This is a post about something that I’d thought had died out but I’ve started seeing it a lot again lately. Whenever a designer does a new website design, they rarely have copy to work with. So when creating promotional areas on the homepage, in sidebars, etc., you’ll inevitably see something like this:
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I spend a lot of time doing development and figuring out new coding tips and tricks. I don’t, however, spend a lot of time thinking about the copy for a site or how to market it. We often get so hung up on the how that we forget about the why. Catherine Seda’s book gives us great insight into another perspective of web development.
One of the most frequent client requests is “I want my site to be #1 in Google”. While we’d all like our site to be #1, in reality it isn’t that simple. Search Engine Optimization (SEO for the truly hip) has become a trendy buzzword for marketing executives who spout false promises of search engine glory. The field has grown to the point where there are literally hundreds of firms claiming to be able to increase your search engine presence for a mere several thousand dollars. There are others on the opposite side claiming that all you need is a few meta tags to make your site stand out in Google. So who’s right? What factors really DO affect your search engine ranking? What can you, as a developer, do to ensure that your site is properly optimized for Google, Yahoo!, and all the rest?