To me, it just seems to make sense, irrespective of SEO and if it works for SEO, then thats great too!

However I would be interested to hear what the result of your panel was… Or was that too long ago now?

You can see my results here: http://www.hotproject.com

Why not ask what everyone that works in the online industry can do to grow, collectively, the % of marketing budget spent on the web? Seems to me, that SEO, designers and everyone else that makes money from websites are either competing for a share of a limitted online spend, or working to grow the total pool of funds. What can we all do make the pie grow??

Many of the SEO people who practice on site/ethical/white hat/content driven/call it what you will SEO are oftentimes messengers delivering bad news that they have no control over. It’s not their fault that search engines aren’t reading style sheets, for example — nor that they cannot parse words out of images. So they can tell you what tradeoffs have to be made — but ultimately, it’s the search engines themselves that must change and advance for those tradeoffs to go away (and by the way, often the tradeoffs will be extremely small).

With luck, there will be two search engine reps on this panel as well — so think of what you want for them to hear from Eric, too.

• Digital Web: Effectively increasing search engine ranking with W3C Accessibility guidelines and Section 508
• Optimising for accessibility (currently not available)

It would be nice to emphasise that accessibility and proper search engine optimisation are essentially the same thing – providing access to content.

We redesigned the site using standards and clean semantic based markup. The site had over 400 articles. Most articles ranked between 50-150 on Google. Now many are ranked on the first page of results on some topics. Some are still buried down around 150 or greater. Most of this is due to ‘page rank’ and the number of links to a particular topic.

What I have learned from this project about Standards based markup and SEO:

1. Page Rank – is the #1 factor – i.e. how many sites link to an article and the linking site’s associated page rank.

2. HTML “title” tag is the second biggest factor.

3. keyword density is third.

4. keywords in semantic based tags. i.e. h1, h2, li, etc.

5 Meta description tag.

6. page weight.

The actual order of those is debatable. It is just what appears to us based the tweaks we have done on the 400+ pages on their site.

Bottom line. Standards based design did make an impact on American Pregnancy Association, because:

1. we got rid of tons of useless in-line JavaScript which bogged down the bots. Bots bail after too much upfront garbage like JavaScript and never get to the important first 250 words in the actual content.

2. The navigation to their site was done all with graphic files. We changed the nav to text based menus using the standard “ul” list methods that Eric teaches in his books. This added a lot of good keyword terms like “unplanned pregnancy” and “labor and birth” to the html that were previously invisible to the search engines because they were gifs.

3. Semantics! The use of h1, h2 tags and list items are very search engine friendly.

4. Overall page weight was cut significantly by going to standards. All things being equal search engines rank the fastest page to load higher.

Now, the million dollar question is, how much did the standards based design take them from page 12 in Google to page 1? Don’t know, but I’m sure it did help some. “Pregnancy Symptoms” ranked down in the cellar before and as of today is on the first page of results for Google and number 1 in yahoo!

Be happy to share more of what we learned on this topic. Just send me an email.

American Pregnancy Association web site

David Wilbanks

Where: December 13-16, 2004 at McCormick Place, Lakeside Center in Chicago

Event Overview:

Organized by world-renowned search authority Danny Sullivan.
Delivers real-time actionable information you nee…

I’m in the process of cleaning up my design act, so to speak, and I’d like to give my sites and my clients’ sites good rankings, good markup, and good accessibility. Thanks.

I’m pretty sure no search engine does not this now, but I guess it’s possible at some point. Seems a bit ridiculous, though. Who knows.

To be clear, I think people with actual content should have access to information that allows them to avoid silly mistakes and present their sites in the best light possible. I cannot help but think that correct semantic markup will help, if even just because there will be less ‘junk’ surrounding the actual content, and because people forget that spiders can’t read text in images. But as soon as you start trying to ‘fool’ the search engines you’ve crossed a line into lies and fraud and for that kind of market a slightly mystical ‘secret’ will always sell better than the straightforward truth (see: crash diet fads vs. eating healthily, expensive cables vs. audio engineering, every popular management theory ever, etc. ) and this is true regardless of actual results. In fact if there is no clear, independent way to gauge success all the better as that requires people to return to the ‘expert’ for guidance.

Hmm, I think my cynicism won through there in the end, so I’ll end with my cynical advice: even if it isn’t true that semantic, accessible, standards-based code is better for search engine ranking then tell them it is anyway, and make sure it gets repeated enough until it’s accepted wisdom.

My questions is, does Search Engines rank web pages with or (da=danish) better or does it not matter at all to incl. these language attributes?

My own experience from Denmark says that not many webdesigners use these language attributes at all. Richard Ishida from W3C says that it’s allways a good idea to incl. language information in (X)HTML documents. See
http://www.w3.org/International/tutorials/tutorial-lang/

On the question of metadata: do SEO’s think that a standardised metadata set (such as DublinCore) is ever going to be adopted? Do we need it in this day and age?

OK enough with the snarky Q’s :)

Really I am interested to see what value they place on correct semantic markup. Considering the number of “cheats” many SEO’s recommend such as using incorrect code (putting half your content in an H1 and the rest in an H2 for example) and search engines now working unfavourably towards such practices.

I have had little trouble getting well marked-up sites to have good rankings on google.

Why aren’t these guys our biggest supporters, because IMHO I think they should be in favour of easy to parse, semanticly correct code.

I think those of us on the front-lines often cringe the instant SEO’s become involved in a project. I know I have done more than a few things because clients have demanded them on the the advice of an SEO … not once have I thought them sound, intellegent changes.
Are SEO’s aware of this, are they trying to do a real job? or just make a quick buck of the gullible?

Don’t get my wrong there is definitely a real job / place for SEO services and I have in the past always factored in such services in my quotes. But I can site real, proven, valuable things I do with this allocated time. And I have the results to prove it.