Google SEO Starter’s Guide

Google have released a “SEO Starter’s Guide” PDF document designed to help web developers understand how to improve their website’s ranking in Google.

“[The guide] covers around a dozen common areas that webmasters might consider optimizing. We felt that these areas (like improving title and description meta tags, URL structure, site navigation, content creation, anchor text, and more) would apply to webmasters of all experience levels and sites of all sizes and types. Throughout the guide, we also worked in many illustrations, pitfalls to avoid, and links to other resources that help expand our explanation of the topics.”

The PDF can be downloaded here. And here’s the original article from Google.

Over the last few months I have seen the issue of website accessibility become a much more important consideration to my company’s clients whenever we are building new websites. DDA compliance is no longer just a buzzword, it’s something clients request as an essential requirement. As such, it’s getting increasingly important for Web Developers to consider screen readers as they develop their web pages.

One useful tool for building screen reader friendly web pages is Fangs – a Firefox 3 extension that creates a text version of what a modern screen reader program would read.

I would strongly recommend that every web developer downloads this extension and gives it a try - you may be extremely surprised at the results and find that the accesible website you just built isn’t actually that accessible after all.

Robert Kieffer has released a new tool for testing JavaScript code performance.

JSLitmus is designed specifically to allow you to quickly and easily write a JavaScript test, run it on any modern browser, and document the result.

By including the JavaScript file and a single line of code per test, loading the page in your browser will give you access to the test suite. By hitting the run button you will get a break down of each test, together with a graphical chart showing the results. You can, of course, use the testing suite in different browsers to see how your code performs in them all.

Want a demo of the tool itself? You can try it out on the JSLitmus homepage.

The Internet Explorer 8 team have been busy - not just preparing the final release of the version 8 browser, but busy writing some very useful articles for CoDe Magazine detailing exactly what’s new in Internet Explorer 8 and what it means for us web developers. The following articles are well worth a read:

• What’s New in Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2?
• Making Your Web site Compatible Across Multiple Versions of Internet Explorer
• Introducing Compatibility View
• Create Your Own Web Slices
• Accelerators in Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2
• Developer Tools in Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2
• Better AJAX Development with Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2
• AJAX Performance Measurement Methodology for Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2
• Performance Improvements in Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2
• Secure Coding with Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2

It’s not going to solve anyone’s web development problems, but this week’s tech tool is an extremely useful bookmarking add-on to Firefox which allows you to seemlessly synchronise your bookmarks between computers. By storing your bookmarks with Foxmarks they are also backed up should your computer fail and are available online, anytime. Even if you are at a client’s computer, or on a computer with only Internet Explorer installed, the bookmarks are available from the Foxmarks website.

So why use Foxmarks instead of del.icio.us? Personally, I find Foxmarks much more user friendly then del.icio.us, with bookmarks appearing as I’d except in the bookmarks toolbar, the ability to order they hierarchically, with drag and drop and edit/delete always just a click away. It all comes down to personal preference.

Check it out at Foxmarks.com

Yahoo! have relaunched recent acquisition IndexTools as Yahoo! Web Analytics. Currently in a private beta, Yahoo! Web Analytics tools look set to give Google a run for it’s money with real time updates, raw data formats and eventually with the release of Yahoo! Open Strategy an API that will allow developers to access data.

Yahoo! Web Analytics is an enterprise site analytics tool that provides real-time insight into visitor behavior on your website. With powerful and flexible tools and dashboards, Yahoo! Web Analytics helps online marketers and website designers enhance the visitor experience, increase sales and reduce marketing costs.

It will be interesting to see what Google do next to respond and stop customers leaving their services.

Sometimes when I’m using Microsoft Visual Studio for my web applications, I find that it gets it’s knickers in a twist over designer files. Designer files are generated by Visual Studio and are used to allow you to create a class which has code in multiple files (known as partial classes).

It’s actually very easy to regenerate designer files (or restore them should you have deleted them) once you know how. Just follow these simple steps:

1. If it is not already removed, deleted the designer.cs file. You can do this by right clicking on it within Solution Explorer and selecting ‘Delete’.
2. Right click on the aspx/ascx page which you need to create a new designer file for.
3. Select the ‘Convert to Web Application’

And, hey presto, a fresh, new trouble-free designer.cs file which won’t cause problems with your build!

At the moment, the Internet seems to be going crazy for Search Engine Optimisation (known as SEO).

SEO is the current buzz acronym, like XML was way back in 2003. My clients want it, my friends want it. I want it. And the best part SEO doesn’t cost a lot to do. It just requires some time investment, once every month or so to keep you at the top of the rankings.

Not everyone can be number one on every search on Google, and anyone who promises that they can make you number 1 within X days is lieing. Google’s search algorithms change frequently, possibly every day, and nobody knows exactly how Google works. But, looking at current top ranking search results, we can get a rough idea.

Before we start, let’s get one thing clear: no one SEO technique can give you the ultimate rankings boost. You need to play with many, and every so often add some new ones, remove some old ones. Keeping your site, and especially your SEO techniques fresh is often half the battle.

A URL counts for a lot

A URL with your desired keyword in counts for a lot when Google is indexing pages. You can add all the other SEO techniques that have ever existed in the World to your website, but if your Britney Spears fansite is hosted at http://www.geocities.com/spacemountain/mysite/90881.html chances are it’s never going to rank higher than www.britneyspears.com, and one could argue that it never should. Google is designed in such a way that official websites should be among the highest ranking. If, however, you happen to be Britney Spears and you have your website on Geocities, then you have a problem. So for professionals, sometimes paying a premium for your official domain is more than worth it. Of course, if this is just a personal blog, it’s probably cheaper just to think of a new name for the blog.

The title of your page

And by title, we’re referring to the title that appears in the Windows title bar and is within the <title> tags on your page. As someone creating a web page you may often discard the title that appears in the browser bar - after all it’s so disconnected from the rest of your content - but Google doesn’t. Currently, the data contained within title is very important on Google rankings.

Gamespot aim to be one of the top search results for computer and video games in a Google search, and one of the ways they acheive this goal is by repeating key words in the title. For example, at the time of writing the title for the Gears of War 2 page on Gamespot reads: “Gears of War 2 for Xbox 360 - Gears of War 2 Xbox360 Game - Gears of War 2 Xbox 360 Video Game”. Notice the change in spelling for Xbox360 in the second repetition, and also notice how the phrase is different each time to suggest that the site is not just repeating key words.

IGN, another games website, take a slightly different approach to their title tags focussing on the additional search parameters that would be linked with the game. At the time of writing, the Gears of War 2 page reads “IGN: Gears of War 2 News, Previews, Features and More Articles”. This method gives IGN a better chance of being one of the top hits should someone type “Gears of War 2 preview” into Google. Once the game is released IGN’s title bar will update to include reviews, cheats and walkthroughs.

The language of your page

It sounds silly, but setting the language of your page can actually help increase your rankings in the countries specific to your target audience, and it doesn’t seem to affect your overall ranking. Add the following attributes to your HTML tag (adjusting the language to the actual language of the page):

xml:lang="en-GB" lang="en-GB"

If you have multiple language versions of your site, offer a <link> tag in your <head> section to the other language, and the search engine will index the correct page for the correct audience accordingly. For example:

<LINK rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="frenchversion.html" hreflang="fr" lang="fr" title="Mon blog">

The META tags

There’s two META tags which search engines pay attention to when ranking your site, keywords and description. These two tags seem to once again be in favour at Google, although only a few years ago it was rumoured that Google didn’t take them into account at all.

For META keywords, add the following tag to the <head> section of your page:

<meta name="keywords" content="comma, seperated, keywords" />

As a comma seperated list, your keywords should be consistent with your website’s content, and what is written in your title bar. It is often a good idea to start with the website name, before adding 4 or 5 keywords which describe a common theme on your site, and then a few more keywords describing the page itself. Try not to go overboard with keywords. Too many, and search engines may just ignore the lot.

For META description, add the following tag to the <head> section of your page:

<meta name="description" content="This should be a description" />

A successful high ranking on Google via META description seems to be based on two things.

1. Your description should basically contain the site name, and then a paragraph which summarises the title of the page, and the keywords. For example, if my site were called ‘Hollywood Stars’ and I had a page about ‘Bruce Willis’ with the keywords ‘news, movies, action, Die Hard, 16 Blocks”; my description would probably read: “Bruce Willis on Hollyword Stars. The number one resource for news, gossip and photos on Bruce Willis, star of action movie Die Hard and 16 Blocks.”
2. Your description should change frequently. Google seems to like websites where the description changes once a month, so try and change the descriptions around a bit every so often.

And so concludes part 1 of our Search Engine Optimisation guide. Be sure to check back for part 2 soon!

Next time you wonder whether there’s a problem with a website’s server or whether there’s a problem with your Internet service providings, check out DownForEveryoneOrJustMe.com This handy service will tell you if the website is up for anybody else.

So if Nested Elements should go down at any time be sure to check out: downforeveryoneorjustme.com/nestedelements.com

And, er, if DownForEveryoneOrJustMe.com should go down, er, maybe try:
downforeveryoneorjustme.com/downforeveryoneorjustme.com?!??

So Google Chrome has produced some interesting debates, some people seem to be fans, some people seem to dislike the simple interface.

Personally, I quite like it but the (current) lack of plug-in support pretty much defaults me back to using Firefox. The browser is considerably faster than current browsers, both at initial boot-up and at loading JavaScript heavy web pages - this is due to the Google Chrome browser generating machine code from the page’s JavaScript meaning everything can execute that much quicker.

So what’s been happening around the web?

• Wired went back 16 days to when they visited Google’s campus and first met the browser-to-be:
  Wired: Inside Chrome
• The first security flaw has been found:
  ReadWriteWeb: Security flaw in Google Chrome
• And there’s also been some controversy about the Terms and Conditions - apparently Google ownz j0:
  Tap The Hive: This post not made in Chrome - Google’s EULA sucks
  (UPDATE: and now they don’t)