Friday, July 28, 2006

Spry framework for Ajax

Adobe Labs - Spry framework for Ajax

This framework seems very interesting. If it is as simple as it sounds to implement it may be a nice tool for simple coding integration of AJAX into web page designs. Being able to implement XML into HTML easily could be a handy trick. Something to look into.

Thursday, July 27, 2006

Free PR

Ask them and they will come. Share the wealth. Spread the word.

Get those free linkbacks! Press releases are a cheap and easy way to get public awareness of your site and promotions. Not all of them charge to send out your PR, although most have some sort of limitation to them unless you pay up (like active links in the article).

The SearchWrite newsletter had a nice list of free Press Release distribution sites. I added a few of my own to the list where you can submit articles and PRs for free.

PR Free [http://www.prfree.com/]
Press Zoom [http://presszoom.com/]
Press Base [http://www.press-base.com/]
Express Press Release Distribution [http://express-press-release.com/]
Press World [http://www.press-world.com/]
Open PR [http://openpr.com/]
Free Press Release [http://www.free-press-release.com/]
Free News Release [http://www.free-news-release.com/]
I Newswire [http://i-newswire.com/]
Newswire Today [http://www.newswiretoday.com/]
======
iSnare [http://www.isnare.com/]
ArticleBlast [http://www.articleblast.com/]
Ezine Articles [http://www.ezinearticles.com/]
GO Articles [http://www.goarticles.com/]
PR.com [http://www.pr.com]

Tuesday, July 25, 2006

# Word Search Queries

OneStat.com has published a report covering the word count on search queries for multiple countries and search engines. Here are the stats for July 2005 and 2006. You can see a slight increase in the words used. I would guess that it is because people are having a harder time finding the quality results they are after with the shorter queries. This is even more true for the USA results. The multiple word searches are almost double what the single averages are worldwide.

    July 2006                   July 2005

1. 2 word phrases 28.91%      1. 2 word phrases 29.60%
2. 3 word phrases 27.85%      2. 3 word phrases 27.55%
3. 4 word phrases 17.11%      3. 4 word phrases 16.21%
4. 1 word phrases 11.43%      4. 1 word phrases 13.42%
5. 5 word phrases 8.25%        5. 5 word phrases 7.58%
6. 6 word phrases 3.68%        6. 6 word phrases 3.21%
7. 7 word phrases 1.59%        7. 7 word phrases 1.34%

    USA

1. 3 word phrases 28.83%
2. 4 word phrases 22.28%
3. 2 word phrases 20.43%
4. 5 word phrases 11.97%
5. 1 word phrases 6.19%
6. 6 word phrases 5.76%
7. 7 word phrases 2.59%

Custom 404 Error Pages

Custom 404 Error pages can come in very handy, and also offer a kindness to your site's visitors. We all have those finger-fumbles and it is usually better to show a bad typer an actual page instead of a big old error that makes them feel stupid. Or having them think you are ;)

Simply in Apache add to VirtualHost:

ErrorDocument 404 /errordoc-404.shtml

Reminder! If your redirect page is less than 512 bytes it won't work in IE.

Monday, July 24, 2006

Printable Pages

Want to let people print out a nice web page you have published? Try using the @media function in a CSS file. This will allow you to modify the layout of your page and remove the images when the page is printed.

Here is a sample CSS file with the screen display and print formatting.

Simply use these containers to define the output mode:

@media screen {

@media print {

}

SEO Pricing

Rand at SEOmoz posted a nice work up on a couple different kind of contracts and services they provide clients and the costs that generally go along with them. It is very interesting to see some of the higher service margins. I doubt that too many of our private practice orthodontists and dentists would be willing to go for this type of price range however.

Still we are dedicated to providing them the best search engine optimization we can and take pride in the results we get from our members site performance.

http://www.seomoz.org/blogdetail.php?ID=1233

Wednesday, July 19, 2006

Gallery Update

The Sesame web design gallery has been updated.

Take a look at some of the latest orthodontic and dental web site designs!

Some of the latest orthodontic and dental web sites are:

Dr. Alena Spielberg
http://www.spielberg-ortho.com/

Dr. Greg Valeriano
http://www.valerianoorthodontics.com/

Dr. Chong Yun Shin
http://www.mightymolar.com/

Dr. Brandon Wainwright
http://www.wainwrightortho.com/

Dr. Michael J. Cook
http://www.orthofamily.com/

Tuesday, July 18, 2006

Length of Registration

Does it really matter how long you have a site? 1 year vs 5+ years for example. Google has their patent application put in (United States Patent Application 20050071741) from back in March '05 that mentioned using the length of registration/existance(?) time to help fight spam. Most portal pages have a short shelf life and most are only registered on a year to year basis.

How should that affect the public in general? Lets say you are starting out as perhaps a freelance web designer. You pick out a catchy domain and put up a really cool web site. Should you be punished if you only register a domain for 1 year?

*Thinks that the domain registration companies had some lobbying done on this*

My personal site has been up since around 2000. It is fairly established and just in the normal course of usage has gotten itself ranked and linked to over the years. I haven't put a lot of work into any kind of optimization because I have been working on too many other peoples sites. How would I feel if I had to start from scratch and face this?

Frankly, there hasn't seemed to be a lot of impact with this actually coming into play. I could have a site up and indexed in just a couple days if I really wanted to. The length of registration factor looks and acts like such a miniscule part of the ranking algorithms that I wouldn't worry about it if you have a ligitimate web site. Just do good optimization and publishing techniques to get those quality link backs.

Saturday, July 15, 2006

Google You Can Say No To ODP

Inside Google Sitemaps: More control over page snippets

Google has added the same ability to disallow ODP editors page descriptions. This follows MSN's release of the same option. You can now globally disallow all robots (at least the supporting ones) with the meta tag:

<meta name="ROBOTS" content="NOODP">

or use GoogleBot only (or MSNbot):

<META NAME="GOOGLEBOT" CONTENT="NOODP">

Friday, July 14, 2006

SEOmoz Page Strength

After reviewing this tool from SEOmoz, I am fairly impressed with it's value. You can find quite a lot of useful information on how your site is being seen on a broad scale (or not being seen respectively).

Here is a sample list of the information that it will pull about any web site.
Links pointing to full URL: (Yahoo)
Links pointing to domain: (Yahoo)
Position at Google for first four words of title tag on target URL: (Google)
Age of Domain: (
Wayback Machine)
Links from domains with .edu TLDs: (
Yahoo)
Links from domains with .gov TLDs: (
Yahoo)
Alexa Rank (
Alexa)
Domain name visibility (A count of results at Google for a search for your domain, showing URL visibility rather than incoming link count.) (
Google)
Internal Link Percent (The percentage of pages on the domain that link to the target url. If the target URL is the same as the domain name, this is usually 100%.) (
Yahoo API )
Number of search results for URL search at
del.icio.us (del.icio.us)
Listings in
DMOZ (ODP) (Yahoo)
Links found in
Wikipedia (Yahoo)
Google Pagerank of full URL and Domain (
Google) Full URL: # Domain: #

Try Page Strength for yourself!

Build the Popularity

I have noticed that my blog is not getting the attention I would like to have. Hopefully to spark more comments and discuss questions and best methods. So this morning I went and submitted my blog to about 20 blog directories. The next step is to start branching out and networking with others in the same field and hopefully receive some linkbacks! If you are so inclined I would greatly appreciate it.

I am endevoring to provide useful content and experience. Hopefully someone will find it usable and valuable.

Ironvine Blog
Link back to me!

I will be working on our corporate dental directory and orthodontic directory today. Some minor tweaks and content updates.

Thursday, July 13, 2006

Page Strength

This new tool, simply called Page Strenth, was developed by the team at SEOmoz. It was designed to determine the importance of a web page, similar to PageRank from Google, depending on the many factors we normally take into account in SEO. This includes things like age of the site, link quantity, referring sources, and PageRank.

Unfortunately, I am unable to give it a test drive due to high call valume. Please hang up and dial your operator. (MATT HELP!)
The pagestrength tool is temporarily offline. We experienced an extremely
high volume of traffic to the tool this morning and it was causing our server to
go down. I'm currently at the airport and will be traveling until later this
afternoon at which point I can properly fix the tool.

Thanks for your patience and check back soon!
-Matt
seomoz.org

Tuesday, July 11, 2006

MSN's Slow Indexing

For the last couple months MSN has not been indexing new web sites very quickly from what I can tell. I have heard rumors that they put new indexing on hold for a couple weeks in June to do some quality control updates. They opened up the doors to the search marketers for experiences in making positive changes. I don't know why they are taking so long (over 4 months now for a couple sites) to index, even using manual submissions and frequest site updates. About the only thing left that isn't highly pushed on these sites are the link backs.

Some of these orthodontist's web sites have been tweaked multiple times and have increased greatly in rankings. For example Dr. Priscilla Denny, Orthodontist in Birmingham, AL and Dr. David Engen, Orthodontist and Periodontist in Spokane, WA. Both beautiful web sites with customized, extensive and relevant orthodontic content. They were created at the beginning of the year and rank well on Google and Yahoo, but are not even listed on MSN.

We have started a Sesame linktrade program for orthodontists and dentists to promote their websites by asking their referring doctors to add web sites links to each other. Depending on the external links coming in, and the quality of those sites, we will see what kind of result comes out of it. There is also the possibility of using NOFOLLOW attributes to keep the outbound links down.

Friday, July 07, 2006

Using RSS as a Flash Page Sitemap

This is a simple way to add a little more content and link navigation for search engines for full flash web sites using a standard RSS formatted document.

If you have not worked with RSS or XML before here are some good introductory resources where you can learn more in-depth coding and information than what we will be covering here:

http://www.w3schools.com/rss/default.asp - RSS Coding
http://searchenginewatch.com/sereport/article.php/2175281 - Information
http://rdf.mobrien.com/xml/rss/open/make-rss/ - RSS Generation Tool

To begin with this RSS file won't specifically be used as a "news feed" but more as meta data or sitemap file.

First let's take a look at a simple example, then we will pull it apart a little.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1" ?>
<rss version="2.0">
<channel>
<title>Ironvine Design Information </title>
<link>http://www.ironvine.com</link>
<description>You could add descriptive content about the web site in general here.</description>
<language>en-us</language>
<item>
<title>Ironvine Design - Homepage</title>
<link>http://www.ironvine.com/index.html</link>
<description>Welcome to Ironvine Design. We provide web site design services, search engine optimization and programming support.</description>
</item>

<item>
<title>Ironvine Design - Sitemap</title>
<link>http://www.ironvine.com/sitemap.html</link>
<description>Add a description of your sitemap page, or the sections it contains. </description>
</item>

</channel>
</rss>

The first two lines are the standard XML/RSS opening tags. There shouldn't be anything that needs changed here.

The next 4 lines describe the channel or in other words, the file overview.
- I would suggest using the same title as your web site, or that this is an "Information" file as shown above.
- Use a link to the root of your website.
- Describe your website cleanly. In other words, don't just cut and paste a list of keywords. Make it relevant to what you web site really is.

Following the channel tags you will see a couple <item> example groups.

This is where you would add an <item> group for each page of your web site. (For larger sites it may be helpful to create multiple RSS files for each section and place them on the section overview page, assuming you have a decent structure in place.)
- Use the same procedures as you did for the channel tags for each of the item group tags.
- Describe your pages. Don't always cut and paste content. Write what your page is about in a descriptive way and you just created yourself more relevant content! Again, don't just cut and paste a list of keywords.

The last two lines are the closing tags. Don't forget them!

Save this file as "ironvine-information.rss"

So, now that we have the meta/RSS file created, how do we add it? Easy!

In the <head> section of your homepage just add the following line:

<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="Ironvine Design Information and Sitemap" href="http://www.ironvine.com/rss/ironvine-information.rss" />

Remember to change the filename to match where you place it on your website.

That's all there is to it. I will do some more information and let you know the results of further testing!