SEO
SEO consultants and experts always trigger “fog-salesman” alert in my head. I had my share of grudge with various people promising to my clients quick rise of rating on search engine reports, easy inclusion of 500 different search engines etc. Anil Dash showed that there is nothing that can replace good content. Write good content, and people will link to you. Have dispersed links, and you will be placed higher.
Additionally, mark that content to be semantically correct. You will certainly have lighter code and SE will find it easier to index your pages. We all knew this by heart or believed that this is the case. However, I recently got a confirmation of this.
A client of my company received an analysis of their web site from one SEO consultancy firm. They listed various issues they found with it. To my surprise, all of the recommendation were really good, something I could put a signature too: add more specific content, write better titles etc.
First of their points was this:
Generic Explanation
Analysis & Change of the structure of existing code, looking to optimize templates so that excessive tables / Javascript etc, do not impede the spiders finding the optimized copy on a page.
Recommended changes for your site:
This is the first time in our practice that we do not recommend changing the code structure � it’s fine. Our compliments to your technical team.
The site we built is semantically marked, with Hx, ul, p etc. This comment, especially since it’s coming from a SEO firm, really made my day. Actually, a week.