(Coverage of the SMX East conference will continue at WebProNews Videos.  Keep an eye on WebProNews for more notes and videos from the event this week.)

Nathan Buggia, Microsoft’s lead program manager of Live Search Webmaster Central, started things off by directing people to look at the Arbor Snowboards site.  Although great for users, it’s much less so for search engines.  Buggia recommends that folks learn about some better alternatives at janeandrobot.com ("search friendly design patterns for web development).

Sharad Verma, Yahoo’s senior product manager of Web Search, later stepped up to give some more specific advice.  While CSS is good, he believes external CSS is better, for example.  You shouldn’t disallow CSS in robots.txt, and don’t hide text using CSS.  As for Ajax, use href links, use spot Ajax, and turn off JavaScript in your browser and ensure that the content is navigable.

"Search engines are getting there," Verma noted.  "We are not fully capable but we are making progress."

This brings us to Tony Adam, Yahoo’s SEO manager.  He recommends being strategic in your Ajax implementations, and applying progressive enhancement to the task.  Adam suggests working with standards or platform teams to build standard interactions, and looking at what Jeremy Keith has done.

One last, solid piece of advice from Adam: "Take care of things before it even starts."

WebProNews Video anchor Abby Johnson contributed to this report.

1. Keyword Research & Selection
2. Competitor Analysis
3. Site Structure
4. Content Optimization
5. Link Building
6. Social Media
7. PPC
8. Statistics Analysis
9. Conversion Optimization
10. Keeping It Up

Overview

Website structure and SEO are a combination of topics that I’ve always had a particular interest in because of my background in software engineering. I have worked on, or maintained over 150 corporate websites having seen many of the things that can make a website go wrong, which can seriously impact a websites operation and search engine rankings.

Of the three pillars of SEO (Structure, Content, and Links) I find the structure of a website to be one of the most under rated things, even among search engine optimization companies. The structure of a website consists of several elements which all are interdependent on each other. These include the code behind your website, how your website interlinks, and the technologies used in your website.

At this point I’m going to strongly recommend that you’re using Firefox with the Web Developer Toolbar installed. The web developer toolbar gives you an easy way to validate your website, test your site on multiple screen resolutions, and around another 100 functions.

Valid Markup and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS)

I have made it practice to develop all my projects in XHTML 1.0 Transitional (my personal preference so I can use target="_blank" and rel="nofollow" attributes) or XHTML 1.0 Strict and CSS 1.0. XHTML is a reformulation of HTML 4 as an XML 1.0 application. It is a very clean and semantic markup language which will also force you to write cleaner code. Whether you choose XHTML or HTML 4 your code will be friendly to the search engines (stay away from 3rd party standards like IHTML).

As for Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) it gives us the ability to abstract the design out of a webpage, or site into a secondary document. This gives us a lot of advantages, and very few disadvantages. By removing redundant design code from your website you place the content closer to the start of the document, while reducing your code to markup ratio. It also makes it easier, and more cost effective to maintain your website as you can implement simple design changes by only editing on file.

When converting a website from table based design, to pure CSS based design there is generally around a 40% decrease in code. The reason for this is when most people use tables they end up placing tables, within tables, within tables all with their own attributes (height, width, border, etc). Now multiple all that redundant, and unneeded markup by the numbers of pages of you site and you’ll quickly see how Google (or any other search engine) will be able to index you website more efficiently.

In my research, and experience I have concluded using these two technologies in conjunction with each other is a part of guaranteeing your websites success, especially with its compatibility with Google. You will also find if you do any research on this topic a recurring mantra of CSS fanatics tables are for tabular data not design.

You’ll find that most of the highly organically ranked SEO companies implement CSS based design on their own websites. For examples of CSS based design check out Beanstalk Search Engine Positioning, SEOMoz, and Quenet Consulting.

Website Templating

Now I’m going to start this section with a rant about Dreamweaver templates, and how useless they are. As a SEO / Web Developer there is nothing I loathe more than seeing a Dreamweaver template. If you’re going to template a site use a technology like Server Side Includes, PHP Includes, or ASP includes. The disadvantages of Dreamweaver templates are:

1. Embedded comments in your code can reak havoc on Keyword Density Tools
2. If you need a non standard footer in an index file you will need to break it from the template, creating issues for future template updates.
3. If you have a disagreement with your web developer / designer and you part company if he doesn’t supply you with the template it’ll cost you.

When building websites I personally use PHP for implementing Server Side Includes. PHP is a relative easy language to learn for implement simple things like includes. It is also one of the most popular Apache modules, as of April 2007 there were 20,917,850 domains, and 1,224,183 IP addresses with it installed. PHP is also available for the Microsoft IIS (Windows Server) web server.

Search Engine Friendly URLs

One thing that I can’t stress enough is try to stay away from Dynamic URLs, these are URL addresses with variables, and values following the "?" character. Google used to state that it had troubles indexing sites with dynamic URLs, and to a degree this still holds true. If you are going to use Dynamic URLs always try to have less than 2 variables in your URL. I have seen sites with excessive products, and URLs where Google / Live / Yahoo all have a different number of pages cached.

A better approach is to URL Rewrite your URLs. For the Linux side Apache has Mod Rewrite, and for Windows you can use ISAPI Rewrite. When you implement a URL Rewriting system you are essentially creating a hash URL lookup table for your site, than when a server query comes in it checks the hash table to see if it finds a match then feeds it the corresponding entry.

To put it into simple terms what we strive to accomplish with URL Rewrites is to mask our dynamic content by having it appear as a static URL. A URL like Article?Id=52&Page=5 could be rewritten to /Article/ID/52/Page/5/, which to a search engine appears to be a directory with an index.htm (or whatever default / index page your particular web server uses). To see an implementation of Mod Rewrites check out Dr. Madcow’s Web Portal in the Article Section, and Link Archive.

Dynamic Websites and Duplicate Content

If there is one reoccurring theme I see in a lot of dynamic websites on the internet is that they can sometimes present the same content on multiple pages. An example of this is when you visit a website that allows you to "view a printer friendly version of this page", a better web solution implementation would be to develop a printer friendly Cascading Stylesheet.

Another goal is also to avoid having any additional URLs on you site such as Links for changing currency with a redirect script, links to "Email to a friend" pages, or anything related to this. Always use Forms to POST date like this so that the same page, or a static page to reduce page count. This issue seems to plague a lot of custom developed ecommerce / CMSes. I’ve actually see CMSes that will present up to 5 URL / Links for each page, in the long run the spiders got so confused in indexing the catalog that some of the main content pages were not cached.

Internal Site Navigation

If built properly most websites will never have a need for an XML Sitemap, other than to get their new pages indexed that much quicker (Ecommerce & Enterprise being exceptions). I will however recommend that every website have a user accessible Sitemap linked from every page to aide your users, and for internal linking.

Most sites with indexing problems have issues with their internal page linking structure. The biggest of all these issues are websites that implement pure javascript navigation based system, these systems depend on Javascript to insert HTML into pages as there rendered. Now Google can parse javascript menus to find URLs, however all of these pages will only be linked from the JS, and not the pages there located on (expect no internal pagerank passing). The best Javascript menus are menus that manipulate your code on your page to change which sections are being displayed via CSS. An example of a hybrid CSS / Javascript menu that I like is QuickMenu by OpenCube (these guys have a great support department).

Keep I mind the more internal links you have to a page, the more internal strength this page will be given. So when in doubt link it up.

Testing Your Site Structure

When it comes to reliable website deploying all I can say is "Test It, Test It, and then Test It Some More". When testing structure I rely on 3 different programs / firefox extensions. The first is Xenu Link Slueth, this is a great tool to run on your website to figure out how many pages can be spidered, and to find dead links. The second is the Web Developer Extension for Firefox, make sure you always validate your code when you make changes. And the last is consult Google and Yahoo to see how many pages are in your index compared to how many pages Xenu found, on Yahoo or Google type site:www.yourdomain.com (Don’t use Live’s site: function it is useless).

After you’ve finished testing your code if you need to debug it I strongly recommend the Firebug Firefox Extension, and the IE7 Developer Toolbar.

Conclusion

When trying to maximize your organic rankings your internal structure is paramount, consider your site structure to be equivalent to the foundation of your house. If your foundation is not built adequately your house may be livable, but may have long term issues. With websites your long term issues will be a failure to maximize your ROI of your website, so practice safe and smart structure.

Panelists will discuss the cut corners, the non-underlined links, the freaky mouse-overs, and other code beautification techniques. HTML, on the other hand, has moved closer towards XML and feeds. Our panelists will discuss how to update your code to match what is evolving on the web.

Moderator:

• Ted Ulle

Speakers:

• Ted Ulle, Partner, The MEWS Group
• Marc Juneau, Founder, Nolagraphics.com
• Bryan Gmyrek, President, Traffic Programming LLC
• Rainer Ahlfors, VP of Engineering, Wildcat Software

Many of the speakers were unable to make it. Nevertheless, Marc Juneau, the founder of Nolagraphics.com is here to speak first. It seems he started with GoDaddy.

Marc begins by giving a history of the web. What began with 1 site now has over 160 million websites. Initially it was all text, now it has graphics, Flash you name it. In 1996, problems started to show when all websites used for aesthetics were images and Flash.

Why are Flash, images make it hard for websites?

• Search engines only see HTML
• Sites were coded in HTML
• Most of the times, there was more code then content

Marc says W3c Gets seen. There are two schools of thought for this. While designing make it look good no matter what the HTMLis. Keep high standards while designing.

This proves advantageous as when many people are working on something, everyone is aware of the standards.

Next up is Ted Ulle, a partner with The MEWS Group. Ted feels that XHTML is a misstep. He feels XHTML should not be use. In this regard, there is a thread in Webmaster World which should be read.

• HTML has semantic Meaning
• CSS has visual rendering

Under used CSS, there are quite a few common elements that deserve their own default style rules, such as p tag, h1, and so on.

CSS Toolkit gives you flexibility

• .c – text align center
• .s – is a small font
• Line-height
• Set ratio (1.25) not px or pt
• Better with readability and comprehension
• Plugs Usability News and how it is a must read

Abused CSS

• Hidden Anchors
• Avoid aesthetics from trumping communication
• Use redundant link cues
• Color/background-color
• Font variations
• Hover behaviors
• Links are the core of the web

Span Tag should be used extremely rarely as it exposes a weak CSS plan. In terms of H1 and H2, avoid it during presentations. Use an imitation style for H1 and H2.

In a presentation, Ted shows what a standard CSS menu is. Also shows a dynamic sample that can be written in PHP, Perl, ASP or any other language.

Advantages

• Less code
• Less storage
• Faster download of CSS

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Moderator:

Anne Kennedy, Managing Partner, Beyond Ink

Speakers:

• Shari Thurow, Founder & SEO, Omni Marketing Interactive
• Vanessa Fox, Product Team Lead, Zillow.com
• Mikkel deMib Svendsen, Creative Director, deMib.com
• Amit Kumar, Senior Engineering Manager, Yahoo!

Q&A Speaker:

• Amanda Camp, Software Engineer, Google, Inc.

Shari Thurow is the first speaker of the session. She begins by citing the pros and cons of CSS:

Pros:

• Adding HTML pages lets webmasters control the design options like margins, font/typeface appearance.
• With CSS one can alter the "look" of a website quickly and easily.
• One can drastically shorten the download time of a webpage.
• Usability pros say 8-12 secs.
• Representative from Yahoo says 30 secs or less

CONS:

• End users will have to install fonts in their pcss else the webpage will now appear as the designers intended.
• Logo or corporate identify
• Banners (advertisements or self-promoting)
• Condensed font employed for screen real estate
• Usability testing (task oriented) and focus groups (user opinions) might show that users prefer a font that is not commonly installed on all computers.
• Print materials
• A/B and multivariate testing
• CSS-formatted hyperlinks can dominate the content of a web page making the content appear unfocused.
• CSS can be used to hide text on a webpage.

Adding an H1 tag to a graphic will not make search engines believe text is more important.

Tips:

• use stylesheets
• Only determine use graphic nav versus css nav after testing with your users
• Make sure your pages display appropriately on multiple browsers
• Hidden elements (layers, text) are acceptable to SEs as long as those elements are meant to be seen and used by site visitors.
• Do not use CSS to exploit SEs.

Next to speak is Mikkel deMib Svendsen of deMib.com on AJAX and Web 2.0.

Tips for using AJAX:

• Use AJAX but not too often.
• Use AJAX only if it boosts your business or generates more income.
• Let AJAX be a choice and not be made mandatory.
• Set proper (301) redirects of "wrong" linking to the AJAX application.
• Leave it to the professionals. AJAX is HIGHLY insecure. Only TRUSTWORTHY vendors and consultants must be used.

Tips for Web 2.0:

• As authentic content does not come cheap, let your users write it for free of cost.
• Keyword research is not required.
• Spelling errors are acceptable in content written by your loyal user, even if that means mistakes in headings and titles.
• Content written by users will better your site’s freshness factor while also rank high in non-community pages too.

Next up is Vanessa Fox of Zillow.com.

Vanessa spots the most common optimizing mistakes as:

• Blocking links
• Blocking content (AJAX is a big reason)
• Not providing content

Tips:

• AJAX does not let Search engines see (as well as users with JavaScript turned off) lots of content.
• Vanessa also echoes that user generated content is a great help.
• The more information there is for search engines to index. There is more freshness, etc.
• Remember to have information though.
• Blank discussion boards are like ghost towns.
• Be certain you know a source you can get content from.

Yahoo’s Amit Kumar lays emphasis on what he calls the guiding principles, technologies, techniques, and resources. These are:

Guiding Principles

Build for your users: Yahoo! will adapt.

Think "Accessibility"

Users vote by attribution — the way we determine what people are looking at and people like is by how many links a site has. It’s important to remember in the context of AJAX. Make sure users can link to you.

We accept hints! Use sitemaps.

Technologies

CSS

Issue: understanding your pages

Core to the web, like HTML

Flash and JavaScript

Issue: reading your pages

Need to consume carefully.

AJAX

Issue: Finding all your content

Think "form filling"

Badges

Issue: Where is the content from?

Attribution

Techniques

Graceful Degradation

Turn off js/css in your browser, make sure everything still works.

Alternate Nav

SItemaps

Site Explorer

robots.txt

Closing the session today is Google’s Amanda Camp who basically spoke about webmaster guidelines, an old Google blog which discusses Flash presentations etc. An interesting quote was, “What to do if you have javascript, etc. Really, just make sure it degrades gracefully.”

SOURCE: SEARCH ENGINE ROUND TABLE

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