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IE6 in a Corporate Setting is Malpractice and SEO

bgt — Sun, 04 Apr 2010 14:11:53 +0000

There has been a few comments back on our post, from back in March, containing the quote from Ed Bott, who stated that “Any IT professional who is still allowing IE6 to be used in a corporate setting is guilty of malpractice“. One person, who we will not name, offered the comment that IE6 is the basis for a whole developer community, so recommending it’s discontinuance was irresponsible and unprofessional. Besides, the commentator sneeringly pointed out that “hundreds of people had used that expression in web commentary.

Ignoring the obvious response to the “whole developer community” thing, of course we immediately did a quick Google search on the expression, and sure enough there are good number of matches (408 exact matches at time of writing). Does this mean that a large number of people had come to the same conclusion and used the same expression spontaneously, or was there some blatant manipulation of the search ranking by unscrupulous Search Engine Optimization (SEO) experts.

This also poses an interesting observation about the way the search engines, like Google, rank pages. If you search for the phrase Any IT professional who is still allowing IE6 to be used in a corporate setting is guilty of malpractice, the original page from Ed Bott appears fourth, and then does not appear again until page two; that is eighteenth in the results set.

At time of testing, the top three results, beating the original post, are as follows:

LessThanDot (a phpBB powered Bulletin board)
Integrity Technology Group (a Joomla powered site)
A Twitter link (with the exact quote verbatim)

This is interesting, and shows just how important your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) can be. The Bulletin board beat the Joomla entry by having repetition of the phrase “Any IT professional who is still allowing IE6 to be used in a corporate setting is guilty of malpractice” twice in the body, plus a partial reference in the title.

The Tweet came an honorable third by repeating the exact quote, and due to the limited number of characters available had the highest match to “noise” ratio.

Could it be that “IE6 in a Corporate Setting is Malpractice” proposition, repeated often enough, could get you a top position regardless of the content of the surrounding article?

By the way to avoid this post jumping immediately to the top of Google simply by repeating the full phrase ad nauseum, we have deliberately shortened it to IE6 in a Corporate Setting is Malpractice. However human readers will be able to substitute the full expression unconsciously, and so allow us to sleep at night! The expression we have distilled down to is concise, accurate and meets the requirement for this exercise.

If you want to see for yourself, try the links below to search for the full expression:

As an intellectual exercise, we have dutifully entitled this posting IE6 in a Corporate Setting is Malpractice, and at the time of posting Google returns no results for the exact phrase “IE6 in a Corporate Setting is Malpractice”. Over the next few weeks we will keep searching for the expression and see how many web sites pick it up. Any that do repeat it in their content will become the subject of extra scrutiny to see if they are brilliant SEO expert who we need to model, or cheap rip-off sites to be added to our SEO blacklist.

IE6 in a Corporate Setting is Malpractice
If you are interested in playing the game, and contributing in some small way to the sum of human knowledge, click here to search Google for the exact expression IE6 in a Corporate Setting is Malpractice. Let us know what you think.

Questions to ask about SEO

bgt — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 19:10:16 +0000

Our article yesterday on Improving Your Search Engine Results has prompted a flurry of inquiries about Search Engine Optimization (SEO). The questions are something like this:

Do you do Search Engine Optimization?
Can you get me to the top of Google?
How much does it cost to get to the top of Google?
Will you do all the work for me?

The answers are pretty clear. Yes, we do offer a service to help you optimize your site for search engines. But that does not mean that we will pad a site with hidden links and create deceptive or misleading content on your behalf. Tricks such as doorway pages or throwaway domains are promoted by the SEO cowboys, but can actually damage your site’s ranking on Google.

Can we get a site to the top of Google? Yes we can and have done so on a number of occasions. However, a site’s placing in the listings is only part of the marketing strategy for a business, and it is far better to have visitors to your site who are interested in your products and services, and who may actually buy from you. For an example of a site we support which is at the top search Google for “End Leprosy“. This site has a simple message, and if anybody searches for that key phrase, they will find that site.

How much does it take to get to the top of Google? The answer is likely to be more than you want to spend, if you are looking to compete for popular phrases. The question should be how much effort do I need to spend on marketing, to keep my business competitive. Not all effort needs to be directed at getting a higher placing in Google. Sometimes a good news story in the press will get you more business than thousands of pounds worth of SEO expertise.

Will we do all the work for you? No we will not. We can help with advice and technical assistance, about things like sitemaps, which the search spiders look for. We can advise you about accessibility issues like including titles in your links, and tags on your images. But you know your business best.

We will ask you searching questions about your content and marketing to ensure your site has the best information, both for people and the search engines. Remember the quality of our experiences are determined by the questions we ask ourselves, or in the case of SEO, that we ask you.

Finally before you engage your search engine optimizer there are a few important questions you should ask, rather than the common ones above. Some useful questions to ask an SEO include:

Can you show me examples of your previous work and share some success stories?
Do you follow the Google Webmaster Guidelines?
Do you offer any online marketing services or advice to complement your organic search business?
What kind of results do you expect to see, and in what timeframe? How do you measure your success?
What’s your experience in my industry?
What’s your experience in my country/city?
What’s your experience developing international sites?
What are your most important SEO techniques?
How long have you been in business?
How can I expect to communicate with you? Will you share with me all the changes you make to my site, and provide detailed information about your recommendations and the reasoning behind them?

We expect our customers to ask these questions, and can provide answers to all of them. You should also know that these questions are available for free, on the Google Search Engine Optimization (SEO) pages, which you should check out before engaging our services, or those of any SEO experts.

Finally, before you contact us to ask us to provide our search engine optomization service, please read the Google Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide!

References:
Google Search Engine Optimization (SEO) pages
Search Engine Optimization from Wikipedia

Additional Material:
Washington Attorney General sues Internet Advancement again

Improving Your Search Engine Results

bgt — Sun, 19 Apr 2009 14:10:33 +0000

Have you ever wondered how to get your business up to the top of Google or Yahoo! search results? Companies and individuals the world over have pondered this almost since Larry Page and Sergey Brin came up with the idea of PageRank (after Larry Page) and founded Google. Some specialist companies charge hundreds of pounds a month just to help you keep your business at the top of the Google results.

PageRank is a link analysis algorithm that assigns a numerical weighting to each element of a hyperlinked set of documents, such as the World Wide Web, with the purpose of measuring its relative importance within the set. The algorithm may be applied to any collection of entities with reciprocal quotations and references.

So how do you improve your position in the search results? Our advice is that if you want to reach the top of the Google search engine then you should build a Blog on your website, and start Blogging.

How do Blogs increase your placement in the Google search engine results? First, Blogs increase the amount of content on your website. Google spiders love to see content, and the more content you have the better. If you have enough content on your site, then Google will deem you an authority site on the topic. If you provide a service rather just having a page full of advertisements, then you get a better page ranking.

If you accept that Blogs are the way to go, the next question would be what Blog program to use? The top Internet Marketers in the world recommend WordPress, which is available at wordpress.org. For some options on starting a Blog see our WordPress Tags

Another advantage of WordPress is that it is a top pick for many search engines. WordPress creates site maps and automatically pings the search engines each time you update your Blog. The best news is that WordPress is FREE.

By making Blogging part of your daily schedule you can increase content on your site and help to improve your page ranking in the search engines. If you can increase your placement simply by writing a Blog, then why haven’t you started Blogging yet? We will be running a regular series of articles on Blogging, WordPress and Search Engine Results on this site to help you get started on the Internet. Why not come back every day and check us out?

For resources to help you get started with your first Blog, see the following links: