nofollow on individual links is simpler for some folks to use. There’s no stigma to using nofollow, even on your own internal links; for Google, nofollow’ed links are dropped out of our link graph; we don’t even use such links for discovery. By the way, the nofollow meta tag does that same thing, but at a page level.”

Now getting back to my anti-nofollow visionary, the nofollow tags also facilitate a fake information architecture. As we know Google ranks the sites with solid internal navigational architecture higher on SERP as these are the sites which provide rich user experience to the Google users as the important content is just 3 clicks away, nofollow isn’t helping to their cause. Coz what most webmasters are doing at the moment is hoarding the page rank and shooting it on the targeted pages even when the target page is nothing but pure crap and weakly linked from other pages of the site.

Having said that, please don’t take me wrong, as I am not questioning the effectiveness of page rank sculpting, because it’s working great at the moment, but I am not too sure how long will this nofollow rampage last: I am afraid not too long. So I have a simple advise to give – use nofollow but only after you have crystallized your internal navigation and don’t rely 100% on this nofollow ploy as you might soon see Google derank the websites with weak internal structure indulging in page rank sculpting. I am looking forward to SMX Advanced and hopeful that it might clear up the mounted clouds over rank sculpting dilemma.

Posted in General, Web Development, SEM | No Comments »

Meet the family: Meta name= “robots”

In my last post on SEO feast, I offered you so many things to eat – PR Bar, optimizer beer, Energy drinks and what not. But did you ever wonder, what do Search Engine bots eat? Yes they love eating fresh content & HTML on your website; but there are few things on your website, that you never want to feed bots with like - flash, silly javascripts, duplicate content, affiliate links (that pass link juice) etc. So how do you stop these dumb bots – Simple, by defining robots meta tag values:

<meta name=”robots” value=” <value> “

I just happened to stumble upon this cute flicker pic of five robots, I could relate to Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask & Altavista. So I just simply used my paint brush and wrote their names accordingly. Looks so cool to me !

And now that you have met the bot family, let’s discuss different values you can serve to these witty Search Engine bots:

1. Index: Allows bots to index the page. This a default value, you need not define it on all the pages.
2. Noindex: Search Engines will not index the page and hence the page will not appear in its results.
3. None: It’s like shortcut for noindex, nofollow. “None” gives strict instruction to search engines – Don’t do any thing with the page at all.
4. Follow: Tell search engine bots, to follow the links on the page and take them as a vote to the linking website ie. pass the link juice.
5. Nofollow: Gives strict instruction to bots not to follow any links at all.
6. Noarchive: Stops paparazzi bots from showing the cached version of the page in its reults.
7. Nocache: Prevents MSN/Live to show the cached version of the page in its results.
8. Nosnippet: Stops the bots from not only reflecting a snippet of the page in search results but also doesn’t let them cache the page.
9. Noodp: Makes sure that search engines don’t use the description of the containing page in DMOZ as the snippet for your page in the search results.
10. Noydir: Works just like noodp, but used exclusively for Yahoo!

BTW, you may also want to go through our comprehensive article on Working with robots.txt file. I hope you enjoyed the post. Cheers!
Image credit: flickr.

Posted in General, Web Development, SEM | No Comments »

The MaGic of Lexical clouds: for higher rankings and enhanced user experience

Web BuzZ-BuZz, Web 2.0 BuzZ-BuZz
There has been so much of buzz about Web 2.0. Many webmasters have embraced weblogs, mash-ups, RSS feeds, bookmarking, social networking, tag clouds, wikis etc. But what excites me most about Web 2.0 are Tag clouds that so many website owners are using these days, for higher website rankings and an even richer user experience. For those who haven’t heard of these lexical clouds before, this is how a tag cloud for flickr looks like:

There are so many websites today, that are using tag clouds but the reason why I mentioned only flickr is because flickr was the first Web 2.0 website to use this concept successfully. Check out the tag cloud for Technorati:

Tag clouds, for better user experience
Tag cloud according to Wikie is - “ A visual depiction of user-generated tags used typically to describe the content of web sites. Tags are usually single words and are typically listed alphabetically, and the importance of a tag is shown with font size or color. Thus both finding a tag by alphabet and by popularity is possible. The tags are usually hyperlinks that lead to a collection of items that are associated with a tag thus describing the item and enabling keyword-based classification and search of information”. Flickr says - “Tags are like keyword or category labels, and they can help visitors find items which have something in common“. The simplest way to explain a tag cloud is that it is a Web 2.0 way of categorizing, organizing and navigating your website content with keyword links.When a user saves, bookmarks or votes (what ever they may call it) for some blog post, picture, video etc on a web 2.0 website like flickr, technorati, del.icio.us etc, he/she has to enter a keyword that the user thinks best describes it.

If you look at the picture above, you will notice that each tag (or keyword link) have different font sizes. The font size of these tags depend on the number of times keyword has been used to tag that an item. More the items are associated with the keyword, the more it is popular and bigger will be the size of the font. So it’s an intuitive means of navigation on a website.

When the user clicks on a tag, he/she is navigated to a tag page which on flickr looks likes this:

The tag page comprises of the most recent items tagged by visitors using that particular keyword they have clicked on. Please note that these tag clouds are not necessarily the only way to reach to the items on the website, but they serve as an alternative & intuitive way of finding them. Most often then not, you will also find the item’s tag adjacent to the item, clicking on which will take you to the other items tagged using that keyword tag. ‘Related tags’ are the other common tags which contain that same item.
Tag clouds: not just usability, it’s also an amazing SEO tool
So you still have doubts, if you should incorporate these lexical clouds on your website or not? I will give you one more good reason to do so - With Tag clouds, you consolidate your website’s internal linking which means you have better strategical control on your link equity (juice) and since the anchor text of these tags is extremely keyword rich, it boosts the ranking of your website or weblog far more than what conventional navigation bar does and hence increases the website’s ranking for significantly larger variation of keywords. You yourself will be surprised to see the keywords tags (including long tail keywords) that people will associate your content with (even wordtracker would have failed to find those). Bloggers will be glad to know that WordPress 2.3 comes with tagging in-built. Ultimate tag warrior is an awesome plugin to create a colorized tag cloud or heat map.

Other Tag cloud resources:
How to make Tag clouds using PHP, MySQL, CSS
Tag clouds using ASP.Net

Posted in Web Usability, General, Web Design, Web Development, SEM | 1 Comment »

Time & Effort distribution to reap maximum out of your Internet Marketing Strategy

RedAlkemi being one of the most comprehensive Online Marketing Solution provider, it is our cyber-duty to suggest website owners and development teams; how to ideally distribute their valuable time (in%) & efforts to reap maximum out of your Internet Marketing Strategy.

Each of the six activities above mentioned focus on how to grow the Popularity, Quality & Profitability for any kind of Internet Marketing venture like Blogs,Informative websites, e-commerce websites etc.

Creating reliable, rich & viral content (40%)
Creating viral worthy rich content deserves at least 40% of the total time spent on the whole internet marketing process. I know it might sound surprising to some but that’s the way it is. The idea here is to spend considerable amount of time creating articles, blogs, forms, applications & graphical content that provides value to your targeted customers. The term ‘viral’ means that the content should be so rich that it has the ability to spread over web automatically. It should entice the visitor to share it with his friends, bookmark it or at least try to memorize your site and to return again in the future to find more useful updates. Make sure that all the content on your website should seem so authoritative that no one on the world wide web can raise questions on its authenticity. The coverage, quality & the entertainment aspect of your content should be so comprehensive that it becomes almost impossible for your competitors to catch up. Needless to mention, in case of any doubt feel free to refer to Wikipedia to create some thing that is 100 times better than others. Rich content works nothing less than anchor for a top performing website. All your efforts including Development, SEO, Link building will go insane if your site is a warehouse of useless & uninteresting information that can be found anywhere on the web inducing nothing but boredom. Make it as interesting & lively as you can.

Developing New Features/Designs (25%)
You can take this component as the cousin to ‘Creating Viral Worthy rich content’. It comprises of the activities to upgrade your website constantly. Think of new ideas that can help you to maximize the impact of the content designed by you. The people involved here are website owners, think tanks, designers, developers etc. Even if you are the industry leader, it takes a lot of effort to stay there and maintain your cutting edge.

Studying the competition for new keywords & other industry trends (10%)
Each week, take out some time to evaluate the industry changes and the activities of your competitors. Keep a close eye on the new entrants, changes in keyword search trends and analyze the whole industry to discover the new trends & ideas that can add to your cutting edge.

Participate in online activities (10%)
Make sure that you spend some time socializing in the internet communities like forums, blogs, social media sites etc where the other industry gurus gather and share their thoughts. All these activities will not only build a positive profile for you as a website owner but will also reap attention, reputation and off course,it will reap some much needed industry relevant powerful links.

Testing/Refining according to the Visitor Data (10%)
Spend the rest 10% of the total time to keep a close eye on the analytics to track most conducive links & keywords so as to focus and redirect your advertising & marketing efforts. The analysis of your PPC campaign can yield surprising results that will surely help you to design or redesign your keyword targeting strategy. Analysis and resulting changes have equal share with in this 10% time share of the total marketing effort. Its all about testing, experimenting, analyzing, refining and repeating the good work. This component involves changing titles, headlines, object placements, PPC analysis, call to action etc. Without these experiments and testing you will never know what works for your targeted market segment and what not.

Manual Link Building (5%)
We are rating the much talked about Link Building at the bottom most, not because it is unimportant or outdated but if you have invested same time & effort on the aforesaid components, you need not beg for links in front of any one; you will get them automatically with much ease. Off course you still would require a link building campaign, but life would be much easier this way. Just a few dozens of rich carefully built links and you are on your way to outperform all your competitors. Obviously these handful of links will not be so easy to find but even if you hire someone else to do it for you, you can save some serious link building man hours.

I am not expecting every one to agree on this time & effort distribution though, it makes lot of sense if you apply simple Internet logics. And it is as simple as it sounds..!

Posted in General, Web Development, SEM | No Comments »

3rd party ecommerce solutions

Have you ever had to make the choice for your business of what shopping cart to use? You can have your own customized solution developed, or choose from a range of pre-built shopping cart options available like Volusion, XCart, Shopsite etc. Each of these shopping carts provide a host of features available ranging from a robust back end, to a user friendly front end along with SEO compatibility.

At first it’s quite tough when you know nothing about each of the different types of shopping carts and software packages. Which one do you choose is a tough choice to make.

Today I’m going to do a review of an all-in-one externally hosted shopping cart system, called Volusion. My review is mostly based on what I have read on the “Volusion” website and our own experience while integrating “Volusion” for a few of our clients.

All in one solution Volusion provides all the tools to create an online ecommerce company. Their software provides total ecommerce solutions including ROI tracking software, SEO optimization software, hosting by RackSpace.com, email marketing software, affiliate software and much more. This ensures that the buyer will not have to work with different providers for all the above mentioned features thus saving time, energy and money.

The components of the solution are completely customizable, and the site can be designed as per the industry and the target audience. Volusion gives enough creative independence to the site owner to have his website designed as per the requirements.

Some companies charge a percentage of sales from the site owner, but Volusion does not. This ensures that the cost of site maintenance remains the same as your online business grows. Volusion charges only a monthly fee for the hosting of your online store, and additional band width (as your business grows) can be purchased at an additional cost.

The pricing structure for Volusion plans is good, with an entry level plan starting at $20 a month, going up to a $100 platinum unlimited plan. All in all, Volusion seems to be providing good shopping cart software with almost all the required features. There are often inherent problems with jack-of-all service providers, but looking through the features of the Volusion website, they certainly have their game together based on their website presentation.

Posted in Web Development | 1 Comment »

Important aspect often overlooked while considering a web development company

When searching for a web development company for a new website, it is wise to also evaluate the level of post development support that you can expect to receive.

Post development support may include guidance on how to use some of the back end features, adding any new features at a later stage, receiving suggestions, evaluations of new ideas etc. What is often overlooked is support in terms of website marketing. Just having an entity out there in the World Wide Web is not enough. It is critical that just before the website is about to be completed, a complete Online Marketing Plan is worked out so that it can be launched along with the website. This Online Marketing plan should focus on getting traffic and conversions both in the short term and long term after finding out the amount and kind of dependency required on search engines for getting traffic, exploring other sources of getting traffic like banner advertisements etc., This should be a complete plan that would also evaluate the traffic to find out how it is interacting with the website, what is the conversion rate etc. and necessary actions should be taken on the basis of this to get a high conversion rate.

Hiring a development company that can provide support in working out a right marketing mix as well, ensures that your website is a successful online business.

Posted in Web Design, Web Development | 1 Comment »