When I write a blog I like to attempt to add some fun activities or tidbits of information here and there – it makes things interesting. What is today’s activity you ask?

Go to Google and type in “Untitled Document”. How many results do you get? I got 44,500,000 search results and I have no doubts that you got more.

As Leigh mentioned in his 'SEO for small business' post, title tags are very important for the search engine optimization of a website. Websites get launched daily without title tags. This is often due to forgetfulness or bad habits on the web developer’s part. Could be a result of being rushed too. When a new HTML document is created, most of the time using templates, it includes a title tag of “Untitled Document”.

No matter what you’re selling, advertising, or wanting users to see, getting anywhere near to #1 under any keywords with an untitled document is not likely to happen and your target users are not going to find you.

Title tags aren't just for search engines either. They are viewed by your website visitor in a few prominent places:

• text that appears within the blue bar at the top of a browser window.
• On browser tabs, the title is also what appears in the tab.
• When a website visitor minimizes the browser window, the title tag is what is appears.
• The title is also what appears on the first line of search results in the major search engines.

The best SEO practices also keep in mind the benefit for your website visitors. Provided good meaningful title tags will help your visitors, as well as your search engine rankings.

So be free my friends – go and give the gift to yourself of properly named title tags and watch your website climb the rankings in the search engines.

“Help! I don't have much time to optimize! What can I do?”

If you’re a small business owner who also has the lovely task of managing your own website, then you may have found yourself in this situation….you know you need to do some search engine optimization but you just don’t have the time to do it all. Of course the first thing I’m going to tell you is to give us a call and we’ll handle it for you, but let’s say that’s not yet an option.

What I would tell you to do is to take a good hard look at your web page title tags!

What are title tags you ask? In laymen’s terms, title tags are the HTML tags at the top of a web page that tell the browser what the page is about. You know, look up at the very top of the browser window and at the left you’ll see some text about that page; well, that’s the title tag. It serves two main purposes 1) when displayed in the browser it helps human users identify what the page is about, and 2) it gives search engines an indication of what they can expect to find on that page as well.

Good title tags are arguably one of the most important aspects of SEO. Search Engines such as Google place a fair amount of value in these little guys! They are also one of the easiest tactics for people to both comprehend and employ. What is important is that you know which key words are important to your business, as well as which ones are relevant to that particular page. You’ll definitely want to create UNIQUE title tags for EACH page on your web site. Be sure to examine each page’s content carefully so that the title tags are reflective of the content message on the page. Whatever you do don’t put in keywords that are not relevant to the page content. This will not help you, your visitors, or the search engines! Try to include one or two keywords/phrases in each title tag. Remember to keep them fairly short as most search engines only support 50 to 70 characters.

Finally, have a good look at the content on the page and try logically insert these same keywords in to the content. You’ll want to have a nice keyword density on the page. I say 'logically' and 'nice', because you don’t want to overdo it and end up spamming your own web site with keywords. Just let it come naturally.

Of course there are dozens of more incredible things that you can do to improve your search engine optimization, such as inbound linking, page renaming and alt tags to name a few, but if you’re strapped for time and budget, you can’t go wrong with this approach! Good luck!

Today’s topic is about CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) and why it’s a better option for developing a website with good search engine optimization.

Spiders are sent out by search engines to crawl websites and index them in the search engine’s databases. These spiders use what is called “top down” logic, which means they index websites and crawl the content from the top of the source code to the bottom. Considering this, developing websites using techniques like tables and frames hinder your search engine optimization, because they add bulky unnecessary code that makes it harder for a search engine to read.

Using external CSS separates content from presentation which in turn will put the content higher in the source code. This also makes for less code altogether, making it easier for spiders to index apparent important information displayed through tags such as headers and titles.

Separating content from presentation also provides more time for making changes to presentation and/or content without searching through an endless sea of code, leaving more time to update the website with new and fresh content and/or presentation. Making updates, another thing search engines love!

Search engine spiders, as much as we’d like to believe of robotic things, are not stupid. Spiders can see the tricks you try to pull, so adding extra content with keywords and using CSS to hide them won’t help your ranking (putting white text on a white background for example).

Another thing that weighs down website code is JavaScript. Developers sometimes use JavaScript to make flashy navigation and menus; however, remembering the “top down” theory, this doesn’t help the spiders find your content. Good navigation and menus can be made just as easily using CSS and they don’t weigh down the code like JavaScript does, so it’s definitely an option to think about when developing your website.

So, in conclusion,

• DO separate content from presentation using CSS
  
• DON’T try to cheat the search engines by hiding content with CSS
  
• DO use titles and header tags
  
• DON’T use too much JavaScript where you can use other methods such as CSS
  
• DO keep the “top down” theory in mind
  
• DON’T write messy, hard to read code
  
• DO update websites often

As mentioned in my previous post about Flash and SEO goals, the use of Flash needs to be evaluated on a case by case basis for each website project. When making this evaluation, keep in mind a new idea that I just found for Flash that help your website look better, helping it pop a little more than others, but without sacrificing SEO. It’s called sIFR, or Scalable Inman Flash Replacement, and it makes your fonts pretty.

Basically, sIFR uses a combination of JavaScript, CSS, and Flash to find and replace all the text that you specify to be whatever font you like. This means not being restricted to fonts like Times New Roman and Helvetica while still remaining accessible, search engine friendly, and semantic.

In addition to accessibility, sIFR can also be selected, copied, and pasted by users and the load time is virtually nothing – the average user has no idea anything different than usual is going on behind the scenes. Plus, sIFR is compatible with Mac, Windows, and Linux with JavaScript turned on and Flash 6 or greater installed. It also works on all major browsers (IE, FireFox, Safari) as well as even some minor ones (Omniweb, Konqueror).

What’s great about sIFR is that, as I mentioned earlier, it remains semantic. Research proves that websites made with semantic and clean code rank higher in the search engines than those that use deprecated code and that are hard to scan. Even Matt May of the W3C endorses sIFR as an accessible method to create rich typography on the web.

Please keep in mind that sIFR is meant to help the design process and to help pages pop out more. This doesn’t mean creating all your content using sIFR. You don’t want to get overzealous and ruin a web page by using too many type faces. Exercise restraint – think carefully about the design and how you can use sIFR to compliment the page. Headlines, pull quotes, or other small passages of text are good examples. Accent web pages with sIFR, don’t bombard them.

Although Flash is a highly sought after medium for websites these days, it may not be the best for search engine optimization. Think of website text as food for a search engine. Search engines 'feed' on many different things, but the most important thing is the keyword rich content. Flash does not provide text-based content for search engines to spider, thus it needs to be used in moderation and in places which still allow good amounts of content to be seen by the search engine spiders.

However, on July 1st 2008, Adobe announced it is teaming up with search industry leaders (like Google and Yahoo!) to improve the search results of dynamic web content (like Flash) and rich internet applications. This means better indexing by search engines and a higher ranking (hopefully) for most flash websites.

This does not mean, however, that you should go nuts with Flash. From a design perspective, although Flash can give that “wow” factor people want, it still needs to be evaluated for effective website usability. Flash should provide "wow" within the context of the user goals for the website content. For example, our Citrus SEO homepage features a prominent banner for Flash case studies, to drive website visitors deeper into the website content.

My recommendation? Evaluate the use of Flash on a case by case basis to balance your SEO goals, business goals, and user goals for your website.