Scene On The Net

The hidden truth about Accessibility — Part 2

By Max Brockbank

Filed under: General
Page updated 8:36 am: March 25, 2009

In my last blog post, I talked about using accessibility standards to improve the SEO  of any web page. The theory is that because search engines like Google, Yahoo!, Windows Live and Ask are “blind”, constructing your site to work well for those with visual impairment makes them ripe for the Search Engine Spiders too.

But we can take this a stage further; making the site even more accessible AND giving the Search Engines more content to index.

In fact, the use of CSS-styling to add extra content to the page which does not show unless the stylesheet is removed can drastically improve the amount of spiderable text on a web page whilst remaining within Search Engine rules about “hidden” content.

Current W3C standards include the display attribute, which includes the value none. If this style is correctly applied to an element it will not show up in a browser which uses CSS.

For example, we can define a style called .accessible thus …

.accessible { display: none; }

This can be applied using SPAN tags thus …

Now you see me <span class="accessible">, now you don't!</span>

In a CSS-compliant browser such as Internet Explorer or Firefox what is seen is

Now you see me

But remove the style sheets for the page and you see

Now you see me, now you don’t!

This means that text can now be embedded in a web page which only shows up in “accessibility” mode (i.e. when the style sheets are not used).

An example of this might be the addition of explanatory text to a web page link …

<a href="/eng/support/" rel="Get help with your BlackBerry device, software or billing, and read about BlackBerry training and how to get technical support"><span class="accessible">Get help with your BlackBerry device, software or billing, and read about BlackBerry training and how to get Technical </span>Support</a>

In the browser, with a style sheet applied, this shows as …

Support

Without a style sheet applied, this shows as …

Get help with your BlackBerry device, software or billing, and read about BlackBerry training and how to get Technical Support

This not only makes more sense to a screen reader, it also provides more spiderable text for search engines to index.


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Four cool aps to Twitter with

By Max Brockbank

Filed under: General, LinkedIn, SEO, Technology
Page updated 12:07 am: February 28, 2009

Micro blogging is big news, and Twitter is the name of the game. Here are four simple ways to play.

TweetDeck

Based on on Adobe’s Air platform, TweetDeck splits up your Tweets into handy customisable columns: All Updates, Replies and Direct Messages. But it goes further by providing filtering to separate the wheat from the goats. There are many other goodies, but they don’t get in the way. The in-built Tweet “growth predictor” is something to keep an eye on.

Best Feature: fine-toothed filtering

Download From: www.tweetdeck.com/beta/

TwitterFox

This is an Add-On for Firefox which you soon won’t want to be without. It sits quietly in the status bar and checks every few minutes for updates. These can be set to pop up as they arrive, meaning that you never need to explore further, but if you’re away from your keyboard and the Tweets mount up, you can click on the icon and see all the latest entries.

Best Feature: Multiple Twitter accounts accessed in the wink of an eye.

Download From: TwitterFox@Firefox Add-ons

TwitterBerry

The essential Tweet tool for the Blackberry, allows you to keep in touch with those you follow without using the browser. And the cool text entry means you can Tweet anywhere you have network access.

Best Feature: Access your friends’ Tweets in two clicks on the 9.32 from Lewisham

Download From: orangatame.com

Digsby Tweet Icon

One of the best features of multiple IM client Digsby, is the ability to connect to social networks such as Facebook, Google Talk and Twitter — which puts it streets ahead of its rivals.

Best Feature: Like TwitterFox, it also allows you to run multiple Twitter accounts.

Download From: digsby.com


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Searching for a silver lining to the cloud

By Max Brockbank

Filed under: General, LinkedIn, SEO, Services
Page updated 6:01 pm: February 17, 2009

It’s not a good time, is it? Not bread queues and soup kitchens, to be sure, but it is very hard to be optimistic.

Still. it is said that every cloud has a silver lining it seems and for SEO it may be that people are seeing Organic Search  in a new light. Compared to other forms of online marketing, SEO is seen as a cheap, effective way of getting the message across. According to recruiters we’ve spoken to recently (and others with less of an axe to grind) demand for good SEO professionals is on the increase. Hooray for our side!

But the loser in this may well be Pay Per Click advertising (not that we expect Google to throw in the towel any time soon). As cheap as a well-run PPC campaign may be, some website managers look at the number of clicks which DON’T end in a sale and think of it as wasted money.

What is only partly appreciated is the link between effective SEO and PPC. In essence, web users are more likely to click on a PPC link — or indeed any brand-related link — if they associate it with good organic search results.

This is because SEO is as much about “Reputation Management” as it is about anything else. That includes quality backlinks — everyone wants to link to the “world’s favourite website”.

In other words, sites that give good attention to organic search can expect other benefits too.

It’s right that SEO is getting more attention, it simply makes sense. But treat it as a FOUNDATION of your whole SEM effort, not all of it.


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Google News is good news for SEO

By Max Brockbank

Filed under: General, LinkedIn, SEO
Page updated 9:44 am: February 11, 2009

When people think of SEO, the name that inevitably comes to mind is Google.

Around three-quarters of the world’s search traffic comes through Google and many people have it as their home page. Getting your site high on Google’s index is important, and every SEO professional claims they are best at improving your Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) score.

But there is an alternative “search engine” with just as much clout as Google and which is probably more widely seen.

Google News is a regularly updated index of top stories from news sites across the Internet. Google News is still Google, but getting your site indexed by it is a much trickier prospect than ordinary search. Nevertheless, if you’re producing “news”-type items on a regular basis, it’s worth a try.

Succeed and you’ll find yourself listed on XML feeds used by some of the planet’s most-visited websites via plugins for popular CMS platforms such as Google News for Wordpress, or Google’s own targeted feed APIs.

So how do you get in? Google’s official rules for inclusion are …

  • Sites that have news content that is original to the site
  • Sites which do not solely promote their own activities
  • Sites which are written and maintained by a clear organization, one that has multiple writers and editors

Most candidates fail on that last requirement since many news blogs are one-man (or woman) bands. But if you can turn your blog into a “community of newshounds” there is hope.

Having said all this, a quick trawl through Google News throws up all sorts of sites which seemingly flout these rules.

Once again, the mystery of Google is preserved.


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How we let a customer lead the way

By Max Brockbank

Filed under: Clients, General, LinkedIn, SEO
Page updated 11:14 pm: February 10, 2009

It’s early days for the new Scene on the Net. The sad fact is that we’re not getting the level of spidering by the search engines we’d like.

The major reason for this is that the old Scene wasn’t really updated very much: we said what we needed to say and got on with making great web sites. As a result, the search engines had no need  to check us over all that often because they believed that we obviously had nothing new to say.

These days, Scene is much more a platform for information, discussion and community (and the odd pitch to build you a website at a jolly nice price). That means we have included more ways to update the site, including blogging and microblogging.

We’ve been shown the way by the masterminds behind CasinoUpdate.co.uk, a site we developed for an independent casino news organisation. The good people of CUUK set out to make their web site interesting and regular, so from the very beginning they posted news items at least TWICE a day.

After just three months, CUUK found their pages were being indexed every 20 minutes or so, with stories appearing at similar intervals. That has contributed to CUUK becoming a trusted news source with a regular following inside and outside of the gambling industry, not to mention good search engine rankings, impressive PR and a popularity among advertisers.

To be honest, I’m not sure we partners at Sceneonthe.net have the time — or the imagination — to post something original and interesting every WEEK, let alone twice a day. We’ll see.

But we do hope that we can be interesting some times. We’ll try, as often as we can.


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Say what you like — in 12 seconds

By Max Brockbank

Filed under: General, Technology
Page updated 1:33 pm: February 8, 2009

Consider this. If humans were descended from cats, horror movies would not be dark and foreboding — the scary thing would be smells, not shadows and unlit streets. It’s almost certain that smellivision would have been invented before television.

However, our primate ancestors lived in savannah and forest, where smells can be confusing and it’s more important to be able to interpret patterns from vague shapes at close quarters than to see for a thousand miles (like a bird), or navigate round caves in the dark (like bats), or hunt mice at night (like cats).

We have good colour vision at at distance roughly comparable to the ambush distance of a sabre-tooth tiger.

Vision is such an important concept in everyday life and on the web as the popularity of YouTube. MetaCafe and Video Jug just go to show.

Today’s buzzword is “microblogging” — and especially Twitter (we even have Twitter at Scene). How do you combine vision and microblogging? The answer is 12 Seconds, the video bloggers answer to Twitter.

12 Seconds’ version of Twitter’s 140-character limit is exactly what it says on the tin — just 12 seconds of video, recorded via your webcam or mobile phone. The only issue seems to be that some users find the image from their webcam is upside down. 12 Seconds say they’re investigating.

And the other issue is conciseness — keeping it short. Like 140 characters, keeping to 12 seconds can be an envigorating experience. You need to learn how to say what you want to say in the time available and there just never seems to be enough spa


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Almost ready

By Max Brockbank

Filed under: General
Page updated 12:07 am: February 6, 2009

The new Sceneonthe.net is almost ready to go.

It’s midnight UK time, which is NEVER a good time to launch anything, so we’ll be delaying the launch by at LEAST 12 hours. After all, no-one is really waiting for this to happen.

Good rules to remember for any website launch [take note potential Scene on the Net customers]  …

  • Things will ALWAYS go wrong
  • NEVER launch without time to firefight
  • Any process takes TWICE as long as your worst estimate
  • The end user’s expectation is less than your LOWEST level of satisfaction

We’ll get there, sooner than we think.


Scene, not herd

By Max Brockbank

Filed under: General
Page updated 10:57 am: February 5, 2009

Work is progressing on the new Scene website with a more up-to-date design and some community features inclusing a blog and even a Twitter account.

We’ve been running blogs for many clients for many years, but it’s only recently that we thought it would be good to have one for ourselves.Time to join the herd?

And Twitter has become something of a phenomenon lately, although I can claim truthfully to have had an account since March 2007. Blogging is a powerful tool for getting information up on the Internet speedily and with a minimum of fuss, but the 140-character limit of Twitter can be a liberating experience.It’s harder than it looks to do well.

Scene’s techie partner Andrew tells me that Oscar Wilde once wrote: “I was going to write you a short note, but I didn’t have the time!”

Anyway, expect to see the new Scene site out of beta and live to the world in the next few days.


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