Archive for October, 2008

Fixing a low Hubspot Score

Friday, October 31st, 2008

One of the issues we addressed today at searchcamp.com.au was what steps to take if your website receives a low grade. In our case we used websitegrader.com but it could well have been any other website analysis tool – I just prefer this one.

One thing to remember with these tools is that they are usually tools that companies use to attract paying customers, so you have to expect a little bias towards a negative grade. That said you can extract a lot of useful information from these services usually for free.

To get started so that you can work along go to http://websitegrader.com and enter your website. We will work our way down the page, using one post for each major section of the report to keep things organised.

After you have generated your report have it on hand and we will start looking at “On-Page SEO”

Page Titles and how to fix them

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searchcamp.com.au

Friday, October 31st, 2008

We have just wrapped up the first search camp and it was a resounding success. One thing that became early on in the day was that there is so much information and only so much time. we worked within those constraints but I did wish at several points throughout the day that I could just spend another 10 minutes and show our guests a few more examples and resources.

Then the obvious came to me. My website is brand new and needs the ninjistics applied. I needed a managable, agreeable website to manipulate to demonstrate each technique, why not use andrewbleakley.com and blog the results, tips and pitfalls as I go.

Follow along as I lift the lid on search engine optimisation and give you a peek at the day to day decision making that goes one when customers ask me to “fix their website”.

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Open links in a new window and still validate

Monday, October 20th, 2008

Since the target attribute of links is no longer considered valid you have two choices to keep your pages valid and still have links open in a new window. Both involve a little javascript, which is fine – but the examples I have fond are horrible. You either have to write an onclick handler for each link or use javascript to reapply the _blank target after the page has loaded.

Looking (and failing) for an unobtusive way around what in reality is a minor issue I gave up and come up with

$(document).ready(function()
{
	$('a[rel~=external]').each(function(i)
	{
	    $(this).click(function(j)
            {
	        window.open($(this).attr('href'), 'child');
		return false;
	    });
	});
});

Add this and a reference to jQuery to your page header and and link with rel=”external” will open in a new window.

Clean, unobtrusive and valid – I love those words.

The Whole Code

<html>
 <head>
 <script type="text/javascript" src="jquery.js"></script>
 <script type="text/javascript">
 $(document).ready(function()
{
	$('a[rel~=external]').each(function(i)
	{
	    $(this).click(function(j)
            {
	        window.open($(this).attr('href'), 'child');
		return false;
	    });
	});
});

 </script>
 </head>
 <body>
   <a href="http://andrewbleakley.com" rel="external">This link will open in a new window</a>
<br /><br />
<a href="http://andrewbleakley.com">This link will <strong>NOT</strong> open in a new window</a>
 </body>
 </html>

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