SEO by Kent

My biggest concern at the moment is Cuil. What’s the fuzz?

Is it a good search engine? Hardly.

How is it possible to raise that kind of money for a web service that is useless? Why is people so stupid, they try to be “the next Google”? I do not care if you crawl 1 billion sites, or 5 billion! It’s called quality, not quantity. Imagine all sites in the world. How many is relevant? We make websites relevant by optimizing it for keywords which people want’s to know about.

This article at TechCrunch really proves my point.
Stop showing your muscles for god’s sake!

What’s the real difference between a user friendly website and a seo friendly website? I would say there is no difference. Or at least a small small difference.

For instance, you should not use images as headlines or text.
That’s something thats important for both sides. In a user perspective, it’s not good because it’s better to transfer text to a browser rather then a big image. Also, no search engine in the world can read text of an image. This means <h1> should be used in both cases.

Then there is the structure of a website. If the structure is wrong there will be complications when trying to browse the website and search engines won’t like your site. Lets say we have a website with a lot of elements and a lot of ajax calls, the user will be confused, as will the search engine.

Another thing is the flash. Why did someone create this? Or lets say, why does some people use this for dynamic and relevant websites? It’s a major error in the web world if you offer your customers a webshop in flash. No one will benefit from it. Probably the designers will see all possibilites and use effects and stuff that will confuse the user.

My tip?
Think as the user. Be the user.

What is really the future for blogging? I mean, the REAL future.

I really think blogs are here to stay but not in this shape as we see today. And of course, I really belive that Internet in itself will evolve in to something very different from today. That’s another story.

But the hardest part of today is to find interesting content. And to find blogs that will interest me. I’ll start something like a megablog sometime in a near future. I think these kind of portals will become huge in the future. We won’t browse through hundreds of blogs, we’ll browse through 10 of blog portals, or blog labels, as I will start call it.

Think of it as record label. Record labels are like a quality check before we see the daylight of music. Of course, this is long gone and is the stone age in the music industry. But is it wrong to think like this when it comes to blogs? I don’t think so. There will be a huge success if we could collect writers, with personalized blogs, and distribute them in a reallt nice way.

Okay, so we all think it’s easy to know what people search for? Right? No. It’s not. To optimize for good search queries we need to go beyond the screen and really think of; How do we use the language? Does people search for “video” or “film”? That’s one of my big questions at the moment. I don’t know what people search for. Of course I could use the fabulous keyword-thingy Google has made public. But does my potential customers really search for what’s most searched for on the internet?

Maybe I want to target those who search for the keywords with lower quantity? Because large quantities doesnt mean large sales. I’m always looking for quality in my work. I think it’s better to have one good position on the SERP that is really really relevant instead of having 10 thats irrelevant and will lead to as much sales as the really really good one.

This story is quite interesting. And I’ve been involved and helped with some linklove.

The story begins when Dan Nilsson, a swedish entrepenuer and e-retailer, finds out that UPS are using wierd methods for their imported package. They are supposed to register the tax Dan is supposed to pay. Dan realize this error and tries to get them to fix this. UPS then wants 71 swedish crowns (10USD) for each product in is shipment. And all this because UPS did wrong and probably does this to everyone. Because registering products in shipments is supposed to be quite time consuming.

This behaviour is outrageous.

That’s why other entrepeneurs with blogs around Sweden decided to start a campaign. We’re now trying to give his post as much linklove so that it will climb up the SERP and push UPS own pages down. I think we’ll manage. I hope.

Today it’s sunday. Which means that all seo-freaks who hangs out at jaiku is on some kind of personal project. This is a small community of people who socialize trought Jaiku at the moment. This has become a big happening in the Swedish web and will probably continue for a long time.

I started my day by trying to implement an API through discogs.com. Didn’t work as expected. I was trying to import cd sleeves to use on my own page which is a page that is working with recently released records. But I realized discogs.com don’t really have new records. Which is about to release. A bit disappointed.

Then I continued with me and my girlfriends project which is a small company specialized in editing home video. I think it could bring some work only throught beeing on the first page of Google. There are no competition so if I optimize selected keywords, hopefully the target group will automatically ask us to do their home videos.

So yesterday we threw a small party. Me and my girlfriend. We had a theme, “Famous persons and red carpet”. It was crazy fun. And really nice to relax and disconnect from everything. Funny I used the word disconnect. But yeah, put all projects on the side for a night.

To be able to present a nice website for your visitors we can use SEO and nice coding as a tool or as a part of a method. Often when I look for on-page SEO I structure the code and maybe finds some design bugs. This means SEO will help us not only for geting visitors, but geting them to return. Which is the most important!

Keep ‘em coming!

Sometimes when I think of SEO I imagine what the search engine sees. There are a couple of nice “search engine”-like sites that strips your page from HTML tags. But to be really good at SEO we need to see the core of each tag. The engines are looking for tags that it recongizes. The HTML standard has tags that all have a purpose. And as a SEO person I need to know which tag to use when. For example, a table is for displaying data. Not organizing a menu. We use the UL > LI tag for that.

It all makes sense. Think about which tag to use and when. With CSS the user don’t even need to know which tags are in use. But the Engines needs to know!

Write nice code.

Put an extra effort in making your HTML look really nice. Because, if you want the search engines to like you and other people who examin your code to think you’re good, this makes sense.

Learn a thing or two from the programming world. Use the Tab key and row break after each statement.

As a programmer, sometimes the HTML code makes me weep. When the code looks good it’s much easier for everyone. The most important task for someone who writes HTML is to row break and tab code at appropriate places. For example;

<div id="wrapper">

<div class="red-text">My name is Ola</div>

</div>

That’s my lesson for all designers out there. Beauty in code!