The Venture Skills Blog

A recent Google Webmaster blog post finally put the last nail into the coffin with regards to content substitution or to give it the demonic blackhat term Cloaking…

A technique like sIFR still lets non-Flash readers read a page, since the content/navigation is actually in the HTML — it’s just displayed by an embedded Flash object.

Source:http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2007/07/best-uses-of-flash.html

So its ok for us to write text and then substitute that text with a flash or image file, now to be fair most SEO I think have been doing this with CSS image substitution for some time, but this is the first time that I have seen Google come out and say that its ok to use these techniques.
Read the rest of this entry »

So following in the vein of our accessibility drive and then our layouts we now turn our attention to some of the best ideas and tips when it comes to using Fonts and typography in your CSS based sites.
In case you were wondering…

Typography is the art and techniques of type design, modifying type glyphs, and arranging type. Type glyphs (characters) are created and modified using a variety of illustration techniques. The arrangement of type is the selection of typefaces, point size, line length, leading (line spacing) and letter spacing.Wikipedia

These as always are in no particular order, but hopefully will help at least one or two people out.
Read the rest of this entry »

I have run an update to this post on my blog timnash.co.uk: Does Flash SEO still suck?

Nothing gets up the semantic web developer lobby noses more then the bane of their lives Flash. After spending months developing perfectly semantic well formed XML compliant HTML some upstart art herbet comes along and ruins their day by showing the boss his latest web site. No amounts of appeals about it won’t be searchable or accessible will help. The lure of flash is to great for many companies and while you may be saying its not accessible the boss is pointing to large corporate sites like Marks and Spencers and Starbucks are using it and ultimately you will loose the battle, but wait this story is not over the Arty farty herbert is a web designer and hasn’t got a clue what your talking about when you mention htaccess and so you end up having to actually launch this monstrous baby, sounding familiar?

Adobe Flash (formally Macromedia) is a great tool for developing highly artistic multimedia applications, it has the accessibility and searchability of a brick. If you are serious about getting organic rankings the only advice is stay away from Flash, I mean it stop reading this post it will not help!
Still here? You either failed to read my last sentence or are being forced into this satanic world so lets get on with trying to make flash searchable. Read the rest of this entry »