Denver SEO Blog: Web Development, SEO & Marketing

Web Designers frequently destroy their clients’ chances of ranking well in Google, without even knowing it! Here are three common mistakes that can ruin a client’s chances of ranking well in Google, Yahoo or MSN - simply by preventing the site from being indexed!
Search engines follow regular text links, but web designers like to use these unfriendly search engine navigation methods:

1. JavaScript Menus
Search Engines do not follow links reliably in JavaScript, if at all.

2. Imagemaps
Search Engines cannot see the image, and so cannot classify the relevance or topic of the link. Lesser search engine robots do not even attempt to follow imagemap links.

3. Image Links / Rollover links
These links frequently contain JavaScript, but also are difficuly for search engines to classify.

4. JavaScript popups
Search Engines do not follow JavaScript reliably, and do not seem to like popups at all!

5. “Jump menus”
These pulldown menus are usually submitting a form. If the form target is sent GET requests, there is a chance that the links will be followed in some manner, but again - this isn’t reliable navigation for Search Engines.

6. NOSCRIPT embedded links
We were told that content in NOSCRIPT tags is for those visitors that have JavaScript off. But if you were told this means search engines, you were told wrong! This HTML tags has been abused by spammers early on, and search engines do not reliably follow navigation within these tags.

7. Frames - they’re rarely done in a search friendly manner
More on the “right way” in a later post. Frames are challenging for search engines, and we have recently seen Google penalizing framee-based sites, perhaps due to the usability challenges they can present.

8. Java
Java cannot be executed by search engines. Many early rollover effects relied on Java, but the navigation cannot be read by search engine robots.

9. Flash
Flash navigation cannot be followed by search engines. Splash pages can become a deadend for search engines, and alternatives to Flash navigation should always be given.
So what can you do to be sure that search engines will crawl your site? We’ll have answers in a future post, but a frequent supplement to websites that use the above techniques - meant almost entirely for search engines - is a set of footer links for seach engines to follow.

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

Google Hell is a term being used to describe a sudden, far drop in a website’s ranking on Google. The ranking is usually for an important - or many different important - keyword terms.

I’m pleased an article on Google Hell being covered in the mainstream press. It’s a phenomenon known to main online businesses, tied heavily to changes in the Google algorthym. Some of the excellent points in the article:

• The criteria for Google’s Supplemental Index can be vague.
• “Grey-area” techniques are sometime necessary to compete on the internet with larger stores.
• Duplicate content penalties exist!
• Newly created sites are especially vulnerable to falling into the supplemental index.
• Buying links may now be a deciding factor in whether your site ends up in the supplemental results.

The article quotes Jim Boykin and Micheal Gray. Besides the great sources, it is refreshing that businesses are starting to see the importance of search engine marketing to the bottom line.

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

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

Google Adwords opens your advertisement up to a vast audience. Sometimes it’s an audience that is a little too vast. You can save tremendous amounts of money on adwords by excluding the wrong audience:

1. Exclude surfers during the wrong time of day
If your product or service is primarily marketed to businesses, be sure to turn off your ads during off hours. Business products and services are only sought during business hours, and there is little need to show ads in evenings and on weekends.

2. Never use broad match
Broad match can be a horrible waste of money. If your broad match is for red widgets, your ad will come up in searches that include the word red, and searches that include the word widgets. With so much of the wrong traffic - searching for red gadgets, red ipods, etc. - there are bound to be costly clicks upon your ad. Instead of using broad match, use phrase and exact match. This will help save your clicks for visitors that might actually buy your product or service.

3. Exclude keywords that are unrelated
For most any product, you can exclude some keyword. If you sell boats, you should exclude the word “toy” from most of your ads. Be creative, search Google and look for negative keywords.

4. Exclude other countries
Make sure you are not showing ads in other countries. Some continents are also notorious for being involved in PPC fraud.
More tips to save money with Google AdWords and Yahoo Search Marketing! Get Joy Milkowski’s “Amazing Results with Google AdWords” course - it pays for itself! Or you can continue throwing extra money to Google.

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