Online Marketing Blog

Recently I fielded a question about making dynamic urls more search engine friendly. A specific site example was not given, so my response was not as detailed as I would have liked, but I thought a post of some recommendations here might be helpful. Feel free to comment on anything else that should be considered to make dynamic urls easier to crawl.

Simple is best for crawlable urls. Although, Google and Yahoo are much better at crawling complicated urls now than they were a year ago. As a general rule, avoid including session id information in the url and if you do need to include parameters, limit it to 2 and limit the number of characters per parameter to 10 or less. Your solution might involve some of the following:

Not “really” on fire, but lots of great info on Jim Boykin’s blog lately. I also like the polls that he runs in the sidebar.

A few great recent posts:

SEO PowWow Next Week - Jan 18th. (I wish I could go!)

Software vs. Manual Link Building and Management (look in the comments)

What does Google know about your domain names? by Nick Wilsdon

Spotlight on Search Interview with Todd Malicoat (Stuntdubl)

I was planning to post this interview with Todd next Monday, but as usual, Todd has done a super job and providing insight into all things important about SEO. I first met Todd via email almost a year ago by commenting on a post at his blog. Since then we’ve met in person several times at Pubcon and SES conferences.

I noticed this morning a link on Google’s home page to Google Pack, a collection of “essentials to make your PC just work.”

Google Pack includes:

• Google Earth
• Google Desktop
• Picasa Photo organizer
• Google Toolbar for Internet Explorer
• Google Pack Screensaver
• Google Talk

Additional Software:

• Mozilla Firefox with Google Toolbar
• Ad-Aware SE Personal
• Norton Antivirus 2005 Special Edition
• Adobe Reader 7
• RealPlayer
• Trillian Instant Messenger
• Gallery Player

Google Pack also comes with an updater program that will keep all the software in the Google Pack current and it works with the programs you already have installed.

At TopRank we’ve been building Google & Yahoo site maps ever since each search engine debuted the service. However, recently I’ve been focusing on how to better automate the process and optimize my time spent creating site maps. I’ve researched and tried tool after tool until I came up with one that worked well for us.

It all started at Google. Google actually lists out a bunch of third party resources. How convenient! You can see them here: http://code.google.com/sm_thirdparty.html

Ones listed under Programs/Code Snippets appear to be code that you add to your website to create your own sitemaps. What I was looking for is a program to create site maps for client sites, so those were out.

I get asked on occassion by new SEOs about how to start getting new business for SEO. There are many answers to that ranging from doing pro bono work for charities or local civic organizations to networking with SEO peers and partnering with web design agencies.

For some reason, whenever I leave town for a conference or in the case of the last 10 days, go on vacation with no blogging, no phone, no emails, no internet, nada - the requests for SEO business just roll in. Well, they don’t really just fall in our lap, they come in as a result of reputation marketing, networking and search engine rankings.