Last month, Google proposed a rather technical solution to tackle the well-known AJAX crawlability problem. In short, we think Google has lost its mind. Their solution is very complex, and this is borne out not only by trying to read it as a developer, but also upon examining the responses.

First, we will look at the comments left by readers on the Webmaster Central blog. Comments are classified (anonymously) into three categories: Coherent, Confused, and Really Confused. The statistics are somewhat subjective, but the result does not bode well for the idea at all.

AJAX Proposal Confusion

Coherent — 10%

Confused — 50%

Really Confused — 40%

Even Google classified the blog entry itself as “Webmaster level: Advanced.” And it’s all downhill from there. There are three fundamental problems with the proposal:

1. It requires *you* to install something (a “headless” browser) on your server.

This is a lot of computation thrown at you in one short line of a spec. Webhosting simply can’t sustain this at $4.95/month.

Their suggestion to use an application called HtmlUnit implies that Java must be running in some form. That is not reasonable. We’re not aware of a browser emulator written in a language that can be readily installed. Ruby developers have tried, and it is non-trivial at best. We won’t comment on the low-end hosting ecosystem for PHP and ASP.NET except to say that it’s frequently even more oversold and under-supported.

This state of ridiculousness is compounded by the fact that Google could run the headless browser more easily and has several football fields full of computers to reduce the problem to a science.

2. Any document that refers to “escaping” is probably going to confuse everyone.

Most programmers don’t even escape things properly. Can we expect otherwise intelligent non-developers to get it right? Many, or even most, security problems stem from sloppy or mistaken approaches to escaping things. Oh, Google, the optimism!

Even if ‘_escaped_fragment_’ is only somewhat abstracted by the headless browser, and debugging problems go from frustrating to impossible, it is also entirely unclear to us how one can intercept the ‘_escaped_fragment_’ calls without a layered and more-complex application design. Let’s face it — most of the internet is thrown together and poorly implemented. It works anyway. This won’t work.

In a nutshell, this complicates design and frustrates non-advanced developers.

3. Even with this implementation, non-trivial modifications are necessary.

So it may not be easy to implement and handle things like _escaped_fragment_. Furthermore, what does _escaped_fragment_ even mean to a non-developer?

It is possible to create a Rails plugin to accomplish what Google is proposing, but it strikes us as a waste. Since most PHP applications are based on disparate or non-existent frameworks, the adaptation would be even more difficult for PHP developers. We cannot comment on ASP.NET, but the likelihood is that it will be non-trivial as well.

OK. That’s enough. The core issue at hand here is that Google is asking the wider world of Internet developers to solve a problem for Google. Google could choose to spider the internet and use “!” as a flag to spider such a link via its own headless browser, but telling us to do it is unreasonable and non-viable.

We’re firm believers that technology should solve problems in the human space, not create them. If the application is designed well, and unobtrusive JavaScript is applied with a bit of elbow grease, all of this can be avoided — the headless browser is beheaded, and the URLs are not subject to mutilation.

This all seems to take a hard problem out of the hands of really great developers with lots of machines into a huge number of lower-quality developers with weak machines. It does not scale well.

Lastly, most of this is already possible with some forethought and good design. JavaScript and jQuery (or similar) allows the programmer to “Ajaxify” a non-Ajax application in most cases. Thinking about URLs ahead of time as a developer is not a bad idea, either. In any case, if the programmer can understand what a headless browser is doing, what escaping is, etc., he can do it right now with the same talent in this non-proprietary way. There are plenty of opportunities to create poor designs and traps for spiders with either of these patterns regardless.

If the application cannot be designed this way, at a certain point, an application becomes a “real” application and probably should not be searchable anyway.

This is a very bad idea, Google. As technocrats, you must think these things all make sense; but you must keep the little people in mind. The internet is filled with the world’s technology-proletariats. Implementing this will probably have long-lasting effects much like the “SEO” of 2001. Those who get it right (and those will be few) will be visible, others will not be. As tech-savvy marketers, we may actually like that prospect, but it’s not in the interest of Google, or the internet as a whole.

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Yehuda Katz is a member of the Ruby on Rails core team, and lead developer of the Merb project. He is a member of the jQuery Core Team, and a core contributor to DataMapper. He contributes to many open source projects, like Rubinius and Johnson, and works on some he created himself, like Thor. He is the author of jQuery in Action, Ruby Core Developer; Engine Yard, and can be found at http://yehudakatz.com.

Jaimie Sirovich is a search marketing consultant. Officially Jaimie is a computer programmer, but he claims to enjoy marketing much more. At present, Jaimie is focused on helping clients sell everywhere, and achieve multi-channel integration with major websites such as eBay, Amazon, and even Craigslist. He is the author of Search Engine Optimization with PHP and can be found at http://www.seoegghead.com.

For more search marketing insights, visit Search Marketing Standard.

3 Good Reasons Why Google Has Lost It On The Ajax Thing

First up is Tad of SEO Blog talking with one of the youngest of the bright stars, Glen Allsopp, who recently brought back his ViperChill marketing blog. They talk a bit about how he achieved success at such a young age and what made him decide to revive ViperChill. Second is an interview with Jeremy Shoemaker by Aaron Wall of SEOBook. Talk about one heavy-hitter interviewing another! Jeremy recaps the story of what motivated him to strive for success and his view of what is needed to maintain that success. Finally, David Mihm is interviewed by Shagun Vatsa, officially about the recent changes Google has made to the local platform. Along the way David tells us what got him interested in local search, how he keeps up with the industry, and advice he has for those just starting out.

Looking into the background and experiences of those who have been successful online in their endeavors is kind of like your own personal SEO – it offers you ways you may not have thought of yet to optimize your life and your business efforts to come out on top. And that’s one of the big reasons why I continue to read interviews and look forward to finding out more about the people behind the ideas that keep us maneuvering towards more success online.

For more search marketing insights, visit Search Marketing Standard.

Editor’s Picks, November 2-6, 2009

Most SEO consultants agree that writing and issuing online PRs at regular intervals is a beneficial addition to your online strategy. Depending on the service agreement you have with your SEO provider, it may be that creating content such as optimized news releases will incur an additional charge. If that’s the case or if you’re limited to the number of releases you can put out per month/year, it’s worth developing your own PR writing skills and taking control of your online releases.

Even trained journalists and marketers can struggle to write a really interesting online PR, as their format and style will differ greatly from an offline release. For this reason, you should resist the temptation to simply put any offline PR materials you have commissioned onto your website and expect them to help you increase online rankings. Offline PRs will very often fail to resonate with an online audience because titles, keyword consideration, and sentence length mean very different things online.

Avoid these pitfalls and create newsworthy online press releases each time by following these steps:

1. Decide On Your Topic

The obvious first step when writing an online PR is to decide on your topic. This will be relatively straightforward if something newsworthy has recently taken place within the company. Events such as being nominated for or winning an award, landing a large new order, opening in a new location, or taking on more staff lend themselves well to an online PR. But you can also fashion a PR out of less-obvious news stories such as the introduction of green initiatives in your office, trade show attendance, the launch of a competition, charitable donations, the setting of new customer service targets, or conducting advanced staff training.

When you’ve decided on your topic, write it down in no more than one sentence. This one sentence is the reason you’re writing the release, so keep it in a prominent position and refer back to it. It’s amazing how many online PRs start off well but then veer totally off track, so refer back to your one sentence blurb throughout the creation process to ensure you’re not wandering off topic.

2. Arrange Your Keywords

When you’re writing an online release, basic SEO principles should be applied to keyword selection and placement. Draw up a short list of words and phrases from your SEO keyword list that you think should be included in the release. Working from this list will give the content an optimized framework and remind you to keep keyword use and organic optimization goals in mind throughout the creative process.

When deciding on keywords, don’t expect to fit every keyword you’re optimizing for into the PR. Good online releases are focused on a particular topic, meaning you’ll only need to use keywords related to that central theme. Trying to shoehorn other phrases in because you want to rank on page one of the SERPs for them will undermine the credibility of the whole PR.

3. Formatting

You should always include the date and your contact details at the top of the release. This makes the job of the recipient easier when they come across your PR in their inbox or on screen – they can see if the news is still timely and who to contact for more information. You could also include a company logo in the top-right-hand corner of the release to give it a firmer brand identity.

If you’re happy that the release go out immediately, include the phrase ‘For immediate release’ either above or below the date. If the story is embargoed until after a certain date, then use ‘For delayed release’ followed by the date it can be used. If you send a PR out with this embargo, don’t be surprised if some sites or editors use the piece before your intended date in order to get a jump on the competition. If the date of release is really important, hold back on sending out the PR until you’re happy that it be published.

Keep fonts standard and no larger than 12 points. Use of non-standard fonts will limit the number of people able to access the PR (a special font may not show up correctly on the screen of a reader without that typeface pre-installed).

4. Write The Headline

The headline should be in bold and centered below the contact details, release information, and date. Those experienced in offline PR will be familiar with clever, witty, and funny headlines that play on words or misspellings. These should be avoided with online PR – the headline should be concise, descriptive, and to the point. Keeping the headline short will also curry favor with busy journalists who get hundreds of thousands of PRs sent to them each week.

As one of the reasons behind writing an online PR is to help you with your SEO work, remember core on-page principles such as keyword placement. If you can use one of the keywords from your keyword list do so, particularly if you plan to publish the release on your own website.

5. The Intro Paragraph

All key facts should be included within the first paragraph of the release. Again, this first section should be kept short and sweet. No more than 5-6 lines of text usually works best. Within this introduction section, try to work in the classic journalism principles of who, where, what, and why. Answering these basic questions early on gives the reader all pertinent information even if they don’t have time to read the full release. It also gives the journalist reading the PR the basic facts needed to decide if the story is worthy of publication consideration.

Keywords should be used in this paragraph if they can be woven into the natural flow of the text. The product or brand name should be used at least once and linked back to the relevant page on your website.

6. The Body

This section of the online PR gives space to elaborate on the basic facts. To add weight to the release and make it more usable, include at least one quote from a relevant source. Depending on the topic of the PR, this will usually be the CEO or departmental head plus a comment from the client, trade body, or other entity mentioned in the release.

A common mistake made by PR rookies is to simply use the quote section of the release to push the company line. This is a sure-fire way to turn off the reader. Instead, use the space to add more detail or a unique perspective to the news announcement.

Any supporting material, such as statistics and market research, should also be included in the body section.

7. The Closing Paragraph

At the end of the release, include general company information such as number of retail outlets, location, and year founded. This can be taken directly from the ‘About Us’ section of your website, but should be kept as brief as possible.

8. Editor’s Notes

If you have high-res images available or are happy to schedule product reviews or send samples to interested parties or have an external PR consultant to deal with press requests, include a brief section attesting to those facts right at the end of the PR.

9. Ends

At the bottom of the page, formally terminate the release with [Ends] or –Ends-.

Follow these tips and your online PR will work to your best advantage for both practical and SEO purposes.

For more search marketing insights, visit Search Marketing Standard.

Write the Perfect Online PR

First up are posts on the implications of Bing and Google’s Twitter deals enabling tweets to be returned in the SERPs and – for Bing – the debut of a search feature for Twitter. Rob Garner from Search Insider assesses the likely impact of the deals on search results and Twitter’s future plans in A Big Week For Real-Time And Social Search. PC World’s Jared Newman focuses on privacy matters and actual benefits to users in Social Search from Google and Bing: My 8 Big Concerns. Finally, Clint Boulton of eWeek discusses How Twitter Search Will Help Google, Microsoft Bing, with input from leading SEMs.

Early reviews of Google’s Social Search feature itself are thought-provoking as well. Danny Sullivan goes through some actual examples in Google Social Search Launches, Gives Results From Your Trusted “Social Circle” to explain how it works to enable you to see search results that include those from connections within your Google-based social networks. The HuoMah SEO blog entry Google Social Search; an early review also goes through an actual query and drills down into the results to explore the feature. For insights into the significance of Google’s Social Search, Noah Mallin of Reprise Media raises some interesting points in Google Versus Google – Will Social Search Tear the Company Apart?, while Tad Chef of SEOptimise talks about Google’s Social Media Strategy: Trial & Error.

For more search marketing insights, visit Search Marketing Standard.

Editor’s Picks, October 26-30, 2009

If the traffic exiting your site has reached unacceptable levels, it’s time to sit down and take action. The first place to start on your quest to encourage visitors to stick around is to identify what’s causing them to leave in droves in the first place. A site’s bounce rate is a standard analytics metric, so you will likely uncover lots of useful data when you begin to dig around for clues.

The following points are common causes of a high bounce rate. If you recognize your website in two or more of the following scenarios, the mystery of your departing visitors has been solved …

1.  Does your site appear in SERPs for irrelevant or outdated keywords?

Appearing for irrelevant or outdated keywords is a common flaw of poorly managed paid search marketing campaigns, but it can also afflict organic listings. If your site is ranking for unsuitable keywords, visitors clicking through expecting to find something specific will be disappointed when a glance at the page doesn’t reveal what they were looking for. In this scenario, the site viewer is more likely to return to the search results than browse around the site in order to satisfy their original search query.

Tackling this issue will take some work and may require either an overhaul of the paid search campaign or a new SEO keyword strategy. For irrelevant pages caused by outdated PPC adverts, a commitment to keeping keywords up to date with fluctuating stock levels and services is needed. A complete review of keyword choice across the campaign should also be scheduled, and any general or irrelevant keywords linked to landing pages showing high bounce rates removed.

If the problem is at an SEO level, it’s important to revise the previous keyword strategy and create a new list of primary phrases to focus optimization efforts on. Coupled with this, it may be necessary to review landing page keyword usage and density to ensure cohesion between on- and off-page efforts.

2.  Is your site design as good as it can be?

Websites are very visual creations, making presentation and first impressions all important. Poor site design is a massive turn-off for many visitors and rather than waste time trying to get to grips with the site, a large percentage will simply exit and click back to the search engine results page. Poor design is often coupled with a poor navigation structure, which makes it impossible for even those willing to persevere with the design to find what they are looking for.

To drive down a high bounce rate, make your landing page as attractive and easy to use as possible. Even relatively simple changes such as introducing an eye-catching logo or image, incorporating a clearly visible call to action such as ‘Call now’ or ‘Download brochure’ or adding more white space instead of a busy screen can make a big difference to bounce rate.

The addition of a breadcrumb trail and simple navigation structure should also be factored in when considering design issues – if a new navigation framework makes it easier for a visitor to move through the site, bounce rates will fall simply by providing a pathway toward more useful information elsewhere on the site.

3.  Is your content compelling?

Having successfully lured a browser through to the website – either via a PPC ad, organic listing, or third-party referral – the onus is on the landing page to encourage that visitor to stay put. If the landing page fails to hold the user’s attention, a high bounce rate will ensue. A page with a lack of compelling content runs this risk by failing to engage the reader enough to make them want to stay.

Interesting, relevant content makes a website sticky and will win over even the flakiest of browsers. While identifying causes of bounce rates, ask yourself if your content is as fresh, informative, and relevant as it could be. Is too much of the content hidden below the fold? If so, simply rearranging its placement on the screen could be enough to lower exits from that page. If, however, your content leaves a lot to be desired, commit to investing in a decent copywriter to add information of interest or make time to sit down yourself to draft out new text. Something as simple as a case study, video-based product demonstration, or news item is often enough to turn around a high bounce rate and increase site conversions.

4.  Is your product information causing problems?

A lack of clear description, missing images, no titles, and high prices can all send site visitors quickly back to the search results. A high bounce rate on product pages could be due to any of these issues and will need to be investigated thoroughly, not just to bring the bounce rate down, but to drive sales from the site up.

A good place to start when assessing the reasons behind bounce rate on product pages is to check out competitor pricing and ensure your own costs are in line with the industry standard. If your price is higher out of necessity, consider adding value with free shipping or loyalty cards to bring you closer in line with rival vendors.

Detailed descriptions are also a must, as is the addition of images and product video where available. Don’t be afraid to bring in other elements to product information pages such as testimonials or catalog downloads to make the page stickier. As with any major change, implement each element individually and monitor the impact on bounce rate and other site metrics before extending across every product sold.

For more search marketing insights, visit Search Marketing Standard.

What’s Behind Your High Bounce Rate?

1. No One Knows Your Product Like You

Marketing agencies have dozens of other clients, most likely in different verticals, and you should not expect them to get to know your product and your target audience as well as you do. You have spent years or even decades researching your audience, adjusting your product line and repositioning your brand. Do not expect your agency to have the same insight from a week-long study of your Facebook or Twitter profiles.

2. Only You Can Be Truly Genuine

This second points ties in closely with the first. Since you have a better insight into your audience and care about your customers more than any outside agency, you will come across much more genuine. Since social media marketing is much more of an art than a more process-oriented SEO and paid search campaign, success on social media comes as a result of a true engagement. It does not come from a large number of keywords in your Google AdWords account or well-optimized meta tags.

3. Social Media Requires Integration With Other Departments

With this point, you can probably make a case for bringing all internet marketing efforts in-house. Just like SEO, social media marketing is becoming an integral part of organizational workflow. Other departments, from research to public relations, need to be trained in, and work closely with, social media. For some organizations with bottlenecks when it comes to marketing, outsourcing can actually speed up the implementation. However, this is just a way to tiptoe around the issue. In this day and age, large brands require close integration between different teams to succeed in social media space. Once of the top experts in the field, Lee Odden, has an entire blog dedicated to the issues of integrating social media and SEO with other parts of your organization.

It is worthwhile noting that this principle also applies to search engine optimization. Social media and SEO tend to work better together. If you have the same agency handling your SEO and social media marketing efforts, consider the downside of separating the two.

4. Outsourcing Is Unsustainable

Imagine an outside social media marketing firm developing your profiles and creating a voice for your brand within the social media community. Imagine that agency actually runs your Twitter account and responds to comments on your company’s Facebook page. Now, consider what would happen if your relationship with that agency were to end. Would the new agency be able to pick up where the old one left off? Most likely not. By having a dedicated social media team in-house and online, you can ensure consistency in, and continuance of, your SMM efforts.

5. Outside Agency And In-House Team Are Not Mutually Exclusive

While building your in-house social media team you will need to maintain a relationship with your marketing agency, for both initial training of in-house personnel as well as ongoing consultation. In fact, your agency should appreciate having knowledgeable contacts within your organization who can lobby higher management on its behalf. You will need outside help to train your new team and key people within other departments. Since it is much harder to keep up with the latest strategies for in-house marketers, experts like Jessica Bowman have also noted the need to bring in outside consult for ongoing training.

Conclusion

While there are certain benefits in outsourcing social media marketing, current trends point to a need to have a dedicated in-house team. Although full of challenges, the process of bringing your SMM efforts in-house should give your organization a mid- to long-term advantage in your brand positioning and engagement.

For more search marketing insights, visit Search Marketing Standard.

5 Reasons To Bring SMM Into The House

You may have the most appropriate keywords, be targeting the best possible traffic, with perfectly crafted advert copy, yet be losing conversion after conversion because your landing page is not up to scratch. Making changes at page rather than campaign level is a sure fire way to convert good clickthroughs into great sales figures.

1. Are you meeting expectations?

When a user clicks on your AdWords PPC ad, they have certain expectations about the page they are being transferred through to. If you’ve flagged up things such as the web’s biggest selection of a certain item, free shipping, a downloadable brochure or handy e-book, it’s essential that this promise is repeated in a prominent position on the landing page. A cohesion of messages creates synergy between the PPC advert and the product or service itself. If you fail to meet these expectations by showing only a small selection of goods, don’t provide the promised downloadable brochure, or choose not to display the e-book in a prominent position, your landing page will fail to resonate with the reader. The result is a higher-than-necessary bounce rate or far fewer conversions.

2. Do you have a call to action?

Even those browsers clicking through with the clear intention of getting in contact or purchasing from your website can falter if a clear call to action is not presented on the landing page. Hiding contact forms or ‘buy now’ buttons amid unnecessary on-page clutter dilutes the impact of the call to action.  Adding a very clear call to action — such as a large button — will increase website conversions by giving the reader a clear path through to the next stage of the conversion process.

A common mistake made by PPC advertisers is to point ads at brochure pages and then assume the visitor knows what to do next. Make your desired behavior very clear — for a catalog page, something as simple as increasing the size of the ‘buy now’ or ‘add to cart’ link or image can make a notable difference.

If your landing page has more than three or four paragraphs of text or is otherwise quite ‘busy’ due to graphics, make sure you scatter your calls to action throughout the page. Don’t leave your PPC visitor with the need to scroll back up and down the page in order to take action.

3.  Have you actually stuck with testing?

Testing performance is a pretty simple piece of advice, but it’s surprising how many advertisers let this basic good practice guideline fall by the wayside after the first flush of enthusiasm has passed. Testing a landing page’s effectiveness can be as simple as trying two different titles or as complicated as changing form layout, number of fields, content length, and style.

Getting the most out of your landing page will often also hinge on how visitors got there in the first place, so while you’re in a testing frame of mind, you could also test the messages used within the ad text. Typical parameters include changing titles, the inclusion of different offers, and use of varying calls to action and value propositions.

4. Don’t forget your ‘Thank You’ page.

When your landing page is sufficiently optimized and performing well, there will be lots of traffic going through your site’s ‘Thank You’ page. This is the page that is shown to visitors after they have completed your form or downloaded the brochure. This page should also be looked at in conjunction with your landing page, as it is your last opportunity to up-sell or cross-sell your products and services to that particular visitor on that visit.

The most common ‘Thank You’ pages are just that – very simple pages that thank the visitor for having filled in the form/downloaded the brochure. The visitor is left with no other incentive than to head off to a search engine or navigate directly to another site. This course of action is sometimes unavoidable because the user has got exactly what they want from that visit, but that’s not always the case. Adding more elements to your ‘Thank You’ page could extend the site visit and result in further conversions.

For more search marketing insights, visit Search Marketing Standard.

PPC Landing Page Optimization

Up until now, most AR apps haven’t been hugely commercial in nature. Augmented reality map-based applications work with your cell phone to pick up compass/GPS type readings and provide specific info about locations pinpointed. For example, you could point your phone’s camera at a famous building and Wikipedia’s entry about that building appears next to it on the screen. Or you can use it to geo-tag places with a variety of information that others can later access. But Urbanspoon’s entry into the field ups the ante for search marketers. If they haven’t already, they now need to think about how to impact the content that appears on a consumer’s iPhone screen as augmented reality.

For example, a user may point their phone’s camera at two adjoining restaurants to find out which one people prefer (Urbanspoon’s focus), or what recent reviews have said, or perhaps even see what’s on special for dinner. Another application is the housing market. Available apps allow you to stroll down the street and have your phone identify which houses are for sale and provide the details of each one (sale price, realtor contact info, interior photos, even a link to click to call the realtor). With all that super-relevant info literally at hand, the consumer winds up more informed, and also more susceptible to on-the-spot purchasing decisions, and perhaps more likely to repeat a purchase in the future.

Visualizing oneself actually interacting with a product is an important part of the buying cycle, and augmented reality brings the product one step closer to enable decisions. In the process, your phone winds up becoming a search engine in a different kind of way. Lots of exciting stuff coming up in this part of reality.

For more search marketing insights, visit Search Marketing Standard.

Editor’s Picks, October 12-16, 2009

Despite these plus points, is it possible to have too much of a good thing? Will too many links have a detrimental effect? Google seems to think so, but the good news for those who have worked to create a library of quality links is that the problem lies not with inbound referrals but on-page links from one section of the site to the other (or to external pages).

Having too many links per page will undermine ranking aspirations by infringing on the search engine’s design and content guidelines.  Google starts out by recommending that links on a page are kept to a reasonable number, which they classify as below 100. This rule of thumb is somewhat outdated and can be traced back to when spiders read a smaller portion of a web page – the more links contained within the page, the longer it was. To ensure its spiders performed effectively, the benchmark of 100 was set. While search engines now read much more of a page before indexing it, having more than 100 links can set off the spam filters and result in a lower perceived page quality.

While Google won’t automatically class a page with more than 100 links spiraling off as spam, it may choose not to follow some or all of the paths off to other pages. If this is the search engine’s only route to that page, it may miss being indexed purely because it hasn’t been correctly integrated into the site’s architecture. If a page is falling foul of being one of too many links and missing out on a possible SERP inclusion, it could be that you (conversely) actually need to build external links in order to negate the impact caused by too many on-page links. Building links back to a page that isn’t being read due to being one of too many links will deliver traffic and will also provide a secondary route into the site for the search engines. Creating this bypass will ensure that the page is accessed and eligible to rank.

If you have a large site selling lots of products or services and have pages that have more than 100 links out of sheer necessity, how do you avoid falling foul of the 100 links rule? The first and most obvious solution is to cut the number of links. Product or catalog pages will have lots of links by their very nature, so ask yourself if it’s possible to split the offending page into two or more new pages. Can products be re-categorized to sit on a new page without sending would-be customers off course? If so, you’ve quickly halved the number of links counted per page and are well on the way to dropping off the spam radar.

Having counted the number of links on each page of the site and come up with an excess of 100, take the opportunity not to berate the potential shortfall in organic placement but to assess end-user value. The 100 link benchmark falls under Google’s quality guidelines for a reason – think of a link as a choice your visitor has to make. When they come across a link on the page, they must decide whether following that link will lead them to the desired information or if they should ignore the link and continue with the same page. With more than 100 links, your visitor must make more than 100 decisions; this is an overwhelming prospect at best and a definite conversion killer at worst.

For more search marketing insights, visit Search Marketing Standard.

Are Too Many Links Damaging Your Search Position?

SEO Cheat Sheet: Anatomy of a URL — SEOmoz has some great cheat sheets posted from time to time, including the always-a-must The Web Developer’s SEO Checklist. This week’s entry is a compact yet powerful reminder of the parts of a URL, showing an SEO-friendly version versus an old-fashioned non-optimized version. Comes in a nice PDF version as well as the large image in the blog post.

25-Point Website Usability Checklist — Updated at the beginning of September, UserEffect’s website usability checklist is divided into handy sections. The list is available as a nice 1-page PDF version, although you will want to review the details on specifics under each point in the list that is laid out in the post itself.

Twitter Cheat Sheet for Businesses — This recent (Sept. 22) Twitter Cheat Sheet for Businesses by LevelTen sets out best practices and tips in a PDF format for handy reference. You will have to provide a name and email to get to the download page, however.

Procedure List + Monday Refocus Form — Low-tech doesn’t mean low value. WhiteHatBlackBox’s “Procedure List” is basically a 15-point to-do list you can customize for any task you need to do periodically, but keep forgetting all the steps to (or if you just want a record of it). Can be used for low-tech tasks (like balancing a checkbook, if anyone ever still does that) on up (like “how do I set up an FTP account again?”).

Bonus: Mod_Rewrite Cheat Sheet — For those of us who start to quake with fear when even thinking about rewriting URLs, here’s a link to the latest version of a dynamite cheat sheet on mod_rewrite matters at AddedBytes. If even the thought of that scares you, there’s even a related beginner’s guide to URL rewriting to help you achieve URL nirvana.

For more search marketing insights, visit Search Marketing Standard.

Editor’s Picks, October 5-9, 2009