Currently with HTML4, mark-up coders are working with document structures like this:

<div id="header">
[insert a logo]
[insert some links]</div>
<div id="leftnav">[bunch-o-links]</div>
<div class="post"><p>Lorem Ipsum</p></div>
<div id="footer">[bunch-o-links]</div>

In principle, <div> tags are generic and don’t tell the browser/crawler anything about the content it contains. It’s true that I’ve used some semantic ids and class names in the above example but that’s just for ease of illustration. I could have called them anything.

If we change up the obvious id and class names, the only way a search engine would know that something is actually a footer or a nav-bar is if it repeats over and over again. But that’s sort of the crucial part, isn’t it? It has to have a way to KNOW that some section is repeating in order to devalue any part of it. Across billions of web pages that would be a fair amount of heavy lifting to maintain.

Well HTML5 is about to make their lives a LOT easier. Here’s how that same code above would look in HTML5:

<header>
[insert a logo]
[insert some links]</header>
<nav>[bunch-o-links]</nav>
<article><p>Lorem Ipsum</p></article>
<footer>[bunch-o-links]</footer>

With HTML5 and semantic markup, browsers and crawler will know exactly what section of the page contain what content. Now all a search engine needs to do is just say “Oh, it’s the footer tag. Give -5 internet points to all the links contained therein.” Or, worse yet, just ignore them completely and only concern themselves with what’s in the <article> tag.

Don’t get me wrong here. I’m all for semantic markup, microformats and RDFa, and all that good stuff. HTML5 is going to be powerful (and it’s about time anyways). I just thought this could make for an interesting side effect of the transition.

Thoughts?

Video source: How do you rate links from sites like Twitter and Facebook?
Original Article: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/01/answering-your-december-grab-bag.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+blogspot/amDG+(Official+Google+Webmaster+Central+Blog)

Points of interest:

1. Links aren’t any different if they come from .gov or .edu. “It’s not like a link from an .edu autmatically carries more weight.” (1:58)
2. Most links on Twitter are nofollow. (We knew this but it’s worth mentioning again.)

I noticed that he didn’t mention links from Facebook Fan Pages, but he makes it pretty clear that all links are treated equally from the outset, but then Page Rank is applied to determine the linking site’s “reputation.” Keep this bit in mind people. It’s not always the number of links you have, it’s the quality of those links. You dig?

(for the experts out there… you may already know all this. however, this is core information that bears repeating for others out there who are just getting their feet wet. thank you for your understanding.)

I didn't know what image to use for this post

Back in 2008 I posted an article about getting mod_rewrite working on a GoDaddy account. I thought it’d be a good time to update that information with another example. This time we’re going to be looking at making some changes on a GoDaddy account with a WordPress installation.

Options +FollowSymLinksOptions -MultiViewsRewriteEngine onRewriteRule ^attorneys/(.*)/(.*)/(.*) practice.php?geo=$2&pa=$3&state=$1
# BEGIN WordPress<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>RewriteEngine OnRewriteBase /RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-fRewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-dRewriteRule . /index.php [L]</IfModule>
# END WordPress
DirectoryIndex index.php

—————————————-

This implementation takes this: “domain.com/pagename.php?paramB=Y&paramC=ZparamA=X”
and turns it into “domain.com/DirectoryName/X/Y/Z ”

I like this set up since it fits in with my normal WordPress url structure. Just make sure that you pick a directory name that isn’t going to be used within WordPress.

Also, notice that the custom rules are inserted before the usual WordPress rules. This was the only way I was able to get it to work.

Hope this helps! Just let me know if you have any questions at all.

Use tools you already have to find ways to boost traffic.

Using a Site Analytics tool? Got a Rank Tracker or some free time to manually check some rankings? Here’s a way you can find and predict how much traffic you might be missing out on.

Aside from the fact that I just ended that sentence with a preposition which drives me nuts, let walk through the process, shall we? Super. Open up your analytics tool and your favorite spreadsheet app and let’s go.

Collect the keywords

Go into your analytics tool and find the report that tells you what keywords are driving organic traffic to your website.

Set your date report range for 30 days and make sure you can see how many visits each keyword/keyphrase drove to your site within that time frame. Get as many keywords as you can. I’m talking like 400-500 keywords if your report allows and if you have that much data.

Paste that data into a spreadsheet. One column for the keyphrase and one column for the number of visits. Good!

Get the rankings

Arguments about the veracity of rank-checking these days aside, paste that list of keywords into your favorite rank checking tool and fire it up. Or, you can always check them one-by-one if your list is manageable.

Plug in your findings into a third column on your spreadsheet. (I’m just checking Google here)

Forget about the #1 ranked items

Now, sort the spreadsheet and delete all the rows that have keywords that are currently ranking #1 for you. We’re only going to concern ourselves with anything not currently ranking #1 from here on out.

Now for some imperfect math

Let’s take a look at the chart here…

source: http://www.seo-scientist.com/google-ranking-ctr-click-distribution-over-serps.html

If we accept these numbers, you can start to calculate how much traffic you might be losing by ranking something other than #1. For example…

“red widgets” brought in 100 visits and you’re currently ranking #4. Based on our chart above, there’s a difference of  44.83% between #1 and #4. Let’s do the math: You could have had roughly 45 extra visits had you been #1. See where this is going?

You can use these numbers to help justify projects/man-hours geared toward trying to rank for all these other keywords. You can use them to give a ROUGH projection of potential traffic/lead increases. I can’t emphasize the term “rough” enough here. The math is not perfect all the time in all cases. You’re going to have two moving targets here:

1. The percentage of click-thru rates are not going to work out exactly for every market or set of search terms
2. The rankings you see might not be the rankings that everyone sees.

But overall, you can see how this can give you a rough estimate on traffic of which you could be taking advantage. You can also turn this into a monthly or quarterly exercise. I find it best to track the traffic I’ve gained by moving up the rankings on that initial list. I use the same spreadsheet we set up above and add columns by date that track the ranking improvements/setbacks. I then add a column after 30 days to see if the traffic to that keyword has improved.

Hope this helps! It’s an interesting report anyways. I gotta give a shout-out to Larry Cotter from ApartmentHomeLiving.com on this one.

Basically, all the search engines will let you suggest the preferred URL you’d like them to focus all the SEO juice on:

To use Google’s example, all you put in the head tag is something like this:

link rel=”canonical” href=”http://www.example.com/product.php?item=swedish-fish”

That’s all there is to it, folks.

Here are the links to the new canonical goodness!

Google Webmaster Blog posting

Search Engine Land posting

For once, the search engines unite to make and SEO’s life a little easier.

WOO HOO!!!

“The Google PageRank Algorithm”

It pretty interesting since he also includes a PageRank Calculator.

Check it out folks!

When I was logged in to my Google account in Chrome, my article was #1. When I was not logged in and using Firefox, I was #8.

Just another example of how using SERP ranking as a success metric is becoming more and more wishy-washy.

However, I did a little tweaking with the title tags. Here’s what I put in:

<?php if (is_home()) { ?>
<title><?php bloginfo(‘name’); ?> | (Lot’s o’ keywords here)</title>
<? } else {?>
<title><?php wp_title(); ?> | <?php bloginfo(‘name’); ?></title>
<? } ?>

Hopefully this will help as well.

I uploaded it yesterday..