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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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Posted: November 2nd, 2007 at 2:11 pm
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Posted in Webmasters
Using alt tags on images is an important aspect of web design, for accessibility reasons. When designing a site, you should always take alt tags into account, simply because to not do so is to alienate an entire section of your audience.
Accessibility
It is sometimes hard to remember that a significant number of web users will interact with your site using something other than a normal configuration. Blind users often have software that will read out alt text in lieu of showing images; mobile viewers may not be able to view large images, and will instead browse your site according to alt tags; dial-up browsers generally turn off images when browsing unfamiliar sites, just to speed up surfing speed; high-tech users may be using a lynx browser to view your site; and e-mail clients almost always have images turned off as default. In each of these circumstances, the viewer will not see the images you put on your site, but just the alt text. Ignoring alt text would be to ignore the experience of these potential prospects on your site.
Thankfully, there is an easy way of fixing this. When placing an image on your site, just always remember to put in alt text describing what the image is, or what the image is for. That’s it. That’s the fix in its entirety.
(If you want to get technical for a moment, what this means is whenever you place a picture up (<img src="w/e" />), just add in an alt description, as so: <img src="w/e" alt="description" />. Of course, in reality you should also be putting in height and width attributes, but that’s a topic for a future article.)
That said, I need to also talk about the part of alt tags that I’ve been consciously omitting until now: alt tags in SEO.
Search engine optimization through alt tags?
In the past, alt tags were used in black hat SEO by stuffing in keywords that could not be seen by normal users into the alt tags. Back then, this was one of a number of techniques used to hide keywords from users while showing them to spiders indexing your site. Instead of a response to this misuse coming from search engines directly, browsers fought back by showing this text to ordinary viewers whenever a user hovered the mouse pointer over the image. But that all changed a couple of years back, when all the major search engines simultaneously decided to revise their ranking algorithms to specifically ignore all alt text content.
I’m going to repeat that to make sure it’s fully understood: Search engines do NOT consider alt text when determining your ranking. This means that keyword-stuffing your alt text is completely pointless. It does nothing to help you, and it does nothing to hurt you, in SEO terms. If all the web were just SEO, then I’d say to just forget about alt tags completely. But accessibility is also important, as if your site is accessible when your competitors’ are not, then that means you’ll get every sale that they lose due to their accessibility. And this is just as important, if not more so, than SEO.
Plus, who’s to say that next year search engines won’t start taking alt tags into consideration again?
A final related tip before I sign off for the day: consider using a description of your graphics beneath each picture. Research has shown that not only do prominent pictures receive a good percentage of users’ attention when they arrive on your site, but also any text right below that image, so long as it is clearly differentiable from the main content of the site (in italics, or small and bold). If you try this, do not eliminate alt text from the picture; but also try not to make the alt text a direct copy of the text below it. Use alt text to further describe the image, whenever possible.
And I really shouldn’t have to say this, but if you use an image that is not meant to be seen by the user (such as a whitespace image or similar), then do not enter in an alt tag. Nothing is more irritating to a blind websurfer than when every bulleted point starts off with the computer reading out “bullet point” in a robotic voice. Well… almost nothing. I guess webmasters who put white text on a white background filled with keywords is more irritating. But not by much, since you can generally just skip over paragraphs full of keywords, but if you want to hear each bullet point, then you’re pretty much forced to hear every instance of “bullet point” spoken aloud.
Posted by Eric Herboso.
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Posted: November 1st, 2007 at 10:00 am
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Posted in Webmasters, SEO Resources
Web 2.0 is all about socialization. Whereas media may have ruled in the 1.0 era, now that 2.0 is here, social media gets all the attention. Even the old guard has brought web 2.0 to their sites: major newspapers like the New York Times and The Guardian have blog comments/forums where users can give feedback, and major television news corporations like Fox News actively requests and airs user generated content, such as video of the recent California fires, or quick comments sent off to The O’Reilly Factor.
But the newest Web 2.0 trend is social bookmarking. Whereas in the old web 1.0 days, setting a bookmark meant using your browser to list a site as your favorite, and then finding that link again meant you had to go back to that same browser on that same computer, now setting a bookmark on your social bookmarking site of choice creates an online link that is not only for your reference, but is open to the public at large to see what you found that was interesting enough to bookmark.
Web 2.0 bookmarks are shared among thousands of viewers, and something as simple as setting a bookmark can now mean that that site will receive thousands of hits within the space of a few days.
What is Digg?
The most popular social bookmarking site by far is Digg. Ostensibly a bookmarking site that’s concentrated on technology news, in reality, Digg is the bookmarking site of choice for the masses. If it’s popular on the web, then you can bet it’s either already on Digg or else it was made popular well before Digg’s occurrence on the scene in 2004.
Digg works like this: someone finds a website or page they find interesting, and they submit it on Digg. Then others browsing Digg see the submission, and, if they also think it is interesting, they bookmark it as well. On Digg, the act of bookmarking is called ‘digging’, and when a site has a number of people who have bookmarked it, then one says that it has been ‘dugg’ that many times.
This is important for you as a webmaster, because when you put up useful content, it is always good to find some way of getting that content to be seen by many viewers. By making it easy for content on your site to be dugg, then you will start to get a lot of new visitors that you otherwise would not otherwise have had. It should be mentioned that, by far, the majority of these visitors will not be high quality leads, but the sheer number of visits you may receive from a popular article on Digg will certainly drive a number of conversions.
When putting up new content, try placing a button next to your article that allows readers to submit to digg.com in a single click. (Some example buttons for this use are available at Digg.com.) If you want, you might try submitting your own articles to get started, but make sure that you only do this for articles that you feel are high-quality enough to not be interpreted as spam. Make sure that when you submit your article, you put in a good description and place it in the correct category; once submitted, these options cannot be modified.
A few caveats…
Having said all of this, I want to make sure that everyone understands that the real reason why digg is useful is for SEO. It is in getting a pagerank 7 or 8 link to your content that Digg really shines. Yes, a popular story may get you more visits in one day than your site usually gets in six months. But these visits are usually by people browsing the general archive, and are not high-quality visitors. Their conversion rate will be far less than what you normally receive. Nevertheless, the high pagerank link makes it all worth it.
A final caveat is that you should remember that each webpage has its own pagerank–your site as a whole does not share pagerank with itself, though if you do extensive internal linking, it will always help. Thus when you get a story dugg, remember that the url of the page that is dugg is the only page on your site to gain that high pagerank link. Nevertheless, do not try digging the main page of your site until you feel truly comfortable with the system, as editing the digg links once posted are impossible, and the system does not allow multiple links to the same url.
Hopefully, this information has gotten you up to speed on at least one web 2.0 site that can help your SEO. In future articles, I will be covering many more.
Posted by Eric Herboso.
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Posted: October 30th, 2007 at 10:50 am
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Posted in Webmasters, SEO Resources
Good SEO requires getting others to link to your content. But most such links will be from lower to mid-range pagerank sources, especially if you’re just starting out. Getting those all-too-important high pagerank sites to link you is the holy grail of SEO, and there are only a few places to get it without paying top dollar.
(For those of you just starting to venture out into the SEO world, it might be helpful to know what pagerank is. The easy explanation is that pagerank is the term Google uses that describes how important your website is in their eyes. In order to get a high pagerank, one must, among other things, have high-ranking pagerank sites link to you. The pagerank scale ranges from 0 to 10, with 3 being quite respectable, 6 being impressive, and 10 being google.com.)
Business.com is one of those directories with a high page rank (currently their internal pages are around 6 or 7), and it costs an arm and a leg to get included in their database. But some precious few high pagerank site actually give out links for free–if you submit your site to them in the right way. CSS Zen Garden is one of them, and I’ll be detailing in a future column how to get on this pagerank 9 site. But today I will be explaining how to get your site listed on dmoz: the Open Directory Project.
The Open Directory Project (internal pages at pagerank 7-8) is a human-edited directory of websites. Its use as an online portal is unrivaled on the ‘net, and even if it weren’t a high pagerank link source, the traffic you receive simply from being listed in the directory will be well worth your time getting on the list.
The problem is that because the ODP (sometimes referred to as dmoz) is so important, its editors are very picky about what websites they accept into the directory. Thankfully, you have Omnistar Interactive at your side; if you go along with the following suggestions, you can be sure of getting your site listed in the ODP in record time.
Make sure your site is listable.
Before anything else, you should check to make sure the site you want to submit is listable at all. The ODP guidelines do not accept sites with illegal content (copyright infringement, sales of illegal substances) nor sites with little to no original content (syndication sites or affiliate sites). Please note that the ‘little to no original content’ rejection does not apply to sites which include unoriginal content, but are, for the most part, a good source of original information. If you run an affiliate site, just make sure that a majority of your site has original content of some kind. Even a 60/40 original content to affiliate ratio should be enough to allow acceptance at ODP. Some editors will actually accept lower percentages, but you should not make assumptions about who will review your submission.
Technically, you could put up temporary original content during the submission and review stage at ODP, then remove this content after your site is accepted. I cannot recommend this procedure for a number of reasons. First, original content is always useful for SEO, not just for ODP submission review. Second, if it is found out that you have done this and a competitor reports this to ODP, then you may not only have your link taken down, but also blacklisted for acceptance at ODP. This is a big deal, because google’s directory is a hard dump of the ODP directory, and so Google will also be aware of your bad practices.
Check if you’re already listed.
Always check to see if your site is already listed before making any submission. To do otherwise is to risk the wrath of your assigned editor. Go to the ODP home page and do a search for your site’s domain name, minus the ‘www’.
If your site is already listed, use the ‘update listing’ link at the top of the page where your site is listed. Please be aware that updates on listings will only be carried out if they are necessary. A change of marketing terms or copy will probably not be accepted, whereas a correction of a misspelling or factual errors probably will.
Find the right category.
I cannot stress this step enough. Find the appropriate category for your site, and the appropriate level at which it should be listed. Take your time in doing this. Failing to find the correct category may increase your wait time by ten times or more.
The reason is that each category has a different editor in charge of submissions. If an editor receives your submission, you have to wait in the queue until your turn is reached; this may be a significant amount of time in itself. At that point, the editor reviews your site, and if it is determined that you submitted to the incorrect category, the editor is supposed to find the correct category and resubmit it for you, at which point you wait in the queue again for the next editor. But in reality, if you are too lazy to find the correct category to submit to, the editor reviewing your site will likely not feel obligated to find the correct category for you either, and so you will probably be resubmitted to yet another incorrect category. This process might go on indefinitely, although it is likely that at some point an editor will decide to just reject your submission, due to your inability to follow submission guidelines.
Fully 85% of submitted sites will be rejected. A large portion of these is due to submission guidelines not being followed. To make matters worse, when a submission is rejected, no notification is issued. Often, you will be unable to tell if your submission is still waiting in a queue or if you’ve already been rejected.
Really find the right category.
This suggestion is so important that I’m listing it twice.
Check to make sure you submit to the correct language category. If your site is in Greek, submit in the /World/Greek/ category; but if it is in English and about Greek, submit it to /Science/…/Languages/…/Classical_Greek/; and if it is about Greece, submit it to /Regional/Europe/Greece/.
Also, always submit to the most specific category possible. Move down the list getting more and more specific until you are unable to be any more specific. If your site is about everything that is soccer, then /Sports/Soccer/ will be fine. But if your site is about soccer for kids, you must click on ‘kids’ in the soccer section, and it will take you to the completely separate category of /Kids_and_Teens/Sports_and_Hobbies/Sports/Soccer/.
Note that since each page is its own identity, if you have a main page about soccer, and individual pages about certain aspects of soccer, you may be able to submit multiple pages to be accepted on the ODP. If you do this, try to submit each page one at a time, and make sure that each submitted page has useful original content sufficient enough to stand on its own as an ODP link. Please be careful with this, however, as if these other pages do not stand on their own, you may find all of your links taken down by a self-righteous editor who notices it.
Optimize your site.
ODP guidelines do not specifically restrict acceptance to websites with good spelling and that practice good design. Yet, in practice, if your site has more than two ads per page, poor grammar, long download times, pop-up ads, left-to-right scrolling, redirects, activeX, spammy keywords, hidden text, forced scripts, broken links, or anything else that may annoy websurfers, then you forget about getting accepted.
The general rule is that if your site looks professional, then you have nothing to worry about. If not, then you have some cleaning up to do before you submit to the ODP. Be aware that if you submit and are rejected, you must wait six months before submitting again, or it may be interpreted as spamming.
You may also want to check your meta tags. Many ODP editors try to actually use meta tags, and if you have well-written (i.e., non-spammy) meta tags, then that keyword-rich content will be copied onto the ODP. But beware: if your meta tags are sloppy, the editor will just write up a quick accurate description that may lack every keyword you were going for, and that’s a _huge_ loss SEO-wise.
And finally, the actual submission part.
Now that you have the correct category, all you need to do is submit your url, title, and description. You do this by hitting the ’suggest url’ link while in the appropriate category.
The URL should point to a folder, and never a filename. In other words, point to http://dmoz.org rather than http://dmoz.org/index.html. Also, it should point toward the highest level possible to reach your site. Be aware that deep links to your site will likely not be accepted. If you want to link content that is deeply embedded, create a higher level folder that links to that page on your site.
For the title, use the official title of your site. Do not use “Welcome to…” or “Home Page of…” or anything that is not part of the official title.
For the description, write a short, well-written description. If it is too ’salesy’, your text may be rewritten by the editor, or even summarily rejected. Don’t use the first person, and write the description in the appropriate language.
Hurry up and wait.
At this point, your part in the process is over. Either your site will be accepted or rejected, and you have no further input in the matter. In addition, if it is rejected, you won’t even be able to tell, because no notification is given. It’s harsh, but that’s just how it is. But believe me, dealing with all this trouble is worth it. A pagerank 3 or 4 site will generally go up a full pagerank just for being accepted on the ODP.
If six months pass with no acceptance, it is considered acceptable to resubmit. Resubmitting before this period of six months is considered spamming, and may get you blacklisted. That said, some categories are very active, and the queue may in fact last for as long as a year, so be patient.
A note on taking an expired domain…
I should note that some black hat websites recommend using software to find a domain that is already on the ODP, but has since expired, and then buying that domain so as to take advantage of the links already invested in that site. While there may be some possible value in this for a site you only intend to test with in the short term, I cannot stress how important it is not to do this for an long term site you plan. Google resets pagerank for any expired domain to zero, and even though buying an expired doman will benefit from the links on ODP and elsewhere, all the major search engines will know what you have done, and they could, at any time, decide to alter their search rankings formulae to take this type of behavior into account and penalize you for it. As of now, there is no such penalty, but search engines alter their ranking formulae almost constantly, and I would not recommend risking a long term project on an issue as shady as this.
Hopefully, these suggestions will help you to get listed in dmoz without too much trouble. And that’s just good SEO practice.
Posted by Eric Herboso.
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Posted: October 26th, 2007 at 1:39 pm
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