by
James Fielding
31. March 2011 11:15
To use HTML5, or not
use HTML5, that is the question...especially when you’re considering Google and SEO.
There are lots of people on both sides of the debate:
PROS & CONS
PROS: Moves the semantic web one step closer, which should help my search rankings (in the long run), and some of the new tags, like <video> and <canvas>, can leave users and clients awestruck, to say the least.
CONS: Not a standard, yet... so I risk having my search rankings and user experience ending up in the crapper.
THE RISKS
In reality, the risks of using HTML5 boil down to three separate issues:
- Google will not rank my site properly, because it can’t find my content.
- Internet Explorer users with <IE9 will ditch my site, because it won’t look right, or worse, won’t show up at all.
- Mobile users with older devices will have a really bad experience when they visit my site.
We’re going to look at all three issues, and how to mitigate them. More...
Sciosoft Systems is a Canadian web design & development company based in Muskoka,
which is in central Ontario. We provide ASP.NET website & Windows Server application
development services to small and medium-sized business, as well as local government
and not-for-profit groups. If you have a website project you’d like to discuss,
please visit us at www.sciosoft.com.
by
James Fielding
14. March 2011 08:00
Here's a quick checklist to improve your Google ranking:
-
A great SEO plan starts with choosing the right keywords. Develop a good keyword list for each page that will lead searchers to your site. Two good resources are Google’s Keyword Tool and Microsoft Advertising Intelligence. Both tools are actually for search engine marketing (i.e. Pay-per-Click advertising), but the keyword information they provide is invaluable to SEO, too.
Use the keywords list from above to pepper your <title> and <meta name="description"> tags. NOTE: Both these tags should be human-readable descriptive statements; don’t use these as keyword dumping grounds. Don’t use any more than 80 characters in the title tag and 200 characters maximum in the description tag.
If you feel you must list keywords in your head section, use the <meta name="keywords"> tag; its SEO usefulness is questionable, but you’re not going to be penalized for it as long as you use a small, targeted list (10 words or less).
Moving into the <body> of your document, make sure your page’s one <h1> tag has your most important keywords and use <h2> tags to support your keywords, where appropriate.
-
If you have an existing site, fire up your favourite browser, and do the following search (of course, substituting your site's name) using your targeted search engine:
SITE:yoursite.com -SITE:www.yoursite.com
This search queries specifically for your site and uses an exclusion filter (“-SITE:”) to remove all indexed results that include the "www." subdomain in your URL. More...
Sciosoft Systems is a Canadian web design & development company based in Muskoka,
which is in central Ontario. We provide ASP.NET website & Windows Server application
development services to small and medium-sized business, as well as local government
and not-for-profit groups. If you have a website project you’d like to discuss,
please visit us at www.sciosoft.com.
by
James Fielding
30. November 2010 21:00
As of late, we've been trying to do some optimization on our ASP.NET MVC base projects that are the starting point for client builds. It is obvious that having META tags, particularly "Description" and "Keywords", on the .aspx pages of our sites is important. Moreover, the content of the tags has to be easily added to and/or updated on any given view's .aspx page.
As you're undoubtedly aware after Googling this topic, most online help will have you instantiate an BaseViewData class on your Master page or write tags by implementing some variance of a base Page/Interface/Abstract class.
After experimenting with a number of these methods, I concluded that the KISS (Keep it Simple Stupid) principle should apply.
The bottom line is this: Save your sanity, and be thanked by the next guy that has to work on your project. Add a MetaContent <asp:ContentPlaceHolder> to your Site.Master page and be done with it.
When you start a new MVC site, the Site.Master head section should look like this:
<head runat="server">
<title>
<asp:ContentPlaceHolder ID="TitleContent" runat="server" />
</title>
</head>
We're going to add another <asp:ContentPlaceHolder> that contains some default values, More...
Sciosoft Systems is a Canadian web design & development company based in Muskoka,
which is in central Ontario. We provide ASP.NET website & Windows Server application
development services to small and medium-sized business, as well as local government
and not-for-profit groups. If you have a website project you’d like to discuss,
please visit us at www.sciosoft.com.
by
James Fielding
4. February 2010 13:09
Yesterday, I attended a training session, where Derek Brown from Pronto Marketing shared some advanced strategies for SEO with us. Derek’s presentation was great…amazing in fact. One of the items that he breezed by, but seemed to really emphasize, was hCards and how Google and Microsoft have really starting to embrace microformats in general. I’d heard about microformats before, but had not really taken the plunge. Having said this:
Microformats are a practical way to make data items (such as events, contact details or geographical locations) recognizable to Search Engines, without breaking existing page formatting that is easily read by humans. This is done by adding a set of "class" attributes that can be added to divs and spans in an HTML page to tag content with semantic meaning. For example, my hCard looks like a standard block of text:
James C. Fielding
Sciosoft Systems
1037 Langford Rd.
Baysville,
ON,
P0B 1A0 Canada
705-571-1123
To get this, I used the following HTML:
<div id="hcard-James-Fielding" class="vcard">
<a class="url fn n" href="http://www.sciosoft.com">
<span class="given-name">James</span>
<span class="additional-name">C.</span>
<span class="family-name">Fielding</span>
</a>
<div class="org">
Sciosoft Systems</div>
<div class="adr">
<div class="street-address">1037 Langford Rd.</div>
<span class="locality">Baysville</span>,
<span class="region">ON</span>,
<span class="postal-code">P0B 1A0</span>
<span class="country-name">Canada</span>
</div>
<div class="tel">
705-571-1123</div>
</div>
Adding this small amount of markup can have significant SEO results. Moreover, you can style this block with CSS by using the class names directly, or by adding a second styling class like this to any of the tags: More...
Sciosoft Systems is a Canadian web design & development company based in Muskoka,
which is in central Ontario. We provide ASP.NET website & Windows Server application
development services to small and medium-sized business, as well as local government
and not-for-profit groups. If you have a website project you’d like to discuss,
please visit us at www.sciosoft.com.
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