SEO: Friday Tip – Character Limits
Welcome to Friday everyone!
Here is a bit of information regarding character limits on <Title> tags.
As you should already know if you are reading this, the Title tag is what gets displayed in the blue bar at the top of your browser window as well as the Title that is displayed on search engines like Google.
Now this tag is a very important one that can greatly affect your SEO on any page on any site, and there are some limits to its use.
The main issue is the length. The maximum you can use that will be shown in any browser is about 124 characters, but on search engines like Google the limit that is shown is as short as 60 characters.
Your best optimization bet is to use around 60-72 characters for a Title tag. That way you can insure that the title you want people to see will actually be visible.
Also remember to always use a keyword rich and descriptive title. Each page should have the title optimized for the specific content it contains to get the best results.
News: Invisalign To Own OrthoClear for $10M
Today Align Technologies, the inventor of Invisalign(r) announced that it has signed a Binding Settlement Term Sheet with OrthoClear which states that OrthoClear will no longer accept new patient cases for treatment and will transfer all rights to Align Technologies.
This seemingly ends the legal court battles between the two competing makers of invisible teeth straightening aligners. The closing formal statement or by October 12, 2006, OrthoClear will file an exclusion order to prohibit any aligners to be imported into the United States.
The statement says that all listed employees will not start any sort of removable aligner therapy products and related soft market items for 5 years and Align will make a one time cash payment of $10 million to OrthoClear Holdings, Inc.
Google: PPC Positioning Changes
Lengthy article about PPC and Google's stance on the positioning and listing.
Topics of relevance: Ranking ads based on performance in the "blue" and sponsored links areas are getting modified. This is to promote sites it finds users like more than others basically.
SEO: Optimize Around Flash or Dynamic Content
SEO Tip: Optimize Around Flash or Dynamic Content
Having a brand new visually stunning website these days seems to be the new trend. Designers want to show off their skill and promote a site to the pleasure of the audience. Fun or dynamic features make the site interesting and interactive. But what happens when you need traffic coming to see it?
A beautiful new site is not all there is to it. You have to have the foundation in place as well to support the web technology, search engines, and marketers who are the ones that really drive traffic to that new site of yours.
Flash is one of the primary methods of having a visually enhanced and interactive site. You can create some really cool effects and movies with it. Some other similar technologies include Flex, AJAX, and Javascript.
The problem with these lays in the fact that they leave little for search engines to see in the way of indexing content. All the text and link system is embedded into the flash movie or script content and relatively unaccessible by most search engines. (Google has been reported to be able to index some content in Flash, but I would not trust that too far.)
Before we start jumping into some coding examples and recommendations there are a couple things to consider and be aware of. There are a lot of "black hat" optimization techniques used by spammers and disreputable SEO firms that may get you to the top fast, but also run the risk of getting your website banned. All the examples here stay away from these techniques, or explain how to do the proper thing with the code.
NOSCRIPT Tags:
NOSCRIPT tags are basically a block of text or HTML code that is not displayed unless the user has a text only browser or has scripts turned off. Generally however this block of text is only seen by search engines. While not all engines rank this information it is good to have for those that do.
The thing to be careful of with the NOSCRIPT tag is that it is widely used by spammers for keyword stuffing. They will add large blocks of repetitive keywords to fool the search engines. What you should only do with the NOSCRIPT tag is add the information that is contained within your dynamic script or Flash file.
Example:
[html]
Dentist San Francisco, CA - California. Dr. Frank Grimaldi.
Dentistry, sleep dentistry, sedation dentistry, hospital dentistry.
Wake up to a healthy smile. Frank Grimaldi, DDS, Dentist. Providing state of the art treatments such as CEREC and immediate dental implants as well as superb comfort with sedation dentistry in San Francisco.
[/html]
The above is the headers and content that the user misses in the Flash and images. It is good to use the
XML/RSS Data:
Another good way to link content in your site is though RSS feeds. You can embed a link to your RSS feed in the header of your site. This allows some of the new browsers like Firefox2 and IE7 to automatically give you the option to view or subscribe to a websites RSS feed.
Example:
[html]
You should also provide a link in your actual HTML page to your RSS feed for those people with older browsers.
Blog Update
I added the mod_rewrite to help make things a bit more understandable for everyone. Having the post title instead of a random number should make things a lot easier and friendlier to use.
SEO Updates
Worked on a couple clients websites today and modified the optimization based on the SE performance. Dr. Frank Grimaldi, Dentist in San Francisco is being optimized for his sedation dentistry specialty as well as for general dentistry in San Francisco. Dr. Kelly Mitchell, Orthodontist in Greensboro and Kernersville, NC has an older site that has had little in the way of regular updates. I have been steadily updating the site with rich text content as well as tweaking the code to fill some of the ranking gaps.
AJAX: Mozilla Dev Center: AJAX Getting Started
This article guides you through the AJAX basics and gives you two simple hands-on examples to get you started.
PHP: Generate XML File From MySQL Records
How to generate a XML file from a MySQL database.
Create a database and name is db_toxml. Create a table in the database and name it tbl_mysqltoxml. Now create four fields in the table. The fields are as follows:
xml_tutorial_id: autoinc.
xml_tutorial_title: (varchar - 100)
xml_tutorial_link: (varchar - 250)
xml_tutorial_description: mediumtext
[php]
$dbh=mysql_connect ("localhost", "user", "password") or die ('I cannot connect to the database because: ' . mysql_error());
mysql_select_db ("db_toxml");
$sql="SELECT * FROM tbl_mysqltoxml ORDER BY xml_tutorial_id DESC LIMIT 0,10";
$results = mysql_query($sql);
$number = mysql_num_rows($results);
$i=0;
while($i < $number){
$lesson = $lesson . "
";
$i++;
}
$file = ('mysqlto.xml');
$fp = fopen($file, "w");
$write = fputs($fp, $news);
fclose($fp);
?>[/php]
O’Reilly Code Search
This Code Search beta search engine released by O'Reilly searches through over 700 O'Reilly books which means there are over 123,000 examples and 2.6 million lines of code.
The search results page works quite well with the condensed view and the full view code options inline with the results.
The downside to the search capability is that you cannot search on topical results such as "ajax" unless it is labeled in the code itself, perhaps in the # comments # section.
Network Solutions Downtime
Network Solutions website (www.networksolutions.com) and customer access has been down for several hours this morning. The main domain name resolves a page with:
"Site Busy
We're sorry, but our site is temporarily taking no more connections. We are working to resolve this problem, and should have it fixed shortly. Please return later."
The alternate domain name www.netsol.com does not resolve at all.
Perhaps they are having a denial of service attack or some other technical issue, but it is causing a lot of backup work and changes to go uncompleted.
SEO for AJAX
From the Search Engine Watch Forums:
"AJAX is kind of like Flash - it looks and acts kind of like a webpage,
but it's actually a program. As such, it's not search-friendly.
Like Flash, there are methods to make parts of it show up, or to
provide alternative content. Also like Flash, much of it's
functionality is based on the operation of scripting (which search
engines don't do) and streaming (which is based on the operation of
scripts).
In short, almost all of the objections to Flash apply to AJAX, even
though they are very different in other ways. Of course, many of the
benefits (engaging, useful, etc) also apply.
Bottom line, you have to plan ahead and provide alternative methods to
show content with AJAX and Flash, or build your site assuming they are
invisible and designing the site to compensate in other ways.
One possible answer to your issue is through the use of CSS activated
via scripting. The content would be hidden until needed, but in the
absence of scripting (which is what a search engine would see), all the
content would be displayed. Test it in a text only browser to see."
-----------------------
The nice thing about AJAX is that a lot of times you have preloaded access to the data and are able to manipulate it on the page in such a way that you can have it there for SE's to crawl through.