SEO Neighborhoods can be used to gauge two things:

1. The link profile of a website: the composition of a websites in-bound and out-bound links
2. The search  index profile of a website: how a website is categorized by a search index (for the purposes of this post I am speaking exclusively about Google)

An Example of a Search Index Profile

Google has developed some helpful search query extensions to assist users in finding index information specific to URL’s and websites. One of these tools is the “related:” prefix. By adding “related:” directly before a website URL in Google (i.e. “related:www.yourwebsite.com”) provides you with a set of results that Google has identified as “related” to the domain being searched. See below for an example of websites related to www.DocuSense.com

Notice in the above example the types of websites that Google is relating to DocuSense. The first (www.laser-supply.com) is a geographically targeted landing page developed for a specific local campaign. I know this because we made it. But continue further down the SERP:

1. Xerox
2. FixYourOwnPrinter.com is a reputable printer repair information resource
3. A site for high quality printer inks for less money
4. An HP Printer repair and service provider
5. StreetDirectory.com ß this is what I wanted to get to. Street Directory sounds like a paid directory website (think yellowpages.com, superpages.com, etc.) but if you take a closer look… you will see this particular instance is an article about laser printer service contracts – definitely a good site to be related to if you are in the laser printer service industry.

Now let’s take a look at another search index profile, this time for the domain http://www.printersrepair.com:

So if you’re looking over the search results above here is what I would like for you to notice:

1. The very first page is superpages.com (as I mentioned above – a paid directory site) Also notice that the links being created from this paid traffic are localizing the search results for both Ann Arbor and Michigan.
2. FixYourOwnPrinter.com again – this is a good thing
3. Solaronics USA – Manufacturing infra-red heating products – not related
4. OnTech Force – IT Repair, ok makes sense – printer repair and IT repair could be considered related
5. Fixya.com – Audio and Video Equipment Repair – repair service yes, but audio and video – Not exactly services you want your printer repair site associated with (Again, this is in Michigan)
6. Ferndale, MI Yellow pages (again, paid directory for local listing in Michigan)
7. DGE Inc. – Electronic hardware and software in Michigan – not directly related
8. Aamtech – Digital copiers and faxes – good.
9. The Pod Drop – IPod repair – Not related.
10. Laseronela.com – Here is a culprit. If you click through to this site you will be dropped into an content network landing page with a handful of sponsored links and no value.

Ok, so I want you to notice a few things:

• Almost all related sites (even the sites that are not necessarily “related” like: Solartronics, Fixya.com, DGE, etc.) are coming from Michigan based sites or paid networks.
• 50% of the search results are not directly related to printer repair or service
• 50% of the search results are paid directories or listings
• 20% of the search results are for spam websites (ThePodDrop.com is an affiliate sales site and Laseronela.com is a parked domain hosting sponsored links)

What does this mean?

Well for starters we know they are not an organically grown website but rather mostly supported through purchased directory listings and sponsored ads. This is not a big deal if they plan to grow out their organic presence, if not this could mean search engine penalties in the future. The search engines are trying to provide authoritative content to their users’ not just display those with the biggest budgets (at least not in the organic results)

This also means that if you have a local business it is a good idea to spend some money on some paid links (as they will provide you with display and affiliation on local network sites). But be careful not to go all paid, you must diversify your search marketing for both the short-term (paid) and long-term (seo). This brings me to my next point…

A Website’s Link Profile

This is rapidly becoming one of the key performance drivers for organic search engine optimization and growth. Your websites link profile consists of the composition of inbound links (places linking to your website) and out-bound links (places your website is linking to). It is a pretty well known fact that search engines (Google specifically) places a lot of weight on the number of links to a particular website. If a website has the most links for a particular keyword, from the most authoritative and reputable websites in that online industry, then that site will most likely rank #1.

This means you need to pay attention not only who you link to (be sure to provide reference to accurate, timely, and relevant information) but be mindful of who is linking to you.  So let’s take printersrepair.com again as our example:

In this example printersrepair.com has 33% of their inbound links coming from a spammy link-farm. This is damaging the overall value of their link profile, and could cause penalty.

In your Google webmaster tools dashboard be sure to check out your “Diagnostics > Web/mobile crawl > Crawl error sources” so you can not only correct links that may be broken, but also to pursue relationships with other site owners/webmasters who have an interest in your site. (And while engaged, see if they’ll fix the broken link. This is an important way of correcting broken links and building reputable link juice.

In addition to correcting these crawl errors; you should probably also use 301 redirects to direct incoming traffic pointed toward outdated URL’s to their new current locations. Google will properly flow link juice through 301 (or “permanent”) redirects.

I have found that a good way to gather insight into your site’s preliminary top-level content is to take a look around at terms and language that is associated with your business/industry and find out what’s working. It is historically very difficult to gauge growth of private companies, and it still is. One technique I have found to be useful is analyzing a specific set of competitors (or competing websites) over a set sample period (let’s say 3 months) pay close attention to changes made to both their website(s) and their overall online presence (are they showing up in alerts, press releases, social bookmarking sites, blogs, social communities like: facebook, linked in, twitter?)

It is relatively straight forward to tell who has begun (if at all) to put money into their online reputation. Companies that choose to build out a web presence do so, usually, for one of two reasons:

1. They have seen a recent surge within their industry demanding online availability, or their site has begun to produce revenue.
2. Business is faltering all over the grid and in order to stay afloat they are forced to explore other selling mediums

In either case, within 3 months, one should be able to determine who has begun or continued to put money into online campaigns. This will provide some insight into what may be working, example; an information technology firm releases a whitepaper once a month, starting in January, by the end of march they are now putting out two a month – and offering additional resources for visitors who subscribe to their blog/newsletter. I think it would be safe to assume that the additional internal resources required to produce these materials are coming out of revenue realized from past success.

While this approach certainly does not always work – it is a jumping off point for many industries, especially in an economy where budgets are very tight – and unsuccessful investments will quickly be diminished.

Css Explosion

Cascading style sheets are an immensely helpful tool in creating appealing designs and provide time savings during initial creation, maintenance, and enhancement.  In the past few years they’ve also become a powerful ally to client-side processing, client management systems, as well as unique identification for hierarchal functionality.  Many bleeding-edge applications of CSS leverage its abilities with scripting technologies to create interesting visual effects which lend themselves to positive user experience.  Even with the majority of web sites in operation utilizing some form of CSS to manage the look of their site while keeping their mark-up lite, and D.R.Y.ing up their code; there are many ways in which CSS can bog down your site, make layouts and styling unintuitive, and in general make it cumbersome to manage, maintain, and enhance current features.  Good, thoughtful design is the basis for a clean, well-factored CSS which is easily extendable and reusable.

D.R.Y. up Your CSS

Don’t Repeat Yourself.  Whether it is source code or CSS the same concept applies, unnecessary repetition bloats the mark-up of your site, slows response times, and makes it difficult to maintain.  Not only that but factoring out duplicate functionality will produce the same results at optimized speeds.  I cannot tell you how annoying it is to go into FireBugs® while viewing a page and see something which is consistent across the page, such as font-family, overridden by an identical value four or five times in the CSS hierarchy.  There is just no reason for it.

Everything Doesn’t Have to Be Different

Many beginning CSS developers get so excited about the vast styling functionality world to which they’ve just be introduced that they go bananas.  Every little element has specific widths, padding, text decorations, etc.  They forget that the best web sites enjoy that prestige because of their consistency.  Nobody’s brain wants to switch between serif text and Arial every other div, let alone jump around between different colors, backgrounds…all while watching blinking text follow around their cursor.  You have to ask yourself this question, does my styling add accessibility to my content for my audience – or is it a distracting detriment to the message I’m trying to convey? (By the way if you can’t answer this it is the latter).  Clean, concise, and fluid layouts are here to stay; trust me when I say to you that no one will be impressed by overloading the CSS styling of your page.

Don’t get it Twisted; CSS is Programming

Many, web developers especially, discount CSS as an after-thought; a cute schema outside the realm of true programming.  This couldn’t be farther from the truth.  The OOP concepts exemplified by CSS demand the same design review scrutiny as any other language in which you develop.  Quality design coupled with clear vision of scope can render kilobytes of fat from your overweight CSS resources and keep other developers from ripping their hair out when they try to add a menu item.  Thoughtful schemas can also lend themselves towards easily implementing various other scripting technologies such as jQuery^TM, YU^TMI, or CodeIgniter^TM.

Until part II – please let me know your thoughts.

            Content creation which is the invention of all non-functional text and graphics which fill the website often take precedent to the true web development and design activities.  The first snare which afflicts personnel charged with presenting a concise, clear, yet thorough perspective on screen is beginning by writing textual content in document format.  It doesn’t matter if you put it in a table, change the background color, or float graphics in front of text it will look like a hokey version of my geocities homepage from 1996; word processors are not design tools and you are not a designer.

            Unless you’ve downloaded a .pdf, are rambling through your extensive library of google books, or reading your favorite blog, when is the last time you saw more than two paragraphs of text anywhere on the internet that didn’t make you instantly want to navigate away from the page?  People hate reading, period.  It doesn’t matter if it’s a financial planning tool or an online dating service, the waste less of my time design approach is taking over the web.  If you could effectively create a page that when loaded spawned a retinal scan which uniquely identified the user and searched the internet for what they were thinking of instantaneously – without a click, you’d be a millionaire.  The overall aesthetics of the final product are directly related to the efforts towards web design being conducted by an design professional.  This psychologically pleasing aspect of web design distinguishes web sites now and will continue to play an increasingly important role in the future of the internet.

Make Users Feel Warm and Fuzzy

            Web design, unlike development, focuses on the parts of the application with which the user interacts.  Core responsibilities include the look and feel of the website which sculpts many subconscious impressions which will influence the user to love or hate the product.  For an example let’s consider test driving a calculator application and observe that it is functionally incorrect, say you press 2+2 and it evaluates to 3.  This is a serious concern for the developers but this doesn’t inspire nearly the emotional response that an offensively arranged user interface potentially could, perhaps the keypad for the calculator was laid out something like this:

More than likely you would have ventured back to your search engine of choice to select another Web Calculator link before you ever discovered that it was functionally unsound.  If the web design is any good, the user should forget their even viewing a website.  The vision of the website should resonate through every page creating consistency and flow throughout the information exchange experience.  The development behind the scenes works together with a clean and intuitive design to support this exchange.

Of Course It Has to Work

            Web development is the discipline which focuses on the functionality of the website; mainly unknown to the end user.  The true credibility of the website is made transparent by the accurate processing of its functional responsibilities.  In the calculator example, if a user enters 2+2 which evaluates to 3 the website has officially rendered itself incompetent.  Not only will the user be skeptical of any answer from the calculator in the future but any content located on or associated with this website.  This functional development weighs heavy on any website creation as it is the most demanding on resources, testing, and skill.  Once the design and functional core have been conceptualized we have to fill in the blanks. Note that I mean the specific verbiage and final-cut graphics to appear on the site, by all means prior to any of the creative processes ensuing a broad vision of the purpose must be grasped by the entire project team. 

            The whole point of this has finally arrived, content creation.  Notice that it comes at the end of the process!!  Only after initial prototypes are developed from a web design can the content owners, those responsible for creating, maintaining, and approving the content, begin filling in the placeholders for their text blurbs, non-functional graphics, and other various information.  This fits the ideas and concepts which drive the web site’s message into the sleek mould of modern web design which has many positive impacts on the overall product.

             Because content placeholders have established dimensions this will inevitably drive content creators to not only become more short winded but also the quality of the lighter pieces of text will improve; space is limited…use it wisely.  Having the site design established will help govern the content’s message.  This also will detract from the Blankscreenophia which can be daunting for content creators; two images, a headline, and two one paragraph blurbs on this page….next.  Another benefit particularly for re-launches or facelifts is being able to touch and feel the new design of the site.  This will help ease the resistance to change and reduce cling to old content;  nobody gets excited about a bulleted list or paragraph of text. 

Just Make It Drag and Drop

            Design is subjective and development is taken for grant it; again the best web sites make you forget your even using a computer.  This leads to a dangerous intersection for content creators whom usually have little to no experience in design or development coupled with a gross naiveté of their complexities.  If content creators complete their tasks at the beginning of the process they are forced to make layout decisions, which should be left to a designer, in order to begin putting the pen to the paper.  This indirectly constrains the design and development potential.  Furthermore they build aversive tendencies towards  modification of their original concept.