I recently attended PubCon 2010 in Las Vegas, NV. The conference ran 8 tracks with 4 sessions every day. With 32 sessions to choose from eachday, it was a task to choose 1 session to the exclusion of 7 others.
The frist session I attended was CSS and HTML Today. It was a panel of 4 industry experts moderated by Ralf Schwoebel. Each panelist presented info about different topics related to CSS and HTML.
First up was Benj Arriola, SEO Director, Internet Marketing, Inc.
SEO Tip from Benj: If you have multiple links on a page that link to the same page, only the text of the first link is considered by the search engines for ranking.
A: Yes it does. Put the main content first, then float the left and right sidebars. Benj referred to A List Apart’s article, Multi-Column Layouts Climb Out of the Box. CSS facilitates the ability to put HTML document components out of order – and – have them display properly on the website.
Next up was Dawn Wentzell, Senior Account Manager, Outspoken Media. Dawn spoke primarily about Microformats.
- Microformats are Structured Markup – Semantic markup
- Google’s rich snippets enhance search results displays
- Google supports microformats, RDFa, Microdata, Good Relations, Merchant Fees, XML sitemaps supported for videos
- hCard
- for people and places – address, phone, name, company – based on a vCard standard
- Mark up your business address on your website with hCard (for Google) – saying since 2007. Google is actively scraping now for this information.
- Linked IN is using hCard to to markup each person’s information
• hReview
o Yelp, Amazon use hReview
Reviews on movies, etc.
See hReview code smoke in code – displays with stars
o Markup testimonials on your website using hReviews
• hCalendar
o on your website events –
o You actually get more screen real estate on Google search results when using hCalendar
• hRecipe
• hProduct – retail products – Combine with hReview – hProduct just announced last week.
• When implemented by more sites, people will be able to comparison shop in Google – by the information that Google supplies in the SERPs
• Use microformats – wide support in technology and Google’s Snippets
• Very easy to implement
• Increase in CTR from SERPs – click through rate increase – if your result has the microformat and others don’t – listing got better click through because listing looked different from the rest.
• Con – other formats – developers like RDFa – which microformat will emerge as the leader?
• Data is easier to scrape
• Only Big Brands have rich snippets displaying in SERPs?? Check this out.
Ted Ulle – HTML5
IETF – Internet … Task Force
HTML 4 – 1999
HTML 5
• Standardizes ERROR handling. All browsers will have the same response.
• Will standardize JavaScript APIs
• Common script functions move to the browser
2006 Google research discovered these standard definitions at websites
o <na>
o <header>
o <footer>
o <section>
o <article>
o <aside>
• Dynamically draw and update graphics with Canvas
• Tags for Magical Forms – Smart tags – autocomplete, placeholder, required, meter, search, email, urls, tel (telephones),
• Media will become browser-native
o Still arguing about format and patents (<audio>, <video>)
• Browser support –
o IE 9 – workaround (JavaScript) for older versions
Todd Keup – coding client side and server side. – jQuery (magnifisites.com)
• JavaScript Library –
• jQuery – easy to use and well documented.
o Code is minimized
o Get source code version
• jQueryUI – User interface for jQuery
• Use tutorials
• jQuery plugin – cycle – rotating carousel/marquee – control button on the bottom right