Daniel Coburn

I have worked in several different development environments in my time working on and off line.  A consistent problem with any software is the developers inability to determine exactly what a customer is going to experience.  Why? Because even if a developer creating a windows application tests it on Vista and XP, the customer might have a newer service pack, or some sort of add-on that might conflict, or a person is running bootcamp on a mac.  While this can also be true in web development it works several different ways, both good and bad.

1. There are so many different browsers you can regression test only so far before you have to say, “We no longer Support IE 4″
2. With the addition of plugin’s to firefox you have no clue what the total environment will be, and there is a slight chance of a user having something “odd” going on.

But where you can control items is in your QA process: Development = QA = Staging = Production.

When I worked at Northrup and developed testing software for the ICBM program we knew that ever aspect of our environments were identical and we never had hiccups (ok once we did, but that was a low level windows configuration).  But for all of our testing I knew that the data in test was only 1 week old compared to production, all the images in staging matched all 3 other environments etc.

If I logged into QA a week before a deploy I knew the page would look exactly how it would show up in production.

Why am I bringing this up? Very simply, it’s hard to test a product when you don’t know if it will match production.  A particular issue I’m referring too is a server configuration that is really out of the hands of development, and really cause a huge SEO headache over the weekend.  What was it? Imagine this you have several top level domains like www.danielcoburn.com and www.bethegamer.com, but for your testing and staging you consolidate onto one domain like: test-daniel.danielcoburn.com and test-gamer.danielcoburn.com.  While you can maintain the data and images like I mentioned you lose one function that you would never look for except for today.

The development crew created a great single sign on for all of our systems, and they would share a cookie with the primary domain, in test no problem, they actually all exist on the same domain, but in production they are now separate cookies that could cause other problems.  And we found one this weekend. After several back and forths with development we figured out the issue and why we were watching pages fall off of Google daily.  The damage was however done, and we are now working to recover.  But at the end of the day the lesson here is to try to get your environments 100% in sync if you can.  If you cannot, be vigilant in your monitoring of your site, you never know when one will bite you, or you might “save the world”

In recent weeks I’ve been doing a lot of talking at the office about SEO lately, and how important it is to the organization as a whole.  I hear many people talk about what I like to call SEO 303, which is “advanced” methods that involve link building, external content, on site content and keyword density.  It’s all good, but as I’ve mentioned before you have to build the foundation of your site, in order to support SEO strategies.

In my previous post, I spoke about sitemaps, and those are imperative for you website, if you page isn’t index, it will never be found.  But also if your page isn’t found, what does the search engines see?

Another foundation is to solidify your page not found (404) page and use it for good vs. evil.  Evil is when you simply put a basic screen that says simply ‘page not found’, even worse is to forward it to our homepage.  Where I am currently at we do both! If you type in site.com/blah you go to the homepage, but if you add an extension (site.com/blah.as) you got to a basic page not found error.  These are is bad for a couple of reasons:

1. If a link into your site is mistyped a person can have a bad experience
2. If you have bad links internally you give the wrong information.

So what should a 404 contain?

1. An apology
2. Something that lets the customer know they are on the right page.
3. A search box
4. A link to a sitemap, to help customers and bots find their way.
5. The proper 404 header
6. A link to your homepage

An Apology – I someone got to a 404 page it’s your fault, either you changed a page, typed a link wrong, or have something pointing to your site that is incorrect.  It’s important to let the visitor know it was a mistake and you are sorry for the inconvenience.

Something letting them know they are in the right place – A person that gets a 404 needs to know they are in the right place, either a logo, sites name, or whatever, simple is good, or simply make a 404 page out of your site skin for continuity.

A Search Box – The customer is obviously lost, either by their own fault, your fault, or a third party link fault, but regardless of blame they are their to find somethings, so give them the opportunity to search and get more detailed information on things on your site.  This could be an ideal way to save a sale and get a person back into the funnel.

Link to a sitemap – Giving customers the ability to browse your site vs. search can also work to your advantage, not everyone wants to search, they might just want to browse.  Never a bad idea to give someone a second option on how to find what they want.

Proper 404 header – This is not that important for humans, but it is very important to search engines and analytics software.  Your server needs to send the complete 404 error header when it is delivered to a user.  If it is not configured correctly, it will send a status of 200 which tells the browser and search engine that everything is OK.

Put a link to your homepage -The homepage is one of the most visited pages on your site, and there is a good chance that a customer is looking for that page.  If you have your logo on the page make sure you make it clickable to your homepage, and also give them a link that states something along the lines of “Visit our Homepage”…

Today I read an article about how sitemap.xml files are not as useful as some people say they are in the world of SEO.  The argument was just because you have a page in the Google, Yahoo, MSN etc. index doesn’t get it ranked.  And I completely agree with them that just because it’s there doesn’t give it rank.  So the question needs to be why use a sitemap.xml file, and once you have them what do you do? Also what about a human consumable sitemap? What’s it’s function and why should you have one that is bot friendly?

First lets tackle the sitemap.xml.  These things are must haves, for a few of reasons.  They help you get your full site indexed, they help you get new pages into the indexes fast, they allow navigation of pages that might be isolated because of no-follow strategies,  and they let you set information about each page, such as how often it’s modified and it’s page priority.

A sitemap.xml is only going to get your pages into the search engine, it will be up to the public (and to some level you) to “vote” on how important those pages are to the world. 

What are the first steps to creating a sitemap.xml file? There are several ways to create a file, the simplest is to find an application that will spider your site and create an xml file for you… easy enough, but what happens if you have massive amounts of pages? Firstly you cannot exceed 50k links per file or 10 mb max, so if you do have more you will have to split your map up into multiple pieces.  The syntax for the “root” is pretty simple

<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”UTF-8″?>
<sitemapindex xmlns=”http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9″>
  <sitemap>
    <loc>http://www.yoursite.com/sitemap_01.xml</loc>
    <lastmod>2007-01-08</lastmod>
  </sitemap>
 <sitemap>
    <loc>http://www.yoursite.com/sitemap_02.xml</loc>
    <lastmod>2007-01-08</lastmod>
  </sitemap>
</sitemapindex>

This will allow a company to get million’s of pages indexed into search engines, vs. thousands.  Once you get the pages in the index, now the magic begins.  Let us jump to user consumable sitemaps and their SEO benefit or purpose.

A user consumable sitemap is one that a person could go to and click around to view pages, ALL pages on your website.  One of the major sin’s I’ve seen is the development of really cool looking sitemaps, that are dhtml/javascript heavy and use those technologies to render elements on clicks, or throw AJAX content into a div for user consumption.  The biggest problem here is that search engines cannot read any of it.  The pages need to be bot friend and user consumable.  This means, no more than 100 links per page and keyword rich links. 

“Daniel WHAT? ONLY 100 LINKS!” — yes 100 links otherwise you get link spammy and that’s not very good, it makes the spiders think you are a link farm.  So there’s this really cool thing called Pagination! And yes those links need to be bot friendly too so they can find the next page.

What this will do is help start creating an internal linking that will allow spiders to find your pages, and start building internal link juice.  This will begin to start allowing them to be one of the more popular kids on the block.  Now all you have to do is start working on external content…. but that’s down the road a bit.

I’m helping a friend out with some paid campaigns they are doing and have started to help them do some keyword research.  One of the best tools to use is actually Google’s Keyword tool.  It will tell you the approximate search volume, and even the monthly trends to help you understand the cycle of the words you are doing.  There are a lot of other tools out there, but start off with the free on from Google and then decided to move on elsewhere later.

The first thing you need to do is put a single keyword in and let it generate synonms, and you’ll get a gaggle of information.  After you’ve done that, feel free to have the same tool look at your competitor’s site.  What a great way to have Google tell you what keywords they think your competitors are good at ranking for?  This applies for both PPC and SEO, you’ll want to use the keyword list to develop content and expand your PPC campaigns.

You build good internal links to push your pagerank around, now you need to focus on building up your Internet reputation. How do you do this? How does Google say who’s important? Short answer it’s a popularity contest! Longer answer: It’s a popularity contest amongst peers.

So when you build links it’s important to build them from pages that make sense to be pointed too you.  So if you are a dog site, links from computer sites don’t help you too much.  So you need to find good sites that are in your niche and get links from them, also bigger sites with links into you are also helpful.  Now on those links if you are able to control the text that’s in the href use keywords that are important to you.  So instead of having <a hfref=”http://www.site.com”>site.com</a> do something like <a href=”http://www.site.com”>keyword</a>.

Also you should try to get your site into DMOZ and if you can afford it get it in Yahoo! directory.

As we mentioned your links need to look like they make sense or they won’t pass PR to you and could actually hurt you if the search engine see’s that you have a ton of unrelated links you will lose authority amongst your friends and will lose rankings.

So just make sure the links make sense to users and they’ll make sense to the engines.

Anyone who has even taken a physics class knows that matter is neither created nor destroyed….  The same sort rings true for pagerank.  All of the pagerank in the world is equal to 1.  If you add 1 million pages, the universal sum is still 1.  Since you cannot change the universe, you need to know how to massage it.  If you have a website with 5 pages, you cannot control a lot of the virtual real estate, and will have to create more depth to control more of the pagerank available.  If you want to grow pagerank on certain pages you need to funnel traffic through links to them.  For example pages that should not have pagerank are contact us, privacy policy, etc.  they don’t earn you money so don’t give them the benefit of pushing rank to them.  So how do you push the rank internally?  Simple provide links.

All page link to your home page, so the home page of a site typically gets more rank since more pages both internally and externally are pushing rank to it.  While pages that should also be considered are category pages etc.  Many of these will be part of your universal navigation so they will also get rank pushed to them.  It’s important that you use appropriate keywords were possible to allow search engines to know the phrase that is important to the page you are pointing too.

You also want to have links to your contact us page etc since you do want to allow customers to get there, and you need them for better ranking in Google, but instead of use <a href=”contactusurl”>contact us</a> use a no follow <a href=”contacturl” rel=”nofollow”>contact us</a> this will prevent you from passing rank from a page to that un “wanted” page.

What does it mean to have unique content?  Is it that you take an RSS Feed from 8 places and merge them together? Is it taking articles and editing a few words here an there?  No it means original content.  Sure you can easily aggrigate content from multiple sources and be someone’s one stop shop, but you’ll never be that one stop shop for the search engines.  You need to have a few original thoughts in your life about your topic, if you do, write about them.  Or if you read a really good article, you can post a summary of it and then link to the original if you want.  The important thing is that your site should be different from everyone else’s site.  This will give more reason to give your site higher rankings and gets spiders looking at you more often than not.  If you are blogging for personal benefit, then that should be easy, but if you are blogging on a topic some people will fall into the not so unique content.  It’s important to be aware of limitations and just keep writing, even a “bad article” is better than a copied one.

SEO 101:

It is important to understand exactly what is search engine optimization.  I believe the easiest way to state it is that it is a method to make your website readable by search engines in such away that the pages you want to be displayed are for a given keyword.

So some major portions of it:

1. Site needs to be spiderable
2. Pages need to be unique
3. Proper use of basic HTML tags (i.e. Title, H1, H2 etc.)
4. Proper use of internal links
5. External Link Building

These are some of the very basics, the things I call SEO 101!

Your url’s need to be search engine friendly / safe.  In other words do not use query strings if you can avoid it for telling the server which page to serve up.  An Example of what not to  do: www.website.com/page.php?id=123  now if you have 10k pages you would have id= 1 -> 10,000 and Google will not like that. so instead do something like www.website.com/page/1.html where you tell the server that the 1.html is actually = page.php?id=1  this makes the pages “unique” from the url perspective.  This also makes the site more spiderable and has the ability to be completely indexed.  Also on the topic of spiderable all of the pages should be linked.  (ok well not all of them, I’ll write about page rank shifting later)  Also you need to use a sitemap.xml file!  That will make sure all of the pages are visible to the different search engines.

More in my next post.