The Craptastic Adventures of SES San Jose 2004

1

Wow! What incredibly bad advice!

2

Uhhh… Wha? What you saying?

Were they serious, or are they actually stand-up comedians? ‘Cause you can’t be serious about people that say that bad = good. Instead, it’s bad != good.

3

You’re kidding. Or exaggerating. That’s INSULTING!!! How did you sit through that?:| I’m impressed, shocked and awed.

AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!

J.

4

It was a very bizarre experience to say the least. The speakers’ ability to contradict themselves within the scope of one sentence was absolutely amazing, and the audience’s (apparent?) approval of everything said was equally mystifying.

However, there was a man sitting in front of me recording the entire session with an iRiver. Toward the end of the last speaker, and apparently aware of the quiet criticism of my co-workers during the course of the session, he turned around to us and said, “These people are f**king morons.”

If only I could have found that guy after the session to get ahold of that recording.

5

SEO ‘experts’ often act like they have harvard degrees in exploiting google, when really they are just part of what is mostly a completely fabricated industry. Companies normally pay more for SEO than for website design, which I find ridiculous and quite insulting.

6

Don’t forget people – Images break search engines!

7

This kind of crap simply proves the point that standards education and evangelism is needed as much now as it ever has. Thanks for writing about this, sad as it is, we need to be reminded that people are thinking in very different ways than we might suspect.

8

Whoa! I had a rough night at work, almost got robbed, and I have to come home and read about this? It sounds like we’ve been dialed back to 1994… no wonder I have a hard time finding a job!

9

Amazing stuff!

I always find it amusing that SEO ‘experts’ place their expertise higher in priority to the actual design and development of a site. I’m not saying that it isn’t important to give a site the best chance of a good Google rating, but I don’t see the point if the end result is an unusable site.

Obviously a site can receive a LOT of traffic through a good search engine posistion, but if this doesn’t convert in to sales it is useless.

I deal with a lot of small-medium sized business, whose scope is often local. They generally receive a higher hit rate by good promotion of their webiste through traditional means, even simple things like making sure their URI is on business cards and letterheads.

The search engine industry is currently domainated by pay-per-click campaigns, a far better place to put your money than in employing dedicated SEO experts. Guraranteed placement, or possible placement (especially at the expense of screwing up your website)? I know which one I would invest in.

I feel that a good standards based, accessible design is most of the way there to a good ranking on Google. I’d be interested to see if there is any evidence that standards based design is detrimental to placement.

10

Personally, I’m of the opinion that these snake oil salesmen don’t need our help, and it’s better for all of us actually using google to find helpful information if these dorks never learn clean HTML. It might actually help them elevate their seo spam even higher.

At this point, they have just enough knowledge to be dangerous (to themselves), which is fine by me.

11

It’s a shame about that session, from the names who ran it, I would expect better.

One I’d suggest doing, is making sure Danny Sullivan knows about this, for thsoe who don’t know, he’s kind of the guy who runs SES, but he is always interested in improving things and clearing up mistakes.

That is very dissapointing that such well known names in the SEO industry seem to be giving that kind of at advice at the premier SEO event.

I would point out that not all SEO professionals are like that, I don’t class myself as an SEO as such, but I design sites with an awareness of it, and many are the same.

12

Sorry you didn’t like this particular session. I hope that doesn’t mean the entire show wasn’t a complete waste of time for you. The very vast majority of people do indeed seem to have found it useful.

This was the very first time we had that particular session, so I’ll take your comments, along with any I receive through the evaluation process, and see about making any needed changes. If you were in any of the sessions I moderated, you would have heard me time and again ask those attending to be sure to let us know things they don’t like, so that we can work on fixing thing.

Reading through the summary, I’m pretty sure you’re putting the wrong spin on this particular aspect, though:

"...and are a great place to stuff keyword spam."

I didn’t moderate the session—but knowing the speakers, I’d guess they’d wanted that inserting text there is often something people do in order to spam search engines and so should be best avoided. In your summary, you make it sound like they were telling people to spam this way.

Again, I’ll check on your comments, and you can also feel free to send me any further suggestions directly, as well. That’s actually a far more effective way to ensure that sessions are improved. I can’t read every blog in the world, but someone did see this entry, so I was able to catch your comments this time.

13

I hope nobody really believe this stuff.

14

It is not so much the fact that these people think this way, we all know they’re still out there in huge numers, but the problem is that they are invited to speak, what gives them a sense of authority. SEO is a very specific skillset that a lot of people have never dived into, so hearing stuff like this can seriously damage the opinions of designers that don’t use standards – yet.

Those people don’t seem to understand that it is mostly the content that sells a site and rarely the spam. That’s only an excuse for not finding the right tone of voice for potential visitors.

15

I wasn’t at this conference, but I have attended a presentation where a member of the audience told the speaker what he thought, no holds barred. It was probably the most embarrassing experience I’ve ever had (and I’ve had a few, I’m British). Feedback forms are a good way of getting honest comments from your audience.

16

Hi everyone-

I was one of the speakers on the Advanced Design session. I always appreciate feedback about conference sessions, be they positive or negative comments, because I always look for ways to improve session content.

I felt that the majority of the comments made about the SES Advanced Design session were taken completely out of context. One specific example I can give is the whole font tag issue. I NEVER made that statement. In reality, I was showing the arguments for (pro) using CSS for text formatting and the arguments against (con) using CSS-formatted text. Basically, all I was pointing out is that through usability testing and focus groups, designers might discover that their target audience likes a certain font, one that might not be a common one. In that situation, I’d probably favor a graphic image over CSS-formatted text.

In the Search Engine Friendly Design Session, I went over the pros and cons of the different types of navigation schemes, both in terms of search-engine visability and site usability. From the initial post, it appears the writer did not attend that session. Maybe he/she might not have taken most of the Advanced Design session’s content out of context had he/she understood the content’s of the previous session. I don’t know. Hypothesizing.

Frames are back??? I was there. No speaker ever made that statement. Unfortunately, I feel that the initial post makes a lot of conclusions that are partially or wholly inaccurate.

Danny is correct in his statements that we were not teaching anyone to spam. We were warning people NOT to try a particular method since the search engines were already savvy about a technique.

In fact, Matt Bailey and I have been speakers on the Cleaning Up the Mess/Spam session for the past year. I’ve been writing about search engine spam for SearchDay, Clickz, and WebProNews for years. This is probably the first time someone has outright accused me of teaching spam techniques.

For the record, I am a designer. Have been for over 10 years.

To be honest, I question this writer’s intent. Was this person giving his honest assessment of the session or was he trying to discredit industry professionals by taking their presentations out of context?

With all due respect, please contact the session’s speakers for what we really said. We’re nice people. We are more than happy to answer an email question. Maybe the writer had different expectations for the session’s content. Maybe we should write a better session description. Instead of outright criticism, suggestions for improvement and asking us questions (for clarification) along with the criticism might be a better approach.

Thank you, everyone, for your feedback. I am open to any and all questions about that session.

17

I’ll admit that I definitely added an aspect of spin to the points listed above. No one actually spoke the words “stuff keyword spam” during the session and I am certain that close to 90% of attendees walked away feeling as if they learned a great deal. But I do think my tone and followup imply a certain element of sarcasm that may go unheard by some, making this appear more of a flame than it really was intended to be.

The main impetus for this entry was seeing only one article that comes anywhere close to a critique of the SES 2004. This was most likely because most of the sessions provided information that was right on – as far as SEO/SEM professionals are concerned. But let’s remember that SEO is an entirely different industry than standards-based web development, and this is a critique from the perspective of the latter.

SEO and standards-based web development exist symbiotically. Sound web development is the foundation for a website that will exhibit solid performance with search engines. I feel as if the flavor of the SES conference was misdirected; I was expecting the SES Sessions to incorporate more a a progressive outlook on some of the newer technologies used in front-end development rather than the same old song and dance about Javascript jiggery-pokery and “this new thing called CSS.”

Additionally, I might add that allowing open discussion and commenting here is a gesture that merits some respect, no matter how small that gesture may be.

18

It’s difficult to be too progressive when the search engines themselves don’t advance. As far as many of them are concerned, CSS is still some type of “new” thing. They may not see it, or they may have problems with it.

Geez—they’ve known about problems with indexing frames for nearly a decade now. Have they advanced so that we can stop telling people about frame workarounds? Nope. What’s Google’s advice? They link to an article on my web site about frame workarounds.

In terms of getting progressive, part of what I’ve been trying to do is have more breakout sessions on exactly this type of topic. As I said, this was a first time with a session completely devoted to these topics (as opposed to being part of other topics) precisely because there’s so much interest on how to make use of CSS, JavaScript and frames and not ALSO have search engine problems.

We get the same thing with Flash. We’ve long offered a session on dealing with Flash and non-HTML content. In San Jose, we focused entirely on Flash—and involved the search engines as well on that. As you saw in other sessions, they are also often part of the panel to try and keep the knowledge as broad as possible. In fact, that’s why the conference has so many panels, period—to help ensure you don’t just get one opinion, as there’s often a variety.

My biggest concern is that your initial post seems to have caused a number of people to think the conference was all about trickery or manipulating “on the page” elements for SEO success. It also inadvertently fed concerns that some have that SEO is all about tricks. To be clear, there are plenty of people who do SEO that do indeed focus on content, who are not into “tricking” search engines and in fact, often themselves preach better usability.

If anything, I’ve consistently worked to try and NOT present tricky type of information to people. I want people to build sites that please people and search engines. My original audience at Search Engine Watch was webmasters—not web marketers. I wanted web designers and others who operated web sites to build great sites that could also be friendly to search engines and naturally pull traffic. Both can be done.

If you want to send me a direct email, as I already said above—and as I said to everyone at the conference constantly—I would love to hear more on specifics you felt were missing, any inaccuracies and so on. I love that type of feedback—that’s why I ask for it always.

19

As another panelist on this session, I would like to thank you for your feedback. It is difficult trying to meet people’s expectations when designing a session, as there are many skill levels and abilities represented in the audience.

Maybe the title of the session was a bit deceptive to an advanced designer, as our goal was simply to uncover some of the programming limitations that companies and programmers may not know.

Danny and Shari have addressed many of your concerns above, so hopefully I can just shed a bit more light on this. At no point did we tell anyone to sacrifice design or to spam for search engine rankings. In fact, I preceded my presentation by telling the audience, up front, that I work for a design firm, and that my presentation was based on our methods of balancing design capabilities with search engines, accessibility issues and user/browser experience. If you felt there was any self-promotion, please let me know, as I would rather avoid any appearance of it.

Specifically to your points of discussion concerning my presentation:

1. Yes, if you detect browsers and change the site based on browser detection, then yes, you should check to see how your site is rendered in new browsers. Conversely, if you don’t detect browsers and use CSS extensively, then you should be aware how your site shows in other browsers and versions of those browsers.

2. Being the speaker who presented on frames, I never said that they were back. I only presented options on how to design and optimize frames in order to avoid orphaned pages in the search engines.

3. I only gave my opinion on CSS v. tables, and I was very clear that this was my agency’s guidelines – in other words, my opinion. We use CSS for attributes, tables for positioning in order to be as cross-compatible as possible. That was specifically not presented as a “have to” instruction, only an opinion.

4. Of course, JavaScript and accessibility conflict, but my goal was to present the issues to the attendees, who were to draw their own conclusions and determine which technique was best for them, based on their market.

Shari and Danny have both stated as such, as these are very basic design issues, yet they are questions that we are asked at every conference.

My company strives for standards-based, accessible design for as many people as possible, including the search engines. However, there are many times when we have to conform to client expectations, corporate requirements and legal restrictions. The presentation was a summary of the issues we face in trying to present a good user experience. Because the better the user experience, the more leads and sales are ultimately driven by the web site.

20

All of this is beginning to get a bit overwhelming, but I feel this discussion is important – and it has been relatively calm so far – so I’ll continue.

As quoted from Cre8site:

“The show is about search engine marketing. It is designed to help you do your search engine marketing better. However, it has had to take on areas that go beyond this…But at what point does it turn into a web marketing/web design conference?”

Good question. And this brings me back to what I said earlier regarding the relationship between CSS and standards-based development: they are impicitly connected. Providing more opportunities for collaboration between industries is not a bad thing, and quite honestly could lead to some very interesting dialogue. This is why Eric Meyer provided his input, not to pose himself as a superior SEO expert.

My intentions were not to bash the conference as a whole, but to shock the web development community into seeing the vast difference in content between a design session in SES and one within a conference such as WebVisions (my true evil intentions are finally revealed!).

So I’ll ask you, why not ask someone like Eric Meyer to collaborate for a session at SES? Industry crossover would not only help SES gain credibility but might actually provide some interesting insight for marketer-designers still wallowing in Javascript and table soup. There will always be link farms, portal sites, and spam. But for those of us who see standards-based design as a powerful tool toward making sites usable to all creatures (all bots & beings included), an expert opinion is needed.

You admitted yourself, Danny, that you are offering an SEM conference, not a design conference. But where is the line drawn between the two? From ground up, every choice made relating to IA will effect rankings in some mysterious way.

21

“visability” – is that the measurement for how much money you can make from people who fall for nonsense? ;)

As for the overall issue, I think it’s important that people stay up to date on their own efforts, and not blindly follow the experts-or-not at conferences alone. If they do, well, eventually they’ll come to a point where they run into problems everywhere, and be forced to get themselves truly up to date.

22

Actually, I already sent a message yesterday to Eric inviting him to come to a show and better get educated to some of the search engine issues that are out there, perhaps as a way to being on a panel in the future.

But the main point is that I already have (and have had) people from design backgrounds on our panels. Both Shari and Matt are examples of this. If I have a choice between a designer and a designer who also understands search engines, I want the dual hat person. That’s because they understand both worlds well. Having someone who only knows one world doesn’t help.

I can’t underscore this enough, that it has not been about SEM “tricks” with our shows. Shari in particular has done a sesson called “Search Engine Friendly Design” since Day 1 of our shows back in 1999. The point was that she was speaking as a designer about things to consider to also make sites search engine friendly.

Because of this, I guess I haven’t felt I needed to reach out and bring someone completely new to SEO into the session, just because they are a great designer. If they don’t understand some key elements of how search engines interact with design issues, they aren’t going to help anyone.

As for drawing the line between a design and a search conference, every session I do has to be related to search in some way. That’s why people are there.

Having a session about standards on CSS isn’t specifically about search. A session on how search engines interact with CSS is right on target for my audience, which is a mix of SEMs, SEOs, designers, traditional marketers, interactive marketers and others.

I think the key frustration I’m sensing is that there are a number of designers who want standards and may feel frustrated that some of things SEO companies suggest are detracting from those.

Here’s my view. I have written for ages that search engines are the third big browser designers need to consider. Nevertheless, they’ve often been ignored. People test for IE, test for Netscape, test for Firefox now I guess. Did you test for search engine friendliness? If you didn’t, you missed out on one of the most popular ways people are going to find your site.

What Shari, Matt, myself and lots of other SEO people are telling designers is how to comply with the search engines. We’d love for them to have standards as well. But since they don’t—in the same way that the browsers don’t—we also have to tell you how to workaround in the meantime. And to be clear—we’re not talking tricks, link farms, spam, etc. We’re talking about how to build a site that pleases both humans and search engines, as many of us have talked about for ages.

So to come back to your frustration, anyone who went in with a desire to see a pitch for CSS standards would certainly have been disappointed. The session wasn’t preaching that. It was explaining how to deal with the third big browsers of search engines right now.

Certainly I’ll explore a future session that perhaps might examine how search engines might have common standards that meet up with web design. I can tell you, lots of us would love it. No one wants to have to fight designers to make changes just because search engines are largely ignorant browsers that do indeed still see the web largely like it was 1997.

Another session I’ve long had on my working list might be the “Working Together” session, on how to win good trade-offs between design issues, marketing issues, SEM issues and so on. But we have long, long had a “Doing SEM In House” session that already covers much of this—it focuses on how to bring multiple departments and issues together to try and get a winning situation for everyone.

I think probably the best thing that’s come out of this entire conversation is that many designers—like many others—clearly seem to be encountering many SEO firms that seem to put pure SEO issues above overall site functionality, and especially things they may feel are tricks or focus on low-quality doorway-page style pages. All SEO firms are not like this. There are plenty of search marketing firms that do indeed want to work with existing great content and help that content be better found with changes that are often simple to employ, if you know how.

The entire conference has long had this type of content. It’s been a hallmark of the conference, in my view. The session you attended in particular was meant to be right in line with this. Clearly, we’ll need to work on making that message even clearer.

23

Wanted to add one last thing. When Jupitermedia, which produces SES, asked me back in 1999 if I wanted to do a search-specific show, I jumped at the chance. That’s because I’d long been a speaker at other conferences where search issues were generally restricted to a 1 1/2 hour session mixed among everything else. It was hardly enough time.

You mentioned the WebVisions conference. So this is an example of that past situation I used to encounter. I’ve looked at the agenda. Where’s the stuff on search?

I see an entire session called “Using Weblogs to Communicate with Customers.” Hey, blogs are great—but don’t you think search represents a lot of reach, as well? Why isn’t there even one session devoted to the complex issues that search presents in terms of web design? Why isn’t there a session on the standards problems that search engines themselves (not search marketers) present to designers? It’s not like this is a new issue. I’ve been writing about it since 1996 and speaking about it since 1997.

I saw a session called “Does Technology Matter?” What’s the coverage on search? Apparently, buy Google AdWords. Paid listings are fine, but why not also consider any simple changes that tap into free traffic.

I know many of the names on the agenda of that conference. Heck, in the past I spoke at conferences such as Builder.com or the Thunderlizard events with some of these same people. I love usability and good web design. But search is a complicated issue. Search marketers (and others with a seach marketing interest) have a lot of issues they want to explore. That’s what SES has been meant to provide.

My assumption is that web designers may come to SES and go to other conferences as well. That’s why I don’t want SES to go outside its search remit. Otherwise, the complicated issues that search presents gets lost among many other issues. It’s not that those other issues aren’t important. It’s just that they already seem to have plenty of conference venues to be explored.

24

"I’ll admit that I definitely added an aspect of spin to the points listed above."

Judging from the 23 comments already as I type, and mentions of your post elsewhere, it looks like your gambit has worked just as intended too. ;)

However, despite the saying being that all press is good press, I don’t believe that publishing your lack of understanding of SEM/SEO has done much but allowed others who don’t understand it to have a quick rant and underline their lack of understanding.

The basis of all SEO is really simple: we design for one more broad type of user-agent than most of the designers ever think of – even the so-called progressive ones. SEOs design for the spiders to get as much out of the site as the human users can.

That is the essence of all SEO in a nutshell.

My job, of the last ten years, is to fix the oversight and inconsiderations of the average designer employed by all levels of companies, from the mom-and-pop business to the large multi-national corporations.

We add appropriate ALT attributes to image tags where the designer got so carried away with how the site should look that he forgot to allow for those who cannot see (be they impaired or robotic).

We ensure that TITLE tags are actually used to title the page, rather than the site, ensuring that each page has an accurate TITLE which will help browsers (human or robotic) to understand exactly what the page is about just from a listing of that title.

We use TITLE attributes in links, so that where narrow but stylish menus have limited the length of link text, further descriptive information of exactly where each link will lead is provided.

We ensure that good, accurate and descriptive link text is used, rather than the appallingly unusefull “click here” that so many designers have foolishly used in the past. Take a look at the link there, and laugh at the sites ranking high for “click here” rather than giving the modern search engine semantic analysis anything worthwhile to use.

I spend time fixing the many sites that are JavaScript reliant for functionality, as all SEOs must, because search engines do not interpret JavaScript (and even though Googlebot can do so to some extent, it still cannot do so reliably or well).

I spend time fixing the run-away use of CSS from designers who have forgotten that CSS is optional, and that one of the advantages of CSS is so that users can specify their own settings and override that of the designer.

In short, I ensure that pages and sites are funtional by a greater range of user types than just designers. That it doesn’t rely on anything that can be disabled, and has failsafes built in so that it will still be useable for user-agents without Frames, JavaScript, Flash, CSS, etc.

SEO is all about usability and accessibility. It always has been. It is incredibly obvious that it always has been.

25

Ammon Johns writes: “SEO is all about usability and accessibility. It always has been. It is incredibly obvious that it always has been.”

Unfortunately, the very people who actively engage in SEO vehemently disagree with you. For instance this was posted yesterday in a discussion about Black Hat SEO.

How big a problem are SEOers who don’t know what SEO is about?

Its obvious to me that placement in search engines should be a function of the quality of content. Yet SEO seems to be more about back link count and page rank, and less about giving other people reason to link to your content.

The nigritude ultramarine competition is IMO a very good demonstration of the failure of SEO. 255,000 results, and only three or four pages actually worth linking to. Too much noise, and very little signal, endemic of the problem surrounding SEO.

26

There are arguments within those who do SEO about tactics, just as there are arguments among designers about tactics. I can trot out plenty of bad web design. Now shall I condemn all web designers as having missed the plot?

Case in point. It’s all about content, right? I guess you’d think Nike ought to have pretty good content on the topic of running shoes, wouldn’t you say? Go search for that on Google. See Nike in the top results? Oops, nope. Now what happened? Hey, that really cool graphic intensive and Flash-based home page just isn’t search engine friendly. Instead, want to see what Google thinks the Nike home page is about? Check it out

That’s sort of like handing out a blank business card. Nike’s great content is definitely NOT being rewarded. And sadly, they could have a great designed site, a super usable site, and ALSO be search engine friendly.

I guess the Nike web site proves that all those who build web sites have no clue about search engines. No, of course it doesn’t. So let’s not take a single example of anything and condemn an entire industry nor those who work in it.

It is clear is that many people outside the SEO/SEM industry have the wrong impression of what some within the industry actually do. I think a number of people are posting to this thread to try and explain that it is not all about building up fake backlinks or creating low quality doorway-style pages.

You can choose to condemn everyone, and that’s your choice. I’d hope instead you’d take away the point that good designers can be helped by understanding SEO. In fact, some good designers also do SEO, and vice versa.

27

Danny Sullivan writes: “That’s sort of like handing out a blank business card. Nike’s great content is definitely NOT being rewarded. And sadly, they could have a great designed site, a super usable site, and ALSO be search engine friendly.”

AND – if they built their website accessibly, it would already be search engine friendly.

What is interesting is the ethical advice about SEO mirrors what webstandards and accessibility have been delivering all along. I wish serious SEOers would take valid and well structured HTML, CSS, as well as web accessibility seriously.

Search engines are the biggest disabled customer anyone will have on their websites, and these disabled people tell millions of others about your site – as long as it isn’t a “blank business card”.

Danny, thanks for the dialogue. Its very much appreciated.

28

You’re welcome for the dialog. Clearly, too many people are forming a one sided opinion of SEO. I know the industry itself is largely to blame. It’s something I’ve tried to start a dialog on here, and that I’m planning to write more about in the coming month.

In terms of well-structured HTML, here’s the deal—many involved with SEO absolutely do believe in good sites, sites that are accessible and so on. Or as Jeffrey Zeldman wrote,

“Search engine optimization (SEO) can generate more traffic than banner ads or pay-per-click methods. It’s not voodoo or rocket science. The techniques many of us already use to lower bandwidth, comply with standards, and follow accessibility guidelines turn out to be some of the best things we can do to enhance our search engine rankings.”

However, not all SEO people are designers. That doesn’t mean they are bad, into tricks, etc. It’s simply that they know what search engines like and can help designers understand that. Hopefully, the designers can integrate that into good standard practice and so on.

For example, back to Nike. If I say that every page in the Nike web site ought to have a good HTML title that summarizes the main content of the page, that’s good SEO advice. It is an important accessibility thing. Honestly, I don’t know. I don’t konw whether designers who are into standards think page titles should be unique and descriptive to page content. And to some degree, as someone who knows SEO, it may be outside my remit.

Now if I say you’ve got many pages that are 300K, as an SEO, I know this is an issue because Google for one will not index past the first 100K or so of textual content. If you—the web site owner—want to be found for some of the things at the bottom of the page, it’s better if you break apart the content in a logical matter.

Do I need to know web design standards to deliver this advice? No—it’s still good advice regardless of the standards, if you are concerned about search engine issues. But hopefully you the web site owner will make the ultimate decision as to what you actually want to implement.

There are some SEOs who can also do great design. But more commonly, they are going to be part of a web design team. My ideal SEO, for the type of SEO I write about, is someone who works within a web site’s team from day one to try and help the site naturally evolve into search engine friendliness. They don’t have to be design experts. They simply need to know how to work with design experts to reach a common goal. And there are absolutely firms out there who do this. I hope the dialog helps those who’ve only heard of one type of SEO realize there’s an entire other type that can help you—and in fact, has been helping designers for years.

29

Danny writes:

“It’s difficult to be too progressive when the search engines themselves don’t advance. As far as many of them are concerned, CSS is still some type of ‘new’ thing. They may not see it, or they may have problems with it.”

This is exactly the point of SEO through structurally valid markup. Google spiders my site, ignores the CSS, reads my heading and my content, and ranks my site based on what it sees. I use CSS to position items on the page and add graphics, but Google couldn’t care less about these things. Images that are actual content are still real imgs, but backgrounds and patterns are called via the stylesheet and ignored.

Treat search engines like users who don’t have images enabled and don’t support javascript and your site will rank well without any “advanced” SEO spam techniques.

30

I’m sounding like a broken record, so I’ll leave the discussion off with this.

“Treat search engines like users who don’t have images enabled and don’t support javascript and your site will rank well without any “advanced” SEO spam techniques.”

Yes, that’s exactly what Shari, Matt, or Ammon who’s posted tell people. The problem is, many web designers simply don’t do this. They build web sites that are heavily image based. They assume sprinking some ALT text will be enough. They assume JavaScript content may be read.

The session being discussed was NOT advanced SEO spam techniques. It was designed to help educate people who might be using some of these more advanced design techniques that they pose particular problems with search engines.

For example, if you built your site entirely with CSS and ignored the issues of those with older browsers, of which search engines mimic, you have problems. That’s the type of thing the session and similar ones were exploring.

If everyone built sites as you describe, we wouldn’t need to have such sessions largely. That’s not the reality, however. Ironically, the panelists and others in SEO are spreading some of the same words as others who assume they aren’t.

I don’t really know what else to say, so I’ll end off with a last recap. All SEO is not the same. There are indeed plenty of people who work with designers, good content and good material to help ensure that it is compliant with the things that even the search engines themselves want. Assuming all SEO is somehow the enemy of good design is terrible thinking. It is not. Any designer worth their salt should be thinking about SEO or working with a good person who knows SEO as it applies to good content. That’s because the old refrain of “if you build it, will they come” remains true. If you build it, it may be that natural links and natural content will help them come. But building it right and thinking about search engines alongside and in cooperation with good design will greatly improve the odds that people will come and find the content you’ve worked so hard to produce.

31

Hi everyone-

I just realized how some of my comments (mine, not the other speakers) came to be taken out of context.

When I teach, I give my students handouts as supplemental materials. Since I give weekly quizzes, I never put content in the handouts that were on the quiz. In order for the handouts to make sense, the students must attend the class and listen to what I have to say. That way, I could ascertain who was paying attention and who wasn’t, and who attended the classes and who didn’t.

That previous paragraph is an analogy. I have the same strategy for my conference presentations. So my educated guess? The writer either was not paying attention to what I had to say, or the writer did not actually attend the session but downloaded the presentation nonetheless. In either case, the initial writer attributed blatantly false or inaccurate statements to me.

In any event, I think the writer owes me and the other speakers an apology. The bios were in the conference book and on the Search Engine Strategies web site. The URLs and emails to the speakers’ sites are also readily available. A little research before publication would have delivered people to helpful information, rather than being adversarial.

For the record, I write for a few Jupitermedia publications. When I cover a conference session for SearchDay or Clickz, I always fact check and (a) send quotations that I thought were particularly helpful to the speaker for verifications, or (b) ask the speaker to write a quotation him- or herself. That way, the speaker’s presentation is never taken out of context or misrepresented.

Think about this, too. If a person attended any of your conference sessions, took your statements out of context, misquoted you, and called your content “craptastic,” how would you react?

You are all entitled to your opinions. I sincerely hope that this courtesy is extended to me and my colleagues.

32

Hi again-

This is in response to Graham Peel’s comment: shown below:

“I use CSS to position items on the page and add graphics, but Google couldn’t care less about these things.”

Google most certainly does care about those things. What if a web developer is using CSS positioning to deliberately trick the search engines into delivering inappropriate, redundant or poor quality search results? What if a web developer hides text and links using CSS?

The search engines are most certainly interested in knowing that information.

Please read the following URL from Google – straight from the horse’s mouth.

33

Some review and hopefully clarity… thanks Danny for your insight.

I was there and I know Compooter. Some of these issues have snowballed here and I’d like to get back to what he was trying to get across before this ends.

We both do design, builds, and SEO/SEM – that’s why we were there – we are not just some css freaks with tunnel vision. We know how it works and we practice it daily.

Now that I have gotten some defensive energy out, on to my viewpoint…

The expectations on this particular session were very skewed – it was labeled as “advanced”, and for an ol’ skool marketer just getting their feet wet in the web it probably seemed as such. For us it was leading people astray… not enough options and too much “this is how my company does it”. This is a criticism, my opinion…. not a flame… of 1 speaker, not the entire SEM industry (of which we are both a part of).

It’s hard to have “advanced” sessions with such a large and diverse crowd, it has to be dumbed down to a point. But it wasn’t just dumbed down, it was presented in a confusing and contradictory manor. We were not the only ones that were more than a little baffled in the crowd at several points during the presentation (the iRiver guy as mentioned in the original post was just one example).

Now I do not believe that any of the panelists were “idiots”. They understandably seemed uneasy at times and I do not agree with some of the methods they use and gave examples of. This was a new topic for SES and what to cover and how far to take it was uncharted territory. This issue is not 100% about “css layout vs. tables” or even 100% about “css and seo walking hand in hand”, even though they can/do.

There were some good sessions, as stated, on server issues and blogs/feeds and others. This was/is not an attack on the conference as much as it was on this particular session. Also this turned into SEM vs. designer/developers which is not the case. We have so much common ground and are both making statements that are agreeing with each other but we are not hearing each other.

It’s hard in these conferences because everyone is walking on eggshells, trying not to divulge too many secrets. What to believe? What’s an advertisement and what’s solid advice? Plus, there are sooo many opinions that are unfounded and, as much as we all know about SEM, there are a lot of mysteries that still leave us guessing… even the experts.

Having a meeting of the minds next year, between the standards/css community (Eric Meyer et al) and the SEO/SEM community would be very interesting, informative and a big learning experience for all in my opinion. I would go back for that.

34

Thanks for the input everyone. I seem to be taking a pretty bad beating here (there’s no crying in web development).

Just as a note, there will be a cross-linked followup to this entry which hopefully will address some of the weaknesses and key points of this massive page.

I will be keeping comments open so as to not exclude anyone’s voice.

35

“Its obvious to me that placement in search engines should be a function of the quality of content.”

Would that it were so. Experience tells that quality content does not automatically result in ranking well, and any reading of search engine white papers will reveal why.

As one of those odd hybrid designers/marketers/SEOs who also has been optimizing websites since 1998, I can say that for a fact. Where a particular web page ranks well in search engines, there are likely other factors than “quality of content” for that ranking.

SEO is nothing more than conforming websites to be “read”, interpreted and ranked by search engines—just as correct web design must be correctly viewable in browsers, among other things. Either can be misused or abused.

To be sure, there are those who would do so with SEO, to be sure. There are also web designers who code incorrectly; schools still teach students to create entire pages including all text in Photoshop; there are websites made entirely of pages generated by Microsoft Word. It would be a difficult stretch of logic to blame the entire web design industry for the latter. And yet it appears the entire SEO industry is being blamed for the faults of some.

“The nigritude ultramarine competition is IMO a very good demonstration of the failure of SEO.”

I would say it is more a failure of a search engine ranking algorithm.

Designing in a vaccuum does not serve the needs of the client. We’ve taken on any number of clients whose sites, good looking or not, simply wouldn’t rank well and wouldn’t sell. Usability is important. Making the website sell is vital.

SEO is another piece of the puzzle. Telling clients to depend wholly and forever on PPC and other paid advertising is shorting them greatly, and giving them a lesser product (finished website) than could be delivered.

Bear in mind, just for a moment, that PPC costs have gone up over the years, as more and more website owners (what PPC companies call “advertisers”) utilize PPC. Unless there is an unforeseen dramatic change, costs are unlikely to lessen. In some areas, the cost per click can be $10USD apiece; please tell me that anyone is comfortable with advising a client to depend on paying $1000 per 100 website visitors.

Bear also in mind that “search engine friendly” means, simply, “able to be read by a search engine”—it does not mean that a search engine friendly page will rank well. And no, it is not only about getting links to a page. And it hasn’t been all about meta tags for years.

That said, I am pleased to read compooter’s message that the initial post was not an attack on SES or the SEO industry in general, although it was allowed to seem so, without comment, for ten days. That its purpose, if I read correctly, was to open a dialogue with Danny about a voice at SES is … an interesting marketing method.

36

As someone who has presented material at SES a few times, and makes the most of that opportunity by attending a lot of sessions, I’d like to chip in a little context here.

The attendees at SES are a mix of people who don’t know anything more about search engines than the average user, designers, SEO/SEM professionals, vendors, random lunatics, etc. Speakers have a very limited time to address a small piece of the puzzle, and they have to speak to an audience that may not even know what CSS is.

Many of the topics are broad enough that you can write a whole book about them, as Shari and I both have. The topic of the specific session addressed by Compooter would at least make a good chapter, and in fact these things make up the better part of a chapter in the book I’m working on right now.

What this particular session addressed was some of the problems search engines have with what are quite common elements of web design. Designing with layers and CSS is good design, but search engines have valid reasons to mistrust aspects of HTML that are frequently misused in an effort to manipulate search results.

Danny gets my feedback every time via the response form, and I usually spend a lot of time on it. The only session I was really disappointed with in San Jose was the session on Flash and search engines, where two speakers talked about a solution for Flash sites, but only revealed that we’ll be able to buy it from them soon.

But Flash is a perfect example of why these sessions are necessary. Search engines can’t trust the content they find in Flash files, even though they are perfectly capable of reading them, because they can’t determine whether the content is really visible. The same applies to CSS and layers. It sucks, but it’s reality.

In my experience, designers make great SEOs, precisely because they can understand what the workarounds mean, and how to prevent SEO considerations from compromising the site’s usability. That’s why it’s so great to have folks like Matt and Shari speaking at SES.

Getting folks like Eric Meyer involved would be great, but if the search engines (and developers like Macromedia) aren’t part of the conversation, nothing will change.

37

OK, said I was going to leave off, but a few new things came up!

Mike, your post could have been written by me—I agree with so much of it. It is indeed hard to do “advanced” sessions with such a large crowd. The “advanced” label is especially meant to say to those completely new, “don’t come in.” But for those people who really are already advanced in SEO, they still may not feel the sessions go far enough. It’s a constant challenge to please those really advanced people, but I’ll keep at it.

You’d written: “It’s hard in these conferences because everyone is walking on eggshells, trying not to divulge too many secrets. What to believe? What’s an advertisement and what’s solid advice?”

I should make it clear that everyone who speaks gets a long prep note making it very clear that they should not be holding back good information, for fear of giving up advantages to competitors. If they have that fear, they shouldn’t have asked to be on a panel. And if I find they do this, it will severely impact whether they are asked back. I have followed-up with speakers before, when I’ve gotten this type of complaint. If you saw it, I want to know. You can bet that what Dan said about the Flash session, I’ll be taking that right back to the Flash speakers. That’s not what was intended to happen.

As for ads, every speaker is also told not to do this in their prep note. They aren’t on the sessions at all to begin with because of any type of sponsorship deal. They are on the panel because I’ve reviewed their pitch, any past speaking experience or scores we’ve had and decides that they seem to have something to offer. If they don’t perform well, then they don’t get asked back.

This page on our site explains these type of things more. If that wasn’t coming across to you as an attendee, I need to do a better job of making it visible.

Your concern over confusing statements is very noted. Believe me, it’s a constant issue to grapple with. Not only within a session, but across sessions, people often hear conflicting advice. In part, this is because there IS conflicting advice. I even had a session once call “I’m So Confused” precisely designed to help those trying to sort out all the different advice on how to procede. But on the flipside, the way to not have so many conflicts is to have fewer speakers who all sing from the same songbook. Sounds great—but which have so many different opinions in SEM that I haven’t felt this is the way to go. Nevertheless, I’m looking at what else can be done.

I do feel somewhat along with Shari that an entire conference got dismissed as “crap” in the blog headline when the concerns seem so focused around this particular session. After all, I produced that crap :) But I gather there may be more that coomputer did not address in his post—he did say up front, after all, that he wanted to stick with the web development aspect.

It’s even more concerning that that blog post prompted Eric and others to assume some things that were written in jest were actually said seriously. And though I and others have been in contact with Eric, his own blog still hasn’t reflected any changes. So a fire-and-forget blog post led to another one that’s still out there calling three people as giving “silly expert opinions,” when it appears that much of what they said wasn’t silly at all.

This all comes during a time when many in SEO feel underfire for things they may not actually do—hence some of the defensiveness you see coming out.

Mike, I would love if you and coomputer would send me an email — dannyATcalafia.com, so I could follow up more. As I’ve said, I really do want feedback. The more the better. It can keep coming via comments, but I personally would love to know more about what you liked and didn’t like in the show by talking directly. I’ve even been known to pick up the telephone (shock, gasp) and talk to people to try and learn more.

I’d like to leave off with what you said: “We have so much common ground and are both making statements that are agreeing with each other but we are not hearing each other.” Absolutely! I think most people posting here are very much on the same page. I’ll see what I can do on my end through the conferences and in my writings to try and bring everyone even closer together.

38

Very well said, Mike and Danny. And I must thank you for the certain amount of damage control it has provided, as this has definitely turned into a massive discussion.

@Danny – yes I believe it is time to move the discussion away from this page and toward a more sane forum (such as human interaction).

Expect a followup article sometime today to relieve some of the tension here and reiterate the best points.

39

Isofarro wrote: “How big a problem are SEOers who don’t know what SEO is about?”

About the same as designers who place the old “Your smelly old browser doesn’t support frames” type of NOFRAMES content, or those that use JavaScript without NOSCRIPT alternative functionality.

In other words, there are a lot of folks in either profession that are not exactly craftsmen, and whom the more skilled and able would rather were not associated with the industry. :)

isofaro also mentioned the Nigritude Ultramarine contest, which of course got a lot of publicity for some questionable SEO tactics, but which was ultimately won by a well-known blogger.

It is iportant to realise that the Nigritude Ultramarine competition was no more indicative of the state of professional SEO than a local baking competition is of the culinary performance of internationally famous chefs.

The real professionals are not tempted by a competion that pays less than one hour’s work, and has no advantages to offer them, while offering to encourage amatuers to copy on a ‘monkey see monkey do’ basis.

40

Danny said:

“Many web designers … build web sites that are heavily image based. They assume sprinking some ALT text will be enough. They assume JavaScript content may be read.”

“The session being discussed was NOT advanced SEO spam techniques. It was designed to help educate people who might be using some of these more advanced design techniques that they pose particular problems with search engines.”

“For example, if you built your site entirely with CSS and ignored the issues of those with older browsers, of which search engines mimic, you have problems.”

The beauty of XHTML is that it is forward and backward compatible. The “older browsers” would see just text of they didn’t understand the CSS and so would the spiders which mimic them. Take a look at a web standards-based site (especially a table-less layout) in Lynx and you see the power. I have never seen these “advanced design techniques” cause SEO problems, though I have seen old design techniques (table layouts, image- and JS-based text content) miss out on SEO opportunities.

A good example: I recently redid a site for Liberty Bank, a small bank here in CT, moving from an old-style table-based design to a XHTML/CSS design. With no SEO work done at all (no fancy titles, metatags, etc), the site jumped from the third or fourth page of Google results for “bank connecticut” to the second listing. Talk about results.

41

I can’t believe this is legitimate! Are you sure you stayed to the end of the presentation? There must have been a punch line at the end of that — you must have just missed it. Considering that nearly every one of those tips is the exact opposite what’s been considered good practice for years, I seriously hope no-one actually follows that advice.

42

“The beauty of XHTML is that it is forward and backward compatible. The “older browsers” would see just text of they didn’t understand the CSS and so would the spiders which mimic them.”

But that’s not the advantages of XHTML you’re on about, that’s the advantages of good coding. Using XHTML doesn’t automatically make it forwards/backwards compatible. You could get similar results using HTML4.01 in most cases.

One ‘advanced design technique’ that could feasibly cause problems is FIR (and its relations). Used properly it’s not a problem (as with most techniques) but if abused, by say stuffing the ‘hidden text’ part with keywords would be spammy.

There have been comments above stating that it’s not generally a technique per se that’s spammy, but it’s implimentation. Good, well written code, made with the right principles in mind isn’t going to be spammy. And yes, you should get some SEO benefit from it.

I would suggest that if you got a decent professional SEM in, you could improve the rank even more, and improve the conversion as well in cases.

Lachlan, did you read the comments? You seem to have jumped in with both feet without seeing the developments that have gone on.

43

Wow! Interesting discussion!

I’ll preface my remarks by admitting to being a professional SEO up front.

Since Danny, et al have done a great job saying what I would have said, I’ll skip that part and add a personal note or two.

First, in spite of the fact that this caused a bit of a firestorm I’m kind of glad it happened. Compooters article, and other comments by fed up and frustrated webmasters hit home to me, and apparently many other SEO’s.

We could have totally ignored this and it probably would have gone away, but it’s something many in the industry care about deeply. Do a search on Black Hat vs White Hat SEO and you’ll get an eyefull. There are many people who “do SEO” that actually can be accused of doing some of the things in the orginal article, but honestly that’s like saying that if I go to some site with a FP theme, garish colors and a kewl midi tune from the 80’s rock era that that is what web designers do. You can find a lot of examples of it, but as someone who used to do web design I’d be appalled to be grouped in with them.

On a personal note, I was actually introduced to CSS and XHTML by, yes, an SEO. I happen to belong to the group of SEO’s that think that making a website the best it can be is the essential first step to SEO. The first step I do on a new client site is run it through the W3C and Bobby validators.

For designers, I’d like to point something out – if you look at your logs, you will probably find that a significant portion of the “browsers” that visit your site are actually search engine spiders – so you can think of SEO as making sure your site is “cross-browser” compatible ;)

Not to mention that the “users” of those particular “browsers” have a tendancy to refer a large percentage of given sites visitors.

This blog (and resulting interest) has been well worth it, from what I can see. Kudos to Compooter for helping to get a dialogue going, and kudos to the posters for not turning this into a flame war – it’s been very interesting, and will no doubt inspire more than a few debates and articles throughout the industry.

Cheers

44

Aaron Gustafson said exactly what I’ve been thinking while reading through the comments.

One other thing to point out for SEOers is code vs. content. There is considerably less code in a web standards compliant page and more content. Isn’t that what search engines like?

Any help in answering this question is greatly appreciated.

Thanks

45

Hi George,

I’m not an SEO, and I’m not a design guru. I have been putting pages on the web since 1995 and doing fairly well in getting people to find those pages, and interact with them.

I’ve learned a lot about usability, accessibility, web standards, and SEO in forums, in books, in online tutorials, at seminars, and helped others learn more about those things in forums.

Aaron was fortunate that his redesign helped him place well for that term. I think we should wonder what it would have taken to rank well for the (possibly) even more desirable phrase:

Connecticut bank

Do the search, and see how standards compliant the AOL member site is that shows up number one. (Not very.)

Look at the full block of text on that page that is an image, and wonder how accessible, and how search engine friendly that is.

Chances are good that Aaron’s high ranking term, bank Connecticut, is something that not many really attempt to compete for. I suspect that if he bothered, he could do better. A good SEO doesn’t want “fancy titles”. He or she wants appropriate titles, that use the words their targeted audience will use to find that particular page, and expect to see there. It’s the title that needs to be able to stand up well out of context, in search engine results. Fancy? No. Thoughfully and intelligently written? Yes.

There is considerably less code in a web standards compliant page and more content. Isn’t that what search engines like?

I’m not sure that is really a true statement. I’m also not really sure that search engines care too much at all.

Think of all of the things that you could put in a standards compliant page, such as table summaries, abbreviation elements, long descriptions, and more. It could be really easy to add in many items in a standards compliant page that wouldn’t be in a noncompliant version.

The ratio of code to content probably doesn’t matter that much, if at all, to a search engine.

An SEO will often try to limit the code on a page regardless, suggesting linked CSS files and external javascript files. They will stress text or CSS menus, rather than javascript, since search engine spiders have problems with javascript.

Be happy to expand upon this even more for your George, if you’d like.

46

Not to beat a dead dog or anything, but I just stumbled across a really good reason why SEO/SEM still struggles with improving its image: It’s pretty hard to establish an honest, credible reputation when some major "White Hat" players are still actively participating in comment spam techniques.

An excerpt from SEO lab's about page says contradictorily, "At [SEO lab's] heart is the aim of putting a stop to the mis-information...This is intended to help clean up the SEO industry." Yeah, right.

Brian Turner (who runs SEO lab) is a great example of someone who preaches White Hat, but also quietly performs Black Hat. An article he wrote about comment spam says, "Hopefully I shouldn't have to even hint at the ethics and morality involved in spamming children with such material."

I guess this doesn't count.

47

Much as I’m sure it would be quite a compliment to be regarded as a “major whitehat player”, I’m too new to commercial SEO to be of any real significance.

Add to that the fact that I certainly do not “preach” white hat SEO – in the business-talk thread are my appreciative comments on Aaron Wall’s wry criticisms, regarding White Hat as a philosophy. My “hat” isn’t white – more a lighter grey.

The comments on “cleaning up the SEO industry” are with regards to trying to put some brakes on general SEO disinformation that disingeniously infects many apparent SEO forums.

I honestly cannot comment on the example given of blog commenting – I know that more than a couple of my sites have been linked to blog comments, without my knowledge. However, a while back I did subscribe to a cheap link building service that turned out to nothing better than comment linking. I am no longer involved in that service, and have not been for some time.

Is posting links on blog comments inherently wrong? No, I won’t argue general absolutes in such a grey area – but I don’t believe it’s an efficient or quality way to get good links for SEO purposes – any more than building a couple of second rate sites will necessarily gain decent search engine traffic for internet marketing purposes.

What I would – and did – object to, is children being targeted, directly or indirectly, for the marketing of adult material and sites. That is the implicit point I made.

At the end of the day, webpublishing is a responsibility that should be taken seriously. That means where children are concerned some degree of adult supervision of internet publishing activities would certainly be advisable.