Archive for December, 2007

In December, Matt Cutts announced that Google had begun treating subdomains more like subdirectories. The reason behind the move was to limit the number of results from one company that appear in a keyword search. If you are unfamiliar with the exact definitions, a subdomain looks like this: subdomain.example.com and a subdirectory (also called a folder occasionally) like this: example.com/subdirectory.

Now that the two are being treated more similarly for SEO you may just want to consider which is best for your company. Typically, you only want to use subdomains if your site is huge – containing thousands of pages. Also, subdomains are a bit labor intensive, as you have to build the links for the subdomain. On the positive side, subdomains can be managed separately.

On the other hand, most sites should probably use subdirectories to organize content. All of the code for a subdirectory is in the same place, which makes it easier to find, edit, move or change. This method is a much simpler approach and will work well for most needs.

People that are novices at SEM or businesses will fewer than 10,000 pages will benefit more from focusing their energies on organizing their site structure and folder names using subdirectories rather than building out subdomains. However, if you are more experienced or have a web site with pages number over 10,000 you could benefit from subdomains.

“Pipes” is a feature on the Yahoo web site, which is currently in the “beta” development stage. It enables Yahoo members to put together multiple online feeds into a single “pipe”, and lets others (membership not required) specify how they want the combined information to be additionally filtered.

Some examples of Pipes which have been created by Yahoo members include “Australian Music Podcasts”, which lists related podcasts from various sources, “eBay Price Watch”, that allows users to find eBay items by price and keyword, and “GeoAnnotated Reuters News” which lets people click on numbers scattered across a world map and see headlines associated with those locations. Another pipe, “New York Times thru Flickr”, takes phrases from the N.Y. Times home page, adds photos from Flickr.com to them, and associates them with locations on a map.

If you are a Yahoo! member and logged in, you can view the sources and built-in filters which apply to each pipe by clicking the “View Source” link. There is usually a short waiting period while it opens each of the pipes, during which the message “running pipe” appears. Some of the pipes which show up in Yahoo Pipes search results do not function properly or are poorly designed; as with web pages, you may have to try a few before you find one that is useful. The system also features a message board and a substantial amount of documentation on developing and using them.

In the search results for pipes, an icon showing interconnected pipes appears next to each pipe listing. Generally, the more complex the icon, the longer it will take to open the individual “pipe.” However, this is not always true; it appears to be partially dependent upon how many sources the pipe uses. On a high-speed internet connection, the loading time is generally about two to thirty seconds, but it can sometimes be longer. If you are using an older web browser, it will probably be necessary to upgrade it before Yahoo Pipes will function properly.

Overall, Yahoo pipes offer a way to combine, associate, and filter data from two or more online sources. They can make it easier to find information, images, products, audio, and video on various subjects. The system currently has a few undesirable aspects, but these might be corrected when it advances beyond the “beta” stage.

Yahoo Pipes can be accessed at pipes.yahoo.com.

Interactivity can help attract repeat visitors to your web site and encourage them to use it for longer periods of time. In some cases, this can add to the content it has to offer. Here are some tips for increasing the interactivity of your site…

POLLS: Offering a poll related to the web site (or particular content on it) increases interactivity and encourages users to return later and check the results. Visitors may even tell other people to vote on the poll if it is about a controversial issue.

RATINGS: Allow users to rate images, articles, links, videos, or other content using star icons or a drop-down menu. This doesn’t add a great deal of interactivity, but is easy to maintain and less likely to be misused.

COMMENTS: Letting visitors to your site post comments about content on it will encourage them to discuss relevant issues and return later to respond to others’ comments. However, this sort of interactivity can pose some problems, like “spamming” and X-rated comments.

CLASSIFIEDS: Creating a classified advertising section for users to post items related to your web site’s topic adds a useful feature and is effective for increasing interactivity.

SEARCH: Providing a feature for searching your web site’s content can be helpful for its visitors. On the other hand, a poorly-designed, ineffective search function may cause them to leave more quickly.

CHAT: Offering a real-time chat system for users is an effective method of increasing interactivity if your site is fairly popular. It can be used for discussion of an issue, or for answering questions about your product or service.

CUSTOMIZATION: Using cookies and/or registration data to provide users with information customized for them, such as automatically providing local weather data or content related to their interests, can make your web site more convenient.

TOOLS: Adding interactive tools to your web site, especially if they address a niche interest, can help attract new users. These can include specialized calculators, programming code generators, converters, or automatically generated suggestions/recommendations.

GAMES: Placing free JavaScript or PHP based games on your web site is good for increasing interactivity and gaining repeat visitors. Some sites offer these to webmasters free of charge, usually in exchange for a link.

Basically, features for increasing the interactivity of your web site are likely to improve its popularity and usefulness, but only if they are implemented properly and sufficiently monitored to ensure that they are not being misused.

Perhaps in face of the question of if social network Facebook would overtake LinkedIn as a business destination network, LinkedIn has launched a developer platform alongside a new design.

LinkedIn’s new features include the ability to find connections to people on LinkedIn while on other websites, through third-party applications. Your friends from other social networking sites such as Myspace will now show up in LinkedIn. There are also “modules” for third-party applications and a news aggregator with articles specific to your industry.

One of LinkedIn’s partners, Business Week, as developed a feature to see how you are connected to people and companies written about it the magazine’s articles. They are also allowing you to send their articles to your friends so they’ll see it the next time they log in.

LinkedIn has also begun aggregating articles that are uploaded so you can see the most popular articles about your company, partners and competitors in addition to your industry news.

As for the design changes, LinkedIn has made the homepage simpler, using Facebook’s “feed” concept, but calling it “network updates”. You can also add “modules” or developer’s applications to your home page. These include things like a calendar that features upcoming events in your industry. This module will tell you who else is attending these events and show links to their profiles so you can learn more about who is attending. Finally, the top menu buttons have been reduced to 5 from the previous 10. All of these steps are to entice it’s users to spend more time on LinkedIn daily.

LinkedIn has more than 16 million registered users and reports a gain of more than one million new members each month.

When designing pages and creating content for them, web site owners must decide upon the best balance of usability and SEO (or Search Engine Optimization). Many favor one or the other and put more emphasis on it. But which is more important to your web site’s success, SEO or usability?

First, it should be made clear why such a decision has to be considered. When web pages are created with SEO in mind, keywords people search for must be picked out and used repeatedly in the page’s content. However, to achieve an appropriate density of keywords, some web site owners use awkward or redundant sentences, which reduces usability. Features like menus or user comment areas are sometimes left out to prevent them from negatively impacting the page’s SEO, as well.

It is important not to go too far on either extreme. It’s unlikely that many people will find a very well-written web page with rather poor SEO keyword density and words which hardly anyone searches for, so its usability becomes irrelevant. On the other hand, a page which has been perfectly keyword-optimized for SEO but is barely readable won’t produce many sales or advertisement clicks.

SEO oriented efforts can harm usability in less obvious ways as well. Some readers will find it obnoxious if a large percentage of the words on a page are linked to other pages (related to each word), and the link codes will make the page take longer to load. Adding a large number of words to the keyword META tag (or using large amounts of other code which is only read by search engine spiders) will also increase the page loading time, reducing usability.

However, some changes can benefit both search engine optimization and usability; using text-based links in your web site’s menus both makes it easier for search engine spiders to navigate your web site and enables people who are visually impaired, using older web browsers, or have images turned off to use the site. Adding a Site Map is another measure which is important for improving usability and SEO at the same time.

Generally, it is best to prioritize usability, but not excessively at the expense of SEO. While efforts aimed at SEO are important, it must be kept in mind that (in most situations) you want visitors on the web site to use it, not just click a search result for it.

It can take a long time to learn about all the important facets of SEO (Search Engine Optimization); keyword density, different types of links, META tags, directories, social bookmarking, etc. One way to learn about SEO is to read one of the many books about this subject, but can a book truly teach you how to do SEO work?

To some extent, yes. However, the methods which work (and no longer work) in SEO change relatively quickly. Major search engines can change their policies at any time, and it is not uncommon for new techniques to be discovered. If you are going to invest the time and money to read a book on search engine optimization, verify that it provides recent information. You will also want to review blog posts, news, and forums related to SEO occasionally, rather than only relying on what the book may teach you. On the other hand, this is not to say that some SEO techniques - like posting links to web site directories or creating Site Maps - have not remained beneficial for many years. It also helps to have sufficient computer/internet skills and a good understanding of marketing, which a book on SEO is unlikely to teach.

Some books on search engine optimization also cover pay-per-click (PPC) advertising or provide information on using particular web programming languages, like PHP or ASP.NET. If you need book(s) which will teach a basic or moderate amount of information about two or more of these subjects, selecting such titles may be a good choice. Be sure to consult reviews of the book you’re interested in (on web sites such as Amazon.com) to see if other readers feel they were able to learn enough from it. It is certainly possible to learn everything you need to know about SEO from the internet; however, it may take you longer to discover some concepts, and many people don’t consider it as convenient as being able to read the information in a book.

Basically, a book might be able to teach you how to conduct SEO work, but will not keep you up-to-date on it and probably won’t teach how to be an effective marketer or computer user; however, there are other books on these subjects which might be helpful. When purchasing a book on this subject, make sure it is appropriate for someone of your current skill level and that it covers the type of methods you’re interested in.

B2B SEO is different than B2C SEO, just as your marketing efforts in a B2B relationship are different. One of the most important differences to remember is that you are talking to more than one buyer. Many B2B purchases involve four or five different people influencing the final decision. And each of these people has a different perspective, needs and interests. Therefore, your B2B strategy needs to consider these varying search strategies.

Another major difference is that B2B keywords are more complex and non-commoditized because of the unique products and language in each industry. You need to do your research well to understand the industry lingo.

To be successful in your B2B efforts make sure you identify all the buyers and influences in your market. Get into your customers’ heads and learn how they identify certain items. Don’t assume your market is familiar with brand names and develop multiple landing pages for different search techniques’ entry points. Finally, realize that B2B sales cycles are much slower and therefore harder to measure in terms of SEO. Although SEO may seem challenging for many B2B companies, not participating in it can be a fatal mistake as not showing up in searches hurts your validity in the eyes of searchers.

Although it is preferable to avoid this, changing your web site’s URL or domain name is sometimes necessary. This may be due to a particular reason, such as trademark infringement, or just because the current URL doesn’t seem to be effective and you have purchased a better one. Another possibility is that you are upgrading from a page on a free hosting provider with a long URL to a domain name. Regardless of the reason, here are some tips on successfully changing the URL of your web site.

1. As soon as possible, notify users that the URL is changing, using your web site itself and any email lists it has. Try to make the new URL ready to use before the web site disappears from its old location, and put a link on the home page of the web site at the old address. Fewer of your repeat visitors will be lost if you can successfully get them in the habit of using the new address. Don’t change the web site’s design radically during the URL changing process; the combination of the domain name and design change might cause some people to stop using the web site or no longer recognize it.

2. Submit the new website address to search engines and directories as soon as possible so it will quickly appear in search results. This is even important for successfully retaining repeat visitors, as some internet users only access web sites through search engines, never using their browser’s address bar. Don’t have the same content on the old URL’s home page (just have an explanation and a link to the new domain name/URL) during and after this step.

3. Remember to change the URL everywhere that it might be listed or entered. Changing or deleting it from social bookmarking systems, forum user profiles, pay-per-click advertising services, affiliate programs, or article directories may be necessary. If you have reciprocal links with other web sites, request that they change the links on their sites, and notify them of the new address where their links will be moved to.

Following these tips should help your web site in more successfully changing its URL, with the smallest losses of traffic and revenue. Changing your website address is not a task which should be done in a hurry or without giving sufficient consideration to reducing its potentially negative effects.

The popular search engine Ask.com has introduced a new feature called AskEraser, which gives users’ searches anonymity when it is activated. This may give Ask.com an advantage over other major search engines with regard to searchers who are concerned about anonymity and privacy.

According to a press release issued by Ask.com’s parent company (IAC), the new feature became available for use in searches on December 11th, 2007. When users activate it, data about their searches is automatically removed from Ask.com servers, providing greater anonymity than other search engines give. The feature is offered by Ask’s websites for the United States and United Kingdom. It will be available in other countries next year.

The AskEraser link can be seen in the upper-right corner of the home page and search pages. No registration is necessary to turn it on or off. The feature is turned off by default, but remains on if you turn it on, close the browser window, and return later. However, if you access Ask.com with a different web browser, you will have to activate it again. To use the “Options” or “MyStuff” features also linked from the upper-right corner of the page, AskEraser must be turned off.

AskEraser worked properly when tested for searches in both Opera 9.24 and Internet Explorer 7.0. It was necessary to upgrade from an earlier version of Opera 9 to 9.24 to activate this feature, but it works fine with Opera 8.54 on a different computer. If your computer has a low display resolution, turn AskEraser on at the home page instead of on a search page.

Ask.com also indicates that search data for users without AskEraser enabled is deleted from their servers after one and a half years. Cookies must be activated in your web browser (they are turned on by default in most browsers) to use AskEraser, so that the computer can “remember” you have selected to use this feature.

The privacy and anonymity of online searches has been an issue of concern in recent years, due to the potential for search data to be turned over to governments for various reasons and/or used for marketing purposes. Some of the other major search engines have come under criticism because of their policies with regard to the anonymity of searches in the U.S. and China.

Alexa.com, which ranks websites based upon how much traffic they receive, gives Ask.com a poorer ranking than Google, Yahoo, and America Online, but indicates that Ask is more popular than Lycos, Altavista, Dogpile, WebCrawler, and a number of other search engines.

SEO podcasts vary from the very basic to professionally produced productions. If you are looking to listen and learn here are a few sites to get you started.

1. SEO 101 - Although the name implies a very beginning level, this podcast also covers advanced SEO techniques. Many in the SEO field believe it to be one of the best available. You can listen to topics on your computer or download them for your commute. Lots of good info made easily available.
2. Daily Searchcast – This podcast focuses on the bigger search engines and their latest happenings. It also features industry gossip, funny and factual.
3. Mr. SEO - This podcast allows listeners to ask questions and then focuses on answering them. Although it’s a bit muddled there’s lots of great information hiding in there.

Additionally WebmasterRadio.fm is a large source of online radio and podcasts covering SEO. Here is a further list that you can explore on your own.

• Beginning SEO Podcast
• RSS Ray
• Strike Point
• SEO Radio
• eMarketing Talk Show
• Web Analytics World
• Rush Hour
• The Pulse
• Good Karma
• Marketing Pilgrim
• SEO Rock Stars
• The Alternative
• Net Income