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Alright, a more technical session. So far SearchFest 09 has done a really good job of getting talented people in the search sphere. This session had 3 speakers, Aaron Kahlow of Online Marketing Connect, Susan Moskwa of Google, and Vanessa Fox of ninebyblue.com, and I was satisfied that they gave good technical tips to improving rankings. Aaron started out by giving listing his 10 favorite tips. A few are:

• Use session stores (cookie, db, etc) don't put session id in url
• No Java or Flash based nav
• Use XML and HTML sitemaps

Concerning the Flash-based nav, that's been pertinent to a client of ours, Destination Realty. They have a funky, hip design, and the original designer implemented the sidebar nav in Flash. At least it was done using swfObject, but still, we couldn't get a hold of the original FLA, so we couldn't update the nav. Besides having a nice looking font, there is an animation that goes along with it. I was able to recreate 80% of the animation in javascript, no Flash needed. With script.aculo.us, jQuery, MooTools, and all the other javascript libraries out there that have animation built in, I hope to see more use of them for traditional animation effects.

On the XML and HTML sitemaps, I had a question which I posed to Aaron. He's gonna get back to me on this, but my question was: The XML sitemap I submit to a search engine contains fully-qualified links to pages (eg: loc="http://www.swipht.com") where my HTML sitemap might contain <a href="/">www.swipht.com</a>. Is there any penalty for not having them the same? My gut feeling is no, unless the sitemap points to www.swipht.com and the site is browsed via swipht.com.

Isn't it time we get rid of www?

Susan Moskwa from Google spoke next. She works with (GET INFO) and had more tips. The new one, in terms of what search engines are looking for, is the canonical relationship. I'll read up on this and let you know what I find out. Amusingly, she informed us that the Google Bot is cheap (not going to index your shopping cart) and forgetful (not going to index password-protected areas) so you might as well save it some processing and disallow in robots.txt

Finally, Vanessa Fox spoke on diagnosing technical issues. Her methods include:

• Access the current site
• Identify the problem
• Analyze the root cause
• Make improvements

Simple and hopefully effective. One site I'm eager to look at is janeandrobot.com, one of Vanessa's SEO resources. A bit more technical in nature, hopefully it'll have some good techniques.