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 […]
Basic Social Media Content
Yanked from some old comments. Here are two instances where people had difficulty with social media content. In one, there’s a disconnect on the “why” of social. In the second, there’s some trouble with content. These are pretty specific situations, but the first might help you understand the why (I have trouble if the “why” is unknown myself!) of social media. The second part with BBQ has more concrete examples, and might be less useful… but maybe it will inspire, too!