Re: CSS and search engines

From: Rob Frankel <rob_at_robfrankel.com>
Date: Fri 22 Apr 2005 21:34:16 -0500

Mel Harkrader Pine wrote thusly:

>CSS helps you lay out a page and does not in itself cause any problems. In
>fact there are a lot of ways that CSS enhances your SEO efforts, but that's
>another subject. Using a JS menu helps you do nifty things like mousovers
>without repeating a lot of tedious work. However, you also need to have
>links elsewhere on the page. I believe that why you so often see another
>menu at the bottom of the page, as with my own site
>www.mhpcommunications.com
>
>People also talked about a site map. That certainly helps -- having a link
>on the home page to a site map that's done in html. But it has been my
>experience that in general spiders don't like dead ends. So if you have a
>site map that leads to a lot of pages, none of which have outbound links,
>there's a somewhat limited benefit.

You know, I'm no SEO expert, but I've got to tell you that despite
the occasional
"If-you're-such-a-hot-branding-guy-why-does-your-site-look-like-that"
letter, my site has stayed pretty much at the top of most search
engines with nothing more than good old HTML. No flash. No
javascript. And abysmally few outbound links.

Could it be that everyone is trying to out-think the search engines?

A while back, I made the decision to lock on to "branding expert" as
my moniker, and I pointed both the hyphenated and non-hyphenated
versions to robfrankel.com. That boosted serach results for
"branding expert," but didn't help all that much when searching
"branding."

What has seemed to help is my Google-hosted blog. Now both "branding
expert" and "branding" return results that are about the best ever.
Usually within the first three to ten spots.

I wonder if dumping the nifty-looking eye-candy helps cut through the
clutter and raise your ranking....
--
Rob Frankel, "Yes, I really do turn users into evangelists for your brand."
Branding Expert http://www.RobFrankel.com
Yes, there's an RSS feed blog, if you can handle it:
http://robfrankel.blogspot.com




Received on Fri Apr 22 2005 - 21:34:16 CDT