Search Engine Optimize (SEO) an AJAX or Web 2.0 Site

Search Engine Optimize (SEO) an AJAX or Web 2.0 Site

One of the three major pillars of Search Engine Optimization is a website’s content, and onsite content optimization. All of the major search engine ranking algorithms have components that relate to the content that is contained on the website. Typically these components relate to Keyword Densities, number of words, content location, and sometimes age of content. In regards to the code that the content is contained in that falls under the topic of structure and not content, and will not be discussed in this article.

Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX) is an advanced web development method which can be used to create more responsive and interactive dynamic websites. AJAX accomplishes this by making object request calls back to the web server without having to refresh your browser, these object calls are then processed and are typically used to update the content of the page on your website that is currently being viewed. For the sake of this Article I’m going to ignore the XML component of AJAX as the search engines never view any of the XML data. Websites that use Javascript to manipulate content without using AJAX will also suffer from the issues described.

When a search engine sends out a robot / spider to visit your website with the goal of indexing your content it is only looking at what is being presented in the Markup Language. Generally a search engine does not behave like a user when indexing your website, it doesn’t click buttons or links it simply makes note of URLs associated with each page then individually then visits these pages to index them. This largely goes against the goal of AJAX which is to have as few pages as possible by interacting with the web server in a smarter method as the users interact with the website.

To put the last paragraph simply any content that is changed via AJAX or Javascript on a webpage that is not hardcoded in a page won’t be cached by the search engines. This essentially means that if you have great content that the search engines may love but you’re using AJAX you may be missing out on traffic. There are two approaches to rectifying these which may even give you an advantage over sites that don’t utilize Javascript / AJAX.

The first approach is to make sure that your website degrades to normal flat markup language for non javascript capable browsers and search engines. Essentially every time you would have used an AJAX call make sure you have a page with the same content. Unfortunately for a lot of people this could mean a lot of work, for those individual using a database with PHP or ASP it is not too hard to build a site that builds itself with some effective web programming.

The second approach is to use AJAX in a more minimalist fashion. The goal here is to present the search engines with your optimized content while making sure that any AJAX calls a user would do has no bearing on what you want the search engines to see. In fact this can be used to remove content from your website which may negatively affect your rankings such as testimonials. I’ve seen very few testimonials that actually do good things for a sites keyword density, I’ve even been known to optimize testimonials on client’s websites. With Javascript / AJAX you could insert a random testimonial into a page and therefore not affecting that pages keyword density. The only downside to this approach is that some offsite keyword density tools actually use Web Browser rendering engines so they may get false results as it takes the Javascript into account.

Now you may think that I’m anti AJAX from everything that I’ve said, but there are times and places for AJAX, provided it doesn’t affect how the search engines see your beautiful relevant content your trying to rank. AJAX is great to use for Member sections of your website, interactive forms, slideshows, and a lot more it just needs to be leveraged correctly to avoid missing out on search engine visitors. The final thing to keep in mind is that most search engines like to see more than a single page website which many AJAX website appear to be, always strive for at least 5 or more indexable pages as internal links and anchor text can have a lot of value.

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Is social media backlinks really worth?

Is social media backlinks really worth?

Social networking profiles

One of the fastest ways to build backlinks is to register on social media sites with high PageRank: Facebook, Xing, LinkedIn, MySpace, Ecademy, Twitter etc. These sites allow you to set up a user profile with information about you and your company, including a link to your website. The only catch is that not all of these sites' links are 'do-follow' - which means your site will not always receive the 'link juice'.

Links in Twitter posts

If you place a link to a web page in your Twitter post, keep in mind that all of Twitter's outbound links are 'no-follow'. Google and Yahoo do not pass the Trust or PageRank power through the 'no-follow' links. Thus Twittering has limited value for your site.

However, such links do have some value. In May 2009, we witnessed the launch of the Topsy site, a technology that transforms Twitter links into a searchable database. Topsy makes it possible for users to search for information (relevancy is determined based on the number of re-tweets). So, any Twitter link now has a chance to be found and followed by Topsy visitors. Remember, increased traffic is the main goal!

Social bookmarks forever?

Is it possible to get permanent links from social bookmarks? Well, yes and no. Most social bookmarking sites will retain your bookmark until it's popular. But as your bookmark loses popularity over time, it will be moved into the archives. Ideally, a permanent link should stay on the same page with approximately the same PR forever, but in reality, most social bookmarking websites remove links after some time.

Nevertheless, social bookmarking sites are valuable for other reasons. If you have a quality article that becomes popular on social bookmarking sites, people will link to that article in their blogs, and post 'do-follow' links on forums.

You can search the Web for the keywords 'do-follow social bookmarking sites' to find the latest lists. Networkers have also created services like socialposter.com or socialmarker.com for automatic submission to bookmarking sites.

The truth about blog comments

Blog commenting is probably the most popular - and in many cases, most irritating (because of spammers) - technique of getting permanent links.

The Google PageRank algorithm implies that the more outbound links there are on a page, the less authority or power this page can pass to each of those links. That's because the page's PR is distributed evenly between the outbound links. If a webmaster wants to add an outbound link, but doesn't want Google to follow that link or for PR power to be passed on to the linked page, then that webmaster has to add the 'nofollow' attribute to the link. Many bloggers do so to prevent their PR from flowing to the pages cited by commenters. However, this practice is no longer encouraged by Google.

A few weeks ago Matt Cutts blogged about a change in the PR algorithm concerning Google's approach to passing PageRank through the links with the 'nofollow' attribute. Although no PageRank and anchor texts are passed through such links, they are also counted when sharing the outgoing 'link juice'. The only difference is that it's neither passed to the linked site nor kept on the page. This means Google disapproves of the practice of using the rel=nofollow attribute for the purpose of not sharing PageRank.

If you own a blog, setting up the 'nofollow' attribute to all comments means conserving your blog's 'link juice' and getting fewer comments. The 'do-follow' principle can lead to more spam, but it's a good way to attract webmasters to your site. On the other hand, if you are a webmaster trying to obtain more links by commenting on blogs, don't rely solely on this method of link popularity improvement. Use a combination of methods, including the time-proven ways of press releases, articles and site submissions to relevant lists and directories, and the newer techniques for site promotion in social media.

Latent Semantic Analysis Gathering Titles

In order to give an example of Latent Sematic Analysis, I went to Amazon.com, searched on "investing", and took the top 10 books titles that were displayed. One of those book titles only had one index word so I dropped it. Here are the other 9 titles with the index words underlined. To be an index word, the word must occur in 2 or more titles, and not be a "noise" or stop word such as "the", "to", "of", etc.

• The Neatest Little Guide to Stock Market Investing
  
• Investing For Dummies, 4th Edition
  
• The Little Book of Common Sense Investing: The Only Way to Guarantee Your Fair Share of Stock Market Returns
  
• The Little Book of Value Investing
  
• Value Investing: From Graham to Buffett and Beyond
  
• Rich Dad's Guide to Investing: What the Rich Invest in, That the Poor and the Middle Class Do Not!
  
• Investing in Real Estate, 5th Edition
  
• Stock Investing For Dummies
  
• Rich Dad's Advisors®: The ABC's of Real Estate Investing: The Secrets of Finding Hidden Profits Most Investors Miss
  

Latent Semantic Analysis

Latent Semantic Analysis Tutorial

Latent Sematic Analysis or LSA is a way of finding patterns among a collection of documents such as web pages. It is increasingly used by major search engines, such as Google, in ranking websites and determining what AdSense ads to show on a page.

To see how Latent Semantic Analysis works, imagine that you have a collection of documents such as web pages, or in the simple example we show below, book titles. How would you go about finding similarities and differences between the documents?

The Basic Idea

One way is to form a large matrix with each column representing a document, and each row representing a word that has been extracted from the documents. Then, each cell of the matrix is simply the number of times that word appears in that document. For example, if the word "farm" appears in the first document 7 times, then that cell would have a 7 in it. Each cell is simply a count of the number of times that word appears in that document.

The cell numbers are usually massaged, so that whatever patterns are present can be seen more clearly. This step corresponds to "cleaning the data" so that, for example, frequent words are not weighted too heavily, some natural language constructs are simplified, and long documents don't have an unfair advantage. Some ways that cell numbers are massaged are:

• Log of Counts - the log of the counts in each cell may be used instead of the actual counts.
• Stemming - related words may have the same root word and should be considered the same (such as golf and golfing).
• TF-IDF - (term frequency - inverse document frequency) attempts to measure the importance of a term or word.
• Entropy - another way to measure term importance based on the distribution of the term through documents.
• Normalization - sets each document vector to length 1 so documents with more words don't have an unfair advantage.

Road to Web 3.0

Out of all the Internet buzzwords and jargon that have made the transition to the public consciousness, "Web 2.0" might be the best known. Even though a lot of people have heard about it, not many have any idea what Web 2.0 means. Some people claim that the term itself is nothing more than a marketing ploy designed to convince venture capitalists to invest millions of dollars into Web sites. It's true that when Dale Dougherty of O'Reilly Media came up with the term, there was no clear definition. There wasn't even any agreement about if there was a Web 1.0.

Other people insist that Web 2.0 is a reality. In brief, the characteristics of Web 2.0 include:

• The ability for visitors to make changes to Web pages: Amazon allows visitors to post product reviews. Using an online form, a visitor can add information to Amazon's pages that future visitors will be able to read.
• Using Web pages to link people to other users: Social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace are popular in part because they make it easy for users to find each other and keep in touch.
• Fast and efficient ways to share content: YouTube is the perfect example. A YouTube member can create a video and upload it to the site for others to watch in less than an hour.
• New ways to get information: Today, Internet surfers can subscribe to a Web page's Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feeds and receive notifications of that Web page's updates as long as they maintain an Internet connection.
• Expanding access to the Internet beyond the computer: Many people access the Internet through devices like cell phones or video game consoles; before long, some experts expect that consumers will access the Internet through television sets and other devices.

Think of Web 1.0 as a library. You can use it as a source of information, but you can't contribute to or change the information in any way. Web 2.0 is more like a big group of friends and acquaintances. You can still use it to receive information, but you also contribute to the conversation and make it a richer experience.

While there are still many people trying to get a grip on Web 2.0, others are already beginning to think about what comes next. What will Web 3.0 be like? How different will it be from the Web we use today? Will it be a revolutionary shift, or will it be so subtle that we won't even notice the difference?

What do Internet experts think the next generation of the World Wide Web will be like? Keep reading to find out.

Web 3.0 Will Work

Internet experts believe the next generation of the Web -- Web 3.0 -- will make tasks like your search for movies and food faster and easier. Instead of multiple searches, you might type a complex sentence or two in your Web 3.0 browser, and the Web will do the rest. In our example, you could type "I want to see a funny movie and then eat at a good Mexican restaurant. What are my options?" The Web 3.0 browser will analyze your response, search the Internet for all possible answers, and then organize the results for you.

That's not all. Many of these experts believe that the Web 3.0 browser will act like a personal assistant. As you search the Web, the browser learns what you are interested in. The more you use the Web, the more your browser learns about you and the less specific you'll need to be with your questions. Eventually you might be able to ask your browser open questions like "where should I go for lunch?" Your browser would consult its records of what you like and dislike, take into account your current location and then suggest a list of restaurants. ­

To understand where the Web is going, we need to take a quick look at where it's been. Keep reading for a quick lesson on the evolution of the Web.