WebDeveloperNews

Why the iPad, Flash, Adobe Products and User Agent Detection Really Do Matter

Michael Gray — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 17:42:34 +0000

Being the owner of a Macbook Pro, iPhone, and iPad, you might consider me an Apple Fanboy. I can tell you I’ve been involved in web development long enough to tell you that the current state of usability on the web is nearing the low point: when, in the late 90′s, browsers had no standardization and we had to design different sites for Netscape and Internet Explorer. The current situation comes mostly from designing sites that don’t render properly or at all on mobile devices like a mobile phone, tablet, or iOS device.

Before you cast me aside as being on the bleeding edge of technology and that I don’t really register as being statistically significant, I’ll share three links with you:

In most cases, people aren’t going to share or link to you if your website doesn’t work on their platform of choice…

Recently, I was trying to fix my dishwasher (listen, I cook a lot and dirty a lot dishes…knowing how to do some basic repairs myself saves me a little cash now then). About every 8-10 months, the part of the dishwasher that is supposed to grind up the food that doesn’t get pre-rinsed gets clogged and needs be cleaned. I’ve bookmarked the site with the video for my model in Evernote because I use it so often. However, because the site was using a proprietary flash video player, when I clicked the link, I only got the audio podcast not the video showing me assembly/disassembly (screen shots below).

Laptop Version

iPad Version

Not a problem. I figured I’d head on over to Sears, get a link to the product manual, and do it the long way. Turns out ManageMyLife.com does such a bad job of user detection that they think I don’t have the Adobe Reader installed and can’t view the PDF for my model number.

Laptop Version

iPad Version

Great. So I had a hard time getting a video on how to fix my dishwasher and viewing the PDF for the instruction manual on my iPad. I had to go upstairs and use my laptop. Boo hoo on me for having first world problems, right? What we really have here is a case of bad site design and usability for not designing in a site that fails gracefully when it gets user agent detection wrong. As a marketer and SEO, these things matter and they are going to matter more in the future …

First World Problems

In most cases, people aren’t going to share or link to you if your website doesn’t work on their platform of choice. They aren’t going to share your link on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, or any other social network, and if they do it will be the way I did: to make fun of you or use you as an example of a McFail. Search engines are getting smarter. They are using lots of signals to determine which sites rank. These days, usability and engagement are two key signals and, as Google gets better at measuring them more accurately, they’ll play an even more prominent role.

So what should site owners do in these cases:

Avoid using proprietary audio/video/pdf viewers and players. If you need to for advertising reasons, build a more bulletproof system of user agent detection and fail gracefully into a condition that allows users to still get the content.
Don’t let the same content exist on a mobile subdomain (link) and normal domain (link) as this only leads to trouble when content gets shared across mobile devices and laptops (looks squarely in the direction of Facebook and Youtube). Use one URL improve your user agent detection if you need to do so, but try to design a system that is user agent agnostic.
The number and kind of devices that people are going to use is only going to increase in the coming years. This is a problem that you will have to deal with sooner or later. If you design systems that are flexible and embrace these platforms, you will have an easier time building links, getting content shared, and improving the on site signals and metrics that the search engines are using.

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How To Programatically Find the Social Statistics of Your Website using PHP

Trevor Boland — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 17:20:34 +0000

Whether you’re in the SEO business or just have a general curiosity about your website’s popularity, it’s nice to see the numbers on your share/+1/tweet buttons climb. But what if you wanted to check the values of those numbers programatically? With most of the sites offering RESTApi methods, you can get the numbers rather simply with an http GET request.

Call to the below listed urls, inserting the URL of the site and you’ll recieve a json object with the desired information.

Facebook: http://graph.facebook.com/?id=[YOUR URL HERE]
Twitter: http://cdn.api.twitter.com/1/urls/count.json?url=[YOUR URL HERE]
Reddit: http://www.reddit.com/api/info.json?url=[YOUR URL HERE]
Stumbleupon: http://www.stumbleupon.com/services/1.01/badge.getinfo?url=[YOUR URL HERE]

We have a couple of choices when it comes to how to get the json object from the url. We could use the file_get_contents method, but, while simple, this method is more prone to errors. So instead, let’s use the cURL method.

	$ch = curl_init();
	$options = array(  			//Create an array of the curl options.  Useful when you're checking multiple sites.
		CURLOPT_URL => $url, 		//Above URL appended to your URL.
		CURLOPT_HEADER => 0,		//We don't need the header of the object.
		CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER => 1); 	//If this option were set to 0 the data would print to the browser
	curl_setopt_array($ch, $options);
	$output = curl_exec($ch);		//Executes the cURL and places returned json into the $output variable.
	curl_close($ch);

Google, on the other hand, requires a POST request. This is not, however, impossible using cURL. The below code creates the POST request with the necessary options required to get the correct json object back.

	$url = [YOUR URL HERE];

	$curl = curl_init();
	curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_URL, "https://clients6.google.com/rpc");
	curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_POST, 1);
	curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, '[{"method":"pos.plusones.get","id":"p","params":{"nolog":true,"id":"' . $url . 	'","source":"widget","userId":"@viewer","groupId":"@sel    f"},"jsonrpc":"2.0","key":"p","apiVersion":"v1"}]');
	curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
	curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, array('Content-type: application/json'));
	$output = curl_exec ($curl);
	curl_close ($curl);

Now we have a json object for each website. Time to decode and find the counts. We’ll use the json_decode method to create an associative array of each json object:

array = json_decode($output, true); 	//Decodes the json object into an associative array

Facebook:
```
$shares = $array['shares'];
```
Twitter:
```
$tweets = $array['count'];
```

Reddit:

$reddit_ups = $array['data']['children']['data']['ups']; 	//If you really want to see how many people disliked your site, just change ups to downs.

Stumbleupon:
```
$stumbles = $array['result']['views'];
```

Google:

$plusones = $array['result']['metadata']['globalCounts']['count'];

And there you have it. All of the social statistics for your website from the most common social sharing sites. Thanks to Tom Anthony for his help with Google+.

Google: No More Panda Updates in 2011

Navneet Kaushal — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 15:50:15 +0000

The Panda will continue to strike in 2012 after a brief holiday break in December 2011. This was announced by Google on Twitter. While Panda updates have ceased for 2011 after the last update in November, they will continue after the New Year. The announcement on Twitter was a part of the weather updates that Google decided to keep coming, about its algorithmic update.

Many webmasters are seeing it as an early Holiday gift from Google. They are getting a breather to Panda Proof their site. The last update in November was considered a minor one which affected only 1% of the searches. Another interpretation has been made that a Panda Update can be expected in as early as January next year.

The Panda Story:
The Panda update (then referred to as the ‘Farmer Update’) was first rolled out on February 24th. It was directed at content and link farms. Then the international version of the Panda Update rolled on the 11th of April for the English sites outside the USA. The Panda 2.5 was rolled out in the last week of September and since then a number of tweaks have been made by Google in the algorithm.

Brace Yourself For the Panda:
If you are lucky enough to have survived the Panda, or want to know how to not be whacked by the update again, you need to work on you site to ensure it is Panda proof.

Get Rid Of Broken Links:
Check your site for broken links, find them and fix them. Get rid of any links you have from “link farms” and poor sites.

Watch Your Keyword Density:
The Panda comes down heavily on keyword stuffed content. Follow the recommended keyword density ratios that Google prefers. The ideal keyword density ratio is between 5–8 percent if it is higher than this, then the Panda may penalize you.

Ensure You Have Relevant Keywords:
You may not have done it deliberately, but you may suffer if your keywords have been abused by other sites. The Panda penalized news sites like Forbes just because their keywords (names of celebrities etc) had been abused by low quality sites. You must check the sites that rank for your keywords and keep an eye on the domain authority score. You must figure out the authority of the chosen keywords and keyword phrases before optimizing them for your site.

Parting Tip:
Google has given a couple of weeks respite. Fix your site or hire a reputed SEO firm to do the same for you.

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WordPress SEO for Beginners

Don Campbell — Fri, 02 Dec 2011 15:16:07 +0000

What are SEO essentials when it comes to publishing a new WordPress Page or Post? There are some basic things you can do to make sure your new page or post is set up for the Google crawler to understand what the page is about, and boost your chances for ranking highly for your search term.

Video

Watch the video below to learn these essentials:

Here are a few highlights from the video:

Decide on the keyword phrase that you will optimize the page for
Choose a compelling title with the keyword phrase in it
Use headers containing the keyword phrase
Include an image, and associate ALT and TITLE tags
Body text, use bold for phrase
Specific Title Tag and Meta Description
Internal linking to other pages

I’ll show you how to do all of these in the video.

More resources

Here are a few more articles I like in case you want to go into more depth on this:

SEO features in the SmallBiz Theme (Video)
Writing the Perfect Blog Post
How to do Local SEO in 5 Minutes by Andrew Shotland
WordPress SEO by Yoast (advanced)

Five Easy Ways To Improve Your Homepage

Kimberly Krause Berg — Fri, 28 Oct 2011 14:19:00 +0000

It’s easy to overlook important information that your website visitors may need when they first arrive to your homepage. While landing pages are helpful in guiding searchers to your site, eventually even these folks will find themselves on your homepage. Everyone has the same basic questions.

These questions revolve around Who, Where, What, When, Why and How. Answering them is fun, and not as obvious as you might believe. Using them as guides for credibility, trust, persuasiveness and desirability is an added bonus for your overall conversion rates. Don’t settle for a brief welcome statement that offers no guidance or spark of interest. These six words can help you add some zing!

Who

Firstly, who are you? This is a basic question. It’s often answerable by a logo. A logo is not that exciting, nor is it likely completely descriptive. Just ask Google. Add a descriptive tagline, which contains keywords and explains the purpose of the site or points out a valuable detail.

“Who” is found in your business address. Evaluate whether it is important to your business to provide an entire business, office or headquarters address, or simply a whittled down version. Many websites offer no clues about their country of origin, language and whether or not it targets a global or local target market. Search engines benefit from finding a zip code and town, in text, on your homepage. This increases your page’s chance of coming up in local searches, or whenever a search engine determines a local result fits someone’s search criteria.

Who you are is not enough, however. Who are you selling to? Men, women, old, young, here, there, and yes, if you offer senior citizen discounts, don’t hide this fact. Who would benefit from your products and services? Who is on your staff? Who is your sales representative? Your visitors want to know who you are. You are much more than your website or company name.

Where

Your location is important. If you place “Call our toll-free phone number” on your homepage, it’s helpful to know what country, at least, your company is located in so that somebody from half-way around the world understands when to call. If you run a local business, targeting local sales, is this obvious from your homepage? Is your site a headquarters with offices worldwide? What is the native speaking language? This may be important for those who are uncomfortable doing business outside their own country.

Some site owners know people will not buy certain products, such as medical supplies or drugs, from outside the USA, for example. Therefore, they pay for fake addresses, or display addresses that are nowhere near the company’s true home base. Determine if you need to offer a map to validate an address, or register with places such as the Better Business Bureau, to improve credibility.

Small businesses, if you work from home, rent a postal box, or explain that your home-based business is located in a certain country or province and leave it at that. There are other ways to prove your credibility and authenticity, without losing your right to privacy.

Included for “Where” is addressing where your target market is coming from. There may be instances where your content can address people from certain towns, cities, countries or schools. This information offers instant validation to your homepage visitor that they have arrived at a place that is intended for them.

What

This may be the most obvious point to address on your homepage, and the most challenging when you truly understand the real question. ‘What” is more than just what your product or service is. That’s the easy part.

What also pertains to what action do you want them to take once you tell them what you do? I’ve been to sites that spend so much time explaining what they’re about, but forgot to say if you could order it online. Remember, this is the homepage we’re focusing on. It’s not helpful to make anyone click around to figure out what services are offered, or what ways they can buy the cool products displayed on the homepage.

What credit cards do you accept? What award did you just receive? What do customers think about your services?

“What” is also where you can offer the value proposition, features and benefits. Do this by understanding and then addressing the one big question your visitors have – “What’s in it for me?”

The more you describe what you do or sell, the more information someone has to base decisions with. You aren’t wasting their time with this one. The value and benefit of your “What” may be greater or more substantial than the competitor’s site, who forgot to include this part or can’t offer a better deal.

When

This is easily an overlooked element on homepages. Everyone has a “When” question. It may be “When I call you?” List office hours or store hours, or when your “live help” person is on duty. When can orders be taken? When do you ship? When is the sale over? When is the clearance sale going to start? When will the next shipment of your hot items arrive? When can they order? That one is easy, and one reason you should use an “Order or Buy Now” button in some cases. (There are reasons for its sister button, “Add to Cart”, too. You may discover you need both.)

I recommend that you walk around your whole site and ask each page the “When” question. When can they print a page? When does the confirmation email arrive? When does the next news update occur? You can go nuts with this one, but the more you answer this question, the more confident your visitors will feel about you or the company.

Why

Related to “What”, is “Why”. This is where you lay out the value proposition and marketing content, in more detail , but be thoughtful and precise. Do you want a homepage that scrolls forever about why your product or service is the best there is? Or, can you nail the top-level benefits and link to more of them inside the site, where additional information and call to action prompts are?

Why will this product make someone smarter, thinner, richer? Why do 3 billion people around the world use it? Why are you so smart, thin and rich? Why is your book on the New York Times best sellers list? Why are the gems in your necklaces so special and will rose quartz really heal? Will being rich make life better, really? Why are the parts on this product better than the parts on a similar product sold by the other company? Why are your qualifications important?

Why did you name your website what you did? I have a friend whose online business has a good reason to answer this question. The site (and company) name cover two unrelated topics, but the company has combined them into something unique. Customers want to know what inspired this.

This is not an excuse to go on an ego trip. It’s an opportunity to show your passion. It’s how you define your offer. Do the homework for the many people who are still comparison-shopping, and convince them you have what they want and need.

How

Finally, how do offer your product or service? If there’s a shopping cart, strong identifiers are a login and cart icon at the top of an eCommerce website. Other clues are links to “Track your order”, “Your account” , buy buttons and order instructions.

In addition, your visitors have Time concerns. Timing is vital for sales. In addition, it communicates your readiness and ability to stay current and up to date.

Are they limited time specials? How often does your blog update? How often do you send your newsletter? How many clicks does it take to get to pricing? You may not address this one via content, but your navigation or embedded links to “Price Comparison Chart” or “View our prices” conveys how long it takes to get to vital information for comparison shoppers. How many products are in inventory? This may express expertise, for example. How many people subscribe to your newsletter? This may indicate popularity and length of time in an industry.

The purpose of interviewing your homepage may seem more practical to you now. Answer the six questions by providing focused content, navigation links and descriptive labels, bullet points, and small size instructive text.

They all contribute to your web site’s overall credibility.

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Now Manage Custom Search Engines From Webmaster Tools!

Navneet Kaushal — Thu, 13 Oct 2011 15:31:54 +0000

In an attempt to make things easier and quickly accessible for webmasters, Google has now allowed for Custom Search Engines to be accessed from the Webmaster Tools account only. This means that creating and managing of custom search engines can be done directly from the webmaster Tools account.

It is a known fact that custom search engines are the perfect solution for creating customized search experiences for you site. Apart from the chance to make money with these custom engines via AdSense for Search, you also ensure a better user experience with a search option on your site. The entire process of getting started is made easier now by Google with the direct access from Webmaster Tools.

The benefits of a custom search:

If you get a custom search for your website or blog, then you can benefit in these ways:

Better user experience with fast and relevant search results
You can search across links, bookmarks or blogrolls automatically with Custom Search
You can better customer retention and conversions on your site
Provide quick indexing of your website via On-Demand indexing

How to create a custom search?

Creating a custom search engine is pretty simple. Click on the “Custom Search” link in the Labs section of the Webmaster Tools, and a default search engine will be created for your site. Then you will get the code snippet to add your new CSE to your site. For further customization, you can move to the full CSE control panel.

To see more on the latest updates in Webmaster Tools, see here.

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Google Webmasters Tools Gets A New Interface

Navneet Kaushal — Fri, 30 Sep 2011 14:17:46 +0000

Google has redesigned the Google Webmasters Tools interface. The new interface will make things really easier for the webmasters managing multiple sites, highlighting the health problems of your sites.

The New Interface:

The new Webmasters Tool interface lets the webmasters know immediately what is wrong with their site. There is a major focus on the site’s health and usability. As is clear from the following screen shots-

The dashboard of the Google Webmasters Tool now shows the sites you own, as thumbnails. Notice the notifications beside each thumbnail. They are like:

“Several Health Issues found on your site” And once you click on “Check Site Health” you will get a detailed view of what is wrong with your site- the categories listed are:

Malware Detected
Important Pages Removed
Robots.txt blocking pages

These notifications about the site’s health and the errors that need to be fixed, are quite handy in allowing webmasters to react promptly and accordingly.

The notifications also inform you of the recent changes you’ve made to the site from within webmasters tools. In case there is no error, the notification says- “Nothing To report.”

The upgrade will be welcomed by most webmasters as it has really sped up the process of find and rectifying the errors on the sites.

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Google Creates Fast-Loading Image Format

Doug Caverly — Tue, 27 Sep 2011 11:09:48 +0000

Compared to the days when it took several minutes for a page full of photos to load, images don’t pose much of a problem anymore. Still, they can create a delay, and so Web developers who don’t want to keep site visitors waiting should be glad to hear that Google’s created an alternative image format to JPEG.

Google named the format WebP (pronounced “weppy”), and it released a developer preview yesterday if you feel like playing around with it.

As for why you should, a post on the Chromium Blog explained, “In order to gauge the effectiveness of our efforts, we randomly picked about 1,000,000 images from the web (mostly JPEGs and some PNGs and GIFs) and re-encoded them to WebP without perceptibly compromising visual quality. This resulted in an average 39% reduction in file size.”

Plus, “We expect that developers will achieve in practice even better file size reduction with WebP when starting from an uncompressed image.”

So again, WebP should help Web developers reduce load times by a noticeable amount. It’s possible the new format will lead to reduced bandwidth and hosting costs, too, depending on how many images are at stake.

More technical details are available here if you’re interested. Otherwise, it should just be interesting to see if/when WebP becomes an accepted file format.

Is A Hyphenated Domain Name Bad For SEO?

Patrick Hare — Mon, 26 Sep 2011 08:51:20 +0000

Should you buy a hyphenated domain name? In many cases, people are unable to buy an exact match domain name but the hyphenated one is available. Depending on your long term goals, a hyphenated domain (such as example-domain.com instead of exampledomain.com) can do a lot for your business, but severely limit your potential in other instances.

One of the key advantages of a hyphenated domain name is that it is nearly as good as an exact match domain name for SEO purposes. If your only goal is to rank on search engines, hyphenated domains can be a good buy and a good SEO strategy. However, if you plan on doing any branding, or you plan on marketing your website through channels like radio, print, or TV, then the hyphen can work against you. Even if people remember the name of the website, they might not remember the hyphen between words. Therefore, the owner of the hyphen-free domain name is going to be siphoning off a share of your traffic.

Copyright issues can also arise with hyphenated domain names. If someone has been selling a service under an original domain name for a period of time, he or she may be able to claim that your domain name is creating confusion, and may be able to claim ownership of your domain name. Normally this is not a problem if you are going after a name that is descriptive and does not carry any brand equity.

Getting back to the SEO advantages of hyphenated domain names, there are a couple of things to consider. It still takes time to rank for competitive keyword phrases, but you can get a bit of a lift from the domain name’s match to inbound anchor text pointing at the site. It may even be possible to push the envelope on linking by using more anchors that exactly match the keyword phrase in your domain name. We have also seen several cases in non-hyphenated domains where links to the domain name itself manage to get a site to rank for terms that are parsed out as keywords.

Therefore, if SEO is the only goal you have for your website, a hyphenated domain name can work wonders. In fact, you can get by with a .net, .org, and maybe even a .info if you want to be accessed only through search engine results or in PPC campaigns. If you ever plan on taking your click and mortar site into the brick and mortar world, you should then consider the acquisition of a site that has no hyphens in the domain name. There are some other considerations at this point in the game, but if you are just starting out, have limited funds, and plan to get a foothold with SEO traffic, then a hyphen is not always a bad thing.

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What Questions To Ask Your SEO Firm

Bill Hartzer — Sun, 25 Sep 2011 09:41:58 +0000

I have to say that when I recently read this article I was a little bit annoyed and elated at the same time. I quickly recalled all of the search engine optimization work I did for a search engine optimization client. One of the most difficult keyword phrases I worked on for a search engine optimization client was “gift baskets”. In fact, the work I did over a year ago still has my client ranking above the company referred to in the article, and I did it all without buying one single link. That part makes me “elated”. What annoys me is that the company in this search engine optimization article about being penalized by Google is still buying links. And Google knows that they are buying links.

This whole issue brings up another issue. Apparently being “penalized in Google” cost Ryan Abood’s company $4 million. From what I can tell, he may have not “done his homework” well enough and found a search engine optimization company that would answer all of the important search engine optimization questions. I have compiled a list of 44 questions that you should consider asking your potential search engine optimization company. These questions are not necessarily in order of importance, and they may not apply to every search engine optimization project. But in any case, here is my list of questions that you should consider asking your potential search engine optimization company.

What type of search engine optimization techniques do you use to achieve search engine rankings?

What type of risk is involved with your method of search engine optimization?

What will happen if our relationship is dissolved?

Can you show me examples of past work?

What was the client’s ROI of their search engine optimization efforts?

Can you give me references? Can I talk to one or more of your current search engine optimization clients?

What type of volume increase in traffic is reasonable to expect from search engine optimization?

How long until I start to see results?

What would you expect from OUR end to aid your work?

What were some of your top search ranking achievements?

What types of internet marketing services do you offer to supplement your SEO (search engine optimization) offerings?

Will my web site point to your web site?

How many number one search engine rankings you have achieved for your clients?

How long have you been providing search engine optimization services?

Are you an individual consultant or are you part of a search engine optimization team?

How long have you and your search engine optimization team been online?

What types of web sites will you not promote?

Do you participate and/or, are you a moderator for any of the SEO – Search Engine Optimization / SEM – Search Engine Marketing Forums? If so, what is your username and can you provide links to your most recent or notable discussions?

Can you describe and/or produce recent successful search engine optimization campaign results?

If so, can I use those clients for references?

Do you have web site design experience?

What is your technical background?

What types of programming environments are you experienced with?

What are your opinions in regards to Best Practices for the SEO – Search Engine Optimization / SEM – Search Engine Marketing industry? How does a company effectively compete online using traditional optimization strategies?

Can you assure us that the search engine optimization strategies and methods that you are utilizing fall under the criteria of Best Practices for the SEO/SEM Industry? Can we assume that this means no penalties for our website?

How many search engine optimization campaigns have you been involved with?

What was your role for those projects?

How many of those search engine optimization projects are still active?

How many of those search engine optimization projects inactive?

If inactive, why?

Do you have experience managing PPC – Pay Per Click, CPC – Cost Per Click, and other bid management campaigns?

What types of programs do you use for PPC bid management?

Are there any guarantees for top search engine positions if we decide not to use a PPC program?

The web sites we are currently linked to have no rank, which means to me that these links are useless.

What linking strategies would you use to increase link popularity for our website?

Is this service part of the proposed price? What types of websites will you target for link exchange?

Our main competitor’s Google PageRank falls between 1 and 3. How would you address improving our PageRank with Google, and other search engines that calculate the number of quality inbound links to our website? Is it possible to rank higher than our competitors?

What changes can we expect you to make to our website to improve our positioning in the search engines?

Will these search engine optimization changes be visible?

Will there be changes in the coding of our website?

What type of reporting (website log analysis) will you provide to us? How often will you provide those reports? Will you provide consultation on how to interpret the reports so that we have a basic understanding of the statistics?

Do you offer ROI analysis? Is this in addition to your contract pricing? Please explain the process of how the ROI will be determined.

Matt Cutts, from Googke, recently had this to say about what you should ask your SEO:

Do you buy links that pass PageRank?
What’s the most aggressive tactic you use?
Anything violate G’s guidelines?

Okay, well, there you go. 44 questions to ask your potential search engine optimization company. If you are employing someone to do your organic search engine optimization, then you might go through this list and see if you can answer all of these questions. If you cannot, then I would ask them. And if they do not answer your questions or cannot answer them, you might reconsider your relationship with them.

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