Navigational elements on your website can be created in many ways, but the only “true” SEO-friendly way to construct any links on your website is to use plain text links formatted with CSS – plain and simple! CSS formatting allows you to render plain, text links more appealing to the user.

However, if you are a web designer that can not envision creating links in this way and you have to use JavaScript, images or image maps, make sure you have these contingencies in place:

1) Ensure there is an Internal HTML sitemap on the site that provides alternate, text based navigation.

2) Link to important pages in your Footer Navigation:

3) Keep your XML Sitemap up-to-date to help the search engines spiders properly index pages on your site.

4) Use optimal text in your Alt tags. While certain images are “crawlable”, they are not necessarily “optimal”. Adding keyword rich text to Alt tags tells the search engines the theme of the linked page:

So, how crawlable is your website? If you are not the person who designed the site and are unsure, simply mouse over a link or button on a page and see if the URL for the link appears in the bottom of your browser window. If it does, there’s a good chance you have an SEO friendly, crawlable link. You can also view crawlable links in a “text only mode” for your site by typing in “cache:www.mywebsite.com” into Google and clicking on the link that says “Text-only version” in the dialogue box at the top of the page when it loads. If the link appears on this text only version of the webpage, you’re most likely in good shape.

To determine if the link is anchored with an image, merely right click the link and see if you have the option to “view image” or “save image as” etc in the pop-up menu.  If you use a browser such as Firefox, you will also be able to tell if the image has associated Alt text by looking at the “Associated Text” section under “View Image Info” in the pop-up menu:

For Internet Explorer, perform a search in the source code for the term “Alt” to locate any Alt tags associated with any images on the page:

Have you ever wanted to make updates to your site from someone else’s computer? If you have, you probably have faced situations where the computer you use doesn’t have the programs you usually use to make these updates. One way to help you easily make updates is by using Cloud tools.

Moo Color Finder is a cloud tool that helps you find the colors being used in a site; this can come in very handy when creating new styles for your site and keeping it consistent. This tool is pretty simple to use, you can either go to the moo Color finder website and submit a url and it will return all of the color values in Hexadecimal and as a Photoshop Palette file, or you can add a snippet of code to the website you would like to retrieve the colors from and they will display on your page. For this you will need a page that uses a language such as PHP.

There is another great tool called Picnik that allows you to edit images on the cloud and could be very useful when tweaking images or adding new images to a blog post. This tool helps you crop, resize, zoom, rotate, sharpen among other features that provides the results in real time. After all the changes are made to the picture, all you need to do is save it.

Another tool that will be very useful when testing code in PHP, .Net and Javascript is called Coderun. This cloud tool allows you to create projects either from scratch, a template provided by the service or uploading your own files and testing it’s functionality. You can test changes you would like to make to your website without having to push it live or using a development server before pushing it to your live site.  

Google docs also provides great tools you can use in the cloud. These include creating a word document, a spreadsheet or even drawing. There is also a tool called Forms, which allows you to create HTML forms that can be used as a template when adding a form to your site.

The great thing about these tools is that you can access them from anywhere that has an internet connection and it can become a real time saver, since it allows you to use their services without the need of setting up any software in the computer you are currently using. They can help you improve your site by adding information, as well as styles and a means to test code which can help develop your site and give you flexibility allowing you to progress your social presence.

Google has created a new image format called WebP, which is more efficient than most image formats such as jpegs and can allow a website to load faster and even allow the use of more images.

Google has provided a conversion tool, to convert jpgs and other formats into WebP format. This conversion tool can be installed on linux computers and will soon be available for Windows. What makes this format so especial is the fact that it provides a better compression than the JPEG format does and maintains good quality of the image. This will improve the user experience of a site by allowing a faster page load as well as lower bandwidth use.

Even though this format is still in its beginning stage, it will soon have support for its format in Google Chrome. WebP can become a very important part of the future of web development since it will provide faster load time of websites, which can improve a website’s SEO standing, since it’s one of the elements being considered for page rankings in Google.