We wrote in April about problems with sites created with Yahoo Site Builder: some important SEO techniques couldn’t be applied. Now there’s more.

When we optimize images on a page, there are three opportunities to employ keywords: in the file name, in the alternate text, and in a title attribute. The title attribute shows up in a small text box when you hover the mouse cursor over an image that has one.

A client of ours found themselves unable to create these title attributes, so they called Yahoo Site Builder for help. The person they spoke with didn’t know what title attributes are, so my client asked me to intervene and ask the Yahoo people about it because we could speak the same language. I submitted a help request, and got the following response:

We’re sorry, the feature you are mentioning is not currently available through Yahoo! SiteBuilder and we do not have an estimated date as to when or if it will be available. However, we’ll pass your comments on to our Development team for further consideration.As you Yahoo! Site Builder uses alternate text (alt tags) on images.

Once again, we must conclude that Yahoo Site Builder is not prepared to allow full search engine optimization.

Business owners often unwittingly commit one or more of five common web site mistakes that silently cost them tons of money in lost business. Read through this list and make sure you’re not making one of these mistakes.

1. Writing content that focuses on features instead of benefits. As business owners, we’re intimately close to our features. But the customer wants to know what’s in it for him or her. Those are benefits. Nail those, and you make the sale.
2. Not making your web site search engine friendly. The most egregious example of this is a snazzy, all-flash website. Beautiful, but totally unfriendly to search engines. With one of those, customers will never find you unless they already know your name. But there are less obvious mistakes of this type that are made al lot, especially with navigation the search engines can’t follow, text inside graphics where search engines can’t read it, and more.
3. Failing to keep your web site fresh. Fresh content encourages the search engines to visit you more often, and offers new opportunities to use variations on keyword phrases people are searching for. Done right, it can also act as link bait.
4. Not having a call to action. Ask your visitor to call you, to buy, to request more information. Why do you suppose at McDonalds they always ask “Do you want fries with that?” That simple call to action sells tons of fries every year.
5. Making it too hard for customers to buy from you. Don’t require a login to shop on your site. You might implement that at checkout, but far to many sites require a visitor to log in before they can ever peruse the merchandise. Bad idea!

One factor we’ve seen that can hurt your rankings … and that almost no web site owner is aware of … is known by the tongue twister “canonicalization“. It can be fixed by three lines of code, and we explain all that on our web site and in optimization recommendations we provide for our clients.

Unfortunately, Yahoo Site Builder can’t let you implement those simple three lines of code. We ran into this on behalf of a client of ours this month. When I wrote Yahoo for assistance, this is the response I got.

We’re sorry, but the feature you are mentioning is not currently available through Yahoo! Web Hosting, and we do not have an estimated date as to when or if it will be available. However, we’ll pass your comments on to our Development team for further consideration. Since Yahoo! is a share hosting service, we currently do not offer access to .htacess files.

A client of ours sent us an article from the industry website Furniture World. He told me it made him laugh since we’d just been through a very similar situation, explaining SEO to his web designer on a conference call. The article is basically an abbreviated transcript of a conference call among a furniture store owner, his SEO consultant, and his webmaster.

Check it out here.

First impressions are important, and for your web site to contribute to your bottom line, you need to worry about two first impressions.

First there’s the “impression” your site makes on the search engine spiders. That’s the impression that will get you god rankings and drive visitors to your site.

The second “first impression” is the few fleeting seconds you have to convince your visitor that you have what they’re looking for and that you’re a company they’ll want to do business with. That depends on the “look and feel” of your web site and written copy that conveys an irresistible marketing message.

Either one of these, by itself, isn’t going to do your bottom line much good.

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This issue is called “canonicalization”, but don’t let that unpronounceable word throw you. It’s all about the potential for confusion when more than one URL points to the same page.

Many web sites have links to their home page that look like this www.mysite.com/index.htm or www.mysite.com/default.php . They all point to the same page, which most people think of as www.mysite.com.

All of those links pass “link juice” or PageRank, but search engines treat those URLs as different URLs … which they are .. kind of. That means that your “true” home page of www.mysite.com is getting less link juice benefit than it deserves, because some is being siphoned away to www.mysite.com/index.htm.

By the way, this also applies to the “www.” version of your domain name and the “non-www.” version. Choose one and stick with it. I prefer the “www.” version, so make sure all links, whether internal links or external links, point to your web site as www.mysite.com instead of as mysite.com.

<Here’s Bill Hartzer’s discussion on the subject>

Have you ever wondered how your web site looks to search engine spiders? Lots of content on your web site that people can easily see and understand is invisible to the search engines. For example, flash content doesn’t register at all with search engine spiders. This spider simulator also includes a link to an article that explains all about how spiders work. Check out this cool tool and see what the search engines see: http://www.webconfs.com/search-engine-spider-simulator.php

For classic examples of what not to do on your web site, you can’t beat WebPagesThatSuck.com. Here are three of the top contenders for the worst web site of 2008.

#1

It’s always fun to find a new kind of mistake in web design. I’ve seen (horizontally) repeating background images, but I’ve never seen (vertically) repeating navigation. Also, I don’t think I’ve ever seen the word “darling” used so many times on a site.

#2

If you’re prone to seizures, you may want to avoid this site — especially stay away from some of the sub-pages. You couldn’t design a more effective page for sending visitors away screaming.

#3

The editors of Web Pages That Suck were almost speechless at this site. They had only two comments:

• Words Fail Me.
• I Think I’ve Gone Blind.

In last month’s blog, we wrote about making sure your web site displays properly in all the popular browsers. It’s just not safe anymore to assume that everyone uses Internet Explorer.

Now there’s a tool that will let you see exactly how your web pages display in almost any browser you can imagine. You’ll find it at www.BrowserShots.org. Don’t get carried away, though. You can chose to see any page on your site in dozens of browsers, but the process takes quite a bit of time and the more browsers you choose, the longer it takes.

For priority service they request a donation, and that’s a good idea if you’re a web designer working on multiple web sites. If you just want to check your own site, though, the service is free as long as you don’t mind a little wait for the results.

It’s great news that Flash is becoming more search engine friendly and there is no question that the addition of previously unattainable Flash content to search engine indexes will prove valuable. But sadly I would never tell a client that Flash can be a competitive medium for search engine optimization. There are simply too many roadblocks that still exist and need to be addressed before a Flash website has any hope of competing with an HTML website on the basis of search engine optimization. An all-Flash web site is still essentially invisible to the search engines. <more>