By: Tim Nash

Sometimes all the basic onpage optimisation is done, then its time to fine tune your pages, the following are some techniques that you may not have even thought about using before, which will not only help your page but in some cases provide a visual edge as well.

1) The CSS Image Substitution technique

Most site have a logo more often then not, this is a picture in an image tag with some sort of alt text such as company logo. I hope I didn't catch you sniggering, have a look at the SERPs for Company Logo sure their are some companies offering design services, but have a closer look at the companies in between.

There are several methods to help optimise your site based around your logo, or any image my favourite is the CSS Image substitution technique, simply put it moves or hides text within a specific tag and replaces it with an image. The technique is most often used with heading tags replacing a keyword rich title for a page with an image of the logo and the title.

2) Flash Video Transcript techniques

We all know Flash is not the golden boy of search engines whatever adobe employees may think, and with many video sites now turning to flash their is not much chance of this changing, but how can we rank Flash videos well for their content?

Google is still a textual search engine, it is at this time unable to convert movement of sound into a search result, the easiest way therefore to help your movies to rank is to assist Google by providing a transcript.

There are many tools out there that convert text to speech, or you could transcribe the movie yourself, even higher out the job. Once you have a transcribed version, use a technique such as SWFObject to swap a div tag with a flash movie, include the transcript in the div and of you go! (beware this technique works best on short movies, to prevent transcripts getting to long)

3) Headings that are not headings

We all have just about got the hang that heading tags are good place to be putting keywords and the concept that headings are hierarchical in nature. Now the term heading is such a strict term perhaps it would be better to think of them as keyword stuffing mechanisms 1 through to 6. That's right there are 6 heading tags how many do you use, did you say more then 3 then you are in the minority and how often have you used a heading inline with text? We all know that strong is also a good tag to place keywords in but which is better strong or a heading tag? What rule says heading tags can't be used inline within text? Just be careful with this one, there is a line between keeping a nice layout with keywords and stuffing keywords in heading tag after heading tag.

4) Secrets of the horizontal rule

Most people know that heading tags help in keyword ranking, but other then anecdotal evidence their is only a couple of documents from Google and or Stanford Uni to support this theory the most often quotes is a patent application for local search

[0040] As an example of assigned weights, consider the HTML element

<hr /> (horizontal rule). The <hr /> element may introduce a weight of 20 before and after the element. As another example, the HTML elements

<h1> through</h1>

<h6> are used to start new headings in which</h6>

<h1> is the most prominent and</h1>

<h6> is the least prominent. The corresponding elements</h6>

through

are used to end the headings. The various headings may, for example, be assigned weights such as, for

<h2>, a weight of 50 before and 30 after the element (i.e.,</h2>

<h2> may be assigned a weight of 50 and</h2>

a weight of 30. This reflects the concept that heading text is more likely to be associated with what comes after it than what comes before it.

Source: US Patent Office
While this is an important indication of the ranking value of heading tags it is the first line that is most interesting, it seems to imply that more emphasis is given to text just before or after the <hr> tag, if so the humble rule may have another life yet!

5) Microformats of the future

Microformats are designed to be both human and machine friendly markup within xhtml, you will be familiar with at least one Microformat already the dreaded nofollow, however their are many more. Both Yahoo and Google are developing several Microformats to define areas of content on a page that should be crawled. With Microformats appearing almost everywhere it will not be long before most of your on page code will be using predefined Microformat blocks.

On a side note, you may notice the poppy to the right of this post, please if your in the UK and you see a poppy seller please give them a few pence and remember the fallen as well as the living this November.