“With this attribute, web developers can drive conversions on their sites by marking their forms for auto-completion without changing the user interface or the backend,” says Google software engineer Ilya Sherman.

In a proposal for the attribute, it says:

Autofill agents save users’ time, and help site authors convert users in purchase and registration flows. Autofill works best when site authors are able to directly provide hints to autofill agents as to what data belongs in each field.
…

We believe that website authors have strong incentive to facilitate autofill on their forms to help convert users in purchase and registration flows. Additionally, this assists users by streamlining their experience.

As an example, Google shows this:

<input type=”text” name=”field1” x-autocompletetype=”email” />

“We’ve been working on this design in collaboration with several other autofill vendors,” says Sherman. “Like any early stage proposal we expect this will change and evolve as the web standards community provides feedback, but we believe this will serve as a good starting point for the discussion on how to best support autofillable forms in the HTML5 spec. For now, this new attribute is implemented in Chrome as x-autocompletetype to indicate that this is still experimental and not yet a standard, similar to the webkitspeech attribute we released last summer.”

The proposal for the attribute can be read in its entirety 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.

"Social media and its various tools have dramatically shifted the way consumers experience and interact with brands online," said Randall Rothenberg, President and CEO of the IAB.

If you’re unfamiliar with the IAB, it’s a business organization that develops industry standards, conducts research, and provides legal support for the online advertising industry. Based in New York, it represents a large number of the most prominent media outlets in the US.

Standards in the area of social media are worth paying attention to as the medium often leaves managers and business owners scratching their heads in terms of finding ways to measure the success of campaigns.

"The terms and metrics we’ve laid out in this document will help marketers better understand the true ROI of participatory communication," says Jeremy Fain, Vice President of Industry Services of the IAB. "That will help marketers reach consumers, and measure that reach, more effectively."

"With social media use now mainstream and new tools emerging daily, it is critical that we as an industry apply consistent metrics and definitions," says Liza Hausman, Vice President, Marketing, Gigya. "The IAB and its members have done a tremendous service to the industry by bringing this consistency to the social media marketing landscape and this document will prove to be an excellent tool for marketers and agencies as they develop social strategies for their campaigns."

The free document is available here (pdf) for your perusal. If you are currently engaged in a social media marketing campaign or are planning to start one, you should definitely check it out.

Click here to See Larger Version and Digital Video Overview (pdf)

The IAB says the guidelines will help all stakeholders in the interactive advertising industry—marketers profit from reduced costs of production, creative agencies benefit from the decreased time it takes to execute a campaign and publishers gain from the expansion of the marketplace to more interactive digital advertising. According to the IAB, the guidelines help the industry:

- Define a standard method for video ads to communicate with video players and enable ad compatibility across all VPAID-compliant players

- Provide specifications that can be implemented by any type of video player

- Cut production costs and improve ROI for advertisers while enabling a less intrusive experience for video content viewers.

"Digital video is one of the most critical growth areas for interactive advertising because it provides marketers with the power of sight sound and motion," says IAB CEO Randall Rothenberg. "The standards that the IAB has created have played a key role in paving the way for a greater breadth of marketers across vertical industries to tap its power and I have no doubt that we are only at the very beginning."

The guidelines can be perused in a group of documents located at the IAB’s site here. Documents include an overview, in-stream ad format guidelines and best practices, an ad serving template, and in-stream ad metrics definitions.

"That means there’s representation for projects that span DiSo, OpenSocial, Open Stack, Facebook Connect, Y!OS, MySpaceID, among others," notes John McCrea, who liveblogged the meeting, and also shares the following related video from the Open Stack Meetup:

The mission: make some progress toward a standardization of user generated content or "activity streams."

Imagine if all the social networks were somehow unified as one communication medium. Marshall Kirkpatrick at Read Write Web uses a couple of really good analogies to describe the event:

1. "Just like a standard size of railroad track helped the trains get across the US like they had never done before (thus opening a new era of commerce and communication) so to do all these social media signals need some common format standards to travel from one website to another."

2. "Activity streams are already a big deal, but if these conversations can be fruitful, the results will be as big as the point in history when customers of different email providers became able to email each other or different telephone company customers became able to call each others’ phones."

It’s quite obvious that the web is going in a more social direction altogether, and the need to have such standards will increase right along with the number of sites going social. With all these data portability projects on the loose, it’s going to be important to have some common ground established, and it’s great to see all of these players are working together to acheive this.   

The National Federation of the Blind (NFB) sued Target, and they settled for $6 million in damages. That’s a lot of money for not including some "alt" tags, which was the  biggest problem with Target’s site. Dave Chartier at Ars Technica explains, "Specifically at issue in Target’s case is a lack of ‘alt’ tags throughout its site, tags which are used by screen reading technology to help disabled users navigate web sites."

As part of the settlement, Target will have to make employees responsible for coding its site attend periodic accessibility training sessions conducted by the NFB. Target has to pay them for this as well.

This case will likely have a large impact on eCommerce as a whole. More lawsuits will probably start coming out of the woodwork. Online retailers will scramble to get their sites within compliance. Accessibility experts will start getting exponentially increased business for their consulting services. The blind will no longer be ignored on the web.

1. Keyword Research & Selection
2. Competitor Analysis
3. Site Structure
4. Content Optimization
5. Link Building
6. Social Media
7. PPC
8. Statistics Analysis
9. Conversion Optimization
10. Keeping It Up

Overview

Website structure and SEO are a combination of topics that I’ve always had a particular interest in because of my background in software engineering. I have worked on, or maintained over 150 corporate websites having seen many of the things that can make a website go wrong, which can seriously impact a websites operation and search engine rankings.

Of the three pillars of SEO (Structure, Content, and Links) I find the structure of a website to be one of the most under rated things, even among search engine optimization companies. The structure of a website consists of several elements which all are interdependent on each other. These include the code behind your website, how your website interlinks, and the technologies used in your website.

At this point I’m going to strongly recommend that you’re using Firefox with the Web Developer Toolbar installed. The web developer toolbar gives you an easy way to validate your website, test your site on multiple screen resolutions, and around another 100 functions.

Valid Markup and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS)

I have made it practice to develop all my projects in XHTML 1.0 Transitional (my personal preference so I can use target="_blank" and rel="nofollow" attributes) or XHTML 1.0 Strict and CSS 1.0. XHTML is a reformulation of HTML 4 as an XML 1.0 application. It is a very clean and semantic markup language which will also force you to write cleaner code. Whether you choose XHTML or HTML 4 your code will be friendly to the search engines (stay away from 3rd party standards like IHTML).

As for Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) it gives us the ability to abstract the design out of a webpage, or site into a secondary document. This gives us a lot of advantages, and very few disadvantages. By removing redundant design code from your website you place the content closer to the start of the document, while reducing your code to markup ratio. It also makes it easier, and more cost effective to maintain your website as you can implement simple design changes by only editing on file.

When converting a website from table based design, to pure CSS based design there is generally around a 40% decrease in code. The reason for this is when most people use tables they end up placing tables, within tables, within tables all with their own attributes (height, width, border, etc). Now multiple all that redundant, and unneeded markup by the numbers of pages of you site and you’ll quickly see how Google (or any other search engine) will be able to index you website more efficiently.

In my research, and experience I have concluded using these two technologies in conjunction with each other is a part of guaranteeing your websites success, especially with its compatibility with Google. You will also find if you do any research on this topic a recurring mantra of CSS fanatics tables are for tabular data not design.

You’ll find that most of the highly organically ranked SEO companies implement CSS based design on their own websites. For examples of CSS based design check out Beanstalk Search Engine Positioning, SEOMoz, and Quenet Consulting.

Website Templating

Now I’m going to start this section with a rant about Dreamweaver templates, and how useless they are. As a SEO / Web Developer there is nothing I loathe more than seeing a Dreamweaver template. If you’re going to template a site use a technology like Server Side Includes, PHP Includes, or ASP includes. The disadvantages of Dreamweaver templates are:

1. Embedded comments in your code can reak havoc on Keyword Density Tools
2. If you need a non standard footer in an index file you will need to break it from the template, creating issues for future template updates.
3. If you have a disagreement with your web developer / designer and you part company if he doesn’t supply you with the template it’ll cost you.

When building websites I personally use PHP for implementing Server Side Includes. PHP is a relative easy language to learn for implement simple things like includes. It is also one of the most popular Apache modules, as of April 2007 there were 20,917,850 domains, and 1,224,183 IP addresses with it installed. PHP is also available for the Microsoft IIS (Windows Server) web server.

Search Engine Friendly URLs

One thing that I can’t stress enough is try to stay away from Dynamic URLs, these are URL addresses with variables, and values following the "?" character. Google used to state that it had troubles indexing sites with dynamic URLs, and to a degree this still holds true. If you are going to use Dynamic URLs always try to have less than 2 variables in your URL. I have seen sites with excessive products, and URLs where Google / Live / Yahoo all have a different number of pages cached.

A better approach is to URL Rewrite your URLs. For the Linux side Apache has Mod Rewrite, and for Windows you can use ISAPI Rewrite. When you implement a URL Rewriting system you are essentially creating a hash URL lookup table for your site, than when a server query comes in it checks the hash table to see if it finds a match then feeds it the corresponding entry.

To put it into simple terms what we strive to accomplish with URL Rewrites is to mask our dynamic content by having it appear as a static URL. A URL like Article?Id=52&Page=5 could be rewritten to /Article/ID/52/Page/5/, which to a search engine appears to be a directory with an index.htm (or whatever default / index page your particular web server uses). To see an implementation of Mod Rewrites check out Dr. Madcow’s Web Portal in the Article Section, and Link Archive.

Dynamic Websites and Duplicate Content

If there is one reoccurring theme I see in a lot of dynamic websites on the internet is that they can sometimes present the same content on multiple pages. An example of this is when you visit a website that allows you to "view a printer friendly version of this page", a better web solution implementation would be to develop a printer friendly Cascading Stylesheet.

Another goal is also to avoid having any additional URLs on you site such as Links for changing currency with a redirect script, links to "Email to a friend" pages, or anything related to this. Always use Forms to POST date like this so that the same page, or a static page to reduce page count. This issue seems to plague a lot of custom developed ecommerce / CMSes. I’ve actually see CMSes that will present up to 5 URL / Links for each page, in the long run the spiders got so confused in indexing the catalog that some of the main content pages were not cached.

Internal Site Navigation

If built properly most websites will never have a need for an XML Sitemap, other than to get their new pages indexed that much quicker (Ecommerce & Enterprise being exceptions). I will however recommend that every website have a user accessible Sitemap linked from every page to aide your users, and for internal linking.

Most sites with indexing problems have issues with their internal page linking structure. The biggest of all these issues are websites that implement pure javascript navigation based system, these systems depend on Javascript to insert HTML into pages as there rendered. Now Google can parse javascript menus to find URLs, however all of these pages will only be linked from the JS, and not the pages there located on (expect no internal pagerank passing). The best Javascript menus are menus that manipulate your code on your page to change which sections are being displayed via CSS. An example of a hybrid CSS / Javascript menu that I like is QuickMenu by OpenCube (these guys have a great support department).

Keep I mind the more internal links you have to a page, the more internal strength this page will be given. So when in doubt link it up.

Testing Your Site Structure

When it comes to reliable website deploying all I can say is "Test It, Test It, and then Test It Some More". When testing structure I rely on 3 different programs / firefox extensions. The first is Xenu Link Slueth, this is a great tool to run on your website to figure out how many pages can be spidered, and to find dead links. The second is the Web Developer Extension for Firefox, make sure you always validate your code when you make changes. And the last is consult Google and Yahoo to see how many pages are in your index compared to how many pages Xenu found, on Yahoo or Google type site:www.yourdomain.com (Don’t use Live’s site: function it is useless).

After you’ve finished testing your code if you need to debug it I strongly recommend the Firebug Firefox Extension, and the IE7 Developer Toolbar.

Conclusion

When trying to maximize your organic rankings your internal structure is paramount, consider your site structure to be equivalent to the foundation of your house. If your foundation is not built adequately your house may be livable, but may have long term issues. With websites your long term issues will be a failure to maximize your ROI of your website, so practice safe and smart structure.

Needless to say i’ve been at the sharp end of peoples decisions as to “what platform to develop for”. When IE and windows were the dominant web platform numerous useful services were blocked to me due to people thinking it’s cheaper to develop for the majority. Thankfully with the help of people like Jeffrey Zeldman and the Web Standards Project more and more people are developing code for standards as opposed to platforms. Developing for web standards means it will work well enough on pretty much every platform that understands web standards, and then you can invest a bit more into “targeting” a specific platform to take advantage of a specific platform.

And yet, these same people who are developing in web standards for browsers have suddenly forgotten all that good practice when it comes to developing for mobile. I mean seriously, I know the iPhone is cool, and has a safari based web browser, but so do most of the Nokia Nseries right (yes, they had safari based web browsers before the iPhone was out)? So all you web 2.0 folks developing iPhone web applications, just remember if you just use web standards they can work for a lot more people. Take a look at this graph of activity on flickr for the iPhone and the top 3 Nseries devices:

(the # of Members is the amount of people who uploaded at least 1 photo the previous day)

This is not supposed to provide accurate market data, but as you can see there are a lot of people out there in the web 2.0 world with Nokia Nseries so it just makes business sense right? Believe me I’m not doing this to pump up Nokia, I’m just tired of mobile apps not working on my N95

Here’s a list of the Top 25 web applications for iPhone

Full disclosure yes I work for Nokia, but this is a personal plea.

Comments

This new test will put more pressure on the browsers to attempt to adhere to further standards with JavaScript. Hopefully they will all pass it soon with their push towards adopting web standards as they are written.

Hopefully we will be seeing IE8 and Firefox 3 released very soon. There are of course already versions of Firefox 3 available for download. However, not many of the extensions work on the beta browser yet. Until they do I don’t plan to fully switch over to Firefox 3. I would like to say that Firefox 3 renders pages incredibly fast and loads and runs very fast within Windows also. I’m awed by the new version.

Comments

Accessibility matters to… — a good overview of who benefits from standards

Web Standards: it’s about quality, not compliance — a passionate, if not somewhat overboard, post about what web standards really means

Web Standards Project Street Team — announcement about a new grassroots program from WaSP

Comments

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