No More Anarchy in Web Development or SEO
As most of us have come to realize (some accepting and some disapproving), the internet is the only medium where people of all nationalities and cultures can truly speak freely and openly. The web is our source for social networking, open source information, and self expression. Aside from the only limited government on the web which is Google, Yahoo and MSN search engines, we really have no authority for rules or standards as to what content we can have on our sites or how we display that content. In fact, looking back, the internet was total chaos and complete anarchy in the early decades, but now we are moving towards a stricter way of doing web, by establishing web authority, rules for relevant content, an information hierarchy, and semantic websites.
Search Engines: The law of the wild west
Many businesses may have heard the terms SEO (Search Engine Optimization) or Organic SEO, but not many fully understand what those terms mean. Search engines (such as Google, Yahoo, and MSN) are in the position to guide and control where a user goes when browsing because, aside from directly going to a web page, most users search the web for a specific purpose or topic. These search engines are really the authority when it comes to what web standards are followed and best practices for writing content, linking to content or structuring pages based on content. We rely on these engines to help us standardize the web and make searching and browsing easier, and at the same time these engines rely on us to code semantically and efficiently according to their standards, as well as format our content the same. This is what SEO is all about.. learning how search engines rank and find web pages and then optimizing a site for engine readability.
A Deeper look into SEO
Let’s start with a scenario of a company that hired some college student to develop their website — this student knows a little about design/html/css and maybe even how to put in a shopping cart or some other sales ability on the site. If this student has no experience with SEO and the company doesn’t get SEO work done on their site.. the fact that they saved money by getting a college student to develop the site rather than a professional company screws them. “You get what you pay for,” it’s a saying that’s all too true when it comes to the web. Sure anyone can get a site developed by Joe Shmoe for $200 but that doesn’t mean it’s going anywhere.. unless you have some REALLY strong advertising that happens outside of the web, you’re not going to get hardly any traffic to your site.. If a search engine doesn’t see content matching with META information, external links, internal links and higher ranking sites linking to yours, then it’s going nowhere and you’re not going to get indexed or ranked well. Search engines have total control when it comes to SEO so you have to play by their rules.
So how do you play by their rules? How do you improve your site’s search engine optimization or rankings? There are two routes you can go.. if you’re a stubborn do-it-yourself kind of person, then you should start out by looking into some SEO tools. I’ve got a few tools listed in another post which integrate right within Firefox that you can check out. Focus on researching and learning SEO for a while until you understand where your site is weak as far as META information, content relevancy and hierarchy.
Once you feel that you understand SEO a little better, then setup a Google Analytics account to track site traffic and source (organic search, direct, external site, etc). Google Analytics is a free service that can dramatically help you to monitor where your viewers are coming from and what they are doing once on your site.
Another service from google that will help you understand SEO is Google Webmasters Tools. The Webmasters Tools are great because they allow you to submit your sitemap and validate it, as well as see how often google is crawling your site (a term that basically means checking across content and links) and what information the robot sees when it crawls.
Next, I recommend signing up for social sharing services such as Digg, Twitter, Delicious, etc. These services are all free and they will help boost your sites rankings and network. This requires a lot of viral marketing and organic optimization. In order to get “tagged” by other users that use these services, you need to network, socialize, and interact with other sites that relate to your own. If you’re in web development especially on the freelancing side, then you probably already know about the huge network of freelancers and developers that continually comment on each other’s posts, link to each other, and help each other to grow and achieve more. This is the best SEO technique out there, but the hardest to execute as well. Quality is better than quantity when it comes to organic optimization, don’t just make pointless comments on numerous sites. You need to interact, genuinely care about, and get to know other sites and bloggers. It’s all about who you know in the web community!
Semantic Web: The new Sheriff in town
If you’re don’t know HTML/CSS and you’re looking to increase rankings for your business on your own.. this is where you stop reading. Semantic Markup isn’t something you can learn overnight, but it’s rather a process that continually growing and developing as new standards are defined.
..What it means for developers..
There are lot’s of areas to cover when it comes to semantic web, accessibility, validation and best practices, but for now, I’m just going to talk about the basics. Semantic web essentially means using HTML tags properly to define content. For example headers should use <h1> through <h6> tags following a specific hierarchy based upon parent/sibling/child relations. Another example is as simple as using <p> tags for paragraphs, <ol> tags for ordered lists, <ul> tags for unordered lists, and so forth. These standards and structures aren’t NEW by any means, but their value and importance have dramatically increased recently and will continue to rise.
This also requires the community to improve search engines and the companies that run them. As web developers we need to recognize which of these engines is the most accurate and fair in it’s algorithm and how it reads a web page. Most would agree that google is by far the greatest and most powerful search engine because it is so organic. Given that fact, we need to match their standards and continue to push browsers, search engines, and markup to match newer and better standards in a more uniform way. Let’s unite and continue to move towards a better more structured future and say no more anarchy on the internet or in web development!
