I just received an invite from Siteopsys on their SEO tools – a product that offers over 30 proficient automated tools categorized into 7 categories that help an Analyst, SEO Consultant, Webmaster, Website Developer or a Website Owner to analyze the website for various SEO and Website parameters. 

The best part – these tools are currently free but may not be in the near future. And, if you want to earn 100 points toward future needs, simply sign up here. 

Worth taking a peek: 

These tools not only make analysis process easy, but the tools also provide intuitive results that help make the analyzer's job easy and productive. As their tag line states, these tools are Fast, Accurate and Insightful. The well categorized tools, are developed with an idea to make the evaluator's work automated and cut down the unnecessary time spent on the analyzing various website, SEO and link parameters, without compromising on the quality of analysis. 

For example, I wanted to see how MacDonald Consulting ranks organically within search engines – here are the results using the Search Engine Rank Checker tool: 

Best
Denice MacDonald

According to Susan Moskwa, Webmaster Trends Analyst, Google Webmaster Central Blog: “URLs are like the bridges between your website and a search engine's crawler.  Crawlers need to be able to find and cross those bridges (i.e., find and crawl your URLs) in order to get to your site's content”. 

If your URLs are complicated or redundant, crawlers are going to spend time tracing and retracing their steps. However, if your URLs are organized and lead directly to distinct content, crawlers can spend their time accessing your content rather than crawling through empty pages, or crawling the same content over and over via different URLs.

Susan provides exceptional learning in a slideshare that can be accessed here.

More tips:

Length of URLs - keep your URLs as short as possible and try to remove all unnecessary folder names. The shorter the URL, the higher the keyword density and the better for your placement in search engine results. Likewise, the closer your main keywords are to the beginning of the URL, the better.

Keywords in URLs - use the same main keywords your webpage is optimized for as this should be the search phrase you want to rank high on. Expanding the range of keywords should not be done in an URL, this should be done in <h2> or <h3> tags or plain text.

Use Hyphens - try not to use underscores in URLs as they are not used as dividers by Google. Use hyphens, periods, or commas instead. Hyphens or dashes are more user friendly and people will find your URL easier to remember. If you use underscore, you will actually have to search on “keyword1_keyword2” to find your webpage. Using hyphens will allow your pages to be found using “keyword1-keyword2” etc. 

Best

Denice MacDonald

Common Tag is an open tagging format developed to make content more connected, accessible and engaging. Unlike text tags, Common Tags are references to unique, well-defined concepts, complete with metadata and their own URLs.  

Specifically, Common Tag format is based on RDFa, a standard mechanism for placing structured content within HTML documents. The format uses the URIs of concepts defined on the Web as a way of anchoring the meaning of Tag objects. Common concepts can be found, among others, in two big databases of structured content or controlled vocabularies, as librarians call it – Freebase and DBpedia.  

According to the Common Tag web site, "The Common Tag format was developed to address the current shortcomings of tagging and help everyone - including end users, publishers, and developers - get more out of Web content. With Common Tag, content is tagged with unique, well-defined concepts - everything about New York City is tagged with one concept for New York City and everything about jaguar the animal is tagged with one concept for jaguar the animal.” 

Faviki is involved in the development of the  new open tagging format – Common Tag, together with AdaptiveBlue, DERI (NUI Galway), Yahoo!, Zemanta, and Zigtag. This is the first time that this number of web companies have stepped together from day one to introduce a tagging standard.

Resources:

Common Tag - The New Semantic Layer by Website Magazine, June, 2009

Will You Implement Yahoo's Common Tag? by Search Engine Roundtable, June, 2009

Best

Denice MacDonald

If you’re a busy web professional like me, you don’t have time to participate in every event, tradeshow or user group.  Moreover, if you don’t care for daily extensive reading and prefer some face time, a video blog may be your answer. 

WebProNews Blog Videos is your home for ebusiness, tech and search video content. They provide exclusive coverage of conferences, compelling interviews with top names in the industry, practical tips, and online news that matters.

You can watch the blog version with actual clips at events with subject matter experts like Bruce Clay, or you can read the blog.

Either way, you will be able to find current information that would take hours to filter through via daily searches or bookmarking. WebProNews provides RSS feeds and archived blogs.

Here are a couple of interesting, if not edgy, posts:

Bruce Clay - SES NY 2009 - Mike McDonald sat down with Bruce Clay for an interview at Search Engine Strategies, NY on a follow-up to ranking being dead, and changes to search results based on behavioral and intent-based data.

SES NY - Twitter Exclusively as a Marketing Tool? - Discussion on Guy Kawasaki's presentation at the Search Engine Strategies, NY.

Best

Denice MacDonald

Flash and AJAX are two technologies that enhance the user experience on a web site and are supported by almost every browser and operating system.  Only pitfall -- this technology is not SEO-friendly.

However, in early July, Adobe Systems Incorporated announced the company is teaming up with search industry leaders to dramatically improve search results of dynamic Web content and rich Internet applications (RIAs). Adobe is providing optimized Adobe® Flash® Player technology to Google and Yahoo! to enhance search engine indexing of the Flash file format (SWF) and uncover information that is currently undiscoverable by search engines.

This will provide more relevant automatic search rankings of the millions of RIAs and other dynamic content that run in Adobe Flash Player. Moving forward, RIA developers and rich Web content producers won’t need to amend existing and future content to make it searchable — they can now be confident it can be found by users around the globe.

BUT, a few technical bloggers out there say that the technology is not quite there yet:

Flash's New SEO is Over-Hyped by IckyDime

Flash indexing and SEO; Remember testing? by "Dion"

This blogger definitely has some sound solutions for Flash and SEO challenges: 

4 SEO Solutions for Flash by Benj Arriola

Best,

Denice MacDonald

Bob Pearson, of Dell, recently presented insight into Dell's learning relative to the web - and in my opinion, they are spot-on with their findings. I've taken the liberty of condensing the learning below.

What Dell's Learned so far?

1. The online world is undergoing the most significant transformation so far. 
2. The # of conversations is exploding. 
3. Customers want to speak with us in their first language. 
4. New countries are formed every day that are not being treated with the full respect that their nation's population deserves. 
5. Watch out for content pushers. 
6. You new home page is really cool .... but do you know where it is? Today's home page is a Google search Results page.  The Traffic that matters is not about you!
7. If you build it they will not necessarily come!
8. Less than 1% of a personal time online will be spent online purchasing.

What has Dell's Key Learnings & Action been with all of this?

1. The most important thing you can do is help customers w/ their technology problems.
2. Blogging is global ... blogging is multi-lingual ... blogging is by community of passion ... blogging is not "one blog". 
3. Would you rather do a focuses group with 10 people or listen to 100,00 people debate ideas for a few months and ask them questions throughout the process? 
4. Customers are partners and partners join together to make a difference. 
5. Communities are more powerful than individuals, Communities want to help each other improve.
6. The online experience at work should be similar to the online experience at home. 
7. Join your customer's communities and become part of the solution.
8. You can be easy to see, and should be easy to converse to.
9. If you are dealing with an issue be truthful, transparent and diligent in updating your customers.
10. Your customers are people not lines of business.  One customer or Employee --> Many communities.
11. Measurement requires thinking outside the box.  Don't try to fit old thinking to the new environment.

 Citation Link: Search Marketing Gurus

As my readers can see, I'm an avid "LinkedIn" social networking participant - not just for exposure, but for all the wonderful resources available.  For example, the web development question resource module is excellent for obtaining information on any subject matter. I recently answered a post for:

What 5 books would you want your web development team members to have read when you hired them?

 There were numerous - and interesting - responses.  Here are a few worth sharing:

1. "The Design of Everyday Things" -- looking at web sites differently increases conversion by Donald Norman
2. "The Tipping Point" -- leveraging web sites from a new point of view
3. "The Long Tail" -- insight into usability and Internet economics
4. "The Cluetrain Manifesto" -- understanding the underlying human dynamics relative to web sites
5. "Getting Real" -- Building faster, easier web applications by 37 Signals
6. "Groundswell" -- Harnessing social technology by Charlene Li
7. "Collective Intelligence: Mankind's Emerging World in Cyberspace" by Pierre Levy

Most of these publications can be acquired through Amazon.com.

As we begin to be measured by our clients and prospects, it’s becoming increasingly important to have ‘just the right facts’. 

Besides my all time favorite Forrester, Gartner and Pew Institute research web sites, here’s a new fav for Internet metrics and ROI - comScore. 

Like the others, you require some subscription to access but for the most part, I can get what I need as a passive visitor.

Lastly, don’t forget this site for incredible marketing charts and stats.

Stay safe today with the impending snow storm.