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Basic SEO for the Mobile and iPhone

July 31, 2010 By 1 Comment

When optimising your site for mobile phones, there are some things you need to know and be aware of. Googlebot-Mobile and other mobile search engine bots crawl sites differently when compared to normal, traditional search engine bots. In part, they determine a site’s ranking on how well it renders on a particular mobile so for different mobiles, expect to see varying results. Another ranking factor I believe to hold some weight is the loading speed of the page due to mobile devices having significantly lower download speeds than traditional means.

Mobile SEO

For mobiles (other than the iPhone), create a stylesheet called handheld.css. This allows you to style up your existing website for mobile phones without the need of creating a whole new site which may cause problems with duplication. Anyone accessing your site through a mobile will automatically trigger handheld.css to be called upon. To link the stylesheet, include the following into the common HTML header.

<link rel="stylesheet" href="handheld.css" media="handheld" type="text/css" />

iPhone SEO

The iPhone does not pull the handheld.css stylesheet, so a separate stylesheet needs to be created and named iPhone.css. iPhones will detect this and render the site accordingly. You can either style this stylesheet as you like or duplicate the existing handheld stylesheet, it doesn’t matter.

A little hack you can use if you’d rather not mess around with two separate stylesheets is to replace the above link with this one

<link rel="stylesheet" href="handheld.css" media="handheld, only screen and (max-device-width: 480px)" type="text/css" />

This link catches any handheld and the iPhone with its “only screen and (max-device: 480px)”. It’s a media query that luckily  iPhone understands and renders.

WPTouch

If your site is built in WordPress, rendering your site on the iPhone is even easier. Simply install the WPTouch plugin and you’re good to go! I really like this plugin, it makes a site much more usable and easier to browse. The good thing is the option (at the bottom of the page) to switch back to normal view if the user wishes to do so.

Mobile Sitemaps

It’s essential to create and submit a mobile sitemap if you’ve not already done so. You can find more information on Google Webmaster’s support page. An example of a mobile sitemap containing a single entry is shown below

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
 <urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9"
  xmlns:mobile="http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap-mobile/1.0">
    <url>
        <loc>http://mobile.example.com/article100.html</loc>
        <mobile:mobile/>
    </url>
</urlset>

Finally

Of course, the most basic of SEO should never be overlooked. On-page checks are essential, such as ensuring your page titles are optimised properly, the use of H1, H2 tags are used appropriately, and that image alt attributes are included (but not spammy).

Filed Under: SEO Tagged With: , , , , ,

My thoughts on personalised search

July 27, 2010 By 2 Comments

A colleague and friend of mine at work Ahmed, did a presentation this afternoon on “Personalised Search and its implications”. It was a thought provoking topic and one that really fascinated me. Google is the only search engine that is currently gathering user’s web history, location and various other information to provide more tailored results for the user, mainly when the user is logged into their Google account. If not, Google will simply store a cookie on the browser and use the IP address to provide personalised results.

Personalised search is meant to be a step towards a better, more streamlined experience for the user, but what are the implications of this in the world of SEO?

When we generally think of search results pages, we envisage the same universal set of results whomever and wherever we are, but this is not the case. In fact, such sets of results would prove to be inadequate in terms of user experience because whether we like it or not, we are all different and want different things. In the past and currently, SEOs work on-page and off-page to get sites ranked on the first page for certain terms and keywords regardless of user type or user behaviour, but this may no longer suffice nor be effective due to personalised search.

Now, more focus has to be placed on the user and target keywords to a particular targeted audience in order to achieve results in personalised serps. This means writing for your audience, in their language. Forget about the keyword density myth and other old school stuff. Capture their interest and give them a reason to be on your site because now with personalised search, it’s going to take a lot more work to attract visitors.

Personalise search does not mean the end of SEO. The end goal remains constant as ever; it is the tactics and the means of achieving the goals that need to change.

Filed Under: SEO Tagged With: ,

Sun, sea and sand in Sardinia

July 22, 2010 By Leave a Comment

I’ve been in Sardinia for six nights now but only just been able to really sit down with my Samsung N120 and do my internet thing. Mainly, I have been browsing online using my iPhone. Just hoping that I don’t get hit with a massive O2 bill like last time I was away.

First impressions of Sardinia was almost unbearably hot, much hotter than I expected! Locals very friendly and always willing to help, food over-priced in most places but the island is extremely beautiful.

George and I took a taxi from Alghero airport to Castelsardo, a 70km trip which cost €90, what a rip off. We should have learnt from previous experiences not to take a taxi. The hotel we stayed at for three nights in Castelsardo was the 3 * Hotel Riviera which we’d booked back home on the internet. With a balcony and sea view, it was lovely. There’s an old castle which resides on the top of the mountain dating back to the 12th Century overlooking the beach and the sea. Did a lot of sun bathing and walking here and also ate some wonderful seafood. Also, I found a book Dog Eats Dog at the hotel which I finished in less than two days, was a good beach read.

Not to be ripped off again, we hired a car, a Fiat Punto for the rest of the holiday and journeyed north to Santa Teresa Gallura for two which is a town on the most northern tip of Sardinia. On the way there, we stopped off at Valledoria and also visited Costa Paradiso. From the Rena Bianca beach in Santa Teresa Gallura, Corsica can easily be seen and the view is just splendid. Rena Bianca beach is one of the most beautiful beaches I’ve been to, it reminds me of the beaches in the Caribbean with its warm, crystal clear seas and white sand.

The only downside is that it was pretty packed with it being peak season and I’m not a big fan of busy beaches. When we visited St. Lucia in late September a year and a bit ago, we more or less had the beach to ourselves with it being rainy season. Luckily for us though, it never rained and we also got a 4* hotel suite for half the price.

Anyway, we stayed at 3* B&B Hotel Moderno near the centre of the town but 10 min walking distance from the beach. There was a lot going on in the centre, plenty of shops and restaurants and bands playing in the evening.

The first night we were here, there was some random ambulance charity do set up right outside our hotel cooking up some fresh yumyum style doughnuts which I queued up for after I put some Euros into the charity pot.

The day we checked out, we left the hire car parked up and headed to the main port to catch the ferry to Corsica to spend a day there. Corsica’s port in Bonifacio is rather grand with many fancy yachts parked up, similar to the port in Ibiza. I tried to look out for Lady Lola but found Lady Sheridan instead. Corsica is beautiful and we did some walking but by this time my ankle had given up and having the wrong footwear for walking didn’t help either.

It’s true that Corsica is ridiculously expensive – I picked up two small mangosteens and a tamarind from the fruit and veg shop and the lady tried to charge me €5.50!! I put the fruit back into their respective baskets. In Hong Kong, they would have cost less than one Euro.

We are spending the last 3 days of our trip in Alghero and booked into the Hotel Rina which was slightly disappointing. It’s supposedly a 3* hotel like the other two but it’s the dearest of the three. They wanted to charge us €158 a night but we managed to get the price down to €125; the other two rooms had a balcony, this one didn’t!

There’s a stalactite cave named Neptune’s Grotto in Alghero which we will be visiting and of course more sun bathing, however I am slowly melting from the heat and my nose has started to peel :)

Filed Under: General

Stop / block secure https pages from being indexed by Google and other search engines

July 15, 2010 By 5 Comments

When your site’s secure https pages get cached, it may cause severe duplication issues which in turn will hinder your SEO efforts and all the hard work you put into your site. There’s literally a duplicated copy of every single page on your site with https appended to the beginning of the URLs. As Google abhors duplicate content, you can imagine the implications this may have…

In this post I’ve outlined several ways of ensuring your https pages are blocked from being indexed or cached by Google and other search engines.

PHP

If you have a common header in a PHP file, add the following code between the <head> </head> tags

<?php
$_SERVER['HTTPS'] = ($_SERVER['HTTPS'] ? $_SERVER['HTTPS'] :"");
if ($_SERVER['HTTPS'] != "") {
<meta name="robots" content="noindex, nofollow" />};
?>

ASP

Same as above, with ASP files add this between the HTML <head> </head> tags

<%
If (Request.ServerVariables("HTTPS") = "on") Then
response.Write("<meta name='robots' content='noindex, nofollow'>")
else
response.Write("<meta name='robots' content='index, follow'>")
end if
%>

.htaccess

Note this will only work on Apache servers. Assuming you already have a robots.txt file, create a second one, giving it a different name, robots_https.txt for example. In this new robots_https.txt file enter the following

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

Upload this file to the root of the site.

In the .htaccess file add these three lines

RewriteEngine on
Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteCond %{SERVER_PORT} ^443$
RewriteRule ^robots.txt$ robots_https.txt

This tells the search engine crawlers if the page they are on is a secure https page to follow the robots_https.txt file which has disallowed the crawler from accessing any of the secure pages through the Disallow: / line in the file.

Filed Under: SEO Tagged With: , ,

Google Toolbar PageRank updates

July 12, 2010 By 6 Comments

Most of us in the online industry know that Google updates the PageRank on average four times a year. What we don’t know however, is when exactly it makes them, it’s kind of a like constant guessing/waiting game.

I should mention here that there are in fact two types of PageRank; the one we see in our browser toolbar (if installed) and the PageRank that Google uses. It is the latter one that is constantly updated and its true value known only to Google. And by the time we’re waiting for the next update, the value that’s shown in the little green bar can be grossly out of date, so it’s worth noting that PageRank is not something to go by and so should be taken with a pinch of salt.

Here’s a list of PageRank updates I’ve compiled so far, hope you find this useful. Maybe you can ‘predict’ the next update?

03 April 2010 : Saturday

31 December 2009 : Thursday

29 October 2009 : Thursday

28 May 2009 : Thursday

1 April 2009 : Wednesday

31 December 2008 : Wednesday

01 November 2008 : Thursday

27 September 2008 : Saturday

24 July 2008 : Thursday

29 April 2008 : Tuesday

29 February 2008 : Friday

20 October 2007 : Saturday

06 June 2007 : Wednesday

Filed Under: SEO Tagged With: ,

O2: Could not activate cellular data network

July 9, 2010 By 4 Comments

After updating my iPhone software to OS 4.0 the other day, I found my 3G network  had stopped working. Each time I tried to access data, I got a blue pop up screen saying “Could not activate cellular data network” and “You are not subscribed to a cellular data service”

Somehow the update had messed up my network settings, but I managed to find a solution. If you’re also on O2 and having the same problem, the following steps should fix it.

  1. Click on Settings
  2. Choose General > Network > Cellular Data Network
  3. Here you will need to change the APN for “Cellular Data”, “Visual Voicemail” and “MMS” to mobile.o2.co.uk
  4. If you’re a pay as you go customer, type in payandgo.o2.co.uk
  5. Restart your iPhone by pressing the Home and Sleep button simultaneously for the changes to take place.

Let me know how you get on with this. If it doesn’t work for you, try resetting the network in Settings by going to General >Reset and clicking on “Reset Network Settings”.

Filed Under: General Tagged With: , ,

SEO Apps for iPhone, tried and tested

July 9, 2010 By Leave a Comment

With over 200,000 apps available for the iPhone (and iPod) we are really spoilt for choice. And being a bit of an app freak, I’ve downloaded and played around with lots and thought I’d share some with you. Of course, keeping with the theme, these apps are designed specifically with SEO in mind. This is not a full blown review, more of a brief summary of each app I’ve tried and tested.

SEOStats

This free app provides SEO statistics and information on any given website simply by tapping the URL into the address bar. The information it returns includes:

Google PageRank

Number of Indexed Pages in Google

Number of links in Yahoo!

Number of .edu links

Number of .gov links

Domain age

del.ici.ous citations

Technorati.com citations

Alexa Rank

Compete Rank

Bloglines Subscribers

Wikipedia Links

Best of the Web links

Clearly, the developers didn’t take into account the aesthetics when designing this app; it loads up and displays the following screen where you tap in in the URL you want information on:

and returns this page:

For a free app, I would say it does a decent job of providing you with some quick real time stats ‘on the go’. It would also help if it was accurate though, as results are not consistent. My Google index jumps around sporadically. A nice feature would be the ability to turn ‘off’ the stats I don’t want to see or bother about.

Space Dog, the developers are intending to release a PRO version of this app which will include a keyword analysis tool, a SERP checked, the ability to save sites you’ve checked and much more. I’ll look forward to checking that out.

LinkJuice

Link Juice is one of the better quality SEO apps on the market. Costing £1.19, there’s no free/lite alternative. Bar the ugly startup screen, it has a really nice user interface and combines data from many reliable industry recognised sources. This includes SEOmoz, SEMRush, MajesticSEO and Yahoo!’s Site Explorer, with more to come (they say).

Link Juice provides data on backlinks, anchor text, page authority, domain authority, linking sources and much more. I like the option to turn on and off information that you deem unnecessary in the settings page.

The only let down with Link Juice is the limitations you have with the data. Sure it gives you rich, detailed info but there’s just no way of delving further into it. It shows I have 1,783 links, but I can’t filter this data  so it shows links from external sources that are followed only – now that would be really useful. Another thing is it does not currently save any history of searches but apparently this is in the works for the next update.

Analytics Agent

Analytics startup screen

This is Analytics for the iPhone. It’s based on the Google Analytics API, developer by Global Agent Inc. and you can access the sites you have registered with GA by logging in with your email and password. I was a bit wary of doing this with being a third party app and not the official Analytics but ddi it anyway. The version I’m using is the free/lite version and while the full Pro version boasts a multitude of reports and fully detailed charts, this Lite version is still pretty cool.

Analytics visits and page views

The feature which many users including myself find highly irritating is the sponsored clickable ad which sits right below the “Sites” button. As it’s in such a prominent place, not only does it take up valuable screen space, it’s easy to accidentally press it which when done so will take you out and away of the app, which is VERY annoying!

Pear Analytics

With a really smart looking startup screen, on first appearances Pear Analytics looks promising. However, after typing in my URL and pressing the “Analyze” button, the app freezes on me for a couple of minutes and then shuts itself down. At least this app was free, but all I can say is: don’t even bother.

Crash...

Filed Under: SEO

Sitemaps: about XML Sitemaps

July 4, 2010 By 6 Comments

Google recently announced that Sitemaps can now finally contain multiple content types. This is good news for websites which had to submit several Sitemaps in the past, one for URLs, one for images, one for video, etc. It will make Sitemaps easier to manage, especially with the ever increasing number of specialised types such as mobile and geographical content. However, individual Sitemaps will still be accepted and some may prefer to keep their content types separate.

XML Sitemaps

A Sitemap is an XML file that contains a lists of all your website’s pages. This file is usually submitted to the various search engines for crawling and enables them to discover, crawl and index pages of your site which they may not have crawled yet or even be aware of. This could be for many reasons; having a badly structured site which crawlers have difficulty navigating through, broken links and weak page rank coupled with deeply nested inner pages, to name just a few.

There are many Sitemap generators available for all kinds of websites, some of which I will outline below.  If you don’t already have an XML Sitemap for your site, I’d highly recommend you get one!

Static HTML site

For static HTML sites, I like to use the free online Sitemap generator. Simple and easy to use, you can also create HTML sitemaps which you can use to help aid users around your site. Set the frequency to weekly and priority to automatic and press “start”. The downside is that it can only generate a maximum of 500 pages. They do have a full paid for version for a one-off price of $19.99, however I like to use this one on Auditmypc which also has a great selection of online tools worth checking out.

WordPress blog/site

My favourite XML Sitemap generator for WordPress is a plugin called Google XML Sitemaps. Two blank files need to be created and uploaded to the root before the plugin is activated, named sitemap.xml and sitemap.xml.gz. Right click these two files and change the permission to 666, or writable before activating the plugin. Once activated, there’s nothing you need to do as it will dynamically generate a new sitemap each time it’s accessed.

Joomla

As with other platforms, there’s an abundance of extensions to choose from, all of which do more or less the same job. The extension I prefer though, is XMAP. A free extension for Joomla, this works particularly well with large, e-commerce sites. Simply download and open the .zip file, then upload the two folders through the Joomla extension manager, that’s it! To find out where the URL of XML sitemap is located, go to Components > XMAP and click on ‘Preferences’.

X-Cart

I’ve not personally experienced installing any extensions (mods) in X-Cart, but I found a free XML Sitemap generator which looks pretty good, called Google Sitemap.

If you browse online, you’ll find many sites that charge a one-off fee for extensions, but there’s no need as there’s always free ones about. You just need to have a good hunt around. A free XML Sitemap generator worth checking out is GSiteCrawler.

Once a sitemap has been created, I would usually add a link to the homepage in the footer somewhere to the XML Sitemap. This is because crawlers usually enter a site through the homepage so this will ensure they will get to the Sitemap and crawl the entire site. To be extra thorough, you should also add the URL of the Sitemap to the end of the robots.txt file to point the crawlers in the right direction, like so

Sitemap: http://www.yoursite.com/sitemap.xml
Filed Under: SEO Tagged With: , ,

Last month’s O2 phonebill shocker

July 2, 2010 By Leave a Comment

I wanted to share this with you, it’s a couple of text messages I received off my mobile service provider, O2 (image below). The first text message I got was while I was away in Hong Kong. It warned me that £189 of data transfer had been made and that if I spend any more, they’ll have to stop the service. That was a bit scary, I didn’t even think I’d spent that much; I was just checking a few emails, Facebooking (is this even a word?), tweeting and general things like that really. But anyway, I accepted that I’d made a silly mistake, roaming outside of the UK and that this be a lesson learnt and hopefully not be so foolish again.

Then just the other day 5pm at work, I received another text off O2, saying that I have now spent £40 on data transfer, in Europe this time! This was getting beyond a joke, and to say I was perturbed was an understatement. The O2 customer service number “202″ was dialled in ready for calling as soon as it was 5.30pm. I finally got through to someone after 15 minutes and explained the situation to them.

Turns out that I was the third person in a row to call up about the £40 data transfer in Europe text message and that it was some technical glitch in their program and to not worry about it. The kind man also said that I’d only spent £45.06 while I was in Hong Kong, not £189. That too was some other glitch – what a relief!!

The good news is that there is now a clampdown on telephone service providers that are trying to rip off customer while roaming abroad. Now, there is a cap on the roaming service which means that  if you’ve been roaming excessively, service providers will not charge you any more than £40 after which you are free to carry on roaming until you reach the limit of 50MB, where they will then stop the roaming service.

o2 text message

Filed Under: General Tagged With: ,

This time of the year already?

July 1, 2010 By 2 Comments

I can’t believe we’re halfway through the year already. I’ll have been working with Just Search for six months at the end of July and I will be 27 veery soon, unfortunately. How the time flies!

Just thought I’d write a quick July the 1st blogpost. During the past week or so, I’ve upgraded from WordPress 2.9 to 3.0 and still trying to get used to it. The user interface is visibly lighter, not sure if I’m keen on it, it’s a bit harsh on the eyes. Maybe an optional colour scheme would have been nice.

I’m looking forward to playing around with the new features nonetheless.

My colleague/friend Benoit showed me a WordPress Woo Theme at work the other day, called The Morning After, which I downloaded and activated as soon as I got home as I really like it. I’m currently using it, but have not styled or modified it one bit. Knowing me, I’ll probably leave it all ‘default’ for a long while before I get round to doing anything with it. :(

Filed Under: General