Archive for the ‘SEO’ Category

Why clean code and markup matters on a web site

Tuesday, July 14th, 2009
A graphical despiction of a very simple html d...
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I work for the Professional Bull Riders, Inc. in the capacity of Web Developer (Visit the PBR Online. Recently we have been looking at making changes to the site, adding more content pages, restructuring the layout on some of the internal pages to be more modern looking and reviewing search engine optimization and marketing.

All of this is necessary for growth, sustained visitors, enhancements and general creating forward motion on any given web site, especially for one that is in the top tier of sports entertainment. The issue happens, as it has happened at countless other enterprises, the code base is getting older, has been touched by many programmers over the years and is nearing point of needing to be completely rewrote to be modernized. That happens. No question.

The discussion here is, does clean, well commented code help sustainability in an application, including a web application? Short answer is yes. Does valid HTML markup do the same? Again, the short answer is yes. If the code base that exists is written using proper and valid HTML/XHTML markup, and is commented properly or document properly to give other developers a decent idea of the logic behind any given subset of functions, routines and other logic to understand what was being done and why. It also helps for the same developer when he/she needs to go back and make changes on code that may have been written months, even years prior.

As we move forward at my place of employment, we are looking at various platforms, ideas and methodologies to create a platform that is extensible, pliable and can be built upon in the future. This platform, as it will become, will be something that can be built upon to create the best possible presence, as any enterprise should have a goal of accomplishing.

So does clean code and markup matter? Yes it does, and if your enterprise, business, or site is lacking in that area, shouldn’t it be about time to correct that situation?

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Google PR – The Ultimate Never Ending Saga

Thursday, October 25th, 2007

You know, when Google first introduced PageRank – the web developing world went absolutely bonkers. There were so many “experts” that had a unique angle on how to attain the highest page rank in the fastest way it was mind numbing. It went on this way for quite a while, with web masters, web developers, SEOs (search engine optimizers), SEMs (search engine marketers) and the regular Internet Junkie trying to prove that their theory was correct about the Google PageRank algorithm.

In the past 1 1/2 to 2 years, we have seen another phenemona happen – the devaluation of PageRank. Apparently not just by web masters, web developers, SEOs and SEMs, but now by Google themselves. With the advent that they are trying to de-value paid links, links that can carry page rank to lend creed and credibility to a site, many top ranked sites are experiencing major PR drops. Sometimes up to 4 or 5 points.

According to Web Pro News, most of them took a 2-4 point drop, with www.statecounter.com taking the largest in their supplied list going from 10 to 6. I do believe their list may have came from over at Andy Beard’s site.

The completely amazing thing of all this, is the buzz it has created in the blogosphere (yes, people just like me {only with more power, clout, writing time and blogging experience} writing about it). People have came forward with conspiracy theories, ideas that Google is personalizing this round of updates against entities and much more craziness.

As I said in a comment over on ProBlogger – when will the Google PR craziness end? Ever? Probably not anytime soon. Can PR drop, the site still have quality content and get great traffic? I guess the next few weeks will tell on some of these sites, won’t it.

Personally? This site’s home page has a whoopin’ up PR of 3. One of my work sites has PR5 and the other a PR4. However, the PR5 page does significant sales volume and has a great visitor number, as well as garnering nearly 60% of our traffic from search engines. I get about 39% of the traffic to this site from the search engines.

Posted in Blogging, SEM, SEO, Search Engines | Comments Off