Posts Tagged ‘seo’

Better Title tags for SEO & Accessibility

Tuesday, April 14th, 2009

As many professional SEO people already know, Web accessibility and SEO are often tied together. Those area of expertise are just starting to hit mainstream Web Development if we can say so. Moving forward to develop better website, search engine optimization knowledge and more recently accessibility are important assets. Let see how title tags and headings can both add context to your site. Helping users with disabilities (can be extend to all users) and search engines getting more out of your website.

  • One of the most important data for people with disabilities is the title tag which is also one of the top ranking factor according to SEOs.
  • The title tag should be as informative as possible on what content the end user will find on that particular page, reuse important keywords that are relevant. Sounds easy, but keep in mind all the others principles it often get tricky.
  • The title tag should be also unique for every page of the site, avoid duplicate title tag which are confusing for users and to some extend for search engine. Duplicate content is still a major issue in SEO. Limit yourself to 65 characters including white spaces.
  • The second most useful element for Accessibility is the first level heading, which is used as a navigation tools to skip block of content. It also give meaning to the content of the page for the user and the search engine, it’s often very similar to the title tag which isn’t a problem if you follow the next recommendation.
  • Keep title tag and headings as short as possible starting with the most useful relevant first. Title tags should length less than 65 characters (including spaces) and about 80 for headings. 80 characters is also a recommended length for a normal line of text on a Website.

Hope you find these useful.

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Posted in Web Development | 1 Comment »

Interactive Strategist at TMP Worldwide

Tuesday, February 3rd, 2009

A new year started and with it came a new job position for me. As a fact I have been pretty quiet over there at my blog, without any substential information about my move. Twitter and facebook have been an incredible way to start rumors and give very fresh info to my friends, contacts, followers and peers. But No Twitter will not take the place of this blog, it just took away a lot of my energy from developing and writing for it. After more than 18months on Twitter I start feeling that sometimes my toughts, ideas and opinions could have a greater impact in the intertubes. Don’t get me wrong I’m really not aiming for fame, but you know just get heard. But as this blog traffic goes so far it doesn’t emerge as something with a decent readership…yes this default layout and erratic blog post should be the reason. So Twitter give me the interaction that I need especially with a lot of great folks in the Montreal Web scene. But I realize that a blog post push you to your limit, in a very different way than a tweet, you need to write down your ideas, to develop them. That’s something I really need to do more and it’s only with a blog that it be achieve. Ok Now you know one of my 09 resolutions.

Working at NVI was a great move

I did work with incredibly talented people at NVI Solutions, a agency on the very edge of everything eMarketing. I learned a lot during this year, a lot of things that have now shaped the way I see the Internet. Search Engine Optimization strategies and tactics and  general search engines strategies to really understand the marketing perspective applied to this medium. I have also been able to eyes open the team to subjects like usability and accessibility wich I’m pretty proud off. Also started a internal Wiki a great tool to share knowledge. To add to this, it was just a great time with great people.

TMP found me

So at the end of last year, a TMP Worldwide’s senior VP found me on Linkedin. First off as a business evolving in the HR world it was a good move to use social networks to reach me as a pasive candidate. Within a few email and phone chat I really got the feeling that they were able to offer me a nice challenge with responsabilities and so on. So I did the move starting this year working downtown Montreal in the same building as Pluc a PHP developer now at Cloudraker and also ex-NVI.

Is this blog will ever have a real layout?

I’m currently working and experiencing with things like bluescreen CSS and way to add more semantic code to wordpress. Hope this third version of my site will finally see the light…

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Posted in Personal | 4 Comments »

First real blog post (finally)

Wednesday, April 23rd, 2008

friends : Sam wheres your blog !?
me : huh ?
friends : Get a blog !

First post, I’m giving some reasons why I start blogging (beside the fact that I’ll be able to answer back to that question) and why I’m blogging in english either than french.

English for Cool aid

Why I have decided to write this website in english and not in french ? It take me months to finaly make the decision to go with the english for my blog posts.

First off, english is not and won’t be ever my mother tongue, can’t deny my french canadian roots and you may find sometimes a few post in french. Although my writing skills are way better in french (some people may say not that much better than my english skills…) with this blog I want to improve my english writing skills, thats one of the reasons why I’m blogging.

Personal branding aka Marketing

With this blog I also want to push further my personal branding, I know that sounds selfish, but its true, I can reach a much bigger crowd using the Shakespeare language.

Learning and sharing knowledge

Since a few years, I’m reading blogs, and before that was a board addict, I realized now that’s really the way I learned the most. Maybe except sharing with a few friends face to face. So I finally face it, I need to go to the next step, I’m already writing comments on others blogs about web development, seo, emarketing guerrilla, etc. so why I don’t have a blog… I have been micro blogging since more than 6 months now with Twitter at twitter.com/sammyQc. Micro blogging is nice, easy and one of the greatest way to share new things and start conversations. But now I want more! And I really think I can handle it, of course I wont stop twittering anytime soon.

So this blog is here to stay and I’m thinking of a weekly update, going to see about that.

Hope you’ll enjoy.

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Posted in Personal | No Comments »