But, are you a victim of the tiniest branding failure – no Favicon?

The Favicon provides valuable and consistent branding and is never forgotten on a professionally built website.  Let’s look at why you should consider fixing the tiniest branding failure.

Favicon Facts

• Appears on your browser next to the address bar (where you see http://webpageadvisor.com) and on a browser tab. It also appears in your Bookmarks and History lists of sites. Some search engines and other sites also use Favicons when referring to websites.

First row: Twitter, blank, Facebook, Pandora, Google Analytics, Google Docs, Modern Drummer, Evernote, WebPageAdvisor, JBS Partners, blank, blank

• Favorites icon was shortened into Favicon.

• In 1999, IE5 was the first MS browser to support Favicons.

• The size of a Favicon is 16 X 16 pixels

• W3C Recommended syntax - <link rel=”icon” type=”image/<format name>” href=”http://Example (dot) com/favicon.<format extension>“>

Who Cares?

The purpose of the Favicon is to identify the site and provide branding in your browser.

Most browsers have multiple tabs open. The Favicon provides a billboard on your tab.

Similar to the power of an effective logo, a good Favicon allows people to instantly recognize your site visually without having to read text.

If you don’t have one, you miss out on these benefits and a default image is inserted on your behalf by default. It usually looks like a blank piece of paper. Or your CMS or hosting provider may insert their own favicon instead. Drupal and DreamHost do this.

The mobile browsing community does not care about Favicons at all because they aren’t shown.

Favicon Design

There are a couple of choices when deciding how to fill up that 16 X 16 space.  In all cases use just the primary corporate colors

1 – Use your logo

2 – Use the leading one, two or three first letters of each word in your company name

WebPageAdvisor Logo

3 – Use a graphic element that is embedded in your company name

Building Favicons

• Upload an image and get a favicon in return – http://tools.dynamicdrive.com/favicon/

• Draw your own favicon – http://www.favicon.cc/

Branding Failure Correction

Use a Favicon and cross the tiniest branding failure off of your list of things to fix.

If you can’t or don’t know how to create your Favicon I will create a Favicon for you.

Just be one of the first ten to write a blog post or article explaining why you want a Favicon along with a link to this post and we will get you sorted out for free.

The Screaming Frog SEO Spider presents more feasible data in a clearer format and I love it.

This desktop program for Mac or PC spiders your website collecting data for up to 500 pages when using the free version. Here is some of the information provided:

1. Links
2. Images
3. CSS
4. Scripts
5. Apps
6. Meta Title – shows the text along with a character count
7. Meta Description- shows the text along with a character count
8. Meta Keyword- shows the text along with a character count
9. H1 and H2 – heading tag text and character count
10. Status codes - Server errors and Redirects (2xx, 5xx, 3xx)
11. Meta Robots – no – index, follow, archive snippet, odp, ydir and more
12. Meta Refresh
13. Canonoical link element
14. In and Out links
15. Anchor Text – for all links and even images that are linked
16. Follow / no follow
17. Images - missing alt text, length of alt text, image file size
18. Custom search can even be added

After the launching the program it is very simple to get started. Just type in the URL and click Start. You can watch the data begin to appear before your very eyes.

The Data is Organized into Tabs

They include:

1. Internal
2. External
3. Response Codes
4. URI
5. Page Titles
6. Meta Description
7. Meta Keywords
8. H1
9. H2
10. Images
11. Meta and Canonical
12. Custom

The expandable bottom pane shows detailed information on any entry above.

These four lower tabs are:

1. URL Info
2. In Links
3. Out Links
4. Image Info

Across the bottom there is information presented to show if the spider is currently active, the average and current URIs and how many pages have been spidered.

How Do I Use It?

When getting acquainted with a new website I like to scan and see what stands out.  Last week I got a call about migrating and redesigning an existing website on a new platform. Using the SEO Spider I can quickly decide whether the site is well build or a mess.

I like to look at the URLs and see whether the directory structure and page names appear to be well thought out.  Sometimes pages and page titles get edited but the URL is not updated.

Status Codes and their status is very important. I like to see a lot of 200 and OK.  Otherwise there is trouble.

Looking over the meta titles, meta descriptions, meta keywords, H1, H2 and the character length of each of these is important.

The first check is do they exist. Missing all of this data is a bad sign.

The Second check is whether they are identical on every page, another bad sign.

The third check is whether they are well written, seem to have good keywords included and are consistent.  If the meta title is about website reviews, the meta description is about shopping centers and H1 is about hair extensions then we have a serious problem. More serious than if they were all blank.

I also like to check the file size and number of inlinks and outlinks to ensure things look reasonable.

An Example Site Review

In this case most of the site data looked reasonable. However, I did find that all meta descriptions were identical and all 187 characters long, which is too long. Interestingly the meta keywords on each page are an exact match for the meta description, almost.  Only 166 characters this time.  This is also too long. And they were all badly worded.

Images and H1 and H2 were completely missing from the website.  Only three meta titles were found across all the pages of the website.

With this quick review taking less than 10 minutes I can see right away that this client will greatly benefit from key word research and populating the meta fields correctly.

Conclusion

While Xenu does produce a nice little webpage to display the data that is easy to email, Screaming Frog will let you export all your data to Excel or as a CSV which is super handy for sorting and focusing.

The only down side of Screaming From SEO Spider is that if you are dealing with a site larger than 500 pages you have to pay an annual fee of (99 pounds) or about $166 for a license. I would kind of like one-time fees better, but heh, it’s a great revenue model.

If you need to check a website or give an assessment of a blog definitely use the Screaming From SEO Spider to quickly gather invaluable information.

What’s your favorite feature on the Screaming Frog SEO Spider? What is missing? Do you have a better SEO Spider to share with us?

Why a Robots.txt File?

The web is built on standards, often called protocols.  These “rules” allow us all to communicate more effectively and allow the various systems to work effectively.  The formal names for the “rules” behind the Robots.txt file include the Robots Exclusion Protocol or the Robot Exclusion Standard and sometimes the robots.txt protocol.

Stop the Bot

The purpose of the Robots.txt protocol is to allow website owners to provide instructions for web crawlers or spiders and web robots that search the web for data.This file is meant to tell them where NOT to go.  This is the no trespassing sign for your files.

On the other hand the Sitemap is the welcome sign for web crawlers or spiders and web robots.

Robots.txt = exclusion
Sitemaps = inclusion

It is for this reason that the Allow syntax in a robots.txt is not really needed normally.  The intent is for exclusion. The rest of the site is assumed to be free and open for searching.

Most thorough site evaluations check to ensure that a Robots.txt file is present, Web Page Advisor included.

What Goes In a Robots.txt File?

Here is  an example robots.txt from the WordPress Codex, which was taken from AskApache.com

1. User-agent: *
2. Disallow: /cgi-bin
3. Disallow: /wp-admin
4. Disallow: /wp-includes
5. Disallow: /wp-content/plugins
6. Disallow: /wp-content/cache
7. Disallow: /wp-content/themes
8. Disallow: /trackback
9. Disallow: /feed
10. Disallow: /comments
11. Disallow: /category/*/*
12. Disallow: */trackback
13. Disallow: */feed
14. Disallow: */comments
15. Disallow: /*?*
16. Disallow: /*?
17. Allow: /wp-content/uploads
18. # Google Image
19. User-agent: Googlebot-Image
20. Disallow:
21. Allow: /*
22. # Google AdSense
23. User-agent: Mediapartners-Google*
24. Disallow:
25. Allow: /*
26. # digg mirror
27. User-agent: duggmirror
28. Disallow: /
29. Sitemap: http://www.example.com/sitemap.xml

What Does that Mean?

Line 1 above allows you to name the search bots that these instructions apply to.  In this case the asterisk * means that it applies to all.

User-agent: *

Disallow: /cgi-bin

#  Google Image

What Should Your Robots.txt File Contain?

You can survey your colleagues and competition to get ideas to consider.  Visit any site and append “/robots.txt” to the URL.  So, for this site, you would visit www.WebPageAdvisor.com/robots.txt to see my Robots.txt file.

Here are a few ideas to consider excluding for personal or security reasons:

Robots.txt is NOT Security

1. Personal photos stored on your hosting account
2. Password files
3. Backups or previous versions of your website
4. Sensitive e-commerce data
5. PayPal connection strings
6. Admin and User account files
7. Plugin, cache and theme files

The other exclusions included above are for SEO purposes, specifically to reduce duplicate content.  Although valid, keep in mind that Google sees thousands of WordPress sites and has probably figured out that the feed, category and comment pages are not meant to be the canonical URLs for your content.

Google Image Search can bring a hefty amount of traffic to many sites. However, if you sell photos, you may not want that kind of traffic.  You then have a reason to exclude the Google Images bot.

Some people don’t want to appear in the Internet Wayback Machine, which is also called the Internet Archive. The following will block the Wayback Machine from visiting your site.

User-agent: ia_archiver
Disallow: /

User-agent: ia_archiver/1.6
Disallow: /

Recommendations

1. See what your current Robots.txt file looks like  (type in yourdomain.com/robots.txt)
2. See what your competitors and colleagues are doing
3. Think about what is on your account that you don’t want to see in the Search Results

It is interesting to look around and find sites with a Robots.txt file such as this example.  It may be part of a default install on that host.

For example, I happened across this one

User-agent: *
Disallow:

Sitemap: http://www.woothemes.com/sitemap.xml.gz

That is pretty useless. It basically means “All User-agents are Disallowed nowhere. Here is my sitemmap”  I think all of that is implied by default.  In the same way that the Robots.txt is found in the same location on most servers, the Sitemap.xml file is also found in a standard location.  So, the above file serves no purpose literally.  Again you can visit the sitemap.xml of most sites by following this example: http://webpageadvisor.com/sitemap.xml

Caution!

Be careful. If you copy an example be sure to edit the website name and enter your own domain name and remove the example.com domain name.

Be sure you know what you are excluding.  Many a site has accidentally excluded all search engines from all or part of a public website.  Not good.

Test your Robots.txt file immediately.  Create an Account with Google WebMaster Tools. Go into Crawler Access and then the Test Robots.txt tab and follow the instructions.   Or you could use this site http://www.searchenginepromotionhelp.com/m/robots-text-tester/robots-checker.php which looks to be helpful in testing your Robots.txt file.  Both sites will also help you create the file as well.

Here is the kicker, Just Because You Tell Them to Stay Away Doesn’t Mean that They Will Stay Away. There are bots that ignore the Robots.txt. So, please do not think of this file as a “security measure”. This file provides advisory information and has no capacity to prevent access. To prevent access you need to go elsewhere.  Consider moving it or adding additional security measures to restrict access. For example on a Linux server use the .htaccess file to restrict access.  Password protection on the file or using https (SSL) can also help.

Resources

Here is a list of web robots with a fairly extensive set of data for each one.  Maybe you want to research a bot that has been sucking up your bandwidth and then block it after review.

As mentioned above, AskApache has a wealth of information on many subjects, including Robots.txt

WordPress.org offers an example and a few links for more information which is helpful.

And as a comparative resource you may find the Robots.txt file entry at Wikipedia helpful.

While creating a recent Web Page Advisor report (links to a sample report), I found that not only was the phone number not on the home page, not in the header or footer of  every page, but also not on the Contact page.

Another report revealed that the phone number was formatted in such a way that the iPhone would not allow me to call the number by tapping on the number.  Such a simple thing to be done correctly.

Here are three common formats for presenting telephone numbers in the United States.

Help Your Visitors Call You

1. 123-456-7890
2. (123) 456-7890
3. 123.456.7890

Believe it or not there are international standards organizations (links to a PDF) that provide in depth documentation on how to notate a phone number.  One such body informs us that the use of () (parenthesis) is to indicate numbers that are not always dialed. Think of county codes when you are in country. The + (plus) sign indicates the international prefix.

In this case the area code is definitely required to dial the number, placing parentheses around the area could would not be according to this standard.

Typing the parenthesis is harder than simply typing a hyphen.  And typing the hyphen is more prone to mistakes according to some librarians.

The period separator provides much less space between the numerals, making it harder to read.

For these three reasons I prefer the hyphen when notating a phone number.

Please keep all other characters away from your phone number if you want the number to be “dialable” from an iPhone.  Some sites scrunch up the characters to save space. Don’t do that. Also, don’t add a hyphen (for example -123-456-7890) to set the number apart.

Don’t present your phone number as an image or flash, else you can count on less phone calls, especially from mobile site visitors.

From an SEO perspective a local telephone number is a location indicator. People and search engines can recognize and identify an area code.  As Google places more emphasis on local search you may find an advantage in providing local information, such as your local phone number, as compared to competitors who do not.

As mobile web browsing increases, be sure that your phone number on your website is highly visible and accessible.

What kind of phone number issues have you seen on websites? What are your best practices?

Mr. Whitley tells the story better than I could. Here is his story of why a web page advisor is needed.

http://www.voiceoftech.com/swhitley/?p=538

This was just the bump I needed to take a smoldering idea and turn it into this web site.

White text on a black background is hard to read.

Black is Cool

But you want to be different and cool. Black is cool. More black is cooler.
Great idea, let’s make the website black. Cool.
Black text on a white background is easy to read.

Well, the black font is now invisible on the black website. Woops!
No problem, we can change the font to white. Now it is highly visible and there is lots of contrast.

Black text on a white background.

Problem Not solved.

Black Background and White Text is not Cool

Here is where I disagree with those who love white text on a black background. Readability just took a huge nose dive.
Don’t believe me?
See is believing.

See the images above, but for a more immersive experience visit the link below and read the text all the way down to the bottom of the page. And then click the “this link”  link in the text.  Here is the website to make a quick visit to and them come back.  http://www.ironicsans.com/owmyeyes/
I suggest that your eyes will send out a sigh of relief after switching from the black background to the white background.

One Effective Solution

If you really want a dark website, produce a dark design. But create a main body text box and place the dark text on a white or even light gray background.

Readability: The ease with which most people can read text.

Readability Factors:

Low contrast results in poor readability

Contrast – difference in brightness and color between the font and the background. Black font on white is best

Line Height – the space between lines of text. Too close and it is hard to read.

Letter Spacing – the space between the letters. Too much and too little makes it harder to read.

Text formatting improves readability, right side. from Cameron Moll

Line Length – Number of words on a line. Very common error. Best is 10 to 14 words per line.

Formatting – The position of text relative to surrounding text. Related text near. Unrelated text further away.

To improve the readability of your website consider the benefits of black text on a white background and review your line height, letter spacing, line length and formatting for the best readability possible.

Are you a fan of black websites or do you find them hard to read?