Breadcrumbs: Everything About Breadcrumbs & SEO

So the first thing to do when analyzing how usable a site is should be to make sure people are able to easily find their way around no matter which page they first landed on. When it comes to huge websites, breadcrumbs can be a great way to help users identify where they are located.

Here are a few essential things you should know about breadcrumbs:

1. Types of Breadcrumbs

Generally, there distinguish three types of breadcrumbs

1. Location-based breadcrumbs: show the user where the current page is located relevant to the whole structure of the site: 

2. Path-based breadcrumbs: visualize the user’s path which brought him to the current page. These breadcrumbs are dynamic and are usually based on the search results. With this type of breadcrumbs one and the same page can be accessed through several paths: 

Consulting > Services > Implementation > Service A

Consulting > Services > Optimization > Service A

Consulting > Services > Upgrade > Service A

3. Attribute-based breadcrumbs: list the attributes of the current page:  

2. Keyword-Optimized Breadcrumbs

Many people view breadcrumbs as the additional way to stuff the site with keyword-targeted anchor text. Thus what they end up with looks something like this:

Main keyword (link to home) > Main keyword + word (category link) – Main keyword + word

Example: 

Posters (link to home) > Celebrity posters (category link) > Angelina Jolie posters 

In some cases (like the above one) this really may look handy (and natural) enough but in on average I tend to take a less SEO-centered approach for a couple of reasons:

1. As we’ve discussed previously, too much keyword-focused anchor text may look strange:mind the keyword-in-anchor-text factor in breadcrumbs.

2. Never put SEO before usability: people will know what “Home” link means and where it is going to bring them. Don’t make them guess: I prefer sticking to universally accepted standards.

3. Breadcrumbs and Google

Starting from this November, Google is integrating breadcrumbs navigation within the SERPs which actually makes your listing look more attractive and trustworthy (well, you may want to argue this but that’s a matter of taste, I like it):

Not in every case the breadcrumb navigation is picked up. The algorithm behind this is certainly a mystery but putting the breadcrumb trail closer to the top of the page source code should help (note: I am not claiming this is the only factor that comes into play but from a few cases I’ve seen, the closeness to the top does seem to make Google recognize the breadcrumbs easier).

4. Breadcrumbs Best Practices

• Only use breadcrumbs when they help a user: for large, multi-level websites. These are for user first of all; if they also help SEO – that’s an additional benefit. Don’t add breadcrumbs just for the sake of adding good internal anchor text.
• Do not link the current page to itself (the last step in the breadcrumbs should be un-linked);
• Do not replace main navigation with breadcrumbs (breadcrumbs visualize your website structure horizontally while the main navigation shows its vertical structure listing its other categories and content types);
• Use breadcrumbs consistently (this makes the user browsing your website feel safer and allows him to faster familiarize himself with how the site is structured)
• Do not use breadcrumbs in the page <title> tag (this makes title too long and untargeted):

SEO: Understanding Google Webmaster Tools

Google Webmaster Tools, as Google explains it, is a "one-stop shop for webmaster resources that will help with your crawling and indexing questions, introduce you to offerings that can enhance and increase traffic to your site, and connect you with your visitors." By using these tools, you can identify problem areas on your ecommerce site. In this article, I'll help you understand the main features of Google Webmaster Tools.

Google Webmaster Tools is a place where Google attempts to give you information about how it crawls your website, what it "sees" when it visits your website, and other information, such as the links to your website. There are also tools that may be helpful to you, such as a way to tell Google's search engine spider, named Googlebot, to "slow down" if it's accessing too many pages of your website too quickly (yes, that does happen pretty frequently). In order to get the full access to Google Webmaster Tools, you'll need a few prerequisites: a Google Account and access to your website (you'll need to prove that you own the website through a simple verification process).

Verifying Your Website

Once you log in to Google Webmaster Tools with your Google Account, you will see the home page. You'll first need to click on the "Add a Site" button to get started.

        Enter the URL of a site you'd like to manage and click "Continue." You're then taken to the "Verify Ownership" page. You'll need to pick one of the two ways to verify that you're the website owner. You can add a meta tag to your website's home page (Google provides the meta tag to use) or you can save a blank file with a certain filename on your website. Depending on the type of access you have on your website will depend on which verification type you select. If you're using a shopping cart, it may be easier to add the meta tag into the administration area of your shopping cart, where it allows you to enter meta data. In other instances, it might be easier for you to add the supplied file by sending it, via FTP, it to your website. In either case, you'll then need to select the "Verify" button when you're ready. At this point, there really isn't much you can do until you've verified ownership.

Navigating Through Google Webmaster Tools

Once you've verified your site, you'll need to go back to the home page and click on the actual website domain name to get to the Google Webmaster Tools' dashboard. On the left side there are several options and sections as shown below:

   On the main page you'll be presented with five main areas:

1. Top Search Queries. When people searched on Google, how did they find your website? Generally speaking, as you review these keyword phrases, they should be in line with what your website is about (its overall topic) and current search engine rankings. It can be confusing when reviewing these keyword phrases and what Google reports as the "position." In the majority of cases, I would not rely at all on these "positions" as Google is reporting them. There are a lot of factors (mainly the "personalization" of search results) that effect the actual position and rankings, so the "position" numbers, as reported here, are not reliable. What's important, though, is that the phrases that are here are related to your website and that they aren't any oddball keyword phrases showing up. If you do see some strange phrases, you might investigate them further to see if there are issues with your website, your website's inbound links, or if that keyword phrase appears somewhere on your website or not.

1. If you dig deeper into the Top Search Queries area, you'll see that there are two different sections: Impressions and Clickthroughs. Ideally, those should be very close (what's shown on the left side is also shown on the right side). There may be keyword phrases that you're site is being located with, but people aren't clicking through to it. By comparing these two lists, you may be able to make some changes to the title tags or meta descriptions of your product pages so that they are more likely to get clicked. For some reason, users may search for a keyword phrase and they may not be clicking through to your website. If you can figure out why they're not clicking through, you may be able to fix it to attract more visitors, and bring in more sales.
2. Links to your site. A primary emphasis of Google's search algorithm is the number and quality links from other websites to your website. Google publicly won't tell your competitors which other websites link to you. But, they will, upon verification that you're the website owner, tell you the links. This is very helpful, especially to see how you're doing overall, and to verify that your website is getting new links--Google will give you the date that they found the link to your website. You can export all of the links to a Microsoft Excel file if you wish, and then you can sort them by date, for example. I recommend that you look at the links to your website on a regular basis, if possible.
3. Crawl errors. Ideally, when Google crawls your website (when it sends its search engine spider, Googlebot, to fetch the web pages on your website) there should be no errors. If there are errors, they'll be reported here. If your website is unreachable then it may report some errors there, as well. If you're having issues with a lack of sales, you might look to see if there are any errors being reported.
4. Keywords. I generally ignore this area. This data that Google provides, the "keywords," really is not very useful, mainly because of the fact that it's only "one word" keywords. You may find it more helpful, but I generally ignore it.
5. Sitemaps. Sitemaps are listings of all of the web pages on your website. Providing the search engines a sitemap may be helpful. It won't help you rank better, but it will give the search engines a list of pages to crawl. You should know how many web pages (and how many products) you have. If there is a big difference in the number of pages that you know you have on your website and the number that's reported in this section, there may be a problem. If that's the case, then you might want to investigate further to make sure that all of the products that you're selling are included.

Summary

These are the main areas of the Google Webmaster Tools that should be reviewed on a regular basis. Certainly you don't have review the information daily, but I would take a look at least once a month if you were confident that everything's going smoothly with your online sales. However, if there is an issue (if you notice a drop in sales), you might want to take a look at Google Webmaster Tools to help identify the problem.

Top 5 Reasons to Use Google Webmaster Tools

There’s a common misconception that registering with Google Webmaster Tools somehow enables Google more access to information about a site. In fact, just the opposite is true. Google Webmaster Tools provides site owners access to data available from no other source, data every ecommerce site needs to manage its organic search channel.

Organic Impressions

A critical metric to paid search campaigns, impressions have been painfully absent for organic search programs. Google, however, gives search engine optimization professionals a glimpse into impressions in the “Search Queries” report under “Your Site on the Web.” The “Top Queries” report shows the top search phrases for which Google drove organic search traffic to a site, the number of impressions or times the site was viewed in the search results, and the click through rate for each. Also included are the percentages that each metric changed since the last comparable period. The “Top Pages” report shows the same data from the URL side as opposed to the keyword side.

Yes, visit data is available in Google Analytics or any other web analytics program. But none of them show impressions. Google won’t show the data for all of its impressions, and the numbers are rounded off, but it’s more than SEO professionals can get from any other source.

Real Ranking Data

In the very same Search Queries reports for top queries and top pages, Google also provides average ranking data. This is a fantastic metric to have, with so many ranking tools falling prey to personalization biases. Since all Google searches are personalized by location, prior search history, behavior in other Google products, and whatever other data Google can get a hold of, running ranking reports directly from a browser merely displays the rankings personalized for you. While some enterprise-level ranking tools claim to be unbiased by any form of personalization including IP location, I prefer to get the average Google ranking straight from the source. This ranking data is limited to keywords that have actually converted to click through from Google’s search results, but it’s a pretty safe bet that phrases that didn’t drive enough click throughs to be displayed in the report are not ranking well.

Let’s look at a real life example from the top queries report on my personal blog. The keyword phrase "merge csv files" received 35 visits from 400 impressions. That’s a 9 percent click through rate, which at an average Google ranking position of 3.8 is about what I’d expect.

If I switch tabs to the top pages report, I can see that the post about merging CSV files — /2011/05/23/merging-csv-files-using-the-command-line/ — was viewed in the search results a combined 2,000 times across all the different keyword phrases it ranked for. Further, I can see that on average that page only ranked number 10 in Google and drove a combined 150 visits in that time period. 

Complete Backlink Reporting

Reliable backlink data is becoming increasingly hard to find. With Yahoo! Site Explorer’s sad demise and Bing’s refusal to honor the link: query, Google has become the only major U.S. search engine to give any information on backlinks. The numbers seem to be shrinking, however, with a link: query returning between .1 percent and 10 percent of a site’s true backlink portfolio. For verified site owners, however, Google does show the entirety of its backlink portfolio for a site. Under “Your Site on the Web” in the “Links to Your Site” report, Google shows the domains that link most to a site and the pages on a site that receive the most links. This is fantastic data to analyze for areas to improve a site’s backlink portfolio, and to trend over time to understand how a site’s link popularity is changing. Unfortunately, this data is only available to verified site owners, so it cannot help in an analysis of competing sites’ link portfolios.

+1 Metrics

Google offers a trio of Google +1 reports, including “Search Impact,” “Activity” and “Audience.” The search impact report details how many impressions were annotated with a friend’s +1, and how many clicks those +1 annotated search results drove. Then it goes a step further to show the impact that those +1 annotated search results had to identify if conversion to click through was higher with or without the +1 annotation.

For example, a search for "SEO" usually turns up SEOmoz’s beginner’s guide to SEO on page one. Several of my Google+ friends have +1’d this page, so for me it shows up as annotated with their avatars and names. Because every searcher has a different network of friends, the annotations for every searcher will be different. The search impact report takes all of this into account and identifies the number of times that a +1 annotation was seen and converted to a click through to that site.

New Crawl Error Reports

Just this week Google expanded their crawl error reporting in an attempt to make it more actionable. This report has always been somewhat problematic because it lists errors that sometimes have a very valid reason for existing. For example, some ecommerce sites intentionally show a friendly 404 error when a product is no longer in stock. Google views 404 errors as, well, errors and sticks them into a long report. As such, the crawl errors reports need to be viewed critically like any piece of data. But they can also help identify real issues such as site downtime.

Google’s new crawl reports focus on showing the errors that are most likely to be real issues that should be fixed. The errors that Google thinks are the highest priority that require an action will be at the top of the list. And once they’re fixed, the site owner can mark them fixed and request that Googlebot fetch that URL now to test the fix. This is very cool.

 Like all Webmaster Tool data, the reports described here are a 30-day snapshot in time. Site owners should export the data monthly to enable analysis of trends longer than 30 days. Yes, saving the data is tedious and there should be a better way. But when a major SEO issue crops up overnight, you’ll be glad you have this data — which can’t be accessed anywhere anymore except on your hard drive — safely stored away for times like this.

New Set of Circular Social Media Icons for Free

Blog Perfume has released a set of Free Social Media Icons some time ago. Yesterday, they have just added another 10 social media icons to the pack.

New Circular Social Media Icons includes AIM, Bebo, eBay, Hi5, Last.fm, LinkedIn, Windows Live, Ning, Orkut and Yahoo Messenger. They includes 3 sizes for 17 icons: 128×128, 64×64 and 32×32. There is also an icon template PSD file included! What kind of age are we living in when you cannot find a good set of simple, sleek, circular social media icons? So here they are.

For more information click the following link

http://www.blogperfume.com/new-27-circular-social-media-icons-in-3-sizes/ 

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) SEO Tips

Website Optimization is a complex issue, but should be known by every entrepreneur who wants to succeed on the Internet.

According to the dictionary of the Royal Spanish Academy, optimize is finding the best way to perform an activity. Therefore, optimization of your website would make it comply with the best possible with each of its functions.

Recall that if a site is designed only to achieve success in the Search Engines, better known as search engines will not be successful with users as the machines do not buy, not sell it. If, however, is intended only for individuals, difficult to achieve a good positioning in search engines and users will not find, therefore, not sell. In conclusion, a successful web site must comply with both their functions inevitably related to Search Engines such as those associated with the usability by site visitors.

We have said that anyone wishing to succeed in the Internet market should make a website that is a true "virtual branch." That is, this should be an extension of your company and operate as a local online. For this, the site must achieve the objectives for which it was created, must be compatible with the principles and policies of the Company, be functional and actually transmit useful information to its users.

In order to reach a site that complies with the characteristics listed above, you must have the help of a Web Optimizer you know how that site should work and how to achieve it.   Click for more

How to link multiple Google Analytics accounts to your website

Quite often I have to work with websites that have multiple versions of Google Analytics code embedded in them. Each tracking for a different account that was probably set-up by different people over the life time of the website.

Almost always, the code is a mess! Old code mixed with new to try and get around the multiple tracking issue.

It took me a while to find a clean solution, so I have decided to share it and hopefully save others time and frustration. I've also written a small script (see end) to make it even easier to track multiple profiles.

Read more: How to add multiple Google Analytics accounts to your tracking code
More information please click following link

http://seo-website-designer.com/Google-Analytics-Tracking-Multiple-Accounts 

The Definitive Guide To Styling Web Links

Hyperlinks (or links) connect Web pages. They are what make the Web work, enabling us to travel from one page to the next at the click of a button. As Web Standardistas put it,“without hypertext links the Web wouldn’t be the Web, it would simply be a collection of separate, unconnected pages.”. So without links, we’d be lost. We look for them on the page when we want to venture further. Sure, we pause to read a bit, but inevitably we end up clicking a link of some sort.
For more information please click following link
http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2010/02/13/the-definitive-guide-to-styling-web-links/#more-21203 

Top Nondestructive Photoshop Techniques

The creative process is not a linear one. As artists and designers, we often set off in one direction only to decide that the proper solution lies somewhere else completely. Unfortunately, many of the creative software packages we use (Photoshop in particular) can be pretty unforgiving when in comes to making changes late in the game.
More information click following link
http://vimeo.com/37147076