Search with Design

This question has resurfaced in the SEO-world, and in my world recently, and so I’d like to weigh-in. Here’s the latest situation presented to me:

My friend sent an email to 100,000 subscribers, of which 1,000 of them were GMail addresses, advertising “college widgets”. The link back to his site contained the anchor text “college widgets”. He went from ranking #10 in a Google search for [college widgets] to #1 in just a few days, then later he dropped back down to #4. I looked at my GMail account and the email page has a PageRank of the 7!

The first thing to understand is that the way the PageRank in your toolbar works, is that when it doesn’t find any data for your current page, it extrapolates an approximate value from the previous page you visited as well as the domain. Because the Google domain is a PR10, your toolbar extrapolates a PR7 for your mailbox.

So where did the resultant change in rankings come from?

Well, the page in question has a title tag whose first two words are “College Widgets”. The page also has 59,000 links pointing at it (according to Yahoo!) most of which are from the same domain, with the anchor text “college widgets”.

In a sample of 100,000 emails, I have to think that at least 1-3% would have the Google Toolbar installed. Add in the GMail subscriber base, and Google has 3-4 thousand pieces of user data to use about the page in question. I would estimate that amount of user data spread over just a couple days would be more than enough for Google to trigger a deeper crawl of the page, and potentially index or count more of the backlinks.

As RC mentioned, you can’t triangulate with only 2 points. Google uses user-data, it’s time to face facts and build your websites for users too.

As a designer, I loved the invention of Flash some many internet moons ago. Motion, bad site intros, and tweening gave way to easing, elasticity, gravity, internet games, full flash sites and flexible ads. Now, with actionscript, you can build a slick slider menu to complete apps. Flash video reinvented itself and made it the industry standard for sites like YouTube. For designers, information architects, and those in interactive media, Flash is your Desktop Zeus.

But for the search bots, Flash just looks like one large grey box. Like an image. Like nothing extraordinary. Just something taking up space in the code and more space on the page. It offers little in the way of information on it’s value. The H1 tag says, “Hey, I’m more important that my little brother H2, or the paragraph kids.” Flash says practically nothing. “I’m this wide and this tall and thanks for passing in those variables and please run me at the highest quality. Thanks.”

So Search with Design could really be called GoogleandFlash.com

It could really be about how the human eye and the robot see.
About which perception holds the most value.
Now, and in the future.

So I’m completely addicted to Yahoo! Pipes, the new service which allows you to create mashups of RSS feeds, as well as maps, user inputs, etc. There are even a few logical functions available to help you organize the data.

My first few forays into the pipes-world were somewhat disappointing due mostly to the fact that I was trying to do things with the interface that are a little bit out of it’s league.

My first project was an attempt to take Shoemoney’s website market RSS feed, parse out the URLs of sites for sale, and reconstruct them with Pagerank and Pages Indexed values to provide more stats on sites for sale. This failed because I couldn’t find a way to return PageRank values into my pipes.

So, for my first couple rounds, I have a couple of requests for future Pipes iterations: more logical operators and more ways to get information.

So, for my most recent project, I decided to tackle a more simple project, but one that requires lots of leg (finger) -work when you do it by hand: finding link partners for SEO.

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I’m have always loved Snagit made by Techsmith, however my current computer didn’t have a working license of the software. So I was forced to find a decent second place application.

Enter FastStone - makers of ScreenCapture. I love it. Lightweight. Has all the pre-built functions of crop, resize, rotate, adds captions and callouts, and best of all, is free. Excellent app.

The only thing I couldn’t do was take a screencap of the application’s interface.
So I guess you will just have to download it.

I wanted to build a navigation piece in flash 8 using both icons and text. I decided to use Flash for several reasons. The navigation could slide left and right, meaning I could have a list of nav options that was wider than the screen, and I could creating interaction that was more engaging than just the up, hover, and current state of most buttons.

However, I wasn’t willing to lose the crisp, clean text. And Flash was presenting my navigation like this:

All I needed to do was correct the y value for the text object to a rounded number, not one with a decimal.

And just like that, viola! Perfectly crisp flash text. No more blurry text.

I was reading a thread about meta tags on the DigitalPoint forums today.

.NET magazine wrote an article on SEO recently and stated that meta tags no longer matter for search engine optimization. Were they correct to do so?

The SEO industry is in state where most of the mechanical aspects of optimization can be handled by a competent web designer who stays on top of the basics (.htaccess, robots.txt, static URLs), which is why we see so many design firms now touting that they can perform SEO while designing a site.

So that takes care of the ’search engine’ part of SEO. But what about optimization?

Search engines (specifically Google) still use meta tags, but not to rank your site. At least not directly.

Let’s start with three statements:

Fact 1: Google has access to your meta- title and description tags.

Fact 2: Google will display your title and description tags in search results, unless the engine feels that writing its own description from your text, or using your DMOZ entry is more relevant (algorithmically determined, happens less than 20% of the time in my experience).

Fact 3: Google will rearrange its search results by click through rate and other (measurable) factors to provide he most relevant results to users.

You may wish to debate fact #3, but for now let’s assume it’s true in this world.

The acceptance of these three facts means that you need to write a title and description that will impress visitors and increase your click through rate. A better visitor experience will push your site higher in the rankings.

So how do you write a good title and description? Well, that means it’s time to take a page from the PPC-world…