SEO The Game

AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript And XML)  is a combination of  Javascript and XML to process information without having to refresh the page. It is used increasingly in web applications and may websites and  search engines have great difficulty crawling  websites that use AJAX because they do not execute  Javascript.

With this being a modern and useful feature for visitors on websites, there is a considerable need to be able to crawl this information.

Sites that use AJAX produces URLs that look like, http://www.example.com/#state1 everything after the octothorpe is meaningless to a crawler.

Google have been researching methods to crawl AJAX sites and have developed a way  that uses the server to run its own JavaScript at the time the crawler visits, via a headless browser. (This is a browser that executes and processes the code on the site in the same way as a visitor might including all the javascript content but does not show the output on screen.)  To finally get the information the crawler can take a snapshot of the processed page from which it can extract the URLs required to make the site work  for visitors.

The good thing about this is that the crawler will see the same thing as a visitor and so everyone is happy.

Because the site needs to run its own code for the crawler, this would be an opt-in method to say which states the crawler is allowed to index but unless it is going to tax your server too much, who is going to mind? Especially if it gets more information for your site indexed.

For more information visit the Official Google Webmaster Central Blog.

Google labs have created another project which looks to be very useful. Google Fast Flip is a news reader that presents recent articles from well respected or well read news sources. Most striking thing about it is that the articles are presented on the same page allowing you to scan them very quickly. Clicking on one of the brings takes you to that story.

You can also search for the latest stories about a partiular topic and this will return stories that are particularly topical. How useful it becomes depends on the quality of the content from sites that are allowed to show news. It will be extremely annoying to see made for Adsense sites or the same story over and over again but think that it would be good for finding new sites to add to Google reader.

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Just when it looked like Bing was going to take off, they have got the marketing so wrong. While people speak of Googling for something, it is far to soon for people to speak in a meaningful way about Binging. The truth is that most people still don’t realise that there is a Google alternative.
To try an promote the site, a viral video has been launched with the intention of being so bad that it is good. But, as with so much corporate advertising that tries to be with it and cool, it falls flat on its face. The video is shown below:

Be warned it is so bad that you will just think it is awful. The search engine is pretty good and this video will ensure that Bing will be used as an as a transitive verb as in, “The’ve binged it up now.”

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One of the annoying things about ColdFusion is when the code has been executed the source code is full of white-space where ColdFusion has been removed. In the most extreme circumstances, this can lead to a much longer source code, which from an SEO point of view is to be avoided. In the settings of the ColdFusion administrator panel. Click enable white space suppression.

It is not going to have a massive effect on your SEO but at least it means that you don’t have to scroll as far, makes the code more readable and it could save you some small bandwidth.

The trade-off is that there is a small performance hit as there is slightly more for the server to do but this is probably something which is worthwhile as long your site is not extremely busy.

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Choose your key phrases correctly and the rest of your SEO will follow. If you choose keywords that are too competitive it will take a long time to and maybe you will never achieve the results that you were hoping. Keywords that are not competitive don’t receive many searches.

Tools such as WordTracker and Google’s Keyword Tool can help you gauge which keywords you want to optimise for. For example suppose you have to optimise for Fire Sprinker Systems, you might choose a broad range of keywords ranging from the generic to the specific.

• Sprinkler Systems – could be confused with garden sprinkler systems
• Fire Sprinkler
• Fire Sprinkler Systems

After this it get a bit tricky so we widen our net to obtain a list of more specific but likely queries.

Location based keywords

• Fire Sprinkler Systems UK
• Fire Sprinkler Systems (town/city)

Action based keywords are particularly useful for e-commerce sites because they are likely to be queries from users that are further in the process of researching.

• Buy Fire Sprinkler Systems

Property based keywords

• Cheap Fire Sprinkler Systems
• Reliable Fire Sprinkler Systems
• Fire Damaged, Fire Sprinkler Systems

Another way to get ideas about keywords is to use Google to find your competitors when the chosen keyword is typed. They are at the top already and their keywords have something to do with it. From the search results we obtain new key phrase ideas such as:

• residential fire sprinkler systems
• commercial fire sprinkler systems
• domestic fire sprinkler systems
• fire sprinkler maintenance
• fire risk assessment

Brand Name Keywords

If the products you are selling has a well known brand or market leading or of renouned quality then brand name keywords might also be worth targeting.

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