Intresting SEO Articles and Links

Thursday, January 8, 2009

What do weight loss and SEO have in common?

I'm going through the process of losing some weight. It's been one of those things which I have needed to do for 10 years or so, made especially worse by the fact I work in front of a computer and don't play any sport. I have managed to lost 12kg (26 pounds) so far, which isn't a bad start, but I have a lot further to go.

So what has this got to do with SEO?

Well, I could have visited a weight loss expert at any point in time over my life, and got some advice on how to lose weight. Any expert would have probably told me I needed to do more exercise, and maintain a balanced diet. Without being rude to weight loss experts, I think the bottleneck is always lack of motivation rather than lack of information.

When you ask for SEO advice on a website, it's just like asking someone how to lose weight. The expert will tell you you aren't targeting the right words in your titles and body copy, and that you need more links.

As a fat person, I bought a book on diet and exercise only after I had got into the habit of going for a walk every day, and had already lost some weight. I didn't need to waste money on a book when motivation was the bottleneck. The book talks about the more advanced concepts of how to balance different food types, and which muscle exercises to do etc. Great stuff, once you are in the habit of doing any exercise at all.

When you are seeking help on your site, you get the best value when you sort out the basic stuff yourself. Do a little bit of homework, and put the basic measures into place, otherwise the expert will spend their time explaining obvious problems. You wouldn't want to pay a weight loss guru to tell you to do more exercise and to eat less food, would you? Likewise, no point in paying someone to tell you that you need more links, when you could be out there getting more links.

SEO reports

I used to offer a free service where I did a SEO report on people's site - and I'd politely ask for a link as a way of saying thanks. I'd suggest obvious changes to site structure and content, but most of the time the advice got ignored, and people would leave their homepage title as "Untitled document" and their H1 as "Welcome to our site".

It's the same reason why fat people are still out there buying pies - Learning how to fix a problem is much easier than actually fixing it, but it won't get you results.

I don't do free reports anymore, because people don't value them enough to actually do anything with the information I give them. I still do paid reports, and even these have a fairly average ratio of recommendation to implementation. Knowing this, I try to prioritize the recommendations so that people can start with the most important and "low hanging fruit" changes.

SEO for 100% flash websites

I'm booked tomorrow to do my first full-flash SEO implementation ever on a website. This has been a long time coming, and I can think of a few reasons why this is my first full-flash SEO project.

There are plenty of good reasons why full-flash sites are a bad idea. Most of the time, SEO is one of them, but it doesn't have to be.
Most clients simply can't afford the expense of re-architecting their shiny new flash website, and opt for Adwords instead.
Quite often you can achieve the exact same effect with unobtrusive Javascript and CSS, which is preferable. I'll talk people out of Flash if it's not needed.
And my Actionscript skills suck, so I haven't been chasing this work.

The plan of attack

The plan is brutally simple, and in my opinion this should be the default logic for new flash-only sites.

Get your designer to create a great flash site, leaving blank areas for content that needs to be indexable.
Store your body content in a database / XML file / config file, or external data source.
Use a little actionscript to allow Flash to read content from your external data source. Flash reads the content from the database, and displays it in the content area.
When a HTML page is requested, a PHP script (or alternative technology) reads the same content from the same data source.
The HTML page outputs the content, but hides the plain content from the user. swfObject is used to replace the plain content with the Flash version of the content.
When the user enters the site from a page other than the homepage, we use FlashVars to fire up the Flash movie at the right place.

What Google Sees

Google sees a plain HTML website, with nicely optimised titles, H1 headings, meta descriptions, and body content. Like a good bot, it caches your site and includes it in search results.

What the user sees

If they have Javascript / Flash, the user sees the Flash content and not the HTML content. This is perfectly white-hat because the HTML content is a fair and honest representation of what the user sees in the Flash - in fact, it's coming from the same data source. The Flash-enabled user gets to see additional animations and interactive effects, but the core content is the same.

What mobile phones and speech readers see

the same as Google sees. Once again, what's good for SEO is good for the website as a whole (when done with good intentions).

Updating content

Content is stored in one place, so unsurprisingly, it's very easy to make changes to the site. Gone are the old days of having to maintain a Flash site and a non-Flash site independently. You can even use a CMS database as your data source, making it even easier to update content.

Not so hard really?

The logic of all this is brutally simple. It's white hat, and it improves accessibility of an otherwise disasterous technology. I posted my concerns about Google indexing flash earlier this year when they announced changes to their algorithm. My point was that developers should stop worrying about how Google indexes Flash files, and worry instead about accessibility - by fixing the accessibility issues (using the above method), the SEO issues take care of themselves.

Thursday, December 18, 2008

How to Use CSS for Search Engine Optimization

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a language that permits Web designers to attach styles such as spacing, color, font, etc. to HTML documents. Cascading style sheets are similar to a template, permitting Web developers to label styles for an HTML element and then apply it to the number of Web pages required. Thus, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) are collections of formatting rules, which control the appearance of content in a Web page. With CSS styles you have great flexibility and control of the exact page appearance; from precise positioning of the layout to specific fonts and styles.

There are many benefits of using CSS. Maintenance of a Web site made with CSS is much easier compared to the ones which are table based. Aside from being able to make extensive changes with one CSS file, the code it generates makes it simpler to update. With CSS, when you decide to craft a change, you simply alter the style and that element is updated automatically anywhere it appears in the site, saving you an enormous amount of time. Without CSS you'd have edit each page independently. CSS generally requires less code compared to a table based layout, making your code lighter, cleaner and easier to maintain.

Cascading Style Sheets Benefits and Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Another major benefit of CSS is that it makes your Web site SEO friendly. The reason behind this is simple. Search engines spiders are actually lethargic. They don't go through the bundles of HTML code to get to the indexed codes. Font tags and tables make HTML code cumbersome, and thus reduce the accuracy of the results. If you use external CSS files to determine the design attributes, the HTML code will be clean and will create better search engine rankings. With some knowledge of CSS you can change the code without destroying the visual layout. For instance, you could easily make the main content of your site to show up above the header or navigation menu in the code of your Web site; this will help to show search engine crawlers the importance of your content. I personally saw a huge boost in rankings in fully functional CSS Web sites. When I look at someone’s Web site that was built using old school HTML code with tags such as: TABLES, TD, TR, FONT and so on, I convert that site to a CSS layout. There are many tools on the Internet that shows the actual code over text ratio weight of your site. Modern search engines such as Google, Yahoo and MSN love light-weighted Web sites. They want to see your content; the text, not the code. With CSS everything is possible. You can place excessive code into an external file, thus leaving the actual page clean and simple.

Web Site Accessibility

CSS makes your Web site more accessible. By 2008, it's estimated that one-third of the world’s population will be using hand held devices to access theInternet. It's important that your site is accessible to them also. You can make an additional CSS document particularly for handheld devices like cell phones, which will be called up in place of the regular CSS document; which is not achievable with a tabular layout. CSS benefits accessibility chiefly by separating document structure from presentation.

Increases Download Speed of Your Website

CSS code downloads faster than tables. Browsers read through tables twice prior to exhibiting their contents; first to work out their structure and then to determine their content. Moreover, tables are shown on the screen as a whole, no part of the table will be displayed until the entire table is downloaded and rendered. Tables support the use of spaced images to assist with positioning. CSS generally requires less code than tables. All layout code can be placed in an external CSS document, which will be called up just once and then stored on the user’s computer; while the table layout stored in each HTML document must be loaded up each time a new page downloads. Also with CSS, you can manage the order of the items downloaded. You have the control to make the content appear prior to images, which tend to load slower than text.

Cross Browser Compatibility

To summarize, CSS makes your Web sites load faster, it saves on time and labor, links can be more attractive and dynamic, and you can add rollovers without using JavaScript. Currently all the major browsers ( Firefox, Explorer and Netscape) recognize CSS.

Affoardable SEO & SEM services provided @ Niyati Technologies