Search engine optimisation (SEO) has come a long way in the last decade. When the phrase first appeared, SEO web design meant little more than stuffing your cool 90’s website with whatever terms you were optimising for, getting listed on DMOZ, and populating your metadata for the search engines to analyse. Search engine marketing and SEO optimisation were basically as primitive as the search engines themselves; before the first algorithm was written to spot keyword-stuffing, you simply typed your key term more times than anyone else to get the top spot in Yahoo. But, oh boy, have things changed. In their endless search to provide users with the most appropriate, authoritative and high-quality suggestions for a given search term, the algorithms and web metrics used by search...
The release of HTML5 is still quite a long way off with W3C announcing that May 2011 will be the final call for the specification and a final release expected by 2014. When HTML5 is finally released it will replace HTML 4.01 as the standard on the web and will feature many new elements and discontinue a number of older and outdated elements still current in HTML 4.01. The good news for web developers is that...
Whether you own a small three page hobbyist website or a monster E-commerce store there are several things you can check to ensure you are not placing any barriers in the way of your search engine optimisation campaign. Below you will find the 5 most commonly checked areas when a website is critiqued by an outsider. Any webmaster has the ability to check these and, depending on your content management system, you should be able to...
Breadcrumbs use a single line of text to show a page's location in the site hierarchy. They are very helpful both for SEO and enhanced usability: From SEO perspective, breadcrumbs allow for "reversed" crawling (for example, when a deep page gets a lot of link juice from social voting sites, breadcrumbs help to spread it to higher levels); From usability point of view, breadcrumbs help users to understand where they are in relation to the...
Today's SEO tip is very short but it is a really good reminder for us, SEOs, that website success is not primarily about search bots - make it for people in the first place. The SEO tip is provided by Scott of Usable.co.nz Make your website as easy-to-use as possible for humans. For example: use a simple navigation menu located in a conventional position (e.g. top left); avoid jargon except when you know your audience will...
