Trae Regan's Posterous

Web Development, freelancing, entrepreneurial resources, and more.

SEO Best Practices Per Google

Here are some notes I took while reading Google's 'Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide' (PDF File). Hopefully you will find them useful.

  • Ideally, you should create a unique title for each page on your site.
  • The contents of the title tag will usually appear in the first line of the results
  • Typically snippet underneath title in search result is the meta description tag (but not always).
  • Clicking "cached" link in Google will show last crawl date.
  • Site links is the section of links that sometimes shows below a result. Google decides which get them.
  • Create a unique meta description tag for each page on your site.
  • The description meta tag might be a sentence or two or a short paragraph.
  • Don't be generic i.e. "a page about baseball cards" in the meta description.
  • Use words in your friendly urls but try not to repeat keywords in the same url.
  • Don't have multiple urls that access the same page.
  • Google likes breadcrumb links in pages, to outline the hierarchy of the site.
  • Allow for the possibility of a part of the URL being removed. Consider what happens when a user removes part of your URL - Some users might navigate your site in odd ways, and you should anticipate this.
  • Prepare two sitemaps: one for users (HTML page), one for search engines (xml)
  • Use mostly text for navigation.
  • Have a useful 404 page.
  • Google provides a 404 widget ( http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/08/make-your-404-pages-more-u... ) that you can embed in your 404 page to automatically populate it with many useful features.
  • Write good anchor text, that accurately describes the content on the page you're linking to.
  • Use alt tags on all images that are used as links
  • consider consolidating your images into a single directory
  • Supply an Image Sitemap file: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=178636
  • Restrict crawling where it's not needed with robots.txt (Generator and more info here: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/03/speaking-language-of-robot... )
  • rel="nofollow" all user added links
  • Another use of nofollow is when you're writing content and wish to reference a website, but don't want to pass your reputation on to it.

 

DigiNotar Google SSL Hack - Securing Your Mac

1. Open Keychain Access (Applications/Utilities/Keychain Access.app):

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2. Hit the padlock in the upper left to unlock the System Keychain:

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3. Select "System Roots" from the list of available Keychains in the upper left:

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4. Click the arrow box to expand Keychains if you don't see "System Roots":

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5. In the System Roots list, find and select "DigiNotar Root CA":

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6. Press Command+I (uppercase i) or click the "i" at the bottom of this window:

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7. Open/expand the "Trust" section at the top and under "When using this certificate", select "Never Trust":

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8. Close the info window and Keychain Access - you're done (and safer!).

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Coding HTML Email - The 40,000 Foot View

Here are some general tips for coding HTML email that have worked for me:

  1. <html>, <title>, <head>, and <body> tags are all unnecessary as they typically just get stripped out anyway
  2. All <table> for layout, no <div>
  3. All inline CSS
  4. No shorthand CSS
  5. No Javascript
  6. 600 pixels, or less, in width
  7. Use one wrapper table with align="center" and set explicitly to your maximum width
  8. Put any font styling in the td nearest the text it applies to
  9. <span> tags are okay in most cases
  10. If an <img> tag is the last piece of content inside of a <td>, close the </td> immediately following the <img>
  11. It's HTML, not XHTML, so self closing tags such as <img/> and <br/> as not necessary
  12. Include alt and title tags for all images that you want some representation of if the user can't see images in their mail client
  13. Use target="_blank" for all href's
  14. 1x1 transparent images used for spacing or tracking tend to trigger spam filters, so either use different dimensions or avoid them altogether
  15. Anywhere a background image is used, also apply a background color of the primary color of your background image to maintain your general layout look and feel if the user can't see images in their mail client
  16. Remember that Outlook 2007 doesn't support background images
  17. Be sure that all of your images are hosted externally and that the <img> src for each image is an absolute URL
  18. TEST your email using MailChimp's Inbox Inspector - It's $14 for every 3 tests, but I don't know any better way to see how your HTML email looks in so many mail clients - very easy to use too!
  19. Once everything looks good in Inbox Inspector, send your HTML email to spamcheck@sitesell.net with 'TEST' in the subject line and you will quickly get a response

Resources:

References & Continued Reading:

 

Where did the "More" menu go in Snow Leopard? Converting your Automator Workflows to Services.

If you've upgraded to Snow Leopard and miss the "More" -> "Automator" context menu used to access your Automator Workflows then this post is for you:
http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=775257

Once you've done one workflow to service conversion the rest are easy.
There are also less steps to access the services than with the previous workflows system, so hurray for efficiency!