Tips, web design book reviews, resources and observations for teaching and learning web development.
Responsive navigation looks at the pros and cons of several types of responsive design navigation options.
Introducing Nerd Love. If you are a nerd with a love story to tell, you may be interested in this new project.
Facebook Brand Pages. An interesting look at eye tracking data on how the new Facebook Brand Pages are going to change things.
Places it’s Tempting to Use display: none, but Don’t. Good article about getting things out of sight without making them inaccessible.
Photo by Tim Waclawski via Flickr
As anyone who pays attention to the social blogosphere and the network news knows, the Susan G. Komen Foundation decided to stop funding Planned Parenthood’s breast cancer screening and mammogram program.
I’m a woman and a liberal. It doesn’t take much more information that that for you to know that I think politicized right wing attacks on the rights of women to receive important health care is wrong. But that’s not what I want to talk about.
I want to talk about how social media–Twitter, Facebook–and motivated individuals with connections online can change the outcome of an event. The Komen Foundation mishandled this event in social media terms. The supporters of Planned Parenthood used social media to their advantage. The consequences include damange to Komen’s reputation, lots of discussion about what Planned Parenthood really does, and many donations rerouted from The Komen Foundation to Planned Parenthood.
Instead of retelling the story of how this happened, I’ll send you to Beth’s Blog, where she’s already recounted it. Go see what social media can do to help a cause, or to slam a social media clueless organization.
Does that make you nervous? I’ve recently been reading about how large corporations manage to influence government, elections, lawmakers, and even laws with their vast corporate money. Now Facebook, with its huge database of information about each of its users, is going to join the ranks of corporate influencers. Privacy and ad targeting remain a concern to me.
Early users of Facebook Timeline are offering mixed reviews, as we see with everything new that comes along. I’m seeing remarks like, “It’s only for stalkers,” or “I love the new look.”
I think I fall into the second category. You aren’t providing any information that wasn’t already there. If you’ve been paying attention to your privacy settings all along, there are no surprises about what is shown in the timeline. Only people who were originally able to see something you posted will be able to see it on your timeline.
There may be an invitation right now to create check out the new timeline feature, or a green button on the lower right of the page that lets you go to the timeline. Once you construct and publish your timeline, you can’t go back. But that hardly matters, because everyone’s information is going to be in a timeline by next week.
Once you are in your profile’s timeline mode, you add a “cover” image. This requires a big image. I picked a photo of some old derelict cars I saw in a ghost town in the mountains of Western New Mexico. Old. Derelict. Okay, I find it funny.
I like the new layout–a lot. It’s much more attractive than the previous profiles were. One of the features is a timeline which you can click to move around in your information.
The timeline also lets you edit your information. You can remove things by finding them in your timeline. (Or use the Activity Log to quickly find and remove stuff you regret.) You can add things from before Facebook even existed. You can feature items if you want to really make them stand out.
You have options about what the timeline shows.
When your friends take some action–such as uploading a photo, it’s going to roll by in a sort of news ticker.
Your status updates are turned into “Stories” which can be highlighted to tell a complete tale of some event in your life. They are displayed in a two column layout with a timeline slider in the gutter between the columns.
If you are someone who was annoyed by seeing what people were listening to on Spotify, you’re now going to see a lot more like that with the new social apps. You can hook Facebook up to all kinds of apps–from a GPS view of your morning run to a list of what you’ve watched on Netflix to a record of what you read at The New York Times.
For more information about getting your Timeline in the condition you want it, see the Facebook Timeline Help page or the About Timeline page.
How to Make Forms more Usable with HTML5 is a good tutorial from Steven Bradley.
The new WeTopia game on Facebook is described by TechCrunch. This game is a perfect example of what Jane McGonigal and other thinkers say about using game theory to create social good.
NC State U evaluates the accessibility of Moodle 2.1.1.
If you are like me and your subscription to 24 ways has been languishing quietly in your feed reader since last December, you know that 24 Ways is back. If not, be sure to check them out and have a great December with 24 Ways.
What search engines and sites like Facebook actually do with meta description information.
The keywords and phrases you use in your Meta description tag may not affect your page’s ranking in the search engines, but this tag can still come in handy in your overall SEO and social media marketing campaigns.
It’s a snippet of HTML code that belongs inside the <Head> </Head> section of a web page. It is usually placed after the Title tag and before the Meta keywords tag (if you use one), although the order is not important.
The proper syntax for this HTML tag is:
<META NAME=”Description” CONTENT=”Your descriptive sentence or two goes here.”>
If you’re using a content management system (CMS), look for a field to fill out that’s called Meta Description, or possibly just “Description.”
Many years ago, the information contained in a Meta description could slightly help a page rank highly for the words that were contained within it. Today, neither Google, Bing, nor Yahoo! use it as a ranking signal.
In other words, whether you use your important keyword phrases in your Meta description tag or not, the position of your page in the search engine results will not be affected. So in terms of rankings, you could easily leave it out altogether.
There are 3 important ways that Meta descriptions are being used today that make them an important part of your SEO and overall online marketing strategy:
Let’s look at each of these in more detail.
People often think that whatever they put in their Meta description tag will be the default description that the search engines use under the clickable link to their site in the search results. While this is sometimes true, it’s not always the case.
Currently, if you’re searching for a site by its URL (for example www.highrankings.com) Google tends to use the first 20 to 25 words of your Meta description as the default description in the search engine result pages (SERP). However, if you have a listing at DMOZ, also known as the Open Directory Project (ODP) and are not using the “noodp” tag, they may default to that description instead. (Do a search at Google for www.amazon.com to see an example.)
Bing and Yahoo!, on the other hand, don’t always default to the Meta description tag for URL searches. Sometimes they do, and sometimes they don’t. A search for www.highrankings.com at Bing or Yahoo! shows content from my home page as the description rather than the contents of my Meta description tag.
Of course, real people aren’t typically searching for a site by URL, so what the search engines show for those types of search queries is not as important as a true keyword search. So don’t get hung up on what you see when you search for your site by its URL or if you’re doing a “site:command” search to see how they’re indexing your pages.
Instead, go to your favorite web analytics program and find the keyword phrases that are currently bringing you the most traffic. Then see what your description looks like at Google when you type in those keywords.
And surprise! What you’ll find is that your search results description will be different for every search query! You may see any combination of the following used:
Some of the circumstances that cause Google to not use text from your Meta description may include:
But even the above are not hard and fast rules. Google doesn’t always use all or part of the Meta description even when the exact search phrase was contained within it – especially if the search query is also contained within the content of the page. Suffice it to say that there are no hard and fast rules for when Google will show it and when they won’t.
My recommendation is to always use keywords on any pages where you get search engine visitors (or hope to get them). Make them very specific to the page they’re on by describing what someone will find when they click through to the page from the search results, while also using variations of your targeted keywords.
Because Google will show only show around 20 to 25 words as your description, many SEOs recommend that you limit this tag to a certain number of characters. In reality, however, you’re not limited to any specific number. Your Meta description tag can be as long as you want it to be because Google will pull out the relevant parts of it and make their own snippet anyway.
For instance, if you’re optimizing a page for 3 different keyword phrases, you could write a 3-sentence Meta description tag, with each sentence focusing on a different phrase. You could probably even insert more than 3 phrases in those sentences if you’re a good wordsmith. The idea, however, is not to stuff this tag full of keywords, but to write each sentence to be a compelling marketing statement – a statement that naturally uses the keywords people might be typing into Google to find your site.
These days, Google often uses the first few words from your Meta description tag when they create the “extended sitelinks” for your website. But this too is not set in stone and is highly keyword dependent. You’ll see different sitelinks and different descriptions showing up depending on the words a searcher used at Google.
As an example, if you do a search for “High Rankings” at Google, you’ll see my sitelinks for that search query.
At this moment, Google is showing my home page as the top result with 6 inner pages beneath:
For the most part, they’re using the first part of the Meta description as the sitelink snippet, but not always. You may have noticed that I optimized those Meta description sitelink snippets that are showing by front loading them so that the first 5-7 words or so are a short description of what the page is all about.
But here’s the rub. Do a Google search for “Jill Whalen SEO.” You should still see sitelinks, and you’ll even see some of the same ones as with the previous query, but some of the descriptions are different:
While the forum home page shows in both, this time Google has pulled text from the page rather than using the DMOZ/ODP description. This is likely because this search query had the word “SEO” in it while the other one didn’t. The SEO articles page also shows up here, and it is using the same Meta description snippet as the High Rankings query. The other sitelinks are different from before, with 3 out of 4 using the Meta description.
As you can see, while you do have some control over your sitelink descriptions via your Meta description tag, Google might not always use them (just as Google does with their regular search results). Your best chance of having them show is to use, close to the beginning of your description tags, the words that you know pull up sitelinks. Also, be as descriptive as possible within the first 5 to 7 words.
Ever wonder why some Facebook links have great descriptions and others don’t seem to make any sense? It’s because some site owners have taken the time to write a summary of the article and place it into their Meta description tag, and some have not. If your article has a Meta description, Facebook and Google+ will default to that when you share a link on your profile or “Page.” If there’s no Meta description, you’ll usually see the first sentence or so from the page being used as the default.
While anyone can edit the description that Facebook defaults to, most people don’t. And at this time on Google+ you can’t even edit the default description. You can either leave it as is or delete it all together. Let’s face it — most of the time the first sentence of an article is not a good description of the rest of it. It’s not supposed to be, because that’s not what a first sentence is for!
Therefore, I strongly advise you to always write a compelling 1- or 2-sentence description for all of your articles and blog content that may be shared via social media, and place it into your Meta description tag. This will give you a big jump on your competitors who haven’t figured this out yet, making your social media content much more clickable because people will know what the article is actually about before they click on it.
Overall, the Meta description tag gives you a little bit more control over what people might see before they click over to your site. The more compelling it is, the more clickthroughs you should see. If your Meta description tags can help with that, then it’s certainly worth the few minutes of time it takes to create interesting, keyword-rich tags that sum up what users will find when they arrive!
Guest Author Jill Whalen is CEO and Founder of High Rankings. This article was originally published on her site, and in the High Rankings Newsletter.
BlogHer and many other organizations are lining up behind a campaign to stop bullying. It’s called Stop Bullying: Speak Up. You can join in at Facebook and take a pledge to help. You can also get a widget like this one that allows others to participate.
There are a constant stream of blog posts by women in the tech world who have been harassed, bullied, and intimidated by online haters and trolls. I hear about it from women in private conversation again and again.
The tech world loses women because of this – women who are smart and who make valuable contributions. Kathy Sierra is a famous example of the loss of a valuable contributor to the conversation about how to make technology work better for people. (See the recent post: Kathy Sierra speaks out on the nymwars and hater comments.) Women are reluctant to speak at conferences, even when they have something valuable to contribute, because of the online harassment that often follows a woman after a public appearance. Now the tech community is losing Skud, who explains about her harassment and her struggles in this post.
The prevailing wisdom has been “don’t feed the trolls.” But that is changing to a philosophy of calling out names and exposing trolls. Skud is doing just that: giving names, IP addresses, and trying to uncover the hidden identities of offensive online bullies.
Another blogger who is urging women to speak up is s. e. smith from Tiger Beatdown. In On Blogging, Threats, and Silence, she said,
All of the bloggers at Tiger Beatdown have received threats, not just in email but in comments, on Twitter, and in other media, and the site itself has been subject to hacking attempts as well. It’s grinding and relentless and we’re told collectively, as a community, to stay silent about it, but I’m not sure that’s the right answer, to remain silent in the face of silencing campaigns designed and calculated to drive us from not just the Internet, but public spaces in general.
We’ve lived in an online culture where the advice is “ignore the trolls and they will go away.” But that advice isn’t working. Sweeping it under the rug isn’t working. Pretending that it’s okay because it’s directed at women isn’t acceptable. Laughing about it isn’t an option.
Women can’t change the culture of abuse toward women by themselves. Women need men to speak up. Men who will let other men know that online harassment and bullying of women is not acceptable to men.