Short 2010 SEO Checklist For ISV’s

Scott Kane — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 17:27:48 +0000

There were a number of changes in how the search engines deal with our web sites in 2009. What follows is a brief list of some of things that may warrant attention by ISV’s in 2010.

1. Google Local Search

If you sell local specifically this is critical. Not going to be helpful for those targeting internationally though.

2 Webpage Load Time

There have been some hints from Google’s Matt Cutts that how fast a website takes to load may affect its ranking. In other words the faster a site loads the better the chance of getting a decent rank for your niche keywords. Some things about Google really get my goat. For small companies server load time can be extremely hard to manage. Mostly because the majority of small ISV’s are on either VPS’ on overloaded networks, shared hosting or a little dedicated box hidden in the water closet of a datacenter somewhere in downtown Dallas.

However them’s the breaks. Looks like this could get important with the theory being concocted that fast loading websites are delivered by a “reputable web host and fast internet connection.” Which says quite a bit about the hosting industry.

3. Social Media

As the world grapples with the social and moral implications of “social media” you don’t need to be Nostrildamus to see it’s the new shiny thing for 2010, as it was in 2009. In theory social media has become an essential tool to reach out, communicate, build trust and build relationships with consumers. It’s also a phenomenal time sink waiting to suck in the unwary into futile exchanges. Use it carefully – but use it. Facebook and Twitter in particular are proving so far to be worthwhile sources for secondary results in the engines. Buzz words emerging = “Micro Targeting” and “Personalization”.

4. Mobile Users

Mobile communications is a still growing market that’s already significant. Despite Apple’s marketing destroying the definition of the industries abbreviation “App” for application – I’m already meeting consumers correcting me in conversations for saying I’m writing an “app” – “For the iPhone!!”, they shout enthused. When I answer “no , for the PC” they declare “…if it’s not for an iPhone it’s not an “app”". Grrrrrrr!

You are going to have to make sure your site loads cleanly at 800×600. Just as 22” widescreen becomes almost entry level some ning nong shrinks our real estate again. Some folks seem to be opting for a compromise here and getting and using a sub domain like mobile.xyz.com and sticking something friendly in there. If you’re running an RSS driven site this is easy – but be careful of duplicate data lest the Google Police get on your case.

5 Analytically

I’m not a fan of Google Analytics as such – mostly because I cringe at the idea of Google having my data and the EULA they wrote to accompany it. But Google isn’t the only player in town and if you’re like me and hate external data collection of your logs then you can take a look at PIWIK – Click Here to investigate – It’s free, open source and it runs on your own server. Adds a load to your MySQL databases and CPU but if you’ve got the resources available it’s quite a good tool (I run it in conjunction with standard Apache logs and some WordPress stats programs).

The idea of analytic tools is to answer the “how” as opposed to the “why”. What that means is you can see how many and who visited a page on your site but it won’t necessarily tell you why they didn’t actually buy anything. Don’t hold your breath while waiting for the latter tool.

Dissecting your data is however, jokes aside, a powerful way of understanding visitor reactions to websites and pages. Things such as trends, stickiness of a site and geo-location to name but a few can go a long way towards helping us understand our customers. From this we can improve and test – or rinse and repeat if you like – and improve the visitors experience and with diligence increase sales.

6 www vs. http

Here’s an odd one from the people who brought you “WordPress”. WordPress MU doesn’t support “www”. It will redirect you to “http” without the “www” every time. Sure you can hack the PHP but next update it’ll change back again as your hacks are overwritten. This doesn’t seem to have surfaced in the single site/blog edition of standard WordPress yet – but as the code is now merged it’s probably only a matter of time.

Why? Security? Big Internet wide bug? Nope. Because “www” is unnecessary according the FOS Unix-head developers at Automatic. I love WordPress, don’t get me wrong and have a lot of respect for the team who produce it – but come on! Why redefine a web convention for the hell of it. Because it’s “unnecessary” is not a reason. It’s dunderheaded and bubble headed and an instance of the worst kind of geeky arrogance.

The point of raising this is that if it becomes mainstream in CMS’ such as WordPress it’s going to mess your Google XML sitemaps up as Google gets narky about addresses that redirect. That means telling Google for every site you run that the site “name” has changed. For one site it’s not a big deal if you generate your XML sitemap automatically. It’s a bloody nightmare if you do them by hand or run many sites.

7. Organic Search

Some folks are tipping organic search will become less important as some of the item points above – which only scratch the surface of “emerging” things to watch and do. Personally I disagree. Given there are indications of Google, Bing and Yahoo using bits of meta tags in pages again – not like the 90’s, but not ignoring them either, as they told us they were not that long ago – and the proclivity for consumers to gradually become inured to advertising due to seeing Google ads at every other site they visit, it’d be nutty to ignore organic search, in fact, it might just be an edge for some folks.

8. Download Sites

If you’re still trying to use these to “optimize” the engines for your product and, as most do, slack off on the SEO and social networking then you’re going to be overtaken in many instances by those who don’t bother with the download sites and have moved on. Get over it – the engines recognize these sites for what they are – it’s time we all did too.

Scott Kane

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“A man was running late for the office one day, so he was exceeding the speed limit along the freeway.

The next thing he knows his wife rings up & says that she’s just seen on the TV that there’s a maniac speeding down the wrong side of the freeway.

The man replies:

“It’s not just one, it’s all of them!!”