I’m starting to lay off on pink, and I don’t like to write about SEO anymore.
I know. What am I supposed to do with this site now, huh? I’m starting to detach myself from the online identities I’ve carried for the past so-and-so years. I guess that includes PinkSEO too.
For now, just in case you’re looking for the person who used to blog here (and who used to be obssessed with pink and SEO), she’s somewhere else now, uhm, chasing dreams. c”,)
I thought it was going to help me be more productive if I move out of the office and/or my bedroom and spend quality time in some cozy coffee shop with my laptop and my Ipod. And I thought I’d get to have faster downloads too, I mean, last time I checked, wifi is relatively faster in coffee shops.
Hence I didn’t mind paying 100 bucks for 60 minutes of internet connection, because I thought they’d at least be worth it. WRONG.
And so I end up with an erratic internet connection inside an abnormally cold coffee shop (I’m brrrr-freeezing!), with my downloads running at 1.2KB/s to 15KB/s, no thanks to Globequest (I mean, yes, Globe Visibility still sucks sometimes, but I haven’t been victimized by another Globe product until now). Whut a slow. :(
On top of all these, I totally lost the mood to have a productive night because the Christmas carols playing in the background is louder than the music that’s plugged into my ears (not that I hate Christmas carols, but I’m not exactly in the mood to hear Rudolf and Jingle Bells right now).
So yeah, aside from for the complementary drink they gave me for I duno, being their only customer tonight?; and the additional Starbucks Planner stickers, my night so far is not going the way I hoped.
And no, don’t get me wrong. Starbucks is one of my favorite places! It just kinda sucks that you have to pay for internet connection that’s crappy anyway when other coffee shops (Bo’s, San Francisco Cafe, etc) provide it as a free service.
Blpht. I don’t intend to make this blog a venue of my complaints. It’s just that.. I need more space for this than my plurk page can offer. Heh. I stop now.
Also, I’m outa here in an hour.
Originally titled as “What Mcdo Delivery Failed To Do”
I’m sure I’m not the only one who just suddenly craved for McMuffin and hash browns, and automatically typed in 8mcdo.com on her browser only to be welcomed by a big blob of green. No redirects. Not even a link pointing you to the right direction. Just an abandoned site that’s a big blob of green.
So I googled a couple of keywords, “mcdo delivery pasig”, “mcdo delivery manila”, “new 8mcdo website”, I tell you, I’ve tried all the important keywords and still — the new online mcdo delivery website did not show up anywhere. Tsk tsk. Pissed, I *almost* decided to just deprive myself of my morning craving, until ever reliable Mommy Maia told me to try mcdelivery.com, or mcdodelivery.com, and after a couple of tries, we finally landed on the right URL: MCDELIVERY.COM.PH. (Ugh, imagine all the lost sales, people! Stoopid.)
What Mcdo should’ve done is pretty simple.
Anyway, if ever you landed on this site Googling for mcdo delivery from your cubicle in some office in Metro Manila, here’s a little help to find the new online Mcdonalds delivery. The URL is MCDELIVERY.COM.PH.
I wait for my mcmuffin nao.
Dear Rand Fishkin, No, I’m not Melissa. When I saw you at the elevator of the Westin Hotel (you were going down and I was on my way up), and I took the courage to say “Hey Rand!”, a nod or a smile would’ve sufficed. But then you said, “Hey.. Melissa, right?“, and for one minute there I wished my name really was Melissa. :P
But my name is Riz. And there’s no way for you to remember that because I didn’t even mention my name to you when I asked if you’d mind me taking your photo at the Seomoz booth at SMX East. But really, thanks for trying. :)
AUTOFOCUS FAIL. :(
That photo would have made my day, if only my camera’s autofocus did not fail me — why God, why now?? So I have a blurred photo of you smiling at me, and I was too shy to ask for another one. Then I ended up on stalker mode again, taking candid photos of you.
..and the lovely Seomoz booth :)
At least I didn’t mess up Gillian’s photo.
Lovely bunch of people, this Seomoz. And I’m digging the shirt too. Thanks Gillian, the size you gave me is perfect. :) You guys are made of awesome. :)
More SMX East 2008 photos after the jump.
Nathan Buggia is up on stage again. He starts by disecting from an SEO standpoint a website called Arbor Snowboards. The site is very flashy and interactive, but when you look at the source code, the meta title alone does not say anything about the site — meta title is “Arbor: Home”.
Unsurprisingly, while the site ranks number 1 for the term “Arbor”, it ranks 49th for the keyword “snowboards”, which basically what the site is about. Nathan suggests ways to optimize the code. Some AJAX and HIJAX best practices:
CSS can improve performance by separating formatting from content. However, it has been abused by Spammers to try and hide links and keywords. (I.e. setting fonts to 0, or setting color to #FFFFFF).
Use <h1> instead of, say, <span class=”heading1″>. Use HTML tags semantically.
Sharad Verma, Sr Product Manager, of Yahoo@ Search, gives a picture of Web 2.0 to start with. He shares that there are 3 pillars of Web 2.0:
CSS is good, external CSS is even better. Yahoo! understands content layout. Through CSS, you can rank for your keywords better and place important stuff higher in your codes. It promotes efficient crawling. It makes pages light.
Don’t disallow CSS in robots.txt. Yahoo! would like to understand your layout also. Don’t hide text using CSS.
Is your site a website or a web application? Some sites are actually web applications. They are functionality driven, don’t need to be deep indexed. Web Sites, on the other hand, are content driven, hence need to be deep indexed. Use AJAX selectively.
Spiders can’t parse AJAX content. AJAX is delivered via JavaScript that search engines have difficulty crawling and indexing. Spiders can’t extract java script links. AJAX content can’t be linked to, can’t be bookmarked.
If you have to have AJAX, make sure that your initial page should have content and navigation in html. Use href links. Turn off JavaScript in your browser and ensure that the content is navigable. Be careful with mirror sites. If your AJAX site has an HTML version, the HTML is the one that will be indexed.
Yahoo! indexes flash. The problem with flash, however, is that they are rendered via JavaScript. Because there is no deep linking, there is less link juice. More over, one URL for the entire flash movie equates to bad user experience.
He ends by promoting the new site explorer, which is now out of beta. It has new site features, allowing you to submit sitemaps, delete URL paths, and rewrite URLs.
Daniel Pang, Software Engineer of Google, starts by discussing also the web 2.0 environment. Much of Web 2.0 is already search engine friendly. Web 2.0 SEO is more designing the site for user accesibility and experience, rather than for search engines. Does your site work in Lynx? If it does, people will be able to use it everywhere (online, mobile, etc.)
Web 2.0 Flash / AJAX. Web 2.0 sites are now embellished with Flash and AJAX elements of richer media (ie. Flickr and Youtube). Daniel discusses a bit of HIJAX also (this I haven’t heard of until now).
Googlebot can read some content and links within flash, but not all. Best practice is HTML for content and navigation, complement with flash for applications and animations.
CSS allows one to separate content from presentation. It’s great for making changes to visual layout, and is generally not much to think about specially fo accessibility/search engines.
Side note: I didn’t know Danny S could be so soft spoken. :)
Tony Adams, SEO Manager of Yahoo!, is up next. He says that Web 2.0 is all about “sleek” designs. A dilemma for search engines, however, is that content is often controlled by JavaScript which is not search engine friendly.
Be strategic in the AJAX implementations. Separate content from presentation and interactions build using scripting language. Work with standards or platform teams to build standard interactions.
(This I have to try) Web Developer Toolbar Firefox addon. It allows you to disable Javascript, CSS, images, etc, allowing you to actually see what the search engines are seeing, on the site content standpoint.
Q&A. Danny Sullivan starts of Q&A with a question on H1 tag, if there’s value in setting the keyword to an H1 tag, even if you set it to look like normal text in your CSS.
Sharad: H1 tags don’t seem to be an important factor.
Nathan: He would question scripts that make H1 tags styled to look like everything else.
Daniel: H1 tags still indicate logical labels, especially when there’s no CSS and AJAX, so there’s still value to it.
Regarding sitemaps:
Daniel: Sitemaps is supplemental, but its better to have more internal links.
Nathan: In making sitemaps, don’t put all URLs, just put the best URLs there. The sitemaps are used in identifying which pages are most authoritative.
On URLs:
Daniel: Better to use nice, clean, and short URLs. If your URLs have a lot of slashes, rename them to shorter versions. Don’t just replace ?s and #s with slashes because to them, “/” does not translate to separation of paramenters.
(Okay, I suck at documenting/transcripting the Q&A, the panelists are talking a handful! I should just post this one.) :)
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