But PageRank is Pointless

Yeah I said it.  While I am pleased with the blogs and NJ small business websites I’ve brought from new domains with a zero up to 4, 5 or 6 — because we all know it’s tough to get an unknown new blog or website started — in the end, PageRank doesn’t mean much. A good link building strategy may help bolster your PageRank, but an effective online marketing strategy will help you target more customers and convert more sales.  So why bother with PageRank?

Google PageRank is just one yardstick to help measure the authority a site may carry in the Google index.  Note I said it is just one of many tools which may help; PageRank is not, I repeat, not an effective measurement of a successful online marketing strategy.  You can have a PageRank of 10 but if your traffic isn’t converting into sales, what good does it do you?

PageRank Doesn’t Determine Your Position In Results

What’s important to note is that PageRank doesn’t even necessarily help your site rank for your target keywords in Google.  There are so many factors which go into determining where your site ranks in the SERPs that it would be ludicrous to assume Google is going to boil down its billion dollar patented ranking algorythm into a number from zero to 10.

In fact, I don’t even like to work with clients who just want high rankings in SERPs; I prefer to work with clients who want to create an engaging customer experience, intelligent branding, and effective marketing.  Let’s face it — as Google and the other search engines evolve to offer more personalized results (and perhaps even begin basing results on user involvement), better websites which offer a better user experience will always rank better in results.

So What Good Is PageRank?

It can be useful for a few reasons:

A higher PageRank will help you sell more advertising space.  I’m not sure why, for all the reasons outlined above, but it does.  You’ll find sites with higher PageRanks can charge more for monthly banners, text link ads, or site reviews.

A higher PageRank will raise the value on your site.  If you’re in the business of flipping domains or selling blogs, PageRank comes into play for the valuation of your site.

A higher PageRank will let you laud it over your friends and competitors.  Let’s face it; among SEOs, website owners and Bloggers, PageRank will always be an ego stroke.  It feels good to have a higher PageRank, because it leads you to believe your site is more important than those with a lesser rank.  In some cases, but not all, this is actually true.

Even though it’s kind of a useless application, it’s fun, and has become pretty popular - we made the top 10 Alexa list (briefly) about an hour or so ago. It’s all thanks to the brilliant genius of Sugarrae, who dreamed up the idea when she noticed how much time Streko was wasting on Twitter. Her argument being anyone who has spent over 24 hours of his life on Twitter can’t be getting much real work done. And then she thought, wouldn’t everyone like to know how much time they’re wasting on Twitter? Know it? Hell yeah, Streko said, they want a Wordpress plugin for it!

So Streko asked if I could program the site and the Wordpress plugin, and after they sat me down in front of a blackboard and explained the complex math involved in the calculations, I said OK. And about 45 minutes later tweetwasters.com beta was built. But it wasn’t very pretty. That’s when they called their friend Reese in; she’s a great designer that put a beautiful logo, design and face lift on the whole thing.

You can see the Wordpress Plugin on the sidebar to your right - and you can download it from Rae’s site for free if you would like to add it to your own blog. Or just visit Tweetwasters.com and enter your Twitter screen name. You might be suprised to find out how much time you’ve wasted :)

“How can I redirect /default.aspx to / on IIS shared hosting without causing an endless loop?”

It’s a familiar problem with Windows Web Servers.  If you just try to apply a 301 redirect rule to the default document in IIS (which is usually a .NET page named Default.aspx) to send reqeusts back to the domain root, it will result in an endless loop of sending visitors back and forth between the two URIs.  http://www.yourdomain.com/ will redirect to http://www.yourdomain.com/Default.aspx (which is built-in behavior in IIS), and http://www.yourdomain.com/Default.aspx will just keep redirecting back to http://www.yourdomain.com/.

I had noticed this when working with IIS 6, but never really found an acceptable solution.  Being aware that Microsoft released the URL Rewrite Extension for IIS 7 last month, I figured I may as well ask someone in the know about it, so I emailed Bill Staples (GM of the Microsoft Web Platform) if he knew how this could be accomplished.

He sent my request to Ruslan Yakushev, the Project Manager for URL Rewriter whom he refers to as “a master at how to use it.”  I was very happy to get an email back from Ruslan with a solution made possible (and extremely simple) thanks to the URL Rewrite extenstion:

<rule name="Redirect" patternSyntax="Wildcard" stopProcessing="true">
<match url="default.aspx" />
<action type="Redirect" url="/" redirectType="Permanent" />
</rule>

While this will rather eloquently solve the issue if you administer IIS 7 on your server and can install the Microsoft module for URL Rewriting, it doesn’t necessarily answer Michael’s question on how to correct this problem on a shared server (i.e., one where the host may not install an IIS extenstion module for you).  It also won’t help anyone still using IIS 6; so if anyone out there has a workaround they’ve found for this issue, by all means please comment on this post or email it to me and I’ll publish it.

ITCN is starting some projects for a couple new clients, and we’re also finishing up some pretty big projects which have been underway for some time.  I’ve been working on a few side projects as well.  I’m very excited about the new application I’m going to be launching for Twitter.  Let’s just say for now I’m getting very involved and acquainted with both the Twitter API and the Google Maps API for geocoding.  I’ll post more about it as soon as it’s ready!

But since it’s Thanksgiving morning and I don’t plan to launch any new affiliate marketing campaigns before I eat today, I was going to write a quick blog post just to demonstrate how to rank for a silly non-competitive term like SEO Thanksgiving.  But I did some quick keyword research (i.e., I typed it into Google) and discovered a whole bunch of silly people already tried to rank for that term.  Talk about highly targetted niche markets - who do you really think is going to search for SEO services on Thanksgiving, let alone use the term SEO Thanksgiving to do it?  I wouldn’t want that client.  He might jump ship next month as soon as he discovers the next guy that ranks for Christmas SEO.

So I figure why not throw in a less competitive keyword like Turkey SEO.  Forget about it - there’s a whole bunch of people actually living in Turkey making their living in SEO, apparently working hard for about $2 an hour from what I can see.  That keyword market is stuffed tighter than the bird I’ll be eating today (did someone say keyword stuffing?).

So that leaves me content rich but keyword poor today, although I’m sure most of you would argue the content on this blog is nowhere near as rich as I think it is.  So what the hell; Happy SEO Thanksgiving to everyone!

Before I get technical, I’ll explain why you might want to do this.  Google Base can be a great way to get your site’s information into the top of Google results, especially if you are selling products in an online shopping cart.  Although they’ll accept almost anything - articles, services, even vacation rentals - Google Base works exceptionally well with displaying shopping results for specific product searches.  Often it will help a site get into the top 3 results in the SERPs where it may not otherwise appear for ordinary competitive keyword queries.  Take a look at the following Shopping Results query for Elmo Live (which I recently purchased for my niece):

If you were selling Elmo Live wouldn’t you like to have your site listed in those top 3 results above fisher-price.com, a site you would probably never be able to knock out of the top spot for that keyword?

In order to submit your product listing into Google Base, you have to first create a data feed in one of a number of formats (Text, XML, etc.).  I’ll be creating one in XML format which uses the RSS 2.0 spec.  The end result will contain a number of products in the XML file, and each one will look like this:

<item>
<id>1</id>
<title>My Great Widget</title>
<description>Teh best product ever</description>
<g:price>25</g:price>
<link>http://www.yoursite.com/item-info.aspx</link>
<g:image_link>http://www.yoursite.com/item-image.jpg</g:image_link>
<g:brand>MyBrand</g:brand>
<g:product_type>Widgets</g:product_type>
<g:upc>0001230001230</g:upc>
<g:weight>0.1 lb</g:weight>
</item>

Basically, the code is pretty simple - all it has to do is loop through a table in SQL Server and format each result set using the System.XML class.  Specifically, I’ll be using the XmlTextWriter in VB.NET to create the file.  You can download the complete code separately so I’ll just demonstrate a few lines below.

First, we select all the product info from the database:

SELECT productId, productTitle, productDesc, productPrice, ... FROM products

It would be great if it were this simple, but it rarely is.  In my live code I actually had to perform several text concatenation functions on my data, and create the search engine-friendly URLs for the link output dynamically.  But for the sake of demonstration let’s just say all you have to do is select the data, and write it to XML.

The next part, writing the XML, is equally easy.  I just use WriteStartElement to open the <item> tag, and then WriteElementString to create each of the elements, such as <title>.  VB.NET makes it very easy to work with XML files using these:

objX.WriteStartElement("item")
objX.WriteElementString("id", myReader("productId").toString())

Now when you call the createXMLFeed class from an ASPX page it will display the XML output directly to the browser, so you can simply point the Google data feed upload to this page.  If you have many products (more than a few hundred) you’ll probably want to alter the code a bit to actually open a file stream and write the XML directly to a file.

Download Complete VB.NET Code:
ASP.NET Create Google Base XML Data Feed

Dear Barry Wize
I know you told me not to worry about it man but I can’t let it ride…

- T-Pain

It’s all cool T-Pain, this Barry Wize got your back, so you don’t need to worry about it.  I wouldn’t let it ride, either.  In fact, I don’t let anything ride.  I’m all up in the SEO every day, gettin’ paid.  You got to make your paper, boo. 

And for all you haters out there; don’t hate on me, hate on the game … and SEO can be a cutthroat game - you’re either east coast or west coast and there ain’t nothin’ in between.

Since it’s my brithday and I’ve got nothing else to write about, why not talk about some other places around the web where the Barry Wise brand name has been dropped, catapulting me to SEO Rock Star status?  Some more notable than others, but they’ve all got my respect:

Lorna Li’s Green Marketing Blog

Bill Staples, Microsoft’s General Manager of the Web Platform and Tools engineering team

Harvard’s Recommended Reading List for Database Normalization

Wikipedia’s definition of Database Normalization

Ty, the SEO Guy on Twitter

9Rules Blog Community

ITCN NJ Web Design and SEO (shameless self-promotion)

As expected, there was really no ground breaking news here - they didn’t release a 3 step guide to getting the #1 result in Google.  But what is interesting is they supported basically all the arguments SEOs have figured out on their own about the Google algorythm - and more importantly (for me at least), everything I’ve been blogging about.  It’s good to be told you’re doing something right every once in a while :)

I don’t want to break down the entire SEO starter guide, since Google really did do a good job on the document, but I will outline some important aspects which I see so many clients having problems with over and over again:

1. Use unique Title tags and Meta Description for each page

Google’s guidelines for a good Page Title tag are simple: Make it accurate, brief and descriptive.  The biggest issue to avoid? Stuffing unnecessary keywords in the titles.  The same goes for Meta Description tags - it’s important to write a description which both accurately describes the page and is enticing to search visitors, since this may be the description displayed in Google’s search results.

One big problem a lot of sites have is duplicate title and description tags repeated across many pages of their site.  Make sure each page has it’s own unique title and description; it also doesn’t hurt to make sure there’s no other pages anywhere on the web which are sharing the same title and description as yours.

2. Search Engine Friendly URLs

Every SEO has been aware of this for a while, but a lot of site owners don’t realize the importance of URLs and filenames which are both easily readable and are also relevant to the page content.  Use URL rewriting to change URLs which look like this:

/index.aspx?id=1243

to this:

/my-category/my-page-title/

Also outlined is the need for unique URLs to each content page.  Having a content page accessible by more than one URL creates duplicate content issues and dillutes the authority and reputation of each page, so it’s no suprise here that Google recommends using 301 redirects if you can’t simply remove the duplicate URLs.

3. Offer Quality content and services

I stress this all the time, but clients simply don’t get it.  SEO needs useful content just as much as your site visitors do.  No one likes a site which is nothing more than a sales pitch.

4. Anchor text in Links

What is interesting here is that Google mentions the importance of internal linking.  Getting other websites to link to you with your competitive keywords as the anchor text is important; but so is linking internally within your own site.  I’ve seen some great results just by changing the anchor text with which you link to your own pages.

5. Semantic Coding and Heading Tags

I’ve said it before; your site will benefit from semantic coding.  Using appropriate heading tags (h1, h2, h3,. etc.) helps Google determine which text is more important on a page, and gives more weight to specific text.  Also use descriptive file names and ALT text for images on your site, and keep those images in their own /images/ directory.

6. Nofollow Links

Google actually used the example of a viagra spam comment to explain the importance of this one!  They only mentioned using nofollow as a method to not pass authority to an unwanted website; they didn’t say anything about using nofollow on paid text links or for internal link power.

Take, for example, that big obnoxious banner on the right side of this page for ITCN SEO and Web Design.  Yeah, you can see it, and maybe you even realize it’s my own company, but you can obviously see that it’s an advertisement and you probably don’t think twice about clicking on it.  In fact I know you don’t because I know how many clicks that banner generates.  But what if I were blogging about SEO (which I am), and I put an intriguing text link in the middle of my content which said something link “these guys are the best SEO consultants in NJ” (which I just did).  Not only are you are more apt to click on it because it’s context-sensitive, but in crawling this site Google sees it as a link with keywords for which I want ITCN.com to rank.

So I think we can safely say the days of text links for the purpose of improving organic search results are here to stay (at least for a while).  Google ranks websites for keywords based on the links which point to them; and the weight given to those links is based on the PageRank or authority of the incoming link site.

For example, let’s say your home page has a Google PageRank of 7.  If I had a link on your home page with the keyword NJ SEO linking to my site, then I would rank better for the term NJ SEO in Google results.  If your home page only had a PageRank of 3, however, it wouldn’t help me as much at all, even if you had thousands visitors a day to your website (which you probably wouldn’t).

Now you could have a graphic banner ad and use some on-page SEO factors such as a title tag in the href code, and keywords in the alt and title tag of the image code - and that does help.  But it’s my bet that nothing is going to beat a good old-fashioned text link any day of the week - especially since Google discourages the practice of buying links, and what says you paid for a link better than a standardized ad banner size in a common ad banner placement position?

Web application programmers often like to name their files for the function they perform.  For example, you’ve programmed a pretty cool e-commerce app so you name the file shoppingcart.aspx.  Why not?  That’s what it does - it’s a shopping cart.  And without a care in the world you go on programming your shopping cart to create links on your site which look like his: /shoppingcart.aspx?id=4757.  Looks good, right?  It’s a shopping cart page showing a product with an ID of 4757.  It’s just a URL, and you know your customers don’t care what the URLs look like on your site - do they?

Well, they probably don’t.  But search engines do care - and after a while you notice all the clients who bought your shopping cart software are starting to complain that their product pages aren’t getting as much traffic from Google as they’d hoped.  But what if that URL was changed from /shoppingcart.aspx?id=4757 to something like /name-of-my-product.aspx?   Now anyone searching for the “name of my product” keywords might have a better chance of finding your page in Google since the keywords they are searching for are right in the URL of the page.

I’ll show you how to (kind of) easily accomplish this task with ASP.NET, IIS, and some simple URL rewriting in your global.asax file.  This will work in both IIS6 and IIS7, but IIS7 has an add-on module you can download which has another way of providing URL rewrites.  (For more info, check out my earlier post on using the global.asax file to fix canonical URL issues in IIS7 and 7)

I realize these functions are hard to read as inline code in this blog, so you can view all 3 functions in this text file: SEO Search Engine Friendly URL Functions for ASP.NET

First, here’s a function which will take the ID of a product, select the name of the product from a database table, and turn it into a search engine friendly URL.  It will turn /shoppingcart.aspx?id=4757 into /shoppingcart/4757/name-of-my-product.aspx.  You should call this function in your .NET pages where ever you link to product detail pages.

Function: seoPageUrls

Public Function seoPageUrls(ByVal thisProductId As Integer) As String

'### CONNECT TO DATABASE - CHANGE yourDSN
'### IN YOUR WEB.CONFIG FILE ACCORDINGLY
Dim myConnection as New oleDBConnection(ConfigurationManager.AppSettings("yourDSN"))
Dim myCommand as New oleDBCommand
Dim myReader As OleDbDataReader

Dim thisProductName As String = ""

'### GET THE ACTUAL PRODUCT NAME FROM THE DATABASE
myCommand.Connection = myConnection
myCommand.CommandText = "SELECT productName FROM productTable WHERE productId = " & thisProductId

Try
 myConnection.Open()
 thisProductName = myCommand.ExecuteScalar()

Finally
 myConnection.Close()
End Try

myConnection.Dispose()
 
'### GET RID OF NON-FRIENDLY URL CHARACTERS AND REPLACES SPACES WITH DASHES
thisProductName = Regex.Replace(thisProductName, "[^\w\@-]", " ").ToLower()
thisProductName = Regex.Replace(thisProductName.Trim(), "\s{1,}", "-")

'### JUST RETURN THE SEO SEARCH ENGINE FRIENDLY URL
Return "/shoppingcart/" & thisProductId & "/" & thisProductName
 
End Function

Now we need a way to tell IIS to rewrite the URLs as visitors (and search engines) request them.  So when someone clicks on a link which looks like /shoppingcart/4757/name-of-my-product.aspx they actually get directed to the page /shoppingcart.aspx?id=4757.  This is done via a technique called URL rewriting in the global.asax file.  The following function will intercept all incoming page requests and send them to the URL rewrite function:

Function: Application_BeginRequest

Sub Application_BeginRequest(ByVal sender as Object, ByVal e as EventArgs)

Try

Dim httpContext As System.Web.HttpContext = httpContext.Current()
Dim currentURL As String = Request.ServerVariables("PATH_INFO")

httpContext.RewritePath(rewriteUrl(currentURL))
 
Catch ex As Exception
 Response.Write("Error in Global.asax:" & ex.Message)
End Try

End Sub

You’ll notice it intercepts the incoming URL (contained in the variable currentURL) and sends it to a function called rewriteUrl.  The rewriteUrl function also goes in your global.asax file and it acutally changes the URL requested to one which the web server will understand. 

Function: rewriteUrl

Public Function rewriteUrl(byVal thisURL As String)

Dim currentFileName As String
Dim currentFileType As String
Dim currentFileID As String
Dim returnURL As String

'### THIS REGEX STRING IS LOOKING FOR A URL
'### IN THE FORM: /shoppingcart/4757/name-of-my-product.aspx
'### SO THE URL WILL GET READ LIKE THIS:
'### fileType = shoppingcart
'### identifier = 4757
'### fileName = name-of-my-product.aspx
 
Dim rewrite_regex As Regex = New Regex("^.*/(?<fileType>[^/]+)/(?<identifier>\d+)/(?<fileName>[^/]+)(\?.*)?", RegexOptions.IgnoreCase)
 
Dim match_rewrite As Match = rewrite_regex.Match(thisURL)
 
currentFileType = match_rewrite.Groups("fileType").Value.toString()
currentFileID = match_rewrite.Groups("identifier").Value
currentFileName = match_rewrite.Groups("fileName").Value.toString()

If currentFileID <> "" Then

 '### IF shoppingcart IS THE CURRENT URL, PERFORM THE URL REWRITE
 If currentFileType = "shoppingcart" Then
  returnURL = "/shoppingcart.aspx?id=" & currentFileID
 Else
  '### NO MATCH, NO URL REWRITING - JUST PASS TO REQUESTED URL
  returnURL = thisURL
 End If

Else
 returnURL = thisURL
End If

Return returnURL

End Function