In the past, when we talked about trying to move our websites to the top of the search results, we called it SEM, which is short for Search Engine Management.  SEM wasn’t really the best term because we indeed do not manage the search engines at all and after all, as SERP managers it’s our job to be concise.  Managing the search engine is a job for the folks at Google, Bing or other web index organizations.

The popular term most recently was SEO, which is short for Search Engine Optimization, but again, we really aren’t optimizing any search engines, so again, that term is also somewhat inaccurate when considering the whole scope of the project.

Therefore, here at Wandzilak Web Design, we conclude that the term SEO might better describe a page’s ability to perform well in the indexes based on its structure matrices alone.  Structure matrices include:

• Complete Metadata
• Search Engine Friendly URLs
• Keyword Effectiveness
• Valid Markup Code
• Script Offsetting
• Outline Format
• Content Silos
• Semantic Themeing
• Internal Link and Navigation
• Control Files like robots.txt and sitemap.xml

These are the foundational elements to work from.  With solid SEO structures in place, we can begin our SERP Management Campaign. (The fun part!)

Search Engine Result Page Management or SERP Management, best describes the full scope of tasks involved in promoting a website or webpage to number one on the major search engines like Google and Bing.

SERP Management includes all of the SEO matrices as well as:

• Digital Asset Evaluation
• Current & Potential Authority Determination
• Keyword Valuation & Determination
• Semantic Themeing of All Digital Assets
• Competition Evaluation
• Strategic & Tactical Interlinking & Back linking

SERP Management focuses on the creation of authority, or in other words, believability.  Fundamentally, the reason a site will out-perform another site is because the search engine has found more evidence to support the case.  This evidence is in the form of Digital Assets.  Digital Assets are any element on the web which can be derived from your website, or other websites that post back-links or content about your site.

SERP Management employs both macro and micro perspectives to accomplish this goal. In establishing authority many details must be addressed.

An initial Digital Asset Evaluation is performed to determine both a site’s current authority as well as its potential authority.  Often a site’s potential authority is easily unlocked by addressing any mal-formed SEO structures or optimizing page titles and urls to become relevant and concise.

Keyword Relevance, Prevalence & Effectiveness

SERP Management involves understanding not only the terms of an industry, but also understanding the way people search, the terms they use and how search trends change over time.  In every case, there are terms related to a topic or industry that are used more often than others.  The effectiveness of a term is based not only on its frequency of occurrence (prevalence), but also its accepted meaning (relevance).  Through the creation of well constructed, accurate and definitive data a site gains authority and trust.  Add that to the already sound SEO structures, and the site is well on its way.

What is Semantic Themeing?

I explain it like this.  When a spider (search engine index agent) sees the word Doctor on a site, it knows that it’s seen that word before, literally millions of times.  It knows that often when it sees the word Doctor it also sees the word patient, or appointment, or prescription or combinations of those words.  These become the supporting terms or semantic theme.

Semantic Themeing is the process of optimizing content to contain correct ratios of supporting key terms.

Semantic Themeing is important because the algorithms that search engines use allow them to assess the authority of a document by how thoroughly the key terms are supported.

 Conclusion

SEO and SERP Management both have their places in our description of the task of promoting a web site within an index, however SERP Management is a more accurate term to describe the big picture.  SEO seems best used to describe internal site elements.

Discuss your view by leaving a comment.

WordPress turns white or flashes white for a second because of latency.  I have not seen this issue with any local installations.  One of the culprits seems to be that jQuery is being loaded by multiple plugins, each using a different version in most cases.  There also appears to be several plugins that can cause this as well.

After some frustration and searching the internet exhaustively for an answer to this issue, I came up with an extremely simple yet acceptable (imo) workaround until we can get it completely solved.

The solutions I ran accross range from calling an empty script tag just before your call to your style sheet.

Like this -

<script type=”text/javascript”>
</script>

To calling a blank style sheet for print media

Like this -

<link rel=”stylesheet” type=”text/css” media=”print” href=”print.css” />

To downgrading your jQuery version to 1.4.4

Like this -

// Downgrade to jQuery 1.4.4 in order to support jQuery Tools
function downgrade_jquery() {
global $wp_scripts;// We want to use version 1.4.4 of jQuery, but it may break something in the admin so we only load it on the actual site.
if ( !is_admin() ) :
wp_deregister_script(‘jquery’);
wp_register_script(‘jquery’, ‘http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.4.4/jquery.min.js’, false, ’1.4.4′);
endif;
}
add_action( ‘wp_head’, downgrade_jquery() );

But none of these solutions worked for us.  So until a better solution reveals itself, here’s what we did.  I hope this helps.

The Workaround

1) Create a tag in your style sheet for the HTML element.

2) Add the attributes from your body tag, like your background image and or your background color.

Like this -

html {
background-color: #ddd;
background-image: url(images/bg.jpg);
}

That’s it.  Hit refresh!  This workaround even works in Chrome but of course it seems to work best in FireFox.