The minute a client or future client asks for a check on their site I load it up in Firefox and run a few tests over it. During a meeting a client asked me what I do and so I showed him. Besides the confusion for him as I had all these little addons in my browser compared to his plain Internet Explorer, he still couldn't grasp what it told me. Of course understanding how spiders and search engines perceive these pages helps too.

So what do I do? Well a 5 minute check requires the use of the web developer toolbar which is a firefox extension. This is a great tool that let's you gain information about a site without having to hunt through the code. Open up any web site in firefox and try the following:

1. Disable CSS
If you go to the CSS menu -> Disable Styles -> All Styles. Alternatively press Ctrl + Shift + S. This will turn off all of the CSS styling. It's not fully known if spiders pay attention to inline styles however they will most likely ignore external stylesheets.

What to look for
Hidden Text – be it intentional or not this will often show up any hidden text on the page.
List Usage – lists should be used for listing information. Often used for navigation, afterall it is a list of links, however lists can be abused at times as they are thought to be given slightly more relevance than plain text.

2. Disable Images
Images -> Disable Images -> All Images. This is an important issue for both SEO and Accessibility. Spiders cannot read images so it's often interesting to see how a site looks without them.

What to look for
Missing alt attributes – this is what the spiders will read. This is also what screenreaders read for partially sighted visitors.
Keyword stuffing – similar to hidden text, the art of placing all your keywords/phrases into the alt attributes on the page – very unhelpful to anyone relying on that text to tell them about the image, that's hardly fair is it?

3. Outline headers
Outline -> Headings. This will put boxes around all heading tags on the page. If you've got Show Element Names when Outlining ticked it will also tell you which type of heading it is. H1, H2, H3 etc.

What to look for
Header Styling – People are beginning to realise that header tags are given more relevance than plain body text and of course headers can be styled using CSS. However some shady developers tend to style their headers to make them look like plain text to the average visitor.
Number of headings – An extension of the above, headings should be used but not overused, however some people tend to believe that if every heading on the page is a H1 then it will fare better in the search engines. A good rule of thumb is to use H1 once, H2 twice, H3 three times. Note that's for an average business page of around 250-350 words.

4. Disable JavaScript
Disable -> JavaScript. This will switch off any javascript or DHTML code. Spiders do not read JavaScript so cannot follow links generated by JavaScript.

What to look for
Inactive links, various text disappearing, certain areas not working.

These are the quick checks. Take any page and try them out. You'll soon start to spot hidden text, keyword stuffing in alt attributes, inactive menus and overuse of headers. A client of mine has a competitor who ranks highly for a particular phrase. When you visit their site there are around 50 words in the top alt attribute. The H1 header has a paragraph in it styled as normal size text, and on one page is a very faint paragraph of key phrases. It's simple and quick to see when you know how!

Something I've been meaning to do for a while. List my Firefox extensions!

Adsense Notifier – Displays your Adsense earnings in your status bar
Blogger Web Comments – Read blog comments on any web page
Fission – Puts the progress bar over the address bar to make the progress of the page load more visible
HTML Validator – Adds HTML validation to the View Page Source and status bar
LinkChecker – Checks all links as to whether they're valid
Live PageRank – Display live PageRank for the visited page (different to Google PR that's only updated every 3-4 months)
MeasureIt – A pixel ruler for taking measurements and checking alignment
Mozilla Accessibility Extension – Does what it says on the tin
Omea Connector – Allows for quick adding of RSS feeds to Omea Reader
Search Status – Display the Google PageRank and Alexa ranking with extra tools
Server Spy – Indicates what brand of HTTP server the visited site runs on
ShowIP – Shows the IP address of the current page in the status bar
Tab X – Adds a close button to each of the browser tabs
Unread Tabs – Makes unread tabs italics so you know you've not read them
Web Developer – Adds a menu and toolbar with various web developer tools
Yellowpipe Lynx Viewer Tool – Displays a Lynx view of the web page – see how the spiders see your site

I tend to look through the new extensions on the Firefox site every few weeks to see what else has been released. Anyone know of any others that are good then let me know

I often wonder if some clients are there to prevent you from doing your job as well as you could. Today was a typical annoying Monday. I've been taking it easy over the weekend (as you could tell from the PHP post yesterday that I've been meaning to finish!) to try and rest and let this illness go away that I've been battling.

I woke up this morning after a good nights sleep (for the first time in a while), feeling all ready to go. I started work at 9am (very impressive) catching up on what I didn't get done this weekend. Whilst sorting a few things out for my contract job, and having to wait for the server to catch up at times I decided to log into Google Sitemaps and check up on the phrases being used for the various sites at work. Now just a quick bit of background info. At work they run their own server. There is a main business site and then each department has their own web site (it's an ego thing for some of the department managers – don't ask!). Since I've been there, despite working on the other sites, getting the copy text tweaked and well written, the department sites don't rank for any general terms, just very very specific ones. However the main business site ranks well and top for all their main phrases so they're happy as the visitors tend to filter through to the right site anyhow. However whilst nosing at the stats today I noticed one of the departments were getting click throughs for very general terms, competitive terms in fact. I checked the phrases in Google and lo and behold there were rankings of 1st, 3rd and 4th for a handful of phrases. Suddenly on cloud nine (sad I know) that one department was ranking I ran over to Digital Point (okay I opened another tab in firefox and clicked the bookmark) and logged in to view the historical rankings data to see when this apparent rankings change had happened. And suddenly the cloud disappeared…

When I first started work part time at work, back in May 2004, I set up the keyword ranker at Digital Point. I targetted around 40-50 phrases, and every phrase was checked on the main business domain as well as the respective department domain. Yes at the time no departments were showing rankings, but there's no harm in them being there. Google's API allows 10,000 searches a day so it's not like I was using those searches up. Then last year the guy in charge of PR and Marketing suddenly found himself a new job to fill his time and took over the checking of the rankings on a fortnightly basis to then have a meeting about the rankings, statistics and other various info with the Managing Director. At the time it was no problem to me. I'd done my job that I'd been hired to do, get the web site back to the top of the rankings for various phrases, so I didn't check the rankings very often. He added a few extra to make the results 'look good', not a problem… Until I discovered today that he had removed all other phrases attached to the other department domains…

So something has happened to make this major change in the rankings. It only seems to have happened to one domain. It's hard to use the statistics to compare from previous months as there are times when there is heavier marketing for the department, other times it's dependent on the time of year. I set up a visitor tracker at the start of February and that was showing people clicking on these phrases so I know it's been ranking top since before then. I took a look in the raw logs but it doesn't tell me much. To be honest I'm so pissed off with him today. It's hard to explain but I put various tools in place for a reason. Perhaps I never need them but when they don't cost or get in anyone's way are they a problem? No! But right now I could have a major piece of SEO information in my hands but I don't know what it is because he killed my tools. So I've been racking my brains as to what I've changed or added over the past few months. We changed some of the content but that was only in the last week or two and therefore doesn't tie up to the statistics from the start of February. I also added all of the department sites to my Google Sitemaps account, but according to GS, it will not improve your ranking. The sites were already indexed so that's not mad any difference. Otherwise I cannot think what could have made the change, but without specific dates I won't know now at all!

I could spend all day moaning about people putting hurdles in my way whilst I'm just trying to help them out but I won't (I sense a sigh of relief!). However all of that aside I decided to set up my own Google Sitemaps account (the other is using my work email account and for work only) for my own and various client sites. Why? Well most of the information isn't of much use to me yet. I'm reading up on various information about it but I think the main bit of information it can give you is on the first page it shows you. When you click one of the web sites listed in your account it takes you through to the Query Stats page. Here it lists the top search queries and the top search query clicks. The first list tells you what you are ranking for, note when I say ranking that's not the top 10, I've not worked out how far it goes but I've found results in the 30s so I'm guessing the first 50 perhaps (I'll read the help file one day, it may tell me!). At least it gives you an idea of what phrases you have a chance of getting visitors with currently, and then the second set of information tells you who actually clicked that phrase to get to your site. I hope they look to expand the amount of information they give you, or perhaps allow you to download a monthly CSV file instead of just restricting it to the top 15 phrases on screen as the information is so invaluable. Digital Point is great for example, but it's not always accurate. It doesn't communicate with Google all of the time and often drops phrases off the scale and then puts them back the next time. The downside of course is DP is not on the Google server, whereas Sitemaps has direct access to all server info.

On a sidenote I've also noticed my Alexa Traffic Rank is dropping/increasing, depending on how you look at it. The traffic is increasing (this I can see in my stats anyhow), the figure is dropping. I'm going to try another little trick that I read about on Graywolf's SEO Blog whereby I add the traffic rank button to this site and see if my figure drops any lower. Of course the figure is only currently accurate for the number of users with the Alexa toolbar, but I'm presuming that by having an actual image on the site it will hit Alexa for every visitor. It's currently around 142,000 so lets see if I can get it into 5 figures I'll be adding a new side column to take this along with some adsense. Now if only I could work out how Site Point do their snazzy 'hide nav' trick, then anyone who doesn't want the ads could just hide them

Probably one of the most used MySQL commands is SELECT. This lets you select information out of a database table. If you take the table created in the previous post, and use phpMyAdmin to insert a few records to give us something to play with.

So to get PHP to work with MySQL you need to first of all tell PHP how to connect to it. In configuring phpMyAdmin (alternatively if you're using it online) you should have a username and password. 9/10 times you'll connect as well to the host "localhost". Unless you're running MySQL on a different server this should be fine for you. So to test your connection details create a file with the following code:
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It's a rareity when Dave posts on his blog. He spends more time breaking and fixing it, and tinkering with the design, adding new plugins, but when he does post he does it well. He's written this time (month/year/decade) about the longdesc attribute used in the Image tag. Now I for one just thought it was an extension of the alt attribute and should be used in conjunction with alt but to explain in more detail about the image. As it happens I couldn't be further from the truth! So if you're interested in good XHTML, Semantics and Accessibility I'd highly recommend you at least read the post on it, if not bookmark the site (and return in maybe a month for another post!).

Direct Link: longdesc, it's not just alternate text.