According to research by Hitwise, as of December 2008, the top four search engines are (in order) Google (72.07%), Yahoo (17.79%), MSN (4.10%) and then Ask (3.15%). Each of these search engines provides a method for you to track how your site is doing in their results.

1. The first step is to make sure you have a robots.txt file and that it allows search engines to index your site.
2. The next step is to setup a sitemap, based on the sitemap protocol. This gives the major search engines a list of what pages you would like indexed and how you would like them to be indexed.

With those two steps complete the major search engines will be able to better find and index your content. To track how your site’s indexing is going for each engine, the steps are pretty much the same. Create a login, verify you own the site through either creating a file on your site or updating a meta tag, submitting a sitemap, and then tracking results:

• Google: Google.com by far the most popular search engine, provides Google Webmaster Tools. I like Google’s tools the best, as it not only provides statistics, but lets you view how individual pages, if there are any indexing errors, and allows you to diagnose your site. I think it provides the most information and I use it in combination with Google Analytics to track my traffic results.
• Yahoo: Yahoo.com provides Yahoo Site Explorer for its users to track their sites indexing. This tool provides a method to submit a sitemap and see your site indexing statistics but not much else. I still have an account registered to track how I am doing statistically.
• MSN: MSN.com provides Webmaster Tools to access indexing information. They provide a cross between Google and Yahoo tools as far as depth of information goes. While they have more information than just the statistics offered by Yahoo, it is not to par with Google’s offering.
• Ask: Ask.com does not provide a webmaster login but states that simply creating the appropriate robots.txt and sitemap files are all you need to do to help your listings. More information about Ask.com sitemap submission here.

Using these tools, why it will not increase your search ranking, will help you see how you are doing and diagnose areas of improvement. They are great tools to see how different SEO techniques are improving how your site is indexed.

The method I was using is no longer working. Google returns a “Forbidden” message now.

It was previously using the return from this link: http://www.google.com/search?client=navclient-auto&ch=6488814576&features=Rank&q=info:www.matthewstevenkelly.com

What is your websites Google Page Rank? A sites page rank shows how important Google says it is for search results. The higher the page rank, the higher and more likely the page will display in a search. Additionally, every page has its own individual page rank. With a good internal site linking structure when one page obtains a higher page rank it will pass it on to all other pages in your site. You should check your home page as well as many different pages throughout your site to see what your overall page ranking is.

Wikipedia actually has a great overly technical description of the page rank algorithm: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank

This site has a few sections that need to be secure when data is transmitted between the server and local computer. I implement an SSL certificate to accomplish this encryption. However, the issue arose as to how I ensured every time someone visited those pages they were using SSL. If I forgot even a single link to those pages and left the link as http:// instead of https:// users would get to the page unsecured. Additionally a user could always simply manually enter the URL into their web browser’s address bar without the https:// as well. The solution of course is for the web server to detect if the user is viewing the secured page with http:// and redirect them to https:// if they are.

Server Requirements:

1. Apache web server
2. Uncomment the mod_rewrite LoadModule call (LoadModule rewrite_module modules/mod_rewrite.so) in the httpd.conf file
3. Make sure AllowOverride is set to “All” instead of “None” in the Directory section of the httpd.conf file

Since this site is powered using Apache web server I can perform this switch over using mod_rewrite and the .htaccess file:

All you need to do is create a file called “.htaccess” with the above contents and put it in the directory of your web server you need to switch to SSL (remember that your server must first be configured to use SSL). This is a great feature for webstores, etc. Simply create a directory called “secure”, place all of your web store files in that directory along with the above .htaccess file and you have just ensured your web store is always using encrypted HTTPS communication. The alternative, trying to manage every link into the web store pages, is a nightmare (I’ve done it before).

Take note that since Windows will not allow a file without a name stored on your hard drive, you will need to name the file “htaccess.txt” locally and then rename it after uploading it to the web server using the FTP program used during upload.

Every so often I need a simple script to validate an “agree to terms” check box for an HTML form. Here is a simple script I came up with to perform that validation using javascript:

The code:

And a form to test with:

I always found tag clouds interesting. I think it will be fun to watch this “cloud” grow as posts continue.

So why is this in the SEO section? Tag clouds organize your pages into categories that cater to the specific word they are targeting. They are the Web 2.0 version of keywords. They add navigability to the site which helps both search engines crawl your pages, but more importantly, users trying to find the material that is relevant to them. Click on the word “SEO” below to see all the posts related to… SEO.

It should be noted that tag clouds aren’t just for blogs, they work for any site with lots of content. Large corporate sites that use tags include Amazon and Flickr. If your site utilizes the pretty much useless meta-keywords (which has been defunct for years but is still somehow touted by “SEO Experts”), now is the time to upgrade to tags and the power of the tag cloud to bring usability and improved navigation to your site. Add the SEO benefits, and it’s a no-brainer.

I just updated my web site pages with the new Google Analytics tracking code snippet. It fixes a rare javascript pop-up error message by using a try-catch snippet. If you are familiar with object oriented programming languages, try-catch statements are nothing new. If you aren’t familiar… well the Google article gives you everything you need to know.

For more on javascript try catch statements:
http://www.w3schools.com/jS/js_try_catch.asp

Have you updated your snippets?

The most important aspect of a website’s search position (beyond of course its content – which is and should be considered the most important) is its search engine friendly-ness.

Here are a few ways to make sure your website is search engine friendly:

1. Provide meaningful content. This is by far the most important factor. No matter how well formatted your website is, without meaningful cohesive content, no one will link to it or view it, and inbound links are very important for successful SEO. I found this little gem on highrankings.com: Without any links at all pointing towards your site not only will it not rank very well, but it won’t even stay in the index. Tis the way of the web. The search engines expect people to link to things those people find to be of value. So if no one ever links to your site they make the (correct) assumption that it has no value to their users. – Randy. Please keep in mind that only relevant links really improve your rankings, and therefore link farms and paid links, etc are generally a bad idea.
2. Check for broken links. These not only appear unprofessional to web visitors, they hamper a search engines ability to index your site. There are many commercial programs which can automatically and periodically check your site. Free web services exist as well: http://validator.w3.org/checklink
3. Make sure your HTML/XMTL and CSS is standards compliant. This helps solve a lot of display issues when visitors with alternative (non-Internet Explorer) browsers view your website. It also ensures search engine crawlers will be able to properly decode your site for their indexes. For HTML validation see: ” target=”_blank”>http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/
4. Analyze your pages for speed and performance. This is more for search engines than for users with slow internet connections. The faster a search engine can spider through your site, the more pages and more often they can index your content. Check out analyzers like this one:
   http://www.websiteoptimization.com/services/analyze/
5. Make good use of HTML structural elements. This means having descriptive title meta tags that match your page content, using heading tags (h1, h2, h3) for important title text on the page, keeping stylistic elements in a separate CSS file, using alt tags for images, among other things. This helps search engines understand the overall intentions of your content, and therefore index it better, bringing more relevant results to its users.
6. Create a sitemap. This lets search engines know what pages are available for indexing, and can help get new pages indexed quicker. The standard major search engines use is sitemaps.org
7. Track your progress and results. This will help you adapt your content to what your visitors are attracted to your site for. Google Analytics is a great tool: http://www.google.com/analytics/. Simply add a small javascript tag to your sites pages and you will have instant access to information such as what your viewer audience is like and what they are interested in on your site. It is a very powerful tool, and even more powerful when you trend results over several months, so get started right away!
8. Keep up to date. Read SEO blogs. Participate in SEO forums. Search engines are constantly changing, and therefore search engine optimization is a fluid process as well. I personally recommend these blogs.

What methods do you use for your site?

I am a very big proponent of technology compliance standards and strive to meet such criteria in all of my work. That includes this site, which is 100% XHTML 1.0 compliant as determined by the World Wide Web Consortium.

If you make your website compliant, you can add the compliance link to every page of your site. The code snippet below allows for users to click the link to really know you are compliant.

The best compliance to go for is XHTML. This is because XHTML is a stricter and cleaner version of HTML. XHTML not only makes it easier for people to follow your HTML code, but makes it more likely to be displayed in multiple browsers. With many surfers using browsers such as Apple Safari, Google Chrome, Mozilla FireFox, or the multiple version of Microsoft Internet Explorer, writing clean strict HTML code is the best thing you can do for usability of your site.

You may be tempted to say that a majority of “normal” web users use IE anyways, and any one technical enough to use an alternate browser will be able to figure the site out anyways. But think of all the Mac users who use Safari or Opera browsers! Do you really want to keep the technically inclined and Mac users away from your site?

I know as someone who helps users out with their website formatting I would love if every piece of HTML code I looked at was formatted XHTML compliant. This would make it much easier to troubleshoot problems when users post their code.

I hope everyone at least checks their website for compliance at the minimum, and strives to make it compliant after doing so. If you have any reservations about how worthwhile it is I encourage you to download some of the alternate browsers to Internet Explorer and see how well your website holds up:
- http://www.apple.com/safari/
- http://www.google.com/chrome
- http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/

More information:

If you are unsure what XHMTL is but want to learn more visit:
http://www.w3schools.com/xhtml/xhtml_intro.asp

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is an international consortium where Member organizations, a full-time staff, and the public work together to develop Web standards.

More information about the World Wide Web Consortium can be found here: http://www.w3.org/ and a great overview of the organization is described at the W3 Schools website: http://www.w3schools.com/w3c/w3c_intro.asp

Their site validation tool can be found here: http://validator.w3.org/

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