Via WordPress SEO I discovered the HeadSpace plugin. HeadSpace allows you to specify a custom title format for all wordpress page types. It does lots of other cool stuff with metadata, like:

• auto-suggesting tags
• mass-editing metadata, including title, description, slugs (urls), and tags/keywords
• adding a custom title or description per post
• adding custom css of javascript files depending on the page type or on a per-post basis

Previously I had other plugins to do some of those things so it’s nice to have it all in one. I was a little concerned about bloat or annoying interface extras but I don’t find that to be a problem (yet). Here’s a screenshot of the title tag settings page:

HeadSpace works with modules that you can add to your write page, either hidden behind a link or always appearing. It’s basically an all-in-one metadata customizer and editor.

Here’s a screenshot of how this is implemented on the “write” page:

More screenshots are available from the HeadSpace site.

Customization on title tags could also be done with the SEO Title plugin. This one works a little differently by allowing you to add a custom title tag for individual posts and pages. I don’t think it can change the default format of titles but I haven’t installed it so I’m not sure about that.

If these solutions seem like overkill to you, my old title tag code may work just fine.

From what I’ve read, there are some misunderstandings on both sides. SEO’s tend to think that validation = web standards and that’s all you need to know. Standards advocates tend to think that standards make a difference for SEO. But do they? That was the question. Read more:

Web Standards and SEO: More Questions than Answers

Recently there has been a bit of a movement among certain web designers to move the h1 tag up to the site title/logo area. What you’ll do is use some way to hide the actual heading text and put your logo as a background image. I’m currently using a variation of that on this site. On my work site, the h1 tag is the main site title, “Housing and Residences” (that wasn’t my doing, although I admit to overlooking it when I rewrote those templates). In that case the image is hard-coded into the page inside the h1 tags.

But, as the article points out, this isn’t really the best way of using the heading. Although you may think it’s the most important headline of your page, it actually should be secondary to the main article title. The h1 heading should answer the question: What is this page about? This page is not about MeganMcDermott.com, it’s about “What is this page about? The h1 tag”. Therefore, the blog post title (or article title or page title) should be marked up with the h1 tag. Other headings should be marked up according to their relative importance. How important is the overall site title and/or tagline? You might give that a 2. How important are sidebar headings? I’d give them a 3 or even 4 depending on the site.

Heading mark-up is an important factor in SE algorithms but I think it does tend to be overstated by some. The SEOmoz google ranking factors give h1 text a 3.3 rating vs. the 4.9 (out of 5) assigned to the title tag. You could wrap multiple headlines in the h1 tag but then you could be forcing the googlebot to decide which one is the important one. I also suspect that google could/would catch on to over-use of the h1 tag and make adjustments accordingly.

In the old days, webmasters would compromise content and usability to fit in more keywords and better “optimize” their sites (see the first diagram in that aritlce). Now we are looking at compromising our content and usability to better target linkers and therefore search results. Is this a good thing??? (Check the long comment by “identity” towards the bottom). I have seen some sites that are obviously attempting to cater to the digg crowd and, to be honest, I find it really annoying.

But really, it’s not just about catering to the Digg crowd. Rand has a few follow-up posts in the series that explain what he means by “linkerati” (anyone who can link!), how to appeal to them, and that every site is link-worthy.

Energy-efficient web design – via Lighter Footstep

Energy-efficient web design takes advantage of the fact that computer monitors require more power to generate lighter/brighter colours. Mark Ontkush of the EcoIron blog and Jon Doucette generated the the Emergy-C low-wattage palette based on the EnergyStar wattage ratings for different colors.

The Monitor Energy Information site also mentions that “the use of dark screen savers can mitigate bright backgrounds, reducing monitor power up to 20%”.

Design process and inspiration – at the Design Observer

(via 37Signals)

When I do a design project, I begin by listening carefully to you as you talk about your problem and read whatever background material I can find that relates to the issues you face. If you’re lucky, I have also accidentally acquired some firsthand experience with your situation. Somewhere along the way an idea for the design pops into my head from out of the blue. I can’t really explain that part; it’s like magic.

This is quite similar to the way I go about designing sites - on a good day, that is. Sometimes the ideas don’t come, or the actual creation doesn’t turn out anything like the mental picture. When I designed this site I had a very specific idea in mind. It happened to turn out just like the picture this time

When topics like this come up I’m always reminded of an interview I saw with Michael Jackson quite a few years ago. The interviewer was asking him about his songwriting process. Paraphrased:

Interviewer: When you write a song, like, say, Billie Jean, where does that come from?
MJ: From above.

I think this is the definition of talent. Where does it come from? How do you do it? It’s a gift. Or remember that scene in Good Will Hunting when he’s talking about how he can do all that hard math? And he brings up Mozart – when you sat him down in front of a piano, he could just play.

I don’t consider myself to have a huge amount of creative talent. I do okay. I always liked art when I was younger, but I was never able to go beyond immitation. I have a lot of admiration for people who have that strong creative talent. Once in awhile I’ll get that hit of inspiration and a strong mental picture for a design. That’s what happened with this site.

Just for fun: Improbable Research

Reporting on things such as non-biological hair and an automatic squirrel ejecting bird feeder. They also have their own version of the Nobel Prize, rewarding research on topics such as why, when you bend dry spaghetti, it often breaks into more than two pieces and that the female malaria mosquito Anopheles gambiae is attracted equally to the smell of limburger cheese and to the smell of human feet.

In 2003, Lal Bihari won their Peace Nobel for leading an active life while legally dead, waging a posthumous campaign against “bureaucratic inertia and greedy relatives”, and for creating the Association of Dead People. Or how about one for the Linux fans out there: In 2005 Victor Benno Meyer-Rochow and Jozsef Gal won the prize for fluid dynamics for using basic principles of physics to calculate the pressure that builds up inside a penguin, as detailed in their report “Pressures Produced When Penguins Pooh — Calculations on Avian Defaecation.”

Search Words vs. Company Words: Targeting Long-tail Searches

Enjoy!

P.S. My new laptop is here!! Well, it’s at home with Liam right now. I let him open it while I’m at work. Will post about that later

I find it interesting that many of the commenters on that post feel that articles (different from blog posts) should not be dated. This is something I definitely disagree with. How many times have you come across content through a search and wondered when it was posted?

The web is getting old now – you could be reading content that was posted 6-8 years ago and not know it because it has no date. I was in a meeting yesterday and some people mentioned that people trust print materials more than web in some cases. They know that the University (or any organization) wouldn’t send them outdated print publications, which might not be the case with web pages.

As a webmaster, it’s easy to lose track of content you write. Pages get lost, you forget about them, or they end up buried in the depths of a deep site structure. If an organization doesn’t have a person dedicated to overseeing website content it may not get updated much at all. So what happens when people come across them on a search? How do they know if this information is relevant or not? I was impressed with a notice on PHP Mac which pointed out that the article I was reading might be out of date. Even when content does have a date people often don’t notice it.

The premise of the original post is that an old date is worse than no date at all. In that case you’re just not being honest with people. You’re withholding information that could be key to their search. In some cases, they may be intentionally looking for something that is from a certain time in the past. If you are researching something, do you trust content that  has no date on it? Maybe, maybe not, but the date is certainly helpful information and, in some cases, crucial.

In many cases, as in the “how to make waffles” example cited in the SEOmoz article, it really doesn’t matter. However, as one commenter pointed out, you should be able to let the visitor decide if the date is relevant to them or not. If it’s not, then that’s just an extra piece of information that you could place in a less prominent position in the design.

I am planning on putting dates on all the web content I maintain. What about you? Do you think everything should be dated? Will you find a way to make sure the content you look after has a date on it?

The words that people search with may not always be the words they would like to read when they arrive at a webpage.

The word “cheap” is a good example here. You probably don’t want to brand yourself as “cheap”. “Cheap” brings connotations of poor quality and bad service – something you probably want to avoid. Words like “affordable” or “low-cost” would be more more appropriate. But you can bet that people will be using the word “cheap” when they search for sites like yours.

Mr. McGovern, unfortunately, stops just when the idea starts to get interesting. You want to show people the nicer sounding words, but in order to rank for the search terms people will actually be using you need a way to show the simpler, cruder words to search engines. How do you develop a site that shows one set of words to people and another set of words to bots?

It’s a difficult problem. Google does not want you to show them different words from what they show to people. But, at the same time, they want to find the best results in their rankings. Or course, we all know that meta keywords are obsolete and underhanded methods such as hidden keywords are ignored. You could try to use off-page factors to target the simpler words but that is still branding yourself in a way you don’t want to be percieved.

It’s an interesting thing to think about, and I’m sure people who actually know about SEO would have more to say about it. One potential solution would be for search engines to be able to match what people enter with the words that marketers are using on the websites. So if someone entered “used car”, Google would know that this is the same as “pre-owned vehicle.” They already have spell checking functionality, so why not a thesaurus too?

Liam had another suggestion: rely on off-site directories and such to drive traffic to your site. So you get listed on sites that list “cheap web design” or whatever you’re selling, but do not include those words on your site. Liam also thinks that there’s no need to use the “nicer” words in the first place – just use the “crude” words to begin with. I’m not so sure about that: I think it’s very possible that people will react better to the nice words, depending on what you’re selling and who your audience is.

P.S. WordPress 2.1 is out and the new visual editor includes – you guessed it – spell check! Yay! I hope that editor works in Opera. I haven’t been using it because it didn’t work properly for me before.

The way I see it, there are two subsets of people here: the designer/developer types who don’t even care enough to ask questions about SEO, and the average webmaster types who for some reason have seriously inaccurate ideas about SEO.

Lets start with the first group. Why don’t designers and developers seem to care about SEO? Think about it. You’re building a web site, shouldn’t you be interested in how people are going to find it? But they aren’t. And that was me for a long time too. I didn’t build commercial sites so I just didn’t concern myself with the topic at all. And yet it is so very important.

True, if you build a nice, people-friendly site you’ve got a lot going for you, but I see a lot of sites from designers who don’t seem to know what to do to make their pages more search-engine friendly. They might have text in images, for example, or designs with very little text at all. Or bad page titles and no headings. But I won’t go on too much about this because I already sort of addressed it in my post about the separation between designers and marketers.

So lets go on to the second group. For some reason, there seems to be a big disconnect between current expert SEO knowledge and what the average webmaster actually believes. As I mentioned, a lot of them still think that page rank really matters, despite the fact that most experts would say that it doesn’t (well, maybe a little bit, but not for what people think it does). Or they talk about exchanging links or other ways to manipulate link value. Or, if you want one-way links, how about submitting to a ton of web directories? Riiiiigggggghhhhhhtttt…….

Have they not read anything recently? Do they not check the dates on SEO articles they do read? Or is it because there is still a lot of bad SEO information being circulated? SEOmoz wrote recently about the amount of bad SEO advice in the news. I’m sure I’ve seen some more bad articles floating around lately but I can’t seem to find them right now.

We also get a lot of people posting to the forum with the obvious intent of getting their signature links crawled. Right, and that’s really going to get you somewhere! Do they not check their linkbacks? Obviously not. In some cases, forum signatures are their only SE strategy. We recently added a couple of new policies to prevent people from doing this, including a vBulletin plugin that prevents signatures from being shown on shorter posts. We noticed a drop in post counts after that. There are many good reasons to have signature links, but posting pointless crap just so the SE’s will crawl them is not one of them (and it’s really just annoying to forum admins, as you can probably tell!).

So, I think there is a need for more credible, accurate SEO information in “regular webmaster” land. It seems that many of them aren’t seeking out the quality blogs and are often relying on outdated and/or low quality information. Unfortunatley, I don’t consider myself qualified to contribute to that. I hope some of the experts will consider contributing content to more mainstream webmaster sites. The Google webmaster guidelines should be require dreading for anyone who does web development, and SEOmoz has a great beginner’s guide. Notice that they spend about 3 paragraphs on PageRank.

Update 08/26: The site has changed quite a bit since I posted this review. See it as it was then on archive.org.

One of the things I noticed as I explored the site is that these people know who they are and aren’t afraid to communicate that to visitors. Right at the very top, even above the logo is a link to their “Declaration of Journalistic Independence”. Visitors can immediately see what makes this site different, expressed clearly and concisely in a written statement. I think this is something that a lot of site owners don’t consider and can really make or break a site: Who are you? What makes you different from other sites? Why should someone visit your site and not another one? Write it down, and don’t be afraid to show it.

The site also does a great job of communicating it’s strengths to new visitors. If you haven’t visited a site before, it’s nice to know about their best articles and have some direction in exploring the site. The right sidebar on the home page does this very well. I also liked the NewsTarget Stats at the top (more on that later) and the other interesting tidbits found in the sidebar (although some of that should be moved to the left side so the sidebars aren’t so uneven). I do find the testimonials on the left to be rather self indulgent, especially since they push key navigation down below the fold. On some pages they’ve even got a highlighted intro for people new to the site and a link to another page that explains what this site is all about (not sure if I agree with how that is presented though). Good idea in principle though

Now, about that NewsTarget Stats section. What I like about this is that they even tell you where they’re getting their revenue. From reading the Declaration of Journalistic Independence it’s obvious that transparency is important to them. This bit also sends a key message to visitors: websites need to get money from somewhere. Gasp! You mean websites aren’t free??? Nope, sorry. At the bottom of each article you’ll also see a line encouraging people to donate using their Amazon.com donation buttons:

Do you find value in articles like this one? NewsTarget needs your support. Click here to learn why or click on “Click to Pay” below

I think that there is a lot of potential in donations as a method of financing websites and I like the way this site has presented them. What I don’t like is the way that Amazon.com has pulled my name into their donation buttons. That’s a little much. The “click to pay” statement is also a little misleading, in that this is a voluntary donation not a payment.

As I browse around the site some more, I also notice blocks on some pages that highlight “Action Items”. This is a great way to get the user to take the next step and become more involved with your site. As evidenced by the growing social networking phenomenon, people want to get involved. They want something to do on your site. Give it to them!

The lessons from this one? First, know who you are. If you’re clear on that all other decisions are easier and the results are much better. Second, consider donations as an alternative to advertising for financing your site. Introduce them in a way that highlights the reasons for doing so and invites the user to contribute. Thirdly, give visitors something to do on your site, and take the opportunity to higlight the options whenever you can.

P.S. I’ve just created a new category called “Great Websites”. I plan to continue writing about good sites I come across and attempting to define what makes them great.

Update 08/26: I Stumbled upon this site again recently and was disappointed to see some not–so–good changes to the site. The right column is now a list of what looks like ads. There’s also a lot of agressive promotion of their email newsletter, which takes up significant screen real estate on the article pages. In fact, there is a lot of junk on the article pages other than the article content, including a lengthy list of testimonials from subscribers. A lot of this was there before but for some reason I’m noticing it a lot more this time.

I’ll give you a sec to skim through that.

Didn’t I see some of those in my spam folder the other day? “Cheap Hosting Provider”, “Wholesale Childrens Clothing”, “Dubai Furnished Apartments”, “Online Gambling Guide”??? Many of the links appear to be for legit but it’s these spammy ones that caught my attention. The W3C is effectively selling PR 9 linkbacks from a highly respected site for $1000 apeice.

Just disgusting. And sad. You’d think that google would recognize that as a spam page with all those shady links on it. Maybe it does, I don’t know.

(This was pointed out to me by this post about digg spamming which really has nothing else to do with this post)