Month: July 2006

I like Netflix's 'to the point' homepage. This article talks about the power of it's simplicity:

The home page is astonishingly clean. Four simple calls to action cover all needs: “How it Works,” “Browse Selection,” “Start Your FREE Trial,” and “Start Now” (The latter two send the user to the same page.). Stare at this page and try to come up with any necessary information that is not covered. You have five minutes…

While this is intuitive, all to many web sites end up being 'designed by committee.' Check out Blockbuster.com, Netflix’s major online competitor. Does it give you the warm fuzzy that Netflix does? Is it as to-the-point? Hardly. Let's hope Blockbuster.com can have a site redesign soon.

Optimizing your site for search engines? Don't forget about DMOZ's Open Directory Project (ODP). Beyond being registered with the dmoz.org open directory project (which Google uses to obtain meta data about your site) be aware that Google uses the title and description from DMOZ's listing for your site in their search logic.

Google sometimes likes to construct the SERP (search engine results page) title from your page's title AND a bit of the first paragraph of text on your page.

But what if you want to override that description, for example, you want to optimize a page for keyword ranking? Enter the 'No ODP' tag:

Vanessa Fox notes over on the Sitemaps blog that Google now supports the META NOODP tag. What does this tag do? In some circumstances, Google uses descriptions from the Open Directory Project as the title and snippet for a web result; this tag lets you opt out of the ODP title and description.

Read more at Matt Cutts blog.

Want to understand more about how Google uses the ODP to build page titles, but only under certain conditions? Here is an article excerpt from SEO Roundtable that shows how Google shows different titles depending on search term used:

It is true, and its a pretty significant change on Google's part. ... The theory is that if the search matches the ODP listing, it will show it. So in my case, if you view the Google Directory (uses ODP) in the "/ Computers  / Internet  / Web_Design_and_Development / Designers / Full_Service / R /" section, and look at the 10th listing, you will see "RustyBrick" and the description. Both used in the main SERPs at Google when search on at Google, under "rustybrick".  

Some information and discussion about Google's use of the Open Directory Project:

You should use hyphens in your page names. In general, this page name:

computer-parts.php

Will likely rank higher in the search engines than these page names:

computer_parts.php
computerparts.php

Why? Because separating with hyphens gives the search engine an easy way to separate the keywords from one another, giving the domain more SEO power. Hyphens are universally accepted as a keyword separator by all major search engines. Yahoo and MSN recognize the underscore (_) as a keyword separator; Google does not. Google at least has admitted that they recognize hyphens as word separators whereas underscores are ignored. Therefore, computer-parts would be seen as " computer parts" whereas computer_parts would be seen as "computerparts". People search on "computer parts", not "computerparts." You optimize for the actual keywords people search on. You should also optimize for Google as they have the lion's share of the search market.

Now in some cases, the search engines can parse out your keywords (for example, 'computer-parts.php' could be deemed to be relevant to 'computer' and 'parts' keywords without ambiguity. But in other cases, the search engines might be confused.

Many say that separators are not necessary as search engines can find keywords in URLs without assistance. Also untrue. Well, not entirely. They are smart and most likely can pick some keywords out of a URL. But they are not that smart. Sometimes it is not obvious where one keyword ends and another begins. For example: expertsexchange.com can be seen as "experts exchange" and "expert sex change". These are obviously two very different topics. In this case a hyphen would clearly separate the keywords and solve this problem. (from http://www.sitepoint.com/forums/showthread.php?t=182915)

Bottom line: use hyphens in your page names to optimize your URLs for the search engines and improve your rankings.

See these articles for more information:

• mattcutts.com excellent blog article
• prweaver.com article
• searchenginewatch.com forum discussion
• digitalpoint.com forum discussion
• impliedbydesign.com article

Ubuntu is a great Linux distribution for personal use, and is easy to install. It's deficiency is that it often lacks features like Flash and other technology due to licensing restrictions.

EasyUbuntu is an easy to use script that gives Ubuntu users the most commonly requested apps, codecs, and tweaks that are not found in the base distribution -- all with a few clicks of your mouse.

Get it at EasyUbuntu

Need to control how Google spiders your site?:

The Sitemaps team just introduced a new robots.txt tool into Sitemaps. The robots.txt file is one of the easiest things for a webmaster to make a mistake on. Brett Tabke’s Search Engine World has a great robots.txt tutorial and even a robots.txt validator.

Read full article: New robots.txt tool

Microsoft's IE browser continues to lose market share. According to OneStat, as of July 2006, the most popular browsers in the USA are:

1. Microsoft IE
   79.78%
2. Mozilla Firefox
   15.82%
3. Apple Safari
   3.28%
4. Opera
   0.81%
5. Netscape
   0.20%

Firefox continues to gain usage at a rapid clip -- Firefox increased total market share by 1.14 percent since May 2006 alone.

Read full article.

An undocumented feature to a pressing business problem:

Did you ever want to make the search phrase appear as the headline of your adwords advert? Well, you should, because it usually increases the click through rate.

Check out this how-to for creating dynamic headlines in Google AdWords.