James Oppenheim’s blog

Links, links everywhere! But where, why? Hang on, who?

Link building is an important part in any Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) strategy. In an attempt to make a website seem more popular with search engine spiders it is important to gain quality inbound links to your website.

Link popularity

OK, but what is popularity? Simply put, link popularity essentially describes how popular a website is based on the number of links from other sites pointing to it. For example a site with 100 inbound links is seen to be more important than a site with 10 inbound links.

Link quality

OK so now we have quantity, what about quality? The quality of the link is much more important than the quantity of links. A few good quality links can increase your websites search engine positioning much more than a huge amount of poor quality links. A quality website will have to following attributes:

• A high Google page rank
• Search engine friendly coding with all its pages indexable
• Relevant content to your particular site
• Small number of outgoing links on the page you will be linked on
• The links on the page should be well classified and focused

Avoid artificial link farms and web rings as search engine spiders will place no importance on these types of inbound link. As a general rule, if a link is not created to be read or followed by humans, the link will be considered spam.

Where to get quality links

A great place to start gain quality and relevant inbound links are website directories. Website directories provide a topical and categorised list of links. The Strongest Links website goes one step further by creating a list of website directories ranking them on the quality of link they will provide you.

Next comes the social websites like Digg, del.icio.us, StumbleUpon, Technorati, MySpace and reddit which provide an easy way to create some user generated content (i.e. content generated by you, the user) with links to your website or a particular page /post on your website. These social websites generally have a lot of traffic and a high page rank which can filter through to your website with each link that you create, not to mention all the extra eyes you will have on your website.

It is a black art trying to gain quality inbound links to a website, one that I will forever be wrangling with. If you have any insights, suggestions or funny stories please let me know.

Technorati Tags: SEO, Interesting sites, link building, website directories, social websites

Recently while I was at work pondering what the most semantically correct way to markup a set of search results I realised that Google is 1) smarter that me and 2) rules my life. I can’t stop using Google products from Google Analytics, Google Reader, Gmail, Google maps, Google Earth, Google Trends to even the good old Google web search. One would be forgiven to think that Google is the Internet! Whenever I have a problem at work I open up Google and type in the a search phrase on the problem I need to solve. Then in under a second, bingo, there it is the answer to all my problems. No I do not work for Google, I just love their search engine and yes I do spend a lot of time on the internet.

All this got me thinking; ‘Wow, Google has some very impressive features’. So I decided to put together a list of some of the more handy Google specific search features.

Google time search

Google measurement search

Google currency converter

Google calculator

Google location search

Google business search

As you can see Google has some very impressive features that makes sure it stays number one in the search engine market. One can only dream of what they will come up with next. But for those of us who can’t wait it is always worth a sneak peak into the future at Google Labs to see the latest Google prototypes that have not quite hit the prime time.

Happy Googling!

Technorati Tags: Google, Web, Personal, SEO

Directory Critic is a fantastic resource of website directories, featuring over 3900 search engine friendly website directories. Directory Critic breaks down the website directories into a number of categories, including free, paid and deep linking enabling a website owner to effectively target relevant websites when creating a link building campaign.

Website directories provide a good way to promote your website, creating exposure and traffic while building relevant inbound links. Directory Critic harnesses this power and is a must do for all good website marketing and SEO campaigns.

Technorati Tags: Directory Critic, SEO, link building

The new version of Google Analytics has launched and wow is it impressive. Showcasing an intuitive interface with drag and drop functionality, Google has taken its website statistics application to the next level. Showcasing large amounts of data in a easy to understand manner is the main advantage of Google Analytics.

Why would you bother with any other website statistics application when there is Google Analytics. Whats more, it is free!

Technorati Tags: Google, Google Analytics, website statistics, SEO

With all the hype surrounding Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) you would be forgiven thinking that you need a degree in computer science to optimise your website for the entire gamut of search engines. Fortunately this is note the case! As long you follow some simple rules you too can come up number one on Google.

Do I need an SEO company?

At my day job many clients ask if they should use a Search Engine Optimisation company. I always suggest to be very careful with SEO companies especially if the company is offering ‘guaranteed number one position’ or ’submission to 1000 website directories’. What I always suggest to do first is to write meaningful and unique content for your website and then do some basic search engine optimisation yourself. By using valid and semantically meaningful HTML code with good content you will be well on your way to achieving a good search engine ranking.

Content

It is often said that content rules the web and this is so very true. You can have a perfectly optimised and professionally built website, but if you don’t have content there is nothing for a search engine robot to index. Writing good and relevant content is the most important part of any search engine optimisation strategy. When writing the content for you website try to think what would someone actually type into a search engine to find what you are writing about. Once you have worked out these keywords or keyword phrases you need to try and mention them as often as possible, consequently making your content more relevant to those terms. Updating your website with good keyword dense content regularly will do two things to help your site:

1. It will encourage people to come back to your website because they will want to see the next installment of your content and;
2. it will make search engine robots revisit your website more often enabling your content to get indexed quicker.

Page titles

Following on from writing good keyword dense content I believe is the second most import part of search engine optimisation - writing good page titles. Much the same can be said about writing page titles as about writing content; it must be both relevant and keyword dense. One basic mistake often made is to have the same page title for each website page, this makes it extremely hard for both users and search engine robots to distinguish between each of your website pages. It is especially important to write good page titles as they are displayed prominently in search engine results. Because of this a website page title must be relevant while also enticing the user to action your website by clicking on your link.

Semantic HTML

Building your site with semantic and meaningful HTML is essential. Using clean and lightweight HTML code will reduce your content to markup ratio, while also structuring your code in a meaningful way for the search engine robots. Start building your website by thinking about the content and how it should be presented without styles. For example, use h1 to h6 elements to mark up headings and ul’s to markup list elements. Then use progressive enhancement of CSS, JavaScript or Flash to add style and functionality to your website leaving your HTML code as it was intended.

SEO friendly URLs

Many search engines find it hard to follow links where the URL has an appended query strings on the end. Google says that it follows up to two Get variables, however, it is much better to avoid them whenever possible. A solution to this is to use Apache’s mod_rewrite functionality to enable you to add keywords into the URL while also providing indexable links.

Inbound links

A comprehensive link building strategy is essential to a search engine optimisation, often however, this proves to be the hardest part of the process. One good place to start to find inbound links to your website are directories such as Dmoz and Yahoo!. Directories provide topical text links to your website which are seen as a vote to the importances of your website.

What to avoid

There are some arcane web development techniques that should be avioded to help maintain your search engine ranking. Some of the horrible old web development techniques include:

1. Frames - Frames provide problems when someone follows a search engine link to a famed page without the parent HTML page be present. This can be confusing and frustrating because parts of the website are missing.
2. Flash - Because search engine robots find it hard to read Flash files when they are used for an entire website none of the content will get indexed. This problem can be fixed with progressive enhancement see: SEO friendly Flash programming for more information.
3. JavaScript inserted navigation and links - Search engine robots do not read JavaScript, therefore, they will not be able to follow the inserted navigation and links.
4. Font tags - meaningless tags that should be replaced with semantic elements such as h2 and strong

By avoiding some of the old web development techniques your website will be in good stead to be fully indexed and placed high on search engine results.

Conclusion

While everything I have mentioned in this article is neither new or groundbreaking for any SEO consultant or good web developer, it is an easy way to save money on a search engine optimisation company while increasing your websites search engine visibility and search engine ranking. One word of caution however, this is not an instant process, it takes months, even years to get the right mix of content, HTML structure and inbound links.

Technorati Tags: SEO, search engine optimisation, website optimisation

I have been thinking about search engines inability to crawl flash files for quite some time now, but then it struck me - use one content file to serve up both the Flash and HTML, then use JavaScript to embed the Flash. Wow, that is really quite easy.

Background

Programming an enter website in Flash is inherently hard for search engine robots to index. This is because all the website content is sitting inside a complied SWF file. This technique has disappeared to the backs of our minds (much like the 80’s) and has turned into an SEO no no. However, there is some light at the end of the tunnel because Google can actually read a flash file. But this technique is not foolproof - mainly because it is very hard to understand structure, context and semantics when reading a linear Flash file as a set of static HTML pages.

Take the following example : ‘Index Index action 92 anatomy 6 Arm band 127 Around the world 62′ - does not really make any sense to me.

Example

Here is an example of search engine friendly flash programming. Wow that is amazing I hear you exclaim, well I will tell you how I did it.

Solution

First of all there needs to be one main content file. The reason for this is that you don’t want to have to update both the Flash and HTML if there is a change to the content or you need to add an extra page. I did this with a PHP array, setting up each page (you could do it with any other server side scripting language):

//setup the pages array
$pages = Array();

//add each page to the main pages array
$page = Array();
$page['navTitle'] = 'home';
$page['img'] = '_img/home.jpg';
$page['content'] = "home content goes here";
$pages[] = $page;

$page = Array();
$page['navTitle'] = 'about';
$page['img'] = '_img/about.jpg';
$page['content'] = "about content goes here";
$pages[] = $page;

//ect...

Then next trick is to use JavaScript to embed the Flash into the HTML page. The reason JavaScript is used to embed Flash is because search engine spiders to not read JavaScript at all. This quirk enables only visual browsers (i.e. people using a web browser) to see the Flash, which is inevitably what we want. Now there are a number of ways to embed Flash using JavaScript, the SWFObject seems to be the popular choice at the moment. However, I recently read about Robert Nyman solution, which looks very promising and at a small 2.1KB, who could you go wrong.

Once we have both the content and the Flash setup, we need to build the website. The first step is to make a normal HTML website using the before mentioned PHP array. Then essentially you do the exact same thing in Flash, however, instead of using PHP you use ActionScript:

//load the nav from the PHP array
loadNavTitle = new LoadVars();
loadNavTitle.load('path to echoed out php file');
loadNavTitle.onLoad = function (success) {


if (success) {
navTitle = loadNavTitle.result;
navArray = navTitle.split('|'); //split up the echoed data into an array
buildNav(); //function to build the nav
}

}

function buildNav(){
for (i=0; i
//spawn clips
root.attachMovie('navObject', 'nav_mc'+i, _root.getNextHighestDepth());


//set instance names
var nav_mc:Object = _root['nav_mc'+i];


//setup an id
nav_mc.id = i;


//add the text
nav_mc.nav_title.text = navArray[i];


//on release
nav_mc.onRelease = function(){
getContent(this.id);
}

I have left out some steps, namely to PHP file to import the Flash data and the main HTML index page, but the essential structure is there.

Done and done!

Conclusion

So there you have it, a fully featured, animated website that is search engine friendly. And with no ajax! Who would have thought.

Technorati Tags: SEO, flash, JavaScript, web