10.25.07
Why is HTML being left on the side of the road?
I am noticing that a lot of web developers consider HTML old school and something to avoid. This is a very bad trend. People need to realize that web pages are documents that need to be cataloged and searched. If you don’t use a universally accepted standard to mark them up companies like Google and Yahoo will have a harder time figuring out what a page is about.
HTML is a standard to define the elements in a text document. An HTML only document looks very ugly and plain in a web browser. Using HTML to design your web page is very old school and does not look very good. At the dawn of the Internet HTML provided 2 roles one being markup and the other design. We now have CSS that takes over the job of defining how something looks. People are so caught up in how a web page looks they forget about the markup side of a web page.
Any good SEO should know this. Part of the job of an SEO is to educate developers about this topic. We are document markup experts. Companies need to have an SEO on staff to make sure the developers don’t lose site of this.
Technorati Tags: seo, html, markup language, css, google, yahoo
Stumble it!
Isis said,
10.25.07 at 12:11 pm
I hope this clears up a lot of confusion. This is an important and well written post.
mike said,
10.26.07 at 8:55 am
even the biggest companies here in germany don’t have an inhouse seo.. and their websites are pathetic in terms of seo
Darrin Ward said,
10.27.07 at 9:13 am
>> We are document markup experts.
I have twice spoken on the subject of SEO at the “Webmaster Jam Session” in Dallas, TX. The conference is mainly focused towards semantics / CSS / HTML / Accessibility / Usability rather than SEO or marketing, and some of the World’s foremost authorities / authors were speaking there on these subjects, including Eric Meyer (CSS Guru), Molly Holzschlag (W3C), Jared Spool (UIE), Jonathan Snook, Derek Featherstone, etc..
I don’t speak any of them, but my impression is that very few of them would agree in that SEOs are (on the whole) considered markup experts! Again, that’s my impression based on having spent some time with them, knowing that they’ve had various opportunities to work with and review the work of SEOs :). Of course, the better SEOs do try harder
Darrin Ward
ogletree said,
10.28.07 at 8:13 pm
When I said “We are document markup experts” I was just talking about one aspect of what we do. We do many other things. There are lots of SEO’s out there that may not even know what markup is and do quite well. There are tons of ways to do this. Somebody who is an expert at getting links can get away with very little on page seo but you will be beat if you go against another link expert that knows how to do on page seo.. If you consider yourself a good well rounded seo you should be a markup expert. That is on page seo 101.
How To Start A Blog said,
12.07.07 at 7:59 pm
How To Start A Blog…
I couldn’t understand some parts of this article, but it sounds interesting…
engrmizan said,
01.25.08 at 12:31 pm
in any site html extension is positive evalution of google search engine. i am not clear this matter.
seo services said,
05.13.08 at 5:33 am
Hey! u r right about the old school of html… y leaned it as well but i thing that it is just an Cisif’s labour…