January 2009

Optimise Your Meta Tags

30. January 2009

The meta description and meta keywords are both important to SEO. Although not a huge factor in influencing rank the meta description can have an influence on the person who sees it in the search results. Here are are some tips to optimise both the meta description and meta keywords tags.

The meta description should be keyword rich and informative. It should describe the service or page information. Make sure it makes sense when read and don't overdo the keywords. Keep it to no more than 150 characters and less than 30 words.

Don't use the meta description to repeat your page title. Sometimes a search engine may display your meta description under your page title. So use the meta description as your chance to give the user more information.

Make the meta description unique to each page. Custom write this for each page to give the searcher more information if she sees it on her search results and to also give the search engines more information about the page content.

With meta keywords these should be keywords or phrases that appear in the page content. It's that simple. Ensure that the meta keywords contains all important keywords. Keep your list of keywords to 10 or less. And write the keywords in lowercase.

Search Engine Optimisation seo tips, search engine, seo, keywords, search engine optimisation

Optimise Your Page Titles

30. January 2009

Comments (1)

Page titles are commonly forgotten about or not used correctly. Which is a shame because they hold a lot of power. Page titles show up as the first line of clickable text in most search engine results. This can influence search engine ranking as well as whether or not someone clicks through. So how do you optimise your page title? Here's how.

Keep it short. Aim for no more than 65 characters and no more than 15 words. Ensure you put your important keywords towards the beginning of the title and that the title makes sense when read.

Include your keywords but don't overdo it! Keyword stuffing is bad and can make your page title meaningless. And that will put people of clicking through.

Always include your company name or brand. Your name may have a better reputation with a potential customer than a competitors.

And the final tip to a better page title. Write unique page titles for each page. This makes it clear in the listings what is on this page and why the user should click through.

Search Engine Optimisation seo tips, search engine optimisation, search engine, keywords

Valid XHTML Dynamic List Instead Of Using A Repeater

30. January 2009

Comments (0)

Repeater controls are great for displaying lists. But these the lists displayed are not valid XHTML. To make sure my pages are valid I have had to use a workaround.

For my events list I created a shared function, in case I need to reuse it.



Public Shared Function getOrderedEventsList (ByVal ds As DataSet) As String 

'take dataset and return an ordered list string that is valid XHTML 

Dim strResult As String = String.Empty 

strResult += "<ol>" 

Dim dr As DataRow 

For Each dr In ds.Tables(0).Rows 

strResult += "<li>" & dr("EventTitle") & "</li>" 

Next 

strResult += "</ol>" 

Return strResult 

End Function

Using an empty div and from the code behind I am filling it using InnerHtml.



divName.InnerHtml = getOrderedEventsList(dataset)

You can use this for any dynamic list instead of a repeater. And your code will be valid XHTML.

.Net xhtml, .net

Free Website Templates

29. January 2009

Comments (0)

Do you need XHTML and CSS based free web design templates? Here are some open source website template websites:

Even if you are a web designer these sites are worth looking at for inspiration.

For premium website templates then there is Template Kingdom and Template Monster.

General css, xhtml, open source, websites

Geo Tag Your Website

29. January 2009

Comments (0)

More and more searches are local searches so take advantage of that by geo tagging your website.

I came across this Geo Tag generator for creating geo tags for your website.

Website Promotion geo tag, websites

Structure Headings Correctly

28. January 2009

Comments (0)

A webpage is a document and should be structured accordingly. Using the heading tags is a great way to structure your webpage and keep relevant information together.

A webpage should only have one H1 tag. Then you can have multiple h2, h3, h4, etc entries. However, my preferred option is to have one H1 and one H2. Then use multiple H3 for headings and H4 for sub headings. I never need to go beyond H4.

Always ensure that you keep the order! Never go H2 then H4, it must be H2 then H3. You can go H3, H4, H3.

So an example heading structure could be:



<h1>Main Heading</h1>

<h2>Content Heading</h2>

<p>paragraph</p>

<h3>Heading</h3>

<p>paragraph</p>

<h4>Sub Heading</h4>

<p>paragraph</p>

<h3>Heading</h3>

<p>paragraph</p>

This helps make the document more easily read and scanned for important information. If it's easier read by humans there's a good chance search engines will be able to read and understand it better too.

Accessibility accessibility

<< Previous posts