SEO Ranking Factors for 2009

Search Engine Marketing and SEO have always been very dynamic fields. Search engines make changes all of the time. Sometime they announce their changes, sometimes we are left to guess at them. In either event, more often than not, we are left largely to our own devices in terms of assessing the impact of these changes and what to do about them - if anything.

This makes sessions related to ranking factors pretty popular at shows like SMX Advanced. This year was no exception and I was able to get a few minutes with one of this years speakers, Rand Fishkin, to chat about the state of SEO ranking factors.

One of the more interesting things Rand and I agreed on was the fact that it's 2009 and a lot of today's fundamental ranking factors, are very similar to the same stuff that worked in 2005, 2006, 2007 and so on. In other words, a lot of the basic things have been pretty consistent.

That said, I thought it might be useful to run down a quick list of some of the things that matter most and least in terms of ranking in 2009. We’ll start with the Important Things:

Title tags - This one is a no brainer. Good title tags have long been recognized as one of the single most important on page SEO elements of any web page. What makes a good title tag? A good title tag specific to each individual page is absolutely essential. Beyond that, as Rand pointed out, having your 'important terms' appear early in your title tag also has a significant impact.

Anchor Text - Anchor text is the visible text of a link. Having inbound links is the overriding number one search factor but not all links are created equally. Say you have people linking to your page about blue widgets. If the text in their content reads "Fantastic Blue Widgets can be found here!" it makes a big difference in which words they link to your page. If they link the words 'Blue Widgets', it's going to do you a lot more good than if they just link the word 'here'.

This is important to keep in mind with your own internal linking too. Avoid using generic, nondescript terms like 'home' and 'here' and 'main' when you link to your own pages.

Quantity of Domains Linking - This one is interesting. if you have 10,000 inbound links and your competitor only has 7,000 inbound links but still seems to outrank you consistently, this could be the reason. Number of links is important, but the number of unique domains those links are coming from is also very important.

You may have 10,000 inbound links but maybe your links all come from 5,000 unique, separate domains. Your competitor may only have 7,000 inbound links but if they have 6,000 coming in from separate domains... they will get you most every time.

Social Media/Mobile - we talked a little bit about social and mobile. Social and to some extent mobile too can be hard to quantify. The fact of the matter is though, these are absolutely 2 hugely explosive categories. Facebook, Twitter and other social giants are continuing to grow in users and usage. Effective social media management can be a tremendous source for generating buzz, those all-important inbound links and just plain direct referral traffic.

Those are a few ranking factors Rand and I discussed as important, so what are some things people might be spending too much time worrying about? Here are some of the things we talked about in terms of being 'not so important':

H1 Tags - A couple of years ago, making use of H1 and H2 tags on selected areas of your HTML code kind of came into vogue. The rationale was the search engine spiders interpreted H1 tags as a signal that 'hey, this text is important because it's bigger'. Of course the proliferation of .css meant that you could throw H1 tags pretty much anywhere and everywhere on your page and just take care of how things looked to people with stylesheets.

That this was ever an effective ranking tactic or strategy is somewhat debatable. However, currently, while H1 tags aren't going to hurt you, they don't seem to be much of a factor.

Keyword Density - This one might surprise you a little bit. Keyword density is kind of a joke. It is in fact NOT desirable to work 500 instances of your target keyphrase into the text of your target page. I know this seems counter intuitive to some, but I for one was very glad to see this claim supported by some data in the Ranking Factors session.

If your page is about Blue Beach Widgets, you have Blue Beach Widgets in your title and you have pages linking to your blue beach widgets page with the terms 'blue beach widgets' in the anchor text THAT is good.

You do NOT have to whore out the content of your page to have 'blue beach widgets' repeated 50 times in the description. I know you have seen these pages... they look like:

This has to stop people. It makes your site read like a bad skit on the Muppet Show. This kind of thing makes me cringe, and it's ruining the Internet. Well maybe it isn't ruining the Internet like MTV ruined America, but it does make for some horrible web pages. I still hear SEOs talking keyword density to site owners. If you are a site owner and some SEO comes talking to you about increasing your keyword density, do everybody a big favor and throw something at them. Please.

W3C Validation - Ah, my old arch nemesis W3C Validation. If I've said it once, I’ve said it a thousand times... but I’ll say it again: if you want your site to validate W3C, by all means... do that. If having code that passes W3C validation makes you sleep well at night, then, my friend... you go get that done. I am all for people having W3C valid code, if that's what they want.

That said.... in terms of SEO and search engine ranking, the simple reality is: IT DOESN’T MATTER. It never has mattered and I daresay it never will matter. Can it hurt you to have valid code? Certainly not. Should you pay a designer and extra 30% to design your webpage to be 100% W3C compliant and valid? That’s up to you. But before you do, consider this: of the top 100 websites online, MAYBE 8 (and I am being exorbitant in that estimate) of them pass W3C validation. Amazon doesn't pass, eBay doesn't pass, Twitter doesn't pass, heck neither do Google, Yahoo or even Microsoft’s new Bing.

Oh Yeah!!!!If your page renders in all the browsers, if you don't have a bunch of broken links, in other words if your webpage looks like a webpage and can be read... that's all you need here folks. Search engines could not possibly care less, in other words if "document type does not allow element "div" here". They just don't. They never will. W3C might help get you listed in some directories (maybe?), it has some practical applications in terms of accessibility, and you could maybe argue that it can help you diagnose some page render/load time issues. Personally I think it’s most common application however is to inflate the bottom line estimate for web designers that can talk you into a cup of the W3C Validation Kool Aid.

So there are a few things Rand and I discussed that matter more and matter less in regard to search ranking factors in 2009. I'm sure we left plenty of things out, so if you want to add your opinion to either list, feel free to do so in the comments section.

[webpronews.com]

Web 2.0 Design & Development - What is Web 2.0?

The concept of "Web 2.0" began with a conference brainstorming session between O'Reilly and Media Live International. Dale Dougherty and O'Reilly noted that far from having "crashed", the web was more important than ever, with exciting new applications and websites popping up with surprising regularity. Hence the Web 2.0 concept was born.

"Web 2.0" refers to a perceived second generation of web development and web design, that facilitates communication, secures information sharing, interoperability, and collaboration on the World Wide Web. Web 2.0 concepts have led to the development and evolution of web-based communities, hosted services, and applications; such as social-networking sites, video-sharing sites, wikis, blogs and others. The sometimes complex and continually evolving technology infrastructure of Web 2.0 includes RSS feeds, server-software, content-syndication, messaging-protocols, standards-oriented browsers with plug-ins and extensions and various client-applications.

To know more about Web 2.0, please visit the site http://www.newpathweb.com.au

Web Design Tips: The Laws of Ecommerce Navigation Design

CSS, Flash, jQuery, and an arsenal of other powerful web techniques and technologies have unbound website design, creating the opportunity to develop either exceptional user interfaces or really frustrating ones.

Furthermore, the growth of "cookie-cutter" ecommerce templates (i.e., "insert your logo here") has quelled site concepts with great potential and made some ecommerce pages as bland and tasteless as a papier-mâché popsicle.

To avoid the pitfalls of a site design that is too confusing, too ugly, or too experimental to be effective, the ecommerce site owner must strike a balance between leading-edge techniques and technologies, effectiveness, and aesthetics. So, in this edition of "Web Design Tips," I'll outline the laws for ecommerce site navigation design to help any ecommerce business.


Law No. 1: Make Navigation Easy to Understand and Use

Shoppers browsing to an ecommerce store don't want to be baffled by navigation. As I implied above, there are a lot of amazing things that you can do with site navigation that you shouldn't.

As a specific example, the agency Publicis & Hal Riney has developed site navigation that responds to gestures captured via web cam. The effect is stunning, and is an excellent way to demonstrate development talent. But as navigation, it is really frustrating. And if an ecommerce site deployed anything like it, I'd bet that they would never make a sale again.

Make your site navigation easy to understand and use. Provide clear labels that explain what a user will find when he or she clicks. If you sell shoes, try labels like "Men's Shoes" or "Women's Shoes" or "Nike." And put navigation in a predictable place, top, left, right, or front and center.

Here are some examples of sites obeying law number 1:

• Skooba Design features labels like "Laptop Bags" and "Apple 4G iPod Nano Cases"
• Bonobos, which sells nothing but men's trousers and shorts, has a homepage with a less than perfect middle navigation, but the sites store obeys this law perfectly
• Gateway obeys this law with a very nice top navigation that provides images (easy to understand) for many products
• Dripping in Fat features a front and center navigation that works because of the limited number of products on the site
• Crucial uses three forms of navigation-each clear-to make it easy for customer to find the computer memory or Flash cards they seek

Law No. 2: Make Navigation Accessible

Making your ecommerce site easy for customers with disabilities is good for business and the right thing to do. Some of your customers are going to have disabilities that require them to surf the web using screen readers, refreshable Braille displays, magnifiers, or other helpful devices. Develop navigation that these devices easily understand. Take a look at the World Wide Web Consortium's How People with Disabilities Use the Web for an idea of how these customers use websites.

One technique to try is to place text-based navigation and skip links (often hidden from most site visitors via CSS) at the very top of the page.

Here are some examples of sites obeying law number 2:

• Productive Alternatives is a very accessible site with a range of products
• Zahradka Art & Illustration is accessible and provides some visual interest
• Crawleys Furniture uses a simple text-based navigation at the top of the page
• Scruffs Hardwear is easy for devices like screen readers

Law No. 3: Tell Me Where I Am

Before customers can make a good choice about where they want to go on your site, they should know where they are. Because so many online shoppers use search engines to locate online stores, your customers can enter your site just about anywhere. So there is no guarantee that they are starting on the home page.

Use visual and text clues (i.e., breadcrumbs) to show the customer where he or she is on your site.

Here are some examples of sites obeying law number 3:

• Eagle Coffee Company uses CSS to change the look and feel of the active page in its left navigation and uses a clear breadcrumb to show the user just where she is
• Tokidoki uses pink font to highlight the current page in the navigation and has a good breadcrumb trail
• PEZ Factory Store has an easy-to-read orange breadcrumb and puts the current page in all capital letters in the left-hand navigation
• Cabela's actually includes the phrase "You are here" in its breadcrumb
• Newegg changes the background and font color of the current page and includes an accessibility-friendly breadcrumb

Law No. 4: Use Layers and Facets on Big Sites

If your ecommerce site has more than a few product categories, more than a handful of brands, or more than a dozen products, add navigation layers and facets.

As a customer, I want to be able to browse by brand, price, age-appropriateness, color, or just about any other relevant product attribute. Your navigation should let me do that right in place.

Here are some examples of sites obeying law number 4:

• PetsRight provides understandable layered navigation
• Ramco Worldwide offers a price facet -MiniRepublic lets customers navigate by just about any product attribute
• Wlanmall includes attributes like frequency, series, and radio frequency connector

Law No. 5: Let There Be Search

Every ecommerce site should allow shoppers to just search for products. Not a lot of explanation needed. Add a search box (yes it is a form of navigation) to every page on your site.

Here are some examples of sites obeying law number 5:

• Amie Street allows you to find music from any page on the site
• Knife Center has search right up top
• Art.com puts search to the left (ahead) of its text navigation

[practicalecommerce.com]

How Can CSS Benefit Website Design For Google?

CSS or Cascading Style Sheets is a stylesheet language that describes the presentation of web documents. Web pages that are written in HTML and XHTML can be styled in many ways by using CSS. In fact CSS allows to separate the stylistic elements of the web page like layout, color and fonts from the content matter like textual paragraphs and images. This is called separation of content from presentation.

Separation of Content from Presentation

The separation improves the accessibility of content on the web pages. Moreover, it provides flexibility and control in the specification of presentation characteristics at the same time reducing complexity and repetition in the structural content.

CSS also allows the web page to be presented in different styles so that it suits different rendering methods. The web content is thus made available in various forms like on-screen, print, voice modes (speech-based browsers and screen readers) etc.

While CSS offers a plethora of benefits on the Internet, a good knowledge of the same is required if you need to employ it for your website. Therefore, to really reap the benefits of CSS and make it work for your online presence, you should invest quality time in learning its nuances.

Why is CSS good for Google?

CSS has a considerable impact on how Google views your website. In fact, you can soar your website's chances to rank well in the Google search results by employing CSS efficiently. CSS has many benefits with respect to Google.

• It shrinks the file sizes on your web pages
• It grants more control over the structure of the web pages
• It allows for certain content information to be hidden by browsers yet be visible to Google crawlers.

Let us understand all these potential benefits in detail:

Smaller File Sizes

Without CSS, all the styles on your web pages require to be supported by appropriate HTML coding. And this bloats up the file size which further adds up on the load time of the website.

CSS takes out the style from the HTML pages and puts into another separate file called the css file. This reduces the amount of code on the web pages. Lesser amount of code means smaller sizes of files and this is something Google prefers in the web pages on the Internet. Ideally, web pages should not be more that 100 kb.

Moreover, smaller file sizes also cause the pages to load quickly. This increases the accessibility and pleases your website visitors.

Increased Control over Web Pages

With CSS, you are able to structure the documents of your web pages as per the HTML standards at the same time retaining the look and feel of the page. Better structure with the same visual appeal is what CSS grants you.

Google prefers well structured web pages that score well on the design aspects too. And CSS allows website designers to do just the same. They can create attractive websites that not only are a treat to look at but also adheres to the standards and guidelines of the web.

Hiding Content from Browsers

With CSS, you can hide bits and chunks of content that you dont want the browser to read yet want Google crawlers to take into account. For example, you may have certain content on your website that you want to appear only on vice versa. CSS makes it possible to camouflage certain text without loosing on the chances of being picked up by Google.

[promotionworld.com]

Make More Money From Your Online Ads

Want to make some quick money with almost no work? If you don't already have AdSense ads on your site, you should think about getting started.

Google's AdSense places contextual ads on your web pages, and keywords defined by advertisers are matched to your site's content by Google. You make money each time someone on your site clicks on one of the ads. You can set filters so your competitors' ads aren't displayed on your site, and you can restrict the ad content by region and language.

This article will point out a few ways you can manage the ads on your website so they make you more money. We'll talk about three key issues: ad design, ad location and keywords.

You'll be surprised to learn just how much control you have over these elements--and you'll be delighted to see how much more money a few small changes can make you.

Designing for Dollars
Yes, "content is king," but good design is the crown jewel. Spend a few minutes getting the look of your AdSense ads right, and the payoff to you is priceless.

Tweak the color. Make the ads blend into your content so they'll be perceived by visitors to your site as supplementary or supporting information. Visitors are much more likely to click on links that look like part of the content they're reading.

You can change the color of the background and the color of the links to match those on your web pages. There are two ways to do this. One is a cinch: Use the pre-formatted colors that Google offers. The other requires a bit of HTML knowledge: Hand code the colors so you get an exact match to the ones on your site.

As an alternative design plan, consider changing the colors from time to time to keep things fresh for returning visitors who might suffer from "ad blindness"--viewers often automatically filter out any content they've seen before.

Align the images. Use images on your site as "captions" for the AdSense ads that appear. Now, of course, they won't have a direct relationship to each ad because you don't know exactly which ads will be placed on your page. The purpose of the images isn't to explain the ads, but to draw the eye and then lead it down or across to the text. Since that text is your ad, the image has just increased the chances that the ad will be clicked.

If you try this strategy, be aware that Google's algorithm is always looking for ways to get your ads to make you more money, and that could mean it might override your default settings. If you've asked for a four-ad banner, but Google knows that three ads will make you more money because of its keywords, then the images you've carefully aligned for four ads will be out of whack.

Run from the border! Unless... Borders separate the ads from the content. This visual separation works against your careful attempts to integrate the ads with the content. (Remember: Your goal is to integrate the ads as much as possible so they appear to be just one more valuable piece of relevant content on your site.)
For that reason, you should not use any of the pre-set borders Google gives you.

But if you use the "image caption" trick described above, Google requires that you use a border or a line separation between the images and the ads. The solution is to create your own line separation that's consistent with other design elements on your page.

When we talk about the location of your ads, we don't mean where they appear on each page.

What we're emphasizing here is that there are methods of setting up AdSense ads to appear on pages other than your own website pages. Increasing the variety of pages you put AdSense ads on can really boost your click-through rate. We'll also tell you about the kind of website page on which to never let an AdSense ad appear.

Extend your reach with AdLinks. When you sign up for AdSense, you also have the opportunity to display AdLinks. These are text links that take your visitor to a page of AdSense ads when clicked. The text links are related to the topics on your site, just like AdSense ads, but you get more of them and they might cover a wider range of relevant topics.

If space on your site is limited, AdLinks are a terrific idea because they're much more compact than AdSense ads. The downside is it takes two clicks (one on the text link and one on the resulting ad) before you make any money from them.

Put AdSense ads in RSS feeds. If you have more than 100 subscribers to your RSS feed, you can apply to have AdSense ads appear whenever the feed is pulled by a news reader. The ads are matched by the content of the entire feed, not just the title and teaser.

You need to put a snippet of code, provided by Google, into your feed, and the ads are then rendered when a reader downloads your feed. The text-based AdSense ad is converted to a graphic that remains stable even after it's downloaded by the reader. (If the ad remained in text form, the news reader would detect a new article each time the ad changed and would reload it.)

Use Web Search on your site. Putting a Google Web Search box on your site adds functionality for your visitors and potential ad revenue for you. When your site visitors search, Google places ads directly related to their search topics on the results page.

This has two benefits for you: You keep traffic on your site longer because visitors don't have to leave to do a Google search; and, of course, you make money when they click on one of the related ads.

Keep your sales pages for your own sales. Do not place AdSense ads on any web page designed to sell your visitors your product. This includes your salesletter as well as any page on which they can make a purchase. You'll make a lot more money by having your customers buy your product than by having them click away on an AdSense ad. Don't mix the messages by giving them more than one thing to "buy."
Keep the AdSense ads on your content and news pages, add them to your newsletter archive pages, but don't put them on your sales pages.

Follow the Money
The amount of money you make from AdSense ads is partly determined by the value of the keywords in the ads--in other words, how much advertisers have paid to use those keywords. Try to attract the big-money ads to your site by generating content that includes those high-paying keywords.

Find the expensive words... If you've signed up for Google's AdWords program, then you already have some resources to help you determine the cost of different keywords. For the rest of us, a bit of detective work is necessary.

Start with Google itself. Do a Google search using the keywords you want to use on your site. Pay attention to the wording of the ads that show up in the right margin--the ads at the top have the higher-paying words in them. You can piggyback on the ad revenue for those words by using them in your site's content.

You can also find the pricey keywords by tapping into keyword databases. Try these three:

www.bestfreekeywords.com
www.factsaboutadsense.com
www.toppayingkeywords.com

...But not at the expense of your credibility. It might be tempting to create all your content around certain high-paying keywords just to benefit from the click-through payments. However, your visitors are savvy enough to know when they're being manipulated, and they won't tolerate it.

If your content ceases to be useful, relevant or interesting to them, they'll stop coming to your site entirely. And you'll have lost not only the high-paying click-throughs, but also the bigger money from product sales.

Final Thoughts
The only criteria Google has for ad placement is relevant content, so AdSense puts your site on an equal footing with much bigger, "more valuable" sites. It's not your bank balance that competes with the big guys for ad revenue but the quality of your content.

Google doesn't actually reveal how much you can make from running AdSense ads on your site--and other site owners are restricted in how much information they can release to the public. Therefore, specific numbers are hard to predict.

It's safe to say, though, that with almost no effort it's possible to bring in a little money, and if you apply yourself, it's possible to make a bundle!

[news.alibaba.com]