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HP
Compaq Presario C500
This laptop is definitely good value, with performance
that's better than many other budget laptops we’ve
tested in the past. The HP Compaq Presario C500
it is a solid product well worth consideration.
Moore's Law can't stand the heat
Sometimes you don't have to teach an old dog a new
trick, but rather just remember that the dog used
to know other tricks than the one it does today.
HP
Chases Data Warehousing Dollars...
Over the past few years, the amount of electricity
required to power a server in a datacentre has more
than doubled. So although buying the server costs
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that server costs significantly more to run.
Telstra
bids to be sheriff in Internet 'wild west'
The head of Telstra has promised improved security
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SES
NY: I, Robots.txt
Danny Sullivan keyed the Robots.txt Summit session
during SES New York, where representatives from
major search engines discussed the future of the
humble file used to manage crawler behavior.
SES
NY: Search Supports Sitemaps Autodiscovery
Major search engines Ask, Google, Microsoft, and
Yahoo jointly announced at SES New York their support
of a new feature that makes sitemaps more valuable
to webmasters.
SES
NY: The Ad Conversion Zone
Picture a technology beyond sight and sound. Your
ad has been submitted to a black box of unspeakable
power. It's left Creative...and entered...The Conversion
Zone. But did it spend some time becoming a compelling
ad first?
SES
NY: Search Speaks Up On Ad Quality Scores
A controversial piece of the SEM puzzle considers
whether or not a marketer's advertisement suits
the quality requirements of the search engines.
A session at SES New York brought out the opinions
from reps of Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft about
ads and quality scores.
SES
NY: Meet the Search Ad Networks
Just got out of the search ad session, and here’s
my liveblog (on tape delay, I guess; no wifi). The
panel listed at the beginning is the expected panel,
but things didn’t quite turn out that way
(and I’m not sure if I heard everyone’s
name right).
SES
NY: In-House Search Marketing
For several years, I did the in-house search marketing
tracks at the Search Engine Strategies conference
in New York, but I asked Danny Sullivan to give
me different session this year, on organic
search benchmarking, which I posted on yesterday.
Help
Nathan Weinberg Find His Camera at SES
So, I was pretty much enjoying SES, seeing lots
of familiar faces, including Barry Schwartz, Mike
McDonald of WebProNews, and laughing in the background
as Rand Fishkin interviewed Google’s Vanessa Fox.
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04.26.07
Coding
- The Most Important SEO Skill
By Steven Bradley
Expert Author
Article Date: 2007-04-26
Last week in response to Lee Odden's What
type of SEO skill is most important? poll I argued that
copywriting
was that SEO skill.
I mentioned that you could really make a case for many of the
items on Lee's list and thought I would take my own challenge
and build a case for coding skills as the most important for
an SEO to have.
Let me say once again that I think the best SEOs are the ones
who can develop the majority of these skills and quite a few
others as well. I still stand by what I said about copywriting,
but if you're writing copy for the wrong target market you may
end up with brilliant prose and very little sales. Shari Thurow
wrote an article about a year ago on why the
best seo experts are named Mike and while the title is a
bit tongue-in-cheek, Shari is making the case why a variety
of skills lead to the best SEOs.
Coding gained only 3% of the vote in Lee's poll. Actually it
was 2% until I just voted again. Sorry Lee, I've tainted the
poll with my double vote. I wonder why such a low vote since
the way you code a site can have some of the biggest impact
on your SEO efforts. Just as I did with copywriting in my previous
argument I'm going to look at coding in the liberal sense of
anything you might do in developing a site, from the information
architecture to the use of css to the way you name your files
and folders. If it's the kind of thing you have your developer
do we'll count it here.
Small Coding Changes Can Make A Big Difference
SEOmoz member, Dr. Pete posted an article on Monday in which
he describes eleven small changes
he made to a site to get it out of the supplemental index.
If you look over the list you'll note it's some pretty standard
seo. It's the kind of stuff you probably want to do to all sites.
A couple of the changes are beyond the obvious, but most really
are basic. Those basic coding changes though, have helped move
over 24,000 pages from the supplemental index to the main index.
It's too soon for Dr. Pete to know what increases in search
traffic the changes will lead to, but if you remember my own
escape
from the supplemental index and the subsequent increase
in traffic I'd suggest Pete will begin to see an increase of
traffic to the site very soon.
It's important to note that in neither Pete's experience nor
my own are the coding changes responsible for increased marketing
of the site. When you build another link into a site you create
a new avenue for someone to find you. When you participate more
actively or advertise in places where your customers spend their
time you increase your brand recognition and gain mindshare.
Coding for seo often works in a sort of reverse way.
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Poor Coding Builds SEO Dams
While the way you structure
a site can have a positive impact on seo, much of seo coding
is about making sure you don't make mistakes that hinder the
rest of your seo efforts.
Take for example the relatively simple canonical URL issue.
It's standard
seo practice to use 301 redirects to make sure both the
non www and www versions of your domain resolve to the same
place. Visitors should not be able to access both versions of
your domain as search engines will see domain.com and www.domain.com
as two different domains. Imagine for a moment that you haven't
done the redirects.
You get two links to your home page, one pointing to domain.com
and the other pointing to www.domain.com. That should be two
backlinks for your site, but from the perspective of a search
engine it's one link each into two different sites. You've just
cut your links in half by not paying attention to a coding issue.
Again the good code hasn't increased anything, but rather the
poor code decreased what you should have been getting. Think
of traffic into your site like a flowing river. Each of your
coding mistakes is akin to another block in a dam that impedes
flow. Put up enough blocks and complete that dam and what happens
to the water? The water is there and it wants to reach you.
The search traffic is there and it wants to reach you too. But
the dam prevents the flow of water and coding mistakes prevent
the flow of search traffic.
Another way to look at the effects of coding on your seo is
to think of it in terms of good coding maximizes everything
else you do. With the canonical issue the lack of 301 redirects
halved our backlinks in the simple two link example. Poor coding
in that case minimized your link building efforts. The same
is true of unfriendly URLs, unspiderable navigation, and a host
of other common cosing issues.
SEO coding can improve how a search engine sees your site, but
more importantly poor coding can hamper everything else you
do in your seo campaign. If your code isn't it order it may
not matter what else you do. You could very well have put up
so many obstacles to getting crawled and ranked that the rest
of your optimization has much less than the effect you'd like.
Again I'm curious to know your thoughts. Do you think coding
is important to seo? Can a poorly coded site overcome itself?
Should basic coding skills be required of all SEOs?
Comments
About the Author:
Steven Bradley is a web
designer and search
engine optimization specialist. Known to many in the webmaster/seo
community by the username vangogh, he is the author of TheVanBlog,
which focuses on how to build and optimize websites and market
them online.
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