You want to make your website as informative as possible, right? For search engines, users – everybody. Help search engines, disabled (blind) users, and any users who may not understand the meaning of your acronym or abbreviation by using semantic XHTML tags like the <acronym>, <abbr>, and <address> tags in context.

If your website, for example, is about Medical Transcriptions, but you refer to them on the website only using the medical jargon MT, search engines and users looking at small snippets of text may confuse the acronym “MT” for Media Temple (MT), or the abbreviation for Montana (MT), so use the <acronym> tag to specify what you are referring to. The more specific you can be, the more likely you are to rank for those relevant terms, and as a result, your users content to be more informative and useful.

To see it in action, hover your mouse over this: XHTML. You’ll see a tool tip with the written-out version: Extensible HyperText Markup Language. If users or search engines don’t already know what the acronym stands for, then the title attribute (see below) will inform them, and text-to-speech engines will be able to see that the full term that the acronym represents as well. 

Finally, using the <address> tag is getting increased attention lately, especially for local businesses and websites that users would search for with Google Local Search, Maps, YellowPages.com, Yelp.com, etc. The <address> tag helps to isolate the address from the rest of the copy on your website, making your website more relevant to local or geo targeted search queries, such as “san diego pizza” or “pizza 94023″ (searching by zip code).

Code Examples

How to use the  <acronym> tag:

1. <acronym title="National Aeronautics and Space Administration">NASA</acronym>
2. <acronym title="Search Engine Optimization">SEO</acronym>
3. <acronym title="Medical Transcription">MT</acronym>

How to use the <abbr> tag:

1. <abbr title="Utah">UT</abbr>
2. <abbr title="Corporation">Corp</abbr>.

How to use the <address> tag:

1. <address>
2. Address:14 East Anywhere Drive<br />
3. City, <abbr title="State">ST</state> 55555
4. </acronym>

When it comes to distinguising between acronyms, initialisms, and abbreviations, the following guides are very useful. When it comes to implementing the <acronym> and <abbr> tags, the W3C appears to suggest that <acronym> should be used for acronyms and initialisms, and <abbr> is used for abbreviated and shortened words (Inc., Gov., etc.).

• The W3C guide for Acronyms and Abbreviations
• Grammar Girl Abbreviations, Acronyms, and Initialisms
• This article sorts out the confusion over the correct use of abbreviations and acronyms: http://juicystudio.com/article/abbreviations-acronyms.php

Why?

IE6 does not support web standards, meaning that not only does it do a bad job of displaying websites correctly,  it is the bane of every web designer who has to stoop to the level of implementing IE6 hacks to fix its bugs.

I can’t stop making websites that support IE6 for my clients, because their websites have to work for everyone that comes along, regardless of their browser.

My website, on the other hand, can (hopefully) educate my visitors who are less experienced on the web, and help them to upgrade to a better, faster, more user-friendly, and free browser like Google’s Chrome (if you’re still using IE6, do yourself a huge favor and just click on that link right now), Opera, or Firefox. I mention them in that order because if you’re still on IE6, you won’t understand the benefits or need the addons of Firefox, and Chrome is the fastest, most lightweight browser and probably the best solution for an older/antiquated computer.

If you look closely, you’ll notice that I’m still using a few IE hacks like the IE png fix to give transparent PNG support, as well as a hack to get my navigation menu to work in IE6. I don’t want to leave IE6 users completely hanging, but they will have to endure the big ugly badge in my header.

If you are interested in doing the same thing for your website, feel free to use my code and image – I’ll be happy if you do. Both were inspired by Elliot Jay Stocks (to give credit where credit is due). You will also probably want to joing the IE Death March – an initiative to end IE6 support by March of this year. I mean, IE6 is older than the Ipod – it’s time to move on.