In the previous posts in this series I’ve focused a lot on the “conceptual” aspects of SEO – the non-technical things that can make a big difference to your SEO efforts. Many of these aspects have other practical and usability benefits.

Over the next few posts I’m turning to some of the more technically-oriented things that you can do to optimise for search engines. These posts definitely sway towards the geek end of the spectrum (just a fair warning if that’s not your thing). However, even if you’re in management, it helps to get an overview on such matters if only for when you’re briefing your tech team.

Today’s post focuses on technical matters that are visible to your participants (i.e. they impact how your users access the site). Future posts will look at some of the behind-the-scenes things you can do to assist search engines.

As before, many of these tips are best practices for other reasons, but they all certainly provide SEO benefits as well. Some techniques will have a bigger impact than others, and how much impact a particular technique may have on rankings is largely unknown (as far as I can tell) as most search engine algorithms are closely guarded secrets. So even if you can’t apply all these techniques, it’s still worth incorporating as many as you can into your site.

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Beth Kanter interviews David Neff:

Good advice. I think the “experiment” tip is essential. Clay Shirky, in his Web 2.0 talk, mentions “failing informatively” – I think experimenting with the sites and spaces, before you put your brand into them, is a great way to “fail informatively” with minimal brand risk.

That may mean setting up a dummy profile to play around with the technology, or it may mean setting up a personal profile and connecting with friends and colleagues – getting a sense of the space and learning the ropes while you’re there.

Having had a long-standing interest in environmental issues I’m very conscious of making environmentally responsible choices for my new business.

I figured it might be useful to others if I shared a little about some recent decisions relating to printing – what I chose and why…

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• Twitter is an Event Aggregator – Interesting use of Twitter – posting news related to the “Super Tuesday” primary voting in the U.S.
• Companies must listen to the Web 2.0 world – I don’t like the “avoid risk” case for social media strategy; I prefer to focus on opportunities. This article provides an overview of the potential risks. I’ve found that blogs can be a bell-weather for broader constituent sentiment, so worth watching.
• Internet fundraising trends 2008 – A collection of predictions for fundraising and donating in 2008, incl. a spot from Priscilla @ Solidariti and Seth Godin.

(These links were posted to my del.icio.us feed on 05-Feb-2008.)

• 9 Benefits of Twitter for Bloggers – Darren Rowse writes up his thoughts on the benefits of Twitter. His focus is specifically on bloggers, but still useful for anyone wanting some ideas as to why Twitter may be useful to them.
• what’s new on reddit: new features – reddit will soon support focused, private and semi-private reddits. I think this is important for orgs wanting to use del.icio.us except for the “public-ness” of it. We might see retooling of del.icio.us tools to support reddit if it takes off.
• Zookoda – An interesting looking (free) service – from what I can tell it takes an RSS feed and sends HTML email updates on that basis. Great for promoting your blog or creating quick email newsletters for your organisation. Will need to look into it some more…

(These links were posted to my del.icio.us feed between 19-Jan-2008 and 23-Jan-2008.)

There’s a weird issue with WordPress that means embedding YouTube video using the <object> tag (which is the standards-compliant method) causes HTML output errors.

The solution is quite simple (for anyone that’s comfortable with a little PHP) – it requires a very small update to the wp-includes/formatting.php file. In the wpautop function, there is a line that starts with $allblocks = '(?:table|thead| (it’s line 66 in the file that ships with WordPress 2.3.2).

The fix requires updating the line to begin with $allblocks = '(?:object|table|thead|.

A simple fix, but frustrating if you don’t know where to look. I’m not sure why this hasn’t been fixed in the WordPress code-base, but hopefully this simple patch will help if you’re experiencing this problem.

And don’t forget – you’ll have to apply this patch each time you upgrade WordPress.

I might be the last person in the world to work this out, but I’ve just found you can search for items in del.icio.us that match multiple tags in the del.icio.us interface.

All you need to do is insert a “+” between terms in the tag box at the top of the page (see screenshot below for an example).

This is, of course, documented in the help section on del.icio.us, but who reads help nowadays? :p

Then, suddenly, the “+” symbol next to tags listed in the “Related tags” made sense – clicking the “+” instead of the tag name adds it to the end of the current tag browse.