ASK.COM – 3D Search… What’s the Deal?
ASK.COM is launching a new form of search engine; it is a search engine system they have dubbed “3D” and has a unique approach to furnishing internet users with search results.
If you search on Gwen Stefani, for example, take a look at what you get: Search Results for ASK.COM
If you use Google, you are familiar with the navigation at the top of the screen that lets you pick what kind of files you are looking for:
In the Google model, you have to select the type of media you are searching for in order to see your search results broken down by file type. If you want to see images, you will not be looking at News items or Websites, for instance. It does seem relatively “old fashioned” in the face of Ask.com’s presentation. It is remarkable to me that nobody has done this before. I realize that there are those of us (I might be one of them) who very much likes to have the ability to separate their filetypes the way Google provides for. I am not sure that I do not prefer Google’s tab-style interface over Ask’s new UI. However, there is no doubt that Ask.com has done something that people will notice and I expect that Ask will experience at least an initial increase in visitors because of it.
I mean, just look at it… it is pretty slick…
…you have an Encyclopedia entry on the right, from our beloved Wikipedia. You have video tracks with thumbnails. You have audio tracks that play from within the actual search page that Ask initially returns. On the left you have popular search strings related to your initial search. It is pretty interesting, and I have not seen any all-in-one media results like this before.
That’s all well and good for something like Gwen Stefani, but what happens when we search for something a bit less “popular”?
Pretty impressive.
Who is less popular than George Lopez?
Maybe, Telly Savalas? (Gotta love bald guys).
Now, Mr. Savalas has no audio tracks, but I still think that Ask.com has done something worth noting here. All they have really done is create a unique and colorful UI that presents search results by file type and given shortcuts to multimedia.
Sometimes, it is all about the presentation.
This is a great example. It will be really interesting to me to see if Ask gets a large increase in traffic after making these adjustments.
Besides the presentation of the search results, Ask has undergone a facelift on their main page and allows you to choose skins (very popular in some demographics) and search blogs in addition to cities. They have a button for “City” so you can search a map that isnt quite Google Maps but beats Yahoo Maps Beta, in my opinion.
It is worth checking out. Your SEO efforts will remain the same. As always, name your files in a meaningful way and link, link, link.
Ask.com 3D search isn’t quite 3D, and I haven’t used it enough to comment on it’s utility, but it looks pretty cool.
There are even little icons (binoculars) that let you preview the site before going to it. That is useful to ME. I hate clicking a link and winding up at a site that is a giant wasteland of spam.
Happy Searching,
- Josh Milane
ASK.COM – 3D Search… What’s the Deal?
ASK.COM is launching a new form of search engine; it is a search engine system they have dubbed “3D” and has a unique approach to furnishing internet users with search results.
If you search on Gwen Stefani, for example, take a look at what you get: Search Results for ASK.COM
If you use Google, you are familiar with the navigation at the top of the screen that lets you pick what kind of files you are looking for:
In the Google model, you have to select the type of media you are searching for in order to see your search results broken down by file type. If you want to see images, you will not be looking at News items or Websites, for instance. It does seem relatively “old fashioned” in the face of Ask.com’s presentation. It is remarkable to me that nobody has done this before. I realize that there are those of us (I might be one of them) who very much likes to have the ability to separate their filetypes the way Google provides for. I am not sure that I do not prefer Google’s tab-style interface over Ask’s new UI. However, there is no doubt that Ask.com has done something that people will notice and I expect that Ask will experience at least an initial increase in visitors because of it.
I mean, just look at it… it is pretty slick…
…you have an Encyclopedia entry on the right, from our beloved Wikipedia. You have video tracks with thumbnails. You have audio tracks that play from within the actual search page that Ask initially returns. On the left you have popular search strings related to your initial search. It is pretty interesting, and I have not seen any all-in-one media results like this before.
That’s all well and good for something like Gwen Stefani, but what happens when we search for something a bit less “popular”?
Pretty impressive.
Who is less popular than George Lopez?
Maybe, Telly Savalas? (Gotta love bald guys).
Now, Mr. Savalas has no audio tracks, but I still think that Ask.com has done something worth noting here. All they have really done is create a unique and colorful UI that presents search results by file type and given shortcuts to multimedia.
Sometimes, it is all about the presentation.
This is a great example. It will be really interesting to me to see if Ask gets a large increase in traffic after making these adjustments.
Besides the presentation of the search results, Ask has undergone a facelift on their main page and allows you to choose skins (very popular in some demographics) and search blogs in addition to cities. They have a button for “City” so you can search a map that isnt quite Google Maps but beats Yahoo Maps Beta, in my opinion.
It is worth checking out. Your SEO efforts will remain the same. As always, name your files in a meaningful way and link, link, link.
Ask.com 3D search isn’t quite 3D, and I haven’t used it enough to comment on it’s utility, but it looks pretty cool.
There are even little icons (binoculars) that let you preview the site before going to it. That is useful to ME. I hate clicking a link and winding up at a site that is a giant wasteland of spam.
Happy Searching,
- Josh Milane
SEO Tips for Developers
I am attempting to put a list of tips together for a client’s development staff. They have separate departments for content writing and marketing, so these tips are only in reference to coding.
I will update this as items are added or changed. So far:
1. Avoid Flash, but if you must use Flash, use SWF_Object() and have a text-only, keyword-centric and fully functional backup site loading behind it. This is only compliance, anyhow.
2. Use meaningful filenames such as “turtle-food.jpg” instead of “image1.jpg” for all files including graphics, sound, scripts, etc…
3. Use hyphens in filenames instead of underscores, i.e. “turtle-food.jpg” and not “turtle_food.jpg”. There is evidence to suggest that some search engine systems do not recognize anything besides the hyphen as a blank space consistently.
4. Use the meta description and meta keywords tags, and put them immediately after the page title, as high on the page as possible.
5. Get a list of keywords for EACH PAGE (you will need to work with marketing and whomever is writing the content to do this) and work them into the meta keywords and meta description tags as well as the page titles. Put keywords ahead of the company name in page titles, such as in: “Turtle Food Experts ¦ ACME Turtleworld!”
6. Try to use header tags where possible, around keywords. If using CSS, use CSS to define the size and characteristics of your header tags. (Important: Validate your CSS, just like you validate your HTML and you validate your XML on the site.)
7. Put bold or italics tags around keywords where possible (without making copy look look chintzy or forced), and name links using keywords. This tip is probably more for content writers or marketing, but developers should be aware of it because efforts to make a page optimized should include collaboration between groups.
8. Link internally, even if only to anchor text created specifically for this purpose, using keywords within the links.
9. Do not put text in graphics. Use text.
10. Use the ALT tag and combine ALT text with keywords (compliance)
11. Generate RSS feeds for pages with good content and syndicate them. Use something like Feedburner to syndicate your content
12. Be sure the site is compliant to coding and compliance standards (see aforementioned references to online tools that will help you).
13. Sites with private content should try to have public pages as well. The more public pages, the more opportunity to optimize a site.
14. Use robots.txt
15. Use a sitemap, ideally sitemap.xml (registered with Google and at the root of your site), but at the least a header/footer/menu that includes text links. There is an entire protocol for sitemaps, provided by Google, and it is definitely worth a look because if you play by Google’s rules, Google will like you more.
16. Be sure that WebTrends or similar program is installed on the server
17. If using a CMS, try to install a “search-engine-friendly URL” component or mod_rewrite for Apache, ISAPI Rewrite for IIS. For mod_rewrite, get ready to deal with some mind-bending stuff. Your best bet, in my opinion, is to search online for someone else’s code, borrow it, and adjust as necessary. There are lots of online discussion forums for this purpose. Be aware of the peculiarities that different content management systems have in regard to SEO. For instance, MOSS (SharePoint 2007) has unique SEO features as well as problems. Other content management systems are similar. Look into addressing any issues early.
18. Avoid using frames. If you must use frames, use <NOFRAMES> tags and have alternate HTML written.
19. Manually submit site to at least Google, Yahoo, and DMOZ (Support Open Source!!). Do not do this more than once. If you do, the search engine systems will not index you any quicker and may decide to just ignore you.
20. Try to ensure that at least some page content is static and keyword-relevant.
21. Make sure that links are not comprised of text such as “click here” but instead consist of keywords and keyword phrases. Shorter is not necessarily better. “Our Turtle Food Catalog is Available Online” works well as link text.
22. Put contextual links within the site. Alternatively, a “links” page can be used. I would much, much prefer to have contextual links within the site, however. A contextual link is a link that has something to do with the content it is embedded within.
23. Make a custom 404 page that looks good and links to the site’s main sections or (preferably) includes a sitemap. Have the custom 404 page do a meta refresh to the main page after a few seconds, and let browsers know “you will be directed to our main site in X seconds”
24. If the site is geared towards a specific geographic area, try to find hosting in that area
25. Use lowercase file names. It seems to matter to some search engine systems.
26. Follow the “First Letter Capital, Every Other Letter Lowercase” naming convention in links with keywords (where it isn’t painful or displeasing to do so). Again, there seems to be evidence that this matter to some search engine systems.
27. If you must do a redirect, always do a 301 redirect. Anything else will make the site suspicious to search engine systems or otherwise create problems for your site.
28. Try to stay current on the latest SEO-related trends and happenings. For instance, not long ago, Yahoo! got its search results from Google. Now it ranks sites quite differently than Google does. Where Google seems to put more emphasis on keyword prevalence and their proprietary, trademarked PageRank, Yahoo! seems to be more focused on the page-related issues, such as headers, etc.
29. Periodically scan your site for orphaned pages or dead links. Address whatever issues you discover.
30. Work with marketing or whomever is managing your link campaigns to establish what is working for you and what is not. Webtrends or other analytic software will help you contribute to the conversation. Again, SEO is not a job for one person, unless you hire a specialist to work full time. I should add here that it is not generally (or ever) a good idea for a small business to hire a full time SEO specialist. If your small business can afford to hire someone to sit around and do contract work while you are paying them a salary, great. Give me a call. I could use the health benefits. Seriously, the best approach is to have everyone in the organization who is on the team that produces web content and web pages to be informed and do their part. That way, your company owns the idea and practice of actively creating optimized content and you are not dependant upon any one person. A consultant can come in and give a fantastic day-long seminar on SEO and how it impacts your various departments. I am biased, but it only makes sense to bring in someone temporary in order to learn skills that everyone will benefit from and retain.
31. Put pieces of JavaScript code in an external file and refer to them with src attributes within your page
32. Use document.write to build things like JavaScript navigation menus and store the code in an external file. You can refer to the code that builds your top nav just like any other piece of JavaScript. The point of numbers 31 and 32 is that they reduce clutter and make your page as clean as possible. I am sure that you have seen pages with hundreds of lines of JavaScript code at the top, followed by a little bit of content. Spiders (‘bots) have to get through all this code before they get to the stuff worth indexing, and you want to prevent that. Bring your keywords and content to the top of the page and increase their prevalence.
33. Stick your CSS in an external file, too. Define your <H1> – <H6> tags there and use the header tags in your content.
34. Avoid pasting from MS Word. There is all kinds of stuff in there that you do not want, Word-specific stuff that will only make your page look goofy to search engines. This is a known issue and programs like FrontPage offer functionality to “clean” your Word documents. Expect to lose your formatting and bullet points.
MIT Technical is available for seminars and consulting in regard to Search Engine Optimization. Contact us for more information.
That’s all for now! Please feel free to leave comments or start a discussion on our discussion board. That is what it is there for, and you are guaranteed that you will get a response to your questions.
Josh Milane
- 01.31.09 – Thought I should note, some of the above tips are no longer valid. Specifically, you really don’t want to mess with your CSS H1 tags. Each Google Dance brings new joy to the world, and SEO remains a “black art” – although the basics are valid, still.
- Interesting: Take a look at W3C Priority 1 Accessibility Requirements. Many of these map quite directly to good SEO practices. The interesting part is the reason why.
Demystifying AJAX
I have lots of clients who want AJAX on their site. They don’t necessarily know what it *is*, but they want it. I don’t blame them. This post is an attempt at explaining the magic behind AJAX, or at least, detailing what it is.
AJAX is not such a hot topic right not, but it is still very much on the minds of businesspeople with friends who are “in the know”. It is not a panacea for your web-based woes, but AJAX is pretty cool.
Developers were using AJAX before it was called AJAX. AJAX means “Asynchronous JavaScript And XML”. JavaScript and XML have been used together to perform AJAX functionality since ~2003, but the term “AJAX” wasn’t invented until two years later. Jesse Garret first used the term in public after coming up with the acronym to explain an idea to one of his clients.
AJAX inst a brand new technology. It is the combination of two technologies for a specific purpose. Instead of having to reload an entire page to update one page of the page – say, your RSS feeds (as formerly on the MIT Technical homepage) – you can create a little container that uses JavaScript to call XML to the specific container. The screen will not refresh, the “container” will refresh. This is made possible through the XMLHttpRequest object and of course, asynchronous JavaScript and XML.
This is admittedly fairly technical, but I wanted to write a quick entry about AJAX because I just got off the phone with someone who was throwing the term around like it was a movie star’s name and we were in Hollywood trying to get a table at a restaurant.
As a last note, if you have AJAX displaying data or copy on your page, you should have a static version of that data or copy as well. Search engine systems will not execute the JavaScript that your AJAX requires and therefore will not index it.
Josh Milane
Project Management – hard or soft skillsets?
I can see both arguments, because I am aware of both types of Project Managers.
There are Project Managers that function as Project Coordinators and have to do a lot of record-keeping, scheduling, and other more ‘administrative activities’.
Then there are Project Managers that develop System Requirements Documentation complete with accurate UML and Scope Matrices broken down into functional components, mapping them directly to Test Cases.
Prior to my most recent position and prior to my focus on consulting, I interviewed for a full-time PM position at a company that made a software product. The interviewee stated her belief that Project Managers were soft-skill professionals. We ended the conversation soon thereafter, but in the case of their organization, it was true. The PM spent their time learning the new release and keeping customers up to speed, helping with implementation, documenting specs, doing whatever otherwise would have fallen through the cracks or would not have been fielded by another staff member.
I very much enjoy the discipline of documentation. Even in my personal life, if something is bothering me, I take the nebulous ickyness that I am feeling and try to break it down. The soup of unhappiness becomes a list of items that I can address. I can manage a list. I cannot manage soup.
There are many flavors of Project Managers. You have your PMP professionals, your Prince certified professionals, and your “accidental” Project Managers who pick up skills, tools, and knowledge as they evolve.
I am proud to be an accidental PM because I was a business person first and learned the art and science and discipline of Project Management from a business person’s standpoint. This is invaluable when dealing with customers. Just like there are “paper MSCEs” there are “paper PMPs” and while they have a great foundation, there is nothing quite as effective as being in the trenches, dealing with day to day operations and in the case of software, seeing things break for no good reason and having to hunt for 12 hours because of a misplaced semicolon.
Processes are not cut and dry. We can extrapolate and we can generalize, but just as human beings are developed in an iterative fashion, interacting with the world, Project Management has intrinsic iteration. You have to be involved with the project. You cannot sit behind a desk and move around bars in MS Project.
Is that a soft skill? Being able to understand process and in my case, software development?
I don’t think so. If I worked in a toothbrush factory, I would have had the same opportunities to be involved with projects as I have had within the software vertical.
I would not, however, know software.
But again, just like soup, PMs come in different flavors. If you are hiring one, pick one who best fits your corporate culture. The skill sets we possess are not terribly difficult to learn. What is difficult is the application of said skill sets.
Best,
Josh Milane
MIT Technical, Boston
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