(Reading time: 3 – 4 minutes)

Here’s an interesting email I received concerning on-page SEO html structure and its effect on search results:

I finally have a minute to reach out. We haven’t spoken since you left your comment on my site. I haven’t had a chance to review the hRecipe plug in [sic] and all the updates you made. Could you please advise if the layout now has the option of tagging the <post type> titles and subtitles to H1?

-Grace

After a few back and forth emails concerning whether hRecipe plugin for WordPress should, by default, use the h1 element for recipe titles, we turned to Google.

What says the Big G?

Let’s take a look:

Matt Cutts states in this video that multiple h1 elements is something Google watches for, and may penalize if the useage doesn’t make sense.

Since Google gets to decide what makes sense, I’m keeping hRecipe titles marked up as h2 elements.

Also, and this is important, hRecipe is open source under the GPL. Everyone is free to modify, or have someone else modify the plugin any way they see fit.

Arguments for and against multiple h1 elements

People arguing for multiple h1 invoke Google’s ambiguity (as of 2009), the lack of a definite standard for structural elements in HTML, etc., and how multiple h1 results (apparently) get better results for them.

People (i.e., me) arguing against multiple h1 elements can’t seem to come up with arguments much better than “Based on my professional experience as an information architect working on the web since the early ’90s, multiple h1 is a bad idea. And, it doesn’t make any logical sense at all, either.”

~~~~
A slight digression… Being intimately familiar all the arguments for or against some contentious issue makes you an expert on the arguments.

It does not make you an expert on the issue itself.
~~~~

Perhaps you are now at that success point where hiring professional SEO help makes sense. I recommend the folks at SEOMoz. I’ve met Gillian Muessig personally and can vouch for her professionalism. Scott Hendison of Seo Automatic is another excellent SEO professional. (Note: I do not have affiliate relationships with either, I simply respect their expertise.)

The upshot: If you’re worried about how many h1 elements (and they are elements, not “tags”) on your web page is best for SEO, you should purchase professional SEO help. Or, you need to run your own SEO experiments (which is what professional SEO people do) and figure out how many h1 elements work best for you.

More about On-page SEO

The really cool thing about on-page SEO is it’s in our control. We can choose whether to use h1, or h2, or what keyword density to write against, or whatever.

I took a look around the web (that means I searched Google) for the latest and greatest articles. I didn’t find much I haven’t already written about (Read through the Building Traffic archives). This article showing 4 graphics illustrating on on-page SEO by Rand of SEOMoz was an interesting and highly relevant exception. As it turns out, getting the simple stuff is still important, but even more important, is good writing.

Content is still king!

Post from: Website In A Weekend

On-page SEO: Multiple H1 Elements Yea or Nay?

(Reading time: 2 – 3 minutes)

It turns out I have a long time interest in structured content, dating back to graduate school and projects dealing with a lot of raw data. Describing data requires using metadata, and from there it’s not really a big jump to the semantic web and rich snippets.

A current project involves describing projects using metadata. Sounds self-referential, no? It’s not, really, because context matters.

One such metadata specification is Description of a Project, aka DOAP. While I’m not a big fan of the acronym, the concept is sound.

Unfortunately, the main website has been badly compromised. Really badly. I have screenshots.

Check out what happens to sites which aren’t actively maintained, or not securely locked down.

This used to be called "vandalism" and it was A Bad Thing To Get Caught Doing.

Such activity used to be called “vandalism,” destroying other’s property for personal gain. Now we call it “SEO backlinking” and it’s a multi-billion dollar business.

Here’s more:

This is akin to theft, theft being the act of rendering high value goods into low value goods (credit: PJ O'Rourke, "Eat the Rich")

Now, watch what happens with this article. Because it has “SEO” in the title, it’s going to get scraped, for sure. SEO in the title will also attract loads of comment snipers (“Great Post! I lerned so much!”) attempting to free ride for, wait for it… SEO backlinks.

How do you feel about being part of culture which allows this kind of behavior? Backlinks are everything, you know.

Post from: Website In A Weekend

Destroy Websites for Fun and Profit! (SEO backlinking, of course)

(Reading time: < 1 minute)

Some days, you just gotta wonder

Black hat SEO total serp domination - click for full scale image

Post from: Website In A Weekend

Black Hat SEO is Thriving

(Reading time: 8 – 13 minutes)

Have you heard of the semantic web? It’s the notion that all the data on the web can have meaning attached, providing readers and writers with a much richer experience and enabling machine-to-machine reasoning.

It’s not really new. The term “semantic web” has been bandied about for at least 10 years. Similar notions date back to Vannever Bush’s memex system proposed in the 1930s.

It’s just taken 70 years of computational innovation to implement a semantic web.

Sort of like Jules Verne’s submarines: imagination outruns implementation.

So what is the semantic web, really?

Actually, before we really get started… I’m setting the stage for explaining how you benefit from technology already being used on websites such as Amazon and Facebook. Technology YOU can use, right now, provided you’re willing to learn.

Let’s get to the learning then.

Here’s one point of view on the semantic web, from Tim Berners-Lee (he invented the World Wide Web, after all) as given to the Toronto Globe and Mail:

Globe: “What do you mean when you use the term ‘semantic Web?’”

TBL: “It’s a way of taking the data that is in lots and lots of different systems and connecting it together — for example, in a company or a database — and not just connecting it together, but realizing that it’s part of a community, that there are partners and suppliers and customers who all want to see and use this data in different ways…”

Source: http://rafaelsidi.blogspot.com/2007/05/more-on-benefits-of-semantic-web-from.html

From our (blogger) point of view, the semantic web means two things:

1. A way to present our data to search engines to get better search ranking.
2. A way to present structured data to readers in an attractive form.

About right here, I expect you’re asking: “Yeah, so what, I like it; how do I make it happen on my blog?”

In a word: Microformats.

Microformats are one way to bring the semantic web straight to your blog.

There are other ways, but this is way we’re going to do it today.

For example, let’s examine a recipe for fish tacos given by Zerala Martinez’s Chef of the Month – Jackie Diaz. Go visit Zarela, and when you come back, we’ll discuss fish tacos using the (partial) screenshot just to the right.

With a lot of programming, the computer can classify at least some of the information given in a recipe for fish tacos as being a “recipe.”

But look, recipes many parts in common. Nearly all recipes have a title of some sort. Recipes have lists of ingredients, and instructions for combining those ingredients. Many recipes may also have suggested serving instructions, nutritional information, and so on.

Microformatting allows you to specify Jackie’s fish taco recipe as a recipe. It gives a sort of “electronic envelope” the computer can use for finding recipes, and displaying recipes. That is, when the search engine comes calling, it will grab up your web page as usual, but it will also take note of any semantic data you have available. In this case, a recipe for fish tacos.

So…

What, exactly, is a microformat?

From the Microformats.org website:

Designed for humans first and machines second, microformats are a set of simple, open data formats built upon existing and widely adopted standards. Instead of throwing away what works today, microformats intend to solve simpler problems first by adapting to current behaviors and usage patterns (e.g. XHTML, blogging).

That’s a little pedantic for us. Let’s dial it down a bit: microformats provide an easy way for you, the blogger, to create content that is easy to find, share, distribute, syndicate and aggregate. The microformat provides a platform-independent way of describing your book review, your fish taco recipe, your resume, contact information, and many more subtle pieces of information such as how you might know someone you’re linking to. For example, you can describe your relationships with the “rel” attribute. Here’s what that looks like when linking to my friend Kelly Diels:

<a href="http://kellydiels.com" rel="friend">Kelly Diels</a>

Any type of discrete information which has a definite structure following well-understood rules is amenable to microformatting.

How do microformats work?

Microformats leverage CSS selectors and classes to provide both semantic information and styling information. Furthermore, using a “microformat,” the recipe can be presented any which way you please. In fact, Google can present microformated HTML as a “Rich Snippet” search result.

Since an investigation into the ineffable coolness of rich snippets would lengthen this article by another 1500 words, let’s take a look at five microformats you can use right now to enhance your search results. Perhaps we’ll discuss rich snippets in a future article.

5 microformats you can use right now

Here’s five of the most useful microformats for your blog, all which you can use right now. Some of these have WordPress plugins for helping you along. For others, various web-based tools allow you to enter your information, and copy the resulting microformatted HTML directly into your blog post.

1. hCard – contact information

hCard is for presenting contact detail for people, places, companies and similar organizations. It’s an easy format, almost anyone with even basic WordPress experience can implement hCard directly in a blog post or page. For example, follow this little tutorial on hCard.

Pretty easy, really. One would think there would be a WordPress plugin for hCard, but a fast search didn’t turn anything up on WordPress.org. There is one hCard plugin distributed via microformats.org which requires a minor theme modification to implement. Unfortunately, the server for that plugin appears to be offline. Opportunity knocks!

2. hCalendar – don’t be late for your date

hCalendar is an open, simple and distributed calendaring and events markup based on the well-established iCalendar format. In fact, you’re probably already using iCalendar in several applications without even knowing it. hCalendar simply makes it easy to put that event data on the web in way that’s fun, easy to understand and search-friendly.

Nate Ritter presented the WordPress Event Plugin which handles hCalendar as one of it’s formats.

3. hReview – review movies, books and more

hReview let’s you wrap your product, book or any other kind of review in a way that Google finds very friendly. According to Jeff Alsopp, the hReview standard was the first microformat that was developed through close examination of actual reviews found on websites. That is, the hReview team went out looking for the “cow paths,” finding existing clear examples of reviews already existing on the web.

In contrast, the hCard and hCalendar standards were adopted from existing, widely used standards.

WordPress bloggers are lucky, having the hReview Support for Editor plugin for inserting hReviews into blog posts.

4. hResume – strut your stuff

The WordPress LinkedIn hResume plugin allows you to snatch your resume from LinkedIn for display on your WordPress blog. There doesn’t seem to be a WordPress plugin making it easy to create a microformatted resume from scratch. More opportunity knocks!

5. hRecipe – everybody eats

Everyone loves to eat, even bloggers! hRecipe is great intersection of interests. The idea is that a recipe is composed of various parts, and those parts are easily described with keywords like “ingredients.” Same notion as the other microformats of course.

Any time you want to present cooking or creating meals, drinks or other food-based items, hRecipe is your ticket.

Even Google agrees: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/04/better-recipes-on-web-introducing.html

(Disclaimer: hRecipe plugin for WordPress is one of my projects.)

More microformat resources

We have barely scratched the surface; dig deeper into microformats with these resources:

• microformats.org is the canonical source for all information about microformats. If you’re serious about semantic web technology, and microformats in particular, be prepared to spend a significant amount of time reading the microformats website. Take a lot of notes, you will need them later.
• Microformats – Empowering Your Markup for Web 2.0 is an introductory book on microformats by John Allsop, who has been working in the web standards field since 1997. John also operates the Microformatique blog, which is packed with useful information.
• Microformats Made Simple by Emily Lewis (A Blog Not Limited) is another excellent resource. Emily also posted her Practical Microformats slide deck from the Voices That Matter conference. If you have any interest in microformats, this slide should be your next stop, it’s that good.

Opportunity, and call to action

Microformats give you an opportunity to raise the bar, very inexpensively. With easy-to-use tools available for blogging platforms such as WordPress, implementing a microformat may be no more difficult than downloading an appropriate plugin and filling in the blanks.

However…

Microformats are information technology. And if there is one thing you should know by now, information technology evolves at an incredibly rapid pace. Semantic web efforts have been underway for over 10 years. There’s a lot going on behind the scenes; as bloggers, we’re simply the beneficiaries of what finally burbles up in an easy-to-use form. In this case, microformats are the tip of the “semantic web iceberg.”

The key is understanding that the technology is simply a means for communicating your message.

You have a killer fish taco recipe to share? That’s great. Right now, wrapping in a microformat gives your recipe leverage. In the future, there may be more effective ways to get your recipe out.

But…

Your time spent learning simple microformatting will come back to you as technology evolves. You will be starting with a vast head start compared to people who are starting from scratch. Take action now, there’s no better time to get acquainted with the semantic web, and no better way than using simple microformats.

What about you? Are using any microformats format right? Will you consider adding this technology to your blog as a result of this article? If not, why not?

Post from: Website In A Weekend

5 Semantic Web Microformats You Can Use on Your Blog Right Now

(Reading time: 2 – 4 minutes)

A backlink is a search engine optimization (SEO) term used for links that point to your site. You may have also seen them called inbound links or incoming links. Regardless of how often a search engine’s algorithm changes, backlinks are almost always an important ingredient.

Why are backlinks important?

Backlinks are a good indicator of how popular or relevant your site is. Although outbound links have almost no impact on SEO, whereas backlinks actually have a lot.

For example, if you create a sports car niche blog site and place links to the top sites in the world (i.e. Top 3 as of this post are www.google.com, www.yahoo.com, www.facebook.com), it would be pointless for SEO purposes. Otherwise, everyone would do what I just did (by listing outbound links) on their blogs, even if they have absolutely nothing to do with the content.

On the other hand, let’s say your sports car niche blog site, actually had quality posts. Now imagine if the top sports car sites reference your blog on a regular basis. Essentially, you have others in your niche community vouching for the content on your blog site. Shouldn’t that represent that your blog site has valuable content for that audience?

Remember, this is just part of the top secret search engine formula that the public will never know. However, since we know that it’s important and it’s somewhat easy to do, doesn’t it make sense to ensure we get some backlinks on our site?

Since backlinks are so important, here’s a quick, do-it-yourself method to guarantee backlinks for your site.

Create your own backlinks

As I mentioned in my Why are backlinks important? post, I’m about to share a way to create your own backlinks. Unlike many of the tools available, some free and some way too expensive, this method allows you to be completely independent.

1. Go to blogger.com and create an account if you don’t already have one. Although there are many places to start your own blog site, blogger is one of the best free offerings available.
2. From your blogger dashboard, click Create a Blog. You will be asked for a blog title and a blog address. For the purposes of creating a backlink blog site, it doesn’t really matter what you choose here.
3. Choose a template. You can always change it later but again, for our purpose, this is really irrelevant.
4. Click New Post and simply type the following two things: (1) name of your post/article and (2) link to your post/article. It should look something like:
   Why are backlinks important? (this will be the anchor text that will be a live link that points to http://freebloghelp.com/why-are-backlinks-important)
5. Moving forward, every time you create a new post or article, add to this post.
   Simple, right? It literally takes less than a minute to do. Again, there are other methods of creating backlinks but, especially for people starting out, there’s little reason not to create their own page that they have total control of.

Gabe Young is a business professional with an entrepreneurial spirit. Gabe has an MBA and managed IT departments in the Fortune 500, creating strategies and tactics for some of the most popular websites. Visit Gabe at Free Blog Help dot Com.

Post from: Website In A Weekend

Backlink Kickstart – Don’t wait, create your own

(Reading time: 5 – 8 minutes)

I was talking to my friend Srini over at BlogCastFM the other day and he asked about simple SEO.

(Actually, he was interviewing me for an upcoming podcast, but it feels a little weird to be interviewed, and to talk about it.)

In any case, really simple SEO. What means? It’s easy to understand, but let’s get some context first.

Probably every one reading Website In A Weekend has heard the term “content is king.” If you haven’t heard that, “content is king” just means really good writing trumps everything else on the web.

Trumps everything except really good writing.

When you’re up against your peers, who are also writing kingly content, a little more work on your part will ensure your great writing gets an even-to-better chance at getting found.

And there’s this: your peers may be doing this little extra work too.

Yes, it’s an arms race with the Red Queen, but the simple skills I’m going to outline are, well, simple. Maybe not “easy” at first, but definitely simple.

SEO for people who hate SEO

If your main interest is in writing, in art or film or music or anything other than running an advertising-driven network built to suck in search results, dominate your keywords and crush your competition, this is for you. (Otherwise, I recommend joining up at Aaron Wall’s SEOBook, only $300/month).

That leaves the rest of us.

In fact, let’s just agree to sh*tcan the whole notion of Ess Eee Ohh. We’re not going to optimize. Really optimizing for search engines isn’t that hard, but let’s be truthful: your beautiful prose will suffer. In my book, anyone saying otherwise is a son of a fire-starting shoe salesman.

Instead, let’s think “Search Engine Friendly.”

“Optimize” is such an extreme word, brooks no compromise, even if nobody quite agrees on what is optimal.

“Friendly” is much nicer. Friendly is a Golden Retriever, always happy to see you. Friendly allows for a little give and take. Friendly is being approachable, dateable even.

Your search engine wants to date you… are you slamming your door in it’s face?

Do you know?

Search Engine Friendly

Getting search engine friendly isn’t very difficult. In fact, if you’re using WordPress, you’re about 80% of the way there. If you’re using a modern Theme such as Thesis correctly (or any of several SEO plugins), you may be closer to 95% of the way there.

95% seems pretty good, right?

It’s not.

If you make 95% of 1,000,000 results, you’re going to be buried under the 50,000 web pages ahead of you.

Doing better isn’t that hard.

The SE Friendly List (you’ve seen this before)

Here’s the key: write your best content, then fit the search engine stuff to your content. Like this:

1. Title. It all starts with your article title. Whole chapters in books have been written about titles. You should read those books. Then write your own killer titles.
2. Post slug. Another critical element, three to five keyword post slugs will really help you out. Can you do it? It’s not that hard, but it takes practice.
3. Categories. Like chapters in a book, help keep your articles organized.
4. Tags. Your index to great blog posts. I used the “geronimo” tag to find some of the links to this article.
5. Meta Title. Important, get the meta title right to attract both readers and search engine loving. It doesn’t have to be the same as your article title, you know. You can make this shorter or longer or different, whatever you think is best. Read more about title elements and meta elements.
6. Meta Description. You can choose to write a summary with keywords, or a little sales pitch to suck in readers. Find out the difference between abstract and subtitle styles of meta description
7. Meta Keywords. Before we go any further, yes, I do know that Google does not weight search engine results with keywords. I use them anyway.

See, not that hard.

And, like I wrote above, you have seen this before. You will see it again.

Master the basics!

Simple Things are hard enough, don’t get ahead of yourself. If you can’t write a decent title for an article, master that before trying to sculpt page rank.

Did I mention? You’re going to see these basics over and over again, because I’m going to hammer them every which way but loose!

Make SE Friendly a habit

Making your writing search engine friendly rather them search engine optimal may seem like high heresy, but I don’t know any other way to remain true to my writing. (Or true to my readers.)

You can do this. It’s not that hard.

Let’s recap in two steps:

1. Write your content for your readers.
2. Add the search engine stuff afterwards; just let the search engine know what you wrote about.

That’s all.

Why Search Engine Friendly works

Two reasons.

First, getting those first 7 points nailed down is fundamental to any SEO. It’s the starting point for everything, because the search engine algorithms weight those components of your web page very heavily. Getting those right is a Big Deal, and you don’t have to warp your world-class prose to fit. Instead, you fit the SEO to your world-class prose.

Second, when you commit to search engine friendliness, each time you publish is like planting a little seed. The more seeds you plant, the fruit your garden will bear. Make planting seeds a habit, and you grow your garden practically on autopilot.

In other words, being search engine friendly isn’t so much like solving a problem.

It’s really a lot more like dating. It’s a process. You live it. Be SEO dateable. Be the kind of blogger search engines want to suck up to.

Because once they start sucking up to you, they tend to keep sucking up to you. But that’s story for another day.

Post from: Website In A Weekend

SEO for Writers and Artists (or, how to date your search engine)

(Reading time: 2 – 4 minutes)

A perennial debate in Blogistan is whether or not to publish a blog post daily.*

Some say “always daily,” others say “never daily.” I could do a big survey to get some numbers, but it’s not necessary. Some big time bloggers publish every day, others don’t. Same with not-so-big-timers.

In truth, the answer depends on you. If you think you can handle daily publishing, consider trying it out for a month or two.

Here’s 3 benefits I’ve found from daily publishing:

1. Daily publishing builds traffic. You are practically forced to write in more depth and breadth to keep yourself invested and your reader’s interest high.
2. Daily publishing maintains momentum. This momentum is both your momentum and reader’s momentum. It’s easy once you get going. For me, cranking out an article is often (though not always) the high point of my day.
3. Daily publishing provides focus. Since it’s non-negotiable, you don’t have to worry or be anxious about publishing. Just sit down and write something, then worry about what else you need to get done.

I’ve been threatening to cut back on posting daily since at least before Thanksgiving 2009, but I have so much material yet to cover, and little announcements like Facebook’s a couple of days ago (April, 2010) ensures I’ll have even more material to cover. So, maybe I’ll cut back in the future, maybe I won’t.

Now on a semi-weekly schedule

It’s now January 27, 2012, and Website In A Weekend is publishing about three times per month. This is a sustainable schedule for the amount of traffic which is visiting. Traffic isn’t growing, but the traffic plateau has been stable over the last 16 months.

That’s pretty cool if you think about it: free eyeballs for work long since completed.

We’re going forward with a new plan: daily monitoring of traffic statistics, and updating articles which are getting relevant, targeted traffic. It’s the content audit part of a content strategy.

Are you publishing a blog post daily? Why or why not?

Post from: Website In A Weekend

3 Ways Daily Blog Posting Benefits You (and your readers)

(Reading time: 3 – 5 minutes)

Are you hearing a lot about “building outposts?” I am too. Outposts are places where you can establish a brand presence that more or less runs on autopilot. Any publishing venue lending itself to 1. visibility (otherwise why bother if people won’t find it); and 2. fire-and-forget publishing is a great candidate for building an outpost. Outposts are important for three reasons:

1. Backlinks: even if nofollow linking is used, you still have another link pointing into your material.
2. Advertisement: reinforce your brand or reputation.
3. Exposure: not everyone uses the same platforms for the same reasons, and each outpost will have a certain culture associated with it.

However, there’s not a lot of specific, actionable information on building outposts. For example, I seem to run across a of explanations looking about like this:

• J. Random Blogger #1:
  

  “You need to build outposts!”

• Semi-Famous Blogger #2:
  

  “You need to build outposts!”

• Famous Blogger #3.141592:
  

  “You need to build outposts!”

• Pro Blogger #13 ½:
  

  “You need to build outposts!”

David Doolin (that’s me!) from Website In A Weekend:

Build an outpost with Amplify. Highlight specific points in your article for publication into your Amplify stream, allowing readers to quickly scan over important points and click through your backlink for more information. Here’s exactly how you do that.

Build an outpost with Amplify

Here’s how to get started:

1. Get yourself on over to Amplify and get an account.
2. Connect up with my Amp Log Dave Doolin – Polymath
3. Install the Amplify toolbar. Click the “Install” link to find the toolbar installation page:
   
   

   Install the Amplify Toolbar Icon.

You should now have the Amplify icon in your browser toolbar:




Amplify icon installed on toolbar

Now you’re ready to Amplify. Find a blog post you really like. I’m going to use Road Ahead – David Risley got me to spill the beans. Here’s the quick step-by-step:

1. Click on the Amplify icon in your browser toolbar. This brings up the Amplify toolbar.
2. Select what you would like to “Amplify.”
3. Click on “Amplify Selection” on the toolbar. You will be directed to the Amplify website.
4. Add title, tags, category and explanatory text.
5. Save your Amplified post.
6. Congratulations! You have a brand new outpost!

Here’s what it looks like:

The final result on Amplify: Extracts from Website In A Weekend’s road map.

Execute now

Website In A Weekend is positively riddled with information you can put to profitable use, right now.

It won’t always be so. Long time readers will tell you I’ve started moving content behind the paywall. Right now it’s free, sign up for the newsletter, you get grandfathered in when I set Website In A Weekend up as a membership site.

There will still be a stunning amount of content out here “in the wild” but articles like this one on Amplify will increasingly be served exclusively to customers and clients. That’s only fair to them.

Signing up is easy, use the “Mad Lib” form below, or the form in the upper right corner of the sidebar.

We’ll see you inside!

Post from: Website In A Weekend

Building Outposts: Amplify Your Blog Post in Seconds

(Reading time: 8 – 12 minutes)

I have an agenda, and this is definitely tipping my hand a bit early, but the iron is hot, so…

It’s time to strike!

There’s something simmering away out there on the web which you’re going to need to know something about Real Soon Now. Because if you don’t, the people that do know about it are going to clean your clock on search results. And if you have any hope of semi-passive income, search results matter.

What is it?

Semantic web.

I’ve been working off and on for about a year on a little plugin that implements semantic styling for recipes. You can find it in the WordPress plugin repository. Just search on “hRecipe” in your WordPress plugin interface, it comes right up.

Last night (April 20, 2010) I checked up on Zarela Martinez, who was testing hRecipe plugin for WordPress, and thanked her for checking it out. She replied that she found it hard to use:

Dear Dave:

I’m trying it out but actually it is very hard to use. It requires lots of cut and pasting plus when you post the recipe all the ingredients and procedures run together and I have to separate them one by one. Also it should ask what category it is so one can save it right there without an extra step.

I’m sorry but I write cookbooks and this is not user friendly.

Thanks,

Zarela

Now that’s great feedback!

I agree, hRecipe isn’t that easy to use. My reply: “If you would recommend just one single thing that would make it more helpful for you, I’ll see about implementing that into the next release.”

Whence:

If you tell me why it is difficult I may be able to make suggestions. Right off the top of my head I think it should be a regular post without the sections and one could put in the separator like you do when you are writing a regular recipe for an article or book.

Here’s an expanded version of my email reply as today’s blog post.

Wow!

Most people don’t care at all about the details. But the details are important. Like cooking, little things can make a big difference.

There are two main issues to consider when displaying semantic recipes:

1. Recipe display, which is the easiest, that can be handled with CSS styling.
2. Recipe data entry, which is getting the recipe into the computer. This is “rope through a hole problem.” The difficulty is the same, it’s just who bears the brunt of the work. When it’s easy on the user, it’s really hard to program. Conversely, being easy to program usually involves conventions most users are not familiar with.

Let’s start with recipe display, the CSS.

No, actually, let’s give you a chance to jump right to hRecipe ingredients formatting.

If you’re still with me, then, here’s what’s involved.

Displaying semantic recipes

CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets. It turns out that when “wrap” your recipe with CSS indicating it’s a “recipe class,” everything inside is treated as part of the recipe. There’s two reasons this is important:

1. CSS let’s you choose a “style” that will render all your recipes exactly the same.
2. Google (and other search engines) are evolving to understand this kind of CSS, which is known as a “microformat,” which defines what is known as the “semantic web.” More simply put, the hrecipe CSS gets you better search ranking. Since you’re putting your recipes on the web anyway, a little extra effort that you do helps.

(MS Word doesn’t have this kind of capability built into it as far as I understand)

Ok, so much for now about CSS.

Entering semantic recipe data

Data entry is obnoxious, for everyone. Programmers, users, business owners, everyone.

In hRecipe, each part of the recipe needs to be classified according to it’s function. Further, some parts of recipes have lists: lists of ingredients, lists of preparation and cooking instructions. These lists can have an arbitrary number of items in them, and each item in the list can be very short or very long. Furthermore, each item in the list has it’s parts. “1 cup of flour” is 3 things. It’s a measure (1), a unit (cup) and the ingredient (flour).

The hrecipe microformat provides for designating each part of an ingredient list. The hRecipe plugin has not yet implemented this… it’s not a difficult problem per se, but there are a lot of “edge cases,” exceptions which make programmers stab their eyes out and users think “programmers are too smart for their own good.”

For example, translation on the user end is pretty simple. But how to deal with translation on the programming side?

And it’s important on the programming side for… parsing.

Let’s examine that word, “parse.”

What means?

From the Free Dictionary definition of parse:

parse (pärs)
v. parsed, pars·ing, pars·es
v.tr.

1. To break (a sentence) down into its component parts of speech with an explanation of the form, function, and syntactical relationship of each part.
2. To describe (a word) by stating its part of speech, form, and syntactical relationships in a sentence.
3. 3.
   1. a. To examine closely or subject to detailed analysis, especially by breaking up into components: “What are we missing by parsing the behavior of chimpanzees into the conventional categories recognized largely from our own behavior?” (Stephen Jay Gould).
   2. b. To make sense of; comprehend: I simply couldn’t parse what you just said.
4. Computer Science To analyze or separate (input, for example) into more easily processed components.

Our main interest is in Definition #4. As it turns out, these “easily processed components” correspond to the syntactical relationships defined in Definition #1.

As it turns out (you should check this yourself), parse can often be used as a synonym for “chop” or “cut.”

(Digression: the web has dumbed down common search terms because the vast majority of search results scrape or license one or at most very few sources instead of presenting their own work. Thus, a Google search for such terms results on a multitude of web pages all saying the same thing, in the same order, sometimes using the same words. You can’t do that in paper. It’s called “plagiarism.”)

Parsing your ingredients list

So, just as you might chop up a carrot, each item in the ingredients list needs to be chopped up into it’s parts.

Is this hard?

Well, not really, but as I hinted above, it’s tedious, time consuming and impossible to get right the first time.

For now, let’s not worry about that and focus on each list as a whole.

So instead of parsing an item in a list, we have to parse the entire paragraph!

One thing at a time… let’s back up a little bit and consider the whole hRecipe interface: 4 panes on a tabbed window, with several fields in each.

Each field represents an part of the recipe which can be defined using semantic CSS.

It turns out that it’s really simple for you to enter ingredients and instructions… if you follow a couple of simple – albeit totally unintuitive – rules. I say unintuitive, what I mean is these rules make perfect
sense to anyone who has written a parser.

When we get to the “Ingredients” field, there is no way for me (Dave) to know what you (Zarela) intend to prepare. That is, I can’t tell from behind the computer, separated in time and space, how many items in your ingredient list.

It turns out, this is the nature of the universe.

Rope through a hole

It’s basic thermodynamics really. There is one length of rope. Pull it through a hole and the length of the rope depends on which side of the hole you’re looking at. But the rope never changes length. TANSTAAFL.

There are several ways out of this predicament. Let’s look at the end cases:

• I do little work, you do a lot.
• I do a lot of work, you do a little.

Neither are very satisfactory. It turns out that using the semantic web correctly requires understanding a little bit about the semantic web, what it is, and the strengths and weaknesses implementations.

Let me restate that last paragraph: Supposing hRecipe was somehow written in MS Word. You would still need to learn some new stuff to use it correctly. There’s no way out!

Think of it this way: each semantic recipe is a little machine carrying little bits of recipe DNA that it can shoot into search engines.

But you have to load the machine. It’s different for each recipe.

Thus, data entry.

Getting back to lists of ingredients…

Upshot – 2 rules for fast hRecipe formatting

Here’s the two rules for helping me parse lists of ingredients or instructions:

1. Each ingredient or step in the instructions should start with an “*”.
2. Each ingredient or step in the instructions should be on it’s own line. Let it wrap if necessary, just don’t put a line break in (don’t hit the Enter key).

Alternatively, you can use raw HTML for these lists, but I don’t recommend it anymore. I’ll be stripping that out in the future.

This is all I have tonight. I’ll do more on this tomorrow and post it on the blog,

By the way, the blog has a LOT of material you will find useful for WordPress.

Thanks again for your interest, it helps keep my interest high.

—-

Thus concludes my email.

Whether Zarela chooses to use hRecipe on her blog is irrelevant. What’s much more important is that she asked me to explain the details.

That is critical. Because even if she doesn’t understand (or decides against taking the time), she has now been exposed to the notion of semantic web.

And so have you.

That’s way more important.

I have metric boatload of material coming your way.

Post from: Website In A Weekend

hRecipe – Semantic Recipes for WordPress (Google loves these)

(Reading time: 3 – 5 minutes)

Ok, listen up people…

I have something really important to say:

Stop effing up your anchor text.

Please, stop it.

Yes, I know we all love (luv) links back from your blog.

Yes, it is a favor and it does bleed you a little Google Juice every link.

And yes, your anchor text will help rank that link for those keywords.

Wait.

Stop.

Do you really understand that last claim?

Honestly, from what I see, you probably don’t.

Most people have no clue about anchor text.

I see it all the time.

Anchor text rules

Here’s the RULE: Anchor text should have 2-5 keywords/phrase for the link.

When you’re not sure how to anchor your link, here’s your procedure:

1. You want to link to someone. Excellent!
2. ASK them for their preferred keywords or phrases.
3. Use what they tell you for your anchor text linking to their article.

Otherwise, you might as well use “Click here.”

Because the alternative is worse: you anchor phrases against the keywords in the article. Dude, that’s what link spammers do! You don’t want to Google to think your friends are link spammers, do you?

(Exceptions: If you link an article by it’s title, it’s ok to anchor the whole title. Lazy, but ok. If you’re pranking, let’s talk.)

Once you get the hang of it, you will be able to figure out appropriate anchor text on your own.

Here’s a hypothetical example.

Suppose your friend writes an article about how nasty bad spammers and the evilness of black hat SEO techniques. Then, your perfectly well-meaning self comes along. You love this article. You want to love (luv) it with links. So you anchor the link with “my friend’s great article.”

Nice.

Now the search is going to attempt to associate “friend’s great article” with evil black hat SEO. That doesn’t really compute. Further, it won’t help drive your qualified readers down that link.

Sure, your friends are the coolest. Everyone already knows that. But if they have a need for specific information about black hat SEO, they’re going to find out by accident, not because you alerted them via keyword-anchored link.

Ok, now that I’ve stirred it all up, here’s more unpleasantry:

1. Linking is NOT easy. I’ve written on this before: the search engine IS part of your audience. If you only write for yourself and human readers, you’re shortchanging yourself long term.
2. Your rants will be quickly forgotten by readers and by search engines. Unless your rant is long enough and has enough of a point to carry meaningful keyword phrases, it’s going to be hard get it ranked in search engines. And that kind of stinks because rants are fun and easy to write.

   Conversely, crap like how to implement register_activation_hook in WordPress plugins is hard to write (because it has to be accurate and precise) and won’t do much for your current readers… but it’s easy to anchor and brings in search traffic like crazy in the long term.

Now I can see the smoke pouring out your ears. The gears have seized up, the oil is burning, you have dozens or hundreds of blog posts full of crappy backlinks.

Bummer.

But wait! There’s hope.

See, I’m running this little month-long program starting around the first of May. It’s called the Blog Maintenance Challenge. And one of the Challenges is unscrewing your anchor text. You’re going to choose a couple of your flagship blog posts or pages, and you’re going to fix your links to them. And if you don’t have any links to them (shame), you’re going to learn how to do it right.

Then you’re going to fix your links from your articles to all your nice friend’s articles, so that Google doesn’t think you’re all a bunch of Dirty Rotten Spammers.

That’s doing link luvin’ right!

Sign up for the newsletter below or up in the right corner. I’ll send you to the sales page when it’s ready.

Post from: Website In A Weekend

Does Google Think You’re a Dirty Rotten Spammer? (Hint: anchor text matters)