I once heard a great oil painter say, “Unity with variety makes great pictures.” My first thought was, “How on earth can you have unity with variety? It seems like a contradiction.” From then on, I started really looking at the world around me, I began to see what he was talking about.

For example, in nature, a row of trees look similar, but still have variety in the branches, leaves and sizes. Clouds on a beautiful day will be off-white against a blue sky, but will have variety in sizes, shapes and distances. Consider the human face, we are used to seeing 2 eyes, 1 nose and 1 mouth, but there are differences that make us distinctly unique.

Lets take a closer look at this concept in a graphic example. Below we have 3 content boxes which represent areas which could possibly link to sections of a website. First of all, notice the similarities of these simple and uninspired boxes. We don’t know what to look at first and may not even be compelled to read the text at all. The boxes have the same shape, fonts, colors, and format. Boring.

Below are the new graphics which have been spiced up a bit with variations in color, font sizes and distances, but still have unity of shape, fonts and effects. We clearly know what to look at first, starting with the orange box labeled “1”. This is the main emphasis of the group. Then, we proceed to look at “2” and “3”.

Another thing to keep in mind when using graphic elements is unity with your website. Notice how I didn’t randomly choose orange, teal, and gray as my new box colors, I picked them because they are specific to the MoreVisibility website and will therefore strengthen branding.

Until next time, look at the world around you and be inspired by the beauty and wonder nature has to offer.

We all know that there is value in participating in social media networks from a search engine optimization (SEO) perspective.  There is link and traffic potential, the benefit of additional organic listings, and the ability to reach a targeted audience. As this is becoming more important for SEO almost everyday, there are often obstacles that must be overcome when participating outside of the U.S.  Recently I read an article about social media in China and came across a few interesting facts. 

China, with a unique and highly regulated media market, has one of the fastest growing online populations in the world. The Internet is censored of sensitive political content; however, this censorship has not hindered the growth of social media and online communities among the population. One research study noted that China’s blogging community is the largest in the world, more than both the U.S. and Western Europe combined. According to China’s Internet Network Information Center, the online population grew by 56% during the first six months of 2008 in comparison to the previous year. With these types of numbers, well-known social media giants are eager to become big players in this growing market, but have encountered a few difficulties along the way.

Unlike in the U.S. where users can freely post and share any information they choose (within reason), social sites in China are held accountable for all content that is posted and shared. Mainly content that is politically sensitive in nature is scrutinized, but these types of regulations play a part in making it difficult for sites outside of China to become as widely popular as they are in the U.S. Not only is it likely that websites outside of China are less familiar with the regulations and political environment, but they are also competing with locals who may have government associations and the ability to better influence the system.

China’s social networking sites have been required to develop robust systems to filter, block, and remove any content that may be considered unacceptable.  Many companies also have employees that serve as censorship teams to supervise the content and manually make changes to prevent the site from being banned.  Although social networking sites in the U.S. also employ technologies to detect and filter inappropriate and copyrighted content, they are not accustomed to a regulatory environment like that in China. 

In an effort to become big players in this market that has such tremendous growth potential, social media giants such as MySpace and Facebook have made adjustments and agreements, often relying on the partnership and cooperation of China based companies. For example, MySpace China is hosted on servers in China and licenses the brand to a company who then monitors the content. A Chinese-language version of Facebook has been developed and is located on offshore servers, avoiding the responsibility of supervising the content. Google Inc. has partnered with Tianya.cn to launch the Chinese social-networking sites Tianya Wenda and Tianya Laiba.  

Not all companies have found ways to weave through these difficult regulations as MySpace, Facebook and Google have. Others such eBay, Amazon.com and Yahoo! all have lost market share as a result of local competitors.

A common SEO technique is to make sure the content of your web page is placed as close to the top of your HTML as possible. This will help ensure that your relevant content achieves higher priority by search engine spiders. ASP.NET provides a great framework for developing feature rich web applications, especially with the addition of view state. View state gives web forms the ability to persist changes across postbacks. Other web scripting languages are not able to accomplish this easily, however, this benefit may have some negative SEO implications.

The view state of a page is placed by default in a hidden form field named ___VIEWSTATE at the top of the html source code. The contents of the __VIEWSTATE form field contain serialized information, which can get very large (tens of kilobytes), about various controls on the web page. When a web page does not have a lot of controls using view state, the hidden form field will look something like this…

… which is probably fine at the top of the page. But, often times a web page may have numerous controls, no matter how much it is optimized to minimize view state, which produce a view state value that looks something like this…

… actually it could go on and on. This particular view state sample (this is just a small portion) was 10 pages long! Needless to say, you don’t want that to appear before your precious web page content.

There is an easy way to move the __VIEWSTATE form field to the bottom of the html source code. By pasting the following VB.NET code, “as is”, into your web form, the view state will be moved to the bottom of the html source code right above the closing </form> tag…

Protected Overrides Sub Render(ByVal writer As System.Web.UI.HtmlTextWriter)<br />
Dim stringWriter As System.IO.StringWriter = New System.IO.StringWriter<br />
Dim htmlWriter As HtmlTextWriter = New HtmlTextWriter(stringWriter)<br />
MyBase.Render(htmlWriter)<br />
Dim html As String = stringWriter.ToString()<br />
Dim StartPoint As Integer = html.IndexOf("<input /><br />
If StartPoint >= 0 Then<br />
Dim EndPoint As Integer = html.IndexOf("/>", StartPoint) + 2<br />
Dim viewstateInput As String = html.Substring(StartPoint, EndPoint - StartPoint)<br />
html = html.Remove(StartPoint, EndPoint - StartPoint)<br />
Dim FormEndStart As Integer = html.IndexOf("") - 1<br />
If FormEndStart >= 0 Then<br />
html = html.Insert(FormEndStart, viewstateInput)<br />
End If<br />
End If<br />
writer.Write(html)<br />
End Sub

Now when you browse your web page, the __Viewstate hidden form field and its ridiculously long value, will be at the bottom of the page, and your precious content will be closer to the top, just how the search engines like it.