Jay Goldman » mod_rewrite http://jaygoldman.com Technologist, Designer, Speaker, Author, Generally Swell Guy Sun, 25 Jul 2010 14:25:34 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.6 en hourly 1 8 SEO Tips and Tricks http://jaygoldman.com/2009/02/08/8-seo-tips-and-tricks/ http://jaygoldman.com/2009/02/08/8-seo-tips-and-tricks/#comments Mon, 09 Feb 2009 03:03:34 +0000 jaygoldman http://jaygoldman.com/?p=457 Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.]]> A client recently asked for a quick overview of good SEO practises, so I thought I’d share them with all of you at the same time. This is by no means an exhaustive list, but following these items will definitely make a difference to your site’s performance in major search engines. These are roughly in order of priority (the first items being the most important):

  • Landing Pages: It’s impossible to do a good job of optimizing your homepage for every possible term people might use to find your site. Think of it as a town fair full of criers who are all yelling their own messages: the end result is a din of roughly equal volume in which nothing stands out. Plan instead to add a page to your site for each search term, heavily optimized for that term using all the tips below, so that page becomes the top organic search result for the term and therefore the page that visitors land on when coming to your site. It’s important to make sure that these pages aren’t islands (i.e.: not linked from any of the site’s main content), because otherwise web crawlers may not find and index them.
  • Titles: Some of the most overlooked SEO real estate in the world is staring right at you from the top of this very window. The <title> tag, which sets the text displayed in the title bar of the browser window, is very highly rate by search engines as being indicative of the page’s content. The engines differ in how much of the <title> they index, but the general rule of thumb is that the first 60 or so characters are the most important. This dictates that the search term should come before things like a company name, so it would be better to have “8 SEO Tips and Tricks » JayGoldman.com” rather than “JayGoldman.com: 8 SEO Tips and Tricks”. Luckily, this also tends to be more useful to users when they view their browser history or bookmarks in a narrow window or menu that cuts off the text, since the name of the page they want is more likely to be visible. I use the WordPress SEO Title Tag Plugin to swap the order around on this blog.
  • Repetition: The search term should be repeated in an <h1> as close to the top of the <body> as possible. We saw a difference for some of Radiant Core’s clients between having text at the top of the HTML and moving it down for presentation using CSS and just putting it at the bottom (e.g.: the list of SEO links at the bottom of the TargetVacations site actually occurs at the top of the HTML and is moved down through a combination of CSS and JavaScript since the page’s length is variable). The term should be repeated again in a <p> following that <h1>, ideally surrounded by <strong> tags.
  • Font Replacement: A necessity if you’re particular to a specific font and want to make sure your text is rendered in it. Since HTML doesn’t yet support embedding fonts (though it’s coming in CSS3 as WebFonts), specifying a font in CSS will only work if the person viewing your site has that font installed on their computer (and could still look strange if they have a different font with the same name). There are two popular routes: image replacement and sIFR for Flash-based replacement. Image replacement is much more limiting in that it requires you to create an image for each piece of text, while sIFR can be really difficult to get working, requires Flash for display, and can really slow down page rendering. I use a mix of the two on the homepage of this blog, rendering the header using image replacement since it never changes and rendering blog titles in sIFR to get Futura without having to manually create images for each post’s title.
    • Doug Bowman of Stopdesign (and now the Visual Design Lead at Google) has a great overview of using background-image to replace text. My preferred method was originally outlined by Mike Rundle and has gone on to be the favourite used widely by web designers (and is even linked to by Doug): Accessible Image Replacement.
    • The concept behind sIFR is really elegant: create a very lightweight Flash movie that has the font embedded and then pull in the text it replaces and render it using that font. The accronym stands for Scalable Inman Flash Replacement, named after Shaun Inman who came up with one of the original CSS-based image replacements. sIFR was originally created by Mike Davidson and Mark Wubben but hasn’t been updated by them in a long time. There’s a sIFR Lite available from AllCrunchy.com, though it looks like it hasn’t been updated in a while either.
  • Domain  Names: Most of the things search engines look for center around trying to determine the content of a page based on the text it contains and the meta information that surrounds it. The more difficult it is to fake the meta data, the more stake placed in it. Some of the hardest to fake are the domain name and URL of a page, which makes them two of the more important tweaks you can make. It’s harder to optimize the domain name since you only have one for your whole site, but if you sell You Won’t Believe it’s Not Tuna you should grab a domain like tunareplacement.com rather than chickenofthesea.com. The age of your domain name does factor into the calculation, so it’s generally better to renovate a site and keep the old domain than it is to start entirely from scratch. It’s also worth noting that some search engines, particularly Google, treat subdomains as different sites, which means things like blog.jaygoldman.com and www.jaygoldman.com don’t necessarily share PageRank. Unless there’s a stronger-than-SEO reason to go with a subdomain, consider a directory instead (www.jaygoldman.com/blog). You should also consider that www.jaygoldman.com and jaygoldman.com (without the www) aren’t necessarily the same, so you should decide early on which you’re going to use and be consistent in promoting the site (I use jaygoldman.com). You can configure mod_rewite (see below) to remove the www if you choose to go that route.
  • URL: The search term should ideally be part of the URL, using -s for spaces (e.g.: www.tunareplacement.com/recipes/tuna-and-marshmellow-salad). This is much, much better than the default URL that your blog sofware or CMS probably produces (www.tunareplacement.com/recipe.aspx?id=23), so you should absolutely switch over if you have that control (WordPress users should take a look in the Permalinks section of the Settings in their WP-Admin). I’ve always prefered avoiding file extensions in URLs entirely (e.g.: .jsp, .php, .asp(x), etc.) since it exposes part of the site’s implementation into the URL and then into people’s bookmarks, web crawlers, and the like. You’ll break all of those if you later rebuild the site on a different technology, so it’s better to abstract to a higher level earlier and just change the rewrite destinations later. Human readable URLs also kick machine generated URLs butt when it comes to things like analytics or emailing links to friends. I much prefer using URL rewriting, which allows the clean and human readable /recipes/tuna-and-marshmellow-salad to get rewritten to /recipe.php?title=tuna-and-marshmellow-salad behind the scenes. If you’re running Apache and don’t mind some server config, take a look at mod_rewrite, but be warned that it’s like black magic, ninjas, and awesomeness mixed together in a very potent but incredibly tricky potion. If you’re running IIS, take a look at IASPI ReWrite, IIS Rewrite, or Mod Rewrite for IIS. I’ve got no experience with any of them so that’s about all I can say on that topic.
  • Sitemaps: Way back in the early days of the web, Site Maps were actually a page on your site that showed people where all the other pages were, usually in some sort of graphical flow chart fashion. Most sites have grown considerably beyond being representable on a map, but they’ve found a new lease on life thanks to web crawlers. Submitting a Sitemap XML file to the search engines helps them understand how to crawl and index all of the pages, including the frequency that they change. You really don’t want to have to do this manually since it has to be updated every time a new page is added, so take a look at automated tools that will do it and submit the update (I use the Google XML Sitemaps plugin for WordPress for this blog). More info at Sitemaps.org.
  • Inbound Links: You want to encourage as many inbound links to your site as possible since they are factored into most search engine’s ranking algorithms as essentially counting as votes for the autoritativeness of your site. Almost all inbound links are positive, with the exception of ones from things like known link farms, but you really want to focus on getting other sites to link to your landing pages with the right link text. If we’re trying to optimize the Recipes page of our Tuna Replacement site for the search term “tuna recipes”, it’s much more valuable for outside sites to link to that page with <a href="http://www.tunareplacement.com/recipes">tuna recipes</a> as the link than it is for them to link with <a href="http://www.tunareplacement.com/recipes">recipes</a>. If you have the kind of site where people might want to feature your content elsewhere (with, say, a Tuna Recipes Widget of the Day), consider developing an embeddable form that includes links formatted to match your SEO priorities.
  • Meta Tags: These used to be all the rage in that you could define keywords for search engines to use in their indexing. That’s a pretty easy system to game (want to attract attention to your porn site? Try keywords like “free money”), so they’re no longer nearly as valuable as they used to be. There’s a lot of discussion in the SEO community about how valuable they actually are, but the general conclusion is that you can’t go wrong by adding the keyword and description meta fields to your pages, and that they may even be used to display some of the information in search results. I use the Add-Meta-Tags WordPress Plugin to automatically add them to all of the pages and posts on this site.

Following all of those steps should make a considerable difference in the performance of your organic search engine results. I haven’t touched on the importance of selecting the right keywords and terms, which is a whole topic in and of itself, but these will make a noticeable difference if you’re fairly savvy in that regard.

What’s your favourite SEO Tip? Disagree with what I’ve said here or have one I missed? Add it to the comments!

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]]> http://jaygoldman.com/2009/02/08/8-seo-tips-and-tricks/feed/ 12 Twitter, Third Party Sites, and Google Analytics http://jaygoldman.com/2009/01/20/twitter-third-party-sites-and-google-analytics/ http://jaygoldman.com/2009/01/20/twitter-third-party-sites-and-google-analytics/#comments Tue, 20 Jan 2009 13:31:54 +0000 jaygoldman http://jaygoldman.com/?p=432 Likely-related posts: Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.]]> I was taking a stroll through this site’s Google Analytics account when I noticed that my recent post Follow Back: How I Choose Who to Follow on Twitter had attracted a whole lot more visitors than I typically get. I was curious to see where they had come from, so I checked out the referring traffic to find out where people were finding the link and discovered an apparent break-down in the usefulness of Analytics.

For those not in the know: your web browser reports the last page you were on to the next page you visit as the “referrer”, which Analytics uses to track the source of traffic to your site. When someone types your URL (jaygoldman.com) into their browser without coming from another page they will have no referrer and therefore count as a ‘direct’ visitor. This also applies if they click on a link in an external application like TweetDeck and Tweetie (my current choices for desktop and iPhone Twitter clients), since they land in your browser and on your site without coming from another web page. A large portion of Twitter users tweet from third party apps (anyone know the percentage?), which means that a large portion of the people who find your content from Twitter leave no referrer and look like direct traffic. All direct traffic gets lumped into one big pool, so there’s no way to tell if they came through Twitter, a non-web based RSS reader, a link in an email not read through webmail, manually typing in your URL, an iPhone app with your link in it, etc. Let’s call this Analytics Problem #1: the increasing number of specialized apps that run outside of your web-browser all get counted as direct traffic.

That got me thinking about other places that Analytics might fail to provide accurate tracking as we move deeper into the realm of social media. As a data and analytics junkie, I find Conversion Goals are one of the most powerful ways you can track your online presence, particularly if you have an ecommerce site or webapp. The basic idea is that your site converts different types of users into other types of users (e.g.: catalogue browsers into paying customers, casual readers into RSS subscribers, etc.), and that tracking those conversions helps you to optimize for your end goal (e.g.: more ecommerce revenue, more exposure, etc.). Goals are usually measured at the end of a ‘funnel’, which allows you to track a specific path to a goal and then compare different paths to find the most effective (e.g.: clicked on newsletter link, browsed catalogue page(s), checked out vs. landing page from google, add to cart, checkout). See this excellent Conversion Goals four-part tutorial from WorkHappy.net if you’d like to know more about Conversion Goals. I started thinking about how I could measure Conversion Goals for this site, which made me very quickly realize that my dependence on third party services means I don’t control key pages in the funnels and therefore can’t instrument them. A quick example: I’d like to measure the number of people who follow a link to my blog from Twitter and end up becoming RSS subscribers. This falls down in two places: I can’t distinguish them from other direct traffic if they come from third party applications, and I can’t set a Goal on the final page because it happens on FeedBurner. Let’s call this Analytics Problem #2: your ability to track Conversion Goals decreases as the number of non-web-based traffic sources and third party utilities involved in your site increases.

What’s a poor data hungry blog writer to do? I can think of a few things that might work, though none are particularly awesomesauce:

  • Inbound Interstitials. Part of the solution could lie in the use of interstitial pages that are inserted in the flow between the first click and the target. For Analytics Problem #1, third party app developers could direct all traffic to a page on their own server that could then send users to their ultimate destination with a referrer in place. This isn’t ideal because… it will annoy users, there are definite privacy concerns, some browsers may not track the referrer if a page auto-redirects rather than following a clicked-on link, and it will be inconsistently implemented by third parties. Verdict: no dice.
  • Browser Tracking. It should be possible for the browser itself to receive a request to open a URL and track the referring application. When you click (or tap) on a link or button in one application that ultimately opens a page in your browser, the operating system steps in to handle the communication between them. The inbound request to your browser might have the name of the app that sent it included, so browsers could start using it as the referrer. It wouldn’t follow a standard URI scheme, but they could cheat and make it look like one (e.g.: macos://tweetdeck or something similar). This isn’t ideal because… it requires a change in browser behaviour across the board (or, at least, by Mozilla and Microsoft) and that’s a full time lobbying job. It also may not be possible on some platforms if the requesting app’s name isn’t included in the request. Verdict: iffy. Might be testable with a Firefox extension.
  • Unique URLs. If you’re particularly concerned with tracking those direct visitors, you could borrow a page from an old junk mail handling play book and use a different inbound URL for every source of traffic you list your posts on. I used to sign up for things like Columbia House CD club with a slightly different spelling of my name (or a fake middle initial) so that I could track who they sold my mailing address to when the junk started pouring in (and it sure did). You could take a URL like http://jaygoldman.com/2009/01/15/follow-back-how-i-choose-who-to-follow-on-twitter/ and turn it into http://jaygoldman.com/2009/01/15/follow-back-how-i-choose-who-to-follow-on-twitter/source/twitter, and then use something like mod_rewrite on your server to strip out the source bit and still serve the right page. Analytics will record the pageview on the pre-strip-out URL so you can still track it in your reports. This isn’t ideal because… the requests wouldn’t get tracked as referrers so you’d have to count each of the pages in the Content section to get a total count. You would have to remember to use a different source every time you linked to the post (e.g.: “source/twitter” when you tweet about it, “source/rss” in your RSS feed, etc.). Your stats will be off if other people link to your post (yay!) but strip out the source or use the wrong one (boo!). Verdict: answer unclear, try again later. This would work but the logistics are almost more effort than the payoff.
  • Outbound Interstitials. The second problem is a little easier to solve — at least on the tail end of the funnel — by either calling Analytic’s _trackPageView() method in the onclick handler for outbound links, or by adding a redirector page to your site that loads up the Analytics JavaScript and then forwards to FeedBurner without displaying any content. The former is great for places where you have an actual RSS link on a page that people click on, and the latter is ideal for things like your <link rel="alternate"> tag that gets handled by the browser without a click. This should be almost entirely invisible to your readers and you’ll be to still track your funnel as long as you use it everywhere you would have just linked to FeedBurner. This isn’t ideal because… you have an interstitial of your own to maintain, but it should be almost unnoticeable. Verdict: should work well for outbound links from your site, provided the funnel ends there and doesn’t require tracking beyond the first link.
  • Your Chocolate in their Peanut Butter. Twitter (and other services) could give you the ability to insert your analytics tracking code into their page. This is a bit of an unorthodox idea (in that I’ve never seen it done), but since Analytics supports tracking across multiple domains, it should be possible for Twitter to insert the modified tracking code listed there into your profile page and record a pageview in your analytics. This isn’t ideal because… service providers need to jump through (small) hoops to get it working. The reports in Analytics don’t show the domain on requests by default, so you would need to follow the instructions listed on that page to setup an advanced filter or Twitter would need to log the request as being something obvious (e.g.: /twitter.com/profile). Verdict: this would actually be pretty great if it worked, since you could track how many people are viewing your profile in addition to using it as the start of a conversion goal.

There are many smarter people than your humble scribe who read this blog. How can we solve the Terrible Twosome of Analytics Problems and restore order to the world? Maybe I’m missing something obvious?

Likely-related posts:

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]]> http://jaygoldman.com/2009/01/20/twitter-third-party-sites-and-google-analytics/feed/ 6 Blocking Images from One Domain http://jaygoldman.com/2008/10/10/blocking-images-from-one-domain/ http://jaygoldman.com/2008/10/10/blocking-images-from-one-domain/#comments Fri, 10 Oct 2008 12:27:40 +0000 jaygoldman http://jaygoldman.com/?p=149 Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.]]> I’ve got a fancy 404 page (displayed when you try to access a page that doesn’t exist, like this one) on this blog, built on the principles outlined in the great A List Apart article The Perfect 404. It’s a great piece of logic that Ian Lloyd came up with that I’ve now implemented once in Java taglibs at Radiant Core and again in PHP for this blog. The gist is that the page changes depending on where you came from in order to display a ’smart’ result, and emails me when something is broken so that I can fix it. If there’s enough interest, I could turn this into a WordPress plugin — leave a comment if you’d like to see that.

One of the advantages of the 404 page emailing me when something can’t be found is knowing that someone else has linked directly to an image that used to be on this site but isn’t anymore. I had a last.fm sidebar for a while with the music I’d listened to but removed it after I figured out that most of my listening was on machines or devices that weren’t logging. In the short time it was on the site, youdao.com latched on to one of the images and linked to it directly for a page on their site. This isn’t a particularly bad practice, but since the image doesn’t exist here anymore they aren’t going to see it on their end. Given that we obviously don’t speak the same language, I thought it might be easier to just redirect their requests for images with a 403 error (forbidden). mod_rewrite to the rescue!

If you’re running an Apache web server and have the module enabled, and have it configured to allow .htaccess files to override your http.conf, you can achieve the same simple result by adding two lines to your .htaccess:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://www.requestingsite.com/ [NC]
RewriteRule .*\.(jpg|gif|png)$ - [F]

The first line matches on the domain of the site, with [NC] specified to tell mod_rewrite to ignore case-sensitivity. The second line says requests for anything ending in any of the three major image formats are forbidden (hence the [F]). How do you know it’s working? Try running the page through something like Google Translate, which pops up a JavaScript error when it gets the 403 back. And remember, as always, check your site after making changes to your .htaccess to make sure you haven’t broken anything!

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