Far From Neutral Notions - Philippine politics, culture and stuff

SEO, xHTML, CSS and why they shouldn’t matter

Well, to me on a personal level, anyway. I know of people for which it’s their bread and butter. Make no mistake, I think web standards are a good thing. They make a web desinger’s life easier for one thing, and they make surfing the web a more pleasant experience. And SEO? I’ve been reading up on it lately (see the link above), and who wouldn’t want a high pagerank?

I just couldn’t get myself all worked up about it.

The way I see it, xHTML is like the holy grail of online publishing: separation of content from code and all that. And personally, divs make so much more sense to me than tds ever did. It’s sexy, it’s elegant, and it’s the hottest thing since animated gifs. Barring Flash and AJAX, anyway. It makes sense to me, because it makes life easier. That’s why people use Blogger over Wordpress over Movable Type over a custom CMS. Unless you actually know what you’re doing, in which case it’s as easy to make your own blogging software as to do the five-minute install. Well, maybe not, but you get the idea.

SEO is a relatively new arena for me, and I suppose I should have given it more thought before. I didn’t understand why WordPress.org got all that flak from Google a while back for link farming, or why comment spammers would get so bad that I’d actually have to turn comment moderation on. Apparently, as with all things, big AdSense bucks are at stake, as well as SERP positioning. Yes, obviously I still live in the GeoCities era.

Naturally, SEO plays a big role in getting your content the attention you think it deserves. Getting the top spot of a SERP for your keyword of choice goes a long way in generating page views - and for those blogs with ads, that translates to a better chance of getting more cash.

And it’s a good thing.

But in the quest to validate our pages as xHTML Strict, are we spending more time on our code than on our posts? In our quest for SEO, are we compromising the integrity of our content and the stuff we want to say? Blogging about something just because the subject’s a popular keyword - or Heaven forbid making a blog about it - strikes me as a bit odd. After all, isn’t the point of having a blog also having your unique voice heard over the cacophony of the masses?

It reminds me of the design vs. content debates a few years back somewhat; content won out in the end (content IS king, after all) and design took a backseat. Thankfully, the division is not as divisive, and even the most stalwart proponents of standards compliance are content-rich and very well designed.

It’s interesting to note then, that one of the most popular and authoriative pinoy blogs doesn’t even validate. And that its high pagerank is more a result of good content than an active SEO campaign. I think.

So apparently the answer to both my questions is no, code doesn’t supercede content, and good blogs with good content demand more attention from search engines. For now, anyway.

I suppose it’s more to do with me being more of a reader; all I’m really interested in is your words, having an RSS feed is just a bonus for me I never got worked up about standards because if you build it well, they will come anyway. All the king’s men and their SEO won’t save Humpty Dumpty, if you follow my meaning

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