Once again, PubCon is upon us. This time next week I and two of my colleague will be winging our way to Las Vegas for this excellent web marketing event. It’s going to be a busy time of learning and exchanging ideas.

If you’re a Crossing reader and will be at PubCon, I would love to meet you. If you see me wandering the hallways or in a session, please stop and introduce yourself. Here’s my partial tentative agenda:

Monday

• I’ll be at the kickoff event at 5:30pm. This is a great time to meet new people in a social setting.

Tuesday

• I will be presenting as part of the In-House Team Building and Training session at 2:55 in Salon D. This will be a great panel with some luminaries in this area: Tony Adam, Peter Leshaw and Josh Gampel.
• In the evening I’ll be playing in the Raven Tools poker tournament. Thankfully this is just for “funsies” because I am not that great of a poker player

Wednesday

• After all the day’s festivities, I’ll be participating in the Epic Dinner organized by Alan Bleiweiss.

Thursday

• From 2pm until 3pm I’ll be sitting in on PubCon Labs. This is a new feature of PubCon which I think will be a huge hit. Session speakers will be at a table and will sit down with you and answer your questions. Reservations are going fast. I’m scheduled to cover Beginning SEO, but I don’t think anyone would mind if you wanted to talk about In-House issues or anything else web marketing.
• From my Labs session, I’ll be rushing over to Salon G to moderate a session entitled Engaging Your Community and Audience Through Contests with Matt Craine and Lisa Buyer
• Fest Call! At 7pm we’ll be having an informal and unofficial meetup at the Hofbrauhaus. Anyone is welcome to attend, but I’d especially like to invite Veterans of the Armed Services to come out and tell lies and talk web marketing.

Instead of posting a long summary of the sessions I attend at the end of the day, I’m going to try posting summaries of each session individually. I think this will be more efficient for me and easier to read for you.

What say you? Are you headed to PubCon next week? What do you hope to learn? Please feel free to share in the comments.

Back in the day, when I first started building web sites, controlling file sizes and download times were a critical part of the process. This was in the days of dialup. For those of you who grew up in a broadband world you have no idea how unimaginably slow some sites would render. Back then, it was important that image tags specified height and width of images so they could act as placeholders. This allowed the text of the page to download on the visitor’s screen in the right place so they could at least read the text while the images downloaded. And those images had better be small, or else. I remember chiding many clients for trying to put 1MB PDFs or 100K images on their sites.

Today, we take broadband for granted. Download speeds are so fast, that the occasional multi-megabyte PDF doesn’t faze most people. Some of us (yes, including me) have gotten a little lazy when it comes to optimizing images and other files for size. Some of our code is bloated and filled with redundancies. Still, for many of our customers, these things don’t really matter. Or do they?

Ah, But It Does Matter
There are two main reasons why download time really does matter: Consider mobile and SEO.

Mobile Browsing
It’s a given that mobile browsing is becoming a larger and larger share of overall internet usage, and that share will continue to grow as time goes on. Think about your customers using their mobile device to visit your site. If they are running on a 3G connection, depending on their provider they can download at speeds from 350 kilobits to 1.7 megabits per second. Those speeds are under optimal conditions and can be/are often slowed by such factors as weather, network congestion, distance from the tower, tall buildings or trees and a host of other things.

While on average your mobile visitors can expect speeds faster than dialup, are they going to wait patiently while the beautiful 150 kilobyte image on your home page downloads? Chances are they won’t, especially if they are stopped at a red light trying to find your address or phone number.

SEO Considerations
I remember during Search Engine Strategies, San Jose in 2006, Google was already warning that Adsense relevancy scores were going to be tied to download times of the landing pages the ads led to. Since then, they have started using download speed as a signal for organic search results as well. I haven’t heard anyone specifically mention Bing using download speed as a relevancy signal, but I can well imagine if they are not using it now they eventually will.

To illustrate this point, Aaron Shear reported in his presentation at last week’s PubCon South during the Advanced SEO Tactics session, that performance gains alone accounted for a 5% increase in traffic to web sites he monitors because of better placement in SERPs on Google. How fast are your pages downloading? Could a performance gain help your placement in SERPs? It’s certainly something worth considering.

Speedometers
There are a couple tools you can use to check your download speeds. My employer uses Webmetrics as an outside monitor to alert if the web sites go down. Part of their weekly report shows download times for monitored websites from their multitude of monitoring sites along with  a comparison to the average of all web sites they measure. This is a paid service, but it might be worth the cost for keeping tabs on downtime and download speeds.

A great free tool is the download speed indicator found inside Google Webmaster Tools. This shows you how long it takes to download your pages, “straight from the horses mouth,” so to speak. Google Webmaster Tools has so many other great features, I highly recommend signing up and using it to help you manage your sites better.

Speeding Things Up
If you find your pages are taking more than 4 seconds to download, there are some things you can consider doing to speed them up:

• Check your image sizes. If you have images on your pages larger than, say, 50 kilobytes, consider putting in some smaller images with options to click for a larger version. Making sure text is text and not embedded in images will not only make the images smaller, it will help search engines index your content better.
• Consider ditching large Flash movies if you have them. If you have one of those “Please wait while the content loads” things on your home page, your Flash movie is too large. Consider moving the “cool” content to other pages with links to it from the home page.
• Use CSS to control the look of your site. This helps eliminate redundant code by taking many style-related tags off each page and refers back to the CSS file, which can be downloaded once and used from the visitor’s local cache.
• Watch for code bloat. If you have CSS files and you’re no longer using some parts of it, delete those parts out. Copy and paste unneeded lines into a text file somewhere off the site if you think you might need them again.
• Consider moving your images and CSS files into a cloud service with distributed data centers. This can help speed up your downloads because bandwidth for these services is usually higher and multiple locations offer better speeds for visitors because files download closer to them. This isn’t usually a cheap solution, but if you have a large web site it could pay off quite well.

What about you? Have you wrestled with download speeds to improve visitor experience and/or SERP placement? Feel free to share in the comments.

I had an interesting conversation the other day regarding file sizes. The person with whom I was speaking had the opinion that since broadband is so common and download speeds are so much faster, one didn’t really need to worry about image or download file sizes. We were talking particularly over some PDFs which were over 5 MB in size.

While it is true that dial-up is all but gone, there is a whole new class of browser which is likely to outstrip even plugged in broadband in just a few years: mobile. According to many predictions, mobile browsing is set to overtake “traditional PC” browsing sometime in the next couple of years.  Gartner, a leading prognosticator of things tech, quoted in this story in MobileMarketingWatch, predicts this will happen in 2013.

While mobile browsing on 3G networks is certainly faster than the old dial-up connections, it’s not as fast as WiFi or wired networks. Speeds will certainly increase as 4G networks become more common, but large downloads still will be an issue even for those on the newer networks.

Another consideration to keep in mind is battery life. It certainly takes more juice to download a 5 MB PDF than a 500 KB one. People will certainly notice if their battery dies faster after visiting your site than if they visit your competitor’s.

There are also search engine optimization considerations to keep in mind. Google very publicly lets us know they take download times into account when figuring out page rank. I’ve not heard that Bing does, but I’m willing to bet they do to at least a certain degree.

So, file size does still matter. It will continue to matter for the foreseeable future. Keep that in mind as you put together your marketing materials for download.

Day 1 at PubCon Vegas 2010 was great, and Day 2 was even better. Rather than reading me wax eloquent on the happenings of the day, how about we get right to the summary? Here we go:

The Keynote was a panel moderated by Melanie Mitchell (@melaniemitchell) with Sarah Evans, Scott Stratten, Chris Brogan and Brian Clark. Here are some of their comments:

Sarah Evans (@prsarahevans)

• Sarah was a PR rep before she got into social. Social is a natural progression of PR.
• The “Motrin Mommies” is the first case study about how quickly a mistake can be amplified and magnified via social.
• We use social to connect with people. We find a balance between doing “work” and using social for looking for leads.
• Put the majority of your resources towards the one thing you can be the best at. The “hedgehog concept” from Jim Collin’s Good to Great.
• Get involved in a good cause. It brings good things back to you.

Scott Stratten (@unmarketing)

• Social media a fad? No, it’s nothing new because it’s just communication. It’s not that special, it’s just talking. No one asks for the ROI of talking, why do we ask for the ROI of social?
• Sold bubble wrap before he was into “Unmarketing.”
• Before, companies would have paid lots of money to listen in on real conversations between real people in real time. Now that it’s free they ask for the ROI. What’s up with that?
• If you make a mistake, the “geek tsunami” kind of takes over and the swell can be amazing. Google “Cooks Source” to see an example.
• You have to speak the client’s language. Start with the question like Chris mentions.
• Even if you hire out someone to handle your social, you/they ARE that brand. Never say “it’s not my department.”
• If you hate people, you shouldn’t be on Twitter.
• It’s hard to keep up with the pace sometimes. I’m failing at engagement because I’m busy and there’s too much to keep up with.
• Sometimes you have to stop. You need to be present for those most important to you, like family.
• Don’t just read books, do something. Put something into action instead of constantly getting new ideas.

Chris Brogan (@chrisbrogan)

• Start with the question “What kind of metric can we move?” when planning socmed strategy.
• Customer service issues get louder faster. You have to take care of your customers.
• You have to use your time on social media efficiently. Just like you can’t just hang around the gym and lose weight, you have to do something.
• Friction – messing up in one area sometimes helps bring balance to the other areas of your life. There’s always more work than there are hours in the day.
• Talk about other people’s stuff 12 times for every one time you promote yourself. Look for people who don’t get retweeted by hundreds, hit the up and coming folks.

Brian Clark (@problogger)

• Social gives us a more efficient means of distribution of information than, say, forwarding emails.
• If you have a moron running your social media, you’re still a moron, and more people will know about it.
• Some of the sharpest SEOs are on social media. Social is not a separate thing, it’s part of SEO.
• Get people to voluntarily join a marketing list and deliver good value. Content creators have an advantage if they have good marketing skills to (regarding making money).
• You have to keep learning, but you can read and never do anything.  If you’re not doing anything, if you’re afraid, just get out there and execute something.

The Convergence of Social Media and Search – Moderated by Aaron Shear

The Convergence of Social Media and Search – Rebecca Murtaugh (@VirtualMarketer)

• The relationship between social media and search is very real and presents opportunities you can work to your advantage, but don’t turn your back on it.
• Social media can be extremely favorable, but it can turn bad if you don’t do it right. Think about crisis and reputation management.
• Search is not going away. It’s still the most dominate method of finding websites customers purchase from.
• Search engines now integrate social popularity in organic search algorithms.
• Search engines are leveraging social into SERPs. Bing’s results are influenced by Facebook’s “like” button. They’re also including this in personalized search.
• Everything that is tweeted now shows up in real time SERPs on Google. Google assigns a unique number to all tweets when they are archived. When links are tweeted, they are in Google forever. Make sure to tweet links so they can come back to your site.
• Twitter’s search is getting a lot better, too. Think keywords when tweeting.
• Popularity and links matter. The more people talking about you, tweeting and liking, the better you show up in the SERPs.
• Leverage all your content: Paid, owned and earned.
• Never forget there is a person behind the device. You are relating to people. It’s real time dialog.
• Set up a Google Profile. If you have a Google profile, it will show up on page 1 for your name.

How Do Social Media & Search Intersect – David Wallace (@DavidWallace)

• Search still sends the majority of traffic that search engines do.
• Social still plays a big part in how SERPs are put together when people search.
• People spend about 22% of their time on social sites. People search and leave the search engines, but they stay on social sites.
• Integrate online and offline advertising. Put Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn addresses on offline ads. Put icons everywhere on your web site.
• Multimedia is huge. Get images and videos out there.
• Tailor your messages to your audiences. May be different groups on Twitter and Facebook.
• Contests and discounts are huge.
• Social media is huge for customer service. People are already talking about you. You may as well get in there.
• Profiles on social media sites can help a lot with reputation management issues.

The Convergence of Social Media & Search – Bill Hartzer

• At the end of the day, we want more traffic from our search.
• We still create content on our sites, and the on-page optimization is very important. “Old” SEO is still key. Use social media to “get noticed.”  When you “get noticed” you will be successful in organic search.
• Success in social media = getting noticed in search
• Deep links are very important – not just links to the home page.
• On Twitter links, mentions are URLs are seen as links on SERPs.
• You have to participate in social on a regular basis. Vote & comment often. Watch your audience.

Social Media & Search = <3 – Tony Adam (@tonyadam)

• Get more visibility through social and get more attention from that visibility.
• If you can jump on a trend while it’s happening you can garner a lot of traffic. Check out Google Trends to get the jump on trending topics.
• Don’t forget the “old fashioned” forums. There are still a lot of people there, especially niche audiences.
• Have a plan and execute.
• Leverage rating and review sites. Ask for ratings from customers.
• Link to social media sites from your web site so search engines know which profiles are actually yours.
• Give ways for people to give you feeback, but keep it private.
• If you launch a new product or service or change one, make sure you are monitoring and talking to your customers.

Keyword Research Selection and Optimization – Moderated by Stephanie Leffler

Amanda Watlington (@amandaw)

• Use www.spyfu.com to view competitor information.
• Search different behavior based on gender, age, location, business versus personal
• Remember, keywords are usually really more than one single word. Watch the doublets, triplets.
• Look for numbers in keyword selection.
• People tend to look for plural words when they buy in singular. Understand the patterns.
• A page can typically support 2-3 keywords. So a 100 page site can handle 200-300 keywords.
• Don’t boil the ocean.
• Don’t rely on a formula alone. Be adaptive and innovative in doing your keyword analysis. It’s part art and part science.

Advanced Negative Keywords – Ken Jurina (@kenjurina)

• Negative keywords are instructions to the search engines to NOT show your ad.
• Example: Roofing Deaths. Use “Deaths” as a negative keywords so your ad doesn’t show if someone searches for that.
• Use these to save money on PPC campaigns.
• Use Ubersuggest: http://suggest.thinkpragmatic.com
• Check out Wordstream: http://www.wordstream.com/negative-keywords
• Wordtracker also helps with negative keyword analysis: http://www.wordtracker.com
• Microsoft’s Keyword Mutation Tool is great to show common misspellings of words. Those can be handy as negative keywords.
• Using negative keywords will cut traffic, but that traffic is probably not relevant so those who do come aren’t wasting their time or yours.
• Check out more information at: http://www.epiar.com/seo-presentations

Keyword Segmentation – Stoney DeGeyter

• Know where your audience is, know who your audience is and target your audience affectively.
• Customer focus segmentation: Target Audience, Areas of Interest and Needs to be Met
• Don’t concentrate on just high-volume keywords. Think about higher quality traffic.
• Look to “how to” keywords as blog fodder to bring people in and then link them to your main web site.
• Check searcher, trends and ROI. Think about seasonal words and possible future trends.
• Don’t worry about optimizing bad words (think about using them as negative keywords).
• Let context guide keyword usage. Make it fit, make it flow and be creative. Don’t make the keywords a distraction and be sure to delete them if they don’t fit well.

Marty Weintraub (@aimclear)

• KW Research = Root + Modifiers, Stem All Nodes (Lateral Synonyms), Mine Known Traffic Drivers (Suggestions), Sort By Weight.
• Use  MS Word with a thesaurus function to start keyword research. Wordtracker (www.wordtracker.com) does the same thing.
• Go from your initial list and use Mozena’s Scrapebox (http://www.mozenda.com) to see what search engines suggestions are.

SEO Design and Organic Site Structure – Moderated by Christine Churchill (@keyrelevance)

SEO Design & Organic Site Structure – Ted Ulle (@tedulle)

• No one starts out to make a crappy web site.
• You want a simple and seamless user experience.
• The top priority is your marketing goals. Make sure you know what the overall goals are before you start the site. Avoid the “throw this out there” mindset.
• After your marketing goals are clear, then you start looking into keywords and site layout.
• Pay attention to information architecture.
• Get someone who does web user interface instead of someone who only does print stuff. Two different worlds.
• Remember, menu labels ARE content.
• Read “Information Architecture for the World Wide Web.” Excellent reference on creating menus for web sites.
• Do you want your site to be slick (where the eyes just slide off your site) or sticky (where they eyes stay on your site)
• Check out Robert Bringhurst’s “Elements of Typographic Style”
• Don’t show off on your site. Stick with your marketing goals.
• Your business goals is not to win web design awards, it’s to sell your products and services.
• Don’t let your IT folks write copy. Even things like error messages, search engine submissions, file not found errors can cause issues. The Marketers need to write the copy for these things.

SEO Design Miracle – Taylor Pratt (@ravenpratt)

• Gameplan
  • Focus on getting the site to look the way you want it to
  • Test your design ideas
  • Optimize the way you build it
  • Kick ass
  • Take names
  • Think about using key words in your links and putting hyphens between the words. Avoid spaces because when they get translated to “%20” it looks bad and people don’t understand it.
  • Check out the book “Microformats Made Simple” to learn how microformats might affect you.
  • HTML 5 has some great new tags to help search engines go through your content.
  • CSS3 helps you make things pretty with code so you don’t have to use so many images, Flash or javaScript. Also helps speed your pages up quite a bit.
  • WebP is a new image format from Google which improves image compression. It’s 39.8% more efficient than JPEG for the same quality. It’s only supported in Chrome now, but it looks promising.

SEO Design & Organic Site Structure – Mobile – Michael Martin (@GoogleAndBlog)

• John Zehr SVP of ESPN Mobile said “Mobile is not cannibalistic – it’s an amplifier”
• Mobile search has increased 500% in 2 years due to Android. According to Eric Schmidt, Android users search more than other mobile users.
• You don’t need a .mobi domain. Keep them on your own site by using user agent detection and moving them over to the mobile content.
• Let Google know they’re spidering a mobile-friendly page. Use the following in the header of your pages:  <link rel=”alternate” media=”handheld” href=”X.htm” />
• WP-Touch is a great plug-in for mobile rendering in WordPress.
• Use mobiready (www.mobiready.com) to check how your site renders on different mobile devices

The last  session I attended was the introduction to the newest search engine, blekko. I had an nice demonstration by one of the blekko team during the break. I think it has a lot of potential. Check them out at http://www.blekko.com.

Blekko – New Kid On The Block with Rich Skrenta, CEO of Blekko (@skrenta)

• Other search engines keep a lot of their crawl and rankikng data secret. Blekko plans to make their data public.
• Rich was behind “NewHoo” which morphed into DMOZ and topix.
• There are only two players now with the death of Yahoo! Search.
• Search is hard. You need to have a lot of knowledge to get it right. That might be why others have failed in the past few years.
• Launched last week with about three billion pages indexed. Did a lot of focus group research.
• Blekko uses slashtags to include and exclude information.
  • Filter your results by source (/health)
  • Filter your results by attribute (/date)
  • Select alternate data source (/maps)
  • The command syntax avoids a cluttered UI.
  • Anyone can apply to be part of an editorial team to help refine results.
  • There is a lot of SEO data readily available in blekko.  Click on the “SEO” button to learn more about your sites.
  • You can subscribe to RSS of search results.
  • You can compare two sites in the SEO section. Information compares sites linking to both sites among other things.
  • Rich believes that being open about everything will help blekko do better search. It allows people outside to offer suggestions and corrections.
  • Note the Facbook “Like” and “Tweet This” buttons on the blekko SERP
  • Twitter channel is staffed. They will respond. @blekko
  • “We’re not going to make search simpler for people. We’re going to give them more tools to help them search better.”

Warning: Major Geek Content

If you’ve been working with Microsoft’s Internet Information Server (IIS), and you check out your log files on a regular basis, you’ve probably seen error messages with content similar to this:

Process Information:
Process ID: 3264
Process name: w3wp.exe
Account name: NT AUTHORITY\NETWORK SERVICE

Exception Information:
Exception type: System.Security.Cryptography.CryptographicException
Exception message: Padding is invalid and cannot be removed.

Request Information:
Request URL: http://www.yourdomain.com/webresource.axd?d=d8qwertyu9a7asdfghjklzxcvn1&t=123456789012345678
Request path: /webresource.axd
User host address: 255.255.255.255

I often wondered what these were about, but all I ever saw in searches on the topic mentioned incompatibility with certain browsers (especially Safari) and miscommunication between the server and the browser. Not really good answers, but enough to know it wasn’t some serious hack attempt.

That was, until a few weeks ago when we started having some major trouble with timeout errors between our web server and the SQL Server which holds the data for our sites. We went round and round trying to figure out the issue ourselves to no avail. Thankfully, we have a subscription to Microsoft’s telephone tech support, so we finally decided to punt.

I have to give Microsoft some serious props when it comes to their top level support. When you get one of these folks on the phone you are dealing with a true professional; one with a lot of knowledge, background and experience to help you work through your problem. The service isn’t cheap, but it’s good.

We worked with a networking engineer who helped us narrow down the issue. He ended up calling in one of his colleagues on the IIS support team to help us find a resolution. 45 minutes on the phone with those two guys was about a week’s worth of education.

In the end, it turned out to be some errant code we put in for error handling. Rather ironic, I have to say, that the error handling caused the errors themselves.

But, the real education was in learning about the webresource.axd and what causes these System.Security.Cryptography.CryptographicException errors.

The webresouce.axd file is generated by the system. Like the web.config, it’s not a file that someone can just “browse” to. It’s requested automatically by the browser and is a helper file to assist with using script files.

The interesting thing is that the “d” portion of the URL string is supposed to be mixed case, but in every instance where I see this type of error, all the letters are lower case, like from the completely fake example I noted above:

d=d8qwertyu9a7asdfghjklzxcvn1

It should be more along the lines of something like this:

d=d8QWErtyU9a7ASDfghJKLzxcVn1

If you go through your server logs, you can track down the requests which cause the errors, compare them to other requests for the webresource.axd file and clearly see the difference. I didn’t notice this until I looked at the logs closely trying to troubleshoot my problem.

Checking closely in the log files, I can also see where sometimes the “&” between then end of the “d” string and the “t=” is sent like “&amp;” – which apparently also causes issues.

There you have it – a “not to technical” explanation as to why you might see this type of error message in your log files. Apparently, so long as your server is patched and set up according to best security practices, this shouldn’t cause you any problems other than possibly filling your log files with messages.

This past weekend I attended a dinner at the home of some friends. I hadn’t yet met one of the other attendees and her son, so it was a fun evening of meeting new people. Over the course of the conversation after dinner, this particular lady described to us the problems her parents were having with their web site. They weren’t getting the desired sales off the site and were very frustrated it wasn’t performing better. She said something to the effect of, “If you don’t know our web address, you can’t find us.”

I borrowed our host’s notebook computer and pulled up her parents’ site. The home page looked very nice, but a few issues were immediately apparent:

• Important keywords were buried at the bottom of the page.
• The logo was large and situated in the center of the page, which pushed a lot of key information below the fold.
• Navigation solely consisted of buttons, no text links were included anywhere on the pages.

Digging into the source code for a few of the pages also revealed there were no descriptions nor keywords nor any “alt” tags for the images. I also noted clicking on the logo for the site designer company’s link at the bottom of the page lead nowhere – the site is gone. That’s not a good sign.

She also told me that when her parents complained about the lack of traffic to the site to their ISP (who, as I understand it, now does the updates to their site), they recommended a PPC campaign to drive traffic to the site without addressing the underlying SEO problems first. I don’t remember how much she said her parents were quoted to start this PPC campaign, but it seemed to me rather high for a small mom and pop business.

I took about 15 minutes and described what needed to be corrected on the site before anything else should be considered. As I went over some very basic SEO considerations, she said something like, “I wish someone had showed us this a long time ago.”

I do, too.

Now, this lady is no technical slouch. She’s a skilled network administrator. But, she is not a web designer and admittedly knows next to nothing about HTML let alone SEO techniques.

I won’t call out their web host, because I don’t know their side of the story.

Still, I have to wonder if they are ignorant, incompetent or just providing bad service. Whichever the reason, there is certainly little value being added to this family’s web efforts.

How many of you have heard stories like this? How many have had to clean up someone else’s mess? I’m curious to hear your stories. Please feel free to leave them in the comments.

I’m looking for a way to embed video which will work with CSS. In my ignorance, I ran into the IFrame problem which plagues WordPress.  I think I found the solution by using “Embed” copied from YouTube instead.

Here is a test using the video I used in my Chaos Scenario post a week or so ago. In that post I used the insere IFrame plugin, which worked great in the post but didn’t work in the RSS feed or the email.

It looks like this is going to work quite well.

I still would like to find a more elegant solution to the IFrame problem, though. There are times I might want to embed a map from Google and I think IFrame is the only way to do that.

Are you having problems with parts of your web site since Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) was released? I’ve been seeing chatter around the web about parts of web sites all-of-the-sudden not working even though they work in other browsers. The menus on our own Business to Business site quit working when customers upgraded their browser to IE8.

The problem stems from how IE8 processes JavaScript. I’m not up on all the technical details, but I do have a fix – albeit a temporary one: add the web site in question to the Compatibility View list. Here’s how to do it -

• Open Internet Explorer
• Click on “Tools” in the menu
• Click on “Compatibility View Settings”
• Enter the web page’s address in the “Add this website” box
• Click on the “Add” button
• Click on the “Close” button.

You may have to close and then reopen IE8, but once you add the web site to Compatibility View list, the site should work properly.

We put a note on the home page of our B2B web site to let our customers know about the fix. As I noted above, it’s meant to be a temporary solution.

The long term solution is to figure out why that part of your web site doesn’t work in IE8 and find a fix for your code which will work in IE8 as well as other browsers.

It all goes back to testing your web site in as many browsers as you can to make sure it works in all of them.

Web pages are about links. The whole reason Dr. Berners-Lee came up with the idea of the World Wide Web was so that information could be linked together to make things easier to find. In some ways he succeeded beyond his wildest dreams. In the “modern” web, links need to be formatted properly in order for search engines to be able to use them. Search engines not only use links to find more content on the web, but also to help determine which content is more relevant. I include images in this discussion because images are quite often links themselves.

The link tag is very easy to understand. For example, a link to this blog is set up like:

<a href=”http://www.crossingmarketingandit.com”>For great web marketing information, visit The Crossing of Marketing and IT</a>

There’s really nothing to it. The key thing to remember is to make the text between the tags relevant to the content the link points to. If at all possible, avoid generic phrases like “Click Here” or “More Information.” The more descriptive the link text the better.

Images are also somewhat simple to set up:

<img src=”/images/BowlOfFruit.jpg” alt=”Example picture of a bowl of fruit”>

It’s a good idea to give your images a logical name; a name reflecting what the image is works quite well. This helps you keep track of them and helps the search engines catalog them. The “alt” part of the “img” tag is very important. This not only helps search engines, but it also helps your visitors using screen readers make sense of your page since they can’t see what the image is.

There are a myriad of additional elements which can be added to the “img” tag, but for our purposes the basics are all we need.

Combining links and images is also quite easy:

<a href=”http://www.crossingmarketingandit.com><img src=”/images/BowlOfFruit.jpg” alt=”Example picture of a bowl of fruit”>
<br />For web marketing information, visit Crossing Marketing and IT web site</a>

Notice I also added some text inside the link tags. Adding text is good for search engines since they don’t read images. Again, it’s good to make that text descriptive to what the web site is about.

There are a multitude of tags which go in between the <body> </body> tags. Of those, there are some which will affect your optimization more than others. The ones which govern text formatting are critical to understand, so let’s go over those now.

In the process of determining relevancy, search engines look very closely at the text of a web page. Words which are highlighted in bold or a larger font are considered more important. So, it’s important to make sure your section headers are in bold face or in text that’s a little larger than the other text immediately before and after.

With all of these tags, the text between the opening and closing tags are affected by them. So if you want to make some text bold you’d set it up like this:

<strong>Bold text here.</strong>.
And the text would look like this: Bold text here.

Let’s get into some tags, shall we?

<b></b> and <strong></strong>
Both of these tags cause the text in between them to appear as boldface. If you look at the source of this web page, you can see “strong” is used, but “b” would make the page look the same.

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which governs the standards of web page tags, tells us to use “strong” instead of  ”b” because “b” is being phased out. To me, that’s a compelling enough reason to use “strong.”

<i></i> and <em></em>
I’m totally against using italics in web page text. I find it hard to read and somewhat distracting. That being said, if you really want to italicize some of your text then “i” or “em” are the tags you should use.

What’s the difference between them? This is another case of the W3C  making a change. In this case “em” is the recommended tag to use.

<p></p>
This tag is used to denote paragraphs. This is a very commonly used tag.

<h1></h1>, <h2></h2>, <h3></h3>, <h4></h4>, <h5></h5>, <h6></h6>
These are “header” tags are are recommended to be used for headers only. “h1″ is the largest header and “h6″ is the smallest. These tags will not only increase or decrease the size of the text, they will also make the text bold. I don’t recommend using these tags just for bold because these are meant for headers. If you want bold, use the <strong> tag described above. Here are examples of how these tags look:

This is h1

This is h2

This is h3

This is h4

This is h5

This is h6

<font></font>
The “font” tag is an all-inclusive tag which allows you to manipulate text in many different ways. By adding modifiers like “size,” “face” or “color” you could change text very quickly and easily. Here’s how it might be used:

<font size=”2″ color=”red” face=”Ariel”></font>

The W3C recommends not using the <font> tag because it is also being phased out.

<u></u>
This tag causes the text  to be underlined. This is another tag I highly recommend not using. This is because most people are going to understand underlined text as being a link. If you create underlined text which is not a link then your visitors might get a bit frustrated clicking on stuff that doesn’t work.

This is another tag which is being phased out by the W3C – just another reason not to get into the habit of using it.

What About This Old Stuff?
Now, you may be asking yourself, “Why are we reading about all these tags which are being phased out?” and “What’s replacing all this phased out stuff?”

I’m glad you asked that, because there is a new way to control everything on a web page, including the text, and this is the Cascading Style Sheet (CSS). CSS is a whole subject unto itself, so I won’t go into too muchdetail here.

Cascading Style Sheets – The Very Short Version
Even though CSS is the new way to control web page elements, tags are still used, and even the ones being phased out are still understood by browsers and rendered properly for the most part.

You can see an interesting example of how CSS can be used to modify how a page looks. In your CSS you can specify certain attributes or “classes.” In addition, you can modify standard tags as well. You may notice, depending on whether your on the site or via an RSS reader, the example for the <h5> tag above appears in red text. The text is also larger than the <h4> text even though it should be smaller, but larger than the <h6> text. This is because the CSS for my WordPress theme modifies the <h5> tag to appear red to the web page viewer. The CSS overrides what the tag would normally do.

Again, CSS is whole subject unto itself, but suffice to say CSS is a great tool for maintaining the look of the pages within a web site.