Developer Shed Weekly SEO News for 2008-08-29

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August 29, 2008 It's time once again for the SEO Chat newsletter. Small is beautiful, as you'll find out when you read the article we're highlighting for you this week from eWeek. IBM may have done it again, with some fancy tricks with carbon nanotubes that will make engineers rethink the way they design computer chips. What's particularly cool is that this advance could lead to some practical applications for everyone's favorite laboratory hopeful. Remember how long the laser waited as a lab toy before we got laser surgery and CD players? We published some excellent articles for you this week, all focused on the business of making your site more visible. On Wednesday we showed you how to do some link building outside the box with a few techniques you might not have considered. At the very least, this article should get you brainstorming. On Tuesday we explained why you need more than one site map to make sure your content is visible to everyone who might want to see it. Remember, not all of your visitors are human. Finally, on Monday we went over the whys and hows of video search optimization. Yes, Google sees Flash now, but that doesn't mean it can see your video, so SEO is still very important for this kind of content. And what are we highlighting this week from Tutorialized? Plenty of SEO-related articles to satisfy your hunger for more knowledge, that's what. Learn how to optimize for MSN, use social media to promote your web site, and more! Be sure to check out our other SEO-related tutorials on Tutorialized as well. There are situations in SEO when a really tangled, complicated-looking situation can have an easy answer. They're rare, but they happen, as you'll see when you check out this week's thread. If you go to our SEO Chat forums, you'll discover that the answer isn't quite as simple as we've implied here, so by all means, add your voice to the discussion. Finally, in this week's Spotlight, just for readers of our newsletter, we deal with a delicate situation that sometimes comes up for professional SEOs. How do you explain to your client that his or her content won't attract links? It's worse if the client wants to use quality original content, but your gut tells you his or her approach won't work. What do you do? Scroll down to the Spotlight for some suggestions. Also, we are running a poll in our Dev Shed forums asking developers and SEO professionals if they would be interested in a new site we are considering. You can read more about the site and let us know if you are interested here. You will notice below that we have highlighted the Your Move Contest, brought to you by Moblin .org. Winners will be eligible to win free Mid Devices, $1000 USD, and two tickets to any open source event in the world. You can find more info about this great contest here! As always, thanks for reading. Until next time, SEO Chat Staff

ARTICLES Link Building Outside the Box You Need More Than One Site Map The Whys and Hows of Video Search Optimization SEO on Tutorialized SEO Thread of The Week SEO Chat News Spotlight TOOLS Get Our Content on Your Site with DevText! New Articles, Right To Your E-mail Developer Search IBM eKits Make Development eAsy! Take advantage of free e-kits from developerWorks. E-kits give you a collection of tutorials, articles, webcasts, podcasts, and demos about a particular product, task, or role. This one-stop shop of resources empowers you to maximize your enterprise investment. Learn more. IBM Rational Project and Portfolio Management certification training e-kit Get free PMI training in the IBM Rational Project and Portfolio Management certification training e-kit. As a member of the Project Management Institute's (PMI's) corporate council, IBM has more than 12,000 PMI-certified project managers and has been honored for its educational programs. Now, you can learn more about the difference that IBM's project management curriculum makes with six free courses based on IBM's best-practices processes and tools. Learn more.

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It's edgy! It's irreverent! It's all about technology! It's News You Can't Use, and you won't want to miss it! View this week's edition to learn the answers to these burning questions: Is Google spying on cows now? How much can we milk this for the sake of science? Sure, Apple's stock is looking very healthy these days, but Steve Jobs? Not so much. Are all those fanboys in denial? Speaking of stocks, it is rumored that a certain search engine company's shares are actually subject to the power of gravity after all. Are employee perks in peril? And of course, you won't want to miss the incisive, hard-hitting commentary of our favorite attorney, Juan Valdezberg! Watch the video!

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Link Building Outside the Box by Terri Wells 2008-08-27 If you have used traditional link building strategies and find yourself running out of ideas, maybe it is time to do a little brainstorming. To help you get started, this article will clue you in to some underused but powerful ideas for generating buzz and traffic for your web site. Feel free to mix and match or use them as jumping-off points. I owe a lot of the ideas I am about to describe to Kim Roach at Zany Pixel. Roach wrote an amazing article on unusual link building strategies. I will not have room to examine them all here, so I urge you to pay a visit to the site. You may come away with just the idea you need to really kick-start your traffic. My first idea, however, comes from Hamlet Batista. He advocates giving something away. Giving goodies away is a time-honored tradition when it comes to marketing, from the little prizes in cereal boxes to the swag-filled days before the first dot-com bust. But how is giving something away going to get you links? It depends on how you do it. Read Link Building Outside the Box

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You Need More Than One Site Map by Justin Pinkus 2008-08-26 Something as basic as your web site's site map could have more of an effect on the success of your web site than you originally may have thought. So why is it that site maps are often taken lightly or overlooked altogether? Most graphic designers, webmasters and even Internet marketers do not grasp the many uses and purposes for a site map. And the ones who do might only incorporate one version when there is a strong value to having multiple types for different "audiences." In this article I will be reviewing the benefits of incorporating a site map, its prime positioning and the different types that should be considered for optimal success. So What Exactly is a Site Map? The simple definition of a site map is a page that contains an organized listing of links to all pages within the web site. You will usually find links to these pages somewhere on the home page of a web site, and on more proactive sites, every page. Often site maps are found at the top right or bottom navigation links, away from the main components and natural site navigation, but still positioned in areas of high visitor focus, based on eye-tracking tests that have been performed by knowledgeable Internet marketers. Read You Need More Than One Site Map

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The Whys and Hows of Video Search Optimization by Terri Wells 2008-08-25 More people are viewing video online all the time. Bill Gates is even predicting that online video will replace TV. How important is this trend for you? And how do you get your video in front of viewers? Keep reading to find out more. The trend began in 2006, with maybe 10 percent of web surfers saying they watched video online. Then Techcrunch reported a survey from Motorola that revealed 45 percent of European broadband users watch at least some TV online. Those numbers date to May 2007; today they are quite a bit higher. In fact, let us switch continents and move forward in time. An article from the BBC in January reported n American online video viewing habits. It noted that the writer strike fueled interest in online video viewing, with some sites doubling their audience. About 53 percent of men and 43 percent of women reported viewing videos over the Internet, according the Pew Internet project. Read The Whys and Hows of Video Search Optimization

Check out the amazing tutorials from IBM developerWorks and see what all the buzz is about! WebSphere Service Registry and Repository Manage, govern, and share services across your organization by using WebSphere Service Registry and Repository. Follow the hands-on exercises to learn how to navigate the Web interface to publish, find, reuse, and update services. Building JavaScript applications with JSEclipse Using JSEclipse, JavaScript programmers now have their own Eclipse plug-in that provides many important features to aid in the development of JavaScript applications. JSEclipse gives JavaScript developers the same ease of use that Eclipse has been providing in the Java language and others for years. Learn to use this tool, while creating a colony of evolving "creatures" on your page. Learn how to install and use the Rational Asset Manager Eclipse client In this tutorial, you can learn how to install and configure the IBM Rational Asset Manager Eclipse client, explore the different views in the Asset Management perspective, learn various search techniques, work with existing assets, and submit a new asset. Improve your build process with IBM Rational Build Forge, Part 1: Create a continuous build and integration environment Learn how to implement a build management system that uses and extends your existing automation technologies. This tutorial shows, step-by-step, how to install and configure IBM Rational Build Forge to manage builds for Jakarta Tomcat from source code. Build Web services with transport-level security using Rational Application Developer V7, Part 1: Build Web services and Web services clients Build secure Web services with transport-level security using IBM Rational Application Developer V7 and IBM WebSphere Application Server V6.1. Follow this three-part series for step-by-step instructions about how to develop Web services and clients, configure HTTP basic authentication, and configure HTTP over SSL (HTTPS). This first part of the series walks you through building a Web service for a simple calculator application. You generate and test two different types of Web services clients: a Java Platform, Enterprise Edition (Java EE) client and a stand-alone Java client. You also handle user-defined exceptions in Web services. Test terminal-based applications with Rational Functional Tester Regression testing -- in which code is thoroughly tested to ensure that changes have not produced unexpected results -- is an important part of any development process. But many testing environments neglect the terminal-based applications that still form the backbone of many industries. In this tutorial, you'll learn how the Rational Functional Tester Extension for Terminal-Based Applications works with other Rational Functional Tester to help test terminal-based applications quickly and easily. Improve your build process with IBM Rational Build Forge, Part 2: Automate builds for a real-world Tomcat project Learn how Rational Build Forge can extend a simple compile and package build process by adding customization and deployment capability. Go from a manual method to automating: checking for code changes; getting the latest source; compiling and packaging; customizing; copying to and restarting a deployment server; and sending e-mail notification that a new version is available. NEW! Application development for the OLPC laptop The XO laptop (of the One-Laptop-Per-Child initiative) is an inexpensive laptop project intended to help educate children around the world. The XO laptop includes many innovations, such as a novel, inexpensive, and durable hardware design and the use of GNU/Linux as the underlying operating system. The XO also includes an application environment written in Python with a human interface called Sugar, accessible to everyone (including kids). Explore the Sugar APIs and learn how to develop and debug a graphical activity in Sugar using Python.

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Tutorialized is dedicated to programming, designing, and many other tech related tutorials. Submit Your Tutorial Today! MSN Optimization The effective seo campaign needs to optimize your website for all popular search engines. Read the tutorial. Confessions of an Underground Link Building Ninja Advanced Link Building Strategies to increase your rankings. Read the tutorial. Learn SEO Techniques from Beginners To Professionals Learn seo techniques to get the results that you desire. Read the tutorial. Social Media Optimization Basics - Part 1 The basics of using social media sites in website promotion. Read the tutorial. Improve Search Engine Optimization What to do and what not do for proper search engine optimization. Read the tutorial. Social Media Optimization Basics - Part 2 Harvest the power of social media for website promotion. Read the tutorial.

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Using a 301 redirect on your URLs is important for canonical issues. It also makes sense for somewhat more tangled issues, as you'll learn by reading this week's thread. Stop by the thread and share your experiences! 301 or not? Hilary Hi I have just discovered not 2 but 3 urls which all land on the exact same page. (which means 100s of duplicate pages across the site) Each of the 3 URLs is completely different so I know we have a severe duplicate content issue. I have asked our developer why all these urls were set up. The reason we have 3 urls is that two of the urls were requested as part of an older SEO project a few years ago on the old site. And the 3rd was introduced as part of the new site redesign (all before my time!) I just want to check that the way to go is to put a 301 redirect on the 2 old urls to the new url - the one we want indexed. Do I also need to put a Meta no index on the two older urls or will a 301 suffice? Thank you seomonkeymanocp Use a 301 redirect to ensure that all the links that could have gone to the old web pages get passed over to the new home page. webslinger I recently conducted an experiment with this... I had a site set up about SEO, I optimized it and also did some off page optimization using a set of 5 keywords. I then put up a brand new site and put a 301 redirect in the htaccess file from the old site to the new site. The interesting thing is not so much that the PR seems to have been passed but moreso the fact the new site started ranking for the keywords used in off page for the original site. After about 6 months I removed the 301 redirect and the original site was returned to its former glory on Google's next update. I think we can safely assume 301 redirects work just fine with Google. Posts from this thread may have been abridged or removed. Forum members are responsible for the content of these posts. Read the full thread.

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Link Building: Managing Expectations Eric Ward wrote an interesting article for Search Engine Land about something near and dear to many SEO's hearts: link building. However you view it, it's a necessity to help a site rank high on the search engine results pages. After you've done link building long enough, you develop an awareness of which approaches will work, and which ones will fall flat. This is a good thing, but it can put you in a difficult position with certain clients. Take, for example, the client who has fantastic content, aimed at a particular audience, and wants to reach that audience but there is no way that the sites that seem most appropriate for this are going to link to their content. Ward gave an excellent fictional example. Say that Trojan wanted to target college students, and wrote an excellent article: College Student's Guide to Responsible Sex. How many university-based health clinic web sites do you think will link to it? Odds are, not many. Just because Trojan thinks they should, doesn't mean they will. The example, though fictional, was not chosen randomly; Ward gave the impression that this kind of issue comes up more often when the client wants to target .edu sites. So what do you do when faced with a client like this? First, praise their content; that may help soften the blow. Then, Ward suggests you explain that building links is a three-step process: find the potential link targets; find the people at these sites who make the actual decisions as to outgoing links; and then contact these decision makers, introduce your content, and gently ask for a link. Emphasize that you do NOT control that last step; it's up to the site to decide whether or not to link. Then you have to explain that the first two steps are the hardest, and you will be spending the time regardless of the results you may find 10 or 100 sites to link to, and out of this number it is impossible to predict how many will link. It is even entirely possible that none of your candidate sites will choose to link to your client's content. Since you will be spending the time, you will be charging based on your time (say $75 an hour or whatever your fee is), not your result. Does your client really want to spend that money and possibly have you come up empty? This isn't the only approach you could take to tricky link building. Though Ward doesn't mention this possibility, perhaps you could consider redirecting your client to look for links from sites that WILL link to that particular content. With the example given, the university health clinic might not link, but how about Planned Parenthood clinics that are in the same neighborhood as universities? Or if your client is keen to target a particular demographic or kind of web site, and you're familiar enough with the type content they prefer, you might be able to convince them to revise their content (or create new content) that is more likely to earn links. Good luck!

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