Wynnefields Web World

I consider myself a typophile and was rather interested in the topic of disappearing glyphs and other punctuation characters during the transition from traditional print media to the web and social networking. However, I found it quite a struggle reading through line after line of continuous narrative with no line breaks or what I might call scannable text, in addition to following even half of the relevant hyperlinks.

 

Considering the topic, Typography and the Internet, I would expect the writing style to be more appropriate to the medium. Wrestling with this very issue on my own weblog, in addition to accessing the Wordpress support forums to learn the formatting shortcuts, my primary source of reference for Web Accessibility and Usability is the Nielsen Norman Group.

 

I attended their international conference, Usability Week 2008, earlier this year and it was one of the educational highlights of my career. I recommend their biweekly Alertbox, which is a complimentary newsletter covering all areas of web usability, accessibility, page authoring and other topics to improve the online customer experience.

  

The realm of search engine optimization can be a confusing world of mystery to most business owners and marketing executives, who are responsible for attracting visitors to the company Web site (and converting those visitors to customers). The old adage “Build it and They Will Come” no longer holds true unless significant time and consideration are given to proper SEO techniques. We hope this section of our weblog provides an education of the key elements involved with these techniques and encourage anyone with questions or contributions to please join in …

 

The key elements of any successful search engine marketing campaign are based on identifying relevant keywords and keyword phrases related to the product or service provided by the Web site. Having identified relevant keywords, the four most critical areas to apply these words and/or phrases are the following: 

1. The Web site domain name;
2. The Web site page titles;
3. Inbound text links to the Web site pages;
4. The most semantically relevant content on the Web site pages.

The domain name commands the most relevant keyword placement of any area of a Web site. Although strong domain names are difficult to secure these days, if at all possible register a name including your identified keywords. For SEO purposes the importance of “.com” versus “.net” suffixes are not relevant.

 

After the domain name, the second place search engines consider relevant is the Web page title. This page title is placed between opening and closing title tags, e.g. <title>Search Engine Optimization Techniques, Internet Marketing Strategies</title>, in the “head” section of the page code. This title also appears in the top most area of your internet browser when viewing the page.

 

Inbound text links from relevant Web sites have become increasingly critical to search engine relevance. A number of companies offer a page of image links (usually the company symbol or logo mark) for customers to publish links back to the company site. Text links rich with keywords related to the company product or service would provide the company site with much higher relevance where search engines are concerned. There are a number of strategies for creating inbound link campaigns, although none are as effective as when others link to your site because it is just good reading, or reference material, they wish to share with others.

 

Last and certainly not least, the more keywords published as semantically relevant page content, the higher the company’s organic, or non-paid, page ranking will be for those keywords and/or keyword phrases. A page created with semantic markup follows a page structure, or hierarchy, with some tag combinations ranking higher than others. For example, keyword phrases in heading tags: <h1></h1>; <h2></h2>; etc. are seen with more relevance by search engines than keywords published in simple paragraphs.

 

Search engine optimization techniques will continue to change as often as search engines manipulate and shift their algorithms for indexing and ranking. We can only react to those changes and hope our research is accurate enough to provide us the tools to rank our pages higher than the competition.