Text Ads in Google’s Image Search?! Woot?

Here I was minding my own business, running a quick image search for cars and to my surprise, I saw text ads above the images, yes Google Adwords text ads above images. Ok, this may not be new for people in other countries but I am pretty sure this is new in Australia (unless I am super behind with whats happening at Googleplex).

Not only did I see text ads, I also found extra image search functions, a drop down to find specific image sizes with another drop down to indicate what type of image you are looking for.

I believe this Google image search change will disappear soon after this post, being one of those “test features” Google play with on a daily basis. If you can’t see it on your image search screen, check out my screen shot above.

Great to see that they are looking to improve their image search, because it returns pretty bad results most of the time, for me atleast.

Tags: adwords, Application Development, Application Maintenance, Flash Graphics, google, Graphics Design, image search, Logo Design, Search Engine Marketing, Technical Outsourcing, text ads, Web Development, Website Maintenance

The usefulness of a website being XHTML compliant

Countless webmasters stress over the issue of the need to be XHTML compliant, for both search engine optimisation as well as to decrease cross browser issues. In a way being XHTML compliant is like providing a guarantee to your users that the site they are visiting is top notch. However is there really a need to goto such extent to get your website XHTML compliant?

In more ways than one, I believe that newly built websites should be XHTML compliant to a certain extent. The reason I say this is because of the fact that being XHTML compliant almost guarantees that your website would look the same on all web browsers (maybe except Internet Explorer because Microsoft likes to be different). However, you will need to take into consideration the extra time needed to make your website compliant.

Sure you will get viewed properly on all browsers, heck you can even add the W3C XHTML 1.0 transitional button on your website just to make yourself feel better about spending those extra 5 hours making it compliant. But then there are times when you need to launch a site within a very short time frame, and your employer or client does not have the patients for make things compliant and most don’t even see the point behind it.

There has been debates about how a website being XHTML compliant can rank better on search engines and that it allows the crawlers to understand the text a lot more. In my opinion, that is complete bullocks, there have been no solid evidence to prove this and worse of all, the major search engines (Google and Yahoo) can’t even pass the XHTML 1.0 test. So how can the major search engines expect us to be XHTML compliant when even they failed to do so. Well, they basically can’t and they won’t.

With that being said, your html coding still does affect how crawlers craw your website. Not in the sense that your html needs to be compliant, but more on the side of how you formed your html and if there is alot of junk in there. The golden rule of thumb of html coding for search engine is “Less code more content“, which basically means that you should minimise html coding where possible so that your content is more prominent to crawlers.

Although search engine crawlers have grown a lot more advance compared to 5 years ago,  they are still not smart enough to decrypt everything that is within your html code. Hence it has become our job (in a sense) to make their life a lot easier by writing clean html and removing the unnecessary “ugly” coding which we often see back in the old days. By writing less html coding, we decrease the chances of mistakes which the crawlers could make whilst trying to understand our pages, this benefits both us and the search engines.

To make your life easier when coding your new website I have devised the following points as tips to guide you to a clean, easy to understand html page.

• Place your javascript codes in a separate js file
• Use CSS to style and format your page
• Place the CSS styling codes in a separate .css file
• Remove unnecessary breaks, paragraphs, fonts, and span tags (or any other tags)
• Remember to close all open tags, this is a general html rule which a lot of web developers forget for unknown reasons
• Start learning to use Divs instead of tables, mainly because its cleaner with less code and very scalable when it comes to style via CSS.

If you follow the above rules, the outcome of your html should be clean, readable, easy to understand and contains no javascript or styling. Doing the above is only one step of making your website XHTML compliant, but in my point of view, its more than enough. If you have anything to add to the above list leave a comment so that I can add your views to my post.

Tags: Application Development, Application Maintenance, html, IT Consulting, on-page-optimisation, search-engines, SEO Traffic Services, seo-tips, Technical Expert, Technical Outsourcing, Web Maintenance, xhtml

Google’s Starter Guide to SEO

Google have published their own SEO starter guide (PDF 550KB) which covers the basics of search engine optimization as it relates to the Google search engine.

If you’re reasonable familiar with SEO there’s not really anything new here.

However, if you’re trying to educate a client or an internal stakeholder on this topic it’s helpful to reference a document that is sanctioned by the world’s largest search engine.

Tags: SEO, SEO for Website, Website Design and Development

Useful Collection of Web Site Checklists

Came across this handy collection of checklists on all things related to developing a successful web site.

The checklists include general best practices such as site design, architecture, and content, as well as more specific areas such as About Us, Contact Us, and Login/My Account pages.

This is a really useful reference which would also make a great starting point for developing your own internal web team checklists.

Tags: Website, Website Collections, Website Design

9 Free Tools to Analyze and Improve Your Website

If you’re running a web site you need to know how it is doing, in particular how you’re performing against your competitors, and where you can improve.

These useful tools will help you to monitor and (hopefully) improve the performance of your site according to generally recognized web site marketing criteria.

SEOmoz Trifecta Page Strength Tool

If you would like to measure the strength of a certain page on a site, blog, or an entire domain, then check out the SEOmoz Trifecta Page Strength Tool(free registration required).

Based on various factors you will see your impact within your industry and can compare it to others. Note that free accounts are limited to one report per day.

Popuri

If you think it’s a lot of hassle to use several different tools Popuri might be what you’re looking for.

Popuri allows you to get a variety of information — from PageRank to del.icio.us bookmarks — all at once. It also includes Compete rank which provides a useful counterpoint to Alexa in order to get a better picture of how your site ranks in popularity.

Raven SEO Analyzer

The free Raven SEO Analyzer aims to help you build a better, more optimized website to rank you higher on search engines.

It checks things like whether your site uses heading tags properly, has deprecated HTML, contains inline styles, and has an acceptable page weight.

It also scores you out of 100 which is helpful if you’re monitoring the performance of your site over time or comparing against competitors.

Mint

Mint is a web analytics tool somewhat similar to Google Analytics. It provides all the usual statistics on everything from number of visits to unique referrers.

Unlike Google Analytics and other web analytics packages, it also tracks RSSfeeds, browser window size, and has a library of official and community-developed plugins.

Website Grader

If you’re looking to analyze the marketing effectiveness of your web site, tryWebsite Grader.

It provides you with a score out of 100 based on criteria such as web site traffic, SEO, social popularity and various other technical factors. It also provides you with advice on how you can improve your ranking.

One useful feature is the ability to compare your site against multiple other websites. This could be really helpful in better understanding how your site stacks up against its competitors.

Crazy Egg

Crazy Egg is a tool that supplements your standard analytics package. It comes in 3 versions — standard (free), plus and pro — depending on how many visits and pages you want to track at once.

Crazy Egg lets you track what visitors are doing on particular page and shows you what links they clicked via heatmaps and various overlays. It’s a great way to test the effectiveness of different versions of a page to see which one is the most effective.

SiteYogi

SiteYogi sets out to be a one-stop-shop for web site analysis.

It examines a variety of areas, including how well optimized your site is for search engines as well as the number of backlinks you have, various social media rankings, whether your code is valid, and how well ranked your site is. It provides quite a comprehensive overview.

Smart PageRank

Smart PageRank provides you with a lot more data about your site than the name suggests.

Like some of the other tools mentioned, it provides you with a variety of data about your site and its ranking on various search engines. Unlike other tools, it estimates a dollar value for your site based on these factors.

SEOCentro

Looking for a variety of SEO-related tools all in one place? Then SEOCentro is worth a look.

It includes tools that will check meta tags, pagerank, links popularity, keyword position, and search engine saturation. It also provides a server headers checking tool, which is useful to make sure that any 301 redirects are set up correctly.

Tags: Technology, Website Design Help, Website Tips