I read a pretty interesting article over at 456 Berea Street about the importance of content above the fold. If you’re not familiar with the concept don’t worry because it’s simple. Think about when you open up Internet Explorer, FireFox or what have you. Now think about when you look at a web page. You automatically already know there is more content and you have to scroll down to see the rest, right? Well the idea up until a couple of years ago was that users generally do not scroll for additional content. Well after much research that was conducted using an eye tracker, it has been proven that if you utilize a proper layout users are more than happy to scroll for additional content. Read the full article
Posts for Category: SEO
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You probably already heard that back in August that Google is one step closer to perfecting their new algorithm for queries executed on their servers (how they come up with search results). They’ve dubbed it Caffeine…most likely because they’ve been loaded up on all kinds of caffeine to get this project moving so quickly. You’d think that their current engine couldn’t get better but the fact remains that Google see’s an opportunity to make something great, even better. Not only will Caffeine be more accurate, more comprehensive, but queries will execute even faster. And this isn’t because they upgraded any hardware; they’re accomplishing this alllllllll will math. Yep…math! To think that in high school I used to say, “When will I EVER need to know this?” Well there ya go lol. If you compare google’s current results with Caffeine’s, most users won’t notice a difference at all. Its pretty easy to compare your results though. Do it old school style and just open up two new tabs and wahla! There ya go. Genius isn’t it? I googled myself to see if my Latino female lover for sale Ad came up (still no luck). So check it out: Caffeine =>http://www2.sandbox.google.com/search?hl=en&source=hp&q=cesar+manuel+perez&aq=f&oq=&aqi=g2 Google => http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=Cesar+Manuel+Perez&aq=f&oq=&aqi= Right away I noticed that there were more results from social networks and blogs and they had a higher ranking. For example the AMC blog, my name is listed in the sidebar from when I used to manage their site and it showed up. Nothing really relavent, more name throwing if anything ;) Speed is definitely a factor. You already know that Google tells us how long it took to run its search but take a look at how much faster it is now. It is partically related to the index of the results since we are now receiving a more relavent subset of results. You can read more about Google Caffeine by visiting their blog.
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By definition, semantic means “having to do with meaning”. In regard to xHTML/HTML, this can be interpreted in so many different ways and that’s why it’s such a touchy subject within the developer community. A good example of what semantic markup is and what it isn’t is the following: Non-Semantic: <div class=“header-title”>Header Text</div> Semantic: <h1>Header Text</h1> The reason why many of us are striving to use semantic markup is that all Grade A search engines look for this ‘best practice’ (if you’d like to call it that; I refer to it as a standard). Why is that important? Well, first of all if you code your header using div tag instead of the proper header tag (<h1>) , search engines will not know that this content is of higher importance than the rest of the page. Secondly, for you to reach your desired look and feel you’ll have to assign a class to that header div which will add to your page weight and will also make the markup more bulky. If you use the proper <h1> tag, search engine will then say, “Hey! This person made this a header. It must be important!” When that happens the search engine will categorize this as relevant data and in turn your site will have a higher SEO score or page rating. There absolutely should be no reason why we don’t code semantically. It makes sense. It lessens the bulk of our markup and it makes it look like you care about what you’re doing.