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>

A few months ago Google officially announced the launch of Adwords for mobiles, answering to the growing importance of mobile devices also amongst advertisers.

Now, advertisers will be able to display ads exclusively on mobile devices, create campaigns for them, and get separate performance reporting. If you prefer not to show your desktop ads on these phones, you can opt out and show ads only on desktop and laptop computers.

On this side it is also quite important to be able to track clics coming from Adwords ads displayed through mobile devices.

The ValueTrack It works both for search and display networks and it can be used to both automatically redirect traffic to a mobile-optimized version of your website http://www.yoururl.com/{ifmobile:movil}

On the other hand it can also be used to actually track down those clics, showing you url www.yoururl.com?type={ifmobile:telefono}

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.

A few months aho Google announced Gmail would switch to a default https connection, increasing protection against sniffing and any other network related threat. It was great news, even though the SLL was already available, Google made it the default option for users.

Nowadays all over the world millions of Facebook users get connected via standard http, keeping themselves quite vulnerable to sniffing or man in the middle type of exploits. Is there any way to switch to a safer connection making our Facebook login a bit more secure?

Just type https://facebook.com when logging in and your connection will pass through SLL encoding, making it safer: your machine will exchange a key with the facebook server through which all date will be encoded.

This means the secure socket layer connection s already availbale: how long should users wait for it to become the default connection in Facebook?

CSS transition have been finally made available on Firefox (3.7, pre-alpha2). With this feature developers will finally be able to apply movement to CSS elements, quite a good alternative to the more common use of Javascript. Here’s the developers Firefox version if you want to have a try.

// HTML
<ul>
 <li id="long1">Long, gradual transition...</li>
 <li id="fast1">Very fast transition...</li>
 <li id="delay1">Long transition with a 2-second delay...</li>
 <li id="easeout">Using ease-out timing...</li>
 <li id="linear">Using linear timing...</li>
 <li id="cubic1">Using cubic-bezier(0.2, 0.4, 0.7, 0.8)...</li>
</ul>

// CSS
#delay1 {
 position: relative;
 -moz-transition-property: font-size;
 -moz-transition-duration: 4s;
 -moz-transition-delay: 2s;
 font-size: 14px;
}

#delay1:hover {
 -moz-transition-property: font-size;
 -moz-transition-duration: 4s;
 -moz-transition-delay: 2s;
 font-size: 36px;
}

Since Twitter went online, beside the early adopters enthusiasts, I always heard many people debating on its actual usefulness.
Still, it is one of the fastest growing platforms, despite its weaknesses, its extreme vulnerability to spam, or its 150 characters limit…

This very last point has been thoroughly debated: 150 characters are not enough to deliver any message and force people to limit the scope of the message they can send.

A few weeks ago, Johnathan Schwartz, former Sun Microsystem CEO, resigned via his his twitter account.

Within 150 characters he managed to say that we resigned from his position, and also gave an explanation for his resignation with a haiku:

Financial crisis

Stalled to many customers

Ceo no more

This should be the right way people should use twitter, and haikus, because or their ability of defining a whole world within a few lines, just fit perfectly this media. Johnathan just seems to have understood this pretty well.

When resigning from a position we often send plenty of emails out, to co-workers, colleagues or acquaintances: Johnathan just exploited the speed and efficiency of Twitter, with no need to waste that much time on writing emails, also getting positive results for his personal brand, communicating directly with the right audience and successfully delivering the message.

Next time we twit, let’s just make sure it is for something meaningful..!

We all know WordPress is one of the most versatile and easy to use CMSs, with plenty of features which made him one of the best blogging platform available on the market. However it still lacks and adequate support for multilingual blogs, for instance when we’d need ot post the same article in more than one language at the same time.

If the CMS itself does not provide enough support for this feature, we can sort thing out pretty easily with a few plugins:

• Google Ajax Translation, this Google API makes available translation to users on your blog frontpage. It is not to be considered a proper WordPress plugin but it works just as good.

• WPML Multilingual CMS, with this plugin we would be able to get a fully working multilingual blogs in just a few minutes. No need of any change inside the source code or tables, it works straight out of the box.

   

• qTranslate, with this plugin we would be able to manage content in different languages from the WordPress editor, through automatic translation and permalink management.

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.

A news realase of WordPress has just been made available and is supposed to fix several security flaws, as explained here on the WP blog.

WordPress got so popular that any security update can actually be crucial, considering the amount of websites using it. Recently a well-known vulnerability allowed a worm to spread around affecting several blogs, according to this article. Still, there’s something more we can do to make our WordPress installation safer.

The WordPress Exploit Scanner extension can scan for well-known vulnerabilities and exploits which might affect your WordPress installation. In order to be used you just need to download, the extension, upload it on you server, active it by the extensions dashboard and a link will pop-up on your general dashboard.

Once you run the extension (it might need a few minutes to complete the task) the report you get is extensive. The plugin analyse in depth every single file, looking for malicious code embedded into standard file. It’s pretty useful, even if a standard report can require some programming knowledge to be fully understood. It’s a very neat tool, I guess it should be included in every WordPress standard setup.

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.