Archive for the ‘SEO’ Category
The Microsoft SEO Toolkit
The MSDN flash newsletter that arrived in my inbox today ran with the subject line “New IIS Search Engine Optimization beta”. To quote from the story…
The IIS Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Toolkit helps Web developers, hosting providers, and server administrators improve their sites’ relevance in search results by recommending how to make them more search engine-friendly.
Brad installed it on a test server and reports that it is freakin awesome. Great to see Microsoft stepping up it’s game in this space. Of course to make any use of this you need to be running your website on IIS 7.0 or higher.
Here is a screenshot of results against a basic DNN site. Download
Link Velocity
A few murmurs in the SEOsphere about Google making a fairly significant change to their rank algorithm in an attempt to nullify the increasing number of spam sites achieving a high rank for their targeted keywords. The spammers do this by writing scripts to create large volumes of sites, pages and comments to blogs and forums with links targeting their chosen keywords. Due to the automation, the links tend to appear in a very short space of time, hence link velocity. Google can identify this phenomenon by looking at the time period that the links were created. However, it is not a failsafe process because this can also be mistaken for natural viral activity. Typically, the key differentiator will be the general spaminess of the page/site providing the backlink. This can’t be a trivial process but it is fairly crucial that Google work it out lest their results start to become peppered with irrelevant/spammy sites. I guess it’s also a warning to SEO practitioners engaged in link building campaigns for their customers. The general rule of thumb: quality will always outweigh and outperform quantity. This will no doubt be an interesting space to watch…
Canonical
A long time ago in galaxy far far away Community Manager 3.0 existed. The year was 2003 and Search Engine Optimisation was a mysterious force known only to a handful of code Jedi’s and the URL’s universe was full of parameters such as…
http://www.elcom.com.au/default.aspx?folderid=5&articleid=21
These URLs really didn’t make much sense to an end user and were not very memorable. As the code Jedi’s began to master the SEO force they realised that URL’s containing human readable keywords could help users and improve search rank and so the era of user friendly URL’s was ushered in.
In 2004 Community Manager 4.0 was released with a feature that allowed the user to specify URLs a technique known as URL rewriting.
Happy days…for a while….but then, along came duplicate URLs.
As you may or may not be aware duplicate URLs are bad. Search engines don’t like to index or present identical or even near identical copies of the same information as it’s wasteful and often indicates a spammy site. However, there are many valid reasons that your site could contain duplicate content, for example print friendly pages or the same product page in an ecommerce system that exists within two categories.
The best way to handle these duplication issues has been via the implementation of a robots.txt with use of the nofollow tag or permanent redirects which all help to inform the search engine crawlers to exclude various bits of content, however this is not entirely easy to manage in the real world of content management.
That is until now…because screening at your local search engine…(this is for fans of Kentucky Fried Movie – to be said in a movie promo voice…)
He was a content management system…
She was a web page…
Together they made…..Canonical URLs
Canonical or relcan as it’s affectionately referred has SEO folk jumping for joy. Can what? Canonical – pronounced CAN – NON – ICLE – sounds a bit like a planet in the vicinity of Tatooine. Wikipedia defines canonical as…
“reduced to the simplest and most significant form possible without loss of generality”
It is a feature that lets you specify the preferred version of a URL. To implement it, simply add a <link> tag to the <head> section of your duplicate content page.
e.g <link rel=”canonical” href=http://www.elcom.com.au/products/web-manager/default.aspx />
The introduction of this feature makes life a lot easier for web developers to specify duplicate URLs so hopefully duplicate will quickly became a relic of the old web. For more details on this great new feature have a look at Google Webmaster Blog.
Google Webmaster Tools
If you’re not familiar with Google Webmaster Tools you’re missing out on a great service to help manage how Google view your web assets.
One of our customers old staging sites recently found it’s way into the Google index. Needless to say they weren’t impresses but Google Webmaster has a tool to quickly remove a single page or an entire site from their index. Warning: proceed with caution when using the removal tool, it would be umm….bad to accidentally remove your live site from Google’s index.
The service also provides site diagnostics such as page not found, URL’s not followed, top search queries, sitemap creation and submission and what the Googlebot sees, to name just a few.
A particularly useful tool is a report which tells you where a page not found is linked from.
The image above shows me that the ATS site has a company profile on elcom which is linking to an old page that no longer exists. Better get that fixed. So you can probably see the value of this tool, it is effectively a very accurate broken link checker.
This is of particular interest to me at the moment as we are designing a link management tool for CommunityManager.NET our web content management product, which will automatically prompt the user to reassign links that are inadvertently broken.
Oh and even though Google accounts for a whopping 90% of searches performed (according to Hitwise) I should mention that Yahoo also has a Webmaster tool called Site Explorer and like everything Yahoo does, its extremely well designed, but more on that in another post because I have to run to find the afikoman now.
