Archive for the 'SEO' category
Wednesday, March 26th, 2008
We've been properly labelling and tagging our images for years. Some of our websites get most of their visitors from Google Images.
Google Images is the greatest SEO reserve left in the world. Chris Silver Smith of Netconcepts let the cat out of the bag in 2006 and told the whole world about optimising for Google images. But it's hard work optimising images for Google Images and most webmasters still can't be bothered. There's still gold - or at least visitors - in those hills.
As Chris didn't cover the technical details in-depth, here's a step by step guide for optimising your images for Google images.
Most websites publish their images like this:
<img src="/images/192a/986943.jpg" alt="image">
Where's the problem? Missing height and width, meaningless directory name, meaningless file name, generic alt tag.
Here's what a properly formatted image should look like:
<img src="http://foliovision.com/images/2007/08/zen-fanless-power-supply-400.jpg" alt="Zen Fanless Power Supply" width="400" height="340" />
For bonus points link that image to a larger version of the same properly labelled image:
<a href="http://foliovision.com/images/2007/08/zen-fanless-power-supply-big.jpg" rel="lightbox"><img src="http://foliovision.com/images/2007/08/zen-fanless-power-supply-400.jpg" alt="Zen Fanless Power Supply" /></a>
For extra bonus points put that image in a h5 tag with a proper caption, close to if not identical to the alt tag:
<h5><a href="http://foliovision.com/images/2007/08/zen-fanless-power-supply-big.jpg" rel="lightbox"><img src="http://foliovision.com/images/2007/08/zen-fanless-power-supply-400.jpg" alt="Zen Fanless Power Supply" /></a><br />Fortron PFC ZEN fanless power supply</h5>
If all that sounds like a huge hassle - when you do it for every image - you are absolutely right. It is a huge hassle to optimize for Google images by hand.
Which is why we built the SEO Images (part of Foliopress WYSIWYG) plugin.
With SEO Images, all of the above is happens automatically.
You only need to give the image the correct name (words separated by hyphens) and upload to the correct directory.
Automatically all the rest is added to your image:
- alt tag
- thumbnail (whatever size you prefer)
- link to larger version image
- caption
- width and height
- lightbox
If you want a lot of visitors from Google Images, you only need to use SEO Images for a few months and you will have the rankings and the visitors to go with them.
Here are the Google Images result for our example from above, the Zen Power Supply. Of 107,000 images, spots one and two are from Foliovision.com. The large and the small version of that image.
SEO Images Google Images results
Why a few months? Historically indexing in Google Images is much slower than for the rest of Google.
Chris and Stephen, in the future, please keep our secrets to yourselves!
By Alec
SEO |
Sunday, December 16th, 2007
The best single website on the internet is the Wikipedia. There is more useful information and less disinformation there than on any other single substantial site.
No surprise Google puts Wikipedia in the top ten for almost everything.
Somewhat of a surprise then that Google has decided to create a pseudo-Wikipedia by the name of Knol.
Right now, it's an expert authors by invitation affair. But they plan (rather foolishly in my opinion) to open it up to free for fall (think the fall of Squidoo).
We are looking at David vs. Goliath, with Wikipedia in the David corner as the innovator facing off against massive Google. It's Netscape - Internet Explorer all over again, but this time Google is in the black outfit.
Unbelievably enough, despite being first to the party with great technology and a loyal userbase, Netscape eventually lost round one of the internet wars.
I wonder if Wikipedia will do better.
By Alec
SEO |
Friday, October 26th, 2007
Stephen Spender of netconcepts put up a beautiful SEO weblog entry over at cNet.
He talks about the same old tired question of ecommerce websites badly organised for SEO with:
- image navigation
- image text
- badly formatted URLs
- session-cookie dependent content
- no content
All true, but old news. Spender suggests Web 2.0 has just made it worse. Perhaps. But the real value in the entry are in the two following screen shots.
The first is a tabbed web interface of a good looking Web 2.0 ecommerce site.
Standard tabbed Web 2.0 product page
So what? Well take a look at what's under those tabs, what's under the covers.
That's what you get with Javascript turned off.
All the content of all the tabs is right there on a single content rich web page.
One could even argue that there is too much content on this page.
It would be better to have these section under different URLs making five or six pages with cleverly crafted hard URLs with interlinking anchor text in as site subsection. All that''s possible too by turning Javascript off but would require even better programming.
But the single page approache is a very good start.
Product page courtesy of the Hobitat.
By Alec
SEO |
Friday, August 24th, 2007
With the huge sites we build over time with and for our clients, one of the most painful parts is keeping the broken links out.
There are online checkers that can handle small sites (up to about 50 or 100 pages) but when you want to scan a site with 300 or 500 pages or more, you need a desktop application.
We use and recommend the Site Audit tool in WebCEO for advanced website checking, but a lot of the time, WebCEO is overkill. We don't care if our images have the alt tag. We don't care if our pages are considered slow right now. We just want to catch and fix the broken links.
In cases like this, we use Xenu Link Sleuth. Xenu Link Sleuth is a labour of love, created by an anti-Scientology programmer (every report contains a banner ad against Scientology). It's fast and reliable. Really fast.
For Xenu to do a maximum amount of good and not give too much useless information you need to get the settings right. Here are the ones we use:
Xenu Link Sleuth settings
Why these settings?
From the top:
- Parallel threads should be reduced to 10 or less. Five is even better. With thirty threads, there is a good chance you will overwhelm you shared server.
- Apply to all jobs checked: you don't want to have change these settings for every project.
- Ask for password or certificate when needed will allow you to spider hidden parts of the site. Be careful about being logged in or not with Internet Explorer, or Xenu might go through your CMS. A properly written CMS shouldn't delete content without a confirmation dialog but this is an option to be careful about.
- Redirections as errors should be off. While I do consider redirections errors for the most part, they are less urgent to address than broken links, especially internal ones.
- FTP and gopher URLs. Should be checked. If you have these links, it would be good to know if they are working or not. I haven't had any large ftp links on any of our sites, so I don't know if Xenu downloads the whole file or just touches it to make sure there is something on the other end. Checking the documentation, apparently Xenu only gives a list of ftp files. Useful enough to do a handcheck.
- Valid text URLs will give you a full list of all the URLs in your site. You don't need this.
- Site Map will create a sort of sitemap based on site structure. It's generally not been satisfactory for modern sophisticated dynamic site. More confusing than anything else. Leave it turned off.
- Statistics will give you a very good summary of your scan.
- Orphan Files you should always leave turned off. It can't handle ID type anchors which means it reports a lot of correctly working anchors as broken. The orphan files options has never given me any worthwhile information.
Here is the short version of the statistics:
Xenu Link Sleuth Statistics
Very nice. Very simple. We aren't doing too badly here, at over 99% ok.
One reason this looks so good is thanks to Xenu Link Sleuth itself.
To get best use of Xenu Link Sleuth, you'll want to set it to browse external links, but make sure to add a list of URLs not to check in the same format as here (with http://):
Xenu Starting Point dialog
The example above is only applicable to our sites. You'll have to include your own tracking services yourself. If you don't get this right, you'll get errors on every page and your reports will be next to useless. Make sure to include the http:// and then the full base URL of each service. Including shorthand like "google" or "statcounter" won't work. Trust us. We've tried it.
The simple solution to false errors on external linksis to turn off Check external links. This way the off site trackers are not checked. But external links aren't checked either. It's worth the extra trouble to get it right. It might take you two or three tries, but once you've figured it out once, you will be able to run Xenu trouble free in the future (although sometimesI've had trouble getting the Do not check any URLs preference to stick).
Other worthwhile link checking alternatives to Xenu include
- the W3C link checker. Online. Simple, straightforward, free. Times out after 100 pages.
- the SEOMoz Crawl test. Online. Unpaid version 5 pages. Paid version 50 pages. Very detailed reports. Nice formatting.
- WebCEO. Desktop application. Most comprehensive reports. Unlimited crawling. Paid, multipurpose tool. Can be depressing as all get out - it finds every flaw in your website.
By Alec
SEO |
Thursday, July 19th, 2007
One of the sites I've occasionally used for picking up links for clients early in the SEO cycle is LinkAdage.
It used to be simple. Go in and pick your links - the URL would often be given. Now the URL must be kept a secret to avoid easy penalisation from Google.
And the language has changed to reflect that selling links is now considered a vice. Here is an example: PR6 Link on Great Non-Profit Website.
This non-profit site has a bunch of very nice natural backlinks from other non-profit organizations. This is a very clean site and it is the first time they are selling links.
Something like selling virginity - "first time they are selling links". Happily enough like virginity, links can be sold over and over again.
By Alec
SEO |
Wednesday, July 4th, 2007
The accuracy of Alexa rankings is always something I've wondered about.
Some of my clients have put great store by it.
After putting their SEO work on hold - "We like our rankings just fine the way they are" - two months later they start to see their Alexa rankings plummeting and are back on the telephone.
"I've seen our Alexa numbers are way down? What can we do about it?"
Of course, I'd have already seen a month ago by the traffic and the search engine referrals that urgent site promotion was called for. I always thought Alexa only provided the roughest ballpark figures.
It turns out the situation is even more dire than one would think. Alexa Rank can be wildly wrong - by a factor of ten.
But the same clients like the Alexa ranking system - it's as inherently easy to understand as a high school popularity contest. Am I more or less popular than my competitors? Am I in the top 200,000 websites in the world or not?
That should read "most popular in the English-speaking world" - Alexa doesn't matter anywhere else. There are a lot of very popular international websites with extremely low Alexa numbers.
In any case, here are the hard numbers from SEOlogs.com: Putting Alexa Rank to the Test - SEOlogs.com:
| Site |
Pageloads (per month) |
Unique Visits
(per month) |
Alexa
Rank |
Site
Type |
| swansea.info |
4,193 |
1,517 |
1,093,097 |
local/ travel |
| ferrao.org |
12,322 |
4,100 |
7,307,702 |
News Blog |
| labitacora.net |
14,469 |
9,663 |
652,472 |
Blog |
| kottu.org |
21,378 |
11,595 |
1,168,943 |
Blog |
| igrice.hr |
59,097 |
22,482 |
391,457 |
Gaming |
| tolkienlibrary.com |
61,701 |
25,615 |
384,627 |
Books |
| liberalavenger.com |
56,453 |
27,987 |
701,743 |
News/ Politics blog |
| claysbamapage.net |
65,559 |
39,846 |
685,256 |
Football |
| seologs.com |
150,243 |
50,665 |
9,921 |
SEO/ SEM |
| pixelperfectdigital.com |
256,571 |
74,608 |
125,565 |
Photography/ Design |
| versosperfectos.com |
436,716 |
98,814 |
78,620 |
Music |
| militantplatypus.com |
712,886 |
144,355 |
130,692 |
Photography/ Design |
| eclipse-plugins.2y.net |
450,307 |
159,205 |
33,404 |
Programming |
| poea.gov.ph |
639,658 |
202,965 |
50,306 |
Govt |
| emezeta.com |
649,052 |
405,382 |
25,312 |
tech blog, espanol |
| osx-e.com |
3,518,005 |
830,437 |
62,039 |
Mac |
| microsiervos.com |
2,496,956 |
1,452,791 |
6,040 |
Computer science |
| blogadorn.com |
13,403,525 |
1,713,931 |
52,704 |
Clip Art for Myspace |
| javimoya.com |
18,075,839 |
7,848,084 |
2,098 |
youtube downloader |
Nice work compiling these figures.
By Alec
SEO |
Thursday, June 21st, 2007
There are lots of ways to build incoming links.
For a small window of time (about six months until April of this year) sponsoring WordPress themes was a great way to get varied links from lots of different independent websites.
Of course these links wouldn't be going on top PR sites generally (custom themes) and you don't have control of the theme of the site.
On the other hand, you do have control over the anchor text, which is already not bad.
And previously it was quite inexpensive - you would pay about $40 or $50/link on a two sponsored link theme and around $70 to $100 for a single sponsored link theme.
Things have changed - most theme developers are pushing three sponsored links and are trying to get $100 or more per link.
With the inflation and feeding frenzy, a lot more lousy developers have thrown their hats into the ring, so there is an oversaturation of themes.
The developers all talk a good game of how they promote the theme on sites such as:
Unfortunately on all or most of these high PR authority sites, your sponsored link will be nowhere to seen. Just a link to download the theme and some jpegs of the theme.
The developers will also try to shout and scream about 450 downloads, 1037 downloads for past themes. But for link building number of downloads accomplishes nothing for you.
What you are interested in is the number of sites which use the theme and include the sponsored links. For the purposes of sponsored links, a single is much better as the end user is less likely to rip out the links. By the same token it would also be better if the links were discreetly nested and not in electric green (where they are likely to attract the attention of the site owner and his visitors and finally get ripped out). An exception could be made if your site is likely to go viral and has a very wide appeal. In that case, clicks from sponsored links might actually contribute to your business. For my regional websites, we are not looking for random clicks. It will never generate any business for my clients and the more discreet the sponsored links the better.
Read the rest of this entry »
By Alec
SEO, WordPress |
Tuesday, June 5th, 2007
Some well-known SEOs are advocating using rel="no-follow" on all outbound links. Aaron Wall has unearthed this gem in Dan Thies's updated SEO Fast Start (free content flypaper for StomperNet membership which is $800/month):
Add nofollow on all of the links that point to other sites, unless you have agreed to a direct link for some reason.
This is the most narrow-minded tripe I've ever heard. Google will rank websites higher who don't link to anyone else? Such a strategy makes a mockery of the whole essence of hypertext and the WWW (world wide web).
This school of thought has its origins with Leslie Rohde from his Optilink/Optispider cult days (circa 2002-2003). The clunky and overpriced Optilink has since been superceded by Brad Callen's Link Proctor, later renamed SEO Elite. Aaron Wall has some free tools (alas some of them broken now - SEO Elite is more reliably updated) and there are lots of other pay tools out there now which track your backlinks.
What is valuable advice is not hoarding PR, but channeling Page Rank. I mean really - you don't increase your wealth by putting your money under your mattress. You increase your wealth by reinvesting your money wisely. And the same thing applies to Page Rank on the internet.
Read the rest of this entry »
By Alec
SEO |
Monday, May 21st, 2007
Some gentlemen search colleagues are thunderstruck by the acquisition of 24/7 Real Media by advertising holding company WPP for $649 million (a tidy sum it is - congratulations 24/7 - although I've always hated your technology). Raycam wonders why more ad agencies aren't snapping up the smaller search houses.
It's simple. All the assets go down the elevator every night (David Ogilvy is reputed the first to coin this phrase).
Read the rest of this entry »
By Alec
SEO, Business |
Saturday, May 5th, 2007
We are currently relatively happy customers of SiteCounter.
I even worked with Aodhan on getting improving the keyword stats. Out of our discussions in 2005, the single and opaque Keyword Analyis became three separate: Keyword Analysis, Recent Keyword Activity and Search Engine Wars. Aodhan was a joy to work with.
Statcounter-Summary
Read the rest of this entry »
By Alec
SEO |
Friday, April 20th, 2007
There's a big discussion going on now among SEOs (search engine optimisers) about Google's pronouncements about paid links. Basically Google has banned them and promised penalties for using paid links. This is a kind of totalitarianism - Google is free to do what they want with their own algorithm but that does not give them the right to dictate how and when you should advertise.
People have been warning of an impending Google oligarchy and it seems to be coming true faster than planned.
There is some confusion about how much Google knows about your website and your incoming links. Don't be confused.
Touchgraph-Google-Seo-Vertical
A site called Touchgraph.com will show you a lot about what Google knows about your vertical in a java application which loads directly in your browser.
Touchgraph runs off of the similar pages data in the Google serps's (look for it).
Particularly useful is the simplicity - click on a link and see the home page in a new window.
What is frightening in the new Oz is that Google has much better technology behind the curtain. I'm sure Google has a similar chart but with the spam and trust numbers for each website popping up. As they analyse a single vertical forensically, to improve the SERPS (at this point that's pretty much what they'd have to do, as SEO spam is getting better), they can apply the algorithm tweaks across dozens of verticals hypothetically. If they like what they see, new algorithm gets rolled out.
Even as a client you will find it interesting to plug in your key search terms and have a look at the results. Who is in your group?
Ideally you'd want a link from nearly every site in the vertical to your website.
By Alec
SEO |
Friday, April 13th, 2007
I've finally found some simple javascript for affiliate or other links you want to partially cloak. It works well in IE 6 and hides the destination altogether in Firefox. It does not work in Safari. I'd like to know if it would work in IE 7 but as 60% of all visitors to my client websites are still running IE 6, that's already a good start.
Why would you want something like this on your website?
- If you are selling anything via an affiliate link people don't like the strange syntax and will often avoid clicking on the link, even though clicking on your affiliate link does them absolutely no harm. In general, having control over one's display URL. It will also help you with the search engines. They judge a website by the content of its outbound links.
- So this way you can link to the top level address of any given domain, rather than to a convuluted affiliate link, making Google happy.
I'd like to show you the code but alas Xstandard is acting up again and won't seem to respect the code tag.
Without Xstandard, I'm back with the basic example:
<a href="http://www.affiliate-link.com/" target="_top" onmouseover="window.status='http://www.company-name.com';return true;" onmouseout="window.status=' ';return true;">Shop at Company Name!</a>
By Alec
Internet Marketing, SEO |
Friday, April 6th, 2007
A very interesting discussion on Aaron Wall's SEOBook about whether Google is contributing to web spam. The best part is in the comments (sorry Aaron!) where two readers to the numbers on AdWords for relatively high priced PPC words.
Basically they just don't add up.
Read the rest of this entry »
By Alec
Internet Marketing, SEO, Business |
Wednesday, March 21st, 2007
Great guidance on how to anonymise your surfing via proxies:
Hiding Your IP Address, Anonymous Internet Surfing HOWTO.
The danger is that unless you do it just right you risk more than you gain. Specifically that the proxy holder can grab all your unencrypted passwords (email, site logins).
Read the rest of this entry »
By Alec
Internet Marketing, SEO |
Monday, March 19th, 2007
Our clients are ready for another round of SEO.
One component we will be doing more of in this round is directories. It's too tedious and slow to have someone senior do it.
There are lots of directory submission services.
But you want to be sure to be applying to directories worth being listed in.
Here is a very good list of directories which are mainly pay for play.
Here is another list of quality directories which are mainly free.
For project preparation, you should fill in the data in the form at addurl.nu for each site for which you are creating a directory campaign.
Another huge concern with a directory campaign is having too many links come online at the same time. One can count on the search engines not to index all the directories at the same time so that the new links will appear more gradually, especially on the more obscure regional categories.
On the other hand, it would make sense to go through a hundred directories per month to avoid any sudden surge.
Even with these vetted lists, I worry that too many of them wouldn't pass my own bad neighbourhood test.
By Alec
SEO |
