8 top tips for video SEO and usability

These 8 tips are some best practice that you really should consider when posting videos online. Most are fairly common sense but still easy to forget.

Related post: For more detail on video promotion, keyword optimisation and transcripts (closed captions) see my original 4 video SEO tips.

This is from a presentation (news item 3 March 2009), originally given at the TFM&A conference by Webcredibles. I'll just summarise my notes here, their website has the original PowerPoint presentation (PPS, 7.4MB) with more information and screenshots.

	1	BIG CLEAR PLAY BUTTON I.e. In the middle of the video with the words ‘play video’ (unlike my image to the left!)
	2	Descriptive title and summary a. This is essential for SEO b. It also gives users a reason to the watch the video c. Make the title really obvious and descriptive, the summary also to be obvious and provide more detail.
	3	HAND-PICK a good still image A nice and intriguing still will encourage viewing.
	4	Length of video Include the video length wherever the video is seen – that includes in thumbnail links as well as the video itself – see YouTube results for example.
	5	RELEVANCE & CONTEXT a. Don’t have a separate video section as the primary method of finding video. b. Include video with content – ie. The BBC often have a video at the top of an article. The article will then go on to summarize what's in the video.
	6	Good / professional quality a. It’s a reflection of your brand
	7	Transcript or/and summary a. Essential for accessibility b. Essential for SEO c. Even if it's not a word-for-word transcript a summary will still help. Plus it may be a lot easier to produce than the word-for-word transcript.
	8	Promote your videos a. YouTube channel – put all your videos on YouTube b. Snippets – you could also just put snippets or teasers on YouTube with a link saying go to mysite.com to view the entire video.

Check your web design in different browsers online

Check what your website looks like in multiple browsers and versions with browsershots.org.

Different browsers render HTML differently. For example when I make a simple table in one of my posts so I can put an image with a caption under it hovering on the right hand side, I invariably find that it looks different in Firefox and Internet Explorer. See a comparison below:

Blog image in Firefox 3 - lovely space around the copyright	Blog image in IE 7 - horrible text coming too close to bottom of copyright

Now this becomes quite a serious problem if the difference between browsers renders some functionality or usability of your website unusable.

It's therefore important to check on building a new website how it renders in other browsers, something I’ve done in the past by having a number of browsers installed on my PC. There are also a number of programmes that allow you to have multiple versions of different browsers installed at the same time - for this exact purpose.

That is a bit of a hassle though, and browsershots.org makes this easier. You just have to wait for an hour or so. The site provides a quick view, as below, and also the option to download all screenshots in a handy zip file.

Problems

• As it works on a page by page basis, if you want to check multiple pages you will have to wait each time for them to upload all the screenshots - which can be up to an hour and a half depending on how many different ones you want.
• You're only allowed 100 shots in a 24-hour period. I've just done 37 so you can see how quickly you could use up your quota.
• Both these problems don't exist if you pay for the priority service at €21.95 a month.

Related posts
SEO problems of white text on a dark background (Jul 2008)
What font / text size online and how to set it in the CSS (Oct 2008)
Improve and check your website's readability (Mar 2009)

The future of mobile: widgets

Vodafone Widget Manager

This article about mobile widgets touches on what will (a long time from now) be a very interesting method of content distribution.

[NB: This guest post is taken from an email one of my colleagues sent me a couple of days ago.]

Mobile widgets, in my mind, will be like the current iPhone apps mixed with databases, HTML, Javascript and XML with cross device/platform support.

The fundamental idea of the mobile widget, is to “write once, run anywhere”, where you download all the necessary files (javascript libraries, xml files, HTML code) in the first instance, then not need to load those files after that point. Increasing load times/accessibility and decreasing net traffic.

The author of the article works on mobile browser compatibility for the W3C and is slowly developing the mobile widget platform.

Something for the future.

Improve and check your website's readability

Is the copy on your website or in your emails readable or incomprehensible to the average user? Well you can check the readability of your copy using Microsoft Word's readability tool.

This tool uses something called 'Flesch Reading Ease' that will tell you what age level your copy is aimed at.

I picked up this tip from a seminar on digital strategy given by Dotmailer at TFM&A.

1. Copy and paste the copy you wish to check for readability into Microsoft Word - I’d suggest copying it to notepad to strip out all the formatting first, then into Word.
2. Turn on ‘readability’ in Microsoft Word 2003 under Tools>Options>Spelling and Grammar tab>Show readability statistics check box
3. Run spellcheck. At the end of the spellcheck you will have the following extra statistics (the following is the result for this post's copy):

The higher the number (50.1 in my screenshot above) the easier to read. Anything lower than 30 means college graduate level and so may be putting off some users from reading and understanding your website. Wikipedia has more about ‘Flesch Reading Ease’ and what it means.

Related posts
20 email marketing tips (Nov 2007)
SEO problems of white text on a dark background (Jul 2008)
What font / text size online and how to set it in the CSS (Oct 2008)
Check your web design in different browsers online (Jun 2009)

BBC increase most read stories to top 10

Shock horror! The BBC has changed it's top 5 most read to a top 10. OK, really it's not that exciting despite the fact that many SEOers and usability people tend to hang on the BBC website's every move.

I can understand why, they have the space, it encourages click-through, increases average page depth per visit. An easy decision really, wonder why they took this long?

Not quite sure why they haven't changed the most emailed to a top 10 yet though, maybe they're worried about people manipulating it, like me!

The "most popular stories now" as of 3.20pm 17th February 2009*
The top 5 most emailed	The top 10 most read

*And in the time it's taken me to write this post it's gone back to a top 5 again, how very strange, maybe it was a glitch? They really should make it a top 10 though, take this fumble as fate.

*And it's back to top 10 again as i write the following morning (18th Feb). Email still top 5.

Update: A few days after writing this post I heard the BBC's head of editorial development, Pete Clifton, speak at a conference and he stated the BBC's current aim of trying to increase time on site through user involvement and related stories - which explains this.

Related posts
Online popularity culture is killing good journalism - writing content for the benefit of most read and most emailed widgets
Feedjit widget provides your site's most popular pages

What page errors? Soft vs. hard 404s

One of the websites I look after demonstrated its amazing crapness to me the other day when I discovered the supplier that ran it / produced it for me hadn't configured it for hard 404s, they'd used soft 404s.

• Hard 404 - tells your web browser that the page you've tried to access does not exist. Precisely it tells the browser that the server (website) exists but it couldn't find the page you wanted. More on 404s here.

• Soft 404 - the page you're trying to access still doesn't exist but instead of telling you so it returns a 200 response code. Now it may well show you, the user, an error page similar to a hard 404 but it also might just redirect you to the homepage so you don't actually know whether the page is broken or not. More importantly it doesn't tell your browser the page doesn't exist.

Do geekier t-shirts exist?

Now substitute 'browser' for 'search engine spider' in the above definitions and hopefully you can see that by having soft 404s instead of hard 404s search engines will just assume that all these dead pages exist (or just get confused, not crawl you properly and ruin your search rankings).

If on the other hand you return hard 404s search engine spiders will know that page doesn't exist, won't index it and will move on. There's also no reason why a hard 404 response also can't show a nice pretty page explaining this to humans - such as Google's 404 page.

Now back to my example, Google had reached a page on my site that didn't exist (due to a link to a dud page on another website) and instead of ignoring it, had indexed it and it was appearing as the first hit on Google for my site name. So users clicking on this link went straight to an error page - not good.

By changing the soft 404s to hard 404s Google won't index this page, and my home page is the top hit on Google for my site name - better.

Not sure what your site returns? Think of a page that doesn't exist on your site, i.e. www.mysite.com/thispageobviouslydoesntexist.html, and enter it into this handy online tool that will tell you the HTTP status code (that's the bit that says 404 or 200).
UPDATE: If the above tool doesn't work try this one from gsitecrawler.com.

Never use soft 404s, it's the first thing I check on any website build. It's amazing how many sites still use soft 404s, such as Wikipedia. Maybe there is a good reason for it? Somebody care to tell me?

Useful link - How to make a snazzy 404 page that's good for SEO

What font / text size online and how to set it in the CSS

Setting website text sizes seems like a fairly straightforward subject. Yet I thoroughly confused myself for a good couple of hours while trying to figure out how to answer my friend's question. I finally found my simple answer - Set your font sizes in CSS and use percentages or em units.

Colour by numbers has never been this easy

This all came about as my friend sent me an email asking, "What's the appropriate text size for websites?" My first thought was, "Clearly I’ve received an email not destined for me, I’ll now redirect it to someone who actually knows something about building websites," but then realising all my techy friends would answer me in a language light years beyond my understanding I’d figure I’d try work it out myself.

Now as I’ve discovered this question is completely unnecessary once you understand how text size should be set in CSS.

You can set the size of your text in three ways:

• Units: ems, points and pixels (I had no idea what em size was either, look it up on Wikipedia)
• Pre-defined keywords (like small, medium, large)
• Percentages

As far as I can tell most websites seem to use a combination of all 3 methods, indeed when it comes to using units some websites also seem to use a bizarre combination of ems, points, and pixels, effectively hacking text size into the web design.

Clearly this is not the way nature intended websites to be built. The W3C suggests you use a size of 1em (or 100%) and also states that you should never use point size or pixel size.

Now there's a reason not to use point or pixel size. The first and probably most important reason would be that by restricting yourself to an absolute length you are preventing people from changing text size themselves using the text size function in their browsers.

The second reason would be because a specific set size, ie.10pt or 5 pixels, may look good on your computer in Internet Explorer but open the same site in Firefox, Opera, Chrome or Safari and the size may look smaller or bigger as different browsers render text differently. The same may happen across different computers and operating systems.

As the W3C page says, if you want different sizes throughout your page - like a bigger heading, smaller footer text - then set the base text size to 1em (or 100%) and then adjust the other elements by a percent of the base. This means that regardless of your computer settings everything is in proportion. So to have your main text at 100% you may want your main heading (h1) to be a lot bigger so you set that to 150% for example.

Go to the W3C site for more information on CSS and specifically setting font sizes in CSS.

Related posts
SEO problems of white text on a dark background (Jul 2008)
Improve and check your website's readability (Mar 2009)
Check your web design in different browsers online (Jun 2009)

SEO problems of white text on a dark background

I wanted to find out how Google treats white writing on darker backgrounds. Design issues aside I'm looking at whether there is any impact on SEO of the colours you choose for your website.

Well first off, the Google spider is colour blind as far as i can tell. It just jumps from link to link regardless of what colour they are. There is an exception to this of course and that is invisible text - if the spider detects the same colour text and background (for example white on white) it may well note this and ban your site from the listings (more on invisible text). So maybe not as blind as i first thought, but the spider isn't going to not visit your content just because of the colour.

However Google doesn't just rank your site on whether it can reach your content - it's concerned with links, and links appear if your site is relevant and easy to use.

Easy to use site = More links = Higher ranking

As to whether you use white on black or vice versa it’s all down to contrast – too much is hard to read and too little is equally hard.

The following points are from this massive discussion on background and text colours:

• There is a trade-off between contrast and readability: too little contrast makes things hard to read, but too much contrast creates so much vibration that it diminishes readability.
• Black is the worst dark colour to use as the contrast is the most (too) extreme
• Screens aren’t white text – they are shining white light – very different to reading on paper
• Unless you have a print style sheet that changes it to black on white you’re going to use lots of ink printing the page
• Most images on a black background create a very high-contrast situation that is more difficult to look at for a long time than lighter backgrounds
  

So none of this condemns light text on a dark background but make sure you do check that your site is easy to use / read and is accessible before settling on your site's colours. Personally I'd stick to dark colours on light backgrounds.

There's a contrast checker here if you are colour blind - for non-colour blind readers i don't think this is a huge amount of help; if you're in doubt whether the contrast is big enough then it isn't, I don't need a contrast checker to tell me that red on pink is 'sort of' contrasting. Plus this doesn't say 'that is awful!' when you choose black on luminous yellow.

And finally, yes black backgrounds do use less electricity than white backgrounds. So it's your choice, but just don't make something that causes dizziness, fainting or looks like one of those Magic Eye drawings from the 1990s.

Related posts
What font / text size online and how to set it in the CSS (Oct 2008)
Improve and check your website's readability (Mar 2009)
Check your web design in different browsers online (Jun 2009)

Digital editions should be killed

Digital editions don't provide the functionality of a website and you are wasting your content by using them.

What are they?
Digital editions are online magazines that physically look like a print magazine.



These have been on the scene for many years but I've so far managed to ignore them and tried to convince others to do so too. I've never had a specific reason for this dislike beyond the feeling that doing something that looks like it's offline online seems wrong. To be honest I'd thought they'd go away but they haven't, in fact they seem just as popular as ever.

So I've recently been looking at them in more depth, well if advertisers are willing to spend money on them and people are willing to read them or even pay for them then i can't ignore them.

Examples include the lad's mag Monkey (NSFW) and a whole host of print titles which you can get in digital magazine format (men's health, business week, hello...). They come in two main types - reader-based and browser-based - the former requiring a download and the other online (with the use of flash).

No search engine indexation
My first problem with digital magazines is their inability to function with search engines. They are flash, Google doesn't like flash. However I'd heard that some suppliers of browser-based digital magazines are also providing a HTML page for each flash page so allowing the magazine to be indexed by Google. I wanted to find out more.

So i rang up a digital magazine supplier (CEROS) and battled through the sales spiel until i was passed to a technical member of their team to properly explain what they did to produce this page and what it looked like. I learnt that they are just outputting the PDF (which is what a digital magazine is made from to begin with, and flash graphics and animation is added in later) to HTML. Simple!

Well yes and no. Simple is what it does - it just takes the text in the PDF and puts it into a HTML page that looks like a simple text file. Not pretty but does the job - some of it will be indexed. All the flash content put in after this process (such as animations) won't have any HTML equivalent unless you type it in yourself.

Normal digital edition page	HTML digital edition page (click to enlarge) Yes, it is black text on a grey background but then i guess it is for search engines only...

This is essentially hacking apart a PDF file to turn it into a website. The time and energy doing this would seem better spent copying and pasting every page into notepad and saving every image and then creating a website with the functionality of, well a website.

Update: Google now indexes flash, this doesn't change my opinions though.

Recreating offline experiences
Why shouldn't you recreate offline experiences online? Well the following are my reasons why and I'm not alone:

• Zooming: If you want to read you have to zoom in to the page and move the page around - This seems ridiculous when you can fit an article with images on a well designed webpage and see it without any zooming, just a scrolling down of the page to read more.
• It's not interactive: The beauty of the internet is its interactivity. You can't comment on digital magazines (mostly), it's difficult to link to it, you can't print it without using up all your ink.
• It's a dead end: The internet is a city and you surf from website to website like you would walk from house to house. Digital magazines don't share this world, they're a web cul-de-sac.
• Where do you go from here? Your digital magazine is a static screenshot. They'll be no dynamic links on the side of your digital magazine articles linking to newer articles. Once it's done it's done.
• Usage: Why would i want to flick through a virtual magazine with turning pages? I know I'm online, I realise this is a computer and I'm looking at a screen.
• Browser function: Digital magazines are flash - you can't press the back button on explorer when you turn a page and want to go back.
• Accessibility: I'm not sure how accessible these are but looking at the HTML page i'm not hopeful

Longevity
Content is king online. Good content will gain links over time, the more good content in your website the better you will perform in searches. More good content = more good links = higher Google ranking. But if you are putting your fantastic content into a format that is not as compatible with Google as a normal HTML web page and it doesn't lend itself to being linked to you are wasting that content.

So if you're thinking about using digital editions only use it if you want something short term - it may well provide instant hits when emailed out, and immediate revenue from advertisers excited by its interactivity. But long term, putting good content in a search engine friendly format will gain exponentially more hits over time and building relationships with advertisers on your website may well provide more revenue over time.

Do rel=nofollow tags on internal links benefit your site's SEO?

Well yes, using rel=nofollows on your internal link structure is an advanced SEO technique but it can help to improve your SEO. [See update at end of page, it's likely this technique no longer works].

I asked this question on LinkedIn a couple of weeks ago and what follows is a summary of some of the responses I received and other research I’ve done online.

What is it?

“A site may have many pages that have the opportunity to get crawled and indexed in the SERPs (search engine results pages). You're also looking at near infinite choices for how you interlink all those pages. Out of all those permutations, there is one configuration that is the most optimal from an SEO perspective.

That's because it maximizes the flow of link juice (e.g., PageRank if you're speaking purely in Google terms) to your most important pages and minimizes (or cuts off completely) the flow of link juice to your least important pages.” - Stephan Spencer at Search Engine Land

By adding rel=nofollow to a link you are telling a spider not to follow that link. This was invented to be used in comment fields to prevent comment spam. However as all it does is prevent link juice being passed on, SEO specialists have realised it can be used (completely legally, Google even approves it!) to sculpt internal linking structures.

Example: If you have 100 internal links on a page you are diluting that page’s link juice. By adding rel=nofollow to 90 of the less important links the 10 that remain have 10 times more link juice and subsequently benefit the pages they link to more.

Site structure
Before I get onto the use of rel=nofollow it’s worth considering that this technique is used to fine tune internal linking structure. There’s no point in fine tuning your internal linking structure if it’s sculpted incorrectly in the first place.

“The size and shape of your site's navigational hierarchy is your blunt instrument and rel=nofollow is your scalpel.” - Stephan Spencer at Search Engine Land

“One of the most powerful, and most underdeveloped, on-page SEO tactics is rejigging your internal hierarchical linking structure to optimise the flow of link juice.” This makes sense from an SEO point of view but also from a user point of view – if all your information is arranged in a logical structure it will make for a better user experience.

Using rel=nofollow
So if your site structure is as perfect as you want it, you’ve tried card sorting, user testing and the hippo (Highest Paid Person’s Opinion) is happy then it might be time to look at using rel=nofollow.

First check you have a good xml and HTML sitemap on your site. As Tom Griffin stated in the LinkedIn answer, “The goal is not to block the page from being indexed - the goal is to funnel internal authority throughout your site in the smartest way possible”.

Then you need to select which pages on your site you identify as the most important (and least important) for the relevant keywords you target. This in itself is a worthwhile task for any webmaster. There could be many pages on your site which rank highly for certain keywords but are underused due to being buried in your site structure. The links from those pages could be a massive boost to other pages on your site.

Next is the big one - look at the pages themselves and identify all the links. Clearly this could be a mammoth task even for a site of a few 100 pages so start with the biggie – the home page.

I haven’t tried this yet but I’d recommend creating or using some sort of database or record of which links are on or off (rel=nofollow) to best understand the impact you are having on your site structure. As mentioned above you don’t want to risk creating a dead end and cutting off a page.

Real life examples
SEOmoz have implemented rel=nofollow on their site and witnessed a 20% rise in traffic. However others are more sceptical; Matt Cutts from Google says that nofollowing your internals is a 2nd order effect. It will best optimise the traffic you have rather than gain you more. Essentially he believes there are others things you can do first for a better return on investment.

Conclusion
And my final question on LinkedIn was why aren’t the big sites doing it?

Bbc.co.uk, theregister.co.uk, look in their source code and you won’t find one rel=nofollow tag. The only answer I can think of (and the only answer I got on LinkedIn from Brian Rogers) is that if you have a perfect link structure and your pages rank very highly due to large amounts of external links what difference will fine tuning your internal links make? Or maybe it’s just too complicated?

So to summarise, it’s worth it and it works. How worth it is something only you can decide and, to bore you with clichés, this is only one tool in the SEO armoury.

Update, June 09: Apparently Google now ignores pagerank sculpting such as this. More on Google's Matt Cutts' blog.

SEO Suite 8 review: What does it do?

According to the Apex website, SEO Suite 8 is a ‘comprehensive’ Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) programme doing a variety of SEO functions.

Some of the functionality of SEO suite 8 is new to me and quite useful (such as the external link checker) however much of it can be found in numerous free tools on the web.

The cost of SEO Suite 8 ranges from £75 to £300 pounds for a number of different versions. I tested the trial version (which is free) for about 20 minutes and there is also more functionality over and above the core functionality I will look at below.

On the sites I carry out SEO on there are already initiatives in place that cover a lot of the functions of this software – such as directory submitting from an online list monitored via an excel spreadsheet, a linking policy done in much the same way, a manual check of internal website structure, tags and links plus reporting done through a separate analytics programme.

As a result I won’t be buying SEO suite 8 but it’s not as bad as my cynical mind expected it to be.

Following is a break down of all the functions and overview of what they do.

SEO suite 8 is split into 4 tools:

1. Site Optimizer
2. Site Submission
3. Links Building
4. Reporting

Site optimizer consists of:

• Keyword builder
• Input in a keyword and it will give you more related keywords. Same thing as Google Keyword Tool or Quintura does.
• Plus a ‘keyword library’ – which is where the list is stored, much like copy/pasting into Excel.
• Site optimizer
• Based on the keywords you input on the previous page this will scan your webpage(s) and tell you the keyword density
• Page creator
• I didn't use this but apparently it creates a page containing all the keywords. You could just do this yourself.
• Meta Tag Editor
• Hook SEO suite up to your website, enter in the meta tags you want and it will change them all. Again you could just do this without SEO suite.
• Competitor Analysis
• Do the same for you competitors and compare where you lie, what keywords they use etc.

Site submission revolves around submitting to search engines

• This has a list of search engines. Essentially it’s a browser that will take you to each of these search engines where you go through the normal submission process.
• Of course if you get people linking to your sites you may well get indexed without resorting to this. (click image below to enlarge)

Links building does what it says on the tin.

• Backward Link checker
• Find sites that link to yours. Do this in Google by entering "link:www.yoursitename.com" into the search box. Update: This is actually inaccurate, read how to get backlinks here.
• Competitor Link checker
• Find sites that link to your competitors. Do this in Google by entering "link:www.yourcompetitorssitename.com" into the search box. Update: This is actually inaccurate, read how to get backlinks here.
  
• Internal link analysis
• In their words "this will analyse your internal linking structure to make sure that it complies with search engine standards. This will help to increase your link reputation." - I couldn't figure out exactly what this did, think it shows amount / proportion of links.
• This seems a bizarre and slightly pointless way of checking site structure - card sorting and user testing (video on user testing) are probably more useful – however i could be wrong.
• External link analysis
• Checks your external links – this will check all the links to your site and look at the keywords contained within those links. One of the few functions of SEO suite I really liked. (click image below to enlarge)

• Link directory creator
• Submit to directories – as useful or not as directory submitter.
• Reciprocal link creator
• "It will send "personalized" reciprocal link invitations to all potential link partners" – much like sending a "personalized" email to a list of websites.
• Article submitter
• I wasn't actually aware of this technology – it will submit articles to popular ezine websites. I've never seen an ezine website but imagine this submitter tool to be along the same lines as the link directory creator.
• Link partner checker
• Become an SEO Clouseau with your link partners. Once you've entered in your link ‘partners’ (the sites you've asked to link to you) this will check their site to see the link actually exists.
• Link validator
• I couldn't get this to work but if it checks internal links then it may well be useful. This would mean alerting you to links on your site (both internal and external) that return dead pages, 404s etc.
• This is something that Google Webmaster tools also does, just not very well.

Reporting

• Web Ranking
• Set up regular reports to monitor your 'ranking' on search engines.
• I've always been a bit dubious of the word 'ranking'. Surely what’s more important are whether people are clicking through, not leaving your site, visiting other pages within it, buying products, reading articles etc. See my post on measuring SEO effectiveness.
• Page Rank
• Gives you Google page rank for all your URLs.
• Link popularity
• I got bored by this point but the promo is just as informative as this post on the matter telling me that "[checking your link popularity] can be done easily with the SEO Suite" no less than twice in a three sentence paragraph.
• Index checker
• What pages are indexed on which search engines, not just Google.
• Ranking on each engine, not just Google.
• Submission report
• Remember that submission you did earlier? Well here's where you find out if it worked.
• Site statistics
• Didn't get into this but quite a stats package with everything from hits to unique visitors. Much like Google Analytics, webtrends etc.

Feedjit widget provides your site's most popular pages

Just stumbled across (in the traditional sense of the word not stumble upon) the feedjit site after checking out this rather interesting real time traffic map.

There's also one of those 'popular pages' widgets that you see more and more on sites these days - see image.

It won't work on every website in the world, the widget has to be able to get the information from your website - therefore it works with blogger, typepad and the open source version of Wordpress (but NOT Wordpress.com).

There's so many widgets out there and most of them are utterly pointless and not even slightly amusing. However there's no doubt in my mind that the 'recommended reading' and 'popular pages' widgets are really useful - it's just another way of highlighting other areas of your site to your users.

The live traffic map may be less helpful but i clicked on it didn't I?!

Related posts
Online popularity culture is killing good journalism
Manipulate the BBC's most emailed stories

Is interlinking sites on the same server bad?

Many companies own many different websites. For example a publishing company may own 20 different sites for its 20 magazines. Now what's to stop them putting a link to each site in the footer of each site?

What's the effect on SEO of doing this?

I’ve looked into this linking issue and there are hundreds of conflicting views about the effects of it. I can’t find anything that says it’s either bad or good.

This forum covers both interlinking sides of the argument and leads me to the following conclusions:

• Google will treat links between sites from the same server like internal links – some weight, not much.
• From a usability perspective it would NOT make sense to include links to your unrelated sites in the footer.
• From a usability perspective it WOULD make sense to include links to your related sites in the footer.
• Spamdexing (linking lots of sites purely for SEO) is punished.
• If you design for the user you won’t be punished.

Example
If a publishing company has a site for accountants it would make no sense whatsoever from the user's point of view to link in the footer to their site aimed at 10 year olds.

However if they were to link to a site for human resource professionals in the footer of the accountancy site it may make more sense.

Conclusion
If you think about this subject from Google's point of view why would they want to punish someone who's genuinely trying to give the user a good web experience and also encourage visits between related sites?

Link your relevant sites together, it will help your SEO as much as internal linking will (ignore internal linking at your peril), however don't do anything EVER that will not benefit your users, confuse them or send them to places they don't want to go.

Don't just have alt tags on images, include height and width too

A fact i hope everyone making websites knows - include an alt tag with all your images.

Doing so will ensure that your website meets accessibility requirements but more importantly it lets everyone use your website including those with screen readers.

Now something i hadn't bothered with until recently was the height and width attributes. If you make your image the right size and don't include the height and width attributes then the image will be displayed the size it is. 'Why bother with height and width attributes?' I thought to myself.

WRONG! By including height and width attributes you will be improving your web page, making it load faster and making a better experience for your users.

While images are still being downloaded your web page will appear correctly because all the spaces where images should be are the right height and width.

Have you ever been onto a site and found that as the images load up, the text and copy and design all start pinging all over the place? Well that's because they haven't included height and width attributes.

It also means that if an image fails to load completely your page will still look the same, and if you've put in a useful alt tag the impact on your web page design is minimal. More info on height and width tags here.

For example, see my fictional code for a pretend image of a certain rock god in a tourist hotspot
including height, width and alt:

<img src="http://www.yourwebpage.com/yourimage.gif" alt="Robert Smith standing in front of the Taj Mahal" width="75" height="100" />

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Search images by the colours within them (Feb 2009)
Give images rounded edges using Photoshop (Nov 2007)

A good use of flash

Flash is cool, flash is funky, however it just annoys me. It provides barriers to entering websites, navigation menus fly back and forwards under your mouse. Have you ever used a particularly sensitive flash website when your mouse is on the blink? It's like trying to disarm a bomb with a shaky hand.

Anyway i've found an example of good use of flash. This interactive graphic on the FT website explains the credit squeeze and why Northern Rock subsequently went down the pan. This subject is extremely dry and I didn't understand it in any way. After using this graphic i still don't understand the subject completely but I could probably blag my way through a conversation.

My only complaint about this graphic would be that it is dependant on sound - annoying when you work in an office and don't have your headphones. Perhaps some sort of text based explanation to go with the graphic would have helped.

Now to clarify, flash doesn't annoy me all the time i'm mainly talking about flash use as integral parts of websites (grr!) and as a substitute for something far simpler like an animated gif or just well written text (aaah) - Flash hinders accessibility in these cases. However, I would never diss the use of flash for amusing and silly animations, badger badger badger.

Related posts
Flashy things in flash (Aug 07)

Linking to PDFs and still being accessible

I'm just about to link to a PDF and want to make sure that the link abides by accessibility guidelines for the benefit of my web users.

Now I know from Steve Krug's book and other accessibility nuggets that there are some basic rules for ALL links and also some specific PDF relevant things (as you can see, the following is just an index of Jakob Nielsen's website!).

• Only use PDFs if you have to. Presenting in HTML format is often a lot more user friendly.
• The link design should be obvious (Jakob Nielson has a whole article on this) - personally i think a different colour and underlined is the most accessible (i bet you just tried to click that!). However links can still suit design, check out the BBC website, it's really obvious what's a link and what's not.
• Create gateway pages for each PDF file so users can see what they are about to get (Jakob on gateways)
• If you are linking to a PDF on someone else's website don't do so directly. Link to their gateway page, there are a number of reasons why, again Jakob sums it up best.
• Ensure the PDF opens in a new browser window (Jakob on opening files from a web page).
• Tell users that it's a PDF and what file size it is.
• Explain to users what a PDF is and give them a link to the Adobe website to download Adobe Reader.

Now it's this last point that i've been stuck on. I'm just linking to a tube map and i don't want a whole gateway page (maybe i really should) with introduction etc. The BBC go all the way and are comprehensive with their PDF links (their annual reports [was] a good example [the page has now been changed]), hence the advantage of creating gateway pages - you have space to explain PDF files.

So against my own advice i'm going to compromise and use a table to format the following side by side (these are pretend links for the purposes of this post...).

Download tube directions (PDF, 300 KB)

More information on PDF files

1. So STOP!
2. Do you need to have a pdf?
3. If you do make sure you give it a gateway page.
4. Explain about PDFs to your users.

UPDATE (2/11): After all that i revisited my pdf of tube directions this week and decided to put it on my site in a downloads section (in other words a gateway page) as it's so much tidier. Should have listened to my own advice ;)

Don't make me think

If you haven't read "Don't make me think" by Steve Krug and you work with websites please do and then return once you have!

The amount of websites that have no relation to the purpose they are trying to achieve is just ridiculous.

• If you just want people to see a picture of soldiers then the marines website is perfect. What do you click on?! And why do people have to use flash for everything?! (see flashy things in flash)
• And i absolutely love the New Zealand Dept of Internal Affairs.
• Find more like this on web pages that suck (their words not mine).

The sad thing is that you don't need any special equipment, skills or time really to improve a lot of these sites. Yes sometimes you can be restricted by dodgy CMS (Content Management Systems) or the page is built without CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) but for sites like the New Zealand one mentioned above all you have to do is rearrange the information better. It's that simple! Honest! I've tried it (and I'm a donut).

I finish with some wisdom from Krug's book:

"When a cat is dropped, it always lands on its feet, and when toast is dropped, it always lands with the buttered side facing down. I propose to strap buttered toast to the back of a cat; the two will hover, spinning, inches above the ground. With a giant buttered cat array, a high-speed monorail could easily link New York with Chicago." - John Frazee

I've just searched for this quote on Google and found a whole world of buttered cat paradox sites, scary...