I used [URL=http://nikon.xphost.org/]nikon cameras[/url] for a long time.

Cheers

Thanks.

Norm,

Interesting to hear. And I agree, the sensible thing is for the right thing to pay off.

Yep, definitely. I also sincerely hope that the search engines will b e able to stifle such bad practices, so it doesn’t pay off in any way.

In my experience, ranking goes fairly fast, if you have better code and copy than your competitors (being mildly popular also helps, of course :-)).

But yes, what you mention is a very common problem: people expect to be no. 1 in search engines immediately, and more often than not, uses shady methods in some desperate vain. In the long run, choosing the correct path together with patience is the only valid option.

Interesting! Thanks for the link, it is well worth to ponder about this.

eugene,

Oh, absolutely. But everyone wants to be #1, right? Both in accessibility/usability as well as search engine ranking.

And if you have really relevant content, eventually other relevant sites will start linking to you, there goes the PageRank up.

Simply follow the (google) guidelines and your site will be indexed, by any search engine.

I just read, at USC Annenberg Online Jouralism Review, http://www.ojr.org/ojr/stories/070312ruel/, the results of a Nielsen eyetracking study where Web pages were re-designed for faster reading AND better retention or comprehension. Interestingly, in the first example what appears to be a paragraph-long preamble is stripped out and replaced with a subheading. Overall, the recommendation was to increase white-space and use more subheadings and bulleted-lists. What this amounts to, of course, is there being less text in each section and on the page.

The question arises, if less text in an area is a usability feature–for everyone? or for visual-content users?– does this conflict with SEO strategies and “text-heavy” or keyword-dense copy-writing?

The thing is that you can probably always get the text indexed, some way or another. But how do you make sure that it get s the same value/weight as all the other text?

Darren,

Build websites for the users

Oh, absolutely, and I agree a 100%. But when doing that, it is good to know if there are any important semantic factors that will, as the same time as making the web site more usable and accessible, also get the most correct and suiting search engine indexing.

telga,

I’m not sure about having the preamble in a H" element; if it’s a proper sub-heading, sure, but if you have one or several full sentences it isn’t really a heading anymore, but a regular paragraph (although more important than the following ones).

But, like you say, accessibility and usability overall.

Aaron,

That sounds like a good approach and one that I’ve been thinking of. However, at the same time, it looks like exactly the same way a spammer/cheater would tackle it, and how would search engines know how to differ those two?

And your examples of new semantic elements are perfect, and I wish we had them!

Ross,

Good input. I’m still that good semantic code in conjunction with great copy will help a lot, but absolutely, domains and trust are indeed important factors.

Binny,

Semantically, that sounds great. I just wonder to what degree search engines parse and analyze semantic class names, though.

Jermayn,

Yeah, definitely. People will shower you with tips, and it’s only a few of them that are actually good ones. But hey, that seems to be applicable for any area in life, right?

There is a lot more emphasis on domain/site trust than on page factors now days. That is not to say that they don’t make a difference, just that you should do the best you can with in good practice and then start thinking about off page strategies.