Most site designers tend to use relative links in internal site linking, but they should actually be using absolute links. For those who need a refresher, an absolute link is a link where the full URL is given in the link such as “a xhref=http://www.domain.com/news.cfm” whereas a relative link only provides the name of the folder/file such as “a xhref=”news.cfm” mce_href=”news.cfm” .

Now, while most people have been taught to just use relative links, it is actually not the best for both search engines and preventing people from scraping your site content. Some people tend to use relative links because the shorter code can decrease a page’s download time and decrease the amount of typing they do. However, a millisecond is about all that is saved this was as far as load time and the majority of users these days are not on a 14K dial-up anymore.

At the Search Engine Strategies conference in Chicago last week there was a Q&A session that had top engineers from MSN, Google, Yahoo & Ask as well as other top figures in the SEO world. A question was posed as to which type of links were preferred, all of the search engines agreed that an absolute link is the way to go. I agree with them not just because they are the experts but because their reasoning makes sense.

People who go to a site by typing in the URL (although many people are just typing the url into a google search and then clicking the first result) may enter the www or may not (e.g. www.domain.com vs domain.com). To a user, either one makes sense as they see the pages the same. Now, when search engines crawl links they don’t want to crawl the same thing over and over again. If they crawl a link to the non www site, then every page linked from there (if it has relative links) will keep the spider on the same non www URL. Now, when they crawl through a link with the www in front of the domain - they see this as a different page and will index all pages again. Essentially they are giving each page a rank twice and crawling twice as much.

So, if you put all absolute links and a spider comes in from a link that doesn’t have the www, you will guide them back to the www pages and then only rank those pages and save them the time of crawling a site twice or more. This also stops what is called PageRank bleed - meaning that the one page gets all the juice and isn’t spread across two versions (the www & non www) of the same page. This is can actually be seen on a site (masterlink.com) if you check the PageRank of http://masterlink.com/news.cfm and http://www.masterlink.com/news.cfm. (You can use this link to check the PR of these URLs to see the difference in ranks)

Another thing that should be done is for all requests for a website without the www to be redirected to the www version of the site. So if I typed in domain.com there would be a 301 redirect to www.domain.com which is just a back up guarantee that they hit the right pages. Search engines can sometimes still get mixed up so this solves this canonicalization problem.

Now, some of this may sound crazy, I agree to an extent, but ultimately search engines drive the majority of Internet traffic so playing by their rules can only enhance the opportunity for good rankings.

-Mark B

RSStatic - Optimizing RSS AggregationRSS has become an Internet phenomenon. It’s ability to both distribute news and information while allowing website owners to actually publish fresh content on their site has cemented it’s appeal.

RSS has become an Internet phenomenon. It’s ability to both distribute news and information while allowing website owners to actually publish fresh content on their site has cemented it’s appeal.Blogs offer RSS feeds. Major news publishers offer RSS feeds. There are RSS feeds for virtually every niche topic you could think up. So why not take advantage of such a free resource?

What is RSStatic?Typical web based RSS aggregators simply allow you to publish a headline and link from your chosen feed. This provides you with fresh content on your site and gives visitors a potential reason to return. This offers very little value to search engine optimization efforts. RSStatic goes one step beyond that.

Typical web based RSS aggregators simply allow you to publish a headline and link from your chosen feed. This provides you with fresh content on your site and gives visitors a potential reason to return. This offers very little value to search engine optimization efforts. goes one step beyond that.C.A.D. Website Design developed RSStatic to take information from the feeds you choose and generate static html pages for each item in the feed. This quickly turns a 10 page website into a much larger, more robust site complete with relevant content that continually grows.

RSStatic gives you to ability to continuously expand your site with almost no effort. By using the freely available RSS feeds of your choice, you can add huge amounts of s.e.o. friendly content to your site.

By simply inputing your required information, a small niche oriented website can grow from just a few static pages to a few hundred relevant pages in very little time and will continue to grow.

To accomplish this, RSStatic uses more of the information provided by the feeds than most aggregators. Most feeds simply output a headline linked directly to the article, leaving you giving away page rank. What RSStatic does different is that it takes those headlines, creates a static html page for each, actually uses the description/blurb provided in the RSS feed as the content for the page and then creates a “read more” link to the full article. It also uses the title of the new article as part of the filename for each html file, providing yet another search engine friendly attribute.

RSStatic - Key FeaturesRSStatic optimizes RSS aggregation and contributes to your search optimization efforts. To accomplish this RSStatic provides the following features:

optimizes RSS aggregation and contributes to your search optimization efforts. To accomplish this provides the following features:

• Unlimited amount of added content to your site
  Everytime a feed updates, your site will have new content added.
• Maintenance free
  Simply set it up and it will continue to expand your site.
• Search Engine Friendly URLs
  By using the title name of each article in the filename, you instantly create keyword rich URLs.
• Built Using PHP
  PHP is supported by most host and is available as a free download for those who don’t currently have it installed
• No Database Needed
  Each page is generated as it comes into the system keeping you from having to worry about a database installation.
• Uses only 1(one) Template
  By using only one template, it saves you the time of having to manipulate tons of include files to fit the look and feel of your site.
• Entirely Customizable
  RSStatic is a free program and upon download you will have complete access to all it’s source code.
• Date Archiving
  You can choose have a new directory created for each month.Â

  To get your free download of RSStatic, please visit us at www.RSStatic.com

Madisonville KY - CAD Website Design has launched the newly designed website for Kentucky Senator Joey Pendleton at http://www.joeypendleton.com. The website was completed using HTML, Dreamweaver, ColdFusion and Photoshop.

One of the press releases I couldn’t wait to make is the announcement of the release of the new University of Pine Bluff Arkansas website. Beverly Arthur, The Project Specialist/Improvement Initiatives at UAPB contacted us to redesign their existing site and add some additional functionality like a content management system, event calendar, photo gallery, etc.Â

She is currently working on populating the website with information on one of their servers at http://159.35.1.66/index.php

Their current website is located at http://www.uapb.edu/

We think it is a major improvement and can’t wait for them to take it live over the Christmas Holiday.

In a total DUH moment while looking for information to blog on, it occured to me that we have several press releases and updates concerning our website and our clients websites that we could post on our blog. With that being said, we proudly give you our section called “Updates and Press Releases”.

We will use this area of our blog to announce the launch of new websites that we have either built from scratch for our client base, or announce the re-birth of websites we have overhauled.

We will also use this area to keep individuals posted on the addition of staff, the development of rsstatic or myezshop, or anything else that we may categorize as press.

Thanks and keep reading

It is often written that one of the best tools for search engine optimization is to keep posting fresh relevant content in your blog, but how much crap is generated on the web because of this school of thought?

Dont post something just to try to generate the most link worthy or digg worthy snippet of useless information, post stories or thoughts that readers can actually use. How many blogs out there are carying the story of Google Ad Words supporting terrorist activities?

Simple re-posting of content from other sites serves noone. Discussion of current topics, though, encourages feedback and gleens insight into the issue.

Our goal with our blog is to keep visitors informed of our activities, educate visitors on areas where we can shed some light, and possibly encourage community involvement. We would like to solicit feedback from our visitors to find out what we could do better to serve their web development needs.

In a recent newsletter from WebProNews I read the following question concerning Google Radio Ads;

One particular hurdle the company will have to address is measuring traffic. Clicks, page views, and unique visitors all offer a particularly reasonable method of quantification when it comes to tracking advertising metrics.

The question remains, however, what analytical method Google will choose to implement for radio, as the aforementioned measurements are unique to the Internet.

So as Google takes to the airwaves, it seems we are left with more questions than answers about how Audio Ads will take shape.

Having placed a few radio ads for other businesses that we own including our web design business, I can tell you that radio is sticky in the minds of the consumers, but is very hard to track. One solution offered by a print media company that also applied to radio advertising was for the company selling the advertising to buy a bunch of toll free numbers and assign 1 number to each advertiser. Using the unique identifying toll free number assigned to each advertiser, it is possible to retrieve a call rate and an area of where the calls are coming from.

This information can be used to hone the radio advertisement to improve “Call Throughs” and also used to improve stickiness in geo targeted areas.

Also, using unique landing pages for the radio ads would help to track the conversions from listener to visitor, then internal metrics can track transformations from visitor to buyer. A simple url of yoursite.com/radio should do the trick.

Rand Fishkin, CEO of SEOmoz.org, made some comments on the benefits of Social Bookmarking and SEO. He stated;

First and foremost is that placement in Wikipedia, a highly dug (i.e., Digg.com), blogged about and linked to submission rules the search engine results on those topics. Fishkin also notes that this can be very influential in the traditional media, who troll social networks and the tops of the search results for information and story ideas.Fishkin recommends five specific tools:

Flickr - upload industry-relevant and useful photos of events, conferences, developmentsNewsvine - create a profile with keywords that will become your Newsvine subdomain; submit news stories, comment on popular stories, create connections with regular users

I have to take exception to the statement about MySpace. MySpace is a social networking website that is just 1 step up the ladder from a dating website. As a website owner and president of a web development company, it is very hard for me to believe that Google is going to be looking at MySpace as an Authority site. My daughter uses Myspace (which I dont particularly approve of), and so does my 26 year old step son to rant about anything and offer very little useable content. Mostly, he uses it to socialize with friends and try to pick up girls.
I dont have an account at MySpace, but I did do some browsing of the site. I navigated to their forums and looked at their business section of their forums. Out of the first 10 forum topics, 6 of them were forum postings for MLM opportunities and work at home opportunities. I delete this crap from my email box when ever I see it.
One look at the video section and you will see why it is just one step above porn. With titles like Paris Hilton grabs Britney Spears Tit, or Super Hot Contortionist, how can this be taken seriously as an authority site?
Why any business professional would look to Myspace as an authority site is beyond me. I can understand Newsvine, Flickr, Technorati, Digg, and the like, but MySpace? Please.
I guess the next SEO advice will be to place videos on YouTube? Please Google, Dont put any weight on a link coming from MySpace.

I don’t write as much as I used to or would like too. Web development takes up most my time these days. My awesome and most humble boss takes care of most the editorial duties around here. Yet that is what inspired me to sit down and write this very article.

My boss, Jeff Phillips, has been doing some blogging on the company website concerning SEO tactics and practices we see a great deal of people overlook. We build quite a few sites and do pretty well in the search engines, but we also understand true SEO is a bunch of leg work and even more patience. That doesn’t mean we can’t advise others how to get off on the right foot and have a solid search engine friendly foundation. That has been the theme of his writing.

Back in my WebProNews days, I can remember when the Google Sandbox theory broke. Then, it went from being theory to a provable fact. Finally it just was something that site owners came to accept and plan around. As I started with C.A.D. Website Design, I can remember advising new clients that their site, worst case scenario, might not show up in Google for up to six months after we launch it. Google’s sandbox had become just part of the web development environment. Then my boss started blogging.

We don’t run our blog through Blogger. We don’t use any of the main tributaries into Google to post our articles. We don’t dump an RSS feed to Google News. We didn’t even start to ‘tag’ anything till yesterday, 12.06.06. We simply host our own PHP based blog (WordPress) on our own server. So when Jeff posted SEO Best Practices When Designing Your Website Part 2 we expected to sit on our site for a brief time before we saw it in the Google index. However, a few hours later, in came a Google Alert letting us know that very post has just been indexed. Not long after that another alert came in to notify us that a link to the article had been indexed.

How could this be? We run a program we developed called RSStatic. Basically, it will take RSS feeds and generate static pages using each item and description from a feed. Sometimes these pages would take months to get indexed. Google loves RSStatic pages, but the sandbox effect was still in play with them. I’ve known for years that Google has a heart-pounding love for blogs, but this was unprecedented.

I’ve watched over the past year as our sandbox time slowly decreased. However, I couldn’t have expected it to become non-existent. So why then, are we seeing a sandbox of hours and not days, weeks or months? It’s simple really. Have you ever heard the saying “It takes money to make money”? Google is a capitalistic search engine so with them it should be changed to “It takes rank to get rank”. We’ve seen this for years.

Some people these days like to claim PageRank is for entertainment purposes only. My guess is they say that because they don’t have any. PR plays a big part in who we link to and who we want linking to us. Any web master will tell you the same. No one wants to throw away their PR on some newbie fresh onto the scene. Conversely, those same newbies are fighting over those scraps from the well-ranked, established sites. Rank begets rank.

At first I thought it was multiple factors that led to the reduction of our sandbox. I though it was a mixture of site age, established links and an established, spam free host. But through deduction I realized our site has a lot of new incoming links. RSStatic is used on a bunch of sites and each page it creates has a link back to CADWebsiteDesign.com. I also remembered that we have recently switched host from Datapipe to Rackspace. So unless Google takes into account who the host is and not how long the site has been hosted there, that factor is null as well. That leaves us with it simply being an established site.

CADWebsiteDesign.com has been around a long time and the whole time it has been owned by a single entity (Jeff and his wife, Lucinda, are very close). Not only that but it has ranked well since I’ve worked here. I’ve seen it go from being ranked #16 for a tough term, website design, to our peak at #4. Currently we rank anywhere from 4 to 8 depending on which datacenter you hit. As I’ve seen us climb, I’ve see our sandbox dwindle. So is Google giving “props” to its favorite sites? Is it bending the rules for those who been around awhile and haven’t gotten kicked out of the club? Does it take rank to earn rank? I think it’s hard to disagree.

Google’s sandbox used to be look upon as a penalty for being a new site. We might consider re-thinking that and looking at it as compliment for being established and remaining atop the rankings. It’s like becoming a partner at a law firm. Once you’ve not only paid your dues, but done the labor to work your way up, you are granted certain privileges that the interns are left envying

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If you are a webmaster, you know what DMOZ is. If you are new to building web sites and site optimization, you will soon learn what DMOZ is. DMOZ is a human edited directory located at http://www.dmoz.org and is used to power the directory for Google.

DMOZ also powers directories for many other search engines and is provided free of charge to those search engines. A listing in DMOZ is critical for any webmaster serious about ranking well on other search engines, the most powerful being Google.

Getting a listing on DMOZ is difficult if not almost impossible. All listing submissions are reviewed by a handful of overburdened human editors. Finding the appropriate category to submit to, writing a concise title and description, and a long wait are all ingredients to a successful DMOZ submission.

It is highly speculated by the webmaster community in general that DMOZ is also very corrupt. Searches for DMOZ complaints will almost always show forums where there have been much discussion on how most of the category editors have personal websites in their category and will regularly delete submissions, change descriptions to be meaningless, and overall squelch any new submissions or their competitors submissions.

Several forums covering this topic are;

http://www.v7n.com/forums/web-directory-issues/23616-dmoz-corrupt.html

http://forums.searchenginewatch.com/showthread.php?t=5999

http://richardz.blogspot.com/2005/01/corrupt-dmoz-editor.html

An excerpt from the blog above reads like this…

Sabotaging a Competitors DMOZ Listing for Fun & Profit

The Wisdom of Weeding Out the Competitors
It is imperative to join DMOZ and sabotage your competitors. No offense intended, but if you don’t join DMOZ you are ignoring a fundamental strategy for promoting your website. Your website’s viability depends on you getting into DMOZ and sabotaging every single one of your competitors. If your competitors beat you to the editorship your website will be toast faster than you can say, “Am I homeless yet?”

“My arch competitor had a dupe content subdomain that they set up for traffic overflow and I changed their dmoz listing to the subdomain with duplicate content and it slaughtered their rankings for a couple of months.

Speaking as someone with 4 years of sabotaging experience, switch their listing from www. to non-www from time-to-time. Switch them from www.example.com to www.example.com/index.html, stuff like that.”

Everybody is doing it. You should too!

I don’t care if you believe me or not. The economics is enough motivation to make it happen. Here are the most common techniques for sabotaging a competitor:

Let it be
Let the site sit in the Unreviewed Queue. Don’t edit it. Don’t touch it. Never click on the link to visit the site. Just pretend it isn’t there.

Across the universe
In the DMOZ editor dashboard you have the option to move the contributed website to a “more appropriate” category. Move it to the lowest level cat you can find, preferably a cat that is not currently edited, and one that has over sixty other websites in it. This cat must be related topically, but not really appropriate. After a year it will probably get bounced to another category and so on, and eventually end up back in your category. Wait six months or a year, then do it again.

The long and winding road
At some point you have to let in a competitor or two. Butcher the submission. Strip the title of important keywords and replace them with useless variations that nobody searches on. Mutilate the description because the last thing you want is for someone to actually click on it. A short and irrelevant description is the way to go. Don’t go overboard. It has to be defensible. When your competitor’s website reaches the end of the submission road, he or she will wish they never submitted.
AOL/TimeWarner own DMOZ and they treat it like the dollar chasing b***h it really is. And you should, too. Sabotaging your competitors is not simply about deleting their sites from the categories, but a more subtle and ongoing process of destroying their relevance for important keyword phrases.

You have to do what you have to do. The person who ranks at the top of the search engines sleeps better than the webmaster whose site is on page eighty six of the serps. Sabotaging your competitors is one way to get there.

There is a forum set up just for DMOZ editors located at http://resource-zone.com/forum/Â

A quick glance through this forum will show you quickly how frustrating it is trying to get resolution over an improper listing, or just plain old getting reviewed in a timely manner.

One of my personal experiences with the DMOZ editors on their forums is cronicled here at http://resource-zone.com/forum/showthread.php?t=43425Â where I have asked for a category change.

The last comment on the forum for the request of a cat change comes from one of the site moderators and I quote…

“This isn’t the place to either request or justify category changes. You gave the benefit of your judgment when you first suggested the site. Now it’s up to the editor’s judgment.”

Like I said when I titled this blog post, still necessary, still hated. It would be refreshing to see Google quit using them all together.