Fonts. Why did it have to be fonts. A quick recap of the my last post: Fonts need to be HTML so that search engines can see them, but web-safe fonts are very limited (to about 6) so designers cannot make things as pretty as they would like. That is until now. Introducing Scalable Inman Flash Replacement (sIFR).

As stated normally, HTML and CSS allow you to use any font but there is no guarantee that it will show up as intended because the user may not have the specified font installed in their system. sIFR on the other hand allows website headings, pull-quotes, and other elements to be styled in any font by enabling the designer to embed the font of their choice in a Flash element that displays the text.

As a result the font used does not have to be installed on the user’s machine…. but wait, if it is just flash then we’re back to the same problem of it being invisible to search engines. But No time to argue. “Throw me the idol, I’ll throw you the whip.” What happens it is uses some fancy Javascript magic, Essentially, any assigned headings (h1, h2, etc…) will be converted to Flash files with the embedded font when the website is loaded. However, any search engine spider coming through your site will still be able to read all of the page content.

sIFR requires JavaScript to be enabled and the Flash plugin installed in the reading browser. If either condition is not met, the reader’s browser will automatically display traditional CSS-based styling instead of the sIFR rendering.

sIFR is not designed for body copy text as rendering greater bodies of text with Flash place formidable demands on the computer.

Designers bless their little cotton socks, love to make web pages look cool, fashionable, and stylish and use their huge array of fonts and skills to create beautiful graphical headlines and titles for Websites.

Then the SEO team gets involved and sparks fly. The problem is that search engine spiders cannot see text in pictures. To define a picture, I mean a graphic on a web page that is a gif, jpg or png.

Therefore if you need a spider to see it, you have to use HTML fonts and this then limits designers to only six fonts that are classified as web-safe fonts. These are Arial, Courier New, Georgia, Times New Roman, Verdana, and Trebuchet MS. What that means is that it is safe to assume that these fonts are installed on the website viewer’s computer.

When you are reading a webpage and that page is displaying text in Arial font, what it is in fact doing, is telling the user’s computer to display the text using Arial. The user’s computer then looks into its fonts directory, finds Arail and display the text correctly. If you were to tell it to use a font the user’s computer did not have, it would substitute it and the text would not display as the designer intended.

So is there some middle ground that will stop the war between the Website Designers wants and Search Engine Optimizers wishes?

Well…Yes this “Treaty of Ghent” style, both sides winning compromise does exist but just like the battle of New Orleans, they go on squabbling unbeknownst.
..and this holy grail hybrid of Design and Optimization is called……..

This post concludes tomorrow.

Here is a quick overview of PageRank.

PageRank is a system developed and created by the founders of Google to qualify the importance of a page on the Internet. The name PageRank is a trademark of Google. The PageRank process has been patented (U.S. Patent 6,285,999 ). The patent is not assigned to Google but to Stanford University.

Here is Google’s explaination of PageRank. Basically the more links that point to a page the better, and if those pages that point are important themselves then that’s better still. Each link is like a vote for that page and some page votes have more weight than others. Google uses this information in its formula to display results from search queries. The higher your page rank, the more change you have of that page coming up for a particular search.

The problem arose after Google released its toolbar that allowed people to see what the PageRank of their webpages were. Now you could clearly see how popular a page was and almost overnight created a black market for ‘PageRank.’ If a site with a high PageRank linked to your page, then you were going to see and increase in rankings on your search results, which is a most valuable thing. People were paying large amounts of money just to get links for these high PageRank sites. Google took exception to this kind of profiteering and decided to act on it, the main way was to punish websites that sold their PageRank power by simply decreasing that site’s PageRank, leaving them nothing to sell.

It is actually now part of the Google webmaster guidelines:

“However, some SEOs and webmasters engage in the practice of buying and selling links that pass PageRank, disregarding the quality of the links, the sources, and the long-term impact it will have on their sites. Buying or selling links that pass PageRank is in violation of Google’s webmaster guidelines and can negatively impact a site’s ranking in search results.”

On top of that it seems that the Google has now slowed the updating of it’s PageRank bar, so that it is hard for you to gague the true page rank of your site and pages also damping the trade in PageRank as your never quite sure what your paying for.”

Search engines do not like duplicate content. Google is especially aggressive when it comes to weeding out unnecessary content from its listings. The simple way Google does this is to keep the first copy it finds and to ignore all duplicate versions after that.

There are several types of Duplicate content:

1. Content that is stolen, ether blatantly taken from a site or scrapped by bots to create content.
2. Added in two locations on the site to aid navigation. This content belongs in two places on a site but it is really the same content.
3. Accidentally duplicated content.
   1. This can be subtle. For example, if you have a gallery and each picture has its own page, if you keep the meta tags and head titles the same and the rest of the pages contain only minimal text, you may find only one of your gallery pages will be listed.
   2. Another example of this is what is known as boilerplate repetition, where too much content is the same on each page. For example, having a large copyright statement on all pages.
4. Printer friendly pages.
5. Syndicated content.

The good news is that Google will not ban your site for duplicate content. Unless it appears deceptive and intentional, it will just not list the duplicate pages.

The best ways to avoid any duplicate trouble are to manage your site with a good robots.txt file or better still, use Google Webmaster tools and a sitemap.xml document to label the content correctly for the spiders.

Oh and of course the number one way to avoid duplicate content is to hire good writers to create original compelling Search-Engine-friendly content. And look no further then DDA as we have the best writers in the whole world when it comes to such a task.

First off, you may be asking what is DNS, let alone why would I want this propagated. DNS stands for Domain Name System and is the way that Internet domain names (like zeroonezero.com) are located and then changed or more correctly translated into IP address (that’s these things ‘208.69.228.94′). We do this because humans like words, as they are easy to remember, but computers need addresses in numbers.

Each machine on the Internet has its own unique number, which is its IP address. So when you type in zeroonezero.com you’re really asking your browser to look for that information at this address ‘208.69.228.94′. The domain name system is really a giant database, probably the biggest and most used database in the world. No only does it handle billions of lookup requests but it is also changed each day by millions of different people. This is where the propagation part comes in.

If you kept and maintained a central list of all domain names and IP addresses, it would be monumentally impractical. Therefore, this list is distributed throughout the Internet in a hierarchy of authority. Your domain registrar, for example Go Daddy, points your domain name to a DNS server. This becomes the master authority of your domain. When a request is made to find a website, it goes to the registration database and finds out the DNS authority. Then it goes to that DNS server to find out what the IP Address is for your domain name.

The problem is, each Internet Server Provider (like Verizion or Comcast) caches their DNS records. This means making a local copy of the database and is done to speed up websurfing as you are able to lookup a domain faster. The downside to this is each company updates their local database with its own timeframe, which could be hours or could be days.

This updating of cache is called propagation and our website’s DNS information is now being propagated across all DNS servers on the web. So it can take anywhere from 12 to 72 hours for all computers to see the the correct location of a websites once it has been changed.

In the past six months we have noticed a distinct increase in website form spam — forms that are filled out with junk content in them and submitted.

What causes this problem are bots — small programs, like search engine spiders, that can read and traverse websites. Unlike Spiders, these programs have malicious intent, be it just to cause vandalism, to create links to websites, or worse still, attempt to hack an unsecure form-mail system. These predatory programs can submit hundreds of forms a minute and not only cause chaos to your inbox, but slow down your server and website at the same time.

The solution is to make the form unsubmittable by a bot, this is achieved by adding a “CAPTCHA” which stands for “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart.” You have probably seen these hundreds of times and not realized what they are for. The most common type is an image CAPTCHA, which looks like this:

You then type in what you see and therefore the form knows your not a bot and allows the form to be submitted. Here at DDA, we use these standard image versions but we have also introduced our own simple math equation version too.

As part of our website design standards, and thanks to our top notch programming team, all future forms for our clients with be built using some form of CAPTCHA system. But not resting on our laurels, as always, our team of expert website designers will keep a constant lookout for whatever future chaos spam artists try to throw at us next, and be sure we will be able to combat it just as effectively.

You’ve been optimizing away and now you have great rankings for your site and you’re getting lots of quality traffic, but wait, why is no one converting into a customer?

Oh yes, that’s right, I forgot all about usability.

As silly as this may seem, clients who are excited about search engine ranking often focus too much on them and how to generate more traffic when their energy may be better spent converting the existing traffic into clients.

Usability is a huge topic and should be addressed from the very preplanned stage of a website. A little footnote here, if you present your content in a user-friendly way, then more often than not, that is an ideal way for the search engine spiders to find and digest your content as well.

The Golden rule is to make sure that a user can find the information they are looking for with the minimal amount of effort. Keep that in mind and you shouldn’t go wrong.

On a more complicated level, this breaks down into a million sub categories. Take the simple task of adding pictures to your site. How many images do I use? What style is best? What format? What size? How compressed should it be? What is the ratio of text to images?

For example, if I’m buying a piece of jewelry, what is more important to the user — how it looks, what it looks like from a different view, the dimensions of it, how much it costs, or the size of it?

All of these are important but if all are presented with the same weight, the consumer would be overwhelmed.

Once you have decided how to present that information, did you take into account the users level of expertise? Now do I mean the user level of comfort navigating a website/using a computer or the user’s knowledgeablity of jewelry? Of course I meant both and both have to be factored in.

Suddenly it’s a lot more complicated than just putting up a picture of a broach.

There is a solution and it’s Us. That is DDA. We have more than a decade of experience in creating user-friendly websites, so stop by to check out our new building, and while you’re here, let us show you how we can convert your traffic into sales.

The tip of the week is for people launching brand new websites. Don’t launch one with a brand new domain name; well, don’t do that if you expect it to rank well.

Due to Google’s aging delay for all new domains, it can take up to six months just for your site to, and that is on the quick side. It is more like eight to nine months even up to 12.

The idea of the aging delay in Google’s eyes, is to stop people creating spam, like throw-away sites that can rank well for a few months before being blocked. If you have to wait six months, it simply takes those sites away from spammers as a tool for quick rankings.

But wait, we do have solutions.

1. The best one is to use your existing domian name. This name will already have links to it and a history of content.
2. Second best would be to use a subdomain, i.e leaves.trees.com would be a good site for your leaves branch of your firm if your main firm was trees.com. You don’t get any existing links but the domain is established in Google’s eyes.
3. As a good website is not built overnight, but is a project lasting several months, you could plan ahead and buy the new name as soon as you start to create a new site. Simply post up a quick brochure style site or holding page, so that Google can find the domain and it will enter the aging process as you and your website design company create your new site. Thus when you launch your full site, it will not have as long to wait to be ranked.

If you have already launched your site on a new domain, then don’t worry you will rank. You just have to be patient and wait for Google.

“My site doesn’t need to be search-engine friendly” and “I don’t need any SEO done on it,” are the oddest notions to us here at DDA, and yet we still hear it time and time again.

If you have a business that is off-line normally, you wouldn’t open it, hidden away down some poorly-lit back alley with no sign and blacked-out windows, which is exactly what you are doing if you choose to ignore Search Engine Marketing and in fact any type of on-line marketing.

In 2008, people still just want a 6-page “about us” brochure website that serves no real purpose at all, as most likely the only way people find it is by seeing the website address on the bottom of the brochure you just gave them.

I don’t even want to think about the amount of time we have used up trying to convince people of the benefit of having a site that brings you thousands of fresh viewers each month, all discovering your company for the first time.

What’s more, it’s so totally baffling that even after sitting down and thoroughly explaining the benefits of SEO and the traffic you get and how controllable it is, they will smile and say “Oh no thanks. I’m happy with my site. I just want it to look prettier.”

What is Bounce Rate?

Well lets say that it is the Brad Pitt of current website statistics. The textbook definition is this:

Bounce Rate – the percentage of single page visits, or better defined as visits in which the person left your site from the entrance (landing) page.

Now there can be some technical nuances to this, like the minimum or maximum times by which a visitor must leave in order for a bounce to occur. If they sit on one page for over 30 minutes then move on, most software will count that as a second visit and therefore the first as a bounce. The actual stat for a website is saved as a percentage value — it’s the number of web site visitors who visit only a single page of a website per session, divided by the total number of website visits.

So why is it so popular? Well because it is very easy to understand or should that be hard to mis-understand? On top of that you can quickly see how your efforts can affect it. The lower the Bounce Rate the better, or more sticky, your site is.

What’s also good with Bounce Rate is you can use it to judge the quality of traffic from various sources.

You can measure the Bounce Rate of traffic just from Google, or from an email campaign, or maybe referrals from MySpace versus referrals from Facebook. And what could be even more important, you can use this to help gage the effectiveness of your PPC campaigns. You may get clicks from your ads but you’re not converting if they bounce straight off. At a glance you can compare terms against each other to see which one are under performing and which ones are wasting your money.

So have fun using this info to tweak your landing pages and watch that ROI rise, or if you want find a expert company to help you tailor those pages for maximum stickiness, say, oh I don’t know a company like DDA.