Welcome Home. Click Here
No wait, click here to visit my homepage. Wait! Don’t leave now, this is bound to be an excellent article on clicking
and optimizing
.
Where do I click?
Ever been to a website and seen a giant link list with nothing but the words “Click Here”? Does it not confuse the hell out of you?
Imagine this
You’re blind (or visually disabled), but you’re savvy with the web. You’ve become familiar with your favorite screen reader and have learned a few navigation tips along the way. You’ve realised that a simple way to jump around a webpage is to hop from link to link to gather detailed information that hopefully fulfills your idea of what any given webpage is about.
Then you run into a page that looks like this:
Begin Excerpt:
Welcome! If you’re a curious mongrol looking to fulfil your fettish on woman web developers click here. Or if you’ve been missing your daddy and haven’t seen him for years, click here. Maybe this website can help you become a better graphic designer. Don’t want to become a graphic designer? Then this guy will help you put together a sweet development resource site. Maybe you’re just bored. Why not just click this damn link, it’s bound to pleasure you some how.
End Excerpt
In case you missed the point, here is what your screen reader is going to yelling back at you:
Click Here. Click Here.This website. This Guy. Click this damn link
Clearly the message is getting sent to the user ;)
Better Page Titles
Welcome to my Website. Looking for some great tips on how to write better headline titles? Look no further than getting descriptive on your filenames. If it’s your home page, use no other than index.html. If your website is is in frames, why not give them logical names like “Frame A” and “Frame B” - or why not master frame? Surely that will entail all your site encompasses.
Looking to be the top for anything in particular. Be vague, general, and indirect. You’ll win over visitors looking to spend ‘almost’ two seconds on your website.
Better headline writing
Sorry, anyone who thinks headline writing is important is a big dork.
Use the freaking <font> tags
You need presentational markup! Afterall, it’s what it looks like that matters. (Damn there goes my xhtml strict markup).
Ok, funny story (true story). I heard someone say that the larger number in the font ’size’ attribute, the better search optimization you’ll receive.
Now it’s your turn
This concludes todays entry for the first day on the 12days series. If you didn’t catch the sarcasm, this entry was on the topic of Search Engine Optimization.
Todays question for the contest: What is the five worst SEO tips you’ve ever heard?
Contest winner will receive a copy of Search Engine Visibility by Shari Thurow.
[Please see '12days' contest rules for details] Ready. GO!
December 13th, 2005 at 7:29 am
Lol, this is so true, I completely agree. I hate it when that happens at well. By the way great site.
Im frank, and im currently desining my home site, so its under construction. But our blog is working, pass by sometime and leave a comment. I really need more traffic on my blog, cause there literally 0 hits a day.
lol
later
December 13th, 2005 at 7:41 am
1. Pay me $5,000. I can get your site listed in MSN, Yahoo and Google top 5 within the month.
2. Always use javascript to link to external sites. Linking to external sites does not lower your own rankings and makes it impossible for some browsers to visit other sites.
3. If you have a directory of files (PDFs, specifically), add a blank “index.html” page to the directory — this will keep people from figuring out your directory structure and help point search engines to the files only from the descriptions of them.
4. Cloak.
5. Keyword stuff your <title> tags — the more the merrier.
December 13th, 2005 at 7:43 am
Whoa, somebody has been reading a little too much Oxton (f-bomb supreme master).
My favorite supposed SEO that I had to implement was when I converted this loan referral website to standards-based (from Dreamweaver tables). When the marketing folks got wind of the FIR technique (covering text with images via CSS), their eyes came aglow when they realized that the main tags (h1, h2) could literally be filled with keywords. We even had spreadsheets dedicated to what keywords would fill the h1 (logo) and h2 (tagline) tags on a per page basis.
December 13th, 2005 at 9:22 am
1. We will move your site from rank 3 to 2.
2. We will submit your site to 100s of search engines and directories world-wide.
3. By having a high keyword density, your site will be found and ranked better.
4. We will do link exchange campaigns.
5. When we increase your PageRank, your site will rank better on the SERP.
December 13th, 2005 at 9:45 am
My favorite is “add keywords at the top of your site in the same color as your background, because no one will ever find out!”
December 13th, 2005 at 11:51 am
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December 13th, 2005 at 1:04 pm
Haha. That’s a good one wench. I remember those days of finding the hard to read text stuffed away at the bottom of a document.
December 13th, 2005 at 1:49 pm
Hey Dustin, I think I have the R-rated version of your RSS feed. I see you’ve removed some freaking four letter words since then. :)
Before I left my former place of employment: acceleration (dot net - would rather not post a link), I submitted a standards based design comp and xhtml template which they apparently never used. Anyway, one of their main issues was that the contents of the h1 tag (which is disguised as 10px white text in the upper right corner of the screen) had to not only stay near the top of the page, but had to be visible and not replaced by an image because Google had to “see the text”. They had a lot of other cooky SEO ideas too, but I’d rather not start a list. I still have a lot of friends there.
December 13th, 2005 at 1:52 pm
Jason, you did in fact saw what you did in your RSS reader ;) That was another subject…
That is kind of funny that “google had to see it”. Hehe…
December 13th, 2005 at 3:06 pm
Need to use lots of meta tags, because the more you use the better rankings you’ll get. Gotta stuff as many keywords as you can into them, otherwise how is Google going to know what your keywords are?
Funny how those folks’ rankings tend to suck. Then again, who am I to talk…
December 13th, 2005 at 3:26 pm
Worst SEO Tips I have received/overheard:
1. Tables are the way to go. Your Content is easily presented in this format and is therefore more search-engine friendly.
2. CSS is still an unreliable technology.
3. I have also been advised with similar tips that others posted above.
December 13th, 2005 at 4:39 pm
Dude! Don’t give in to the pressure. Let your true self and your naughty words shine, this is *your* blog.
December 14th, 2005 at 11:48 pm
5. Gotta pump up those meta tags with some max keywords and descriptions.
4. Content doesn’t matter.
3. Who needs links with content this good.
2. Insert flavor o’ the month SEO hot tip here.
1. Google smoogle. I’m going for # 1 on alltheweb beeotch!
January 13th, 2006 at 12:22 am
[...] ;. I just had to throw in some irony. So Who won? In ascending order. Here they are: 1) Welcome Home. Click Here Worst SEO Tips ever. [...]
February 2nd, 2006 at 12:52 pm
Congratulations, stunning blog! Found it while searching on internet for more information about Adobe Photoshop slideshow. Your blog has quite a lot of interesting thoughts. Keep up the good work, Dustin.
February 9th, 2006 at 4:17 pm
I was searching the web and found your entry. I really like your site and found it worth while reading through the posts. I am looking to publish a comprehensive site reviewing many different articles and blogg. Please feel free to take a look at my blog at search engine optimization uk and add anything your want.
March 31st, 2006 at 1:28 pm
no wonder click-overs have dropped. i get about one a day. i use statcounter which does do much. your call-to-action “click this damn link” isn’t selling =)
May 29th, 2006 at 12:13 am
We once asked someone for some good examples of sites they had optimized - the best example they showed us had about forty 1×1 spacer gifs on the homepage with (you guessed it) mass alt tag spam.
It’s insulting enough using spacer gifs in the first place, but using them for keyword loading… eww.
November 7th, 2006 at 9:09 pm
Hi, my name is Harvey. I found your quality site on website usability and found the content much interest. I think we can help each other. My site is pagerank 5 and is on mesothelioma and is much related to your content. By swapping links both our sites will rank much higher in all the search engines.
Yeah, some on those link swap emails crack me up. I remember back to when I started SEO, desperate for any link at all…
March 4th, 2007 at 11:22 am
Is it ok?