Extra! Extra!

One of the most important factors search engines use to rank your website for keyword phrases is analyzing the number of websites and how popular (or important) the websites that are linking to you are (note: I’ll refer to these type of links as “backward links” although other SEO professionals might call them inward links, insite links, etc).  Google even patented a link analysis algorithm called Page Rank (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank) which helps Google determine the ranking of your website on keyword phrases.

Hence, link building should be an integral (and ongoing effort) in any search engine optimization (SEO) program.  Where should you look to increase the number and quality of backward links to your website?

• Find industry related blogs; and blog!
• Find and participate in industry related websites and forums.
• Submit your website to free search engine directories like DMOZ.org.
• Build relationships with similar website owners and prove value in having them add a link to your website.

To elaborate on the last point a little more; in Google’s search engine find related websites by using the following search syntax “related:www.yourwebsitehere.com” and identify any websites that might benefit from adding a link to your website.   Don’t email or call the website owner blindly.  You will need to build a relationship and prove value to the other website owner that creating a link to your website is in their best interests. 

Show value!  For example, if your websites focuses on listing all the Happy Hour events in the city of San Francisco consider contacting websites like MustSeeSanFranisco.com or SFTravel.com.  Who on vacation in San Francisco doesn’t want to have a drink at a local Happy Hour event?

Lastly, don’t forget to “optimize” the hyperlink by including the primary keyword phrase in the actual link.  Example:  Instead of adding the following text to another website you are getting a link from, “Visit http://www.yourwebsitehere.com/ to see some social events including happy hours in the city” write “Visit our partner to find great happy hours events in San Francisco”

The direct benefits of getting backward links is A) your website will receive more site traffic from visitors clicking through on that backward link and B) search engines will give your website more “weight” when determining where your website should appear on related keyword searches.

When developing a new website, most companies (or web development agencies if the project is not being done in-house) go through an exhaustive “Test Plan” or “QA Checklist” before the site is launched. This document tends to focus on checking for broken links, spell checking site copy, testing site features like search or online forms, verifying the presence of 301 redirects (on the old website), making sure the site is free of (CSS, JS, etc) errors, ensuring the navigation is consistent, checking cross browser compatibility and so on goes the list.

When of the areas that I believe that is most often overlooked when “QAing” a website before it is launched is verifying that the sites analytic and search engine strategies are in place.

So just because your QA team believes the website is free of errors and ready to be launched don’t forget to verify your analytic strategy has been addressed and you’ve taken the necessary steps to make it easy for search engines to find and understand your new website.

Extractable is pleased to annouce the launch of the Schwab MoneyWise web site! Kudos to the Extractable team for a solid inital project, resulting in site launch during Financial Literacy Month. The team is excited to continue enhancing the site with additional activities, tools, content, and a community forum! More information regarding the site’s charter can be found in the official Charles Schwab press release.

The site is live at: http://www.schwabmoneywise.com

Today Google announced an updated version of their Analytics service. The service was already terrific, and free. It now features a much more robust dashboard, the ability to better track campaigns and the ability to email reports to collegues.

Check out the flash demo for an overview of the service and this blog for details on what has changed in the reporting interface.

Congrats to the Extractable team on the launch of the redesigned Merit Medical website.

The site is live at: http://www.merit.com

Dear Yahoo!

Thank you for refreshing MyYahoo! with a new Ajaxy UI. Your UI team deserves cheers for this polished experience. However, following the trend of your Mail beta, the browser-side experience is unnecessarily clunky and slow. Despite the fact that I’m packing Pentium and a high speed connection, I feel like I’m back in 68040 land on 28.8k surfing a FirstClass BBS. I will be more than happy to download a plugin to speed things up if you make one available.

Safe Credit Union’s web site wins praise in Friday’s netbanker report. There, Jim Bruene compliments Safe Credit Union’s Clever Homepage Comparison tool, citing it as “one of the best rate comparison tactics we’ve ever seen.”

Kudos to the Extractable team who made the Safe CU rate comparison tool and web site come to life!

Need to explain “Web 2.0″ to your friends? There is a short video available that might help. It manages to convey the central idea in fairly non-technical language. The presentation is at a music video pace to keep the viewer interested and walks through a short history of the evolution of the web.

Tom Coates of Plastic Bag (and now Yahoo!) has long been reliable for his occasional thoughtful long-form essays about the nature of the web as a medium. Back in February he posted one called Native to a web of data. Then a few weeks ago Christina Wodtke posted about it to the IAI list, summing up the points thusly:

1. Look to add value to the Aggregate Web of data
2. Build for normal users, developers and machines
3. Start designing with data, not with pages
4. Identify your first order objects and make them addressable
5. Use readable, reliable and hackable URLs
6. Correlate with external identifier schemes
7. Build list views and batch manipulation interfaces
8. Create parallel data services using standards
9. Make your data as discoverable as possible

Then Margaret Hanley followed up, writing:

Tom and I worked together at the BBC on the project that brought our thoughts together on this.

We created PIPs (Programme Information Pages) that has now been rolled out to create pages on Radio 3 and Radio 4.

As a quite technical information architect form a data perspective, I enjoyed myself immensely, looking at the XML, identifying how to break source data to make it human readable/ sensible and the “highlight” getting 5 new fields into a BBC-wide database. But I also did user testing and research and worked with a fabulous designer on creating the pages.

What struck me, since I moved into a more traditional UX/IA role in an agency, is that there are very few of us who enjoy the level and granularity of data into interface or applications. My team look aghast at the thought that they would look at XML and identify how to create applications out of it.

I think this is the growth area of IA especially in the world of mash ups, but it does require a love of detail and the vision to see how it can be grown, merged and manipulated. It is the ultimate in collision between Big and Little IA.

I stumbled across Yahoo! Next last night. Similar to Google Labs, this is a glimpse into what Yahoo! is working on. It’s a collection of some pretty nifty beta services. I particularly like the Open Shortcuts.