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.

Your page will not validate otherwise and will therefore not be valid XHTML. If you write all your XHTML by yourself, it shouldn’t be an issue.

You simply write all tags in lower-case.

Now, imaging situations where you’re not in control over the code being written.

One situation is when you let visitors/users of the website write HTML in a text box or even better, a rich text editor like FCKeditor or FreeTextBox. For some reason, no rich text editor I know of can write flawless XHTML in all situations, correct me if I’m wrong.

So, I wrote a little static helper method in C# that converts HTML tags to lower-case.

/// <summary>
/// Convert HTML tags from upper case to lower case. This is important in order
/// to make it XHTML compliant. It also includes some tags that are not
/// XHTML compliant, you can remove them if you want.
/// &tl;/summary>
private static string LowerCaseHtml(string html)
{
    string[] tags = new string[] {
    "p", "a", "br", "span", "div", "i", "u", "b", "h1", "h2",
    "h3", "h4", "h5", "h6", "h7", "ul", "ol", "li", "img",
    "tr", "table", "th", "td", "tbody", "thead", "tfoot",
    "input", "select", "option", "textarea", "em", "strong"
    };

    return html;
}

If you also want to lower-case the HTML attributes, you can do it almost the same way as the HTML tags. I probably missed some attributes, but you can easily add them to the string array in the method below.

/// <summary>
/// Convert HTML attribues from upper case to lower case. This is important in order
/// to make it XHTML compliant.
/// </summary>
private static string LowerCaseAttributes(string html)
{
    string[] attributes = new string[] {
    "align", "cellspacing", "cellpadding", "valign", "border",
    "style", "alt", "title", "for", "col", "header", "clear",
    "colspan", "rows", "cols", "type", "name", "id", "target", "method"
    };

    return html;
}

You can use this method when you save the input from a text box or you can use it when you render the page. Here’s how you change the output of the ASP.NET page by overriding the Render method. You can remove the tags you don’t need from the method to optimize the performance.

protected override void Render(HtmlTextWriter writer)
{
    using (HtmlTextWriter htmlwriter = new HtmlTextWriter(new System.IO.StringWriter()))
    {
       base.Render(htmlwriter);
       writer.Write(LowerCaseHtml(htmlwriter.InnerWriter.ToString()));
    }
}

You can use this approach in conjunction with my whitespace removal method. It also uses the page’s Render method.

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Mads Kristensen currently works as a Senior Developer at Traceworks located
in Copenhagen, Denmark. Mads graduated from Copenhagen Technical Academy with a multimedia degree in
2003, but has been a professional developer since 2000. His main focus is on ASP.NET but is responsible for Winforms, Windows- and
web services in his daily work as well. A true .NET developer with great passion for the simple solution.

http://www.madskristensen.dk/

Someone called me with a project, they sent me the content for their website, which I would then upload to Microsoft Frontpage or a text editor, insert some HTML tags for formatting and some graphics to make the site colorful, and the job was finished.

The wireless revolution changed everything. Almost every electronic device now comes equipped with access to the web and email. Palm tops, laptops, cell phones, even computer screens installed in automobiles are now connected to the internet. The web browsers and operating systems installed on these wireless devices are often very different from what is installed on an ordinary desktop PC. Many elements of the HTML programming language are not compatible with some of these wireless platforms. As a result, web design has completely changed. Cross-platform programming languages and specifications have been created so that websites can be viewed on any PC or wireless gadget.

These new innovations include languages such as XML, XHTML, and XSL, to name a few. XML was probably the most important of all of them, because it allowed a programmer to define data without telling the browser how to display it. The problem with HTML is that it defines data and also tells the browser how to display it. XML is different in that it merely defines the data, and allows the browser to display the data as it sees fit. Languages such as XHTML and XSL were developed in order to convert XML documents into web pages that could be displayed in a manner that was compatible with all browsers.

Now that you have some background on how and why web design has changed, you are now ready to learn about Document Type Definition (DTD). DTD is a tool that enables a programmer to define the format to be used for the data in an XML document. Remember, XML does not tell the web browser how to display or format content. DTD helps to establish the format.

An XML document consists of five different components. There are elements, attributes, entities, PCDATA, and CDATA. We will start with elements. Elements of XML are the tags. There are no predefined tags with XML; you can create your own tags. HTML does not work this way. All of the tags used in HTML are predefined, such as the paragraph tag and the body tag. Attributes provide additional information about the tags, such as the source file for an image, or the alignment to be used for a paragraph. Entities are variables that define commonly used text, such as the no-breaking-space entity. PCDATA is used to mark data that is to be parsed or separated into more easily processed components and to cause tags within that data to be interpreted as markup instead of as ordinary data. CDATA is used to mark data that is not to be parsed and to cause the tags within that portion of the text to not be treated as markup. As an aside, markup is any language that defines how certain text is to be displayed or structured.

For novice programmers, DTD is a little hard to get used to. I recommend that you search for tutorials on any major search engine, or perhaps find some courses offline at a local college or computer science institute. If you have never studied XML, XHTML, or XSL before, then you should find a broad-based curriculum of computer programming courses that teach you all of these languages so that you can learn to incorporate them together when you create web sites.

Learning to use these new specifications and languages is essential for any web designer. With so many people using cell phones and other wireless devices to surf the net, by creating your web sites exclusively with HTML you run the risk of your site being invisible to a wireless internet user. Designing web sites that are cross-platform compatible is a must in the wireless age we now inhabit.

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Jim Pretin is the owner of http://www.forms4free.com, a service that helps programmers make email forms.

Lots of Microsoft program managers push back and say “normal people don’t care about HTML quality.”

That might be true (although we all hate it when our pages don’t display right on all browsers, or when they are slow to load) but the influentials who write reviews and tell their friends (or set up their computers) do care about such things.

One guy told me “but we have 10s of millions of users already, so why should we care?”

Well, you woulda had 10,000,001 if you had clean HTML.

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Robert Scoble is the founder of the Scobleizer blog. He works as PodTech.net’s Vice President of Media Development.

Go to Scobleizer …

Even the favorite whipping boy of standards-compliance punditry, Microsoft, presents their primary homepages, msn.com and microsoft.com in XHTML. Standards compliant XHTML sites are still the minority. The reason is simple. When the W3C released the new standard, the rest of the web running on HTML did not cease to function. Nor will the rest of the web, written in various flavors of HTML, cease to function any time soon. Without any pressing need to conform to the new standard, designers continue to use old, familiar methods. These methods will perform in any modern browser, so why bother switching?

These sentiments are similar to ones I experienced. A kind of “if it’s not broke, don’t fix it” mentality sets in. Whether HTML was “broken” or not is a different argument. To the casual Internet user, their standards are fairly direct. If a site displays without noticeable error and functions to their satisfaction, these standards are met. Whatever additional steps the browser took to make such display possible is irrelevant to most users. This kind of mentality is difficult to overcome in designers accustomed to their old methods.

Technical obstacles to adopting XHTML may be quite steep as well, especially as regards large, existing websites with complex scripting. Yet the time may eventually come where yesterday’s “tried and true” HTML is little more than an ancient language, unable to be interpreted by modern electronic devices. Whether one agrees with the direction the W3C takes in the development of HTML is irrelevant, you are just along for the ride. With some perseverance, getting the hang of XHTML is possible. In form, it is not as different from HTML as Japanese is from English. Knowing HTML grants a basic knowledge of the language, it simply becomes a matter of learning a particular dialect. Even an original nay-sayer such as myself managed to do it.

Benefits of XHTML

There are 2 primary benefits to using XHTML. First is the strict nature of valid XHTML documents. “Valid” documents contain no errors. Documents with no errors can be parsed more easily by a browser. Though the time saved is, admittedly, negligible from the human user’s point of view, there is a greater efficiency to the browser’s performance. Most modern browsers will function well in what’s usually referred to as “quirks” mode, where, in the absence of any on-page information about the kind of HTML they are reading, present a “best guess” rendering of a page. The quirks mode will also forgive many errors in the HTML. Modern browsers installed on your home computer have the luxury of size and power to deal with these errors. When browser technology makes the leap to other appliances it may not have the size and power to be so forgiving. This is where the strict, valid documents demanded by the XHTML standard become important.

The second benefit is in the code itself, which is cleaner and more compact than common, “table” based layout in HTML. Though XHTML retains table functionality, the standard makes clear tables are not to be used for page layout or anything other than displaying data in a tabular format. This is generally the primary obstacle most designers have with moving to XHTML. The manner in which many designers have come to rely on to layout and organize their pages is now taboo. Simple visual inspection of XHTML code reveals how light and efficient it is in comparison to a table based HTML layout. XTHML makes use of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), which, when called externally, remove virtually all styling information from the XHTML document itself. This creates a document focused solely on content.

XHTML makes use of “div” tags to define content areas. How these “divisions” are displayed is controlled by CSS. This is known as CSS-P, or CSS Positioning. Trading in “table” tags for “divs” can be tough. Learning a new way of accomplishing an already familiar task is generally difficult. Like learning to use a different design program or image editor, frustration can be constant. Looking at “divs” as a kind of table cell might be helpful, though they are not entirely equivalent. As required by the XHTML standard, always make sure there is a DOCTYPE definition at the top of the document. This is not only required by the standard, but it will force Internet Explorer 6, currently the most common browser, to enter its “standards compliance” mode. IE6 and Firefox, both operating in standards compliance mode will display XHTML in much the same way. Not identical, but far better than IE6 operating in quirks mode. Learning how to iron out the final differences between displays is the final obstacle and can require a bit of tweaking in the CSS.

Clean code has multiple benefits. It creates a smaller page size which, over time, can save costs associated with transfer usage. Though the size difference may appear small, for someone running a highly trafficked site, even saving a few kilobytes of size can make a big difference. Further, some believe search engines may look more kindly on standards complaint pages. This is only a theory, though. In a general sense, any page modification that makes the content easier to reach and higher in the code is considered wise. Search engines, so it is believed, prefer to reach content quickly, and give greater weight to the first content they encounter. Using XHTML and “div” layout allows designers to accomplish this task more easily.

Conclusions

XHTML is the current standard set by the W3C. The W3C continues development of XHTML, and XHTML 2.0 will replace the current standard in the future. Learning and using XHTML today will help designers prepare for tomorrow. Valid XTHML produces no errors that might slow down a browser, and the code produced is clean and efficient. This saves in file size and helps designers better accomplish their search engine optimization goals. Learning XHTML is primarily about learning a new way to lay out pages. Though frustrating at first, the long term benefits far outweigh any initial inconvenience.

Eric Lester worked in the IT industry for 5 years, acquiring knowledge of hosting, website design, before serving for 4 years as the webmaster for Apollo Hosting, http://www.apollohosting.com. Apollo Hosting provides website hosting, ecommerce hosting, vps hosting, and web design services to a wide range of customers.

The post on the Google blog promises “instant gratification” for users. Sounds good so far. Everyone likes gratification.

And that satisfaction comes from three new options for users of Google’s search engine via the mobile phone web browser. The engineers have been working on advanced search features that take advantage of XHTML to deliver more than just keyword search results.

One options lets users search for movie showtimes by movie title. Or, they can enter [movies] or [showtimes] followed by a location to see what’s playing nearby. Weather works in a similar fashion, and returns a four-day forecast. Just type in the name of a city, or a zip code, after the word [weather] to get a forecast for a US location.

When Google begins its next stock sale and those 14+ million shares hit the market, the last new feature, stock quotes, will be useful. If Google recognizes the ticker symbol entered (note to Google Mobile Team: you have tested this with GOOG, right?), a delayed quote will be retrieved.

All of these features will return their results atop a search result page, similar to what users see from a typical PC browser search session. Query results beyond those created by the new features appear below the weather forecast, movie showtime, or stock quote retrieved.

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

At the last count it is said that there are 64 million firefox users on the internet. Growing in massive numbers by the day.

So, the issue with browser compatibility is at its highest importance. The way browsers are constructed, they can show a webpage slightly differently.

Therefore, webmasters should be making sure their web page is viewable in both internet explorer and firefox equally. If it doesnt, then they risk loosing a large percentage of web users. There is nothing worse than surfing a web site and not being able to see it properly in a particular browser.

The solution for webmasters is to make all their pages XHTML transitional. Web sites that validate to this, have a higher chance of being viewed correctly in all major browsers.

XHTML is the next generation web language, and is said to replace HTML eventually. XHTML was released in January 2000.

XHTML is not a difficult language to learn, it is basically identical to HTML but the main difference is that tags in XHTML always have an end tag.

For example, a IMG SRC tag in HTML has no end tag. In XHTML the IMG SRC tag has the end tag of />

More information on learning XHTML can be found at http://www.w3schools.com/xhtml/xhtml_intro.asp

Once you have constructed your XHTML web page then you can validate it at http://www.w3schools.com/xhtml/xhtml_validate.asp

Further, to ensure near complete browser compatibility you can validate any stylesheet here : http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/

http://www.onestop-webdesign.com One Stop Web Site Design specialises in creating the complete web site without the buyer having to understand all the jargon. Simply sign up to our low cost monthly plan, and give us an outline of what your website should be about and what products to sell. You can then sit back as we organise everything from hosting, web site development to setting up your shop ready for going live.

Part One can be viewed here. For Part Two I will discuss:

A. What to validate your web pages for

B. The validation process

C. Validation Tools

D. Common validation errors

A. What to validate your web pages for:

1. Doctype

2. HTML or XHTML document ( or other coding languages you have used)

3. CSS style sheet

4. Links

5. Browsers

6. Screen Resolution

7. Connectivity

B.The validation process

1. Use the correct DOCTYPE ( Document Type Definition, or DTD)

This defines which version of HTML or XHTML your document is actually using. It’s needed by browsers or other tools to process the document correctly.

Using an incomplete, outdated or no DOCTYPE at all, throws some browsers into “Quirks” mode, where the browser assumes you’ve written old-fashioned, invalid markup.

This means that your web pages may not render well in all the major browsers.

The DOCTYPE tag should be placed at the top of each web page.

Here are the correct DTDs to use:

HTML 4.01 Strict, Transitional, Frameset
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN"

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.1//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml11/DTD/xhtml11.dtd">

Here’s an example of a web site I recently designed which has correctly validated XHTML and CSS: http://www.discount-real-estate-listings-md.com/

2. Validate your HTML or XHTML document ( and other coding languages you have used).

If you validate your code it will make it easier for:

- search engines to index your web pages

- pages to load faster

- make your pages accessible for other devices that surf the Web.

- checking coding errors by running your pages through a validator.

3. Validate your Cascading Style Sheets (CSS).

If there are errors in your CSS, the layout of your web pages will be affected and your site will not appear correctly when viewed in any of the main browsers.

4. Validate your links

Broken links in your web pages will:

- frustrate your visitors when searching for relevant information from your site.

- affect search engine rankings. When spiders can’t index the links on your site they won’t find your keyword rich web pages.

5. Check browser compatibility

The main browsers you should design your web site for include: Internet Explorer (IE6, IE5), Firefox, Opera, and Netscape (Mozilla).

This is according to the current statistics taken from: http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp

6. Test for different screen resolutions

The current trend is that more and more computers are using a screen size of 1024×768 pixels:

Here are the stats for June 2005:

1024×768…………………………56%
800×600………………………….28%
Higher than 1024×768…………11%

7. Check connectivity speeds

Web pages that contain a large number of graphics or tables, use flash or video, will load slowly or sometimes not at all with a dial up connection but will be fine with a cable or dsl connection. Although the trend is towards people converting to high speed connections many still use dial-up to surf the Net for information. Therefore design your site for both.

C.Validation Tools

HTML/XHTML validation

http://www.validator.w3.org/

CSS validation

http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/

Link checker

http://validator.w3.org/checklink

Browser Compatibility

http://www.anybrowser.com

Connectivity Test

http://www.websiteoptimization.com/services/analyze/

http://www.netmechanic.com/maintain.htm

D.Common HTML/XHTML validation errors

Improper Nesting of Tags

This is a very common error. You should close tags your in the reverse of the order you opened them:

<xx><yy>content</yy></xx>.

An easy error to make, but it’s easy to fix, too.

Missing alt tags

You should include alt tags for all your images with a text description so that visitors will still know what the image is about even if they turn off viewing images in their browser.

Improper closing of tags

ie <p>This is a paragraph<p>. The end tag should be </p>

It will validate in html, but not xhtml.

For XHTML 1.0 validation it’s easy to omit these closing tags:

<br /> or <hr /> or <img src="xx.gif" />

Margin height and width

marginheight="0"
^Error: there is no attribute “MARGINHEIGHT” for this element. Use CSS to fix this error.

marginwidth="0"
^Error: there is no attribute “MARGINWIDTH” for this element. The only fix for this is to utilize CSS and absolute positioning.

Horizontal Line Color

<hr size="1" color="#C0C0C0">
^Error: there is no attribute “COLOR” for this element.

This can only be fixed with CSS.

ie <div
style="color:#000;background-color:#C0C0C0;height:1px;font-size:1px;">
</div>

Border Color

bordercolor="#ffffff"
^Error: there is no attribute “BORDERCOLOR” for this
element. This can only be fixed with CSS.

Unescaped Ampersand (XHTML)

Always use & in place of &.

Conclusion:

If you get into the habit of always validating your web pages, your web site will be faster loading, more search engine friendly, accessible to a greater number of devices and therefore appeal to a larger number of visitors.

Herman Drost is the Certified Internet Webmaster (CIW)
owner and author of http://www.iSiteBuild.com. Affordable
Web Site Design and Web Hosting. Subscribe to his
“Marketing Tips” newsletter for more original articles.
mailto:subscribe@isitebuild.com. Read more of his
in-depth articles at: http://www.isitebuild.com/articles

Link: mobile.google.com

I’ve spent the last half an hour hunting around for mention of this and at least according to my searches, it is brand spanking new.
Accessing and Using Google Mobile

You can access Google Mobile by simply navigating to the normal Google home page. Presumably it detects you’re on a mobile phone and displays the correct formatting for you. You can see how it looks in a web browser by going to www.google.com/xhtml

What you can do..

You can use Google Mobile for:

Other services such as Froogle and Gmail are not available right now. There an extensive FAQ however.

You can also Add Google Mobile to your site.

Looks good doesn’t it?

Thanks El Telendro

Nick Wilson is the publisher and founder of Threadwatch.org.

Threadwatch is a group blog, or forum if you prefer, focusing on Marketing and Related Technologies – News and discussion for those that make their living on the WWW – Register here to participate.

XHTML stands for EXtensible HyperText Markup Language. XML was designed specifically to describe data, whereas HTML was specifically designed to display data. XHTML is aimed to replace HTML and is almost identical to HTML 4.01. XHTML is stricter, cleaner and a definitive of XML and HTML combined. With current HTML standards, whether your webpage code is validated or not has no impact that will stop the information being displayed within your browser. XML is a markup language and everything has to be marked up correctly.

HTML is great, in that errors don’t sacrifice the page whilst displayed on the Internet. Now, however, with the more frequent use of mobile phones and PDA’s for Internet access, these devices simply do not accept unacceptable codes with errors very well. This will no doubt start a debate on validation or not. As W3C states, “XHTML pages can be read by all XML enabled devices and while waiting for the rest of the world to upgrade to XML supported browsers, XHTML gives you the opportunity to write “well-formed” documents now, that work in all browsers and that are backward browser compatible”.

XHTML has only minor changes from HTML. So if your pages are HTML 4.01 compliant, then your ahead of the game already. Changing to XHTML has some of the following syntax requirements: attribute names must be in lower case, attribute values must be quoted, attribute minimization is forbidden, the id attribute replaces the name attribute and the XHTML DTD defines mandatory elements.

XHTML works hand in hand with CSS2. Both must be used in conjunction which forces the removal of repetitive code such as, fonts and styles. These must be placed within the CSS file. XHTML does not adapt to the use of tables well although they can still be used, they are just not the most ideal option. The idea is more based around the fact that you can position your pictures, text, even the entire page through CSS keeping the page code very minimal and very fast. Note though that this can be a time consuming process with either HTML or XHTML.

XHTML’s main advantage compared to HTML is faster streamlined code. Who knows what the future may bring with page validation and search engines? With XHTML requiring validation for operation, the search engines may begin to favour this in the near future. This will ensure clean quality pages are being fed to them, error free before they commence reading other on and off page techniques.

Anthony Parsons has been performing search engine optimization since 1998. In late 2003 I decided to fly solo and opened my own SEO business to service the global community. With my wife being an acknowledged copywriter, anthonyparsons.com as a business will continue stepping forward breaking the boundaries of conventional SEO techniques. Making a winning husband and wife team, we make SEO affordable for all budgets.