The other day a friend of mine was asking me about XOXO and Microformats. He is relatively new to the industry and was trying to get some advice about how to implement XOXO. After talking to him a little bit we got on the to subject of (re)building a website and the steps to fixing/building sites.

A while ago I had started a project to go through the process of building a website. It’s still on the back burner right now but I thought I would present a list of things that, when developing a website’s interface, need to be focused on. I’ve collected my thoughts on a short list that hopefully will help you.

1. Structure

   All websites need to have some sort structure when writing the (x)html. I would suggest taking the semantic approach and organize things, that is to say use meaningful IDs and class names.

2. Accessibility

   I know people don’t get all excited when they see accessibility. But if you take a minute and think about it most of the SEO concerns are addressed with Section 508 and WCAG. Consider this: alt attributes on images help both accessibility and SEO concerns. I say make your site usable by all (humans) and you won’t have to worry about the robots. Google did say to build websites for humans for a reason.

3. Users

   Make sure that users can use your site. This sounds like a no brain-er but you would be surprised how how many developers launch their sites without even putting it through a simple user test. Its not overly hard to do, grab your boyfriend, girlfriend, brother, sister, parent, random person in a coffee shop… well you get the idea, sit them down and watch them use your site. Take note of where they go and what they do. Ask questions like: what are you looking for? and what did you expect to see?

4. Extras

   While Microformats are nice and handy, not everyone can use them. For example my parents don’t even know what they are. Some web developers I know don’t really know what they are. So use them but don’t expect people to use them right now. When it comes down to it and time is a factor don’t worry about Microformats. I’d rather see beautiful accessible websites then being able to scrape information off sites with a toolbar.

So it happened. I hoped it would take longer but I knew it would come. It was a sad and frustrating day the other week that I have only now wanted to or have been able to write about it.

A little background to set up the scene: I work at a university, we have a rather large system that is built on MOSS. Which in of itself isn’t a major problem but still proves to be an interesting challenge.

One of those challenges is to create a development environment that is available anonymously (not logged in) to the developers only on the local network. Pretty common in the Apache world and should be fairly easy to setup on the MOSS system (or so I thought). Well it turns out that it’s not overly easy, and currently can’t be done so that it is limited to the local network. Something with how they have the firewalls setup or something.

In order for the developers to work we needed anonymous access turned on so that we could test our code as how the rest of the world would see it. Now this really isn’t an issue because only people who are working on the server know the URL. Google doesn’t know about it, Joe Plumber doesn’t know about it and you anonymous person doesn’t know about it. However the server admin thought that Google would index it right away, and was confused about it because another development environment was already being indexed by Google (another story for another time). After I reassured him that: 1. Google wouldn’t index unless it knew about it, 2. We can make sure that Google won’t index it, and 3. I couldn’t work unless anonymous access was turned on. After going back and forth a little, he decided that he wouldn’t turn it on unless he got approval from him supervisor (out for the day) or from my supervisor (also out for the day).

What it comes down to it a lack of knowledge on his part and a lack of respect for my position. I’m pretty much an expert in SEO and things related to search engines. I can tell you I knew next to nothing about Windows servers and IIS, which is why I trust the people who hold those positions to do their jobs and hope that they also realize what I do and trust me to do my job to the best of my ability.

On the 12th of November Google came out with a SEO starter guide. I thought since this will be my very first post about SEO that I would review what they had to say. They have 12 points that they make, most of which are common knowledge. This comes on the heels of Google’s Tricks and Treats webmaster event where they dispelled a few common myths about SEO and gave an idea about Google’s stance on SEO practices.

I’m going to take a look at this from the stance of building and designing websites for people (rather then robots), since that is what Google has always said.

So before I ramble on…

1. Create unique, accurate page titles

   No problem here. It only makes sense to have unique, accurate page titles. Would you want a page title to say “Fish Market” when the page was really about coffee? I didn’t think so. As for the uniqueness of a title make sure you don’t have two pages with the same title. With the page title you are telling your users where they are with a quick glance.

2. Make use of the “description” meta tag

   Well fancy that. Google telling us to use one of the meta tags. I know some people that are going to be a little upset about this one. Google makes it pretty clear how this helps users. They (sometimes) take the description meta tag and use it in the search results. Helpful? Maybe… Though it is another place to give a little bit more information about the page/site.

3. Improve the structure of your URLs

   Google says to make your URLs make sense. That is to make your URLs have human readable words in them so that people can understand where they are. Not much to say here…

4. Make your site easier to navigate

   Hrmm they suggest adding sitemaps and Sitemaps to your site to make it easy. That is one way of doing it, though having a good navigation on all your pages would seem like a better choice for your users. They do start to talk about that a little bit seem to rely on Sitemaps a little too much I think.

5. Offer quality content and services

   Well Duh… “Users know good content when they see it…” I beg to differ. There are some places that users would not know good content if it walked up and slapped them in the face. But they did hit this one right on the head. Good content/services will bring users back.

6. Write better anchor text

   Yup. No more “click here“. But alas people still do it.

7. Use heading tags appropriately

   I think this section should really be about writing good markup. It would go far if Google started saying that good clean HTML meant something to them. Using markup how it was meant to be used should always be done.

8. Optimize your use of images

   Ahh Google I love you. You used “alt” attribute and not “alt” tag. Good for you. Remember kids use your attributes wisely. Not only will they help people who can’t see images figure out what is they but they will also save lives!

9. Make effective use of robots.txt

   Robots.txt is for robots and not users. There’s no other way to put it. Though in a round about way users use Google to to find your site and if you have a directory hidden then the users won’t see it in the search results. Err umm… yea I say we start a standard called humans.txt for use by humans… yea… that’s it.

10. Be aware of rel=”nofollow” for links

    Again rel=”nofollow” is for robots. Unless you want to look at the source code of a site most people won’t even know its there. Also in this section they mention using CAPTCHAs for spam… NO! Damnit Google I thought you were better then that. W3C has been saying since 2005 (or longer) that CAPTCHAs are in-accessible. Bad Google bad bad bad…

11. Promote your website in the right ways

    Not much to say here other then: Google can you give us examples of the wrong ways to promote our sites? I mean are there any?

12. Make use of free webmaster tools, Take advantage of web analytics services, Helpful resources for webmasters

    “Oh hey there, I’m Google, I hope you enjoyed this guide of mine. I’m going to sell my products to you under the guise of an SEO guide. I make a lot of products that you should use. So I’m going to put ALL my links at the end of this SEO Guide so that you’ll click on them. YAY!” said Google over enthusiastically.

Well kids that’s pretty much it. I hoped you enjoyed my “review” of Google’s SEO Guide.