When it comes to a solid design for your website, a grid can come in handy. Just as a house needs a sturdy foundation, a work of art or design requires the same. The website picture plane, or the monitor size and resolution, is your first consideration when building your foundation. Below are some statistics regarding user resolutions according to the W3Schools web statistics and trends from January 2009.
The average user has a resolution of 1024×768 or higher so it is a good idea to base your grid on this information. A good number to start with is 960 wide x 500 high. The reason your size should be slightly smaller than 1024×768 is that you need to take into consideration browser toolbars at the top of the page, the right scrollbar, and the horizontal fold of the page. This width will give you an even number to divide the space into columns of 12 (60px each) or 16 (40px each) with 20 pixel gutters and 10px side margins.
12 Column Grid
16 Column Grid
You can repeat a similar process horizontally if desired. You can now use this grid as a guide when placing objects and text on the page. This solid structure will help ensure a solid design.
Last week, in a rare unified move, all three major search engines announced support for a new “canonical URL tag” designed to help search engines understand a website with multiple URLs displaying the same content. Basically, all a site owner needs to do is add this tag to the head section of all versions of a duplicated page. So, for example, this tag:
By adding the canonical tag to all these potential versions of the page, it tells search engines that all these URLs are essentially the same page and should be treated as such. This allows them to easily determine which page should be listed and at the same time ensure that all the linking value for these pages is preserved and combined under one URL.
The introduction of this new tag provides an alternate way for site owners to address duplicate content issues created by the way their site is designed. Up until now, the only solution that worked for all three search engines was to restrict the access of the robots to duplicate pages using instructions in the robots.txt file, robots meta tags or both. Any website owners that have been using the robots meta tag or robots.txt file to deal with this and who decide to switch to the tag will need to remove any instructions restricting access to duplicated pages from their robots.txt files and/or remove the robots meta tags so that search engines can find the new canonical URL tags.
Unfortunately, for some websites, using the robots meta tags and robots.txt file may continue to be the only viable solution to duplicate content, because although this new tag addresses the issue of which page should be indexed, it does not resolve the crawling problem associated with duplicate URLs. Since search engine robots do not realize that these pages are all the same until after they have been crawled and indexed, they may still waste valuable crawling time accessing the same content and potentially delaying the indexing of unique content. Furthermore, all three search engines have indicated that they will view the canonical URL tag as a “suggestion” and will still be using alternate means to determine which URL should be displayed in duplicate content situations. This is why the best course of action is not to give search engine duplicate URLs in the first place and using robots.txt, robots meta tags or the canonical URL tag should only be used if there is no way to program the site to be search engine friendly.
Google says of its “Personalized Search” that, “personalization is subtle—at first you may not notice any difference. But over time, as the search engine learns your preferences, you’ll see it.” I myself never really utilize the personalized search experience. I kind of like the randomness that Google or search engines in general provide to me in regular search results.
The Search Engine Optimization industry was a little concerned about the development of the Google technology which provides relevant, useful search results, recommendations and other personalized features. Many SEOs felt that optimization efforts would be thwarted by people getting less general search results, but something specific to their needs. Matt Cutts says, “The thing that will change the most will be local search results.” Basically he is saying that certain search terms in some areas may result in different search results in others. Of course, localization is not really the same as personalization. You can turn personalization off and in most cases, people with a Google account of some sort will do that. Personally, those little icons in the SERPs that allow you to move your search results up and down are kind of redundant as once I’ve found what I’m looking for, I’m more prone to simply bookmark that page and not use Google again for the same search result.
The big question for SEOs is that down the line, how much will they have to adapt to new trends? Good, legitimate SEOs already know that there isn’t always just one general search result to target. It’s the consensus of good SEOs that it’s better to target multiple search terms for your website and increase your reach in the search engines. So, in actuality, if you follow good optimization efforts to begin with, as opposed to only focusing your website on a couple of highly placed keyphrases, personalized search should not hinder the SEO industry that much. Those that optimize their website to target for several, relevant keyphrases should certainly prevail in the personalized search conundrum.
The fact that you are able to turn the personalized search function off by simply logging out of your Google account is the overriding factor. The casual Internet surfer will simply just visit Google, Yahoo! and MSN and plug in their search result. For those that want the customized search results, it’s purely at their discretion, but it may just be a matter of time before Google or any other big search engine do a major overhaul and base all search results on one’s personalized search habits.
February 24th, 2009 by 
Shawn Escott
