Ignore the Box

There's a new secret to gaining traffic on the web. Rather than thinking outside the box, staff at the popular Craigslist site have a different motto:

"Ignore the box completely"

An interview with Craigslist's CEO Jim Buckmaster reveals the company are too busy focusing on usability to worry about what anyone else is doing. They don't even want to make money. Heck, they try NOT to make money.

Their unusual approach is working. The site publishes nearly 15 million classified ads every month from users who clearly enjoy contributing to a site without ads.

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Website vs Web Site

When I'm grading student assignments for our Search Engine Optimization courses, I often come across alternative spellings. Some are regionally based, such as "optimization" versus "optimisation". But today I want to comment on "website" versus "web site" which I'm seeing a lot of confusion over.

There are conflicting arguments about this, but in academic circles, the correct version is considered "web site" as two words in support of W3 standards. Sites such as the Chicago Manual of Style Online insist that the two word version is correct formal usage. Then again, a search for "web site" on Wikipedia.org redirects to their definition article for "website". Dictionary.com also suggest "website" is the most commonly used form as it has developed in usage:

Usage Note: The transition from World Wide Web site to Web site to website as a single uncapitalized word mirrors the development of other technological expressions which have tended to take unhyphenated forms as they become more familiar. Thus email is gaining ground over the forms E-mail and e-mail, especially in texts that are more technologically oriented.

But perform a Google search for both versions and you’ll see that web site is much more common than website.

Personally, I believe you should always use the two-word version in your site, particularly in your Title and Description tags, because search engines won’t be able to distinguish the two words if you bunch them together as "website" and you might not capture as many searchers. If you use "website", you might also isolate pedantic readers who feel "web site" is the correct spelling. Consistency is key, no matter which version you decide to use.

So readers: which version do you prefer? Tell us via comments.

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Q and A: Does changing the name of a site impact search rankings?

Dear Kalena...

I am thinking of changing the name of my internet business site so as to direct more traffic because the current name, while nice, doesn't really spell out what we do. It is now Gilt-Edge Luxury Tours and Travel and I would like to change it to DC Luxury Tours. However, we have had this site for 10 years and it well indexed by the search engines. Does changing the name (but not the url which would stay the same) have any impact on the search engines? Or would I have to start all over from scratch if I changed the name?

Gilda

Kalena's Answer:

Dear Gilda

A site name change is not necessarily a problem. It would be different if you were changing your domain or changing your name from one with keywords in it to one without. Losing the word "travel" from your site name may slightly impact your site's rankings for searches involving the word "travel", but only if you no longer include that word prominently in your site. Your main site heading will no longer include "travel", but you can compensate by making sure that the rest of the site is optimized for travel-related keywords.

The other area that might be impacted is your link popularity. If other sites are currently linking to you using your old name, it might be contributing to your site's relevancy for "luxury tours and travel". But if ranking for "DC luxury tours" or "DC tours" is actually more important to you, then you should encourage sites already linking to you to change the anchor text of their link to your new site name and of course any new link partners should link to you using your new name. DC Luxury Tours is certainly easier to remember than your old name, so the change should be good from a marketing and usability perspective.

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Does Your Web Site Need a Workout?

I recently turned one of my blog rants into an article and I thought you, my dear readers, would enjoy it.

Does Your Web Site Need a Workout talks about how some companies waste hundreds of thousands of dollars on their web site without ensuring that it's working hard for them. Extract:

"I see it so often, regardless of company size. Web sites that could easily be bringing in loads of traffic and revenue simply wasting away because nobody can be bothered tracking visitor activity, analyzing trends or checking for search engine compatibility and usability.

These companies are simply keeping up appearances, investing heavily in Internet technology because their competitors are doing the same."

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Q and A: Is it ok to use an alt tag for every image for accessibility purposes?

Dear Kalena...

Your newsletter reply to one visitor included: "I would also avoid using more than 2 or 3 alt tags on a single page if you can help it." I designed and manage a site for a visually impaired friend who writes children's books: www.gate.net/~labooks/francesindex.html

Especially for her site, I notice how her text reader (JAWS) handles the page. It was my impression that I should have an alt tag for every image so a text reader could let visually impaired visitors know what was there. I wasn't really thinking about what the search engines want. What should I do about this?

You also mentioned using only 3 or 4 words in the tag. On my site, the picture is often a book cover. For example, I have put in the tag: "Click cover to order The Buggy That Boogied Away." Should that be changed to "Click cover to order" or to an abbreviated form of the title? (Some titles are longer than this one.) Again, I'm thinking about text readers such as JAWS rather than search engines.

Thanks
Betsy

Kalena's Answer:

Dear Betsy

Don't worry about a thing. When you say "I wasn't really thinking about what the search engines want", you're right on the money. You were thinking primarily about the user and they are THE most important consideration when it comes to designing a web site.

It's perfectly fine to add an alt img tag to every image if you are doing it primarily for accessibility purposes. My prior post was really aimed at persons wanting to add alt tags primarily for search engines. As long as the alt tags are not excessively stuffed with keywords, it shouldn't be a problem to include longer ones, especially where it makes sense to do so, such as the use of full book titles.

Do whatever makes the most sense for the user and you should be fine.

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Think Global, Act Global

I'm waaaay too tired to answer an FAQ tonight, so I'll just point to an article of mine published today in SiteProNews: Think Global Act Global: Writing For Your Online Market.

It's about all those sites you see that claim to target an international audience when their content only caters to a regional one. If the article has moved from SPN's front page, try this archived version.

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Q and A: Does the use of bold or italics tags add relevancy weight in search engines?

Dear Kalena...

A quick question - How much added value is there to placing keyword text within bold, strong, italics, or emphasis tags in terms of the weight given to those terms by search engines?

Thanks,
Adam

Kalena's Answer:

Dear Adam

Just like a healthy diet, everything in moderation is the key to a search engine compatible page. Yes, if you use bold/strong or italics to highlight text on your page, the search engines will assume you consider the content of that text to be important.

Same goes for the use of H1, H2 tags etc. If you consider certain keyword strings important enough to emphasize via headings, it is my understanding that the search engines will give the content between the tags slightly higher relevancy weight than content outside the tags. But don't go overboard and emphasize too much content, or you will defeat the whole purpose of making certain keywords stand out. You'll also annoy your readers - there's nothing worse than trying to read a web page that has been over-formatted. Overuse of such tags might also trigger anti-sp@mdexing filters.

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Q and A: Why does my site ranking fluctuate so much in Google and Yahoo?

Dear Kalena...

What do you think about recent changes going in Google and Yahoo search? Because I have seen that my site in Yahoo was on top but now I am not able to find it on any pages though I can see that my site is there in Yahoo by site. So what can you suggest about this?

Kind regards,
Huned

Kalena's Answer:

Dear Huned

Search engines are constantly in a state of flux. Think about how many new pages are added to the Internet on a daily basis. Now think about how many different computers around the world are required to hold all this information. Top that with the number of idiots trying to game the system or crack the search algorithms and you've got the problems that Google and Yahoo face.

It's only natural that your site will ebb and flow within the search results. The major engines need to shuffle their content between data-centers and tweak their relevancy algorithms on a regular basis. Instead of concentrating on what rank your site is on any particular day, try checking the search engine compatibility and the usability of your site for visitors. If it can be better, improve it! The more improvements that you make in these areas , the more likely you are to see your site rank higher in the search results.

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Q and A: Is the Google PageRank update over?

Dear Kalena...

Is the google-pagerank update over? Or its still going on. Can you tell us something about it?

Thanks and Best Regards
Avik

Kalena's Answer:

Dear Avik

I've no idea. I don't spend a lot of time tracking database shuffles and PageRank updates. I'd rather spend my time working on my site to make it more user-friendly or up to date.

That said, I did notice a change in the Google Toolbar PR ranking for each of my sites over the past week or so. I don't know if it's a permanent change but I don't spend too much time fixating on the little green bar. It's not an accurate indicator of your true Google PageRank, only a very broad approximation. Don't sweat the small stuff Avik - just make your site a better place for your visitors and the search engine rankings will follow.

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Q and A: Is Web 2.0 an SEO Killer?

Dear Kalena...

I have been doing link building for a local SEO firm for a couple of years now. I want to learn more but the person I sub-contract for seems reluctant to teach more than bits and pieces. Never the whole picture. After reading your article 11 Reasons Why You Should Consider A Job In Search Engine Marketing, I mentioned wanting to learn more since it looks the future is good in this industry. Her response was: "Just because SEO is hot today doesn't mean with more Web 2.0 functionality coming down the road it couldn't change all that in a very short time".

Is this a belief held by the majority of the industry? I would like to know that I am putting my energy into something that will be around for a while.

Thanks
Sue

Kalena's Answer:

Dear Sue

It sounds like you should find a new employer! It's interesting that somebody working in SEO is so sceptical about its future. Regardless of her personal opinion, not embracing the opportunity to educate you about search engine compatible design (and that's what SEO is in a nutshell) seems very short-sighted. Perhaps she's concerned that you will indeed learn more than her and take her job?

I can assure you that the majority of us working in SEO have no immediate concern about its continuing viability. Traditional search engine optimization methods may change over time as we move towards a Web 2.0 approach to design and collaboration, but there will always be a market for consulting to make sites more search engine compatible, user friendly and accessible.

What you need to do is expand your skills to a range of areas aside from link building (think blogging, search-friendly design, web site copywriting, usability etc.) so that you will be ready to meet the market demand that continues to grow. Good luck!

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Q and A: Can you please suggest improvements to my web site?

Dear Kalena...

I enjoy your Q. & A. column and note from your profile that you enjoy looking at new websites. I invite you to take a moment and give my website a look at www.thetreeofselfrealization.com especially the section on partnerships.

Please feel free to ask questions and to make suggestions for its improvement. Your comments will be greatly appreciated and helpful as I try to reach my target audience.

Sincerely,

John

Kalena's Answer:

Hi John

Lots of things will improve your site's search engine compatibility. Here are just a few suggestions:

• Your title tag only contains the phrase "The Tree of Self Realization". Unless persons know the name of your site, they are not going to type that phrase into search engines. You need to expan on your title tag to include logical search keywords relating to your content.
  
  
• Your home page HTML is missing a META Description Tag. This tag is often used by search engines to describe your site in their search results pages, so it shouldn't be excluded.
  
  
• Your navigation menu is entirely graphical, meaning search engines can't index it. I suggest changing it or supplementing it with a text-based menu.
  
  
• Your home page copy consists of long paragraphs of text. People don't read on the web, they scan. So you need to break up long pieces of copy with headings and bullet points if you want them seen.
  
  
• There's no site map. A site map is important for usability and also to enable search engines to find and index all the pages on your site.
  

Happy Editing!

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User-Friendly Client Management Software

I've said before that I love software that makes my job easier. This week my husband put me onto WHM Complete Solution. The developers describe it as a "Complete Client Management, Billing and Support System for Web Hosts", but it works for any Internet-based business. We are in the process of switching our existing Search Engine College student registration process over to it.

It has a client login area where customers can view FAQs, lodge a support ticket or make a purchase. It has a built-in shopping cart which is really easy to use and supports a huge range of payment gateways, including PayPal and 2Checkout (our main two providers). We haven't yet trialled the client invoicing but if it's anything like the cart process, it should be perfect. It also has a built-in affiliate program. You can see how it compares to other providers here.

The main reason I wanted to tell you all about it is the user-friendly cart design. It is almost impossible to "break" during the sales process and even if a user abandons the sale halfway, it creates an invoice and sends them an email with their username and login so they can view the invoice they abandoned. This is a great feature to combat cart abandonment or usability issues.

It also captures the user's details and sends them to the vendor, regardless of the outcome of the cart process and automatically bans IP addresses that have 3 successive invalid login attempts. It has a 15 day fully functional trial and after trialling we are definitely going to purchase!

I was just really impressed with it and thought you all might like it.

Q and A: Should we use mailto: on our web site?

Dear Kalena...

We use the mailto: direct on many pages of our website. This is just one method by which people can contact us (including an online enquiry form which can be submitted etc).

However, when logging on in internet cafes (and anywhere that personal email is not set-up on the computer) users get an error message. We have had such users contact us to tell them there is a problem with our website, not understanding that the problem is with the computer set-up.

Is there anyway you can change the error message to make it more user-friendly? Alternatively, do you think it’s possible to divert mailto to our online enquiry form in this instance?

What would you recommend?

Thanks!
Lucy

Kalena's Answer:

Dear Lucy

I know it's commonly used, but in these days of excessive spam and virus circulation, MailTo: is not a good protocol to use on a website. It's too easy for spambots and hackers to scour your site and pick up your email address in their travels.

One way to trick spambots is to use a free email protection program like Natata Anti-Spam Encoder which locates email addresses on web pages and encodes them into a format that cannot be understand by spiders or robots but can still be readable by the web browser and people. Unfortunately, this does not stop humans from taking note of your email address and manually adding you to junk mail lists. Plus it doesn't solve your roaming user problems.

Instead, I would recommend changing all your mailto: links to point to your online enquiry form. It should just be a matter of using your code editing "find and replace" tool. You should also make sure that the email address your enquiry form submits to is hidden in the code (I can see from your site that it currently is not hidden). You can use Natata for this purpose.

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