Google has created a font API that allows a range of fonts to be use in websites. The types of fonts available can really transform a site and make it more attractive to users.

Google also provides a font previewer, where you can test how a font will look and help you decide if any of the fonts available in font previewer will work on your site, as well as customizing it. To implement one of these fonts all you need to add is a link to an external stylesheet and customize your site’s styles with the new font. You can view an example of how to set it up here.

Even though this API is still in Beta testing, it shows how impressive it’s use is, and how easily it is to set up. The only problem that will need to be faced is how fonts that are not open source, fonts you need to pay to use, will be considered in this API.  Buying once, will allow anyone visiting the site to view that font and this could create a problem. Google only provides open source fonts, and they seem to work fine in most browsers, but questions about fonts that are not open source will soon be raised. Below you can view a font called tangerine, added using the Google fonts API and how it renders in 4 different browsers IE, Chrome, Firefox and Safari.

The flexibility allowed from this API can create sites with a more distinguished look and feel and also allow older sites currently using images to change those images and replace them with text, especially navigation items. This will improve the site’s SEO ranking as well as making any updates to the site easier and a lot faster.

Meta data is a critical component of SEO. Meta data consists of primarily the title tag, the description tag and the keyowrd tag of a page.  This information, when properly used for SEO, can help to tell the search engine spiders and the searcher a bit more about what they will find on the page.

Let’s start by breaking down a listing in a search engine results page.

The clickable, blue link in Google’s search engine results pages is the title tag.  This is usually the actual title tag of your page, which is also visible when viewing the page (shown in the top of your browser).  As you can imagine, since this is the clickable link, it’s important to make sure that it includes keywords.  This can help with rankings and it can also encourage someone to click through to the page of your site listed.

The snippet of text just below the title is displayed to show a bit more information about the page to the searcher. This text can be pulled from a few places.  If Google’s spiders are not able to crawl the page or if they are not finding text that they think will be valuable to the searcher, they may rely on the Open Directory Project for this information.  Other times they may use the description tag that you assign to the page.  Lastly, Google may pull this text from a place within the page’s content.  For instance, if the specific search query is most related to a piece of the content located at the bottom of the page, Google may display content from the bottom of the page as the search snippet.

One bit of confusion is that Google will not always display the description tag that you have assigned to the page.  As mentioned earlier, if a piece of content on the page is more relevant to the search query, the search engine may choose to display that instead of your description tag.  This does not mean you should ignore the description tag by any means.  It can still add weight to your page. As Google is trying to create the best experience for the searcher, there are some elements such as the descriptive snippet, that they will tweak in order to create what they believe makes best search experience.  The next question that usually arises is: can I tell Google to only use my description tag?  Since it’s an algorithm that determines this, you can’t. However, if the text pulled is from the Open Directory Project, you can use the META NODP tag, which essentially lets you opt out of the Open Directory Project title and description.

Other elements of a snippet that are within the search engine results page are the URL and sometimes site links. The URL is pretty self explanatory – it is the destination URL of the page listed in the search engine results page. The site links are additional non-paid links into a few other pages on your site that Google feels is relevant for searchers.

Review your website’s meta data and be sure that the content on your page and meta data are in sync.  Even conduct searches for your keywords and see what displays in the search results. This can help you to find out what Google is telling searchers about your pages.

Embedding videos on your website is a great way to engage people and give them the information they need. We all know that, from a user experience point of view, videos can be both informative and fun. That being said, how do we make sure they get the maximum exposure in the search engines?

Search engines, such as Google, need to be able to interpret what the video is about to correctly include it within their search results. One way to do this is to ensure that the content of the video is marked up in the body of a web page (uses coding that is recognized by the search engines). For instance, Google is able to recognize Facebook Share and Yahoo! SearchMonkey RDFa, but still has difficulty with videos that are JavaScript or Flash enabled. Using the correct code for the search engines is imperative if you want your videos to show up in places like Google’s own YouTube. As with all content you have on your website, traditional SEO practices still apply when it comes to videos. Make sure there is some descriptive, keyword rich text below the video, make sure there are unique titles and description meta tags for each of your video landing pages and allow people to post comments and share for social media and viral marketing efforts.

Of course, once the videos have been included on the site, it’s a good idea to tell the search engines where they are, so utilizing a video sitemap can be very beneficial. Once your Sitemap is created, submit it in Google Webmaster Tools or through your robots.txt file.