13 Mar 10 Provide Alternative Content for Flash Files on iPhone and Flash Disabled Browsers
Problem: How to downgrade your site gracefully for non-flash browsers such as the iPhone. The iphone is nice enough to show you a icon in place of the flash content so you’re aware that something is not displaying correctly on the page. However, this can get in the way of a good design.
Solution:
You can’t use Dreamweaver’s built in javascript to drag and drop the SWF on to the page, unfortunately. You have to use a different javascript class file from Adobe, SWFObject 2.
Here’s the help page from Adobe going over how to use it;
Alternative Content for SWF
In case that page is ever taken down, here is the link to the zip file with the examples of how to use the object.
alternative_content_examples.zip
20 Aug 07 SEO Gold
I just stumbled upon a very valuable resource (in my opinion). I’ve taken to reading SEO blogs to get insight into what ranks one in Google and the other engines. SEOMoz surveyed the top SEO professionals and did a great job of organizing their opinions.
Here’s the link:
http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors
13 Jun 07 Is ASP.NET Viewstate bad for SEO?
One of the features of ASP.NET is that it remembers the state of controls that are on the page throughout the page cycle. It does this automatically for you by creating a hidden field called Viewstate.
This field can often times become very large. This can impact SEO because search engine bots don’t like to wade through lots of code to get to the content. Many SEOs will tell you to optimize your code so as to remove all needless HTML, Javascript and CSS from the page and to use external files whenever possible.
I researched this recently and found a good forum thread on this topic.
http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum47/2044.htm
It goes into several methods for working around ASP.NET’s viewstate for SEO.
The first is to disable viewstate all together:
< %@ Page EnableViewState="false" %>
or
remove the runat=server attribute of the form tag. (I have not tried that)
The second is to minimize the size of the viewstate field by removing the runat=server attribute of all controls you don’t need to remember their state.
The last thing they recommended was to move the viewstate field to the bottom of the page. There is some code there that supposidly did this, but I haven’t tried it. Keep in mind that the post is dated 2004 so I don’t know if it willl work without bugs in ASP.NET 2.0
Here is the excerpt from the post:
Actually…I just found the code in the DNN project…they use it in a base page…if you are not familiar with that it is a class that inherits from Inherits System.Web.UI.Page and then any page you make should inherit from your custom base page. You could also probably copy and past the below code into each of your pages.
' This method overrides the Render() method for the page and moves the ViewState
' from its default location at the top of the page to the bottom of the page. This
' results in better search engine spidering.
'
Protected Overrides Sub Render(ByVal writer As System.Web.UI.HtmlTextWriter)
Dim stringWriter As System.IO.StringWriter = New System.IO.StringWriter
Dim htmlWriter As HtmlTextWriter = New HtmlTextWriter(stringWriter)
MyBase.Render(htmlWriter)
Dim html As String = stringWriter.ToString()
Dim StartPoint As Integer = html.IndexOf("<input type=""hidden"" name=""__VIEWSTATE""")
If StartPoint />= 0 Then 'does __VIEWSTATE exist?
Dim EndPoint As Integer = html.IndexOf("/>", StartPoint) + 2
Dim ViewStateInput As String = html.Substring(StartPoint, EndPoint - StartPoint)
html = html.Remove(StartPoint, EndPoint - StartPoint)
Dim FormEndStart As Integer = html.IndexOf("") - 1
If FormEndStart >= 0 Then
html = html.Insert(FormEndStart, ViewStateInput)
End If
End If
writer.Write(html)
End Sub
18 Jul 06 Digg Blog Integration Improvements
According to Digg’s blog, they’ve just released a blog widget that allows you to show the number of diggs a current story has received.
This will be a great tool to increase the number of diggs your story can receive. It looks fairly easy to implement as well:
-Digg Story Button
Once your story has been successfully submitted you can now display the number of diggs and allow users to digg your content directly by using the…
15 Jul 06 The NOODP Meta Tag
Matt Cutts just wrote a post recently on Google adopting NOODP meta tag. It specifies that the SERPs (search result pages) shouldn’t use the description from your Open Directory Project listing (ODP for short, located at dmoz.org). MSN already supports this feature.
Having a listing in the ODP helps tremendously in getting traffic to your site from the directory itself as well as increased traffic from the search engines. If you have a high quality site, I suggest you submit it for approval.
This tag is great though. I hadn’t thought of it, but – what if the editor writes a description of your site that you don’t like? What if your description is several years old? Without this tag and feature, you’d have to be content with the search engines describing your site using the data from the ODP.
Good feature.
Related Posts:
29 Dec 05 Google – The World View
From Google Labs:
Animation: The paper references this movie showing how the distribution of requests to google.com around the world changed through the day on August 14, 2003.
13 Sep 05 Google TrustRank
This is a highly insightful post on a factor that most SEOs are missing out on.
