Validation is largely irrelevant to either SEO or accessibilitybut I think that you have met a cowboy or two and so are slandering those of us who do this professionally.
(
LordManley twitter.com/LordManley,
Tue 22 Jun 2010, 11:13,
archived)
Validation *is* important to accessibilityIf 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.
(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.
monkeon schmonkeon,
Tue 22 Jun 2010, 12:09,
archived)
Valid HTML is good, but nopt neccessary.For example, JAWS often requires broken code to work effectively and it is a requirement that you make sure it degrades gracefully.
( LordManley twitter.com/LordManley,
Tue 22 Jun 2010, 16:51,
archived)