Posts Tagged ‘stoney degeyter’

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Here is another round of questions submitted to me during a Website Architecture webinar I gave a couple months back. I wasn’t able to answer most of these questions before or during the presentation so I’ve been answering them in this Q&A series. You can check out Parts one, two, three, four, five , six and seven. This post covers questions regarding session IDs, repetitive vs. duplicate content, robots.txt files, navigation text, and maintaining link juice after a site re-design. Let’s get to it.
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There are a lot of little things that can junk up your code, but, for the most part, the search engines don’t really care. It doesn’t matter to them if your HTML validates or if you keep your code “clean” or not. When it comes to analyzing your pages for search engine rankings, none of that really matters a whole lot. But when it does matter, it matters a whole lot.

Here are some typical coding issues that can screw up your on-page optimization processes:

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When performing a site architectural review, one of the first things I look at is the site’s main navigation elements. This includes top, side and footer navigation. Together, they all play an important role in both the ability of the search engines to properly spider your website, as well as allowing your visitors to find important areas and information quickly and efficiently.

Site navigation can come in many different flavors. There isn’t just ONE way to do it correctly. If there were then every site would have navigation that looked exactly the same. So while navigation can vary greatly between sites and industries, there are certain navigational elements that should be implemented to ensure solid usability and effective website architecture.

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Many years ago I put my site through a re-design. I worked hard to make sure everything was done just right, including the images and navigation. But one thing I failed to consider was internal linking, separate from the navigational elements. It wasn’t until much later that I realized how much traffic I was losing because my internal linking was (or lack thereof) wasn’t benefiting my visitors.

In-site link implementation can make a considerable difference in how effective your optimization campaign is. Or isn’t. While your site’s primary and secondary navigation is extremely important, you shouldn’t make that the only way for visitors to get around your website. Click here to keep learning

There are advantages and disadvantages to using both absolute and relative links. Here I will explore the differences between the two, outline some pros and cons and also provide some additional information on how you can create hyperlinks in your site that will ensure that all links to your content remain in tact and properly functioning.

Back in the day, you know… the early 2000’s I loved to use relative links. Inserting relative links made websites development easy in cutting-edge programs such as Microsoft FrontPage. By using relative links you could move files around in your directory structure and FrontPage would automatically update all your link paths throughout the site, keeping them connected to the pages in their new location. No more manually updating all your internal links by hand! It was brilliant.

But now I’m not so big of a fan as relative links as I once was. I don’t have huge problems with them, but I understand the value in using absolute links rather than relative links. But perhaps I should take a step back and explain the difference between the two.

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This is a continuation of the questions I was asked during a webinar presentation on website architecture. Before and during he presentation I was submitted over 70 question and each week I’ve been answering a handful of them. This article covers questions about Wordpress, password protected pages, iframes, multiple paths to content, and filenames. Click here to keep learning

Meta description tags get a bad rap. They are often either considered to be more valuable than they really are, or dismissed as near irrelevant. The truth is that the meta description can be useful but it’s on the lower rung of importance when it comes to the on-page elements considered by the search engines. So while not a whole lot of time needs to be invested in creating workable description tags, I’ll give you a few pointers on what you need to consider.

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When a website goes into development most of the attention is usually paid to the design elements. That’s obviously the most important thing, right? The images, the layout, the colors, the navigation, how the user will interact with the site? These are all important elements to consider and necessary for developing a site that provides the best usability experience for your visitors. But what often doesn’t get enough attention is the site’s directory structure.

When I talk of a site’s directory structure I refer to both the file directory and internal link structures. They are two very different things, but in reality they should often mirror each other very closely, but not always… Click here to keep learning

In business, it is pretty much well known that it requires less of a financial investment to keep a customer than it does to acquire a new one. The internet is really no different. Once you get a visitor on your site, or get them wanting to be on your site, it takes less investment to keep them there than it does to go bring in another new visitor. Therefore it is important to do whatever you can to keep acquired visitors on your site helping them move through the conversion process. Everything, that is, short of hijacking their web browser!

One of the easiest ways to lose visitors from your site is through broken or invalid links. You’ve been there before… surfing through a website, looking for things that interest you only to click on a link that brings you to something like this:

Click here to continue reading at Search Engine Guide…

Day 1: Sessions

WOW. What a great day. The day gave us four sessions / two tracks of indepth introductions to all aspects of Search Marketing for small businesses. Each speaker had a full hour to go into more depth on their subject than any conference you’ve ever attended.

Rather than have a keynote speaker, Unleashed opened with a general overview of what Online Search Marketing is all about. Jennifer Laycock introduced three incredible presenters,
Matt McGee of Marchex and Small Business SEM (who happens to hate Twitter I do not like green eggs and ham, I do not like them Sam I am.), Wendy Piersall of sparkplugging.com and Matt Bailey of SiteLogic.com.

After the Common Sense introduction, we split out into the sessions. These are the ones I got to attend: Click here to keep learning