If you've ever heard of this new kid on the block called HTML5, or maybe even consider yourself an expert on it, please note that this post still treats headings in the HTML4 / XHTML1 way of using headings. I'll briefly talk about headings in HTML5 in the end, it's a whole 'nother ball game!

This post will cover:

1. 5 basic principles about HTML headings
2. The headings for your homepage
   1. The issue of full posts on archive pages
3. Heading structure for your single posts / single pages
4. Structure of headings for your category / tag / taxonomy pages
5. Headings and HTML5
6. Conclusion: re-think your blog's headers

5 basic principles about HTML headings

Let's get these things straight before we do anything about our heading structure:

1. The most important heading on the page should be the H1.
2. There is usually only one H1 on any page.
3. Sub-headings should be H2's, sub-sub-headings should be H3's, etc.
4. Each heading should contain valuable keywords, if not, it's a wasted heading.
5. In longer pieces of content, a heading is what helps a reader skip to the parts that they find interesting.

Based on headings, there are tools out there that can, and will, make an outline for your content. If you were to make an outline for this article, it would look like this:

• [h1] The heading structure for your blog
  • [h2] 5 basic principles about headings
  • [h2] The headings for your homepage
    • [h3] The issue of full posts on archive pages
  • [h2] Heading structure for your single posts / single pages
  • [h2] Structure of headings for your category / tag / taxonomy pages
  • [h2] Headings and HTML5
  • [h2] Conclusion: re-think your blog's headers

The most widely known, and probably also the easiest, tool capable of doing this is the W3 Validator.

The headings for your homepage

So while we can (and will) discuss some specifics in the comments, your homepage should probably have a structure that looks like this:

• H1: Blog's name
• H2: Your blog's tagline, if it's "keyword-rich"; if not, all your recent posts should have an H2.
• H3: Your recent posts, or, if those have an H2, this could be used for somewhat older posts.
• H4: related content in the sidebar, like the heading of an "about" widget.
• H5: Unrelated headings in your sidebar, footer, etc.

As you can see, I differentiate between "related" widgets and unrelated widgets. It's no use at all to have an H3 heading saying "Our Sponsors". An H4 HTML heading saying "About this SEO blog" could be useful though, if "SEO blog" is what you want to rank for.

The issue of full posts on archive pages

Maybe you've seen it, maybe you didn't yet, but this sort of heading structure creates a problem. If you're displaying full posts on your front page, your sub headings would be H2's, just like your post titles. That's wrong, of course, and a good example of why we should be separating our content and markup a bit more then we're doing now, but that's not an easy fix. Basically, if you're displaying a post on an archive, category, tag or home page, each H2 should become an H3, H3 should become H4, etc.

No code samples yet, but my mind is working on this now, so it might come soon.

Heading structure for your single posts / single pages

This one is simple:

• H1: post / page title
• H2's and H3's: subheadings and sub-subheadings
• H4: your blog's name, and possibly related widgets
• H5: same as above: sidebars etc.

Makes sense right? The most important line on the page is the post or page title, second come the subheadings. Your blog title still has some value because, if the post is good, people will search later on for "Yoast WordPress SEO", for instance.

Structure of headings for your category / tag / taxonomy pages

If you actually want your category and tag pages to rank, meaning you've given them some unique content and are making them interesting for people, the heading structure should basically be the same as the homepage, with this difference:

• H1: category / tag title
• H2's: post titles
• H3: blog's name
• Rest: repeat from homepage.

Headings and HTML5

In HTML5 the entire method of dealing with HTML headings changes, and while it's a bit harder to grasp for people at first, the new system makes a lot more sense for content management systems. In short: headings and heading structures are section specific there, where section could be any part of a page. It would take too long to explain here, but if you're interested, read the header section of Mark Pilgrims excellent Dive into html5.

Truth be told, Mark doesn't talk about how search engines deal with HTML5 headers yet. In all honesty: I couldn't tell you yet. Simply a case of "not enough data to tell".

Conclusion: re-think your blog's headers

Now it's time for you to take some action. Go and use the W3 Validator now to check your blog's outline. If you've read an understood all the above, you should now be able to determine whether your theme is doing a good job. If you're using a premium theme or a theme that you downloaded from WordPress.org, I'd love for you to share your results in the comments!

The heading structure for your blog is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

WordPress

• Code Snippets and Examples

  • The only proper way of adding a Facebook “Like” button to your WordPress blog
  • An article I wrote recently for Smashing Magazine: Lessons Learned From Maintaining a WordPress Plug-In
  • Gravity Forms PayPal integration
  • 16 Vital Checks Before Releasing a WordPress Theme
  • How to Display Human Readable Post Dates in WordPress
  • Control WordPress Content via Userrights or Time
  • A good Beginner’s Guide to the Thematic Framework

• Plugins

  • BuddyPress Courseware beta; a very cool plugin for schools & other educational institutions.
  • Post to post; nice plugin for creating relations between posts.
  • Press This Reloaded; pretty useful if you need to, for instance, adapt the SEO title of a post.
  • WPMU.org features my WordPress Salesforce CRM plugin.
  • Custom Post Permalinks; I seriously think this should be in WordPress core, but as long as it's not, this'll do.

• News

  • Common WordPress Multisite Problems and Solutions
  • Top 10 WordPress News Blogs
  • When is the Best Time to Post a Blog Post? Not enough people think about this.

SEO

• Without any work from me, my Google Analytics plugin now helps you verify your Google Webmaster Tools account.
• I'm seeing similar stuff to this: Google Webmaster Tools Link data - a case study by Dave Naylor, my favourite UK SEO.
• Want an SEO job? Check out the Daily Mail's robots.txt file

Analytics

• Qualitative Web Analytics: Heuristic Evaluations Rock! another great post by Avinash Kaushik
• The new Management API for Google Analytics rocks; check out the docs

Web design / web development

• Practical? No. Cool? Yes. Compressing Your JavaScript and CSS to PNG Images
• What a surprise: Steve Jobs was right, Flash fails on Android
• HTML5 for Web Designers: Book Review at Nettuts+ - I've read it too, it's amazing
• Good Help is Hard to Find is another A List Apart classic. Wonder how to apply this to my plugins...
• A very concise explanation of the viewport metatag by David B. Calhoun
• A pretty awesome example of what can be reached with CSS3 now
• I'd almost start using Typekit: Adobe partners with Typekit to bring legendary typefaces to the web.
• MathML is now part of WebKit nightlies, go forth and play, all you math lovers out there!
• Delay loading of print CSS (in WordPress, but useful for everyone)
• Debugging Tools - jQuery for Designers
• This would work perfectly for WordPress plugin developers: Readme Driven Development

Online Marketing / Social media

• Daring Fireball - Online Advertising: Losing the Race to the Bottom - listen to this, seriously.
• What's this thing called Buzz that Leo talks about? :)
• Facebook Tabs: What They Are & How to Use Them - Good writeup on RWW
• Quite curious how many people will do this: German Homes Can Now Opt Out Of Google - TechCrunch

Science

• Experts are usually wrong
• Everyone looks better after you've tipped back a pint or two, and now we know why
• A nice infographic on the history of the Internet
• Freakonomics: loved the book, looking forward to the movie, check out the trailer.
• Wonder what my wife does? Read her latest paper on the Intergenerational Transmission of Convictions.

Fun

• (Fake) Lady Gaga sings about Java programming with some hilarious quotes
• Gonna have to try this on my son in about 2 years: 4 Tools for Teaching Kids to Code
• Basically, you can't block Mark Zuckerberg on Facebook, because too many other people did it before you
• You know you're a geek when you think this is funny

Lifestyle

• Trying to follow this advice: living a Balanced Freelance Life (even though I'm only partly freelance)

Mac

• Why Daniel Jalkut is sticking with the Mac
• Precipitate: search for and launch the info you stored in the cloud from Spotlight or G Desktop for Mac
• This is bloody hilarious: No Comment: Justin Long's jailbroken iPhone
• This proved to be pretty awesome for mp3 splitting: Macsome Audio Splitter

Link dump: interesting reads from around the web is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

Click here to view the embedded video.

My WordCamp Ireland WordPress SEO Presentation is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

There is something wrong however, with how this post is being treated by several social networks. First of all, there's Delicious. Check out this search; it'll show you Delicious has 12 different URLs for the same post. While the proper URL for the post has the most bookmarks, as much as 15% of all the bookmarks are for "wrong" versions of the URL. This means that the post could, in later searches on Delicious, do 15% better if the URL had been canonicalized / standardized properly, in other words, if all this stuff had been redirected to the proper URL.

Those wrong URLs are basically divided in 2 groups: StumbleUpon "framed" URLs and FeedBurner or otherwise "campaign tagged" URLs. Let's go through these groups one by one, and see if we can solve this.

StumbleUpon framed URLs

I very much dislike the fact that Delicious doesn't understand these URLs. Delicious should be able to "stab" through a URL like that, and then bookmark the proper URL. But I also actually dislike the way StumbleUpon puts a frame around URLs. Somehow, when Digg did this, it created an outrage, but if StumbleUpon does it, it's fine. Now their goals might be different, but I still dislike it. The "rough" solution is simple: add a frame breaker to your blog:

<script type="text/javascript">
if (top !== self) top.location.href = self.location.href;
</script>

The issue is that doing this would prevent people from voting up your site on Stumble, something you might actually want to happen. The second solution is adding a visible delicious button to your site so people can bookmark the post through that button, using the proper version of the URL. It's not as safe, but it might work for a part of the group that made the wrong bookmarks in the first place.

Google Campaign tagged URLs

These are the URLs that annoy me most. FeedBurner has the quite awesome option to campaign tag your posts, which means that it'll add variables to your URLs like this:

?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+SmashingMagazine

Those give some awesome insight into where your readers come from, and it's a feature I'd hate to miss. However there's one issue with it, and it's in the very first part of that string: it's the question mark. The question mark has a real meaning in URLs: it allows you to add parameters to a URL. For that reason Google and other search engines, as well as sites like Delicious, can't automatically strip these off. There is, however, a very nice solution to this problem: campaign tracking using a hashtag.

This requires you to use the setAllowAnchor() function within your tracking code. After you've added that to your tracking code, you can now use #utm_source instead of ?utm_source, and suddenly the world looks much cleaner and nicer. Of course there's a small issue left: FeedBurner still uses the question mark based tracking. This is fixed by redirecting the question mark based campaign tagger URLs to the hash tag based ones.

This may all seem a bit daunting, but I've got some good news: if you use my Google Analytics for WordPress plugin, all you have to do is check a box under the advanced settings:

It will then automatically add the needed code and redirect all campaign URLs. Just another step towards a better optimized site, as this should prevent sites like delicious from bookmarking the wrong URL.

URLs, social media and campaign tracking is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

You see, while it's of more benefit to one user specifically if I help him or her fix their site, it's of way more benefit to the community at large if I spend the time I work for "free" by writing plugins or articles here on yoast.com or elsewhere, like my recent article on Smashing Magazine. A plugin or an article like that will help tens of thousands, if not millions, of people. A quick site analysis from me telling you what to improve is of no benefit to the community at large.

When I charge for it, and people pay me for it, I actually make more money (d0h), which allows me to in turn spend time writing those plugins and articles. Sounds fair, doesn't it?

If you just realized you want me to analyze your WordPress site, and you're willing to pay the $500? Go get yourself a WordPress site analysis then!

How to get me to analyze your site is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

As mentioned before I'm working on my WordPress SEO plugin, and it'll do sitemaps, three kinds of sitemaps actually: video, news and normal. For all three of them I've developed so called XSL stylesheets, so I can quickly glance over a sitemap and get an idea as to whether everything I expected to be in there is actually there. An XSL stylesheets transforms an XML document into HTML output, for instance, for a normal XML sitemap, that looks like this:

Click for larger image

And for an XML video sitemap:

Click for larger image

Especially with the recent addons to the sitemaps protocol (check out the image count in the first "normal" sitemap for instance), this makes it a lot easier to see if you're doing things wrong. On top of that, using some jQuery, the headers are sortable!

Download

Because I know you want your own XML sitemaps to look this good too, I'll release my XSL stylesheets here:

XSL stylesheets for XML Sitemaps

Usage

Usage of these XSL stylesheets is easy, just add a line like this to the top of your XML output:

<?xml-stylesheet type="text/xsl" href="/url/to/xsl-stylesheet.xsl"?>

Let me know whether you like this, and what you'd like to add to these XSL stylesheets!

Debugging your XML sitemap with an XSL Stylesheet is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

The reason this interests me is that we have a weird issue in the search marketing / social media industry: most companies have 1, in some rare occasions 2 figureheads. Hardly ever are there more than 2 true experts at a company. BlueGlass is different. It combines not 1 or 2 heroes of the industry. If you've been reading blogs in this industry, it's hard to have missed the likes of Brent Csutoras (a buddy from SEOktoberfest), Chris Winfield, Dave Snyder or Loren Baker. Or people like Danielle Winfield, Ann Smarty, Jordan Kasteler, do I need to keep going?

This amazes me. These guys and girls are among the best from several specialties within our industry, from online PR to viral marketing and SEO: it's really hard to get multiple great minds into a company like that. Usually there's cases of conflicting ego's, different interests. When I asked Loren Baker the question "how do you deal with those 6-7 ego's in one company?" he said:

"We all have our own divisions and services we are 100% in charge of, so for example, I run the Online PR & Social Outreach Division, and have a dedicated team underneathe me. Their only job is to do what I tell them, get assignments done, report to clients on calls when needed, and report on their assignments.

Utilizing a central project management system assists with that, but my team is my team, and my division's responsibilities all fall under me. In the same way, Brent is the SVP of Viral Marketing, if I need something there, I send it to him, if he needs bloggers to write about a client he's working on, he processes the order with me. This way, we don't step on each others' toes and have defined roles and responsibilities."

Sounds pretty solid and thought through. I'm very curious as to how these guys will do. But as Dave Snyder put it when I congratulated him on IM: "I love collaborating with people, always better when they are friends". I think that's the main point: friendship is the basis of all this, compared with a shared love for the trade. To end with another quote from Dave:

"My whole thing in life is that I care more about what I am doing than money
so the merger for me was amazing because of what we could accomplish as a team and not how much we could make."

It sounds amazing, and I wish them all the best!

BlueGlass: When great minds come together… is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

Click here to view the embedded video.

You've seen it scroll by if you checked out the video, but here's the speaker line up, and do realize when you look at it that more speakers will be announced later on:

1. Marcus Tandler
2. SEO Blackhat
3. Bob Rains
4. Johannes "Sistrix" Beus
5. Dave Naylor
6. Greg & Barbara Boser
7. rSnake
8. Frank Watson
9. Brent Csutoras
10. Avi Wilensky
11. me, myself and I

There will be 16 experts total, and only 18 attendees. That is what we call attention for our attendees! Now some of you might want to come, but... You can't buy tickets just yet...

SEOktoberfest 2010: looking forward to it is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

Talking about that, it seems as though everyone is focussing on XML Sitemaps, while there's actually not 1 but 4 methods of getting Google to recognize your video content.

Video SEO consists of 3 parts: indexation, ranking and click through optimization. While I might cover #2 and #3 in a later article, I’m focusing on the technical aspects of Video SEO for this article, and thus on the methods of getting your video’s indexed. I’ll focus mainly on Video SEO for Google, as I haven’t really looked at other search engines so far in testing.

XML Video Sitemaps

There’s several ways to tell Google you’ve got video on your site. The most well known, and probably also easiest, is the XML Video Sitemap. Just like a normal XML Sitemap, this sitemap contains URL’s, and for each URL it contains a video section, outlining all the details about that video, from its location and / or player location to its keywords.

<url>
  <loc>http://example.com/video/</loc>
  <video:video>
    <video:title>Sitemap Example Video</video:title>
    <video:publication_date>
      2010-06-17T18:00:00UTC
    </video:publication_date>
    <video:player_loc allow_embed="yes">
      http://example.com/video/player.swf
    </video:player_loc>
    <video:content_loc>
      http://example.com/video/video.mp4
    </video:content_loc>
    <video:thumbnail_loc>
      http://example.com/video/poster.png
    </video:thumbnail_loc>
    <video:description>
      example description of a sitemap example video
    </video:description>
    <video:category>Example Videos</video:category>
    <video:tag>Examples</video:tag>
    <video:tag>Videos</video:tag>
    <video:tag>Xml Sitemap</video:tag>
    <video:duration>180</video:duration>
  </video:video>
</url>

Most of the attributes of a video are optional, but you need either a location or a player, preferably both, and a “poster“ image. We’ll touch on the image later on, but remember to add this for each and every video.

Once you’ve created an XML video sitemap, make sure to submit it to Google through Google’s Webmaster Tools. While you can submit it manually, you can also ping Google with the URL of the sitemap every time you’ve updated it. Pinging Google is very simple, just open the following URL (replacing the sitemap URL with your own, of course):

http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/ping?sitemap=http://example.com/sitemap.xml

Within Google Webmaster Tools you can also check whether Google understands your sitemap, or if it’s missing any vital components.

MediaRSS

Another way of telling Google that your site carries video, that also uses XML, is by adding MediaRSS tags to your RSS feed, and then submitting your RSS feed to Google as a sitemap.

MediaRSS is a standard conceived by Yahoo!, which Google fully supports for the discovery of all sorts of Rich Media, ranging from images to video. Because it’s an add on to your RSS feed, this has one downside compared to XML video sitemaps: usually it’ll only contain your last 10, 20 or 100 posts, while you might have hundreds of posts and pages containing video. The upside is there too: for a lot of sites, their RSS feed get’s indexed very regularly, allowing for fast inclusion of your video in Google’s index.

<media:content 
    url="http://example.com/video/video.mp4" 
    medium="video" 
    duration="180">
  <media:player 
    url="http://example.com/video/player.swf?file=video.mp4" />
  <media:thumbnail 
    url="http://example.com/video/poster.png"/>
  <media:title type="html">Sitemap Example Video</media:title>
  <media:description type="html">
    Example description of a sitemap example video
  </media:description>
  <media:keywords>
    Examples,Videos,XML Sitemap
  </media:keywords>
</media:content>

Yahoo! Searchmonkey

Yes, I said I’d be focusing on Google, and yes this is the second Yahoo! standard I’ve mentioned. The reason is simple: Google supports it. If you mark up your pages with Yahoo! Searchmonkey Video tags, Google will, as stated here, recognize these and list your video in the search results.

Other than XML Video Sitemaps and MediaRSS enhancements, Yahoo! Searchmonkey code goes straight into your pages. This has the benefit that Google will recognize your videos without any additional submission of feeds or sitemaps. Depending on how you embed video, this might be fairly easy to add or might take some more work. The reason is that it starts with attributes on the object element, and some JavaScript based injection methods might not have an object element.

Let's have a look at what it looks like (example stolen from Google's example page):

<object width="512" height="296" 
  rel="media:video" 
  resource="http://example.com/video_object.swf?id=12345" 
  xmlns:media="http://search.yahoo.com/searchmonkey/media/" 
  xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/terms/">
    <param name="movie" value="http://example.com/video_object.swf?id=12345" />
    <embed src="http://example.com/video_object.swf?id=12345" 
      type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="512" height="296">
    <a rel="media:thumbnail" href="http://example.com/thumbnail_preview.jpg" />
    <a rel="dc:license" href="http://example.com/terms_of_service.html" />
    <span property="dc:description" 
      content="Example description." />
    <span property="media:title" content="Example title" />
    <span property="media:width" content="512" />
    <span property="media:height" content="296" />
    <span property="media:type" content="application/x-shockwave-flash" />
    <span property="media:region" content="us" />
    <span property="media:region" content="uk" />
    <span property="media:duration" content="63" />
</object>

Most of these aren't required, and some are even outright not needed at all. There's only one valid media type: application/x-shockwave-flash. It's not required, there's only one option for it anyway: pretty safe to leave it out. You can easily leave out width and height as well for as much as Google is concerned, and you probably won't need the regions.

Of course, if you use javascript to embed your video's and thus don't have an object tag to add this RDFa to, you could add a <noscript> tag with an object tag in it. This object element in the noscript element would have the SearchMonkey RDFa added to it: this is an adequate (and perfectly legal) fallback, for both search engines as well as people browsing the web without JavaScript.

Facebook Share

Facebook Share is probably one of the simplest methods of telling Google about video on a page. It uses meta elements in the head section of a page to point to a video file, poster image, size etc.:

<meta name="title" content="Example title" />
<meta name="description" content="Example description" />
<link rel="image_src" href="http://example.com/thumbnail_preview.jpg" />
<link rel="video_src" href="http://example.com/video_object.swf?id=12345"/>
<meta name="video_height" content="296" />
<meta name="video_width" content="512" />
<meta name="video_type" content="application/x-shockwave-flash" />

Like with Searchmonkey, the video_type is kind of bogus, as are width and height, so you could narrow this down a bit. The Facebook Share method of embedding has the added benefit that it’ll sometimes allow people to share your video on Facebook and play it directly on Facebook too.

Conclusion: one or more methods?

It’s perfectly possible to mix these methods of telling search engines about your videos, in fact you could even use all 4 of them, and there’d be nothing wrong with that. If you ask me which one to use, I'd say: at least use XML sitemaps, and as many of the other ones as you can. In my tests, MediaRSS has been very fast in indexation, so I'd highly recommend using that if applicable to your situation and if speed of indexation is an issue to you.

Something to keep in mind: independent of which method above you use, Google will try to verify whether the video you claim to have on the page is actually on the page, so it’ll look for an object tag, or at the very least a JavaScript element with the link to your video file and / or player in it. If it can’t find these, it won’t index you video.

Please do let me know in the comments how this works for you, and what you've been testing with!

Video SEO: A technical guide is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

Now you're probably asking: what on earth's name does this stuff about video SEO have to do with WordPress? Well, it's quite simple: one of my upcoming WordPress SEO plugin's features will be to automatically generate video sitemaps, for video's added with several supported video plugins, like the awesome Viper's Video Quicktags.

So, for a preview of what will be able to do, check out my video sitemap, and try and search for some of the terms in there, you'll see my video's have started ranking nicely. There's a lot of voodoo involved and this needs a lot more testing, so don't expect this out tomorrow, but it is possible, and it will be available within a few (I'd say 2-3) months.

For those who missed it, I published a technical guide to Video SEO a couple days after this post!

Video SEO and WordPress is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

Since I’ve taken it upon me to create articles for each question that I’ve answered more than once, let’s have a look at the pros and cons of W3C validation.

W3C validation & Web design

We’ll have a look at the pros and cons of W3C and web design first, before we dive into the SEO aspects. There are two types of validation errors in my opinion: there are errors that break or hamper rendering, which I’ll refer to as hard validation errors, and there are validation errors that don’t cause rendering issues, which I’ll refer to as soft validation errors.

An example of a hard validation error: an unclosed anchor - <a> - tag. This can cause serious issues. Just about any unclosed element that should be closed and is not can cause you to look at styling issues for far too long. W3C validation is a very easy way to catch coding errors like that and thus it makes debugging and continued development of HTML a lot easier.

Having hundreds of validation errors is not usually a sign of code quality, so trying to keep the number of errors, hard or soft, down is usually a good idea. Whether you really have to bring it down to zero is another discussion, as over obsessing with certain issues can be a costly thing to do. Is your client, or are you, really willing to pay to get the page to validate when all that’s not working is the fact that you use an iframe (something I’d call a soft validation error) when you’re required to use a Strict DTD? Some clients might be willing to pay for that, most I’ve worked with don’t care that much.

I’ve seen people do weird things to get their site to validate. Adding a JavaScript library to your site purely for the goal of getting your site to validate, for instance. Is that really a service to the website’s visitors? Adding 50kb of download for each visitor because you didn’t stand up to your client? I don’t think so.

W3C validation & SEO

So, on to the question on a lot of people’s minds. While Googling for this subject I noticed loads of people have written about this topic, which made me decide just my own opinion wouldn’t suffice for this article; so you’ll get mine, and the opinion of some of my friends. First of all, let me draw from my own experience.

My own opinion on Validation & SEO

Last year, while doing SEO for a major Dutch news site, I found out this site had its entire front-page show up blank in Google’s cache. The reason was that they were using an unclosed - and rather obscure - HTML tag, the XMP tag. The XMP tag is basically the same as the PRE tag, but instead of rendering tags inside it, it outputs them. This XMP tag wasn’t closed properly, and thus, Google’s spider choked on it, causing their pages not to be indexed the way they should. So this error caused a browser, which is what Googlebot is in essence, not to render. That’s the kind of validation errors I think you should fix. For other validation errors, like the use of target=”_blank” with a Strict document type, I do not care, and would not want my client to spend development time on my behalf fixing it.

I do know that I use the number of errors as a sign of code quality when doing quick scans, and poor code quality can very well be a reason for ranking badly. Do remember though that validating your site with the W3C doesn’t validate the semantics of your HTML.

But as I said: that’s just my simple opinion, let’s get some of my friends opinions:

Respected SEO’s on W3C Validation

First of all I asked Aaron Wall, of SEOBook fame, his answer was pretty direct:

“If you want to get links from web designers who charge high rates then W3C validation is important to SEO, otherwise it has little direct importance outside of ensuring proper rendering to end users. When one visits Amazon.com or Google or Yahoo! (or just about any billion Dollar+ internet company) they will find a website that doesn't validate. Why is that?”

Is Aaron suggesting that validation being good for SEO is a web design industry scam, because they need a better reason to get people to pay for writing valid HTML other than "we like it"? Yes, he is.

Next up was Greg Boser, his reply went along the same lines:

“We try to use frameworks that validate, but we don't spend a ton of time trying to rework a plugin or widget that cause minor errors that aren't site operation critical.”

Next up, Brent Payne, SEO Director for Tribune, seems to be right in line with my thinking:

“I like to keep errors under 25 or so, though Tribune has 100+ errors. Perfect code, I don't think is necessary but you don't want to have too malformed of HTML. Some say it is a ranking factor, I say you just don't want to have stuff that is too unexpected for the bots.”

Dennis Goedegebuure, Senior Manager & Head of SEO at eBay Inc., said:

"It depends on the type of errors and how many, it all depends on whether the crawler can actually read the real content of the page."

Lastly, I asked Jaimie Sirovich, the author of two technical SEO books, he said:

“As long as google.com doesn’t validate, I’d say no. They actually don't quote attributes, I’d guess deliberately to shrink page size.”

(In fact, as Dennis pointed out, Google doesn't even close the body and html tags). When asked what kind of issues he would fix, Jaimie was very resolute:

“Tag nesting, that’s about it. Just make sure it’s a tree.”

In other words: fix unclosed and or improperly nested tags, don’t bother about the rest.

The verdict on W3C Validation & SEO

Most SEO’s seem to agree that having code that isn’t properly nested or has big errors is bad for SEO. They all agree too that it’s not going to get you any better rankings when you really have valid HTML.

My final conclusion thus is: both for web design  & SEO reasons, you’ll want to fix any and all blatant errors that might cause bad rendering or parser issues. Don’t worry about attributes that are not allowed though, nor about that one plugin using <b> tags instead of <strong>. It’s just not worth your time or money.

Don't agree with me? Here's a kicker: even Matt Cutts says there's no bonus for validating, check out the following video:

Click here to view the embedded video.

W3C Validation: why you should care, and why not is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

• The Salesforce plugin we released last week, WordPress to Lead, got so much attention that my head is still buzzing... It got featured on Mashable, TechCrunch and loads and loads more blogs and news sites. Very very cool to see such a reply to one of my products. We've got loads more ideas for v2, but we'd still love your feedback, preferably on the original post.

  Some of the ideas we've already received? Make it work as an addon for Gravity Forms, allow for multiple forms, allow to set the lead source through a shortcode, and many more.

• VPS.net will now help you migrate your site from any other hoster, even if you buy only 1 or 2 nodes. I've been wanting them to do this for a while since migration can be hard, and now they do. If you've considered migrating, it just got a bit easier. Ow and btw, if you send them a postcard, you get a $10 discount and have a chance to win an iPad!

• This tuesday on the WordPress Podcast, we'll have John Mueller, aka JohnMu as a guest. We'll be talking about Google Webmaster Tools and other things Google provides bloggers with to improve their blogging. We're really looking forward to it, and would love for you to be there live. Make sure to listen live and chat, we broadcast at 2 PM Pacific, 5 PM Eastern and 10 PM GMT.

  Also, I think our last episode with Chris Pirillo about creating communities was quite good, you can go listen to that on WMR.fm.

• Brian Clark (of Copyblogger fame and a buddy from SEOktoberfest) emailed me yesterday that he wrote a 24 page report on SEO copywriting that pretty much covers all the basics. I've read through it and it's very, very solid stuff, so I suggest you click here to grab your free SEO copywriting report.

  If you read through to the end there's some stuff about Scribe too. Scribe is an SEO plugin Brian co-created that actually is very cool, I'll have to find the time to do a proper introduction of it to you, but starting with this report by Brian is probably a very good idea, even if you don't want to use Scribe, the content is solid, and free.

• WordPress 3.0 beta 2 has been released. Yoast.com is running it and it seems quite stable. WordPress 3.0 is the first release to merge WordPress and WordPress MU. I haven't had a chance to upgrade a big MU site to this version yet, once I, or one of my colleagues, do, we'll let you know, but I'd love to hear your experiences.
• Last, but not least, for the geeks among you, there's three pretty cool tutorials I'd love to share, first of all, Ozh wrote a post about oEmbed and embedding tweets that I really enjoyed. BinaryMoon had a very cool post on embedding Twitter's new @anywhere service into the WordPress comments, and Leland had a good post on styling WP-PageNavi, which is what I use for my pagenumbers here on Yoast.

Small updates from me & my friends is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

Now I want to remind you that I've been writing about site speed for quite a while. I wrote about WordPress template optimization (a quite dated post now, btw) back in january 2008. And even in april 2007 I wrote about the effect a slow server could have on how Google spiders your site.

Now of course I do a weekly WordPress podcast together with Frederick Townes, who is the creator of the awesome plugin W3 Total Cache, so I talk about speed a lot, and I've talked more than once about getting proper WordPress hosting. And that is leading to what I wanted to tell you in this post: the fact that Google now officially has made site speed one of the (over 200) ranking factors, means that there can be no more excuses; you have to get proper hosting. Now.

Having said that, I should probably tell you that I recently switched to an even better CDN, which has made my site even faster. I'm now on VPS.net's Akamai service, as well as still being hosted on a VPS.net VPS itself. My site now loads, depending on where you are in the world, in somewhere between 1 and 2,5 seconds. Am I finished? Of course not, there's always room for improvement. Has this speed helped my rankings? Probably. I do know one thing: I've had several clients whose sites were too slow, and who, after being properly optimized for speed, got better rankings.

And heck, if it's a ranking factor, this is one of the easiest ones to get right. There can be no discussion about it: 10 seconds is slow, 1 second is fast. Of course there's grey areas, but why settle when your site is still loading in more than say 2 seconds? There are several pieces of research that show that decreasing load times on pages leads to an increase in sales, pageviews and other desired actions. Of course it does. A fast site is nicer to hang around on. Nicer to purchase stuff on. Nicer to subscribe to. In short: a faster site is more likely to make you money.

Do I need to say it again? Make your site load as fast as you can. Install W3 Total Cache if you're on WordPress and you haven't done it yet. Get proper hosting if it's still slow after that (test with Pingdom, f/i), and yes, I urge you to try VPS.net in that case. Go do it. Now!!!

Site Speed is now a Ranking Factor is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

Now I hadn't paid too much attention to this new feature until we started testing a new search traffic monitoring tool we've built at OrangeValley, and I noticed that 5% of the traffic coming to my WordPress SEO article had such rich "jump to" snippets. I could see this because they entered the site with a URL with a fragment identifier (aka hash: #) in it.

Now 5% of the traffic didn't immediately make me go all nuts, until I started thinking about what this meant usability wise: instead of people having to search within the article for the content they came for, they're taken straight there. That's a bonus, right? I've yet to prove that this improves conversions, but I'd guess it would.

Researching jump to snippets

So here starts the research: how do we optimize for these rich snippets? In the post on the Google Webmaster blog accompanying the official release, they state that:

There are a few things you can do to increase the chances that they [these jump to snippets, JdV] might appear on your pages. First, ensure that long, multi-topic pages on your site are well-structured and broken into distinct logical sections. Second, ensure that each section has an associated anchor with a descriptive name (i.e., not just "Section 2.1"), and that your page includes a "table of contents" which links to the individual anchors.

When I dove more deeply into our stats, I noticed a couple of things:

• almost every article that has an internal Table of Contents is getting this kind of traffic
• those articles are getting more search engine traffic in general (probably related to their length too)
• they use different ways of identifying the anchor, and all seem to work
• their tables of contents are always marked up using a list
• articles with "just" inline internal links to other parts of the article do not seem to get this kind of traffic

How to create internal anchors

Basically there's three ways of defining these anchors:

1. <h2 id="heading">Heading</h2>
2. <h2><a id="heading">Heading</a></h2>
3. <h2><a name="heading">Heading</a></h2>

All three options require linking to them like this:

<a href="#heading">Heading</a>

Where my WordPress SEO article uses option #2, our Magento SEO is using option #1, and the examples Google gives are using option #3. I can't see any real reason to choose one over the other, so I chose the cleanest one: option #1.

Optimizing for jump to snippets

So what do we need to do?

It turns out this is awfully simple, you need to do two things:

1. properly identify the different sections of longer articles, and identify their headings with fragments;
2. create a table of contents, linking to these fragments.

While the Magento SEO article has a clearly marked Table of Contents, the WordPress SEO article only has a listing of internal links, without any heading. They do have one thing in common: a list, either ul or ol linking to the different sections with their appropriate fragments.

So your table of contents should look like something like this at the minimum:

<ol>
<li><a href="#research">Researching jump to snippets</a></li>
<li><a href="#createinternal">How to create internal anchors</a></li>
<li><a href="#optimization">Optimizing for jump to snippets</a></li>
</ol>

I'll keep track of this kind of traffic from now on, and I'll let you know if I find any more optimizations. There's one caveat to this: this is not based on a very large data set yet, and it just so happens to be that all of the pages with ToC's I found getting this traffic have these ToC's marked up as lists. It could be that other ways of marking up a ToC work too, I just haven't found a working example yet.

Optimizing for Rich “Jump To” Snippets is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

However, the use of microformats, a set of agreed upon HTML conventions used to describe content, can give you more control of the snippets displayed in Google SERPs. Once your site is properly using rich snippets, you will see them also appear in your Google custom search and Google site search results, so this technique is definitely worth exploring if you use those tools as well.

The changes are easy to implement for WordPress, Magento and other software, let's take a look at some use cases based on hReview, hCard, hProduct and XFN:

Businesses & Organizations

Could be marked up as follows:

<div class="vcard">
   <span class="fn org">L'Amourita Pizza</span> 
   Located at 
     <div class="adr"> 
        <span class="street-address">123 Main St</span>, 
        <span class="locality">Albuquerque</span>, 
        <span class="region">NM</span>.
     </div>   
     <span class="geo">
        <span class="latitude">
           <span class="value-title" title="37.774929" />
        </span>
        <span class="longitude">
           <span class="value-title" title="-122.419416" />
        </span>
     </span>
   Phone: <span class="tel">206-555-1234</span>
   <a href="http://pizza.example.com/" class="url">http://pizza.example.com</a> 
</div>

Learn more about the business and organization markup at webmaster central.

Products

Could be marked up as follows:

<div class="hproduct">
   Brand: <span class="brand">ACME</span>
   <span class="category">Heavy objects</span>
   <h1 class="fn">Large all-purpose anvil</h1>
   On sale for 
   <span class="price">$99.95</span>.
   <span class="description">If you need an object to drop from a height,
   the classic A23859 anvil from ACME is the way to go.</span>
   <a href="http://anvil.example.com" class="url">Anvil details page</a>
</div>

Becomes:

Learn more about the product markup at webmaster central.

People

Could be marked up as:

<div class="vcard">
   My name is
   <span class="fn">Bob Smith</span>,
   but people call me
   <span class="nickname">Smithy</span>.
   Here is my home page:
   <a href="http://www.example.com" class="url">www.example.com</a>.
   I live in
   <span class="adr">
      <span class="locality">Albuquerque</span>,
      <span class="region">NM</span>
   </span>
   and work as an
   <span class="title">engineer</span> at
   <span class="org">ACME Corp</span>.
   My friends:
   <a href="http://darryl-blog.example.com" rel="friend">Darryl</a>,
   <a href="http://edna-blog.example.com" rel="friend">Edna</a>
</div>

Becomes:

Learn more about markup for people at webmaster central.

Reviews

Could be marked up as:

<div class="hreview">
   <span class="item">
      <span class="fn">L’Amourita Pizza</span>
   </span>
   Reviewed by <span class="reviewer">Ulysses Grant</span> on
   <span class="dtreviewed">
      Jan 6<span class="value-title" title="2009-01-06" />
   </span>.
   <span class="summary">Delicious, tasty pizza on Eastlake!</span>
   <span class="description">L'Amourita serves up traditional wood-fired   
   Neapolitan-style pizza, brought to your table promptly and without fuss. 
   An ideal neighborhood pizza joint.</span>
   Rating: 
   <span class="rating">4.5</span>
</div>

Learn more about markup for reviews at webmaster central.

Interested in getting started? Well there's no reason not to start using microformats as much as possible already; semantic markup is always good for search engine optimization:

1. Update your markup (make sure it's valid) and use the Quix bookmarklet to check your page, by entering 'snippet' to submit the current page to Google Rich Snippets test tool.
2. Getting the “Insufficient data to generate the preview” error? Then make sure that there are no errors in the markup (go back to step one) or check that you are using enough data to generate the snippet preview, so check the microformat syntax again.
3. Finally, let Google know that you're an early adopter.

So who's using microformats in this and other ways? Brands like Mashable, Yahoo!, Yelp, Technorati, SearchMonkey, LinkedIn, Urbanspoon and many more. If you're interested in digging deeper into the future of microformats as they relate to web analytics as well, Dennis Mortensen from Yahoo! has a great post on what the future may hold.

Google & Microformats: Drive More Traffic is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

The reason Directory Journal and some other directories can still survive is because they do editorial reviews of sites they list in their directory, and as far as I've been able to tell, they really do a pretty good job of those. If you check out a category like Business Software, you'll see a couple of listings, and when you click one, like the one for Fuel Quest, you'll see that along with the homepage link you get up to 3 deep links you can submit. Now Fuel Quest doesn't rank top notch with those links yet, but they do rank second page on some nice terms when they've only got 2-3 links, one of them being from Directory Journal.

I've investigated some more sites, and it seems that these links do help. After seeing that I dove into why that is true, after all, to be able to give away link equity, a site must have some of it first. If you check out the Majestic SEO report for the site, you'll see they've got an awful lot of nice pages with pretty good backlinks, acquired through multiple methods. They've got some free WordPress themes to download, not one but a couple of very decent blogs with some real quality, unique content and some nice tools for webmasters as well. In all: they've earned their links, and have quite a few of them, which explains why a link from the domain would help in your rankings.

So I think I can honestly say that I think investing the $159.95 for a permanent listing along with 3 deep links is worth it if you need a couple of extra links, and that Directory Journal belongs in the small list of directories that you can still use and feel good about.

DirJournal: a directory still worth submitting to is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

Let's go through some terms here:

Indexed / Indexing
The process of downloading a site or a page's content to the server of the search engine, thereby adding it to it's "index".

Ranking / Listing / Showing
Showing a site in the search result pages (aka SERPs).

So, while the most common process goes from Indexing to Listing, a site doesn't have to be indexed to be listed. If a link points at a page, domain or wherever, that link will be followed. If the robots.txt on that domain prevents the search engine from indexing that page, it'll still show the URL in the results if it can gather from other variables that it might be worth looking at.

If my explanation above doesn't make sense, have a look at Matt Cutt's video explanation:

Click here to view the embedded video.

So, if you want to effectively hide pages from the search engines, and this might seem contradictory, you need them to index those pages. Why? Because when they index those pages, you can tell them not to List them. There's two ways of doing that: by using robots meta tags, like this (and I've got an article on robots meta tags that's more extensive):

<meta name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow"/>

The issue with a tag like that is that you have to add it to each and every page. That's why the search engines came up with the X-Robots-Tag HTTP header. This allows you to specify an HTTP header called X-Robots-Tag, and set the value as you would the meta robots tags value. The cool thing about this is that you can do it for an entire site. So, if your site is running on Apache, and mod_headers is enabled (it usually is), you could add the following single line to your .htaccess file:

Header set X-Robots-Tag "noindex, nofollow"

And it'd have the effect that that entire site can be indexed, but will never be shown in the search results. So, get rid of that robots.txt file with Disallow: / in it, and use the X-Robots-Tag instead!

Preventing your site from being indexed, the right way is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

But today, I can tell you that we've got something new, and better. Tracking rankings is hard, especially because Google isn't too fond of people scraping their search results. Because of that, running daily rankings was a pain, but the data we all secretly wanted was in there, we've all known it for ages: visitor data, combined with rankings, day for day, week for week.

Let me show you what I wanted, all this time:

This isn't some mockup, this is real stuff. A rankings tracker called SEO Rank Monitor, that uses the Google Analytics API to combine rankings data with visitor data, showing you what the difference really is between position 1 and position 2. It's also the fastest rankings tracker I've ever seen, ranking a few dozen keywords for me in a few minutes, and then on a daily basis after that, giving some awesome ranking charts:

It also allows you to add your competitors, so you can easily track their goings on your keywords as well. Now all experienced SEO's know they should work on keyword groups more than they should work on single keywords, and thus this new ranking tool allows you to tag your keywords, easily allowing you to check rankings for the group:

As you can see it also allows you to export the keywords to a CSV file. There's more: tracking the number of backlinks to your domain according to the search engines you selected, the number of indexed pages etc. Also, because this isn't a rank tracker that runs on your own machine, it's not clogging up resources and you can check your rankings from everywhere you want.

The tool is paid, of course, but you can try it for free for a month. The normal pricing is $39 a month for the Pro package and $19 a month for the Basic package. With the Pro package you can track 2,500 keywords and 10 domains, with the Basic package you're limited to 1 domain and 100 keywords. In other words: the Pro package is well worth the money. Now there's something even better: I've negotiated a discount code with which you'll get $10 a month off, for as long as you decide to keep your subscription! The discount code should be easy to remember: "yoast" is all you need.

So go check it out, and should you decide to sign up, don't forget to use the discount code "yoast"!

Rankings that make sense is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

Click here to view the embedded video.

Hope you enjoy it!

WordCamp NL Presentation is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

Think Visibility by sk8geek

So I'm starting to wake up from Think Visibility, after flying back yesterday to dive straight into a family party. I can honestly say it was very cool, my presentation went quite well I think, judging by the average of the reactions. Julian's presentation after mine was very interesting as it was the first time I ever heard someone who actually works at a newspaper in Europe talk smartly about SEO.

Straight after that was the presentation by Judith Lewis, who did a great job as usual, but still felt she had to bribe the audience by handing out chocolates :). I've seen a couple of sessions after that, but one that's worth a special mention was Zoe Piper's presentation on the content network, which was well structured and had an awesome design. I think she's a better presenter than Patrick Altoft, whom she works for, so maybe Patrick should consider sending out Zoe in the future. (Kidding, but she really is a talent to keep an eye on!)

Joost de Valk presenting, by Caius

Both the night before the conference and the "after" party turned into great nights out, with a dinner in between the drinks and the conference which gave me a chance to catch up with Anthony Shapley, whom I met last year at A4UExpo and went on to work for Dave. He's a really cool guy to hang out with, so I hope Dave makes a habit of taking him to conferences too!

So, the conference was a blast. Everyone was in a good mood and a lot of people walked up to me to have a chat, which I really, really enjoyed. In all I must have met about 50-60 people I didn't know before the conference, that's what I'd call good networking!

View of the delegates, by Caius

Now there's a load of other reviews, I'll try to link to most of them:

• Think Visibility conference
• ThinkVisibility: the things that get left behind in the web development process
• Think Visibility Conference Review (Sept 2009)
• Think Visibility 2009 Review | SEO & Social Media | Web Toastie
• Think Visibility September 2009 | Piggynap's Blog | Zoe Piper
• Think Visibility | MichaelAHeap.com
• Think Visibility Update
• Burn Down Easy » Think Visibility was Awesome
• Think Visibility II

Think Visibility II was a blast is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!