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| Video Sitemaps & mRSS vs. Facebook Share & RDFa Posted: 23 Dec 2010 12:34 AM PST Webmaster Level: Intermediate to Advanced What are the benefits of submitting feeds like Video Sitemaps and mRSS vs. the benefits of Facebook Share and RDFa? Is one better than the other? Let's start the discussion. Functionality of feeds vs. on-page markup Google accepts information from both video feeds, such as Video Sitemaps and mRSS, as well as on-page markup, such as Facebook Share and RDFa. We recommend that you use both! If you have limited resources, however, here's a chart explaining the pros and cons of each method. The key differentiators include:
If you're further wondering about the benefits of specific feeds (Video Sitemaps vs. mRSS), we can help with clarification there, too. First of all, you can use either. We're agnostic. :) One benefit of Video Sitemaps is that, because it's a format we're actively enhancing, we can quickly extend it to allow for more specifications. All this said, if you're going to start from scratch, Video Sitemaps is our recommended start.
"Starving" to start conversation about feeds or on-page markup? Join us in the Sitemaps section of the Webmaster discussion forum.    | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Ring in the new year with accessible content: Website clinic for non-profits Posted: 22 Dec 2010 03:51 PM PST Webmaster level: Beginner Cross-posted on the Google Grants Blog In our previous post, we did some source code housekeeping -- just in time for the holidays. But once users have landed on your site, how can you make sure they'll know how to get around? As it turns out, easily accessible content on your site can make a big difference. Users tend to have a better experience when a site helps them find and understand its content. Having an accessible site not only empowers users, it also helps search engines understand what your site is really about. So if you've resolved to boost your site's user experience and online presence for the new year, improving your content accessibility is a great way to start. Thankfully, there are tons of features you can add to make your site more accessible. In this post, we'll highlight three of them:
Intuitive navigation Help users avoid confusion by providing them with intuitive navigation, so that when they arrive at your site, they'll know where to click to find the information they're looking for. Here are three features you can implement in order to lead your users down the right path:
Let's explore how these features can make a site's navigation more intuitive by looking at one of our submitted sites, Philanthropedia.  Thanks to this site's clean navigational menu, users can find all of the site's important pages within a few clicks. Wherever users end up on the site, they can always click on the "Home" button to return to the main page, or on any of the links in the menu to return to the site's important subpages. Like all of the links on this site, the links in the navigational menu are text-based links, which make it easier for both search engines and users to access the site's content. Finally, Philanthropedia has included a user-viewable site map, shown below, in case visitors are looking for a specific page not listed in the main menu.  Concise, descriptive anchor text for links Anchor text -- the clickable text of a link -- can help users quickly decide which links they want to click on and find out more about. Meaningful anchor text makes it easier for users to navigate around your site and also helps search engines understand what the link's destination page is about. 20% of our submissions could improve their sites by improving the anchor text used in some of their internal links. When writing anchor text, keep two things in mind:
Let's take a look at how anchor text played out in two user-submitted examples:
You can learn more about anchor text and internal linking strategies by checking out this blog post on the importance of link architecture. Unique, accurate page titles throughout the site Each page on your site is different, so flaunt your site's diversity by giving a unique title to each page. Giving each page a unique title lets search engines know how that page is distinct from others within your site. In our analysis, over 28% of sites could have improved their site quality by adding unique page titles. Let's check out a few more examples to see what a difference unique, accurate page titles can make:
Wrapping things up We hope that this blog post has given you some ideas on how to ring in the new year with improved content accessibility, which can boost the user experience and online presence for your site. To learn more about the features discussed here and in our previous two site clinic posts, check out our SEO Report Card and SEO Starter Guide. This blog post wraps up our website clinic for non-profits. We send our warmest regards to all the great non-profit causes you are working on, and thanks to everyone who took the time to submit their sites and read our posts! Contributors: Aditya Goradia, Brandon Falls, Charlene Perez, Diara Dankert, Michael Wyszomierski, and Nelson Bradley   |
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