Monday, October 29, 2007
SearchPath is proud to announce the launch of the new website for Mrs Crimbles, Britain's fastest growing wheat, gluten and dairy free cake and biscuit company - once endorsed by Fanny Craddock herself!
SearchPath created the new site's design, and implemented a full standards-compliant xhtml static website.
We're really pleased with the result - now try their cakes, they're even better!
The new site can be found at
www.mrscrimbles.com.
Tuesday, October 16, 2007
AJAX has a bad rap in SEO, for obvious reasons – it makes for pages that can’t be indexed. Most AJAX articles relating to SEO mention that you need unique URLs (but not too many), and the back button needs to work. Well, that’s only half the story, AJAX content itself
cannot be indexed by Google because it doesn’t
exist until
after the page has been displayed.
So what can you do about it? Well the simple answer is to not let AJAX run the whole web site; AJAX is best used to
enhance the user experience. Here are some simple rules to follow:
- Is the content critical? If yes, don’t use AJAX.
- Is the information useful, and dynamic? Use AJAX.
In essence Google (and any other search engine) does
not click on links. This is very important to realise, Google simply follows any content within ‘href’ attributes. This means if there is nothing in an href, Google will not find it. This has ramifications for .NET applications too, since they often rely on postbacks which Google will
not perform.
In essence all important content should be static on the page, while superfluous yet useful functionality and information should be AJAX. If a piece of content falls between these two extremes, try using straight JavaScript. By having a hidden div, the content is still on the page, but not visible until necessary. Don’t over-use this latter technique; otherwise Google may think you’re hiding content with the intention of gaining ill-gotten rankings.
The WordPress blogging system is a great tool and very easy to use. However, to get the most out of it for search engines, you need to tweak its default settings.
Using the default settings, you will have bad titles, bad URLs, duplicate content...and more.
The good news is that this can all be rectified and we know how! We can setup permanent links, modify the post slug, optimise the page titles, minimise the duplicate content, prevent feed crawling and advise on the best plug-ins to use.
If you're using WordPress and haven't modified the settings in any way, give us a call and we'll help you get the most benefit from your blog.
Thursday, October 11, 2007
According to new research by comScore, shows that Google powered more than half of all search requests carried out around the world in August.
The study showed that more than 61 billion searches were performed by more than 750 million users in the month.
Users performed more than 37 billion searches via Google, more than all the other major search engines combined.
Yahoo was the second most used engine, followed by Baidu, the Chinese language search engine, the report said.
"Seeing Asian search engines like China's Baidu.com and Korea's NHN ranked alongside Google and Yahoo underscores the fact that search has become a truly global phenomenon," said Bob Ivins, executive vice president of international markets at comScore, in a statement.
The Top 5:
Google sites 37 billion searches
Yahoo sites - 8.5 billion
Baidu (Chinese) 3.2 billion
Microsoft sites 2.1 billion
NHN (Korean) 2 billion
Tuesday, October 09, 2007
We're often asked by clients how soon we can get them decent rankings for their brand new website with its brand new domain and they're usually suprised (and disappointed!) when we say 6 months minimum.
Their next question is usually, "So why is it easier to get good rankings for an older site than a new site?"
For Google, it's all about trust and it will take time to work out whether it can trust you and your site. It wants to know that you're not a spammer hoping to make some quick money before Google you them from its search results.
So, as the owner of a new site, what can you do? Do the right things that any website owner should do - start with the right keywords, optimise your pages so Google knows what your pages/site is about (but always write with your visitor in mind), attract links to your site (natural not spam links), register your domain for 10 years (for a .com). Then, the most crucial thing is to have patience...and consider a good Paid Advertising campaign until (and after) your search rankings have kicked in.
More for information regarding
search engine optimisation, please call SearchPath today.
Monday, October 01, 2007
Google recently released guidelines on its
webmaster central blog for meta descriptions, the snippet of text sometimes used by Google in the search results. They advise that meta descriptions can be useful for increasing the number of clickthroughs a search engine listing gets. They also say what has been suspected by us for a while: that the meta description does not affect Google's rankings, and should only be used to improve clickthroughs.
They advise of some good meta description strategies:
1.
Use different descriptions for different pages. Google advises: "You should obviously prioritize parts of your site if you don't have time to create a description for every single page; at the very least, create a description for the critical URLs like your homepage and popular pages."
2.
Include clearly tagged facts in the desciption. Product pages might have key information such as age, price and manufacturer unavailable on the page content so it would be an ideal opportunity to use the meta description tag. Google deems this meta description not desirable: (opening and closing brackets left out due to formatting issues)
meta name="Description" content="[domain name redacted] : Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (Book 7): Books: J. K. Rowling,Mary GrandPré by J. K. Rowling,Mary GrandPré"
Google outlines various reasons why this tag is not desirable, including the duplication of information within the tag and the fact that none of the information in the tag is identified: who is Mary GrandPre?
The blog post identifies the following as a much better meta description:
META NAME="Description" CONTENT="Author: J. K. Rowling, Illustrator: Mary GrandPré, Category: Books, Price: $17.99, Length: 784 pages"
"What's changed? No duplication, more information, and everything is
clearly tagged and separated. No real additional work is required to generate something of this quality: the price and length are the only new data, and they are already displayed on the site."
3.
Programmatically generate descriptions, but make sure they're not "spammy". Use these for larger database driven sites with lots of dynamically generated pages.
4.
Use quality descriptions. Google advises to "make sure your descriptions are... descriptive." A little work on the meta description can increase the amount and quality of your site traffic.
At SearchPath we utilise the above techniques to achieve quality search engine optimistation results. Contact us today on 01285 643496 to see how we can help your business.
