Do you enjoy reading mission statements?
How about “welcome to our website” headlines? Photos of jigsaw puzzles and handshakes?
No?
That’s weird, because according to the vast majority of small business websites out there, this stuff is the friggin cat’s pajamas. Why would anybody publish pages this way, if nobody likes it?
Because they failed, that’s why. And if you don’t want to fail too, here are ten things you probably shouldn’t do on your website.
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In September of 2008 I walked out of an SEO job at a web marketing agency. I’d had enough.
The fact that this was also just when the U.S. economy was taking a big crap in its pants was just a fun coincidence. Here I was walking away from a paycheck when thousands of people a day were finding their own stripped away.
A lot of people asked me whether I had another job lined up. When I told them I didn’t they also crapped their pants.
What the hell was I thinking?
It’s been about 17 months – plenty of time to reflect on that decision, and the following decisions to turn down well-paying jobs at other agencies.
I still don’t know exactly what I’m doing.
But I have a better idea of why I’m doing it.
I used to write the worst code in the world.
It was sloppy, bloated and choked search engine crawlers like a boney chicken sandwich.
Then I learned the right way to use CSS. I learned it from Andy Budd, Simon Collison and Cameron Moll in a phenomenal book called CSS Mastery that should be on every front-end developer’s bookshelf.
That’s my copy looking well-worn from years of use.
Here’s the thing: search engines love clean code. When you give it to them your websites tend to rank better.
But if you learned how to build websites with tables and <font> tags chances are your code isn’t clean. Your pages are probably overloaded with extraneous crap that search crawlers don’t need or want.
Using CSS properly gets all of your presentational code out of the way so search crawlers can focus on what they want: your content. It’s also from an SEO standpoint in various other ways.
Here are seven ways you can use CSS to improve your search rankings.
Most small and mid-sized businesses use Google Analytics – it’s user-friendly, powerful and, best of all, free.
An “out-of-the-box” installation of Google Analytics gives you a lot of great data when it comes to analyzing your organic search traffic. However, there’s a lot more to dig into – and the value can be tremendous.
In my experience most Google Analytics users and installations barely scratch the surface of what the platform can do.
Here are 10 ways to pimp your Google Analytics installation and get the most out of your SEO data:
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The problems Flash creates for SEO are well-documented. I covered the topic in April.
Less-often discussed are the numerous reasons, other than SEO, that building a website with Flash is the lame sauce.