What Potential Impact Can HTML5 Have on SEO?
Although still a work in progress, HTML5 is the next major revision of the HTML standard. HTML, which is the markup language that allows us to structure and present our web content, is the primary factor in search engine optimization efforts. HTML gives search engines the needed context they need to understand what’s contained in a web page.
SEO Beyond Your Site
The most common initial SEO strategy is to follow best practices for building user-friendly, well-formed websites. Optimizing your content and HTML, using good web page titles and generating links to your website are all ways you can help search engines such as Google, Yahoo! and Bing index your site better and more accurately.
However, because of an updated Google search ranking algorithm (dubbed "Panda") — which aims to reduce the efficacy of content farms with shallow content that often have artificially inflated backlinks and black hat search engine optimized content — the status quo has drastically shifted.
The Importance of Web Content Strategy
Some web design and web development agencies have it all. They provide their clients with a complete site solution from beginning to end, from site planning and information architecture to web design, web hosting, and SEO. It’s tough for a smaller web design company or the solo freelancer to compete.
Or is it?
Five Social Media Mistakes That Suck
Along with all the excitement over the potential power of social media, a handful of common bad strategies and decisions have begun to pop up.
These aren’t just small issues, either. Several of them are serious enough to critically damage your overall social media efforts, and could even stop your program dead in its tracks. I’ve seen several of these terrible mistakes appear repeatedly across companies of all sizes.
Effective Communication Tips for Web Designers
We lay increasing importance on doing things in the user’s best interest and meeting their expectations, but we often forget that content and design is the window to a website’s soul.
Our designs tell visitors something about us and build emotional bonds to brands through first impressions and reputation.
By taking advantage of communicative design, we can better engage audiences and more effectively serve user needs.
A Commonsense Approach to Improving SEO of Images and Videos
Search engine spiders haven’t yet evolved to the point where they can directly extract the meaning from a visual medium such as a photo or a video. Instead, search engines must rely on the metadata we provide them through alt attributes, title attributes, surrounding elements (for context), and so on.
With some basic techniques, we can enhance the semantic value of images and videos so that search engines, as well as humans, can better deal with them.
Looking Beyond Google PageRank: Alternative SEO Metrics
When it comes to SEO, Google’s PageRank (PR), which is the most used SEO ranking metric, is vague and unhelpful. Although most SEOs would agree that it’s an indication of a page’s popularity (or power), it’s unclear why that’s so or exactly how popular a ranked website is.
For example, for a website with a PR of 7 — and as a point of reference, this website has a PR of 6 — most people would assume it’s a popular, and thus powerful, website.
But that’s not always the case, and there are quite a lot of exceptions.
