Archive for October, 2008
In an increasingly-competitive search environment, it’s more important now than ever to have a solid strategy for building quality links to your website. Inbound link quality and count still seems to be one of the most influential factors in determining search rankings. Many of the traditional techniques used for building links, such as article marketing and link exchanges, are still pretty effective and important to an SEO campaign. To gain a competitive edge, however, one has to be creative and adapt new ways to attract quality links. Here are four link-building strategies that you may not have tried.
Contests
Both online and offline, contests have always been a good strategy for creating buzz around a brand, product or business. Consumers love opportunities to win free stuff and are usually attracted to contests. Next time you’re running a contest, promote it on popular contest promotion websites and social networks. Attractive contests are viral by nature and word of them can quickly spread across the blogosphere. If you’re contest is unique enough, you may get a lot of press from this strategy.
Guest blogging
Guest blogging is when a writer posts to another writer’s blog. There are many incentives for guest blogging including; increasing exposure, monetary compensation and of course, backlinks. Contact bloggers in your industry or in related industries and offer to write a good article for them. In exchange, ask for a link back to your website. It may take a little work to form a good relationship with blogging partners, but it will be worth the effort if you can acquire a link and traffic from new blogs.
Job Fairs
College job fairs are not only a great place to find new talent for your organization; they are also a good place to find quality .edu links. Most colleges and universities promote upcoming job fairs online, often linking to the websites of employers who are sponsoring the job fair. If you’re organization recruits new college graduates on a regular basis, be sure to follow-up with the organizers of these events and make sure you’re getting a link back to your website. Sometimes, all you have to do is ask for a link. From the perspective the search engines, .edu links are a strong indicator of the importance of a website. While it may not be feasible to attend these events just for the purpose of gaining a link, it is worth a little extra effort to get a link if you’re already attending.
Charities
Links from non-profit organization websites can be great because many of these sites already have strong trust. Do you regularly donate to any charities, non-profit organizations or foundations? If so, make a phone call and see if they’ll link to your website as thanks for being a supporter of their organization.
Oddly enough, some of the best links you can get won’t come from your online efforts. Your actions offline, such as involvement in charities, professional organizations, etc., will provide the best opportunities for high quality links. Take a minute to ask yourself or your clients what they are doing in the ‘real world’ that might provide a linking opportunities online.
Tags: link building
Posted on Oct 30, 2008 by Damien to General, Technology Trends
Here we go. I’ve just installed a new design blog on our servers to better server the viewing public and give us something a bit more manageable to work with. The old blog was built on the Nucleus system of blogging and has become quickly outdated. Well, not that quickly but it was over 2 years old and the system itself had become difficult to extend.
This new blog is built on the Wordpress system, fully widget ready and completely expandable.
Tags: That Agency's New Blog
An outdoorsman’s dream, Silver HIlton needed an online presence to embody the atmosphere of it’s British Columbia, Canadian fishing lodge and THAT Agency was there to deliver.
The experience result was a site that accurately showcased the lodge’s wide open world of outdoor sports from towering mountain ranges to it’s rushing rivers.
Built exclusively on a PHP platform wrapped in optimized CSS the site is streamlined and user friendly. Focusing more on the visual aesthetics and allowing the imagery and design to really convey the experience of the Silver Hilton Lodge. A harmonious marriage of imagery, technology and information, the site is the true online face of Silver Hilton Steelhead Lodge.
Here is a brief critique of a couple of popular sites with regards to design and usability.
1.) www.commarts.com- a designer’s informational site. You might recognize it as it is the best graphic design magazine in Barnes and Nobles priced at $15. But here online, it’s free and it’s just as packed with useful information…
2.) www.tripadvisor.com- a traveler’s site. My friends use it often when they go out of the country. It helps you plan your trip step by step so your time is not wasted…
3.) www.amazon.com- an online shopper’s site. Everyone has been to this site. It started out with books and it’s expanded to sell everything including groceries…
www.commarts.com- a designer’s informational site. You might recognize it as being the best graphic design magazine in Barnes and Nobles priced at $14.95. But here online, it’s free and it’s just as packed with useful information.
It’s great because every day they feature fresh designers in the world of Illustration, Print, Web, Interactive developers, Exhibits and many more categories. The design of the site show cases the designers that are featured. To keep their brand identity they use skinny fonts for the headers, similar to that of their logo. They use only “green” for the title of the article or beginning of the paragraph. All other colors are grey, black and white. Keeping it simple really makes the designers work stand out. The navigation is across the top and the slick drop down menus keep the site up to date. They also have a “News” section on the right panel so you can know what everyone is talking about and stay educated in your field.
www.tripadvisor.com- a traveler’s site. My friends use it often when they go out of the country. It helps you plan your trip step by step so your time is not wasted.
Tripadvisor is really easy to use. It’s broken up into only 2 sections, the first being your trip and where you are going and the second is where others have gone and how they reviewed it. It’s not bogged down with any ads or sponsors. The colors are simple and stay consistent, green and orange. The pages load fast so you can compare different options easily. It seems like they didn’t miss any stops putting this site together either, it has just about every location and hundreds of reviews on that location. What you choose is also rated, so you can read the good and the bad. You can really spend hours researching your destination, which is great. Once you find your perfect trip you can buy everything right there.
www.amazon.com- an online shopper’s site. Everyone has been to this site. It started out with books and it’s expanded to sell everything including groceries.
The design, is great for SEO. This is product site and that is all you see. Pick a category and a plethora of items are at your disposal. The color scheme changed from green and tan to bright orange and blue, it is now very masculine looking. My eyes wander all over the page, my eye is not drawn to the product as it should be. All the headers and titles are orange, copy is blue and black. This color scheme is used throughout every department and is quit boring. They are forgetting the hierarchy of the page, consistency without being drab and how great a little negative space can be.
Once you get past the lack of design put forth on this site, the usability is excellent. This site has saved many students hundreds of dollars in book fees. Once you find the product you searched for you have the option of choosing it “used” which can save you up to 50%. Amazon’s definition of “used” is the corner was creased, or it was on the book shelf. So everything is always in great condition, you buy books like that from Barnes and Noble all the time, why not cheaper? Check out is a breeze, they store your account information, and most times shipping is free.
The importance of the domain name in SEO is a widely debated topic. There are those SEOs who swear by the effectiveness that a keyword rich domain name has on rankings. There are others who swear that the domain name is not all that important. In the end, it’s a really hard thing to test which is why there isn’t more collusion. For the most part, we rely on what we see in the search engine results pages (SERPs) to make inferences about this issue. Today, I want to briefly point out both sides of the issue.
Argument: Domain Name IS Critical to Search Engine Rankings
There’s no doubt that, if you were to search several random, short-tail keywords, you’d find that keyword rich domains appear toward to the top of search results quite often. While writing this article, I searched for shoes, cars, doors and rental cars. After taking a look at the results of each, many of the domain names in the top 5 or 10 of the search results are keyword rich. This in itself could be an argument that domain name may have a strong impact on search rankings.
When considering this argument from a logic standpoint, there is an argument that’s hard to dispute and that’s that a website’s domain name, more often than not, is a good indicator of its content. For example, you wouldn’t likely see news articles about your favorite celebrities on the a website www.car-rental-agency.com. Likewise, you would expect www.cars.com to contain information about cars.
Argument: Domain Name ISN’T Critical to Search Engine Rankings
Analyzing the results from above in a different light, there are domains appears in the top 10 of search results that contain absolutely no keywords from the search query. The argument could be made that the keyword rich domain names are correlated with high rankings for competitive search terms, but may not be the entire cause of those rankings.
Can a case be made, then, that it’s more often the SEO-conscious companies that utilize keyword rich domains and than that it’s their other SEO efforts that drive their rankings? Perhaps. If I were to build a site from scratch that was going to rely on organic traffic, I’d certainly choose a keyword rich domain name. But I’d also have a solid optimization strategy implemented, too.
Overall, I think it would be tough to argue that domain name has no importance or effect on search rankings. While you can certainly get by without a keyword rick domain, life would probably be a bit easier if you had one. If you’ve got an established site and are considering a changing to a more keyword-rich domain, you may want to consider focusing on other optimization techniques like creating better content and building quality links instead.
When writing CSS you’ll often find yourself with an extremely long CSS doc that could pass the 1000 line mark. Commenting every block of CSS can be very helpful and benificial especially if working within a team of developers who may need to change items in the future.
Aside from just commenting your individual blocks of code there’s also another VERY helpful method that we often use here at THAT Agency. We simply break our stylesheets into several documents and link them through a CSS import. Breaking everything apart into it’s base elements is a handy way of navigating. Some basic categories could be:
Reset – a full CSS reset to alleviate cross browser issues
Structure – base structure of the layout
Text – controls all copy, header tags, horizontal rules, etc.
Navigation – Primary navigation
Header – Logo header, contact information, etc.
Footer – The all important closing statement
First we’ll start off with a base StyleSheet.css which would house all classes that don’t necessarily fall within the above mentioned categories. Here is a sample stylesheet header:
/*********************************************************************
Sample Cascading Stylesheet (c) 2008
Written by: THAT Agency LLC
All rights reserved.
Any reproduction or intentional misuse is strickly prohibited
*********************************************************************/
/* Reset CSS */
@import url(“reset.css”);
/* All Text CSS */
@import url(“text.css”);
/* 960 Grid CSS */
@import url(“960.css”);
/* Global Navigation CSS */
@import url(“global_nav.css”);
/* jQuery Tooltip CSS */
@import url(“jquery.cluetip.css”);
/* jQuery Facebox Lightbox CSS */
@import url(“facebox.css”);
/*********************************************************************
By using the @import url to bring in corresponding stylesheets allows easy access to the block items such as primary navigation CSS, base Text CSS and various other items that may otherwise get lost within a long CSS document. This also serves as a major help when working with a team of developers as each can then focus on just a particular block of CSS without the need to adjust the main CSS doc.
Tags: CSS
Posted on Oct 21, 2008 by Damien to Projects
ME Cabo, one of four five star ultra chic hotels by Sol Melia recently contracted THAT Agency to design and develop a website that could give the site visitors the high end experience that patrons to the hotel have come to expect. In this respect, THAT Agency, at high end web design company, came through in fine fashion.
Upon entering the experience based site of ME Cabo you’re greeted by a subtle and very effective story displayed within a large yet optimized flash element. This stylish representation of ME Cabo conveys the luxury and style of the hotel itself.
As you navigate through the site the home page influence remains allowing visitors to really experience the hotel in full force. Large crisp images, thumbnails that launch larger images in Ajax lightboxes and well written content all are extremely informative and inspirational. This site is truly a must visit.
Following closely along the ME Brand guidelines the Ultra Chic ME Hotels are a stunning group of resorts located around the world.
Technologies used within the site include Flash, AJAX, CSS and PHP. ME Cabo is also a completely bi-lingual online presence catering both to English and Spanish speaking visitors the world over.
Tags: ME by Melia Resort Site Design, ME Cabo, ME Resort Website
The internet is full of all kinds of applications. Some are incredibly useful, some are not THAT useful and others are just downright useless. I would say wordle fits somewhere in the middle, but it has one charactistic THAT wins me over – its fun.
Heres what wordle does….it crawls the words in your webpage, pulls out the most used terms then kicks them back at you in the form of a design! You can then take the resulting design and customize it in realtime using a WSIWYG editor. Its pretty cool and can be quite rewarding. Some of the designs they show are really good and it shows you what words are coming up on your site.
I admit THAT wordles usefulness is questionable, but its fun and I find it more entertaining than following Uncle Bens rice on Twitter.
A THATagency Wordle is shown below…….go ahead and try wordle yourself here: wordle.net
Wordle
Tags: wordle
Posted on Oct 15, 2008 by Rick to SEO
When it comes to SEO, link building is probably the most time-consuming part of most campaigns. This is why it’s important to tweak every onsite factor possible to maximize the impact of the inbound links that you’ve acquired. One tactic we’ve used in the past here at THAT Agency is a tactic known as PageRank sculpting. This tactic is geared towards maximizing the impact of the inbound links that a website already has on search engine rankings.
What is PageRank Sculpting?
PageRank sculpting is a technique where, by adjusting onsite elements like website architecture and applying nofollow tags to chosen links, you can guide the search engines in assigning PageRank to the most important pages of your website. Ideally, you’ll want to guide PageRank to pages that you’ve optimized for search and that will convert well with your visitors.
In general, most websites have the strongest PageRank on the homepage. This is because PageRank is determined mostly by inbound links and most people will link to a website’s homepage more often than to an interior landing page. Since PageRank can be passed from one page to another when one page links to another page, how you design your website navigation will affect the way that Google assigns PageRank to internal pages of your website.
For example, internal pages linked to from the homepage will look, in the eyes of Google, as important pages because the most important page on the website, the homepage, links to them. Pages not linked to from the homepage but linked to from other pages on the site will still get PageRank, but not as much. Also, on most websites, the navigation area and footer appears on each and every page of the website. Usually, these areas content links. In the eyes of Google, any page that is linked to from many internal pages also appears to be important and thus, will likely receive more PageRank than internal pages with fewer internal links. These are only two examples of how your website architecture will affect your PageRank. The important thing to remember is that your most important pages should be linked to from your homepage and from the global navigation, if possible.
The NoFollow Attribute
On many sites, the global navigation links to the ‘About us’ or ‘Privacy Policy’ pages. From the user experience perspective, this is necessary. From a search engine perspective, this can be a bad thing. By linking to these types of pages, which aren’t typically optimized for search, you’re passing PageRank that could better be used on pages that are optimized for search.
This is where the nofollow attribute comes into play. It looks like this html:
a href=”http://www.yourwebsite.com/page.php” rel=”nofollow”
The nofollow attribute can be applied to any link and tells Google not to pass PageRank to the page on the other end. In effect, this means that a little more PageRank will be passed to each of the other links on the same page. By applying this attribute to global navigation links which link to non-important pages (form the perspective of search engines), you can force PageRank to be passed to the more important pages.
The three important things to remember about PageRank Sculpting are:
* Link to the important pages on your website from your homepage
* Link to the important pages on your website often
* If you have unimportant links (privacy policy, about us, etc.) in your global navigation, apply the nofollow attribute
Tags: pagerank
To keep track of all the SEO tools that I use while working on SEO projects, I’ve mostly used bookmarks. I’ve got one bookmark for a tool that analyzes inbound links, a bookmark that tests website speed, two bookmarks that check search engine rankings, a bookmark that checks keyword density and the list goes on. In all, I think I’ve got bookmarks to about 15 different websites, each of which have one or more tools useful to doing SEO analysis.
Of all the tools I typically use, some are more difficult to use than others. Some of the tools required me to login and register, some charge a yearly fee and some require nothing at all. It can be pretty time consuming jumping around this much when researching SEO projects.
This is why I’m glad to announce that THAT Agency has finally released a new set of SEO tools. Phase two of our launch of thatseo.com included the launch of an entire SEO resource section which includes over 15 SEO tools, SEO whitepapers and checklists and a comprehensive SEO glossary.
In our collection of SEO tools, we’re got a PageRank checker, AlexaRank checker, keyword position research tools, a keyword density checker, a link suggestion tool, a link analyzer and much more.
Whether you’re a beginner or experience SEO, I’m sure you’ll find these tools and resources valuable to helping you to improve your search engine visibility. Most importantly, you’ll be able to access all these resources in one place and you won’t have to register or pay to use them. Checkout these new tools and bookmark ‘em if you like what you see.
Tags: seo tools
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