SEO - Search engine optimisation, is a strange world. People can start up companies and charge a fortune as long as they sound like they know what they are talking about. But does anyone actually know? Or are they just guessing? The search engine's have been very clever in keeping these mythical logarithms a secret and only giving a few hints and tips on how it works. Companies dedicated to SEO come along and say "You must make your website w3c compatible! You must have 140 characters in your metatags! You must have a H1, H2, H3, H4, H5!" But are they just making this up?
To be honest I have no idea how search engines work, if I follow some of the rules I get good results and, sometimes, if I don't follow any of the rules I get good results, luckily that's not my department I just design stuff.
I find it frustrating that the internet is an amazing place for new ideas but unless you design your site in a conventional way or write about your idea using the correct amount of certain words then nobody will ever find you. But on the other hand, if you have an opinion about something and get higher than everyone else in search engines, your opinion could soon be everyone elses opinion. Say I have a useless theory about life the universe and everything. If I designed an official looking website and said "this IS the theory to life the universe and everything FACT!" I then got that website to the number one position on all search engines, why would people not believe its true and why is there nobody to stop me doing that? It's more powerful than publishing. But I suppose newspapers spout rubbish everyday, which is the same sort of thing.
However I have the opposite problem with our company's website design, I personally like the look of it, and I think we are a nice company that other people would enjoy working with, or for, though I would say that. http://www.tinydesign.co.uk My web site design goes against conventional design and so doesn't do well in search engines, which is annoying, but why should I design it for SEO purposes, surely websites should be designed for the viewer not for a spider.
I'm not sure if it's going against the search engines or working with them but there is a new 'punk' style of website design where the designers are talented but deliberately design sites to shock and get talked about. It is marketing genius! There are loads and loads of discussion threads and blogs about this site http://www.lingscars.com/ which is absolutely brilliant advertising, Lings site and business has won awards. I think Ling is a genius, if not a little mad, if only I had thought to design a site like that, not that it would work for a web design company! But now that it has already has been done it should not be copied, am I saying it's art, I think I am.
