inter:digital strategies

Big news this afternoon as MSN announces that webmasters can now prevent MSN search results from using a site’s Open Directory Project description in search results.

Most of the big search engines currently will occasionally use Open Directory Project data in search results. Unfortunately, this means that instead of using wonderfully wordsmithed phrases (tongue in cheek!) such as "Internet Marketing and Strategy Consulting from inter:digital strategies" you might end up with just "inter:digital strategies" as your primary enticement to get a new visitor to your site.

Yuck!

Webmasters have been clamoring for a way to avoid this for years, and finally the revolution is beginning. (OK, that’s a little over the top.) At any rate, it is possible at least in one search engine.

It’s accomplished by the use of a new meta tag - and very simple to use. Simply place <meta name="msnbot" content="NOODP"> or <meta name="robots" content="NOODP"> in your head tag and wait for MSN to notice the change.

Thanks, MSN! (Credit given where it’s due.)

Recently, I joined the forums at Cre8asite, where I’ve been posting fairly regularly. One of the great things about this forum is that it is extremely active in advocating web standards, quality search engine marketing methods, and best practice guidelines for web businesses. There are some fantastic people involved with this forum - and I’m not going to name any names because there are simply too many great people to get started. You can read the forum and find these people at any time.

At any rate, one of the concerns I latched onto early in my web design career was web standards. The early days of the web were a zoo of design rules using custom tags from Netscape or Internet Explorer - and frequently a page could only be viewed using one or the other. Today, the World Wide Web Consortium has established a solid baseline for HTML standards. Are there still non-compliant tags? Yes. Are there non-compliant browsers? Yes. Do you want your site to be filled with these? No.

I’ve found myself making frequent posts at Cre8asite helping people understand the reasons that it makes good business sense to follow web standards. I’ve been referring people regularly to a great article at Adaptive Path which talks explicitly about the business advantages of web standards. As a result, I’ve been giving this further and more in-depth thought myself.

• Faster Development Times

  Got a display issue you just can’t resolve? Validate your code and you can find any errors you’ve made very quickly. If you’ve still got problems, then you may have found a bug - and there are great resources online for most problems you’ll come across.

• Bigger Audiences

  If you’ve got one of those sites which is usable only in IE, you’ve got a problem. You’ve wiped out at least 10% of your potential market. Similarly, if you’ve got a site which isn’t using standards, you may have wiped out several other classes of users - those with alternate devices, such as screen readers, handheld devices, or perhaps some device which hasn’t even been invented yet. Standards checking will ensure that your site at least meets the most basic accessibility guidelines - and can do much more, if you use it right.

• Reduce Costs

  A standards-based site is almost always smaller and leaner than a non-standard site. Eliminating all those pesky FONT tags, spacer gifs and tables can make a big jump in size. If you’ve got a popular site, where you pay excess bandwidth costs on a routine basis this change can be HUGE. If you receive 1000 visitors a day and you shave 10K off your website you’ve saved approximately 300 MB a month. That’s not a huge savings - but the page savings can be quite a bit higher.

• Faster Site

  It’s estimate that the average user will not wait more than 8 seconds for an unknown website to load. On a 56K modem, this is a website with a total page size of about 40k. If you’ve loaded up that 100k version of your company logo without compressing it, then you’re already looking at 20 seconds before your potential customer will even see that logo. Although standards based code won’t save the kind of bandwidth that total speed optimization can, it certainly could save 20 or 30K on a page, shaving several seconds from your download time.

A good search engine optimization program is based around bringing your site a higher conversion rate, not just more traffic or higher rankings. If your site is optimized to give better access to your services or information, you’ve got a better chance of winning that new customer - using valid code is simply one element towards a better business online.

As we say on the front page of this site, "It’s not enough to bring your site visitors - we want to bring your site customers." Bringing customers to a site is an important crossover between straightforward search engine optimization and other forms of marketing.

Keyword selection is a critical part of both tasks - but a big part of keyword selection is a knowledge of your business that goes well beyond the use of standard keyword research. This is a knowledge which only you and your business partners really have. Bill Slawski recently wrote a long post on defining objectives as related to SEO.

To me, what it seems like he’s saying is that the fundamental need of a website is communication - communication from the site to the visitor as an end result and communication between the designer and the site owner at the beginning. Assuming that is what he’s saying, he’s exactly on target with what we believe.

The issue of design as a means of communication is at the forefront of the mind of any good designer. Cameron Moll assembled statements from many different designers on the subject not too long ago. The statement he started off with is a simple statement for designers to live by:

Good Designers Decorate, Great Designers Communicate

This is the core of effective design - ultimately, beauty is only a small fragment of the goal. If a potential customer can use your site and get involved with it, you’ve won half the battle already.