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Something new »

I've decided to take this blog in a different direction. Away from the process of changing jobs (the new job is going well, by the way) and more to the process of search engine optimisation; specifically, I want to write more articles like I always promised myself I would, and what better place to do it then here? Expect some big changes around here soon ...

Why framesets are bad for SEO »

So you're interested in frames (or framesets) are ya? Nothing wrong with that I suppose. They have there uses, but in terms of SEO they will limit you sites success and in this article Im going to show you why.

Lets dive straight in ... you're sitting in a chair, as you are now, but instead of absorbing the alpha rays from your monitor there are, instead, five ceramic bowls and one glass bottle on the table in front of you; you know this because you are told this - you, my friend, are blindfolded.

Bare with me my search optimisation friends ... all will become clear

Reaching forward you place you hand inside the first bowl and remove one of the many like objects within i.e. you pick out something from a pile of similar somethings from within the bowl.
The object is small, about the size of the ball from within your mouse. Only its not round. One side is perfectly flat whereas the other is curved. On the curved side you can feel slight bumps - dimples almost - and lots of them. The object is tough but squashable. If you so wished you could mulch this object between your fingers, leaving a dripping, fibrous mess in your destructive wake. Satisfied? Good, then its onto bowl two.

Reaching into bowl two your fingers sink into a sea of tiny spheres (about half the size of your mouse ball). Each one rolls around trying to accomodate your probing fingers. Removing a single sphere you role it around the centre of your palm. It is almost completely spherical aside from a small indentation at its north and south poles. Squeezing the sphere causes it to pop leaving a lot of liquid and a little sticky tissue between your fleshy talons.

Bowl three contains the opposite of bowl two. Cubes (are cubes the opposite of spheres? For this example, yes; but maybe this is something we could revisit at a later date .. with a search engine marketing twist or course). Removing a cube you notice it to be much more substantial than the contents of bowl two. Its heavy, its firmer, it approximately the same size, if not a little larger, than your mouse ball.
Each side is perfectly flat and leads to an, every so slightly rounded, edge. Testing the compressile strngth of this object you notice that the outer most corners of the object seem to breakdown under the pressure you excrt whereas the inner core appears to remain fixed and solid. |Some liquid runs down your fingers are you place this slightly distorted mass back into its bowl.

Bowl four, contains what can only be described as rough, yet incredibly flexible, paper. The edges of this thin material are course yet easily pliable.You can crunch it, tear it and much it easily enought. Each fragment appears thin but with very fine ridges on one side. It is no bigger than a fifty pence peice.

Upturning the bottle a little liquid runs quickly onto, then over, your palm. You notice the sticky sensation on the back of you palm first as the liquid drops quickly to the floor. Its texture is not unlike water but with a distincly tacky residue.

Before we examine bowl five, what have we got? Can you guess what is in each of the bowls? Do you know what liquid was in the bottle? Do you know what would happen if we mixed all four bowls and the contents of the bottle together?

Well, the bowls contained sliced strawberrys, whole blueberries, cubed melon and freshly picked mint (respectively) with the bottle containing 1.5 litres of Amaretto liquor and according to Chef Gino D'Acampo we have the ingredients to a fruit salad.
Did you guess right? On all counts?!
The truth of the matter is that unless I was able to describe the contents of each of the bowls in such minute, scientific detail you probably wouldnt have guessed the contents of bowl five, the fruit sald; or that bowls one to four, along with five tablespoons of the liquid from the glass bottle, had gone into bowl five to create something that was more than the sum of its parts.

Is this seach engine marketing or cooking for beginners?

By using frames, or framesets, in your website you are splitting up the ingredients of the page, forcing the Search Engine Spider to consider each in turn (just like you did with bowls one to four) and then making the Spider predict what your page, as a whole, was actually about.

How can I improve my cooking skills?

If you can, avoid using frames. With modern techniques such as CSS you can recreate the look of a frameset without actually having to split up your page content through several mini-component pages. The following can create a smiliar look and feel:

<div id="amaretto" style="height: 100px; overflow: scroll;">
<p style="height:300px;">Glug</p>
</div> If you have to use frames, and CSS workarounds just won't do, then pleaseuse the <noframes/> tag along with your frameset code. This will give the Spider a good indication of what the page is about before following the links to the individual mini-component pages; Like so

<body>
<frameset>
<frame source="sliced-strawberry.htm" name="Strawberrys"/<
<frame source="blueberry.htm" name="Blueberrys"/<
<frame source="cubed-melon.htm" name="Melon"/<
<frame source="mint.htm" name="Mint"/<
<frame source="five-spoons-amaretto.htm" name="Amaretto"/<
<noframes>
So, you like fruit salad do ya?! Well what better way to spend a summer evening than to enjoy this wonderfull fruit salad dish (somprising of Strawberrys, Blueberrys, melon and Mint) that the italians call <em>Macedonio di Frutta</em>.
</noframes>
</frameset>
</body>

And with that, there is nothing left for me to say other than, buon appetito!

I originally wanted to call this article Why framesets are bad for SEO : Or how I learned to love fruit salad, but given the focus of the opening paragraps thought that might have given too much away.

You know you made the right decision to leave when »

The new dotcom offers you an almost full-expense paid trip to London. Meanwhile, the old dotcom installs cameras and microphones in the ceiling insisting that they will not be turned on during the day. Staff are in uproar. The right noises are made from the upper-echelons and the angry-mob settles. Later in the day the staff in the I.T wing are informed that they have been being filmed all day as part of some mis-guided attempt to gain publicity/build moral. Several staff storm out of the office, several refuse to sign the consent forms for their images to be shown on the idiot-box, several resign from the staff-forum as they feel they have been lied to and mislead. Management, at all levels, end up with egg on their face. So, do I miss it?

noscript vs. display:none; »

I had my first real SEO argument today; it felt pretty good. Essentially, the new SEO firm believes in doorway, excuse me, information pages; and to be honest, from the looks of things they appear to work and rank well. At present they hide links to information page sitemaps within <noscript/> tags and place these in the <head/> of each page. My initial thoughts were that

1. The <noscript/> might have more weight if it were in the <body/>
2. The links might have more weight if they were in a hidden div

The general consensus of my colleagues was that this was a 'spammy' technique as

1. The <noscript/> is not to be displayed so why place it in the <body/>
2. The hidden div would constitute as a cloaking mechanism

I disagreed with both of those points as the <noscript/> tag is already being misused, im simply suggesting that we move it within the code in an attempt to increase weightage; i.e. stuck in the header a search spider knows that its not to be displayed to a user and therefore might not give it much consideration, but within the body the search-spider thinks that it should be displayed and therefore might pay it more attention. And a hidden div is far less 'spammy' as the search-spider will see it everytime - it doesn't have to ask itself whether it can handle some code (read script) before considering the alternative (read noscript). But anyways, we agreed to disagree. Still think Im right though. Was good to finally get to openly discuss some of my geeky knowledge.

Oh yeah ... »

One week today. Woo.

New gliggs »

Girlfriend Clare is of the opinion that I actively seek fads and that my need for a temporary addiciton helps me get through the month. This patently isn't true. I dont seek fads ... Im just the type of person that stumbles across them. Take today, for example. Its a sunny day and Im squinting practically all the way to work. Although you cant see any stress lines on my forehead (I checked in the rear view mirror) I can feel them and can massage them away (whilst looking in the rear view mirror). So I thought "Why not get some sun glasses" - actually thats not true. At the weekend I had that thought and even went so far as to walk into Topman Liverpool and try some on only to place them back after about five minutes later because £12 seemed a little expensive for no name, p.o.c shades. No, today I thought "Must remember to check out ebay for some shades ... maybe Ray Ban's". I choose Ray Ban's because that is the only manufacturer of spectacles that I can recall. So I have a quick browse on ebay, searching for retro looking shades similar to those I was trying on in Topman; and I find the Ray Ban Wayfarer. Now, I didn't know that these shades had a cool, clique history until I do a bit of research and find this site dedicated to them and their wearers; most notably the Blues Brothers. So as soon as I know this I gotta have them. Okay, perhaps thats a bit of fad-seeking but ... I did stumble across them and just because they're cool should I be punished for that? So I place a bid on ebay and get on with my dayjob. On the way home 'Boys of summer' comes on the radio and guess what I hear?!

You got that hair slicked back and those Wayfarers on, baby

Smiling and squinting all the way home I bound onto ebay only to discover that I've been outbid. Placing a final bid for £21.01 (seconds before the auction closed) snags me the gliggs for a mere 2 pence more than my rival was willing to pay. He who laughs last, laughs longest.

Welcome to my world »

I got quite a shock today when I was asked to go to the Internet World conference, in London, next week and man the SEO stand for two days. Jinkies. Lets just hope I know my stuff; either that or lets just hope I can wing it for that length of time. The new firm spent the afternoon go-karting. It was my first time and quite a blast. There were three heats, two semi-finals and a final. For the first two heats I was under the illusion that placement meant nothing and that it was only lap-time that counted towards your position on the leaderboard. By heat three I had realised my mistake but still only managed to finish fourth (out of six) as I had in the first two heats. In the semi-final it was do or die. Nine of us lined up on the grid and set off at the green light; within seconds I was at the back of the pack. But I had tactics on my side. I knew that with so many drivers it was only a matter of time but they wiped each other out and allowed me, Wario-like, to slip-by. Sure enough, on the first tight bend, three karts were involved in a slightly sticky accident and I, having hung back, slid by to take sixth place. Having held my position for over a lap and a half I gained sufficent ground on racers four and five so that when they crashed and burned (quite badly actually - a head on collision) I, again, slid by to take fourth place. Pedal to the metal I raced flat-out for another few laps till I was, not only secure in my fourth position but also, hugging the rear of the third-placer. It was no good; I couldn't get passed. Try as I might there was no room for me to move. Lap after lap I tried to over take but all to no avail. Then, as we neared the finishing post (literally as we were within 20 feet of the thing), my rival took the bend wide and began to slow down - clearly happy with his third place result. But the race was not over. The finishing line was still to be crossed. Slamming my foot on the accelerator and steering my cart to the inside track time appeared to slow. Foot by foot. Inch by inch. I began to claw it back, until... BOOM ... third place! Won by a nose. What a driver I am. What a maneouvre that was. What a nice way to spend a Monday afternoon.

Coming Around »

The lack of posts for the past several days has been completely purposefull; I wanted to settle into my new role before blogging about it. A quick summary of the past week is: Tuesday: By 12:30pm I was tempted to hop in the car and go home Wednesday: I don't think I like this job, what have I done? Thursday: Wasn't so bad Friday: I could probably get used to this; I even kinda like it. I think I was suffering from a case of culture shock - simple as that. The office itself is young and vibrant and full of the type of mistakes young companies can thive on and compensate for; its a world away from the increasingly corporate, increasingly commercial old job. One thing that has surprised me is that the SEO work done here is not a million miles away from the SEO work I conducted at the old place. i.e. The information I gleaned from that twelve month project was pretty much bang on the nail and had I have been allowed to stick at it a bit more ... bingo. So the only real news to report is that the new job is going well and, to make matters better, we're all going go-karting Monday afternoon. Game on.