Xarcell

  • Posts: 30
Wedge & SEO
« on March 31st, 2011, 05:37 AM »
I was wondering if you guys have made any steps towards improving SEO?

Like the proper use of headers(in proper order, H1, H2, H3), alt attributes that aren't empty, image width & height attributes, and titles for input elements that do not have a LABEL.

Even a default Privacy Policy and Can-Spam Act of 2003 Information on how to unsubscribe from the newsletter, PM's, etc(all email notifications). Both are required by law in most places. I think I read somewhere that 80% of sites don't have them :P

Also, proper "Contact Us".

Arantor

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Re: Wedge & SEO
« Reply #1, on March 31st, 2011, 09:49 AM »
Firstly, please read http://www.simplemachines.org/community/index.php?topic=427913.0

Secondly:
* proper use of headers is not that significant, especially in an environment where the bulk of the actual content is user generated and that trying to optimise it is more like picking the exact shade of a colour rather than picking the colour as a whole
* there are no alt attributes in the code for the majority of images seeing that HTML 5 does not require them (and we use an HTML 5 doctype)
* image width and height - funny how even the W3C has been pushing for years to deprecate those
* most of the input elements have labels anyway
* default privacy policy is a bit difficult seeing how while it's a legal requirement in most places, that puts the onus on us to figure out a default policy that meets the legal requirements of all the different countries - which we're not responsible for in the slightest
* Can-Spam Act... do the notifications not include a link to unsubscribe from them?
* Proper Contact-Us, we can probably do

I should note that other than the first item, none of the above are actually useful in SEO terms.
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Nao

  • Dadman with a boy
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Re: Wedge & SEO
« Reply #2, on March 31st, 2011, 10:28 AM »
Re: images. Dimensions are generally not useful. The only time they'll be useful, is when there are lots of icons and you need to get a proper layout as soon as the page shows up.
When it comes to icons, Wedge manages them differently (spriting or base64 encoding), so there's no point in discussing SEO for them anyway. As for big images, they'll all be managed by Aeva Media, and obviously it stores image dimensions so it's not a problem.

Re: markup, we're not using h1/h2/etc more than SMF for now. However, since I converted the templates to HTML5, the category and title headers were turned into <header> tags. I'm planning to implement <article> and <section> tags as well, but I have yet to decide whether blog comments should be in their own <article> tags or not.

Re: labels, I didn't change much here, but I did ensure that labels that have a nested input, do not specify a 'for' parameter. It's a waste of space, and nested tags are supported by all browsers except for IE6. I don't see the point in wasting bandwidth over this wicked little outdated browser.

Re: privacy, the source code will be available for everyone to see that we're not using anyone's data... As for how admins may use the data: it's not up to us to determine a privacy policy, is it...?

Re: contact us, I don't really see the point personally. When it comes to a blog, you can easily PM/e-mail the author by visiting their profile area. For an entire forum... Check out the memberlist and click the admin's name.

Artur

  • Long time no see wedge.
  • Posts: 43
Re: Wedge & SEO
« Reply #3, on March 31st, 2011, 01:37 PM »
Quote from Xarcell on March 31st, 2011, 05:37 AM
I was wondering if you guys have made any steps towards improving SEO?
You don't really need seo to get your forum indexed right. If your forum is popular, google and other search engines will update things fast. And making all things to seo links, doesn't change your popularity.
Quote from Xarcell on March 31st, 2011, 05:37 AM
Like the proper use of headers(in proper order, H1, H2, H3), alt attributes that aren't empty, image width & height attributes, and titles for input elements that do not have a LABEL.
Alt attributes for images should be used, but I never heard that image hight and width is a must.
Quote from Xarcell on March 31st, 2011, 05:37 AM
Even a default Privacy Policy and Can-Spam Act of 2003 Information on how to unsubscribe from the newsletter, PM's, etc(all email notifications). Both are required by law in most places. I think I read somewhere that 80% of sites don't have them :P
How to unsubscribe from newsletters and pm's? Almost everyone knows that you have forum settings for this - at least the ones who use forums often. Implementing a privacy policy would be really hard. Countries have different ways how a privacy policy can affect. You would need to ship many policies with the forum software.

CJ Jackson

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Re: Wedge & SEO
« Reply #4, on March 31st, 2011, 02:06 PM »
Yawn SEO, I always told myself to forget SEO and focus more on productivity.

Arantor

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DoctorMalboro

  • I like rounded borders.
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Re: Wedge & SEO
« Reply #6, on March 31st, 2011, 02:50 PM »
I want useful functions, not stupid and useless stuff like pretty urls... now get back to work :P

* DoctorMalboro whips Arantor

Artur

  • Long time no see wedge.
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Re: Wedge & SEO
« Reply #7, on March 31st, 2011, 02:57 PM »
Well I use "pretty urls" on my site because i think index.php?seite=news is harder to remember than news.html.

But what I often see, are sites which use things like:
http://examplesite.org/index.php/really-long-topic-name-which-no-one-remb-f18-t346.html

Honestly, who can remember all that stuff at all :lol:. I can't :unsure:.

If they would look like "http://examplesite.org/f1134.html" or "http://examplesite.org/t334.html" they look memorable to me.

I saw some topics on phpbb.com too about that seo stuff and like a team member there mentioned: Even without using seo at that site, the topic already got indexed in google, if you do a search with some words of that topic.

Arantor

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Re: Wedge & SEO
« Reply #8, on March 31st, 2011, 03:09 PM »
Pretty URLs != SEO. Pretty URLs is what's in use here for example, and that's reasonably nice looking, and not hideous to remember.

I'm not even going to turn it on for my own stuff.

MultiformeIngegno

  • Posts: 1,337
Re: Wedge & SEO
« Reply #9, on March 31st, 2011, 05:48 PM »
Quote from Nao/Gilles on March 31st, 2011, 10:28 AM
I'm planning to implement <article> and <section> tags as well, but I have yet to decide whether blog comments should be in their own <article> tags or not.
That would be great! ;)

TE

  • Posts: 286
Re: Wedge & SEO
« Reply #10, on March 31st, 2011, 05:54 PM »
Quote from Nao/Gilles on March 31st, 2011, 10:28 AM
I'm planning to implement <article> and <section> tags as well, but I have yet to decide whether blog comments should be in their own <article> tags or not.
Would be great in general, but IIRC you'll break IE6 compability..
Thorsten "TE" Eurich - Former SMF Developer & Converters Guru

MultiformeIngegno

  • Posts: 1,337
Re: Wedge & SEO
« Reply #11, on March 31st, 2011, 06:02 PM »
Who cares...? :whistle:
No seriously, maybe a check before echoing those parameters? :unsure:

Arantor

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Re: Wedge & SEO
« Reply #12, on March 31st, 2011, 06:04 PM »
We're not overly interested in IE6 compatibility, and given suitable CSS declarations it should work tolerably well anyway...

MultiformeIngegno

  • Posts: 1,337
Re: Wedge & SEO
« Reply #13, on March 31st, 2011, 06:17 PM »
Quote from Arantor on March 31st, 2011, 06:04 PM
We're not overly interested in IE6 compatibility, and given suitable CSS declarations it should work tolerably well anyway...
Yes, I think there won't be any problem!

Xarcell

  • Posts: 30
Re: Wedge & SEO
« Reply #14, on March 31st, 2011, 07:00 PM »
Mobile phones with full browsing support and Touch Screens change things really.

H1, H2, H3 isn't really needed if your doing HTML 5 <header>/<section>. That's even better.

I'll argue the image height & width though. Without it, too much page jumping going on. Especially at slower speeds, or those with latency/server issues. Every little bit helps...

Alt attributes are still needed, even though they are not a requirement for HTML 5 Doctype. Again, mobile phones, ipads, some netbooks, will not cache or even load most images over 25K. So from there, you see the problem. Same goes for height/width.I completely disagree with about 80% of what was said there. But hey, it seems your mind is set, so there's no since in arguing about it.