The Rank Magic Blog

5 Reasons To Redesign With CSS

January 26, 2007 ::: CSS stands for "Cascading Style Sheets" and is a web design technique that minimizes the amount of underlying HTML code on your web page. Your webmaster understands what it is and if you're not a webmaster, it probably isn't important that you understand much about it, except to know whether your web site uses it effectively.

From a search engine viewpoint, when you have a high code-to-content ratio, your keyword density (the relative frequency of the  targeted keywords on your page) is diluted by HTML instructions for how tables, fonts, styles and colors should be displayed. With CSS, there are no tables, and most formatting information is contained in one separate style sheet. As a result, search engines see more keywords and less code, and that helps your rankings.

Linda Bustos, Marketing Director for Image X Media, a Vancouver web design and Internet marketing firm, has written an article for Site Pro News on reasons you should consider redesigning your web site (or having it done) to make better use of CSS techniques.

<full article here>

What's Wrong with Reciprocal Linking?

January 22, 2007 ::: Donald Nelson writes on Site Pro News: "I dread getting a 'reciprocal link request' in my email inbox. I have a few pet peeves with reciprocal linking, as it is practiced today, and here they are: ..."

We hate getting those kinds of reciprocal link requests, too. And that's why we do it differently. Check out Donald's article as well as his suggestions on what we all should be doing to get good incoming links to our web sites. His list of four things to do to get great incoming links:

1. Make your site so cool that people will link to you without being asked.

2. get involved in forums related to your business, and place a link in your signature block.

3. Write articles about your field of expertise that other web sites can use on their sites ... with links back to your site.

4. Do judicious reciprocal linking. (That's the only kind of reciprocal linking we do at Rank Magic.)

<full article here>

The Meta Description Tag

January 17, 2007 ::: The keywords and phrases you use in your Meta description tag don't affect your page's ranking in the search engines (for the most part), but this tag can still come in handy in your overall SEO campaigns.

What Is the Meta Description Tag?

The Meta description tag is a snippet of HTML code that doesn't appear visibly on your web page, but which is nevertheless visible to the search engines.

It used to be thought that the purpose of the Meta description tag was twofold: to help the page rank well  for the words tit contained, and to provide a nice description in the search engine results pages. That's changed, though, and today the words in the meta description tag aren't given any weight in the ranking algorithms of Google, and only a small amount of weight in the other search engines.

SEO expert Jill Whalen explains everything you'd ever want to know about meta description tags in an article on her web site.

Flash Sites: Can They Get Ranked?

January 12, 2007 ::: How can a web site that's all done in Flash be optimized so the search engines will rank it?

That's been a tough one up until now. Generally, the search engines read text. And flash pages are like large pictures that include text. That text is in the picture, though, and the search engines can't tell if there's informative text there or a movie of your pet cat. Normally we recommend creating an HTML version of the web site for those without Flash as well as for the search engines.

Now, there's a pretty cool workaround for optimizing Flash sites from Jonathan Hochman on his web site. It's technical, so unless you're a web designer experienced in HTML, it might be a little dense for you. (Actually, to be fair it'll probably be incomprehensible to you.) But if you're a skilled webmaster, it provides a technique that should prove to be very valuable.

Top 10 Mistakes in Web Design

January 9, 2007 ::: The 10 most egregious offenses against users. Web design disasters and HTML horrors are legion, though many usability atrocities are less common than they used to be. This compendium comes from usability expert Jakob Nielsen, Ph.D., a User Advocate and principal of the Nielsen Norman Group which he co-founded with Dr. Donald A. Norman (former VP of research at Apple Computer). Until 1998 he was a Sun Microsystems Distinguished Engineer.

Dr. Nielsen founded the "discount usability engineering" movement for fast and cheap improvements of user interfaces and has invented several usability methods, including heuristic evaluation. He holds 79 United States patents, mainly on ways of making the Internet easier to use.

Wikipedia Search Engine Coming Soon

January 5, 2007 ::: Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, the online encyclopaedia, is set to launch an internet search engine with amazon.com that he hopes will become a rival to Google and Yahoo! The search engine will exploit the same user-based technology as his open-access encyclopaedia, which was launched in 2003.

<more here>

Cranky: Search Engine for the Over-50 Crowd

January 3, 2007 ::: An age-relevant search engine and Web site, Cranky.com targets baby boomers and seniors, aiming to remove confusion from the search process and deliver content that appeals to the over-50 crowd. Unlike other search engines, which define their success based on capturing and categorizing the entire Web, Cranky.com attempts to narrow search results to a relevant but short list.