What they have or what is needed to return a good SEO result?
If the project / team warrants it, an SEO person is needed to take the load off others. They should be getting on with other things.
Can the site be read by a text reader? Yes.
Can the site be used by a blind person? yes.
SEO over.
OR
Is the site interesting and linked to a lot ? nope.
Don't worry google will find you.
SEO over.
( ,
Mon 21 Jun 2010, 16:01,
archived)
Can the site be read by a text reader? Yes.
Can the site be used by a blind person? yes.
SEO over.
OR
Is the site interesting and linked to a lot ? nope.
Don't worry google will find you.
SEO over.
SEO is a big subject and the snake oil needs changing a lot.
I wouldn't pay a dev to be pissing about with all that when there are 1001 other features that need to be knocked out by 5pm yesterday. There is the "business point" more than anything else.
I've seen some fucking mental changes requested by an SEO that returns some nice results. The Dev that had to code them didn't like it at all. He can code; but didn't like getting out of his box.
If you can do bother Great! others cannot. I pro SEO as a subject on its own.
( ,
Mon 21 Jun 2010, 16:30,
archived)
I've seen some fucking mental changes requested by an SEO that returns some nice results. The Dev that had to code them didn't like it at all. He can code; but didn't like getting out of his box.
If you can do bother Great! others cannot. I pro SEO as a subject on its own.
I wouldn't mind if SEO was a separate subject
if it wasn't entirely about blinding people with science and doing very little for their money.
It should perhaps be combined with Accessibility (a genuinely useful area) - which *does* require good coding skills.
( ,
Mon 21 Jun 2010, 17:23,
archived)
It should perhaps be combined with Accessibility (a genuinely useful area) - which *does* require good coding skills.
we've been talking about different SEO
for me they are much the same subject as they overlap in many places.
I'd say build a site with magic Accessibility and you'll return very highly in google. The balance between SEO and DDA is always a business decision and the money wins that one.
You've had some bad SEO people haven't you.
( ,
Mon 21 Jun 2010, 17:39,
archived)
I'd say build a site with magic Accessibility and you'll return very highly in google. The balance between SEO and DDA is always a business decision and the money wins that one.
You've had some bad SEO people haven't you.
To be honest, it became an annoyance
when I looked to see if it is something I could offer my clients, and the more I looked into it, the more of a con the whole thing seemed to be.
The books I have read on it are all about possibilities and never proven facts. No science whatsoever. There is also very little theory behind it, proven or not.
Which would be all okay if it was offered as a small job. However, it's the fact people then dare then charge monthly fees for SEO which costs more than the site is actually worth by pretending it's a really complex science. If it was, they would need a degree in statistical analysis to do the research.
Reaching a high accessibility level does take real programming skill, and yet SEO (the actually Optimisation side of it) which should be a sub set of that job same seems to be an unqualified position.
I think you'll find that it's a shockingly low amount of SEOs who could build a site which even validates, and making a site validate is rarely part of what companies offer as SEO work.
If SEO meant that the Accessibility would be improved for people, at least it would have some positives!
( ,
Mon 21 Jun 2010, 18:32,
archived)
The books I have read on it are all about possibilities and never proven facts. No science whatsoever. There is also very little theory behind it, proven or not.
Which would be all okay if it was offered as a small job. However, it's the fact people then dare then charge monthly fees for SEO which costs more than the site is actually worth by pretending it's a really complex science. If it was, they would need a degree in statistical analysis to do the research.
Reaching a high accessibility level does take real programming skill, and yet SEO (the actually Optimisation side of it) which should be a sub set of that job same seems to be an unqualified position.
I think you'll find that it's a shockingly low amount of SEOs who could build a site which even validates, and making a site validate is rarely part of what companies offer as SEO work.
If SEO meant that the Accessibility would be improved for people, at least it would have some positives!
Validation is largely irrelevant to either SEO or accessibility
but I think that you have met a cowboy or two and so are slandering those of us who do this professionally.
( ,
Tue 22 Jun 2010, 11:13,
archived)
Validation *is* important to accessibility
If bad code breaks a site in certain browsers, it could well break a screen reader, which is ultimately another browser.
It maybe not so important with SEO, but could confusing code not also confuse the Google spider, which is ultimately also html-parsing software?
There is also the cross-over with things like alt-tags.
Back on topic - I fail to find out what skill sets an SEO uses on a day to day basis which deserves the high price they charge. I'm not saying all the work is invalid, but do you really not think that a lot of people are abusing the fact that most business people have heard of SEO, think they need it but are ignorant to what they are actually paying for on a day-to-day basis?
I don't mean to slander *everyone* - and I am willing to admit that my own research hit a brick wall when I started looking into link building and felt dirty, so if I may have just done a bad job on the actual optimisation side.
However, I've yet to find anyone who can explain what it is they actually do that requires an expertise that people should pay premium rates for.
I like to think that I am willing to change my opinion, and it might be bad experience - but when I've asked why a theory exists or why a change needs to be made, it's rare that anyone seems able to qualify it with anything other than hearsay.
Again, a lot of them do not seem to actually use common "Would Google have any reason for doing this?" sense when they do optimisation. Eg The recent theory about page speed. You see blogs obsessing about milliseconds difference, when surely Google is only trying to weed out sites that are on a stupidly slow server and piss people off, rather than the rank a site that takes 0.5 seconds to load over one that takes 0.7 seconds.
( ,
Tue 22 Jun 2010, 12:09,
archived)
It maybe not so important with SEO, but could confusing code not also confuse the Google spider, which is ultimately also html-parsing software?
There is also the cross-over with things like alt-tags.
Back on topic - I fail to find out what skill sets an SEO uses on a day to day basis which deserves the high price they charge. I'm not saying all the work is invalid, but do you really not think that a lot of people are abusing the fact that most business people have heard of SEO, think they need it but are ignorant to what they are actually paying for on a day-to-day basis?
I don't mean to slander *everyone* - and I am willing to admit that my own research hit a brick wall when I started looking into link building and felt dirty, so if I may have just done a bad job on the actual optimisation side.
However, I've yet to find anyone who can explain what it is they actually do that requires an expertise that people should pay premium rates for.
I like to think that I am willing to change my opinion, and it might be bad experience - but when I've asked why a theory exists or why a change needs to be made, it's rare that anyone seems able to qualify it with anything other than hearsay.
Again, a lot of them do not seem to actually use common "Would Google have any reason for doing this?" sense when they do optimisation. Eg The recent theory about page speed. You see blogs obsessing about milliseconds difference, when surely Google is only trying to weed out sites that are on a stupidly slow server and piss people off, rather than the rank a site that takes 0.5 seconds to load over one that takes 0.7 seconds.