Websites. Software. Consulting

Web Design and SEO Blog - TotallyBlog - London - Totally Communications

August 2008

• Monday 04/08/2008

  Google Sitelinks - What are they? by Toby Mason

  Every now and again you may see links underneath the first result in the Google search results. Google call these "sitelinks" but there is not much more we know about them. What are they and how do you get them.

  These links usually only appear when your website "owns" the keywords or brand you are typing in to Google. For an example of what I mean try typing "MSN" (link). Notice how there are eight "quick links" under the MSN result.
  
  We used to have them for this site until launching our new (award winning) website design about 4 months ago. I was intrigued to see when these would come back and more intrigued to see what Google would deem important enough to allocate a link to.
  
  Finally, quite soon after the page rank update (maybe a correlation there?) I noticed in the Google Webmaster Tools that 8 sitelinks have now been allocated. According to a few blogs it may take a couple of months for these to actually start showing in the search results, watch this space.
  
  Within the Webmaster tools you have the option to block any of the chosen sitelinks if you do not want them to show. I have actually decided to block one link that pointed to a specific website in our portfolio. Its not that I'm not proud of that site, I just dont think its relevant to our prosepcts. Google will then allocate a new link to takes its place.
  
  Other sitelinks Google chose are:
  Contact Us
  Charity
  Development
  Online Dating Software
  Blog
  Case Studies
  Consulting
  
  Even though they wouldnt be my first choice I'm going to keep these ones. I think these give a good insight into the broad range of our business and will help potential vistors to the site. However I am slightly bemused as to why one of the links is tagged "Development" rather than "Web Development" and really confused as to why our most popular website section "Web Designers" is not there at all.
  
  The jury is still out as to how Google chooses these links.
  
  Google says they choose links if they "think they'll be useful to the user". How do they determine that?
  
  Some say its to do with website traffic, others say its down to your backlink strategy. All I know for sure is that its not as simple as that. The links show neither our most popular pages or our most linked pages and I have yet to find anything conrete by analyzing the web statistics either.
  
  I would very much link to see "web design" there soon though, after all it's a pretty big part of what we do what we do!
  
  
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• Friday 01/08/2008

  SEO Case Study - Month Two by Toby Mason

  We have made a really good start and the site is actually performing better than hoped considering that most of this month was taken up doing onsite work.

  Here are the positions as of 4 weeks into the campaign:
  
  Managed Offices London n/a
  Managed Offices Soho 60
  London Serviced Offices n/a
  Serviced Office London n/a
  Serviced Office North London 89
  Office Space London Central n/a
  Flexible Office Space London 138
  Flexible offices London 55
  
  As discussed in Month One of the SEO Case Study these results are purely based on changes made to the website itself so they are really encouraging.
  
  This coming month we start in earnest on the offsite and link building. The important thing for progressing a link campaign is to build good realtionships with those in the industy you are targeting. You will be amazed at the blog and article sites out there that will be more than happy to host a well throught out article or paper with plenty of backlinks.
  
  Directory submissions are important, but they tend to carry a lot less weight than industry blogs so its important to use the time wisely. Even though a lot more effort may go into writing a blog post about office space and befriending the bloggers to host it the results and reaction to the links will be much more impressive.
  
  We can look forward to the next month. Google is always the hardest nut to crack but we have made really good headway on our targeted key phrases as well as with some periphery keywords such as "flexible offices soho" (position 16)
  
  Check back in a month for part three of SEO Case Study.
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• Friday 01/08/2008

  Shiretoko Web Browser - New Features by Tom Jowitt

  Firefox have released an alpha of the new 3.1 web browser called Shiretoko which is promising to have some really great features. I don't normally bother with alpha releases past reading the occasional preview but this looked interesting enough to install and have a play with. So what better way to get a feel for it than to write my first blog post for Totally and do a bit of testing with the latest browser technology?

  One of the best things about the new browser is the continued HTML5 support. I'm still not sure if this is a blessing or a curse for those of us in the web development industry. But the new standards will be a much needed upgrade from HTML4 which is nearly 11 years old now. I just hope the new standards will go hand in hand with concepts like 'best before' dates for all browsers. This could be a huge step forward for both security and standards.
  
  I knocked up a quick test based on the W3 guide and A List Apart's HTML5 article to see how it looks and it's pretty good. Have a look at the source code here and the screenshot below of how it renders in Shiretoko (as well as some other current browsers). It instantly looks more manageable as the XML-style syntax allows you to name containers without the div and span tags. If you combine this with a template engine or your favourite framework it should make templating and managing views a lot easier than in previous versions of HTML.
  
  
  
  This is just the tip of the iceberg for the next generation of browsers. I'm sure we'll notice huge improvements in CSS and Javascript support in the next few years, not to mention the complete overhaul in how audio and video media is displayed. There's also lots of nifty features like the canvas tag that are due to be widely implemented. I'm not sure how far Firefox have taken their HTML5 support in this release as it's not even a concrete standard yet (and probably won't be for some time) but I'll be looking into the media objects and CSS features in future posts.
  
  There's been a few improvements on the new Firefox 3 'awesome bar' too. You can now use wild card characters to filter history searches to either specific domains or page titles. One of the main issues users had with the new URL bar was it often bought back a lot of irrelevant results due to searching the page names as well as the addresses. This has gone some way to fixing that.
  
  Another new feature is the tab switcher. Rather than just skipping to the next tab when you CTRL + Tab, Shiretoko has a nice little preview box allowing you to quickly scan though you tabs until you find the one you want. It's a nice little bit of eye candy even if the underlying functionality hasn't changed much.
  
  
  
  So there you go, a lot of progress and some exciting features. It's not really practical to use for daily tasks at the moment as the most useful extensions such as Firebug and the Developers Toolbar haven't been upgraded. HTML5 is also only in the draft stages but the browser companies are already chomping at the bit to cater for it. Hopefully this kind of interest will speed up the W3 publication process a bit and we can have a nice new standard in the next few years.
  
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