Seo Tag | Jacob Emerick's Blog

SEO Consultants are not Necessarily Experts

I've always been a bit confused by people who consider themselves SEO (Search Engine Optimization) consultants. It's not that I don't think such a position should exists - on the contrary, SEO is an important part of the web development process that is often overlooked by web designers and programmers. What confuses me is how they consider themselves experts.

Most of these consultants devote their focus on Google. This makes a lot of sense, with Google being the elephant in the room when it comes to search engines. However, it seems that the majority of their focus is always on the algorithm and how it changes over time. When Google made the Panda update early in 2011, there was a big push for unique, organic content on sites. SEO consultants seem to be reactionary, watching to see what Google determines is important in determining good content and structure is. This is the wrong approach.

Well-rounded web developers take a simple stance when it comes to SEO. Just build out a web presence that make sense. Each page on a website has a ...

• Tags:
• best practice
• optimization
• seo

Responsive Web Design and Duplicate URLs

Duplicate content is a well-known issue that members in the search engine optimization (SEO) and web development communities keep a close eye on. This issue can lower the relative value of a page in the eyes of search engines, due to their being multiple instances of the page's content. The address, or URL, of any page on the internet is meant to be a unique identifier for the page, and if there is an exact duplicate of that content located on a separate URLs than the pages are not as useful for end users. A great example of this is the www vs no-www duplication that many sites have... Both versions of the URL may render the same page. GET parameters, tailing slashes, and other types of dynamically generated pages can also generate duplicate content issues.

I wanted to address the opposite issue in this post. Duplicate content can be easily fixed using a variety of solutions, but there are other practices that are starting to pervade the web development community that could potentially confuse users and search engines alike. Let's call it ...

• Tags:
• best practice
• seo