41 THANK YOU!!!

I have just started a web site, www.zone4health.com, and am desperately looking for more cost-effective ways to get the name out there. For the novice, this was a brilliant article. You have my utmost appreciation!

posted at 12:37 pm on August 8, 2003 by Marie

42 THANK YOU!!!

I have just started a web site, www.zone4health.com, and am desperately looking for more cost-effective ways to get the name out there. For the novice, this was a brilliant article. You have my utmost appreciation!

posted at 12:39 pm on August 8, 2003 by Marie

43 In reply to Jerome

Jerome asked: “…what do you think of my hidden logo and title in the http://www.via-israel.com ? I coded this since the logo is already embeded in the background image and I am lazy to positionate some transparant PNG logo with a javascript/activeX hack… Anyway the logo and title are hidden but not for pda/smartphones/lynx-like/NS4… “

Hi Jerome. I certainly understand your reasons, and the implementation is both practical and sensible. You do have a hidden H1 heading, but it repeats exactly what would otherwise be hidden from user-agents that do not support images. In other words, what you have is a cross-browser compatibility device rather than a method for hiding keywords.

In fact, I commend you for not trying to take further advantage. It would be easy for many to think that if you were going to have a little hidden text anyway, legitimately, that adding in a couple of extra keywords wouldn’t hurt. Your honesty is your final and strongest protection.

You see, even were some jealous competitor to personally report your hidden text to Google or any other search engine, I believe that the employee following up on that report would determine that there was no intention to decieve or ‘trick’ the spider, and so would reject the complaint immediately.

What I’m saying is that the technique you have used has been used well and with honest intention. That makes a big difference in the final analysis.

In fairness to all at ALA, I wish to ask that any further questions or requests for analysis be brought to the forums where I and others give advice freely, so that this discussion doesn’t get side-tracked into discussions of individual sites.

Anyone wishing to ask about specific issues on their sites, rather than comment about the article and issue under discussion here, is most welcome to seek me out at http://www.cre8asiteforums.com/

posted at 11:06 pm on August 8, 2003 by Ammon

44 Learn CSS

Dudes, you really need to learn to use CSS properly and update your web site. I used to be able to read “titchy small tiny fonts” like many of you egotists seem to prefer, but in the long run, the only thing that “titchy small tiny fonts” do to a person is to make them blind.

Update your CSS to enable older bods with eyesight that is less than perfect (like meself) to be able to change the fonts to suit us.

ROFLAO, watch em squirm as they scramble to find out how to achieve this. I bet they don’t update their web site to enable this feature.

posted at 12:56 am on August 9, 2003 by DudeMan

45 Why the sarcasm?

Because if you are going to do something, either do it to the best of your abilities, or don’t bother doing it.

posted at 12:59 am on August 9, 2003 by DudeMan

46 Sort of

While these tips are good for optimizing the returned results of a search that hits your site [and there’s a lot to be said for that] I don’t really know how much this advice could help one’s actual search ranking. I don’t think there are any big engines anymore that actually use the page itself for ranking outside of keyword appearance.

Having a legible summary on a search engine results page can be extremely valuable though.

posted at 07:17 am on August 11, 2003 by James Dezendorf

47 Don't go giving away all the secrets!

You’re giving away all the search engine optimisation secrets! Free! ;) Just kidding – it’s a really great article and I’ll be pointing my clients to it to help them understand the basics. Good one!

posted at 07:13 am on August 15, 2003 by Yoki Holte

48 I need some help validating

I am in the process of converting to XHTML/CSS, everything looks fine in all browsers tested so far (expect IE 5.2 Mac).

However, when I run the site against the w3c validator for transitional XHTML, it reports several errors in my javascript header. Like this

Line 5, column 417: character “)” not allowed in attribute specification list (explain…).

Its complaining about the “)” after “i<clen”

WHat gives??? Do I need to wrap the script contents in CDATA?

posted at 12:55 pm on August 20, 2003 by Scott Blanchard

49 Dynamic PHP Websites and SE

Hi, I may be a bit off-topic here, but does search engine spiders access web pages like browsers do?

I’m not referring to long URLs. But …

Lets say I build my site using custom objects and function libraries that render HTML elements.

something lke this:
<? // get all custom function an objects include(“html_elements.php”);

will this example make sense to a search engine spiders / robots?
when a spider accesses this page, what will she see?

Thanks!

posted at 07:40 am on August 21, 2003 by Edward_Hew

50 Server side script

Edward, when your using server side languages like PHP, the code, as I’m sure you know, is processed on the server before being exported as standard HTML to the browser.

When an SE Bot requests a web page from a web server, the same process applies, the page is requested, the PHP engine processes it and outputs the product to the useragent.

With the kind of example you posted above, I don’t think any SE will have problems crawling it as if it was any other static HTML page. You can get problems with certain areas of page dynamics, with things like variables being passed in the url for example. Its getting better, but there are things, well otuside the scope of this article, that can be done to make them more ‘Search Engine Friendly’. If you want more info on that kind of thing, I’d suggested following myself and Ammon to wwwcre8asiteforums.com where theres a few people more than willing to help. The article here was very specifically about XHTML and engines and how coding with standards can help. Anything outside that would be better discussed elsewhere I think!

And DudeMan, I don’t think its especially hard to find articles on using relative font sizes instead of px to get user adjustable fonts. If your complaining, you could use a browser like Opera which has a full page zoom function that works whenever……

“ if you are going to do something, either do it to the best of your abilities, or don’t bother doing it.”

Isn’t always true in business, your best may take too long, use too many resources to make it viable. Over at www.accessifyforum.com its been discussed that maybe it would be better for people to be told if their site conforms to Bobby A or AA (within what the auto tests can handle) rather than just telling them what they need to do to make the site ‘prefect’. That would provide more encouragement to web designers not fully conversant with Accessibility to say that they have at least made an effort, rather than demanding they use an all or nothing approach to get any kind of recognition of it.

Its always nice to aim for the best, but people also have to learn and businesses need to take ROI into account, can they justify the extra expense to make it ‘perfect’ when 85% ‘perfect’ may be good enough?

posted at 03:33 pm on August 22, 2003 by Adrian

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