This is a helpful article for the uninitiated regarding control over not only which pages appear in search results, but also shows some options you can use to control how they appear- read 6 ways to control how and what content appears in search engines
William Laakkonen, AVATAVA
One of the most important things to avoid in creating a dynamic web site is the use of session IDs in your URLs or pages with an ending of ?parameter. Here’s an example:
http://www.yoursite.com/index.php?PHPSESSION_ID=123456
PHP Session IDs may be suppressed in your .htaccess file using: php_flag session.use_trans_sid off
The reason to avoid using PHP variables and session IDs as well as URLs ending in question marks is due to the fact the URLs may be ignored by some web bots and search engine spiders. It’s best to avoid anything that even resembles a session ID. Here is a direct quote from Matt Cutts also known as Googleguy: “sites shouldn’t use “&id=” as a parameter if they want maximal Googlebot crawlage, for example. So many sites use “&id=” with session IDs that Googlebot usually avoids URLs with that parameter,” See: http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum30/29720.htm for the full article.
Another thing to avoid is the use of variables in URLs. Here’s an example:
http://www.mysite.com/page.php?var1=a&var2=b&var3=somethingelse
Using even one variable in the URL can decrease your search engine results and multiple parameters likely make it even worse; per Googleguy: “The number of parameters in a URL might exclude a site from being crawled for inclusion in our MAIN index’ (IOW parameters = relegated to a supplemental listing)”.
Another thing to avoid is serving all your content from a single page or a set of pages. As far as a search engine is concerned it sees the same pages or sets of pages over and over again. This will likely relegate your web content to either the supplemental index or even out of the index altogether.
Example:
keys.php?SiteCounty=Lee
keys.php?SiteCounty=Martin
or
index.php?Category=Apples
index.php?Category=Pears
What should be used instead is a server side rewrite to create static page names and links such as:
Buy-Product-Name.html or Buy-Another-Product-Name.html
With the Apache web server you can use the Apache module mod_rewrite to do the rewrites. For Microsoft® Windows® IIS you must look for a third party module to do a rewrite of your URLs. On IIS there are several ISAPI modules for rewriting URLs, including one which requires no changing of your web pages at all. Most of the IIS modules are commercial but there is one free module available from Antonin Foller of Motobit.com.
I’m sure you may find additional ISAPI rewrite modules for IIS, these are the ones I found available during June, 2007.
You should avoid using underscores in file names or URLs. See: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/dashes-vs-underscores/
If you find your site is guilty of doing all the things listed here earlier as ‘not-to-do’, your site is likely already in the Google supplemental index. How do you know you if your site’s pages are in the supplemental index? Go to google.com and type in the search form: site:your_site followed by *** -sjpked Example: site:www.domain.com *** -sjpked
Here are some other reasons your pages may not show up in the indexes or end up in the supplemental index:
Checking where you stand and will depend on who you ask. The actual raw data of the number of visitors to your site is really not as relevant as is the quality of the visitors to your site. It really does not matter if you only have 100 visitors to your site each month if your goal is to have 10 sales and 10 out of the 100 visitors purchase your product. That would be much better than having one million visitors and no one purchasing your product. Use your web site statistics (log file analysis) as a guideline. People should be finding your site both as a result of a natural search, and additionally as a paid search result listing for you to have the highest conversion rates.
Optimize the content on your pages once you have created static pages using mod_rewrite or a similar product. You can choose appropriate key words and key word phrases using wordtracker.com or goodkeywords.com. A handy tool for analyzing your existing web pages is WebPositionGold (you should note that the use of WebPositionGold on google.com in an automated fashion violates their terms of service).
One of the best ways to get a good idea of what the search engines see when they visit your web site is to view your web page in a text only web browser such as Lynx. You might be surprised how the semantic presentation differs from your visual layout. The search engines treat HTML semantically. As an example, a H1 tag takes precedence over a font-size tag. Keep this in mind when viewing your pages in the text browser and consider adjusting the HTML accordingly.
When designing a web site, you generally want to test your pages consistent appearance in any type of browser. In other words, your work of art should not look different depending on the color of eyeglass frames someone is viewing it through.
In general, designing using XHTML, CSS, and validating your design using the w3.org validator will get you very close to a consistent appearance among many browsers on various operating systems. Once you’ve done this part, the more difficult task is checking your site presentation on multiple platforms and web browsers.
In the past, the only way of checking your site for presentation in multiple browsers was to have workstations (or virtual machines) running each type of OS along with each web browser, at each screen resolution, with various plug-ins (such as Flash) which you desired to check against. As you can well imagine, this can be out of reach for the average small business or designer both on the basis of budget and time constraints.
One solution to this issue has been conceived and implemented thanks to Johann Rocholl. It is a free web service called BrowserShots and it allows you to submit your site for snapshots in many different browsers in only a few seconds. What happens then is the web site is visited via many computers running the selected OS, browser, screen resolution, and plug-ins which you selected. Depending on the length of the queue, you may have a wait of 30 minutes or so for the results, but it is worth the wait. Once you have your screen shots you will know what additional work you (or your web developer) need to complete. No technical aptitude is needed to use the site so I invite you to check the job your developer is doing by submitting the site for snapshots and looking at what the rest of the world sees when visiting your web site.
The entire service is volunteer and free so you may want to limit the frequency of submitting jobs to the queue to allow resources to be available for others. The service is in beta stage at the present so there may be issues form time to time. Hats off to Johann Rochall and his volunteers for a great and idea and service with BrowserShots.org
The best reason to be Section 508 compliant (besides the Law) is increased visibility in search engines and better usability for your visitors. Another benefit is the ability to have your content viewed in a wider variety of User Agents (such as cell phone based web browsers).
It is almost ten years now since the US Congress amended the Rehabilitation Act requiring agencies to make their electronic and information technology accessible to people with disabilities.
Section 508 was enacted to ensure people with disabilities are not excluded from accessing information by requiring the elimination of technology barriers. The barriers most often encountered by the disabled on the Internet are excluding technologies such as Java, JavaScript, and the overused technology of Flash animation. First, let me say I am not an anti-Flash extremist. I have in fact used Flash technology in designs and find there are many compelling applications for it. YouTube is a fine example; as are interactive training applications. The NOAA web site illustrates the proper use of Java technology in a 508 compliant manner well. Unfortunately, most of the applications of Flash and Java technology are gratuitous and seem implemented by otherwise well meaning web designers, much to the detriment of both the web site and the disabled visitors (customers) of the site. The most significant sight impaired visitor your web site will ever have is a search engine robot. You should always design your site as if the robot were your prime audience FIRST and then add the eye-candy (read Flash) later.
Here are some reasons and places on your site not to use Flash:
* Navigation. You should never make your web site navigation accessible only via Flash. This is a sure way to eliminate the disabled visitors of your site from navigating it. It also eliminates spiders from crawling your site if the only links are embedded in Flash.
* Content. Embedding content is a sure way to control the presentation of your site and also a sure way to prevent most search engines from including your site in their results. If a person is sight impaired they may not be able to access your content no matter how pretty it may appear to the sighted.
Other design errors to avoid for Section 508 compliance include the use of Frames and lack of a text equivalent for every non-text element such as images or Flash animations. I suppose at this point the quickest way to demonstrate what not to do would be by an example and illustration of what the sight impaired person (or search engine robot) may “see”.
Here is an example of what not to do for a Section 508 design: City of Stuart, FL Web Site
Here is a nice screen shot of this web site rendered in a (sight impaired) text based browser. As you can see from the image, the sight impaired get a message of “go away” rather than the alternate content which should be there. Of course this should bring home the fact that frames are possibly the worst thing you can do for your web site.
Now let’s go a little further and follow what links we DO have. The first is labeled “banner”.
I won’t bore you with an image of the banner frame- the frame contains this text: [banner_rev2_web.jpg] -which should drive home the reasoning behind the ALT requirement for non-text elements. An alt tag should be there to label the image with something such as “The Official City of Stuart web site” or similar.
Following the main frame link we have this page rendered in the Lynx browser:
You should see the first thing on the page is navbar.swf - a Shockwave/Flash file containing the navigation for the web site. Most search engines (and virtually all sight impaired visitors) will not be able to navigate the rest of the site other than the regular links on this frame page. The item on this page labeled EMBED is ironically a request to take a survey for feedback on this web site. The form posts to a simple FrontPage web bot save results component so the use of Flash here is gratuitous. A text link to the survey would work much better. In both cases where Flash is used here, GIF images with alt texts could have done the job with widespread support for virtually all user agents, even for the site impaired.
The fact that the designer took the time for a survey on her site indicates her care for the improvement of her customer’s experience with their web site product. Unfortunately, this site needs much improvement and perhaps more so is typical of the implementation seen with many service oriented web sites. It is important to remember the site exists solely to serve the visitors and failing that service leads to increased load on your staff as well as other costs. A Section 508 compliant web site has many benefits and chief among them is the saving of your resources when visitors can locate and access information quickly without tying up your staff on the phones, with email, or Faxes.
You may be wondering how you can check your site for Section 508 compliance. A quick check can be done using Cynthia Says which has an automated Section 508 test. It should give you a quick checklist of issues to resolve with your web designer should the test indicate failure. Most web sites will not pass all the tests and you should use the results as a guideline rather than looking for strict compliance. You can also find more information on the Official Section 508 website.
I was asked by a customer today to add driving directions to live classes listed on their website.
It seemed a job tailor made for the Google Maps API so I went ahead and got an API key to start developing a test page. While the API offers many features, the one I needed- routing and driving directions- is not part of the actual API (correct me if I’m wrong).
It turns out to be dead simple to implement driving directions by simply creating a form which does a GET to maps.google.com/maps and having the form open a new window using target=”_blank” (yes, I know this is deprecated but on a production site you sometimes must “engineer” a solution which works even if not 100% standards compliant).
For my client’s site, all the class locations are already in a database and the pages are generated from there so all I needed to do was write a few lines of code.
Of course if you only need one destination address such as your office you can simply hard code the value into the destination address (named daddr) field.
Here is an example of how to get to the Saint Lucie County Fairgrounds.
Show me directions to the Saint Lucie County Fairgrounds in Fort Pierce, FL (Opens a new window).
Here is the live site where I implemented Google Maps driving directions:
http://www.educationprograms.com/safefood/store/index.php
The code is not the prettiest around but it does work. You should be able to view the source to quickly see how the form works.