I need not delve into the technical details of percent-encoding to make my point regarding keeping your URLs clean as part of your on-site search optimization, but some basic coaching is in order. I see a couple repeat offenses that bother me and I would like to discuss them here briefly in hopes of raising some awareness of the situation.

First major offense is the use of an apostrophe in URLs

Feel free to use them in the title and throughout the content of your page but do not use them in the URL structure. Search engines view an apostrophe in a URL as %27. So Google sees http://domain.com/don’t-do-this as http://don%27t-do-this. This causes issues with keyword separation and can very well cause issues in your search rankings. Some sites also have problems dealing with encoded characters as well. For example bit.ly and other URL shortening services have had issues properly linking to sites using apostrophes and other encoded characters in the URL.

If you use the WordPress platform for your site and/or blog it will automatically fix your URL for you after you type your post title as you can see in the image below.

Second major offense is the use of spaces in URLs

I don’t see spaces used in URLs as often as I see apostrophes but it is unfortunately still all too common.  Spaces cause a similar issue by displaying as %20 character. Hyphens are the preferred character for separating two words in URLs – do not use spaces or underscores. Don’t argue with me, there are many reasons for this, including the actual spec that explains it.

Same goes for Filenames

While I’m at it, your filenames need to follow these same guidelines. You optimize your image and video filenames to include keywords (right? you should be!) and should be using hyphens to separate those keywords as you do in your URLs.

If you currently have these problems on your site – I don’t recommend editing your old URLs unless you’re prepared to create 301 redirects for all of them.  Do keep an eye on your new posts and be cognizant of the situation in the future and keep your URLs clean as part of your SEO strategy.

rYnoweb.com by Chuck Reynolds

Clean URLs for Good SEO

I mentioned previously that I was speaking at the Local Search Summit in NYC during Search Engine Strategies. New York was great, met (in person) great people in the industry that I’ve only previously talked to online and more importantly was able to present on something I’m very passionate about – local search. My talk and accompanying slide deck focuses on Foursquare and using Foursquare for local search marketing.

Foursquare is a location-based application that works on the iphone, android and blackberry smart phones.  It brings a game aspect and some competition into the mix and you can use that to your benefit as a small business in regards to how you market yourself locally.  I’ll tell you how you can use it for free marketing and promotion as well. I’ve attached the slide deck at the bottom of the post for review.

First and foremost, Foursquare promotes exploration around town and trying out new venues.  You can open the app, see what is around your current location, if there are any specials nearby and what those are, and you can see if any of your friends are checked-in at any of those locations.  You can see if a place is trending (quite a bit of checkins in a short amount of time) and how many people are there.  Think popularity.  Foursquare has badges that one can “unlock” for certain accomplishments, say if they visit 5 different Starbuck’s they unlock the “Barista badge”.  There is also a “Leaderboard” as you receive points for checking in and for visiting multiple venues in a day.

What do badges and leaderboards mean to you as a business?

Ego.  People have one.  Competition.  People like to win.  This means that people are already playing this game and checking into your business whether you’re currently aware of it or not.  This means that there is a game, external from your knowledge, that is essentially tracking and rewarding your customers for frequenting your venue.

The next magic part is that Foursquare will dub the most frequently visiting player a “Mayor” of that location.  Somebody could quite possibly be the Mayor of your venue right now.

What does Mayorship mean to your business?

Again, think of the game – people like to win. Ergo people start to try and oust the Mayor so they can be in that spot. Being the Mayor is like having bragging rights.  Whoever comes to your business can see who the Mayor is, click on their profile, friend them, etc.  Mayorships and the oustings get posted publicly to twitter (most people have their account hooked to twitter and sometimes to their Facebook wall as well) with your business name and a link to your business’ profile page on foursquare.com. (Example: CK’s Tavern & Grill)

In addition to that, visitors can announce their arrival and/or “shout” that they’re at a location and again your business name and profile link will be posted along with anybody else’s username that has checked in recently (slide 4).  In addition to all of that, people can leave “tips” and “todo’s” for other visitors that will literally ‘pop-up’ when they check in at your location.  “Try the buffalo wings with ranch, best in town” or “Friday fish fry is awesome” or “Best tax prep in town and excellent service”.  Think short reviews.  And why are those good?  Read the SEO Benefits section below to learn why!

Some Stats about Foursquare

At the time of my talk, Foursquare had been around for just about 1-year.  In one year, they’ve obtained about 600,000 users (now they’re getting very close to breaking 1 Million users), have over 16 Million checkins, have over 1.4 Million venues in the database (all created by users mind you).  That’s fairly impressive no?  Out of the over 1.4 Million venues, only about 1200 venues have special offers.  Really?  Can you say “Opportunity“?

People love playing the game, and less than 1% of businesses are seizing the opportunity to entice those users into their place of business.  And you’re spending how much on print ads that hardly convert?

SEO Benefits of Foursquare

Google maps (slide 6) and now Bing maps are showcasing Foursquare venues when people search locally.  Again all without you spending a penny.  Google is starting to use the tips and shouts from Foursquare venues for citations about your business.  If you haven’t heard, citations are used in the rank algorithm.  This is why Yelp and Google Local reviews are so powerful and sought after.

Foursquare venue pages are ranking in search results (slide 7).  It has your business name, address and again links to your Foursquare venue page which also has your phone number.  Need I say more?

How Businesses get Involved with Foursquare

Simply put – goto Foursquare.com, and Search for your business.  If you’re in there make sure your information is correct.  There should be a little pencil icon under the info (once you have an account).  This is like any site, you need to make sure your information is correct and that you’re represented properly.

Not listed on Foursquare.com?  Add your business/venue at Foursquare.com/add_venue

Start a Special Offer for your Business

Like I mentioned above, there is a great opportunity for businesses to get an offer on Foursquare and potentially be one of the only places in town offering a deal.  Foursquare is still new, and people like exploring so if you’re one of the only places that shows you are on Foursquare and recognizing people’s enjoyment of the game and you basically say HI we have a special for you because you play Foursquare…  And even if they’re close to you, a “Special Offer Nearby” tab will show up and upon clicking on that your offer will be visible. Tell me that’s not great!?   Maybe you’re an ice cream shop next to a steak house – make an offer for “Free scoop with your Acme Steak receipt” or “25% off dessert every Friday, Saturday and Sunday night”.  (make up whatever)

How?  Goto Foursquare.com/businesses and fill out that form – they’ll get back to you shortly. My experiences have proven they act fairly quickly.

Note: In slide 9 I show a dashboard with some nice stats on it.  That currently is in private beta and will be visible to businesses with offers.  Possibly a monetization entry for Foursquare as a “pro” feature or something but currently there are no such talks.  Only that the stats dashboard is in private testing for businesses.

Though you can see some of that on your profile page, such as who’s there, who’s been there, what tips there are, etc.

New School Loyalty Rewards

The new dashboard present some great flexibility for business owners.  Think of Foursquare as the 2010 version of the old school rewards punch card.  You could offer rewards for tweeting 20 times while at the venue or even about the venue, or even a reward for bringing 10 friends in with you.  Foursquare is working hard for local business; expect to see more coming in that regard.

Big Name Companies are already Adopting Foursquare

More and more companies are seeing the benefit in the many options Foursquare can provide and already Pepsi, the New York Times and Bravo network have jumped in and are working with it in different ways.  In fact while in Manhattan I unlocked a Bravo badge for visiting Radio City music hall!  In Las Vegas if you become the Mayor of the Miracle Mile Shops you’ll get your face and name on the 126-foot LED video screen.  I don’t know about you but that would be fricking cool (yes I’m a geek and simple things make me happy – if at least for the photo opp).

So the question is how are YOU going to use Foursquare for local search marketing?

I’m Chuck Reynolds on Foursquare as I am everywhere.  Feel free to friend me on Foursquare and follow me on twitter @chuckreynolds.  I appreciate you reading.  Feel free to ask any questions and/or post concerns on here or twitter.  Cheers!

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rYnoweb.com by Chuck Reynolds

Local Search Marketing using Foursquare

This is why architecture of a project is important and if you build it right the first time, you don’t have to worry about this being an issue.  There are always times however that a bot will surprise you with some weird entry URL so as a guideline, it’s good to monitor your analytics and do simple 301 rewrites as they happen, if they happen.  Also just for kicks, there’s already a WordPress plugin from Joost de Valk (thanks man) to handle it on your blog, and an extension for Magento too!

Read More:
- Google, Specify Your Cononical
- Yahoo, Fighting Duplication
- Live, Partnering to Solve Duplicate Content issues
- SEOmoz has a really detailed write-up too

December 2009 Update:
WordPress 2.9 is adding this function into core so no more plugins will be needed to accomplish this if you’re running wordpress.

rYnoweb.com by Chuck Reynolds

Canonical Rel Attribute Just a Band-Aid

So yesterday Adobe and Google announced that Google, and soon Yahoo (after they “work some bugs out”), will be improving their indexing of Flash files.  This won’t solve all the problems with Flash content showing up on search engines and it’s not the complete and total package but it’s a great step in the right direction for Adobe Flash and their users.

So what’s going to be indexed?

All “textual content” in Flash files.  It’s not everything, including images and any descriptive text that those would contain, but will at least start to index your keywords and phrases.

What’s not going to be indexed?

I’m not a Flash expert by any means so I’m not real sure how Flash files are built but if you include your text in that initial movie, you’re okay, but if you pull data from XML files or another .html file Google currently won’t include those.  Also if you include your SWF file by way of certain Javascripting, Googlebot may or may not recognize that.  They didn’t get specific on that part but if you read into Googlebot’s javascript ability I’m sure you’ll figure it out.  (Give it a little more time and I bet Google figures that stuff out though.)

So now what?

I’m in no rush to start developing things in Flash just because of this news but it is good to know that Adobe is working on getting this done.  I still have my qualms about Flash and the way most web sites use it, its accessibility issues, and the problems of users having older versions and having to update, etc.

I still say web site content and its navigation should not reside within a flash file and should be semantically marked up for the best search results and best accessibility.  This news also worries me that the people making those crappy flash sites will only use this news to justify their bad sites/code are just that much better.  Fail.

Read the news from Google and from Adobe for source information and some more details.

EDIT: (19 July 2008) – Google has rolled out an “update that enables support for common JavaScript techniques for embedding Flash, including SWFObject and SWFObject2″.  So one of the first issues with their news they’ve already fixed.

rYnoweb.com by Chuck Reynolds

Flash gets some Search Engine Love

If you’re using an image replacement technique for design purposes it’s okay, BUT use common sense and understand the word “moderation”. Much like an alt attribute on an image, the text needs to be descriptive but not full of useless garbage just to throw keywords at the bots. So when you replace an H1 with an image and put text-indent:-9999px or display:none or visibility:hidden on the text within the H1; as long as you keep it description of what the image is you’re fine. If your H1 image replacement is the HLF Industries logotype, and your text says “HLF Industries” – there’s nothing wrong with that. Now if you put tons of keywords in with the HFL Industries… now you’re intent is not with the benefit of accessibility and your users, but to gain rank illegally and you’re not using common sense. That’s when Google starts to lay down the law with their algorithm.

The same goes for sliding door images and navigation bars with text in list items that are “hidden”. It’s descriptive text for the button navigation and there for text browsers and audible accessibility reasons.

Now if you don’t believe ME, then read the following comments and posts from Matt Cutts and Susan Moskwa of Google and feel free, Beau, to forward my comments onto your client if it would help.

1) Matt Cutts is a software engineer at Google and when posting about a site using some shady tactics got misunderstood and taken out of context by the community. He then made some comments and cleared up the situation, leaving us with some definitive answers on the topic.

Initial post on MattCutts.com – and his comment on ThreadWatch regarding people taking it out of context.

2) From a Google Groups discussion in the Webmaster Help thread (located here):
Susan Moskwa, who is one of Google’s Webmaster Central Google Groups support people, said it is acceptable, based on intent. Note the keyword there… “intent”.

“If your intent in hiding text is to deceive the search engines, we frown on that; if your intent is purely to improve the visual user experience (e.g. by replacing some text with a fancier image of that same text), you don’t need to worry.
Of course, as with many techniques, there are shades of gray between “this is clearly deceptive and wrong” and “this is perfectly acceptable”. Matt [Cutts] did say that hiding text moves you a step further towards the gray area. But if you’re running a perfectly legitimate site, you don’t need to worry about it. If, on the other hand, your site already exhibits a bunch of other semi-shady techniques, hidden text starts to look like one more item on that list.”

3) Roger Johansson at 456 Berea Street in 2005 weighed in on the situation and Matt Cutts said “We can flag text that appears to be hidden using CSS at Google. To date we have not algorithmically removed sites for doing that.” It is now 3 years later and Google still hasn’t done that, and in my opinion they won’t. That comment here at ThreadWatch.

I hope that helps Beau. I don’t consider myself a SEO guru by any means but I am on the front lines and have been at it for some years so if that’s any consolation; then there ya go.

For further reading here are some of my bookmarks on the subject: http://del.icio.us/chuckreynolds/seo

rYnoweb.com by Chuck Reynolds

CSS Heading Image Replacement