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Person A starts spouting SEO stuff and complaints
Person B says how to fix it
Person A says... I don't know how to "do that HTML stuff" or something similiar.
what is that about?
How does it come about that you have/own/operate a site, can talk SEO like you know whats up, then claim HTML is to hard to figure out?
</rant>
When I created my first sites almost ten years ago, I only knew the basics of HTML. Today, I head a web department, and at a certain point I simply hired web designers and website programmers. This left me room to venture into search engine marketing. I still CAN build a site from scratch. But in other companies people with a grasp on marketing, or psychological skills, or print-copywriters could have joined such a team and solely focus on search engine marketing without ANY knowledge how the technology behind all this works.
For web-design, you need to know your graphics tools, color psychology, good taste and artistic skills.
For website building, you need organisation skills, programming skills, and a graps on data structuring.
For copywriting you need psychological skills, writing skills, fantasy and intuition.
For search engine marketing, you need marketing skills, and understanding of finacial processes and return on investment, and also a lot of psychology.
This CAN be all done by a single person. But with the size and the importance of the project, you better get specialists in.
WebmasterWorld is a forum for (mostly) specialists. So you find the people who know SEO tactics by heart, but have never coded a line of HTML in their life. You find people who can do a bit of everything. And you find people who eat and talk and breathe and dream CSS, but disgust advertising in search engine results and never click on one.
Welcome to the Multitude!
if you can't "do" html I don't see how you can "do" SEO
Some believe, that you get farther with white-hat anyways...
link development -> you need to know what a good link is. how to tell if its a redirect, if it has a nofollow in the anchor, if is a javascript
good copy -> your right on this
meta-tags -> a meta tag is html. so requires knowledge of html
site navigation -> made of links & have to use the right linking technique to get a spider to follow it.
furthermore how is understanding that using html and using it in its proper form grey or black hat? putting a article title in a H1 tag is grey? or linking to articles using descriptive words is grey or black?
thats just silly.
you need to know what a good link is. how to tell if its a redirect, if it has a nofollow in the anchor, if is a javascript
You have a point here. But in a good team, the website programmer would be consultet regarding that matter.
meta-tags -> a meta tag is html. so requires knowledge of html
The tags itself are coded in the html source. Right. The CONTENT of the tags however, is pure, plain text. Much closer to copywriting than to html. Html helps, but is no requirement.
site navigation -> made of links & have to use the right linking technique to get a spider to follow it.
On a technical level I agree. However to make the navigation work for the user is pure psychology, mixed with a bit of design. And since spiders try to emulate human users more and more, a good user-navigation is - already now - equally important compared to a spider-friendly navigation. Of course for the technical implementation the website programmer needs to be involved.
furthermore how is understanding that using html and using it in its proper form grey or black hat?
You misunderstood me here. I was not referring to pure html, but to things like cloaking, doorway pages, pop-unders, redirects, invisible text, etc. Maybe I wasn't clear enough on that.
putting a article title in a H1 tag is grey? or linking to articles using descriptive words is grey or black?
Both 100% white! But both need no html skills. The conceptual designer and/or the copywriter define certain parts as headlines (with hierarchies), others as teaser, article text, abstract etc. Again it comes to both the webdesigner and the website programmer to convert it into proper html. If the website programmer uses <div class="headline"> instead of <h1>, he has some lessons to learn.
As for descriptive links: actually it is a no-brainer to use descriptive links. If more psychologists, linguists or social/language scientists would be envolved in creating websites, we would have much, much more descriptive links on the web.
It's actually the programmers, software developers or information science guys that came up with non-descriptive links in the first place. Because it's their way of thinking. A link is a valuable resource. Use it sparsly. Why are there so many technology sites out there, which say
A deeper description of the flux-compensator and its influences on the time-space continuum can be found <a href"url">here</a>A good copywriter would do it like this:
Additional reading: <a href"url">Influences on the time-space continuum created by flux compensators</a>, by Dr. Emmett Brown, Princeton, 1985. More <a href="url2">articles by Dr. Emmet Brown</a> can be found in our online libraryThat's possible without ANY knowledge of html!
Yes, working in a team is greatly different from being a one-man-show. You have more freedom being alone, but you have less choices since your own horizon limits you. In a team, you have sometimes a lot of friction- losses, vanity, jealousy, misunderstandings. But if the team is "in sync", you have a much higher productivity. Fresh insights. New angles.
And finally, your team is perfect to get drunk with when your CEO has torn your great new concept to shreads and demanded "I want a Flash site".
no need to argue, we disagree,
after a zillion forums I just can't muster enough energy to argue much on the internet
:-)
