Searchlight

Seeing how it is nearly Thanksgiving here in the States, what better time to take a look at the SEO industry and give a little thought for some of the things that I give thanks for.

Search Engines

First and foremost would have to be search engines themselves, since without them, SEO would not be as important as it is. This isn't to say that SEO's value is only tied to the existence of search engines. SEO has really become much more encompassing than the acronym it is as SEO continues to evolve more as an extension of traditional marketing.

Ability to Rank

While every client and site owner feels challenged when it comes to ranking...... Read more

Having your site rank high in the search engines can be a real boost to traffic for your site. Could anything be better than achieving that top spot in Google? How about getting eight more keyword-rich links up there? What I'm talking about is the highly coveted site links.

Site links have been the icing on the cake for a top listing in Google. Site links are additional links to a site that occasionally appear below the listing. What made these especially sweet was that they haven't been something that you had direct control over, but were like a little gift from Google. And gifts from Google are good.

Speculation was that site links typically appeared on highly relevant searches, often for well-established sites, that also had clean, keyword-rich URLs. In other words, when Google could make a fairly safe assumption that the site links it would generate would lead the searcher to what they were looking for.

What could be even better than having site links appear for your site? What about having the number increase from five to eight links? Or how about the ability to actually have some say in the creation of site links? That would be pretty nice! How nice? Well, take a look at what this does for The Planet. It's like having your own navigation appear within the Google results and increasing the chances that the searcher will see what they are looking for and be able to click right through to it.

Google SERP showing site links for The Planet.

How powerful is this if you were looking for a reseller program or private rack hosting? Based on the result title and snippet, you may not have clicked through to the site to look around on your own. Along with the additional links, site links also make a site appear even more authoritative. Another subtle benefit: notice how the links take up additional room, about another listing's worth of space, essentially moving potential competitor listings further down the page.

Not only is this an exciting development, it's also further reassurance that Google is continuing to develop and implement great features into its Webmaster Tools. Unfortunately, if your site doesn't warrant site links, then this new feature won't give you the ability to make them magically appear. At least for now, what you can and can't do if site links are being created for your site may still be limited, but maybe that will change over time.

You can learn more about site links from the Google Webmaster Central Blog.

When you work in, on, or around the Web, you tend to collect tools. A site here, a toolbar there...you really can't help it. Here's a total must-have for your SEO toolbox...but don't tell the developers and designers.

Chris Pederick's Web Developer browser extension.

(Credit: chrispederick.com)

The Web Developer extension from Chris Pederick is a hugely popular and useful tool for Web developers and designers everywhere. But this browser add-on is an equal-opportunity tool that should be in every SEO's toolbox as well for quick snapshot views and reviews of sites. It will require the use of one of the following browsers, Firefox, Flock, Mozilla or Seamonkey, but will run on Windows, Mac OS X as well as Linux, and it's free.

While you may find many uses for the extension beyond SEO and even more SEO uses than listed here, below are some of the top ways to put it to use. The best way to follow along though is to first install it, view a site that you are familiar with, and then try some of the methods listed below:

Disable Tab

Disable JavaScript.

(Credit: chrispederick.com)

Select Disable JavaScript and reload the page and browse the site. Does that fancy drop-down navigation still function? Can you click on all the links? If it doesn't and you can't, then guess what...the search engine spiders probably can't get there either.

Images Tab

Is all that great copy on the page really text that the search engine spiders can eat up and use for indexing the pages, or is it really just a bunch of images? Select Disable All Images and you'll quickly find out.

Displaying alt attribute text.

(Credit: chrispederick.com)

Use the Display Alt Attributes feature to view the alt attribute text of all images on a page. You should do this to make sure that none of the images has been stuffed with keywords, which won't help in ranking and doing so may actually hurt rankings.

While text is best for navigation and links, if images are used for this, it's especially important to make sure the alt attributes contain the textual equivalent to capture any value the search engines may give to images used for links.

Information Tab

Select View Link Information to view all the links on a page. Are there more links on a page than you thought? If this is your site, are there any links leading out to sites that you weren't aware of?

Use View Meta Tag Information to quickly see all the meta information for a page to make sure that each page has a unique, keyword-rich and relevant description.

Use the View Response Headers and check the 404 Error page of a site by going to a page that doesn't exist, like yourdomain.com/errortest and make sure that it returns a 404 Error and not a 200 "OK" response.

Miscellaneous

Linearize the page.

(Credit: chrispederick.com)

Use Linearize Page to see the order of content based on how search engines will read the content. Is the most important content toward the top or buried at the bottom? Does the content read logically, or are "paragraphs" all jumbled because tables have been used poorly to lay out the content?

Outline

Select Outline Headings and Outline Current Element to see whether HTML headings have been used (e.g., H1, H2, etc.) to help highlight important page elements. Headings will be outlined and when you mouse over them (or any element), you'll see the HTML trail in your toolbar, identifying the HTML tags because of the Outline Current Element function, which will allow you to see whether the heading tag is an H1, H2, or other tag.

Options

Persist Features.

(Credit: chrispederick.com)

Bonus...for a little known but very useful feature, select Persist Features if you want to click-through to different pages of a site while maintaining some of your selections, like outlined headings and displaying alt attribute text as you move from page to page.

While the Web Developer extension won't stop the need for a deep dive into a page's code--there's also a View Source feature for that too--it will satisfy and simplify many of the routine tasks associated with a quick SEO review.