Simply stated, sIFR is a SEO friendly way to use your custom fonts, without the need to use an Image. It’s a search engine friendly method for using your custom fonts.

Who is sIFR for? It’s for any website that has been using an Image or Flash as the H1 (or other headings) because of the need/desire for custom fonts. sIFR is your SEO solution to finally optimize your H1 tags. In short, sifr replaces short text blocks with Flash of selected typefaces. Technically speaking, sIFR is a text replacement method using JavaScript, Flash, and CSS.

While most people simply create images when they need a custom-type font, sIFR can dynamically create short text blocks using whatever font you want (while still rendering the text with a default font on non-Flash browsers). In general, if you want to utilize better typography, while maintaining the optimization of your H1 tags… sIFR might be the easiest way to pull it off.

So, now you can still use your own custom fonts. No images needed. This technique allows the use of h1, h2 tags to have its copy replaced by a Flash using the desired font.

Google will crawl and index the text content of sifr Flash files. Hence, it’s search engine friendly.

Here is an example of a website that does this. TV Land: (example shown using Firebug).

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Listed below are several methods to use to generate inbound links. Many of these techniques are for finding highly related websites for website/blogger outreach.

I’d like to emphasize to be very careful regarding link structure, so it:
Adds value to the web, looks natural, and looks “social” to a search engine. For example, using social bookmarking to point to an article, that references a blog, that ultimately points to the Target URL. This type of natural/social link structure has become even more important since the Google Panda Algorithm update.

There are many factors to analyze when building links. Some important ones to consider are the inbound link profile of the website you contact, and their social activity metrics.

Below are link building methods that include: paid subscriptions, free tools, and just some SEO experience.

Targeted searching:
Solo Seo.
SEOmoz Link Finder.
Advanced search queries in Google: allintitle:”relevant keyword” resources site:.org

Link Aquisition tools:
SEOmoz Link Finder. (same as above).
Link Research Tools. (Paid subscription).
Ontolo.

Competitor Backlink Trolling:
Open Site Explorer. (Paid subscription).
Advanced search queries on Google/Yahoo: link:relatedsite.com -site:relatedsite.com “sponsors“
Raven Backlink Explorer. (Paid subscription).
Competitive Link Finder. (Paid subscription).

Viral Concept creation:

• Contests.
• Badges.
• Awards.
• Videos w/HTML wrapper.
• Article writing.

Visualizing the connectivity between websites:
TouchGraph shows the connectivity between websites in a visual fashion.

Their service pulls in data from Google’s database of related sites, delivering an interactive visual map of interconnected websites or search terms.

Managing the Link building process.
As you approach target sites to request links, here’s a list of the most basic data you’ll need to manage (Raven is great for this).
1) The name of the target site.
2) The site’s URL, as well as the specific URL of the page on their site where you are hoping to get a link.
3) The contact method (email, online form, phone).
4) Name and email address of decision maker for the target site (hint: usually NOT the webmaster).
5) The date you contact that person.
6) The date he or she responds.
7 ) A copy of the sent link request.
8 ) The response. Some will say yes, some will say no, others will not reply at all, others will want a link back from you, some may want money for links, some will be out of town and take weeks to reply.).
9) The status of the process.
10) Verifying that the link is in place.
11) Checking the site periodically for the link. They can vanish, usually by accident.

Link Request Letter:
Make it short and sweet. Be upfront and completely transparent. Identify the page on their site, where you would like a link. Explain why you think it makes sense…for them.

Traditional link building methods:

• Website Outreach.
• Press release optimization.
• Web directories submissions (Use quality directories like www.botw.org , dir.yahoo, dmoz, etc).
• Article submission sites.(Write an article with links in the article and/or in the resource section to your site. )
• Social bookmarking sites.
• Widget optimization.
• Email marketing.
• Discussion forum links.
• Cached comment links from high PageRank dofollow blogs.

Link building is relationship building. It takes a lot of time, diligence, and SEO smarts. You want to get the biggest bang for your bucks (and time). So, before going hog wild building links, I’d recommend doing an seo audit and taking a hard look at your website to make sure it’s optimized.

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There are situations where a website needs to place a lot of additional text on a webpage, but it interferes with the visual designs & potentially user-experience. So, whaddya do?

For example, what if you want to include a video transcript on your video webpage, or place a list of UPC codes on an ecommerce site, it could be a very large amount of text.

How can you elegantly place the additional text on the page without messing up the user experience, and/or appearing spammy?

The answer is to create collapsible content that exists on a page that is still crawlable to the search engine spiders. But, if you use AJAX, can it still be SEO friendly?

One might wonder if the collapsible DIV is search engine friendly since it is in Javascript. However, it can still be crawled by making jQuery SEO friendly.

Google is able to read Javascript onclick textlinks.

If you’re defaulting to visible for the spiders, but hidding the DIV via javascript for normal users, that seems similar to cloaking. Is it considered Black Hat SEO because the content is hidden? Isn’t it intentionally differing the appearance for the search engines?

I wouldn’t consider this Black Hat SEO because you are showing the copy on the page without having to go to another page or even refreshing the page. The copy in the include file is being displayed on the page it is intended for when a user chooses for the full copy to be displayed.

White hat all the way!

I found a good example using the jquery framework.

It is spiderable. I used a Search Engine Spider Simulator to check:

Here are 3 things to remember to insure your collapsible DIVs are Search Engine Friendly:

1. Make sure your page is configured with all of your DIVS expanded when JavaScript is disabled.
2. Make sure all the divs and the text is on the page–and not called from an external file.
3. Make sure the header line is visible, otherwise you might be considered as hiding text.

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Having your images or photos appear in the Search Results can mean a lot of incoming visits to your site. Many sites create photo galleries. So, why does one image appear for a site, and no images appear for another site? There are several reasons. Without going into great detail, I’m going to discuss Webpage Elements, Information Architecture, Increasing Page Speed, and Internal Linking.

Webpage Elements:
Let’s start with the basic page structure. Make sure all webpages are optimized. They should have an optimized unique Title tag (or optimized dynamic schema) on every page, optimized URL structure, H1 tag, Alt attributes, and sufficient body text.

Key Factors:
1) URL structure.
2) Title tags.
3) Meta Descriptions.
4) H1 tags.
5) Alt attributes.
6) Inbound links/anchor text.
7) File nomenclature – keywords used in the image filename provide additional relevancy.
8 ) Use Breadcrumb navigation.

Taking care of the basics like the above factors are very important, and especially important for Keyword rankings. Take note of the Alt attributes. Every image should have a Alt Attribute. Each image filename should use descriptive keywords…not some ID number. Use optimized anchor text whenever internal linking to an image.

I’ve always been a big fan of the Breadcrumb navigation. It’s a great way to internally link back to the previous page.

Information Architecture:
Next, make sure your Information Architecture is properly structured. Create content silos.
In a music site this would be a consideration in the: Photo Gallery hub, Artist Gallery page, Artist Aggregation page, Gallery page, photo detail page. Use keyword rich URLs. For example: www.yourDomain.com/pictures/britney-spears/

Organize your content. Eg: Photo Gallery hub, Artist Gallery page, Artist Aggregation page, Gallery page, photo detail page. Use a schema for the Main photos hub, the Artist Hub, the gallery page, the image page.

Increasing Page Speed:
This is has become an important ranking & usability metric since Google is incorporating page speed in search rankings…(Youtube video).

It is very important to specify the width and the height of your images in your HTML code. Since the text of your page usually loads faster, if you don’t specify the width and the height of your images the browser will have to reposition the text once the pictures load, consuming more time.

Reduce image file sizes. If you cut 40% off the file size of every image you optimize, you have cut almost 40% off the combined size of your entire page for every reader. That’s a lot of extra speed.

Besides just optimizing images, I’d recommend optimizing your entire site for Page Speed using Google’s Web Performance Best Practices.

Internal Linking:
When combined with other on-site optimization tactics, cross linking can help generate top keyword rankings across the major search engines. Choose your landing page wisely, and link consistently & persistently throughout the site.

Use anchor text. For example, a photo of an Artist should use the artistname+”pictures”. Anchor text for links to gallery pages should use the gallery name. Anchor text to individual images should use the image title.

When Thumbnails are too small for adjacent anchor text, incorporate a hover DIV that includes spiderable text links with the appropriate anchor text.

Use cross linking within the body text of the page to allow search engines latent semantic indexing to extract synergies between keyword anchor text and the surrounding copy.

Summary:
Doing these things will be extremely helpful in getting your images to appear in the Image results, blended universal search, and overall keyword rankings.

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Tag pages are usually just a collection of posts in a given topic. They can be especially harmful in light of the Google Farmer Algorithm Update. The Farmer update affected sites with auto-generated or low-quality content. Also affected sites with UGC content, and sites with inbound links from the above sites. Page “Quality” has became an important SEO signal.

So, what makes tag pages potentially harmful?

Here’s an example of a Tag page, taken from this Engadget post:

Official From Google: Low Quality Content On a Part of a Site Can Impact a Site’s Ranking As A Whole

Now, think about Tag pages. Think about all the thin and/or empty tag pages from User Generated Content, and UGC tags. Think about all the additional textlinks on a webpage due to tagging… (FYI, It’s a best practice to try to stay at around 100 links per page). Google can crawl over 100 links per page, but every outgoing link bleeds Pagerank of the page, so choose links carefully, from both a value and user experience perspective.

Tag pages are shallow, low quality pages that could lower the overall quality of your entire site. And, that could affect your keyword rankings.

Google has said publically (and privately) that they don’t like tag pages. They think of them as Search Results pages. And, we all know that Google doesn’t like to index Search Results pages. Google can identify Tag pages easily because the URL usually contains /tag/. When Google bought Youtube, they used robots.txt to exclude all their tag pages.

The Solutions:

• Use the noindex meta tag to block these pages from being indexed.
• Use robots.txt to fully exclude them from being crawled & indexed.
• Remove them from the XML sitemap
• Place them in Javascript. document.write them out. Place Tags in Ajax so they don’t get crawled by the Search Engines.
• Change the URL structure. Use Category or Topic Pages instead of “Tag” Pages. Change the URL to say /category/ or something else. Perhaps /topic/ or /collections/.
• If you must use tags, then limit tag volume, or tier tags based on usage.
• Add unique content to tag pages. Fill the page with evergreen content. Use all types of content. Eg: images, video, text.
• Optimize the Title tag, and H1 tag.
• Link to tag pages contextually.

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I was sitting at my desk. Phone rings. My wife said she was trying to buy groceries with the debit card, and the card was declined because if insufficient funds. I was shocked. This has never happened to us before. So, I logged online to Wachovia (which Wells Fargo has recently acquired).

We have a working checking account. The balance fluctuates. The problem was a post-dated check I forgot about was cashed. That shot us in the hole. Then, all of a sudden, several checks I had in the que were cashed in. Resulting in $158 in bank fees!

I stopped in a NYC branch, and tried to get my money back. I’m a longtime customer. The bank rep there was really nice and told me that I could only get my money back from the branch where I opened the account. They will be able to refund my money. She said I should make a big fuss about it.

So, I went there. I spoke to my “personal banker”. He’s a nice guy too. We spoke about the bank fees, and I followed up with an email….see below:

Hi David,
Please do not forget to follow up with refunding my fees from my checking account.
I was shocked when I saw how much money was deducted.

During this transition from Wachovia to Well Fargo, I’m sure nobody at Wells Fargo wants to see customers leaving….taking their multiple accounts & money. Especially, long-time valued customers. But, I’ll have no choice if this doesn’t get resolved quickly. There are plenty of banks to choose from in the NYC area. I have a low tolerance for this kind of stuff, and I take this very seriously.

I know you’ll do your best, as you are my personal banker.

Please let me know by the end of the day.

He replied…

The problem is this was not the bank’s error. As a courtesy I can get $70 of the charges back.

Best he could do is refund $70. No more. He told me it wasn’t the banks fault!
My next and final email to him was this:

I guess the bank fees are more important for the bank to use, than my accounts & assets. Poor business decision. As a courtesy, I’ll give you till the end of the day to salvage our relationship. If I don’t hear from you, consider me a lost customer.

Then I had a thought….use Twitter. I know big brands monitor sentiment using tools like Radian6 (check out their client list), monitor keywords, and use Twitter for customer service. Hmm. I tweeted. In my tweet, I used “bad sentiment” type of keywords. Here’s my tweet to catch their attention.

It worked. Because approximately an hour later, I received this reply in their Twitter feed mentioning me:

It gets better. Big brands also monitor keywords. So, I received a couple of mentions from Ally Bank:

Well Fargo sent me a Direct Message (DM), with a phone number to the highest escalation point at their corporate office. He told me to mention that I came via Twitter. I spoke to a very polite & professional young woman. Told her what happened. Within 1 hour I had a full refund of the $158, and it left me with a great feeling about Wachovia & Wells Fargo.

By the way, I still haven’t heard back from my “personal banker”.

To conclude:
I was very impressed how well Social Media (specifically Twitter) worked for resolving this issue, and thought I’d share it with my blog readership. It also made me think that the people managing the corporate bank twitter accounts are much more customer service oriented, business thinkers, and digitally saavy than their counterparts that sit in the retail branch.

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First of all, let’s review what an Onclick textlink looks like, and why would someone use them.

A few years ago, Google was unable to read inline Javascript. But, as we all know, Google has been getting more and more sophisticated.

Onclick textlinks are search friendly, but not optimal. Primarily javascript onclick textlinks are used to track clicks. But, is there anything else you should know about them?

As long as the onclick elements doesn’t change where the user goes and just track clicks, there shouldn’t be any problems. The real issue is where the onclick determines location–or worse, supercedes the href, or the href is blank.

As long as the href= is in place you’ll be fine with the javascript in the link.

Here is an example:

Using the above example, the search engine sees the link text is “Carrie Underwood Undo It”. The span is just to put the song title in italics.

GoogleBot can crawl JavaScript with clean URLs.

In summary, for SEO, it’s best to use the straightforward static HREF textlink whenever possible.

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