SEO Blog – Asia SEO Blog

The effects of Web 2.0 are far-reaching. Like all paradigm shifts, it affects the people who use it socially, culturally, and even politically. One of the most affected groups is the designers and developers who will be building it—not just because their technical skills will change, but also because they’ll need to treat content as part of a unified whole, an ecosystem if you will, and not just an island.

To summarize, these are what we see as the six main themes covering design in the Web 2.0 world:

1. Writing semantic markup (transition to XML)
2. Providing Web services (moving away from place)
3. Remixing content (about when and what, not who or why)
4. Emergent navigation and relevance (users are in control)
5. Adding metadata over time (communities building social information)
6. Shift to programming (separation of structure and style)

Our purpose in this column is to analyze those themes and figure out what Web 2.0 means for designers. We’ll explore the new technologies that are making it happen, take a closer look at the new interfaces that demonstrate its power, and ponder the social effects it has on the people who use it.

As we move along, we hope that designers who may be wary of the promises of new technology help us focus on the practical aspects of this one, the subtle but real changes that Web 2.0 is having (and will have) on design.

UsabilityAccessibility and Usability issues

Since Googlebot is actually designed to simulate the behavior of an average Internet user, it will check web pages for accessibility and usability issues as well. In general, the algorithms identifying major problems of a web site are highly refined, thus errors, misused code or hard to comprehend layouts are all playing a role in deciding the ranking of the pages. While a few errors will most likely be ignored, major problems, site-wide navigational inconsistencies, and especially intentional misuse or even overuse of certain elements may very well lead to a decline in rankings.

Known issues

Accessibility and usability checks are heavily relying on browser compatibility, which in fact is an ever changing factor. Some practices may now be more widespread than they were about a year ago, yet still be viewed as a hindrance, because of a minority of web browsing software still can not display them correctly. Google is updating its algorithms and Googlebot constantly, thus is expanding the methods a web site may utilize in its design to get its content properly indexed. The results try to be on par with the majority and technical advancements. Shockwave Flash content is analyzed for its textual content, javascript based links are followed the same as anchor text links ( although they don’t pass any parameters ), image maps, information in the <NOFRAMES> tag, and other advancements in standards are evaluated in the same manner for relevance and trust. However the broader range of browsers a web site can serve, the more importance it will be given to. There is still a hierarchy in judging usability issues, rendering the most accessible sites above the specialized designs. For example, text link references will weigh more than image based links, references buried in heavy code will likely to be followed at a slower rate than easy to access navigation.

+ Resolution: The W3C standard for web pages is a good hint on whether web sites are ready to be evaluated by Googlebot, based on the simulated user experience. While a page does not need to comply with all standards, major errors, and problems that are not only browser specific differences will less likely be ignored. Asking yourself the question whether your web site is easy to use, and whether it is accessible with most common web browsers is also a hint. A simple checklist might be to watch out for broken links, orphaned pages, loading time, number of links within the navigation, and the overall navigation communicating a consistent and coherent page hierarchy, images being labeled with ALT tags, the use of unique TITLE and META description tags, proper page encoding settings, language settings, text of readable size and color, no hidden text, no overuse of anchor text in links, no cloaking or off-screen content, no invisible layers, no redirect chains, no overuse of keywords to an extent where the content becomes meaningless, use of all necessary but also closing of all HTML tags, use of proper layout emphasizing the parts unique to a page, and the code not relying on yet to become standard practices. While the list of things to keep an eye out for could seem long, once thought over, the knowledge of web page coding and some common sense applied will save most pages from becoming a burden to your web site, or the visitor trying to decipher them. The most common errors are still the most obvious ones, with misused or vital but forgotten HTML code leading the list of problems, and cause many of the instances of a drop in rankings.

I have been reading the Bruce Clay’s websites since 2003 , while there are hundreds or i better say thousands of seo guys out there but i say with confidence that he is the one of the top seo and internet marketing experts who knows well about his job inorder to understand the relation between each search engine and how each one of the engine feeds others there is a below chart is being taken directly from his site .

In the boldly headlined blog entry, “Search quality, continued,” Googler Ben Gomes explaines in greater depth what search quality means to Google.

It’s too bad Google didn’t publish the post before the Un-Search Engine, Un-Cuil, Cuil, launched.

Gomes has written a clear overview of factors that Google considers to improve search user experience. Those are some of the same factors SEOs take into consideration when consulting on site design:

1. A small page. A small page is quick to download and generally faster for your browser to display. This results in a minimalist design aesthetic; extra fanciness in the interface slows down the page without giving you much benefit.

2. Complex algorithms with a simple presentation. Many search features require a great deal of algorithmic complexity and a vast amount of data analysis to make them work well. The trick is to hide all that complexity behind a clean, intuitive user interface. Spelling correction, snippets, sitelinks and query refinements are examples of features that require sophisticated algorithms and are constantly improving. From the user’s point of view search, almost invisibly, just works better.

3. Features that work everywhere. Features must be designed such that the algorithms and presentation can be adapted to work in all languages and countries.

4. Data driven decisions – experiment, experiment, experiment.

We’re looking forward to the next installment when Google discusses some of the specific experiments they’ve done to improve search quality.

Author:  Kevin Heisler

Many web designers view search-engine optimization (SEO) as a “dirty trick,” and with good reason: search engine optimizers often pollute search engine results with spam, making it harder to find relevant information when searching. But in fact, there is more than one type of search-engine optimization. In common usage, “black-hat” SEO seeks to achieve high rankings in search engines by any means possible, whereas “white-hat” SEO seeks to code web pages in a way that is friendly to search engines.

In Using XHTML/CSS for an Effective SEO Campaign, Brandon Olejniczak explains that many web design best practices overlap with those of white-hat SEO. The reason is simple: such practices as separating style from content, minimizing obtrusive JavaScript, and streamlining code allow search engines to more easily spider, index, and rank web pages.

Two years later, I am going to take Brandon’s conclusions a step further. I have been a search engine optimizer for several years, but only recently have become infatuated with web accessibility. After reading for weeks and painstakingly editing my personal website to comply with most W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, I have come to a startling revelation: high accessibility overlaps heavily with effective white hat SEO.
Accessibility for all users, even search engines
On further reflection, this overlap makes sense. The goal of accessibility is to make web content accessible to as many people as possible, including those who experience that content under technical, physical, or other constraints. It may be useful to think of search engines as users with substantial constraints: they can’t read text in images, can’t interpret JavaScript or applets, and can’t “view” many other kinds of multimedia content. These are the types of problems that accessibility is supposed to solve in the first place.

Walking through a few checkpoints
Now that I’ve discussed the theory of why high accessibility overlaps with effective SEO, I will show how it does so. To do this, I am going to touch upon each Priority 1 checkpoint in the W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines which affects search-engine optimization.

1.1 Provide a text equivalent for every non-text element (e.g., via “alt”, “longdesc”, or in element content)…

Not only are search engines unable to understand image and movie files, they also cannot interpret any textual content that is based on vision (such as ASCII art). alt and longdesc attributes will, therefore, help them understand the subject of any such content.

Search engines are also “deaf” in reference to audio files. Again, providing textual descriptions to these files allows search engines to better interpret and rank the content that they cannot “hear.”

1.2 Provide redundant text links for each active region of a server-side image map.

Text links are very important to search engines, since anchor text often succinctly labels the content of a link’s target page. In fact, many search engine optimizers consider anchor text to be the single most important factor in modern search algorithms. If a website uses an image map rather than a text-based menu as the primary navigational method, a redundant text-only menu elsewhere on the page will give search engines additional information about the content of each target page.

4.1 Clearly identify changes in the natural language of a document’s text and any text equivalents (e.g., captions).

Major search engines maintain country and language-specific indexes. Specifying the language of a document (or of text within a document) helps search engines decide in which index(es) to place it.

6.3 Ensure that pages are usable when scripts, applets, or other programmatic objects are turned off or not supported [...]

Some users choose to disable JavaScript and applets in their browser’s preferences, while other users’ browsers do not support these technologies at all. Likewise, search engines’ “browsers” do not read scripts; therefore a webpage’s usability should not be crippled when scripts are not supported. Otherwise, search engines may not even index the page, let alone rank it well.

14.1 Use the clearest and simplest language appropriate for a site’s content.

It is a bit less obvious how this particular checkpoint aids SEO. But if a website contains the “clearest and simplest language appropriate for the site’s content,” it is probably using those keywords with which potential searchers will be most familiar. Searchers tend to use succinct queries containing familiar language. Thus, to receive maximum traffic from search engines, it is best that a website contain the same words which the site’s audience will use when searching.

The benefits do not end with Priority 1—many of the Priority 2 and 3 Checkpoints are important for SEO purposes, too. For instance, Checkpoints 6.2 and 6.5 refer to the accessibility of dynamic content. In fact, making dynamic content search engine-friendly is one of the most daunting tasks a search engine optimizer faces when working on an ecommerce or database-driven site. Following the W3C’s recommendations can help to avoid any indexing or ranking problems related to using dynamic content.

From the horse’s mouth
If you doubt any of the above, perhaps a visit to Google’s Webmaster Guidelines could convince you that Google rewards high accessibility. This page specifically mentions best practices which will help Google “find, index, and rank your site.”

Design and Content Guidelines:
Make a site with a clear hierarchy and text links. Every page should be reachable from at least one static text link.
Offer a site map to your users with links that point to the important parts of your site. If the site map is larger than 100 or so links, you may want to break the site map into separate pages.
Create a useful, information-rich site, and write pages that clearly and accurately describe your content.
Think about the words users would type to find your pages, and make sure that your site actually includes those words within it.
Try to use text instead of images to display important names, content, or links. The Google crawler doesn’t recognize text contained in images.
Make sure that your title and alt tags are descriptive and accurate. [...]
Technical Guidelines:
Use a text browser such as Lynx to examine your site, because most search engine spiders see your site much as Lynx would. If fancy features such as JavaScript, cookies, session IDs, frames, DHTML, or Flash keep you from seeing all of your site in a text browser, then search engine spiders may have trouble crawling your site.
Note that each of Google’s guidelines actually correlates with a W3C Web Content Accessibility Guideline. (Oddly enough, the word “accessibility” does not actually appear in Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. Perhaps they are afraid of scaring off some webmasters with technical jargon? In any case, it is clear that Google is lobbying for high accessibility.)

SEO: just another feather in accessibility’s cap
The checkpoints I highlighted above are just a few of the many ways that high accessibility will help optimize a website for search engines—many of the other checkpoints in the W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines are helpful to SEO, as well. Of course, to most web designers, the goal of accessibility is (and should be) to make sites accessible to all people, independent of their platform or any disabilities they have. But if accessibility gets a website more traffic from Google, even better!

The good news is that a web designer who follows best practices for accessibility is already practicing solid white hat SEO. Search engines need not scare anyone. When in doubt, design your site to be accessible to blind and deaf users as well as those who view websites via text-only browsers, and SEO will fall into place.

Author :  Andy Hagans

 Paid search placement can be used as part of your Internet marketing strategy to give your business an increased competitive advantage. This is because it gives you immediate control over your search engine rankings. This is one of the big differences between paying for rankings and rankings achieved through “organic” search engine optimization (SEO) where the results are achieved through a persistent and long term strategy. With paid search placement you pay to get immediate high rankings in specific search engines.

Paid search placement usually takes the form of Pay Per Click (PPC). This requires you to pay only when someone clicks through to your site. PPC can be an effective addition to your overall search engine strategy as it can get you off and running quickly.

The main PPC providers, Overture and Google Adwords use systems based on bidding. Whoever pays the most gets the highest ranking. Adwords differs from Overture in that they also use a click-through-rate which rewards high click through rates with better pricing.

As with “organic” SEO you will need to define the keywords that your audience will use to find your product. Your keywords are an important part of your sales message. Bear in mind that popular keywords will be more competitive and may have higher bids associated with them. This means that you will have to pay more if you use common keywords or phrases. Remember that if you use the wrong keywords you will get visitors that do not respond to your message.

The great thing about PPC is that you can get information and modify your campaign in real time. You can check the effectiveness of your PPC campaign by using the reporting tools that are offered by your PPC provider. This tells you how much business the campaign is bringing you. You can get immediate return on investment information. You can monitor your PPC ads and if they are not effective you can quickly change them. The key is to watch how much you spend and change the ads if they are not working.
Paid search placement can be an important part of your Internet marketing strategy. It is a great way to get it up and running very quickly. It also gives you a good insight into how effective your keywords are and an opportunity to try out different ones. “Organic” search engine optimization is much more cost effective in the long term. (3 months+) SEO also benefits you by giving your site exposure for a wide variety of keyword phrases across many directories and search engines.

If you use PPC with SEO you will find that 60% of your clicks will come from organic searches and 40% from PPC. Therefore neither option should be ignored especially in the field of e-commerce. The two systems can be used effectively together so that you can make full use of your Internet marketing options over a period of time. This will help your business maximize its online marketing efforts.

Author : James Peggie

t failed to acquire Yahoo’s search business — or at least that’s what Yahoo has said. So now Microsoft has to rely on its own resources to come up with a plan for moving forward in search; and to do that, it’s setting up a second laboratory.

This morning, Microsoft publicly announced it will be opening what it’s calling a “Search Technology Center” somewhere in Europe at some point next year. It did not say exactly when or exactly where, though with the company’s slate of acquisitions in the search space already hailing from all over the continent, there are several intriguing candidates.
Although Microsoft’s announcement was made this morning in Cannes, Oslo, Norway may be high on the company’s list. That’s where one of its most important acquisitions in the search space is located: Fast Search & Transfer, the manufacturer of a groundbreaking behavior-monitoring search platform for enterprises. That platform already enables big businesses that produce and manage a lot of text to use tracking data gleaned from employees to enhance the relevancy of documents retrieved during queries.

But that’s a product sold to businesses, not a query line served up through a public Web page like Windows Live Search. In a statement sent to BetaNews this morning, Microsoft said that its new tech center — wherever it ends up being located — will be partnering directly with the Live Search team to develop “a highly relevant, localized, and interactive search experience” for online users. If FAST’s behavioral algorithms are to play a role there, perhaps Oslo will be the center; but if FAST remains a professional platform, the new European STC might be running on a different track.
For the last two and a half years, Microsoft has already been operating an STC in Beijing. There, one of its key projects has been improved relevancy and experience for Live Search and the public Web, though some academic projects are also involved.

Back in February 2006, Microsoft acquired Paris-based mobile search technology provider MotionBridge. Since that time, the company has made some headway in building location-oriented search services for mobile handset users — not just Windows Mobile — although it’s struggled with the problem of branding these services. Then in a deal completed last January, Microsoft acquired geographical search provider Multimap, based in London. That deal could also play into the company’s expansion of mobile search services as well.

But if Microsoft’s intentions with this new STC are to provide more transparency to European regulators, who may be questioning the efficacy of these acquisitions, the company may want to consider Brussels as a home base.

Author:  Scott M. Fulton, III, BetaNews

On the subject of popularity — we consider it vital to long-term ranking. The objective is this: if you get a site to link to you then you gain popularity points. If that site has a lot of quality sites linking to it and it links to you, you get a lot of points, but if that site has few sites linking to it, you get only a few points. As such, a link from Microsoft.com would be worth more than a link from personal homepage.

In essence, if enough quality sites link to you your site becomes a quality site by association. So you want the best sites, not the most, to link to you. Likewise, if you link to other quality sites then your site is assumed to be a quality site by association. However, the sites must be covering the same topics as the linking page in both directions. All other links are ignored. And do not bother to buy hundreds of URL’s and cross link them. The search engines can locate them and filter them out faster than you can submit them.

Keywords phrases within a Web page are among the most important issues to achieving top ranking on search engine . it needs to pay attention closely and chosen as much relevant to site business as possible ,while analyzing the issue that keywords phrases should bring high qualify visitors to site.

List the primary keywords that pertain to this page.
Put the most important words at the beginning of the tag.
If you don’t use your keywords within the viewable text of the page, then just adding them to the Meta keywords tag is very unlikely to help with rankings for those keywords. However, some use the Meta Keyword tag as a place to put alternatives or misspellings of their keywords even though they are not on the viewable text. It is not clear whether this helps or not, but it wont hurt.
Don’t use this tag to ?stuff? or repeat keywords. This doesn’t help and could hurt with some search engines. The optimal number of keywords should be between 7 and 48 words

Good quality in-bound links have become more and more important in how the search engines rank web pages yet many website owners still have misconceptions about building links for link popularity and how links figure in their search engine optimization efforts.

How the Search Engines View Linking

Link pop, link popularity, page rank, PR, inbound links etc. are all industry lingo for the same thing; but understanding the meaning and importance of links is essential to your website’s success.

Most people think that good quality in-bound links from other sites is what the search engines use to determine if your website is an authority site. In fact, in-bound links are only part of the equation.

The search engines actually look at three areas of website links equally to determine if your website is an “authority” within your industry;

1. Internal Linking
2. Out-bound links
3. In-bound links

Important Note: In organic search engine listing results, an authority website is considered an industry leader and that is why they are listed above the rest, at the top of the search engine listing results. The leader (or authority site) is a resource on a specific market or industry. A leader would be able to provide answers, news and information on specific topics. They would also share their knowledge in the industry as well as link to other sites who share additional or related resources about those topics.

An “authority” is not afraid to share, because whether it is a brick and mortar store or an on-line website, the leader is considered to be the most knowledgeable resource that customers remember; not just the one who pushed their sale the hardest.

For instance, when you want to make a purchase you usually have a lot of questions. You may visit three or four different places but the one who was most knowledgeable and gave you the comfort, security and trust you needed, is likely to be the one you make your purchase with.

Internal Links:

These are the links that you place from one page within your site, to another page within your site.  If done correctly this provides a “map” for the engines to follow and when they do they should be following and finding pages that are related to one another.

If all of your internal links are about one subject and use that subject as the link text (anchor text) it helps you create the thought that you are an “authority” on a specific subject.  You have to determine if you will be an authority on a keyword, a topic, or an overall theme. This can be done with the keyword phrases and with the pages you choose when linking from one page to another throughout your site.

Important Note:  Often times I will review the inbound links of a site with the special site:www.domain.com operator within the search engines. When I do this I may see 500 links as the total number of returned results.  What I find is that the site may have 5 good quality inbound links from quality sites; but then the remaining links that were counted came from their own internal linking structure. Some may ask how is that so? Well if you have 500 pages that have achieved their own page rank, what you are considering an internal link from one page within your site to another page within your site can also be considered an “in-bound” link from one page to another on a page to page level.

Outbound Links

Often times commercial sites are reluctant to place outbound links to other sites; they feel it may cost them sales and traffic; but having links that leave your site and point to sites that are relevant to your industry, as well as being considered industry leaders (or authorities) helps to build your website’s relevance as an industry leader.

Be sure to truly review the site you intend to link out to, find a specific page that discusses what your pages is about and feel comfortable that you are helping your web page relevance as well as providing a resource for visitors to your site.

Inbound Links

A common misconception is that in-bound links are the key determining factor search engines use to rate and rank a web page within the top 10 listing results; this is simply not true.

All the factors listed above help to determine if you will rank well in the major search engines. When sites find success with creating large inbound links it is usually because they had to compensate for not providing outbound links, or having a good link structure within their own site; and the search engines had to rely on inbound link text to figure out what their site was really about.

Important Note:  Quality over quantity is the tone the search engines have set as of late. It is no longer a race to see how many links you can achieve, but how many you can achieve that are in your industry, that are related to the keyword phrase you are trying to rank for, how this site is considered as an industry leader, the other websites this particular website has chosen to link to and how relevant to your theme is the content that is shown on the page supplying the in-bound link.

Understanding this concept will save you a lot of time and make the links that you decide to go after more meaningful; as well as helping your site achieve the rankings you want.