Multiregional websites using substantially the same content. Example: English webpages for Australia, Canada and USA, differing only in price

Multiregional websites using fully translated content, or substantially different monolingual content targeting different regions. Example: a product webpage in German, English and French

The support is an expansion of the rel=”alternate” hreflang link element. Google says it has expanded it to handle content that is translated or provided for multiple geogrhapic regions.

“The hreflang attribute can specify the language, optionally the country, and URLs of equivalent content,” the company explains on the Webmaster Central blog. “By specifying these alternate URLs, our goal is to be able to consolidate signals for these pages, and to serve the appropriate URL to users in search. Alternative URLs can be on the same site or on another domain.”

You can always use re=”canonical” for pages that have the same content in the same language that are aimed at different countries.

“We’ll use that signal to focus on that version in search, while showing the local URLs to users where appropriate,” the company says. “For example, you could use this if you have the same product page in German, but want to target it separately to users searching on the Google properties for Germany, Austria, and Switzerland.”

Google looks at some examples of when to use the new markup here. They also have a help center article about the markup here.

The feature is already being utilized by MySpace, Rhapsody and ReverbNation. Search results would look something like this:

“As with other rich snippet formats, implementing the markup does not guarantee that your site will be displayed with the UI shown above on a given search; a variety of factors affect whether a particular rich snippet type will appear in our search results. However, having correct markup is a prerequisite for music rich snippets to ever be displayed,” says Associate Product Manager Gideon Wald.

Schema.org offers a set of guidelines for MusicRecording Markup:

Schema.org was announced by Google, Bing and Yahoo earlier this year as an initiative to support a common set of schemas for structured data markup.

“For now, music rich snippets will display song information when users search for artists, album names or song names,” says Wald. “We’ll continue working both on expanding our existing rich snippets formats and on creating new ones, so keep watching for updates about new types of content that you can surface for users right in your site’s snippets.”

Google offers a rich snippets testing tool here.

A representative for Bing tells WebProNews, “Over the past two years, Bing has worked to improve the search experience to better reflect both the evolving Web and changing consumer habits.”

” While this effort has a major ‘geek factor,’ it serves as quite a significant advancement for both the search industry and consumers,” he said.

The site will provide tips and tools for helping sites appear in search results. “It will also help search engines better understand websites, and moving forward, Bing will work jointly with the larger web community and its search partners to extend the available schema categories,” the representative says. “Consumers will also benefit from this effort by experiencing richer search experiences and content from a much broader set of publishers.”

“At Google, we’ve supported structured markup for a couple years now. We introduced rich snippets in 2009 to better represent search results describing people or containing reviews. We’ve since expanded to new kinds of rich snippets, including products, events, recipes, and more,” says Google’s search quality team. “Adoption by the webmaster community has grown rapidly, and today we’re able to show rich snippets in search results more than ten times as often as when we started two years ago.”

“We want to continue making the open web richer and more useful. We know that it takes time and effort to add this markup to your pages, and adding markup is much harder if every search engine asks for data in a different way,” the team adds. “That’s why we’ve come together with other search engines to support a common set of schemas, just as we came together to support a common standard for Sitemaps in 2006. With schema.org, site owners can improve how their sites appear in search results not only on Google, but on Bing, Yahoo! and potentially other search engines as well in the future.”

The search engines also worked together to support the canonical tag.

Here’s what the schema.org site itself says:

This site provides a collection of schemas, i.e., html tags, that webmasters can use to markup their pages in ways recognized by major search providers. Search engines including Bing, Google and Yahoo! rely on this markup to improve the display of search results, making it easier for people to find the right web pages.

A shared markup vocabulary makes easier for webmasters to decide on a markup schema and get the maximum benefit for their efforts. So, in the spirit of sitemaps.org, Bing, Google and Yahoo! have come together to provide a shared collection of schemas that webmasters can use.

Google says it has added over 100 new types and ported all existing types of rich snippets. Where in the past it has supported three different standards for structured data markup, they will no only focus on microdata. Google says it will continue to support existing rich snippet markup formats. They also provide a testing tool for markup here.

Bing also says that while it accepts a wide variety of markup formats, it is working to simplify the choices for webmasters.

Jess Lee in the official Google Lat Long blog explains the first feature, multi-user My Maps:

[M]ultiple people can edit the same My Map. Just click the “Collaborate” link and enter the email addresses of the people you want to invite. They’ll receive an email invitation with a link to the map. Once they open the map, they should be able to edit it

Google’s Brian Cornell details how to import KML (Keyhole Markup Language) files, which are often used in the context of Google Earth:

[C]reate a new map and click the Import link. You’ll be able to upload a file from your desktop, or enter the URL of a file on the web. We’ll import all of the data from that file into your map for online access and editing.

Brian notes that not all features working in Google Earth (like 3D models) are supported in Google Maps yet. Previously, you were already able to enter a KML address in the Google Maps search box to have it be displayed instantly – but only if it’s not too large.

Comments

Tag:

I am thoroughly impressed with the hospitality I was shown in Milwaukee. Everyone was very helpful and welcoming. I appreciate that very much. I intend to return to Milwaukee and see more of this great city.

A special thanks to Tiffany, Bill, and Erica for the extra work they did to make sure I was taken care of during my trip.

Regarding the 3 main points I made about constructing quality websites for your clients, here are some links for additional reading.

Code Quality

• W3C Markup Validator — Enter a URL in the first box and click the “Check” button to validate any page on the Web.
• Firefox web developer extension — This is the tool I use to turn stylesheets off and do other geeky website evaluation tricks.
• Adobe on Accessibility — A great primer on accessibility.
• CSS Zen Garden — This is the site that illustrates the power of semantic markup and separating website content from presentation.

Search Engine Optimization

• The Goal of Search Marketing — Sometimes ranking first isn’t necessary to achieve your goals.
• Guide to Link Building for SEO Purposes — Linking is a powerful SEO strategy…this article discusses link building strategies in depth.
• Choosing Keywords Wisely — An overview of the keyword selection process.

Manageability

• 10 Reasons Every Website Needs a CMS — There are more than 10 but this is a good start!
• Sitemaps and SEO — An overview of the Sitemap XML protocol we discussed.

Miscellaneous

• Ten Buzzwords and What They Mean
• All Websites are Not Created Equally

I also had a few requests for information about the services my company offers as well as about Tweak, our content management system so here are links to both of those.

Agency Fusion
Tweak CMS

If you’re interested in learning more about our CMS, I recommend having one of my project managers do a brief online demonstration of the system for you. They’re really good at showing you specifically how you and your clients can benefit from using Tweak.

Please don’t hesitate to post a comment below if you have additional questions or have suggestions on my presentation. I love receiving feedback!

Comments

Tag:

Can Coding Affect Your Search Ranking

With all the talk about the importance of quality inbound links and avoiding spammy tactics like keyword stuffing, we also deal with myths surrounding coding and text-to-code ratio in terms of search ranking.

Some SEO professions subscribe to the theory that extraneous code throughout the source of a site could hinder the search crawlers from being able to adequately perceive the content of a page, which subsequently leads to less than optimal rankings within the SERP pages.

This article at PhoenixRealm SEO attempts to stress the importance of keeping your backend code clean and pristine:

A cleaner markup means extremely light pages and it also means an increase in content-to-markup ratio. Search engines want more content and less code on your web pages. With less code on your page, your main content moves closer to the top and consequently, gets easily crawled.

Remember that crawlers read only 150-250 words of your page and you should make sure everything important should be covered there. Pages with unnecessary and incorrectly nested code are difficult to crawl. They are also a hindrance to DOM scripting.

However, the handling of messy code is the subject of some debat. Some would say that poor coding can, in effect, disguise the true quality of your content, which you&’ve no doubt gone to great pains in order to develop and perfect. Google, however, is on the record as saying that the text-to-code ratio of a site isn’t really a significant factor in determining that site’s ranking. If the site is crawlable, it is indexable.

In a WebProNews video, Rand Fishkin interviewed Google’s Vanessa Fox and asked her about text to code ratio point blank. Fusednation has a nice synopsis of our video interview with Vanessa Fox of Google where, among other topics, she addresses text-to-code ratio.

From Fusednation:

This point I’ve seen crop up so many times, and each and every time I say – it does not matter! One of my first sites was created in Frontpage with absolutely shocking code and it ranks fine, even for searches with 100 million+ results.

The good word = Google ignores code to text ratio.

Not really big news, but I remember having an argument with a guy on a business forum who was adamant that content / code positioning was a deciding factor.  Ha!  I told you so!

Nice to get clarification on these small things, even if we knew them to be true before. – Scott Boyd (Marketing Guy)

So perhaps a panic induced effort to recode your entire site by hand may be a bit premature, if not altogether unnecessary. Don’t get me wrong; I’m not saying that making your code as clean as it needs to be is an altogether bad thing, but it’s more for your own personal benefit than for that of the search spiders.

When working with keyword themes, alt and title attributes, and developing an intuitive linking structure, you’ll be very well served to keep your code clean enough to easily navigate and edit. Just don’t depend on text-to-code ratios to be the end-all, be-all of your optimization process. 

I’m sorely regretting my decision to sign a new contract with Verizon Wireless last fall because it means I face a stiff cancellation fee if I want an iPhone (currently only available through Apple’s partnership with Cingular).

Other than the relationship with Cingular (see my rant on the Cingular/AT&T confusion), the iPhone seems perfect. Jobs made some pretty big claims about how the iPhone is as revolutionary as the original Macintosh and the iPod. I’m inclined to believe him.

Even if the iPhone doesn’t turn the mobile phone industry upside down, which it seems poised to do, it will do one great thing in my eyes: further the cause of semantic, standards-based web markup. You already know I think standards and semantic markup are important. The iPhone will help make sure even more people think so too.

Here are 3 reasons the iPhone will further the cause of Web standards and semantic markup.

1. The iPhone puts handheld Internet-access in the hands of people other than the usual gadget-heads who’ll put up with a quirky home-grown phone browser. With more of the masses accessing the Web via a handheld device, more clients, designers, and developers are going to be concerned with how a website looks and functions in both traditional and mobile environments.

2. The iPhone has a real browser that developers already target: Safari. The “smartphones” on the market today aren’t full-featured browsers and aren’t even on the radar of most web developers in terms of writing code optimized for these browsers.

3. The iPhone will spawn a whole slew of imitators just like the iPod did. With the bar effectively raised, Motorola, Nokia, Samsung, LG, etc. will all have to step up their game and produce a competing product. That means everyone will be making phones capable of a more robust handheld browsing experience, further increasing the desire of web designers and developers (and their clients) to make websites that look good on all devices.

Semantic markup that adheres to established standards is ideal for websites whose audience will be using a variety of devices. The right markup works flawlessly in a desktop browser, a handheld device’s browser, and even in a screen reader.

Apple’s iPhone brings a new device to the market that will gain market share quickly, promote handheld web browsing, and as a result, increase the value of web standards and semantics!

Comments

Tag:

Add to Del.icio.us | Digg | Reddit | Furl

Bookmark WebProNews:

Brett Derricott is the founder and CEO of Agency Fusion, a web development company with a sweet content management system.

Brett blogs about technology at Agency Byte.

One of the more recent developments in web design is the use of CSS and semantic markup. CSS and semantic web design has several benefits: clarity in code, browser and other web-enabled devices compatibility, seperation of content and presentation, smaller burden on bandwith, and better visibility to search engines.

Back in the day, we designed sites with tables and hacked those tables into doing things that they were never meant to do. The table tag was designed to display tabular data, not as a way to render the layout of a website. Unfortunately, a better alternative did not exist, so we used tables. This made for inefficient, slow loading sites with code that was very hard to read and maintain. Wikipedia defines sematic markup like this:

Sematic pages: supply information for Web search engines using web crawlers. This could be machine-readable information about the human-readable content of the document (such as the creator, title, description, etc., of the document) or it could be purely metadata representing a set of facts (such as resources and services elsewhere in the site). (Note that anything that can be identified with a Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) can be described, so the semantic web can reason about people, places, ideas, cats etc.)

These days, hip designers and developers use CSS extensively to create beautiful, fully standards compliant sites. CSS-based layout allows us to develop sites that will degrade effectively–that is that they will be viewable on all types of devices such as PDAs, cell phones, T.V.s–and will work correctly on devices that dont even exist yet as long as they are standards compliant.

Most importantly, developing sites with CSS allows us to effectively separate content and presentation. Have you ever looked at the source code of HTML pages that were created with a table-based layout and wondered what the heck is going on here? You see lots of opening and closing of tables and table rows all mixed together with textual content and graphics. With a clean, CSS-based layout you can create pages that are easily understood by looking at the source, making them easier to understand, maintain, and update. Look at the source of my company site http://www.vp3media.com and then look at the source code of this site that uses a tables based layout: http://webservices.org/. Big difference, huh?

If you have a site with high traffic, you can significantly reduce the amount of bandwdth used by transitioning from a table-based site to a CSS-based layout. If a visitor to your site doesnt have to load all of the code needed to render those tables and spacer gifs, you are transmiting less data.

CSS also offers search engine optimization benefits over tables. If you have a tables based business site that relys on Internet traffic to turn a profit or aquire new clients you will see real advantages by switching to CSS. When a search engine spiders your tables-based site, they retrieve a large amount of content that has nothing to do with you business. When search engines spiders a clean CSS-based site, the majority of content retrieved will be textual content that describes your business. The ratio of content-to-code is higher with CSS-based layouts.

Weve all seen search engine descriptions that dont make any sense; thats because search engine spiders use a top down method for retrieving information. Whatever is topmost in your document, the search engines are going to think is the most important part of the document, and therefore should be used as the description. Since we seperate content and presentation with CSS, we can put the most important information at the top of a document no matter where it is actually displayed on the page. Try that with tables!

I hope this article gives you an overview of why it is important to transition from your current tables-based layout to a fully valid CSS implementation. If you dont have a web site, but are planning on launching one in the near future, make sure you tell your developers you want a CSS-based implementation. If you need help moving from your current tables-based site to a CSS-based one, please feel free to contact me at vp3media@gmail.com or call me toll free at 1-877-320-4349 and Ill be happy to discuss your site with you.

James Kendall has been developing websites for over a decade and has founded and co-founded several companies concerned with web development since 1994. Currently he runs VP3Media and focuses on one on one interaction with select clients.

Industry standard Extensible Markup Language technology forms the base of the next version of the company’s flagship productivity suite. Called Microsoft Office Open XML Formats, they will be the default file format for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint when the new Office product arrives in 2006.

Developers attending the Microsoft Tech Ed conference in Orlando next week will hear more details about the new XML file formats. Benefits of moving to XML in addition to better interoperability include better security and much smaller file sizes.

XML is a system for tagging and organizing the content of a document. Where HTML defines how a web page will look, XML defines what that document will contain.

“Making XML the default Office file formats is, for me, the culmination of a 35-year dream,” said Charles F. Goldfarb, the inventor of the markup language technology.

“In 1970 we had just one system that could share documents between an editor, a back-end database and a publishing package. Now Microsoft is enabling hundreds of millions of people to routinely create XML that can interoperate with every kind of back-end system and Web service.”

Data recovery will be better as well. Office 12 will be able to open and use a document when one part of that document, such as an image or a chart, is damaged. The new data formats will be able to attempt to fix corrupted files when users try to open them.

“Customers have asked us for improved file and data management; improved interoperability; and open, royalty-free, published file format specifications — without sacrificing backward compatibility,” said Steven Sinofsky, senior vice president of Office at Microsoft.

“We’re confident that by adopting XML-based default file formats, we are delivering the tools that will help IT professionals address these challenges, while enabling developers to integrate Office even further into their customized solutions.”

Office 12 won’t be Microsoft’s first foray into XML. The company had introduced XML within the HTML file formats supported by Word, Excel, and PowerPoint in Office 2000. Support expanded with the releases of Office XP, Office 2003, and the company’s InfoPath product.

But there have been user complaints about the XML handling capabilities of those programs, likely stemming from an XML format that was not as open and interoperable with other programs as Office 12 should be.

People interested in the new file formats and the next version of Office can get additional information at a preview site, http://www.microsoft.com/office/preview, beginning Monday, June 6, to coincide with the start of Tech-Ed.

David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business. Email him here.

Typical markup is either very tight, hand-crafted and standards-focused, filled with comments and formatting white space, or it is bulky, editor-generated markup with excessive indenting, editor-specific comments often used as control structures, and even redundant or needless markup or code. Neither case is optimal for delivery. The following tips are safe and easy ways to decrease file size:

1. Remove white space wherever possible

In general, multiple white space characters (spaces, tabs, newlines) can safely be eliminated, but of course avoid changing <pre>, <textarea>, and tags affected by the <white-space> CSS property.

2. Remove comments

Almost all comments, save for client-side conditional comments for IE and doctype statements, can be safely removed.

3. Remap color values to their smallest forms

Rather than using all hex values or all color names, use whichever form is shortest in each particular case. For example, a color attribute value like #ff0000 could be replaced with red, while lightgoldenrodyellow would become #FAFAD2.

4. Remap character entities to their smallest forms

As with color substitution, you can substitute a numeric entity for a longer alpha-oriented entity. For example, È would become È. Occasionally, this works in reverse as well: ð saves a byte if referenced as . However, this is not quite as safe to do, and the savings are limited.

5. Remove useless tags

Some “junk” markup, such as tags applied multiple times or certain tags used as advertisements for editors, can safely be eliminated from documents.

CSS Optimizations

CSS is also ripe for simple optimizations. In fact, most CSS created today tends to compress much harder than (X)HTML. The following techniques are all safe, except for the final one, the complexities of which demonstrate the extent to which client-side Web technologies can be intertwined.

6. Remove CSS white space

As is the case with (X)HTML, CSS is not terribly sensitive to white space, and thus its removal is a good way to significantly reduce the size of both CSS files and <style> blocks.

7. Remove CSS comments

Just like markup comments, CSS comments should be removed, as they provide no value to the typical end user. However, a CSS masking comment in a <style> tag probably should not be removed if you are concerned about down-level browsers.

8. Remap colors in CSS to their smallest forms

As in HTML, CSS colors can be remapped from word to hex format. However, the advantage gained by doing this in CSS is slightly greater. The main reason for this is that CSS supports three-hex color values like #fff for white.

9. Combine, reduce, and remove CSS rules

CSS rules like font-size, font-weight, and so on can often be expressed in a shorthand notation using the single property font. When employed properly, this technique allows you to take something like

p {font-size: 36pt;
font-family: Arial;
line-height: 48pt;
font-weight: bold;}

and rewrite it as

p{font:bold 36pt/48pt Arial;}

You also may find that some rules in style sheets can be significantly reduced or even completely eliminated if inheritance is used properly. So far, there are no automatic rule-reduction tools available, so CSS wizards will have to hand-tweak for these extra savings. However, the upcoming 2.0 release of the w3compiler will include this feature.

10. Rename class and id values

The most dangerous optimization that can be performed on CSS is to rename class or id values. Consider a rule like

.superSpecial {color: red; font-size: 36pt;}

It might seem appropriate to rename the class to sS. You might also take an id rule like

#firstParagraph {background-color: yellow;}

and use #fp in place of #firstParagraph, changing the appropriate id values throughout the document. Of course, in doing this you start to run into the problem of markup-style-script dependency: If a tag has an id value, it is possible that this value is used not only for a style sheet, but also as a script reference, or even as a link destination. If you modify this value, you need to make very sure that you modify all related script and link references as well. These may even be located in other files, so be careful.

Changing class values is not quite as dangerous, since experience shows that most JavaScript developers tend not to manipulate class values as often as they do id values. However, class name reduction ultimately suffers from the same problem as id reduction, so again, be careful.

Note: You should probably never remap name attributes, particularly on form fields, since these values are also operated on by server-side programs that would have to be altered as well. Though not impossible, calculating such dependencies would be difficult in many Web site environments.

To be continued…

*Originally published at Port80Software.com

Thomas Powell is founder of PINT, Inc. and a lecturer in the Computer Science
department at University of California San Diego. His articles have appeared in
serveral magazines and sites, including Network World, Internet Week
and ZDNet. He has also published numerous books on Web technology and design,
including the best-selling Web Design: The Complete Reference. Visit pint.com.

Joe Lima is the Director of Product Development for Port80 Software. He has
worked for a variety of Internet, wireless and software development companies,
specializing in research and development for server-centric technologies. Visit
port80software.com.