Clicks & Notes

10 February 2005

Basics of Search Engine Optimisation

456 Berea Street - Basics of search engine optimisation

Good checklist, reiterating much of the usual advice, i.e. use valid semantic markup (including header tags), no frames, text instead of graphics or Flash elements, readable URLs…

Standout bits:

  • on writing descriptive page titles:

    When it comes to the order of the text in the title element, I’ve found that the following works well:

    Document title | Section name | Site or company name

  • resources about generating search engine friendly, human readable URLs:
  • browser detection scripts may inadvertently block search engine spiders and prevent your site from getting indexed
  • most meta tags aren’t of much value, however:

    Some search engines use the contents of the meta description element to describe your site in their search result listings, so if possible, make its contents unique and descriptive for every document.

As the author summarizes:

The ultra-short guide to SEO: add quality content regularly and make sure your site is well-built.

⇒ Filed under:  by jen @ 10:51 pm

Advantages to Building with Web Standards

Digital Web Magazine - The Dollars and Sense of Building to Standards

  • unless a significant portion of your user base (i.e., both numerically and “commercially” significant) is still browsing with Netscape 4.7 and/or IE 4, you should be coding in XHTML and not HTML4.01
  • dropping support for Netscape 4.7 and IE 4 and 5 results in a time reduction of anywhere from 15-35% in the HTML development phase of Web development
  • using CSS can reduce the cost of updating a design significantly, even for older browsers
  • standardized code is also easier to maintain; this again translates into a cost savings
  • using standardized semantic markup and removing presentation elements from a page also enables search engines to read the content more easily, thus boosting search engine rankings

See also: Search Engine Watch - Web Standards vs. Search Friendly Sites: Can You Have Both?

⇒ Filed under:  by jen @ 10:22 pm

Web Authoring Links

IT and communication - Allowed nesting of elements in HTML 4 (and XHTML 1.0)

XHTML 1.0 is, as its subtitle says, “A Reformulation of HTML 4 in XML 1.0″, so the nesting rules are the same as in HTML 4.01. However, there are… differences that affect the nesting rules

Moreover, some of the restrictions on nesting are expressed differently; due to metalanguage differences

Phono Phunk - Managing CSS Hacks

  • separating browser hacks into individual style sheets ensures that the main style sheet will validate; you can also try grouping hacks into separate files for separate browsers
  • (via del.icio.us)

evan.nixsys.bz - Annotating images with CSS

  • various techniques using only CSS and HTML; text in unordered lists appears when you mouse over an image; some nice effects
  • (via del.icio.us)

onlinetools.org - Unobtrusive Javascript

  • techniques for using JavaScript while maintaining accessibility
  • (via paranoidfish)
⇒ Filed under:  by jen @ 9:45 pm

Managing Defects by Severity and Frequency

Managing Product Development - Managing Defects by Severity and Frequency

I’m familiar with managing defects by severity (how bad the problem is for the user if the user encounters the problem), and by priority (what’s the business value of fixing this problem), but I had lunch yesterday with some folks who use frequency of occurrence to also manage defects.

Here are their definitions:

1 - High: Encountered by many users, including downstream teams, in their normal course of work (> 10% of the user community or > 100 individual users)

2 - Medium: Encountered by some users, including downstream teams, in their normal course of work

3 - Low: Encountered by few users, including downstream teams, in their normal course of work (< 1% of the user community and < 10 individual users)

⇒ Filed under:  by jen @ 9:01 pm

© Jennifer Vetterli, 2005