Forum Moderators: open
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</body>Throw in a few images, links, other media, shake well and viola.
Why do things have to be complicated? How does one take the above and over-engineer the process? Rhetorical question? Maybe. You're welcome to opine...
My fear is that what I'm doing is old-fashioned, and I'm going to lose my rankings because I'm not doing the latest and greatest.
I tried social sites like Digg, Stumbleupon, Squidoo, blogs, and all the other venues. Maybe it's my niche (something that doesn't appeal to teens), but those things didn't work.
I just keep creating content and people keep coming to look at it, and link to it from other sites.
I agree that HTML isn't that complicated (I don't imagine it's intended to be), although trying to use HTML semantically is not always a clear cut thing - there are other useful elements ranging from acronyms, to definition lists; all the available elements must be the best choice under some circumstance.
Perhaps this is an unfair comparison, but if HTML provides the building blocks for web content, then isn't the question a bit like saying: OK we have bricks, doors and windows - so why all the fuss about architecture?
But I understand where you're coming from - SEO is IMO a somewhat awkward expression, since anything that affects search engine results could potentially be classed as an SEO activity. So good mark-up practices could be SEO. Or information architecture could be, or any other number of standalone disciplines.
There's also what I think called be called the "magic formula" approach, which I think is a historical hangover from early-day eureka! moments about things like actually using keywords, or how influential titles are. So if you just hit upon the right sequence of words within the right HTML elements then you pop up in top place on Google. Hence unhealthy myths and obsessions about differences of a few characters.
Actually read W3C. Understand markup. Do this, and you are better than 2/3 sites.
Fix your canonical issues, optimise your title and meta tags. Your in the top 10%.
After that, its about experience, instinct and analysis. I'm not there yet, but these boards have accelerated the process no end.
Beyond creating a good page, there is marketing. I imagine thats why you posted here ;) Same as business. I can create the best business model ever, but unless I have customers/clients, its all a bit pointless, no?
But its what I want to do, build a useful site and the thing will work. IM always hearing of this technique or that technique, tomorrow they would have forgotten it, its just buzzwords, the web was built to share information. Thats the secret of a good website.
