AJAX is one of those things that every webmaster needs to know about. In today’s e-commerce world, every move toward making a site easier to navigate and interact with is a big plus, and using AJAX is one method of doing just that.

AJAX stands for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML–in english, that just means that xml and javascript are being used on a page to load content asynchronously with the rest of the page. In other words, a webpage that has an ajax component can fully load and remain static even while the ajax component is still processing data between the user and the server.

The beauty of AJAX is that it allows a user to do things without requiring the entire page to reload. This makes it a powerful way of improving the speed and functionality of your site. But, perhaps more importantly, it makes your site seem more professional. As end-users, we are so used to seeing interactivity cause page refreshes that whenever we interact with a page and it doesn’t refresh, that by itself can make it feel professional.

And yet, strangely enough, AJAX is not some complicated new technology. It’s just a new way of processing information, and its power, though perhaps more psychological than anything else (saving page loads isn’t that big a deal, when you stop and think about it) is sufficient to make it a staple of all the new web 2.0 technologies.

Writing AJAX into your site is not difficult if you’re already familiar with javascript. In most cases, a good webmaster will be able to integrate AJAX into a site without too much technical trouble. (A good tutorial on writing AJAX is available here.) The hard part is not writing the code; it’s recognizing which parts of your site should integrate AJAX.

Try to find an interactive part of your site that would not lose functionality by making it just a small box on your main page. For some, this might be a link to subscribe to your newsletter; although if you are marketing a product, you should keep in mind that a ’subscription confirmed’ page is not fluff, but is an important and viable marketing stategy. Another idea might be to integrate a sales presentation on your site if you have a product to sell, or a virtual home tour, if you are a realtor. Although these functions could also be done in flash, AJAX is preferable because of standards. Nearly everyone has javascript available. Also, flash loads much more slowly, since the entire program has to be uploaded before it can even begin.

As you can see, AJAX is a powerful tool that webmasters can use to increase the speed, functionality, and professionalism of their site. I hope that these ideas will convince you to start working on implemenmting AJAX on your own site. Oh, and if any of you care to share, please post any examples of AJAX you’ve used on your website in the comments. (c;

Posted by Eric Herboso.
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Good SEO often takes a lot of effort, but some of the most important parts of SEO best practices are actually quite simple.

Clean & Simple Code

Making your site validate really isn’t that difficult if you code appropriately. And believe it or not, code that validates is good for SEO. By using semantical markers the way they were meant to be used, search engine spiders will be able to better understand your site, and will then crawl it more efficiently.

But what does this mean, exactly?

First, make sure you have a good webmaster. Don’t use wysiwyg html generators–they never validate. Your webmaster should not only know what validating means, but shold be able to create validated html from scratch.

Second, using semantical markers means to use header tags (<h1>) rather than text that is simply bolded and enlarged. This is fundamentally different from how you might make headers in a word document. It also means to use emphasis and strong tags rather than italics and bold tags.

Third, always link to external files for javascript and css. Remember to try to keep your actual content as the main thing that spiders see when they crawl your page. If they have to wade through lines of javascript and style definitions, it may give up before it even reaches your content.

These three simple rules will help your SEO significantly without requiring too much effort on your part. Remember: clean code is always good.

Posted by Eric Herboso.
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Robots Exclusion Standard (also known as robots.txt protocol) is the agreement whereby search engines will not read or index certain content on your site, even though it is freely available for the public at large to view. The way it works is that a robots.txt file will instruct search engine spiders on which pages you don’t want it to read, and assuming the search engine is acting in good faith, it won’t crawl those pages. Obviously, this is not a reliable way of hiding data; you must have the cooperation of the search engine for it to work, and even pages that aren’t indexed are still available for viewing by anyone with a web browser. Yet it has its uses.

Blank robots.txt

Before I go into using a robots.txt file, I should mention that to maximize your SEO potential, you should consider allowing everything on your site to be read and indexed. By being fully open, you give yourself more chances to do well in search engine queries. Technically, you can accomplish this by not putting in a robots.txt file at all, but putting a blank robots.txt file will accomplish the same thing and have the added benefit of not creating any errors in your logs. Remember that search engines will look for robots.txt whenever they crawl your site; if it is not there, then this is logged as a 404 error. If you include a blank robots.txt file, these 404 errors will disappear, and you can still rest assured that your entire site will be crawled.

A blank robots.txt must be placed in the root directory of each subdomain, with the following text:


User-agent: *
Disallow:


The asterisk tells the spider that the fllowing rule should be followed by all user-agents (i.e. search engine spiders), and the blank disallow means nothing is disallowed.

What should you disallow?

If you have copyrighted images that you made yourself, and you don’t want people grabbing them off google, you might want to disallow your /images/ folder. If you use cgi, disallowing /cgi-bin/ might be useful, as they don’t tend to do well for SEO anyway. If you have a support page, you may not want that info to show up in web searches. If you are mirroring content on multiple pages, you definitely want to disallow crawling for all but one of those pages. All of these are good examples, and you may come up with many more.

How to Disallow Portions of Your Site

The code is actually quite simple. Just list whichever pages you want disallowed as follows:


User-agent: *
Disallow: /images/
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /dontcrawlme.html


Will adding robots.txt help my SEO?

An unsolved question in SEO circles now is whether or not including a robots.txt file will increase your ranking in the search engines. It’s possible, and some people think they have evidence for it. But the answer is not really clear, as it isn’t the kind of thing that’s important to test intensively enough to tell for sure. After all, it’s not difficult to create a blank robots.txt file, and you certainly can’t lose anything by including it. So even though I don’t know if it makes a difference, I recommend putting one up anyway.

Hopefully, this quick overview of robots.txt will help you to properly take care of your site. If you have any further questions, feel free to leave a comment.

Posted by Eric Herboso.
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Today’s article is going to be a little controversial, but in a past article I said that was okay, so I’m not worried. The reason today’s article is controversial is because I’m going to talk about URLs. And despite its innocuous name, the differing uses of URLs tend to create huge disagreements in quite knowledgeable people.

URLs are the web addresses you usually see at the top of your browser–it’s basically the pathname of a given internet document. (This article’s url, for example, might be blog.omnistaretools.com/, omnistaretools.com/blog/, or even omnistaretools.com/blog/ 2007/11/02/should-you-keep-urls-consistent/, since this content is served in multiple locations.) The idea behind URLs is that you can use them to reach specific content at any time. As such, the majority of web developers are in near unanimous agreement that once you put up content at a URL, it should stay at that URL.

But there a significant number of web designers who disagree. For reasons of simplicity, an increase in brand recognition, and overall looks, sometimes a designer will make the conscious decision to create a site that has content over multiple pages yet will keep the same apparent URL in the address bar of the browser throughout the entire site.

At this moment, I can guarantee that any web developers out there are groaning at that last paragraph. Yet it is important to remember that web developers and web designers are two very different breeds, even if sometimes you will see developers who also design on the side, and, very occasionally, designers who develop on the side.

The difference between Designers and Developers

Web Designers are the people that determine the look and feel of a website. Their vision is largely artistic. Web Developers are the people that take that vision and create code to put into action. The difference here is subtle, but it is very important to understand.

From the developer’s point of view, the best way to do things is the way they are meant to be done. He is like the engineer who wants to make the bridge functional, maintaining that functionality is what makes it beautiful. See CSS Zen Garden, for example. But for the designer, there is an overarching plan that sometimes goes beyond simple functionality. Sometimes the artist wants to add parts to the bridge that will actually decrease functionality, but in a way that makes it closer to what the designer has in their mind.

The Designer’s Argument

Keeping It Simple & Clean

Simplicity is king in design. Take a design class, and one of the first lessons you will learn is to respect clean whitespace as an integral part of any project. Emptiness can often be more striking than actual content.

In that same vein, designers often do not like the idea that when they design a webpage, they can only affect content within the confines of a browser. Good designers will often use whatever tricks they can come up with in order to break this restriction of being inside the box. This includes using menubar=no, scrollbars=no, and the like for popups, which I may go into in a future article. But it also includes making the address bar look clean, by enforcing it to refer to the homepage only, regardless of what page you are actually on.

How to Do It

Accomplishing this is actually not that difficult. You can mask an entire site to look as though it is from a different domain using functionality that is present in most domain name services, or you can do it manually yourself. Either way, the method is the same. (Omnistar Domains, for example, can do this for you automatically if you choose the ‘mask’ option.) Just create a single frame on your index page that links to your actual content. What follows below is a simplistic example.


<html>
<head>
<title>Your Page Title</title>
</head>
<frameset rows=”100%,*” border=”0″>
<frame src=”Your Content URL” frameborder=”0″ />
<frame frameborder=”0″ noresize />
</frameset>
</html>


SEO

Of course, the above example code is not good for SEO. To optimize your site for search engines, you must also put up noframes content that mirrors your important content. Although most readers will not view the noframes content (some will, of course, so make absolutely sure you include it for accessibility reasons), search engines will spider this content and tag it as being what you have on your index page. You MUST do this, if you want to take full advantage of the SEO benefits.

What benefits are those, you may ask? Well, since all of your pages have the same web address posted, you can spend all of your time increasing the pagerank for your index page, as opposed to spreading out the links to each of your individual pages. In terms of total ranking, you may lose out, but by putting all your rankings into this one page, you can almost guarantee that this one page will rank higher than it otherwise would have ranked.

Branding

This one is easy to see: by keeping your main page url in the address bar, along with everywhere else on your site, you are enforcing the capacity to remember your site name over time.

Bringing Multiple Source Content Together

Sometimes, if you’re building a test site with a limited budget, it pays to start a website out by bringing together content from another page. By using the single frame but without putting in identical content in the noframes page, you can effectively start to age a site even before you’ve gotten around to starting it. For example, my personal site is still a work in progress, yet instead of putting my domain name in stasis, I mask it over to my blog. This is useful for SEO, as the age of a site is taken into account when determining ranking. Please note that I do not use noframes to mirror content, as having the same content over multiple pages can actually hurt SEO. Only mirror content if the mirrored location is NOT indexed.

CGI

Another interesting use for this masking is to hide ugly cgi addresses. In this case, you really are not losing all that much, since generally cgi generated pages are not as permanent as they could be; especially if you end up using id=’w/e’ or similar function calls. In these cases, you don’t even get good SEO capability with the pages, since search engines tend to extremely disvalue any page whose address uses id=’w/e’ or the like.

Furthermore, such addresses are generally extremely ugly and impossible to remember manually, so there is even further justification for masking the address. Yet even as I say these words, I am confidant that the developers out there are protesting to their utmost, so I’ll move on to their point of view.

The Developer’s Argument

SEO

While it is true that by making all links to your site point to the same page, you are increasing the links to that one page, it is also true that you will get much fewer spontaneous links to content on your site. If you have a good page on widgets, for example, and users find out that if they try to link to it, they instead are putting a link to your main page, which is not the widgets page that they wanted, then they may decide not to link to you at all. This can be a problem, though it is of course minimized if your site is small, and if your best content is on your main page, as opposed to making your main page a portal to your content.

Bookmarks

Again, the issue is that content is not where users expect it to be. When a user bookmarls your site, they expect to be able to go back to what they were looking at by going back to that bookmark. But if the address they bookmarked is in fact a different page, then they may lose interest in your site later on when they return to the bookmark and are confused about where it has taken them.

Developer-hate

One of the strangest effects is that by deciding to go this way with your site, you will effectively upset any web developers who happen to visit your site. They will not consider that you made this decision on purpose, but will instead just think that you do not know what you are doing with web development. This means that for a very small subset of the population, your site will look unprofessional. If you are marketing to a technical audience, then this is a major issue. But if your audience is for people in general, or some other nontechnical group, then I wouldn’t worry about this at all, since from a design standpoint, masking is much cleaner, and so looks more professional to nontechnical people.

In conclusion…

I don’t expect to win over too many developer-oriented adherents, but then that wasn’t the point of this article. As the webmaster of your own site, it really is your site, and you can make the design decisions for your site on your own. Just make sure to take note of all the pros and cons of utilizing this masking method.

Posted by Eric Herboso.
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