Archive for July, 2008

How to get a better Google snippet description

Friday, July 11th, 2008

I suspect you’ve always wondered how google gets the snippet information that it displays with the link to your site in it’s SERPs. Well I have too, and now i’ll let you in on the secret http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2007/09/improve -snippets-with-meta-description.html

“We want snippets to accurately represent the web result. We frequently prefer to display meta descriptions of pages (when available) because it gives users a clear idea of the URL’s content.”

So it seems that google does care about meta descriptions after all…

How do we apply this to dynamically generated products then I hear you ask. Well firstly I’m going to imagine that you have your product information stored in a database or flat file format and you know your SQL/parsing queries that will pull the relevant tags.

(more…)

Usability and Readability Tidbit #1

Wednesday, July 9th, 2008

This is part 1 of my quick guide to readability. Personally, i’m an Evangelist for semantics and usability, and the man you should all pay attention to is Jakob Nielson. He invented usuability (well almost) on the internet, and defined a lot of standards that ideally should be followed. He backs up all his “suggestions” with practical measured studies and you can find his website at useit.
(more…)