| LED Digest 2109: Google Sitemaps, also Cell Phones |
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================================================== The LED Digest Moderated Discussion List "Effective Online Advertising, Since 1997" pair Networks: The LED's Web Host Hosting and Domain Reg. from a Trusted Leader pair.com for Hosting | pairNIC.com for Domains ================================================== List Moderator: Published by: Adam Audette LED Digest adam, led-digest.com http://www.led-digest.com .............................................. March 3, 2006 Issue #2109 .............................................. .....IN THIS DIGEST..... ======= NEW ===================== --== Google Sitemaps Tricks? ==-- ~ Claudiu Spulber "...what do you all think about the new features in Sitemaps?" --== Cell Phone Visitors ==-- ~ John Barendrecht "Does anyone bother to make a site friendly to cell phones?" ==== CONTINUING ================= --== Drop-Down Menus & Search Engines ==-- ~ Viggie Bala "...we are still using Javascript for drop-down menus solely because of Internet Explorer." ==== BILLBOARD =================== --== Fighting Spam ==-- ~ Michael Linehan --== The LED Archives ==-- ~ Steve Pronger --== US Website Maintenance Rates? ==-- ~ Rick Gortatowsky ========== NEW =================================== From: Claudiu Spulber Subject: Google Sitemaps Statistics I've seen that the Google Sitemap shows statistics now too: https://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/docs/en/stats.html (after you verify your sitemap). They show you statistics about: - Sitemap details and errors - Indexing information about your site - Query stats about your site - Crawl stats about your site - Page analysis of your site - URLs from your site we were unable to crawl, and why we couldn't crawl them - robots.txt analysis This is great from the SEO point of view. First of all, the page analysis gives you a little hint on how the Googlebot crawled the content of your website; plus it gives you information on what keywords were associated with your website from external links (it would be great if they gave an option to see the "nofollow" links). Second the query stats: * Top search queries - list the top queries that return results from your site. Note that this list is unrelated to where your site is listed in the search results. * Top search query clicks - the top search queries that directed traffic to your site. These are the top searches that caused users to click on a link to your site. They limit those to the first 20 results, but still that is useful information. I know you get that too by analyzing the raw log file, but this is more simple. So, what do you all think about the new features in sitemaps? Any tricks :) ? Regards, Claudiu Spulber http://www.backup4all.com// http://www.novapdf.com// --------- new post - new topic -------- From: John Barendrecht Subject: Cell Phones Looking at my web site's log files, I noticed an increasing number of daily visits from cell phones, Blackberry devices and other portable devices. My site is not optimized at all for these small screens and I think trying to navigate my site with a screen smaller than 640 x 480 would be extremely frustrating. I don't think anyone would order my products using a cell phone as trying to enter name, address and Visa # on a phone would be very time consuming. Besides that, I am not sure that cell phones could display a secure browser. Does anyone bother to make an ecommerce site friendly to cell phones? Other than sites selling ring tones, etc. Is this worthwhile? Will they come back later from their computer and order products? Best regards, John Barendrecht Centralhome.com Company Inc. http://www.centralhome.com ======== CONTINUING =============================== From: Viggie Bala Subject: Drop-downs I would like to remind that we are still using Javascript for drop down menus solely because of Internet Explorer. Drop down menus can be created without Javascript. Except IE, all other latest browsers will show them. You can see the demo at http://snipurl.com/eitr [meyerweb.com] (The CSS / Edge link at top left will show a drop down on all browsers except IE). Mark Bishop and Donna Donohue in LED 2107, showed some really cool workable options. It might be a little daunting for the un-initiated, but can be quite simple really. We have used a simple custom built solution similar to them. A Javascript drop-down menu is un-readable for SE robots only if the entire menu is created through Javascript. So if you create a normal HTML navigation bar with clickable links, and use javascript 'roll over' effects to display drop down menu, you can have both drop down menu & SE friendliness. For example, if an 'About Us' link in HTML nav bar has drop down menu of 5 different pages, visitors can reach any of these 5 pages directly through the drop down menu. The 'About Us' in HTML nav bar is also a clickable link, but users will not normally click it. Whereas the SE robot will ignore the javascript and visit the 'About Us' page. This page will have links to the 5 pages in the content area. So SE robot can visit all the 5 pages in drop-down menu through this way. I was told that the upcoming IE Version 7 is only concerned about tabbed browsing, png transparency etc., but it still does not support CSS drop down menus. Not sure whether this is true. If that's the case, we are resigned to this Javascript/SE friendly jugglery for another 5 years. Regards, Viggie Bala Helping Websites to Work http://www.viggie.com ==== BILLBOARD =================================== From: Michael Linehan Subject: Fighting spam Whenever there is a "Fighting Spam" thread, I sometimes have a look at sites being discussed. I frequently see (this time again) that there is an email address completely exposed to spam harvesters, either in the copy or in the HTML code. The best way I've found to not get spam is to prevent it. And one of the major ways of doing that is not to expose an address on your site. Use a contact form or encode the email link. I get around zero to six spam a day, and have done so for years. Michael Linehan www.marketing-alchemy.com -------- new post - new topic -------- From: Steve Pronger Subject: LED archives > The LED archives are indexed and the links to your site > from your posts in the archives do *contribute* to both > link popularity and PageRank for the linked site.... - Mike Banks Valentine, LED 2108 Yes, I would normally agree. It's just that I can't identify a single bone fide Google backlink from the 113 archived pages which link to my site. I'm not talking about the fact that Google has indexed those pages or that the signature URLs are hyperlinked. Doing a "site:audettemedia.com keyword" search just confirms what we already know - the pages are indexed. What I'm curious to know is if anyone can identify one of those pages as a backlink using the link: command. They can't contribute to your link pop or PageRank if they're not recognized as a backlink, no? It's interesting that of the pages I checked (I didn't check them all of course) none appeared to have any PageRank. And, if you have a download manager installed like me and click on one of the listings in the search results, it tries to download it. Download manager thinks "this is an .exe file, not a web page". My only point here guys is that these archive pages do not appear to be SE friendly. I'm quite happy to change that view - I WANT them to be SE friendly - if just one person can identify any LED archive issue as a backlink using link:yoursite.com. Yahoo and MSN are another matter. They're not nearly as clever as Google in indexing files. > Many high PR pages no longer confer reputation > or PageRank for Google. It's a total roll of the dice. > Google has done this to combat link manipulation > at all levels. - Michael Martinez, LED 2108 Randomly devaluing links? I don't think so. Evidence please. Steve Pronger http://www.stevepronger.com -------- new post - new topic -------- From: Rick Gortatowsky Subject: Web rates > Can anyone tell me what sort of per-hour rates are the > norm in the US for website maintenance work such as > content amendments, addition / deletion of pages, images, etc? - Gurdip Singh, LED 2102 Generally speaking its been our experience that most webs in at least mid-sized eCommerce have these areas addressed by employee's who are multi-functional bots. That is to say there is usually not enough work in a day for them to be devoted to this task solely. I suppose pay rates would be dependent on magnitude of the work. Does the employee have to for example simply to ammendments? Do they need to create unique pages by hand and optimize them for search engine effective results? Do they need to archive old pages or amend links within the site to said pages? Do they need simple scan images or do they need to also have to know Adobe Photoshop well enough to manipulate images in fairly complex ways? Do they need take digital photo's and again do they need to fine tune images? Do they need to set up professional quality image displays? For example the front of a TV set looks quite similar to the front of that TV Set. Do they need to take photos at all angles, closeups on & on? In sizeable eCommerce sites where there are significant amounts of inventory that come in these functions are placed upon employee's that both have a web skill set but also a marketing background. In other words, the corporations are basically highly compartmentalized. They even call varied categories stores. Such as the Electronics Store, The Apparel Store etc. Each has a category manager and each has employee components skilled in said goods genre. I hate to say it but they set things up alot like programming (and as a result run into the same issues of problems in interprocess communications!!! LOL.) Specifying payment rates would be comensurate to the skill set required. If a person just needs scan images, type in some content to a standard template or database etc... ok. But if they need actually know the varied technologies required for things such as presentation quality displays (ie: Here is a watch vs Here is a watch with a professional background image display, macro photo's of the face, review content from other sites) then thats a tad more complex. I suppose if I were in a position where I needed someone with these varied certain skills then I would need to sit down and really define what the individual needs to do in precise terms. From there I would look at my organization to see if any other staffers skill sets are of similar proportions. I would need to evaluate exactly how much of this update work need be done on a daily basis so I know the person is going to be busy each day. If its 5 hours of work and they are there for 8 hours a day then I need find 3 hours more work for them to accomplish. So what else needs to be done that may fit this particular skill set. Perhaps some typing, perhaps some data mining whatever. Now I have a gauge by which I can attempt to set a wage. I would estimate that no LED'rs have responded to the posting because the posting is somewhat vague. I mean, hey, entering data into say one of these "Online ready-set-go" Yahoo stores for example takes a whole lot less voodoo than attempting to negotiate a complex Miva Storefront shop. Thus an accurate measurement need be made by the employer of what the staffer skills really need to be. I find tools like Microsoft Word's outliner ability to be very good at breaking down such things into a form that gives me good perspective. I outline things alot. I am Mr. Outliner. It keeps my most local CPU from becoming spaghetti. In the case of staff one needs to consider all facets from what the person is to do, is the person going to get benefits such as health care or profit sharing? Paid vacations on and on? Local economy? If the business is in Los Angeles then $12 an hour is not exactly a living wage .vs. $12 an hour in say Iowa which might be just fine. So... many factors to consider and I do not think enough information was given and thus no responses came. But! For $150,000 a year and a 5 year contract I am available and will relocate :) Rick Gortatowsky ------------------------------------------------------- The LED Digest is sponsored by pair Networks: pair.com for Hosting | pairNIC.com for Domains © Copyright 1995-2006 Orange Wheel, LLC. All Rights Reserved. "Opportunities are usually disguised as hard work, so most people don't recognize them." - Ann Landers |
