What Every Programmer Should Know About SEO

Mainly because unlike eating healthily it's actually a pretty broken concept.

Your search ranking is determined by your ability as a writer rather than the quality of your product.

A lot of people take a more directly cynical view of content creation, rather than the more passive ignorance we have with regard to health. Our health is not something someone else can take generally, content is.

It is too easy to look at the rampant copying and dirty tricks used to pull in viewers for ad revenue and think "if you can't beat them, join them" or worse "I might be able to beat them, but joining them seems easier".

This only works if your site has something to do with development.

Or are you suggesting posting development related topics to a non development related site purely to get those juicy backlinks (and thus good pagerank)?

Site freshness only matters for certain categories/topics. For other topics you could say the older the static content the better. Some of my best ranking/money making pages have not changed in 8 years and rank better every year, without doing anything.

Regarding ranking algos, you did not mention the Trust Rank (there is a patent G filed some years ago). A low Trust Rank is equally bad as a low Page Rank. I don't really know much about it, but afaik it has to do with the trust that G has collected on your site, while Page Rank is based on individual pages. If you link to "bad neigborhoods" (another important term, think casino sites, v*agra, etc.) your TR will go down for example, and its hard to get it back up. If National Geographic links to one of your pages, your site's TR goes way up.

And then there is the number of pages on your site. Google will only crwal a limited amount of pages from your site, depending on your Page Rank and distribution of incoming links. So try to keep the number of crawlable pages focused to the relevant pages (ie the ones you'd like to see in G's index).

After some time and if you have tons of links, you will see a "deep crawl" with a bunch of Gbots hammerings you server and downloading many more pages a day than usual.

PLEASE DO NOT READ THAT ARTICLE - it is bad for you and your business.

SEO is a bullshit industry. this means that 80% of everything that is written about SEO actually reduces your knowledge of SEO, that article is in no way different.

just pick a few examples:

    > A web crawler has to crawl your site (and every other site on the web)
   > Indexes all the pages ..
   > Organizes the indexed collection and stores ...

this one misses on of the most important steps of the google site processing pipe: Discovery is the process of discovering URLs to crawl. It is fueled by the sitemap.xml and crawling.

PageRank - is not - "another important part of authority" - pagerank is thoughtcancer. don't ever say that word, don't ever think that word. see my TC article here http://techcrunch.com/2010/07/07/startups-linking-to-your-co...

    >Ensure pages render without JavaScript enabled

sadly google parses and to some degree renders JS ... badly. this tip is good, but leads to the false conclusion that google does not parse/render/"see" JS.

    > you should also pay attention to how you construct links and anchor text to internal pages on your site.

internal link anchor text is mostly irrelevant.

    >your own internal links use relevant keywords in the anchor text.

it's also some of the worst things, as the impact in minimal to not measurable.

    >So if you load a bunch of text dynamically with Ajax, or JavaScript, create a non-JavaScript version that will show the same information.

outdated, google now even does onload-triggered POST requests if necessary. js is still bad, but the story above is only half the story.

    >Put them in the URL (and even better if your domain name has your keywords)

oh god, not again. these are the SEO URL rules

    #### landingpage url rules

    all URLs on an a webproperty must be according to these rules
    listed in priority!

    1. unique (1 URL == 1 resource, 1 resource == 1 URL)
    2. permanent (they do not change, no dependencies)
    3. manageable (1 logic per site section, no complicated exceptions)
    4. easily scalable logic
    5. short
    6. with a targeted keyword phrase

further down she says something about 404s and it sounds like they are bad. 404 are great. when pages are gone, they are gone - 404 or 410. if the move then 301. but do not redirect gone pages to friendly 200 pages. keep your site simple and your redirects rules as well.

    >Additionally you want as many links to contain appropriate alt text.

links don't have alt text, images have alt text. in an image is linked, that alt text substitutes the anchor text.

    >But SEO isn’t just about building a great site that is crawlable and has the right content – it is also about converting users.

no, that is the job of the product, onpage marketing, conversion optimization. SEO is really just about getting - targeted - visitors. (she has clearly read too much SEOmoz)

    >the most defensible SEO strategy is links,

no, it's not. that is just something that SEO agencies tell you to sell you their services and useless tools.

disclaimer: i work as an SEO - i hate SEOs. my biggest success is 62 M visitors a month. i don't read SEO blogs.