Search engine optimization is one area in which I expect our progress toward standards-compliance and good structure to pay major dividends and time savings.
Increasingly, search engines are biased away from deliberate manipulations (like metatags) in favor of the actual content of the page. Semantically structured pages benefit by being very accessible to searchbots, but only if the semantics are well designed. Pages that rely too exclusively on CSS layout (you'll know them by their abundant and tags), without adequate semantic structure in the page markup, also suffer. Pages with abundant Flash and javascript will be indexed well if their essential content is described as required by the HTML/XHTML spec in effect on that page. We used to spend inordinate amounts of time and attention on keywords in the metatags, and other SEO gimmicks; I suppose some people still do. But in the past year or two it's become clear to me that I have more success with search engines if I give each page a unique and meaningful title and assure that all headings are contextually meaningful. It helps too if the text on all pages follows the "inverted pyramid" model familiar to journalists. If you do all that, which is pretty simple, you can be reasonably sure you'll be appropriately indexed and also fairly accessible to assistive technologies (of which searchbots are only one example). All this serves the user well, too. So I guess my bottom line position at this moment in time is that SEO now relies on semantic structure and other good design principles, and is not the separate consideration it once was. I also think that's the way it should be. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Posted from the new ixda.org http://www.ixda.org/discuss?post=24134 ________________________________________________________________ *Come to IxDA Interaction08 | Savannah* February 8-10, 2008 in Savannah, GA, USA Register today: http://interaction08.ixda.org/ ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
