How does one get their dynamic website optimized? The answer is more subjective than you would think. A dynamic web page is a web document that can be updated in real time and will display new content nearly every time the page is accessed. This can give the surfer a new experience with your site each time they visit and provide them a constant flow of new information. Obviously, this poses a problem for the search engines in that every time a new piece of content is added or subtracted from the page, it would make said page difficult to index. Consequently, there are many things to consider when strategizing for optimization of your dynamic website. Examples of the types of dynamic websites include: news sites, blogs, bulletin boards, ecommerce sites and any site that gives users the ability to upload new content.

Firstly, you could create static pages and optimize them in the normal fashion and submit those to the search engines in addition to the dynamic pages. These static pages would be linked to all of your dynamic pages. A site map would be the way to go here. You could also keep a paragraph or two static on a page and just make part of the page (news feeds) dynamic. There will also be a ton of issues with all those long, parameter rich URLs. If you do need to include parameters, limit it to two and limit the number of characters per parameter to ten or less. Also, if using an Apache web server, one could do a mod rewrite (have the server redirect the URL to an alias file) and make the URL more indexable for the search engines. There is also the issue of slow loading pages (which will not do wonders for the surfer experience!). You could combat this with something like page fragment caching which is used to generate part of the page before it is displayed, and then ASP is used to generate dynamic content when the page is requested. Essentially, this technique would speed up the server side, thus making the page load quicker for the user.

All in all, whether your site is a small ecommerce site, a blog or a gigantic site with loads of dynamic news feed pages, it is always intelligent to make sure it is optimized for search. Basically, the tools are there and you don’t have to worry about your site not being static anymore. If you have a good game plan in place and nice, simple URLs, you needn’t worry about the spiders ignoring your web page. The Internet and more specifically SEO are forever evolving.

When it comes to emphasis using photography, the same concept holds true from my last post regarding Emphasis in design: Part 1- Content. We want to have a main focal image and subordinate, enhancing images to strengthen our theme. We can accomplish this by utilizing subject, size and placement on the page.

In this blog post I’ll be referring to a landing page example MoreVisibility created for our Design and Usability Webinar. The challenge was to create a design for a fictitious beach town which could be used for an in-depth look at Search Engine Optimization design.

For our main image we chose a tropical photograph depicting the ocean, a clear blue sky, and a palm tree island. This image immediately evokes a calm and relaxing feeling and certainly strengthens our message of a tropical getaway.

The smaller thumbnail images in the left top corner support and enhance the viewer’s perception of a tropical getaway: Kids playing, a woman relaxing, a beautiful sunset, a vacation home, tropical palm trees, and a relaxing game of golf.

Questions to ask yourself when searching for photography.
What feelings do I want my users to experience when they see my images? For example: warm, fun, sunny, privacy, relaxing, cool breezes, etc.
How much emphasis should I give an image?
What will be the sizes, formats and placements for my images? The way you crop a photograph can make or break your design.
Will the colors in the photograph harmonize with my design?
Always keep in mind the cohesive feel of your design.

Lastly, don’t forget your “alt”tags

Check back soon for part 3:
Emphasis in Design: Graphics Elements

Contact us today to learn more about having your website designed by MoreVisibility.

Now that some time has passed since the launch of Cúil (www.cuil.com), one of two new search engines lauded as “Google killers”, let’s take a look at how Cúil has (or hasn’t) improved.

One of the initial quirks noticed when searching within Cúil, aside from the sporadic uptime due to the high-traffic interest, was that the image results didn’t always match with the content on Cúil’s results pages.  As we first noted in our blog on the day of launch, a query on “tree frogs” yielded interesting findings on the Cúil search engine results page (SERP).
 
Figure 1: Cúil search engine results page (SERP) from 29 July 2008

At the time, it did appear that the Cúil engine was in the process of learning – bettering its results as more and more people used it.  So what does the same query yield today?
 
Figure 2: Cúil search engine results page (SERP) from 19 August 2008

Comparing the two results pages, it’s easy to see that the image matching has greatly improved on Cúil.

How has the other of the two new search engines fared?  Much as Cúil gained early notice by virtue of their back story (the search engine was developed by ex-Google staffer Anna Patterson — who developed the TeraGoogle indexing system that Google still uses today — and her husband Tom Costello, who developed search engines at Stanford and IBM) the other contender, Wikia Search (re.search.wikia.com), also boasts an impressive pedigree.

Wikia Search is the brainchild of Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales.  The “human-powered” search engine debuted officially in January and purported to be an open source Internet search engine.  Using our earlier example of “tree frog”, let’s see what the results are in Wikia Search.
 
Figure 3: Wikia Search SERP for “tree frog” query

One of the key components of Wikia Search was the fact that the engine encourages users to contribute to the search results, effectively making Wikia Search a form of a social networking search engine.  The “community” can build upon the search results through the use of an Add to this result feature which appears on the SERP itself (please see below).

Figure 4: Wikia Search “Add to the result” field highlighted

This week, Wikia Search has publicly demonstrated that it is moving forward with improving its results by updating its Grub web crawler tool (www.grub.org) and by encouraging users to become a part of the process by ranking websites and by downloading Grub.  Also, earlier this month, Wikia Search launched an official version of the Wikia (www.wikia.com) toolbar.  This toolbar is available for download and can be added onto the Mozilla Firefox web browser.

Through all of the various ways in which Wikia Search can improve its results through community participation, a question arises – how can Wikia Search compete with Google in terms of perceived usefulness and relevance with the results?  Scrolling down the Wiki Search SERP for “tree frogs” shows an unusual result.
 
Figure 5: Wikia Search result for “tree frog” query highlighted

Mixed into the various “tree frog” related websites is an entry for a writers’ reference site.  What relevance does this have to tree frogs?  It’s difficult to say off-hand.  What is apparent is how out of place this result seems to be for the “tree frog” SERP.

While Cúil and Wikia Search are making progress in improving their search results, they both still have quite a ways to go in order to become the “Google killers” they were reported to be.  According to data reports from Hitwise (www.hitwise.com), the Internet monitoring company which measures market share, last month the Google search engine accounted for just over 70 percent of all online search engine queries.  Based on that number, it’s plain to see that the two newest players have a long climb to the top.