asymptoticdesign.com

web development and SEO

photo - web

Try to visualize the World Wide Web as a topological space with sheaves-like structures mapping semantic content to website pages and to their position in search results. How can this be used by a website to have good stable search results for relevant search phrases, how can the site be optimized for search results.

Content is the most important component of a website, and the way it is presented to search engines and browsers. Search engines are accessing more and more of the content that is on the web, Google is parsing and indexing content from Flash files, or text from images embedded in PDF files (optical character recognition). This is great for a website visibility in search results, but it also means that websites have to be carefully structured and designed.

Another very important component is accessibility, websites have to be accessible to people using browsers without JavaScript or image support, and that can be presented in a meaningful way by screen readers.

simple SEO tips

HTTP server header
Indicate correctly the status of your URLs with the HTTP status response, for example HTTP status response 404 (Not Found) for non-existing URLs, or 500 (Internal Server Error) for internal server error, etc. For most websites it is good practice to return HTTP status 403 (Forbidden) for URLs of folders without index file, not 200 (OK) with the folder tree.
Valid (X)HTML and CSS mark-up
Help browsers and search engines to parse correctly the content of your pages by using correct (X)HTML and CSS mark-up. It is good practice to have all styling information in an external CSS file, for better use of bandwidth, compact HTML source content and accessibility (if people need to use their own CSS settings in their browsers).
HTML elements of high visibility to search engines
Have good smart content for HTML elements of high visibility to search engines like the <title> element, meta description tag, <h1>, <h2>... headings, anchor text of links, the alt attribute of the <img> element for images. Make things simple, for example do not use nested <span> elements within <a> or <h1>tags, do the styling by using the class attribute of <a> or <h1>
Search-engine friendly URLs
Use friendly URLs, with a word or two describing the content of the page. Google recommends hyphens as word separators in the URLs.
Good crawlable site navigation.
Have well structured site navigation. Do not have too many links in an HTML page, more than a few hundred links on a page can cause problems for bots and people.
XML sitemaps
Indicate to search engines which are the URLs you want indexed in search results by submitting a good XML sitemap.
Provide alternative crawlable content when you use JavaScript
Search engines might not process JavaScript code, and they do not accept or process cookies. Have a look with 'view source' at the cached copy of a page from search results, especially at the text-only version to see how search engines see the content of a web page. Comment-out content of <script> elements in HTML documents, to help search engines to parse correctly (X)HTML content.
Avoid duplicate content
Google and other search engines introduced recently support for the new <link rel="canonical"...> to point search engines to the canonical URL (the one to be indexed in search results) from URLs with similar content
Avoid URL infinite spaces
There is a very good Google blog article about URL infinite spaces. An example of an infinite space is a calendar with a "next month" link. URLs like these have to be disallowed in the robots.txt file and the link nofollowed.
Avoid things that can be perceived as intended to manipulate search results
Avoid link schemes and domain farms, they are against guidelines published by all important search engines. If in doubt about a link add rel="nofollow" The link will be usable by people visiting your site, but it will indicate to search engines not to follow that specific occurence of the link for inclusion in search results. Avoid hidden content and keyword stuffing. Keyword stuffing can be any out-of-context larg chunk of words important to the website, but not included in the HTML content in a meaningful way, for example too many repetitive phrases in the meta keyword tag, or in the alt attribute of <img> elements

reference links

tools

some cool links

Sat Jul 4 02:04:16 2009 (British local time)

valid XHTML . valid CSS