[thelist] How do you handle search engine optimization?

martin.p.burns at uk.pwcglobal.com martin.p.burns at uk.pwcglobal.com
Wed Dec 12 11:00:45 CST 2001


Memo from Martin P Burns of PricewaterhouseCoopers

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Hi Chris

Experience shows that most (not all) of SE placement is a combination
of:
1) Media buy (banners, sponsored links etc)
2) Being what your audience is looking for
3) Making that obvious to a machine which only reads text

Now while I accept that there is a certain amount of day-to-day
evolving knowledge in 3, you'll get a long, long way by coding
your site structurally & semantically, with <h#> tags for the headings,
ALT texts for the images and so on, and by having your key content
in text (not pictures of text).

Of course, all of this needs planning before you lay a mouse to
pad, so it can't be effectively stuck on afterwards.

One thing which SE placement companies *can* (and are the best
people) do for you is report on your placement, just make sure that
the reporting is not done by the same people who are paid by the
results of improving that placement...

Cheers
Martin


To:   thelist at lists.evolt.org
Subject:  [thelist] How do you handle search engine optimization?

What I am asking is how do people handle this issue in their own designs
and design companies? I have read several articles on this topic and
there seems to be two trains of thought on the matter;

1. Do everything in house, search engine placement is really not that
hard and can be done as an afterthought to the overall design of the
site.

2. Search engine placement is a science and needs to be studied full
time. So, if you are going to handle it in house, hire someone to make
that their profession and to do it full time and place that as one the
priorities when initially designing the site. Tailor all the content,
the key words, links, etc for search engine placement while at the same
time designing an accessible website.

Or.

Send that part of the design out to a company that specializes in that
exact thing and knows the market and science.


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