This is a work in progess – but the evidence from a quick google search is “Google doesn’t use it!!!” You can’t say fairer than this… or is this too trusting?
And if a video from the “Horses Mouth” isn’t enough for you try this that’s not enough ammo – try this google search …
You might like to read this post on the description meta tag along with the post on the title tag…
The <meta name=”description” content=”Brian the two month old labrador puppy goes for his first walk in the park” /> gives google et al a summary of what the page is about. The <title> might be a few words, the description could a short paragraph. Google MIGHT use them as snippets for your pages. MIGHT – because google may choose to use a relevant section of your page’s visible text if it does a good job of matching the search term. Its always good practice to add this tag, in case the friendly robots can’t find a good enough section of text within your page.
Words in the snippet are bolded (emboldened?) when they appear in the user’s query and so gives the user a clue about whether the content on the page matches what he or she is looking for.
Write a description that both informs and interests the user and use unique descriptions for each page – avoid a single description across your site.
Suppose you have a site with the domain mysite.com. Google will see www.mysite.com and mysite.com as two different sites. This can affect you rankings, although there is (as always) discussion out there about just how much.
Its important to tell goolge which of these is there prefered domain often called the “canonical” domain – personally, I like the www version, so I normally set this via the google developer tools for my sites. Here’s a quote from google themselves:
Once you tell us your preferred domain name, we use that information for all future crawls of your site and indexing refreshes. For instance, if you specify your preferred domain as http://www.example.com and we find a link to your site that is formatted as http://example.com, we follow that link as http://www.example.com instead. In addition, we’ll take your preference into account when displaying the URLs.
Also, as a belt and braces thing I often set a 301 re-direct in the .htaccess file. This then means that should anyone follow a link such as http://mysite.com/apples they will be automatically redirected to http://www.mysite.com/apples – and this is what will appear in the browser window.
You can set the .htaccess file like this
Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine On
#to send mysite.com -> www.mysite.com
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^mysite\.com
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.mysite.com/$1 [R=permanent,L]
There’s lots of good info out there on how to edit the .htaccess file – try
ee-web design and development are really pleased to announce the launch of another website for a SME client. This time its a independent coffee lounge in Enfield, North London and they probably make the best coffee money can buy. Or so they say. The site, based around the joomla CMS features a bespoke look – no templates here. Its simple, quick and elegant – or so we think anyway!
Its clear that small businesses need websites and Edi hopes that he’ll be able to keep in touch with his regular clients, telling them about open days, new menus and special offers.
I’ve just discovered two new pseudo-classed (well new to me) These are :before and :after. You can use these to insert content before or after a selected element. If you use these along with the “content” property you can insert additional content beofre or after an element. So…
p:before {
content: "Some text out front";
}
does what it says - and adds some text out front of the <p>…</p>
On the face of it this sounds fun, but why would you want to use it – afterall, css is all about keeping content separate from style. I can think of a couple of examples – you could be wanting to change the text next to an item on the fly, say if its out of stock, or setting some marker for an active link – say to show the page you are on.
The later is where I am planning on getting stuck into this idea. Here at ee-web developers I am just about to launch a site and, as often happens, I have left the “What will the active menu links look like” question until the end (tut tut). Since the logo for the site is a real funky coffee cup (its a coffee shop afterall) I think a little cup behind or to the left of the active link might look good. I guess i could do this with a background image on the link – probably eaiser, but I want to try out these pseudo-classes!
Please let me know what you use it for!
Of course, the other big deal here is that I was reading up on how to create mobile sites … and in so doing learnt some new css – you just have to keep on learning in this game. You can de-evolve back into a dinosaur so quickly!!!