published by Hannah in SEO
I just finished reading Justin Brigg’s post “9 SEO Tips”. The post may have a boring title but his tips are pretty sound. I especially liked tip number 5, which tells about the power of the hash #, something frequently overlooked, if known at all, by SEO newbies. On my next post I will be expounding on the uses of the hash but for now what I’ll really be writing about was inspired by the accompanying illustration on the need to compromise to come up with a good web design. The illustration, which I’ve shown below, may seem funny but is perfectly true.
As I have written back in 2008 both in my posts entitled “More than Just Optimisation” and “SEO Doctors: Educating our Clients” it is clear that many times clients ideas on how to “optimise” their website may not necessarily be what we know should be done. What I haven’t touched on though is the difference in priorities between web designers and SEOs. I say priorities because more often than not both parties acknowledge the work the other does though they of course give more emphasis on their expertise. As Justin shows us though, just like in real life what ought to be done is often the intersection of two opinions.
Web designers deal with the user interface and so have to focus on the aesthetics as well as the user experience. SEOs are concerned with search engine algorithms and so need to focus more on technical aspects. The thing though is that these two are not mutually exclusive and in fact should go hand in hand. As experience has shown as following good web design practices ends up benefiting SEO efforts and vice versa so there is no reason why web designers and SEOs shouldn’t work together to come up with what’s best for their clients’ sites.
To SEOs my advice would be to follow web design trends because as I said earlier following web standards for good design benefits SEO efforts most of the time. Do not wait for someone to confirm something you know to be good for users to be good for SEO too before you act on it. Stay on top of things. Search engines algorithms are constantly improved upon so you never know when they start factoring in better practices. And as search engines become more intelligent you can bet that with their aim to give users the best possible results they’ll be giving more weight to web design aspects.
Popularity: 2%
published by Gary in SEO
Let’s face it 404 pages are a pain, for webmasters and for users. I absolutely hate clicking on a link and getting a 404 error page. However, what’s really our concern here is what it does for your SEO. What should you do about those 404 pages? Should you just leave it alone or should [...]
Popularity: 5%
Continue reading “404 Pages: Tips for SEO and User-Friendliness”
published by Hannah in SEO | Search Engines
Bing has arrived and the net is buzzing with reviews and comparisons to Google and even MSN’s old live search. With all the comparisons with regards to search results and what you can and cannot to do with Bing that you can do with Google and vice versa I though that it would be better [...]
Popularity: 9%
Continue reading “Staying on Top of the Bing Buzz: Readings and Thoughts”
published by Hannah in General | News | Search Engines
I spend my weekend playing around with one of the most awesome things to come out in the internet ever – WolframAlpha. If you haven’t heard of it’s the fruit of Stephen Wolfram’s vision and it is real live working computational knowledge engine. Forget search engines for the moment because the geek in me is [...]
Popularity: 16%
Continue reading “WolframAlpha: A Knowledge Engine”
published by Hannah in News | SEO | Web Video
Google’s VP of Search Products and User Experience, Marissa Mayer, announced yesterday the latest in Google’s Search Options. I’ve embedded the YouTube video below but am going to give you an outline of what you’ll see on the video. The new options allow you to:
view results identified as videos, forums, and reviews;
narrow down results depending [...]
Popularity: 18%
Continue reading “Filter Results Using Google Search Options”
published by Gary in SEO Mistakes
Microsoft Word and other word processing programs auto format punctuation. Unfortunately, punctuation that has been modified by word processing programs is not converted in the same way by the programs running the search engines.
For example, word processing programs will turn:
• straight apostrophes, commas, and quotation marks into curved ones;
• a short hypen - is converted [...]
Popularity: 16%
Continue reading “The danger from automatically formatted text”
published by Hannah in SEO
Heads up SEOs. If you haven’t been factoring in Twitter in your client’s SEO campaign now is the time to stop and seriously consider upping your social media efforts.
Twitter has announced that it will be expanding its Twitter Search to include not only the text found in tweets in its index, which is what it [...]
Popularity: 19%
Continue reading “SEO for Twitter Search”
published by Gary in Copywriting | Keyword Research
There used to be an old saying that if you throw enough mud at the wall some of it will stick and that used to be the way people threw in keywords. Splatter enough keywords across a Home Page and some of them are sure to attract the big boys. Times and the competition have [...]
Popularity: 21%
Continue reading “Keywords or Key Phrases?”
published by Hannah in SEO
We all agree that carewords are important and should be factored in when writing up a website’s content. What I haven’t mentioned though is how to come up with these carewords. The truth is that it is pretty much just like doing keyword research except that what you have to focus more on is not [...]
Popularity: 30%
Continue reading “Finding Carewords”
published by Gary in Google Page Rank | Organic SEO | Rep. Management | SEO | Web Video
Matt Cutts has confirmed that recent changes in Google’s algorithm that has lead to a surge in bigger brands appearing among the top results of Goole’s SERPs. According to Matt Cutts though the changes did not result from Google’s bias towards known brands but due to their commitment to give users the best possible results, [...]
Popularity: 36%
Continue reading “Google Likes Brands Because of Quality”
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