Archive: October, 2007

Yesterday Metamend issued a press release touting one of the most exciting collaborative efforts in the history of the company. Earlier this year, Metamend entered in to discussions with the MIT Sloan Sales Club regarding applying our expertise to their websites. We are pleased to announce that Metamend will be working on the website for the annual MIT Sloan Sales Conference which is next scheduled for April 25, 2008.

Founded in 2006, the MIT Sloan Sales Club promotes sales as a skill set of business and as a career option for students. According to its website, it was created to, “… address the lack of a focus on sales at MIT as well as business schools in general.”

“The research undertaken by Metamend’s engineers will allow us to design and build more advanced website documents for the search engines,” say Nathan Williams, MIT Sloan Sales Club President. “This will expand our viewing reach and provide a higher degree of relevance for those that find us through search engines.”

For Metamend, this is an opportunity to expand our connections and relationships in the academic and business worlds. It is also an opportunity to demonstate the growth and sophistication of the search engine marketing sector to emerging entrepreneurs and business leaders.

SEOs around the world reacted with smugness, with the recent news that a California judge has allowed a class action lawsuit to proceed over the use (or lack thereof) of image alt attributes. This crime against HTML validation was perpetrated by Target Corp. and is brought by an organisation representing people with visual disabilities.

Alt attributes for images are mandatory within the W3C HTML specification and are a Priority 1 checkpoint in the W3C’s Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) . Alt attributes are essential in conveying the ‘meaning’ of images for the visually impaired through their use of talking browsers, screen readers or text only browsers. The most important consideration for SEOs is that Google strongly recommends the use of alt attributes for images.

From Google Webmaster Help

“If your site contains elements that aren’t crawlable by search engines (such as Flash, Javascript, or images)….

…. you should consider visitors to your site who are unable to view these elements as well. For instance:

* Provide alt text that describes images for visitors with screen readers or images turned off in their browsers.

Including substantially different content in the alternate element may cause Google to take action on the site.”