Entries from May 2009 ↓

Stugoo asks:

Thanks for this btw. Just read through the posts and you have answered most of my SEO questions. Much appreciated dude!

however I have a couple.

I heard that img Alt attributes take less precedence than text for SEO? EG, if I was to use an image as my h1 as oppose to text. Is this true?

I saw you directed a few people to your blog about certain things and one debate I raised before was this :
http://www.qbn.com/topics/571586…

How would this effect SEO?

My Advice:

Yes alt is marginally less ‘weighty’ than anchor. anyhoo why’d you put an image in a h1, it doesnt make semantic sense?

Regarding content first – if you accept the following statements to be true then you’ll understand why this is best practice:

Google gives more weight to links with good anchor text

Google gives more weight to links surrounded with on-topic text

Google only attributes weight to the first link to a page in your content (sometimes it uses the second but thats rare)

So as a result having your content first gives you the oportunity to use better anchor text from links that are inside paragraphs of content that override the links in your menus i.e. intead of ‘products / services / about your links would carrt more weight as you coudl link ‘ our range of widgets’ / ‘ learn about our wodget finding’ / ‘company name is…’

Hope that helps!

The new Wolfram Alpha computational search engine has many great features like telling you whay happened on a certain date, what makes up chemicals and even breaks down your mortgage payments however one of my favourite uses is as a competative analysis tool.

Simply type your domain name or your competitors domain name to get some juicy information like host geography, hits and impressions. It’s not as indepth as Alexa.com or Compete.com but does give you the data in easier to understand formats!

Flashbender Asks:

If you are using jquery (or any other framework) tabs / accordians to dynamically show/hide content is the content that is initially hidden indexed?

I’ve had discussions with web planners and marketing types about this and they are adamant that tabs hurts SEO.

My research shos that the spiders read the content and don’t give a shit about display:none or hidden and index the content normally. The only possible exception is if display:hidden is inline, this could cause problems, but if it is in class then there is not really any issues.

What’s your take on hidden content and SEO?

My Advice:

As long as the tabs content is written to the page i.e. not generated on the fly then yes it will be indexed by Google. I believe Googles guidelines state that if you can justify the content being hidden to one of your competitors then its valid. Tabbed menus are 1 example of where I believe this is justified as at some point it is intended to be read by the user.

Seattle based UKIT on www.qbn.com asks

“What are ten things I can do to increase my search rank NOW?”

My SEO Advice:

1. Revise your page titles based on your analytics data
2. Revise your headings to reflect your new titles
3. Use Adwords Keyword Research Tool to expand the topics on your site
4. Revise your internal link structure weeding nofolllowing off topic links
5. Use canonical rel tags to remove dupe content due to query strings
6. Add more content to each page
7. Visit all existing links to your site and ask to revise the anchor text to something on-topic
8. Start blogs in your niche on different class C’s and link into your main site
9. Ask all suppliers/customers to link to your site using supplied code
10. Submit Google sitemap
11. Create a really detailed Froogle feed
12. Sign yourself up to Google local and attract more local custom

I know that’s 12 but what the hey the last 2 are really juicy

Today sees a significant change to your Google listings with google announcing its support for rich snippets including vCard and vCalendar. This is important as it gives us an edge to make our listings stand out from the crown, however the down side (yes theres always one isnt there) is that it arms Google withgreater understanding our our content which can be used to marginalise sites and even worse reduce them to a local listing.

hCard

Heres my quick guide to creating a semantic hcard for your site to be used where ever you put your address:

1.  <div class="vcard">
2.    <a class="fn org url" href="http://www.click4beds.co.uk/">Click 4 Beds</a>
3.    <address class="adr">
4.      <span class="type">Work</span>:
4.      <div class="building">Enterprise Works</div>
6.      <div class="street-address">Long Lane</div>
7.      <div class="locality">Honley</div>,
8.      <div class="region">West Yorkshire</div>  
9.      <div class="postal-code">HD9 6EA</div>
10.     <div class="country-name">England</div>
11.   </address>
12.   <div class="tel">
13.     <span class="type">Work</span> +44 (0)1484 666563
14.   </div>
15.   <div>Email:
16.     <a class="email" href="mailto:sales@click4beds.co.uk">sales@click4beds.co.uk</a>
17.   </div>
18. </div>

The Breakdown.

1. Tells Google to start a vCard
2. Sets a link thats a [fn] Full Name, [org] organisation that has a [url] website address
3. Starts the [adr] address content
4. Sets this [type] field to be a work address
5. Sets this [building] field to be the building name
6. Sets this [street-name] field to be the street address
7. Sets this [locality] field to be the town/city or village address
8. Sets this [region] field to be the county address
9. Sets this [postal-code] field to be the postcode
10. Sets this [country-name] field to be the name of your country
11. Closes the address content
12. Identifies content as a telephone number
13. Tells Google this is a work number followed by the telephone number itsself
14. Closes the telephone number content
15. Starts a container
16. Tells google that this is an email address
17. Closes the container
18. Closes the vCard

Adapted from microformats.org/wiki/hcard

hReview

If you read the original Google post above you’ll notice that theyre also displaying a review for this listing. They claim that this is a standard format widely used on the Interwebs so best keep your eyes peeled for something like the following which is used as a sample on microformats.org/wiki/hreview

1.  <div class="hreview">
2.    <span><span class="rating">5</span> out of 5 stars</span>
3.    <h4 class="summary">Crepes on Cole is awesome</h4>
4.    <span class="reviewer vcard">Reviewer: <span class="fn">Tantek</span> -
5.      <abbr class="dtreviewed" title="20050418T2300-0700">April 18, 2005</abbr></span>
6.    <div class="description item vcard"><p>
7.      <span class="fn org">Crepes on Cole</span> is one of the best little
8.        creperies in <span class="adr"><span class="locality">San Francisco</span></span>.
9.      Excellent food and service. Plenty of tables in a variety of sizes
10.     for parties large and small.  Window seating makes for excellent
11.     people watching to/from the N-Judah which stops right outside.
12.     I've had many fun social gatherings here, as well as gotten
13.     plenty of work done thanks to neighborhood WiFi.
14.  </p></div>
15.  <p>Visit date: <span>April 2005</span></p>
16.  <p>Food eaten: <span>Florentine crepe</span></p>
17.  </div>

Based on the break down from the HCard this is pretty easy to understand.

XFN

XFN is already sidely used on blog engines like Wordpress where it encourages you to identify link relations to your site using the REL attribute.

Heres the official list of regognised REL attributes microformats.org/wiki/existing-rel-values

I’ve been tasked with finishing one of my pet projects Chesterfield Sofas.com as the site in its unfinished state is ranking really highly, internationally for the term ‘chesterfield sofas’ despite not being complete and having little linkage as Steve wants to put this project to work in our quest to dominate Google’s page 1 for our main key terms.

Apart from deciding on the format of a product page (a pretty big decision) one of my biggest tasks is writing all of the copy for this site which has been constructed around Google’s on-topic and expanded keyword research results. Having just looked up from my keyboard I realised that I’m using MS Word to write the semantic HTML whilst using Words built in on-the-fly grammar and spell checking to minimise re-writes. This is a pretty good tip for all SEO copy writers as it just saves time! Just be wary of Words rewriting of hyphens, speech marks and apostrophies etc.

Try it for yourself!

I’ve posted previously about how you can use Amazon Wishlists to get do follow links from your Amazon profile. Well I’ve just discovered that if you categorise your wishlist items that these categories are shown in sequence on your profile page raising your links from a megre 5 to as many as you want (I’m sure theres a top no of categories displayed, I just havent found it yet).

Remember to bolster these links with a well rounded profile and several supporting social bookmark links to get juice flowing back into your site.

UPDATE – it only lets you add 2 categories to your profile page… still 10 links is better than 5