SEO
Page one is a good page to be on
After some strenuous effort on behalf of a brand that wasn't within spitting distance of its category leader, we've managed to take step one in making them relevant, by getting 8th Continent Soymilk on page one of the organic Google search results for several terms. Sorry about the blur on the image, but you'll understand I don't feel like shilling the competition.
From here we will go on to bigger, brighter things.
I believe in Black Hats...but White Hats? Not so much
SEOptimise.com has a bit of video up from SES London about what Google ought to do about Black Hat SEO's. While I like some of the answers, and others are compelling, I have trouble with the whole Black/White Hat view of the world. One fellow in the vid correctly points out that most SEO effort is "light grey" anyways. In my view, any SEO that's not totally organic has a "light grey" aspect to it, but SEO can be done ethically, nonetheless. What do you think?
New Google AdWord product link approach
Searchengineland is rapidly becoming a favorite haunt of mine. Here's a rundown on Google's new approach to AdWords:
- The ad is an extension of the AdWords Product Plusbox feature Google has been introducing to advertisers who use Google Base. The new method is to not show the plus box, but instead just show three small links to products directly under the AdWords ad title.
That oughta jack up the value of your AdWords efforts if you've got individual products to sell. How would you apply that to a service company? We've been brainstorming that for quite a while.
SEO-Friendly Fluid CSS Layout with Right Sidebar
In building this site I ran into a problem I hadn't seen before. I was looking to have the sidebar on the right side of the screen, which is easily accomplished by floating it right, but in doing so the sidebar would come first in the html, decreasing the SEO-awesomeness of the page. Observe.
The archaic way of doing things:
<style>
body{ width: 100%; }
sidebar{ width: 220px; float: right; }
content { margin-right: 240px; }
</style>
<body>
<div id = "sidebar"> [sidebar content] </div>
<div id = "content"> [main content] </div>
</body>
This will work just fine, but as you can see in the markup the content in the sidebar comes first. As google weights text more depending upon its location on the page, this isn't the correct approach.
A bit of searching lead me to discover that what I was looking for was Negative Margins. Using negative margins, i can float the right sidebar and have the main content come in its seo-friendly first position, even with a fluid width. Lets take a look at the functional markup:
<style>
body{ width: 100%;}
sidebar{ width: 220px; float: right; }
content { margin-right: -240px; float: left; width: 100%;}
</style>
<body>
<div id = "content"> [main content] </div>
<div id = "sidebar"> [sidebar content] </div>
</body>
For a more thorough description you can visit the A List Apart article on negative margins.
