Re: [WSG] The head of the document
The other issue is that those top ranked sites have a lot of other sites linking to them. Relevant linking also drives Google's search engine rankings and a lot of other search engines have moved to that too. It isn't just about the content picked up by the search bots, but the massive number of sites linking to them too. But good content also means you'll have more linking to you, further boosting your ranking. Personally, I count quality content as part of SEO efforts. Janice Schwarz GeekArtist Web Solutions Putting the e in your business www.geekartist.net Do a search for something small to medium scale, for instance a doctor's surgery, a restaurant, a musician, a theatre etc. (I guess a large proportion of internet searches are for things like this). Now have a look at the number one entry returned in your search engine and examine the head. In my experience it probably won't have any meta data, and yet there it was at the top of the list. There is so much great content out there presented in terrible ways and the success of search engines is that they are able to interoperate all that mess and return relevant results to people's searches. Part of me feels that most SEO is a bit of a waste of time - if you have good content, the search engines are clever enough that they will find it. I am not saying that you should put barriers between your content and the search engines, but maybe all the time and effort you spend forming the correct keywords would be better spent improving the quality of your content. Andy -- a...@universalsprout.com Andrew Stewart London :: +44(0)7900 245 789 Sydney :: +61(0)416 607 113 www.universalsprout.com :: websites that sprout *** List Guidelines: http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm Unsubscribe: http://webstandardsgroup.org/join/unsubscribe.cfm Help: memberh...@webstandardsgroup.org *** *** List Guidelines: http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm Unsubscribe: http://webstandardsgroup.org/join/unsubscribe.cfm Help: memberh...@webstandardsgroup.org ***
Re: [WSG] The head of the document
Hi Paul I recently read a interview with SEO expert Frank Paul. The gist of the interview was that description, title and keywords were just as important today as they have ever been. This lead me to go read his website and find out in more detail what the interview only skimmed the surface of. any way his site is really interesting and offers a lot of free SEO advice. http://www.smingle.co.uk/freeseoguide/ Cheers Dave Paul Collins p.coll...@twentyfirst.com 23/07/2009 13:14 Hi all, I'm just curious to know what other people do these days with the header of their document? What is best practice for: - Good search engine rankings - Best charset for English text (utf-8, right?) - Do we need robots - all anymore? - Any Accessibility issues? (Can't think of any) - Does anyone bother with descriptions, keywords anymore? - Dublin Core metadata, is that a forgotten fad?! I'll show you an example of how I setup a standard page, please anyone offer what they think is best practice, or perhaps send any useful links: !DOCTYPE html PUBLIC -//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd; html xmlns=http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml; xmlns:v=urn:schemas-microsoft-com:vml xml:lang=en lang=en head meta http-equiv=Content-Type content=text/html; charset=utf-8/ meta http-equiv=Content-Language content=en-us/ titleTITLE/title meta name=ROBOTS content=ALL/ meta http-equiv=imagetoolbar content=no/ meta name=MSSmartTagsPreventParsing content=true/ link rel=stylesheet href=STYLESHEET type=text/css media=all/ /head Cheers *** List Guidelines: http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm Unsubscribe: http://webstandardsgroup.org/join/unsubscribe.cfm Help: memberh...@webstandardsgroup.org *** - This email and any attachments are confidential and intended solely for the use of the individual to whom it is addressed. Any views or opinions presented are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of Edge Hill University or associated companies. If you are not the intended recipient, please contact the sender as soon as possible and delete it and all copies of it. You must not, directly or indirectly, use, disclose, distribute, print, or copy any part of this message if you are not the intended recipient. The message content of in-coming emails is automatically scanned to identify Spam and viruses otherwise Edge Hill University do not actively monitor content. However, sometimes it will be necessary for Edge Hill University to access business communications during staff absence. Edge Hill University has taken steps to ensure that this email and any attachments are virus free. However, it is the responsibility of the recipient to ensure that it is virus free and no responsibility is accepted by Edge Hill University for any loss or damage arising in any way from its use. - *** List Guidelines: http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm Unsubscribe: http://webstandardsgroup.org/join/unsubscribe.cfm Help: memberh...@webstandardsgroup.org ***
Re: [WSG] The head of the document
2009/7/23 Paul Collins p.coll...@twentyfirst.com: - Good search engine rankings - Best charset for English text (utf-8, right?) - Do we need robots - all anymore? - Any Accessibility issues? (Can't think of any) - Does anyone bother with descriptions, keywords anymore? - Dublin Core metadata, is that a forgotten fad?! Google pays attention to meta description: see their SEO Starter Guide, a PDF linked from http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/11/googles-seo-starter-guide.html. -- Nick Fitzsimons http://www.nickfitz.co.uk/ *** List Guidelines: http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm Unsubscribe: http://webstandardsgroup.org/join/unsubscribe.cfm Help: memberh...@webstandardsgroup.org ***
Re: [WSG] The head of the document
Btw, the minimal valid header for *HTML5*: !DOCTYPE html html head meta charset=utf-8 / title Your Title Goes Here /title /head I really love the simplicity of this. Cheers Gregorio Espadas http://gespadas.com On Thu, Jul 23, 2009 at 7:14 AM, Paul Collins p.coll...@twentyfirst.comwrote: Hi all, I'm just curious to know what other people do these days with the header of their document? What is best practice for: - Good search engine rankings - Best charset for English text (utf-8, right?) - Do we need robots - all anymore? - Any Accessibility issues? (Can't think of any) - Does anyone bother with descriptions, keywords anymore? - Dublin Core metadata, is that a forgotten fad?! I'll show you an example of how I setup a standard page, please anyone offer what they think is best practice, or perhaps send any useful links: !DOCTYPE html PUBLIC -//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd; html xmlns=http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml; xmlns:v=urn:schemas-microsoft-com:vml xml:lang=en lang=en head meta http-equiv=Content-Type content=text/html; charset=utf-8/ meta http-equiv=Content-Language content=en-us/ titleTITLE/title meta name=ROBOTS content=ALL/ meta http-equiv=imagetoolbar content=no/ meta name=MSSmartTagsPreventParsing content=true/ link rel=stylesheet href=STYLESHEET type=text/css media=all/ /head Cheers *** List Guidelines: http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm Unsubscribe: http://webstandardsgroup.org/join/unsubscribe.cfm Help: memberh...@webstandardsgroup.org *** *** List Guidelines: http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm Unsubscribe: http://webstandardsgroup.org/join/unsubscribe.cfm Help: memberh...@webstandardsgroup.org ***
Re: [WSG] The head of the document
Good question—I’d like to see what some other responses are. Even with the advent of HTML5 I’m still firmly in the XHTML 1.0 Strict camp currently and typically add to the head you illustrated: • meta http-equiv=content-language content= / • link rel=license href= / …along with a few other meta tags for author(s), designer(s), developer(s), description and keywords. Kind regards. —Pascal On 23/07/2009, at 10:14 PM, Paul Collins wrote: Hi all, I'm just curious to know what other people do these days with the header of their document? What is best practice for: - Good search engine rankings - Best charset for English text (utf-8, right?) - Do we need robots - all anymore? - Any Accessibility issues? (Can't think of any) - Does anyone bother with descriptions, keywords anymore? - Dublin Core metadata, is that a forgotten fad?! I'll show you an example of how I setup a standard page, please anyone offer what they think is best practice, or perhaps send any useful links: !DOCTYPE html PUBLIC -//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd html xmlns=http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml; xmlns:v=urn:schemas-microsoft-com:vml xml:lang=en lang=en head meta http-equiv=Content-Type content=text/html; charset=utf-8/ meta http-equiv=Content-Language content=en-us/ titleTITLE/title meta name=ROBOTS content=ALL/ meta http-equiv=imagetoolbar content=no/ meta name=MSSmartTagsPreventParsing content=true/ link rel=stylesheet href=STYLESHEET type=text/css media=all/ /head Cheers *** List Guidelines: http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm Unsubscribe: http://webstandardsgroup.org/join/unsubscribe.cfm Help: memberh...@webstandardsgroup.org *** --- Simon Pascal Klein Graphic Web Designer Web: http://klepas.org E-mail: kle...@klepas.org Twitter: @klepas; http://twitter.com/klepas This email is: [ ] bloggable [x] ask first [ ] private. Kaffee und Kuchen. *** List Guidelines: http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm Unsubscribe: http://webstandardsgroup.org/join/unsubscribe.cfm Help: memberh...@webstandardsgroup.org ***
RE: [WSG] The head of the document
At the web shop for the U.S. House of Representatives, we recommend that our offices use Dublin Core and a number of other meta tags. The specific tags that we recommend are set out at http://cao.house.gov/web-standards/best-practices.pdf#page=186. Elliot From: li...@webstandardsgroup.org [mailto:li...@webstandardsgroup.org] On Behalf Of Paul Collins Sent: Thursday, July 23, 2009 8:15 AM To: wsg@webstandardsgroup.org Subject: [WSG] The head of the document Hi all, I'm just curious to know what other people do these days with the header of their document? What is best practice for: - Good search engine rankings - Best charset for English text (utf-8, right?) - Do we need robots - all anymore? - Any Accessibility issues? (Can't think of any) - Does anyone bother with descriptions, keywords anymore? - Dublin Core metadata, is that a forgotten fad?! I'll show you an example of how I setup a standard page, please anyone offer what they think is best practice, or perhaps send any useful links: !DOCTYPE html PUBLIC -//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd; html xmlns=http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml; xmlns:v=urn:schemas-microsoft-com:vml xml:lang=en lang=en head meta http-equiv=Content-Type content=text/html; charset=utf-8/ meta http-equiv=Content-Language content=en-us/ titleTITLE/title meta name=ROBOTS content=ALL/ meta http-equiv=imagetoolbar content=no/ meta name=MSSmartTagsPreventParsing content=true/ link rel=stylesheet href=STYLESHEET type=text/css media=all/ /head Cheers *** List Guidelines: http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm Unsubscribe: http://webstandardsgroup.org/join/unsubscribe.cfm Help: memberh...@webstandardsgroup.org *** *** List Guidelines: http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm Unsubscribe: http://webstandardsgroup.org/join/unsubscribe.cfm Help: memberh...@webstandardsgroup.org ***
Re: [WSG] The head of the document
There's some interesting info and referenced articles on this Sitepoint blog concerning HTML5 http://www.sitepoint.com/blogs/2009/07/24/google-html5-and-standards/ Don't feel totally comfortable with Google setting standards 'by default' to suit their operational requirements...but maybe that's 'old school' thinking now ;-) cheers Marie-Laure Bouchet *** List Guidelines: http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm Unsubscribe: http://webstandardsgroup.org/join/unsubscribe.cfm Help: memberh...@webstandardsgroup.org ***
Re: [WSG] The head of the document
Do a search for something small to medium scale, for instance a doctor's surgery, a restaurant, a musician, a theatre etc. (I guess a large proportion of internet searches are for things like this). Now have a look at the number one entry returned in your search engine and examine the head. In my experience it probably won't have any meta data, and yet there it was at the top of the list. There is so much great content out there presented in terrible ways and the success of search engines is that they are able to interoperate all that mess and return relevant results to people's searches. Part of me feels that most SEO is a bit of a waste of time - if you have good content, the search engines are clever enough that they will find it. I am not saying that you should put barriers between your content and the search engines, but maybe all the time and effort you spend forming the correct keywords would be better spent improving the quality of your content. Andy -- a...@universalsprout.com Andrew Stewart London :: +44(0)7900 245 789 Sydney :: +61(0)416 607 113 www.universalsprout.com :: websites that sprout *** List Guidelines: http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm Unsubscribe: http://webstandardsgroup.org/join/unsubscribe.cfm Help: memberh...@webstandardsgroup.org ***
