feddy.ca

I have been busy at work recently so I do not have my next post in my series on the components of a website ready.  I will get the next post in that series up in the next couple weeks.  In the meantime, there were some very valuable posts from Google and Microsoft this past week that provide reinforcement of many of the concepts I write about and get asked about frequently.

Google’s Webmaster Central blog has produced a number of good basic instructional videos on topics such as discoverability, accessibility and ranking as well as Webmaster Central and other tools in this post.  These videos provide very short, easy to understand explanations of these topics and related information.  The Live Search Webmaster Center Blog also has posts on Webmaster Guidelines and Unraveling URLs and Demystifying Domains with information from presentations from the SMX East 2008 conference.

When you are just getting started with a website, I find these short, simple explanations right from the search engines helps reinforce an understanding of why administrators recommend certain methods.  This helps create the right expectations from new site owners as to how they will be discovered and ranked by the search engines.

Thought I would provide a quick link to a video presentation on the Google Trifecta — Google Webmaster Tools, Google Analytics and Google Website Optimizer that I finally got around to viewing last week. I was quite impressed with the Website Optimizer as I never looked at it in detail before. I thought the whole presentation was a great introduction to website owners to these free tools available to them. Understanding that these tools are out there is key to deciding to move and do it yourself or hire someone with the expertise to assist you with the setup and management of the tools. Many people with brick and mortar stores expanding onto the web don’t realize there are these powerful tools that will help them tremendously during the initial stages of their Internet expansion.

Microsoft also recently updated their Live Search Webmaster Center tools to provide much of the same information available in Google’s Webmaster Tools. If you haven’t signed up or been using Live Search Webmaster Center, you should check it out now.

On another note, I continuously have to remind clients about the importance of their content, of making it permanent, findable, and relevant. Too often people want to tear everything down and start from scratch. Unless you are on an old system that doesn’t provide a lot of features and content that is not worth saving, it is important to not remove old content even if it is no longer relevant. Updates that make note of the changes and direct visitors to other relevant areas is a much better idea for maintaining traffic, especially from search engines. But don’t listen to me, listen to Jonathon Snook.

Just a quick post to note these two links. First, Microsoft’s Live Search team announced the release of their Live Search Webmaster Center as a public beta this week. A quick review of the service shows promise, with valuable link and rank information shown for my site immediately after registering and verifying. I did have to switch to Safari, however, as I could not get my site registered in Firefox or see my site in Firefox after registration was completed in Safari. I thought it was a cookie issue, but after many retries I was not able to get Firefox to work, even after removing cookies, closing the browser, clearing the cache, etc. Once again, I believe it is important for any serious web site owner to be registered with any tools the search engines provide. This is the method for notifying search engines of new content (and sites) and getting reports of issues on your sites.

Also, the Yahoo! Search Blog has a nice summary of a SEO workshop talk, covering the topics of spiderability, duplicate content, linking strategies, fighting spam, and blended search, social marketing, behavioural search, and local issues. Many points a stress when talking to customers are reiterated here, including site structure, content is king, descriptive link text and the potential consequences of spamming the system among other, new and interesting points. A good read to reinforce tactics available to achieve your site strategy.