Hi All, I have noted there seems to be a lot of SEO on this site. Personally I have given up on SEO for a number of reasons. The main one being there is an algorithm out there that, when it spots your SEO, will unSEO all your work (ban you). This sickening behavior makes me believe that we should be designing for our users and not search engine placement after all. What do you think. I have a site about <a href="http://www.york-united-kingdom.co.uk/">hotels in York Ltd</a> HTML: . It has been up a number of years and does the job it should, which is attract visitors to the city. Now this site was initially an "information overload". That being, there was 1000 words of text on the front page with a few pictures. Not ulike this page <a href="http://www.hotels-london-hotel.com/hotels/">luxury london hotels</a> HTML: . I have now thought more about what it is my users might require as a landing page and produced the smaller, faster loading version of it. If you compare this with something that looks "better to the eye", such as <a href="http://www.icmyhotel.com/hotel-club/">ICmyhotel hotel club</a> HTML: which is in fact better? Is it the compact full of keywords shorter faster loading site? Or is it the slightly slower 1000 pixel wide different design? If they were your users which one would they like best and why?
The worst penalty I have had is losing a single keyword for over-optimizing (anchor texts) for it. SEO is 100% beneficial, there is no reason not to do it.
SImple to answer: are you building a web site for Google to look at, or are you building a web site for human beings? Your answer should always be 100% HUMANS. Fuck google. Instead, by making sure that your site is -accessible (even to the blind, the deaf, the scriptless, the colour blind, those without Flash, those with bad eyes and crappy monitors and old Operating Systems) -easy to read, low on jargon -not only pleasing to the eye, but I mean, doesn't induce headaches-- keep good reading contrast, keep typography in mind, and "keep it simple stupid." -sensible when images are off and css is on -readable for folks with mobile phones and PDA's -has something we actually want to f**ing read then you will likely be 90% there as far as making teh googliebots happy. The only special things you may want to do for search engines is make sure each page has its own indivudial text between the <title> tags, and that the meta tag called "description" is used appropriately-- describing that page and not the site. You don't need to do keyword crapola (if your site is about New York Hotels it damn well better have the words New York and hotels naturally, don't you think?) or SEO tricks. The purpose of search algorithms is to find things for people who are looking for such things. When people try to game the system, the system stops working-- people looking for New York Hotels find viagra and get rich quick and other uninteresting unwanted things. When google stops bringing up what people are looking for, people stop using Google. And then where is your page? Attractive to a google nobody uses. It's like trying to make hammers drill in screws. Why mess with the tool? That just breaks it so nobody else can use it. Screw SEO. Think Usability, accessibility, and common sense. *edit all that said, the two sites on top could use a little design, and the middle one simply needs to learn how to use navigation to reduce clutter while keeping content. A nice header with a graphic, a snappy Suckerfish menu and a searchbar in the upper right corner will do you good. The actual list of hotels on the right though is done quite well and would maybe only make small typographic changes... and maybe also design the site to expand to something wider than 800px if the browser window can. A flex-width design would do well here, or making search results more centered can help, for example: http://stommepoes.nl/Homeselling/secondhome/zoekresultaat2.html
There are many worse penalties. My sites were top ranking for many competitive keywords for some 4 years. Since the update of 14 Nov 2004 they have been: 1) removed from google 2) now back in but last for any query. (if there are two pages with "a not quite unique sentence" on ... my pages will rank 2nd) 3) 1/2 pages were put to supplemental (now not so) 4) pages are not crawled regularly (50 visits from google bot per day with 5000 pages) So SEO is not always beneficial imo.
Over the last few years I have come to the same conclusions. Accessibility is important. In my new designs I will not be using fixed size fonts. For those who have deteriorating eyesight (the majority) being able to change the font sizes in your browser is important. OK, you may loose some of your painstakingly put together design when people do this but, at least they will be able to read the text. Also, meaningful alt text for images. Don't just stuff them with keywords. Imagine you are blind and want to know what an image is. Text to speech software will tell you but whats the point of a picture called "picture of cheap hotels in london and discount hotels in london"? Yes there are some potential SEO benefits, well there were 4 year s ago but, to a blind person this is useless. Use the alt text as it was designed to be used imo.
Although if you're careful, you don't have to. I have quite a few pages I've made more recently with not only the text but all boxes in flexible sizes, and they do well on text-enlarge (although I should test them in FF3, as I've heard deathshadow say that they've changed something about text-enlarge from FF2). *if you want more info about such setups, just ask : ) Now, Tommy will tell you that for a particular hotel, instead of "photo of a cheap discount hotel in London" you'd rather want "the SuchAndSuch hotel in London is a discount hotle known for its intractable rodent problem" or some such thing. Me, I don't see images as content anymore, I stick them all in the background, thus no alt text, but that's me. I feel that images are like Javascript-- they may enhance the content, and enhance understading of the content, but are not content themselves, and there should be nothing in any alt text that actually isn't already represented in the actual copy anyway. It's NOT a bad thing to have keywords in the alt text, it's just that those words should just be there naturally when you're trying to pick the best text for the image anyway. If your site is about New York Hotels, then it will OF COURSE have those words, and if everyone just had their sites with their content easily sitting out there, teh googles would work better. I swear, for all the people heaping praise on how the Wondrous Google Magically Knows What I'm Looking For, I often DON'T find what I'm looking for. Only certain areas/topics seem to bring up the links I'm looking for (luckily, HTML and CSS is one of these topics). If I type in "second home rental" or any such combination, I find lots of sites with information about laws, tips, this sort of thing, but actually no places where I could get one myself. I would expect this is because the places that sell or rent vacation homes have so stuffed themselves with keywords and other bullshit that they are effectively ignored by google, when there are all these other sites using the same words more meaningfully (the ones with tips and legal info).