When functionality and SEO collide

November 30, 2007 By Jeremiah Staes Leave a Comment

I was thinking about this problem earlier today – so many “SEO optimized” sites are ugly, not functional, or link spam.

What gets me is people focus so heavily on “engineered” SEO, and trying to work the system.

I’m wondering about this. This hype around SEO – is it because people want a magic elixir to have their site rank without having to create relevant content all the time?

Isn’t it about fresh content more than keywords, content that people find valuable? Every conversation I’ve had with people who actually create search engine algorithms (they never talked in more than generalities – they can’t) has focused on to keep the design solid, follow basic conventions, keep it updated, make it relevant, useful information, and don’t try to game the system and you’ll do well, regardless of the technical implementation.

Many SEO firms have you do completely dysfunctional things like not use a content management system (yes, some CMS systems seem to be better than others) or create sites that are just plain ugly and unfriendly to users.

Check out what Calacanis says on his blog – as much as I have friends in the SEO business too, I gotta agree. I went and took a look at their various optimized code in various implementations – and it’s just well tagged or files labeled well (and sometimes, not so well). An excerpt from Jason:

Note: There are some whitehat SEO firms out there I know, but frankly the whitehat SEO companies are simply doing solid web design so I don’t consider them SEO at all. SEO is a tainted term and it means “gaming the system” to 90% of us.

Now, if you make great content, keep your page design clean, and stick with it you’re gonna do just fine in the rankings. Don’t smoke the SEO-crack… you’ll just wind up chasing your tail as digg and Google closes the tiny SEO loopholes and put your domain on the black list.

In short – SEO / SEM looks like, at it’s best, just over-hyped solid web design that people buy because they think it’ll be a magic bullet.

Thing I’m wrong? Fire back in the comment session. Just beware – I might return volley :-)

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Filed Under: Interaction Design, Rant, Web Sites

Content Is The King

November 25, 2007 By Jeremiah Staes Leave a Comment

Well, unless you’re reading in Tennessee. As I remember from my trip to Memphis, Elvis is “The King” there.

But everywhere else, content is the number one thing that will make your online presence great, yet it’s the very last thing anyone seems to want to create.

It’s the number one project killer. Someone will want a website, podcast, or other piece of media – but have no idea what they want to say, even an idea of the message.

All too often, business, organizations, and entrepreneurs think that a list of bullet points suffice as what’s needed.

When it comes to product or service sites, commonly, it’s the lack of a clear value statement and making it about the visitor.

Other times, it’s doing meta overload and relying too much on others, creating too little unique, interesting content. After all, more and more web users are employing Google Reader, Bloglines, and other services to pull that content in for themselves, and the use of yet another meta-site is declining by the day.

It goes down to a theory you will see repeated over, and over, and over, and over again – it isn’t one thing.  It’s the combination of things that make interactive successful, and for the most part, there needs to be a significant majority if not all the part there for it to work.

Content is one of those parts.

Filed Under: blogging, Interaction Design, Podcasting, Web Sites

It’s about the plan and writing down your goals

November 16, 2007 By Jeremiah Staes Leave a Comment

There is an interesting observation Keith Ferazzi made in his book, Never Eat Alone: And Other Secrets to Success, One Relationship at a Time.

Those who don’t have goals make some money; those who do have goals but don’t write them down make double the first group; and those who have goals and write them down make double the second group did.

So in short, write down your goals. Make an interactive plan – sure, things will change and adapt – but there needs to be master documents everyone works off of to get things done in a timely and expected manner.

Filed Under: Interaction Design, Web Sites
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