Our goal has always been to provide the very best in design, development, optimization, and training. To continue this tradition, TreeHouse has partnered with WebAssist to create an interactive training platform that will serve as the new standard in SEO training. This will dramatically improve the quality of our training modules and allow for true interactive teaching. We are very pleased with the progress so far and look forward to showing it off to you all.

We estimate the first module (Keywords and Best Practices) will be completed and available to the public in February 2009. Currently, we plan on building 5 modules that will cover the entire scope of SEO from keyword analysis to inbound linking.

Google has launched the SearchWiki addon to its search results which allows users to re-rank and comment on search results. Of course, this does not affect the main index, but it is a big first step into more personalized search results.

Today we’re launching SearchWiki, a way for you to customize search by re-ranking, deleting, adding, and commenting on search results. With just a single click you can move the results you like to the top or add a new site. You can also write notes attached to a particular site and remove results that you don’t feel belong. These modifications will be shown to you every time you do the same search in the future. SearchWiki is available to signed-in Google users. We store your changes in your Google Account. If you are wondering if you are signed in, you can always check by noting if your username appears in the upper right-hand side of the page.

This could mean a lot of things for search in the future. I’m very curious as to how popular this feature will be. If the masses are very interested in customized searches, it could mean a whole new era for the SEO industry for both good and bad. This could be used to help weed out poor sites that manipulate rankings, but it could also be used to ensure large popular sites further dominate search results. For right now, there appears to be no plans to use data from the SearchWiki in the main algorithm.

TreeHouse Labs, our training wing, is growing rapidly and nearing completion. We are currently working with a partner to deliver our training material in a fully interactive and engaging manner. Our goal is to have this training material available in the next couple of months. As of this post, the material covers the following main topics:

1.) Keywords and Best Practices
2.) Onsite Optimization
3.) Offsite Optimization
4.) Dynamic Sites
5.) Tracking Results

We are really proud of the material we have so far and are looking forward to getting this out to everyone. There is no reason that someone should have to search 20 locations to get good, trustworthy information on SEO when the knowledge is already compiled in any easy-to-follow training format. No quick overview. No sales pitch masquerading as training. Just the complete story from A to Z on how to get your Web site optimized.

We will continue to bring you updates as soon as they are available.

Here is a great article on the search engine space, spending, market share, and some odds and ends relating to search in 2008. I’m especially interested in their projected spending for SEO. According to the article, 19.3% of total search dollars was spent on SEO and it’s estimated to reach 22.8% by 2011. This of course is at the expense of paid search and paid inclusion programs.

I have to admit, I’m a little shocked by the statistic that 80% of SEO spending is spent on in-house initiatives as opposed to outsourcing to SEM companies. It’s apparently become very commonplace for medium to large businesses to hire an SEM team in-house to take care of their organic SEO needs.

Another thing to note is that according to these figures, people are becoming more and more search savvy. Longer keyword searches are up while single term searches are down. Searchers are realizing more and more that looking for more specific information provides better results.

Every Web designer attempts to target their sites for visitors. It’s the whole purpose of having a Web site in the first place. There is a second audience however that is often ignored: search engines. When initially designing a Web site, it is important to consider both. I’ve reviewed hundreds of Web sites planning SEO strategies and there are three extremely common errors made by designers that can drastically limit the search engines’ ability to properly index and assess the site.

1.) Flash / JavaScript Navigations

It’s no secret that search engines have trouble spidering certain links. The goal should always be to make things as easily as possible for the search engine spiders. Though Flash navigations may look nice, they generally are not spidered well. Links in JavaScript are not spidered at all. The engines do not render pages, they only look at code. As a rule of thumb, all links on the site should appear as standard HTML. Text links are optimal. Image links are spiderable, but not as effective for SEO. Image maps are spiderable, but are sometimes a unpredictable.

We always recommend drop down navigations to increase internal linking, but is it important that the links themselves are not in JavaScript. It is always ok to use JS to power animation or appearance, but the links themselves should be in basic HTML. Usually, a good dropdown menu will use CSS in conjunction with JS to provide a good, spiderable menu system.

2.) Poor Architecture

There is nothing harder to change after-the-fact than poor architecture. If the site is built on a poor foundation, there is only so much you can do to fix it without redesigning. It is of dire importance that good internal linking and prominence be considered prior to designing a site. Because the search engines try to view a site’s architecture as a user would, this should be Web marketing 101, but some sites still struggle with this. Here are the rules you should always abide by:

• Ensure that all important pages are easy to get to and are no more than 3 clicks from the home page. If pages are hard to get to or involve a lot of searching, the search engines will see these pages as unimportant to the site. They’re not stupid. They know if it takes 10 clicks to get to, it’s not being pushed to users.
• Ensure that all links to important pages are in prominent locations on the site. It is not enough to have easily-accessible pages. Important pages will always be linked to from a high position in the code. For example, a link to a category page from the top navigation will get more internal authority than a page linked from the footer. This is why CSS dropdown menus are so effective in a top navigation.
• Main navigations should be site-wide. If you decide to make mini navigations that apply to individual sections of the site and use no consistent main navigation, you run the risk of creating bottle necks on the site. This essentially causes certain pages to be accessible only through specific other pages/sections. All main category pages and important pages should support each other; not just the pages in the category they are in.

3.) Splash Home Page / Splitter Page

Splash pages can completely kill a site’s internal linking. The home page of a site is given the most authority and links on them are very valuable. The rationale is that any page linked from the home page (which has limited space) must be a very important page for users. If you place a splash page on your site instead of a home page, then you are dramatically reducing the potential internal link authority of the site. The home page should be a portal to the site…not an intermediary page in front of a pseudo home page. This is compounded even worse when the splash page is really a splitter page with an HTML form. Pages like these attempt to split incoming traffic into mini sites.

For example, a site that has a consumer and corporate section might place a splitter page in the root that asks the user to choose which version of the site they want to visit. If we were to place this choice inside a dropdown HTML form, we would literally have the worst possible home page. HTML forms are not spiderable. This practice is commonly seen with sites that have international/language versions of a site. When going to the home page you are prompted to choose a language with an HTML form and redirected to the applicable version of the site. VERY bad idea.

4.) Non-spiderable / Non-existent Text Content

It is not that uncommon to find sites that have the vast majority of their text content in Flash, JavaScript, images, called via an IFRAME, or just completely missing. It’s nearly impossible to rank (with the exception of using heavy inbound link manipulation) a page that doesn’t even mention the keywords once in a form that is visible by the engines. It may look good to have your content written in script through the use of images, but the engines cannot read it and you won’t get credit for it.

If you cannot determine what is visible and isn’t to the engines, use one of the many online spider simulator tools. They basically strip out the visible text content and show you what the spiders see. Some good ones are:

http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/spider-simulator/

http://www.webmaster-toolkit.com/search-engine-simulator.shtml

http://tools.summitmedia.co.uk/spider/

Most SEO people already know about ranks.nl, but I wanted to share it just in case some of our readers here were unaware. This is a GREAT tool for finding out keyword density, if you have broken links, comparing two files for changes, and a ton of other things. Most of the tools are free to use to a point and can really help you determine problems with your site.

I would take special note of the keyword density and proximity tools. I haven’t found a better tool for checking keywords on the Web yet. Most software packages don’t even include that level of detail when checking densities. Definitely take a look at their tools. I find them really helpful during the optimization process.

Since we went over the core of what makes up a good SEO project, here is the core of what makes up a bad one. This relates to both black hat SEO as well as flat out ineffective SEO. Follow these rules if you want to make sure your site either doesn’t rank or ends up getting banned.

1.) Hide stuff. Instead of improving the site, create two totally different experiences on the same page; one for users and one for engines. Hide your text content using CSS or something as simple as white text on a white background. This will ensure the engines pick up the SEOd content and the users never see it. A great way to move up in the rankings until you get caught and banned.

2.) Ignore the part of the campaign that is inconvenient. Instead of attending to all aspects of an effective campaign, simply leave out the parts that take too much work. For example, if you can’t write text content, simply ignore that part and continue working on the rest of the items. This will ensure a partial optimization (which is an oxymoron I think).

3.) Make up for weak areas by overcompensating in other areas. This one is super common among SEOs as well as less-than-informed clients. Instead of ignoring parts of the optimization that are inconvenient, we try to make up for it by greatly escalating another area. This is dangerous territory because it always leads to over optimization. For example, let’s say a site has very poor inbound linking. Instead of doing everything in our power to increase inbound links, we would instead bring their keyword density up to a crazy level. This may sound like a good idea, but it’s like fighting fire with gasoline. Now we not only have a site with a poor inbound linking scheme, but we also have a site with spammy content.

Some of these items may sound a little obvious, but almost all SEO mistakes originate from one of them. Often, they just appear more complex, but always go back to either hiding content, ignoring part of the optimization, or overcompensating. In the long term, they never lead to good results. Don’t be fooled.

Every so often it’s important to go back and look at the basics. The fundamentals of SEO may seem obvious to most SEOs, but with so many changes, updates, and tactics out there, the fundamentals can get forgotten. Today, I want to go over the very core of SEO and what we’re trying to do. I like to look at it as a refresher for what we do as a company and what our main goals are. Later, I will continue this with the 3 fundamentals of bad SEO.

1.) Your pages must be authoritative for their keywords. If you don’t write the best content, then you can’t really expect to be ranked high. Assume that each potential visitor searching for your keywords is looking for good information relating to them. Does your site provide that information? If it does not, no amount of ethical SEO is going to overcome that. Also keep in mind that the search engines read the META headers, alts, titles, and formatting tags such as H1 and use them in their calculations. Your page should be very targeted and the best page on the Web related to your keywords. If you create the most authoritative pages, the rest of the optimization is much easier.

Also remember that the search engines base the majority of their calculations on links and text. If your text is very low density, not visible to the engines, or poorly written, you cannot expect to rank higher than someone who writes well thought out articles. Check out your competition and see what they are doing…then do something better.

2.) Your site must be vouched for by other sites. The search engines have placed the burden of determining what sites are credible and which are not on the Web itself. They do this through analyzing the quantity, quality, and relevancy of links pointing to a specific site. The more high quality links you have, the more authority the site has and the easier it is to rank. Link building is an ongoing process and should never stop. Consider it to be public relations for your Web site.

This ties back to the number 1 fundamental. If you write good authoritative content, people will naturally link to it. Getting inbound links is not easy, but it’s much more bearable when you have good content that prompts other Webmasters to link to it organically. Write good articles/content, get the word out there, and watch the links come in.

3.) Your site must have a good history with the engines. It’s no secret that search engines have trust issues with new sites. When a spam site gets banned from the index, the spammer simply puts up a new site. Because of this, search engines are always a little hesitant to trust new sites. The longer the site is around, the more trust it obtains. It is always easier to rank domains with a longer track record than brand new domains. Keep this in mind when deciding whether to use an existing domain or start a new site on a new domain.

The end goal of SEO should always be to improve a site, better target it to selected keywords, and increase its inbound links. This is definitely the 10,000 foot overview, but it’s good to go back to the basics to remind us what we’re doing.

Everyone has a low attention span on Mondays, so let’s just stick with a list for today. The following are compiled from the most common problems I see in client Web sites and on the Web in general.

1.) Make your home page a portal to the site. The home page should be a showcase of all your content which means linking to as many internal pages as possible (within reason). If your home page does not support internal pages, the site will suffer.

2.) Write an informative article and submit it to article syndication sites. People are on the Web looking for information. Provide it and reap the rewards.

3.) Begin converting your site to CSS instead of tables. Tables are a terrible clutter of code space and the search engines have no use for them. Make as much formatting as possible external through CSS.

4.) Cross link your text content. When a keyword from page A shows up on page B, link it to page A. I call this ‘wikipedia style linking’. Having individual content pages support other content pages is a great way to optimize internal linking.

5.) Check the keyword density of your optimized pages. Does the keyword show up on the page at all? The engines will not rank a page that does not even contain the keyword in the text content once.

I talked with someone recently that was reading the Google blog and saw a post about URL rewriting being unnecessary. I wanted to comment here because a lot of people don’t understand the perspective Google is writing many of their ‘how to’ blog posts from. SEO testing has shown URL rewriting does work well and makes it easier for the engines to index pages. It’s also beneficial to have URLs that accurately describe the content in a good hierarchy. Logical layout comes directly from Google’s Webmaster guidelines. The problem with rewriting comes when someone does not know what they are doing and inadvertently causes serious spidering/indexing problems for the search engines.

Google’s stance is always ‘don’t make our job harder’. They have always promoted URL rewriting and apparently there are now more people messing their sites up with it than fixing things so they no longer promote it. The biggest thing to consider in Google’s comment is this:

Should I try to make my dynamic URLs look static?

Following are some key points you should keep in mind while dealing with dynamic URLs:

1. It’s quite hard to correctly create and maintain rewrites that change dynamic URLs to static-looking URLs.
2. It’s much safer to serve us the original dynamic URL and let us handle the problem of detecting and avoiding problematic parameters.
3. If you want to rewrite your URL, please remove unnecessary parameters while maintaining a dynamic-looking URL.
4. If you want to serve a static URL instead of a dynamic URL you should create a static equivalent of your content.

Their main premise here is that it is hard to rewrite URLs and it can cause more problems than it’s worth for novice Webmasters. Basically, Google doesn’t like the fact people can make dynamic content appear static via the URL. If used properly though, URL rewrites can be invaluable to a site.

For your rewrite to be effective make sure you consider the following:

1. URLs should be logical and follow a hierarchy. If your site is structured into categories and products, a good URL would look like this: http://www.yourdomain.com/category/product.html. This makes sure a URL is treated like breadcrumbs. A dynamic URL generally shows no hierarchy at all.
2.Make sure you don’t end up with duplicate content on your site.
3. Make sure the rewrite actually works properly and isn’t returning the wrong pages, 404s, etc… It’s best to use some kind of spider simulation tool and spider the site yourself.
4. The URLs should remove as many unnecessary parameters as possible. Simply converting an ugly dynamic URL to an ugly static URL doesn’t help anything. Dividing variables with / instead of & does not a good URL make.

The facts of the matter are that good, clean URLs are better for search engines and users alike. Saying dynamic URLs are better than static URLs goes against all accepted rules of usability. Just don’t break your site with a rewrite that doesn’t work correctly. You really have to be careful what you take from Google’s blog posts because they are aimed at the entire base of Webmasters and not necessarily at mid to high level programmers. This post from Google is basically throwing the baby out with the bath water.