SEO… or Courtin’ the ’Bots
Life teaches you that it's hard to get noticed. That's true for websites too. Search engines like Google help level the playing field, but ultimately success requires a strategy.
Despite email pitches to the contrary, there are no long-lasting shortcuts to your website being found on the web. That said, the more you understand about how search engines evaluate web pages-- the sooner you figure out that there are various techniques that can help your site stand out from the competition.
Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, is, in part, the art of using semantic markup to structure the text and images that form your website. Done correctly, search engines will effortlessly and accurately categorize and index your pages. This can help your website move closer to that elusive first page in the search rankings for certain keywords. It's important to understand that SEO is much more than this. However, without 'good bones,' no amount of additional SEO work is going to prove cost effective.
"There are what's known as 'White Hat' SEO practicioners and 'Black Hat' practicioners. Put another way-- there are the 'good guys' and the 'bad guys.' We're one of the good guys."
Jim Pietrangelo
WebCamp One, LLC
We practice informed SEO techniques by optimizing new web pages as they are designed, not as an afterthought. We start, but don’t end, with the HTML markup itself. It's the building block upon which all else is based.
Positioning of content and images is handled with CSS -- Cascading Style Sheets. Search engines don't care about what your site looks like. We do, but they don't. By separating the actual text and images from the code that determines the presentation of that content, the search engine 'bots' that visit your website won't have any artificial walls to run into that might stop them from reading and indexing your entire site. Further, separation of content and presentation guarantees that the 'bones' of your site will stand the test of time as display and browser technologies evolve. Any changes that might be needed to accommodate that evolution should be relatively straightforward and painless.