I've some html text like
<h1>GreenWhiteRed</h1>
Is it SEO friendly to split this text in something like
<h1><span class="green">Green</span><span class="white">White</span><span class="red">Red</span></h1>
Is the text still ranking well and is it interpreted as a single word 'GreenWhiteRed'?
It does not matter at all. No worries. What wheresrhys said is a common myth.
Start focusing on building strong backlinks. That 's the key to the castle.
This would greatly harm your SEO ranking. One of the major factors used in calculating pagerank is (probably - nobody knows for sure) a low code to text ratio, in other words, that your code is mostly useful, informative text, rather than a load of tags... even if your extra tags contain relevant information in attributes, unless it's part of a recognised standrad (eg hCards) it will probably not count in your favour.
Most search engine spiders see your site as a text browser would, so they would see the text as GreenWhiteRed still.
Source:
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35769#2
I believe it really matters on the subject of the page. If you have a website about dogs and only dogs then you put in the word cat, nothing will happen. Searches for 'cats' will never reach you. Also with colors, just like Andy said, mean nothing to a spider. The real SEO is what a user would read not see. Try to maintain alt tags and don't overflow the same word.
Related
What I'm wondering is will such html code:
Product Name
<del> lead </del>
<del> mercury </del>
Be somewhat interpreted by the browsers as "product without mercury" or "product mercury free"? Will it show in the results for such queries? Or is it strictly interpreted as editorial marks?
Google just indexes the content of these tags, which makes sense, because it is visible content to the page visitor.
Barry Schwartz has done an experiment last year to proof this, inspired by this Google Webmaster discussion thread in which someone asked more or less the same question as you did.
The outcome was that a piece of garbage text in <del> tags was quickly picked up by Google News, and later also showed up in organic search results.
Of course other search engines might handle this differently, and I also don't know if those tags affect the weight of the match.
So, they do match the content, but to index this content as a 'lead free product', Google would first have to know that this is a product in the first place. The fact that there is a product name doesn't mean that Google will automatically know this.
I think a better way to tell indexers about your product is to use microformats like h-product or maybe even h-recipe. And/or add the actual text 'mercury-free' to your product page and use markup and CSS to show it as mercury.
The <del>-tag is usually used to denote deleted text and is often (but need not be) rendered with strike-through text. How search engines interpret this markup (and if at all) is completely up to the vendor. You may test with different search engines, but there is no general standard for markup interpretation. In fact, page ranking algorithms are often a company secret.
I can't find a convincing answer for this. Is it wrong in terms of semantic HTML? SEO unfriendly? Accessibility?
A lot of WYSIWYG editors use it. I think it is a good way to add some extra space between paragraphs, like you do when you're writing a document and want to express 'extra differentiation' between 2 specific paragraphs. Of course you can do that with CSS, but you need to add extra classes like so:
<p class="extra-space">
Some text
</p>
<p>
Other topic
</p>
I'm sure this is not a problem for screen readers. And semantics … why an 'empty paragraph' has not a valid meaning by itself?
It's because an empty paragraph is not a paragraph at all. A paragraph is defined as "A paragraph is a self-contained unit of a discourse in writing dealing with a particular point or idea." (by Wikipedia)
From a typographic point-of-view there are other elements that help seperating content in a more semantic way. If the next paragraph is so important you maybe want to add a heading in front of it.
You also violate the rules of seperating content and design. It's just not a good idea. Think of a blog you're writing. If you do something like that, you're typographic appearance may become totally inconsistent because sometimes you use 2 empty paragraphs, sometimes none. It's just not a good idea to mix content and appearance.
It is wrong in terms of semantics because these semantics define a way to properly "Talk" to the machine.
Although it displays fine, it is can become an issue when you need some automated process.
To put it in another perspective, lets say you have a recipe, that works well when you tell it to someone. At some point you are writing down the recipe for an automated robot.
Instead of writing "Add ice cream in the blender"
you are writing "Add I scream in the blender"
When you hear it, it is the same.
When someone reads it, and can correct the mistake, is fine.
What about when the robot reads it ?
EDIT: Rephrased question.
Other than being bad practice, what other reasons are there against empty paragraphs in HTML?
ORIGINAL:
Background
Currently to add a nicely space paragraph in our CMS you press Enter key twice. I don't like empty paragraphs because they seem unnecessary to me. If you want a new paragraph, just press Enter and space it with CSS. If you want to write just below some text (e.g. to display code), then do a line break with Shift+Enter.
Question
Is there any very good reason in not allowing empty paragraphs? Is there a standard here? Seems like I just have a philosophical issue right now -- i.e. using empty paragraphs probably won't make page viewing faster or save that much space.
One thing I've learnt the heard way is that any time you have a WYSIWYG editor for a web page, you stand a risk of ending up with poor quality HTML.
It doesn't matter how good the editor is, or how well trained your people are to use it, you will end up with bad code.
They'll click the 'bold' button instead of selecting your sub-title class. They'll create spurious paragraph tags rather than line breaks. And I've had to explain to one person several times why it's a bad idea to use multiple spaces to indent stuff.
Even when people are very good at using the editor and understand the implications, you'll still get things like stray markup setting styles and then unsetting them without any content, because if you (for example) make a word bold and then delete it, it generally doesn't delete the bold tags, and no-one thinks to switch to the HTML view to check.
The basic problem is that when you make it easy to use like a word processor, people will treat it like a word processor, and the underlying code becomes completely irrelevant to them. Their job is to produce content that looks good, and as long as they can achieve that, they don't generally care for how the code looks.
The good thing is that there is a solution. In general, the people generating the content are the same people who care the most about SEO. If you emphasise that there might be SEO consequences to poor quality HTML, I find that they suddenly care a lot more about the code they're generating. They still don't generally have the skills to fix it when they've broken it, but it does seem to make people take more care to follow the rules.
To directly answer your question, I don't think it's a disaster to have empty paragraph tags like that. It's preferable not to though, and you need to consider how the content would look semantically to a search engine - it may cause the search engine to see the two paragraphs of content as being less connected to each other than they should be. This may affect how it weights the content of each paragraph when it comes to deciding its page rank. In truth, it's unlikely to be a huge difference; in fact, I'd say it's probably very tiny, but in a competitive world, it could be enough to push you down a few places. There are probably other more important SEO issues for you to deal with, but as they say, every little helps.
There are times when you have a CSS styling a particular element in your case a paragraph. IF you will use empty paragraph they will unneccesarily pick up that styling which might not be needed.
By styling paragraphs with CSS, you can change the way paragraphs are styled easily in future.
For example, you might want to style differently if the user is browsing on a mobile device, or you might just decide that you want to add more or less space between paragraphs (using attributes like margin-top and margin-bottom on the p tag I guess) because it just looks better that way. If the spacing is done with extra p tags it'd be a lot harder to change.
I expect that things like screen readers for the visually impaired would deal with CSS-styled paragraphs better than if the structure of the page is changed by adding empty paragraphs.
I have a question regarding title tags. I have been using them on every link on my site in the hope that it will be good for SEO. Because I have so many title tags in use it looks very crazy to actually visit. No matter where you point there's another title popup. Is there any way to prevent these hovers (the ones that show the content of the title tag) while still using title tags?
Thank you for your answers.
Quit overobsessing about "SEO".
The title tag is for information about the link (target). If you use it for keyword lists or something like that, then stop. If you simply duplicate the link text, there's no need. If you use it correctly, you shouldn't worry about the tooltip that browsers display.
You could use JavaScript to remove the title attribute (not tag).
But as the others said, the title attribute is intended to provide “advisory information about the element for which it is set”. So don’t spam the user with useless information just because you heard/read that search engines love that.
I fully agree wuth Joel (+1), imho now you achieve reverse effect: your site looks like one big fake to google without real content :)
The best "rule of thumb" I have heard and experienced in a positive way with SEO is to make a great site for your visitor and let the search engines take care of themselves. It sounds like you are making a site for Google and making the visitor miserable which is the exact opposite of successful SEO.
Remember, without the visitor it doesn't matter what your SE placement is.
<a onMouseOver="javascript: this.title='';" href="../path/to/image.jpg" title="some title here">link</a>
I agree with others though, you should not sacrifice usability, integrity of content and the site's design in order to achieve better SE ranking.
As Andy (and others) note, you may be confusing the Page Title tag with the Link title attribute.
To clarify, in terms of SEO:
Page Title tags on pages ARE very important for SEO
Link title attributes are very minor and not worth upsetting user experience with.
I have not tried this myself, and I am not sure how Google feels about it:
But what about putting all your title tags where you want them, for the SEO, then after the onload event is fired, simply null them all at once by finding all elements that have the title attribute and setting them to "". This way, the user is not beaten-to-death by title tags as they try to stumble their way through your page....?
In Prototype, I use the $$() function to get all items of a specific class and it works like a champ.
I am building a site with a ton of 1999 style capitalization of navigation and headings. I have been simply adding in the text content as it appears (capitalized), but the other designer on the project insists on using lower case text in his HTML and capitalizing it with an applied style:
.tedious {text-transform:uppercase;}
I understand the argument of separation of style from content, but in this case it really doesn't matter because I personally will not maintain the site, nor do I ever imagine that the client will need to un-capitalize all of this text. The question is: 1. will search engines pay any attention at all to capitalization of text in a document and 2. would a crawler go so far as to read my style sheet and look for such things (me thinks not). I know that BOLD, STRONG, EM, etc have a (diminishing) effect on SEO so I can imagine a scenario where CAPS would, but have never heard of anyone actually claiming, let alone confirming this.
Digging this site the last few months. First post.
It will only effect what is shown in the search results, you colleagues work will show as lower case in the results.
You mentioned separation of style from content, but i'm not convinced that text-transform is a style really, it's a change of content, i'm sure some people would argue the other side though.
if i was a search engine - I wouldn't care about casing. I would care about the content.
From a human readability standpoint - upper case isn't as easy to read.
Well, I was taught at school that all proper nouns (eg names and names of places) should begin with capital letters.
How would Google know whether I was talking about reading (as in a book) or Reading (as in the town of Reading, Berkshire), without taking into account the capitalisation? I would argue that capitalisation is definitely a semantic indicator rather than simply a case of aesthetics, and is therefore one factor that could be used for SEO.
As noted elsewhere, Google clearly does have knowledge of the CSS being used to render a page (eg Google can spot black-hat techniques such as white text on a white background).
So if capitalisation (or lack of) is a relevant SEO factor, can the CSS text-transform (or lack of) value also be an SEO factor?
Yes - because Google considers page speed to be an important factor. Text that doesn't need to be transformed by CSS will display faster.
Answer from google:
I don't think we'd do anything special with all-caps headings, but it feels like the kind of thing you'd want to do in CSS instead of in the content, since it's more about styling.
https://mobile.twitter.com/JohnMu/status/1438159561391751170?s=19