Posted by weslinda on June 5, 2007 under SEO / SEM | 
The Title Tag of your web page is one of the most important pieces that can directly affect how well your page is optimized for the search engines. Out of any attribute or section of your page, the title tag deserves the most time.
The title tag needs to be three things.
- Specific to the page.
- Short and concise.
- Include on page keywords.
Specific To The Page
Each and every page on your web site should have a unique title attribute. The tag should be written specific to the content on the specific page. The title tag is typically used by search engines as the link text in the results and is the first opportunity for your web page to convince someone to visit. Time should be taken when writing these tags and never overestimate it’s value.
Short and Concise
In my opinion, and in the opinion of many SEO experts, you want to keep your title to under 70 or characters which forces you to only use words that are important to the page and the visitor. Clean, clear, short and concise is the best option for all titles. Make sure not to stuff this tag full of keywords that you feel need to be there. Simple and effective is the optimal way.
Include On Page Keywords
The final piece is to include the main keywords from the page, in the title. If the page is on pink widgets, then your title should say that, not something about blue widgets.
To summarize, your title should be specific and unique to the page, short and concise and include the keywords of the page. A well written title can go a long way to improving the quality of a page. Make sure to focus on this and take your time to do this well.
Resources On Title Tags
Check out the other 25 items that make a great foundation for your web site.
Posted by weslinda on June 4, 2007 under Search Engines |
Yahoo has announced that a new pricing model has been rolled out today at Yahoo Search Marketing. This is great news for anyone marketing using the Yahoo Search Marketing platform.
To quote Yahoo:
Yahoo! Search Marketing is rolling out a new feature that we think will help enhance the quality, potentially reduce the cost and increase the value of traffic to you, our advertisers. It’s called quality-based pricing, and it measures the quality of traffic coming from our distribution partners—that is, the web publishers large and small that display your ads.
Yahoo Rolls Out New Quality Based Pricing
Posted by weslinda on under General Information |
Okay…so I got tagged by Jaan and wanted to continue this on:
While I don’t have an extensive list of charities that I donate to and support, I have come to find one need that is huge in this country and really underserved.
With over 40 million people suffering from some form of Arthritis in the US, the #1 cause of disability in the country needs to be addressed.
Disclaimer: I am employed full-time by the Johns Hopkins Arthritis Center as their Web Administrator. It is through this position that I’ve learned just how vast of a problem Arthritis is and how urgently we need to find a cure.
Posted by weslinda on under Web Design |
So this will be the first in our series on the 25 pieces that make up a solid web site. We’ll cover pieces numbers one and two in this article. They are the doctype and the language declaration.
These are two cores to a well built web site and while typically overlooked by many people. These are actually quite important pieces of information that should be included in the template for each and every web page you design.
Lets start with the Doctype declaration. To quote W3:
The document type declaration names the document type definition (DTD) in use for the document.
There are various Doctypes you can choose from. We feel the best two to work from are HTML 4.01 Strict or XHTML 1.1. Unless you truly need the XML functionality of XHTML we recommend going with HTML 4.01 Strict as an optimal base for your web site.
Here are some great resources for a more detailed look at doctype.
Declaring the language is also important so browsers and applications accessing the information can understand the language the document is in and not be forced to guess.
Language Declaration Resources:
Character Encoding Declaration:
Also important in the basic structure of your web site is a declaration of the Character set you are using for your page. The W3 tells us:
The “charset” parameter identifies a character encoding, which is a method of converting a sequence of bytes into a sequence of characters. This conversion fits naturally with the scheme of Web activity: servers send HTML documents to user agents as a stream of bytes; user agents interpret them as a sequence of characters. The conversion method can range from simple one-to-one correspondence to complex switching schemes or algorithms.
More Resources on Character Encoding:
In our next article we’ll discuss the all powerful Title Attribute of your page.
This article is a part or our series on 25 items that your web site needs to be successful.
Posted by weslinda on June 2, 2007 under Web Accessibility |
This is a fantastic video posted on Yahoo. It is an Introduction to Screen Readers by Victor Tsaran. If you are interested in learning the basics of web accessibility, this is a great resource to get a true understanding of the need for greater accessibility for all web sites and applications.
Introduction To Accessibility Screen Readers
