http://tc.eserver.org/dir/Articles/Web-Design/Search-Engine-Optimization A listing of the most recently indexed works about Articles and Web Design and Search Engine Optimization in the field of technical communication. en-us Copyright (c) 2005-08 by the EServer. All rights reserved. tclib-editorial@eserver.org (TC Library Editorial Board) webmaster@eserver.org (Geoffrey Sauer) http://tc.eserver.org/images/newlogo.gif http://tc.eserver.org/dir/Articles/Web-Design/Search-Engine-Optimization http://tc.eserver.org/35648.html http://tc.eserver.org/35648.html In this installment of Search Matters, we’ll continue our discussion of ads in search results. Understand what makes a good ad. Limit cannibalization. Provide ads for internal merchandise instead of third-party advertising. Pay special attention to ads on pages that appear if there are no search results. http://tc.eserver.org/35657.html http://tc.eserver.org/35657.html Conflicting demands make many UX professionals think of ads as a necessary evil. Customers frequently go out of their way to say they hate ads, while marketers always seem to try their hardest to stuff as many of them as they can on each search results page on your site. This leaves many UX design professionals caught in the middle, trying to balance the ad equation—and frequently failing to fully satisfy either customers or marketers. For this 2-part column, I’ve teamed up with advertisement and eyetracking research guru Frank Guo to present real-world strategies for successfully integrating ads into your search results. The goal is making money without unduly turning off your customers. http://tc.eserver.org/35514.html http://tc.eserver.org/35514.html Over the past year we have worked with a number of organizations that have chosen to relocate their sites from an existing domain to a new domain. One of the questions that always comes up early in the process is “how much traffic are we going to lose?” It is an excellent question and not an easy one to answer, but in today’s column I am going to explore that exact question. http://tc.eserver.org/35384.html http://tc.eserver.org/35384.html How can you enable readers to naturally find the content in your archives? How can you make the hundreds of posts you write more visible and prominent, especially if readers are looking for it? This is partly what the field of findability is all about. You can implement several easy aggregation techniques to increase the findability of your content. You can add tags and categories to your posts, and readers can navigate your content this way. http://tc.eserver.org/34761.html http://tc.eserver.org/34761.html The ten essential categories for good optimization are: important HTML tags, search engine indexing limits, title tag syntax, common canonical issues, 301 redirects on Apache, search engine robot user agents, common robot traps to avoid, robot meta tags syntax, robots.txt syntax and site map syntax. http://tc.eserver.org/34739.html http://tc.eserver.org/34739.html Many web editors spend a lot of their time writing news stories for the company web site. However, traffic analysis frequently reveals that this content is not very popular - and that users may in fact miss the key content they come to find (product data, addresses etc.) because it's practically drowning in news stories. http://tc.eserver.org/34742.html http://tc.eserver.org/34742.html If your company web site is currently not ranking well at search engines, you are missing out on a vital source of web traffic. Here are some tips for improving your search engine rankings yourself (without hiring a search engine optimization company). http://tc.eserver.org/34693.html http://tc.eserver.org/34693.html The internet is more like the heliocentric model championed by Galileo, with search as the sun. It is an ever-growing collection of distribution channels, each with their own audience, revolving around an increasingly contextual search experience. It’s time to expand your perspective to account for this. But, like Galileo, you may have a hard time with the authorities as you start to act on this understanding. http://tc.eserver.org/34694.html http://tc.eserver.org/34694.html SEO techniques will increase your search rankings and SEM will get you traffic on the top search engines. But a boatload of quality content will also accomplish these things and prepare you for the more contextual future of search. http://tc.eserver.org/34665.html http://tc.eserver.org/34665.html Web databases do much more than passively store information. Part of their power comes from indexing records efficiently. An index serves as a map, identifying the precise location of a small piece of data in a much larger pile. For example, when I search for “web development,” Google identifies two hundred million results and displays the first ten—in a quarter of a second. But Google isn’t loading every one of those pages and scanning their contents when I perform my search: they’ve analyzed the pages ahead of time and matched my search terms against an index that only references the original content. http://tc.eserver.org/34477.html http://tc.eserver.org/34477.html In the last six months, we've been lucky enough to help quite a few companies and websites drive significant traffic to their sites. Many of these campaigns have been constructed around the goal of building search engine rankings, as this is our primary business, but we've also found that our ability has given us great power in the fields of brand-awareness and marketing overall. Thus, the following ten processes are primarily about building traffic and through it, attention. http://tc.eserver.org/34478.html http://tc.eserver.org/34478.html This guide is designed to describe all areas of search engine optimization - from discovery of the terms and phrases that will generate traffic, to making a site search engine friendly, to building the links and marketing the unique value of the site/organization's offerings. http://tc.eserver.org/34483.html http://tc.eserver.org/34483.html This document represents the collective wisdom of 37 leaders in the world of organic search engine optimization. Together, they have voted on the various factors that are estimated to comprise Google's ranking algorithm (the method by which the search engine orders results). The result is a resource of incredible value - although not every one of the estimated 200+ ranking elements are included, it is my opinion that 90-95% of the knowledge required about Google's algorithm is contained below. http://tc.eserver.org/34181.html http://tc.eserver.org/34181.html We consider the problem of dust: Different URLs with Similar Text. Such duplicate URLs are prevalent in web sites, as web server software often uses aliases and redirections, and dynamically generates the same page from various different URL requests. We present a novel algorithm, DustBuster, for uncovering dust; that is, for discovering rules that transform a given URL to others that are likely to have similar content. DustBuster mines dust effectively from previous crawl logs or web server logs, without examining page contents. Verifying these rules via sampling requires fetching few actual web pages. Search engines can benefit from information about dust to increase the effectiveness of crawling, reduce indexing overhead, and improve the quality of popularity statistics such as PageRank. http://tc.eserver.org/33925.html http://tc.eserver.org/33925.html Welcome to Google's Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide. This document first began as an effort to help teams within Google, but we thought it'd be just as useful to webmasters that are new to the topic of search engine optimization and wish to improve their sites' interaction with both users and search engines. Although this guide won't tell you any secrets that'll automatically rank your site first for queries in Google (sorry!), following the best practices outlined below will make it easier for search engines to both crawl and index your content. http://tc.eserver.org/33867.html http://tc.eserver.org/33867.html I don’t “really” know anything about SEO. What I do know is the folks at Google and other big search engines are just human beings like us who have created and constantly tweak the search algorithms. Their goal is to give us what we want when searching, the best possible websites relevant to what we are searching for. So let’s set aside all the fancy technical stuff and just use some good ol’ common sense. http://tc.eserver.org/33750.html http://tc.eserver.org/33750.html In a recent article on Netimperative, Mike Grehan examined if the traditional role of SEO was becoming outdated, given the rise of social media. In this article, Eliza Dashwood, Director of Sales and Marketing, Ambergreen Internet Marketing offers a counter-point to Mike’s argument. http://tc.eserver.org/33406.html http://tc.eserver.org/33406.html Both AdWords and YSM are much more complicated beasts than the old banner networks ever were, and coming to grips with them can be a bit of a headache. http://tc.eserver.org/33046.html http://tc.eserver.org/33046.html The SEOs with white hats conduct legitimate optimising of web pages to make the site come up appropriately in the Search Engine Results Pages (also called SERPs). The back hat SEOs implement tricks to appear high in the results pages even if the web site is not necessarily relevant. The range of tricks is astonishing. But most of the techniques used by white hat SEOs were similar if not identical to the guidelines given by accessibility experts. http://tc.eserver.org/33035.html http://tc.eserver.org/33035.html The shift in how search engines treat keywords is significant. They tend to ignore the keyword metatag and rather look for keywords in the actual page content. This means that you need to figure out your keywords before you write any content. Then, you include them throughout your content, particularly in headings and summaries. http://tc.eserver.org/32838.html http://tc.eserver.org/32838.html In traditional marketing you're looking to define your targeted audience for your business or organisation. In Internet marketing things work in the same way. Unfortunately, with the growing popularity of the Internet in the past years and with the growing number of people building sites, a certain part of the online audience has been overlooked. http://tc.eserver.org/32862.html http://tc.eserver.org/32862.html One of the main benefits of Web accessibility is that a Website that's more accessible to people is also usually more accessible to search engines. The more accessible your site is to search engines, the more confidently they can guess what the site's about, giving your site a better chance at the top spot in the search engine rankings. http://tc.eserver.org/32769.html http://tc.eserver.org/32769.html Attracting the attention of Google and other search engines is crucial for bringing visitors to your website. To achieve this effectively, search engine optimised copy should run parallel with good website construction. http://tc.eserver.org/32740.html http://tc.eserver.org/32740.html Website visitors do not arrive magically… they follow recommendations from others, such as links, display ads, or even offline word of mouth. As 2007 turns into 2008, here are 5 easy ways to substantially increase the amount of traffic coming to your site. http://tc.eserver.org/32752.html http://tc.eserver.org/32752.html A findability strategy cheat sheet that will guide you through all of the stuff you should be doing when creating new websites or even redesign existing ones. http://tc.eserver.org/32753.html http://tc.eserver.org/32753.html You can communicate information about your site to search engines and see your site from their perspective using some free services and utilities from Yahoo! and Google. http://tc.eserver.org/32755.html http://tc.eserver.org/32755.html You’ve built a great site-now get the word out! There are plenty of places where you can promote your site for free. http://tc.eserver.org/32757.html http://tc.eserver.org/32757.html Desperation, ignorance, and a moral compass that doesn’t point due north often get perfectly logical, good people and companies in trouble with search engines. Because being listed high in search results is such a desirable goal to attain, many people search for shortcuts to the front of the line—which can land them in serious trouble. http://tc.eserver.org/32550.html http://tc.eserver.org/32550.html Search engines are one of the most important traffic drivers to sites these days, which is why Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is becoming more and more important. SEO is often thought to be just a set of some technical tricks, and as a professional SEO, I confess to spending a lot of time with clients fixing technical issues. A site's structure though, is just as important. Your site's structure determines whether a search engine understands what your site is about, and how easily it will find and index content relevant to your site's purpose and intent. By creating a good structure, you can use the content you've written that has attracted links from others, and use your site's structure to spread some of that "linkjuice" to the other pages on your site. http://tc.eserver.org/32529.html http://tc.eserver.org/32529.html So what is POSH? No, it's not just some new clothing fashion hype amongst web designers - POSH is the acronym for Plain Old Semantic HTML. The term Semantic HTML is used for a variety of things, but it has it's origin in one objective: creating (X)HTML documents using semantic elements and attributes, as opposed to using presentational HTML. http://tc.eserver.org/32064.html http://tc.eserver.org/32064.html There are many reasons to use mod_rewrite to create informative, useful URLs for your website. Most dynamic websites use some form of PHP or ASP to pull the data from the database and often times use that data in the URL as a string. This is not only a potential security flaw, it also gives the user and search engine alike a very uninformative destination for your website. http://tc.eserver.org/32058.html http://tc.eserver.org/32058.html While many niches depend on PPC search traffic, there’s a wide group of sites that benifit from bought traffic from individual sites. Often times you can get very high quality traffic that converts very well from niches that tend to deal in a more direct site to site type traffic deal, rather than 3rd party ad networks. This guide is mostly to be used when buying traffic from forums, from individual websites, and from “plug” type packages, yet there are many things that transfer over to more traditional PPC outlets. http://tc.eserver.org/32067.html http://tc.eserver.org/32067.html Sometime Search Engine Optimization (SEO) seems to have morphed into a mystical creature. Most people, even those who design and develop websites for a living, know they need it, but don’t know exactly what it is. They have been feed so much rheteric and sales speaches that they seem to have given up on SEO long ago. http://tc.eserver.org/31396.html http://tc.eserver.org/31396.html Branding has been called the most powerful idea in business, yet few companies consciously craft and promote their brand. Making a brand visible to an online audience can be an additional challenge. Studies show that searchers regard the companies that are placed on the first page of search engine results as the major players in the field. So how do you get the coveted page-one positioning? New technologies like RSS feeds are one way to accomplish this and make your brand more visible in the process. http://tc.eserver.org/31068.html http://tc.eserver.org/31068.html To get the first spot on Google, Yahoo, or MSN, all it used to take was the highest bid. Today, even the experts aren't sure exactly what it's going to take. http://tc.eserver.org/30770.html http://tc.eserver.org/30770.html The updating of massive indexes by Google is not a smooth affair by any means. Notably, as a result of updating process, old indexes do not simply yield to new indexes, but there is quite an haphazard movement in transition. It takes a couple of days for Google to complete its update. Especially during this period, both old and new indexes get their place on www.google.com, albeit alternatively or even in unpredictable ways before new indexes stabilize there for all to see. The fluctuations witnessed on Google between transition from old indexes to new indexes seem as if Google were dancing. Hence, in SEO parlance comes the word Google Dance. Varying indexes have a say in the final rankings just when PageRank calculation sets in action. So, the fluctuating indexes of your site should not be a cause of concern when Google is dancing. Wait for Google to come to a halt and you will see all the things stabilize. http://tc.eserver.org/30769.html http://tc.eserver.org/30769.html No webmaster worth his salt can rule out the indispensability of Google for enhancing the prospects of one's business potential the online way. The ways and means to augment your business statistics are fine as long as they are paving the way in your business interest. The fact is that end results are always important and determine the continuation of a set of strategies or tactics in the future. Notwithstanding the enormous benefits accruing from top positions in Google's rankings, you will end up to lose sight of the long term survival if you drive your business on a Google-only focus. http://tc.eserver.org/30768.html http://tc.eserver.org/30768.html Google has earned its giant position in search engine marketplace through real innovative solutions, and of course, strategic moves all aimed at users ultimate convenience. It has been almost customary for Google to bring in some exciting features initially for a price then slashing the rate drastically to making it FREE for all. This sort of repeated move could be seen as first serving the target market with its innovative solutions, and later making it free to give many a business in similar or remotely similar categories a run for their money. Critics claims have to stand the test of contemporary business realities. http://tc.eserver.org/29676.html http://tc.eserver.org/29676.html Acquiring and installing a search engine is just the beginning of creating an effective enterprise search system. John Ferrara walks us through strategies for addressing critical aspects of the user experience often overlooked or ignored. http://tc.eserver.org/29493.html http://tc.eserver.org/29493.html Now that you've got a website it's time to start thinking about promoting it. Search engine listings are the number one way to generate traffic to your website. http://tc.eserver.org/29491.html http://tc.eserver.org/29491.html The Google Sandbox is a filter that was put in place in about March of 2004. New websites with new domain names can take 6 to 12 months to get decent rankings on Google. Some are reporting stays of up to 18 months. The Sandbox seems to affect nearly all new websites placing them on probation. Similarly, websites that have made comprehensive redesigns have been caught up in this Sandbox. Does this Sandbox Really Exist, or is it just part of the Google algorithm? This has been a big controversy with many different opinions. Most now believe that this is an algorithm. In either case, the Sandbox functions to keep new sites from shooting to the top of Google in just a few weeks and overtaking quality sites that have been around for many years. This appears to be an initiation period for new websites. http://tc.eserver.org/29489.html http://tc.eserver.org/29489.html Google's increasing use of anti-spam features has meant that optimising websites for Google has become much harder and it's now not just a case of opening your websites source files in notepad, adding some keywords into your various HTML tags, uploading your files and waiting for the results. In fact in my opinion and I'm sure others will agree with me, this type of optimisation, commonly referred to as onpage optimisation will only ever be 20% effective at achieving rankings for any keywords which are even mildly competitive. Those of us who aced maths in school will know this leaves us with 80% unaccounted for. http://tc.eserver.org/29490.html http://tc.eserver.org/29490.html Explain some of the first steps to get your website not only optimized for the search engines, but to push your website up in the rankings war. http://tc.eserver.org/29492.html http://tc.eserver.org/29492.html Outbound links' anchor text affects a page's search engine ranking in much the same way that inbound links' anchor text affects search engine ranking. http://tc.eserver.org/28209.html http://tc.eserver.org/28209.html Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of analyzing your site and modifying it to enable search engines to read it, understand it and catalog it correctly. This is not rewriting the site or changing the look and feel. It is subtle changes, adding or modifying inconspicuous visible and invisible text so that the search engines can read the site. SEO is not 'spamming' the search engines - it is simply helping the search engines help you - by specifying information using a variety of methods. http://tc.eserver.org/28052.html http://tc.eserver.org/28052.html Search engines extract too much of the Web's value, leaving too little for the websites that actually create the content. Liberation from search dependency is a strategic imperative for both websites and software vendors. http://tc.eserver.org/27520.html http://tc.eserver.org/27520.html For years, 'link popularity' and 'Google PageRank' have been the talk of the town in the search engine optimization community. However, the definition of link popularity and how it differs from PageRank (PR), as well as how much effect these actually have on search engine rankings, is often misunderstood. http://tc.eserver.org/27519.html http://tc.eserver.org/27519.html The keywords and phrases you use in your Meta description tag don't affect your page's ranking in the search engines (for the most part), but this tag can still come in handy in your overall SEO campaigns. http://tc.eserver.org/27515.html http://tc.eserver.org/27515.html There are simply no quick fixes regarding search engine optimization. Adding META tags on your site neither a quick fix nor a slow fix. It won't fix anything and it won't have any effect on your search engine traffic. http://tc.eserver.org/27516.html http://tc.eserver.org/27516.html Even keyword phrases that nobody's searching for can sometimes be difficult to obtain high rankings with unless you really and truly know what you're doing. And even then, those rankings may be here one day, and gone the next. http://tc.eserver.org/27518.html http://tc.eserver.org/27518.html When practiced at the level of those of us who've been in the game for 5-10 years, SEO is in fact very Zen-like. We can look at a website and know exactly what needs to be done to make it the best it can be for the site visitors and the search engines. Often, it's easiest for us when we can just roll up our sleeves and do what we know needs to be done, rather than try to explain the whys and wherefores. Many times it's not even possible to explain exactly why we are doing a specific thing, because it simply comes from the gut. http://tc.eserver.org/27504.html http://tc.eserver.org/27504.html This article will try to tell you about the basics of copywriting and its advanced application on the SEO aspect. This article aims to provide the beginners in the Search Engine Optimization industry, an in-depth but friendly guide to seo content writing, as well as providing the more advanced copywriters with a guide to remind them of the several tricks they might have forgotten about the craft. http://tc.eserver.org/27480.html http://tc.eserver.org/27480.html Every year is always rocked by a plethora of changes in the search engine marketing world. The acquisition of smaller companies by the Big 3 changes the marketing landscape as we know it every month and with every update to the index that is made, we hold our breath and hope that we come out better (if not, the same) in the end. So when it comes to the new year, there are many things that we should look out for to stay on top of the rankings. http://tc.eserver.org/27158.html http://tc.eserver.org/27158.html Search engine optimization or SEO is very important to get your website listed in search engines. Even if this is the first website you have built there are a few basic and easy steps that will help you with optimizing your website without being a pro. http://tc.eserver.org/27062.html http://tc.eserver.org/27062.html There's actually quite a lot to take into account when targeting a new geographic territory. I asked my two experts to share just two or three of the most important tips they would give to someone launching in the German marketplace. http://tc.eserver.org/26886.html http://tc.eserver.org/26886.html Making your Web site attractive to search engines is a key factor for your success as a Web site developer. Get the basic information you need to organically optimize your Web site in this four-part series. In Part 1, you'll receive a foundation in search engine optimization so you can organically optimize your Web site and create Web pages that are usable, accessible, and friendly to search engines. http://tc.eserver.org/26884.html http://tc.eserver.org/26884.html Making your Web site attractive to search engines is a key factor for your success as a Web site developer. Get the basic information you need to organically optimize your Web site in this four-part series. In Part 1, you learned the background of why white hat SEO is good for your site. In Part 2, you'll start optimizing. You'll create a strategy for choosing and optimizing your keywords from the top-left-down and learn more about other factors that can influence your success in search engines. http://tc.eserver.org/26879.html http://tc.eserver.org/26879.html Making your Web site attractive to search engines is a key factor for your success as a Web site developer. Get the basic information you need to organically optimize your Web site in this four-part series. In Part 3 of the series, you'll learn how to get the pages of your Web site into the search indexes. http://tc.eserver.org/26873.html http://tc.eserver.org/26873.html Making your Web site obvious to search engines is a key factor for your success as a Web site developer. Get the basic information you need to organically optimize your Web site in this four-part series. In this final part of the series, learn specialized techniques for large Web sites or sites with many dynamic pages. http://tc.eserver.org/26881.html http://tc.eserver.org/26881.html PHP, a dynamic Web-based programming language, takes a variety of input formats and uses a built-in SOAP client to obtain information from the Web. PHP, combined with applications using search engine optimization (SEO), is a powerful tool for obtaining information from major search engines, allowing this information to guide a webmaster's online marketing and SEO strategies. http://tc.eserver.org/26518.html http://tc.eserver.org/26518.html Write compelling headings that attract both search engines and your desired kind of site visitor. http://tc.eserver.org/26150.html http://tc.eserver.org/26150.html Virtually every search engine and directory is now associated with some kind of paid solution, and it is tempting to see them as an easy way to get top ranking for your web site. http://tc.eserver.org/25955.html http://tc.eserver.org/25955.html A substantial number of people use search engines to find goods and services that interest them. Incredibly, though, many web designers don't pay much attention to designing sites to rank well in searches. This means that in order to protect your investment in your website, you need to know what has to be done to get good rankings, and how to make sure that your designer has done it. http://tc.eserver.org/25954.html http://tc.eserver.org/25954.html A substantial number of people use search engines to find goods and services that interest them. This second half of a two-part article explains how to make sure that your web designer has set up your site so search engines will like what they see and rank you high. http://tc.eserver.org/25525.html http://tc.eserver.org/25525.html Improve your search engine ranking by harnessing the benefits of well-authored XHTML and using CSS to boost your code-to-content ratio. http://tc.eserver.org/25381.html http://tc.eserver.org/25381.html What do learning how to outline a research paper and optimizing your website to rank highly in Google have in common? Much more than you might think at first glance. http://tc.eserver.org/25339.html http://tc.eserver.org/25339.html The Florida Update effected more than site rankings in the SEO industry. Jim Hedger looks at Google one year later after the disaster. http://tc.eserver.org/25340.html http://tc.eserver.org/25340.html A developer friend of mine, before he knew I worked for an SEO firm, told me he thought of SEO as 'snake oil,' not an uncommon view among many Web professionals. http://tc.eserver.org/19759.html http://tc.eserver.org/19759.html Small websites get less traffic than big ones, but they can still dominate their niches. For each question users ask, the Web delivers a different set of sites to provide the answers.