Using Standards for better SEO
Search Engine Optimization is not rocket science. However being as it may, it’s still a science and very easy to learn and master. I’m telling you this from the perspective of ranking high in almost anything I write about. When I realized what I was already doing was the way to do things, I decided I was an expert. Although, I can’t get too ahead of myself, I am no guru when it comes to marketing. You just tell me what you want to sell, and I’ll sell it. In other words, I have no freakin’ idea what qualifies as a healthy keyword versus a bad one. Keep that in mind as I delve into telling talking about basic S.E.O. – I am not the brain behind the people, I am more or less going to share some tips on how to implement what you think people are thinking, and how I can help you make what you think you think are what they’re thinking. So I hope you have your thinking caps on!
Think Simple
Most likely, if you’re a regular to my blog, then you most likely know about standards schmandards. And, if you know what I’m talking about, you probably know how to use them. Basically, it all comes down to writing good HTML. Writing HTML is not hard. It’s easier than any foreign language anyone can ever learn. And too be quite frank, it’s eeeeeeeeeasy schmeeeeeeeezy. My first tip to you is this very command. Write good HTML. That’s it! Tutorial is over. Ok almost but not quite.
What I’m trying to get at is that if you write good semantic markup, chances are you’re already ahead of the rest of the world.
What’s Semantic Markup?
Oh boy. Let me take one big deep breath…and of course, crack my knuckles because this is going to be the longest run-on sentence in the history of brewed beer from Holland. (I just downed a Heineken)
Semantic markup is writing HTML just like XML – since that’s what it is – you need to define the text that lies within the tags you’re defining them with with the right tag so that it conveys proper meaning and so once you get the right meaning for the content you’re trying to convey you’ll be right on your way to kickin’ the hay and writing semantic markup which is what web standards is all about which there’s so many great books about that you can read and so many blogs that have long exhausted the subject but I’m still here writing about it for you so that you can benefit from the all the benefits that using web standards gives which, I might add, are great because it makes writing HTML so much easier which is what I was trying to say earlier but got off track because I needed a segway into why we all need to learn semantics which, by the way, is just like writing XML which uses tags to define the content that lie within each tag like if you had…
Exhale…inhale…
three donkeys and a big farm and you decided you wanted to put your donkeys on the internet and glorify each and all of them displaying their name, weight, and favorite horse food then you’d want to make a separate page for each one of them and on each one of them you’d want to lay it out just like an outline – and an outline is just like one of those documents you used to have to put together in high school for something like a book report or just a report in general which usually has a header and then sub-headers and then paragraphs outlining each detail of each point you wanted to make and in the end your Teacher gave you a C minus because she was such a wench – but that’s besides the point – but back to the headers, sub-headers and subpoints and paragraphs – that’s basically what you want your page about donkeys to look like so that – with high hopes – you’d be able to sell off these donkeys and make a million bucks and live happily ever after.
Holy Schmaza that made no sense. I can only hope you caught my drift.
HTML is not a layout language
If it was, they would call it HTLL. HTLL on the other hand has been upgraded to the term otherwise known as CSS. If you’re one of those people that really don’t think a site can be laid out entirely without tables, or if your layout is so complicated that there’s just no way…well…um…you’re wrong. Nanny nanny boo boo. I’m only saying that to you because you need to try harder. The argument for standards and CSS layouts is long over exhausted and I’m not going to start throwing swings left and right on the reasons why. Just know that it’s all possible – more or less.
Web Developers make SEO happen
Keep in mind that your job as a developer is most crucial to the optimization process. If you don’t implement correctly what those darn marketers are telling you to optimize; then they’re just going to remain barking at you “why isn’t our product selling?â€
Aside from it all, it all comes down to this simple bullet list – as most things comes down to on my website.
- Use semantic markup
- Write Good titles – and put them in your title tag
- make an HTML wireframe for your website
Yep. Just those three things. That’s how easy it really is.
August 6th, 2005 at 8:55 am
I agree.
What SEO should be is showing search engines exactly what you’re offering so that they can place you correctly in their SERPs. Which, if you have good content and you used semantic markup to prove it, should be pretty close to the top.
August 6th, 2005 at 9:12 am
Zactly Elliot. None of this spoofing backdoor redirect repetitive keyword shady hoopla. Talk about what you want to talk about, and let the standard take you up.
August 6th, 2005 at 12:07 pm
I really think there is much more to it than just writing XHTML pages with semantic markup, but yeah, it does put you well ahead of the race without even really trying.
To take it a notch above, you need to talk about internal links and external links and their respective keywords. Good meta description and value tags (yes, search engines still read those) that actually convey the content of any given page. meta keywords and descriptions (just like page titles) should be unique from page to page, not just some generic text to describe your entire site.
> When I realized what I was already doing
> was the way to do things, I decided I was an expert
I don’t know if writing good HTML makes automatically makes somebody an expert on SEO, I certainly wouldn’t call myself one.
August 7th, 2005 at 6:54 pm
This tid bit of an article is really aimed at what developers can do… not necessarily an entire team.
Semantic markup assumes you know how to make an proper outlined document. With that aside, you should always write a unique title for each page.
Remember, according to the DOM, even text is considered nodes. Thus writing a solid title is important even in standards. Slapping the same title on every page of your site - imo - is not semantic since a title tag should describe (in short) what lies on a page.
August 8th, 2005 at 1:06 am
> Slapping the same title on every page of
> your site - imo - is not semantic since a
> title tag should describe (in short) what
> lies on a page.
I wasn’t suggesting anything different when I said:
> meta keywords and descriptions (just like
> page titles) should be unique from page
> to page, not just some generic text to
> describe your entire site.
August 28th, 2005 at 6:37 pm
I dont actually write any code, I just tell developers what I want. I usually tell anyone who works for me that the CSS and HTML must validate. I assumed that this would be enough, but after reading this I feel like I need to make sure that they write my pages in XHTML with semantic markup. The problem is that even after your wonderfully long winded decription of semantic markup and its relation to donkeys, I still dont understand what it is. My question is……..What should I be telling my developers I need? and…… How do I validate that it has been done correctly?
August 28th, 2005 at 7:03 pm
Excellent question Jacob. I wasn’t expecting the managers to roll by.
Using xHTML and CSS is the first step. Semantic Markup is the second. I’m not sure how much involved you are with your developers and what else you require, but I assume you do have a quite the authority on which way things swing in your ball park (horrible Baseball analogy).
Semantic is more or less using the correct tag for the content of which you are trying to convey. It’s like building an outline. One thing I’d recommend is to read some of the links I provided near the end of this article. Mainly: Build an HTML wireframe. By doing this it will force your developers separate the content (wireframe) from the presentation. Standards Developers already know what I’m talking about and some of the things I’m talking about are perhaps trivial. However on the contrary, very little website’s practice using the W3C recommendations.
As far as validating against these practices, it’s not merely enough that someone can pass the validator. Aside from embedded objects like Windows Media or Flash, they are sometimes impossible to get your side valid. For now, don’t worry about that. You wouldn’t want to catch the validation fever.
Here is a small excersise you can do.
download firefox
then install the web developer extension
Close the browser and reload it.
After doing this, you should notice a new sub-menu near your URL bar. The second one in particular will say Diable. Click on that menu, then scroll to disable styles › All Styles.
Do this technique of disabling styles on each and everyone of the pages that your developers create. The page should -in fact- look more or less like an outline.
To see what I’m talking about. Go ahead and look at the CSSZenGarden and browse through all of their different designs. You’ll see that they all use the same html markup (which is a great example of semantic markup) but a different style sheet.
Here are a few other good examples.
This Website
SimpleBits
OrderedList
Sacramento Web
…And of course thousands more (but still nothting compared to the billions of non-semantic/standards using’ websites out there).
Wow, I think this definitely qualifies as the longest comment I’ve ever written.
October 15th, 2007 at 9:26 am
Actually, I like this post a lot :) . Finally I found someone who’s familiar to my manners. I do SEO for about 2 years and the only thing I learnt is that a clear and usable code ranks much better than any spaghetti code especially in Google.
After I rebuilt the homepage of my client’s site, it’s rankings got better. It wasn’t anything extra, just about 30-40 places moving from the top50 to the top10, but it brought a reasonable traffic for quite competitve phrases.