Discuss: Using XHTML/CSS for an Effective SEO Campaign
by Brandon Olejniczak
- Editorial Comments
22 I agree that it's too thin
I was totally surprised by the length of the article. There should’ve been more material in it. As it is… it looks more like a blog post than an ALA article. (And no, don’t tell me that ALA is a blog.)
posted at 07:21 pm on August 4, 2003 by Eugene
23 Knowing your market.
I’m quite bemused by some of the comments in this discussion so far. I mean, SEO is a sub-function of Internet Marketing, and yet some of the marketers who’ve commented seem to have completely missed the fact that they are not your primary audience.
The opening paragraph should have informed them:
“ANY INTERNET MARKETING PROFESSIONAL will tell you, just as we will…”
As a professional Internet Marketing Consultant of many years standing I agree. For an audience of web designers (professonal and amatuer alike) the advice that using CSS and XHTML can help with SEO is sound. Leaner code, faster downloading of pages, the ability to use a H1 tag without it defaulting to huge chunky size, rollovers that can be crawled – all great benefits.
As for some of the questions and ‘tips’ in the posts above, well, no major search engine gives as much ‘weight’ or credence to ALT text as to regular text. Even if you put H1 tags around it.
<h1>keywords</h1> will beat <h1><img alt=“keywords”></h1> in every engine that matters.
In fact, in some of the most important engines, keywords will beat <h1><img alt=“keywords”></h1> too, making it far from ‘optimal’ for search engines.
“put an h1 containing the company name (for example) above that image. Then just hide that h1 (i.e. h1#hidden {display: none}).”
The trouble with this is that idiots misuse it. Google is very clear about hiding anything: Don’t.
“Quality Guidelines – Specific recommendations:
1. Avoid hidden text or hidden links.” says Google
http://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html
You see, if you are in a market that is competitive enough to need to use hidden content, then conversely, it is too competitive to use hidden content. One of the competitors will make a spam report to Google (after examining your code to see how you rank well).
While some very good sources have been mentioned already, my final point is to offer one more:
http://www.cre8asiteforums.com/
Owned by a professional Usability and UI Consultant who also does SEO, yet with plenty of the more traditional SEO related topics of course, Cre8asite takes a slightly more holistic view of marketing than many webmaster forums.
posted at 09:12 pm on August 4, 2003 by Ammon
24 Fair Representation
Re: Mark Orbits comment that we’ll be back to square one once everyone discovers the benefits of good XHTML and CSS coding, I don’t agree!!
I run a website, unfortunately I am only involved with the content and moderation issues and do not get a say on the coding behind the pages. We are running the site using PHP Nuke and the code it creates (or the template creats) is hideous.
We also struggle to rank well in a search engine because of all the crap in the code. How does a search engine know what is a title on any of my pages? What parts are lists? The semantic meaning of my site is currently close to nil.
Any site that has good semantic definition will allow the search engines to give them fair representation. Currently some parts of my site (footers for example) are being given much more weight than they deserve by the search engines. I could sort that problem if my site was properly marked up.
The URL to my web site is in the above link if anyone is interested in looking at the code (it’s not a pretty sight!!)
I may just have a go at a PHP-nuke template one of these days and see if I can get my site using good code!!
posted at 12:44 am on August 5, 2003 by Michael Ward
25 Ooops
Missed out the URL!!
http://centurions.rlfans.com
posted at 12:45 am on August 5, 2003 by Michael Ward
26 Too Thin???
Articles are like code. It’s either lean or bloated. Come to think of … any form of communication is like code. Lean or bloated.
The author said what he had to say … and that’s that.
posted at 06:02 am on August 5, 2003 by Ray
27 Levelling the Playing Field
Let’s look at this from a utopianistic perspective: It is the future. Everyone who makes websites are using standards. .01% of websites are obsolete. We’ve all learned to use clean, valid, semantically correct markup. There’s no mixing of content and design anymore.
In this future, every website is rendered equal; on the same level. Search enging spiders can read them all with the same ease. Does this mean google is going to have to find new algorithims to rank websites? Absolutely not. If everyone were using standards the only algorithim necessary would be relevancy. One website on cardiovascular workouts is going to be more relevant than the other, guaranteed.
The future is not about writing great code. It’s about writing good content.
posted at 06:04 am on August 5, 2003 by Brandon
28 Hiding Techniques
Wow,
As usual Ammon makes some great points. Cre8asite is an excellent resource.
WRT the hiding the h1 image technique written on Stop Design and mentioned here, it does involve hiding text and could be considered a little risky wrt Google. (Now that StopDesign has comments available, maybe someone should post a ‘warning’)
We got dinged by Google on one site when using Eric Meyers hide/show menu text using a ‘hidden and revealed’ span – a technique/example that he uses on his website.
Another cutting edge thing that may or may not be dangerous:
The excellent ‘Pure-CSS Tabs’ (http://kalsey.com/2003/05/css_tabs_with_submenus) are something that we are afraid to try due to our bad luck with Eric Meyers technique described above. We figure (but what do we know, really – this is speculation based on experience) that Google seems not to mind hidden/shown elements when mixed with Javascript, but maybe bites you when it’s pure CSS.
posted at 07:22 am on August 5, 2003 by Sonia
29 was it good for me? - no.
“This article was in no means meant as a complete guide on optimizing a site. Its primary purpose was to inform the knowledgeable CSS and XHTML author about things they are already familiar with and how implementing them will improve upon their search engine optimization. “
why bother?
if the authors are already knowledgeable and familiar with information, why would we care? what would be useful is a well-written article that we could use to convince Marketing Professionals, Executives and everyone else with their fingers in a project why XHTML and CSS are useful.
this article spends more time telling the reader “what they already know” and what’s not going to be covered than it does in providing useful information.
even some simple discussion of what search engines you should target, and why XHTML and CSS are great food for primary SE spiders would have been useful.
this article is thin, and far from the quality i’ve come to expect from ALA.
posted at 07:58 am on August 5, 2003 by
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21 we may know but clients do not
While good web developers will know why XHTML+CSS is a Good Thing, many managers/clients will refuse to believe it until someone else says so. Hence, being able to reference a document online adds weight to your argument.
Plus, I’d never really thought about the effects on search engine ranking that standards compliance could have… so it was good to bring the point to my attention.
The grandma crack does make it risky to give out the URL though – should have been edited out. Beautiful code doesn’t mean perfect copy! :)
posted at 05:58 pm on August 4, 2003 by heretic