Building a website within SEO best practice guidelines is the first step to getting your site crawled, indexed and ranked by major search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing.

The important points here to remember are to :

1. Submit your URL to the search engine (like this for Google)
2. Ensure that your sitemap.xml has been submitted (like this)

These 2 steps ensure that the search engines know that your site is there to be crawled and searched. Once this has been done though it takes a while for the bots to get to your site and actually crawl it.

The process of getting it indexed can take anywhere from between 2 and 4 weeks; but there are a few ways that you can “speed” up this process and take you to the next level.

Ranking, the second step after indexing

Inbound links to your site act as lead ins to your site which Google and other search engines will follow to your site. As soon as they have followed the link and arrived at your site they will begin crawling; indexing and ranking it. Google enjoys finding a website through links as it already confirms popularity of the site (which is closely related to relevancy).

The ranking process is the really important one as this determines where in the SERPS (Search Engine Results Pages) you will show up. Apart from on site optimisation techniques such as title tags, H1 tags, keyword relevancy, code, etc. it is the process of link building and marketing your site that will greatly improve where you rank.

Cementing your site rank with link building

By having your site linked to by other sites which are directly related to your site and in fact in the case of article syndication, to article directory sites that are not directly related to your site. These back links are the cement with which the page rank for your site is built and it is this page rank which ultimately determines where you show up in the SERPS.

JD Consulting is an Online Marketing Consultancy based in Johannesburg Gauteng. For over 10 years we have been assisting our clients with their online strategies from the design of their website through to the marketing online thereof. For more information on how JD Consulting can assist you with our online marketing strategy and implementation needs, contact us on business@jdconsulting.co.za or visit our website at www.jdconsulting.co.za

Popularity: 41% [?]

I have recently been developing mobi sites for some of our customers and after an immense number of hours researching, I have yet to find a South African mobi website that validates. Can someone point me in the right direction please?

Before we go any further, let’s define the term “Validation“:

1. To declare or make legally valid.
2. To mark with an indication of official sanction.
3. To establish the soundness of; corroborate.

After some time, I managed to validate the 2 mobi websites I have been busy with and to be honest, it was somewhat of a challenge. Rules and guidelines have been laid out by the W3C to ensure (or try to ensure) that websites (including mobi sites) keep to the best standards of practice. This ensures search engines can actually crawl your webpages and it maintains universal understanding between browsers and users. For more information on understanding the phrase “Validating a website” please refer to the first half of this wordpress post.

With mobile validation, your validation score is represented by a number, with the maximum being 100 at the top of the scale, and the opposite side can go into negatives. I have taken a look into some of the most well known SA mobi sites and can say that they do not score well at all, they range between -13 and 77.

Some common errors included the following:

• Extraneous characters (whitespaces or comments),
• The document does not validate against XHTML Basic 1.1 or MP 1.2,
• The Table contains less than 2 tr elements,
• Page weight errors,
• Embedded external resources,
• Nested tables,
• Cache control,
• Incorrect character encoding,
• Incorrect Doctypes,
• Broken links,
• and the list goes on…

It is imperitive to source a web design/mobi design company that complies with the W3C standards. This will ultimately save you thousands in the long-run when you decide to hire a SEO company to market your site online.

For those of you that don’t know how to validate your site, visit the W3C Mobile Validator page to try yourself, but once you have pulled enough of your hair out, consider JD Consulting.

If anyone knows of any valid mobi sites, please send me the details.

Popularity: 7% [?]

JD Internet Consulting is looking for a senior PHP developer to fill a position in our development department.

Requirements:
- Minimum 5 years of proven commercial PHP and MySQL experience
- Strong JavaScript, DHTML, XHTML, CSS and HTML experience
- Ability to develop and support PHP and MySQL technologies
- Develop according to coding standards and best practices
- Ensure that all applications meet business requirements
- Ability to work under pressure, multi task and use your capabilities to proactively implement solutions
- be willing to work flexible hours where necessary

Permanent Position

Remuneration: Negotiable based on ability with experience as a secondary consideration

Please send CV’s to production@jdconsulting.co.za

Popularity: 4% [?]

It seems as if Google will probably be implementing pageload speed to their algorithm. Of course, this does make sense… somewhat. The quicker the page loads, the quicker you get the information, the happier you are. Right? Right. I guess this makes Google (and every other search engine) happy as well due to the fact that their bandwidth usage drops, and crawling speeds pick up making available more capacity for more information to be crawled at the end of the day. Which in turn is good for us at the end of the day

Just think about this for a minute. If there are 120billion websites (wild guess), and lets say 5% increase their speed effeciency by 0.1seconds. Thats means that 166 666 site hours have been saved. Quite a lot isnt’ it?

Google ofcourse created their own software for web developers, they wouldn’t want them using Yahoo!’s YSlow would they?

Download Googles Pageload Speed Tool to see how your site compares to the best practises.

Popularity: 17% [?]

With the official release HTML 5  in 2022 around the corner, it’s still a good idea to keep up to date with what is happening in the world of W3C, and with the working draft sitting at around 773 pages, you can only imagine the amount of work that has been done and still needs to be done. October 2009 is the last call for the HTML 5 working draft, so with all that in mind, lets take a look at a simplified overview of whats going on in HTML 5.

HTML 5 will be fully backwards-compatible as well as having the ability of a javascript-accessible built in SQL database which will render the current cookie method laughable in terms of the amount of information that could be stored. Also, in an effort to make website source more “legible”, a heap of new elements are being developed, some of which are <nav>, <article>, <header>, <canvas>, <video>, <audio>, <command> and <figure>. New input types are also being developed to ease the ever-fustrated web developer. Inputs such as ‘Date’ will become a common tool which replaces the old javascript calenders and another new feature will include browser supported form validation which will make web application development a walk in the park.

With the last HTML update being in September 1999 (4.01 Specification), it is evident that HTML 5 is definately long overdue.

Keep in mind that “HTML 5″ refers to the W3C specification name, while “HTML5″ refers to the document type.

You may have already noticed that some websites are using HTML 5. Firefox 3.5 includes the <audio>, <video> and <canvas> tags while Chrome and Safari are already supporting key features of HTML 5.

Here is a simple HTML 5 blog example:

<body>

 <header>
  <h1>My Blog!</h1>

 <nav>
   <h1>Navigation Links</h1>
   <ul>
    <li><a href="articles.html">All articles</a></li>
    <li><a href="latest.html">Latest Articles</a></li>
   </ul>
  </nav>

 </header>

 <article>
  <p> Article Goes Here</p>
 </article>

 <footer>
  <p>Copyright © 2022 My Blog</p>
 </footer>

</body>

To clarify the strikeout of 2022 above, there seems to be quite a bit of confusion going around on the web with regards to this topic.
2022 will be the final proposed recommendation of HTML 5 and October 2009 is the last call for the HTML 5 working draft. The final proposed recommendation requires complete compatibility of at least 2 browsers, and with that in mind, CSS 2.1 also remains in development until 2 browsers fully support all of it’s features.

Popularity: 44% [?]