At Beanstalk Search Engine Optimization we know that knowledge is power. That's the reason we started this SEO blog. We know that the better informed our visitors are, the better the decisions they will make for their websites and their online businesses. We hope you enjoy your stay and find the SEO news contained within this blog useful.
Tomorrow, January 18th, is SOPA blackout day, and lots of very popular sites are committing to participate in the blackout.
How can web companies, such as SEOs, and supporters (like us) maintain workflow in the midst of a major blackout?
We’ve got some tips!
I need to find things mid-blackout!
While some sites will be partially blacked out, a lot of the larger sites will be completely offline in terms of content for maximum effect.
This means that during the blackout folks will have to turn to caches to find information on the blacked out sites.
If Google and the Internet Archives both stay on-line during the blackout you can use them to get cached copies of most sites.
If you’re not sure how you’d still find the information on Google, here’s a short video created by our CEO Dave Davies to help you along.
I want to participate without killing my SEO campaign!
If all your back-links suddenly don’t work, or they all 301 to the same page for a day, how will that effect your rankings?
Major sites get crawls constantly, even 30 mins of downtime could get noticed by crawlers on major sites.
A smaller site that gets crawled once a week would have a very low risk doing a blackout for the daytime hours of the 18th.
Further to that you could also look at user agent detection and sort out people from crawlers, only blacking out the human traffic.
If that seems rather complex there’s two automated solutions already offered:
sopablackout.org is offering a JS you can include that will blackout visitors to the site and then let them click anywhere to continue.
Simple putting this code in a main include (like a header or banner) will do the trick: <script type="text/javascript" src="//js.sopablackout.org/sopablackout.js"></script>
Get a SOPA plugin for your WordPress and participate without shutting down your site. It simply invokes the above Javascript on the 18th automagically so that visitors get the message and then they can continue on to the blog.
I’d be a rotten SEO if I suggested you install an external Javascript without also clearly telling folks to REMOVE these when you are done. It might be a bit paranoid, but I live by the better safe than sorry rule. Plus just because you are paranoid, it doesn’t mean people aren’t trying to track your visitors.
How’s Chia Bart doing? .. Well I think he’s having a mid-life crisis right now because he looks more like the Hulkster than Bart?
To all my little Bartmaniacs, drink your water, get lots of sunlight, and you will never go wrong!
For those interested in what some of the top minds of SEO, SEM, Mobile Marketing and Social Media have to say about 2011 and maybe more importantly – what they see coming in 2012 then Thursday’s Webcology is a must listen. Hosted on WebmasterRadio.fm, Jim Hedger and I will be hosting 2 separate round-tables with 5 guests each over 2 hours covering everything from Panda to personalization; mobile growth to patent applications. It’s going to be a fast-paced show with something for everyone.
The show will be airing live from 2PM EST until 4PM EST on Thursday December 22nd. If you catch it live you’ll have a chance to join the chat room and ask questions of your own but if you miss it you still have an opportunity to download the podcast a couple days later. I don’t often focus this blog on promoting the radio show I co-host but with the lineup we have including SEOmoz’s Rand Fishkin, Search Engine Watch’s Jonathan Allen and Mike Grehan, search engine patent guru Bill Slawski and many more talented and entertaining Internet Marketing experts it’s definitely worth letting our valued blog visitors know about it. And if you’re worried it might just be a quiet discussion, Terry Van Horne is joining us to insure that doesn’t happen. Perhaps I’ll ask him a question or two about his feelings about Schema.org (if you listen to the show … you’ll quickly get why this is funny).
I swear I’ve seen iframes crawled before but even if I haven’t seen iframe data in search indexes, it’s not something that we should just count on and forget about, especially with the growing competition in the search engine market. I’m looking at you Blekko.
So how do you test such a thing without wasting time waiting eons for the results to appear in the SERPs? Here’s how!
The text below is just an iframe:
Seems like a unique phrase that very few, if any search engine optimization companies would use, so it should work well.
After a few days if we’re never seen for the above phrase but we are seen for the below phrase, the question is answered. We’ll run the query across the gamut and see if we can’t report back on who/how quickly it’s crawled.
May many Russian rockets sail past the Earthling moon and delve into many Martian delights with a souvenir to show for it.
Just in time to make your candy hangover even worse, Google’s decided to fiddle with the layout/appearance of it’s Reader product. Naturally the squeaky wheel gets the up-votes, so most of the reactions getting attention are going to be negative. Let me break that trend and explain why with this post.
Over on the official Google Reader Blog, Alan Green had the task of explaining the new look and improvements. The first image posted is ideal, great use of space, very use-able and very little room for improvement:
Sure there’s a bit of ‘padding’ in the header, and there’s a bit of white space going on, but as you can see, a well used reader account won’t be staring at gulfs of great white spaces that most folks seem to be taking issue with.
The next common point of ‘contention’ is the display of news items, and the amount of screen space that the actual text is getting on the reader screen:
This really seems to be coming from the ‘more is better’ camp who only have 19″ screens. If you put things for me to read stretched across my screen from edge to edge, I would take longer to read it, and my neck would get sore from panning my large displays. If I was making this observation on my home setup it’d be even worse than my work displays.
Plus there’s already a ton of CSS hacks you can apply to change/tweak the layout to fit your needs. A Google search will dig up tons of these, I don’t need to sponsor any particular solution but the first I found did a great job of tightening up the UI.
So with all the negativity aside, what was the Google Reader update all about? Well I can sum it up with one word “Google+”.
To quote the official reader blog:
The ability to +1 a feed item (replacing “Like”), with an option to then share it with your circles on Google+ (replacing “Share” and “Share with Note”).
Integrating with Google+ also helps us streamline Reader overall. So starting today we’ll be turning off friending, following, shared items and comments in favor of similar Google+ functionality.
So it was a needed update, with a bit of give and take. The authors of the post knew there’d be feedback, negativity, and the usual ‘quiet riot’ around the changes. They even suggested, to anyone that doesn’t leave over the update (their words not mine), that comments and concerns would be great to hear. Plus they also gave a handy link to the import/export settings so your decision to stay doesn’t have to be marred by concerns of how to make the switch.
Now we move on to discuss the new GMail UI changes.. Does it ever end?
I wouldn’t normally blog on a Monday, but everyone’s got the cold or is travelling, and Google just announced a very important new feature called rel=standout.
The attribute works the same way as the other link rel attributes (like rel=nofollow):
The tag should be placed in the <head> section of the source code on the page
You can use this on your own domain up to 7 times per week, but you can point to other domains as much as you’d like.
Google’s News service will consider this link as an indication of items that should be included in the ‘featured’ news feeds.
Some sites are also mentioning the importance of tying this in with the rel=canonical and rel=author tags for maximum SEO. Since this is a new feature and all these features require testing we’ll likely speak more on this later when we’ve had a chance to test things first-hand.
In the mean time, better start including the tag for maximum effect, at least 7 times per week.
(UPDATE: We have a lot of clients who use WordPress and they may want to know how we updated our blog so quickly. The patches we’ve applied to our blog require a plugin which we cannot endorse, and the code is very specific to our site, so it’s nothing we’d share in public. If the days pass and you don’t see a rel=standout solution for WordPress, or your blog, we can probably help but we’ll need to look at how your blog is setup to assist. I am working on a specific plugin solution for WordPress that applies the link to only ‘post’ headers, and only when a specific category/tag is used. If I get the kinks worked out it will be offered to all our WP enabled clients.)
I visit many websites every week. From small single person operations and startup businesses, to multi-national conglomerates. Sometimes the most difficult things to explain to clients are that good rankings do not necessarily equal good conversions.
Clients often get confused by this point. One thing I always ask myself and try to get clients to answer about their own site is "Who is this site for?" and "What problems does this site solve?"
The answers are going to determine how long I spend on a site.
I think this is an often overlooked question that unfortunately eludes most websites owners. In many cases it is very straight forward. You have a product, you sell a product.
However, when you are in a very competitive market or in a niche driven market, you must actively recruit and find effective ways to keep people on your site.
Sadly, it is not enough to have a static page that just sells widgets. It is imperative to try to find something different to offer that other related sites do not or, at least to find a new and creative way to do it.
There is no right or wrong answer, but the best thing you can do for your site is to find a way to set yourself apart from your competition. This can be in the form of superior product information, blogs/forums, reviews, link bait, or any other resource that is not readily available from a competitors website. You need to know your market and your customers and be able to appeal to what they need or want. Sometime visitors don’t know what they want until you tell them!
Remember also that it is not just about having shiny things to attract (or distract) people to trick them in to spending time on your site (although this has merit as well when used correctly). You can have great content and unique resources, etc but is your visitors cannot get to the information they are looking for, then it will be for naught. Some other ways to keep people from leaving your site immediately are:
Page load times; this is a huge conversion killer. If a page takes more than a few seconds to load, people will leave.
Avoid using ads, these tend to cheapen the site and they detract from your message.
Be very selective in your use of multiple fonts, font colors or animations on your page.
While images are great for enticing visitors to a page, too many increase page load times and causes frustration on a slow connection. Remember a picture (one) is worth a thousand words.
Pop-up windows are very annoying and also very antiquated.
Ensure that your “buy” button/links are easily seen and that your shopping cart system works well and is not confusing to the user.
Remember that there is always thousands of other website for people to choose from. It helps to step back from your site and view it from the end user perspective. Better yet is to have friends and colleagues from outside your own market to take a look at your site or to offer suggestions as to what they might look for when researching your particular field or product. Doing so may allow you to spot potential issues or problems with your site that may be hindering or turning off customers.
Yesterday I went public and openly admitted I’d managed to overlook Google’s all-in-one solution to Zynga, Microsoft, Grooveshark, Foursquare, etc..
The fact that I’ve played with Google’s ChromeOS makes this all the more amazing..
Google wants to make it possible to use a browser as your operating system, experiencing the entire internet via the world wide web.
I doubt that in 1989 when Sir Tim Berners-Lee proposed adding the WWW specification to the internet he could have imagined it becoming a single point of access to the extreme of causing confusing between the two technologies. Yet here we are with an entire OS written around booting into a web browser.
The result of this enormous effort to solve the world’s problems inside a browser makes Android, ChromeOS, and the Google Chrome browser much more useful/powerful than even I had expected.
Chrome web store is more than just games.
Yes, you can play Angry Birds, PacMan, SuperMario, and modern versions of PaperBoy until you’re divorced and homeless, but there are really handy applications and tools in the web store.
The two SEO applications that I’d like to take a minute to highlight are not all there is to offer, just the first two really handy apps that I’ve used and recommend.
First app is the SEO SERP Workbench, a tool for watching both websites and keyword phrases. This tool has all you need to track your position, your competition, and your market in real-time and historically.
The interface is clean and simple, skipping a lot of pointless options that would inhibit less experienced users, and it works great. The only gripe I have with the tool is that it looks to give you ‘worst case’ results by fetching it’s info from a US based IP address on Google data centres in the US. If you were a UK site looking for UK rankings, this tool would not give you the correct results for your location.
The second app is ShiftEdit, an on-line tool for developing website code. It has (S)FTP support for direct edits, upload support for existing disk based projects, and it’s code engine can edit/markup PHP, Ruby, Java, HTML, CSS and JavaScript.
The beauty of having a single point of access for editing, where all you need is a web browser, is a dream come true for most developers. Accessibility is a huge annoyance for me and having a tool I can access from anywhere makes it far more useful and productive. If Adobe is reading this, it’s time you made an on-line version of Dreamweaver with full interoperability between the desktop version. Personally, I know that’s an upgrade I’d actually appreciate paying for.
I could go on all day discussing the Chrome Web Store, but I have to get some work done, and then get back to beating my CanvasRider high score on the Whistler Mt. sketch by Jon312.
If you’re not too busy playing around with Google’s tribute to Les Paul’s 96th birthday..
..you may have time to check out some of Chrome 12′s new features.
Chrome’s never been big on fluff, and most users upgrading to the version 12 release are going to have to look carefully to see anything new. Part of this is due to the very speedy release cycle that Chrome adheres to.
Some of the changes include:
Proactive alerts on malware detection to avoid downloads
Full flash integration with local shared object management
Hardware support for accelerated 3D CSS transforms
Small tweaks like the new default favicon:
H.264 is still in place even though many speculated that the next release would be dropping H.264 to pave the way for more open standards with HTML5 like WebM and Theora.
The flash integration gives access to cookie management and more:
Release 12 wouldn’t be a new version without some issues, and much like the recent performances by the Canucks this latest version has a few failings:
Proxy support is broken. If you need to use a proxy, there is a fix. Check here for updates.
The version jump has enraged numerologists around the globe to the point where I couldn’t resist busting out the Roman numerals. Version 20 next week?
Native HTML5 Netflix support is still not working for everyone
So while it could have had a bit more time on the ironing board, it’s here now and we can try it out. If you wanted to see the 3D CSS transform upgrades try viewing this HTML5 video demo before and after you upgrade.
Yesterday was an exciting day for more than just hockey fans (Go Canucks!). Wednesday was Microsoft’s first public showing of the new Windows 8 user interface.
Microsoft isn’t kidding when they admit to having some strong influences from the mobile phone market!
Moving towards web technologies and taking a page from the ‘Google Gears’ handbook, Microsoft is saying that Windows 8 is geared towards 2 unique application types. The first being the traditional compiled windows application including games and software you currently run on windows. The second would be more of a full screen HTML5 + Javascript full screen application.
Google made great success out of exploring what a browser can do without an internet connection when they built the Chromebook and Microsoft clearly wasn’t ignoring this development. Beyond the usual stock tracking widgets and weather displays that could be running from an internet connected browser, this will extend to innovative applications like the customizable touch Piano application that was demonstrated.
Hardware in general seems to be an interesting focus of Windows8
Internet Explorer 10 is built into Window 8 and it will be very touch friendly, allowing the OS to run on a tablet or make full use of a PC with a touch screen.
Microsoft has stated the OS will be compatible with ARM processors and NVidia hardware. There should be a showing of that later today.
Windows 8 continues the tradition of Windows 7 where dependance on improved hardware is not a given. Indeed the way forward seems to be extracting more from the current hardware vs. demanding more under the hood for each new feature.
Our next public blurb from Microsoft on the Windows 8 front is due in September during a developer conference in California.
Dave’s Footnote:
While this post focuses on Windows 8, Dave believes that the author may have glossed over the truly important point (tsk tsk Ryan) which is captured in the following video:
