Matt Cutts is the head of the Google Webspam Team, and for a long time has been the lead evangelist/spokesperson for Google and their products via his blog.   I tuned in today to see if I could glean anything new and stumbled on a recent repost of the state of the index speech from Pubcon 2009.

Some great tips about using the Google Wonder Wheel for keyword research, cool developer tools and  (most importantly in my mind) verbal confirmation that Meta Keywords aren’t used by Google for anything (yay!).  I admit that it’s been so long since I’ve seen a picture of Matt I didn’t know he shaved his head. I’m thinking that he’s starting to look like Jeremy Schoemaker.  Check out the computer generated rendering above.

I won’t rehash the whole thing as Matt has done a great job of articulating the finer points.  It’s worth a watch, because if I learned something – it’s almost certain that you will too.

It’s surprising to me how many websites are still being built without a thought to future online marketing efforts. What I find especially surprising are the number of web development frameworks and tools that were built without a single thought of search engine optimization.

When I develop a website these days, whether it’s for personal or professional use, one of the first questions I ask is “Is this site going to be difficult to optimize? What are the barriers to achieving my goals?”

I’ve compiled a list of content management systems and frameworks that I’ve worked with, ranging from the simplest to the most difficult to optimize. If something is impossible, or nearly impossible to optimize – even if the price is right, I usually won’t consider it for a project unless nothing else will achieve the laid out directives.

Ranking of content management systems by ease of optimization.

9. Homestead

Homestead is a complete solution for website owners.  The monthly fee includes items like web hosting and a small website.  The pros are a short list.  Manage everything in one place, easy to learn and use.  The cons, well, for one – there’s no source control.  You can’t have access to the code, even if you want to.  Custom titles are a no go.  Custom design is equally no go.  You usually have a fixed number of content items (5 pages for $x) and very little power to alter the existing structure.  Plus, you can’t move to another host without losing everything.  There are others like it, such as Vistaprint.  In general, these sites are not much bang for your buck and are often more expensive than a ‘free’ CMS like WordPress or Joomla.

8. Flash built sites

Forget it.  Having a flash site is choosing the opposite of easy search engine optimization.  The rasterized text can’t be read.  The pages aren’t pages.  You may as well have a blank page up there, unless SEO isn’t a consideration.

7. Anything in .asp or a windows environment

Many corporate, big box type sites are developed using .asp.  Don’t go anywhere near this unless you’re an .asp programmer.  SEO for these types of sites is a nightmare at the best of times.

6. Joomla

While I’m fairly proficient with Joomla SEO, it’s taken me a long time to get there.  Joomla has struggled with providing users the configuration necessary to optimize a site properly.  There are third party plugins available, but they’re a bit daunting to say the least.  Things can go horribly awry if you don’t know what you’re doing, I’ve even been approached by other SEO agencies who aren’t comfortable working with the extensions.

5. Any e-commerce system.

E-commerce systems, like Magento, Virtuemart, OScommerce, Volution and others have strange rules.  You often need to download an extension to optimize them well, and even then they’re not self explanatory.

4. Sites using Dreamweaver templates

Dreamweaver allows you to use a template to set global styles for s website.  The problem is that once your template is set, you’re often locked into it and cutting out parts of the code to make it easier to optimize is a challenge.

3. Custom built PHP sites

Sites built in PHP can be as easy to optimize ans anything, if the developer thought about SEO when they built it.  The problem is that they usually don’t, so the elements required to do proper SEO are not available.  If you know PHP, or know someone who does, you can easily make the necessary changes.  You are required to have a working knowledge of the elements you would find in the <head> section of your web page to make this happen.  This is generally my preferred way of doing things.

2. Custom built HTML sites

If a site uses only HTML, it’s easy to optimize.  The hardest part of doing this is gaining the working knowledge of HTML and FTP programs, so you can effectively download and manipulate your website.

1. WordPress, blogging platforms

WordPress is by far the easiest SEO I have ever done.  WP sites get indexed quickly, the extensions for enabling optimization are free and easy to use, and optimization itself is all done via a simple extension to your blog’s posting interface.  When I launch a new site, I always start with WordPress to build traction and develop another site in the background.

Sometimes you need a specific solution to achieve your goals, so you have to find the right balance.  If you don’t speak HTML, or if a blog doesn’t have the features you need, you may have to use a CMS like Joomla.  If you need to sell product, then your shopping cart is more important than initial ease of SEO.  But you should always ask the question of your developer or agency, or yourself if you build it on your own.  There are few things more painful than building a site with lofty goals of search engine success to only discover later that you’ll be ice skating uphill to get there.

Back in March of 2008, Time published an article titled How Google Earth Ate Our Town.  Big news for our “old coal mining town” of 78.000.  We had replaced San Francisco, the 13th largest city in the US as the capital of Google Earth.

I’ll let you read the article, because I want to talk about something different.  There’s a new feature that allows you to embed Google Earth into your webpage via an iframe.  It lacks some of the major functionality of the full version but it beats Google Maps hands down for a rich user experience.

In addition, Google has their eyes on the Island streets as they troll the towns from Duncan northward for street view footage.  While heading out to visit my folks in Duncan, I found myself driving behind a Google car on Herd Road – this was about a week before I read the article in the PQB News.

As a small business, you can use these tools to give out of town clients a better picture of your business.  They say a picture is worth a thousand words, it makes you wonder what an interactive 3D map is worth.

If there’s a downside to running Google Earth off of your site, it’s that visitors have to download a plugin (on demand) before it will work.  Since I have to do the same with Flash though, it’s hardly an inconvenience.

Visit earth.nanaimo.ca for the City of Nanaimo’s KMZ files.

In my other life as marketing director for Hosting Nation, I have the luxury of working in a development environment before placing anything live.  It’s a nice benefit. We can test design, applications and software and pretty much everything.

If you were a fly on the wall, you would hear three words at least once a day.  From me to a co-worker, from them to me or from me to a client.  It’s almost become a bit of a joke, something we utter every time something doesn’t look right.

“Clear your Cache”.

See, browsers like Firefox and Internet Explorer save copies of some of your web files.  Stuff like your stylesheets, graphics and images and processes that run in the background.  They do it so that they can load pages more quickly the second time around.  The pitfall is that when you make changes and upload them to the live server, if you don’t clear your cache before viewing the content you often won’t see the differences.  I’ll tell you now, it can be extremely frustrating.  I’ve seen it result in the hapless mashing of F5 like a rookie gamer playing Street Fighter against the world champ.  I’ve seen it cause grown adults to act like the angry german kid (warning – explicit content – NSFW) and it takes 2 minutes to fix.

Here’s how to do it. (source, wikihow)

Internet Explorer 8

1. Once your browser is open, click the Tools menu and select Internet Options.
2. Be sure the General tab is selected.
3. Under “Browsing history”, click “Delete…”
4. In the new window, be sure the Temporary Internet Files box is checked. You can uncheck everything else you don’t want to delete.
5. Click Delete.

Firefox 1.5 / 2.0 / 3.0

1. Below is the full method, although it is possible to simply go to Tools, and select Clear Private Data, or to just press Ctrl+Shift+Delete. Please note that these options clear what you have set the browser to clear in Tools > Options… > Privacy, which can mean the cache, although it may also include passwords, and search and browsing history, so be careful.
2. Go to Tools and select Options….
3. Go to the Privacy tab, and click Settings… (in the blue box in the image).
4. Select what you would like to have cleared.
5. Return to the Options menu. If you want your cache cleared automatically, every time you close the browser, click the appropriate checkbox (shown in red in an earlier image).
6. Press “Clear Now” under the Settings button.

WikiHow shows you methods for several older versions of IE and Firefox.  If you use Safari, Opera or Chrome use your favourite search engine to find instructions.

The worst part?  We all know better and still forget at least once a day. Maybe writing this post will help.

Canonicalization is a big word, essentially meaning standardization or normalization.  In the context of SEO, it’s best described by Wikipedia.

URL normalization (or URL canonicalization) is the process by which URLs are modified and standardized in a consistent manner… wikipedia

Even more simply, it’s a set of rules written in regular expressions that instruct browsers to redirect your site from http://yourdomain.com to http://www.yourdomain.com (or the opposite, I like the www – but it doesn’t matter in the practical sense)

The point is to make sure that all links resolve to one url.  By default, there are four possible versions of your home page that someone could link to.

http://yourdomain.com

http://www.yourdomain.com

http://yourdomain.com/index.php (or html, or htm)
http://www.yourdomain.com/index.php (or…)

That’s at least four.  Some content management systems, like Joomla, create multiple links your home page – so it’s not unreasonable to have more than four.

Canonicalization, in my opinion, is an effort of vanity. Google won’t penalize you for having multiple links, and I’ve not seen a lack of proper canonicalization affect the typical small business site adversely.  Still, if you have the time, it’s worth the ten minutes it takes to set this up.

Here’s how to canonicalize your site to resolve to the ‘www’ version

1.Open up an FTP client and navigate to the public_html directory of your website (I use FileZilla)
2. Download the .htaccess file
3. Insert the following code (replacing yourdomain.com with your own site)

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^yourdomain\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.yourdomain.com%{REQUEST_URI} [R=301,L]RewriteBase /

RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /([^/]+/)*index\.(html|php)\ HTTP/
RewriteRule ^(([^/]+/)*)index\.(html|php)$ http://yourdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

4. Upload the file to the public_html directory.

That’s it, your site should resolve properly.  That didn’t take long, did it?

If you’re especially lazy, you can download my htaccess sample script - just remember to change yourdomain.com to your sites URL before you upload it.

Have a more complex situation?  Contact me for help or post a comment below.