Personalized Search seems to be popping its head up in marketing circles as well as search engine development news. So, what is Personalized Search and how is it going to affect the future of how we Google, Yahoo, LiveSearch and Ask? Basically it is the fine-tuning of search results and advertising based on an individual's preferences, demographic information and other factors. As the technology evolves, the better a search engine understands a user's interests and preferences, the better able it is to target search results, advertising, sponsored links and so forth.

The same techniques used in personalizing web content are now being used to make search more personal. The process is not an easy one as it requires technology to learn a user's preferences and then automatically apply that knowledge to the universe of web content, advertising and sponsored links. Each Search Engine has their own specific algorithm and technology to do this, but they all require the ability to the following

- Determine preference and demographic information from users in a way that does not interfere with their online experience.

- Analyze content and advertising traits are the best predictors of relevance for users.

- Categorize and filter content based on those characteristics.

- Present results in a way that is easy for users to understand.

The end result of applying personalization to search technology is an enhanced search experience with:

- Sponsored links that are targeted at users based on their tastes, interests and recent search histories to increase the likelihood of a click through.

- Ads based on user preferences as well as terms entered by users.

- Premium paid inclusion that targets search results at higher quality prospects.

- Web search results that can be organized by style, meaning, category, etc. and can be presented under a personal results tab so as not to displace unfiltered results.

As search constantly changes and evolves, so must our marketing tactics. By staying ahead of the curve and following its course, we can provide higher visibility to websites that need to be seen and people want to see. I don't believe this will change SEO drastically as organic search and ads will continue to be prevalent within this new technology. After all, evolution is a necessary part of the world of online search.

We've all been on one of those sites that takes entirely too long to load and chances are most of us weren't there for very long. Long loading sites lose more traffic than they think. So, what makes sites perform so poorly?

- The size of the html doc is far too big or they're using outdated code such as table based layouts.
- In-page elements like imagery, flash files, mutlimedia files and scripts are not optimized or are either too large or too processor intensive for the users browser.
- The html is overly complex for it's need. Smaller, better organized pages render much faster.
- The users connection is extremely slow.
- Third party servers where additional content is pulled from is lagging.
- DNS response time is slow in pointing to the correct server IP.
- General server responsiveness.

These are just a few common problems and though some are out of the designer's hands there are a few things you can do to speed up your site's performance.

- Optimize all of your html and dependent files as much as possible. Condense your CSS, use DIV tags instead of a table based layout. Compress all of your images down as far as you can without losing the integrity of your message.
- Reduce the amount of dependent files needed by your browser. CSS has the fantastic ability to take over the role of buttons, rollovers, background images, etc. Condense your external javascripts or php scripts into full library files.
- Don't rely on third party content pulled from other servers.
- Include all "large" scripts or CSS image loading divs at the end of your html file allowing the meat of the page to be loaded and displayed before the browser has to deal with rendering large script files. By removing these scripts from the head section of your pages and placing at the bottom of the page before the closing body tag you'll ensure the loading scripts won't interfere with the overall load of the page and the user's wait time to see your content is reduced.

What makes a User Interface good?

To me, good ui comes down to one deciding factor - Ease of use.

Before the ui is designed the client and agency generally compile and agree to a site architecture. although this stage comes before the actual ui design , it can be a key factor in how the ui turns out. If the client pushes for a site architecture that has upwards of 10 - 15 navigation items (i.e. Home, About, Philosophy, Products, Location, Background, Contact, etc, etc, etc) the chances of the site having a good UI are greatly reduced. On the other hand, a site architecture that consists of around 5 main navigation items with sub sections has a much better chance of success.

The rule of less is more comes into play here. A site that has 12 buttons accross the top for its navigation not only looks bad, it is also confusing to use. Additionally, if the companies business model is selling sprockets - the best way to insure that the sprockets are seen is to place the sprockets button next to as few other buttons as possible. This will increase its chances of being pressed and eliminate the chances of a user getting distracted by other navigational items. To do this its just a question of organization. For example, the items: management, background, philosphy, & careers could be combined into one item called About The Company then further divided into subsections.


Of course this is just my opinion, being more of a minimalist I tend to take things that are complicated and reduce them into their more basic form.

With the rapidly changing realm of the World Wide Web, it is impossible to think that the old school ways for reaching the public haven't changed as well.

Taking into consideration the promise that Web 2.0 public relations old, you must ask yourself the following...

1. Do you want to reach your buyers directly?
2. Do you want to drive traffic to your site?
3. Do you want to achieve high rankings within Search Engines?
4. Do you want to move people through the sales process?
5. Do you want to compete more effectively?

Back in the day, Press Releases were actually "a release to the press." Back then, you knew that the only significance of a Press Release was to get the media to write about you. You needed to have significant rules in order to write a Press Release, and it had to include quotes from third parties.

A New Press Release Strategy allows for Press Releases to be sent over wires and appear nearly real-time on services lik Google News. However, this New Press Release Strategy does not mean that you should just write the same old boring Press Release whenever you want. Since you are reaching your buyers directly, you must now change it, to talk their language. Your primary audience has changed from journalists to millions of people with the Internet, who access Search Engines, RSS Readers and Social Bookmarking Services.

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As a Project Manager, before I start to even think about Web Design, I need to understand the websites overall purpose. Understanding and achieving the goals of a website ultimately determines whether or not I have done my job successfully.

I would say that 99% of all websites are built to fullfill a need. In almost all cases it is to fullfill a need for information. There are all types of information out there on the web, everything from 100% factual to 100% false. Your site may have information that users want to find, or it may contain information that you want users to know, but they don't necessarily want to. It is very important to understand all of a sites needs. The user may want information, but you may want to sell them something. Bottom line is that behind all of these needs are goals that determine our behaviors. It is the goals that drive users to websites and to make purchases.

Determining your user's goal initially is what will make or break your website. If a user's goal is not fullfilled by your site, they will simply click off your site and be on to the next one in seconds flat. Goal-oriented design is the process of creating solutions that empower people to achieve realistic goals. All goals are important, but you may not be able to deliver them all, and you certainly can't design for every possibility. If a web project is going to succeed, you need to know which goals to shoot for.

The first step that you can take in determining your websites goals is to start writing down what needs to happen for your primary users to reach their goals? You can also write down what your site must avoid to prevent failure? Another good way to start to get a clear picture of the full range of goals a site needs to fulfil is to consider all the people or groups who have some significant interest in the project's success.

Once a sites inital goals are set in place, web designers can now begin develop a web site design that has those goals at the core. The utimate goal of your website should never be an after-thought!

Taking advantage of your .htaccess file can save you in several ways when it comes to running your website. Broken links, bad browser behaviors, changing domain names and unwanted guests are problems we all face. One way to remedy these issues is to take advantage of the .htaccess file when it comes to broken links.

Within the .htaccess file you have the ablitiy to (301) redirect a broken or missing page to a new url or a replacement page at any time by using the code below. The reason this is recommended when removing or moving pages within the site is the search engines tend to keep they're links regardless of the outdated copy. Especially if your site doesn't have a high traffic rate or get spidered often. Users coming from the search engines will hit missing or broken pages and get a 404 error and thus not getting the benefit of your site or content.

Search engines as well will hit 404 errors and eventually stop spidering or penalize you for running errors on your site via missing or broken links.

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Throughout my years in the web industry, the subject of SEO has become very controversial. SEO has also seen many changes and phases since it was first introduced. While SEO practices are every changing as the Search Engines become smarter and smarter, the following are a list of some SEO Sins that will never become main stream practice again...

1. Hidden Text: the practice of making content on your site, match the color of the sites background is considered a no-no. Black hat SEO companies may use this technique to try and increase a pages keyword density by creating hidden text that just contains a lot of keywords.

2. Doorway Pages: these are pages that are specifically designed for search engines to rank highly for one keyword phrase and then will redirect a user to a different page when they visit, commonly known as "bait and switch". Pages like these commonly use the keyword phrase repetitiously and try and trick search engines into ranking them well for that particular keyword phrase.

3. Doorway Domains: these are multiple domains with duplicate content. This technique uses URL redirects that are meant to display another web address for the same web page or several domains show same content. Black hat SEO companies will use this technique in hopes that they will be listed on a Search Engine Results Page for at least one or all of the URLs.

4. Duplicate Content: going along with #3, many site owners try to increase their content base by creating multiple pages of the same content. They will either make multiple pages within the same site, or copy the site over to additional domains, so that they exact same site is out there multiple times.

5. Cloaking: this is a technique in which a site serves keyword-stuffed spam pages to search engines spiders through the detection of their IP, while they deliver completely different pages to their customer.

6. Keyword Spam: this is a technique in which you attempt to overload your pages with keywords. Stuffing keywords into the Title Tag, Meta tags, Anchor texts, and Alt Attribute tags in an attempt to increase your keyword density or to increase the amount of keyword phrases you can target per page, is considered spam. For best results, you should focus your pages to contain two or three keyword phrases.

7. Frame-based Websites: Older sites were initially built using frames. If your site is built in frames, there is a very real possibility that your sites content is not accessible to search engine spiders. For best results, you should re-structure your site using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS).

While Frame-based websites will not get your site banned, they will prevent your site from being indexed properly by search engine spiders. However, point 1 through 6 are major SEO no-no's and can potentially get your site black listed from every search engine out there. If you are caught and your site is black listed, you will have to go through the long process of removing all black hat SEO tricks, and then re-submitting your site to all search engines for them to review and confirm that you are practicing proper SEO techniques. Only then will they even consider allowing your site back within their index.

At the end of the day a search engines main goal is to provide users with the most reliable, accurate information regarding the searches they perform. Don't start off on the wrong foot by trying to trick them.

After discussing On and Off Site factors that effect your search engine rankings in my previous posts I've found some additional that you may want to keep in mind.

Make sure that your web server is reliable, not to mention fast. When a search engine spider visits your site and your server does not respond fast enough, then your web pages won't be listed in search engines. For that reason, it is important to choose a reliable host. Sometimes you get when you pay for when it comes to cheap hosting so make sure you go with a quality server.

You should also consider that Google will put your web site into the sandbox if you have a new web site or if you change your web pages. The sandbox is a holding area in the indexes of Google until such time is deemed appropriate before a ranking can commence. What does this mean? Well it can take up to eight weeks until you get regular rankings for your pages on Google. Ask, Yahoo and MSN have similar filters.

Most of the time the only thing you can do is to wait. If you have optimized web page content and good incoming links, you will get high search engine rankings. It just might take a while until you're out of the sandbox.

The most important thing to realize and and understand, is that it takes some time until search engines pick up new pages. Search engines have to visit your web pages, they have to evaluate the found pages, they have to build a new index and then they have to publish the new index. Depending on the search engine, this might take 4-12 weeks. If you already have other pages indexed by a search engine, new pages might get indexed faster but that's not always the case.

If you experience a random drop in your web page rankings, don't panic. Search engines like to test new ranking algorithms. Sometimes you will need wait 2-4 weeks to find out if your rankings have really dropped.

Frustrating? Of course it is. Unfortunately if you have everything taken care of on your site and you've done everything right you are still at the mercy of Google's latest update, Yahoos new ranking algorithm or MSN's search spider habits. Stay vigilante and be patient and you'll be happy with your results.

So, why should you validate your CSS and XHTML code? There are many reasons but primarily so the so the site functions and looks exactly the way you intend it to. Another important reason is that search engine spiders don't necessarily act like web browsers in the fact that once they encounter an error some simply quit and move on to another page or even worse, stop coming to that page all together. Which mean that the search engine is kind of penalizing the site pages for invalid code.

It could be as simple as making sure you've got the right Doctype at the top of your XHTML document. Is it XHTML 1.0 Strict, XHTML 1.0 Transistional, HTML 3.2 or HTML 2.0? Making sure you've got the right type of document is always the first step in the process of validating your site. Some Doctype's don't allow things like "target="_blank" for opening new windows. Something simple yet it will show up as invalid code.

A great resource for making sure your site pages validate is brought to you by those handy dandy people over at the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C.org). They have several free online validators for XHTML and CSS and more so you've got no more excuses.

Their tools will lay out each error encountered and will often give you some idea of how to fix it. Having clean and valid code is just another way of making sure you're on top of your SEO and coding game.

There are two popular methods that people think of for Online Marketing: organic Search Engine Optimization and Pay-Per-Click Advertising. Most people would ideally want to use both methods strategically to maximize their site's online presence, however each method has it's distinct advantages and disadvantages.

Organic Search Engine Optimization:

Organic Search Engine Optimization offers distinct advantages over Pay-Per-Click Advertising, as many recent studies show. A majority of studies indicate that people are less likely to click on paid search ads, rather than search results that appear from organic search engine optimization. Studies have also shown that the overall conversion rate is higher for unpaid search results, than for paid search results. More and more people are becoming aware of the difference between paid search listings and those listings that are naturally occuring. One recent study shows that 54 percent of Google Search users are aware of the difference, and 66 percent of those users distrust paid advertising. While Pay-Per-Click Advertising may be popular for producing results more quickly, Organic Search Engine Optimization can give you the results that will last. If your Organic Search Engine Optimization Campaign is built from a solid foundation, the results will outlast and be more beneficial than any Pay-Per-Click Advertising Campaign.

Pay-Per-Click Advertising:

This is not a no brainer, even though it seem pretty cut and dry. Pay-Per-Click Advertising does benefit those people looking for fast results on a minimal budget. Pay-Per-Click Advertising provides user with immediate results. There is no down time for your site while it is being optimized for organic rankings. Additionally, some companies just do not have a budget that will allow for the expenditure for Organic Search Engine Optimization without seeing immediate results. With Pay-Per-Click Advertising, users can select the keywords they would like to target, and also dictate how much they are willing to spend to be ranked within the paid search. This allows users to control how and where their money is spent. Pay-Per-Click Advertising, as daunting as it may seem, is much easier to handle within your business, then Organic Search Engine Optimization, which almost always must be outsourced. And when you outsource your Organic Search Engine Optmization, there is almost always a contract of a certain length, due to the time it will take in order to see actual results. With Pay-Per-Click Advertising, you are not bound to any length of time, and you are able to start and stop as you see fit.

There are some very distinct positive and negatives to both Organic Search Engine Optmization and Pay-Per-Click Advertising. You must first determine what your overall goal for your online presence will be, and then determine what your budget will be. That should help you to figure out which solution is best for you. However, I most definitely feel that a combination of both (a.k.a a happy medium) will give you the best of both worlds!

When it comes to search engine optimization, flash sites are generally regarded as somewhat of a problem. The problem lies in the fact that the text content of a swf (flash) file is not readily available through view source like an html site. Instead the text is embedded into the swf and therefore is not indexable by the search engine spiders. This presents a problem for sites built using all flash.
Luckily, The developers at Deconcept have this flash SEO situation under control and have broken it down for the rest of us.

Here's how it's done: First design your page as if you aren’t using Flash at all. To do this, design an HTML page that contains a summary of what is covered in your site (the content). Then using "swfobject.js" you tell the browser to display the flash while the search engines actually index your HTML summary. This causes Google to skip the Flash swf files and only index the HTML (the content). When a viewer with a browser that supports Flash visits your site, they will only see the Flash content. This technique basically lets a 100% flash site be treated just like any other html page as far as search engines are concerned.

Heres a preview of the code that allows the search engines to index html content but display the flash instead:

<div id="flashcontent">

This is replaced by the Flash content if the user has the correct version of the Flash plugin installed.

Place your HTML content in here and Google will index it just as it would normal HTML content (because it is HTML content!)

Use HTML, embed images, anything you would normally place on an HTML page is fine.

</div>

<script type="text/javascript">

// <![CDATA[

var fo = new FlashObject("flashmovie.swf", “flashmovie", “300?, “300?, “8?, “#FF6600?);

fo.write("flashcontent");

// ]]>

</script>

For a full breakdown as well as the source files visit deconcept here:

I recently had a conversation with a fellow designer in Chicago about the state of the web and and the constantly evolving coding structures. He, as with a lot of web designers out there, has a general fear of CSS if not the simple lack of time to learn new techniques. He is accustomed to using simple image slices and table based layouts but in todays webby world this technique will be the death of you.

CSS and XHTML based sites are easier for search engines to pick up, quicker to load and are more accessible to people with disabilities than any other type of site. Often times image/table based sites are skipped over by search engines as their content is hidden within image files which are not accessible to the disabled let alone the search engine spiders. Old swap_image markup for rollovers is also thing of the past as this this requires the user to download several unnecessary graphics in order to use the navigation. CSS handles this gracefully and quickly.

Also table based sites are slower to load, require much more HTML markup than CSS/XHTML. Speed is key when it comes to web users. The longer the user has to wait for the information the more likely they won't wait at all.

My advice to those out there still afraid of the big bad CSS is to head to Amazon or your local bookstore and pick up a couple books and find some in-house project for which to play with. A couple good ones to start with would be CSS, The Missing Manual by David Sawyer McFalarland and the beautifully illustrated The Zen of CSS Design by Shea and Holtzschlag.

CSS is here and as far as I can tell, it's going to be here for quite a while so take the time to learn it. It may just save your job.