The web pages actually at the top of Google have only one thing clearly in common: good writing. Don’t let the usual SEO sacred cows and bugbears, such as PageRank, frames, and JavaScrïpt, distract you from the importance of good content.
I was recently struck by the fact that the top-ranking web pages on Google are consistently much better written than the vast majority of what one reads on the web. Yet traditional SEO wisdom has little to say about good writing. Does Google, the world’s wealthiest media company, really only display web pages that meet arcane technical criteria? Does Google, like so many website owners, really get so caught up in the process of the algorithm that it misses the whole point?

Apparently not.
Common On-the-Page Website Content Success Factors

Whatever the technical mechanism, Google is doing a pretty good job of identifying websites with good content and rewarding them with high rankings.

I looked at Google’s top five pages for the five most searched-on keywords, as identified by WordTracker on June 27, 2005. Typically, the top five pages receive an overwhelming majority of the traffïc delivered by Google.

The web pages that contained written content (a small but significant portion were image galleries) all shared the following features:

Updating: frequent updating of content, at least once every few weeks, and more often, once a week or more.

Spelling and grammar: few or no errors. No page had more than three misspelled words or four grammatical errors. Note: spelling and grammar errors were identified by using Microsoft Word’s chëck feature, and then ruling out words marked as misspellings that are either proper names or new words that are simply not in the dictionary. Does Google use SpellCheck? I can already hear the scoffing on the other side of this computer screen. Before you dismiss the idea completely, keep in mind that no one really does know what the 100 factors in Google’s algorithm are. But whether the mechanism is SpellCheck or a better shot at link popularity thanks to great credibility, or something else entirely, the results remain the same.

Paragraphs: primarily brief (1-4 sentences). Few or no long blocks of text.

Lists: both bulleted and numbered, make up a large part of the text.

Sentence length: mostly brief (10 words or fewer). Medium-length and long sentences are sprinkled throughout the text rather than clumped together.

Contextual relevance: text contains numerous terms related to the keyword, as well as stem variations of the keyword. The page may contain the keyword itself few times or not at all.

SEO “Do’s” and “Don’ts”

A hard look at the results slaughters a number of SEO bugbears and sacred cows.

PageRank. The median PageRank was 4. One page had a PageRank of 0. Of course, this might simply be yet another demonstration that the little PageRank number you get in your browser window is not what Google’s algo is using. But if you’re one of those people who attaches an overriding value to that little number, this is food for thought.

Frames. The top two web pages listed for the most searched-on keyword employ frames. Frames may still be a bad web design idea from a usability standpoint, and they may ruin your search engine rankings if your site’s linking system depends on them. But there are worse ways you could shoot yourself in the foot.

JavaScrïpt-formatted internal links. Most of the websites use JavaScrïpt for their internal page links. Again, that’s not the best web design practice, but there are worse things you could do.

Keyword optimization. Except for two pages, keyword optimization was conspicuous by its absence. In more than half the web pages, the keyword did not appear more than three times, meaning a very low density. Many of the pages did not contain the keyword at all. That may just demonstrate the power of anchor text in inbound links. It also may demonstrate that Google takes a site’s entire content into account when categorizing it and deciding what page to display.

Sub-headings. On most pages, sub-headings were either absent or were images rather than text. That’s a very bad design practice, and particularly cruel to blind users. But again, Google is more forgiving.

Links: Most of the web pages contained ten or more links; many contain over 30, in defiance of the SEO bugbears about “link popularity bleeding.” Moreover, nearly all the pages contained a significant number of non-relevant links. On many pages, non-relevant links outnumbered relevant ones. Of course, it’s not clear what benefit the website owners hope to get from placing irrelevant links on pages. It has been a proven way of lowering conversion rates and losing visitors. But Google doesn’t seem to care if your website makes monëy.

Originality: a significant number of pages contained content copied from other websites. In all cases, the content was professionally written content apparently distributed on a free-reprint basis. Note: the reprint content did not consist of content feeds. However, no website consisted solely of free-reprint content. There was always at least a significant portion of original content, usually the majority of the page.

Recommendations

Make sure a professional writer, or at least someone who can tell good writing from bad, is creating your site’s content, particularly in the case of a search-engine optimization campaign. If you are a SEO, make sure you get a pro to do the content. A shocking number of SEOs write incredibly badly. I’ve even had clients whose websites got fewer conversions or page views after their SEOs got through with them, even when they got a sharp uptick in unique visitors. Most visitors simply hit the “back” button when confronted with unpalatable text, so the increased traffïc is just wasted bandwidth.

If you write your own content, make sure that it passes through the hands of a skilled copyeditor or writer before going online.

Update your content often. It’s important both to add new pages and update existing pages. If you can’t afford original content, use free-reprint content.

Distribute your content to other websites on a free-reprint basis. This will help your website get links in exchange for the right to publish the content. It will also help spread your message and enhance your visibility. Fears of a “duplicate content penalty” for free-reprint content (as opposed to duplication of content within a single website) are unjustified.

In short, if you have a mature website that is already indexed and getting traffïc, you should consider making sure the bülk of your investmënt in your website is devoted to its content, rather than graphic design, old-school search-engine optimization, or linking campaigns.

It seems commonplace to say that life is stressful. It is becoming increasingly ‘normal’ to hear that this or that person is suffering from stress. Articles about stress abound in health magazines and journals, and stress is generally considered to be a real pathology of today’s societies. The new millennium brought with it a new illness, one which is often silent and discrete. Stress seems to be often underestimated and alarmingly invisible enemy of today’s societies.

One of the most frightening characteristics of this silent threat is that is it is not discriminative. It chooses its victims carefully and unexpectedly, taking them by surprise, but it does not exclude any walk of life, profession, geographical space or age group. It affects young and old, privileged or downtrodden, professional or amateur. It takes away their balance, it eats them from the inside and, eventually, turns their world into a black and white picture. It can also make them physically fragile, puzzling them with frightening symptoms easily confused with serious life-threatening illnesses. It takes many forms but it always takes away the quality of life and joie de vivre of those affected by it.

The increasingly demanding world in which we live is presenting us with growing, more complex challenges. Life is more difficult for everyone and the fear of being overshadowed by others and losing what one has accomplished is more intense in a world where the most fearless and ruthless seem to rule. There seems to be no place for pity, commiseration or solidarity in a market struggling to survive and thrive.

Even leisure can become stressful, if regarded as an end and not as a means. For example, there is such thing as too much exercise. In fact, it is becoming a problem in itself. What should to be a healthy, relaxing way of keeping fit, can easily become an obsession. That happens to people who use exercise to achieve extreme weight loss. They become competitive with themselves in search of the perfect figure. It becomes a trigger of low self-esteem because it is never enough. As one looks at the distorted image one has of oneself, one sees nothing but an ever imperfect body in need of exercise and calorie control.

Moreover, everyday activities such as driving, shopping and picking children up from school become real ordeals when one sees them as obligations and duties, instead as means to important ends. Traffic is hectic, supermarkets are full of noisy people who complain about having to stand in line for half an hour, and picking one’s children up from school often means having a difficult time with parking and driving all the way back with two or three little ones screaming and arguing in the back of the car. It is the last thing one needs after a tiring day at work!

However, the most infamous of all stress causes is undeniably money, most frequently a lack of it. Wondering how to reach the end of the month with some money left for all the family’s necessities puts an extremely significant amount of pressure on people, overloading them with worries.

Although stress is a real, pervasive problem, there seems to be a simple recipe against it: be positive, intellectually and physically active, find aims and work towards them, set priorities, be attentive to little details and appreciate what you have. But, above all, give more space to others and, as Ghandi once said, “be the change you want to see in the world”.

You may have recently launched a website or are about to launch a site that’s currently under development, but you have not given any thought to search engine optimization (SEO) until now. If so, then you may feel a bit overwhelmed. There is no shortage of articles and information about SEO online. Even a minimal amount of digging can give you a bad case of information overload which can leave you wondering how to apply various SEO strategies to your new website after it’s live, or even if it’s possible.
It is possible, so don’t panic! Although it is ideal to implement SEO during your website’s development, you can absolutely employ an effective SEO strategy after your website has been developed, although you will face some unique challenges. This article really caters to small or micro-sized (one person) organizations. If you work for a larger organization, you may get more out of my article titled, What You Should Expect from an SEO Proposal.

My website needs SEO and I’m out of money

Small-to-medium-sized companies may not realize they need to budget for SEO for many different reasons including the fact that they’ve never heard of SEO until after their website is complete. Web development shops often bundle SEO into the overall development package under headers such as “search engine submission” or “search marketing” without a detailed explanation of what this actually means. SEO that is bundled together with website development may not actually be the comprehensive, full-service SEO that stand-alone SEO vendors provide. Just for clarification purposes, when I say website development I am referring to both the design and programming of a website. Most website development agencies provide both services, but lone consultants tend to do one or the other.

When SEO is bundled with website development, it can be easy for companies to dismiss it as an unnecessary cost which does not provide any clear value, particularly when they are trying to get their website completed in a reasonable time frame and within a limited budget. If you did not leave any wiggle room for SEO services such as on-page optimization, keyword research and link placement in your initial budget, you will definitely feel overwhelmed if you decide you need these services AFTER your website has already been developed.

The good news is, in most cases, you do not need to delay the launch of your site because you did not implement SEO. You should, however, take immediate action to correct the situation. Here are a few things you can do if you find yourself with a brand new website which has not been optimized for search engines.

1) Speak with your website development company to see if they have implemented any SEO tactics. What you’re looking for at this point is at least some basic keyword research, customized title tags and the presence of relevant Meta and ALT tags throughout the website. If your website has dynamically generated pages (e.g., shopping cart pages), ask about search engine friendly URLs. You may be surprised to learn that your website is fairly search engine friendly, even if it wasn’t on your radar during the planning phase.

2) If your web developer (in this case, your programmer) indicates that SEO has not been applied to your new site, ask how much it would cost to add some SEO components to key pages of the site. The cheapest way to do this is to create the SEO tags yourself or hire a consultant or copywriter to create them and submit them to your programmer for implementation. It should not be prohibitively expensive to optimize a few pages of your website once your site is live.

3) Develop a short-term and long-term search engine optimization strategy starting with optimization of your home page and a few key secondary pages, and track the results. You can then build a long-term SEO strategy which may involve hiring an SEO firm the following year if you can demonstrate results from your short-term SEO efforts.

Keep in mind that even companies that are lucky enough to implement SEO during the web build must continue to budget for SEO indefinitely. In fact, many SEO packages include optimization of 10-20 top-level pages of a website. Optimization of additional pages often costs more and may never be addressed, thus you will actually be ahead of the game if you plan for optimization of all your site’s pages and not just a handful of the top level pages.

Starting SEO for your Existing Website – Where Do I Begin?

Even if you have enough time or money to integrate SEO into your online strategy after your website is live, you may feel overwhelmed if you’re learning about SEO two days after the site’s launch. As with website development, SEO encompasses many different components including keyword discovery and research, optimization of the site itself, search engine submission and link placement and (in an ideal world) ongoing site updates and content creation. It can indeed be a daunting task to confront each of these issues soon after you’ve conquered the challenge of the site build and launch. Again, don’t panic! Here are a few things to consider that may make the task at hand much more palatable.

- Remember, you are the expert in your industry. Just because you did not build your website with SEO in mind does not mean that it isn’t search engine friendly or that the content isn’t keyword rich and valuable. Spend some time reviewing what you’ve already done and create a wish list of things that you could do to enhance the asset you’ve already created. Most people will not need to start from scratch when it comes to SEO even if they are just learning about it at the end of the web development timeline.

- You probably already have the resources to implement basic SEO including web developers (either in-house or via a vendor partner), a good copywriter and the drive to learn the basics of SEO via Websites such as www.seochat.com and www.searchenginewatch.com. As stated, you can start by optimizing just a few pages of your website and build a case for more in-depth optimization when time and money permit.

- It can take up to 8-10 months for brand new domains to rank well in Google and other search engines after site launch. This gives you quite a window of time to build an SEO strategy for your new website and begin implementation of SEO tactics. Basically, your website’s not going anywhere anytime soon, so relax, take a deep breath, and read a bit more about SEO instead of going into panic mode.

- You can build inbound links the minute your website is launched, so at the very least, consider a link building strategy even as you contemplate how to approach on-page optimization. The same resources that discuss the basics of SEO also provide direction about link building strategies. You can also learn a lot by lurking and posting on the popular SEO forums including SEOchat.com’s own forum, Highrankings.com, Searchenginewatch.com and others.

Starting SEO for your Existing Website – Get Some Help If You Can

If you haven’t completely exhausted your online budget on the web build or online media and can carve a bit more room in the budget for assistance with SEO, by all means do so. It is not too late to hire an agency, consultant or in-house expert to assist you with getting your website up to par and ready for indexing with the search engines. In fact, there are certain barriers that your newly designed website may have that can be overcome swiftly with a bit of hired help. In the long run, this can be worth the additional investment for your website.

Consider the following when deciding whether or not to hire yet another vendor or outside consultant to assist you with the next phase of your website’s development.

-If your website is very large and complex and contains deep content and variables in the URLs, then an SEO or programmer who is knowledgeable in URL rewriting can help you overcome this barrier quickly and effectively.

-If your primary navigation and/or site structure is in Flash, hidden behind frames or composed mainly of images, a seasoned SEO can work with you and your programmer to optimize the site as much as possible and assist you with major overhauls, if necessary.

-If you do not have much actual content on the site (e.g., product numbers but not descriptions), then an SEO copywriter can work with you to create relevant keyword-rich content that ensures people will find your site for your targeted keywords.

-If you are overwhelmed by the laundry list of SEO tasks that must now be implemented, you may want to hire an SEO for a few hours of consulting to help guide you. Remember, you do not need to be the expert here. You are already an expert in your chosen industry. A professional SEO can provide you with a game plan based on their own expertise in the field, which will save you time and money in the long run.

Starting SEO for your Existing Website – Conclusion

Just because you did not plan for SEO in the first phase of your website’s development does not mean it cannot be effectively implemented after your site has been made live. Always keep in mind that SEO is an ongoing process and can be incorporated into your annual online marketing budget along with things like regular website updates, newsletter mailings to site subscribers and online and offline media planning.

It can be overwhelming to discover that your work is not done once your website is live, but learning about SEO at the end of the project curve, rather than the beginning, is not as much of a setback as it seems. Most website owners already have the tools in place for good SEO and with some relatively simple tweaks to code and copy for the short term, and a comprehensive SEO strategy for the long term, you’ll do just fine.

Hoewel het heel leuk is om altijd de allernieuwste versie van WordPress te kunnen gebruiken, is het feit dat ik de template van dit wordpress.com weblog niet kan aanpassen erg vervelend en daarom heb ik besloten om dit weblog een eigen domein te geven.

Voortaan zal ik mijn berichten plaatsen op het volgende adres:

http://ictblog.nl

Hier heb ik versie 2.02 van het WordPress weblog systeem geïnstalleerd en kan ik fijn experimenteren met de templates. Uiteraard heb ik als eerste mijn AdSense banners geplaatst

Ik zal af en toe hier nog eens langskomen om te kijken wat ons te wachten staat in de nieuwe WordPress versies. Ik kan overigens nu al melden dat een (engelstalige) spellingchecker een van de nieuwe features van WordPress 2.1 zal zijn.

Sinds vorige week zijn de urls van alle startpagina dochterpagina’s gewijzigd. Deze zijn niet langer bereikbaar via paginanaam.pagina.nl, vanaf nu dient het adres te eindigen op .startpagina.nl (dus: paginanaam.startpagina.nl).

Hoewel de oude .pagina.nl adressen met behulp van een 301 redirect omgeleid worden naar de nieuwe adressen, is deze overgang helaas niet zonder negatieve effecten op de bezoekersaantallen gebleven. Op het Startpagina prikbord wordt hier dan ook zeer druk over gediscussieerd. Omdat hier echter niets meer aan te doen is ben ik maar begonnen met het actief promoten van de nieuwe adressen, te beginnen op dit weblog.

Dit zijn de nieuwe adressen van mijn dochterpagina’s:

• backup.startpagina.nl
• desktopmanagement.startpagina.nl
• isdn.startpagina.nl
• skype.startpagina.nl
• wordpress.startpagina.nl

Ik verzoek een ieder die nog linkt naar de oude .pagina.nl adressen, deze te wijzigen zodat de goede positie in de zoekmachine resultaten spoedig hersteld zal zijn.

Young people are the living mirror of society’s virtues and vices. Their life patterns, priorities, habits and plans are a reflection of what our world has become. I do not like generalizations, as they very often end up distorting reality, but I must say that I believe there are dangerous patterns taking hold of young people’s lives today.

“Too much too young?� The question to ask is, I believe, exactly the opposite one: are young people’s lives filled with emptiness too soon? The most worrying problem afflicting today’s youth is a spiritual problem, rather than a material one. It does start with a focus on material things, no doubt, but that only disguises the real lacuna: the absence of values and goals. The most dangerous aspect of young people’s life patterns today is precisely their lack of passion, interest, care and conviction. Many of them simply seem not to care much about anything but their own immediate needs.

Perhaps it is true that growing up in an overindulging world, which puts so much at their disposal, makes them take things for granted, but the truth is that none of that is inexorable. Parents have the responsibility to assure that they prepare their children for the challenges ahead of them by teaching them how to distinguish what is important from what is not. It takes a fair amount of common sense and intelligence to know how to profit from what is offered without letting it take over one’s life. Of course our world is becoming more and more open and diversified; of course knowledge is no longer a prerogative of a privileged few; of course nothing is truly impossible in a world of open borders. But that very world, that gives so much, can also take quite a lot. Our world has become as ruthless as it is generous.

It is much easier for parents to go with the flow and overindulge their children. It is less tiring to say ‘yes’ than to say ‘no’. Saying ‘yes’ is effortless because one does not need to go out of one’s way to do it. Saying ‘no’ creates problems, conflicts and frowns. But it is saying ‘no’ when necessary that teaches children what is good and what isn’t. It shows them that it is not what we get that makes us happy, but how we are as people and what we are willing to make of our lives. Not always getting what we want is fundamental because it teaches us to value things more. But, above all, it changes the focus of our attention to truly important things.

No matter how much one has, life is a struggle. It is a struggle for balance, happiness and meaning. Preparing children for the competitive world they were born into is all about strengthening their characters and showing them strong values. Without that, they are bound to become fragile human beings with little to contribute to society and to themselves. There is a very fragile balance at stake here: a balance between what needs to be given and what needs to be taken. Guidance is crucial and without it there is no way out of the materialistic deadlock.

Sinds afgelopen vrijdag is mijn nieuwe Startpagina dochterpagina online: desktopmanagement.pagina.nl

Ik hoop dat ik veel (tevreden) bezoekers zal mogen ontvangen!

Overigens heb ik vorige week een post geschreven over wat desktop management nu precies inhoudt.

Bummer, I just found a plugin that might be the cure for all my complaints about the image handling of WP 2.0 that I wrote about in my previous post.

Unfortunately I am at my work now where the friendly sysadmins have disabled ftp-access. This means I have to wait until tonight to try out the ImageManager 2.0 plugin… I really can’t wait!

There I go again, another rant about WordPress 2.0… But let me start by saying that WordPress is by far the best blogging tool around (and I have tried them all ).
With the introduction of WordPress 2.0 I had high expectations of all the wonderful new features, that now appear to be in need of much more work. There are even many WordPress users that don’t even switch to the 2.0 version because they think it is not worth it.
So what is wrong with the way WordPress 2.0 handles images in posts?

1. Well, let me start by saying that I think the new html editor is the root of all evil and here is why:
   When I upload a new image I have to send it to the post by clicking on the thumbnail of the uploaded image. After doing this, the image appears with a very strange size and I have to switch to html view (which opens in a pop-up!!!) to take away the height and width values that have been added incorrectly.
   Before the release of WP 2.0 I have seen very cool demo’s of the developers where they were resizing the images in the editor, this then looked very cool, but in practice is just plain stupid. You should never manually resize images in the html editor because they will end up looking horribly!
   So could you please remove this unusable feature and just use the default size of the image instead?
2. Images are created as posts of the type ‘attachment’, this is very cool and can be used for nice features such as a photo album with categories and comments. The big problem is that there is no good way to edit the existing images in WP.
   There is a ‘Browse All’ feature that shows you all images in the database, but there is no way to see to which posts these images belong. This means that it is now possible to delete an image that is a ‘child’ of a post. It should be very easy to implement a feature that prevents images to be deleted when they have a parent post in which they are being used.
   Now it is very likely to accidentally delete an image that is used in a post and end up with broken image paths.
3. Less important, but still a bit annoying is the dreadful quality of the generated thumbnails. Using GD it should be possible to create decent looking thumbnails that make things look much better.

Okay, I could go on for hours, but I don’t want to bore you with my complaints, so here go a few recommendations:

1. Replace the horrible html editor that randomly applies image height and width and allows you to resize the image and thereby distorting them completely.
2. In the html editor replace the insert/edit image button for one that connects to the images in the WordPress database. The button that is there now does not make any sense and WP has a completely different way of handling images. (Advanced users know how to make an image tag, this is now just confusing new users).
3. Under the ‘Manage’ tab, create a tab for images on which it is possible to edit the titles and descriptions and to see in which posts a certain image is being used. Only allow images to be deleted from that page (and not from the ‘Browse All’ window) to prevent images from being deleted that are used in posts.
4. Make an ‘options’ page for images in which it is possible to define default image sizes. Uploaded images can then automatically be resized to help unexperienced users not to break their lay-out. Blogger.com for example has three pre-defined image sizes, this is very convenient for the less experienced users.

Unfortunately the image handling of WordPress 2.0 is not the only weak point. In future posts I will comment on some other ‘weak spots’.

I think that 2.0 has been released much to quickly and I am anxiously waiting for the 2.1 version! (and it seems I am not the only one)
Please comment on my post! I really would like to know what you think of this all!

I have been playing around with K2 for WordPress 2.0 for using as a website content management system.

I had a little problem with pages function. Whenever I uploaded an image, it automatically assumed that there was a sub-page is available and therefore shows the page name in the sidebar.

To overcome this you should edit the sidebar.php file to only show the page name in the sidebar if the sub-page is a page and not an image. Therefore I have invented the following code: post_status != ‘attachment’.

Which makes:

if ($wpdb->get_results(“SELECT * FROM $wpdb->posts WHERE post_status != ‘attachment’ AND post_parent = ‘$parent_id’”)) { ?>