This started out as a comment in response to someone interested in hiring an external SEO company, and got rather long. If you’re a business owner, how do you find a good SEO company or provider? Unfortunately, SEO has a poor reputation to some due to poor providers. You’re right to worry about bad providers. Bad SEO can mean someone spinning up a thousand spammy comment links pointing back to your site, like it’s 2004. This may not sound damaging — but enough of the “bad SEO” can result in your business getting deindexed from Google, meaning you can say […]
Basic Speed Optimization
Speed optimization is important for your website. It is very easy to build a bloated site, and that’s obviously bad — but why an optimized site? Several reasons: You use less server resources (thus your site is more scalable in the face of lots of traffic). Your site loads faster, meaning: Human visitors are less likely to click away from your site (people give about 2-3 seconds for your site to start showing content before leaving). Search engines give preference to faster sites in search engine rankings (NB: albeit very slight, and as one factor in many). Both of the […]
Basic On-Page Search Engine Optimization for Web Developers
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is another discipline of the web — albeit one not exactly relevant to design or development. More broadly, SEO is “web marketing.” More narrowly, however, for your purposes as a web developer — SEO is simply the process of making your website more understandable to search engines. Even if you do not plan to be a web marketer, when you build a site you should usually adhere to basic SEO standards. This information is primarily relevant to on-page SEO. There’s such a thing as off-page SEO, too, where you focus on gaining links to your website […]