Viewing posts about Seo.

Two Types of Content

With the advent of responsive design and later discussions adaptive content has come a split in the world of content strategy. In one corner is NPR's COPE, the idea that content should be flexible and flow through many different formats with the standard web page being just one possible outlet. Over…

  • Category Web Development
  • Posted July 22, 2013
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Another Kick at QR Codes

There's been a lot of kicking around of QR codes since they first cropped up, complaints about their usability or a specific implementation (see WTF QR Codes for plenty of examples). I recently bumped into them in a discussion with some coworkers regarding 'short URLs' vs longer keyword-stuffed URLs…

  • Category Web Development
  • Posted May 15, 2013
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Web Crawlers are Difficult

In my last post I explained what a web crawler was and some of the basic steps that someone could break up the logic into. I also dived into some of the difficulties I had when building out my own crawler. Granted, some of the difficulties were self-imposed: I was using PHP, had a limited timeframe,…

  • Category Web Development
  • Posted March 1, 2013
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Building a Web Crawler

A web crawler is a script that goes out and crawls the web. Pretty surprising, eh? There are many crawlers out there, including the famous GoogleBot that attempts to index every site it bumps into and nefarious spambots that look for and exploit vulnerabilities. The logic behind them seems simple:…

  • Category Web Development
  • Posted February 27, 2013
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A Year of Hits and Spiders

Right around this time last year I set up a simple hit logger on my server. Nothing complex, just a dump of the server superglobal with some extra metadata. This is something that is partially captured by the server itself in access logs: what file was requested, who was requesting it (user agent…

  • Category Web Development
  • Posted February 15, 2013
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Don't Focus on the SEO, Focus on the Human User

One of my least favorite phrases to hear while working on a website is 'do it for the SEO'. SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is a valid factor in website development. If Google and other search engines are having a difficult time crawling and understanding your content than it will be more…

  • Category Web Development
  • Posted December 13, 2012
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URL Shortening Services Suck (and could be Better)

Thanks to the prevalence of microblogging, and before that the infamous 80 column screen, friendly (or keyword-stuffed) URLs have run into character limit issues. Long URLs are great for both SEO and usability. They give both users and search bots an insight on the page's content before actually…

  • Category Web Development
  • Posted August 23, 2012
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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…

  • Category Web Development
  • Posted February 14, 2012
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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,…

  • Category Web Development
  • Posted October 2, 2011
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Best Practices in Development

Over the last few days I've been working on a relatively large change to my image linking logic. This change involved some reorganization on the server side, adding name-spacing, changing the url structure, and placing 301 redirects to all 1200+ of my photos. I made this update both in hopes of…

  • Category Web Development
  • Posted September 6, 2011
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