In case you missed it, a short while ago we posted a video about how to use ALT attributes for images. I’ll include the video here, but I’ll also use this opportunity to remind everyone that you really should subscribe to the Official Google Webmaster Blog (Atom link for feedreaders). Here’s the video:
In the comments, you’ll note that Philipp Lenssen corrects me about something: “IMG” is a tag, but “ALT” and “TITLE” are attributes of the IMG tag. So referring to an “ALT tag” is a bit sloppy and incorrect.
Luckily, the webmaster central folks were kind enough to clarify the original post. John Mueller also made the original post even more valuable by talking about ALT and TITLE and how those attributes are slightly different. John is one of the newer voices in webmaster/SEO communication (okay, he’s been a voice for quite a while, but only joined Google a few months ago); I’m really glad that he’s joined Google. For example, you might have missed his incredibly useful meta tag reference guide that he posted not long ago. Yet another reason why you should be subscribing to the Official Google Webmaster Blog (Atom link for feedreaders). At this point, the official webmaster blog is doing Google SEO-related posts faster than I can.
Several weeks ago I flew up to Google’s Kirkland office to visit with the wonderful webmaster tools team. While I was visiting, someone said “Hey, why don’t you grab a video camera, find an empty office, and record as many videos as you can in an hour?” That sounded good to me, and the first result of that is an eight-minute or so video about Google’s search snippets:
I’d like to say a special thanks to Ríona MacNamara of the webmaster tools team. Ríona took care of everything so that all I had to do was stand in front of the camera and talk. She reserved the room, grabbed the video camera, brainstormed topics, taped everything, got it digitized, and even wrote the official webmaster blog post. Thank you, Ríona!
In our quick efforts to make a video, I know the audio turned out crackly in a few places. Sorry about that, but that can happen when you grab a video camera/microphone/whiteboard and do a speed-recording session. I think the audio might be better on the other two topics we taped. Enjoy!
Okay, people always ask me about weather updates and what’s going on with data centers at any given moment. I recorded this summary last week as an overview of the various software infrastructure changes that have happened this year, and some meta-insights about data center watching.
A combination of review and weather update for datacenters as of August 23rd, 2006. Some comments on: - data refreshes on June 27th, July 27th, and August 17th 2006 - Bigdaddy - Supplemental Results - Infrastructure that improves quality and gives more accurate site: results estimates
Plus a short reminder that - results estimates for site: are just estimates, with some reminders of their limitations (I mention too-high site: estimates in middle of the video, in the context of the “5 billion page” spammer whose best domain actually had <50K pages on it). - watching individual data centers may not be the most productive use of your time.
As a bonus, at the beginning of the video I review some some schwag from the recent SES San Jose conference.
I recorded this last week and I’m just now getting around to pushing it live. If you didn’t get to attend Search Engine Strategies San Jose, I’ll mention some of the stuff I saw.
At this point, I think Google’s webmaster console offers enough useful features that every site owner should try it on a site. If you haven’t checked out Google’s webmaster tools recently, I’d highly recommend taking another look, especially for the brand new “pick www vs. non-www” feature.
google.com/support can answer general user questions.
http://www.google.com/webmasters/ provides tools to - tell Google that www.domain.com and domain.com are the same - test out robots.txt files - discover crawl errors that Googlebot saw - see some spam penalties
All this is happening as Sitemaps is renaming itself and tackling a wider scope: all of webmasters. There’s even an official Google blog for webmasters now at http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/
By the way, I wanted to send shouts out to folks that have been transcribing the videos: - Dave at ViperChill was one of the first to twig to transcribing as a linkbait idea, and has transcribed many (all?) the videos so far. - Philipp Lensen has been among the most meticulous. Philipp also prodded me into thinking about what the copyright should be for these videos. Based on the talks we had, I’m placing the videos under a non-commercial Creative Commons license. So as long as you don’t charge for it, feel free to mash up the videos all you want. - Poor Rebecca Kelley is stuck transcribing for SEOmoz and is starting to ask me not to do any more video answers. Sorry to have to disappoint you, Rebecca.
