Posts tagged “web”

Just follow these simple tips for SEO Beginners and you could see your site ranked as #1 in every search engine in the world for every term you could want!* (*Results not guaranteed. Your results may vary. No animals were harmed in the making of this claim.)

And thus begins just about every SEO article ever. Ever since search engines started to dominate how we use the internet and people started figuring out how to game the system boost their ranking, the SEO industry has churned out blog after blog after blog from “SEO Experts” and “ninjas” and “gurus” and the like. And they all tell us the same thing.

Here, let me try. Here’s what pretty much every post for SEO beginners looks like:

• You should write good content!
• You should make sure your site has good keywords!
• Buy a good domain name!
• Make sure your important content is in text! When you use images, use the alt attribute to assign it text!
• Use clean, readable URLs!
• Get people to link to your site!

I’m sure I missed a few, but doesn’t that look familiar? Know why it looks familiar? Because it’s the exact same advice every time. It’s common-sense web development advice. Well-done web development already does most of these things as a matter of principle. So really it comes down to “write good content and write it often.” Write good content, and people will link to it.

So how many times does that need to be said? Google claims to have 226,000 results for the search phrase “seo for beginners” just in the last 24 hours. SearchEngineLand.com posted an article titled “Bing Rankings Cheat Sheet“:

It’s becoming more important that you be sure your site is optimized for Bing. So what does Bing look for? Here’s a cheat sheet you can use to optimize your site for Bing.

They then go on to list all the same points that matter for every search engine in existence. None of it was actually Bing-specific. (And fortunately, several of the commenters pointed this out.) There was no reason for that article to exist – everything it covered had already been covered ad nauseum by other sites, better.

What’s even better is that for website owners that are legitimately beginners looking for advice, many of these tips aren’t going to mean much. They’re probably not going to be familiarity with the details of writing code, they’re probably not going to be manually writing URL structures, etc. Hopefully they’re going to be working with a web developer that understands these things and how to set up their clients to be successful without having to get their hands dirty.

Yesterday on Twitter, Rachel tweeted that she was posting a new article on beginner SEO tips, and I immediately asked why. Why add another article to the pile? She responded that news stations report the news every day, why shouldn’t the same apply to SEO articles? Except, the news changes every day. SEO articles are a dime a dozen, and 99% of them cover the same material over and over. (Probably including this one of my own.)

So, please. No more. The world doesn’t need any more blogs discussing tips for SEO beginners, unless you’ve discovered some new groundbreaking SEO tricks techniques that will skyrocket your site to the first result. As Derek Powazek said in his Spammers, Evildoers, and Opportunists post:

The One True Way to get a lot of traffic on the web. It’s pretty simple, and I’m going to give it to you here, for free:

Make something great. Tell people about it. Do it again.

That’s it. Make something you believe in. Make it beautiful, confident, and real. Sweat every detail. If it’s not getting traffic, maybe it wasn’t good enough. Try again.

That’s all there is to it. Now go forth, and make great stuff.

I recently ordered a couple boxes of contact lenses online (mostly because it’s a hassle to get them from the store I usually order from). It was a pretty straightforward process – find the particular product I wanted, click the “add to cart” button, open the cart, click the “checkout” button (why do we cling to this metaphor?), put in my shipping and billing information, and click click to submit my ord—hold up, not so fast. Can’t submit the order without first creating a user account.

Wait, what?

Yep, for me to place an order and give them my money, I had to create an account which I will probably never again sign into. Since this particular site still had the best price I could find, I reluctantly submitted to their demands and dutifully filled out the required fields. But I didn’t have to like it.

Brick-and-mortar stores don’t require customers to create accounts with them in order to buy things, so why do websites? Imagine this: you walk into your local <Sears/K-Mart/Macy’s/Joe’s Party Store> and wander around the aisles for a bit. You pick up a few things, wander a bit more, put a few things back, pick them back up thirty seconds later, then finally decide you’re ready to check out. You take your assorted knick-knacks to the counter, let the clerk scan them, pull out your wallet to pay, and the clerk says “Please sign in or create an account to complete this purchase.” Uh, what? This would never happen. Oh, sure, you can always join their rewards program, get a punchcard, something you swipe to get the discounts of the week, whatever. But you would never be forced to join said program just to walk into their store, make one purchase, and never come back.

So why do websites do this?

I understand the general rationale – requiring accounts let you gather information about your users, lets them complete the ordering process more quickly in the future by saving their contact and billing information, gives you an easier way of providing order status, etc. But that’s only useful if I intend to order from your site often enough to need that convenience.

Dear owners/operators of websites that rely on ecommerce: please, for the love of Cthulhu, cut it out. Don’t require us to create user accounts just to buy from you. We’re already willing to give you our money, don’t make it harder for us to do so.

Bruce of Milwaukee’s own Roll Mobile posted an article on the tendency of social media users to produce content the way porn stars produce movies: quantity over quality.

Social media is no longer a fad; it’s a trend. Which means it’s here to stay, even if its form morphs and evolves over time.

But like any trend, there are those elements that hinder its growth and opportunities.

For social media, I see that hindrance being the widespread acceptance of quantity over quality. Twitter, Facebook, and blogging platforms such as WordPress and Tumblr make it easy for us to publish our every thought. Couple the ease of use with the fact that mobile devices allow us to do this from anywhere and at anytime, and suddenly people are communicating their thoughts louder and more often than ever.

This is both good and bad.

Because the chatter is so loud, and being expunged so fast and furiously, many of us feel the need to match that in order to have our own messages not get lost in the masses. It becomes sensory overload after a while.

– Social Media: The Porn Stars of the Communication Medium from Roll Mobile

Amen, Bruce, amen. I know the feeling well. Late last year I posted on my own sense of oversharing – not in the sense of sharing too much detail about myself, but sharing too often; creating too much noise and not enough signal. Since then, my frenzied output on Twitter has decreased steadily, though I still feel occasionally like it’s still too much.

It’s so very true that in the world of social media, especially on Twitter, you feel a need to be posting that often. Depending on who you’re following and when you check in, your tweet stream can move very quickly. You toss something of your own in, and it’s already been washed downstream in the blink of an eye. But you’re so damn clever/inspiring/knowledgeable/informed! People want to read your every joke/quote/link! However can I make sure they don’t miss out? Obviously the solution is to just post more often. Fight the flood with a flood of your own, right?

But that’s exhausting. No one can really keep up with that kind of deluge regularly. So my renewed goal is to unplug more often. Tweet less. Check Twitter less. If there’s something important, it’ll find me eventually. William Powers, aka @hamletsbb, wrote a book titled Hamlet’s Blackberry on “staying human in a digital world” in which he explains how it’s a human necessity to get away from the flood once in a while (I had the pleasure of sitting in on his SXSW presentation).

So that’s what I intend to do.

Less noise, more signal.

I’m just going to leave this here for reference:

…the most crucial aspect of user experience –is that anyone can have an experience at all. A mobile Web site is the cost of entry for universal access. We want our content to flow between devices. The Web is the common element across devices.

– Luke Wroblewski: Web App Masters: Native or Web-Based Mobile Apps?

Julien Smith thinks a “social crash” is coming:

I am pretty confident a social crash is coming. Whether you agree or not, it’s important that you read this.

We think all of this social stuff is building value for us– building wealth for some and just well-being for others. This is somewhat true– but I suspect we are overvaluing what it can do for us– most of us anyway.

Steven Gorrell responds with his thoughts on the social crash, namely that it won’t affect most people so terribly:

The social media bubble will only affect people who have a vested interest in it. My group of people would probably be upset if Facebook bombed and shut off, but then would just go back to email, or phone calls, to keep in touch. The other services would go unnoticed, except by the people that use them.

I think that the very nature of the social web will go a long way toward preventing this “crash” in the first place. People are by nature social, whether they like to admit it or not. We’re built to be social creatures. Services like Twitter and Facebook and the myriad of other similar sites cater to some fundamental human desire to be connected to others.

Yes, no doubt some of these social services will go under. Business models fail, investors dry up, costs exceed revenue and businesses close, but in the long run… the social web is here to stay. It doesn’t have to be one of the current big dogs that stays. Maybe in ten years there will be no such thing as Twitter or Facebook. Maybe that’ll be the case in two years. No one knows.

But regardless of which individual services fail – or which broad types of services fail all together (check-ins, anyone?) – it’s my firm belief that the social web isn’t going to “crash” like Julien supposes. Not like the dot-com bubble, at least. The notion of the social web has been too firmly entrenched in our lives now to simply disappear. While it may certainly change drastically and only really affect those of us who have a “vested interest in it,” it’s not going to crash or disappear.