Category: SearchEngines

Useful links: Accessibility and SEO, creative writing/programming, Edge

Jared Smith wrote an excellent WebAIM article talking about how Accessiblity and SEO are moving closer and closer together in their goals and techniques. He talks about a variety of things, including HTML5 and SEO. Look at Jared’s list of similarities (links are to WebAIM articles):

The list of accessibility and SEO practices that are closely in alignment include:

Of course content is king, in both accessibility and SEO.

Teaching Creative Writing with Programming at ReadWriteWeb is one of the most creative teaching ideas I’ve seen in years.

Adobe Launches HTML5 Web Animations Tool is the announcement at Mashable. The tool is called Edge and is free right now because Adobe wants testers and feedback. The tool uses only HTML5, CSS, and JavaScript. Stephanie Sullivan Rewis tweeted another article about Edge.

 

Adobe’s Edge summarized on MacWorld: http://srewis.me/p79ij4 #html5 #css3Wed Aug 03 01:41:56 via TweetDeckStef. Sullivan Rewis
stefsull

 

Guest Post: 4 Web Design Trends in 2011

With the unavoidable presence of mobile devices and social networking, 2011 saw some major changes in the way websites are designed. In order to have any presence in the new online experience, web designers have embraced a number of changes, but here are four trends that won’t be going away any time soon.

follow the light
Image Credit: familymwr

Mobile Design

Today’s web designers have to create sites that work easily with mobile devices. More and more people are relying on their smart phones to navigate the Internet. The explosion of apps has also forced a change in the way websites work. Users no longer have to navigate browsers to get exactly where they want to be.

Since Apple holds a large part of the mobile app market, it makes sense that fewer and fewer web designs are incorporating Flash. It’s a tool whose time has past. It may look cool, but it tends to be a time suck. After all, if people are browsing on the go, then, well… they’re on the go! Flash is potentially too time consuming, thus making websites easy to navigate away from, due to impatience.

Social Media

It’s online suicide to not incorporate social media into a web design. Whether it’s simply putting Facebook, Twitter and RSS buttons in a prominent place on the homepage or whether it’s actually incorporating a Twitter feed, websites with plenty of traffic are those designed to make social networking a fluid part of their design.

The web designer has to also make sure that the website is valuable when the various social media outlets direct visitors back to the actual web page. Although Facebook is the “it” site of the moment, social media sites that do a better job of assimilating themselves into private websites are youtube.com and flickr.com. Both sites allow the users to easily place code into another website so that visuals can be easily accessed.

SEO

With the trend towards social media taking hold, SEO is even more important in web design. Basically, the content has to be very high quality, and it has to be something visitors will want to share. Without good Search Engine Optimization tactics, websites will simply fall off Google’s top two pages of search results.

Websites need to have good image content, and about 300 words per page. The words have to be quality content. That means the web designer or the client needs to brush up on fourth grade grammar.

Touch-Screen Friendly

Back to mobile computing. Mobile devices work with a touch-screen design. If the new web designs don’t incorporate this into the site, then the visitor will leave immediately. Therefore, whatever web building tool the designer is using has to provide up-to-date coding options.

Since most of these shifts are centered on mobile computing and the new changes in SEO rules, most web masters and designers can expect them to dominate designs for awhile. Fast, visual, easy to navigate and full of meaningful content will be the primary components of the most popular websites in 2012 and beyond. For the do-it-yourself web builder, look for templates that help optimize the new design trends. Joomla.com and WordPress.org are two good examples of web design sites that will help people keep their websites contemporary.

This is a guest post by Rodney Warner from the Denver Web Design Company Connective Web Design.

Useful links: image search queries, :nth-child, accessibility game plan, ARIA

Google Search By Image: Use a Snapshot as Your Search Query. Wonder if it will do faces – that’s sort of scary. Maybe match fingerprints?

Useful :nth-child recipes. Nice examples that clarify the concepts.

A terrific article by Karl Groves called Barriers to improving the Accessibility Game Plan makes a number of good points. This article is worth studying and then putting into action.

How screen readers speak a page with HTML5 and ARIA. Fast read/listen makes an important point in no time.

Modifying an hReview microformat to include HTML from schema.org

Google, Yahoo and Bing announced schema.org yesterday.

Many sites are generated from structured data, which is often stored in databases. When this data is formatted into HTML, it becomes very difficult to recover the original structured data. Many applications, especially search engines, can benefit greatly from direct access to this structured data. On-page markup enables search engines to understand the information on web pages and provide richer search results in order to make it easier for users to find relevant information on the web. Markup can also enable new tools and applications that make use of the structure.

A shared markup vocabulary makes easier for webmasters to decide on a markup schema and get the maximum benefit for their efforts. So, in the spirit of sitemaps.org, Bing, Google and Yahoo! have come together to provide a shared collection of schemas that webmasters can use.

I immediately began to think about how this would apply to my frequently used hReview microformat. I looked at the schema for books, and tried to see how I could incorporate that into a book review if I continue to use the hReview microformat to do book reviews.

Here’s what I came up with. I’d love comments. The additions to the hReview from the book schema are in red.

<div class="hreview"
itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Book">
<span style="display:none">product</span>
<p><img class="photo" src="image.jpg" alt="alt here"></p>
<div class="description" itemprop="reviews">
<p><a class="fn url" itemprop="name url" href="link here"
title="affiliate link to Amazon"><cite>book title
here</cite></a>
by <span itemprop="author">author's name</span> is from
 <span itemprop="publisher">publisher's
name</span>, <span itemprop="datePublished">date
here</span>.
Text of the review here.</p>
<p>Text of the review here.</p>
<p>Text of the review here.</p>
<p class="summary">Summary: text of the summary</p>
<p><span class="reviewer vcard">A review by
<a href="http://www.webteacher.ws/" rel="me">Virginia
DeBolt</a></span> of <cite itemprop="name">
book title here</cite>
<span class="rating" itemprop="rating">
(rating: n stars)</span></span></p>
</div>
</div>

What I’m wondering.

  1. Is the hReview microformat even needed since there is so much overlap between the book schema and the hReview microformat. It’s redundant. Should reviewers switch to the schema and abandon the microformat?
  2. I’m wondering about putting an itemprop in the cite element, since most of the schema HTML is added with span tags. It seems more semantic to me.

What do you think? Are schemas going to replace microformats completely?

Want to get in on Google +1? Here’s how.

Google +1 is now live. If you want to make it part of your process, here are some tips for getting started.

Add it to Your Web Page

Using +1

Useful Links: media queries, search tips, colors

Media Queries: a collection of responsive web designs is a new site with selection of sites to study. (Also, see my post on Media Queries 101.)

If you’re teaching one of those introduction to the Internet classes where you show students how to search effectively, here’s a helpful post. How to search & do more with Google.

Named, HSL and RGB colors is another brilliant resource table from Standardista. It deserves a bookmark.

Tips For Choosing A Search Friendly Domain Name

domain names

One thing that many people do not think about when they choose a domain name is whether it is search engine friendly. However, if you are starting a business then you will need to ensure that your website is easy enough to find. After all, the easier the site is to find the more potential customers you are likely to receive.

The good news is, there is very rarely a terribly bad domain name. Some may be a little more search friendly than others, but even if you have chosen a more difficult one then it isn’t the end of the world. There are things that you can do to improve how easy it is to find. Most people opt for a brand-specific domain name. However, you could also choose a keyword driven domain name instead.

Choosing a Keyword Driven Domain Name

Ideally you want to choose an exact-match domain name. This means that a URL has a character for character match of a certain keyword. These types of domain names are pushed high up the search engine rankings. In order to produce an exact match domain name you will need to follow particular criteria. These include:

  • No Hyphens
  • Have a .Com .Net or .Org Domain Extension
  • Identical Spelling and Word Order

You will find that extensions which feature do-com are far more popular than others. They are considered to be more credible and if you plan on selling the website it will have more value than other extensions too. If you use extensions such as .US, .Info or .Edu then they will not always produce high SEO results.

When you are creating a domain name you should try to avoid Hyphens. A domain name which features a hyphen is not an exact match domain name. If you find that the domain name that you want is taken then there are ways to make it unique without placing an hyphen between the words. For example, if your exact match domain name would have been Redial.Com, you could add words such as “Top” or “Best” to increase its popularity and to make it unique.

You will also need to make sure that the spelling of the domain name matches the keyword. For example, it should have the same spelling and be in the same order as the keyword that you are targeting. HairdressingTools.com for example will target Hairdressing Tools. If you were to choose a domain name such as HairdresingTools.com then the spelling error would affect your search engine ranking.

Finding the Best Keywords

One of the best tricks that you can use to get a good exact match domain name is to search for relevant keywords. You can do this through Google Keywords. Use the keywords that you want to target. Once you have typed those keywords in you will be able to see which ones have a .org, .com or a .net extension. Next you should download all of the keywords into a Excel document. Under the keyword tool you should find the word “Download”. Select all from the list and an Excel spreadsheet will open.

Once you have the keywords you can use the most popular ones in a bulk domain search tool. This will tell you which keywords you should use for your domain that is currently not already taken.

Overall creating an exact match domain name can be frustrating but it will help you to improve your search rankings. It is important to make your site as easy as possible to find. Why not follow the above advice and create an exact-match domain name now?

This guest post is by Lior who is an advisor to an applicant tracking software company and also works with an MA in Israel program.