3 SEO Basic Tips to Improve Your Search Engine Rankings Today!

There are a lot of small details in the world of SEO that are important to understand in order to maximize your SEO campaign. Everything from PageRank sculpting using rel=nofollow, to XML sitemap feeds, to analyzing competitor backlinks. But some of the biggest gains in SEO can be accomplished by paying attention to the basics. Here are my top three basic SEO tips we apply at our search engine optimization firm that can help you increase your search engine rankings TODAY!

1. Keyword focused Page Titles - You would think in 2008 that every man, woman and child in America would know that having keywords in your Page Title is step 1 to actually getting ranked for those same keywords. Ok, so maybe I am overstating it just a little. *lol* But I still see a huge number of clients and potential clients that have web sites with the same page title on every page of the site, or with little or no keyword focus.
   
   Incidentally I have said this before and will continue to do so. Limiting page titles to 64 characters because that's all Google displays is not good for usability or SEO. Page titles should primarily serve as a reference point for users as to what the content of the page, and even the web site, is relevant to. Page titles should convey as much relevant information to the user as possible and should read like intelligent sentences. Personally I limit page titles to about 150 characters as this is near the upper limit of what we have found that Yahoo will actually index and is close to the maximum number of characters that most users are capable of seeing in their browser. Of course many of the page titles I create are no where near 150 characters, it just depends on what is called for based on the keywords and content found on the page.


2. Homepage Alt Tag - In Google, a link is a vote. Even if the link comes from your own web site. So my motto is, vote for yourself early, and often! If you don't vote for yourself, who else will? And one of the most powerful ways you can vote for yourself is via the Alt Tag (The alt="" attribute of the image tag.) on your homepage logo. Most web sites have a company logo that they link back to their homepage. And all too often that Alt tag lacks keyword focus. Most commonly the alt tag is equivalent to the company name. That's great if you are having a hard time getting ranked for your company name. But in order to maximize the SEO benefit of that link, it is much better to use at least a couple keywords in the overall phrase.
   
   According the Matt Cutts Alt tag video, Alt tags should be around 4 to 7 words in general. I lean a little closer to 7 most of the time myself as I believe that good, detailed Alt tags help with both usability and accessibility as well as SEO. For example, if I was writing an alt tag for Sony PlayStation, instead of "Sony PlayStation" as my Alt tag, I would use "Sony PlayStation Video Games and Game Systems". This tag not only conveys useful information to the end user, but also helps the search engines understand that Sony PlayStation is relevant for phrases like "video games", "video games", "video game systems" and many other phrases based on the permutations that can be derived from the keywords found in the Alt tag.
   
   This same concept should be applied to all image links, especially any images you might have in your global navigation.


3. Internal Linking - As previously discussed, a link is a vote. And while external links are certainly a huge driver of search engine rankings, internal links can often times yield very powerful results if leveraged correctly. One of the best ways to use internal linking to augment your rankings is to simply find occurrences of the keyword phrase you want to rank for, and make sure those phrases are all linked to the same page within your site. You can usually find a number of different pages on your site that mention any particular keyword phrase you are targeting. Linking all these occurrences to the same page sends a strong signal to the search engines that the page being linked to is relevant for that keyword text. This can be a very fruitful exercises if you have a blog as many people do not take enough time to link blog content to Web site content.
   
   It's good to do this exercise on a monthly or semi-monthly basis using not only the keywords that you have identified that you want to rank for, but just as importantly, the keywords you already rank for. This is especially true for the long tail keyword referrals that can be seen in your analytics report. It's very common to get a good lift for long tail keywords by just adding a handful of internal links as many of the longer tail phrases are not that competitive.

So there is your SEO plan for the day:

1 - Evaluate and add keyword focus to ALL the page titles in your Web site (do the Meta description tag too!).
2 - Add keyword focus to all image Alt tags, especially images that link
3 - Evaluate opportunities within your site to link keyword phrases you are targeting (as well as phrases that you are currently ranked for), back to the pages that have the best chance to rank highly for them. Do this on a consistent and ongoing basis.

See you at the top of the search engines! Have a great week.

Catfish

SEO on JavaScript Lightbox JS Content

Lightbox JS was popularized by Lokesh Dhakar where he made a nice friendly degradable JavaScript function where thumbnails can be linked to their larger images but load dynamically using JavaScript in a separate <div> box that loads in an animated manner. Many webmasters have adapted this and users like it too since there are no more page reloading and the need to hit the back button to go back to the thumbnail view. You can see demonstrations on the Lightbox JS website. After Lightbox JS came out, many other implementations of this technology emerged where the applications have been used not only for images, but for videos and also any content in general. The benefit of using this technique aside from the seamless fluid integration, they do not open as separate popup windows using a new web browser instance that is sometimes anti-popup blockers.

Generally, when would you use Lightbox JS?

When you need to display something briefly to the website visitor and you do not want them to leave the current page where the page has to reload again and to move back, you would have to press the back button. Often you see this in:

• Thumbnail Preview Images
  When clicked on, they open the larger image in a Lightbox.
  *Real life example. (Click on any image on the page.)


• Thumbnail Preview Videos and other Animations
  Similar to images, just using animations or videos.
  *Real life example Click on any video thumbnail.)


• Tips and Other Brief Helpful Information
  As guides to users on your website, you can give small tips here and there without them getting lost in the loading of a new page.
  *Real life example (Click for more information on each dog.)


• Fill Up of Quick Forms
  Quick questionnaires, surveys and other simple forms that would only take a few minutes or seconds to fill up. People may want to fill up these quick forms.
  *Real life example (Click on Request a Quote)

SEO Issues in using Lightbox JS and Similar Technologies

Depending on how you intend to use Lightbox, each way can have their own unique SEO issue.

• Content Written by JavaScript/AJAX
  If the content of the dHTML popup window is written by AJAX or even JavaScript alone, search engines disregard this content.


• Loss of keyword focus with multiple Lightboxes
  Content of a Lightbox JS popup can be already existing on the same page but are not displayed right away using some CSS and/or JavaScript tricks and their contents only appear when pulled by the dHTML popup. Here is an *example of this where three lightboxes are on top, but the content is actually on the page already as non-displayed <div> boxes.
  
  Somehow this is sometimes good because the content can be read by the search engines as they are all on the same page. This works well for photo galleries with picture descriptions. At least we know search engines can read the content.
  
  This does not work if various Lightbox popups were meant to have different topics and this mixes the focus of the keywords on a single page.


• Pulled from a different URL
  This may solve issues with keyword focus, as you selectively choose the content on the page and anything in a Lightbox can be on a separate page not diluting the content focus. Although the problem here is the content will be pulled in various ways, either AJAX or HTML iframes, where both have crawling issues.

SEO Solution to Lightbox JS content

There are many out-of-the box code, ready to use for the Lightbox JS effect. Here are a few:

• Lightbox JS


• Thickbox


• HighSlide


• Greybox


• Suckerfish HoverLightbox Redux


• Lighbox Gone Wild

You can totally make one from scratch or you can use one of the above and modify the code. For the purposes of this discussion, I chose Greybox. Because it is easy to use having the content source as a separate file. This solves the problem of content focus dilution. Greybox is pretty easy to implement by any web designer/developer and links are clean and degrades gracefully which is a good practice of using JavaScript and AJAX for SEO.

The solution does not rely on modifying Greybox in any way. The solution is really within the file that loads within the Greybox.

To explain this further, look at the *SEO friendly Lightbox JS example found here using Greybox.

There are two links found on that page. The first one is how you normally implement Greybox and the second is how it is done to make it SEO friendly.

The nice thing with these Lightboxes, the links are normal links with normal <a href="..."> values, this way they are crawled properly by search engines which is good. The not so good part is when the contents of these Lightboxes get indexed by search engines, they are indexing a partial page and you do not necessarily want people to land on this partial page. Thus you can use JavaScript to redirect to a similar page with the same content but with the navigation and design elements the page normally has.

Why a JavaScript redirect?

Search engines disregard JavaScript, and this is what you really want to happen since the design elements are only for the users and not for the search engines. Just be very careful to make the content of both the Lightbox and standalone page exactly the same to avoid running into any red flags that may perceive the site do be hiding any content.



Notice in the examples above, there is no difference between the two implementations in terms of how it executes. Although as search engines crawl the contents of these Lightboxes, and when visited directly on a link from a search engine, people will see two different looking pages.



When both implementations will be crawled and indexed, the link found in search engine results will appear differently. The normal implementation will display a partial page that nobody would want to go to. This can be as worse as a 404 page. Because it seems to go nowhere and appears to be not part of the site. The optimized Lightbox JS example on the right will show something else. It will still pull in the correct page template and would work as a standalone perfectly fine. Thus pleasing both search engines and human visitors of your website.

Greybox uses an iframe running this file and parameter: greybox/loader_frame.html?s=0 Depending where you saved your greybox files, the absolute URL of this will be your referring URL. Using your favorite scripting language, detect the referring URL and redirect by JavaScript to a page for humans with the exact same content but with the design elements and Navigations. Also include a noindex tag on this page to avoid any duplicate content issues. In the examples posted, the SEO friendly Lightbox JS loads seofriendly.php, but if the referring URL is not Greybox, it redirects to a noindex page seofriendlyuser.php. This example used PHP with the following code:

<?php if($_SERVER[HTTP_REFERER]
   !="http://www.ajaxoptimize.com/seogreybox/js/greybox/loader_frame.html?s=0"){ ?>
<script type="text/javascript" language="javascript">
   <!--
      window.location = "seofriendlyuser.php";
   //-->
</script>
<? } ?>

Although this example was in PHP, this could also be done in other languages. You may need to do your own research on that for .Net, ASP, Cold Fusion, Perl, MivaScript, JSP, Phyton, TCL and other languages

*Examples above are used to show that this is used by current day web designers. BusinessOnLine is not associated with any of the websites used above. The examples above may change or modify their website over time and may not be valid examples in the future but were valid examples during the time this blog post was first written.

Top 5 Ways to Evalute the SEO Ability of Your Creative Agency or Web Design Firm

One of the things that I notice about a lot of Web Design firms and even creative agencies who say they bake SEO into everything they do, is that very few of them bake it into there own sites. Now I don't want to call anyone out today but I do want to give people a quick little guide on the top five things to look for when evaluating the SEO ability of design firm that says they know SEO. I mean, if SEO is part of their overall offering, they would be silly not to SEO their own site right? And if they haven't taken the time to do that, is that a firm that you can really feel confident in? I think you know my answer. *lol* So here is the top 5 things that I would look for in a design firms web site that will give you some idea if they know what they are doing:

1) Are their page titles unique on every page and are they keyword focused. If you see a site with Page Titles like "About Us - Company Name", they have not been optimized. Page Titles should read like intelligent sentences or phrases and convey as much information about the content of the page as possible. If you see short page titles that lack keyword focus in relation to the content that is on the page, that's a sure sign that the optimization skills of this company are lacking.

2) Are all their pages indexed in Google, Yahoo and MSN? Many times if a site is dynamic or has extra long URL strings with too many parameters, search engines can have some difficulty indexing pages. Doing a site:www.domain.com search on the company URL can tell you if the pages you see on the Web site are indexed. If they are not, or there are issues with duplicate content where content is indexed, your company might not be the best option for SEO.

3) And speaking of dynamic URL strings, if your design firm has you using URLs that are a mile long with more than 4 or 5 parameters, you want to recheck #2 to see if those pages are indexed. Google does fairly well with long URL strings nowadays although they are inconsistent at best. The other engines are farther behind in their ability to understand and rank these types of pages. So it's best to be on the safe side and have URL strings which are as short and easy to understand as possible.

4) Flash - While there have been a lot of advancements over the last year in SEO, it is still not recommended that your site be completely based in Flash. Usability and accessibility concerns aside, unless your design team has a specific solution to optimize your Flash, like using FlashObject or one of the other Flash Solutions that Benj has recommended, your SEO millage may vary. And if they put your primary navigation for your site in Flash with no alternative way for spiders to see it, you have clearly found someone who does not have a SEO.

5) JavaScript - Again, if the entire site navigation is built in JavaScript with no alternative text link navigation or noscript tag, odds are the company in question has a very limited understanding of SEO.

Obviously there is a lot more to SEO than these five issues. But these are pretty easy to spot and can be a quick clue as to the relative sophistication level of your Web design firm or creative agency as it relates to SEO. If they don't offer SEO as part of their services, then these types of issues may be expected. But if they do offer SEO and these issues exist, it might be time to re-evaluate whether or not you want to engage that company for SEO work.

I hope that helps a few people in their decision making process. Have a great week!