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What every Web Developer should know about SEO

polemicdigital.com

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Re: What every Web Developer should know about SEO

#21

Post by thejosh »

alphadevx wrote: post #9

I'm coming to the conclusion that SEO does not matter anymore, at least not this basic stuff as everyone is doing this, including your rivals, so it is really not going to get you to stand out from the crowd. Search engines make their money from advertising your site, _not_ from sending you free traffic via SEO. So fire up your credit card and buy some Adwords in key search terms for your business, that's want they w…

"SEO" is starting to lose it's term.

People should be focusing on building sites right, not relying on dirty hacks to get their sites indexed of using Javascript etc.

You can actually rank quite well and get respectable clicks if you just build your site well and create a good action plan to actually optimise your site over a set period of time.

Or you know, go to BlackHatWorld and fall for one of their scams to promises super trusty backlinks that'll rank your site.

Re: What every Web Developer should know about SEO

#22

Post by butler14 »

mootothemax wrote: post #8
josefresco wrote: post #6

Some additional info... 1. Don't let the new HTML5 tags distract or confuse you. Google knows how to deal with traditional DIVs so only use the new tags (example: SECTION, ASIDE) if you know how to properly implement. 2. Maintainability is a big one for page speed optimizations. You can easily get 95% there but that remaining 5% often comes at the expense of maintenance, and the ability to see/make changes easily. 3.…

Maintainability is a big one for page speed optimizations. You can easily get 95% there but that remaining 5% often comes at the expense of maintenance, and the ability to see/make changes easily. Agreed. You might be able to gain a percentage point by inlining some vital CSS rules, but without hellish attention to details, that way madness lies.

Absolutely - it's also a complete waste of time from and SEO perspective, and represents a poor cost vs. benefit if your goal is to reduce bounce rate / increase conversion rate.

Re: What every Web Developer should know about SEO

#23

Post by ssharp »

alphadevx wrote: post #19
ssharp wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree with you, but I certainly would like to know your reasoning behind this. Most people are going to use a search engine if all they get are paid ads. People go to Google for the organic results and sometimes the paid ads are useful for those people. It's still in Google's best interest to provide the most relevant organic results as possible. Most businesses I've worked with still get more revenue from organ…

> Most people are going to use a search engine if all they get are paid ads. Most people will just click on the first few "results", even if they are in fact ads. They can hardly tell the difference. That's why businesses are paying so much to be on top of certain lucrative search key terms: if they we not getting a return on their advertising spend, then they would not be spending it. My main point is, even if your…

I don't want to get too specific into our paid and organic strategies, but I can say that our numbers don't support that people will be more likely to click on the ads than the organic results. This is for both popular, competitive keywords, and branded.

You main point is valid. You can buy traffic from lots of places and that traffic is often very good. But organic traffic can still make up a big part of your revenue and shouldn't be ignored.

Re: What every Web Developer should know about SEO

#25

Post by alphadevx »

kendallpark wrote: post #20
alphadevx wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Could you expand on this? I'm interested in your thoughts. Sure! Here goes... SEO was supposed to give you a competitive advantage, with your highly-optimized site appearing ahead of your (supposedly) less-optimized rivals in the search rankings. With the majority of above-the-fold space on Google being taken up by ads, those looking for free traffic via organic SEO are really just fighting for scraps. For the past…

When you talk about "organic" links do you mean non-advertising links from other websites like blogs/news sites? It seems like you get diminishing returns on SEO. What's the point at which you'd recommended a site stop SEO and try other means of maximizing exposures. What would these other means be?

> When you talk about "organic" links do you mean non-advertising links from other websites like blogs/news sites?

Correct.

> It seems like you get diminishing returns on SEO.

I agree, better to spend the money on ads than SEO consultancy.

> What's the point at which you'd recommended a site stop SEO and try other means of maximizing exposures. What would these other means be?

I consider SEO at this point to be about breaking even with the search engine bots: if your _don't_ do it then they might actually penalize you (e.g. your site is slow, you have broken links, broken redirects etc.), but if you do optimize then they will take benign view of you, but not necessarily a favorable one.

Re: What every Web Developer should know about SEO

#27

Post by hising »

alphadevx wrote: post #19
ssharp wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree with you, but I certainly would like to know your reasoning behind this. Most people are going to use a search engine if all they get are paid ads. People go to Google for the organic results and sometimes the paid ads are useful for those people. It's still in Google's best interest to provide the most relevant organic results as possible. Most businesses I've worked with still get more revenue from organ…

> Most people are going to use a search engine if all they get are paid ads. Most people will just click on the first few "results", even if they are in fact ads. They can hardly tell the difference. That's why businesses are paying so much to be on top of certain lucrative search key terms: if they we not getting a return on their advertising spend, then they would not be spending it. My main point is, even if your…

> My main point is, even if your website is horribly un-optimized in terms of SEO, if you have a bucket of cash to spend on Adwords, you will still get a tonne of traffic. SEO in this instance is almost irrelevant.

I do not agree. A competitor with an optimized page will pay less and rank higher even in the payed result. It is not as simple as the one who payes the most will rank highest, Google has a quality score for Adwords landing pages that will effect your ranking in the payed result as well as what you pay per click.

Re: What every Web Developer should know about SEO

#28

Post by ActVen »

alphadevx wrote: post #9

I'm coming to the conclusion that SEO does not matter anymore, at least not this basic stuff as everyone is doing this, including your rivals, so it is really not going to get you to stand out from the crowd. Search engines make their money from advertising your site, _not_ from sending you free traffic via SEO. So fire up your credit card and buy some Adwords in key search terms for your business, that's want they w…

If you compete in a B2B space selling a high revenue product it absolutely still matters. Even more so if you are taking on larger companies with a heavy focus on outbound sales. Everyone is not "doing this". Assumptions like that are way too broad.

Re: What every Web Developer should know about SEO

#29

Post by mootothemax »

gildas wrote: post #15
mootothemax wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another additional bonus of doing is that you can serve "true" 404 pages (i.e. not soft 404) for invalid URLs when the page is requested with the _escaped_fragment_= query parameter. For one of our sites, the Angular router redirects the user to a "true" 404 page if the in-app page cannot be found, along with the troublesome URL. For example: https://example.com/products/name-does-not-exist/ Will do a JS redirect to:…

Interesting and good to know! I was actually wondering if a JS redirect would suffice.

Interesting and good to know! I was actually wondering if a JS redirect would suffice.

Hehe, as I say, take it with a grain of salt, as I have very little real data to back it up with :)

Re: What every Web Developer should know about SEO

#30

Post by enjo »

ssharp wrote: post #23
alphadevx wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Most people are going to use a search engine if all they get are paid ads. Most people will just click on the first few "results", even if they are in fact ads. They can hardly tell the difference. That's why businesses are paying so much to be on top of certain lucrative search key terms: if they we not getting a return on their advertising spend, then they would not be spending it. My main point is, even if your…

I don't want to get too specific into our paid and organic strategies, but I can say that our numbers don't support that people will be more likely to click on the ads than the organic results. This is for both popular, competitive keywords, and branded. You main point is valid. You can buy traffic from lots of places and that traffic is often very good. But organic traffic can still make up a big part of your revenu…

FWIW we are seeing exactly the same. We compete in highly competitive areas, and our paid search ads barely break even these days. Paid search is really tough.

Our organic efforts are much more fruitful.

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