Rich snippets are all the rage these days. Ever since Google started
enhancing their search results with these extra tidbits of information,
everyone is rushing to update their web sites with the metadata to
enable them. So what is the benefit of having a “rich” search result for
your site? Good question. Other than giving the search engine user a
little bit of extra bit of detail, I suppose there’s also a subtle
psychological factor that kicks in. Someone might be more inclined to
click on a search engine result that has a 5 star rating and a friendly
face than one that doesn’t. Plus, they’re just plain cool. Who doesn’t
want to add bling to their search results? But this only scratches the
surface. There’s much much more to them than that.

Instant information aggregation: It’s only a matter of semantics

Rich Snippets, as Google calls them, are actually semantic markup. The
idea of marking up some sort of document with meta information for the
benefit of machines is not a new idea. Semantic markup is as old as
information technology its self. For example, a Word document contains
metadata about its author, and a digital photo contains meta data about
the camera it was taken with. You might, for instance, store your
digital snapshots in a photo archiving program which uses this semantic
data to filter your photos by date taken, lens type, flash used, etc.
So, in essence, metadata is data about data.

It’s should be clear, then, how this “data about data” can be extremely
useful to search engines. It can provide a search engine the ability to
derive a semantic meaning from a document’s meta
information rather than having to rely purely on the abstract, human
understandable, concepts within the text of the document. Searches can
become less about keywords in text documents and more about
relationships between semantical data types.

To illustrate this point further, consider the following search: Find
all restaurants with a 3.5 star or better rating on the Las Vegas strip
that specialize in Italian OR Mexican cuisine AND are open after 11 PM
on Sunday nights AND do NOT require reservations. On the
semantic web, rather than a list of links to restaurant web sites that
may or may not match your given criteria, you might get a list of
“restaurant result objects” that DO match exactly
that criteria and never even have to visit the restaurant’s web site.
This is where the real power of semantic data lies. Instant information
aggregation.

This “semantic web”, also, is not a new idea. In fact, Tim Berners-Lee
himself envisioned the world wide web as a kind of “Semantic Network
Model” and even the earliest HTML specifications included the concept of
meta tags, which you are undoubtedly familiar with. Later iterations,
such as XHTML, took this idea a step further. Most notably is the RDFa
specification, which has been around for quite some time.

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dynoTable: A JQuery plugin for creating editable tables

A while back I was working on a project that required the GUI
to allow the user to dynamically add, remove and rearrange various form
fields contained in table rows. The tricky part was that the UI needed
to have this functionality for several different types of elements
across several different forms. For instance, one set of fields was for
adding and removing specifications to a product while another set of
fields was for adding images to a product. Thus, I needed a solution
that would be flexible enough to work across virtually any type of form
elements.

Naturally, I turned to JQuery. I first took a look around within
JQuery’s plugin ecosystem to see if perhaps there was already a plugin
that might do the job. While I did find a few different plugins for
adding removing form elements, none of them did exactly what I
needed, specifically re-arranging items… So, I was left with either
trying to hack the functionality into an existing plugin, or roll up my
sleeves and write my own. I choose the later option, since JQuery’s
excellent extension mechanism makes writing plugins a fairly
straightforward process. The result is the plugin below, which I call
dynoTable.

What the plugin does

DynoTable makes an html table editable. With it you can:

• Add rows
• Remove rows
• Clone rows
• Click and Drag to Re-arrange rows (If you have Jquery UI included on
  your page)

Getting started with dynoTable is a snap. First make sure you have
JQuery, and the dynoTable plugin, included in your page like so:

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Track any client side event with google analytics

By: Bob Tantlinger

I’ve recently been doing some work integrating social media events, such
as facebook likes, with google anayltics and was pleased to find that
Google gives you a deep level of control over what you can track. It
occurred to me that since a social media “event” is not really much
different than any other client side event, why not use google analytics
to keep tabs on any event the visitor might trigger.

With just a few lines of code, you can take your analytics a step
further and get some fine grained details about not only your visitors,
but their interaction with your web site. Using the techniques I show
below you can answer questions such as:

• Did the user scroll a section of your page into view?
• Did the user start filling out a form?
• Did the user encounter an error while interacting with your site?
• Did the visitor move their mouse over a particular page element?

These are just few examples off the top of my head for how this could be
useful, but you get the point. The sky is virtually the limit on what
you can track.

Get Tracking with _trackEvent

So, let’s dig in with a quick and dirty example that shows how to detect
if a user mouses over a a specific image on your page. To get started,
you’ll need:

• A google anyltics account (Obviously)
• The google tracking code installed in your sites head
• JQuery included in your page

When you include google’s tracking code in your html, it brings in a
global variable named _gat
(Google analytics tracker) . Using this variable, we have a handle by
which we can get all trackers that have been included on the page. Using
the tracker objects, we can push arbitrary events onto the _gaq
(google anyltics queue) to be tracked. They can be anything. Their
meaning is entirely up to you.

After an event has been pushed onto the queue as an event, you can
monitor them under the “Events” section in your google analytics
account. (If you’re the pointy hair type, it’s probably neat idea to set
up goals for your events!)

So, the steps thus far are:

• Decide what arbitrary events you want to track
• Get a handle on all trackers included on the current page with _gat
• Use the tracker to send an event to GA.

In our example, we will present the user with some images of food and
ask which is their favorite. We want to know when a user mouses over an
image, what type of image it was, and which food they select. With this
in mind we might write with some code such as this (Take note of
comments) Read the rest of this entry »

Tracking Pins With the Pinterest Button

By: Bob Tantlinger

Recently I was tasked with logging social media interaction on a site
utilizing the “buttons” (what do you call those anyway) of Twitter,
Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, and Pinterest.

We wanted to be able to record not only when a social media button was
clicked, but when an actual share, like, or whatever took place. In
other words, we needed to know that the user actually did the share.
Nothing very difficult. Most of the big players in social media have
handy APIs that let you subscribe to events they fire off when a share
takes place, which makes this fairly straight forward. In a perfect
world it WOULD be easy, but there’s -always- a monkey wrench lurking
around the corner ready to ruin your day. In this case the monkey wrench
was a royal “Pin in the Ass.” I am referring to, of course, Pinterest.

Pinterest is the newest social media fad, so their button is popping up
all over the place at an alarming rate. Everyone is rushing to get their
images pinned to the worlds biggest pin board. But there’s a problem.
While Pinterest’s “Pin it” button works fine, they offer no offical API,
so unlike the other social media services, there’s not much you can do
with the Pin It button. You can stick it on your site, and that’s it.
You cannot track events, such as when a “pin” occurs, or even when
someone simply clicks on the darn thing.

The good news is that Pinterest is working on an API, which should
hopefully be ready soon. Parts of it are apparently in “Read Only” mode http://tijn.bo.lt/pinterest-api

http://articles.businessinsider.com/2012-03-26/tech/31238519_1_mobile-apps-twitterrific-hootsuite

Sadly, until then, the best you can hope for is a hack like the one I
will document below.

Bending Pinterest to your will (Almost)

When you include the Pinterest button on your page like they want you
to, you include their javascript file:

http://assets.pinterest.com/js/pinit.js

and a simple link where you want the button to show up:

        
<a href="http://pinterest.com/pin/create/button/" class="pin-it-button"
count-layout="horizontal"><img border="0"
src="//assets.pinterest.com/images/PinExt.png" title="Pin It" /></a>
        
        

All well and good… BUT when the pinterest javascript executes, it
takes the simple link, removes it from your DOM, and replaces it with an
IFRAME. (an embedded html document right in your page where the button
goes) So the pin it button is not actually a button. Rather, it’s a
small html file loaded from Pinterest’s CDN embedded in your page. The
transformed code looks like this:

        
<iframe scrolling="no" frameborder="0"
src="http://pinit-cdn.pinterest.com/pinit.html?url=http%3A%2F%2Fmysite.com&amp;media=http%3A%2F%2Fmysite.com%2Fpic.jpg&amp;description=Neat+Pic&amp;layout=vertical"
style="border: medium none; width: 43px; height: 58px;"></iframe>
        
        

Because they put it in an IFRAME, it’s like putting a brick wall around
the button. The IFRAME is pointing to
http://pinit-cdn.pinterest.com/pinit.html, which is obviously different
than your domain… Thus, you run up against the browser’s same origin
policy (A security measure browsers implement which ensures scripts from
two different domains can not interact with each other.). So, I was
stuck. I could not get through the IFRAME brick wall, so I decided to go
around it completely.

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GoDaddy might not be as familiar name as Google to ordinary internet users, but most webmasters had, of course, heard this name. GoDaddy is currently on of the leaders in webhosting industry, providing various related services, such a website hosting, domain registration, dedicated servers, email plans, etc. Although dominating the market is not something GoDaddy had achieved, it might very well be on their mind.

It has been reported recently, that Google and GoDaddy enter certain form of partnership considering a “WebSite Tonight” feature, offered by GoDaddy. This service is a powerful tool that allows users create a website pretty quickly by using one of the available pre-designed templates, making it look almost “professionally designed”.

Google’s share of WebSite Tonight is offering various add-ons, widgets and tools that might be useful for a website owner and/or visitor. These include customizable search bar, Google Webmaster Tools, SEO-checking tools and more. Submitting website to Google is also made easier, helping webmaster to appear in the listings of world’s leading search engine quickly. Some tools will be available during the website building process; others are incorporated into the website’s control panel.

Well in the past, most rapid drops in a websites search engine rankings were caused by off site factors. Bad links, too many links too fast, too many exact match anchor text links, too many footer or site wide links etc. Recently we are seeing more keyword specific or page level penalties which are turning up to be caused by on site factors. Google is starting to look carefully at websites. They are becoming picky about internal link structure and placement of navigation, content quality and placement, and general over optimization on site is becoming a BAD thing.

We were trying to sort out why a particular website we were working on dropped hard in the rankings. The back link profile was not bad, and the links were not built overnight. The website was old enough 2006, and had been growing organically for several years. We tweaked a few things on site and off site to no avail. We decided to try something sort of outside of the box, we blocked Googlebot. Why block Googlebot? Well it permitted us to see if the problem was off site or on site. Low and behold within 2 weeks, we had lost a ton of long tail traffic, but we recovered all the keywords search results that had been dropping. Which showed us that the back links alone were fine, and strong enough to carry the website in the serps without any content .

Now we know, we have some on site work to do.

It’s no big news that Chinese market is growing with an impressive speed and more and more businesses turn eastwards – both for production and marketing. Over a billion people live inside the Far East giant borders – a healthy reason to address the region in order to increase sales as well as exposure.

The news is, however, that the internet content is now also part of the trend. China has reportedly surpassed USA in the number of internet users in mid-2009, and although English is still the primary internet language (42 percent of almost two billion of online “population” worldwide), Chinese is in solid second place, with about 32 percent. And since China is still less technologically advanced than the Western Countries, the number of potential Chinese speakers, who will soon be joining the online world is far greater than that of the English language carriers.

And with the Chinese government now requiring all English content in China-based websites to be accompanied with local Mandarin translation, the number of webpages in Chinese is about to increase immensely. And, restating the above thought about more and more companies regarding China as a prospective market, it seems that the near future of online marketing can easily shift toward Chinese content.

We all know Facebook is one of the fastest (if not THE fastest) growing websites around. The popularity of Facebook is amazing and the number of hours spent by the users on their Facebook pages, playing games, posting and tagging photos is increasing every day.

And here is another indication of the website’s growth: unique visitors. This is a statistic that keeps track of websites (really webpages) being accessed by users based on their IP (which is very similar to physical location). Google is leading the way since very-long-time-ago, with an average of about 1 billion hits a month, and Microsoftis is second, about 100 million unique visitors behind.

According to Geek.com, Yahoo! has been pushed down to fourth place in November 2010, by (guess who?) Facebook, of course. The numbers reported (648 million for FB and just over 630 million for Yahoo!) were supplied  by comScore, providing yet another confirmation of Social Media progress towards taking over the internet.

If you’re not using video on your website, you should be. Any business can use video on their website to improve their branding and profits. In fact, small businesses have been quick to adopt video on their websites. The number of small businesses using video on their websites at the end of 2009 was four times as great as only one year earlier. Video capability was the single fastest growing feature small businesses added to their websites. On-page video is one of the best known ways to engage an audience and it’s also a way to position your business right in front of those who are seeking out your product or service using search engines.
You can use video to showcase how to use a product, to show testimonials, to highlight a product’s features, or to upload clips made by customers about the product. Since search engines used to have to ignore video, everyone pretty much dismissed video. But now Google’s universal search format, which includes videos, news, blogs, maps, and other so-called vertical search content is making video more relevant than ever. Another factor driving the importance of video in SEO is the increasing saturation of broadband internet coverage. And there’s the simple fact that people like watching short videos. We’ve all watched funny cat or “fail” videos on our coffee break. Given all this, it makes sense to do what you can to optimize video content for search engines.

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It seems we’re always hammering home the importance of link building, external links, and inbound links, and that sometimes makes us minimize the importance of the links available right there on your own pages. After all, you have complete control over the pages on your site, and if they have matured to where they have page rank, then that’s even better. There’s a lot you can do with respect to how your pages pass rank, which influences how search engines view the content on your pages.

SEO and high ranking for competitive terms actually has a lot to do with your internal link structure, though you might never know it for the choruses of “link building or die!” (which, yes, we’ve been guilty of as well). A new site that’s designed well, that’s themed and structured topically around a specific handful of keywords, has a better chance of rising to the top of the SERPs than an older site that doesn’t take this structure into account with respect to internal links, content, and naming conventions of filenames.

Optimizing Internal Linking

Since you have control over your internal pages, you might as well make the most of your on-site SEO opportunities. There’s a lot you can do to increase the relevance of all the pages on your site.

Start by making all your links absolute and getting rid of any secondary keywords that are irrelevant. As your pages mature, you want to make sure that they have names in the format of http://www.yourwebsite.com/pagename.html. That causes your pages to boost each other in the SERPs, and ensures that if your content is copied, the links will point back to your pages, giving you another back link (hooray!).

Put a limit on your outbound links at about 10. This helps you keep your pages focused. The fewer the outbound links, the more link juice the page has to transmit to its own keywords. This should be come evident when you start building external links and see how quickly the pages float to the top of the SERPs.

Optimize your anchor text by making sure your main keyword phrase shows up at least once on the page and in the title. If you assign each link wisely, you can nail down a handful of keywords that you want to show up exactly when people do searches. But don’t optimize any given page for more than three keywords. And if your page is getting much over 750 words, try to changing it into two pages with another keyword variation. This can get you double listed in the SERPs.

Keep in mind that contextual links inside your content should go high up on the page – above the fold if possible. Links that show up higher on the page carry more influence in search engines when compared with footer links. And if you’re using contextual links within your site, make sure you use the main keywords for the page that you want to rank with. In other words, make sure the anchor text on page x uses the keywords for page y that you want to rank for. This improves the quality of the internal back link with time, and in the meantime keeps your relevance high.

It’s ideal if you keep your Javascript and other programming code off the page in its own file, hyperlinked to the page. Cascading style sheets are the best because they separate content from images ind give the search engines what they’re hungry for without a bunch of excess. And, of course make sure your pages are laser focused. The main keyword should appear two to four times on the page, once in the h1 tag, with a variation on the keyword in the h2 tag.

Other Things to Consider

It’s also important to remember that keyword stuffing isn’t good. It’s one of those cases where less is more. Keep it to the basics of once in the title, again in the description, and a few times on the page. And once in your h1 tags.

You know how when you break a toe, the doctor will often “buddy tape” the broken toe to its neighbor to provide support as it heals? Well, You can buddy tape your pages by letting four or five of your highest ranking pages concentrate their link-mojo to your newest page, the one that may be slightly wobbly and needs to build up its strength. This is a good idea whenever you launch a new page.

Sometimes you need to do some housecleaning as well. Getting rid of off-topic pages and doing a 301 redirect to another page (or your home page) that’s been indexed. Some people will buy a new domain name made up mostly of your keywords, then redirect your old site to the new one. This is a little controversial, and can be painful in the short term, because it will take a few weeks for your rankings to get back up to where they were. However, the rankings should come back stronger in the long run, assuming you’ve done your due diligence with optimizing.

This is a sort of risky move, and if you’re put off by the idea, you could instead make sure you have a blog that’s listed in blog directories and start updating it regularly to increase how often the blog is crawled. This should eventually lift the tide for your whole site from all the spidering going on.

If you take care of these on-page optimization techniques, then think how powerful your off-page optimization will be!