SEO Experts and the Complex Web

This could go on for days:

SEO Guy: I do x, y, and z, how is that bad?
Derek Powazek: X, y, and z isn’t SEO, it’s making good websites.

SEO Guys, please change your titles to Good Website Makers. I don’t care why, just do it. Derek Powazek insists.

Posted by Jason Kirk on 12 October 2009 @ 3pm

SEO Blocks

SEO Blocks by Vishraval. Wikipedia Hosted. PD Licensed.


Is the very witty comment by Jason Kirk on Derek Powazek’s “Spammers, Evildoers, and Opportunists” published October 12th, 2009.

Derek’s intense, absolute position and lack of a shared language with SEO Experts leads to little opportunity for real discussion between the parties, but at the heart of Derek’s article is a sentiment shared by many web developers: we are extremely frustration that there continues to be a market for search engine manipulation.

This reminds me of Cory Doctorow’s “All Complex Ecosystems Have Parasites“, published 16 March 2005. It makes me think that I’ll happily pay the price of having to put up with SEO Experts, if the alternative is a less flexible and diverse Web.

Mozilla SEO & Firefox Tips & Tricks Web Page Bugs

Update Thurs, May 7th (2 days later): Mozilla is working on the issue for Mozilla.com “Bug 491985 – Title tag changes for select product pages on Mozilla.com to help SEO rank “. To clarify, the improvement is more search engine clicks than ranking.

I provided some feedback to Mozilla just over a month ago about the Mozilla Firefox Start Page tip of handy tips & tricks (how meta):

“Get the most out of your Firefox! Improve your skills with some handy tips & tricks.”

I’m sure web browser developers share my passion for these web page details, but nothing has changed yet.

As I often see other sites with similar issues, I might as well share this web development tip & trick ;-) and other suggestions.

<Title> Tags

First, the <title> field is bad SEO. Says
<title>Mozilla Products | Tips &amp; Tricks</title>
instead of including “Firefox”:
<title>Firefox Tips &amp; Tricks | Mozilla Products </title>

Actually, all the product pages are likely in need of switching the “Mozilla Products” to the end.

This made a big difference for WordPress.com search traffic way back when.

I work with many of our WordPress.com VIP new customers on this issue. Their instinct is to always have their brand or blog name first. But think of which search result you would be more likely to click on? In fact, WordPress historically made it to easy to get this wrong, so in version 2.5 a 3rd parameter ‘seplocation’ was added to wp_title() to make it easier to do it correctly.

So http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/products/ title would become

<title>Firefox Web Browser &amp; Thunderbird Email Client | Mozilla Products</title>
(Plus title case for the win.)

I suggested they give it try and see what happens ;-) I’d be surprised if it does not squeeze a little more juice out.

Wow, there are lousy <title> tags all over their sites ;-)

http://www.mozilla.org/projects/ title is just <title>Featured Projects</title> Hopefully, David Boswell will have a chance to coax out of someone some work here during the current redesign ;-)

Firefox Tips & Tricks

The Manage Your Downloads is an advanced tip? Say what?

“Find it a Flash” intermediate tip reads:

The Find As You Type feature is another handy timesaver. Rather than
using the “find” bar to search for a word on page, just click anywhere
on that page and start typing the word you want. Your cursor will
immediately jump to the first instance of that term.

“You can use it for links, too. For example, instead of moving your
mouse across the page to a “learn more” link, just start typing the
word and when the cursor finds it, press enter.

It does not say that this is disabled by default, and can be enabled at Advanced > Accessibility or any other hint or tip ;-) Also, the phrase “on page” feels awkward, maybe “on a page”.

PS. I would not recommend enabling this, because it breaks some web apps that have click to edit.

TypePad SEO Blows…

There are so many possible places to start in supporting Michael Krotscheck‘s statements and pointing out Six Apart VP Anil Dash mistakes. Here is an easy one:

And TypePad simply blows WordPress.com away on SEO when it comes to search engine indexing. TypePad delivers your blog posts directly to Google Reader and My Yahoo and Blogline.

Are there specific issues that WordPress needs to fix to reverse the blow (hard)?

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