Page Title Tag and Keyword Placement

I’m currently reading an excellent book by David Viney titled “Get to the Top on Google.” Now don’t let the title fool you, much of the emphasis on Google is for promotional purposes. However, David does state that since Google drives much of the web’s traffic, why not.

As I’m reading along on a chapter devoted to on-page optimization, I get to the subject of optimizing the page <title> tag. For those of you not aware. content placed within the HTML <title> tag provides information to the search engines that aid in ranking your pages properly.

Recipe for Success Online

The recipe to success with web sites is straightforward and common sense, yet we all too often disregard key ingredients.

• Findability
• Accessibility
• Usability
• Convertability
• Measurability

Start SEO Post Launch? I don’t think so…

I’ve heard this ideology before, but was just reminded again while viewing a presentation by a well respected web professional. It’s the idea that, when building a website, SEO is started at the time of launch and beyond into maintenance mode.

Ah, no…

Search engine optimization must be considered during the initial planning stages of a site (or even during the initial planning stages of a redesign). SEO factors into many aspect of a site’s creation, from the naming of the domain, files & folders, navigation labels to the coding, design and and layout of the pages/templates. SEO is a piece of the overall puzzle, a peer and beneficiary of usability, accessibility, information architecture, etc.

Search Engine Optimization as part of the Web Design Workflow

The standard web design workflow is presented below (Thanks to Kelly Goto for writing the book on this topic). I’ve embellished and added to the workflow with SEO tasks that should take place in conjunction to the web design tasks.

180 on Flash

In the past, I’ve communicated that Flash, while useful for creating rich web experiences, is the scorn for anyone looking to rank well based on content within Flash movies. Search Engine are just unable to crawl & index this content.

Well, as of July 1, 2008, things have changed.

Check out Vanessa Fox’s article on SearchEngineLand.com regarding Google & Adobe’s partnership to enhance the search algorithm to crawl & digest Flash content. Mark this date; everything has changed.

Google Improves Webmaster Documentation

As posted on SearchEngineLand.com, Google has just updated their webmaster and SEO documentation. Updates include the Robots.txt documentation, spam reporting tools and documentation, IP delivery /geolocation/cloaking documentation, Nofollow documentation, doorway page documentation and quality guidelines.

Resources

• Matt Cutt’s post with additional information
• Google’s Webmaster Central