Posts Tagged ‘coding’
SEO consulting is NOT a game
A friend recently forwarded me a blog post about SEO consultants. It makes the premise that SEO people are evil, scammers and opportunists. In the post, the blogger claims:
Search Engine Optimization is not a legitimate form of marketing. It should not be undertaken by people with brains or souls. If someone charges you for SEO, you have been conned.
Ok – so I don’t agree because if you hire a good SEO company, they can help you understand your opportunity. For example, you might have a great product and call it a kid toy. What you don’t realize is that moms out there call them toddler toys. If you don’t put that word in any of your content, you are NEVER going to rank well for the term, and there are going to be thousands of people who will never ever consider your product.
Another point – not all marketers grew up in the internet age. Some of them are very uncomfortable with the web. It also means they probably don’t understand how a website should be coded in order for the Search engines to successfully crawl through your site. If you are not coding your site correctly, you might as well be whispering your message on the internet. It is like you have an amazing house, but there is a ton of string tied around everything so you can’t see what is underneath (also know as javascript).
It is true, you don’t want to game the search engines, but you do need to know the playing field. Some people don’t have the time, talent or desire to do all of the research and technical lifting it takes, so they hire SEO companies.
Beef up Firebug with YSlow…
So now we have extensions to add-ons in Firefox. You can download YSlow now from the Yahoo! Developer Network and boost the results you get out of the excellent Firebug add-on. With YSlow you can analyze web pages that you are working on listing such things as:
- number of components (including their type)
- total size of the web page
- changes to make the page performance better
If you haven’t already downloaded the latest version of Firebug, do it now and then add YSlow. Also watch the creator of Firebug talk at the excellent YUI Theater.
Technorati tags: firebug, yslow, firebug, extension, addon, development, web, coding
semacode generator…
Andy Mabbett posted a semacode for microformats.org on the Wiki. I have mentioned, on other blogs, my interest in semacodes, shotcodes etc.
Andy pointed to Semafox which lets you create them on the fly from a URL.
You can see the semacode for this blog and if you have a capable phone, let me know if it works.
This is definitely a technology that is still sitting in the wings.
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CSS3 gathering speed…
For those developers that “get” CSS, the recent burst in interest & activity has been pretty exciting.
Now with Apple’s Safari browser on the PC, bringing in more CSS3 support, the next year or so should be as frustrating as it is creative.
Why?
Well, over at CSS3, Peter Gasston has been diligently track the adoption and implementation of all things CSS3. His latest post concerning rounding corners highlights the frustration we as developers will face. Finally we won’t have to fiddle around with graphics for corners, but, we may have to write two different versions of the CSS to achieve this as Mozilla and Safari interpret the specs in different ways.
Just as we are doing away with all the hacks 
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