Designing for your least able user
Michael Smethurst
Information Architect
The first rule of SEO
- Never believe anyone who claims to know anything about SEO
- Google is like Coca Cola
- Only 2 people know how it's made...
- ...and they're not telling
- Having said that...
Some things we know make no difference to your PageRank
- Meta description element
- Meta keywords element
- (hidden data is too easy to spam)
Some caveats
- If your local site search is a little behind the Google curve it may still use meta elements to index content
- Google doesn't index the description element BUT sometimes search engines do use this (along with the page title element) in the search results displayed to users. You still need to write good titles and descriptions
One thing we know makes little difference
- Keywords in URIs
- Adding keywords to URIs is a common SEO recommendation
- Google say it makes no difference to their indexing
- It MAY have an effect on Yahoo but no-one seems sure
- We'll come back to this!
Some things that do make a difference
- Well structured semantic (x)HTML - h1s, h2s etc
- Search sitemaps
One thing that makes lots of difference
- Write in plain English
- (Use words your users are likely to use and search for)
But...
- Don't repeat yourself unnecessarily
- Write for people not for search bots
- If you saturate your content with repeated keywords it will be unpleasant to read and less useful
- If it's less useful people won't link to it...
...and one thing that makes all the difference is...
- Links
- The more your page is linked to the higher your PageRank
- The higher the PageRank of pages that link to your page the higher your Page Rank
In addition to the density of links the titles of those links are all important
- Don't do this: To find out more about {important key word} click <a href="..">here</a>
- Do this: Find out more about <a href="..">{important key word}</a>
- The importance of link titles is what leads to link spam (see 'miserable failure')
Remember!
- You can't make people link to you
- How well your site fares in search engines is at the discretion of the web
- The only things you can do are build links from aggregations and help to encourage linking
How to encourage linking
- Make good content!!!
- Stuff that people want to pass on to friends, cite and bookmark
- Spend time getting your URI schema right
- Make every nugget of content addressable
Share the love
- Links make the web a better place
- Don't be a link sink
- If you like something link to it
- And go easy on the rel nofollows
Three rules for URI design
URIs should be:
- Human readable
- Hackable
- Persistent
- And the greatest of these is persistent
Cool URIs don't change
- Before adding keywords to URIs think what happens when those keywords change - can you generate appropriate redirects?
- Don't sacrifice persistence for the sake of readability / hackability
Cool URIs
- One URI per concept; one concept per URI
- Avoid semantic drift (this year's Glastonbury was not last year's Glastonbury)
- Minimise redirects - Google will only pass PageRank for one 301
- Don't expose your technology stack (.shtml, /cgi-bin/, .php, /struts/, .jsp)
- Return an appropriate representation (one URI for desktop + mobile + API with conneg)
Finally
- Google are cleverer than we are - you can't cheat em
- Google are only trying to reward good behaviour - play nicely
- Remember your pages are for humans first and search bots second. Don't wreck your UX by chasing the SEO money
Be accessible
- Think of search bots as your least able users
- If you stick to the common rules for accessibility, you won't go far wrong
- Don't rely on Flash for navigation
- Degrade any JavaScript / AJAX gracefully
- If you must use forms provide other browsable / crawlable routes to content
Absolutely finally
- Magazines are made of pages, websites are made of links...