If you are considering setting up a server and have a Mac of some kind waiting to be used, then this may be just the book for you. Or, alternatively, if you are considering setting up a server for a network with multiple Mac users, this may be just the book for you. ‘Using Mac OS X Lion Server” is a wonderful resource that you can use to do all that is needed to set up a Mac OS X 10.7 (“Lion”) for your business, school or home network.

Charles Edge, the author, is a very competent, interesting and skilled techie, who shows you how to set up file sharing, a mail server, as well as servers for multiple operating systems, wikis, websites and podcasts.

Charles Edge has given speeches at several high level conferences («Mac events») and is the author of six other books about Macs, including “Enterprise Mac Administrator’s Guide,” “Enterprise Mac Security” and the “Enterprise iPhone and iPad Administrator’s Guide.”

For the past 10 years, Edge has been the Directory of Technology for 318, a Mac-first consultancy based in Santa Monica, California. He is also the author of krypted.com, a site dedicated to heterogenous networking. On krypted.com, you can find a lot of useful information about using Macs. I especially appreciated the comprehensive list of the Mac OS X commands. Overall, Using Mac OS X Lion Server is a good, comprehesive and very useful book for people working with Mac OS X servers.

Some key points made and elaborated on in the book are:
Plan your installation to make sure you have the right server hardware
Control data access with permissions, and use Apple’s Time Machine to back up your network
Share contacts, schedules, and instant messaging with groupware
Manage wikis, blogs, and websites with Lion’s web service
Build an email server and protect it against spam and malware
Handle preferences for the network’s Apple computers and iOS devices
Deploy new Apple computers to the network with disk imaging

Using Mac OS X Lion Server is a handy, comprehensive no-nonsense book that is of great value for anybody engaged in the (perhaps) daunting task of setting up a Mac server for the first time, and is likely to be useful even for people who have done it before.

Links to books by Charles Edge at Amazon US and Amazon UK

Original article: Using Mac OS X Lion Server by Charles Edge

©2013 CSS and SEO. All Rights Reserved.

This thin little book, whose full title is High Performance Web Sites: Essential  Knowledge for Front-End Engineers, has probably been one of the most influential books on web development and the strange art of “front-end engineering” written during the past decade. In order to precisely identify and measure the impact of various factors that affect the speed of a website, Souders has conducted a series of tests. His conclusions, along with the test results, are presented in the book in a clear and precise manner. Some of his findings were quite surprising. And most of the techniques he discusses are techniques that can fairly easily be implemented by most people managing web sites.

So if you want your web site to display more quickly, this really is the book for you! If your site is very slow, you will be able to reap huge benefits using the advice in this book and spending some very few hours of your time. High Performance Web Sites summarizes Souders’ findings in 14 specific rules that will cut 25% to 50% off response time when users request a page.

Steve Souders, the author of this book, previously worked at Yahoo! as the Chief Performance Yahoo!, where he blogged about web performance on Yahoo! Developer Network. He was named a Yahoo! Superstar. Steve worked on many of the platforms and products within the company, including running the development team for My Yahoo!. Prior to Yahoo! Steve worked at several small to mid-sized startups including two companies he co-founded, Helix Systems and CoolSync. He also worked at General Magic, WhoWhere?, and Lycos.

The rules in High Performance Web Sites explain how you can make changes to achieve increase the speed of your web site. Some of the rules deal with elements that go into the htaccess file of your site, some deal with how elements are loaded (sequence as well as form) on the site. Souders simply has paid a lot of attention to how browsers and servers behave and how they can be tuned to reduce the display time.  High Performance Web Sites covers every aspect of the tuning process.

Each performance rule is supported by specific examples, and code snippets are available on the book’s companion web site. The rules include how to:

• Make Fewer HTTP Requests
• Use a Content Delivery Network
• Add an Expires Header
• Gzip Components
• Put Stylesheets at the Top
• Put Scripts at the Bottom
• Avoid CSS Expressions
• Make JavaScript and CSS External
• Reduce DNS Lookups
• Minify JavaScript
• Avoid Redirects
• Remove Duplicates Scripts
• Configure ETags
• Make Ajax Cacheable

If you’re building pages for high traffic and want to optimize the experience of users visiting your site, this book is indispensable.

However, be aware that even though most of the rules are easy to implement, following the advice will also in some cases require some difficult choices. Are you willing to use fewer and smaller images in order to achieve more speed? Are you willing to throw out ads that slow your site down? The choices are many, and affect many aspects of the look and feel of any web site.

Steve Souders also provides a special addition to his tips: his example pages offer direct comparisons and means to make your own tests. And the book ends with a very interesting 30-page chapter where he deconstructs 10 of the top Web sites in the U.S. using the rules and tools described in the book. Also quite interesting to note is that most of these sites have later implemented his advice after the book was published! So if the top 10 web sites can learn from Souders, perhaps you and I can too?

Praise for this book:

“If everyone would implement just 20% of Steve’s guidelines, the Web would be a dramatically better place. Between this book and Steve’s YSlow extension, there’s really no excuse for having a sluggish web site anymore.”

-Joe Hewitt, Developer of Firebug debugger and Mozilla’s DOM Inspector

“Steve Souders has done a fantastic job of distilling a massive, semi-arcane art down to a set of concise, actionable, pragmatic engineering steps that will change the world of web performance.”

-Eric Lawrence, Developer of the Fiddler Web Debugger, Microsoft Corporation<

Links to books by Steve Sounders at Amazon US, Amazon UK, and Amazon CAN.

Original article: High Performance Web Sites, by Steve Souders

©2013 CSS and SEO. All Rights Reserved.

Google search engine ranking an Associate punishment?

So now Google has declared that it takes site speed into consideration in determining the ranking of web sites and web pages. On face value, it’s a move that seems and sounds reasonable.

However, as I indicated in a previous post, it is a little more complicated. What if your site is fast but you have ads on it that are slow? Will you be punished? And how much?

You see, I am guilty of this! I have advertising on this site and on other sites I am running as well. I am an associate both with Goggle and Amazon. So, being concerned, I have tested a little to see how it works in practice – how web advertising affect the speed of my sites.

Test setup

I have used several testing tools to measure the effect of the ads I am running on the speed of a web page. I could have tested a number of different pages, but as I use the tests only to illustrate, I think this one test is sufficient for now.

I took a page from my site ScandinavianBooks.com, a page about Swedish author Mari Jungstedt.

I tested it first as it is – a 30.46 KB HTML file with 10 small images, linking one CSS file and one JS file (both minified), but which in addition contains scripts and images in ads as well as iFrames from Amazon which call external CSS and JS files.

Then I took out all the Amazon ad-related stuff – ads and links . This reduces the page from 30.4 KB to 25.58 KB, and created a second version of the page.

Finally, in the third version, I also took out the two Google ads on the page. This reduced the page size further to 24.97 KB. Then I uploaded the three pages on my server and tested their speed on various site speed testing services online and inspected them with YSlow and PageSpeed.

Table: The impact of Google and Amazon ads on Web page speed and loading

Notes: * Pingdom seems allergic to Amazon ads on tested pages (I’ve seen lots of odd results there). ** At 1.44 Mbps

HTML Size

The results differ a lot (to express it mildly) but are somewhat consistent even so. It seems the ads from Google increase the overhead relatively little, less than 10% in these tests. The ads from Amazon, on the other hand, result in a 20% increase in the size of the HTML file and almost double the time it takes to render the page (far worse, if Pingdom is to be believed – which I don’t).

Diagnostics using YSlow

The total page load, according to YSlow, is 344K (empty cache, 51K with primed cache), including 144K in 19 javascript files and 112K in 41 images. The original file – will all the ads – gets an overall grade of “C” (performance score 79), but “F”-s for lacking compression, large number of DNS-lookups and HTTP requests (74 in all). It gets a “D” for “minfy” JS and CSS. Some of the scripts from Amazon have response times in excess of 1000 ms according to YSlow.

After removing the Amazon components, the page load is 145K (9K with primed cache). The performance grade is A, and score 94. The page gets Bs for compress and minify JS and C for DNS look-ups. The version without any ads gets grade A and a performance score of 99. The overall page load is now 70K (1K with primed cache).

Diagnostics using PageSpeed

PageSpeed gives a performance score of 81 for the full page. The top complaints are “minimize request size”, “specify image dimensions” and “combine external javascripts”. A lot of ad servers are requesting cookies and a lot of images from Amazon lack dimensions. Closer inspection shows that Amazon is also wasting 13.5K of bandwidth on JS files that have not been minified. There is also some “very inefficient CSS” involving use of “star selectors”.

With Amazon components removed PageSpeed gives a performance rating of 85, now mainly complaining about “combine external javascrit”, minimize request size and serve static content from a cookie-free domain.

In the version without ads, PageRank gives a performance score of 90 and gripes about “serving static content from a cookieless domain” and “specifying a cache validator”.

Conclusions: Advertising and search engine ranking

I conclude that there is a price to pay in terms of speed and very likely search engine ranking – in some cases even a heavy price – for being associated with the “big guys” and placing their ads on web pages. In the case of Google it is small, the main problem being that Google spreads their ad elements over a number of servers and cause several unnecessary DNS lookups. But even if the speed decrease due to Google ads is small, it is quite interesting that Google actually will punish their own associates.

In the case of Amazon ads, the overhead is huge and the price in terms of search engine ranking may be big as well. Amazon ads are “smart”, convert well and are excellent from a business perspective but from a technical perspective they could be better. There is much to be done – minification of scipts, optimizing images, better html, get rid of unnecessary and inefficient CSS, make fewer DNS lookups and HTTP calls, and so on. Amazon is not doing a very good job. (Other ad networks I have used, for instance the European network Tradedoubler, are equally bad.)

Also – other tests I have done (not reported here) indicate large speed differences depending on type of ad. So you may want to test individual ads on your own site, and try to – as I do – get rid of the worst performing ones.

However, it’s not a price for sloppy delivery of ads to associates Amazon or other advertisers will pay directly, but one I and maybe you – if you are guilty of placing ads on your pages as well – will pay. The Amazon site itself is good, and their search engine ranking is not affected by what they feed their associates. Amazon, however, will be affected indirectly – fewer hits to their legions of associates will ultimately translate into fewer sales for Amazon.

Sandboxes or isolation chambers for badly performing ads

It seems to me to be important to develop techniques for loading ads in ways which do not affect web page loading speed. I am currently testing a couple of ways of loading ads after the page has been loaded and shifting them into ad placeholders when they have finished loading using Javascript. It is possible to do this, but the way to do it depends on characteristics of the ads. Several methods, using Ajax or Javacripts, seem feasible.

The advantage of sandbox-ing or using an isolation chamber for ads this way is that it makes the page load faster and improves the user experience. I would prefer to have the ads load between the </body> tag and the </html> tag. This way badly performing ads will not slow down the page or have a negative effect on search engine ranking. The disadvantage is that slow ads get marginally slower and “pop” into their slots a little while after the page has loaded.

What do others using ads think?

Original article: How Google and Amazon Ads Impact Web Page Speed – a Test

©2013 CSS and SEO. All Rights Reserved.

In an earlier post, I wrote about the push by Yahoo and Google for faster web sites, and that Google has now started to take web site speed into consideration when determining site search engine ranking. It’s an initiative I sympathize with and support. However, there are several huge problems associated with it, which require well thought-out and extremely well-executed policies by Google.

Site speed and content

It is obvious to anyone using the net that if you want rich content, good looking sites and speedy web sites, you have a problem. Lots of content means lots of bytes. Generally, the more content you load, the more you prettify and make your site interesting to look at, the more slowly it will load. Surely, not even Google would like all sites to look as their own home page does? Its excellent for its purpose, but a web looking like that is not what we want! Rather, you, Google and I would prefer Google searches to send us to content-rich, good-looking, and interesting sites like this one or like this site?

For Google and for those of us who use the net, there is a real danger of a boring and mostly text-based internet in our future if Google pushes the page speed criterion too hard! Also, it seems to me that the rule set pushed by Google represents a Google-centric view of the net.

Big guys and small guys

A second concern is with balancing the contributions from the huge internet actors against those of the small guys – small companies, hobby sites, small blogs and the like. A number of the things you can do to speed-up your site are quite demanding, in terms of the required skills, time spent on perfecting the pages and optimizing code, as well as with regard to hosting.

The small guys host on GoDaddy, HostGator and similar places. Those are web hosting sites where the load is high and the pages are served slowly, especially when the servers are strained, for some or other reason, as they often seem to be (most of the low price hosting services seem to load their servers much too close to the max). The big guys, on the other hand, have IT departments, content delivery networks, and dedicated servers in the cloud. It is easy for them to be fast. So, if the speed criterion is pushed really hard, we may end up seeing the big corporations topping all the search result pages from Google.

According to TechCrunch, the internet is already dead and boring. But how boring would Google and Yahoo searches be with the big corporations topping all the search pages? I mean, you don’t really search to find eBay, Yahoo or Amazon, do you? You just go there! So search result pages with the top 10 internet sites on top all the time would make searching boring and un-interesting, and would to some extent defeat the purpose of the search!

The danger of punishing affiliates

If you look at this page, you will see that I have ads from Google and Amazon. Now, if you have PageSpeed or YSlow installed, take a look at the page (YSpeed is the best for what I discuss). You will see that there are all sorts of problems on this page – with “page expires headers”, with javascripts that aren’t minimized, with images where dimensions aren’t given, and so forth. And you will see that the page has a huge overhead in javascripts, loads from several different hosts, requiring a number of HTTP calls. Well, guess what? Those are not problems created by me: Those are mostly Google and Amazon (mostly Amazon) problems!

I have looked at a number of sites with ads, and it is quite clear that if Google pushed the speed criterion hard, it would actually punish its own associates and the associates of a number of other big corporations, such as Amazon. Many of them serve ads using images without dimension, javascripts that aren’t minified, inefficient CSS, served from several different servers, and so on and so forth. But would that be a smart move by Google? Is that what Google really wants? And how will the other big guys, like Amazon, react if Google really pushes hard?

What now?

It will be interesting to see how this plays out. The problems associated with the Google/Yahoo push for speed are not trivial, and the consequences may be big if the push is pursued too dogmatically. There are other concerns as well, but the ones I have discussed are the main ones – at least to my mind. What do you think?

Original article: Google and the push for faster Web sites: A difficult balancing act

©2013 CSS and SEO. All Rights Reserved.

Server downtime

Few hosting services are perfect. Server downtime is something most people who have sites on the web have experienced. It is bad. But how bad? How does it affect search engine ranking, which is so important to most of us?

Personally I had a really bad experience recently which made me think a lot about this. For more than two years I had hosted my site ScandinavianBooks on a very low-priced hosting service that only cost me one dollar a month. I created more and more content, added a couple of blogs to the site, and the site had a nice increase in traffic. I was pleased.

Then I started to have problems with my hosting service. The site would go down for all sorts of reasons, I would get in touch with the tech support at the hosting service, they would fix it, and then it would go down again for some other reason. I got lots of support – some good, some not so good – but the problems persisted. Then I went on vacation for a few days to beautiful Portland, and of course the whole thing crashed while I was there. I was basically off-line, but managed to send a message to the tech support. They restored the main site, but, as it turned out, not my blog. So as a result, my blog was down for four days.

When I came home, I immediately moved the site to another hosting service. This service, however, turned out to be fine for my HTML pages but almost a disaster for my WordPress blogs. A blog page could take as much as 10 seconds to load, even after I had spent time speeding it as much as I could!

Restoring Search Engine Ranking?

So off I went again – and moved the site to a new, more expensive hosting solution (where both this blog and the site are now). And now it all works fine and both stability and speed are more than satisfying for me.

However, my stats had suffered enormously during this process, especially at my main blog, Nordic Bookblog. I now had less than 40% of the visitors I had before these “crises”. And, as I have learned, the stats did not improve immediately after the move either.

I have to tell you that I invest a lot of time on my web sites – writing content, implementing solid and fast HTML and CSS, and optimizing my sites for speed and Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Given this, the loss of search engine ranking was quite a blow.

It is easy, of course, to understand why. Visitors don’t like to get a 404 page or a 500 page or a blank screen. And if server problems persist and they meet those pages several times, they will eventually stop coming. And Google and the other search engines don’t want to send visitors to sites that are down, so when the bots are unable to crawl a page repeatedly, they block it.

To be more exact: What Google does depends on how long the site is down. Google’s Matt Cutts, in the video below, explains it by asking viewers to look at it from Google’s point of view – you don’t want to keep dead sites in the search results, but you also don’t want to throw out perfectly good websites after a few seconds of downtime. Because there is no real way for the web crawler to know when a website will be back up, it has to try to reach a compromise between the two.

My advice

I have found that the site has been gradually re-indexed, but it has taken me quite a bit of time and effort to achieve this. After 3 weeks I am still more than 30% down from where I was. So the lesson really is quite clear: If you experience server downtime or stability problems, you should jump immediately. Just move to another hosting service without delay. Do not, like me, stay too long with a bad service provider just because you like them or they seemingly are doing their best. If you don’t jump to a better hosting provider, you are likely to pay for it: lost customers, fewer visits, lost inbound links, less income, and so on. My experience indicates that is can be quite costly and requite a lot of effort to catch-up if you don’t jump fast enough.

Original article: Hosting stability, downtime, and search engine ranking

©2013 CSS and SEO. All Rights Reserved.

I love speed on the Internet, and few things on the net frustrate me more than when a site takes eons of time to load. Often I even leave a site before it has finished loading if it is too slow. Maybe I lose out on something very important when I do that, but I simply don’t always have the patience to watch a blank screen for very long.

Being a speed addict, I fully support and embrace the push for a speedier internet by a number of big internet actors – among them Google and Yahoo. Google says “Let’s make the Web faster.” I love it, as a matter of fact. The faster a web site is, generally the better the user experience, in my opinion.

Google has provided web designers and web masters with very strong incentives to work hard for faster page loading. They are launching instant search, and have now officially announced that they consider website speed when determining search engine rankings:

You may have heard that here at Google we’re obsessed with speed, in our products and on the web. As part of that effort, today we’re including a new signal in our search ranking algorithms: site speed. Site speed reflects how quickly a website responds to web requests.

As far as I can see, both the average internet user, serious web site owners and Google have a common interest in speedy web sites.

However, Google’s announcement also means that web site speed is now officially an important factor in Search Engine Optimization (SEO). I don’t think anybody outside Google knows exactly what the weight of the speed factor is relative to other SEO factors, but personally I have a feeling that it is significant, and that it may become even more significant over time.

Partly because of some experiences I have had with instabilities in a web hosting service I used and partly because I want my sites to rank well in the search engines, I have spent a lot of time lately reading, pondering and implementing all sorts of changes in order to speed up my sites. It is actually a huge job. So over the next few weeks I will write a series of posts about this topic. I will write about web hosting, server stability, server speed, server configuations, and a number of ways to speed up web sites.

Original article: Improving Web Site Speed – Making Your Site Load Faster

©2013 CSS and SEO. All Rights Reserved.

There is a whole lot of writing on a number of sites about the importance of have the content of the site come before other parts – such as sidebars with navigation and ads and the like – for reasons having to do with Search Engine Optimization (SEO). The argument is that the bots indexing sites will rank the content higher and more correctly if they meet the content before they see all the other, relatively unimportant stuff on a given page.

I do not believe this argument. I think it is a myth. I even think it is a myth that is being promoted and repeated over and over by a certain group of people because it serves their collective interests.

First, the people from search engine companies that have produced programs for indexing web  pages are obviously not stupid. I am quite sure they have written programs that distinguish between navigational elements, ads and content, and that correctly classify these elements regardless of where they appear. Do you really believe that Google is willing to wrongly classify the millions of pages people have posted where the content comes at the end or towards the end of the source code file? Well, I don’t. After all, this was how every page looked not many years ago!

Secondly, content is usually served using different types of  elements than ads and navigational elements. For instance, most often we use h1, h2, h3 (headlines) as headers and p (paragraph-elements) for most of the content. So there are certain syntax clues usually that allows spiders and bots to identify content – that’s why semantic HTML makes sense and it important. Furthermore – content is usually recognizable words that appear between tags. So identifying content is not very hard, and I am confident that the search companies have it pretty well figured out.

Third, I have never seen any hard evidence that content first matters for SEO. Which is pretty strange, if it is as important as the people promoting this myth seem to mean.

Fourth, the people that promote the idea that content must come first for SEO purposes are CSS experts. And as they also maintain that the only way to achieve this is by having a CSS-based site layout (this argument is false – there exist easy to implement table-hacks that achieve the same with respect to column order) , this argument also serves to increase the demand for the services of this group of web designers and specialists. So it could and perhaps should be viewed as a self-serving argument or a self-serving myth. And that, I think, is how I view it.

I will also add that if you take a look at the source code for some of the really popular blogs out there – blogs that are high up on the first page of search results, you will, as I do, immediately see that content does not come first. In many cases far from it, actually. So this is a myth we really should get rid of as soon as possible.

Original article: SEO-Myths 3: Content first is important for SEO

©2013 CSS and SEO. All Rights Reserved.

Sometimes titles are misleading – and this one surely is, even though I am sure it is intentional. While this book starts from the basics of search engine optimization (SEO), it really is a very advanced and excellent overview of this large and complicated topic.

Search engine optimization is fundamental to anyone trying to do some kind of business on the internet. It is about all those various things you can do to make the search engines list your site and its pages high enough in the search results so that your site attracts the people you are targeting. This basically means you want to be on the first page of the Google or Yahoo search results. If you manage to be on the top of the first page – that part of the page that is visible without scrolling – that is even better. The best is, of course, to be numero uno. The number one return usually gets the most clicks!

Consider for a moment why this is so important. It is not because you get more visitors per se, even though you may like to get lots of visitors. Rather it is because if your page is presented to the search engines the right way, the people you get as visitors are exactly the ones you dream of – people who are very likely to become customers. A person searching the net is a person with a need,at the very least a need for information. In many cases the personis looking for an item or a service he or she wants to buy. And they are doing something active – they are searching, trying to find it. This makes them much more attractive for you then people passing over your ad in a newspaper while skipping through the paper on the way to the sports pages!

Good SEO is search engine optimization using techniques that make you highly visible in searches conducted by your specific target group. There is little benefit to getting a top spot for pink elephants if you are trying to sell PCs. The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Search Engine Optimization – to my mind, as a person who has worked with marketing for longer than I care to remember, and who works with SEO virtually every day – is a wonderful, highly informative, and well-organized book with a wide enough coverage of the topic to help you achieve this.

So if you want to utilize the best and most cost effective marketing there is on the internet to full advantage, then this is a book you should get! It is very comprehensive- Michael Miller knows what he is talking about! Among others, he answers the following questions:

How do search engines work?
What are search engines looking for?
How do you improve your search ranking?
What will decrease my site ranking?

The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Search Engine Optimization is a book I simply cannot recommend strongly enough. It is well written – actually beautifully written – and clear and comprehensive as well as very, very solid. There is something to learn in every chapter and on each page. Master this book, take the advice given seriously, implement it on your site and work with it, and you will – trust me, I know – get great results!

Links to Complete Idiot’s Guide to Search Engine Optimization at Amazon US, Amazon UK, and Amazon CAN.

Original article: The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Search Engine Optimization, by Michael Miller

©2013 CSS and SEO. All Rights Reserved.

Search engine marketing, which goes far beyond search engine optimization, is an incredibly important part of Internet marketing. It is concerned with not only how to optimized your pages and make them visible to the search engines, but also with other strategic marketing issues like purchasing keywords, and the role of search engine marketing in your overall marketing mix as a means to realize your marketing goals. If you do any marketing at all, in addition to SEO, then SEM is something you must know about in the age of Internet.

However, learning about search engine marketing is difficult and at times frustrating. It is a large field, and it is fairly complicated. And while there are lots of people and businesses that are glad to tell you the secrets of how to get into one of the top positions on a search engine most of them are old techniques that don’t work any more.

Search Engine Marketing Inc. : Driving Search Traffic to Your Company’s Web Site, Second Edition, can not solve all you online marketing problems for you. Nor can it makes it easy for you to learn – there simply is a lot to learn, and no easy way to learn it without a investing a bit of time and effort. That said – this book is one of the best tools for learning this difficult trade that I have ever come across. A very serious, very thorough book which covers the whole field from A to Z.

The authors examine the details of how a search engine really works, how they rank search results and what you can do to get to the top of the heap. They also give you all the basic search marketing methods. One of the most interesting parts of the book is a section on understanding how a person thinks when they are issuing a search query.

The process they outline is simple yet very powerful if followed. First you have to identify the goals of your web site. If you don’t know what you are trying to accomplish then you are unlikely to accomplish it. Then you determine how to measure the success of your website. After this you develop a search marketing strategy and how you are going to measure the success of your marketing efforts. If you are in a larger company the authors even include a section on selling your search marketing proposal to your company.

Content:

Part 1 – The Basics of Search Marketing: Why Search Marketing Is Important… And Difficult; How Search Engines Work; How Search Marketing Works; How Searchers Work

Part 2 – Develop Your Search Marketing Program: Identify Your Web Site’s Goals; Measure Your Web Site’s Success; Measure Your Search Marketing Success; Define Your Search Marketing Strategy; Sell Your Search Marketing Proposal

Part 3 – Execute Your Search Marketing Program: Get Your Site Indexed; Choose Your Target Keywords; Optimize Your Content; Attract Links To Your Site; Optimize Your Paid Search Program; Make Search Marketing Operational; What’s Next?

Glossary; Index

Regardless of where your organization is located and regardless of your organizational size and structure, this is a very worthwhile book if you spend dollars for marketing online.

You’ll learn how to

Whether you’re a marketing, Web, or IT professional, product manager, or content specialist, Search Engine Marketing, Inc., Second Edition will help you define your SEO/SEM goals, craft a best-practices program for achieving them, and implement it flawlessly. I strongly recommend this book! If you are serious about not wasting them and concerned about using them as effectively as possible, then this book is for you!

PS: The book also comes with a valuable DVD which includes over 2 hours of exclusive how-to video presentations, plus audio interviews and white papers on cutting-edge search engine marketing topics.

Links to Search Engine Marketing Inc. at Amazon US and Amazon UK.

Original article: Search Engine Marketing, Inc, by Mike Moran and Bill Hunt

©2013 CSS and SEO. All Rights Reserved.

Another myth, created and maintained by proponents of CSS-based layouts, is that Web site layouts that that use tables are inferior to CSS-based layouts as far as Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is concerned.

In arguing this case, the proponents of CSS-layouts site a long list of what they refer to as problems with table-based layouts, often mixing into it a number of things that have nothing to do with the choice of layout and things that have nothing to do with SEO.

One thing they often argue is that CSS layouts are cleaner, less cluttered with code, and therefore better for SEO (see Myth 1). However, table-based layouts using CSS to format the tables can be just as clean as CSS-layouts. And CSS-based layouts can be just as messy and cluttered with code as those based on tables – a layout with lots of nested DIV’s is no less messy than one full of nested tables. The extent to which a site has messy code seems to me to depend more on the HTML and CSS skills of the person who created the site than with the type of layout.

Another line of argument is that CSS is preferable for layouts because tables are “meant” to be used for display of data. This too is flawed, I think. First, table based designs were at one time the only designs available. Even though it doesn’t matter much today, I think one of the reasons for introducing tables in HTML was to make it easier to create HTML layouts.

But who cares what a statement is meant for? Coding is not philosophy – I hope we can agree that you should not need to be skilled in phenomenology or hermeneutics in order to code? The “meaning” of “li”, “table”, “div” and “ol” is not the issue, rather it is what they do. Furthermore, bots do not care whether they encounter a “div” or a “table” – to the bots these are both HTML-statements devoid of “meaning”.

I say these things because I think people should use CSS for the right reasons. Personally I use CSS a lot and prefer CSS to tables. I use CSS because I want my pages to load fast, because I want them to have as little code as possible, and because I want them to be easier to maintain over time. For me those are sufficient reasons to prefer CSS. However, I do not think using CSS affects the search engine ranking of my pages at all.

Furthermore, I have not to date seen anything online or elsewhere that delivers solid empirical evidence that basing a layout on CSS gives better search engine ranking than using tables when everything else is equal.

So I think we should get rid of this myth, and I think people should design with whichever tools they prefer, and that CSS experts – many of which I otherwise admire – should stop “scaring” people with negative consequences for SEO if they do not use CSS-based layouts.

Original article: SEO-Myths 2: CSS-based layouts better than table-based for SEO

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