Conference Buddies

SMX Advanced – Seattle, WA – June 2008
Topic:  Website Architecture Issues – SEO Tips

Here are a couple useful commands and tools for SEO:

This is  a useful command to find all your website pages that are indexed in Yahoo and Google:  site:insert-website-name-here.com

You type this command in the search field in either Yahoo or Google. This is great to see before a website redesign, in order to do your 301 redirects properly.  90% of website redesigns end up in a significant loss in traffic due to the lack of due diligence and planning.   Having a snap shot of what pages you have indexed, their meta tags, and keyword ranking is definitely useful and should be on the all web designer’s check list, as well as on every SEO manager’s check list. 

Use the Firefox Developer plugin tool to disable JavaScript to see what the search engine crawlers see.   You can download it here:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/60

Finally a good Google page rank tool for Firefox:
http://googlebar.mozdev.org/

I never heard of this tool.   This tool helps you check if the redirects are the ones you actually want (i.e. 301, 302, etc.).   In which case for SEO you want 301 redirects to tell the search engines that you have permanently move this page with the page rank and score intact.  Google will not transfer score for anything other than 301 redirects.  Check out this tool the next time you do your SEO QA:
http://web-sniffer.net/

Here are a couple other tools from Google not mentioned in this session, but is very useful for Webmasters:
http://www.google.com/webmasters/

Google has released a set of “free” development tools and standards which helps developers save time and money producing new “widgets” for the web.

Open ID = Login credentials can be shared between different websites. Almost like a “Single Sign On” or “SSO”. Developers and social websites can make it easier on users so you don’t have to log in 10 different times with 10 different passwords. It makes life more integrated and easier to use multiple social websites for a each person.

OAuth = This helps developers write code that can talk to other applications and social websites, by providing a way to authenticate into and use information in between different websites.

Open Social = Build once, compatible with many. A new development standard or application programming interface (API) for developers to build applications with one set of code that is compatible with all other social applications that support Open Social, instead of building a different set of code for every single website API. Well, actually it should at least save you at least 80% of coding, in lieu of 100% of recoding each time. The 20% difference may be for any special features that’s specific for each social network or application. Google, Yahoo and MySpace, collaborated together in forming the open social foundation, www.opensocial.org.

Shindig = New protocal to help develop in open social. The actual programming languages can be either Java or PHP; both are supported.

Google App Engine = “Free” development platform/infrastructure to build, test, debug, host and run your applications. This includes the hosting and app server development environment for free. The first 5,000,000 page views are free, with a small nominal charge ($40/mo avg) after that. You can still use your favorite IDE such as eclipse, then use Google App Engine to test, debug, and launch your applications for free. Utilizing the Python programming language.

Android = Build mobile applications, with the help of Google’s mobile software stack. Interactive, touch screen capability, and even motion sensor capability such as a virtual compass navigation within your mobile maps application (of course dependent on what your phone supports as well).

Google AJAX = Using AJAX as your programming language you can add Google functionality onto your website, such as Google Search.

Google Web Toolkit = Helps developers build AJAX applications.

Google Gadgets = Helps developers build widgets or mini applications to run on multiple Google website properties such as iGoogle.

Google Gears = Helps developers build desktop applications.

You Tube Data API = Customize and integrate YouTube on your website, including look/feel, layout and navigation.

Google I/O is a 2 day developer conference in San Francisco, Wednesday & Thursday, May 28 to 29, 2008.

This conference is geared toward developers wanting to develop applications that integrate with any of Google’s applications.

The latest buzz involves the public launch of several development tools to create any type of web application (not just for google) which is geared toward Web 2.0 Social Applications, such as Google App Engine which provides a full development environment to build, test and host new web applications for free.  Registration is now open to the public.

Major programming languages supported are Java, AJAX, and PHP.   Phython is also used within Shindig for their new Open Social project, which is standardizing widget or mini-application plug-in development for Social Applications (where you build once and can launch on various social websites without rebuilding 100% of the code each time for each website – build once, use on many websites).  

You can visit the conference information at: 

http://code.google.com/events/io/