Thursday, January 21, 2010

Bing Website Architecture and SEO

Bing’s Recommendations for Website Design for easy indexing from their June 26, 2009, blog post by Webmaster Center team

The main components of SEO are, in Bing’s view
1. content
2. links
3. site architecture.
and ALL of these must work for search engines to index your website properly.

The search engine web crawler for Bing is MSNBot.They explain that the Bot interprets the HTML code it finds on a webpage and sends the content it discovers back to the search engine database so that it can be analyzed and indexed. They suggest setting your website up with the simplest structure so that any search engine and any browser can use it.

Bing’s suggestions with regard to website architecture are;

Use descriptive file and directory names

Avoid using underscores as word separators. Use hyphens instead.

Limit directory depth - …deep directory structure will mean the bot never gets to the deepest content. To alleviate this possibility, make your site’s directory structure shallow, no deeper than four child directories from the root.

Externalize on-page JavaScript and CSS code
…Removing JavaScript and CSS code from your pages into external files offers additional advantages beyond just shortening your webpage files. By being external to the content they modify, they can be used by multiple pages simultaneously. Externalizing this content also simplifies code maintenance issues.

A few notes to consider. External file references are not supported in really old browser versions, such as Netscape Navigator 2.x and Microsoft Internet Explorer 3.x. But if the users of such old browsers are not your target audience, the benefits of externalizing this code will far outweigh that potential audience loss.

I also recommend storing your external code files separately from your HTML code, such as in /Scripts and /CSS directories. This helps keep website elements organized, and you can then easily use your robots.txt file to block bot access to all of your code files (after all, sometimes scripts handle business confidential data, so preventing the indexing of those files might be a wise idea!).

Use 301 redirects for moved pages

To find out more see………301 Redirects

Avoid JavaScript or meta refresh redirects

Implement custom 404 pages
…Instead of letting users go away thinking your site is broken, make an attempt to help them find what they want by showing a custom 404 page. Your page should look like the other page designs on your site, include an acknowledgment that the page the user was looking for doesn’t exist, and offer a link to your site’s home page and more importantly, access to either a site-wide search or an HTML-based sitemap page. At a minimum, make sure your site’s navigation tools are present, enabling the user to search for their content of interest before they leave.

Other crawler traps

Do Not use frames on your website.
Robots cannot “see”
1. forms
2. login pages
3. Pages that require either session IDs or cookies to be accessed as the Bots cannot generate session IDs or accept cookies so they are blocked from accessing content requiring such tracking measures.

Friday, January 15, 2010

Free Blogs

For more information about this fantastic list of free blog programmes from SEO News visit their site. Many thanks.

GreatestJournal.com, InsaneJournal.com, JorunalFen.net, LiveJournal.com, Blogabond.com, BlogCheese.com, BusyThumbs.com, Freevlog, Trippert.com, Ufem.com, Word Count Journal.com, Xanco.com

WordPress Powered

Blogetery.com, BlogRox.com, Blogsome.com, Edublogs.com, WordPress.com

Various Platforms

Blog.com, Blog Ladder.com, Blogger.com, Blogr.com, BlogSpirit.com, Blogster.com, BlogYx.com, Bloki.com, Bravenet.com, ClearBlogs.com, Etribes.com, Multiply.com, Netcipia.com, Open Diary.com, ShoutPost.com, SoulCast.com, Squarespace.com, Terapad.com, Tooum.com, Tooum.com, Tumblr.com, Weebly.com, Windows Live Spaces, Vox.com, Xanga.com, Yahoo 360, Zoomshare.com

Blogs, Twitter and Real-time Search

Google is now including real-time search results from Twitter etc in its search results. Search Engine Land have quoted an interview with Amit Singhal of Google via Technology Review.

Singhal says;
“One user following another in social media is analogous to one page linking to another on the Web. Both are a form of recommendation,”
and
As high-quality pages link to another page on the Web, the quality of the linked-to page goes up. Likewise, in social media, as established users follow another user, the quality of the followed user goes up as well.”

Therefore in simplistic terms, the more Twitter followers you have the higher you will rank in search engine results. But surely this must work in the same way as inbound links count for websites - surely the relevance and credibility of the followers must be taken into account?

There has been the suggestion that hash tags, eg #followfriday will be seen as an indicator of spam and therefore hash tags should be used with caution. This is particularly relevant if you use for example Feedburner to send your blog posts to Twitter. One of the options on Feedburner asks whether when on sending details of your blog posts to Twitter you want it to add hash tags. If you just say yes to this you will find that ANY keyword within the Tweet will be turned into a hash tag meaning there could be several just within one Tweet.

If you want to still use hash tags then you are better to not choose that option and to choose instead to append text to your tweet and here you could add a suitable hash tag which would be at the end of all of your tweets. This is particularly suitable for businesses. So, for example, for this blog I can attach the hash tag #seo to the end of all the blog posts that are sent via Feedburner to Twitter.

Google will not be showing absolutely every Tweet as it will take into account credibility as explained above but in addition it is felt that it will focus on current trending topics and so it is worth checking out Google Trends for the current buzz for today.

Google Trends

As search moves towards real-time you can keep ahead of current search trends by looking at Google Trends where today you will see that the hot topics today are
1. today solar eclipse
2. haiti quake
3. port-au-prince
4. coakley
5. google china
6. scott brown
7. conan leno
8. american idol
9. tonight show
10. bin laden
And the most common searches are, today
1. rob lowe
2. jeron lewis
3. stephanie mills
4. hilary hahn
5. haitian relief efforts
6. sundiata gaines
7. james vanderbeek
8. jersey shore episode 7 online
9. kimmel on leno
10. jimmy kimmel on jay leno

If you then go down the page you will see a search box for hot topics and if for example I put in SEO as a search terms it produces the real-time ie current results for that term with results literally appearing before your eyes as you look. (You can of course obtain the same real-time search by going to the normal Google search and then at the left hand side choose Options and then Latest) The current view is;

New results will appear below as they become available.

RT @tweetmeme Best SEO Practices
Best SEO Practices | Morgan Web Design - webdesign-gm.co.uk

oliblake - twitter.com - 1 minute ago
A Principal Goal Of SEO Should Be Customer Loyalty: How search engine optimization (SEO) profe… bit.ly/7qMMQm #SEO #Referencement

djabdou50 - twitter.com - 1 minute ago
A Principal Goal Of SEO Should Be Customer Loyalty bit.ly/8MET6G #SEO #Referencement

djabdou50 - twitter.com - 1 minute agoContent Writer, Link Builder & SEO (London) |

You will see that most of the real-time results are from Twitter although frequently indexed blogs and press releases will also be quickly picked up by the hot topics search. Using Google trends Hot Searches is an excellent way to keep on top of the buzz about your industry.

Thursday, January 14, 2010

Consider SEO and SEM before Using a CMS for your Website

Before deciding to use a CMS content management system for your website do consider search engine optimisation SEO and search engine marketing SEM. Will the CMS allow you to make your website SEO and SEM efficient and allow for tracking etc with Google Analytics etc. For a full discussion on this please see this blog and then look at Desire Solutions CMS website where you will see that this CMS allows for easy addition of analytics code.