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OpenID Gaining Critical Mass, Yahoo Announces Support

Seo Men — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 11:00:02 +0000

OpenID is a single sign-in infrastructure that potentially alleviates the need to create new passwords and user names for every new site one joins or visits. There’s been lots of discussion about OpenID and who’s in, who’s almost in, and so on. Today, Yahoo formally joined (and fully legitimized) the effort. Microsoft Passport was originally conceived to be a similar system but failed to gain support and broad adoption. While it’s a great convenience for end users and intended to “open up” the process of signing in to sites, the strange paradox of OpenID is that it potentially reinforces a relationship between a user and his/her open ID “home.” That is, the master login that a person uses: AOL screenname, WordPress login, or, now, Yahoo login.

As Yahoo explains: When you are on a web site that supports OpenID login, simply look for a Yahoo! login button. Or if you see a text box with an OpenID icon, simply type in “yahoo.com”. You will be sent to Yahoo! to verify your Yahoo! ID and password, and then you will be able to continue on.

OpenID Logo

OpenID is thematically related to another, broader issue: data portability. The latter is very much like the idea of a unified login/password system except that it applies to data much more broadly. In theory, “data portability” would allow interoperability among various participating sites. However, the issues surrounding data portability are much more complex than OpenID. At the heart of the debate over data portability are questions of who “owns” or controls data and user privacy.

Yahoo’s 248 million registered users globally now become part of the system. Google, LinkedIn, and Facebook have all been associated with discussions to support OpenID, though have not formally announced that support. Now, with Yahoo’s participation secured, it should just be a matter of time before other big names join (AOL and Plaxo are also currently on the list of supporting companies.)

Walking the Line between SEO and Design

Seo Men — Fri, 26 Oct 2007 10:24:46 +0000

Like the Hatfields and McCoys, agency creative and SEO teams remain locked in a continuous feud divided by a line in the Google sandbox. Both sides stand behind their respective crafts, each believing their work vital to online success.One must drive traffic. The other must communicate brand experience. Both are essential, yet employ very different techniques and ideas. How can design and SEO live together in harmony?

The Design Side

Designers create Web sites with the audience in mind. Too often they believe a user’s experience dictates success. A simple “build it and they will come” mindset pervades their approach to site design. That’s not all bad.

At a very basic level, creative teams long to tell a story. Through design and copy, the team takes a brand and crafts a world for it. They instill a Web site with a look and theme; a feel and flavor. Often, the most effective way to convey a message is through more expressive technologies like Flash, AJAX, and Silverlight. Even video integration has become more prevalent with increased broadband penetration.

Designers want to make use of these technologies because they engage the user. Technological integration helps tell the brand story and bring design to life. If Flash or Silverlight will make the overall site experience more enticing and interactive, then designers should implement them accordingly.

The SEO Side

If a designer tells a story, then the search engineer provides directions to the lecture hall where it’s told. The SEO side focuses heavily on traffic and visibility, believing a Web site must be seen to be heard.

Now here’s a surprise. Remember those cool technologies the creative team wants to use? Well, SEO wants to use them too. They’re just more cautious.

While an SEO-friendly Web site doesn’t need to be straight HTML, SEO teams must take into consideration search engine spiders. Even if a site uses AJAX, key content must be accessible to spiders for indexing.

This is where the two teams lock horns. When creative says Flash, SEO counters with CSS. When creative wants rollover navigation, SEO wants text-based. So what’s more important: the experience or the traffic? Which side is right?

The Compromise

It can’t all be about SEO. If you drive traffic to a site and user experience is sub-par, you disappoint not only the user but the client as well. Conversely, what good is an eye-catching Web site if no one can see it? The Internet is big enough for both experiential design and search optimization.

While not always easy, the designer and search engineer can find ways to achieve both creative and search interest without sacrificing the integrity of either.

The key to such compromises is education. Creative must understand how SEO works; SEO must comprehend the importance of certain design elements to branding and messaging. Both must also consider how visitors will reach the site. Will they find it solely through search? Or will a media blitz help drive traffic to the site? All these elements must be considered when negotiating design and optimization issues.

The Client Comes First

Regardless of department affiliation, designers and SEOs must place client interests before their own. Clients want both brand identity and search visibility. The creative and SEO teams need to put aside their blood feud in order to meet such expectations.

Sometimes you might have to forgo a video splash page, or you may need to optimize a Flash microsite. Even if you disagree with the other department’s tactics, you still need them to achieve project objectives. The client matters, not your personal interests.

Semantic Web and SEO

Seo Men — Fri, 17 Aug 2007 10:23:34 +0000

What is The Semantic Web?

The Semantic Web is a (currently theoretical) future state of the World Wide Web where information is machine-processable, rather than just machine-renderable for human viewing. Software will then be able to better find, organise and merge the data as it will have more “understanding” of the meaning of the data.

For example, if I go to a web page about a particular conference, my calendar software would be able to interpret the web page to extract the date, time and location of the conference. This may then allow it to show me available flights for the conference or transfer the data directly to my car’s GPS system. This is a simple example, but demonstrates the power The Semantic Web could provide.

The are many different technologies which have been proposed to describe this “meaning” to computers including: Resource Description Framework (RDF), RDF Schema (RDFS), Web Ontology Language (OWL (sic)), XML and many more. The discussion of these is beyond the scope of this article.

How could The Semantic Web effect search?

The Semantic Web will allow search engines to be much more intelligent and give answers to more general queries. For example, rather then searching for “Florida Holidays”, I may be able to search for “Sunny holiday destinations that are fun for kids in America”. Most humans would be able to give Florida as a possible answer to this query. However, for a computer to come to the same conclusion it must “understand” information much better than it currently can. A search engine needs to know that Florida is a sunny place, that is it good for kids and that it is in America. Thus, significant amounts of AI technology will also need to be developed.

How will this change SEO?

It is hard to say how The Semantic Web will change SEO, as the technology has not really developed into a useable state yet. However, if webmasters are required to label the meanings of the items on their web pages then their may be large amounts of spam annotations.

No matter how The Semantic Web changes the WWW, it likely that the fundamentals of SEO will still remain relevant for a long time. They may even become more important, because as search engines understand more about your content and the links to your content they will be better equip to judge the quality of those links.

Michael Hawthornthwaite works at Acid Computer Services

How to rank on Yahoo!

Seo Men — Fri, 14 Jul 2006 14:07:03 +0000

Recently I have been concentrating on Yahoo and the elements on a page that they look at when ranking, I looked close at their own guidelines and noticed a few very important key points. Think of this document as a break down of their guide lines. As the following text points out, Yahoo are focusing heavily on page criteria.

Quoted from Yahoo: Users are more likely to click a link if the title matches their search. Choose terms for the title that match the concept of your document.

Sound advice to make the title tag descriptive of the pages contents as this is what people will see in the search results and click on.

Quoted from Yahoo: Use a “description” meta-tag and write your description accurately and carefully. After the title, the description is the most important draw for users. Make sure the document title and description attract the interest of the user but also fit the content on your site.

This is the clearest indication that Yahoo read and give weight to the meta description tag, make sure that the tag is a desriptive sentence with all of the pages keywords present. I would aim at no more than 3 lines.

Quoted from Yahoo: Use a “keyword” meta-tag to list key words for the document. Use a distinct list of keywords that relate to the specific page on your site instead of using one broad set of keywords for every page.

Clearly Yahoo hold weight to the Meta keyword tag, what once was deemed to be a spammy aspect of ranking tactics is now an ok method of getting your sites message across – by no means stuff it full of keywords and repeat them to the extreme, just make sure that the pages keywords are mentioned twice or so in the tag.

Quoted from Yahoo: Keep relevant text and links in HTML. Placing them in graphics or image maps means search engines can’t always search for the text, and the crawler can’t follow links to your site’s other pages. An HTML site map, with a link from your welcome page, can help make sure all your pages are crawled.

Basic sound seo advice, keep links and text plain HTML that way the spiders can read and follow the links.

Quoted from Yahoo: Use ALT text for graphics. It’s good page design to accommodate text browsers or visually impaired visitors, and it helps improve the text content of your page for search purposes.

From this it is clear that Yahoo, read and asign weight to the alt text. Make sure that the text describes the image, but be sure to include a keyword to increase your keyword density.

Quoted from Yahoo: Correspond with webmasters and other content providers and build rich linkages between related pages. Note: “Link farms” create links between unrelated pages for no reason except to increase page link counts. Using link farms violates Yahoo!’s Site Guidelines and will not improve your page ranking.