Html | SEO Blog / SEO Video Blog - Search Engine Optimisation (Optimization)

Posts Tagged ‘html’

Jun23

HTML 5 and SEO

Author: Carly

Search Engine Optimisation, SEO

In the 5th revision of the HTML standard, there are many lovely new features to learn about and get to grips with.

Some of the new syntactical features include <video> and <audio> which will make it much easier to include and distinguish multimedia content on the web. The SEO benefit of videos being easier to handle would be getting them cached first. The authority needs to remain with our site as the original author.

The <article> tag is really quite a significant new addition in terms of article addition for those clients who we do external distributions for. The tag is intended to mark separate entries in an online blog, publication or article site.

A <section> tag can simply be used to indicate the separate sections on a page but may not always be necessary to use in addition to the other tags.

The <header> tag is different to the <head> element. It is more similar to the <h1> but this new tag can include whole paragraphs of text, <h1> <h2> tags and hard coded links which is going to be invaluable in terms of SEO. We can give higher priority to internal links.

There is a <nav> tag to identify a collection of links to the main pages of the site. This will give them slightly more weight than less important sub pages.

There is a new <footer > tag but is slightly less useful compared to the <header> tag. However, it is much more flexible in that these tags can be used many times on one page. This means that you can potentially have separate <header> and <footer> tags for each section of the page.

These are just a small selection of the new features that I thought might be useful from an SEO point of view. It this selection, it is mostly about improving page segmentation, prioritising and most of all, reducing the coding. In these instances, the new tags can eliminate the use of quite so many <div>s. Therefore HTML 5 is full of SEO goodness that we need to make the most of. Lets learn to use and enjoy!

Posted in Search Engine Optimisation, SEO | Tags: html, Search Engine Optimisation, SEO | Comments Off

Mar15

HTML and SEO

Author: Carly

Search Engine Optimisation, SEO

First of all, just to reiterate that semantic HTML and SEO are closely related. Most notably the tags provided in the build of the site denote the structure and emphasis of the page. The relevance to SEO is that we can obviously use the structure of the page and the tags which have ‘some’ bearing on how search engines categorize them. We use this to prioritise our campaign effectively and give relevance to the most important or competitive keywords first. The heading tags, meta tags and page title are all resources where we can include keywords to tell the search engines about the web page we are optimising.

The reason for going over old basics is to restate that it really should be an ongoing work in progress. I discovered this just recently when I noticed that a clients SEO campaign was no longer reflected in the keyword distribution throughout the tags. This was due to search volumes changing, seasonal trends and sometimes just a client wanting to emphasise a different aspect of their business. As such, it is occasionally necessary to rewrite and restructure your HTML tags. If the campaign in question has not changed and the client still has the same goals in mind, it is still useful to check all the tags and value them as the resource they are.

Keeping the coding simple and tidy is beneficial to the website from a usability perspective as it can speed up page load time. It can also prevent an impact in the rankings from ‘cluttered HTML’ that has occurred over time as changes have been made. From a design perspective, we just need to be aware that using the simplest coding possible is most effective. As is using a CSS style sheet because this is created as an external file thus allowing even less ‘clutter’. We have discovered that some meta tags become redundant or simply don’t have the benefit we thought they did. The unnecessary tags can be removed as another way to tidy the HTML. If we are working on a site that is not new, why don’t we look through and compare it to new standards and make some improvements?

It is not essential for an SEO consultant to be an expert in the area of HTML but I personally have felt the benefit of learning some of the basics. It also enables me to provide my clients with a better more rounded service if I can also identify the relationship between HTML and SEO that allows me to keep the internal optimisation effective. I have also been able to make the internal changes myself rather than sourcing someone with design experience to do it. Without spreading ourselves too thinly, we are just increasing our abilities regarding internal SEO, it is a smaller part of what we do but worth doing well!

Posted in Search Engine Optimisation, SEO | Tags: html, Search Engine Optimisation, SEO | Comments Off

Jul03

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) – Sitemaps XML / HTML Video

Author: Nick Rinylo

SEO Videos

Nick and James explain the basics of sitemaps and how to generate search friendly sitemaps online, both XML and HTML.

Posted in SEO Videos | Tags: html, map, Search Engine Optimisation, SEO, site, sitemaps, XML | Comments Off

May19

Will my website benefit from Search Engine Optimisation?

Author: Mike

Search Engine Optimisation

With the SEO industry expanding their are lots of companies that can offer their services, Creare included. Some websites perform better in search engines than others, this is often due to the sites architecture. Static pages, domain age, backward links and domain name can all help towards an SEO campaign. I have complied a list below of things that will set you in good shape for an SEO campaign as well as things that may mean that your website will need to be re-build from your search engine optimisation company.

Things to look for:

? marks in URL’s, This means that the page is a DB (database) query and can often restrict the performance of your site, Google and other major search engines do not rank these types of pages very highly. This can be fixed by converting them to permalinked (SEO friendly) extension. Most developers would provide this functionality, but otherwise it may have to be a rebuild.
Automated Meta Data & Page Titles, If your site automatically generates Meta data via a CMS (content management system) it can often cause issues, Search engines will see them as unusable and not accurate. This can also be fixed via certain development techniques.
Domain Age, if you have a brand new site and you want to optimise for a hugely competitive phrase you can often run the risk of the ‘sandbox‘. If Google thinks a site has been unnatural with its development and growth (i.e. an SEO company building pages and links) you can be removed from the search results. The older the domain the better, but nothing is impossible you just have to consider the time scales.
Flash Websites, flash websites can look great but the content will not be correctly read by search engines, you firstly have to ensure that your flash website is coded properly and that google can find a text based version of your site, otherwise it will not find anything. Also flash websites are usually based on 1 page, meaning as far as Google can see your site has no depth or additional content.
Frames, if you have a HTML site (not flash) and you browse through your site you can usually see the URL extension changing as you go, if it remains the root URL on everypage, the site has been set up using frames and the search engine will not be able to define your specified sitemap.
Domain names, A keyword rich domain name is great, but a domain that is 100 characters long full of keywords isn’t.

Posted in Search Engine Optimisation | Tags: benefit from SEO, engine, flash, html, optimisation, search, SEO | 1 Comment »