SEO and Tabs

The company I work at for my day job just recently implemented tabs in their website page design. I found out because I happend to go on the website to look for something. Not a good way for a content manager to find out about a major UI interface.

As one of the staff responsible for a great number of programs with landing pages, I've had to scramble a little to figure out how to correct copy and best make it fit in with the new UI.

Each landing page now has an area of text at the top to provide some brief orienting introduction, then there are a complement of tabs underneath with each tab assigned a particular topic area or subsection of the project/service/product.

Tabs need to be concise for design esthetics and usability to the reader. We don't have yet guidelines for content length nor subhead formatting, etc. Which creates a bit of a pain point for me as I share content revisions with a very busy IT department.

The "about" tab is first, and provides some orientation to the reader about the value proposition and help them decide if they want to keep reading the next tabs. Then depending on the content and information that needs to be shared about the particular program or product, each following tab will have concise information about that pertinent sub-area. This is ideal for intuitive UI that helps the reader help themselves

These sort of changes are best implemented with a little key stakeholder discussion ahead of time, so that the content managers work with IT closely on effecting a smooth transition to the new UI. Something that didn't take place in this case. Make sure this doesn't happen to you.

So as part of my own self-education in regards to optimizing content in this new UI (tabs) environment, I am now reading up about tab navigation best practices and SEO for pages featuring tab navigation. It's not rocket science, I'm sure, but it doesn't hurt to scan the market and read up on it to make sure the bases are covered.

Here are some of the more interesting articles I discovered and a summary of why:

• The Eric Pender Blog, Tabs and SEO: Things You Need to Consider - the importance of focused content, ways to program/present tabs, deep linking content on tabs.
• The Simon Kenyon Shepard Blog, smartTabs: SEO Friendly Ajax Tabs - similar content on a site makes search engines work harder, the ease of sharing tab content, html anchors.
• The Tony Adam Blog, AJAX and Non-JavaScript Experiences for SEO Friendly Websites - importance of indexing tab content.

I will keep reading and if any nitty gritty how-to articles show up I'll post about them. What do you do to help make your tabs the best they can be? What reading do you suggest?

Feedburner vs. Google Webmaster Tools

I've always wondered what happens to legacy subscribers to a blog, once the author switches the feed to feedburner--vs. the usual feed provider (blogger in the case of this and my other two blogs). Well, I finally got my answer, reading through some of my stats on Google Webmaster Tools:

Webmaster Tools subscriber stats reflect known subscribers to feeds hosted on your verified domain (http://www.example.com). FeedBurner sees all requests for your feeds. If a Google user is subscribed to the FeedBurner version of your feed (for example, http://feeds.feedburner.com/yourfeed or http://feeds.example.com/yourfeed), this information will not be reflected in Webmaster Tools subscriber stats, but it will be included in your FeedBurner stats.

Guess that's all I had to hear (er...read) to feel more at ease. ^_^

Google Webmaster Tools

I've been uploading my different blog URLs and other site URLs to Webmaster Tools to see how their tools can help me optimize the sites.

Apparently, I figure out, you must use no-space tags for blog entries or else risk an alert. I also noticed that videos posts I've uploaded cause issues either because of the title or the tags. I'm not sure why, so I'll need to spend some time researching that.

UPDATE: the "URL restricted by robots.txt" message for the URL of various posts (approx 23 on my personal blog and 5 on my beauty blog), seem to be one of those rare occurrences that don't mean anything apparently, according to this forum post.

Have you tried Google Webmaster Tools? How does it help you?

Blog Trifecta and Revamp

(this has also been posted on my personal blog)

Starting this past Thursday I revamped my two blogs (this one and this other one) and added a third--this one you're reading right now. My third blog will focus on Internet, related book reviews, and other assorted and related matter I run into on my cyber-wanderings.

If you look at the right-hand side of any of these three blogs, you'll notice:

• a chiclet to add this to your technorati favorites
• a chiclet to share this blog to any amount of social sites
• you can subscribe to my blog RSS or via email updates
  
• my adsense box
• my Google Associates store link -- check out my store and suggested items!
  
• the about me blurb and pic
  
• Each blog varies in the content from here on down: and a number of links, favorite blogs, RSS feeds ofinterest, my twitter feed (@jeda_21), etc.
  

I'm very proud of myself for having figured out how to add adsense to blogger, how to create an amazon associates store **and** link it to the blogs, and for having figured out how to add an RSS feed or email option for subscribers (courtesy of Feedburner). This is an achievement for someone who has moderate-to-high old skool HTML skills and a lot of persistence and investigative skills... if I do say so myself ^_^

*pats self on back* ^_^;

Google Webmaster Tools

I recently became acquainted with Google Webmaster Tools through a recent post on Google Blogoscoped.

I learned about way too many things to mention here. But suffice it to say that I wanted to take advantage of the Webmaster Tools data mining for my Google Pages personal webpage in the summer of 2008, as well as my two blogs.

But, as it often-times happens to me, whenever I'm trying to learn and implement something new on Blogger, the Help area wasn't as much help as I'd like. So here comes my trusty Google search, to save the day, and this most excellent tutorial. It's the best result in my search for an easy-to-follow tutorial on using Google Webmaster Tools in Blogger.