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Many SEO people simply go through the motions and almost forget about creating good content; the technical on-page factors such as a good title, link text, etc are there because these are naturally important for good content, not solely for search engine optimisation.

Read the full post titled, “SEO for sake of SEO misses the point”

WYSIWYG editors for HTML are fraught with problems, as discussed in a previous post. This post is a quick look at why WYSIWYG editors would be important for content producers and offers some links to tools and research that people are doing.

Read the full post titled, “WYSIWYG HTML Editors”

Yahoo and Microsoft provide some improved search tools. Yahoo’s is a dynamic URL rewriting capability so you can tell the search engines which querystrings can be ignored in a URL. Microsoft’s Live Search announces a new SEO tool for webmasters, similar to the Yahoo and Google’s

Read the full post titled, “Yahoo and Microsoft provide some improved search tools”

‘Search engine optimisation’ (SEO) can be a misleading term, because natural search engine strategies often involve two areas: search engine indexing and search engine ranking. At a high level,

• Improving indexing is mostly a technical task
• Improving ranking is mostly a business/marketing strategy (because search engines are trying to measure the popularity of your site, typically by understanding who links to your site and why)
• What might work now may not work in the future
• It all takes time to build good ranking

Read the full post titled, “Explaining Natural SEO: Search engine ranking vs indexing”

A useful article compares tagged PDFs generated from Acrobat, Office 2007 and OpenOffice, looking at how each tool (or plugin) provides various options for tagging PDFs so that the output will be more accessible. The test document is just a simple one, and even there differences can be seen!

Read the full post titled, “Quick link: Accessible PDF comparison”

XSLT tips for cleaner code not only helps with maintenance and readability, but some of these also help improve performance. The first in a series of XSLT posts, this one concentrates mostly on cleaner coding. Tips cover areas such as xsl match templates versus named templates, xsl:for-each versus match templates, optimising use of variable declarations, using in-built XPATH functions for performance and easier to read code, and more.

Read the full post titled, “XSLT Tips for Cleaner Code and Better Performance”

Explaining whitespace to clients is important. Sometimes people may want to cram everything into a small place. But the way you explain it to clients is also important.

Read the full post titled, “Explaining whitespace”

HTML, JavaScript and AJAX are not only used for normal web sites and web applications but often for general applications that happen to use these technologies as a delivery mechanism. This latter type of application is ideally meant to be a desktop app, but issues such as deployment, upgrading, and installation, especially in corporate-wide scenarios leads to use of web technologies instead. But HTML, JavaScript, etc were not built for these kinds of applications. So, what about Flash or even HTML 5? HTML 5 is still not meant for those apps, but Flash can be, if desktop apps are still not possible due to some of these constraints.

Read the full post titled, “AJAX, Flash or HTML? (or HTML 5?)”

Usability is often considered a big deal and ultimate goal for a site. While obviously important, user experience expert Jesse James Garrett (also the guy the coined the phrase AJAX) makes the point that it is just the first step.

Read the full post titled, “Usability — only the first step?”

HTML 5 is gaining increasing interest, with the potential to improve accessibility, make richer web sites more consistent and help make developing web sites that bit easier. A lot of new useful elements are proposed and some big companies are backing this. Yet, it will still likely be a long time before we see this.

Read the full post titled, “HTML 5 = Improved Web, Accessibility, Productivity?”