As an aside, content from Ed’s old Blogger account was transported via the handy WordPress ‘import’ function. Although imported in an untidy spaghetti like inline code fashion, it certainly relived the burden of having to paste each and every blog post. All in all, it’s a great function for a prolific Blogger based blogger looking to upgrade to a self hosted WordPress outfit.

For the actual programming of the blog, customised template pages were utilised for the ‘about’ , ‘newest’, and ‘archive’ pages. The ‘about’ page saw the use of custom fields to extend WordPress’s CMS capabilities to allow Ed to post both images and descriptions of his favourite books. The ‘newest’ page leveraged a custom page template so as to order and limit the latest posts by date, while similarly, the ‘archive’ displays category headings and related posts by date.

In addition to customised Facebook and Twitter plugins, a user subscription and Google sitemap plugin rounded out the build.

For seasoned SEO experts and budding beginners alike, the study represents “the collective wisdom of expert practitioners”, and without doubt sheds a some light on what’s percieved by some to be more art than science.

The guide goes over the solid fundamentals of SEO such as semantic URLs, meta tags, and the correct use of various attributes. It’s a good read for all levels.

Download Google’s SEO guide for the inside line on what’s required.

Put simply, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the quality and content of a website in order to drive more traffic to it from search engines, through natural (or organic) search results.

The SEO solutions I offer fall under the ‘White Hat’ umbrella. These boil down to providing content that’s relevant to a web user, as opposed to employing deceptive ‘Black Hat’ techniques, which are aimed at deceiving search engines. Black Hat methods are ridiculous and a waste of time in terms of effort and outcome. White hat solutions are sustainable; not only will they make sure your site scores better, but they’ll enhance the overall user experience of your website. In short, search engines aren’t blind to the quality of a website’s content.

Following the sustainable white hat route leads us neatly to the subject of ‘Accessibility’, which deserves an entire section. Doing SEO the right way helps to meet ‘accessibility issues’ head on. The crux of accessibility is to make your site as accessible as possible to the widest audience. This involves taking in account user disabilities, browser types and ages, and search engines! So you see, optimising your site the correct only enhances it’s accessibility. For further information on accessibility, feel to contact me.

Returning to Search Engine Optimisation, the SEO process isn’t exclusive to a website’s copy (or text), it can also, and should be, extended to image search, local search and vertical search (industry specific, content type specific such as video, or blog specific, to name a few). To use image search as a brief example, let’s take an image you’ve just uploaded to your website, straight from a digital camera without any changes. The image will have a non-descriptive file name such as IMG_1000. As you can probably see, this name would have absolutely no meaning whatsoever to a search engine. Effectively, the image is invisible.

To make an ‘Image’ search aware, could be Google Images for that matter, the image should have a descriptive (or ‘sematic’ in web parlance) name; i.e., if it’s a picture of Golden Retriever puppy, name it as such: [img src="images/golden-retriever-puppy.jpg"]. This example assumes it is in your ‘images’ directory, which is where it should be when maintaining a semantic file structure. Already, you’ve given Google, or another search engine, something to get its hooks into. Another image attribute of importance is ‘alt’, or ‘alternative text’ as its meant to represent.

In Internet Explorer (7 and older), when mousing over an image you’ll see what looks like a ‘tooltip’; this is the alt text being rendered to the screen. Though helpful, this is in fact an error on the part of IE; the correct attribute of that purpose is ‘title’. Apparently this bug has been fixed in IE8. The alt attribute should be rendered when the image can’t be, for whatever reason. Essentially, alt should describe what the user can’t see. Accordingly, standards based browser engines such as Mozilla use the value of the alt attribute as a textual replacement for the image to be displayed when the image isn’t. According to Mozilla, they have seen fit not to display the alt attribute as a tooltip, because doing so encourages authors to misuse the attribute.

Why? Simply put, authors have tended to fill it with useless or superfluous/auxiliary information. Moreover, if a tooltip effect isn’t required, authors will avoid the attribute all together, thus making the experience harder for people who can’t see the image; again, we’re getting back to accessibility. To reiterate, the title attribute should be used to display tooltips in IE8 and non-IE browsers.

So, to use alt effectively, you must describe the picture, or even the whole scene to make it more specific in an ‘Image search’. Don’t fill it spam, keep it simple and descriptive. Back to the puppy example; if the little puppy is playing with a bone, write “golden retriever puppy playing with bone;” no more, no less. Anything more could be construed as spam. A simple description will assist both your accessibility and SEO endeavours. This is just the tip of the SEO iceberg and should serve as a mild introduction; there’s far more to be done including the use of proper markup. For further assistance on SEO, feel free to fire an email off.