I thought I was doing a good thing. I appeased the mighty Google god; I listened to Matt Cutts; I made W3C-compliant pages. But Google hates me for listening just as much as they would hate me if I disobeyed all the rules. Either way, what it amounts to is that I can’t try to make a great page or a horrible page.

While I’ve been away a long time, I have not been out of the loop — quite the contrary. I started a search marketing internship and have been learning quite a lot of information from my new bosses. One thing I have found out about the mysterious world of SEO is that I knew a lot more than I thought I did – but oh, do I have a lot to learn.

After diving into this position, eager to learn as much as I could one thing has become abundantly clear: I don’t get Google, and I think that’s their intention. For one thing, let’s start with a concept known as LinkJuice. I’m not sure where the term originates but every time I hear it I flash back to high school and hear Nelly’s “Pimp Juice.” Yeah, I both hate the term and laugh every time I hear it. LinkJuice basically is this weird value that Google and other search engines associate with links to and from other sites. If you have an incoming link from, say, Microsoft.com, the value is quite high and your search engine ranking supposedly improves. However, if you have a link from, say, buycheappills.com, there is no value coming in and it does nothing for you.

Where this becomes controversial is in the concept of paid links. Way back when SEO got started, bad SEOs, or “black hats,” tried to game the system and would exchange links for cash. Google realized this and quickly started to crack down on it. One of the ways this is combated is using “nofollow” which basically removes any of the aforementioned LinkJuice. So, to be a good guy, if you were given money for a link you were supposed to use “nofollow” so that a domain wouldn’t get any juice it tried to pay for. The idea is that it’s supposed to keep the Web honest.

Well great, but now you’re getting into some gray areas. Lisa Barone from Outspoken Media points out that if Apple were to send you a new Mac Book to blog about, that constitutes as a paid link. However, if Mom and Pop bakery is handing out free cupcakes and you tweet or blog about it, it isn’t a paid link. Obviously Mom and Pop don’t intend to get links (or at least for this argument they don’t), but they are giving you product just the same as Apple. So really what Google wants to go after is intent – but how do you measure intent? Moreover, at the Google I/O conference, Google handed out free G1s to attendees who went out and blogged about it or sold it on eBay. Isn’t the LinkJuice and publicity Google got from that paid? As far as I’ve read, there was no “please make every link ‘nofollow’” from Google.

As if to add further confusion about the way Google works, rumors have it that they are considering changing how they value “nofollow.” Currently, if you have three outgoing links on your Web page then each link gets 1/3 of the available LinkJuice. If you use “nofollow” on one, then the remaining two get 1/2 each, and so on. The fear and rumor is that Google is changing it so that no matter what you use “nofollow” on, the LinkJuice doesn’t redistribute. In other words, if you have three sites and one uses “no-follow,” then the two remaining sites would still get 1/3 each instead of getting 1/2. What’s the big deal? Well, if you’re going off the earlier example of paid vs. non-paid links, somebody is getting hosed.

If you go to mom and pop bakery, review their cupcakes and blog about it, they’ll be getting less of the normal share of LinkJuice and a portion of your LinkJuice goes into thin air. It effectively demerits the authority of your site. It’s confusing because it’s my understanding of “nofollow” that it was supposed to allow Webmasters to give the most applicable share to content generated sans fees or gain by the author, basically “honest content.”

The past few weeks of research and work combined with the few events that have or might take place have left me wondering exactly what the heck is the whole idea behind this game. It’s been said by Seth Godin that your content is your SEO, and that is certainly true. An SEO shouldn’t be trying to game Google and scam the system but Google does ask you to do a few things to provide clean honest content – and then ignores it and treats all SEOs like they are evil. Leading me to ask: What the Google?

For as long as I can remember I was told to design for 800×600 resolution monitors. As time went on it generally seemed to move up to 1024×768. Now two things have come a long that could make change back to good old 800×600: Netbooks and Smartphones. Smartphones have come along way, now with phones like the Apple iPhone and T-Mobile G1 there is full Internet browsing but with smaller resolutions than even 800×600. Netbooks have been extremely popular lately but also focus on small resolutions like 1024×600. With screens sticking around the 9-10″ range they aren’t exactly easy reading. The key point with both these devices is that they are supposed to be mobile. Why is that a big point? Because of navigation. Users don’t want to have to pan significantly to have to read even a small amount of text. Although it is a lot easier with touchscreen devices, trackpad navigation has never been ergonomic. It’s just clumsy.

Fine, you think, we have mobile sites that fit this problem. You’d be right, but there is a catch to that as well. Consider the rapid development of both netbooks and smartphones. Where will these devices been in 6 months? A year? It’s not inconceivable that both will see a moderate gain in resolution putting them much closer to their larger counterparts. Which begs the question, with a line so blurred, why maintain two sites? Start shrinking larger web pages a bit and just maintain one. In other words, go back to 800×600.

Chances are that if you’ve taken a few courses are been employed to design a website for a decent size organization that you’ve heard about the World Wide Web Consortium. The W3C is ” an international consortium where Member organizations, a full-time staff, and the public work together to develop Web standards.” The W3C provides a standard for several web coding languages like HTML, XHTML, JavaScript, etc.

The W3C provides a validator that makes sure the code you write adheres to a standard. When designing a web page it isn’t necessary to make sure the code adheres to these standards, but there are some benefits. For one, if you are looking for a job in web design, potential employers will be more impressed with code that clean and proper than sloppy with unclosed tags.

There’s a couple of reasons for that. Consider that your potential boss and coworkers will either have to edit your page(s) when you are working there or after you leave. If you really wanted to, you could write a web site in one line. Wouldn’t that be fun to edit?

Even if you’re thinking that nobody but you will edit your pages validation is important. Why? Consider what the W3C has to say about it:

Do remember: household-name companies expect people to visit because of the name and in spite of dreadful websites. Can you afford that luxury?
Even if you can, do you want to risk being on the wrong side of a lawsuit if your site proves inaccessible to – for instance – a disabled person who cannot use a ‘conventional’ browser? Accessibility is the law in many countries. Whilst validation doesn’t guarantee accessibility (there is no substitute for common sense), it should be an important component of exercising “due diligence”. It is now just over a year since a court first awarded damages to a blind user against the owners of a website he found inaccessible (Maguire vs SOCOG, August 2000).

Still not convinced? Well if the threat of being sued just isn’t enough how about not being able to make money in the first place? See good coding is one of the ways Google distinguishes your web site, from a spam site. Good sites are more relevant for users, and therefore higher on the search rankings.

Now hopefully at this point you realize just how important it is to validate. But what is valid code? Well, the long answer is here: http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG10/#gl-structure-presentation but for most people here’s a list of things to get you started:

(ignore the p tag, its apparently a WordPress error)

Questions? Shout out in the comments and I will try to answer them.

This is actually a copy from a past blog I did a few years ago, but it is still good info for the novice web designer.

While not a web standard in the sense of a W3C standard, CSS is becoming, if not already, a layout standard. For good reasons too. The “old” method of tables, still in use of course, should be avoided if at all possible, and for lots of good reasons. Tables do a lot of things that, more than 5 years ago made life easier, but they didn’t make them correct.

Tables take longer to load than CSS, in many ways. For one, the code in and of it self takes longer. Secondly if you are using a CSS style sheet for more than one page, the sheet doesn’t need to be loaded again to go in between pages. There is no need to have miles of code in your pages too, it is much easier to read CSS than it is to sort through tables.

Another great benefit of having one style sheet for a bunch of pages is that changing your layout on every page can be done simultaneously. If I change the parameters of one div tag is goes through the entire site. If you used tables, you would have to change each and every page, what a pain.

It’s easier to write valid CSS once you get the hang of it. Part of the reason tables are bad is that they don’t play well for web accessibility. This means that for the blind, who use web page readers, elements on the page don’t come out verbally, as they may appear visually to us. This is especially important to educational and government institutions, but that certainly doesn’t mean that it shouldn’t be important to you too. Especially if your business web page isn’t web accessible, you don’t shut your doors to blind people, do you? Of course not.

There is a downside to CSS though. It doesn’t render the same in Internet Explore as it does in Firefox. Which can create quite a headache for web designers sometimes. There are “hacks” for these issues, most notably perhaps is the box model hack, but hacks are hacks for a reason. It’s a cheap way of coding and it also isn’t web accessible.

If you’re looking to learn about CSS, or more information I suggest you check out these pages:

CSS Zengarden
W3C Schools CSS Tutorials