From MSN.com to Live.com and finally Bing.com, it is now branding itself as a “decision engine.” Do they mean Bing has some unique decision algorithm in giving relevant results and that it can decide on what are the best sites for you to look at? Not really. It is a decision engine that gives you various types of results that may help you decide on what you are looking for. In my opinion this just sounds like Google Universal Search Results, they just gave it a new name (from Live to Bing) and slapped a full marketing campaign on various advertising mediums to spread the word of the Gospel of Bing everywhere.

Should I even care about Bing?

From daily SEO interactions with SEO friends working at an SEO firm, SEO friends on forums I interact with daily, to some SEO competitors who joined Sulumits Retsambew SEO Contest, a large percent of SEO professionals do not even care about Bing because they believe Google has the majority search usage worldwide. Based on some research data by comScore, last April 2009, Google websites receive about 8 times more search queries than Microsoft websites.

Is this the case forever? We cannot really say since Microsoft is really pushing their search engine in this all out marketing campaign for Bing. There are some sites showing Bing gaining in market share. As for the usage, several news sites and blogs are showing an increase in Bing search traffic but this can still be due to the campaign that makes everyone curious about Bing, thus everyone checks it out. In the end, it will still boil down to how pleased the search engine users are in being able to look for what they are searching for. So we still have yet to see in the next few months if Bing’s traffic sticks, continues to increase or will drop again to being only the 3rd most used search engine again.

Going back to the question: should you even care about Bing? Well, if Bing is only 8.2% of all search queries, this can still be a big number. The US has 220 million Internet users and about 73% of those use search engines for shopping. That is an estimated 13 million people searching with Bing in the US. Still a large market to target. Ok, you can say my numbers are not accurate. My B2C Local Business Search data was from Nielsen back in September 2007, but even 50% of 13 million is still a significant amount of people using Bing.

I’m an SEO and what do I need to know about Bing?

Ok SEO people, what do we need to know? Since Live.com, we have been seeing Microsoft reach out to SEO people, when they came out with their own XML Sitemap submission area, with some basic top 5 backlink info, and making an MS Excel plugin for keyword research from Microsoft’s AdCenter. Now with Bing, they have released a Bing webmaster guideline document for the SEO people that care about Bing.

Most SEO concepts are the same throughout search engines. Good SEO best practices are valid for most search engines. And in this 24 pages of information of Bing’s webmaster guidelines, after reading all of it, I will try to sum it up into 3 key bullet points that may be unique to Bing:

1. Target Category Keywords that appear on the upper left of the SERPs. You want to make sure you appear on all of them that are good converting keywords for your business. People usually narrow down search results by adding in keyword modifiers and Bing suggest these, so that people do not have to think or type and may find it convenient to click. It is even placed on the top left sidebar where navigational menus people normally click on.
2. Optimize the Document Preview of your pages. All SEO people know that the Title tag and Meta description tag does not only help in the ranking process but if written well, these can be more compelling to click and increases CTR. Now aside from these two, Bing now has the Document preview which based on current observations it is pulling in the initial content found on the page. Thus, for your first few paragraphs, it would be ideal to write something very unique that compels users to click on.Having your address and phone number which is a normal practice for Local SEO is a good thing since Document Preview will try to look for this information and place it in the preview window.
   If you do not want this feature enabled, you can use the nopreview tag.
   <meta name=”robots” content=”nopreview” />
3. Implement SEO Flash Best Practices. Bing has expressed their sophistication in this technology by specifically stating the following:
   

   When titles and/or Meta descriptions don’t exist on an HTML page, at runtime Bing creates a best-effort caption from relevant external sources of reliable information to populate the caption with meaningful data for the searcher. Bing, in the effort to improve searcher experience and avoid empty captions, can even construct captions using keyword inbound link text from external, authoritative websites to help create basic captions where no publisher data exists.

   Initially this sounds good. But sometimes any information based on other websites may give you a limited amount of control. Every business has enemies and sometimes even if the enemies are a minority, they can sometimes be the “noisiest” online and could be creating a significant amount of negative publicity for your business. You do not want Bing to show this information thus as a precautionary measure: always do Flash properly.

Everything else mentioned in their webmaster guideline whitepaper is all standard SEO best practices applicable to other search engines, such as good content, unique title tags and Meta tags, avoid duplicate content, etc.

So if you know SEO already these are the 3 main differences you might want to look at when optimizing for Bing.

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1. The importance of measuring the right data from each step in the “search cycle” and then,…
2. Taking action based on that data.

Many people get caught up in metrics and measuring all kinds of things that don’t drive any tactical optimization activities. In an ongoing SEO campaign, resources for continued optimization need to be prioritized based on analytics data, so as to maximize ROI. Therefore, we need to measure the right data in each step of the “search cycle” in order to understand the proper allocation of those resources.

The “search cycle” is a five step process that illustrates how potential customers become customers through search:

Each of the steps in this process have certain metrics that can be leveraged to drive SEO strategy. Because of time constraints I was only able to discuss rankings and traffic at my presentation. For today’s blog post, I will be discussing Search Rankings and Wednesday I will write about Search Traffic.

Search Rankings:

In the search rankings phase of the cycle, its obvious that the primary metric of concern is the ranking of a phrase. But it’s important to note that where the phrase is ranked is not always consistent between users. Between localization, personalization, universal search results and ranking fluctuations between data centers, ranking #1 for a particular phrase in Google, Yahoo or MSN, isn’t as clear cut as it once was. That isn’t to say that top listings for competitive keyword phrases aren’t important, they certainly are. But they are getting harder to measure accurately.

It’s also worth noting that typically, an enterprise level Web site that gets thousands of search visitors a month, is not able to check rankings for every keyword permutation that they are interested in. Therefore they chose a smaller set of “fat head” keywords that are competitive and will in theory, generate the highest revenue or at least search traffic. But in reality, if you optimize a site for a three word phrase, you are likely also optimizing it for dozens if not hundreds more related long tail keyword phrases. And the resulting taffic from these long tail keywords for sites that target high traffic niches can be significant.

The main takeaway here is that rankings in and of themselves don’t tell the whole story about your SEO campaign. So its important not to rely solely on rankings as the primary metric of success. It’s certainly a key indicator, but the rest of the search cycle must be considered in order to both understand and improve your ROI from search.

So with that in mind, I gave some tips on how to use search rankings to drive SEO strategy:

1. You should create a “keyword map” in Excel that lists all of the keyword phrases that you are targeting as well as which URL you would like ranked for that URL. The keyword map serves a number of purposes.One, it is a permanent record of which pages have been optimized for which keywords. This is very helpful in both internal and external link development on an ongoing basis.Two, in the event that a different page on your site is listed for a particular keyword, it allows you to see the differences in what content you think is most relevant for that phrase versus which content Google thinks is most relevant. Often times this will provide excellent clues on how to improve your optimization.

   Additionally, you can then ensure that the messaging on the page that is ranked, is consistent with the page you thought was going to be ranked, thereby improving your conversion rate. In other words, if you sell a product and you have a blog post about the product, and the blog post gets more links and gets ranked higher than the product page, make sure you have a “buy now” button on the blog post.

2. The second way rankings can drive strategy is understanding that rankings in the top 10 are the only rankings that really matter, because they are the only rankings that consistently produce traffic. Therefore, it makes sense to monitor your top keywords to see which in are the top 30 or so that are not in the top 10. These rankings illustrate an immediate opportunity where a few small improvements can make a big difference.
3. Additionally, it pays to look at long tail keywords that convert well and add them to your optimization. Often times it doesn’t take much optimization to really improve your ranking for a long tail keyword. And the difference in traffic between a #8 listing and a #3 listing can be substancial.

In summary, any ranking not in the top 10 represents an opportunity for continued optimization. There are usually more opportunities for more SEO (content, internal links, external links, etc) than there are resources. In that event, it is useful to prioritize based on which terms convert better, which terms drive the most profitable sales and which terms are in markets where the company has a competitive advantage. It is advantageous to have a keyword map that serves as a master gameplan for your optimization. This will allow you to understand if your visitors are going where you want them to and that they see messaging that will result in the highest possible conversions. Adding long tail keyword phrases to your map that convert well according to your analytics and then optimizing for those phrases can significantly increase rankings for those phrases.

Rankings are really just the tip of the iceberg as it relates to what you need to measure to maximize your ROI for your organic search campaign. In my next blog post, I will talk about traffic metrics, what’s important, what isn’t, and how that data should drive your ongoing optimization.

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• March 3, 2009 -- Eliminate Potential Google Duplicate Content Penalty with SEO Tag "REL=Canonical" (5)

*special note about “duplicate content penalties”: Some people feel that it is very important to be clear that a duplicate content “penalty” is not really a penalty. Google is not punishing your site for having a Web page that has the same content as another Web page. But what it is happening is, if your page is not the original version of the content, it is highly likely that your page will be put into the supplemental index which makes it less likely to rank well for competitive terms. So in effect, it’s the same end result of incurring a penalty but in fact there has been no “penalty.” For some reason this game of semantics is very important to some members of the SEO community, so I wanted to make sure I was clear with everyone that I know the phrase “duplicate content penalty” is not entirely accurate, but it is how most people view the situation.

Having said that, here are some of the issues that the rel=canonical tag can help with:

1. Capitalization: The search engines treat each unique URL string as a separate entity. So any variation in a URL, no matter how slight, creates a new URL in the eyes of the search engine. This includes differences in capitalization, although Google specifically has been much better at figuring this out on its own since the “Big Daddy” update. So for example, when an engine indexes these URLs:
   http://www.businessol.com/seo-blog/ and http://www.businessol.com/Seo-Blog/ it sees two different URLs for the same content.

   This happens often because Webmasters are not standardized in the way that they link to 3rd party websites. Some Webmasters and blogs capitalize letters in URLs out of coding practices or habit.

   In the old days, Google would have not been able by itself to figure out that these two URLs are the same page. And therefore one of these two URLs (most likely the one with the least amount of Page Rank) would have been put into supplemental results and the links that pointed to it would essentially be lost (because now they point to a page in the supplemental results that isn’t going to rank for much and they are not helping the other URL that is listed in Google). But nowadays, Google is pretty good about figuring this stuff out although not perfect. And the other engines are not very good at this kind of thing. So by including the Rel=Canonical tag on every page of the site, you make it easy for all the engines to consolidate URLs that have capitalization problems.

2. Dynamic URL Strings: Whether its tracking codes like www.domain.com?tracking-code or CMS systems that generate multiple URLs for the same page, the issues with these pages are the same as the issues for capitalization. But now instead of an elaborate 301 redirect strategy or costly adjustments to your backend system, this simple tag solves the problem.
3. Other Canonical Issues: Some other issues that Google already does fairly well but that can still cause problems include www versus non www version of the Web site (domain.com versus www.domain.com), session IDs and also linking using IP addresses. This tag if correctly implemented, should fix all of these problems.

Given the number of potential issues that this tag can correct, it should be added to every page of your site. If your site is dynamic, this should be a pretty easy addition.

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Good news from Google, Yahoo and MSN/Live who have announced support for the rel=”canonical” tag. This new tag with the following syntax:

<link rel=”canonical” href=”http://www.example.com/product.php?item=whatever”>

This should be placed in the head section of each page of the site, with the URL that should be used as the primary URL for that page.

So if for example, if this page is linked to somewhere in the site with this URL:

http://www.example.com/product.php?item=whatever&trackingid=1234

where a tracking id has been appended, Google, Yahoo and MSN will now understand that this page is really the original:

http://www.example.com/product.php?item=whatever

Therefore the duplicate URL is not indexed and the link connectivity is assigned to the right page. This is a wonderful new tool that now allows sites with extensive tracking codes to use that technology without duplicate content issues. Additionally, sites have CMS systems or dynamic Web platforms that generate multiple URL combinations for the same page can now be brought under control without a huge list of 301 redirects. Cheers to the search engines for getting this one right.

Catfish

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Blog > Read other blogs in your industry > Participate on those blogs by commenting > Build a link to your blog in your comment > reap the rewards

Blog commenting is one of the best ways to market your blog if you are incubating a brand new blog or want to increase your readership and build quality links on an already established blog.
If you make interesting/intelligent/insightful comments on highly trafficked and well recognized blogs in your industry and build links to your site through your nickname or within the comment itself, you will be;

1. attracting many relevant visitors
2. building quality links to your blog
3. promoting your brand
4. building some authority in your industry

Once you leave a comment with a link on someone’s blog, they will check out your site. So there is at least one relevant visitor to your blog per comment. If the blog you’re commenting on is in your industry then there is at least one relevant link (we will discuss nofollow / dofollow a bit latter) to your site for your commenting effort.

If you make interesting comments on highly trafficked blogs in your industry, your potential for relevant traffic is infinite. You are also putting yourself in a position to generate natural links because that blogger that followed your link may be looking for topics to cover for their next blog post and just may reference your content.

Best practices for blog commenting for link building include; writing a compelling blog post and then searching on Google Blog Search for any other bloggers that may be writing about the same or similar topic. Read the entire blog post and the other comments. Make useful comments and keyword focus your username (do this intelligently, as keyword focused usernames tend to sound spammy.) Some bloggers are more strict than others when it comes to keyword focused usernames (especially do follow blogs) so read the blog’s commenting policy if they have one. If the blogger has strict rules for leaving links, follow those rules to the T even if it means not leaving a link at all. Use Cligs to track the clicks you get from your commenting effort.

Avoid using any automated blog commenting software and make sure that your comment is not mistaken for spam. Bloggers are especially acute to any form of spam and will report spam by using programs such as Akismet . This is a program that blocks certain commentators based on email and IP addresses as well as the commentator’s name. The rule of thumb is to make your comment sound relevant to the post and avoid phrases such as “I like your blog” or “great post” or “interesting insight”. The bottom line is remembering that your comment will go through a human review and concentrating on making an insightful comment that adds interest and attracts relevant visitors should alleviate any spammy looking comments. If you find that you are having a difficult time coming up with a comment that you like on a certain post than skip it and find a post that you have something of value to add.

Comment on all blogs that you find interesting and relevant to your industry, however commenting on dofollow blogs will help your SEO effort, (don’t just comment on a dofollow for the sake of a link, make sure it’s relevant and that the page your linking has real value to those following the link.) Remember that you are an evangelist for your brand and people can see right through you if your intentions are in the wrong place.

Chances are you will end up finding a few blogs that you really like, when you do, submit the best posts to your favorite bookmarking site, this will add to your profile at your social bookmarking site of choice which will increase your authority at such sites. By commenting on these blogs and submitting posts to bookmarking sites you will end up building a relationship with that blogger. They will start to read your blog, submit your posts to bookmarking sites and eventually you will develop some quality banter which can lead to industry contacts. Link building is about cultivating relationships and this is one of the best strategies to develop those relationships and give back to the community.

Image Credits: Comment box by: Seigel Display Products

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Here are some of the highlights:

1) Always focus on User Experience.
2) Always have unique page titles and Meta descriptions.
3) Use short concise URL strings, preferably with descriptive words.
4) Make your site navigation as flat as possible.
5) Avoid using generic page names like page1.html.
6) Be consistent in your internal linking (caps versus no caps, www versus no www).
7) One URL to each document, avoid duplicate URL paths to the same content.
Have an xml and html sitemap with no errors.
9) Use breadcrumb navigation
10) Make sure the link text of all internal links is keyword focused.

There is a lot more in this document that makes for a great read about SEO, especially for those just learning the art. Reading it is the perfect way for any SEO to start a great new year.

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There are a number of reasons why any company should consider blogging. The social media opportunities, networking opportunities and ability to enhance brand reputation are all compelling reasons to participate in blogging. Often times however, these benefits are hard to quantify in a way that illustrates the ROI that is achieved through blogging. Fortunately, blogging is also one of the best available tools to improve your SEO campaign if leveraged properly. Therefore, it is much easier to justify the expense of blogging when one can show the direct SEO benefit to the Web site because search activity is much easier to tie to ROI than brand management or even social media in many cases. Here are the 3 of the top ways that you can use your blog to enhance your SEO campaign:

1. Create new content
2. Create new internal link opportunities
3. Create new external links

While it may seem obvious, one of the biggest advantages that a blog gives you with respect to SEO, is a consistent source of new keyword focused content. Most Web sites do not update or add content very frequently. In many cases at the enterprise level, adding or changing content requires a lot of resources. Often times the content production team must agree to add or modify the content, the marketing and branding people might have something to say about it, and then you need to wait for the IT production schedule to allow you to publish. The end result is not much new content.

Blogging typically allows content producers to circumvent this entire process because most of the time, blog post topics are controlled by bloggers. Because the content lives outside the main information architecture of the site, the marketing team usually has less concern about the impact of the content to the overall site design, messaging and conversion funnel. This also allows for more flexibility in terms of what content can be produced for the blog and therefore, what keyword phrases can be targeted. And because the blog enables the author to publish directly to the Web site, the content production schedule is not dependent on the IT production schedule. For these reasons, effective blogging can give you a huge competitive advantage in your ability to produce keyword focused content.

Another benefit that all this additional content affords your SEO campaign is the ability to create additional internal links to relevant content from new blog posts. Those new internal links will enhance the ranking opportunity of the pages they link to. Having an ongoing strategy to create internal links from blog posts to relevant pages within your Web site should be a key element in your ongoing SEO campaign. If you’re on Wordpress, you can make this process easier by using the following plugin:

Cross Linker Wordpress Plugin

Blogging not only creates additional internal linking opportunities, it is also one of the best ways to acquire one way external links. There are three primary reasons that blogs are so effective for link building.

First, assuming you are creating compelling content that helps your users solve problems, you will naturally acquire links from Webmasters and bloggers who link to your content as a reference. This is especially true of bloggers, who tend to link to other blog posts as references or as talking points for their own blog posts, much more frequently than do traditional Web masters.

Second, blogs humanize your Web site and give you a more personal voice in the blogosphere which allows you to develop more personal relationships with other bloggers. These relationships often result in links as well as votes for your content in social bookmarking networks. And because a large percentage of the users who read social bookmarking sites like Digg and social news sites like Delicious are bloggers, favorable exposure on these types of sites can also produce a number of high quality, relevant, one way back links. Additionally, inclusion and subsequently links on some social media sites like Mixx.com, can also provide some direct SEO value.

Third, blogs publish their stories through RSS feeds. RSS stands for really simple syndication. An RSS feed is a data file that contains information and content from your blog in a standardized format that readers can understand. Some Webmasters include these feeds as a supplement to their own web site content through a feed aggregator that displays snippets of your blog posts on their site. The snippet will have a link back to your blog post for the complete blog post, thus establishing a link to your site. Again this assumes that you are creating thought leading content that Web masters and bloggers can use as a reference.

Blogging is a great tool for SEO. It allows you to create new keyword focused content easily, creates new internal linking opportunities and can be a huge catalyst for external links. By analyzing the search traffic that your blog brings in as well as the links that it attracts, you can begin to paint a more accurate picture of the ROI that your blogging efforts are having on your SEO campaign.

Photo Credits: Thiago Felipe Festa & Beau de Noir

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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

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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.

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• November 10, 2008 -- Top 5 Ways to Evalute the SEO Ability of Your Creative Agency or Web Design Firm (9)

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!

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• November 24, 2008 -- 3 SEO Basic Tips to Improve Your Search Engine Rankings Today! (6)
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