Blogging for SEO

Copy and paste.  It can be a godsend, but only in times where it’s actually supposed to happen.

The only place where it honestly should happen is  when actually inserting content into the backend from Dreamweaver or Word or whatever program you might be using to write it - and that’s after you’ve finished writing it.  However, when it becomes obvious that you copy and pasted the last three paragraphs over and over again and just changed a few keywords, things get a bit fishy.

Besides, in many cases, that’s blatant plagiarism, especially if taking from sites outside of your realm.

A home based business site that I worked on had to have a few paragraphs reworked in order to clean it up because of so much copy and pasting.  I honestly hope I caught everything; the last few paragraphs seem especially suspicious, but my main thing with this site was to add in more keywords, as far too much of the content wasn’t keyword enriched at all and to add in more images.

What’s more, it seems that a lot of client sites are changing and quickly.  You can turn in a site and get it back because the client site changed overnight; that means more work, simply because you want the optimization page to look as close to the client’s site as it can, but in the span of a few hours to even a few days, the client site can be completely different - utilizing different images to even an entirely different layout.  This can feel really frustrationg, but staying on top of this sort of thing like the techs here have been equals better results.

So, I did a site today for a California commercial painting company, which marks a new turn for the skins.

Today, a lot of time was spent developing a new skin in order to make optimization pages look and feel better - less confusing, if you will.  And believe me, it was time consuming!  I’ll project that creating the CSS templates for sites is definitely going to take a little while; the flow of the new skins page is a lot more CSS dependant for presentation, as it has to have certain elements completely moved from their natural flow into another position, and some even made so that they do not affect the other elements in the flow.

Really, this is a great example of how positioning can be used in order to control how the flow of a skin can be completely changed with CSS.  It is absolutely crazy how much CSS can change the look of a page, and just the power that it has as it slowly evolves and changes with new standards.  Before it was developed, there was a time when the look of a page could only be edited on how tables were made.  As standards have grown, this has changed to having complete control over what div does what and how to present it in the page’s layout.  This, in and of itself, is just the tip of the iceberg of the power of the twenty-first century.

Sometimes, the smallest change in code can mess things up, and that’s where bugfixing comes in.

I generally follow a cleaned CSS template that I edit for each individual optimized page that I create, because I know the stylesheet so it’s easier for me to read and edit.  But when changes are made to the skin, oh ho ho can there be major bug fixes then!  That might seem slightly irritating, but if you know the flow and dynamics of your code, it’s not that bad - you just have to figure out what changed, and you’re good to go.

Sometimes a helping hand is all you need to finish up that damn project, or just get through those horrendous tasks that keep kicking you down like a Krispy Kreme truck driver making a late delivery to the 7-11 next to Jenny Craig’s. Because information is key, and sometimes you lose your keys, the great folks over at smashingmagazine.com compiled a list of said helping hands; cheat sheets for quick referencing. Everything from PHP to CSS2 can be quickly printed out and posted next to your desk.

So, you’ve researched your meta keywords. You’ve kept them to no more than three phrases per page. You’ve focused the title, meta description, and H1 tags to the keyword sets without going overboard. Your code is lean and mean—no crummy JavaScript or tables. You’ve gone content-crazy and have a respectable mass of content constantly refreshing on your site. You have a juicy site map. You’ve done it all. Or have you?

Relax, there’s always room for improvement with SEO.

It’s generally accepted that search engines place higher value on the code closest to the top of your HTML, and some may only read part of the HTML document. Most Web pages have plenty of code before the main content, usually the links that form the main navigation of a site.

Unfortunately, moving content above navigation code often makes things difficult to display well, for all but the simplest of layouts. What if you have, say, a header navigation scheme atop a two-column layout?

Never, ever link to the page you’re on

Remember, navigation tells a story. When the user mouses over a link and that trusty pointer hand appears, that says: “This is a place you can go. Click me to go there now.”

When the user clicks, their expectation is that click will make something happen or take them to a new place. If that does not happen, that’s a bad experience and the user is filled with doubt and uncertainty. Your site’s trustworthiness just went down a notch.

Show where you are

In practical terms, this means that when a user is on the main page for a section (awesomeness.org/section), the global navigation element that had been linking to that section should be unlinked and visually highlighted so that, at a glance, you can tell where you are.

Then, when the user drills down to a content page within that section (awesomeness.org/section/page), the global navigation element for that section should go back to being a link (because now the link has utility), but it should not go back to looking exactly like it did on the home page (because now you’re in that section).

Think before you link

If you were considering nominating me for Captain Obvious after the last two guidelines, you’re gonna love this one. Just think about every link in your global navigation. Ask yourself, “Will users really need this link every single time they visit?”

Just because you’ve decided to give a page a top-level directory does not mean it has to be represented in the global navigation. And if it is, what you’re communicating to the user is: “This thing right here is absolutely integral to this site and what you can do here.”

So choose wisely. Think of everything in your global navigation as describing your site. Make sure it tells the story you want to tell.

The myriad of tags that HTML offers are for far more than just styling up a page. Infact, styling up a page should be the farthest thing from your mind when deciding which tag to use for a particular instance. Far too often, I see tags abused and misused, and this misuse of tags can do nothing but harm your search engine placement, especially for a young site that doesn’t have the weight of years to boost it’s placement.

Here are some tips to get the most out of your elements and help the search engines properly identify and categorize your content:

• Never use <h1>-<h6> elements, unless you are making a header element. If you want large text, use a <span> or <div> and give it a ‘class’ element with some associated CSS stylings to make it big. Using the header tags makes a spider think that is a header and gives it greater weight. Do you really want a site about dog breeding to be categorized under the title ‘Now serving 4 states in the southwest United States!’ when you just wanted that text to be large? If you need help figuring out if your use of headers makes sense, try this experiment…remove everything from your page, except the header elements. Does the page look like a proper table of contents? If the answer is no, then consider changing some out into <div> or <span> tags.
• Avoid tables! I can’t stress this enough. Let me repeat that a few times…tables are bad. Tables should not be used. Tables are not proper search engine optimization. A table does not tell a search engine how data relates to other pieces of the document. There are exceptions to this rule, but they are often self apparent. If you can’t take the table and put it into a spreadsheet and have it still make sense, it’s no good. The top row should be header elements and each row after should be a record of data with each column matching its header element. The use of <div> based layouts with a heavy reliance on CSS is not only far more coherent for search engines, but also far more flexible for design changes. If you contact a company to build a website for you, make sure to ask if they use table based designs. If so, run to the hills. Or better yet, run to USA SEO Pros, a company that I can confirm does not use table based designs.
• The <label> tag is an underused element that helps spiders figure out what a form is all about. Each<label> is tied to a single form element through the ‘for’ attribute on the label and the ‘id’ attribute on the form element. You can get quite attractive forms by placing a <label> and <input> inside of a <span> and using some CSS on each element. The span will define the overall size and placement of the <label>/<input> combo, and the CSS on the <label> and <input> can be used to align those properly within the <span>.
• Another underused set of elements is the <dl>/<dt>/<dd> tags. These are used for defining objects on the page..
  • <dl> is the definition list, which will be the wrapper around the <dt> and <dd>
  • <dt> is definition term. It is usually something short and sweet, like “Name” or “Address”.
  • <dd> is the definition definition. The <dd> that immediately follows the <dt> is assumed to be it’s definition. For instance…<dt>Username</dt><dd>devsteve</dd> would be used to define the username as devsteve.
• Try to avoid the <br /> tag as much as possible. The break tag is merely used to jump to the next line, which should never be needed if these other tags are properly used with good CSS. <p> tags wrap a paragraph and do an automatic line break at the end, <div> tags have an automatic line break. Any element with the CSS value ‘display:block;’ has a line break. The <br /> tag is forcing an action that should be smooth and automatic.
• Do not touch the <font> tag! Unlike my advice against using <table>, this one is absolute. There is no exception to this rule. There is no ‘but sometimes its okay’. There is nothing but a slap on the wrist over this one. The <font> tag never should’ve existed in the first place. HTML is not about defining how something looks. The aesthetic qualities of HTML, such as the large font sizes for an <h1> or the bulleted attributes of an <li> were put in place as mere placeholders. CSS is about styling HTML, the HTML itself is defining data. A <ul> tag with its accompanying <li> tags merely says it is a list of items that are not particularly ordered. The font tag tries to place style attributes into the HTML, and that is bad. That is very bad. Anytime you plan to use a <font> tag to style up some text, use <span> instead. Give this span a class, give this class some style. You’ll have more options than <font> and you won’t have people scoff at your work.
  

I rampantly mention CSS through this list, so for those of you unaware of what CSS is, I highly recommend W3Schools to learn the basics. This site also provides good info on the HTML tags I’ve listed above.

When designing a website, one question that comes up for any decent web developer is how important is making sure your code is valid and using the most modern standards. But…when it really comes down to it, how much does this matter? Wrapping your attributes in quotes, properly closing your tags, and conforming to W3C standards is sometimes quite a pain.

In addition to code validity, what about using code that complies to the Web Accessibility Initiative, a program created to assist the blind in surfing the web? Is this important?

The answer to these questions is somewhat vague. While standards compliant code is something that should be taken seriously, it won’t help your page rank any higher on the search engines. Completely invalid and broken code will most certainly help, but if you reuse an id, fail to self-close a <br /> or <img … /> tag, you won’t find yourself blacklisted from Google.

In the end, pay attentio, but don’t kill yourself over it. Don’t spend days making sure code is valid when you could be spending those days putting in new content, advertising, or running your business.