SEO Web Design Blog » Code

Be Specific: Using Semantic XHTML for Search Engines

Claye Stokes — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 22:28:21 +0000

Using the , , and

tags to improve readability for disabled users, web crawlers, and search engines.

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 , , and

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 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

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

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 tag:

NASA
SEO
MT

How to use the tag:

UT
Corp.

How to use the

tag:

Address:14 East Anywhere Drive
City, ST 55555

When it comes to distinguising between acronyms, initialisms, and abbreviations, the following guides are very useful. When it comes to implementing the and tags, the W3C appears to suggest that should be used for acronyms and initialisms, and 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

Using the META Robots Tag

Claye Stokes — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 04:14:13 +0000

Tutorial: How to use the Meta Robots tag — code examples, meanings, and all the major REP directives.

I’ve seen a whole lot of websites lately that are wasting space (and the time it took to write it) by implementing the Meta Robots tag like this:

If you want search engine bots to crawl and index your website, then just leave it alone. By default, search engines will crawl, index, and archive every page on your website that they can find by following links. You also don’t have to say “all” — every bot that obeys the Robots Meta tag will obey it by default.

So not only is that example pointless because that is the default, it is repeating the same command twice!

Here are some handy uses for the Meta robots tag (these work for Yahoo!, MSN, and Google bots):

Normal talk: Just ignore this page – don’t keep a copy because I don’t want to see it in search engine results. I don’t want you to follow the links on this page, either.

Code:

(surprised that it’s not “noindex, nofollow”? – that’s just a long and unnecessary of telling search engines to ignore the page completely)

Normal talk: I don’t want to see this page in search results, so don’t keep a copy of this page. You can follow the links on this page, though – those websites deserve credit.

Code:

Normal talk: Take as many copies of this page as you want and hook me up with traffic from your search engine results. Don’t follow the links on this page though, those websites aren’t that great anyways.

Code:

Normal talk: You can make a copy of this page to plug into your algorithm, but don’t give anyone access to it with the “cache” link in search engine results.

Code:

Normal talk: I don’t want you to pull any text from my website to use in search engine results. Just a link will do. You’re free to index this page and follow all links.

Code:

Normal talk: Stop using my Dmoz.org listing description in search results – I want you to use a snippet of text from the page to show users the contextual relevance of my site to their search query.

Code:

(NOODP is an acronym “No Open Directory Project”)

Some Useful Googlebot Meta Tags:

These Meta tags work exclusively in Google (all of these would work with the “robots” name, but since Googlebot is the only bot that officially follows these REP directives, I’ll use “googlebot” or “google”, in the case of the notranslate tag):

Normal talk: Ignore the images on this page – I don’t want to see them in Google Image Search.

Code:

Normal talk: Heads up – this page will be out of commission (deleted, expired, moved, etc.) on this day.

Code:

Normal talk: Don’t translate the content on this page into other languages.

Code:

! Notice that in this case, the Meta name is “google”, not “googlebot”.