Topic: Web development

SEO

SearchCap: The Day In Search, May 21, 2009

Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Live Search? Kumo? Bing? Put Your Questions To Microsoft’s Dr. Qi Lu At SMX Advanced Dr. Qi Lu, the leader of Microsoft’s search efforts, will be keynoting on day two of […]

An Insider’s Look At SMX Advanced: Michelle Robbins

Continuing our series of behind-the-scenes insights from our SMX Advanced programming team, today we have a Q&A with Michelle Robbins, Third Door Media’s Technology Director, and the operations whiz behind Search Engine Land, Sphinn and our other web sites. You are the Technology Director at Third Door Media. Tell us what that means. Michelle Robbins: […]

SEO

L.A. Tech Scene Welcomes Web Dev & SEO Meetup

On the journey from HTML to SERP, a Web site may face a number of potential pitfalls. Pinpointing the obstacles on the path was the focus of the first Jane and Robot meetup in Los Angeles last Tuesday night. Nathan Buggia and Vanessa Fox, the pair behind search and search-friendly web development site JaneAndRobot.com, held […]

Hey Usability Professionals: Get With The SEO Program

For over 10 years, I have been trying to convince my clients, colleagues, friends, family, and my 2 cats that SEO and website usability go hand in hand, that they are intricately related. And I have even chastised colleagues and clients for not considering users during the optimization process. I have seen many of my […]

SEO Vs. Web Site Architecture

If you ask web professionals what their interpretation of the phrase information architecture is, you will get a wide variety of responses. A search engine optimization (SEO) professional might launch into some grand scheme about indexation and PageRank sculpting. A web developer usually views information architecture in terms of fields in a database—how each field […]

Are You An SEO Hybrid?

During search engine optimization (SEO) consultations, have you heard any of the following statements: “I didn’t hire you for website usability. I hired you for SEO.” These statements, and the sentiments associated with them, come in many variations, such as: “I didn’t hire you to redesign my site. I hired you to get my site […]

SEO

Content: The Once, Current & Future King Of Big Site SEO

All web sites, whether large or small, have many of the same search engine optimization challenges. Since the beginning of interactive time, it has been a struggle for many business websites to find their voice and to provide meaningful content to the Internet audience. At Agency.com we see this struggle every day, particularly in an […]

SEO

Choose Your CMS With Care

The best time to start working on SEO is before you start building your site. It goes back to that old saying: “If you don’t have time to do it right, will you have the time to do it over?” And, of course you don’t have time to do it over. One of the biggest […]

A Small Business Success Story: Element One Photography

Picture this: You’ve spent two months creating a website for your small business. You’ve poured yourself into it. The web site is a thing of beauty, and it showcases your work very effectively. But no one can find it. Six months go by, and you’re not getting any traffic from search engines. You type your […]

SEO

Searching For Small Businesses, Coming Up Frustrated

Having written about search for years, it’s often easy for me to mistakenly assume that everyone gets it. Search is where the customers are. Surely every business owner, large or small, understands by now the importance of appearing before these customers in search. Surely. But as I’ve looked for local businesses to help with my […]

Google Announces Google Book Search APIs

The Google Book Search Blog announced the new developer site for the Google Book Search APIs. The API allows developers to add Google Book Search features to their web site. For example, you can now embed book previews, when available, to books listed on your site. For example, if you are on Books A Billion […]

Del.icio.us Now Delicious.com, With Improvements

Delicious has now relaunched under Delicious.com with some new functionality. The old Delicious was at del.icio.us and should soon redirect to the new dot com address. Along with the domain change, the Delicious site has been redesigned to aid newcomers on using the site. Here are before and after screen captures:

Google Now Crawling And Indexing Flash Content

Historically, search engines have been unable to extract content, such as text and links, from Flash (SWF) files. Subsequently, much of the Flash-based content on the web has been unavailable in search results. This situation has been frustrating for web developers, who have tried to come up with workarounds to help get search engines to […]

SEO

So, You Think You’re A Search Engine Optimization Expert?

A few years ago, I wrote a three-part article series about the different levels of SEO skills: beginner, intermediate, and advanced. I placed copywriters at the beginner level, information architects and interface designers at the intermediate level, and web developers and programmers at the advanced level. At the time, I was pretty confident at the […]

SEO

Are We In-House SEO Experts? Not Really… And Here’s Why

When you hear the phrase “in-house SEO expert” or “in-house SEO,” certain things immediately flash to mind. There’s the glamour bits built around the perceptions fostered from hearing of six-figure salaries, or direct involvement in big projects and depth of contact many in-house search marketers seem to have within the executive workings of their companies. […]

SEO

Yahoo! Launches SearchMonkey Developer Tool In Limited Preview

Today, Yahoo! is providing a "limited preview" of a tool that enables developers to create SearchMonkey applications. Yahoo! CTO Ari Balogh will be unveiling the tool at Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco today, and more details are available in the Yahoo! Search Blog. Yahoo! first announced SearchMonkey in February at SMX West, and followed […]

SEO

How Flash Can Be Search Engine Friendly

For a long time there has been a tug of war between developers and designers who love to use Flash and SEOs who know how bad Flash can be from a search engine crawler perspective. The designer wants the beauty of an all Flash site. The SEO wants to bring the site traffic. It’s a […]

PPC

The Art Of Growing An In-House Search Marketing Team

You’ve been tasked with building an in-house search marketing team, and now you’re wondering where to start. It’s a daunting task, to be sure. Do you start by rousting the programmers to get the content management system (CMS) into shape? Do you grab a credit card and start up a paid search campaign? Do you […]

PPC

SEO Is Not An Option, It’s A Requirement!

Recently, there was a thread in the High Rankings Forum asking whether SEO is an extra skill or a prerequisite for any website designer/developer. It was a great question that spurred a lot of conversation. It goes without saying that the average small-business owner in 2007 knows that they need a website. But do they […]

PPC

Website SEO Health Check Tool

Aaron Wall has released a new tool named the Website Health Check Tool. The tool reviews a site’s title tags, descriptions, URLs, and page status codes. It then returns problems the site may have with missing title tags and descriptions, any duplicate title tags or descriptions, www versus non-www issues, index page health, and error […]

SEO

The IT Group: Friend Or Foe Of In-House Search Marketers?

The battle lines are drawn. On one side stands our plucky heroine: the redheaded stepchild of the corporation, the search marketer. Armed only with her knowledge and expertise, she stands, all alone. On the other side stand the massed hordes of the IT department. Armed with their “best development practices,” their coding standards documentation, and […]

Google AdSense To Launch Code Free Ad Changes

The Inside AdSense blog announced that they will be releasing a new ad management solution to enable code-free ad changes. Currently, if you want to change your AdSense layout to a different color, format, channel, or whatever, after you make that change in the AdSense console, you need to copy and paste new AdSense code […]

Attention Shopping Sites! Generic Content Means Generic Links

I had the pleasure of participating on a Link Building Clinic at the Shop.org conference in Las Vegas last week. This conference attracts a different crowd than the SEO/SEM related shows in that practically every attendee at a Shop.org show is running a web site that sells something. Now, link building for a shopping site […]

Organizing The World’s Push Content: The iGoogle Ecosystem

Today, we welcome another guest author to Just Behave. This week, we’re pleased to welcome Sep Kamvar, the lead software engineer of personalization at Google. In the first of two parts, Sep looks at how the introduction of iGoogle and gadgets have created a new ecosystem of push content and how Google tackles the problem […]

SEO

Local Lessons From A Massive Launch

As reported here and elsewhere, Marchex recently launched more than 100,000 local and vertical Web sites. This involved aggregating and organizing millions of pieces of data, crafting refinements to help users pinpoint businesses, designing sites to support the variety of use cases involved in look up and discovery of local businesses, and the other couple […]

SEO “Don’ts”: 20 Fatal Mistakes You Must Avoid To Succeed

Small businesses are often hard-pressed for time and money. That’s been a recurring theme in the Small is Beautiful columns here on Search Engine Land. And as I read various small business blogs, it’s clear to me that there’s a growing interest in search marketing and understanding the benefits of SEO. But there’s still a […]

SEO

SEO Is Easy? Let’s Look At The Hard 5 Percent

The SEO world has always had its supporters and its detractors, and it’s never made a great deal of difference. The bigger battles often waged within the community between the whitehats and blackhats. The whitehats would rant and rave about how the blackhats could get clients in trouble and how blackhat tactics generally junked up […]

PPC

Defending SEO, Yet Again!

SEM and SEO, Rocket Science, or Just Plain Science? (Part 1) from Kevin Lee at ClickZ has Kevin jumping formally into the "SEO is easy versus SEO is rocket science debate" and digging a hole even deeper for himself, as far as I’m concerned. Sorry, Kevin. Kevin writes: To recap the roots of the controversy, […]