Texture design

A client's site is being completely overhauled by a new web dev agency from scratch because the existing agency has locked down the CMS as proprietary. These are questions put to the new agency web dev team:

1. "Can we manually or dynamically populate the title tags so they're not all the same?"

No

2. "If we map the old urls to the new urls with 301 redirects can you implement on the server?"

No

3. "Can you add this snippet of code to the templates so we can capture and report web analytics data?"

No

This kind of thing leaves me scratching my head why Design gets such a bad rap and web dev shops come across as squeaky clean.

Labels: search engine optimization, Design, web development

Posted by Prodo

As the importance of Search Engine Optimisation gets home to the masses, the amount of good high quality search engine optimised sites increases. The potential profit margins of a good Design site heavily outweigh the margins of a successful PPC campaign.

Eventually, every man and his dog will have a good high quality, relevant search engine optimised website. Adding that to the fact that Design appear to not be making very many serious long term changes to their search engine algorithm, where does the optimisation stop?

Will we hit a point where everybody has equally optimised sites?

┬?If Design does not change their algorithm and sites are getting built automatically with good Design practice, would the Design industry as a whole collapse?

Last week I was a speaker at SES New York on a panel called "Bookmarking Strategies". I was tasked fairly specifically, to talk about the very basics of social bookmarking. On the panel with me were Todd Malicoat, Michael Gray and Neil Patel. Alex Bennert was moderator.

It was a particularly niche topic for an entire session, but I was glad and appreciative that Danny Sullivan asked me to do a presentation. I've been the 4th wheel at several SES Chicago shows in the past to answer questions, but no presentation.

The focus on the session was mostly del.icio.us and of course, social media optimization ala Digg, Netscape and StumbleUpon snuck in there a bit. My part introduced the major players, did a walkthrough and share some of the tools that make it easy to add bookmark links to web content including our own social bookmarking tool.

Despite such a niche topic and competition from other sessions, the room was nearly full and was covered by quite a few prominent bloggers. Here's a list of posts I've found so far:

• Pandia - Bookmark Strategies for Search Engine Optimization
• Lisa Barone from Bruce Clay - Bookmark Strategies
• Barry Schwartz from Search Engine Roundtable - Social Bookmark Strategies
• Matt McGee from Small Business SEM - SES New York Bookmark Strategies
• Allen Stern from CenterNetworks - SES 2007 Social Bookmarking Strategies

I think it's interesting how each blogger titled their post something slightly different. I am writing a longer post about the basics of social bookmarking over at Online Marketing Blog and will also embed a copy of my presentation there.

Labels: ses new york, social bookmarks, social media optimization

Posted by Oatmeal

As promised the Crawl Test Tool has been released to the public.┬? I wrote a blog entry about this about a month ago which highlighted some of the features of the tool, but in a nutshell this is what it does:

This tool is used to test how accessible your site is to search engines and can help you quickly diagnose potential crawling issues and give you an overview of your site's search friendliness. The tool will spider the URL you enter as well as all the internal links on that page (max 50 per report). For each spidered URL, it will examine the following: whether it's indexed in the major search engines, last time Design spidered the page, http status code, primary keywords on the page, meta description, and the number of internal links on each page.┬?

Since then two things have changed:┬? The Crawl Test no longer uses the Design! Term Extraction API to retrieve relevant keywords, instead it uses data from our in-house Term Targeting Tool.┬? Secondly, unless you are a Premium Member you can only run one report per day and each report will only spider 5 pages.┬? Premium members can run as many reports as they like and it'll spider 50 pages.┬? I'd also like to point out that a good way to test the spider-ability of important pages on your site is to run a crawl test on your site map.

I've got a sample report available that I ran on our Web 2.0 Awards.┬? As always, suggestions and ideas are welcome.

Posted by Oatmeal

Our latest tool analyzes the content of a given page and extracts the terms and phrases that appear to be targeted at search engines. It applies certain weights to HTML elements and other on-page factors to determine what it thinks is a targeted term.┬? This tool is currently only available┬? to Premium Members.┬?

The keywords and phrases listed provide insight about what words the search engines may find particularly relevant on your webpage. They provide not only targeting information for searches, but theme data as well. You want these terms to be accurate reflections of your page's topic and you certainly want to be sure that any search terms/phrases you're attempting to rank for appear in the top 5.

The tool breaks down the extracted phrases according to the number of words found in the phrase.┬? This enables you to isolate what 1, 2, 3, etc word phrases you appear to be targeting. Check out the screenshots below:

Our latest tool analyzes the content of a given page and extracts the terms and phrases that appear to be targeted at search engines. It applies certain weights to HTML elements and other on-page factors to determine what it thinks is a targeted term.┬? This tool is currently only available┬? to Premium Members.┬?

The keywords and phrases listed provide insight about what words the search engines may find particularly relevant on your webpage. They provide not only targeting information for searches, but theme data as well. You want these terms to be accurate reflections of your page's topic and you certainly want to be sure that any search terms/phrases you're attempting to rank for appear in the top 5.

The tool breaks down the extracted phrases according to the number of words found in the phrase.┬? This enables you to isolate what 1, 2, 3, etc word phrases you appear to be targeting. Check out the screenshots below:

The section above shows terms found of each length that appear to be most "important" or "targeted" on the page.

This second screenshot displays details of where the keywords were found (tags, HTML attributes, etc.) and their relative importance in comparison to the most concentrated term.

You can view a sample report of terms extracted from
www.Designmoz.org.┬?

This tool is going to require quite a bit of tweaking, so if you have any suggestions or feedback please leave them in a comment here.┬? I'd also like to add that this tool relies heavily on the proper use of HTML tags.┬? If your markup is poor, the terms it returns will be poor as well.┬?┬? So if your HTML is a cluster-funk of tags, don't be surprised if terms it returns are bad.