The suggestions in this post are focused on the “behind-the-scenes” elements of your site – to the untrained eye they may not be visible/obvious.

This post definitely sways towards the geek end of the spectrum (just a fair warning if that’s not your thing). However, even if you’re in management, it helps to understand these things for when you’re briefing your tech team.

Web standards and the “semantic” web

The web is built from a range of technologies, many of which are based on standards managed by the World Wide Web Consortium (or W3C for short) – things like HTML, CSS and JavaScript.

These standards define how a web page looks and functions. In recent years there has been a strong move towards “standards-based” web development because of the many benefits this provides.

These best practices focus on using specific HTML elements for their intended purpose – for example, making sure you use the HTML “heading” elements (<h1>, <h2> etc.) to represent the various headings on a page – and using other technologies (such as CSS and “unobtrusive” JavaScript) to represent the design and functionality – e.g. the font size, colour and positioning; or custom functionality such as drop-down menus – independently of the underlying HTML.

Often this is referred to as “semantic markup” or the “semantic web” (the concept of the semantic web is broader than presented here, but semantic markup is an essential element).

While I can’t go into the many details of semantic markup, using such markup is very important for search engines. This is because many search engines will use the HTML as cues to what information is important in a document – e.g. the text in a heading may be considered more important by the search engine because the page author has signified, through the use of specific HTML, that that text is more important (i.e. we are embedding “meaning” and intent into our content by using certain HTML elements).

Accessibility

Good accessibility practices also help here. For example, images with no “alternate” text are problematic in all number of ways, but for the purposes of this article it’s suffice to note that they are also invisible to search engines. Sites made purely from Flash, or including Flash elements without appropriate alternate content, may also not be indexed by search engines (yes, Adobe have worked to make Flash more visible to search engines and accessibility devices, but it’s still important to provide alternate content).

Another case of “best practices” benefiting both your participants and search engines (do I sound like a cracked record yet?).

Other considerations

The amount of unnecessary HTML you have in a document can even be an issue – I’ve read/heard that some search engines may not process all of your page if there’s too much markup as they want to keep their search crawlers efficient. And the order that content appears: search crawlers may treat content higher up the page as more important.

Tech-team skills

A good web development team/agency will naturally create HTML/CSS that is semantically rich and well structured. Unfortunately my experience is that many agencies and companies pay lip service to web standards, only to deliver finished products that are far from exemplar.

It’s important that you ensure that your team is across these concepts and has the practical skills to produce good code. This may require training (for in-house developers) or asking some hard questions and getting technical advice from a trusted third party with the necessary skills when choosing your vendor and evaluating the products they are delivering.

Content Management Systems

Nowadays most websites employ some form of Content Management System (or CMS), whether that be a blog engine like WordPress or a more feature rich (read: more complex) system such as Drupal or Joomla.

Some of the recommendations made in this series may not be possible without modification or extension (e.g. through plugins) within these systems. I believe that these factors should be included in your consideration CMSs for your organisation.

Content entry

In my experience it is common for non-technical users to content into a CMS. This makes a lot of sense for a whole bunch of reasons, ranging from a desire to ensure that content is kept up-to-date by distributing the editorial responsibility to resource constraints where in-house development/technical expertise is limited.

This has a significant impact on whether or not your content is SEO-friendly (i.e. using semantic markup). If the CMS has a WYSIWYG editor for entering content – e.g. you enter content into a field with a Word-like toolbar – quite often the HTML that is generated by the editor is not as clean and semantic as it could be (sometimes it can be down-right problematic).

It is important that any CMS choice takes this into consideration and that the person(s) entering content are correctly trained to use the system in a way that generates appropriate HTML. This may include some training in the basics of HTML so that they can get “under the hood” and tweak the HTML accordingly. Alternatively, your business workflow for content may include a step for a technically-oriented person to “clean up” the content after it’s been edited by non-technical users.

While I know how frustrating it might be for subject matter experts to learn basic HTML, or for someone to have to clean up content after the fact, this step is quite important to undertake such a step to ensure your site is performing as well as it can.

To be continued…

And that’s not all – in the next installment I’ll cover off some more of these “invisible”/more technical aspects of a site that should be considered.

Over the next few posts I’m turning to some of the more technically-oriented things that you can do to optimise for search engines. These posts definitely sway towards the geek end of the spectrum (just a fair warning if that’s not your thing). However, even if you’re in management, it helps to get an overview on such matters if only for when you’re briefing your tech team.

Today’s post focuses on technical matters that are visible to your participants (i.e. they impact how your users access the site). Future posts will look at some of the behind-the-scenes things you can do to assist search engines.

As before, many of these tips are best practices for other reasons, but they all certainly provide SEO benefits as well. Some techniques will have a bigger impact than others, and how much impact a particular technique may have on rankings is largely unknown (as far as I can tell) as most search engine algorithms are closely guarded secrets. So even if you can’t apply all these techniques, it’s still worth incorporating as many as you can into your site.

URL design

Web addresses are technically known as Uniform Resource Locators, or “URLs” for short. URLs uniquely identify an individual “resource” (a web page, image etc.) on the web, which is how a browser is able to display all the content we view each day.

Search engines are affected by URLs in a couple of ways:

• URLs that include query string information (which appears at the end of a URL following a “?”) are ignored by search engines under certain conditions
• Pages that are too deep in a site hierarchy (i.e. greater than 4 levels deep) may also be ignored
• Some search engines will use the words in the URL as part of their index (i.e. to determine relevancy for specific keywords)

For these reasons it’s important to get the URLs of your site right.

“Clean” URLs

Some CMSs or systems that query databases (e.g. a product catalogue) will be implemented using the query string (the bit after the “?” in certain URLs) to identify content/pages etc. within a site. Sometimes this query string will contain things like product codes or database record identifiers that don’t contain much meaning.

By default the popular blogging engine WordPress uses this format to access blog posts – for example, “http://zum.io/?p=213″ is the “non-clean” URL for a post on this site. This format of URL is used by default in WordPress if you don’t enabled the clean URL options in your admin settings. The query string – “?p=213″ – contains the blog post ID which WordPress can understand, but isn’t very useful to anyone else.

URLs like this can be problematic for search engines. If at all possible, you should create and enable what are known as “clean” URLs on your site, and you should make sure that your CMS supports this requirement.

Clean URLs don’t have the query string parameter and usually include a human-readable component. The clean URL for the example page mentioned above is “http://zum.io/2009/02/16/exploring-seo-part-4-writing-effective-copy/” which includes the keywords from the title and date information which is useful to both humans and search engines alike.

(As an aside: in WordPress you can do this under “Settings > Permalinks”)

Information architecture

In a previous post I mentioned that getting the information architecture of the site – the structure of information across the site – was important. This is one place where doing this well helps.

As most website will use section names, or derivatives, in URLs, your URLs will naturally contain your trigger words because you’ve thought through your information architecture well.

For example, WWF-Australia has a section called “Our Work” with a sub-section called “Climate Change”. This is represented in a URL as “http://wwf.org.au/ourwork/climatechange/”. You can see the keywords “climate” and “change” there in the URL. So good information architecture makes this process easy ;)

Title design

Search engines pay a lot of attention to the title of a page, so it’s important that you ensure they are keyword rich and well structured. When I refer to “title” here, I’m talking about the <title> element which is rendered in the title bar or current tab of the browser.

Some CMSs automatically prepend the title with the site name and section (e.g. “Site name > Section title > Page title”), see if your team can flip the order of these elements in the template so that the unique content, the page title, appears at the front (e.g. “Page title / Site name / Section title” or similar). You can see this at work on this blog – the theme is designed to support this requirement.

See the previous post for some tips on creating effective titles. These same tips apply here.

Canonical URLs

Domains

Some web servers can be configured to accept requests at both “<domain-name>.com” and “www.<domain-name>.com” (note the missing “www.” in the first example). Search engines may treat these as different domains (as “www.” is technically a subdomain) – potentially affecting your rankings adversely, as an incoming link to the “www.” URL may be considered distinct to one coming to the plain domain.

For example: if one site links to “http://www.<domain-name>.com/section/page.html” and another site links to the same page, but without the “www.” – “http://<domain-name>.com/section/page.html” – a search engine would consider that a vote for two separate pages, reducing the ranking of each as a result.

Home page URLs

This also applies to home page URLs. Your server may be configured to respond to requests for the same page using different URLs – for example “www.<domain-name>.com”, “www.<domain-name>.com/” (note the “/”) and “www.<domain-name>.com/index.html” are all considered different URLs by search engines, even though in most web servers they would result in the same page (the home page) being shown.

CMS that don’t enforce unique URLs

Lastly, your CMS may allow you to use the same content in two different parts of the site, so the exact same content/page can be accessed at the end of two different URLs.

For example, you may access the same page at: “http://<domain-name>.com/section/mypage.html” and “http://<domain-name>.com/a-different-section/mypage.html”. Again – these are seen as two separate pages by search engines, even though the same content appears in both places.

Solution

In each case, your server or CMS will need to be configured to avoid these scenarios.

For example, your web server should be configured to redirect to one canonical domain – e.g. requests to “www.<domain-name>.com” be redirected to “<domain-name>.com” (or vice versa) so that there is only ever one domain being referenced by incoming links. I emphasise redirect, as the server should force a HTTP 301 Status to indicate to the browser/search engine that only one URL should be used.

Speak to your tech team about implementing this if you don’t have it setup already.

(A quick aside: if your website doesn’t work when accessed using “<domain-name>.com” it should – speak to your team or ISP about setting this up if it isn’t already.)

HTML-based solution

In cases where you don’t have access to your server, or your ISP does not allow configuration of these settings, you can use a special HTML tag to advise search engines as to the correct URL to use. This is not as good as the server-configured solutions (as it doesn’t fix the problem of duplicate URLs, simply works around it), but may be the only practical solution in your circumstance.

More on URL canonicalisation:

• Matt Cutts: SEO advice: URL canonicalization
• Google Webmaster Central: Demystifying the “duplicate content penalty
• Michael Nguyen: Cleaning up canonical URLs with redirects (technical post on one technique to us with Apache)

Invisible touch

Next installment we’ll look at some of the “invisible”, behind-the-scenes, things you can do.

While many of the principles of good copywriting apply in the offline and online world, there are a few tips for copywriting that are specific to on-screen reading and search engines.

Over the jump I’ll review some of the things I’ve learnt about writing effective copy for the web.

Keyword targeting

In the previous post in this series I mentioned “trigger words” – the kind of words your participants are looking for when browsing your site to lead them to the information they are looking for.

Once you’ve identified your trigger words, you should think about how you can include them, when appropriate, in the copy of your site. Special consideration should be given to page titles, headings and links, as all of these elements in a site are important for “information scent” when someone is scanning a page.

If you are linking to a page, consider using consistent language (incorporating trigger words) when linking to specific pages – i.e. use the same text in the link to improve search engine recognition of those keywords.

Also review your search term referrer statistics (in Google Analytics this is found under “Traffic Sources” – the “Keywords” box in the “Top Traffic Sources” section of the page.) Using these search terms appropriately in your content will help your users find what they’re looking for more efficiently.

And as highlighted in the previous post – consider including common synonyms in your copy and evaluate which ones you favour based on analysis using tools like Google Trends.

What’s in a title?

The page title and headings within a page are critical for SEO, but also for usability. And, as we’ve seen time and again in this series, best practice for usability is also best practice for SEO.

We’ve already mentioned keyword targeting, but there are a couple of additional tips for writing great headings that are worth pointing out.

Avoid clever titles and puns

Avoid clever titles and puns when writing your titles for online content. While such puns are enticing to try, and can certainly work well in print medium (like newspaper headlines), they can be confusing for visitors, especially international visitors who may not get the “in joke”.

More importantly, however, search engines don’t get the jokes – so your clever titles could impact your search engine ranking. For this reason, it’s important to use explanatory titles for articles, and you should try and include one or two of your primary keywords in your title. See point 6 of Jacob Nielson’s Alertbox article Top Ten Mistakes in Web Design for some further tips.

Front-load your titles

In Microcontent: How to Write Headlines, Page Titles, and Subject Lines Jakob Nielsen advises “Make the first word an important, information-carrying one” and “Do not make all page titles start with the same word[s]“. (The article has further tips worth exploring.)

This comes back to the way people read or, more to the point, scan web pages (more on that in a minute). People will scan the first few words of a headline or a link and if the words don’t capture their attention they will continue scanning the page.

Write for scanning

Jacob Nielson undertook a study in 1997 that evaluated the impact of different ways of writing for the web. While the research was carried out some time ago, the key points still largely hold true:

• Your content should be scanable. Elements that can help a reader scan a page are:
  • Information rich/clear headings and sub-headings
  • Bulleted lists
  • Properly captioned and relevant pictures
  • Highlighted text (through bold or emphasis effects)
  • In-text links (readers will notice links as though they were “bold”)
• Pull out quotes quotes that are highlighted visually within the text help people identify key points while scanning page
• Simple and conversational writing is preferred – as opposed to sales/marketing-style writing or over complex scientific writing
• Text should be concise and to the point (no waffling)
• Each page on a site should revolve around a natural focus point/subject – don’t try to put everything on one page
• Humour, puns and plays-on-words need to be used with caution, especially in headings. This is particularly important given the international nature of the audience.

And make sure that the first paragraph on your page provides a strong summary of the key points on the page – it may be the only thing they read!

Links

People use links to scan read a page, so always link using words that describe well what you are linking to. Importantly, search engines also use the text of links in their ranking algorithms.

Wherever possible (read: always) avoid linking on “click here” or “read more” or words that mean nothing if taken on their own, for example:

• GOOD “The resulting visualisation can be quite complex.”
• BAD “The resulting visualisation can be quite complex.”
• BAD “To see the resulting visualisation, click here.”
• BAD “To see the resulting visualisation, visit zum.io“

Remember that people see links as emphasised in the text – fill the page with links and you lose the “highlighting” effect. So only link when there is a clear benefit to the user in doing so.

How does all this benefit SEO?

This is another case of “what helps humans also helps search engines”.

Search engines like Google will use the “semantic structure” of the HTML in your page to determine the importance of information. So it will treat a major heading (a <h1 /> in HTML) as more important than a secondary heading (<h2 /> or <h3 /> in HTML).

They also consider the surrounding content of a page in it’s ranking. For example – a page that is short and to the point containing a specific keywords is likely to rank higher than a verbose page covering a range of topics, as the keywords appears more relevant in the context of the page – i.e. they have more importance.

These are just two of the technical reasons of how search engines benefit, though there are probably more…

In the next installment I’ll start looking at some of the technical measures that can be taken to assist in SEO.

Related links

Here are a few links I’ve found along the way that you may find useful:

• Alertbox: ‘How users read on the web’
• Alertbox: ‘Microcontent: How to Write Headlines, Page Titles, and Subject Lines
• Writing for the web: Guidelines for MIT Libraries
• Lifehacker: Write effectively for the Web
• Web writing tips
• Dave Tips: Top 6 Online Writing Tips

Over the jump I’ll expand on a few techniques that can help increase your site’s visibility to search engines.

Information architecture

By my rough definition, information architecture (for websites) is the process of working out the best way to structure your site – in terms of sections, URLs, page layout etc. (There may be a better, “formal” definition, but hopefully this captures the essence for the purposes of this series.)

This can be a big task, and would be best informed using user interviews, site usage statistics analysis (as outlined in the last article), a content audit and more… The results of such analysis may result in significant changes to your site if it is not already well structured.

The benefit of strong information architecture is that by creating intuitive navigation, with well organised and labels links, headings and the like, will naturally benefit search engines.

Some examples:

• Clearly labeled links in your site, based on trigger words from your audience research (more below), help search engines to categorise and rank your pages based on the most likely search terms.
• Well structured headings can be mapped to the semantically appropriate HTML code which search engines use to determine information priority (more on semantic markup later in the series)
• Page titles and URLs (web page address), which also factor into search engine rankings, can also contain the keywords that people will be using to find information in search engines

As an aside, take care to keep your site structure to as few levels deep as possible – definitely less than 4. Not only is it typically easier (there are possible exceptions) for your users to find information in a well structured, more shallow site, some search engines will ignore or rank lower content more than 4 levels deep.

Trigger words

A good information architecture will utilise key words that users are looking for, known as “trigger words”, to help give people a “scent” of where to go in your site. As such, it’s important to get an understanding of the sort of words your participants’ will be looking for.

Analysing the terms people use to find your site, or to find content within your site, using Google Analytics or other site statistics tools, can help you to work out what people are looking for. So can user interviews and usability testing (more on that in a minute).

You can also use tools like Google Trends to evaluate which search terms are more popular. By choosing the right words, and using them appropriately in your site, can dramatically improve your search engine visibility (and the resultant traffic).

One small example: when I was at WWF-Australia I did a trends analysis on the terms “global warming” and “climate change” and found “global warming” was the most popular term. By making a conscious effort to use the more popular term (where technically accurate) increased traffic from this search term dramatically, becoming the #1 search traffic driver (at the time) over the space of a few months.

Using the words and language familiar to your users in menu and other navigation, as links in the body copy of your site, and even in your URLs, will not only help your users find the information they’re looking for, but will guide search engines as well.

Usability testing

Another way to improve information scent and “findability” is to carry out usability testing. There are many types of testing – formal and informal.

Usability is a big area requiring specialised expertise, so I would recommend engaging a usability specialist to advise on the best plan for your requirements/organisation. Although this may appear like an extra cost, usability testing has the potential to save money (or make money, depending on your perspective) because it can fix errors early in your site’s development, before the costs of design and development have been incurred.

That said, Silverback provides a cost-effective way to carry out informal testing if your on a tight budget, or have the skills internally to run your own usability testing.

Again, this comes back to the “ask your users” approach (mentioned in the last post in the series), rather than guessing based on your own (biased) experience or expectations. By engaging your users in testing the site, you can learn a lot about what works and doesn’t work – informing your information architecture, design and choice of trigger words. This in turn will help when a search engine crawls your site.

Pathways from where your visitors land

Thanks to the effect of search and the “long tail“, many (if not most) of your site visitors may never see your home page.

With that in mind, consider pathways from a content page – say an article, or individual blog post – to other parts of your site that are relevant, based on where they’ve landed. This can impact the design of your site considerably; in fact, some designers start designing the content pages first because of their relative importance.)

The benefit of taking this approach is simply that there are more internal links within your site to relevant content. These internal links may be used by search engines in a similar way to incoming links to your site to rank your page with relation to the words contained in the links.

This is simply another example of helping your participants, and in turn improving your site’s visibility to search engines.

And more…

There are probably lots of other ways to improve findability, and similarly to my last article I run the risk of trying to summarise a bunch of different techniques without doing any of them justice. The core principle, however, is by investing in making your site easy to use to your participants, you are investing in search visibility. It’s a win-win situation.

Related links

These are a few relevant resources that you might find handy. If you know of others, feel free to leave a comment with a pointer…

• A List Apart: Findability, Orphan of the Web Design Industry
• UIE: The right trigger words
• Ambient Findability: What We Find Changes Who We Become

In the next installment, I’ll look at how to write search-friendly copy.

Whether it be a blog or a web application that you’re building, knowing what value you provide (and what that means to the participants of your site) is a critical piece to the puzzle. While with a blog you may be able to get away with not going to great lengths to analyse your audience and traffic sources etc. some of these principles outlined over the jump can be useful.

In this post-Cluetrain world, the term “audience” is not a suitable description for the people we want to communicate with – this process is a two-way street. Other terms like “users”, “visitors”, “targets” or “consumers” are also problematic. That said, I’m yet to see an adequate term – so for this article and others in this series I’m going to use the term “participants” to describe the people you want to engage.

Inspiration and authenticity

There is no sure-fire way to achieve success online. There are plenty of blogs, books and sites that provide lots of great tips and techniques, from developing content to idea generation and more.

Ultimately “inspiration” is going to play a part. An inspired idea or execution of an idea – something “remarkable” in Seth Godin’s words – will go a long way to getting noticed.

Authenticity is also important. People can see through a fake, especially online. In this day and age if you fake it, we’ll find out. The power of social media and all that…

On that note – some of the ideas I present below may seem a calculated. But coming from the right place – providing value for your participants – rather than working out how you can manipulate your target market, is key. The aim is to use these ideas to create inspiration and to understand what your authentic offering/position is.

Understand your participants

The first step, of course, is to get an understanding of the needs of your participants. The principles of user-centered design should inform such a process: understand and put your users’ needs first, and work out what you can offer of value to support those needs.

Ask first, do later

Whilst the most critical thing is to look at things from your participants’ perspective, in my opinion the best way to find out what these needs are is to ask your participants. This may be through online surveys, contextual inquiry, listening to feedback from the feedback form of your site or from email complaints, one-on-one or focus group interviews – any opportunity you can muster will help.

I was first introduced to the idea of contextual inquiry by Stephen Cox (who is currently working at News Limited) and I was immediately drawn to the concept. I’ve had the pleasure of working with Penny Hagen (whilst she was working with Digital Eskimo) and Natalie from Redrollers on a number of projects to do this kind of study and I’ve found the process to be immensely valuable in gaining deeper insight into participant requirements.

But there are a number of methods for getting into the mind of your participants and responding to their needs – the critical thing is to not make assumptions. You are not your participants. This is really important – it’s much better to ask, even if it’s not a formal process or using an imperfect method, than to guess or assume – even if you understand the problem domain and think you have a handle on participant needs.

Analyse website usage

Another useful method of gaining insight into your audience behaviour is via analysis of your website’s usage data. There are a number of tools for doing this, but by far the most cost-effective (IMO) is Google Analytics. If you don’t already have Google Analytics – or equivalent – setup for your website, I would recommend you arrange it ASAP.

Analysing how people access your site – where they come from, what they search for, which pages they visit – can provide excellent pointers as to what works (or what doesn’t) in participants’ experience of your site.

This is not just about what’s most popular though – thorough site usage analysis can also identify patterns of usage that can give insight that goes beyond “what’s popular”, uncovering the hidden opportunities presented by “long tail” thinking.

Develop a strategy for your website

Once you have an understanding of your participants, you can develop a strategy for how your website is going to meet their needs. This strategy should include opportunities for regular updates to your site – search engines like sites that change frequently. You should envision your site as a living thing that evolves and updates over time – it is not something you can “set and forget” (this is something that I see missed by organisations all the time).

Your strategy may also include provision for blogging and other social networking activities. These can play a role in improving your rankings – such as by keeping your content fresh when you update your blog regularly, for example (search engines love regular updates). They can also give you so much more. I have to echo Stephen’s warnings here – social media/networking is also not something you can “bolt on” and you should get advice from someone who understands the space.

You might be wondering “what’s this got to do with search engines?” Search engines are designed to reward content that people find useful. If your website is not meeting this fundamental goal, all the SEO tricks in the book won’t get you very far in the rankings race.

As you can see, this part of your SEO plan cuts to the core of what your website does – it is not something that you can “bolt on” to your site at the end (contrary to what the term “optimisation” might imply). So it’s important to be thinking about this very early in the (re)development of your site.

Tip of the iceberg

With this post I run the risk of trying to explain an entire design process – so I’ve only really scratched the surface of a lot of what goes into the design of a successful website.

But hopefully the key points – focus on and seek to understand your audience, responding to their needs an inspired and authentic way – have come through.

In the next installment I’ll be exploring ways of making information findable in your site.

It probably doesn’t need to be stated, but search engines are the “first port of call” for many internet users, and usually represents a significant proportion of traffic to websites (in my experience anywhere between 30% and 80% of site referrals come from search engines).

Therefore it’s important to make your site as search engine friendly as possible.

Bad rap

SEO has received a bit of a bad rap because of some vendors’ attempts to “game” the system – that is use nefarious techniques to try to “trick” search engines into giving their sites higher ratings. However, there are a lot of things that we as practitioners (developers, producers, designers, content writers etc.) can do to help our clients achieve better rankings.

While I’m no SEO expert, I have picked up a lot of tips and techniques over time that I thought would be useful to jot down here in a series across the next week or so. The notes will take the form of a series, and will be tagged SEO to make them easier to find for future reference.

(Note: I’m going to focus on organic search results, not targeted search advertising such as Google AdWords)

Many facets to SEO

The first thing I think worth mentioning is that SEO is not something that you can just “bolt on” at the end of a project. Aspects of SEO permeate many levels of a project – everything from information architecture (how a site is structured and information presented), search term and site analytics data analysis, copywriting (the content of your site), web publishing system choice, HTML coding, and more.

To my mind, the various facets of SEO can be broadly split into three categories:

1. Site strategy
2. Copywriting/content
3. Information architecture
4. Technical

Each is interelated – without certain technical capabilities, information architecture related SEO methods may not be possible. Similarly, without strong site architecture, copywriting methods are less effective.

Therefore a wholistic approach is required, from the beginning of a project to the end execution, to facilitate a strong SEO strategy.

In the coming posts I’ll expand on each of these and delve a little deeper into some of the techniques that can be employed.

In the next installment I’ll touch on what I think is the most critical aspect of SEO: creating something worth finding.

The other day I came across a slightly different approach presented by Steve Souders [via Ajaxian] – which presents a rough calculation of how a reduction in page weight might reduce electricity consumption at the server side.

Interesting – especially if it holds up to scrutiny. What I like about it most is that it suggests that coding best practices, like web standards, server-side compression, and code optimisation, can actually have green benefits as we strive to reduce energy consumption.

Who woulda thunk it…