The morals of Search Engine Optimisation

May 4, 2009  FILED TO: Search Engine Optimisation, Web Design

Maybe I’m just old-fashioned, but every time I get an email offering reciprocal links or paid website reviews, I immediately hit the “spam” button and sigh a deep sigh.  In the “real” world, it takes time to build a good reputation, for individuals and for businesses; in the Internet world, it seems that people don’t have the patience for this, they’re happy to follow immoral or unethical Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) practices in order to grow a false reputation for their website.  And the smarter search engines get, the smarter the schemes get.  “Black Hat” SEO used to involve reams of hidden keywords at the bottom of pages and keyword stuffing (adding large numbers of irrelevant keywords and phrases to pages).  Search Engines now penalise pages if they find this.  Instead, we’re seeing practices like duplicate sites and paid reviews (website owners pay a company to write a review of their site with a link to it). 

         

What do I do?

April 24, 2009  FILED TO: Web Design

Here’s a great explanation!

This YUI Theater entry captures one of the courses Nate has taught at Yahoo, “Professional Frontend Engineering.” It covers the foundations of the discipline, some of its core ideas, and some of of its best practices. If you are looking to reset your own assumptions about “web development” or “frontend work”, I know of no better place to start. If you have friends who are new to the discipline, or backend engineers transitioning to the frontend, this is also a fantastic resource to which you can point them.

         

Why you should sell SEO and copywriting

April 17, 2009  FILED TO: Business Management, Search Engine Optimisation, Web Design

When I started out as a freelance web designer I knew that Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and professional copywriting are important, but as I was still new to the business, my focus was on getting work; my goal, whenever I drafted a quote, was to propose the cheapest possible option that would allow me to create a professional-looking site without underselling myself. I didn’t have the skills or the contacts to offer SEO or copywriting so it was something I avoided.

         

Podcast your blog with Talkr

April 1, 2009  FILED TO: Blog, Software, Technical, Web Design

For quite some time now I’ve had an audio version of my RSS feed available but as it didn’t work at first for some reason, I forgot about it. I was cleaning out my feeds recently and found that all of my recent posts were there with audio files ready to download - and they worked!