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

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

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, website design, search engine optimization, website development

Brian Wiener has an interesting post over at AdAge: YouTube as marketing channel.

I agree that the TV Networks should be controlling their content by distributing it themselves:
1. Full Episodes should be available online(with Ads, of course). NBC’s Heroes will probably never be bootlegged on Youtube, because there is no need for it to be.
2. Small clips - 2 minute highlight clips - should be purposefully uploaded everywhere on the web. These previews and teasers are perfect to drive increased traffic and gain exposure.

I also agree that search optimization should be key. Networks should host blogs to encourage as much juicy user-generated content as possible. And by using search friendly link structures throughout their sites, these media empires could rise to the top of search results - right where their audience expects to find them!

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

The United States is behind other nations when it comes to adopting broadband. According to a recent report, the broadband has finally been adopted by more than 50 percent of residences.

Yet, U.S. web surfers have never been less patient: Studies show visitors will not wait more than 4 seconds for an eCommerce page to load. Page load times are vital to your visitor’s experience. We will have an upcoming post with some valuable tips on reducing your page load times. Most do not require a page redesign!

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

Nofollow tags are a fairly recent invention. The history of nofollow goes something like this:

1. Google gives priority to sites with many links.

2. Spammers use blogs and guestbooks to artificially increase their link counts.

3. Somebody proposes that certain places on the web - like blogs and guestbooks - should have a way of devaluing any links that are added.

4. Search engines listened. Well, some of them. Well, Google.

Search Engine Journal did a recent  posting: 13 reasons why nofollow tags suck.  I couldn’t agree more!

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

The phenomenon known as “Googlebombing” has been defused by Google. It used to be that if enough sites linked to a site using certain words, that site would quickly rise in rank for that keyphrase. The result? You could search Google for “miserable failure” and see the White House is number 1, with Micheal Moore only slightly behind. Political viewpoints were being communicated, and we all understood a little more about the “Google Algorithm”.

With a recent change at google, this “Googlebombing” technique is no more. What technique lies ahead? What is Google’s new strategy for ranking? We’ve seen positive results for many of our clients in this last Google update, but it will be interesting to see what techniques will be found with Google’s latest changes!

More coverage on slashdot…

And at Google’s webmaster blog

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