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« Tools of the brain trade, past & present | Main | Help an impoverished student »

The search engine optimization rap

Category: HumourMusicTechnology
Posted on: March 30, 2008 11:01 AM, by Mo

This track, called Design Coding by The Poetic Prophet, has just been uploaded on YouTube. I thought it was hilarious the first time I saw it, and it's still very amusing on the fourth viewing. I'm not an expert on search engine optimization, but the advice provided here is, as far as I know, accurate.


Here's a transcript of the lyrics:

Your site design is the first thing people see,
It should be reflective of you and the industry,
Easy to look at with a nice navigation,
When they can't find what they want it causes frustration,
A clear call to action to increase the temptation,
Use appealing graphics they create motivation,
If you have animation use with moderation,
'Cause search engines can't index the information,
Display the logos of all your associations,
Highlight your contact info that's an obligation,
Create a clean design you can use some decoration,
But to try to prevent any client hesitation,
Every page that they click should provide an explanation,
Should be easy to understand like having a conversation,
When you design the style go ahead and use your imagination,
But make sure you use correct color combinations,
Do some investigation, look at other organizations,
But don't duplicate or you might face a litigation,
Design done, congratulations but it's time to start construction,
Follow these instructions when you move into production,
Your photoshop functions then slice that design,
Do your layout with divs make sure that it's aligned,
Please don't use tables even though they work fine,
When it come to indexing they give searches a hard time,
Make it easy for the spiders to crawl what you provide,
Remove font type, font color and font size,
No background colors, keep your coding real neat,
Tag your look and feel on a separate style sheet,
Better results with XML and CSS,
Now you making progress, a lil closer to success,
Describe your doctype so the browser can relate,
Make sure you do it great or it won't validate,
Check in all browsers, I do it directly,
Gotta make sure that it renders correctly,
Some use IE, some others use Flock,
Some use AOL, I use Firefox,
Title everything including links and images,
Don't use italics, use emphasis,
Don't use bold, please use strong,
If you use bold that's old and wrong,
When you use CSS, you page will load quicker,
Client satisfied like they eating on a snicker,
They stuck on your page like you made it with a sticker,
And then they convert now that's the real kicker,
Make you a lil richer, your site a lil slicker,
Design and code right man I hope you get the picture,
What I'm telling you is true man it should be a scripture,
If it's built right you'll be the pick of the litter,
Everyone will want to follow you like twitter,
Competition will get bitter and you'll shine like glitter,
If you trying to grow your company will get bigger,
Design and code right man can you get with it.

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Comments (3)

1

"Don't use italics, use emphasis,
Don't use bold, please use strong,
If you use bold that's old and wrong, "


This is a bizarrely widespread misconception. There's nothing wrong with "b" and "i" tags if used correctly. They are not deprecated, and not wrong -- they're perfectly cromulent X/HTML tags. They're in all the published standards, they're widely used and understood, every user agent has a strategy for rendering and/or interpreting them (including SE spiders, every web designer knows how every user agent will interpret them, and if you're using XHTML and CSS standards then who cares anyway -- it's just another inline tag you can override as you see fit. What is the deal with people fretting over the "b" and "i" tags? More to the point -- what makes "strong" and "em" any better? If one-letter typographically-themed primitive types are bad, why are six- and two-character aliases for them recommended? You always just use the "span" tag as you see fit. In fact, the only tags needed are "html", "head", "script", "link", "title", "body", "div", and "span". I'll grant you "a", "form", and "input" -- hell, even textarea --if Javascript is disallowed. I prefer to use a few others myself.

"I'm leaving on a 'b' and 'i' Ferry" -- Shane MacGowan


Posted by: ben | March 31, 2008 2:36 AM

2

It's not a misconception, it's about separating content from presentation and using semantic markup. The 'b' and 'i' tags are purely visual (much like a 'font' tag), they don't carry any meaning, they just determine how the text should be displayed. On the other hand, 'strong' and 'em' are semantic and in turn useful to things like screen readers.

As the Poetic Prophet says, "Tag your look and feel on a separate style sheet"

Posted by: Tom | April 1, 2008 9:24 AM

3

word

Posted by: ernie | June 5, 2008 7:41 PM

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