Usability Tools

Over the years I’ve seen quite a few Requests for Proposal from companies seeking to buy SEO services. If your RFP is not written well, it hinders the SEO firm’s ability to understand and define your needs and to scope and price your project. This in turn leads to a disconnect in expectations for both parties. A lousy RFP can discourage a busy SEO firm from even responding—a very unfortunate outcome, since it takes the best firms out of the running.

Many companies intuitively “know” what they want but are challenged structurally to “ask” for it in a way that is clear, succinct, informative, and constructive. If written properly, an RFP will facilitate the sales process and ensure that everyone involved on both sides gets to a shared understanding of what the purpose, requirements, scope, and structure of the intended engagement are. By following a few, key steps in the beginning of the RFP process, you will be able to rest easy, knowing that you are going to get what your company wants in the way that is best for you.

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A few weeks ago, Udi Manber, Google’s vice president of engineering, announced the advent of Google Knol, a program meant to challenge Wikipedia, the popular user-generated encyclopedia. The idea, like Wikipedia, is to let anyone create a page of information on a specific topic, and all of those pages will be organized like an online encyclopedia. Google has not announced when Knol will launch.

Jeff Muendel, Search Analyst for Netconcepts, writes about how this upcoming feature from search giant, Google, may affect eCommerce.

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“In this era of Web 2.0, it seems that blogs, mash-ups, RSS feeds, and wikis have been the buzzwords occupying most of the limelight. But personally, tagging is the Web 2.0 technology that excites me the most, because of its versatility and wide applicability,” writes Stephan Spencer, President and Founder of Netconcepts, in this article written for Search Engine Land. Find out how you can utilize effective tagging for your website, social bookmarks, or other Web 2.0 functionality to get the most out of tagging and SEO.

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Google Blogoscoped reports that Yahoo’s Image Search now particularly likes Flickr content, so this may be incentive for webmasters to use Flickr “as a kind of Yahoo search engine optimization”. My frequent readers know that I’ve been advocating using Flickr for image search optimization for some time now, and I’ve been speaking on this subject at Search Engine Strategies conferences as well.

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Use this handy tool to check title tags across a bunch of URLs.

Enter some web site URLs (for example “http://www.netconcepts.com”):

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The WordPress plugin “Mini Manager”, written by Charlie Evans, Sr. Developer at Netconcepts, was designed for a client who wanted to manage mini blocks of HTML, then include them in posts or pages simply by using their reference name in curly braces, like so: {Reference_Name}

Examples of Use:

• Isolate tricky JavaScript or Flash code. Instead of having lines of complicated code in the content field of posts - create a miniblock of code and reference it.
• Bypass complications caused by advanced HTML within the WordPress WYSIWYG interface
• Insert an image or logo without having to create individual HTML references

It is completely free and has been released as “open source” under the GPL license. So enjoy!

Features include:

• “Manage MiniManager Blocks” form page
• Add new blocks of text
• Edit existing blocks of text
• Manage large blocks of code from one single admin
• And best of all, it’s FREE!

Download the plugin!

Installation instructions

1. Upload mini-manager.php to your wp-content/plugins directory.
2. Activate the plugin.

Implementation Instructions:

1. Once installed, Click on the “Manage” tab
2. Click on “MiniManager Blocks” tab
3. Select “Create New Block” and click “Continue”
4. Type in a “Reference_Name” and respective block of code
   Note: the “Reference_Name” is what will be referenced in the post content field to call the block of code

5. Type the “Reference_Name” within curly braces { } in the content where you wish the block of code to appear.
   For Example:
   When you have everything configured, insert “{Reference_Name}” within a post or page where ever you want the specified code block to appear.

To manage an existing block of code:

1. From the MiniManager admin page, select the “Reference_Name” you wish to edit from the drop down menu
2. Click “Continue”
3. Make the desired edits to the code block
4. Click the “Continue” button, your block will be saved and ready to use

Feedback?

Got a bug to report? Or an enhancement to recommend? Or perhaps even some code to submit for inclusion in the next release? Great! Share your feedback by commenting to this post.

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Have you accessed the new Google analytics package yet? Chris Smith gives us an inside look at usability in this article from the Natural Search Blog. Chris calls the new analytics “upgrade” as being “All glitz with little beneficial substance.” Read more about the updated Google Analytics from an SEO expert point-of-view.

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Note: SEO Title Tag 2.1.3 adds compatibility with WordPress 2.5!

Title tags are arguably the most important of the on-page factors for search engine optimization (”SEO”). It blows my mind how post titles are also used as title tags by WordPress, considering that post titles should be catchy, pithy, and short-and-sweet; whereas title tags should incorporate synonyms and alternate phrases to capture additional search visibility.

Now, thankfully, there is a solution, allowing you to decouple post titles from title tags. Introducing… the SEO Title Tag 2.1.3 WordPress plugin.

SEO Title Tag makes is dead-easy to optimize the title tags across your WordPress-powered blog or website. Not just your posts, not just your home page, but any and every title tag on your site! If this plugin, along with a few hours of keyword research and copywriting of optimized titles, doesn’t make a significant impact on your search traffic, you’re doing something wrong!

SEO Title Tag is authored by SEO specialist web agency Netconcepts. Version 1.0 was by Netconcepts’ president Stephan Spencer. Version 2.0 was a collaborative effort — Stephan did the concept development and Netconcepts’ code jockeys Oliver Kastler, Mike Harding and Elton Fry did all the heavy lifting. It is completely free and has been released as “open source” under the GPL license. So enjoy!

Features include:

• Allows you to override a page’s or a post’s title tag with a custom one.
• New for v2.0 A Title Tag input box in the Edit Post and Write Post forms. (Previously in version 1.0 you had to use the Custom Field box.)
• New for v2.0 Mass editing of title tags for all posts, static pages, category pages, tag pages, tag conjunction pages, archive by month pages, — indeed, any URL — all in one go.
• Define a custom title tag for your home page (or, more accurately, your Posts page, if you have chosen a static Front Page set under Options -> Reading), through the Options -> SEO Title Tag page in the WordPress admin.
• New for v2.0 Define the title tag of 404 error pages, also through Options -> SEO Title Tag.
• New for v2.0 Handles internal search result pages too.
• For users of the UltimateTagWarrior plugin (which should be everybody!), incorporates the tag name into the title tag on “tag pages” (sorry for the confusing use of “tag” in two contexts here — as in tagging and HTML title tags).
• New for v2.0 (When used with Ultimate Tag Warrior) Customize the title tags on tag pages, and on tag conjunction pages too (e.g. http://www.netconcepts.com/tag/seo+articles). The latter is done through Manage -> Title Tags -> URLs; see this screenshot for an example.
• New for v2.0 Title tags of category pages can optionally be set to the category description. If you use a Meta Tag plugin like Add Meta Tags, then you should not use this feature and instead let the Meta Tag plugin use the category description for the meta description on category pages.
• If you choose to keep the blog name in your title tags (not recommended!), the order of the blog name and the title are automatically reversed, giving more keyword prominence to the title instead of the blog name. Note there is also an option to replace your blog name with a shorter blog nickname.

And best of all, the plugin is FREE!

Suitably convinced? Then Download the plugin!

NEW: Rate this plugin at WordPress.org

Screenshots

Installation instructions

1. (If upgrading from a prior version of SEO Title Tag, be sure to deactivate the old version beforehand.)
2. Upload the seo-title-tag directory and the files within it to your wp-content/plugins directory.
3. Activate the plugin.
4. Under Presentation -> Theme Editor in the WordPress admin, select “Header” from the list and replace:

   <title><?php bloginfo('name'); wp_title(); ?></title>

   (or whatever you have in your <title> container with:

   <title><?php if (function_exists('seo_title_tag')) { seo_title_tag(); } else { bloginfo('name'); wp_title();} ?></title>

5. Configure the settings under Options -> SEO Title Tag. You’ll want specify a title tag for your home page which will override your blog name as the home page’s title tag, specify a title tag for 404 error pages, and enable the UltimateTagWarrior support if using that plugin. You can also configure here whether you want all the rest of your site’s title tags to have your blog name, or a shortened version of your blog name, or neither, appended to the end. IMPORTANT: You must save the settings, even if you haven’t changed them from their defaults, in order to ensure that the title tags for Posts and for Pages works properly.
6. For those of you with a static Front Page chosen under Options -> Reading, the “home page” described in the point above is actually the Posts page, and as such, the SEO Title Tag options page will actually will say “Posts Page” instead of “Home Page” — because it detects that you have selected a static Front Page. In such a scenario, in order to also customize the Front Page’s title tag, specify a Title Tag on that page’s Edit Page form, or within Manage -> Title Tags -> Pages.
7. Define custom title tags for your existing posts, static pages, category pages, tag pages and tag conjunction pages (if using UltimateTagWarrior) in the admin under Manage -> Title Tags.
8. When writing a new post/page, define a title tag by typing something into the “Title Tag (optional)” field. If you’re happy to use the post title as the title tag, then you can leave it blank.
9. Note: If upgrading to WordPress 2.3 from a prior version where you used the SEO-Title-Tag plugin with Ultimate Tag Warrior (UTW) in order to migrate your old tag page titles you need to first import your UTW tags into the new native tagging structure. You can do this in your WordPress admin by clicking on Manage > Import > Ultimate Tag Warrior. Once you have these imported just deactivate and reactivate SEO-Title-Tags and your old title tags will be able to be used.

To learn more about search engine optimizing your WordPress blog, you’ll probably want to read Stephan Spencer’s 10 tip series on Blog SEO.

To-do

• support mass editing of meta descriptions?
• import titles by uploading a file in CSV format
• possibly rename custom option fields and table name
• move the UTW tags to an extra table (like categories)
• autocheck if plugin upgrade is available (like Podpress does)
• add some more text to the titles of tag pages globally. They are using the same divider as used for posts, and really there should be an option to add something like “Tag | Posts Related to Tag | Blog Name”
• create all needed values on activation so that you no longer have to save the settings in the SEO Title Tag Options before the plugin will work properly

Feedback?

Got a bug to report? Or an enhancement to recommend? Or perhaps even some code to submit for inclusion in the next release? Great! Share your feedback with the author, Stephan Spencer, either below or on his blog at this post.

UPDATE: 2.0beta2 has some important bug fixes, including the issue where Options weren’t updating and the Manage > subtab wasn’t displaying.

UPDATE: 2.0beta3 has more important bug fixes, including the issue where MySQL tables were sometimes not being created, and PHP tags weren’t all consistently starting with <?php but instead the <? shorthand which doesn’t work on some server configurations.

UPDATE: 2.0beta5 has more fixes for MySQL issues some folks were having. Also fixed a IIS server incompatibility issue.

UPDATE: 2.0beta6 fixes a problem where some folks were seeing a “No Posts Found” message under Manage -> Title Tags -> Posts even though the blog has posts. And it fixes a problem for users of WordPress version 2.0.5 and earlier, where titles on category pages weren’t showing up due to an undefined function attribute_escape (a new function introduced in WordPress 2.0.6).

UPDATE: 2.0beta7 fixes a problem with the page number sometimes appearing on static pages and a problem with a MySQL error on the Manage > Title Tags > Posts page.

UPDATE: 2.0RC1 fixes categories showing a warning if there are no category title tags set; Manage Posts filtering out everything thats not a post (images, pages). Also added and tested fix for menu links (”edit.php”).

UPDATE: 2.0RC2 fixes a problem with backslashes appearing before apostrophes.

UPDATE: 2.1.0 adds WordPress 2.3 compatibility.

UPDATE: 2.1.1 fixes bug where old title tags for UTW tag pages weren’t being imported. Also fixes WordPress 2.3 bug of not displaying page titles for tag intersections and unions correctly.

UPDATE: 2.1.2 fixes display issues with international characters.

UPDATE: 2.1.3 fixes issue with extra slashes being added. Also adds Nonce support for extra security.

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About the Author

This plugin was developed by Netconcepts, a web agency specializing in SEO, ecommerce, and blog marketing. Clients include Montgomery Wards, LL Bean, Skechers, Ralph Lauren, Pottery Barn Kids & Teen, Hello Direct, Home Visions, Bellacor, Charles Keath, Your Kids Direct, Northern Tool, TireRack, The Guild, Sur La Table, Abbey Press, Toolfetch, Cabela’s, Hancock Fabrics, Invitations by Dawn, Innsite, Zappos Shoes & High Heels, Metro Style, Brylane Home, Woman Within, the Discovery Channel Store, and Expedia Australia. Netconcepts was founded in 1995 by Stephan Spencer and is based in Madison, Wisconsin with a production office in Auckland, New Zealand.

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AJAX-driven web applications are becoming increasingly popular on commercial websites. AJAX has an ability to enrich, yet simplify a user’s experience when used properly. AJAX can also provide a highly user-friendly interface that works smoothly, quickly, and often better than traditional programming.

AJAX is short for Asynchronous JavaScript and Extensible Markup Language. Make no mistake about it — JavaScript and XML are not “new” technologies. Both programming models have been around for some time. However, the unique combination of JavaScript and XML is relatively recent, as are the problems AJAX presents for a site’s search engine visibility.

The primary benefit of developing a site with AJAX is the ability to work invisibly in the background of a site. AJAX is used to supply data to the client browser that renders up as a relatively seamless “application” instead of the click-and-wait-to-load functionality associated with more conventional web page constructs.

How seamless is the user experience with AJAX? Check out Google Maps or Google Suggest to see world-class AJAX applications in motion. You can find what you want, when you want it, with relative ease and accuracy when AJAX is in use. What you can’t find is a unique URL or navigational links for search engine spiders to crawl and index, which brings us to our first SEO barrier to overcome — the “J” in AJAX.

JavaScript has been a stumbling block for search engine visibility for quite some time. None of the major search engines show any indication of overcoming these types of scripted data issues anytime soon. Consequently, the single greatest optimization issue with AJAX is the tendency to not generate unique, bookmarkable, linkable and therefore indexable URLs.

The comparative shopping engine Become.com overcomes this barrier by creating and linking together static URLs of search results pages. A quick [site:www.become.com] search in Google reveals how well this AJAX-workaround in indexed.

Meanwhile, sites like Scion.com fail to make the same programmatic leap to provide a similar search experience. Imagine how the carmaker could promote celebrity built custom automobiles in the search engines if only static pages of a punked-out Ashton Kutcher or a blinged-out Usher-mobile were rendered and linked to throughout the site.

While AJAX can be a great way to enhance the user experience, not all visitors will have a great on-site experience when non-JavaScript-enabled browsers are being used. When it comes to site accessibility and SEO, it’s imperative that an AJAX-alternate experience be provided.

Because AJAX relies on JavaScript — as well as Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and XML – it’s relatively easy to provide an alternate experience for non-JavaScript users. The key is to tap into your CSS and XML files to render other versions of the AJAX application. This tactic is as “progressive enhancement.”

Progressive enhancement is a web design strategy that emphasizes accessibility, semantic markup, external style sheet, and scripting technologies. By layering designs in a concatenated progressive enhancement allows all users – and search engine spiders – to access the basic content and functionality of any web page.

When implementing progressive enhancement, a basic markup document is created, geared toward the lowest common denominator of browser software functionality. The web designer then adds functionality or enhancements to the presentation and behavior of the page using CSS, JavaScript or other combinations of Flash or Java applets. In tandem with user-agent detection, progressive enhancement will automatically render both user- and search engine-friendly pages.

You can observe progressive enhancement in motion by visiting Amazon’s Create Your Own Ring page. Simply turn off your JavaScript capabilities to see how the program maintains its AJAX-like functionality for all users. Also note that the initial load of the AJAX application contains the optimized elements such as title attributes, header tags and meta description, as well as a crawlable static URL. All of this is visible in Google cache and revealed in the page’s search engine snippet:

Amazon.com: Create Your Own Ring: Diamond Search
The Amazon.com Collection. Why Buy Jewelry & Watches at Amazon?
… More to Explore. Preset Engagement Rings … Create Your Own Ring …
www.amazon.com/gp/cyo/cyor-fork.html

To produce these particular SEO elements, server side scripts and .htaccess rewrite modules are required. (If site is not Apache server-based then the rewrite module may not be an option, but there are always solutions.)

When optimizing AJAX it’s important to remember three things: Search engine results are affected by on-the-page, behind-the-page and off-the-page factors. It’s essential to provide an alternate way for users and spiders to navigate their way through to all of your great content without sacrificing usability, accessibility and linkability.

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The best thing you can do to grow your search engine referrals this year is focus on producing great content says PJ Fusco, lead strategist with Netconcepts in this article for Click Z. After all “content is king” and it’s all about crowning that king by speaking to your audience in a language that appeals to them. And Pat advises that when writing articles for the web, short stories are better than novels.

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