All Entries in the "Website Design" Category

The New iPad and SEO

Ok, that is confusing isn’t it? Why would the iPad have anything to do with SEO? It also has a little to do with web design.

FLASH

First of all, users of the new iPad won’t be able to use any website that has flash. I don’t like a lot of flash on any website, but there are some good uses for it. I wonder why Steve Jobs and Apple wouldn’t make the iPad flash-compatible?

I found this at Adobe.com

It looks like Apple is continuing to impose restrictions on their devices that limit both content publishers and consumers. Unlike many other ebook readers using the ePub file format, consumers will not be able to access ePub content with Apple’s DRM technology on devices made by other manufacturers.  And without Flash support, iPad users will not be able to access the full range of web content, including over 70% of games and 75% of video on the web.

If I want to use the iPad to connect to Disney, Hulu, Miniclip, Farmville, ESPN, Kongregate, or JibJab — not to mention the millions of other sites on the web — I’ll be out of luck.

SEO

This is only speculation. But Ian Hickson of Google and David Hyatt of Apple are  the HTML 5 editors. HTML 5 is being worked on right now.

According to Wikipedia;

HTML5 is the proposed next standard for HTML 4.01, XHTML 1.0 and DOM Level 2 HTML. It aims to reduce the need for proprietaryplug-in-based rich internet application (RIA) technologies such as Adobe Flash, Microsoft Silverlight, and Sun JavaFX.

HTML5 introduces a number of new elements and attributes that reflect typical usage on modern Web sites. Some of them are semantic replacements for common uses of generic block (<div>) and inline (<span>) elements, for example <nav> (website navigation block) and <footer>. Other elements provide new functionality through a standardized interface, such as the <audio> and <video> elements.

Ok, what does that have to do with the iPad and how will it affect SEO? With HTML5, there will be a lot of new elements and elements like the <font> and <center> tags will be eliminated. It will be backward compatible, so you don’t have to run change all of your code.

There will be new APIs built into HTML5 to handle canvas elements for immediate mode 2D drawing, Timed media playback, Offline storage databases, Document editing, Drag-and-drop elements like with AJAX, Cross-document messaging, Browser history management, MIME type and protocol handler registration.

In addition to that, it is speculated that HTML 5 will eliminate the problems with compatiblity with proprietary software applications. And it will be friendlier to iPads and other handhelds as well.

HTML 5 will do one more big thing for me. I hate checking the websites I build in IE, Firefox, Safari and every other browser out there. HTML 5 will make all HTML 5-compliant browsers render error the same way.

We don’t yet know all the ways that HTML 5 will improve things, but I can’t wait for the browser compatibility feature. What do you think?

Related articles by Zemanta

• Apple’s iPad — a broken link? (blogs.adobe.com)
• Adobe CTO Defends Flash Against Apple, HTML5 (lifetoup.com)
• Nuanti brings HTML5 and Ogg Theora video to Silverlight (arstechnica.com)
• The Flash saga continues: Adobe responds to charges of “laziness” (tuaw.com)
• Adobe authoring for “HTML5″ (blogs.adobe.com)
• Steve Jobs lights into Adobe, Google (sfgate.com)
• Adobe Says IPhone Risks Losing Customers Without Flash Software (businessweek.com)
• iPad Lacks Flash Support, Adobe Decries Choice (multiplayerblog.mtv.com)

Does W3C Validation Have Anything to do with SEO?

I read a blog post today that offers the top 5 SEO tips for 2010.  In the very first tip it says;

Optimise all your code before sending the new website live

• This is likely to become a concluding ranking factor in the near future for the Google SERPs
• Many tools are available to help you optimise your code such as Google Page Speed and Yahoo’s YSlow

I believe they were talking about clean code that loads fast. I’m not sure what they mean by “concluding ranking factor”, because load time has been a factor for a long time now.

But it brought up a question. A lot of people pay a lot of attention to W3C Validation. It’s a selling point for some web design companies.

But is it or will it be a factor in search engine rankings in the future?

Google.com 45 Errors, 2 warning(s) when I checked.

Yahoo.com had 141 Errors, 28 warning(s)

Bing.com had 12 Errors.

Searching for the term auto parts in Google and the top result is Advanced Auto Parts, 358 Errors, 162 warning(s).

Searching for the term real estate in Yahoo and the top result is Realtor.com, 137 Errors, 4 warning(s)

Searching Bing for the term airplanes and the top result is Wikipedia and that page validated. The number 2 ranked site for airplanes is Airplanes.com, 35 Errors, 17 warning(s)

So besides the Wikipedia result, none of the top ranked sites validated. This is by far not a complete study obviously, but I used 3 different random terms and top results for those terms did not validate and nether did the search engines’ own pages.

So, do you believe that W3C validation has anything to do with SEO?

Can you show examples?