Tag Archive for page

HTML 5 – A work in Progress

May 12, 2009 SEO News No comments

It has been a few years since Mr Berners-Lee started out on his quest to link one document on a disk linked to any other document on any other disk anywhere in the world, but as Tim Berners-Lee himself may say, “we have come along way since my boss marked my memo about hyper text markup language as “Vague but Interesting”"

As of 23rd April 2009 the HTML Working Group which forms part of the HTML Activity have produced a Working Group Note to accompany the HTML 5 Specification.

What does all that mean?

If you have returned to this page after reading through those links, you are either completely enlightened or none the wiser maybe the differences between HTML 5 and HTML 4 might help

No?

Ok, put it this way the internet is continuously evolving and growing at an unmeasurable rate and in keeping with the original insight of Mr Berners-Lee and the inception of HTML 4 in 1997 the core code behind that which makes this page and all future pages has to evolve as well, but it also has to have the ability to understand what makes it tick before that (backwards compatibility).

HTML 5 is still a  draft under discussion but my initial understanding is that it is designed at phasing attributes out that were originally used in HTML 4, but are better handled using CSS.  CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) are for presentation and from this draft and the evolution of the internet we are moving into a more parallel way of coding to accommodate new media, i can not wait to see the release of HTML 5.

What does this mean for SEO?

As an SEO i tend to hand code/recode a lot of the sites i work on, the HTML  i use will no longer validate.  If i am to fully understand and use this new syntax draft language and validate it against HTML 5, sooner or later i will need to evolve in my code understanding to fully adopt and recognise that some of the tags i am using need to be changed to meet the accessibilty needs of visitors as well as seperate some of the presentational elements that still reside within HTML 4.

Further Reading

A Preview of HTML 5 (A List Apart December 2005)
A vocabulary and associated APIs for HTML and XHTML (Editors Draft 12th May 2009)

Optimization of content within your existing site

April 30, 2009 SEO No comments

Optimizing the pages within your website is achieved by reviewing what your target keywords and phrases are and restructuring links, link text, navigation and content to reflect the keywords or keyphrases it relates to.  It all begins with the what the actual page is named.  This has to have an obvious benefit firstly to the visitor, ultimately it is they who will decide if the content they searched for actually relates to what they wanted.

I will use the page you are reading now as an example, it is called “optimization of content within your existing site”, following on from that the page title you see at the top of your browser also reflects what the page is about, furthermore the first heading used within the content will reflect the content i am targeting.

This gives you a brief idea of onpage optimization is but let`s crawl a little deeper, the title of this page is a broad set of keywords targeted at what is know as a “Long Tail Search” which basically means simply because of the very nature of the page naming, title and headings alongside the content within will be unique or as close to unique as those words may imply.  If i was to build a whole website around optimization of your content this page would be considered as a targeted landing page for those search terms, it would never rank within the search engines results pages for a single keyword term like “SEO” or “Optimization” it will always be a combination of some or all of them.

There are reportedly over 200 ranking factors considered by Googles search engine result page algorithm to consider and not one SE on the planet has an idea of what those are, we have only ever speculated through testing, trial and error to understand what works and what does not, overdo it and you`re gone from the results for good, underdo it and you will never be found.

Long Tailing it to Success

August 11, 2008 SEO News No comments

SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) in it`s infancy was simply guesswork and waiting for Google and other bots to stop by and crawl your pages content, then return the bots findings to a central index. Then things changed..

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