Kavoir » Content / SEO Tips & Tutorials

in .htaccess

Yang Yang — Fri, 02 Dec 2011 04:45:44 +0000

I was debugging about some mod_rewrite errors caused by the .htaccess file on one of my sites and couldn’t solve the problem myself so I opted for a help thread on the SitePoint.com forum. Turned out it’s not the problem of my mod_rewrite rules in .htaccess but some incorrect file permissions that were causing the trouble.

Dklynn was very nice to help me in this regard and offered a gold advice that I thought I should share with you.

You Should NOT Use . Why?

He pointed out that I should get rid of the conditional from the .htaccess file. It’s useless and a complete waste of server resources by all means. No excuses.

Considering the fact that all HTTP requests (including those to trivial assets such as .css, .js, .gif, .jpg, etc., thus each web page download would trigger about 10 or even more HTTP requests) to the Apache web server are handled by the rules in your .htaccess file, I think I should get rid of all such conditionals from all .htaccess files on all my sites, or the server would be doing useless check of “If Module xxx Is Enabled” every time a HTTP request is received…..

With a site receiving 1000 page visits per day, your server would have to do 10,000 such useless checks at the cost server resources and performance.

Many famous 3rd party scripts such as WordPress has in the .htaccess file by default. This is to prevent potential errors should the module was not installed on the client’s production site / server. You should try and remove it. If the mod_rewrite and SEO friendly URLs are working, you can remove it without any problems.

This is pure gold advice offered by Dklynn. Check out his site about Apache mod_rewrite.

SEOmoz Pro Review – Bad Bad Bad

Yang Yang — Mon, 05 Sep 2011 02:29:19 +0000

So I’ve tried the Pro version of SEOmoz, an online SEO software application, for a few days and I think I’ve got to write a review. This would turn out to be very ugly.

Many years ago the features that this system brings to the table could have been useful for the SEO novice, but today almost everything that it does, other systems do better. In addition, most of the tools you need to duplicate this product are either free, or very inexpensive.

One of its primary features is that it crawls your website weekly, and lets you know if you have any broken links or other issues with your site. If you have a Google account, you can simply register your URL with them, and use their free webmaster tools to do the same thing, and it does not cost you $99 a month like this product does. Here’s the link for Google Webmasters Tools http://www.google.com/webmasters/.

The next claim to fame that this item promotes is on-page optimization. This is a very simple concept to understand and implement. There are many articles on the internet that you can read for free that will tell you exactly how to do this. And it’s quite easy.

Essentially, it just comes down to using your primary keywords in the title and a description of that post. There are a few other things you will need to do besides what was mentioned above, but not too many. Lots of WordPress plugins have been created to help you in this regard. Simply search for ‘wordpress SEO plugins’. Some of them are totally free while some of them may charge a humble one-time fee which is exponentially lower than $99 / month. And they do the job very well.

Thirdly, it keeps an eye on your competition for you. Great, like you could not just use Google, Yahoo, or Bing to accomplish the same thing. It will also tell you all of your competitor’s backlinks for only $99 a month. If you would like to find out that very same information, there are tons of free ways to do that. Just google.

The final item they would like to impress you with is that the software will continue to improve and evolve over time. Well, for $99 a month it better, because it is pretty close to being useless right now.

The only thing I appreciate is their blog. It’s the best SEO information outlet I’ve seen. No one ever comes close. You would learn a hell lot more about SEO from there in an hour than from any other sources combined in a whole year.

For this review of SEOmoz Pro, the paid SEO productivity application, we give it a big fat zero stars, with 5 stars being the best. What else can we say about this thing, it is pretty much as bad as it gets. There is nothing that it does now, that cannot be accomplished for free with another application, or by researching a few articles on the internet. But if you don’t mind spending a *premium* price for a premium *looking* application, by all means, go ahead and sign up with it.

How to Change the Homepage Title of vBulletin Forum?

Yang Yang — Sat, 26 Mar 2011 05:06:51 +0000

By default, only the forum name / title is displayed in the tag of the homepage of your vBulletin forum, which is far from ideal in terms of SEO. One should give a much more descriptive title to the home page of the forum other than the mere name of it.

To do this:

Log in to the /admincp of your vBulletin forum
From the left administrative menu, Styles & Templates –> Style Manager –> Select Edit Templates in the right drop down of the current style set.
In the left selection of templates, double click Forum Home Templates –> double click FORUMHOME.
Now opens the homepage template of your forum, search for ‘’ and you would find the HTML tag to edit.</li> <li>Add something descriptive and keywords-rich in the <title> tag and click Save.
Done!

vBulletin is such a sophisticated application with a very large user base. Took me some time to find this solution. Hope it helps! Check out how I changed the homepage title of the forum for Go.

A few SEO tips

Yang Yang — Wed, 10 Nov 2010 02:39:41 +0000

Haven’t come up with any solidly helpful posts recently so I thought I’d throw in this one. These are some of the things I learned the hard way in the past few years for ranking my websites in Google. Hopefully you would find something new in here.

I rely on SEO to get traffic – in most cases, it yields the best traffic across all possible sources. With good SEO (both on-site content optimization and off-site reputation / link building), it’s hard to not make money. Especially if you are an expert in Internet marketing (niche research, reputation building & management, consumer psychology, landing page tuning, blah blah blah…), it’s even harder to not be rich. Making good money is easy, you just need time.

Don’t use a host that’s POPULAR and CHEAP.

Really popular hosts like hostgator and dreamhost have millions of domains hosted with them. Because they are cheap, spammers like them and Google knows it. I frequently launch new sites and from my experience with dreamhost, after submitting the new site at here, without building any backlinks, it typically takes 1 week or more to get it indexed.

However with hawkhost and wiredtree, it’s totally different situation. Without any initial backlinks, new sites can be indexed in Google 1 day after submission, even when it’s just a blank site with an empty Apache index page. Sometimes I didn’t even have to manually submit the site and it magically and automatically got in Google’s index.

Sites hosted with hawkhost tend to be more stable in Google’s index. However, it’s hard to keep a new site (with merely any content) in Google’s index if it is hosted with dreamhost (and similarly very popular hosts with cheap shared plans). Google would soon get rid of your new site if you don’t keep working on it.

Have a 4 year old website.

Adsense is one of my favorite money makers and my most steady stream of Adsense income comes from a site I built in 2006. I created some nice content (very nice and very original) back then and I just left it there.

I made only $10 a month from the site in the first year and after some very frustrating ups and downs, it’s gradually climbing up. Now, 4 years later, it’s averaging $600 a month. To be honest, I never actually spent much time on it at all. No link building nor frequent content updating no nothing and it’s now making me 600 bucks a month. Not much, but still.

Not only is it receiving large amount of steady traffic, new content are generally very well positioned in front spots in search engine results. The older the site, the more authoritative it can get from search engine’s point of view.

Time is the ultimate distinguisher between builders and spammers. Spammers come and go, hit and run. They are always impatient, looking to make the quick buck with a spammy site. Once they find it’s not profitable, they’ll stop renewing the domain after the 1st year. Google knows this too well.

So most of your sites would not actually start performing in terms of search engine traffic until at least 1 year after domain registration. Yet most people are too obsessed with quick results and never wait that long. They kill their sites just before they can make them decent money.

Be natural.

Google is becoming smarter and smarter. I would never go against them by challenging their intelligence and capabilities to identify spam (or partial spam).

Sites I intentionally optimize in title, description and content keywords as well as off-site link anchor texts never seem to get anywhere substantial. It’s boring and it’s chores. It’s not worth it. I can spend the same time and dollar bill in creating content that’s useful and exciting. Best of all, it’s much more fun that will keep you going!

Duplicate content is a myth.

While being original is absolutely a must in ultra saturated / competitive niches, duplicate content isn’t that big a deal in most niches.

Forget SEO. Start making friends and never stop creating stuff.

I’ve been doing SEO for 4 years and I can finally say, this is the ultimate SEO tip.

Auto-generated content by user searches

Yang Yang — Wed, 29 Sep 2010 02:45:03 +0000

A not-so-commonly employed content strategy is to automatically generate custom content by user searches. For example, if you’ve got a popular blog, there will be a lot of users searching for things they want to find on your blog. It’s an obvious sign that they want you to write about them. While you are recommended to keep an eye on what they are searching so as to provide content accordingly, you can also make the blog automatically generate search results pages by the searching terms.

I tried to find some WordPress plugins that do this for us but was unable to find any. Basically, the plugin would record all unique user search phrases and present them on a page as a list for the search engines to index the results pages with the custom page titles.

You should use the search term prominently in the page title and in the h1 tag. After the search engine has indexed the search results pages, you will have a lot of custom content pages AND best of all, they are exactly what users and potential visitors want to read. I have seen pretty exciting increase in searching traffic for my quotes site after I have implemented the strategy. The quotes search automatically generates a lot of custom pages by the searching phrase. What the user is searching is usually stuff that’s hard to come by in other sites or search engines so Google is pretty hungry in indexing these pages.

Use robots.txt Disallow directive to forbid spiders and search engine robots

Yang Yang — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 08:52:16 +0000

Just like .htaccess, robots.txt resides at the document root of your domain. It’s a text configuration file containing directives or rules any well behaved web spiders or search engine robots should respect. While you can use .htaccess to forcibly prohibit any visits (including those of human visitors) to a certain part of your site, robots.txt just deals with automated web page spiders such as googlebot.

To forbid any robot spiders to access and index /includes/ and /search/ directories of your site, simply write a robots.txt file and put in the following rules:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /includes/
Disallow: /search/

The asterisk * stands for any robot. By these rules, all robot spiders should not access nor index /includes/ and /search/. This is a good way to protect sensitive data and stop search engines from indexing certain part of your site.

Similarly, you can write rules targeted at a specific search engine:

GoogleBot – Google
Slurp – Yahoo
MSNBot – Bing

(Note that these search engine providers may very probably have more than one bots, the listed bots are just the most common ones at present.)

For example, to prohibit Google from accessing and indexing /ihategoogle and any web documents under it, use rule:

User-agent: GoogleBot
Disallow: /ihategoogle/

There is no Allow directive

Therefore, to allow a spider to access your site, say nothing or:

User-agent: GoogleBot
Disallow:

To allow a single bot such as GoogleBot to have the only privilege to access your entire site:

User-agent: GoogleBot
Disallow: 

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

Modify Index Homepage Title of MyBB Forum

Yang Yang — Sat, 13 Jun 2009 08:53:44 +0000

Upon a fresh installation of MyBB forum software, the default homepage title is the name of the forum. Sometimes you want to add more keywords in it or change it in some way for the sake of SEO but don’t want to tamper with the forum site title itself because that’d make it look long and nasty.

How do we do that?

Simple, just follow me: Log into the Admin CP -> Templates & Styles -> Templates -> Default Templates -> Index Page Templates -> index. Now you should see the HTML template of MyBB index page.

Locate this line:

{$mybb->settings['bbname']}

And possibly, change it to:

{$mybb->settings['bbname']} - site keywords, your keywords and more keywords

Just change it according to your SEO keywords research.

Web Hosting IP and SEO: Are You A Slum Dog or Are You A Millionaire?

Yang Yang — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 13:51:33 +0000

I don’t know for sure how Google takes the web hosting IP into account of determining your website’s ranking position, but I’m sure they do take that in consideration, albeit not so significantly as a maker or a breaker.

Most of my sites are currently on DreamHost and every time I register a new domain, make a grand new website with original home page content and submit it to Google, I have to wait like 2 weeks to a month or so to get indexed, even after I have linked the new site from one of my most powerful pages.

For one reason or another, I decided to give it a try with another hosting company, Rackspace Cloud. I have been with them for nearly a month now and everything’s been smooth and pleasant, no downtime that I can experience of.

The most exciting part is, however, that after submitting all 3 freshly registered domains (which I’m sorry that I can’t disclose) with 3 blank home pages that are not even HTML, containing just a string text of the domain, to Google, they all got indexed in less than 3 days.

The home pages don’t even have a title and I never bothered to link to them either. Strange, but sort of understandable.

DreamHost is currently hosting like 700,000 domains. Imagine a huge city that everyone has some websites hosted by them. Google knows that your websites are with them by the IP which may very well has been used by some spammer or spamming sites before or even worse, you are currently sharing the IP with another spammer or slug dog rubbish-quality-seeking-money-quick kind of site. Even the IP itself has a clean history and is only used by fairly good sites, Google knows you are with DH by the IP range chart and because of the simple fact that a lot of sites on DH are not so good, it looks down upon you, with good reason. You can’t blame it.

However this is not to say all websites with DH are bad or worthless ones, a lot of them are very outstanding actually. Therefore, Google has thought about it and decides once a site crosses a threshold that’s determined by the content originality, update frequency and number of quality backlinks, it will let go of the fact that you are hosting in a bad neighborhood. But before your site hits that mark, it will be treated like it’s a slug dog because it is born in a spammy IP range.

You can still make wonderful things happen, but slightly more difficult.

This is not just about DreamHost. All heavily marketed cheap / affordable web hosting companies have the same problems and may pose similar SEO disadvantages to your sites, though maybe in a gentle manner. Because they are cheap, they have long since become a paradise for underprivileged short-sighted webmasters to build under-quality sucking websites.

On the contrary, if you host your sites at a premium hosting provider with your own fresh IP addresses, Google will be more likely to show love to them from the very beginning.

Anyway, this is just my theory that’s never been practically testified. But I have always held faith in the Law of Attraction: Everything that happens to you is attracted by yourself.

How to know if your site has been penalized by Google for malicious software or suspicious content?

Yang Yang — Wed, 20 May 2009 02:19:18 +0000

Back when WordPress was pretty young there’s some loopholes that enable hackers to inject unauthorized and dangerous HTML code into your website pages, thus promoting the distribution of malware that damages the end users computer. I was once there and got penalized by Google for one of my sites. However, they are gentle enough to detect that this might not be my fault but still decided to bring down the overall ranking of all the pages on that site for a while to protect Internet users and notify me.

If you have spotted anything suspicious or sense that your overall site ranking is down, you may want to check it out for sure if your site has been infected with malware or anything else that’s a threat to your site and the visitors.

Just go here: http://www.google.com/safebrowsing/diagnostic?site=example.com

And Google will present you a detailed report of what they have found on your site for the last 90 days.

I dismiss SEO

Yang Yang — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 06:34:13 +0000

Other than a descriptive title and a few describing words about what the current page is about, there’s no more needed to be done SEO-wise. No more. Period.

Why, when I can create art, fulfill dreams, amuse and please my users and make them feel they have never been treated so well on other sites, should I spend majority of the time doing SEO chores and hunting for a few pathetic back links?

Semantic HTML Table Checklist – For The Sake of SEO!

Yang Yang — Sun, 12 Apr 2009 01:49:25 +0000

Semantics is the study and practice of introducing meaning to markups, enabling computers to better understand human language. In real world, it is much more than just academics and web standards.

Google crawlers and ranking calculators are just the sort of computers dealing with large chunks of text data everyday, reading and analyzing millions of pages of HTML documents. While they strive to better understand the articles on the Web, we, the writers and composers of content need to do our part to present as much meaningful information for them as we can, thus gaining upper hand in the search engine ranking war.

As tabular data containers, HTML tables can be a major part of the HTML semantic optimization for SEO. As far as my knowledge extends, below is a complete semantic checklist of HTML tables.

The ‘summary‘ attribute of the table element:
```
 ... 
```
caption element inside a table:
```
...

table caption title
```
Distinct sections of the table: thead for table header, tbody for table body and tfoot for table footer:
```
 ...  ...  ... 
```
There are 2 types of table cells: th and td. th is used for header cells containing the title or descriptive information for the td in the same row or column:
```
Direction: UpDown
Color: BlackWhite
```
In the example snippet above, you may want to specify the header cell in a row or column by the ‘scope‘ attribute:
```
Direction: UpDown
Color: BlackWhite
```
For columns, the value of ‘scope’ can also be ‘col’:
```
PropertyValue 1Value 2
```
which indicates that ‘Value 1′ and ‘Value 2′ is the header cell for the rest of the cells in the same column with each of them.
‘headers‘ attribute for ordinary td or th cells indicate the single or multiple headers for them, usually used in complex structure tables, for example:
```
x = 3y = 4x * y = 12
```
The list of IDs separated by single space: value_x value_y, indicates that this table cell is combinedly determined by the table cells with the respective IDs. It’s a way of specifying multiple semantic headers not necessarily in the same row of column with the original cell.
‘abbr‘ attribute to give an abbreviated version of the cell content which can only be used in header cells:
```
Monday
```
‘axis‘ is yet another way to categorize table cells other than row and column. For example, a series of randomly spread cells are containing the same kind of information and can be seen as the 3rd axis / dimension of the table:
```
4.700
04.710
004.72
```
While you can group similar rows by thead, tbody or tfoot tags, similar columns can be grouped together semantically by the help of col tags and colgroup tags:
```
<col width="20%" class="first-column" />
<colgroup span="2" class="last-columns">
colgroup>


I'm 20% and classed as first-column. I'm 40% and classed as last-columns. I'm 40% and classed as last-columns.
```
This way, table columns can be easily distinguished and styled respectively.

Linking back to start a war!

Yang Yang — Sun, 05 Apr 2009 04:30:04 +0000

While there’s a positive backlink without rel=”nofollow” on an ordinary a tag that adds favorable link juice for the linked site, and there’s a neutral backlink with rel=”nofollow” that does nothing other than sending some clicking traffic, there should also be a negative backlink that’s meant to be in attacking position to the linked site, representing a vote down to the linked site thus its search engine positions.

In a case such as this, people would generally want to link back to the bad guys for the sake of story but wouldn’t want the fight to benefit them in any way and boost their search engine rankings. Instead, Google could introduce a new attribute tag like rel=”hell” or rel=”condemned” or rel=”evil” to accomplish such task.

Imagine people starting to bitch about each other and fighting back and forth with all these sorts of negative backlinks and big guys with strong networks of web presence defaming people who they don’t like.

Isn’t this hilarious! :D

Robots.txt Disallow All and Block Search Engine Spiders

Yang Yang — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 14:50:41 +0000

You can literally block any visitor including search engines and secure the data or information you have on your website by the help of .htaccess Deny From All. A similar solution is to have a robots.txt, majorly for search engines.

To disallow all search engine visits and stop the any spider or crawler, create a robots.txt and put the follow text in it:

User-agent: * Disallow: /

That’s a rather strong statement of close-up, as after you have placed the robots.txt file in the document root of your domain, almost all search engine spiders would stop accessing and indexing your entire site, preventing the precious information that you want to keep private from leaking outside.

Usually, you just want a sub folder / directory under the domain to be excluded from the search engine crawling scope, then below is what you need:

User-agent: * Disallow: /data/

Similarly, put the robots.txt at the root directory of the domain, and all play-by-the-rules search engines would never break your privacy by accessing http://www.yoursite.com/data/ any more.

The Ultimate On-page SEO Checklist – Better SEO, Semantics and Accessibility at The Same Time

Yang Yang — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 13:43:43 +0000

Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 is the Bible of web developers who are responsible for HTML templating and independent content authors who are eager to reach the biggest audience possible. However, if you think that’s just for the sake of that, accessibility, think again.

WCAG is way more than just accessibility, it’s also the technical part of on-page SEO – leveraging the most out of HTML and make your web pages full of meaningful structures serving as containers of keywords.

Keywords alone don’t rule. Much attention should also be paid to how to combine and where to place them. Think about your competitors who are already writing rich HTML structures WCAG-wise such as by implementing the alt property / attribute of img tags. Yep, your explicit content is much better but in this case, without descriptive information for the images, you lost a combat in the search engine ranking war. Search engines just don’t know what the heck the image is about and you lost a good chance to tell them that it’s about the very niche you’ve been focusing on.

HTML?

HTML is the language of the Web. Beginner webmasters who have just started a blog with WordPress may or may not know exactly what it is. Search engines read your content pages which is written in HTML to decide what your content is about and how relevant it is to a search phrase. Therefore, knowing how to write a rich structure HTML content page with as many HTML features as possible is crucial in winning the search engine war.

The most important tag or element of HTML in terms of SEO is undoubtedly . It’s simply the first on-page factor that search engines look into to determine about your pages and what the content is. A page with a title will be significantly more successful than one without. A page with a fully descriptive title that is well optimized in keyword research will be much higher in search engine rankings than one with a poor title. It’s as simple as that.

WCAG?

WCAG is actually not the reason why I’m writing nor is it that for why you are reading this. Technically, it’s how we can make online content better to accommodate as much audience or terminals as possible by optimizing content structures. Accessibility and semantics is the meter and goal of it.

As search engines’ sophistication grows in analyzing large amount of online data, it’s now taking everything into consideration in rating web sites and their pages. HTML is the tool while WCAG is the perfect guideline for us to use that tool to extremes for our own as well as visitors’ sake.

SEO?

SEO is the war to win search engine favors, thus visitors, ultimately buyers.

It’s where the money lies, baby.

Enough for the bullshit, now let’s get something done.

The On-page SEO Checklist

While you may have your own ideas to get things done in a certain way, below are a compilation of guidelines that may help you do them better in providing as much juicy keyword information to search engines as possible – in W3C‘s web standard way!

Provide anchor text that describes the purpose of a link for anchor elements.


  Current routes at Boulders Climbing Gym


   Current routes at Boulders Climbing Gym" />

Combine ordinary text link with an adjacent image that’s relevant for the same destination. Add to the image an alternative text that’s different from the link anchor text.
```
 
   <img src="icon.gif" alt="product listings icon" />
   Products page
 
```
For every image link, try adding a word or two of anchor text to it or at least make sure you have a descriptive alternative text for the image.
Do provide text alternatives for the area elements of image maps.
```
  alt="Reference" />
  alt="Audio visual lab" />
   
```
It helps the search engines as well as other web terminal devices understand the area and the linked resource better.

Provide a descriptive title to every page you create.


   
      <title>On-page SEO Guidelines through WCAG 2.0 Techniquestitle>
   
   
      ...

A good title is worth a thousand dollars.

Provide text and non-text alternatives for object.


  As temperature increases, the molecules in the balloon...


  
    
      As temperature increases, the molecules in the balloon...

Provide definitions for abbreviations by the help of abbr elements.

Sugar is commonly sold in 5 <abbr title="pound">lb. bags.
Welcome to the <abbr title="World Wide Web">WWW!
Tasini <abbr title="and others">et al. v.
The New York Times et al. is the landmark lawsuit
brought by members of the National Writers Union against ......

Provide definitions for acronyms by the help of acronym elements.

The use of <acronym title="Keep It Simple Stupid">KISS became popular in ...
<acronym title="World Wide Web">WWW

Supplement a text link with the title attribute.

title="Read more about failed elephant evacuation">
   Evacuation Crumbles Under Jumbo load

Provide alt attributes and title attributes on images used as submit buttons.
```
  alt="Submit" title="Submit" />
 
```

Use alt attributes on img elements.

alt="Free newsletter.
   Get free recipes, news, and more. Learn more." />

Use table markup to present tabular data and information.

<table>
  
     
    Monday
    Tuesday
    Wednesday
    Thursday
    Friday
  
  
    8:00-9:00
    Meet with Sam
     
     
     
     
  
  
    9:00-10:00
     
     
    Doctor Williams
    Sam again
    Leave for San Antonio
  
table>

Use caption elements to associate table captions with data tables.
```
<caption>Schedule for the week of March 6caption>
...
 
```

Use summary attribute that describes the content of the table.

summary="Schedule for Route 7 going downtown. Service begins
at 4:00 AM and ends at midnight. Intersections are listed in the top row.
Find the intersection closest to your starting point or destination, then read
down that column to find out what time the bus leaves that intersection.">
  
  …

    State & First
    State & Sixth
    State & Fifteenth
    Fifteenth & Morrison
  
    4:00
    4:05
    4:11
    4:19

State & First	State & Sixth	State & Fifteenth	Fifteenth & Morrison
4:00	4:05	4:11	4:19

Use the scope attribute to associate header cells and data cells in data tables.

 
  Contact Information
  
    
    scope="col">Name
    scope="col">Phone#
    scope="col">Fax#
    scope="col">City
  

    1.
    Joel Garner
    412-212-5421
    412-212-5400
    Pittsburgh
  

    2.
    Clive Lloyd
    410-306-1420
    410-306-5400
    Baltimore
  

    3.
    Gordon Greenidge
    281-564-6720
    281-511-6600
    Houston

Contact Information
	scope="col">Name	scope="col">Phone#	scope="col">Fax#	scope="col">City
1.	Joel Garner	412-212-5421	412-212-5400	Pittsburgh
2.	Clive Lloyd	410-306-1420	410-306-5400	Baltimore
3.	Gordon Greenidge	281-564-6720	281-511-6600	Houston

Use id and headers attributes to associate data cells with header cells in data tables.


   
     Homework
     Exams
     Projects
   
   
     id="e1" headers="e">1
     2
     Final
     1
     2
     Final
   
   
    15%
    15%
    15%
    20%
    10%
    10%
    15%

Homework	Exams	Projects
id="e1" headers="e">1	2	Final	1	2	Final
15%	15%	15%	20%	10%	10%	15%

Use ol, ul and dl elements for lists.

<ol>
  Mix eggs and milk in a bowl.
  Add salt and pepper.
ol>

<ul>
  Milk
  Eggs
  Butter
ul>

<dl>
  blink
  turn on and off between .5 and 3 times per second
  
dl>

Use definition lists for lists of terms and definitions.

<dl title="Nautical terms">
  <dt>Port
  <dd>
    Port is the nautical term (used on
      boats and ships) that refers to the left side
      of a ship, as perceived by a person facing towards
      the bow (the front of the vessel).
  
  Starboard
  
    Starboard is the nautical term (used
      on boats and ships) that refers to the right
      side of a vessel, as perceived by a person
      facing towards the bow (the front of the vessel).

Use h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6 to identify headings and different page sections.


 Stock Market Up Today
 

 

 
 
 <h2>Site Navigationh2>
 
 

 
 
 <h1>Stock Market up todayh1>
 
 

 
 
 <h2>Related linksh2>

Use label elements to associate text labels with form controls.
```
<label for="markuplang">HTML
```
Use longdesc attributes to further describe important non-text objects such as images.
```
longdesc="chartdesc.html"/>
```

Use noembed element with embed element.


  <noembed>
    Transcript of "The history of Rome"
  noembed>

Use semantic markup such as strong and em elements to mark emphasized or special text.

 ...What she <em>reallyem> meant to say was, "This is not ok,
 it is <strong>excellentstrong>"!...

Use blockquote element for block quotations and q element for inline quotations.

The following is an excerpt from the The Story of my Life by Helen Keller
 <blockquote>
   Even in the days before my teacher came, I used to feel along the square stiff boxwood
   hedges, and, guided by the sense of smell, would find the first violets and lilies.
   There, too, after a fit of temper, I went to find comfort and to hide my hot face
   in the cool leaves and grass.
 blockquote>

 Helen Keller said, "<q>Self-pity is our worst enemy and if we yield to it,
we can never do anything good in the world.q>"

Use the body of object elements.

 
  Here is some text that describes the object and its operation.

Use the dfn element to identify the defining instance of a word.

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines require that non-text content
has a text alternative. <dfn>Non-text contentdfn> is content that is not a sequence
of characters that can be programmatically determined or where the sequence is
not expressing something in human language; this includes ASCII Art (which is a
pattern of characters), emoticons, leetspeak (which is character substitution), and
images representing text .

Use the dir attribute on an inline element to resolve problems with nested directional runs.
```
The title says "dir="rtl">פעילות הבינאום, W3C" in Hebrew.
 
```
rtl stands for right to left while ltr is left to right.

Use the language attributes on the html element.


lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">

  document écrit en français
  


...document écrit en français...

Use lang attributes to identify specific changes in the human language.

xml:lang="de" lang="de">
  
    Da dachte der Herr daran, ihn aus dem Futter zu schaffen,
    aber der Esel merkte, daß kein guter Wind wehte, lief fort
    und machte sich auf den Weg nach Bremen: dort, meinte er,
    könnte er ja Stadtmusikant werden.

Use the link element and navigation tools to designate page relationships.

<link rel="Contents" href="Contents.html" title="Table of Contents"  />

Use ruby element to provide information about the pronunciation and meaning of a run of text where meaning is determined by pronunciation.
```
  <ruby>
    慶應大学
    (
    けいおうだいがく
    )
  ruby>
   
```

Use the title attribute of the frame and iframe elements.


  
    A simple frameset document
  
  
    title="Main menu" />
    title="Documents" />
    
      <body>
        <a href="lib.html" title="Library link">Select to
        go to the electronic library</a>
      </body>

Use the title attribute to identify form controls when the label element cannot be used.
```
Search for:

 
```
Use null alt text and no title attribute on img elements for images that user browsers or search engines should ignore.
```
 alt="" />
```

Provide a description for groups of form controls using fieldset and legend elements.


  <fieldset>
    <legend>Your preferred philosopherlegend>
    
    Socrates
    
    Plato
    
    Aristotle
  fieldset>

Ensure that opening and closing tags are used according to specification.
Ensure that Web pages are well-formed with respect to XML.

Use optgroup to group option elements inside a select.


    What is your favorite food?

Use the title attribute to provide context-sensitive help.

Address: 
title="Address example: 101 Collins St, Melbourne, Australia" />

What a list.

Make yourself familiar with each and every of these guidelines and your days as a HTML student is well over. It’s also a very good start for SEO courses.

Top Sites Visited on Internet, Download the Free Top Sites List (Top 1,000,000 Sites in Traffic)

Yang Yang — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 09:35:03 +0000

Alexa, the traffic company under Amazon is now releasing the top sites ranking data free.

Updated daily, it’s currently the most authoritative top sites ranking data by traffic you can find on the Web. Download the list here. It presents the 1 million sites most visited around the globe.

Other than Alexa, you can also have reference to some other sources of top sites listings, such as Quantcast’s top million sites rankings.

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