Data Types

There are a large set of new data types described, including:

Creative works: CreativeWork, Book, Movie, MusicRecording, Recipe, TVSeries …

• Embedded non-text objects: AudioObject, ImageObject, VideoObject
• Event
• Organization
• Person
• Place, LocalBusiness, Restaurant …
• Product, Offer, AggregateOffer
• Review, AggregateRating

Formats

There are currently 3 standards in use (referred to by Google as rich snippets): Microdata, RDFa  and Microformats. Microdata has been chosen for use at the core of schema.org, but it is supplemented by additional ‘vocabulary’. The other formats will still be supported by the major search engines, but I suspect are unlikely to be developed much further and may eventually be phased out.

Validation

It’s worth being aware that in terms of HTML validation:

• Microdata is a HTML5 specification and will not validate as HTML4.
• RDFa will only validate within XHTML documents.
• Only Microformats will validate as standard HTML4.

Testing

Google provide a rich snippets testing tool to check the accuracy of data (note this tests for Microdata, RDFa  and Microformats)

Getting Started

Schema.org provide a handy guide to getting started, that points you in the right direction.

Related Posts:

• SEO and the Semantic Web – how RDFa and HTML 5 will impact search
• The Future of the Web – Connected APIs
• iPad, iPope, Obama, HTML5 – SEO Weekly News 30 Jan 2010

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/dont-ask-sites-for-links-find-people-and-connect

The crux of it is: don’t write to anonymous website contact email addresses asking for links; instead join the community (participating with relevant comments on blogs/social media sites that don’t just publicise your own content) and create useful content that the influential website owners (who you’ve created meaningful relationships with through your participation) will want to link to.

Related Posts:

• Off-site Linking Strategies
• 11 top link building tips from Matt Cutts
• Diverse affiliate linking in SEO – proof of concept

http://www.w3.org/2009/cheatsheet/

As summarised by W3C:

The W3C Cheat Sheet is an open source tool freely available for Web developers. It provides quick access to useful information from a variety of specifications published by W3C, the leading international Web standards community.

On a similar subject, don’t forget to have a read through my page about HTML for SEO.

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If you need to use an OLE style connection string to connect to a SQL Server database (for example, you’re using pre-written code that relies on that provider type), but you’re having trouble connecting, you can use the SQL Native Client Provider instead.

So rather than:

Provider=SQLOLEDB;Server=myhost;Database=mydatabase;Persist Security Info=False;User ID=xxxx;Password=yyyy

you can use:

Provider=SQLNCLI;Server=myhost;Database=mydatabase;Persist Security Info=False;User ID=xxxx;Password=yyyy

Bear in mind, the provider should match your version of Native Client, so in my case (I’m running SQL Server 2008 R2), it’s actually SQLNCLI10, as per:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms130822.aspx

If you can, avoid SQLOLEDB altogether and use SQLClient.

Hope that helps someone.

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WordPress 3.0 is out and has a number of nice new features – I’ve upgraded 2 websites automatically (one from 2.91, one from 2.92 on different hosts) without any problems so far. It’s worth checking out the official blog entry and the video below about v3 from WordPress:

To summarise some of the new key features:

• multiple site functionality added (WordPress MU has been merged)
• big improvements to menus, custom post types & taxonomies exposed via new APIs – this makes WordPress a more serious CMS contender, no longer just a fancy blogging engine
• there’s a new default theme called ‘Twenty Ten’ with some nice artwork out of the box
• lots of bug fixes
• upgrades (to themes, plugins, etc) all bundled together
• generate short URLs automatically
• a new slightly lighter looking admin area

If you already have an existing blog, it’s worth upgrading for the bug fixes and upgrades, but you’ll really stand to gain most from the custom post types (for example, it can now handle products) and multi-site features if you’re starting afresh. So if you’ve been meaning to start blogging for a while, now’s a good time to go for it…

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Whilst the seminar didn’t deliver any particular revelations for those of us acquainted with SEO and contained the customary undercurrent of thinly disguised self promotion, it nicely summarised a solid method for gaining back-links. Feel free to check out a PDF of the whole branded3 presentation, but to summarise, the process Patrick described is as follows:

1. Create some (ideally non-commercial) content worth linking to. You’ll be more likely to attract links from others if you have for example: guides, reviews, a blog, news or photos.
2. Perform competitor analysis by identifying 20 target keywords, make a list of domains ranking in the top 20 search results for each keyword.
3. Using seoMoz’s Open Site Explorer, export .csv files of  to compile a list of external followed & 301 pages linking to all pages on the root domains of these sites.
4. After deduping and tidying up, you end up with a theoretical list of the top sites in your area to receive links from. You can refine the list further by sorting on domain authority, then filter for influential TLDs (like .ac.uk and .org).
5. Evaluate whether it’s worth spending time trying to get a link on each site. Try to figure out how your competitors have gained links. In some cases, you may not be able to get links, because you don’t have the same relationship with the linking site that your competitor does. Sometimes, the links are paid for and may not be worth pursuing.
6. Whilst evaluating, check more stats about a site using seoMoz’s Firefox SEO toolbar.
7. If a site looks like it’s worth getting a link on, make contact in as personal way as possible:  speak to people over the phone; send personal emails to people who run relevant websites; make sure emails don’t start with “Dear Webmaster”; ask about advertising; ask bloggers if they accept guest posts.
8. You should take advantage of any partnerships you have: talk to your suppliers & offer reviews; do interviews for industry news sites; give discounts to customers in return for links; offer to write news articles or guides for websites in your industry, make friends with people who control websites.

Patrick added that if you’re buying a link, make sure it doesn’t resemble advertising, as you will get little or no credit from search engines. Buying text links is actually a somewhat unethical practice, at least in the eyes of search engines, so you should think twice about doing this – it can lead to being penalised or getting bad press.

In a slight twist of irony, a number of top SEO companies use this method to gain a competitive edge – I recently published a post about Just Search (who were also present at Internet World) using this tactic to gain a lot of ‘link juice’ from paid links.

Related Posts:

• Diverse affiliate linking in SEO – proof of concept
• How to build links
• 11 top link building tips from Matt Cutts

It shows how successful particular pages are at achieving impressions and perhaps more importantly, the conversion rate. This allows you to optimise 2 areas:

1) If a given page is not appearing as high up or for as many impressions as you would expect for a given keyword/phrase, you can fine tune the page content and get very specific feedback about how that page is performing as a result for the keyword in question.

2) By experimenting with your page title and meta description, you can attempt to make a given page more appealing for users under a keyword or phrase that’s proving more popular than you first thought and perhaps you didn’t optimise for in the first instance.

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Having said that, every little helps and (as is the case with content and usability) to have a successful website, users must find visiting it a pleasant experience and want to come  back. As home and  business internet connection speeds increase, users’ patience for slow sites drops, so the faster your site performs, the better.

If you need some more information about the monetary value of improving page speed, I found an interesting webinar about how web speed affects online business KPIs.

That in mind, here are some handy tips for increasing page loading speed…

1. There are a number of tools that provide a free comprehensive website performance scans: Google’s PageSpeed, YSlow or Zoompf. These analyse what you can improve within the scope of your website (e.g. number of objects on page, image sizes, DNS requests, compression)
2. If you have WordPress, these plugins (all of which offer free versions) will speed up your site with a minimum of effort:
   - W3 Total Cache
   - WP Supercache
   - Webo Site Speedup
3. Get a good hosting provider. Sounds obvious, but on the whole, the more you pay, the better hardware you get. Although a private blog may not need a load balanced multiple server industrial strength solution, if you choose a really low end hosting solution, be prepared to have a slower site. It may be worth paying a little extra for better performance.
4. Carefully consider the size of your images. It’s well worth using a tool like SmushIt to compress image file size and in general use the most appropriate compression algorithm. Often png is a better option than jpg or gif, but that’s not always the case.
5. If you feature videos, use streaming if you can and don’t automatically trigger playback, as this effectively adds to the initial page load time.
6. Don’t use table based html – use css for more efficient markup and smaller file size.
7. CSS sprites is a rather cunning technique to improve performance by using a single background image instead of multiple smaller images.
8. Compress javascript with a tool like Yahoo’s YUI Compressor. This also has the added advantage of obfuscating code, making it harder for visitors to steal & re-purpose your hard work.
9. Utilise caching wherever possible – this can work on a number of levels:
   • if you’re doing a database look-up to load a list on your homepage for all users, which doesn’t change on a regular basis, store it in the server’s application cache for a sensible amount of time, rather than looking up every time
   • partially cache data for pages within a CMS using xml and transforming with xslt at runtime
   • after creating a page dynamically, if there’s no user specific customisation or real-time data, have your server save it as flat html for users to access
   • set expiry/cache control for pages appropriately so that users can take advantage of local browser based caching
10. Minimise the number of DNS look-ups by hosting assets on as few domains as possible. e.g. don’t feature lots of images hosted at other websites.

Related Posts:

• nofollow Comment Links on Blogs
• Google Buzz and WordPress plugins
• Matt Cutts on Google removing PageRank from extinct links
• How Google Ranks Links from Social Media websites
• Haiti Earthquake – a Disaster Sponsored by Google

Odd that one can gain public notoriety for queuing in the right places. I’ve spent an inordinate amount of time waiting in line for tube tickets in London and have never once been on TV for my troubles.

Anyway, whilst I can’t say I share this unbridled enthusiasm for the iPad, it’s no doubt going to re-energise the tablet format, which until now never really took off. Looking back at tablets over the years, it seems to me that the two main reasons for the lack of popularity are:

1. The technology hasn’t been there to create a truly useful user interface as an alternative to other portable platforms.
2. It wasn’t fashionable enough to catch on for either users or software manufacturers

From what I’ve seen of the iPad so far, it will won’t fail for those reasons. The technology has caught up over the past few years, with the iPhone-eqsue environment already tried & tested: by both end users in the case of the user interface and programmers in the case of the very similar SDK. As for being fashionable, the Apple fanatics queuing up outside the stores provides at least anecdotal evidence that there won’t be a problem in this area.

So it would seem Apple have developed a very successful business model with the iPhone over the past 3 years. They’ve capitalised on mobile phone companies discounting the hardware to gain a massive number of users. This, coupled with the simplicity of the App Store and iTunes Connect, making commercial app development accessible to all has led to an army of both fans and developers – a wonderfully symbiotic relationship.

Admittedly the target demographic for the iPad is different to the audience for the iPhone. It will be aimed more at a smaller (older) market sector, with a higher retail price, no subsidies through mobile phone operators and more expensive apps. Nonetheless, Apple have nurtured the market, releasing the iPad via the iPhone springboard and I think it will do well.

I started this article with a reference to Mashable’s coverage of the iPad launch and I will end it by pointing you in the direction of their list of 10 best iPad apps – a taste of things to come…

Related Posts:

• iPad, iPope, Obama, HTML5 – SEO Weekly News 30 Jan 2010

All in One Packs

These are handy if you’re new to WordPress and don’t have time to faff, but if you’ve already got plugins in place, use with caution to avoid messing up any existing settings you’ve fine tuned…

HeadSpace2 SEO

This plugin helps manage everything in the ‘head’ of your HTML pages (so meta data, page titles, etc) in one place.

Platinum SEO Pack

Includes the likes of: Optimised Post and Page Titles; Generates META tags automatically; Helps you avoid duplicate content; Lets you override titles & meta data.

Internal Links

You shouldn’t underestimate the importance of good internal linking for SEO – you can drive traffic within your own site and push link juice around tactically. These plugins make this task easier.

Efficient Related Posts

A related posts plugin that works quickly even with thousands of posts and tags: well worth adding to the bottom of your single post template to lower bounce rate by keeping the reader’s attention focused on your site.

Enhanced Recent Posts

A plugin that enhances the built-in “Recent Posts” widget.

RB Internal Links

Link to other blog posts and pages without specifying the full URL. Uses a UI to ease finding the post or page you want to link to.

SEO Smart Links

Automatically generates links in all your posts. Handy time saver, but I generally prefer to use the plugin above to do it manually.

Redirection

Manage all your 301 redirects and monitor 404 errors. If you set up 301′s for common 404′s, you can get claw back some of your lost traffic. Also handy if, like me, you use an auto post service and sometimes the auto generated URLs don’t match those created by WordPress.

Sitemaps

These are also internal links really, but are important enough to warrant their own heading.

Google XML Sitemaps

This plugin automatically generates an XML sitemap and submits to search engines on your behalf. Bit of a no-brainer really.

Dagon Design Sitemap Generator

Generates a fully customizable sitemap:  useful for visitors and to help search engines index pages they might not otherwise find their way to.

Google News XML Sitemap

Automatically generate XML sitemap for inclusion to newly formatted Google News. You have to be a Google approved news site for your articles to appear in Google news, which generally involves having a ‘team’ of people posting for your website/blog. Well worth doing to gain additional SERP real estate.

SEO Semantics

A couple of random SEO related helper plugins.

Fuzzy SEO Queries

Increase your long tail search traffic automatically: this is a widget that automatically adds search terms that visitors have used to find a particular page on your site.  The theory is that it tweaks the page content to make it more attractive to search engines for effective & relevant search terms.

Recent Google Searches Widget

Widget to display a list of recent search engine queries in a link to the wp search function. Similar idea to the above.

Speed up

Having a fast site is essential for keeping users happy and with loading speed potentially becoming a contributing factor in search ranking, it’s worth being as quick as you can be. These plugins help speed up page-loads and are particularly handy if you don’t have the best hosting environment.

WEBO Site SpeedUp

Speeds up your website by crunching js/css files together & so on. Makes a significant difference.

WP Super Cache

Caches your pages so the server doesn’t have to generate them on the fly each time they’re accessed by users.

Page Titles and Meta Tags

You need to have unique, well organised page titles & meta descriptions and it’s useful to craft your nofollows & noindexes for minimum link juice loss.

SEO Title Tag

Create a customised title tag for any post, static page & category page. Admin allows for mass editing of title tags. Very handy to optimise all your titles in one place, ensuring uniqueness.

Robots Meta

From Mr Yoast, who is wise in the ways of WordPress & SEO, this plugin allows you to add all the appropriate robots meta tags to your pages and feeds, disable unused archives and nofollow unnecessary links.

Ultimate Noindex Nofollow Tool

Improves your blog’s search engine optimisation by “noindexing” pages you choose. Very similar aim to the above.

SEO Slugs

Removes common words like ‘a’, ‘the’, ‘in’ from post slugs to improve SEO. Also leaves less of a mess than salt.

Social Bookmarks

Encouraging your users to share your content with one another is an excellent way of gaining traffic.

Google Buzz

Adds a button which allows you to share post on google buzz (as you can see to the top right of this post).

Topsy Widgets

Provides a Twitter retweet button (as you can see to the top right of this post).

SexyBookmarks

Don’t let the name put you off – this plugin adds a (X)HTML compliant list of social bookmarking icons to each of your posts.

Outbound Marketing

These plugins help you spread the word yourself from within your own blog.

MaxBlogPress Ping Optimizer

Saves your WordPress blog from getting tagged as ping spammer, by only pinging when you.

Newsletter

A simple plugin to collect subscribers and send out newsletters.

Related Tweets

Automatically tweets links to relevant posts from your Twitter account, automatically adding hashtags. This leads to more (relevant) people following you on Twitter, which in turn gives you more people to communicate your own blog posts to.

Socialite

Publishes your WordPress posts to Twitter, Facebook, and Myspace. Very handy, but I also use an auto post service to allow me to post to more places at once.

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