About Anup Shah

A web developer/consultant/trainer specializing in web standards, accessibility, CSS, JavaScript, XSLT and server side coding.

Explaining Natural SEO: Search engine ranking vs indexing

‘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

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Posted in SEO

XSLT Tips for Cleaner Code and Better Performance

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. Continue reading

AJAX, Flash or HTML? (or HTML 5?)

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. Continue reading