HTML5 is already here and it is changing the SEO world forever.

HTML 5 basically follows the way the web evolved in the last years and includes many useful tags and elements. It develops more towards a semantic approach to content, with specific tag which mark the kind of content is going to be displayed. It might seem as its developers where aiming to create a PHP kind of programming language but it is still an XML-based markup language.

The major development from HTML5 is a bunch of new tags with outline the semantic content of a page section. It is quite of a revolutionary change, considering now search engine will be finally able to understand the actual content of a page.

It’s easy to see how letting sites mark individual blocks of their page with meaningful information would assist in the segmentation of a page. Search engines would be able to know instantly what is what and decide how to treat it.

Here is a short list of a few new tags and the way the should be implemented on page:

<article> tag – The new <article> tag is probably the best addition from a SEO point of view. The <article> tag allows to mark separate entries in an online publication, such as a blog or a magazine.  It will reduce the need to use <div> tags, hence making the code cleaner and easier to be understood both from humans and search engines. Search engines will put more importance on the text inside the <article> tag as compared to the contents on the other parts of the page.

<section> tag – The new <section> tag can be used to identify separate sections on a page, chapter, book. Each section can have its separate HTML heading. As with the <article> tag, it can be presumed that search engines will pay more attention to the contents of separate sections. For instance, if the words of a search string are found in one section, this implies higher relevance as compared to when these words are found all across the page or in separate sections.

<header> tag – The new <header> tag (which is different from the head element) is meant to give developers much more flexibility in term of heading categorization. The <header> tag is very similar to the <H1> tag but the difference is that it can contain a whole different set of header tags (h1,h2….) or whole paragraphs of text, hard-coded links (and this is really precious for SEO), and any other kind of info you feel relevant to include.

<footer> tag - Both the footer and header tag can be used several times in a pge, which means the do not have to belong necessarily to the standard header and footer of the page. For instance it can be used to define recurrent elements on a page (think of a blog post) with specific header and footer.

<nav> tag – The new <nav> tag can be used to identify a collection of links to other pages. It is quite important when it comes to define page rank distribution through links on a page. We often have to struggle a bit in order to distribute page rank through link, this should be make life a bit easier.

Beside these tags there a whole bunch of new ones which might require further explanation. For instance, <audio>, <video> or <dialogue> tags are also part of the HTML 5 standard and they will allow to further separate the content into the adequate categories. As you can see the main point of this update is making HTML closer to a human level of understanding, besides the obvious consequences with SEO.

How it works: HTML4 tags vs HTML5 semantic tags

Currently with HTML4, mark-up coders are working with document structures like this:

<div id=”header”>
[logo]
[links or navigation]</div>
<div id=”leftnav”>[navigation links]</div>
<div><p>text</p></div>
<div id=”footer”>[footer links]</div>

Site architecture is quite of an important factor when it comes to code/architecture optimization. This video from SEOmoz goes in deep with a few examples, so that you can get a real grip of page structure and architecture.

No matter how updated is your sitemap, a correct site architecture is the first step towards a site proper optimization. The video also mention the potential effects of this procedure on usability, keeping always content at a one-click distance from every page.

Content structure is a pretty invisible task in any SEO project but absolutely fundamental. I have always seen positive consequences anyway.

A flat site architecture does not mean at all that you have to get rid of directories in URLs and these are my two cents to those articles. On the contrary, it is something to add to the click distance + relevancy distribution equation.

Robots.txt has got its own system of codification for content, which does not allow any text codification different than US-ASCII.

According to the URI specifications, only the US-ASCII character set has to be used in order to define URL’S. This very point can create quite a lot of trouble for webmasters trying to set up their own robots.txt with a different set of characters.

ASCII’s 128 characters only covers the English alphabet, numbers, and punctuation marks, making impossible to control search engine behaviour when some “weird” characters are used into folder codification, like ñ in Spanish and ç in French, which are left out of ASCII.

Most characters in non-Latin-based alphabets, such as pi (π) in Greek, ya (я) in Cyrillic, and entire alphabets from many other world languages, can’t be accurately written in the limited, English-oriented ASCII.

robots.txt file codification is the following:

• ANSI (Windows-1252)
• Unicode
• UTF-8

The file however supports following codifications for its content:

• ANSI (Windows-1252): 8 bit
• ASCII: 7 bit
• ISO-8859-1: 8 bit
• UTF-8: 8 bit

Let’s take the case of a russian website, using Cyrillic codification for its folders and directories. In this case, characters like π or я should be correctly encoded into US-ASCII.

Percent-encoding comes into play, making possible to encode a non-ASCII string into a set of characters which can be perfectly read by search engines.

Let’s consider a russian website with a admin folder we do not want search engine to crawl:

http://www.domain.com/папка/

In order to avoid search engines crawling the admin folder, the folder’s name should be encoded as following:

Disallow: /%D0%BF%D0%B0%D0%BF%D0%BA%D0%B0/

…while the following line won’t work, since directory specifications into robots.txt must be always encoded in US-ASCII:

Disallow: /папка/

You might also want to read this article from the Bing Community, which explains the issue.

Like everyone else who’s in this industry, I daily read loads of stuff, bog posts and articles, about how good SEO is, how important is to be ranked for the right keywords, how successfull a product can be if is commercially developed on the internet through SEO and online marketing services.

I read loads of this stuff and I’m honestly starting to get sick of it. Years ago things were simpler: marketing departements had no even idea about what SEO was and how crucial the internet would have become in a few years.

Now everybody jumps on the bandwagon… just take a look to your list of Twitter followers: how many people or companies you can find which supposedly know all secrets about SEO and internet marketing? Well, take a few of them and read those blogs and articles. As pointed out by Derek Powazek in this article:

The problem with SEO is that the good advice is obvious, the rest doesn’t work, and it’s poisoning the web.

Then it goes deeper analysing his own perspective about the industry and even if it goes to harsh sometimes, I can only agree with him. The fact is that all the hype about SEO it’s just artificially created by the market. Good webdesign and content shouldn’t need any “seo expert”.

However the need of search engine optimization professional tells us that the quality of web development these days (and the quality of the content) are getting worse and worse, requiring someone to artificially (and magically) make them appear on search engine simply correcting all those stupid mistakes developers do. It’s a pretty simplified explanation, but I guess it delivers the big picture about what the industry has become nowadays.

Take a look to the reaction to the articles as well: from the offended “seo professional” to the old school coder, to whom “magic seo practice” sound obvious. It’s quite interesting and gives also an idea about the different character the industry of made of…

Here’s the full article. And think about adding the Derek blog to your feeds, it’s worth it.

What is the Canonical Link Tag?

A few months ago Google introduced the Canonical Link Tag.

This tag is supposed to solve the duplicate content issue on different URL, which can negatively affect those page’s ranking. It just tells search engine the preferred version of the content, in order to be ranked better by the engines themselves.

The Canonical Link Tag should reside in the HEAD section of the page, and the href attribute should point to the URL of the chosen page. That should be enough.

<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.yourURL.com/">

Canonical Link Tag vs. Redirect

Upsides
It is way better than a 301 redireccion: it’s search engine to be redirected, not the users hence not affecting the user experience though making sure rankings wouldn’t be affected.

A 301 redireccion would actually affects search engine who have to update their rankings according to the quality of the content of those pages

Downsides
However, while the 301 redirects visitors and search engines from different domains, the Canonical link tag can be used only into a single domai, its folders and subdomains. That’s the only downside. Still it’s a pretty tool.

Possible application of the Canonical Link Tag

Usually PHP pages create dynamic content with random urls, lacking of informative content related in any way to the content. They usually have the visitor’s session ID and merge content from different sources. The Canonical Link Tag can preserve rankings of the original page which featured the content.

To learn more about the Canonical Link Tag, check out this post from Matt Cutts or take a look into the Google Webmaster Center.

Search the original Google algorithm and show side-by-side comparisons to Caffeine.

Last week Google announced a next-generation architecture for Google’s web search, called Caffeine.

They also kidnly asked users to contribute in the effort of benchmarking the new technology providing some feedback on their searches through this URL:

http://www2.sandbox.google.com/

Anyway, a few days ago a new service has been released which compares in real time results from both Google and Google Caffeine: GoogleCompare.

I’m not going to explain any more about the service since it’s pretty straightforward: the whole thing has a funny retro-style, kind of coffe adverts from the ’50s. It’s quite funny. Then you just type your keyword and click on brew and you get a quick comparison eventually showing how SERPs have changed due to the new algorithm.

So how did your ranking changed due to the update? I’ve have not experienced any major change in my rankings. However search speed has increased a lot… I guess that was the main effort behind the development of Caffeine.

I’ll keep an eye on Caffeine for the next few days if anything changes…

Page loading time is a crucial factor when it comes to estimate page’s usability as well as search engine’s rankings and Google’s Adwords quality score.

according to this statement, Google is going to update its assessment policy . Page load time it is soon due to become an important factor requiring specific assessment and optimization from webmasters and SEOs.

In order to calculate page loading time, you might try Pingdom. Pingdom is an online utility which calculates pages text, images and scripts, giving you also some interesting suggestions about improvement.

However, besides any Google statement about quality score or rankings, it’s always good to think about you user’s experience on your website: nobody likes websites taking too long to load.

Considering both usability and rankings, this should be some general guidelines to be followed one assessing and optimizing page’s loading time:

Text and page structure should load and be completely visible within the first 3 seconds
Any other element of the page must be visible within the first 8 seconds

These are only thumb rules of course. Always cehck your page weight and loading times. Working on this side of on-page optimization can lead to interesting discoveries sometimes.

It seems that search engine are digging through Twitter more and more

. In the past few days a came across a few episodes which made me think about how much search engine are considering Twitter content as valuable enough to be included into their own search results.

Let’s take a look at Bing first. Try looking for Al Gore this query on Bing: the very first result will be it’s Twitter page with is real time twits. This entry comes also before his personal website. This has been also confirmed by a public statement from Bing published on its community page.

Something interesting happens with Google as well. A few days ago I posted a link to one of my websites I found and I wanted to share with my Twitter followers. Analytics record show the following as the very first visit on the website right after the link was published on twitter:

216.200.55.83 invx.com [01/Jul/2009:02:49:01 +0200] “GET /a HTTP/1.1″ 404 136 “-” “Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)” “-”

Clearly the page was just being crawled by Google. The link has not apperead anywhere else and it is not a fronpage or entry page for search engines on the website.

This it’s just another proof on how important Twitter is becoming in terms on search value. It’s not going to take long before Google itself will either buy or create its own real time search tool.

Bing has just released its Bing Webmaster toolbox.

It’s basically the Bing version of Google Webmaster tools. According to Microsoft, Bing Webmaster Toolbox development will aim toboost user engagement and traffic to websites and web-based application. The Toolbox is an organized set of tools for the entire Bing community, plus links to Webmaster and Developer community blogs and forums.

Compared to competitors like Google and Yahoo, I guess the community its the real bonus of the toolbox. The collaborative and collective help of users is way more valuable than any webmaster toolbox, especially when it comes to SEO and content optimizacion, considering how recently Bing has been released.

We all know SEO is not science: most of SEO practices come from direct experience or reliable source but there’s som much uncertainity that makes everything blend into doubts.

That’s the reason why advices coming straight from Matt Cutts or the Google webmaster blog should be taken definetely seriously. We’ve already seen Matt getting into certain topics put into the spotlight of the SEO community and giving useful (altough sometimes ambigous) insight.

This time he realeased a bunch of slides he presented to the 2009 San Francisco Wordcamp

Following is a resume of the main points he discussed:

Crawlers and PageRank algorithm

• Google spiders go crowling pages in a pagerank order: highest pagerank pages get crawled before pages with a lower pagerank
• Being relevant and reputable is the actual criteria that works behind the Page Rank

Keywords and content optimization

• When it comes to keywords, put yourself into the user shoes: think about what he would type in his search string
• Do not think about stuffing your pages with keywords: write naturally.
• ALT attribute are handy (3-4 relevant words)

WordPress

• Set your permalink to domain.com/post-title (setting -> reading -> custom permalink structure /%postname%/)
• Modify your titles and file names (urls) acconrding to the content

This is the powerpoint format. Slides are also available from Google Docs.