Review Your Ad Placements.
I wrote in a previous post about Facebook ad targeting, and how I believed a handful of advertisers were focusing their ads on individuals with “engaged” as their status because of the wedding-related sites that were advertising which I had not previously seen ads for.
Today, I would like to remind everyone to check their search query placement report in Google’s AdWords program, as you never really know where your ads are showing unless you check! Why the reminder? Because a well-targeted(?) ad came into one of my Gmail accounts. I was perusing the spam folder for anything I might have missed recently, and at the top is the following ad:
Now perhaps a recipe site doesn’t much care that they’re showing up for “spam” in my spam folder. They may even like that. It certainly got my attention and gave me a chuckle. But still, do you know where your ads are showing?
Blank Lines in Code Detrimental to SEO?
Can blank lines in your code affect your SEO efforts?
I’m always looking at websites and monitoring potential “competition” to my employer’s growing business. Today, I come across a marketing agency that offers SEO services along with a “proprietary content management system.” Now, there are plenty of capable open-source content management systems, and some very capable, well developed commercial solutions. Usually, one or the other serves the purposes of companies and nonprofits alike. Any proprietary solution as part of a marketing team would need a closer look. Who is the developer? How often are updates made and how simple is it to modify things? And amongst many other questions, what type of code does it create? Is it valid code?
This agency uses the CMS for their own website as well as the clients who need a new CMS. Being a curious person, I took a peak under the hood at the resulting code. I was surprised to see massive numbers of blank lines of code! The code had over 3800 lines, and at one point, there was a gap of 2000+ blank lines. When I removed the blank lines, I was able to get the code down to an even 600 lines, and I probably could’ve pushed it into fewer than that.
Now, I’ve been through an SEO course (or three), and do this stuff for my employer all of the time, and we always encourage proper structure of code, including minimizing code bloat and excessive blank lines. But never, have I come across documentation that says a spider won’t read blank lines or that poorly constructed HTML code will affect your SEO efforts. Flash, Javascript, and forms may (and DO!) cause issues, but I’m talking plain HTML without that stuff.
So I reached out to some industry colleagues to ask them, “Have you ever found evidence or read anything that says the length of code affects spiderability and SEO efforts? I’m referring to massive amounts of blank lines.”
Response? No evidence, and no documentation, but it can’t be a good idea. Spiders can be programmed in different ways, and because we’re not the search engine spiders, we can only guess what a search engine spider might do. It’s possible that when a spider comes across a slew of blank lines, that it may be programmed to stop or give up. And why risk what we don’t know for sure? Best bet: Reduce the code and don’t give the spider a reason to stop moving about your pages.
2007 in Review.
2007 was a great year for this blog.
First of all, I broke the dry posting spell by actually getting back to it in May, thanks to seeing a co-worker blog personally and professionally at the same time. (Simon).
Second of all, I actually drove a considerable amount of traffic (for this blog) during 2007. Visitors increased 123%, people averaged 25% more pages viewed per visit, my bounce rate dropped over 30%, and average time on the site increased 120%.
My Top Sources of Traffic Outside of Organic and Direct Traffic:
Stumbleupon, MyBlogLog, and Sphinn.
Stumbleupon traffic appeared to actually read my site, as did MyBlogLog users. Sphinn users did not appear to read content based on the time on site. If they did, they read at least twice as fast.
My Organic Traffic
Organic traffic is definitely improving, and one lone experiment in keyword research prior to posting did result in that blog post lodging itself for several months in a top ten listing in Google for my targeted phrase and subsequently delivering traffic.
The top ten posts by number of visitors:
11 Measures of Social Networking Profile Success
Blog Improvement Tips for the Meme
PPC Bid Management Strategy - Bid Optimization of Non-Converting Keywords
SEO for Federal Agencies
Airline Marketing Strategies and Travel Advertising
Holiday E-Commerce Marketing Roundup
Why Internet Marketing Is Like A Treasure Hunt
Stop Shooting Viral Marketing Blanks
Michael Vick, Atlanta Falcons, NFL, and Reputation Management
Opt-in Email Marketing Techniques
Happy New Year! See you in 2008!
