Denver SEO Blog: Web Development, SEO & Marketing

Sometimes webdesigners get low blood sugar, or suffer minor head injuries. The effect? Bad HTML title tags.

Title tags are an important piece of real estate on your page. In properly structured HTML, it’s the first chance for you to tell human prospects and search engine visitors what your page is about. Depending on the search engine, page titles are someytimes shown prominently is results - your page is likely to be passed up if it doesn’t look relevant to the potential visitor’s search. Think about your page title as an advertisement for your website!
Since I’m feeling snarky today, here are three things NOT to do when creating your title tags:

1. “Welcome to our website”
It sounds like a friendly greeting for your human visitors, but it completely ignores the wonderful gift that a title tag can be. A title tag is a chance to tell both human and search engine visitors just how helpful your content is. Use this chance to target keywords that BRING and CONVERT traffic.

2. “Unititled Page”
If your web designer is using Dreamweaver, hope that they are properly caffeinated when they are working on your page. Otherwise, they may forget to change your HTML title tag from the default. Don’t expect quality traffic when you are one of the almost ONE MILLION pages that have “Untitled Page” as their title.

3. “Welcome to Adobe GoLive”
You can probably guess where this default page title came from. Check out the ONE MILLION crappy page titles. Oh, that’s neat: version 6 is out. I think we can see what they DIDN’T improve.

What SHOULD you do in your title tags? Keywords, focused sets of keywords. More on that in a later - and less snarky - posting.

Tags: search engine optimization, denver web development, denver web design, website development, seo, website design

For those of you not currently signed up with MSN adCenter, you may want to give it a look(starting tomorrow).

On April 26, 2007, we’re upgrading Microsoft adCenter with the improved navigation, reporting, and campaign management features from our beta site…

While I currently like some of the MSN adCenter demographic targeting and PPC keyword bargains, I think they have room for improvement. Will this be MSN’s “Panama” upgrade that catches it up to Google? We’ll know soon enough!
Also from the email:

Additional feature upgrades will also occur on April 28, 2007. During this upgrade, adCenter will be unavailable for up to 24 hours starting at 12:00 P.M. Pacific Time. Your ads will continue to run as scheduled during both adCenter upgrades.

With these upgrades, you’ll experience new features that will allow you to:

• Search within your campaigns. Use full text search to easily find ads, keywords, ad groups, campaigns, and accounts. Please note that orders are now called ad groups.
• Save important items in Favorites. Tag your campaign items for follow-up using Favorites.
• Quickly navigate your accounts. Use the improved navigation to quickly navigate to any campaign or ad group in your account.
• Easily access help content. Hover over the green question mark icons for pop-up help tips.¹
• Manage keywords faster. Bulk edit keyword settings and delete low-performing keywords.
• Save time importing campaigns. Directly import your campaigns from other search advertising programs.
• One click downloads. Download your datasets into Excel with one click.
• And more! View our blog and watch the webinar for tips and training on these new features.

If you have any questions, please contact our adCenter support team.

Sincerely,

The Microsoft adCenter Team

Frequently Asked Questions

Why are you upgrading Microsoft adCenter?

Over the past few months, we’ve been running improvements on the adCenter beta site, which has been available to customers in our U.S. Content Ads pilot. Now, it is time to share these new and improved features with all advertisers.

Will my campaigns be affected?

Your campaigns will continue to run as scheduled. With this upgrade, using adCenter is now easier and more efficient. The updates provide you with improved campaign management, navigation, and reporting.

Where can I learn more about the most recent updates to adCenter?

Our webinar, walks you through the features that will be included in this upgrade, and additional information can be found on our adCenter blog.

¹ This feature will be available after the April 28, 2007 upgrade.

Tags: search engine optimization, website design, denver web design, website development, denver web development, seo

This post is for server geeks. Everyone else should flee. Here we are talking about the underlying codes that every server sends along with html of a web site design when a page is requested from your website.

There are really only a few httpd server codes that should ever be sent on purpose:

1. Code 200 OK

This status code tells browsers (and the googlebot) that everything is a-okay. The content sent with the code appears to be just what was requested. Code 200 says “Yes, I have that content right here. This is the right location for requesting it, and I’m sending it to you now.”

2. Code 301 (A redirect)

A status code 301 tells the googlebot that content has moved. There isn’t a penalty applied to 301 redirects in the search engines, which makes it ideal for:
- Redirecting traffic to the www version of your domain (to solve possible duplicate content issues)
- Redirecting traffic from old or broken URLs

3. Code 404

A status code 404 tells visiting search engine spiders like the googlebot that the content is missing. After receiving a 404 error after several visits, most search engines will remove the page from their listings.

These are the HTTP status codes that should be sent to the server in most cases. Other status codes - like the dread 302 redirect - will usually only cause problems. One site we recently analyzed sent these codes when the hompage was requested:
302 (Redirected to another page)
404 (Missing. The page they were redirected to was missing!)
Then the HTML of the homepage was returned as the 404 error page. What a wild ride for the Googlebot!

Curious about what codes are being returned by your server? Try our new SEO Diagnostic tool, currently in beta.

Tags: website design, search engine optimization, seo, denver web design, denver web development, website development