Denver SEO Blog: Web Development, SEO & Marketing

There are many parts of the web that Googlebot has not been able to access, but Google has been working to shrink that. Google wants to find content, and while many webmasters do not make it easy, Googlebot finds a way.

1. Crawling flash!
Adobe announced today that they have released technology and information to Google and Yahoo enabling them to crawl flash files. It may take the search engines some time before they are able to integrate and implement these abilities, but a time is coming where rich media is less of a liability. I wonder if MSN/Live was left out to prevent them from reverse engineering Flash for their new silverlight competitor? At any rate, MSN is still working on accessing text links, so let’s not swamp them.

2. Crawling forms
Googlebot recently started filling out forms on the web in an attempt to discover content hidden behind jump menus and other forms. See our previous article if you’d like to keep Google out of your forms.

3. Working with Government entities to make information more accessible
A year or so ago, Google started providing training to government agencies to assist them in getting their information onto the web. I’m assuming much of the information has been hidden by URLs with large amounts of parameters.

4. Crawling JavaScript
Many menus and other dynamic navigation features have been created in JavaScript, and googlebot has started crawling those as well. Instead of relying on webmasters to provide search friendly navigation, Google is finally getting to access sites created by neophyte webmasters that haven’t been paying attention.

5. Google’s patent to read text in images
Google also knows many newbie webmasters use text buttons for navigation. By attempting to read text in images, the Googlebot will once again be able to open up previously inaccessible areas of a site.

6. Inbound links
Of course, Googlebot has always been great at following inbound links to new content. Much of the invisible web has been discovered just through humans linking to a previously unknown resource.

7. Submission
Of course, you can always submit a page location of currently invisible content to Google. This is usually the slowest way, especially compared to inbound links.

8. Google toolbar visits, analytics
Recently, many SEO professionals have noticed links being indexed that have not been submitted. The only plausible explanation was that Google has been mining it’s toolbar and analytics for information about new URLs. Be careful - Google is watching and sees all!

9. Sitemap.xml files
The somewhat new stemap.xml protocol is very helpful for webmasters and googlebots alike in getting formerly invisible content into google’s hands.

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

1. Frames
Frames were rarely done in a search-friendly manner. In the age of cellphone browsers and section 508 compliance, frames must go.

2. IE 5 Mac hacks
Internet Explorer was a miserable little browser on every OS it ran on, but was particularly miserable on the Mac. It required CSS hacks that other browsers tripped over. Some standards it - inexplicably - did not support. Even on MacOSX, it sucked.

3. Splash pages
These pieces of eyecandy were frequently skipped by visitors, and even more frequently cursed under their breath. Known to be slow-loading and pointless, it is nice to see them used less often.

4. Microsoft Frontpage Extensions
These buggy little replacements for scripting would break if you looked at them funny, and gave years of frustration to unix admins. Even Microsoft is turning it’s back on the Frontpage product, and not a day too soon.

5. Popup and Popunder windows
There are still sites that tout the effectiveness of popups and popunders, but let’s face it: We all hate them. Every good browser tries to block them, but every once in a while you’ll see one. They are the junkmail of web browsing, and it’s time for them to go far, far away.

6. Animated layers that block content on page load
There are few things as annoying as a layer that suddenly slides over to block content you are reading. They usually make users dismiss the ad to read page content.

I’ve gotten so that I dismiss anything that slides over, not even taking the time to read the ad.

The web will be a better place when these web design techniques are no longer seen. Have others? Add a comment and let us know!

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

Website visitors have never been more impatient, and I’m the worst. Just today, I was looking up the lyrics to a song. I clicked on the site in #1 position(Like 90% of the rest of the world), but it was too slow. Before I even left the Google SERPS (Search Engine Result Pages), I clicked on the link in position 2. I’m going to bet I’m not the only impatient soul looking for lyrics… or even more important things(as if!).

Lucky, mother Google(our gentle overlord) is paying attention. One of the items mentioned in seomoz’s reent survey of perceived ranking factors is the availability of the server hosting a site. In this case lyricbarn, or whatever they were called, lost a visitor and a potential adsense click or two(Ads are fun to click).

Web Designers - Yeah, you - Reduce your page load times and keep visitors!

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

Forms can be quite annoying to users. We have all had to fill out “The Form From Hell” at one point or another. Often they are created with no regard to usability whatsoever. The form is sometimes a direct reflection of the organization of a backend database, and human needs are not taken into acount.

There is a great article on sitepoint today titled Checklist for Usability Forms. Based on our own experience with forms, here are a few items that probably seem like no-brainers, but I would also like to see the web’s programmers take into account:

1. Never erase user-entered data
Sometimes a form will have a required field that we humans miss at the first go. “Oh, my title was required?!” I enter “King of the world”, but then discover my credit card details need to be entered again. Who knows what will be missing if I mess that up? If the form is on a secure server, even credit card information can be kept between page requests.

2. If the form requires JavaScript, let the user know
Although users are surfing with JavaScript turned on most of the time, there is nothing worse than finding a form you just filled in requires JavaScript to actually be submitted. Sometimes I’m testing pages with JavaScript turned off, and I’d appreciate the warning when it’s needed. After I fill out a form and see the submit going nowhere, I usually check my JavaScript settings. Then I refresh the page, and all of my precious data entry is gone! My tired and worn fingers just look up at me and sigh as we start filling in fields again.
3. Autofill wherever possible
When a user has to type in their billing address, web designers should also offer a box to copy all information to the “shipping address” field, or it should automatically be filled in. Intelligent web form design should mean users are never required to enter the same information twice. Unless lives are at stake, our web forms can usually make the correct guess.

4. Make it easy for users to find their country in a list
When 99.9% of site visitors are from the United States, it is not impolite to list the United States at the top of the list, and even have it preselected. Yes, I said it - preselected. Rarely is it appropriate to have Afghanistan as the first option(or the option that has already been selected). I cannot tell you how many sites still think I’m located in the “United States minor islands” due to my lack of apparent skill with a mouse.

In most cases, we web developers can even sense the visitor’s country of origin by looking at their IP Address. Why not preselect the country of origin accordingly?

5. Set the tab order of form fields when necessary
Most forms do not require this step, but be sure to tab through the form in various browsers. In most cases, you won’t find anything strange. But that one percent is what testing is for, isn’t it?

Please feel free to comment with additional tips. I didn’t see a way to add tips to the original article, but we can certainly add them here. We’ve all encountered the poorly designed web form. Tell us about it - we won’t think you’re crazy. Let it out: You’re among friends.

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

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

Google defines supplemental results as follows:

“A supplemental result is just like a regular web result, except that it’s pulled from our supplemental index. We’re able to place fewer restraints on sites that we crawl for this supplemental index than we do on sites that are crawled for our main index. For example, the number of parameters in a URL might exclude a site from being crawled for inclusion in our main index; however, it could still be crawled and added to our supplemental index.

If you’re a webmaster, please note that the index in which a site is included is completely automated; there’s no way to select or change the index in which a site appears. Please also be assured that the index in which a site is included doesn’t affect its PageRank.”

If your web pages are listed in the supplemental results then it is likely that your web pages could not be parsed correctly by Google’s standard crawler.

The problem with Google’s supplemental results are that they are only supplemental. If your web pages are listed in the supplemental results then they won’t be returned very often for regular search queries.

How to find out if your web pages are in the supplemental results

An easy way to find out how many of your pages are listed in Google’s supplemental results is to search for the following on Google.com:

site:www.domain.com ***

Search for that phrase and then proceed to the last result pages to find the supplemental results. Of course, you have to replace www.domain.com with your own domain name.

How to get out of Google’s supplemental results

Most web sites have pages in Google’s supplemental results. It means that Google had difficulty to index these pages or that Google had other problems with these pages.

1. Make sure that your web pages don’t contain any spam elements and that you don’t use any spam techniques to promote your web site. Using spam techniques to promote your web site is often the reason why a web site doesn’t get good rankings. Better focus on ethical search engine optimization methods.

2. Make it easy for search engines to index your web pages. If possible don’t use web page URLs that contain question marks or the & symbol. Make sure that the HTML code of your web pages offers what search engines need. Use IBP’s Top 10 Optimizer to prepare your web pages.

3. Make these pages easy to find for Google’s web crawler. The more links point to your web pages, the more likely it is that search engine crawlers fill find your web pages. Use ARELIS to get good inbound links to your site.

Most web sites have pages in Google’s supplemental results. The easier you make it Google to index your web pages the more pages of your site will be listed in Google’s normal results.

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

With the ever increasing impatience of internet visitors, it is important that pages load as fast as possible. Here are some quick tips we implement when developing websites to keep the page size to a minimum:

1. CSS and Javascript should be in external files. This way, they are cached after the first page is visited.

2. For large images that cannot be optimized any further, load a placeholder and update it with the full version after the page has loaded.

3. Get faster hosting.

4. Use CSS instead of tables for layout.

5. Be a minimalist. Do you really need a sound on the home page? Are animations really needed to convey your message?

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

According to a recent study, Shoppers will wait four seconds for a page to load. The study was commisioned by a company that provides high bandwidth services, but seems about right.

Recent blog postings have talked about “page rage” and “mouse rage” occurring in surfers who do not feel their page is loading fast enough. These are the same people who honk in the Wendy’s drive-thru when the line is long. We live in an ever-impatient society. If you want to keep these customers - who may not take time to comparison shop or ask presales questions - make sure your pages load quick!

There are several strategies to decrease your page loading time:

1. Get better hosting, or a dedicated server
If you have the budget, consider a dedicated server or a third party solution. Or go with a smaller hosting company like VI-Solutions.
2. Optimize your graphics
Make sure any graphics on your site are at 72 or 96ppi, and the exact size they are being used at. Many novices accidentally save graphics at resolutions way too high.

3. Load graphics after your page loads
Use a little javascript to load graphics after the page has loaded, if needed.

4. Clean up your HTML
Use external files to load Javascript and CSS files. Use CSS-based layout, and fewer HTML comments.

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

For all of the attention paid to “On-Page Relevance” and “Link Popularity”, SEO begins with accessiblity. Are your websites search engine friendly? Follow our checklist below to measure:

A. Search Engine Point of View
Surf your site from a search engine’s point of view. Download and Install Firefox and the Fangs Extension. By experiencing the web as a non-sighted user, you are also experiencing the web as a search engine would. Can you navigate your site easily?

Experienced SEOs already have the tools and knowledge to examine a site for the items below, but beginners may find our free tool at the SEO Diagnostic website quite helpful.

1. HTTP codes
When any web page is accessed, the server hosting the page responds with a code. Most visitors are familiar with error 404, returned when a page is missing, but many users are not aware of the full range of HTTP codes that can be returned. Are your pages returning a code 200, indicating “OK”? Don’t know where to start? Test your site at http://www.seodiagnostic.com.

2. Page size
The size of your HTML page - including all images, stylesheets, and external scripts - should never exceed 90k. A recent study shows only 63% of Americans are online - an even smaller number have a broadband connection. If your target market includes consumers, or impatient business users, it is imperative to keep the size of your pages(including images, scripts and stylesheets) under control.

3. Frames
Frames have usability and accesibility challenges that are rarely overcome. If your site’s HTML code uses frames, you should have an experienced SEO see if they can make it navigable inside a NOFRAMES tag. You may also require a site redesign.

4. Flash
Flash navigation cannot be followed easily by search engines. While flash is becoming more friendly, it still poses challenges to search engine indexing. Where flash is used on a site, make sure that html text links also exist.

5. JavaScript navigation
JavaScript menus and rollover images make for stunning visual elements, but be sure to include navigation for your visitors that are not capable of executing JavaScript! While a NOSCRIPT tag may be indexed by some search engines, not all are created equal.

6. Dynamic URLs
Google’s webmaster guidelines advise against dynamic URLs. Humans don’t like ‘em, and search engine spiders don’t either! Use Apache’s modrewrite - hire an expert if you need to - but get rid of those dynamic URLs!

7. Robot Metatags /robots.txt
While it may not seem that robots.txt is always necessary, consider adding a very basic robots.txt file that welcomes all spiders to index the site. Consider the relatively “open arms” policy our site has, reflected in our robots.txt:

# All robots will spider the domain
User-agent: *
Disallow:
User-Agent: googlebot
Disallow:
# Disallow directory /cgi-bin/
User-agent: *
Disallow: /cgi-bin/

8. Google Sitemap.xml
Google’s new sitemap features allow your site to specify page locations and how often to “check back”. For large sites, this can be a dream come true. For smaller sites, it can be an opportunity to see your site as Google sees it. Once your Google sitemap is active, Google will disclose any problems it had with your website. Get started in the Google Webmaster Area.

9. Yahoo Site Explorer
Yahoo Site Explorer is another great tool to see your site as a search engine does. No sitemap creation necessary!

10. Pages Indexed
The number of indexed pages is a telling measurement about your search engine accessibility. To view the number of pages any of the major engines have indexed on your site, do a search for your domain with the “site:” prefix. For example, for seomoz.com you could search for “site:seomoz.com” (no quotes) in msn, yahoo or google. You will see each of the engines has a different number of index pages!

11. Best Practices
HTML sitemap
Include a HTML sitemap to help your search engine(and other) visitors get to any page fast. A HTML sitemap is simply a html page with links throughout your site. Keep the amount of links under 100, as Google’s Webmaster Guidelines recommend. Structure the links in a categorized outline, well organized for human and search engine visitors.
CSS and JavaScript relocated to external files
CSS files can be cached, reducing your bandwidth bill and providing less code for the engines to wade through before they encounter content. For human visitors, we often think about what is “above the fold”. For search engines, try to get as much juicy content “above the fold” as possible, too.

HTML Validation
While search engines can navigate some of the worst HTML code, why make it any harder than it needs to be? Try to keep to valid HTML as much as possible.

Search engine accessibility is so very important. First the search engines come, then the human visitors come. It does not matter how pretty your site is, if important visitors like the Googlebot cannot get through it. Take a good look at your site accessibility to determine improvements you might be able to make.

And, of course, many of these accessibilty metrics can be measured with our new tool SEO Diagnostic. If you aren’t sure where to start, start there!

Tags: JavaScript, HTTP codes, Apache, Yahoo Site Explorer, accessibilty metrics, search engine friendly, Best Practices, error 404, Search engine, Link Popularity