SEO

I recently started rewriting some of the templates we use for SEO reports at my company. I first thought that the task would be a simple one. Just rewrite all the SEO stuff to match the latest trends, add more diagrams, charts, and graphs, and make it more personal by increasing the number of client-specific sections. However, soon I started to question my motives (as I usually do when doing something independently). Are these reports really necessary? Who reads them? What use is the information within? Should I require that my clients fix all the issues I reported or are they just recommendations? Are SEO reports the final product of a project, or do they mark the beginning of a hopefully successful post-audit journey for the client? The questions just kept coming, and in the end I was pretty certain that I had uncovered at least some insight into the business of reporting.

“Oh no, not another ‘SEO in a nutshell’ post!” I hear you scream. Oh yes! And to make matters worse, I’m actually calling this SEO In A Nutshell just out of spite! But why, oh why, must I litter the otherwise so clean and orderly forum that Internet is with yet another here’s-what-something-is-in-case-you-ever-cared-post? I promise, I’m only doing this for selfish reasons. I’m not trying to buy myself into the major league by posting about something that everyone else is posting about. I’m not trying to impress those whom I work with by telling them I’m good at something I’m supposed to be good at. And I’m definitely not trying to impress you, my cynical reader, since I know you are so difficult to please.

When Matt Cutts speaks, the world listens. We reach out our hands to catch even the tiniest morsels that make up the bread that fills the basket that is Google. We hush in anticipation, as we know that we are about to be revealed another piece of the puzzle that is Google’s search algorithms. We want to know these dark, esoteric, technological secrets because a) as humans we are genetically coded to abhor secrets and shadow-talk, and b) as SEOs we are competing in a business where only the first place is rewarded. And now Matt Cutts has spoken a glorious 7 minutes, 24 seconds on Penguin 2.0, the next version of Google’s spam-blasting incarnation.

In this post, I propose that a combination of valid, accessible, and search engine friendly markup is the perfect recipe for optimal web design.

For markup to be valid, it needs to conform to the guidelines laid out by the “governing body” of HTML standardization: the World Wide Web Consortium, or W3C. While the Internet anxiously waits for HTML5 to shift in status from candidate to recommendation, we’re stuck with ye olde HTML 4.01 standard (est. 1999) as laid out by W3C. Naturally, HTML5 is already widely supported by all the major browsers, and it can (and should) be incorporated in web design without hesitation.