Last saved by Isaac Traynis 8/15/2008 6:20 AM
Leads360.com Overview & SEO Foundation Overview: Built entirely on an ASP.NET 2.0 system; the website takes advantage of the AJAX framework and uses CSS Friendly Adapters. The structure is based on nested Master files, web forms, and user controls where partial postbacks are used. The site is made to satisfy HTML 4.01 Transitional W3C compliance to the fullest extent that the .NET system permits. JavaScript (JS) unobtrusive- when JS is disabled [5%]1 the site still retains its main navigational functionality. And because it degrades gracefully when JS is turned off, Search Engine Crawlers (Robots) can index 100% of the content on the site. The layout is entirely table-free. Tables are only used to display data-tables and form-elements. Alternative CSS files used conditionally to cure specific ie6 and ie7 bugs is kept to an absolute minimum. The website has been carefully tested to be cross-browser/platform compatible in ie6 [30.1%], ie7 [21.9%], Firefox [37.0%], & Safari [2.1%] 2.
The Basic SEO Foundation of Leads360.com: 1. Back Links. 2. Quality Site Content 3. Good Title Tags 4. No JavaScript for Links/Content 5. No Flash for Content 6. No Frames 7. No hidden Text 8. No Duplicate Text
1. Back Links: Quality & volume of links from external sites to Leads360.com. a. Major groundwork for this aspect of SEO has already been made by Jeff via the creation and trackbacks from externals sites, blogs, and partner pages. b. Aside from the organic growth of back links, Leads360.com has instituted a monetary incentive for employees to post to its own blog. c. Janet Meiner, from OrangeSoda, is currently working on creating many more valuable back links to Leads360.com.
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Web statistics taken from W3C and are reflective of January 2008: http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp 2 Web statistics taken from W3C and are reflective of March 2008: http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp
Last saved by Isaac Traynis 8/15/2008 6:20 AM
d. Those pages that are no longer part of the new site structure, but still have active external back links have been replaced with a redirect to the new location of relevant content. 2. Quality Site Content: Satisfy the need/want of users. a. The old Leads360.com had a good volume of content, however, much of it was repetitive and without structure. b. The new Leads360.com has a much smaller volume of content, but all of it is soundly structured and content is beginning to expand around a redesigned framework (Read #7 for additional info). 3. Good Title Tags: Serve to attract visitors on search engine results pages (SERPs). a. Jeff has already created the majority of the Title Tags that have been transplanted to the new site. b. Important: Title Tags should comply with the theme of the page and be slightly, not overtly, promotional, since it will appear on SERPs. Many of the current Title Tags appear to be a list of keywords. Is this intentional? 4. No JavaScript for Links/Content: JS generated links & content cannot be indexed. a. No content on the new Leads360.com is generated by JS. All JS function calls, which can be found in the source, are simply ignored by Robots; the content remains in place and is indexed. b. Robots are known to leave pages where there is an excess amount of embedded JS they have to scan over. All major blocks of embedded JS, with the exception of .NET generated JS, have been removed and made to load in the tag of each page. c. The “Industries” & “What We Do” sections of Leads360.com are the only 2 sections that implement ASP.NET‟s partial postback using UpdatePanels. This means that the entire site does not need to reload when the user clicks on different links in the side-menu. The new content is updated in the center of the page without the „flicker‟ one would get on full postback. i. The concern is that because the content is loaded asynchronically from a JS call, the URL never changes and as a result Robots cannot crawl to the rest of the content pages in those sections. Fortunately, this is not an issue on the site because when JS is off, the HREF URL element in the
tag becomes „visible‟ and Robots as well as users with disabled JS can still view the pages via full postback. Check these images out for reference: 1. JavaScript ON:Y:\Leads360\Marketing\Archive\images\leads360on-js.png 2. JavaScript OFF:Y:\Leads360\Marketing\Archive\images\leads360off-js.png 5. No Flash for Content: Main content of sites should never be in flash. a. Currently, most Robots cannot index flash files and although Google is developing methods to improve the indexing of embedded flash files, SEs are still years behind.
Last saved by Isaac Traynis 8/15/2008 6:20 AM
b. A significant portion of Leads360.com uses flash files. Particularly the homepage, the “Industries,” and the “Should We Work Together” sections of the site. This has been addressed by the use of JS to provide alternative HTML content when either JS or flash or both are disabled. The alternative content is visible to users and indexable by SEs. Check these images out for reference: i. Flash & JS is ON:Y:\Leads360\Marketing\Archive\images\leads360-onflash.png ii. Flash & JS is OFF:Y:\Leads360\Marketing\Archive\images\leads360-onflash.png 6. No Frames for Content: Generally SEs cannot index built-in iframes. a. The following links on Leads360.com site display in iframes via JS modal box: i. How It Works: Video ii. Security: Certifications iii. Security: Technical Partners iv. Security: Proactive Backup v. Security: Data Protection vi. Security: Hosting Infrastructure vii. Security: Technology Platform viii. Privacy Policy ix. Terms & Conditions b. The links that reference the JS modal box, however, are unobtrusive because they are attached to the tag and abide fully by W3C standards3. And the URLs for these iframes are all coded into the HREF element of the very same tag. Therefore, when a user has JS turned off or when a Robot is indexing Leads360.com, they will be directed to the attached URL in the HREF rather than fail to present any new content. 7. No Hidden Text in HTML: Avoid hiding text; especially text spammy in nature. a. There has been much discussion by standards aware developers on the use of CSS to hide text for legitimate reasons, such as accessibility or usability reasons. The general consensus has been that this is a valid method and that SEs will not penalize the website for hiding „legitimate‟ CSS text4. b. Text intentionally hidden in HTML, on the other hand, such as text too small to read or text with the same or similar color to the background, can result in penalization or non-indexing. There are no places on our site where text is hidden in the HTML. c. There are, however, plenty of areas on our site where the text has been „technically‟ hidden because it has been moved off the page via CSS (i.e. textindent: -9999px) or simply made invisible because it is used as a CSS pop-up (i.e. display: none). This approach is generally acceptable and, in fact, warranted
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An example, which can be found at the bottom of every source page on the Leads360.com, is this: privacy policy
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Reference the October, 2005 article “Google, SEO and using CSS to hide text” from 456 Berea St. for more info: http://www.456bereastreet.com/archive/200510/google_seo_and_using_css_to_hide_text/
Last saved by Isaac Traynis 8/15/2008 6:20 AM
because the text is used as a descriptor for, as an example, an image that is displayed via CSS (opposed to the HTML
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tag) 5. Here‟s an example: i. The text that is used as a title tag alternative is not spammy in nature. So, for instance, the logo that appears throughout our website has the following text „hidden‟ via CSS: 1. “Leads360: distribute. track. convert. (logo)” ii. And not something like: 1. “Leads360 Lead Management, Mortgage Lead Tracking, Lead Distribution Software, Sales Lead Management!” d. As a further precautionary measure, the CSS along with some other internal files on Leads360.com have been excluded from the prying eyes of Robots by declaring they‟re no-index status in the robots.txt file. 8. No Duplicate Text: Avoid similar text within a site or that is used elsewhere on the web. a. Duplicate content happens to be the current enemy of SEs, especially Google. SEs want to refine the search experience by having distinct material – they do not want different sites displaying on the SERPs with the same content. b. Currently, this is our biggest problem on the Leads360.com because our material is very similar, if not a duplicate. This is in reference to the industries section, which uses practically identical material on each vertical page. This needs to be remedied. c. Aside from being original, we have to think creatively when adding new content to the Leads360.com. The #1 question we should be answering when creating new content for our site: “Does this stand-out from our competitor‟s websites, our own site, and the rest of the web?”
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Why do we avoid using the
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tag in 2008? CSS permits us to use the “background-image” and “backgroundposition” rules, which make it possible to use a single (sprite) file full of images, rather than a collection of individual image files. Why is this better? The single sprite reduces HTTP Requests substantially. What could once be 10 or 20 request (depending on # of images on page) is now just 1.