Slashdot Mirror
What if Google Had to Design For Google?
An anonymous reader writes "Web developers increasingly grow weary of having to put so much effort into designing their sites according to the whims of the Google search engine. When the most important thing is 'getting indexed' it is increasingly difficult for web site designers to offer the simple, uncluttered user experience they'd like to. Reminiscent of the famed what if Microsoft designed the iPod box here is a humorous look at what would happen to that famed, clean, uncluttered look if Google had to design for the Google Search Engine."
He only did the surface optimization. Missed keywords and description in the headers, didn't bold enough stuff, and didn't use H1 and H2 enough. :-)
Start a happiness pandemic
FYI.
As a web developer, I can honestly say that my arch nemesis in any workplace is always the search engine optimization "expert". I have had to do so many stupid things because of those idiots it's insanity. I've actually written a couple of Daily WTFs about SEO folk.
The truth of the matter is that if you bother to play by the rules, Google will index your site just fine and if your site is popular you will end up high in the page rankings. If you want to become more popular through your page rank, you can always buy keywords, too. It's a really simple, non-mysterious process, but people get caught up and obsess about it and start paying consultants to torment their web designers and developers for no obvious gain.
( Interestingly enough, the company that had the SEO guy who didn't know his ass from his elbow was pretty much the only business doing what they did, was a Fortune 50 company, and absolutely refused to use metadata in their web site; instead of metadata they opted for super ridiculously long URLs. )
alt is an attribute, and you certainly don't want title tags anywhere but in your <head> element.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
title is also an attribute and that's probably the sense he meant it in, considering that it was paired with alt.
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
Your rude manner aside, you're absolutely right.
Why should I care about Joe's HVAC Repair in B.F., South Carolina? I don't live in SC, much less that particular part of SC. In fact, I've never been to SC. So why should I (or anyone else not in the area) care about Joe's HVAC Repair? 99.999% of small businesses are 100% irrelevant. Only the 0.001% that are near me and pertain to my search are relevant. Google Local was great for this, and integrating it with Google Maps has made it even better. If you want your business to be found by Google 100% of the time, register it with Google Maps as a local business. It's even free.
Sigh. Google
The word webpage hasn't lost all meaning - a webpage should still be viewed as a page - a document. It should have a title, and a structure that best fits its content. That means enclosing the "Google" image in header tags, using lists, and so forth. As soon as you nail down this basic, web devving becomes a bunch easier because every decision is an easy one. HTML was initially designed to be like this, but the browser wars screwed things up. It's only now that people are taking a critical eye.
In summary: Search engines read webpages the same way you'd read the source code - it identifies headers, lists, links, etc. Having a shit load of embedded table cells is unreadable to humans, let alone bots. Designing with your source structure in mind scores you good search engine ranks. Every other optimization compared to this is nothing. Don't beleive the SEO people.