SEO

Back in January I met a man named Steve who had a website and he told me that it was doing very, very poorly in the search engine stakes and since I was a web developer, perhaps I could help him improve things. Somebody told him his site was invisible but he didn't know what that meant.

I looked at the website. It was quite nicely designed and comprised about forty pages. Every one of them was an image. There were no alt tags on these images, but each page had a list of meta tag keywords encompassing random words from the pages. I charged a modest fee and rebuilt the site to look almost identical but actually be indexable. I explained that users reliant on screen readers couldn't see anything of their website, and neither could website crawlers. Nobody could turn up the font size easily and it was nigh impossible to edit the text of the site.

It's been a month or so since I launched the site, it's a treasure hunts business that Steve runs and the site still doesn't show up on the first page of Google if you search for "treasure hunts london" but it does better if you try "treasure hunts adult".

Meanwhile a visit to my mum had her ask me to set up a site for her, too. This time the requirement was that it be easy to update by somebody with no knowledge of HTML or real experience of doing anything editorial. I went down the easy route of using Google's sites. At least, I thought it was an easy route - I didn't think it was a particularly easy interface to get to grips with and it was pretty restrictive in some ways but eventually I handed over the site for her to start updating with lovely information about chickens (yup, she's retired to the country to raise chickens for fun and profit). "Why can't I search for it?" she asked.

Of course, she could search for it, she just couldn't find it when she did. While I've built the first site and worked on the other with the idea of having structured pages full of the right sort of information for the topics, they're islands in the middle of the web that nobody knows about. I've encouraged both site owners to try to arrange links into their pages so they get some level of recognition and I know that the dark art of search engine optimisation has ways and means of cheating and pushing sites to the top but I advise people against that. What's the point? You want interested parties to land at your site because it's got a good reputation and you want to maintain that. Cheat and the cheat method will just get cut off eventually.

So it's kind of ironic that I've decided not to try overly hard to promote this blog in the first instance. It's partly down to me not wanting to crow about it (hell, it's just a blog, anyone can wibble at length and many - but not all - do it better than me) and partly because I want to make sure I can keep up the updates before I chase a readership. I'm waiting to see who lands here first, how long it takes and where they come from. Maybe I'll crack and start pointing and shouting about it after a while, but at the moment I'm just peering at the log files now and then.

Should you care to look at the sites mentioned, they're here:
Chick O' Lin Poultry
Bigfoot Treasure Hunts