SEO Strategies – from “Building Findable Website”, Aaron Walter

1. Strictly follow the standards of W3C. You can validate your web page by the tool at: http://validator.w3c.org/.

2. Decrease the ratio of markup to content, improve the page load time and improve the communication of the information hierarchy of your page.

3. Image Replacement:

Replace the img tag which shows the logo or the most important information of this page with a <h1> tag. The content of <h1> tag will be the details introduction of the page or the logo, with indentation to place that can not display on the screen, and a background image setted to be the real image file with its name renamed to be more meaningful. This strategy can only be used once for any certain page since it is better to limit the <h1> tag into only once for a page.

4. Signals of Quality:

1) Number of inbound links to the page from reputable sources, which is the way Google does.

2) Web standards are not 100 percent gurantee of top page ranking, but important to it. Therefore pages should follow the standards as closely as possible.

5. Highly valued tags for search engines:

1) <title>, keep it concise and natural. <title> page title | organization or site name | short keyword-rich phrase </title>

2) <strong> and <en>, elevating certain part of the content’s ranking within the information hierarchy

3) <a>, title attribute inside <a> tag, and also include target keywords in the link labels. An inbound link with the same keyword in the label as your site target is extremely effective.

6. Meta:

1) keywords in <meta> is useless, while description is still important. Limit the characters in <description> between 100 to 150 which is better for search engines to display.

2) use lang for multilingual site, like <meta name=”description” lang=”en-us” content=”" /> and <meta name=”description” lang=”zh-cn” content=”" />

3) No need to use robots in tag. <meta name=”robots” content=”all” />

4) Never use refresh attribute since it might be penalized for bait-and-switch strategy.

5) Always include content-type.

6) Use <meta name=”robots” value=”noindex,nofollow” /> to prevent certain page be indexed by the search engine.

Add class=”robots-nocontent” to those tags that you wish to hide like ads.

7. Making Images Visible:

1) When the image is just used for decoration, apply it to css file as a background.

2) Always use alt attribute to give short introduction of the image

3) If alt is not long enough, use longdesc instead, which can link to a footnote to have more details.

Recently

It is a long time since last updating, actually every May in Melbourne tends to be exhaustable. Finally, I have walked through this dark period to embrace my shining vacation. Even I still have one more exam left, I feel absolutely well and just happy to wait for it to come.

A lot of incidents happened recently, like the air crash AF447, swine flu, bus burning in China, and curry bashing. I think the world, right now, is in a very unstable status that even a little touch may change the whole situation. Similar like the butterfly effect, but more disastrous. I believe everybody can feel the difference in our environment compared to just decade ago. Maybe all the things happened to us is just a punishment from the nature and also a warning for us to pay much much more attention to our behaviors. I'm a little bit afraid of what will going to be in 50 years or so, it will be very difficult to deal with such a complex problem in such a late time.

Back to my personal stuff, even it is a vacation, I have to stay at Melbourne without any outing plan until now. My parents had cancelled their trip to Australia because of the swine flu, which also cancelled my trip to Perth or Brisbane. Anyway, I still got lots of opportunalities to fullfil my desire. Yep, my flight from Singapore to Hong Kong and return have been upgraded to A380, which is the first time for me to taste the giant superjumbo. I'll definitely shoot many photos and really looking forward to it.

During this two months vacation, I will try to finish my MEDC project with Dr. James, and another VOIP project for SUN with Dr. Ariff. I hope things will turn out to be better than my nowadays condition that I have waste too much time on unnecessary matters. Now it is time for me to cheer up.

Melbourne is cold though, I'm ready to the coming chanllenges. And I will also add several functionalities recently to make my blog more powerful, and also increase the frequency to update my English blog.