SODO DOJO / GREEN DESIGN

Alas, Earth Day is here. Hoorah! Have you seen our home page today?

We might also recommend our green Web services page if you’re considering any print or Web design…we be eco-friendly! So what do we all do now? (Are your thumbs twiddling? Are you twittering? We are!) For starters, you can check out sites to help you get involved…

Check out events in Seattle here or find an event in your own home town.

But beyond all the happy joy of Earth Day, I thought I’d point out something interesting…a turn of the tides, as it were. That is to say, I’ve got some dirt on Google! Yes, we love Google…but looking at the search results for “earth day” in both Live and Google, it’s quite apparent that Live is doing a much better job with this query. What’s up with that? You’ll see what I mean when you compare this to this. The first query is Google’s…why in the world does an entry for “The Day the Earth Stood Still” from Wikipedia come up as the 5th result for “Earth Day”? In the humble dialect of Yoda, “Sense, this does not make.”

Live’s results on the other hand are not all that bad. I get a pretty dense set of information all pertaining specifically to Earth Day. That’s Rock and Roll! What does this mean though?

Well, for as much as we can gather, it’s apparent that Live is placing some pretty heavy emphasis on <title> tags whereas Google is continuing to rely more (perhaps) on linking to define context and relevance. Either that or Live has done some amazing programmatic changes to surface these results today. We’ll be checking and comparing these same results the day after Earth Day to see what we get. Should be interesting! Anyway, we we wish you a fantastic Earth Day and hope you get all “earthified” from today forward…all the cool kids are doing it (like us)!

CNET covers it here. But in short, the algorithmic perfectionists at Google were so inclined to “tweak” how Google search results are rendered 450 times (at least) over the course of 2007. What does this mean? Well, essentially Google is trying to improve their product…by tweaking the results they are really trying to give you better information based on what you search for. The extended version is that this has an impact on site owners. Sites might disappear from that golden first page of search results temporarily…or for good based on these tweaks.

But what about the case for the searcher, where what you find today in Google may not be in the same place tomorrow? That’s a likely scenario and in fact will most definitely occur depending on what zip code you’re searching from and whether or not you’re signed in to a Google profile or not (Gmail users out there)…

This should come as no surprise for anyone keeping up on search news. Google search algorithm tweaks have been so big that they’ve had names. So what is an SEO to do?

The first step is not to totally freak out…we do this by listening to a little Sinatra and making a few martinis (shaken, not stirred). Add a couple of olives and then it’s over to the forums to read up on things and try to better understand what the impact is…or will be. As far as change management, the secret is that for the most part no emergency tweaks are needed. Most of these changes are so minuscule that they don’t necessarily impact the big impact ranking factors we at SODO Creative focus on. That said, the bottom line is that search rank shouldn’t be the focus of an SEO campaign. The ultimate goal is to drive more search referrals (and more conversions) through optimization.

Optimizing sites for search is our game. SODO Creative is our name. Get in touch with us today so we can bring your site into our DOJO. You’ll be kicking *!$ in no time.

Jumping right in to the advertising/marketing (and more technical) conversations we promised early on, I’d like to cover a relatively common issue with Flash-based sites. Flash-based sites are great for interactivity and sometimes provide the exact look and feel you need that can’t be accomplished through static graphics. The challenge is thus: while I was surfing for “DC Shoes” the other day in Google, I noticed something:

Now, if you were looking for DC Shoes, which result would you click on? My assumption is probably not the one that says “Adobe Flash Player Not Current.” But this is the DC Shoes Web site. Not good for business! So, how does this happen and could it happen to you?

It’s actually a common issue for any company that is doing what’s called “Flash player detection” on their home page…since the search engine bot that visits the site to crawl it (for the search engine’s index) does not have Flash player, the Web site redirects it to a page that basically says “You don’t have Flash, so you cannot view our site—but you can click here to download it.” The search engine (which doesn’t care about downloading Flash, it just wants your content) crawls the latter page and indexes it. The title of that page is “Adobe Flash Player Not Current” and so we have the result (literally).

Flash player detection is a tricky thing, but we would solve this by simply creating a Webmaster Tools profile in Google and using the “Remove URL” tool to remove the URL from search results. Then we would go into either the page itself or create a robots.txt file to disallow search engines (*) indexing that page and following any links to that page. That should fix the problem. So why doesn’t DC Shoes do this? They may have already attempted the latter fix, but that doesn’t remove it from search results…Webmaster Tools is a great program that we use for all our clients to manage some of the search result snafus that sometimes come up in the process of indexing a site. We’re convinced not enough people are using this awesome resource yet…are you?