Posts Tagged ‘major search engines’

25
Aug
2009

Top Five Myths of SEO

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Here’s my list of the top five myths of SEO and some suggestions for how to work past them.

Meta Tags are Dead

There’s absolutely no proof that major search engines ignore META data, in fact my experience is that well used meta tags are almost always rewarded while horrible meta tags are almost always punished. Make sure that the meta tags you use on each page are specific to that specific content and relevant.

Multiple Domain Names Help Your Business

There’s some truth to this rumor but only if you use them right (Marketing With Sub Domains and Other Neat Tricks). If your business has 100 domain names and they all reproduce the same content, you’ll actually hurt yourself because Google will confuse content as repetitive. Instead, install a copy of WordPress MU (multiuser) and host 100 completely different websites, each with valuable information and resources specific to those domain names or redirect your domain names using .htaccess level redirects to tell Google your domain is pointing to another.

Doorway Pages Help Your Ranking

This is a big one, but it’s completely untrue! Doorway pages are special pages designed as landing pages which are specifically programmed to appeal to visitors but more importantly override major search engines understand of what your website is all about. Doorway pages are only linked from external websites and use a series of ‘black hat SEO’ techniques to override the search engines …. why doesn’t it work? Simple, major search engines such as Google hate being tricked. Remember, Google isn’t a company it’s a culture and the people who make up that culture want to be the best search engine in the world. If they believe you’re lying to them, they’ll kick you off their search engine.

Search Engine Friendly URL’s are Critical

No so fast, they make look great and even show up highlighted in result pages but there’s no concrete evidence to suggest making your URL’s pretty vs. database generated strings has any impact on your rankings at all. In fact, Matt Cutt’s (Google’s voice to the people and all around SEO guru) makes it clear that Google’s smart enough to ignore SEO friendly URL’s. So should you stop using them? Not a chance, they don’t hurt and they make the site easier  for people to use.

SEO is a One Time Fix

Hiring a reputable SEO consultant isn’t a one time fix, there are many aspects to building a great search engine ranking and it takes time, effort and patients.

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Posted in Blogging, Business Advice, Make Money Online, Web Site Advice

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29
Jun
2009

Great Chefs, Great Website

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greatchefs portfolio top Great Chefs, Great Website image

A while back, I mentioned that I went down to New Orleans to help a friend out on his website and since early April, I’ve been consumed with the Great Chefs website, it’s not completely finished yet and I’m sure there will be many changes over the coming months but I wanted to share the progress with you and explain some of the choices so that other restaurants and chefs could see how the Internet can be better utilized for their business.

Rich Search Engine Friendly Content

For those who are regular readers of my blog, you know that I’m a huge fan of content. In fact, I don’t believe there’s anything more important on a website and when it comes to making a website successful, content truly is king.

SEO Features

great chefs navigation 300x265 Great Chefs, Great Website imageSearch Engine Optimization isn’t about tricking Google, it’s about helping Google understand what’s on your website and that’s exactly what we do with Great Chefs. Take for example the recipe page, this page has been carefully designed to contain significant value for Google and other search engines without taking away from the value of the page for the reader. In fact, the page was designed to provide the reader with quality navigation before worrying what Google found.

This is the true strength of a website, serving the needs of the user, your customers while ensuring the information is easily read and understood by popular search engines. The Great Chefs website includes SEO tactics hidden from the general public but optimized for search engines including:

  1. automated sitemap.xml creation and optimization which helps major search engines find deep pages it might otherwise miss;
  2. automated notification services to major search engines of page updates, additions and changes to the structure of the website which ensures an accurate listing on engines;
  3. creation and maintenance of META data tags for search engines including the powerful META description and META keyword tags for all pages;
  4. optimized nofollow and noindex META data for duplicate content to avoid being penalized for content appearing in multiple areas;
  5. W3C compliant xHTML 1.0 publishing structure;
  6. canonical URL’s to indicate content which appears on Great Chefs website as original
  7. enforced www. to ensure all pages are only indexed on the main (www.greatchefs.com) domain, not a secondary domain such as greatchefs.com.

In addition to these hidden tactics for optimizing the website, the pages also feature a wide variety of tactics clearly visible to users of the website.

great chefs recipes rich listings Great Chefs, Great Website image

  1. rich pages with links to free giveaways, each containing descriptive titles and appropriate attributes (rel, title, href);
  2. proper use of the HTML <title> tag to inform search engines that a webpage is about specific items. For example, Bermuda Wahoo and Lentils with Foie Gras as a title;
  3. use of attractive website addresses such as http://www.greatchefs.com/bananas-foster-bread-pudding/ instead of http://www.greatchefs.com/?p=4507 to help visitors find content;
  4. proper use of the <h1> and <h2> heading tags to ensure the webpage structure is clear to both visitors and search engine robots;
  5. deep linking from products and free giveaways to similar content on the website, designed to help users locate items of interest;
  6. inclusion of a comprehensive sitemap for visitors to locate content easily;
  7. an easy to use search tool, providing easy access to all areas of the website

Promoted Content

great chefs deep linking Great Chefs, Great Website image

Beyond simply deep linking content (the process of ensuring pages other than your homepage are linked to), I also wanted to highlight and feature the great programs Great Chefs Television has created over the years and add some distinct color to the pages. To accomplish this, I added a special highlighted content at the bottom of the pages. This area is automatically generated each time a page is cached (we’ll get the that in a moment) and randomly selects three products from the store, tests to see if there is a featured graphic and displays it along with a text description. This way, each webpage has a different collection of three great TV shows at the bottom, giving both users and search engines the ability to find distinctly different content.

Interlinked Content

greatchefs video list 240x300 Great Chefs, Great Website imageOne of the things which pleased me most about the way the Great Chefs website turned out is it’s ability to automatically link and re-link content from other areas of the website. For example, the free daily videos are linked from both the easily accessible free cooking videos page as well as each individual series.

This allows visitors to quickly locate videos which have been published from a given series (for example, Great Chefs Great Cities) to determine if they would like to buy the series similar to how the video game industry would let you download a free trial version.

Free Recipes

With over 700 amazing chefs in the Great Chefs family, the television program has thousands of award winning recipes and books to share with the world. Every day, the people at Great Chefs select three wonderful recipes from their archives and post them for free on the website.

To make sure you never miss a great free recipe, I’ve built in a number of tools:

Subscribing to Great Chefs

To help ensure people have access to all our great free recipes,  the website automatically published the latest recipe links to both Facebook and Twitter. If you’re familiar with RSS readers or have an email account, you can also receive free daily updates to the recipes via email subscription or RSS feeds hosted by Google.

Free Videos

youtube Great Chefs, Great Website imageWhat kind of television station would put up a website and not give away free, award winning cooking shows? Every day, Great Chefs posts two recipes from their hit TV show directly to YouTube where fans can subscribe to be kept up to date and watch the program in High Quality.

You can also receive notifications via Facebook and Twitter, email subscription or RSS feeds. In fact, if you really want to make the most of the Great Chefs Television free videos, you can even subscribe to the service on your iPhone or iPod via the iTunes store or the PodCast service!

Chef Biographies

With over 700 chefs appearing in 2,100 series episodes and hundreds of more specials the Great Chefs website is home to biographies on the vast majority of the chefs who have graced the television program. Of course no index is complete, so if you know any links or projects these Great Chefs are involved in, why not comment on their profiles!

Blog

Each area of the website, including the videos, recipes and biographies includes the ability for visitors to leave comments and links to related content. Soon, the website will also feature a daily blog for those interested in cooking shows and the industry as a whole.

DVD Store

GreatChefs GreatChefsofChicagoBoxSet 271x300 Great Chefs, Great Website imagePerhaps the most important part of the website is the store. While most people never reach the sales pages of the Great Chefs store, it’s critical that visitors are made aware of the fact it’s possible to purchase the product. Simply put, while you can watch the show for free online the purpose on the website is to sell DVD’s.

With that in mind, each free DVD (or recipe) page has been designed to offer links to the DVD from which it was created and the homepage of the website is set to promote the DVD’s upon each visit.

On the DVD pages themselves, navigation makes it easy to purchase the discs as either a complete set or individual items, with the focus being on ensuring customers are able to purchase online using Googles secure checkout system or via a toll free telephone number.

Each collection shows a 3D rendered collection of exactly what customers can expect to receive in their order, including an accurate depiction of the number of discs in the set. Since it is possible to also order each disc as an individual item, the recipes included on each disc are listed for visitors to choose from.

Google Integration

google analytics Great Chefs, Great Website image

One of the major differences between the Great Chefs project and many other previous websites that I’ve worked on is the level of Google integration that I went with on this particular project. In addition to ensuring the Webmaster Tools was fully supported by the website, we’re also using:

  1. Google Analytics to provide daily tracking of website traffic, page testing and optimization settings;
  2. Google Feedburner to provide easy access to daily RSS and email subscriptions
  3. Google AdWords with integration with Analytics to promote and market the website;
  4. Google AdSense to sell advertising in the footer of most pages as well as on free content located throughout the website;
  5. Google Checkout for online shopping cart integration and to offer a fast, safe and secure means to order online;
  6. Google GMail to host the email for the Great Chefs web domain and finally;
  7. YouTube to host the video files displayed on the website

Automation

great chefs videos page 300x249 Great Chefs, Great Website imageRunning a website is hard work, in fact it’s not just time consuming it’s also extremely technical and the great people at Great Chefs Television all have tons of work to do already without having to learn about Search Engine Optimization, Organic Marketing, keyword density and all the other things that make promoting a website successful. That’s why the vast majority of the website is completely automated.

Easy Updates

Knowing that the team at Great Chefs do amazing work on their television series, I wanted to ensure they had the ability to do the same on their website without having to make any of them learn extensive HTML programming. To do this, I used the powerful WordPress content management tool to build a robust solution capable of serving their needs while making it easy for them to update content.

Fast Pages

A website is useless if it’s not fast, that’s why the website makes the most of caching technology to rapidly build and store dynamically generated content. Instead of rebuilding the webpage each time a visitor comes to the site, the Great Chefs website rebuilds the pages only when needed.

Service Integration

When the staff of Great Chefs updates their website, it automatically generates Email and RSS updates for people who are subscribed, as well as informing Twitter and Facebook of the recent changes. Podcasts and Apple iTunes are automatically updated within minutes of fresh videos being posted to YouTube. This ensures that quality content is distributed to all areas of Great Chefs, without having to spend countless hours reproducing the same content in multiple sources.

The Future of Great Chefs

Over the next few months, there will be a lot of great new features added to the Great Chefs website, I hope you’ll join me in supporting the wonderful television series and as always I would love to hear your feedback and suggestions for improving the website!

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Posted in Web Design

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03
Apr
2009

How to get backlinks

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First, let me tell you what a backlink is … it’s a link from a website to your website, that’s it. Pretty technical right? The link serves a few purposes:

  1. It provides Google with the ability to find you on the Internet by allowing it to follow preexisting websites to yours.
  2. It allows Google to assign a PageRank to your website based on who else is willing to link to you.
  3. It allows people to find you by following hyperlinks from one website to another.

So a backlink is a link from one website to another which drives traffic and increases the value of the second (target) website.

Backlinks to Avoid

The old marketing adage is that all publicity is good publicity but in the case of backlinks, that’s not entirely true. There are some type of backlinks which serve either no purpose or end up damaging your websites reputation. For example:

  1. Paid Links. It’s possible to pay companies to link to you and usually it’s pretty cheap to do so but it’s proven to be fatal for websites. Major search engines such as Google look very poorly on websites which provide this service or try to benefit from it. Here are two great blog posts written to help you understand how Google punishes people for paid links:
  2. Link Farms. A link farm is a series of websites all linking to each other with the hopes of transferring PageRank between themselves. Self contained ecosystems, be it economies or websites are bound to fail. Google is a very, very smart company with some exceedingly talents minds at work … in my opinion using the computer power of the big G would make detecting Link Farms fairly easy and they’ve made no secret about punishing offenders.

What are good backlinks?

The best, and strongest links to generate between websites are the honest ones. I don’t know if I’ve made that clear enough throughout my website so I’ll restate it. The best backlinks to generate are the ones which are completely and without fail genuine. I give Google (and other search engines) a lot of credit for being run by pretty smart people for a reason, they won’t hire me … so when people ask me about SEO services, I generally tell them the same things:

  1. Write quality content.
  2. Promote quality content.
  3. Support quality content.
  4. Contribute to the Internet.

In real world terms, it’s fairly easy to do all three of these.

1. Write Quality Content

I write a half dozen posts a week that get published but about another two dozen get started and never finished. Writing for my blog is a 20 hour a week job, it’s how I relax and practice my writing skills. To be honest, I don’t think I’ve a very good writer but it gives me a chance to improve by receiving feedback from much better writers.

2. Promote quality content

When I write good content I try to include a few links to other better content as well, so my readers can find out where I received my information, sort of like a bibliography. This serves two purposes:

  1. It provides you, the reader with the ability to follow those links and learn more about the subject being covered and;
  2. It provides the original authors with credit for providing great content

Strangely there’s a third, link building reason for website owners to credit others in our writings. When I include a link to another article in my post, my website (powered by WordPress) automatically sends a message to the other authors website informing them that I’ve cited their article in mine. This PingBack is an automated notification system designed to help blog authors communicate and one startling benefit is that many blog owners will in turn link back to your original article (if it’s valuable), creating a free backlink to your website.

3. Support quality content

Every morning I fetch articles from 700 different quality news sources and skim through the headlines to find at least a dozen articles which will help me or my clients be more successful on the web, then I read the articles and if I have anything valuable to contribute to the article I add a comment for the blog author to consider adding.

Blog comments (such as what you will find at the bottom of this article) are powerful marketing tools. Every day I comment on two or three articles and I try to make those comments as relevant and useful as possible, this drives endless traffic to my website as clicks (in fact, more than purchased advertising) but it also tells major search engines that my content is valuable and my contributions are respected by the website author.

4. Contribute to the Internet

Possibly the easiest way to build massive backlinks in a short period of time … contribute something useful to the Internet. It doesn’t have to be Earth shattering, my article Creating a Splash Screen in Torque Game Builder generates five unique page visits per day because it’s helpful and free. I have backlinks located in key locations throughout the Internet for this article but more importantly? It’s useful. Take the time to write quality how-to articles, build a plugin for your favorite software or make an animation that puts a smile on your face, contribute to the Internet in a useful manner and you’ll build significant traffic.

Conclusions

Building quality links from other websites will take time, it’s would be faster and easier to cheat but the people you’re trying to cheat are very clever and very dedicated to catching you. I once heard a comment by a visiting police officer to a grade six class, he said that criminals by-and-large forgot one simple fact … being a criminal was hard work, one minor mistake could get you caught and the police had a lot of very smart people dedicated to catching criminals. I think that’s very true for black hat SEO as well, tricking Google is easy … but getting caught is also very easy and in the end if you want to benefit from the services they offer, the best way to build a strong online business is to be honest, support the community and build a better web for all mankind.

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Posted in Blogging

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09
Feb
2009

Want to know how to make money online? Stop thinking so hard.

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The other day I was wrapping up a new website for the Fredericton Meals on Wheels organization, it was a charity gig that I happily donated my time on (thanks again for the support everybody) which led me to work with a well known local community activist, John Carty. He’s the new director of the MOW program and a man who’s master the art of giving to the community, funny thing was that he said something hilarious one day when I was on the phone with him and it’s brilliant advice for web entrepreneurs.

Everybody loves pets.

What he actually said what that everybody loves animals, he used to be the head of the Fredericton SPCA so he’s a man who knows about animals. During another chapter of his life he ran for local office and he discovered that most people had a pet in the house when they came to the door. I hope John doesn’t mind me sharing this story, but the point is pretty simple … people love animals. So what’s this got to do with making money online?

i can has cheezburger if I tell you? Honest to Google, while the rest of us are killing ourselves building complex social networking engines, marketing tools, SEO optimization mechanisms and writing content on everything from how to make money blogging to Google in your TV … these guys are making a mint doing nothing more than putting funny captions on pictures.

Want to know how to make money online? Stop thinking so hard. imagehttp://icanhascheezburger.com/ may seem like a joke at first glance but this cheesy little website stacks up like this:

Basic Traffic Statistics
Alexa Traffic Ranking: 2,780
Google PageRank: 7
Average of 709,717 backlinks from major search engines.

You read that right … a PageRank of 7 and over 700,000 backlinks to a website with cute pictures of kittens and some funny text. Their website’s estimated worth (for the domain name, not the business) … $2,202,868.

I’m not knocking icanhascheezburger.com, honestly I’m just jealous that I didn’t think of it first. The website is a  WordPress.com hosted website powered by the greatest tool ever, it also means that there was basically no startup costs to put it together. Basically a domain name and a free account.  

My point I suppose (if I indeed have one) is that much like my recent article So You Lost Your Job, Now it’s Time to Live., and How make money online? the only obstacle between you and making money online is your own desire to start doing it.

Well … I think there’s only one thing for me to do then …

icanzbuiltwebsitez Want to know how to make money online? Stop thinking so hard. image

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Posted in Make Money Online

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04
Feb
2009

Improve your SEO with Site Maps

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Every day people take the time to read my posts on building better websites and optimizing website content but I’ve not written about one of the most important aspects of Search Engine Optimization previously, the dreaded site map. To be honest, I haven’t written about it because I assumed everybody knew how important a site map was and simply implemented them without question. Apparently I was wrong.

Let’s start by determining what I mean by a site map and then we can look at how to properly use one. There are two types of site maps common on the Internet today. The first is a hypertext document filled with all the links on your website, organized in a way that is comfortable for people  to read. The second is an XML data file designed for search engines and other computers to read.

Both types of site maps are important for SEO (let’s call it organic marketing instead) because it helps search engines and visitors traverse your website more effectively. Visually, having a site map allows visitors to quickly load an index of all the pages on your website and find what they’re looking for while it also allows search engines to link to various pages and ensures your whole website is indexed. Mechanically, the XML variety also provides major search engines with the ability to know when pages are updated on a website.

In essence, a site map is a document that acts as a table of contents for your website and both people and machines use it the same way, to rapidly find areas of your website which would otherwise be difficult to locate.

For those of us who have had our websites designed in WordPress, the task of implimenting a site map is pretty straight forward. Simply download and install a plugin such as the Google XML Sitemaps before signing up for a Google Web Master Tools account. Once you’re signed up, you can specify the URL of your XML file and you’re all done.

Articles worth reading:

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Posted in Search Engine Optimization

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31
Jan
2009

Web Design and SEO Go Hand in Hand

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I’m often asked how Search Engine Optimization works and without being an expert on the subject, what I can tell you is that SEO is about more than just adding a few keywords, as a small article on the British Computer Society website points out the optimization of your website for organic traffic starts with the design. While I was ‘across the pond’ I also came across a strange article by Nick Sommerlad on SEO spam. What I found odd about it wasn’t the article (OK that was strange too) but the comments, take a look and you’ll see what I mean … those Brit’s seem to get pretty passionate about bashing things. Search Engine Land had a feature this morning called Are You an SEO Hybrid?. The article pretty much covers my life with questions like:

  • “I didn’t hire you to redesign my site. I hired you to get my site #1 on Google.”

One article that really caught my attention today was over at addicottweb.com and it focussed on how to fix some of the problems WordPress has with SEO. I’ll admit that WordPress isn’t well optimized out of the box but I’m going to have to disagree on the solution. The two plugins he recommends (All-in-One SEO plugin & SEO Title Tag plugin) are acceptable if you have no programming skills but a much better solution is to take care of the problem yourself in the code. Here’s my three simple recommendations for people who are legitimately concerned with WordPress SEO:

  1. Reorder your Title tag
  2. Use your Tags as META Keywords
  3. Use your Excerpt as META Description

This allows you to do something that neither plugin will do, control your blog. Remember that major search engines don’t care who (or how) you optimized your blog poorly, so take ownership of it and do it right or you might be making the worst mistakes you can.

Jonathan Aston wrote an interesting piece on SEO and made the point that country specific domain names are a great idea. I also wanted to point out that Dave Bascom has the funniest license plate I’ve seen in weeks and that the economy may be tanking but jobs for people in the SEO field? On the rise …

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Posted in Search Engine Optimization

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30
Jan
2009

Fresh Post at Getaway Graphics: What do Search Engines Really See?

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One of the most difficult things for the average business owner to understand is how major search engines work and what they can read from a website. All of the holiday and hotel websites we build here at Getaway Graphics are designed so that major search engines can properly read the content from sites. 

 

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Posted in Blog Posts

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30
Jan
2009

What do Search Engines Really See?

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One of the most difficult things for the average business owner to understand is how major search engines work and what they can read from a web site. All of the holiday and hotel web sites we build here at Getaway Graphics are designed so that major search engines can properly read the content from sites.

To see what major search engines see, take a look at our free SEO checker found at seocheck.getawaygraphics.com. This tool was original designed as an internal tool for our development team to ensure quality marketing and online promotion for our clients so it’s not the prettiest tool but it gives you a great idea of what major search engines can see.

Why does it matter?

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) isn’t really about making it possible for companies like Google or MSN to find you, it’s about making it possible for people who have never heard of you to find you. If you think of major search engines as a blind person, then you begin to understand that the single most important aspect of your web site is the text you display and that by extension the better the text you display, the more people can find you.

We call it organic traffic, it’s designed to save you countless marketing dollars.

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Posted in Search Engine Optimization, getawaygraphics.com

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24
Oct
2006

Does the Meta tag still matter?

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There’s been a lot of talk on the web of late and most of it isn’t good for the META tag … it seems some people think poor old META is dead but personally, I think META is going to stick around for a lot longer than people think.

Here’s the thing (for non webbies), a META tag is a special series of instructions, found on almost every web page on the Internet and what they do (or are meant to do) is tell search engines such as Google what your website has on it.

In the old days, major search engines used to use spiders to crawl the web and find pages, they would then pick up the META data and display it on their search engine but people quickly began abusing this and posting fake META data, to trick web users into visiting their website.

The more advanced search engines, and most modern engines use a complex series of algorithms to create their own summary of websites, making the META data seem fairly unimportant. After all, if the search engine is going to create its own version of the META data, what possible use will the sites META data be?

Well here’s the kicker, I’ve found that websites I build with great META data continue to be placed high on major search engines, while pages or sites without META data rarely rank well.

My theory (and it’s just a theory) is that if your META tags are accurate, the search engines reward you for being honest but if your META tags make no sense to the search engine, they either reject them or worse, punish your rankings.

As for me, I use a custom build module for my websites, it builds the META data on the fly, based on the actual content of the website, which means that when the search engines come to index, they receive great META data based on actual content, not just what I thought would look good at the time.

This article first appeared on my old website in 2006 but was recently recovered from my old archives.

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Posted in Web Site Advice

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27
May
2006

Just how bad a site is frederictontourism.com?

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The city of Fredericton hired Ontario based esolutionsgroup to produce the new tourism website for the city of Fredericton, located athttp://www.frederictontourism.com. What exactly does the city get for $60,000 plus $20,000 per year in maintenance? Let’s take a look at the site together and see.

The Splash Screen
First off, esolutionsgroup elected to start the website with a very attractive but useless opening screen, often referred to as a splash screen, this design element is creatively thought of as a book cover for a web page but is extremely damaging to a websites ranking.

This splash screen is the first piece of property viewed by internet search engines such as Google, Yahoo and MSN. It’s the retail equivalent of a store window but instead of utilizing the page to index the city of Fredericton as a tourist destination, esolutionsgroupelected to include no content at all, the result? Instead of indexing content, events and news about the city of Fredericton, search engines will simply regard the most important part of the site as an empty page, lacking even the most basic tags.

In the long run, this will ensure the city is required to pay extensive marketing costs to generate even a basic return on investment for the website.

Key META Data
For those who don’t know, a website is like a book and in that site there is in essence a write up about the site similar to the one we reference on the back cover of a book.

In web terms, we call this META data and it helps people find websites. We use this information, much the way we would use a book cover to determine where major search engines would rank a website. The city of Fredericton, and esolutionsgroup elected to waste this space, instead of packing it full of words and phrases which would help market the website, they instead choose to include far out misspellings of the cities name and keywords so common they’ll never be indexed by major search engines.

This may just seem like a petty web designer, voicing his opinion because he didn’t win the contract but it’s not, it’s an opinion shared by various local web developer firms in Fredericton from RedCow to Nictech, the website simply does not function as a quality product.

Basic HTML Errors
Ignoring the massive errors associated with keywording and META data, lets turn out attention to the most basic of website functions, the HMTL. This is the language web browsers around the world use to access the page and much like any computer language, must be written properly for browsers to interpret and display.

Certainly any web development firm would take the time to ensure their work met basic HTML requirements? Not esolutionsgroup, or at least not in the case of the tourismfredericton.com website.

The W3C group is the definite standard to which all websites are measured, failing their test is the kiss of death for a website. So how does a $60,000 website stand up to their online tests?

45 significant errors on the first content page alone, of which all 45 are critical enough to have the website not work in current or future web browsers. How important is this? Let’s just say that if the tourismfredericton.com website was a house, it would have failed even the most basic home inspection. The irony of course is that the website includes a W3C badge on it, so we know esolutionsgroup is aware of the standards.

And as for Accessibility, the term used to define how easily the website can be read by people with disabilities, the site again fails the most basic tests, with 65 errors meaning that if you have a hard time seeing, this website is not for you.

The Final Verdict
In the end, the final verdict for this website is a pretty dismal one, the site fails to meet basic web standards, it is not accessible to disabled web uses, to can not be indexed by major search engines and as Bob Gillespie of Nictech web concludes in his interview with the Gleaner, it attempts to undermine the integrity of Google using methods which the web community know better than to employ.

Any of great web development teams here in Fredericton could have build this solution for a tenth of the cost, ensuring it met basic HMTL standards, employed standards designed to be inclusive of users and assured the city of rankings in search engines.

My final verdict on this website is that it fails to deliver, and cost far more than is reasonable.
What was Fredericton’s response to this outrage? According to Information Technology chairmen Tommy Jellinek, sending $60,000 to Ontario was the best option possible becuase local web developers should “sharpen their pencils”.

I think I speak for the whole Fredericton web community when I say it’s the city and not the local, internationally recognized tax paying population who should rethink how they approach the web.

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