"We'll make you number one on Google in 48 hours!!!" "Our techniques will drive 100X more traffic to your site!!"
We see the wild claims all the time. Chances are, they're bogus; if they're not, then the techniques are suspect. Legitimate search engine optimization practitioners refrain from making such wild claims, leaving them to those who are less reputable. Besides, you should never trust someone who wantonly uses multiple exclamation points.
I recently attended a workshop series called UX Intensive, hosted by Adaptive Path. For four days, I and about 100 other web enthusiasts examined four key elements that contribute to a successful website design: Design Strategy, Design Research, Information Architecture, and Interaction Design. I've put together a list of four insights to better web design, one for each day of the week.
I've always been a big fan of Berkeley Breathed's Bloom County, the comic strip that introduced Opus the Penguin and taught us that 12-year-olds could find humor in subtle political satire. One of my favorite quotes from the strip, uttered by Opus himself, was "You can lead a yak to water, but you can't teach an old dog how to make a silk purse out of a pig in a poke."
I spoke to a local service organization this morning about, among other things, some fundamentals of SEO. Architecture, content and link-building were the three highlights of this discussion. What I think I may have failed to communicate was the difference between driving traffic through search engine optimization and attracting an audience by offering compelling content.
Going green has been in the forefront of plenty of news stories this year. Just last month, we even shared a blog post about Digett's "green" efforts.
You won't necessarily become an expert in search engine optimization through reading this article, but it's a great start on learning the bare bones essentials of having your site perform well on search engines.
Many Digett clients have heard me talk about improving a web page's position on a search engine results page, the practice commonly referred to as Search Engine Optimization (SEO). It doesn't take a genius to understand that the higher a page appears during a Google search, the more likely it is that a user will visit the page.
