Microsoft is the master, but many, many programmers and software development companies are guilty. I can’t count the number of times I’ve had the most meaningless error messages pop up on my computer screen.
What set me off this morning? A client sent me a Word file. A simple, one-page Word file. I double-clicked it.
Many of my clients already have an existing web site when they contact me. Often they’re unhappy with their site’s visual design, or its functionality, or its performance in the search engines. I hate — I really hate — telling a potential client that their site needs to be completely re-developed from the ground up in order achieve the level of performance they’re looking for. Yes, I can charge more for a complete redevelopment, and I like that part, but it always feels sort of “snake oil salesman” to me. I’d rather tell the client, “Yes, we can work with your existing site. We can make these changes, and add this functionality, and we can do this, that and the other thing.”
But sometimes that’s simply not possible. Particularly when the potential client is looking for improved search engine performance or better usability.
Difficult as it may be to believe, but by January of 2007, Google is still unable to recognize when URLs that obviously lead to the same page are in fact the same page. So what’s a URL, and what’s the problem here?
Is there a sandbox or is there not? Is the question purely one of semantics? Let’s see what Googler Matt Cutts actually had to say:
Timing is everything. I launched this blog on Jan. 11. On about the 15th, some crazy hacker started hitting SEO-related blogs, using a security vulnerability discovered in the WordPress blog software. Just my luck. The story of my life.
You’ve decided your business needs a web site. Good, that’s the first step. You have a lot of additional steps to get through before you actually have a web site. One of those steps is selecting a domain name for your site.
Web sites need inbound links to do well in search engines. One-way, unpaid-for links are clearly the types of links the search engines prefer. How does one go about getting such links?
(Read on: Linkbait: What is it?)
My quick rundown:
Title tag: Yes, this one’s a biggie. All indications are that the title of the page matters a lot to Google and the other SEs. Every page on a web site should have well-written title that accurately summarizes the page’s main focus.
(Read on: On-page SEO: What matters, what doesn’t)
Yesterday I sniped at Google with my No NoFollow post, but today I’m here to praise Google. The technology that powers Google Maps is so very cool, and the very best thing about it, in my opinion, is that Google lets us use that technology right on our very own web sites!
The keywords meta tag seems to get a lot of attention, but the description meta tag (meta content=”This is the description” name=”description” /) is one that actually matters.
Not for search engine optimization in the sense of helping a page appear higher in the search results.
I just edited the files in my wordpress template to remove all traces of the rel=”nofollow” attribute from links in this blog. All links, including those in comments and signatures, are now your basic bog-standard “follow” links.
I develop web sites for a living. One of my priorities is building search-engine-friendly sites that follow best practices for making sure that sites are easily spiderable by the search engine bots, and that the key on-page elements are present and used appropriately.
For about the umpteenth time, this morning I responded to a question on a newsgroup by some poor soul who didn’t understand why the images weren’t showing up on his web page. The links were correct. The images were uploaded to the correct directory. But when he viewed his page in his browser, the images were just …. not there. As if they had never existed.
What do web site development, search engine optimization and Hippocrates have in common? A line from the Hippocratic Oath comes to mind: First, do no harm. In a previous post, I touched on how the technological factors underlying a web site are important to the site’s search engine optimization.
These factors aren’t important so much for their ability to rank a site highly, as they are for avoiding problems that can harm a site’s ranking.
I use a fairly wide variety of software programs in my work, on both the Mac and PC platforms (primarily Mac, of course). Some programs stand head and shoulders above the others, because they provide so much value, and/or make my work (and my life) easier.
I was just browsing the referral keywords for my company’s site, TropicalWebWorks.com, and I discovered that TWW shows up in Google at the #4 spot for a search on web works. Out of 683 million results. Just wow.
I don’t imagine that phrase will bring much (if any!) paying work my way, but still…..
Search engine optimization (SEO) is often referred to as if it is some single monolithic task. It’s not.
SEO includes everything from the technical configuration of the server hosting a web site, to the site’s coding and structure, to the visible content on the pages, to the development of incoming links to the site from other sites.
I’m building some photo gallery pages for a client. Apparently the client will be regularly adding new photo galleries, and some of them will include a fairly significant number of photos.
Sure, I can batch process the images in Photoshop to create the thumbnails and larger images, but the tools available to create the actual galleries leave something to be desired with respect to the time required and the code generated.
Some years ago, when I worked in public relations in the corporate world, we hired a new employee in our department (the Public Relations Department, or PR for short). On her first day on the job, my boss, the department head, happened to see her as she drove into the parking lot — her car was sporting a bumper sticker that read, “I love PR.”