Some of his tips include unplugging mouse and using only keyboard to work with the web, using only a software keyboard, turning off the monitor and navigating by screen reader only, sitting far away from the screen or decreasing brightness of the screen.

His tips are well thought and if more developers and designers followed them, it would make websites better in general.

Newspapers will become a lucrative niche for SEO. There are signs of print newspaper slowly fading away - two Detroit daily papers are refocusing on digital, as the old model had become “unsustainable”. Circulation and advertising revenues are falling for newspapers around the world.

People are reading digital media much more and news is reported often up to the minute (e.g. Twitter journalism, Qik, Google News) rather than with a day’s lag. Since newspapers are under pressure to build their online presence, around the world (with the partial exception of Belgium) they are trying to optimise the content to appear better in search engines.

SEOs noticed when New York Times put its SEO strategy in place. It made its archives accessible (with a few old school SEO “tricks”) to build traffic and incease ad revenue.

There has also been talk of reporters getting trained in basic SEO tactics regarding usage of keywords. The Times Online editor-in-chief said search and SEO were completely interwoven - reporters learned SEO techniques and monitored site searches to better gauge reader interest. Sub editors, who usually make up catchy headlines, are being pushed out by SEO requirements.

Respected Dutch SEO Joost de Valk put forward his ideas for newspaper SEO based on work he did for Dutch papers: fix templates (tags, code) and URLs (include keywords, as well as some numbers with at least three digits to meet Google News requirements) and a bunch of other useful tips.

At Pizza SEO we had the privilege of working with SME Online in 2006, the online edition of one of Slovakia’s main broadsheets. They have been lauded as some of the most innovative online newspapers in Europe and had introduced blogging into the press. We have also worked with Euractiv, a news server on EU affairs both in Slovakia and in Brussels.

Media clients are usually refreshing in that they do not have a shortage of content, which many other clients suffer from. Rather they have an abundance and there are numerous challenges in presenting the rich content to visitors in a usable and accessible format.

Lookout for more and more traditional media outlets around you looking for SEO staff and consultants. There are likely to be opportunities for SEOs both in-house and outsourced in many geographic an linguistic news markets.

After we had agreed to start one of Slovakia’s first SEO consultancies in the beginning of 2006, we had thought long and hard about a good name - one that would work both in our home market and leave room for international work. We thought the name should contain SEO as it stands for the search engine optimization, our core area of work. Trying different phrases and finding no agreement between the four founders even after multiple rounds of beer, I finally said in exasperation: “We might as well call it Pizza SEO, huh?” Everybody was surprised for a moment, but then we realized we had stumbled upon a winner. After all, everybody likes Pizza…

So there it was and it became official - we are Pizza SEO.

However, it does not mean that searchability, accessibility and usability issues regarding Flash websites have been resolved. Flash is an important tool and has a role in web presentations but should rarely be the format of choice for entire websites.

Indexing Flash better does not mean indexing Flash well. By design there is very little text within a Flash site for the search engines to read. Moreover, you have little control over how the website will appear in the SERPs (and often, it won’t be pretty).

There is no jumping inside a Flash movie. Google reading more into Flash does not mean it can overcome one of its main usability drawbacks – the fact that most flash websites are on a single URL or have a limited URL structure. You cannot link to a specific point within a Flash site. So even if Google knows that somewhere within your site there is something a user wants to see, it has no way of sending her there.

Many usability conscious SEOs are worried that news on better indexing of Flash sites devalues their oft used argument – it is easier to convince someone to avoid Flash if you can threaten very poor search engine visibility. However, most companies with pure Flash websites are simply victims of looks-obsessed graphic designers who don’t understand user experience. All the arguments against Flash abuse still hold: hard to optimize for search engines, poor accessibility (think rich managers on mobile devices if sight-impaired users aren’t good enough), poor user experience (no back button, no way of knowing how to interact with many sites).

This does not mean there is no role for Flash to play. If used correctly (most of the time within a website rather than instead of a website) Flash can make for great user experience (Future NOW’s Jeff Sexton provides great examples) . So next time your advertising agency or web designer tells you to go Flash make sure they understand its limits.

Banks often try to minimize client visits at branches through prices set in favor of using online services. For active clients internet banking is one of the key channels for banking transactions. Its usability and the overall quality of user experience are therefore vital.

According to Eurostat, the EU’s statistical office, 15% of the Slovak population used Internet banking in 2007 – a higher share than in the neighboring countries. These clients are lucrative for the banks, since Internet is accessed disproportionately not only by the young but also by people with higher socio-economic status.

In 2007 Pizza SEO began working on rating Internet banking applications of Slovak banks. Our methodology is based on the so-called user personas technique – we created three fictitious but representative users who attempted to complete specific tasks in the various Internet banking systems.

As a result we defined 60 indicators used to test applications of Slovak banks. The list of indicators along with our resulting rankings of usability of Slovak Internet banking applications will be published at the end of this exercise.

Our check-list focused on two aspects of usability: efficiency and errors since these were the easiest to measure objectively. We evaluated to what extent the functions we identified as necessary can be easily accessed by a regular user and whether the application can withstand user errors (ability to enter data in varying formats, etc.). For selected tasks we tracked the so-called click distance (number of mouse clicks required to complete task). We based our methodology on several international research reports on the importance of individual functions and features of Internet banking applications.

Pizza SEO is financing this test – we rejected the option of being supported by banks themselves, to avoid conflict of interest. This is one of the reasons why the ranking has been so long in the making.
However, while testing each application our consultants have come across a variety of interesting aspects, pleasant and unpleasant surprises. We are therefore publishing a brief videocast (in Slovak) on each of the banks. Some of our findings may be of interest to developers of online banking applications but many are relevant to other types of applications and will therefore be of interest to a broader audience.

We released the first videocast on Komercni Banka on 7th May 2008 on our Slovak blog, several others have followed and we will release several every month. The ranking table of all banks will come at the end and will be provided in Slovak and English. We look forward to your comments and experiences with Internet banking in Slovakia and in general.

In addition to Slovak, OpenPhrases.com offers English, German and Russian. I have little to say on the latter two versions as we rarely if ever get to use them. On the other hand, we often get to use the English version both in our client work and the work we do on our own projects (to supplement, rather than replace other tools, as I explain below).

Unlike with Slovak, this is where OpenPhrases.com enters into a competitive arena with several heavy weight competitors. How does it stack up? Where does it fit in a search marketer’s tool box?

Keyword Analysis

Keyword analysis is bread and butter of any search marketing effort – both on the organic search optimization front and for paid search advertising. In performing keyword analysis SEOs usually look to:
1. Gather keywords and phrases to use in organic optimization and paid ads in search engines,
2. Assess importance of words and phrases (absolute and relative) in terms of search volume,
3. Estimate competitiveness for a given word in organic or paid search.

There are a number of tools usable for simply gathering keywords (e.g. to create a list of words for a PPC campaign) - you can mine logs, use suggestions from search engines or even a simple thesaurus. You can easily load tonnes of keywords in a pay-per-click campaign and see if they receive any searches.

Competitiveness of search phrases can be estimated using Google itself (popular method simply looks at the number of results for the given phrase, although this is only a proxy for competitiveness at the top of the SERPs). Tools within online advertising systems give an indication of competition in paid search.

There are only a few tools to look at search volumes and assess the absolute and relative search frequency of various phrases (especially since the highly popular Overture Inventory Tool went dead in December 2007). Three major tools are used: Keyword Discovery, Wordtracker and Wordze. For a serious search marketer these tools are a de rigeur regardless of their prices – some marketers swear by one of them but many use several to cross verify the info they get.

Having said that these tools can actually be quite costly – monthly subscriptions run from about $45 (Wordze) to $69 (Keyword Discovery). Lots of people do subscribe and there is obviously value to each one of them (see Copyblogger for a great review).

But OpenPhrases.com is completely free (”at least for some time” according to the creators’ blog). Therefore I think it only makes sense to compare it with other free tools or free versions of paid tools.

So I ran OpenPhrases.com head-to-head with the Google Adwords Keyword Tool, Free Search Term Suggestion Tool by KeywordDiscovery.com and the Free Keyword Suggestion Tool on Wordtracker. I chose the search for ‘real estate’ as one I expected to have reasonable search volumes. I also played around with other searches (’shirt’, ‘Bratislava’, ’sex’) but my impressions were very similar.

For Google I turned the Synonyms option off, for Wordtracker I left the default Remove offensive (results) option selected and for Open Phrases I unchecked Synonyms but left Stemming on.

‘Real estate’

For real estate Google’s results looked very reasonable (although Google does not give any specific numbers, just green bars and you can therefore only see the order by volume). ‘Real estate’ as a phrase appeared first, followed by ‘real estate listings’ and ‘commercial real estate’. The first geographically specific phrase and the only one in the top 10 appeared in the seventh position – it was ‘florida real estate’. Overall, the results looked quite US-centric.

The Keyword Discovery tool also showed ‘real estate’ in the top position, with an overwhelming 431,375 searches (to 23,033 for second-ranked ‘Las Vegas real estate’). The other geographic phrase in the top 10 was again ‘florida real estate’ in the 8th position. Several real estate agents (prudential, century 21) also showed. All in all the first 100 results (showed for free) appeared pretty sensible, too.

Wordtracker started off with ‘Marbella real estate’ and seven out of the first 10 searches were geo-specific (places like Portland, franklin tn, fort myers). ‘Real estate’ itself came sixth. Interestingly, search volume on Marbella was reported at 23,526 compared with 18,504 for real estate itself.

Results returned by Open Phrases were somewhat suspect: ‘brava costa estate real’ came first with 568 searches (about 300 of them on a single day according to the detailed info I got when I clicked on [DETAILS] next to the phrase, which brings up a cool 92-day histogram) followed by ‘califormia real estate ray and peggy pierce’ with 310 searches. All the other top 10 searches were also geo-specific, ‘real estate’ on its own appeared nowhere in the top 50.

Digging into the results gave some further clues on their quality: clicking on the third placed ‘crete estate real’ with 253 searches showed there were also five for ‘real estate crete’ indicating these could be drawn from distinct data sources (one that preserves the order of words and one that does not). Clicking on ‘real estate agents’ showed multiple variations with the word kanpur: ‘real estate agents at kanpur’, ‘in kanpur’ and ‘at kanpur.’.

Fun with keyword analysis?

OpenPhrases.com shows promise – nice interface with some great features such as the three-month search history, limiting searches by phrase length or frequency or looking for synonyms (as a side note, what I found quite annoying was the auto-suggest feature which showed phrases as I typed – when I hit enter using Firefox, the tool searched for the top auto-suggested phrase and not the on I had typed in).

At the moment, however, it lacks a database of sufficient quality to be a reliable source for keyword analysis. This is not surprising - finding usable and representative search data to play with is not easy in a world 80% dominated by one search engine. Say the creators: “Current database contains more than 45.000.000 unique keywords (unique search queries) and more than 500.000.000 search queries. We got them from world-wide used search engines, if you ask which, sorry, we keep this information secret.”

As a free tool OpenPhrases.com is great for individual marketers or amateur SEOs to supplement the Google Adwords Keyword Tool and free Wordtracker – i.e. it is great, as its tagline says, “…when keyword analysis is fun” (though maybe not when it is supposed to be serious work). It can provide extra info to anyone who does not need or cannot afford to pay for full access to one (or several) of the heavy duty tools.

If and when the creators get their hands on a more extensive search data feed and sort out minor usability and data parsing niggles, the Open Phrases tool with its friendly interface can become very useful.

Not much, except for a post by Michael Martinez at Seo Theory blog. I know, Michael meant optimizing for “seo”, “pizza” and “Britney Spears” separately, but I guess optimizing for those three terms together could bring some SEO-targetted traffic as well (readers of Michael’s blog searching for these three phrases, welcome!).

Since we already rank in top spots for phrases such as our company name - Pizza SEO, SEO Pizza and other related keywords, it shouldn’t be much harder to rank well for Britney Spears in connection with Pizza SEO.

DISCLAIMER: We do not have ANY other connection with Britney Spears!

The sound samples for songs on music CDs are only available in WMA (Windows Media Audio) music format as well as in RA (Real Audio). Microsoft does not support Linux, so you are unable to listen to Windows Media Audio legally. Real Audio Player v10 is available for Linux systems, however Amazon uses the old unsupported RA codec that the current version of real Audio Player does not support.

Now as a Linux user I do not have any options of trying before buying - Amazon does not take me into account when accessing their website. Linux users are intentionally left before the gates of listening to music samples. Amazon website thus have accessibility issues. This is the email I have received from Amazon after multiple requests to clarify the situation (mostly receiveing the standardized FAQ replies):

Currently, our Music store does not offer a version of titles that are Linux compatible. Please note that, currently Linux users couldn’t able to listen to audio samples on Real Player/Windows Media Player.

We do offer many software titles for Linux systems. Just click the “Browse Categories” link at the top of our Software home page (http://www.amazon.com/software). On the next page, click on the “Linux” link to browse through our list of titles that will work on your system.

We are aware of this issue, and our developers are working on a resolution. At this time, they have not provided us with an exact date when they expect this situation to be resolved, but I would suggest you check back in the near future. We appreciate your patience in this matter.

Thanks for visiting Amazon.com

Keepon dancing robot created by Hideki Kozima and programmed by Marek Michalowski reacts to the music vibrations (or sound vibrations to be correct). The viral video of Keepon robot on YouTube has been getting millions of viewers lately. Keepon is accompanied by its inventor and dances to Spoon’s Don’t You Evah song. Great idea to popularize both Keepon robot and the “Don’t You Evah” song by Spoon.

Watch Keepon dancing for yourself:

Recently I searched for GAIM in Google using the keyword “gaim”. Usually, the GAIM website comes up as the first result, but not this time. Something had changed, the first result did not contain theword “GAIM” anywhere in the title. So, my eyes moved below, making their way to find a GAIM link. After checking a few more results, it became clear to me that I would have to search more. I used “gaim download” now , but large software download website was the first result. I wanted to visit the original GAIM website.

I tried searching for “gaim” only again. I checked the first result thoroughly this time. Andjust as well that I did - the title was “News - Pidgin”, but then in the description Google displayed the following text: “AOL naturally complained, and Mark Spencer changed the name to ‘Gaim’. … Adium uses libgaim, the backend to gaim and gaim-text behind a slick OS X native …“. The four mentions of “gaim” caught my eyes. I clicked the link and finally was transferred to the official GAIM website, same logo with new name Pidgin.

Although, no message describes why GAIM has been renamed to Pidgin on the homepage (except the long text deep down titled “Important and Long Delayed News”), the logo and the unchanged look of the website reassured me that the website is that of GAIM. Now to the SEO and usability aspects of changing product names.

From a SEO point of view, GAIM developers mastered the basics and used proper redirection via 301 Moved Permanently status from the old gaim.sourceforge.net website to the new www.pidgin.im. Google and other search engines (and their robots) picked up the redirection soon and changed the webpages in their indexes.

From a usability point of view, however, the GAIM (now Pidgin) developers made a mistake - they did not keep the original name “GAIM” anywhere in the title, nor had they informed visitors of the name change via some large text placed near the logo on all pages.

Be sure to use common sense when chaning names or using redirection from an old to a new domain - don’t forget to inform your returning visitors (and returning customers) about the name changes. Explain, why you moved the website from one domain to the other. Use large bold text displayed in a highly visible position (above the fold and close to the logo) informing about the change. Think as your visitors do and allow them to digest the change.

What is Pidgin? “A pidgin is a simplified language that develops as a means of communication between two or more groups who do not share a common language, in situations such as trade. Pidgins usually have no native speakers, but are learned as second languages, and they usually have low prestige with respect to other languages.” (Wikipedia)