Soda - Keeping Curious

In part two of my article on SEO and Usability I mentioned the A9 toolbar and their SiteInfo specification; specifically, questioning why it appeared that Amazon were not making more use of their technology.

Reports hit the mainstream media this week that probably go a long way to explain why. Amazon have overhauled their service after receiving lackluster usage. Reports seem to indicate that the majority of the overhaul is simply removing the functionality that made them different from everyone else, and simply rebadging other engines search results. Hardly spectacular.

A great shame really. I don’t believe there was need for most features, but SiteInfo is certainly just as useful now as it was when I originally blogged about it. Certainly more so than Microsummaries, which I didn’t even feel like making mention of at the time.

I guess that if anything, the introduction of these technologies is very much trial and error. RSS hit the sweet spot, but that certainly took time to build momentum. In the meantime, we obviously just have to keep on the look out for that next big thing.

In the second part of this examination of the SEO and usability of websites I’ll be looking at the little value-add functions that Soda both offers and takes advantage of in order to keep us that one step ahead.

Firstly, as I pointed out at the end of my previous entry, there is the all important RSS Feed. Everyone and their dog is starting to utilise RSS nowadays as a way to make their web browsing just that little bit easier. Well ok, maybe not the dog, but let’s not see it as some fantastic new scary technology to shy away from. It’s actually quite old technology; don’t let these Web 2.0 guys fool you. What I’d like to know is where was RSS in the initial dotcom explosion? It was developed a short time after ‘99. It worries me that it only now gets a big mention. What changed?

Either way, it certainly has huge merit. I personally use an external feed reader, watching subscriptions at more than a few media publishers, but I know that some of our creative department just use Safari’s built in functionality. Becky has already mentioned her use of Google Personal Homepage. If you don’t use RSS yet, you have no excuse.

The next thing on our list of functionality is A9’s SiteInfo. A9 is a search engine operated by Amazon, a step removed from selling books. SiteInfo is utilised by users who have the A9 Toolbar installed in their browser. It offers the site author the ability to add their own menu options into the Toolbar, hopefully helping their visitors navigate the site. It also allows the user to quickly search the site content. One thing I haven’t been able to confirm is if A9 is crawling the SiteInfo definition to better index pages on our site. Maybe at some point in the future I’ll put a secret page in there and see if A9’s search starts showing it.

The reason I mention crawling at this stage is because of our final two mentions. Like SiteInfo, Google and Yahoo aren’t to be left behind, they have their own methods to improve indexing.

Google decides to go its own way and published their Sitemap Specification. It’s been improved a little bit recently with its inclusion in the Google Webmaster Tools product, but the method remains the same. You create a specially crafted xml file on your website that includes information about all of your pages that google will keep coming back to check for updates. Think of it as a way of telling the Googlebot what pages it should look at and how often and you aren’t far wrong. Of course, nothing is set in stone and Google warn you that any instructions you include in your Sitemap is only taken as advisory.

Yahoo make it even easier. Just tell Yahoo about your RSS Feed and its Web Spider will keep checking that just like your own Feed Reader. Every time you update your RSS feed Yahoo gets the goods, just like your other subscribers.

People have been questioning why I haven’t posted anything to this blog yet considering the amount of time I’ve spent working on it recently. It occured to me that I may as well kill two birds with one stone and write a couple of entries about the work I have been putting into Soda.

Since launching the site a couple of months ago, we, like most people, have been monitoring the ammount of “buzz” we’re producing. It’s a well played game when it comes to websites, your traffic ultimately comes from a search engine, and if you aren’t playing to their rules you may as well not be online at all. But the blogosphere is more than just the old school; Google and Yahoo are a fraction of the landscape, which makes for a more interesting challenge than normal SEO.

For this first entry we’ll be focusing on Google, Yahoo and MSN as all are still very important traffic builders, and its here where I’ve been making most changes.

The first issue I’ve been solving is the way Google displays search queries that result in multiple page hits for this site. Because we quite often revisit a similar topic for our entries a search for Second Life in Google would result in a few entries on Soda, but happily Google would hide them all away under whichever article it thought was most relevent. Not having any of that, I’ve altered Soda so that each entry will appear in Google as a seperate result. After all, we are the most important source for any search query. Strangely, MSN and Yahoo love to do much the same, I’m hoping the alterations I’ve made will correct those results too.

The second issue we’ve been having with the search engines is a result of our own mistakes. More than a couple of entries were published prematurely before having titles, resulting in listings with rather funny addresses. Sadly, its these entries that just seem to continue bringing us traffic, resulting in a rather confusing message stating how the article is no longer here when someone follows them through. Fingers crossed, that one is fixed too. Soda will happily automatically redirect your web browser (and the search engine spiders) to the neat and tidy new entry. Flawless; Or it will be once the search engines update their listings.

The net result? Increased traffic ranking of course. Alexa says we’ve moved up 99,301 in three months, but that wasn’t the goal here.

Traffic means nothing unless you can’t keep people interested. Content is obviously the number one priority, but I’m no author. Instead I’ve been trying to improve the usability of the site such that our authors work isn’t interupted by any nasty errors or issues, as well as adding other value-add functionality for those that notice it. For those that don’t, they’ll be the subject of part 2. If you don’t want to keep coming back and checking for updates, I suggest you have a look at our RSS feed.