Unintentionally Blank

Yahoo! announced today that Yahoo! Search is to support semantic web standards to enhance their search. This is fantastic news for anyone interested in semantic technologies as well as the general public. Why? Because Yahoo! Search is big enough to be the tipping point, the breakthrough point for semantics on the web.

The Problems That Previously Faced Semantic Technology

There are a number of ways of implementing semantics on a web site, from the original methods defined by the W3C using RDF and OWL to microformats, built on (X)HTML, technology we already have and use. The issue is that there seems no real reason for anyone to use these standards; sure, marking up content so that machines can understand it is all very well, but what’s the use if there are no machines reading it?

Up until today only a few technologies supported certain standards, the Operator extension for Firefox supports microformats, as will Firefox 3 when it is released, but none of these are big enough or important enough for the mainstream. Adding semantics to a website is a lot of hard work if no-one is around to use it.

Time For The Big Guns

This is why Yahoo!’s announcement is so big. Now there are machines reading that data and using it and enriching the web with it, do you, as a developer or site owner, want to miss out on that? Yahoo!’s search is to use microformats initially, to improve their understanding of the data to return more relevant results (and, from the looks of their example with LinkedIn add more detail to their search results). So, will other search engines, I’m looking at Google and Microsoft here, want to miss out on the wealth of data that they aren’t collecting and Yahoo! is?

Now it will be beneficial for developers to include microformats and other semantic data as Yahoo! is reading and using it. It will be beneficial for other search engines to get in on the act, as they don’t want to lose market share to a more relevant Yahoo!. Furthermore, it will then be even more beneficial for developers to include the information as everyone watches what Google is doing! Then, with the wealth of semantic data going around, startups and other small web companies will be able to leverage the data for their own uses producing a whole new wave of technologies: web 3.0 anybody?

The Semantic Web Is Coming And Everyone Wins

What could be better, a reason to include semantic technologies in your site, better search results, new, intelligent services? I can only say thank you to Yahoo! for supporting this and giving it the much needed boost.

An argument started up recently regarding the use of actionable anchor text for links on a page, or phrases like “Click Here” when you want someone to click. It all started with Brian Clark’s question, does telling someone to “click here” actually matter? It was the following paragraph that made me think about the issue:

Another reader once chastised me for wasting anchor text with the words “click here,” even though my primary goal for the link was to get people to click (shocking, I know). This is when I first realized that Google is truly making people retarded. Somehow, this person no longer saw links as navigation for actual people to use; they only exist to pass on “juice” according to an algorithm that no one fully understands.

Does Anyone Else Feel The Argument Got Off On The Wrong Foot?

Brian was right, search engines shouldn’t be telling us how to run our websites, however, rather than heading off in the wrong direction and maintaining that “Click here” and other similar, meaningless phrases are the right thing to do, we should really be thinking about what is important: the users.

Dawud Miracle highlighted exactly the reason why “Click Here” should not be used as anchor text. Put plainly, you cannot tell what a link with the anchor text “Click Here” leads to.

Context Explains The Link

Some would argue that in a sentence such as, “For more information on accessibility, click here,” gives context to the link and lets users know what to expect when clicking there. But not all users are reading everything on the page.

Back in 1997, Jakob Nielson tested and wrote about how users read web pages, they scan and pick out highlighted phrases, headings and links. If you scanned down a page and found the phrase “Click Here” highlighted as a link, you would have to stop scanning and read around the link to find out what it was about. Or you could just click the link to find out, Mike Cherim alluded to this in a comment on Ian Lloyd’s compromise solution on Accessify. Clicking to find out what a link is all about is an untargeted click which may have a lower conversion, if you are talking in marketing terms. I wonder if Mike has anything that backs up his comment.

How About Accessibility?

It is always sensible to consult the WCAG when concerning ourselves with the usability and accessibility of these choices. Point 13.1 says the following:

Link text should be meaningful enough to make sense when read out of context — either on its own or as part of a sequence of links.

This is a priority 2 checkpoint, but it deals with the usability aspect above as well as assistive technologies.

Yucca Korpela has a number of good examples and explanations of link texts out of context, as part of a very good article on not using “Click Here” in general.

Click Here For A Compromise?

I mentioned a compromise solution on Accessify earlier, where Ian Lloyd suggested linking a full phrase including “Click Here” using a <span> and some CSS to emphasise the “Click Here” part of the link. This allows for the link to have all the information needed to read it out of context, but draws the attention of a normal “Click Here”. I’m not a fan of this method because it still compromises on usability, by making users read around the link or click it to find out what it means.

I propose a final compromise. Let your link contain all the information that you need and use “Click Here”. What is wrong with saying “Continue reading X”, “Click Here to subscribe to X” or “Click Here to buy to X”? If you look at the phrases that Marketing Sherpa showed were better, none of them included “Click Here” for a start, in fact they used a little more explanation.

Ideally, I’d expect more explanation from a link still. You can tell your users what to do, but explain where they are going too. Brian Clark was right, Google shouldn’t matter when thinking of your link text, but the accessibility and experience for your users should. As Roger Johansson said, almost a year ago, think before you link.

Watching the keywords that drive traffic to your site or blog can show a few things; the interest in certain posts, whether users are finding what they search for when they arrive at your site and the amusing combinations and events that conspire to cause one of my posts to appear as result number 31 for the phrase “strange experience blindfold”.

Another interesting result turned up two days ago, when I received a couple of visits for the search top wordpress designs. Whilst touched that Google considered my design to be one of the top WordPress designs, I didn’t believe them and decided to look closer into why I appeared so high up the ranks for these keywords.

Continue reading “Google Flatters Me: When SEO Goes Right” »

I was going to write a post on how using semantically correct markup for your post titles would improve the accessibility of your page, impress the meaning of your content to both readers and search engines and generally add to the level of well-being in the world. Sadly for me, Chris Pearson got there first with his post, The Definitive Guide to Semantic Web Markup for Blogs. The other unfortunate thing is that he probably did it better than I would have done!

Flattery aside, the article really does hit the spot. Header elements are not to be used for presentation and selecting the size of font you use for a particular word, they convey the hierarchy and meaning behind each heading and subheading and should be used like that. Recently I changed my post titles on their single pages from <h2>s to <h1>s as I realised that the title of my post is the most important part of the page, not the name of my blog. I do have my own tip as well, so I wrote this post instead.

Continue reading “Semantic Header Markup Means Search Engines Will Understand Too” »

Recently we have seen Google Accessible Search pop up in Google Labs and already there are a bunch of complaints about the search engine giant’s latest idea.

Firstly, there have been moans about how the search only caters for those who are blind or visually impaired. This isn’t a surprise when one of the research scientists on the Accessible Search team is blind. However, many of the methods that the WCAG 1.0
recommend that target problems that the visually impaired may have remain relevant to those with other disabilities. Thus a search that prioritises those features will benefit other disabled users anyway. Continue reading “Accessible Search - It’s a start” »