uxTags – VEO is the new SEO

September 17th, 2010 | by Ozgur Cem Sen |

You may want the link below once you’re finished reading and realize that this is exactly what you wanted:

http://uxtags.appspot.com/invite/?ic=I1eSzCspKFo8gRDRAynETqs0Yn7ECwwAirbuIIBFlIo

uxTags, short for “user experience tags“, is enriching a web page’s browsing experience by presenting the visitor with a number of significant key phrases on the page. Perhaps an alternative way to look at it is; Think of micro formats embedded in HTML – to somewhat help the machine readability. uxTags helps human readability and experience.

By the way, you can see it in the works on this page. Look right, see the box that’s titled uxTags.

Why this is important?

First and foremost, it most likely eliminates the “second search“. Given that, uxTags list also contains search engine referral key words, it helps the visitors to locate the part of the page they’re most interested in.

Second, uxTags also helps the visitors to have a “key-phrase overview” of the page.

And third, uxTags introduces an in-page navigation mechanism across the tagged keywords. Think of this as an “integrated/automatic find(CTRL+F)” in the page.

Finally, we (Brilaps) think it’s pretty cool!

For shitsandgiggles, you may even consider this as SEO 2.0 (a.k.a Visitor Experience Optimization). *If nothing sells the uxTags idea, SEO 2.0 should. Are you convinced that it’s a good thing now?  (here is a new term for you SEO boyz and girlz. If no one else came up with this before, dwell on this term while it lasts)

How can I get my site uxTag’ed?

Once you register your site, stick the script tag (or install the extension) on your site, there is not much to do. That’s it.

If you’re not happy with the dull-widget’s look-n-feed uxTags generates for you, you can style it accordingly with your site’s colors/fonts etc.

I like the “sticky tags” feature, where you can add tags that’ll appear on every tag list. This might be a good thing to emphasize certain terms on your pages (a new product, a new article etc)

What’s up with IE?

Nothing. That’s the problem. IE is a downer, that’s what’s down with it.

I personally have no patience left in me to spend my precious hours on a thing that annoys me more every second I touch it.

IE 6,7,8 users will most likely be presented with a “you deserve better. go get a better browser notice”. At some point, the standard features of uxTags that makes it more worthwhile may make it to IE. Just not yet.

What’s behind the scenes?

In a nutshell; uxTags runs on AppEngine, her frontend is built using Django, she utilizes task queues, cron jobs, mappers(no reducers), natural language processing (taggers, chinkers, chunkers, parsers and things in that nature), YQL, web services (doh!), JSONP etc.
*the rest is up to the readers imagination.

What’s appspot.com?

appspot.com is Google’s hosting platform to develop scalable applications with Google AppEngine (which I personally enjoy a lot developing things with.)

Aside from the virtually unlimited scalability option that Google AppEngine provides, it also strips us from the responsibility of dealing with authentication, personal information etc insanity.

We let the big boy deal with the boring things, while we enjoy the better parts.

If you can make Google believe that you are who you say you are, and Google tells us that you are who you are; you are considered authenticated within uxTags application.

What’s next?

As my time allows, I’m working with some brilliant minds on enhancing the tagging mechanism to be more precise and efficient.

Pretty soon, expect a Jetpack extension for Firefox, and a Chrome extension.

Most likely, either us (Brilaps), or someone else will build extensions for WordPress, MiaCMS, Joomla!, Plone, Drupal etc. Ping us, if you want to do such a thing.

Links:

uxTags site: http://uxtags.appspot.com

uxTags wiki: http://wiki.brilaps.com

I guess, I’m allowed to give away invitation codes for uxTags.

So here is one I1eSzCspKFo8gRDRAynETqs0Yn7ECwwAirbuIIBFlIo . You can use/abuse/distribute this code freely. It can be redeemed here.

*this post is subject to change!