Over the last several years a very important theme has emerged over and over again. Keep it simple The problem with simplicity is it’s more complicated than you think. Every day, day in, day out, you are surrounded by jargon. Meta tags, title tags, attributes, robots.txt, etc. While all of these terms roll off your tongue, heck if you have a child they probably know some of them. Well, your clients probably don’t It’s all too easy to talk over the heads of your clients and, at best confuse them, at worst piss them off. Nobody likes to feel stupid, or uninformed and if you leave your clients dumbfounded, they may leave you.

Here are a Few Tips for Explaining Your SEO Strategies to Your Clients:

Skip jargon – If you have to use it, explain it fully
Ask Questions – make sure your client understands what you are saying
Pause – Slow down, it allows for the information you are presenting to sink in.
Don’t Assume – It makes an Ass out of U and Me – get it?
Listen – I can’t stress this enough, listen to what your clients are saying, it’s important! They pay you.

The SEO Puzzle

Well, the major search engines, use guarded algorithms to serve their users the most relevant results possible. When you go to Google, or Yahoo to find something on the web, you hope, nay, expect to receive a list of websites that pertain to your search. If unscrupulous site owners knew exactly how the algorithms worked, they would exploit them and you would receive results that didn’t make any sense, search engine spam so to speak.

5 Tips for Simple SEO We will try to provide you with useful tips to help increase the ranking of your site in search engines. We don’t claim to know how to solve the puzzle, it’s ever-changing. But by using solid design and above-board techniques, we can help.

The Curse of AJAX

From a programming perspective, I love AJAX. AJAX, which stands for Asynchronous Javascript And XML, is a fantastic programming tool that can deliver extremely interactive websites. Outside of Java or Flash, it can deliver user interactions that closely match programs installed on the user’s PC. I come from the viewpoint that a user’s experience should be smooth and fast. I detest sites that take forever to load or have to reload the entire web page every time I choose an option. AJAX works by updating only the areas of a page that need to be updated.

Since much of a site’s content can be delivered by AJAX, it’s not there for the spiders to see when they crawl your site. I’ve seen sites that are rich in content, but to a spider, they are nothing but empty div tags. Without content, the spiders will move on to sites with relevant content, and we know content is king. Google has announced that they are working on a solution to enable the spidering of AJAX-generated web pages, but it’s not out there yet. So what can you do? Use AJAX to deliver the functionality you want to users, especially if they have signed up for your site, but use it sparingly on entry pages that you want to be ranked high in organic search results.