So you want to value your website or business online. Have you thought about placing a monetary value on your search engine positioning for keywords and keyword phrases specific to your business or online purpose? You should.

Every day millions of dollars is spent on paid advertising where competitors pay dearly for the guaranteed top sponsored position for a keyword and are happy to pay for sponsored positions in other less optimal places.

The fact is being seen in the top position has a high value; you get seen, if you’re seen you’re more likely to get visited, if you get visited you’re more likely to influence, e.g. sell the product or service. Yes, keyword positioning has a value that advertisers pay considerably for.

If your site is positioned well in the natural search engine results in positions 1-3 for example, or even on page one if the keyword is highly competitive, then obviously your positioning for that keyword has a monetary value because we’ve already established advertisers pay for sponsored positing as near to your free listing as possible. If your website extends outside of the immediate geographical area e.g. serves Australia as well as New Zealand, then you also need to consider the value of keyword positioning in the com.au as well as the co.nz domain.

Do you know what keywords and keyword phrases your webiste ranks for and in what position?

The single most important piece of metadata you will write for a webpage is its Title.

Writing a title for a webpage/blog post is an art but it is even more so when it comes to incorporating search engine optimisation into the mix.

In the source code of each webpage, title tags look like this:

I am very important

Without a doubt you want to spend time on optimising your title text because they are the first words that appear about your webpage in the search engine results pages (SERPS); a title can work for you or against you.

A good title can:

1. Convert a searcher to a visitor. If your title catches the eye of someone on a SERP then they are more likely to click on it. It could be because the title is highly relevant to their search or because it’s been written in way that makes the person want to find out more. If you can get the searcher to visit you have an opportunity to sell and influence.
2. Good usability. The title is displayed by the visitor’s browser (most often Microsoft Internet Explorer) in the border of the viewable screen as the visitor is viewing your website.
3. Make you popular with the search engines.  You want that…right? The goal of a search engine is to return relevant results to the searcher so if you use keywords that accurately describe the content of the webpage they are more likely to deem your content as relevant to the searcher and return it in the SERPS.

Here are some tips to writing SEO titles:

1. Make sure you have unique title for every single page/blog post on your website
2. Aim for about 64 characters (6-9 words). The W3C recommends that The title should ideally be less than 64 characters in length. Google displays up to 66 characters, if your title extends longer than this Google cuts off to the last word. For example Cats love Nutribics for shinny coats, strong claws and good clean teeth. (72 characters). Google would display this as Cats love Nutribics for shinny coats, strong claws and good clean … (65 characters) so as you can see it makes more sense for the characters to come in at 66 characters or under. In this example the title could have been edited to Cats love Nutribics for shinny coats, strong claws and good teeth. 66 characters, makes more sense, and your get the valuable keyword ‘teeth’ in your title. Yahoo displays titles up to 120 characters. In order to accommodate and maximise opportunities on both major search engines you could have a two part title e.g. Cats love Nutribics for shinny coats, strong claws and good teeth. Cat food bargains at our pet supermarket every Friday (120 characters) - that way you would still look good on Google and maximise the opportunity for a longer keyword rich title in Yahoo.
3. Start with the specific i.e. with exactly what the page is about, and move to the general
4. Ask yourself, what are the main keywords that describe the content of the webpage? Try and include the main keywords in the title. Don’t try to include all of them; it’s important the title makes sense and indicates what the webpage is about.
5. Try and exclude common words such as: the, and, of, is.

Came across this today and it kept me occupied for about an hour. Searchme.com is a search engine that displays it’s results as an image gallery of web pages you can flip through and filter results by topic.

I found it allowed me to seach through a lot of information quickly as I could see which pages were relevant, click on the visual and be brought to the page. It’s a good way to ’see’ your presence online, where you/your company/your brand appears, images that were used etc.. It also highlights, on the page, where the term you searched for appears.

See while you

Steps to take towards valid code?

1. Start with the right doctype
2. Be aware of doctype modes (standards compliant, quirks mode etc)
3. Use a character set
4. Close HTML elements
5. Use alt tags for images
6. Avoid HTML hacks
7. Use HTML validators regularly
8. Fix any bugs you find before you go live
9. Make validation part of your normal work process

How to start well and maintain validation?

1. As part of any new web development or enhancement make it a requirement that any coding validates. If you’re a Government department web development work needs to comply with the New Zealand Government Web Standards one of which (Standard 3.1) states documents including any web page and/or form, validate to published formal grammars. Factor this requirement in to any development work undertaken on your behalf.
2. Even if you receive a website that validates it doesn’t mean it’s going to stay that way. Get into the habit of checking every page after you make a change to it. If you notice an issue try to fix it.
3. Here are some free validators you can try; they will at least help you identify a potential problem to be fixed. I use the W3CMarkup Validation Service I enter the url of the page I want to test, click check, and hope for the green ‘good-to-go’ bar. If you get the red bar it means the validator has come across a validation error. To get some help on what the error could be click the Verbose Output box that can be found under Options, and then revalidate. If you have problems interpreting the data then I would recommend hiring someone to check and fix validation errors on your site for a few hours every month. It won’t cost you a lot but could make a big difference to your website findability online. Some more validators: HTML Tidy and HTML VALIDATOR.
4. This is worth repeating, if your site has validation errors DON’T PANIC it’s completely curable and happens to almost everyone! Either teach yourself to fix them or hire someone to do it for you regularly. It’s good SEO.

We are talking about valid code. Valid code is code that passes validation; a process of checking your documents against a formal standard, like those published by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). A webpage that has been checked and passed is considered valid.

From an SEO perspective ensuring that your website pages validate to W3C requirements is important because a consequence of poorly coded pages is poor search engine indexing.

Poor search engine indexing can lead to chunks of your content not being index and therefore not appearing in search engines to be found. Not being findable is of course the kiss of search engine death.

Some common validation errors:

1. No Document Type Definition (DTD) declaration
2. Lowercase DOCTYPE
3. Missing closing ” /”
4. Unescaped ampersand (“&”)
5. Uppercase tags
6. Incorrect nesting of elements
7. Missing required attribute
8. Unquoted attribute values
9. Omitted end tag
10. End tag not open

If a document is missing a closing tag or a Document Type Declaration, modern browsers, especially Internet Explorer, which is very adept at interpreting erroneous code, will usually oblige by displaying the page the way it was intended to be seen. This has spawned a dependency on browser technology to interpret code and display pages correctly. If it looks good, it must be all good. Wrong.

Search engine spiders care that your page does not validate, they are the most basic text browsers and they need a free and easy ride through your code; remember, just because human visitors can read your page it doesn’t mean search engines can.

You need the search engine spiders to visit and have a clear pathway through your page, your visibility online is dependent on the quality of their visits. Coding errors and invalid mark-up can also cause problems with layout and accessibility which means you could also be turning away potential customers from your site who may never to return and that’s only if they can find the site in the first place (see spidering problem…).

In part 2: Steps you can take towards valid code and what you can do to ensure as few errors as possible.

Applying the nofollow link attribute, rel=”nofollow”, to some or all of your links on pages/posts can make a lot of sense if you want to lower the number of outbound links and preserve more pagerank.

A lot of outbound linking, where “nofollow” is not applied, is often viewed as pagerank leakage, almost a weakening the pagerank potency of your webste. Conversely going mad and making every link nofollow can be frowned upon by the search engines so as with most things a degree of moderation is required and monitor your website for effects.

Rel=”nofollow” was originally created to block search engines from following links in blog comments, due to the amount of blog comment spamming. The idea being that if spammers are spamming in blog comments to get better SEO and anchored links for their sites, nofollow would render such spam useless.

Rel=”nofollow” does not mean that search engines won’t spider the link destination; they will follow the link, spider the page and count the link as a backlink. What rel=”nofollow” means is that PageRank/TrustRank does not pass from your site to there’s; obviously a hit of page rank from another site further enhances your reputation in the eyes of Google as it is viewed as a sign that you trust and recommend the site so when that isn’t passed on it one less significant benefit to the link.

Many people opposed to the use of rel=”nofollow” in blogging argue that it is a sign of mistrust, however there are some very legitimate reasons for using it and I think that every website owner should decide who to pass on the benefits of their PageRank/TrustRank to. This is why there is a backlinks industry where people pay for backlinks that have “nofollow” switched off – backlinks have value.

Since the use of rel=”nofollow” in comments on Wordpress blogs is a default, many bloggers do not even realise they are using it. If you run a wordpress blog and want visitors to be rewarded for taking the time to contribute it is possible to use DoFollow plugins and share your link love, such as:

DoFollow: Which includes the ability (optional) to remove nofollow from comments after a period of time.
or
Lucia’s Link Love: Which removes nofollow after a certain number of comments have been made – this rewards regular commenters

WARNING: if you disable “nofollow” on your blog make sure you either moderate your blog or have a good spam filtering for your comments e.g. Akismet and SpamKarma for Wordpress.

The Redemptoristine Nuns in Ireland are an enclosed order; they are also known as the Red Nuns because of the red habit that they wear and in a country where seeing a nun in a habit is now rarer than alien sightings I think they are kind of special.

What really impresses me about them is the way they have embraced technology as a tool to help them communicate with the world and allow the world into their lives.

I am writing about them because recently they placed a webcam in their chapel and are now streaming 24/7; you can check-in for mass and watch special occasions such as a recent first profession. I believe that the introduction of the webcam has been a huge success and that people are tuning in from all over the world to take part.

It just goes to show that if you take a chance and try something out, even if you think no one is going to show up or tune in, that you can be completely blown away by what happens.

If you’re interested in checking out the Red Nuns on the www here they are, even just to see their beautiful chapel.

Mass times: Mon-Fri 04.45am NZ time (for the dedicated)
Sat-Sun: 08.80pm NZ time