The advent of the Internet has changed the way people do many things. The most obvious changes are, of course, in the way they communicate and relate to each other (Instant Messaging, Facebook and the like, and many others). There are also changes in the way people do business, as they can now reach a global market without having to place offices in every country.

Other changes, perhaps less noticed by people, have to do with the way people look for information and answers to their problems or needs. For instance, many people use Google to search for just about any kind of information on the Web, including images, videos and blog entries like this one.

There are even specialized sites such as Download Software Here that allow you to Quickly find and download software you want, without having to browse through many unrelated pages. This particular site, actually, is offers a wide range of the latest and popular software and programs, with a clear objective: provide not only the largest software collection on the Web but also provide its visitors (customers?) with a simple, safe and fast download experience.

The two things I found really useful about this are the way software searches are performed (with results presented according to a matching score, with closer results first, and the site’s design, which allows for a really fast access and browsing experience.

Search results are displayed according to their similarity to keywords entered in the search box, with an option to search for phrases such as “PDF conversion” software by adding double quotes, much in the way Google does.

To sum up, searching for software has been very easy thanks to sites like Download Software Here,that makes searching and downloading applications a breeze.

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Posted by randfish

There are some very different schools of thought out there regarding 404 error code pages. Some SEOs recommend:

• Never allowing them – 301′ing every error page back to the home page or an internal category level page to preserve the maximum amount of link juice (in case someone links to a broken URL)
• Letting any erroneous/mistyped URL 404.
• Something in between – 301 some kinds of 404 pages and not others.

I’m generally in this last group. I think there are times when it pays dividends to let a URL 404, both for accessibility and search engine reasons. I also don’t think it’s intuitive or semantically accurate to 301 every 404 page on the site – it certainly pays to build great custom 404s (good piece with examples on that here), but to simply have your homepage appear when a URL is mistyped or a link breaks doesn’t send the right message to users or search engines.

When faced with 404s, my thinking is that unless the page:

A) Receives important links to it from external sources (Google Webmaster Tools is great for this)
B) Is receiving a substantive quantity of visitor traffic
and/or C) Has an obvious URL that visitors/links intended to reach

It’s OK to let it 404.

Recently, though, Lindsay and I were faced with a tough call on a consulting project. The client has a site that receives a ton of search queries, many of which map to their category and subcategory level pages (which are more landing pages than search query pages, but also serve to address the search keywords). The client also has a number of search pages that have no content (either because they’re for mis-typed, nonsense or mis-spelled searches or because they simply don’t have content for those terms). Some of these pages earn links, some get a moderate amount of traffic and up until recently, they’ve essentially existed as error pages that resolve with a 200 code.

What to do?

Our conundrum contained a few critical elements. We don’t want the search engines wasting bandwidth crawling and indexing junk pages (especially since the site is monstrous and needs that crawl/index power to flow to the right sections). We also don’t want users to have a bad experience and while the error pages effectively communicate the right message (there’s no results for this query), semantically the pages should really 404. Finally, of course, we don’t want to waste any of that precious link juice that’s flowing to some of them.

The solution turned out to be a compromise – we’d 404 the pages, but keep track of those that earned links and any substantive level of traffic and try to build better experiences for those pages (sometimes a 301 to a sub-category page, sometimes to a results listing and sometimes we’ll actually add content to those pages and make them resolve). We hope that this lets us have our cake and eat it, too.

We’d love to hear your thoughts around 404s and SEO in general, as well as on this specific scenario (and others like it). 1000s of SEOs are smarter than 2

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Particularly in SEO industry we are used to calling small, medium sized, large and extra large websites. So what determines the size. Well size is a relative word in our industry. It’s important we know the size before quoting for SEO work or starting work on the site.

Small sized sites: Most of the small Business sites that come to us a small. People think just putting one website online is enough to be on top of search engines. Fact its not enough we need to have a quality site to be on top. We say a site is small when it is built completely in flash, or html sites with only 10 to 20 pages ( without any database / products ) , just pages with contact and few other pages, sites that have products but very few like 10 or 20 etc. If sites like these come to us we tell our clients to add blogs, articles, news and all other possible information that helps SEO and helps expand the size of the site.

Medium sized website: Medium sized website sites that has decent amount of pages with articles, good well written information pages, at-least 50 products etc. Medium sized websites are ideal for targeting regional and low competitive keywords. So we prefer to take medium sized sites for SEO for low competitive keywords. To be eligible to be medium sized you can say the site should have at least search engine crawl able pages. We don’t consider flash sites as medium sized even if it has 500 pages embedded into flash. It’s because flash are still not efficiently crawled and it’s difficult for us to optimize a flash website.

Large websites: Large websites are mostly product based websites. We get lots of websites that are product driven for optimization. Some sites have up to 10,000 products. It can range from costumes, cosmetics, tools etc. In rare cases we get large websites that are not product based but still have 1000s of pages. These websites have good contents already and it’s easier to optimize. A large website is mostly database driven and it’s eligible to be called large only if it has 1000s of search engine index-able pages.

Very large websites: These websites are rare but lots of them exist we rarely take these sites for SEO because it contains more than 100,000 products and it’s not easy to optimize these sites. We had a client in medicine industry that had more than 150,000 pages. Optimization was never easy because it’s difficult to funnel PageRank and backlink power to all those pages.
So as you can see from my explanation size is a more relative word. Online marketing industry is the most concerned when it comes to size. We take size seriously.Visit www.searchenginegenie.com for more interesting blogs on Search engine related information

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Posted by jennita

Last Friday I attended and spoke at the Jane and Robot Search Developer Summit in San Francisco. The idea of the conference was to cover technical SEO topics and help train developers and others. The 100 attendees (or so) were a mixed bunch; developers, SEOs, managers and the like.

The event was coordinated by Vanessa Fox and Nathan Buggia. The sessions covered site architecture, Microsoft and Open Source Stacks, and working with rich, interactive content. In addition to the sessions, there were round table discussions in which attendees had a chance to ask the experts questions, in small groups. In fact, having a fairly small group allowed many to get their questions answered one-on-one.

The day went something like this…

• As people trickled in, I helped get them signed in, handed out Bing t-shirts and asked "could you spell that for me?" quite a bit.
• Vanessa Fox kicked off the event with "Developers Are A Vital Key in Search Acquisition" and got everyone in the mood.
• Next up, Maile Ohye discussed Site Architecture and best practices. She also fielded quite a few questions (actually she answered questions throughout the day) and gave a great, informative presentation.
• Dennis Goedegebuure from eBay.com spoke about how eBay fixed some of their issues… I can’t really give too much detail here or I’ll be forced to pronounce Dennis’s last name 50 times. But he did give us this awesome gem: New-Pulse.ebay.com
• Then it was time for the most delicious meal in the world, well at least in the conference world. There were some serious raves about the little white cookies
• After lunch, Cesar Serna, Nathan Buggia and myself spoke to the the very loud and boisterous "Microsoft Stack" group while Kenny Hyder and Todd Malicoat spoke about the "Open Source Stack." Ok I’m lying here, we had 9 people in our session (and a couple of them were there to show their support) but they did have some great questions. I heard that the Open Source session was great as well, and from the laughs coming through the room dividers, I’m sure it was awesome.
• Yay! Cookie break!
• For the last official session of the day, Vanessa Fox and Damien Bianchi spoke about Flash, Silverlight, Javascript, etc. I heard the discussion got pretty heated towards the end but unfortunately I missed that part of it.
• Finally we got to the round table discussions. [see photo above] These were really great and led to a lot of interesting interactions. Well, except for the fact that Mystery Guest was the only one to sit at my table "Microsoft Technologies: IIS and ASP.Net" and she had no idea what either were. heh. Other than that they seemed to go over very well. Even after Vanessa let everyone know there were appetizers, beer and wine, many people decided to keep talking rather than eat and drink. huh?
• Before I had to run off to the airport (only to find my flight an hour and a half delayed) I chatted with some great people and had more yummy food and a beer. I definitely wish I had been able to hang out with the group longer.

Personally, I got a chance to meet pretty much everyone attending because I helped check people in. This was great for me, since sometimes the developer in me kicks in and I find myself standing in a corner, staring around the room, thinking I should probably go talk to someone. heh.

The venue was beautiful and the greatest part was that the people were genuinely engaged and interested in learning. Sometimes at large conferences it can be difficult to participate in the sessions… or perhaps it’s simply that people are intimidated to ask a question in a large setting? Either way, there were many interesting questions, lots of people sharing and many smiles.

Really, overall I had a great time and have to say that the food at the event was absolutely superb. I think I may even go on record by saying that it was the best food I’ve ever had at a conference (sorry SMX Advanced, you used to be my favorite!). I also seriously think that having awesome food and drinks helped people to stay engaged and the drinking definitely helped get people talking.

A few takeaways

• Google will now show sitelinks for individual pages, not just home pages (we noticed this the night before actually!)
  

• If you have a porn site, separate your family friendly and adult images into different directories. heh.
• You don’t have to have your keywords in a directory specifically, as long as it’s somewhere in the URL
• Check out New-Pulse.ebay.com – this was demo’d by Dennis Goedegebuure from eBay. This is a great tool to see most popular searches, most popular stores and the most watched items per category. Seriously cool stuff.
• You can get an internal search box on Bing based on
  • Query volume (not sure what the number is though)
  • Simple site search – the search can’t use javascript, etc
    
• There’s one lady at Microsoft who picks all the photos that show up as the background on Bing.

The Technical SEO

In general, I’m a huge advocate of helping and training developers to understand SEO more in-depth. Often I picture a harmonius world of developers and SEOs holding hands and working together. (yea, yea quit laughing – it could happen!) Developers hold the key to many SEO projects and the more they know, the better.

I’m really hoping that the "SEO Developer" becomes a trend in the industry. Sure, there are many SEOs who are quite technical but there are only a small number who can also claim to be developers. I’ve personally always liked the term "Technical SEO" and often use it when describing what I do.

At the Jane and Robot Summit I was asked whether I felt it helped me as an SEO to have been a developer. My answer was swift and loud, "YES YES YES!" Now, I don’t think that all SEOs should be developers, but it has definitely helped me. I explained that I think I often look at a website from the inside out, rather than the outside in. It helps when doing site audits (or well anything really) if you have in-depth knowledge of how everything works technically.

I definitely hope that we have more technical SEO conferences, workshops, summits, conventions, trainings…whatever you want to call them. Helping developers to understand SEO is a very good thing in my book. The more you know, the more you grow! (ok… cheesy)

Now I have a few questions for you, my dear reader (yes I’m assuming there may be only one – especially with the PageRank hubub going on next door):

1. What’s your stance on SEO Developers, or Technical SEOs? Take them or leave them?
2. More seriously, do you think it helps an SEO to have a development background?
3. Can developers and SEOs live in peace and harmony (and do we really want them to?)
4. If you were at the event, please add anything I may have missed!

Also, check out twitter and #janeandrobot to see what other’s said about the day.

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