#Alabama#Alaska#American Samoa#Arizona#Arkansas#California#Colorado#Connecticut#Delaware#District of Columbia#Florida#Georgia#Guam#Hawaii#Idaho#Illinois#Indiana#Iowa#Kansas#Kentucky#Louisiana#Maine#Maryland#Massachusetts#Michigan#Minnesota#Mississippi#Missouri#Montana#Nebraska#Nevada#New Hampshire#New Jersey#New Mexico#New York#North Carolina#North Dakota#Northern Marianas Islands#Ohio#Oklahoma#Oregon#Pennsylvania#Puerto Rico#Rhode Island#South Carolina#South Dakota#Tennessee#Texas#Utah#Vermont#Virginia#Virgin Islands#Washington#West Virginia#Wisconsin#Wyoming

And here is the entire string, including “State” as a label:

State#Alabama#Alaska#American Samoa#Arizona#Arkansas#California#Colorado#Connecticut#Delaware#District of Columbia#Florida#Georgia#Guam#Hawaii#Idaho#Illinois#Indiana#Iowa#Kansas#Kentucky#Louisiana#Maine#Maryland#Massachusetts#Michigan#Minnesota#Mississippi#Missouri#Montana#Nebraska#Nevada#New Hampshire#New Jersey#New Mexico#New York#North Carolina#North Dakota#Northern Marianas Islands#Ohio#Oklahoma#Oregon#Pennsylvania#Puerto Rico#Rhode Island#South Carolina#South Dakota#Tennessee#Texas#Utah#Vermont#Virginia#Virgin Islands#Washington#West Virginia#Wisconsin#Wyoming

Cforms II is the best Wordpress Plugin out there for building forms – visit their site for more information.

Anyone who designs HTML for emails on a constant basis should set up a testing server but for someone like me who only has to create a couple HTML emails, max per web design project, I found Campaign Monitor to be the best free option, hands down. 

They allow as many free test emails as you want – I just set up a free account and within seconds I was putting the email together in an incredibly user-friendly interface (great work, guys). I really enjoy this tool – I can’t say much about their email campaign management features, but I am very impressed with the testing interface so I’m sure it’s great.

They also allow you to test the email in a large selection of email clients (I only really cared about gmail and Outlook but they have pretty much everything), which is obviously a must for large-scale email campaigns.

The Problem With Coding and Sending HTML Emails

You can’t send standards-compliant HTML with a nice stylesheet to structure the layout, you have to use tables, spans, and (sad but true) the font tag.

And of course, the main reason you want to send a HTML email (flyer, newsletter, or whatever) is so that you can send in-line pictures in that email. The problem is, you can’t simply send the images as attachments, you have to actually install them on your server (same server you’re mailing from) and link to them with absolute paths – that’s where testing them becomes extremely inconvenient.

If nothing else, it is a good source for ratings, links, and traffic, but it could possibly generate some leads, depending on how popular it gets. We’ll see I guess. Read Mashable’s review for a more intensive review, I just signed up.

After posting my Geo Sitemap tutorial, I have had a difficult time getting my own Geo Sitemap, and my clients’ Geo Sitemaps to validate in Google Webmaster Tools.

If you add your Geo Sitemap to your general XML sitemap, it isn’t going to validate in Google Webmaster Tools, you’ll get this error:

“Status: Invalid XML tag,” as well as this line: “This tag was not recognized. Please fix it and resubmit.” followed by a reference to the line on the file containing the <geo> tag.

Apparently, even if you include Google’s geo namespace, their XML parser isn’t smart enough to figure out that the sitemap is referencing both regular web page, and a Geo Sitemap (KML file). Instead, Google recommends using a separate sitemap for every type of content that you have on your website (regular sitemap, Video Sitemap, Geo Sitemap, etc.). Here is an excerpt from an interesting discussion in Google Groups:

“One thing I would recommend is that you spit your URLs into separate Sitemap files based on the kind of content they’re pointing to. In other words, make a single Sitemap file just for your geo-content, and a different Sitemap file for (X)HTML / web-search based content. That makes it easier for us to recognize the kind of content that you’re pointing to.” 

The Solution

Here is the simplest solution:

• Create a Sitemap Index. Learn more about Sitemap Index files - basically a Sitemap Index file is used to list every sitemap on your website (for example, I have a sitemap in my root folder, and one in my blog directory that is generated automatically via a Wordpress plugin. Both are referenced in my Sitemap Index file.) Include links to each sitemap you plan to implement.
• Create a sitemap for each type of content on your website that you want search engines to index. I created sitemap.xml for my web pages, and geo-sitemap.xml for my KML Geo Sitemap.
• Submit all three to Google Webmaster Tools, and this time they will all validate.

From the sound of the Google Groups discussion, Webmaster Tools should eventually be smart enough to contain references to both kinds of content (which would make sense, considering Google’s official documentation says nothing about separating the two). For now though, it looks like we have to separate sitemaps based on content.

You want to make your website as informative as possible, right? For search engines, users – everybody. Help search engines, disabled (blind) users, and any users who may not understand the meaning of your acronym or abbreviation by using semantic XHTML tags like the <acronym>, <abbr>, and <address> tags in context.

If your website, for example, is about Medical Transcriptions, but you refer to them on the website only using the medical jargon MT, search engines and users looking at small snippets of text may confuse the acronym “MT” for Media Temple (MT), or the abbreviation for Montana (MT), so use the <acronym> tag to specify what you are referring to. The more specific you can be, the more likely you are to rank for those relevant terms, and as a result, your users content to be more informative and useful.

To see it in action, hover your mouse over this: XHTML. You’ll see a tool tip with the written-out version: Extensible HyperText Markup Language. If users or search engines don’t already know what the acronym stands for, then the title attribute (see below) will inform them, and text-to-speech engines will be able to see that the full term that the acronym represents as well. 

Finally, using the <address> tag is getting increased attention lately, especially for local businesses and websites that users would search for with Google Local Search, Maps, YellowPages.com, Yelp.com, etc. The <address> tag helps to isolate the address from the rest of the copy on your website, making your website more relevant to local or geo targeted search queries, such as “san diego pizza” or “pizza 94023″ (searching by zip code).

Code Examples

How to use the  <acronym> tag:

1. <acronym title="National Aeronautics and Space Administration">NASA</acronym>
2. <acronym title="Search Engine Optimization">SEO</acronym>
3. <acronym title="Medical Transcription">MT</acronym>

How to use the <abbr> tag:

1. <abbr title="Utah">UT</abbr>
2. <abbr title="Corporation">Corp</abbr>.

How to use the <address> tag:

1. <address>
2. Address:14 East Anywhere Drive<br />
3. City, <abbr title="State">ST</state> 55555
4. </acronym>

When it comes to distinguising between acronyms, initialisms, and abbreviations, the following guides are very useful. When it comes to implementing the <acronym> and <abbr> tags, the W3C appears to suggest that <acronym> should be used for acronyms and initialisms, and <abbr> is used for abbreviated and shortened words (Inc., Gov., etc.).

• The W3C guide for Acronyms and Abbreviations
• Grammar Girl Abbreviations, Acronyms, and Initialisms
• This article sorts out the confusion over the correct use of abbreviations and acronyms: http://juicystudio.com/article/abbreviations-acronyms.php

Thanks to Aaron Wall’s latest SEO tool – the instantly popular SEO Toolbar, I was able to get rid of almost all my other SEO addons and scripts, including SEO for Firefox. Even though the SEO toolbar has a button to click to see nofollow links on any given page, the feature can’t be turned on by default for all pages, so that nofollow links are instantly viewable.

So, I modified Joost’s script to highlight all nofollow links with a nice pink background, whether the nofollow is specified within the anchor or Meta tag.

Install the Script, if you like.

Install Greasemonkey

How to install: First, install Greasemonkey with the link above, then click on the “Install the Script” link above that. Greasemonkey will automatically detect that it is a Greasemonkey user script, and will ask if you want to install it.

I’ve seen a whole lot of websites lately that are wasting space (and the time it took to write it) by implementing the Meta Robots tag like this:

1. <meta name="robots" content="all, index, follow" />

If you want search engine bots to crawl and index your website, then just leave it alone. By default, search engines will crawl, index, and archive every page on your website that they can find by following links. You also don’t have to say “all” — every bot that obeys the Robots Meta tag will obey it by default.

So not only is that example pointless because that is the default, it is repeating the same command twice!

Here are some handy uses for the Meta robots tag (these work for Yahoo!, MSN, and Google bots):

Normal talk: Just ignore this page – don’t keep a copy because I don’t want to see it in search engine results. I don’t want you to follow the links on this page, either.

Code:

1. <meta name="robots" content="none" />

(surprised that it’s not “noindex, nofollow”? – that’s just a long and unnecessary of telling search engines to ignore the page completely)

Normal talk: I don’t want to see this page in search results, so don’t keep a copy of this page. You can follow the links on this page, though – those websites deserve credit.

Code:

1. <meta name="robots" content="noindex, follow" />

Normal talk: Take as many copies of this page as you want and hook me up with traffic from your search engine results. Don’t follow the links on this page though, those websites aren’t that great anyways.

Code:

1. <meta name="robots" content="index, nofollow" />

Normal talk: You can make a copy of this page to plug into your algorithm, but don’t give anyone access to it with the “cache” link in search engine results.

Code:

1. <meta name="robots" content="noarchive" />

Normal talk: I don’t want you to pull any text from my website to use in search engine results. Just a link will do. You’re free to index this page and follow all links.

Code:

1. <meta name="robots" content="nosnippet" />

Normal talk: Stop using my Dmoz.org listing description in search results – I want you to use a snippet of text from the page to show users the contextual relevance of my site to their search query.

Code:

1. <meta name="robots" content="noodp" />

(NOODP is an acronym “No Open Directory Project”)

Some Useful Googlebot Meta Tags:

These Meta tags work exclusively in Google (all of these would work with the “robots” name, but since Googlebot is the only bot that officially follows these REP directives, I’ll use “googlebot” or “google”, in the case of the notranslate tag):

Normal talk: Ignore the images on this page – I don’t want to see them in Google Image Search.

Code:

1. <meta name="googlebot" content="noimageindex">

Normal talk: Heads up – this page will be out of commission (deleted, expired, moved, etc.) on this day.

Code:

1. <meta name="googlebot" content="unavailable_after: 13-DEC-2011 11:45:00 PST">

Normal talk: Don’t translate the content on this page into other languages.

Code:

1. <meta name="google" value="notranslate">

! Notice that in this case, the Meta name is “google”, not “googlebot”.

“And returning to the importance of the written content: make it so useful that your visitors will want to link to it. Make it so remarkable they will share it; make it factual so that they will cite it in their blogs, articles, and reports. Finally, make it relevant so that search engines will deem it worthy of great rankings.”
-Me

Websites need to be useful. They need to match your visitor’s expectations and needs, but until you ask them for feedback, optimizing your website for usability is just a guessing game.

There are several options for getting that feedback, some more expensive than others. The expensive routes include hiring firms dedicated to optimizing websites for usability, and if you can afford it, that’s an investment that will most likely yeild some significant returns. 

There is a free alternative though, and although it isn’t as informative as organized focus groups, it will get you headed in the right direction and offer enough feedback to dramatically improve the user experience, from your visitor’s perspectives.

4Q is a web survey – it shows a popup (visit the 4Q website to see what that looks like) when you first visit the site, asking users to opt-in to a little survey. If the user clicks “Yes,” a new window will appear and then minimize, so that they can finish the survey after leaving your website. You decide the questions that will be asked, and the user is given the opportunity at the end to write their general thoughts, insights, and feedback regarding your website. 4Q takes care of gathering and reporting the data, which you can access by logging into the admin section on their website.

Good questions to ask may include:

1. Rate your overall satisfaction after browsing through the website.
2. What was the  purpose of your visit?
3. Did you find what you were looking for?
4. Rate the difficulty you experienced navigating the website.
5. Rate the usefulness of the content on the website.
6. (If testing a new website design) If you are a returning visitor, how do you like the new look?
7. Do our solutions/products/services match what you were looking for?
8. Please describe what you liked about the website.
9. Please describe any changes we can make to improve the website.

Motivate your visitors to take the survey with a promo code, free shipping, or a free whitepaper, and don’t take too much of their time.

You don’t want to ask all these questions, and depending on your reasons for implementing the survey on your site, pick questions that will meet your goals. And don’t ask too many questions – your visitors are doing you a favor, so don’t waste their time. They will be more likely to fill out the survey if you offer something in return, such as a promo code, free shipping, or a free whitepaper. 

The admin section allows you to manage the amount of users that will see the survey, so that you don’t have to bombard 100% of your traffic with the survey (make sure you use a number high enough to yeild accurate statistics, though). 

It is important to look at the results of the survey with the right attitude – you will most likely be very surprised at some of the responses, but avoid discarding scathing or seemingly unreasonable feedback – there is a reason for it. It’s an opportunity to improve your website in ways that will affect your visitor’s attitudes towards your website, and will result in higher conversions and results.

4Q is a joint venture between Avinash Kaushik (wrote Web Analytics: An Hour a Day) and iPerceptions, a company that uses analytics to measure the perceptions and attitudes of website visitors in order to improve user experience.

SEO Book.com just released the ultimate SEO toolbar - and so far, I’m really pleased with it. I’ll even get to delete a few SEO Firefox addons that I won’t be needing anymore.

The goods include all the website overview stats that SEO for Firefox provided (Yahoo links, domain age, Alexa rank, directory links, etc. – visible right on the toolbar), as well as a handy keyword tool that allows you to enter a keyword right in the sidebar and look it up in all the major keyword tools across the web. Very handy indeed. 

To see and download the toolbar, go to http://tools.seobook.com/seo-toolbar/