Half’s SEO Notebook

Just to let you know if you’re reading this blog, I’m working on a non-SEO-related script right now and I’m won’t be really posting for another week or two (Stop reading here if you’re not a Javascropt geek).

What kind of script is it? Well, like other scripts I wrote, its mainly for my own use, though it would be cool if I could somehow monetize it, which is one reason I’m gonna be pretty tight-lipped about it (at least till its done), but I can say with absolute certainty in its present state it already beats the pants off all apps Google came out with this year (and I’m not just saying that because I wrote it).

I’ll also add, in case you’re into Javascript, that till this year I wrote everything in PHP/MYSQL, and never even realized how limiting that 100% server-side model was. This should come as no surprise to anyone, but if you’re doing a huge amount of manual data entry (in cases where you hit a wall in a mass automation approach), you want as few keystrokes, mouse clicks, page scrolls, and page reloads as possible to get whatever you want done. Less input means less time wasted. If I was just designing a blog, I wouldn’t really care. But when I need to save thousands of work hours, good UI design can’t be overlooked. Client-side funtionality provided by AJAX and Javascript makes it all possible.

A few other things I’ve come to appreciate while hacking away for a few days is coding event handlers in Javascript instead of using Onclick in HTML (ya know, the CSS/HTML/Javascript = Design/Content/functionality model). I still prefer OnClick in situation where I generate the HTML via Javascript, but if I do View Source, it feels nice when all I see is HTML.

And yeah, I’ve been reading about the Yahoo IE7 VS Google IE7 non-sense but it seriously doesn’t interest me. Am I going to get richer by knowing about that design theft or is it supposed to be the spark that lights the “Google is Evil” firestorm that brings way too many “Google fucked up my site, I tried everything, I give up, I hate Google” whiners out of the woodwork? Just fire whoever is responsible (or give him/her a good spanking), and put some kind of approval process in place so things like this done by (I assume) a Googler newbie doesn’t go unchecked. I’m still waiting for an admission from Google that someone did in fact steal Yahoo’s design (as if removing the page wasn’t good enough - I guess it is - but I’d still like to hear it) and I’m also curious as to the reason why they decided to steal it, but like I said, talking about it isn’t going to make me any richer.

P.S. The other day, I noticed I was No. 1 on Google for “Pagerank doesn’t matter.” (Hehe) I know it’s a low-traffic, non-competitive term and I’ll lose position as I post more stuff on here, but I did take a screenshot just to remind myself I was there (too lazy at 3:33 in the morning to post it, but I got it). I keep imagining PageRank haters typing in “pagerank doesn’t matter” in Google and reading my post that proves they were wrong for way too long. Of course, I also noticed Andy Hagans posted a similar post way back in 2005, so I’m no SEO pioneer on that, but still. Too many people either say “it doesn’t matter” or obsess about it. The healthy POV is to look at it like your TITLE tag.