Joe Sak

SEO for Enliven has been Successful

Monday, October 6th, 2008 | Improving Code, Programming, SEO, Semantic XHTML, Web Development, Websites, Work Stuff, XHTML | 1 Comment

Bunmi told me recently that our sister company, Enliven Software, has been getting regular business and sales through online visitors who did a search on Google.

I’m proud of this, because I wrote the XHTML that’s been helpful in optimizing enlivensoftware.com for robots like googlebot to understand the site and return it high in the rankings for search results lists.

How did I do it?
 
Header tags, Title attributes and Cross-linking, oh my!

Use the proper hierarchy of Header tags in your code. On the home page, H1 belongs to your logo and company name. H2 belongs to the main headline of the page and maybe your company’s motto if you have one. H3 and H4 can be headers of sections, like News or Events.

On your subpages, make your logo/company name a regular anchor tag linking back to the home page. Now H1 goes to your page name and H2 becomes a sub-header for dividing content. H3 and H4 can still designate page sections. It helps if your H1 matches your Page Title

Then you should put titles on those tags and on your navigation menu links. Hell, you can even put titles on divs! These titles should differ from the text in the tag itself. For example, you could have a link named “Events” and its corresponding title could be “Calendar of Events at Company ABC”. This is cross-linking and keyword density rolled into one swift move without overloading the user with too much fluff in the words they see.

Also, a good friend of yours can be the ABBR tag. It’s the tag you use to define abbreviations. In a real-world example, here’s the code I used for the logo for the new MHSAA web site we’re working on:

<h1 id=”logo” title=”Michigan High School Athletic Association”><abbr title=”Michigan High School Athletic Association”>MHSAA</abbr></h1>

Now Google and other robots will know what MHSAA means. That should help in future searches. It also helps that their domain is mhsaa.com.< You can submit your sitemap to google and use webmaster tools and google analytics, as well.

So these are simple ways you as a programmer can help your company and clients succeed in SEO. Don’t forget that you should start with a kick-ass writer, too.

CFD Smile Goes Live!

Monday, November 12th, 2007 | CSS, Clients, Code, Custom Development, Design, Portfolio, Portfolio - Freelance, Programming, Projects, SEO, Semantic XHTML, Skinning, Web Development, Websites, Work Stuff, XHTML | No Comments

Well, my first side project has finally gone live! After months of hard work, I now unveil www.cfdsmile.com to you. We wanted to bring out the services right up front for best emphasis, and lots of heavy stock photo usage for high impact.

We also worked with a professional web content writer to make the content more effective and search-engine optimized. This, coupled with semantic HTML, CSS, and google web master tools, will help this site rank high in keywords for Texas Dental Services.

So, please visit the site if you get a chance, and enjoy!

Semantic XHTML – More than Table-less layouts

Wednesday, July 18th, 2007 | CSS, Improving Code, Life, Programming, Semantic XHTML, Web Development, Work Stuff, XHTML | No Comments

OK so I have a confession to make. I didn’t know that semantic XHTML is different from standards-compliant XHTML.

I formally apologize to the entire web development community. My terrible practice over the last seven years has finally caught up with me and put me in my place!

I am deeply ashamed and will be making every effort to step up my game and read all about the wonderful world of semantic web development.