Found this really good post about improving website performance

http://www.insidecrm.com/features/webmaster-turbo-kit-042108/

Read, Learn, Execute!

Attended the SEO session at the Web2.0Expo in San Francisco today. The Session was held by Nathan Buggia (Microsoft), Vanessa Fox (Ignition Partners).   Since about 43% of the visitors of websites are referred from search result pages, this is obviously getting more and more important.

In short, a couple of good rules for HTML coding to be successful in SEO:

• <title> element – This is by far the most important tag. It should be short and sweet and unique for the page.
• <meta> data element – the ”description” meta data is by far the most important one. If you write this well (relevant and not too short) this text will be the one displayed on the Search Result page. Also it means a lot for the relevance of the search result resulting in better ranking.
• Link elements (<a>)- Always use anchor text to describe the link – it will make the “trust ranking” better resulting in better ranking in the end. So, please no more “More information, Click here” links!
• <h1>, <h2> and <h3> elements –  Use these the way that they are meant to be used. Do NOT use <span class=”heading1”> etc to make the same visual experience for devices able to show CSS, use the headings to bring structure to your content.
• <img alt=”the image description”> – Use Alt text if you want the search engines to care about them.
• <script> element – Not good to create links using JavaScript for search engines (or device independence or for web accessibility). Google is currently working on a simple JavaScript parser, but it is from what I heard still in an early stage. This doesn’t mean that you can not use JavaScript to show, hide and change stuff, but you should always have a Url that, also without JavaScript enabled, actually take the user (or the crawler) to the actual content. So, use the JavaScript to do fancy stuff with a onClick, but please, do not leave the url parameter empty).
• Flash – Use SWFObject to detect if the browser has Flash support. And if not, show a HTML version instead. Remember that crawlers can’t index Flash movies.

If a page do not have a unique URL it simply doesn’t exist. Not in search engines anyway.

Bottom line is really this; If you design for accessibility you design for SEO. It goes hand in hand. Stick to the guidelines and everybody is winners.

Today I arrived in San Francisco. The whether is nice and I’m looking forward to spend the week in the Bay Area. There will be 4 days of conferencing and networking among others active in the area of innovative web development. Apart from attending the Web2.0Expo and visiting partners and customers I will try to get some time to really see the city and see what the nightlife has to offer. On Thursday I will go to the Web 2.0 Afterparty arranged by the Netvibes Team where they will launch their “Netvibes Universe”.

If you happen to be in the area and would like to have a meeting to discuss what Voice On The Web can do for you, please contact me directly at niclas@voice-corp.com.

VoiceCorp announced today, together with VocalFruits, that they launcing the rSpeak VocalFruits Information Composing System.

It is a “Web 2.0″ web application where anyone can create a podcast from any RSS source and where content owners such as bloggers can offer their audience a speaking version of their content!

The blog posts- Bang! Right into iTunes.

rSpeak VocalFruits will basically replace AudioFeed (www.audiofeedcreator.com), a not very social, but very appreciated free web service that I created about a year and a half ago.

With the new web based podcasting service, any registred user can create a podcast from any RSS feed in no time! There are also a couple of really cool features like aggregating a number of RSS feeds into one podcast or why not create a personal podcast that you can update (adding posts to) just by emailing to your personal vocalfruits email address.

In addition to the podcast RSS feed it also creates a web browser version and a mobile version ideal for mobile devices such as mobile phones and PDA’s.

In this release there will be support for US English, French and Spanish. Support for more languages (Swedish, Dutch, German, UK English and Portuguese) will be available within a month or two from what I heard. Also it will be changed so that you do not need to be a registered user to be able to listen… Anybody should be able to listen. That is key.

Check it out at www.vocalfruits.com. Stay tuned!