I’m on a kick, I know. I am really trying to figure this SEO stuff out. I think it’s important. And as a website designer, it’s probably one of the most important service I can offer my clients. So today, I was looking for some really basic SEO stuff. I found it at one of my favorite blogger’s sites, Mr. Mike Davidson of Mike Industries (he’s the dude that created sIFR). In his article, Lessons From The Roundabout SEO Test, he tries some quick and dirty experiments that tell us a lot about how Google ranks sites.

His conclusions:

Header’s Matter: He found that H1 tags get ranked over simple mentions and even duplicate mentions of a keyword.
Despite nasty rumors, nested tables aren’t that big’a deal: While a page with an instance of a keyword is ranked above a page with an instance of a keyword and a nested table, if two keywords appear on a site with a nested table, it will be ranked highest of all. And so, as he says, “The mere appearance of many nested tables…does not have a strong enough negative effect to be considered a drag on search engine ranking.”
code validity matters (at least in some instances): Mike found an instance in which invalid code got a page blackballed from google. While it doesn’t happen all the time, it apparently does happen some of the time.
The placement of semantic elements of coding don’t matter:An H1 tag put at the end of a post where it doesn’t even matter is far more effective than an H4 tag at the top of a post where it actually serves a function.
Semantic elements of coding don’t matter that much:“Although good semantics are somewhat valuable in optimization, simple things like proper titles, descriptive filenames, and incoming links are dramatically more important.”

He goes onto say that for good Search Engine Optimization, making a “site sticky enough to attract quality incoming links is by far and away the thing to concentrate on.” Apparently, pagerank doesn’t matter much, but “link love” does.

SEO is an interesting animal. While some developers make it a priority in developing their site, others seem to think it sort of a happenstance feature of good coding and good practice. I’m sort of inclined to agree with the latter. It seems that most basic SEO is accomplished by building sites that are W3C compliant and use HTML elements correctly and efficiently. And that is why I will sign this blog post off with a great big

I love SEO-Search Engine Optimization

.