Competitive Intelligence in SEO & Social Media

Identifying the Competition

The first step in identifying your online competition is checking out the search results for your most popular keywords. Do not look only at keywords which drive the most traffic, but also your longtail keyterms and also the keyterms which convert the most sales, leads or phone calls.

By comparing the sites which you compete with in these various groups of keyterms, you will more or less identify different styles of competition that you can learn from and monitor. Here are some types of sites which may not appear for your basic keyterms in the serps, that you need to monitor.

• Affiliate sites are your competition. Not only sites which run the affiliate ads of your rivals, but also your own affiliate ads, because if they are ranking above your company’s site, they are taking money out of your pocket (or the search division’s pocket) by driving traffic and sales that you should be driving. Furthermore, affiliates don’t have to deal with internal regulations and beauracracy, so they can more or less get away with more tactics like publishing loads of content, paid linking, and taking full advantage of the social media outlets your management or PR division is not letting you tackle. Affiliates are the ninjas, mercenaries and dark armies of your industry, learn from them.
• Offline competitors sometimes don’t do the best SEO, maybe they just launch a flash site or brochure page and don’t rank at all, but they may have an advertising agency with a massive creative team building up their social media presence, hold contests or sweepstakes, build up Facebook followings, have a massive PPC budget and spend a lot of money on site advertising and sponsorships. By monitoring what the do in online advertising, you can identify keyterms and copy which work for them in their PPC campaign and also find out the sites or networks where they are serving graphic advertising, and contact those same networks about striking a deal which will assist with your SEO or linking. If your competition is serving ads there, then those sites hit your target market.

On-Site Competitive Intelligence

Now that you have identified the sites you need to monitor as part of your competitive intel strategy, now start looking into the on-site factors which help them rank in the search engines. You may find not only what they are doing right, but what you are doing wrong. When performing a competitive intel report, I suggest including your own site in the report and even having a third eye, like an SEO consultant or internal staff member, do the research on your own site.

• Site URL Structure : By tracking the URL structure and file naming structure of competitors, you can determine the best route to gain a competitive advantage over other companies.
• Site Development and Coding Structure : Which language is the site being coded in. Are there any conflicts in programming language or separate IP’s? This information is vital to SEO competitive intel.
• Use of Analytics : Is the competitor tracking user behavior and referrals via Google Analytics, Hitbot, Omniture? Looking into their analytics systems help give an idea of how much information they are capturing from their visitors and how advanced their internal tracking is – which may define how advanced their SEO team is.
• The directory files and URL structures of listings pages : This will be used to determine which techniques these competitors are using for their individual pages, their content, meta and URL structures, and how these reflect in the Google, Yahoo and MSN rankings.
• Page Title and META Title Review: Page titles are one of the most influential HTML elements used in an optimization campaign. Since the optimization of this variable is connected to rankings and actual links in the Search Engine Results Pages (or “SERPs”), an analysis has been conducted to provide which sites use a preferred title structure and which just use repetition of their company name.
• META Tag Review (Description / Keywords): META tags have limited relevance to rankings, but do play a part in that search results often feature the META Description tag. Knowing this, an optimized description that instigates action from the searcher is preferred. Further, integrating the targeted keywords allows for them to be bold or otherwise emphasized in the listings – which helps to convert more clicks in the SERPs through to the optimized site.
• Navigational System Review: Search engines spider, or seek out new content based on the links they find to resources on a page. Navigation systems are the most consistent manner for building internal link popularity, so research evaluates the overall strength of these systems used. For example, a Flash based navigational system is horrible for SEO, whereas consistent keyword driven links with keywords integrated are optimal.
• Broken Links : If a site has broken links, broken files or lists non-existant pages, then Google will lower the ranking of that site because the engine believes that the site is under construction. Run a link check using Xenu Link Sleuth to see if your competition is overlooking such linking and internal navigation issues.
• HTML Code Validity: Using the W3C Validation tools, your competitors’’ web sites have been reviewed. This allows the engines to promote sites that deliver a consistent and predictable user experience. Run each site through the validation tool, and reported back the number of errors noted.
• Design & SEO Integration: Similar to the internal navigational structure, the use of some HTML elements are preferred over others for SEO purposes. Our research and analysis of competing site designs have been provided in this document.

Offsite Competitive SEO Elements

Not only do onsite tactics assist with the ranking of a website, but sometimes more importantly offsite tactics can benefit the competitive advantage to boost a site from the bottom of the front page on Google, to the top three traffic driving positions.

By monitoring offsite SEO tactics, and social media tactics, you can get a rounded feel for the link building strategies your competitors are using, their participation in blogs, sites they may own which are harnessing social media equity and directing it to their main site, if paid linking is working for them, and how they’re doing on Delicious, Digg and in vertically targeted social networks. All of these factors have a direct influence on search engine rankings and you will not only learn what your competition is doing, but what they are not. And by identifying these holes, oversights or even genius ideas … and applying them to your marketing strategy, you can further excel within your industry.

• Local Listings : Determine the local SEO listings that your competition has made on Yahoo Local, Citypages, BOTW Local, MSN Live and other local search engines or local profiles. These differ from the results shown in organic web search sometimes and can be an indicator of local seo techniques used or overlooked by the competition.
• Number of Inbound Links: Using Yahoo! Site Explorer, report on the number of inbound links to each of the analyzed web sites. As a rule, the more links and the more relevancy – the better. Search Engines like Google use inbound links to help shape the overall level of authority of a web site.
• Linkbait or Viral Marketing : How are these competitors building links? Are they running link baiting programs and actively having articles submitted to Digg & StumbleUpon? Are they using any Viral Marketing techniques like videos, widgets or badges which link back to them and assist with their rankings. Dig into their campaigns to find out what they are using, and monitor the social networks to identify future social linking campaigns.
• Social Media : Do they actively use social media to market their business? Does their company have a Wikipedia page? How do they rank for their own brand name and are social profiles served in these results? Have they even secured their brand across social networks? Do they distribute online video? This research will help determine a social media plan and also identify competitive advantages that you can use to your advantage.
• Blogging : Do these companies blog and who is doing their blogging? Are the blogs on a subdomain, a whole other website or in an internal directory file. How often do they post? How many subscribers will they have? This information will assist you construct your blogging strategy and possibly unearth some ideas.
• Paid Link Research: It is difficult to say with certainty that an inbound link has been purchased. There are however signs where common systems like Paid Directories and Link Networks are used on a site. Research of inbound, paid links to your competitors from sidebars, ads on newspaper sites or bad paid linking in footer links may give you some insight as to which anchors they are targeting and what is working for them.
• Site visits and Traffic : Using a mix of data from Alexa, Compete and other web traffic estimation tools, estimate the traffic of the competitors in terms of visitors, time spent on site, top referrals and other information driven by third party tools.
• Page Rank and other Metrics : Compile a list of competitive metrics including Google PageRank, SEOmoz PageStrength, Delicious Bookmarks, StumbleUpon voting, Google Page Indexing, Google Competitive Indexing.
• Competitive Rankings : Last but not least, run a ranking check using a search engine friendly software for each of the terms which you have determined for targeted SEO keyterms via your comeptitive research. Check the rankings for these sites and terms in Google, Yahoo, Ask.com, Bing and maybe some engines which are used specifically by your industry.

This may sound like a lot of information to monitor, and you’ll probably want to add more industry specific metrics to your research dependent upon how SEO savvy your market is. But in the long run by documenting this information now, and revisiting it once a quarter, you will have a pinpoint idea of the tactics your search rivals are utilizing, what they are not, and even what they are picking up.

5 Ways to Create Mobile Phone Website

People hooked to internet via their mobile phones is on the rise but only few websites offer mobile compatible format of their websites. Do you want to offer mobile version of your website or blog? Don’t worry, this does not invlove learning any programming laguage or formatting/recreating your exsiting computer based website.

Here are few tools that will make this  creation or conversion easier than expected. Your website is designed for screens 15″ or greater, these tools let you make mobile website for screens 3″ or less.

1. Google’s Conversion Utility - This is as simple as it gets. Just need to enter the URL of your website, check the option for ‘No Images’ if you do not want images to appear, then click on ‘GO’ button.

Mobile version of your website will pop up, add the link to your faovrites for browsing website on mobile. You can even insert Google Mobile Ads to earn some money.

2. Zinadoo - Using this web service you can easily create, publish and share you mobile website. Besides you can also colour the website, create a page that site visitors can email you from or request that you call/email them back, create a guestbook page, create a comments page and much more.

3. Winksite - Winksite is mobile Website builder that also includes RSS-driven content deployment and mobile-tuned community features such as forum, chat, and polls. No need to install software, do everything online. You also monetize your website with Google Mobile Adsense.

4. MobiSiteGalore - Let you build websites that will work consistently across all mobile phones as they 100% comply with W3C’s mobile web standards. You can host website wherever you want. This service is completely FREE and is supported by donations.

5. MoFuse - Use your RSS feed to power your mobile blog. Design your mobile blog with WYSIWYG editor. Automatically redirect your mobile visitors to your mobile blog. You can also enroll in revenue sharing program and earn 50% of all advertising profits using Google AdSense Mobile and AdMob.

Now getting hooked to your website or blog on mobile phone wont be that difficult. I am sure

Mobile SEO Future Planning

2010 is the next year that has been talked about year after year as far as mobile online use truly taking off.

The iPhone was indeed revolutionary and provided the true smartphone leap forward, that has been followed and in many ways being surpassed by Android, with more and more mainstream users browsing online via mobile devices.

How does this impact & affect the SEO that you have already carefully crafted for your sites?  Not much…for now.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt stated at the 2010 Mobile World Congress their new mantra & current strategy is “Mobile First” thus you can be first by getting ahead of your competition by planting these mobile seeds into your site:

• Create a mobile version of your site optimally in a mobile subdomain or  subdirectory rather than a separate domain or TLD such a .mobi

• Render this mobile version of your site via mobile user agent detection while also providing the user an opt out to the standard web version.

• The mobile version of your site should have the following DocType declared above the HEAD code:  <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//WAPFORUM//DTD XHTML Mobile 1.0//EN” “http://www.wapforum.org/DTD/xhtml-mobile10.dtd”>

• The SEO coding elements will remain the same in the mobile version but to improve usability & reduce any possible duplicate content issues its best to strip extraneous content, JavaScript & graphics out – optimally via CSS.

• A mobile site should have at least half the load time in comparison to the standard site with a true target of under 2 seconds load time on an Edge or non-3G signal.

• A mobile sitemap XML should also be created which has as the main difference from the standard sitemap XML a <mobile:mobile/> declaration after each URL listing – Google Mobile Sitemap Instructions

• Affirm your mobile progress by using the tools at W3C & MobiReady to validate your code for mobile readiness as well check load time and actual mobile device rendering.

Currently Google Mobile search is nearly identical to the standard search but there is a separate mobile index which will only grow in providing differentiated results.

6 Ways to Optimize Your Site for iPad

The iPad is no Apple Newton. It truly is a revolutionary device. The whimsical blog of “Fake Steve Jobs” calls the iPad a “life-changing, mind-altering product”. Although that may be an overstatement, the iPad is certainly important — to the computing industry, to computer users, and to online marketers.

The launch of the iPad marks a significant step forward for mobile computing, and for computing in general: one’s productivity can finally be as high as when they are in front of their laptop or desktop computer. The iPad user can efficiently and effectively do their shopping, banking, email, YouTube video watching, and general web surfing. It is also surprisingly easy to use the iPad for more complex, input-intensive tasks, like writing term papers, building slide decks, and manipulating spreadsheets — particularly when also equipped with a Bluetooth keyboard. In fact, the iPad just may be versatile and powerful enough for the road warrior to travel with sans laptop. Conversely, smart phones and other handheld mobile devices, really only serve as a complement — rather than a practical replacement — for the user’s laptop or desktop machine.

Technically speaking, the iPad’s operating system is the iPhoneOS, but practically the OS is the Internet. Just upload your documents into “the cloud” (e.g. MobileMe, Dropbox, Xythos) and you are off and running. For the multitude of Google Docs users this is an unnecessary step, as the documents already live in the Cloud, not on any local hard drive. The iPad will undoubtedly speed adoption of this trend towards Internet-based file storage.

Overall, it looks like this launch is going to be a success and the iPad, like the iPod, iPhone, and the iMac before it, will gain significant distribution among consumers globally. And, since it includes a browser with a different set of specifications from either the standard mobile devices, the question for advertisers becomes a practical one – “will my web pages come up on this browser?”

With the iPad’s Safari browser, the Web generally looks and works like one would expect on any traditional laptop or desktop computer. However, there are important differences in the browsing experience and these differences could thwart your web visitors, stopping them in their tracks. As a site owner, you must compensate for these differences, or risk losing the conversion, and more importantly, the customer.

“Mobile-Friendly” Does Not Equal “iPad-Friendly”

If you created a mobile-friendly version of your website, you are probably seeing the fruits of your labor in customer adoption already. That mobile site, however, is not suitable for iPad user consumption. Mobile sites are designed for a teeny-tiny screen and translate to a deficient user experience on the iPad. Consequently, your mobile site should never be served up automatically to the iPad user. This can happen inadvertently when your web server’s “user-agent detection” is overly broad in its matching of mobile user agents (the user-agent strings for the iPhone and iPad are very similar; the iPad’s even includes the word “mobile”). This is the case for Walmart.com and Officedepot.com (screenshots photo-2 & photo-21). Thankfully this is easy to correct.

Avoiding the mobile-friendly version is one thing, serving up a site that offers an iPad-optimized user experience is quite another. It can involve overhauling page layout, recoding CSS, redesigning navigation, and adding alternative non-Flash elements.

Layout and Formatting

Your website design should lay out correctly whether the user is holding the iPad in landscape mode or portrait mode. Furthermore, when in landscape mode the primary call-to-action should still be visible without scrolling.

Even if the page renders properly on the Safari browser for the Mac or Windows, it will not necessarily render the same on the iPad. Case in point: Homedepot.com, with overlapping text where the breadcrumb navigation displays. This anomaly does not occur on Safari for the Mac. (screenshots photo-26 & screen shot 1)

Bear in mind that the browser window cannot be resized on the iPad. This means you cannot force elements to stay in a specific fixed position on the screen like you can for desktop browser users. Fixed positioning should not be used, if at all possible.

Retool Your Navigation

The multi-touch display provides an elegant and intuitive interface for users, but it also presents some unique challenges to web designers who are use to designing for the desktop. The biggest one is that iPad users cannot hover their cursor, potentially rendering any mouse-over navigation unusable. On the iPad, holding your finger down invokes the copy-and-paste function rather than creating a hover state.

On Officedepot.com, once you manage to get off of the mobile site, you will find that the sub-navigation items underneath the main navigation tabs are practically inaccessible. When you press on a tab (e.g. Furniture), the sub-navigation is displayed, but at the same time you are taken to the Furniture category page. So there is not enough time to select a sub-item (such as Modular Collections) before you are whisked away to the top-level category page (screenshot photo-18). The aforementioned sub-section (Modular Collections) is not accessible elsewhere on the page, like in the footer. It is not in the sub-navigation directly under Furniture on the mobile site either, curiously.

On Homedepot.com, pressing on a top navigation button caused its sub-items to display — without loading the top-level category page. Clicking on the top navigation item a second time takes you to the top-level category page. Unfortunately, you have to click twice on the sub-item before it will load the requested page. (e.g. to get to the Light Bulbs page from the navigation requires pressing on Electrical once then pressing on Light Bulbs twice (see screenshot photo-24). That was not at all intuitive.

The CDW.com top navigation and MacConnection.com’s left navigation both functioned beautifully on the iPad. Press on a category, and the sub-categories are visible and accessible with one click (screenshots photo-9 & photo-8). You are not whisked away to a top-level category page before you made your sub-navigation selection. On MacConnection.com you can go to the top-level category page by clicking that item again; on CDW.com you cannot, presumably, because there is no corresponding top-level category page for Products, Services, etc.

Lack of Flash Support

This is one of the main complaints with the iPad. No, this was not an oversight. The lack of Flash support was intentional. The company line at Apple is that Flash is prone to crash and is too resource-intensive. Just ask the helpful employees at the local Apple Store and that is what they will tell you. I do not buy it. If Flash really were that unstable, wouldn’t we notice it on our desktop machines? Speaking for myself, this is not something I experience regularly. Google’s Chrome browser, which I now use as my default, even calls it out when Flash crashes and displays an unhappy icon in the place of the Flash animation. Note that in Chrome, Flash does not crash the browser or even the tab/window. Surely Apple can follow Google’s lead and build this same capability into Safari? I feel this is more a political/competitive issue than anything else.

What are the implications of not having Flash? For one, you will find a content-less hole in many home pages across the Internet. Some sites will display a blank space where the Flash animation would have been (photo-20 and photo-5 screenshots). If on your website this represents a large amount of the screen real estate, that void could cost you a conversion. Other sites fill that void with a message urging the user to download and install the Flash player from Adobe’s website (photo-23 screenshot), thus sending the user on a wild goose chase that will ultimately end fruitless. Still other sites discretely display a warning that the lack of Flash makes their site inaccessible or somehow unusable. (photo-10 screenshot)

The workaround involves a mix of user-agent detection and HTML5. First, detect the iPad Safari browser, then selectively serve up a version that eliminates the dead space and compensates for the loss in content/functionality. If the Flash was navigation or a rotating carousel, this can be accomplished with HTML and CSS. If it was a video (the majority of video on the web is Flash-based), then develop an alternative HTML5-based player or utilize a solution like BrightCove’s (examples: eBags, onlineshoes.tv, screenshots photo-1 & photo-4). If your Live Chat function relies on Flash, then you have a very big and immediate problem. MacConnection’s customer service chat (screenshots photo-7, photo-6) is fully functional on the iPad. Is yours?

Expect Glitches

It’s still early days for the iPad. This is version 1, with many more revisions to come. There are still many kinks to be ironed out, including in the iPad Safari browser rendering engine. So do not be too surprised if Safari for the iPad mangles your website with browser rendering bugs and inconsistencies. For example, notice in the figure below (insert photo-11 screenshot) that the “New Account?” checkbox partially overlaps the input field, the combination of the two resembling a pull-down list. User confusion could result: if the user doesn’t recognize the checkbox, then they are liable to mistakenly expect the “New Account?” label to be a clickable link and find themselves unable to proceed to checkout.

Bottom line: expect to compensate for Apple’s bugs and glitches, and develop workarounds. The process starts with good old-fashioned QA. Without rigorous testing, you may never know that your site does not work on the iPad. Please do not rely on your users to tell you. Broken websites can happen to anyone. Even to Apple, ironically. Parts of Apple’s Safari Dev Center are un-navigable when accessed from an iPad, including their “Preparing Your Web Content for iPad” technical note in their Safari Reference Library, which does not scroll (screenshot photo-0).

A Simple Solution

If implementing an iPad-optimized version of your website quickly is not feasible or would be a struggle, there are a number of vendors that provide real-time site translations – one such solution is our own Mobile Site Optimizer. These solutions can be implemented quickly, cost-effectively, and with minimal IT involvement. See our product overview at http://www.covario.com/what-we-do/deployment-software/mobile-site-optimizer

36 SEO Myths That Won’t Die But Need To

Exposing some of the more insidious myths in this very article. I think this is only fitting, considering Covario’s oft-stated goal is to be “the source of truth” for our clients on the performance of their SEO and SEM.

And now, without any further ado, the list…

1. SEO firm is endorsed/approved by Google. The following comes from an actual email a friend of mine received from an SEO firm last year:
   

   We are…Google Approved, a partner with Google, they endorse us as an optimizer, and their list includes very few partners, and we are one of them!. To find us on their list please go to: http://www.google.com/websiteoptimizer/woac.html and select region: United States; scroll to the middle of the page and find National Positions.”

   Hmm…. you won’t find them listed there anymore.

2. Don’t use Google Analytics because Google will spy on you and use the information against you. This one comes straight from the conspiracy theorists. Google has made numerous assurances that they aren’t using your traffic or conversion data to profile you as a spammer.
3. Your PageRank score, as reported by Google’s toolbar server, is highly correlated to your Google rankings. If only this were true, our jobs as SEO’s would be so much easier! It doesn’t take many searches with SEO for Firefox running to see that low-PageRank URLs outrank high-PR ones all the time. It would be naive to assume that the PageRank reported by the Toolbar Server is the same as what Google uses internally for their ranking algorithm.
4. Having an XML Sitemap will boost your Google rankings. I just heard this one from a fellow panelist in an SEO session at a conference I presented at within the last month (I won’t mention who, or which show.) This made me cringe, but I bit my lip rather than embarrass and contradict them in front of the audience. Should I have spoken up? Did I do the audience a disservice by leaving this myth unchallenged? I struggled with that. In any event, Google will use your sitemaps file for discovery and potentially as a canonicalization hint if you have duplicate content. It won’t give a URL any more “juice” just because you include it in your sitemaps.xml, even if you assign a high priority level to it.
5. Since the advent of personalization, there is no such thing as being ranked #1 anymore because everyone sees different results. Although it is true that Google personalizes search results based on the user’s search history (and now you don’t even have to be logged in to Google for this personalization to take place), the differences between personalized results and non-personalized results are relatively minor. Check for yourself. Get in the habit of re-running your queries — the second time adding &pws=0 to the end of Google SERP URL — and observing how much (or how little) everything shifts around.
6. Meta tags will boost your rankings. I’m so sick of hearing about meta tags. Optimizing your meta keywords is a complete waste of time. Period. They have been so abused by spammers that the engines haven’t put any stock in them for years and years. What about other meta tags — such as meta description, meta author, and meta robots — you ask? None of the various meta tags are given any real weight in the rankings algorithm.
7. It’s good practice to include a meta robots tag specifying index, follow. This is a corollary to the myth immediately preceding. It’s totally unnecessary. The engines all assume they are allowed to index and follow unless you specify otherwise.
8. It’s helpful if your targeted keywords are tucked away in HTML comment tags and title attributes (of IMG and A HREF tags.) Since when have comment tags or title attributes been given any weight?
9. Having country-specific sites creates “duplicate content” issues in Google. Google is smart enough to present your .com.au site to Google Australia users and your .co.nz site to Google New Zealand users. Not using a ccTLD? Then set the geographic target setting in Google Webmaster Tools; that’s what it’s there for. Where’s the problem here?
10. You can keep search engines from indexing pages linked-to with Javascript links. There are many documented cases of Google following JavaScript-based links. Google engineers have stated that they are crawling JavaScript links more-and-more. Of course, don’t rely on Google parsing your JavaScript links, but don’t assume it will choke on them either.
11. Googlebot doesn’t read CSS. You’d better believe Google scans CSS for spam tactics like hidden divs.
12. You should end your URLs in .html. Since when has that made a difference?
13. You can boost the Google rankings of your home page for a targeted term by including that term in the anchor text of internal links. Testing done by SEOmoz found that the anchor text of your “Home” links is largely ignored. Use the anchor text “Home” or “San Diego real estate” — it’s of no consequence either way.
14. It’s important for your rankings that you update your home page frequently (e.g. daily.) This is another fallacy spread by the same aforementioned fellow panelist. Plenty of stale home pages rank just fine, thank you very much.
15. Trading links helps boost PageRank and rankings. Particularly if done on a massive scale with totally irrelevant sites, right? Umm, no. Reciprocal links are of dubious value: they are easy for an algorithm to catch and to discount. Having your own version of the Yahoo directory on your site isn’t helping your users, nor is it helping your SEO.
16. Linking out (such as to Google.com) helps rankings. Not true. Unless perhaps you’re hoarding all your PageRank by not linking out at all — in which case, that just looks unnatural. It’s the other way around, i.e. getting links to your site — that’s what makes the difference.
17. It’s considered “cloaking” — and is thus taboo and risky — to clean up the URLs in your links selectively and only for spiders. If your intentions are honorable, then you have nothing to fear. All the major search engines have said as much. You are helping the engines by removing session IDs, tracking parameters and other superfluous parameters from the URLs across your site — whether it’s done by user-agent detection, cookie detection or otherwise. After all, if it were bad, would Yahoo be doing it? Check it for yourself: visit the Yahoo.com home page with the Google bot user agent string (e.g. with Firefox using the User Agent Switcher extension). You’ll notice the “ylt” parameter has been stripped from all the links.
18. If you define a meta description, Google uses it in the snippet. We already learned from my last column (”Anatomy of a Google Snippet“) that this is oftentimes not the case.
19. The bolding of words in a Google listing signifies that they were considered in the rankings determination. Also discussed in my last column, this phenomenon — known as “KWiC” in Information Retrieval circles — is there purely for usability purposes.
20. H1 tags are a crucial element for SEO. Research by SEOmoz shows little correlation between the presence of H1 tags and rankings. Still, you should write good H1 headings, but do it primarily for usability and accessibility, not so much for SEO.
21. There are some unique ranking signals for Google Mobile Search, and they include the markup being “XHTML Mobile”. Google Mobile Search results mirror those of Google Web Search. By all means, create a mobile-friendly version of your site; but do it for your users, not for SEO.
22. SEO is a black art. And it’s done, usually in a dark room, by some rogue SEO consultant, without requiring the involvement of the client / rest of the company. If SEO were like that, our lives would read like spy novels.
23. The Disallow directive in robots.txt can get pages de-indexed from Google. As I explained in my article “A Deeper Look at Robots.txt“, disallows can lead to snippet-less, title-less Google listings. Not a good look. To keep pages out of the index, use the Noindex robots.txt directive or the meta robots noindex tag — NOT a Disallow directive.
24. SEO is a one-time activity you complete and are then done with. How many times have you heard someone say “We actually just finished SEOing our site”? It makes me want to scream “No!” with every fiber of my being. SEO is ongoing. Just like one’s website is never “finished,” neither is one’s SEO. Catalog marketers get this better than anyone else: they are used to optimizing every square inch of their printed catalog. There is always more performance to be wrung out. The “set it and forget it” misconception is particularly prevalent among IT workers — they tend to treat everything like a project so that they can get through assignments, close the “ticket” and move on, and thus maintain their sanity. I can’t say I blame them.
25. Automated SEO is black-hat or spammy. There is nothing wrong with or inappropriate in using automation. Indeed, it signals a level of maturity in the marketplace when industrial-strength tools and technologies for large-scale automation are available. Without automation, it would be difficult to impossible for the enterprise company to scale their SEO efforts across the mass of content they have published on the Web. Chris Smith paints a compelling picture for SEO automation in this classic post.
26. A site map isn’t for people. A good (HTML, not XML) site map is designed as much for human consumption as it is for spiders. Any time you create pages/copy/links solely for a search engine, hoping they won’t be seen by humans, you’re asking for trouble.
27. There’s no need to link to all your pages for the spiders to see them. Just list all URLs in the XML Sitemap. Orphan pages rarely rank for anything but the most esoteric of search terms. If your web page isn’t good enough for even you to want to link to it, what conclusion do you think the engines will come to about the quality and worthiness of this page to rank?
28. Google will not index pages that are only accessible by a site’s search form. This used to be the case, but Google has been able to fill out forms and crawl the results since at least 2008. Note this doesn’t give you permission to deliberately neglect your site’s accessibility to spiders, as you’d probably be disappointed with the results.
29. Placing links in teeny-tiny size font at the bottom of your homepage is an effective tactic to raise the rankings of deep pages in your site. Better yet, make the links the same color as the page background, and/or use CSS to push the links way out to the side so they won’t detract from the homepage’s visual appearance! (I am being facetious here, don’t actually do this.)
30. Using a service that promises to register your site with “hundreds of search engines” is good for your site’s rankings. If you believe that, then you may also be aware that there is a Nigerian prince who desperately needs your help to get a large sum of money smuggled out of his country, for which you will be richly rewarded.
31. Home page PageRank on a domain means something. As in: “I have a PageRank 6 site.” In actuality it means nothing. As I already stated, toolbar PageRank is misleading at best, completely bogus at worst. Furthermore, a high PageRank on one’s home page doesn’t necessarily equate to high PageRank on internal pages. That’s a function of the site’s internal linking structure.
32. Outsourcing link building to a far-away, hourly contractor with no knowledge of your business is a good link acquisition solution. And a sound business decision… NOT! As it is, the blogosphere is already clogged enough with useless, spammy comments in broken English from third-world link builders. No need to make it worse by hiring them to “promote” your site too.
33. The clickthrough rate on the SERPs matters. If this were true then those same third-world link builders would also be clicking away on search results all day long.
34. Keyword density is da bomb. Ok, no one says “da bomb” anymore, but you get the drift. Monitoring keyword density values is pure folly.
35. Hyphenated domain names are best for SEO. As in: san-diego-real-estate-for-fun-and-profit.com. Separate keywords with hyphens in the rest of the URL after the .com, but not in the domain itself.
36. Great Content = Great Rankings. Just like great policies equals successful politicians, right?

The following mythbusters contributed to the above list: Chris Smith, Rand Fishkin, and Eric Enge. (Thanks guys!)

Online tools for Web Designers

Iconfinder

IconFinder is a great online resource for web designers, it helps them search over thousands of web icons by keywords or browse them by icon sets and tags. Finding icons with IconFinder is really easy as it gives you an option to filter results by icon size, background color and download any icon with one click in PNG or ICO format. No sign up required to download icons. Shoutouts to Martin for a great job.

Dafont

Dafont is an excellent website which allows web designers and just about anyone to browse fonts easily by alphabetical listing, by themes, by author or by popularity. Dafont allows you to upload your font and allows it to be downloaded. Most of the fonts are free to download.

Creately

No list on Web designer resources would be complete without our very own Creately application. Creately is a web-based collaborative diagramming application that launched publicly in Oct 09. Creately comes with the best capabilities to make collaboration between team members easier and better. Today, besides supporting many diagram types it’s very focused on the Web Wireframes, Sitemaps and page flows that are used by web designers and developers everyday. Creately comes with free and paid plans, go give it a try!

Pixlr

Pixlr is a popular advanced photo editing software, this is a close alternative to Adobe Photoshop. However, it can handle most editing work that designers do on a day-to-day basis. You can use layers and an array of filters and effects. This is available for free.

Color Scheme Designer

Color Scheme Designer is an online tool which looks modern. It offers a wide range of tools to help designers arrive at the alluring colour palette they really want; and with sophisticated web based interface this is just too good! The best part of this is it enables exporting your colour palette to several formats. Try it- it’s free!

Brusheezy

Brusheezy is a very cool site which offers a whole lot of free Photoshop brushes and patterns for download. The best part of Brusheezy is that is Web Designers are also invited to contribute their own brush sets. This is a great one for all Adobe Photoshop users.

ColoRotate

ColoRotate is a web-based service that allows designers to view and edit colors in 3D. This application shows the multidimensional nature of colors and the relationships between colours. ColoRotate also gives designers the ability to edit foreground and background colors as well as creating and adding to color swatches. This is a free service to play around with!

Net2ftp

Net2ftp is a web-based FTP client with all the functions of a standard FTP. This has the ability to manage websites using a browser. Users can edit code, upload and download files, copy,move or delete directories recursively, rename files and directories without installing any software.

Wufoo

Wufoo is an application that allows you to generate a wide variety of forms. Some of the forms available include contact forms, surveys, invitations, quizzes, and planners. There are even templates available that will give you a starting point for your forms that you can then customize as you desire.

BrowserShots

BrowserShots is a tool which makes screenshots of designs in different browsers. Designers have to simply submit the URL of the website and select the browsers h/she would like to get a screenshot from, and press submit- simple as that. This is a free service – Try it today!

Deadly Sins Against SEO

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a specialty that is intricately woven into many other disciplines: website design/development, information architecture, copywriting, website usability, analytics and conversion analysis, etc. Successful SEO hybrids are web professionals who are equally skilled in SEO and another area of expertise. For example, many search-savvy web developers understand how search engines access content on a website, and they make it as easy as possible for search engines and searchers to access that content.

Many SEO professionals work very hard to understand other disciplines to create the best overall searcher experience. Yet we meet with a lot of resistance. Copywriters don’t want to want to change their clever headlines (that often lack crucial keywords). Designers take great offense when you tell them that Flash was used inappropriately. Even landing page and conversion specialists are dumbfounded that we optimizers are trying to prevent a sale, at least from their perspective. Here are some of the top SEO sins I commonly encounter.

Sin #1: Eliminating important keywords

I have this beef with a wide variety of professionals, be they journalists, public relations (PR) professionals, information architects or website usability professionals. I constantly observe landing page professionals remove important keyword phrases from pages… after I put them in. And the tug-of-war begins. Who is a website owner to believe: the search usability expert or the conversion guru?

For search engines and searchers to accurately determine the “aboutness” of a web page, the page needs to contain important keyword phrases, and the page needs to appear somewhat focused on those words. I am not saying that web pages should contain a sea of black text. I am not saying to eliminate calls to action and other important sales copy. But I am saying to stop eliminating important keywords that successfully communicate the “aboutness” of a page.

Guess what? It might mean that some items will not appear above the fold. But that’s okay, because users/searchers will exhibit important finding behaviors long before they click “add to cart,” which brings me to my next SEO sin….

Sin #2: Not accommodating searcher behaviors

One of the reasons I contradict landing page professionals is what I perceive as ignorance on their part. All too often, I encounter a profound lack of knowledge about common searcher behaviors, such as orientation. Before users “add to cart,” and before users determine the product/service they wish to purchase, they are going to land on a web page and quickly ascertain whether or not they have: (a) landed on the most appropriate page, and (b) landed on the most appropriate site. And they are going to orient very quickly. In fact, successful orientation should occur in less than 1 second.

Successful orientation, reinforcement of information scent, and validation of user/searcher mental models ultimately leads to customer satisfaction, brand credibility, increased findability and sales. Keywords are a critical part of the scent of information and successful orientation. Landing page and conversion specialists might convince you to place more products/services to appear above the fold, but you are also doing that at the expense of critical finding behaviors.

Prioritization is a key skill of a qualified information architect, which brings me to my next beef….

Sin #3: Making sites difficult to navigate

With all due respect to landing page and conversion specialists, site navigation and relevant page interlinking isn’t exactly their forté. In fact, conversion specialists seem so overly focused on sales and conversions that they often lack the objectivity needed to construct intuitive site navigation schemes and labels.

I have seen global navigation schemes that are completely inappropriate for a site, all in an effort to get as many internal links as possible to important “sales” or “conversion” pages. I have seen “page interlinking gone wild.” I have seen keyword-stuffed navigation labels that are incredibly difficult to scan. On the flip side, I have also seen content orphaned when it shouldn’t be orphaned. I have seen links buried or de-emphasized that shouldn’t be buried. And all of this “conversion” advice comes from persuasion architects, landing page specialists and conversion professionals. Which led me to conclude that hiring a landing page or conversion expert to come up with a site’s information architecture might not be a wise decision.

Information architects tend to be more objective than any person involved in sales. They understand that finding behavior consists of browsing, querying and asking. They accommodate these three finding behaviors into site navigation schemes and other navigation labels, such as headings and titles. They determine the order in which information (and navigation) should be presented via a variety of usability tests and other data.

Information architects do not ignore or discount business goals. They try to make websites more intuitive. Their goal is to make task completion easier and more efficient. The end result? More sales, conversions, and findability.

Sin #4: Using tools vs. developing skills

A tool can be effective if the person using the tool has aptitude, skill and talent. A tool is not a substitute for skill. For example, I can hammer a nail into a wall to hang a picture, but I do not have the skill and aptitude to build an entire house. This is analogous to SEO. Knowing how to use various keyword research tools does not automatically make a person an effective search-engine friendly copywriter or information architect.

Don’t get me wrong. I understand the initial need and usefulness of many SEO tools. A keyword density tool can be useful for people who are not accustomed to writing with keywords and applying them appropriately on a web page. Some of the search engines’ webmaster tools help site owners pinpoint easily overlooked crawlability roadblocks.

Problems often arise when SEO professionals use these tools as a crutch instead of becoming true optimization chefs. For example, one tool will say that your content’s keyword density is too much and another tool will say that the content is perfect. And search engines have not used keyword density to determine rankings for a very long time. What about users/searchers? What keyword density tool determines what your target audience thinks? At some point, search-engine friendly copywriters should know how to write effective content without relying on such tools.

Sin #5: Misinterpreting data by taking numbers out of context

A number without context is just a number. A number taken out of context can lead website owners down the wrong path.

Here is an example that has been driving me crazy for many years. I know of a sales/conversion expert (who touts himself as an SEO professional) who created this word calculator. This calculator supposedly determines the number of times you use your company name on a web page. The reasoning is that if you use your company name too much, your site content is more focused on your company name and brand than on site visitors.

On the surface, this sounds somewhat reasonable. But what if your company name contains keywords, including the primary keyword phrase you wish to target? Or your trademark? What about navigational queries, when the searchers’ intent is to go directly to a website or even a page within a website? Navigational queries are far more common we might imagine, often up to 33% of search engine queries. Why would any website owner make it difficult for a person to arrive at the official company web site?

Bounce rates can be an indication of meeting searcher expectations (for a “quick fact” informational query) or not meeting searcher expectations. Increased page views per visitor can be an indication of confusion (poor navigation and labeling) or interest. Eye-tracking data can show the page elements (text, graphic images, videos) that people view and the order in which they view them. But people view content differently, based on individual scenario and user goals, especially during eye-tracking tests.

I have been a strong believer in web analytics and usability testing since the mid- to late 90s. But I am equally a strong believer in accurately interpreting that data.

Sin #6: Treating symptoms instead of solving the problem

Sometimes, I swear the SEO industry has become the industry of band-aids and workarounds. Is your entire site designed in Flash? There’s a workaround for that. Do you have a content management system (CMS) that generates an uncrawlable URL structure? There’s a workaround for that, too.

Again, don’t get me wrong—some SEO workarounds are necessary because the “powers that be” who are employed at the commercial web search engines do not yet know how to deal with the new and emerging technologies that enhance and enrich the searcher experience. In addition, software developers seem to discount or ignore crawlability and indexation issues when they create CMS software. Therefore, we SEO professionals find it necessary to use these workarounds until software is developed to accommodate web crawlers.

Nevertheless, many workarounds are not workarounds. Many workarounds are band-aids for genuine site problems. For example, site maps (both wayfinder and XML site maps) are still used as a substitute for a site’s poor information architecture and crawlability issues. A wayfinder site map is a web page that all sites should have as a part of defensive design. But if the wayfinder site map is the only way in which users can directly access desired content? Then the solution is to fix site navigation and supplemental page interlinking.

Likewise, XML site maps (also spelled XML sitemaps) are commonly used as a crutch. If a site has 50,000 pages and a search engine is not crawling all of the pages, the problem might be duplicate content delivery, substandard or non-existent third party link development, poor navigation and interlinking, poorly implemented URL workarounds, and so forth. A URL list is not going to fix those problems.

I have to admit that I found it very difficult to identify my top SEO sins, as each SEO professional has unique challenges. What SEO sins do you commonly observe? Let us know in the comments section below

Source: Deadly Sins Against SEO; Search Engine Land