Sub Domain SEO

SEO (Search engine of a sub-domain) is like promoting a completely new web site.

The sub-domain stands by itself and needs its own SEO plan.
The sub-domain can be for another language: for example www.artefac.ca and french.artefac.ca


The sub-domain can be for another province / state: for example California traffic school and New York traffic school.


Each sub-domain is a world of it-self.


Make sure the UI (user interface) of the domain and subdomain are accessible and easy to navigate.







Looking for a deeper analysis of your web site? the Diagnostic Program can help you.

Web site Stickiness

Stickiness is the amount of time spent at a site over a given time period.


Stickiness is often measured in the average minutes visitors spend on your web site.
Sometimes stickiness is measured in terms of page views.

Getting quality traffic is great, but you need to keep your audience interested.
This is where the stickiness factor plays an essential role.

Stickiness is achieved by the following elements:

• Good user interface (UI).


• Good content.


• Changing content - if the web site content does not change you will not get many re-visits


• Your content needs to answer the web visitors question.

Looking for a deeper analysis of your web site? the Diagnostic Program can help you.

Img Alt / Image Alt

Img Alt is the alternative text to browsers that do not see the image.
Browsers like "Lynx", browsers used by the blind etc.

This is what Google gas to say about img alt:
Images: Use the alt attribute to provide descriptive text.
In addition, we recommend using a human-readable caption and descriptive text around the image.

Europeans embrace Firefox

Firefox has made huge inroads in Europe over the past year, to the point where Internet Explorer is in danger of losing its market share lead in some countries. According to French web metrics firm XiTiMonitor, Firefox's overall market share in the 32 European countries it measures has grown to 27.8 percent, up from just over 20 percent in January 2006.


read the whole article

Cell Emulators

The world is moving forward. Cell phones are browsing the internet and are creating new challenges in web site building.

While most web companies build web sites for IE, the front-line web companies build web site for many more browsers:

• Sony K750, Nokia N70


• iPhone


• Opera Mini

Spam technique - Hidden text

This spam technique is very simple to apply, and very simple to catch by search engines.


A hidden text is simply a piece of text robots could read, but is not visible to the web surfer.

Hidden text could be a pixel by pixel paragraph.

Hidden text could be keywords written in the same color as the background.

Matt Cutts is currently the head of Google's Webspam team: Nearly hidden text

Spam technique - Noscript

This spam technique is very simple to apply, and very simple to catch by search engines.

The web page has a paragraph full of the keywords between <noscript> and </noscript>.


Example: (You must do view source to see the noscript)

Spam technique - Noscript

Site-targeted campaign

I wrote about Pay per click (PPC) and about "stealing eyeballs" through Google ads.

I was asked how to do it with Google ads.

The instructions are here:

Google site-targeted campaign



Happy stealing...

Is my site indexed by search engines?

To see if Google bot picked up your web site, you need to search for:

site:nameofsite.com

The results page would look like this:

Google - Dogs World

Yahoo! - Dogs World



These search results show you which pages on your web site are "known" to the search engine.

Traffic reporting tools

There are a few traffic reporting tools to see your web site traffic.
I will mention 3 that I like

1. The software that is used by your hosting company.

Your hosting company might have webTrends or similar software.
I prefer these, since they are accurate and show you (almost) everything.

2. Google analytics - a very popular solution and rightfully so.

You can register here http://www.google.com/analytics/.
The reports are for savvy users and the new reporting version is even more complicated. Overall this is a wonderful (free) solution.

3. Another solution in Beta is "Enquire", you can find it here Enquisite.

It gives you great reports, but only about traffic that came from search engines.
There is nothing about traffic that came from "referring sites".



You can have them all or just one.

They are all good traffic reporting tools.

Pay per click (PPC)

Pay per click (PPC) is an advertising model used on websites, advertising networks, and search engines
where advertisers only pay when a user actually clicks on an ad to visit the advertiser's website.
When a user types a keyword query matching the advertiser's keyword list, the advertiser's ad may appear on the search results page.
These ads are called "sponsored links" or "sponsored ads" and appear next to, and sometimes, above the natural or organic results on the page.
The advertiser pays only when the user clicks on the ad.


Pay per click advertising is a search engine marketing technique.


To make the most of this medium the advertiser needs to "steal eye balls".
The advertiser needs to refer traffic to his/her web site.
The best way to do this is by assigning the Pay per click (PPC) to another web site.


For example,

The Google ads on this web site Driving School are "stealing" the quality traffic that this web site is getting.
Every click they get is a quality click, since the "eye balls" are already focused on "Driving Schools".


Find a web site that has quality traffic, and locate your ads there.

Ask us about our SEO friendly content management system

User interface design

The "User interface design" is very important in the SEO world. if the SEO company gets the traffic to the site, the "User interface design" will keep the clients or make the leave the web site.
The user interface design is based on:

• Functionality - what is the web site supposed to do?


• User analysis - analysis of the potential users.
  
  The user interface design needs to answer:
  
  
  
  • What does the user want the web site to do?
  
  
  • What would be the web sites normal workflow?
  
  
  • How savvy is the user and what similar systems did the user already use?
  
  
  • What interface look and feel would appeal to the user?
  
  
  
  


• Information architecture - the flow of the web site.


• Prototyping - development of wireframes.


• Usability testing - testing of the prototypes on actual users.


• Graphic Interface design - actual look and feel design of the graphical user interface (GUI.) It may be based on the findings developed during the usability testing if usability is unpredictable, or based on communication objectives and styles that would appeal to the user. In rare cases, the graphics may drive the prototyping, depending on the importance of visual form versus function. If the interface requires multiple skins, there may be multiple interface designs for one control panel, functional feature or widget. This phase is often a collaborative effort between a graphic designer and a user interface designer, or handled by one who is proficient in both disciplines.


• Consistency, consistency, consistency.


• Navigation between items is important.


• Navigation within a web page is important.


• Expect your users to make mistakes.


• Your design must be intuitive.


• KISS - Keep It Simple Stupid

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Search engine optimization

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the quality of web traffic to a web site.
The quality traffic can come from search engines, industry related sites etc.
Search engine optimization (SEO) is not about increasing the number of web clients, it is always about getting you the right clients for your web site.

Search engine results are very important, and being on the first pages is one of the objectives.

But, it is not the only objective.

Ask us about our SEO friendly content management system