We had one website where it looked perfect in Firefox, Opera and Safari. Also if we checked it on a system with an English Windows OS is also looked fine. But it would only render a white screen in Internet Explorer on a system with a Japanese OS. When we checked the page source, the markup was there but only a white screen showed in the browser.

We originally has the markup like this:

< !DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"
head
title Our site title /title
meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
meta name="keywords" content="widget 1, widget 2, local widgets” /?
meta name="description" content="Widgets by a local widget maker you can trust"/>

The page title was at the top. Again this rendered fine in firefox and opera but we had the white screen of death in IE.

We then changed the order of the head items:

PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"
head
meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
title>Our site title
meta name="keywords" content="widget 1, widget 2, local widgets” /?
meta name="description" content="Widgets by a local widget maker you can trust"/>

Vola! Japanese IE rendered fine after putting meta http-equiv=”Content-Type” content=”text/html; charset=utf-8″ /> before any other head content.

Bill Hartzer posted an excellent article at WebProNews about SEO for corporate websites. He goes over the most important items, including: the home page, product pages, news, articles, leadership and ROI.

Although your corporate website does not allow customers to purchase products or services online, your company can benefit greatly from optimizing your website for the search engines. Ranking well in the search engine results will not only increase your business’s brand awareness, it will bring increased sales leads, which will lead to increased ROI from your corporate website.

First, he recommended that the corporate homepage have paragraphs of text and links to the most important pages in the site.

Second, the article mentions that on the product and services pages, each page should be unique. These pages should also include several paragraphs of text with targeted keywords in that text.

Product or services pages can help bring in sales leads for your company. When potential customers are looking for a product or service the company sells, they typically turn to search engines. When they find your product or services page listed in the search engines, the visitor will come directly to your product or service page. They’ll typically take a few seconds to glance at what you have to offer; its at that time when you need to give them some sort of action to take.

Mr. Hartzer also argues that the company news and events pages are an important way to increase brand awareness and generate leads. He makes a great recommendation about trade shows:

Oftentimes people search at the search engines for trade shows they’re going to attend. By including separate web pages about each trade show the company is going to attend or exhibit at, there’s a good chance that people searching for that trade show in the search engines will see the page on the corporate website mentioning the fact that the company is attending; this can lead to company and brand awareness as well as potential sales leads. If someone is searching for the trade show then they’re interested in that particular industry; so those types of visitors to your corporate site are extremely targeted and valuable.

Corporate websites offer an excellent way to market the company as an industry leader. Including articles from the company’s experts will increase the website’s credibility. Additionally having information about the company’s executives is helpful for those who search for this information. Each leadership page should have it unique title and description.

The article’s concluding paragraph is a must read for corporate or “in-house” SEO:

By making a few changes to your corporate website that dont sacrifice its quality and good looks, you can make your corporate website pay for itself by turning it into a serious lead generation tool. Not only will your corporate website be found at the top of the search results, it will be seen as an industry leader and start to show up everywhere for your company’s most important keyword phrases, the phrases related to your products and services. And not only will the corporate website be found more often in the search engines, it will increase your company’s brand awareness.

Google announced in the Google Sitemaps blog an improved interface, more tools for webmasters and a notification area explaining to site owners of potential problems with their website that could draw penalties.

The new interface and reporting is an improvement. The new “indexing snapshot” provides:

• If site is in the index
• When Googlebot last accessed the home page
• If some pages of the site are partially indexed
• If the home page is currently inaccessible
• If Googlebot has encountered a large number of errors when trying to crawl the site

There is also a new webmaster help center. It includes a central place for webmasters to get more information about Googles guidelines, details on Googlebot, ranking, indexing and about sitemaps.

Interestingly Google has added a section that notifies webmasters if their site is in a violation of Google guidelines that may result in penalties. While I hope to never find any messages there, I applaud Google trying to improve its relationship with the webmaster community more. I think that the latest improvements will generate goodwill.

RSS and Search Engines. Search engines are always watchful for fresh content. Google, Yahoo and MSN will generally reward sites that provide new content on a regular basis. For example, if I write an article every week and place it on my web site. I then link to that article from my home page and from my news or articles page. That article is made available to others as an item in my RSS file. People who use RSS readers like My Yahoo! or other news aggregators can read, then link to the article from their website.

I have now syndicated my content for others to view. This is a great way to improve or maintain your search engine rankings by naturally getting incoming links. Every time you write a new article it will be instantly available to thousands of webmasters, with a link back to your website.