This document discusses best practices for developer grade SEO, including proper validation of code to current standards, clean and semantic markup, use of meta tags and microdata for rich snippets, and ensuring AJAX content is crawlable. It emphasizes starting with a clear site purpose and keeping code well-organized, validated and semantic to provide the necessary signals and metadata for search engines. While not absolutely necessary, following these guidelines can help sites rank better through clearer communication of content and structure to robots.
7. Start at the beginning What is the purpose of the site? If you canât answer this question â hit the STOP button!
8. Oh no you didnât! <meta name=ârobots" content=ânoindex"> User-agent: * Disallow: / Make sure you didnât do something really simple, yet tragic
13. What is the current standard? XHTML 1.1 became a W3C Recommendation on May 31, 2001. CSS 2 became a W3C Recommendation on June 7, 2011. <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.1//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml11/DTD/xhtml11.dtd"> <html version="-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.1//EN" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/SCHEMA/xhtml11.xsd" > <head> <title>Virtual Library</title> </head> <body> <p>Content is <a href="http://example.org/">good</a>.</p> </body> </html>
23. How are you writing your ajax? <a href=â#â>Click Me</a> <a href=âjavascript:someFunction(âsomepage.html#parameter=1â)â>
24. The Hijax Approach No javascript? You get this <a href=âsomepage.html?parameter=1âonclick=âsomeFunction(âsomepage.html#parameter=1â); return falseâ> Got javascript? You get this This doesnât work if you are trying to serve dynamic content
25. How Google wants you to write your ajax They want AJAX content crawlable without executing JavaScript <a href=âhttp://example.com/page?query#!stateâ> Special Hash Fragment http://example.com/page?query&_escaped_fragment_=state
26. RDFa, Rich Snippets, Microdata & other delights <div itemscopeitemtype="http://data-vocabulary.org/Person"> My name is <span itemprop="name">Bob Smith</span> but people call me <span itemprop="nickname">Smithy</span>. Here is my home page: <a href="http://www.example.com" itemprop="url">www.example.com</a> I live in Albuquerque, NM and work as an <span itemprop="title">engineer</span> at <span itemprop="affiliation">ACME Corp</span>. </div>
27. The Semantic Web is a "web of data" that facilitates machines to understand the semantics, or meaning, of information on the World Wide Web. It extends the network of hyperlinked human-readable web pages by inserting machine-readable metadata about pages and how they are related to each other, enabling automated agents to access the Web more intelligently and perform tasks on behalf of users.
28. What is Semantic Markup, or Meta-Data? Meta-data can be a difficult concept to grasp. So for example, here is some regular data: (+1)212 867 5309 Of course, most of us will guess correctly that this as a telephone number, but computer systems have no way of knowing that. They see it as a string of numbers â it could be anything! So thatâs where meta-data comes in. <span class=âtelephoneâ>(+1)212 867 5309</span>
37. F.A.Q. Do I have to do this stuff to rank well? No. Would my time be better spent doing other SEO tasks? Possibly. If I ask my development team to do this theyâll punch me in the face! Possibly.