Websites exist for sharing information.

Whether it’s news of your latest big product release, general info about your company or industry, or a story about your day in the park with your dog, chances are you’re putting it out there for people to read. Since the days of Lycos, AltaVista, Yahoo, and, of course, Google, search engines have been a big part of that goal.

Building your site to entice search engines to index and favorably place your pages has gone from the brute-force spider-baiting methods of the late 90′s, to the… well, brute-force spider-baiting methods of the 2000′s.

SEO has become an acronym, but many SEO companies still seem focused on keyword bombing, link farming, and site “build-out.” This approach does kind of work, so these guys can get away with it up to a point and sell their clients on their “success,” but it usually means leaving two things behind: 1) your customers, and 2) sane, usable content.

There is a better way. It is possible to build search engine friendly sites without making your site look like a dictionary or random pile of keywords. With a little bit of time and effort, a good understanding of your site’s real goals (“getting a top search ranking” is not a real goal), and some thoughtful copywriting, you can serve your customers a readable, usable site and still rank well in your target searches.

As I see it, there are two basic principles of SEO:

1. Understand how the spiders see your site’s pages,
2. and create compelling, accessible, usable content, and organize it so spiders can see it.

I’ll talk about these a bit more in-depth, but not necessarily in great detail–this post is merely intended to offer an overview, and perhaps a better general approach to SEO, not blow-by-blow implementation guidelines. With that disclaimer in place, let’s continue…

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There are many issues to deal with when designing for the web, and one of the most fundamental—and seemingly hard to understand or remember—is the simple fact that the end user ultimately has control over font size, not the designer. I’ve seen many gorgeous designs that are completely untenable if the fonts are enlarged by even a single point size.

In this post, I’m going to look at a singular expression of this problem, but it should be remembered that this is just one possible example. The possibility of font resizing should be considered when designing any and every piece of a website.

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Last month, there was quite a bit of discussion around how URL shorteners are bad for the internet, and what we developers and users might be able to do to minimize the potential damage. One big idea was to use HTTP headers and rel(or revrel attribute has been called into service in other areas, namely in defining relationships between people (or to other sites you own or have a profile on), and in telling robots how to treat a link.

The first suggested solution to the short URL problem to get broad exposure was rev=”canonical”, which proposed that a page should define a “reverse” relationship to a given short URL. In other words… “You see that short url over there? well, I’m the canonical version of it, so nyah.” (In my head, web pages are full of attitude. This probably comes from years of having to physically subdue rowdy CSS.)

rev=canonical was picked up by several major sites, and has some traction. When I was looking into the issue myself, thinking about what I wanted to do for this site, I found an alternate recommendation that seemed to make more sense to me.

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