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I wasn’t going to link to this video tutorial from Google on the usefulness of image alt attributes, but once I watched it, I thought it was such a great explanation that I added it to the Resources page and am posting about it here.

Alt attributes sometimes become one of the little things that are forgotten when trying to get clients who are new to web publishing understand how to use markup effectively. This video described it much better than I ever have. Coming from a search engine, the advice will likely hold more weight while the clarity of the message is more likely to stick with clients, so I will be pointing people to this explanation from now on.

Published today was a summary of Google’s consistent policy over buying and selling links. It is worth pointing out to site owners. A frequently asked question by someone with a “big idea” and wants their site up and running on the web in two weeks with loads of search engine traffic on launch day is “Can I buy links for search engine placement?”. Of course they can, but against my recommendation. If they choose to do so, I choose to not get involved with them. Some people just see money as a short cut and understand once they read the webmaster guidelines. Others could care less about the rules, they are more interested in gaming the system and trying to get away with it. I think that effort is much better spent elsewhere.

Much of the anti-Google sentiments on the web I believe is from site owners who provide no value whatsoever, and are still trying to eke out revenue from link doping or other paid for links strategies as were employed over five years ago (Remember searching on a topic and ending up on a page full of links that had no relevance to your search in terms of actual content? See examples of today’s methods). Google is not the monopolistic dictator in this regard protecting big business/themselves as is often portrayed. There is a universal desire among all search engines to protect their indexes’ PageRank or equivalent from manipulation from paid links. I commend the search engines proactive work in this area, keeping their indexes unpolluted and user trustworthy. I feel the whole Internet becomes much less useful if the search engines were ever contaminated this way.

Just a quick post to note these two links. First, Microsoft’s Live Search team announced the release of their Live Search Webmaster Center as a public beta this week. A quick review of the service shows promise, with valuable link and rank information shown for my site immediately after registering and verifying. I did have to switch to Safari, however, as I could not get my site registered in Firefox or see my site in Firefox after registration was completed in Safari. I thought it was a cookie issue, but after many retries I was not able to get Firefox to work, even after removing cookies, closing the browser, clearing the cache, etc. Once again, I believe it is important for any serious web site owner to be registered with any tools the search engines provide. This is the method for notifying search engines of new content (and sites) and getting reports of issues on your sites.

Also, the Yahoo! Search Blog has a nice summary of a SEO workshop talk, covering the topics of spiderability, duplicate content, linking strategies, fighting spam, and blended search, social marketing, behavioural search, and local issues. Many points a stress when talking to customers are reiterated here, including site structure, content is king, descriptive link text and the potential consequences of spamming the system among other, new and interesting points. A good read to reinforce tactics available to achieve your site strategy.

… that purpose is not to make the search engines think our site is better than it is. The purpose is to actually make the site better than it is.

Jill Whalen

So instead of chasing rainbows by using this or that technique you read somewhere or trying to get away with forbidden practices, concentrate on making your site better. Understand the reasons behind the changes, improve the content, improve the semantics, improve your incoming links and most of all make your site better for your visitors. It may involve a lot a work, but the satisfaction of accomplishing something through hard work rather than gaming the system might feel just as good.

In Improve snippets with a meta description makeover on the Google Webmaster Central blog, an explanation of how Google provides page description information and uses meta descriptions provides valuable information in controlling the appearance of your site’s pages in Google search results. It is encouraging to see this thorough explanation as I have been confused as to the benefit of meta descriptions and the priority one should give to customizing them for each page.

The meta description is one place Google (or any search engine) can get your page snippet — the short text preview Google displays for each web result — from. This is preferable as it gives you control of what is displayed as the page description for search results rather than an extract from your page or other sources.

To summarize, it seems to me the key points for meta descriptions are:

• Quality meta descriptions without keyword stuffing are more likely to be used as a page description.
• Provide a different description for each page. Use site level descriptions for the main page and other aggregation pages and page specific descriptions for other pages.
• Descriptions should be human readable. Use a sentence structure when appropriate, or clearly tagged and separated information for permalink pages such as blog post or product pages.
• While not addressed in the Google article, it is touched on in the comments. Keep your descriptions short so they are not cut off. It appears descriptions are limited to between 140 and 160 characters. Keep the important information at the beginning of the description if you must exceed the character limit (approximately two lines in Google’s search results). Tweak your descriptions when you see them truncated on Google’s search results to provide the best results.

Considering this information, I need to look at an automated way to insert appropriate meta descriptions on every page. My previous standard was a site level meta description for every page, or just the home page. If I cannot find a satisfactory plugin myself I will add that to the list of development tasks I have. Once developed, this is something I can easily provide to clients to maximize the appropriateness of their meta descriptions in an automated way. This is the type of value-add I like to offer my clients. If only I had more time to focus on these tasks.