Gadgetopia

I just found scribbling.net this morning via spid.ero.us, and found two great articles: one with some great common-sense tips on site design, and the other on how to help Google’s spider index your site.

Gadgetopia usually does pretty well in Google searches, but I imagine there’s always room for improvement.

Use meaningful text inside your tags so the Googlebot can associate that text with that href link. Meaning, if I am going to link my pictures from the war protest, I should say “Take a look at my photos from the war protest” instead of “My war protest pictures are here.” Now, Google doesn’t explicitly recommend this. But I have a friend named Damion who has a weblog which I link with the word “Damion” on my Bookmarks list. If you do a Google search for the word Damion, this weblog is the third result. So what, you say? Well, Damion doesn’t mention his name anywhere on his site.

So don’t use link text like read more or go here or download it or, God help us, click here. Don’t click here.

Webloggers: take heed of this when you display the permanent link for a post. You should link the title of a post which presumably contains words which indicate what the post is about instead of a [+] or the word permalink or, common amongst Blogger users, the date and time.

Like that. Whoops.